Somehow he slipped under a right to the head and got in close. Spreading his legs wide, he began to slug both hands into the big man’s body. The crowd had gone mad now, but he was berserk. The huge man was fighting like a madman, eager for the kill, and Kilkenny was suddenly lost to everything but the battering fury of the fight and the lust to put the big man down and to keep him down.
Slipping a left, he smashed a wicked right to the ribs and then another and another. Driving in, he refused to let Turner get set and smashed him with punch after punch. Turner threw him off, but he leaped in again, got Tombull’s head in chancery with a crude headlock, and proceeded to batter blow after blow into the big man’s face before Turner did a back somersault to break free and end the round.
Panting, gasping for every breath when each stabbed like a knife, Kilkenny swung to the ropes. “We’ve been refused food in Cedar Bluff!” Kilkenny shouted hoarsely at the officials. “We sent a wagon to Blazer, and three men were waylaid and killed. On a second attempt, we succeeded in getting a little, but only after a pitched battle.”
The call of time came and he wheeled. Turner was on him with a rush, his face bloody and wild. Kilkenny set himself and struck hard with a left that smashed Turner’s nose, and then with a wicked right that rocked Turner to his heels. Faster than the big man, he carried less weight and was tiring less rapidly. Also, the pounding of his body blows had weakened the bigger man.
Close in, they began to slug, but here, too, despite Turner’s massive strength, Kilkenny was the better man. He was faster, and he was beating the big man to the punch. Smashing a wicked left to the chin, Kilkenny stepped in and hooked both hands hard to the body. Then he brought up an uppercut that ripped a gash across Turner’s face. Before Tombull could get set, Kilkenny drove after him with a smashing volley of hooks and swings that had the big man reeling.
Everyone was yelling now, yelling like madmen, but Turner was gone. Kilkenny was on him like a panther. He drove him into the ropes and, holding him there, struck the big man three times in the face. Then Tombull broke loose and swung a right that Kilkenny took in his stride. He smashed Turner back on his heels with a right of his own.
The big man started to fall, and Kilkenny whipped both hands to his face with cracking force! Turner went down, rolled over, and lay still.
In an instant, Kilkenny was across the ring. Grabbing his guns, he strapped them on. His fists were battered and swollen, but he could still hold a gun. He caught a quick glimpse of Nita and saw Brigo was hurrying her from the crowd. Parson and Quincy Hatfield closed in beside him, guns drawn.
“I’ll have to go with you,” Dixon said. “If I stay now, they’ll kill me.”
“Come on,” Kilkenny said grimly. “We can use you.”
Backing after them, Runyon kept Cub Hale at the end of his gun. The younger Hale’s face was white. Then, as the Hale cowhands began to gather, a mob of miners surged between them.
“Go ahead!” a big miner shouted. “We’ll stand by you!”
Kilkenny smiled suddenly, and, swinging away from his men, he walked directly toward the crowding cowhands. Muttering sullenly, they broke ahead of him, and he strode up to King Bill Hale. The big rancher was pale, and his eyes were cold as ice and bitter. Halloran stood behind him, and the tall, cool-eyed man stood nearby.
“I will take my fifteen thousand dollars now,” Kilkenny said quietly.
His face sullen and stiff, Hale counted out the money and thrust it at him.
Kilkenny turned then, bowed slightly to Halloran and the other man, and said quietly: “What I have told you here, gentlemen, is true. I wish you would investigate the claims of Hale to our land, and our own filings upon that land.”
Turning, he walked back to the miners, mounted, and rode off with the Hatfields, O’Hara, and Runyon close about him.
“We’ll have to move fast!” Kilkenny said. “What happens will happen quick now!”
“What can he do?” Runyon asked. “We got our story across.”
“Supposin’, when they come back to investigate, there aren’t any of us left?” Kilkenny demanded. “What could anybody do about that? There’d be no witnesses, an’, even if they asked a lot of questions, it wouldn’t do us any good. The big fight will come now.”
They rode hard and fast, sticking to little-known trails through the brush. They threaded the bottom of a twisted, broken cañon and curled along a path that led along the sloping shoulder of a rocky hill among the cedars.
Kilkenny rode with his rifle across the saddle in front of him and with one hand always ready to swing it up. He was under no misapprehension about King Bill. The man had been defeated again, and he would be frantic now. His ego was being sadly battered, and to prove to himself that he was still the power in the Cedar Valley country he must wipe this trouble from the earth. He would have lost much. Knowing the man, and knowing the white lightning that lay beneath the surface of Cub Hale, he knew the older man must more than once have cautioned the slower, surer method. Now Cub would be ranting for a shootout. Kilkenny knew he had gauged that young man correctly. He was spoiled. The son of a man of power, he had ridden, wild and free, and had grown more arrogant by the year, taking what he wanted and killing those who thwarted him. Dunn and Ravitz would be with him, he knew. That trio was poison itself. He was no fool. He believed he could beat Hale. Yet he had no illusions about beating all three. There was, of course, the chance of catching them off side as he had caught the Brockmans that day in Cottonwood. The Brockmans! Like a flash he remembered Cain. The big man was free to come gunning for him now!
Chapter XVII
Winding around a saddle trail leading into a deep gorge, they came out on the sandy bottom, and he speeded their movement to a rapid trot. Despite himself, he was worried. At the cup, there were only Jesse and Saul Hatfield, Bartram, and Jackie Moffitt. Suppose Hale had taken that moment to sweep down upon them and shoot it out? With luck, the defenders might hold the cup, but if the breaks went against them…?
He turned his horse up a steep slope toward the pines. Ahead of him, suddenly, there was a rifle shot, just one. It sounded loudly and clearly in the cañon, yet he heard no bullet. As if by command, the little cavalcade spread out and rode up through the trees. It was Kilkenny who swept around a clump of scrub pine and saw several men scrambling for their horses. He reined in and dropped to the ground.
A rifle shot chunked into the trunk of the pine beside him, but he fired. One of the riders dropped his rifle and grabbed for the saddle horn, and then they swept into the trees. He got off three carefully spaced shots, heard Runyon, off to his left, opening up, and then, farther along, Parson himself.
He wheeled the buckskin and rode the yellow horse toward the cañon, yelling his name as he swept into the cup. What he saw sent his face white with fear! Jesse Hatfield lay sprawled full length on the hard-packed ground of the cup, a slow curl of blood trickling from under his arm, a bloody gash on his head.
As he reined in alongside Jesse, the door of the house burst open and Jackie Moffitt came running out. “They hit us about two hour ago!” Jackie said excitedly. “They nicked Bart, too!”
Kilkenny dropped to his knees beside Hatfield and turned him gently. One bullet had grazed his scalp; another had gone through his chest, high up. He looked at the wound and the bubbling froth on the man’s lips, and his jaws tightened.
Price Dixon swung down beside him. Kneeling over Hatfield, he examined the wound. Kilkenny’s eyes narrowed as he saw the gambler’s fingers working over him with almost professional skill. He quickly cut away the cloth and examined the wound.
“We’ll have to get him inside,” he said gravely. “I’ve got to operate.”
“Operate?” Parson Hatfield stared at him. “You a doc?”
Dixon smiled wryly. “I was once,” he said. “Maybe I still am.”
Ma Hatfield came to the door, bearing a rifle. Then, putting it down, she turned and walked back inside, and, when they brought the wou
nded man in, a bed was ready for him. Her long, thin-cheeked face was grave, and only her eyes showed pain and shock. She worked swiftly and without hysteria. Sally Crane was working over a wound in Bartram’s arm, her own face white.
Kilkenny motioned to Parson and stepped outside. “I’ve got to go back tonight an’ get Nita,” he said quietly. “I’ll go alone.”
“You better take help. There’s enough of us now to hold this place. You’ll have you a fight down to Cedar Bluff. An’ don’t forget Cain Brockman.”
“I won’t. By night I can make it, I think. This is all comin’ to a head, Parson. They can’t wait now. We’ve called their hand an’ raised ’em. They never figured on me talkin’. They never figured on me winnin’ that fight.”
“All right,” Parson said, “we’ll stand by.” He looked down at the ground a moment. “I reckon,” he said slowly, “we’ve done a good day’s work. I got me a man back on the trail, too. Jackie says Jesse got one up on the rim. A couple more nicked. That’s goin’ to spoil their appetite for fightin’, an’ spoil it a heap.”
“Yeah,” Kilkenny agreed. “I’m ridin’ at sundown, Parson.”
Yet it was after sundown before he got started. Jesse Hatfield was in a bad way. Price Dixon had taken a compact packet of tools from his saddlebags, and his operation had been quick and skilled. His gambler’s work had kept his hands well, and he showed it now. Kilkenny glanced at him, curiosity in his eyes. At one time this man had been a fine surgeon.
He was never surprised. In the West you found strange men—noblemen from Europe, wanderers from fine old families, veterans of several wars, schoolboys, and boys who had grown up along the cattle trails. Doctors, lawyers, men of brilliance, and men with none, all had thronged West, looking for what the romantic called adventure and the experienced knew was trouble, or looking for a new home, for a change, or escaping from something. Price Dixon was one of these. The man was observant, shrewd, and cultured. He and Kilkenny had known each other from the first, not as men who came from the same life, but men who came from the same stratum of society. They were men of the lost legion, the kind who always must move.
Despite his lack of practice, Dixon’s moves were sure and his hands skilled. He removed the bullet from dangerously near the spine. When he finished, he washed his hands and looked up at Parson.
“He’ll live, with rest and treatment. Beef broth, that’s what he needs now, to build strength in him.”
Parson grinned behind his gray mustache. “He’ll get it,” he said dryly. “He’ll get it as long as King Bill Hale has a steer on the range.”
Sally Crane caught Kilkenny as he was saddling the little gray horse he was riding that night. She hurried up to him and then stopped suddenly and stood there, shifting her feet from side to side. Kilkenny turned and looked at her curiously from under his flat-brimmed hat.
“What’s the trouble, Sally?”
“I wanted to ask…” She hesitated, and he could sense her shyness. “Do you think I’m old enough to marry?”
“To marry?” He stopped, startled. “Why, I don’t know, Sally. How old are you?”
“I’m sixteen, ’most nigh seventeen.”
“That’s young,” he conceded, “but I’ve heard Ma Hatfield say she was just sixteen when she married, an’ down in Kentucky and Virginia many a girl marries at that age. Why?”
“I reckon I want to marry,” Sally said shyly. “Ma Hatfield said I should ask you. Said you was Daddy Moffitt’s friend, an’ you was sort of my guardian.”
“Me?” He was thunderstruck. “Well, I reckon I never thought of it that way. Who wants to marry you, Sally?”
“It’s Bart.”
“You love him?” he asked. He suddenly felt strangely old, and yet, looking at the young girl standing there so shyly, he felt more than ever before the vast loneliness there was in him, and also a strange tenderness such as he had never known before.
“Yes.” Her voice was shy, but he could sense the excitement in her, and the happiness.
“Well, Sally,” he said slowly, “I reckon I’m as much a guardian as you’ve got now. I think, if you love Bartram an’ he loves you, that’s all that’s needed. I know him. He’s a fine, brave, serious young fellow who’s goin’ to do right well as soon as this trouble clears up. Yes, I reckon you can marry him.”
She was gone, running.
For a few minutes he stood there, one foot in the stirrup. Then he swung his leg over the gray horse and shook his head in astonishment. That’s one thing, Lance, he told himself, you never expected to happen to you!
But as he turned the horse into the pines, he remembered the Hatfields digging the grave for their brother. Men died, men were married, and the fighting and living and working went on. So it would always go. Lije Hatfield was gone, Miller and Wilson were gone, and Jesse Hatfield lay near to death in the cabin in the cup. Yet Sally was to marry Tom Bartram, and they were to build a home. Yes, this was the country, and these were its people. They had the strength to live, the strength to endure. In such a country men would be born, men who loved liberty and would ever fight to preserve it.
The little gray was as sure-footed as a mountain goat. Even the long-legged yellow horse could walk no more silently, no more skillfully than this little mountain horse. He talked to it in a low whisper and watched the ears flick backward with intelligence. This was a good horse.
Yet, when he reached the edge of Cedar Bluff, he reined in sharply. Something was wrong. There was a vague smell of smoke in the air, and an atmosphere of uneasiness seemed to hang over the town. He looked down, studying the place. Something was wrong. Something had changed. It was not only the emptiness left after a crowd is gone, it was something else, something that made him uneasy.
He moved the gray horse forward slowly, keeping to sandy places where the horse would make no sound. The black bulk of a building loomed before him, and he rode up beside it and swung down. The smell of wood smoke was stronger. Then he peered around the corner of the building. Where the Mecca had stood was only a heap of charred ruins.
Hale’s place—burned! He scowled, trying to imagine what could have happened. An accident? It could be, yet something warned him it was not that, and more, that the town wasn’t asleep.
Keeping to the side of the buildings, he walked forward a little. There was a faint light in Bert Leathers’s store. The Crystal Palace was dark. He went back to the gray horse and, carefully skirting the troubled area, came in from behind the building, and then swung down.
A man loomed ahead of him, a huge bulk of man. His heart seemed to stop, and he froze against the building. It was Cain Brockman!
Watching, Kilkenny saw him moving with incredible stealth, slip to the side of the Crystal Palace, work for an instant at the door, and then disappear inside. Like a ghost, Kilkenny crossed the alley and went in the door fast. There he flattened against the wall. He could hear the big man ahead of him, but only his breathing. Stealthily he crept after.
What could Brockman be doing here? Was he after Nita? Or hoping to find him? He crept along, closed a door after him, and lost Brockman in the stillness. Then suddenly a candle gleamed, and another. The first person he saw was Nita. She was standing there, in riding costume, staring at him.
“You’ve come, Lance?” she said softly. “Then it was you I heard?”
“No,” he spoke softly, “it wasn’t me. Cain Brockman’s here.”
A shadow moved against the curtain at the far side of the big room, and Cain Brockman stepped into the open. “Yeah,” he said softly, “I’m here.”
He continued to move, coming around the card tables until he stood near, scarcely a dozen feet away. The curtains were drawn on all the windows, thick drapes that kept all light within. If he lived to be a thousand, Lance Kilkenny would never forget that room. It was large and rectangular. Along one side ran the bar; the rest, except for the small dance floor where they stood now, was littered with tables and chairs. Here and there were fallen
chips, cards, cigarette butts, and glasses. A balcony surrounded the room on three sides, a balcony with curtained booths. Only the candles flickered in the great room, candles that burned brightly but with a wavering, uncertain light. The girl held the candles—Nita Riordan, with her dark hair gathered against the nape of her neck, her eyes unusually large in the dimness.
Opposite Kilkenny stood the bulk of Cain Brockman. His big black hat was shoved back on his huge head. His thick neck descended into powerful shoulders, and the checkered shirt was open to expose a hairy chest. Crossed gun belts and big pistols completed the picture, guns that hung just beneath the open hands. Cain stood there, his flat face oily and unshaven in the vague light, his stance wide, his feet in their riding boots seeming unusually small.
“Yeah,” Cain repeated. “I’m here.”
Kilkenny drew a deep breath. Suddenly a wave of hopelessness spread over him. He could kill this man. He knew it. Yet why kill him? Cain Brockman had come looking for him, had come because it was the code of the life he had lived and because the one anchor he had, his brother Abel, had pulled loose. Suddenly Kilkenny saw Cain Brockman as he had never seen him before, as a big man, simple and earnest, a man who had drifted along the darker trails because of some accident of fate, and whose one tie, his brother, had been cut loose. He saw him now as big, helpless, and rather lost. To kill Kilkenny was his only purpose in life
Abruptly Kilkenny dropped his hands away from his guns. “Cain,” he said, “I’m not going to shoot it out with you. I’m not going to kill you. I’m not even goin’ to try. Cain, there’s no sense in you an’ me shootin’ it out. Not a mite.”
“What d’you mean?” The big man’s brow was furrowed, his eyes narrowed with thought as he tried to decide what deception was in this.
“I don’t want to kill you, Cain. You an’ your brother teamed up with the wrong crowd in Texas. Because of that, I had to kill him. You looked for me, an’ I had to fight you an’ whip you. I didn’t want to then, an’ I don’t now. Cain, I owe somethin’ to those people up there, the Hatfields an’ the rest. They want homes out here. I’ve got a reason to fight for them. If I kill, it’ll be for that. If I die, it’ll be to keep their land for them. There’s nothin’ to gain for you or me by shootin’ it out. Suppose you kill me? What will you do then?”
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