“Answer me!” Step Eaton bawled at the banker.
A look of disgust crossed Mike’s face. He never wore a hat except during blizzards. His white hair shone like the tops of those thunderheads floating below timberline like ducks swimming around a tule patch.
“Get out of my way,” Mike said quietly, icicles dripping from every word.
“Hell, I will! How come you think you’re so high and mighty you won’t loan a man a few dollars? Where’d you ever get enough money to start a bank with anyhow, hah!” the sheriff shouted.
“Go find another whipping boy, Step,” Mike advised. “I suppose you’ll go home and take it out on your wife. Henry Cartwright says you’ve become very good at it lately.”
“I knew it!” Step Eaton yelled angrily. “She used to work for you to buy a weddin’ dress, and you’re in with ’em too. Maybe you slipped her a little extra money along—”
But Mike, his nose wrinkling with loathing for something unclean, had passed him by. The sheriff, unaware of how many eyes were watching him with something of the same in them, turned and pursued his course toward the courthouse once more.
Again he spotted Kathy who, heavy-footed, was tying to walk a little faster. She, along with everybody else along the short street, had overheard. Again the little jab of fear struck through the alcoholic rage and frustration in Step’s brain. Again he found excuse not to face his deputy and ask for the badge old Tobe had pinned on a seventeen year old youth ten years before.
Glad of that excuse, Step lurched on in the-middle of the curved team-and-scraper scar, toward the corral.
Inside the courthouse two men had been talking. Many things that had formed a silent, distant barrier between them were swept away. They were looking at Step’s lurching progress past the horse tied out front with Ordway’s flathorn Mexican saddle strapped on and the Sharps in its boot.
“Look at the killer,” Koonce said bitterly. “I know he did it, it would be so easy to knock out this window and cut him down with eighteen buckshot.”
“You’d be doing everybody in town a favor, Kathy included.”
“Except me. I don’t have to live with them. Just myself, Chann.”
“What are you going to do, let him beat her up? Her and poor old Lon?”
“No,” Koonce said. ‘I can stop that. I can wait just a little while longer.”
Ordway followed him back outside, but as they stepped down the two steps to a boardwalk leading fifty or sixty feet out to the courthouse hitch-rail and a proud pine flagpole, all of thirty feet high, new movement caught their eyes.
About a dozen heavily armed horsemen came in sight.
Sonny’s men had mounted on the old south side of Hansen’s place, ridden west a hundred yards to a fifty-yard gap separating a store and Ethan’s livery, then swung north into the new street toward the courthouse.
“I guess,” Koonce said, his eyes glinting like polished lead marbles, “that Step will have to wait.”
“So soon,” Ordway commented dryly. “Ethan didn’t lose any time giving new orders.”
“Ethan never in all his life got gun-whupped neither,” the grim deputy replied. “Let’s get to that Sharps. The range is too great for this Greener.”
They moved along the boardwalk, out and away from the courthouse, toward the saddled horse. The sun was almost down, Ordway was surprised to note. The thunderheads were being henna’d with copper.
Ordway said, “Maybe we won’t have to do the job, Bob.”
Step Eaton had lurched out and thrown up both hands in the universal gesture that meant halt.
He stood belligerently in front of them, fists now jammed upon his hips, elbows akimbo. He wasn’t aware of his danger, only of the amused lights in the eyes of Sonny and his mounted toughs.
He bawled the same words at the horsemen that he’d bawled at Mike. “Where’n the hell do you think you’re goin’?”
The amused lights dancing wickedly in Sonny’s eyes faded and the dance was over. “Make just one move and you’re dead. I’d do it anyhow but I haven’t got a second to spare.”
His eyes forgot Step, were upon two men approaching a freshly saddled horse. On that horse, in a saddle boot, was the deadliest rifle in this country. If Ordway got to it Sonny could die quickly.
He raised himself in his stirrups. “Chann! Not another step toward that gun. Bob! Go back in that courthouse if you know what’s good for you.”
No answer. The two men were within thirty feet of that rifle. And if Ordway got to it Sonny could never get out of range in time. If he got to that horse he’d get away while a shotgun and Koonce’s six-shooter were blasting.
A simple solution came to Sonny’s mind. A short, explosive laugh broke from Ethan Ordway’s protege. First things first. The horse …
Sonny bent and snapped his repeater from its own scabbard. He whipped it to his shoulder with a single fast motion. A hard report rang out. A bullet whacked loudly, distinctly.
A scream broke from the tied horse. It screamed again as another bullet into its lungs sent it crashing down. It lay there futilely, its head held off the ground because of the close tied reins around the rail.
A bright flood of crimson gushed upward and out of its mouth and nostrils as it screamed a strangled death cry.
Echoing it came the sound of Sonny Shackleford’s jeering laughter. No matter what happened next, he’d put Ordway afoot. And the odds now stood at a dozen to two.
It was time for Ethan to come out into the open, to take over and combine Pronghorn Basin and Squaw Valley into the greatest cow outfit in all Colorado and a few other states and territories.
He’d failed once to keep Squaw Valley, where Chann Ordway had been born in a stinking Indian tepee. Now he’d finally figured out how to get around that legal stuff. All that stood in the way were two men.
Two against a dozen tough guns.
EIGHT
Sonny bent forward and with a deft flick of the wrist choked the lethal short range weapon back into the scabbard under his left leg. He straightened and looked down at the sheriff with a contemptuous sneer. Fifty yards to one side, in the livery corral, Kathy Eaton stood beside her father and watched the scene while a grulla horse on a lead rope drank its fill.
Sonny had time now. The dead horse had fallen on Ordway’s rifle and pinned it under several hundred pounds of weight. Or so it appeared from here.
“Now you look here—” Eaton began to bluster.
“Oh, shut up, booze head,” Sonny flung down at him. “Go on home and sleep it off.”’
He glanced around at his men. “All right, boys. Easy now and spread out”
Two or three of the men looked doubtful, but none hesitated. They moved forward at a slow walk. Sonny was banking that those two men he’d been raised with would not open fire first. By then it would be too late.
“Hey, Bob,” he called to the deputy, hand dangling close to his right hip, reins lifted. “You got a last chance. Get back in that courthouse or take what’s coming.”
Koonce didn’t reply. The two men waited. They were within six feet of the dead horse when suddenly Channon Ordway sprang. Before Sonny realized what had happened the Sharps was out of the scabbard and Ordway lay with it leveled over the saddle.
“Keep coming” Ordway called piercingly to Sonny. “And the first man who moves makes you dead.”
Sonny had cockily, over confidently walked himself into a death trap. He turned sick inside when he saw the double-barrel go up and knew that he was done for.
“Hey, Step!” he called back over his shoulder. “Come over here and call off your watchdog before somebody gets killed.”
“Put down that shotgun, you hear?” Step bawled, more in fear of Ethan than a desire to keep Sonny alive. He’d taken everything off the young tough today: sneers, jeers, insults. And there could be no doubt that Sonny wanted old Tobe Whitehouse’s badge.
Koonce, however, ignored the sheriff. The ominous Greener was swinging back and forth, and every man
swept by the muzzles knew that if he made a move to draw a gun he would be the first to die. Ordway also was up on his feet, his Sharps covering Sonny.
And Sonny had seen what the big cartridge weapon could do to a man. Close up. Today.
Step came puffing up, his face beef-red from liquor and running. He stopped and spread his legs like a played out horse. No matter what happened this was the opportunity, the one chance he’d been hoping for to hurdle the problem that had confronted him since four obsequious county commissioners under Ethan’s orders had made him sheriff.
“You’re fired!” he shouted, leveling a finger at the deputy.
“All right, I’m fired,” Koonce replied. “Sonny, get down off that horse or you’re dead.”
“Ethan!” cried out Sonny, his voice edged with panic. Never in his brutal, cow-thief years had he ever found himself in a situation such as this. And, as in past years since his father had been hanged, he was calling upon his mentor to get him out “Ethan!” he called, again like a child to its father.
Channon Ordway shifted his glance and the muzzle of the Sharps toward Hansen’s bastard back porch, now his front porch, and the men there. Ethan’s battered face stood out clear over the front sight “Sheriff,” Ethan’s voice came in the eerie silence. “Turn that prisoner loose. Sonny, ride out”
“Sonny stays until I go, Ethan,” Ordway called. He twisted his neck and looked at Koonce. “Can you keep them until I get clear of town? If it’s going to be fox and hounds I want a start”
“They’ll keep.”
“How about you?”
“I took care of myself for ten years behind this badge. I still can now that I won’t be wearing it anymore.”
He spoke to the sheriff as he unpinned the pentacle. “I kept this badge clean for all those years. But as long as you’ve dirtied it that’s where you’ll pick it up.”
It cleaved the air and fell at the sheriff’s feet. The sun was gone and a chill was in the air. Like the day was ending, something else was ending as a sheriff’s office star lay in the street near the carcass of a dead horse.
Sonny Shackleford laughed as he reined his horse around and, his arrogance restored, waved for his men to follow. He knew he wouldn’t be shot in the back and the knowledge brought forth a hidden sneer. It damn well would have been different had the harness been on the other end of the horse!
Koonce said to Step Eaton: “I know in my heart that you killed old Tobe. Even if you didn’t, you still deserve killin’ for what you are, what you did to Chann and Kathy. You are finished, Step.”
“Now, look here—”
“Bob, cover my back while I make a run through Hanse’s saloon. I’ll take that black mare. If Step makes a move kill him for me.”
Ordway broke into a trot across the street, an odd figure in vaquero clothing and big hat. The peso rowels of a dead Mexican general rattled at last. He carried the Sharps in his left hand, his six-shooter in his right His eyes bored into those of Ethan as he came close. “Hanse, take Ethan’s gun until I get through. I’ve already taken two bullets in the back because of this mad scoundrel. Give me two minutes.”
“You’ve got them,” Hansen replied. “If it wasn’t for Sonny and his outfit coming after me I’d finish him right here.”
Ordway entered the darkened interior of the saloon and darted across a dance floor unused for twenty years except on special occasions. The black mare flared her nostrils as he untied Red Waldo’s reins. He went into leather and not a moment too soon. From a point two hundred yards away, to the west, Sonny Shackleford and his men emerged into view in the broken teeth gap near Ethan’s livery.
A yell went up and a rifle spanged.
The game of fox and hounds had begun.
Ordway dug in the rowels and felt the tremendous surge of silk-smooth muscles. Seventy-five yards away was timber and through it the road leading down into Pronghorn Basin. Ordway and the fast running mare disappeared into it.
The entire crowd who had been on the north porch of the saloon now came boiling out of the old south end, funneling through like a herd milling at a corral gate. Ethan Ordway’s giant figure knocked men aside like tenpins, as he plunged toward his own horse.
His own horse, like the black mare, had been beaten about the head, and Ethan’s dive for the reins startled the frightened animal. Ethan lost a couple of minutes, holding onto the reins and cursing the frightened, circle-plunging animal, before he finally got mounted. A grunt went out of the beast as his great knees slammed into its ribs and then rowel steel bit into its sides.
He swept down the road in the wake of his hoodlum pack, and one of the silent men who watched him go was Mike Adkins. His was the only grin among them. “I was waiting for Step to get liquor-broke enough to mortgage that mare to me for a loan. I could take her to Denver and Cheyenne and country-boy clean up those gambling city slickers.”
“You gone crazy?” Hansen snorted disgustedly. “She’s been outrun by every crow bait, ewe-necked, hammerhead Indian pony in this country.”
“She’s been out-sprinted, ”Mike said wickedly. “I know her background, and there’s no horse in Colorado who can catch her on a fifty mile run.”
“She’s a high-strung bitch who can rear and break more bridle reins than any horse I ever saw. Hell, she’ll even chew a knot loose. If she was mine I’d give her to the Utes for a feast.”
Henry Cartwright joined them, three men from the old days, and a fourth appeared at a run. Lon Perry’s face was streaming blood.
“Henry.” He was sobbing like a child. “Come quick to the corral.”
“What’s the matter, Lon?”
‘It’s Kathy!” the handyman gasped, tears streaming from his eyes. “Step knocked me down first and then started beating her. She’s layin’ over there by the water trough. And, Henry, there’s blood coming from under her skirts.”
“That goddamned son-of-a-bitch!” Doc Cartwright swore savagely. “If she dies, I’ll kill him!”
“He’s gone!” sobbed Perry. “Grabbed a saddle horse and lit hard for his house.”
“Where’s Koonce?”
“After him. But afoot.”
Channon Ordway rode out of the timber and, in the dusk, saw far away and below him the familiar panorama of Pronghorn Basin. In the dying light a wagon road lay there like a piece of tossed string.
Five miles away, directly in the center of the huge grassy bowl, was an old, weather beaten dot. He knew every yard of the basin, every foot of the road, every inch of that house.
He had been born within a few miles of it all
He turned in the saddle and looked back. But his pursuers either were afraid of a deadly ambush or were waiting for Ethan and darkness. Well, neither would be long in coming.
They could afford their time, guessing correctly Ordway’s probable destination; figuring he might fort-up and try to reduce their dozen men by several.
It was full night by the time Ordway covered the five miles. He rode past familiar corrals and sheds, all now deserted because Ethan spent only the nights here when the mood suited him. There were no cattle in the basin, although Ethan probably had some plans to change in the very near future.
Ordway rode directly to the kitchen porch with its roofed over well-sweep above the ancient cistern. The odor of sour trash came to his nose as he swung down. God alone only knew what had been tossed from the porch by rough uncouth men like Sonny and the others, now somewhere out there in the night It came to Ordway with something of a shock that the place looked smaller than in former years. Older. Against the night sky the kitchen stovepipe tilted precariously in the arms of loose guy wires.
Ordway stumbled and almost fell into more trash as he dismounted. Grunting an execration at Ethan, he crossed the porch to the kitchen door and reached a hand to open it Then he froze.
Was it his imagination or had he heard a board creak inside. Was it the weather popping ancient flooring? Or had somebody heard him coming and shifted weight?
>
With Colt ready he leaned back a trifle and crashed the door open with single drive of his Mexican boot and leaped aside.
“Don’t move, Mr. Ordway, or you are dead” came Eric Randolph’s voice. It was grim, icy.
“In all my gray-whiskered years,” Ordway said exasperatedly, “I have never seen a man as determined to get himself killed as you are, Randolph.”
“Wait!” Vernell’s voice cried out. “We’ve made a mistake. We thought you were Ethan Ordway.”
A match flared in her hands as he came in. It outlined the faces of Mrs. Randolph and the one of her grimly determined husband. Ordway bowed and spoke sardonically. “Mi casa es su casa. As we Mexicans say, ‘My house is your house.’ ”
“Please,” the girl said. “Don’t mock us. We came here tonight on a terrible errand and right now I’m trembling with relief.”
“What errand, may I ask?”
Randolph said quietly: “We held a family conference today after driving Sonny and his men from the ranch. It’s a part of family tradition, when big decisions are to be made. We came to the unhappy conclusion that within a few hours you would be dead, that in order to survive, Ethan Ordway had to die.”
“And you decided to hide out here until he came.”
“I almost shot you before you could speak, Mr. Ordway.”
The match went out and a wave of darkness engulfed the four of them. Ordway, sheathing his Colt, said: “If you belonged in this country you would have. That’s why I think you should get out of it now while you’re all still alive.”
“And let you fight your uncle to see which of you gets Bitter Squaw?” Vernell’s voice flashed with sudden, desperate bitterness. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Mr. Ordway?”
He ignored the thrust and lit a lamp. In its glow he saw a filthy table piled with dirty dishes, saucers filled with cigarette butts, blackened pans filled with more soured food.
A big rat ran across the cold stove, thudded to the floor, and scurried behind the wood box.
An overwhelming feeling of disgust came over Ordway. There was a sickness in it, a bitter nostalgia for a home once scrubbed dean as only a proud, beautiful woman could scrub it.
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