Grant felt the knot on the back of his head. “It wasn't my idea.”
Bud Muller turned slowly, his smooth young face set like concrete. “I should have killed him!” he said hoarsely. “I should have shot him before saying a word!”
“Do you think that would have been smart?” Valois asked quietly.
“He killed my father!”
But now that some of his anger had burned itself out, Grant was beginning to wonder about other things. He sat carefully on the edge of the runner's cot and fixed his gaze on Valois. “I guess we owe you a good deal for lending us a hand down there. Next time I'll be acquainted with Farley's rules and maybe I can handle my own trouble.” He frowned. “Why did you do it, Valois?”
Bud Muller looked puzzled, too, and was waiting for an answer.
Surprisingly, Valois laughed. “Why does anybody make a fool of himself? Take yourself,” nodding at Grant. “What good reason do you have for getting mixed up in this kind of trouble?”
Grant nodded but he was not satisfied. “You've got more to lose than I have. You said yourself that Farley could ruin your business, if you turned him against you. Did you think of that when you threw down on him?”
The runner's eyes narrowed. “I've got no cause to like Farley; not many people have. Yes, I thought about my business before I stepped in.” He strode to the room's small single window and gazed down at Kiefer's muddy street. “If I had it to do over again, I don't know as I would do the same thing—but I'm not going to have that chance. I'll have to take my business where I can find it, whether Farley likes it or not. Do you still want those rig builders and roustabouts for the Muller lease?”
Grant and young Muller made small sounds of surprise.
“I think I might be able to rake up some men who'd be willing to work against Farley,” Valois went on. “But they won't be the kind of men you want; they'll be hard cases, drunkards, the scrapings of the barrel.”
Grant glanced at Bud Muller, and the boy nodded.
“How soon can you get them to the lease?”
“Tomorrow morning maybe. It depends on how big a scare Farley throws into this town.”
“Get them,” Bud Muller said, but his face showed that he was worried. “There's just one thing, Valois, that you ought to know. I don't think it's going to do you any good with Rhea.”
The runner smiled. “I hope you're right,” he said dryly. “I'm fighting Farley now—that's all the trouble one man can rightly handle.”
The crowd in the lobby parted and stared curiously as Grant and Bud made their way down the stairs and out to the sidewalk. They were marked men. Every glance in their direction was a speculative one. How long would it be before Farley finished them? Suddenly they had become untouchables; their names were on Ben Farley's black list. Grant was just beginning to realize how strong a man Ben Farley was.
They climbed stiffly over the freighter's wheel and dropped heavily to the driver's seat. Grant breathed deeply, and as bright needles of pain shot through him he experienced the exhilaration of a new kind of anger.
For the first time he saw that fight with Farley as a personal matter. The throbbing at the base of his skull, the pain in his side, and the numbness of his arm—they would be with him for a long time to remind him of Farley.
And after they were gone he would still remember.
Silently, he took up the lines, and the horses strained obediently in the harness. Bud Muller rode like some mute stone god of hate, and Grant could only guess what went on inside the boy's mind. The freighter dragged slowly through the slush of Kiefer, forming another bulky link in the endless chain of wagons along that deep-rutted road between Kiefer and the Glenn ranch. The town had grown overnight; it was even noisier and dirtier than Grant remembered it from the day before, yet many of the business places were already leaving Kiefer, especially the dance halls, the crib girls, the gamblers. They were picking up and moving on to Sabo.
Grant was getting used to it, the way he had got used to trail towns and end-of-track towns of the past. Still he didn't like it—and suddenly he remembered something that Rhea had said to him. Do you think I like living out the good years of my life in towns like Kiefer and Sabo?
Now, thinking calmly, he felt that he understood Rhea Muller a little better than before. Even the fire of her ambition and greed became more understandable.
Then caution stepped in to guide his thinking. It was all right to understand her, if he could, but nothing more. He must keep one thing clear in his mind—any argument he had with Farley was a personal one, it had nothing to do with Rhea Muller.
They rode on in silence, the jolting freighter starting new pains in Grant's head and side, then he saw a horseman coming toward them, quartering across an open field from the direction of Kiefer. Grant stared, then shrunk a bit into his windbreaker, as though he hoped to make his identity unknown.
Marshal Jim Dagget reined alongside the freighter, his eyes hard, his mouth a cruel slash across his blunt face. With a jerk of his head he motioned Grant to pull off the road, and then he sat for a moment, his anger fixed on Bud Muller.
“So you wouldn't listen, would you?” he snarled. “The law wasn't fast enough for you, was it! You had to take it on yourself to see that justice was done!”
The color of outrage mounted steadily in the lawman's face, and for the moment Bud Muller was his sole target. “There's one thing I want you to listen to and I want you to get it straight: from now on I'll see that justice is done. I intend to catch the man who murdered your father, but I'll do it my own way, with no help from you. Do you understand?”
Young Muller hadn't been prepared for this outburst. He looked surprised, then angry.
“I said,” the marshal's voice cracked, “do you understand?”
There was a savagery there that not even Bud Muller in his state of grief could fail to understand. Jim Dagget was a lawman; the law and its enforcement were his life. He was letting it be known beyond all doubt that he would allow no man to ride over him.
Bud understood. The marshal's anger was the only thing that had penetrated the hard core of his bitterness, and at last he nodded.
“I hope you do,” Dagget said, and this time his voice was not quite so harsh. “Farley could have shot you dead on the Wheel House floor and he would have gone scot free, because he had the law on his side. That's what he would have done, too, from what I hear, if it hadn't been for Turk Valois.”
Now he fixed his anger on Grant. It was more than just a look—it was something else as well, a look of suspicion. “And you,” Dagget said thoughtfully, almost as if his mind were somewhere else. “I thought I told you to see that this kind of thing didn't happen.”
“I didn't have much to say about it.”
But a subtle shift of attention had taken place in the marshal's eyes. Then, abruptly, “You planning to stay on at the Muller lease?”
Grant nodded. There was nothing else to do.
Dagget's mouth turned up slightly in that smiling expression that was not a smile at all, and suddenly he reined his horse around. As suddenly as he had come, he was gone. Grant's mouth was dry, and beneath his windbreaker he was sweating. What was going on in that mind of Dagget's? What was he thinking, what did he suspect, and how much did he know? He couldn't know so very much, Grant reasoned, or he would have taken him back to Joplin.
Just the same, something was going on behind the marshal's shaded eyes; Grant could see the wheels begin to turn every time Dagget looked in his direction, and he didn't like it. He had the feeling that Dagget was amusing himself, toying with him like a cat toying with a crippled sparrow. If he ran, it would only focus the marshal's suspicions. If he stayed, Dagget would finally work out the answer in that methodical brain of his.