Liar's Dice

The eleven days I spent in Boulder were the longest I stayed anywhere.

My father's shack at the edge of town was now mine. The county office clerk had stamped the deed and handed it across the counter. I walked back to the shack with it folded in my coat pocket.

The stovepipe leaked where the joints met the ceiling. The wind found the gaps under the door, and the view out the only window was of the mountain. In February, the mountain was white and vast and paid me no attention. I had inherited a bedroll, a skillet, and a stack of Penny Dreadfuls. I read them by lamplight and thought, this wasn't so bad at all.

I had done trail work for the better part of my adult life. Cattle, some horses, and a season moving sheep through Utah. You get the picture. You get good at reading the weather, but towns become places you pass through. And one day you're forty and inherit a one-room shack in Boulder, Colorado, with the deed in your coat pocket. I had some money. I could pull the shack down and build a house on the land and rear my own cattle. I could be my own boss.

I decided I wasn't going anywhere anymore.

But later that night, a cattle agent found me in the saloon. A drive was heading south to Chihuahua, good money for a man who knew the work.

'No can do,' I said. 'I got a p-place here now.'

The stammer was with me from birth. My mother said I came out of the womb trying to say something too big for my mouth and never quite got over it.

'You have until sunup,' the cattle agent said, leaving me at the bar.

The barman, who looked like someone had made him out of spare parts, poured another rye without me asking for one.

That's when I heard the name.

'Bill "The Bullet" Bosworth'.

Two drunks bent over their cards at a corner table thought they were whispering. They said someone spotted Bosworth in town a week ago. He was after the bounty on the Bolder Twins. 

I near fell off my stool.

I read every Penny Dreadful ever printed about Bill Bosworth. The Bullet of the Badlands. No Law But His Own. Forty Bounties and Counting. The Scalping Man. Nobody had ever seen his face. The stories said he wore disguises and could be anyone, even a woman.

'Bob told me they're hidin' out at his place.'

'What one?'

'His sister's place, top of the mountain.'

If there was a chance of any action, I knew I'd have to climb that mountain. I pulled on my coat, walked out into the February blizzard, and mounted my horse. 

The mountain was perilous. I didn't know how long it took. Snow buried the trail, and the wind tried whipping me off the slope. My hands went to wood inside my gloves. The horse slipped twice on rock hidden under the snow. The second time, I tumbled off. I sat there a minute, kneeling there in the white and looking down at Boulder below.

I thought about my shack. The stovepipe. The deed in my coat. I could turn back.

But I got up and kept climbing.

I only knew I'd made it when I could make out firelight, creeping through the shuttered windows. The shack camouflaged in the snow. A few horses were around the side in a state of misery. I knocked, a shutter cracked, and an eye looked me over.

'We're playin' Liar's Dice. Win, you can stay. Lose, you freeze. Them's the terms.'

I agreed, and an old, gruff guy beckoned me in: the bartender. I knew him. He'd been there at my father's burial.

'You're Elias' boy.'

'Yessir.'

He positioned himself between me and the table in the back, the way a man does when he's minding something. Empty liquor bottles and two men were sitting at the table. They looked like they'd been sitting there for some time.

Clay Bolder was enormous. Curtis was thinner, quicker-eyed, with fresh desperation about him. I had heard he'd lost badly at poker the week prior.

Clay spoke first. 'You got money?'

'N-not much,' I said. 'J-just a couple of b-bucks.'

'Show yourself out, buster.'

'I'll f-freeze to death.'

'He's got land,' the bartender said. 'His father recently passed.'

'You carrying the deed?' Curtis asked.

I said I only j-just got that place.

Curtis smiled and said to play careful.

'What do they call you?'

'Elias S-Stevens Junior,' I said. 'They call me S-Shaky.'

'Good to meet you, S-Shaky,' Clay said. 'Siddown.'

I played careful. I read the bluffs I could read and called the ones I was certain of, and won two rounds. I got the flutter, the hope in your chest that comes before it gets snatched away from you.

The cups came down hard on the table. Curtis had a way of lifting his enough to peek before he called, a tell a man doesn't know he has. I saw it on the second round and said nothing. Let him take the pot. Clay drank and watched me the way a bear watches antelope, waiting to see what it does next. I rolled a three, a three, a one, a five, and a two, and tried to look like a man deciding whether to be brave.

Curtis called bullshit on a bet I shouldn't've made. It cost me down to one. Palifico, they called it.

The deed went across the table, and Curtis Bolder folded it into his coat without looking at it. I was left looking at my hands.

A sound came up through the storm.

Wheels on frozen ground. The slow grinding approach of a wagon on the trail below, working up through the snow.

Nobody spoke. Curtis's mouth came open and stayed that way. Clay rose from the table, his chair screamed back across the floor, and drew his gun.

'It's Bosworth,' Curtis said.

The room went cold. I felt it move through us all. Bill "The Bullet" Bosworth. Coming up this mountain to this cabin in the snow.

'If you know what's good for you,' the bartender said.

'I can help.'

Clay opened the shutters. 'If you put down whoever comes through that door there, you can keep your land.'

Curtis went to protest, but said nothing.

A rifle appeared in my hands. I wasn't sure afterward which of them had put it there. Clay Bolder got close to my face and said if there were still bullets in it after, they'd shoot me.

I took the rifle.

I moved behind the bar. I crouched between a barrel and a shelf of tinned goods and listened to the wagon getting closer.

I thought about the deed. I thought about the shack and the stovepipe and my time in Boulder without the wanting to leave coming on me. I thought about the cattle agent's offer and all the miles of country between here and Chihuahua. What were my chances of staying now?

The wagon stopped.

Clay Bolder cocked his hammer. Curtis moved to the window. The bartender covered the back door.

I stood up from behind the bar.

What happened next was instinct. My hands knew the rifle. My hands had always known the rifle, every rifle, any rifle put in them. I wasn't the same old 'Shaky' Stevens with a stammer.

Three shots. The bartender, Curtis, Clay.

The sound of them was final.

I stood in the smoke, and the silence that follows smoke, and I felt the stammer leave me. It left me years ago, but I just allowed it to come back.

Curtis writhed around on the floor. I walked over and turned him over with my foot. Blood poured out of his neck. He didn't have long, so I took the deed out of his coat and used it to wipe the blood off the paper. I offered the rifle under his chin.

'Y-you,' he stammered.

'Me,' I said and fired.

Outside, the wagon had stopped twenty yards down the trail. The man climbing down carried a lantern which threw his shadow long across the snow. 'Sheriff's Office,' he shouted and trudged through the snow to me.

I didn't move.

He raised the lantern and looked at my face.

I watched the realization set in. 'It's you,' he said. His voice came out steady. 'Bill Boswell.' He took his hat off and set it back on. The snow came down around the lantern light in slow curtains. 'God Almighty,' he said. 'It was you in the saloon. I came to arrest the Bolder Twins myself.' He stopped and looked at the rifle. 'They say you killed over fifteen hundred men. That you scalp your bounties. That nobody has ever seen your face and lived.'

'Someone recognized me,' I said. 'Saw me in town a week ago. Know who that someone was?'

He watched me for a long time in the lantern light. 'If I tell you, they're dead, right?'

'Right.'

'Then I ain't tell you.'

I smiled. 'Good evenin', Sheriff.' I headed back inside to do some scalping.

Later, I loaded the twins onto their horses and got them lashed. I ran rope through their saddles and tied them off to mine. The bounty office in Pueblo required proof. I hadn't climbed this mountain in February to leave the job half-done. I led the horse down the trail in the dark. Past the lights of Boulder, past the edge of town, past a shack with a leaking stovepipe. The sky was beginning to pale behind the mountains. It was a nice dream while it lasted.

I didn't stop.

The road south opened up past the first ridge, and the sky came out enormous overhead. The first grey light was spreading east. The horses moved steady. I didn't look behind me.

I'd need a new name before Mexico.