by T. T. Flynn
“Impossible, I’d say,” Frank said tightly.
“Undoubtedly,” Wyman agreed, his interest waning.
Frank desperately wanted to get away from the man’s gossipy talk. He had to wait while Wyman relocked the desk, the safe, and leisurely accompanied him outside.
“Thank you, Captain.”
“Not at all, Mr. Darrah.”
Frank stepped into the buggy in a mist of sick fear. Forgetting any business with the sutler, he drove around the parade ground and out the sentry gate. The reins felt slippery in his sweating palms. Details of the Apache raid on the Fort Kilham supply train jostled in his thoughts. Even Chris Boldt had been worried about that raid.
Frank drove recklessly down the dusty, descending road of the bluff. Captain Wyman was a fool. This Lockhart must be the surviving brother. A gruesome, shaking thought intruded: It was like the dead walking again, searching even to far-off New Orleans and back to Coronado. Then here to Roxton Springs. Frank had no doubt now Lockhart had trailed him here. The end might be a bullet from Lockhart’s gun. Or a legal hangrope—
Frank reached up and loosened the black string tie, easing pressure around his throat. Must be an answer—He was still Frank Darrah, a prospering merchant. Barbara Kirby was eagerly planning their wedding, and Alec Waggoman, half-blind, was running out his final days as lord of Barb. What could change all that? Only Chris Boldt knew about the past. Lockhart must be watching the future—those fifty cases of guns and who got them. But guns in Roxton Springs or Coronado weren’t guilt if the past could not be proved.
Frank was calmer after that thought. His mind began to function in fresh clarity, coolly calculating, as he drove on toward town—toward Will Lockhart and Chris Boldt.
It was full night when Will Lockhart, tall and loosely striding, crossed the plaza, idly speculating on why Frank Darrah hadn’t yet asked for McGuire’s message. Oil lamps on tall poles glowed at the four plaza corners. Store windows and saloon fronts were illuminated. A starry night like this softened the harsh reality of a town, Will thought. Shabby buildings took on grace, and a kind of gallantry cloaked dimly seen figures. Will paused to let a buggy pass and smiled understandingly.
A young officer from the fort held the reins. The girl beside him sat discreetly over on her side of the seat. A town girl undoubtedly. Captain Will Lockhart had done exactly that on pleasant evenings in other garrison towns, and would again.
A slight nostalgia touched Will. He was an uprooted shadow now, patiently stalking other shadows, and trouble was at his elbow if he strayed too far from the invisible rank still riding his shoulders by law and custom.
The Gem Café where he went for supper was a plain place with oilcloth on the tables. The counter stools were filled. Two men quitted a small table over against the wall and Will sat down there. A hurried waitress loaded the soiled dishes on a tray, swiped a damp towel over the white oilcloth, and took his order.
When the food came, Will ate thoughtfully, half his mind now on what was planned for the evening. Frank Darrah found him like that and dropped into the opposite chair, smiling ruefully.
“You’re hard to find, Lockhart; hear you have a message for me.”
Will ignored his dislike of this blond, assured young man and said calmly, “McGuire said to tell you the Half-Moon wagon got everything on the list. And on another list the driver brought.”
He noted irritation in Darrah’s glance. But the man’s rueful smile came stronger. “More credit on the books. Kate Canaday has the devil’s own way about her.”
Will had to smile at that, even while he was wondering what Barbara Kirby found in this man worth love and marriage. One could see certain things about the man which might appeal to a woman. The narrow-brimmed townsman’s hat in Darrah’s hand had bared the close-cropped neatness of thick blond hair. The black string tie and white cambric shirt and blue broadcloth suit were all conservative and tasteful. And Darrah had the assurance of success.
That assurance was in Darrah’s smiling comment now. “So you decided to pull out of Coronado?”
“Have to look for more wagons and mules.”
“But you’re not going back?”
“Why not?”
Darrah shrugged. “I’ve work for you then, after you get an outfit together. Steady hauling. I’ve leased the salt lakes.”
“When?” Will asked quickly.
“Yesterday. From Alec Waggoman. You’ll have no more trouble with Barb if you haul for me.”
“I’ve been worried,” Will said ironically.
There was a falseness about this talk, and in Darrah’s smiling offer. “I might help you buy mules and wagons cheaper.”
“I’ll think it over,” Will decided, and when Darrah left, Will ate thoughtfully, pondering the man.
When Will paid at the door and bought a cigar and stepped outside again, the tinny raucousness of the plaza saloons had increased. Three sun-blackened troopers swaggered by, their boot heels thumping the boardwalk.
Will smiled at their backs, guessing the trio knew every rascally trick in the barracks book. They were the kind who put starch and confidence in any grinding patrol.
Will was bringing the cigar to his mouth when he was bumped from the rear. The shock mashed the cigar end against his teeth, and Will turned irritably, finding a stranger in buckskins who weaved unsteadily and demanded, “Who you shovin’?”
Disgustedly Will pitched the ruined cigar to the gutter. “Never mind,” he said briefly.
The next instant he was dodging a clumsy blow. Will slapped the arm down and shoved the man away. “Get going!”
But the man came back, lithe and not weaving at all. The dark shadows were thick here and Will barely noted the stranger’s hand sliding in behind his belt buckle. Gun hidden there! was Will’s instant guess. Cold sober, too!
Will moved equally fast, jabbing his left fist at the man’s head and pivoting a little as his right fist swung a completely vicious smash to the man’s stomach.
A drunk would have collapsed over the sickening blow. This lithe stranger merely swayed back, grunting explosively. Will grabbed the reaching hand and heard the three troopers pounding joyously back to watch the fight.
It was more of a wild scuffle. The buckskins reeked of sweat, stale grease, and the rankness of old chip campfires. The stranger was silent. Will was struggling too furiously to speak. He felt the stranger’s left hand trying to get past his guarding elbow, and remembered his own holstered gun on that hip.
Furious now, Will slapped his left hand to the man’s concealed gun and snatched back to his holster. He got hold of his own gun and twisted the holster up enough to shoot through the bottom.
“Last chance!” Will panted against the stranger’s sweating face.
Then he had proof it was all deliberate. The man slacked back to a weaving drunken state. His loud thick pleading reached the bystanders.
“Leggo, mister! Do’ wan’ trouble!”
Will got the gun from the pants top. Panting from the short wild struggle, he brought the hard gun steel up in a flat slamming blow to the side of the man’s head. Then he stepped back and watched the slow, sodden collapse to the dusty walk boards.
Back in the shadows a voice jeered from the watching men who had gathered, “Hell on drunks, ain’t you?”
“Who is he?” Will demanded malevolently.
No one seemed to know. Will threw the gun beside its owner and wheeled off the boardwalk, still panting as he ducked under the hitch-rail and headed across the plaza.
Half an hour later, walking toward the shadowy outskirts of town with Charley Yuill, Will said, more puzzled than angry now, “Charley, he was faking. He was sober and he meant to kill me.”
“Had on buckskins?” Charley repeated Will’s comment. “Did he have a red mark under the chin?”
“Yes. Who is he?”
“That was Chris Boldt. An’ I never heard of Chris Boldt pullin’ a shootin’ drunk. He ain’t the kind. Too foxy.”
“Then Boldt must know who I am.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Which must mean the guns are here now.” Charley’s nod agreed, and an edge of grimness came into Will’s decision. “We’ll have that look inside Darrah’s ware house for sure now. In an hour or so if there’s no one around.”
They killed time by strolling on the fringe of town. Dogs barked at them. Horses snorted in small corrals they passed. The quiet night had the feel now, Will thought, of rising danger. He caught himself thinking in cold anger again of the sprawled dead of the Fort Kilham wagon train and isolated ranches flaming on dark nights like this.
Charley said musingly, “Three hun’red dollars a gun—Two hun’red guns—Lot of money, Cap’n.” Charley spat to the side. “Hell of a lot. Worth killin’ you to keep it quiet.” And then Charley wondered, “How’d Chris Boldt guess you were bad luck to him?”
“He’s seen Darrah. And Darrah had something working on his mind to night. Too friendly when he talked to me. Offered me steady hauling. Darrah’s leased the salt lakes.”
Charley’s soft “Oh-oh!” drew Will’s keen look. Charley said with a trace of sheepishness, “Old Grandmother Salt lives in them lakes. Couple thousan’ years, anyway, the Indians think. Them lakes are sacred.”
“Not too sacred,” Will reminded. “The Apach’ burned two wagons in sight of them the other day.”
“Old Grandmother Salt ain’t Apach’,” said Charley, more seriously probably than he guessed. “But the Apach’ needs salt, too. Even before guns. Cap’n, that Darrah’ll find trouble if he meddles between the tribes an’ their salt.”
“Just now, it’s Darrah and guns,” Will reminded. “Suppose we meet at the ware house in about an hour?”
The feeling of danger lingered as Will walked alone toward the plaza. Only now could he fully understand how close death had brushed in that wild scuffle with Chris Boldt. The feeling brought him alert, watchful, when two men angled across the street to his side and waited for him to pass.
One man was a trooper from the fort, staring hard as Will came abreast. The trooper murmured something and the other man said sharply, “Lockhart, the sheriff wants a talk with you.”
Will made out the pale glint of a badge on the speaker’s shirt, and halfway recognized the trooper as one of the trio that had doubled back joyously to watch the fight with Boldt.
“Why a talk with me?” Will countered.
“Johnson said to find you. We been looking all over town. Where you been?”
“Picking stars,” Will said. The deputy’s hand was hovering near his side-gun and Will asked sarcastically, “Expecting trouble?”
“I’ll take your gun, Lockhart. Turn around.”
“Want to try taking it?” Will invited calmly. “Or I’ll walk with you like this.”
Chapter Thirteen
Roxton court house was a squatty adobe structure built around a large, bare patio one could enter directly from the street. Sheriff Johnson’s office was in the left back corner of the patio, and when Will stepped in ahead of his escort, the sheriff was tilted back in his desk chair waiting.
A competent man, was Will’s swift judgment. Johnson looked him over keenly, too, as the rangy deputy and the trooper followed Will in. Johnson’s drawl to his deputy was pointed.
“Ira, you going to learn the hard way about prisoners packing their guns in?”
Will said softly, “Prisoner?”
The trooper was grinning and Ira gave Will a sour look, and Will’s caustic demand was to the sheriff. “Do you always take fights this seriously?”
“Nope,” Johnson said politely. “You’re the man, I take it, who slapped that drunken Boldt down with his own gun.”
“He wasn’t drunk.”
Johnson glanced inquiringly at the trooper. “You saw it. Was he?”
“I’d say so for a civilian,” was the grinning reply. “A good man from the fort now, he’d be down an’ paralyzed before I’d give him the name.”
Will chuckled and asked the sheriff, “How does the army get in on this?”
Johnson clasped hands behind his graying hair, studying Will thoughtfully. “He saw the fight and could point you out. Where’ve you been?”
“Walking.”
“You’re the man who had trouble at the salt lakes and picked a hell of a fight with the Barb foreman in Coronado.”
Will said dryly, “You get news fast.”
“Where you from, Lockhart? What brought you to town here?”
“Mules. I’ve been freighting. I need more mules.”
“Why’d you have trouble with Boldt?”
Johnson asked that in the same brief, direct way, and unclasped his hands from behind his head and leaned forward, listening carefully as Will told equally briefly what had happened.
Irony came then into Johnson’s voice. “You’re saying this Boldt—this stranger to you—went through all that foolishness of playing drunk before he tried to put a bullet in you?”
“It sounds foolish,” Will admitted. “That’s what happened.”
“Not all that happened, Lockhart. Boldt’s dead.”
There was a shocking, believable simplicity in Johnson’s statement. Sick regret caught Will. All he could say at the moment was a helpless, “I’d have sworn I didn’t hit him that hard.”
“Oh, that,” said Johnson carelessly. “Hell, Boldt got up from that and walked away. It was later he was found under a wagon in a vacant lot, knifed four times in the back. And stabbed in the throat to make sure. He was a mess.” Johnson stood up, a graying man almost as tall as Will. His manner was regretfully impersonal.
“You can see why I’m locking you up.”
Will’s tremendous relief flared into quick, angry protest. “Hell, no, I don’t see! You’re making a wild guess now! Why would I stab a stranger I’d already left flat and helpless?”
Johnson kept the impersonal manner. “No one said you stabbed him. But you’re a stranger, too. Trouble seems to boil up when you appear. You tell a cockeyed story about your trouble with Boldt. I want you around while we’re looking into this.” Johnson paused an instant and suggested mildly, “Now don’t make Ira use that gun he’s holding at your back.”
Will’s mind ran over the possibilities. He was boxed in here, and this was the law. In this austere office with whitewashed walls and a few pieces of plain furniture, Will fastened on a new and jabbing thought.
He’d been hunting a man coldly and patiently. But in some devious, sudden way, Will Lockhart himself seemed to have become the hunted one. He was the prisoner now. And Boldt’s murder was still a mystery.
Behind Will, Ira sounded sourly satisfied as he plucked Will’s gun from its holster.
“Right through that door there, Lockhart. We’re kinda proud of our jail.”
Will ignored Ira’s small malice. “I want a lawyer,” he told Johnson curtly. “The best lawyer in town. Now—tonight.”
At the same time Will was wondering if Charley Yuill also was being hunted. Charley had a half-wild elusiveness. He might take care of himself—And certainly when Charley heard of Boldt’s death, Charley would winnow the town, seeking the man who had knifed Boldt.
Johnson asked, “Got money to pay for a good lawyer?”
“I can get it.”
Johnson stayed completely impersonal and almost regretful. “I’ll get you a good lawyer if you’re bound to waste the money. But it’ll take a court order to get you out. And Judge Vandiger is out of town.”
“Get the lawyer, anyway.”
Disgusted now, and uneasy over what might happen while he was snarled in this legal red tape, Will moved toward the sheriff’s cells ahead of Ira’s satisfied malice.
In Coronado the next day, Barbara Kirby emerged from Hetty Smather’s millinery and dressmaking shop and walked toward the near-by corner of Main with light, brisk steps. In her plain white linen suit, Barbara looked cool and fresh and young and purposeful. She was thinking wryly that the
town males would be appalled—if not entirely surprised—at the industrious snipping of lives and secrets which went on in Hetty’s quiet little shop.
For instance, one heard in Hetty’s today that the tall, smiling stranger named Lockhart had paid his room rent at the hotel a week in advance. But on the Roxton road yesterday, with a bland smile, Will Lockhart had let Barbara assume he was leaving Coronado for good. Indignantly now, Barbara vowed to remember the man’s bald evasion.
Also, today in Hetty’s, there was gossip that McGuire, Frank Darrah’s clerk, had paced his rented room at Mrs. Dillon’s for half of last night. And what could be worrying that unmarried, frugal little man who lacked all questionable habits?
Barbara’s smooth, tanned forehead knit over the intriguing puzzle of McGuire’s sleeplessness as she crossed the dusty width of Main and turned briskly along the boardwalk toward Frank’s store to select some rickrack braid. In addition, today, the list of other things to buy and do was dismaying.
Everyone assumed that Barbara Kirby was wildly, excitedly happy. Actually, today, she was perplexed and harried by this rush into marriage. So much to do and think about—so little time—Naturally she was happy; but—
Barbara halted on that thought, smiling with quick pleasure as a loud, familiar voice called her name across the street. Kate Canaday crossed over with manlike strides, her broad, weathered face shining with haste and satisfaction.
“You seen Judge Andy Vandiger?” Kate demanded vigorously.
“Why, no,” Barbara said, and Kate grumbled.
“He was in town this mornin’.” Kate’s knowing glance went back along the street to McGrath’s big log saloon on the corner. “Bet you a rusty tin cup Andy Vandiger is wettin’ his snoozle in McGrath’s an’ politickin’ forty a lick.”
Barbara smiled and her glance went casually to the big, black-bearded Barb foreman riding by in the street. When Vic Hansbro reined over to them, Kate’s hoarse, far-carrying comment was bristling. “I’d swear a skunk was in town!”
