He reached out with his right hand and found a small stone the size of his fist. His rage lay tight within him like a coiled steel spring, and he thought, I hope Dunc's ready. I hope he doesn't shoot me in the back.
Then he flipped the stone over to his right and suddenly the darkness was ripped and torn by gunfire. Owen smiled bitterly, spotting the two guns and the boulder, and then the noise was compounded by the bellowing of Dunc Lester's shotgun, and then by the boy's revolver. In that brief interval of quiet, before Dunc could start up again, Owen leaped to his feet and rushed the boulder recklessly.
To make things worse, the moon chose that particular moment to appear again, and Owen experienced the brief terror of a man racing naked through a nightmare. But perhaps, after all, the moon was the thing that saved him. Dunc Lester held his fire and Owen crashed through the brush with all the noise of a range cow in stampede.
The sudden noise and his abrupt appearance in white moonlight must have startled the two gunmen for just an instant, and an instant was all that Owen asked for. Suddenly before him loomed the flushed, youngish face of one of the gang members. He's just a kid, Owen thought. But there was no time to think of it further. Surprised, the young man curled back his lips in rage and swung his heavy saddle gun to face the charge.
He did not get to complete the turn. Owen triggered Deland's carbine once, and the face fell away.
Another man appeared from behind the boulder, and this one was also young and angry, and his hair was the color of burnished copper. Owen knew that this must be Wes Longstreet, for his pale blue eyes held the bitterness of great age, although his body was young and tough.
Snarling, the young hothead fired once with a revolver, and the heavy slug smashed sickeningly against the boulder. With elaborate deliberateness that came of long experience in deadly matters, Owen let Wes have the first wild shot, and then he gently squeezed the grip of the carbine, firing from the hip, but carefully, and he knew that it was over.
As it sometimes happened, even among older and more experienced men than Owen Toller, a sickness rose up inside him and left him weak and sweating. It was all over. Only the echoes of the shooting remained in the hills. Owen let himself sag against the cold bulk of stone and wondered vacantly how long it had been since he was last forced to kill a man. This was something a man never got used to.
“Marshal!” Dunc Lester called, his voice high-pitched and excited.
“Yes,” Owen answered wearily.
“Are you all right?”
Dunc, holding his shotgun across his chest, came crashing through the waist-high growth of brush. He stared at Owen as though he had never see him before. He looked down at one of the sprawled bodies.
“Wes Longstreet,” he said with a touch of awe. “Wes was a quick man with a gun.”
“But excitable,” Owen said flatly.
Together they left the two bodies and found the third several yards down the slope, this one riddled with buckshot from Dunc's shotgun. “Homer Clinkscale,” Dunc said.
He walked a little more heavily and his shoulders were not quite so straight as they went back to see about Arch Deland.
The old deputy lay exactly as Owen had put him, his faded eyes gazing blankly at the dark underbellies of the flying clouds. “It's over?” he asked weakly.
“Yes,” Owen said.
Deland smiled. “You haven't lost your touch, Owen.” The ex-marshal and the hill boy knelt beside the deputy. Death stared frankly and unafraid from Deland's old eyes. Owen said, “Dunc, break open the packs and tie the tarps together for a sling stretcher. I'll cut some poles.” A kind of vague outrage appeared on the deputy's face.
“Don't be a fool, Owen!” His voice was little more than a whisper. “I'm done for and you know it.” With great effort he moved one hand and let it fall across his chest. Dunc got up and began to open the packs.
Deland said, “Get out of here, Owen, you and the boy. Ike will have the gang on top of you in a matter of minutes.”
“He's got no shooting to guide him now. He can't find us in the dark.”
“He'll find you,” he said, as though this were the one ling in the world that he was sure of.
Owen wouldn't let himself think of that. For the moment he dismissed Ike Brunner from his mind and thought only of his old friend. I shouldn't have let him come! he accused himself. But it was too late for accusations; somehow they had to get Arch to a place where they could care for him. Slowly he got to his feet and tried to establish their position in his mind. Once he had known these hills as well as an outsider could ever know them... but that was five years ago. The few old-timers—men like Mort Stringer, whom he might have counted on—were now gone from this country or dead.
“Dunc,” he said at last, “don't you have any friends you can trust?”
Owen could feel the bitterness of the boy's grin. “I guess Gabe Tanis was the closest friend I had.”
“How about Manley Cooper, the man whose place was burned out? He sure can't have much love for the Brunners. Do you think he'd help us?”
“Maybe, if we could find him. But he's probably headed toward Arkansas with his family by this time.” Then the boy frowned, worrying at the beginning of a thought. “I remember,” he said, “that old Cooper had a brother down south of here.”
“Do you think he'd put us up until Arch gets better?”
Dunc shrugged. “That depends on how strong he stands with Ike. It wouldn't hurt to try, though. We have to head in that direction anyway, unless you want to go right over the top of Killer Ridge.”
It seemed as though a shell of numbness had closed around Owen's brain. He had lost all interest in Ike Brunner; he no longer remembered the principles that had driven him into these hills in search of a killer. He wanted to forget that they had been important to him.
