by T. T. Flynn
VIII
Tom snatched his gun off the ground, holstered it, and jumped for the steps. The side where the bullet had skinned a rib was burning and hurting. But the rib hadn’t been more than cracked; he could move fast enough.
Dan and Leatherneck came after him without asking more questions. But Leatherneck’s grumble was audible. “It’s a fool stunt. It won’t work. We’ll get our gizzards shot out. But git them hands up, Tom. We’re backin’ you with six-guns an’ our lives. Now let’s see what good Hooker men we can make.”
Tom’s eyes were damp as he led them into the courthouse. Dan and Leatherneck—two friends who thought enough of Tom Fortune to follow him into hell. Men with drawn guns burst excitedly into the other end of the back hallway as Tom stalked in with his hands held high.
Leatherneck whooped: “We got him! Tom Fortune hisself, sneakin’ around the back here! Bent Hooker in his office?”
“My God! Tom Fortune! Sure Bent’s in his office . . . an’ this’s the jasper he wants bad. What’s Fortune doin’ around here?”
“Won’t say,” said Dan.
Then they were rushing Tom toward the sheriff’s office at the front. This was the building where Tom Fortune had once been sentenced to the pen and led away handcuffed. He was an outlaw. They’d hang him, if Hooker bullets didn’t settle it first. Sundown law was like that now—Bent Hooker’s law, that could send an innocent man to prison for twenty years. And try to send him back when he came again.
They met more men who had heard the shots. In the hall outside the sheriff’s office, men were laughing and talking, quieting down again from the alarm the shots had made. Ranchmen, townsmen, all were armed and keyed up for the business in hand.
“Make way fer Tom Fortune, boys! We got Tom Fortune!”
They rushed him into the sheriff’s dingy office, half-filled with more armed men—and Bent Hooker’s tall figure leaped up from behind the desk at which he had evidently just sat down again after the alarm.
“Fortune, by God! Was he in that shootin’?” Bent Hooker rasped with savage satisfaction. “What’n hell . . . Leatherneck!”
Tom’s jump carried him back against the wall as his gun whipped out. “Reach, Hooker! Don’t move, men!”
“Who wants to start the shootin’?” yelled Leatherneck, backing around, too, and sweeping the room with his guns.
Through the open window behind Hooker’s desk came a shout: “Trouble at the back, Sheriff! Two men you put back there are lyin’ on the ground!”
Over near the door a hand, slow in going up, streaked for a gun—and Dan triggered faster. A mustached man with a surly look and rash bravery wilted, groaning, with a smashed hand.
The last arms went up; uneasy and glowering, those men inside the room looked at one another and stared at the guns covering them.
“Mighty near murder in the sheriff’s own office,” muttered one.
A scramble of movement in the hallway had cleared the space outside the door; the news was being yelled to men outside. “Tom Fortune’s got the sheriff cornered in his own office!”
Feet were scuffling, voices starting to argue as men stirred about out there and wondered what to do.
Tom spoke coldly: “Not murder. We’re bringing law to Sundown. Honest law instead of Hooker law. You men aren’t forming a sheriff’s posse. You’re here capturing the men who had that stage held up today!”
“You lie!” challenged Bent Hooker. His hands were up, but his eyes were bright, hard, watchful.
One man had been edging behind others across the room, a tall man who held himself stiffly, kept his head down so his hat brim held his face.
“Push that skunk out here who was with Ben Tag this evening,” Tom ordered. “The one with the shot-up shoulder. Quick . . . before I start shooting to get him out.”
Hastily they cleared a way. The man was sullen, uneasy.
“Name?” snapped Tom.
“Kaw Kimberly.”
“Kimberly . . . you’re a dead man if I don’t get the truth fast. Who held up that stage?”
Kimberly glowered. Then sullenly he answered: “Ben Tag an’ I done it!”
“Who told you to?”
Sweat had come wet and glistening on Bent Hooker’s face. “Kimberly,” he said hoarsely, “don’t let him make you lie.”
But Kaw Kimberly’s eyes were on Tom’s gun. He was sweating, too, licking his lips as fear wilted him. “Bent Hooker hired us,” he blurted.
“Who sent you to shoot up Gaylord?”
“Dude Hooker.”
“What else have you been doing for the Hookers?”
“Workin’ for Kid Hooker, rustlin’ an’ such-like . . .”
Purple with fury, Bent Hooker yelled: “Kimberly, you can’t tell the truth with a gun in your face!”
But Kaw Kimberly had the look of a terrified man telling the truth unwillingly. Men who saw him and heard him looked stunned and wondering; Kimberly’s words were repeated beyond the door and passed outside.
“Hooker,” Tom said, “you’re a gone goose. Outlawed in your own office and branded for Sundown to read. I’m giving you half as long as Kimberly had to talk. Give us the truth or eat lead. Who really did that killing you pinned on me, so I’d be out of the way and you’d get the XO and a chance at the bank?”
Bent Hooker choked: “The jury . . .”
“I’m judge and jury tonight. Five seconds, Hooker. If it isn’t the truth, I’m shooting.”
Ben Hooker’s whisper reached them all. “I done it. Followed Timmins outta town that afternoon, dry-gulched him from his horse, an’ dropped your saddle brandin’ iron before I headed for the river to lose my trail . . .”
“Look out, Tom!” Dan yelled.
The gun in the open window was firing as Tom jumped back against the wall—and Dan’s gun was pouring lead at the window. Tom saw the hatless head, the thin, handsome, hostile, young face that had been lifted up from the ground to fire across the window sill. The bullet tearing into Tom’s left forearm was numbing. He saw an ear vanish from the head—the face go bloody and unreal as it dropped.
Two men by the door dived out and escaped—and Bent Hooker leaped for a gun on his desk. Leatherneck’s bullet smashed his shoulder, knocked him half across the desk. And in seconds, while the gun reports still echoed in their ears, they held the office again. Now as their ears cleared, a low, drumming roll of galloping horses became audible.
Outside the courthouse door, a harsh, furious voice lifted: “Shoot them three killers outta Bent’s office! They’re alone! Do it quick! There’s trouble comin’!”
“Shoot ’em yourself, Dude!” was a loud reply. “The back way, boys!”
The thunder of hoofs was coming nearer. Sam Dodge and his men were galloping past the saloons, the stores, toward the courthouse. Outside, orders were being bawled, men were yelling, running to their horses at the hitch racks. And Tom bit back the pain flooding into his arm and ordered: “Get Bent Hooker’s jail keys. Lock ’em in the cell in the basement.”
Steps led down from the office to the basement jail. Bent Hooker and seven men stumbled down, Dan ahead, Leatherneck behind. Tom waited upstairs.
Dude Hooker tried to lead the sheriff’s posse. Tom heard him shouting as the avalanche of riders swept near. Gunfire began to bark faster, to rise suddenly to a blizzard of shots. Then quickly the shots began to die away. The sheriff’s men were scattering in all directions. Word had flashed through them of Bent Hooker’s confessions. The heart had gone out of them.
Sam Dodge and a dozen riders raced to the courthouse, burst in with drawn guns—and found an empty hallway inside the doors. Tom was there, grinning, tearing the sleeve off his bloody arm, while Leatherneck and Dan kept guard.
“Where’s all that damn posse?” Sam Dodge yelled.
“Gone, I reckon,” Tom said.
“Where’s Bent Hooker?”
“Locked up down in the basement. Kid Hooker’s outside the window, dead.”
“I’ll be teetotally damned!” said Sam Dodge, looking around helplessly. “Boys, we been done dirt. Tom Fortune snuck in here an’ stole our fight.”
Grinning, Dan Walker said: “Tom worked a hocus. There’s witnesses locked up with Bent Hooker that’ll hang Hooker higher’n a deer’s hind quarter in cougar country. And clear Tom of killing Timmins. The town’s your’n, Sam. Me, I’m headin’ back to get Gaylord.”
“Whyn’t you tell the truth?” suggested Leatherneck slyly. “You don’t hardly know Gaylord.”
“Soon as I get my arm fixed a bit, I’ll go,” offered Tom hastily.
“I was waitin’ for that, too.” Leatherneck sighed. “If Gaylord wasn’t hurt, you two’d be hung up fer an excuse to rush back there. Let’s get that arm fixed an’ go. Love must be a turrible pain.”
* * * * *
They hanged Bent Hooker at the prison, although Tom Fortune asked for mercy. A new house was built on the Gaylord Ranch, with extra rooms for Betty Gaylord and her husband. Dan Walker and his wife built a second house nearby, on Gaylord land—and when the XO passed back to its former owners, Dan Walker ran it from the Gaylord headquarters.
It was understood that one day fence lines would be torn down and the two ranches would be one. Meantime there was a new sheriff in Sundown, new law on Sundown range. Tom Fortune’s law, they called it—fair law, square law, that kept Tom Fortune packing the sheriff’s badge long after he wanted to quit and help run the big Walker-Fortune Ranch.
TRAVIS
I
He had learned, finally, that a man without bold plans and high hopes and humor and laughter had nothing, however recklessly he lived. He was in Costa Rica, drinking the day’s first black, bitter coffee, watching the cottony ground mists steam under another rose and gold sunrise, when the future suddenly promised all that again. Seventeen days later, still wearing rumpled tropical whites and the old Western hat he had never discarded, and humming a Guatemalan love song, he walked off a rusty little steamer just docked at San Francisco from sweating, fever-ridden ports far south.
A heavy duffel bag rode his left shoulder. Deck winches were rumbling, men shouting, but he did not look back. The rich reek of dried hides and green coffee, of spices and fish, came at him. His smile widened. He walked into it with striding eagerness, taking the bracing coolness of the north once more into bronzed skin and hard flesh. On the rough cobblestones of the wide waterfront street, he paused, smiling up at the soaring hills of the city. On Nob Hill, where the new nabobs of the Comstock Lode had built mansions such as the West had never seen, distant windows glinted in the sunshine. An immense dray loaded with huge hogsheads came noisily at him, and only at the last instant did he move a lithe step. The driver was swearing as the heavy Belgian horses and massive wheels clashed by.
A gleaming carriage and team of matched bays going the other way pulled up before the lone figure in white. The coachman gave wry advice from under the jaunty tilt of his high plug hat. “Them hooligans drivin’ the drays’ll flatten a man. Better get your saddle horse, mister.”
The heavy duffel bag thudded on the blue floor carpet of the open carriage. The stranger eyed the bright brass buttons on the coachman’s long black coat and grinned. “First I’ll go to the South Bay Bank, Nob Hill-style,” he stated cheerfully.
“This here’s a private carriage, an’ no job left for Howie Quist if he’s caught haulin’ strangers,” said the coachman severely. He consulted a thick silver watch. His broad, sun-baked face looked down shrewdly. “Nob Hill-style ain’t cheap . . . You got five dollars?”
Chuckling, the stranger stepped into the carriage. The coachman straightened his plug hat, shook the matched bays into a smart trot, and spoke over a shoulder. “The look of cattle is on you.”
“Two years ago,” the stranger admitted, “I sold a ranch in Wyoming.”
He sat comfortably back on the soft cushions and watched hacks and buggies, wagons and carriages fill the city streets they entered. The full midtown cacophony and confusion were about them on Montgomery Street when the carriage drew up with a flourish before the impressive stone façade of the South Bay Bank.
The coachman spoke with a trace of pride as his passenger stepped out. “In Texas, I rode on the Palo Duro for Goodnight.”
“A long jump from a Palo Duro saddle to a fancy Nob Hill rig,” said the stranger as he started into the bank.
From the wide world, strangers had entered the ornate marble and gilt banking room of the South Bay Bank. But when the teller in Cage Two glanced at the draft, he suddenly became nervous.
“You forgot to endorse, sir.”
“You’re looking at it,” was the amiable correction.
“Of course . . . One moment, please.” The teller left the cage, taking the draft. When he returned, he said politely: “Mister Campbell, the cashier, will attend to this. He has your draft.” And when the bronzed stranger nodded agreeably and walked to the rear of the large banking room, the teller ducked out of the cage again, almost scuttling on some urgent errand.
The half paneling in the cashier’s office was of rubbed dark walnut. Chairs were crafted in black leather. The carpeting was thick. In that cheerless elegance, William Campbell with his compact build, thinning sandy hair, and closely trimmed beard watched from the high-backed swivel chair at his desk as the stranger walked in, hat in hand, and said: “I’m Roger Travis.”
This was an unusual case, William Campbell sensed immediately. The rumpled white suit and the old wide-brimmed Western hat had an authentic look. The visitor’s face, stripped of superfluous flesh, was molded in strong planes under a shock of brown hair that needed a barber. The wide mouth and the full lower lip held upward lines of humor. And the man had a bronzed litheness and a look of far places, of recklessness and boldness, Campbell noted warily as he reached to his desk.
“I’m told that you presented this draft for five hundred dollars against the account of Roger Travis.”
“I did,” the stranger agreed, smiling.
“Our books,” Campbell said with studied politeness, “show that a certificate of deposit was issued to Roger Travis when the account was opened. You have the certificate, of course.”
“Lost it,” was the amiable reply.
“The signature and endorsement on this draft,” Campbell said calmly, “resemble that of Roger Travis in our Signature Book. The five hundred dollars probably would have been paid without question if the ledger balance had covered the amount of this draft.”
“Look again,” was the cheerful retort. “Two years ago I deposited thirty-two thousand dollars.”
Terse now, Campbell said: “The Travis account has a balance of one hundred and three dollars and sixty cents.”
“Mistake somewhere.”
“The mistake,” said Campbell with full brusqueness, “is yours, young man. You’re not, of course, Roger Travis. I personally am acquainted with Travis. I inspected his credentials and received his certificate of deposit. Furthermore, over a period of time, the bank’s lawyers have assisted Travis in the settlement of an estate. We know . . .”
“What estate?” was cut in swiftly, sharply.
Campbell said coldly: “When Travis returned from Central America somewhat less than a year ago, he learned from letters which the bank had been holding for him that an uncle had passed away and he had inherited.”
“An uncle in Ohio,” the stranger said without hesitation.
“Yes,” Campbell said.
“And you people helped collect the inheritance?” The stranger’s tone was hardening.
Stiffly Campbell replied: “Travis requested our assistance. He wrote immediately, of course, to the lawyer in Ohio who had notified him of his uncle’s death.”
“Didn’t Travis go to Ohio and identify himself?”
“It was not necessary,” said Campbell shortly. “Travis and the lawyer in Ohio were old friends. I read the correspondence between them. Incidents of long ago were mentioned by both men. The Ohio
lawyer was quite satisfied as to the identity of the Roger Travis who was writing to him.”
“Incidents of long ago?” the stranger said. He weighed the statement. “I kept a journal for years,” he said levelly, “and lost it when I lost my certificate of deposit. This man evidently has my journal and knows a great deal about my past life.” And, when Campbell stared without comment, obviously unmoved, the stranger demanded: “How much did the estate amount to?”
“Something over sixty thousand dollars, I believe.” Uneasily Campbell watched the visitor prowl to the nearest window. Prowl, Campbell thought, was the word for the lithe, noiseless steps.
Staring out the window, the man slowly said: “Thirty-two thousand dollars deposited two years ago. Over sixty thousand dollars paid in from Ohio . . . and a hundred and three dollars left.”
“And sixty cents,” Campbell corrected out of meticulous habit.
The visitor prowled back. “Where’s the fellow who got it?”
“Roger Travis left San Francisco some two months ago. He hasn’t communicated with us.”
“And he won’t. What did he look like?”
“A most pleasant young man,” said Campbell curtly. “A thorough gentleman despite an adventurous background. He was well liked by all who had contact with him.”
“Obviously,” in the same level tone. “Never mind the gentleman part. Describe him.”
“A large man, about thirty, I should say,” Campbell recalled. “Hair on the reddish side. A longish face. Very intelligent blue eyes. He dressed well.”
“He should have dressed well with the money he got with a few plausible letters to a trusting old family lawyer in Ohio, and smooth talk to the bank here,” the stranger said with irony. “Well, what was his story?”
Campbell wished now that he had made an exit, however undignified, while his visitor was at the window. His anger was stirring at the hardening, insistent questions. But when Campbell looked at the stripped, bronzed face, no longer smiling, he continued talking to hold the man and keep him calm until the help that was coming arrived.