A GUNMAN RODE NORTH
by William Hopson
Avalon Books 1954
CHAPTER ONE
During the late afternoon hours large white clouds began to form in ominously boiling platoons over the Gulf of Lower California, drawing up heavy loads of precipitation from the undulating swells of the wind-disturbed salt waters below. In the night blackness they moved slowly northward like well-fed cows plodding ponderously homeward from pasture, long overdue and with heavy udders swinging. Converging into a solid front over Arizona's arid southern wastes, they unloaded amid ear-shattering thunder and lightning flashes; then, gathering their forces, lumbered on farther to the north.
It was the first big rain of early September; the wet blanket before the passing of the months until the coming of Ghost Face. Winter.
The Colorado River, rough and angry now because of slashing brown waters fed in by the rain-hit Gila tributary, had begun to rise; and, as always, Yuma's main street turned from tire and hoof-powdered dust into soggy mire and muddied boardwalks.
In the territorial prison, on a bald caliche rise northwest of town, the hard-packed, rocky yard lay drenched.
Lew Kerrigan hadn't slept much that hot September night. A man usually didn't the last hours before release. You could lie there on a dank straw bunk in the pitch-blackness, listen to the muted rumble of water growing in volume; hear the steady creak-creak of mooring lines holding bobbing Southern Pacific Company river boats to the crude wharves, and try to figure out why release from prison was coming so unexpectedly.
Why, in fact, it should come at all after a man had served only two years of a life sentence at hard labor for killing a buck-toothed young "town marshal," one Buck Havers, up north at old Fort Pirtman. Something wasn't right.
The unexpected summons to the office of Elia Mangrum, the warden, had not sent him back to his wheelbarrow amid the sweating work gang fired with elation. It might have been that way with others among the murderers and plain desperadoes, and even those serving light sentences, but no elation had come to the quiet man who had shot dead the hulking Havers to protect the girl Kerrigan planned to marry, lovely Kitty Anderson.
Kerrigan had left the warden's office with a strong sense of caution overriding the knowledge that he was being paroled to "Colonel" Tom Harrow, the man he'd sworn to kill if he could ever make good a planned escape.
Something about Harrow's intervention after two years of ignoring him didn't fit. The Territorial Governor was "paroling" Kerrigan to Harrow; overriding a sentence handed down by a U.S. District Court, and that meant bribery. Nothing from Kitty since her letters had ceased abruptly six months before. Nothing from Clara Thompson, the widow of a cavalry captain, now running a boarding house near the old military cemetery where her husband lay buried.
Not a word from Harrow those two years in answer to Lew Kerrigan's letters, not even a visit from Tom yesterday. But then the "Colonel" was a rich and respected man in the territory now, and likely he couldn't smudge his new standing among Arizona's prominent men by visiting a man who had thrown a gun and thrown it fast.
Not a thing had happened, unless you could except the speculative look in the bloodshot eyes of Wood Smith, the heavy-drinking head prison guard. Smith had become civil, almost cordial, for a change.
Now, as day began to break soggily, Lew Kerrigan heard the rattle of a light chain near him in the darkness. He and Kadoba had talked about many things during the night; in the English Kerrigan had taught the Apache, in the Apache the Indian had taught his cellmate to while away nights, with a few Spanish words sprinkled in.
Talking while the chain rattled on the gesticulating Apache's unseen hands.
Outside the row of hillside dungeons, which faced west, Bud Casey, special night guard for Tough Row, rose from his chair beneath a hastily erected canvas fly, slapped disgustedly at the swarm of Anopheles mosquitoes newly hatched among the reeds, took down his night lantern and returned to the warden's office. Presently he and Wood Smith came slogging across the yard to Tough Row.
Smith had been drinking most of the night with Jeb Donnelly, the marshal, and his eyes showed the effects of it. His and Casey's huge keys began their familiar rattle along the row of iron doors, and with the first sound of the keys came the head guard's bellow:
"All right, you sons of bitches! Come out of there and line up for the count. Out pronto or I'll bust a few more sore butts this morning!"
Casey's big key twisted once and slid the bolt, and the heavy hinges, rusty and wet this morning, creaked as Lew Kerrigan stepped out. Out into a world in which he shortly would be free, if one could discount certain restrictions to be laid down by Thomas Harrow. And there would be conditions. After two years of silence from Harrow, you could bet on that.
The man wanted something from Kerrigan and he must want it pretty badly.
" 'Mornin', Lew." Bud Casey grinned a sandy-whiskered grin. "I never thought I'd see this one, but I've been looking forward to it all night long—since I first heard when I came on duty." He lowered his voice. "Watch out for Wood this morning, Lew. He's had a bad all-nighter in town with Jeb Donnelly, and I don't like the way he's acting. Strange as all get-out. And if he does happen to treat you like a white man this last mornin', then I'd be a damned sight more on guard after I got out of here!"
"Thanks, Bud," said Kerrigan, and stepped out into the mud. Moving toward the short line of the prison's worst from Tough Row, forming over there a few feet away, he saw the wiry figure of the Apache killer follow as far as the open doorway, chains still around ankle and wrist.
A knife in his slender hands had slashed open the throat of a woman, his adulterous squaw, and Kadoba had been doomed to spend the rest of his life in chains.
The Indian stood there alone, in filthy pants cut off at the knees and wearing moccasins almost in shreds after more than two years. Here was one able-bodied prisoner who did no man-killing toil; he remained on a fifty-foot length of light chain, the other end padlocked to a huge iron ring sunk deep into the mortar floor.
Chained like a vicious black wolf because guard and other prisoners alike were afraid of him. All except Bud Casey and the man who had nightly shared a cell with the Indian for two years, "Yew" Kerrigan.
Kadoba, watching, shook back the coarse black hair around his shoulders; the hair that Wood Smith had talked about in the warden's office one day two years ago, an hour after the Apache killer had been brought in manacled and weighted down with leg irons:
Hell no, Mr. Mangrum. Let's not cut his damned hair off. Leave it long so's he'll knot it tight around 'his neck some night and choke himself to death. No Apache of Loco's bronco band can stand a dungeon and chains very long. Let him kill himself and then the territory'll thank you for getting rid of one more of those black devils.
Kadoba hadn't knotted his long hair around his throat and killed himself. He had stood it. He'd taken Wood Smith's clubbings and all the rest of it because he was a smoky-eyed Apache bronco, and because he had found a strange friendship and understanding with a Pinda-Lick-O-Yi cellmate so different from other White Eyes.
The count of prisoners from Tough Row had begun, and almost immediately Wood Smith let out an angry bellow.
"Martinez! Come out of there, you sick faker! So you want to go back to the hospital again and eat eggs for breakfast, do you? I'll damn well give you something to get sick about!"