Town Tamers by David Robbins Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t trust anyone, do you?”
    “It’s how I stay alive.”
    Knox made for a table near a mother and her young girl, but Asa said, “Over here”, and chose one in a corner where he could sit with his back to the wall and watch the door and the window, both.
    “Yes, sir,” Weldon Knox said. “Not a sliver of trust in you.” He removed his bowler and placed it beside him. Nattily dressed, he wasn’t much over five feet tall and had a thin mustache and no chin. His eyes were ferretlike and his jaw twitched a lot.
    Asa chalked that up to nerves. He leaned the Winchester against his chair and folded his hands. “They said you wanted to talk.”
    “I do, indeed.” Knox glanced at the front door. “I can’t believe I got away with it.”
    “With what?”
    Before Knox could answer, the lady who owned the eatery came over. Knox asked for soup. Asa settled for coffee. Nothing more was said until after she returned with their order and walked off.
    Knox cleared his throat. “What do you know about me, Mr. Delaware?”
    “You came here to talk about you?”
    “Humor me, if you would.”
    Asa shrugged. “You’re from back east somewhere. You bought the Circle K about seven years ago. For a while you and the town got along well, and then you hired Bull Cumberland.”
    “‘Hired’ isn’t how I would put it, but go on.”
    “You brought in more like him—border trash. Gunmen and rustlers and road agents . . . so now you have your very own wild bunch.”
    “Did you ever think they might have me?”
    “You’re the big sugar,” Asa said.
    “I own the ranch, yes, but I haven’t run it in a long while.” Knox seemed to wither in on himself and placed both hands on the table and bowed his head. “God help me.”
    Asa waited.
    “I didn’t
hire
Bull Cumberland. He showed up at the ranch one day and informed me that he was going to work there, and that was that. I was a little put off, but to my sorrow I didn’t have the gumption to tell him no—even when my foreman objected. And the very next day, my foreman was dead.” Knox looked up. “Kicked by a horse, Cumberland claimed. Fool that I was, I believed him. And when he offered to take my foreman’s place, I let him.”
    Asa stayed silent.
    “I was stupid, I know. But Bull Cumberland has a way of intimidating people. Part of it has to do with his eyes.”
    “Say again?”
    “There’s nothing in them. No emotion, no feeling. They’re as flat as I hear the eyes of sharks are supposed to be. They’re killer eyes, Mr. Delaware, if there is such a thing. I confess that when he looks at me, my legs turn to water.”
    “Folks say he’s snake-mean,” Asa mentioned when the rancher didn’t go on.
    “They don’t know the half of it. Anyway, he wasted no time bringing in more of his kind—that vile Jake Bass, the gunman; Old Tom, the stage robber; Crusty, who’s an expert at changing brands with a running iron; Tyree Lucas and Chadwell and the rest. And before I knew it, they’d taken over.”
    At moments like these, Asa wished he could peer into a person’s soul. “You expect me to believe that?”
    “As God is my witness,” Knox said solemnly, “I’m telling you the truth.”
    “You didn’t go to the marshal?”
    “I have a wife, Mr. Delaware. Bull made it plain what would befall her if I opposed him. And besides, he murdered the marshal not long after.”
    “Why didn’t you say something to the Rangers when they came?”
    “Same reason. When they showed up at my ranch, Bull stood behind me on the porch with his hand on his revolver while I talked to them. He’d already told me what to say.”
    “I see,” Asa said. But did he? “This could well be a trick.”
    “I’m not that devious.”
    “So you say.”
    Weldon Knox glanced at the front door and wrung his hands. “What can I do to make you believe me?”
    Asa debated with himself. If the man was shamming, he was good at it. “You never once thought to slip word to friends in