A GUNMAN RODE NORTH
by William Hopson
Avalon Books 1954
Scanned and Proofed by Highroller and RyokoWerx
CHAPTER ONE
During the late afternoon hours large white clouds began to form in ominously boiling platoons over the Gulf of Lower California, drawing up heavy loads of precipitation from the undulating swells of the wind-disturbed salt waters below. In the night blackness they moved slowly northward like well-fed cows plodding ponderously homeward from pasture, long overdue and with heavy udders swinging. Converging into a solid front over Arizona's arid southern wastes, they unloaded amid ear-shattering thunder and lightning flashes; then, gathering their forces, lumbered on farther to the north.
It was the first big rain of early September; the wet blanket before the passing of the months until the coming of Ghost Face. Winter.
The Colorado River, rough and angry now because of slashing brown waters fed in by the rain-hit Gila tributary, had begun to rise; and, as always, Yuma's main street turned from tire and hoof-powdered dust into soggy mire and muddied boardwalks.
In the territorial prison, on a bald caliche rise northwest of town, the hard-packed, rocky yard lay drenched.
Lew Kerrigan hadn't slept much that hot September night. A man usually didn't the last hours before release. You could lie there on a dank straw bunk in the pitch-blackness, listen to the muted rumble of water growing in volume; hear the steady creak-creak of mooring lines holding bobbing Southern Pacific Company river boats to the crude wharves, and try to figure out why release from prison was coming so unexpectedly.
Why, in fact, it should come at all after a man had served only two years of a life sentence at hard labor for killing a buck-toothed young "town marshal," one Buck Havers, up north at old Fort Pirtman. Something wasn't right.
The unexpected summons to the office of Elia Mangrum, the warden, had not sent him back to his wheelbarrow amid the sweating work gang fired with elation. It might have been that way with others among the murderers and plain desperadoes, and even those serving light sentences, but no elation had come to the quiet man who had shot dead the hulking Havers to protect the girl Kerrigan planned to marry, lovely Kitty Anderson.
Kerrigan had left the warden's office with a strong sense of caution overriding the knowledge that he was being paroled to "Colonel" Tom Harrow, the man he'd sworn to kill if he could ever make good a planned escape.
Something about Harrow's intervention after two years of ignoring him didn't fit. The Territorial Governor was "paroling" Kerrigan to Harrow; overriding a sentence handed down by a U.S. District Court, and that meant bribery. Nothing from Kitty since her letters had ceased abruptly six months before. Nothing from Clara Thompson, the widow of a cavalry captain, now running a boarding house near the old military cemetery where her husband lay buried.
Not a word from Harrow those two years in answer to Lew Kerrigan's letters, not even a visit from Tom yesterday. But then the "Colonel" was a rich and respected man in the territory now, and likely he couldn't smudge his new standing among Arizona's prominent men by visiting a man who had thrown a gun and thrown it fast.
Not a thing had happened, unless you could except the speculative look in the bloodshot eyes of Wood Smith, the heavy-drinking head prison guard. Smith had become civil, almost cordial, for a change.
Now, as day began to break soggily, Lew Kerrigan heard the rattle of a light chain near him in the darkness. He and Kadoba had talked about many things during the night; in the English Kerrigan had taught the Apache, in the Apache the Indian had taught his cellmate to while away nights, with a few Spanish words sprinkled in.
Talking while the chain rattled on the gesticulating Apache's unseen hands.
Outside the row of hillside dungeons, which faced west, Bud Casey, special night guard for Tough Row, rose from his chair beneath a hastily erected canvas fly, slapped disgustedly at the swarm of Anopheles mosquitoes newly hatched among the reeds, took down his night lantern and returned to the warden's office. Presently he and Wood Smith came slogging across the yard to Tough Row.
Smith had been drinking most of the night with Jeb Donnelly, the marshal, and his eyes showed the effects of it. His and Casey's huge keys began their familiar rattle along the row of iron doors, and with the first sound of the keys came the head guard's bellow:
"All right, you sons of bitches! Come out of there and line up for the count. Out pronto or I'll bust a few more sore butts this morning!"
Casey's big key twisted once and slid the bolt, and the heavy hinges, rusty and wet this morning, creaked as Lew Kerrigan stepped out. Out into a world in which he shortly would be free, if one could discount certain restrictions to be laid down by Thomas Harrow. And there would be conditions. After two years of silence from Harrow, you could bet on that.
The man wanted something from Kerrigan and he must want it pretty badly.
" 'Mornin', Lew." Bud Casey grinned a sandy-whiskered grin. "I never thought I'd see this one, but I've been looking forward to it all night long—since I first heard when I came on duty." He lowered his voice. "Watch out for Wood this morning, Lew. He's had a bad all-nighter in town with Jeb Donnelly, and I don't like the way he's acting. Strange as all get-out. And if he does happen to treat you like a white man this last mornin', then I'd be a damned sight more on guard after I got out of here!"
"Thanks, Bud," said Kerrigan, and stepped out into the mud. Moving toward the short line of the prison's worst from Tough Row, forming over there a few feet away, he saw the wiry figure of the Apache killer follow as far as the open doorway, chains still around ankle and wrist.
A knife in his slender hands had slashed open the throat of a woman, his adulterous squaw, and Kadoba had been doomed to spend the rest of his life in chains.
The Indian stood there alone, in filthy pants cut off at the knees and wearing moccasins almost in shreds after more than two years. Here was one able-bodied prisoner who did no man-killing toil; he remained on a fifty-foot length of light chain, the other end padlocked to a huge iron ring sunk deep into the mortar floor.
Chained like a vicious black wolf because guard and other prisoners alike were afraid of him. All except Bud Casey and the man who had nightly shared a cell with the Indian for two years, "Yew" Kerrigan.
Kadoba, watching, shook back the coarse black hair around his shoulders; the hair that Wood Smith had talked about in the warden's office one day two years ago, an hour after the Apache killer had been brought in manacled and weighted down with leg irons:
Hell no, Mr. Mangrum. Let's not cut his damned hair off. Leave it long so's he'll knot it tight around 'his neck some night and choke himself to death. No Apache of Loco's bronco band can stand a dungeon and chains very long. Let him kill himself and then the territory'll thank you for getting rid of one more of those black devils.
Kadoba hadn't knotted his long hair around his throat and killed himself. He had stood it. He'd taken Wood Smith's clubbings and all the rest of it because he was a smoky-eyed Apache bronco, and because he had found a strange friendship and understanding with a Pinda-Lick-O-Yi cellmate so different from other White Eyes.
The count of prisoners from Tough Row had begun, and almost immediately Wood Smith let out an angry bellow.
"Martinez! Come out of there, you sick faker! So you want to go back to the hospital again and eat eggs for breakfast, do you? I'll damn well give you something to get sick about!"
Around Smith's hairy right wrist was a slip-on buckskin thong, and dangling from the sweat-slick thong hung a long billy of brightly polished manzanita wood which the head guard habitually swung in a spinning circle. The club snapped up into Wood Smith's hard right hand as he slogged determinedly through m
ore of the mud to a gaping doorway and peered inside.
His reaction was instant. He let out a disdainful grunt and came back. "Never mind old Martinez, Bud. He's here. Maybe his spirit ain't but his old carcass damn sure is. Not a bad day for us, Bud. A few more mornings like this one and we won't have to work so hard. One killer dead in his cell from sickness and we turn Lew Kerrigan loose in parole custody of Colonel Harrow. Not bad at all," and Smith laughed.
With the count completed and cells sloshed down with buckets of water to counteract the fetid air, Kerrigan took his place in line with the others from Tough Row. Smith came up, club spinning a circle once more, and stopped behind Lew Kerrigan.
"Some lucky break for you, eh, Kerrigan?"
"I'm not complaining," Lew said.
"Well, I should hope not! Otherwise, some morning twenty or thirty years from now we'd be dragging you out like old Martinez and planting you deep under the caliche down there in the Point by the riverbank."
Kerrigan waited for the lock step to breakfast to begin. But Smith apparently had something on his mind.
"Maybe I shouldn't have treated you so rough, Kerrigan," he said, "but some men are just plain stubborn. Take you now: you brought it on yourself. I always wondered what you and that damned Apache killer jabbered about so much nights. From what I hear, there ain't a one of them in the whole country who don't know where there's plenty more free gold like Colonel Harrow found up north in Apache country two years ago. I always did sorta figger that Kadoba might have told you where more of it is, the two of you bein' cellmates and in for life, anyhow. But you had to play tight-lipped, so I had to play rough. Like I said, some prisoners are just plain stubborn…"
The blow came from behind with terrific force.
More than two feet of polished brown wood cut a numbing streak of hellish fire across Kerrigan's seat, causing violent and abrupt reaction inside his empty stomach. The sickness from it erupted into his throat, bile sour. He retched hard and then retched again, and his legs began to tremble.
"Hold on there, Wood," Bud Casey protested mildly. "Lew'll be out of here as soon as the warden comes up. There wasn't any call for that a-tall."
"You better keep your trap shut, Bud, if you want the job I'll be resigning one of these days pretty soon," the head guard advised. "One word from me to Mangrum that you're too soft on these cell birds and the job's gone."
Standing behind the frozen men from Tough Row he grinned almost lazily at Kerrigan's back. "That was a little too much to resist this mornin', Kerrigan. Just a little goodbye rememberer so's you'll not forget ole hard-workin' Wood Smith when you get out and go downtown this mornin'. Sure, I know what's in your mind. It's in all of them the last mornin' when they leave. But you won't be doin' what you're thinking, Kerrigan. You'll be just like the others. You'll find Jeb Donnelly waitin' to have a few words to say real nicelike. You ain't forgot how Jeb worked up here as guard for awhile last year, eh? He swatted your butt a few times himself, now didn't he?"
Kerrigan made no answer. He'd seen this thing happen to other men on the last morning. A freed man, limping in pain, going downtown to find a tough marshal waiting to order him to keep going or get another beating.
And Wood Smith was deliberately baiting him, Kerrigan knew; waiting for words that would bring the gripped club into action again. His big face was flaming with more than early-morning whiskey flush now.
"Maybe you sorta figgerin' on squaring up with Jeb, too, hey?" Smith's voice came again. "Now that's what you was thinkin', wasn't it, Kerrigan?"
No reply.
The club smashed again, the pain of it more sickening than ever. "Answer me, damn you!"
"Cut it out, Wood!" Bud Casey said angrily.
"Answer me, Kerrigan!"
"I've no quarrel with the marshal if he'll keep out of my way," Lew Kerrigan answered quietly.
"Out of your way? I'll damn well fix it where he can get in your way and you won't do a thing about it, cell bird!"
The club began to crash. No more against the buttocks. It struck hard against Lew Kerrigan's right shoulder. Hellish pain tore through the muscles and rained downward through biceps and triceps, all the way to the elbow. Smith finally finished, panting in rage and short-windedness, and bawled at the men to face right.
On legs trembling so badly he could hardly stand Lew Kerrigan stumbled along, his hands on the shoulders of the man in front of him. He needed their support.
Bud Casey was out in the yard when Kerrigan emerged from the tin-roofed mess hall with food for the Apache. Casey fell in alongside, and though he said nothing his glance was sharp when he looked sidewise at the prisoner.
"I was afraid of something like that, Lew," he finally said, and closed the door as Kerrigan carried breakfast in to the Indian for the last time.
Kadoba sat as he usually sat, back against the mortar wall, knees drawn up.
"So now you are a free man again, Yew," he said, speaking in a garbled mixture of three tongues.
"When the Giver of All Things rises and the Nantan viene aqui. Maybe three hours."
"You talk much last night when you sleep poco. Call out name of a squaw Kitty and talk about a White Eyes. 'I gonna kill you, Harrow.' Who this Harrow you zas-tee, Yew?"
"Pinda-Lick-O-Yi. He took my part of much gold and gave me to the White Eyes law to be hanged. Now he frees me."
The Apache looked puzzled. He'd looked puzzled in the pitch-black darkness last night and said murmuringly, "The White Eyes are a strange people who walk a strange path."
"Enyah!" Kerrigan said, and indicated the food. But Kadoba ignored it.
An inner excitement had begun to grip the Indian. He lifted his left foot by the chain around his bare ankle. With an index finger he made sawing motions across the wide but thin band of iron riveted to the end of the long chain.
"You get me knife with teeth, Yew. I go with you. Teach you how to hang him by the feet from a tree and burn him like Apache burn hunters of yellow iron."
Kerrigan couldn't help smiling. This slender, boyish-looking Indian of perhaps twenty-six had done no wrong in the eyes of his people. He had been taught from babyhood that all other human beings were enemies to be killed; to protect the young and the aged—to hunt and steal food and warm winter clothing for them.
Their laws said it was just and right to hack off the nose or kill the young squaw who had shared her loins with another Indian, and he'd followed those laws. He had cut her throat quickly and painlessly, with a single slash of a knife blade.
Simple generic laws, harsh but quite just to the Apache code of life. So different from the foolish law of the White Eyes who now ruled over most of the bands of Apacheria. Judge Eaton up at Globe, Arizona's notorious "Hanging Judge," had shown "mercy." Because Kadoba was but "an untutored young savage," he'd received a mere life sentence as a good lesson to other Apaches trying to follow their own laws instead of the white man's new ones.
"You cannot escape from here, amigo" Kerrigan said simply. "Too many guards. Many guns. And the river. No man can cut the waters. The pools swirl around and around in circles and catch a man and hold him in their arms. Sometimes many days later the man is found in the same whirlpools, dancing around and around in the Last Dance in the arms of the water."
"Send me knife with teeth," the Apache hissed.
The hinges creaked again and light flooded in from outside as Bud Casey swung back the unlocked door. He was silent as he locked the Apache in again, his sandy-colored face sober.
He turned to Kerrigan, heavy key ring dangling. "Come on, Lew. Let's get on over to the storeroom and get your stuff. I'm worried."
They walked through the gummy mud of the yard and Kerrigan said, "Why?"
"Because," Casey replied grimly, "that's the first time I ever saw Wood Smith try to break a man's gun arm the morning of his release."
"I thought for a few minutes it was broken. I won't be able to use it much for a week."
"Something about this whole deal
is fishy, Lew. If somebody is out to get you, Wood was in on the deal and did his part a little while ago. Hell of it is," Bud went on, "if they get you, you're six feet under. And if you ever throw a gun again, even to defend yourself, they'll bring you back here. And I'll have to supervise the building of the scaffold they'll hang you from."
"They'll never hang me," Lew Kerrigan said harshly.
"Three other men I know of thought that same thing, Lew. They're down there on the Point below the prison, under six feet of caliche. Right close by where old Martinez will be planted this morning."
CHAPTER TWO
The storeroom was a square, heavily barred affair in the southwest corner of the high-walled yard, and directly south of the warden's office. Casey unlocked another iron door leading in from the prison yard and led the way inside. Full daylight came in through the bar-protected windows and the damp, unused air gave off a faintly musty odor. In the distance the wet mooring ropes creaked and the paddle-wheel boats rocked up and down under the rolling swell of the turgid waters.
Casey turned from a large wooden cabinet in the corner with a card in his hand. He pointed to a warbag with a saddle and bridle beside it on a wide shelf and said, "Over there."
He replaced the card and seated himself on an empty packing case. "Lew, Arizona's territorial laws ain't worth a damn four hundred yards from here, on the California bank of the river. Why don't you hide out until I get off at eight and then let me hunt up a Yuma Indian ferryman and get you across the river?"
"I'm in 'parole' custody to Colonel Harrow, remember, Bud?" Kerrigan almost grinned, opening his warbag.
"You'll at least be a free man. You ain't the type to bend under another man's hand."
"You never spoke a more truthful word in your life, Casey," Lew Kerrigan said, jerking open the drawstrings of the canvas bag containing his "possibles."
Casey sighed and reached for tobacco and papers. "Maybe the sheriff who brought you down here from up north two years ago has a few ideas on what's in the wind. Your guns and money came along last week."
A Gunman Rode North Page 1