by Abel Short
When he left, the Countess went upstairs to her hotel room and opened that secret compartment in her desk. She took out a packet of reward handbills, dodgers from sheriffs' offices. Some were weathered and others were yellowed by time. She had been amassing them over the years. They were a handy thing for a woman in her business; it was nice to know with whom you were dealing, especially if they happened to be going under another handle at the time.
She began to go through them. Some had crude pictures, photos. All carried a description though often vague. But the Countess was certain she could recognize any description of the mountainously stout man. And she came to it. It was on a "Wanted" notice from up in Cochise County. It was headed "Dead or Alive!" And the reward offered for the living man or the corpse was twelve thousand dollars. The Countess whistled sharply from the side of her lush mouth, then looked around quickly, remembering she was supposed to be a lady. There was no doubt about it. It was him.
She didn't need to read the handbill though. His name was Jeff Arizona, and he was one of the biggest outlaw chieftains ever to operate in the Southwest. There was nothing two-bit about the odd-named Arizona.
Word came that Silver Linn was downstairs. The Countess had him sent up. Silver took in the rich fittings of her room and then came across to her with arms outstretched. The Countess blew cigarette smoke from her nose and brushed him off.
"There's no time for anything but business, Silver. Things are happening here," she told him.
He mopped his forehead. "Yep. Somebody tried to frame me tonight through Shandy and that Pony fella. Did you hear anything?"
The Countess didn't know anything but what she had witnessed. "I do know this, though… Brace yourself, Silver. Jeff Arizona was here in town this evening."
Silver looked as if a hogleg had been shoved against his middle shirt button. He recovered and nodded. "Him, eh? That Arizona gent."
"You don't have to bluff with me, Silver. Jeff Arizona is mighty big potatoes. We both know it."
Silver nodded some. "Oh, he's got a hard-case outfit riding at his back." He knew more than that. Arizona had one of the biggest packs to ever hit an owlhoot trail in one piece, large and well-heeled. No half-starved grubline riders trailing their ropes with Arizona. They never had to bust in somewhere blindly to grab off some dinero to keep them alive.
"He's a slick ears, too, Silver. More than just another cap-busting killer."
"Yeah," Silver admitted, "he's cold-headed as a snake." Again he knew more than he spoke. Arizona was smart as bumpkins; he always had money behind him. When things got too hot, he simply holed up somewhere or else split up his outfit and laid low a couple of months. And he had bought agents up and down the line. Innocent-seeming townsfolks and storekeepers. Not just plumb owl-hooters, but people who could tip his hand about what was coming, or warn him off if a trap was to be laid.
The Countess squashed out her smoke. "Look it in the eye with the bark off, Silver. Arizona doesn't drop around to a place to see scenery. He's smart—and big. He doesn't buy chips in any game for dobie dollar stakes. They tell that last railroad stick-up of his at Abor got them better than sixty thousand. And they didn't leave a man behind, Arizona played it so slick."
Silver stood up, smiled thinly as he helped himself to a drink from the carafe on the Countess' boudoir table. He knew one thing about Jeff Arizona that few others knew. About the one thing of which Arizona was ascared. He didn't say it though. Instead: "Maybe he was just passing through."
"And maybe he wasn't, Silver… What're you going to do?"
"Go down the line and pick me up some new gunmen." But he had been planning to do that since the Ventares almost blotted his brand a little while earlier this evening.
After he had departed the Countess brought out her collection of reward handbills again. She looked at the one for Jeff Arizona. Flipped through some others after it. There was one of a sad-faced bald-headed man in prison garb. A man called Snake Hallin. She had a feeling she had seen him not too long ago, but she couldn't place where…
CHAPTER 12
Silver Linn left that night on his errand to import new gunmen. His pony was saddled up out back and he was giving Shandy a spine strengthening talk in his office. Silver told Big Joe to get his sombrero from his room. Joe found the Stetson on the table in Silver's room. As he turned away with it he saw the photograph that had been dropped under it.
The old pain stabbed through the back of Big Joe's Gannon's head. A thought, some vague, cloudy thing, was trying to get through again. He moved a hand out toward the picture. It was that of a man in prison garb, hatless and bald-headed as an egg. One big tooth seemed to gleam from the front of his mouth. Joe guessed that was gold though he didn't know how he guessed. But the thing in his throbbing head told him he knew the man in the picture.
And that if he looked at it long enough he would recognize it.
The wind in the corridor made the door creak. Big Joe felt rather than heard the other's breathing. The door had slammed behind Joe when he came in to get the hat. He gloved a black gun butt with a hand.
"Don't do it, Pony… And what have you got there?" Behind Joe, Silver stood with his left hand nowhere near his holster. But his right hand was along the right seam of his trouser leg. His sad eyes seemed to burn as if a hot thing licked behind them.
"Just—just looking at this picture, Silver," Joe said.
Silver's eyes licked to it past him. "Know who it is?"
"No. I feel like I oughta know but—"
Silver laughed without any mirth. "You sure got a straying set of brains under your hat, Pony." He stepped forward and jerked the photograph roughly from Joe's hand. "Why that's your dang brother Stan! The one I saved… the one down in Mex land now. Sabe?"
"I remember," Joe said, squeezing out his quirly with hard-skinned fingers. And steel replaced the worried vagueness in his glance. "Yeah, Stan. But —but he's in prison rig."
"Sure. Stan did a term in the Big House, Pony."
Joe reached for the picture. "Oh. All right. But it's my brother and I'd like to have it to carry, Silver." His voice was rough.
Silver's eyes drew deep into his head. He was remembering what Doc Hilder had warned him about. About some little clue from the past restoring Pony's memory. "You don't want that picture, Pony. It might be dangerous for it to be found on you. I'm your friend, Silver; I saved you and your brother. I've taken care of you." His voice was low and wheedling.
"I want my brother's picture, Silver."
"No-o. I'm your friend. You always obey me, Pony." And there was a powerful hypnotic quality in his stare then. Big Joe felt as if he were drugged, as if his senses were fading to the borderline of unconsciousness. For the first time in his life he knew fear. It was like a smell in the air.
"All right, Silver," he heard himself saying. Then Silver was putting the picture in his pocket and they were going down the hall…
Silver was gone seven days, but things kept happening. The Spit was seething beneath the surface and Maddox was the heart of the Spit. A miner passing through put a knife in another hairpin in a barroom brawl. Dinby tried to take the miner in. But two of the new gun-slicks of the Ventares— though not supposedly so—declared themselves in on it. The miner rode out of town free and laughing back over his pony's tail at the marshal. The Law seemed to have lost all its power.
There were two more gun brawls before midnight, one man being seriously shot up. Hilder admitted there wasn't much chance of him saving him. Dinby went back to his home beside the jail and got so drunk he forgot to feed the prisoners. They were caterwauling through the barred windows for their dinner half the night. One of the deputies drew his time and rode out. "I never contracted to rod the Law in the Devil's own corral," he stated.
"Somebody's shoving a chunk under Hell itself," Shandy Smith complained. "Anybody'd be a fool not to sell out if he could get half his price and pull stakes."
"Wasn't thinking of departing from our company were
you, Shandy?" little Doc Hilder said. His lidded eyes ran over Shandy inch by inch, and Shandy got a-sweating. Yet there was the shadow of fear in those eyes of Doc's, like he was scared of what would happen to him if he let Shandy slip away. Doc was Linn's lookout man.
Couple of days later word came into Maddox that the Bar-Grande up near the top end of the Spit was selling out cheap to the Ventares. The riders of the Red Mask had paid it a visit, warning them to pack and clear out. And one of the Bar riders had been killed riding fence, another winged by dry-gulchers.
"That gives the Ventares another place," Shandy moaned. "They'll have the whole Spit soon, like a buzzard gobbling a carcass. Gives 'em more land along the Snake too."
But that night, strangely, a parcel of red-masked horsemen busted into the town. They held up the General Store and left a man dying on the doorstep of the Cimarron Gal bar on the way out. The peculiar part of it was that the dying man was one Bill Nels, a Ventare hand out on the Pothook.
Shandy and Doc were dumbfounded as they tried to dope it; Big Joe couldn't savvy it either. He was beginning to understand some of the set-up though Silver seldom told him much. He knew Silver was playing against the Ventares, and for plenty big stakes. But he had a problem of his own; he wondered when he would begin to remember who he himself was and all the things Silver had told him. It was like walking in a fog continually. Sometimes he felt almost out of it, and then a thing like a shade would be lowered again in his head.
One evening he was walking down a curving track behind the buildings on the main street. Thinking and thinking. A feeling had begun to grow in him. It was that there was something about Silver he shouldn't like him for. Something, in fact, that he should hate and detest. Maybe his head was going funny again like Silver said it often did. Then Marie from the dance hall stepped into sight from behind some bushes. She had a man's frock coat drawn about her shoulders against the chill-fingered wind coming off the range with the scent of sage.
Joe overtook her and said good evening. He had been slipping over to the dance hall at odd times. Edging inside or fitting himself against a post to watch her furtively. Sometimes when a celebrating customer seized her in his arms possessively to dance Joe found his fingers curled up into fists.
She answered his greeting, turning her eyes up to him shyly. For the first time he saw they were sloe-shaped. "It's a lovely night, isn't it? And so quiet and peaceful out here."
He said it was too. He turned his dusty hat in his hands as he slowed his strides to her steps. Then he blurted it. "Ma'am, Miss Marie, you lied for me the night of the hanging party. You saved my hide, of course. I'll never be able to repay you for that. But I got to know why you said I was with you— when I wasn't."
She laughed softly. "Why, Mr. Grimes, I simply wanted to halt a miscarriage of justice. I didn't want an innocent man hanged and—"
He turned quickly so he blocked her further progress. "How did you know I was innocent, ma'am?"
She went paler though her lips seemed redder in the gathering purple. "I—I guess I just knew. So—"
She tried to pass. Without quite knowing it, he seized one of her slim wrists in his big hand, tightened. He was probing for some kind of truth. "How'd you come to know, Marie?… That same afternoon there was a man at your table, a danged John Law. He was talking about me, reckon maybe he recognized me."
She tried to step back from him but his grip was like a vise. "He—he seemed to think he did, Pony. He said—" She bit her lip.
"A John Law. And you told the Countess and Silver about him. Silver took him away with him. And—well, I know that badge-packer'll never be back this way again."
She shuddered and the coat slipped off her shoulders some. "Pony, are you one of those badge-packers?"
His rusty head pitched back though there was no laugh on his face. "Me? A lawman? Ha! As much chance of that as finding an angel in Hades, Marie. I'm just a poor devil—"
She was staring up, eyes lifted to his, hurt and pleading. Then he had her hard against him and was kissing her. He got his hands in her pit-black hair and felt her trembling and his own legs going shaky. The next moment he had half-pushed her away, his teeth bared in pain. He was just a two-bit longrider, a big stupid gun-slick with something funny in his head. He wasn't fit for a thing like her.
She had faced back toward the dance hall. One of her slippers gouged the dust angrily. He tried to get in front of her again to get an answer to his question.
"How did you know I was innocent when they aimed to make a cottonwood apple out of me, Marie?" He didn't know it, but he was blindly seeking something straight and decent in this hellhole. "How? Or are you one of those—those—like the rest—a-scheming and hating John Laws and—"
She ran. He took a few leaping strides after her. But she went like an antelope, coat grasped under an arm, skirts of her gleaming black dance hall frock swirling high. A woman looked out the door of a little shack on the track and he stopped. He didn't want folks to be able to say anything against Marie.
He cursed because there was an ache inside his chest. He looked down. Something glittered in the dusk. It was a small gold locket. When he picked it up and pried it open there was the picture of a sweet-faced girl inside. But it wasn't Marie. He stood staring at it minute after minute. From the main road there was the spatter of crashing glass as an orey-eyed hombre was ejected from a rust-stained tent set up as a whiskey mill.
For some reason the picture made him think of that one of his brother, Stan. The one Silver carried. It seemed locoed. But the idea stuck; he couldn't place this girl. Maybe never clapped eyes on her. Yet somehow, he knew, there was a connection between that and Stan in his jail garb. He walked slowly back toward the rear of the Stirrup.
He knew one thing. He had to see that other picture again. Had to get it from Silver, no matter how…
CHAPTER 13
Two days later Silver returned. They— Big Joe and Stub and Shandy Smith—knew he was coming. A sod buster came to town and said there had been a raid on the Bar Grande the Ventares had taken over. Night riders. The sod buster had been out tracking down a stray cowbait and seen it from a hilltop. The raiders had cleaned out the handful of men Scar Ventare had put on the place, left three for dead, and burnt the place into the ground, every last building. Then swung up to the north pasture and driven off the herd gathered there. He figured they had stampeded them into the Wild Horse Canyon from the sounds he had heard on the night afterward.
And those riders had worn white head masks. "Flour sacks with holes cut in 'em, I figger," the sod breaker said as he told it out in front.
But Joe and Shandy and Stub knew. The moment they heard that. Silver was en route back with his new parcel of gun-passers and had struck en route. Just the way he had struck at the red-masked bunch of the Ventares in the defense of Buck Lennore's outfit. Shandy shook his head worriedly; Silver was brewing big poison for himself, maybe too big.
Big Joe said nothing. He was opening that locket and looking at it a heap. It was a clue to something, yet he couldn't tell what that something was. But he knew it was more important to him than anything else happening. That and the picture of "Stan" that Silver had.
Stub had been talking less and less since the night of the fight at Lennore's place, the night Nick was killed. Now he had a great trick of sitting alone at a table in back and staring by the hour over an untouched glass of redeye. He seemed to have to come back a long way when spoken to.
Late that afternoon, Silver came riding in through the cold rain. One man accompanied him, a hairpin called Mouger. He was known as "Shots" to his intimates, had eyes cold as gun bores. Had just finished a jail term in Eastern Texas. Two more came down the road the other way and eased to the back and went upstairs. A chubby bow-legged gent came to the back door a few minutes later and asked for Silver. Three more, Silver said, would be checking in at the boarding house to avert suspicion. Seven in all. And the four who came to the Stirrup were the type weighed down with ha
rdware. Wearing it, too, as if they'd been born with holsters. They might laugh with their mouths, but never with their cold stones of eyes.
Shandy brought a bottle to a back table for them. One slapped his empty glass to the floor as Shandy was about to fill it. "Save that slop for hogs and slobberhaids, mister. I'm a trigguh specialist, yuh see. In my business, a felluh gits careluss once—just once. Then they try tuh git his name spelled correct on his Boot Hill cross."
They were cold ones; Shandy said as much to Silver a little later.
Silver hand-smoothed his carefully combed hair before the mirror. "Yuh'd ask fer warm-blooded laughing rattlesnakes, Shandy."
"That was a right slick job you pulled up at the old Bar Grande, Silver," Shandy said placatingly.
"What?" Silver came around as if hit.
"The Bar Grande the Ventares took over," Doc said.
"What the hell kind of mouth music are you making?" Silver snapped, seizing Doc threateningly.
Big Joe told him, about the story of the raid by the white hoods. Silver liked to have choked, puffing up like a gila monster. "Gawd, we was never near there." He sucked hard on a tailor-made cigarette. "Somebody's building something—something like one hell of a double-cross… I'd better go down and see the Countess."
"Just a minute, Silver." Big Joe stepped forward, a certain gaunt determination in his eyes. "About that picture of—of Stan. I—"
"You what, ya addled-brained idiot?" The threat of a showdown banged in the room. Doc Hilder in a dim corner bugged his eyes at his one-time patient. Stub stood rubbing his taut fingertips together just in front of his gunbelt.
"I want it, Silver," Joe said.
Silver looked at his left hip holster that he had dropped on the table in changing to dry clothes. Joe's eyes followed his glance. Silver said gently, "Couldn't give it to you now nowise. I haven't got it. I must uh lost it on my trip… I'm in a hurry now. Trail me."