Six-Gun Crossroad

by Lauran Paine

  Perc did a shrewd thing. He got behind the loose horse and drove it on ahead, let it amble up to the spring first, and waited to see what might occur. Nothing happened. From the way the Arizona horse acted, he knew the spring was uninhabited. His own horse was beginning impatiently to saw on the bit by then, so Perc rode on up and dismounted where a perfectly circular and glass-like pool of spring water lay. There was a little space of close-cropped greenery where the spring’s lower end overflow dispersed making the grass grow. After drinking, the Arizona horse shuffled over there and dropped its head to eat.

  Perc left his own mount and paced around, reading sign. Not too long before, perhaps very early that morning, two men had camped here. This puzzled him because the two that had gotten Boots bucked off couldn’t have reached this spot so early. Upon the opposite side of the pool he found where two men had sat and smoked and left their sitting-down imprints as well as their cigarette stubs. These were even fresher marks. These two, he reasoned, would be the pair he’d been seeking before encountering that last man. All the tracks, when they left this shady, cool place, headed northwest, a totally different direction from which they’d all been riding up to now.

  Then he saw the bleached cow skull with the arrow daubed on it with dried, black mud. The arrow pointed in the same direction those men had all ridden, after resting at this cottonwood spring.

  He squatted in soft shade, made a cigarette for his noonday meal, and began to understand what was happening. Evidently these men had all been converging, patently enough, but just as clearly they didn’t all know this uplands country and were following signs left behind by the first pair.

  Two men had spent the night here. Two more had arrived this morning and had gone on. Rawlings’s murderer was the last one to show up, read the sign, and push on. That was all very clear but for one thing. There had been only two pairs of strange outlaws, Ringo and Howard, Rawlings and his killer—name so far unknown. But there had been another two. The ones who had spent the night at this spring. Those two, Perc thought with a sinking sensation, could only be Sam Logan and John Reed, which of course meant they were certainly part of the outlaw gang, were, without much doubt, the ones who had left the mud-daubed arrow on the skull.

  He smoked and thought bleak thoughts. Old John Reed hadn’t reformed. He’d not only lied to Perc, which was understandable, but he’d also lied to Abbie, and that, in Perc’s thoughts, was his most unforgivable sin.

  He killed the smoke and reflected upon the northwest country he had yet to traverse to find the rendezvous. He’d hunted all that land and he’d also ridden over it several years before as Snowshoe’s rep on the Rainbow roundups. He knew it as well as anyone did, which made it simpler for him to discard a number of secluded places where an outlaw band might come together in secret to plan a series of robberies or divide some loot.

  Actually the northward country, nearer the distant mountains and therefore broken and brushy and forested, turned less wild the farther west one traveled because the actual peaks and thrusts swung more to the northeast.

  The area where he thought these men might be heading was in fact rather pleasant although it was very isolated. Not only were there no ranches over there but also there was little to draw people this late in the grazing season unless it was the superb hunting and fishing—two things he bleakly doubted any band of renegades would be interested in. On the other hand there were a number of perfect spots for such a rendezvous as he was now convinced was in the making, and whether he followed the murderer of Frank Rawlings or not, he knew them all and could, with luck and a great deal of caution, locate the exact spot.

  He left the cottonwood spring and for a while that Cross-Quarter-Circle horse ambled along in his wake, still feeling the gregarious urge of a lonely animal. But as he struck the colt’s tracks and neither deviated nor slowed, the Arizona horse dropped steadily to the rear and finally halted, watched him ride on for a while, then turned and started back for the spring and the green grass, the urgent sense of security triumphing over the need for companionship.

  He was glad the horse had turned back. Somewhere up ahead Rawlings’s killer would undoubtedly take a stand to watch his back trail. Not, Perc knew, because the outlaw thought he was being followed, but simply because it was the second nature of all hunted things—four-legged or two-legged—to observe every instinctive precaution. Survival demanded no less.

  But the instincts of the hunter were equally sharp and cunning. Perc stopped often to scout ahead on foot. Once he saw the outlaw on his Snowshoe colt; the man was drowsing along, all slumped and loose. But another time when he skulked ahead and settled low in among some scrub oaks, the colt was standing, head hung, tied in some chamizo brush and his rider was halfway up a rocky slope, sitting like an Indian with his Winchester across his legs, stolidly watching the rearward country.

  A prudent tracker never pushed his prey. Perc took his time even when the sun began to drift on down the westward heavens, indicating that unless the outlaw halted soon, Perc would have to, because there would not be sufficient moonlight to track the man after sundown.

  Still, this was midsummer, the sun did not completely drop away until nearly 9:00 p.m. Perc had several hours yet to go.

  The heat brought fresh thirst. Perc was tempted several times to angle off and go hunt up one of the little waterways in this rolling countryside, but he didn’t for the elementary reason that he’d come too far, had gone through too much, to risk losing his man now, this late in the day.

  He thought the same thirst that was tormenting him must also drive the outlaw to water. It did, but not until Perc had just about given up the hope that it might. The murderer finally headed straight for a rocky escarpment to the north, which was off his route. Perc knew that spot; evidently the outlaw’s horse had smelled the pool of water up there.

  He also left his route, but instead of making for the rocky place, he cut back northwestward slightly to come upon another, probably tributary, little pothole where another spring ran year round.

  His horse tanked up and would have rolled with the saddle on except that Perc growled at him. Afterward, they rested for a short while in the coolness before stalking onward again toward the place where the outlaw had also watered. Perhaps it was carelessness, perhaps just an inevitable thing resulting from this endless game of cat-and-mouse, but when Perc halted in a stand of spindly pines in response to some instinctive warning, he heard the outlaw up ahead moving in the dry brush.

  He froze for a full sixty seconds before dismounting, yanking out his carbine, tying his horse, and sneaking forward on foot. It seemed improbable the outlaw would be bedding down with three or four good daylight hours still ahead of him. Curiosity drove Perc into the low brush where he carefully inched ahead, raising one foot and planting it down silently before lifting forward the other foot. It occurred to him the outlaw might suspect something, might have somehow detected the fact that he was being followed. That suspicion exploded into certainty when a Winchester crashed deafeningly less than a hundred yards southward. He dropped flat when the steely breath of a bullet touched his cheek. Not only had the outlaw somewhere discerned he was being followed, he had also laid a good ambush. He’d ridden to the water hole, left his horse up there, then had slipped back southward with his carbine to wait, and Perc had walked right into the trap.

  “That’ll learn you,” the outlaw snarled, and fired again. “Takes a better man than some damned fool cowboy to stalk me!” He fired his third shot.

  Perc was pinned. The brush and grass was bone-dry and rustling-brittle. Any move he made would easily carry to the killer. The only thing in his favor was the fact that after he’d dropped and had not returned the gunfire, the outlaw seemed to quicken with sharply curious interest.

  “Hey, cowboy!” he called. “Hey … you there in the brush, fling out your guns!”

  Perc didn’t move. In fact, he scarcely even b
reathed. Two of those three bullets had come very close. He knew where his adversary was. The trouble with retaliation was simply that, while he was hidden, his underbrush cover was a long way from being bulletproof. While southward his enemy was securely hidden by a big granite slab that had sometime, in ages past, broken loose from the uphill escarpment and tumbled conveniently out where it was now being used to hide a killer, he lay perfectly motionless with his cocked Winchester ready, but without any intention of firing it. At least not yet.

  “Hey, you damned fool!” growled the assassin. “You deaf or something? I said fling out your guns!”

  Perc remained like stone. He heard the outlaw’s booted feet drag abrasively over shale rock and peered closely down through the dried weeds and arid grass toward the slab of rock, hoping the outlaw would appear in plain view. But he didn’t; he obviously was no novice at this kind of fighting. “Cowboy, you hurt …?”

  Perc let his breath out very slowly. This is what he’d been waiting for, this was exactly why he hadn’t moved.

  “You hear me, cowboy, you hit?”

  Still Perc lay like dead.

  The outlaw mumbled a curse and moved again, behind his slab of granite. Perc heard his gun stock grate over stone as the man inched out where he could peer into the onward tall weeds. He heard the killer curse again as his feet slipped on shale, then that ugly sound of grating wood over unyielding stone came again. But the outlaw wasn’t coming up for a look any longer. He was for some reason going back in the opposite direction. It didn’t at once occur to Perc what the man was up to, but when it did, he clenched his carbine tighter and swung his head as far as he could to the right.

  The outlaw was slipping around where Perc had left his horse.

  Whether the man meant to set him afoot or not, he couldn’t take the chance, not this far from town and another mount. He braced himself for a very gradual, very gentle movement. Got his free hand set upon the flinty ground and, holding his weight off the dry brush as best he could, gently turned to face in the direction his adversary was now boldly hiking along through the yonder little belt of spindly pines. He glimpsed the man passing through patches of light and shadow, got squared around, raised up into a kneeling position, and snugged back his Winchester. When he had the man across his sights, he hesitated. If he gave the outlaw a chance, the man could—and undoubtedly would—spring behind one of those little trees. If he shot him in cold-blood without giving him any chance to surrender, it would be murder.

  He lowered the tip of his carbine, and when next the outlaw stepped between two trees, he fired. The outlaw flung out both arms to catch himself as one leg was violently knocked from under him. He roared a deep-down cry and fell. His Winchester fell ten feet away and hung up in a bush. As the outlaw rolled and wrenched around, Perc stood up and sprang ahead. The man saw him standing there with his carbine, low and ready, less than twenty feet away. He’d been fumbling for his six-gun but now he froze. There was a grotesque angle to the outlaw’s left leg below the knee, and a sticky scarlet stain was rapidly spreading to the ground from the shattered leg.

  Very slowly the outlaw took his hand away from his holstered .45, made a terrible grimace up at Perc, and made a low, harsh gasp of pain. He was whipped.

  Perc stepped over, yanked the man’s .45 clear, and threw it away. He set aside his Winchester and kneeled to examine the broken leg.

  Chapter Fifteen

  His bullet at that close range had made a gory wound and had broken the man’s leg below the knee, but miraculously, perhaps exactly because it had struck at such close quarters, it had made a clean break, and the lead did not shatter, tearing flesh, ligaments, and tendons. Still, it was a very painful injury.

  First, Perc tied off the bleeding. Next he cut two straight pine limbs and, using the man’s trouser belt, shell belt, neckerchief, and handkerchief, set the bone and lashed the leg so that it was immobile. After that, with dusk settling in under the gloomy big rock cliff above them, he washed at the spring, brought back a hat full of water, and sluiced off the leg and the splint. All through this the evil-faced outlaw had writhed a little and had, from time to time, weakly cursed or gasped, but when it was all over Perc caught the man eyeing his carbine where it had fallen into a bush. Without a word Perc went over, levered the outlaw’s gun empty, and brought it back and handed it to the man.

  “What’s this for?” the outlaw croaked, pale and gray and badly shaken. “It’s empty.”

  “For a crutch,” said Perc. He sank down and methodically made a smoke, lit it, pushed it forward, and placed it between his prisoner’s eager lips, then made a second smoke for himself. “Before we leave here, mister, you’re going to discover that saddle guns make fair crutches.”

  “Before we …? Where you think you’re goin’ to take me?”

  “To jail down at Ballester.”

  “You … the law?” the outlaw asked, looking surprised. “Hell, I thought you was just some danged nosy range rider.”

  “I’m the law, mister. I’m also the man who found your pardner and hauled him into town tied face down across my saddle.”

  “What you talkin’ about,” scoffed the prisoner, darkly scowling but also quickly shifting his glance to some indeterminate onward place. “I got no pardner.”

  “That’s right. Not now you haven’t. But the night you boys threw down on me in town you had one … an Okie or a Texan … and you shot him in the back south of here at a water hole.”

  “You’re talkin’ through the top of your skull,” the outlaw growled.

  Perc smoked placidly a moment, studied the man’s evil, narrow face, raised his booted foot, and set it down upon the man’s broken, splinted left leg. The outlaw howled and cursed and started to wrench away. Perc bore down with a little more pressure and took a long drag off his smoke.

  “You still say you didn’t have a pardner named Frank Rawlings?” he softly asked.

  The outlaw choked and gasped. Sweat popped out on his forehead. He rolled his eyes in agony. “I had one,” he panted. “All right, Deputy, I had one.”

  Perc removed his foot and flicked ash. “Tell me about him,” he said. “Tell me particularly why you killed him.”

  The outlaw leaned forward from the waist and placed both hands alongside his broken leg. “Oh, my God,” he moaned. “Oh, my God.”

  Perc smoked and watched, and sat there, waiting. Finally, as the pain eased off, the outlaw leaned far back with his shoulders to a spindly pine and let off a ragged long sigh. He rolled his muddy eyes around at Perc. There was no mistaking the look of slow murder in their depths.

  “Start talking,” Perc said gently, “and finish your smoke. It’ll help.”

  “Wait until I get into town,” the outlaw croaked. “I’ll tell the whole cussed world what you just done to me.”

  “Good idea,” said Perc calmly. “Maybe by then you can tell ’em I did it more than once. But when it’s your word or mine, mister, and you’re a murderer and worse, I sort of doubt you’ll get much sympathy around Ballester. Now start talking. Why did you kill Frank Rawlings?”

  “Why? Why, because I had to. First off, that crazy idea he had of gettin’ you to lock up Sam Logan backfired. You got a real good look at Frank. I told him it was crazy … that it wouldn’t work. That you probably already knew Sam was a lawman even if he did shoot a couple of cowboys in your town.”

  “Naw,” growled Perc, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out. “That’s not enough to shoot a man in the back over.” He reared back and lifted his booted foot. The outlaw’s reaction was swift and violent.

  “Wait!” he wailed. “Wait, Deputy, I’ll tell you, I swear I’ll tell you.”

  Perc lowered his foot and cast a sidelong glance upward. “Hurry up with it,” he said, “it’s getting late. Be dark directly.”

  “Well, like I said, I had to kill him.” The outlaw paused, co
nsidered his mangled leg, and shook his head in anguish. “He was … well, there was some money, you see, an’ Frank an’ me was to divide it even. But without Frank there’d be twice as much for me, providin’ …”

  “Providing what?”

  “Well. Just providin’ …”

  Perc sighed, reared back, and raised his foot again. But this time when the outlaw raised both arms in supplicating protest Perc didn’t stop. He eased his foot down atop the man’s broken leg but he exerted no pressure. All it would take, however, was for him to simply lean forward the slightest bit to cause excruciating agony to rack the murderer again.

  “Providing what?” he repeated.

  The renegade’s eyes were swimming in anticipated agony. He spoke very fast, running all his words together in a breathless rush.

  “Providin’ the other fellers saw it my way. There was four of us in on it. The other two got the money. We come up here followin’ a marked trail, to meet where we’d be plenty safe from detection, to divvy the money and plan our next raid. With Frank out of it, I’d stand to get his share. Now take your damned foot off my leg, please, Deputy.”

  Perc removed the foot. “Four of you,” he said. “What about John Reed and Sam Logan?”

  The outlaw looked up. “Reed?” he queried. “John Reed ain’t around. There’s only Sam Logan …” Gradually the killer’s face underwent a slow change. “Are you tellin’ me John Reed’s in this somehow, Deputy?”

  “Sure he is. He and Sam Logan.”

  “Logan we knew about because we seen him in the saloon the day we arrived in Ballester. But old John Reed … hell, Deputy, old John’s took the Bible trail. He was down at Wolf Hole in Arizona, preachin’ and spoutin’ all over the place. He even button-holed me an’ Frank one time at the Mormon store down there run by that red-headed lady and liked to shouted us deaf about sin and evilness and all that nonsense. But he was still …”

  Perc, seeing the gradual change come over his prisoner, thought that the mention of John Reed’s name was powerful medicine among outlaws.