The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [196]
He was a slim, good-looking boy, but he never smiled unless he said something he thought was funny, and he liked to pose, as he was doing now with the quirt and his hat tilted forward and the low-slung Navy Colt. In the few weeks he’d been with us I’d learned this about him.
I started to bring the horses and he turned his head. “You keep them horses over there.”
“What’s the difference? I’ll take them over.”
“Just stay where you are.” His gaze went back to the stable as the one-armed fellow came out of the shadow into the sunlight again, and for a moment Tobin just stared at the man.
“Are you deaf or something?”
THE MAN TURNED to Tobin and his eyes looked tired. They were watery, and with the bits of straw sticking to his shirt and pants he looked as if he’d just slept off a drunk in the stable. He was about thirty, a year one way or the other. He didn’t answer Tobin, but came on toward me.
“I asked you a question!”
He stopped then and looked at Tobin.
“I asked you,” Tobin said, “if you were deaf.”
“No, I’m not deaf.”
“You work here?”
The man nodded.
“You’re supposed to answer when somebody calls.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” the man said.
The temper rose in Tobin’s face again. “Listen, don’t talk like that to me! I’ll kick your hind end across the yard!”
The tired eyes looked at me momentarily. He came on then and took the reins and started back toward the stable with the horses. Tobin called to him, “Water and rub ’em down now… you hear me?” He stood looking after the horses for a time, then finally he turned and started for the adobe as I did.
“You didn’t have to talk to him like that.”
Tobin shook his head disgustedly. “Judas, I hate a slow-moving, worthless man.”
“He had only one arm,” I said.
“What difference does that make?”
“Maybe it makes him feel bad.”
“It don’t make him walk slower.”
“Well maybe some men it does.”
Tobin opened the door and walked in ahead of me over to the bar that was along the left-hand wall where Chris and Kite and Vicente stood leaning and drinking mescal, and he said, “Whiskey,” to Brady standing behind the bar.
Brady was looking toward me, waiting for Tobin to get out of the way. “How you been, Uncle?” Brady said to me.
“Fair,” I told him. “How’ve you been?”
“Good.” He smiled now, that big, loose-faced, double-chinned smile of his. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“I want whiskey,” Tobin said.
Brady looked at him. “I heard you, Sonny. You can’t wait till I tell a friend hello?”
I got to the bar before Tobin could say anything. “Joe, this is Tobin Royal, a new man with us.”
Tobin nodded and Joe Brady said glad-to-meet-you, because he was a businessman. He sat the whiskey bottle on the bar and poured a drink out of it. Tobin emptied the hooker, and touched the bottle with the glass for another. But this one, after Brady poured it, he took to one of the three tables that were along the other wall, where the stage passengers ate. He sat down with the drink in front of him and started making a cigarette.
Joe Brady nudged the mescal bottle toward me. “What’s he trying to prove?”
“That he’s older than he is,” I answered. I could hear Vicente telling a vaquero story and Chris and Kite were listening, knowing what the ending was, but waiting for it anyway. They didn’t have much to say to Tobin, because the first day he joined us he had a fight with Kite. Kite had been a Tascosa buffalo skinner, a big rawboned boy, but Tobin licked him good. Tobin always stayed a few steps out from them, like he didn’t want to be mistaken for just an ordinary rider.
“I see you got a new man too,” I said to Brady.
“That’s John Lefton,” Brady said. “He came here on the stage a few weeks ago… got off like he expected to see something. As it turned out, he’d paid the fare as far as his money would take him… which was to here.”
“What’s he running away from?”
“Did you see him close?”
“You mean the one arm?”
Brady nodded. “That’s what