The Tall Men (2 page)

There were upward of a hundred men packed into the forty-foot square of the Black Nugget’s main mudfloored saloon. From among their sardined ranks the practiced eye of the bartender picked the two newcomers the moment the street doors swung inward to admit them.

His swift glance of discovery was followed by a second look, equally practiced, toward the bar’s undercounter and the rusted, ten-gauge shotgun which rested there. Satisfied, he returned his gaze to the approaching customers, nodding to himself as he did so. These were sure enough ten-gauge birds. And tough as buckshot.

Some men have it in them to stand out in any crowd. Unquestionably, these were such men.

The first one was very tall, blackhaired, noticeably slant of eye and easy of grin. Any boy long enough in a gold camp to know a jackhammer from a bullprod drill would know this one was no miner.

The second man was taller still, six-four, if he was an inch, and all bone and sinew fattened by nothing but snake muscle. His face was different too, not so fresh nor so startlingly handsome, leaner and skullier than the first man’s, while his long hair was a pale, flax blond where it swept from beneath the flat-crowned black hat. But in the end it was the eyes which set the two apart for you.

Where the first man’s were a deep, raw sky blue,
those of the second were so light and springwater cold as to be almost colorless. And slitted as they were above the high cheekbones, watchful and wolf thoughtful, they trapped you and held you while those of his companion merely tapped you on the shoulder going by.

“What do they drink in Montana, friend?”

It was the second man asking it, the one with the eyes. His voice was pleasant and easy as March wind in a silver thaw. It fooled a man and made him uneasy.

“Valley Tan. Four bits a shot, eight dollars a bottle,” grumbled the bartender, suddenly finding his bar top in need of a nervous polishing.

“Make it a bottle and two glasses.”

Clint scowled at Ben’s order. “What’s the idee? I had it in mind to belly-up to the bar.”

“You had it in mind to get stunk-up as a skunk, too. But you ain’t. Yonder’s a corner table jest cleared. Grab the whiskey.”

Clint speared the bottle out of the bartender’s hand, strode angrily off. Ben carefully counted the eight silver dollars onto the bar, frowned at what it left him and followed Clint. At the table he spun the last silver cartwheel toward his brother. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” he grunted.

“Gawd Amighty,” grinned Clint, the prospect of the whiskey lifting his spirits, “you mean we’re thet close to the blanket?”

“Thet’s all there is, there ain’t no more,” said Ben. “Drink up.”

The younger Allison half filled his pint tumbler, slid the bottle and the other glass to Ben. His drink was down before Ben’s was poured. The subsequent stiffening of his scalp hair nearly lifted his hat off
his head but he only gazed speculatively into the bottom of his empty glass and announced gently “Watch thet first mouthful, brother. It’s a seven-day son of a bitch.”

Ben poured three fingers, put them down.

“It ain’t been in the barrel long,” he agreed.

“Thet stuff never saw no barrel,” said Clint. “They bottled it right out’n the buffler wallow, bull-water and all.”

“Likely,” nodded Ben, looking around the room. “You see anything thet looks good to you?”

“Thet strawberry blonde yonder at the bar. The one with the million dollar nuggets.”

Ben glanced at the blonde, scowled at his brother. Clint got the point, settled down.

“There’s plenty of money in sight,” he said, filling his glass again while making the observation.

“Thet’s jest the trouble,” muttered Ben, letting his eyes run the smoky gamut of the nearby poker tables. “It’s in sight.”

“Where’s your trouble in thet?” Clint pegged his third shot, the Valley Tan going down like water now that its first flame had cremated his throat beyond all feeling. His older brother eyed him narrowly, saying nothing. Clint shrugged, poured his fourth glass. Ben let him finish, pulled the bottle away from him and held it up to the light.

“Thet’ll be your pint.”

He said it in a passing way but it was a statement, not an opinion. “What we’re lookin’ fer,” he continued softly, “is a belt player. One with his poke in his pocket, not spilled out in front of him backin’ a busted flush.”

Clint looked at him, broke his eyes away, grinned, jerked his head toward the street doors. “Them as asks, gits,” he drawled.

Ben watched the big man come in through the doors, pause inside them to scan the room as though looking for someone—or anyone. He nodded, not answering Clint, his eyes busy with the newcomer.

He was a blond man, one of the pinkskinned ones that never took a tan no matter they were in the sun and the wind their whole lives. And this one had been. You could tell that in a minute. He had a square of shoulders and trimming of hips for all his bulk, that told you right off he was a horseman. Not a cowboy nor yet a highline rider like him and Clint. But a man that knew horses and had sat to them one way or another, to ride or drive, for a long, tough spell.

Probably a freighter, thought Ben. But not driving any more. No working skinner wore buckskins like that, all fringe and handmade, nor boots of that slim, thin cut either. Those were genuine Cordovans, mister, and a man didn’t come by a set of them for less than forty dollars, Yank. Clint had called this one’s tune pure and clear.

He was their man.

The thought no sooner formed than Ben felt the impact of the newcomer’s eyes. The big man’s glance had found him in the crowd and fastened on him with a jolt he felt clear across the room. Then, even as Ben was returning the compliment and while the big man was turning away from the exchange of hard looks, a hoarse-voiced miner at the table next to his and Clint’s was speaking disgustedly.

“There he is now. The big jasper in the buckskins and dude boots.”

“Naw!” one of the miner’s tablemates said incredulously.

“It’s him,” growled a third man. “The lucky bastard. It’s jest like Jake says. He buys thet wuthless
Yeller Jacket diggin’s fer five-hundred dollars, hits a new pocket in three days, takes out thirty-thousand dollars in dust and hauls out clean this here very afternoon.”

“Wonder what he’s doin’ in the Nugget?” said the second man, unconvinced. “Strikes me he’s a purty fancy cat to be prowlin’ this here kind of a alley.”

“Reckon I kin tell you thet, too,” nodded Jake superiorly. “He’s clearin’ out of Virginy City. Goin’ down inter Texas somewheres. Got some kind of a crazy scheme he ain’t talkin’ about. Says he’ll make a million out of it inside three years and without he touches pick or pan the livelong time. I allow he’s here to swap his dust fer greenbacks with old Lazarus. See, yonder he goes, headin’ fer that goddam little green door.”

Esau Lazarus, owner of the Black Nugget and half a dozen other saloons in Nevada City and Bannack down the gulch, was the camp money changer and self-established First National Bank of Virginia City. When a man with a floursack full of highgrade headed for his “little green door” behind the Nugget’s backbar, it didn’t take a financial genius to guess his business.

“What in hell’s the exchange runnin’ now?” scowled the second miner.

“Forty-to-thirty, bills fer dust,” said Jake disgustedly. “It ain’t changed since the first of the year.”

“Well, there’s a cramp nobody never cussed about survivin’,” shrugged his companion. “Forty thousand dollars ain’t too sharp a pain to take on. Not even in depreciated bills—”

By this time the oily mists of the Valley Tan were clearing even from Clint’s narrowing eyes. He eased back in his chair, watching Ben.

The latter was methodically pouring the last of the whiskey into his tumbler. The downslanted tilt of his hatbrim indicated he had no other interest in the world. But beneath that brim his pale eyes were tracking the recent owner of the Yellow Jacket through the crowd and toward the green door, moving as soft padding, close and sure behind him as a mountain lion walking down a weanling colt.

“Git the hosses,” he said to Clint. “Tie mine out front. When he leaves, you head him. I’ll tail him out from in here.”

“Anythin’ else?” grinned Clint, coming to his feet.

“Yeah,” said Ben softly. “Trust in the Lord and keep your finger on the trigger.”

“Aye de mi!”
sighed Clint, reverently palming his hands with the old Spanish phrase. “I do admire a humble, Godfearin’ man."

The big man came out of Lazarus’s office ten minutes after Clint had gone. Ben followed him to the street doors, watching him across their slatted tops. To a graybearded miner just entering, he drawled. “Say, pardner, who’s the good-lookin’ feller gettin’ on the bay yonder?"

The oldster glanced toward the hitching rack. When he looked back at Ben there was a shade of tightness at his eye corners.

He shifted his quid of longleaf Burley, spat through the doors.

“Well, now,” he announced at length, “you might say he buys and sells minin’ claims. And again you might say he runs the Guv’mint freight contract ’tween here and Fort Leavenworth, down to Kansas.” His crowfooted eyes squinted along the entire six feet of Ben, from Texas boot-soles to traildusted black hat.
“And still again, young un, you might say he’s the head of the Virginy City Vigilantes.”

He paused, eying the lean rider with the full relish of an old hardrock hand about to touch off a fivefoot drillhole packed solid with prime grade DuPont powder.

“Think it over, son,” he nodded slowly.
“That there’s Nathan Stark.”

For all the outward effect the name had on Ben Allison, it might as well have been John Smith.

Inwardly, it hit him like a balled fist.

He and Clint hadn’t been in the trade long. But they had ridden enough of its ridges to hear the names of a few of the past masters in the profession. Names like Frank Parrish, Ned Ray, Jack Gallegher, Boone Helm, George Ives and Henry Plummer.

And names like Nathan Stark.

The elevating part, of course, was not those first names, themselves, but their association with the last one. From first to last, beginning with George Ives and running through Boone Helm to Henry Plummer, the owner of each and every one of those famous outlaw labels had wound up on the necktie end of a Virginia City vigilante rope—by personal courtesy of Nathan Stark.

“Never heard of him,” shrugged Ben. He added one of his sober grins to the dismissal, touching his hatbrim respectfully to the grizzled miner. “I’m beholden to you, nonetheless, oldtimer. See you down the trail.”

“We ain’t travelin’ the same one,” grunted the old man, and turned away.

Ben saw Clint siding his sorrel mare in a shadow across the street. He had his head down, his shoulder in the saddle fenders, fussing with a cinchbuckle that just wouldn’t seem to notch up right. At the Black Nugget rail, Nathan Stark was legging up on his bay. One look at the horse told you how near you’d been when you figured Stark for a horseman.

That bay was a Kentucky blooded horse, as fine in head as a jade cameo, as deep in barrel and haunch as a mountain grizzly. He was an uncut stud, the kind of a horse nobody but a
hombre duro
could have under him—and keep there.

But Nathan Stark was the one to ride him, and a hard man for all his pink cheeks and fine blue eyes.

If your look at him in the Nugget hadn’t told you that, your look at his Kentucky studhorse was telling it to you now.

He waited for him to swing the stud clear of the rail, head him up the street, north, toward the short, dark edge of town, away from the down-gulch lights of Bannack and Nevada City. It was a good break and Ben grinned. Had he turned south, through the lower camps, it would have been only a two-bit chance they could have boxed him without they were seen at it and a respectable chunk of hell jacked up and raised right then and there. As it was, he apparently had his tent or cabin in the hills to the north.
Five minutes would see all the darkness between him and Virginia City a man could ask for.

With the grin, Ben held up yet another handful of seconds, making sure Clint moved out on schedule. He did, sending the sorrel past Stark at just the right unhurried lope. The minute Clint had him headed, Ben went for his black.

The last saloon fell behind, the sagebrush and the starlight took over. The four or five inches of late, fresh snow on the ground opened up the darkness just enough to let a man see what he was doing—not enough to let other men see him doing it.

Stark was playing it just right, holding his bay on a slow jog about a hundred yards up on Ben. Ahead of him, Clint was picking up his sorrel’s lope, opening up the ground between him and Stark. Straining the dim light of the trail ahead of Clint, Ben saw why.

Perhaps fifty yards north of where Clint had touched up the sorrel, the trail angled sharply to the left, following the creekbed through a cutbank about ten feet high, not over twice that, wide.

Ben’s lips straightened.

He kneed the black, edging his swift singlefoot up another notch. Clint knew the right spot when he saw it. And he had just seen it.

It worked the way you always dreamed they should—and almost never did. Stark was halfway through the watercut when Clint’s mare loomed in front of him. He had no more than time to pull the bay in to avoid colliding with Clint when Ben’s soft voice took over from behind.

“You’re boxed, Mr. Stark. Point and drag.”

“Hold that bay in,” added Clint. “And don’t use your hands fer nothin’ but doin’ it.”

Nathan Stark was no stranger to dark nights and narrow trails. “He’s held,” he said quietly.

“Get his guns,” ordered Ben. “Check him close for a Henry D.”

Clint nodded. He slipped Stark’s Colts out of their leathers, tossed them aside. His practiced hand slid inside the fringed jacket, quickly pulled away. “No Henry D.” he grunted.

It was Ben’s turn to nod. With Stark’s fancy dressing kind you always looked for one of Henry Derringer’s little pepperbox pistols stashed away somewhere inside. It was Rule One. Many a fine boy had taken a .41-caliber round ball through the brisket for his failure to observe it.

“Moneybelt?” he asked Clint.

“And fat,” drawled the latter. “Greasy as a June grouse.”

“Unhook it,” Ben advised Stark. “Pass it to my friend.
Real slow.”

Stark removed the belt. Clint took it, dropping it around his saddlehorn with his free left hand. His Colt-filled right never left the target area of Stark’s solar plexus.

To the moment, Ben had been behind the Virginia City man. Now he moved the black gelding around him.

“We like it clean and quiet, Mr. Stark. It works best for everybody. You been real nice. We’re some taken with your company.”

“You have the money,” said Nathan Stark dourly. “Get out of my way and let me go on.”

“I reckon you didn’t understand me, Mr. Stark. I said we was taken with your company. Fact is, we’re that taken with it we dassn’t leave it.”

“Have your little joke,” gritted Nathan Stark. “You can afford it, I believe.”

“He ain’t jokin’, mister.” Clint let the advice come earnestly. “He don’t know how.”

“What do you want of me, you scoundrels? You have my money. If you mean to take my life as well, get on with it.”

“’Pears you’re in a tolerable stampede to git to hell,” observed Clint. “I allow we won’t hold you up none. Move jest a shade to the side, Samuel.”

Ben held the black right where he was.

The interesting thing about Clint was that he forever kept a man on his toes. Never a dull moment with old Clint. Half grin or whole, pleasant nod or airy salutation, cheerful greeting, warm advice, sagacious counsel or spiritual solicitude, it was all the same with Clint. And always the same. The voice stayed soft, the eyes innocent, the mouth loose and friendly. And you were left to try and guess what in God’s name he would do next.

Right now Ben was guessing that if he moved the black one hip-switch away from in front of Nathan Stark, Clint would kill him.

And Stark wasn’t helping any.

“Hell be damned!” said the Virginia City man, boldly. “Get on with it. I don’t fear you.”

“Now, I reckon it ain’t that desp’rit,” soothed Ben, heeling the black deliberately into Clint’s mare, not liking the way the latter was edging her clear. “It’s jest that it’s a fine night fer a ride and we’d admire to have you jine us.” The drawl dropped a tone. “Move that bay along, Mr. Stark.”

“I’ll not move him an inch, you understand? You have what you came for, now get out.” He paused,
eying them both, levelly. “It would be my final suggestion that you get
far
out.”

Ben studied him.

“Mr. Stark,” he said at last, and speculatively, “we have been here before. We can count to ten without our fingers.”

“So?” The belligerency was unabated.

“So, we don’t ride off in a strange country and let you bust back into the Black Nugget ten minutes after we follow you out of it.”

“Naturally,” Clint eased the suggestion in, “I’m in favor of leavin’ you here. And if my friend Sam will git out’n the way—”

“Hold that mare still!” Ben broke him off, low voiced, and Clint checked his sorrel, along with his request. But Stark continued to make it tough.

“I don’t scare worth a damn, boys, so save your breath for fighting the rope.” He sat relaxed in the saddle, not moving to obey Ben’s order to get going and not knuckling to Clint’s drawling implication as to how things would fare with him if he didn’t. If he was bluffing, Ben thought, he was almighty easy about it.

He decided he wasn’t.

“We don’t want to leave you here,” he said. “I’d rather we didn’t
need
to.” He caught the big man’s look and held it. “I reckon it ain’t no longer a case of nobody bein’ afraid of nobody, Mr. Stark. I’ll give you that.”

“And I’ll give you five seconds,” said Clint. “And start countin’ at three. My friend is soft in the haid. I ain’t. You comin’ or stayin’, mister?”

Nathan Stark looked long at both riders. He took all of Clint’s five seconds. And in the end he nodded.

“It’s a better night than I thought. Let’s go.”

“Two’s company,” grunted Clint. “I’ll ride point. Where-away, Samuel?” With the grunt and as a matter of standard past procedure, he handed the moneybelt to Ben.

“South, along the base of the hills.” Ben took the belt. “I allow we’d best hook back up with the road we came in on, seein’s we don’t know no other.” He pulled the black off the trail, touching his hat to Nathan Stark.

“After you, Mr. Stark—”

Nathan Stark said no more. He swung his horse in behind Clint’s, following the latter’s mount out of the creekbed gully and on up the steep slope of the flanking hill beyond. Behind him came Ben.

Only the quease and squeak of the freezing saddles and the grunting slosh of the water in the stomach of Stark’s bay broke the stillness. Occasionally a striking forefoot, slashing the crusted surface snow for the surer footing of the rock beneath it, would ring the night with the thin sound of iron on granite. But that was all. There was no more talk and no more need for talk. The sheerness of the climb and the glare-ice treachery of the trail Clint picked up and across it left no spare eye nor effort for conversation.

And the lateness of the hour, for all concerned, left no time for it.

Two gaunt riders from fifteen hundred miles south had highwayed and hoisted the foremost citizen of the toughest mining camp west of Denver or north of Laramie. Two lean gentlemen from Texas, plyers of a trade which their silent guest had stamped out in Montana with twenty-two hangings in six weeks, had their wolf by the tail and knew it.

There was one way out for them and they were taking it.

To Ben and Clint Allison it was only interesting, and beside any point of personal fear, that they were sharing that way with the fabled head of Virginia City’s dread vigilantes. With a gun in their guts, all men were equal.

And they had a gun in Nathan Stark’s guts.