by Frank Bonham
Fran slapped her. Serena gasped and touched her cheek. They stood staring at each other. Then Fran began to weep. She turned to mount. She heard Serena mounting, also. Finally she heard Serena say throatily: “Forgive me. I’ll try to behave.”
XIV
Once Troy tried to slide down the stump, but the bark gouged his back and the rope that bound him did not give. In desperation, he tried by lunging against it to gain slack. He heard the rope groan, but when he relaxed, sick and sweating with pain, Roth’s lever arrangement recovered the slack.
He did not know how long Roth was gone. But suddenly he and Swede were back. Roth was pulling off buckskin gloves as he stood, spraddle-legged, before him.
“Man, you got to start taking care of yourself,” Roth said in fake concern. “You’re looking poorly. What’ve you got to say for yourself?”
Troy cursed him quietly. He was obsessed with Roth’s brawl-marked face, with the broken nose and filmy eyes.
“Temper,” Roth cautioned. “Reckon we ought to take up some more slack, Swede?”
The logger moved behind the stump. Roth stood there while Swede worked with the knot Roth had thrown over the branch.
“That fella’s name was Deke Howard,” Roth said sadly. “He was with me eight years. Got a nice family. If I thought you’d shot him, I’d pull you right through that stump. Maybe I’ll have to anyway. Ready?” he asked the logger, moving to the side of the stump to take the lever.
Swede said, “Take holt,” and there was a sudden lessening of tension in the rope. A whistling sound cut the air. Swede gasped, “Look out!” and tried to catch the helve, but it went over like a semaphore. Troy saw Roth duck but the branch struck him on the side of the head. Dazed, he went heavily to his knees. It had all happened in a fraction of a second.
For an instant Troy stood there, feeling the hot rush of blood into his arms, and filling his lungs with air as cold and sweet as brook water. Swede was bending over Roth, who remained on his knees, stunned. He was telling him how it had happened.
Then Troy realized the rope had begun sliding down. He looked dumbly at it. It lay loosely about his waist. Quickly he drew up his arms, took hold of the rope, and pushed it down. He took one long, restorative breath, draining the strength from it. Then he moved quietly behind the logger and cocked his arm. Just as he threw the blow, Swede glanced around. Troy went forward with the swing, driving viciously at Swede’s jaw. He jarred Swede’s head and they went down in front of Red Roth. Troy scrambled on top of him and chopped at the logger’s jaw until the man went slack.
He came up then, turning swiftly as Roth got on his feet. Roth had drawn his Colt. He was white, but his jaw was set and he was trying to point the gun. When it went off, the concussion jarred Troy like a door slammed in his face. Powder sparks stung his cheek. The bullet hit the stump behind him. He pushed himself at Roth and the gun. His hand took the gun barrel and twisted it. He raised it as Roth staggered aside. He chopped. Roth took the butt of the gun on the back of his head, stumbled, and fell.
Troy had to lean back against the stump. Everything glistened with the unnatural brightness that told a man he was going to faint. He stood with his face tilted up, breathing deeply. At last he knelt by Roth and took his gun from Roth’s belt. He walked drunkenly to his pony, grazing in the bullpen. He put it on the road to Frontera.
* * * * *
All afternoon Big Jim Jackson had marshaled the search through the foothills and over the broken desert. There were plenty of fresh trails to follow, but always someone like Bob Briscoe or old Colonel Ike turned up at the end of them, resting his horse or building himself a smoke. And you could not jail every man you encountered on the ground that he lived in the Defiances.
Late in the afternoon Roth rejoined him. He had a headache from a head blow that took a pint of whiskey to kill. At last Jackson, with sunset promising, took Roth, Doyle, his range boss Owen McCard, and four of his cowpunchers, leaving the others to watch the trails, and headed for Frontera. Darkness came before they reached the village.
In the windy night, they rode into Frontera. Along the streets, lamps shone with a hard desert glitter. Jackson heard Doyle humming to himself.
“What makes you so damned musical?” Jackson growled.
“Gonna see the bottom of Becket’s boots before the sun rises,” Doyle said cheerfully. “Gonna get me a grass rope, a little old tree, and set him on a horse.”
“Dream on,” Jackson scoffed. He was growing disgusted with this highly paid specialist of his. “What’s Troy Cameron going to be doing all this time?” he baited Doyle.
Then he saw that Doyle, for all his grinning, was as grim as a cocked Colt. A stubble of blond whiskers made his mouth coarse, and with his bruised face and his hat tugged low he had a look of single-minded ugliness.
“It ain’t a question of what Cameron’s going to be doing about me,” Doyle said. “It’s a question of how’ll he have it … standing up or sitting down. That’s all he’s got to decide.”
As they rode down the narrow slot of the business section, Jim Jackson saw a woman herd a small boy into the doorway of a store. He rode into Mundy’s feed barn. Mundy was at the door of his office.
“Seen Becket?” Jackson snapped.
Mundy stroked his soiled beard. “Reckon not, Jim.”
“Don’t Jim me, you old pirate!” Mundy had cornered half of Jackson’s beef money by threatening a lawsuit unless his feed bills were paid up.
As they rode on, Jackson told Roth to ride a block north and take the alley to the rear of the Pima Bar. “Doyle and I’ll go in the front. If he’s in there, we’ve got him.”
He had already seen the congregation of horses before the saloon. As they continued, Jackson watched the stores and boardwalks, Doyle looked straight ahead, the other men crowded close, hard jawed and silent.
There was no room at the Pima Bar hitch rack, and Jackson shoved along until he found space. Doyle crowded in ahead of him and slid off the back of his pony. As Jackson found another opening, Doyle pulled up his belt, loosened his gun in the holster, and flexed his fingers. “Yes, sir!” he said.
He cracked the door open with his knee and stood in the opening. Jackson came up close behind him. “You’re a hell of a fine target,” he prodded.
“Nobody in this tin-can town could hit a target,” Doyle retorted.
Jackson put his hand on his shoulder. “Watch the door, now. I want to smell around a bit.”
Doyle started to protest, but Jackson sauntered into the room. McCard and the other men moved with him and settled along the bar, their backs to it. Men who had been drinking there quietly drifted away. Jim Jackson inventoried the long room. Cameron, Mike Saddler, and Colonel Ike Edwards sat at a table, and Nate Croft was bringing a tray bearing a bottle, some spiced Mexican meats, and a loaf of rye bread. At another table sat Joe Wiley, Saddler’s Basque cowpuncher, and Bill Thorne. Wiley had the coloring of a bay horse, red-brown skin and black hair, and his eyes were cold as ice on a pond. Other Defiance Mountains ranchers were spread around the room. They watched tensely, mouths set, eyes hard, as Jackson came on. No, he thought gloomily, Doyle won’t pull any aces out of this deck. If he threw down on Cameron, ten men would blast him out of his boots.
Jackson stopped at Cameron’s table just as Nate Croft halted beside it. Croft moved back uneasily. The rancher saw that Cameron looked sick. Roth’s treatment had done him no good.
“Where is he?” Jackson asked harshly.
“We lost him,” Cameron said.
Jackson pivoted and found Nate Croft in his way, stubby and strong, his sleeves rolled back from hairy forearms. “Excuse me, Nate,” he said. He pushed him aside and heard one of the glasses shatter. Croft murmured an oath. Jackson went behind the bar. Three bartenders stared at him uncertainly.
“Get out of there,” Jackson told them.
They came out and he sa
untered behind the bar, looking under it, kicking at crates and wadded rags.
“When do you swamp out the roaches, Nate?” he asked. “Election years?” He made an arm signal to Tom Doyle. Doyle took a stack of yellow chips from a game table as he came. He flipped a chip into a cuspidor with a ring and a splash.
“Watch things,” Jackson told him. “I’m going upstairs. Nate, you come, too,” he decided suddenly.
His brother-in-law hesitated, glanced at Cameron’s table, but accompanied Jackson up the short spiral staircase to the second floor. Jackson had taken a bracket lamp from behind the bar. He inspected the closets and a small storeroom. They walked down the rough-planked hall to Croft’s bedroom over the street. Jackson drew his Colt.
“You first, Nate.”
Nate’s oily brown skin was sweating. He stared at the gun. He opened the door and stood there with the dark room before him. Jackson held the lamp high. “Inside,” he ordered.
They went in. There was nothing but the smell of Croft’s bedclothes, the disordered bachelor’s gather, the tattered green blind. Jackson satisfied himself that Becket was not there. Croft watched him rigidly. Jackson holstered his gun and patted Croft’s cheek.
“Nate, if I find him in this building … if I find he’s even been here … what I do to you will make this town honest for forty years.”
Red Roth entered from the back as he descended the stairs. Jackson drifted on and put his hands on the back of Troy Cameron’s chair. Behind the colonel stood Tom Doyle. Doyle dropped a poker chip into the loose collar of the old man’s shirt and chuckled as Colonel Edwards started.
“It’s a small town, boys,” Jackson said. “I’ll have a man on every trail out of town. Make it easy on Becket and have him turn himself in.”
“Shore will think about it,” said Colonel Edwards. His eyes were sunken and dull. He looked tired enough to bury.
At the door, Jackson glanced back. Doyle was still staring at Cameron. “Ever fight a man from the front?” he asked him.
“Only on Sundays,” Cameron said pleasantly.
“Sunday’s comin’,” Doyle said.
“Well, if I’m not at church,” Cameron said. But although he was casually tilted back in his chair, he held his glass in his left hand and his right lay in his lap.
Doyle asked: “Why’d you quit marshaling? Rheumatism?”
Colonel Edwards twisted to glare at Jackson’s gunman. “Why don’t you get the hell out, Texas?”
Doyle leaned down to peer into the colonel’s face. Then he plucked the star from the old man’s coat. “Hey! Bet you could help us, Colonel. You’re marshal of this town, ain’t you?”
“Paper-servin’ marshal,” Edwards said stiffly.
“Marshal just the same. Make me a deputy! Then I can really go after this killer.”
“When I make you a deputy,” Colonel Edwards sneered, “they’ll make Geronimo a deacon in the church.”
Doyle grinned and bent the star. He bent it back and it broke across the middle. “Mighty puny, at that.” He dropped the pieces on the floor and swaggered after Jackson.
Dust, and a tightening cold, ruled the town. They stood before the saloon. Red Roth was cursing Doyle, low and bitterly.
“If you were an Indian,” he told him, “they’d call you Chief Big Mouth. Thought you were going to give him a choice … standin’ up or sittin’ down. Well, he was sittin’ down. But you were walkin’ out.”
Doyle’s rough-featured face soured. “And only fifteen Defiance men backing him up. Go get him for me, Red. Tell him I’m waitin’. I’ll take him on any time … but not all the nesters in Arizona.”
“Tom’s right,” Jackson snapped. “If you want action, Red, it’s here for the picking. Becket’s in this town. We’re going to flush him.”
Squatting in the dirt, the big man made a map with his finger. “These here are livery barns. Go through ’em, Tom. Don’t ask leave. Just make yourself at home.” He cocked an eyebrow at Roth. “Red, use some of your orneriness in the Mexican joints. Dump over a few tables. Knock some greasers around. Let ’em know Big Jim is looking for somebody.” His tawny eyes glinted as he rose. His face was like hardwood. “Tell them Jackson’ll burn every Mexican saloon and store in town if I find a Mexican shielding him.”
He stood there, tossing a fat .45 cartridge. “McCard,” he told his range boss, “take the rest and go through some of the places where a man might hide, houses in close and any store that’s open. Tell ’em who sent you.”
A gusty relish for what was happening formed in him. Did they think he couldn’t keep up with changing times? There was a club called power that a man could always take in his two hands and swing with all his force, if he had the guts to—if he meant it and was not bluffing.
The men were mounting again. “Where will you be if we need you?” McCard asked. He was a tall man with the shape of a rifle and cool, intent eyes. He could take orders but act on his own.
“I’ll be at the hotel. I saw my daughter’s horse there. It’s just possible,” Jackson said, “that she may want to tell me something.”
The hotel lobby was acrid with smoke of a mesquite-root fire snapping on a corner hearth. A door broke the rear wall, with a wicketed enclosure that was hotel desk and town post office combined at the right. Behind, a large, pudgy-featured man in a green eyeshade was reading a newspaper under a goosenecked student lamp. Ed Mattson rose hurriedly as Jackson came through the room. A few drummers in for the fall beef buying sat about the lobby.
“Howdy, Jim,” he said with uncertain cordiality. Mattson’s thin red hair was arranged with painstaking but ineffective art. “Which room is my daughter in?”
Mattson’s eyes shifted to the key rack. “Serena?”
“I only had one daughter, at the last tally.”
Mattson patted his scalp nervously. “Of course it’s your business, Jim,” he hedged, “but if I was you, I’d let her rest. She may be asleep already. She and the Becket girl come in pretty beat.”
Jackson picked up the corroded pen lying on the register. “I’m going to shove this right through your windpipe if you don’t answer me, Ed.”
“Eleven,” Mattson said hastily.
Jackson drifted down the hall and thumped on the door. When he spoke, Serena unlocked it. He went inside. He kicked the door shut with his spurred heel and glowered at her. She crossed her arms and turned away.
“Where’s Becket?” Jackson said.
“I don’t know. How would I?”
“How did you know he and Cameron weren’t really going to trade hats and horses?”
“They must have changed back. When they passed me …”
Jackson’s hand whipped her around. “Where is the harebrained little parcel of meanness?” he demanded.
“I can’t tell you,” she said.
“You can let Red Roth back out because I don’t give him protection,” Jackson said. “You can let Woodbury’s bank foreclose me. But you can’t tell me where Becket is.”
“He’d be lynched, Dad. You know it.”
“I told them I’d see him jailed and tried,” Jackson told her.
She turned away again. “I can’t tell you. I can’t.”
Jackson caught her wrist and yanked her back. He shoved her rudely against the armoire. “Wake up, ma’am! We aren’t talking about next year’s election. We’re talking about being cleaned out. About us not having a three-cent nickel. We’re talking about Miss Serena Jackson marrying a bullwhacker to keep herself in clothes and food, and Big Jim Jackson muscling hay bales in Will Mundy’s feed barn.”
Serena said huskily: “Gil Becket’s sister is in the next room. She can hear us.”
“I don’t give a damn if the governor hears us!” Jackson shouted. “Somebody in this town is harboring a criminal. That somebody is going to wish to hell he hadn’t
, unless Becket’s turned over.”
“Dad,” Serena said quickly, “there’s something you don’t know. Mike Saddler burned his friends’ cabins and his own. Frances Becket and I found where he’d hidden all the things he didn’t want to lose when he burned his own cabin. He had to burn it so that it would look like you’d done it. Then he engineered the raid on Roth’s wagons. Don’t you see it?” she pleaded. “After you whipped him yesterday, he had to be sure you and Troy’s friends fought … or he’d have been the only one we foreclosed.”
Jackson received it slowly.
“Don’t you understand, Dad, why you must go easy now?” Serena continued. “Talk to Troy. Talk to Roth. It can be worked out. I know it can.”
“And I know Red Roth,” Jackson said with gloomy decision. “He’s tough. He’s simple. He’s the kind of man who’ll tattoo Mother on his chest, march in Fourth of July parades, and strip the living hide off a man who does a friend of his a bad turn. But he’s mean as a rattlesnake when he’s crossed. Do you think he’ll go along with me before somebody’s paid for the murder of Deke Howard?”
Serena shook her head. “But he’d never consider jailing sufficient punishment, because the hanging might not be for weeks … if ever.”
Jackson hesitated a moment. “Serena, what he does with Becket is no affair of ours. Becket asked for it when he shot that logger. If I have to give him Becket to survive, he gets him.”
“And that’s why I won’t tell you where he is.”
Jackson clenched his fists, then let them relax. Well, no rush. She wanted to sound tough. Her own woman. But when he applied the pressure, she’d come through. He opened the door.
“Be thinking about marrying that bullwhacker,” he advised. “If Roth leaves, we’ve got just sixty days before they close us out.”
XV
After Jackson’s crowd left the Pima Bar, there was some lackluster poker and drinking among the Defiance men. These men were exhausted and worried; Troy himself could scarcely move without groaning. Colonel Edwards fell asleep at the table, his head pillowed on his arms. Mike Saddler dealt cards to Troy and Bob Briscoe, and then he growled: “Pick ’em up, boys.”
