Nathan Burdette came out of the doorway.
“Now,” Chance said. “I’m ready if you are.”
Nathan turned and nodded to someone inside. Dude and Matt Harris appeared in the doorway.
Nathan spoke, calling across the bare open space where the ground was the color of copper under the rising sun. “We’ll start Dude when you start Joe.”
Chance said softly, “All right, Joe,” and then he whirled to face the back door as a voice called his name. He almost fired and the voice said, “It’s me, Colorado.” Chance relaxed and the kid came in. He carried a rifle from the office gunrack in addition to his own guns and his pockets bulged with shells. He said matter-of-factly, “I’ll watch the back here.” He took up a position at the side of the door, facing out.
Chance smiled and shook his head. “You’re a fool, Colorado.”
“That makes two of us,” Colorado said. “Better get on with it, Joe’s looking kind of fidgety.”
Chance said, “Start walking, Joe. Slow! If I tell you to stop, you stop. Understand?”
Joe nodded. His face was strained between eagerness and fear. He wanted to run fast and hide behind Nathan, out of reach of Chance’s cold eyes and his rifle. The stretch of copper-colored ground between him and the warehouse looked a million miles across.
He stepped out into the sunlight.
Nathan shouted suddenly, “Hold it! Hold it, Joe! Not yet!”
“Come back, Joe,” Chance said, and Joe went back. A scuffle had developed in the doorway of the warehouse. Chance could see Dude’s head bobbing back and forth. Nathan was talking hurriedly to Matt Harris.
“What’s the matter?” Chance shouted.
“Dude won’t leave.”
“Oh Jesus God Almighty,” said Chance. “Dude, come out of there!” he bellowed.
Dude shouted back, “The hell with you. Joe’s your prisoner. You keep him.”
“Dude!”
“I don’t want any part of it.”
“Stay there, then,” Chance shouted. “Joe’s coming anyway, but you stay if you want to.”
He jerked his head at Joe. “Get out there. Remember—slow.”
Joe began to walk, setting one foot carefully in front of the other like a man walking a tightrope.
Chance watched the doorway of the warehouse.
Dude came out of it after a moment. His face was sullen and angry. He began to walk toward the shed. Chance sighed and wiped the sweat off his forehead. Dude and Joe continued to walk toward each other. Matt Harris stood in the warehouse door with his gun centered on Dude’s back.
Chance measured the distances with his eye and said sharply, “Joe! Slow down there! Come on, Dude!”
He wanted Dude to reach the shelter of the shed before Joe got to the warehouse and under cover. The minute Joe was safe from his rifle he and Dude were fair game.
“Damn it,” he said impatiently. “Come on!”
Dude walked a little faster. He had come about halfway across the open now. His head was down, as though he did not wish to have to look at Joe when he passed him.
“Hurry up,” Chance said.
“I’m coming,” Dude said irritably.
He strode two long paces ahead and came level with Joe going the other way.
Without any warning at all, Dude flung himself at Joe.
TWENTY-SIX
Chance hardly understood what was happening, it happened so fast. Dude clapped his arms around Joe’s waist, and the force of Dude’s rush carried them both sideways to crash over the top of a broken wall that was there and only about three feet high at that point. Somebody, Nathan perhaps, or Matt Harris, let out a startled cry that mingled with the strange noise Joe made as he went over the wall, but there were no shots. Not even Harris could have guaranteed to hit Dude without hitting Joe too.
Colorado let out a wild rebel yell and came running to join Chance. He had been watching both doors at once, more or less, and had seen Dude’s leap.
“Hold him, Dude!” he shouted. “Hold him down!”
His face was flushed and he was fairly dancing with excitement. Across the open space Matt Harris had pulled Nathan Burdette bodily into the warehouse. Chance was hunched over with the rifle in his hands, looking everywhere at once to estimate distances and positions, trying to grasp in a few seconds that were given him the essentials of this new situation.
From behind the low wall came violent sounds of motion and a rising dust.
Chance flung the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Some men had come running out of a side door of the warehouse, with the idea of circling behind the wall. One man dropped. Another one doubled over, turned, and went plunging back inside. Colorado got his two guns going. Burdette’s men ran back inside.
Chance turned and started for the back door.
“Where you going?” Colorado said.
“I’m going to try and get this gun to Dude.” He went out the back and looked carefully around the corner. From this angle he could see Dude’s and Joe’s feet thrashing where they rolled on the ground. There was no cover between the shed and the wall. Chance went back inside again.
“He’s all right as long as he hangs onto Joe,” Colorado said.
He and Chance both ducked as a burst of firing came from the warehouse and bullets began to chunk into the bricks beside the doorjamb or hum like bees through the interior of the shed. When this slacked up a bit Chance risked a look out and saw that the dust was beginning to settle behind Dude’s piece of wall.
More bullets came, sending brown clay chips flying out of the bricks.
“They’ll get tired of wasting ammunition,” Chance said. “But be careful how you stick your head out.”
“You bet,” Colorado said. “How’s Dude doing?”
“Don’t know yet,” Chance said. “He ought to be able to take Joe any day of the week, but sometimes the damnedest things happen.”
The firing stopped. Again there was a period of quiet while Burdette and his men thought things over, and in that quiet Dude called out loud and clear.
“Chance, can you hear me?”
“Yeah!”
“I got Joe. He can’t walk, but I can drag him.”
“Stay where you are!” Chance shouted. “You hear me?” He turned to Colorado. “Think you could throw him the gun from here?”
“I could try.”
Chance tossed it to him. “You’ll have a better shot at it from the back. Wait till you hear me start firing.”
Colorado nodded. He slipped out the back door. Chance gave him a second or two to get set. Then he started shooting at the warehouse doors and windows as fast as he could work the rifle. Out of the tail of his eye he saw the spurt of dust where the gun landed. Colorado had placed it well but it was short. Dude reached out from behind the end of the wall to get it but it was just beyond the stretch of his arm and he had to pull back fast because Chance could not keep all the windows of the warehouse covered at once.
Colorado came back in. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was just a little too far.” He returned to his position beside the door.
“Take the north front,” Chance said, reloading. “I’ll take the south, and we’ll divide the door between us. Ready?”
“Ready,” Colorado said.
They worked their guns fast, plastering the warehouse with lead. Dude came out in a crabwise rush after the gun and got it.
“Whew!” said Colorado, jamming cartridges into his empty guns. “Now what?”
“Now things begin to get tough,” Chance said. “Look there.”
On the far side of the warehouse, the side away from Dude, several clumps of mesquite and yucca provided cover and some men were moving in it. Chance could not see how many but he guessed six or eight at least, going Indian-fashion in the general direction of Wheeler’s wagons. From there they could easily swing around and come up on the shed from the back. Almost as soon as he noticed the dust and movement among the mesquite clumps a terrific fire star
ted up from the warehouse. He had to pull back from the doorway and content himself with snapping shots at the mesquite clumps. He did not think they were doing much good.
And then Colorado said, “There’s more of them coming out on Dude’s side.”
The men came fast, running. There was partial cover on the way they were going, a yucca, a boulder, a bit of old wall like the one Dude was behind. Chance and Colorado both did what they could but in spite of it at least three of the five or six made it to cover and started working their way around behind Dude.
Dude had Joe, and he had a gun with six shots in it, and a piece of broken wall that was only good one way. It was not exactly the same situation as having Joe safe inside a stout jail with a shotgun at his head and two or three men to guard the door.
There was another difference too. Nathan could no longer hide behind the pretense that Joe’s friends were responsible for all the trouble. He could not afford to let Dude live. He could not afford to let Chance or Colorado live. When the last chips were down, it might seem to Nathan that possession of his own life, freedom, and holdings was more important than Joe.
“Better get to the back door again,” Chance said. “They’ll be all around us in—”
The coughing double blast of a shotgun sounded abruptly from the direction of Wheeler’s wagons.
“What the hell?” said Colorado.
The firing from the warehouse slackened. Chance ran and looked out the back door.
“It’s Stumpy,” he said. “The old devil. I told him …”
Colorado grinned. “I reckon he couldn’t stay behind when there was all this good shooting going on.”
“Well, he’s sitting in a damned bad place,” Chance said.
“Where’s that?”
“Under Pat’s wagons, with the dynamite on ’em.”
He stepped out the back door. Stumpy’s double-barreled blast had caught the men unaware as they came out of the mesquite and some of them were down. But others were still whole and able to fight. Shots rattled out of the mesquite, hunting for Stumpy around the wheels of the wagons. Stumpy was huddled down somewhere out of sight, reloading. Chance fired into the mesquite, sweeping it blindly. A man leaped up grotesquely and fell. Somebody cried out. The shooting stopped and then began to come his way, considerably reduced. He dodged back inside and yelled, “Stumpy!” at the top of his lungs.
For answer there was another shotgun blast and the firing from the mesquite stopped completely.
Somebody in the warehouse unlimbered a rifle. The bullets tore up dirt around the wagon wheels.
Chance groaned. “Keep ’em as busy as you can, Colorado. I’ve got to get that old fool out of there, or we’ll all go to heaven with our boots on.”
A voice hailed him from outside. It was Carlos. He had made a long circle around to avoid the road and the men who were out on Dude’s side of the warehouse had not seen him. Now the shed covered him from them and the warehouse both. He went up to Chance and put some boxes of shells in his hands.
“I thought you might have need of these,” he said. “Now I will go and get Señor Stumpy.”
Chance caught his arm. “No,” he said. “I’ll go.” All at once his face had lit up and his eyes were shining. He shook Carlos. “Get that extra rifle and help Colorado. I don’t care if you hit anything or not, just shoot like hell and keep shooting till I get back.”
Carlos stared at him. But Chance was already pulling off his jacket. He dropped his hat on top of it, picked up his rifle, and went out the door.
Colorado said, “Carlos! Come on.”
He began to fire at the warehouse. Carlos shook his head. He took up the extra rifle and joined him.
Chance went down on his hands and knees, scuttering like a lizard across the ground and keeping the shed between him and the warehouse. He was so intent on what he was doing that he did not even feel how much his back was hurting. He heard Dude’s gun go off twice but there was no answering fire from the side. He imagined Dude had Joe pulled up over him like a blanket and the men were still afraid to shoot at him. The channel of a shallow wash opened up in front of Chance, blinding with white sand and pebbles. He slid into it. This was the way Stumpy had come and his tracks were already there. Chance followed them toward the wagons. He felt ridiculously joyous. For the first time since Dude was taken he could see a ray of hope, and it was such a beautiful thing he did not want to ruin it by admitting how frail and lonesome it really was.
The tilts of the big wagons loomed high over him like clouds against the sky and he called out softly, “Stumpy! Stumpy!”
Back in the shed Colorado began to sweat and fidget. So far Dude was holding his own and Colorado thought he had killed at least one of the men creeping around on his flank. But the firing from the warehouse was getting hotter. It kept both Colorado and Carlos pinned back against the walls on either side of the door so that they could hardly do more than make a useless noise with their guns. Colorado knew why they were suddenly wasting so much lead again, and there was nothing he could do about it.
“They are coming out, I think,” Carlos said.
“Yeah,” Colorado said.
Colorado fired obliquely at the shapes of hurrying men, briefly seen as they crossed his limited field of vision. Bullets chewed at the edges of the door, throwing dust and chunks of clay into his face. It seemed to him that Chance had been gone for years, and he wondered what the hell he was doing. The old man was slow on his feet, but even if he crawled he shouldn’t be that slow. Carlos was cool and handling the rifle well but he was no great shot and he could double for Chance only so long as he did not have to hit anything with extreme speed and accuracy. Colorado looked out through the back door of the shed and saw nothing at all. A feeling began to come over him that he was awfully young to die.
Dude’s gun went off. Colorado counted the shots. There were three. Dude was saving the last one for Joe. Colorado could hear Dude yelling. In the racket of gunfire he could not make out the words but he knew it was a warning. The evil thought crossed Colorado’s mind that Chance and Stumpy had just kept on going while he and Carlos covered for them, and then he yelled to Carlos to keep shooting and ran toward the back of the shed, keeping close to the side wall out of the line of fire.
Bullets coming through the shed were spattering into the walls all around the back door so that he could not stand beside it. He picked the best position he could, crouched down against the side wall. He would at least have one advantage: men coming out of the blazing sunlight into the sudden gloom of the shed would be momentarily blinded. He thought he could pick off quite a few before they got him.
He saw through the doorway the first of Burdette’s men coming around on the side away from Dude, running low through the sparse mesquite and the stiff dark spiny yuccas.
And all of a sudden the world turned over with a hell of a bang.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Dust flew up in a great geyser. Little green scraps of Yucca and mesquite flew with it. Colorado saw men falling and floundering around with their hands over their faces. Almost at once there was another explosion. More dust and trash and pebbles erupted and a man screamed. The men were practically invisible now in the cloud. One came stumbling out of it with his shirt in ribbons and blood running down his face where a stone had torn it. Colorado shot him. The shot sounded extremely loud on the heels of the two explosions and he realized that all firing had stopped. He ran to the back door. The dust cloud was spreading on the wind. He saw something bounding clumsily toward him, a strange misshapen shadow, and he raised his gun. Then he heard Chance shouting, and somebody let out a war whoop and he knew it was Stumpy. They came plunging in carrying boxes of dynamite, Stumpy hopping two big hops on his good leg for every one on the bad one and whooping like a maniac. Chance shoved the box he was carrying at Carlos.
“Throw it,” he panted. “A stick at a time. Colorado! Come on, kid, let’s see how good a shot you are. He’ll throw it, you hit it. For C
hrissake, Carlos, keep the damned box out of the doorway!” He ran to the back again, where Stumpy was filling his shirt out of the other box. “Come on, while they’re still not sure what hit them.” He went out the back door and Colorado heard him yelling to Dude to keep down and pull Joe up over his head.
Carlos said, “Ready, amigo?”
“Ready,” Colorado said, and from somewhere outside Chance’s rifle sounded one split second before the explosion, and it was the most beautiful combination of sound that Colorado had ever heard.
Carlos sent one of the little grayish candles looping out toward where some of Burdette’s men were going in some confusion back to the warehouse. He marked where it fell and shot at it with that calm feeling of perfect power a man gets on rare occasions, when he knows he can’t miss.
He didn’t. Not then nor after, as long as he could see to shoot.
The explosive force of the dynamite was not enclosed and so it expended itself mostly in making violent bursts of dust and noise. Some of Burdette’s men were dazed or knocked senseless by concussion, and others were hurt by flying pebbles or chunks of clay. In a few minutes the whole area between the warehouse and the shed was so obscured by smoke and dust that it was difficult to see anything at all. Colorado did not know what was going on out where Dude was but he figured from the noise, that Chance was making his own dust screen and getting to Dude that way, driving back whatever men were left over there from Dude’s last three shots.
The sunlight was only a dim orange blur now. As the dust began to move and thin in patches Colorado saw men standing or kneeling or lying down or running like hell away from there. Stumpy and Dude came in the back door hauling Joe between them. Dude was covered with dust like a clay man, his eyes shining weirdly between whitened lashes. He loaded his gun while Stumpy tied Joe’s hands behind his back. Outside a silence had come, stunning to the ears after all that noise. In it Chance’s voice sounded thin and thrilling as a trumpet.
Burdette’s men began to drop their guns and put their hands up.
Rio Bravo Page 18
