‘My God,’ he said as he sat up in bed. ‘They’ve got the girl.’
He could not remember when he had been more scared.
He felt as if he wanted to retch with fear. He was cold and he shook.
What must he do?
He had friends in this town. Real friends. Men who were not bothered and fussed with his gold.
McAllister was one. Mark Tully another.
He threw his skinny old legs over the side of the bed and reached for his pants. Quickly, he dressed, stamping his feet into his boots and losing his balance in the dark. He found his gun on the bureau on the far side of the room. When he had checked the loads, he thrust the weapon away in the top of his pants. Then he searched for his old shotgun and loaded that. The weight of the weapons were a great comfort to him. He hesitated a long time in the kitchen, not daring to go out into the bright moonlight. He wondered if a stiff drink would help, but he ruled against that. He wanted his mind clear.
Suddenly, he thought: what the hell did it matter what happened to him? He was old and near the end of his days. The girl was young and just starting out. If he was killed, she need have no more financial worries. He’d made his will in her favor.
He opened the door, paused for a moment to fill his narrow chest with air, and stepped outside. Now he did not stop, but walked to the white gate and swung it open. He walked along the rear of the buildings until he came to the alleyway that would take him to the sheriff’s office and hurried along it. He found the office open, but no lamp burning and nobody there.
This threw him off-balance for a moment. He had banked on McAllister being there. Or at least Charlie Stellino. Now, he crossed the street. Tully’s was open. It was always open. There were three men there, propped up against the bar in wordless, drunken communion. The barkeep sat behind the bar, fast asleep. Joe leaned across the bar and poked him awake with the muzzle of the shotgun. The barkeep woke, saw the gun and snarled: ‘Get that goddamn thing away from me, you old fool.’
‘Old fool?’ cried Joe with some of his former spirit. ‘Ain’t you learned nothing yet. Nobody with a million dollars is an old fool. Where’s Tully?’
‘Where every smart man is. Asleep.’
‘In the back room?’
‘What if he is?’
‘Go wake him.’
‘Like hell I do.’
Joe headed for the rear of the place, and the barkeep started along his side of the bar to prevent him. Joe halted and waved the shotgun. ‘Keep off my tracks, you son-of-a-bitch,’ he cried, ‘or them drunks’ll have you splattered all over ’em.’
The barkeep looked suitably horrified and halted. The old man hurried to Mark’s room and inside a few seconds was prodding the saloon-owner awake.
‘What the hell!’
‘You’re deputy, ain’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘They took the girl.’
‘Who took what girl?’
‘Them bastards who’re after my gold took the girl. Allison.’
Mark was fully awake. ‘Go get yourself a drink in the bar,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right with you.’ He had started to dress before the old man was out of the room.
Chapter Sixteen
A still sleep-eyed boy, riding Mark Tully’s horse, woke McAllister to tell him that he was wanted in town. When McAllister was saddling the mare, Lige, grey-faced from his bed, staggered into the barn and demanded to know if he should go along. He looked mystified when McAllister said, no, he dared not use any more Copleys. The town boy did not know why McAllister was wanted, but he said Mr Tully was fussing some. The boy had gathered from Mr Tully that it was about “some goddamn girl”.
McAllister galloped into town and tied up outside the saloon. Mark Tully was in the bar drinking black coffee and old Joe was flushed with whiskey.
Mark said: ‘They took the girl, Rem.’
‘Did they say why?’
Joe said: ‘They want to know where my claim is.’
McAllister poured himself some coffee and stared at the barkeep, who was sitting upright behind the bar, fast asleep. Three drunks stood at the bar, leaning and not moving.
McAllister said: ‘I ain’t worried two cents worth of cold piss.’
Joe said: ‘Well, I’m worried to hell, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll start worrying, McAllister. I’m not just any old citizen. I’m Joe Ramage and I’m worth a million. If I’m worried, everybody else has to be worried.’
‘Joe,’ said McAllister, ‘you’re losing faith. Just sit around till the stage gets in and all will be revealed.’
Mark finished a cup of coffee, poured himself another and said: ‘You’re taking this very calmly. I thought you thought a lot of that girl.’
‘Sure,’ said McAllister, ‘I think she’s one hell of a girl. But I ain’t fazed.’
He drank his cup of coffee, settled himself in a corner in a chair, put his feet on another chair and went to sleep. Joe said: ‘He’s getting too damn old for the job, he did ought to be replaced by a younger and more able man.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mark, though there was doubt in his voice. ‘I reckon the bastard is about to play his hole card.’ The old man said: ‘It had better be good, or I’ll have his guts for galluses. The thought of that girl ...’
They were all there on the sidewalk when the stage got in, Horry Wanlace up, grinning, whip in hand. The first passenger out of the vehicle was Charlie Stellino. He moved stiffly and in evident pain. His grin was glassy and inclined to be fixed.
‘Don’t pretend I ain’t a surprise, McAllister,’ he said, ‘because I know I am. I bet you told these fellers I was out of the fight. All washed up.’
McAllister told him coldly: ‘Your name just naturally didn’t crop up.’
Charlie looked hurt. He turned to hand somebody down from the stage. This was a tall and extremely fine-looking girl. One of those women who, without the aid of any kind of artifice or chemistry, are able to turn men’s heads and bowl them over. On the face of it, she had a number of things going against her physically, but the general effect was stunning. She was too tall, for a start, and very tall women were not admired at that time. The nose was a mite too long. The mouth a shade too wide. The hands possibly a fraction too long. The figure a suggestion too pronounced. The whole made up a young woman who immediately attracted men to her. There was about her, in spite of old and made-over clothes of rather unfashionable cut, in spite of having been confined to stage coaches for days and even nights, an air of cool elegance that stole away the masculine breath. In spite of the male stares and being in a strange town, she was as self-possessed as a princess among her subjects. Men had already started to drag their hats from their heads.
McAllister stepped forward. ‘Miss Disart?’ She smiled. ‘You must be Sheriff McAllister, sir.’
McAllister bowed, and she gave him a long, cool hand, at the same time turning to smile at the others and waiting for them to be introduced. McAllister named names, and she said a kind word to all of them, not forgetting the boy who had ridden to wake McAllister from his sleep. She was even polite to the three drunks who had roused themselves from the bar at the announcement of female loveliness on the morning stage.
Old Horry Wanlace hovered, declaring: ‘I take treasure out and I bring treasure in.’
Somebody said: ‘Just as well you didn’t lose this one, Horry.’
Joe Ramage said: ‘I don’t get it. How can this young lady be …’ Then he got it and gazed in wonderment and distress from McAllister to the girl. ‘McAllister, you knowed this all along. By crackey, you ain’t telling me—’
‘Yes, Joe,’ said McAllister. ‘That’s what I’m telling you. That’s why I wasn’t worried. They planted the girl on you. What do you think of this one for a replacement.’
Joe said: ‘Can this one cook?’
The young lady said, in a voice that struck them all of a heap: ‘I don’t think you’ll have any complaints on that score, Uncle Joe.�
�
Charlie Stellino stood on the sidelines and fumed, unable to believe that his re-entry into town had not caused a sensation.
‘I bet,’ he said, desperately trying to gain McAllister’s attention, ‘you didn’t think to see me for a month or more.’
‘A man,’ said McAllister, ‘lives in hope. Charlie, you came back at the right time. I want you to stay with Joe and never let him out of your sight. That goes for the girl, too.’
Charlie said: ‘That don’t call for agony.’
‘It could be dangerous, so keep your gun by you.’
‘You realize you’re getting a hero on the cheap?’
Lennie Wallach, the newspaperman, came across the street from his office and wanted to know if there was anything he could do. Which meant, did McAllister have anything for his rag? McAllister said, no, but he would have something for Lennie before the morning was through.
He arranged for Joe Ramage and his new niece to take a room at the hotel. He wanted them both where there were plenty of people. Colonel English found them two connecting rooms on his third floor. Charlie installed himself in Joe’s room. The only access to the rooms was along a wide corridor. Joe went there meekly enough, still puzzled and bewildered and not knowing whether to accept this new girl as his niece. He had, he said, become mighty fond of the other one and it was not easy at his age to switch affections at the drop of a hat.
McAllister questioned the colonel about his guest Stevenson. There was no mystery. Mr Stevenson had checked out yesterday afternoon. Did the colonel have any idea where he had gone? Unhelpfully, the colonel suggested that he most likely had gone to fetch his horse from the livery-
At the livery stable, Lon McKenna’s boy, Tommy Shultz, said that Mr Stevenson had taken his own horse and hired another from the livery. He had tied his portmanty on the spare horse. The boy did not know who the spare horse was for.
In reply to the question: had anybody else ridden out yesterday, the boy told him that Mr Madders had gone out on his own horse during the evening and had not been back. He owed five dollars on his feed bill. Nobody else had taken a horse from the livery yesterday.
McAllister walked down to the bank. He found that the banker was apparently quite well-informed about the recent happenings in town. He even knew about Charlie Stellino being wounded.
‘I cannot say, Sheriff, that I am best pleased,’ Lindholm said. ‘You gave me an assurance that the gold shipment was safe. This is a serious catastrophe, you know. I shall have to take Mr Ramage’s advice on how to proceed from here on in.’
McAllister was not quite sure what he meant by that. He pushed a question or two at Lindholm. ‘Did Stevenson call in here before he left town?’
‘Stevenson? Left town?’ The banker sounded quite startled.
‘Yes,’ McAllister told him. ‘He lit out with Madders and the girl.’
‘Madders. Who is Madders? And what girl?’
‘Madders is the man who came into town and pretended to have no connection with Stevenson.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t begin to understand.’ This was one moment when the banker came near to giving himself away in panic. It caught him unawares and he did not know what to do with it.
‘The girl was the one the gold thieves planted on Whiskey Joe as his niece.’
‘My God, McAllister,’ cried Lindholm, ‘this is the kind of nonsense one reads about in dime novels. You can hardly expect an intelligent man—’
‘What did Stevenson and you talk about when he was here in this office?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Lindholm looked scandalized, horrified, unbelieving that he had been asked the question.
‘Lindholm, this thing is going to blow up in our faces. A deputy has been wounded and a man killed.’
That shook Lindholm. ‘A man killed? Who? I didn’t hear of a man being killed.’
‘One of the stage robbers ran into a bullet.’
‘Whose bullet?’
‘Mine.’
The banker seemed to gaze at McAllister in awe. ‘This is terrible,’ he said. ‘That this should happen in a peaceful country. Sheriff, are you quite sure you’re on top of this thing?’
‘Not yet I ain’t. But I will be. Just as soon as I find out who the road agents have inside this town working with them.’
‘You don’t mean to suggest …’
‘Yes, sir, that’s what I do mean to suggest.’
‘It is absolutely unthinkable that—’
‘Where do you reckon the road agents are taking the gold, Lindholm?’
‘Taking the gold? My word, how would I know a thing like that?’
As McAllister walked out through the bank, he winked at Ham Stoppard, who gaped back at him. He was still gaping when Lindholm snapped irritably from his office door: ‘Stoppard, come in here.’
Lindholm stood there, bitterly regretting that he had overruled Stevenson’s plan to take the gold in Casper on the grounds that it was too dangerous and might lead to shooting. Fear swooped through him and he fought to suppress it.
Chapter Seventeen
A passenger on the stage who had received no attention from anybody was a small man named Pudsy Harper. His birth certificate said William Ditch Harper, but who remembers what is written on a birth certificate? Pudsy was an inhabitant of the slums of Chicago and, as such, considered himself a cut above the hicks around him who called themselves Westerners even though they had not been here a minute. To him, they talked funny, they acted funny and worst of all they were slow.
Even this man McAllister who had hired him to come here seemed mighty slow in making up his mind about anything. He seemed to ponder each reply demanded of him for five minutes at a time. Though a crook in birth and rearing, Pudsy was a real get-up-and-go man. A great believer in the American virtue of enterprise and action. ‘If you don’t get up and do it fast, some other son-of-a-bitch will,’ he would say as his contribution to world wisdom.
He was small, quick-moving as a ferret, alternately pathetic and dangerous. He had been a dip as a boy, living by picking the pockets of the more affluent of his fellows. From there, he had graduated to plain burglary. Finally, he had learned the trade of a peterman in the pen, where all good men learn their trades. As a safebreaker, he had never been caught. Jail had taught him much, amongst which was the fact that it is better to be careful than sorry. He never tackled a job beyond his capability and he never tackled one which was not as safe as any such job could be.
This one, here in this hick town, he reckoned was a pushover. He had the protection and patronage of the local sheriff. You could not do better than that. He had to confess that the business intrigued him, for it looked as if the whole town was in on this caper, except the man who was being robbed. The sheriff had hinted that even the mayor knew what was going on. It was hard to believe, but McAllister did not look like a liar to him. The man was too damn simple for that.
He lay on his bed in the best hotel in town. On that he had insisted. The best. He thought about the job. McAllister had described the safe to him and told him the name of the maker.
‘I could open it with my fingers,’ Pudsy had told the sheriff. ‘I wouldn’t like you to think I couldn’t. But that’d take time. If you want a quick job, I’ll have to blow it. There’ll be quite a noise and it’ll be heard.’
That worried the sheriff a bit, but he said if noise was necessary then they would have to put up with it. What did Pudsy need? Pudsy told him. It would all be at the bank when Pudsy arrived there to do the job. When would that be? Pudsy wanted to know.
The sheriff said: ‘You just be available when I want you. We’ll get you into the bank when the time’s right.’
Pudsy said: ‘All right.’ But he did not know that he liked the idea of kicking his heels waiting on the word of another man. In a way, being a safe-breaker was something like being an artist; there was temperament to be considered. He felt himself getting a little nervous. The feeling came quite una
ccountably and he did not like it.
‘I hope the safe is just exactly as you described it to me,’ he said. ‘I mean, my craft is kind of exact and all that, you know. I mean, just a few things different and it could all go wrong. Blowing a safe ain’t child’s play, you know.’
McAllister said: ‘You want to change your mind, now’s the time to do it. We’ll call it a day and I’ll see you out of town. I daresay I might find something to arrest you for, though. Like vagrancy. Or maybe even rape. The preacher’s daughter, say. That would kind of rile up the local populace.’
Pudsy did not like the sound of that. He took a good look at the sheriff and wondered if he was a simple hick after all.
‘Just so’s you don’t keep me hanging around in this lousy hotel room too long,’ he said.
The sheriff gave him a doubtful look and left the room. Pudsy found a pack of cards in his grip and played a little patience to calm his nerves. Calm his nerves? My God, he thought, what had gotten into him? He hadn’t suffered from nerves ever before in all his life. Maybe it was being among all these cowboys. They were sure a funny lot.
He was having a tough time getting the game to come out right and he was starting to cheat when the sheriff returned. He came so quietly, he was at Pudsy’s elbow before Pudsy even knew he was in the room.
‘Jesus Christ’, said the safe-breaker, ‘you scared me out of my life almost. Do you have to creep up on a feller that way?’
‘The quieter, the better,’ said the sheriff, ‘for a chore like this.’
Pudsy saw that the man had on a pair of Indian shoes that were much like slippers. He himself wore a pair of shoes with India-rubber soles, but they were noisy compared with those worn by this cat-footed sheriff. McAllister said: ‘Go down onto the street and turn right. Go along a half-block and you’ll find an alleyway there. Go down the alleyway and you’ll find a man waiting there for you. He’ll get you into the rear of the bank. He has all your gear with him.’
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