by Lauran Paine
Morgan Hyatt turned a scowling countenance upon Dwinell. “That was a pretty underhanded thing to do,” he said.
Dwinell did not reply. He was still watching Ben Knight with his undivided attention. Hyatt’s last words echoed briefly, then the deadly silence pulsed on.
Finally, Dwinell spoke, and although none of the onlookers could see it in his eyes, there was in his stance the solid resolution of a man willing and ready to fight.
“All right, Knight,” he said. “You called it. You and me will just walk out a ways and have this out.” Dwinell still carefully kept his arm hanging wide of his holstered gun. “Unless your guts have run out through your boot soles while we been standing here talking.”
Knight stepped back a short distance and jerked his head sideways. “Walk,” he ordered. “I’ll follow you.”
Ace Dwinell began moving. As he passed his cowboys, one of them called out to him. “What about us, Ace?”
“Just relax,” replied the Diamond H foreman stonily. “ I’ll be right back. This won’t take long.”
Chapter Fifteen
To the men filling the roadway in front of Morgan Hyatt’s Cross Timbers Saloon there was a bizarre awkwardness in the air. Dwinell’s Diamond H horsemen sat self-consciously gazing about them. Ben Knight’s organized townsmen, mostly bearing carbines and rifles, held their weapons loosely, an indication of disapproval with themselves.
Jacob Howell and one or two others, still resolutely grim and determined, kept hawkeyed watch on the riders. Old Jacob reflected privately that trouble usually affected people in this fashion—as long as the tension lasted there were some who would persevere. But let reaction set in and most people were bothered by self-doubt, by procrastination and its accompanying demoralization. He saw this happen now as men muttered to those nearest them, looked uncomfortably at their adversaries, and made long and critical studies of the ground underfoot.
* * * * *
Beyond Gunsight, in the depth of night, Ace Dwinell strode purposefully forward with Knight pacing behind him. When he thought they were far enough out, Dwinell slowed. Immediately Knight’s voice hit him in the back.
“Keep walking. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
Dwinell went on.
They were a long two hundred yards out when Ben said: “Turn around.”
Dwinell wheeled. He seemed, somewhere since leaving Gunsight, to have lost something. There was yet no fear or cowardice in his steady gaze, but his lips had softened away from their former harshness.
“You’re making a mistake,” he told Knight. “You’re not bucking Arthur Hobart now, lawman.”
They stood about sixty feet apart with dripping night between them. Each man stood gently sprung forward at the knees. Each man had his gun arm cocked for the blurring downward sweep. In the watery light they even looked alike. Both were above average in height. Both were strong-willed men without an iota of fear to them.
“Hobart,” said Knight, “had some help along. You haven’t.”
“That kind of help,” snorted Diamond H’s foreman, “ain’t no good anyhow.”
For a lingering moment they regarded one another without speaking, then Knight said: “Back off, Dwinell. It’s not too late.”
Dwinell made the smallest of wags with his head. “I never backed off in my life, fellow. I’m too old to commence now.”
“What’s the point in getting killed?” asked Knight. “You can’t stay in Gunsight country anyway win or lose. So go back, get on your horse, and ride on. There’ll be talk, sure, but it can’t bother a man who is hundreds of miles away.”
Dwinell’s lips drew apart in a wolfish grin. “That’s pretty good advice,” he said in a drawling way. “Why don’t you take it yourself?”
“I’m going to stay here, that’s why.”
“I heard you was a US deputy marshal. That right?”
“That’s right.”
“What the hell can a hick town like Gunsight offer to a man like you, Knight? You just want a place to sit down and grow old in?”
Knight drew in a careful breath and expelled it. “That’s about it,” he replied. “You might give that some thought, too, Dwinell. We’re about the same age. A man doesn’t get any younger.” Knight paused for emphasis, then added: “But he gets a little slower on the draw as time passes.”
Dwinell’s humorless grin lingered. He considered Knight thoughtfully, then said: “You going to talk me to death, fellow?”
“No. You can make your play whenever you’re ready.”
They had both said all they had to say. Actually more than either of them had meant to say. Among professional fighting men there was an embedded, age-old conviction: the longer a man talked, the less likely it was that he would fight.
It was not possible for Ben to see Ace Dwinell’s mouth because too much night gloom lay between them. Had this not been so, he would have strained to catch that slightest tightening of Dwinell’s lower face which would have given him a fraction of a second’s warning. Gunfighters did not watch an opponent’s eyes—they watched his mouth.
Another second went by. It seemed as though all eternity was packed into it for one of them. Then Ace Dwinell went for his gun. There was nothing actually to see. His right shoulder scarcely dipped downward at all. His taloned fingers were a blur of speed.
Ben, as experienced as Dwinell—but more intelligent, and this made the difference—did not lower his shoulder at all. He was already standing hip shot so that his right side was lower than his left side. This was a slight consideration, true, but in a race against time for survival the most infinitesimal advantage was often the difference between life and death.
Ben had another advantage, too, but Dwinell could not have known of it. In fact, he did not even suspect it until, dead ahead and out of the darkness, came that rocketing muzzle blast with its accompanying red lash of flame. Then it was too late.
Dwinell’s pistol exploded as Knight’s slug struck him, half turning his body with impact. Dwinell’s bullet tore up a gout of earth twenty feet short of where Ben Knight stood.
The wounded man forced himself back around. He stood weaving unsteadily like a tall tree in a storm, and he would have brought up his gun for a second shot except that his strength was too swiftly ebbing. He dropped the gun. His knees bent, and he slid heavily down to stretch his full length upon the ground.
Ben crossed to him and knelt. With dimming eyes, Dwinell said: “Hold up that gun.”
Ben complied, cradling the dying man’s head with his free arm.
“Be damned,” said Dwinell. Those were his final words.
Ben put his head gently back upon the ground and picked up the fallen man’s six-gun. The pistol of Ace Dwinell had a regulation eight-inch barrel. Ben Knight’s six-gun had had the barrel sawed off at four inches. Knight’s advantage had been the difference between life and death. He had his weapon clear of its holster a fraction of a second before Dwinell’s longer barrel cleared leather. On so seemingly insignificant a thing as that had a man’s life depended.
Ben walked back to the straining, still, and stonelike townsmen and range men. Until he appeared, fully recognizable through the darkness, there was not a sound. After he appeared a sigh passed over the crowd. The sheriff of Gunsight had triumphed. That was what those waiting men wanted to know: who had been victorious.
Ben stood a moment gazing at the cowboys. They returned his regard owlishly. He then spoke to them quietly, and in a twinkling the tension dissolved.
“A man does what he has to do,” he told them, now. “I have no regrets but I think we owe a toast to the one of us who didn’t come back. Dwinell was a brave man.” He let that sink in, then added to it: “Mister Hyatt, I’ll take it kindly if you’ll pour the drinks for all of us Diamond H and townsmen alike. I’ll stand the bill.”
Morgan Hyatt shifted pos
ition, shuffled his feet in the dust, looking up expectantly at the Diamond H riders. One of the mounted men put both hands upon his saddle horn, kicked his right leg up and over the cantle, and swung down. He was an older rider—a grizzled man with perpetually squinted eyes.
“I’ll drink to that,” he said, and at once the other Diamond H men dismounted to troop forward and hitch their animals at the Cross Timbers’ hitch rack.
Around them the townsmen, more than ever self-conscious about the guns they carried, pushed those weapons out of sight against Morgan Hyatt’s front log wall and pushed into the saloon with the cowboys.
Ben, standing back until the others had entered, turned to face the man who came forward now to pluck gently at his sleeve.
“Well spoken, son,” old Jacob murmured, his ancient eyes fully on Knight with strong approval. “It’s never easy to kill a man, and usually, afterward, a fellow’s got to live in his own private hell for a while.” Jacob took up his buffalo gun, laid it across one arm, and nodded. “You go have that drink. I’ll get a wagon and fetch Dwinell down to Doc’s shed for cleaning up and laying out.”
Ben had not one drink, but two. He offered no additional salute to the courage of the man he had killed, but those who, like himself, solemnly downed their liquor understood, for they, too, felt as Ben did. A man did what he had to do.
But he did say one thing before leaving the saloon. With his back to the yonder night and his shoulders filling the doorway of Morgan Hyatt’s saloon, he called for silence. Then he said: “I’m not going to say Ace Dwinell died uselessly. But I am going to say if each one of you will turn around and offer your hand to the man beside you and if you’ll put meaning into that handshake Gunsight and the cattle outfits won’t ever have to go through a thing like this again.”
He paused, watching the townsmen and cowboys look at one another, then he said: “Good night, boys.” And he passed out into the roadway’s stillness.
* * * * *
He had walked perhaps fifty yards south of the Cross Timbers when a creaking dray wagon went slowly past with old Jacob upon the seat. They exchanged a long glance, but neither of them nodded. Then Jacob was gone northward and Ben continued southward until he could distantly make out the bleached-bone white fence around Doc Parmenter’s front yard.
He turned in two doors north of the Parmenter place and went up to the porch steps. She was there, waiting. At sight of his familiar silhouette she had arisen from the swing and swept to the porch’s very edge to stop, looking down to him.
“Are you all right?”
He went to her, led her back to the swing, and sat down.
“I’m all right,” he then said.
“I saw grandfather go by with the wagon.”
“Yes.”
She sat close, aware of their touching hips and shoulders. “I’ll make us some coffee if you’d like, Ben.”
“I’d like that, Kathy.”
She made no immediate move to arise, and after a time she murmured to him: “Is it all over now?”
“I think it is, yes.”
“And you will stay?”
He put forth a hand to touch her. “I will stay,” he said, “if you will marry me.”
She twisted fully toward him, saw the looming dark sweep of his shoulders blotting out the farthest stars, and met his lips with her own in a quiet kiss.
“I will marry you.”
He drew back. There was a faint twinkle in his eye. “And now the coffee,” he said.
She smiled mistily, arose, and passed around him bound for the house.
He caught her hand to draw her temporarily to a halt.
“Do you know that it will always be like this?”
“How do you mean?”
He let go the hand and looked gravely out into the dark roadway and beyond, as far out as the faintly discernible mountains rimming Gunsight Valley.
“Every time there’s trouble here, you’ll have to sit and wait and wonder.”
“Yes,” she told him unsmilingly, “I thought of that tonight. But not always, Ben. There will come a time when conditions on the frontier won’t be like they now are.”
“I wonder,” he mused, then roused himself. “Can I help you inside?”
She shook her head at him and moved on to disappear within the house.
He sighed. He ran his legs out their full length upon the porch flooring and allowed his body to turn completely loose where he sat.
From the north came a familiar sound of grinding wagon tires. Jacob was passing along slowly with his burden.
Someone struck a loud note on Morgan Hyatt’s old piano up at the Cross Timbers Saloon. This note, discordant though it was, seemed to Ben Knight a kind of paean.
A few men appeared upon the plank walks heading northward. It did not take long for the word to pass, Knight thought. By this time tomorrow Gunsight would be well along on its road of recovery. Cowmen and townsmen would work at healing old wounds. A little effort was all that was required. But he knew it would take time.
Kathy returned with the coffee on a tray. She helped him with his and took the second cup to her seat at his side. She obviously had been thinking of things he had temporarily forgotten, for she now said: “What will happen to Bob Hogan?”
He sipped thoughtfully before replying. “Prison for life if he’s lucky. Death by hang rope if he isn’t.”
She looked over at him. “You are not sorry for him, Ben?”
He answered truthfully. “I’ve never met a man I felt less sorry for, Kathy.” He caught her gaze and held it. “Does that shock you?”
“No, I don’t think I expected any different answer.”
“But you wish I was more sympathetic?”
She looked into her cup as she answered with a slow head shake. “No, Ben, I only want you always to be honest with me.” She swept her glance suddenly upward to him.
He drained off the last of his coffee, set the cup aside, and regarded her with slowly widening and tender eyes. “I will be, Kathy. I promise you that.”
He bent to kiss her. She turned fully to meet his mouth. The thin overhead moon sank behind a silvery cloud and for that moment darkness lingered.
the end
About the Author
Lauran Paine who, under his own name and various pseudonyms has written over a thousand books, was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His family moved to California when he was at a young age, and his apprenticeship as a Western writer came about through the years he spent in the livestock trade, rodeos, and even motion pictures—where he served as an extra because of his expert horsemanship in several films starring movie cowboy Johnny Mack Brown. In the late 1930s, Paine trapped wild horses in northern Arizona and even, for a time, worked as a professional farrier. Paine came to know the Old West through the eyes of many who had been born in the 19th century, and he learned that Western life had been very different from the way it was portrayed on the screen. “I knew men who had killed other men,” he later recalled. “But they were the exceptions. Prior to and during the Depression, people were just too busy eking out an existence to indulge in Saturday-night brawls.” He served in the US Navy in the Second World War and began writing for Western pulp magazines following his discharge. It is interesting to note that his earliest novels (written under his own name and the pseudonym Mark Carrel) were published in the British market and he soon had as strong a following in that country as in the United States. Paine’s Western fiction is characterized by strong plots, authenticity, an apparently effortless ability to construct situation and character, and a preference for building his stories upon a solid foundation of historical fact. Adobe Empire (1956), one of his best novels, is a fictionalized account of the last twenty years in the life of trader William Bent and, in an off-trail way, has a melancholy, bittersweet texture that is not easily forgotten. In later novels
like The White Bird (1997) and Cache Cañon (1998), he showed that the special magic and power of his stories and characters had only matured along with his basic themes of changing times, changing attitudes, learning from experience, respecting nature, and the yearning for a simpler, more moderate way of life.
