“Maybe to somebody he wasn’t a stranger.”
McCasford nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe so.”
They passed through into the main room. The fire had subsided; on his way by, McCasford threw fresh logs on it. At the far end, the stove was out.
Brand said, “I need some snow for a compress,” and regretted that he had not thought to bring his mackinaw. The wind wheezed outside, making shingles shudder.
McCasford said, “That door opens outward. “You’ll never push it open against the pile of snow outside.”
“That’s so,” Brand agreed, and wondered what the kid was doing hanging on to his coat tails this way. He turned toward the tackshed door and went that way. The stove was still warm when he passed it. The kid caught up and opened the door, and followed him into the tackshed, carrying a lantern.
“Obliged,” Brand said, going into the stable. McCasford was beside him, the lantern swinging from his grip, and now McCasford swung around to face him, stopping in his tracks. Brand’s free hand hung cautiously close to his gun; he said, “What’s wrong?”
“I want to talk.”
“Go ahead then,” Brand said, feeling a trifle standoffish.
“I want you to leave the girl alone,” McCasford said, without bluster, and immediately Brand felt a certain distant pity for the kid’s blundering. “You’re no good for her,” McCasford told him. “Maybe you can persuade her with your fancy gambler talk, but when you ain’t around to influence her, she knows enough not to trust you.”
“Well,” Brand said, “let’s say that’s all true, for a minute. Where does it leave you?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, what makes you any better for her than I am?”
He saw the confused light behind McCasford’s shifting eyes, and he said more quietly, “At least I haven’t robbed any stagecoaches lately.”
McCasford’s face snapped around. “Where’d you learn that?”
“From a friend.”
“Don’t fool with me, Brand. How many people know about it?”
“Three,” Brand said promptly. “But I won’t say which are the other two, you see? So you’re just as bad off as you were before. You going to kill all of us?”
“I’m not going to kill anybody,” McCasford said softly, his eyes cast down. “The whole thing went sour the minute we called down that stage driver. It’s tasted bad ever since. I don’t want to kill anybody on top of it.”
“You’re in it now, and you don’t like it, so you want to get out. That it?”
McCasford made no answer, but his silence was reply enough. Brand said speculatively, “If it wasn’t for Elias you’d probably be willing to go back and turn the money in and surrender yourself.”
“Maybe.”
“But Elias is in the way, and he’s got good eyes and a good gun and a quick knife.”
“All right,” McCasford said. “I sucked myself into this deal—nobody forced me. So now I don’t like it and I’m scared. What the hell can I do about it?”
Brand gave him a quick and quiet answer. “Where’s the loot you stole?”
Hot anger flamed in the youth’s eyes. “Why should I tell you that?”
“What did you get?”
McCasford’s shoulder’s slumped. “Gold bullion. Maybe twenty thousand dollars. You want me to give all that up?”
“You’ll likely be giving it up anyway,” Brand drawled. “To the law or to Elias.” He fingered the damp towel. “Where’d you hide the stuff? It’s in Elias’ saddlebags, isn’t it?”
“If you know that much, maybe you can figure out the rest.”
“All right,” Brand said easily. “He took the saddlebags off and carried them and buried them somewhere. They must be pretty heavy, so he wouldn’t have taken them far. It’s a sure thing he didn’t take them into the saloon where everybody could see them. So either the two of you buried the gold before you got here, or it’s right around the stable somewhere. And I doubt you’d have buried it out in the storm—no landmarks to find it by.”
“Why,” McCasford said, “you’re pretty shrewd, ain’t you?”
“You’ve got to see a lot across a poker table. Where’d you hide it, kid?”
McCasford still had a stubborn, uncertain look, and so Brand continued his thoughtful calculations: “It was cold when you got here. The storm had already reached this place. You wouldn’t have had the stomach to go outside into that muck again just to bury a couple of sacks of gold. That means it’s probably right inside this room. All right. I’ll search the place as soon as I can—and I’ll probably turn up your loot.”
McCasford was looking down. “In the loft,” he said. “Under the hay.”
“Fine and dandy,” Brand said, a little wryly. “When I get this compress inside for Zane, we’ll dig the stuff out of there and hide it somewhere else, where Elias can’t find it.”
“What good will that do?”
“When the storm blows over, he’ll either want to take you with him or he’ll kill you. Either way, he’ll want that gold. If he can’t find it, he’ll stick around long enough to hunt for it. We can pin him down them. Otherwise he could sneak off any time—maybe leaving you in a dark room with a knife in your back.”
“Sure,” McCasford breathed. “Listen to that—you think it’s lettin’ up?”
Brand could hear no diminishing of the storm’s wail; bracing himself, he took the towel toward the big outside door. The lantern threw crazy shadows along the dirt floor.
CHAPTER XVII
DIGGING WAS HARD work and left callouses on Brand’s palms; he remembered with regret the vitality of his youth, which had drained away in years of soft dissipation.
Afterward, the two men smoothed the earth and scattered straw over it and led the horse back into the stall in which they had buried the heavy saddlebags. Brand found himself wishing that George Zane would come to—he had the feeling he would need more than one halfhearted ally in the hours to come. Now he said to McCasford, “Let’s clean off the shovel. If he sees dirt on it, he’ll know we’ve been digging.”
Then they put the cleaned shovel back in its corner and stood, Brand brushing his hands together and McCasford smoothing hair back out of his eyes. McCasford said, “If I turn myself in and give the money back, I wonder how it will go with me?”
“I’ll put in a word,” Brand said. “So will Michaela. They ought to let you off easy. You didn’t hurt anybody in that holdup, did you?”
“Elias fired a couple of shots, but they didn’t hit anybody.”
“All right. When the time comes, you turn yourself in to George Zane, if he’s up and around.”
“Why Zane?”
“He’s a federal marshal. He trailed you two up here.”
“Ah,” McCasford said with a long exhalation of breath. “That’s it then. That’s why somebody knocked him out, tried to kill him.”
“Probably. Let’s get going—I’m freezing in here.”
There was a stink in the place, the deputy’s rotting carcass. “He ought to be buried,” McCasford said, not moving.
“Where?”
“In here, I guess. We buried the gold in here, didn’t we?”
It hadn’t occurred to Brand before, but now he could see that the kid was right. The body shouldn’t be left in the open any longer. “All right,” he said wearily. “You dig a while, then I’ll take over.”
When it was over, his back was paining and his hands were raw, and his eyelids drooped for want of sleep. But at least the exercise kept a man warm. He stood over the mounded grave, in the back corner stall where no horse had been in a long time, and spoke a few awkwardly chosen words over the grave.
Then McCasford picked up the lantern, flickering now on low oil, and went ahead of him back through the tackshed and pushed the door open, and stepped into the saloon.
Brand, behind him and still in the tackshed, heard the shot ring out and saw McCasford stumble forward. The lantern crashed with a tinkle o
f glass. Ramming through the doorway, gun up, Brand saw McCasford on the floor drawing one leg up against his chest, and Brand wheeled toward the far end of the room, cocking his gun, searching the place with a single quick sweep.
Nothing stirred. Echoes of the shot seemed to hang in the room; there was very faint the smell of sulphur smoke. The shattered lamp’s wick had gone out, with no oil left to sustain its flame.
McCasford was crawling around the floor in a circle of pain. The door to the corridor stood ajar but no figure filled that space; the room was empty until at the head of the stairs the old man appeared in his long-john underwear, a long gun in his hands—the same buffalo rifle Brand had found in the afternoon—and peered question-inly down into the big room. Brand, making a quick decision, went back and knelt by McCasford.
The wound was high in the youth’s chest—painful but probably not fatal, unless it failed to be tended. Too high for the heart or lungs, certainly. He made the youth lie flat and he removed the kerchief from his pocket to stuff it against the wound. McCasford was conscious, his eyes rimmed with pain, and Brand said, “I’m afraid you stepped in the way of one meant for me, kid. Hold this against the hole until I get something better for it.”
When he looked up, Elias and Lutz were coming through the door. There was a gun in Lutz’s fist and a knife in Elias’. They stopped inside the door, Lutz throwing bull-voiced questions forward angrily, and Andrews appearing thick-eyed in the door, unarmed and half-dressed. Michaela pushed past him, saw the scene in an instant and ran forward, a wet towel still in her hand.
The bullet had sliced straight through; blood welled from an exit wound high at the back of the kid’s shoulder. Brand said to the girl, “Cauterize it with an iron from the fire, and bandage him up. He’ll be all right.”
McCasford grinned tightly. “At least it didn’t hit the side where my good arm is.”
“Sure,” Brand said drily. “You’ve got all kinds of luck.” He stood up, the gun still in his hand, and faced the others. “Lutz, let me see that gun.”
“Now, look here, Brand—”
“Don’t argue with me,” he said in a taut voice. “I don’t suppose anybody saw who shot him?”
No one answered. “All right,” Brand said to Lutz. “I’ll have that gun—and don’t argue with me.”
Lutz considered the droop of the gun idly balanced in Brand’s fist, and the weight of his own gun, and silently, grudgingly, came forward to hand over his gun.
Brand merely sniffed at the barrel and handed it back. He looked at the old man, but ignored the old man’s buffalo gun—the shot he had heard was a pistol shot, and the wound McCasford had suffered was not big enough to have come out of the bore of that .50-70. Brand tramped toward the doorway where Elias stood musing, picking his teeth, and Andrews was grinding knuckles into his eye sockets, rubbing away sleep.
“I’ll want to see your guns,” he said to them.
Elias merely shrugged. He caught no reaction from Andrews. “Go ahead, boys,” Brand said grimly, waving his gun.
They all turned into the corridor. A backward glance showed him Michaela bending over McCasford’s prone, distended figure, and Lutz standing in the middle of the room as though for the first time in his life events had made him uncertain and afraid of mystery. Michaela had a red-tipped poker from the fire and when she touched it to the youth’s skin he cried out; there was a second cry as Brand went through the door, and his lips clamped together thinly.
Elias turned into his room, and Andrews said thick-tongued, “I’ll go get mine.” He went on down the hall barefoot, and Brand followed the Mexican into his room.
Insolently, Elias lifted the gun from his holster, thrown across the back of the room’s only chair, and handed it gingerly to Brand as if he were afraid of it. It had not been fired. Brand handed it back to him and Elias grinned at him without humor.
“In the high storm,” Elias said, “many things happen, amigo. Who knows how many shots will be fired before the wind dies away?”
“I’ll do without your philosophy,” Brand told him, and went back into the corridor to find Andrews coming from his room, a puzzled expression on his broad face.
Andrews scratched his bald spot with one hand and his paunch with the other. “It ain’t there,” he said. “What’s not there?”
“My gun,” Andrews said. “Funny thing, I know it was there when I went to bed, because I took off the gun belt and put it down beside me, but not it ain’t …”
Brand wasn’t listening. He was on his way down to Andrews’ room. When he got there he found that what Andrews had said was true. The holster was there, empty. He wheeled out of the room and confronted Andrews, who was stumbling along the corridor, seemingly still half-asleep, hung over.
Brand shook him by the shoulders and said, “You claim somebody stole it?”
“Must’ve,” Andrews mumbled. “It didn’t walk out there by itself and shoot the kid, did it?”
“Maybe you shot him and then hid the gun.”
“All right,” Andrews said, throwing up his hands in an exasperated gesture. “Maybe I did—maybe I didn’t. What difference does it make? God, a man can’t even get a night’s sleep in this place. Listen to me, Brand, and I’ll tell you something—this place is an old castle, see, and it’s haunted by ghosts. Ghosts—you know? That’s who shot the kid. Ghosts.”
“Shut up,” Brand told him, and left the man mumbling to himself in the corridor. He turned in at George Zane’s door and found the man propped up on folded blankets, a bandage wrapped around his head.
Zane’s eyes were open; they did not seem quite focused, but he spoke, albeit in a hoarse croak. “What was the shooting?”
“Somebody shot McCasford.”
“The kid?”
“Yes.”
“Who’d do that?”
“I think it was aimed at me,” Brand said. “Whoever it was, was rattled enough to shoot the first thing that came through the door. It happened to be the kid instead of me.”
“Why should it be you?”
“I haven’t let on whether or not I was a witness to the deputy’s murder.”
“I see,” Zane said. His forehead gathered in a grimace of pain. “Some joker put a nice pleat in my skull, for sure.”
“Got any idea who it was?”
“No,” Zane said. “I just saw a shadow in the dark, and that was all. Someone must have recognized me.”
“That’s about how I had it figured out,” Brand said. “It’s not much help, though. The kid didn’t do it, and Elias probably would have knifed you.”
“Maybe he wanted to avoid suspicion by doing it this way.”
“Maybe he did,” Brand said. “But you’d have a tough time proving it.”
Zane began to nod, then appeared to think better of it. Brand said, “You need something? Water or food, maybe?”
“No, thanks. I’ll be all right.”
Brand reached the gun in the marshal’s holster and put it into his hand. “You might need this. It’s a crazy night.”
“Obliged.”
Brand nodded and turned out of the room, pulling the door shut after him. His fears had been realized; the killer was loose and prowling the building. But which one?
CHAPTER XVIII
BUNDLED IN HIS sheepskin, he kept wood on the fire and covers spread over McCasford, keeping a lonely vigil through the night with his gun ready while the storm wailed in undiminished fury and McCasford slept fitfully on a mattress that Michaela had supplied from her own bed.
Brand sat in a tipped-back chair with the back of his head against the wall and the gun in his lap. His boot heels were hooked over the front rungs of the chair and now and then he gave himself a short jolt from the bottle of forty-rod whiskey.
Fatigue was heavy upon him; he was a man accustomed to a regular daily sleep, and to stay awake beyond a normal twenty-hour period was a difficult thing to do in the absence of a marathon poker game’s excitement.
&
nbsp; He thought of the old man, by now blanketed and trying to warm his ancient bones so that he could go to sleep; he thought of Lutz, the surliness deep in his red eyed, unshaven face; he thought of Andrews, thick with whiskey-sickness, and Elias, grinning around his toothpick with a knife glinting wicked fragments of light; he thought of George Zane, lying in his blankets with a dizzy head bruised almost to the point of death by a killer’s clubbed gun or boot.
It was a strange admixture of men. And he thought of Michaela; when he came to her in his mind, his outlook softened and, reminded by her image, he sought once again the reasons and the meaning he had searched for along the course of this long day.
In that manner, with McCasford’s chest slowly rising and falling, and with the storm whistling and rattling steadily, the moments trudged past. Midnight came and went, unmarked.
A new day began, by the clock if not by the sun; the small hours passed in drowsy intervals at the end of which Brand would jerk his head up and silently curse himself for falling so near to sleep. He fumbled in his fob pocket and snapped open the lid of his watch, and saw by that timepiece that it was past three o’clock; he took out the key and wound the watch, closed it and put it away.
Shortly thereafter, with the storm howling loud, the corridor door opened. Brand’s hand dropped on the gun and rested there. Armando Elias came through, fully dressed, and tramped slowly forward, his spurred feet softly jingling. “Restless?” Brand inquired.
“I always get up early,” the Mexican drawled with thin accents. “I should look after my horse, I think.”
He put the coffeepot on the stove, built a wooden fire inside and lighted it, and closed the isinglass-windowed door. Then, buckling his coat, he went into the tackshed. Suspicious, Brand shifted his grip on the gun and held it ready. If the restless Elias was paying an inspection call on his hoard of gold, and found it absent from the hayloft, he might do anything. Anything at all.
Indeed, it might have been Elias’ plan to sneak away while everyone was asleep, take the gold and his horse and face his chances in the storm. It seemed to Brand that the wind had subsided an audible trifle; perhaps the storm was dying.
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