“Hey,” yelled Jake, “what order do you want me to take ’em in? Plumb senseless for the two of us to be shooting the same people.”
Quinn moved closer to Carson, lowered his voice. “Listen, Carson,” he said, “you’ve got until tomorrow to disappear.”
“What?” asked Carson in mock surprise. “No ten thousand?”
CHAPTER TWO
Gunsmoke Goes to Press
Jake scrubbed the back of his neck with a grimy hand, his brow wrinkled like a worried hound’s.
“You sure didn’t make yourself popular with the sheriff,” he declared. “Now he ain’t going to rest content until you’re plumb perforated.”
“The sheriff,” announced Carson, “won’t make a move toward me until he’s heard from Fennimore.”
“I’m half-hoping,” said Jake, “that Fennimore decides on shootin’. This circlin’ around, sort of growlin’ at one another like two dogs on the prod has got me downright nervous. Ain’t nothin’ I’d welcome more than a lively bullet party.”
Carson tapped a pencil on the desk. “You know, Jake, I figure maybe we won that election right out there on the street. Before tomorrow morning there won’t be a man in Rosebud County that hasn’t heard how Bean backed down. A story like that is apt to lose him a pile of votes. Fennimore can scare a lot of people from voting for Purvis, but this sort of takes the edge off the scare. People are going to figure that since that happened to Bean, maybe Fennimore ain’t so tough himself.”
“They’ll sure be makin’ a mistake,” said Jake. “Fennimore is just about the orneriest hombre that ever forked a horse.”
Carson nodded gravely. “I can’t figure Fennimore will take it lying down. Maybe you better sneak out the back door, Jake, and tell Lee Weaver, over at the livery barn, to do a bit of riding. Tell the boys all hell is ready to pop.”
“Good idea,” agreed Jake. He shuffled toward the back, and a moment later Carson heard the back door slam behind hm.
There was no question, Carson told himself, tapping a pencil on the desk, that the showdown would be coming soon. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning … but it couldn’t be long in coming.
Fennimore wasn’t the sort of man who would wait when a challenge was thrown at him, and what had happened that afternoon was nothing short of a challenge. First the refusal of the offer to buy the paper off, then the refusal to submit to arrest, and finally the bluffing that had sent Bean skulking back to the sheriff’s office.
In his right mind, Carson told himself, he never would have done it, never would have had the nerve to do it. But he was sore clear through, and he’d done it without thinking.
The front door opened and Carson looked up. A girl stood there, looking at him: a girl with foamy lace at her throat, silk gloves, dainty parasol.
“I heard what happened,” she said. “I came right down.”
Carson stood up. “You shouldn’t have,” he said. “I’m a fugitive from justice.”
“You should skulk,” she said. “Don’t all fugitives skulk?”
“Only when they are in hiding,” he said. “I’m not exactly in hiding.”
“That’s fine,” said the girl. “Then you’ll be able to eat with us tonight.”
“A murderer?” he asked. “Kathryn, your father might not like that. Think of it, a murderer eating with the banker and his charming daughter.”
Kathryn Delavan looked squarely at him. “I’ll have Daddy come over when he’s through work and walk home with you. Probably he’ll have something to talk with you about.”
“If you do that,” Carson said, “I’ll come.”
They stood for a minute, silent in the room. A fly buzzed against a windowpane and the noise was loud.
“You understand, don’t you, Kathryn?” asked Carson. “You understand why I have to fight Fennimore – fight for decent government? Fennimore came in here ten years ago. He had money, cattle and men. He settled down and took over the country – free range, he calls it now, but that’s just a term that he and men like him invented to keep for themselves things that were never theirs in the first place. It’s not democracy, Kathryn, it’s not American. It isn’t building the sort of country or the sort of town that common, everyday, ordinary folks want to live in.”
He hesitated, almost stammering. “It’s sometimes a dirty business, I know, but if gunsmoke’s the only answer, then it has to be gunsmoke.”
She reached out a hand and touched his arm. “I think I do understand,” she said.
She turned away then, walked toward the door.
“Daddy,” she told him, “will be over around six o’clock to bring you home.”
Carson moved to the window, watched her cross the street and enter Robinson’s store. He stood there for a long time, listening to the buzzing of the fly. Then he went back to the desk and settled down to work.
It was almost seven o’clock when Roger Delavan came, profuse with apology.
“Kathryn will be angry with me,” he said, fidgeting with his hat, “but I had some work to do, forgot all about the time.”
Outside, dusk had fallen on the street and the windows of the business places glowed with yellow light. There was a sharp nip in the rising wind, and Delavan turned up the collar of his coat. A few horses stood huddled, heads drooping at the hitching post in front of the North Star. Up the street a dog-fight suddenly erupted, as suddenly ceased.
Carson and Delavan turned west, their boots ringing on the sidewalk. The wind whispered and talked in the weeds and grass that grew in the vacant space surrounding the creaking, groaning windmill tower.
“I want to talk with you,” said Delavan, head bent into the wind, hat socked firmly on his head. “About what happened today. I am afraid you may think –”
“It was a business deal,” Carson told him. “You said so, yourself.”
“No, it wasn’t,” protested Delavan. “It was the rankest sort of bribery and attempt at intimidation I have ever seen. I’ve played along with Fennimore because of business reasons. Fennimore, after all, was the only business in Trail City for a long time. I blinked at a lot of his methods, thinking they were no more than the growing pains of any normal city. But after what happened today, I had to draw the line. I told Quinn this afternoon –”
Red flame flickered in the weeds beside the tower, and a gun bellowed in the dusk. Delavan staggered, coughed, fell to his knees. His bowler hat fell off, rolled into the street. The wind caught it and it rolled on its rim, like a spinning wagon-wheel.
A man, bent low, was running through the weeds, half-seen in the thickening dark.
Carson’s hand dipped for his gun, snatched it free, but the man was gone, hidden in the thicker shadows where no lamplight reached from the windows on the street.
Carson slid back the gun, knelt beside Delavan and turned him over. The man was a dead weight in his arms; his head hung limply. Carson tore open his coat, bent one ear to his chest, heard no thudding heart.
Slowly, he laid the banker back on the ground, pulled the coat about him, then straightened up. The bowler hat no longer was in sight, but a half-dozen men were running down the street. Among them, he recognized Bill Robinson, the new store owner, by the white apron tied around his middle.
“That you, Robinson?” asked Carson.
“Yeah, it’s me,” said Robinson. “We heard a shot.”
“Someone shot Delavan,” said Carson. “He’s dead.”
They came up and stood silently for a moment, looking at the black shape on the ground. One of them, Carson saw, was Caleb Storm, the barber. Another was Lee Weaver, the liveryman. The others he knew only from having seen them about town. Men from some of the ranches.