One-Man Massacre (4 page)

"Gold," Buchanan said. "About two ounces' worth,
but I'll take your measure."

"My measure for what?"

"Fifty dollars."

Rosemarie laughed at him. "You're fooling," she said.
"You're pulling my leg."

"Hold out your hand," Buchanan told her and she laid it meekly inside his huge one. He tipped the pouch and
the gleaming, glistening grains of sand
-
like metal made a
conical, two-inch mound in her palm.

Mulchay bent low, eyes wide, and inspected the stuff.

"By God, it is," he said. "Hamlin, Macintosh
—come
have a look at this!"

His friends came and had their look, rubbed it ex
pertly between the tips of their fingers.

"Ay," said Hamlin, "it's the McCoy. The root of evil."

"Convinced?" Buchanan asked the girl, but apparently
she wasn't.

"Better wait until Mr. Terhune comes in," she said.
"I wouldn't dare give you fifty dollars for that
—that stuff."

"Then Terhune is standing the drinks," Buchanan
told her, wondering if female bartenders were such a good idea after all. "This gold of mine you're holding is all I've
got"

“I’l
l stand you," Rosemarie said and the man named Hamlin cleared his throat.

"No need of that," he said. "I'll buy it from you."

"Sold," Buchanan said.

"Forty dollars," Hamlin said.

Buchanan looked at him. "Fifty," he said.

"Split the difference, laddie. Forty-five."

Buchanan dipped his free hand into the pile inside
Rosemarie's palm, pinched an insignificant few grains and
scattered them to the floor.

"Now you've got forty-five," he said and Hamlin
nodded, appreciating the fine principle of the transaction.
He took a billfold from his pocket and laid out four tens
and a five-dollar gold piece.

"Careful now," he cautioned, and Buchanan guided the
dust from the girl's hand into the pouch again.

"Where
—ah—did you come across the gold?" Mac
intosh inquired innocently.

"Won it in a poker game."

"Poker?" Hamlin inquired amiably. "You like the re
laxation of the game?"

"That's my roll," Buchanan told him, "less what I owe the lady."

"Then let's have at it," Hamlin said, and six of them
proceeded to the nearest table. Cards were produced, everyone anted, and the deal began. Buchanan watched the cards fall, face down, and a grin that was tugging at
the corners of his mouth burst full bloom before he
picked them up.

"If you've got a new joke," Mulchay said, "let us all hear it."

"No," the big man said, tilting his chair back and
looking around at each friendly face with a kind of
gratitude on his own. "Just feel real good," he explained.

They all lifted their cards, and under the pretense of
studying them, Hamlin stole a long glance at the stranger
and was reminded of a loneliness he had known once.

"How can you play poker without a smoke?" he asked,
extending a long cigar across the table.

"Well, thanks," Buchanan said, accepting it. Mac
intosh lit it and Buchanan inhaled deeply. Life, he de
cided, was wonderful.

"Deal me in," a truculent voice ordered and Hamp
Leach lowered himself into the last vacant chair, his gaze full on Buchanan's face.

"Next hand," Buchanan said when the dealer seemed
not to know the way of it.

"This hand."

Buchanan looked again to the dealer of the game. It
was that man's business to set the thing straight, not his,
and then he saw all the others had turned to mute statues
behind their cards.

"This hand's already been dealt," he said reasonably.
Leach felt the tenseness around the table acutely, the
fear, and with a lazy smile he swung his head to the
dealer.

"Deal me in," he said and that one gave him five cards.
Buchanan debated the Tightness of it in his mind, de
cided that he was having much too good a time, that if
they did things that way in Scotstown he was no one to
object, and opened the betting with a conservative one
dollar.

"Raise you five," Leach said, not even looking at the
hand dealt him. Stranger still, he neither had money in
front of him nor produced the six he had bet.

The others threw in their hands, quickly, one after the
other.

Buchanan cocked an eye at his pair of queens, looked
into Leach's unwavering glance and grinned.

"Yours," he said, "and five more," laying his money on
the line.

"And five more," Leach said, still not picking up his
cards, still not showing any money.

"Cards?" the dealer asked in a small voice and Buchanan
asked for three.

"Play these," Leach said.

Buchanan could hardly believe what he had drawn. An
other queen and a pair of treys. He suddenly wished that
Fargo were standing behind his chair, that his partner
could see how many easier ways there were to make
money besides mining a Big Bend mountain.

"You opened," Hamp Leach said, "now bet." It was
not a reminder but a hard challenge and Buchanan looked
at him, at the cards still lying face down on the table, at
the prominent gun butt in the cutaway holster, at the un
blinking gaze.

"Before you make a play, brother, you better check
your hand," he advised him.

"My hand is pat. Bet your own."
"These little darlin's are worth five dollars," Buchanan
said affectionately. Mulchay stole a look at the full house
and his eyebrows lifted.

"Raise you ten," Leach said.

"All I'm going to do is call," Buchanan told him then.
"But first I want to see your money in the middle next
to mine."

"I don't need money. I got four queens."

Buchanan laughed. "Only four?" he asked.
.

"You heard me."

"Added to my three, that makes a strange deck." He
put his arm out, turned over Leach's first card. It was a
six of hearts.

"Let 'em be," the gunman said, squatting his hand
down over the remaining four. "I've got four queens."

Buchanan laid out his full house.

"Now how many do you have?"

"You're calling me a liar?"

Buchanan cocked his head at the man. "Who put the
burr in your pants, anyhow?" he asked him.

Leach's chair scraped against the floor and he came
out of it threateningly. Now his eyes went to Buchanan's
hip, scornfully.

"You think because you're naked," he said, "that you
got some kind of protection?"

"Man doesn't need a gun to be right," Buchanan said.

"You're wrong, jasper. You need one bad, and you
better go get it."

The words evoked an improbable image in Buchanan's
mind, a picture of himself reclimbing the mountain for
his gun, coming all the way back down here with it. He smiled.

"What do you think is funny?"

"Nothing tonight, I
guess," Buchanan admitted and
stood up. He turned his broad back to Leach and started
walking away from the table.

"Running, riffraff?" Leach asked harshly. "Had your
bluff called?"
\

Buchanan stopped, looked over his shoulder.
"I'm not running," he told him. "I'm going to borrow
a gun."

"No!" Rosemarie protested from behind the bar. "Don't
anybody lend him one!"

"Walk out, fella, and keep walking," Angus Mulchay
told him shrilly. "You're playing
his
game!"

Buchanan stood before one of the few armed men at
the bar.

"How about yours, friend?"

"Don't give it to him, Mr. White," Rosemarie pleaded.
"Don't anyone!"

White shook his head, so did the others.

"He's a gunny on the prod," someone murmured to
Buchanan. "Walk away from him like Mulchay says."

"Rig," Hamp Leach called out then. "The riffraff needs
your Colt. Give it to him."

Rig Gruber stepped forward, unbuckling his gunbelt.

"Much obliged," Buchanan said, taking it and adjusting
the buckle. Then he hefted the .45, checked the fully
loaded cylinder. "This your special, mister?" he inquired
conversationally.

"Never owned one better."

"With all the weight up front?"

"What's he doin', Rig?" Leach asked loudly. "Tryin'
to crawl out?"

The gun suits me," Gruber said to Buchanan.

"Then I guess it'll have to suit me, too," Buchanan replied. Gruber looked up into his face and an impulse
he
didn't understand caused him to move directly into
Leach's line of fire.

"You don't know what you're in, ranny," he said.
"That's Hamp Leach."

"Is it?"

"Bodyguard to Black Jack Gibbons."

"Fancy job," Buchanan agreed. "Better get out of the
wa
y
now." Gruber did, and then Buchanan swung to face
Leach. "This fight ain't necessary," he said across the
thirty feet that separated them.

"If you're gonna crawl," Leach rasped, "get down on
your belly."

"Just pay up your losses and we'll call it square," Buchanan suggested, and it finally got through to Leach that
the drifter opposite wasn't begging for an out at all.

"I owe you nothin'," he said. "And no man can call me
a liar."

"I do."

"Then draw!" .

That was what broke up Malcolm Lord's conference.
They heard the shattering explosions but missed the
sight of two tall men braced against each other in deadly
combat, two hands flashing, two guns exposed and roar
ing blue-orange flame. All of that in two seconds' time,
and with the sound still racketing from the walls and ceiling Hamp Leach sunk to his knees in astonished
surprise, and fell dead. It had been a very brief moment
of truth for the man, sad in its peculiar way, but no one
there was sadder about it than Tom Buchanan.
He carried the borrowed Colt to Rig Gruber, who took it from him automatically, his eyes riveted on the im
probable sight of Leach's forever unmoving body.

"Slick shooter, mister," Buchanan told him, "but you
ought to lighten the barrel. Doesn't swing up as quick
as it might."

"Who's responsible for this?" demanded the authorita
tive voice of Malcolm Lord then. Buchanan swung to
the sound, took in the prosperous-looking group at the
doorway.

"If you're the law," he answered Lord, "I guess you
mean me."

"I stand for law and order in Scotstown," the rancher
said. "What happened here?"

"Thing explains itself," Buchanan said patiently. "Me
and him had an argument."

"We all of us saw it, Mr. Lord," the man Hamlin put
in. "There was no crime committed."

"Prevention of one," Angus Mulchay announced, sur
prised that he could speak through his excitement. He
whacked Buchanan between the shoulder blades. "Every
man in this room owes you a drink, lad, and let Mulchay
be the first to treat."

"Me next," Macintosh cried, and from that and the
general murmur of approval Malcolm Lord was satisfied
that the fight had been conducted according to the
standards of the country.

Black Jack Gibbons moved away from the door, knelt
briefly beside the dead man, then made a curt signal for
Gruber to join him at the quiet end of the bar.

"What did you have to do with this?" Gibbons asked
in a fierce undertone.

"Not a damned thing."

"But it was your gun. I saw that much."

"Hamp said give the ranny my Colt. I gave it to him."

"Who is he? What was it all about?"

"A woman," Gruber said. "A poke
r
hand." He shrugged
his shoulders. "Hell, in Laredo Hamp plugged a puncher
account of the way he wore his hat. He never needed a
re
ason to throw down on somebody."

Gibbons knew all that and more about his bodyguard,
b
u
t it seemed incredible that he would ever lose his life
in a cowtown to a borrowed gun. He stole a glance at
the winner, the big man being noisily feted at the other
e
n
d of the room. If he had ever seen that one before he
would remember, and he didn't.

A Ranger? He had been expecting trouble from Austin
e
v
er since Laredo, and it could be their tactics to try to
infiltrate the militia, learn their strength and the identity of their riders before moving against him in force.

"Ride out fast to the bivouac," he told Gruber. "Bring back Kersh's squad and tell Lyman to keep everyone else
rea
d
y
to move."