Free The Night Listener and Others by Chet Williamson Page B

disappointment.
    As Eustace walked into the hotel, the imprecations of the teamster dying away behind him, the idlers eyed him, but Eustace felt that it was more out of curiosity than from any interest in a lasting bond of manly friendship. Ah well, he thought, Maria Prescott too had been looked on with mere curiosity upon her arrival in the West, as primitives are apt to gaze upon a rare and lovely flower without understanding its potential for pollination.
    The manager of the hotel, Mr. Owen Barkley, was rather more solicitous than had been the grizzled coachman, and Eustace was relieved to find that he had indeed been expected, even though Barkley addressed him as Mr. Sanders, perpetuating the error the coachman had made. Barkley himself showed Eustace to his room on the second floor, a clean if spartan chamber boasting the scant amenities that most third-class Eastern hotels would have offered.
    “And what brings you to our little town?” asked Barkley, a fat and florid man in his early sixties.
    “Art, really,” Eustace replied.
    “Art?”
    Eustace then spoke of the magazines and books he had illustrated, and Barkley’s eyes glowed. “I’ve got that Chambers book—my sister back East sent it to me last Christmas. And we’ve got lots of your magazines in the lobby— Country Gentleman, Harper’s, lots of them—d_mn good pictures in them too. An artist, eh? My, that’s really something.”
    They chatted all during the time it took for the coachman to bring up all twelve trunks, and it took only until trunk number three for Eustace to inquire about outlaws.
    “Outlaws?” Barkley said, as though the word was foreign to him. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Sanders, there sure aren’t many outlaws these days. We’re pretty d_mn civilized now out here. But when I was a youngster, well, things were mighty different then…”
    It took until trunk number five for Eustace to persuade Barkley to end his reminiscences of gunfights past. “Please do try and think of some in the present day,” Eustace pleaded. “You see, the reason I came out here was to sketch and paint some of the more, shall we say, adventuresome of your denizens, in order to add as much verisimilitude as possible to my work.”
    “Uh-huh.” Barkley nodded. “Uh-huh. So you’re lookin’ for some bad men. Well, I tell you, anybody commits crimes nowadays our country sheriff— that’s Zed Dorwart—arrests them pretty d_mn quick, so they’re either behind bars or hung.”
    “But isn’t there anyone,” Eustace persevered as trunk number six arrived, “who has eluded the law, who is secreted in some hole-in-the-wall, as it were?”
    Barkley thought for a moment. “Nope,” he said.
    Then the coachman-cum-teamster-cum-porter spoke up. “Them Brogger brothers are mean sonsab_tches.” This uninvited comment earned the menial a glance from his employer sharp enough to send him out of the room with more haste than was his wont.
    “The Brogger brothers?” Eustace repeated. “Now who are they?”
    Barkley shook his head grimly. “You don’t want to get mixed up with the Brogger boys,” he cautioned. “They’re not outlaws, they’re just crazy.”
    It took until trunk number eleven for Eustace to wheedle the full story of Olaf and Frederick Brogger from Barkley. They were two brothers in their early thirties. Born of a Norwegian father and a Scotch-Irish mother, they were hated by the god-fearing Norwegians in the county because they gave Norwegians a bad name. Rejecting the farm life of their father, they had purchased a small spread where they raised enough stock to get by, though many said that it was not their skinny herd of cattle, but thievery around the Deadwood area that brought them the little money they had. Nothing had ever been proven, however, though it was felt that the Broggers had more luck than skill or intelligence.
    “Mean as coyotes but a lot dumber,” was Barkley’s studied opinion. “Used to come to the saloon,