succeed.
Two trains arrived daily, one at ten in the morning and the other at
six at night. The men were thorough in their search. After the
passengers departed, a clean sweep was made of every car just to make
certain the women weren't hiding.
The hours in between the trains' arrivals were spent in the town
saloon. The four of them drank hard whiskey together, but none of them
got drunk. Mr. Robertson did get a little careless, though, and the
others had to help him cover up his spot of trouble. Robertson blamed
his lack of control on boredom, for surely that was why he had taken
the homely little whore named Flo out to one of the caverns and cut
her. He hadn't meant to kill her, just scare her a little, at least
that's what he believed when he started out with her perched on his
saddle, but once he took his knife out and started carving, he got such
a kick out of hearing her scream he didn't want to stop.
His friends helped him bury the body, and aside from having to listen
to Robertson boast about how she had squealed like a pig, they all put
the inconvenience behind them. Flo was just a whore, after all, and no
one was going to miss her.
Because they still hadn't heard from Johnson, they assumed he'd failed
to kill the women himself. Robertson told the others he wished their
boss were there because he was much smarter than they were and would
surely be able to figure out where the women were hiding. He wasn't
there though, for he and his mistress had gone south to get Bell out of
jail.
On the third morning of their watch, they heard through the grapevine
that a U. S. marshal named Cooper had been killed. Someone had shot
him and thrown him off a train. A wire had been sent to the sheriff in
Red Arrow telling him to be on the lookout for any suspicious
characters. He relayed the information to the owner of the saloon, who
told it to everyone who came into his bar for a drink.
The four men felt they had cause for celebration. They sat together in
the corner and shared a bottle of Rabbit Rye among them.
Robertson, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, wasn't in a festive mood.
"What's taking those women so long to get here? According to the
boss's calculations, they should have gotten off the train yesterday or
the day before." He had only just made the remarks when an old coot,
with long straggly hair and a smell about him as rank as a skunk's
spray, came walking into the saloon.
He strutted up to the bar and draped himself across the counter. "Give
me a drink, Harley. I just seen something real special, and I'll tell
you about it after I wet my whistle." The bartender, a big man with
beefy arms and missing front teeth no one ever noticed because he never
smiled, sauntered over to his customer and squinted at him.
"You got money today, Gus? " In answer, the misshapen, scrawny man
slammed a coin down on the countertop. "I sure do, " he boasted. "I
got a lot of money today, almost three whole dollars."
"Where'd you get it? " Harley asked as he poured Gus a watered-down
drink of whiskey.