The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 3

by Louis L'Amour

  “That’s right.”

  “You whipped Frank Mailer the other evening. You reckon he will take it lyin’ down?”

  “He can take it as he chooses.”

  “He’ll meet you with a gun, Kilkenny, and he’s fast as greased lightnin’.”

  Kilkenny waited, saying nothing. This old man wore his guns with the butts well forward. Some gunmen liked them that way.

  “You can’t get away from meeting him unless you run, an’ you don’t set up like a running man. I want you to meet him right away. Soon as he comes back.”

  “Where’s he gone?”

  “How’d I know? Don’t care, neither. He’s a bad hombre, that one, and he’s got to be killed. You got to kill him, anyway, but if you hunt him down or kill him as soon as he gets back, any way you like, I’ll give you five hundred dollars!”

  The way he said it made the sum sound big … but was it big enough? What were the stakes to Poke Dunning?

  “No. I’ll meet him when I have to. I won’t hunt him down.” Kilkenny pulled out his tobacco and began to build a smoke. “Nice place you’ve got here. Had it long?”

  Dunning tightened up inside. The old fear was always on him. “Quite a spell,” he replied. “Been some changes made.”

  “I heard it belonged to your daughter, to Lona.”

  “Well, you’re right. I gave it to her when she was just a child.”

  “You going to start another place someday?” Kilkenny touched the tip of his tongue to his cigarette, then placed it in his mouth. He dug out a match and lit up, glancing through the first smoke at Dunning. “Let her have her inheritance?”

  “Maybe,” Poke said flatly. “Someday.” Poke Dunning stared at Kilkenny. What was this, anyway? He had the man out here to try to hire him, and now he was asking questions. Too many questions.

  “I was wondering.… Why is it that they call you ‘Poke,’ Mr. Markham? What was your given name?”

  He faced Kilkenny. “What’s it to you?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Too durned curious! You ain’t takin’ me up on Mailer?” Poke wanted to change the subject.

  “No.” Kilkenny moved a step toward the door. “But I’ll be back to see you, ‘Poke.’ ” He stopped at the door. “You see, Ike Markham was a friend of mine!” As he spoke he stepped quickly back into the shadows, dropped a hand to the porch rail, and vaulted it neatly. “Buck!” he called.

  The horse came to him, holding his head high and to one side so as not to step on the trailing bridle reins. Catching them up, Lance Kilkenny wheeled the horse and vanished into the darkness.

  He need not have hurried. In the big room of the old ranch house, Poke Dunning was standing where Kilkenny had left him, his face ashen, his cheeks sunken and old.

  For all these years he had been afraid of just this. A dozen times he had thought of what he might do if ever faced with somebody who knew Markham, and now the moment had come and gone, and he had let the man get away. He should have killed him! But why, if someone had to come, did it have to be Kilkenny, of all people?

  Alone in his room, he paced the floor. After all these years! Why, there had to be a way out! There had to be! There was no justice in it!

  Mailer! If he could only steer Mailer into Kilkenny! They might kill each other off, or at least make it easy for him to kill the survivor. In that case, there might still be a chance.

  He paced the floor, cursing Mailer’s absence as once he had blessed it, eager for the man to return.

  It was this fear that had caused him to keep the gunmen on the payroll even after he had given up banditry and rustling. This fear that someday, someone would come over the Old Mormon Trail who knew the truth. He had made a bold play, that long-ago night in the dark shadow of Thieving Rock.… Markham had been a friendly man when they met, and he had talked cheerfully of the ranch he had for his young daughter, and little by little Poke had worked the information out of him, that his wife was dead, that he had no near relatives but Lona. Poke Dunning could see his big chance, and in the following nights he sat across the fire from the man who was carrying him west, and waited for his chance. It came, finally, only a day’s drive from the ranch itself. It came when he was growing desperate with anxiety, and he knew that Markham had begun to suspect him, that the man moved his bed at times, shifting it from one place to another after they had turned in.

  Yet, in the accomplishment, it had been easy. He had tossed a stone into the darkness near the horses, and Markham, seeing him lying there, apparently asleep, had risen and walked out to the horses, fearful that a mountain lion might come down on them. Poke Dunning had slid out of his blankets and followed him in his sock feet. He had used a pick handle, and it was only after the third and last blow had fallen that little Lona called from her blankets and he had replied that everything was all right, keeping his voice low.

  The next day he told the child her father had gone on ahead to make ready for them. Later he told her that he was off doing business for the ranch and made arrangements to send her to school. Once she was gone, he had gambled that she would not remember after the years. He had even gone so far as to change his own ways, to use gestures and mannerisms the father had used, and even grow a beard in the same style as her father. It had been a bad moment when she returned on her first holiday, but after eleven years the memory had dimmed, and although he saw doubt in her eyes, he soon managed to make her forget those doubts. When she finally came home after many years, the memories from when she was five or almost five had been erased but for a few moments. The rest was a shadowland where memory and fantasy mingled, where the face of her father was never quite distinct.

  Poke Dunning had made his big gamble, and he had won. Now he might lose. He would lose if something was not done. For years he had built up the ranch. Though Lona was the actual owner, in his mind the ranch was his and his alone. And now he was threatened.

  When she had first returned from school, Poke had been worried and he had started planning how to take back control without raising a lot of questions. Frank Mailer had been his first hope.

  He had hoped that Frank Mailer, the outlaw that owed him for so much, would be a fitting partner in the ranch. But now he was increasingly sure that Frank had his own plans and that Poke Dunning did not figure in them. Mailer could be handled, but somehow he must stall him on marrying Lona until after Kilkenny was out of the way. Then he could take care of big Frank, and he would enjoy doing it. He was going to make sure that Mailer died. He was going to make sure that Kilkenny died. And now that his long-held plan to legally wrest ownership of the ranch from Lona had fallen apart, he would kill her, too. If she died, wouldn’t he, as her only surviving relative, inherit the ranch? After all, wasn’t he supposed to have given it to her?

  Only Lona’s death had to look like an accident. Gunmen like Kilkenny and outlaws like Mailer were always dying violently. He could shoot Mailer himself, and if he carefully revealed what he knew about the big man’s outlaw past and various aliases, no one would think twice about it. But killing a woman, a girl, was another thing entirely.

  As if his murderous fantasy was echoing in his mind, Dunning suddenly heard her voice. She was in the kitchen talking to old Betts, and something was said about coffee. At this hour on nearly every night Dave Betts made coffee for the two of them. Dunning suddenly heard a new voice, Flynn’s, making some laughing comment.

  Poke’s eyes narrowed. What was going on here? What was Flynn doing in the house so late at night? The hands rarely came for coffee this late unless working cattle close by, and they were not now. He turned and started for the kitchen.

  Voices suddenly stilled as he opened the door. He glanced at Lona, her face bright with laughter, the light catching in her auburn hair, and then at Flynn. Dave had drawn back near the big cooking range, his face drawn.

  “What’s goin’ on here?” Dunning demanded. “Flynn, you should be in bed asleep. Ain’t nothin’ for you at the house this time of night
.”

  “I was just palaverin’,” Flynn replied.

  “We was havin’ coffee,” Betts offered. “You want a cup?”

  “Yes, won’t you have some?” Lona looked up at him, and there was something level and hard in her eyes that he had never seen there before. “I like to talk to Gordon.”

  “So it’s Gordon, is it?” He glared balefully at the puncher. “Get out!” he growled.

  Flynn hesitated, and Dunning’s gun flashed in his hand. He was thinking that something else had been going on behind his back, that this Flynn … “Get out!” he said quickly.

  Gordon Flynn backed to the door. Never before had he seen the old man go for a gun, and on his best day he could not have come within twice the time to match that draw. He was no gunfighter. On the other hand, his eyes met Lona’s. “Go, Gordon. I’m all right.” She spoke softly and he opened the door and backed out, his face white.

  Poke Dunning stood very still, first glaring at Dave, then at Lona. “You come in here!” he said. “I want to talk to you!”’

  “All right.” Lona got to her feet. She felt a queer, frightened sensation inside her, yet in another sense she was perfectly calm, her thoughts working carefully.

  Kilkenny had come to see Dunning. The man might know his secret, kept for so long, was now about to be exposed. What would he do? What would he try?

  She stepped past him into the big room and walked past the long dining-room table in the huge old parlor of the ranch house. She crossed to the fireplace, and stood there straight and looking suddenly taller than she was as she awaited him.

  Poke Dunning slammed the door behind him and crossed the room. He dug his pipe into a can of tobacco and tamped it home. Then he looked up, his eyes bitter and hard, like flecks of steel under his shaggy brows. “We’ve got to have a talk. Sorry I got sore out there. Don’t like to think of you wastin’ time on those cowhands. You’re too good for them.”

  “But you approve of Frank Mailer?” she asked coolly.

  He looked up then, measuring her with his glance. “No,” he said flatly, “and you ain’t goin’ to marry him. That was a bad idea.”

  “I agree.” Lona waited, wondering.

  He rubbed his chin. “Lona,” he said hesitantly, “I got a confession to make. When Mailer first come down here, I figured him a right up-standin’ young feller. Lately, he ain’t seemed so much what he should be; in fact I been hearin’ some things from up Durango way.”

  “Things?” She looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Stories. Stories of robberies and such. When he comes back I may have to fire Frank Mailer.”

  At that moment they both heard a shout, then a sound of running horses, and Mailer’s hard voice, talking to Socorro.

  Dunning turned on the girl. “Get to your room!” he said. “An’, Lona, you keep your mouth shut to what we’ve been talking about!”

  CHAPTER 5

  Miles back, along the trails north and west of Aztec Crossing, there rode a small, grim-faced group of men. In the van were three men on gray horses, three men who answered to the names of Jim, Pat, and Terry Mulhaven, the brothers of Johnny, who was alive but badly shot up back in Aztec.

  There were eight of these men in all, headed by an Apache tracker, and these were the men who had built the Crossing from nothing to a fairly stable little outpost. Storekeeper Worth, answering to the name of Bill, was among them, his old Sharps across his saddlebow.

  The peace and contentment of their town had been violated and good citizens had been done to death, so the attitude of the posse, self-appointed, was harsh and determined. A dozen times they had lost the trail, and a dozen times they had found it again. Their progress had been slow, but it was relentless.

  Most often, it was the distinctive tracks of the blood bay ridden by Mailer that they found. They knew this horse by sight, and they knew his tracks.

  “I wonder how much farther?” Worth asked.

  “We got all summer,” Jim Mulhaven replied shortly. “This is one trail I ain’t leavin’ until those hombres stretch hemp.”

  A good day and a half behind the outlaws, they had come upon the body of Kane Geslin. The sign made evident what had happened here. “Killed by one of his own men,” Worth commented.

  “One less for us,” Pat said grimly. “Let’s be ridin’!”

  They rode on, into the hot, still afternoon, their eyes grimly upon the trail.

  At Blue Hill, Mailer had wasted no time in facing Poke Dunning. He went at once to the ranch house, opened the door, and closed it, looking at the older man across the big room. “Poke, let’s get this over with. Come Saturday, I’m marrying Lona!”

  He could see that something had happened—what, he did not know—but Mailer was a changed man, not suddenly insistent, demanding, but with some deeper, more deadly change.

  “I don’t think so, Frank. She doesn’t want to marry you. And now I agree with her.”

  Frank Mailer looked at old Poke Dunning through narrowed eyes. “You double-crossin’ me, Dunning?” he asked.

  “It could be I’m protectin’ myself from a double cross. An’ don’t think that I’m scared of you telling people who I really am. I’ve been here for years and most of those that haven’t forgot who Poke Dunning was are dead.”

  “What if you died, mighty sudden,” Mailer suggested, his eyes holding Poke’s, “an’ I married Lona?”

  Dunning shrugged. “The trouble with that is”—he spoke carefully, knowing how slender was the thread along which their course was holding, a thread that might snap with a burst of gunfire at any moment—“that Kilkenny knows.”

  “Who?” Mailer started at the name. “Kilkenny? Is he here?”

  “Who do you think whipped you, Frank?” Dunning asked. “That was him, all right. Kansas tipped me off.”

  “Kilkenny!” All thoughts were suddenly gone from Mailer’s mind but the one. It was fantastic. He had heard of the gunfighter for years, but had never seen him. Remembering the description that Gates had given in the saloon the first night they met, he knew Poke was telling the truth. Despite himself, he was awed and worried.

  Had anyone suggested that the name frightened him, he would have scoffed at it. He had never been frightened of anything, but one could not hear the countless stories surrounding that name without it taking on an almost magical quality. He felt a strange, deadly chill within him.

  Kilkenny! And the man had beaten him with his fists, but perhaps with a gun …?

  “Look,” Poke said softly, “we’ve had our troubles, Frank. We both have it in for each other, but it ain’t necessary. We started in this deal an’ we can do all right with it yet. I can’t let you marry Lona yet … not until I can trust you. We can settle this; the only thing in the way is this Kilkenny. We’ve got to get rid of him.”

  “We?” Mailer looked at Dunning, trying to assemble his thoughts. The knowledge that Kilkenny was in this deal disturbed him.

  “Sure! Look, alone neither of us can win. Together we can. As long as Kilkenny is in the picture, we stand to lose, so what we’ve got to do is get him out of it. Then we can settle this deal between us, or work partners on it. Our first job is to be rid of him.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Mailer agreed grudgingly, “but that won’t be so easy. Got any ideas?”

  “Sure. I’ve been thinking about it. Look, he came over to the ranch once, so we can get him here again. He was a friend of Lona’s father. All right, we send him a message from her. He’ll come, an’ when he does, we’ll be waitin’ for him. Geslin, Starr, Socorro, an’ us.”

  “Not Geslin. He’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah.” Mailer’s cold eyes shifted to Dunning’s. “We had some words an’ he tried to draw on me. I killed him.”

  Poke Dunning absorbed that and didn’t like it. He had known Mailer was good, but if he was good enough to get Geslin and not even collect a slug in the process, then he was even more dangerous than Poke
had believed.

  “Ethridge is dead, too.” Mailer was rolling a smoke. “We took that bank at Aztec Crossing.”

  Rage boiled up inside of Poke Dunning. He had refused to allow anything of the kind. This was going directly against his orders. For an instant he was about to give vent to his fury, but he throttled his anger. “That’s no matter. We can use Socorro an’ Starr. It will be easy enough. You an’ me an’ Starr will be out of sight. We can have Socorro mendin’ a saddle or something. Kilkenny rides in, an’ we take him in a cross fire. Four guns. He won’t beat that.”

  “All right,” Mailer agreed. “It’s a good plan. Can you get word to him?”

  “Sure. Through Kansas or that Spanish girl.”

  “You’re right, there’s something between them.”

  “Yeah”—Dunning nodded—“we should have guessed it. She’s that Nita Riordan who was with him on the border and at the Cedars. Remember? We heard about her.”

  So that was it? Kilkenny’s girl? But after Kilkenny died?

  “Poke,” Mailer said suddenly, “I think I’m goin’ to like this. You get word to Kansas or the girl. Let’s get started on this an’ get it over with.”

  Sam Starr walked into the bunkhouse and pulled off his boots. Behind him Socorro followed, and Rusty Gates opened his eyes and looked at them in the darkness. He could see only vague outlines, but he heard Socorro’s muttered curse, then Starr’s low question. “How do you feel?”

  “Bad,” Socorro said. “My whole arm and shoulder are so stiff it hurts to move.”

  “You feel better than Geslin.”

  Socorro did not say anything for a minute. Then he said, “Frank should have buried him. If there’s a posse, they are liable to stumble on the body.”

  Rusty Gates was wide-awake now. What went on here? To speak would cause them to clam up, and he wanted to hear more. He lay still and listened.

  “There will be a posse,” Starr said. “Aztec is a tough place. I knew that kid who opened up on us. He was one of the Mulhaven boys, an’ there’s four or five more.”