He squinted, and waited for the room to come back to something that looked possible.
The gentleman in the broad-brimmed hat was gone.
Totter fumbled his way across the sawdust on the boards of the floor and leaned on the table, spilling chips, planting his hands in cards, spilling a drink.
The gentleman’s chair was empty, clearly.
“He cheated me,” yelled Totter, and slammed both fists on the table.
Chips jumped and glasses shook, and nobody at the table said anything.
Payday, said Totter to himself, and it’s all gone, all gone.
Totter could’ve cried, but he was too goddam mad to cry.
He kicked a brass spittoon halfway across the room, a long swirl of brown water flying out of it, leaving a trail of puddles and spots across the floor.
“Take it easy, Soldier,” said the bartender.
Totter knew there was a shotgun under the bar, but he didn’t see it yet, and so he knew he didn’t have to pull out, not yet at any rate.
“He cheated me,” said Totter.
“Have another drink, Corporal,” said the bartender. “On the house.”
Totter, being a man of principle, did not immediately take the drink, but waited an amount of time appropriate to a man of principle, and then stomped to the bar and took the drink.
Goddam Southerner, he was, said Corporal Jake Totter to himself. Goddam soft-talking Southerner. We whipped ’em, we whipped ’em good. Whipped ’em.
Should of beat the living tar outa him. Should of.
Beat the hell outa him. Should of. Should of.
Should of.
It had been another hot, dry summer, that summer of 1890.
Homesteaders claimed that the rain graphs prepared in Washington were forgeries, to dupe people into settling desert lands.
The maps of General Fremont had been honest.
He called it the Great American Desert, from the Rockies to the Missouri Basin.
And now it was fall again, and once more the crops had burned and the grasshoppers had come, and the trains and wagon trails were filled with the predictable exodus of homesteaders and settlers, broken and impoverished, their dreams vanished in the dust and rainless skies.
Thousands upon thousands, this year like last, and the year before, picked up their stakes and moved out.
You could ride through the land, for hours, without seeing a human being, though the abandoned sites of their habitations might be in evidence, the soddies with their fallen roofs, the furrowed, barren fields, the dry, cracked boards of empty corncribs, the miles of sagging wire, swaying in the dusty wind.
The town of Good Promise, South Dakota, population 407, no railroad, lay pretty well within a network of Indian reservations, of which Standing Rock was only one.
There were more than thirty thousand Indians in the Department of the Dakotas.
The Ghost Dance had swept through the reservations, an Indian Pentecost carried by seers and prophets, men like the Minneconjou, Kicking Bear. The powerful medicine of these men shirts that could turn bullets, chunks of meat brought fresh and hot from the spirit world, their signs and miracles, breathed into the plains nations, mostly Cheyenne and Sioux, the vision of the apocalyptic destruction of the white race, the return of the buffalo, the restoration of the days of the eagle feather. Once more the grass would grow waist high, and green, and the brown humps of the buffalo would bend northward again in the now almost forgotten flowing rivers of hide and meat. The Son of Wakan-Tonka, the Christ, rejected by the white man, would return to His true children, and they would accept Him, and give Him robes and ponies, and meat and beads, and smoke with Him the pipe of friendship and of peace.
The town of Good Promise, never much as it was, now seemed very small. with its few boarded stores and shacks on the prairie. Outside the town lay dozens of abandoned homesteads, and farther out a handful of isolated ranches, where stubborn men nursed their small herds on prairie browse, and beyond that lay the Indians, some thousands of them, and the Ghost Dance.
A lone rider came up the unpaved main street of Good Promise, the dust of the street hanging fetlock high about the hoofs of his rangy sorrel stallion.
He was a stranger and so was marked by the people of Good Promise. No one came to Good Promise in these days. Plank bars lay near the doors. Many of the windows had been shuttered, except for the cracks you could shove a rifle barrel through. At each end of town there were men on the roofs of buildings. Wagons were bunched at each end of the street, so they could be drawn by men across the street, making a barricade, closing the town, making it into a fort. No children played in the street. There were no women in sight. Not many men. Those there were carried weapons, and they watched the rider as he approached.
The stranger had a beard some six or seven days heavy on his face, and it was a tired face, not old, but worn and lined. His eyes were half closed, and he slumped in the saddle, and the boots in the stirrups moved with the horse’s pace, and you had to look to make sure he wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t. You could tell that from the eyes. They weren’t much open, but they were, and he was looking.
Back of the saddle, fastened with the blanket roll over the saddlebags, was a small black bag, something like those physicians carry around in their buggies.
This man wore a dark shirt, plaid, cotton, and over this shirt, like a jacket, he wore another shirt, this one of brown corduroy, with the sleeves cut off at the elbows. His pants were blue denim but pretty much white now, from the sun and the rain, and washing. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, white and low-crowned, something like those once favored by Southern gentlemen.
He also wore a Colt, and when he dismounted in front of the saloon, the natural fall of his hand was at the handle of the weapon.
Edward Chance tied his sorrel to the hitching post and entered the saloon.
Edward Chance was tired, and he wanted to cut the prairie dust with a drink, and find some place to wash, and eat and sleep.
Mostly he wanted to be left alone.
When Chance shoved open the swinging doors and entered the saloon he was surprised at the number of men inside. The street outside had been mostly empty.
Of course in the days of the Ghost Dance it was good to have a place to gather together, and talk and drink, and tell each other there was nothing to worry about, and see plenty of men and guns in the same place.
Hadn’t troops been ordered into the area? Hadn’t they taken target practice near the ration points on Saturday? There was nothing to worry about, but the saloon was a good place to listen for news, to meet friends, to forget the dust and the wind outside.
Chance noted that there were about nine tables in the saloon, and each was full; at most of them men were playing cards, nursing their drinks, making them last a long time from the looks of it, almost all the glasses about half full.
The bar, too, was crowded, and there Chance saw the blue uniforms of two or three soldiers, contrasting with the vests and jackets of the civilians.
There must have been townspeople there, homesteaders, too, probably, some ranchers, and the soldiers.
These people suddenly seemed to have one thing in common, their interest in Edward Chance.
The cards had stopped clicking and slapping.
It’s because they don’t see many strangers, said Chance to himself.
It could have been that, but what Chance didn’t know was that no one came to Good Promise in these days, because of the Ghost Dance, the Indians. A man would have to have plenty good reason to come to Good Promise this dusty, dry fall. And the men in the saloon, looking at Chance’s bearded face and haggard features, decided that he must have had that plenty good reason.
And so it was that most people, for the wrong reasons, figured Edward Chance right that afternoon in Good Promise-that here was a man running from something, and they figured him wrong only in figuring he was running from the law.