McAllister 7

by Matt Chisholm

  ‘How do I know—’ Pudsy began.

  The sheriff interrupted him with: ‘It’s too late for questions or doubts. Just do it. Hear? Count to fifty before you go.’ He turned and walked out of the room.

  Pudsy counted to fifty. The fact that he did so obediently made him a little mad. This was the last time he worked with a bunch of dumb hicks. What the hell kind of a town was it where the mayor and the sheriff were in on a bank job?

  When he reached fifty, he walked out of his room and down the stairs. The street was almost deserted when he walked out onto it. Just to prove itself a one-horse town, there were no street lights of any kind. The darkness of the street was cut here and there by a few lights from houses. The lights of Tully’s saloon threw quite a large bright arc. The bank stood in total darkness.

  He found the deep, dark maw of the alleyway and hesitated for a moment as he found that he could not see a yard in front of him down there. For a moment, this quiet cow-town was menacing to the city dweller. He called himself a goddam fool and pushed forward into the darkness. He had taken no more than thirty paces when he heard a soft whistle off to his left. Halting, he heard a man say: ‘Harper?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Over here.’

  He stepped to the side of the alleyway and saw a faint gleam of light ahead. A man said: ‘Go ahead to the light.’ Pudsy went forward cautiously, now and then stumbling on uneven ground. Then he had stepped through an open doorway and he heard the door close behind him. Now, another door opened ahead and he walked into a large lighted room. He realized that this was the main part of the bank. Off to his left was a smaller room. At his elbow, a voice said: ‘There’s the safe, Harper. Go ahead.’ He knew the sheriff was there with him.

  He walked into the smaller office and saw the Purely Crutten safe in the far corner. A lamp gleamed on the desk in the center. All the gear he had requested was laid out neatly on the desk. He stepped forward to check it and saw to his relief and pleasure that everything he had asked for was there. This gave him a sudden burst of confidence. Maybe people who could be as efficient as this were not hopeless amateurs after all.

  The sheriff said: ‘Everything there you want?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Then for God’s sake hurry it up.’

  Pudsy Harper rubbed his hands together and got to work. He could feel the old professional excitement rising in him. That kind of excitement never threw him, only inspired him to do his best work.

  He worked smoothly and with skill. Everything seemed to be in order. It was only when he opened up the powder bags and ran the powder through his fingers, as he always did before using it, that he noticed something wrong.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The last place anybody would have thought of looking for the stage robbers was in the house of the bank owner. J. Howard Lindholm was, to start with, a man wholly above suspicion. By the evening of the bank raid, Lindholm started to undergo a curious transformation of character. Or maybe it was that he had discovered things about himself of which he had been ignorant in the past. For example, his original plan to obtain Whiskey Joe’s gold had originated in his need for money, his desire to be rich and to fulfil his ambitions. His devotion to his own cause may have been quite passionate, but the carrying out of the scheme had been a cold and calculated process of thought inside his skull. Now, however, he found that he was obtaining excitement from the carrying out of the scheme itself. More than that, it fed his vanity and pride.

  There was the girl. A few months ago, even a week or two before, such a woman would have been beyond his dreams. He had never been much of a hand with women and he had never fooled himself that he was any oil painting. Now, here was the girl smiling at him.

  He had discovered her through the use of a private investigator in Chicago. Her real name was Carla Blount. Not much of a name for a beautiful girl, but there it was. She had come to town as Allison Disart and she had fooled old Joe into thinking her his niece. That had not been difficult. She had spent five years on the stage and she had at one time been the room-mate of the^ Disart girl. She had been made for this part.

  He looked at her sitting on the edge of the bed, brushing her hair. The lamplight shone on its glossy darkness. To think that so much loveliness was his for the taking, somehow caught him by the throat. He wondered if a man could stand only so much happiness. When she turned her head to smile at him, he found something there he had not expected, a friendly warmth, even affection. That was almost too much for him.

  He didn’t fool himself. Behind all the present excitement and expectancy, his brain stayed cool. He knew the main attraction was the gold. The girl was sensible. She had herself to think of. Yet, as he knew, money could evoke real passion in a certain kind of woman. Nor did the gold prevent her having a genuine liking for him. After all, he had made himself as charming as possible to her.

  ‘Howard,’ she said, ‘what will you do when this is all over?’

  He took off his necktie and loosened his shirt collar. ‘I thought I knew, my dear,’ he said, ‘but now I’m not so sure. I had thought of England or Ireland for a few years. Some wise investments. You know the kind of thing.’

  She laughed. ‘Sensible, but dull,’ she said.

  He smiled in an avuncular kind of a way. ‘That’s my present thought. Investment, sure. That looks after the future. But I think maybe a year or two of fun. I could afford it.’ She laid down her brush and threw the dark veil of her hair back from her face.

  ‘Hank Stevenson wants me to go to South America with him,’ she said. ‘Unbutton me at the back, please.’

  He went across the room to her and started to unbutton her dress. As his fingers touched her neck, a thrill that was like a deep shudder ran through him. Her scent touched his nostrils and he was painfully conscious that it was too long since he had had a woman.

  ‘Stevenson,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know, it was like—’

  ‘It isn’t,’ she said. ‘Not yet. I guess he scares me a little. He acts and talks like a gentleman, but I’ve heard the other men talking.’

  ‘Stevenson a gentleman?’ Lindholm said. ‘The man’s a blackguard with blood on his hands. I would hate to think of you ... You can do better than that, my dear.’

  ‘A girl has to think of her future.’

  Their gazes met in the mirror. He did not look at his best with his jacket off and his shirt unbuttoned. As he unbuttoned her dress, she slipped it down, and now he could see the creamy rounds of her breasts and the delicious divide between them. The sight almost made him faint.

  ‘Carla,’ he said, ‘I’m an old man to you, I guess.’

  She turned and looked up at him, giving him the full benefit of those eyes, as if he was not devastated enough.

  ‘You’re mature, Howard,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel you’re old at all.’

  ‘That’s nice of you.’

  ‘I feel so safe with you. Just having you here. I’ve led a pillar-to-post kind of a life. I’d so much love to settle down.’

  ‘My dear,’ he said, and was so overcome at what was being offered to him, when he had only contemplated the possibility of a night or two in her company, that he bent down and put his lips to her shoulder where it sloped up to her long slender neck. She put an arm around his neck. Then she stood up and his arms were around her, holding her tightly against him. He kissed her on the mouth, and then he went a little wild and she had to tear herself away from him. She panted nicely like a modest woman overcome by unseemly but delicious passion.

  ‘Hurry,’ she said, ‘I can’t wait.’

  J. Howard Lindholm needed no second bidding, as they say. He had ever been a man for instant action when it was called for and he had never heard it called for so urgently as now. With a speed that would have done credit to an equally aroused man of half his age, he began to tear his clothes from him. His frenzy of speed dispensed with pants, shirt, socks, in no time at all, while the young lady was still struggling with all the fema
le appendages and restrictions of the period. He saw, with his usual insight, that he would reach the post first to no avail, if he did not go to her assistance. With fumbling fingers he unlaced and pulled. In no time at all, it seemed, he had the young lady stark and incredibly beautiful upon the bed, hurling himself upon her with an enthusiasm which did him credit.

  It was at that very moment that a block down the street, Pudsy Harper blew the bank safe.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The robbery of the Black Horse bank was a strange incident in the life of the town from many aspects.

  For one thing, there were a great many people involved in it. There was no member, for example, of Mark Tully’s backroom club who was not fully aware of what was going on. This meant the mayor, who was the senior justice of the peace, and two councilmen. The explosive which Pudsy used and which was, as you might say, provided by the town, had been obtained by a friend of a cousin of the mayor who worked in mining. This was because the local gunsmith, who had a good store of explosives, was not in on the plot. McAllister had ruled against his inclusion, because he was known to be a friend of J. Howard Lindholm.

  This explosive did not arrive until the eleventh hour; indeed McAllister nearly suffered heart-failure, it was delayed so long. Eventually, on the night of the bank raid, it arrived in a mine wagon. Everybody concerned was so relieved that it had arrived that nobody thought to check whether it was the normal powder the average cow-country man would think to use. None of them knowing anything about the latest developments in the explosives industry, which about that time was great, they thought there could be little difference between one type and another. Unbelievable, maybe, but true nonetheless.

  It must be said in poor Pudsy’s honor that he tried to back out at the last moment. Nobody in his right mind, he claimed not without justification, would use an explosive he did not know something about. Not for this kind of job in a confined space. These wretched hicks showed not the slightest interest in his right and proper feelings. Every one of them over-ruled him. Now they had come thus far in the robbing of their own bank, there was no turning back for them. They left Pudsy no choice-they stood between him and the door with drawn guns. Guns had always terrified Pudsy.

  In all fairness to the man, we must recognize that under the circumstances it was understandable that by the time he came to setting his charges, the little man from Chicago was confused. Working with an unknown material, he was faced with a gamble – whether to underestimate the charge used or to be generous with it. He argued, quite falsely it turned out, that nothing new was better than the old. Ergo: new explosive must be weaker than good old black powder. So he was lavish with the unknown material and, did he but know it, laid charges which, placed strategically, would have been enough to blow the bank itself across the nearby creek.

  For safety’s sake, he had placed the mattress from Lindholm’s office bed across the front of the safe with a couple of chairs to hold it in place. He then ran a fuse from the inner to the outer office. Before he struck his match and ignited the fuse, he remarked with the casualness that he thought marked the true professional: ‘This is liable to make quite a bang, sheriff. My advice is get your head down.’

  McAllister dropped to one knee and cupped his head in his arms, saying: ‘Go ahead.’ He called to anybody who was near that the safe was about to be blown. Pudsy struck his match and the fuse started to splutter. He and McAllister watched the burn race along the fuse line and enter the inner office. At this point some ultimate truth seemed to strike the little safe-breaker. He was heard to utter: ‘Oh, my Gawd,’ and McAllister saw him start in a sudden rush of panic for the rear door of the bank.

  He never reached it.

  As he passed the bank counter where each day Ham Stoppard did his daily stint, there came a stunning volume of sound and every particle of solid matter and of air seemed to be rent and shattered from its original form. Pudsy Harper’s lightweight self was ripped from its feet and hurled with a horrifyingly titanic power into the outer darkness. McAllister, crouching near the street door of the bank, felt himself being hurled backwards as if he weighed no more than a morsel of paper, smashed through the door itself and thrown violently onto the street.

  The force of the explosion must have knocked him unconscious, but how long he lay there in the dust of the street he would never know. All he knew as he staggered trembling to his feet was that his whole being was shattered. All around him there seemed to be wreckage, confusion and flame. Men shouted. One stumbled into McAllister. Through the chaos and confusion of that moment, McAllister retained the importance of obtaining the gold. He seized the man who had stumbled into him and found that it was Lon McKenna, the mayor. He shouted into Lon’s face: ‘Get the gold.’

  ‘Gold?’ said McKenna, wonderingly.

  McAllister turned the mayor into the wreckage of the bank and shoved him forward. ‘Get the gold.’

  McAllister himself must have been light-headed. He was vaguely conscious of knocking out some flames which were licking at the tails of his coat. He then carefully walked through the frame of the doorway, ignoring the fact that the walls of the bank were no longer there. By the bright light of the flames, his astonished eyes saw that the banker’s desk had been transferred from the small office into the larger one where it rested in a rather forlorn condition on top of the tellers’ counter.

  A ghost of a creature appeared in front of McAllister, apparently carefully dressed in rags, his face looking like that of a Kentucky minstrel wearing a silly and inane grin. ‘Who the hell’re you?’ McAllister demanded.

  ‘Tully,’ was the reply. ‘Who the hell’re you?’

  ‘McAllister. Get the goddam gold.’

  Together, they staggered on failing legs in the direction of the safe. When they found it, they stood and gazed in consternation and dismay. While everything around it had been destroyed, the giant safe stood there in almost pristine condition.

  Tully said a very socially unacceptable word. They approached and found that the safe was too hot to touch. They both said: ‘Ouch.’

  ‘We got to get the gold,’ said McAllister.

  Out on the street somebody was yelling: ‘Somebody’s blown up the bank. The bank’s been robbed. The bank’s been robbed.’

  McAllister told Tully: ‘Get the gold, for God’s sake, while I head off the local citizenry.’ He drew his pistol and tottered out onto the street, bawling as loudly as he could: ‘There they go. After ’em, boys,’ and fired several shots in the direction of the creek.

  A man came up to him and said: ‘Hold hard, man. I don’t see anybody.’

  ‘Ah,’ said McAllister, ‘you ain’t trained to it like me.’

  ‘Who the hell’re you?’ the man demanded.

  ‘McAllister,’ McAllister snarled. ‘Get a posse together. They went over the creek.’

  ‘Like hell they went over the creek. Nobody didn’t go over no creek.’

  ‘You calling me a liar, you son-of-a-bitch?’ McAllister demanded.

  ‘Sure I am calling you a liar. You are a liar.’

  ‘You’re under arrest,’ said McAllister.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Calling the law a liar. You can’t go around calling the law a liar at a time like this.’ He turned to a nearby man, who stood gaping this way and that with a gun in his hand. ‘Arrest this man.’

  The man said: ‘This is old Billy Dyson, I can’t arrest him.’

  ‘Go ahead and arrest him. He’s a bank robber.’

  ‘Is that a fact? This world will never cease to surprise me.’ He turned his gun on Dyson. ‘Ain’t there no honest man left anywhere? Come along, Dyson, you thieving son-of-a-bitch.’

  ‘I ain’t no bank robber,’ said Dyson, ‘and you know it,’ scared out of his wits by the pointed gun which he knew to be hair-triggered.

  ‘Tell that to the judge,’ said his arrester.

  ‘Good man,’ said McAllister and ran back through the flames.

  He f
ound that Mark Tully had the back of the safe off.

  ‘Blast is a funny thing, ain’t it?’ said Mark. Considering the physical condition he was in and ignoring the fact that he showed an inclination to walk around in circles, Mark was being his usual efficient self. He had a small pile of canvas sacks there, ready for the gold. Now he rapidly began to put the pokes of gold from the safe into the sacks. McAllister ran them to the rear of the building, where the distraught mayor seemed amazed to see any gold at all. He staggered away down an alley under the great weight. When McAllister got back into the bank, he found Mark arguing fiercely with a man who was demanding to know what was going on here. He was Smith, owner of a hardware store in town. He was an anti-committee man and was suspicious of anything. McAllister bustled him out onto the street, telling him that if he received an injury the county could not be responsible.

  ‘That man was stealing gold in there,’ Smith accused.

  ‘No, sir,’ said McAllister stoutly, but with failing courage, ‘he’s trying to save what’s left. Why ain’t you out after the thieves?’

  ‘Thieves?’ What thieves?’

  ‘The ones who blew up the bank and lit off across the creek with the gold.’

  ‘Say, is that a fact?’

  ‘True bill.’

  There was no further chance to continue this conversation, for a wild figure came cantering down the street like an obscene Percheron. McAllister, with some difficulty, recognized the owner of the bank, J. Howard Lindholm. This gentleman, clad in longjohns and an expression of frozen horror halted and gazed at the meagre remains of his bank.

  ‘Disaster,’ he said.

  McAllister could almost feel sorry for him. ‘We’re saving what we can,’ said McAllister, ‘at some danger to life, I might say.’

  ‘The gold,’ said Lindholm, turning a crazed pair of eyes on the sheriff.

  ‘A gang of four men was seen escaping from the fire,’ McAllister told him, lying desperately. ‘They were carrying sacks which we guessed contained the gold you speak of. What gold was this, Lindholm?’