by Alan Lemay
Lew Gordon stood at the bar of the Red Dog Saloon. The hard line of his jaw was blurred by a silver shag of whisker now, and his mustache was silver, and his hair; but the clear blue eyes were unbelievably young, younger than Bill Roper had ever seen them before. His hands were folded quietly, one elbow on the bar; and so greatly did this silver-haired man dominate the space in which he stood that it was minutes before Roper realized that there was a bartender there at all.
"So you came," Lew Gordon said.
"Of course, Lew. Didn't you know I would come?"
"In one way," Lew Gordon said, "I'm glad you came. I want to say a couple of things to you, Billy, my boy."
"Thorpe," Bill Roper said - "Is Thorpe coming here?"
"I sent for him," Gordon said. "Oh, yes, he'll come."
"How many with him?" Bill Roper said sharply.
"Do you care much, Billy?"
"No, Lew; I don't care."
"I done something wrong, Billy," Lew Gordon said. "You was right and I was wrong. You fought Him; I tried to smooth things out. I'm glad I've lived to tell you this: you was right and I was wrong!"
"Lew-" Bill began.
"I should have killed him, Billy," Lew Gordon said. It was strange how young Lew Gordon's eyes could look, clear and blue under silver bronze. "I should have killed him, Billy, long ago when I first knew he killed your Dad...."
A thrust like the vitality of the prairie itself came up into Bill Roper, who thought he had resigned himself to death.
"Lew! What are you telling me?"
"Dusty knew," Lew Gordon said. "Dry Camp Pierce knows; I don't think anybody else knows. You remember a pinto horse, Billy? By the pinto horse we knew it was Ben Thorpe killed your father, on the Old Sedalia Trail-"
"All these years," Bill Roper said, "all these years you've known that, and you let this man live"
"I know I was wrong," Lew Gordon said. Yet, somehow he did not seem unhappy. "Always I stood for law, for order the decent thing, the thing that would build this country into something my kid could live in. But-I guess it wasn't meant to be. I should have swung with you when you tied into him in Texas, and igain when you tied into him in the north! But I aini to square it all up today!"
"You mean-?" said Bill Roper.
"He's coming to meet me here."
"With how many men?" Roper asked again.
"What does it matter?" Lew poured himself a drink.
Outside, on the board walk of Sundance, were sounding the heels of approaching men...
"To your Dad," Lew Gordon said, "and in apology to you." Roper, who had ridden with Tex Long and Dave Shannon, had never seen a lighter or more carefree fight than shone then in the eyes of Lew Gordon, under those swiftly silvered brows.
"I can kill him," Bill Roper said, "I can kill him even if I die."
Lew Gordon's face changed swiftly. Suddenly he was the indomitable old man whom Bill Roper had always known.
"Ben Thorpe is for me," he said.
"How can you figure that, when he killed my Dad"
"This is for me," Lew Gordon said again, "to make up for the quiet years..."
And Bill Roper, looking deep into the young eyes of that ageing man, finally said, "Okay."
The bartender said suddenly, nervously loud, "You gents want the same?"
It was as if neither of them had noticed him before. They saw him now, bald-headed, soft with standing, broken out of his sleepiness by a situation which he did not understand.
"The same," Lew Gordon said.
And then the door darkened, and the approaching heels on the board walk were silent because they had arrived. The man Lew Gordon had sent for had come...
It was Ben Thorpe who stepped quickly through the door, and one pace to the left, so that his gun, already drawn, swept the bar. It was Walk Lasham who followed him through the door, stepping one pace to the right, so that the door was clear for the three unknown gunfighters who tried to enter all at once.
Walk Lasham, dark, lean, and dour, with his strain of Indian blood showing strong in his gaunted face, stood with his wide shoulders bowed in a suggestion of a crouch. Ben Thorpe, whom Bill Roper had not seen since the death of Dusty King, looked just as Roper remembered him to look; a hundred nights, in restless dreams, he had seen that big squareset frame, the big and mask-like face with its saddleleathered skin, the unreadable but faintly malevolent stare of the heavy-lidded eyes. Thorpe looked a little older now, a little heavier than Roper remembered, but that was all.
"Draw, Ben," Lew Gordon said} and then all guns spoke at once.
In the blast of gunfire that followed, no man could tell what happened but Roper knew that all guns seemed to converge upon Lew Gordon, and frantically he threw the lash of his fire at Thorpe, at Lasham, at the unknown men at the door.
For a moment the guns spoke in a smashing roar, and the powder smoke stung Bill Roper's nostrils; and then suddenly there was silence again, after the manner of gunfire, which begins abruptly with a lash of savage destruction, and ends again abruptly, in the same way.
Thorpe and Lasham both were down as that gunsmoke cleared, and those other strangers in the doorway had disappeared, except for a boot heel that dragged almost out of sight, and then was still.
Beside the bar of the Red Dog Saloon Lew Gordon still stood. Perhaps it was his bullet in the heart of Ben Thorpe no man would ever know.
He turned now, slowly, elbow upon the bar, and looked at Bill Roper.
"Thanks, son," he said. The hand that held the heavy forty-five sagged deliberately, then dropped the gun; it made a strange clatter upon the unswept boards of the floor. Then Lew Gordon's knees broke and he went down, and Bill Roper caught him as he fell.
Thin and tinny across the squalid town, across the thawing prairie, the church bell was ringing-a makeshift church bell ringing, on Sunday morning, as Lew Gordon died.
HEY buried Lew Gordon at Miles City. That dot upon the northern prairie marked, in effect, the farthest north reached by that great and dramatic upthrust of power which had welled up out of Texas, carving new trails, opening new vast countries, driving herds unnumbered, under the name of King-Gordon. Jody thought that her father would have wanted to lie there.
After that was done with, Jody went back to Ogallala.
All through the spring news kept trickling in. A swift bankruptcy was sweeping Thorpe's loosely grouped organizations. Wiped out of Texas by the so-called Rustlers' War, broken in the north by the Great Raid the shaken power of Ben Thorpe crumbled fast, now that Thorpe himself was dead. A once unbeatable organization, powerful from border to border, was going down in such utter debacle as no man could check.
And as Thorpe's power vanished into the gunsmoke in which he had died, a strange new prestige began to attach itself to the name of the man who had destroyed him. Only a little while ago Bill Roper had been an outlaw, a hunted man with a price on his head, in whose behalf few men ever dared speak a good word. But now that his enemies were down, it seemed that the whole length of the Long Trail held men who professed themselves his lifelong friends. Like coyotes after a killing, like worms after rain, Bill Roper partisans were rising up, a score here, a hundred there, where not one friend had been, during those smoky hours of his greatest need. Already men were less ready to remember what weapons he had used in fighting fire with fire than to remember simply that he had won. Three governors had issued blanket pardons for what he might or might not have done. He could have had almost any position he wanted near the top of any one of three or four of the great cattle companies. He could have had almost anything he wanted, then.
But Bill Roper where was he? Nobody seemed to know. His own raiders Tex Long, Hat Crick Tommy, Dave Shannon now swaggering wherever they pleased amid a curious acclaim, did not know. And if Dry Camp Pierce, that one most trusted of all Bill Roper's men, knew where his leader was, he held his tongue.
Jody Gordon was making every effort to find out Bill Roper's whereabouts, and she had other than personal
reasons for that. For, with the death of Lew Gordon, it suddenly appeared that Dusty King's share of King-Gordon was no longer to be withheld from the boy Dusty King had raised. By Lew Gordon's will, King-Gordon was now divided in ownership between Jody Gordon and Bill Roper himself, this same Bill Roper upon whose head King-Gordon had such a little while ago placed a tempting price! A length of red tape longer than the Long Trail itself needed to be gone through before that split legacy could be straightened out, and everywhere in the West Jody Gordon's men sought some word of Roper-without any success.
It was known that he had ridden out of Sundance; but after that no one seemed to have seen him again. There was a rumor current now that he had been desperately wounded in the gunfight at the Red Dog Bar, and that somewhere, at some unknown and unmarked place upon the prairie, Bill Roper was dead.
The weeks passed, and the new grass came on the prairie, and still there was no word. Two or three times a week, after the first spring flowers began to show, Jody Gordon rode out to the pile of stone with its wooden cross that marked Dusty King's grave, putting there little handfuls of blue Indian hyacinth and white anemone.
And then suddenly one day as she sat her horse before Dusty King's cross she knew that Bill Roper was alive, that he was near, that he had come. The notch that she had seen Bill Roper cut in the arm of Dusty's cross to mark the death of Cleve Tanner was well weathered by this time; but now, sharp and freshly cut in the opposite arm of the cross, was a second notch that had never been there before.
A choking lump rose instantaneously in Jody's throat, and she spun her pony in its tracks as instinctively her eyes swept the plain and the low hills. So freshly cut was the new notch upon the cross that it seemed Bill Roper must still be no more than a few minutes away.
In the clear light of the late afternoon she could make out every detail of the rambling little town of Ogallala, and the tower upon the house her father had built stood tall and clean, catching the sun; but nowhere was there to be seen any horseman. She turned her pony and rode home with a strange empty, gone feeling, because for a moment Bill Roper had seemed so near and now was nowhere in sight.
When she had unsaddled she went into the tall white house by the back way, and walked through it slowly, preoccupied, wondering what she should do.
Then, as she came into the front room, her hand jumped to her throat, for someone was waiting for her there - a woman who stood up as Jody came in.
For a moment Jody Gordon hardly recognized Marquita. This was partly because the westering sun was making a red blaze on the curtains behind her visitor, and Jody's eyes were not yet accustomed to the dimness within; but also because Marquita herself had changed. Marquita's black hair was drawn back from her face, very smooth and polished-looking; it made her face look thinner and sharper than Jody Gordon remembered. Only a little time had passed since they had faced each other in a remote cabin set in Montana snows, yet Marquita looked unmistakably older; and the live, sultry fire behind her dark slanting eyes was gone.
"I didn't realize," Jody said, "that you were in Ogallala."
"No, of course; I just came."
"To see me?"
"No; I'd hardly come to the sand hills for that, would I?" Jody noticed again the odd contrast between the soft, below-Rio-Grande speech and the direct American words. "I came to Ogallala because Bill Roper came."
"I see," Jody said without expression.
"No," Marquita said queerly, "you don't see. You can't possibly see. I guess that's why I'm here."
There was a little silence then, and Jody Gordon waited. Even if she had thought about it, she perhaps would not have felt it necessary to ask this woman to sit down; but Jody was not thinking about that.
"I lied to you," Marquita said. "I'm not sorry for that. I'd lie to you again, for the same reason, or for less reason. But this time it didn't do any good. So I thought I might as well tell you, since I was here."
"You lied to me?"
"I told you I was Bill Roper's girl. You natu rally thought I was at Walk Lasham's camp because Bill Roper was there." Marquita's voice sounded curiously metallic and old, without that sultry fire to back it up. "Well, that wasn't so."
"You mean you mean to say"
"You don't understand much about men," Marquita said. Suddenly, for no reason, she seemed to be on the defensive. "You don't know what it is to love a man."
Jody Gordon heard herself say, "You think I don't?"
"Do you?"
"I love him," Jody said. Her voice was quiet, but her words were startling to herself. "I love him with all my heart, and all my body, and all my soul. There can't ever be any other man for me."
"Even if he belonged to me?"
"Even if he belonged to you, or to everybody, but me."
"Well," Marquita said, "he did not belong to me, not even for one minute, in all my life. How do you think you would like that, in my place?"
"But at the Lasham camp you said-"
"I know I did. I would have got him if I could, in any way I could. I even came here because I knew he was coming here. But now I can just as well tell you it's hopeless, and I'm through. After all, I don't need to run after any man; not any more."
"You mean you're willing to let him go even if-"
"Let him go? I never had him." An odd edge of contempt came into Marquita's voice, but whether for Jody or herself was not plain. "Can't you get that through your head?" She turned toward the door impatiently; perhaps she could not remember why she had come to a meeting for which she found nothing but distaste. "I tell you I don't need your man, or any man. Ben Thorpe died broke, but Walk Lasham didn't; he was too clever for that. Walk Lasham left everything he had to me; it was Walk Lasham who was my man. I can go back to my own people now. Don't fret yourself - I haven't anything to worry about any more."
Jody said curiously, "Why did you come to me?"
"I haven't the least idea why I came." Marquita's hand was on the door latch now. "Maybe it was because I feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for you, because you are a little fool."
Jody Gordon supposed that she ought to thank Marquita for having come here, for having made the confession which she had made, but she was confused, and the words would not come. Instead she said, "Do you know where he is? Is he well? Is he safe and all right?"
Marquita's smile was mocking. "You want me to find him and send him to you?"
"I think," Jody said, "he'll come."
"Okay," Marquita said, and she pulled open the door.
It was still impossible for Jody Gordon to understand Marquita; she could not understand the guiding lines of Marquita's life, nor the moods and emotions that had pressed Marquita to choose them. Most of the episodes of Marquita's stormy career would probably have been unimaginable to Jody. Yet now Jody recognized in Marquita a certain strain of wild, hawklike gallantry.
"I want to tell you something," Jody said. "I want to tell you I appreciate-your letting me know-"
Marquita flashed a queer hard smile; there was bitterness in it, more bitterness in her smile than in her words. "Keep your thanks to yourself" Then she was gone.
After a moment Jody heard the hoofs of a team, and the wheels of the carriage in which Marquita had come-and gone-slicing the deep mud...
Yet, Bill Roper did not come.
When two days had passed a panic caught Jody Gordon, and she began to haunt the vicinity of Dusty King's cross, out on the prairie beside the trail over which Dusty King, with Bill Roper beside him, had brought those first weary herds of cattle in. She believed that Roper would not leave the Ogallala coun try without visiting once more the grave of Dusty King, for whose death he had fought the Texas Rustlers' War, and conceived Montana's Great Raid, and brought down Ben Thorpe himself, in the end.
But it was the evening of the fourth day, before Roper came.
ITTING her quiet pony beside Dusty King's pile of stone, Jody Gordon saw Roper riding toward her when he was still a long way off. Roper was not alone. Beside
him rode a little grasshoppery figure in disreputable clothes which Jody recognized as that of Dry Camp Pierce. Somehow Dry Camp had managed to rejoin his chief when the others could not. It was typical of Dry Camp that he was riding beside Bill Roper now; would always be typical, so long as both of them should live.
The two riders hesitated at the five hundred yards. Roper said something to Dry Camp Pierce and after a moment or two Dry Camp turned his horse and went back. Bill Roper came on alone. Perhaps he feared this meeting more than anything he had ridden into yet but she knew he would not turn.
It seemed to Jody Gordon that time lagged forever as Billy Roper'spony slowly approached; it seemed to her that that slow approach was characteristic of all that had happened to them delay, and delay, while wars were fought, and raids struck in, all through those smoky years in which they had been apart.
And yet, at last, when he stopped his horse beside her, and they looked at each other, there was some thing between them still, as if the smoky years themselves had built a wall.
Bill Roper said, "Hello, Jody. You're looking mighty well."
Jody said, "I'm all right."
There was a pause, curiously awkward; in the pause, Jody's horse struck at the cinch with a hind foot, tormented by an early fly.
"You didn't come to see me," Jody said.
"Well," Bill Roper said slowly "I didn't know if you'd want me to."
"Don't you know that you're half of King-Gordon? And I'm the other half"
"Jody-people like you and me can't go by things like that things like legacies and wills."