by Lauran Paine
“How long was that before Dodge got killed?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t rightly know. Six months maybe, maybe eight months.” The old cowboy screwed up his face. “Say, you don’t think Les Tallant killed the old man, do you? Hell, from what I heard around town, they was more’n one man in at the shootin’.”
The Kid reached into his pocket and shrugged at the same time. He passed the hostler a gold piece and watched the avaricious glitter come into the whiskey-rheumy eyes. “No. I don’t allow Tallant did the killin’ by himself. ¿Quién sabe? Who knows who did it, or how many there were?” He thanked the hostler, and ducked back out of town.
The Kid had the thing pretty well worked out in his mind before he moved out of his lair among the juniper hills. It wasn’t exactly clear to him, yet, what it was all about, but somehow he felt that he’d stumbled onto a short-cut to the killers. He leisurely saddled up the big black, hummed in the late afternoon, checked his gun and belt loops, swung aboard, and rode carefully out over the moonlit range. The night was balmy, like there might be summer rain in the offing, and the full, mellow light of the heavens covered the land with its mantle of eerie, soft, and mysterious light.
The Kid rode for several hours before he came to the knoll where he’d watched the D-Back-To-Back ranch yard the day of his gunfight with Dugan and Beale. Like a ghostly silhouette, the Kid sat in a pensive mood, overlooking the ranch below. The buildings were dark. The Kid dismounted, shucked his spurs, hobbled his horse, and began the descent to the ranch yard below. He knew the way, this time, and, by the time the back of the house loomed up before him, he had taken only a fraction of the time he had used on his first abortive visit to Toma Dodge.
The Kid tried the window, found it not only unlocked, but easier to slide up than it had been before. A tiny tinkling of warning rang far back in the dim recesses of his mind but he shrugged them away. He was inside the room, flattened against the wall, hand hovering over his .45, listening, when the little warning buzzed again. This time, concentrating on the darkness as he was, the warning was limned sharply in his mind. He stood motionlessly and listened. Somewhere in the house he could hear voices. Men’s voices. A full awareness of his position swept over him in an instant and he hesitated briefly, looking wonderingly at the opened window. The voices came again, dim and distant and incomprehensible, but unmistakable. He turned his back on the route of escape and began a sidling, stealthy advance across the room.
The Kid’s eyes were accustomed to the gloom by the time he had been in the Dodge house for ten minutes. Still, he felt his way along the wall, careful not to bump into anything. He found a long, cool corridor and went down it. The voices were clearer now and suddenly he heard the voice of Toma Dodge. The words weren’t hard to understand and they sent a chill over the Kid.
“No. You’re both wrong. He told me about the two bullet holes, and I saw them for myself.”
A masculine voice interrupted. “I told you we should’ve finished off the damned horse.”
Another voice, garrulous and sullen, answered: “All right, I was wrong. As soon as she signs the deed, we’ll go back an’ kill the damn’ critter.”
The first voice answered swiftly and there was the sound of a man rising from his chair. “Come on, Toma, we ain’t got all night. Sign it an’ nothin’ll happen to you.”
“And if I don’t?”
There was an unpleasant silence that the Kid felt and understood. He let his hand rest caressingly on his gun butt. “An’ if you don’t, you’ll get what your old man got.”
“You’d do that to a woman?” Her voice was high and incredulous.
Apparently the man nodded because Toma’s voice came again, softly, as though a dismal apathy had swept over her. “You’ll never be able to get away with it.”
“Let us worry about that, Toma. You jus’ sign the deed.”
The Vermilion Kid was as tense as a coiled spring. He was prepared to go into violent action on an instant’s notice. There was a long silence from the other room, then the Kid relaxed and turned away as he heard one of the men sigh and speak: “That’s more like it, Toma. Now you’re as safe as can be.”
The Kid was lowering himself out of the window when Toma answered, but he couldn’t hear her reply. He thought: You’re not safe, though, Jeff Beale. You’ve made the greatest mistake of your life.
The Kid ran in a crouched, zigzag course back to his waiting horse. He slipped off the hobbles after pulling on the split-ear bridle, mounted in a flying leap of frantic hoofbeats, and rode down the night like a wraith of doom, thundering along the trackless range, a faint, ghostly figure bent on an act of justice that would thwart, if timely enough, the evil plans of two ruthless murderers.
Holbrook was noisy in a desultory sort of way. It was a weekday night and the revelers that inundated the town on Saturday night were mostly asleep in the bunkhouses across the cattle country. Even so, however, there was enough noise to mute down the thundering approach of hoofbeats. The raucous screech of a protesting piano, accompanied by a nasal tenor, frequently drowned out by the laughter, shouts, and curses of the saloon clientele, ignored the narrow-eyed rider who swung down inside Tallant’s livery barn, tense and with probing, hard eyes of smoke-gray.
Disturbed in his secret libations, the bleary-eyed hostler came grumblingly out of a dark stall where a mound of unclean hay served as couch, bed, and bar. Looking up when he was close enough to discern the night traveler, the hostler gave a small start and shook his head. “Too late, pardner, too late.”
The Kid stepped forward. “What d’ya mean, too late?”
“Jus’ what I said. Sheriff Dugan’s got a warrant out for you. Dead or alive. You’re a goner.”
The Kid appraised the man. He wondered if the man was too drunk to trust. “Pardner, just how drunk are you, anyway?”
The hostler’s face got a sullen smear of color in his cheeks and his eyes were surly. “Not so drunk that I don’t know a thing or two. Why?”
The Kid jumped in whole hog. He had no other choice. “Because, pardner, a man’s life depends on you tonight.”
“That so? Whose?”
“Mine, amigo, mine.”
The hostler looked owlishly at the Kid and a stray strand of his old-time decency flared up in a quick, final effort to assert itself. The man’s voice was suddenly very steady and sincere and his jaw shot out a little. “All right, pardner, start at the beginnin’.”
“Tallant an’ Jeff Beale are on their way here to kill Dodge’s horse tonight.”
The hostler made a forlorn little clucking sound in his throat. “An’ the poor critter’s on the mend, too. Damned if I don’t believe he’s goin’ to pull through, after all.”
The Kid let the interruption run its course. “Listen, pardner, I want you to hide my horse in one of those back stalls. Don’t unsaddle or unbridle him. Jus’ close the door to the stall and fork him a little hay so’s he’ll be quiet.”
“That all?”
“No. I want you to take a note over to Sheriff Dugan an’ then stay out of the barn until the shootin’s over. Understand?”
“I reckon. Where’s the note?”
“Take care of my horse an’ I’ll write it.”
The hostler nodded, took the Kid’s reins, and led the black horse off into the dark recesses of the old barn. The Kid tore a handbill of himself off the barn wall, scrabbled a stubby pencil out of a shirt pocket, and wrote frowningly until the sot returned. He folded the coarse paper and handed it to his accomplice. “Pardner, here’s where you’ve got the whip-hand. If you double-cross me an’ hand that there paper to Tallant, Beale…or anyone besides the sheriff…I’m done for.”
The old cowboy pulled himself up in his filthy rags and his watery brown eyes were stern. “I’m a lot of things, compadre, but a bushwhacker ain’t one of ’em.”
The Kid nodded softly. “I believe you, pardner. On your way.”
The hostler had disappeared down the plank sidewalk and
the Kid had hidden himself behind some loose planks in the gloom of the building, before the sound of horses came to him over the sounds of revelry. He watched, motionless, as Beale and Tallant swung down, tied their horses in tie stalls, loosened their cinchas, and looked at one another.
Beale spoke first. “Went off like clockwork.”
“Yeah. All we got to do is make two more killings. Blast the damned horse, then go back an’ get the girl, an’ the whole shootin’ match is ours.”
Tallant nodded. “Yeah. It come off better’n I expected. Two more killin’s an’ the whole country’ll be after the Vermilion Kid with orders from Dugan to shoot on sight. Hell, that dang’ would-be owlhooter’ll never get close enough to anybody to convince ’em he ain’t guilty.”
“Yeah, but what about the horse?”
Tallant rubbed his hands together. “That’s the easiest part. We kill him, drag him off out on the range behind town, an’ the coyotes’ll have him torn to pieces in twenty-four hours. Nobody’ll ever see them two holes again.”
Beale swore gruffly. “Yeah. But if it hadn’t been for that damned Kid, nobody’d ever’ve noticed there was two holes to start with.”
Tallant laughed smoothly. “Don’t make no difference now. Come on, let’s go in the office an’ have a drink afore we finish off the horse.”
Beale nodded heavily. “Sure, we’ll be ridin’ again, back to the D-Back-To-Back for Toma before this night’s work is done, so I reckon we’ll need the lift, eh?”
Tallant didn’t answer and the Kid could barely make out his outline and hear the soft music of his spurs as the two men went into the cubbyhole office, lit a lamp that cast a rich, yellowish light, and drank deeply from a brown bottle Tallant got out of the safe.
The Kid’s fury was murderously cold. That Beale and Tallant intended to shoot down Toma Dodge was almost overpowering him.
Jeff Beale came out of the office first. He hesitated at the door, waiting for Tallant to lock up the whiskey bottle in the safe again. Tallant’s garrulous voice came to him: “If I don’t lock up the whiskey in the safe, that damned booze hound I got for a hostler’ll steal it all.”
Beale didn’t answer. He was studying the mellow moonlight inside the barn. He finally got impatient: “Come on, dammit.”
Tallant slammed the safe door, spun the dial, and hurried out of the office. The two men walked down the long, wide corridor toward the stall of the wounded horse. Tallant walked with the sure steps of a man to whom the darkness posed no deterrent, but Beale swore dourly to himself and made slower time. Tallant stopped at a stall directly across from the Kid’s hide-out and waited for Beale to come up.
“He’s in here.”
“If you shoot him, it’ll make too much noise.”
“Ain’t goin’ to shoot him. Goin’ to knock him over the poll with my gun barrel.”
Tallant swung open the door as Beale came up. “Lead him out here to the alley. He’ll be too hard to snake outen the stall when he’s dead.”
“Right.” Tallant put a shank to the horse’s halter and led the weak, stumbling animal through the doorway. Beale swore savagely at the animal’s slow progress and kicked out viciously, striking the horse in the stomach. The animal flinched and grunted with pain. The Kid’s eyes flamed in the darkness. Tallant turned the big bay so that he faced the rear door of the barn, drew his gun, tossed a quick look at Beale, who nodded indifferently, his evil face twisted into a cruel grin of anticipation, then all hell broke loose.
There was a thunderous, magnified echo from inside the barn and Tallant’s six-gun went flipping out of his hand as though plucked from his startled fingers by an invisible hand. The bay horse jumped frantically and lurched out of the barn’s rear doorway. Beale ripped out an obscene oath and threw himself sideways to the ground. Les Tallant stood for a full ten seconds, incredulous and unbelieving, then he leaned quickly backward into the recently vacated stall and ran his hand, like the striking tongue of a rattler, under his coat and came up with a big-bore little Derringer.
Jeff Beale had seen the mushroom of flame from the Kid’s gun and fired as soon as he hit the ground, then rolled away, waiting for the answering shot that never came. Beale’s breathing sounded as loud as the puffing of a locomotive in his own ears. He strained his eyes into the gloom for a target, saw none, listened acutely, heard nothing, threw two more snap shots toward where the flame had been, and waited. He began to hope that his first shot had found the hidden gunman, and, as the seconds ticked by, he felt certain that the hidden assassin had been knocked off with his first shot.
“Les?”
For a long moment Tallant didn’t answer, then, seeing that no exploratory shots came toward Beale’s voice, he answered: “Yes?”
“Think I got him with the first shot?”
Another pause, then Tallant’s voice cautious and soft, came back: “Who is it?”
Beale’s voice was almost normal now. He was certain the unseen gunman had been killed outright. “Hell, how should I know? I can’t see in the dark like no damned cat.”
Tallant made out the rising form of his partner, coming erect off the floor of the barn. “Be careful, Jeff. He might be playin’ ’possum.”
“I’ll damned soon find out.”
Walking slowly forward, Jeff Beale was crouched almost double, his gun held out in front of him, when the second shot came out of the darkness. Tallant saw the flash out of the corner of his eye and heard the roar even as he fired and saw Beale go down in a cursing heap. He fired again and again, then suddently the little Derringer was empty. The acrid smell of gunsmoke was thick in the air and some of the stalled horses were snorting wildly in fear.
Tallant was panicky. He was unarmed now, and Beale was hit. A thought flashed across his mind and he darted toward the fallen man, jerked the .45 from his fingers, and ran zigzag through the barn toward the tie stalls and his snorting, wild-eyed horse as Jeff Beale called after him. Once, Tallant whirled, aimed carefully, and pulled the trigger. Beale abruptly stopped his swearing, jerked spasmodically against the violence of his suddenly short-circuited nervous system, and went limp, twitching dully over the freshly raked, hard-packed earth of the livery barn floor.
Seeing Tallant on the verge of escape, the Vermilion Kid leaped stiffly from his hiding place, ran to the middle of the alleyway, unmindfully of the clear outline of the moonlight behind him that silhouetted him into a perfect target. “Don’t move, Tallant. Get away from the horse’s head.”
Tallant was obsessed with an insane urge to flee. He was beyond reason. He whirled, threw up his gun, and fired. The Kid staggered backward, went down to one knee, and his head drooped. Only one thing made it possible for him to force his mind and muscles to work, the certain knowledge that Tallant was on his way to kill Toma Dodge.
He brought up his right arm. The gun weighed 100 pounds. Its barrel weaved unsteadily, and, as the Kid squeezed the trigger, he saw a vague, shapless figure leap out of the shadows and attach itself to the bridle of the horse that Tallant had just swung upon. He saw, too, the quick, descending arc as Tallant’s gun came down, and the orange tongue of flame when he fired. The ragged figure fell suddenly to earth. The Kid squeezed the trigger and saw Tallant straighten in the saddle. The blasting roar of another gunshot split the night, and the Kid sank down.
When the Vermilion Kid opened his eyes, he was looking into the hard, relentless face of Sheriff Dugan. His eyes wandered from Dugan’s flinty features to the surrounding walls and ceiling. He had never been in the sheriff’s office before, but he knew he was lying on a makeshift cot behind Dugan’s untidy desk. He swung his eyes back to Dugan. “You got the note?”
Dugan nodded dumbly.
“Where’s the bay horse? Seems a shame that a horse as gutsy as he is damned near got killed.”
Dugan’s eyes clouded for just an instant, then the film of hardness settled into place once more. “He’s goin’ to be all right. Some of the D-Back-To-Back riders led him out to the
ranch. The old boy’s lookin’ a little better all the time. He’s goin’ to make it, all right.” The sheriff’s voice drifted off and faded out altogether.
The Kid nodded slightly. “What happened after I took my siesta?”
“Nothin’ much. Tallant was fixin’ to ride out when old Bob, the hostler, jumped him an’ tried to pull him off his horse. He shot the old boy dead.”
There was an awkward moment of silence as each man, in his own way, said a rough, embarrassed prayer for the drunkard. Dugan cleared his throat loudly. “After I got your note about Tallant and Beale wantin’ to kill the horse, I loped down there an’ got there just as Bob made his play. I could dimly see you kneelin’ in the back o’ the barn, near Beale’s body. Les Tallant threw down on me, an’ I shot him out o’ the saddle. That’s all there was to it.”
The Kid’s eyes strayed around the room again and came up suddenly, wide and incredulous. Toma Dodge was sitting, small and fragile, white-faced and big-eyed, near Dugan’s desk. The Kid swallowed a couple of times quickly and felt the blood rushing into his face. Dugan cast a quick, furtive look at the two of them, arose, coughed, and ambled toward the door. When he was at the opening, he turned slowly.
“Take it easy, Kid. You got a bad notch in the side. Three inches more to the left and you’d’ve been makin’ the long march with Beale.” He let his eyes wander aimlessly to Toma, small and slightly flushed, in the old cane-backed chair. “Sorta look after him for a spell, will you, Toma? I got to go…uh…uptown for a few minutes.” Dugan closed the door softly behind him and strolled slowly down the roadway toward the silent, gloomy maw of the livery barn.
“Miss Dodge, I…”
“Toma.”
“Uh, yeah. Toma, I reckon we figured this thing out pretty well, at that, didn’t we?”
“Yes.” Her lips quivered for a moment and the reserve melted away. “Oh, Kid I’m so sorry I misjudged you.” She left the chair and went up closer to the improvised cot. The Kid smiled up at her and the faint little wistful smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
