The little whore said, “Stick it in.”
“Wait a minute,” Cameron said. He started to shift out of the love position. He had made up his mind.
The Indian girl reached into her pocket and took out a photograph. It was the photograph of a very beautiful young woman. She wasn’t wearing any clothes in the photograph. She was sitting on the floor in a room filled with musical instruments.
Magic Child showed the photograph to Greer.
“What’s this?” Greer said.
Magic Child walked over and showed the photograph to Cameron.
“Interesting,” Cameron said.
The two little whores didn’t know what was happening. They had never seen anything like this before and they had seen a lot of things. The brunette suddenly covered up her vagina because she was embarrassed.
The blonde stared silently on with disbelieving blue eyes. Whenever a man told her to shut up, she always shut up. She had been a farm girl before she went into whoring.
Then Magic Child reached into the pocket of her Indian dress and took out five thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills. She took the money out as if she’d been doing it all her life.
She gave Greer twenty-five of them and then she walked over and gave Cameron twenty-five of them. After she gave them the money, she stood there looking silently at them. She still hadn’t said a word since she’d come into the room.
Greer sat there with the blonde whore still on his lap. He looked at the Indian girl and nodded OK very slowly. Cameron had a half-smile on his face, lying beside the brunette who was covering up her vagina with her hand.
· Indian ·
Greer and Cameron left Portland the next morning on the train up the Columbia River, travelling toward Central County in Eastern Oregon.
They enjoyed their seats because they liked to travel on trains.
The Indian girl travelled with them. They spent a great deal of time looking at her because she was very pretty.
She was tall and slender and had long straight black hair. Her features were delicately voluptuous. They were both interested in her mouth.
She sat there exquisitely, looking at the Columbia River as the train travelled up the river toward Eastern Oregon. She saw things that interested her.
Greer and Cameron started talking with Magic Child after they were three or four hours out of Portland. They were curious as to what it was all about.
The girl hadn’t said more than a hundred words since she had walked into the whorehouse and started to change their lives. None of the words were about what they were supposed to do except go to Central County and meet a Miss Hawkline who would then tell them what she would pay them five thousand dollars to do.
“Why are we going to Central County?” Greer said.
“You kill people, don’t you?” Magic Child said. Her voice was gentle and precise. They were surprised by the sound of her voice. They didn’t expect it to sound that way when she said that.
“Sometimes,” Greer said.
“They got a lot of sheep trouble over that way,” Cameron said. “I heard there was some killings there. 4 men killed last week and 9 during the month. I know 3 Portland gunmen who went up there a few days ago. Good men, too.”
“Real good,” Greer said. “Probably the best three men going I know of except for maybe two more. Take a lot to put those boys away. They went up there to work for the cattlemen. Which side is your bosslady on or does she want some personal work done?”
“Miss Hawkline will tell you what she wants done,” Magic Child said.
“Can’t even get a hint out of you, huh?” Greer said, smiling.
Magic Child looked out the window at the Columbia River. There was a small boat on the river. Two people were sitting in the boat. She couldn’t tell what they were doing. One of the people was holding an umbrella, though it wasn’t raining and the sun wasn’t shining either.
Greer and Cameron gave up trying to find out what they were supposed to do but they were curious about Magic Child. They had been surprised by her voice because she didn’t sound like an Indian. She sounded like an Eastern woman who’d had a lot of booklearning.
They’d also taken a closer look at her and had seen that she wasn’t an Indian.
They didn’t say anything about it. They had the money and that’s what counted for them. They figured if she wanted to be an Indian that was her business.
· Gompville ·
The train only went as far as Gompville, which was the county seat of Morning County and fifty miles away by stagecoach to Billy. It was a cold clear dawn with half-a-dozen sleepy dogs standing there barking at the train engine.
“Gompville,” Cameron said.
Gompville was the headquarters of the Morning County Sheepshooters Association that had a president, a vice-president, a secretary, a sergeant at arms and bylaws that said it was all right to shoot sheep.
The people who owned the sheep didn’t particularly care for that, so both sides had brought in gunmen from Portland and the attitude toward killings had become very casual in those parts.
“We’re running it tight,” Greer said to Magic Child as they walked over to the stagecoach line. The stage to Billy left in just a few moments.
Cameron was carrying a long narrow trunk over his shoulder. The trunk contained a sawed-off twelve-gauge pump shotgun, a 25:35 Winchester rifle, a 30:40 Krag, two .38 caliber revolvers and an automatic .38 caliber pistol that Cameron had bought from a soldier in Hawaii who was just back from the Philippines where he had been fighting the rebels for two years.
“What kind of pistol is that?” Cameron had asked the soldier. They had been in a bar having some drinks in Honolulu.
“This gun is for killing Filipino motherfuckers,” the soldier had said. “It kills one of those bastards so dead that you need two graves to bury him in.”
After a bottle of whiskey and a lot of talk about women, Cameron had bought the gun from the soldier who was very glad to be on his way home to America and not have to use that gun any more.
· Central County Ways ·
Central County was a big rangy county with mountains to the north and mountains to the south and a vast loneliness in between. The mountains were filled with trees and creeks.
The loneliness was called the Dead Hills.
They were thirty miles wide. There were thousands of hills out there: yellow and barren in the summer with lots of juniper brush in the draws and a few pine trees here and there, acting as if they had wandered away like stray sheep from the mountains and out into the Dead Hills and had gotten lost and had never been able to find their way back.
. . . poor trees . . .
The population of Central County was around eleven hundred people: give or take a death here and a birth there or a few strangers deciding to make a new life or old-time residents to move away and never to return or come back soon because they were homesick.
Just like a short history of man, there were two towns in the county.
One of the towns was close to the northern range of mountains. That town was called Brooks. The other town was close to the southern range of mountains. It was called Billy.
The towns were named for Billy and Brooks Paterson: two brothers who had pioneered the county forty years before and had killed each other in a gunfight one September afternoon over the ownership of five