He looked up at the rigidly seated driver he'd seen briefly up in the high country two years before. It might have been this man who had taken the message to Joe Stovers and caused Kerrigan's arrest. His left hand slid inside his unbuttoned shirt and a six-shooter with a long thin barrel sailed through the air. It landed at Stubb Holiday's booted feet, and the man's sudden wooden look indicated that he knew the gun and was wondering if the owner was still on his own feet.
Kerrigan said quietly, 'Harrow already knows it by now, Holiday, but you tell him I said Jeb Donnelly didn't quite make it this morning, and your friend Saunders won't get a second chance. Tell him I'll be along up in the high country one of these days. He'll know I'm there when he sees the smoke.'
'What smoke?' grunted the driver, and sawed at the restive mouths of the six sleek blacks. 'What are you talkin' about?'
'That twenty-room house he built with my money,' snapped Kerrigan. 'I'm going to burn Dalyville and give the ashes back to the Apaches.'
The rain-swollen Gila River branched off across the desert and Kerrigan made his way along its course, heading toward the distant Salt River Valley and Phoenix. No sign of pursuit showed up in the burning distance behind, and he guessed that Jeb Donnelly had spent most of a bad morning in a doctor's office having his shattered jaw attended to and thus was in no condition to ride. A thought that gave Kerrigan a measure of ironical satisfaction inasmuch as he himself was in little better shape.
It enabled him to take his time, to let the pain gradually ooze its way out of his bruised arm. By day he grazed the red horse and slept well hidden out of the heat from now hellishly hot sun coming after the rains. By moonlight he moved on at a leisurely pace, the impatience that once had gripped him forgotten; the combination of thought and physical movement away from the confinement in prison a calming antidote for what had been.
One morning at ten, five days after leaving Yuma, Lew Kerrigan rode at a jog trot down one of the dusty streets of Phoenix and found a livery. He felt no sense of danger here, although Harrow undoubtedly had come through ahead in his red coach.
Just what had happened between him and Carlotta Wilkerson after she returned to the hotel in Yuma would be interesting to know. But in all probability Tom Harrow had twisted her meeting with Kerrigan into something insidious, and in all likelihood the woman, sensing Kerrigan's danger to her financial security, probably hated him the more for what he was going to do.
Kerrigan shrugged away the thought and forgot it. She had been given blunt intimation of the kind of man Harrow really was. Any future decision she made was no concern of Lew Kerrigan's, he told himself.
But he still hoped, instinctively, that some womanly intuition would cause her to postpone becoming Mrs. Harrow.
He slept a few hours, bathed and shaved, and then went out to see if a drink still revolted his sense of taste. Strangely enough, he felt no fear where the law was concerned. Jeb Donnelly would think Kerrigan too cautious to enter a town like Phoenix, and probably hadn't sent word ahead to the law.
Or was it more likely that Harrow, desperate as he was, still hoped that something could be done up north and had stayed the marshal's hand?
At five that afternoon Kerrigan came out of a Chinese grocery store with more of the food that was surging new strength back into his emaciated body. Mormon honey and dried fruits. Canned milk and plenty of sugar. His clothes were new and clean, his brown hair neatly cut, the strings of tension loose now after five nights and two hundred miles of riding.
Wood Smith's brutal clubbing of his arm and Jeb Donnelly's effort at mayhem already were easing themselves out of his mind, replaced by thoughts of the job that had to be done.
Kerrigan moved on along the wide boardwalk carrying his purchases. Back to Big Red busily graining more copper along his sleek belly in a livery-stable stall. Back to a horse that would take him across the desert mesa and on into the high country where trees were green all the time and the grass cool beneath them all summer. Back to a horse that could outrun danger and, if necessary, carry him all the way back to Texas.
Across the width of the dusty side street the slat swing doors of a small saloon swung wide and two men stepped through. One of them was dirty bearded and wearing an outdated buckskin shirt much too hot for Arizona summer weather; a man who looked half desert rat, half mountain hunter.
But it was the second man, a much younger man, upon whom Kerrigan riveted his attention. This was the rider who had come into the corral at the hotel at Yuma and asked LeRoy, 'He going with us to California?' The one supposedly ordered to go relieve 'Old Cap' of some supposed horses.
They stopped and stared, and Kerrigan felt the chill take a hard grip on his belly. He shifted the food package to his left armpit, right hand dropping down within reach of the worn butt of the .44. But the younger man grabbed the older one by a shoulder and spun him back through the slat swing doors, and Kerrigan hurried on at a faster walk.
The next afternoon he saw them following him.
Five men and a pack mule. Five indistinct shapes in the shimmering heat waves back there when he first spotted them. He could even make out the shape of Hannifer LeRoy's odd hat.
'Well, I'll be damned!' Kerrigan ejaculated softly, and began to laugh, the first time that kind of sound had come from his lips in a long time. Quite a few things suddenly were clear to him.
You want to buy a horse, Mr. Kerrigan. My name is Hannifer LeRoy and I've got some. Forty-six of the best. They're on pasture south of town—in case Ace Saunders or Jeb Donnelly fails to make the kill. Right along the old Colorado's muddy waters. On the bank where right below it the deep swirl pools roil around and gouge out deep holes in the sandy bottom. Where a man goes around and around and around for about five days, sometimes standing upright, until gas forms in his swollen intestines and brings him to the surface at last and the waters float him on into Old Mexico twenty-six miles away. You haven't got that much time? Very well, Mr. Kerrigan. Take this red horse and cross the Colorado and wait for me. Wait until I can come over with Ace and Old Cap and maybe Jeb Donnelly…
Kerrigan looked back again. The shimmering heat waves had broken briefly and he saw the white bandage swathing the lower part of Donnelly's face. Yuma's marshal, it appeared, had changed jobs. Beside Donnelly rode LeRoy, as well as the man who'd come into the hotel corral and later appeared in the doorway of the side street saloon in Phoenix. Behind them, Ace Saunders and the man referred to as 'Old Cap.'
He looked ahead at some lava beds beginning to crop up in the distance; black and ugly on the sandy floor of the desert.
'I suppose,' Kerrigan informed the big red horse, 'that after Jeb made his try and failed, LeRoy figured he'd get you back, either across the river in California or at some later place up here.'
He reached the black lava beds that lay like lymphatic scabs from volcanic eruptions of untold millions of years before, now radiating heat waves that distorted the vision. He did not go through, as those patiently biding their time probably expected of him. At the south edge of the beds he swung west and started around.
Close to them he felt the heat blasts. Big Red's sweat glands began to work overtime to cool him around neck and flanks. The sun was like a blowtorch upon Kerrigan's shoulders and neck and he shifted the bandanna at his throat and pulled his hatbrim farther down over squinting eyes. He pushed the big horse on around the edge of the black hell and then resumed his course northward. The heat waves threw up a wall of shimmering glass and the five men and six animals disappeared into the center of a cool lake mirage with green trees around the edges.
Only then did Kerrigan turn the horse in among the hellish heat of the rocks and start back to where his trail had ended at the south edge of the lava beds.
He let the reins trail, pulled the heavy .45-90 repeater from the thorn-scuffed scabbard, made sure of the long length of bright brass in the firing chamber, and closed the breech of the ugly-snouted weapon.
He crept back a few yards to a rocky vantage point and settled down to wait. Now let them come, damn them, he thought grimly. A man could only be pushed so often—and he was tired of being pushed.
