“It would empty the Winchester.”
“You’d be on your way by then. You could bring some of the boys back from the Hammer.”
He felt a quivering in her shoulders. Then tears came abruptly. No weeping; no sobbing; just bright diamonds of moisture on her lids.
“And what would we find when we got back? My life, lying in the dust.”
“Quit that kind of talk! You’ve got to go.”
“You’re not married to me yet, Brad Pickens. I refuse to take the order.”
He put his arm about her and brushed her cheek with his lips. Then he released her.
Clem and Jeffers had started their play. They’d overturned the massive oaken rain barrel behind the house and moved toward the creek, pushing the rain barrel before them.
Clem broke, dove into the brush before Brad could fire. He started moving down creek and Jeffers began working the barrel at an angle up the long slope away from the creek.
“I know what’s in his mind,” Brad said. “He figures I’ll go mighty slow about wasting what he thinks is the last bullet. He reckons one of them will get close enough to fire the brush or grass. When the flames reach the barn and this loft of hay, we’ll come out in a hurry or be cooked alive.”
Jeffers was moving slowly, staying out of sixgun range. Clem was making more speed. Brad could mark his progress by the shaking of a bush or sapling now and then.
“Last warning, Clem!”
“Now, Brad, you wouldn’t use that final bullet in my direction.”
“I’ve got plenty of bullets.”
“Don’t let him bluff you, Clem,” Jeffers shouted. “Close in.”
Clem obeyed the order. Brad raised the rifle to his shoulder. His face congealed, as if turning to hewn, hard maple. He saw a bush shake, and he fired.
Clem made a cry like a bull moose. He stood up, fell backward, and Brad heard the echo of the splash. In a few moments, Clem’s body washed down the creek, lodging face-down where the creek raced over stony shallows.
The barrel had stopped its slow journey. Jeffers endured stunned silence before saying, “That was no sixgun.”
“You’re mighty right it wasn’t. It was the crack of a rifle. The oak in that barrel might scotch a sixgun slug from long range, but it won’t stop a steel-jacketed rifle bullet, Jeffers. I’m coming after you.”
Brad dropped low and ran a few steps, then dropped behind the watering trough. He raised, pumped a bullet, and saw splinters jump from the barrel.
He slid around the end of the trough. The barrel was still a great impediment. He might empty the rifle into it without doing more than scratching Jeffers.
Jeffers heard his movement and couldn’t fail to realize that in short seconds the rifle would be barking at him from a new angle where the barrel wouldn’t help.
Jeffers shot one glance around the end of the barrel, shifted it to correct aim, and gave it a shove.
The barrel came booming and bouncing at Brad, heavy enough to smash him. Brad almost gave way to the surprise Jeffers had counted on. He glimpsed Jeffers on one knee, fanning his sixgun.
He swiveled the rifle on his hip, ignoring everything but the man before him. He fired, and with that sixth sense of the marksman he knew his aim had been true. Jeffers dropped his gun, sat a moment on one knee. Then he pitched to his side. Brad plunged to one side as the barrel, with a bounce, loomed over him. The barrel missed him by inches, crashing against the barn, as Brad staggered to his feet.
And with the crash, like an echo, came the bark of a six-gun. He turned, and he saw Elena lying on her face near the house, a gun near her hand. Then he saw Laura, holding herself stiff and straight, coming from the barn toward him. Clem’s smoking sixgun dangling at her side.
Laura lifted the gun, stared at it, and with a cry in her throat threw it from her. Brad gathered her into his arms. She shuddered with reaction.
“She crawled from the porch, Brad. Then I saw the gun in her hand. She raised it. She was going to shoot you in the back. I... I fired the final bullet, Brad.”
He held her close, and looked at Elena down the slope. She had the gamin face of an innocent doll, but what she couldn’t have she would kill.
It was late that night before Brad got back to the Hammer ranch house. He threw reins over the hitch-rail, mounted the porch, and Mike Simmons’s voice came to him out of the darkness down the porch: “Been waiting. Figured you’d ride this way.”
Mike rose, hobbled down the porch. “Come in. Few things I’ve got to say to you.”
Brad was haggard, but there was a calm light in his eyes. The last hours had been crowded, sheriff and deputies going out to clean up the carnage and bring back the bodies in wagons. He recalled the hush that had fallen on San Miguel, and the way men had stared at Brad Ledbetter Pickens, who’d walked with his head high and a friendly smile on his lips. The first handshake, from the sheriff himself; started the thawing out of these strangers.
Brad followed Mike into the cavernous front room, with its bearskin rug and heavy chairs before a fireplace large enough to take logs.
Mike rubbed his rheumatically-gnarled knuckles against his cheek. “You know you got one hell of a nerve, keeping the truth about yourself from folks, I always had the feeling there was something you was hiding.”
Brad colored a little at the prodding tone. “I don’t mean to speak disrespectful to a man crippled with rheumatism—”
“Who says I’m crippled!”
Brad held up his hand. “—but I’m going to tell you something anyway. I discovered something today. Running is no good. If I’d never hidden, Jeffers, Clem, and the girl couldn’t have used my place and showed me — and Laura — the face of death. I’ve let the Pickens name run me for the last time, Simmons. I came here with honest, hard-earned money, saved a dollar at a time. And here I’m staying. To earn the respect of my neighbors and live like a man, to put down roots, build my herds, marry a good woman, and raise a family. And when I’m old and plagued with rheumatism I’ll sit on my front porch and snort and cuss a little and take nothing from any man, because I’ll look out over the land and know I’ve earned my right to it.”
Mike’s eyes began to twinkle. “You sound pretty sure of yourself.”
“I am. I’m going to marry your daughter, Mike, if she’ll have me.”
“She’ll have you,” Laura’s voice came quietly.
Both men turned. Laura was standing across the room, limned in yellow lamplight. Her hair was loose about her shoulders and she was clad in a long, white nightgown that draped to her ankles.
She came forward smiling, slipped her left arm about Mike’s neck, her right about Brad’s.
Mike cleared his throat. “Thought you was in bed. Confound it, don’t know what this younger generation is coming to. You traipsing in here in your nightgown when you ain’t even married to this hard-headed galoot—” Mike grinned — “yet.”