by Jack Sheriff
Chapter Nine
Cliff McClure was behind the desk in his office talking to well-oiled Dave Lee Nelson when they heard the distant snap. For an instant the sound was so faint, so insignificant, it failed to register. Then, as his subconscious went to work deep down, memories of other times and other places were stirred, rose to the surface and – still talking inconsequentially of this and that – he recalled a bone-thin gambler on a Missouri riverboat, an irate miner accusing him of cheating, a pale hand sneaking beneath a frock coat’s tails and the brittle snap of the shot that settled the argument—
‘That was a shot from a pocket pistol,’ McClure said, and sprang from his chair to reach up to the wall-hook for his gunbelt.
Nelson, who had ridden into town to see how Becky was getting on then stayed for a rare evening of relaxation, had sobered up fast, ripped the door open and was out in the street and running. McClure charged out after him, still buckling his belt, and the two men ran at an angle across the street to where the lights from the saloon spilled across to shine on the locked door of Jake Cree’s gunsmith’s shop.
From the lighted, curtained upstairs windows there was no sound. They raced into the dark alley. Drawing his gun, Nelson began clattering up the steep stairs. Behind him, pistol in his fist and cocked, McClure saw that the door to Cree’s home gaped wide. Even as they climbed towards it, a child screamed shrilly, and Nelson let out a roar of rage.
Immediately, a voice from inside the room yelled, ‘Stay back, we’ve got the woman!’
Nelson stopped on the small, square upper landing, flattened himself against the wall alongside the door, looked back helplessly at McClure.
‘That was Beebob Hawkins,’ McClure said softly. He took another cautious step upwards, held the rail as he paused with his rear foot still on the lower tread. ‘Texas Dean’ll be in there with him. Tell them you’re coming in, but first you’ll throw in your pistol.’
‘And then?’
‘You’re alone. If they see you’re unarmed, they won’t keep the woman covered. Then keep them talking, work it so they’re standing with their backs to the door. When the time’s ripe . . .’
Turning his head, Nelson hoarsely called out his name and what he was about to do. McClure couldn’t hear the reply, but Nelson took a deep breath, moved away from the wall and with an underhand throw sent his pistol sliding across the unseen room’s board floor. Then, with a mute glance down the steep stairs at McClure, he stepped into the room.
Mumbled talk, the words indistinguishable, the sense unimportant. All McClure knew was that Dave Lee Nelson was playing his part by keeping the two roughnecks occupied. That gave the lawman the slimmest of chances – but a slim chance was better than no chance, because without his intervention the woman and the young girl faced unimaginable horrors.
A stair creaked as McClure stole upwards.
The talk stopped, left a heavy silence, then picked up.
He reached the small landing, hesitated with the toes of his boots touching the pool of lamplight flooding from the room; watched that light on the boards, the gross, elongated shadows, from those shifting shapes tried to determine the position of Nelson, the woman and the girl, the two men.
And shook his head at the impossibility of the task.
Inside the room, Beebob Hawkins said, ‘We aim to stop Will Sagger, so his kid sister’s going with us.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Ask her.’
‘Mrs Cree?’
‘In the other room, Dave, getting herself ready for bed.’
McClure smiled savagely. Dave Lee Nelson was using his head, asking questions that drew the right answers and painted a picture for the listening lawman. The girl was still out of the way. Cath Cree was there, in the room – but it must have been her pistol they’d heard, and if Nelson could get his hands on it, or snatch his own pistol from the floor when McClure exploded into the room . . .
But had the Circle C foreman managed to ease past Hawkins and Dean while he was talking? If McClure burst into the room and the two villains were still facing the door, even a cocked six-gun would be of little use. He’d get one man, but not the other – yet there was only one way of finding out for sure what was going on in there. He had the one chance, the agonizing spin of a coin, the uncertain turn of a card, and he was playing blind when the odds against him were heavily stacked.
Aware of cold sweat beading his forehead, a tightness in shoulders and chest that made the drawing of each breath a terrible effort, Cliff McLure braced himself, lifted his six-gun, and took that uncertain, fateful step out of the shadows and into the lamplit room.
Amos Skillin was baiting him.
They’d pulled off the trail on to a slope of tumbled rocks and stunted mesquite as the sun dropped behind the western mountains, lit a smokeless fire of dry sticks, cooked up a meal and brewed coffee in Skillin’s blackened pot. Now, with the moon a thin crescent rimming the high still clouds with silver, the filthy owlhoot was sprawled on his blankets with the Mexican sombrero tilted over his eyes, drinking from an unmarked bottle of moonshine corn whiskey and muttering insults.
‘You tell me,’ he said, ‘why the hell the Utah Kid is keen to ride with a man with a yeller streak down his back who’s walked out on him once already.’
‘Pride was past it, a liability,’ Sagger said. He was sitting on a flat boulder, watching the half-drunk killer across the dying fire. ‘There’s a thin line between success and failure. Riding the owlhoot, failure means someone dies. When one man loses his fine edge, he puts others in danger.’
‘Excuses, not reasons.’ Skillin tilted the bottle, drank, belched. ‘Justifyin’ what you did, when what you did was you turned your back on a good man, a fast gun, twice the man—’
‘Older, slower, his sights set too high and refusing to admit—’
‘A man the equal of Jesse, better’n Curry, smarter than Cassidy—’
‘This afternoon you were suggesting Pride was past it.’
‘Past his best is still better than almost any other owlhoot.’
‘How the hell,’ Sagger said, ‘would you know?’
Skillin lifted the bottle, squinted past it at Daniel Sagger, then carefully placed it upright in the dirt. As he struggled to a sitting position, it tipped over. Whiskey gurgled, slopping on to his boot. He kicked out, sent the bottle rattling away into stones lost in the darkness outside the circle of firelight. Squinting blearily, he struggled with a tied-down holster, pulled the pistol to the front of his thigh.
‘Because,’ Skillin said thickly, ‘me and the Utah Kid’re like that.’ He lifted a hand, held the first and second fingers upright and crossed one over the other. ‘That’s why he sent me, knowed he could rely on me, knowed I wouldn’t let him down like goddamn Cold Hand Sagger, yeller-streak Sagger, useless bastard walked away from him, stands by while his wife’s throat—’
Like a cat, Daniel Sagger came to his feet and sprang away from the fire. Amos Skillin’s out-of-kilter eyes followed him, and a savage grin bared yellow teeth. As time stood still and Sagger dropped to a crouch with his hand hovering over his six-gun, he knew that a drunk Amos Skillin was still as dangerous as a striking rattler. The man spent half his life swilling moonshine whiskey. With his mind dulled by mountain liquor he would still draw like greased lightning, instinctively send hot lead screaming to its human target.
But in that moment that seemed to stretch to cover all eternity, Sagger knew that Amos Skillin, the grinning, sneering Amos Skillin, was a dead man. He’d gone too far. A superhuman strength surged through Sagger. The muscles of his right arm sang with power. The distance between his clawed fingers and the butt of his six-gun shrank to nothing so that, before he exploded into action, he could feel the smooth wood against his palm and the cold trigger hard against his curled finger.
In that instant when time slowed to a crawl, Amos Skillin went for his pistol. And a detached Daniel Sagger watched. He saw the renegade tilt his body sideways to fr
ee his right arm. Saw the filthy hand stab towards the holster lying on stained pants. Saw the pistol pulled clear, a stubby thumb draw back the hammer, the glittering barrel lift—
Sagger shot him.
His six-gun was in its holster. Then it was in his hand, spitting fire. A black hole appeared beneath Amos Killin’s chin. His eyes flew wide. His mouth gaped. He tried to speak, but the words gargled wetly in his throat. Then he fell backwards, his head slamming against his saddle, bright wet blood bubbling on his lips.
Daniel Sagger dropped to his knees, bowed his head, felt the damp earth beneath him and the electric tremor tingling through every nerve in his body. ‘The only way, it was the only way, the only way, the only way. . . .’ The words hammered at his brain, he knew they were sensible and true – but what had he done? He had executed a killer – but by so doing had he put his daughter in danger?
Numb, drained, Sagger climbed to his feet and put away his six-gun. And it was as if those movements, ordinary movements, the return to normality, cleared his mind. He had done nothing to endanger his own existence, or the lives of those he loved. The action that had taken but a split second and removed a cold-blooded killer from the face of the earth would have caused no stir beyond the shrinking circle of the fire’s light. If Will was coming after him, he would be too far back down the trail to have heard the shot. And what he, Daniel Sagger, had said to Amos Skillin that afternoon held good now more than ever: back in Ten Mile Halt there was nobody to know, nobody to care, nobody likely to go back to Bar C and risk his neck committing murder on the say-so of a dead man.
But his actions had created a dilemma.
Sagger was now free to return to his ranch, nurture the grieving members of his family and throw himself into the back-breaking work coming up with the spring: the hiring of hands, purchase of a remuda, the roundup and the branding and the long cattle-drive to market. But if he did that, over his head there would still be hanging the unsolved mystery of Cajun Pride. He had thought things through to the inevitable conclusion earlier that day: the dead Skillin would be replaced by another hard man, then another, and the danger would return tenfold. Now, Skillin was dead, and what he had envisaged would surely become reality.
So it was a dilemma, but one that was easily solved. He was now a free agent. If he continued on to Hole In The Wall to face the man who had been his companion in crime, it would be because he wanted to go, not because he was being forced. It would be because he wanted to move any present or future dangers that might threaten his family – and for that reason alone there was but one way out of the dilemma.
An hour later, Amos Skillin’s body lay buried beneath a pile of rocks, and Daniel Sagger had broken camp and was riding through the night towards the distant mountains.
‘Stand still!’
The impact of Cliff McClure’s roar hit Beebob Hawkins and Texas Dean like a physical attack from the rear, brought them spinning around. They moved fast, but not fast enough: Nelson had walked in and they’d caught him cold and dropped their guard but now they were unnerved by the shock of the unexpected and their attention was fatally distracted. Dave Lee Nelson took his chance. As they turned sluggishly to face the new danger, he swooped low to scoop up his pistol. Cath Cree, too, had been forewarned of what might happen by glances Nelson had cast in her direction. She had been expecting intervention from the same quarter, had anticipated McClure’s sudden appearance, and when Hawkins and Dean found themselves caught in no-man’s-land between the six-guns of the Circle C foreman and Ten Mile Halt’s marshal, she calmly stepped over to Beebob Hawkins and snatched her Smith & Wesson pocket pistol from his belt to make it a three-way bind.
‘Unbuckle them,’ McClure said to the stunned pair. ‘Let them fall, then step aside.’
Hawkins’s pale eyes were fathomless. He looked at Texas Dean, then unbuckled his gunbelt and sent it clattering to the floor. His black-clad sidekick did the same, glared at McClure and angrily kicked the gunbelt across the room. The heavy weapon slammed against the interior door. As it hit the woodwork, the young girl in the other room whimpered in fear, then broke into uncontrollable sobbing.
‘Cath, you attend to Becky,’ McClure said. ‘It’s all over. There’ll be no more trouble, this night or any night.’
He watched Cree’s wife, still holding her pistol, leave the room and close the door quietly behind her. Then he turned to Hawkins and Dean.
‘What the hell were you thinking? Big fellers like you, what crazy idea turned you into cowards going after helpless women?’
Beebob Hawkins turned his head aside and spat.
Dave Lee Nelson said, ‘They know Will Sagger’s gone after his pa. I guess they figured gettin’ ahold of his kid sister would make him change his mind.’
‘Muddled thinkin’,’ McClure said, shaking his head. ‘How would taking his sister back here in Ten Mile Halt prevent him riding across country to Hole in The Wall?’
‘Because he wasted too much time at Circle C,’ Hawkins said. ‘Ridin’ across country, we’d cut him off.’
‘With Becky slowing you down?’ McClure considered for a moment, then nodded. ‘Might have worked, but that still don’t say why. What the hell’s goin’ on at Hole in the Wall that’s so all fired important it requires Sagger’s presence there?’
Hawkins grinned. ‘You know about Daniel Sagger, who he is?’
McClure looked at Nelson, saw incomprehension and concern in the big foreman’s eyes, and said, ‘It’s my job to know. I know what he’s been in the past, and what he is now. Everybody in town knows he put that past behind him when he rode home, but now it looks like continual harassment and the cold blooded murder of his wife has turned his head – and one way or another I aim to find out what’s going on.’
‘Sending Slim Gillo along with Will was a step in that direction,’ Nelson said – a statement, not a question, but when he looked at McClure for some reaction, the marshal had already moved on.
‘Dave, what Hawkins said made sense. If he could intercept Will with Becky slowing him down, you could do the same only a damn sight faster.’
‘Why should I do that?’
‘Because when he pokes his nose into that hornet’s nest called Hole in The Wall, he’s goin’ to need all the help he can get.’
‘He left me to look after the ranch, keep an eye on Becky.’
‘Forget it. With these two behind bars, his sister’s safe. You give me a name, I’ll ride out to Circle C and tell the man you nominate he’s actin’ strawboss.’ He paused, looked hard at the big Circle C foreman, the erect posture, the clear eyes, and came to a decision. ‘I’ll also swear you in, pin a badge on your vest.’
Nelson hesitated. Listening hard, he could hear no sounds from the other room. The little gunsmith’s wife had comforted and reassured Becky Sagger; the young girl was in good hands here, and there was a man out at Circle C who could organize the run up to a spring roundup without raising a sweat. And, much though Nelson respected Jake Cree and Slim Gillo, he knew that his presence alongside them would add considerable power to a small force that was setting out to achieve the impossible.
It would need strength, determination and luck to bust into Hole in the Wall – and the more Dave Lee Nelson thought about it, the more he thought about what had happened to Mary Ann Sagger and tried to put himself in Daniel Sagger’s place, feel the savage emotions that must be tearing the man apart – the more he wanted to be in on the attempt.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll ride after them, and I’ll wear that badge with pride. Let’s get these two locked up and I’ll be on my way.
Chapter Ten
The silence was eerie. In the valley, the waters of the meandering creeks tumbled and sparkled in the sun, the tule grass on the slopes leading to the sheer, thousand-foot-high red cliffs to the north of the basin gleamed like polished brass. Far away, the opening to the narrow gorge that was the entrance to Hole In The Wall was a black notch shimmering in the heat of midday.
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Nothing moved.
Cajun Pride, the man who many years ago had ridden north from Louisiana to forge a reputation as the Utah Kid and, years later, an unholy alliance with Daniel ‘Cold Hand’ Sagger, turned away, hiding his disappointment behind a gaunt mask of a face in which his black eyes were deeply sunk. He moved away from the outcrop that had been his vantage point, stumbled once over a loose rock, then made his way across the stretch of naked earth that fronted the log cabin.
Two men watched his approach. Fergel O’Brien was a bulky figure at the window. Karl Weiss, dark and brooding, had moved away from the solid timber table still littered with greasy eating utensils and empty coffee cups left over from breakfast and was in the open doorway. There was a critical expression on his bearded face, uneasiness in his watchful gaze. He had noted the way that Pride – dark hair streaked with grey beneath his flat-crowned black hat, flamboyantly dressed in yellow shirt beneath a black vest – had turned from his vigil with an almost imperceptible loss of balance; how he had stumbled over the loose rock that, not too long ago, he would have stepped over without looking.
‘No sign?’
It was a needless question. The entrance to the gorge was as clearly visible from the cabin as it was from the outcrop fifty yards away and, with the aid of field-glasses, O’Brien had scanned the distant ravine and reported to Weiss: no movement; no riders; Amos Skillin was not bringing Daniel Sagger back to Hole In The Wall.
‘He’ll come. They’ll come.’
Pride’s voice was thin, lacking in strength, but, as he answered Karl Weiss’s question, there was a fire smouldering in his black eyes. The strength of that gaze forced Weiss to take a step backwards, and he shrugged as the smaller, leaner man brushed past him and dropped into a chair.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘maybe they will. We’re expecting too much, too soon. Ten Mile Halt’s one hell of a ride, and Skillin’s an old man. . . .’