Boomer

by Clifton Adams

  The steps were closer now. With his back against the far wall, Grant could hear the gunman's heavy breathing as he stood at the dugout's entrance. Only one lone thought circled like a soaring hawk in Grant's mind—why did Lloyd want to kill him? A gunman killed for money, not for the mere pleasure of it. Why had the killer gone to all this trouble, stalking him through the storm, to shoot him down from ambush?

  Suddenly the dugout itself was a storm of violence as Lloyd fired two fast rounds blindly through the doorway, then stalked into the room. Grant glimpsed Dagget's grimace of pain as he tried to shift to a firing position.

  Lloyd saw it, too, and in the same split second wheeled to fire at Dagget when a single explosion of Grant's .45 drove the gunman against the wall. The killer's face was a twisted picture of amazement as he dropped his own revolver and clawed at his chest.

  Lloyd was dead before he fell to the dirt floor, before the sound of Grant's shot had ceased to reverberate around the walls of the dugout. And in the sudden silence that followed, Grant stood heavily with the smoking pistol held lax in his hand.

  “Why?” he asked, his voice strange and leaden in his own ears.

  And Dagget, who had met death face to face only a few seconds before, wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his wind-breaker. “Did Lloyd know about this hideout of yours?” he said at last.

  Grant shook his head. “Not unless Valois told him.” Then he turned, his gaze clashing with Dagget's, and suddenly they were thinking the same thing. “Valois...”

  The marshal sighed. “It looks like it.” Suddenly he laughed, but the sound was harsh. “You never know what goes on inside a man's head; experience is a poor teacher in that respect. There it was against my nose all the time, and I couldn't see it. I couldn't get my mind off Farley, I guess. He had a top lease on that land; he was the logical one to start trouble. And not only Farley. You were in the picture, too, standing to get rich by getting rid of the old man and marrying his daughter. Or you could have been tied up with Farley some way.” He shrugged. “But I never paid enough attention to Turk Valois.”

  Grant stared at the marshal as though he had never seen the man before. Gone now was Dagget's savagery, and in its place was cold, machinelike calculation, as efficient and unfeeling as a Chinese abacus.

  “I was looking for a man greedy for money,” the marshal went on quietly, ticking his thoughts off to himself. “I was thinking all along of that lease of Zack Muller's and how much money a good well would bring.” He squinted up at Grant. “I rode into Kiefer that day looking for a bank robber and ran into a murder. Bank robbers—usually they're greedy for money, but there was something I overlooked.”

  He motioned with his revolver. “Close the door. We'll have to go on waiting here until the search party finds us.”

  But Grant didn't move. “What was it that you overlooked?”

  “They say hate and love are cut from the same cloth, they're that close to being the same thing. I figured it was a simple thing when Turk hired on for the Mullers, helped them out with workers, deliberately putting himself on Farley's black list. I figured he was still stuck on Rhea.”

  “He is,” Grant said steadily. “I've seen the way he looks at her.”

  But the marshal shook his head. “You're forgetting what I said about the two being cut from the same cloth—love and hate. Maybe he didn't know which it was. But it's my guess that Valois killed Zack Muller. It's my guess, too, that Kirk Lloyd was working for Turk.”

  Grant's frown deepened. “It was Turk who went to Kiefer and got Lloyd to take the job.”

  “And it was Turk, probably, who sent Lloyd gunning for you this morning,” Dagget said wearily. “Now shut the door before we both freeze.”

  But that single, circling question was still in Grant's mind and he could not rid himself of it, could not rest because of it. “But why? Valois and I got along all right. Why would he want to kill me?”

  “I intend to ask Valois about that,” Dagget said, shrugging. And he started to motion again toward the door when Grant raised his revolver with studied deliberateness.

  “I'll have to go back on my word, Marshal.”

  Dagget blinked, then retired once more behind his mask of anger. “Walk through that doorway and I'll shoot you, Grant.”

  “That's a chance I'll have to take.”

  “Don't make yourself a worse fool than you already are!” the marshal snarled. “Even if you did escape this dugout, I'd catch you. Sooner or later I'd catch you, if it's the last thing I ever did!”

  They studied each other like two wolves, and at last Grant said, “Yes, I know. But I'm going anyway. If Valois would try to have me killed, there's no telling what else he's got in mind. If he's that full of hate, the least he'll do is try to ruin the Muller well. When Kirk Lloyd doesn't come back, Valois is going to know that something went wrong...”

  He paused for a moment, then turned toward the door. “I'm going to stop him before he carries out the rest of his plan, Dagget—if you don't shoot me in the back as I walk out of here.”

  He walked out of the dugout, purling the stockade door into place from the outside. Dagget did not shoot.

  About fifty yards below the dugout Grant found Lloyd's horse tied up in a stand of scrub oak. As he climbed painfully up to the saddle a dazzling sun began to appear over the edge of the rolling, snow-softened prairie. A new day was beginning. Grant pulled his hat down on his forehead and turned the horse toward Sabo—he hoped this day would turn out better than the last one.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  TOPPING THE RIM of Glenn Basin the new oil field looked clean and sterile beneath its cover of glistening snow. The endless chain of freighters had commenced again like some bright, moving ribbon thrown down among the derricks. And from that great distance the derricks themselves looked like a toy forest of Christmas trees, standing straight and serene, their hard angles softened and rounded now with a frosting of glittering ice.

  Everything about the scene seemed quiet and peaceful-even Sabo looked clean and white under the snow—and for a moment Grant almost forgot how much greed and violence lay before him in that derrick-studded saucer.

  He rode obliquely down from the rim, his head pulled deep into the collar of his windbreaker. The pain in his shoulder was like a small fire blown to white heat, but Dagget's bandage had stopped the bleeding, and stiffness had not yet had time to set in. Anyway, the pain was a secondary thing now, crowded to the back of his consciousness by more pressing thoughts.

  He rode on, circling Sabo, keeping to the ridges and high ground as much as possible, watching for the search party that would soon be starting out to look for Dagget.

  Now he could see the tall white cottonwoods that marked Slush Creek's course across the basin, and soon he could make out the Muller derrick on the other side standing tall and proud, the construction of the crown block just begun.

  He approached the lease from downstream at a shallow crossing, and the ice cracked like rifle shots as he urged the reluctant animal into the freezing water. From the other side he could see the dark smoke streaming up from the dugout's chimney and from the two stovepipes of the bunkhouse, but the lease itself seemed deserted.

  Slowly, like a tired old man, he climbed down from the saddle and tied Lloyd's horse in some brush behind the shack. Beyond this point he had no plan. His only aim had been to return to the lease, and now that he was here he was not sure what to do next.

  Then, between the naked girts and sway braces of the derrick he saw a man come out of the belt house and swing under the derrick floor to the cellar. The working crew— the rig builders and roustabouts—were still in the bunkhouse waiting out the tail end of the storm.

  All but one man, who worked alone under the floor of the icy derrick. A big man wearing a loud mackinaw and a flap-eared cap, a man who moved with the litheness of a mountain cat, a man who nursed a consuming anger....

  Grant felt the hand of caution touch him as he swung wide behind th
e dugout and headed toward the derrick on the windward side of the belt house. He could not silence his approach on that crackling crust of snow and there was no use trying. He had his revolver in his hand as he stepped into the sheet-iron belt house which housed the huge band wheel, and he could almost feel the rigidity of the sudden silence from beneath the derrick floor.

  “Is that you, Lloyd?”

  Grant moved as quietly as possible past the band wheel and newly installed sand reel.

  “Kirk?” Valois called again, sharply.

  Now Grant moved from the floor of the belt house to the derrick. He knelt, grasped the edge of the flooring timbers, and swung down to the rig's cellar. He felt his wound tear open under Dagget's bandage, and the brief knifelike pain that drove through his left side was breathtaking. But he landed on his feet in the gloom of the cellar, revolver ready and cocked, and Turk Valois wheeled sharply, a small bundle of dynamite sticks in one hand.

  And Grant said quietly, “Put it down, Valois. Lloyd won't be coming back.”

  Surprisingly, Turk Valois smiled, but the expression was as cold as the winter morning. “So Kirk failed again,” he said mildly. “I should have done the job myself.”

  “Put it down,” Grant said again, indicating the dynamite.

  But the runner held his cold smile and shook his head. “When I put it down, you'll never know it, Grant. Have you ever seen what a handful of this stuff can do at close quarters?”

  Now, his eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom, Grant saw three more dynamite bundles, like the one Valois held, lashed to three of the derrick's huge wooden legs. He tried to keep his voice calm and his eyes away from the compact packet of violent death. “So you were going to blow up the derrick,” he said.

  “You're wrong. I am going to blow up the derrick!”

  Grant thought that he was beginning to understand, and now his voice was edged with bitterness. “So you were working for Farley all along! Even when you brought us the workers. When you hired on yourself. You were doing it for Farley, seeing to it that the Mullers lost their lease.”

  The runner's mouth twisted with sudden hatred. “I wouldn't spit on Farley! What I do, I do for myself.” Then he smiled again, as suddenly and coldly as before. “You don't understand that, do you, Grant? A saddle bum like you, a hard-scrabble farmer—you wouldn't know about pride, would you? Pride is the most important thing in the world to some men.”

  Like Dagget, Grant found it hard to believe that a man could do what Valois had done for any reason other than greed. But the truth was in Valois' eyes. If he had never told the truth before, he was telling it now.

  “I see,” Grant said heavily. “But is pride worth dying for?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn't know exactly why, but he did know, instinctively, that now was the time to bring Valois to a test. And he said tensely, “All right, drop the dynamite, Valois. Throw it at me—now—before I take it away from you.”

  The runner's eyes widened as Grant took one step forward. Then another. He drew his arm back and shouted, “I'll do it!” His forehead glistened with the effort, but something inside him would not let him loosen his deathlike grip on the dynamite. He whirled away and grabbed frantically for his revolver.

  Grant shouted hoarsely, but he was already too late, for there was a kind of insane rage in the runner's eyes, and as the muzzle cleared his waistband, Grant set himself grimly and fired.

  The tremendous impact of the bullet slammed Valois against the clay wall of the cellar, grasping death in both hands. He stared blankly, letting the .45 slip slowly from his fingers and fall to the ground. Grant stood frozen, knowing that he could do nothing, watching with a kind of terrible fascination as the runner's fingers began to loosen on the explosive.

  Slowly, almost gracefully, Valois began to fall, his glazed eyes fixed on the dynamite, and in some fragmentary way he seemed to sense and fear the packet's violent potential. And even as he fell to the ground himself, he hugged the small bundle close to his body, taking the shock of the fall on his shoulder.

  Grant felt that all the strength had been sapped from him; he was an old man, his knees weak. He took one deep breath and thought bleakly of what Dagget had said about love and hate, but he guessed that he would never understand completely.

  He grasped the edge of the derrick floor and with the last of his strength climbed out of the cellar. As if from a great distance he could hear the crunch of several boots on the packed snow, and the sound of excited voices, mellow and bell-like in the dazzling winter morning.

  At last he became aware of the warm flow along his side and the numbness of his shoulder, and wondered vacantly why there was no pain. He knew in an abstract way that his wound had opened under Dagget's bandage and that blood and life were running out of him, but now even that seemed very unimportant.

  He took one reckless step from the derrick floor and sprawled face down in the soft snow—and that was the last he remembered for a long time.

  Shortly after noon that day four men brought Jim Dagget into Doc Lewellen's sickroom on a stretcher made of saddle blankets and trimmed saplings. As always, the marshal seethed in his perpetual anger, roundly cursing the stretcher bearers for their clumsiness and old Lewellen for reeking sourly of rotgut whisky. But when the doc ripped the trouser leg up past the knee and began probing the humped discolored flesh around the broken bone, Dagget fell abruptly into perverse silence. He did not make a sound as Lewellen gleefully sawed off his boot with a bloodstained scalpel, but when the old man grasped the leg with both hands and rasped together the ragged ends of bone, great beads of sweat rolled down the marshal's rock-hard face.

  A few feet away Grant watched the operation from one of Lewellen's sagging army cots. After Lewellen had set and bound the leg in packing-crate splints, Dagget said hoarsely, “Go find Ben Farley. Tell him I want to see him. Now.”

  The old doctor scowled, but he didn't have the spirit to fight the fire in Dagget's eyes. At last he nodded, pulled on his soiled swallowtail coat, and went out. Only after Lewellen was out of the room did the marshal permit himself to look at Grant on the nearby cot.

  “So you had to come back!” he said, almost snarling.

  Grant smiled. “Yes, I came back.”

  Dagget pulled himself up on one elbow, breathing hard with the effort. Angry words were on the tip of his tongue, but in a strange, weary gesture he choked them down again and lay back on the cot, his eyes closed. “They say you told them where to find me.”

  Grant nodded but said nothing.

  “And they say you killed Turk Valois.”

  “Not until he started his draw. He was setting dynamite to the legs of the derrick—he was going to blow it up.”

  The marshal breathed heavily but said nothing more for a long time. At last old Lewellen returned, tramping into the sickroom with the blunt, scowling figure of Ben Farley in his wake. Slowly, Dagget opened his eyes and gazed flatly at the oilman's face.

  “Look here,” Ben started harshly, “I don't know what you've got in mind, Dagget, but you can't tie me to any of this trouble!”

  “Not even the shooting at the railroad station?” the marshal asked, almost gently. But he went on before Farley could reply. “I didn't call you here to tie you with any of the past trouble; it's the future I'm thinking about now. How much time have the Mullers got before your top lease goes into effect?”

  The oilman's frown deepened. “Four days. What're you getting at, Dagget?”

  But the marshal turned to Grant this time. “What kind of shape is the rig in?”

  “It's ready to spud in,” Grant said carefully, “except to raising the crown pulley.”

  The marshal nodded and spoke quietly, almost to himself. “That's no more than a day's job, so the Mullers should get spudded in in plenty of time to hold their lease, unless”—and lie looked directly at Farley—“unless something happens.”

  Farley's eyes narrowed. “A lot of things can happen on an oil rig—
sometimes at the last minute.”

  Dagget's mouth curved slightly, but the expression was diluted with fatigue, the smile betraying only a small part of its old savagery. “Nothing else is going to happen at the Muller rig,” he said flatly. “Turk Valois is dead. Kirk Lloyd's dead. Grant's under arrest. So that leaves only you, Farley, if anything happens...”

  The oilman's face burned a deep red. “Don't threaten me, Dagget!”

  “I'm not threatening,” the marshal put in quietly. “If anything else happens on that lease I'll see you in prison, even if I have to he under oath in federal court to do it.” He gazed expressionlessly at Farley, then closed his eyes, sighing. “That's all I've got to say. Now get out.”

  After Farley had gone, after the storm clouds began to recede with the sound of the oilman's angry tramping on the sickroom stairs, Dagget opened his bloodshot eyes again and gazed at Grant. “One day soon,” he said vacantly, “maybe before we get out of this sickroom, the president will take up his pen and sign the paper that will make Oklahoma a state. Then every town and county will have its own elected law; the responsibility will be on their shoulders then—and I can't say I'm sorry.”

  He grinned faintly at the puzzled expression in Grant's face. “I'm just a man, after all. Does that surprise you?”

  But Grant's mind had drifted on past the marshal to other things, and a core of hardness grew inside him as he said, “I guess nothing will ever surprise me again.”

  “Valois?” Dagget said quietly. “A lawman is supposed to get used to such things, but he never does. I guess Turk was crazy about the Muller girl, after all.” And he blinked, thinking back on what he had said. “Yes, that's the word for it. Crazy. He was a proud man and couldn't stand failure. He couldn't stand the idea that people were laughing at him because a girl had thrown him over. So he had to hit back. Somehow, he had to bring Rhea down to his own level—he had to ruin her, the way she had ruined him—I can imagine just how Turk must have had it figured.”

  “I can't,” Grant said. “I can't see why he killed Zack Muller. If he's the one that did kill him.”