Free The Night Listener and Others by Chet Williamson Page A

baggage car, Eustace P. Saunders arrived in Deadwood late on a Friday afternoon.
    He had no time to drink in the aroma of the West, which, to his way of thinking, was rather soured by the smell of horse droppings which carpeted the dirt street next to the ramshackle railroad station, for he had to immediately attend to his trunks, which had been unceremoniously dumped onto the platform by the baggage car man, who, without a wave of regret, pulled the massive door closed as the train rattled out of the station toward its next stop. Eustace sought and obtained the attention of a noble young scion of the West, and gave him a quarter dollar to go to the hotel and inform the manager that Mister Saunders had arrived and needed a cab for his luggage. When a half hour passed and the loiterer did not return, Eustace asked the man at the ticket window for directions to the hotel, and if he would be kind enough to watch Eustace’s trunks while he fetched a cabman.
    The man replied through a mist of tobacco spittle that he was closing up and had no leisure to observe luggage, but that he would stop at the hotel and inform the proprietor that a guest was in need of teamster service.
    After another half hour, a rickety wagon drawn by two horses dropped anchor in the Sargasso of horse dung. Painted in faded letters on two of the remaining sideboards was the legend Barkley Hotel, Deadwood. The coachman, a living embodiment, Eustace thought, of the Old West, jumped down from his box, entirely oblivious to the way his boots sank into the equestrian mire.
    “You Sanders?” he said through a broken picket fence of yellow teeth, making Eustace think that perhaps the art of dentistry had not penetrated this far west.
    “That’s Saunders,” Eustace replied. “I have some trunks.” And he gestured to the small mountain on the platform.
    “Holy jacksh_t,” the man expostulated. “Never seen so g_dd_m many in my f in’ life!”
    Muttering vociferously, the rustic nonetheless carried them one at a time from platform to wagon, dropping only one in the reeking miasma. Eustace opened his mouth to protest, but a harsh glare from the man made him slap his mouth shut. When the trunks were loaded, the frontier coachman climbed onto his box and fixed Eustace with a withering stare. “You comin’ or ain’tcha?”
    Eustace glanced tremulously at the surface he had to cross to arrive at the coach, then said to himself, “I am, after all, in the West, where a man’s character is not diminished by the presence of honest soil on his boots,” and stepped boldly into the muck, wincing only once when part of the gelid mass crept over the edge of his shoe.
    Despite the presence of horse manure in his heel, Deadwood struck Eustace P. Sounders as a veritable fairyland. This then was the West, and these bold men and women who lined the wooden sidewalks were the pioneers of their age. He felt a tingle of hormonal as well as intellectual excitement as he recalled the second plate of The Desperado:
    “It was a new world to her, and one she feared to enter.”
    He wished he could open the trunk that contained the Desperado oils and gaze at it right now (they were the only finished works that he had brought with him, for how could he have his maid discover them when she prepared his other work for delivery to the West!). But he could see it in his mind’s eye well enough—Eustace P. Saunders riding into the town in a stagecoach, looking out from its windows at the rough men lining the street in front of the saloon, leering at him with unnameable desires in their heads beneath their ten-gallon hats.
    And God, yes! There was a saloon now, and, glory of glories, on the other half of the building that housed it was the Barkley Hotel. It had been everything he had dreamed it would be, a rough-hewn, clapboard edifice of three stories, with loungers out front waiting no doubt for the sun to go down. But none of them, he noticed, wore a gunbelt. It was a bit of a