Rough Justice

by Lauran Paine

  Bannion pushed the storekeeper aside, whirled Rufus around, and said sharply: “Where is Arnold?”

  Rufus turned angrily and jerked his arm out of Bannion’s grip. “How do I know where he is?” he demanded. “I ain’t his wet nurse. He met three fellers outside the livery barn and told me to come over here and load up the wagon. He’s gone to wet his cussed whistle for all I know. An’ you keep your hands off....”

  “Three gunfighters, Rufus...not three fellows. Three gunhands John Rockland sent for to kill the King boys.”

  Rufus’s anger disappeared in an instant. He blinked at Bannion, saying slowly: “Sheriff, do you know what you’re sayin’?”

  But Bannion was already moving toward the front roadway and did not reply.

  Rufus looked after him a moment, then jack-knifed into action. Pushing the list of supplies into the slack-jawed storekeeper’s hand, he bellowed, “Wait for me!” and went hobbling as rapidly as his crippled legs would permit, in pursuit of Sheriff Bannion. At the doorway, remembering his obligation to Texas Star, he twisted and called back: “Load the wagon with them things! I can’t stay to help you, but, even if I could, it wouldn’t much matter ’cause I can’t hardly read anyhow.”

  Bannion went first to the livery barn. He was already a good two hundred yards ahead of Rufus Paige, when he was told the three strangers were no longer around. Next he struck out for the nearest saloon to the livery, and he lost old Rufus entirely.

  The gunfighters were nowhere to be found in this bar. Bannion spent thirty minutes going from saloon to saloon. When he found himself near the hotel, he went upstairs there to check with his guards. They had seen no strangers, nor anyone else for that matter, they told Bannion.

  Bannion went back down to the roadway and stood there, thinking, looking north and south. He was stumped. It was as though the earth had opened up and swallowed Rockland’s new range boss, along with his three hired killers.

  “Hey, Sheriff...!”

  It was Rufus, puffing from exertion and looking indignant. Bannion let him catch up. “Where are they?” the Texas Star’s cook asked. “Consarn it...there’s no need to rush around like a chicken with its head shot off, is there? We’ll find ’em.”

  Bannion was angry and he showed it now. “We’ll do nothing. You go on back to your wagon and don’t get involved in this. You hear me, Rufus?”

  “I’d have to be deaf not to,” growled the old man. “Two heads are better’n one, Bannion. You heard that ol’ sayin’, ain’t you?”

  Bannion purpled. He glared at Rufus, then he said in a whipsaw tone: “Get! Go on back to your wagon! Damn you, Rufus, if it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have this mess on my hands. Two heads better’n one.... Dog-gone you for an old meddler, anyway. Now scat, or I’ll use my boot toe to start you out.”

  Rufus blinked before he moved back a few cautious feet where he continued to stare. “Never seen you so mad before,” he muttered. “All right, Sheriff, I’m goin’. No need to be nasty...I’m goin’.”

  From fifty feet along the plank walk Rufus turned, put his indignant eyes upon Bannion, and hesitated there, obviously considering the sheriff’s words and a response to them. In the end though, he kept them to himself, wheeled around, and went stiffly back toward the general store.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Something was wrong here and Bannion knew it. He stood on the plank walk with the afternoon bustle going on around him, seeing the people of his town, hearing them at their chores. He felt that the recent windstorm was all that occupied their conversation, while a big black cloud of real trouble was steadily building up over their heads of which they were totally ignorant.

  He went back to the livery barn, had Sam Ryan show him the horses and outfits of the three newcomers. All three horses wore the same brand. These men were not, as Sam had opined, strangers to one another at all.

  Under the livery man’s worried eye Bannion rummaged through the bedrolls and saddlebags of each man. He found nothing in the first two, but in the third one he found a copy of John Rockland’s telegram. Ryan read this over Bannion’s shoulder and gasped.

  “Be damned,” he said. “Mister Rockland sent for ’em.”

  Bannion pocketed the telegram and crossed the road to the first saloon he’d entered in his earlier search. There he unexpectedly came upon Carl Arnold idly drinking cool beer at the bar. Arnold seemed deep in thought and somewhat troubled. Bannion stepped up beside him, ignored the barman, and said: “Carl, I want to know where those gunmen are.”

  Arnold straightened up, looking astonished. For a moment he simply stared, then he said in a hollow tone: “What gunmen, Sheriff?”

  Bannion checked an impulse to say something fierce. “Don’t play games with me, Carl.” He shook out the telegram, watched Arnold read it, then he put it back into his pocket. “Those gunmen, and unless you tell me within two minutes I’m going to arrest you.”

  Arnold pushed his emptied beer glass away. He twisted from the waist so that he was facing Bannion. He had made a decision and Bannion could see in the resolution upon his face that good or bad he was going to stand by it.

  “Don’t ask me nothing, Sheriff. If you want answers, go see Mister Rockland. He’s probably at the ranch.”

  “What d’you mean probably. Don’t you know where he is?”

  “No,” said Arnold. “I haven’t seen him since last night. After we got back to the ranch last night he told me to come to town with Rufus an’ the supply wagon this morning. I ain’t seen him today.”

  Bannion was at once struck with an idea. He said: “Carl, what did Mister Rockland tell you fellers after he went storming out of town last night?”

  Arnold shook his head. “Nothing. He rode all the way back without saying a word. He was mad...we could see that...but he’d been pushing himself and us too dog-gone’ hard for over twenty-four hours, so didn’t none of us pay much attention. He went into the house the second he got home, and we hit the bunkhouse.”

  Bannion’s idea was becoming a slow conviction.

  “Carl, you listen to me. Last night Judy tried to talk her paw into forgetting his private feud with the King boys over McAfee’s killing. She told me he actually went to see the Kings with maybe an idea of apologizing to them, or at least thanking them. But whatever he had in mind, it wasn’t more fighting.”

  “He didn’t say anything like that to us, Sheriff.”

  “Just shut up and listen. I had guards outside the room where the Kings are. They roiled Rockland, I guess... anyway, he went fuming out to you boys and led you out of town in a big rush.”

  Arnold considered. He shrugged, beginning to frown. “I don’t know anything about any of this, Sheriff. All I know is that I take my orders from Mister Rockland, and a couple of days ago he told me....” Arnold closed his mouth and deepened his dogged scowl.

  Bannion nodded. “I’ll finish that for you,” he said. “Rockland told you he’d sent for three gunfighters. He told you why he’d sent for them...to avenge McAfee. Today, when you rode into town with Rufus, you saw three strangers over at the livery barn and you figured, if these were the gunmen, you’d save them riding out to get their orders straight from John Rockland, so you went over, told them you were Rockland’s foreman, and told them what Rockland wanted. Carl, you gave them the names of the Kings.”

  Arnold took up his empty beer glass and peered into it. He set it down and looked around for the barman. When the apron-covered barkeep came forth, Arnold indicated he wanted a refill.

  At his side Bannion watched all this, waiting. Finally Arnold turned, looking harassed.

  “Try and prove any of that,” he growled at Bannion. “I take orders from the man who pays me, and what he says is good enough for me.”

  “You’re a fool!” exclaimed Bannion. “Since last night things have changed. If you had a brain inside your skull, you’d know that
’s a fact. Rockland doesn’t want the King boys killed now...they saved the life of his only child.”

  “All I know,” Arnold said stubbornly, “is what he told me a couple of days ago...after Dale McAfee’s killing.”

  “Yeah,” Bannion said disgustedly, “so now you’ve put those gunhawks to work, and you’ve put John Rockland in one helluva spot. All right, Carl, you’ve done what you thought you had to do. Now I’m going to undo that and save your stupid neck for you. Where are those gunfighters?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re a liar!”

  Arnold came around in a flash, his eyes flaming.

  Bannion was ready. He had stepped away from the bar as he’d hurled those fighting words. He was standing, wide-legged and bent inward slightly from the shoulders now, waiting.

  “Go ahead,” he said to Arnold. “Go on, Carl, make your play.”

  But Carl Arnold, not an intelligent man, was mixed up in his mind. He was not basically a bad, or even a mean, man. He was fearful Bannion’s words might be true and he was beginning to worry over what he’d done. He hung there, undecided, and indecision in a gunfight was the worst possible attitude. Very gradually the rigidity left Arnold’s spine, his arm straightened, and he drew up erect. His expression was more troubled now than angry.

  He said: “I’m going to get me a livery horse and go back to the ranch.”

  “You do that,” agreed Bannion, also coming up out of his crouch. “And you’d better make a fast trip of it, too, because if anything happens while you’re gone, it won’t just be you that’s in hot water up to his neck, it’ll also be John Rockland.”

  “I’ll find out,” Arnold said, and started away.

  Bannion halted him briefly with his question: “Where are those gunfighters? This is the last time I’m going to ask you that, Carl.”

  But Arnold, like most people who operated almost entirely by instinct, had closed his mind around this one thing like iron. He could have been dragged behind wild horses, but he never would have volunteered this information. He only glared balefully at Bannion, then pushed on out of the saloon, leaving Bannion standing there, wondering whether to go after him, or let him rush back to Texas Star.

  In the end Bannion thought Arnold’s return to Texas Star was more important than any additional delay, so he turned, leaned upon the bar, and his warm gaze fell upon Arnold’s untouched glass of beer. He lifted it, drained it dry, and slammed the glass down.

  The barman shuffled up, put forth a tentative smile, and said: “Sheriff, when them fellers was in here with Carl, I couldn’t help but hear a little of what they was talkin’ about.”

  “Yeah,” Bannion muttered dryly. “One thing about barmen...they got awful good ears. I don’t suppose you heard them say where they were going, though.”

  “I heard that, yes. Carl told them the King brothers had a room at the hotel.”

  Bannion was puzzled. His deputies had said no one had approached them. Suddenly it struck Bannion and he started in his tracks. The back stairway. He had not placed any guard there, believing it would be unnecessary, but now he recalled how a rickety fire escape of checked wood ran along the hotel’s rear. Access to this fire escape, which went along beneath the windows of each upstairs room, was by that back stairway.

  Bannion rushed out of the saloon, turned south, and went ahead to a little passageway between two buildings. He hastened along this toward the rear alleyway leading down behind the hotel.

  Back at the saloon, the barman stood mournfully considering that emptied beer glass. Both Arnold and Bannion had drunk from it, yet neither of them had paid. If a thing like this becomes a habit, a feller could go out of business, he thought to himself, picking up the glass. He was still standing there, viewing the glass when the gunshots came, exploding into the afternoon quiet like cannon.

  Bannion was nearly through the dogtrot and into the yonder alleyway when he heard the shots. He knew at once that while he’d been trying to winnow information from Carl Arnold time had run out on him. Instead of springing erect as everyone else did who heard those blasting explosions, Bannion ran harder, hurtled out into the alleyway, turned to his right, and went along toward the rear of the hotel. It had initially been his hope to catch the gunmen halfway up the hotel’s back wall, exposed upon that old outside staircase. Now though, as a veritable fusillade of gunshots erupted, he knew the hired killers had gotten inside the hotel.

  When he came down through the afternoon shadows behind the hotel and glanced up, the fire escape was empty. He wasted no second glance but rushed the rear entrance to that building, went charging into the pantry, encountered a wide-eyed waitress there, and shot past her on through the dining room and into the adjacent lobby.

  Here, people were milling, speaking shrilly, and looking at one another, dumbfounded. From overhead, there came several rattling shots that sounded thunderously loud within the building and made the windows rattle noisily in their casings. The hotel clerk shot a beseeching look at Bannion and said something, but two more shots came from upstairs and Bannion, rushing headlong toward the stairs, paid no heed to the people around him.

  Near the landing Bannion slowed with caution, and as he did so, a bullet came out of nowhere to strike solidly over his head and to one side. Bannion dropped down, drew his handgun, and risked a peek ahead.

  There was no one visible in the hallway. There was not a sign of his five deputized cowboys. The door to the King brothers’ room hung ajar and acrid gunsmoke eddied outward there.

  There were a number of closed doors on each side of this hallway, perhaps six of them. Then the hallway made an abrupt right turn going southward, but it seemed to Bannion from the sounds of that unseen battle, that the participants were to his left—either in the King brothers’ room or the rooms adjoining it to the left.

  He sprinted as far as Judith’s room, kicked open the door, and jumped sideways against the wall with his cocked gun swinging.

  Judith was in bed, sitting stiffly forward with a frightened, apprehensive look on her face. She called Bannion by name, then a solitary loud shot came, and she sat there clutching the bed clothing with her lips parted, saying nothing more.

  Bannion lowered his gun. She was safe and there was no one with her. He said: “Lock this door after me, girl, and don’t let anyone in here.”

  “Sheriff! What is it? What’s happened?”

  Bannion’s bitterness almost let him tell her, but he didn’t. He only repeated his previous instructions, and slipped back out in to the hallway. He stood there until he heard the lock click behind him, then he started forward very cautiously.

  He was approaching the door that was ajar when a man rushed out of the room, saw Bannion, and jumped back. Evidently though, in that fleeting second, this man had recognized the sheriff because he called out, poked his head through the opening, and then stepped out fully.

  It was one of the deputized cowboys. His face was white; his eyes were shades darker than usual.

  “Damn!” he exclaimed to Bannion. “I thought you was another of ’em.”

  “Who?” demanded Bannion. “Where are they?”

  “In the room beyond this here one. We was all sittin’ out here, half asleep, when all of a damned sudden they opened up. They got one of the Kings...that dark feller whose eyes were swollen closed.”

  “Al?”

  “Yeah...Al. They knocked him off his bed with the first shot.”

  “Killed him?”

  “How the devil would I know?” exclaimed the agitated range man. “All hell busted loose. We smashed open the door, rushed in, and, Sheriff, the lead was flyin’ thick as bumble bees. No one had time to look at that shot feller. All a man had time to do was drop down and try to get behind something.” The rider started past. “I got to go,” he stated. “I’m goin’ downstairs and see if I can’t find a way to come up behi
nd them fellers. Hell, there must be ten of ’em in among these damn’ rooms.”

  “There are three of them,” stated Bannion, and at the deputy’s unbelieving look, he added: “Go on...tell the clerk downstairs to show you how to come up from the pantry. But, pardner, be awful careful. Those three men are professionals. They’re some of the best gunfighters in Texas.”

  “That,” snapped the cowboy, “is somethin’ you sure didn’t have to tell me, Sheriff.”

  Bannion watched his deputy hurry along to the stairs and go bouncing down them two at a time. He considered rushing after and joining him in his attempt to flank Hobart, Elam, and Fuller. But several loud shouts from the room where the Kings and his other men were battling it out changed his mind.

  Bannion turned and moved slowly along the hallway until he was flattened to a wall outside the room. He waited there with good sense until he announced himself several times, then he whirled around the door casing and jumped inside.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Five guns had their smoking barrels trained unwaveringly upon Bannion.

  Al King lay sprawled and unconscious beside his cot. One deputy was writhing upon the floor with a broken leg—the result of a bullet through his upper leg. Another deputy was attempting to staunch blood from a bad hole in his fleshy thigh. Ray and Hank and Austin King were flattened beside a shattered door leading into an adjoining room. Their faces were white and their eyes showed cruel lights. Two closely spaced gunshots erupted, echoing thunderously, from beyond the door and Bannion heard those bullets smack into the wall on either side of him.

  Hank King shouted: “Down, Sheriff! Get away from the door!”

  Bannion dropped, rolled sideways, and came up on his knees. He crawled to the first wounded deputy, wordlessly assisted this man at making his broken leg as comfortable as possible, then he went on to the second deputy. Here, though, that raw torn flesh had been staunched and the range man’s white face looked dumbly at Bannion.