by Lauran Paine
Morgan Hyatt, unable to see over the bar, sighted only the sudden eruption of black-powder gun smoke. He shot a look at the adversaries. Both were still as they had been, standing about fifteen feet apart, glaring fully at one another.
Then Arthur Hobart’s knees sprang outward. He crumpled. His body made a solid sound as it struck the floor.
Hobart’s stunned riders were like stone. It had happened too fast, and now there was nothing between them and Ben Knight but his naked pistol barrel with its faintly curling wisps of dirty smoke.
No one at the bar or behind it had seen Knight draw. At a poker table near the door three card players, who had no dispute with either adversary at all, nor any interest in their disagreement, had seen Ben Knight’s draw, and they sat there now staring at him, eyes popped wide open, mouths slackly hanging, their faces ashen.
“Knight ?” Morgan Hyatt said tentatively.
“Yes.”
“Someone better go for a doctor.”
“No need,” said the tall man, watching the Diamond H men. “He’s dead.”
Hyatt subsided. Very gradually some of the trauma passed. Somewhere out in the roadway and southward a man’s high cry of alarm echoed. That solitary gunshot had been loud enough; people had heard it. But except for that one cry, the roadway beyond Hyatt’s saloon remained utterly deserted. None of the curious or the morbid rushed up as people customarily did after a shootout, to ogle victor and vanquished.
“Pick him up,” Ben Knight said to the Diamond H men. “Take him outside, tie him across his saddle, and get out of town.”
The cowboys moved at last, stiffly, awkwardly. They gathered up Arthur Hobart and lugged him across the saloon, shouldered past the spindle doors, and emerged into the empty roadway. There, while they worked at making their employer’s body fast over the saddle, they spoke a little among themselves.
Finally, as they were mounting, one of them faced Ben Knight where he stood in the Cross Timbers’ doorway, saying to him: “You didn’t finish nothing, mister you just started it.”
Knight said nothing.
The horsemen turned away, riding on out of Gunsight. They did not look back, nor did anyone appear to stare at them. Where they wheeled easterly out upon the valley floor, they broke over into a wild race, Hobart’s body jouncing soddenly along across its saddle, head hanging low upon one side, booted, spurred feet upon the other side.
Morgan Hyatt stood beside Ben Knight until the last echo of hooves faded out, then he leaned upon the log wall. “You better get astride,” he told Knight. “And don’t even look back.”
Knight holstered his weapon and moved past as though he had not heard Hyatt speak at all. He had progressed perhaps twenty feet along the plank walk when he turned back to say: “Just whose side are you on, anyway?”
Hyatt shook his head. “Hobart had some cause to complain about the way folks here in Gunsight treated his riders. It wasn’t all his making this trouble.”
“I see.”
“No. Don’t get me wrong, Mister Knight. The Diamond H is a tough outfit. They’ve ridden roughshod over folks here in town, too.”
Hyatt drew off the wall, he squinted against the afternoon sun smash, looking down at Knight. He spoke again, and this time his words were quieter.
“But you didn’t help anything, Mister Knight. Shooting Mister Hobart may satisfy you for something Hobart may have said about you that wasn’t true but Ace Dwinell is just as hard as Hobart was.”
“Who is Ace Dwinell?” Knight asked.
“Hobart’s foreman. He’s got as little use for this town as Hobart had. Now, you fixed it so’s Dwinell will sure as the devil want blood over Hobart getting killed here.”
Ben Knight considered Morgan Hyatt a moment, then, in a tone that carried to Hyatt and no farther, he said: “You’re overlooking something, Mister Hyatt. I have reason to hate this town!”
Chapter Eight
Ben Knight went to the livery barn. There, he ascertained from Cal Taylor who Colt Balfrey was. He then departed in search of Balfrey, who was an itinerant cowboy and saloon swamper. But he had been gone only a few minutes when Bob Hogan appeared at the barn. Ordinarily Hogan would not have come on duty as night man until somewhat later, but the news of Hobart’s killing and the growing tension—plus his own secret anxieties—had drawn Hogan uptown like a magnet.
Now, Calvin Taylor told him of Knight’s questions, and as soon as Colt Balfrey’s name was mentioned, Hogan knew discovery was imminent, for Colt Balfrey was one of the weaker of Hogan’s lynchers. He waited, affecting interest but a lack of concern personally, until Cal retreated to the harness room. Hogan then left the barn by the back entrance, fading out southward in the direction of Balfrey’s shack, with lengthening shadows partially concealing him.
Knight, unaware he was being deliberately stalked, went directly to Balfrey’s bachelor cabin at the southerly end of Gunsight. There, he found no trace of the man he sought. Behind Balfrey’s shack stood a horse shed. It was empty as well, although there was ample evidence of recent occupancy. Studying the tracks of a recently ridden horse, Ben Knight could tell from the dug-in places where steel horseshoes had slammed down hard into the earth, and that whoever had ridden that animal—and he had no illusions here—had left in a hurry.
It was too late in the day to track this man. Dusk would shortly be settling. Knight went back to the horse shed and turned to examining it and its contents. He found a dusty pack outfit, complete with webbed britching. He also found a wooden grain barrel and a number of rusty old bits suspended from nails. All the impedimenta of a lifelong horseman were here, and there were also several boxes of household goods which evidently had been stored in the horse shed for lack of room in Balfrey’s little bachelor shack.
To Ben Knight’s lawman-trained eyes, there appeared instantly one outstanding discrepancy. Although the grain barrel had recently been opened and closed—as evidenced by the disturbed dust on its top—there was a longtime accumulation of dust in the feed box affixed to the west wall of the horse shed’s simple tie stall. Balfrey had not, then, grained his horse in a long time, and yet he had obviously been at the grain barrel.
For a while Knight stood in shadow considering this. He did not immediately examine the barrel, but passed thoughtfully out of the shed, took a slow-pacing turn around Colt Balfrey’s yard, found no other animals out there to whom the missing man might have fed grain, then he returned to the barrel, removed the lid, and thrust one arm deeply downward. Grain covered the lower half of the barrel. Knight pushed through this, rummaging. His fingers closed upon something which was not grain and he drew it forth.
A small flour sack hung in his fingers. In it had been cut two eyeholes. The lower part of this obvious mask showed by wrinkles where it had been pinched down to fit inside a man’s shirt collar.
Knight moved deeper into the shed’s gloom to sit loosely upon a manger. He continued to examine the mask. No one had told him the lynchers of his brother had worn masks. To the best of his acquired knowledge no one who had seen the lynchers was now alive. Yet he knew intuitively why Colt Balfrey, this missing man, had used this mask.
He arose from the manger, carefully folded the flour sack, and pocketed it. There was nothing more to be gained by remaining here. He moved forward. Beyond the horse shed where descending dusk was beginning to obscure those faraway mountains, there was utter silence. This, to a man of Ben Knight’s training, was immediately noticeable.
Any frontiersman, reared in an atmosphere of naturalness, remained attuned to the world through which he passed. It became his second nature to consciously or unconsciously gauge the moods, the colors, and the silences around him. Now, Knight was aware of something beyond the horse shed which a differently matured man might never have noticed at all—there was not a solitary sound out there. This was the time of evening when birds went to roost. The time when th
ey sought out trees, underbrush, buildings, to settle in for the night. There was no sound at all of birds settling or making their garrulous roosting sounds.
It was too quiet.
Knight paused within the horse shed’s thickening gloom. He tested the shadow world beyond where early dusk was moving in over the land. Danger was out there.
He thought immediately that Colt Balfrey had returned, had seen him, perhaps with the flour sack mask, and was now lying out there somewhere with a gun trained upon the shed’s only doorway.
Knight made a leisurely examination of the shed seeking another way out. He found none at all, for, although the shed was roughly put together, it had no cracks large enough for a man to squeeze through. He then passed across to the doorless opening again, went low upon one knee, and strained for the hidden assassin he was certain awaited him. There was no movement, no manlike silhouette—and no sound.
He went still lower, pressed his body flat upon the ground to inch forward, and, hatless, peer around the moldy mud sill, exposing only a small portion of his face. He was not now seeking his adversary so much as he was looking for a bulwark which might protect him when he made the charge out of the horse shed he was determined to make.
There was, some distance ahead, between shed and house, a pile of cedar posts, evidently collected against the day when Colt Balfrey got around to erecting a corral. There was also a stone cairn type of an outdoor fireplace where a bachelor might boil his soiled clothing in a cauldron, which was the customary way for single men on the frontier to do their laundry. In first approaching the shed, Knight had noticed both these obstacles to a direct passage to the shed but had attached no significance to either at the time. Now, he wondered behind which lay his enemy. Knight felt in his gut that Balfrey had to be hidden by one or the other because there was no other place for a man to hide within accurate shooting distance of the shed.
Knight, annoyed now by the gloom which made it impossible to determine upon the ground where fresh man tracks lay, considered the two places. The stone cairn was closest to the shed, but it lay in a direction in which a routed gunman would have no additional protection. He thought it unlikely that a gunman would choose this barrier, for if he were compelled to break and run for it, he could be shot down easily since there was no additional protection to retreat to.
The pile of posts, on the other hand, was between Balfrey’s shed and house. In flight, an assassin could depend upon the house to protect him. This then, Knight told himself, was where he would have taken position.
He drew up his legs, arched his back, dug in his heels, and palmed his six-gun. He breathed deeply for the space of several breaths, then sprinted toward the cairn as swiftly as he could.
Immediately a gunshot blew the silence asunder. Then came a second lancing tongue of scarlet flame. Unhit, Knight threw himself bodily behind the rock cairn’s solid substance, twisting as he did so to catch sight of that second shot. He had, fortunately, made a good deduction. There was an assassin in the yard, and he was behind the pile of posts.
Knight snapped off a shot, saw a daggerlike cedar splinter peel off and fly into the air, and swiftly drew in his exposed legs.
Silence came again, thicker, more ominous than ever, to mantle the Balfrey yard. There was no called forward threat from the assassin. No warning at all, and former lawman Ben Knight knew from experience that this meant his enemy in the predusk had no intention of scaring him off. He fully intended to kill him.
Seconds dragged past on leaden feet. Knight remained cramped and waiting. Nightfall, he felt, was on his side. If he waited long enough, with the aid of full darkness, he could possibly crawl out and around the post pile and flank his unknown enemy.
But Knight was not the only one thinking ahead to eventualities. The assassin, too, recognized the need for an early kill, only he attributed this necessity more to interruption from townsmen who heard the shooting than to the advent of darkness. He accordingly took careful aim with his handgun at the topmost rock on the stone cairn and fired.
The rock burst under impact sending razor-like splinters in every direction, shrapnel-like. One struck Knight on the upper arm. He winced instinctively and pressed lower to the ground. He also thrust his handgun around the cairn and fired once, blindly, and heard this slug strike the house beyond.
Another shot came to fracture a rock. This time, though, Knight was uninjured; he was moving clear in anticipation. Before still another shot came from the post pile, he raised swiftly up, aimed downward, and fired three times, patterning his shots so that they effectively bracketed the post pile. Then he dropped down to reload.
Time passed again, with silence returning to the yard. Knight waited for what seemed ages, then, feeling darkness was down sufficiently, began to edge cautiously clear of the stone cairn. He made an elaborate and time-consuming crawl far outward, then began coming down behind the post pile.
It took nearly an hour for him to accomplish this, then, when he was in position, he fired three times rapidly, first to the left of where he figured the assassin must be, then to the right of that spot, then directly in the center. Before the echoes of these muzzle blasts had died out, Knight was hurtling forward. He landed upon churned earth realizing as he groped for the hidden gunman, that the man was no longer there.
Sometime, probably when Knight had been making his painful crawl, the assassin had fled in the night.
Knight reloaded his six-gun first. Next, he very carefully exposed himself. When no shot came, he then put out a hand to lean upon the uppermost post to assist himself in arising. This hand, when he drew it suddenly back to peer at it, had blood upon the palm.
One of Knight’s shots had struck home.
He made a closer inspection of the spot where the bushwhacker had been. He could barely make out the boot tracks or the imprints of a kneeling man’s legs. Finally, he collected six spent handgun cartridge cases.
Before leaving Colt Balfrey’s yard, he had also determined that the blood he had found had probably come from a hand or arm wound. Most likely, in arising from behind his barricade, the assassin had done exactly as Knight had also done—he had stretched forth a hand to steady himself in arising.
Knight passed back around Balfrey’s shack to the terminating plank walk beyond, and there he struck out thoughtfully back northward, toward Gunsight’s main commercial square.
* * * * *
The town, as before, was unnaturally subdued. A stranger arriving in Gunsight at this time might not have sensed anything amiss because it was now suppertime, but no stranger appeared in the wide and empty roadway, and behind the doors of homes and stores this illusion of quietude and peacefulness deluded no one.
Knight made his solitary way as far north as Jacob Howell’s saddle shop. He might have passed by, but here lamplight glowed behind the window and he turned in.
Old Jacob and his granddaughter Kathy were there, neither speaking, neither concentrating upon what they were doing, which was, for Jacob, the concluding chore of skiving the saddle seating leather he had earlier been working upon, and which for Kathy Howell was the rendering of bills at a small, scarred desk. They both looked up solemnly as the tall, dust-encrusted man entered. Both saw the tear in his shirt and the dull sheen of blood there.
Still without speaking, Kathy got up, passed around Jacob’s bench, and poured a basin of water. She took this back to the little desk, put it down, and crooked her finger at Knight, saying: “Sit down here.”
The tall man crossed over and sat down gravely. Kathy tore Knight’s shirt cloth further and began to efficiently wash the injury, which was not serious, although the slash was fairly deep and had bled copiously.
Knight, seeing old Jacob’s gaze upon him, lifted the outer corners of his mouth in a sardonic small smile and very solemnly winked.
“I went to see Balfrey,” he explained. “He wasn’t home. When I was
ready to leave, someone behind a pile of posts bushwhacked me. It was Balfrey, I expect.”
Old Jacob began wagging his head negatively. “Not Balfrey,” he said scratchily. “Someone else.”
“How do you know?” challenged the tall man.
Kathy answered him, working swiftly and speaking almost disinterestedly, almost casually. “Because Colt Balfrey is over at Doctor Parmenter’s with a bullet through his lungs.”
Chapter Nine
Doc Parmenter opened the door to admit Ben Knight. He cast a professional glance at the visible bandage upon Knight’s arm, showing through torn cloth.
“Kathy Howell,” he said, indicating the bandage
Knight nodded, then said: “Where is Balfrey?’
Parmenter turned, jerking his head for Knight to follow. They passed across Parmenter’s parlor along a gloomy corridor and into a small room at the rear of the house.
“There,” said the medical man, standing aside and gesturing toward a still form under a blanket in the room’s solitary bed.
By subdued lamplight Colt Balfrey appeared to be dead. Knight went close to stare downward. Balfrey’s chest was shallowly rising and falling.
“Through the lights,” said Parmenter, coming to a halt beside Knight. He then added: “From the rear.”
Knight bent to peer into Balfrey’s face. The injured man returned Knight’s look. He was deathly pale and blue-lipped, but his eyes had an otherwise look of warmth and resolve.
In a voice scarcely audible, he said: “I know who you are.”
Ben nodded, saying dryly: “I reckon most folks hereabouts know me by now.” He perched gently upon the side of the bed. “Who shot you?”
Balfrey rolled his head upon the pillow. “I don’t know,” he husked. “I was riding.”
“Riding where?” Knight asked.
“Just riding.”
“And ?”
Balfrey was struggling with something. For a time, he was silent, his gaze tortured and indecisive, then he evidently came to a conclusion, for he said: “I know who it was. I didn’t see him but I know.”
