by Ray Hogan
“You going to take a hand in it—as a witness, maybe?”
“I aim to tell what I think—that you’re my friend and you figured you had a right and a reason to do what you did.”
Quist rubbed at his jaw. “I’ll appreciate that. Expect it’ll count for plenty.”
“I figure to tell the judge how you sided me in getting back the money that Dallman and his bunch stole, too. It should prove to him that you’re no outlaw.”
Red nodded. “Anything you say in my favor will be good—and I’ll be beholden to you for it ... That coffee ought to be done by now,” he added, holding out his cup.
Shawn emptied the lard tin into the container, blocking the coarse grounds with a bit of wood placed along the tin’s rim.
“Anyway, however it comes out,” Quist said, easing back, “I reckon it won’t matter too much. I rode a few thousand miles to do what I had to, and now it’s all over. Long ago I learned to take what comes, just live one day at a time—same as you’re doing, hunting for your brother. You take it a day at a time.”
“No point looking ahead until I do catch up with him ... I thought I’d come to the end of that when I got the word you’d sent me by that drifter.”
“I hated to fool you, but it was the only way I could see to get you out of town. I’m telling you again I’m sorry I fired you all up and let you get hurt.”
“I’m used to it,” Shawn said, rising and staring out over the moonlight flooded prairie. “If I’d taken time to think it over when I got the message, I’d figured there was nothing to it.”
“Probably, but you’d have gone just the same—just on the maybe there was some truth to it. That’s the way a man’s head works. Guess there’s some kind of hope in him that keeps pushing him along no matter what … You had any leads at all on your brother since you came to Babylon?”
Starbuck shook his head. “None. I spread the word around, and about everybody’s trying to remember if he might’ve dropped by.”
“Seems he would, was he in this part of the country. Expect I’ve finished things there for you now. Place’ll probably shut down.”
“I doubt it. Turns out that Bessie was McGraw’s wife. Fisher told that to Doc Gilman before he died. She’ll likely take over and keep it running.”
Red’s face was blank with astonishment. “Old Bessie was McGraw’s real wife?”
“So Fisher said. Always sort of wondered about her. Once told me she’d known McGraw longer than anybody else around—and she sure never minded saying what she thought of him.”
“Funny she never told nobody about it.”
“Afraid of him for one thing—and it was plain she hated him. Could be she was hanging on, waiting for the day when she could get back at him.”
“Well, I beat her to that,” Quist said with a short laugh. “We staying here till morning?”
“No, best we head back pretty soon. We’re going to have to ride double, and it’ll be easier on the horse traveling while it’s cool.”
“How about Babylon—we swinging by there?”
“Got to. You need a horse. It’s only place we can get one.”
Quist wagged his head. “I doubt if I’m going to be very popular around there.”
“Nobody’ll bother us, not when I tell them I’m taking you to Dodge. No reason for locking you up in Babylon. McGraw was the judge, and he’s dead.”
“Whatever you say. Be obliged to you, however, if you’ll keep your iron handy—just in case some of that bunch around the Palace gets lynching ideas.”
“I’ll watch sharp—”
“You ain’t about to do nothing,” Hake Dallman drawled from the shadows, “’cept raise your hands, real careful like ... Me and the boys was headed for Babylon to pay you a little visit. Spotting your fire’s saved us a long ride.”
Twenty-Two
Rigid in the quick, hushed tension, mentally cursing himself for his carelessness, Starbuck raised his arms. Quist, remaining seated on the bank of the arroyo, followed suit.
Shawn didn’t know if the redhead realized it or not, but an avenue of escape had opened for him. When the outlaws discovered he was a prisoner en route to a cell, the chances were good they would welcome him into the fold, the incident at Brewer’s Flat notwithstanding. Now being on the opposite side of the law would make a vast difference.
Dallman emerged from the dense brush to the left and sauntered in close to the fire. The others appeared. Weapons leveled, they fanned out to either side of him. Starbuck eyed them coldly ... Al, three of the bunch who had been in on the robbery, and Gannon, the gunslinger he had so recently driven out of Babylon.
Smirking, Dallman hooked his thumbs in his belt, thrust his head forward. “Yes sir, sure makes it mighty nice, finding you birds here ... Get their irons, Al.”
The scarred man crossed to Red, then drew up in surprise. Frowning, he wheeled. Jerking Starbuck’s pistol from its holster, he pointed to Red’s weapon thrust under Shawn’s waistband.
“Would you look here! I think the marshal’s got hisself a prisoner.”
Dallman stepped forward and claimed the redhead’s gun. Holding it in front of Quist, he said, “This your’n?”
Red nodded.
“He trotting you back to the pokey?”
Again the husky rider moved his head.
“Figured you and him was pals ... What for?”
“A killing,” Red said, slowly lowering his hands.
Dallman’s interest heightened. “That a fact? Who?”
“McGraw and Bart Fisher.”
The outlaw’s jaw sagged. “Well, what do you know! You sure picked yourself a couple of real humdingers. Why’d you do it?”
Quist had come to his feet. His shoulders twitched. “They was a couple of bastards that needed killing.”
Hake Dallman glanced at the men ranged behind Starbuck. “Ain’t saying they didn’t, but that don’t make me forget something—it was you that blasted the Kid.”
“Couldn’t help it,” Red replied coolly. “It was him or me—and he was a damned fool to try for his gun.”
The outlaw considered that briefly. “Yeah, reckon that’s right. Kid wasn’t long on sense, anyhow.”
Starbuck, with Hake standing an arm’s length in front of him, calculated the odds. It would be easy to grab the outlaw, pin his arms to his body, and whirl to one side. But the chances of his being able to do so fast enough before the others could act were small. Likely he would get a half a dozen bullets in his back before he could complete the move and snatch up a gun.
But he must come up with something. Dallman and his bunch intended to kill him where he stood, and with Dan Quist evidently going over, joining them, he would have to depend upon himself.
“I got to get myself a horse,” he heard Red say. “Mine’s laying back up the trail a piece, dead. One of you mind me riding double till we get to Brady’s? I figure I can dicker him out of something.”
“Reckon so but there ain’t no use’n that,” Dallman said. “The marshal won’t be needing his no more. Whyn’t you just help yourself to the one he’s forking?”
Quist, grinning, shook his head. “I sure never thought of that,” he said, and turned to look at the buckskin picketed back in the brush.
In that same instant he bent forward. Starbuck caught the faint glint of metal as he snatched up the rifle he had tossed there earlier, saw him spin fast. The weapon smashed the quiet of the night with its shocking report. Hake Dallman recoiled as the heavy bullet drove into him and knocked him to the ground.
Shawn lunged to one side as Red levered the rifle and threw himself full-length into the brush. The weapon spat again at the remaining outlaws scrambling for cover. A bullet whipped at him as Al triggered a shot. Starbuck, swearing at his own helplessness, glanced about for the pistol Dallman had been holding.
A dull shine in the sand drew his attention. It was Red’s gun—the one he was looking for. Ducked low, he rushed from the protection of the stump
behind which he had taken refuge, scooped up the weapon, and plunged on. A bullet whipped at his leg, another breathed hot against his cheek, others whirred close by.
He reached the bank of the arroyo, dived into the deep shadow of the brush lining it, and pulled himself around. In that same instant he saw the scar-faced Al dart into the open. He pressed off a quick shot and saw the outlaw stumble and fall.
The remaining members of the gang had pocketed themselves in a dense pool of blackness and undergrowth a short distance beyond. They were firing steadily, their guns marked by small flashes of orange each time discharged. The outlaws were taking similar advantage, were aiming their shots at the telltale flare of Quist’s rifle and his six-gun.
“I’ll circle around—come at them from the side,” he called in a hoarse whisper to the redhead, a few strides below him. “They’ve got us spotted here ... Hold your fire until I open up.”
Red’s answer was an unintelligible murmur. Starbuck, on hands and knees, worked back deeper into the brush until he was well away from the arroyo; then rising, he circled in toward the outlaws’ left. They, too, had ceased their shooting, apparently now in doubt as to the location of their targets since they were drawing no answering shots.
Breathing hard, Shawn halted at the edge of a small clearing. The outlaws, he thought, were directly ahead in what looked to be a brush-filled hollow. He could not be sure, however, as their guns continued to remain silent. For a long minute he waited there, listening, hoping for a sound that would reveal the presence of the men. There was only the far-distant barking of a coyote.
Turned impatient, he moved through the dappling of moonlight filtering through the brush to a mound of roots and earth a stride or so above him. Crouching behind it, he held his pistol at arm’s length to one side and squeezed off a shot into the hollow.
A splatter of answering bullets came immediately. Lead clipped through the brush surrounding him and thudded into the solid mass of soil and twisted roots. He rolled farther over, aimed again at the dark swale. The hammer of his weapon clicked on an empty cartridge.
Lying flat on his back, he emptied the spent casings from the weapon’s cylinder and fed in a fresh supply. Snapping the loading gate shut, he rolled back into position and paused.
The quick tattoo of horses racing off into the night reached him. He remained motionless, listening, waiting until the sound had faded entirely, then slowly drew himself upright. The outlaws had pulled out. Even Gannon had turned tail and was running.
Shawn turned and headed back to where he had left Dan Quist. It came to him suddenly that the redhead had not opened up with his rifle as he had expected him to do. Ignoring the circuitous path he had followed to get at the outlaws’ flank, Starbuck cut directly into the open, hurried by the lifeless figures of Al and Hake Dallman, and reached the brush where Quist had made his stand.
The redhead was sitting up, hunched forward, hands pressed to his middle. The rifle lay across his legs, and blood smeared its stock and metal action. Shawn knelt beside him.
“Bad?”
Quist looked up wearily. “Reckon so,” he replied in a dragging voice. “We get them—all?”
“Dallman and Al. The others run for it.”
“Best you—hightail it—out of—here ... Could come back—trick you.”
Quist began to sink. Starbuck slipped an arm around his shoulders and laid him down gently.
“Red, there anything I can do—maybe take word—”
“No—ain’t nobody—left ... Better—this way ... Less trouble—all around,” the redhead murmured, and went limp.
Shawn studied the man’s slack face for a long time. There was an ease to it now, almost a contentment as if he were pleased by the way it had all ended.
Slowly Starbuck pulled himself upright. He guessed it was better, if ever death is a better solution. Turning away, he moved off to retrieve the horses.
Twenty-Three
He loaded Quist’s body on one of the two horses he found picketed back a distance from the arroyo and those of Hake Dallman and Al on the other. Then, astride his own buckskin, he pulled out of the broad wash and in the crisp, silvered night struck for Babylon.
They were not far from the settlement—less than half the distance separating the town from Buffalo Brady’s outlaw sanctuary. Thus, he could expect to arrive sometime near first light.
That thought stirred little interest in Starbuck. Dan Quist’s death had taken something out of him, and despite the fact the redhead was an admitted murderer, Shawn’s feeling of friendship had diminished none. Red had done what, in his heart, he believed he must do; that in the doing he had flaunted the law was undeniable, but to him it was a justifiable action.
And who was to say he was not right? The system that threw a cloak of protection around criminals like Amos McGraw, that safeguarded them from earned retribution at the hands of one such as Dan Quist because it was the prerogative of that system to exact the ultimate punishment was not necessarily fair.
Vague technicalities, influence in high places, and the sheer power of money all too often stayed the mills of the gods and permitted the patently evil to flourish while the beset floundered helplessly, unable to find redress.
Quist had simply chosen not to be counted among those, Shawn realized, and while it went against everything he had been taught, and he could not condone the murders his redheaded friend had committed, he could understand his behavior.
But it was all water downstream now. Red would never stand before a judge and hear himself sentenced to death at the end of a hangman’s rope or, at best, assigned to a cell within high prison walls for the remainder of his life. Amos McGraw and his lesser light, Bart Fisher, would not again set themselves up as kings in a regime of greed and lust, and the land was also freed of three more conventional outlaws—the Kid, Al, and Hake Dallman.
That much should be said for Dan Quist, regardless; in his vengeance-oriented search he had relieved the world of two stellar malefactors along with a trio of others that it could very well do without.
Starbuck drew to a halt on the brow of a hill, shrugged to dispel the heavy thoughts that filled his mind. Raising himself in his stirrups, he looked back over the land, stirring now with a night wind, that he had crossed—a remembrance of Red’s last caution coming to him.
The prairie lay silent and deserted. There was no one on his trail. Hake Dallman’s friends had evidently decided that their leader’s quarrel was his own and that further prosecution of it was not their affair.
Sighing, he settled onto the leather, shifting his attention to the east. A pale flare of pearl was spreading across the dark arch of the sky. Dawn was not far off. He would be glad to see the sun again.
Touching the buckskin with his rowels, he moved on, riding before the breeze, idly listening now to the sounds and seeing the signs of life awakening to meet the new day ... A rabbit poised in a sage clump, birds cheeping sleepily, an owl hooting his reluctance to yield the night.
Starbuck’s head, slung forward at ease as he rocked to and fro in accord with the buckskin’s rhythmic plodding, came up slowly. Miles ahead, slowly taking shape against the brightening sky, was a broad pall of smoke. He frowned. It was much too extensive a cloud for a range fire and he could recall no grove of trees in that area that would account for such a fire.
Babylon ...
The thought came to him in that next instant. The settlement was ablaze, was going or had already gone up in flames. There was no other explanation.
Spurring the buckskin to a lope and urging the two horses with their roped-down loads to keep pace, Starbuck dropped off the rise he had been following into a long swale and came finally to the road.
Swinging onto its firm surface, he maintained speed until he broke over the last hump and looked down onto the flat where the structures stood.
There was little of Babylon left. The fieldstone that had served as foundations for the buildings loomed starkly gray through the hov
ering layers of smoke and swirling ashes whipped about by the breeze. Here and there charred timbers silhouetted bleakly, marking a corner of the Palace, the entrance to the stable, the rear of the hotel ... Even the Flophouse, quarters of the ill fortuned, was no more. The jail was a lonely cage.
Shocked, Starbuck turned his eyes to the clearing east of the smoking ruin. Two dozen or so persons, a number of horses, piles of belongings, and a wagon or two occupied it. Urging the buckskin on, he rode forward. As he approached, a few lifted stunned faces to him. Only Pete Dison, clothing scorched, brows and hair singed, stepped up to greet him.
Dropping from the saddle, Shawn glanced again at the smoldering skeleton. “How’d it start?” he asked.
“Bessie—was Bessie that done it,” the barman replied in a hoarse voice.
Starbuck came around slowly to face Dison. Beyond, in the group that had gathered in the clearing, he could see Doc Gilman bending over someone.
“Doesn’t make sense. Why would Bessie want to burn down her own place?”
Dison moved wearily. “Who knows? Went sort of crazy, I suspect. After you left, she come out of the room where McGraw’s body’d been put—told us all to get out.
“Some of the boys had picked up Bart Fisher, was toting him out for burying. She hollered at them, made them put him on the bar, all the time yelling something about she was aiming to put an end to things right there. We figured it was best to humor her, so we done what she said.
“After we was out, she slammed the doors, and we heard her drop the pin lock to keep them shut. We set ourselves down then to wait, figuring she’d open up soon’s she’d spent some time with Amos’s body.”
“Bessie the only one inside—except for McGraw and Fisher?”
Dison looked down. “Nope—that the worst part of it. We learned pretty quick she’d locked the women in their rooms—all but six or seven that happened to be downstairs and got drove out when she shut the doors.”
Shawn felt his blood chill. “You mean they—”
“Burned up—right along with Bessie and McGraw and Fisher. It was pure hell, hearing them screaming and crying in there ... Bessie must’ve poured coal oil from the lamps all through the place before she touched it off. There was a pretty fair wind blowing at the time, too, and they just wasn’t a thing we could do. The whole place, from one end to the other, went up in no time.”