Free A Good Man by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Mr. Dunne!”
    Dunne plants his fists on each side of the plate, a fork upright in one, a knife in the other. Dagg throws him a questioning look. Dunne nods, and Dagg reluctantly goes to the door, unbarring it to reveal an urchin holding an envelope in a grimy paw. Brimming with self-importance, the boy announces, “Message from Lawyer Tarr for Mr. Dunne.”
    Dunne beckons and the youngster crosses to him, bare feet whispering on the floorboards. He is one of Fort Benton’s whore whelps, a boy of ten in stained canvas trousers and a shirt he laid claim to when its owner got bounced naked as a jay bird out of the knocking-shop where his mother plies her trade. The shirt hangs to his knees like a filthy dress.
    Dunne slits open the envelope with a gravy-smeared knife, reads the brief note. Mr. Dunne, I will come to your lodgings at ten o’clock. Be there, I beg you. It is a matter of the utmost importance . The signature, Randolph Tarr, is an urgent, assertive scrawl. Dunne slips the paper into a coat pocket, places both hands flat to the table, and hoists himself out of his chair, the joinery of the table wailing under the strain of his weight. Slipping a penny into the street arab’s hand, he asks, “You ate?” The kid replies with a violent shake of the head. Dunne points to his plate. “Go to it.”
    “No sirree,” says Dagg, “I got to shut down. It’s half past closing time already.”
    Dunne turns to Dagg. “I paid hard cash for that and I got the right to do with it as I please.” He draws back the chair. The boy scrambles into it to attack the leftovers. Dunne goes to the counter and counts coins into Dagg’s hand. “And if the mite wants more biscuits, see he gets them,” he says. “Biscuits ain’t extra according to the bill of fare.”
    The proprietor coughs apologetically. “No they ain’t, Mr. Dunne. As you say.”
    “And don’t rush him. Rushing is bad for the digestion.” Dunne adjusts his celluloid collar. “I’ll see you per usual tomorrow night, Mr. Dagg.”
    “Look forward to it. Always a pleasure to serve you.”
    Dunne steps out into the night. For a moment, he hovers on the boardwalk outside the Oxbowtrying to remember the face of that other whore’s catch colt. The bits and pieces of memory, a pendulous lower lip, the shine of an eye, tufts of hair that lie strewn about in his mind nearly succeed in binding themselves into something recognizably human just as it is said the bones of the dead will reassemble themselves come Resurrection Day. Then it all goes slinking off into the darkness. Dunne does the same, crossing over Front Street to where the glow from the saloon windows doesn’t penetrate.
    Twenty yards to his right, the Missouri coils heavy and black as if it were a river of pitch; intermittently, a pallid moon appears between tattered clouds, its reflection shivering on the water. On the riverbank, where the refugees who have come in from the countryside are encamped, cook fires are flickering, someone can be heard singing, a baby cries. It is chiefly women and children who populate the village of wagons and tents; many of the men are still out on their ranches and farmsteads, guarding their property against the threat of Sioux marauders. Others, who have had all the fight knocked out of them by years of drought, hailstorms, frosts, grasshoppers, and horse-killing outbreaks of the equine epizootic, have preferred to remain safe in Benton and let the damn Indians help themselves to whatever they want. According to their temperaments they take to the bottle, to gloomy silence, or to backhanding the missus. There has already been one suicide, a fellow who loaded himself down with a length of chain, a post maul, a branding iron, his wife’s Dutch oven, and then threw himself into the river. It is said his widow professes to regret the loss of the Dutch oven, which she claims was a damn sight more use to her than her husband ever was.
    Across the way from Dunne, on the