“Know him! He’s the man that broke me out of jail!”
Spike’s face split into a grin. “Well, in that case, maybe it’s different. Says he’s bringing word from Doc. But I thought that Doc …”
Westman yelled at him savagely: “Shut up!”
“If you mean you thought that Doc was dead,” Harrison told Spike, “you’re right. I got there right after he was killed and I got the letter he was writing.”
“But that man the boss.…”
“If the man was the gent with the daisies on his vest, I killed him.”
He laughed at the two of them, Spike with the rifle dangling in his hand, Westman stiff and straight upon the horse.
“So, if you’re figuring on fixing it so that something happens to me,” said Harrison, “you better give it up. You can’t afford to kill me.”
Westman wheeled his horse, said brusquely: “Come on. You better see the boss.”
“That,” declared Harrison, “is what I come for.”
They rode carefully down the rocky trail and ahead of them Harrison saw the spreading green of a hidden valley.
“The boss ain’t going to be pleased about this,” said Westman. “He’s plenty sore to start with. Sore at me for getting out of jail. Figured on using me for bait, I guess. Wanted me to stay there so he could have an excuse to shoot hell out of the town.”
“How do you feel about it?” asked Harrison.
Westman hesitated, as if debating his answer. “To tell you the truth, Harrison, I don’t really know. My wife, Marie, she’s all for you. Says the boss don’t care what happens to me. She figures maybe that if I had got killed in the jail break the boss was stewing up it would of pleased him fine.”
“Sounds like you and the boss don’t get along.”
“We’ve had our arguments,” Westman said tersely.
The trail reached the valley and slanted across its greenness, heading for the group of buildings huddled under the western wall of a towering escarpment. They splashed through a ford in the river.
In front of one of the larger residences Westman swung in to the hitching rack. Two men sitting on the front steps got up and lounged against the porch railing, watching Westman and Harrison dismount.
“The boss in?” asked Westman.
One of the men jerked his thumb toward the door, said nothing. The other gave his attention to rolling a quirly. Harrison glanced quickly, closely at the man who had jerked his thumb. There was something hauntingly familiar about the man, about his bearing rather than his face.
“Come on,” said Westman.
Harrison followed him into the house. At the door of a small room furnished as an office he stopped stock still, staring at the man with his feet cocked up on the desk.
Dunham! Dunham, of Bar X!
The big rancher took a cigar out of his mouth, spat at a cuspidor and missed.
“Don’t look so damned astonished, Johnny,” he said. “Who did you expect to find?”
Harrison paced forward a step. He understood now. “So this is why you don’t want the county split.”
Dunham waved his cigar, airily. “Let me tell you something, Johnny. She ain’t going to be split, either. Me, I get along swell the way it is. The boys at Rattlesnake understand the situation, but that damn Sundown gang would be riding my tail all the time … all the time.”
“Nothing strange about the Rattlesnake gang understanding you,” Harrison said, blithely. “You practically hand pick them.”
Dunham chuckled good naturedly.
“Ain’t none of them damn Sundowners suspected me, not out loud, at least. Except maybe Ma Elden and she didn’t peep about it. Figured, I guess, she wasn’t sure enough. And now I got her where I want her. I got it fixed so she’ll never crack a whisper.”
“Carolyn,” said Harrison, quietly.
Dunham put the cigar back in his mouth, leered around it. “You figure things out fast,” he said. “When Ma gets the note the gal’s going to send her, she’ll get out and work against the county splitting. She’ll do an about-face so fast it’ll make her dizzy.” He chuckled at the thought. “Imagine Ma Elden lining up with Rattlesnake!”
“Smart,” said Harrison. “Smart operator, Dunham. You even were on hand to join the posse that went out hunting Carolyn.”
“Sure,” Dunham told him. “I think of everything.”
“And rigged one of your buzzards all up in city togs to do a killing job on Doc. Or was it somebody you hired to come in and do the trick?”
“Someone I hired,” said Dunham, easily, “but I played it safe. He doesn’t even know who hired him.”
“I hope you haven’t paid him yet,” said Harrison, “because he sure botched up the works.”
Dunham’s mouth flopped open and the cigar tumbled to the desk. His feet came down off the desk with a heavy thump.
“What’s that!” he roared.
“The gent with the daisies killed Doc all right enough,” said Harrison, “but I sort of interfered. I pegged your killing hombre with a hunk of lead and got the letter Doc was writing.”
With an angry gesture, Dunham swept the burning cigar off the desk. His face was red and flushed.
“What letter?” he shouted.
Harrison laughed quietly. “Why, I thought you knew,” he said. “The one to Omaha. To the marshal there. Doc must sort of hinted to you that he was going to write it.”
Dunham’s hand moved swiftly beneath the desk, came up with a heavy six-gun that leveled on Harrison’s stomach.
“Pull that trigger,” said Harrison, “and there’s a noose around your neck. Doc had got quite a ways along in that letter. He had put in some names.”
“Where is it?” Dunham asked, icily. “Hand it over to me.”
“I left it with a friend of mine,” Harrison told him, “and asked him to mail it if I didn’t come and get it. Told him if I wasn’t back by tomorrow morning to send it on to Omaha.”
Dunham snarled. “I could get it out of you, you lousy wagon tramp. I could …”
“You can’t do a thing,” said Harrison, softly. “I’ve got you across a barrel and you know I have. Kill me and the letter goes to Omaha. Wait too long to make up your mind and it goes to Omaha. So you better put away the gun and let us talk some business.”
The six-gun in Dunham’s fist sagged.
“What do you want, Harrison?”
“How much did Doc hold you up for?”
Dunham hesitated. “Ten thousand,” he said, finally, “and it was too damn much. If he’d asked four or five …”
“It’s going to cost you more than that,” Harrison told him, flatly.
Dunham smashed his fist against the desk. “I won’t pay it,” he shouted. “I’ll …”
“It will cost you a woman and a horse,” said Harrison.
“A woman and a …”
“Carolyn Elden and the black horse that one of your men stole from me.”
Dunham looked relieved. A grin crept across his face.
“Now, Johnny, that’s fine. You get me the letter and then you and the gal ride out on the horse and don’t tell no one where you been.”
He licked his lips, like a cat that had just lapped up a plate of cream. “No trouble at all, you see. We make the deal and everything’s all right.”
Harrison shook his head. “And you’d have men along the trail to bushwhack us before we’d gone a mile.”
Dunham raised his hands in horror. “Never! I stick to my word. I’ll shoot square …”
Boots pounded on the porch outside and the door squeaked open. Harrison spun on his heel, backed against the wall. The boots tramped across the outer room and the man came in the door.
At the sight of him, Harrison’s hand slipped swiftly for his gun.
“Hello, marshal,” said Dunham smoot
hly. “Don’t mind Johnny over there. He’s just sort of nervous.”
Marshal Albert Haynes stood rigid, staring at the gun in Harrison’s hand.
“Get them up,” snapped Harrison. “All of you. You, too, Westman!”
He switched a quick glance at Dunham, still seated in the chair, but with his elbows on the desk and his hands lifted stiffly in the air.
“So you hired him, too,” said Harrison.
Dunham grunted. “Bought him. Sundown don’t pay its marshal much.”
Still watching Harrison, Haynes spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Got a letter for you, Dunham. Took it out of the pocket of the hombre you sent to kill Falconer.”
Dunham chuckled heavily. “You made a good bluff, Johnny,” he said, “but I guess it’s run out now.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Bare Fists vs. Three Guns
Harrison’s brain spun, but his gun hand held steady and his face was grim. Dunham was right. His bluff had run out to nothing and he was on his own. A moment before Dunham would not have dared to lift a gun against him, but now he was fair game for any bullet that should come his way.
“Hold still,” he told them. “Anyone that moves will get it in the guts.”
Dunham laughed at him. “Better think fast, Johnny. You can’t stand there all day. The next move is up to you.”
And that, Harrison knew, was the bitter truth. Slowly, cautiously, he catfooted toward the door, slid into the doorway. His hand reached out and grasped the knob.
“Good luck, Johnny,” said Dunham, and the man was laughing at him … laughing because he knew that Johnny couldn’t make it, knew that he would die as soon as he reached the street.
“I’ll shove that laugh right down your throat,” said Harrison. “With bullets!”
He stepped back and slammed the door behind him, ran across the room, heading for the stairs that ran to the upper floor. Half way up them, he swung around to cover his back trail, but there was no one there. The door into the office still was closed, but someone was shouting out a window to someone in the street.
“Don’t let him get out! Watch all the doors and windows!”
Trapped, Harrison told himself. Trapped here in this house, without a chance to win.
A soft voice came to him from above.
“Johnny! Johnny Harrison!”
He swung around, a cry surging in this throat.
“Carolyn!”
She stood there, at the top of the stairs, more beautiful than he had remembered her. She wore a dress that matched her eyes and her hair was done up in a way he’d never seen … piled on top of her head instead of being braided into pigtails. Half school girl of the east … half Ma Elden’s daughter as he remembered her.
“I knew you’d find me, Johnny,” she said, and her voice was soft. “I knew that you would come.”
“Get back!” warned Harrison. “Get back out of sight!”
He sprang up the stairs toward her, dragged her back out of line of the room below.
“Trouble, Johnny?”
Harrison half groaned. “Up to my eyes,” he said. “I thought I had them bluffed, but it didn’t work.”
There were shouts outside the house, the sound of running feet, men calling to one another, the rushing pound of hoofs.
“You here all alone?”
He nodded glumly, then asked: “How about you?”
“Marie was with me, but she went out and left me for a minute.”
“Marie?”
“Jim Westman’s wife. She’s been with me all the time. They want me to write a note to Ma, telling her she had to work against the county splitting if she ever wants to see me.”
“And you wouldn’t write it.”
She shook her head, stubbornly.
His arm around her tightened. “Good girl,” he said.
From the room below a voice bellowed at them. “Better come down, Johnny. We got the whole house covered.”
Harrison’s hand tightened on the six-gun and he glanced at the girl.
“Go to hell,” said Harrison. “If you want me, come and get me.”
“Good boy,” said Carolyn, with a smile.
In the room below a six-gun bellowed and a bullet smashed into the wall opposite the staircase. Harrison waited. The six-gun roared again and splinters leaped from the paneling of the wall.
Silence … deep and deadly silence. Then all at once something scraped outside, a sliding, grating noise.
Carolyn gasped. “A ladder! Someone’s putting a ladder up to one of the windows!”
Harrison half turned toward the room from which had come the scraping noise, and then turned back. Black defeat welled within his brain. Licked, he told himself. Licked right down to the ground. Boxed in so he couldn’t move. If he left the stairway to get at the men on the ladder, the gang downstairs would charge up and get him and if he waited here, the ladder-men would nail him.
Silence again … and then the silence was broken by a steady creaking, the protest of the ladder at the weight of a man upon it … a man who was climbing fast.
“Carolyn,” said Harrison, huskily. “Carolyn, I …”
His words were drowned out by a human scream, a soaring note of pain and terror. And cutting through the scream came the distant spat of a high power rifle. The rifle spat again, an angry sound thinned by distance … and then again. Another man screamed shortly, as if the scream had started and then someone had grabbed him by the throat.
Carolyn was staring at him with wide eyes. “It’s the men out at the ladder,” she cried. “Someone is shooting at …”
He jerked erect and grabbed her by the wrist.
“Come on,” he shouted.
He charged across the hall and into the room where the ladder had been placed. At the window, he saw that the ladder still was there, planted against the house, while at its foot two dead men lay, one spread-eagled on the ground where the bullet had stretched him, the other huddled grotesquely where he had fallen from the rungs.
He glanced upward at the towering cliff. The gun, he knew, must be up there on that cliff … the gun that had driven all of Dunham’s men to cover.
Feet were pounding up the stairs and Harrison switched around. With one hand, he shoved Carolyn away, toward one corner of the room. In a single leap, he reached the doorway of the room.
His gun spat fire as a man’s head and shoulders came into sight around the corner of the staircase, the hammer of the weapon shaking the tiny room like a thunderclap. The head and shoulders slammed against the railing and slid out of sight. Someone yelled and feet were going down the stairway, not coming up.
“Quick!” Harrison yelled at Carolyn. “Get out of the window and go down that ladder.”
She hesitated, crouching in the corner of the room.
“Hurry!” he shouted at her. “While there’s light whoever’s on the cliff can cover us and the light won’t hold for long.”
With one long stride, he was at the window, jerking it open.
“Here,” he said, and reaching out an arm, boosted her roughly through the sash.
“Hold on tight,” he whispered. “But hurry, hurry …”
Terror was in her eyes as she looked up at him, but she moved swiftly, sure footed down the rungs. Carolyn had reached the bottom of the ladder and was running, heading for the shadows that lay like a rumpled blanket at the foot of the towering cliffs.
Recklessly, Harrison hurled himself down the ladder in great leaps. From a clump of grass to his left a six-gun opened up with a hacking cough and somewhere to the right a rifle talked with measured tones. He heard the hum of lead spinning past him, heard the sullen chugging of the bullets in the house, felt the twitch of jerking hands that wrenched at his vest and shirt.
Then he was stumbling, falling headlong, throwing u
p his arms to shield his face from the ground that was rushing at him. Far up the cliff the hidden rifle churned. Harrison clawed blindly to his feet and ran, ran with head bent low and with shoulders hunched, ran with a mind that forced him on.
The edge of the shadow at the cliff was close … he was almost there … and that’s King’s X, his tired mind told him. The shadow is King’s X. Once you get there no bullet can touch you … none of those buzzing little bees whimpering in the grass and whining overhead.
Something moved in the shadow ahead of him. Carolyn! Carolyn, coming toward him!
“Go back!” he croaked. “Go back!”
A dark form rose out of the grass and clutched at the girl with ape-like arms. Harrison tried to scream a warning, but all that came out of his throat was a rasping sound. He half-raised his gun and something sliced across his skull, something that was a streak of light tumbling into blackness, something that was a whirling pinball of flaming red. And he was falling, tumbling head over heels into an inky pit.
He groped back out of the darkness, revived. His head was a throbbing pulse that rose and fell, that swelled and then collapsed. Slowly he moved one of his hands and put it to his head. It came away wet and sticky.
The first star was twinkling in the east and the haze was bluer, almost black. Harrison lay on his back, thoughts surging through his pulsing head.
He had been hit by a bullet as he’d raced from the house, as he’d raised his gun to shoot at the man who had risen out of the grass beside Carolyn.
His lips moved. “Carolyn,” they said. “Carolyn …”
But it was all over now. Back in the office Dunham had laughed at him and said the bluff had run out. And now it had. Despite …
The rifle on the cliff! Someone had been up there. Someone still might be around. One gun that would not be raised against him.
Hope flared and then almost flickered out. One gun against the valley. He shook his head slowly. It simply wouldn’t work.
His own gun? Carefully he hunted for it. But there was no gun, nothing but the grass. It must have fallen from his hand when he had been hit, probably had gone tumbling for many feet before it came to rest.
A faint rustling came to his ears and he tensed. The rustling came on. Carefully, he rolled over, got to his knees and waited. His hands clenched tight, then opened, clenched again. Bare hands, he thought. Bare hands are all I have.
The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 10