The Whippoorwill Trilogy - Sharon Sala Page 0,233

the hat he’d jammed on his head. His pants had been patched a number of times and his coat was obviously handmade from beaver pelts that were still bearing the heads of some of the beavers to whom the pelts had first belonged. He looked like something out of a bad dream, and she knew the first moment he took an interest in her. At that point, she glanced nervously toward the land office. Eulis was still at the counter.

“I killed a wolf with a stick. I can handle one ugly fat man,” she muttered, but clutched the rifle a little tighter just the same.

Sean Clancy had been at Cherry Creek almost from the beginning of the strike. Like all the others who’d come to Denver City, he’d dreamed of gold just laying around waiting to be gathered up, somewhat like when he’d been small and his mother had made him gather in the hen eggs. It had taken him exactly one week to learn that he’d been sorely mistaken. He’d lost his grubstake in a poker game, and then crippled the gambler. If it had been anyone other than a card shark, they would have hung him on the spot. As it was, he convinced enough of them that he’d been swindled, and so they turned him out on the street, and the gambler over to the doctor, who patched him up and advised him to get the hell out of town while the getting was good.

But Clancy hadn’t been as smart as the gambler. He’d stayed on, trying to beg a grubstake from anyone who looked willing to share, and sleeping with Arapaho women every chance he got. Ironically, it was his lust for the Indian women that probably saved his life. He was in the Arapaho camp when word spread that there was smallpox in Denver City. The Arapaho had sent him packing as they gathered up and moved out. Afraid of the pox, he hid out along the creek, watching the various claims to see if any became abandoned. By the end of the second week, he’d taken the belongings of four miners who succumbed to the pox and then holed up in a cave above the city.

It had been a long, lonely winter, and there were days when he’d thought he would go mad. But the Chinook thawed him out, just as it had Eulis and Letty, and he’d come to town with a winter’s worth of stored-up frustration, looking to hump a few women and fight the good fight.

When he saw the raggedy woman perched on the wagon seat, his instinct for trouble led him straight to her. He rubbed the front of his pants in a suggestive manner, and then pointed at her.

“I been waitin’ for you all winter,” he said, and stepped off the curb.

Letty swung the rifle straight at his belly.

“You in a hurry to die?”

When she cocked the hammer back on the rifle, he stumbled. In an effort to steady himself, he reached for the mules. The unexpected slam of his body weight made Rosy and Blackie step sideways, and in doing so, moved the last obstacle from Sean Clancy’s path. He went face first onto the frozen ground and came up with a busted lip, a sore nose, and a handful of fresh mule manure on the front of his coat.

“Son-of-a-holy-bitch!” Clancy roared, and reached for the barrel of Letty’s rifle.

Tempted to aim for the mule shit he was wearing, Letty changed her mind at the last second, swung the rifle up and fired it off in the air instead.

The gunshot stopped Clancy dead in his tracks, and brought Eulis running out of the land office, with the agent not far behind him.

“What’s going on out here?” Eulis yelled, then saw the determination on Letty’s face. “Are you all right?”

“So far,” she said. “Fat-ass here, seemed to think I’d been waiting out the winter just for his arrival.”

Eulis eyed the mountain of a man with a calm that came out of nowhere. He doubled up his fists, ready to wade into the man, while accepting the fact that he would most likely take a whipping.

“That’s my wife, you insulted,” Eulis said. “Apologize to her now, or I’m gonna have to whip you where you stand.”

Sean Clancy started to laugh and then remembered the rifle aimed straight at his chest.

“Hell, mister… ease up. I didn’t know she was yore wife.”

“You do now,” Eulis said. “Apologize to her.”

Clancy gritted his teeth