over the crest, but still hidden in the grass.
He’d been right. There were three men just climbing out of a light guncarrier.
Well, that’s what our grandparents were, he thought. Looters. He slipped the safety. And our parents had a code. And, now his brothers had a community. But I’ve been living a way all my life, and I guess I’ve got integrity.
He fired, and one of the men slapped his stomach and fell.
The other two dove apart, their own rifles in their hands. Cot laughed and threw dirt into their faces with a pair of shots. One of them bucked his shoulders upward involuntarily, as the dirt flew into his eyes. Cot fired again, and the shoulders slumped. Thanks for a trick, Jeff.
The other man fired back—using half a clip to cut the grass a foot to Cot’s right. Cot dropped back below the crest, rolled, and came up again, ten feet from where he had been.
Down by the house, the remaining man moved. Cot put a bullet an inch above his head.
He had about ten minutes. Well, if he kept the man pinned down, the first salvo would do as thorough a job as any carbine shot.
The man moved again—a little desperately this time—and Cot tugged at his jacket with a snap shot.
Five minutes, and the man moved again. He was shouting something. Cot turned his ear forward to kill the hum of the breeze, but couldn’t make out the words. He pinned the man down again.
When he had a minute of life left, the man tried to run for it. He sprang up suddenly, running away from the weapons carrier, and Cot missed him for that reason. When the man cut back, he shot him through the leg.
Damn! Jeff would have done better than that!
The man was crawling for the carrier.
Over at the Kittredges, the first muzzle-flashes flared, and the thud of guns rolled over the hills.
Cot put a bullet through the crawling man’s head. He’d been right. The Kittredges’ gunnery was poor. The first salvo landed a hundred yards over—on the crest of the ridge where he was standing with his rifle in his hand.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I
Jeff Garvin moved through the loosened window like a darker shadow in the night, and his feet made no sound as he touched the floor. He grinned quietly as he closed the window behind him and adjusted his eyesight with near- animal ease to peer at the darkness of the room.
He was in the dining room. He took quick stock of the doorways and chose the one most likely to lead to the kitchen. He moved toward it without hesitation, holding his rifle with his right forefinger on the trigger while he nudged the door gently open. He’d been right—it was the kitchen, and he stepped noiselessly into it.
He located a storage cabinet, and began to fill his pack, grimacing because most of the food was home- canned in glass jars. He’d have to be careful with those, if he got in a fight. He packed them as carefully as possible, stopping to listen carefully after each barely audible tink! of their touching. When he had a full load, he slipped the pack onto his shoulders and picked up his rifle again. He crossed the kitchen, opened the door, and stepped back out into the dining room.
“Whoa, feller,” the voice said, and the rifle was jerked out of his hand. He saw the glint of faint light on the barrel of a shotgun, and stopped still, the spring of his muscles sagging into dissolution. He squinted at the shadowy figure, feeling a despair wash through him, and knew that was it, this was the end, a thousand miles and five years away from home. He had fought and tracked his way this far, over the cold plains and through the long nights, with men against him all the way, and this was where he had finally come to the end of it all.
A girl had caught him. A girl with a shotgun. He grinned at the thought and let her see the grin where she sat in the semicircle of people who were looking at him. He liked the way she didn’t try to avoid it, but kept looking at him—looking, not staring the way the rest of the women were doing at the wild outlaw.
“What’s your name, mac?” the man who seemed to be running things asked.
“Jeff Cottrell,” he said with the right amount of hesitation. He’d found out long ago that Garvin wasn’t a popular name in some places. He had no idea if it was the same way here, but there was no use taking chances with a dull knife or a slow fire.
“What were you doing in the Boston house?”
He looked at the man expressionlessly, wondering what sort of local quirk of justice demanded particulars of a man about to be executed out of hand.
“Stocking up,” he said, willing enough to play along.
The man nodded. “Been out on the plains a long time?”
That was a trick one. Nobody could do it very long without raiding a lot of towns, and a man who raided a lot of towns was bound to run into times when he didn’t come and go without leaving some of the citizenry bleeding. On the other hand, if he gave them some ridiculously short figure, they’d simply lose patience with him and get it over with now.
“Being cagey about it, huh?” the man said. “All right, we’ll let that one go.” He didn’t seem particularly disturbed.
“How many people have you killed?”
“My share,” he answered instantly. It was a foregone conclusion anyway.
The man took it without any surprise, and started another question, but the girl cut him off.
“Don’t see any point to carrying this business on any longer,” she said, standing up.
Whew! I didn’t think it’d be you that yelled for blood first, Jeff thought.
“Maybe you’re right, Pat,” the man admitted. He turned to the rest of the crowd—the town’s entire adult population, probably—and directed his next question at them. “How do you people feel about it?”
There was a scattering of nods, and a few people said “Pat’s right,” or things to the same effect. Jeff braced himself.
The man turned around and looked at him. “We’ve got a proposition.”
Jeff felt the air rush out of his chest. “You’ve got a what,” he asked completely astonished.
The man smiled tightly. “This is something we decided on a while ago. This is a farming town,” he explained. “Every one of us has enough to keep him busy all day and half the night. We can’t keep up any sort of adequate guard against people like you; and people like you are a nuisance. So we’ve got a standing offer to every one of you we catch that doesn’t flunk the little oral examination. Goes like this: we’ll let you draw food and clothing from the town supplies and give you a place to stay. In return, you keep the neighborhood cleaned out of light- fingered tramps like yourself.”
“I’ll take it,” Jeff said.
The man held up his hand. “Let’s not get hasty, feller. There’s a catch, far as you’re concerned. One of us goes with you everywhere you go around town. He carries a gun. You don’t. When you go out hunting, we take shifts and send two people with you. You get your rifle outside the town limits, and turn it back in before you get inside ’em again. If we catch you heading out, we shoot you down as a sort of generalized favor to all the other towns around here.”
“I’ll still take it.”
“Funny,” the man said, “they all do, at first.” There was a ripple of cold grins through the crowd, and Jeff didn’t waste a thought on wondering why the position was currently empty.
