The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  “We got another tragedy to report, son,” Farnick said gently, as Logan swung his feet off the blankets. “Happened at daybreak this mornin’, but you were out scoutin’ the river camps so I decided to let you get some shut-eye first.”

  Logan, half drugged by sleep, came fully awake now, almost knowing from Alva’s appearance what the nature of Farnick’s evil tidings would be.

  “Parson Ames was bushwhacked, Cleve,” the sheriff said. “Miss Ames here was makin’ breakfast for Doc Nease, and her brother went over to his woodpile for some kindlin’. He was hit where his suspenders cross from somebody firin’ from the fence.”

  For a moment, Logan was too shocked for coherent reaction. He stood up and put both arms around Alva, pulling her to him, feeling her body constrict with the soundless spasms of her grief.

  “The parson didn’t know what hit him,” Farnick went on. “I scouted the grounds soon as Doc Nease sent the word down about the dry-gulchin’. Found a rimfire .54 ca’tridge in the weeds by the fence, but the wind had wiped out any sign on that hardpan.”

  His cheek pressed against Alva’s brunette head, Logan stared across the room at the sheriff, who stood gaunt-cheeked from his own sleepless night.

  “Reckon I know the bore of every long gun in Owlhorn,” Farnick went on, ill at ease here. “Nobody I know of owns a .54.”

  Logan said, “Obviously it was Perris’s work, or Marengo’s. Duke must have known Jeb Ames could have pinned Kinevan’s murder on him if he identified his voice. Perris always covers his tracks thoroughly. Ask John Stagman about that.”

  Alva disengaged herself from Logan’s arms and spoke dully, as if to herself, “Jeb was to have preached his first sermon in Owlhorn this morning. At least Jeb isn’t—isn’t walking in the dark now.”

  Logan forgot the presence of the old sheriff beside them, forgot everything except the shining, transcendent faith he saw glowing in the girl’s eyes.

  Whatever more Alva would have said was cut short by the appearance in the doorway of an over-painted girl who had the look of a dance-hall jezebel about her.

  “They told me you were up here, Mister Sheriff,” the girl said in a brassy monotone. “I—I got something to tell you, and to hell with what happens to me for the telling.”

  Logan tore his gaze off the stars in Alva’s eyes and rasped out to the woman in the doorway, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  The girl swung her glance from the sheriff and put her gaze on the silver star pinned to Logan’s shirt.

  “My name’s Mitzi LaMotte, not that it matters a tinker’s damn. What I want the law to know about is that Duke Perris an’ Blackie Marengo hid in my room over the Palace right after that shootin’ scrape last night.”

  Logan gave Mitzi LaMotte his sharpest attention.

  “We searched every room in that honkytonk, including yours.”

  Mitzi shrugged her bony shoulders. “Not until after Perris and that ape of a Marengo had left, you didn’t. When I finished work at three o’clock Marengo was waiting in my room. He sent me downstairs to get Opal Waymire. Opal told me to wait in her office till she got back. When I finally got to bed it was getting onto daylight. Perris and his plug-ugly were gone. One of the girls across the hall saw them leave. I didn’t know until Sonora Belle told me that Perris was in there with Marengo. Perris must have hid in my closet.”

  Logan reached for his gun belt looped over a bedpost and buckled it on with a weary gesture.

  “I believe your story, Mitzi. I’ll go over and have a talk with Opal. She must have had a hand in their getaway.” He turned to Alva Ames. “There’s not much I can say just now, Alva.” He spoke in the softest of tones. “I’ll see you later this afternoon. We’ll both be burying the best friends we ever had, you and I.”

  Mitzi LaMotte clutched Logan’s sleeve as he brushed past her into the hall.

  “Opal would kill me if she knew I squealed,” whimpered the percentage girl. “She would break me limb from limb.”

  Logan smiled. “Where Opal is headed for, she’ll be an old gray-haired woman before she’s free to molest you, Mitzi. Don’t let that worry you.”

  Leaving the hotel, Logan crossed Main Street to the Palace. A deputy was guarding the padlocked batwings, which Logan unlocked. Wading through the litter of the past night’s revelry, Logan reached the door of Opal Waymire’s living-quarters behind the bar.

  That door was unlatched, and he stepped into the darkened back room to find Opal asleep on a satin-quilted bed with gilt posts. He awakened her by the expedient of running up the window blinds to let the afternoon’s westering sunlight flood the room.

  Opal Waymire gasped and sat up, jerking the covers over her filmy nightgown. Her face was devoid of make-up and in this harsh light Logan was disillusioned by the stark depravity he saw limned on the woman’s features as she stared at him through eyes alight with fear and dread.

  “Opal,” Logan said, “you tried to tip me off that Perris was going to trap me in your poolroom last night. Why did you do that, knowing I was on a manhunt, knowing who I was after?”

  The girl’s hard eyes searched Logan’s unshaven face, calculating her method of parrying this unexpected visit. She swung the bedcovers back and gave Logan a tantalizing glimpse of her seductively-draped body as she reached for the same robe he remembered she had worn on the Sacajawea the first time he saw her. The intervening week of elapsed time seemed like an eon.

  “A woman in love,” she said, “does unaccountable things.”

  Logan took out his pipe and loaded it thoughtfully, fully aware of her treacherous charms.

  “If you love Duke Perris, why did you betray him?”

  Opal dropped her eyes with a spurious shyness.

  “I didn’t say that, Cleve. From the moment I laid eyes on you, throwing your lasso at that river boat—when you kissed me—”

  “Cut out the theatrics, Opal.” Logan’s voice carried a whiplash. “Last night you helped Duke Perris and Blackie Marengo escape town. You laid yourself open to criminal prosecution by that, don’t you understand?”

  Opal dropped her coquettish pose, reading his inflexible mood. Her eyes held a brittle, reptilian brightness as she glared up at him from her seat on the bed.

  “You’d take the word of a little tramp like Mitzi La-Motte?”

  Logan lit a match and got his pipe going.

  “The word of Mitzi LaMotte can send you to the penitentiary for aiding and abetting a known murderer to escape, Opal.”

  The girl started to speak but Logan waved her into silence.

  “Yes,” he went on ruthlessly, “Duke Perris overstepped himself on this Owlhorn land grab, Opal. In the past, he covered his tracks, let hired guns do his dirty work. John Stagman has spent fifteen years trying to out-fox Perris. But this time we have a murder—two murders to pin on him.”

  Opal licked her pale lips. “You can’t prove anything like that against Duke. You’re bluffing, Cleve.”

  Logan shook his head, putting his sidewise stare on her.

  “Perris shot Tex Kinevan—once in the poolroom, a wound which would probably have proved fatal, and again up at the parsonage. And on his way out of town, thanks to your help, Opal, Duke Perris took time out to ambush Jebediah Ames. It takes a pretty low breed of snake to shoot a blind man in the back.”

  From the look of pure shock on Opal Waymire’s face, Logan was positive this was her first knowledge of Ames’s murder.

  “You no doubt plan to join Perris sooner or later,” Logan said. “Mitzi’s testimony could delay your departure for some time, unless you want to turn state’s evidence. The thing for you to do is to decide in a hurry whether a blind man’s killer is worthy of your loyalty, Opal.”

  Logan saw the girl trembling violently, then draw herself together with an effort. Her eyes avoided his as he walked slowly to the door, hoping agains
t hope that she would tell him now what he wanted to know about Perris’s whereabouts.

  “I love you, Cleve Logan,” she said humbly. “Whatever I did, I did for you. My attempt to warn you about last night’s trap should prove that. If—if I hadn’t helped Duke get away, he would have killed you.”

  Logan paused at the doorway, a genuine sympathy easing the hard surface glitter of his eyes.

  He said, “You surely realize there is nothing in the cards for you and me, Opal.”

  The hope that had never been absent from Opal’s expressive eyes faded and expired before the man’s gaze.

  In a voice that barely reached his ears across the room, Opal said, “It’s Alva, isn’t it? She adores you, Cleve, which is one thing a woman can tell about another, even though Alva and I are at opposite ends of the earth. I—I was like her, once.”

  Logan said briefly, “I’m not putting you under arrest now, Opal, because I figure I owe you that much. But when John Stagman gets here this evening and I turn this case over to him, he’ll be around to interview you. I advise you to come clean with Stagman. He has the power to lock you up for a big hunk of a lifetime.”

  He left her with that, returning to the street. Sheriff Farnick and Alva Ames were waiting in front of the Palace.

  “She admitted having helped with their getaway,” Logan reported, “but she’s not yet ready to confess where Perris will be waiting for her. But if we give Opal enough rope, I think she will lead us to Perris eventually. That’s the main reason why I didn’t lock her up with the others.”

  Logan glanced at his watch.

  “Stagman’s due on the six o’clock stage from Pasco,” he said. “I shudder to think of what that salty old cuss will say when he finds out Perris slipped through my fingers.”

  He offered to escort Alva back to her home, but the grief-stunned girl declined and made her aimless way up the street.

  She avoided the town’s cemetery at the western limits of Owlhorn, where the coroner had a crew working at the opening of three graves. Jubal Buckring, who had found gunsmoke at the end of his rainbow last night, would occupy one of those graves. She was glad to see that the workmen were putting the graves of Tex Kinevan and her brother side by side in a far section of the cemetery.

  The sun was westering toward the remote Cascade peaks when Alva returned to the town after a walk which had taken her across the river bridge and far out across the farther prairie.

  Emotional strain and the rigor of this exercise had made the girl drowsy, and she was thinking of returning to Mrs. Nease’s to sleep, knowing she could never set foot inside the parsonage which held so much of tragic memory for her.

  She was climbing the hill toward the doctor’s home when she saw Opal Waymire emerge from the rear of the Cattleman’s Mercantile, accompanied by the storekeeper.

  A saddled horse, Buckring’s own blue roan, was hitched behind that building out of sight of the street. Alva saw the honkytonk girl mount, noted that Opal Waymire was wearing a riding-habit.

  She waited in saddle while the storekeeper lashed two heavy gunny sacks behind her cantle, and then spurred off in the direction of the stage road which snaked into the notch of Satus Pass.

  Something like panic seized Alva then. She broke into a run, heading for the stable behind the parsonage. The pinto pony her brother had purchased two days ago was waiting there, beside the empty stall which had housed her own horse, shot out from under her by Ringbone’s alert guard on her futile attempt to reach Jubal Buckring’s Hole-in-the-Wall.

  Saddling up, Alva headed for the Owlhorn jail. She was about to dismount there when she saw Cleve Logan leading his dun out from behind the Pioneer House. Sheriff Vick Farnick was walking beside the deputy marshal, and she saw him hand Logan a pair of glittering handcuffs.

  The girl put her horse across the intervening distance and called out frantically, “Cleve, you said if we gave Opal enough rope she’d lead us to wherever Duke Perris is hiding.”

  Logan grinned back at her.

  “I’ve had Opal watched all afternoon,” he said. “She just stocked up on canned grub and ammunition at the Mercantile. I’ve got the sales slip in my pocket now.”

  Farnick chuckled at the astonishment in Alva’s eyes.

  “Opal just left town by the Pass road,” the sheriff said. “I’ll bet that’s what’s got you all flustered up, ain’t it? Well, you got nothing to worry about. Logan will trail her.”

  Alva nodded frantically. “She can’t have more than a mile head start. I’m certain she’s on her way to Klickitat Landing.”

  Cleve Logan stepped into saddle and adjusted the walnut stock of the sheriff’s .45-70 Winchester which projected from under his right knee.

  “Heading Opal off would be easy,” the deputy said, “but it’s Perris and Marengo we’re after, remember. Opal doesn’t know I’ll be on her trail, but she’s cagey. Rather than face Stagman this evening, she decided to leave before dark. But you can bet your bottom dollar she’s laying a false trail when she heads into Satus Pass. Perris and Marengo didn’t head that way.”

  Logan backed his horse away, looking down at the sheriff.

  “Give my regards to Stagman when the stage rolls in,” he said, “and keep an eye on Alva here. I may be gone a few days, but I’ll be back with big game.”

  Logan roweled the dun into a gallop from a standing start, leaving Alva Ames and the sheriff in the dust of his pony’s hoofs.

  Something in the taut fixture of Alva’s following gaze caused the sheriff to make a belated and futile reach for the bit of the pinto’s bridle.

  As if she had anticipated Farnick’s intervention, Alva spurred her horse sharply away and called back, “I’m going with Cleve, Sheriff. And don’t try to stop me.”

  The girl slapped her pony’s withers with the end of her reins and through the stirred dust old Vick Farnick saw her lining out down the street of false fronts past the lineups in front of Gulberg’s land office, following Cleve Logan toward the Pass road and the sunset’s golden glory.

  Chapter Twenty

  At Fort Rimrock

  Midnight found Opal Waymire at the summit of Satus Pass, the lights of the Wells-Fargo relay station glowing in the darkness at the foot of the south grade.

  Traffic was light on this back road through the Horse Heavens as a rule, but three times tonight she had been forced to put her horse off the road to avoid being seen. Once by the Owlhorn stage inbound from Klickitat Landing; again by a platoon of blue-coated cavalry troopers heading to town from Fort Simcoe; and lastly by a string of jerkline mules drawing a tandem-hitched freight-wagon train loaded with a consignment of whisky for her own saloon.

  Only the dread of meeting John Stagman had driven Opal Waymire into such a rash thing as leaving Owlhorn in full daylight. She had fully expected to be trailed out of the cow town, which was why she had made this false tangent away from the direction of her true destination; but so far as she knew, Owlhorn had ignored her departure, perhaps assuming she was taking one of her habitual rides at dusk before starting the night’s work at the Palace.

  Cleve Logan was in her thoughts as she traveled up the Pass tonight. The knowledge that she would never see him again put a poignant sense of loss in her.

  Remembering Alva, Opal Waymire experienced something close to jealousy, but she put aside what might have been, storing her memories of Cleve Logan along with the other shattered dreams of a tarnished past.

  Now, having gained the crown of the Horse Heaven range, the girl was physically exhausted from these unaccustomed miles in the saddle. Here at the summit, the bedrock had been stripped of its volcanic topsoil by the erosion of the ages, and Opal knew that she must leave the main road at this point if she was to throw off any possible trackers who might be on her trail tonight or tomorrow.

  This was literally a crossroads in Opal Waymire’s checkered a
nd disillusioned worldly existence. To follow these wheel tracks to the Columbia River settlements might bring escape from Washington Territory and the oblivion of Oregon or California, a chance to pick up the disordered remnants of her life in some new scene, under some assumed name.

  But she remembered Duke Perris and that man’s malignant grip on her heartstrings, the joys as well as the disappointments of the years she had followed his evil star, sharing the uncertainties of his uneasy existence living by his wits, feeling the pressure of a woman living just outside the law’s reach.

  Studying her choice with a cold detachment, Opal Waymire knew that her destiny was inextricably interwoven with Perris’s, that it was in the cards that she must rein off the Owlhorn road at this spot and cut eastward along the rolling divide toward the abandoned cavalry post where her man and Blackie Marengo would be waiting, depending for their own escape on the supplies she was bringing.

  She waited for long minutes here on the breeze-swept summit, probing the starlit night for any sound of pursuit from the north and hearing none. Here under the Milky Way, Opal Waymire felt the lonesomeness of her misbegotten life pressing in about her, as if she were stranded for eternity in some sterile crater of the moon.

  Being a woman with a woman’s weaknesses as well as strength, Opal had her temporary release in tears. When the emotional upsurge had spent itself, she picked up her reins and sent the blue roan picking its way up the roadside rocks, secure in the knowledge that the last visible tracks she had left were behind her in the stage road’s dust.

  Dawn of the day which ushered in the month of June and brought the opening of Owlhorn Valley’s coveted public lands found Opal Waymire alone in a dead world of sage and bunchgrass.

  To the south lay the shadowy chasm of the Columbia’s gorge, twisting its way to a tryst with the sea. Beyond that shadow lay Oregon; at her back were the snowy sawteeth of the Cascades above their mantle of timber, with Mount Adams’s ice-crusted pile duplicated by St. Helen’s perfect cone farther to the west.

  She made a dry camp in a sheltered coulee, emptied a canteen in her hat crown to assuage the roan’s thirst, and put the horse on picket. In her haste to leave Owlhorn behind her she had forgotten to bring along blankets, and the best bed she could fashion for herself was a mattress of tumbleweeds.