Lassiter Tough (24 page)

With Shorty Doane's sudden appearance in a rear doorway, hope flashed in Sanlee's gray eyes like a blinding beacon. For Shorty Doane was lifting the first weapon he had been able to get his hands on after he had deserted his companions to go it alone. No longer was there any possible execution of Doane's plan to make Lassiter's death as ugly as possible at the point of a knife. Now he wanted to get it over with!

In the space of seconds it had taken for Lassiter to realize the giant's ominous presence, Doane yelled, “Brad . . .
jump!
”

And Brad Sanlee did just that, hurling himself headfirst to an open window. As he was clearing it, Lassiter dropped hard to the floor, all thoughts of trying to bring Sanlee down erased from his mind. It was now self-preservation.

A roar rattled through the windows and shook the office. Smoke belched as buckshot screamed and dug splinters from walls and demolished a front window, the sheet of lead directed solely at the spot where Lassiter had been standing only a heartbeat before.

He felt a numbing along his back, a wetness. But in desperation he twisted to a supine position on the freshly scrubbed floor. He saw Doane still in the hall doorway. A row of yellow teeth were revealed as he lifted the shotgun to discharge the second barrel. But before the barrel settled on the intended target, Lassiter shot him. Doane's head snapped back and the shotgun roared again, this time sending that scythe of shot into the ceiling. Powdered plaster fell
like a sheet of snow. Doane collapsed, still holding the shotgun, now empty.

Lassiter picked himself up, aware of a groaning sound, wondering dully if he was the source. Painfully he made his way to Doane. He was aware of shouting from farther uptown.

“Kill you,” Doane breathed, staring up out of shocked eyes. “It's all I wanted. . . .” Then, as if punctured, the great bleeding chest collapsed and his head rolled to one side.

Lassiter turned around. The pain burned like the heated blades of a dozen knives. He saw Doc Clayburn lying on his back. Blood from several wounds formed a puddle. Breathing hard, Lassiter forced himself to walk over to where Herrera was crumpled in the doorway. The whole purpose of Lassiter's extensive maneuvering had been to save lives. And now it looked as if Hell's double doors had burst open to incinereate anyone within reach.

In front of the building, the vaqueros were firing at something down the street. Bullets slammed into the side of the building as they began to give ground. Rudy Ruiz made what appeared to be a grand bow, then he toppled and fell across his rifle in the rutted street.

“Lassiter's inside!” It was Sanlee's screech.
“Get him!”

Jamming the .45 into his belt, Lassiter snatched up the carbine Herrera had dropped. At a crouching run, despite pain, he hopped over the crumpled segundo and reached the street. Those advancing from the Hartney Store missed a beat in surprise at Lassiter's boldness. His first shot doubled up Pinto George. His second knocked Jeddy Quine into a twisting gargoyle, blood streaming down his face.
Semple, the left-handed one, whirled like a dervish as a bullet crashed into his shoulder.

Shocked by Lassiter's sudden and devastating marksmanship, Joe Tige fired in haste, the bullet ricocheting off Doc Clayburn's metal sign above the door. By then the shot from Luis Herrera's carbine, now in the capable hands of a frenzied Lassiter, dug deep through the packed bandage on Tige's chest and out of his body.

Pete Barkley started to lift his rifle, then wheeled in panic. He threw away his weapon and started back up the street at a limping run, past spectators frozen along the walks or taking refuge in buildings. The blacksmith was crouched behind his cooling tank.

Black specks were whirling in front of Lassiter's eyes and his knees felt wobbly. He let Barkley go and started to turn. From a corner of his eye he saw Brad Sanlee snatch the gun from Pinto George's dead hand. For a big man, Sanlee seemed to have the speed of a gazelle as he sprinted for the safety of a building wall. In the next instant a bullet fired from Sanlee's weapon ripped the rifle out of Lassiter's hands. Lassiter felt a numbness to the tips of his fingers. The shock of the blow sent him stumbling to his knees. A second bullet whipped past the tip of his nose.

Far up the street he saw Isobel Hartney at a run from her store, her blond hair tumbling, skirts and apron flying. “Get back!” he yelled, gesturing with a numbed hand.

Added to that awful moment was the sudden appearance of Rep Chandler's widow. For some seconds, Lassiter had been aware of the growing sounds made by a fast-moving team and wagon. He
watched in horror as Millie Chandler came whipping out of a side street in a buckboard. She was standing up, lashing a lathered team that ran as if their hindquarters were licked by flame, eyes wild, manes streaming. Millie's hair was a dark banner caught by the wind.

Her eyes were on Lassiter, on his knees, some distance down the street, as if in an attitude of prayer. Around him, three vaqueros were dragging themselves away. A fourth lay unmoving. Herrera was crumpled in the doorway. She came pounding past Isobel Hartney and on down the street, her buck-board skidding dangerously. Then she spotted Sanlee and made a slight shift with the reins. Sanlee saw her coming and turned his big body.

“Millie!”
he screamed. In his eyes was a mixture of hatred and adoration.

As the speeding team and buckboard bore down, he leaped aside, for it was obvious that her intention was to run him down. But the left rear hub of the speeding wheel caught an awning post and ripped it out. The rear wheel went flying as did Millie, like a black-haired rag doll flung by an angry child.

The last Lassiter saw, she was tucking her body into a curl. And then a great cloud of dust erupted like a blinding midnight fog.

Hurt as he was, bleeding from a dozen or more shotgun wounds, Lassiter was barely able to fling himself away from the forefeet of the terrified team. On down the street they raced, the buckboard tilting unsteadily. A great geyser of dirt and dust was hurled into the air from the left rear axle that was digging into the street.

As the dust began to clear, Lassiter saw Sanlee step suddenly into view from a slot between buildings
thirty feet away. The gun he had taken from Pinto George hung straight down his side.

“All right, you son of a bitch!” Sanlee screamed. His hat was gone and coarse, reddish hair hung down on either side of his face. “You killed my sister, as sure as if you shot her with a gun!” Tears streamed into his beard and ran through the rust-colored hairs to lips stretched across bared teeth.

Lassiter, sickened by what Sanlee had yelled about his sister, dug for the revolver he had thrust into his waistband. A bullet sliced across his right thigh like a hot iron. He stumbled and nearly went down.

Sanlee was lurching toward him, drawing back the hammer of his weapon for another shot. That was when Lassiter emptied the .45 he had jerked from Semple's holster. Sanlee's image was as if viewed through heat waves. But the blurred vision received at least two of the bullets; the rest smashed into the wooden parapet above the building, which had lost its awning pole. One end of the wooden awning sagged precariously.

“He's down!” a man shouted. “Sanlee's
down!
”

Men swarmed around Lassiter much as they had the day he had beaten Shorty Doane with his fists. Letting the empty gun slip from his fingers, he pushed through the growing crowd over to where he had seen Millie hurled into the street. She was sitting up, supporting a broken arm.

She looked up at him with a shocked, white face. “I tried my best to kill him. To kill my own brother.” Then the tears sprang from her eyes in a flood. “Oh, Lassiter . . .” was all she could manage.

And when he turned to stumble over to where Sanlee lay at the edge of the street, she saw the bloodied back of his shirt and nearly fainted.

Sanlee was staring up. A man fanned him with a hat.

“Tell 'em about Buck Rooney,” Lassiter said, breathing hard.

“Go to hell.”

“I didn't kill him. You know damn well I didn't.”

Sanlee was laughing when the light went out of his gray eyes and they stared, unblinking, up into the noonday sun directly overhead.

It was found that both Clayburn and Luis Herrera had received superficial but painful wounds from a peripheral buckshot that had exploded from Doane's shotgun. A bandaged Doc Clayburn gave instructions to Señora Herrera, who had come from Box C in a wagon and now was ready to take the wounded back to the ranch. One dead one, Rudy Ruiz, who had survived the ambush and stampede, had his luck run out in Santos.

Lassiter didn't go with the wagon. Isobel Hartney took charge of his care, putting him in her big bed above the store. Under the tragic circumstances, no one mentioned the moral implications of such an arrangement. Because of the wounds in his back, Lassiter was forced to sleep on his stomach. But one day he was able to turn over, which brought a smile of delight to the one who had been nursing him for a week.

“My darling,” Isobel whispered. She started to take down her hair so that the sweet scent of it was in his nostrils. She whispered, “I've been thinking. We'll run the store together. It'll be yours as well as mine.”

But he regretfully pushed her away and had a long talk. And when he had finished, she said bitterly, “It's Millie Chandler, isn't it?”

He shook his head. And that gave her some satisfaction.

That day he rode out to Box C. It seemed that a hundred miles had somehow been added to the trip. When he arrived, he was exhausted. Luis Herrera was sitting in a chair outside his small house, looking wan. He waved and Lassiter waved back. He found Millie sitting on the sofa, the bandage of her splinted arm only slightly whiter than her face. “I see you pried yourself away from Lady Bountiful.”

“How are you feeling, Millie?”

“Like hell.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. “How else? Without you.”

He sat beside her on the sofa in silence for a few moments while he got his breath after the ride. He stared at the maw of the big stone fireplace. Somehow it reminded him of his own future—dark and without purpose. Then he flung aside the feeling of depression. He couldn't help the way he was built. As he had once told Rep Chandler: “To see what's on the other side of the mountain.”

“I heard what you told the sheriff,” Millie said. “That Doc had been in some trouble back East and that you wondered if Brad had ever said anything about it. And when the sheriff said he hadn't, you said something about letting sleeping dogs lie, that it hadn't been Doc's fault, the old killing. And the new killing couldn't be blamed on you. Buck Rooney. You spoke right up to the sheriff.”

“I did.”

“And Sheriff Palmer was in his best baby-kissing, electioneering mood because you had reminded him that I, as Brad Sanlee's only living relative, would take over his ranch. And that Diamond Eight in addition to Box C would make me a power in Tiempo County.”

“So I did.” He gave her a rueful smile.

“Damn it, Lassiter, I'd trade it all. . . . If only you were different. I don't know how many times you've told me that you're a drifter, that you can't stay in one place very long. . . .” Her voice was shaking.

“Listen, I've been thinking. Marcus Kilhaven . . .”

“Oh, yes. Brad had spoken to him about me. I was to be bartered again as I was with poor old Rep. But Marcus said he told Brad right out that he didn't want me that way, that I had to want him for himself. Not just to please my . . . my brother.” She put a hand to her eyes. “Brad's dead and the horror is finished. But, my God, at what a price. The dead, the wounded . . .”

“I wanted it to be just between the two of us—Brad an' me. But it didn't quite turn out that way.” He gave a deep sigh. “I better get over to my own quarters. . . .”

“Stay the night, Lassiter. I want to argue against your leaving.” She bit her lips and tried to smile. “And I just might win out in the end.”

But she didn't. He rode out one midnight. He had left her a long note. One thing he dreaded was a tearful good-bye. But he would always remember the Santos country and the price of avenging the death of his friend, Vince Tevis, and of leaving behind two beautiful women. It would have been damned hard, had he been so inclined, to choose between them. But now he didn't have to. His nature as a drifter was too strong.