by Lauran Paine
Bannion climbed up to throw his shoulder against the board. He felt it go forward a little. Then it was struck by two additional shoulders and went nearly into place. Bannion yelled something. Neither the storekeeper nor his clerk heard this because wind whipped the words away almost before they were spoken, but that third strong presence heartened the store men and even without hearing Bannion’s profane encouragement they fought, gasping, to press that board in close enough.
At once both store men began to drive nails furiously. Bannion slanted an upward narrowed look, saw the nail heads glistening, and very gingerly withdrew his shoulder. The plank quivered and vibrated, but it held.
The clerk stepped away from the window into three inches of gritty sand, turned to look upward where his employer was finishing pounding in the last nail, and fainted. Bannion grasped the man’s bloody shirt, dragged him behind a counter, and bent over him, ascertaining that it was nothing more than a faint.
When he rose up, the merchant was panting there with both arms braced. He gasped: “Is he bad hurt?” Bannion shook his head. The merchant twisted to frown downward. “Fainted?” Again Bannion nodded. The storekeeper said: “I’ll fetch him some whiskey.”
Bannion left the store, was rushed along for a hundred feet, bumping and turning until he caught hold of a railing, and there he halted, looking beyond the last building out across the rangeland. Everything five feet beyond was utterly blotted out by that mustard-tan gritty blight. He stood for a moment with his back against the wind, breathing deeply, then he turned, dropped his head, and began fighting his way southward a foot at a time directly into the face of this unrestrained natural force.
Somewhere west of town there was a loud report, then the grinding crash of a roof being torn away and flung violently against another building. This was the only sound Bannion could distinguish over the howl, the shriek of this worst of all Santa Anas he’d ever experienced.
He could progress southward only about fifty feet at a time without having to halt, turn his back, lean against that tangible force, and struggle for more of the insufficient air before attempting to go farther. Once, something struck his lower legs. He bent down, caught hold of something furry, lifted it close enough to see it, and saw a terrified little mongrel dog writhing in his grip. He crushed this small animal against his chest and backed along the plank walk to the first doorway. There, he flung the panel open, dropped the little dog inside, and slammed the door closed. This took more of Bannion’s energy. He hung there in that recessed place, panting.
It was then that he heard something that might have been a door slamming or a rooftree snapping, or even a piece of tin being whipped away in the wind. But what he thought was that this sharp popping sound was a gunshot.
He left the doorway and went onward again, bearing southward, body bent nearly double, one arm flung out to feel the wood siding on his left, and in this manner got back to the hotel. Here, he could make out blurred movement dead ahead through the grating wetness of his slitted eyes. He kept on, passing the hotel door, and closed his fingers over a man’s upper arm.
It was Al King. With Al was Ray. Al tugged at Sheriff Bannion’s arm and turned back, going southward a hundred yards, following Ray. The three of them got into a doorway with wind tearing at them but with its greater force whipping past. Al pushed his mouth against Bannion’s temple and shouted.
“Someone...over at...jailhouse...fired a gun. You hear it?”
Bannion nodded, although he had no idea where that earlier sound had come from, nor, for that matter, that it was actually a gunshot.
Al pushed in close again. “Ray says...let’s go over there.”
Bannion nodded a second time. He pushed out of the doorway, got to the plank walk’s very edge, and hung to an upright, steadying himself. Now, the dust was so bad he could not make out even the opposite side of the road.
Ray King came up. He and Al had their arms locked together at the elbow. Ray pushed Bannion roughly away from the post, rammed a powerful arm through Bannion’s arm, hooked it hard, and dragged Bannion down into the roadway.
Al’s legs went out from under him as though struck by a log. Ray and Bannion set themselves against this dragging force. Al managed somehow to get up and the three of them forged ahead. They could not determine the plank walk when it loomed close and this time Bannion stumbled and the other two braced hard until he could regain his balance. In this fashion they lurched to the left, sometimes gaining, sometimes losing, headway, but endlessly struggling until they arrived in front of the jailhouse. Here, Bannion saw without really noticing it that his horse, left tied earlier at the rack, was no longer there.
Bannion lurched for the door, felt for the latch, lifted it, and nearly fell into the room beyond. Al did fall. He stumbled against his brother, went down on all fours. Then, when the door slammed behind them effectively closing out the threshing wind, Al made a heavy effort to regain his feet. Ray caught his right arm, giving a rough assist.
Bannion’s jailhouse was solid adobe. It was a very old building, having once been a Mexican barracks, and after Mexico lost Texas, it had then been a Texas Ranger post. With walls of adobe mud three feet thick it was the only building still in use at Perdition Wells as an office. It was also the only building in town that was literally soundproof, and therefore, while the raging storm outside could be faintly heard, the loud, dry coughing of someone within the office sounded much louder.
Bannion yanked down his mask, threw aside his hat, and looked over where Hank King was trying to stifle his coughing with dippers full of water from the drinking bucket. Young Austin had his hat off. His hair stood out in every direction, stiff with static electricity. His eyes were fast swelling and badly bloodshot. Ray and Al shucked their windbreakers, and all five of them stood there looking dumbly at one another, sucking this relatively clean air deep down.
“Damn,” husked Al, groping his way to a bench. “I can hardly see.”
Bannion cautioned: “Don’t rub your eyes. Go get some water at the bucket, soak a rag with it, and wash them real gently.” His own eyes grated in their sockets. “You rub your eyes now and the sand’ll rupture blood vessels. You’ll be blind for a while. Be careful even when you wash them.”
Ray King coughed and spat and coughed again. He found a chair, dropped down into it, and threw back his head. Exhaustion was deeply etched into every line of his sprawling, big body. After a while he said: “The worst one I ever saw. It’s like a genuine hurricane.”
“How do you know it isn’t?” asked Austin. “I don’t see how this town stands that abuse.”
“Some of it didn’t,” replied Hank. “I heard a roof tear off somewhere west of town.”
Ray brought his head forward and down. He looked at those badly punished men. “Who fired that shot?” he asked.
Austin said: “I did.”
Each face turned to regard the youth. No one spoke.
Austin ran a hand through his awry hair. He went to Bannion’s desk and perched upon it. He looked at them all, but he looked longest at Ray.
“Hank and I went to the livery barn,” Austin said. “Everything there was in pretty good shape, only....”
“Yes?” Al urged, sounding irritable.
“The liveryman told us that Rockland girl left town about five minutes before the storm struck.”
Even cold-blooded Al King lifted his head to regard Austin now. All four of the men sat there looking at Austin, the youngest King brother, struck dumb by their instant realization of what his words meant.
Chapter Nine
Hank had his coughing under control now. He looked at Bannion, saying: “Any chance, Sheriff...any chance she might’ve got under cover somewhere?”
Bannion had instantly considered this after Austin had said what he’d learned at the livery barn. Now he shook his head. “There’s nothing between here and Texas Star except s
ome little arroyos and a few trees. No buildings she could hole up in, and that’s what it takes for a person to ride out one of these storms out...four good walls and a solid roof.”
Ray King drew his legs under him. He leaned forward in the chair, looking straight ahead at nothing. “She’d get lost,” he said quietly. “No matter how good a homing instinct her horse had, it wouldn’t work in a storm as bad as this one.”
Bannion shared this belief. He said to Austin: “Why didn’t that damned fool at the barn keep her there?”
Austin looked at Bannion and shrugged. “I reckon he had no idea, like the rest of us, it would strike this fast and hard. At any rate he didn’t, and that’s what counts now.”
“Yeah,” Ray murmured so quietly they scarcely heard him. “That’s what counts now.” He straightened back in the chair, looking over at Bannion. When he spoke again, it was in the same quiet way, as though he were actually thinking aloud. “A man couldn’t go after her on horseback...he’d have to go afoot.”
“If he went at all,” said Hank, from over by the water bucket. “That’s a pretty big country out there, Ray.”
Bannion took off the coat the hotel clerk had given him. He tossed it aside and got his own windbreaker from a wall peg, put it on, and sat back down while he beat dust from his hat and his handkerchief that he had used as a mask. As though instructing children and without once looking up at them, Bannion said to the west Texans: “You take four lariats. You stretch them to their maximum limits and each man ties an end of one around his wrist. Then you fan out. If the lariats are sixty-footers, you can cover a heap of ground. Then you keep walking.”
Hank finished bathing his face and made room for Al. Young Austin sat on Bannion’s desk, looking steadily at the sheriff. Ray removed his hat, savagely beat it against one leg, then crushed it back onto his head.
“You got the lariats?” he asked.
Bannion bobbed his head up and down, retied the handkerchief over his face, and got up. He went to a closet and returned with several coiled hard-twist ropes. He gave Ray one, Austin one, Al one, and kept the fourth one himself. “You really only need three,” he explained to Hank, who was regarding him with a little scowl. “But when you find the person you’re after, why then you tie him...or her...with the fourth one, so he...she...don’t get blown away again.”
Bannion stood there watching Al at the water bucket gingerly bathing his eyes. “Maybe only a couple of us could do it,” he said.
Ray stood up to his full towering height and looked at Al exactly as Bannion was doing. “Hell, Sheriff, a little sand in the face wouldn’t stop my brothers. How about that, Al?”
From the water bucket there came a soft cursing, then, as Al raised his face and lowered the wet rag, he growled: “A little sand wouldn’t, no...but a damned world filled with sand might. Just you be dog-goned sure my end of the rope is tied tight. I got a hunch I’ll be blind ten minutes after we walk out of here.”
Ray said to Bannion: “You take the easterly end of the line and we’ll be guided by your pulls.”
“I intended to. Now remember this...one hard yank means stop. Two hard yanks means go ahead. Three means bear west, and four means bear east. That’s all you’ve got to remember. If something happens to one of you, sit down. We’ll all feel the drag and converge toward it.”
“What could happen?” queried Austin.
“Probably nothing,” Bannion responded. “But one time I was on a rope posse, such as this, when a loose horse ran between two of us. I was laid up for two months with a dislocated shoulder.” Then he smiled at young Austin, went to the door, and said: “If you’re ready, we’d better get started. If she’s down, the sand could cover her over completely in ten minutes.”
Al left the water bucket with some hard words, got into his windbreaker, and started to tie his wet neckerchief over his face.
Bannion said: “Use a dry one. Dust’ll clog that one so you can’t breathe in two minutes.” Al looked unhappy as he complied.
They grouped around Bannion at the door, towering above him. He looked into their faces and passed each of them the end of a lariat. Without speaking he made his end of a lariat secure to his wrist. Also without saying anything, the others did likewise.
Then Ray King put a considering gaze upon Bannion. “I kind of had you sized up for a pretty good man,” he said. “I guess that other thing...”—and they all knew he meant the killing of Dale McAfee—“maybe prevents us from being friends, though.”
Al King’s dark and swollen eyes held to Bannion from the thin slit between hat brim and mask. Bannion regarded Al in long silence; he was the only one of these four men he had an aversion to. Al, understanding this, said in grumbly and muffled way: “Well, hell, I don’t like you, either.”
Young Austin laughed aloud, and Hank, standing next to Austin, chuckled deep in his chest.
All Bannion said was: “We’ll let the wind take us beyond town, then I’ll lead off easterly a ways before we start north. I know the direction she would have taken. You fellers be guided by my rope. The main thing is to keep up, and keep at the end of your ropes. Don’t let a lot of slack build up.” He paused, looked at them, lifted his shoulders, and let them fall. “I have no idea how far we’ll have to go or how long this will take. I only know we’ve got to make the effort.”
“Sure,” Ray said softly. “We understand.”
Bannion turned, took a firm hold of the door, and opened it. At once all that screaming tumult that had been muted by the jailhouse walls roared around them. They crowded outside, waited until Bannion closed the door after them, then went scudding into the roadway.
At once the raging wind engulfed them. It was worse than before. They could barely make out the man on each side of them. They let it almost carry them to the north end of town, then Bannion began paying out rope and working his way off to the right. The others, guided by their ropes, drifted along with him until, from one end to the other end, they were strung out over a hundred-and-eighty-foot line. Now, none of them could see the other. Only that whipping hard-twist rope linked them. Along it was transferred the only contact they had. It became a kind of hemp telegraph. Bannion signaled for them to drift still farther eastward, and they responded at once.
Bannion, experienced in this savage contest of man against Nature, let the wind do most of the work. He moved his legs mechanically, taking small steps, compelling the storm to push him along. In this fashion he hoarded his energy. Once, when a fractional lull came, he sighted Ray King downcountry on his left. The oldest King brother was doing as Bannion was himself doing—making the wind work for him. Then that lull passed, the wild force returned, and Bannion was fiercely pummeled.
None of them could see ten feet ahead. For Bannion this required total reliance upon instinct. But he was neither a novice at what he was about, nor likely to be misled from his sense of direction. What he feared was not that they wouldn’t find Judith Rockland, but that they might, if she was down, pass over her. This had happened in the past when rope posses were searching blindly for lost people during a Santa Ana.
Bannion had the fourth lariat around his middle. Once, a loop of it slipped down nearly tripping him. He fixed the loop, went another hundred yards, and felt a sharp tug on his guide line. He did not converge, but waited, and, true to his guess, Ray had only stumbled. Within seconds the signal came to advance, and Bannion went on again.
It was useless to try and detect foreign sounds. The wind’s howling fury drowned out everything else. It cut around and lashed their faces, their eyes, but it was not as bad in this respect, Bannion knew, with their backs to it, as it would be later, when they had to face its unbridled fury on the return trip. He wondered briefly about Al King’s eyes, then a frantic tugging came on his wrist from Ray. He did not know whether this signal originated with Ray or was being transmitted from farther along the rope, but his heart struck
hard in its cage, bringing hope flashing upward.
Bannion halted. The frantic, insistent tugging continued. Then a violent jerk wrenched Bannion off balance, drawing him fiercely westward. He turned a little, trying to keep pace with that hard pulling. Now the wind beat mercilessly along his side driving him relentlessly ahead, around, and partially away from Ray. He fought for balance and footage. He kept his mouth open, his head bent, and one shoulder up to protect his eyes as much as possible, and came finally toward something crouched and lumpy in the mad-whirling sand and dust, low upon the ground. He very dimly made out other converging man shapes staggering like scarecrows inward from the west.
Ray caught Bannion’s trouser leg and yanked hard. Bannion fought down to his knees and finally saw the sifted-over lumpiness Ray King was striving to shield with his body.
They had found her!
Ray was already working a handkerchief over Judith’s face. He had brushed most of the sand off her upper body, her face and head. Bannion at once made loose that fourth lariat, tied one end to the unconscious girl’s gritty wrist, and made the other end fast to his free arm. Young Austin worked his way in close and the five of them made a barrier of their bodies around the girl. Al fashioned a spare cloth over her hair and upper face. Ray leaned, worked both arms through the sand, got a good grip, and strained. The others instantly rose up with their powerful arms helping him stand upright.
Bannion now took charge. By hand motions and by pushing and pulling, he got Austin and Al ahead of Ray in a manner that would break the force of the wind’s direct beating. They understood his purpose, and when all of them began struggling back toward Perdition Wells, Ray had a meager amount of help in his struggling onward battle into the face of the storm.
Bannion remained with Ray, partially supporting the larger man with his arm. It was a staggering procession, at times forced off course, at other times made to stand nearly motionless while leaning far forward into the undiminishing power of the Santa Ana’s fiercest onslaughts.