Grotto of the Dancing Deer

by Clifford D. Simak

  Craig stepped closer. “We can get along without him, Packard. Just the two of us to split.”

  Packard frowned. “What about this man that Cardway killed?”

  “Name of Jett,” said Craig. “One of the express office guards. Same as I am.”

  “But why did Cardway kill him?”

  The flabby face twisted impatiently in the shadow. “Jett was in with the Randall crowd. He heard us talking.”

  Packard’s hand shot out, grasped the man’s vest, twisted it tight and drew him close. “Talk sense,” he snarled. “What has Randall got to do with it?”

  Craig wriggled. “Didn’t Cardway tell you?”

  “Not a word,” said Packard. “Just wrote to me and said that I should come. Said there was a good thing here.”

  “It’s the gold,” wheezed Craig. “Ready for shipment. Randall’s gang holds up the stages. Easier and safer than holding up the office.”

  “This Jett was Randall’s man, you say. Tipped him off when a big shipment was on hand.”

  Craig nodded vigorously. “You catch on quick. Cardway said you would. Said your dad …”

  Packard jerked the man even closer.

  “You say that Randall’s gang holds up the stages. Who else knows this? Everyone in town?”

  Craig gulped unhappily. “No sir, they don’t. Just me now. You see, Cardway found it out and told me and now—”

  “And Cardway figured on beating Randall to the draw. Figured on robbing the office before the stage ever started out.”

  Craig gulped again and nodded.

  “And how much were you to get?”

  “A quarter, Cardway said. Said I’d get a quarter and you and he would get the rest. But now that he’s dead, I figured maybe you could do some better by me.”

  “Want me to tell you how much Cardway really would have given you?”

  “He said a quarter.”

  “Not a damn ounce,” said Packard coldly. “He’d use you and he’d shoot you down. You see, I knew Preston Cardway.”

  “But he said—”

  “You shouldn’t have stopped me here,” snarled Packard. “Don’t do a thing like this again. Don’t speak to me again. Don’t act like you’ve ever seen me. I’ll look you up when it’s safe to talk.”

  He released his hold upon the vest.

  “Make tracks,” he told Craig curtly.

  A grim smile on his lips, he watched the man scuttle down the alleyway to be swallowed in the shadow.

  Back on the street again, Packard sat down on the hotel steps and built himself a smoke.

  So it had been gold that Cardway had been after. An inside job, fixed up with the office guards. Probably could have pulled it off, too, if it hadn’t been for Randall. Randall, naturally, wouldn’t have wanted anyone horning in and so Randall had fixed up a vigilante deal.

  Packard’s head hurt and it was hard to think and even through the pain of the throbbing head, he was so sleepy that his eyes drooped shut as he nodded over the cigarette.

  Steps sounded on the boards and he snapped awake. Before him stood a little man with a checkered suit.

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Packard.

  The man squinted at him with his one good eye.

  “Haven’t seen an eye?” he asked. “A glass eye. I lost it and I’ve looked everywhere …”

  “Oh, hell,” exploded Packard. “I’m going up to bed.”

  He rose and climbed the stairs to the porch. The little man in the checkered suit stood and watched him go.

  Chapter III

  LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

  Jason Randall was sitting in the chair beside the window, smoking a cheroot and with a whisky bottle on the table at his elbow, when Packard awoke. ‘You sleep innocent,” said Randall.

  Packard swung himself off the bed, located his boots, stomped his feet into them. “What the hell,” he asked, “are you doing here?”

  “Wanted to talk with you,” said Randall, smoothly.

  “I haven’t got a thing to talk with you about,” snarled Packard.

  Randall did not press the point. “Weren’t taking any chances, were you?” he asked. “Sleeping like that with your clothes on.”

  “I was too tired to take them off.”

  “Wouldn’t want to be set for a quick getaway?”

  Packard shucked his gunbelt to a more comfortable position.

  ““Look, Randall,” he said, “I’m not making any quick getaway. When I leave this town I ride out, on my own horse, in broad daylight.”

  “I hope so,” said Randall. “I most sincerely hope so.” But he sounded as if it was just too much to expect. He reached out for the bottle, tipped it toward one of the two tumblers setting on the table. “Drink?” he asked.

  Packard nodded. Watching Randall pour, he saw that the sun was slanting through the window before which Randall sat. It must be late afternoon, he told himself. An hour or so to sundown.

  He crossed the room and took the tumbler, sat down on the edge of the table. “Let’s have it, Randall,” he demanded. “What’s on your mind?”

  “It’s the job,” said Randall. “The one that you turned down.”

  “I’m still turning it down,” said Packard.

  Randall clucked sympathetically. “And with jobs so hard to get … and keep.”

  “I’ll find one,” said Packard.

  “Look,” Randall told him, “there’s no use of running a bluff on me. You can’t keep a job and you know it. Your old man was an owlhooter and pretty well known at that. When whoever you’re working for finds that out, you’re hunting another job. You tried to change your name and it didn’t work. Too many people knew your old man.”

  “Hurley’s been talking to you,” Packard said.

  “Sure, why not? Hurley works for me.”

  “I didn’t know, though I should have. So that deal with Stover was all cut and dried. Except maybe that you figured it would work out the other way.”

  “Don’t go blaming Hurley,” Randall warned. “If it hadn’t been for him, you’d be buzzard meat right now. I was pretty sore, you see, the way you acted, and I told Stover to go out and finish you. But Hurley told me who you was, and said you should have a chance.”

  “A chance! With Stover sneaking in the door behind my back?”

  “It wasn’t planned that way,” Randall told him. “It was to be fair and square. But Stover, the dog, double-crossed us all! Well, he got what was coming to him. It probably seemed pretty raw to you, but it wasn’t meant to be. And a man who handles guns like you do is too good a man to let get away.”

  Packard shook his head. “I got other things to do.”

  “Like holding up the express office?” asked Randall.

  The liquor in Packard’s tumbler jerked and slopped, but he held his face steady. “Something like that,” he admitted.

  If Randall knew, there was no use denying it. “You saw Cardway out on the trail?” asked Randall. And when Packard nodded:

  “Hell of a way to die,” Randall said.

  “Never aim to die that way,” said Packard.

  “Neither did Cardway,” Randall told him.

  He emptied his glass and set it down. “If it’s gold you want, why not come in with me. It’s safe. I run the town.”

  He drummed his fingers on the table. “Leastwise, I’m still running it. But I been sort of lax. One man I have to tighten up on.”

  “Preacher Page,” said Packard, casually.

  Randall nodded. “Threatening to ask for martial law,” he said. “But it’s not going to happen. I’ll take care of Page.

  “Let’s put down our cards. You came here to hold up the express office. Probably you’d never done anything like that before, but more than likely you figured since you couldn’t keep a job, you might a
s well be what people thought you were. You figured what the hell.”

  Packard nodded soberly.

  “Well,” continued Randall, “you can’t hold up the express office, for I’ve got the gold staked out. Anyone that lifts a finger toward it is signing his death warrant.”

  He stared hard at Packard. “Agreed?” he asked.

  “Agreed,” said Packard.

  “All right, then,” said Randall, “let’s get together. You can’t hold any other sort of job than the one I’m offering you, for people always will find out just who you are and then out you go. And I need a man like you.”

  “I suppose,” guessed Packard, “that if I refuse you’ll try to fix it up so I don’t leave town alive.”

  “Your reasoning,” Randall told him, “is downright uncanny. Of course, if you have some ideas of your own … ?”

  “Not a one,” Packard told him.

  “O.K.,” said Randall, “you’re on the payroll. Five hundred a month and splits.”

  “And my duties?”

  “Act as if you aren’t one of us. Build up the idea that you are out to get my pelt. I’ll help the idea along a bit.”

  “Outside man,” said Packard.

  Randall nodded. “Exactly, except—except you’re going to be on one hold-up. A big shipment is going out tomorrow. You’ll ride out tonight.”

  “Just so I’m in deep,” said Packard. “So I’m one of you.”

  “In this business,” Randall told him, “we can’t have any pure and holy hombres. Your neck’s got to be nominated for the noose just like the rest of us.”

  “You,” said Packard, “don’t leave a single thing to chance, do you, Randall?”

  “Not a thing,” said Randall.

  “And how will I know what I’m to do? Where I’m to go?”

  “You’ll be told,” said Randall, shortly.

  He pushed himself from the chair, walked across the room. At the door he turned back. “And you’ll be watched,” he added.

  “I figured,” said Packard, “that I would.”

  Listening to Randall’s footsteps going down the hall, Packard reached out for the bottle, poured himself a drink and gulped it, set the tumbler back on the table again.

  It was the only way that he could play it, he told himself, staring at the door. To have refused Randall’s offer would have meant that he’d be dead before the hour had passed.

  Getting up, he shucked his gunbelt, shaped his lips into a twisted grin. First he’d get some food. He jingled the few dollars left in his pocket and grinned. He could use some of that money Randall was paying him. Maybe he’d ought to go and hit him for something in advance.

  At the Chinaman’s, Packard hung his hat on a nail, sat down and gave his order.

  The Chinaman prattled as he ran with knife and fork and plates. “You new man in town, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” agreed Packard.

  “Maybe man who shot Stover?”

  “Might be,” said Packard.

  “Good shooting,” said the Chinaman.

  He scuttled into the kitchen and out again.

  “Preacher Page, he in to find out if you been in. Ask you go his place soon as you show up.”

  “Thanks,” said Packard. He ate hurriedly, gulping his food and thinking.

  He was glad that Page wanted to see him, glad that the man had inquired about him. It would be taking a chance with Randall to go and see the minister, but he had to take some chances. If Randall climbed him about it, he could say that in seeing Page he was merely out to create the impression he was not on Randall’s side.

  Dusk had fallen on the street outside and the first faint stars were beginning to glitter in the east. Packard leaned against the front of the restaurant and fashioned himself a cigarette, strolled leisurely away.

  He recognized the twisting path down which he and Hurley had come the night before and took it, following its windings up the mountain side.

  Halfway up, he stopped and rested. The climb was steep and he was not used to walking. Below him were the lights of Hangman’s Gulch, a cluster of sparks in the gathering dark.

  Steps came up the path and drew closer. A man stood outlined in the gloom. A hunched, bow-legged man who shambled in the deepening dusk. Five feet away he stopped. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Walking,” said Packard.

  The man moved closer. “If you’re goin’ where I think you’re goin’, you better change your mind.”

  “Why?” asked Packard, flatly.

  “The boss wouldn’t like you goin’ to see Page.”

  Packard took a quick step forward and the man went for his gun. But Packard’s fist beat the gun, smacked against the jaw.

  The man snapped backward, straight and stiff, rocking on his heels, hit the ground with a thump that bounced him.

  Bending over the fallen man, Packard yanked the gun out of his belt, heaved it into the brush. Still squatting, he rolled another cigarette, used the match that he struck to light it to study the man’s face. But it rang no bells. If he’d seen him in the Crystal Palace, he did not remember it.

  The man groaned and struggled to a sitting position, rubbed his hand tenderly against his jaw. His eyes found Packard, stared at him. His lips twisted. “The boss will get you for this,” he mumbled.

  “He set you to tail me?” asked Packard.

  The man nodded.

  “He didn’t tell you to stop me from going anywhere or doing anything?”

  “No, he didn’t, but—”

  “But he wouldn’t want me to see Page.”

  “That’s it,” said the man. “He’ll be sore as hell. Sore at both of us.”

  “How do you know he didn’t send me to see Page?”

  The man gaped. “Did he? Did the boss …”

  “That,” said Packard, “is none of your damn business.”

  Packard rose. “I’m going on,” he said. “If you want to come, I don’t mind. But see you stay behind … a long ways behind.”

  Page opened the door at Packard’s knock, reached out a hand and dragged him in, thumped him on the back. “So you came,” he said. “You saw the Chinaman.”

  Packard frowned. “Don’t get your hopes up, Preacher. I know what you have in mind, and I can’t do it.”

  The old man’s silver hair was shining in the lamplight and the pictures were on the wall and the books still on the shelves. From the kitchen came the smell of frying meat and the quick, swift tap of a woman’s feet.

  “But you killed Stover,” Page protested. “You gunned the fastest gunman this town has ever known. You got him even when he was sneaking up behind you, with his guns half out.”

  “What’s your proposition?” Packard asked, flatly.

  “A marshal’s badge,” said Page. “A marshal’s badge and other men to back you up.”

  “Marshal’s badges,” said Packard, “can’t be picked up anywhere.”

  “I can get you one,” Page told him.

  “And while you’re talking the authorities into giving me one, what am I to do?”

  “You’ll leave town tonight. There’s a trail over the mountain and I have a horse. You can get your men.”

  “I haven’t any men,” said Packard.

  “But … but …”

  “Sure,” said Packard, “you’re just like the rest of them. You’ve got me pegged for an owlhoot rider. You figure that maybe I kill a man every day for breakfast. You figure that I have a band of curly wolves hidden out somewhere and that if you could get me to bring them in, we’d wipe out Randall’s gang in one grand blaze of gunfire.”

  “But,” protested Page, “there would be compensations. Blanket pardons and—”

  “I haven’t done a thing,” said Packard, “to be pardoned for, except maybe shootin
g Stover and that was self-defense. And I haven’t any men. So forget your dream of using me to clean up the town for you.”

  The old man slumped into a chair, face suddenly haggard. “It was wrong of me,” he said, almost as if he were speaking to someone who wasn’t in the room. “It was not my way of doing, nor my church’s way of doing, but sometimes a man’s vision can be clouded. Force is wrong … as wrong for me to use as it is for Randall. But I was tempted. I saw a way to make this a decent town …”

  “I’m sorry, Preacher,” Packard said.

  “Don’t,” said a voice from the doorway, “waste any sorrow on us.”

  Packard jerked his head around and saw the girl. He took off his hat. “Good evenin’, miss,” he said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t come here,” she said, tartly. “It’s bad enough with Hurley seeing father all the time. I’ve told him that he ought to go away where he wouldn’t meet men like that. There isn’t any reason that he should stay out here when he could go somewhere else, some place that’s civilized.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to her,” begged Page. “She’s angry. Angry because I’m sending her east to school. This isn’t any place for a woman to stay.”

  But Packard scarcely heard the old man. He was looking at the girl. “Miss,” he said, “just to get the record straight, I want to tell you something. You maybe won’t believe me, but it really doesn’t matter. Until I killed Stover I never killed a man. But I am getting tired of two-bit gunmen wanting to add me to their kills so they can brag they killed Steve Packard’s kid. I don’t hanker to become a notch on someone’s gunbutt, miss, and I figure maybe the only way to keep from it is to collect some notches of my own.”

  She did not speak, but from where he stood Packard could see the blood beating in her throat, could see her lips half open to reply, then close again.

  “You’ve had bitter disappointment, son,” said Page. “And you are too impatient. There is good in the world—”

  “I haven’t seen any of it,” snapped Packard.

  “You came here,” said Page, “with something in your mind. I don’t know what it is, but you best get rid of it. It will bring you nothing but everlasting sorrow.”