Gunman

by Lauran Paine

  Ray watched his former friend a moment, then drew up off the wall. “Dunc, Salter doesn’t know yet what you’ve done. He hasn’t run across Perry yet, and you’d better pray he doesn’t, too, because as his foreman you’re the one man who can put Mort in prison for a lot longer than five years and he’d do anything to get a witness like you killed.”

  Holt turned a speculative look on Kelly. “That’s up to you,” he stated. “If Mort’s in town, you’re here to kill him. If you get him before he finds out and comes for me, I’ll be around in five years or so to hit you up for a job. If you don’t get him.…” Holt’s shoulders rose and fell. He held up his cigarette, examined its tip meticulously, and blew off some gray ash.

  Ray turned away, opened the door a crack, peered out, saw nothing at first and was in the act of closing the door again with the intention of awaiting Salter’s arrival at Smith’s office when from northward up the deserted roadway came a sharp cry of warning. He recognized the voice immediately as belonging to Grace Fenwick. He knew she was sounding an alarm for his private benefit and waited, his gaze raking up along the empty roadway. There was nothing moving anywhere.

  From across the room Holt called quickly, softly: “Watch him, kid! He’s not fast with his gun but he’s as slippery as an eel.”

  Beyond the oaken door was a deepening hush. Salter knew now Ray was in Welton, he was waiting, too, and, as Duncan Holt had said, he was not just dangerous, he was as wily and deadly as a rattler.

  He would not now come to the sheriff’s office and Ray knew he had made a mistake in thinking earlier that Mort would think first of his two incarcerated men and secondly of his banked money. It had been the other way around.

  He eased the door open sufficiently to squeeze past, drew back a big breath, and sprang through, lit hard on the plank walk, and streaked for the dogtrot. No slamming gunshot came. He paused briefly, feeling sweat running in rivulets under his clothing, then inched his way down the narrow opening toward the alleyway. It was his thought to go north behind Welton as far as the livery stable, find Grace, and determine her reason for calling a warning. It never occurred to him that a man of Mort Salter’s stripe would do anything other than lie low and wait for his target to move into view. Ray was concentrating too strongly on offensive action himself to think Salter’s reaction might be to free his foreman in order to have Holt’s gun as his ally, but as he neared the end of the dogtrot, was in fact pushing forward a long stride to move into the open, a gunshot burst the stillness apart with echoing reverberations and a six-inch splinter of wood was wrenched off the wall on his left. He sucked backward instantly, nearly lost his footing, and threw out an arm to regain his balance. The shot, he determined by a dirty, drifting little puff of smoke, had come from the abandoned old building south of Perry Smith’s horse shed.

  It required a moment of thought to adjust to this unexpected tactic of Salter’s, but he understood it at least. Salter was seeking desperately to free the man he still thought could hold Ray off while he escaped. It was ironic.

  Pushing his six-gun quickly into view, he slammed off a wild, unaimed shot at the slatternly old building beyond whose walls, somewhere, Morton Salter was watching. There came a sound of tearing wood, then the rapid reply in kind from Salter’s gun. Ray knew what he wished to determine. He drew back a little, methodically punched out two spent casings, flicked the cylinder so that a fresh load lay under the hammer, and gave an abruptly wild jump that left him momentarily exposed in the alleyway, then he sprinted forward, a blur of crouching movement six feet ahead of Salter’s third shot.

  He made it to a doorless opening in the abandoned building, backed away from the edge of the place, retreating into deeper protection as far as a gaping window casing, and risked a look into the shadowed, cool, and refuse-littered first floor.

  The place had been a hotel once, before Welton had grown up in front of it, and the musty, dry odors that lingered there were strong with a kind of discernible nostalgia of the people and events that had once inhabited it. Rats in the walls, disturbed by Salter’s shots from within that had set up a reverberation through rotting wood, scurried now with a faint and gritty sound, but this was the only thing for Ray to hear as he moved along the wall to the outer stairway and put forth a booted foot to test the steps. The first five upward-leading shorings were warped but solid still. The sixth one creaked ominously, making a sound that seemed as loud to Ray as if the step had actually broken under his weight, each echo swelling large in the hush. He stepped over it and paused, watching upward and ahead, acutely conscious of the fact that, if Salter appeared now at the head of the stairway, he would be exposed to his fire. A coolness brushed along the back of his neck, an intuitive warning. He moved onward, reached the overhead doorway, and slipped past. Here, with the rotting roof directly above, heat was more solidly noticeable than upon the ground floor. Here, too, there was an odor of disturbed dust and despite the gloom he could make out boot tracks.

  He started along the hallway, placing each foot carefully down before moving the other one forward through muffling powder-fine dust. Salter’s tracks were his guide, still faint in this hot, deathly still and silent world of deep gloom and deeper hush.

  At the first doorway he halted a long time, unwilling to move past without making certain Salter was not crouching beyond waiting to sight movement. Then he stepped wide, cleared this doorless opening—and his foot struck solidly against a broken plank lying athwart the hallway. Instantly a voice came out of the dark shadows to turn him wary.

  “Kelly…?”

  Ray waited, gun coming to bear in the direction of the voice, keeping silent and watchful as the voice came a second time.

  “Kelly? I’m waiting. I’ve got the hallway covered. I’ll give you a chance for your life. Turn around and go back down from here.” When no other sounds came beyond the front room where Salter stood, he called more loudly: “You hear me, Kelly?”

  “Come out,” Ray answered.

  “I’ll kill you, Kelly,” Salter said in a rising tone, and swore.

  “Come out, Salter.”

  Salter’s knifing tone came again, more shrill and desperate-sounding now, and the building’s emptiness diffused it, making the sound seem to emanate from a dozen different directions at once. Ray cut across it with a third call for the hidden man to come forth. Salter went suddenly quiet and every echo died out to let the deep, formless, and dripping hush return. Ray took a short step across the plank and the floor beyond groaned under his weight. Again Salter’s voice came straight down to him.

  “You’re an outlaw, Kelly. You’ve been in prison. Anyone can kill you.”

  “Come on out, Salter.”

  “I’ll hire a dozen of the best guns in the country. They’ll track you to hell and back and kill you. I’ll pay five thousand dollars to have it done, Kelly, unless you back out of here.”

  “I’m coming in after you, Salter.”

  Ray bent, groped behind him for the plank, and deliberately dragged it across the floor, setting up a rough, grating sound of heavy movement. He stopped, crouched forward, and, listening, heard a man’s body move ahead of him in a room off his left side.

  “Better come out,” he said. “I got you located, Mort.”

  “Five thousand dollars for you dead, Kelly.” Salter’s words fell out, hurried and breathless; he could be heard backing away, dragging his feet through dust and litter.

  “Kelly? All right…I’ll give you the five thousand. That figures out to a thousand dollars a year for your term at Yuma.”

  “Not enough,” Ray answered, stepping lightly to the corridor’s edge where wall joists and flooring merged to form solidness, inching along again to stop just short of the opening into Salter’s room.

  “Ten thousand, Kelly.”

  “Still not enough.”

  “For five damned years? You’re crazy, that’s more’n you’d make cowboying in twenty years.”

  “It’s not the five years, Sal
ter…it’s what you just said…it’s the felon’s stain. It’s for carrying the memory of being railroaded and turned into an ex-convict for the rest of my life. Ten thousand dollars doesn’t begin to equal that out, Salter.”

  “All right, twenty thousand cash, but that’s my last….”

  “Come out, Salter.”

  “Didn’t you hear me? I said twenty thousand.” “Will that buy back Joe Mitchell’s herd and the other herds? Will it pay for the years of making mountain and desert cowmen hate each other? Will it fetch back the men killed in shoot-outs you engineered, Salter?”

  The cornered man shifted position again. Ray heard and brought his gun to bear. He knew how thin and flimsy the walls were and squeezed off a shot. It was a deafening sound that shook the old building. Instantly, over the cracking sound of broken boards, came back a fierce crimson lash of muzzle blast visible in a reflected way past the doorless opening. Ray knew what he had to find out and slammed another shot through the wall, shuttled fully into the framed opening, and let off his final shot before Salter was ready to return the earlier blast.

  The last bullet in his gun was the one he had waited five years to fire; beyond the shadowy darkness came a guttering slow beat of failing breath. He holstered the useless gun without moving from that limning doorway, waiting coldly for Salter’s last rattle. When it came, he went heavily forward, feeling of a sudden none of the anticipated elation, none of the deep satisfaction he had anticipated feeling for five years, toed the body over, and stood there, gazing downward. He continued to wait for bitter pleasure to arrive, and, when it never did, he made his way out of the building, back down the stairway, out through the dogtrot, and into the lurid sunlight of Welton’s solitary broad roadway, empty still. He crossed to a saloon, entered, and crossed to the bar to stand there, exchanging a long stare with the barkeep.

  “Sour mash…two of ’em.”

  He was downing the last drink when horse men beat up into Welton from the south. The barman threw a nervous glance from Ray to the window. He said nothing.

  “Another one,” Ray said emptily, and, when it came, he tossed it off after the other two as an unhealthy flush began to color his face, to bring a luster to his sight that did not alleviate the emptiness lying there.

  “You ate lately?” the barman ventured.

  “No,” Ray answered. “Set it up, mister.”

  He was holding the fourth one when Perry Smith and Joe Mitchell burst past the doors, setting them to quivering on their spindles, followed by a horde of sweaty posse men. Sheriff Smith’s full glance touched the barman’s anxious look, flicked over Ray, and came to rest finally on his face. He crossed to lean upon the bar and speak to the barman without looking away from Ray.

  “Beer all around,” he said, then: “Some of the boys are takin’ him down to the undertaker’s shed,” meaning of course the body of dead Mort Salter. He drew in a big breath and let it out in slow pinches. “Kid, you satisfied now?”

  Ray looked long at Perry Smith without speaking. “I could’ve told you,” the sheriff went on. “It’s one thing to think about killin’ a man and another thing to do it.” He removed his hat, struck it upon his leg, setting free several layers of dust. “You don’t feel good afterward, you feel sort of sick.”

  Ray faced the barman. “Another one,” he growled, and, when the barman looked at Perry Smith, the sheriff nodded without speaking. Beyond him, old Joe Mitchell was standing on Ray’s far side, twisting his beer glass in its damp circlet, ruminating. When Ray dashed water from his eyes after the fifth sour mash, Mitchell said: “Kid, I need a foreman. A real good foreman.”

  “You got Fenwick,” Ray said, beginning to hear a roaring.

  “Naw, he ain’t the mountain ranch type of foreman.” Joe turned slightly sideways, pushing his beer glass along the counter. “I need you. Mort danged near busted me, kid. Five years ain’t a long time to a feller your age, but it’s like a lead weight on a man’s shoulders when he gets along about my age. I got to have someone like you who knows the where-fore of our kind of ranchin’, Ray, so we can build JM up again.”

  “I guess so,” Ray murmured, twisting to face away from the bar. “I’ll be up to see you, Joe.”

  “No hurry, take your time,” Joe said gently. “By the way, Perry’s got five confessions. He scooped up about half o’ Mort’s gun hands heading toward Mexico.”

  Ray looked toward Sheriff Smith. The lawman nodded but brushed these details aside. His weathered face was carefully inscrutable; he was thinking what Ray would one day discover for himself—that it hadn’t been necessary to kill Mort Salter at all. What he said was: “Before that stuff you been drinkin’ hits you, Ray, you’d better go down to the office. Grace’s waitin’ there for you.”

  “Yeah,” Ray said, pushing off the bar.

  They watched him leave the saloon in silence. When the doors shivered closed to cut him from sight, Perry Smith leaned fully forward upon the bar and said to Joe Mitchell: “A feller learns a lot in prison, you know, Joe, but where he really gets his education is outside it.”

  “He’ll be all right,” intoned Mitchell, faintly smiling.

  “Yeah. He’ll be all right.”

  Joe raised his glass. “Grace’ll see to that. Drink up, Perry. Five years is a long time to wait for something good to happen around this dog-goned country.”

  Smith tiredly extended his arm. They drank in silence, gazing confidently and wearily at each other over the glass rims.

  About the Author

  Lauran Paine who, under his own name and various pseudonyms has written over 1,000 books, was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His family moved to California when he was at a young age and his apprenticeship as a Western writer came about through the years he spent in the livestock trade, rodeos, and even motion pictures where he served as an extra because of his expert horse manship in several films starring movie cowboy Johnny Mack Brown. In the late 1930s, Paine trapped wild horses in northern Arizona and even, for a time, worked as a professional farrier. Paine came to know the Old West through the eyes of many who had been born in the previous century, and he learned that Western life had been very different from the way it was portrayed on the screen. “I knew men who had killed other men,” he later recalled. “But they were the exceptions. Prior to and during the Depression, people were just too busy eking out an existence to indulge in Saturday-night brawls.” He served in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War and began writing for Western pulp magazines following his discharge. It is interesting to note that all of his earliest novels (written under his own name and the pseudonym Mark Carrel) were published in the British market and he soon had as strong a following in that country as in the United States. Paine’s Western fiction is characterized by strong plots, authenticity, an apparently effortless ability to construct situation and character, and a preference for building his stories upon a solid foundation of historical fact. Adobe Empire (1956), one of his best novels, is a fictionalized account of the last twenty years in the life of trader William Bent and, in an off-trail way, has a melancholy, bittersweet texture that is not easily forgotten. In later novels like The White Bird and Cache Cañon, he showed that the special magic and power of his stories and characters had only matured along with his basic themes of changing times, changing attitudes, learning from experience, respecting Nature, and the yearning for a simpler, more moderate way of life.

  Other Leisure books by Lauran Paine:

  FEUD ON THE MESA

  HOLDING THE ACE CARD

  THE DARK TRAIL

  BORDER TOWN

  OPEN RANGE

  GUNS IN THE DESERT

  GATHERING STORM

  NIGHT OF THE COMANCHEROS

  GUNS IN OREGON

  RAIN VALLEY

  Copyright

  A LEISURE BOOK®

  April 2009

  Published by special arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency.

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 M
adison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © 2006 by Mona Paine

  “War at Broken Bow” first appeared in Real Western (12/55). Copyright © 1955 by Columbia Publications, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1983 by Lauran Paine. Copyright © 2006 by Mona Paine for restored material.

  “Taos Man” first appeared in Double-Action Western Action (1/55). Copyright © 1955 by Columbia Publications, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1983 by Lauran Paine. Copyright © 2006 by Mona Paine for restored material.

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