“You can’t hoorah my place, Charlie,” he said.
A few men grouped themselves behind him as he spoke, while several others, watching from various parts of the room, signified partisanship by standing fast. Miss Tandy had stopped gathering up chips and was watching some men — also Barringer’s followers, I assumed — file in from the rear door. As for me, I realized that my slowness to react had trapped me. Now the tension was such that any movement might be taken as a hostile one.
It was the barkeep, a stocky towhead, who started the landslide. He was stealthily reaching in a drawer, gun-minded, when a man posted to guard against just such a rear attack stepped in from the street and opened fire.
As I hit the floor there were shots, yells and the sound of shattering glass. Shotgun John was on the floor, too, but it didn’t look as if he shared my fervent hopes of being able to rise again. There were three men trying to use the main door at the same time, and I think one of them was hit. Then the last of the lamps was shot out.
They found me behind the bar when lanterns restored light to the place. The barkeep was gone, a trail of blood showing his line of retreat. Courtney and a couple of others remained, because they could never again go anywhere of their own volition. The lookout admonished by Miss Tandy stood against the wall, unhurt but looking as nervous as I undoubtedly did. Miss Tandy herself sat at her faro table, playing solitaire. Everybody else was one of Barringer’s men.
“What’ll we do with this gink, Charlie?” one of my two captors asked, when I had been gun-prodded into the gambler’s presence. “I never see him before, but he stayed with Shotgun John, and he was packing a six-shooter until we took it away from him.”
Not liking the inference to be drawn from this summary, I made haste to speak up. “I don’t know anything about this business except that it’s none of mine. You remember me, Barringer. I’m just in from Colorado. I told you that earlier this evening.”
The gambler was seated at the other table, watching money being heaped on the layout. For a moment I was afraid he wouldn’t recognize me, but he finally did.
“Oh, you’re the man with the stagecoach.” Abruptly he grinned and turned to a walleyed man standing near him. “A stage is the perfect way to get her out of town,” he said. “We’ll have one of the girls check her stuff out of the hotel and just spread the word that she left after John cashed in.”
“That’s a good notion, Charlie.” The fellow made me nervous by still seeming to watch me while he gazed at his chief. “I’ve been wondering how we was going to get her that far without putting blinders on the town.”
There were some missing parts to his statement. Left undefined was the purpose of the abduction and what would happen to a stage driver made accessory to a kidnapping.
Barringer interrupted my consideration of these points by rising to tap me on the chest. “A hundred dollars cash all right with you for taking two passengers to Socorro?”
Although certain that he would get it back, I nodded and went through the motions of accepting advance payment. “Clinker here will go along with you and help you pack and harness up,” the gambler smilingly told me. “Don’t forget to tell the hotel clerk where he’s heading, Clinker.”
The walleyed outlaw did not lend the helping hand his chief had promised; but he kept one or the other of his eyes on me while I gathered my belongings, paid a sleepy night clerk and readied the stage for the road.
He did carry my rifle for me, but he relieved himself of even this burden when we reached the coach. Pitching it through one of the windows, he then followed me into the stable. The voluble proprietor was not around, nor was anyone else until we were joined by a fellow with a shotgun. At a word from my guard this man entered the stage.
“He’ll be riding with that gun right where buckshot would blow your tail through the top of your head if it had to go off,” Clinker said, as I obeyed his instructions to let the curtains down. “After I get in, drive back around to the hotel and wait till they bring out her traps.”
It was nearly dawn by the time Miss Tandy and the lookout were bundled into the stage, but the saloons were doing a fine business accommodating the people who still wanted to talk about the town’s big excitement. Men strolling from one establishment to the other saw the coach, and a man stationed in front of one saloon bawled to the inmates that Dolly Tandy was leaving. A rush to the street followed, but we were rolling rapidly away from the cheers.
Crushing my nebulous plans for a breakaway, once open country was reached, a couple of riders were waiting just outside of town. Clinker then mounted to the driver’s seat beside me. Of Barringer I saw nothing until we had reached the Socorro road and, after making westing, had swung back south along a barely discernible set of tracks. He was waiting by the abandoned mine shaft to which they led.
The old wooden hoist above it looked like a gallows looming against the reddening dawn, and I learned that Barringer thought so, too. “We’ll hang them from that, drop them in the shaft and heap tailings on top,” he told Clinker. The gambler had the sickish look of a man getting ready to lance his own boil, but he tried to be jocular. “Ladies first.”
None of them liked that part of it. “Why don’t you just shoot Sparks and let her get lost?” one of the escorting riders asked.
“I’m only stretching Roy because we might as well save a bullet since the noose’ll be ready,” Barringer snapped. “But she’s the one that matters, you damn fool. She’s too well known, she’s got tough friends and she’s smart. She could have us run out of the territory, and the same thing would happen if her murder is pinned on us. Now shut up and get busy.”
“Well, I don’t know as I want to see it,” Clinker said. “We’ll be busy turning the stage around.”
“You damn well will see it,” his chief told him. He wore his gun slung from his belt now, and his right hand dangled near it. “Why do you think I’m insisting upon hanging anyhow? You’re getting your cut out of the twenty-five thousand we got, mostly from her bank, and you’ll have as much of a hand in the dirty part of it as the rest of us. And I mean a hand, too — your fist around the rope.”
The outlaw inside the stage then dismounted, hauling the faro lookout after him. The latter fell and rolled face down on the ground. Miss Tandy, though also bound and gagged, managed to keep her feet after stumbling forward a couple of steps. Roy Sparks was then jerked erect, and both were hustled toward the hoist.
One of the riders had unslung a lariat from his saddle and was in the act of tossing it over the crossbar. The rest stood watching, the other four executioners standing tall in their boots, Sparks bent over as though stove in, and the erect young woman. The latter’s curiosity proved to be more diversified, though. Above the cloak which swathed her I saw her head turning everywhere. At least twice while taking her last look at the world, her eyes rested on me.
I knew what she was doing because I would soon be doing it, too. The plans for my own disposal seemed clear enough. I would be used to drive the coach in which Dolly Tandy was known to have left town away from the bodies in the mine shaft. At some point I’d be shot and left as the victim of a holdup, leaving the question of what happened to the girl as something for mystery lovers to argue about.
Meanwhile nobody was paying any attention to me. There was reason behind this carelessness; for I could not flee without turning the stage around, nor proceed because of a steep slope not far ahead.
I could have made it afoot for a ways, it is true, and my instinct was to take the chance of being able to outmaneuver them amongst the surrounding boulders and ledges. Yet I did not try it, because the thought of Blackfoot Terry came between me and the yearning for survival. The only knowledge I had left was that I could not attempt to escape at the price of deserting his friend, or whatever Miss Tandy was to him, so I stayed hunched on the driver’s seat.
From where I squatted, as lost to action as a man in a coma, I looked down with loathing not only on what I was seeing but on
myself. Whether the evil to which I was witness or my own helplessness in the face of it was worse I did not then have the clarity of mind to determine. A dead man, I watched murder in the making, because I could not look elsewhere.
Yet there is a difference between a planned execution and killing in hot wrath. Where violence does not spring from passion it must lean on some degree of formality, and that fact found realization now. Charlie Barringer had always talked like a man of some education, even if he had eschewed anything resembling manners. When he turned to Miss Tandy after the hangman’s knot had been tied, however, he took off his hat when he addressed her.
“I’m sorry you got caught in between Courtney and me; but you had warning, and I can’t let you go. Is there anything you’d like to say before you step off?”
At the end of her nod of assent, she looked straight at me once more. When the gagging neckerchief had been removed from her face, though, she gazed from one of her captors to another before her eyes fastened on the man who had ridden as guard inside the coach.
“I see you have your shotgun,” she said slowly, “but there’s one thing that puzzles me. Why did you leave that rifle under the rear seat of the stage?”
Except for Clinker, none of them had known of the rifle’s existence. While they were still goggling at her as though they thought fear had addled her mind, I hit the ground on the far side of the vehicle.
In the accidia of hopelessness I had forgotten about the weapon, which still would have been of no use to me if I had had to waste time in searching. It was where she said it was, I saw when I yanked open the door, but on the opposite side. I had to scramble in before I could reach it, and by that time feet were pounding toward me. Another precious moment was lost because the curtains were lashed down, and I had to move to the door, left hanging open after the captives had been forced out.
The outlaws were all on the move toward me, with Clinker, trying to compensate for his blunder, in the lead. Five feet away, he got off a revolver shot which nicked my ear. When my rifle kicked, one of his ill-matched eyes disappeared, and then the cloud of black powder hid his whole face from me. He kept going forward, though, and didn’t collapse until he bumped into the hind wheel of the stage. We were rolling away from him, for the horses had lurched into action at the sound of the shots. It was their promptness in doing so which spoiled the aim of the man with the shotgun. Instead of finding me, the slugs ripped the curtain of the window to my left.
The coach jolted and swayed as it wheeled over rocks and hollows, so that I could do nothing but brace myself to avoid bone-shattering injury. Fortunately for this purpose, my frantic horses soon got into difficulties. A hundred yards from the mine shaft, they found a ledge they couldn’t negotiate and jammed the wheels when they tried to swing away from it.
Pitched out the open door by the shock of that halt, I fell on the side already burned by one of the bullets which had been sent through the stage before it was out of pistol range. I could feel my shirt sticking to the wound as I rolled over to rest my rifle on a rock.
Barringer and the two other horsemen were on the far side of the shaft, having just reached the horses they had left hitched to an abandoned ore wagon. The squat fellow with the shotgun was still moving in my direction, and so was Miss Tandy, scurrying along in his wake as fast as her cloak and bound arms would permit.
I had range advantage, and the shotgun lad showed his respect for that fact by diving for cover as soon as he saw me in position to fire. No doubt he had thought that the footsteps behind him were those of an ally. He wasn’t undeceived until Miss Tandy jumped on his back and kicked his weapon out of his hands.
The owner of the shotgun was of no mind to recover his weapon, what with me looking down his throat and shooting from a rest, but the riders were coming on, pistols in hand. Having but four shots, I held off until Barringer fired at Miss Tandy. Bobbing in the saddle, he wasn’t accurate, nor did he make a good enough target for me. My first bullet missing him, I aimed at his horse and did better. When the animal fell, the gambler came over its head, landed on a pile of rubble and lay still.
The other riders gave up the charge then and circled back out of range. By the time they had done so, Miss Tandy joined me. She was exhausted and limping on the foot which had booted the gun. Except for the fact that she advanced to collapse right beside me, she gave no sign of recognition.
“Hey, you behind the rock,” I called out. It was possible that the man had a revolver, although I hadn’t noticed one on his person, so I walked forward slowly. “I’m coming your way,” I went on, “but if you’ll back out of there, I won’t shoot.”
As it turned out, he was way ahead of me. When he answered, it was from behind a rock ten yards in back of the one near which his shotgun lay.
“No foolin’?”
I watched him as he hustled in retreat, making certain he wouldn’t try to get Barringer’s revolver. After I had worked off Miss Tandy’s bonds, already loosened by her own exertions, I next got a box of cartridges out of the boot and set out to wind the situation up.
First bringing the shotgun to where the girl could use it in case of emergency, I secured Barringer’s pistol. It looked to me as if the gambler’s left arm was broken, but he showed signs of coming to when I relieved him of his gun belt.
One of the riders started to prowl, making motions toward cutting me off from the stage; but he stopped when I yelled at him and slapped the stock of my rifle. “Come and get your boss when I leave,” I shouted, “or I’ll come back and shoot him out of his misery.”
Upon my withdrawal, they did come forward. Looking them both over, they boosted the groggy Barringer into one saddle and draped Clinker’s body in front of him. The former owner of the shotgun led the horse thus burdened, the two riders doubled up, and they all went slowly over the hill toward Midas Touch, with no banners flying.
The neglected faro lookout, who had previously done a thorough job of making himself inconspicuous, rose up and hurried toward us. He was still bound and gagged, but I had no time for him. Beside me I heard the sound of a woman crying while trying to conceal the fact.
Chapter 7
THIS WAS A SITUATION I wouldn’t have known how to cope with even if I had been feeling good. I wasn’t. Reaction had left me shaky and nauseated. My ear was mourning for the chip of it that would never come back, my side felt as though it were pressed against a hot iron, and I had some bruises to show for having rattled around in the coach.
At the same time I thought I ought to make some effort on the girl’s behalf. I also felt a compulsion to shield her from the eyes of the man about to join us.
“Miss Dolly,” I said. It was a form of address I hadn’t used since leaving Maryland, but it now seemed in order. “Miss Dolly,” I repeated, when a twitch of her head told me she was listening. “Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable inside the stage?”
When I turned away after closing the door behind her, Roy Sparks was only a few yards off. Popeyed with the effort to talk, he was making uncouth sounds which I took to be requests for aid. A moment later I had obliged him, and he was flapping his arms to work the stiffness out of them.
“You done good,” he applauded me. He stamped his feet as though to assure himself that they touched terra firma. “If you hadn’t got busy with that rifle I’d have sure been up there, meetin’ the buzzards halfway.”
“I’m not the one that saved you.” Whatever triumph I might otherwise have felt was smothered by the realization that it was not I who had been alert at the crucial moment. “I’d have been on the way to slaughter with a ring in my nose myself, if Miss Tandy hadn’t done the thinking for me.”
“She do think, don’t she; but you done the shootin’, and I ain’t forgettin’ what I owe you.” He had already put dull care behind and was as breezy as an end man in a minstrel show. “Say, when Charlie Barringer went sailin’ through the air like a chicken which ain’t got wings enough to fly, I nearly choked to death tryin’
to laugh through that bandanna they muzzled me with. I don’t suppose you got a drink cached in that wagon of yours, have you?”
There was the small end of a bottle in the boot, and if we had been alone I would have brought it out. As it was, I decided that if Miss Tandy had to pull her nerves together unaided, I could tough it out myself.
“We’re moving out of Barringer’s reach right now,” I told Sparks. “Are you coming west with us, or have you got other plans?”
“There’s a quid of tobacco in my shanty back at Midas Touch that I wish I had now, but I don’t want it that bad,” he said. “You got you another passenger.”
There were no sounds coming from the stage as I approached. “I think we’d better get started,” I said, when I had opened the door.
She was wan but otherwise composed. “Marylanders are supposed to be able to make horses run,” she added, after I had introduced myself. “Do it with my blessing and stop looking so worried about me. I was only crying because I was hungry.”
I stared at her and then chuckled. “You know that’s mostly what’s the matter with me, I think. We’ll shake some sort of snack together as soon as we’ve put mileage behind us.”
While I was maneuvering my team out of its tangle I noticed that Sparks stayed near the coach door. “What’s on your mind?” I paused to inquire.
He looked at me out of a tanned, mustachioed face that was both easygoing and calculating, knowing and foolish. “I figgered to ride with her to keep her company,” he told me.
“You won’t,” I snapped. “You’ll ride with me.”
He hitched his belt up to emphasize the fact that his shoulders were both wider than mine and higher from the ground. “Don’t tell me what to do, Shorty.”
It was the wrong time for him to say that. My spirits had been on the way back from the depths of relief and humility to which they had sunk. If I had earlier remembered what I had not done, I was by then recalling what I had accomplished. Among other things I had just killed a man who had come between me and my purpose, and the harsh satisfaction of the thought was so strong in me that I could taste it.
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