McAllister 5

by Matt Chisholm

  ‘Like shooting the girl?’

  That stopped the man. He looked surprised—‘Shooting the girl? Why, man, I had to defend myself. You don’t hold it against me for defending myself.’

  ‘You’re sure a misunderstood man,’ McAllister said.

  ‘Now you’re laughing at me.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said McAllister. ‘Right this minute I don’t have a laugh in me. Get on your feet.’

  Not taking his eyes from McAllister, the man rose slowly to his feet. He was unshaven, his eyes were wild and he looked considerably shaken from the blow he had taken and the fall from the horse which followed it.

  McAllister reckoned that they were at that moment about physical equals.

  The man said as McAllister rose: ‘Now you stay away from me.’ McAllister walked up to him.

  ‘My nose was never much to boast about, but you sure put the kybosh on what I had. A nose for a nose sounds like justice to me, though I don’t aim to use a rock on yours.’ The man tried to kick McAllister in the crotch, but a quick hand knocked his foot aside. The next instant something caught him on the nose. The sound of it breaking was so loud it startled the horses. The man sat down and sounded as if he were weeping. From his disfigured nose blood streamed down over his clothes.

  Very indistinctly, he muttered: ‘You’re a goddam Indian.’

  ‘Ain’t I?’ said McAllister.

  He called Sally and threw the saddle on her, loosely cinching it. He told the man to get to his feet and then drove him down grade towards timber and water. The man stumbled along making small mewing sounds of distress. Once he turned to McAllister to explain again: ‘You don’t understand, McAllister. That girl wanted me dead. She begged you to kill me, didn’t she? Over and over. She wanted me dead. Me who’d done everything for her. There’s no gratitude.’

  McAllister let him run on for a while, but his headache overcame his patience. He snapped: ‘Shut your gab or I’ll bend my gun-barrel over your head.’

  The man gave him a stare of pure hatred and stayed silent as he stumbled on. Thus they came together, the two men and the animals, even the broken horse who stumbled along no better than its rider, to timber and water, a dense forest of conifers and larch circling the waters of a lake. Near them a mountain torrent tumbled its crystal clear waters in the lake. A beautiful and peaceful sight.

  McAllister said: ‘Like you said, I have a soft core. So thoughtfully I brought you to soft ground that’s easier to dig.’ He drew his knife and threw it so that it stuck in the ground an inch from the man’s toe. ‘Start digging. A grave should be six foot long and as deep as you feel inclined to keep out the varmints.’

  The quarry lifted a querulous gaze to McAllister’s face. ‘You’re just showing off, McAllister. We both know you don’t mean it.’ There was just the smallest particle of doubt in his voice.

  ‘If you told me that a week back,’ McAllister said, ‘you’d of been right. Right now, you’re wrong. Knowing you changed me. Like instant conversion. I saw the error of my merciful ways. I saw that my respect for law and justice were mere heady notions. I learned from you that I’d lived wrong all my life. What I should of been was mean, petty, spiteful, jealous, murderous and dishonest. Believing in right and wrong was purely despicable and I have to confess that I am wholly ashamed of my virtues. You are now my shining example. From here on in, I shoot men in the back, I kill women and kids and I whine and cringe when somebody knocks the shits out of me. Why, Jack, now I’m just like you. I’m a stinking polecat. Now, get digging, boy, or I’ll kill you without a grave and leave you lie.’

  The man said in a low voice: ‘I believe you mean it.’

  ‘It don’t matter one way or the other—the result’s going to be the same. You’re going to be dead.’

  ‘Now see here—’

  McAllister drew his gun, cocked it and presented its muzzle at the man’s head. The fellow’s eyes became large as they stared.

  ‘Get this, Jack,’ he said. ‘This gun rules here from here on. It says you dig and you don’t talk. I’m thinking of the girl and I want to hurt you and it’s as much as I can do to hold myself back. Now dig.’

  The man bent and pulled the knife from the ground.

  ‘Oh, my God…’ he said.

  He dropped blindly to his knees and started hacking halfheartedly away at the earth. Every now and then he stopped to look at McAllister. Each time he did so he saw the dark eye of the gun muzzle, considered it hopelessly and resumed his digging.

  Finally he stopped and walked a couple of paces nearer to McAllister.

  ‘This won’t do,’ he said. ‘This is all wrong, McAllister. Men like you and me should understand each other.’

  McAllister ignored the words. ‘It was you killing the girl that finally did it, Jack. You would have gone back to stand trial and most likely gotten away with a few years in the pen, the way these things go with smart lawyers and all. Now, I’m going to sleep on this business and so are you. Get down in that grave and sleep. I’m going to sit here and watch you. If you think I’m asleep, just you lift your head out of that grave and I’ll blow it off. Hear?’

  ‘I haven’t even ate yet.’

  ‘Where’s the sense in feeding a man who’ll most likely be dead before breakfast?’

  The man gave McAllister a long look in which malevolence and fear were equally mixed and lay down in the freshly dug grave. McAllister threw a blanket over him. Then he thought of the animals and attended to them. The quarry did not move. He did not show himself when McAllister settled himself down with his back to a tree, blankets around him and gun in hand. Whether McAllister slept that night nobody would ever know, but certainly the man in the grave did not lift his head above its rim to test his captor. It is just as certain that McAllister did not have the occasion to blow his head off during the night.

  Twenty

  McAllister may or may not have slept, but it’s pretty sure that the quarry did not. When McAllister ordered him out of the grave in the first grey hour of the day, his face was the color of clay and his eyes that of mud.

  Chewing on the jerky which had occupied him during the quiet hours of the night, McAllister eyed him with a kind of distasteful pleasure.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘you look as bad as you are.’

  ‘McAllister, I have had as much of this as I aim to take.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’

  ‘Yessir, it is. You have no right—’

  McAllister raised a majestic hand. ‘Hold your horses a minute, pard,’ he said, ‘I have news for you.’

  ‘Your treatment of me is inhuman, despicable, low-down—’

  ‘I have news that you may or may not want to hear.’ The man stared, eyes wary.

  ‘You son-of-a-bitch,’ he said, ‘what have you cooked up for me now?’

  ‘The worst ordeal of all. Guess?’

  He said with venom: ‘As everybody knows you’re a ‘breed, more Cheyenne than white, I can only guess it’s the torture before you kill me.’

  ‘Worse’n that,’ said McAllister, delighted with himself. The man seemed to shrink. ‘For God’s sake kill me and get it over with.’

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ McAllister told him, ‘I’m not going to kill you. I find I can’t go against the habit of a lifetime, Jack. Any more than you can. Once a feller has been on the side of the angels it sure do spoil him for evil. I couldn’t kill you on my own account any more than I could fly. Mind you,’ he stabbed the air with a forefinger, ‘if you so much as look at me wrong I’ll make smoke and you’re dead, because I’m the law and you’re not allowed to look at me wrong. Besides which I was thinking through the night how I saw the Cheyenne tote a Pawnee prisoner across the plains and I reckon that’s the way I’ll tote you.’

  An hour later they departed the lake, McAllister riding at his ease, face somewhat battered, but decidedly better for a good breakfast which had tasted all the better because the prisoner did not share it with him. The prisoner ate jer
ky and he washed it down with water. McAllister ate a pile of bacon and beans washed down with hot coffee.

  He picked up his Henry rifle as they passed and shoved it away in the boot under his leg, promising it a good clean when they halted that night. He looked back at the lake and saw the broken horse back there watch them go. That made him feel a mite sad. Maybe the animal would take up with the mustangs. Who knew? The mule plodded past him towing his burden behind him. He had taken quite well to the Indian travois McAllister had constructed. Indeed he might have been born to it. On the travois was all McAllister’s gear. Somewhere among the gear was the unknown man, the quarry now caught, the murderous pride and vanity, Ana’s killer, finally brought low. And he was going back for legal trial. McAllister had fixed him so that he could not move hand or foot. The man did not like it.

  McAllister thought of the girl and he wondered … but what the hell good was there in wondering? What did it matter if she had betrayed him or saved him? For a brief moment they had been the only two people in the world who mattered to each other. For just as brief a moment, he had forgotten all the rules which he instinctively followed, the first being that, if you do not have law, you have nothing. The law and how it is managed is not always perfect, but without it life falls apart. The man on the travois was the extreme of a man taking the law into his own hands. The craziness of human vanity had taken over, as it always did.

  There was a sort of relief in McAllister, the relief of the return of sanity to a man who had lost his reason and knew it.

  His heart lifted. He was going home. He would raise Sally’s foals and they would grow to be horses that could run the asses off any other horses in the country.

  A pair of malevolent eyes glared at him from the travois.

  ‘You’re the smuggest looking bastard I ever saw.’

  McAllister smirked.

  ‘Ain’t I?’ he said.

  About the Author

  Peter Christopher Watts

  (19 December 1919 — 30 November 1983)

  Is the author of more than 150 novels, is better known by his pen names of “Matt Chisholm” and “Cy James”. He published his first western novel under the Matt Chisholm name in 1958 (Halfbreed). He began writing the “McAllister” series in 1963 with The Hard Men, and that series ran to 35 novels. He followed that up with the “Storm” series. And used the Cy James name for his “Spur” series.

  More on PETER WATTS

  McALLISTER 5: McALLISTER—QUARRY

  By Matt Chisholm

  First published by Hamlyn Books in 1981

  Copyright © 1981, 2017 by Matt Chisholm

  First Smashwords Edition: December 2017

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

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