Ralph Compton Blood on the Gallows

by Joseph A. West

  McBride’s addled brain was slow to put it together, but in the end he realized what had happened. The handle of the revolver had deflected Clare O’Neil’s bullet and it had then plowed across his belly. It was a painful wound, but not deadly, and he felt relief wash over him. But with that sense of elation came the realization that he must now continue along a much more difficult trail—to go on living.

  The guttering lamp sent shadows chasing across McBride’s face, and the regular rattle of rain on the roof lulled him. He closed his eyes, blinked and tried to stay awake. He had thinking to do.

  Why had Clare shot him when only a week before she had saved his life? Did she suspect that he’d killed her father? No, that was impossible. The girl had left him lying unconscious on the ground. She knew that he was not fit to ride, let alone bushwhack an old man at the door to his cabin.

  Then why had she wanted to kill him?

  McBride’s thoughts chased their tails around his head, going nowhere. Far-off thunder rumbled and water dripped from the top of the barn door and ticked into the mud. He closed his eyes again. And this time he slept.

  A soaked coyote trotted toward the barn, attracted by the light. It looked inside but caught the man smell and backed away. Near the cabin the animal sat and yipped to its mate. It waited for the answering yip and then faded into the night.

  McBride stirred in his sleep, his lips moving, tormented by phantoms as pain entered his subconscious and invaded a dream.

  The little calico kitten, thin, bedraggled, walking on silent feet, made its tentative way into the stall where the big man slept. It sniffed his cheek, was stirred by a memory of a soft voice and gentle hands and curled up on his chest.

  McBride slept on.

  Sunlight bladed through the barn door and cast a rectangle of yellow light into the stall where McBride slept. He woke to see the kitten staring intently into his face.

  ‘‘Where have you been, Sammy?’’ he asked, smiling. He stroked the little cat’s matted fur and felt its ribs just under the skin. ‘‘Seems you haven’t been eating well lately. Well, that makes two of us.’’

  It took McBride a considerable effort to get to his feet, a terrible weakness in him. The pain in his belly was much less, but it still gnawed like a bad tooth-ache and he felt light-headed and sick. He shoved the battered Colt into the hip pocket of his pants where it would be handy, then forked the mustang hay. His shirt was stiff with blood and he let it flap open as he stepped to the barn door, the kitten in his arms.

  The black skies of the night were gone, replaced by an arch of deep violet where drifted a few puffy white clouds. The rising sun reached out to the mountains, deepening the shadows in the crevasses and ridges even as it splashed the flat rock faces with dazzling light. In homage to the newborn day the air smelled fresh, of pines and wildflowers, and came at McBride clean on the wind.

  It was a day to make a man feel glad to be alive, and wounded, battered and bleeding though he was, McBride turned his face to the sun and let its warmth embrace him like a woman’s arms. He felt like a man just raised from the dead.

  McBride had not liked the idea of sleeping in the cabin, but he had no such qualms about raiding the pantry.

  He found eggs, bacon, butter and a round loaf of sourdough bread, dusted with flour, that showed patches of green mold in places. But these he scraped off with a knife and declared to the interested and unblinking Sammy that as far as he was concerned the bread was now edible.

  There was firewood enough in the kitchen and some torn-up newspaper. Even in New York McBride could light a stove and he soon had a fire going. He filled the coffeepot at the sink pump and threw in a handful of Arbuckle. When the pot started to boil he scrambled eggs for the kitten, reserving the shells to settle the coffee grounds. As Sammy ate hungrily, McBride sliced a mound of bacon into the fry pan and beat up half a dozen eggs for himself.

  Only after he’d eaten did the thought come to McBride that he should check Clare’s bedroom. Perhaps there he could find some clue to her behavior.

  The girl’s room was what he expected, frilly, feminine, the scent of her perfume still lingering in the air. But the patchwork quilt on her bed was threadbare, the top of her dresser scarred with age. The furniture, a worn, overstuffed sofa, a couple of rickety chairs and a frayed rug, spoke to McBride of genteel poverty and a history of making do. He remembered Clare’s shabby dress in the restaurant the night he first saw her, in such stark contrast to Lance Josephine’s expensive gambler’s finery. He was not an expert on female fixings, but he had the feeling that the girl had been wearing a hand-me-down.

  Clare’s closet was empty. She’d taken everything except for a pair of elastic-sided boots that seemed to be too down-at-heel and scuffed to be worth packing.

  Much like my own, McBride thought, shaking his head.

  The dresser was also empty, but for a few hairpins and a tortoiseshell comb with most of its teeth missing. Suddenly McBride was embarrassed. The woman had tried to kill him, yet he felt he was invading her privacy.

  He went back to the kitchen and poured himself more coffee as the pure light of the aborning day flooded through the window as though it was trying to make everything that was wrong right again.

  McBride slept in the barn again that night, and made his way to the cabin at sunup, Sammy running after him.

  He fed the kitten and thirty minutes later, as he drank his fourth cup of coffee, a rifle bullet smashed a front window and rattled through the cabin . . . followed by another.

  Chapter 17

  From his hiding place in the parlor McBride saw two riders tracking back and forth across the front of the cabin, their eyes fixed on the door as though they expected someone to suddenly appear. Both men held their rifles upright, the brass butt plates on their thighs, and they looked tough and ready, hard-faced men who had ridden many a moonlit trail.

  ‘‘Hell, Boone, he ain’t here,’’ one of the men said, loud enough for McBride to hear. He was tall and thin with sad, hound dog eyes and a knife scar on his left cheek. ‘‘The girl said she gut-shot him. He probably crawled away into the brush an’ died.’’

  ‘‘Probably,’’ the man called Boone allowed. ‘‘But them ladies told me they want us to kick his body and make sure it don’t come alive again. They don’t trust McBride to die or stay dead.’’ He turned to his companion. ‘‘If you find him still breathing, scatter his brains and then we’re done. Now go check the barn, Russ. I’ll try the cabin.’’

  ‘‘He isn’t here,’’ Russ said stubbornly.

  ‘‘Yeah? Well, if he ain’t, you’ll earn the easiest fifty dollars of your life, won’t you? Now, go do like I told you.’’

  As Russ muttered his way toward the barn, Boone swung out of the saddle. His eyes wary, he slanted his rifle across his chest and walked to the front door. Boone was a tall man with long, black hair cascading over his shoulders under a flat-brimmed hat. He affected the flamboyant dress of the frontier gambler/ gunfighter and he moved gracefully, with the arrogant self-confidence of a named man.

  McBride knew he was up against it.

  He moved quickly and silently into the hallway and took up the shooting position he’d been taught by his police instructors. His right arm was straight out, revolver held hammer back, at eye level, the arch of the left foot behind the heel of his right.

  The boot steps of the man called Boone grew closer to the door, squelching in the mud churned up by last night’s rain. Hostage to a silence that clanged in his ears like a firehouse bell, McBride nonetheless heard the taut tick of the clock in the parlor. Good, someone must have wound it, he told himself. He was about to take part in a gunfight to the death, and the thought was so incongruous he attempted a smile. But his lips were stiff and parchment dry and he couldn’t manage it.

  A ways in the distance, McBride heard Russ yell, ‘‘Hoss in the barn, Boone. And a saddle.’’

  McBride’s sweating fingers opened, then closed on the splintered handle
of the Colt. The thud of his racing heart was in his ears, and his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. Outside the door the dead silence from Boone was filled with menace.

  The man was going to shoot!

  Every nerve in his body shrieking, McBride threw himself into the parlor just as four shots ripped through the front door. An instant later the door crashed inward, the hinges shattered from the frame. The door landed aslant in the hallway, its bottom edge wedged in the angle where the wall met the floor.

  It took Boone a couple of seconds to boot the door aside and he gave McBride the time he needed. He had no time to assume the approved NYPD shooting position. He dropped to a knee in the hallway and raised the Colt to eye level with both hands.

  Boone assumed he was stalking a gut-shot man who was either dead or dying hard and that made him overconfident. Had he gone to his holstered revolver he would have given himself more room in the narrow hall. Instead, he was forced to move his rifle up and clear of the door as he stepped around the debris. That cost him a lot more time than McBride was willing to give him.

  McBride and Boone saw each other at the same moment. The gunman knew he’d been caught flat-footed. He cursed as he swung his rifle down and tried to bring it to bear on the big man. The Spencer carbine in Boone’s hands was short and handy, but he was a heartbeat too slow.

  McBride fired. His bullet caught Boone in the right shoulder. The man absorbed the shock, but he was off balance, all his weight on his forward right leg. He triggered a round at McBride. Too low. The .50-caliber bullet plowed into the floor an inch from McBride’s left knee, throwing up a shower of splinters. McBride fired again, missed, then thumbed off a third shot. This time his aim was true and his bullet crashed into Boone’s throat where it met the top of the man’s breastbone.

  The gunman staggered back into the angled door. His eyes were wild, filled with the knowledge of death. The terrible wound in his throat made him gag like a man drinking month-old milk and his bloody lips were stretched wide under his mustache.

  But Boone had been there before and he had sand.

  He threw the Spencer at McBride and went for his Colt. He was already a dead man, but he was fast. His revolver was clearing leather when McBride fired, hitting the gunman low in the belly. Boone’s Colt slammed, but his shot was wide. The man shook his head, trying desperately to focus eyes that were already seeing only darkness.

  Anxiously aware that this was his last round, McBride rose to his feet, charged Boone and fired at point-blank range into the center of the man’s chest. Suddenly, as his heart burst apart, all the fight went out of Boone, draining away with his life. He fell against the wall, then slid to the floor, his dead eyes lifted to McBride, shocked and accusing.

  His Colt hanging loose in his hand, McBride backed against the wall and lifted his head, gulping in air. He had not taken a breath since the fight started. His knees were shaking and Boone’s blood stained his hands and gun.

  In the dime novels he’d read, the stalwart frontiers-man always downed his opponent with a single, well-aimed shot, and at one time McBride had believed this. But he had come to know that the reality of a gunfight was death in a slaughterhouse, bloody, drawn out and terrifying, and nobody died clean.

  Wearily, McBride shouldered off the wall and reloaded the Colt from the shells he carried in his pocket. Outside he heard Russ yell, ‘‘Hey, Boone, you all right?’’

  ‘‘He’s dead,’’ McBride called out, an unreasoning, futile anger in him. ‘‘Damn you, if you want what he got, come right ahead.’’

  The only reply was the hammer of hooves fading into the distance. It seemed that the man called Russ wanted no part of John McBride.

  McBride had neither the strength nor the will to bury the dead man. He traded his damaged Colt for Boone’s much better model and filled his pockets with shells from the man’s gun belt. Then he left him where he was.

  Russ would spread the word that McBride wasn’t dead and he could no longer remain at the cabin. In a land where he had plenty of enemies and mighty few friends, it seemed that every man’s hand was turned against him—and every woman’s as well.

  Clare had sent the gunmen after him, McBride was sure, but Boone had talked about ladies in the plural. Who was the other one? The only woman who fit the bill was Dora Ryan—but she had no quarrel with him. Or did she?

  McBride let it go. He was asking himself questions for which he had no answers. Only time would provide them . . . if he lived that long.

  After loading what food he could find into a sack, McBride added a coffeepot and fry pan. He found Sammy curled up and terrified in a corner of the kitchen, soothed the trembling kitten as best he could, then carried him to the barn.

  McBride saddled the mustang and led it outside. He had no clear idea what direction his future trail should take, and that bothered him. He knew that he owed it to his young Chinese wards to keep them at their girls’ finishing school, and for that he needed to do a couple of things—stay alive and earn money. But where to earn it? And, more importantly, how to keep breathing?

  Again he was tempted to ride on and brush the dust of this part of the country off his shoes. But he was tired of being everybody’s whipping boy, and a slow-burning, enduring anger was building in him. In short, John McBride was through with being pushed around. It did not set well with him that so many people wanted him dead, and for reasons he could not fathom.

  Clare’s betrayal was particularly hard to take. Why had she turned on him so suddenly? Why, after saving his life, had she tried to kill him—and then tried to kill him a second time?

  McBride was convinced that the answer to the mystery lay within the boundaries of the O’Neil ranch—if only he could find them.

  Chapter 18

  McBride rode west toward the Capitan Mountains under a clear sky and a sun that burned hot and fierce. The thirsty sage flats had absorbed last night’s rain and the mustang kicked up a cloud of yellow dust. At first McBride was alarmed. He might as well be sending up smoke signals. Then logic took over. If anyone was out looking for him they’d figure he was smart enough not to be trapped at the O’Neil ranch a second time. It was a big country and they’d be searching elsewhere.

  The day was stifling and McBride took off his slicker and laid it on the back of his saddle. His eyes constantly searched the land around him for any sign of movement.

  Clare O’Neil had no way of knowing that he would be at her father’s ranch, so someone must have told her he was there. Again, the obvious suspect was Dora Ryan. After she’d returned to Rest and Be Thankful she could have told Clare where he was and that he was still very much alive. But Clare would not have had time to ride to the ranch in pitch-darkness, in the middle of a violent thunderstorm, and ambush him when she did.

  But what if Dora had not driven all the way to town? Suppose Clare was holed up much closer? Maybe in the arroyo where she’d shot at him?

  McBride stroked Sammy’s head, nodding to himself. For whatever reason, Clare had it in mind to kill him. It was just her good luck, and his misfortune, that he’d saved her a search for him. He’d ridden right into her rifle and she’d been more than delighted to cash in on her good fortune.

  Only when Clare had searched for his body and found it missing had she panicked. Either she or Dora, or both of them, had gone back to town and hired a couple of guns to find him and finish the job.

  Denver Dora Ryan, a woman with a past, and demure Clare O’Neil. It was an unlikely alliance and one that troubled McBride. Were both women now in league with Lance Josephine and his father, accepting a share of whatever spoils Rest and Be Thankful had to offer?