The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

That was the play Kinevan was planning. That was the move Perris no doubt expected. The big speculator was watching them both with a hard intensity, every muscle taut, waiting, waiting.

  “I’m out of pipe tobacco, Tex,” Cleve Logan said, deliberately putting himself between Kinevan and the window. “How about one of those stogies?”

  Anticlimax shot across Kinevan’s eyes as he fumbled in his vest for a cigar and handed it over. Something in Logan’s eyes as their hat brims touched warned the Texan that Logan was figuring another angle here.

  Biting off the end of the cigar, Logan leaned his cue against the pool table and reached up to the suspended lamp with his left hand, pulling it down on its counterbalanced chains.

  With the shadow of his hat brim falling on his right hand and the eight ball palmed there, Logan jacked up the hot globe of the lamp and, leaning forward across the mahogany rim of the table, touched the tip of his cigar to the wick flame.

  Tex Kinevan, deducing that this seemingly innocent business was somehow fraught with critical import for them both, forced his eyes off the pulled-down lamp which Logan’s left hand held at face level.

  Under the pretense of getting his cigar going freely, Logan let the celluloid eight ball roll out of his cupped palm, into the brass cowling which housed the lamp’s wick-spreader. Screening this maneuver behind dense puffs of cigar smoke, Logan lowered the chimney on its prongs and let the counter-balance weights lift the lamp back to its place under the ceiling.

  At that elevation, no eye could see the highly inflammable pool ball which Logan had left inside the lamp chimney, an inch from the open flame.

  From somewhere in the recesses of his memory, Cleve Logan had dredged up a picture from out of the past—the time a drunken cowhand in a Montana saloon had chucked a similar pool ball into a heating stove. The resulting explosion of the celluloid sphere had shattered the cast-iron stove to bits, scattering embers which had burned the building to its foundations.

  The intolerable strain was beginning to show on Kinevan, for his next shot missed a pat setup by inches. Waiting for the cue ball to finish its angling journey around the rubber cushions, both men heard the sound of a side door opening and closing, and it seemed to them in that moment that the temperature of this smoke-fouled poolroom dropped by ten degrees.

  Logan heard Tex Kinevan suck in a breath at his shoulder as he crouched over the table, studying his next shot. Glancing up under the downsweep of his Stetson brim, Cleve Logan saw the big shape of Blackie Marengo standing there.

  Marengo’s right arm was reposing in a sling. His left was filled with a big-bored Remington six-shooter, its knurled hammer tipped back to full cock.

  Logan straightened up, restraining an almost irresistible urge to glance up at the lamp. It seemed impossible that the eight ball nested against the hot metal wick housing had not heated up to the detonation point by now. He knew a moment’s panic, wondering if the pool ball was made of some noninflammable composition, perhaps ivory, enameled black.

  “All right, men,” Duke Perris spoke, lifting a stubby-barreled .41 derringer from his coat pocket. “This farce has continued long enough. I could have tallied you over at Ringbone tonight, Logan. I brought you here to face Marengo first.”

  Kinevan was standing at Logan’s side, every muscle in his rawhide frame bulging with strain as he chalked his cue tip. A rivulet of sweat trickled off the point of his chin as he heard Logan’s half-whisper, “Take it easy, kid. Wait this out.”

  Blackie Marengo was grinning at Logan with pure venom in his eyes. Duke Perris moved over beside the convict, his gaze directed now at Tex Kinevan.

  “You told Toke Grossett that Logan was Trig Fetterman,” Perris said. “That’s why I’m forced to scratch you off, Kinevan.”

  Cleve Logan spoke desperately, “My error there, Perris. I wasn’t sure you’d taken my bait. I got Kinevan to do that to help establish my little masquerade. Kinevan’s not mixed up in this.”

  Perris grinned. “He’s not wearing a star?”

  Logan shook his head. “Kinevan is an old friend, not a lawman. He had the bad luck to run into me on the Sacajawea. I deserve to be stirrup-drug through hell for sucking him in.”

  Perris turned to his gorilla-faced henchman.

  “Blackie, you take Logan. I’ll cash in Kin—”

  In that instant an earsplitting blast came from the innards of the big ceiling lamp overhead. The eight ball’s delayed explosion was a cataclysmic thing in this confined room, plunging the place into deep and instantaneous blackness, the air filled with flying shards of glass and twisted metal from the blasted lamp.

  Logan hurled his cue like a harpoon at the flash of bore-flame which spat from Blackie Marengo’s big .44. He felt the concussion wave of the explosion strike his eardrums; the blow of that was a physical thing, as acutely painful as a nail being pounded through his temples; and it seemed that instantaneously the poolroom was choked with celluloid fumes.

  Splashing coal oil from the lamp’s ruptured tank sprayed Logan as he spun on his heel, reaching in the darkness for Kinevan.

  He was pushing Kinevan toward the window when he heard the flat discharge of Duke Perris’s derringer, followed by a shocked lurch on Kinevan’s part as the .41 ball hit him a solid blow.

  So brief had been the elapsed time that the first clatter of falling debris from the wrecked lamp was only now raining on the pool table and floor. In that moment Logan felt Kinevan sag to his knees, his head thumping into the window sill.

  The drawn window blind protected Logan’s shoulder as he smashed bodily through that opening, sending glass fragments and splintered sash into the alley outside.

  Hoisting Kinevan’s sagging bulk over his shoulder, Logan half lunged, half fell through the window, the windstorm’s blast putting its cold touch on him as he and Kinevan hit the ground with jarring impact.

  Marengo’s .44 was hammering out shots as Logan got to his feet, aware that Kinevan was either dead or unconscious, giving him no help.

  With the wind’s thrust at his back, Logan staggered down the alley in a zigzag run, bent low under Kinevan’s bulk. He remembered the Ringbone riders Buckring had left out here, but as his feet hit the first up-angle of the hill he knew he had somehow escaped those guards if they had been waiting behind the Palace.

  Above the roar of the storm Logan thought he heard following shots, but it was blood beating in his ears. He had to lower Kinevan to the ground to get a fresh hold on the Texan, and as he resumed his slogging flight up the hill he heard Kinevan’s cry, “Drop me an’ vamoose, kid. I’m past savin’.”

  Resting here was too risky. By now Perris and Marengo would either be in pursuit or would have Buckring’s men questing the night in search of their escaped quarry.

  Kinevan was unconscious now. The back of his shirt was drenched with warm blood, dripping onto Logan’s supporting arm.

  Holding Kinevan in his arms like a child, Logan slogged blindly uphill, steering for the yellow nimbus of light which marked a house window up there.

  He lost all sense of direction. That lighted window might prove to be haven or trap; with a badly wounded, perhaps dying, man to think of, he would have to make that gamble.

  He passed a fence gate that was slamming and banging in the wind’s blast and stumbled to a stone doorstep. He heard Kinevan emit an anguished groan as the wounded man’s shoulders hit the door panels.

  Logan was shifting Kinevan’s heavy burden in his arms, making ready to rap his boot toe on the door, when it opened and Alva Ames stood framed there, holding a hurricane lamp shoulder-high.

  “Let me in, Alva,” Logan panted. “Tex has been shot.”

  He felt a mixture of relief and anxiety surge through him as he realized that his blind, stumbling flight away from the Palace Casino had led him to Jebediah Ames’s church parsonage.

  Chapter Sixteen


  Voice of a Killer

  Alva Ames put her full weight against the door to force it shut against the pressure of the dust-laden gale as Logan lurched into the welcome warmth of the room.

  “Opal told me you were in danger,” the girl was saying, her words barely reaching Logan above the storm’s roar outside. “I tried to reach you at the ranch. I failed you, Cleve.”

  Logan’s glance took in the room, one edge of his mind marveling at the transformation it had undergone from a shambles of dirt and disorder to this neat, feminine room with curtains at the windows, hooked rugs on the floors.

  “This way—my bedroom,” Alva said, hurrying past him to open a door on their left. “Jeb, bring a kettle of water. Mr. Logan has brought a wounded man here.”

  Logan saw the spare figure of the blind parson emerge from the kitchen, then wheel back immediately to do his sister’s bidding. Logan carried Kinevan’s limp weight into Alva’s bedroom and lowered him gently on a blanket as the girl pulled aside a chenille spread.

  “This is a doctor’s job,” Logan panted hoarsely, afraid of what he saw in Kinevan’s ashen face. “Do you know if Owlhorn has a—”

  “Doctor Nease. He lives in the next cabin up the hill,” the girl broke in. “I’ll bring him.”

  Jebediah Ames appeared in the bedroom doorway with a steaming copper kettle an instant after his sister hurried through it. Logan heard the back door slam, felt a rush of cold air as Alva raced out into the storm on her errand.

  “Reverend, put all the pots of water you have on to boil,” Logan ordered the blind man, taking the kettle from him. “That’s the first thing a medico will call for.”

  Tex Kinevan’s eyes flickered open as Logan was stemming the flow of blood from the bullet hole over the cowhand’s left kidney, using a wad of linen he had ripped from a bed sheet.

  “You don’t belong here, kid,” the Texan’s feeble whisper reached Logan. “You come out here to dab your twine on Perris. You better go scoutin’ for that rat before he skins out.”

  Logan got the hemorrhage stopped for the time being. His throat had a swelling ache in it, and his words came hard.

  “I got you into this thing, Tex. I ought to be shot.”

  Kinevan closed his eyes, and his white lips twitched in a ghost of his old indolent smile.

  “Nice play down there in the poolroom. Didn’t think we had a chance.”

  Kinevan’s voice trailed off on a diminishing scale, and the man’s painful shudders relaxed as a merciful coma blanked out his senses. Somewhere in the back part of the house Logan listened to Jebediah Ames priming a pump, getting a supply of water ready to heat.

  Having done what he could for the wounded puncher, Logan made the rounds of the windows in bedroom and living-room and secured the blinds. He stepped outside the front door and stood keening the storm-whipped darkness for any trace of the manhunters he knew Perris and Buckring would have searching the night.

  Going back inside he heard Jeb Ames greeting his sister and the Owlhorn medical practitioner, who had entered from the kitchen in the rear.

  Some vagrant impulse made Logan grope under his Levis to unpin the marshal’s badge he had worn concealed there, affixing it to his shirt as Alva and the cow-town doctor entered the room. The goat-whiskered old medico was carrying a black kit and he had only the briefest of glances for Logan as he followed Alva into the bedroom and took his first look at the wounded man on the bed.

  “If this man dies it will be a murder case, Doc,” Logan said, watching as the doctor spread out his scalpels and hemostats on a sterile towel. “Can you give me any hope to go on?”

  Dr. Nease’s skilled fingers cleaned Kinevan’s bullet-torn tissues with a wad of alcohol-soaked cotton.

  “I’ll probe for that slug,” Nease said without looking up, “but offhand I don’t give this man a chance to survive the night.”

  Logan’s eyes held their pain and grief as he glanced over to where Alva Ames stood at the foot of the bed, her waist encircled by her brother’s arm. The sky pilot’s lips were moving in silent prayer, and Logan saw that the girl’s eyes were fixed on his law badge with a kind of fierce pride burning in them.

  “The parson and Alva are in personal jeopardy as long as the patient remains under their roof, Doctor,” Logan said anxiously. “Is there anywhere else we could move him for the operation?”

  Dr. Nease reached for a probe.

  “Impossible as long as this man is in a comatose condition.”

  Logan’s shoulders slumped. “Alva, bolt every door and window in the house. I’m going down to roust the sheriff. We’ll deputize a couple of reliable men and post them here to guard the parsonage for the rest of the night.”

  Turning to leave, Logan saw the doctor glance up at Alva Ames.

  “Run over to my place,” he ordered the girl, “and tell my wife to fetch a can of chloroform from the office. This man could go into a fatal case of shock if he came to without an anesthetic.”

  Logan and the girl left the house together, breasting the storm’s full fury. Alva headed up the hill toward Nease’s place, Logan quartering down the slope toward the blurred lights marking Owlhorn’s Main Street.

  Black shapes crossed and recrossed those lights, men moving erratically through the storm’s fury; and Logan caught raveling snatches of shouts being exchanged by these men who were hunting the ground behind the Palace.

  Those would be Ringbone riders spurred on by Perris and Buckring, most likely. Realizing his danger, with no gun at his hip, Logan broke into a run.

  He reached the courthouse square’s stake-and-rider fence and followed it to the brick jail. He found the office lighted but empty. A gun cabinet stood behind the sheriff’s desk, and Logan broke the lock with a stove poker to open it. Looking over the assortment of rifles and shotguns and side arms which the arsenal contained, Logan selected a coiled shell belt with loops filled with .45 caliber ammunition.

  He found a Peacemaker revolver in the collection which Farnick had probably confiscated from former prisoners in his custody, checked the loads, and snugged the gun into holster.

  He was about to leave the jail office in search of the sheriff when Vick Farnick came in out of the night. Their hands met and clasped, no introduction necessary between these two.

  “I let Stagman know you made it here safe, Logan,” Sheriff Farnick said. “You mixed up in the ruckus at the Palace tonight?”

  Logan recounted the escape from Perris’s pool-hall trap and the high points in the tangled events which had led up to that episode.

  “You’ve scotched Perris’s land grab, at any rate,” the sheriff commented when Logan had finished. “That’s what Stagman sent you out on this case to do, wasn’t it?”

  Logan accepted a bottle which Farnick took from his desk, and fortified himself with a quick drink.

  “Yes and no,” he said. “Stagman wasn’t aware of this plot between Perris and Jube Buckring to grab off the river-front homesteads for Ringbone. All he knew was that Perris had gone to Lewiston to round up twenty-odd men and was shipping them down the Snake in the Sacajawea, bound for Klickitat Landing. My job was to find out what Perris was up to, passing myself off as an escaped convict named Fetterman.”

  Farnick’s rheumy eyes held a bright animation in their mottled depths as he pondered this information.

  “How’d Perris get wise to you bein’ an impostor?” he asked.

  Logan told him of Blackie Marengo. Then, realizing that the outlaw was still abroad in the night and that arresting Duke Perris was still a major objective as yet unaccomplished, he said harshly, “We got to work fast, Sheriff. I’ll need a couple of deputies to guard the parsonage where Kinevan is. Buckring can wait—he won’t drift. I’m not too concerned with those Lewiston flunkies, whether they escape or not. But if Perris makes his getaway I’ll be a long time getting rid of this star and g
oing back to my spread in the Blue Mountains.”

  Farnick blew out the light, and they left the jail office, moving up the deserted, wind-hammered street toward the town lodge hall where, Farnick explained, he had men he could deputize to assist in tonight’s manhunt.

  Reaching the lodge hall, Logan remained in the outer vestibule while the sheriff went in to contact his deputies.

  Thus alone with his thoughts for the first time since leaving Kinevan’s bedside, Logan recalled what Alva Ames had told him tonight about Opal Waymire’s efforts to warn him of the trap Perris was laying for him and Kinevan here in town.

  The mystery of Alva Ames’s abortive attempt to reach the Ringbone this morning was explained now; she had been trying to carry Opal’s message to him. Shifting her allegiance from Duke Perris was a thing that Logan could not fully understand in Opal Waymire; it had involved terrible personal risk and it could only have been engendered by some real feeling that he had roused in the honkytonk girl.

  The run of Logan’s thoughts was interrupted by the return of Sheriff Farnick and two men whom he introduced as Gulbrandsen and Hartnig.

  In the gloom of the lodge-hall vestibule, Logan explained to the two deputies that their business would be to maintain an all-night guard at the Ames parsonage, to protect Kinevan against any attack by Perris or Buckring’s men.

  When Gulbrandsen and Hartnig had departed on their mission, the sheriff and Cleve Logan paused indecisively outside the lodge hall.

  “Perris could be anywhere in this storm,” Logan said. “We’ll try his room behind the land office, in case he decides to go through with this deal of filing premature claims on those river-strip homesteads and collect Buckring’s pay.”

  The sheriff gripped Logan’s arm and leveled a bony hand toward the Federal land office, directly opposite them. The twin windows of the little shack were aglow with light, and through the storm’s driving dust they could see Gus Gulberg’s pudgy figure seated at his desk, engrossed in a dossier of papers.

  “How about arrestin’ that land agent here an’ now, for a starter?” Farnick asked. “If Gulberg’s in this as deep as Perris or Buckring, we’d—”