Gunman

by Lauran Paine

  They had not been fighting for their lives for more than half an hour, perhaps three quarters of an hour. What chilled him along with this knowledge was the fact that a guarded appraisal of the shell belts around him worn by his companions showed that many were completely empty and none had more than a handful of bullets left in them.

  It would, he knew, take Perry Smith a good, long hour to round up a posse and ride to Salter’s ranch. He knew also, now, that Smith was going to arrive too late. As soon as the posse’s firing dwindled, Salter would launch an all out attack. As he rammed his six-gun barrel through the loophole, he began considering ways of escape, but clearly there was no way out. They were not only surrounded and outnumbered, but now even the brightening new day was against them.

  There was, of course, the choice Salter had offered. He was thinking about this when the buffalo gun erupted again. For the first time since the duel had begun he did not answer the shot, but moved tiredly back, closed the loophole, and looked at his filthy, dogged companions.

  He thought it was unlikely Salter would massacre the posse men. Even as vicious a killer as Mort Salter would realize he could never escape the consequences of such an act. He would therefore permit the Welton men to ride off unharmed, but Ray’s fate had never been in the slightest doubt. Salter meant to kill him and would certainly do it. Further, Salter would do it as he had promised, by shooting chunks off him, killing him slowly, a little at a time.

  “Hold it!” he called into the din. “Hold your fire!”

  It took a moment for the shout to bring results, but gradually his men turned, moving clear of the windows and looking half quizzically, half hopefully at him.

  “We’re not going to be able to hold out until Smith gets here,” he told them. “There’s a way….”

  “Sure we will,” a posse man stated emphatically. “He’ll be along any minute now.”

  “Look at your belts,” Ray said shortly, and watched as groping hands went low to feel along the empty loops, as men’s faces changed expression when they gazed at the belts of other men.

  “I’ll go out,” he continued quietly, nodding toward the propped-up captive on the back wall who was watching him through slitted eyes. “Like our friend here said…Salter wants me. He won’t bother the rest of you.”

  An angry-eyed townsman said loudly: “No! We ain’t got time now for heroics, Kelly. We come into this together and….”

  “Heroics, hell,” Ray shot back irritably. “Like our prisoner said, no one life is worth a half dozen lives, and, if we wait until we’re all killed…who’ll be around afterward to make sure Salter pays for this?”

  There was a short interval of silence. Far back, near the rear wall, a posse man’s brow clouded briefly. This man bent, pressed his ear to the wall, then ducked lower, scrabbled at the loophole cover, yanked it aside, and forced his head sideways to the opening. In a hoarse and unbelieving voice he said: “Horse men! There’shorsemen coming!”

  A large, raw-boned man forced his way to the same loophole and strained sideways to hear. He rose up, looking breathlessly at the silent, stone-like figures around him. “It sure as hell is,” he said.

  Beyond the bunk house, Salter’s gunmen were still firing, but only sporadically, and, when Ray bent to listen at the loophole, he heard a distant call of alarm raised from well north of the barn. The shout was taken up and passed forward. Salter’s gunmen had also heard the hoof thunder and were crying questions back and forth.

  Ray drew back so others could listen at the loophole. It would not be Perry Smith; he was certain of that. Then who? Realization came abruptly, warming him.

  “Joe!” he exclaimed abruptly. “Joe Mitchell and JM!”

  A townsman breathed outwardly a fervent curse and wiped sweat from his face with a soiled sleeve. “I’ve heard lots of tales about old Joe Mitchell,” he said, almost prayerfully, “an’ I never cottoned to him, but if he’s out there now to help us…s’help me no one’ll ever dast say nothin’ ag’in’ him around me ever ag’in.”

  “Comin’ fast,” a man at the loophole chortled, straightening up and moving toward the north window. “Hey, lookit there,” he intoned from his new position against the bullet-splintered sill. “Mitchell’s whole blessed crew!”

  Ray went to the window and as recklessly exposed himself as did the other besieged men. It was the finest sight of his lifetime. In that softly delicate new daylight the hard-riding band of horse-men swept steadily onward, boring strongly toward Salter’s ranch yard, brandishing carbines, and emitting sharp cowboy yells as they rode.

  A scattered burst of gunfire met them when the range was right, but Joe Mitchell, well in the lead, instead of slowing, threw back his head, let off an Indian howl, and spurred the harder.

  Salter’s yard suddenly came to life with mounted men breaking from cover and riding thunderously southward into the desert. A few other gunmen, sprinting toward the barn after mounts of their own, wasted no time shooting at the exposed observers in the bunk house window, painfully visible and scornfully contemptuous of that fact.

  “Look at ’em go,” a posse man chortled, pointing with an empty pistol at Salter’s fleeing riders.

  Ray, struck suddenly with the knowledge that this time Salter, expecting no mercy and indeed unlikely to get it from Mitchell, the man he had worked fiercely to destroy, would be fleeing too. With scarcely a thought that there might still be a gunman or two waiting beyond the door, he unbarred it, flung it back, and sprang out into the yard, handgun bared and swinging. No shots came. He began the race to arrive at Salter’s barn before the last horse was taken; there was no time to go after his ugly buckskin.

  He was in the barn, seeking a mount when Mitchell’s JM crowd swept up, dismounted on the fly, and pelted for cover, seeking targets. An occasional gunshot sounded, more from exuberance Ray thought, than because anyone had more than a fleeting glimpse of a target. Triumphant roars rocketed back and forth as Mitchell’s riders scuttled among the buildings. The loudest shouts came when Ray’s beleaguered posse men crowded out into the yard and junctured with the JM.

  He found an iron-gray stud horse in a stall by himself, evidently overlooked by Salter’s escaping riders, and led the snorting beast forward to saddle him. He was cinching up when a deep voice spoke down the barn’s alleyway to him.

  “Is that you, Kelly?”

  Ray turned, stiffening as he straightened. “It’s me.”

  The wide-shouldered shape approached. “It’s me,” the man said, “George Fenwick.” He stopped, looking steadily at Ray. “I owe you an apology.”

  Ray returned to rigging the stallion. Over his shoulder he said sparsely: “You owe me nothing, Fenwick.” He bitted the animal, swept up the reins, and toed into the stirrup. “Tell Joe I’m goin’ after Salter.” From the saddle he added: “Unless you want to try and stop me….”

  Fenwick shook his head. “You’ve got me wrong, Kelly.”

  “Yeah? Now tell me you didn’t send word to Salter I was at the JM?”

  “No,” Fenwick replied. “I won’t deny that. Only…you see…the way Salter told me, you were a hireling outlaw, a gunman, and a cow thief. I figured I’d be doin the country a favor by….”

  “By getting me bushwhacked, Fenwick?”

  “I didn’t know that was what Salter had in mind. I give you my word on that, Kelly. He said he’d have you arrested to keep the peace. Those were his exact words.” Ray started to rein past. Fenwick reached forth to touch and hold the reins. “Hear me out,” he said.

  Over the swells of Ray’s saddle a black pistol barrel appeared. “Take your hands off those reins, Fenwick!”

  JM’s foreman released the hold he had and ignored the gun. He nodded understandingly. “All right,” he said. “I can’t blame you. But if you’d let me give you the whole story….”

  “Maybe,” Ray said, holstering the gun, shortening the reins, and looking steadily down into Fenwick’s face. “Some other time.” He nudged the stallion, f
elt powerful muscles bunch under him, then begin to flow with the beast’s movement, and passed out into the yard. As he halted just beyond the barn opening, a horse man spun up, threw out a stiff arm, and in a muffled voice said: “If you’re after Mort Salter, he went east, not down into the desert.” The arm dropped and the rider leaned slightly. “Come on, I’ll show you.” With a lunge the rider sped away and Ray, hearing his name called, twisted for a backward look as he followed.

  Joe Mitchell was sitting his horse, gesturing. “Give him a lick for me!” the raffish old cowman called. He added something else which sounded like “Perry’s south” or something similar to that, then Ray was beyond hearing, following the gracefully riding JM horse man ahead, with enough yellow, glittering, bright new sunlight in his eyes not to be able to recognize his guide until, half an hour later and miles out across the range, the rider slowed, drew off, and let Ray ease up to ride stirrup. Then his mouth fell open and his pinched down squint briefly widened.

  “You!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  Grace threw back his look of astonishment with an uncompromising stare of her own. “I told my father I was coming along. That after what he’d done, we owed you this much. He said I was right.” The girl’s moving eyes perceptibly darkened. “You look bone-tired,” she said. “I…I’m not very good at saying I was wrong, Ray….”

  “Wrong? Wrong about what?”

  She finally dropped her gaze before his stare. “The things you told me about Salter and Joe…and about my father…they were all true.”

  Discomfort swept over him. “Never mind that,” he said quickly. “If you really saw Salter, just point out the way.”

  “I’ll do better than that, I’ll show you,” she replied, leaning in the saddle again, booting her mount out in a spurt of speed that leveled off into a mile-eating lope, all her softness, her femininity gone, and her profiled expression showing strong resolution.

  Neither of them looked directly at the other again but both, from time to time, stole sidelong glances.

  Around them daylight brightened the world. Hours later the same sunlight would be a hard and flinty, faded yellow malignancy, but for that first hour it blanketed the world with promise, with strength, and with an understanding that filled them both. For Grace Fenwick it would be a time long remembered and cherished in her secret heart. For Ray it was a space of time divorced from everything that had gone before; it could have lasted on into eternity and he would have murmured no objections.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mort Salter’s trail went easterly over the range until Ray considered the likelihood of losing him in the broken country that grew continually rougher as they penetrated it. Then it swung unexpectedly south, held to that direction for several miles, and cut easterly in a purposeful manner that puzzled the pursuers.

  “He’ll come out somewhere below Welton,” Ray told Grace. “I don’t understand what he’s thinking.”

  She agreed. “We probably would have lost him in the badlands if he’d continued on eastward.”

  Ray rode with unconscious effort, concentrating on Salter. The only answer he could arrive at was that the fleeing man was riding now for Welton in the hope that he could buy some guns there who would either stop Ray with bullets or at least delay him until Salter could get a good long start for the border.

  The more he thought of this the more reasonable it became to him. It did not occur to him that Salter might have a second reason for riding to Welton until they had progressed along his trail for another hour, then he said: “Grace, he’s taking a long chance…a calculated risk.”

  “Oh?” she said, turning a soft and questioning gaze sideways. “Because he knows Perry Smith isn’t in Welton?”

  “That’s part of it. There are two other parts. Mort’s range boss is in jail. If he can get Duncan out, he probably figures Dunc will sidetrack me long enough for Mort to make a clean getaway. The third reason is pretty elemental. Mort’s got a lot of money at the Welton bank….”

  She nodded slow agreement and for a while said nothing. Then, with Welton showing low upon the sparkling plain, she broke the silence. “I think he would have probably made it if he’d ridden straight for Welton instead of wasting time going east like he did, then having to cut so far south into the desert to get around to his ranch.”

  Ray was thinking past this phase; his next words proved it. “Joe called out something as we were riding off. I think he said Perry was south of Salter’s place somewhere.”

  “On the desert?” she asked, casting about for signs of other horse men. “I see no sign of him, Ray.”

  “He wouldn’t still be down here.”

  They were within sight of Welton now. He drew down to a fast walk, turning gradually cautious. When they were coming onto the village from the rear of its scattered buildings, he told her to split off, to ride to the livery stable, and await him there.

  She did not at once comply but neither did she offer argument. His expression was a deterrent; it was a solid-set look that showed clearly that everything but the uppermost thought in his mind was closed out. She slowly drew back, cut obediently across his trail rearward, and angled northerly to enter town from the northerly roadway. The pleasant time when they had been a team was past now; he went to his long-delayed rendezvous with destiny; she went to a lonely place to wait for him.

  Welton lay somnolently under the sun smash. Heat waves danced along the roadway and shimmered from windowpanes. Ray left his horse tied in a dilapidated old barn at the southerly terminus of Welton, crossed to the west side of the road, and started northward to Perry Smith’s jail house along a refuse-littered and strong-smelling alleyway. He met no one. In fact, the closer he got to the business section of town, the more it became abundantly clear that Welton’s citizens were deliberately keeping indoors. This served as a warning but it also served as a means for convincing him that he had, indeed, surmised Mort Salter’s destination and purpose correctly. Mort was somewhere in Welton. He thought it a strong possibility that Mort would free Duncan Holt first, and then go for his money at the bank.

  He was wrong.

  He approached the jail house carefully, moving along the adobe wall soundlessly as far as the doorway. Around him the silence and stillness were almost tangible. Behind him, across the alley, were two old wooden buildings. One, which housed the sheriff’s horse, showed unmistakable signs of being used, but the second, southerly building, windowless, doorless, and with an old-fashioned outside stairway to its upper story, was very patently abandoned.

  No sound came from Perry Smith’s office. There would be someone in there, he knew. Smith would not go off and leave Duncan Holt and Carter Wilson unguarded. He considered the possibility that Salter had already been there, had perhaps overpowered the guard. One thing was certain. Welton, as quiet as it was, had been given some recent reason to be so.

  He drew off the wall and started past. Where Smith’s office and the saddle shop next to it came close to juncturing, there existed a narrow dogtrot, leading fully the length of both buildings from the alleyway to the main thoroughfare out front. He squeezed along this as far as he dared, and paused in the cool murk at the easterly extremity to make a long study of windows, doorways, and the roadway beyond. He caught no reflected sunlight of a gun barrel or any sign of life at all, and stepped into full view, cut swiftly to his right, and flung into the sheriff’s office. From across the room Duncan Holt looked up quickly, took in the drawn gun, the sprung knees, and stone-set expression, and slowly stood up to stare.

  “Mort been in here?” Ray asked.

  Holt shook his head, questions forming and multiplying in his eyes. “No. Why? Is he coming? What happened?”

  Ray eased the door closed behind him and leaned upon it, looking from Holt to Wilson. “He got his crew shot up at the ranch and he’s here in town somewhere. That’s what’s happened, Dunc.”

  From Carter Wilson came a long, wavering sigh. It sounded to Ray as though
the cowboy was letting out his breath in relief. Wilson looked through the strap-steel bars at Holt. “It turned out right,” he said, the relief more apparent when he spoke. “You figured right, Dunc.”

  Duncan continued to gaze out at Ray, ignoring the words of his fellow prisoner. Ray leathered his handgun and frowned. “What’s he talking about?” he demanded of Holt.

  “I told Perry the whole story.”

  “What whole story?”

  “About the rustled cattle, how Mort got rid of them over the line in Mexico, how he’s been whittling down the mountain cowmen for years and blaming it on the plains ranchers, then rustlin’ from the plains outfits and blaming it on the mountain people so both got to hating each other while Mort cleaned up.”

  Ray’s gaze cleared a little. “You were takin’ a long chance,” he told Holt. “How’d you know Salter wouldn’t find out and have you salted down for saying that?”

  Holt made a small smile that didn’t come off very well. “I didn’t know,” he replied, and leaned carelessly upon the bars. “I guess I just got religion, Ray.” The crooked smile lingered. “A man sometimes gets off on the wrong foot….”

  “And?”

  “Well, I been thinkin’ in this damned cell. When you’re on the owlhoot trail, if you don’t get off before it’s too late, you’re a goner.” Holt’s smile died out. He fished for his tobacco sack, looking away from Ray’s gaze. “What the hell,” he muttered. “If you could take five years of Yuma Prison, I reckon I can take it, too.” He lit up, blew out a great cloud of smoke, and turned his back, crossed to the bunk, and sank down. “I took the chance. Ray, I got to get off this owlhoot trail before it’s too late. When you make that decision, you got to take some chances.”