Buchanan 21

by Jonas Ward

  “Nonsense. But maybe you’d better take a good drink of it first.” She handed him the bottle and he uncorked it, took a pull in direct ratio to his size. Ellen looked a little startled when he returned the bottle.

  “Now lie down,” she told him, and when he was prone she took off the bandage. “It’s all red,” she said worriedly. “It’s going to hurt something fierce when the whisky touches it.”

  “Can’t be helped.”

  She poured the straight liquor directly onto the wound and Buchanan’s whole enormous frame went taut with the shocking pain of it. His eyes shut tight, and the two large tendons alongside his neck were stretched so tight that Ellen thought they would snap.

  “Oh, dear God!” she cried out, throwing herself across his chest fitfully, as if somehow she could shield him with her own body, absorb some of his suffering.

  Neither of them were aware that another presence had come into the room, a man who stood in the doorway with a look of murderous rage in his too-handsome face.

  “HARLOT!” he shouted, and at the terrible sound Ellen’s head swung around.

  “Frank—!”

  “Stand away from him, you cheating, two-faced jezebel!”

  “Frank, Frank—you don’t understand—”

  “I have eyes! Stand away—”

  Now she saw the gun in his hand and she got to her feet, stood squarely between her husband and the man on the bed. The raw alcohol was still searing Buchanan’s festering wound and he was only half-aware of what else was happening.

  “He was shot, Frank,” Ellen was pleading. “Helping me. There’s nothing between us. I swear to you—”

  Then, from down the hall, Juanita’s piercing scream filled the house.

  That aroused Buchanan, brought him erect. Frank Booth made a half-turn, seemed frozen with indecision.

  “Juanita—what is it!” Ellen called to her in a voice on the thin edge of hysteria. Buchanan brushed past her, shouldered Booth out of his way as he stalked down the hallway.

  “No me toca!” Juanita was crying to someone.

  “Tenga calma!” a rough voice told her.

  Buchanan stepped into the room, came up behind another big man and pulled him around. “Take it easy yourself, brother,” he told him raggedly. “Come on out of here.”

  “Hands off!” the intruder growled, but when he tried to jerk his arm free the grip only tightened and he found himself out in the black hallway a moment later. Buchanan let go of him then.

  “Luth—what the hell’s going on down there?” Frank Booth called.

  “How do I know? This your ranch, or ain’t it?”

  Booth had the candle in his hand, came toward them. The light flickered brightly on what looked like a brand new Colt in his hand. He had to raise the candle to peer into Buchanan’s face, then his glance took in the gun wound in his shoulder, the bandage at his ribs.

  “Who’re you?” he demanded.

  “The name’s Buchanan.”

  “What’re you doing in my house?”

  Buchanan laughed wryly. “Resting up for a trip tomorrow morning,” he said.

  “How come you pick my place?”

  “Frank,” Ellen interrupted, “you don’t understand what’s been happening down in Salvation. Buchanan helped me.”

  “Yeah? How?”

  “Sheriff Hallett was holding me in jail. He said I was a hostage to make sure you wouldn’t make trouble.”

  “The dirty sonofabitch!”

  “Frank!”

  Her husband looked at her in surprise. Then a crooked smile crossed his face. “I’m changed some, Ellen,” he said. “I don’t sing in the choir anymore.”

  “And you carry a gun,” she said. “What is that for?”

  “To protect myself, that’s what for. I’m all through being pushed around by the goddam Sid Halletts.” He said it defiantly, but Buchanan observed that he didn’t want to return his wife’s steady gaze. Instead, he swung to the tall man. “If you helped Ellen, I’m obliged,” he said. “But you can do your sleeping out in the bunkhouse.”

  “Frank, he’s wounded! See for yourself.”

  “The bunkhouse is fine with me,” Buchanan said quietly. “So long as he bunks there, too,” he added, nodding at the other one.

  “I’m company, friend. I sleep right here.”

  “Your name is Luther Reeves?”

  “That’s right—and what’s it to you?”

  “We’ll bunk together,” Buchanan told him.

  Reeves was nearly as tall as Buchanan but his body was stringier, slack-looking, and his face had a hungry, furtive expression. Now he was plainly measuring the man opposite with his thin-spaced appraising eyes.

  “The bunkhouse ain’t my style,” he said thinly, apparently deciding that the gun at his hip was the big difference between them.

  “I think you’d better,” Ellen said then. “There’s a young girl here …

  “And what of it?”

  “We know who you are, Mr. Reeves,” she said. “We know all about your fine record.”

  At that, Reeves glanced sharply to Frank Booth.

  “You had everything all fixed,” he said accusingly.

  “Something went wrong, dammit,” Booth answered, then turned on Ellen. “What’d you do, run to Hallett with my letter?”

  She didn’t answer for a long moment.

  “Well?”

  “You know I wouldn’t do a thing like that, Frank,” she told him, a tone of disillusion in her voice. “Hallett intercepted your letter—and he already had information on this man. What are you doing with such a person, anyhow?”

  “Ah, don’t you believe them stories about me,” Reeves said. “I never did nobody any harm.”

  “How about the woman you raped?”

  “Raped? Me? Why, you never heard such a trumped-up charge. That girl was ready, willing and able …”

  “Come on, Reeves,” Buchanan said wearily. “I got some sleeping to do tonight.”

  “Then go, for crissake, and get it!” the man snarled, switching without effort from the wheedling voice he had just been using. Suddenly he had his back hard against the wall, with Buchanan’s thumb and forefinger imprisoning his neck pitchfork style.

  “Mister, I’m as tender as a boil tonight,” Buchanan told him. “On top of that I took a gut-whacking yesterday on your account. What you want to do is oblige me by marching to hell out of here toward that bunkhouse.”

  Reeves had both hands free and he knew that all he had to do was draw either gun on his hip. But the more he stared into this wild man’s face the less inclined he was to show him who was boss. Frank Booth broke the silence.

  “Maybe you better, Luth,” he said. “We’ll get this thing all straightened out tomorrow.”

  “Let’s go,” Buchanan said, without Booth’s deference, and pushed Reeves ahead of him, crowded him along the hall toward the front door. “Thanks for the treatment, Ellen,” he called back through the darkness. “I think it helped.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. “Good night.”

  “’Night.” He opened the door, moved the still-reluctant Reeves on through, closed it behind them. “The bunkhouse is over this way,” he said.

  “What’s your game, anyhow? What’re you proddin’ me for?”

  “So I can get to sleep.”

  They reached the dilapidated building and Buchanan had to force the door ajar on its squeaking hinges.

  “Home sweet home,” Reeves complained, going inside unwillingly. “Christ, what a hole.”

  “Turn around, Luther.”

  “What?”

  Buchanan turned him, deftly unbuckled the man’s gunbelt.

  “What the hell you think you’re doin’?”

  “You don’t sleep with ’em, do you?”

  “None of your business what I do with ’em.”

  Buchanan laughed in his face. “Luther,” he said, “if I ever ‘had any business it’s your hardware. Now go pick yourself a feath
er bed and get to sleep.”

  “How do I know you won’t plug me?”

  “Now you’re putting ideas into my head. Just go bunk down, will you? And sleep?”

  Reeves made an indignant sound, muttered an obscenity. But he was moving away all the same, abandoning his guns to Buchanan’s care and searching out a bunk. Buchanan’s own choice was the cot nearest the door, but first he tossed the desperado’s gunbelt out of the building, then swung the cot directly across the doorway. If Reeves wanted his weapons he would have to get by Buchanan—if he wanted them that much.

  “Sleep tight, Luther,” Buchanan advised him.

  “Ah, go to hell,” his roommate answered with a growl.

  Eleven

  In the main house there was also mistrust and strain, and Ellen Booth was a young woman with badly mixed emotions. On the one hand she was grateful to have her husband free again—but she couldn’t put out of her mind that the first word she’d heard from his lips in three years was harlot, that he had jumped immediately to the worst conclusion about her. And there was the gun in his hand, the certainty she had that if there hadn’t been the other interruption he would surely have fired it at the defenseless, unarmed Buchanan—that he might even have killed her. Ellen was also deeply disturbed by the other change in him, the hard tone of voice, the bar-room language, the snarling defiance of the law. Most worrisome of all was the obvious bond between her husband and this Luther Reeves. Frank had thrown in with the man, they were partners, and what chilled her very heart was the fear of what business that partnership was engaged in.

  So now, as he followed her into the bedroom, she felt as if she were alone with a stranger, as if she had been thrust into an intimate situation against her will. Ellen was actually embarrassed to stand before him in her underclothes, and it came to her as a kind of shock that she would be more at ease with the real stranger, Buchanan. Even more than that—she missed his presence in the house.

  “Don’t shut the door, Frank,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “And please blow out the candle.”

  “I want to look at you,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Very long. Please blow out the candle.”

  Instead, Booth walked closer to her, bathed her naked shoulders in the yellow glow.

  “It was all right for him to see,” he said and Ellen bent forward angrily, extinguished the flame with a whoosh.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” her husband exploded. “Grown real willful-like, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve learned to manage for myself,” she said.

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “That I won’t be taken advantage of.”

  “Advantage of? You’re my wife, by God—or did you forget that?”

  “Not for a minute, Frank. Not for one second in three years …”

  “Then what do you act like this for? ‘Don’t shut the door!’ ‘Blow out the candle!’ Some homecoming this is!”

  “It’s what you made of it, Frank,” she told him, keeping her own voice low.

  “What was I supposed to make of it? There you are—in bed with a man! Throwing yourself all over him! I’m thinking I’m lucky I didn’t walk in five minutes later—”

  Her hand struck him across the face hard, stunned him into silence.

  “That’s something you shouldn’t have done,” he said.

  “It was something you shouldn’t have said,” she told him.

  “No one hits me,” he said. “Not anyone. Not anymore.”

  “What is it that’s changed you so?” she asked unhappily. “What happened to the Frank Booth that went away?”

  “That poor damn fool?” he said contemptuously. “He’s dead. Dead and buried. Sheriff Sidney Hallett killed that one. Now we’re going to see how he makes out against the new Frank Booth.”

  “So you did come back to cause trouble—just as he said.”

  Booth laughed harshly. “So Mr. Holier-Than-Thou is expecting trouble, is he? Well he’s sure going to get it. Right where it’ll hurt him hardest.”

  “You plan to kill him?”

  “If I get the chance I’ll kill him. But if I don’t it won’t make too much difference. Not when his bank is cleaned out.”

  “I can’t believe it’s the same person talking,” Ellen said. “The man I married—”

  “I’m not the same man. You’ve got a better man now, a stronger one. This one knows just what he wants and how to get it. Where you going?”

  The girl had stifled a sob, started to push past him in the dark. His hand gripped her bare arm, stopped her.

  “I said where are you going?”

  “Let me be!”

  He released her arm, but his body was directly in her path, blocking. Now he took a backward step, slammed the heavy door shut.

  “Open it, Frank. I don’t want to be in here with you.”

  “I do want you in here.”

  “Against my will?” she asked him hollowly.

  “You’ve forgotten a vow you took, wife. To love, honor and obey.”

  “A vow I’d keep—if you were the man I made it to.”

  “‘For better or for worse,’” Booth’s voice recited, almost as if she had spoken. “‘In sickness and in health. Until death us do part …’”

  “You said a moment ago that my Frank Booth was dead. Now I want to leave this room.”

  “And go where—to the bunkhouse?”

  Ellen said nothing.

  “Is that where you’d rather be?” Booth demanded. “Laying down in the bunkhouse?”

  “Let me warn you about something, Frank,” Ellen said very quietly. “That man you met here tonight—Buchanan. Don’t ever let him hear you accuse him of what you accuse me.”

  “No? And what will he do?”

  “He’ll take you and he’ll beat you,” she promised him. “I think he’d thrash you to within one inch of your life.”

  “Maybe tomorrow he’ll have his chance.”

  “But don’t count on that brand new gun you bought for yourself. Lafe Jenkins’ gun didn’t save him.”

  “Jenkins?” Booth said, and there was an entirely different note in his voice. “What about Lafe Jenkins?”

  “Lafe is dead. And the last I saw of the invincible Bull Hynman he was flat on his back. And Enos. You remember big, tough Enos, don’t you, Frank?”

  “I remember them all,” Booth said sulkingly. “Who’s this friend of yours supposed to be—a gunfighter?”

  “A friend,” Ellen said, “a man,” and if she sounded proud to say it she didn’t care if her husband noted it.

  “But what does he do?” Booth asked. “How come he got himself tangled up with Hallett’s crew?” The subject seemed very important.

  “You can stop thinking about him in that way, too,” Ellen said.

  “What way?”

  “That he’d have anything to do with you and Luther Reeves.”

  “How long you been carrying on with him?” Booth asked then, nastily.

  “We’ve been having our affair since yesterday afternoon,” Ellen said scornfully. “It was about two o’clock, and I was being arrested at the time. I met him later on in the afternoon, but he was busy with Mr. Hallett, and after that we were left all alone, except for some bars between us …”

  There was a light knock on the door, then Juanita’s voice from the other side, calling her name. Booth opened the door a crack, looked out at the Mexican girl’s dark figure.

  “What do you want?”

  “Yo quiero Elena.”

  “Speak English.”

  “She can’t,” Ellen said, moving to the door and pulling it ajar. She stepped into the hallway, put her hands on the other girls shoulders and tried to reassure her by tone of voice.

  “The hombre is not in the house, Juanita. The bad hombre. Buchanan took him out of here.”

  Juanita nodded her head, as if she understood.

  “Who’s she?”
Booth asked.

  “Another friend,” Ellen said. “He helped her, too.”

  “I’ll bet he did.”

  “Don’t judge all men by that Luther Reeves,” Ellen told him with warmth.

  “You don’t know anything about Luth. He’s got guts.”

  “Yes, I saw.”

  “What’d you expect him to do—start shooting right here in the house?”

  “He’s not in the house now, and it’s still very peaceful.”

  “Don’t you worry—old Luth’ll handle that guy in his own way, in his own good time.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it, Frank. If I were you I’d break clean with Luther Reeves. Break clean and start over.” She stepped closer to him, her voice softening. “Give up these new ideas of yours,” she said. “Try to forget prison and be the person you were before. I’ve forgiven you …”

  “Forgiven me what?”

  “The embezzling. That woman in San Francisco.”

  “I told you there was no embezzling, that there was no woman. Didn’t you believe me?”

  “Frank, I tried to believe you. I tried so hard. But all that evidence …”

  “All that evidence,” he mimicked unpleasantly. “Lies! Filthy, rotten lies! Hallett worked out the whole thing!”

  Ellen moved back again, let the sound of his violent protest echo and die. “I’m going to stay with Juanita,” she said then.

  “Stay with anyone you please!” he shouted, more furious than ever. The door closed in her face.

  And so passed the night—what was left of it—in the rugged and lonely hills above Salvation.

  Buchanan had the sleeping habits of a cat. Let him unwind his six-and-a-half feet someplace where there was peace, some measure of security, and the amiable giant could pass out until the hour hand came full circle. But bedded down amidst the chance of trouble, in the same room with the likes of Luther Reeves, and it was as if some sentry patrolled the corridors of his mind.

  It wasn’t even dawn, just the leaden grayness separating night from day, when he awoke and turned in pure reflex toward the loudly snoring Reeves. A turn of the head the other way showed Reeves’ gunbelt lying in the grass where it had been thrown. He checked over his own condition then and found himself much nearer whole than he’d been twenty-four hours earlier. The whisky treatment had killed the infection, and though there was still considerable stiffness the wound had the feel of being better.