This morning he had shown the warrant to Sheriff Armitage and solicited his cooperation in making the collar. The special deputies had been gathered, a plan of action worked out. And now the moment was at hand. He felt no particular tension — he had made dozens of arrests as an operative of the Secret Service — and he had seen none in the faces and actions of Armitage and the other locals. The Stanleys did not have a reputation for courting trouble. No one anticipated any difficulty in competing the raid without incident.
The heat on the dusty street was intense; one of the deputies mopped his streaming face with a yellow bandanna. Somewhere a dog barked, a child laughed at play. Houses lined the street, most of them rundown, their yards choked with weeds. In one yard, a makeshift swing — a barrel hoop attached to a length of rope — hung motionless from the branch of an oak tree. In another yard, clothing and bedsheets rippled in the faint, dry breeze, and the dark-haired woman who was hanging the wash turned to gaze at them curiously as they passed. He barely glanced at her; he noticed only that she was young and pregnant, her belly swollen so large that it made her clumsy when she moved.
The rear door to the printing shop was twenty yards ahead now, just beyond where the street ended at an intersecting alleyway.
He took out his stemwinder, flipped open the case. It was one minute and thirty seconds until one o’clock.
He nodded at the two deputies; all three men drew their sidearms, holding the weapons in close to their bodies. The alleyway was deserted. The only sounds, now, came from out on the street in front — the soft whinny of a horse, the rattle and squeak of a passing wagon.
They reached the alley; the rear door to the printing shop was less than ten yards away. The deputy with the yellow bandanna wiped his face again and muttered something profane about the heat.
The time was one minute before one.
And the print-shop door flew open and two men burst out at a panicked run. The Stanley brothers. The one in the lead, Ross, carried a double-barreled shotgun; the other clutched an old Army revolver.
Quincannon had no time to think; he knew by instinct that Armitage and the other deputies had stupidly let themselves be seen making their approach. He threw himself sideways into the street just as Ross Stanley, wild-eyed with terror, emptied one barrel of the shotgun. The deputy with the yellow bandanna screamed and went down. Ross jumped the pole fence into the nearest yard; his brother started to run down the alley.
The second deputy, belly-flat on the ground now, shot Adam’s legs out from him. Adam flopped around in the dust, yelling, trying to bring his revolver up for a shot; the deputy fired twice more. It was the third shot that blew away the side of Adam Stanley’s head, but Quincannon didn’t see that. He was already up on his feet, attempting to draw a bead on the other fugitive brother.
Ross was running sideways so that the shotgun and its remaining load were pointed in Quincannon’s direction. He was almost to the fence separating that yard with the next in line, the one in which the pregnant woman still stood, frozen with shock, a white sheet stretched out in her hands like a flag of truce.
Quincannon did not see her. There was sweat in his eyes, made gritty by the dust; all he saw was Ross and the shotgun. He fired and Ross fired. The charge of buckshot exploded the top rail of the fence between them — harmlessly. Quincannon’s shot missed too. His second bullet was the one that knocked Ross over on his back and left him there unmoving, the empty shotgun canted across his bloodied chest.
The noise of the guns still echoed in Quincannon’s ears; it wasn’t until he got slowly and shakily to ha’s feet that he heard the screams, rising above the shouts and running steps of Armitage and his two men. At first, confused, he thought the screams were those of the deputy who had taken the load of buckshot. But when he glanced that way he saw the man sitting up, grimacing in silence as the second deputy knelt beside him.
He looked back the other way, beyond where Ross Stanley lay motionless in the near yard. Then he saw the woman, down on her back amid the remains of her wash, skirt pulled high on her thrashing legs, her cries lifting and falling and lifting again through the hot, dry air. And he realized with a sudden sickening anguish that his first shot hadn’t been wild at all.
He dropped his weapon, ran to her fence, vaulted over it. Blood on the front off her swollen stomach, pumping through her clasped hands. Her eyes open, staring at him, accusing him. Her mouth open, the screams coming out, sliding up and down the scale, scraping at his nerve endings like a carpenter’s file. Wetness blurred his vision as he fell to his knees beside her. He said something, an apology, a prayer, but she never heard him. She stopped thrashing, and her body convulsed, and he watched life pour out of her in a bright red spurt; helplessly he watched her die.
But the screams went on. Long after she was dead her screams went on and on inside his head…
He was sitting up in bed, soaked in sweat, staring blindly into the darkness. It was a minute or more before Katherine Bennett’s screams faded and he could hear the silence of the room, the distant rhythm of the stamps on War Eagle and Florida mountains.
But he could still see those eyes, accusing him; still see her life’s blood and that of her unborn child pouring out between her clasped fingers. He groped the whiskey bottle off the nightstand, drank from it without bothering with a glass.
Murderer.
Murderer…
Chapter 10
Shortly past dawn, Quincannon roused the night hostler at Cadmon’s Livery out of his bed. The liveryman rented him the same blaze-faced roan he had ridden to the Paymaster mine, and provided directions to Cow Creek and the Ox-Yoke ranch. Quincannon rode out of town to the west, on the heavily rutted wagon road to DeLamar and the Oregon border.
He sat stiff in the saddle, every now and then taking a drink from the flask in his coat pocket. The whiskey did nothing for the hangover pain in his temples and behind his eyes, but it eased the queasiness in his stomach, kept his hands steady and his thoughts dulled. The fresh bottle had cost him five dollars from the night clerk at the hotel; he would have paid fifty. He had emptied the one in his room sometime during the night.
The road followed Jordan Creek down-canyon, through Ruby City a mile below Silver and then Booneville — semiabandoned camps whose crumbling buildings appeared to be inhabited mostly by prospectors still scouring the old, once profitable claims nearby. At Quincannon’s back the sun rose and took the chill out of the early morning air. He barely noticed; the whiskey had long since made him impervious to the cold.
A mile above DeLamar he passed a pair of jerkline freighters on their way to Silver, cussing their mules the way ’skinners always did; otherwise there was no traffic on the road. DeLamar turned out to be a thriving little settlement, nestled in a cluster of little hills, its buildings strung along the sides of the canyon wherever a level place had been found to build on. Steep stairways climbed the hillsides and connected the houses, so that the whole place had the look of a white man’s version of an Indian cliff-dwelling pueblo.
West of DeLamar Quincannon climbed to a ridge, and from there he could see the grass- and sage-covered sweep of the interior basin — one of the sections of rich cattle graze — and beyond that, the Oregon desert and the Parsnip Mountains. The road continued to drop, coming out of the bleak ridges and valleys of the Owyhees; the scent of sage replaced the spicy odor of juniper trees. When he reached the basin he encountered a fork: left to South Mountain, the hostler back in Silver had told him, right to Cow Creek. He swung right, into one of the little creek valleys where two or three hundred head of Herefords and Texas Longhorns fattened themselves on bunchgrass. Not as many as there would have been before the disastrous winter of 1888-89, perhaps, but more than enough to sustain the ranches in the area.