Colorado Clash by Jon Sharpe

gaze now. She was enjoying this. “Never thought I’d see the Raines brothers worried about anything.”
    “You get out of my sight, Rose.”
    She fluttered her fan in front of her wrinkled doll-like face, parted the beaded curtain and went into the other area of the house.
    He got up and walked to the window that looked out on the butt end of the town. To his mind, one long latrine. People still living in tents and shanties. On the other side of the mud street were the saloons and the casinos, the owners of which lived in Cawthorne proper. No way would they live here among the people they hired for pennies a day. This was where respectable people and visitors came to be bad and as soon as they’d taken their pleasure they hightailed out of here.
    The whorehouse was quiet, something Sam wasn’t used to. A Negro man with enormous pink arm garters usually played the piano. A girl or two in filmy dresses carried trays of drinks around. On nights when the wait was long you might find three or four customers playing a friendly hand of poker.
    The beaded curtain parted. A middle-aged Mexican woman with large hands gave him his drink. “Your brother, he was bad with Deborah this morning.” She touched her eye. “The black eye as it is called.”
    What the hell was this? First Rose and now this Mex. They acted like no girl ever got slugged before in a whorehouse. He’d been going to whorehouses since he was fourteen. Girls got slugged in them all the time.
    The curtains rattled again and there was his brother. The Mex scowled at him. Kenny laughed. “She giving you shit about that little gal upstairs?”
    “Says you gave her a black eye.”
    “Yeah, well she probably gave me crabs. So we’re even up.” He raised his bandaged hand. “All I did was backhand the bitch with this.”
    The Mex flashed a look that said he was despicable and left.
    Kenny walked over and took Sam’s drink from him. Took a deep swallow and handed it back. “You been thinking about it?”
    “I don’t know what we should do. This Fargo—”
    “Right now he’s all I care about.”
    Kenny purloined his brother’s drink again. Took another deep swallow and handed it back. Sam hadn’t taken a drink yet. “If you won’t help me, I’ll do it alone.”
    “He’s thrown in with Cain.”
    “To hell with Cain. People want rid of him anyway. It ain’t like the old days when he was such a big man.”
    The beads clattered again. Rose. She said, “It’s one thing hittin’ a girl at night. At least I can understand that a little bit. But hittin’ a girl this early in the day, I should charge you boys double.”
    “You’re lucky we didn’t hit you , Rose,” Kenny said.
    Then he whipped the drink from his brother’s hand and finished it. He handed the empty glass to Rose.
    “C’mon, Sam, let’s get the hell out of here.”
    It was only as they were walking out that Sam Raines realized he hadn’t gotten as much as a sip of his own drink.
     
    Fargo stood behind three people in line for stagecoach tickets. This gave him a chance to observe Ned Lenihan. The Pinks he’d worked with said that you could tell a lot about a man just by watching him deal with other people. If he was in any kind of trouble he might appear agitated in some way.
    If Lenihan was agitated, he knew how to keep it hidden.
    “The finest book I’ve ever read,” said a sensible-looking middle-aged woman in a man’s denim shirt and gray butternuts. She held the book up for Lenihan to see. “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Have you ever read it, Ned?”
    “No. But I’ve been meaning to. Amy has and she really enjoyed it.”
    “I’m taking it along on my trip to Denver. That’s one of the few good things about the stagecoach—no offense, Ned—I get a lot of reading done. Unless the other people talk too loud. You get some real loud ones once in a while.”
    Lenihan was a small man of about forty with fine, precise features. Instead of looking annoyed at the woman