“Be quiet. I should’ve known better than to trust you. I…”
“Doggone it, hold on a minute, will you? I didn’t have a chance…”
The voice of the girl was as firm as the gun barrel. “No, of course you didn’t. Oh, what a fool I was to believe in you. Jeff Beale suspected you from the start, and, when he found the bullet in Dad’s horse, he and Sheriff Dugan stole one of your bullets and they matched. I ought to kill you right now. You’re nothing but a cold-blooded murderer.”
All the time she was talking, the Kid was trying to piece something together. He listened to her angry voice drone into the darkness without hearing much of what she said, then it came to him in a flash. He started to move and the gun barrel, momentarily forgotten, pressed deeper. He pulled backward instinctively and interrupted the flood of vituperation.
“Wait a minute, will you? Hold it a second.” Her voice died away gradually, begrudgingly, and the Kid tried to see the violet eyes, but he couldn’t. “Did you say Beale found a bullet in your paw’s horse?”
“Yes. He dug it out this afternoon, after you shot him.” Her voice held a full measure of sarcastic triumph in it. “He wasn’t so badly shot up that Doc Carter didn’t patch him up enough to go on digging up facts to hang you with.”
The Kid’s funny bone had been rubbed. He nodded soberly, lugubriously. “Yeah, I’m sure of it, ma’am, especially since I didn’t shoot to kill…but just hold off pullin’ that trigger for one second, will you?”
“Well?”
“Look, Toma…”
“Miss Dodge!”
“Uh, yeah, Toma…uh, Miss Dodge, honey. Your dad’s horse was shot through the chest sort of between the shoulders an’ the chest. The bullet went in on the left side. There’s a hole to show where it entered, an’ on the right side there’s a hole to show where it come out. Now, listen, Toma…”
“Miss Dodge!”
“Uh, yeah, Toma, now listen. How in…uh, heck…could Beale dig the bullet out of your paw’s horse, when the slug went in one side an’ come out the other side? In other words, ma’am, there couldn’t have been any slug in that there critter to dig out.”
The girl was silent and the Kid felt the pressure on the gun barrel lessen slightly. She was silent so long that the Kid felt uneasy. “You didn’t happen to see the horse, did you?”
“No.”
“Was Sheriff Dugan here this evenin’?”
“Yes.”
“Look, Toma”—there was pointed pause but she didn’t take it up—“do me a favor, will you?” “What?”
“Go to Holbrook tomorrow mornin’ an’ look at that there horse.”
“Yes, I intend to…but not as a favor to you.”
The gunbarrel had dropped quite a bit and the Kid wanted to smile.
“Well, then, can I go now?”
“Why did you come here tonight?”
“To talk to you, to tell you how I was forced to make that gun play or get locked up, an’ I don’t want to get locked up just yet. I’ve got a couple of ideas I want to try out. Can I go now?”
The gun was at her side now, dangling from a white, small hand. Out of place and slightly ridiculous. She tried to see his eyes in the darkness. “You haven’t discovered anything, then?”
The Kid gingerly let one leg out of the window as he answered. “Yes, ma’am, I discovered one thing. ’Course, it’s got no bearin’ that I can see on the murder, but still it’s awful important to me.”
“What is it?”
“That I’m in love with you.”
He was gone over the windowsill before she could recover from the surprise and shock. The faint rustle of his boot heels in the geranium bed softly blended into the night and Toma Dodge sank into a rocker and let the gun drop to the floor. She let her wan, worried face follow the shadowy figure that faded into the gloom as the Vermilion Kid fled through the night, back to his patiently grazing big black horse on the little knoll.
Chapter Four
The Kid was in his element now and there were few better at it. He was on the dodge. There were handbills tacked to the trees along the Holbrook road and on the fronts of buildings in town. He hid with the almost nonchalant casualness of an old hand on the owlhoot trail. Once he even slipped into Holbrook. He flattened against the walls of the livery barn and buttonholed the startled hostler.
“Listen, pardner, I want you to tell me somethin’.”
The hostler recognized him and relaxed a little. He hadn’t forgotten that $20 gold piece. “Sure, Kid, what is it?”
“Was Beale alone when he dug a slug out of Dodge’s horse?”
“Well, I don’t know what he done to the horse, ’cause they sent me away…”
“Who were they?”
“Oh, Les Tallant…the hombre who owns this here barn…an’ Jeff Beale. They was messin’ around that wounded horse, an’, when I come up, Tallant told me to beat it. I don’t know what they done to the poor critter after I left.”
“How is the horse?”
“’Sfunny thing, by golly, but the dang’ critter got up all by hisself today. ’Pears to be gettin’ better.”
“One more thing, pardner. Were Tallant an’ Dodge friends?”
The hostler shrugged a little. “No, I wouldn’t call ’em exactly friends. Y’see, Tallant’s hell to gamble, an’, near as I can figger out, old man Dodge set him up in this here livery barn with a big loan. Les’s been gamblin’ pretty heavy, an’ once I heard ’em cussin’ at each other in the office. ’Course, I wasn’t eavesdroppin’, y’understand…”
“’Course not, I understand.” If there was a tinge of amused sarcasm in the Kid’s voice, the hostler didn’t get it.
“Anyway, like I was sayin’, they was hollerin’ at one another an’ Dodge tol’ Les, if he didn’t keep his word on the note, they’d have some trouble.”
“How long was that before Dodge got killed?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t rightly know. Six months maybe, maybe eight months.” The old cowboy screwed up his face. “Say, you don’t think Les Tallant killed the old man, do you? Hell, from what I heard around town, they was more’n one man in at the shootin’.”
The Kid reached into his pocket and shrugged at the same time. He passed the hostler a gold piece and watched the avaricious glitter come into the whiskey-rheumy eyes. “No. I don’t allow Tallant did the killin’ by himself. ¿Quién sabe? Who knows who did it, or how many there were?” He thanked the hostler, and ducked back out of town.
The Kid had the thing pretty well worked out in his mind before he moved out of his lair among the juniper hills. It wasn’t exactly clear to him, yet, what it was all about, but somehow he felt that he’d stumbled onto a short-cut to the killers. He leisurely saddled up the big black, hummed in the late afternoon, checked his gun and belt loops, swung aboard, and rode carefully out over the moonlit range. The night was balmy, like there might be summer rain in the offing, and the full, mellow light of the heavens covered the land with its mantle of eerie, soft, and mysterious light.
The Kid rode for several hours before he came to the knoll where he’d watched the D-Back-To-Back ranch yard the day of his gunfight with Dugan and Beale. Like a ghostly silhouette, the Kid sat in a pensive mood, overlooking the ranch below. The buildings were dark. The Kid dismounted, shucked his spurs, hobbled his horse, and began the descent to the ranch yard below. He knew the way, this time, and, by the time the back of the house loomed up before him, he had taken only a fraction of the time he had used on his first abortive visit to Toma Dodge.
The Kid tried the window, found it not only unlocked, but easier to slide up than it had been before. A tiny tinkling of warning rang far back in the dim recesses of his mind but he shrugged them away. He was inside the room, flattened against the wall, hand hovering over his .45, listening, when the little warning buzzed again. This time, concentrating on the darkness as he was, the warning was limned sharply in his mind. He stood motionlessly and listened. Somewhere in the house he could hear voices. Men’s voices. A full awareness of his position swept over him in an instant and he hesitated briefly, looking wonderingly at the opened window. The voices came again, dim and distant and incomprehensible, but unmistakable. He turned his back on the route of escape and began a sidling, stealthy advance across the room.