The Plains of Laramie (5 page)

At daybreak, the Vermilion Kid had saddled up and ridden out of the D-Back-To-Back ranch yard. The air was cool without being cold and the land was lazily stirring to life. Here and there a hustling rabbit was out searching for dew-drenched young shoots and garrulous, sleepy birds made slight noises at his passing. Holbrook was just coming to life when the Kid rode in. He left his horse at the livery stable. The bleary-eyed hostler smiled at him through a foul fog of sickening breath. “Sure nice to see you again.”

The Kid raised his eyebrows. He had forgotten tipping the man so lavishly, besides, his mind was on a small, oval face with violet eyes. He smiled vacantly, said nothing, and walked slowly out of the barn. He was almost to the street when the hostler came weaving up to him. “Say, I was wonderin’ if you’d he’p me move a horse?”

“Move one? Hell, can’t you lead him?”

“No, y’see, this here critter’s dyin’ from a bullet wound an’ he’s down.”

The Kid understood. The animal was down, weak and dying, and the hostler wanted to turn him over so his body weight would be on the off legs for a while; just in case he ever got up again, the legs wouldn’t be too numb to operate. He walked back, helped the hostler turn the horse, straightened up, and was dusting off his hands when he saw the hip brand. D-Back-To-Back.

“Where’d you get this horse?”

“He come staggerin’ in here the night Dodge was killed. ’Twas his horse, so the sheriff says.”

The Kid studied the bullet holes with compressed lips, then walked from the barn. He went to the Royal House and had an early breakfast. The dining room was vacant and he ate slowly, turning Dodge’s murder over in his mind.

The day was well along and the Kid had decided to have a talk with Sheriff Dugan. He was approaching the sheriff’s office when he saw Dugan and Jeff Beale standing in the shade of the portico, watching him come forward. The Kid felt an uneasy suspicion at the silent, intent way they watched him approach, but shook it off. He was almost in front of the two men when his wary eye, trained from youth to be alert, caught the slight drop of Beale’s right shoulder. The Kid halted, legs apart, surprised but not unprepared.

There was a long, tense silence, then Emmett Dugan, still motionless, spoke: “Don’t go for it, Kid.”

“No? Why not?”

“’Cause I want to talk to you, an’ a killin’ won’t help you any right now.”

“All right, Sheriff, tell Beale to shove his hands deep in his pockets.”

Dugan turned to the D-Back-To-Back foreman. “Do like he says, Jeff.”

Beale hesitated, still staring, wide-eyed, at the Kid.

“Come on, Jeff, gun play won’t settle nothin’…not yet, anyway.”

Beale shoved his balled-up fists reluctantly into his pockets, and the Kid approached warily until he was even with the two men. Dugan jerked a
thumb toward his office, but the Kid slowly shook his head.

“Let’s do our talkin’ right here, Sheriff. I sort of like the fresh air this mornin’.”

Dugan regarded the gunman for a long, doleful moment, then shrugged. “Kid, where was you the night Dodge got killed?”

“Early in the evenin’ I was at the First Chance, later I went to bed in my room at the Royal House.”

“Got any proof that you were abed?”

The Kid snorted. “Hardly, Sheriff. I make it a habit to sleep alone.”

Dugan and Beale exchanged a significant glance, which the Kid saw. He puckered up his eyebrows and looked from one to the other. “Just what in hell have you two
hombres
got on your minds?”

Dugan spoke slowly, in a measured voice devoid of inflections, as if he was reciting a story. “Dodge was killed an’ robbed. We got reason to suspect you done it. If you got proof you didn’t, then we gotta hunt further afield. But if you ain’t got proof, then I’m goin’ to hold you for a while.”

The Kid’s right shoulder sagged perceptibly and his eyes narrowed. He shook his head slowly. “No, Sheriff, I didn’t kill or rob Dodge, an’ you’re not goin’ to hold me, either.” His voice was almost gentle, and Beale looked at Dugan accusingly, hands still rammed into his pants pockets.

Dugan shifted his weight a little and frowned. “If you’re innocent, Kid, you got nothin’ to worry about. Better give me your gun.”

“No good, Sheriff. I don’t know what kind of a deal is cooked up here, but I’m not goin’ to walk into a noose to help it along.”

There was a long moment of silence as Dugan’s
flinty eyes washed over the Kid. He knew the Kid’s reputation with a gun, but Emmett Dugan had a job and a duty to perform, and his complete lack of imagination saw only the course he must pursue. He shook his head slowly and his face set in hard, uncompromising lines. “I’m warnin’ you, Kid, you got no choice.”

“You’re wrong, Sheriff”—the voice was very gentle now—“I got a pretty good choice.”

Dugan almost sighed. The Kid saw his eyes widen a fraction of an inch. That was all he needed. Two explosions rocked the still, lazy atmosphere of Holbrook. There was a second of awful suspense, then twice more the coughing roar of a .45 blasted the silence. Dugan was cursing in a low, deadly monotone and sagged against the front of his office, holding a scarlet rag of torn shirt over his ribs and Jeff Beale, outgunned from scratch, was writhing in the dust of the roadway, a bullet through the hip. The Vermilion Kid was untouched and crouched low with his lips pressed back flat over his teeth.

Holbrook’s citizens were prudent folk. They loved to revel in the recounting of gunfights, but they reasoned, logically enough, that in order to pass on the stories, it was a necessary requisite that one stay alive. In order to accomplish this, they stayed out of sight until the fight was over. Thus it was that the Vermilion Kid strolled away from the scene of carnage, retrieved his horse from the suddenly sobered hostler at the livery barn, and rode easily out of town in a long, mile-eating lope.

That night the Kid sat on a juniper-studded knoll that overlooked the D-Back-To-Back ranch house. The watery, faint light of the clear, cold stars and
the weak moon, made shadows of the coming and going riders below. He knew that Toma Dodge had heard, by now, of his shooting scrape. He wondered what she thought of him, in light of his recent blunder. The Kid thoughtfully chewed a straw as the night hours drifted by. Finally, when the last lights had died out over the ranch, he carefully removed his spurs and made a cautious, laborious descent to the gloomy buildings of the ranch. The Kid got to the house without much trouble. The riders were sawing wood after the day’s excitement. The Kid forced a window with determined effort, slid through the opening, only to feel the cold, menacing barrel of a six-gun in his belly. He exhaled slowly and tried to pierce the gloom.

“Don’t move.” It was Toma’s voice.

The Kid froze but felt a surge of relief at the same time. At any rate, it wasn’t Dugan or Beale. “Miss Dodge…?”

“Be quiet. I should’ve known better than to trust you. I…”

“Doggone it, hold on a minute, will you? I didn’t have a chance…”

The voice of the girl was as firm as the gun barrel. “No, of course you didn’t. Oh, what a fool I was to believe in you. Jeff Beale suspected you from the start, and, when he found the bullet in Dad’s horse, he and Sheriff Dugan stole one of your bullets and they matched. I ought to kill you right now. You’re nothing but a cold-blooded murderer.”

All the time she was talking, the Kid was trying to piece something together. He listened to her angry voice drone into the darkness without hearing much of what she said, then it came to him in a flash. He started to move and the gun barrel, mo
mentarily forgotten, pressed deeper. He pulled backward instinctively and interrupted the flood of vituperation.

“Wait a minute, will you? Hold it a second.” Her voice died away gradually, begrudgingly, and the Kid tried to see the violet eyes, but he couldn’t. “Did you say Beale found a bullet in your paw’s horse?”

“Yes. He dug it out this afternoon, after you shot him.” Her voice held a full measure of sarcastic triumph in it. “He wasn’t so badly shot up that Doc Carter didn’t patch him up enough to go on digging up facts to hang you with.”

The Kid’s funny bone had been rubbed. He nodded soberly, lugubriously. “Yeah, I’m sure of it, ma’am, especially since I didn’t shoot to kill…but just hold off pullin’ that trigger for one second, will you?”

“Well?”

“Look, Toma…”

“Miss Dodge!”

“Uh, yeah, Toma…uh, Miss Dodge, honey. Your dad’s horse was shot through the chest sort of between the shoulders an’ the chest. The bullet went in on the left side. There’s a hole to show where it entered, an’ on the right side there’s a hole to show where it come out. Now, listen, Toma…”

“Miss Dodge!”

“Uh, yeah, Toma, now listen. How in…uh, heck…could Beale dig the bullet out of your paw’s horse, when the slug went in one side an’ come out the other side? In other words, ma’am, there couldn’t have been any slug in that there critter to dig out.”

The girl was silent and the Kid felt the pressure
on the gun barrel lessen slightly. She was silent so long that the Kid felt uneasy. “You didn’t happen to see the horse, did you?”

“No.”

“Was Sheriff Dugan here this evenin’?”

“Yes.”

“Look, Toma”—there was pointed pause but she didn’t take it up—“do me a favor, will you?” “What?”

“Go to Holbrook tomorrow mornin’ an’ look at that there horse.”

“Yes, I intend to…but not as a favor to you.”

The gunbarrel had dropped quite a bit and the Kid wanted to smile.

“Well, then, can I go now?”

“Why did you come here tonight?”

“To talk to you, to tell you how I was forced to make that gun play or get locked up, an’ I don’t want to get locked up just yet. I’ve got a couple of ideas I want to try out. Can I go now?”

The gun was at her side now, dangling from a white, small hand. Out of place and slightly ridiculous. She tried to see his eyes in the darkness. “You haven’t discovered anything, then?”

The Kid gingerly let one leg out of the window as he answered. “Yes, ma’am, I discovered one thing. ’Course, it’s got no bearin’ that I can see on the murder, but still it’s awful important to me.”

“What is it?”

“That I’m in love with you.”

He was gone over the windowsill before she could recover from the surprise and shock. The faint rustle of his boot heels in the geranium bed softly blended into the night and Toma Dodge sank into a rocker and let the gun drop to the floor. She
let her wan, worried face follow the shadowy figure that faded into the gloom as the Vermilion Kid fled through the night, back to his patiently grazing big black horse on the little knoll.

The Kid was in his element now and there were few better at it. He was on the dodge. There were handbills tacked to the trees along the Holbrook road and on the fronts of buildings in town. He hid with the almost nonchalant casualness of an old hand on the owlhoot trail. Once he even slipped into Holbrook. He flattened against the walls of the livery barn and buttonholed the startled hostler.

“Listen, pardner, I want you to tell me somethin’.”

The hostler recognized him and relaxed a little. He hadn’t forgotten that $20 gold piece. “Sure, Kid, what is it?”

“Was Beale alone when he dug a slug out of Dodge’s horse?”

“Well, I don’t know what he done to the horse, ’cause they sent me away…”

“Who were they?”

“Oh, Les Tallant…the
hombre
who owns this here barn…an’ Jeff Beale. They was messin’ around that wounded horse, an’, when I come up, Tallant told me to beat it. I don’t know what they done to the poor critter after I left.”

“How is the horse?”

“’Sfunny thing, by golly, but the dang’ critter got up all by hisself today. ’Pears to be gettin’ better.”

“One more thing, pardner. Were Tallant an’ Dodge friends?”

The hostler shrugged a little. “No, I wouldn’t call ’em exactly friends. Y’see, Tallant’s hell to gamble, an’, near as I can figger out, old man Dodge set him up in this here livery barn with a big loan. Les’s been gamblin’ pretty heavy, an’ once I heard ’em cussin’ at each other in the office. ’Course, I wasn’t eavesdroppin’, y’understand…”

“’Course not, I understand.” If there was a tinge of amused sarcasm in the Kid’s voice, the hostler didn’t get it.

“Anyway, like I was sayin’, they was hollerin’ at one another an’ Dodge tol’ Les, if he didn’t keep his word on the note, they’d have some trouble.”

“How long was that before Dodge got killed?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t rightly know. Six months maybe, maybe eight months.” The old cowboy screwed up his face. “Say, you don’t think Les Tallant killed the old man, do you? Hell, from what I heard around town, they was more’n one man in at the shootin’.”

The Kid reached into his pocket and shrugged at the same time. He passed the hostler a gold piece and watched the avaricious glitter come into the whiskey-rheumy eyes. “No. I don’t allow Tallant did the killin’ by himself.
¿Quién sabe?
Who knows who did it, or how many there were?” He thanked the hostler, and ducked back out of town.

The Kid had the thing pretty well worked out in his mind before he moved out of his lair among the juniper hills. It wasn’t exactly clear to him, yet, what it was all about, but somehow he felt that he’d stumbled onto a short-cut to the killers. He leisurely saddled up the big black, hummed in the late afternoon, checked his gun and belt loops, swung aboard, and rode carefully out over the moonlit range. The
night was balmy, like there might be summer rain in the offing, and the full, mellow light of the heavens covered the land with its mantle of eerie, soft, and mysterious light.

The Kid rode for several hours before he came to the knoll where he’d watched the D-Back-To-Back ranch yard the day of his gunfight with Dugan and Beale. Like a ghostly silhouette, the Kid sat in a pensive mood, overlooking the ranch below. The buildings were dark. The Kid dismounted, shucked his spurs, hobbled his horse, and began the descent to the ranch yard below. He knew the way, this time, and, by the time the back of the house loomed up before him, he had taken only a fraction of the time he had used on his first abortive visit to Toma Dodge.

The Kid tried the window, found it not only unlocked, but easier to slide up than it had been before. A tiny tinkling of warning rang far back in the dim recesses of his mind but he shrugged them away. He was inside the room, flattened against the wall, hand hovering over his .45, listening, when the little warning buzzed again. This time, concentrating on the darkness as he was, the warning was limned sharply in his mind. He stood motionlessly and listened. Somewhere in the house he could hear voices. Men’s voices. A full awareness of his position swept over him in an instant and he hesitated briefly, looking wonderingly at the opened window. The voices came again, dim and distant and incomprehensible, but unmistakable. He turned his back on the route of escape and began a sidling, stealthy advance across the room.

The Kid’s eyes were accustomed to the gloom by the time he had been in the Dodge house for ten minutes. Still, he felt his way along the wall, careful
not to bump into anything. He found a long, cool corridor and went down it. The voices were clearer now and suddenly he heard the voice of Toma Dodge. The words weren’t hard to understand and they sent a chill over the Kid.

“No. You’re both wrong. He told me about the two bullet holes, and I saw them for myself.”

A masculine voice interrupted. “I told you we should’ve finished off the damned horse.”

Another voice, garrulous and sullen, answered: “All right, I was wrong. As soon as she signs the deed, we’ll go back an’ kill the damn’ critter.”

The first voice answered swiftly and there was the sound of a man rising from his chair. “Come on, Toma, we ain’t got all night. Sign it an’ nothin’ll happen to you.”

“And if I don’t?”

There was an unpleasant silence that the Kid felt and understood. He let his hand rest caressingly on his gun butt. “An’ if you don’t, you’ll get what your old man got.”

“You’d do that to a woman?” Her voice was high and incredulous.

Apparently the man nodded because Toma’s voice came again, softly, as though a dismal apathy had swept over her. “You’ll never be able to get away with it.”

“Let us worry about that, Toma. You jus’ sign the deed.”

The Vermilion Kid was as tense as a coiled spring. He was prepared to go into violent action on an instant’s notice. There was a long silence from the other room, then the Kid relaxed and turned away as he heard one of the men sigh and speak: “That’s more like it, Toma. Now you’re as safe as can be.”

The Kid was lowering himself out of the window when Toma answered, but he couldn’t hear her reply. He thought:
You’re not safe, though, Jeff Beale. You’ve made the greatest mistake of your life
.

The Kid ran in a crouched, zigzag course back to his waiting horse. He slipped off the hobbles after pulling on the split-ear bridle, mounted in a flying leap of frantic hoofbeats, and rode down the night like a wraith of doom, thundering along the trackless range, a faint, ghostly figure bent on an act of justice that would thwart, if timely enough, the evil plans of two ruthless murderers.

Holbrook was noisy in a desultory sort of way. It was a weekday night and the revelers that inundated the town on Saturday night were mostly asleep in the bunkhouses across the cattle country. Even so, however, there was enough noise to mute down the thundering approach of hoofbeats. The raucous screech of a protesting piano, accompanied by a nasal tenor, frequently drowned out by the laughter, shouts, and curses of the saloon clientele, ignored the narrow-eyed rider who swung down inside Tallant’s livery barn, tense and with probing, hard eyes of smoke-gray.

Disturbed in his secret libations, the bleary-eyed hostler came grumblingly out of a dark stall where a mound of unclean hay served as couch, bed, and bar. Looking up when he was close enough to discern the night traveler, the hostler gave a small start and shook his head. “Too late, pardner, too late.”

The Kid stepped forward. “What d’ya mean, too late?”

“Jus’ what I said. Sheriff Dugan’s got a warrant out for you. Dead or alive. You’re a goner.”

The Kid appraised the man. He wondered if the man was too drunk to trust. “Pardner, just how drunk are you, anyway?”

The hostler’s face got a sullen smear of color in his cheeks and his eyes were surly. “Not so drunk that I don’t know a thing or two. Why?”

The Kid jumped in whole hog. He had no other choice. “Because, pardner, a man’s life depends on you tonight.”

“That so? Whose?”

“Mine,
amigo
, mine.”

The hostler looked owlishly at the Kid and a stray strand of his old-time decency flared up in a quick, final effort to assert itself. The man’s voice was suddenly very steady and sincere and his jaw shot out a little. “All right, pardner, start at the beginnin’.”

“Tallant an’ Jeff Beale are on their way here to kill Dodge’s horse tonight.”

The hostler made a forlorn little clucking sound in his throat. “An’ the poor critter’s on the mend, too. Damned if I don’t believe he’s goin’ to pull through, after all.”

The Kid let the interruption run its course. “Listen, pardner, I want you to hide my horse in one of those back stalls. Don’t unsaddle or unbridle him. Jus’ close the door to the stall and fork him a little hay so’s he’ll be quiet.”

“That all?”

“No. I want you to take a note over to Sheriff Dugan an’ then stay out of the barn until the shootin’s over. Understand?”

“I reckon. Where’s the note?”

“Take care of my horse an’ I’ll write it.”

The hostler nodded, took the Kid’s reins, and led the black horse off into the dark recesses of the old
barn. The Kid tore a handbill of himself off the barn wall, scrabbled a stubby pencil out of a shirt pocket, and wrote frowningly until the sot returned. He folded the coarse paper and handed it to his accomplice. “Pardner, here’s where you’ve got the whip-hand. If you double-cross me an’ hand that there paper to Tallant, Beale…or anyone besides the sheriff…I’m done for.”

The old cowboy pulled himself up in his filthy rags and his watery brown eyes were stern. “I’m a lot of things,
compadre
, but a bushwhacker ain’t one of ’em.”

The Kid nodded softly. “I believe you, pardner. On your way.”

The hostler had disappeared down the plank sidewalk and the Kid had hidden himself behind some loose planks in the gloom of the building, before the sound of horses came to him over the sounds of revelry. He watched, motionless, as Beale and Tallant swung down, tied their horses in tie stalls, loosened their
cinchas
, and looked at one another.

Beale spoke first. “Went off like clockwork.”

“Yeah. All we got to do is make two more killings. Blast the damned horse, then go back an’ get the girl, an’ the whole shootin’ match is ours.”

Tallant nodded. “Yeah. It come off better’n I expected. Two more killin’s an’ the whole country’ll be after the Vermilion Kid with orders from Dugan to shoot on sight. Hell, that dang’ would-be owlhooter’ll never get close enough to anybody to convince ’em he ain’t guilty.”

“Yeah, but what about the horse?”

Tallant rubbed his hands together. “That’s the easiest part. We kill him, drag him off out on the
range behind town, an’ the coyotes’ll have him torn to pieces in twenty-four hours. Nobody’ll ever see them two holes again.”

Beale swore gruffly. “Yeah. But if it hadn’t been for that damned Kid, nobody’d ever’ve noticed there was two holes to start with.”

Tallant laughed smoothly. “Don’t make no difference now. Come on, let’s go in the office an’ have a drink afore we finish off the horse.”

Beale nodded heavily. “Sure, we’ll be ridin’ again, back to the D-Back-To-Back for Toma before this night’s work is done, so I reckon we’ll need the lift, eh?”

Tallant didn’t answer and the Kid could barely make out his outline and hear the soft music of his spurs as the two men went into the cubbyhole office, lit a lamp that cast a rich, yellowish light, and drank deeply from a brown bottle Tallant got out of the safe.

The Kid’s fury was murderously cold. That Beale and Tallant intended to shoot down Toma Dodge was almost overpowering him.

Jeff Beale came out of the office first. He hesitated at the door, waiting for Tallant to lock up the whiskey bottle in the safe again. Tallant’s garrulous voice came to him: “If I don’t lock up the whiskey in the safe, that damned booze hound I got for a hostler’ll steal it all.”

Beale didn’t answer. He was studying the mellow moonlight inside the barn. He finally got impatient: “Come on, dammit.”

Tallant slammed the safe door, spun the dial, and hurried out of the office. The two men walked down the long, wide corridor toward the stall of the wounded horse. Tallant walked with the sure steps
of a man to whom the darkness posed no deterrent, but Beale swore dourly to himself and made slower time. Tallant stopped at a stall directly across from the Kid’s hide-out and waited for Beale to come up.

“He’s in here.”

“If you shoot him, it’ll make too much noise.”

“Ain’t goin’ to shoot him. Goin’ to knock him over the poll with my gun barrel.”

Tallant swung open the door as Beale came up. “Lead him out here to the alley. He’ll be too hard to snake outen the stall when he’s dead.”

“Right.” Tallant put a shank to the horse’s halter and led the weak, stumbling animal through the doorway. Beale swore savagely at the animal’s slow progress and kicked out viciously, striking the horse in the stomach. The animal flinched and grunted with pain. The Kid’s eyes flamed in the darkness. Tallant turned the big bay so that he faced the rear door of the barn, drew his gun, tossed a quick look at Beale, who nodded indifferently, his evil face twisted into a cruel grin of anticipation, then all hell broke loose.

There was a thunderous, magnified echo from inside the barn and Tallant’s six-gun went flipping out of his hand as though plucked from his startled fingers by an invisible hand. The bay horse jumped frantically and lurched out of the barn’s rear doorway. Beale ripped out an obscene oath and threw himself sideways to the ground. Les Tallant stood for a full ten seconds, incredulous and unbelieving, then he leaned quickly backward into the recently vacated stall and ran his hand, like the striking tongue of a rattler, under his coat and came up with a big-bore little Derringer.

Jeff Beale had seen the mushroom of flame from
the Kid’s gun and fired as soon as he hit the ground, then rolled away, waiting for the answering shot that never came. Beale’s breathing sounded as loud as the puffing of a locomotive in his own ears. He strained his eyes into the gloom for a target, saw none, listened acutely, heard nothing, threw two more snap shots toward where the flame had been, and waited. He began to hope that his first shot had found the hidden gunman, and, as the seconds ticked by, he felt certain that the hidden assassin had been knocked off with his first shot.