And then one night I ran into her. It was the Sunday night after I drew my first time as foreman, $120 for two weeks at ten dollars a day. I had just finished dinner at the International, roast beef, potatoes and gravy, stewed peaches and coffee, and I had poured myself a second cup when she came in with Brewer. I had heard about what he was buying her, the pony cart, rings, clothes, and hats, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what she looked like in all that stuff. The dress was crimson silk, with a big floppy lace hat, and yellow flowers pinned to one shoulder. Her face was all painted up, and she had lace gloves on with the fingers cut off so they stuck through bare, and on every finger were at least six rings with diamonds. She looked exactly like what she was. Brewer took her to a big table in the middle, and then here came Biloxi all dressed up too, and Renny in evening clothes with a white tie, and Haines dressed even fancier than Renny. I drank my coffee and paid my bill, and I didn’t hurry that I know of, but just the same, when I was done I left.
I got down to C Street, and could feel my face burning, and turned into a place and took a seat and ordered a glass of beer and watched them gamble. About six of them were near me, playing roulette and losing their shirt, three or four men and a couple of girls, and all of a sudden I thought about her system and the money in my pocket and stepped over and laid down a silver dollar. I laid it on the first twelve and lost. I followed it with the same bet on the same twelve and won. I was a buck ahead. I let it lay and won again. I was three bucks ahead and I laid one on number one, one on the first four, and one on the first twelve. The ball dropped in three, and I was ten bucks more to the good. I kept it up, and soon as the croupier took an interest and the others began to follow my lead, I quit. Because with them all over the board he’d have a hard time staking me out, because if he didn’t have to pay me he’d have to pay them. But with all of them aboard the same numbers, his play was so easy he wouldn’t have been human if he didn’t make it.
But I had $45 of his money, and I drifted on to the next place. I won $300 there and next door, and across the street, and began to realize I was riding a run of luck, as well as playing one hell of a system. And I had this excited feeling it wasn’t going to let me down. I won and lost here and there, and my winnings kept rising, and then pretty soon I upped the ante and left ten dollars on number one, with ten dollars on the first four and another ten dollars on the first twelve, as usual. And the ball dropped in number one. I cashed $450 in gold, and went back in the washroom to count up. With what I’d been paid and what I’d won, I had $1,085.
Back in the hotel, Renny was at the piano, and Haines was facing the people, getting ready to sing. Renny was tall and thin and dark, with an olive tint to his skin and kinky black hair. He was around thirty, and Creole French. Haines was an Irishman, kind of stocky, with a round, good-looking face, China-blue eyes, and sorrel gold hair. When I got in there, he was making a little speech, saying he didn’t often get a chance to sing for such a distinguished audience in Virginia City, but so long as he was here he was going to sing some arias he had used in a tour he made with an opera company in Italy or France or Germany or wherever the hell it was they took the show out. So that got a big hand, especially from some women over in one corner that seemed to be from out of town. So that was the first I heard of Italian opera, which he sang in Italian and Renny played without notes or anything. I found out afterward that opera was what he and Renny lived for, only of course they never bothered with music like that on a big Saturday night at Biloxi’s.
I didn’t break in on the singing at all. I just took a seat in the bar and listened to the music, and kept an eye on things so nobody walked out or anything before I got around to what I was there for. Then after five or six selections, when Haines had got a big hand and he and Renny had sat down to the table again, I went in and walked over and clicked my heels in front of Morina. “Good evening, Miss Crockett.”
“... Roger, what do you want?”
“An engagement, whenever you’re free.”
“What do you mean, engagement?”
“Business.”
“I told you once, no.”
“That’s not what you told me. It’s what you would have told me if you didn’t love money more than you love anything else on earth. What you told me was, for one thousand dollars business would be done. All right, I’ve got the one thousand dollars, and I want to make a date.”
Her eyes flickered, and while it soaked in I spoke to the others. None of the men said anything. Brewer lit a cigar and looked at me under the heavy black eyebrows that he had. Renny had eyes like a snake, and kept them on me without winking or showing expression of any kind. Haines kept looking at Brewer, wondering why he didn’t do something, and not knowing what Brewer must have known, which was what happened to Trapp when he did something. But Biloxi put out her hand, and smiled, and pulled me down for a little kiss. “My little Annapolitain is back, ’allo Rogay! Come, let me ask something. Why you no let my Rina alone, ha?”
“Just want her, that’s all.”
“But I ’ave ozzer girl. Prettier girl.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You come down, I show you. Li’l girl, ’alf Irish, ’alf Chinois, oh, oh, oh! Such ’air, such skin, such eyes! Is fourteen, jost right for my petit Annapolitain!”
“She sounds good, but first—”
“Roger.”
“Yes, Morina.”
“I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
“I’ll be waiting for you, over there in the bar.”
I went back to the bar, and next time Haines got up to sing, she came in there. “Roger, this has to end. You have no right to follow me around the way you do, and—”
“Follow you?”
“I can’t stir out of the house that you’re not there, watching me, counting how much money I bet, how much I win, how much I lose, what I have on, who I’m with—”
“Can I help it if I happen to be there?”
“It don’t just happen.”
“Have it your way.”
“Roger, you asked me something just now. I don’t want anything of the kind. I’d hate it. But if it makes you happy, if you’re willing to have that and leave, you can go on down to the house and I’ll be with you directly.”
“What do you mean, leave?”
“Get out of Virginia City, go back where you came from, do what you’re supposed to do, the wonderful things you told me about, the first night we were together, forget me and this place and everything else you’re not in any way fit for.”
“... All right then.”
“You’ll be a lot happier.”
“What about this other hombre? This Brewer?”
“That’s none of your business.”
She stepped in the lobby, snapped her fingers for a boy, told him to get her carriage. I paid for my drinks and started on down.
I had just crossed C, taking the short steps you always took to keep from sliding down the hill, when I heard the footsteps behind me. They came in a rush, like somebody rolling a drum, and then all of a sudden I was hitting and kicking with everything I had, and getting it through my head, too late, that what I had really done, with that trip through the roulette wheels, was collect a gang at my heels, and a gang that was out to get me, first chance it got, on account of what I’d done to the union. I’ll fight anybody if I have to, but nobody’s good enough to fight ten, or twenty, or however many there were. I went down, and they began kicking and stomping and spitting. A kick missed me, and caught my coat pocket, and gold coins spilled over the street in a shower, and went bouncing and rolling down the hill, even past D Street. They left me and ran after the money, yelling like Indians and fighting each other about it. A deputy rounded the corner at C Street and drew his gun and still they kept on hollering and fighting and picking up gold. He helped me up and asked what had happened. I told him nothing, and as soon as he left me and started toward the ruckus, I slipped away. Because in front of the hotel I could
see her and Biloxi getting into a pony trap, and I didn’t any more have the thousand dollars.
7
AFTER I WOKE UP a few nights, hearing those feet come at me from behind, I got out the .36 I took from the fellow in Sacramento. But I wouldn’t have kept it if it hadn’t been for the fellow in Scholl & Roberts where I went to exchange it for a .44, and get me some caps and paper cartridges. He listened, then asked me what I expected to shoot. “Nobody, if I can help it. Otherwise, anybody looking for trouble.”
“But not no elephants?”
“They got elephants here?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then why do you ask?”
“Mister, my job is to sell guns, and if you want a .44 I’ve got a .44. But short of a elephant, I’d like you to tell me something a .44 will kill that a .36 won’t, and do it better.”
“Dead is dead. What’s better?”
“Better is quicker.”
“You take this awful serious.”
“Don’t you?”
I kind of shut up then and let him talk: “There’s four main points to shooting, and only four: the draw, the aim, the fire, and the recoil. But they’re all important, equally important.”
“I begin to get the idea there’s no unimportant points.”
“That is correct, but you’d be surprised how many unimportant things men get their minds on, like how pretty they look, how much noise they make, how loud their artillery entitles them to talk—all good points on Sunday morning in church, where they got the Ten Commandments. But on Sunday night in the saloon, where all they got is the Golden Rule, do unto others as they would do to you, only do it first, only important things are going to do you any good. First now, consider the draw. A .44, you’ve got to carry it on a belt holster, no matter whether you sling it on your right hip, your left hip, or across your belly. You’ve got to strap that holster end to one leg, and its uncomfortable, and there’s always the chance that when you draw, that was when you had the thing hitched around a bit, to ease it, and the gun jams with unfortunate, not to say fatal, consequences. The .36 fits comfortable into an armpit holster, the only way to carry arms, and specially this .36 does. That’s a navy gun, my friend, made in the Colt London factory; if you look at the engraving on that cylinder, you’ll see it’s a battle at sea. And it’s one of the few models that were made with a short barrel, so it really does tuck under your arm there nice and snug and inconspicuous. Try it there. See how natural it is for your hand to go to it? Just like going to your heart. Your arm coddles the holster, so there’s no sticking, fouling, or jamming. And when it comes out, it’s about two feet closer to the line of vision than a gun coming out of a belt holster and that’s a fraction of a second saved, but it could be the difference between yes and no or, as we say, perpendicular or planted.”
“Did you learn all this by heart?”
“And I hope you will.”
“The aim comes next.”
“On that point there’s also a great deal of unreliable stuff told. You’ll hear about hip and fan shooting, and undoubtedly there’s been some, with monuments commemorating the results. But I’m telling you there wasn’t any proper cause and effect. It was simply accident, or you could say luck. There’s only one way to aim a gun. Bring the sights in line with the target and your eye. Do it as quick as you can, but do it, or you’re liable to wish you had. Noting once more that you can level a nice handy gun like this one quicker than a big one, I pass to the subject of fire. Here the same principle is still guiding us. A .44 is simply too big. Even if you aim it, by the time the heavy trigger pull is taken into consideration, you’ve twitched your weapon out of line, and accurate shooting is impossible. Naturally any gun, no matter what caliber, needs some work to bring the trigger pull to where it’s exactly right for you. I don’t mean hair trigger, you understand. A hair trigger is nothing but a fool’s way to get his thumb shot off, or whatever shot off that happened to be in the way, and with a belt holster it might not be his thumb. But get a whetstone and stone your notch, so the gun is as much a part of you as your hand is. And even on that point the lighter gun is better. And now I come to the point so seldom thought of, the lack of whose proper appreciation has had so many, many sad but final consequences. A .44, I don’t care if you’ve got the arm of a grizzly bear, is simply going to yank your hand up three feet in the air, and you’re not going to shoot it again, to hit anything, until you’ve pulled it down, aimed it, and fired it. But a .36—”
“Is this holster for sale?”
“It is, but I’ve got a better one.”
“It sounds expensive.”
“It is, but you’ll thank me.”
It was a beauty all right, all hand-stitched in limp, tanned buckskin, with straps to hold it in place and a set to it that fitted the gun under your coat so most people would hardly notice it. I took it, and some ammunition, and thanked him for his lesson, and next night, around sundown, sneaked down Six-Mile Canyon to a gully where there was nobody around, stuck a playing card up on the timbers of an old drift, and went to work. Every thing he told me, I found out, was true, and specially what a fine gun I was using. I bought a stone and took it down, and worked on spring and hammer and pins and everything else in there, and wiped everything with machine oil and dried it, so every night it was better and then one night it was right. And then came the night when I could shoot. At ten feet I’d put up a six spot of hearts and knock holes in the spots as fast as I could pull the trigger. At fifteen feet I could hit three but stay on the card, and at twenty I could hit the card. I taught myself to keep shooting whether I hit the target or not. Because another important thing, I figured, was to get the habit of doing it a certain way, because when the time came, if your hand didn’t do it before your head woke up, why probably it wouldn’t wake up.
My real practice came by accident, one night when I was ready to go home. I heard something behind me, and before I knew it I had wheeled and fired and a jack rabbit went straight up in the air and when he lit he was dead. Then I noticed the moon coming up, and all around rabbits were coming out and starting to play. I stayed there and practiced what I needed most, which was to wheel and shoot at anything coming from behind. I brought so many rabbits home to Mrs. Finn, who ran the boarding house I lived in, that the other boarders began to complain. A jackass rabbit is not like a cottontail. He’s long, lean, and tough.
All that time I saw a lot of Paddy, because even if he wished I hadn’t cut the union, we were friends and took walks and talked. Then one Sunday he said: “Is wrong, Rodrigo, how they mine, in a Dakota.”
“In what way?”
“They follow a lode, yes?”
“You can’t blame them for that.”
“Follow a lode, and all a time, a tunnel, a crosscut, estope, all slide down a mountain—must one time come out in air, yes?”
“Looks like it.”
“Real lode is dip.”
“How you figure that out?”
“No figure, fill. Dees goddam owner, especially Hale, too chip to buy estoff he need to go dip. Try near top, follow liddle pocket, have a bonanza one day, bad borrasca next, all because no dig a mine in big way, in rill way, only liddle way, chip way.”
“So?”
“Is old shaft up there, uphill, no?”
“The little one they abandoned?”
“We go down, try for big bonanza, dip under hill, yes?”
“I’ll have a hell of a time with Williams.”
“You tell, soon ’e have borrasca.”
“How do you know?”
“You see. Soon no ore, only rock.”
It came the next week, as a matter of fact. The vein began to narrow, and instead of a deep blue-black, the ore began to run a slaty gray, a blue-gray, a dull gray, and Hale was down there every half hour, breaking off specimens with his hammer and putting them in a box for the assayer. Then all of a sudden we were getting nothing but rock, and had to lay men off. That night I stopped
by the office to talk with the super and lay it out what Paddy had said, and I thought he’d be sore when he found out I was handing him stuff I had got from a Mexican working in my gang. He wasn’t.
“They’re fine miners, the Mexican lads. They have a real skill with timber, and an instinct for metal. An instinct for a process and an instinct for a vein.”
“He says the real ore’s under the mountain.”
“He’s probably right.”
“Then how about letting me dig?”
“Duval, I’m employed by Hale and I can tell you without hearing any more what he’ll say. He’ll agree with everything I tell him, roll his big black eyes, thank me for the suggestion, weep on me collar, open a bottle of rum—and do nothing. He thinks of costs, and the deep stuff is expensive.”
“The borrasca is worst of all.”
“So I’ve told him.”
“And he’ll wind up with no mine. You know what happens. They run bonanza a little while, then they run borrasca as long as they can, which means till they’ve spent the stake the bonanza piled up, and then some bank takes over.”
“Stop talking about banks!”
We had it again that night, with Hale, at the International Hotel, and he did just like Williams said he would. He wept, and told us how his mother was killed over in Hungary in 1848, and how much he loved America, because it stood for liberty. He said he didn’t ask anything of anybody except justice. He said was it fair he had to pay four dollars a day for his help when that very minute, for roustabouts in St. Louis, they were paying twenty cents an hour. It seemed to mean we couldn’t do what I wanted, so I said: “Will you let me prospect just one entry? Off that small shaft that you abandoned last year? The one up the mountainside from the big one we’re using now?”