“I wish,” he softly said, “Frank could have known you. He’d have laughed at you, Amy. It would have taken him a long time to understand that beauty and brains can go together in a woman. Then he’d have loved you.”
Her eyes showed a quick break in their dark depths. She recklessly said: “Parker, I want that from only one man.”
He watched her, balancing a thought and a decision in his mind. She saw the reflection of this in his face and she breathlessly waited. Then the light faded. He took up his hat, gazed at its dusty crown, and turned the thing in both hands.
“I reckon I’d best go do what’s got to be done.” He looked at her almost sadly, moved doorward, and said: “Maybe we can talk some more later, Amy.”
“I’ll be with Lew in Hub’s room, Parker.”
“I’ll walk you over there.”
She shook her head at him. There was a wet brightness to her gaze now. “No. You go on. But I’d like to see you when you…when it’s over.”
He nodded a little, put on his hat, and walked out of the jailhouse.
Wagons from out over the Laramie Plains drifted into town for supplies. Occasionally a rider or two also loped in, and generally, although these men had been sent after a badly needed tongue bolt or a new length of hard-twist lariat rope, or perhaps the ranch mail, they tied up before one of the saloons first, entered with the free-swinging stride of willing imbibers, then emerged a few minutes later with the same closed faces, the same wariness, which otherwise gripped the town, for the word of what was in the offing filled Laramie’s very air. There were two exceptions to this; they entered town from the south. One was a gaunt, battered cowboy; the other was a swarthy, raffish man with a slouched posture in the saddle, but whose quick, sharp eyes belied his general attitude of lazy indifference.
Parker saw these two because they walked their mounts past the jailhouse where he stood. He did not know them, yet a little warning flashed along his nerves as they looked over, then looked on again, too casual and too disinterested.
He did not see another two of the same brand of men amble into town from the north, and another two ride in quietly and separately, one from the glittering west, one from the hot, dry east. Still standing in the shadowed heat under the jailhouse overhang, he watched those first two draw up before Fleharty’s Great Northern Saloon, tie up, and pass on inside. He stepped out into the roadway, crossed over, and swung north, heading for Fleharty’s place. A man stepped forth from a doorway, looking worried. It was Councilman Pierson.
“Have you found him yet?” Pierson asked, meaning Swindin.
Parker shook his head looking past, up toward Fleharty’s place.
“Have you some idea where he might be?”
Parker’s gaze came back. He said: “I can tell you where he isn’t. He’s not watching the roadway or he’d have taken a shot at me. I stood in front of the jailhouse, waiting for him to try that.”
Pierson’s long face grew longer. “I know. I saw that an’ stood over here, holding my breath. I’ve passed the word around.”
“What word?” asked Parker, beginning to look annoyed. “Listen, Mister Pierson, I’d just as soon not have a lot of trigger-happy store clerks slipping around town with guns in their hands.”
“You can’t do this alone, Mister Travis.”
Up the road those two men walked out of Fleharty’s saloon and stopped on the plank walk, looking right and left. Parker stepped away from Pierson and started onward. Pierson, seeing the look on the larger man’s face, seeing also his destination—those two loafing range riders on ahead—said a quick swear word to himself and ducked back into the doorway from which he’d emerged.
Parker’s footfalls echoed upon the boardwalk. He saw one of those men ahead speak to the other from the side of his mouth. Both men turned fully and watched Parker approach them. The shorter, darker of these two hooked both thumbs in his shell belt, looking nonchalant. His raw-boned companion, though, was clearly a rough man. He had a high-bridged nose that had been broken at least once and lay bent a little. His eyes were challengingly hard and the color of a wintry dusk. He gave Parker look for look without moving or shifting his glance except to once make a little flickering appraisal of the way Travis wore his gun. There was a reckless slight droop at the outer comers of this man’s long mouth.
“You boys looking for Johnny Fleharty?” Parker asked, coming to a halt ten feet away.
“Now we might be, Sheriff,” said the gaunt man. “And then again, we might not be. Why, you got a law against it?”
In the face of this antagonism Parker wintrily smiled. Matching the other man’s insolent drawl, he said: “Well, now, boys, Fleharty’s in jail, and maybe you’d like to visit him there…or maybe you wouldn’t like that. It’s up to you.”
The battered man’s eyes drew out narrowly. He kept studying Parker as one stray dog studies another. His unkempt swarthy companion said smoothly, with an apologetic little smile: “No call to get hostile, Sheriff. No call at all. We just thought we’d have a drink, is all.”
“With Charley Swindin?” asked Parker, keeping a close watch for reaction to this. He got it, not from the tall man who was concentrating on only one thing, taking the measure of this big man wearing the badge, but from the raffish man. His eyes registered abrupt surprise, then turned oily again and slyly deferential. He chuckled, saying: “No, just a little drink for the two of us…unless you’d care to join us, Sheriff. Cold beer’d go mighty good on a day like this ’n’s promisin’ to be.”
“No thanks,” replied Parker dryly. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” He paused, saw the gaunt man’s eyes show dawning curiosity, took a step closer to this man, and said: “I’ll escort the pair of you down to see Fleharty at the jailhouse.”
Neither of those rough men spoke and their faces settled gradually into skepticism, into suspicion. “You,” said the gaunt man very softly, “ain’t goin’ to escort us nowhere, Mister Tin Badge.”
Parker had both these men under his gaze; he had taken that step closer to the gaunt man for a purpose. The swarthy rider was slightly behind his friend; he could not throw down on Parker without first stepping around his companion.
“Care to make a little bet?” Parker asked the gaunt man.
He thought this would trigger action and it did. The gaunt man’s right hand blurred in a whipped-back draw. Parker, bracing into this for the past few moments, was faster. When the cowboy’s gun was clearing leather, Parker’s own weapon made a vicious short arc, struck down meatily, and there was the unmistakable sound of steel grating on bone. The gaunt man gasped; he dropped his weapon and wilted from pain. Parker stepped clear, leveled his weapon upon the raffish rider, and coldly smiled. That man’s hand was resting tentatively upon his undrawn six-gun.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Draw it.”
But the raffish man instead let off a long breath and removed his hand, let it glide downward easily. He shook his head, looking out of wide eyes.
“Help your pardner and let’s go,” directed Parker.
The injured man called him a hard name. “It’s broke!” he exclaimed, holding out one hand with the other hand. “Broke at the gawd-damned wrist.”
Parker considered the broken flesh, the blue swelling that was already coming on. “There’s a doctor around. He’ll set it for you. Move along.” But when those two would have stepped down into the roadway, he said: “Stay on the sidewalk. Go south until you’re directly across from the jailhouse, then stop.”
The raffish man screwed up his face at these orders. “You afraid of something?” he asked.
“Yeah, a bullet in the back. Get along now.”