Bill Parker’s eyes lifted slowly and clamped onto Wes Marriner’s. “The reason I’m tellin’ you all this, Marriner—I don’t give a damn who you are or what your name is. You touch that girl and I’ll kill you. Hear?”
When Marriner said nothing, Bill Parker said, “I seen the way you looked at her. Like a damn moonstruck cowboy. Now, I never had no designs on her myself—I’m too old and anyhow I ain’t half good enough for the likes of her. And neither are you. You understand what I mean?”
Wes Marriner’s slightly lopsided grin appeared briefly. “Maybe you ought to relax a little. I mean the girl no harm.”
“Feller like you, gun hung low like that, you don’t need to mean nobody harm. You just carry it around whether you mean to or not.”
Wes Marriner gave him a somber study. “I believe you mean what you say.”
“You ought to believe that.”
“And that’s too bad,” Wes Marriner said flatly. “Because if I feel like having a talk with her, then that’s just what I’ll do. I’ve never taken kindly to being posted out of a place.” He raised his hand. “Let me finish, Bill. The last man who tried to close me down—well, I closed him down. Now, you understand me?”
“Long as all you got in mind is talkin’ to her. But I see you touch a finger to her, I ain’t foolin’ you—”
Wes Marriner’s pride was such that he could not let Bill Parker’s threat hang unanswered in the air; and so he said, “I’d hate to have to fight you, Bill.” And then he walked away, leaving the hard-muscled foreman crouched on the earth with a stalk of straw in his mouth and a speculative frown across his broad, dour face.
He found the girl in the shadow of a ball-shaped bush. “Mind if I have a word with you?”
“If it’s a good word,” the girl answered softly. “I’ve had enough bad words for one day.”
He chuckled and, uninvited, lowered himself to sit near her. His eyes lay against her, unblinking; he said, “I still don’t make sense out of finding a girl like you—”
“—in a place like this?” She made an unhappy gesture. “I didn’t want to come.”
“Ma brought you here? Whatever for?”
“To see her kill that man.”
“Six?”
“Yes.” She seemed withdrawn, faraway; but now for the first time her glance came fully toward him and she spoke with greater fire. “You’re Ma’s nephew, but you ought to know this. She won’t listen to anybody who tries to tell her the truth, because she had her mind all made up the minute she learned Buel was dead. But that story they told you in Spanish Flat—how he drew first and the marshal shot him in self-defense—that story was the truth.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” she answered simply. She added, “She wouldn’t listen to Sandee. Sandee saw the whole thing happen, but she wouldn’t let him tell her how it was. He told me, though. It was just the way you heard it. Buel went to town to kill the marshal.”
“What for?”
“Because of Cleve.” She gave him a strange look. “Your cousin Cleve.”
“Yeah,” he echoed dryly, “my cousin Cleve. I remember a few years back when Cleve was on the gambling circuit. He and I ran together for a while. There were three of us, playing all the high games from Dodge City to Salt Lake. Cleve and me and Jeremy Six.” His voice trailed off.
She said, “He never talked about you very much.”
“Cleve and I didn’t see eye to eye on a few things,” Wes Marriner said. He wondered if he could trust her; finally he said, “Cleve never was much good, even though he made a try at it for a while.” He watched her to see how she would take it.
She didn’t seem surprised. She only said, “Cleve’s always been a big brother to me. He and Bill Parker always treat me as if I’m made out of glass. It’s nice, in a way, and I love them both a little bit. But I can’t pretend to myself that Cleve is any better than he is. He was always like his father.”
“Did old Buel cheat at cards, too?” Wes Marriner said, with a voice as dry and wry as dust.
Her eyes flickered. “Is that why he broke up with you and the marshal?”
“Jeremy Six wasn’t a marshal then.”
“I see.” Suddenly she had turned cold again. “Now that he’s wearing a star, he’s your enemy. Fair game for your gun.” She turned to face away from him; he had a good look at her profile then, and he approved. She said coolly, “You’re just like the rest of them, after all.”
“Maybe not,” Wes Marriner murmured. He got his feet under him and rose. In parting he said quietly, “Try to trust me if you can, Wanda,” and then he went away from her because he was afraid of what might happen to him if he stayed near her much longer.
Nine
Clem Sandee had come into camp at a gallop with his news, and now the whole war party thundered along the road. Bill Parker was saying with evident surprise, “Looks like he headed for Aztec after all, then.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Sandee answered. Sandee was undependable a good part of the time, but he had few equals when it came to scouting tracks. He had thrown out Matador’s best scouts to flank the road, to insure that Six had not left the main trail; with the moon well down after midnight, a rider called Vidoza came swirling in out of the night. “Looks like he cut west toward the Smoke.”
Ma Marriner heard him. “Tryin’ to lose his tracks in the stream? Slippery as a watermelon seed, that lawdog. All right—fan them out, Clem.”
“Maybe we better find out if they went straight across, first.”
“Then get at it,” Ma yelled. “What are you waitin’ for?”
Wes Marriner was eating the dust of the drag, deliberately: he wanted all of them in front of him, where he could see them. He had drifted from rider to rider during the past two hours, dropping a word here and a word there, striking up what seemed to be idle conversations; he had learned a good deal. By now he knew the names and faces of the eight men who were the regular members of the Matador crew—Parker, Sandee, Vidoza and the others—and he had a fair idea of the sentiments of the rest of them, the border-jumpers. Chances were, if things heated up, most of them would bolt. They wouldn’t stand and fight, that much seemed certain.
The crowd bunched and milled at the edge of the Smoke while Sandee’s trackers splashed into the water and spread out to examine the opposite bank for tracks. Every time the men heard Ma Marriner talk they thought there was a steamship going by. She roared, “Lawdog, badge-toter, I want him brought to me by the thumbs. By God, he likes law fooling so much, we’ll give him some law. Some Marriner law. We’ll have ourselves a court and we’ll try the badge-toter. And then maybe I’ll hang him myself.”
She hurled her voice across the river. “Sandee! God damn it, ain’t you found nothing yet?”
Near Wes Marriner, a border-jumper talked in a troubled voice, “I don’t know as I like this business. Kill a lawman, you got real trouble.”
Someone answered without much interest: “Out this far in the sticks, it’ll be just another funeral nobody’ll go to. Nobody’s ever got to know.”
“If that’s what you think, then you got a lot of faith that Ma’ll keep her mouth shut about it. I never heard of her keepin’ her mouth shut yet.”
“She’s loud, but she ain’t stupid. She ain’t never squealed on us for rustling across Matador, has she?”
“Well, maybe you’re right, but I still don’t like the smell of it.”
Wes Marriner drifted forward toward the riverbank; then Vidoza’s call sang out, and Sandee was galloping along the opposite bank. Finally Sandee called across the river, “Here’s where they came out. Come on across.”
The crowd sprang forward. Horses struggled across, half bogged in the sandy bottom; Wes Marriner was half-drowned in kicked-up spray by the time he got across. He was looking through the darkness, trying to find Wanda in the confusion; finally he singled out her slim shape, shadowed close by the looming shoulders of watchful Bill Parker. Ever vigilant,
Bill Parker was keeping his eye out for her.
“Due west,” Sandee was saying, lifting his arm and pointing toward the heavier shadows ahead, the vague black mass of the mountains.
Bill Parker swung his horse up; Wes Marriner was near enough to hear his troubled talk. “Don’t make much sense. He’s a fool if he rode into the Tuolumnes. Take him three days to get across.”
Sandee said, “Maybe he turned north along the foothills.”
“Maybe. We’ll have to find out.”
“We’ll play hell trying to find tracks in those foothills in the middle of the night,” Sandee complained.
Ma Marriner roared, “Quit bellyaching and let’s get after him.”
Sandee shrugged, took Vidoza and two others with him, and trotted forward, leaning low to keen the ground. Sandee’s arm lifted, beckoning; Ma yelled, “He’s got the tracks. Come on—what you lazy saddle tramps waiting for? Ain’t nobody going to blow a bugle for you.”
Ramming west toward the Tuolumnes, the Matador thundered with a massive drumming of hooves through the night. As the crowd began to line out in column, behind the scouts, Wes Marriner managed to place himself in position right beside the girl Wanda. He had only just pulled up beside her when Bill Parker came up. Parker frowned angrily and gave Wes Marriner a hard glance full of warning and threat; Parker swung in behind them.
Wes Marriner chuckled. “I think your friend’s jealous.”
“Bill just doesn’t want to see me hurt. He’s kind,” she said.
“You think maybe he figures I intend to fill you full of bullets?”
She gave him a sidewise glance without answering his laugh. She said, “Why are you laughing at me?”
He said, “Wouldn’t be much point in my getting serious about you, would there?”
“You don’t really believe that, or you wouldn’t be with me,” she said, frankly and directly.
“Then tell me what I should believe, Wanda.”
When Wes Marriner looked at her, she knew she was a woman. There was no explaining to herself the feelings that had swept fiercely through her ever since he had ridden into camp several hours ago. She said in a low voice, “I can’t tell you what to believe.”
“About what?”
“Your own heart.”
He pointed ahead, toward Ma’s broad back and the motley crew of toughs riding in the jam. “You don’t belong within a hundred miles of any of this. Don’t let that iron-sided old woman make anything out of you that you don’t want to be.”
“I don’t know what I want,” she answered softly. “I’m afraid it’s just that simple, Wes.”
“It may be, but you’re not. Get out of this, Wanda, before you drift into somebody’s line of fire. Just rein back easy and let the rest of them ride on. They won’t know you’re gone until it’s too late. Ride back to Spanish Flat and get on the stagecoach and travel as far away from here as you can get.”
She said, “No. She’d only find me.”
He studied her momentarily; maybe it was just the contrast between her fresh clean beauty and the hard ugliness of the crowd, but he could not help feeling a catch in his throat whenever he looked at her. He said, “She’s got you terrified.”
“It’s not just Ma. I’ve never been on my own—Matador is the only home I’ve known. Can you understand that?”
“I guess I can,” he said.
Her eyes were warm, but they were sad. She said, “I hate all of them. She’s not my mother—I hate her just as much as any of them.”
He said quietly, “Do you hate me?”
She answered him levelly. “I hate your gun. I hate men for their guns. There’s got to be something more than that.”
“There is,” he said. “I found it, once—but I lost it.”
“A woman, Wes?”
“A wife,” he murmured. “We had a gold mine. Not rich, but enough to feed us. We didn’t need any more than that.” He shook his head. “Suddenly it seems a long time ago, as if it happened to somebody else.”
“What happened?” she asked softly.
“She died.”
“Oh—I’m sorry.”
“So was I,” he replied; he tipped his hat to her then, glanced back at Bill Parker, and drew his horse away from her. Bill Parker’s hat brim swiveled as Wes Marriner fell back along the column: Bill Parker was keeping an eye on him.
They reached the swells of the foothills; here the scouts had to dismount and track on foot. The war party was slowed to the pace of a slow walking man and Ma Marriner became more irritable than before. Her megaphone voice lashed mercilessly at Sandee and his trackers, driving them forward, mightily resenting each moment’s delay, bellowing against Marshal Six and the blackness of night, bellowing against Sandee and the scouts, bellowing against anything that entered her head.
Finally Sandee got on his horse and lifted his hat, and waved it around in a rallying signal. He was barely visible, although he was only eighty feet or so ahead of the main body. Ma galloped forward. The rest arrived on her heels. She roared, “Well?”
Sandee scratched his jaw. “I don’t get it, ma’am, and that’s the truth. No question about it anymore. He couldn’t have turned back from here. Couldn’t have turned north or south—too many cross canyons up this way. He’s gone straight in.”
Bill Parker said, “You mean across the Tuolumnes?”
“Must’ve,” Sandee said.
Bill Parker said, “Then he’s out of his mind.”
“And he’s out on a limb,” Ma Marriner shouted with gusto. If rage added weight to her voice, then pleasure added even more. Like a steam horn she blasted her words against the assembled men: “We got him where we want him, boys. Now you listen to me.”
Near Wes Marriner, one of the toughs growled, “How in hell can we help listenin’?”
Ma thundered, “I want twenty of you men to go with me. We’re gonna cut around the north end of the range and get over to the other side, where we can set up to wait for Six to drop in our laps when he makes it across the Tuolumnes. The rest of you ride with Bill Parker. I want you to go right up into them mountains and get right behind Six so he don’t have no chance to double back on his trail. Don’t start a fight unless you got to. I want you to push him right across the mountains. I’ll be waitin’ for you to drive him right into the palm of my hand. And you men mind me this—if anybody lets that badge-toter slip through his fingers, I’ll roast the man on a spit. You hear me?”
Ten
Sweating like a winded horse, Six reached the top of the pass and called a halt. All morning, and half the afternoon now, he had plodded forward on foot, leading the one remaining horse, with the prisoner on the saddle. Six’s saddle horn was steel, and there was no chance of Cleve’s getting loose from the handcuffs this time.
Six dragged a soaked sleeve across his face. Cleve said, “You’re putting up a good show, but what for? Why not quit now? Leave me off. You’ve still got a horse and a good chance to run for it. You know damn well they’re after us. You saw their dust back there.”
Half staggering, Six stepped to the horse and unlocked the handcuff. “Get down.”
Cleve began to grin. “That’s more like it. Now you’re showing some sense.”
“Your legs aren’t hurt,” Six said. “And you’ve had plenty of time to get your strength back. It’s your turn to walk, Cleve. Out ahead of me. Get going.” Six’s eyes looked like holes burned in a blanket.
“You’re crazy,” Cleve said, half in awe. “Jeremy, for God’s sake. You know you haven’t got the chance of a snowball in hell.”
“Whatever the chance is, I guess I’ve got to take it.”
“What in hell for?”
Six gestured with his hand and Cleve dismounted, stiff and awkward. Six gathered the reins over the horse’s withers, lifted his foot stiffly into the stirrup, and hauled himself up into the saddle with a frightening amount of effort. He said, in a voice gone husky and hoarse, “When you carry a tin badge, Cleve,
sometimes it gets damned heavy, but you can’t just put it down.”
“Why not? Hell, man, you—”
“Just shut up and walk, all right?” Six hipped around in the saddle and looked back down the steep trail behind them.
Like lances on parade, the spires of massed pines marched across the mountainsides. Up here the air was thin and bracing; but even here, the sun reached down with its heavy-handed heat. The clean, spicy fragrance of pine resin filled the pass. The horse pulled at its reins, trying to reach underbrush by the side of the trail to eat. Six pulled its head up. “On the hoof, Cleve.”
“Suppose I don’t. Suppose I just sit down here and tell you to go to hell.”
“Then,” Six said through his teeth, “I’ll hogtie you and rope you by ten feet of lasso to my saddle, and by Judas I’ll drag you down this mountain, Cleve.”
Cleve saw the raw bitter resolve in Six’s cheeks, and he said softly, “You know, I think you’d just do that, too.”
He turned, and started walking. His voice drifted back over his shoulder: “These boots ain’t much made for walking, Jeremy.”
“Neither were mine.”
“I’m a wounded man. You got to take that into account.”
“Shut up, Cleve.”
It was downhill for half an hour, but then the canyons sloped upward again; they still had not achieved the summit of the range. Before them the timber-shadowed broken country lifted, tier upon tier of pines and occasional rock outcrops. Six frequently twisted in the saddle to search the country behind; he kept his ears tuned, knowing that a big crowd coming up behind him would throw forward a telltale echo. He glanced, for the twentieth time, at the sky. Clouds were building and it seemed certain they were in for a storm. Rain could be a blessing, right now: it would cut down visibility and wash out tracks. But a feeling of foreboding ruffled Six’s flesh. Along the hills visible behind him, nothing was stirring.
Marshal Jeremy Six #5 Page 9
