“I’m asking you to leave town, Cleve. But you don’t hear that, do you?”
“Been a long ride,” said Cleve Marriner in a husky tone. “My bones are weary and I feel like taking it easy a while. Jeremy, whatever happened to the old times?”
“They died,” Six said, “the day you sold out to your old man.”
Cleve’s face jutted out defiantly. “My old man’s a better gun than you or me, Jeremy. You’ll never stop him.”
“Maybe—maybe.” Six turned full away.
“God damn it, don’t you turn your back on me!”
Six did not turn, but spoke slowly over his shoulder. “I guess that’s right—a man shouldn’t turn his back on you. Not anymore.”
“Christ, we’re friends, Jeremy. Do you forget that like a bad dream?”
“Get out, Cleve.” Six went through the door and shut it behind him, and moved forward through the dim saloon. It was Clarissa Vane who stopped him at the walk.
“He won’t leave, will he?”
“No,” Six said. “There was a time when I thought a lot of him.”
“We all change.”
He said, “Stay inside tonight, and after he leaves don’t let anyone in.”
Bleak and regretful, he left her, going toward the center of town, a lonely but powerful figure of a man; his face settled into a grim cast.
Two
At the far end of Border Street a hatless rider was visible for a brief span of time, riding crosswise on the street. It might have been the tall white-haired Buel Marriner, keeping surveillance on the town.
In the alley beside Zimmer’s store stood one of Marriner’s gunmen, shading a match with his hat while he lit a smoke, and unaware of the spurless boots moving soundlessly along the alley behind him. But the cold touch of a pistol muzzle at the side of his neck was unmistakable. The gunman froze. The low voice behind him came from the lips of Spur’s Larry Keene:
“Don’t move. I’m taking your iron.”
There was the soft whisper of the gunman’s revolver sliding out of its holster. Keene said, “Let’s head around for the back of the Drover’s Rest. Don’t make noise, friend, or you’ll end up with your head in your lap.”
In the lobby of the hotel a tough sat in plain lamplight reading Police Gazette, Keene’s foreman, fat Bones Riley, walked in the side door with a shotgun. “Move and you’re dead. Shuck your gunbelt.”
In the stable big Tracy Chavis of Chainlink waited with controlled quiet breathing while a horseman rode in, dismounted, and loosened the cinch. The horseman put a feed nosebag over the pony’s muzzle. Chavis said conversationally, “Hike ’em.”
Hal Craycroft was at that moment stalking his target behind the row of whitewashed houses at the foot of Main Street; and Bill Dealing avoided chance when he struck his prey from behind with a gun barrel, lifted the unconscious gunman effortlessly and walked swiftly toward the back of the Drover’s Rest.
When Jeremy Six entered the Drover’s Rest by the front door the town was silent and seemed asleep. But there was a crowd remaining in the Drover’s Rest. The marshal was subjected to an anxious scrutiny, and was keenly aware of it: it was this recognition of the little currents of fear and anger moving wordlessly through the air that had helped keep him alive over the years.
Behind the bar room, Craycroft’s office was thickly packed with men, five of them trussed with ropes. Six counted noses and nodded. “Marriner will be watching the jail. We may have fooled him.”
“There’s still four men unaccounted for,” said Tracy Chavis. “Marriner and Cleve and two others.”
Larry Keene, seated on the corner of the desk with a gun hanging idly in his fist, spoke with even mildness. “Bill Dealing brought one of these hairpins in and then went out again. He’s prowlin’ around somewhere.”
“I’ll have a look,” Bones Riley growled. “He was headed down by the blacksmith’s.” He curled his bulk out the back door and shut it quietly.
Not long thereafter Bill Dealing entered with a prisoner, and Riley close behind. Dealing turned the disarmed gunman over to Tracy Chavis to be roped; the night marshal slid a coat sleeve across his brow and shook his head. “Nobody could have convinced me this was going to work. But not a hitch yet.”
“Marriner’s still in town,” Chavis said in answer. “Or anyway his horse is. Tied up half a block from the bank, right beside Cleve’s horse.”
“Where’s that third man?” Marshal Six said. He had been standing with head bowed in thought; now he rose to speak. “Somewhere around this town Buel and Cleve Marriner and one other man are loose. Nobody’s spotted them and that means they’re holed up tight. It won’t be long before one of them goes out for a look around and finds out their gang’s all gone.”
“Then what?” asked Hal Craycroft.
Tracy Chavis, who had done his share of gunfighting, observed: “If we were talking about ordinary gunnies, I’d say it was long odds against them staying. They’d pull out and go home. But the Marriners are a different breed.”
Jeremy Six said, “That’s a fact. It wouldn’t surprise me if they tried to ram it through alone.” He shook his head and exhaled strongly. “I surely wish they wouldn’t.” Then his lids rose and when he spoke again his voice was clipped, businesslike. “This is my job from here. I thank you all for your help. I’d be obliged if one or two of you stood watch on these prisoners until we finish this thing. The rest of you can head home.”
“Why,” said Larry Keene, “I guess we’d all as soon see it through, Jeremy.”
“Keep your heads down, then.”
Tracy Chavis said, “Jeremy.”
“What?”
“Old Buel Marriner didn’t just come here to hold up the bank. He came here for you.”
Craycroft said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Chavis turned his palm up. “I was on the Circuit too. Cleve Marriner was as wild a kid as there ever was. Jeremy took him in hand. Straightened him out, for a while there. Old Buel never forgave him that—taking over his own son. For a long time Cleve refused to ride with his old man because Jeremy’d showed him a better way, the honest man’s way.”
“Uh-huh,” said Craycroft.
Chavis said to Six, “It’s for sure Buel Marriner won’t leave town without seeing you. Just make sure you see him first.”
“I intend to,” said Six. He nodded to them all, and left.
When Six was gone, Chavis said, “That’s a loose freewheeling bunch old Buel’s got on his payroll. Look at these two-bit hooligans. None of them’s interested in backing up old Buel’s personal feuds. He had to promise them a fat bank or they wouldn’t have followed him—they knew this was a tough town to tree. But make no mistake, gents. The Marriners didn’t come for the bank. They came for Jeremy. They won’t leave before they’ve tried to settle with him.”
The solitary, blunt-shouldered figure of the marshal tramped the boardwalks vigilantly. The night was silent: the loudest sound abroad was the pound of Six’s feet against the worn boards, like mailed footsteps in a cold stone corridor. Never walking the same path twice, he prowled the town, laying down his challenge to Buel Marriner.
It was after one o’clock when Six was seen to enter the main thoroughfare, two blocks down from the saloon. At precisely the same moment three men, bunched close, came into the street from a farther intersection and spread three-abreast across the street, moving forward with measured gait toward the bank. Six, also heading for that spot, had twice the distance to travel.
The Marriners were proceeding toward the bank as though nothing had happened to the rest of their force.
They made it plain they intended to ignore the marshal. One of the three stopped at the hotel, across the street from the bank, and posted himself under the shade of the porch roof. Cleve and Buel Marriner continued up onto the walk before the bank.
In the saloon Hal Craycroft spoke with wonder: “What in God’s name do they think they’re proving?”
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p; Chavis said, “The big party was to be Jeremy’s funeral, not the bank holdup.”
Larry Keene put in, “And they figure him to come at them alone. He’s too proud for anything else, and old Buel knows it.”
“The bastards,” said Craycroft.
In the street the light was poor. Dominguez appeared at the outside corner of the hotel building and stood, not saying anything, just cradling his shotgun and facing the tough who had posted himself on the porch. Watching this byplay from the saloon, Craycroft said, “Fools. Even if they kill Jeremy they’ll never leave this town alive.”
“They know that,” Chavis said bleakly. “Pride’s been pushing at old Buel for years. It looks like he’s lived with it as long as he could.”
On the corner outside, Dominguez’s shotgun muzzle stirred. The two Marriners, father and son, stood together on the bank porch, and half a block away Six had come to a halt in the exact center of the street. The moon had set. Stars were brilliant dots on the sky and lamplight, splashing along the dusty street at irregular intervals, gave the scene a stage set quality.
The tough on the hotel porch reached around with his left hand and carefully lifted his revolver with thumb and forefinger. The sound of the gun hitting the boardwalk was clearly audible as far away as the saloon. The tough gave Dominguez an expressionless glance and swung away down the street. He went into the stable and for some time no one spoke, no one moved; the scene was a static painting. Then hoof beats telegraphed along the ground from the stable and the tough left at a canter, riding away down the street toward the desert road. On that signal, Dominguez shifted his shotgun toward the front of the bank.
Six was observed to walk ten paces forward. He stopped again, within thirty yards of the two men at the bank, deliberately placing himself so that the line of fire from the bank would not reach the saloon. A single slim shape moved up the walk from the direction of Cat Town, coming as far as the courthouse. That was Clarissa Vane. She did not speak.
Cleve Marriner’s voice was the first to rise. “You can walk away, Jeremy. We intend to visit the bank.”
Six made no answer. Buel Marriner swept his hat from his white mane and cuffed his son’s arm with it. “To hell with this roundabout rigmarole. Six, draw your gun and let’s get at it.”
Six talked imperturbably. “The first one of you that touches the door, I’ll shoot his ears off.” Six was playing by the rules.
Buel Marriner shook his head. “This is stupid. I’ve come here to kill you.”
“Have a try, then.”
“You’ll face both of us at once?”
“I didn’t pick the odds,” Six said.
Cleve said, “There’s one across the street, Pa. Shotgun.”
Dominguez spoke up, then: “Ready to blow both of you in half.”
Cleve studied it, brows low, and moved out in front of his father. “Suppose we make it even, shotgun. You and me, we’ll both put out of it.”
Dominguez said, “I take my orders from the marshal, bucko. Not from you.”
Six said, “Buel, you’re dead either way. Throw down your gun.”
Cleve Marriner moved deliberately out into the street. He was standing directly in the line of fire between his father and Dominguez, and he said, “I’m not going to draw, shotgun, so God damn it don’t dump that buckshot in me.”
Old Buel growled: “Don’t pussyfoot, Cleve. You’ve got him ranged—you can knock him down.”
“No, sir,” said Cleve. “You put this up between you and Jeremy and if that’s the way you want it, that’s how you’ll get it. I didn’t come down here to kill anybody else.”
“I never will make sense out of you,” his father said bitterly. “As you wish. I got no fight with the shotgun.” He dropped off the porch into the street.
Six stood as an oak while old Buel moved forward several paces. “The light’s bad for shooting.”
“I didn’t pick it,” Six said again.
Cleve moved aside to keep himself between his father and Dominguez, thus neutralizing Dominguez’s shotgun; Cleve lifted both hands to shoulder height and stood there like that, stubborn and ungiving.
Old Buel let out a long sigh of breath. “I didn’t come here to talk, Six.”
“Then stop talking.” Six’s hat brim rose a few inches. He was standing with his feet slightly apart, arms hanging relaxed.
Old Buel nodded slowly. Some saw his shoulders stir just before his hand whipped to his holster. Earsplitting gunshots cracked the night wide open and in the uncertain light it was hard to make out what was occurring on the street; but when the echoes died Six stood in the same spot, right arm extended with his gun lying fisted, pointing into space where Buel Marriner had stood.
Old Buel had crumpled to an awkward crouch; he seemed ready to pitch forward, but he did not. His revolver lay on the street below his hand, a small wisp of smoke rising from the bore.
Six stepped forward into the light falling out of a window. Not until then did Cleve Marriner move. Cleve read the story with his eyes and then walked slowly to his father. He got his hands under old Buel’s arms and straightened the old man out on the ground; Buel was dead.
Cleve looked up. “You tricked him,” he breathed. “You must have tricked him. Nobody ever beat him.”
“He got old,” said Six, “and it was a bad light for shooting, Cleve.”
Cleve doubled over with a sharp, audible breath. He reached out to turn old Buel’s white head around. “You tricked him,” he said. His eyes lifted, glistening, to meet Six’s. “I’ll kill you for this, Jeremy.”
“It was coming to him.”
“It’s coming to you, too.” Cleve’s teeth showed when his lips pulled back.
“Maybe. But not tonight, Cleve. Get on your horse and take him home.”
Crouching by old Buel, Cleve was nodding his head, touching old Buel’s cheek with the fingertips of his left hand. It was in that position that he drew his gun and flung its muzzle up.
Six’s gun flashed, beating away the stillness with its harsh single explosion.
Cleve had not fired. With a great sob he crushed his shattered arm against his ribs, the elbow crooked unnaturally. The hat fell from his head and rolled into the street; the startling brush of his hair moved in the light breeze and a savage oath escaped his lips.
Six’s glance lifted and traveled across the intersection. Dominguez depressed the muzzles of his shotgun and walked forward, leaning down to pick up the two revolvers from the ground, Cleve’s and old Buel’s. A knot of men issued from the Drover’s Rest. Six loomed above Cleve Marriner and said, “Maybe there’s an apology due somewhere, Cleve, but I don’t know who’s to make it.”
Cleve’s voice grated through teeth set with pain and grief. “I’ll have your guts for guitar strings, Jeremy.”
Two men hoisted Cleve to his feet and helped him toward the doctor’s house. The light wind deposited a grit-coat of dust on the features of old Buel Marriner. Six said tonelessly, “Get him out of the street.”
Dominguez said, “What about those gunnies tied up in Hal’s office?”
“Keep their guns and post them out of town.”
“Maybe they’ll come back, make trouble.”
“Not them. All they were after was the bank.”
“What about Cleve?”
Six said grimly, “I’ll hold him for attempted murder of a peace officer.”
He met Dominguez’s bright glance before he turned away. A block down the street, Clarissa Vane waited. Six went that way and took her arm. At his window, Henry Zimmer saw the moisture in her eyes. Six’s lip corners were stretched tight. He and Clarissa Vane turned off the street and went from sight.
Three
Mrs. Marriner’s first name was Ilsa, but nobody knew it. No one called her anything but Ma. Ma Marriner. She was a hard woman, stout and big, with calloused great hands and a face which, according to the Matador cow hands, had been clouted by the Ugly Tree. She was broad of beam and shoulder—
she probably outweighed most of the hungry-thin riders who pretended to be cow hands when they were between rustling jobs on the Matador. She had given birth to one child—a son, Cleve—and she had raised another, a girl called Wanda who was the orphaned daughter of a drifting cowboy who had had the bad luck to die, of cholera, on the Matador. And, somehow, Ma had in a curious way fulfilled the tough and bitter life of her husband, old Buel.
Old Buel had migrated into the southern Arizona hill country in the days before the Civil War when he had been a young man traveling light: he had brought his wife and his wagon, and that was about all. Cleve had been born on the Matador. No one knew where Wanda had been born—no one knew who her mother had been, but from Wanda’s sultry coloring it was guessed her mother might have been a Creole in the bayou country from which Wanda’s father hailed. At any rate, Wanda had grown up on the Matador, calling it home. The ranch was big. It sprawled across ragged hills and brakes, flowing up into the crags of the Hatchets where timber grew thick and there was no shortage of hiding places for a man on the run.
Old Buel hadn’t started out to be a criminal; he had drifted into it. It happened that the site he had chosen to build his ranch on lay smack-dab across all the most popular shadow-trails that riders on the run used to get to and from Mexico. Less than ten miles from the border, the Matador proved to be an ideal gathering place for stolen cattle: cattle stolen in the States for sale in Mexico, and cattle stolen in Mexico for sale in the States. Either way, the Matador provided a clearing house, and by a gradual process old Buel had become the middleman through whom all dealings were done.
Once in a while old Buel himself would ride down into Mexico at the head of a gang of cutthroats to plunder a Mexican ranch of its stock, but most of the time he had left that kind of hard work to the hardcases who did it for a living. Old Buel didn’t have a big crew of his own; the Matador employed about fourteen men, all gunmen, whose principal job was to keep track of visitors, and make sure that old Buel didn’t get shortchanged during the exchanges of stolen cattle that took place on his property. Old Buel’s policy was to extract a tithe—a ten percent cut—and the rustlers who frequented the Matador found it worth paying, because of the fattening grass the Matador supplied, the water it offered, the safe haven of the nearby canyons of the Hatchets and, perhaps most of all, the good company: any rustler who came to the Matador could be sure that his companions would be colleagues, and not law men.
Marshal Jeremy Six #5 Page 2
