Wild Town Read Online Free Page B

deal to him.
    “Now, that little gal there,” Ford went on. “That’s my fee-an-say, Amy Standish. Teaches school here in town. Probably do a lot better some place else, but she’s lived here all her life and her family before her for God knows how long. So it looks like I’m stuck with her.”
    “You’re stuck! ” Bugs turned on him. “I’d say you were damned lucky!”
    “Well, now, I guess you would,” Ford nodded, “just seein’ her in that old picture. But she’s got fat as a hawg since it was taken.”
    “Fat? Why, you’re—” Reddening, Bugs choked off the sentence.
    Ford looked at him innocently. “Yeah? You was sayin’, McKenna?”
    “Nothing. Are we going to stand here talking all day, or are we going to see about that job?”
    “Just as soon as I make a phone call,” Ford said. “Want to do me a little favor while you’re waitin’? There’s a sign out there on the door—keep fogettin’ to take it down—an’ if you’ll get a screwdriver out of the—”
    “Do it yourself!” Bugs grunted. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”
    He slammed out of the house and climbed into the convertible. A couple of minutes later, Ford joined him. He had a fresh cigar in his mouth. He was wearing a coat that matched his blue serge trousers, and a tan ranch-style hat.
    “Couldn’t reach Mrs. Hanlon at the hotel,” he announced, as he headed the car toward town. “Have to look around a little for her.”
    “All right,” Bugs said.
    “Now, I been thinkin’—got an idea I better fix you up with a gun for your job. Don’t figure you’ll have any call to use it, but sometimes the best way of not needin’ one is to have it.”
    “Yeah?” Bugs said. “What about yourself?”
    “Oh, well, me, now…” Ford paused to turn the car into the curb. “That’s a different situation. Me, I’m never around any action. Never run into nothing where a gun might be necessary.”
    He had parked at the end of the old town’s main street, the beginning of the boom town’s chief thoroughfare. They walked to the end of it, then crossed in the deep reddish dust, and started back up the plank sidewalk on the other side.
    Mammoth sixteen-wheeled trucks lumbered down the street toward the oilfields. The smell of white-corn whiskey drifted from doorways. There was an incessant tinkling of juke-boxes, a clang-clinking of slot machines, the rattle-and-smack of dice and the whirr-and-click of roulette wheels. The noise rose and fell, a chorus that faded with the passing of one doorway and picked up, in perfect tempo and tune, at the next.
    There were no “women.” None, at least, who appeared to be anything but women (no quotes). So Ford apparently did draw the line somewhere. The men were young, not-so-young, but never old. Most of them wore hats spattered with drill-mud, and the “rattlesnake insurance” of laced eighteen-inch boots.
    Ford paused at each establishment and glanced inside. Near the end of the second block, he looked over the swinging doors of a gambling house, and gave Bugs a nod of satisfaction.
    “In here,” he said, taking a pair of black kid gloves from his pocket.
    He began putting them on, smoothing them over his tapering, delicate-looking fingers. A man came hurrying through the swinging doors, a burly, pasty-faced man with a slit for a mouth and eyes that were like tiny black buttons.
    “Well, Lou!” He smirked nervously. “Saw you lookin’ inside. Nothing wrong, is there?”
    Ford didn’t answer him. He didn’t look up from pulling on his gloves.
    “Lou. Be reasonable, huh, keed?” There was desperation in the guy’s voice. “I didn’t know she was in there. I swear I didn’t! I just this moment came back from eatin’, and I told those jerks I got working for me a thousand times not to let her—”
    Bugs didn’t see the blow, or, rather, two blows, that Ford delivered. They were so unexpected and executed so swiftly that he saw little more than their results…The