“A man’d have to have a good reason for riding in weather like this,” commented Parker. “Like runnin’ from the law or trying to find water.”
Fleharty nodded. Parker saw a conversational germ take root in Johnny’s mind. “Water’s no problem on the Laramie Plains. We got plenty of water. But runnin’ from the law, now that’s something else again. I expect you saw in the papers where our express office was robbed a few weeks back.”
Parker started to murmur something, but Johnny, who was quite a talker, pushed right on over this little fading sound.
“I was out with that posse, mister. It was at least a hundred and fifty in the shade.” Johnny grinned. “An’ no shade.”
“Hundred and twenty,” mumbled the drowsy big man down the bar, correcting Fleharty.
“All right, Ace, a hundred and twenty.” Fleharty looked at Parker Travis. “I always say hot is hot. It can be a hundred and twenty or it can be a hundred and fifty…a feller suffers just as much from one as the other.”
The loafing big man down the bar muttered again. “An’ you weren’t with the posse, either. You come later with your buckboard.”
This time Johnny had to work at keeping up his smile. He considered Ace McElhaney for a silent moment, then lifted his shoulders, dropped them, and swung away. “What I was getting at, mister,” he said to Parker. “That feller who robbed the express office run from the law, and, like you said, that’s the only kind of a man who’d ride in weather like this.”
“Seems to me,” Parker drawled, as though making an effort to recall something half forgotten, “you boys got that man.”
Johnny vigorously bobbed his head at this. “Yes, sir. But don’t you know that outlaw was mounted on a thoroughbred horse and he led the posse for darn’ near…How long was it, Ace, before you an’ Charley caught up with him?”
From down the bar that gruff voice came back slurred. “’Bout four hours, I’d say.”
Johnny looked triumphant. “Four hours. How do you like that for ridin’ hard under this damned sun?”
Parker removed his palm from the empty glass and considered the wet ring in his hand. “Put up quite a fight, I heard,” he mumbled without looking at Johnny.
“Like a lion,” agreed Fleharty. “His horse fell in a ’dog hole an’ hurt his leg or maybe the feller’d have got away.”
“Like hell he would have,” growled McElhaney.
Johnny bridled at this. “Anyway, this Travis feller…that was his name…yanked off his saddle and forted up behind it.” Johnny considered the empty glass. “Care for a refill?”
Parker nodded. “And a refill for the big feller down the bar, too,” he said.
Johnny got the beer, placed the glasses in front of McElhaney and Parker Travis, swiped once at the bar automatically with a rag, then said: “He killed Ken Wheaton, our sheriff. Plugged him comin’ in neat as a…”
“He was on the ground, not comin’ in,” contradicted McElhaney again. He drew wearily up off the bar, half turned, and leaned sideways again. “Damn it, Johnny, after all you saw and all you heard, you still can’t get the straight of it. Ken was pressin’ Travis from the north. He’d jump up, run in, drop down to an’ Injun-crawl. That’s what he was doin’ when Travis got up on to one knee, caught Ken plumb in his sights, an’ let him have it.”
Parker turned from a long look at his untouched glass to put a very dry, very steady gaze upon McElhaney. What he saw made no very good impression. Ace had been drinking beer and ale all day, from the loose, oily appearance of his face. His rider’s butternut shirt was salt-stiff and great crescents of sweat darkened each armpit and for halfway down each side. He hadn’t shaved in several days, either, as he returned Parker’s regard.
“You talk like a man who was there,” Parker said.
“I was there. Only three of us was within sight o’ Travis when that big blood bay horse o’ his stepped in the ’dog hole and went down. Ken Wheaton, Charley Swindin, and me.”
“Tell him how it was,” urged Johnny.
“Not a lot to tell,” mumbled McElhaney. “Travis forted up behind his saddle. He had a Winchester. Ken went north, Charley went around behind him, an’ I come in from the south.”
“You killed him?”
McElhaney looked exasperated. “Everyone asks that. There were three of us firin’ at him until Ken got knocked over. After that there was me an’ Charley. But Travis started to fall right after he shot the sheriff. Maybe Charley got him, maybe I did, an’ it’s not plumb impossible that Wheaton’s last slug struck him before he downed Wheaton.” Ace shook his head in a lowered way, looking annoyed. “How the hell do you know in a battle like that who shoots who, I’d like to know, an’ I’ll tell you somethin’ else, too. I’m getting sick an’ tired of talkin’ about it.”
The day after Parker Travis’s arrival in Laramie he rode westerly out upon the plains. He was gone all day, and, when he returned, he had a handful of corroding brass cartridge casings, a piece of cloth from someone’s shirt, and an indelible memory of the place where his brother had died fighting.
He took the things he’d found out there to his room, put them carefully upon a table, dragged a wired- together old chair to the front window, and sat there until night’s cooling breezes came to mingle with the scorched scents of a dead day that lingered on throughout the night.
Later, he cleaned up and went down to the hotel’s dining room, ordered supper, and killed the wait by drinking all the water he could pack under his dehydrated hide. He let all his muscles turn loose; it was a luxuriant feeling after suffering under the scalding sun all day. When his meal came, he realized that he had not been entirely aware of just how hungry he was until he actually smelled the food. Afterward, he evinced no hurry to depart. This was the first decent dining room table he’d pushed his boots under since leaving Arizona weeks earlier. The people coming and going, eating and speaking back and forth, fresh-scrubbed people in clean clothing, lifted his spirits a little. So did the meal. He sat on thoroughly enjoying this foreign atmosphere, was still sitting there, smoking one of those black Mexican cigars with his eyes drawn out narrowly with little shrewd lines around them, when a thick- shouldered, gray-headed man and a lithe tall woman passed up to the dining room entrance, and paused there.
He recognized the man at once as the same person who had been speaking to Laramie’s sheriff in front of the express office the day before. But the rustyhaired, smoky-eyed woman he had never seen before; the high fullness of her upper body sang across that room to him, enlivening his every male instinct. Her wide mouth with its heavy- centered lower lip lay calmly closed, and her dead-level gaze, running over the room, which reminded him of smoke on a winter day, dropped once to his face, passed on, then came slowly back again. Her gaze though was cool, her manner indifferent. She had caught his unwavering regard; now she was returning it.
The older man spoke at her side indicating a table. The spell was broken, the two of them passed along into the room, and Parker removed his Mexican cigar to consider thoughtfully its inch-long dead ash.
The urges of a lone man always moved like the needle of a compass to consideration of a beautiful woman, and afterward, perhaps a lifetime later, if her initial impression was strong enough, he could recall her in each handsome detail exactly as he’d seen her that one time.
Parker, with his back to that couple, did that now, considered Amy Morgan as he’d seen her beside Lew Morgan that little moment in the dining room doorway. Later, when he arose and nearly passed out of the room, he turned suddenly and saw her glance following him. Over all those heads and unnoticed, they looked straight at one another. Amy didn’t look away; she caught his gaze and held it, seemingly appraising him, her face composed, her gaze cool, and after a time her eyes showed a little flare of surprise at his boldness, a little lift of interest.
He turned and walked on out of the room, a big compact man who moved with a rolling gait and a determined, deliberate onward thrust.
Amy touched Lew’s arm. “That man leaving the room…who is he?”
Lew looked up and around, saw only the sweep of wide shoulders, and shook his head. “I don’t know, I’m
