The Second Western Novel

by Matt Rand

  Thus, with devilish cleverness, he twisted the weapon from his own breast and directed it at that of his enemy. The explanation, plausible enough, made an impression which his sharp eyes were quick to note.

  “Most o’ you have known me some time,” he went on. “Am I the kind to put myself in the power of a man like Potter, or to rob a bank which was practically mine to hand you back the money?”

  “Less my thirty thousand,” Andy reminded him.

  Raven refused to be ruffled. “Is it likely I’d go stravagin’ about the country holdin’ folks up? Why, I never carry a gun,” he said. “That’s all I gotta say, boys. There’s Sudden, an admitted outlaw an’ a stranger, an’ here’s Seth Raven, who ain’t a stranger. Which are you goin’ to believe?”

  It was a superb piece of acting and brought its reward. A big, black-bearded man from the Tepee Mountain country jumped up.

  “Gents, I reckon Raven has the straight of it,” he called out. “I’m backin’ him.”

  Shouts of “Good for you, Darky” and “Here’s another” followed this pronouncement, and a number of the men got to their feet, stamping, yelling, and directing threatening looks at the little group near the door. Amid all the hubbub Green stood alone, cynically surveying the noisy scene. Again the tide had turned and at any moment might come the word which would transform the dance hall into a shambles. His stern voice rang out above the din, and the very audacity of his request quelled it.

  “Raven, I want the gun yo’re wearin—it’s under yore left armpit. Hand it to yore friend yonder”—he indicated the black-bearded man—“or I’ll drop you right now.”

  The half-breed looked surprised, hesitated, but one glance at the speaker’s granite face told him that the leveled gun was no mere bluff. With a scornful smile he pulled out the weapon and pitched it to Darky.

  “Yo’re a good guesser, Sudden,” he sneered. “Gettin’ scared, huh? You needn’t be; yo’re slated for a rope. Take care o’ that shootin’-iron; she’s an old favorite I wouldn’t like to lose, though I ain’t carried one for years.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Green said, and to the man holding the revolver, “Fetch it out here, friend, where we can all see.” From the pocket of his chaps he produced two slender brass tubes and held them up. “The bullets from these killed Bordene an’ Potter; I found ’em near the bodies,” he went on. “Both have the same distinctive mark.” He turned to Darky. “Take the ca’tridges outa that gun an’ have a look at ’em.” Curiosity again rampant, the spectators clustered round and stood on the benches to watch the operation; the singular duel was not yet over. Raven alone betrayed no interest. He did not know what this new move portended, but confident in his regained supremacy, he believed he could circumvent it. One by one the black-bearded man drew out the shells, scanning each carefully. Not until he came to the last did he speak.

  “This one is scratched along the side—a straight line,” he said, and looked at the gun. “The chamber is nicked.” Green handed him the empty shells. “Would you say they were fired outa that gun?” he asked.

  Darky gave them one glance. “Hell! There ain’t a shadder o’ doubt,” he said. “Them marks is eedentical.” He looked at Raven and spat disgustedly. “An’ I was for him,” he added. “Stranger, I’m right ashamed.”

  A tense silence followed the black-bearded man’s verdict and instant condemnation. Swiftly the telltale tubes passed from hand to hand, but in every case the scrutiny was of the briefest. Familiar with weapons as all present were, the evidence was conclusive, even to the dullest intellect. Had further proof been needed, Raven’s ashen face supplied it. The blow, coming in the moment of triumph, had shattered his self-control. He knew that he was beaten, that nothing he could say or do would save him. Not only had the fatal weapon been on him, but he had admitted that he prized it; Green, too, had been astute enough to have the cartridges examined by one of his, Raven’s supporters; there was no loophole.

  A cold fear clutched at his heart and he cursed himself for having kept and worn the gun. One slip had cost him everything, even life itself, for he knew that he must hang. Furtively he glanced about, reading his doom in the set, lowering faces of those who, but a few moments before, had been his friends. At the thought of all he had so nearly gained a madness born of his Indian blood came upon him, a fierce desire to taunt these men who were about to send him to death, to vent his spleen upon them for the last time. He rose and faced them, a sinister, evil figure. And then he laughed, a harsh, jarring cackle which seemed scarcely that of a human being.

  “Yo’re a clever lot, ain’t you?” he sneered. “Superior race, salt o’ the earth—scum would fit you better. Me, I’m what you called me: The Vulture, yet I’ve beaten an’ fooled you all—killed, robbed, an’ had you pattin’ me on the back for a good fella. Bite on that the next time you meet a man whose skin ain’t as white as yore own. Why, if it hadn’t bin for a stranger”—his gaze rested viciously on Green—“you’d be eatin’ outa my hand this minit like the dawgs you are!” The stinging, scornful voice lashed them like a whip and he had his moment. Silent, spellbound, they stared at the extraordinary spectacle of a criminal glorying in his evil. Only Strade spoke:

  “You admittin’ Potter was right, Raven?” he asked.

  The half-breed grinned hideously. “You pore pin-head, ain’t I said so?” he retorted. “Potter knowed all, an’ I killed him, for that, an’ so’s I could buy the town with its own coin.” The mad laugh came again. “Oh, I played big, an’ damn near got away with it.”

  “You—robbed—the stage?”

  He turned on the speaker. ‘Yeah, Pardoe, I stole yore roll an’ flung a bit of it back to you in charity,” he gibed.

  For Pardoe, with a growl of a savage beast, was reaching for his hip. Raven’s hand flashed to his breast, a shot crashed, and the gambler went writhing to the floor, and was still. The killer faced around, crouching, the smoking weapon poised.

  “Fooled you too, Sudden,” he peered. “You guessed at one gun, but you didn’t figure on two, did you? Now”—the muzzle was directed point-blank at Green’s breast—“if anybody makes a move, you die.” His beady eyes gloated over the man whose life he held in the crook of a finger, for Green’s guns were back in their holsters. Raven broke the tense silence. “Sudden the Second is goin’ to hell presently,” he rasped. “Sudden the First is goin’ now, damn him.”

  As the last words left his lips he squeezed the trigger, and with the speed of light itself, Green’s right hand swept to his side. To the onlookers the reports seemed simultaneous. They saw the younger man stagger back as a bullet seared his left temple, and then Raven reeled, his knees hinged under him, and he collapsed like a house of cards. For a long moment there was no sound—men were breathing again—and then Rusty voiced the thoughts of all:

  “My Gawd!” he said in awed admiration, “Raven had him covered an’ he beat him to it! ‘Sudden,’ huh? Well, I believe you.”

  Green sheathed his gun and mustered up a grin as Pills came to bandage his hurt. “Only a scratch, Doc,” he said.

  “H’m, another inch to the left and you’d have been travelling together,” the little man said grimly.

  “He figured wrong—reckoned I’d raise the gun, but I fired from the hip,” the patient explained. “If he hadn’t been so keen on cussin’ me—”

  At the far end of the room a crowd gathered round the fallen men; both were dead. Raven’s thin lips were drawn back in an ugly snarl and between the staring eyes was the mark where the bullet had entered.

  “An’ we thought he never packed no artillery,” Durley said.

  “I knew different,” Green told him. “Twice he nearly went for it; when he shot Jevons, and again when I throwed him off the Double S, but I didn’t suspect he carried a brace.”

  “Good thing he was totin’ the one he did his dirty work with,” Strade commented.

  “I figured he would be,” the marshal explained. “You know how it is with a gun; they has dif
ferences, an’ a fella gets fond of his own, an’ wise to its little ways. When he told us it was a favorite, I felt pretty shore.”

  Lawless was itself again when, two weeks later, Green emerged from the Red Ace and went in search of his deputy. He found him in the office, sitting with his feet on the ramshackle desk, moodily smoking.

  “Howdy, Marshal,” the newcomer greeted.

  Pete looked up. “Yo’re a-goin’ then?” he asked, and regret was plain in his voice. “How’d they take it?”

  “One an’ all they wept copious,” Green grinned. “But I guess that was just to spare my feelin’s. You see, they know you wouldn’t accept unless I pulled my freight, an’ they’re pinin’ for you.”

  “Yo’re seven sorts of a liar, includin’ the damn kind,” the little man smiled. “Dunno as I wanta be marshal anyways. I’m goin’ to miss you a whole lot, Jim.” And then, with the cowboy’s natural aversion to showing emotion, he added, “I’ll have no one to talk to.”

  “The bride an’ bridegroom is due back from Tucson,” Green said. “You’ll have Andy to chatter with, an’ there’s allus Durley.”

  Pete grunted. “Andy’s slid back into his early childhood again: can on’y speak one word—Tonia,” he complained. “Oh, I know she’s wonderful—he told me so hisself, ’bout a million times. No, I’ll have to win me a parrot, if you must go, an’ won’t let me trail along.”

  So the day came when Andy and Tonia stood on the veranda of the Double S ranch house to take farewell of the man to whom they owed their happiness. Reuben Sarel, Strade, and Pete were there, and all were loth that he should leave. But he had met every protest with a slow shake of the head, and now, as from the saddle of the big black he looked at these good friends, there was a suspicion of sadness behind the smiling eyes.

  “I don’t see why you have to go,” Tonia told him for perhaps the twentieth time that morning.

  “I got a rovin’ disposition,” he evaded. “Allus did wanta find out what was the other side o’ the hill.”

  The girl gave a gesture of despair. “But you will come to see us again?” she pleaded.

  “I’ll shore be back—for the christenin’.”

  TWO-GUN OUTLAW, by Burt Arthur

  Copyright © 1952 by Star Guidance, Inc.

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was a revolting, sharp smell about the place; not just the musty, subtle kind of smell one encounters upon opening the door to a room that has not been aired for a long time. There was mustiness here, all right, but there was something else, too. Something far stronger, that assaulted the nostrils heavily. It seemed to hang over the threshold and engulf everyone who entered. Those who had been here before had gotten used to it and suffered it without complaint or comment. Newcomers, though, invariably made a wry face and raw comments when it descended upon them. In addition, because it was a saloon, there were the expected and more recognizable odors of malt, and hops, and ale, and stale and spilt beer.

  With all its vile smells the place was not entirely deserted because it was surprisingly cool at the long bar, while the heat outside was stifling, oppressive. Another attraction was the tangy beer, always properly chilled and refreshing when Jake served it up.

  It was late afternoon, half past four to be exact, yet the sun, that should have been waning at that hour of the day, was almost as hot and unrelenting as it had been at noontime, a brassy-yellow, flame-tinged mass of fire and heat.

  A tall, lean, young fellow was leaning against the bar with his back to the door, drinking a glass of beer. His shoulders, broad for his rangy body, sloped a little, a reflection of his tiredness. His clothes were speckled with fine alkali dust he had picked up on the trail. His hat was faded and weather-beaten and had long ago lost its original shape. His light flannel shirt was unbuttoned at the throat and minus a button about midway down, and his levis and his boots were worn looking. His face and neck were tanned, almost bronzed, and his big hands were leathery colored. He wore no holster. Instead he carried his gun thrust down into the waistband of his levis with the butt, ominously black and grip-worn, jutting out. There was a dirt smudge on one cheek bone and a smaller smear on the very tip of his nose.

  The young man shook his glass, swishing its contents about till a foamy head formed at the top of the beer, then he raised the glass to his lips and drank deeply. He put it down on the glistening bar, took off his hat and wiped his sweat-beaded forehead with his shirt sleeve, leaving a streak that looked like pencil lines that had run together. His hair, brownish at the top and blondish at the sides, was matted and in need of cutting.

  The bartender, a stocky, bald-headed and somewhat washed-out looking individual, stopped wringing out his bar rag, a torn piece of toweling, looked up, caught the youth’s eye and smiled at him weakly. “Some day, huh?” he said, and he shook his head in disgust.

  “Yeah, it sure is hot.”

  “You wanna know something?” the bartender asked, and he leaned over the bar as though he were about to impart a confidence. “I’ll take the winter any ol’ time. Yep, any time. I can always find a place where it’s warm, but I’m doggoned if I c’n always find a place to cool off.”

  There was no comment from his listener.

  “So gimme the winter, an’ whoever wants the summer c’n have it, an’ welcome.”

  “That’s all right ’cept for this. It depends on where y’are, y’know.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “You ever been in Montana or up in the Dakotas in the winter?”

  “No, but I’ve heard about the winters they have up there. They have some real beauts, huh?”

  “Beauts?” the youth repeated. “You’ve gotta go through one o’ them to really know what they’re like. Hearing about them isn’t enough.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so. But gettin’ back to this kind o’ weather, I dunno what the heat does to you, partner, but it just about ruins me. Leaves me feelin’ so blamed all in, I don’t wanna do anything ’cept lay around an’ take it easy. You look kinda beat yourself. Your shirt’s stuck to you.”

  “So’s yours, and you ain’t been out ridin’ in that sun like I have. I figure I covered more’n forty miles today.”

  The bartender’s eyes arched. “Forty miles, huh?” he repeated. “An’ in all that heat? You must be in a helluva rush to get where you’re going. If I hadn’t had to work today, y’know what I woulda done? I’da stripped right down to the skin an’ spent the day in the rain barrel.”

  The tall young fellow smiled. The bartender sniffed and made a wry face. “It’s really ripe in here today,” he announced.

  “Yeah. It hit me like a load, o’ bricks when I came in. What is it?”

  “Dunno,” the bartender answered with a lifting of his shoulders. “We keep the doors open practic’lly right around the clock, but it don’t seem to help any. Y’know something? I’ve worked in a stable, an’ I’ve shipped on a cattle boat, but I’m a son-uva-gun if either o’ them could come up to this place for downright, out-an’-out stinkin’. That’s a fact. Only time it seems to let up is in the evening. Then the place gets crowded up, an’ with just about everybody smokin’, you don’t seem to notice anything out’ve the way. Leastways, I don’t, and I don’t think anybody else does, either, because nobody ever says ’nything about it to me.”

  The youth wrinkled his nose and sniffed loudly. “Smells like sheep dip,” he said. “Only stronger and worse.”

  “Y’got me,” the bartender said. “I dunno what it is, an’ I’ve just about quit tryin’ to figure out what it could be. It hasn’t gotten me anywheres.”

  When the youth turned his head and ranged his gaze toward the rear, the bartender moved away and busied himself. There was a card game in progress at a table in a far corner of the place, and one of the four players, a wizened old fellow, laughed in a high-pitched voice and pointed with a shaky finger at the man who was sitting opposite him. The man’s white head was bowed and bobbing, his hair shaking with his movements.
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br />   “That old feller’s got the damnedest cackle when he laughs,” the bartender said, and the youth glanced at him over his shoulder. The bartender shook his head. “Them ol’ timers, they haven’t got a whole buck between the lot o’ them, but they don’t let that bother ’em. They play high. On paper, of course. But they go at it like they expected to settle up some day. The feller who fell asleep, his name’s Matt Pollard. He must be about eighty. The gent doin’ the cacklin’ is Lafe Watkins. Nobody knows for sure how old he is, but I’m willing to bet he ain’t such a helluva lot younger’n Matt is. He falls asleep, too, when he’s losing. When he wakes up an’ stays awake like he is now, you know the cards are runnin’ his way. Funny, huh?” In another corner of the saloon, directly under one of the swinging ceiling lamps, a dark-complected man, with a thin face and long, slender fingers, was sitting alone and toying with a deck of cards. He shuffled them expertly, dealt out four hands, looked at each hand in turn, then he scooped up the cards and shuffled them again.

  The bartender followed the youth’s eyes. “If you’re well-heeled,” he said, wiping the bar and swishing the rag around the youth’s glass, “and you think your luck’s good, Doc’s the feller who can change it for you. Sky’s the limit, in case you’re interested.”

  “Nope,” the youth said.

  The bartender shrugged. “Just thought I’d mention it,” he said mildly. He slung the bar rag away, and it fell with a splash into a pail of water. “Doc owns this place. He took over from Wes Canaday about three months ago. Wes only had the place about a month when Doc came in, looked around an’ made Wes an offer. Wes snapped it up an’ sold out to him an’ took off. In the three years I’ve been tendin’ bar here, I’ve had ten bosses.”