Only his eyes flicked as he at last saw them coming.
Hannifer LeRoy turned and called something to his men, and the buckskin-shirted one named Old Cap rode out ahead at a gallop, face bent low over the right shoulder of his horse. Kerrigan still lay like a giant iguana. The sweat and its salt taste were in both corners of his mouth now, the sun-heated barrel of the rifle uncomfortably hot in his work-calloused hands.
He lined the front sight of the rifle at a point twelve inches below the face of the scout as the man straightened in the saddle. Old Cap's body was twisting to straighten up and look back at LeRoy to say something.
The words never came. Lew Kerrigan let out a part of his breath for steadiness and gently pressured the trigger that exploded 90 grains of black powder back of a .45 caliber bullet.
With the ear-splitting report of the rifle and the hard recoil of it against Kerrigan's shoulder, the trailer pitched face forward off the left side of his horse.
Somebody yelled, and men galvanized by fear wheeled to spur away. Kerrigan flipped out the smoking shell and lined the sights above Jeb Donnelly's big white horse. He held them steadily for a moment and once again he almost spoke aloud to the fleeing ex-marshal. Jeb, you should have stayed up on the hill with Wood Smith.
A heat wave shimmered in front of him, throwing up a wall of moving glass, and Kerrigan fired twice more through it until he saw the frantically spurring figure of Donnelly fade from sight.
He flipped out the third smoking shell and rose almost leisurely. He removed his brown hat and wiped at his forehead with a sleeve and put the hat back on again. His left hand burned as he shifted the barrel and instinctively reached for the loops of his cartridge belt, pushing the long shells into the magazine with a thumb.
He went back to where the big red horse stood like a statue.
Maybe, he thought, it was a mistake. Only time can give the answer to that one. Maybe I should have killed LeRoy with the first shot and stopped the whole shebang right here. But Tom might not know they had failed until I got around to telling him as a surprise. Huh!
He flicked the hot-barreled rifle back into its boot, took a drink from his canteen, mounted and rode out into the desert again.
He camped briefly at sundown to give the horse a small feed of oats and relief from the saddle and afterward he rode on most of the night, knowing they couldn't trail him in the darkness. From hidden caves many miles away the bats darted here and there on a nightly hunt for winged insects and their favorite of all foods, the long-tailed scorpions. The coyotes prowled on a hunt for rabbits and field mice. They stopped and listened to the passage of a lone rider in the darkness and now and then one of them barked derisively; and when one of the old loafer wolves—the bachelors with claws badly worn from following the rocky trails alone—let go with a hoarse howl the coyotes fell silent.
Put a coyote skin over your head, Kadoba the Apache had explained, and you can crawl within arrow distance of the watching antelope…
The miles rolled by, and the country changed in the varying major latitudinal life zones. The Tropical Sea Level Zone on the river at Yuma was far behind Kerrigan to the south. The Transition Zone of the Mogollon Plateau lay fostering to its great, rough, eroded bosom a vast, uneven sea of green forest. Ponderosa pine and blue spruce and aspen. Douglas fir and juniper, some birch and oak. Mountain streams flowing into the headwaters of the Gila to start their Columbrine journeys southward through Yuma and on to the gulf of Baja California.
It was northern Apache country, and at its worst the past three or four years.
Old Victorio and his Warm Springs raiders might be down at Lake Guzman in Chihuahua, making life hell for Mexican villages and haciendas, and even cutting a few telegraph wires over across the border in Texas now and then out of pure cussedness. But Loco and his small, elusive band of tough fighters weren't. They'd just returned to the high country after a breather over in New Mexico because it was their country. Scorning soldier "peace" and telling the troops from Fort Whipple and other posts to try and catch them. Leaving their women and children on the reservation to be cared for by the Government while they roamed and raided.
It had been while on a secret visit to see his wife that Kadoba had found a soft-bellied, well-fed reservation Indian in his jacal and been caught by Apache police after cutting his woman's throat. In the confused official mix-up, so commonplace at the time, the case had been cleverly juggled by Judge Yeager Eaton into his own court. A court composed of military officers likely would have sent Kadoba to the army's new escape-proof military prison on Alcatraz Rock in San Francisco Bay for a couple of years; and this thing Loco, and especially the reservation Apaches attending the trial at Globe, would have understood.
But an old White Eyes man who was not a soldier had sent him to Yuma for life.
For that stupid official blunder many people, including those going to and from Tom Harrow's new gold strike at Dalyville, had paid a disastrous price under the guns the esteemed "Colonel" had sold Loco for raw gold.
On a late afternoon Lew Kerrigan dropped warily down a sharp declivity and worked the red horse through thick underbrush until he came to a small stream where the water splashed over bright stones. Kerrigan dumped warbag and saddle on the ground preparatory to making camp. He took a double handful from his meager supply of oats, put them into a nose bag, and went over to Big Red. The horse turned his broad head and nuzzled at him before the feed bag was slipped on.
Night came down and the stars were out clear and cold up above, blinking to the eye from infinite space. Kerrigan would be in Pirtman to see Kitty Anderson tomorrow, and the thought warmed him. Two years now since he'd seen her, six months since Mangrum had stopped her letters.
Then suddenly he found himself wondering about Carlotta Wilkerson and the thought came to him that he'd had her on his mind much of late. Maybe because she'd been the only woman he had seen for so long.
He finished his supper and then carefully doused his tiny fire. The years of wrist and shoulder coordination had returned, and the sagging cartridge belt wasn't heavy around his waist any more. The night birds twittered in the trees…
Sometime during the early-morning hours the big red horse filled his great lungs with air and expelled it a little faster than usual, enough that Kerrigan heard the sound and came awake fast. He could see Big Red dimly in the darkness, a blocky outline of horse beneath the trees, head and neck high, ears forward.
He was facing south, the direction whence he'd brought his rider several hundred miles.
Kerrigan lay there on his flat belly, hugging the ground, the .45-90's flat-headed hammer drawn back under his right thumb. Big Red breathed a slobbering warning.
It might be a bear that had smelled the odor of bacon grease, but a rock rattled suddenly and somebody followed the sound with a grunt. If Loco's band had spotted him that afternoon and closed in for the kill at dawn, there wouldn't be any rocks rattling. A white man unaccustomed to crawling in the darkness had made those sounds.
Kerrigan lined the sights of the repeater and the heavy roar of 90 grains of exploding black powder went rocketing out across the country for miles. He thought, Damn, the fat is in the fire now, and heard a man scream a startled oath. It was followed by the crashing run of somebody through the underbrush. The man's unexpected terror had galvanized his reflexes into flight before he'd had time to think.
Kerrigan rolled over catlike three times to get clear of the flash area. He heard the voice of LeRoy cursing angrily, and then curse again as somebody else went excitedly trigger-happy and emptied a six-shooter. Bullets drummed through the underbrush around and above Kerrigan and were followed by a scream of anger from Hannifer LeRoy.
"You thickheaded jackass! We want him alive. He can't find Apache gold for Harrow and the rest of us if he's dead!"
In the silence that followed, the crash of the rifle came again as Lew Kerrigan coolly drove another .45-90 slug of lead squarely into the center of the area where the or
ange flashes of revolver fire had come from. And there was no startled yell this second time. Nothing but a threshing of legs out there in the brush as a man died, kicking convulsively.
"Hey, LeRoy, you stupid damned fool," Kerrigan called.
A moment of silence. And finally, "Well, what do you want?"
"I could have turned on you a dozen times and probably got all of you. I could have killed you with the first shot back there among the lava beds and sent the rest of these curs running."
"Then, why didn't you? Maybe we could have cut around in front and done some ambushing of our own. But we wanted you alive."
"I wanted you alive back there, too. To go crawling back to Tom Harrow and tell him I'm still coming."
There was no answer and he shifted position again. He had no illusions about Jeb Donnelly. In a game like this the ex-marshal, despite his massive bulk, was more dangerous than all the others put together.
Kerrigan spoke quickly, "If you want to stay alive, clear out of here fast, LeRoy. This is Loco's country and it's a hell of a lot closer to his raw gold supply than you think. If he's within miles of here, and I'm betting he is, he'll be coming to investigate."
"Better think about your own scalp, mister."
"Apaches don't scalp. They burn head down from a tree limb. But I spent two years in a cell with one, remember? I've got Yuma Apache moccasins in my pack. Get those fools out of here fast if they don't want a hair singe."
He slid to his bag and hurriedly slipped on the new moccasins he'd bought for himself in the Big Adobe the morning he'd sent a new pair to Kadoba; hard rawhide soles laced into six-inch buckskin tops and tied above the ankle.*
* Author's note: These low-top moccasins made by Yuma squaws and peddled in town across the river were for poor whites and Mexicans. The regular Apache moccasin usually was near hip length and doubled down for protection against thorns as well as forming makeshift pockets around the leg.
With the reloaded .45-90 repeater in one hand, Lew Kerrigan faded into the brush without a sound to mark his passing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
At daybreak the next morning in Pirtman, Joe Stovers came out of his comfortable log house and went out to grain his two favorite saddle horses. He returned to have his morning shave in a kitchen no woman had set foot in since the death of his wife, many years ago. A round-faced man of fifty-one, light in the saddle for a man of such blocky weight but merciless astride a horse when the exigencies of his office demanded it.
Afterward he strapped on his pistol and rode among the trees to Clara Thompson's place for breakfast. Pirtman's main street was actually a wide former military road almost blocked overhead by the spreading branches of pine and fir and, of course, snowbound in winter.
Some officer on staff in the War Department in Washington, remembering the successes of winter campaigns against the plains Indians when their ponies were thin and hide lodges wrapped in sub-zero weather, had ordered the fort built with the same idea in mind for the Apaches. Indian vedettes had watched with amusement while sweating soldiers hauled logs and rock and built the place, after which they had packed up their families in the late fall and headed for the more pleasant clime of Old Mexico, where food in the form of horses and sheep was to be had for the taking.
Two years afterward Fort Pirtman had been abandoned; but not before Clara Thompson's husband had been brought back to her face down across his horse, hacked to pieces in a vicious fight with Loco's band—using guns Joe Stover believed had been sold to them by Tom Harrow.
Stovers jogged across the clearing in front of Clara's low, spacious place and got down before a porch railing of bark-covered pine poles. It was this same porch from which Lew Kerrigan had shot Havers, the hulking-shouldered night watchman "marshal," because the buck-toothed young lout apparently had lost his head over Kitty Anderson and laid rough hands upon her.
Stovers clumped through parlor and the big dining room once filled by stagecoach travelers during the heyday of the boom. He made his way through into the large kitchen. He said, " 'Mornin', Clara. Coffee ready yet?" and hung his old hat over the back of a rawhide-covered chair.
"You're four minutes late, Joe," she said, and brought the big coffee pot.
He found himself studying her tall, firm figure with its high rounded bosom and the lift of chin only a proud, lonely woman could have. He noticed that for the first time her hair, not quite blonde and yet not a full brown either, was parted in the center and swept back in soft, fluffy waves. It came to the sheriff with something of surprise that Clara Thompson was astonishingly beautiful this morning.
"Has there been any more news of Lew?" she asked, and placed the sugar bowl within reach. She came back from the stove and sat down with her second cup that morning.
He shook his head gloomily and dropped two lumps into the cup and stirred vigorously. "Nothing good. The sheriff at Yuma sent me a report by mail that after Lew bashed in their marshal's jaw with a gun barrel, Jeb Donnelly put on a deputy's badge and came after him. Asked me to co-operate."
"And you will, of course," she said pointedly.
"Not on account of Lew bustin' a marshal's jaw," he grunted at her. "I saw what happened to one prisoner I took down there to the pen and delivered to Mangrum. He was turned over to Jeb, who was working as a guard at the time. As for the sheriff, it was damned strange he wasn't around when Lew was released; everybody in town seemed to know what was going to happen. I figure that Harrow's money bought him, too."
"Then you won't arrest Lew?"
"I'm going to arrest him on sight, Clara," he answered uncomfortably. "Another killing. And if Judge Eaton tries his case again, no power on earth can save him from hanging. Eaton is just as fanatical about trying to emulate the new hanging judge at Fort Smith, Arkansas, Judge Parker, as Buck Havers had stupid ideas of someday becoming another town marshal like Wild Bill Hickock or Wyatt Earp. Any man who quotes the Bible like Judge Eaton does and then sentences some poor devil to get his neck broken from a scaffold is crazy. Why don't you just make sure about Lew by putting a good dose of strychnine in the judge's grub when he comes in today to stuff his gluttonous old belly with enough food to do three men?"
"Just tell me about Lew, Joe. I wrote him encouraging letters for a long time but he stopped answering them some time ago. Whom did he kill this time?"
"One of Jeb Donnelly's so-called 'posse' running him across the desert country northeast of Phoenix. They crowded in on him too close and he turned on them and laid an ambush from some lava beds. He missed Jeb twice. Two stray horse hunters happened along and Jeb sent one of them at a run with a mail message to me. Lew's first thought will be to head straight here to see about Kitty. She up yet?"
She lifted her spoon and placed it alongside the cup in her saucer, her coffee untasted. She shook her head. "She was tired last night from traveling so far by train and stage. She was very eager for news of Lew."
"Well?" he demanded almost roughly. "Are you going to tell Lew when he gets here?"
"What should I tell him, Joe?"
"You women!" he growled at her to cover his feelings. "Kitty wandered in here from the East over two years ago with the fool idea of finding a father who'd probably been dead for years. Lew was alone up there on his little ranch in the basin, watching his small herd grow. It was natural them two would fall in love, both being alone. But Havers, being too lazy to work, got the people here to pay him twenty-five a month as night 'marshal.' He knew Kitty wouldn't spit on him, that she was crazy about Lew. But he went after her all of a sudden in a way Lew couldn't overlook, and he got himself killed. I've always been puzzled why Buck did it the day Harrow was around."
"Joe, what in the world is going through that cagey mind of yours?" she demanded, and he saw the new look that came into her startlingly blue eyes.
"Harrow was always after money. He'd bought Buck a couple of drinks in the Pine Knot. He was aware I'd have to put a territorial reward on Lew's head when Lew rode out. Clara, you might as we
ll know the truth after two years: Tom collected that reward. Ace Saunders brought me word where Lew was, outfitting a pack train to go hunt some gold. Tom Harrow found that gold, Clara."
"Merciful heaven," she said softly. "I never dreamed there might be a connection."
"Right after the strike that made Dalyville, Tom took Kitty up there to work for him in the office. You know as well as I do, Clara, that Tom's sudden wealth and smooth manners were too much for a girl like Kitty. In the months that followed she was more than a woman working for him. To put it bluntly, she became his mistress. And you know it, too, though you'd never let it get through that poker face of yourn. She traveled with him when he went back East to sell gold stock. But he left her there, probably tired of her as a man like him always tires of such a woman after awhile. He met Carlotta Wilkerson, a real Southern lady, and made plans for a big summer wedding out here. Miss Wilkerson didn't know Tom long enough to see him for what he is. And if Lew hadn't been a lonely man, if he probably hadn't seen your own heart buried over there in the cemetery, he'd have seen through Kitty in a hurry."
Relief went through her when he changed the subject. "Harrow is going to be one hell of a surprised gent when he finds out Kitty came back to Pirtman last night."
"And you planned it that way, every bit of it," she said accusingly, and rose. She went to the stove and slid a warmed frying pan over the firebox plate.
"All right, I planned it that way," he growled defensively. "I wrote her that Tom Harrow was arranging to get Lew out of prison, although I admit I was puzzled at what he expected to profit from it. I didn't want Lew writing Kitty to come West and marry him. He's got to find out the hard way, and I knew a poker face like you would never tell him what kind of a woman she turned out to be!"
She said, laying strips of bacon in the hot frying pan, "Lew met Carlotta in the hallway outside of Tom Harrow's suite in Yuma. She doesn't say much but I think from that moment she began to have doubts about the man she is supposed to marry. She's a lovely woman, Joe."
A Gunman Rode North Page 6