Read Online The Vanquished by Brian Garfield - Free Book Online

apparently to hunt up a blanket. Charley’s expression remained blank.
    Woods’s professor was pounding the battered keys of the spinet, and the rouge-cheeked girls moved around the sawdust floor avoiding the stamping boots of the miners. A vaquero came into the place, swept off his huge hat and laughed loudly, afterward making a place at the bar and calling for a drink. Charley wished he was a vaquero —they were always laughing.
    A husky miner with a pugilistic expression went by, bought a ticket and stood by the rope that defined the limits of the dance floor, waiting his turn. Charley felt in his pocket, and remembered he had no money, and observed that luck was truly indifferent, that you had to endure and reject it with equal sobriety, and that he was hungry again. One o’clock came and went. Chuck Parker was talking to a new group of interested listeners, and Norval Douglas did not appear; Charley remained in the saloon because it was cold and he did not want to sleep in the stable again. His lids were weighted. Men, eddied around, trafficked in and out, and gradually the crowd began to diminish and the volume of sound lessened. Chuck Parker shouldered away from the bar and backed against a wall, building a cigarette, covering the room from under the droop of his eyelids. Charley had a good idea of what was on Parker’s mind. He watched the big tough with a measure of old contempt in his look. Parker was clearly roving, on the hunt in his animal way, awaiting the passing of some simple prey, and presently Parker’s eye fell upon a small hollow-chested old miner who sat eating with his fingers at a table, alone in the back of the place, half drunk or more, with a round-butted leather sack at his elbow—a gold poke. Parker’s attention became fixed, and Charley pitied the little drunk miner.
    Parker’s cheeks were flushed red, broiled to their lobster color by the sun. Road gang , Charley thought, seeing the raw marks of chain cuffs on the man’s thick wrists. Parker pushed indolently away from the wall and rolled through the crowd out into the night. When Charley looked back, he saw the miner on his feet, swaying a little, pocketing his gold poke. His shoulders were stooped; his beard was ragged. The little man went bent-backed through the place and out the door. Knowing that Parker would soon be upon the miner, Charley, in a fit of accumulated unaimed rage, slipped from his seat and went to the door. He remembered a time when Parker and Bill, the bartender at the Triple Ace, laughing wickedly, had backed him into a corner and hurled obscene insults at him until his face had burned, and with his eyes redly filmed Charley had hurled a chair at Parker and Parker had been too drunk to dodge, so the chair had smashed his face, making his broad flat nose bleed furiously. In unreasoning rage Charley had cried out and Parker had growled and slung his weight forward, trapping Charley in the corner, and had pounded Charley senseless while somewhere in the background Bill was laughing.
    That was Charley’s memory of Chuck Parker, and now he wheeled out of the saloon doorway and saw the old stooped miner turn a corner two blocks away and fade back into the part of town that consisted mostly of board shacks and tents, where Charley had lived until two days ago. Charley hunched his shoulders against the cold and cursed his thin garments, and quickened his pace as he rounded that corner. He skirted the back of the big mercantile emporium and passed a row of tents and the frame building that was Madam Sarah’s, and went up on his toes, running. A wide circle placed him behind a warped, weatherbeaten cabin, where he waited drawing up his breath for the miner to come by so that he could warn the miner against Chuck Parker. Parker would be along soon. Time grew shorter and Charley chafed.
    The miner shuffled nearer and lurched against the side of a tent, springing its canvas, speaking to