A Gunman Rode North

by William Hopson

  "Something has happened," Clara said as she began unlocking the front doors. "Here comes Harrow walking as free as you please. Why isn't he in jail? And I wonder what happened to Joe Stovers? Carlotta, something is wrong!"

  "Very much wrong," Carlotta replied, looking unhappily at the other woman. "Lew is gone and won't be back."

  Harrow reached the long porch with its rough pole handrail. "Why the unhappy countenances, ladies? Lew got out of Pirtman without being arrested, and that's what the two of you and Kitty wanted, wasn't it?"

  "You're not welcome here any more, Mr. Harrow," Clara informed him coolly. "I thought you would have known."

  "Just waiting for my coach, the last time I'll ever pain you with my presence, I assure you."

  "What happened? Where's Joe?"

  "Joe," he laughed softly, his eyes dancing, "is temporarily incarcerated in his own log jail to prevent him from doing anything foolish. Because of his actions, or lack of them, in not arresting Kerrigan, Judge Eaton has stripped him of his marshal's badge. To put it briefly, he's finished. Jeb Donnelly is now United States marshal for this district, with Ace and three other men as deputies. Here they come now."

  Two horses flashed up from the fort at a hard gallop, one of them white and carrying the former Yuma marshal. They spurred by and disappeared among the trees along the road north to Dalyville. The red coach was following at a fast trot, three men up on top. Harrow laughed softly.

  "Lew swore he'd burn Dalyville, but he completely overlooked the fact that Judge Eaton is a determined man when it comes to exterminating outlaws. When he gets there, he's going to walk into a trap… Where's Kitty? Oh, there you are, my dear."

  "What is it?" Kitty asked. "What's happened?"

  "Nothing at all, my dear," Harrow said fondly. "Merely that you're going back home to Dalyville. Go upstairs and pack a few things. Quick!"

  Kitty glanced at Clara in bewilderment and then shook her golden head. "I just won't go with you any more, Tom. I—"

  "Hurry!" snapped Harrow at her. "Don't you want that big mansion again? Do you wish to stay out here on the frontier alone and with nobody to turn to? I'm going to marry you, Kitty!"

  "I don't know," she said doubtfully. "I— Oh, all right, Tom. I guess I'd better."

  He walked on through the parlor and into the dining room, his eyes flicking around as though he owned the place. They fell upon the black valise still on the kitchen table. He snapped it open and then smiled as he closed it. This saved the bother of forcing his way into Carlotta's room to take it.

  "I'm sure you won't object if I 'borrow' this from you, Carlotta," he said, smiling at his former fiancée. "If it will make you feel better, it's only temporary. I happen to need it at the moment."

  "That money belongs to Lew Kerrigan, as I've already told you," Carlotta said calmly. "But I'm powerless to prevent your taking it. It's rather amazing, now that I look back, that I didn't see through your suave manners and fine clothes long before I came."

  "Perhaps you were blinded until you met Lew." He grinned lazily as the red coach crackled to a harness-jangling halt outside and a man bellowed they were ready.

  "I saw through him because he had nothing to hide," she answered. "And I liked very much what I saw."

  Kitty came downstairs with a single bag, her face flushed but something in her eyes Clara perceived instantly. Instinct was telling the girl she mustn't go. But she was still grasping at any straw, even marriage to the man who'd deserted her.

  "Ah, there you are, my dear." Harrow smiled at her reassuringly. "We'd better be going. There's much to be done tonight."

  Clara spoke up and her words startled him. "Somebody might need help up there before this night of devil's work is at an end. We'd like to go with you, Tom, Carlotta and I."

  "And try to talk Kitty into changing her mind? But—no, I don't suppose you would. Not two women following a man, both probably in love with him, who's going to get what is coming to him tonight. By all means come with us," and Harrow bowed with a sweep of his hand toward the front door.

  They rolled away from the place five minutes later. Beneath the green branches of the tall pines and over to the road; across it to the front of Joe Stovers' yard. Judge Eaton came out, looked in surprise at the three women inside with Harrow, frowned and pulled his long, gaunt frame in with them. A few men stood watching in the distance and from somewhere out in the back came muffled shouts of anger.

  "Joe isn't used to being locked in his own jail." Harrow's grin faded in the face of Judge Eaton's icy glare. "Some of the people will probably let him out."

  They got under way along the twisting mountain road down which the coach had come that morning with an escort of cavalry troopers. The team trotted and pulled by turns, the driver working them to the utmost.

  Darkness came down and in the coach five people, three women and two men, sat mostly in silence. What little conversation passed back and forth had nothing to do with the thoughts uppermost in the minds of them all. Judge Eaton had sternly forbidden it.

  And he'd said to Clara, "Don't forget that I am a U.S. District Judge, Clara, sworn to uphold justice and the law. It is my intention to see justice done tonight if we get there in time."

  They got there in time. About ten that night the completely exhausted team of six strained up the side of a final ridge and stood panting on trembling legs while the eight people who weighted down the coach looked below. The moon that had been early when Kerrigan rode north from Yuma more than a week before was late now, but it threw dim silver light into the gulch where in the past furtive Apaches had come like flitting shadows when they needed money for Tom Harrow's guns and cartridges; where an old man wearing an ancient bear skin and claw on his left arm had come alone, leading a burro and carrying food from Lew Kerrigan's well-stocked ranch cabin.

  The shacks stood out like black humps and a light breeze was blowing down the dark funnel below. A half-dozen lights twinkled here and there where womenless miners still hung on. Only one building was lit up in the deserted street below. From it emanated the tinkle of a mechanical piano and a man's voice singing in a drunken bellow. One of Cherokee Sam Blaze Face's customers.

  The words held no relation to the music.

  If you want to smell hell—

  If you want to have fun—

  If you want to catch the devil—

  Jine the Cavalry!

  The words came quite clearly to the listeners in the coach and Tom Harrow stirred and broke the silence among them, his voice strange and faraway, as though he was seeing something out of the past.

  "That was General Jeb Stuart's favorite song," he remarked. "He always closed his gay parties with that song, and sharply at midnight if the day was Saturday. He went to church Sundays when there was an opportunity."

  "Probably an ex-Confederate soldier down there and a long way from home," Carlotta replied softly. "I didn't think you'd remember, Thomas. I thought you deserted the war long before that."

  He stiffened beside the small, huddled figure of Kitty, and said sharply to the judge, "Looks like we arrived in time. Jeb Donnelly and Ace are hidden in my house by now, waiting for Kerrigan. I told them he'd probably set fire to that first, to draw the men out of the gulch. Let's get on over there."

  "No," Judge Eaton disapproved sharply. "If they're hidden inside, let them wait for him up there. Take the coach down into the gulch to my office. I dare say that if Kerrigan sees it—and the presence of three ladies here—he'll hesitate before firing the town."

  Harrow leaned out the window, head twisted up. "All right, boys, we're in time. Take the coach down to the judge's office and hold a tight line on those horses. We don't want to roll down the side of the mountain."

  The coach broke into jerky movement and the brake block began to bite at the rear tires like a rusty nail drawn across a pane of glass. It tilted forward as the driver began a cautious descent.

  They came at last to the floor of the gulch and entered town at the
narrow north end. They passed the lone saloon where the music still tinkled out and eight or nine men drank whiskey to alleviate boredom. Two or three looked out as they passed and then disappeared again with surly oaths as they recognized the outlines of the red coach. Harrow had gone East to get more money to find more gold. He'd come back and done nothing. Not one damned thing, except ride around with a pretty Southern lady he'd brought back. What had happened to that yaller-haired Kitty? Now there was a woman…

  A few doors past the saloon the driver stopped the coach on the opposite side of the deserted street in front of a single-story building unadorned by a false front. Harrow had built the place as a courtroom for Judge Eaton, with small living quarters, plus a jail of sorts in the back. During the heyday of the boom the man appointed Deputy United States Marshal had made a fair living making arrests at five dollars each, two dollars for serving papers, and six cents per mile going after a prisoner, ten cents the mile to bring him back.

  But there was no deputy marshal in Dalyville now. Like the miners and gamblers and others, he'd faded away to more prosperous diggings.

  They got out of the coach stiffly and the judge opened the front door with a key from his pocket and soon produced a light. In the yellow rays of the lamp he looked more gaunt and cadaverous than ever. To Clara he looked like some kind of vulture. A hungry one.

  "You ladies can find food in my living quarters behind the rostrum and jury box," he said. "Some coffee would be especially good at the moment. Tom, I think we'd better go over to that rotten sink of iniquity and inform those Godless creatures sober enough to understand that their services as guards will be needed again."

  They went out on the narrow porch to where the three men who'd ridden guard atop the coach were waiting. "Spread out and hide under cover near the coach," Judge Eaton instructed them. "If Kerrigan goes to Tom's mansion first, Saunders and Jeb Donnelly will bring him in. If he descends into the gulch first, he'll go straight to the coach here to investigate. Shoot at close range and shoot for his right shoulder. Kill the Apache, by all means, but Kerrigan must be taken alive. Understand?"

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The same late moon looked down upon the two dismounted figures of a tall white man and an Apache Indian. They had come out on a ridge above the lower end of the gulch, because in Arizona the night breezes always blow from the southeast. In the distance, on the opposite ridge and looming up like a black square box in the moonlight, stood the house Carlotta Wilkerson had referred to as an architectural monstrosity. Twenty rooms and two stories high, and otherwise doomed to become an eyeless, weather-beaten haven for bats in the years to come had not the embittered man standing beside the Apache Indian willed different.

  Kerrigan stood there pondering his next move. He could hear the faint tinkle of the piano far up the gulch, but the sounds themselves registered only vaguely in his mind. The main street of the gulch was a good half-mile long and the night breeze blowing up through it wasn't too strong. Those men up there, unless sleeping off a drunken stupor, would have plenty of time to evacuate after they saw the flames.

  Kadoba stirred impatiently, the excitement of a lifetime beginning to grip the Indian. This would be a fire that all the White Eyes and Indians in Arizona would never forget.

  "We go now, Yew, huh? Burn big house first?"

  "The sheriff will think of that and perhaps be hidden there waiting for me," Kerrigan said. "He'll try to put me in irons to keep the gulch from being burned."

  The Indian made no reply. He laid a hand on Kerrigan's arm and stood rigidly, face to the west across the gulch, sniffing the air like a night-hunting animal. He pointed. Kerrigan could see nothing.

  "Wagon over there," Kadoba said hissingly. "Many people, many horses."

  Wagon? No wagon entered the gulch except by the old military road cut-off from the north end. No freight wagon, at least. A freight wagon didn't come into an abandoned mining camp at night.

  He heard, then, the faint jangle of harness and the distant squeal of a brake block against tires, and the answer came to him in a flash. Nothing but a coach or buggy could come down the steep west side of the gulch at night.

  Harrow's coach, of course, and Lew Kerrigan knew that somehow the man had regained his freedom. The judge probably had been so obsessed with the idea of getting his hands on Kerrigan again he had ignored Stovers' charges.

  Kerrigan squared his shoulders and something terrible came into his face. He'd fought his way free of Yuma. He'd killed only because he'd been forced to kill. He'd wanted only to come on up here, free his soul once and for all by burning out this place, and then pull out. In the back of his mind was the thought that he'd like to slip back in a few months and get his money from Joe Stovers; in his heart the hope that when it happened a woman would still be in Pirtman.

  But where Judge Eaton apparently was obsessed with the idea of hanging him, so apparently was Tom Harrow obsessed with the idea of getting his hands on Kerrigan and more gold.

  Harrow would get no second chance this time. Kerrigan was going straight in for the kill. He said, "'We're going down in the town."

  "No burn?" asked the Indian, and pointed into the south mouth of the gulch where the night breeze rustled through.

  "I'm going to kill a man first," Lew Kerrigan said.

  They mounted and began to work their horses down through the scrub pine. A rock rattled here and there as they took their time quartering back and forth along the sharp declivity. They half slid past two or three shacks perched precariously upon painstakingly placed rock foundations buttressed to levelness, and finally came out at the lower end of the street.

  A coyote barked somewhere off in the night and then another. Kerrigan saw the Apache jerk up the head of his horse and sit with a hand shading his eyes, sniffing like a hound.

  "What is it?" asked Kerrigan.

  "Loco."

  "What!"

  "Loco is out there, Yew. Maybe follow red wagon of Harrow. He come kill more White Eyes Pinda-Lick-O-Yi—"

  From far over across the gulch, at Harrow's mansion, a sudden burst of firing broke out and a man let out a yell. It sounded like a white man, and Kerrigan thought of Stovers; presuming him to be alone up there. A series of sharp animal-like cries rent the night air, followed by more firing and yells that definitely were those of white men.

  Light appeared up there in a half-dozen different places, pin points in the night. The faint thunder of two hard-running horses broke out as men fled but Kerrigan heard none following in pursuit. He was watching the torches carried by a half-dozen sprinting Apaches disappear through smashed windows in the twenty-room mansion. He could picture the fine curtains and draperies at all the downstairs windows and around them beautiful wallpaper in flowered designs over pine walls cut by a new sawmill and nailed into place.

  Those boards would have had nearly two years in which to dry out thoroughly.

  "Loco," Kadoba said again, looking up impassively. "I tell him much you tell to me in prison, Yew. How bring many Pinda-Lick-O-Yi here and take Apache gold. He follow red wagon tonight to catch Harrow. Burn big house up there. Catch Harrow. Hang him by heels and burn him, too."

  Over on the narrow road Tom Harrow had ordered cut up the side of the ridge to the big home now licking flame, two horses were coming down carrying two panic-stricken riders. In a clearing where the moonlight lit up a sharp bend around a rocky promontory Lew Kerrigan saw a dot of white flash by. A white horse; and, so far as he knew, there was only one white horse whose rider would have been up there at the mansion.

  As though the firing of Harrow's mansion up on the ridge had been the signal, a whole chorus of screaming cries now broke out among the deserted shacks festooning the south end of the gulch a quarter mile below where Kerrigan and Kadoba sat their horses. More torches appeared; at least twenty of them this time. Amid the screaming cries, riders on Indian ponies began dashing here and there firing shacks and tents so rotted their former owners hadn't bothered to take the
m away.

  They had been left as they stood and it would be but a matter of minutes until the whole south end of the gulch, fed by the night breeze from the southeast, would become a ball of fire beginning a slow roll forward up the gulch to sweep it clean.

  Kadoba had been excited all evening at the prospect of seeing such a fire. He was not going to be disappointed. Dalyville was going to be wiped out. The decision to burn it had been taken from Lew Kerrigan's hands.

  "Now what we do?" Kadoba asked excitedly. "We help 'em, huh?"

  That decision, too, was taken from Kerrigan's hands. Tossing their torches aside, Loco's kill-mad broncos came spurring along the rutted road, making a dash for the heart of town where lights from the whiskey dive and Judge Eaton's courtroom could be seen. Kerrigan whirled the big red horse, digging him hard, and jumped from sight back of a building that would soon be caught in the path of the advancing flames.

  Nor was he any too soon. More than twenty screaming Apaches slashed by at a run and swept up the street, and when Kerrigan jarred out into the road again Kadoba was gone. The lust to kill had proved too much for the Apache. He'd gone with the others of Loco's hard-riding band.

  Kerrigan slapped soft heels into Big Red's sides and began a thundering run along the wagon road, following the Apaches.

  General George Crook had referred to them as, "the tigers of the human race." Over a period of twenty years of desert and mountain warfare against them other cavalry leaders had admitted with grudging reluctance that many of their chiefs were possessed of sheer military genius. Kerrigan was seeing a facet of that diabolical genius now.

  Loco had sent about six of his dependable broncos up on the west ridge to burn Harrow's great mansion, now turning into a roaring mass of flames and a high, twisting column of smoke. Those six would come down that same narrow, winding coach road and kill anybody trying to escape up it.

  And Loco himself was slashing through town, to kill on a run through, and then in all likelihood station himself at the north end of the gulch to await any victims running before the flames.