Night Riders

by Abel Short

  The crowd moved in closer. "What about it, Shandy?" one man called.

  Rivers said, "I'll give you a chance for your life, you lowdown lily-livered polecat! I'll meet you out in the road—face to face—even draw, Smith."

  Dinby came through the batwing doors, elbowing his way into the crowd. He wanted to know what was taking place. It was Scar Ventare who explained it to him quickly. "It's only fair and square that this stranger here, Rivers, has a chance to avenge himself, Marshal!"

  There was a chorus of assent from the hard-case crowd in the room. Shandy's last hope was gone; Mitch Rivers backed doorward.

  "All right, Smith… I'll be comin' around the corner by that there bank in ten minutes. I'll be ready to fill my hand. But don't try no tricks—and don't try to take a runout and fog it outa town. 'Cause I didn't spend all these years tracking you down for nothing! Sabe?"

  "Don't worry. He won't leave," Scar Ventare said. "If he's innocent, he wouldn't try to run for it. What's fair and square is fair and square!"

  Rivers left and Shandy Smith got back to his office. He saw the taciturn Big Joe outside and signalled him in. He asked when Silver would be back. Joe didn't know.

  "Look," pot-bellied Shandy said desperately. "I never stole nobody's wife like that Rivers said! Honest! I never clapped eyes on the hairpin before tonight."

  "No?" Joe said.

  "No. Swear it on my dead mother's soul, Pony! I'll go out there and meet him." He was taking a shoulder scabbard and gun from the desk to rig it under his coat. "I'll meet him. But there's some kind of a trick in this. I never heard of Wirango—much less been there. This is a frame-up, Pony. I don't know how, but it is. And I wouldn't be surprised to be dry-gulched—shot in the back. Whoever it is—they're out to get me. Will you do me one favor?"

  Big Joe studied the smaller Shandy intently, and one thing became obvious to him. The man was a partner of Silver Linn's and might be outside the Law; but he had no love for the Law himself. And it was pretty plain that Shandy wasn't the breed who'd steal a man's wife. Joe nodded and said maybe he could.

  Shandy clutched his arm. "Just see that I don't get it in the back, fella. Be somewhere's out along the road where I'll pass, and smoke 'em down if they try to get me from behind. I know you'll be taking a damn big chance on your own hide, but I want a fighting chance, Pony!"

  Big Joe thought only a moment. His head was hurting again. He didn't know how much of a code he had; after all he was an hombre without a past except for what Silver Linn had told him. But it seemed only just that any man got a chance. He nodded. Shandy clutched his big hand, and then Joe eased out and vanished in the back of the place.

  There wasn't much said in the Stirrup when Shandy came striding past the bar to keep his date in the moonlit road. One of the drink-wranglers looked at his watch and mumbled that there was two minutes to go. Shandy summoned up a sad imitation of a smile and waved weakly. He had the nerve to run a bluff to mask his terror, anyway.

  "If I'm delayed returning," he quibbled, "the first round of drinks will be on the house." Then he went out.

  Word had raced through Maddox like a prairie fire. The usually bustling street and crossing was as deserted on the surface as if a plague had descended. Men were there but they were out of sight in doorways and crouched on porches. Peering from behind half-opened shutters, too. They saw little Shandy come along, head high, hatless. His boots left little puffs of dust drifting in the air behind him. The voice of a woman crooning to a restless child carried down the night.

  Shandy Smith passed the barber tent with the rudely painted post before it. The tent was closed up. And beside it in the righ rank grass, Big Joe waited and watched.

  It happened abruptly and was suddenly done. Rivers had moved around the corner unseen. Then he leaped out from beneath the gloom of a wooden awning of a corner building. Two hoglegs stabbed from his trained hands. Little Shandy was surprisingly fast. He levered up his weapon and had it spitting muzzle flame at the same instant Mitch Rivers sent his first lead winging. They both missed the first shots, their bullets jetting the moon-silvered alkali feet from the other.

  There was one sliver of livid flame from the alley beside the Ventare bank. Big Joe spotted it. Nobody else noticed it in the din and flash of guns of the two antagonists. Scar Ventare and the ever-present Largo quickly headed for the rear of that alley.

  Mitch Rivers stopped shooting, going into a half spin. His wide-ripped eyes twisted up at the moon as if he had been hit by a blow from the sky, A rattle issued from his throat. But he didn't look any more surprised than Shandy Smith who stood as if dumbfounded, watching, crimson running down his hand from a scratch on his forearm. Mitch Rivers slapped down into the dirt of the road and lay motionless.

  Men came spewing out from all angles. The first to get to Rivers knew he was stone dead in a matter of seconds. Then they thronged around the gaping Shandy to slap his back and grip his hand. The outlaw scum and saloon toughs of Maddox always strung with the winner. Because he was alive and kicking, that made him right. There was a cheering bunch on the steps of the Countess' dance hall in the wing of the hotel.

  They went piling back to the Stirrup. Shandy ordered the drinks on him. He was beginning to strut a little. "Yep, he thought he had me buffaloed," he boasted. "Right from the first I knew he was working some kind of a game so I strung along with him to find out what it was. Then, by dang, when he forced my hand I had to hang the deadwood on him!"

  Big Joe Gannon had not joined the admiring mob of hangers-on; he was baffled. He wished Silver was there to talk to. Joe had seen the gun flash behind Rivers from beside the bank, and he couldn't figure it. Whether Shandy had used him as a dupe and had another man planted to get Rivers from the rear or what. Yet if it wasn't stark surprise he had seen written on Shandy's face in the moon when Rivers went down, Joe had never seen surprise before in his life. He couldn't understand.

  The explanation was about a half hour in coming, then it swept through the tide like a twister. The first warning was an ominous rumble like thunder building along the road. A man's swearing broke above it once. The chatter in the Stirrup hesitated, wavered, then grew thin. Shandy turned toward the door.

  Men came in, grim-eyed, stalking purposefully. Dinby moved along on the flank. He started, "See here, Shandy. Things don't look so good. We just—"

  One of the others interrupted him. "First time we ever knew you was such an itching hot gun-slinger, Shandy Smith…"

  Shandy stuck out his jaw. "You saying I'm not?" Big Joe edged up from the end of the bar.

  The front row of men parted to reveal others behind them carrying a body. Mitch Rivers' corpse, in fact. They had laid him out on a shutter, but face down. Largo and three of the Ventare gun pack moved on one side of the shutter.

  "This Rivers was killed by a slug that took him 'tween the shoulderblades, Shandy!" one of the men spat hotly. "I saw the gunfight. You couldn't uh put that slug in him 'cause he was always facing you!"

  Shandy goggled. "I never shot him in—in the back! I shot—"

  "Take a look-see at the only wound mark he's got! Square in the back—"

  "It looks plumb bad, Shandy," the marshal temporized.

  "You didn't get him—but one of your house guards did!"

  "Why—uh—"

  Scar Ventare showed his hand then. He moved forward as if pushed. "Well, I hate to say this, folks, I hate to be accusing anybody. But there was a man seen in the alley beside the bank. That man fired the shot that fixed this poor devil, Rivers; and that man was seen by a gent who had the honesty to come and tell me."

  He reached behind him and pulled forward a middle-aged scared-looking fellow. The sweat glistened on his bald head. His name was Beach, Elmo Beach. He was a cousin of a man who worked in the Ventare bank. He nodded.

  "Do you see the man now, mister?" Scar prodded him.

  The Beach gent let his watery eyes run over the faces in the coal-oil lamps of the gambling hell-barroom. Then he str
etched out a skinny arm and pointed right at Big Joe Gannon, the man known to Maddox as Pony Grimes.

  "He was the one who was there," Beach got out thinly. "Him, the one they call Pony."

  Big Joe was so stunned he didn't make a move for a couple of seconds, then it was too late. Largo had snaked out a gun to cover him from the front. And a pair of Ventare hands, alleged cowhands, had been around behind him for some moments. They were ready to put out his lights if he made a single false move.

  "Now wait a minute," Dinby began.

  But he was shoved aside as the throng closed in on the pair, Big Joe and Shandy Smith.

  "It was dirty murder and those two committed it!" Duke Ventare yelled out.

  "And there's plenty of rope in this town—and the old hanging tree!" Scar chimed in.

  CHAPTER 11

  Silver Linn with Doc Hilder and the three house guards came forking their ponies down the trail from the north. Silver drew up on a rise looking down on the town in the night and cocked an eyebrow.

  "Hey," he yelled, "something's busting high, wide and handsome down there. Take a squint at them coal-oil torches bobbing around!"

  "Heap of noise, too," Stub said, pinching out a quirly and carefully pocketing the dead end. "Hear it? Yelling like a Comanche pack."

  "Let's get in there and see," Silver ordered. He sent his dust-powdered pony bounding down from the rise. The old sixth sense of the rider of the owlhoot told him it wasn't good down there.

  They rounded a bend and came down a broad alley behind the buildings on one of the side streets. An orey-eyed gent stumbled out almost under the hoofs of Silver's pony. Silver cursed and veered the horse and set it on its haunches as he pulled up short. He reached from the saddle and collared the man, demanded what was going on down by the main corners.

  The drunk gibbered foolishly. "They're a-hanging Shandy Smith and that Pony Grimes what works at his place," he said with a loonish laugh. Then he twisted away and was gone into the night.

  One of the men burst, "Holy Gawd!" But Silver sat staring as his nervous horse sidled.

  He was a very superstitious man as well as one who honestly believed he had been wronged by life. He hated Law and the badge-packers who represented it. And because he hated and fought that Law he had always been ready to lend a hand to any lobo, whether he knew him or not. A lobo was one of his tacit allies against the Law. Now he was wondering if Fate was punishing him for the murder of Yellow Head and his companion. They had been outlaws, of course.

  Doc and the house gunners had met him in the canyon beyond the river. They had all ridden up it some distance, to some non-existent outlaw chief's hideout, according to Silver's story. At the proper moment Yellow Head and his trail pard had been jumped and disarmed. Silver had shot them in cold blood; he was playing for too high stakes and Pony—the one Yellow Head had recognized as a lawman called Gannon—was too important a tool. So Yellow Head and his friend had to be silenced permanently.

  But now, for some moments, he was torn by superstition. After the double murder, they had pushed on up the canyon and swung in an arc to throw off any suspicion from themselves. And the Ventares—or whoever was behind it—had been given their opportunity to strike.

  "Ain't we a-going to do anything?" Stub asked.

  Silver came alive, jerking down his headpiece firmly. He yelled to them to follow and they stormed toward the heart of the town. "Tie their dewclaws behind 'em!" a man down there bawled in a sudden lull in the uproar.

  Silver knew there was no time to scout around or make any scheming plan. Lynch mobs were impetuous groups of mankind on the loose, who didn't waste any time. He led the way into a side street and turned for the main corners. And he might as well have thrown in his cards then and there.

  It was a colorful scene and grisly. There was an open lot across from the Ventare bank. In it back a few yards from the road stood a dead old patriarch of a cottonwood tree. Long since, lightning and weather had peeled away its bark. For years before Maddox had suddenly blossomed into a seething boom town, that lone limb had served as a gallows in the meting out of frontier justice.

  The crossroads around it now were packed with a milling mob. Coal-oil torches bobbed about. The moon silvered the scene, especially the hollow space in the core of the shouting cursing horde. Men were constantly urging them with foul-mouthed epithets to stop wasting time. From the gaunt cottonwood limb a rope with a white noose dangled over the open arena. Near it two cayuses stood to carry the doomed pair the last few steps to eternity. Poor Shandy himself was marched forward to go first, arms slashed behind him, pale as a parson's stiff shirt front.

  There was an interruption as Big Joe, a few yards behind, flattened two men in a prodigious effort to break free. Even though his arms also were shackled, he sent another captor spinning off with a kick, started for an alley dragging a fourth.

  But they quickly overpowered him, smashing him down into the alley. When he was dragged up his face was dirt-smeared.

  "Let's cut in and get 'em," Silver twisted in the saddle to call back. "Yell like blazes and—"

  "Wouldn't try it, Linn." It was Largo, bony ace of the Ventare gunspread. He took form from the shadows. The moonlight played off the pair of hoglegs ready and cocked in his hand. "Wouldn't try interfering with the course o' justice, mister!"

  "It'd be plumb unlucky—like digging your own grave," another voice said thickly. And Silver looked and saw another gun-slick glide into sight. Behind him Duke Ventare's blank face showed a moment.

  Doc Hilder tried to throw his pony down a side alley. Two men with guns spiking before them moved from behind a tent. Then others showed and Silver and his four men were neatly hemmed in. Outnumbered as well. The Ventares had had men up the roads in every direction, awaiting the return of Silver Linn.

  Silver started to holler like wild. He wanted to know what the two prisoners had done. A black-bearded freighter spoke up from a doorway and told it. "Dry-gulched a man—shot him clean in the back, the snakes!"

  "Better be smart, Linn," Largo called softly. "We got more hempen neckties if we need 'em!"

  There was a fresh roar from the crowd. It had been decided to string up Big Joe first because he was causing so much trouble. They had him over by the stirrup of one pony and two men struggled to hoist him up.

  Somehow the clear, cool voice of a girl cut through the din. It was Marie on the big veranda of the Elite Hotel. A lamp in the hands of a Chinese houseboy haloed her in quivering gold. Her flood of hair and white face were set off by the mantilla over her slim shoulders.

  "Hang them and it'll be murder," she spoke out distinctly. "They couldn't have done it. Because the big one," and she pointed at Big Joe who was halfway into the saddle, "wasn't in the alley next to the bank!"

  An orey-eyed man tried to clamber up the hotel steps to grab at her. He mouthed that she was a painted woman and a liar. The Countess stepped from behind and sent the man roiling back onto the sidewalk with a swinging blow.

  Marie held them more than any man could have with bared guns. There was something direct and honest about her on top of her almost fragile beauty. "What makes you think that, ma'am?" a burly figure holding the other end of the hanging rope sang out.

  "He couldn't have been in the alley," she said without hesitation, "because he was with me in the dance hall. He had been there earlier today— and came back to visit."

  "Other folks must uh seen him there then, gal! In the dance hall."

  She shook her head slowly, eyes level. "No. He wasn't seen—because he was in one of the booths with me."

  It was dead quiet for as much as half a minute. Everybody knew how those booths were curtained, and what occurred inside them. Then some man guffawed.

  "And they told me she was a nice girl," he snorted.

  Marie stood there motionless, chin high, face frozen. The Countess stared at her, and over under the noose Big Joe looked at her in bewilderment. But she won out. She convinced them where they would have s
moked it to a blood-letting fare-thee-well with any bunch who tried to interfere. The very fact that she accused herself, pulled herself down to the level of a typical dance hall hussy, did it.

  Men stepped forward and slashed away the bonds of Shandy and Big Joe. Silver and Stub and the others came cutting through. Dinby dared to take command and demand that Elmo Beach be brought forward. But nobody could find the hombre who'd sworn he saw Joe in the alley. The quick-acting Scar Ventare had already spirited him off the scene. The Ventares had lost their big bet.

  A hero again, Shandy went stepping down the line to the Stirrup. Big Joe headed for the dance hall in a vague way; he wanted to talk to that Marie. But Silver herded him away…

  Once the hanging had broken up, the Countess had eyes only for the mountainous chunk of flesh of a man who stood watching in the doorway of the dance hall. He had been inside before. He was garbed in a plain blue serge suit in contrast to the usual Western rig—a white shirt, fresh, and a neat, plain black tie too. He had black hair, carefully parted on one side of his broad head. He was constantly a-grin, often chuckling.

  The Countess knew that she knew him somehow, without ever having seen him before, perhaps. But she knew. He wasn't tall. But he was a massive piece of man with a tremendous girth. He had three chins, and his pale face looked three times as wide as it was long. When anybody looked at him he smiled easily. Now he stood pointing out some of the figures in the flowing crowd to his companions. He had two with him; their eyes were always busy. There was another behind them who pretended not to be in the party but was. And when he had entered the Cimarron Gal, two others had drifted in and taken a nearby table.

  His chuckle rumbled out as he watched a couple of orey-eyed gents wrestling in the dirt over the unused hangrope. Life to him was most amusing. When he returned to the dance floor, he invited a whole bevy of girls to his table with a sweep of his arm, ordered drinks for the orchestra as well. But when somebody bumped the table and whiskey was spilled on his suit, he glowered fiercely for a moment. His eyes went like stones seen under the ice in a blue-frozen creek.