Out of the darkness Westman’s voice said: «Next time it’ll be in the head instead of in the arm.»
Harrison, his own gun out, swung it toward the bartender, who froze in the saddle and slowly raised his arms.
«You gents,» commanded Harrison, «get down off them broncs. We’re trading the team and wagon for them.»
«And toss the gun away,» Harrison told Ben. «Just reach down easy and let it drop. If you make a sudden move, I’ll plug you.»
Carefully the two got down off the horses, climbed into the wagon seat under the threat of Westman’s gun. Harrison seized the bartender’s horse, vaulted into the saddle.
The marshal’s teeth were chattering with fear and rage. «I’ll get you for this,» he growled. «I’ll get the both of you.»
«You get that team turned around,» snapped Westman, «and get started out of here.»
Awkwardly, the marshal turned the team around, yelling at the horses. The wagon clattered at a fast clip back toward Sundown.
For a long moment Harrison sat his saddle, staring in the direction the wagon had taken. Harrison stiffened. Westman’s gun was out, resting across the saddle, trained straight at his middle. And in the pale moonlight the man’s face was twisted into something that might have been a grin, but probably wasn’t.
«This,» said Westman easily, «is as far as we go together.»
For a second Harrison sat speechless, staring at the shining muzzle of the gun. Then he lifted his head, stirred slightly in the saddle.
«So you’re backing out,» he snapped. «You get me in a jam and you’re backing out.»
«And you played me for a sucker,» snarled Westman. «You wanted to have me lead you someplace and you thought that I would do it if you got me out of jail.»
He spat viciously. «Hell, I didn’t need your help to get out of there. If you hadn’t come along the boys would have been in in a day or two and yanked the place up by the roots to turn me loose plenty pronto!»
He motioned abruptly with the gun barrel. «Hit the dirt, tin horn. And don’t try to follow me.»
Harrison slowly swung his horse around. There was, he knew, no use of trying to argue. No use of doing anything. He’d gambled and he’d lost.
«I’ll be watching,» warned Westman, «and if you try to trail me, I’ll waste a bullet on you … right between the eyes.»
The horse paced slowly down the road … back toward Sundown.
But he couldn’t go there, Harrison knew. He couldn’t go anywhere.
«Damn fool,» he told himself.
He switched around in the saddle and Westman still sat his horse in the middle of the road, a vague blot in the feeble moonlight.
I could pull my gun and shoot it out, Harrison told himself. I could …
But he’d gain nothing in a shoot-out with Westman, he realized. That wasn’t the way to go about getting out of the jam … and what a jam, he thought. Assisting an accused murderer in escape, resisting a marshal, stealing a horse…
«They’ll hang me, sure,» he said.
He shrugged and faced forward in the saddle, rocking with the slow plodding of the horse, head bent forward, thinking. There had to be a way to carry out the thing he had started to do. There had to be a way to find out where Carolyn had been taken, to find out why she had been taken. And Satan? There was Satan, too. Best horse he ever had.
Then, suddenly, he had it. Doc might help him. Doc would understand.
Doc, with his legendary gold mine, with his riding off and coming back with money, Doc with his cold wry humor and the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, might be the friend he needed. Hours of darkness still remained.
Time to go and see.
Doc might know something… Doc might help him out.
Chapter Three
Trapper Bill Disappears
Squeezed tightly against the wall of the bank, Harrison stood motionless in the narrow alleyway between the bank and Smith’s general store, listening for any sign of life out on the street. Back of the bank the horse he had taken from the bartender whickered softly and pawed at the ground.
«Damn the horse,» thought Harrison. «He’ll wake somebody up.»
But the street apparently was clear. Over it and up and down its length hung the unnatural, breathless silence that comes in the dark hours just before dawn.
Satisfied, Harrison slipped out of the alleyway, ducked into the doorway that led upstairs over the bank to Doc Falconer’s office and living quarters.
Light seeped from beneath the door of Doc’s waiting room and Harrison hesitated, sudden fear gripping at his throat.
«Of course, he might have a light,» he told himself. «He might leave one burning so if someone needed him…»
Carefully he approached the waiting room door, reached out and turned the knob.
Doc was slumped forward on top of the desk on which the lamp was burning, slumped not as a man would slump in sleep, but with his body twisted.
«Doc!» Harrison whispered hoarsely.
A knife hilt stuck out of Doc’s back, just between the shoulder blades, a little low and to the left. The cheap rag rug was scuffed beneath his feet as if he’d tried to rise and then had fallen back.
Harrison moved across the room, stood beside the desk, hands hanging at his side. Doc was dead. There could be no doubt of that. The one man who might have been able to tell him some facts that he needed to know, must know.
Killed with a knife blow in the back as he sat writing at the desk.
Harrison’s eyes took in the pencil and the scattered sheets. Harrison stiffened, remembering back to the afternoon. Doc’s words came back to him:
Wonder if you’d keep a letter for me and forget you ever saw it.
A letter that he said he might come back and get but if he didn’t Harrison was to mail. Perhaps … perhaps this very letter.
Harrison stooped quickly to examine the desk, reaching out to shuffle the paper. But there was no letter. The sheets were blank and clean … no pencil strokes upon them.
Harrison’s breath caught in his throat. Here was the letter … or at least a duplicate of the letter Doc had been writing. The pencil had been hard and the paper thin and the lines were lettered here, once the light caught the paper right, as legibly as they had been upon the sheet on which they had been written.
He bent closer to the sheet, adjusting it so that the light brought out the lines, and read:
U.S. Marshal,
Omaha
My dear sir:
You no doubt have received complaints of the horse thievery going on in this territory. Through diligent observance, not without danger to my person, I have ascertained that the gang is using Grizzly Valley as it headquarters. Few persons know the exact location of this valley and while I hope to be here to lead you and your party to it when you arrive, if such should not be the case, I would advise that you contact Trapper Bill, who has a cabin…
A creaking board brought Harrison spinning around, right hand darting for his gun.
In the doorway stood the man with the flowered waistcoat who had come in with the stage. His lips were drawn back in a vicious snarl and one gold tooth gleamed dully in the lamplight. His hand, coming away from the inside pocket of his coat, held a snub-nosed gun.
The gun snicked viciously, like a tiny, yapping dog. The bullet slammed past his head and smashed into the window.
Harrison tilted up the muzzle of his own gun, hauled the trigger back savagely, too hurried for smooth shooting.
The little gun in the gold-toothed man’s hand snarled again, but its tiny noise was drowned out by the bellow of the .45 in Harrison’s fist.