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  Here was an opportunity to become respectable. If he took Will Trotter’s body into Shoshone Hats, he would be regarded as a citizen doing his duty. He was twenty-eight, time for him to start thinking about making his old age a possibility. He couldn’t go on forever as an itinerant bank robber.

  He held the idea at arm’s length, eyeing it distastefully. Respectability was for women and men with green eyeshades and bankers who put mortgages on the homes of widows and orphans. Admittedly he wasn’t called Johnny Loco without a reason, but he had not yet gone plumb loco.

  Yet the idea had its good points. Neither of these heavy draft horses could get him close enough to town and leave him much time to spare for finding a faster horse, stealing it, and robbing the bank. If he rode in on an errand of mercy, bringing Will Trotter’s corpse, his behavior might lull the natural suspicion of the natives toward a stranger and give him more time to act unobserved. He could spend a leisurely half hour or so finding a fast horse, steal it, rob the bank, and pound leather to Green River where he would bushwhack Colonel Blicket and the sergeant.

  Suddenly he realized he was planning ahead. Colonel Blicket had always been a great one for plans. Maybe the master’s lessons were finally getting through to the student, Loco thought, as he walked down the road and grasped the head harness of the Percheron.

  The beast balked at a stranger’s touch, swerving its head away from the man. With a beautiful demonstration of brute power and fearlessness, in G-7’s opinion, the man jerked the horse’s head around, slapped its jaw with a resounding whack, and said curtly, “Move, you son of a bitch!”

  In utter obeisance, with complete docility, the great beast moved to follow the man. Shades of the stalkthorns of Mirfak! But the man had commanded with the flat of his hand.

  Back at the body, Loco, augmenting his plan to appear honest, put eleven cents back into the dead man’s trouser pockets and buckled the dead man’s money belt back on while G-7 made an instantaneous reevaluation of the host it had occupied. The brute beauty and valor here buckling contained too much energy to be controlled outright without a loss of fissioning power. Its host would have to be nudged or enticed toward the light, and at the moment its most likely lure seemed to be this mysterious Colonel Blicket whose insult had aroused in its host such implacable hatred. Hatred, G-7 realized, was a negative motivational force, but it could find no positive forces 11 in the brain of its host nearly so strong.

  Very well, G-7 decided, let hatred be the spur to raise this ignoble spirit.

  Unaware that his fate was being decided, Johnny Loco draped the one-hundred-and-seventy pound body over the Percheron with casual ease and said aloud to himself, “Yeah, I either got to learn to play poker or quit robbing banks, unless I can find some richer banks to rob.”

  Again the man was unaware that the addition of the last phrase to his sentence had catapulted him to heights of intelligence he had never before achieved. Always in the past his thinking had been “either-or.” Now he had added an option, and he weighed the option. After he robbed the bank at Shoshone Flats and killed the colonel at Green River, he might head east and hold up the more prosperous banks back in the States.

  The being inside was acutely aware that Ian McCloud—it rejected the alias as untruthful—was perverting its suggestion that he carry the body into town. The man did not regard his proposed actions as a step toward respectability but as a ruse for facilitating the theft of a horse. Still G-7 was not dismayed. Old habit patterns, it knew, often persisted, but it also knew that time, the implacable foe of large-molecule organisms, was on its side. Day and night the silent hammers of reformation would be pounding in this man’s brain.

  Meanwhile G-7 had more pleasant observations to make, more pertinent data to absorb about this planet men called earth.

  Golden light from a young sun fell lavishly on this side of the globe, warming the cheeks of the man and triggering universal photosynthesis in lush grass across the floor of a valley dotted with herds of cattle and spotted, here and there, with fenced fields of hay and corn. Northwestward the peaks of the mountains soared to snow-tipped summits. Forests of stately trees skirted the lower fringes of the peaks. It was a many-shaded world of blues, greens, whites, grays, varicolored flowers, and, toward the south, the silver sheen of the river seen through a lacework of pale green cottonwoods and willows. The pure air held enough hydrogen to fuel untold fusion furnaces for millennia, and once, when the man forded a creek and stopped to drink, G-7 found the water cool and pure in its native state.

  The man, possessing limited but acute senses, was the only discord in this symphonic flow of free energy. Riding slouched on the broad back of the horse, he needed but to inhale and his nose registered and clarified the syrupy redolence of alfalfa, the lushness of grass, the pungency of pine resin, the musky maleness of corn pollen. His ears recorded the roadside scurryings of chipmunks, identified insect sounds, the thump of a falling pinecone in the woods to his left, and, far to southward, the plaintive lowing of a cow. Yet this rich panoply of sounds and smells was keyed on a strange alertness. McCloud was sniffing the air for human body odor, listening for the metallic click of a rifle’s bolt. Though seemingly indolent and relaxed, the man rode in wariness of his fellow human beings.

  G-7 was no stranger to violence, but interspecies destructiveness ordinarily occurred from collisions on crowded planets. Here, where no other human being or human habitation was visible for miles, McCloud feared for his life, and he only feared for it because he wanted to live long enough to kill Colonel Blicket and his aide-de-camp.

  This was a world of paradoxes mystifying even to a universal intelligence. A bank robber who risked his life for the possession of material trinkets lived to avenge an insult, a nonmaterial epithet. Obviously McCloud’s pride had been offended by the colonel’s abusive language, and pride was a cardinal sin. Very well, G-7 decided, it would use the man’s sin, tempt him with dishonest trifles to betray him into righteous consequences.

  Three hours of sunlight were left—the bank would still be open—when Ian McCloud rode into the outskirts of Shoshone Flats with Will Trotter’s body draped over the trailing horse. He felt ill at east as he approached the two rows of sod shanties, log huts, and frame buildings strung along the wagon ruts of the main street. Leading a funeral cortège into a strange town was a job for an undertaker’s assistant; the production of corpses, not their processing, was his line of business.

  Frame buildings grew more frequent as he approached the midsection of the town. Looking over the horses he saw tethered or before hitching racks, he could not see one more suited to running than to pulling a plow. Most of the beasts looked winded while standing still, those that were able to stand, and the Clydesdale he rode would have been even money against most of them in a race.

  An old lady in a sunbonnet, holding the hand of a boy of ten or so, was the first citizen he saw. She stood at the frayed beginnings of a boardwalk, leaning over and peering at the body on the horse behind him as he rode up.

  Politely tipping his hat, he asked, “Ma’m, who’s sheriff of this here town?”

  “Sheriff Faust… Run ahead, Hickam, and wake the old gentleman up… Land sakes, young man, is that Will Trotter you got there?”

  “Yes’m,” he answered, as the boy turned and ran down the sidewalk. “I reckon it was.”

  “Lordy mercy,” she exclaimed, falling into stride with the Percheron, “this is going to break Trudy Spence’s heart. Him and her been engaged for three years. Poor Trudy! Widowed afore she’s wed… Dead Man’s Curve got him. Am I right, young man?”

  “Yes’m. I reckon.”

  “I knowed it. You can’t fool Betsy Troop about that road. Been traveling it for twenty years. Traveled it afore the Indians moved out and the Mormons moved in. Don’t know which of them two I’d rather have. Either one would outrun the other in a two-man race to the boondocks… Well, I’ll say this for Will Trotter, he looks natural, except his head’s kinda on backwards�
�� You can’t fool me about Dead Man’s Curve, mister. Only time that curve’s safe for vehicles is when there’s forty two feet of snow on the road. People around here won’t do nothing about it either. Reckon they figure if they wait long enough, that kink’s going to grow out of the road.”

  Betsy Troop’s monologue, begun for McCloud as a chatty conversation, swelled to a tirade directed against a growing audience as more wayside idlers fell into step with the ambling Percheron, commenting on its burden with low voices.

  “Can’t expect them Mormons to do no road work, what with them planting all day and plowing all night…”

  McCloud rode on, aloof above the tumult, as Betsy Troop, having dismissed the Mormons, turned her attention to “the lazy, no-count Gentiles” gathering alongside the Percheron. He directed the cortège toward the sheriff’s office, recognizable from the barred windows at the rear of the stone building, and pulled up before the front porch. A tall, gray-haired man emerged, tugging a suspender over a shoulder, his star pinned to the top half of a suit of gray flannel underwear. He had the dignity of age if not the authority in his manner as he walked down from the porch to look at the body.

  The crowd grew silent, waiting for the sheriff to speak, and in the pause Ian McCloud had time to decipher the sign posted on the front of the building:

  CITIZENS: PLEASE DO NOT DISCHARGE FIREARMS INSIDE THE TOWN LIMITS… SHERIFF FAUST

  Sheriff Faust cleared his throat and said, “I’ll be, if it ain’t Will Trotter. Dead Man’s Curve get him, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then he died outside my jurisdiction. Why didn’t you leave him there? Buzzards wouldn’t bother him, not for a couple of hours anyhow. Let the stage line go bring him in.”

  “I thought it was my Christian duty, sir.”

  “Reckon you would think that”—the sheriff nodded—“not being familiar with the Territorial Stage Lines. I suspect the town owes you a vote of thanks anyway. What’s your name?”

  He started to answer, “Johnny Loco,” and paused. Chances were, the sheriff would be more apt to recognize his alias than his name.

  “Ian McCloud,” he answered, and the name sounded strange on his lips.

  “The town thanks you, Mr. McCloud. Now, would you haul Will three buildings down to the Territorial Stage Lines’ office and let Mr. Birnie, the stationmaster, take care of the matter.”

  Yawning slightly, the sheriff turned and went back into the jail, apparently to resume his afternoon nap. McCloud glanced at the horse tied to the jailhouse hitching rack. The sheriff’s nag wasn’t worth stealing. He nudged the draft horses forward.

  Mr. Birnie, the stationmaster, was summoned from an early supper by someone in the crowd. Judging by the girth of the man who waddled from the door, McCloud figured it to be the first of a bunch of suppers. Birnie’s shirt was unbuttoned above the belt because the lower buttonholes couldn’t reach the buttons, and his belt, looped below his protruding navel, was as much a hammock for his belly as a support for his trousers. The stationmaster was munching on a half-moon pie as he walked onto the porch.

  McCloud explained the circumstances of Trotter’s death and returned the dead man’s wallet, publicly itemizing its contents.

  Birnie took the wallet, finished his pie, and declaimed to the crowd in a petulant whine, “Now, this beats all get-out. Long as that galoot’s been driving this run, he goes and wrecks my stagecoach. Haul him down to Near-Sighted Charlie’s, mister. Charlie’s the undertaker. Tell him I’ll be down later to settle the estate.”

  McCloud bridled at the order. “Mister Birnie, I done my Christian duty, getting this poor soul to where he was paid to get me. You can take him from here. But I had a ticket to Green River which was lost with all my clothes and money when my valise fell in the river.”

  “How much money you lose?”

  “Better than eighty dollars.”

  “I can sure sympathize with your loss, Mr. McCloud, because I just lost a six-hundred-and-fifty-dollar stagecoach. Between you and me, I figure I’m about five-hundred-and-seventy dollars more deserving of sympathy.”

  Ian knew from the man’s plaintive voice he would get no rebate on his nonexistent clothes and money, but there was the possibility he might be refunded for the imaginary ticket to Green River.

  “I sympathize with you, Mr. Birnie, but I wasn’t under no contract to get your stagecoach to Shoshone Flats. You sold me contract to get me to Green River. Since I ain’t getting there, I think you ought to give me my money back.”

  “Where’d you buy your ticket?”

  “Pocatello.”

  “Mr. McCloud, I can’t give you money that’s back in Pocatello, but I’ll play fair with you. We got another stage coming through, Tuesday. You can ride it, free of charge, if the durned driver can get it around Dead Man’s Curve.”

  “Tuesday!” Ian exploded. “You mean I got to set here till Tuesday, with all my money and clothes floating down the river. How’m I going to eat and sleep till Tuesday?”

  “Times is hard, son”—Birnie shook his head dolefully—“but I ain’t no innkeeper. I run a stage line.”

  “Least you can do is give me the driver’s meal ticket. He ain’t going to use it.”

  “Son, that’s the company’s meal ticket.”

  “Give him the meal ticket, Birnie”—a tall, red-haired man shouldered his way through the crowd—“or, so help me, if I catch you eating on that ticket at Miss Stewart’s, you’re going to lose about three hundred of them five hundred pounds before you get off the stool.”

  Birnie flinched at the big man’s anger and reconsidered his position. “Well, seeing as how you brought in the horses, Mr. McCloud, I reckon the company can afford to be generous. Here’s the meal ticket.”

  As Birnie handed up the meal ticket to McCloud, still astride the horse, the tall man turned and said, “My name’s Bain, Mr. McCloud. You can take the ticket to Miss Stewart’s. Her place is right across from my saloon. As far as your sleeping arrangements are concerned, you can hole up, upstairs over my barroom, till Tuesday, if you don’t mind a little female company.”

  “No, Mr. Bain,” a man called from an outer circle of the crowd, “he can have the choice room at my hotel till Tuesday. He did his Christian duty by Brother Trotter and I’ll do my Christian duty by him. If that meal ticket runs out before Tuesday, son, you tell Miss Stewart to charge your meals to Jack Taylor.”

  Ian appreciated all that was being done for him as he used his last few seconds atop the Clydesdale to survey the horses up and down the street. From where he sat, he could not see a horse he judged capable of outrunning a Tennessee walker. Still, all the palaver going on around him was about nothing. He’d take their meals and room, if he had to, and stay long enough to find a decent horse, but, come Monday, he’d ride out of here with all their money, heading for Green River and Colonel Blicket.

  Followed by admiring looks from the crowd, he slid from the horse and angled across the street toward Miss Stewart’s Restaurant.

  So it was that Ian McCloud, alias Johnny Loco, coming in part from the defeated armies of Robert E. Lee and in part from the great nebula in Andromeda, arrived in Shoshone Flats, Wyoming Territory. The stride carrying him across the wagon ruts was given additional jauntiness by the success of his plan, so far, to rob a bank and murder a colonel and by the first stirrings, deep in the nodes of his brain, of a drive toward sainthood.

  Of saintliness Ian knew little, only a remembered aphorism dragged laboriously from McGuffey’s Third Reader that virtue had its own rewards. Awaiting him at the restaurant was the second lesson: that virtue could be as parsimonious as the Territorial Stage Lines. Inwardly the nobler being now diffused along the neuron paths of McCloud contemplated with keener awareness a different observation: In this small cluster of the breed called “man” it had observed pride, avarice, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth—six of the seven deadly sins.

  Awaiting it in the restaurant was the seventh, lust.
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  2

  Sunlight through a western window fell on the golden hair of a waitress, sole occupant of Miss Stewart’s Restaurant, who stood behind the counter reading a book with such intentness that she did not look up until Ian was seated on a stool across from her. When she lifted her head and he caught her eyes, cool yet friendly, their blueness accented by a swash of freckles beneath them, he took off his hat.

  “Ma’am, I got a meal ticket from the stage lines that belonged to Will Trotter, deceased. If Miss Stewart should question you…”

  “I’m Miss Stewart,” she said, moving down the counter and leaning slightly over it to smile toward him, “Miss Gabriella Stewart. I saw you bringing in Brother Trotter’s body, so you must be Mr. Ian McCloud.”

  “Yes’m,” he said. He had placed her age at eighteen, but she had to be older if she owned the restaurant and read books. He wondered how she had learned his name so quickly, since she had not been among the spectators gathered to see the body. “Hope I didn’t turn your customers’ stomachs, hauling a dead man past your window. I must have been a sight.”

  “Oh, no, sir,” she assured him as she handed him a menu. “ ‘I wad some power the giftie gie us,’ as Sir Walter Scott says, so you could have seen yourself riding into our town as a Sir Galahad on a draft horse bearing Brother Trotter like the Holy Grail. Brother Trotter was respected among us Methodists. He was a deacon of our church.”

  She had taken a peculiar stance to deliver her benediction, backing toward the front window as she spoke and leaning across the counter, as if she were shielding her face from a view from the street.

  Without looking at it, he laid the menu down. “I’d like steak and potatoes, ma’am.”

  “Mr. McCloud, I can’t recommend my steak this week. It’s a little gristly. But my fried chicken is the best you ever tasted.”