“Go to bed,” the marshal said. “I have all the trouble I need tonight.”
“I'll take my gun before I go,” Jeff said icily.
Sighing, the marshal took the Colt's from the desk drawer. “I don't suppose you had sense enough to listen to Amy when she tried to talk to you this afternoon.”
Jeff glared and did not answer. He buckled the cartridge belt around his waist, turned stiffly on his heel, and headed up the stairs.
The air outside was clean and sweet, and he dragged deep gulps of it into his lungs when he reached the sidewalk. All around him were the Saturday night sounds of a western town. The clang of the Green House piano, the sound, of bawdy laughter from the Paradise and Surratt's. Above him, fiddles sang in the Masonic hall, and the building trembled with the heavy tramping, of count dancing. Jeff wondered bitterly if Amy was up there she often came with Todd when Jeff was busy or had forgotten to ask her.
He headed toward the outside stairs and gazed angrily up at the splash of lamplight on the landing. His pockets were empty; he did not have the door price, even if he had wanted to go. He turned and walked quickly away.
He hated the thought of going back to the blistering heat of his room, but there was nowhere else to go. And he had to think, he had to plan. The stench of the jail cell was still in his nostrils and his anger was a hard knot in the pit of his stomach.
Crossing the street, he gazed into the night and ached to break away from this place that he hated, and which hated him. He longed to escape, as his pa had done, and yet he knew that he couldn't leave.
More than a lack of money kept him here. His craving for vengeance was strong—but even more important, there was Amy. This was the second time that she had seen him behind bars, and that knowledge angered him. As always, she had asked the impossible of him, wanting him to make up with Beulah. He would have taken a thing so unthinkable as a joke if he had not glimpsed that blank look of finality in her face. He tried to put it from his mind, telling himself she would get over it. But this time he could not be sure. Uncertainty gnawed at his nerves. He had never seen her look at him the way she had looked today. It was as though shutters had been drawn behind her eyes; that she had erected an invisible, impenetrable wall between them.
She had said quietly, “I'm sorry, Jeff,” and turned away from him and left. It had never been that way before, no matter how angry she got, and the memory of how she had looked and sounded set his nerves to jumping.
He did not see the stranger until he had almost reached the outside stairs at the side of Ludlow's store. A tall, big-boned man in his late thirties, he loafed quietly in the darkness under the wooden awning. Jeff gave him only a brief glance, took him for a drifter, and turned toward the stairs.
“Blaine?” the man asked quietly.
Surprised, Jeff turned toward him. “Yes?” '
“Then you're Nate Blaine's kid. I'm a friend of your pa's.”
Chapter Fifteen
THE STRANGER LEFT THE shadows, and Jeff noted the big sunburst rowels of his Mexican spurs. He was trail-dirty and shabby, his stubbled face partly hidden under the dark overhang of his shapeless hat. “So you're Nate Blaine's kid,” he said again, and laughed shortly. “I saw the to-do in the saloon today. I take it that fat marshal ain't a special friend of yours.”
“What about my pa?” Jeff said bluntly. “You said you knew him.”
“Sure, we hired out to the same bunch in Mexico for a while.”
“Is he still down there?”
The stranger shrugged. “Far as I know. My friend can tell you all about it; he just came from Mexico.”
Jeff frowned. “Who's your friend?”
A match suddenly blazed in the stranger's hand. He held the flame to the end of a thin cigarette and shot the matchstick into the street. “He's your friend, too, kid,” he said. “You saved his neck yesterday when you turned that posse off his trail.”
Amazement was in Jeff's voice. “Bill Somerson? The one that shot Costain?”
Smiling thinly, the tall stranger nodded. “He's got a message for you—from your pa.”
Jeff shot quick glances up and down the street. “Maybe we'd better go somewhere else to talk.”
The man shook his head. “I've got nothin' else to say. Somerson does his own talkin'. If you want that message from your pa, you'd better hightail it down south. Do you know where Rifle Creek forks with Little River, across the county line? About a mile north of the fork there's a shack, and that's where Somerson's waitin' for you.”
Jeff shook his head, not in rejection of the proposition, but because it was hard to believe. “Can't you give me an idea what the message is about?”
“Just that it's important; that's all Somerson would tell me. Straight from Nate Blaine to his kid, he said. Bill's kind of taken a personal interest in the matter, I guess, after the way you steered the posse off him. Have you got a horse?”
When Jeff shook his head, the stranger laughed. “I guessed as much, seein' the way they cleaned you in that stud game. Take that claybank at the rack; it's mine. If I have any ridin' to do, I can hire one at the stables.”
Jeff looked closely at the stranger, seeing hardness in the bony face, a kind of brutal humor in the pale eyes. As the man talked, Jeff instinctively tensed up, not liking what he saw. He didn't trust the stranger's words any more than he trusted his smile.
Jeff said bluntly, “It seems like you're going pretty far out of your way to do me a favor. Why?”
The smile disappeared; blankness took its place. “I told you Somerson wants to talk to you, kid. If you don't want to know what your pa has to say, then I'll go back to where I come from.”
“Wait a minute,” Jeff said quickly, knowing that he had to go. He had to know what message Nathan had sent that was so important. “A mile north of the fork. All right, I'll go.”
The stranger nodded shortly. “Be careful nobody trails you. I'll take the claybank around to the alley and you can take it from there.” Jeff stood in the shadows as the man went to the horse and rode lazily around the corner of the bank building. Jeff felt that hand of caution firmly upon his shoulder; a vague uncertainty nagged at him as rider and horse disappeared into the darkness of the alley.
Common sense told him that a wanted man like Somerson would not expose himself simply to relay a message for a friend. And this tall stranger was branded a hard-case in every move he made. Still, five long years had passed since he had had direct word from Nathan. He was sick of the town and would be glad enough to put it behind him for a while. He headed for the alley.
“Remember to cover your trail,” the stranger reminded him, as Jeff stepped up to the saddle. “The name's Milan Fay,” the tall man added as Jeff was riding away. “Somerson will want to be sure who sent you.”