Abruptly, in a kind of bleak panic, he shoved himself to his feet and attacked the icy creek bank, still dragging Dagget's bulky weight with one hand. He crashed through the tall weeds standing like giant upside-down icicles in front of the dugout, and shoved open the stockade door.
Only after several minutes of rubbing his hands before the fire did he realize that he had left Dagget in the open doorway. He pulled the marshal inside and blocked the opening again.
“Dagget!”
Water from the thawing snow rolled down the marshal's face like giant tears. At last Dagget opened his eyes and glanced coldly at Grant. “This is quite a place you've got here.”
“It'll have to do.” Quickly he examined the marshal's leg and saw that the splints had held. “I'll pull you over to the fire; it won't he long before you're thawed out.”
Dagget sighed, a strange, hard cast on his blunt features. “Just a minute; there's something I have to do first.” Propping himself up on one elbow, he reached into his wind-breaker and drew his revolver. “You're under arrest, Grant. Let me have your gun.”
Grant felt himself go rigid. “You don't waste any time, do you?”
Dagget's voice was bleak, without tone or timbre. “I warned you how it was going to be. I didn't ask you to save my life.”
Grant's voice was almost a snarl. “I should have left you out there to freeze!”
“Maybe... but you didn't. I'm still alive and I'm still a deputy U. S. marshal.” He motioned with the muzzle of his revolver. “You're under arrest and I want your gun.”
“And if I don't give it to you?”
“You will, because you know I mean business.”
The day was an endless, howling eternity. Grant kept just enough wood in the fireplace to drive back the icy chill and warned himself to stay awake and alert. Sooner or later Dagget would have to sleep; eventually he would have to give in to exhaustion and pain.
But the marshal showed no signs of giving in. Against the far wall in the dark shadows, his face expressionless, the color of yellow clay, he sat hour after hour, the revolver handy at his side. As the day dragged on, Grant became acutely aware of his own hunger, the growling and sour nervousness of his stomach.
“I brought no provisions here,” he said at last, watching Dagget's face. “We've got nothing to eat.”
The marshal shrugged faintly. “The storm won't last more than a day or so. Then somebody from Sabo or Kiefer will come looking for me.”
“We're snowed in. How are they going to find us?”
Dagget shook his head as if to say he'd worry about that when the time came.
Once more the dugout became heavy with silence. Snow from the outside had clogged the chimney opening and the heavy, pulpwood smoke forced Grant to cut the fire down to a small finger of flame. Dagget didn't seem to mind the cold. Nothing seemed to disturb him; discomfort, or pain, or hunger. Hour after hour his eyes stared flatly at Grant, his face cast in a yellowish mold of clay.
Those eyes and the monotony of the silence began to work on Grant's nerves. At last he walked to the door, punched a bit of snow and ice from a crack, and peered outside.
“The storm seems to be slacking off,” he said to himself.
Dagget grunted. “Northers like this don't last long.”
Grant remained at the door for a long time studying the blue-white landscape through the crack. The sun had set hours ago, but it was almost as light as day outside. The savagery of the wind was now tamed, and the swirling snow fell softly. By morning the storm would be completely over. The Creek Nation would begin digging itself out, and search parties would be formed in Sabo and Kiefer to look for Dagget.
I'm lost, Grant thought to himself. Everything is lost. From the minute I walked into that Joplin bank and threw down on Ortway, the world started coming apart at the seams.
Strangely he did not feel angry. Perhaps there had been too much anger all at once and it had blown itself out, like the storm. Then, from the far side of the dugout, Dagget asked, “Why?”
Frowning, faintly surprised, Grant turned away from the door.
“It's my professional curiosity,” the marshal said dryly. “I'd like to know why you robbed that banker. Why you took exactly twenty-five hundred dollars, not a penny more or less. Why you didn't spend the money after you got it, except to buy a horse and make the payment to Battle.”
Grant returned slowly to his place beside the fire. “What difference does it make?”
“None, more than likely. As I said, it's my professional curiosity.”
And Grant thought back to that day in Joplin which now seemed so long ago, and he tried to recall the anger that he had felt for Ortway at the time. But that anger, too, was strangely missing, and Ortway was a shadowy figure in the past. He said thoughtfully, almost to himself:
“It's a funny thing. It seemed so important then, but now I can hardly remember anything about it.”
The marshal shifted his position with great care. “You were a farmer, weren't you?”
“I had a farm. There's a difference. Most of my life was spent tramping from one place to the other; I was fifteen when I rode drag on my first cattle drive.” At that moment, glad that the silence had been broken, he could almost forget that Dagget was his enemy. “It's a funny thing,” he said again. “All those years I spent on the trail I thought of just one thing. Owning my own land and being my own boss. And I thought I never wanted to see another beef steer again, so I saved my trail money to buy a farm.”
He shook his head. “But I was no farmer. I guess I would have lost the place anyway, even if Ortway hadn't tricked me out of it, but I didn't think of that in Joplin that day. All I could think about was getting my money back—the twenty-five hundred dollars that Ortway had tricked me out of....”
Dagget sat stolidly, like some squat stone idol, but his eyes were slitted, thoughtful. “There's one more thing I'd like to know. Why did you drag me out of the storm?”
“I wish I knew!”
Dagget surprised him by grinning—that same savage expression, completely devoid of humor, that Grant had come to know so well. “I'll tell you why you did it! You figured you could make a deal, didn't you? You knew your string had run out, and getting me in your debt was the only chance you had!”
To Grant's own surprise he failed to respond to the marshal's prodding. “You always see the bad side of a man, don't you?”
“It's the business I'm in.”
“And in your business a man never saves a life without selfish reason?”
“That's about it.” Dagget still held his grin, but only with his mouth. His eyes were slitted and cautious, and he shifted again, grimacing. He rested against the wall, sweat beading his forehead, but he never took his eyes from Grant's face.
“Tell me about Rhea Muller,” he said at last.
Grant looked at him flatly, not with anger but with quiet hatred, then turned back to the door.
Dagget could not let him alone. In the back of his searching mind all was not exactly as it should have been, the pattern did not fit the material. The marshal was a blunt, calculating man and did not like subtleties. And there were shadings and overtones to this man who called himself Joe Grant that he could not fully understand, and this angered him.
“I guess,” he said harshly, “you must be pretty stuck on the Muller girl. Well, you're not the first one. Turk Valois had himself a bad case up in Bartlesville, but she threw him over, they say, when Turk lost his money.”
He fixed his eyes on Grant's back and saw it go rigid. Dagget grinned again and went on with his probing. “Rhea's got kind of a reputation with the wildcatters; she's got a good head and plenty of gumption. Why did she hire a hard case like you, Grant?”
“She hired Kirk Lloyd, didn't she?”
“That's different. Kirk's a gun shark, but he's not wanted by the law. Not in this country, anyway.” He shook his head. “But why would she hire a wanted man—it was a fool move:, and Rhea Muller's
no fool.”
Abruptly Grant wheeled away from the door. “What are you trying to say?”
“I was just thinking maybe you've got the girl figured wrong. Maybe she really liked you from the first; maybe she still does. It's funny, isn't it, you not trusting her, and her with too much pride to do anything about it?”
Dagget's eyes almost flamed with intensity, then suddenly he sank back against the wall, breathing heavily. “That was hitting below the belt, wasn't it? Well, I fight that way when I have to.”
Grant's anger returned, a cold, compressed thing, and his words were as brittle as the ice that crackled in the trees outside the dugout. “You must enjoy your work, Marshal! Catching a man isn't enough for you, is it? You've got to build him up in his mind, show him a picture of everything he's ever wanted, and then grab it away!”
Exhaustion and pain were beginning to show on the marshal's face; the mask of clay was beginning to melt and sag at the corners of his hard mouth. “You won't believe it—but I don't hate you, Grant. But I had to see your face naked, unmasked. I had to see what you looked like after having the ground cut out from under you.” He sighed, and years of fatigue were behind the gesture. “I had to be sure in my own mind that you didn't kill Zack Muller.”
Words would not form in Grant's mouth; he could only stare.
Dagget seemed vaguely amused. “Did you think I'd forgotten how the girl's father was killed?”
“You thought I did it?”
“Had it done, maybe. A hard case arriving from nowhere, going to work for the Mullers, getting mixed up with the old man's daughter. Rhea was the old man's legal heir; she'll get all the money if the well comes in. Your money, if you'd married her.”
“You're crazy!” Grant hissed. “Rhea wouldn't marry me if I was the last man in the Territory!” Dagget shrugged. “Did you ask her?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GRANT LAY RIGIDLY on his thin blanket before the fireplace. Outside, a shifting wind slithered over the dugout roof and trees clashed their icy branches. A coyote ventured forth into the night and barked forlornly. But inside the dugout the silence was almost a tangible thing, with only the crackling of a small bark fire to break it.
Dagget, wrapped in his dark shadows against the wall, had not moved for a long time, and Grant listened intently to the marshal's measured breathing. He could not see whether Dagget was asleep; he could only guess at that. And hope.
Grant lifted himself quietly to his elbow, then to his knees, peering steadily into the darkness. Without a horse there was no hope of escape, but there might be a chance of bargaining with the search party when it came—providing he could get the revolvers away from the marshal now.
An inch at a time, hardly breathing, he made his way across the dirt floor until at last he could see Dagget's shapeless hulk slouched forward at the corner, the broken leg stretching straight out. Now he paused, taking one last deep breath before reaching across the marshal's body to where the pistols lay. Then, as he started the movement...
“That's far enough, Grant!”
Out of the darkness the muzzle of a .45 loomed in Grant's face so close that he could smell the oil on the blued steel. “That's far enough!” Dagget said again, harshly. And Grant's hope melted like wax—the last hope he had.
“It's just as well,” Dagget said, faintly amused. “An escape now would only get you killed.”
Grant had no words in him. He rested for a moment on his hands and knees, crouching, but he had no thought of springing into the muzzle of Dagget's revolver. It had been a faint hope at best.
He got to his feet slowly and paced the dugout floor, and the only sound that came from Dagget was the steady, measured breathing of one who is neither fully asleep nor awake.
Grant told himself with some bitterness that he might as well face it. Like a bulldog, Dagget had his teeth in his throat and would hold on to the death.
At last Grant went to the door and peered once more through the crack and saw that daylight was not far off. His stomach was empty and sour, his nerves lay on the top of his skin. Pretty soon the searching party would come, he thought, and Dagget's job would be over.
He held that thought in his mind, concentrating on the trial, the conviction, the prison. He was afraid to let his mind go free, for he knew that it would return to Rhea.
But he could not keep from remembering what Dagget had implied in his own brutal way.
Did you ask her?
And he realized now that he had not asked her anything. He had been ready to believe anything Turk Valois and others had said against her, but he had not bothered to ask what she thought about it herself.
Then Dagget, as though he had been reading his thoughts, said dryly, “Maybe she'll wait for you.” His voice had a knowing quality to it. “They've been known to wait—for the right man.”
But at the moment Grant was more interested in the marshal than in what he was saying. Dagget was a strange one—cold as winter, humorless, tough as whang leather. It was faintly shocking to see behind that exterior some semblance of human emotion, no matter how slight. And Grant knew, in some uncertain way, that Dagget was merely doing his job and did not hate him. But he was wrong about Rhea. Rhea waited for nothing or no one. She had set her ambitions long ago and her course was as inevitable as a bullet's flight.
Then, as they studied each other silently across the gloom of the dugout, they heard a sound that did not blend with the passing storm. Dagget grunted with pleased surprise, his ears turned sharply to the crunch of hoofs on the crusted snow.
The marshal was thinking of a search party from Sabo, but Grant had the sudden final hope that the rider might be Turk Valois.
“Open the door,” Dagget said quietly, “but go no farther.”
Grant peered quickly through the crack but could not see the horseman. Then he began kicking away the packed earth at the bottom of the door, and a deluge of powdery snow spilled into the dugout as he pulled the door away from the facing.
“I wouldn't like to kill you,” Dagget said in his measured voice, “but I will if you don't do exactly as I say. Call out; let them know where we are.”
Grant swung half around and saw the marshal's revolver aimed directly at his back, and he knew that Dagget would be as good as his word. Then he called out, his voice strangely muffled on that blanket of snow, like shouting into a feather pillow.
There was no answer, but he still heard the sound of hoofs as a horse stamped nervously on the other side of the creek. “Call out again,” Dagget said, and Grant took a careful step forward, framing himself in the doorway. He cupped his hands around his mouth, but before a sound could escape his throat he sensed, rather than heard, the scream of the bullet. And then, almost instantly, he heard the sodden, matter-of-fact report of the rifle as the slug caught him under his left arm, spinning him around like some giant hand and slamming him to the dirt floor.
There was no pain at first, only shock, and as he lay on the floor he turned numbly to look at the marshal's amazed face. All color drained from Dagget's face as he shoved himself away from the wall and began crawling to Grant's side. Swearing savagely, he pulled Grant over on his back, ripped open the windbreaker, and probed for the wound with his blunt fingers.
“Who was it?” he demanded angrily, as though Grant had got himself shot on purpose in order to make his job more difficult.
“I don't know. I couldn't see.”
Now the pain was beginning to come, a bright flame that started under his left shoulder, reaching up to the base of his skull. The marshal probed harder, keeping his eyes on the dugout's open doorway.
“Who'd want to kill you?”
“I don't know. Farley, maybe.”
Dagget swore again and tried to straighten his own injured leg. “That bushwhacker knew just where you were. He was waiting across the creek for you to show yourself in the doorway. Farley couldn't have known about this dugout, could he?”
The first flare of pain had lessen
ed now as a great ache spread out over the left side of his torso. “Farley couldn't have known. Turk Valois told me about the place just before I got away from the lease.”
Dagget's eyes slitted and his anger became something much more subtle and thoughtful. But he only said, “The bullet went right through the soft part of your shoulder; no bones broken that I can find.”
Now they heard the horse again, heading downstream on the other side of the creek, and Dagget began stripping the windbreaker and shirt away from Grant's shoulder. “Whoever it is, likely he'll head for the downstream crossing and come back to see what kind of job he did.”
With quiet expertness the marshal ripped off the shirt sleeve and bound it about the wound to stop the bleeding. “Do I get your word that you won't try to run if I give you your gun?”
Grant grinned thinly. “You get it... for whatever it's worth.”
Dagget didn't like it, but there was little he could do about it now. One wounded man stood little chance against a killer who'd stoop to bushwhacking.
Now, with a revolver in Grant's right hand, his left side didn't seem to hurt so much. His pain became bewilderment, and the bewilderment anger, as he dragged himself shakily to his feet. He helped Dagget hack to his place in the shadows, listening to the sound of hoofs returning on the dugout side of the creek. Now he heard the screech of cold leather as the rider dismounted, and the slow, careful steps as he approached the front of the dugout. “Grant!”
The voice was flat and toneless, and Grant groped In his memory for the face that went with that voice. He glanced at Dagget, and the marshal was grinning with even more savagery than usual.
“Lloyd,” he said quietly. “Kirk Lloyd.”
A prickle of warning went up Grant's back. He had faced this killer once and survived, but he felt that his luck had run out. You don't give a man like Lloyd a second chance and live to tell about it. Any man who will shoot from ambush is deadly—but Lloyd...
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