The Crossings by Jack Ketchum Page B

slightly off to the right so I could see his cards but he didn't seem to mind. In his left hand he held a short leather thong with one die studding either end and these dice he would pass through his fingers knuckle to knuckle and over and under one another in a smooth fluid motion the trick to which I could not immediately fathom. It may be that whiskey had something to do with this. I was on my fifth and what I thought might be my last glass of the evening but I wasn't making any promises to myself either.
    The bet was to Heilberger but he folded so that left Hart and Donaldson.
    I don't know how much was on the table but it was a lot. The Little Fanny was crowded that night with Irish and German miners mostly plus the local entrepreneur here and there and the whores of course and when Donaldson bet, thirty one of the miners whistled low, but loud enough so that you could hear it over Sam Perkins' drunken fiddle-playing.
    While Hart was thinking it over Donaldson rolled himself a cigarette and drew the sack shut with the string held between his teeth and when he raised the match there it was, a jack of diamonds staring out at us between his ratty shirt and wool jacket. I saw it and Hart saw it and probably so did Heilberger. I guess that like me Hart simply couldn't believe what he was seeing.
    "Jesus and Mary on a broomstick," he said. "You could at least be a little careful, couldn't you?"
    He didn't seem angry, only more or less annoyed with Donaldson, but he drew his gun out nevertheless — some huge grey antique of god knows what vintage — and set it on the table and when Donaldson saw this monstrosity pointed in his direction he began fumbling for his own gun and Hart said don't do that which stopped him for a moment but then he went back to fumbling again, just some fool in a panic and Hart said dammit, George, don't do that now but by then Donaldson had his own gun out so Hart had no choice but to pull the trigger.
    You expected a lot from a gun that big and people were already moving away from behind Donaldson but all we heard was a click.
    "Aw shit," said Hart, "that goddamn firing pin."
    And Donaldson's face went from white to smiling. It was not a nice smile and it was certainly my turn to move away out of the line of fire but damned if I could. I sat frozen in my chair watching Hart roll the dice between his fingers and over and under his knuckles like he was still considering his card-hand and nothing more and Donaldson fired. And for a split second nothing happened then either.
    Then the thing exploded on him. Threw him over and off his chair.
    So that he lay writhing and groaning on the rough plank floor with his shirt on fire and a badly scorched face and gunhand until Jess Ake, the barman, threw a bucket of water on him.
    That was the gunfight at the Little Fanny Saloon .
    We waved away the powder-smoke, Hart and Heilberger and I, and Hart collected his winnings off the table.
    "I bet he got that gun up at Gusdorf's," he said. "That man ought to be arrested."
    I was amazed at his utter calm. My own stomach was churning whiskey and bile in equal portions — and I hadn't been the fellow staring down a pistol but merely sitting behind somebody who was.
    I guessed Hart to be in his late forties, early fifties, though it was hard to say and wondered not for the first time what sort of forces had shaped men like some of them you found out here.
    If they weren't just plain-out demented, like E.M. "Choctau" Kelly, who was quietly carving a tombstone for Miss Nellie Russell, one of Ginny Smalls' whores over at the Fairview, then the best of them seemed to hold some mix of craziness and courage that served them as a kind of lucky charm.
    I think of Old Bill Cooney, who found a black bear snuffling through his ten-dollar sack of coffee beans one morning and got so mad that he chased the bear over half a mile in his stocking feet with nothing in hand should the creature have turned on him but a bottle of lemon beer