Sunset Trail

by Wayne D. Overholser

  “Sit down, kid,” she said, and motioned to one of the straight-backed chairs. “Surprised that a woman is gonna run herd on you?”

  He nodded. “A lot of things are surprising me.”

  She laughed. “I’ll bet they are, kid. I’ll bet they are.” Her face turned grave as she bit her lip and stared at him for a moment, her good-natured expression gone. “We’d best have an understanding, kid. Don’t figure you can take advantage of me. I’m tougher’n a boot heel. If you get ornery, I’ll blow your head off. Savvy?”

  “I sure do,” Bud said. “That’s about all I’ve been hearing.”

  “I guess all of us want you to know that, when we talk, we ain’t just making the wind blow,” she said. “You and your family got caught in this scheme. None of us, unless it’s Ross Hart, wants to hurt you. But on the other hand, we can hurt you plenty if something goes wrong that might make us lose our big, fat fee.”

  He started to ask her what she meant by big, fat fee. It didn’t seem right for her to call the stolen bank money a fee. Sammy came in then and closed the door, so Bud didn’t ask the question.

  The woman went to Sammy and kissed him, then patted his cheek and said something that must have been a love word. It seemed a little crazy to Bud. She was older than Sammy. Besides that, two people working on a bank-robbing scheme like this didn’t seem to be the kind who would be lovers. But then, maybe all lovers didn’t look like Jean and Jerry.

  “It’s going fine so far,” Sammy said. “The Dugans are behaving all right. John’s a real slick one. He even fooled the sheriff when he came in with the Dugan girl.”

  “I ain’t staying here for no posse to find,” the woman warned. “You be sure John Smith knows that.”

  “Oh, he knows it, all right,” Sammy said. “No reason why it won’t work on schedule just like we planned. Well, I’ve got to get back. Don’t let the kid get the bulge on you.”

  “He won’t,” the woman said.

  She kissed Sammy again. After he left, she barred the door, then jerked a thumb at the bunk. “You lie down and go to sleep. After a while I may lie down with you, but right now I’m wide awake, thinking about all that dinero Sammy’s gonna make out of this caper.”

  “What are you getting a big, fat fee for?” Bud asked.

  “For murdering. . . .” She stopped, looking as guilty as if she were a small child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “You little bastard, you ask too many questions. Now, you go to sleep or, by God, I’ll put you to sleep.”

  He didn’t argue. She looked mean, real mean. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, the familiar prickles running up and down his back again. Who were they going to murder? Not his father. They’d had plenty of chance to do that already. And not Jerry Corrigan. They’d have made him stay when they’d had a chance. No, it must be somebody else, maybe some of the visitors who would be in town for the celebration.

  He couldn’t think who it would be, and presently he dropped off to sleep, the question still unanswered.

  XII

  Time dragged for Matt until he began to wonder if Bud and Sammy Bean were going to spend the night on the back porch. He heard nothing for what seemed a long time after the screen slammed shut, then the mutter of talk. After that there was silence again. They must have gone. He relaxed, realizing only then how tense he had been.

  Smith rose. “You can’t see Ross up there at the head of the stairs, but he can see you. Don’t move till I get back.”

  He left the room and disappeared into the kitchen. Matt glanced at Nora, then at Jean. He said: “This is really happening, Jean.”

  She had been staring at the floor, her hands clasped on her lap. Now she looked up, whispering: “I’m not sure it is. I never felt like this before in my whole life except when I’ve had some awful dream. Maybe I’m having one now. I hope I’m alive tomorrow noon so I can wake up from it.”

  “We will if we don’t lose our heads,” Matt said, trying to make his voice hold a calm assurance he did not feel.

  Smith came back into the room. “They’re gone. Sammy should be back in an hour or so. If you folks have kept your heads as Dugan was just saying, the boy will be released about noon tomorrow, unharmed. Now you can go to bed. Jean, you will stay in your room in the morning until you’re called. Missus Dugan, you will get breakfast for us. I want a good meal because we’ll have to ride like hell when we leave here and I don’t know when we’ll get a chance to eat again.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll poison you?” Nora asked. Smith’s lips smiled, but his bright eyes narrowed and grew hard. “No, I’m not afraid. You’d better make sure I don’t get a stomach ache, though. I might lose my temper if I do.” He turned to Jean. “Go to bed.”

  She rose and climbed the stairs and walked past Ross Hart without as much as glancing at him. When her bedroom door slammed shut, Smith said: “Now you old folks can go to bed.” His lips widened into his humorless grin again, then it faded. “I guess I’m older than either of you, but tonight you probably feel older than I do. I doubt that you’ll sleep much. You’ll lie awake and think up a dozen notions to whip us. Slipping out through the window and going after the sheriff, for instance, but you’ll give them up.”

  Nora held up her hands to Matt who stood in front of her. He helped her to her feet. She remained motionless for a moment, staring past him at Smith. She was not a woman who normally hated anyone, but now Matt saw a loathing in her eyes he had never seen there before.

  “Before this is over with,” she said, “we’ll see you dead. I don’t know when or how, but we will.”

  She turned and stalked into the bedroom, her heels clicking sharply on the floor. Smith said somberly: “She will be the death of you and your children if you don’t talk some sense into her.”

  Matt followed her into the bedroom and shut the door. She had lighted a lamp on the bureau and now walked to the windows and pulled down the blinds. When she turned, he saw the pulse throbbing in her temples.

  “I believe you would give your life to get the best of them,” he said.

  “Of course I would,” she said, “if it would do any good.”

  “That’s the point,” he said. “My head still hurts, but I’m thinking straight enough. They’re after our money. All right, we’ll let them have it and then try to catch up with them after they’ve left, when you and Jean and Bud are safe.”

  She started to unbutton her blouse, then dropped her hand. “I’m not going to undress. Something might happen.” She sat down on the bed and took off her shoes, and then lay down, frowning at him. “Matt, I don’t think we can trust them to do what they say. We don’t know they won’t kill us after they get the money. We don’t know what will happen to Jean when she’s alone with them in the morning. We don’t know that they’ll leave Bud alive when they go.”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and tugged off his boots. Then he looked at her. She shocked him. In twenty years of married life he had never seen her like this. But then they had never faced a situation like this before.

  “You’re saying we had better let them kill us if that will keep them from getting the money?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m thinking they’ll kill us anyway. If that’s what we’re up against, we’d better deal the cards ourselves.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The window’s open,” she said. “Go get Jerry.”

  He shook his head. “I’d live maybe. You might. Jean wouldn’t. Neither would Bud.”

  “You’re going to let them have both the money and our lives?” she asked. “After all you’ve gone through to raise that ten thousand dollars to do something for Amity?”

  “I’d rather let them have the money than to get “I’d rather let them have the money than to get any of us killed,” he answered. “There’s a chance we could get the money back, but we’d never get our lives back if they killed us. They’re not bluffing, Nora. If we push them, they’ll do
exactly what they said they would.”

  He lay down beside her. The room was like an oven. The sweat oozed out of his pores and soaked his clothes. He stared at the ceiling, thinking it wasn’t entirely the heat that was making him sweat. He wanted to take his clothes off, but Nora was right. Something might happen. They had better be dressed.

  Nora got up and blew out the lamp, then returned to the bed and lay down. He put a hand on her stomach. It was as tight as a drumhead. His touch was all it took to break her self-control. She began to cry. She turned to him and hugged him. He felt her tears on his cheek; he heard her whisper: “What are we going to do?”

  He slipped an arm under her shoulders and brought her body against his. He held her that way for a moment until they made each other so hot that neither could stand it. He kissed her and pulled his arm away from her. She turned to lie on her back again.

  “We’ll play it out,” he said. “We wait for them to make a mistake. Somewhere . . . sometime . . .they’ll make one. I’m sure of it.”

  “Honey, have you thought of what people will say?” she asked. “About you if these . . . these devils get the money and escape? I mean, their staying in our house and you bringing it to them?”

  “Yes, I’ve thought about it,” he said somberly. s“We’ll pay everybody back. With prices what they are now, it would break us if we have to sell the ranch and all our stock, but if we have to start over, it will be better than losing our children.”

  “I know you’re right,” she said in a low tone. “I never knew you to be wrong in any kind of a crisis, but I just can’t stand it to let these monsters get away with that money after they’ve come into our house and ordered us around and slugged you. I never thought I would want to kill another human being, but I want to kill these men, all three of them.” He was silent and presently he heard her relaxed breathing and knew she was asleep. He stayed awake. Smith had been right. One idea after another occurred to him, but none would work as long as they had Bud.

  He wondered who was involved who lived here in Amity. Someone had to be. Smith had been informed, informed of so many details about Matt and his family that this someone, whoever he was, must be a person who knew the Dugans very well.

  Matt went over in his mind each man who might be an informer. Jerry Corrigan? Ridiculous. He was going to marry Jean. Matt had known him since he was a boy and he had never suspected Jerry of doing anything that even smacked of dishonesty. In any case, Jerry would not be involved in a crime that put Jean in danger and she was surely in danger now.

  Uncle Pete Fisher? No, that was almost as ridiculous. He was a bitter old man, as he had admitted, and there were some folks in town who thought he was a little foolish, sitting on a bench in front of the courthouse and telling tall tales to the town boys like Bud the way he did.

  There were plenty of others who were better bets. The hotel man, Cole Talbot, was one. His business had been next to nothing ever since the panic had struck almost a year ago. His temper had grown worse until he seemed to be mad at everyone and everything.

  Fred Follett, the cashier? Matt was fond of him, but he had to admit Follett was a good candidate. He knew the $10,000 had been delivered to the bank, a fact which Matt had not advertised. He was a poor man who wanted to marry a girl who had a bad case of the gimmes. A portion of the $10,000 would set him up with the girl.

  There were plenty of other men in town who knew the Dugan habits well enough to give Smith all the information he needed. The saloon man, Sam Elliott. Walt Payson, who owned the livery stable. Jim Long, who ran the Mercantile and was in bad financial trouble.

  Too, it could be one or more of the cattlemen. Some had opposed the dam project on general principles, claiming that it was a bad thing for any cattle country to start inviting farmers to come in and settle. The next thing you knew, they said, farmers would be stupid enough to start dry farming and there went your range.

  It didn’t seem to Matt that any of these men would be part of a scheme that would endanger Nora and Jean. Even Fred Follett. . . . Matt tensed. He heard voices from the front of the house. One of them belonged to Jerry Corrigan.

  XIII

  Jerry Corrigan woke with a start. He was sitting up in bed, the words Ross Hart running through his mind like an ugly refrain. The name had been vaguely familiar when he heard it. Now he had to identify it because it was significant. He didn’t know why, but he knew it was.

  He had not been asleep very long. The moonlight was falling through the window just as it had when he’d gone to bed. He put his feet on the floor, knowing he had to do something. To go to the Dugan house and knock on the door at this time of night and get them up just to ask about a man they didn’t even know was ridiculous.

  But he had to do something. Ross Hart. Ross Hart. Ross Hart. On occasion he’d had a tune run through his mind like that. Sometimes he wouldn’t get rid of it for hours and it would almost drive him crazy.

  Usually it was a tune that meant something. Maybe Jean had hummed it when they’d been together, or she might have played it on the piano. Perhaps they had been to a band concert in the park and the band had played it. He had a hunch that the name Ross Hartmeantsomethingthathadtodo with Jean’s safety.

  He dressed, thinking that this last notion was as ridiculous as getting the Dugans out of bed. Jean was safely home with her parents, her brother, and two cousins. What could a strange man named Ross Hart do to her? He buckled his gun belt around him, upset because of the vague uneasiness that refused to go away.

  He went down the stairs and across the deserted lobby and into the street. He had never felt this way in his life before. It was like seeing some sort of apparition that you can’t identify. You know it isn’t real, but you have chills running up and down your back because it is something strange and mysterious that you don’t understand.

  Corrigan turned toward the courthouse, thinking that he might have seen the name on a Reward dodger sometime or other, perhaps months ago. He had forgotten it, but perhaps the memory had lingered in some dark corner of his mind to pop out after he had gone to sleep.

  This seemed ridiculous, too. At least it had never happened before, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen now. Agood many things were taking place in the next month that would make it the most important month in his life. By the time he reached the front door of the courthouse, he decided that he was just plain nervous about getting married. Well, he was here, so he’d go ahead and look through the Reward dodgers.

  He felt his way along the dark corridor to his office at the end of the hall, his footsteps making weird, echoing sounds in the nearly empty buildi-ing. He scratched a match and lighted a bracket lamp on the wall above the desk, then sat down and took a pile of Reward dodgers from the bottom drawer.

  He began thumbing through the notices. He had almost reached the bottom of the stack when he found the one he wanted. It had come in nearly a year ago. He had not paid much attention to it because it was from southern Arizona and he had no reason to think that Ross Hart would ever show up here in eastern Colorado.

  As he read, Corrigan understood why he had not entirely forgotten the name. Ross Hart was about as bad as they came. He was young, only twenty when the Reward dodger had been printed, but if he lived, he would become as famous as Jesse or Frank James or one of the Daltons or maybe Sam Bass.

  According to the description, he was a small man with red hair and brown eyes. He was fast and deadly with the two six-shooters he habitually carried. He was wanted for bank robbery, stage robbery, and murder. No one knew how many women and men he had killed, but it was thought to be at least ten.

  After the last stage hold-up, he was known to have fled into Mexico and had not been heard of since. Areward of $1,000 was offered for his capture, dead or alive. At the bottom of the paper were the words in tall letters: THIS MAN IS DANGEROUS.

  Corrigan sat back and wiped the sweat from his face. How could Nora’s cousins get hooked up with a man like that? But maybe he wa
s jumping at shadows. This probably wasn’t the same Ross Hart. An outlaw as notorious as he was would surely change his name.

  Corrigan rolled and lighted a cigarette, then leaned back in his swivel chair. He stared at the ceiling and tried to think this through. Where had the real Ross Hart spent the last year? The Reward dodger said he made a habit of jumping back and forth across the border, but Corrigan thought he would have heard of him sometime during the past year if he had come back into the United States.

  Ross Hart was not a common name like John Smith. Corrigan supposed there were 10,000 John Smiths in the United States, but there were not likely to be many Ross Harts, particularly in the West and be the kind of men who could hire out as cowhands. This last thought finally forced Corrigan’s decision. Ross Hart might have decided that the heat was so great he’d better just lie low somewhere. Riding for a cattle buyer in the Grand Junction area was about as safe a hide-out as he would be likely to find.

  Corrigan dropped the Reward dodgers back into the drawer, closed it, blew out the lamp, and left the office. He was bothered by the fact that Ross Hart had not changed his name, but it didn’t prove anything. Men like Hart sometimes kept their real names simply as an act of bravado. Too, he may have thought it wouldn’t make any difference, that law officers in Colorado wouldn’t know anything about him.

  Matt would more than likely cuss him out for waking him in the middle of the night, tired as he was and with a big day coming up tomorrow. But he was going to do it anyway. All of his thinking about the real outlaw and this cowboy in the Dugan house had been wild guessing. Corrigan had no way of knowing what was in the outlaw’s mind as to why he would hide out up in Colorado or why he didn’t change his name. But he did know a little bit about what the outlaw looked like and his approximate age.

  If this man tallied, Corrigan would jail him, dangerous or not. The chances were that John Smith and Sammy Bean didn’t know anything about the fellow’s record. Naturally Smith wouldn’t quiz him about where he had been or why he was looking for work on the Grand. The only thing Smith would want to know was whether he could handle a riding job.