“I didn’t pry into secrets,” she whispered with dry lips. “I didn’t ask any questions. I never before suspected you were the chief of the Vultures—”
The expression of his face told her she had made an awful mistake.
“So you know that!” His voice was soft, almost a whisper, but murder stood stark and naked in his flaming eyes. “I didn’t know that. I was talking about something else. Conchita told me it was you who told Corcoran about the plan to lynch McBride. I wouldn’t have killed you for that, though it interfered with my plans. But you know too much. After tonight it wouldn’t matter. But tonight’s not over yet—”
“Oh!” she moaned, staring with dilated eyes as the big pistol slid from its scabbard in a dull gleam of blue steel. She could not move, she could not cry out. She could only cower dumbly until the crash of the shot knocked her to the floor.
As Middleton stood above her, the smoking gun in his hand, he heard a stirring in the room behind him. He quickly upset the long table, so it could hide the body of the girl, and turned, just as the door opened. Corcoran came from the back room, blinking, a gun in his hand. It was evident that he had just awakened from a drunken sleep, but his hands did not shake, his pantherish tread was sure as ever, and his eyes were neither dull nor bloodshot.
Nevertheless Middleton swore.
“Corcoran, are you crazy?”
“You shot?”
“I shot at a snake that crawled across the floor. You must have been mad, to soak up liquor today, of all days!”
“I’m all right,” muttered Corcoran, shoving his gun back in its scabbard.
“Well, come on. I’ve got the mules in the clump of trees next to my cabin. Nobody will see us load them. Nobody will see us go. We’ll go up the ravine beyond my cabin, as we planned. There’s nobody watching my cabin tonight. All the Vultures are down in the camp, waiting for the signal to move. I’m hoping none will escape the vigilantes, and that most of the vigilantes themselves are killed in the fight that’s sure to come. Come on! We’ve got thirty mules to load, and that job will take us from now until midnight, at least. We won’t pull out until we hear the guns on the other side of the camp.”
“Listen!”
It was footsteps, approaching the cabin almost at a run. Both men wheeled and stood motionless as McNab loomed in the door. He lurched into the room, followed by Richardson and Stark. Instantly the air was supercharged with suspicion, hate, tension. Silence held for a tick of time.
“You fools!” snarled Middleton. “What are you doing away from the jail?”
“We came to talk to you,” said McNab. “We’ve heard that you and Corcoran planned to skip with the gold.”
Never was Middleton’s superb self-control more evident. Though the shock of that blunt thunderbolt must have been terrific, he showed no emotion that might not have been showed by any honest man, falsely accused.
“Are you utterly mad?” he ejaculated, not in a rage, but as if amazement had submerged whatever anger he might have felt at the charge.
McNab shifted his great bulk uneasily, not sure of his ground. Corcoran was not looking at him, but at Richardson, in whose cold eyes a lethal glitter was growing. More quickly than Middleton, Corcoran sensed the inevitable struggle in which this situation must culminate.
“I’m just sayin’ what we heard. Maybe it’s so, maybe it ain’t. If it ain’t, there’s no harm done,” said McNab slowly. “On the chance that it was so, I sent word for the boys not to wait till midnight. They’re goin’ to the jail within the next half-hour and take Miller and the rest out.”
Another breathless silence followed that statement. Middleton did not bother to reply. His eyes began to smolder. Without moving, he yet seemed to crouch, to gather himself for a spring. He had realized what Corcoran had already sensed; that this situation was not to be passed over by words, that a climax of violence was inevitable.
Richardson knew this; Stark seemed merely puzzled. McNab, if he had any thoughts, concealed the fact.
“Say you was intendin’ to skip,” he said, “this might be a good chance, while the boys was takin’ Miller and them off up into the hills. I don’t know. I ain’t accusin’ you. I’m just askin’ you to clear yourself. You can do it easy. Just come back to the jail with us and help get the boys out.”
Middleton’s answer was what Richardson, instinctive man-killer, had sensed it would be. He whipped out a gun in a blur of speed. And even as it cleared leather, Richardson’s gun was out. But Corcoran had not taken his eyes off the cold-eyed gunman, and his draw was the quicker by a lightning-flicker. Quick as was Middleton, both the other guns spoke before his, like a double detonation. Corcoran’s slug blasted Richardson’s brains just in time to spoil his shot at Middleton. But the bullet grazed Middleton so close that it caused him to miss McNab with his first shot.
McNab’s gun was out and Stark was a split second behind him. Middleton’s second shot and McNab’s first crashed almost together, but already Corcoran’s guns had sent lead ripping through the giant’s flesh. His ball merely flicked Middleton’s hair in passing, and the chief’s slug smashed full into his brawny breast. Middleton fired again and yet again as the giant was falling. Stark was down, dying on the floor, having pulled trigger blindly as he fell, until the gun was empty.
Middleton stared wildly about him, through the floating blue fog of smoke that veiled the room. In that fleeting instant, as he glimpsed Corcoran’s image- like face, he felt that only in such a setting as this did the Texan appear fitted. Like a somber figure of Fate he moved implacably against a background of blood and slaughter.
“God!” gasped Middleton. “That was the quickest, bloodiest fight I was ever in!” Even as he talked he was jamming cartridges into his empty gun chambers.
“We’ve got no time to lose now! I don’t know how much McNab told the gang of his suspicions. He must not have told them much, or some of them would have come with him. Anyway, their first move will be to liberate the prisoners. I have an idea they’ll go through with that just as we planned, even when McNab doesn’t return to lead them. They won’t come looking for him, or come after us, until they turn Miller and the others loose.
“It just means the fight will come within the half-hour instead of at midnight. The vigilantes will be there by that time. They’re probably lying in ambush already. Come on! We’ve got to sling gold on those mules like devils. We may have to leave some of it; we’ll know when the fight’s started, by the sound of the guns! One thing, nobody will come up here to investigate the shooting. All attention is focused on the jail!”
Corcoran followed him out of the cabin, then turned back with a muttered: “Left a bottle of whisky in that back room.”
“Well, hurry and get it and come on!” Middleton broke into a run toward his cabin, and Corcoran re-entered the smoke-veiled room. He did not glance at the crumpled bodies which lay on the crimson-stained floor, staring glassily up at him. With a stride he reached the back room, groped in his bunk until he found what he wanted, and then strode again toward the outer door, the bottle in his hand.
The sound of a low moan brought him whirling about, a gun in his left hand. Startled, he stared at the figures on the floor. He knew none of them had moaned; all three were past moaning. Yet his ears had not deceived him.
His narrowed eyes swept the cabin suspiciously, and focused on a thin trickle of crimson that stole from under the upset table as it lay on its side near the wall. None of the corpses lay near it.
He pulled aside the table and halted as if shot through the heart, his breath catching in a convulsive gasp. An instant later he was kneeling beside Glory Bland, cradling her golden head in his arm. His hand, as he brought the whisky bottle to her lips, shook queerly.
Her magnificent eyes lifted toward him, glazed with pain. But by some miracle the delirium faded, and she knew him in her last few moments of life.
“Who did this?” he choked. Her white throat was laced by a tiny trickle of cri
mson from her lips.
“Middleton—” she whispered. “Steve, oh, Steve — I tried—” And with the whisper uncompleted she went limp in his arms. Her golden head lolled back; she seemed like a child, a child just fallen asleep. Dazedly he eased her to the floor.
Corcoran’s brain was clear of liquor as he left the cabin, but he staggered like a drunken man. The monstrous, incredible thing that had happened left him stunned, hardly able to credit his own senses. It had never occurred to him that Middleton would kill a woman, that any white man would. Corcoran lived by his own code, and it was wild and rough and hard, violent and incongruous, but it included the conviction that womankind was sacred, immune from the violence that attended the lives of men. This code was as much a vital, living element of the life of the Southwestern frontier as was personal honor, and the resentment of insult. Without pompousness, without pretentiousness, without any of the tawdry glitter and sham of a false chivalry, the people of Corcoran’s breed practiced this code in their daily lives. To Corcoran, as to his people, a woman’s life and body were inviolate. It had never occurred to him that that code would, or could be violated, or that there could be any other kind.
Cold rage swept the daze from his mind and left him crammed to the brim with murder. His feelings toward Glory Bland had approached the normal love experienced by the average man as closely as was possible for one of his iron nature. But if she had been a stranger, or even a person he had disliked, he would have killed Middleton for outraging a code he had considered absolute.
He entered Middleton’s cabin with the soft stride of a stalking panther. Middleton was bringing bulging buckskin sacks from the cave, heaping them on a table in the main room. He staggered with their weight. Already the table was almost covered.
“Get busy!” he exclaimed. Then he halted short, at the blaze in Corcoran’s eyes. The fat sacks spilled from his arms, thudding on the floor.
“You killed Glory Bland!” It was almost a whisper from the Texan’s livid lips.
“Yes.” Middleton’s voice was even. He did not ask how Corcoran knew, he did not seek to justify himself. He knew the time for argument was past. He did not think of his plans, or of the gold on the table, or that still back there in the cave. A man standing face to face with Eternity sees only the naked elements of life and death.
“Draw!” A catamount might have spat the challenge, eyes flaming, teeth flashing.
Middleton’s hand was a streak to his gun butt. Even in that flash he knew he was beaten — heard Corcoran’s gun roar just as he pulled trigger. He swayed back, falling, and in a blind gust of passion Corcoran emptied both guns into him as he crumpled.
For a long moment that seemed ticking into Eternity the killer stood over his victim, a somber, brooding figure that might have been carved from the iron night of the Fates. Off toward the other end of the camp other guns burst forth suddenly, in salvo after thundering salvo. The fight that was plotted to mask the flight of the Vulture chief had begun. But the figure which stood above the dead man in the lonely cabin did not seem to hear.
Corcoran looked down at his victim, vaguely finding it strange, after all, that all those bloody schemes and terrible ambitions should end like that, in a puddle of oozing blood on a cabin floor. He lifted his head to stare somberly at the bulging sacks on the table. Revulsion gagged him.
A sack had split, spilling a golden stream that glittered evilly in the candlelight. His eyes were no longer blinded by the yellow sheen. For the first time he saw the blood on that gold, it was black with blood; the blood of innocent men; the blood of a woman. The mere thought of touching it nauseated him, made him feel as if the slime that had covered John Middleton’s soul would befoul him. Sickly he realized that some of Middleton’s guilt was on his own head. He had not pulled the trigger that ripped a woman’s life from her body; but he had worked hand-in-glove with the man destined to be her murderer — Corcoran shuddered and a clammy sweat broke out upon his flesh.
Down the gulch the firing had ceased, faint yells came to him, freighted with victory and triumph. Many men must be shouting at once, for the sound to carry so far. He knew what it portended; the Vultures had walked into the trap laid for them by the man they trusted as a leader. Since the firing had ceased, it meant the whole band were either dead or captives. Wahpeton’s reign of terror had ended.
FIRST ENDING
But he must stir. There would be prisoners, eager to talk. Their speech would weave a noose about his neck.
He did not glance again at the gold, gleaming there where the honest people of Wahpeton would find it. Striding from the cabin he swung on one of the horses that stood saddled and ready among the trees. The lights of the camp, the roar of the distant voices fell away behind him, and before him lay what wild destiny he could not guess. But the night was full of haunting shadows, and within him grew a strange pain, like a revelation; perhaps it was his soul, at last awakening.
* * *
SECOND ENDING
But he must stir. There would be prisoners, eager to talk. Their speech would weave a noose about his neck. The men of Wahpeton must not find him here when they came.
But before he turned his back forever upon Wahpeton Gulch, he had a task to perform. He did not glance again at the gold, gleaming there where the honest people of the camp would find it. Two horses waited, bridled and saddled, among the restless mules tethered under the trees. One was the animal which had borne him into Wahpeton. He mounted it and rode slowly toward the cabin where a woman lay beside dead men. He felt vaguely that it was not right to leave her lying there among those shot-torn rogues.
He braced himself against the sight as he entered the cabin of death. Then he started and went livid under his sun-burnt hue. Glory was not lying as he had left her! With a low cry he reached her, lifted her in his arms. He felt life, pulsing strongly under his hands.
“Glory! For God’s sake!” Her eyes were open, not so glazed now, though shadowed by pain and bewilderment. Her arms groped toward him. He lifted and carried her into the back room, laid her on the bunk where Joe Willoughby had received his death wounds. His mind was a whirling turmoil, as he felt with practised fingers of the darkly-clotted wound at the edge of her golden hair.
“Steve,” she whimpered. “I’m afraid! Middleton—”
“He won’t hurt you any more. Don’t talk. I’m goin’ to wash that wound and dress it.”
Working fast and skillfully, he washed the blood away with a rag torn from her petticoat — as being the cleanest material he could find — and soaked in water and whisky. Corcoran had just ceased bandaging her head when she struggled upright, despite his profane objections, and caught at his arm.
“Steve!” Her eyes were wide with fear. “You must go — go quick! I was crazy — I told McNab what you told me — told Middleton, too, that’s why he shot me. They’ll kill you.”
“Not them,” he muttered. “Do you feel better now?”
“Oh, don’t mind me! Go! Please go! Oh, Steve, I must have been mad! I betrayed you! I was coming here to tell you that I had, to warn you to get away, when I met Middleton. Where is he?”
“In Hell, where he ought to been years ago,” grunted Corcoran. “Never mind. But the vigilantes will be headin’ this way soon as some of the rats they’ve caught get to talkin’. I’ve got to dust out. But I’ll take you back to the Golden Garter first.”
“Steve, you’re mad! You’d run your head into a noose! Get on your horse and ride!”
“Will you go with me?” His hands closed on her, hurting her with their unconscious strength.
“You still want me, after — after what I did?” she gasped.
“I’ve always wanted you, since I first saw you. I always will. Forgive you? There’s nothin’ to forgive. Nothin’ you could have ever done could be anywhere near as black as what I’ve been for the past month. I’ve been like a mad-dog; the gold blinded me. I’m awake now. And I want you.”
For answer her arms groped abou
t his neck, clung convulsively; he felt the moisture of her passionate tears on his throat. Lifting her, he carried her out of the cabin, pressing her face against his breast that she might not see the stark figures lying there in their splashes of crimson.
An instant later he was settled in the saddle, holding her before him, cradled like a child in his muscular arms. He had wrapped his coat about her, and the pale oval of her face stared up at his like a white blossom in the night. Her arms still clung to him, as if she feared he might be torn from her.
“How the lights blaze over the camp!” she murmured irrelevantly, as they climbed toward the ravine.
“Take a good look,” he said, his voice harsh with suppressed and unfamiliar emotions. “It’s our old life we’re leavin’ behind, and I hope we’re headin’ for a better one. And as a beginnin’, we’re goin’ to get married the first town we hit.”
An incoherent murmur was her only reply as she snuggled closer in his arms; behind them the lights of the camp, the distant roar of voices fell away and grew blurred in the distance. But it seemed to Corcoran that they rode in a blaze of glory, that emanated not from moon nor stars, but from his own breast. And perhaps it was his soul, at last awakened.
THE END
Historical Stories
Howard began writing historical adventure fiction as a young boy and embraced the genre to the full in his professional writing career. One of his most successful series of historical stories featured the Texan gunfighter El Borak (Arabic for ‘The Swift’). El Borak is a Texan gunslinger that settles in Afghanistan, where he attempts to keep the peace between rival tribes. These tales have thematic links with the Western genre and even featured the Senora Kid on occasion (a character created by Howard for his westerns). Only five El Borak tales were published during Howard’s lifetime, the rest appearing posthumously as interest in the author grew. Howard also created a similar character named Kirby O’Donnell, though with less success.
Delphi Works of Robert E. Howard (Illustrated) (Series Four) Page 265