Doctor Who_ The Gunfighters - Donald Cotton [34]
But Phineas was in no condition to help him find le mot juste. So, mumbling mechanically, the boys backed up and off, towards where the sunset would have been if it hadn’t been over.
Where the sunset used to be was now the Clanton Ranch; and the difference was immediately apparent. For one thing, whereas the sunset had been a golden testament of glory, and poets had said so, the ranch fell somewhat short of this high standard in several respects, and everybody said so. ‘Squalid’ was the word they generally used. Pa Clanton claimed he kept it that way in memory of his wife, God rest her tongue, whose early death had followed hard upon her premature burial, back in ‘75.
You could still see her temporary grave near the blocked over-flow from the hog-pound, if you weren’t careful; and along about now of an evening, it was the old man’s habit to wander gladly down there, and get in some spitting practice – a thing he hadn’t hardly got enough of when she was alive.
It was at these times of solitude he would remember his early pioneering days, when he had trecked West to carve out a false name for himself, far from her father’s shotgun; and also with what soulless devotion she and the Pinkertons’ men had finally tracked him down to this blessed corner of nowhere.
But now he was alone in the world; apart, that is to say, from his four fine boys – no, three now, he chuckled to remember – who seemed to be doing their damndedest to remind him of her. Still, they were all he’d got, Heaven help him; so, tossing a bunch of poison-ivy onto the hallowed mound, he strode – briskly, for a man with his unpleasant diseases – back to the chill intimacy of his old colonial kitchen – so called, because the termites were into it in a big way – to see if they were home yet.
Rightly speaking, he considered, there should have been big doin’s in town this day; and, by now, Holliday should be gracing a trestle-table in the cold-store at Jackson’s Hardware – so often pressed into service as ante-room to the infernal hot-spot.
And with the demon dentist thus occupied, why, the way would be clear for an undisturbed final confrontation with the more properly constituted authorities; for Earp and Masterson, he judged, were now all that stood between him and the mayoral parlour, with its bright vistas of graft and civic corruption, plus a complimentary pass to Ma Golightly’s.
So he was a mite discountenanced to find no-one in residence bar his yellow hound dog, which was gnawing a disused buffalo skull on the groaning table. Absent-mindedly, he removed man’s best friend with a bull-whip; whereupon it bit him affectionately on one of his numbed ankles, en route for the Great Outdoors. They understood each other, these two – having many points in common.
He was therefore engaged in plastering varmint-fat on the probably rabid cicatrice, when he heard the sound for which his ears were already half-cocked – that of horses’
hooves in something of a hurry; and he limped over to the mullioned arrow-slit, his over-crowded countenance a-gleam with dubious welcome.
Three horses cantered into the dung-encrusted yard – a feature of the property commonly referred to as the unpleasance – but only, he was puzzled to note, two riders.
The medium-sized, bearded boy was missing.
‘Where’s Phin?’ he enquired, after a recount. ‘Stayed on in town fer a few laughs, an’ such?’
Damn! Ike had been hoping the subject would not be touched on till after a few words of conventional greeting.
‘Well, I’ll tell you...’ he said, dismounting abruptly, and picking himself up. ‘Or maybe Billy here would rather... ?’
Billy waived the privilege. ‘You’re the eldest,’ he said,
‘best get it over...’
They edged into the house past Pa’s doom-exuding bulk, and settled themselves side by side on the parlour hitching-rail. They put Pa in mind of two turkey-buzzards at a christening...
‘Go on,’ he said, grimly, ‘where’s he at this time?’
‘Properly speaking,’ said Ike, ‘I cain’t rightly say; but its a fair bet that by