by Lauran Paine
Ladd listened and Joe Reilly said: “Don’t think for a minute all they got over here is clods. There’s a feller works at the general store who was badly wounded in the war who was a full colonel. He’s directing things. Right now he’s using his sharpshooters. Simon and Doc and I sat in on their war council and this feller took command. Believe me, those outlaws don’t stand a single blessed chance.”
“If they were smart, they’d give up,” Ladd said, but Reilly shook his head.
“Too late.”
“You mean that man meant it. They aren’t going to let Cass and Walt give up?”
Joe was emphatic. “They said they’d give ’em one chance, and after that they’d bore in until they’d killed every blasted one of them.”
Ladd listened to the gunfire. It was more like a duel between two men with rifles or carbines, and two other men with six-guns, and that was exactly what it was. First one side would fire, then the other side would retaliate, but the riflemen seemed repeatedly to change position while the pair of outlaws inside the livery barn remained stationary. What ultimately broke up this duel was someone with a shotgun firing from inside the barn. The noise was not just deafening; it also was followed by the splintering of wood and the loud cursing of a man Ladd thought was Walt.
For a moment only the ear-ringing echoes lingered, then two six-guns blazed away, and this time they were firing at something inside the barn. Again the shotgun went off, first one deafening barrel, then the other deafening barrel. A man cried out, a pair of simultaneous six-guns blazed back, and Ladd joined Joe Reilly in crawling belly down to the doorway of their horse stall to peek around.
That bully day man was lying face down over along the opposite side of the runway, the shotgun still in a grip of one scarred big fist. The townsmen beyond the barn were suddenly silent, listening and trying to guess what had happened. Harrison, the cowman, utilized this moment to sing out: “Cass, you’re done for.” It was said in his customarily calm and casual tone. “Did you see Walt? He’s caught one of those full-bore blasts in the chest. You can read a newspaper through him, and that means you’re all that’s left. Cass . . . ?”
There was no answer or any more defiant gunfire. Joe screwed up his face. “He’s hit sure as hell, and maybe he’s even dead,” Joe whispered to Ladd. “Which stall was he in?”
Ladd had no idea. When they had all initially scattered in panic, the only person Ladd had kept an eye upon was Reilly.
“Can you see around the door?” Joe asked.
Ladd inched ahead a little, until he saw the dead lawman and Abner, then he squeezed over closer and craned harder until he could also see up past the harness room where the dead day man was lying, still gripping his shotgun, all the way to the front roadway. There was no one to be seen and there was no noise. He pulled back. “Three corpses and that’s all,” he reported.
Reilly, upon the opposite side of their stall opening, also inched ahead and sought to look out and around in the opposite direction. Without warning someone fired, a long pale splinter of stall door wood took flight, and the door itself was slammed back hard against Reilly, almost stunning him, but instinct made him back-pedal as swiftly as he could. Ladd thought Joe had been hit until the saloon man pointed to the splintered stall door.
A man said—“I know which stall he’s in.”—and followed this up by firing into the siding of the stall where Joe and Ladd were crouching.
Horse stalls were usually built of planking that would resist the normal abuse animals might give, but they were never built to withstand gunfire. The siding that was protecting Reilly and Buckner stopped a number of slugs and turned aside more slugs, but it was also gradually disintegrating until Ladd decided, if he continued to lie there, he and Joe Reilly were going to be killed, and pulled back as far as he could into a corner, then waited for the gunfire to pause, so that he might make a dash for some other place of concealment.
The lull arrived when Paso’s townsmen decided they surely must have obliterated someone inside that shot-up horse stall, but just as Ladd was rising to run, someone in a stall up closer to the front roadway fired twice, very fast, and over among the men in the freight wagon a man cried out in pain. Now, those men in the alleyway saw their mistake. They shifted their sights and began systematically blazing away at the stall where Cass had fired from. Reilly motioned for Ladd to get back down flat again, and in this position they heard someone running toward their stall and were absolutely helpless to do anything about it. They hadn’t even heard the man running until he was so close they had no time to jump up and face him.
It was Harrison, the range cowman, and he was clutching that shotgun the day man had died firing. As he sprang inside and saw the pair of men lying prone inside, he swung the shotgun for a moment, then swung it away, and sank to one knee as he said: “I think I can nail him from here.”
Before either Joe or Ladd could speak, Harrison knelt in the doorway and raised his shotgun to rest on the door top. After a moment without the exposed shotgun barrel drawing gunfire from the outlaw leader up front, Harrison slowly raised up to snug back the shotgun as though it were a rifle, and aim it.
That was when the six-gun blast came without warning and Harrison went down backward and rolled in agony, his shotgun falling close to Ladd in the straw. Without a moment of reflection Ladd grabbed the weapon and jumped over to the edge of the door, but low enough so that he would come around it from the floor. He looked up as soon as he was exposed. Cass was just lowering himself again. Ladd fired even though he felt certain it was too late.
Wood burst up where Cass had been and a man’s clear-toned profanity erupted up there. Ladd hauled back the second hammer and waited. Cass did not make an attempt to fire back, and he did not expose himself, but Ladd had accomplished something the dozen or so men out front had most earnestly hoped for and that none of them had been able to accomplish. Ladd pulled the outlaw leader’s full attention away from the roadway, which allowed those men out there to get realigned. One of them suddenly leaned around the doorless front opening and fired on the spur of the moment. The bullet raked the paneling one foot from Ladd. He dived back inside his cell where Joe Reilly was working over the wounded cattleman. Neither Harrison nor Joe glanced up as the gunfire became brisk again.
Ladd waited. He had one more loaded barrel in his scatter-gun so he could not join in any indiscriminate shoot-outs. He waited, listening and estimating and deciding what his chances might be. When there was another lull, he eased to the broken door again, eased around it to peer in the direction of Cass’s horse stall, and from out back in the alley a man yelled at him.
“Get the hell out of the way, Buckner!”
Ladd glanced over his shoulder. Simon, the Piñon blacksmith, was down there holding a long-barreled rifle in both hands.
Ladd turned his back on Simon. Up ahead Cass fired into the roadway again. Ladd knew what he would do, finally. He waited until the townsmen had got Cass to fire back at them again, then Ladd stood up and moved swiftly on the balls of his feet. He had about ten or twelve yards to traverse before he could look down into the horse stall which was his objective. He heard someone out back sharply commanding someone else not to shoot. Otherwise, he did not feel especially exposed, although there was no doubt about it, he was not just exposed, he was also unknown to most of the townsmen out there, waiting. He was in the most dangerous situation of his lifetime when he stalked the deadly outlaw leader up in one of those front stalls.
Simon had made certain those townsmen out back would not fire at Ladd. Out front, over in the freight wagon where the wounded man was still groaning, Dr. Orcutt was not just working on the injured man; he was also explaining to the townsmen around him and within hearing distance of his voice who that whisking shadow was, down there in the runway.
Ladd only knew he was close enough to Cass’s horse stall to raise his shotgun. He could not risk a snap shot. He had only one blast in the old weapon, and, if he missed with it, or if h
e wasted it, he was going to pay with his life. He knew it. He had never thought of Cass as any less of a murderer than Abner had been. He began to rise up just outside of Cass’s stall. Inside, since no one was firing at him, Cass was down on his knees, reloading. As it turned out, this was the last time he would be able to reload; he had shot out all the extra shells from his shell belt. One way or another, Cass had come to the end of his personal trail.
Ladd kept rising up. When he was able to do it, he lifted the scatter-gun in both hands, then began the final maneuver that would permit him to lift the shotgun over the half wall of the stall. As he did this, the man in there on his knees caught sight of a shadow from the corner of his eyes and with incredible speed slammed closed the gate of his Colt and twisted from the waist, simultaneously tipping up the Colt barrel. Ladd had the shotgun pushed straight ahead when he pulled the trigger. That blast, in such a confined place, sounded like a Howitzer being fired, and the full bore of that scatter-gun charge lifted Cass half to his feet and hurled him violently back into the far wall, then allowed him slowly to fold forward and slide off the wall, dead.
XVII
Enos Orcutt had six wounded individuals, which was somewhat of a surprise to Ladd and Joe Reilly. The only wounded men they were aware of were two in number; one of them was over in the freight wagon out front of the blacksmith’s shop, and they had heard that man cry out when Cass had shot him, while the other injured one was that cattleman, Harrison, and he had been less than ten feet from them when he had been hit. Otherwise, though, they’d seen no one get hit and hadn’t really thought much about this possibility except when the townsmen had mistakenly opened up and had splintered the front wall of the stall they had been hiding in.
Now that it was over, Ladd walked back to the stall where Joe Reilly was still working over Harrison. Until now Ladd hadn’t even seen Harrison’s wound, which was through the left shoulder up high and may not have broken any bones. Ladd pitched something into the straw near Joe. It was the sack with the money pouch inside it. Joe looked over, looked up at Ladd, and said: “You get the son-of-a-bitch?”
Ladd nodded. “How’s Harrison?”
Reilly looked down. “He needs Enos. You’d better go out there and find him.”
“Mind the money,” Ladd said, and leaned the scatter-gun aside as he turned to leave the barn. Out front there were several visible armed men for a change. Everyone seemed to realize it was over. Ladd called across to the men around the wagon.
“Is Doctor Orcutt over there?”
He was, and he’d just completed giving instructions to the injured man’s brother for the care of that man Cass had wounded in the wagon. He turned and strode across, accompanied by several armed townsmen. When he got close, he looked closely at Ladd before saying: “You hit, by any chance?”
“No. Joe and I made it through all right, but there’s a cowman in the stall with Joe who got hit . . . Enos?”
Orcutt paused to say: “Six injured ones counting your cowman, Ladd . . . Cass and Walt and Abner?”
“Dead in there. You’ll see them.” Ladd felt tired and drawn out. “I’ll be at the bathhouse if anyone needs me,” he added, and turned to walk away. Enos Orcutt barked at a couple of townsmen who started after Buckner.
“Leave him alone for a while,” the doctor said.
The town was beginning to show new signs of life as Ladd approached the jailhouse, then walked right on past it all the way up to the rooming house where he got the key to the bathhouse, plus a towel and a chunk of lye soap from a teenaged boy who couldn’t fathom someone wanting to bathe at a time like this, when three notorious bank robbers were holed up down at the livery barn, fighting it out with the entire town, plus several men from over at Piñon. Ladd listened to all the youth had to say, nodded, and walked out back to the one place in Paso, aside from private dwellings, where a body could get a decent bath. He was also hungry, but that consideration could wait.
By the time he was freshly attired and smelling strongly of lye soap, Paso had assessed the cost of its unexpected, savage fight. There was no undertaker in Paso, but the proprietor of the general store, the only person in town who owned a sawdust-filled icehouse, allowed the dead to be stacked in his icehouse until other dispositions could be arranged for.
There were still people who had difficulty grasping the fact that Constable Lewis Brennan had not only been killed, but had also been in league with outlaws. On the other hand there were enough other people around the Paso countryside who suspected that Brennan had never been a man of purest virtue. As Harrison was to say later, when he was able to be up and around: “Maybe they sometimes start out plumb honest, but after a few years in office . . . providin’ they was raised by folks who themselves never could make out the difference between real right and wrong . . . they just sort of slide right down to the renegade level.”
Ladd Buckner and his companions from Piñon did not hear Harrison say that because by the time the cowman was able to be up and around, the men from Piñon had been back home for a week or so.
On the ride back, with Joe Reilly in charge of the money sack, it was the taciturn blacksmith who made the most cryptic observation. “Two days wasted, damned near killed a dozen times, got the money that don’t belong to none of us, and now we go home to hand it over to folks who’ll never understand all we went through to get it back for ’em. Why?”
Dr. Orcutt, looking more raffish than ever in his tipped-back dented derby, his torn and rumpled and soiled frock coat, and his unshaven countenance, replied with a twinkle: “Simon, you do things without thinking because you know without thinking you should do them. If any of us had coldly thought this thing through, we wouldn’t any of us have struck out like we did. Emotionalism gets people killed every day, but even when they are dead, they are still better men than the ones who react coldly and avoid their responsibilities.” Doc glanced at the blacksmith. “How’s that for being profound when I need a bath, a shave, and probably protection from the folks in Piñon who’ll be mad as hornets about me traipsing off to play lawman?”
Reilly fished in a saddle pocket and brought forth a bottle of brandy. “Got it free in Paso,” he said, offering it around. Doc took two swallows and Simon Terry had three swallows, but neither Reilly nor Buckner took a drop.
They were coming down the near side of the pass and could distantly make out roof tops and sun-brightened glass windowpanes even from that distance, when the southbound coach headed for Piñon, after having briefly stopped back in Paso, careered past, stirring dust to high heaven and forcing the men from Piñon to the shoulder of the road where they cursed the driver with considerable feeling.
“He can’t wait to get down to Piñon to tell all he knows,” growled Dr. Orcutt. “They never get anything right.”
Joe Reilly had vindicated himself honorably, had resolved what he would have classified as his civic responsibility, and now was perfectly free to think in other terms. He therefore said: “Lads, when we get back and you’ve had a little time to clean up and get straight again, drop by the saloon this evening. You’ll be deserving all the free likker the boys’ll want to pour down you to hear the lurid and true story of all we’ve gone through in the interests of law ’n’ order.”
Ladd, remembering that his background had been exposed, pointed to the sack tied to Reilly’s saddle horn. “Just you be damned certain you get that pouch back to the folks at the bank. And not tonight. The minute you get back to town.”
Joe looked aggrieved. “That was my intention right from the start.”
Doc smiled at Simon and the blacksmith did not smile back. He simply looked dead ahead, already thinking of the work he had to do, starting fresh tomorrow.
Promise of Revenge
I
In the moonlight the roadway looked oddly strange. There was no life in it anywhere. Dark shadows lay heavily across store fronts, across roof lines, and along the plank walks beneath wooden overhangs. It dropped from eaves in its many
overtones; in some places it was darker and deeper than in other places. In front of the Cowmen’s & Drovers’ Bank, for instance, the darkness had a cold, bright lining to it, because the moonlight was reflected from a large glass window with golden letters upon it. Everything that lived was shrouded in this black and silver, cold, strange world of absolute silence. West of town where low hills lay there was flat open country for perhaps six miles, then the rise and lift of running land frozen in motion; a man on horseback atop the nearest hill could see the valley as it was.
Beatty was the hub. Emanating outward from Beatty were a dozen pale roads, the spokes. Around the valley, far out, were the hills, silver-tinted now in the pale light. It was a scene to put a man in mind of an immense wagon wheel. The man atop the hill shifted in his saddle. Then he moved again because a pinched nerve in his right hip reminded him of the old wound. He looped the reins, made a cigarette, lit it, and exhaled. The silence was as deep as it would be at the bottom of the sea. He smoked and looked down into the valley and remembered.
There was a fine iron bird bath in Judge Montgomery’s front yard behind the gleaming picket fence. There was a swing there, too, where the judge’s daughter had been playing the first time he’d seen her. There was the fine gold lettering on the bank window; the substantial brick courthouse that rose majestically where the old plaza had been, and always—except in bad weather—the flag atop its white-painted pole. And the people. The good and orderly people. Of course many of the faces would now be strange; some would have moved on; a few perhaps would have died; but in the main they would be the same people. Judge Montgomery, Banker Elihu Gorman, Moses Beach of the Beatty Mercantile Company, Sheriff Tim Pollard—all the excellent, substantial citizens of Beatty.
The solitary rider’s lips drew down at their outward corners. All the fine people of Beatty. He pushed out his cigarette against the saddle horn, took up the reins, and kneed his mount down off the hill, moving slowly and very deliberately as though forcing himself to relive each twisting, hurting part of some deep-seated memory.
