They looked. It was a rolling ball of fire. The night breeze, blowing in from the southeast as always, had caught it and moved it along. But it was the terrible heat of expanding air, growing to explosive intensity as it became hotter, that was mushrooming the roaring inferno faster and faster as it grew in volume.
Joe Stovers ran up, wiping at his face and panting. "They're going to try getting that red horse of yourn into harness, Lew. Don't know whether he's broke to pull or not but he ain't got much choice, and neither have we. We got to get out of here!"
"There's only one way to go, Joe, and Loco knows that," Lew Kerrigan answered tiredly.
"He knew it from the beginning. North ahead of the fire. He sent several of his bucks to fire Harrow's mansion and then to hold the road up the side of the gulch. We've got no place to go that I can think of at the moment."
Carlotta had disappeared inside and now he saw the dim glow of a light behind a curtained doorway in the back of the courtroom. Something impelled him to follow her. He found her there alone, poking idly through a lid opening in the small cookstove, as though she had to find something to do with her hands.
"Would there be time enough for coffee, Lew?" she asked.
"No," he said. "We're in a bad spot. The broncos are waiting for the fire to drive us up the gulch and into their rifles. And there's nowhere else to go."
"That would mean that we won't get out alive, at least some of us?"
"That's right, Carlotta. There's a pretty good chance that at least some of us haven't much time left."
She looked up at him and actually smiled, lifting the lid into place over the fire and laying aside the hook. "Then I'd like to ask a question, if you don't mind, Lew. Why was it that you and Clara—that the two of you—"
"Never got married?" he interrupted soberly. "Well, I suppose it shapes up about like this: Clara walked out beneath an arch of sabers to be married to a childhood sweetheart the day he graduated from West Point. To her he became a living symbol of something fine and great in a young country flexing its muscles. It wasn't a question of her remaining in Pirtman to be near him, and me letting that stand in my way. It was the fact that I couldn't go to a woman who'd lived her kind of life and offer her an assumed name with a background of five dead men behind and the law hunting me for it. She was strong and self-supporting and with a will and intelligence to work out her own future in her own way. Kitty was merely a lonely, helpless youngster, hunting someone and needing someone. Does that answer your question, Carlotta?"
"Yes," she said in a low voice, "that answers my question."
Warmness of a kind he'd never known before stirred through him and with it the strong desire to reach out and sweep her to him. In the back of his mind had been the vague hope that when he slipped into Pirtman some night in the future to get his money from Joe Stovers she'd still be there. She must have read what was in his thoughts, for she suddenly slid inside his arms and buried her face against his chest.
"Lew," she said and looked up at him and smiled, "I've carried a picture inside me of how you looked that first day down in the hotel corridor in Yuma. I felt an ache all through me today when you left Pirtman, thinking I'd never see you again. It's not the proper thing for a Southern lady to say, but would you bend those rough whiskers down just once—"
He buried them against her warm mouth and neither of them felt the pain until a discreet cough came from the curtains over the doorway. Kerrigan released her and looked at Judge Eaton.
"Kerrigan, I must speak quickly," Eaton said, and cleared his throat with a throbbing up-and-down motion of his prominent Adam's apple. "We're trapped by fire that's coming fast. If words will help any at this acute time, I have done you a great injustice. I know Harrow now for what he is, and what he has done. I'm looking at the kind of death tonight I have meted out to other men in the past, and I find myself afraid. Is there any chance that you, knowing those Apaches as friends, could stop this terrible thing that is about to happen?"
"Not any more than you could stop a pack of wolves from pouncing on the one that happened to go down, Judge. They go mad with the lust to kill. I can only try."
"What did you have in mind, sir?" asked Eaton, hope in the sunken sockets of his skull-like features.
"Take all the men and move forward on foot, and let the coach follow behind."
"A fine idea. A very fine idea!" cried out Eaton and actually shook his hand. "Let me assure you, Kerrigan, that if we get out of this place alive tonight you will be a free man tomorrow."
Kerrigan looked at him and thought, Maybe he was right in his way. Maybe I've overlooked the good he's done because Harrow framed me.
"Let's get out of here," he said.
From out in the street came the threshing jangle of harness as men fought the big red horse into the gap left by a dead one. The coach had been turned around, the team to head north. Everybody was out in the street now, clustered around the red coach.
Everybody except Clara Thompson. Kerrigan felt her hand upon his left arm and looked down. She was smiling at what she'd witnessed but a look of dark fear haunted her eyes, the first time he'd ever seen such a thing there.
"Lew, your shadow and Carlotta's were outlined against the curtain from the lamplight and Tom saw it. He rushed outside like a madman. He'll kill you before he'll let you have her."
He said, "All right, Clara," and led her outside. Big Red was in harness in the center span between wheelers and leaders but it took two men to hold the plunging animal by the bit. The fire was beginning to brighten the street as it swept on its way, shacks and tents disappearing into its fiery maw.
As the three women got into the coach Kerrigan said to the frightened driver, "Just keep them moving behind us. If those broncos try to close in, lay on the whip and bust through us and keep going. Hit the old military road cut-off after you get out and then swing south on it to Pirtman. Savvy?"
The light that had gone on over in the Cherokee's dive suddenly went out with a loud crash, as though the lamp had been flung. It had. Flames sprang up from scattered kerosene and Sam Blaze Face came out with several men, a 16-shot Civil War Henry repeating rifle in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.
"Ain't no damned Apaches goin' to burn a Cherokee Indian's saloon," he bellowed into the night and waved the rifle. "I bootlegged liquor to the Indians up in Indian Territory until U.S. marshals chased me out, and I'll live to go back there and do it again. Come on, you free-loadin', whiskey-drinkin' gents. Let's go hunt us some Apache scalps!"
They made a strange-looking group as they moved up the street. A red coach with three women inside and a driver up front and a man walking along with both hands on the bit of a big red horse still fighting the harness. A part-Cherokee Indian and several human dregs of a mining camp striding boldly in front with whiskey courage high. Ace Saunders walking on one side of the coach, leading his horse, and Jeb Donnelly riding his big white horse on the other side. Harrow and Judge Eaton had fallen in directly back of the wheels, the rear boot within easy grasp if the driver suddenly put the whip to the six horses.
In the darkness Judge Eaton looked over at Harrow. Harrow's lips were swollen, his face a mask of the poisonous hatred inside of him. He looked anything but the suave, immaculately tailored man who'd waited for Lew Kerrigan in the hotel at Yuma. To the cool, brightly reflective eyes of Judge Eaton he looked no better than those human dregs out of the Cherokee's dive, and at the moment the judge held him in less respect.
He was an object of contempt, and at the moment he revolted the judge. Kerrigan had sworn a vow to destroy the man and everything he represented, but Eaton had been unprepared for the terrible thoroughness with which the tall ex-ranchman had gone about it.
And now, as though he still wasn't through, Lew Kerrigan came out of the night on noiseless moccasins. "Harrow!" he said sharply.
"What do you want?" came the low, gritted reply. "Haven't you and those Apaches done enough to me?"
"Not as
much as Loco would like to do," the tall man answered grimly. "You bought me out of prison because I celled with Kadoba. Through him, Loco has found out you were responsible for this boom camp and what it's done to Apache country. Kadoba told me that Loco wants you worst of all. If he can get his hands on you, he's going to swing you by the heels and burn you."
"Haven't you punished the man enough!" Judge Eaton cried out despite his feelings. "How terrible must your vengeance be, Kerrigan? You've broken him body and soul and taken his woman. What more do you want?"
"Like Ace Saunders, I don't like the idea of a white man being tortured and mutilated by Apaches. Get in the coach with the others, Harrow. The wiping out of Dalyville finishes my job with you. I'm not going to kill you."
He was gone again at a trot, to rejoin Joe Stovers somewhere up ahead. Harrow's shoulders straightened and he wiped at his mouth with his hand, remembered, and removed a handkerchief from his coat sleeve. He used that and then smiled over at Judge Eaton.
"I'm not licked yet, Yeager," he said. "We've got a long way to go."
"Yes," Judge Eaton replied, "we've got a long way to go. But it will be necessary for us to wait until Kerrigan gets us out of this trap. You'd better join the ladies in the coach, Tom. The money is still in there, you know."
The speculative look came again into Eaton's sunken eyes when he found himself alone behind the coach. The contempt for Harrow was still there. The information that Kerrigan not only wouldn't kill him but would try to protect him had worked a new transformation in Harrow.
Let him get Kerrigan, the judge thought. Let Kerrigan find the source of further wealth for them. But Harrow could never again be trustworthy…
Scattered firing broke out somewhere up ahead and Eaton heard men running as though the Cherokee and his followers were scattering to take cover. The coach surged forward under the panicky driver's whip and then was hauled up short again at Lew Kerrigan's harsh order to the man holding the lines.
Judge Eaton found himself fifty yards to the rear, and he lengthened his pace to catch up again. Thanks to Kerrigan's actions since the man had been freed from prison, this thing had gotten completely out of hand. A man like that was hard to stop, as Harrow and his men had found out to their fear and sorrow, and yet that same quality of determination gave the judge confidence now. Someway, somehow, the man he'd sentenced to life at hard labor would get them out of this, the judge was certain.
After that, of course, appropriate action would have to be taken. Self-preservation was the first law of man, and the judge had to protect his name and reputation in the territory…
A shadow glided out of the night on noiseless feet; five feet six inches of young Apache Indian, crouched and leaning forward like the black weasel that had shot out of the dungeon doorway and lunged at Wood Smith. In the dim light the smoky-black eyes of Kadoba were burning.
He closed the distance between them with terrible swiftness. His left arm reached out and locked itself across the judge's throat from behind. Eaton felt the black steel band of forearm sink deep into his prominent Adam's apple and went down into a sitting position, helpless and silent and watching the back end of the red coach move out of sight. To his fear-dilated nostrils came the odor of something not unlike a wild animal and he felt like a rabbit in the firm jaws of a desert wolf.
One of Loco's band had him and he knew he was going to die.
The Apache shifted his grip and twisted around until the terrified "Hanging Judge" saw a face he hadn't seen in two years. He recognized it quite readily despite the streak of white bottom clay now drawn below the fierce black eyes and thin dark nose.
He'd looked down at that same face in the courtroom in Globe, thundering his apologue against lawless white men but that he would show God's mercy to this untutored young savage; thundering it while the interpreter tried vainly to get some of it across to the smoky-eyed bronco. Cavalry officers who knew the Apaches and why they had fought so bitterly against the encroachment of whites across their lands and their way of a free life had listened to Yeager Eaton's overly long harangue with poker faces becoming those of career soldiers.
It had been a big day, a personal triumph, for the judge; taking the case out of their hands and, later, lecturing them severely about setting stern examples for other "savages" to observe, all the while gorging himself on food in the officers' mess and drinking their brandy.
That same young Apache who hadn't understood a word the judge had said now twisted around still farther in front of the judge and spoke to him in garbled English.
"Kadoba, me. You 'member me, huh? I killum squaw with knife. You send me Yuma in iron ropes. Send Yew Ker'gan too, huh? Now I come back kill you."
Eaton's hat had fallen off. Kodoba's dark hand grasped him across the forehead and bent his neck over a knee, the prominent Adam's apple tight beneath the skin as the Apache's knife swept up in a vicious arc.
If Harrow and Jeb Donnelly die this night, Yeager Eaton thought, my name will go into the National Archives as that of an honorable man who helped put down lawlessness in the terr—
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Tom Harrow stepped to the ground and closed the coach door upon three silent figures, none of whom had spoken to him. Jeb Donnelly reined the white horse over close and looked down, bulking huge in the saddle like a sack of sheep wool.
"Some of them boozed-up miners saw somethin'," he said in answer to Harrow's question. "They'd shoot at a bat overhead, they're that nervous—not that I blame them, I'm nervous, too."
"Where's Kerrigan?"
"Up front some'ers. I saw him duck back of a building. We're almost at the edge of town."
"There might be a possibility," Harrow said in a low voice, "that those broncos will wait until we get a mile or so along the road. Jeb, now is the time. Go get the judge— Say, where is he?"
"He was with you behind the coach a little ways back. I'll take a look… but not too much of one."
He loped away as the coach began to inch ahead in answer to Kerrigan's distant call. And then Donnelly came spurring back, hauling up hard on a sore-mouthed white horse. The lividness of fear had come into his big face again.
"What is it?" demanded Harrow.
"Goddlemighty," panted out the new marshal appointed by Judge Eaton. "He's—back there."
"Dead?"
Donnelly nodded and swallowed hard. He drew his hand and part of his thick forearm all the way across his throat. "They're in behind us, and it was you got me into this trap with your dirty money. For two cents I'd lay the steel to this hoss and take my chances—"
A rocketing explosion of rifle fire broke out at least a mile ahead of them. Lew Kerrigan, working his way far ahead of the others from one now thinly scattered shack to another, came up short and tried to look through the dim moonlight. He could hear the roar of the flames back there, whipping through and consuming the main part of what had been the business section. The great mansion up on the west ridge was a single blazing pillar of fire.
"Joe!" Kerrigan called piercingly. "Joe, where are you?"
Somewhere up there he caught the sound of hard-running ponies and wild cries. Amid the broken sound of ponies darting here and there and the panic-stricken shooting of the fleeing miners, he heard the steady drumming of other horses. They were coming hard in a steady rhythm, a whole line of them riding abreast in skirmish formation, and now for the first time he caught the clear notes of a Cavalry K of C bugle sounding a charge. A sound he hadn't heard in more than ten years; not since Terry's Texans had ridden into battle against Union Cavalry.
He thought, Hell, I'd forgotten about Rawlinson and his troops being camped somewhere up in this country, using Apache scouts from the reservation. I should have known old Greybeard Fox* would figure Loco's next move would be toward home country …
* Author's note: General Crook.
Loco had timed one trap too often. He'd known that the glow of the fire could be seen for fifty miles and that troops would know it hadn't
been set by lightning. He'd gambled on a quick butchery of all the whites in the gulch and then scattering like quail, to meet two hundred miles away at a predesignated point.
To Kerrigan it looked as though he'd been outsmarted by Apache scouts in the pay of the army, and from the sound of things up there in the night, cavalry troops at last were putting an end to his elusive career of butchery.
Kerrigan leaned the .45-90 against the logs of a shack he'd been using for cover, suddenly more tired than he had ever been in his life. With the sudden realization that he wouldn't have to kill any more, the hatred and bitterness had drained out of him. He stood there for a few minutes, listening to the crash of running horses, the shots and general confusion. He thought of Carlotta and wondered how she'd feel, now that it was all over. She'd come to him there in the kitchen of Judge Eaton's courtroom because none of them knew what would happen within the next hour or so.
He'd have to run for it, of course. This night's work would be all over the territory—in every small hamlet paper—within a week. It would go to Washington in the reports of Captain Rawlinson and that of the Indian agent accepting new prisoners surrendering to the soldiers and Apache scouts.
And he'd have to get out of the territory to some faraway place because he hadn't believed a word Judge Eaton had promised less than an hour before. He knew the man and his fanaticism. He suspected that Tom Harrow's freedom had had something to do with money paid or to be paid.
Kadoba's familiar shadow loomed up out of nowhere and the Apache grinned his schoolboy grin. "Soldiers come, Yew. Loco gone."
"Dead? Run away?" Lew Kerrigan asked without particular interest. General Crook had cleaned out most of the other bronco bands, and it would have been but a matter of time until he'd run down Loco if the raider had escaped.
"No dead. No run away. Apache scouts catch him. Catch me too but I go back there."
A Gunman Rode North Page 14