The Sixth Western Novel

by Jackson Gregory

  “I tell you—” stormed Bill Dorn.

  Just then her voice came back to her. She went straight on from where she had left off:

  “You—you big ugly beast! The nerve of you, talking to me like that! You are out to do murder tonight, Mr. Bill Dorn; all keyed up to shoot a man—in the back, I suppose!—and you stand up and lecture me! You’d do better to slink off in your own slime and hide your ugly face in the good clean desert sand! You—you—you make me sick!”

  Down here at the end of the hall they were out of sight of any in the barroom, out of hearing, too, since the men at the tables and strung along the bar were drowning with their own voices all other sounds. Bill Dorn lifted his hands as though to choke her. But he did not touch her. He said: “How do you know I am here to commit murder?”

  “Every man, woman and child in Nacional knows! I’ve heard it a dozen times. And if I doubted—Oh, go look into a mirror! You’re eyes are full of it! You are here to kill your own partner—and then, you drunk fool, you dare—you dare!—to read me a lesson in human behavior! Ugh! Go away; get out of my sight!”

  “You are going to clear out of this dive,” he told her in still fury, not caring the snap of his fingers whether he spoke in reason or out of it. To hell with reason anyhow. “And you’re going to get out now.”

  She said curiously: “You’re a big unimaginative beast—like a plow horse—or a sick lion! Did you ever see a dead man? A man who had been alive a little while before, then suddenly dead? Ever see a man recently murdered?”

  “You little fool!—Well, yes. Not longer ago than this afternoon.”

  “You killed him!” She shrank still tighter back against the wall, her eyes large with horror.

  “No. I found him.”

  “Was it—Was he nice to look at?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Maybe I am. But not murder-mad like you. Now tell me, Bill Dorn: Will you ever forget how that man looked, dead this afternoon? And after you have killed Mike Bundy, and have looked at him, turned all of a sudden into a senseless lump—”

  “Shut up!” he stormed. “If you think for a split second—”

  “Sh! What’s all the commotion in the barroom? Do you suppose that Bundy has come at last?”

  She tricked him into swinging about, for an instant shifting his eyes from her. An instant was all that was required by that girl, as swift as a leaping deer, for her escape. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the flash of her flight; she was at One Eye’s private door, had snatched it open and shot through, before Bill Dorn could say damn.

  That commotion in the barroom? There wasn’t any more uproar than there had been pretty consistently for an hour. Anyhow Bill Dorn disregarded it. Of a sudden he took the bit between his teeth; of a sudden he was wholly himself again, which is to say he was a man whom you might readily call Sudden Bill Dorn. He had heard the girl shoot a bolt on the inside of the door as she sped through. He hurled himself at the door, going in his accustomed fashion, headlong. He had heard also an exclamation which he knew came from One Eye Perez.

  “Open your damn door or I’ll smash it off its hinges,” said Sudden Bill Dorn.

  CHAPTER III

  Beyond the bolted door the girl was vehement in her demands.

  “I want my money now. Now, do you hear me?” she cried excitedly. “You promised yesterday—” One Eye Perez spoke sneeringly to her. He said in that oily voice of his which could grow ugly as rancid oil grows ugly:

  “I pay you, seguro. But when I get ready. Now with a big crowd in town for maybe two-three day—”

  “No, no, no! Now, I tell you—”

  Then there was Bill Dorn at the door. Perez called sharply:

  “Quien es? Who is there? What you want?”

  “Open up, and get a move on,” said Bill Dorn. “It’s Bill Dorn, and I’m coming in.”

  Perez promptly shot the bolt back and Dorn came surging in.

  “Hello, Bill. Caramba contigo! What’s wrong?”

  Bill Dorn bestowed only a fleeting glance at the girl, then looked scowlingly upon the swart, squat, one-eyed figure.

  “What’s the row in here?” he demanded angrily.

  “He promised me yesterday,” the girl began, flushed and all but breathless, her eyes blazing.

  “I’m talking to Perez,” snapped Bill Dorn. “Speak up, Perez.”

  Perez shrugged. Also he bristled. He had been rough-handled of late by Dorn’s partner, the Michael Bundy who had taken up his papers, papers which One Eye Perez little understood, in exchange for what looked like generous loans. He had no stomach for further brow-beating; he meant to stand nothing more from anyone connected with Bundy. So he flared out, catching fire in a heated atmosphere:

  “This dirty little road-runner, this little scrap of garbage that I fed when her belly was empty—” He was speaking fluently in border Spanish, so the girl didn’t get it all, which was just as well. But Bill Dorn did catch all the implications, which was not just as well for One Eye Perez. When Dorn’s fist cracked into the Mexican’s jaw it was like an explosion. Perez didn’t fall, but that was only because the smallness of the room favored him; reeling backward he brought up with the breath jolted out of him, his thick shoulders against the wall. He made a gesture toward the gun worn low on his left hip.

  “Reach for your wallet instead,” roared Bill Dorn, towering over him. “Pay her and let her go.”

  Perez’ hand went first to his jaw, feeling it gingerly.

  “Some day, Señor, I get you for this,” he said almost inaudibly.

  “Then you’ll shoot me in the back, you scum!”

  No man in Nacional or in all shrugging Mexico, for that matter, could shrug more eloquently than One Eye Perez.

  “The back is a good place, Señor,” was all that he said. But he moved, all obedience, to his table, unlocked and opened a drawer and extracted a small box containing coins and bank notes. “There you are,” he said to the girl. “There’s your pay. You’re through.” And he shoved it into her hand.

  She didn’t stop to count; she flashed him a look of terror; she sped a bright, undecipherable look at Bill Dorn, and vanished into the corridor where they heard the light patter of her running feet.

  Dorn backed to the door, making his exit as from the presence of royalty, his eyes bright and hard on Perez’ unlovely face, a face just now so twisted with rage that it was as though the hate within him were a poison, himself in convulsions because of it. Once through the door, Dorn drew it shut and turned toward the long barroom. He kept looking back, half expecting at every stride to see the rear door open, to have a stream of lead poured after him by the enraged Perez.

  He returned to the front room and saw that every man there was watching him, had been awaiting his return. He ignored them now as before, looking not at them but among them, through them, beyond them, hunting for Michael Bundy. Failing to find Bundy anywhere, he returned to the bar. As he did so a small knot of men, four or five of them, moved purposefully toward him from somewhere near the front door. At their fore was a young fellow whom Bill Dorn knew well and liked, a lean gangling chap of not more than twenty-two or twenty-three, his hair a windblown, straw-colored mop, his eyes a shining, fearless, good-humored blue. He wore two guns tied down at his hips, he walked with an unaffected swagger and he was doing his level best to summon up a casual grin. This was young Ken Fairchild, a small rancher from the desert rim of Antelope Valley.

  “’Lo, Bill,” he said.

  Dorn nodded with a curt, “Howdy, Ken.” He looked beyond young Fairchild to the men who had followed him and had come to a halt only a few feet away; three of them he knew well, all from Antelope Valley; Stock Morgan, old man Middleton and John Sharp. All were eying him. He said to Ken Fairchild: “Looks like a delegation.”

  The Adam’s apple went up and down in Ken’s brown thr
oat.

  “Dammit, Bill,” he burst out. “You’re lookin’ for Mike Bundy, ain’t you?”

  Bill Dorn lifted his thick, ragged black brows at the young fellow and that was all the answer he made. Ken Fairchild, under his thick tan, flushed up. Also those steady blue eyes of his hardened. Young was Ken, but a man whom already other men banked on. He liked Bill Dorn, and there was a genuine warmth in his liking, and a certain respect went along with it; but he wasn’t taking anything off Dorn or anyone else. He said, with an edge to his voice:

  “You got to look here, Bill! You came in town to kill Bundy. Well, us fellows don’t want him killed. Not today. Get it?”

  Dorn did get it, and for a moment Ken Fairchild held his interest. Still, though wondering, he kept his silence. He knew that Fairchild and Bundy hated each other like poison; he couldn’t understand Fairchild going out of his way to protect Michael Bundy.

  Fairchild went on crisply: “We don’t know what he’s done to you, Bill, though we can guess, knowin’ the two o’ you. But that’s none of our give-a-damn.”

  “Give him the straight of it,” called out Stock Morgan, grown impatient. “Looky, Bill Dorn, word’s got out that gold has been found. A bonanza they say it be! Well, you know that much, seein’ ever’body does. But do you know they’s only three men knows the rights o’ the whole thing, only three men knows where the new strike’s been made? Them men is, firs’ an’ las’, Jake Fanning—”

  “Jake’s dead,” said Bill Dorn. “Somebody shot him through the head today.”

  “Then,” shouted Morgan, “that leaves only two men knowin’; one of ’em is One Eye Perez, who keeps out’n sight an’ won’t talk until his new pardner shows up; an’ the las’ one is that pardner, Mike Bundy. An’ us boys has an int’res’ in keepin’ them two alive until we know as much as they do.”

  It was right then, while Morgan was striving to make his point emphatic in the only way he knew, roaring lustily, that the pistol shot startled the roomful of men and created a deep hush. The shot was muffled and came from no one knew exactly where; just the one cryptic crash of sound, dying away echolessly. Men started pouring out through the front doors; someone cried out that the shot came from the street. But a half grown Mexican boy came running from the rear where the kitchen was.

  “It’s One Eye Perez!” he shrilled in a jibbering sort of fashion. “In his room—somebody shot in from outdoors, through the window. He’s dead already—a bullet in his head. And, Jesus Maria, blood all over everything!”

  The frightened boy began to grow incoherent. Stock Morgan caught him by the shoulder, shook him until his teeth rattled, then yelled into his ear: “Who kilt One Eye? Did you find him like that, or did you see the shootin’? Talk, or I’ll bat your brains out! Who kilt him?”

  “I don’t know,” stammered the boy. “Somebody outside. Maybe it was that girl, the new one that came yesterday. She and Perez had trouble. I saw her run outside just before the shot. She had something in her hand, I don’t know what. Maybe it was a gun. I tell you—”

  “Dry up an’ blow away!” said Morgan disgustedly, and flung the boy from him. Then he turned to confront Bill Dorn, his face grim, his eyes stone-hard. “An now they’s only one that knows whether there’s been a bonanza turned up or whether some johnny-come-lately has jus’ got his pick in fool’s gold. An’ the one that knows is Mike Bundy. Sabe, Dorn?”

  While other men hastened to the rear room to look in on the dead saloon keeper, and while others ran outside and quested up and down, hoping to come on some trace of his slayer, Bill Dorn and the small group gathered about him held their ground. Dorn looked at these men curiously.

  “Are you boys crazy or am I?” he demanded. “If there is a pot of gold somewhere, if Michael Bundy knows where it is—and if he is the only man living who does know!—do you count on having him take you by the hand and lead you to it?”

  “Bundy’s close-mouthed, all right,” grunted Stock Morgan, “but no man is as mum alive as he is dead. What’s more, there’s been rumors about Jake Fanning, grubstaked by Bundy, finding gold somewheres up in the Blue Smokes. And there’s other rumors. Bundy, the hawg-for-money that he is, won’t be hangin’ back, doin’ nothin’, leavin’ it to chance for some other feller to back-track along Jake’s trail an’ spot the place. You know damn well, an’ Bundy’ll know it jus’ as well, that either Jake Fanning or One Eye Perez might have talked before they got kilt. Give me a grab on Mike Bundy’s coat tails, Bundy bein’ alive, an’ I’ll get a sniff o’ this new bonanza anyhow—an’ maybe I’ll stake me a claim. That ain’t too hard for you to understand is it, Bill?”

  “I see,” said Dorn.

  He went back to his table and sat down, insistent on being left alone. So there were three, Bundy and Jake Fanning and Perez, who knew all about the new gold strike—and now, with Fanning and Perez shot to death, there remained only Michael Bundy with the golden key in his possession. That was Bundy’s luck for you!

  But was it just luck? Bill Dorn, the last man in the world to grow circuitously suspicious, frowned into the glass slowly twirling between his sunbrowned fingers. Funny, he accounted it; funny that today those three alone had known the answer to the question which at this moment was making a turbulent maelstrom of Nacional—that now, of the three, two were dead with bullets through their brains—that only Michael Bundy still lived!

  “I see,” said Dorn to himself, and did feel like a man who had been blind for a long time and now had his sight restored. He thought that belatedly he began to see other things as well. Take this place of One Eye Perez, for instance. It had long been a favorite resort of Michael Bundy’s; he had dropped in here more and more frequently of late and had gained a fresh reputation for plunging at the gaming tables. He had brought Bill Dorn with him more than once, and Dorn knew that Bundy had steered others of his “friends” into pretty lively games here. There was the mining man from Colorado, the big sheep man from Nevada, a couple of strangers, good spenders both, from Los Angeles. They, along with Bundy, had lost of course; men like them, knowing their ways about, knew how to lose at such dives and could take their losses with less of a grimace than they made when downing the border’s forty-rod whisky. Bundy was always the best loser of them all—but now when Bill Dorn muttered, “I see,” it was with the realization that perhaps Bundy hadn’t lost a red cent. If the One Eye Perez house belonged to Bundy now, perhaps he had had a major interest in its winnings all this while.

  Always Bill Dorn had sensed that Michael Bundy was a man of large caliber, a man who could do big things, and some day, when he got good and ready, would do them. Now it dawned on him that Bundy was by far the biggest man on the border, if you gauged a man’s stature by his financial accomplishment and weren’t concerned with the ethics of his methods. Bundy began to loom as a sort of border colossus; he functioned like a gigantic, well-oiled, crushing, merciless steel-entrailed engine. He was hitting his stride, was Michael Bundy; he was operating like a steam roller. A steam roller doesn’t grow sentimental, doesn’t shed tears no matter what it presses back into the earth whence all things come anyhow.

  When there arose a sudden commotion, as abrupt as an explosion, in the street just outside the swinging doors, Bill Dorn cocked an alert ear, thinking, “Here comes Michael Bundy at last!” In fact Bundy was close at hand, yet the flurry had not arisen about him, since he had not yet been glimpsed. Dorn, starting to his feet, heard a rustle of voices all about him, heard and hearkened to a gust of exclamations, got the drift of it. “They’ve got the man that killed Perez. They’ve caught him red-handed. They’re bringing him in here.”

  Dorn reached out for his forgotten glass and started settling down into his chair again. Then like a rising wind came voices again bearing another burden: “Mike Bundy’s coming! He’s in the crowd outside. It’s Bundy! Mike Bundy!”

  By now every man in the room was on his feet and Dorn had a t
ight-packed mob to plow through, but plow through he did, getting himself cursed at every step. He broke through into the outer night that was palely lit by the stars, rather more warmly illuminated by the lamp with its huge reflector hung over the narrow hell-gates of the Perez swing doors. He saw two men—he knew them both, gunmen of a sort he had small liking for, lean, Cassius-eyed Hank Smith and the bleak, cold, reptilian Mex Fontana, a pair of desert coyotes with the trick of hunting in pairs, men who of late had been so often doing chores for Mike Bundy that they began to be known as his bodyguards. He saw too, in that swift first photographic glance, that Hank Smith and Mex Fontana held prisoner between them, one by each jerking wrist, a slight, frightened familiar figure.

  But he scarcely noted that it was the Señorita who danced and sang, too; and he marked not at all that her terror-widened eyes flashed him a plea that was like a summons. For beyond this small group a handsome blond head and a pair of stalwart shoulders loomed above the crowd. Bundy! As Bill Dorn tore along, one half his brain had to register impressions though he cared nothing for them. The tight knot of men about Smith and Fontana and their white-faced prisoner were muttering: “She killed Perez. These two saw her shoot; they ran her down.”

  Bill Dorn shook his head like a young bull annoyed by summer flies. He made straight, crashing through the crowd, for Bundy. Bundy saw him in the lamplight and read aright the message of the red fires in eyes grown smoky with long smoldering rage. As though a storm wind had blown an open pathway through a cornfield, men fell away to right and left.

  Not a man in Nacional that night cared to stand between the two.

  “What the devil’s happened to you, Bill?” shouted Bundy. “You’re crazy—you’re drunk—”

  Bill Dorn came grimly on. He hadn’t anything to say. He knew at last, past all doubt, the sort of man Michael Bundy was; and he knew that Bundy understood that the inevitable moment had come. There was no use saying in words what could be said so much more forcefully another way.