Six-Gun Crossroad

by Lauran Paine

  “Nothing. They just drank and loafed and wandered around the place. I kept clear of them. And there’s something else. Whatever you said to Logan last night must’ve worked like a dose of salts. He moved out this morning and hasn’t even shown up over at Ab’s place.”

  “That’s what you fellows wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” assented the sly-eyed older man. “I’m not complaining, Perc. I just thought I’d tell you about those first two … and let you know whatever you told Logan worked.”

  “Thanks,” Perc dryly said, got up, and went over to the door. As he opened it, he said: “Anything else?”

  Champion looked a little bewildered as he shook his head and walked out of the office.

  Perc stepped back to his desk, picked up that second poster, pocketed it, blew out his desk lamp, and walked out, turned to padlock his jailhouse door, and turned right as he strode away.

  He had one more thing still on his mind in the realm of unfinished business. John Reed. Reed had made him wonder a little the evening before. Several things that had crystallized since that time had firmed up into a hard suspicion of Reed, and now Perc had in mind putting aside his soft gloves with Reed.

  Reed and Sam Logan knew each other. He’d bet a year’s wages on that. He’d been to Wolf Hole, Arizona. It was a well and a peach tree at the side of the road. No two men such as Logan and Reed, in a place no larger than Wolf Hole, had escaped seeing each other. Yet, here in Ballester, they acted as though neither had ever before set eyes upon the other.

  And another thing, if these other strangers who were also drifting mysteriously into Ballester knew Sam Logan, then they also knew John Reed. The whole thing had a bad smell to it. When this many gunmen and outlaws drifted into a cow town, there had to be a very good reason for it, and that was precisely what he meant to sweat out of John Reed right now—this very night.

  He cut through Ab’s barn and turned northward up the yonder alleyway. It was only slightly less dark than it had been the evening before, but the alley was just as deserted as it had been then. That same orange glow came from the Reed wagon. He walked straight toward it.

  Chapter Nine

  Abigail came to the door when Perc knocked. She had her hair down and a light shawl around her shoulders. She recognized him at once and neither smiled nor spoke as she waited.

  “I’d like to see your paw, if I can,” he said, not at all impervious to the affect of her wealth of wavy brown hair and the way it framed her face.

  “He’s not here, Mister Whittaker. He was gone when I came back from the general store. I haven’t the least notion when he’ll be back.” She paused, watched the way he accepted this information, then said: “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  He slowly shook his head. What he was thinking was elemental. Reed hadn’t left Ballester since his arrival in town more than a week earlier. Now he just happened to pick the same day to ride out that Sam Logan had also picked.

  “Mister Whittaker … what is it?”

  He looked up again. She had read his puzzlement and his doubts even in that poor light. Before he could reply, she stepped through the door and came down the little stand of rough steps to the ground in front of him. It was a very warm night but in spite of that she drew the shawl closer about her shoulders. When she tipped back her head all that thick, heavy hair cascaded around her full shoulders.

  “It’s about my father, isn’t it?” she persisted, holding the shawl close and staring up at him. “Isn’t it, Mister Whittaker?”

  “No,” he finally said. “It’s nothing to get upset about, Miss Abigail. I just wanted to talk to him is all. I didn’t know he wasn’t around. Where do you reckon he might be?”

  She didn’t answer that but instead stepped closer to search his face, to make certain he wasn’t just trying to shield her from something. Evidently what she saw reassured her for she loosened her hold on the shawl and settled slightly, letting the stiffness depart.

  “I have no idea where he went. I don’t even know why.”

  Over beyond them at the public corral two horses squealed and lunged at one another. Beyond the corral, farther off but distinctly visible, light from the Golden Slipper lay in warm square patterns out in the roadway. He took her elbow and strolled over to lean upon the cribbed old corral poles with her. Out there, away from the wagon’s shadow, moonlight touched her. He felt in a pocket, drew forth a folder, carefully smoothed it out, and draped it across a peeled-pole stringer. “Know him?” he asked, and closely watched her reaction as she leaned a little to study the vicious, swarthy face on that Wanted poster.

  She straightened up and shook her head. “No. I’m sorry but he’s not at all familiar.”

  Perc was disappointed. He’d felt confident her father would have recognized that outlaw, and after discovering Reed wasn’t around, he’d thought she might know that man, too. He slowly re-folded the paper and tucked it away. She kept watching him all through this.

  Finally she said: “What is it, Mister Whittaker, what’s bothering you so much?”

  “Logan left town today,” he answered. “Now I want you to tell me something.”

  “If I can.”

  “Tell me John Reed didn’t know Sam Logan.”

  She hung fire a moment over her reply, then she said: “Mister Whittaker, you’re cynical. I’ve never seen that in you before. It surprises me. No, I can’t say my father didn’t know Sam Logan because he did. They knew each other very well.”

  He stared at her. She gave him look for look, never flinching or wavering. When he loosened and reached out to lay an arm upon a corral stringer, she moved to place her shoulders against the same stringer, facing away from the yonder roadway and instead toward the western run of land.

  “Sam Logan was the lawman who sent my father to prison, Mister Whittaker. That was a long time ago. I was just a girl when it happened.”

  He blinked and looked down at her again. “Logan … a lawman?”

  “Yes. What did you think … a gunfighter? Well, in a way he was, but not in the way you’ve thought of him.”

  “I’ll be … Ma’am, that fellow I showed you the picture of … are you absolutely certain you’ve never seen him before?”

  “I’m sure, Mister Whittaker. If I had, I’d have told you.”

  “He came into town last night with a bullet in him. Doc Farraday said he couldn’t have gone far after he patched him up. Do you suppose Logan could’ve seen that man … could want him for something or other?”

  She made a little shrug. “Sheriff Logan’s been retired several years, Mister Whittaker. He only came out of retirement because my father sent for him down at Wolf Hole in Arizona.”

  “I see. What’s your father up to?”

  “I’m sorry, Mister Whittaker. You’ll have to talk to him about that.”

  “But you know?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And you knew Sam Logan, too?”

  She nodded. “He was sitting on a bench in front of the livery barn when we drove into town. He told us last night he’d been sitting on that bench long enough to hatch a setting of eggs.”

  “Whoa,” murmured Perc. “Last night. Do you mean just before I came along to talk to your pappy, he was at the wagon?”

  “Yes. In fact, he left just a few moments before you came up.”

  So that’s who that blurry shadow had been. Perc felt like kicking himself. He’d thought at first, from the size, it was Abigail. Logan was taller than Abigail, but walking stealthily and stooped, he wouldn’t have appeared any taller in the darkness.

  “Sam hasn’t wanted to risk coming to see my father before. He said, after those two cowboys forced him into gunfights, he was no longer the nondescript drifter he’d hoped the people around Ballester would think, he said they’d be watching him.”

  Perc hooked both
arms over the corral and leaned there, gazing over across the roadway toward Ev Champion’s saloon. A lot of things were falling very neatly into place.

  Abigail half turned and gazed at his bronzed profile. “Let them work it out, Mister Whittaker. It’s something my father feels that he must do, and it is also something Sam Logan has to do.”

  “Kill each other,” said Perc, turning to face her. “Two old men with a big, out-dated grudge coming this far to square an old-time …?”

  She laughed. First she looked startled, then she laughed. It was a soft, rich laughter, lifting into the warm night and sounding full of relief. He stopped speaking.

  “No, Mister Whittaker, it’s nothing like that at all. They’re friends, not enemies. My father told you … I’ve also told you … he’s a changed man. He’s neither an outlaw any longer nor a vengeful man. They are in this together but as friends. Please believe me.”

  He continued to watch her for a moment. The relief and the amusement stripped her of ten years. Or maybe it was just the silvery star shine that did that, but for the first time since he’d known her, Abigail Reed was a girl again. He dropped both arms and turned, leaned upon the corral, and said: “Just for a minute there I almost forgot those two, Abigail.”

  She became instantly cautious and wary, her soft, liquid glance both distant and at the same time warm toward him.

  “If you’d tell me what it’s all about, maybe I could keep someone from getting hurt, ma’am.”

  “No. As I’ve already said, Mister Whittaker, let them do it their way.”

  “It’s got something to do with these strangers showing up in town, hasn’t it?”

  She looked straight at him and did not answer. She brushed away a heavy wave of hair and looked over toward the wagon where a lantern glowed. She was not going to say any more on this subject. Moonlight touched down into the V of the throat, showing an erratic pulse.

  He put out a hand to her. She neither moved clear nor resisted his touch. The night before when he’d made this a personal matter between them, she’d told him good night and had walked away. Now, she stood like stone, not even looking at him, her eyes fixed dead ahead, her face entirely unreadable.

  He stepped away from the corral, lay both hands upon her waist, half swung her toward him, and drew her inward.

  She came forward and stood on tiptoes as his head dropped, cutting out the sickle moon overhead and the rash of stars. He found her lips and suddenly she was against him, meeting his hunger with a strong, quick fire of her own, and whatever had been between them before was gone in that instant. In its place was something altogether new, something a little frightening, a lot confusing, and quietly solemn.

  She braced with both palms against his chest, exerting slight pressure. He eased back and raised his head. As before, she met his glance head-on in her characteristically frank and candid manner.

  “It was too easy, wasn’t it?” she whispered to him.

  “It was hard,” he replied, “very hard … not to.”

  She dropped back down, turned, and put both arms around an old corral post, stood a while considering the restless horses inside the public corral, then said: “Now things are different between us. Percy, I think we’ll be sorry about that.”

  He put up a hand to touch her hair, let the hand lie lightly upon her shoulder. “Different all right, Abbie, but it’ll take a heap of convincing to make me sorry.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “And,” he murmured, leaning beside her, also gazing in at the horses, “I don’t care.”

  “Even if I won’t help you against my father and Sheriff Logan?”

  “Abbie, that belongs to another world. Another part of my life. This … what happened here just now … this belongs to a part of me that’s got nothing to do with badges and guns, and trouble.”

  She turned to gaze at him. “My father said you were different. Sam Logan also said that. They like you, Percy. Neither of them is an easy man for other men to fool.”

  He looked down and met her upturned face. “All the same I wish … in one way … they’d taken their feud, or whatever it is, to some other town.”

  “They couldn’t. They didn’t have anything to do with making the arrangements. Other men did that. They only trailed along.”

  He smiled down at her. “Sometimes you make more sense than any woman … or man … I’ve ever known. Other times, like now, you talk in plain riddles.”

  She returned his smile. “I don’t think tonight it’s important, is it?”

  He chuckled and wagged his head, stepped back, and felt for her hand. “Tonight nothing’s important to me … but you.” He started back over toward the wagon with her, pacing slowly and feeling the solid rhythm of her cadenced walk beside him, saw how the heavy cascading waves of her hair caught and entrapped vagrant moonbeams. “Last night I guess I sort of took you by surprise, saying those things to you.”

  She gave him an impish little smile. “Not exactly. I just had other thoughts last night. But I knew before that, Percy. I knew that day you helped me fill the water barrel. A woman feels things like that. She doesn’t have to be told.”

  They halted near the wagon. Over across the vacant lot and beyond the community corral a cowboy hooted, long and loud, at another range rider and got back a simulated coyote wail that sent both those unseen men into peals of good-natured laughter. She heard and looked over that way and said: “It’s a good town. We both like it.”

  Perc nodded but said nothing because he’d recognized the voice making that coyote wail. Boots, the cocinero for Snowshoe. If Boots was in town, then so also were the other Snowshoe men, including Johnny West, and that also meant something else—John Reed’s identity was in a fair way to becoming public property. He sighed a little and said: “Abbie, by morning folks are going to know your paw’s not someone named Jonah Reeves.”

  “It had to happen, didn’t it, Percy?”

  He nodded. Yes, it had to happen, but it didn’t have to happen tonight because it depressed him, and this was the one night of all nights he didn’t want to be reminded of all the intricacies of life. Just for a little while he wanted to go back to a time when the stars were closer, the moon brighter, the fragrance stronger, the way they had all seemed to him as a small boy.

  “I reckon I’d better go now, Abbie.”

  “I suppose you must.”

  He reached for her. She came swiftly and hungrily. She found his mouth and burned him with her passion, threw him a little off balance with her unleashed fire, then dropped down and stood, pale and dark-eyed, before him.

  “It was the same with me, Percy, that day down beside the creek. I wanted you to know. Good night.”

  She moved past, went up into the wagon, and eased the door closed after she entered. He could still smell the fragrance of her hair and feel the ripeness of her mouth and was therefore unwilling to move away for a while. Eventually, though, he turned and walked down toward the rear entrance to Ab Fuller’s livery barn. Up near the roadway entrance, Ab’s recognizable silhouette was engaged in conversation with another man, a second shadow that was thoughtfully puffing on a long cheroot.

  Perc didn’t feel much like being engaged in talk by those two, so he turned and strolled on down toward the jailhouse. The alley was empty and quiet.

  He came out upon the yonder roadway near the saddle and harness shop where he’d earlier walked into the harmless little ambush with those two strangers, and this location brought his thoughts back to other things.

  He knew more than he’d known before he’d gone to the Reed wagon, but he didn’t know enough. Still, he’d made a good start. Come morning, he’d nail John Reed and get the rest of it—one way or another.

  Chapter Ten

  A man’s best plans are never entirely dependent upon the planner. Reed did not return to town in the night. Abbie told P
erc that after he’d around the town, looking for Reed and Logan. She was worried, she said calmly, but not too worried. She smiled into his eyes and said if ever two men were capable of looking out for themselves it was her father and Sam Logan.

  Perc went around to Ab’s barn and asked if the parson had rented a horse. Ab’s reply indicated that exactly what Perc had prognosticated the night before had come to pass. With a narrowed look Fuller said: “Parson, hell. You mean John Reed, the outlaw. That’s who that fuzzy-faced old coot is … in case you hadn’t heard, Perc.”

  “I’d heard, Ab. What I want to know is did he rent a horse from you yesterday?”

  “Yes he did. A good gray gelding. It’d take a good horse to pack him around.” Ab paused and squinted closely at Perc. “You knew? You mean you knew all the time he wasn’t no parson? Them Snowshoe fellers over at the saloon last night said you didn’t know nothing.”

  “Nice to have friends like that,” murmured Perc, looking across at the Golden Slipper’s empty tie rack and closed front doors. “Sure I knew. Something else I know you might like to spread around town, Ab. Sam Logan’s not a professional gunfighter like rumor has it. He’s a lawman. At least he’s a retired lawman.”

  “Ahhh,” croaked Fuller, popping his eyes wide open. “A lawman? Are you dead certain, Percy?”

  “Yeah. Now about this gray horse. What time did the parson ride out on him?”

  “Two o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Say where he was going?”

  “No.”

  “Which way did he ride?”

  “Northward, up the back alley, then he cut off westerly like he was heading for Snowshoe, or at least like he was bound for Snowshoe range.”

  Perc thought a moment, then said: “Rig out my horse. I’ll be back for him in a minute.” As he strode southward toward the jailhouse, he knew Ab was standing back there, scratching his head and peering after him. Ab scratched his head whenever he was perplexed.