When Parker strode up, the old man interrupted his vigil long enough to say: “I can hear ’er fillin’ up down there. I figured that ground’d be more porous than that.”
“You hear anything else?” asked Parker.
“Yup,” responded the oldster. “I heard a man cuss a blue streak.”
Parker let off a long sigh. The old man turned at this close sound, put an understanding glance upon Travis, and said: “Know exactly how ye feel. I been in situations like this m’self, years back. It’s hard on a man thinkin’ he’s right but bein’ unable to make sure. Well, mister, you guessed right enough…he’s down there, even if he is tryin’ to make out like he ain’t.” The old man spat, considered the trapdoor, and said in a pensive way: “What’s botherin’ me is what’ll happen when he comes out.”
Parker had no chance to reply to this, even if he’d intended to. From behind the building a gunshot sounded, then another explosion, and several more. A townsman stepped into the saloon, saw all those alert faces, and said: “He’s down there. He tried pushin’ the hoses out. The fellers opened up on him through the door.”
“The hoses?” asked Parker.
“Still in place, Mister Travis. Them slugs busted hell out of Fleharty’s door. They drove Swindin back.” The townsman smiled expansively. “Everything’s workin’ fine.”
At Parker’s side the old man said: “That only leaves him one way out, sonny. He knows now he dassn’t try it through the cellar door. That leaves this here trap door.”
Parker silently agreed with this. He listened to that deepening water for a while, then said: “Old-timer, you and these other men move back. Go over by the front door. That man down there belongs to me, but, if I miss when he comes up out of there, you fellers can have him when he tries rennin’ for it.”
Everyone who heard this obediently drifted clear of the bar. The old man was the last to shuffle away. For a moment he gazed calculatingly at Parker, then he, too, moved off.
There were no more shots from around back, but Lew Morgan came shouldering inside from the roadway. He stopped when a man detained him by a hand upon his arm. Lew watched Parker, standing alone at the bar’s southern ending, his six-gun in one fist, cocked and ready, his body slouched and his gaze downward. Lew called over to him.
“It’s filling up faster than we thought. Must be up past his knees by now.”
Parker started to swing his head; something beyond sight of Morgan and the others caught his attention, turning him suddenly stiff, poised, and utterly still.
Across the room those watchers stared. The only movement among them was from the old man. He continued rhythmically to work on his pouched cud of tobacco.
The trapdoor was beginning to rise. It did this with perceptible slowness. For almost a full minute Parker had no view of the hand or shoulder or head that were raising it. Then he did; a man’s straining big fingers showed. Afterward the wrist also showed. Then the top of a hat. Parker stood, leaning upon the bar’s far curving, his legs and lower body hidden from the vision of that stealthily climbing figure below in the cellar’s dark dankness.
There was a breathless silence in the saloon, but, outside, those protesting pumps clattered and men’s voices lifted and faded, coming on, then trailing off. Parker tilted his six-gun barrel the slightest bit. He could have shot at the top of that hat, but instead he waited. It was in his mind to let Swindin see and recognize him, to let the ex-foreman of Lincoln Ranch feel some of that terrible finality that men know when they realize there is no way out of a situation but death. His brother had known that feeling; he meant for Swindin also to know it.
The trapdoor continued to rise. Swindin’s forearm was visible. He seemed emboldened, acted as though he thought perhaps no one knew of this other way out of the cellar. His shoulder showed. His other hand appeared, holding a cocked .44. Very slowly, inch by inch, his head came into view, around it his big shoulders all hunched with tightness.
He saw Parker, standing there. For a lengthening second those two men stared at one another, neither breathing, neither blinking. Swindin wrenched violently, bringing his gun hand up and around. He fired and above him glass broke into myriad pieces. He fired a second time, still frantically swinging that gun to bear.
Parker’s whole attention was forward and downward. He was cold; no excitement was in him, and even that consuming fire for vengeance was blanked out as he methodically began drawing his trigger finger tight. Then, at the very last fraction of a second he did something he’d not intended doing. Just before his gun went off, he deliberately dropped the muzzle slightly. He shot, thumbed back, and shot again. Swindin gave out an explosive grunt, whipped backward from impact, let go of the trapdoor and the ladder he was standing on, fell into the water below, and, as the door slammed down, he was lost to sight.
Parker stepped forward, heaved the door up again, let it fall beside him, peered downward for a moment, and afterward got up and turned away, walking out around the bar into the barroom’s center. He said nothing to any of those dozen men standing statue-like at the doorway. He ejected those two spent casings, plugged in two replacements from his shell belt, holstered the weapon, and shouldered through to the reddening roadway where afternoon sun glare was putting its dying day mellowness over Laramie.
Men drifted from the saloon. They looked but they did not speak. Not even Lew Morgan, one of the last to walk out. Lew was soaked; so were three men with him. Lew told one of them to go around back, tell the men back there to stop pumping. He also said to another man: “Fetch Doc Spence.” Then he stood back in the fiery shade under Fleharty’s overhang and silently began squeezing water out of his clothing. Ahead of him, leaning on an upright post, Parker Travis stood looking straight out over the Laramie Plains.
Silence came; the grimy men began coming around into Laramie’s roadway. Some of them trooped into the saloon to look upon the man lying there with pink water around him. Some showed more interest in the heavy, soaked leather saddlebags lying beside Charley Swindin. Lew had put a man to guarding those gold-filled saddlebags with a rifle, but no one was guarding Charley Swindin. No one had to; he wasn’t moving; his eyes were closed, and only the faintest flutter of a sodden shirt front showed that he was even alive.
Parker moved, finally, turned southward, and went tiredly along toward the hotel. Men everywhere ahead had spread the news. As he went along, people showed him admiring faces. He ignored them; he was asking himself the same question over and over again: Why did I fire low? Why didn’t I kill him when he was mine?
At the hotel he turned in, paused at the bottom of the stairs, looking upward, thinking how Hub would look his reproach at what Parker would tell him—that he hadn’t killed Swindin, after all, that he didn’t know why he hadn’t—he just hadn’t.
He climbed those stairs like an old, weary man. Behind him the hotel lobby filled with people gazing after him. At the landing he turned, ran a hand along the banister, and went heavily to the door of Wheaton’s room. It opened before he raised his hand. Amy was there, white down around the mouth but darkly liquid in her steady regard of him. She put out a hand, drew him in, and closed the door. She leaned upon it, watching Parker and Hub exchange their masculine stare.
“All over?” asked Hub.
“Yes.”