They went out into the yard, past other guards waiting at the regular cells, walking together toward the hillside dungeons of Tough Row. The big keys began to rattle in iron doors and Wood Smith let go with his usual morning bellow:
"All right, come out of there, you…"
Dim figures emerged in the dim dawn from their burrows. The hard, cold-eyed bad ones. Sullen men who had killed without mercy and would kill again. Men filled with hatred and with only one hope left to sustain them: escape.
Wood Smith saw the familiar figure of the Apache appear in the doorway with his chained left leg out of sight. Standing dark and stoically silent, alone now since Kerrigan's release. Long black hair down around naked shoulders. Ragged pants torn off at the knees.
Looking up at the sky. Always looking up at the sky each morning and maybe praying his damned Apache prayers to the Great Spirit.
He wouldn't kill himself by knotting his hair around his throat, Smith thought grimly. But I damn' sure came back up here this morning to pay a little debt to Kerrigan for what he done to Jeb Donnelly. I know how to bash in a man's jaw, and his skull too!
Smith snapped the spinning club up into a big hand and his bloodshot eyes began to burn. He moved in on the slight figure, but the opaque black eyes, always so devoid of expression, never moved.
Too late, Bud Casey realized what had been in the former head guard's mind in coming back to roust out the prisoners for the last time.
"Don't stand there like that, you black-faced cholo son of a bitch!" the former head guard roared, and lunged without warning.
Bud Casey's yell to the Apache, however, had come too late. Wood Smith already had swung the club for a skull-crushing blow. But the blow never fell. A black steel spring shot out of the dungeon doorway like a blood-hungry weasel leaping from its burrow at a much larger prey.
Only then did Bud Casey see the big coil of horsehair rope in the Apache's left hand. A rope with a heavy iron ring on one end, made much heavier because wrapped around it were the iron links of fifty feet of light chain.
The Apache's body leaped straight past Smith and was gone, running like a black streak for the far north wall by the river bend. Somebody yelled. Another guard more alert than the others took up the cry. In the tower a hundred yards west of Tough Row two sleepy night guards broke off yawns, grabbed up rifles and tried to peer through the greyness of dawn; shouting to know what the hell was going on down there anyhow.
They heard the booted yard guards in full cry, like a pack of yelping hounds.
"The Apache! He's loose from his chains! Shoot him!"
But there was nothing to be distinguished as a target until the sprinting figure reached the wall and a heavy object on one end of a horsehair rope was flung over the thick top. Something that looked like an oversized monkey skinned up the side of the wall, and then the rifles began to crash. Two ex-cowpunchers, wide-awake now, levering shells frantically. The .44-40 slugs struck adobe and stone and screamed off in ricochet like an Apache in his death cry. But the monkey-like figure never paused.
Kadoba went over the top and dropped from sight.
Bud Casey had broken into a run on the heels of the Indian, surprisingly fast on his feet for a man who had spent so many years in the saddle, grabbing at a flying key on his ring as he sprinted. The smaller key was for a gate near the south bank of the river bend, through which water was carried each morning by trusties to slosh down the cells. He jerked open the gate and looked through.
He was in time to see the Apache flitting among the markers of the graveyard as reloaded rifles began to spang anew. Kadoba's flashing body streaked on through, reached the bank where the current swirled past the rocky promontory named the Point, and arced through the air into the water. Then he was gone and there was nothing among the reeds except newly hatched mosquitoes.
Nothing but a small, final geyser of water as a .44-40 caliber bullet slapped futilely into the belly of the river.
"Why, that little son of a gun!" Bud Casey marveled pantingly. "That black-faced Apache got over the wall into the river! Who'd a thought it?"
He closed and locked the gate and trotted back to where the men from Tough Row stood obediently in line, pointing and cracking coarse jokes while guards in high-heeled boots and big hats gazed down at the body of Wood Smith.
Smith lay sprawled on his back, looking straight up at the grey sky with whiskied eyes that saw nothing. The leather thong of the polished club that had smashed Lew Kerrigan's arm was still around his right wrist.
Protruding from Smith's blood-spurting neck and severed jugular vein were the remaining four inches of a ten-inch file bought in the Big Adobe Store and inserted into a length of sausage when the bespectacled clerk's back had been turned for a few moments.
Bud Casey thought of Kerrigan as he stood looking down at the body of the man who had come up just one time too often to "roust 'em out." He thought of Smith's part in the plot against Lew Kerrigan, and the man's intention of going on north to work for Harrow. But that final trip had been too much for Wood Smith to resist. He'd come to kill the Apache.
A half-hidden smile unseen by the other guards and the prisoners came to Casey's genial, sandy-whiskered face.
The warden, he thought that morning, is going to be awful' mad when he finds out Lew Kerrigan paid somebody to slip the Apache the food that had a file concealed in it.
But then, on the other hand, old Wood always did need all the extra money he could get aholt of to pay his signed whiskey tabs at the Escondido Saloon!
CHAPTER SIX
Lew Kerrigan lay motionless, like a lizard sunning itself in the quiet desolation. Waiting patiently like an Apache, like Kadoba himself would have waited. Sweat formed above the inside leather band of his hat, grew in volume, and finally found an opening near his left temple. It ran down his cheek and into the corner of his mouth, and he felt the salty taste of it. Still, he did not move.
Only his eyes flicked as he at last saw them coming.
Hannifer LeRoy turned and called something to his men, and the buckskin-shirted one named Old Cap rode out ahead at a gallop, face bent low over the right shoulder of his horse. Kerrigan still lay like a giant iguana. The sweat and its salt taste were in both corners of his mouth now, the sun-heated barrel of the rifle uncomfortably hot in his work-calloused hands.
He lined the front sight of the rifle at a point twelve inches below the face of the scout as the man straightened in the saddle. Old Cap's body was twisting to straighten up and look back at LeRoy to say something.
The words never came. Lew Kerrigan let out a part of his breath for steadiness and gently pressured the trigger that exploded 90 grains of black powder back of a .45 caliber bullet.
With the ear-splitting report of the rifle and the hard recoil of it against Kerrigan's shoulder, the trailer pitched face forward off the left side of his horse.
Somebody yelled, and men galvanized by fear wheeled to spur away. Kerrigan flipped out the smoking shell and lined the sights above Jeb Donnelly's big white horse. He held them steadily for a moment and once again he almost spoke aloud to the fleeing ex-marshal. Jeb, you should have stayed up on the hill with Wood Smith.