He put his fingers up to feel of his eye, and then he was really worried. The swelling was gone. If the swelling was gone he must have been lying here for days. He tried to move, but his body felt stiff. He felt of his midsection and found it was wrapped tightly in bandages. His leg, too, was bandaged.
How badly hurt was he? Could he stand the ride it would take to get out of here?
He moved himself tentatively. He was stiff, all right, but he could move. He glanced toward the door where he had left his travel gear. It was gone … and then he saw it, all there, even his rifle, standing just inside the closet door.
He heard a wagon in the street, the heavy rocking, rolling sound of a loaded wagon, and he listened. He heard voices … and down below in the saloon, somebody laughed. He had not considered the saloon. There was a way out the back, however, and he could use that.
The question was: how much time did he have?
He heard footsteps, the quick rap of light, hard heels … a woman walking. Quickly, he closed his eyes, allowing one hand to lie helplessly on the blanket that covered him.
She came quickly into the room and looked down at him, then placed a hand upon his brow. It was a cool, pleasant hand. It rested for a few minutes upon his forehead, then whoever it was went to straightening the bed, which had never needed it less.
And then she seated herself in the rocker and he heard the creak of a basket, the faint click of knitting needles. After a moment, she began to sing very softly, and not at all badly. Somewhere along there, he fell asleep.
When he awakened, it was dark within the room. No … not quite. There was a light across the room, shielded from his eyes.
Someone spoke … Brennan. “How is he?”
“He’s alive.” That was Ginia. Of course it would be Ginia. She was not the kind to let well enough alone. “How much alive it’s hard to say.” Now, that had a sarcastic tinge that his ear was delicate enough to catch.
“Pollock was asking about him. He wants to talk to him as soon as he’s conscious.”
Well, that was no surprise. He had ten thousand dollars of Pollock’s money.
“Do you think he really intended to leave us?” Brennan asked.
“Of course. That is exactly what he would do. You saw his things … he was all packed to go.”
“Well, he won’t get away now, I’ll lay a bet on that There are some things a man never escapes. This is one of them.”
“He’s perfectly free.”
“For how long? I tell you, he hasn’t a chance, and you know it. In fact, nobody knows it better than you.”
“I’m afraid you are mistaken.” Her voice was stiff. “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Brennan.”
“He’s trapped … trapped, I say.” Brennan did not sound too upset about it, however���and it was Brennan he had counted as a friend.
After Brennan was gone he lay perfectly still, waiting for her to go. And when she went, he would get out of here. With luck, he could be twenty miles away before daybreak … perhaps thirty.
Suddenly Ginia got to her feet. She put her things in the basket and closed it, then she opened a cabinet and took out a bottle. He knew the sound, all right, but it startled him and he opened his eyes.
Her back was half toward him. She had a brandy glass, and she was pouring a little from the bottle. He closed his eyes quickly as she turned around and came toward him. “You’d better drink this,” she said coolly. “You’re going to need it.”
He opened his eyes. “I never saw the time when I needed a drink,” he said, “but I’ll take it.”
“You’d better,” Ginia said grimly. “They’ll be coming any minute now.”
” ‘They’?”
Her face was expressionless. “Mr. Pollock, Mr. Brennan, Joshua���all of them.”
“Coming here? What for?”
“They had to make it official,” she replied. And then she added, “Reverend Tattersall is coming, too.”
“Reverend? In this town?”
“He’s the pastor of our church. We have a church now.”
He looked at her suspiciously. “How long have I been here?”
“About eight days … almost nine. You’d be surprised how much has happened.”
He was afraid to ask what had happened. Instead he said, “How’d we come out in the fight?”
“We lost two men, and three wounded, besides you. Mr. Hamilton was killed, and Jim Karns���he was one of the new ones.
“The Bellows gang … they were hit pretty hard, everybody seems to think. You killed Lute Semple, Tandy Herren, and another man���we found him on the balcony���and six others were killed, most of them when you emptied the saloon.”
“You mean when they busted out of the door?”
“When you started shooting and drove them out.” She smiled suddenly. “They’re all talking about how perfectly you had planned for them. There were four men at the mine aside from Mr. Pollock, and when those men burst out of the door they ran right into the open in front of their guns. Until then, it looked as if we’d lost the fight.”
“I didn’t get Bellows?”
“You wounded him. They had the trial the next day, and they tried him and another man who would never tell us his name.”
“What happened?”
“They were guilty, and they were hanged. Justice is very prompt here, Mr. Fallon.” And then she added slyly, “Wiley Pollock was the prosecuting attorney.”
They had acted promptly then. He lay quietly thinking about it, and then he heard the boots on the steps. “Look”���he sat up quickly, so quickly he felt a dart of pain in his side���“my horse is right down in the stable. Stall them … say anything … let me get out of here. After all,” he pleaded, “I never did you any harm.”
“I never let you,” she said, “or you might have. After all, you did try to seduce me.”
“I what?”
“Didn’t you try to win me over with flattering words? Didn’t you tell me I was too lovely for this sort of life?”
“Well, look … I didn’t mean to …”
“And weren’t we in a dark cellar under the hotel? How does that sound?”
Suddenly he was angry. “Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but���”
“Oh, shut up!” she said primly. “Here they are.” John Brennan was in the lead, and behind him were Blane, Teel, Budge, Devol, Pollock, and a dozen others, some of whom he did not know.
“That claim you sold me,” Pollock said, grinning, “was no damned good.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Fallon said. “I can return the money.”
“You don’t have any money,” Ginia interrupted. “I used it.”
“You what?”
“She gave it to me,” Pollock said, “to develop the claim up on the mountain … the claim you found when you had that brush with the Utes.”
“You talked when you were delirious,” Ginia said maliciously, “but the claim sounded good. So I went to Mr. Pollock and suggested he go with Mr. Teel … he’s a very good tracker, you know … and backtrack you to where you found the gold. It took them five days to find it, but they did.” He lay perfectly still, his eyes staring out of the window. It was night out there now, and if he’d been left to himself he would be out there … running.
So they had located the claim he’d found, and she had returned his money to Pollock to develop the claim.
“You took the money out of my pockets? That’s stealing!”
“I doubt if anybody would know more about that than you, Mr. Fallon, but time was passing and you were very ill … and of course, every wife has a right���”
“Every what?”
“Every wife. Of course, I am not your wife yet, but I told them all how you proposed to me under the hotel that time, and the things you said to me, and how we planned to be married, so Mr. Pollock and I drew up the papers for the Red Horse Mining & Development Company.”
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sp; “I threw in my claim,” Pollock said cheerfully, “the one you sold me.”
“And we contributed ours,” Ginia said, and the light in her eyes was no longer quite so malicious, “and the money you got from Mr. Pollock. You are president of the company, Mr. Pollock is vice president and superintendent of development, and I’m the treasurer.”
“And we had an election,” Blane interrupted, “and you were elected mayor. I voted against you,” he added.
“You’re the only sane one in the crowd,” Fallon said irritably. “This has turned into a madhouse.”
“And this,” Ginia said, indicating a man standing near her, “is the Reverend Mr. Tattersall.”
The door opened just then and Joshua Teel’s wife came in with a cake, followed by Ruth Damon, in her prettiest dress.
“What’s that for?” Fallon asked.
“That’s the wedding cake, Mr. Fallon,” Ginia replied, “and Ruth is my bridesmaid.”
“This has gone far enough!” Fallon protested. “A joke is a joke. I never proposed to you���never!”
“Not in so many words,” Ginia agreed.
“How many do?” Mrs. Teel asked. “In so many words? Josh didn’t.”
“Neither did pa,” Mrs. Blane said, “not in so many words.”
The Reverend Mr. Tattersall came up beside the bed. He cleared his throat.
“We wouldn’t like to have it said,” Riordan commented, “that one of our girls was slighted. Why, I’ve seen men hung for less.”
The Reverend Mr. Tattersall cleared his throat again, more emphatically. “We are gathered here …”
Macon Fallon was no stranger to the town of Red Horse, and the fact that he was a man with a fast horse wasn’t going to do him a damned bit of good.
About the Author
LOUIS L’AMOUR, born Louis Dearborn L’Amour, is of French-Irish descent. Although Mr. L’Amour claims his writing began as a “spur-of-the-moment thing” prompted by friends who relished his verbal tales of the West, he comes by his talent honestly. A frontiersman by heritage (his grandfather was scalped by the Sioux), and a universal man by experience, Louis L’Amour lives the life of his fictional heroes. Since leaving his native Jamestown, North Dakota, at the age of fifteen, he’s been a longshoreman, lumberjack, elephant handler, hay shocker, flume builder, fruit picker, and an officer on tank destroyers during World War II. And he’s written four hundred short stories and over fifty books (including a volume of poetry).
Mr. L’Amour has lectured widely, traveled the West thoroughly, studied archaeology, compiled biographies of over one thousand Western gunfighters, and read prodigiously (his library holds more than two thousand volumes). And he’s watched thirty-one of his westerns as movies. He’s circled the world on a freighter, mined in the West, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, been shipwrecked in the West Indies, stranded in the Mojave Desert. He’s won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and pinchhit for Dorothy Kilgallen when she was on vacation from her column. Since 1816, thirty-three members of his family have been writers. And, he says, “I could sit in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and write with my typewriter on my knees; temperamental I am not.”
Mr. L’Amour is re-creating an 1865 Western town, christened Shalako, where the borders of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. Historically authentic from whistle to well, it will be a live, operating town, as well as a movie location and tourist attraction.
Mr. L’Amour now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Kathy, who helps with the enormous amount of research he does for his books. Soon, Mr. L’Amour hopes, the children (Beau and Angelique) will be helping too.
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