from the compact packet of violent death. “So you were going to blow up the derrick,” he said.
“You're wrong. I
Grant thought that he was beginning to understand, and now his voice was edged with bitterness. “So you were working for Farley all along! Even when you brought us the workers. When you hired on yourself. You were doing it for Farley, seeing to it that the Mullers lost their lease.”
The runner's mouth twisted with sudden hatred. “I wouldn't spit on Farley! What I do, I do for myself.” Then he smiled again, as suddenly and coldly as before. “You don't understand that, do you, Grant? A saddle bum like you, a hard-scrabble farmer—you wouldn't know about pride, would you? Pride is the most important thing in the world to some men.”
Like Dagget, Grant found it hard to believe that a man could do what Valois had done for any reason other than greed. But the truth was in Valois' eyes. If he had never told the truth before, he was telling it now.
“I see,” Grant said heavily. “But is pride worth dying for?”
“Yes.”
He didn't know exactly why, but he did know, instinctively, that now was the time to bring Valois to a test. And he said tensely, “All right, drop the dynamite, Valois. Throw it at me—now—before I take it away from you.”
The runner's eyes widened as Grant took one step forward. Then another. He drew his arm back and shouted, “I'll do it!” His forehead glistened with the effort, but something inside him would not let him loosen his deathlike grip on the dynamite. He whirled away and grabbed frantically for his revolver.
Grant shouted hoarsely, but he was already too late, for there was a kind of insane rage in the runner's eyes, and as the muzzle cleared his waistband, Grant set himself grimly and fired.
The tremendous impact of the bullet slammed Valois against the clay wall of the cellar, grasping death in both hands. He stared blankly, letting the .45 slip slowly from his fingers and fall to the ground. Grant stood frozen, knowing that he could do nothing, watching with a kind of terrible fascination as the runner's fingers began to loosen on the explosive.
Slowly, almost gracefully, Valois began to fall, his glazed eyes fixed on the dynamite, and in some fragmentary way he seemed to sense and fear the packet's violent potential. And even as he fell to the ground himself, he hugged the small bundle close to his body, taking the shock of the fall on his shoulder.
Grant felt that all the strength had been sapped from him; he was an old man, his knees weak. He took one deep breath and thought bleakly of what Dagget had said about love and hate, but he guessed that he would never understand completely.
He grasped the edge of the derrick floor and with the last of his strength climbed out of the cellar. As if from a great distance he could hear the crunch of several boots on the packed snow, and the sound of excited voices, mellow and bell-like in the dazzling winter morning.
At last he became aware of the warm flow along his side and the numbness of his shoulder, and wondered vacantly why there was no pain. He knew in an abstract way that his wound had opened under Dagget's bandage and that blood and life were running out of him, but now even that seemed very unimportant.
He took one reckless step from the derrick floor and sprawled face down in the soft snow—and that was the last he remembered for a long time.
Shortly after noon that day four men brought Jim Dagget into Doc Lewellen's sickroom on a stretcher made of saddle blankets and trimmed saplings. As always, the marshal seethed in his perpetual anger, roundly cursing the stretcher bearers for their clumsiness and old Lewellen for reeking sourly of rotgut whisky. But when the doc ripped the trouser leg up past the knee and began probing the humped discolored flesh around the broken bone, Dagget fell abruptly into perverse silence. He did not make a sound as Lewellen gleefully sawed off his boot with a bloodstained scalpel, but when the old man grasped the leg with both hands and rasped together the ragged ends of bone, great beads of sweat rolled down the marshal's rock-hard face.
A few feet away Grant watched the operation from one of Lewellen's sagging army cots. After Lewellen had set and bound the leg in packing-crate splints, Dagget said hoarsely, “Go find Ben Farley. Tell him I want to see him. Now.”
The old doctor scowled, but he didn't have the spirit to fight the fire in Dagget's eyes. At last he nodded, pulled on his soiled swallowtail coat, and went out. Only after Lewellen was out of the room did the marshal permit himself to look at Grant on the nearby cot.
“So you had to come back!” he said, almost snarling.
Grant smiled. “Yes, I came back.”
Dagget pulled himself up on one elbow, breathing hard with the effort. Angry words were on the tip of his tongue, but in a strange, weary gesture he choked them down again and lay back on the cot, his eyes closed. “They say you told them where to find me.”
Grant nodded but said nothing.
“And they say you killed Turk Valois.”
“Not until he started his draw. He was setting dynamite to the legs of the derrick—he was going to blow it up.”
The marshal breathed heavily but said nothing more for a long time. At last old Lewellen returned, tramping into the sickroom with the blunt, scowling figure of Ben Farley in his wake. Slowly, Dagget opened his eyes and gazed flatly at the oilman's face.
“Look here,” Ben started harshly, “I don't know what you've got in mind, Dagget, but you can't tie me to any of this trouble!”
“Not even the shooting at the railroad station?” the marshal asked, almost gently. But he went on before Farley could reply. “I didn't call you here to tie you with any of the past trouble; it's the future I'm thinking about now. How much time have the Mullers got before your top lease goes into effect?”
The oilman's frown deepened. “Four days. What're you getting at, Dagget?”
But the marshal turned to Grant this time. “What kind of shape is the rig in?”
“It's ready to spud in,” Grant said carefully, “except to raising the crown pulley.”
The marshal nodded and spoke quietly, almost to himself. “That's no more than a day's job, so the Mullers should get spudded in in plenty of time to hold their lease, unless”—and lie looked directly at Farley—“unless something happens.”
Farley's eyes narrowed. “A lot of things can happen on an oil rig—sometimes at the last minute.”
Dagget's mouth curved slightly, but the expression was diluted with fatigue, the smile betraying only a small part of its old savagery. “Nothing else is going to happen at the Muller rig,” he said flatly. “Turk Valois is dead. Kirk Lloyd's dead. Grant's under arrest. So that leaves only you, Farley, if anything happens...”
The oilman's face burned a deep red. “Don't threaten me, Dagget!”
“I'm not threatening,” the marshal put in quietly. “If anything else happens on that lease I'll see you in prison, even if I have to he under oath in federal court to do it.” He gazed expressionlessly at Farley, then closed his eyes, sighing. “That's all I've got to say. Now get out.”
After Farley had gone, after the storm clouds began to recede with the sound of the oilman's angry tramping on the sickroom stairs, Dagget opened his bloodshot eyes again and gazed at Grant. “One day soon,” he said vacantly, “maybe before we get out of this sickroom, the president will take up his pen and sign the paper that will make Oklahoma a state. Then every town and county will have its own elected law; the responsibility will be on their shoulders then—and I can't say I'm sorry.”
He grinned faintly at the puzzled expression in Grant's face. “I'm just a man, after all. Does that surprise you?”
But Grant's mind had drifted on past the marshal to other things, and a core of hardness grew inside him as he said, “I guess nothing will ever surprise me again.”
“Valois?” Dagget said quietly. “A lawman is supposed to get used to such things, but he never does. I guess Turk was crazy about the Muller girl, after all.” And he blinked, thinking back on what he had said. “Yes, that's the word for it. Crazy. He was a proud man and couldn't stand failure. He couldn't stand the idea that people were laughing at him because a girl had thrown him over. So he had to hit back. Somehow, he had to bring Rhea down to his own level—he had to ruin her, the way she had ruined him—I can imagine just how Turk must have had it figured.”
