“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.
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.
The Kid’s eyes were accustomed to the gloom by the time he had been in the Dodge house for ten minutes. Still, he felt his way along the wall, careful not to bump into anything. He found a long, cool corridor and went down it. The voices were clearer now and suddenly he heard the voice of Toma Dodge. The words weren’t hard to understand and they sent a chill over the Kid.
“No. You’re both wrong. He told me about the two bullet holes, and I saw them for myself.”
A masculine voice interrupted. “I told you we should’ve finished off the damned horse.”
Another voice, garrulous and sullen, answered: “All right, I was wrong. As soon as she signs the deed, we’ll go back an’ kill the damn’ critter.”
The first voice answered swiftly and there was the sound of a man rising from his chair. “Come on, Toma, we ain’t got all night. Sign it an’ nothin’ll happen to you.”
“And if I don’t?”
There was an unpleasant silence that the Kid felt and understood. He let his hand rest caressingly on his gun butt. “An’ if you don’t, you’ll get what your old man got.”
“You’d do that to a woman?” Her voice was high and incredulous.
Apparently the man nodded because Toma’s voice came again, softly, as though a dismal apathy had swept over her. “You’ll never be able to get away with it.”
“Let us worry about that, Toma. You jus’ sign the deed.”
The Vermilion Kid was as tense as a coiled spring. He was prepared to go into violent action on an instant’s notice. There was a long silence from the other room, then the Kid relaxed and turned away as he heard one of the men sigh and speak: “That’s more like it, Toma. Now you’re as safe as can be.”
The Kid was lowering himself out of the window when Toma answered, but he couldn’t hear her reply. He thought:
The Kid ran in a crouched, zigzag course back to his waiting horse. He slipped off the hobbles after pulling on the split-ear bridle, mounted in a flying leap of frantic hoofbeats, and rode down the night like a wraith of doom, thundering along the trackless range, a faint, ghostly figure bent on an act of justice that would thwart, if timely enough, the evil plans of two ruthless murderers.
Holbrook was noisy in a desultory sort of way. It was a weekday night and the revelers that inundated the town on Saturday night were mostly asleep in the bunkhouses across the cattle country. Even so, however, there was enough noise to mute down the thundering approach of hoofbeats. The raucous screech of a protesting piano, accompanied by a nasal tenor, frequently drowned out by the laughter, shouts, and curses of the saloon clientele, ignored the narrow-eyed rider who swung down inside Tallant’s livery barn, tense and with probing, hard eyes of smoke-gray.
Disturbed in his secret libations, the bleary-eyed hostler came grumblingly out of a dark stall where a mound of unclean hay served as couch, bed, and bar. Looking up when he was close enough to discern the night traveler, the hostler gave a small start and shook his head. “Too late, pardner, too late.”
The Kid stepped forward. “What d’ya mean, too late?”
“Jus’ what I said. Sheriff Dugan’s got a warrant out for you. Dead or alive. You’re a goner.”
The Kid appraised the man. He wondered if the man was too drunk to trust. “Pardner, just how drunk are you, anyway?”
The hostler’s face got a sullen smear of color in his cheeks and his eyes were surly. “Not so drunk that I don’t know a thing or two. Why?”
The Kid jumped in whole hog. He had no other choice. “Because, pardner, a man’s life depends on you tonight.”
“That so? Whose?”
“Mine,
The hostler looked owlishly at the Kid and a stray strand of his old-time decency flared up in a quick, final effort to assert itself. The man’s voice was suddenly very steady and sincere and his jaw shot out a little. “All right, pardner, start at the beginnin’.”
“Tallant an’ Jeff Beale are on their way here to kill Dodge’s horse tonight.”
The hostler made a forlorn little clucking sound in his throat. “An’ the poor critter’s on the mend, too. Damned if I don’t believe he’s goin’ to pull through, after all.”
The Kid let the interruption run its course. “Listen, pardner, I want you to hide my horse in one of those back stalls. Don’t unsaddle or unbridle him. Jus’ close the door to the stall and fork him a little hay so’s he’ll be quiet.”
“That all?”
“No. I want you to take a note over to Sheriff Dugan an’ then stay out of the barn until the shootin’s over. Understand?”
“I reckon. Where’s the note?”
“Take care of my horse an’ I’ll write it.”
The hostler nodded, took the Kid’s reins, and led the black horse off into the dark recesses of the old barn. The Kid tore a handbill of himself off the barn wall, scrabbled a stubby pencil out of a shirt pocket, and wrote frowningly until the sot returned. He folded the coarse paper and handed it to his accomplice. “Pardner, here’s where you’ve got the whip-hand. If you double-cross me an’ hand that there paper to Tallant, Beale…or anyone besides the sheriff…I’m done for.”
The old cowboy pulled himself up in his filthy rags and his watery brown eyes were stern. “I’m a lot of things,
The Kid nodded softly. “I believe you, pardner. On your way.”
The hostler had disappeared down the plank sidewalk and the Kid had hidden himself behind some loose
