The Bold Frontier (11 page)

“What the hell’s the idea of waking a lady at this time of night?” she growled, pulling her wrapper close. The liquor fumes clouded around Rome’s head as she spoke.

“I’m looking for a man named Yancey. Does he live here?”

“Sure he does. Cole Yancey. Second floor. First door to the left of the landing.”

He moved by, into the hall. She slammed the door and continued to babble drunkenly about being awakened, standing in a pool of lamplight by the newel post. She was still complaining when he turned the corner at the head of the stairs.

He halted at the first door, standing in the gloom, listening. Beyond the thin panel he heard loud snoring. He eased his gun from its holster and shoved the barrel near the lock. Then he rapped on the door.

He kept knocking till the snoring stopped. Yancey mumbled incoherently; footsteps padded to the door. Rome heard the noise of a hammer going back. Even if Yancey was still groggy from sleep, he couldn’t get out of the habit. But his reaction would be slow … or so Rome hoped.

“Yeah?” Yancey called. “Who is it?”

“Gashlin sent me over,” Rome whispered.

“What about?”

“About you and Job Thompson. Now open up.” He tried to sound angry and harried at the same time.

Rome’s heart slugged out a beat within his chest. The key rattled in the lock. A tiny bit of light appeared as Yancey pulled the door open.

Rome shoved the barrel of his gun against the man’s stomach. “Let go of your gun.
Now!
”

Yancey’s face lost its look of sleepy idiocy. His eyes flared with the sudden awareness that he was caught. He tried to step back, but Rome jammed the barrel deeper into his flesh, gouging. “Drop it on the floor!”

Yancey choked and coughed, still not totally awake. He eased the hammer carefully into place. The gun thudded on the carpet, and Rome stepped quickly into the room, shutting the door. Yancey, barefoot, in his underwear, looked like a helpless and frightened boy. He didn’t have a gun anymore.

That was what Rome counted on. Without his gun he was nothing; a harmless youngster. Rome scooped up the weapon and thrust it into his belt. Yancey waited submissively, terror in his eyes as he stared at the glinting blue metal in Rome’s hand.

“What do you want from me, Rome?” he croaked. “Listen, I only work for Gashlin …”

Rome moved to the bed and sat down. A smell of rotting garbage filtered into the bedroom through the open window. The Emporia piano clattered its mechanical melodies.

“I know you work for him, Yancey. That’s why I want to know a few other things. You’d better answer my questions. If you don’t, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?”

Yancey trembled. Rome felt a surge of triumph. He had been right. Yancey was like so many of them, master of a situation only when armed. The youngster was scared of the cold muzzle eye looking at him. He was seeing the fire of the explosion, seeing the smoke rising before the bullet slammed him. He said, “Ask your questions.”

“Did you know you were going to shoot Thompson before the meeting tonight? Was it planned?”

Yancey shook his head doggedly. “No, Mr. Rome.” He emphasized the
mister.
“Gashlin give me the nod, and I knew what he meant. I always understand when he gives me the nod. People were packed so tight, nobody could see much. It was easy. I had a few drinks afterward and came back here.”

Suddenly a new thought wrote itself across his face. “Say, they were supposed to hang you. I saw ’em start …”

Anger filled Rome. He rose, staring. His voice grew loud. “You cheap punk, I’m good and alive, and I’ve got half a mind to kill you right now. Remember in the Emporia? You said you’d accommodate me soon. Well, here I am.”

“Yeah,” Yancey mumbled faintly.

“No good without a gun, are you?” Rome couldn’t resist the remark.

“No, sir, I ain’t.”

“You’re damned quick with the answers, too.” Rome felt angrier by the moment. This crazy kid had put the murder brand on him as casually as he’d taken a drink afterward. Finally, Rome got control of himself.

“All right, Yancey. I want you to do something.”

“Sure, anything.”

“You got some paper and a pen?”

Yancey pointed to the dresser. “In there. Belongs to the landlady.”

Rome moved to the bureau and pulled open the drawer. Beneath two soiled work shirts were a few yellowed sheets of writing paper. He also found a metal-tipped pen and a bottle a third full of ink. He set the items on top of the table in the center of the room. Then he caught the chair with his boot tip and jerked it forward. “Sit down.”

Yancey sat, fidgeting with his underwear.

“You’re going to write what I say. Pick up the pen. You can write, can’t you?”

“Yeah, I went to school in Indiana when I was a kid.”

“Don’t waste my time. Write this.
I, Cole Yancey …
”

The pen scratched laboriously. Yancey hunched over the table, peering at each word.

“…
killed Job Thompson outside of church tonight on orders from my boss, Bruce
…”

“Not so fast, will you?” Yancey whined.

“Shut up and keep writing.
Bruce Gashlin.
Got that?”

Yancey nodded.

“Date it and sign your name.”

Yancey obeyed, then pushed the paper away from him. Rome picked it up, scanned it briefly, and put it down again. “Not just the initials. I want your whole name.”

“I always use my—” Yancey stopped, looking again at the gun. He wrote out his full name.

Rome was reaching for the paper, feeling satisfied, when the door opened abruptly. Bruce Gashlin stood there, his clothes dirty and sweat-stained from hard riding. His fingers curled around the doorknob. His husky face remained calm, but his blue eyes narrowed just a bit.

“Well!” He laughed gently. “Mr. Rome, I didn’t expect you.” He noticed the gun immediately, closing the door and stepping into the room. Rome’s backbone tingled. A new factor had entered the situation. It was now no longer just Rome against Yancey.

Rome indicated the paper on the table. “I’ve got a nice confession from Mr. Yancey about Job Thompson’s murder. It implicates you.”

A tiny superior smile edged Gashlin’s mouth. His fingers dipped into the pocket of his checked waistcoat, and he pulled out a cigar. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t do a thing at the railroad camp since you’d already gone. Anyway, your boss Hamilton had plenty of men with guns. I just wanted to have a talk with Cole here. I didn’t think you’d be on the scene.”

“I’m leaving,” Rome told him. “But I think the sheriff will be looking for you in a little while. I’ll be with him. I want it to be legal.”

Gashlin shook his head. “The paper won’t stand up in court.” His fingers dipped down into the waistcoat again. Rome observed him carefully. Controlled as it was, Gashlin’s tone still revealed more than a trace of anxiety. The paper could finish him, and he knew it.

“I’ll take my chances,” Rome said. “And get your hands up where they belong.”

Gashlin shrugged. “I only want to light my cigar.”

The fingers reappeared, holding a pepper-pot derringer.

Rome tried to move fast. He swung the pistol toward Gashlin, but the other man slid the tiny gun across the table. “All right, Yancey.” The youngster’s eyes flared wildly as the derringer fell into his lap. He fumbled for it.

Rome swung his gun back again, the finger whitening on the trigger. He had no time, and Yancey was back in power, his young eyes full of kill-lust as he brought the derringer up from beneath the table. Gashlin was smiling; Yancey’s face broke into its idiot grin.
He had no time
…

A ragged burst of piano music came through the window, cut off abruptly by the thunder of Rome’s gun exploding three times. Yancey dropped the derringer on the table with a loud thump, then sat back, his eyes bulging. Blood poured out of the hole Rome had blown in his neck. Slowly, he toppled to the floor.

Rome whirled. The last fragments of the confession were curling into black ash. Gashlin tossed the match onto the table. He kept smiling. “Do you want to kill me, too, Mr. Rome?”

From the first floor, the drunken landlady began to shout. Rome cursed and ran to the door. He did want to kill Gashlin, kill him where he stood, but he had to get away. The foundation had fallen, the bottom had tumbled out, and the hole had grown death-deep. He was caught now, more than ever.

He crashed against the landlady coming up the stairs, knocking the lamp out of her hand. There was a rattle of glass, then a leaping of flame as she screamed again. He bolted through the door and vaulted onto his mount, digging his heels in savagely. He thundered away through the darkened streets, out toward the end-of-track. Behind him, hoarse shouting filled the night. The moon had vanished; the world lay dark as he rode.

The gun, the law of the gun,
he thought. You couldn’t outwit it, you couldn’t beat it. In the end, it trapped you; you returned to it, and it destroyed you.

He had actually killed a man. The hoofbeats echoed it.
Killed a man, killed a man, killed a man …
The wind screaming in his ears sang it to him. Nothing remained but force, animal force. He knew it was wrong, but the other way had failed.

The end-of-track camp lay in darkness. The guards challenged him and he called out to identify himself as he rode past. He ran up the steps of the office car, pushed the door open, and faced Ben Hamilton, his heart beating furiously, his mind whirling.

“I killed Yancey, Ben. I shot him, I killed him, I couldn’t help it. …”

His nerve broke, and he sank onto the chair before Hamilton’s desk. He cradled his head on his arms, letting the dry sobs shake him, letting the strained emotions break loose.

He was no gunslinger. He was no fast-draw man. He worked for the railroad. He had a job. But they were killers. Ruthless …

He worked for the railroad … my God … the railroad … the wheels … round and round … killed a man … and round … killed a man and round and round … killed, killed, killed …

It took Ben Hamilton nearly an hour to quiet him down.

When Rome began to talk coherently once more, Hamilton drew the story from him.

Rome felt a sense of calm slowly returning. The familiar interior of the old car with its closed-in atmosphere of protection soothed his nerves. “I’m just not the man to handle a gun like that,” he said wearily. “I thought times were changing. I thought you could work out differences in other ways.”

“Back East, maybe. The country out here’s slow to change. You ought to know that.”

“I’m a killer,” Rome said, as if he hadn’t heard the other man.

Hamilton jabbed a finger at him. “The important thing is to get out of sight. We’ll fix a place for you to hide in one of the boxcars. Then we’ve got to get the Kansas & Western rolling through Warknife.”

Rome nodded. “Maybe these’ll help.” He fished the three papers from Gashlin’s office out of his pocket, shoved them across the desk, and explained briefly what they were and how he had gotten them.

Hamilton read them, then laughed.

“By God, this may be our break.” He got to his feet quickly. “Come on, let’s get you under cover. They may be looking for you soon.”

It was cold in the boxcar, cold and dark. He slept huddled among some old blankets Hamilton had collected in the camp. The first night he rested fitfully, lying awake for hours listening for the drum of hoofs in the distance. The night air remained still.

When dawn gashed the east with gray streaks, he realized they wouldn’t be coming. The Thompson killing still stood; they would be hunting for him on that count. But Gashlin probably figured Yancey could be forgotten. There were a hundred others like him to be bought anywhere in the West.

Toward noon, while Rome hunched in the boxcar playing solitaire with a worn-out deck furnished by one of the Irish section hands, he heard the sound of horses. He slid the door open a fraction of an inch, peered out and saw a big man, evidently the sheriff, with a party of horsemen from Warknife drawn up in front of the office car. They were conferring with Hamilton. Presently, they rode out again, back toward the town.

Hamilton made his way across the sprawling camp to the boxcar. “Looking for you,” he reported. “About Thompson. Told them you’d gone—lit out of here last night after we saved you from stretching the rope. They don’t seem to feel too bad about it. They’ve quieted down, and the sheriff doesn’t like lynchings. They figure somebody else will catch up with you.”

“What now?” Rome asked quietly. He gestured at the boxcar’s interior. “Do I have to stay cooped up in this damn place when I should be out clearing myself?”

Hamilton’s eyes bored into him. “Can you do that?”

There was silence for a moment. Then Rome shook his head. “Gashlin’s free and I’ve got nothing on him.”

“Nothing but those papers. They aren’t incriminating, but they may help.”

“You got an idea?”

“Yeah,” Hamilton said. “Right now, you wait.” Without another word, he stalked back across the camp. After Cookie brought Rome his noon meal, he saw Hamilton ride out in the direction of Warknife.

Wait. …

The hours stretched on, dull, colorless, relieved only by an unwanted nagging fear about which he could do nothing. He was trapped. He had no alternative but to wait, as Hamilton had said. Even then he didn’t have an idea in the world of how to clear himself. Maybe he would have to ride out permanently. With a sick feeling, he realized that he might always be a hunted man. Something had to break. …

Ben Hamilton returned right at sundown, riding directly to Rome’s car. He was grinning as he swung up, passing Rome a cigar. “This is it, boy! I think we’ll be laying track within two days.”

“What happened?”

“I took the papers to the sheriff.”

“What for? They won’t put anybody in jail.”

“That’s true. The sheriff himself told me he can’t touch any of the ranchers, or Gashlin. The papers are strictly legal. But he didn’t like the idea of the ranchers double-dealing Warknife like that. A lot of people really do want the railroad. Now the word’s going to spread.”

It spread rapidly; Rome heard it secondhand from the men who came back after an evening in Warknife. The town was reacting; rising on its haunches; wondering, voicing questions, even hurling accusations. As individual citizens had once fused into a single mass of hatred directed at Rome, now they were uniting against the trickery of a few. They began to wonder about Gashlin’s statement of Rome’s attempted bribery.