The Last Shootist by Miles Swarthout

Author:Miles Swarthout
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466851931
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Twenty-four

Gillom slept fitfully that night. After a first hour of turning on his feather mattress, the darkness was rent by gunfire, shots echoing up Tombstone Canyon, cowboy yips in the night and clattering hooves from up near the livery stable. A stray bullet busted one of his neighbor’s glass windows and he quickly rolled out to hit the floor. Gillom groped for his holstered pistols and pants on the floorboards.

Peering warily through his one front window, Rogers could see coal oil lamps being blown out in shacks in Chihuahua Town atop the denuded hillside across the canyon, so they wouldn’t become targets of these wild cowboys on a midweek toot. His landlady, Mrs. Blair, had forewarned him this was a regular midnight interruption; that the sideboards of these miners’ shacks were so thin that gunwise residents hit the floor when sport-shooting forays erupted. But he couldn’t spot any shooters in the dark below, so Gillom crawled back into his built-in bed with his jeans and pistols still on, ready for trouble. With a nervous shiver, nature’s sweet restorer finally overtook him and he slept well past dawn.

* * *

Walking to work, Gillom watched a water train climbing uphill, the short-legged, stout little burros each rigged with an iron frame and a ridge pole from which hung a heavy canvas sack on either side, twitched along by Mexican muleteers. Each sack held seven gallons of water from the wells up Brewery Gulch and sold for twenty-five cents, to be poured into the barrel outside the back door of every dwelling.

He paused to watch the Mexican women gathered at the narrow, polluted river in the canyon to beat their clothes clean by hand on the wet rocks. The women gossiped with their friends while smoking hand-rolled cigarillos. Naked babies splashed happily in the gurgling waters at the ladies’ bare feet. It was a soothing scene after a restless weekend, and the young man drank it in for a long moment before trudging on to his bank. Today is gonna be a warm one, he realized. Luckily it rarely hits a hundred at this high elevation, Ease said.

Lucky his boss, Mr. Pinkham, hadn’t heard about his run-in with the big gambler in the dance hall, so it was an untroubled day. Near closing time, before 3:00 P.M., Anel Romero dropped in.

“Anel! Nice to see you.”

She was wearing a shawl over her head, although it was too warm for that this late spring day, trying not to attract attention in her flashy dress, but she recognized him.

“Oh, sí, Mister bank guard.”

“It’s Gillom. Gillom Rogers.”

“Sí, Gillom. Putting mi monies safe, from last weekend.”

“Good. Are you on your way to work? Tonight?”

“Sí.” The Mexican miss looked about, unwilling to discuss her place of employment in public.

He smiled. “I’ll walk you there.”

“No necessario.”

“Bank’s just closing. I’ll get permission.”

While Miss Romero made her deposit, Gillom wheedled an okay to escort one of its good customers to work.

“Which good customer?” M. J. Cunningham looked up from his ledger and scanned the bank’s floor.

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