Gunsmoke

by T. T. Flynn

  "No," Mollie said huskily, "I won't forget."

  Brent wished she'd stop talking. Every word put her in more danger. He stood by the open slit in the door, wondering how many men Murphy had. There was a man down the road, one on the passage floor behind him, two in there with Mollie. But how many with the horses? How many others out on guard?

  Tucker and Shorty were going to be surprised by the guard when they rode up the trail. Brent was thankful he'd slipped up the arroyo; he was wondering what chance he had to get at Murphy and the other man without danger to Mollie O'Brien, when the decision was taken from him.

  Horses trotted to the house; American voices talking carelessly were among the sounds. Then in the direction of Tucker and Shorty gunfire keened sharply.

  "Git Murphy!" one of the men outside cried urgently.

  Brent stepped into the room.

  The light was from three candles flickering in a cluster on a wooden table. The dim light was almost dazzling to Brent's night-widened eyes.

  With the first sweeping look he made out a fat, white-haired figure sprawling laxly at the left side of the room. A lanky man with flat-crowned black hat pushed back was turning toward him. Mollie O'Brien's boyish figure was on the other side of the table, and a step beyond her across the candlelight was a big, brutally handsome stranger with a shock of challenging red hair.

  They thought at first he was one of them. The light dazzled Murphy's eyes a little, too, perhaps. "Anything wrong out there?" Murphy demanded.

  Brent took time to slam the door behind him, and even that slight delay was costly. The lanky man saw trouble and acted without speaking. His gun was drawn and firing as Brent lunged desperately to one side and fired back.

  Through the bright muzzle flashes and eardeafening reports Brent felt the burn of a bullet against his side. He was pulling the trigger again, still moving in the lunge, when a hand slapped all three candles off the table and the low-roofed room was drowned in utter blackness.

  "Damn her!" the heavy bellow of Murphy rang out. The table crashed over.

  Brent was already down, dodging back the other way as Murphy's gun lashed flame. The lanky man's gun spoke a third time. Brent fired at it and kept moving fast along the floor, and, when both men shot wildly at him, they missed.

  Ears could hear little, but the cry that came through the powder reek was audible. "Red! He hit me!"

  Murphy did not answer.

  "Red!"'

  Brent fired at the voice and jumped to one side. "Keep flat, Mollie!" he yelled, and kept moving.

  She didn't answer. Murphy and his companion fired at the sound of Brent's voice, and Brent shot again at the flash of the lanky man's gun, low down toward the floor.

  Brent dared not fire toward Murphy, who seemed to be keeping in that end of the room. Mollie O'Brien had been that way, too. He had the cold anger of helplessness. She had been standing close to Murphy and she did not answer.

  Men in the passage jerked the door open.

  "What's wrong, Murph? We're in a trap!"

  Brent fired at the doorway. A man yelled with pain. Then Murphy's bawl filled the room. "Come in an' help git him! He's used up his six shots! I been countin'!"

  Murphy's gun opened fire at the spot where Brent had been. Three shots as fast as Murphy could pull the trigger. One of them drove bits of the hard earthen floor into Brent's face.

  He was looking at the doorway, and by the gun flashes behind him he saw the first man fill the doorway in response to Murphy's order. Brent hammered two shots from the gun he had taken off the guard, and kept on going back across the room. Men cursed outside the door.

  "What the hell's wrong, Murphy? Was that you? Andy's kilt!"

  A second man called angrily: "Are you comin' out, Murph?"

  A gun fired out front. A man cried urgently: "They're closin' in! Hurry up!"

  "I'm waiting, Murphy," Brent said.

  There was no other door out of the room. Murphy would have to pass him, and he knew why the man was silent. Somewhere in the blackness Murphy was waiting, or was slipping toward the door.

  Running boots cleared out of the passage. Guns fired again out in the night, close now, as spurred horses started away. In the reeking quiet of the black room Brent took post beside the door and waited, cocked revolver in one hand, knife in the other.

  The lanky man had stopped all sound. The quiet of death was over Mollie O'Brien. It was hard to wait, but this was the way it had to be, this was the way Murphy had to come out of the room.

  "He's coming on the left side," Mollie's voice gasped from the other end of the room.

  Brent swung that way, forgetting that her left as she faced him was his right side. The man came with a desperate rush from that right side. He was almost to the floor when Brent fired at the sound, then a viciously swung chair slammed into his arm and shoulder and drove him back against the wall.

  The rip of a knife blade went through his shoulder and the gun misfired as he lunged over against Murphy's rush, the chair dropping beside them.

  Brent struck out with his knife hand and blocked another vicious stab. No longer trusting the gun, he clubbed the heavy barrel at the spot where Murphy's face should be. The man stumbled against him, and, when Brent struck again with the gun, Murphy went down heavily.

  Panting, Brent bent over him, feeling with a foot for a sign of movement.

  "Mollie," he said thickly. "Keep quiet until I get a candle lighted."

  Tucker and Shorty found them in candlelight, and Shorty ran back out front to guard and keep out the neighbors who were gathering in the open now that gunfire had stopped.

  "Run right smack into a feller on the trail," said Tucker disgustedly. "But I didn't wait fer a whole hour t'be up an' I wasn't sure there was trouble ahead. Johnny, you're bleedin' at the shoulder like a gutted deer."

  "I've seen worse," said Mollie O'Brien wanly as she opened the shirt against Brent's protests. "He will be able to ride. And Murphy is still alive."

  "That won't be hard to fix," Tucker said, and drew his hunting knife.

  "No," Mollie O'Brien said involuntarily. Her eyes were wide as she looked up at Brent. "Not like he is. Not while he's helpless."

  "You'd see him carried back to Camargo after all he's done?" Brent asked her.

  Mollie swallowed, nodded.

  "Tucker," Brent said, "we're still taking orders."

  Tucker for once seemed to realize that it had to be like this. "We better git started an' be a long way from here by daylight," he said. "No tellin' what'll be down around our ears if we tarry. Daylight ridin' jes' won't be healthy."

  Don Santiago was a sick man, but he was sitting up and reassuring his neighbors when they left on the out trail with Murphy lashed to a horse.

  Brent's slashed shoulder hurt, but he was strangely at peace as he rode beside Mollie O'Brien.

  "I won't forget this trip, ma'am. But I'll never make another with you. A girl has no place in this sort of business."

  Mollie's laugh was still a bit unsteady. "I think I knew that when I hugged the floor and waited to see who would die next. You're all angry at me for taking Murphy back, aren't you?"

  "I think we're all glad to see you wanted to take him back," Brent said slowly. "There's not much mercy in the fur country and little enough in war. We expected it in you, ma'am."

  She rode in silence for a full minute, and then she said: "No one has ever said a nicer thing to me. I'll remember it if we never meet again."

  "We'll meet. Be sure of that, ma'am."

  "I wonder," she answered lightly, and dropped back and let him lead the way.

  Brent was smiling, that she should doubt they would meet again. He was still thinking of her when Shorty's quirted horse drew up beside him.

  "She's gone, Johnny."

  Brent brought his horse to a rearing stop. Tucker and the prisoner closed up with them. "Gone where?"

  "Said suddenlike to me she's goin' to Monterey to find her father. And not to foller her
. Then she was gone off the trail on that big horse like the devil was in her saddle." Shorty swore helplessly. "I didn't know what to do. Wasn't a chance to stop her outside a long chase."

  Brent listened. The night already had swallowed any sound Mollie's horse made, and blotted her tracks.

  "Johnny, she ain't one to hold," said Tucker dryly. "Don't do it, Johnny. You wouldn't find her tonight ... an' they're lookin' fer Yank riders between here an' Monterey. Don't try it, Johnny. Orders is orders." And Tucker added the one thing that carried weight: "We'll need you, Johnny, to git this skunk back to Camargo, where the law'll hang him."

  "Ride on," Brent said heavily as he lifted the reins. "We'll get him there."

  But Brent was looking back in the fathomless night and making plans as he led them on. Off there across the dry, lonely miles, Monterey was waiting for Taylor's army. There would be a way to get there quickly. He had always wanted to see Monterey, and now he knew he was going, and quickly.

  T. T. Flynn was born Thomas Theodore Flynn Jr., in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was the author of over 100 Western stories for such leading pulp magazines as Street & Smith's Western Story Magazine, Popular Publications' Dime Western, and Dell's Zane Grey's Western Magazine. He lived much of his life in New Mexico and spent much of his time on the road, exploring the vast terrain of the American West. His descriptions of the land are always detailed, but he used them not only for local color but also to reflect the heightening of emotional distress among the characters within a story. Following the Second World War, Flynn turned his attention to the booklength Western novel and in this form also produced work that has proven imperishable. Five of these novels first appeared as original paperbacks, most notably The Man from Laramie (1954), which was also featured as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post and subsequently made into a memorable motion picture directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart, and Two Faces West (1954), which deals with the problems of identity and reality and served as the basis for a television series. He was highly innovative and inventive and in later novels, such as Night of the Comanche Moon, concentrated on deeper psychological issues as the source for conflict, rather than more elemental motives like greed. Flynn is at his best in stories that combine mystery-not sur prisingly, he also wrote detective fiction-with suspense and action in an artful balance.

  The psychological dimensions of Flynn 's Western fiction came increasingly to encompass a confrontation with ethical principles about how one must live, the values that one must hold dear above all else, and his belief that there must be a balance in all things. The cosmic meaning of the mortality of all living creatures had become for him a unifying metaphor for the fragility and dignity of life itself.