by Lauran Paine
All the men turned when Fleharty, Amy, and Parker Travis entered the jailhouse and were lost to them, and gazed in deep silence at the woman who’d said this.
She furiously blushed under their stares. “It’s not seemly,” she uttered, blustering now, “for a young woman to go tagging after a man like that. It’s not lady-like.”
That thoughtful-looking elderly man chuckled. “You know, Nettie,” he said, “nowadays, if a pretty girl’s going to catch her man, she’s got to trot a little. It isn’t like it used to be. Waitin’ can make a girl wind up a spinster.”
There were sly smiles over this remark; the men knew Nettie Fellows and her acid tongue. Nettie, at thirty-five, had never been married. She drew herself up, said: “Hump!”—and flounced back into the hotel lobby.
Chapter Fourteen
Parker locked Fleharty in a strap-steel cell, closed the intervening door on him, and returned to Wheaton’s little stuffy office. There he got a dipper full of water from a bucket, drank deeply, and observed Amy over the dipper’s blue rim. She was standing half in shadow over by the sheriff’s desk watching Parker, and as before her gaze did not falter under Travis’s regard. As Parker was putting aside the dipper, she spoke.
“You know something you didn’t mention up in Hubbell’s room, don’t you, Parker?”
He turned, walked over closer, and stopped to cock his head a little at her, looking critical. “You’re smart, Amy. As smart as any man in town. I was impressed with your looks the first time I laid eyes on you. But upstairs at the hotel just now, it dawned on me that you’re smart along with it.”
“If that’s a compliment,” retorted Amy without smiling, without lowering her eyes before that critically masculine stare, “I thank you for it. But the tone of voice was wrong. I think it wasn’t so much a compliment as an appraisal.”
“You’re dead right.”
“I didn’t measure up, did I?”
Parker removed his hat, dropped it upon Hub Wheaton’s desk, and carefully put together the words for his reply to that question. “You measured up all right, but not particularly as a woman.”
She dropped her eyes now, not uneasy under his stare but so that he would not see that sad and knowing look in their smoky depths. She stood thus for a moment, darkly in thought. Light from the little barred window came into the room, glowing against the coppery darkness of her hair, putting its barred pattern across the fullness of her breasts. She was thinking of him; he knew that much even though her face was averted.
“You’ve been a smart woman in a man’s world too long, Amy,” he said, paused, and went on, a faintly rough edge coming to his voice. “Standing as you are now, half in light, half shadowed…you’re a picture a man could take with him over the years, because this minute you’re a full woman, and that’s the substance every man’s dreams are made of.”
“You’re telling me to be more woman and less…whatever else I am…aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
She raised her eyes to him, showing a tenderness, a good warmth. “I couldn’t change, Parker, any more than you could. But for the right man that would be no problem.”
“What kind of a right man?”
“The kind you are. Not the kind my uncle is, or those others. You think calmly. You don’t do rash things. You didn’t ride in here like other men would have…with hate like a banner in your eyes and a cocked gun in your fist. You came quietly and you felt your way. You were more interested in truth than in killing.”
“You didn’t think that before,” he said.
“Yes, I did. I’ve thought that ever since we first talked in the dell. But several times you wavered. I know why you wavered, because you loved your brother so. You don’t show things to the world. You keep things inside you. When you wavered, I was cruel to you because I couldn’t bear the idea of your abandoning fairness and becoming hair-triggered like the others are.”
She had a little stain of color in her face as she faced him, as she saw him as he was, not yet at peace with himself but near to it, his strong, dark face with its tough set to the mouth, handsome, his dead-level eyes deeply thoughtful, his expression more gentle than anything else.
“You see a lot,” he murmured. “Maybe you see too much.” A shadow appeared in his eyes. “Why should I show the world that it hurts like hell to think of Frank’s dying like he did?”
“The world knows anyway, Parker. All people aren’t blind. Hub Wheaton for instance…he knows how you feel.”
“He’s the only one, Amy.”
“No. I also understand.”
She swayed toward him a little, fighting down a powerful impulse to reach forth and touch him. Tenderness and want came out of her deepest thoughts. Yet she held herself away for a reason; he’d need her more later on, when the anguish and the things he’d set as his goal were done with.
“I wish,” he softly said, “Frank could have known you. He’d have laughed at you, Amy. It would have taken him a long time to understand that beauty and brains can go together in a woman. Then he’d have loved you.”
Her eyes showed a quick break in their dark depths. She recklessly said: “Parker, I want that from only one man.”
He watched her, balancing a thought and a decision in his mind. She saw the reflection of this in his face and she breathlessly waited. Then the light faded. He took up his hat, gazed at its dusty crown, and turned the thing in both hands.
“I reckon I’d best go do what’s got to be done.” He looked at her almost sadly, moved doorward, and said: “Maybe we can talk some more later, Amy.”
“I’ll be with Lew in Hub’s room, Parker.”
“I’ll walk you over there.”
She shook her head at him. There was a wet brightness to her gaze now. “No. You go on. But I’d like to see you when you…when it’s over.”
He nodded a little, put on his hat, and walked out of the jailhouse.
Wagons from out over the Laramie Plains drifted into town for supplies. Occasionally a rider or two also loped in, and generally, although these men had been sent after a badly needed tongue bolt or a new length of hard-twist lariat rope, or perhaps the ranch mail, they tied up before one of the saloons first, entered with the free-swinging stride of willing imbibers, then emerged a few minutes later with the same closed faces, the same wariness, which otherwise gripped the town, for the word of what was in the offing filled Laramie’s very air. There were two exceptions to this; they entered town from the south. One was a gaunt, battered cowboy; the other was a swarthy, raffish man with a slouched posture in the saddle, but whose quick, sharp eyes belied his general attitude of lazy indifference.
Parker saw these two because they walked their mounts past the jailhouse where he stood. He did not know them, yet a little warning flashed along his nerves as they looked over, then looked on again, too casual and too disinterested.
He did not see another two of the same brand of men amble into town from the north, and another two ride in quietly and separately, one from the glittering west, one from the hot, dry east. Still standing in the shadowed heat under the jailhouse overhang, he watched those first two draw up before Fleharty’s Great Northern Saloon, tie up, and pass on inside. He stepped out into the roadway, crossed over, and swung north, heading for Fleharty’s place. A man stepped forth from a doorway, looking worried. It was Councilman Pierson.
“Have you found him yet?” Pierson asked, meaning Swindin.
Parker shook his head looking past, up toward Fleharty’s place.
“Have you some idea where he might be?”
Parker’s gaze came back. He said: “I can tell you where he isn’t. He’s not watching the roadway or he’d have taken a shot at me. I stood in front of the jailhouse, waiting for him to try that.”
Pierson’s long face grew longer. “I know. I saw that an’ stood over here, holding my breath. I’ve passed the word around.”
“What word?” asked Parker, beginning to look annoyed. “Listen,
Mister Pierson, I’d just as soon not have a lot of trigger-happy store clerks slipping around town with guns in their hands.”
“You can’t do this alone, Mister Travis.”
Up the road those two men walked out of Fleharty’s saloon and stopped on the plank walk, looking right and left. Parker stepped away from Pierson and started onward. Pierson, seeing the look on the larger man’s face, seeing also his destination—those two loafing range riders on ahead—said a quick swear word to himself and ducked back into the doorway from which he’d emerged.
Parker’s footfalls echoed upon the boardwalk. He saw one of those men ahead speak to the other from the side of his mouth. Both men turned fully and watched Parker approach them. The shorter, darker of these two hooked both thumbs in his shell belt, looking nonchalant. His raw-boned companion, though, was clearly a rough man. He had a high-bridged nose that had been broken at least once and lay bent a little. His eyes were challengingly hard and the color of a wintry dusk. He gave Parker look for look without moving or shifting his glance except to once make a little flickering appraisal of the way Travis wore his gun. There was a reckless slight droop at the outer comers of this man’s long mouth.
“You boys looking for Johnny Fleharty?” Parker asked, coming to a halt ten feet away.
“Now we might be, Sheriff,” said the gaunt man. “And then again, we might not be. Why, you got a law against it?”
In the face of this antagonism Parker wintrily smiled. Matching the other man’s insolent drawl, he said: “Well, now, boys, Fleharty’s in jail, and maybe you’d like to visit him there…or maybe you wouldn’t like that. It’s up to you.”
The battered man’s eyes drew out narrowly. He kept studying Parker as one stray dog studies another. His unkempt swarthy companion said smoothly, with an apologetic little smile: “No call to get hostile, Sheriff. No call at all. We just thought we’d have a drink, is all.”
“With Charley Swindin?” asked Parker, keeping a close watch for reaction to this. He got it, not from the tall man who was concentrating on only one thing, taking the measure of this big man wearing the badge, but from the raffish man. His eyes registered abrupt surprise, then turned oily again and slyly deferential. He chuckled, saying: “No, just a little drink for the two of us…unless you’d care to join us, Sheriff. Cold beer’d go mighty good on a day like this ’n’s promisin’ to be.”
“No thanks,” replied Parker dryly. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” He paused, saw the gaunt man’s eyes show dawning curiosity, took a step closer to this man, and said: “I’ll escort the pair of you down to see Fleharty at the jailhouse.”
Neither of those rough men spoke and their faces settled gradually into skepticism, into suspicion. “You,” said the gaunt man very softly, “ain’t goin’ to escort us nowhere, Mister Tin Badge.”
Parker had both these men under his gaze; he had taken that step closer to the gaunt man for a purpose. The swarthy rider was slightly behind his friend; he could not throw down on Parker without first stepping around his companion.
“Care to make a little bet?” Parker asked the gaunt man.
He thought this would trigger action and it did. The gaunt man’s right hand blurred in a whipped-back draw. Parker, bracing into this for the past few moments, was faster. When the cowboy’s gun was clearing leather, Parker’s own weapon made a vicious short arc, struck down meatily, and there was the unmistakable sound of steel grating on bone. The gaunt man gasped; he dropped his weapon and wilted from pain. Parker stepped clear, leveled his weapon upon the raffish rider, and coldly smiled. That man’s hand was resting tentatively upon his undrawn six-gun.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Draw it.”
But the raffish man instead let off a long breath and removed his hand, let it glide downward easily. He shook his head, looking out of wide eyes.
“Help your pardner and let’s go,” directed Parker.
The injured man called him a hard name. “It’s broke!” he exclaimed, holding out one hand with the other hand. “Broke at the gawd-damned wrist.”
Parker considered the broken flesh, the blue swelling that was already coming on. “There’s a doctor around. He’ll set it for you. Move along.” But when those two would have stepped down into the roadway, he said: “Stay on the sidewalk. Go south until you’re directly across from the jailhouse, then stop.”
The raffish man screwed up his face at these orders. “You afraid of something?” he asked.
“Yeah, a bullet in the back. Get along now.”
The three of them stepped out southward. No one appeared upon the plank walk as far as they went, but Parker saw from the corner of his eye the faces glued to store windows as they went along.
The gaunt man’s broken wrist was losing some of its numbness and the pain was coming on strong by the time they halted across from the jailhouse. He swore helplessly in a singsong manner, a lot of the starch gone out of him. He said to Parker when they were no longer moving, “I owe you something for this. We weren’t doing anything. Just come in for a drink and got buffaloed by a damned gun-drunk tin badge. I’ll pay you back for this an’ a damned sight sooner than you think, too.”
Two men drifted out of a northward dog-trot to stand slouched, looking down at Parker and his prisoners. Two more came walking out of a saddle shop across the way. Those four were strangers to Parker; they were cowboys by the looks of them, tough and hard and reckless. It was the still way they stood, all their attention on Parker’s prisoners, that made him particularly notice them, that and the fact that those four men suddenly appeared like that, the only men in sight along the roadway. He stepped closer to his captives, putting their bodies between him and those four motionless watchers.
The raffish man made an oily smile. “You’re smart,” he said. “Smart enough to use us for shields. But, Sheriff…how you goin’ to get across the road with us? There’ll be two on one side of the road an’ two on the other side o’ the road. Either way, lawman, your back’s goin’ to be facin’ someone.”
Out of a nearby doorway stepped several armed men. Councilman Todhunter was in front of them. He moved gingerly up and said: “Go ahead, Travis. We watched it build up against you. We’ve got shotguns. Go ahead, and, if those four try it, they’ll get fiddled.”
“That answer you?” asked Parker of the raffish men. “Move along, both of you.” He touched their backs with his six-gun. “Keep closed up. Make a wrong move and I’ll open the thing by killing you.” He pushed harder with the gun barrel.
The raffish man made a quick, negative wag with his head, stepped down into roadway dust, and went walking onward with the hurting weight of that fierce overhead summer sun fully on him. At his side the gaunt cowboy plodded along, ignoring everything but the agony each jarring footfall brought him through his shattered arm.
Parker stayed close enough to these two so that no one firing at him, even if he was hit, could escape also hitting one of his prisoners. He had a peculiar, cold feeling between the shoulder blades as he made that crossing, as though venomous eyes were burning a hole in him with their icy determination to kill him.
He was not entirely sure what he had, but he’d thought, when first those two range riders had walked their mounts past the jailhouse, that they were not just ordinary hands, and that they hadn’t just happened to ride into Laramie this particular day and this particular time.
Behind him on both sides of the plank walk, as he stepped with his prisoners into the hot shade in front of the jailhouse, men were easing quietly out of stores, armed and silent and solemn-faced. Two of those other cowboys turned abruptly and went toward a saloon. The other two then did the same thing, acting indifferent, acting completely unconcerned.
Chapter Fifteen
Amy wasn’t still in Wheaton’s office when Parker entered, but Lew Morgan was there. He was taking a riot gun off the wall with his back to the door when Parker entered with his prisoners. Lew turned, looked at the prisoners, finished bringing do
wn the shotgun, then walked across the room.
“Who are they?” he asked, indicating the man with the broken wrist and his swarthy companion.
Instead of a direct reply, Parker leaned on the closed door, holstered his weapon, and said: “When Fleharty told me Swindin offered him five thousand dollars for helping, it occurred to me that your foreman would make the same offer elsewhere. That’s why I left Wheaton’s room with Johnny when I did. It didn’t seem likely Swindin could recruit gun hands among Laramie’s townsmen, so he’d have to do it among the cowboys. I wanted to be over here where I could see any riders coming into town.” Parker jutted his chin at his prisoners. “These two rode past a little while ago. They tied up outside Fleharty’s saloon. I wasn’t sure about them, but they looked capable of murder for five thousand dollars. Then the dark one there, when I mentioned your foreman’s name, showed by his expression that he knew Swindin, that he and his pardner hadn’t just happened into Laramie this morning.” Parker looked wryly at Morgan. “I almost made a fatal mistake, though. There are six of them, not two. Just now out in the roadway four more showed up. If it hadn’t been for Todhunter, they’d probably have nailed my hide to a wall.”
Lew pushed his hat far back, turned, and viewed the sullen prisoners. “I’ve seen them before. I think they’re itinerant cowhands like Ace McElhaney was.”
“Well,” said Parker, “the tough one there needs a doctor. Would you find him and fetch him down here while I’m watching them?”
“Sure, be glad to.”
“And, Mister Morgan…leave the shotgun here. Those other four don’t know you’re in this, too. The shotgun might convince ’em otherwise.”
Lew obediently put aside the scatter-gun, stepped around Parker, and walked out of the office.
The raffish cowboy went to the bucket, took a long drink, ignored his partner, and said to Parker: “You got this all wrong, Sheriff. All wrong. We didn’t know them four fellers out in the roadway.”