14.

I was about to get in my chair in the late afternoon on a Friday, when one of the clerks from the general store came into the saloon.

“Mr. Wolfson wants you in the store,” he said. “Bring the shotgun.”

The saloon was next to the hotel, and the store was on the other side of the hotel. We walked through the lobby of the hotel to get there. In the store were six men, sodbusters probably, gathered in front of the counter, behind which Wolfson stood with a second clerk. Everybody looked at me when I came in.

One of them said, “And we ain’t gonna get scared off by your bully boy, neither.”

The speaker was a small, dark, wiry man, with a kind of sharp angularity about him, like a farming tool. I stopped inside the door and stood against the wall with the shotgun beside my leg, pointing at the floor.

“Make your point, Redmond,” Wolfson said.

“You got no right takin’ our property,” Redmond said.

“I ain’t taken your property, Redmond.”

“We’re all in this together,” Redmond said. “You take Pete Simpson’s land, it’s like takin’ mine.”

“Simpson owed me money, and he couldn’t pay. What am I supposed to do, just give it to him?”

“Give him time. He’ll pay,” Redmond said. “Thing is, and we all know it here, you don’t want him to pay. You want his land. You want all our land.”

“I’ve already made an arrangement for Pete Simpson to stay on his land.”

“Sure,” Redmond said. “Except now it won’t be his land. It’ll be your land. And he’ll pay you rent.”

“Nobody made him run up a bill he couldn’t pay,” Wolfson said.

I looked at the other sodbusters as Wolfson talked. I wondered which one was Pete Simpson.

“So how’s he supposed to feed his cattle, or plant crops, or feed his kids?” Redmond said.

“You know, Bob,” Wolfson said, “when you come right on down to it, that ain’t my concern. Simpson and I made a business deal and he couldn’t hold up his end of it.”