Port Hazard Read Online Free Page B

it on a door panel. “I’ll have one of those beers, if they’re not all spoken for.”
    A gray tongue like a toadbelly came out and slid the length of the bartender’s lower lip. “You lost, mister. You gots to follow the creek north till it gets light.”
    That seemed to be the joke of the town. I said, “It’s a long dry walk.”
    The customer to my right reached over and pinched the sleeve of my travel coat between thumb and forefinger. He had on overalls with a big safety pin keeping one strap in place over a pair of red flannels gone mostly gray. “That silk?” he asked.
    â€œNot for thirty a month and four cents a mile. What about that beer?” I was still looking at the bartender.
    His eyes moved from side to side, couldn’t find a quorum. He slammed a thick glass onto the bar and filled it from the bottle, not bothering to tilt the glass to cut the clouds. I thanked him and took a drink. It was homemade stuff, bitter, with hops floating in it, but I felt the cold of it drying the sweat on the back of my neck. I asked the bartender how he kept people from stealing the bottles out of the creek.
    â€œWater moccasins.”
    â€œI didn’t think we had water moccasins in Montana.”
    â€œBenetsee’s got everything in it. Except gold.” He opened a mouth with no teeth in it and let out air in a death rattle of a laugh.
    â€œMaybe you just spread the story around to protect your beer.”
    The mouth clapped shut, then opened a quarter-inch. “Maybe I is a liar in your eyes.”
    â€œNo, sir. Just a good businessman.”
    A full little silence followed, like a fire gulping air. A drop of sweat wandered down my spine, stinging like molten lead. I had five cartridges in my revolver and thirty-two pairs of eyes on me, if the dusty mirror strung from a nail behind the bar wasn’t missing anyone in the shadows. Then someone laughed, a shrill, bubbling cackle, with no irony in it. A hand smacked the bar, hard enough to create a tidal wave in my glass.
    â€œHe’s snared you, Danny.” This was a voice I recognized. “I’m so scared of snakes in general I never once thought you was bluffing about them water moccasins. What you need now’s a wolf trap. Man’s got to be thirstier’n Christ on the cross to trade his fingers for a sip of that piss you stir up in back.”
    Another silence, shorter than the first. Then someone else laughed. That started a rockslide. The room shook with guffaws. I extracted a fistful of coins from my pocket and laid them on the bar in a heap.
    â€œPour each of these fellows a beer,” I said. “If there’s anything left, you can put it toward that wolf trap.”
    Danny joined the others this time, showing his pink gums. “I’m thinking bear. You don’t know these boys when they’s parched.” He scooped the coins into a box with Pallas Athena on the lid and started pouring.
    I picked up my glass and moved to the end of the bar, where a gap had opened in the rush to take advantage of my generosity. Edward Anderson Beecher leaned there on his forearms with one hand wrapped around his glass, a cigarette building a long ash between the first two fingers. He had on his porter’s outfit, the cap tilted forward and touching the bridge of his nose—a violation of the Northern Pacific uniform code. The scar on his cheek looked like a curl of packing cord caught in fresh tar. He was smiling into his beer, his lips pressed tight.
    I said, “Prefer to buy your own?”
    â€œDon’t take it as an insult. Two beers and I’m a bad risk. If it gets back to Mr. J. J. Hill I even showed up in a place like this in my working clothes, I’ll be back shoveling horseshit.”
    â€œYou railroad men all talk about Hill like you’ve met face to face.”
    â€œCould have. One white man in a beard looks pretty much like all the