by Noel Loomis
“You been trying to believe what you wanted to believe. Almost you made it stick, didn’t you? But you couldn’t quite do it, for I’ve watched you. How deep are you in the Silverado project, Sessions? I don’t know, but I’m betting it’s plenty deep. What I do know is that Shaw is a part of your organization. Ask yourself what becomes of the organization when it gets in so deep that it has to kill man after man just took keep one jump ahead of the rope! You know the answer to that. One stone out of the arch, and the whole tower falls.
“You know that; you know what’s ahead of you. That’s why I’m kicking you out, to save your hide now. But there’s just one thing more. You’re going to remember this the day you die. You’ve got a good memory, haven’t you? But you never thought that you’d remember anything like you’re going to remember what I’m going to tell you now!…Wait a minute; don’t be in a hurry. You’re going to get it all right.”
He got out a cigarette paper and a pencil with which he had tallied calves on more ranges than one. “Sally,” he said, “I promised you that when I was ready to tell what Hugo Donnan said, before he died in Crazy Mule Canyon, I’d tell you first of all. Well, I’m ready now.”
He hesitated an instant, then on the cigarette paper he wrote these words: “Donnan said nothing. I am going to lie.”
Then he went on, aloud. “Hugo Donnan died in my hands, Sessions, as you know. Until this moment I’ve never told a soul what he said to me before he died. It hasn’t been understood very well why I held it back. You’ll see when I tell you now. I held it back because I couldn’t see what possible connection the name he used could have. Well, I was thinking of it from the wrong angle, as you’ll see.
“Hugo Donnan pulled me down close to him and he said, ‘Get Stephen Sessions’. Then he died.
“Naturally, I couldn’t see how Stephen Sessions could have any connection. You can see where I looked at it wrong. I thought he meant he was trying to name the man that was to blame. He couldn’t have been, of course. You were too high up, Sessions, and in a different part of the state. And—you didn’t have the guts. So I said nothing. So long as I thought Donnan meant to point you out as guilty in some way, I couldn’t see what he meant. But I see it now. You all see it.
“‘Get Stephen Sessions.’ That was what old man Major here said, when trouble come down on him and his brand. That’s what every honest, hard-fighting man has said in this part of the country when crookedness got him tangled up in an unfair way, and he had to have help from higher up to get out. ‘Get Stephen Sessions.’ I reckon that’s been said many and many a time!
“Me being new here, I didn’t know about that then. I didn’t know about what getting Stephen Sessions meant, when I heard Donnan say it as he died. I didn’t know he was telling me to get help to straighten out this awful mess. I didn’t know he was just repeating at his very end, and in the worst trouble he could be in, what maybe he heard his father say once, way back in the earlies when this country was new.
“Now you all know what Donnan said when he died. You all know what he meant—and what those words meant that he didn’t know—‘Get Stephen Sessions.’ And I guess maybe that last half-cocked send-out for help has turned out to be an accusation after all. Maybe that dead sheriff was making the most terrible accusation that was ever made by any man, just when he asked for help in a place where God knows there was no help to be had.
“I reckon we’re lucky here. I reckon I’d rather be the man that’s at the bottom of all the Buckhorn trouble, and caused every killing the Buckhorn’s ever seen, than be the man that people turn to—‘Get Stephen Sessions‘—and then found out what we all know now.
“You can get out now. Take a good look at a couple of these people first—you ain’t going to see ’em again, but you’ll remember them often enough. And I don’t have to tell you to remember those words that Donnan said. You can’t ever forget ’em now. You’ll hear ’em like the drum of hoofs, and in the wind, and in the rain, and in the blow of the sand; and they’ll ring in your ears when it’s dead quiet, and that’ll be worst of all. You’ll hear ’em until some night you’ll get out your six-gun, that you haven’t used for so long, and you’ll put it up to your head; but you won’t pull the trigger, not you! Because you haven’t the guts, any more. So you’ll just have to go on with it, for by that time you won’t even be half way. And I’ve got no doubt that pretty soon you’ll be asking God to help you with it, and you already know the answer to that one too. No, I reckon it’d be a right smart injustice, old Steve, to let you get killed now!
“Now—get out! Stick your tail between your legs, and run!”
There was silence in the room when Clay Hughes had finished that long halting speech. He had used more words than he had ever used in his life, or ever would again; and they were also more words than these people were accustomed to listening to.
Mostly their minds had wandered off before he was done, turning off to what was ahead of them, and perhaps also a little bit to things behind that they were not going to see or experience again, by the look of things now. But one man there listened because he couldn’t help but listen; and it was not the ears, but the infallible memory Stephen Sessions owned that was listening to Clay Hughes.
To Hughes that halting indictment was perhaps the supreme effort of his life; but it was not the low-voiced stumbling phrases of the cowboy that Stephen Sessions was unable to shut out or to evade. Of all men in the world, he was the one who could see, clear and distinct in the half light of that boasted memory of his, the face of every man or woman who had ever said, ‘Send for Stephen Sessions‘: and Lord knew that they were legion. They were scattered over mountain and desert and plain, all the length and breadth of the southwest. He remembered their voices, and their troubles, and their names, effortlessly, against his will. And he knew why he had chosen to fail them all, and what had been the price of each. Without that deep-mottled background of faces, and of memories sharper than those of face or name, the others could not feel the thrust of those slow halting words; but this one old man—
There was a silence again; and the face of Stephen Sessions was an ugly thing. The granite was out of it, so that it looked like something shapeless and pallid in which the bones had swiftly gone bad. And the hard-set line of the mouth was strictly a thing of the past by now, for the lower lip hung pendulous, and jerked.
Yet he did not speak; and as the moments passed Hughes was forced to the slow conclusion that he had failed. Ever since Hugo Donnan had died in his arms in Crazy Mule Canyon, Hughes had nursed the scant thin hope that in the end he would be able to conceive a bluff which would somehow pull the fortunes of the Lazy M out of the fire. The opportunity had never come.
It had seemed to him for a moment that he had a chance. Stephen Sessions was an old man, and weary in his years; the terrific strain of the past five days might well have brought him near the cracking point. That Stephen Sessions was allied with Earl Shaw in the Silverado project was now obvious. And without seeing the memories that stood ready to flood the mind of Stephen Sessions, Hughes yet knew that there must be hidden there a heavy weight of guilt.
Perhaps, he was considering now, Stephen Sessions after all had not had the power and authority which they had believed rested in him. Perhaps it was only that with every other moral resource cracked away, nothing but the aged stubbornness of Stephen Sessions remained, of no value to himself or to them.
Little time remained. Soon now Dutch Pete would come for his final word. Old Oliver Major, Hughes knew, would not wait for that. Whether Major would wish to rush the house, in an attempt to break through the security behind which Earl Shaw directed operations, and confront his enemy face to face at the last, Hughes did not know; but the old man would certainly walk out fighting, to face the guns. And the rest would go with him, those that could walk, ending the long fight over the Buckhorn water in a final blaze. Oliver Major was looking slowly about the room, gazing at the walls, at the beams, and Hughes knew that he
must be seeing things that other eyes could not see. Here were the courses of adobe which Oliver and his brother Sol had laid with their own hands, back in the days when they and the range were young. There was the old fireplace, the old shelves; in this little two room adobe, lonely then in the broad valley, Sally Major and her brother had been born, in the days when Major’s dream of the Buckhorn water was filled with young hopes. Now the Lazy M was ending where it had begun. In the dim lantern-light the air was heavy with the odor of horses, of leather, and the smoke of guns. The scene was one which might have taken place in the days when that adobe was new; only the iron pump engine in the middle of the room bore witness that there were years of great change between.
Oliver Major spoke. “You boys ready?” he said. “My idea of it is this: We’ll—”
The smash of lead upon the wooden shields of one of the windows broke in like an interruption upon his low voice. Someone, seeing the light of the raised lantern at some crevice, had been unable to abide by the hour’s armistice which Dutch Pete had declared. It had become almost a familiar sound to them in the last five days, that thud and shatter of bullets; but Oliver Major paused a moment, listening by habit. Four times the lead smashed into the wood of the barricade at brief, regularly spaced intervals. There was something singularly vicious in that deliberate searching fire, the message of a rifle rested and well aimed. There was a moment’s pause, and once more Oliver Major opened his mouth to speak. Then—
The fifth and last shot found the lighted crack in the planking that it sought. There was a smash of splintered wood and the short growl of the smothered ricochet. A jagged bit of plank half the size of a man’s hand spun the length of the room like a bat. As the fragment passed, the thin cloth of Sally’s dress was torn open at the shoulder as if by the stroke of a knife, revealing white flesh that instantly covered itself with a swift run of red.
Hughes and Dick Major sprang to support her, one on each side, but after an instant she pushed them away, rigidly, ashamed to yield to pain.
“It isn’t anything,” she said, her voice small and shaky. For a moment as she stood apart from them, very thin and still, she looked like a little girl, trying to hide the fact that her fingers were brushing away tears.
Stephen Sessions’ voice broke out unexpectedly, a voice that no one would recognize as coming from this man. “It isn’t worth it! Nothing’s worth it! By God, I’m through!” He jerked to his feet and moved lurching toward the door. “It’s too much! It’s gone too far! Let me out of this!”
“I told you to get out,” said Clay Hughes, his voice low and cold.
“I can stop it yet! I will stop it!” Stephen Sessions’ hands were shaking, ineffectual claws as they fumbled at the bar of the door. “Replogle will acknowledge what I do in his name. That Colonel of Cavalry will do what I say. I gambled two-thirds of my fortune in the Silverado, but this—this is too much!”
“Wait!” said Hughes, jumping to the door.
“Let me out, I say! I can turn the cavalry against them, and call the posse off!”
“It’s too late,” said Oliver Major. “No man can get out of here unless we all go out with our hands up; and if we do, you know what will happen then.”
“They must let me pass!” gibbered Stephen Sessions.
“Sing out to them, then!” said Hughes. “Flatten yourself to the wall, and I’ll open the door a crack.” He unbarred the door, and opened it an inch or two. “You, out there!” he hailed. “We’ll talk to Dutch Pete!”
They could hear voices beyond in the dark, calling Dutch Pete’s name; but moments passed, and Hughes called out twice more, before they heard the voice of Dutch Pete himself answering them across the darkness from the house.
“Talk loud if you want to talk to me,” came the words, thick and heavy, but made small by the distance. “I’m not coming down there no more.”
“Yell across to him,” said Hughes to Sessions.
Stephen Sessions’ voice rang big and powerful, the voice that had once harangued crowds and rounded votes. “This is Stephen Sessions speaking! I represent Governor Replogle here! Hold your fire while I come out!”
There was a brief silence.
“Who?” called Dutch Pete at last.
“Stephen Sessions, I say! I demand safe conduct while I come out!”
“You lie,” Dutch Pete answered after a moment. “Steve Sessions skedaddled over the Pass with the women, before the fight began.”
“But I’m here, I tell you!”
In the silence they could hear dimly the heavy booming chuckle of Dutch Pete as he said something they could not understand.
“Good lord!” Sessions burst out. “Don’t you recognize my voice?”
“Sure I do,” Dutch Pete shouted back. “Old man Major’s who you are!”
“Then let me talk to Earl Shaw!”
“Earl Shaw’s gone back to town.”
“Do you suppose,” said Stephen Sessions huskily to those within the adobe, “that that’s true?”
Oliver Major spat. “It’s like him,” he decided. “If they’re coming on with dynamite, he’d rather leave the finish in the hands of Dutch Pete, so as to be clear of it if the investigation bears down too hard afterward. Yes, I suppose he’s gone back all right—or more like, he’s laying low and given out that he’s gone back.”
Stephen Sessions’ face was ghastly. The flesh sagged away from his eyes so that they stared fishily. “They can’t shoot me,” he mumbled. “They can’t shoot me… I’m going out.”
“Stand where you are,” said Hughes.
Before he could be restrained, Stephen Sessions threw up the bar of the door and flung it wide. He was stumping out into the night as Hughes seized him by the belt, jerking him back with all his strength. Outside, with the opening of the door, a ragged salvo of gunnery wakened to life, dusting the outer adobe of the wall, sending a scatter of bullets scudding, by the handful it seemed, into the timbers of the open door. Hughes dragged Sessions in bodily; the door was slammed shut, and once more barred.
“They can’t shoot you, huh?” said Hughes. Sessions staggered backward, caught his balance, and stood swaying; he was staring unbelievingly at one of his hands. A bullet had just nicked the side of it; it was his only wound. “They were firing on me,” he said idiotically, as he watched the slow trickle of blood run down his little finger and drip to the floor.
“Oh, were they?” said Hughes.
“But I can stop this,” Sessions persisted dimly. “I can call this off. I can change the sheriff; I can get a change of venue. If only I can reach that cavalry camp I can stop this whole damn—”
“You could have once,” said Oliver Major. “You had your chance when you were the only hope we had. It’s gone now. They can put forty guns on the man who tries to make the break. It’s all over, Steve.”
Hughes stepped forward and jerked Sessions to face him by the front of his shirt. “Look here,” he demanded. “Can you write a message to the Cavalry Colonel that will do the work?”
“You mean—”
“Does the officer in charge of the Cavalry out there know your signature?”
“Of course he does. It’ll be Bob Everett; I’ve known him since—If it isn’t Everett, it’ll be one of the others. Yes! If we can get a message—”
“Then write your message.” He snatched a tally book from a shelf and thrust it with a pencil into Sessions’ hand. “Write it, and write it quick, and make it full and complete. There mustn’t be any mistake or misunderstanding now.”
“But—”
“Write it, I say. What are you waiting for?”
“We can get no message out!”
“The hell we can’t. I’ll get the message out.”
Chapter Twenty
“It can’t be done,” said Oliver Major. “No man could do it in this world.”
“What can’t be done?”
“No man could get out of here with a message to the cavalry or anybody else. An
y one of a dozen men that Earl Shaw’s got out there can shoot so as to stop a man the minute he steps out. Just one of those men could do it—you hear? And instead of one man, I suppose they’ve got forty!”
“Sessions just showed himself, and he’s alive,” said Hughes. “He showed himself for half a second; it come as a surprise to them, and he was only partly exposed anyway. Do you think he’d have lived to move three strides?”
Hughes made an impatient gesture and turned on Sessions. “Put down what I say. Write—”
“I know what to write,” said Sessions. Slowly, in a ragged vibrant script, he began to write on a blank page of the tally.
“It’s suicide,” insisted Major. “It’s quick death if anything ever was.”
“Give me your gun, Dick,” said Hughes.
Dick Major obeyed, and Hughes thrust the gun into the left side of his belt.
Sessions was writing rapidly now, his hand overcoming the shock of its slight wound. He had wrapped his handkerchief around it, yet here and there his script was emphasized by little smudges of red. There was silence while the swift pencil covered a page, started on the next. “Are you going to write all night?” said Hughes.
“I must make sure,” said Sessions. “There mustn’t be any mistake.”
“What are you going to try to do?” Dick Major demanded.
Sessions answered slowly as he wrote. “Everett must take full charge. All prisoners under his protection. He must declare an emergency of martial law until the Shaws are removed and replaced… It’ll mean the discrediting of Shaw, instead of Major. It’s the end of the Silverado project; nothing can save it.”
“But Everett and his cavalry—Will he do as you say? Will he dare do as you say?”
“He won’t dare not to. They know which side their checks have been buttered on these many years. After all, all that is needed is a delay, as far as he is concerned. I am telling him in detail what he must do.”
