The Trail Rider/Chapter 25
ZEB SMITH was in a bitter frame of mind that afternoon. Out of a job, out of money, wanting a drink, and no credit in the town. The more he thought of the snug nest that Ollie Noggle had nosed him out of, the blacker grew his hate against the long-legged artist of the perfumed hair.
Old Zeb was sitting on a keg in the shade of Jud Springer's combination joint, where he had so lately been a power under the mighty arm of Johnnie Mackey. The smell of sour beer was in the keg, and a score of its mates around him, whetting Zeb's appetite to frenzy. He cursed his bad luck, he cursed Malvina, he cursed the barber and, above all, with a double curse, he blasted Texas Hartwell for his meddlesome interference on the bridal night.
If it hadn't been for that glum-faced stranger, with that thing in his eyes which Smith had come to respect in the very few men who were gifted with it—that thing which was like a cold hand on the back of a man's neck and lead in his heart—if it hadn't been for that solemn, slow-voiced stranger, look what he'd have come into! A hotel, and a good bed to stretch in, and meals at all hours and money coming in at doors and windows on every wind. It was a shame the way things ran in this world. What fatal prearrangement had fixed their conjunction in Cottonwood at that hour? That was what puzzled Smith and, because it puzzled him, threw him into a deep and dark resentfulness.
There he had come to Cottonwood to hold up Henry Stott at close range, and had found the tent boarding-house that Malvina had started with hardened into a regular hotel, like some kind of a bug that grows a shell in the summer sun. First, this Texas had beaten him out of the hotel, with the insignificant assistance of the despicable barber, and now he had beaten him out of Stott.
Fool enough in his own time, Zeb reflected, he had owned to Hartwell and that little Indian, that he had seen Stott murder McCoy and had been a pensioner of silence ever since. But that little Indian knew it all the time, and knew more, so much more that old Zeb grew cold in a sweat when he considered how much. But the little Indian was dead; he couldn't talk. If Hartwell was out of there also, Zeb believed he could run the barber out of town and take his place again with his feet under Malvina's table.
Zeb hadn't followed events very closely in Cottonwood that day. He had heard that Stott was gone, and the little Indian killed, and somebody else shot up by that Texas man, but all those events were small and uninteresting in comparison with the demand of his clamoring nerves for a drink.
And nobody in town would trust him; not a soul. He had ruined his chances by his overbearing conduct while working as bouncer for Mackey. He hadn't a friend in the world. Worse than that, he hadn't a single article left that he could pledge for a drink, or raise the money on. His gun was gone, his hat was gone, his spurs were gone. A man had to keep the rest of his clothes to meet the requirements of a despised society.
It was torture to smell liquor and not be able to get it, for there was nothing in the beer kegs but the scent. Zeb had tipped them all, licked their chines, rammed his hot tongue into their bungholes in the burning hope of one dribbling drop.
And there was that barber, that snipe-shanked suds mixer, enjoying the kingdom that rightly belonged to him. Noggle never lacked a dime to buy a drink, never knew the torture of the longing for one sizzling slug of whisky to cool his burning guts.
A thought grew out of this bitter denunciation. It swelled in the vaporous brain of alcoholic lees and raised old Zeb Smith to his feet. That barber had money; people gave the fly-headed scoundrel dimes for shaves, quarters to cut their hair. And what Noggle had, by all the justice that the disinherited claim, belonged to him.
Zeb got up; he headed for the barber shop, a glaze in his eyes, a feeling of dust on his dry lips, his tongue a streak of fire. What belonged to Noggle now had belonged to him originally. No consideration had been rendered for the bed and board which the barber had usurped. This was the day to collect.
Noggle was not in the shop. The door stood open, a newspaper on the chair backed against it, just as if the barber had put it down and fled at the sound of his enemy's footfall. But Noggle was quite unconscious of both Smith's presence and designs. He was across the street in the drug store, smelling over a new stock of perfumes.
Smith went in and sat down, turning his red eyes around the shop, taking stock of what could be snatched and carried off in case the barber did not return speedily and make a settlement in cash. The druggist called Noggle's attention to the waiting customer, and Noggle went out to face the crisis of his life.
Noggle was whistling a little tune when he stepped into the street, and the wind was playing in his scented hair, and turning back the skirts of his seersucker coat, displaying his pearl-handled gun. He could see the reflection of his own elegance in his shoes. Zeb Smith rose up and filled the door, as forbidding as a lion.
Noggle did not stand to question any phase of the situation at all. He turned and ran, with a cold, gurgling noise in his throat of absolute fright. Smith dashed after him, commanding him in his hoarse, whisky-burned voice to stop and begin a reckoning.
There was but one thought in Noggle's mind, and that was the sanctuary of the hotel. Toward that refuge he sped, cutting the ground in great scissors leaps, old Zeb Smith close after him, his wild hair flying, his wild eyes glaring, his great mustache blowing back to his ears. Away through the business block they went, people giving ground to them, Noggle holding the middle of the sidewalk, that water-gurgle of cold terror still in his throat; after him followed Smith, the one thought of his thoughts being that his last chance must not be allowed to slip his hand.
They passed the city marshal in front of Jud Springer's new joint, but they were going faster than any city marshal in this world ever could hope to move of his own effort, driven by his own physical machinery. He saw the uselessness of pursuit, and let them run unchallenged.
When they arrived at the hotel, Smith was reaching for Noggle's coat-tail. Up-stairs the barber leaped, up-stairs after him Smith lumbered; along the hall toward Malvina's bedroom Noggle ran, shaking the house from shingle to foundation stone, and close behind his heels panted Smith, his eyes as red as hate.
Noggle jumped to the door like a swooping eagle, Smith a rod behind him. Within there was a glimpse of bare shoulders, a shower of unloosed red hair, and the sharp alarm of a woman's scream. Then the door was flung shut in Noggle's face and locked, and the terrible Smith was upon him, his obscene hand gathering a firm hold in the back of the seersucker coat.
Noggle felt a chill of fear crinkle his hair, and leaned and strained and pawed the floor in his struggle to break that hold. It broke, for seersucker is not as strong as fear in the heart of a coward naturally born, and away went Noggle again, on through the hall, down the back stairs, around the hotel, into the main street. He shaped his halfblind course for the door of his shop again, thinking frantically of a razor, beating the ground with his long flat feet until the cow ponies hitched along the way reared back on their halters, and plunged and snorted, raising a dust for a background to the most tremendous race that Cottonwood ever had seen.
And all the time there hung by the barber's side, under his elbow, near the grasp of his true right hand, his .32 caliber pistol in its patent-leather case.
Three razors lay on the little shelf beneath the mirror in Ollie Noggle's shop, their blades bent backward like the heads of serpents lifted to strike. Smith came up the two steps which raised from the sidewalk to the shop threshold with the back of the seersucker coat still grasped in his defiling hand, at the moment that Noggle, purple, popeyed, panting, whirled round and faced him, a command like a cough in his dry throat.
"Don't y'u come in—don't y'u come in!" he panted.
But Smith was already in, and Noggle backed before him to a corner. There, with his thin back to the wall, his own floor beneath his feet, his chair on one hand, his hot water tank on the other, and no possibility of escape through the door, his soul began to enlarge with the desperate determination to fight.
Old Zeb Smith stood before him, red spines of beard on his dirty face, his red flannel shirt open on his hairy chest, crouching from the knees, his hands fixed to spring and tear.
Noggle seized a razor, the hot water of a coward's courage in his eyes, swiped with it, slashed with it, brought it around in bright, confusing whirl in front of Zeb Smith's face. Smith fell back a step, growling in his bearded neck, winking his red eyes as if a hot iron had been thrust under his nose.
"Git out! Git out!" Noggle commanded, his courage bristling on his narrow back like hairs.
"Gimme ten dollars and I'll leave you alone," said Smith.
"No, I won't—no, I won't!" Noggle answered, cheered and strengthened to heroic endeavors by the gathering crowd before his door.
"Gimme—"
Whether Zeb Smith had it in mind to raise his demand, or to lower to a compromise, no man ever heard. For his words broke in horrified, shivering exclamation as Noggle's bright razor darted and slashed and snipped the end of his nose off as if it were a green cucumber.
Smith clapped his hand to the end of his nose in time to catch the fragment as it fell. Terrified beyond expression, he gazed a moment, clamped the bleeding parent stem between finger and thumb and, with the severed portion tightly clasped in the other hand, ran bellowing from the shop.
It wasn't a very big piece that Noggle had cut from the end of Smith's nose, perhaps not much bigger than a silver quarter, but it must have looked the size of a wagon-wheel to Zeb as he ran with it in his hand to the doctor's office. There he presented it, holding hard to the end of his nose to check the flow of blood, with a thick request that it be immediately attached to its proper surroundings.
The doctor was a short man with a black beard, which was red at times for half an inch next his skin, as business might press, or the coloring matter be slow about reaching him from Kansas City. He was a saw-and-calomel survival of the Civil War, a vituperative man, full of strange and disquieting oaths. He looked on Smith, his bleeding nose, his extended fragment, and cursed him by all the gods in his uncommon vocabulary.
"It's a pity he didn't cut your dam' head off, you old soak! No, I won't sew it on! I won't touch you, you old skunk!"
Smith implored his compassion, still offering the little piece of red nose-end, fiery yet, though drained of blood. The doctor cursed him again, and turned from him. Smith stood looking at the bit of flesh in his hand, breathing through his mouth with a loud noise. "Can't you put it back, doc? My looks'll be ruined!" he said.
With that the swearing doctor turned to him again, ordered him to sit down, examined the cut.
"It wouldn't take, you old fool!" he said.
Smith insisted that he had heard of such things being done, but the doctor gave him no heed. He set about bandaging the nose, chuckling to himself from time to time behind Smith's back.
"Yes, it might be done," he said, when he had the injured nose wrapped and stuck over with adhesive tape, "but I'm not prepared to do it, Smith. You've got to have human grafting-wax for a job like this, and I'm all out. If you could keep that piece of nose fresh till you go to Kansas City, they could do it for you there."
"Lord, doc, I ain't got the money to go there on!"
"Would you go if I got your ticket, Zeb?"
"I would if I could keep that piece fresh till I get there."
"I'll fix it for you; I'll get a chunk of ice. We'll wrap it up and put it in a box on the ice, and it'll keep as fresh as a fish."
Smith was on hand to take the train for Kansas City, a large dripping box in his hand, a ticket in his pocket for which the money of Ollie Noggle had paid. For the barber realized very well that this was the cheapest and easiest way of ridding himself of Smith for many a day to come. It was one thing for him to go to Kansas City on a provided ticket, and another for him to come back on one bought by himself.
The doctor was there to watch Zeb aboard, and to caution him in all gravity to get more ice out of the water-cooler in case the chunk in his box should run low. And so Zeb Smith departed from Cottonwood. Whether he ever came back is not a matter that concerns us now. Certainly he was not seen there again in the brief time that remains to the portion of this diminishing tale.