Gunsmoke Masquerade

by Peter Dawson

  “That could be,” Pete drawled. “Fred never had much use for me. Bishop’s one of his best friends. Tom, it’s up to you to get him.”

  “Why me?” Buchwalter was quick to ask.

  “I sure can’t. And you don’t dare send another man without a reason. That leaves it up to you.”

  “What if he’s talked?”

  “How could he? Mathiot was alone when I got him. That much I’m sure of. I’ll lay you two to one Kelso hasn’t got his answers yet. He hasn’t had a look at me. With all the hell poppin’ up there on the slope he likely hasn’t had a chance to think much about this if Mathiot gave him anything at all to go on.”

  “You sure pick me some nice jobs, son,” Buchwalter drawled.

  “Do this one right and we’re set,” was Dallam’s answer. “I’ve seen Cathy. She’s leaving with me tonight. You’ll hear from me in a week or so. By then we ought to have things goin’ pretty much our own way.”

  “You’ve seen Cathy.” Buchwalter whistled softly. “You burn out her old man and she’s still for you?”

  “Just like she always was.”

  “Pete, I’ll have to hand it to you.” Buchwalter’s tone was tinged with an honest admiration.

  “Then you’ll hang on and see this through?”

  “Think I’d throw a thing like this away?” Buchwalter’s laugh was gentle and for that reason all the more packed with meaning. “Hell, yes, I’ll hang on.”

  * * * * *

  Bill Paight wondered if he was going loco. He stood on a tie rail in front of the Emporium, bracing himself with a hand on an awning post and stared belligerently down into the faces of the crowd below him. Ledge’s street was packed walk to walk except for a small cleared space halfway across where Bill’s dead horse lay. He had run the animal to death, killed him getting here to warn these people of what was coming. And now they wouldn’t believe him!

  Someone on the far walk shouted: “What good will two cases of dynamite do Kelso? If he had a wagon load, he couldn’t blow enough of that dam away to fill my back pocket!”

  Loud guffaws greeted this remark and another man called: “Kelso could pick it away with his cane!”

  Bill waited out the laughter and the ribald side remarks. He was reaching the end of his patience, feeling a white-hot anger. At the same time he sensed the half hysteria that had taken the townspeople; all they could do was watch the smoke-fogged east slope, the orange glow of the fires there, and imagine the slow dying of the town after the big outfits, which were the chief source of trade in this country, lay in ashes. When he could make himself heard, he shouted: “All I’m asking is that you empty those houses down by the creek and carry whatever can be moved up here onto the street where it’s safe! Those people down there don’t deserve to be flooded out and lose everything.”

  “You do it, Paight. We’ll look on!” came a raucous voice from the middle of the street.

  There were some more laughs. Bill knew then that he was wasting his time. He looked down, about to jump aground, when Harvey Strosnider’s voice boomed all over the others. “Quiet, you jug-headed fools!” the owner of the Pride Saloon yelled. “Is it goin’ to hurt you to do a little work? Suppose the dam does go out?”

  “Supposin’ it does, Harvey. Your place is safe.” This time no one laughed at the poor wisecrack. The saloon owner’s word bore some weight.

  “Who’s goin’ down there with me and help clear out those houses?” Strosnider yelled again.

  Instead of waiting for answers, he moved through the crowd, making for the path down the passageway between his saloon and a neighboring store. The path led down to the flat along the creek. Several men followed him, but not many.

  Bill sensed in the hush that had fallen over the crowd his last chance to drive home the small doubt Strosnider had put in his listeners. He called scornfully: “The least you can do is stay off the walks and give us room to pile things!”

  He jumped down off the rail and, using his elbows roughly, began shoving his way across toward the passageway. Men moved sullenly out of his way. Whenever Bill saw a face he knew well, he glared at it before going on. Three shamefaced men fell in behind him and followed. By the time he reached the far wall seven others had joined the first trio. Still, but for those ten, the rest held back. Yet they no longer shouted their taunts; they were silent before a stubbornness against being bulldozed into doing something they wouldn’t do.

  Bill was stepping into the head of the passageway when a faint earthy concussion pounded over the barely audible roar of the distant fires. Faces turned upstreet, all eyes traveling to the rosy-tinted east slope, beyond it, and up toward the pass that was hidden by the billowing clouds of smoke there. The crowd stood hushed, not a man moving.

  Then a strident shout rang along the street: “There she goes!”

  For a moment longer a paralysis of uncertainty held the crowd. Had the blast broken the dam? Suddenly a man bolted for the mouth of the passageway. Then, in near riot, others were after him. They jammed the narrow opening and ran down it toward the shacks below. At the foot of the alleyway, Bill stepped aside and watched them go past, a bleak smile graven on his square-shaped face.

  Within the next two minutes the shacks down there began disgorging their furnishings: sofas, beds, barrels of dishes, piled bed clothing, chairs, crates, a hundred other items. Two men fashioned a stretcher of broomsticks and an old overcoat and carried a sick woman up to a house on the street. Most amazing of all, eight others got to work axing out the end wall of one house and, through the opening, lifted out a grand piano. They lugged the heavy burden up the alleyway as carefully as though it had been stuffed with eggs and didn’t set it down until it was in the back warehouse room of the Emporium. Up off the flats and into the lower mouth of the passageway alongside the Pride trudged an unbroken line of men stooped under heavy burdens. They climbed the slope singly, in pairs, an occasional quartet grunting under the dead weight of a horsehair sofa or a big walnut bureau. On the street, Bill kept order, gathering together the belongings of one household, piling everything in under the walk awnings.

  All at once a series of shouts echoed up the passageway. Bill caught the words: “She’s comin’ down!”

  “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, look at the trees!”

  “It’s too late! The fire’s jumpin’ the creek!” He understood at once and wheeled to look out along the murky distance of the east slope. A fierce joyous shout welled up out of his deep chest.

  There, barely in sight through the murk, a thick gray shadow moved slowly down along the twisting line of the creek. It was a wall of water so wide that the broad ribbon of the foaming flood behind it took up half the expanse of the Crescent B’s lower meadow. Bill caught his breath at imagining what the raging torrent had probably done to Bishop’s house. What looked like twigs and branches, in reality huge uprooted trees, rolled on the crest of the first high and foaming wave.

  Bill looked below and groaned as his hopes instantly died. The ring of fire had spread around the small cleared pocket that marked Schoonover’s place and the rosy line of flames had already crept beyond the line of the creek. In his frenzy of work Bill had forgotten to watch that critical point. Now he knew that all this work was for nothing, that the east slope was doomed as certainly as it had been before Streak thought of that last desperate way of saving the big layouts. For now, with the fire spreading on the creek’s south bank, nothing could keep it from gutting the timber of the lower slope.

  He sat down wearily on an overstuffed chair beyond the walk, unable to take his glance from the oncoming wall of water. It appeared to be moving no faster than a man could walk, but Bill realized its great speed in the face of seeing it, at this distance, in motion at all.

  After what seemed an eternity, it reached the upper end of Schoonover’s clearing. The small dark square that was Schoonover’s house disappeared under the gray mass. Then the water wall was cutting through the lower line of fire, erasing it. But when it had swe
pt lower, beyond Schoonover’s, a minute speck of livid flame still remained on the south bank. Bill sat in that lifeless posture of lost hope as the roar of the oncoming water mass filled the air. Presently the sound became deafening. Majestically, more slowly now, the oncoming flood surged down across the lower valley. Its mighty roar made the air tremble, rattled windows in the stores along the street. Finally it was abreast the upper end of the street. The crash of the crushed buildings along the lower flat was drowned in the voice of the raging water. Twenty feet high, the giant boles of uprooted trees turning lazily below its crest, it picked up the shacks and houses below the street level, ground them, crushed them into splintered boards, and passed relentlessly on.

  Then came the main mass of the flood, a boulder and tree-strewn river of white, foaming water littered with all the debris of its twelve-mile flow. Its roiled borders struck the foundations of a few of the higher buildings. The lean-to at the back of the Pride was swept away and for half a minute sailed majestically along until it tilted over and was slowly crushed. A wagon bed floated in the middle of the current, turning around and around as though its lost wheels were trying to find a secure footing.

  Then the main flood was gone, its roar receding as it struck southward along the lower line of the creek. Toward nightfall it would hit Twin Forks, far below at the edge of the desert and sometime tonight would spread out across the sandy waste of Dry Reach to spend itself in running the countless dry washes there.

  Men gathered along the alley behind the stores to look down on the destruction that lay along the still overflowing creek. Nothing was left of the settlement down there, nothing but a few broken boards, the mud-filled brick foundation line of one cottage, and a few littered scraps of metal marking the spot where the hardware store’s junk pile had been. A layer of clay-colored silt covered everything. And up to the south of Schoonover’s a bright pinpoint of live flame marked the gloom to make a mockery of the awesome destruction these men had just witnessed.

  When nothing but the fading, far-off roar of the flood disturbed the silence, Bill got up out of the chair and stared along the street. Other men were doing the same, their glances stunned, helpless. They didn’t talk. They were too miserable for words.

  With a lifeless shrug, Bill faced halfway around and started toward the Pride, feeling the need for whiskey. He had taken only three steps when he came to an abrupt halt. Up the street from the lower end of town came a rider, his horse at a trot. That rider was Tom Buchwalter.

  Bill’s glance whipped around to a trio of men standing nearby. One wore a gun butt foremost in the holster at the left side of his waist. Unceremoniously Bill went over and jerked the gun from the man’s belt, saying: “You’ll get this back.” He stepped down off the wall, ducked under a tie rail, and, the gun hanging in his hand at his side, waited there as Buchwalter approached.

  Buchwalter was barely thirty feet away when he saw and recognized Bill. His face lighted up at sight of his crew man and he reined over toward Bill, saying: “What happened? Who blew the . . . ?” Abruptly he reined his horse to a stand. The look on Bill’s face was unmistakably hostile, and now Buchwalter saw the gun.

  “Get down, Buchwalter,” Bill drawled.

  Fencerail’s foreman sat silently a moment, making no move to dismount. Then: “What’s eating you, Bill? What have I done?”

  “Get down,” Bill said tonelessly.

  There was a veiled wariness in Buchwalter’s look now. His glance wouldn’t meet Bill’s directly. He looked beyond and asked the men on the walk: “You know anything about this?”

  Before they could reply, Bill’s voice rasped out: “Blast you, light and take your licking!”

  Buchwalter’s glance swung on Bill an instant. Then he looked down at his waist. “You can see for yourself I’m not packing an iron,” he said.

  “That makes it all the easier.” Bill tossed his Colt away. It skidded into one of the shallow wheel ruts a few feet out from him.

  A cold smile came to Buchwalter’s face. “You always were a trusting soul, Bill,” he drawled. And suddenly his right hand lifted from the swell of his saddle and stabbed in under his coat.

  For the split second it took Bill to realize his mistake, he stood motionlessly. Then, as Buchwalter’s arm swiveled down, Bill made a sideward lunge that became a rolling fall. Buchwalter took deliberate aim and fired. Bill, rolling over, clawing his gun from the dirt, went rigid as the bullet struck him. Then, arcing up the gun, he got in a shot that blasted out at the exact instant Buchwalter’s second bullet came.

  The Fencerail foreman stood up in stirrups as his second bullet kicked up a geyser of dirt that sprayed in Bill’s face. Then, his horse shying, Buchwalter toppled off balance. Bill’s next three shots jerked the man erect in three separate solid blows. But finally he was so far off balance that he fell. He struck the ground on his head and right shoulder. In the momentary silence the breaking of his shoulder bone made a small but plainly audible sound.

  Bill came to his knees and, his gun held before him, crawled the twelve feet across to where the other lay. Men were running along the walks but Bill ignored them. When he was within reach of Buchwalter, he twisted the smoking gun from the dying man’s hand and threw it aside. He took a hard hold on the shoulder of Buchwalter’s coat and gave it a savage pull.

  “How did you drag her into this?” his voice grated. “Damn you, talk! What were you holding over that girl to make her come here and back your play?”

  The very intentness of his tone seemed to bring Buchwalter back to consciousness. He opened his eyes.

  “What have you got on Laura?” Bill repeated. “How did you get her to come here?”

  Blood flecked Buchwalter’s lips and his white-shirted chest was splotched with spreading crimson. Still, no pain showed on his face. When he spoke, his voice bore the kindly gentle lift Bill knew so well. “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you, Paight?”

  “You’re going to tell me.”

  While Buchwalter took a gasping breath, the onlookers who by now had gathered close listened in wonder to this play of words they couldn’t understand.

  In a moment Buchwalter said: “She’s a good girl, Bill, sound clear through. Her father was my partner once. I . . . I had something on him. She threw in with us when I threatened to . . . to send him to Yuma. She . . . she . . .”

  They saw life leave him. His eyes remained open but his head rolled loosely to one side, lying against his twisted broken shoulder.

  Bill stared up bleakly at the circle of men. Then, slowly, a smile played against the pain written on his face. He reached up, grasped the belt of a man standing close by and pulled himself erect. Now the watchers could see the red stain low along his side at waist level. A man said quietly to a youngster at his side: “Run down and get Doc Swain.”

  Bill shook his head. “No. What I need is a horse. Who’s going to lend me one?”

  “You’re hurt, Paight,” the man who had helped him to his feet protested. “Where you want to go?”

  “Agua. Where’s a jughead?”

  “You couldn’t ride a mile if you had to.”

  “Damn it, I want a horse!” Suddenly Bill’s glance went to Buchwalter’s pony, standing ground-haltered in the middle of the street. Pushing aside a man who blocked his way, he walked over to the animal, spoke to it gently when it shied, and caught up the reins.

  He managed somehow to get into the saddle and thrust his boots in the stirrups. So amazed were the watchers that no one thought to try to stop him. He was sitting straight when the horse took him out the lower end of the street at a run.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Streak walked his pony into the upper end of Ledge’s narrow street a few minutes short of 9:00 that night, his borrowed Stetson tilted against the slant of the downpour. Along his back the cold feel of his soaked shirt—borrowed, too—gave him keen relief from the bite of the burns there. But for the rawness of the rain-washed night air, he would have slept in the s
addle, for now the nerve tension that had kept him going since mid-morning had drained out of him and he was feeling bone-deep the nagging exhaustion that made even the weight of the gun at his thigh a bothersome burden. He fought his weariness with a restlessness that wouldn’t let him alone. He could explain that uneasiness no better than he could his feeling of having left something undone, or than he could the sense of incompleteness he had felt on leaving Cathy Bishop some five hours ago.

  Common sense told him that he should look up a doctor, have his burns treated, and turn in at the hotel for a night’s rest, but a subconscious urging kept him from doing this. That urging was a blend of several emotions—an emptiness that hit him each time he thought of Ed Church lying in that mistakenly marked grave down at Agua, cold anger at the realization that Pete Dallam was still very much alive and very much a threat, and, most irritating of all, a reluctance to ride out of this country now that his job here was done. Guilford had sent him in to find out what had happened to Ed Church. He had found that out and there was nothing to keep him. Certainly the affairs of the men and the one girl he had met during the past four days were no longer any concern of his.

  This last thought brought Streak to a decision and he made up his mind to act on it before he gave way to those more personal urgings. He would leave tonight, ride to Agua Verde, pay Snyder to return his borrowed horse, and take the morning stage across to Johnsville and start back home—well, not home exactly because he didn’t have a real home. Rather, he’d report back to Guilford. Maybe Guilford would keep him on now that he was shy a deputy.

  Streak wondered if he were foolish in starting on a thirty-mile night ride as played out as he was. But then his stubbornness ruled out any thought of changing that decision, and he lifted the pony to a trot as he went on down the street. He saw the lights of the Pride and didn’t fight the welcome idea of turning in there. He excused this brief delay by telling himself he would be better off for a drink or two of whiskey and a light meal with plenty of coffee; actually, in turning in to the saloon’s tie rail, he was making a small concession to that inexplicable reticence he felt at so abruptly leaving.