The Plains of Laramie (6 page)

“Les?”

For a long moment Tallant didn’t answer, then, seeing that no exploratory shots came toward Beale’s voice, he answered: “Yes?”

“Think I got him with the first shot?”

Another pause, then Tallant’s voice cautious and soft, came back: “Who is it?”

Beale’s voice was almost normal now. He was certain the unseen gunman had been killed outright. “Hell, how should I know? I can’t see in the dark like no damned cat.”

Tallant made out the rising form of his partner, coming erect off the floor of the barn. “Be careful, Jeff. He might be playin’ ’possum.”

“I’ll damned soon find out.”

Walking slowly forward, Jeff Beale was crouched almost double, his gun held out in front of him, when the second shot came out of the darkness. Tallant saw the flash out of the corner of his eye and heard the roar even as he fired and saw Beale go down in a cursing heap. He fired again and again, then suddently the little Derringer was empty. The acrid smell of gunsmoke was thick in the air and some of the stalled horses were snorting wildly in fear.

Tallant was panicky. He was unarmed now, and Beale was hit. A thought flashed across his mind and he darted toward the fallen man, jerked the .45 from his fingers, and ran zigzag through the barn toward the tie stalls and his snorting, wild-eyed horse as Jeff Beale called after him. Once, Tallant whirled, aimed carefully, and pulled the trigger. Beale abruptly stopped his swearing, jerked spasmodically against the violence of his suddenly short-circuited nervous system, and went limp, twitching dully over the freshly raked, hard-packed earth of the livery barn floor.

Seeing Tallant on the verge of escape, the Vermilion Kid leaped stiffly from his hiding place, ran to the middle of the alleyway, unmindfully of the clear outline of the moonlight behind him that silhouetted him into a perfect target. “Don’t move, Tallant. Get away from the horse’s head.”

Tallant was obsessed with an insane urge to flee. He was beyond reason. He whirled, threw up his gun, and fired. The Kid staggered backward, went down to one knee, and his head drooped. Only one thing made it possible for him to force his mind and muscles to work, the certain knowledge that Tallant was on his way to kill Toma Dodge.

He brought up his right arm. The gun weighed 100 pounds. Its barrel weaved unsteadily, and, as the Kid squeezed the trigger, he saw a vague, shapless figure leap out of the shadows and attach itself to the bridle of the horse that Tallant had just swung upon. He saw, too, the quick, descending arc as Tallant’s gun came down, and the orange tongue of flame when he fired. The ragged figure fell suddenly to earth. The Kid squeezed the trigger and saw Tallant straighten in the saddle. The blasting roar of
another gunshot split the night, and the Kid sank down.

When the Vermilion Kid opened his eyes, he was looking into the hard, relentless face of Sheriff Dugan. His eyes wandered from Dugan’s flinty features to the surrounding walls and ceiling. He had never been in the sheriff’s office before, but he knew he was lying on a makeshift cot behind Dugan’s untidy desk. He swung his eyes back to Dugan. “You got the note?”

Dugan nodded dumbly.

“Where’s the bay horse? Seems a shame that a horse as gutsy as he is damned near got killed.”

Dugan’s eyes clouded for just an instant, then the film of hardness settled into place once more. “He’s goin’ to be all right. Some of the D-Back-To-Back riders led him out to the ranch. The old boy’s lookin’ a little better all the time. He’s goin’ to make it, all right.” The sheriff’s voice drifted off and faded out altogether.

The Kid nodded slightly. “What happened after I took my
siesta
?”

“Nothin’ much. Tallant was fixin’ to ride out when old Bob, the hostler, jumped him an’ tried to pull him off his horse. He shot the old boy dead.”

There was an awkward moment of silence as each man, in his own way, said a rough, embarrassed prayer for the drunkard. Dugan cleared his throat loudly. “After I got your note about Tallant and Beale wantin’ to kill the horse, I loped down there an’ got there just as Bob made his play. I could dimly see you kneelin’ in the back o’ the barn, near Beale’s body. Les Tallant threw down on me, an’ I shot him out o’ the saddle. That’s all there was to it.”

The Kid’s eyes strayed around the room again and came up suddenly, wide and incredulous. Toma Dodge was sitting, small and fragile, white-faced and big-eyed, near Dugan’s desk. The Kid swallowed a couple of times quickly and felt the blood rushing into his face. Dugan cast a quick, furtive look at the two of them, arose, coughed, and ambled toward the door. When he was at the opening, he turned slowly.

“Take it easy, Kid. You got a bad notch in the side. Three inches more to the left and you’d’ve been makin’ the long march with Beale.” He let his eyes wander aimlessly to Toma, small and slightly flushed, in the old cane-backed chair. “Sorta look after him for a spell, will you, Toma? I got to go…uh…uptown for a few minutes.” Dugan closed the door softly behind him and strolled slowly down the roadway toward the silent, gloomy maw of the livery barn.

“Miss Dodge, I…”

“Toma.”

“Uh, yeah. Toma, I reckon we figured this thing out pretty well, at that, didn’t we?”

“Yes.” Her lips quivered for a moment and the reserve melted away. “Oh, Kid I’m so sorry I misjudged you.” She left the chair and went up closer to the improvised cot. The Kid smiled up at her and the faint little wistful smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

“ ‘To a man from a cesspool, the gutter is heaven,’” he quoted softly.

There were misty tears in her violet eyes. She bent down swiftly and her warm, moist lips clung to his for a tremulous moment, then she arose and turned away. He recovered from his startled attitude as she reached the door.

“Toma?”

“Yes?”

“Did you do that because I’m hurt an’ you feel sorry for me?”

“No.”

His head came off the pallet. “Then I’ll be ridin’ out to the D-Back-To-Back in a day or two.”

She went through the door with a high blush on her face, but there was also a demure flash of affection in her eyes and the answer came back softly to the Kid. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

Laramie lay in its breathless heat and the plains lay brown to their distant ending against blueglazed mountains. Frank Travis had crossed the Laramie Plains, that immense and seemingly endless stretch of flatland running from east to west and from the mountains southward down into Colorado, buckling near Tie Siding and Virginia Dale into parks and forests and rocky breaks.

His crossing had one purpose. It had to have; no one in their right mind crossed the Laramie Plains in full summer unless they had a sound reason for doing so. At times that searing scorch was unbearable even to the Indians who’d been on the plains for thousands of years and should have therefore been inured to summer heat.

The heat bothered him, but Frank was a native Arizonan. He’d lived among some of the most adroit people in the world where heat was concerned—Mexicans. He’d learned as a little boy how to relax, how to avoid unnecessary exertion and movement, how to keep a little round stone in his mouth to promote saliva flow, and, finally, he had learned the main secret of living with heat—think about it as little as possible and never be angry about it.

That was the way he appeared over the Laramie Plains, slouched in the saddle, philosophically accepting discomfort, patiently awaiting dusk, the
earth’s ultimate cooling, and his arrival in the farahead, shimmering village of Laramie.

That was the way the posse found him as they swept up over the shimmering horizon, spied that solitary figure passing steadily along, and rushed at him all in a body, thirty of them, every one a hard man, every one of them armed with a six-gun and carbine, each sun-layered face bleak with cold wrath and oily with perspiration.

Frank saw them coming. He considered their numbers and also the bunched-up way they were riding, and initially these things did not disturb him. But when he saw evil sun glare reflecting off armament, saw the lead horseman swing abruptly toward him and boot his beast over into a long lope, Frank felt sudden concern. He had no idea this was a posse under Sheriff Ken Wheaton; he saw no badge at that distance.

But Arizona or Wyoming, or almost anywhere else for that matter west of the Missouri River, when a traveler saw a hard-riding mob of heavily armed horsemen coming purposefully and grimly toward him, he did not ordinarily accept those odds with equanimity, and neither did Frank Travis. He had come a long way, his horse was heat-wilted, and to race in that dancing heat was suicidal, but Frank Travis accepted what he considered the inevitability of this, rowelled his astonished horse, and it plunged wildly around and went in headlong flight over the westward plain.

As soon as Frank turned tail and raced away, those oncoming riders raised a high yell. Two of them fired guns but the distance was too great. Still, those shots confirmed Frank in the suspicion that he was being pursued by one of the numerous outlaw gangs for which this north country was notorious.

He didn’t like doing it, but he hooked his horse again. The animal was a thoroughbred, Frank’s pride and his joy. His brother had given it to him two years earlier on Frank’s twenty-first birthday. A fast horse even more than a fast gun was a man’s life insurance in the West. Frank’s beast responded to this second spurring with an additional bunt of speed. He was spending his reserve strength rapidly now, but his heart was strong. He swept along in a belly-down run for two scalding miles, then began to slacken, great lungs working like bellows, red inside nostril lining extended its full limit as he sucked avidly for more of the hot, thin, high country air.

Frank drew him in a little. He twisted to look back. All but three of his pursuers had fallen out of the race. Those three, wise in the ways of the summertime plains, were not closing the distance between themselves and Frank; they were instead loping slowly along keeping him well in sight. This was an old Indian trick. If a pursuer could not run down his prey, he walked it down, by persistence, by going without food or water or rest. The pursuer would doggedly keep at it until he overtook his enemy.

Frank recognized what those men were doing. He drew the thoroughbred down to an alternating slow lope and fast walk. Sweat darkened the horse’s satiny hide to a rich glossy wetness. He rolled the cricket and fought the bit wishing to run again; Frank held him down.

Those three grim horsemen far back kept at it. As the sun glided off center, they loped, then walked. They sometimes stole a march on Frank by trotting. But this was a gait few Westerners ever used and Frank’s pursuers did not trot often, which in the end
prolonged the conclusion of this silent, bizarre pursuit.

From time to time Frank saw a few of those other riders come up from farther back, but generally these other posse men had been outdistanced. Some, in fact, had abandoned the chase in discomfort and disgust and had put about, heading for the village that was no longer in sight.

He did not know this country at all, yet he was instinctively and acutely conscious that unless and until he could get off the Laramie Plains, could get into some shielding hills or into a forest of trees, those moving dark shapes far back there would always have him in sight, and probably, in the end, because they knew where water was in this sere world and Frank did not, they would overtake him.

The pivot of survival for Frank Travis was his thoroughbred horse. This handsome big blood bay animal may have lacked the seasoned toughness of those coarser beasts far back; he may have come a greater distance under the blasting summertime sun, but he had the speed to outdistance his pursuers completely. It was this that Frank was relying upon; if he had to, he could use the swiftness of his mount to escape. But if he did this, he very well knew, he would probably kill the thoroughbred or at the least break its wind. Either of those things would put Frank at the complete mercy of his pursuers, and he had no doubt at all about the limit of that kind of mercy. Road agents were notorious for killing anyone they robbed, in order that no living witnesses ever identified them.

The race continued. Frank kept just beyond Winchester range, and his pursuers plodded after him as stubbornly persistent as men could be. Sun glare diminished; a reddish brightness lay rustily over the
countryside. The race became now a test of endurance. Men and animals moved mechanically, eyes inflamed, throats tortured, and muscles jerky with dehydration, with fatigue. The end could not be postponed much longer. Frank gradually accepted this nearing finality and assumed that those three men behind him, all that remained in sight now of the original thirty, also understood this.

He began to view those onward mountains without hope; they were still retreating, still miles away. Northward it was the same, Laramie Plains all the way to other blue-blurred forested lifts and peaks. That flat, summer-hard land ran on like an oily sea frozen in motion. Southward, too, there was nothing, no trees, no rocks, not even erosion gullies as far as Frank could see.

His blood bay horse began to lag.

Far back those three grim pursuers were still there. One of them was dropping back from the others, his horse also nearly finished. The other two, however, were still coming on. They no longer loped but they alternately walked and trotted. Beyond them there was nothing to be seen of their companions. A filmy heat haze back there obscured the horizon, made it shimmer and fade out, firm up, then fade again.

The day was close to ending. Dusk would come, and after that night, but full darkness would not descend until near nine o’clock. Frank knew this and was discouraged from believing nightfall could succor him. He had only one hope of escape, and that was the thoroughbred horse under him.

Time flowed. Frank favored his mount as much as possible, but obviously the hours-long chase had drained away the thoroughbred’s last reserves of strength.

Only two pursuers were now in sight far back. Frank was considering them, balancing in his mind the odds of survival. He was sitting, twisted in the saddle, both booted feet lightly touching his Visalia stirrups. He was not looking ahead at all and therefore did not know he and his horse had entered the honeycombed ground area of a prairie dog village until, without even a grunt, his animal stepped upon weakened ground, broke through up to his fetlocks, and fell heavily. Frank was shot ahead. He landed hard and lay a second without moving, without immediately comprehending what had happened. He rolled over, got up onto one knee, and saw his horse struggling upright with one front leg held clear as though injured or broken. One glance at the caved-in earth, the myriad holes roundabout, explained what had happened. He stood up, mechanically struck at the gray dust, then went over where the thoroughbred was standing head down, eyes glazed, that injured foreleg held up.

“This is where we part company,” he told the horse as though speaking to another man. “You did your best. Except for the prairie dog village we’d have made it, old-timer.” He ran a gentle hand over the animal’s quivering shoulder, drew his carbine, looked back where those two remaining pursuers were coming together, were stopping to speak, and also draw forth their saddle guns, then he did what he could for the horse. He tugged loose the
cincha
, the flank rigging, dropped the saddle at his feet, cast down the sweat-stiff blanket, removed the bridle, and gently struck the horse over the rump.

“Move off,” he said. “No point in you getting it, too.”

The horse responded with several awkward hops,
still favoring that sprained ankle. Frank caught up the saddle, walked northward a little distance, threw it down, and got down flat behind it with his Winchester. He did not have a good defense; against one man it might have been adequate but not against two men. Two men could do what had to be done easily, one in front, one behind.

He levered up a load, placed the carbine over his saddle seat, and waited. He was thirst-tortured; each time his eyes moved, it felt as though he had granules of sand under his eyelids. That blood-red sun, which was falling away in the west, burned against his back, his shoulders, his saddle-molded legs.

Those two unrelenting horsemen began their slow advance. Behind them the third rider was coming up again. None of those three men hurried; even if their horses had been capable of hurry, there was no longer any need for it.

They halted again just beyond carbine range; they turned to wave the third man forward. Some little time passed before the three of them were all together, but even then they evidenced no eagerness. They sat out there in that reddening immensity of dead land like some bizarre variety of carrion eater, looking ahead where Frank Travis lay forted up behind his saddle, speaking quietly among themselves, planning what they would do and how they must do it. Once or twice they looked back for the balance of the riders who had been with them; this was their only indication of uneasiness.

Frank’s body oozed sweat where scorched earth touched him. He ran a soiled sleeve over his face, let the arm fall upon the saddlebags behind his saddle cantle, and followed out the movement of that arm. He gazed at those saddlebags with irony; he ran his
free hand over their scuffed and bulging exterior, thinking back down the years for this little quiet time as men sometimes do when the scent of death is close and unmistakable.

He looked around for the thoroughbred, saw him hobbling toward a clump of buffalo grass with that swollen foreleg six inches off the ground, and called softly: “Thanks and good luck, pardner.”

A thin, fluting call rode the westward air from out where those three horsemen were. Frank swung his wandering thoughts, his full attention back to them. They were breaking up as he’d known they would. One was coming straight at him; another was riding widely around to come in upon him from behind. The third man was swinging wide, too, in the opposite direction; he would come in from that side.

Frank swore under his breath saying—“Get it over with.” and called those three strangers harsh names.

He watched to see which rider would come into range first. But these were canny plainsmen; they remained just out of bullet reach as they circled and tacked and angled onward. They seemed to know almost to the foot just how far Frank’s carbine would reach. When they were finally in position, the man who was to strike from Frank’s rear dismounted, drew his carbine, and dropped down to one knee. He made a poor target in that failing red light low upon the cooling earth, but Frank twisted and fired at him just the same.

At once all three enemies fired back. Frank whipped around as the northward man dashed suddenly ahead Indian-like and threw himself flat to blend with the puddling shadows. Frank would have fired at this man but he had no time. The south
ward man got off a shot, then the rearward man also fired. The northward man lunged upright and raced ahead again. This time Frank fired. Dust spurted a yard ahead of his racing foe-man. The running man dropped like a stone. He did not return Frank’s shot. He began snake-crawling forward, using his punched-down carbine butt for balance and purchase. Of the three he was closest. Frank swung to concentrate upon this man. He levered and fired, saw dust spurt, saw that crawling man frantically change course, and fired again.

Behind him a slamming explosion showed that another enemy was also running in now. That bullet pierced Frank’s saddle skirt. From southward came another near miss; this one struck through the
rosadero.

Frank’s vision cleared and his tormenting thirst was entirely forgotten. He had only a few moments left. He ignored those near misses to put his whole attention upon that northward crawling man. He came up off the ground to one knee. A slug struck leather beside him, tore into saddle swells, and violently upturned the saddle. Frank ignored it. He tracked that northward enemy, caught him in his sights, drew him down the barrel, and fired. The crawling man jerked up off the ground like a broken doll; he flung away his Winchester; he fell back and flopped frantically with diminishing motions until he lay quite still.

Frank was turning away, was levering up another bullet. He did not hear the gunfire; he only felt a sudden burst of heat inside him, then he tumbled into a suffocating black and spiraling void.