“What’n hell do we want ’em for?” thundered old Red Shirt Bill. “Me, I don’t.”
“Which way did Warbuck go?” Young Jeff demanded of Jim Ogden.
“How do I know?” snapped Ogden.
Young Jeff said, “My finger’s sweaty on the trigger, Jim. It might slip. You ought to know that. Where did Warbuck go?”
“He headed north,” said Ogden. “Up toward Cooper’s Sluice. That’s all I know.”
Jeff said, “Jeff, you and Bill close-herd these men a minute. There was some jasper I met on my way over here; I konked him but maybe he’s awake by now. We better make sure of him.”
He hurried to the spot where he had met up with a straggler of the Warbuck crowd and had crowned him with his gun. He found the man where he had dropped him, dead to the world. Dead to everything, Jeff thought him at first, but a hand on the man’s chest and the light of a match told him otherwise. It was young Johnny Smith, and he was alive and beginning to come back to dazed consciousness.
“Wake up, kid,” Jeff said. “It’s time to go.”
Johnny Smith groaned and clapped a hand to an aching head and managed to sit up. At first he didn’t know where he was, or why. But when realization swept over him he came to his feet with a bound, groggy yet aware of general conditions.
“Wh—who are you? Wh—what you want?” he muttered, and fumbled for a lost gun.
“Let the gun go, kid,” said Jeff. “You won’t be needing it. Come along.”
Johnny Smith came along, having nothing better to do. He staggered a bit, like a drunk man at first, but got himself under control by the time he and Young Jeff came to the three horses. He did as he was commanded to do, pulled down the tie-ropes and led the horses along as Young Jeff showed him the way. So they came where the other men were, those still lying flat, Jim Ogden standing ill at ease yet in a manner resigned, Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill on guard.
“Let’s hurry, boys,” said Young Jeff. “Warbuck’s not far off; he’s got Arlene and Sharpe and the old woman. There are two men with him; they’re Buck Nevers and Pocopoco Malaga. They maybe have heard the shooting; we might meet them on the way, coming back. Anyhow I promised Arlene.”
They tied their captives hand and foot, and made a good job of the tying; trust old timers like Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill for that sort of work. After that the men they had trussed up were dragged this way and that, scattered so that they couldn’t help one another, and were lashed to trees, anchored securely. Then Young Jeff and Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill got into their saddles and headed north, toward Cooper’s Sluice.
* * * *
Cooper’s Sluice was in a narrow pass which connected the badlands with Round Valley where once men had thought to have located gold in paying quantities. It was only four or five miles from the old house at Devil-Take-It. The gold hadn’t amounted to anything, and Cooper’s Sluice, as a town, was still-born. But there was a rock hut there, half dug-out, to mark the place and stand a monument to short-lived, lurid hopes. It was there that Bart Warbuck convoyed his impressed guests.
“Let me go! Let me go!” Arlene screamed, panic-stricken. “You have no right! You’re driving me mad! Let me go!”
“Take it easy, girl,” said Warbuck. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. But you know too damned much. I’ve got to shut your mouth for a while. And I’ve got to talk to you.”
“I’ll keep my mouth shut! Do you think I’d go talking about my own father—about the things you say I know? For very shame I’d keep still.”
“Shut up!” he growled at her. “I know what I’m doing.”
There was a high night wind whistling down through the pines, and the clatter of Warbuck’s horse’s hoofs on the rocky ground was loud in their ears, and alongside was the torrent that spilled out of the pass and rushed circuitously, making a merry din of its own, down to Wandering River. So they did not hear the distant shots, down at Devil-Take-It. Had the wind been blowing the other way they might have heard, but the wind was no friend of Barton Warbuck’s tonight.
He alone rode, the others trudged along on foot. He got his spice out of the evening by leading Doc Sharpe the way he did. Sharpe’s hands were tied behind his back; Warbuck’s rope was around his neck; Sharpe was led like a cow that was going to the yard to be slaughtered. Arlene had never dreamed of such curses as, for a time, Sharpe screamed—nor of such laughter as came from Warbuck.
The old woman and herself were herded along by Nevers and Malaga, dragged along part of the time over the roughest going. After Arlene’s single outburst, she had never a word to say. Amanda Grayle was as silent as a sphinx—except once. That was when they were fording the creek. She had her chance for a harsh, savage whisper in the girl’s ear.
“Sometime, when they’re not watching and listening, I want to talk to you,” she said. “It’s terribly important. I’ll pull Barton down yet!”
“I don’t want you ever to talk to me,” said a wretched Arlene.
“I’ve got to. You’ve got to know—”
“I wish I didn’t know what I know already! I am so ashamed! Oh why—”
“Hey, there,” called Warbuck. “What are you two jabbering about? Amanda, you better keep your mouth shut. I’d cut your scrawny old throat for two cents.”
“You better not, Barton Warbuck,” she railed at him. “You know what would happen to you!”
He cursed her and went on riding, letting the others walk, dragging Sharpe along; and Sharpe, with his hands bound behind him, was forever stumbling, and the rope about his neck was always jerking. He didn’t curse back any more; perhaps he was half choked and couldn’t.
To Arlene it was an hour of horror; it was like being mad in a mad-house, like being in hell. When at last they came to the stone hut at Cooper’s Sluice and were herded inside like cattle, she was on the verge of exhaustion; her shoes were cut on the rocks, her ankles and knees bruised where she had fallen in the dark, her hands grimy, her whole body aching.
Pocopoco Malaga made a fire in a cramped, triangular fireplace in a corner; the room filled with smoke. There was not a stick of furniture in the place, not a bench or even a box. She slumped down, sitting on the dirt floor, her back against the wall. Above, the roof was nearly all gone and stars shone down through great gaps where the shakes had rotted or been blown away.
She saw Sharpe dragged in with the rope around his neck, looking like a dead man, his face so white and his eyes so staring. She saw the old woman squat down and sit mummy-still. But the old woman didn’t look dead; those eyes of hers were glittering, full of life and of hate and many things evil.
Arlene didn’t want to look at Sharpe again, but couldn’t control her eyes. The rope was still around his throat; his face, from, a dead, pasty white, was growing purple. His eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. She jumped up and ran to him; she began fumbling with the noose, trying to get it loose. Sharpe was making terrible strangling noises.
Warbuck, standing with his big hairy hands on his hips, his broad hat far back, his eyes and mouth cruel, jeered at her.
“You little fool! What if he does choke to death? Who cares? I’ve a notion to hang the rat right now. I ought to have done it twenty years ago.”
She got the rope loosened and heard the long sobbing breath that Sharpe pumped into his lungs. Then she dropped down again, her back to the wall as before. She began to think about Young Jeff, and to wonder. She thought, “There was something magnificent about him tonight. Nothing is going to stop him. He’ll come back. He will take me out of all this.”
Sharpe gasped and gasped and gasped, and then began raving like a maniac. At the moment he was mad. The words that he said, that he spewed forth, were vile—and yet they did not just then shock her; rather they awed her. There was no coherence, no sense for anybody to make of what he said at first, and while Arlene shivered and the old woman stared, as di
d Pocopoco Malaga and Buck Nevers, Warbuck with his hands on his hips only laughed. But at last Sharpe said something that did make sense, though it baffled Arlene. He screamed out, “Damn you, Warbuck! I’ll tell the world if I die for it! I’ve got a bellyful; you can’t pay me enough to make me keep my mouth shut any longer. When your wife had a baby—”
Warbuck shot him. His smoking gun drove two bullets through Sharpe’s scrawny body, and the man went down, sliding slowly along the wall, clawing feebly at the dirt floor, then growing quite still.
Then, the most horrid sound in the world, worse than Doc Sharpe’s choking and strangling, worse than his fulsome curses, worse even than the pistol shot and the sound of a body slumping down so loosely, came a cackling, derisive muttering from the old hag of Witch Woman’s Hollow.
“You’re a fool, Barton, and always was,” she said. “Now, most likely, you’ve hung yourself. If Sharpe wrote down—”
“I’ve a notion to kill you, too,” said Warbuck.
She was frightened and yet stiffened by a queer sort of courage; she was like a cat that a pack of dogs had chased into a corner. She clenched her bony hands as she screamed at him, “Kill me, you great big fool, if you want to! Me, I’ve written it all down; it’s in a safe place; ten days after you’ve killed me the whole world that can read will know all about it—and you’ll be as dead as Sharpe is! Look at him! Look how pretty he looks! You’ll be like that in ten days or less if you lift your hand against me. And—”
“Shut up!” Warbuck stormed at her. “Shut up! I’ll kill you anyhow unless you shut your mouth. I’ll hammer you over the head; I’ll beat you into shutting up. Shut up, I tell you!”
Arlene scarcely heard them. She looked at the faces of the others, Pocopoco Malaga and Buck Nevers, and saw how strained they were, how narrow and glinting their eyes, how strong muscles stood out like ridges along their jaws. She tried to look anywhere except at the sprawling body on the floor, so near her, with a pool gathering at its side that looked like ink and flashed redly and glassily as the flames in the fireplace darted up and shrank down again.
“It’s murder,” she kept saying over and over to herself. “I’ve seen my own father commit murder—killing a defenseless man—and it isn’t the first time—A murderer. Oh God, why, why did this have to be? And I—and I—”
* * * *
The two Jeffs and Red Shirt Bill Morgan heard the two shots coming so close together yet so coolly spaced, and they saw a ruddy glow where the old rock chimney and the broken roof let the red light escape. They rode closer but not too close, not wanting the sound of shod hoofs to foretell their arrival. They dismounted swiftly, tied their horses and went prowling forward on foot like three old-time Indians bent on a scalping party.
“I hope nobody kills Warbuck tonight,” said Young Jeff. “Someday, if we keep him alive and put the spurs to him, he’s going to talk. For one thing, he knows about Charlie Carter’s mine. Then—Well, dammit, after all he’s Arlene’s father.”
“He’s due for a killin’ just the same,” said Red Shirt Bill. “As for Carter’s gold—shucks, I can find it. And as for Arlene—Well, she’s young yet; she’ll get over it.”
Inside the old hut Warbuck was saying, “Buck, you get outside and keep an eye peeled and your ears stretched. Just in case. If you hear anybody, let me know on the run.” Outside, the three men were speculating, but doing so silently, wondering about those two shots; just two, and a dead silence eloquent of some sort of finality.
“It’d be convenient if somebody has burned Bart Warbuck down,” said Red Shirt Bill. “But at that I’d be kind of disappointed. I’ve always figured as how I’d someday be the lucky man to nail him.”
Buck Nevers came slouching out. He always slouched in a queer crouching sort of way, always seemed ready at the drop of a hat to spring in any direction. Now, as they saw him, he either saw or heard them coming on. He shouted out something and leaped well to one side of the door, out of the path of light. At the same instant Poco-poco Malaga came running out, and Warbuck’s vibrant voice called, “Who’s there? What’s going on?”
Young Jeff sang out, “Keep your shirt on, Warbuck! It’s—” But across his words cut a yell from Buck Nevers: “It’s that damn fool Young Cody, an’ he’s got men with him and—” and Warbuck’s throaty roar of rage slashed across Buck Nevers’ shout as Nevers had done with Young Jeffs: “Shoot, you damn fools! Shoot ’em down!”
But the shooting had already started. Nevers was crouching and firing from some place at the cabin’s darkest corner, and Pocopoco Malaga had darted to the semi-protection of a big tree and was shooting, and the trio from Halcyon were pouring hot lead back at them.
Warbuck didn’t show his face at the door. He was standing inside, his gun in his hand, listening, uncertain. He was trying to estimate how many attackers had pounced on him; no one could tell.
“Warbuck!” screamed Buck Nevers. “Warbuck! Get into it. You—”
Buck had been winged, perhaps badly hurt. He got no response from his employer. Nevers whirled and began running, cursing sobbingly as he ran. Pocopoco Malaga began cursing fluently in Mexican border Spanish, and began a stealthy withdrawal. But his retreat was neither sufficiently stealthy nor swift. A bullet traced him and he went down, floundering, with a yip of pain like a stricken coyote’s.
Young Jeff went streaking in through the door like something carried blindly on a storm wind. There in the middle of the floor stood Bart Warbuck, still looking uncertain, his gun still in his grip. Both that gun of his and Young Jeff’s came up at the same instant.
Arlene too was standing; she had snatched up a stick of firewood, not in the least knowing what she meant to do with it, just making an instinctive move. With all her might she brought the stick down across Warbuck’s hand. The weapon flew out of his grasp.
There was a doorway leading into a small room, store room or kitchen. Warbuck, during his brief moments of uncertainty, had seen it out of the corner of his eye, and now one tremendous bound carried him through it and into the dark. There was one small, high-up window; he had remembered that. He squeezed his big bulk through as Young Jeff came running after him. Then, from outside, came the sound of a man running—Bart Warbuck at last in full flight.
Chapter Eighteen
Arlene flung the stick from her with a shudder and flew into Jeff’s arms; she began to sob, “Oh, thank God he got away—that you didn’t shoot him! You might have and—And I struck my own father’s gun down so that you could! Oh, Jeff, why can’t I be dead?”
Both Still Jeff and Red Shirt had come running, close behind Young Jeff, and were just in time to see Warbuck make his headlong escape. Now they whirled and ran out again, bound on getting him or at least on making sure that he didn’t grab a horse. They found their own horses; Warbuck’s was tied to a tree not twenty feet from the door; he hadn’t dared to go to it and so was on foot in the badlands.
“Looked like Sharpe in there was dead,” said Red Shirt Bill. “Guess that was the shots we heard; Warbuck plugged him. I think we peppered the other two guys that came barging out; we better make sure ’cause a dead snake is the only good snake. What say you keep an eye on the four horses? Me, I’ll go smoke them fellers out that made the mistake to start shootin’.”
He knew he wouldn’t get an answer from Still Jeff; just the same he snorted as he trudged away. He found Pocopoco Malaga lying close to the house, dead; the man had been shot twice, once through the throat. He found no trace of Buck Nevers. Nor was Nevers ever seen again; either he got clean away or merely dragged himself a few heart-breaking miles and died in some gully where it might be years before some man stumbled across his disturbed bones.
Young Jeff held Arlene tight a moment, not knowing what he could say to her, then turned a pair of stormy eyes on the old woman.
“What happened to Sharpe here?” he demanded. “Who killed him?”
“Barton did,” she said with malicious relish. “We all saw him. Sharpe started to blab, the fool. Only he’s not dead—not quite dead yet.”
Arlene, having thought him already dead, went hurriedly with Jeff to the wounded man, a quick pinprick of hope prompting her to believe he might live. But even she could see that the man was dying.
He called faintly for water and Young Jeff went out to Cooper’s Creek where once the sluice had been and brought water in his hat, the best he could do. By that time Still Jeff and Bill Morgan were looking in on them.
Sharpe wanted desperately to talk; he wanted to accuse Warbuck; he wanted with his last iota of strength to make sure that Warbuck’s own fall and death came about through him. He drank gulpingly, and then began mutterings. At first his mouthings meant nothing; then, with a last flare-up of his vital forces, he forced his words to make sense. They all crowded close to listen, feeling that this derelict should not go drifting out across the vast dark seas of death without leaving his comprehended message behind him. They heard him say, “Warbuck’s killed me. He always swore he would. He’s killed other men. It was him that killed and robbed Hank Ryan twenty years ago—that’s where he got his start. Amanda Grayle knows.—Old Jeff Cody and old Bill Morgan, they never knew.—And when Warbuck’s daughter was born, I was the doctor. And she—”
He had given all he had; he couldn’t get any further, not a syllable more. He slumped back, slack, loose, dead.
Then, all unexpectedly, Young Jeff felt a strange electrical atmosphere in the bleak room, a moment of quivering, still tenseness. He didn’t know how that sensation had come upon him; surely not from having seen Sharpe stop breathing. Then he realized, though the realization didn’t carry him far forward, that as he straightened up he had caught the strangest look in old Still Jeff’s eyes he had ever seen there. Instinctively he turned toward Red Shirt Bill Morgan: The mystifying thing now was that the same strange look was in old Bill’s eyes. Yet he noted that the two men did not look at each other; both were staring at the old woman of Witch Woman’s Hollow—and she, in deadly terror, let out a thin screech and started to run. They stopped her before she had raced three steps, Still Jeff’s hand clamping down on one of her scrawny arms, Red Shirt Bill’s on the other.
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