There were shouts outside the house, the sound of running feet, men calling to one another, the rushing pound of hoofs.
«You here all alone?»
He nodded glumly, then asked: «How about you?»
«Marie was with me, but she went out and left me for a minute.»
«Marie?»
«Jim Westman’s wife. She’s been with me all the time. They want me to write a note to Ma, telling her she had to work against the county splitting if she ever wants to see me.»
«And you wouldn’t write it.»
She shook her head, stubbornly.
His arm around her tightened. «Good girl,» he said.
From the room below a voice bellowed at them. «Better come down, Johnny. We got the whole house covered.»
Harrison’s hand tightened on the six-gun and he glanced at the girl.
«Go to hell,» said Harrison. «If you want me, come and get me.»
«Good boy,» said Carolyn, with a smile.
In the room below a six-gun bellowed and a bullet smashed into the wall opposite the staircase. Harrison waited. The six-gun roared again and splinters leaped from the paneling of the wall.
Silence … deep and deadly silence. Then all at once something scraped outside, a sliding, grating noise.
Carolyn gasped. «A ladder! Someone’s putting a ladder up to one of the windows!»
Harrison half turned toward the room from which had come the scraping noise, and then turned back. Black defeat welled within his brain. Licked, he told himself. Licked right down to the ground. Boxed in so he couldn’t move. If he left the stairway to get at the men on the ladder, the gang downstairs would charge up and get him and if he waited here, the ladder-men would nail him.
Silence again … and then the silence was broken by a steady creaking, the protest of the ladder at the weight of a man upon it … a man who was climbing fast.
«Carolyn,» said Harrison, huskily. «Carolyn, I …»
His words were drowned out by a human scream, a soaring note of pain and terror. And cutting through the scream came the distant spat of a high power rifle. The rifle spat again, an angry sound thinned by distance … and then again. Another man screamed shortly, as if the scream had started and then someone had grabbed him by the throat.
Carolyn was staring at him with wide eyes. «It’s the men out at the ladder,» she cried. «Someone is shooting at …»
He jerked erect and grabbed her by the wrist.
«Come on,» he shouted.
He charged across the hall and into the room where the ladder had been placed. At the window, he saw that the ladder still was there, planted against the house, while at its foot two dead men lay, one spread-eagled on the ground where the bullet had stretched him, the other huddled grotesquely where he had fallen from the rungs.
He glanced upward at the towering cliff. The gun, he knew, must be up there on that cliff … the gun that had driven all of Dunham’s men to cover.
Feet were pounding up the stairs and Harrison switched around. With one hand, he shoved Carolyn away, toward one corner of the room. In a single leap, he reached the doorway of the room.
His gun spat fire as a man’s head and shoulders came into sight around the corner of the staircase, the hammer of the weapon shaking the tiny room like a thunderclap. The head and shoulders slammed against the railing and slid out of sight. Someone yelled and feet were going down the stairway, not coming up.
«Quick!» Harrison yelled at Carolyn. «Get out of the window and go down that ladder.»
She hesitated, crouching in the corner of the room.
«Hurry!» he shouted at her. «While there’s light whoever’s on the cliff can cover us and the light won’t hold for long.»
With one long stride, he was at the window, jerking it open.
«Here,» he said, and reaching out an arm, boosted her roughly through the sash.
«Hold on tight,» he whispered. «But hurry, hurry …»
Terror was in her eyes as she looked up at him, but she moved swiftly, sure footed down the rungs. Carolyn had reached the bottom of the ladder and was running, heading for the shadows that lay like a rumpled blanket at the foot of the towering cliffs.
Recklessly, Harrison hurled himself down the ladder in great leaps. From a clump of grass to his left a six-gun opened up with a hacking cough and somewhere to the right a rifle talked with measured tones. He heard the hum of lead spinning past him, heard the sullen chugging of the bullets in the house, felt the twitch of jerking hands that wrenched at his vest and shirt.
Then he was stumbling, falling headlong, throwing up his arms to shield his face from the ground that was rushing at him. Far up the cliff the hidden rifle churned. Harrison clawed blindly to his feet and ran, ran with head bent low and with shoulders hunched, ran with a mind that forced him on.
The edge of the shadow at the cliff was close … he was almost there … and that’s King’s X, his tired mind told him. The shadow is King’s X. Once you get there no bullet can touch you … none of those buzzing little bees whimpering in the grass and whining overhead.
Something moved in the shadow ahead of him. Carolyn! Carolyn, coming toward him!
«Go back!» he croaked. «Go back!»
A dark form rose out of the grass and clutched at the girl with ape-like arms. Harrison tried to scream a warning, but all that came out of his throat was a rasping sound. He half-raised his gun and something sliced across his skull, something that was a streak of light tumbling into blackness, something that was a whirling pinball of flaming red. And he was falling, tumbling head over heels into an inky pit.
He groped back out of the darkness, revived. His head was a throbbing pulse that rose and fell, that swelled and then collapsed. Slowly he moved one of his hands and put it to his head. It came away wet and sticky.
The first star was twinkling in the east and the haze was bluer, almost black. Harrison lay on his back, thoughts surging through his pulsing head.
He had been hit by a bullet as he’d raced from the house, as he’d raised his gun to shoot at the man who had risen out of the grass beside Carolyn.
His lips moved. «Carolyn,» they said. «Carolyn …»
But it was all over now. Back in the office Dunham had laughed at him and said the bluff had run out. And now it had. Despite …
The rifle on the cliff! Someone had been up there. Someone still might be around. One gun that would not be raised against him.
Hope flared and then almost flickered out. One gun against the valley. He shook his head slowly. It simply wouldn’t work.
His own gun? Carefully he hunted for it. But there was no gun, nothing but the grass. It must have fallen from his hand when he had been hit, probably had gone tumbling for many feet before it came to rest.
A faint rustling came to his ears and he tensed. The rustling came on.
Carefully, he rolled over, got to his knees and waited. His hands clenched tight, then opened, clenched again. Bare hands, he thought. Bare hands are all I have.
A voice called softly. «Johnny!»
Carolyn! Carolyn calling for him. Swiftly an answer came to his lips and then it died, for there was another sound, the sound of the men that he had forgotten. Boots coming through the grass, heading straight toward him.
«Over this way,» said one voice and he recognized it as that of the man who had worn the blue mask back there on the road when the three had stopped him yesterday. Was it only yesterday? Enough had happened for a lifetime.
A voice growled at the blue mask man. «You’re loco, all you heard was just the wind.»
«It was a voice,» the man said stubbornly. «Sounded like the girl.»
«It wasn’t Harrison,» said the other one. «Spike got him. Didn’t you, Spike?»