The Kid nodded slightly. “What happened after I took my
“Nothin’ much. Tallant was fixin’ to ride out when old Bob, the hostler, jumped him an’ tried to pull him off his horse. He shot the old boy dead.”
There was an awkward moment of silence as each man, in his own way, said a rough, embarrassed prayer for the drunkard. Dugan cleared his throat loudly. “After I got your note about Tallant and Beale wantin’ to kill the horse, I loped down there an’ got there just as Bob made his play. I could dimly see you kneelin’ in the back o’ the barn, near Beale’s body. Les Tallant threw down on me, an’ I shot him out o’ the saddle. That’s all there was to it.”
The Kid’s eyes strayed around the room again and came up suddenly, wide and incredulous. Toma Dodge was sitting, small and fragile, white-faced and big-eyed, near Dugan’s desk. The Kid swallowed a couple of times quickly and felt the blood rushing into his face. Dugan cast a quick, furtive look at the two of them, arose, coughed, and ambled toward the door. When he was at the opening, he turned slowly.
“Take it easy, Kid. You got a bad notch in the side. Three inches more to the left and you’d’ve been makin’ the long march with Beale.” He let his eyes wander aimlessly to Toma, small and slightly flushed, in the old cane- backed chair. “Sorta look after him for a spell, will you, Toma? I got to go…uh…uptown for a few minutes.” Dugan closed the door softly behind him and strolled slowly down the roadway toward the silent, gloomy maw of the livery barn.
“Miss Dodge, I…”
“Toma.”
“Uh, yeah. Toma, I reckon we figured this thing out pretty well, at that, didn’t we?”
“Yes.” Her lips quivered for a moment and the reserve melted away. “Oh, Kid I’m so sorry I misjudged you.” She left the chair and went up closer to the improvised cot. The Kid smiled up at her and the faint little wistful smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
“ ‘To a man from a cesspool, the gutter is heaven,’” he quoted softly.
There were misty tears in her violet eyes. She bent down swiftly and her warm, moist lips clung to his for a tremulous moment, then she arose and turned away. He recovered from his startled attitude as she reached the door.
“Toma?”
“Yes?”
“Did you do that because I’m hurt an’ you feel sorry for me?”
“No.”
His head came off the pallet. “Then I’ll be ridin’ out to the D-Back-To-Back in a day or two.”
She went through the door with a high blush on her face, but there was also a demure flash of affection in her eyes and the answer came back softly to the Kid. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
Laramie lay in its breathless heat and the plains lay brown to their distant ending against blueglazed mountains. Frank Travis had crossed the Laramie Plains, that immense and seemingly endless stretch of flatland running from east to west and from the mountains southward down into Colorado, buckling near Tie Siding and Virginia Dale into parks and forests and rocky breaks.
His crossing had one purpose. It had to have; no one in their right mind crossed the Laramie Plains in full summer unless they had a sound reason for doing so. At times that searing scorch was unbearable even to the Indians who’d been on the plains for thousands of years and should have therefore been inured to summer heat.
The heat bothered him, but Frank was a native Arizonan. He’d lived among some of the most adroit people in the world where heat was concerned—Mexicans. He’d learned as a little boy how to relax, how to avoid unnecessary exertion and movement, how to keep a little round stone in his mouth to promote saliva flow, and, finally, he had learned the main secret of living with heat—think about it as little as possible and never be angry about it.
That was the way he appeared over the Laramie Plains, slouched in the saddle, philosophically accepting discomfort, patiently awaiting dusk, the earth’s ultimate cooling, and his arrival in the farahead, shimmering village of Laramie.
That was the way the posse found him as they swept up over the shimmering horizon, spied that solitary figure passing steadily along, and rushed at him all in a body, thirty of them, every one a hard man, every one of them armed with a six-gun and carbine, each sun-layered face bleak with cold wrath and oily with perspiration.
Frank saw them coming. He considered their numbers and also the bunched-up way they were riding, and initially these things did not disturb him. But when he saw evil sun glare reflecting off armament, saw the lead horseman swing abruptly toward him and boot his beast over into a long lope, Frank felt sudden concern. He had no idea this was a posse under Sheriff Ken Wheaton; he saw no badge at that distance.
But Arizona or Wyoming, or almost anywhere else for that matter west of the Missouri River, when a traveler saw a hard-riding mob of heavily armed horsemen coming purposefully and grimly toward him, he did not ordinarily accept those odds with equanimity, and neither did Frank Travis. He had come a long way, his horse was heat- wilted, and to race in that dancing heat was suicidal, but Frank Travis accepted what he considered the inevitability of this, rowelled his astonished horse, and it plunged wildly around and went in headlong flight over the westward plain.
As soon as Frank turned tail and raced away, those oncoming riders raised a high yell. Two of them fired guns but the distance was too great. Still, those shots confirmed Frank in the suspicion that he was being pursued by one of the numerous outlaw gangs for which this north country was notorious.
He didn’t like doing it, but he hooked his horse again. The animal was a thoroughbred, Frank’s pride and his joy. His brother had given it to him two years earlier on Frank’s twenty-first birthday. A fast horse even more than a fast gun was a man’s life insurance in the West. Frank’s beast responded to this second spurring with an additional bunt of speed. He was spending his reserve strength rapidly now, but his heart was strong. He swept along in a belly-down run for two scalding miles, then began to slacken, great lungs working like bellows, red inside nostril lining extended its full limit as he sucked avidly for more of the hot, thin, high country air.
Frank drew him in a little. He twisted to look back. All but three of his pursuers had fallen out of the race. Those three, wise in the ways of the summertime plains, were not closing the distance between themselves and Frank; they were instead loping slowly along keeping him well in sight. This was an old Indian trick. If a pursuer could not run down his prey, he walked it down, by persistence, by going without food or water or rest. The pursuer would doggedly keep at it until he overtook his enemy.
Frank recognized what those men were doing. He drew the thoroughbred down to an alternating slow lope and fast walk. Sweat darkened the horse’s satiny hide to a rich glossy wetness. He rolled the cricket and fought the bit wishing to run again; Frank held him down.
Those three grim horsemen far back kept at it. As the sun glided off center, they loped, then walked. They sometimes stole a march on Frank by trotting. But this was a gait few Westerners ever used and Frank’s pursuers did not trot often, which in the end prolonged the conclusion of this silent, bizarre pursuit.
From time to time Frank saw a few of those other riders come up from farther back, but generally these other posse men had been outdistanced. Some, in fact, had abandoned the chase in discomfort and disgust and had put about, heading for the village that was no longer in sight.
He did not know this country at all, yet he was instinctively and acutely conscious that unless and until he
