guess. The axle for your wagon still isn’t fixed.”
“You’re right there, fella.” The corset salesman shifted his bulk—he was pushing three hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce—simultaneously with shifting the stump of a cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right side. “I needa be on my way soon. Got customers to see.”
“Corsets a big business?”
“Big. Future’s in corsets.” Jack laughed silently at that. “Someday every woman in this here great land o’ ours gonna be wearin’ one o’ my corsets. See, I don’t just sell ’em, neighbor. My brother-in-law and me, we own the factory back in Chicago what makes ‘em. I cover the West and he covers the East.”
“Sounds like he’s got the easier job, friend.”
“Future’s in the West, neighbor. And your average woman, well, she wants to have what other women have, and that’s a corset. If’n you’ll pardon the word, ‘virgin’ territory. That’s what the West is for corsets. Virgin territory.”
Jack Naile shrugged his shoulders. “Where I come from, most of the women who wear corsets aren’t exactly virgins. Say, you see my wife and son and daughter come in?”
“That wife o’ yours—and I mean no disrespect—but her and your daughter, you might wanna get ‘em some of the Night Thrush corsets. They’re top o’ the line. Top!”
“My girls aren’t the corset type, friend; but, I’ll ask them. So, they went inside?” Jack pressed.
“Ain’t seen ‘em, neighbor, and I been on this here porch since . . .” He tugged a big gold pocket watch from the confines of his nearly bursting vest. “Since half-past four.”
Jack licked his lips, simultaneously snapping away the butt of his cigarette and thumbing the hammer loop off his revolver holster.
“Thanks, friend!” Jack shouted, grabbing up the attaché case as he broke into a dead run through the gathering darkness, toward the store, his right hand on the butt of his gun lest it pop out of the holster.
Jack heard indistinguishable voices from the narrow breezeway to the side of the store. The store’s lights were still on. He passed the store at a dead run, glancing through the near window, the double doors and the far window as he ran. The aproned, balding proprietor was sweeping up, no sign of customers.
The sounds coming from the breezeway were definitely voices, male and female.
Jack stopped, his hand still on the butt of his Colt, his palms sweating.
“Lookee heah, gals. Don’t matter no mind to me an’ Lester whether you hitch up them there skirts y’selves or we go an’ do it fer ya. Less’n ya like gettin’ on ya knees and doin’ us that way. And don’t go lookin’ to the boy. If’n he wakes up, it won’t be for a long time, and that’s fo’ fact.”
“Go to hell, you son of a bitch.”
It was Ellen’s voice, and Jack, stepping into the mouth of the breezeway, announced, “And I can send both you assholes to hell real quick.”
The only light in the breezeway came in broad pale-yellow shafts emanating from gaps in the curtained windows above. The general store had a false front, but the building beside it had a true second floor, the rooms there serving as a cheap rooming house for cowboys and drifters.
Ellen and Lizzie, all but lost in shadow, but obviously scared, stood shoulder to shoulder, their backs against the side wall of the Merchants Café. The men bracing them, on the general-store side of the breezeway, were more readily visible in the weak light from the café’s second-story windows.
David lay sprawled on the ground, mostly in shadow, and Jack couldn’t tell his condition.
“Lester” and the man who’d declared his foul intentions wheeled around to face Jack. They had the look of Fowler’s range detectives about them, broad-brimmed slouched hats, leather stovepipe chaps, each of the men with a six-gun at his right hip and a second one butt forward at his left. Jack noticed one of them had a third revolver, probably David’s.
“They mess with you or Lizzie, Ellen?”
“They don’t have the balls, Jack. One of them—that piece of shit, Lester—” Ellen stabbed an accusatory right index finger toward the man with David’s revolver in his belt—“he slugged David from behind while David was beating the crap out of the other one.”
Jack Naile wanted a cigarette very badly. “If you harmed my son, guys, you’re in deep shit.”
“Back y’all’s play an’ fill y’all’s hand!” Lester of the three revolvers shouted, the gun at Lester’s right hip springing from his holster as if levitated