“What can I do for you, Mr. Cord? My teller said it had something to do with the cow business.”
“Yes,” Cord said.
“What sort of cow business?”
“The kind of business you hired Will Staley for.”
“Oh,” Williams said. He drummed his fingers on the desk for a moment or two. “I see. So tell me, Mr. Cord, why didn’t Mr. Staley come to discuss this?”
“He didn’t come ’cause he’s dead.”
“Dead?” Williams asked, sitting back in his chair, surprised by the statement.
“Yeah, him and five others.”
“What happened?”
“We ran into a hornets’ nest, that’s what happened.”
“Am I to understand that you did not get the herd?”
“You ain’t been listenin’ to nothin’ I’ve said, have you?” Cord asked. “No, we didn’t get the herd. We’re damn lucky they didn’t kill all of us.”
“I see,” Williams said. “What am I to do now?”
“I don’t care what you do now. All I care about is gettin’ the money.”
“What money would that be?”
“The money Staley was supposed to pay us.”
Williams’s smile was without mirth. “Why, Mr. Cord, you don’t really think I’m going to pay you for failure, do you?”
“There wasn’t nothin’ said about failure. Only thing Staley said was that he would pay us to go with him. Besides, you set us up, you son of a bitch. You didn’t tell us we was goin’ to run into an army.”
“When I pay to have something done, how it is done is none of my business,” Williams said.
“Yeah, well, that’s just it. I went with him, and now I want my pay.”
“And if I refuse?”
“I’ll go to the sheriff and tell him what you had planned,” Cord said.
Williams stroked his chin. “You wouldn’t do that. You would be incriminating yourself.”
“Hell, I don’t care nothin’ about that. I’ve been in prison before, wouldn’t bother me none to go back in. But a highfalutin fella like yourself? You’d have a real hard time in prison.”
“How much did Staley say he would pay you?”
“Two hun…uh, five hundred dollars,” Cord said.
“Five hundred dollars is a lot of money.”
“Yeah. But that’s what he said he would pay us.”
“Us?”
“I’ll be splitting the money with the others.”
“I see,” Williams said. He nodded. “All right, I suppose what’s right is right. I’ll give you the money.”
“I thought you might see it my way,” Cord said with a self-satisfied smile.
Williams opened the middle drawer of his desk, reached his hand in, wrapped his fingers around the butt of a Colt .44, then pulled the gun out.
“What?” Cord asked, surprised by sudden appearance of the gun. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll not be blackmailed,” Williams said, pulling the trigger.
The sound of the gunshot was exceptionally loud. The bullet caught Cord in the heart, and though he lived long enough to slap his hand over the wound in his chest, he was dead by the time his body hit the floor.
“Mr. Gilbert! Mr. Gilbert, come in here quickly!” Williams shouted.
Gilbert, the teller who had come in earlier, now came running into the room carrying a poker over his head. Williams was standing over Cord’s body, holding a smoking pistol in his hand.
“Mr. Williams, what happened, sir?” Gilbert asked.
“I don’t know,” Williams answered, his face registering shock. “This man came in here and threatened to hold up the bank. I tried to talk him out of it, but he was quite obdurate. Then, it all happened so quickly. One minute I was arguing with him and the next minute”—Williams held up the pistol—“I was holding a smoking pistol and he was lying on the floor.”
“Yes, well, don’t worry, Mr. Williams,” Gilbert said. “You did the right thing. A bank robber like that should be shot.”
Chapter Twenty-one
