The Floor of Heaven Read Online Free

fracas armed with an ice mallet. As if he were hammering a fence post into the ground, Masterson pounded away at the face of a big Dutch cowboy. With each solid blow, blood spurted from the Dutchman’s face. Charlie wanted to go to the cowboy’s aid, but he was too busy trading punches, trying to keep on his feet; if a buffalo hunter took you down, his friends were certain to pile on, and then all would be lost.
    Jim White was soon lying on the floor, blood oozing from his head, dying, and the Dutchman’s face was raw meat. Then Charlie saw a buffalo hunter plunge a knife into Wess’s back, driving the blade in up to the handle and giving it a mean, punishing twist. At once his friend collapsed to his knees. Dodging a flying chair, Charlie hurried over and somehow managed to drag Wess out the saloon door. A deep horseshoe-shaped wound had soaked the back of Wess’s shirt red, but he had not lost consciousness. Charlie got Wess on his horse, and he’d just mounted Whiskey Pete, his cow pony, when the sheriff ran over and indignantly barked that they were under arrest. Without a word, Charlie drew his big silver-plated, pearl-handled Colt .45 and charged Whiskey Pete up the wooden steps right at the lawman. The sheriff turned and ran. So with Wess slumped in the saddle and Charlie letting loose a triumphant cowboy yell, the two men put spurs to their horses and galloped east out of Dodge.
    Telling the story to the LX hands, he said his point was “to illustrate what fools cowboys were after long drives up the trail.” “Had a shot been fired that night in the dance hall,” he lectured with an uncustomary earnestness, “the chances are several new mounds would have been added to Boot Hill,” Dodge City’s graveyard.
    Sure enough, Charlie’s warning worked. None of his men landed in any real trouble in Caldwell. Instead, to the amusement of the whole outfit, it was Charlie who stumbled; and it was a fall that even an experienced hand like Charlie himself would never have anticipated.
    AFTER THE cattle had been chuted onto stock cars and were on the rail to Chicago, Charlie passed a pleasant winter in Caldwell. Throughout the cold months he kept warm with festive nights and accommodating ladies. But in March Charlie received a letter from David Thomas Beals, the Boston-based owner of the sprawling LX Ranch. He was ordered to lead more than one hundred head of cow ponies and a crew of cowboys back down to the panhandle. As fate would have it, the same day the letter arrived he also received an invitation from Miss May Beals, the boss’s niece, to accompany her to church. And it was after the evening service, while they were standing on the church steps, that it happened.
    Miss Beals introduced Charlie to her new friend, Mamie Lloyd. Charlie would always insist that he could not remember a word that passed between them. No doubt there must’ve been some conversation about the impression the raucous “Queen City of the Border” had made on Miss Lloyd; along with her parents, she’d only recently moved to Caldwell from their home in sedate Shelbyville, Illinois. Still, all Charlie could remember with any certainty was the impression the fifteen-year-old black-eyed Mamie made on him. Though she was still a ruddy-cheeked teenager, he detected a precocious maturity, an impressive promise of authority and confidence. She charmed him, too. Mamie presented herself with a self-conscious shyness, but even in those few moments on the church steps this well-bred reticence would without warning give way to a magnificently mischievous smile. Their one brief, seemingly inconsequential conversation that March evening had an immediate effect on Charlie: “I was a sure-enough locoed cowboy—up to my ears in love.”
    It was a whirlwind courtship. Mamie’s father, H. Clay Lloyd, was, however, a bit of an impediment. The prospect of his only daughter taking up with a freewheeling Texas-born cowpuncher a dozen years her senior did