"I'm damn' glad I got here in time to see you on a good horse, Lew," he said in an undertone.
"What's up, Bud?"
"Something pretty plain. Wood Smith boasted to me just a little while ago, when I got ready to go off shift, about how he beat up your gun arm and elbow. 'Pulled your fangs,' was the way Wood put it. He said there was a pretty good chance you was too full of cussedness to accept the conditions of a parole to any man, so he set you up for an easy kill. Get out of town quick, Lew!"
"You're a little late, Bud." Kerrigan swung a leg high up over the warbag humped back of the cantle. "Jeb Donnelly has already tried it."
"Jeb? Hell he did!" Bud stared in amazement. "Never gave him credit for having that much nerve."
LeRoy had followed over and closed the corral gate. He looked up at Bud and smiled. "Neither did I, Mr. Casey. I didn't know Kerrigan had been hurt, but apparently the marshal did. Unfortunately for the blubbery Mr. Donnelly, he completely overlooked the fact that Mr. Kerrigan is ambidextrous with a hideout gun. An oversight that cost him a caved-in jawbone and the loss of several teeth. Good luck to you, Kerrigan, and if you're ever over in the Mojave Desert country of California, and the sheriff isn't hunting me, he'll be able to tell you where I can be found."
After he was gone, Casey reined over beside Lew Kerrigan, a quizzical look on his long face. "So you busted him in the jaw? Why the devil didn't you kill him, Lew?"
"I only wanted to square up in return for what I got from Donnelly the day I slipped into a ditch with a wheelbarrow and he clubbed me while I was down."
Casey snorted and the sound bespoke his indignation. He said worriedly, "What are you figgering on doing now? You're same as an outlaw, and from the looks of things you'll have a bunch of rough buckos after you, to boot. Wood said something about a professional gunman named Ace Saunders in town and another around with him called Stubb Holiday. You hitting back to Texas?"
Kerrigan nodded, his eyes searching the panorama of the town and the river beyond. "That's right, Bud. Back to Texas. But I'm going by way of Pirtman and Dalyville."
"To get that girl—but kill a man or two first, huh? Dammit, Lew, if they catch you and bring you back here, I lose my job. I'll resign rather than—"
"Take good care of Kadoba. Smith seems to be getting ready to resign and you're slated for his job. Try to keep him from clubbing the Apache to death before then. So long, Bud, and if I get back to Texas in one piece, maybe you won't need that better job. I square up the other kind of debts, too."
They shook hands with a brief, firm grip and Kerrigan reined over and rode west toward the prison; to cut across the railroad grade and swing north along the east bank of the Colorado River.
A red coach with six sleek black horses was trotting into view over there near the prison, coming back from a swing around town.
Kerrigan wanted to send a message to Tom Harrow and this looked made to order. He rode to meet the coach and its lovely occupant.
He held up a hand and the chunky driver, not knowing what to expect, hauled up on the lines. Stubb Holiday sat with his hands occupied with leather; a short man with the strength of a full-grown black bear in arms and shoulders. Ironically, it made Kerrigan think of old Bear Paw Daly, the eccentric prospector who'd lost an arm in a powder accident and made a big strike in bronco Apache country because of it. And then lost his life by a probable bullet from Tom Harrow's gun.
Kerrigan saw Carlotta Wilkerson's tricorne hat emerge from a door opening, her clear grey eyes looking at him quizzically.
"Mr. Kerrigan," she smiled at him as he lifted fingers to the wide brim of the brown hat peaked high and sharp on top, "I assume you've had quite a talk with Thomas?"
"We talked a bit," he admitted.
"Everything is now… understood between you?" she asked hesitantly.
"All clear, I reckon, Miss," he answered. "I'm leaving. I rode over this way to have Holiday take a message back to Tom."
He looked up at the rigidly seated driver he'd seen briefly up in the high country two years before. It might have been this man who had taken the message to Joe Stovers and caused Kerrigan's arrest. His left hand slid inside his unbuttoned shirt and a six-shooter with a long thin barrel sailed through the air. It landed at Stubb Holiday's booted feet, and the man's sudden wooden look indicated that he knew the gun and was wondering if the owner was still on his own feet.
Kerrigan said quietly, "Harrow already knows it by now, Holiday, but you tell him I said Jeb Donnelly didn't quite make it this morning, and your friend Saunders won't get a second chance. Tell him I'll be along up in the high country one of these days. He'll know I'm there when he sees the smoke."
"What smoke?" grunted the driver, and sawed at the restive mouths of the six sleek blacks. "What are you talkin' about?"
"That twenty-room house he built with my money," snapped Kerrigan. "I'm going to burn Dalyville and give the ashes back to the Apaches."
The rain-swollen Gila River branched off across the desert and Kerrigan made his way along its course, heading toward the distant Salt River Valley and Phoenix. No sign of pursuit showed up in the burning distance behind, and he guessed that Jeb Donnelly had spent most of a bad morning in a doctor's office having his shattered jaw attended to and thus was in no condition to ride. A thought that gave Kerrigan a measure of ironical satisfaction inasmuch as he himself was in little better shape.
It enabled him to take his time, to let the pain gradually ooze its way out of his bruised arm. By day he grazed the red horse and slept well hidden out of the heat from now hellishly hot sun coming after the rains. By moonlight he moved on at a leisurely pace, the impatience that once had gripped him forgotten; the combination of thought and physical movement away from the confinement in prison a calming antidote for what had been.
One morning at ten, five days after leaving Yuma, Lew Kerrigan rode at a jog trot down one of the dusty streets of Phoenix and found a livery. He felt no sense of danger here, although Harrow undoubtedly had come through ahead in his red coach.
Just what had happened between him and Carlotta Wilkerson after she returned to the hotel in Yuma would be interesting to know. But in all probability Tom Harrow had twisted her meeting with Kerrigan into something insidious, and in all likelihood the woman, sensing Kerrigan's danger to her financial security, probably hated him the more for what he was going to do.
Kerrigan shrugged away the thought and forgot it. She had been given blunt intimation of the kind of man Harrow really was. Any future decision she made was no concern of Lew Kerrigan's, he told himself.
But he still hoped, instinctively, that some womanly intuition would cause her to postpone becoming Mrs. Harrow.
He slept a few hours, bathed and shaved, and then went out to see if a drink still revolted his sense of taste. Strangely enough, he felt no fear where the law was concerned. Jeb Donnelly would think Kerrigan too cautious to enter a town like Phoenix, and probably hadn't sent word ahead to the law.
Or was it more likely that Harrow, desperate as he was, still hoped that something could be done up north and had stayed the marshal's hand?
At five that afternoon Kerrigan came out of a Chinese grocery store with more of the food that was surging new strength back into his emaciated body. Mormon honey and dried fruits. Canned milk and plenty of sugar. His clothes were new and clean, his brown hair neatly cut, the strings of tension loose now after five nights and two hundred miles of riding.
Wood Smith's brutal clubbing of his arm and Jeb Donnelly's effort at mayhem already were easing themselves out of his mind, replaced by thoughts of the job that had to be done.
Kerrigan moved on along the wide boardwalk carrying his purchases. Back to Big Red busily graining more copper along his sleek belly in a livery-stable stall. Back to a horse that would take him across the desert mesa and on into the high country where trees were green all the time and the grass cool beneath them all summer. Back to a horse that could outrun danger and, if necessary, carry him all the way back to Texas.