Logan shook his head. “Gulberg’s in the clear until we catch him red-handed making out homestead papers in advance of the government’s due date.”
Logan pulled the sheriff into the black archway of a livery barn which gave them a view of Gulberg’s office.
“I have a hunch Duke Perris won’t try a getaway until he’s made his deal with Buckring,” Logan said. “He can’t do that without drawing Gulberg out of his office. I’d say our best bet would be to give up the idea of hunting down Perris and wait for him to send for Gulberg. I’d stake my last blue chip that Gulberg’s waiting for just that.”
* * * *
At that moment Duke Perris was standing in the shelter of a storm-tossed juniper midway up the hill overlooking the roof of the Palace Casino.
From that vantage point Perris had a full view of the house where Dr. Lawrence Nease, the town’s only doctor, made his home. A moment before, Alva Ames and the doctor’s wife had left the house and were heading at a run in the direction of Nease’s office on the main street. And this strange nocturnal haste on the part of the two women took on a significant importance to Duke Perris.
Waiting until the two women had disappeared down the hill, Perris approached the doctor’s home and came to an unshuttered window. Through that opening he convinced himself that Nease was not at home.
Nothing short of an emergency case could have taken the old medico away from the comfort of his fireside on a night like this.
Perris was certain that he had killed Cleve Logan at the instant of the deputy’s escape through the pool-hall window; at such short range the derringer couldn’t miss. He wondered now if Kinevan had carried Logan somewhere, wounded, and had sent for Owlhorn’s doctor to attend the man.
On a hunch, Perris slanted along the hill to the rear of the Ames parsonage. Testing the doorknob, he found it unlocked. Holding a cocked six-shooter in his right hand, the speculator eased the door open cautiously and stepped inside.
Two doors faced him. One gave Perris a view of a darkened bedroom off to the right. The other led into the living-room.
A subdued mutter of voices reached Perris’s ear from the front part of the house, followed by approaching footsteps. Perris moved quickly into the unlighted bedroom, just as Dr. Nease came into the kitchen and headed toward the cookstove.
A crack of light immediately ahead revealed a second bedroom, from which the sound of voices had come. Perris skirted the edge of a dimly-seen cot and opened that door a crack, peering into the farther bedroom.
A man, stripped to the waist, lay belly-down on the bed there. Jebediah Ames knelt beside the unconscious man, shielding his face from Perris’s view; the blind man was holding a retractor in place where the doctor had made an incision in the patient’s back. The room reeked with the smell of blood and antiseptic.
Then Perris realized that the man was Kinevan, not Logan; and he concluded that Marengo’s shots had wounded the cowpuncher, who must have dropped Cleve Logan’s body somewhere down the hill on his way to this place.
The absence of chloroform odors in this room told Perris that the man he had shot down in the Palace was not under an anesthetic. Obviously, the doctor was in the process of probing for Perris’s derringer slug.
If Kinevan regained consciousness even for a moment, his word before witnesses could pin a murder charge on Duke Perris. And during his long career of outlawry, Perris had never given the law any tangible proof of his criminal dealings. Next to Deputy Marshal Cleve Logan, this unconscious man on the bed was Perris’s most dangerous enemy.
Out in the kitchen behind him, Perris could hear the doctor stoking the cookstove. Perris had only to worry about Jebediah Ames as a witness of what he intended to do here. And Jebediah Ames was a blind man.
Perris opened the door wider and slid the barrel of his Colt along the wooden door frame. He spoke softly, “Ames, move around.”
The blind minister started violently as he heard the voice coming from his own bedroom doorway. Straightening up, he no longer formed a shield between Kinevan and Perris’s gun.
“What?” Jebediah Ames exclaimed. “Who is it? Who’s there?”
With cold precision, Perris aimed his Colt at Kinevan’s head and squeezed the trigger. He saw the cowpuncher’s head roll violently on the pillow to the shock of the point-blank bullet.
Raw gunsmoke smote the blind sky pilot’s face in a thick smudge. His supersensitive ears caught the faint pad of the intruder’s feet moving back, the door closing with a slight thud.
The blast of the gunshot brought Dr. Nease racing through the living-room from the kitchen. The medical man stood aghast in the doorway of Alva’s room, staring through the gunsmoke’s stirring layers at the murdered man on the bed. Kinevan was beyond his help now, irrevocably and finally.
A cold draft against his neck nape told the doctor that Kinevan’s murderer had left the house by the back door.
After a long moment, the doctor stepped past the frozen shape of Jebediah Ames and pulled a blanket over Kinevan’s bleeding head.
“Only the fact that you were blind saved you from being shot down, Reverend,” the doctor said huskily. “This man is dead.”
Jebediah Ames groped a shaking hand over the blanket to grip Kinevan’s fingers.
“God have mercy on your soul,” he whispered.
Ames stood up, turning his scarred face toward the doctor.
“I heard the killer’s voice speak an instant before that shot was fired, Doctor,” the blind man said. “I could identify that voice if I ever heard it again. It belonged to one of the men I heard talking during the voyage of the Sacajawea down the Columbia River last week. I’m almost certain it was the voice of Duke Perris.”
Chapter Seventeen
Gunsmoke Roundup
Spying on Gus Gulberg’s office became an intolerable thing to Cleve Logan, crouched in the livery stable’s archway with Farnick hunkered at his elbow.
His overactive mind was deviled by conflicting possibilities. What if Perris had decided against going through with his land-grab deal and at this moment might be riding across the Horse Heaven Hills, taking advantage of the dust storm to escape Owlhorn forever?
On the other hand, what possible chance was there of hunting Perris or Buckring down in the black fury of the night? It was an impossible stalemate, an enforced interval of inaction which might bring them a showdown or prove wholly futile.
The whipping wind carried the ammoniac reek of the stable against their backs, put a chill to the marrow of their bones as time ran on, growing into an hour. Only the figure of the government land agent, still waiting in his lighted office across the street, kept Cleve Logan chained to his tracks.
Gulberg was waiting for something; it wasn’t logical that he should be working through the wee hours this way. Upon Gulberg’s duplicity depended the entire outcome of this land-grab outrage with its terrible consequences for the unsuspecting homesteaders who were waiting for Monday’s opening date to set the land rush in motion.
“Damn John Stagman,” muttered the sheriff, starting to roll a smoke and then realizing he could not light a cigarette and thus betray their vigil here. “Why didn’t the marshal handle this job himself, instead of draggin’ you into it?”
Logan shifted position to ease the throbbing ache in his bones. His eyes smarted from peering across the dusty street at Gulberg’s window for so long a time, not knowing whether this vigil was a waste of precious time or not.
“Perris knew Stagman; he didn’t know me. My work as a deputy kept me in Montana where Perris has never operated. We were sure Perris didn’t know that Fetterman had been cornered and shot in Pendleton, a month ago. I tallied close enough to Fetterman’s description on the reward posters to fool Perris. Besides, I owed Stagman another fling behind the star. He sold me my Blue Mountain ranch for a song last year.”
Farnick chewed on his mustache for a moment, fighting his own personal battle with his keyed-up nerves.
“For Stagman’s sake, I hope we nab Perris tonight,” Logan went on. “He’s watched Perris put over crooked oil-stock deals in Oklahoma and salted mines in Colorado, but he’s never been able to pin anything tangible on him. The man’s slippery as a—”
Farnick suddenly rose to his feet. “Hold on!” he cried. “There goes Hartnig an’ Gulbrandsen comin’ out of Prosser Street. Didn’t you tell them to guard the parsonage all night?”
Struck by a sudden prescience of disaster, Logan and the sheriff bolted out of their hiding-place and slanted across Main Street to intercept the two deputies, just as they rounded the corner in front of the Palace Casino.
“Somebody sneaked into the parsonage an’ shot Kinevan in cold blood,” Hartnig answered their query. “The blind preacher said he’d know the killer’s voice if he heard it again—thinks it was Perris. We waited until Miss Ames an’ her brother went over to Doc Nease’s to spend the night, an’ then pulled out. No sense in playin’ guard to a dead man, is there, Sheriff?”
Cleve Logan stood rigid in a well of cold shock and anger as his mind ran back across the years, recalling the boyhood he and Tex Kinevan had spent together in Wyoming’s Bighorn country. Now that friend of yesteryear was dead, drawn into a business which had been Logan’s responsibility alone.
“Son,” old Farnick said huskily, laying a hand on Logan’s arm, “the only thing I can say is that Kinevan didn’t die in vain. He died to help save the bacon of all those homesteaders Perris might have robbed. It’s a cinch Perris won’t go through with his Ringbone deal now.”
Logan was staring off upstreet, past the glum deputies. Suddenly he jerked his head up.
“Gulberg’s office just went dark, Sheriff. Either he’s given up waiting or Perris has sent for him. Come on.” Farnick started after Logan at his hobbling gait, then turned to grab Hartnig and Gulbrandsen.
“Boys, Logan an’ me are fixin’ to round up a den of rattlers tonight. You got your guns loaded for bear. I’d take it as a favor if you’d come along and back our play.” Cleve Logan broke into a run, leaning his body against the storm’s unseen barrier as he slogged up the hardpan street toward the government land office.
As Logan made out the dim outlines of the homestead agency by the glare of a farther saloon’s lights up the street, he caught sight of Gus Gulberg’s mountainous shape leave the land-office porch and turn abruptly into the adjoining alley. Waiting for him there was a hulking figure Cleve Logan identified as Blackie Marengo.
Logan halted, waiting until Farnick and the two deputies caught up with him. “Marengo and Gulberg just headed down that alley, Sheriff. Where does it lead?” Farnick conjured up a quick mental picture of the lay of the land. “To the alley that cuts behind the Palace and Perris’s place.”
“Come on. We’ll bag some game after all.”
Guns ready, the four lawmen approached the alley where the land agent and Perris’s man had vanished. On their left was a wheelwright’s shop, the only building between Gulberg’s office and Perris’s headquarters.
Their cautious passage down this alley brought them to the back end of the wheelwright’s in time to see lamplight flash briefly from the lean-to behind Perris’s land office, as the door opened and quickly closed again.
But that brief whisk of light was sufficient to reveal the destination of Perris’s messenger and the land agent.
“Buckring will be in there with Perris’s gang of toughs,” Logan whispered for the information of the others. “I hadn’t hoped that they’d dare pull this off in Owlhorn. We’ve got to look sharp for any guards Perris has out.” Lights from the upstairs windows of the Palace, where Opal Waymire’s percentage girls had their rooms, enabled Logan to lead the sheriff and his two men along the back wall of the wheelwright’s shop.
They halted at its far corner, studying the dim light which leaked through holes in the window shades of Perris’s living-quarters, when a match bloomed briefly behind a man’s cupped fingers, betraying the craggy face of one of Jubal Buckring’s ranch hands posted alongside the door out of the storm’s fury.
Logan charged across the alley, knowing the guard would be temporarily blinded after lighting his cigarette. Gun metal made its sudden impact on the rider’s skull, and he went down, his grunt lost under the howl of the wind through the roundabout eaves. Twice more Logan hammered his gun muzzle on his victim’s skull to make a sure job of it, then signaled through the blackness for the sheriff and his deputies to cross the alley.
“Gulbrandsen, you take the window.” Logan whispered his orders. “Shoot to kill anybody who tries to come through. Hartnig, go up the alley and scout the front end of the building. The sheriff and I will make it a direct play through the door. We’ve got to push this thing fast.”
The two deputies vanished to take their appointed stations. Farnick was at the deputy marshal’s elbow as Logan mounted the square back porch facing Perris’s door. Stooping, Logan took a quick squint through the keyhole. Even the limited angle of view afforded by that aperture told him everything he needed to know.
Perris’s derelict crew from Lewiston packed the room. Gus Gulberg, his customarily florid face bleached to the color of ash now, was spreading the contents of a brief case on a table.
Silver-haired Jubal Buckring stood in the background, hugging his carpetbag to his chest. At his either elbow stood Blackie Marengo and Duke Perris.
With the sheriff waiting tensely at his side, Logan stooped lower and put an ear to the keyhole. He heard Perris talking to the men assembled around the table.
“You’ve got your steamer tickets back to Lewiston. You’ll get your final payoff when you reach Idaho. As soon as you get these papers signed, your job is finished. This storm will furnish cover for you to get through Satus Pass to the river. You’ll find Caleb Rossiter waiting with his stern-wheeler at Klickitat Landing. Now hurry this along.”
Logan heard a nervous shifting of feet inside, a rattle of papers. Gus Gulberg’s sleazy voice, high-pitched with the anxiety that had unnerved him, squeaked above the hubbub. “God’s sake, hurry. I don’t like this business any more than you do.”
Logan stood up, giving his gun cylinder a twirl with his thumb. He grunted his signal to Farnick and then, backing off, put his weight against the door. It was locked.
Logan thrust his Colt against the keyhole and fired. The gun made its flashing report and simultaneously with the bullet reducing the cast-iron mortise lock to shards, Logan kicked the door open and leaped into Perris’s room behind a jutting gun.
Through fogging gunsmoke which eddied violently in the tug of air currents, Logan and the sheriff shouldered inside, Farnick’s twin six-guns covering the paralyzed figures of Gus Gulberg and Jubal Buckring.
The closely-massed ranks of Perris’s henchmen were frozen there in stunned tableau as they whirled to face the door. In the farther shadows Logan saw Blackie Marengo, and he swung his gun on the man.
“This place is surrounded,” Logan’s voice broke through the wall of silence which followed the blast of his gun. “I want every man to get his arms up and belly against the wall. This play is for keeps.”
For a moment terror held the crowd enchained. Then Jubal Buckring let slip his carpetbag and clawed a gun from his coat.
The sheriff let gun hammer drop, and his slug caught the Ringbone cattle king in the right eye before he could lift his Bisley .38 for a shot.
In falling, Buckring’s body hit the table lamp and extinguished it instantly, plunging the room into blackness.
Men shouted their panic as bedlam seized the room. Gulberg screamed, “Don’t shoot!” and somewhere behind that moving mass of humanity Farnick and Cleve Logan heard a door being kicked open to give access to Perris’s front office.
Both lawmen held their fire, knowin
g that to shoot into the packed dark would be wanton slaughter. They braced themselves to meet the onslaught of jostling bodies, ready to lash out with clubbing gun barrels as they heard the table upset and furniture being smashed to match-wood by struggling bodies.
Out front the street door opened, letting the storm’s blast have its full and uninterrupted sweep through the building. A spate of gunfire beat up rolling echoes in that direction, and Logan knew Hartnig was shooting it out with escaping men.
Then the firing ceased, and the room was silent save for the furtive scrape of boots and the chorus of men’s labored breathing, like saw cuts behind the darkness.
Farnick and Logan separated, putting the wall to their backs. From the gloom Logan’s voice lashed out, “Somebody strike a match. Make it fast.”
The quavering voice of old Pegleg Cochran chattered out, “Hold your fire, son. I’ll give you a light.”
Cochran’s match spurted from the far left corner. The rising glow revealed a ludicrous picture of men sprawled on the floor like sheep. Gus Gulberg was a trembling mound of fat entangled in the broken legs of the table, half concealed under the spilled legal papers from his brief case.
The big shape of Jubal Buckring lay in a grotesque sprawl beside Gulberg. Blood trickled from the bullet hole under his eyebrow.
“Cochran,” Logan addressed that oldster, “light the lamp on that shelf yonder.”
As the one-legged derelict complied, Cleve Logan swept the pandemonium-struck room a second time, ignoring the trembling Lewiston riffraff. This search confirmed his first impression. Two men had made their escape from the trap, by way of the outer office. Duke Perris and Blackie Marengo. Unless the deputy had tallied them in the act of escaping to the street.
Leaving Farnick to hold these men under the threat of his guns, Logan passed through the length of the building to reach the open door. Glancing outside, he saw Hartnig’s still shape, gun in hand, stretched out on the porch.
Visibility was too restricted here on the street to give any clue as to which way Perris and Marengo had fled after shooting down Hartnig.
The Fifth Western Novel Page 15
