by Lauran Paine
This was U.S. Marshal John Trent, a man whose almost nondescript, very average appearance had enabled him to build a reputation around his name that was almost a legend, because until he introduced himself, which Trent did not often do, people had visions of this notorious lawman as being nearly ten feet tall, as implacable as death itself, and as deadly as a whole troop of cavalry.
He finished his coffee, tossed down payment, and walked out into the fading evening. There was a rising breath of air coming fragrantly from the punished roadway; here and there wooden store fronts popped as the wood cooled after daytime’s furious heat.
There was a solemn blandness to this night, a kind of melancholy resignation that accompanied the faint scent of greasewood, sage, cured grass. This was the half-light, half-dark hour of total loneliness for strangers, when being far from home brought up in them all the quiet memories.
Trent made a cigarette out front of the café, lit it, and saw that powerful blacksmith walking along toward the northward saloon with elk antlers bolted overhead. He watched and he speculated. Trent was a man who knew men. That blacksmith had been some part of whatever had happened here today involving the liveryman. It was one of the idiosyncrasies of this sparse, hard life that men were wise in the ways of keeping their own counsel where the law and what it stood for was not always available to give protection.
Trent smoked on. He was tired and he was dehydrated. He knew where Lincoln’s rooming house was—a bed with a genuine set of springs under it could seem more desirable than a handsome woman to a man in his condition. But Trent had a feeling. It wasn’t anything he could pin down or even define, yet it was a solid premonition in the dark places of his mind. He’d felt it before, near the end of a trail.
He dropped the smoke, stepped on it, turned, and walked north toward that same saloon the blacksmith had entered. As a hound dog picks up his wanted scent, so did John Trent obey the proddings of that feeling he had.
The Antlers Saloon was one out of many just like it. There was one large, barn-like room with an iron stove in a far corner, with tables and chairs scattered back along the walls, and with a worn-smooth old bar running along the far wall with shelves and pictures behind it. There were also the typical patrons—cowboys, merchants from the town itself, freighters, stage men, a few traveling men, here and there old-timers whose world, once large and violent and colorful, was now shrunk to the size of these four rough walls where they idled away their sundown years in a good, masculine atmosphere, picking up a free drink now and then, and living for little else.
Generally the customers knew one another. There was a little joking back and forth, a little careless comradeship, and occasionally the quick flash of a spun coin to see which of two men would stand the drinks.
Trent blended into this tobacco-hazed atmosphere as easily as a lizard on a rock. His expression was easy, near to smiling, his dusty attire and tied-down .45 were nondescript. Only Trent’s eyes held a veiled but sharper look until he spotted the blacksmith, then they became as good naturedly indifferent as all the other eyes in that restless room.
He eased in beside George and called for a beer. He stood there, one spurred boot draped across the brass rail underfoot, quietly sipping.
George was having a straight shot of rye whiskey. He turned, recognized the graying man, nodded, and got a carefully smoothed-out expression upon his scarred countenance.
Trent understood. He put down the beer glass, half twisted from the middle, and said: “You know what we could do, friend? We could play this game for half the night, me askin’, you duckin’ around the questions.” Trent beckoned to the barman, pointed to their glasses, and said to George: “But you put in a hard day. So did I.” He leaned over the bar, waited out the barman, then lifted his replenished glass and gazed into its bubbly amberness. “Which way did he ride out?”
George hadn’t touched his whiskey glass. He swung his head though, and he said: “Who?”
“The feller who had his horse fresh shod with new shoes all around, friend.”
“All I told you …”
“Was that you’d shod a feller’s leggy bay horse all around, friend,” interrupted Trent. He sipped, looked through the upheld glass again, and said: “I could describe those shoes to you … the ones you pulled off. One had the outside calk worn smooth, another was split at the toe. Friend, I’ve been trailing the horse that wore those shoes too long, too far. I’ve had a hard day, too.”
“How do you know it’s the same man, mister?”
Trent put the glass down and looked squarely at George. “How many leggy bay horses have you shod today that were being ridden by strangers?”
George didn’t answer. He took up his shot glass, balanced it, tipped his head, and downed the fiery liquor. After that he rapidly blinked for a moment before he said: “South. He rode south.”
“What happened with the liveryman, friend?”
George blew out raw breath. That whiskey had been very green. “He was talkin’ about gettin’ the drop on some of these drifters that come down here on their way over the line into Mexico. He’s talked like that before … only this time that feller who owned the leggy bay horse had walked up without either of us hearin’ him, and was standin’ in the shadows of my shop, listenin’.”
Trent smiled. His eyes came to a gradual twinkle. He suddenly laughed. He could imagine it all now, and it struck him funny, particularly since he’d seen that derby-hatted liveryman who was anything but a brave man.
The blacksmith didn’t laugh; he didn’t even smile. But he looked understandingly at Trent. “That feller figured on stayin’ in town until that happened. After that, he sat there until I finished, paid me, went back after his saddle, and rode on out … southward.”
Trent shook his head at the barman’s inquiring look. He faced George again with the hum of voices all around them, with the tobacco smoke growing steadily thicker as the evening turned to solid night outside. “Your friend,” he said evenly, “is a fool. One of these days he’ll get killed.” Then Trent walked on out of the saloon.
There was a rash of opaque stars overhead now, and a lop-sided old moon was serenely floating across the great vault of heaven. A scratch of light blazed briefly across infinity where a falling star turned to cinder and rained earthward in fragments.
Trent looked over where the rooming house stood. He also considered the livery barn where a pair of lamps burned inside, hanging from rafters to light the runway. Warfield hadn’t eaten or rested. Neither had his horse. Neither had Trent rested—but he’d eaten and his horse had both eaten and rested. It wasn’t much of an edge, but sometimes this was all it took.
If you pushed them hard enough, sooner or later you gained an infinitesimal advantage. The trick of pursuit was to know when you had that much of an edge, and how to exploit it.
Trent knew. The horse was the critical thing. A man could suffer a little. He could catnap in the saddle or he could take his belt up an extra notch. But he had to have a strong animal under him.
Well, here in this god-forsaken little cow town it had finally happened. After seven hundred miles—and with about three hundred left to go—Trent had finally gotten an edge. That’s all he’d been waiting for, just enough of an advantage to enable him to overtake Warfield.
“Mister …?”
Trent turned. The thickly made blacksmith was standing there.
“You’re the law, aren’t you?”
Trent nodded. “Yeah, friend, I’m the law.”
“What did he do that you’re after him so hard?”
“He murdered,” said Trent softly, and kept staring at the blacksmith until George turned, stepped down into the roadway, set his shoulders, and walked straight on over toward the livery barn.
Trent somberly watched the blacksmith disappear over where those interior hanging lanterns were. He waited a little longer, then he, too, crossed the roadway.
Now, there was music coming from the saloons; there were off-key
masculine voices being raised in discordant singing. Sometimes it didn’t take much to give release to bone-dry gullets and repressed spirits in hot summertime. Sometimes only a couple of beers did it.
Trent walked into the livery barn, saw the blacksmith and liveryman in earnest conversation farther along, and bellowed for his horse. The liveryman started in his boots. He hastened after Trent’s animal, and the blacksmith glanced up, saw Trent, turned, and walked on out through the rear of the barn.
Trent turned to view the little town. A half hour from now Lincoln would be another shadowy place in his memory. He sighed, thinking of that bed with springs under it. When his horse came along, saddled and bridled, Trent scarcely wasted a glance at the liveryman except to say: “What’s the next town, friend, and how far from here is it?”
“Fourteen miles, and it’s called Daggett.”
Trent flipped the liveryman $1 from atop the saddle, reined around, and went riding stolidly southward on out of Lincoln with the night closing instantly around him. He still had an edge.
Chapter Three
Lying back, his body all loose and easy, Warfield listened to the pleasant night, listened to his horse’s shifting, freshly shod hoofs on the hard ground as the hungry animal nibbled on graze and the none-too-nourishing cured grass. Total relaxation came to Warfield and the surrounding scents and sounds comforted him in his complete loneliness. They were familiar. They were old and pleasant, and a part of his life clear back to its earliest years.
There was simplicity to the sound of a horse moving, of its strong teeth grinding over fodder. There was an age-old reality to the smell of summertime dust in cool night air. And there was something in the timeless heavens turning purple that reached for a man’s spirit, cradled it in a gentle grip of endlessness, which was both promise and surcease.
A man was put upon this earth to be a part of dust and loneliness, to be a part of struggle and suffering. To feel with every pore of his hide the hardness of life, and to take his small pleasures during the intervening periods of relaxation—like now, lying there ten white-hot miles south of a place called Lincoln, on the way to another town the name of which he didn’t even know. Lying there under that scatter of pale stars, under that old pewter moon, surrounded by the formless night, safe and at peace.
Warfield had a smoke between his fingers. Its tangy fragrance was good. Tobacco was always good to a man who’d run out days before. It was one of those little pleasures, like a drink of cold water after a hard ten hours in the saddle on a hot day that a man relished.
But a lonely man has lonely thoughts, try as he may to close them out, so Warfield sat up finally, inhaled, exhaled, stubbed out his smoke, and put his head in his hands remembering the secret things in a woman’s glance, remembering her long silence as she gazed at him, remembering the tilt of her head in star shine and the solemn knowledge she’d shown him that last time. A solid knowledge that told him in complete silence that she knew what life was, not what it ought to be.
Something came over that bridgeless distance separating them to touch Warfield briefly, to bring a quick, squeezing pain to his heart, so he got up, dusted off, and walked over to watch the horse graze.
New shoes were fine. The bay wouldn’t go lame now. But new shoes were no substitute for an empty gut, and no matter how much of this roughage the bay ate, he’d still be tucked up in the flank and heavy on the bit when they resumed their way.
Warfield thought of Derby Hat back in that last town and his long mouth drooped unpleasantly at that recollection. Except for Derby Hat, Warfield would have spent the night back there, the bay would have gotten a decent bait of fodder, and by dawn they’d have both been on the trail again, refreshed and ready.
Down the southward night, on across the ghostly plain, lay a cluster of town lights. On a clear summertime night a man could see twenty miles. But those lights weren’t more than four, five miles away. Warfield, thinking of a bed with springs under it, pondered the wisdom of pushing along. But he didn’t ponder very long; a man’s horse was his life insurance. He had to take particular care of his bay. Another time, years back, he might have struck out for that town, but not now. The horse was all-important now. Somewhere back there was a man with graying temples astride a durable steeldust gelding with a U.S. marshal’s German-silver circlet in his pocket. Warfield had to favor his breedy bay or the steeldust would win, and he couldn’t permit that to happen. Life was good. Maybe at times it was hard and cruel, but a man never hated it, never considered voluntarily surrendering it.
Warfield went back where his saddle lay, dropped down, and closed his eyes. Sleep came quickly, as a sort of blessing, relieving Warfield of any further need for resistance to his secret thoughts. He was dog-tired and although he’d picked up a few tins of food back at Lincoln, he hadn’t bought very many of them because they constituted a dead weight, so he’d eaten, but very sparingly, and had gone to sleep on a shrunken gut that nagged a little. He felt vaguely and uneasily that somehow that town back there had been some kind of a crucial turning in his life, but he hadn’t been able to see exactly how this might be, except that his horse had been denied needed rest and food, so he’d gone to sleep with only the very faintest of troubling thoughts.
And he awakened the same way, with the moon far down and the night much cooler, that uneasy feeling still in him. But in the confusion of any troubled man’s mind lay all manner of suspicions, all manner of doubts and skepticisms, so Warfield arose concentrating only on hitting the trail without a lot of thinking that would lead him nowhere.
He rigged out his bay horse, rose up to settle over leather, and reined out, always southward. Within slightly less than an hour he was parallel with that town but off to the west so that its pre-dawn shape and silence lay on his left. There had been only one thing he’d wanted from that town—a decent place to rest—and, since he was now rested, he rode on past with pre-dawn’s silent grayness shielding him from view, if anyone over there had been looking, which they weren’t.
The southward land heaved away mile upon mile of it, seemingly endless, with always some peaks and hills standing east and west under the strengthening light of new day. He crossed a gravelly dry creekbed, skirted a land swell that curved inward slightly from south to west, passed a bosque of cottonwoods, the first he’d seen in many days, sighted a ranch dead ahead, and angled out and around it with his careful attention never resting for fear some inadvertent meeting with cowboys might come about. But it didn’t, and he left the ranch behind and for many miles afterward there was nothing.
The sun steadily climbed, turning his world a faded, brassy hue. The heat piled up, brought dark sweat out to make Warfield’s shirt cling to him, and robbed Warfield’s bay of his energy.
That browse the big leggy animal had filled up on the night before was excellent roughage, but it did not reinvigorate the horse at all, so now he plodded along mechanically, head hung and lethargic, which troubled Warfield. He could not afford to have his horse play out on him, not out here, not this close to security. He would have to go into a town, and soon, otherwise the bay’s reserves of strength would be too depleted and no matter how much rest and grain he got, there would be for him no quick recovery. If that happened, Warfield was finished.
He could buy another horse. Even rope one out of some corral or pasture in the night. But two things discouraged him in this. One was very elemental, too. If he abandoned the bay, Trent would inevitably find it and know how close he was to Warfield. The other was that this particular horse was a thoroughbred; he had never in his life been outrun, and it was this particular ability that Warfield was now relying most heavily upon. In the final showdown, that incredible speed could very easily make the difference between life and death for Troy Warfield. No horse he could buy in this southern country would have that same high-bred attribute.
Miles south of the town Warfield had by-passed, and, with the punishing sun cruelly bearing down, a deer sprang up from its bed beside a me
squite clump and rattled down into an arroyo, leaving behind the scent of alkali dust and musk. Warfield scarcely heeded. He was riding now with that strength-conserving looseness that experienced range men employed on endless rides, his hat tipped forward to shield eyes that dryly grated in their sockets, his body swinging in relaxed cadence to the steps of his mount, the drying perspiration giving him a mote of relief.
It was late afternoon before he halted, a time when the sun reddened, the sky turned steely, and the fiercest heat should have begun diminishing. But it didn’t because Warfield was now upon the edge of the desert. He stopped at a large old stone watering trough, got down, and pushed his hatless head all the way to the shoulders into the tepid water, while beside him his horse drank and sweated and drank some more.
Afterward, being cooled by that water, he made a smoke and lit it, turned slowly and gazed out and around, saw the saddled horse standing, hip-shot, under a low-limbed ancient juniper, and gradually drew up to an alert stiffness seeking the person who was also out here somewhere.
He didn’t find that person, not at once anyway, and eventually it was the other person who found Warfield. He was a boy of fourteen or fifteen, tall and straight as an arrow with a tumbling shock of unruly fair hair. He walked forward from up out of a distant arroyo with something in his arms. He’d seen Warfield. There was no hint of suspicion, of doubt in the lad’s tilted, sun-bronzed face as he walked on up. He seemed in need of something he could not himself provide, knew it, and therefore came with beseeching eyes up to the stone trough.
He had a half-grown mongrel pup in his arms. The dog was limp and dirty and covered with what appeared to be the saliva, mixed with blood, of a larger animal.
