by Jonas Ward
“Gold,” Buchanan said. “About two ounces’ worth, but I’ll take your measure.”
“My measure for what?”
“Fifty dollars.”
Rosemarie laughed at him. “You’re fooling,” she said. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“Hold out your hand,” Buchanan told her and she laid it meekly inside his huge one. He tipped the pouch and the gleaming, glistening grains of sand like metal made a conical, two-inch mound in her palm.
Mulchay bent low, eyes wide, and inspected the stuff.
“By God, it is,” he said. “Hamlin, Macintosh—come have a look at this!”
His friends came and had their look, rubbed it expertly between the tips of their fingers.
“Ay,” said Hamlin, “it’s the McCoy. The root of evil.”
“Convinced?” Buchanan asked the girl, but apparently she wasn’t.
“Better wait until Mr. Terhune comes in,” she said. “I wouldn’t dare give you fifty dollars for that—that stuff.”
“Then Terhune is standing the drinks,” Buchanan told her, wondering if female bartenders were such a good idea after all. “This gold of mine you’re holding is all I’ve got.”
“I’ll stand you,” Rosemarie said and the man named Hamlin cleared his throat.
“No need of that,” he said. “I’ll buy it from you.”
“Sold,” Buchanan said.
“Forty dollars,” Hamlin said.
Buchanan looked at him. “Fifty,” he said.
“Split the difference, laddie. Forty-five.”
Buchanan dipped his free hand into the pile inside Rosemarie’s palm, pinched an insignificant few grains and scattered them to the floor.
“Now you’ve got forty-five,” he said and Hamlin nodded, appreciating the fine principle of the transaction. He took a billfold from his pocket and laid out four tens and a five-dollar gold piece.
“Careful now,” he cautioned, and Buchanan guided the dust from the girl’s hand into the pouch again.
“Where—ah—did you come across the gold?” Macintosh inquired innocently.
“Won it in a poker game.”
“Poker?” Hamlin inquired amiably. “You like the relaxation of the game?”
“That’s my roll,” Buchanan told him, “less what I owe the lady.”
“Then let’s have at it,” Hamlin said, and six of them proceeded to the nearest table. Cards were produced, everyone anted, and the deal began. Buchanan watched the cards fall, face down, and a grin that was tugging at the corners of his mouth burst full bloom before he picked them up.
“If you’ve got a new joke,” Mulchay said, “let us all hear it.”
“No,” the big man said, tilting his chair back and looking around at each friendly face with a kind of gratitude on his own. “Just feel real good,” he explained.
They all lifted their cards, and under the pretense of studying them, Hamlin stole a long glance at the stranger and was reminded of a loneliness he had known once.
“How can you play poker without a smoke?” he asked, extending a long cigar across the table.
“Well, thanks,” Buchanan said, accepting it. Macintosh lit it and Buchanan inhaled deeply. Life, he decided, was wonderful.
“Deal me in,” a truculent voice ordered and Hamp Leach lowered himself into the last vacant chair, his gaze full on Buchanan’s face.
“Next hand,” Buchanan said when the dealer seemed not to know the way of it.
“This hand.”
Buchanan looked again to the dealer of the game. It was that man’s business to set the thing straight, not his, and then he saw all the others had turned to mute statues behind their cards.
“This hand’s already been dealt,” he said reasonably.
Leach felt the tenseness around the table acutely, the fear, and with a lazy smile he swung his head to the dealer.
“Deal me in,” he said and that one gave him five cards. Buchanan debated the rightness of it in his mind, decided that he was having much too good a time, that if they did things that way in Scotstown he was no one to object, and opened the betting with a conservative one dollar.
“Raise you five,” Leach said, not even looking at the hand dealt him. Stranger still, he neither had money in front of him nor produced the six he had bet.
The others threw in their hands, quickly, one after the other.
Buchanan cocked an eye at his pair of queens, looked into Leach’s unwavering glance and grinned.
“Yours,” he said, “and five more,” laying his money on the line.
“And five more,” Leach said, still not picking up his cards, still not showing any money.
“Cards?” the dealer asked in a small voice and Buchanan asked for three.
“Play these,” Leach said.
Buchanan could hardly believe what he had drawn. Another queen and a pair of treys. He suddenly wished that: Fargo were standing behind his chair, that his partner could see how many easier ways there were to make; money besides mining a Big Bend mountain.
“You opened,” Hamp Leach said, “now bet.” It was not a reminder but a hard challenge and Buchanan looked at him, at the cards still lying face down on the table, at the prominent gun butt in the cutaway holster, at the unblinking gaze.
“Before you make a play, brother, you better check your hand,” he advised him.
“My hand is pat. Bet your own.”
“These little darlin’s are worth five dollars,” Buchanan said affectionately. Mulchay stole a look at the full house and his eyebrows lifted.
“Raise you ten,” Leach said.
“All I’m going to do is call,” Buchanan told him then. “But first I want to see your money in the middle next to mine.”
“I don’t need money. I got four queens.”
Buchanan laughed. “Only four?” he asked.
“You heard me.”
“Added to my three, that makes a strange deck.” He put his arm out, turned over Leach’s first card. It was a six of hearts.
“Let ’em be,” the gunman said, squatting his hand down over the remaining four. “I’ve got four queens.”
Buchanan laid out his full house.
“Now how many do you have?”
“You’re calling me a liar?”
Buchanan cocked his head at the man. “Who put the burr in your pants, anyhow?” he asked him.
Leach’s chair scraped against the floor and he came out of it threateningly. Now his eyes went to Buchanan’s hip, scornfully.
“You think because you’re naked,” he said, “that you got some kind of protection?”
“Man doesn’t need a gun to be right,” Buchanan said.
“You’re wrong, jasper. You need one bad, and you better go get it.”
The words evoked an improbable image in Buchanan’s mind, a picture of himself reclimbing the mountain for his gun, coming all the way back down here with it. He smiled.
“What do you think is funny?”
“Nothing tonight, I guess,” Buchanan admitted and stood up. He turned his broad back to Leach and started walking away from the table.
“Running, riffraff?” Leach asked harshly. “Had your bluff called?”
Buchanan stopped, looked over his shoulder.
“I’m not running,” he told him. “I’m going to borrow a gun.”
“No!” Rosemarie protested from behind the bar. “Don’t anybody lend him one!”
“Walk out, feller, and keep walking,” Angus Mulchay told him shrilly. “You’re playing his game!”
Buchanan stood before one of the few armed men at the bar.
“How about yours, friend?”
“Don’t give it to him, Mr. White,” Rosemarie pleaded. “Don’t anyone!”
White shook his head, so did the others.
“He’s a gunny on the prod,” someone murmured to Buchanan. “Walk away from him like Mulchay says.”
“Rig,” Hamp Leach called out then. “The riffraff needs your
Colt. Give it to him.”
Rig Gruber stepped forward, unbuckling his gunbelt.
“Much obliged,” Buchanan said, taking it and adjusting the buckle. Then he hefted the .45, checked the fully loaded cylinder. “This your special, mister?” he inquired conversationally.
“Never owned one better.”
“With all the weight up front?”
“What’s he doin’, Rig?” Leach asked loudly. “Tryin’ to crawl out?”
“The gun suits me,” Gruber said to Buchanan.
“Then I guess it’ll have to suit me, too,” Buchanan replied. Gruber looked up into his face and an impulse he didn’t understand caused him to move directly into Leach’s line of fire.
“You don’t know what you’re in, ranny,” he said,. “That’s Hamp Leach.”
“Is it?”
“Bodyguard to Black Jack Gibbons.”
“Fancy job,” Buchanan agreed. “Better get out of the way now.” Gruber did, and then Buchanan swung to face Leach. “This fight ain’t necessary,” he said across the thirty feet that separated them.
“If you’re gonna crawl,” Leach rasped, “get down on your belly.”
“Just pay up your losses and we’ll call it square,” Buchanan suggested, and it finally got through to Leach that the drifter opposite wasn’t begging for an out at all.
“I owe you nothin’,” he said. “And no man can call me a liar.”
“I do.”
“Then draw!”
That was what broke up Malcolm Lord’s conference. They heard the shattering explosions but missed the sight of two tall men braced against each other in deadly combat, two hands flashing, two guns exposed and roaring blue-orange flame. All of that in two seconds’ time, and with the sound still racketing from the walls and ceiling Hamp Leach sunk to his knees in astonished surprise, and fell dead. It had been a very brief moment of truth for the man, sad in its peculiar way, but no one there was sadder about it than Tom Buchanan.
He carried the borrowed Colt to Rig Gruber, who took it from him automatically, his eyes riveted on the improbable sight of Leach’s forever unmoving body.
“Slick shooter, mister,” Buchanan told him, “but you ought to lighten the barrel. Doesn’t swing up as quick as it might.”
“Who’s responsible for this?” demanded the authoritative voice of Malcolm Lord then. Buchanan swung to the sound, took in the prosperous-looking group at the doorway.
“If you’re the law,” he answered Lord, “I guess you mean me.”
“I stand for law and order in Scotstown,” the rancher said. “What happened here?”
“Thing explains itself,” Buchanan said patiently. “Me and him had an argument.”
“We all of us saw it, Mr. Lord,” the man Hamlin put in. “There was no crime committed.”
“Prevention of one,” Angus Mulchay announced, surprised that he could speak through his excitement. He whacked Buchanan between the shoulder blades. “Every man in this room owes you a drink, lad, and let Mulchay be the first to treat.”
“Me next,” Macintosh cried, and from that and the general murmur of approval Malcolm Lord was satisfied that the fight had been conducted according to the standards of the country.
Black Jack Gibbons moved away from the door, knelt briefly beside the dead man, then made a curt signal for Gruber to join him at the quiet end of the bar.
“What did you have to do with this?” Gibbons asked in a fierce undertone.
“Not a damned thing.”
“But it was your gun. I saw that much.”
“Hamp said give the ranny my Colt. I gave it to him.”
“Who is he? What was it all about?”
“A woman,” Gruber said. “A poker hand.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Hell, in Laredo Hamp plugged a puncher account of the way he wore his hat. He never needed a reason to throw down on somebody.”
Gibbons knew all that and more about his bodyguard, but it seemed incredible that he would ever lose his life in a cow town to a borrowed gun. He stole a glance at the winner, the big man being noisily feted at the other end of the room. If he had ever seen that one before he would remember, and he didn’t.
A Ranger? He had been expecting trouble from Austin ever since Laredo, and it could be their tactics to try to infiltrate the militia, learn their strength and the identity of their riders before moving against him in force.
“Ride out fast to the bivouac,” he told Gruber. “Bring back Kersh’s squad and tell Lyman to keep everyone else ready to move.”
“We working here?”
‘They don’t know it yet,” Gibbons said, “but we are. Get back here quick.”
Malcolm Lord was waiting for him when he returned to the private room.
“Where are the rest?” he asked and Lord answered him irritably.
“Gone, Captain,” he said. “This shooting incident didn’t exactly help our case.”
“Are fights so uncommon in Scotstown?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, they are. Common gunfights, at any rate. I might also point out that your sergeant, or whatever you called him, didn’t exactly stand up under your description as an expert with a gun.”
The words raked Gibbons’ excessive pride in his militia, and color climbed into his cheeks.
“That fellow will have other opportunities to prove himself,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“Let it go,” Gibbons said, sorry he had spoken. “What about our business?”
“I obviously can’t afford your organization by myself. This has been an especially poor year for beef growers.”
“But you can subsidize half, as you offered?”
“Yes, I think I can undertake to pay you ten thousand.”
“Let’s call it settled then, Lord,” Gibbons said. “I’ll take the other half as I find it.”
“I don’t think I like the sound of that,” Lord told him and the ex-Ranger smiled sardonically at the other man’s self-righteousness.
“We each know what we want,” he said, “and why we want it. Let’s not short-change ourselves by any needless criticism.” He picked up the decanter from the table and poured out two tumblers of the mellow liquor. “This is the age of realism, my friend. Let’s drink to our mutual understanding.”
Malcolm Lord studied the military man thoughtfully, hesitantly, then raised his glass and quaffed it with a single swallow.
“Keep in mind, Captain, that you are a transient. I have to go on living in the Big Bend when you are gone.”
“Who knows?” Gibbons said, a worldly smile touching his lips. “I glimpsed a dark-haired beauty out there who would make the settled life damned attractive. What’s the girl’s name?”
“Rosemarie,” Lord told him. “She’s the niece to old Lauren MacKay.”
“MacKay? Isn’t he one of the river ranchers you mentioned?”
“Aye,” Lord said, and there was bitterness in his face. “Six hundred acres of grass growing a foot high. High because the poor impoverished fool doesn’t have fifty head of cattle to his name.”
“A waste of riches,” Gibbons agreed. “You’d think he’d sell.”
“Sell? The stubborn old mule won’t even lease the graze. But his pride isn’t above sending the lass to pour out drinks in a saloon. Puts her to work while he sits on his duff in the shanty he calls a hacienda and prays for a miracle.”
“Perhaps the miracle’s at hand.”
“But not the one he expects,” Lord said. “When can your men move onto the land?”
“At any time,” Gibbons answered. “They’re encamped in the hills and awaiting orders.”
“Hold them at the ready,” Lord suggested. “I’ll have Mulchay’s land scouted, and if he’s harboring any of his bandit friends your militia can strike.”
Gibbons nodded. “I’ll take some prisoners,” he said, “and march the dirty beggars through town. They leave a good impression, get the right people on our side.”
“T
hen what do you do with them?”
“Try them for their crimes,” Gibbons said. “I have a Sergeant Kersh with a knowledge of public trials, and a man named Lyman as interpreter.”
“Trial by jury?”
“Always. Gives the town a sense of responsibility. Of course,” he added, “I sit as special magistrate.”
“But what if Mulchay won’t press any charges? Isn’t your jury trial likely to prove dangerous?”
“You have not seen Kersh and Lyman try a case against a Mex bandit,” Gibbons reassured him. “They do not need the testimony of Mr. Mulchay, believe me.”
““I leave it all in your hands,” Lord said.
“In a month the riverfront will be evacuated,” Gibbons told him. “You can bring your herds in then.”
The rancher nodded, and his smile was hard as he shook hands with the ex-Ranger. “Good night, Captain,” he said. “Good luck.”
“Luck?” Gibbons echoed. “I make my luck as I go along. And make it for those who go along with me.” Lord left him alone in the room then and Black Jack filled his glass again, sat with it musingly, his mind on many things. He reflected that he was rarely left to himself these days, that the whole tenor of his life had abruptly changed since that assignment to Brownsville, the fateful decision he had made there.
Quo vadis? he asked himself. Well, where was he going? How far did his ambition reach? Did Caesar have it all carefully planned when he defied the authorities and crossed the Rubicon? How about little Mr. Napoleon? Had his career been all so crystal clear to him that afternoon he took the law into his own hands?
This was not a new subject with Gibbons. Several times he had been reminded of a parallel between what he was doing along the Texas border and what other men had done in their own times. Like them, he had a cause to fight for, a rally-round. ““Texas for Texans” meant one thing to Malcolm Lord and another to Hamp Leach—but they both followed where Jack Gibbons led.
Except that Leach was lying dead just beyond this door. Gibbons felt no blame for that, but he did know a responsibility. Just as Caesar would have, had a man outside the ranks triumphed over a trusted centurion. Leach the individual meant nothing—but Leach the hand-picked bodyguard for the captain stood for the gunfighting reputation of the entire militia. Now that reputation had been challenged, besmirched openly.
