“Chino,” he said. “It’s a dirty world.”
Sandoval did not answer. Brian started up the rickety stairs. He stopped at the door, starting blankly at it, reluctance lying upon him like a weight. Finally he knocked. He heard her light step inside, and the door opened.
She wore a dress of watered blue silk with a vivid red sash about her waist. Her black hair was pulled plum-tight against her head, shimmering like wet silk in the light, and a pair of copper earrings lent her face a barbaric touch. She started to smile, then let it fade. She didn’t bother to hide her confusion. Her lips were parted, damp and red. Her voice sounded a little breathless.
“I hardly expected—” she said.
“I know.” He took off his hat and tried to smile.
She stepped back and allowed him to enter. The door made a soft click at his side. He looked around at the familiar furniture, the frilly curtains. Her skirt rustled softly as she moved around him. Once he had wanted this woman more than anything else in the world. How could you wipe out such a desire?
She stood before him. He spoke quickly. “We sparred before, Arleen. We beat around the bush and we were afraid and we lost it somehow. Let’s not lose it again.”
She shook her head, puzzled. “Brian—”
“You said it would take time. You were right. But now we’ve had the time. I know where I stand for good. The Salt Rivers are through. I never belonged with them anyway. I’m clearing out. But I’m not going with empty pockets.”
“Brian, what’s happened?”
“Nothing yet. But I’ve got a chance to get back part of what I lost. Let’s be honest. Your brother was behind it all. Tarrant was just a figurehead.”
A stricken look came to her face. She bit her lip and turned away, walking to the window. He followed.
“You knew. Admit it.”
“Not for sure. I just had a feeling—I—”
“That was the thing between us—the barrier. Those strange moods the year before it happened. Not being able to answer when I asked you to marry me.”
She nodded helplessly.
For a moment he felt like hell. She couldn’t be that good an actress. She was really miserable. He took her shoulders in his hands. They were like satin, burning against his palms.
“I don’t blame you. They had you on the rack. How could you expose George when you didn’t know for sure?”
She turned, tears in her eyes, torture. She looked into his face as if searching for understanding, sympathy, forgiveness. It was all there and for a moment what he was doing gagged him.
“Arleen—” He could hardly make it. “The cards are on the table. That’s in the past now. All that matters is you and me. Knowing for certain what George did, you can’t feel any loyalty to him now.”
She hesitated a moment, then lowered her head, shaking it miserably from side to side.
“We’ve got to fight for our chance,” he said. “There’s a way to get some of it back.”
Slowly her head raised. “A way?”
“Tarrant’s meeting me at the Archuleta place tonight. He’s got something that’ll blow the whole thing sky high. All we need is some of those deposit slips George was using when he was juggling my accounts.”
She pulled back. “George—”
“He was willing to ruin everything for us, wasn’t he?”
She bit her lip, not answering. With a soft curse he released her and walked to the desk. Before he could open the first drawer she spoke, “It’s no use.”
He looked up. “Are they at the Double Bit?”
She shook her head. “Brian … don’t ask me … my own brother.”
He walked back to her. His tall figure threw a dark shadow across her face and his red hair blazed like an angry god’s in the lamplight.
“How can you go on defending George, knowing for certain what he did to me?”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. She was looking at his chest. A little muscle twitched in her cheek. He was staring at the cameo of her face, trying to see how much was sincere reaction, how much was synthetic. He couldn’t tell. He felt like a heel and yet it had to go on, he couldn’t stop now, with Asa’s life at stake.
He said her name and he took her in his arms and kissed her. It was hard, savage, bruising. The reaction ran through her whole body. She moaned and arched herself against him and locked her arms about his neck. He could feel her tremble and at least that wasn’t synthetic. He had drawn out the old passion, more vivid, more urgent than he’d ever seen it in her before.
In that first moment the animal in him couldn’t help but respond to the hot length of her whole body glued to his. Then it was gone. Heat was gone and desire was gone and there was the taste of ashes in his mouth. It was the answer he had looked for ever since Estelle had asked him. In a single instant all the doubt and confusion was swept from him and he knew.
He let Arleen’s response run its course and when she pulled back he was a prisoner who had been freed. She was breathing heavily, deeply shaken. Her eyes were wide and startled and as she looked at him he saw the same dazed wonder he had seen in Latigo when the man finally realized Brian had whipped him.
“You and me,” he said. “It was never meant to be any different, was it?”
Her lips moved faintly. “Brian, I only wish—”
He grasped her shoulders. “George is your brother, sure—but now it’s up to you to choose between us.” Holding her gaze, he let his voice go hard. “I’ll meet you at the Archuleta place about ten. It’ll give you time to get the deposit slips. I’ll see you there.”
“Of course, Brian. I’ll be there.”
Her suddenly brittle tone gave Brian the certain feeling that Wolffe, not she, would show up at Archuleta’s. His whole plan depended on it.
CHAPTER 18
Outside he stood with his back against the closed door for a moment. He was trembling now in reaction, feeling none of the savagery or strength he’d shown Arleen. Finally he went down to the men waiting in the alley.
“You do it?” Pancho asked.
Brian mounted his horse. “I don’t know.”
“How about her?” Sandoval asked.
“What the hell,” Brian said angrily. “It’s been a gamble from the beginning, hasn’t it?” He saw Sandoval react and was immediately sorry. He was edgy as a skittish bronc after what he’d been through. He slapped Sandoval’s shoulder. “Don’t pay any attention to me. Let’s go get the judge.”
They rode up back alleys to the Cochise Hotel, where Judge Parrish was staying. While Pancho held the extra horse and their two animals, Brian and Sandoval went up the back stairs to Parrish’s room. They knocked and in a moment Parrish answered. He wore his bathrobe and slippers and held a brief in his hand. Lamplight made a snowy nimbus of his white hair.
“We’ve got some evidence we’d like you to hear, Judge,” Brian said. “Out at the Archuleta place.”
The man’s patrician face narrowed disapprovingly. “Can’t you present it here?”
“We haven’t got time to explain. It might mean a man’s life.”
Parrish had an orator’s voice. “Gentlemen, I’ve got a dozen briefs to review before Saturday. I can’t ride all over the desert on some fantastic hoax—”
Brian touched his gun. “Don’t make us use force.”
Rage made a pale ridge about the judge’s lips “Abduction. Threatening the court. Contempt. Twenty years, gentlemen, and I’ll be glad to pass the sentence myself.”
“In the meantime,” Brian said, “do you want to come with us on your feet, or hanging over a horse on your belly?”
Parrish looked at the gun, at their grim, dust-grimed faces. With a hopeless curse he turned back inside; they followed and waited for him to dress, then accompanied him downstairs to the waiting horses. They left town by back alleys and turned
northward into the broken land that tumbled down off the Rim.
As they rode, they told Judge Parrish what they knew, what they suspected, and what they planned. It simmered him down somewhat, but he still thought the whole thing fantastic. They followed an old Indian trail through the broken, lifting country until they reached a fork. The right branch led to the Archuleta place; the left one twisted into higher country and eventually entered Skeleton Canyon.
“If I’m figuring right,” Brian told Sandoval, “you and the judge will reach the Archuleta place ahead of everybody else. Try and get into that old wine cellar off the patio. You can hear from there and you won’t be seen.”
Sandoval seemed about to speak. Then he thought better of it, gave Brian a tight grin, an affectionate punch on the shoulder, and turned to edge the judge off onto the right fork. Fuming and fretting, Parrish preceded the Yaqui into the brush. Brian glanced at Pancho, then led him onto the left branch. It was late afternoon and the clouds were flying ragged crimson banners above the broken silhouette of the Rim when they reached the yawning mouth of the canyon. They penetrated it half a mile to the trail Tarrant would use coming down into the canyon; if Brian was traveling from Sandoval’s to the Archuleta ruins, this was the point where he and Tarrant would most logically meet. Brian and Pancho dismounted and sought fresh tracks, without success. Brian knew it would have taken Wirt Peters most of the morning to reach Tarrant’s and it would take Tarrant another three or four hours to reach this point in the canyon.
“Looks like I timed it right,” Brian told Pancho. “If Ford fell for the note, he’s still coming.” He squinted his eyes at rimrock and lifted a hand toward the castellated heights. “Get up there with your gun. When he shows, let him catch up with me. Then start shooting. Get as close as you can without hitting.”
Pancho wiped the back of his hand across a sweating brow. “You sure you know what you do, amigo?”
Brian gave him a bleak grin. “I want hell scared out of him, Pancho. I’d do it with your face but he might have heart failure.”
The Mexican laughed gustily. “Hombre, how can you make a man laugh at his own insult?”
He kicked his scrawny bronc up the switchbacks to rimrock and Brian pulled into the shadows shrouding the canyon. The moment of humor passed and the strain of tension began to set in. He had showed Pancho a confidence he didn’t feel. Could he really be certain of his own timing? Or maybe Tarrant hadn’t fallen for the note. And what if he took a different trail?
He tried to shake the apprehensions off. This was the only logical route to the ruins. And Brian knew the rotten core of the man now. Fear of being involved in Cline’s murder should send him scurrying like a rat to Wolffe.
He had been waiting in the shade half an hour when he saw furtive motion on the rimrock. Sunlight flashed against metal and he knew Pancho was signaling him. He turned his horse into the canyon, heading westward. He moved slowly, rounding one turn, another. He was out of sight of the trail but he could hear the faint rattle of a horse coming down off the switchbacks into the floor of the canyon; the scraping echo of hoofs on shale grew louder and a rider rounded the nearest turn behind. He looked back and saw Ford Tarrant. The man’s handsome bottle-green frock coat was powdered with dust.
He almost pulled his horse to a halt, at sight of Brian. Then, wary as a strange dog, he let the animal walk forward.
“You spend a lot of time in enemy country,” he said.
Brian smiled enigmatically. “Maybe I like the view.”
Tarrant stopped three feet away, suspicion muddying his eyes. “You aren’t going to see Wolffe again?”
Brian still smiled. “After what I found out yesterday?”
Reaction ran through Tarrant’s face and he started to speak. The first gunshot drowned his voice. Brian saw the slug kick up a miniature fountain of dust and shale ten feet ahead of them. The shooting sound made both horses squeal and rear. Tarrant’s animal bolted before he could check it. The echoes of that first shot crashed back and forth between the canyon walls, a deafening bedlam of sound. It obliterated the second shot, but Tarrant’s running horse was only a dozen yards ahead of Brian when he saw it jerk, leap into the air, and flop over on its side like a great fish. Its flailing legs struck the ground and that pitched Tarrant from the saddle, to be lost in the cloud of dirt plowed up by the sliding, falling animal.
Brian let his own frightened horse run past them and when he saw a sandy spot he pulled up on the animal, causing it to rear, and took a dive as though he had been pitched off. He hit on a shoulder in the soft sand, flopping against a mat of creosote brush.
The echoes of gunfire still filled the gorge. He saw Tarrant, with his gun out, squirming to the cover of rocks. Brian pulled his gun and crawled toward the man, shooting upward into the air as though returning fire. A bullet struck granite a foot from Tarrant, screaming off in ricochet. The noise was deafening. Brian reached Tarrant, huddling behind the rock with him. Panic turned Tarrant’s face slack and foolish. Fright shimmered in his eyes as he fired wildly at the unseen gunman above.
Another slug struck close, howling off the rock in ricochet. Tarrant jerked back into cover. “Brian,” he shouted. His voice was shrill, cracked. “What the hell! Do something—”
Brian made another show of returning fire, wincing as a ricochet whined too close for comfort, adding to the bedlam with the crashing racket of his own gun, firing till it was empty and then sprawling back into the sand beside the man. The echoes rolled down into the gorge and died reluctantly against the distant sounding boards of unseen cliffs. The silence crept against the men like a furtive pressure, an ache in the ears after so much awesome noise.
Brian thumbed a pair of shells into his gun and glanced tentatively at the rimrock. He drew no fire. They lay against the rocks, sweating, trying to see movement on the heights, until enough time had elapsed to convince Tarrant they were safe.
“I guess that’s it,” Brian said. He looked at Tarrant’s horse, lying dead down the canyon. He knew Pancho hadn’t meant to hit the animal, but it made things more convincing. “Lucky you got pitched,” he said. “If you’d been in the saddle another ten feet it would’ve been you instead of the horse.”
A pallor stole the ruddiness from Tarrant’s cheeks. “Have they gone crazy?” he asked.
“Who?”
“The Salt Rivers.”
Brian let a look of disgust come to his face. “Don’t try to cover up, Ford.”
The man gaped blankly. “What?”
“The Salt Rivers wouldn’t shoot at me. What happened? Did you and Wolffe get your wires crossed somehow?”
Tarrant’s eyes widened; then he shook his head. “Brian, I had nothing to do with—’’
“Maybe you figured I heard too much yesterday.”
“Brian, I swear—”
“I suppose you don’t even know about this.” Brian yanked out the letter he had written to himself, dropping it contemptuously at the man’s hand. Still sprawled against the rock, Tarrant opened it wonderingly. Surprise, fear, rage—they all shuttled through his face as he read.
Brian frowned at him. “You knew about it,” he said accusingly.
Exasperatedly Ford pulled out the note Brian had written him. Brian took it and made a pretense of reading, letting confusion replace the bitter accusation in his face. Finally, softly, he said, “So that’s it. After yesterday we both know enough to hang him.”
Tarrant shook his head helplessly, suspicion and fear still mingled in his face.
“You still think it was the Salt Rivers?” Brian asked.
“He wouldn’t,” Tarrant said doggedly. “He couldn’t—”
“There’s one way to find out,” Brian said. “If he really wanted us to reach the Archuleta place, he’d be there.” Brian felt on safe ground in saying this. If Wolffe was at Archuleta’s—and he had to be—he’d be in hidi
ng when Tarrant and Brian showed up, waiting to hear what they had to say. And once Tarrant was convinced Wolffe had tried to bushwack him, nothing Wolffe said would change his mind.
Tarrant glanced at him sharply, speculatively, then looked out at his dead horse. Brian could see that the man was still bitterly confused, not completely convinced. Yet the wording of the note Wolffe had purportedly written to Brian had planted a deep suspicion in Tarrant’s mind; and the apparent attempt to kill him should, Brian figured, shock him into a showdown with Wolffe. Finally, in a husky voice, he said:
“How’ll we get there?”
“Well,” Brian said, “I never thought I’d ride double with a snake.”
It took them half an hour to find Brian’s horse, where it had spooked down the canyon. Then, through the mauve haze of late afternoon, through the long twilight of the desert evening, they made their way out of the canyon and along the tumbled country edging the Rim to the Archuleta place.
They came upon it after dark, an ancient Spanish colonial rancho built in this land a hundred years before the Yankees came, its deserted and crumbling buildings overlooked on all sides by the towering buttes and weirdly eroded mesa of the dropoff just below the Rim. Brian pulled the horse to a halt in the shelter of a dense mesquite thicket, looking intently at the silent buildings.
If Arleen had gone to the Double Bit as soon as Brian left her, she would have reached her brother by afternoon. And if Wolffe had acted immediately on her information, he should have reached the Archuleta ruins by now.
“I don’t see anybody,” Tarrant said.
“We’d better make sure,” Brian said.
He lifted the reins and the weary horse moved at a jaded walk into the weed-grown yard. The house had been built in the typical style of colonial Spain, the fort-like walls protecting it from the marauding Indians of an earlier age, the outside rooms built around a central patio. In most places the roof had fallen, its heavy beams broken or tilting crazily toward the sky. The walls were crumbling and a dozen breaches yawned darkly, opening into the shadowy interior.
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