Pinto stripped a long peeling carefully off a potato. “Gone.”
It was the tone of his voice, more than anything else, that told Brian the story. Slowly he wheeled, aware of Pinto raising his head to look, and walked down the hall to the living-room. It felt like the bottom was gone from his belly. It seemed to put the stamp of utter finality on his defeat of the preceding days. Robles had given him his chance. He had failed to measure up. His wild drunk in town had finished it. Hearing of it, Robles had known how complete was his failure and had left for good. For a moment he resented Robles for not giving him more time, more of a chance. Then he knew how wrong that was. The Indian had given him a lifetime. What had happened after Tiger’s death was merely a culmination. Brian went to Tiger’s big hide-seated chair by the fireplace and sank into it.
Yet the resentment would not leave him. The old Indian’s action was too much like Tiger’s constant nagging. Memory of Tiger always brought its dull grief; but with it were the bleak recollections of their old clashes. Hadn’t he left that behind with Tiger’s death? What right did the others have to judge him? Robles or Wolffe or Pa Gillette or any of them. If he didn’t measure up to their standards, the hell with them. It was his life and, now more than ever, he would live it as he saw fit. With Tiger gone he was answerable to no one but himself, and it was going to stay that way.
* * * *
A week later he received an invitation to a party at Ford Tarrant’s. It was a glittering affair, with most of the unattached young women in the county there. It helped him take his mind off Tiger and it provided the impetus that returned him to the scapegrace existence he had known before Tiger’s death.
Through the winter months, time gradually healed his grief over Tiger’s loss. Little by little his carefree humor returned; little by little he slipped back into the familiar patterns of life.
He saw Arleen once in a while but the stiffness was still between them. The constant round of Christmas parties during December gave him little time to think about it. In the early part of the year he began giving affairs of his own at the Double Bit. All the questions and doubts of a few months before were submerged in a frantic whirl that left him little time for self-doubt. When Brian wasn’t spending time in the higher social echelons he was carousing with his more disreputable cronies in town. He was playing the gay young bachelor to the hilt and it seemed sufficient.
That was the way things stood on the day early in May when he got word that George Wolffe wanted to see him in town. There had been a lull in things for the past few days and he welcomed a chance to go into Apache Wells. His Steeldust was being re-shod and he took the spring buggy with the scarlet bed and the bright yellow wheels.
It was good to ride into your home town that way. Good to smell the hot spring dust stirred up by your buggy wheels. Good to know there would be a friend on every corner, a bottle and a game waiting at the Black Jack, a dozen of the prettiest girls in Arizona to choose from when you got tired of cards. And the first friend to appear was Charlie Casket, stepping from the Café. There was a deck of cards in his hand, and Brian waved at him, expecting the old salute: “Pick a card, Brian.”
But it didn’t come. Casket stared at him blankly, holding the cards in one pale hand, neither nodding nor acknowledging the greeting. Farther on, it was the barber, standing in his doorway. Brian waited for the traditional greeting: “Looks like a shave this morning, Mr. Sheridan.”
It didn’t come. The barber didn’t open his mouth. He stared at Brian with a strained, pale look to his face. When Brian was past he saw the man turn into his shop and speak to someone inside.
It made Brian pull his team down to a walk. The hot street ahead of him was empty save for a few forlorn cowponies stamping at the tie-racks. The silence of the town was like a pressure, cottony, waiting. The white dust sifted from beneath his wheels and settled like cornstarch on his coat. He pulled up before the feed store, and his eyes lifted to the windows above. Arleen’s windows. He was brushed by a sense of loneliness.
There had been a dozen girls, since then. Why did they all seem so shallow?
With a curse, he shook the mood off and started to climb from his buggy. At the same time the banker’s kid cut around a corner and ran toward the buggy. His eyes were round as silver dollars and there was fear on his white face. The boy caught the side of the buggy with a freckled hand.
“The Gillettes are in town,” he panted. “They’re lookin’ for you and they’ve all got their guns.”
Brian frowned sharply at the boy, then pulled a quarter from his pocket and flipped it to him. “Thanks, Dee. You better go home now.”
Brian tried to shake his apprehension off. What the hell was wrong? He stepped out of the buggy, winding the reins around the whipstock. He had acquired a taste for bottle-green frock coats and wore a different hat for every day in the week. This was his Wednesday Stetson, bone-white and fresh-blocked, the one he always wore with his white silk cravat and bench-made boots of red Morocco. As he stepped up to the sidewalk he saw three people come out of Jess Miller’s Mercantile directly across the street. It was Pa Gillette and his two sons, Cameron and Asa. Their faces were white and set.
“Morning, Gillette,” Brian smiled. “Your beef getting fatter on that new forty?”
There was no answer. Sweat glistened in the deep channels of Pa Gillette’s face and his mouth was narrow as a scar.
Behind him, moving ponderously as the mules he drove, came Cameron, an immense blond man with hair like straw thatching. Asa, the youngest son, brought up the rear, a nervous, driven boy with hollow cheeks and feverish eyes. Brian felt his face tighten as they stopped in front of him and stood there, staring at him in silence. Then Pa Gillette said:
“Guess you’ll be the richest man in Gila County, now.”
Brian frowned at him. “How do you mean?”
“Asa wanted to shoot you,” Pa said. Anger shook his voice. “I told him they’d hang us for that.”
“They can’t hang us for whipping the hell out of you,” Asa said.
Sudden anger cut through Brian. “What the hell for? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Pa.”
“Morton Forge was always getting into some kind of trouble,” Pa Gillette said thickly. “When you foreclosed on him, I thought maybe you was in the right. I even kept quiet when you shut down Partridge’s outfit. He wanted to get up a bunch of us and burn you out. He said you was a damn octopus, eating us up. I wouldn’t believe him. But you was just stringing us along till you really had us over a barrel, wasn’t you? Tellin’ us you wouldn’t call in the note if we let it lapse a few months. Letting us stretch out so thin we couldn’t ever get back.”
“Are you saying—”
“You know what happened,” Pa almost shouted. He hooked Sheridan’s coat with one hand, pulling him up on his toes. His voice broke with his rage and his eyes were blazing. “Your foreman was with the deputy sheriff when he brought the notice this morning.”
Brian grabbed the man’s arm, trying to twist free. “Let go, Pa. I didn’t send the law out.”
Still holding his coat, Pa shoved Brian back so hard he had to stumble against the wall of the building to retain his feet. “You can stand there and say that?” Pa shouted in his face. “An hour ago Cline’s deputy was on my door-stoop and that damn Latigo with him.”
“But I didn’t send him!” Brian was shouting in a hot anger of his own now. He got purchase against the wall and thrust all his weight into Pa, shoving him back off balance and tearing free at the same time. He heard his coat rip. Pa tried to come back in at him, but Sheridan twisted free.
“Don’t let him get away,” Asa shouted.
Brian had a blurred impression of Cameron coming into him. He tried to dodge aside. But the man’s great body smashed him back against the wall. He saw Cameron pull back a rope-scarred fist. Saw Pa Gillette lunging back in from the ot
her side. Knew he’d be finished if they both caught him there.
He dropped to his knees as Cameron struck. The man’s fist cracked into the wall above Brian’s descending head. Then he drove outward against the man, waist-high. It carried Cameron across the sidewalk and he pitched off the curb with Brian sprawling out on top of him.
He tried to roll off Cameron but both Pa and Asa lit on him from behind. He went back down beneath a fury of blows and kicks. Stunned by it, he had a blurred vision of a booted leg, and twisted around to catch it and throw his weight against it. This toppled Pa back into Asa and both of them went down.
Brian went right with them. He saw Asa’s face before him as the man tried to twist free and rise. He smashed it square with all his weight behind the blow. Blood spurted and Asa was jerked backward to hit flat on his back against the street.
Brian was still partly on top of Pa. The elder Gillette twisted up into him, jamming a knee into the crotch. The pain of it made Brian double helplessly over on the man.
Pa clawed at him, trying to get out from beneath. In desperation, Brian pawed for some handhold. His fingers found Pa’s hair. Pa clawed at his eyes and tried to knee him again. Face still twisted with pain from that first knee, Brian slammed Pa’s head against the ground. He was dimly aware of Asa rolling over, face whipped by rage.
“He’s killin’ Pa,” Asa bawled. There was no reason left in the wild tone of his voice. Hot rage twisting his face, he went for his gun.
Brian let go of Pa’s hair, rising up on the man, filled with the helplessness of knowing what was coming and being utterly unable to stop it. Asa’s gun was clear out before Estelle Gillette’s figure blocked him off, jumping down into the street.
“You can’t kill him in cold blood, Asa!” she cried.
Brian saw Asa jump to his feet, trying to lunge aside. But she threw herself into him, grabbing for the gun arm and hanging on, fighting with him till he finally stopped.
Brian tried to get up off the half-conscious Pa, but he was too drained to gain his feet. He had to crawl to the curb and hoist himself to a sitting position. The air passed in and out of him in great, broken gusts. Each breath was stabbing pain. He thought for a long while that he was going to be sick. At last, with a great effort, he lifted his head, to see Estelle Gillette still standing in front of Asa, her head turned over one shoulder to look at Sheridan.
“Thanks, Estelle,” he said. “I think Asa really meant to kill me.”
“Nobody would have been killed,” George Wolffe said, from behind Sheridan. “Unless it was Asa.”
Sheridan turned to see Wolffe standing by the bank door, a gun in his hand. His square face was Indian-dark with anger, beneath a flat-topped black hat, and his eyes were fixing their black intensity on Asa Gillette.
“I heard the commotion from my office,” he told Brian. “I wish I could’ve gotten here sooner.”
Brian winced as his grin pulled at cut lips. “I’ll never leave lather in your shaving mug again, George. Where does a lawyer get off packing a smoke pole that big?”
Wolffe looked down at the huge Frontier Colt he held, and then raised his eyes again, unsmiling. Estelle had finally turned from her brother now. Her cheeks were flushed and her round young breasts swelled against her calico dress with every panting breath she took. But her lips settled into a full, almost pouting shape again as she regained her composure.
Cameron was on his feet, shaking his straw-thatched head from side to side like a bull with blow-flies. Pa’s whole face was still squinted up with pain, but not enough to obscure the anger glittering in his sun-faded eyes.
“This ain’t the finish,” he said. His voice was guttural with rage and frustration. “You better stay indoors after this, Sheridan. You’ll be taking your life in your hands to put one foot outside. There won’t be a road safe for you to ride in all Arizona.”
He turned and stalked off, gesturing for his clan to follow. Cameron and Asa followed, and it left only Estelle, standing in the street, staring at Brian with tortured eyes. He got shakily to his feet, holding out one hand.
“Estelle, you don’t believe—?”
She regarded him without answering. He couldn’t tell whether it was hate in her eyes, or pity. Then she turned and left. Brian watched her go down the street after her family. At last Brian turned to go upstairs with Wolffe. At the stairway he grew so dizzy he had to lean against the rail. His face was putty-colored.
“You’re really out of shape,” George Wolffe said. “Little fight like that.”
Sheridan laughed shakily. “Have to get in some more riding, I guess.”
“I’m sorry about the girl.”
“They come and go.”
“I thought you were really interested in Estelle.”
Sheridan glanced at him, seeing a sharp calculation in his eyes. “You manage my money, George,” he said. “I’ll take care of my love life.” He turned squarely to Wolffe. “That was sort of a dirty deal, wasn’t it? Tiger had given them his word we wouldn’t push that note.”
“They had no proof, Brian. How can we do business that way?”
“Pa said something about Forge and Partridge,” Brian said. “Did you foreclose on them too?”
“They were six months behind on their notes. Claimed Tiger had made a verbal agreement with them too. I told you how this thing would get out of hand if we let the Gillettes get away with it.”
“But I gave Pa Gillette my word too. Tiger made Sheridan a name anybody could trust, George. I’ve got to straighten this out.”
George put a hand on his shoulder. “Simmer down, Brian. You couldn’t get within a mile of the Gillettes now, anyway. This is all a part of those politics you don’t want to get involved in. For several years Pa Gillette has been the leader of the Salt River bunch. Tiger thought he’d won them over with his loans and his help. But you can’t pull the little man and the big man together that easy. The Salt Rivers would still drag you down if they could. It’s one of the reasons I asked you in today. We’re having a meeting and I wanted you to see the truth.”
The Gillettes’ hatred had shaken Brian. Could he really be this blind to what lay beneath the surface of the town? He felt confused, subdued.
Ford Tarrant galloped down Cochise from the east end of town on a handsome, sweat-shiny Appaloosa. He pulled to a flourishing halt, grinning down at them. “Looks like you finally collared the prodigal, George. Brian going to join us?”
“Only if it’s at the Black Jack,” Brian said.
“No,” Wolffe said sharply. “It’ll only end up with another game. You dropped five hundred dollars to Casket last week.”
“Don’t nag, George.”
“But you’re getting in too deep, Brian.”
Tarrant swung off his horse, beating dust from his tailored cutaway. “Indulge the young cock, George. It’s obviously the only way you can interest him in the more serious aspects of life.”
Grudgingly Wolffe gave in, and they went to the saloon. At his usual table sat Nacho, glazed sombrero tilted precariously back on his narrow black head, a corn shuck cigarette dangling from his slack mouth. He was playing black jack with Casket but when he saw Brian he turned to hail him. Brian saw the tarnished deputy’s badge winking on one lapel of his greasy charro jacket.
“I knew the long arm would get you one way or the other,” Brian said.
Nacho polished the star proudly with a palm. “How you like? It was me help Latigo foreclose on the Gillettes.”
Brian stopped. “You?”
“Sure. Sheriff Cline had to go down to the county line after some Apaches jumping reservation. Nobody left to serve the eviction notice official. He deputize me before he leave.”
Brian shook his head. “I wish you hadn’t done that.”
Nacho laughed heartily. “Listen to him. Does that sound like the son of Tiger Sheridan?
Tiger would have gone to the Gillette place himself, tear them apart one by one, and throw them off the land piece by piece. I myself saw Tiger turn a stampede once with nothing but a lighted match. It was a night like coal, and here they come, and he didn’t have no horse or nothing—”
“You couldn’t of seen him,” one of the Double Bit hands said. “That happened before you were born.”
“I don’t even think it happened,” the barman said, cleaning a glass. “It can’t be done. Just one of those things you hear about Tiger Sheridan.”
Nacho turned on the barman. “But it can be done, Jigger. The thing animals fear mos’ is fire. Even a little flame like that.”
Jigger put his tongue in one cheek and winked broadly at Sheridan, asking Nacho, “Would you like to try it?”
The deputy arched his chest, pounding on it. “Jus’ give me the stampede. I show you.”
“Let’s go,” whooped one of the Double Bit hands. “I got just the cattle for you.”
It was the old, good-natured ragging Sheridan had heard a hundred times, and he could not help feeling a return of his humor. “All right,” he said. “Joke’s over. If Tiger was here he’d throw you all out in the street for doubting that story.”
Charlie Casket sat at one of the rear tables, his face gaunt and hollow-eyed in the dim light. “Pick a card, Brian.”
Brian went through the routine with him, picking a queen of hearts, shuffling, holding the deck out to the gambler. Casket picked a card out, held it face up.
“Queen of Hearts,” Wolffe said wonderingly.
“Uncanny, Charlie,” Sheridan said, sinking down into a chair. He held up a finger at the barman. “Bring the bottle, Jigger.”
Brian had downed several drinks when Jess Miller came into the saloon, hurrying, round face ruddy and shining with perspiration. He greeted them all absently, pulling a chair up.
“Heard you had a fight with the Gillettes,” he told Brian. “You must be convinced they’re—”
Last of the Breed Page 7
