Free Winds Blow West

by L. P. Holmes

  A shrill, piercing voice cut through the solid clamor out in the street.

  “Come on out, Asbell! Come on out, or we come in after you. We got a rope just your size and length. Come on out!”

  There wasn’t a cowardly bone in Hack Asbell’s spare, rawhide old carcass. He was a cattleman of the old school to whom vast acreages of unfenced range—with herds of cattle free to graze anywhere they willed—were badges of a sane, well-ordered world. He thought in terms of miles, not in quarter sections. And he was afraid of nothing that walked.

  “Son,” he said, “the day I run from a flock of crazy sodbusters, that day I ain’t fit to live. We’ll just have a look at that gang and read the color of their hides.”

  He headed for the front door of the hotel, swearing to himself. The fat man spoke up quickly.

  “No, Hack! Don’t go out there. They’ll eat you alive. Let me tell ’em off. This is my hotel and no man enters it without my permission.”

  While he spoke, the fat man was scurrying around behind the bar. He came up with a sawed-off shotgun, ancient and rusty. “They take a look down the throat of this,” he puffed, “they’ll think twice about busting into my place.”

  He would have gone to the door ahead of Asbell, but the cattleman pushed him back.

  “No, Sam … you stay out of it. This is my steak to chaw. Appreciate it, of course … but I don’t need your help. That crowd wants a look at me and I won’t disappoint ’em.”

  In another stride he was through the door and out on the hotel porch. The hoarse howl that greeted his appearance washed menacingly against the sky. In the vanguard of the crowd was Jason Spelle and his wagon, drawn up just beyond the porch steps.

  Hack Asbell stood, feet slightly spread, looking out over the yelling, threatening mass of settlers with an iron-jawed defiance. The clamor of the crowd beat against the front of the hotel in waves of sound. Asbell waited, motionless, for them to quiet.

  Watching the old cattleman, Bruce Martell knew stirring admiration. Here was steel-cold nerve, bitter and defiant. In his time, Bruce Martell had seen men with more than an average share of courage go pale and sweating in the face of mob wrath, and this was definitely mob wrath now, with numbers steadily augmented all the time. But Hack Asbell was as solid and unmoved and as coldly indifferent as if he’d been carved in stone.

  “A lot of man,” mumbled Sam Beardon, the fat hotelkeeper. “Old Hack is a lot of man. I’ll kill somebody before I see that mob take hold of him.”

  The mob quieted enough for his words to carry, so Hack Asbell hurled his defiance flatly.

  “Well, here I am! You wanted to see me. Take a good look. What’s all this howling about a rope cut to my size?”

  “The same size and length of the one you hung Jake Hendee on!” bawled a settler, and this set off another massed roar. Again Asbell waited for their clamor to die.

  “I know nothing about a Jake Hendee being lynched, and neither does my outfit. The only ones we’re out to lynch are the damned slow-elkers who’ve been butchering my stock. We catch any of them and they’ll be lynched, all right … and I’ll invite you to the party. But so far we ain’t had any luck. That’s my word on it!”

  They howled at him again, and the rising hate was like a macabre heat.

  Now it was Jason Spelle who took over, waving his arms to quiet the mob. He was standing up in his wagon and he pointed a dramatic arm at Asbell.

  “It won’t do you any good to lie, Asbell. I know what I found, and I know how the sign on Hendee’s body read. If you wanted your murderous warning to carry all over Indio Basin, you’ve succeeded better than you know. You’ve done something else. You’ve aroused the avenging wrath of a peaceable, long-suffering people. Now you must answer to that just wrath!”

  It was overdone, it was sticky, it was cheap melodrama, but it suited the mood of the mob perfectly. There came an ominous forward crowding, a flowing of insensate power, blind and ravening. Hack Asbell met it with harsh words that ripped out like bullets.

  “Why, you bigmouthed, forked-tongued whelp! Calling me a liar … spreading that kind of mealy-lipped talk. Get out of that wagon and come up here where I can get my hands on you!”

  Bruce Martell, watching closely from the hotel door, saw Cashel Edmunds standing beside Spelle’s buckboard. He saw Edmunds turn and say something to a man standing beside him. The fellow spread his arms to make room, then threw a fist-sized rock straight at Hack Asbell’s head.

  The missile flew true. It landed with a crunching thud. Hack Asbell crumpled in a heap. Instantly, the mob started forward, whining its eagerness to lay hands on the unconscious cattleman.

  They never got there, for Bruce Martell arrived first. A hand clawing at Asbell was kicked aside savagely, and the owner of it fell back, cursing the agony of a broken wrist. Then Bruce Martell was blocking the way—a tall, bleak-faced figure with cold, bitter eyes, and with a drawn gun in his hand. His voice rang.

  “I’ll kill the first man to put a foot on this porch! Or the next one to throw a brickbat. You, Spelle … call em off!”

  At first glance, the mob saw only another man up there on the porch, facing them. Then they saw something else. It was something invisible, but real. It was an indefinite atmosphere of authority, which came out of him in a chill, unyielding current. It was a thing made up of background, of past experience in the ways of violent deeds and violent men. It was as real as if a star of office were pinned on him. Here, they realized, was a man who had faced mobs before, who knew the uselessness of verbal argument with one, but who knew perfectly the one type of argument any mob could not fail to recognize. Force—and a ready deadly gun to back it up with.

  He had proclaimed a deadline—the edge of the porch. And not a man in that mob but understood Martell stood ready to do exactly what he threatened—which was to kill the first one who tried to cross that deadline. They hated him for it, they raged against him, but they obeyed him. Not one of them tried to come up on the porch.

  Jason Spelle alone seemed to believe that Bruce Martell could be bluffing. At any rate, he again produced the inflammatory notice and waved it in an attempt to whip them to fresh fury.

  “I told you what was written on this!” he shouted. “Jake Hendee was one of us. I told you—!”

  The hard, coughing blast of a gun cut through Spelle’s tirade. Part of the paper he was waving, sheared off by an accurate slug, fluttered and drifted downward. A thin haze of smoke curled from the muzzle of Martell’s gun, and his voice whipped out again.

  “Last warning, Spelle! Shut that big yap of yours and get out of here. I mean … you!”

  From behind Martell, Sam Beardon’s fat man’s voice wheezed. “Buckshot in both barrels of this. It’ll spread and take in plenty. You can have all of it if you want!”

  Jason Spelle stared at the fragment of paper still in his grasp. Then he swung his head and stared at Bruce Martell. His eyes paled with a baffled, white-hot rage. Over stiff lips he spoke just three words.

  “We’ll be back!”

  Then he faced the mob once more, waved a commanding arm down the street, caught up the reins, and urged his team to movement. The moving buckboard broke up the hard pack of the mob, and men fell in behind it, following it, sending their confused anger back in growls and fading curses. Soon there was open space before the steps. Bruce Martell leaned down, caught Hack Asbell under the arms, and dragged him inside.

  Chapter Eight

  Blue twilight smoked up the world, cooling only what a man could see with his eyes and feel with his hand. Beyond that, the town of Starlight seethed and boiled with the angers and passions of men. To a listening ear the town hummed like a hive of disturbed bees. It was a sound made up of the voices of many men, walking up and down the street, massing at saloon bars and in front of Donovan’s store. There were no shrill and solitary yelps or shouts, the venting of individu
al anger, but just that ominous, growing hum, intensifying with every passing minute. It held a significance to make a man’s nerves crawl.

  In the Longhorn Hotel Bruce Martell prowled back and forth, having his look and his moments of listening at all sides. All the weight of past experience told him that Jason Spelle had meant what he said. They would be back. It was forming out there now, the purpose and the power. It would come after dark, some time during the night. The tide had washed up as far as the hotel porch steps, then ebbed back, a wave that had not had quite enough power to engulf. But when it came again …

  There was a light burning in the Land Office and a buckboard standing in front of the place—Jason Spelle’s buckboard. Spelle himself was in the Land Office, along with Cashel Edmunds. Watching at a hotel window, Bruce Martell saw men constantly passing in and out of the lit doorway. Listening, he heard wagons pounding out of town, but more wagons coming back. And so he could guess what was going on. The word was being spread. The ghost of Jake Hendee was being dangled in settler camps everywhere, as bait for the gullible. And the gullible were pouring into town, to give added weight to Jason Spelle’s promise. We’ll be back!

  There were just four people in the hotel. Bruce Martell, Hack Asbell, Sam Beardon, and the blowzy woman who had been washing clothes (and who was Sam Beardon’s cook and maid-of-all-work about the hotel.) Beardon and the woman were working over Asbell, who was stretched on an ancient sofa in the hotel parlor. Martell, after still another prowl around through the hotel, stopped in there.

  “How is he?” he asked.

  “Scares me,” mumbled Sam Beardon. “Got his eyes open, but don’t seem to see anything. He’s conscious, yet he ain’t conscious. He’s here, but he’s somewhere else, too.”

  “Concussion,” murmured Martell. “Which doesn’t make it any easier. Sam, we got to get him out of here. They’re going to come again. They’ve sent out messengers to spread the word. In a couple of hours from now there’ll be three times as many settlers in town as we had to face this afternoon. Some of them will be liquored up. It’ll take more than just the sight of a gun or two to turn ’em back. Yeah, we got to get Asbell out of here.”

  “How’re we going to do it?” asked Beardon. “Right now he couldn’t sit a saddle, even if we had one for him. Which we ain’t. Hack allus leaves his bronc’ at Joe Leggett’s livery barn. It’s down there now and, things being like they are, it might jest as well be a thousand miles from here. And they got watchers strung all around this damn hotel.”

  “I’ll get him out,” said Martell grimly, “if I have to shoot my way through every settler in the basin. There’s a lot of things in the air I don’t savvy, but I’m sure of one thing. Asbell’s too good a man to die on the end of a rope. I’ve got a couple of ideas. Here’s what you do, Sam. Get a light going in a front, upstairs room. You and the lady act plenty busy in that room, moving back and forth between the window and the light. Be carrying towels, a basin of water. Make it look like you got an injured man, in that room, you’re tending to. I’ll show a couple of times in the room myself. They’ll be watching and they’ll think we got Asbell in there. And then, when the dark settles in, good and thick, I’ll take Asbell out the back way.”

  “You’ll have to carry him, and you can’t carry him far,” argued Beardon. “Besides, they got watchers out back.”

  “A couple.” Martell nodded. “With a little luck, I’ll take care of them. We’ve got to take the chance, Sam. It’s the only way.”

  The fat man was still for a moment, looking down at his old friend, Hack Asbell. Slowly he nodded. “All right.” And so the things Martell suggested were done. The false show was put on in the upstairs room, and Martell, lingering once by the open window of the room, knew that at least some of the effect he had gambled on had gone over. For he heard a man down in the now-black street call to another.

  “See that, Cass? They’re puttin’ Asbell to bed. That rock must’ve hit plenty hard. Tell Spelle we’re liable to find ourselves tryin’ to lynch a dead man.”

  “Dead or alive, just so we lynch him,” came the answer.

  Martell drifted to the door of the room. Sam Beardon looked at him. “Good luck!”

  The blowzy woman, softening under the strain, began to snivel and dabbed at her nose.

  Martell went down to the parlor. He did not try to get Asbell to his feet. He simply lifted the old cattleman in his arms and carried him back through the darkened hotel to the rear door. He laid Asbell down on the kitchen floor, edged the door open, looked and listened. The night out here was still. But somewhere out here were men posed to watch. Before full dark had come down, he’d located two of them, one at each back corner of the hotel. He couldn’t be sure that’s where they were now, or whether there were more than two by this time. But the die was cast. It was this way or no way. He went out and across the ancient porch, moving as softly as he could. The last of the porch steps let out a protesting squeak as he moved off it. A voice struck sharply at him from the dark.

  “Who is it?”

  He turned toward the voice, moving steadily. He answered in heavy, muffled tones. “Who do you think? Spelle told me to make a circle and see if everything was quiet back here. Looks like they’ve put Asbell to bed upstairs, but you never can tell …”

  His eyes probed the dark with straining intentness. He located the man, a vague shadow, standing at the corner of the building ahead of him. He slid his gun noiselessly free and kept on moving in.

  “We shouldn’t have let ’em bluff us out in the first place,” he went on, in that same muffled way. “The time to have stretched Asbell was when we had him down and out …”

  Now he was close enough, and he moved with explosive speed. He leaped, his gun chopping out and down. A yell of startled alarm formed in the throat of the man in front of him, but before it could erupt, Martell’s gun thudded home. The man grunted and went down.

  Swift and complete as this thing had been, still it left some small sound. Any violence was that way; it could never be completely noiseless. For even though the ear could not hear it, it seemed to throw out invisible waves that a man could feel. And now, from the other rear corner of the hotel, a man called.

  “Hocken! Oh, Hocken! What’s going on over there? You hear anything? Who’s that you were talking to?”

  Martell walked straight back toward the speaker. “Just checking up,” he said. “Spelle and Edmunds want to make sure the bird don’t get away. Spelle said to tell you fellers to watch that back door.”

  It got him most of the way there, but he was still several feet short when the guard’s indecision became open alarm. Martell moved as fast as he ever had in his life, but he still didn’t get there in time to beat the hoarse yell that the fellow lifted. Right after that, Martell got him with his lashing gun barrel.

  Martell turned, raced for the kitchen door. He brought Asbell up off the floor, jackknifed him over his shoulder. Then he plunged out into the night again, running. He headed straight away into the open country beyond the edge of town, and when he got a hundred yards of darkness behind him, he began to circle.

  Back at the hotel, men were shouting. There was a high and angry cursing when someone stumbled over one of the guards Martell had gun whipped. Panting heavily from the violence of this physical effort he was putting out, Martell knew cold exultation.

  Let ’em cuss … let ’em yell. They’d be like chickens with their heads cut off for a few precious minutes, bumbling and thrashing around, mired down in their own confusion. Most men were like that. Surprise, the bewilderment of things unexpected, turned them inside out. They’d do a lot of senseless charging here and there, but unless the scent was red hot or the trail plain under their noses, they’d waste a deal of time doing a great deal of nothing. And this night was big and dark.

  Martell stopped to rest. His heart was pounding, breath rasped in and out of him in hungr
y gulps. Across his shoulder Hack Asbell hung loose as a sack, yet groaning a little.

  Martell went on, sighting the indistinct masses of the town buildings to his right. The hotel was easy to distinguish. And Donovan’s store was about—there! He drifted in, slowed now to a walk. He had the line he wanted.

  He lowered Hack Asbell to the black earth, and spoke, though he knew Asbell did not hear him.

  “I’ll be back after you, Hack.”

  Relieved of the cattleman’s weight, he was his old, soft-moving, swift-prowling self. He came up to the corral in back of Donovan’s store. And then knew a relief so great it was almost a tide of weakness. The black horse was there, just as he’d left it. He mauled the horse’s head and ears for a happy moment, then freed the reins, and led it away at a walk.

  In back of him, the town was surging with the alarm. But what could they be sure of? A pair of hotel guards found gun-whipped and unconscious. How much else could they guess and what definitely could they be sure of? Who was still in the hotel and who wasn’t? Later they’d find out, but for the moment …

  Martell laughed softly as he drew the black to a stop beside Hack Asbell’s prone figure. The sack of food he had tied behind the saddle earlier that day, he now loosened and tossed aside. The black would have enough to carry without that. He got Hack Asbell across the saddle, then swung up behind. And then he rode deeper and deeper into the wide night.

  Chapter Nine

  It was full midnight when the black horse breasted the slope of the flat below the Rocking A headquarters, moving slowly and wearily, for the miles had been long under a double burden.

  There were no lights about the place, and when Martell pulled up beside the corrals, he lifted his call.

  “Carp! Oh, Carp!”

  He had to call again before there came a stirring in the bunkhouse, a rumble of voices, and then a stir at the door of the building.

  “Who’s out there … who’s yellin’ for me?”