There was no sign of any of them. Gunter was not around, and Burwick and Keith seemed to have vanished. Idling in the office, Tom heard a slight movement upstairs. He called out. Feet hurried along the floor above him and then Connie was at the stair head. “Yes?” Recognizing him, she hurried down. “Is something wrong?”
Swiftly he explained, holding nothing back. “Nothing may come of it. But it wouldn’t take much to start something. They all know that the company’s gunmen are mostly out of town. Burwick, Keith and your uncle must have lit out.”
“Uncle John hasn’t been around all day. I saw him at breakfast, and then he disappeared.”
“I’ll look around. Do you have a gun?” He shook his head then. “Don’t much think you’ll need it. Most of them like you around here, and you’ve been pretty outspoken. But stay close to your room. The lid’s going to blow off.”
Before he could reach the door she called to him and he faced her again. “Tom?” He saw the pleading in her eyes. “Be careful, Tom.”
Their eyes held for a long moment, and then he nodded. “I will—if I can.”
He went out and paused on the steps. Burwick and Keith might get out of the way. But whatever else Gunter might be, he was scarcely the man to leave his niece behind at a time of danger. Puzzled about Gunter’s disappearance, Kedrick paused and looked around him. The back street was bare and empty. The white powdery dust lay thickly and had sifted into the foliage of the trees and shrubs.
Kedrick hitched his guns into place and walked slowly around the house. The stable was usually filled with horses. Now it seemed empty. He strode back, his spurs jingling a little, and tiny puffs of dust rising from his boots as he walked.
Once, nearly to the stable, he paused by a water trough and listened for noise from the town. It was quiet, altogether too quiet. He hesitated, worrying about Connie again, but then went on and into the wide door that gave entrance to the shadowed coolness of the stable.
The stalls were empty, all save one. He walked back, then paused. The chestnut was Gunter’s horse, and a saddle lay nearby. Could Gunter be somewhere around town? Kedrick considered that, then dismissed it. He removed his hat and wiped the band with his kerchief, then replaced it. His face was unusually thoughtful as he examined every stall.
Nothing.
Puzzled, he stepped out into the bright glare of the sun and heard no sound anywhere. He squinted his eyes around, then saw the ramshackle old building that had done duty for a stable before the present large one was built. He stared at it and then turned in that direction. He had taken scarcely a step when he heard a rattle of hoofs, and swung swiftly around, half crouched, his hands wide.
Then he straightened. Sue Laine slid from her horse and ran to him. “Oh, I’ve found you, Tom!” she cried, catching him by the arms. “Tom, don’t go to that meeting tomorrow. There’s going to be trouble!”
“You mean, McLennon’s framed something?”
“McLennon?” For an instant she was startled. “Oh, no! Not Mac!” Her expression changed. “Come home with me, Tom. Please do! Let them have this out and get it over with! Come home with me!”
“Why all this sudden worry about me?” He was sincerely puzzled. “We’ve only met once, and we seem to have different ideas about things.”
“Don’t stand here and argue! Tom, I mustn’t be seen talking to you—not by either side. Come with me and get away from here until this is all over. I’ve seen Dornie, and he hates you, Tom. He hates you.”
“He does, does he?” He patted her arm. “Run along home now. I’ve things to do here.”
“Oh?” Her eyes hardened a little. “Is it that woman? That Duane girl? I’ve heard all about her, how beautiful she is, how—how she—what kind of girl is she?”
“She’s a lovely person,” he said gravely. “You’d like her, Sue.”
Sue stiffened. “Would I? I wonder how much you know about women, Tom? Or do you know anything about them? I could never like Connie Duane.” She shook his arm. “Come, if you’re coming. I just heard this last night, and I can’t—I won’t see this happen.”
“What? What’s going to happen?”
She stamped her foot with impatience. “Oh, you fool, you! They plan to kill you, Tom. Now, come on.”
“Not now,” he said quietly. “I’ve got to get this fight settled first, then maybe I’ll ride your way. Now run along, I’ve got to look around.”
Impatiently, she turned and walked to her horse. In the saddle she glanced back at him. “If you change your mind …”
“Not now,” he repeated.
“Then be careful. Be careful, Tom.”
He watched her go, then happened to glance toward the house. Connie Duane stood in the window, looking down at him. As he looked up, she turned sharply away. He started for the house, then hesitated. There was nothing he could say now, nothing that would pave any effect or do any good at all.
He started toward the front of the house again, then stopped. On an impulse he turned and walked swiftly back to the little old building and caught the latch. The door was weathered and gray. It creaked on rusty hinges and opened slowly. Inside there was the musty odor of decay. Kedrick stood there for a minute watching the sunlight filter through the cobwebbed window and fall in a faint square upon the ancient straw that littered the earthen floor. Stepping forward, he peered around the corner of the nearest stall.
John Gunter lay sprawled upon his face, his head pillowed upon one forearm, the back of his shirt covered with a dark, wide stain. Kedrick knelt beside him.
Connie’s uncle had been stabbed in the back. Three powerful blows, from the look of the wounds, had been struck downward—evidently while he sat at a desk or table.
He had been dead for several hours.
CHAPTER 9
ALTON BURWICK, FOR all his weight, sat his saddle easily and rode well. His horse was a blood bay, tall and long limbed. He walked it alongside Tom Kedrick’s palouse. From time to time he spurred it to a trot, then eased down. On this morning Burwick wore an ancient gray felt hat, torn at the flat crown, and a soiled neckerchief that concealed the greasy shirt collar.
His shirt bulged over his belt, and he wore one gun, too high on his hip for easy use. His whiskers seemed neither to have grown nor been clipped. They were still a rough stubble of dirty mixed gray. Yet he seemed unusually genial this morning.
“Great country, Kedrick. Country for a man to live in. If this deal goes through you should get yourself a ranch. I aim to.”
“Not a bad idea.” Kedrick rode with his right hand dangling. “I was talking about that yesterday with Connie Duane.”
The smile vanished from Burwick’s face. “You talked to her yesterday? What time?”
“Afternoon.” Kedrick let his voice become casual, yet he was alert to the change in Burwick’s voice. Had Burwick murdered Gunter? Or had it been one of the squatters? With things as they were either would be difficult or impossible to prove. “We had a long talk. She’s a fine girl.”
Burwick said nothing, but his lips tightened. The red canyon walls lifted high above them. Along here they were nearly five hundred feet above the bottom of Salt Creek. There was but little left to go, and Tom became puzzled by Burwick’s increased watchfulness. The man might suspect treachery, but he had said nothing to imply anything of the kind.
Tom’s mind reverted to Sue’s warning of the previous day—they intended to kill him—but who were “they”? She had not been specific in her warning, except to say that he should not keep this rendezvous today. Kedrick turned the idea over in his mind, wondering if she were deliberately trying to prevent a settlement, or if she knew something and was genuinely worried.
Pit Laine, her gun-slinging brother, was one element in the situation he could not estimate. Laine had not been mentioned in any of the discussions. Although he seemed always just beyond reach, he was definitely in the background as was the mysterious rider of the mouse-colored horse. The whole story of the disappearin
g seemed fantastic, but Kedrick did not think Sue was inclined to fall for tall stories.
The canyon of Salt Creek widened out and several branch canyons opened into it. They left the creek bed and rode closer together to the towering cliffs, now all of seven hundred feet above the trail. They were heading south, and Burwick, mopping his sweaty face from time to time with a dirty handkerchief, was no longer talking.
Kedrick pushed back his hat and rolled a smoke. He had never seen Burwick so jittery before, and he was puzzled. Deliberately, he had said nothing to any of the company about Gunter, although he had arranged with some of the townspeople to have the body moved. Tom was afraid it might precipitate the very trouble he was trying to end, and bring the fight into open battle. Moreover, he was not at all sure of why Gunter had been killed, or who had done it. That it could be retaliation for Singer’s death was an answer to be considered, but it might have been done by either Keith or Burwick.
Suddenly he drew up. A horse coming in alone from the northwest had left recent tracks. Burwick saw them too. “I’ve seen those tracks before,” Tom Kedrick said. “Now whose horse is that?”
“We better step it up,” Burwick said, impatiently. “They’ll be there before us.”
They pushed on into the bright, still morning. The sky overhead was a vast blue dome scattered with fleecy puff-balls of clouds, like balls of cotton on the surface of a lake of pure blue. The red cliffs towered high on their left, and the valley on their right swept away in a vast, gently rolling panorama. Glancing off over this sagebrush-dotted valley, Tom knew that lost in the blue haze, some seven or eight miles away, was Malpais Arroyo and Sue Laine.
Was she there this morning? Or was she riding somewhere else? She was strangely attractive, that slim, dark-haired, dark-eyed girl with her lovely skin, soft despite the desert sun and desert wind. She had come to him, riding all that distance to bring him a warning of danger. Why? Was it simply that she feared for him? Was she in love with him? He dismissed that idea instantly, but continued to wonder. She was, despite her beauty, a hard, calculating little girl, hating the country around, and wanting only to be free of it.
Heat waves danced out over the bottom land, and shadows gathered under the red wall. A dust devil lifted and danced weirdly across the desert, then lost itself among the thick antelope brush and the cat claw. Tom Kedrick mopped his brow and swung his horse farther east. The tall spire of Chimney Rock lifted in the distance, its heavier shouldered companion looming beside and beyond it.
“Look!” Burwick’s voice held a note of triumph. “There they come!”
To the south, and still three or four miles off, they could see two riders heading toward Chimney Rock. At this distance they could not be distinguished, but their destination was obvious.
“Now that’s fine.” Burwick beamed. “They’ll be here right on time. Say—” he glanced at his heavy gold watch—“tell you what. You’ll be there a shade before them, so what say you wait for them while I have me a look at a ledge up in the canyon?”
Minutes later, Kedrick swung down in the shadow of the rock. There was a small pool of water there. He let the palouse drink and ground-hitched him deeper in the shade, near some grass. Then he walked back and dropping to the ground lit a smoke. He could see the two riders nearing now. One was on a fast-stepping chestnut, the other a dappled gray.
They rode up and swung down. The first man was Pete Slagle, the second a stranger whom Kedrick had not seen before. “Where’s McLennon?” he asked.
“He’ll be along. He hadn’t come in from the ranch, so I came on with Steelman here. He’s a good man, an’ anything he says goes with all of us. Bob’ll be along later, though, if you have to have his word.”
“Burwick came. He’s over lookin’ at a ledge he saw in the canyon over there.”
The three men bunched and Steelman studied Kedrick. “Dai Reid tells me you’re a good man, trustworthy, he says.”
“I aim to be.” He drew a last drag on his cigarette and lifted his head to snap it out into the sand.
For an instant, he stood poised, his face blank, then realization hit him. “Look out!” he yelled. “Hit the dirt!”
His voice was drowned in a roar of guns and something smashed him in the body even as he fell. Then something else slugged him atop the head and a vast wave of blackness folded over him, pushing him down, down, down, deeper and deeper into a swirling darkness that closed in tightly around his body, around his throat. And then there was nothing, nothing at all.
ALTON BURWICK SMILED and threw down his cigar. Calmly, he swung into the saddle and rode toward the four men who were riding from behind a low parapet of rocks near the Chimney. As he rode up they were standing, rifles in hand, staring toward the cluster of bloody figures sprawled on the ground in the shade. “Got ’em!” Shaw said. His eyes were hard. “That cleans it up, an’ good!”
Fessenden, Clauson and Poinsett stared at the bodies, saying nothing. Lee Goff walked toward them from his vantage point where he had awaited anyone who might have had a chance to escape. He stooped over the three.
Slagle was literally riddled with bullets, his body smashed and bloody. Off to one side lay Steelman, half the top of his head blown off. Captain Kedrick lay sprawled deeper in the shadow, his head bloody, and a dark stain on his body.
“Want I should finish ’em off for sure?” Poinsett asked.
“Finish what off?” Clauson sneered. “Look at ’em—shot to doll rags.”
“What about Kedrick?” Fessenden asked. “He dead for sure?”
“Deader’n Columbus,” Goff said.
“Hey!” Shaw interrupted. “This ain’t McLennon! This here’s that Steelman!”
They gathered around. “Sure is!” Burwick swore viciously. “Now we’re in trouble. If we don’t get McLennon, we’re—” His voice trailed away as he looked up at Dornie Shaw. The soft brown eyes were bright and boyish.
“Why, boss,” he said softly, dropping his cigarette and rubbing it out with his toe, “I reckon that’s where I come in. Leave McLennon to me. I’ll hunt him down before sun sets tomorrow.”
“Want company?” Poinsett asked.
“Don’t need it,” Shaw said, “but come along. I hear this Bob McLennon used to be a frontier marshal. I never liked marshals noway.”
They drifted to their horses, then moved slowly away. Dornie Shaw, Poinsett and Goff toward the west and Bob McLennon. Alton Burwick, his eyes thoughtful, headed toward the east and Mustang. With him rode the others. Only Fessenden turned nervously and looked back. “We should have made sure they were dead.”
“Ride back if you want,” Clauson said. “They are dead all right. That Kedrick! I had no use for him. I aimed my shot right for his smart skull.”
Afternoon drew on. The sun lowered, and after the sun came coolness. Somewhere a coyote lifted his howl of anguish to the wide white moon and the desert lay still and quiet beneath the sky.
In the deeper shadow of the towering Chimney and its bulkier neighbor there was no movement. A coyote, moving nearer, scented the blood, but with it there was the dreaded man smell. He whined anxiously and drew back, then trotted slowly off, turning only once to look back. The palouse, still ground-hitched, walked along the grass toward the pool, then stopped, nostrils wide at the smell of blood.
Well down behind some rocks and brush, the shooting had only made it lift its head, then return to cropping the thick green grass that grew in the tiny sub-irrigated area around the Chimney. Nothing more moved. The coolness of the night stiffened the dried blood and stiffened the bodies of the men who lay sprawled there.
Ten miles north Laredo Shad, late for his meeting with Kedrick, limped along the trail leading a badly lamed horse. Two hours before, the trail along an arroyo bank had given way and the horse had fallen. The animal’s leg was not broken, but was badly injured. Shad swore bitterly and walked on, debating as he had for the past two hours on the advisability of camping for the night. But remembering that Kedrick
would be expecting him, he pushed on.
An hour later, still plodding and on blistered feet, he heard horse’s hoofs and drew up, slipping his rifle into his hands. Then the rider materialized from the night, and he drew up also. For a long minute no word was said, then Shad spoke. “Name yourself, pardner.”
The other rider also held a gun. “Bob McLennon,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Laredo Shad. My horse lamed hisself. I’m headed for Chimney Rock. S’pose to meet Kedrick there.” He stared at the rider. “Thought you was to be at the meetin’? What happened?”
“I didn’t make it. Steelman an’ Slagle went. I’m ridin’ up here because they never come in.”
“What?” Shad’s exclamation was sharp. “McLennon, I was right afeared o’ that. My bet is there’s been dirty work. Nevah trusted that there Burwick, not no way.”
McLennon studied the Texan, liking the man, but hesitant. “What’s your brand read, Laredo? You a company man?”
Shad shook his head. “Well, now, it’s like this. I come in here drawin’ warrior pay to do some gun slingin’, but I’m a right uppity sort of a gent about some things. This here didn’t size up right to me, nor to Kedrick, so we been figurin’ on gettin’ shut of the company. Kedrick only stayed on hopin’ he could make peace. I stayed along with him.”
“Get up behind me,” McLennon said. “My horse will carry double an’ it ain’t far.”
CHAPTER 10
HIS EYES WERE open a long time before realization came, and he was lying in a clean, orderly place with which he was totally unfamiliar. For a long time he lay there searching his memory for clues to tie all this together. He, himself. He was Captain Tom Kedrick … he had gone west from New Orleans … he had taken on a job … then he remembered.
There had been a meeting at Chimney Rock and Steelman had come in place of McLennon. He had thrown his cigarette away and had seen those men behind the rocks, seen the sunlight flashing on their rifle barrels. He had yelled and then dropped, but not fast enough. He had been hit in the head, and he had been hit in the body at least once.
Novel 1953 - Showdown At Yellow Butte (v5.0) Page 8