by Lauran Paine
“I got your letter, Doctor,” the stranger said. “I’m Ben Knight.”
Parmenter’s shaggy brows drew out across his face. His shrewd eyes dimmed a little. He stepped aside. “Come in, Mister Knight.”
He closed the door after Ben Knight and motioned toward the chairs in his parlor. Without speaking, he took a chair himself and sank down.
Knight crossed to stand nearby, but he did not sit down or remove his hat. He was considering Dr. Parmenter impassively.
Parmenter noted that there was something about Ben Knight that was not readily definable. He looked more than capable, but that wasn’t it. He wore a gun like a man fully accustomed to not only wearing it, but also using it. But it wasn’t this either. Or, to Parmenter’s mind, at least this was not all of it.
After a bit more observation of Ben Knight, Dr. Parmenter, student of humanity, finally put his finger upon this elusive thing: Ben Knight was perfectly coordinated. He was entirely confident. He was deadly.
“I won’t bother you,” Knight now said in that deep but soft voice Parmenter had noted at the door. “I just want some names, Doctor.”
Parmenter sighed. He rummaged his pockets for his pipe. “I can’t give them to you,” he replied. “Even if I knew them, I don’t think I’d give them to you.” He found the pipe, loaded it, fired up, and stoked it with a thumb pad. Over the smoke he studied Ben Knight. “You think killing them will bring your brother back?”
“It’ll make him rest easier, Doctor.”
Parmenter wagged his head. “You don’t believe that,” he retorted. “The dead are dead.” He gestured again toward a chair. “Sit down, young man. I don’t like looking up at you.”
Ben Knight did not move. Dr. Parmenter sighed resignedly and leaned back. “They killed our sheriff, too. I forgot to tell you that in the letter.” Parmenter puffed a moment, then said: “You’re a lawman, Mister Knight. Would you help out here until a replacement can be found for our dead sheriff?”
Knight’s gray gaze turned smoky. He made a little smile with his lips and shook his head. “You’re pretty wise,” he told the doctor. “No thanks. I’m not a lawman now. You can’t bait me into putting on a badge, Doctor. I know what’s in your mind.” He paused for effect. “A local lawman couldn’t hunt down those responsible for the murder of my brother and kill them.”
Parmenter peered into his pipe bowl, tamped it gingerly, and plugged it back into his mouth. “The boy rode into Gunsight,” he recapitulated now. “They thought he was a hired gunfighter, and they took him out in the night and hung him.”
“He was no gunfighter. He was just a kid.”
“Yes, just a kid.”
“Why didn’t they try to find out who he was first?”
“Mister Knight, did you ever hear of a lynch mob that had any sense at all? Of course you haven’t, because if those men had had any sense, they never would have been there with your brother under the cottonwood tree.”
“I know,” murmured the tall man, who paused then to watch the older man’s face before adding: “You travel around a lot, Doctor. You’ve heard names mentioned.”
“Probably the wrong ones. Would you want them?”
“No.”
“Mister Knight, no one knows who lynched your brother. No one in Gunsight knows I wrote you, either. I don’t believe, the way folks feel now, they’d lynch another stranger, but I preferred not to tempt them.”
Knight’s brows drew slightly downward. “No one knows about me?” he asked.
Dr. Parmenter shook his head and puffed up a gray cloud. “Mike Mulaney may have known about you, but he’s dead. As far as I know, there is not a soul in town who knows your brother had living kin. In all the talk that’s going around, no one has mentioned this possibility around me.”
Parmenter stopped and squinted his eyes at Knight. He removed his pipe and held the bowl cupped in one hand.
“It’s up to you, my boy. You can ferret them out and kill them. I have an idea that’s in your mind. Or you can do this thing the way it ought to be done.”
“How is that?” the tall man asked, showing plainly by his expression that he knew what Parmenter’s reply would be.
“Bring them to the bar of justice, Mister Knight. You’re not God. It’s not your job to judge them to execute them.”
Knight began to move across the room toward the door. “I think it’s my duty to execute them, Doctor, not my job.” He lifted the latch, hesitated only a second, then passed out of the house.
Dr. Parmenter sucked at his pipe again. It had gone out, so he put it aside and looked at a large mantle clock.
“I know the kind,” he told the clock, speaking aloud his thoughts after the manner of men much alone. “I’ve patched them up and I’ve buried them. The Jesse Jameses of this world the Will Hickoks the Daltons and Renos.”
Parmenter arose, shook his head, and stalked over to a front window to peer out. “Within the law or beyond the law,” he said, “they’re killers.” His gaze strayed along Gunsight’s roadway where fading sunlight slanted, and very slowly it came to him that the roadway was unnaturally empty. He stopped speaking aloud and peered more sharply at the town. “Now what the hell ?” he said grumpily, and crossed to a rack, took down his hat, and left the house.
As Dr. Parmenter passed beyond his front gate four horsemen riding slowly, scuffed down through the roadway dust. He squinted outward at them. One, the foremost rider, he recognized instantly—Arthur Hobart.
Parmenter increased his pace and turned in at Blakely’s Emporium. He asked the clerk, who looked worried, the whereabouts of Blakely.
The clerk’s expression of anxiety deepened. “They’re in the back room,” he told Parmenter, “but they said they weren’t to be disturbed.”
“They?” the doctor asked testily. “Who is ‘they’?”
“The town council.”
Parmenter digested this thoughtfully, then turned to watch Hobart and his Diamond H horsemen plod past out where the lowering sun was reddening Gunsight. He thought Hobart’s forbidding, sun-rusted countenance looked bleakly pleased. He could imagine with little difficulty what caused this pleasure. Hobart knew the hanged cowboy’s gunfighting brother had arrived in the valley. How he knew, Parmenter couldn’t guess, but that did not trouble him right then. Hobart had come to town with his toughest riders. He obviously meant to linger in Gunsight in anticipation of trouble.
This started the doctor on a new train of thought. He faced back, considered the closed far door behind which Gunsight’s administrators were in session, then he shrugged, saying to the clerk: “What’s going on in town? It’s as quiet as a graveyard out there. Not a soul in sight.”
The clerk shot a look out the front window at the descending sun. “Haven’t you heard?” he said. “That there cowboy that got lynched his brother has shown up and he’s in the hills north of town somewhere. He sent word to the councilmen to drive the fellows who lynched that cowboy beyond town before sundown or else.” A shiver seemed to run down the clerk’s back.
Dr. Parmenter’s seamed old face very gradually creased with deep perplexity. “In the mountains, you say? No he can’t be up there.”
“Oh, yes he can,” retorted the clerk warmly. “Hobart’s men saw him this morning. He sent the message in by Hobart himself.”
Dr. Parmenter pinched his lips with the fingers of one hand, staring at the floor, then, a moment later, he left Blakely’s Emporium bound for the livery barn. There, he talked for a while with Calvin Taylor before heading for Jacob Howell’s saddlery, where he drew out a chair behind the front window, leaned far back in it so the front legs were off the floor, and cocked his booted feet upon Jacob’s display shelf. In this fashion he sat motionlessly for the length of time it took for old Jacob to return from the council meeting. By that time, too, Dr. Parmenter had smoothed out and carefully arranged his
thoughts.
What he had deduced did not please him, either. Jacob, entering his shop, saw Parmenter’s grim expression, tossed aside his flat-brimmed hat, scratched his mane of white hair, and began belting his working apron around him, as he said: “Going to be some killings, Doc. I reckon you heard, though.”
Parmenter did not immediately reply.
“We got to get a marshal for town right quick, too,” went on the old saddle maker. “Just had a meeting over at Blakely’s about that and this Knight fellow.”
“Which Knight fellow?” Parmenter growled, without looking away from the roadway.
“Why, the one’s up in the hills loaded for bear.”
“He’s not up in the mountains, Jacob.”
“What?”
“I said he’s not up in the mountains,” Parmenter repeated, and turned. They were both old men, nearly of an age. “What’s the matter with you anyway, Jacob? You going deaf?”
Old Howell was stung. His faded blue eyes flashed. “Deaf like a wolf,” he said sharply. “I could hear a Sioux draw his fleshing knife at a hundred yards.”
“Hasn’t been a hostile Indian around here in twenty years,” Parmenter reminded the old shopkeeper. “Besides, a bronco buck couldn’t even walk in the shadow of this here Ben Knight.”
Jacob finished adjusting and tying on his apron. He stood a moment before his large work table considering an unrolled oak-tanned cowhide there. Then he turned slowly and threw a stare at Parmenter’s back.
“Just how do you know about Ben Knight?” he demanded.
“Because, dammit, he was at my house not more than half an hour ago.”
“At your house?”
“In my parlor.”
Jacob Howell shuffled forward so he could peer into Parmenter’s face. “You’re joshing me,” he said, but without any conviction in his voice. “You sure he was this Knight fellow?”
“I’m sure.”
“How do you know you’re sure?”
“I got eyes, Jacob,” Doc Parmenter said, getting a bit annoyed.
Howell drew up his apron and sat down upon the edge of his display shelf near Dr. Parmenter’s feet. He squinted. “You got to be wrong, Doc. A fellow can’t be two places at once.”
“I’m not wrong, Jacob.” Parmenter brought the front legs of the chair down with a crash, gathered his legs under him, and arose. “It was Ben Knight all right. Even if he hadn’t told me who he was, I’d have known. Don’t forget I embalmed his brother. I caught the resemblance all right. He was Ben Knight!”
Jacob grew thoughtful. After a moment’s reflection he said: “Something’s wrong here, Doc. Hobart told Blakely that this here brother of Pete Knight come to his cow camp, give him a message for us townsfolk, then rode back into the mountains.”
Parmenter’s old face smoothed out a little. His eyes shone with hard irony. “Something’s wrong all right,” he said. “And I’ve been sitting here trying to figure it out.”
“I’m listening,” said old Jacob. “Go on.”
“Keep this between us, Jacob. For the time being anyway. You understand?”
“You got my word, Doc. Shoot.”
“Diamond H met Ben Knight somewhere. That part’s true enough, and maybe Knight said why he was here which is to kill the men who lynched his brother.” Parmenter paused to rub his chin before continuing. “But the rest of it that story about Knight demanding us to deliver the lynchers to him beyond town before sundown that’s Hobart’s work. Don’t ask me why Hobart’s doing this. I can only guess about that but he made up that message. Ben Knight never sent it.”
“Did he tell you he didn’t?”
“Of course not. How could he mention a message he didn’t send? Trust me, he didn’t mention it and neither did I. The reason I didn’t was because I didn’t know anything about it when he came to see me. The reason he didn’t I think was because he didn’t know anything about it either.” Parmenter gazed downward at Howell.
The old saddle-maker was perplexed now. He sighed and wagged his head.
Parmenter then explained further. “A man who has thrown down a challenge to a town doesn’t come riding into it in broad daylight, Jacob. Nor does he tie up at my front gate and pay me a social call.”
“Doesn’t seem likely he would,” agreed Howell.
“Of course, he wouldn’t. He’d know the whole town would be watching for him that they’d throw down on him the minute he showed his face.”
“Be pretty risky all right, Doc.” Jacob Howell was briefly silent, then fixed Parmenter with a shrewd look. “Does this Knight fellow look like a damned fool?”
Parmenter snorted. “He’s a long way from being that, Jacob. This fellow is a top-notch gunfighter. It’s stamped all over him. He’s maybe thirty years old, too. Gunmen don’t get that old by being foolish, Jacob.”
“No.”
“And furthermore, he’s after his brother’s killers, and he’s going to find them, too. I wouldn’t want to be in their boots, believe me.”
Old Jacob got to his feet. He turned toward the window. “Like a ghost town out there,” he murmured. “What you reckon is going to happen, Doc?”
“The Lord only knows, Jacob. Whatever Hobart’s up to spells trouble. But Ben Knight is definitely somewhere around here. And believe you me, he’s maybe even bigger trouble.”
“We got to get that temporary lawman,” Jacob said adamantly. “That’s all there is to it.”
Dr. Parmenter, also gazing out where dying day mantled Gunsight’s broad and deserted roadway, made his derisive snort for the second time.
“Fat lot of good some amateur lawman’s going to do now, Jacob. What Gunsight needs is a divine miracle.”
Jacob turned away from the window. “Kathy was going to fetch supper down here to me,” he told Parmenter. “Expect I’d better go home and tell her to stay off the walks until this here thing blows over.”
“Good idea,” muttered the medical man, moving toward the streetside door. He stopped there to fix a puzzled look upon Howell. “Hobart’s timed this to coincide with Knight’s arrival in Gunsight.”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“You got any idea why, Jacob?”
“No, I got no idea.”
“Because, whatever he’s got planned, will need a man to be blamed for it. Knight’s supposed to be that man.”
Old Jacob considered this, then shook his head as he said in a tired tone: “Dammit it all, Doc why’d those idiots go and lynch that young fellow, anyway?”
“I think,” retorted Doc Parmenter with a grim expression on his face, “that a conscience is a pretty worthless thing, Jacob. It should bother folks before, not after, they think up meanness.”
Chapter Six
It appeared to those watching, that the sun descended with inordinate swiftness this day. By midafternoon everyone knew about Ben Knight’s alleged message. They had also heard that Arthur Hobart and several of his riders were at the Cross Timbers Saloon. At Blakely’s Emporium men passed inward, tarried long enough to speak with the harassed proprietor, then pass out again to spread what Blakely had told them in answer to their questions, among the other people of Gunsight.
Across the road at the livery barn Gus Cawley sweated bullets. He was a man who worried. If he wished for rain, and it came, Gus fretted for fear it would turn into a flood. He told the dayman, Calvin Taylor, he thought Ben Knight might get the wrong names and shoot innocent men.
Taylor, not ordinarily a worrier, recalled without effort the vivid first view he’d had that morning when he’d discovered the hanged man. Up until Knight’s appearance in the Gunsight country, Taylor had only been grimly bitter. Now he secretly hoped Knight might find those hang ropers. For some reason or other he did not believe Ben Knight would get the wrong men, but he said nothing of this to Gus.
“It’s the injustice,” replied Cawley, wincing from the recollection that he had been one of those whose outspoken and militant denunciation of Hobart had kept tempers white-hot. “It’s one thing to lynch an outlaw, and it’s another thing to up and lynch an innocent man.”
“Any proof yet that he was innocent, Gus? What I mean is everyone’s so busy being contrite, and all ”
Kathy Howell, old Jacob’s granddaughter passed along the plank walk in full view and Cal’s voice dwindled. She was the loveliest female in Gunsight, bar none.
Cal’s eyes followed her admiringly.
“There’s proof,” said Cawley, scarcely sparing a glance for the beautiful blond girl. “Hobart himself told Blakely he hadn’t hired Knight.”
Cal ambled to the threshold of the streetside door and leaned there, still watching Kathy Howell. She went as far as her grandfather’s saddle shop and there she turned in. For a moment, slanting sunlight burnished the spun-like gold of her hair as she paused to turn a slow, penetrating glance upon the roadway’s emptiness. Two small parallel lines appeared between her eyes. Then her grandfather’s voice came forward to draw her attention.
“Don’t stand there,” commanded old Jacob from within the shop. “Come in, come in.”
Kathy went as far forward as the work bench where Jacob was laying out a pattern for the leather seat, his faded eyes bright with concentration. There, she put a small basket upon the bench, saying: “Hello, Grandfather.” Then she looked outside again, and added: “Why is everything so quiet today?”
Jacob sighed. He pulled his attention from the layout with an effort. He gazed long upon his lovely granddaughter before answering her. “Trouble over that young fellow someone lynched,” he said.
“Trouble? What kind of trouble?” Worry washed across her face.