Play a Lone Hand (8 page)

Surprisingly, when they drew abreast the
Free Press
office, Welling turned in, Giff following. Mary Kincheon came from the print shop at the sound of the door being closed. When she saw Giff, she halted, nodded, and then regarded Welling with a close curiosity.

“Good afternoon, ma'am,” Welling said, and touched his hat. “I'd like to place an advertisement in next week's issue.”

“You already have one in today's and it isn't paid for,” Mary said tartly. “Let's get that settled first. It'll be two dollars.”

Her abruptness brought a startled look to Welling's face. He looked blankly at her for a moment, then remembered, and said, “Oh, yes. I'd forgotten that.”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out his wallet and handed Mary two silver dollars. As he finished, the door opened behind him, and a puncher stepped into the office. He closed the door and put his back against the wall, as if waiting his turn.

Mary gave him a glance as she went over to the desk and without sitting down, drew paper and pencil toward her, then looked expectantly at Welling. Welling quoted: “‘To whom it may concern, Gifford Dixon, formerly employed by the General Land Office, has been discharged. He has no authority to purchase supplies, sign vouchers or speak for the General Land Office in any capacity whatsoever.' Sign that, please, ‘Vincent X. Welling, Special Agent, General Land Office.'”

Welling glanced at Giff now and said mildly, “Your newspaper advertisement gave me the idea. Thanks.” He turned to Mary then and said, “How much will that be, Miss?”

“Not a penny, because we won't print it,” Mary said. As if to underline her words, she folded the paper, tore it in quarters, eighths, sixteenths, and then deposited it in the wastebasket.

Welling regarded her with total amazement and for long seconds he did not speak. “Why won't you print it?” he asked at last.

“That's a right all newspapers reserve for themselves, isn't it?”

“Are you the publisher of this newspaper?”

“No. You'll find him over at the billiard table in Henty's saloon. Go tell him I wouldn't print it. Then he'll come to me and tell me to print it and I still won't print it and I still won't get fired.”

Welling looked from Mary to Giff and back to Mary. “What's going on between you two?” he demanded.

“Mostly hard words,” Mary said dryly.

“Then why can't I get that printed?”

Mary gave him a searching, thorough stare as if she were examining something new and distasteful to her. “Just assume that I don't like the color of your bloodshot eyes. That's reason enough for me.”

Welling's face flushed and he glanced quickly at Giff whose face was expressionless. “Haul her up to the sheriff's,” Giff jibed.

Welling wheeled and tramped out of the office past the waiting puncher, slamming the door behind him with the petulance of a child.

Mary said to the puncher, “Something for you?”

“A paper.”

“Try the hotel or any of the saloons. We're out.”

The puncher nodded, touching his hat and went out.

Mary glanced at Giff, then, “Did I do right?”

Giff was looking at the door, and now his glance shuttled to Mary. “Who's that?”

“I don't know. Why?”

Giff didn't answer.
I've seen him
, he thought,
and where?
but he couldn't place him. Then it came to him.
The fellow who whistled and tossed the coin
. He was the man who had dropped that same coin through the plankwalk. Remembering now, Giff knew that Welling's voice had been raised in anger, so overhearing him would have been easy. He knew with sudden conviction that the puncher had heard every word of his argument with Welling. Furthermore, he had just heard Welling's attempt to fire his chainman publicly.

Standing there, scowling, Giff thought of another thing, too. The hotel room door had been open when they argued. And another door had closed softly as they went into the corridor, Giff remembered now.

Without a word, he turned and tramped out. Looking upstreet, he saw the puncher hurrying up the boardwalk. Increasing his pace, Giff kept the puncher in sight in the late afternoon crowd.

The puncher was in a hurry. Two doors below the Plains Bar, he cut across the road, heading for the hotel. Now Giff moved to a dog trot, so that as he reached the lobby he saw the puncher starting to take to the stairs. At the landing, Giff slowed, and saw the man turn right at the head of the stairs, toward the front of the hotel. Then he lunged up the steps three at a time and was just in time to see the door of the room adjoining Welling's close.

He stood motionless a moment, coming to his decision, then he followed. At the door he paused long enough to lift Cass's gun out, then he softly palmed the knob. The door wasn't locked, and he threw it open, stepping inside.

Traff lay on one the beds, a towel pressed to the side of his swollen face. Sebree sat at the desk chair, listening to the puncher's report. A couple of riders, chairs tilted against the wall, swiveled their heads at his entrance.

In unison, both punchers brought their chairs down to all four legs, and Giff lifted his gun in their direction, “Sit still!”

His glance shuttled to Sebree, and he asked thinly, “What do you think of it?”

Sebree said pleasantly. “I haven't heard it all yet.”

“I'll finish it for him,” Giff said. “Welling wants to fire me. I'm still working for him. I'll work for him as long as he stays.”

“That's interesting, but not very,” Sebree murmured.

“One more thing.”

Sebree waited.

“They shouldn't have kicked me,” Giff said slowly. “That was a mistake. I'll make it a mistake.”

Sebree didn't comment, and Giff backed out, closing the door behind him.

As soon as the door was closed, both punchers lunged out of their chairs, headed for it.

“No!” Sebree said sharply. The two halted, and looked sullenly at him. “Go downstairs and wait, all of you.”

The three went out, and Sebree made a slow circle of the room, head lowered on his chest. When he hauled up beside the bed, he looked down at Traff and said, “Can you talk, Gus?”

“It hurts like hell to,” Traff said in a muffled, dull voice.

Sebree said, almost musingly, “A drunk and a hardcase—and they hate each other. If the drunk shoots the hardcase, that can't be helped, can it, Gus?”

Traff's eyes rolled toward him, and he looked at Sebree for several seconds. “Welling isn't the man to do it.”

Sebree smiled, and shook his head once. “No, he isn't. But load him with whiskey some night, and in the morning he'll believe he did.”

3

Taltal was a stage stop in the high pines before the last long haul to the pass for Taos. Night was kind to it, for it was a small raffish collection of adobe buildings, and pole corrals and log barns beside the creek. The big building was a hotel of sorts; it served meals that a man could forget in the bar that opened off the dining room, but in the half-dozen shoddy rooms above, sleep was made impossible by the constant rush of the creek whose sound was magnified and thrown back by the steep walls of the narrow canyon in which the hotel was located.

Tonight, as Sebree approached it, he reined in before he crossed the creek, not wanting his horse to announce his presence yet on the noisy planks of the bridge. He saw no horses at the saloon's tie rail, and the up-stage had already passed. But he knew that the nameless fiddle-footed drifters, the shifty riders who traveled the back trails, and the small-time rustlers often stopped at the place for a lone drink or to stay a week. For Sid Bentham, who had looked upon the face of trouble and therefore never invited it, seldom asked questions; the slow-witted Mexican family he employed were incurious and could speak no English.

Sebree had his look at the dim-lit bar and the almost dark dining room, and satisfied, crossed the bridge, tied his horse at the saloon tie rack and climbed the steps. It had been three months since his last visit, he remembered, and thinking of Sarita, Sid's wife, he thought drearily,
She'll be nasty, but it can't be helped
.

He entered the dining room where a fat Mexican woman was wiping off the long oilcloth covered table. “Where's Sid?” he asked her without bothering with a greeting.

In the fashion of her people, the woman pointed with her chin to the kitchen.

“Get him.”

The woman left and Sebree walked through the doorway into the saloon adjoining. It was a comfortable room, low ceilinged and cool. The bar and two oversized circular card tables with their chairs almost filled the room. An overhead kerosene lamp burned dimly. Sebree turned up its wick, then slacked into a chair and idly studied the labels of the whiskey bottles on the back bar. He heard footsteps crossing the dining room and was relieved that they were not a woman's. Sid Bentham came through the doorway, said, “How are you, Grady?” then halted at the end of the bar. He was a spare, clean man past middle age, dressed in townsman's clothes, and his dead white hair parted deep on the side was combed with a barber's neatness. His features were sharp and had once been handsome, but now a cynical weariness was reflected in his dark eyes. “Sarita will be 'long in a minute,” he said.

“It's you I want to see, not her.”

Wordlessly Bentham turned and went back into the kitchen.

Sebree wondered if Bentham had ever spoken an unnecessary word. He remembered the night in Henty's saloon two years ago when he had caught Bentham dealing a marked deck of cards. Only the two of them had been playing and the game was Black Jack. As Henty's new houseman, Bentham had not yet learned the names and habits of the customers. Sebree had been drinking; Bentham saw it, underestimated his man and took the chance. When Sebree had said suddenly, “Give me that deck,” Bentham settled back in his chair, looked blandly at him without any fear at all, and said, “All right, they're marked. Want me to wake Henty?” That was the night that Sebree found a husband for Sarita, who had been his mistress for a year.

He often wondered how Bentham, a townsman at heart, bore the tedium and isolation of this remote spot. The fact that he was married to another man's woman wouldn't bother him, Sebree knew. It had been an arrangement of convenience and had worked out admirably. Bentham could watch Sarita, and the fact that she was Mrs. Bentham, combined with Sid's earned reputation as a rough man with a gun, kept other men at a distance.

Sid came back now, halted by the bar, and said, “Want a drink?”

“Yes, brandy.” Sebree watched Bentham take down two glasses and a bottle and he asked, “How is she?”

“I haven't asked her.”

Sebree smiled, but did not comment. Bentham brought the glasses to the table, sat down and poured the brandy. He accepted Sebree's offer of a cigar and both men lit up in silence. If Bentham was curious as to Sebree's mission, he did not show it. That was a quality Sebree admired in a man—that and the ability to be really secretive, which Bentham had also.

When Sebree had sipped his brandy and had his cigar burning evenly, he said, “Sid, you've never told me this, but I took the trouble to find out. You ran with a hardcase crowd over in Beaver County before you came here, didn't you?”

Sid nodded.

“I want a man for a job. He'll kill a man.”

Sid's expression did not change; his level glance held Sebree's, and then he asked quietly, “In a fight?”

“No.” Even now there was no censure in Bentham's face. Sebree continued, “I don't want a drunken, loudmouthed gun hand. I want a quiet, sober, middle-aged man whose face you'd forget as soon as you looked away from it. Can you get him?”

Bentham looked at his cigar a long moment, then he nodded. “Jim Archer; but he'll come high.”

“How high?”

“I can't say, but I can get him.”

Sebree knew that Bentham was planning on keeping at least half of the asking price but that was agreeable to him. He didn't mind this sort of harmless blackmail as long as Bentham's man was reliable, and Sebree knew he would be.

Sebree said, “Send for him, then. I don't want to see him. Tell him to register at the Territory House and wait until somebody gets in touch with him. Tell him to stay sober and talk to nobody. Make it plain to him that he's on his own and that I'll probably place a reward on his head afterward.”

A flicker of amusement touched Bentham's cynical eyes and then vanished. “How soon do you want him?”

“Right away.” Sebree drew out his wallet and carelessly counted out five hundred dollars in double eagles and shoved them across the table. “Will that be enough?”

Bentham nodded and pocketed the money.

A woman's sullen voice came from the doorway then. “From here, that looks like a lot of money.” Both Sebree and Bentham glanced up. Sarita, her shoulder against the door frame, her arms folded across her breast, was watching them. She was a black-haired full-bosomed girl in her middle twenties. From her Mexican mother, she had inherited a dark-eyed sullenness find indolence. From her white father—an Irishman, Sebree had guessed—she had inherited a white, creamy skin that was almost pale. She was, Sebree recognized again, a beautiful woman who, for reasons he could not understand himself, held no attraction for him any more.

He and Sid exchanged a brief glance and then Sebree said, “How long have you been standing there?”

Sarita didn't answer immediately. She was studying Sebree with a cool dislike. “Not long.”

“How long?” Sebree insisted.

“I heard you tell Sid to send for him right away. Who?”

Sebree smiled, “I doubt if he'll be young enough to interest you.”

“Don't be too sure about that,” Sarita said with quiet viciousness. “Anybody who speaks English and is under sixty would look good to me.”