LeRoy.
'You thickheaded jackass! We want him alive. He can't find Apache gold for Harrow and the rest of us if he's dead!'
In the silence that followed, the crash of the rifle came again as Lew Kerrigan coolly drove another .45-90 slug of lead squarely into the center of the area where the orange flashes of revolver fire had come from. And there was no startled yell this second time. Nothing but a threshing of legs out there in the brush as a man died, kicking convulsively.
'Hey, LeRoy, you stupid damned fool,' Kerrigan called.
A moment of silence. And finally, 'Well, what do you want?'
'I could have turned on you a dozen times and probably got all of you. I could have killed you with the first shot back there among the lava beds and sent the rest of these curs running.'
'Then, why didn't you? Maybe we could have cut around in front and done some ambushing of our own. But we wanted you alive.'
'I wanted you alive back there, too. To go crawling back to Tom Harrow and tell him I'm still coming.'
There was no answer and he shifted position again. He had no illusions about Jeb Donnelly. In a game like this the ex-marshal, despite his massive bulk, was more dangerous than all the others put together.
Kerrigan spoke quickly, 'If you want to stay alive, clear out of here fast, LeRoy. This is Loco's country and it's a hell of a lot closer to his raw gold supply than you think. If he's within miles of here, and I'm betting he is, he'll be coming to investigate.'
'Better think about your own scalp, mister.'
'Apaches don't scalp. They burn head down from a tree limb. But I spent two years in a cell with one, remember? I've got Yuma Apache moccasins in my pack. Get those fools out of here fast if they don't want a hair singe.'
He slid to his bag and hurriedly slipped on the new moccasins he'd bought for himself in the Big Adobe the morning he'd sent a new pair to Kadoba; hard rawhide soles laced into six-inch buckskin tops and tied above the ankle.*
* Author's note: These low-top moccasins made by Yuma squaws and peddled in town across the river were for poor whites and Mexicans. The regular Apache moccasin usually was near hip length and doubled down for protection against thorns as well as forming makeshift pockets around the leg.
With the reloaded .45-90 repeater in one hand, Lew Kerrigan faded into the brush without a sound to mark his passing.
At daybreak the next morning in Pirtman, Joe Stovers came out of his comfortable log house and went out to grain his two favorite saddle horses. He returned to have his morning shave in a kitchen no woman had set foot in since the death of his wife, many years ago. A round-faced man of fifty-one, light in the saddle for a man of such blocky weight but merciless astride a horse when the exigencies of his office demanded it.
Afterward he strapped on his pistol and rode among the trees to Clara Thompson's place for breakfast. Pirtman's main street was actually a wide former military road almost blocked overhead by the spreading branches of pine and fir and, of course, snowbound in winter.
Some officer on staff in the War Department in Washington, remembering the successes of winter campaigns against the plains Indians when their ponies were thin and hide lodges wrapped in sub-zero weather, had ordered the fort built with the same idea in mind for the Apaches. Indian vedettes had watched with amusement while sweating soldiers hauled logs and rock and built the place, after which they had packed up their families in the late fall and headed for the more pleasant clime of Old Mexico, where food in the form of horses and sheep was to be had for the taking.
Two years afterward Fort Pirtman had been abandoned; but not before Clara Thompson's husband had been brought back to her face down across his horse, hacked to pieces in a vicious fight with Loco's band—using guns Joe Stover believed had been sold to them by Tom Harrow.
Stovers jogged across the clearing in front of Clara's low, spacious place and got down before a porch railing of bark-covered pine poles. It was this same porch from which Lew Kerrigan had shot Havers, the hulking- shouldered night watchman 'marshal,' because the buck-toothed young lout apparently had lost his head over Kitty Anderson and laid rough hands upon her.
Stovers clumped through parlor and the big dining room once filled by stagecoach travelers during the heyday of the boom. He made his way through into the large kitchen. He said, ' 'Mornin', Clara. Coffee ready yet?' and hung his old hat over the back of a rawhide-covered chair.
'You're four minutes late, Joe,' she said, and brought the big coffee pot.
He found himself studying her tall, firm figure with its high rounded bosom and the lift of chin only a proud, lonely woman could have. He noticed that for the first time her hair, not quite blonde and yet not a full brown either, was parted in the center and swept back in soft, fluffy waves. It came to the sheriff with something of surprise that Clara Thompson was astonishingly beautiful this morning.
'Has there been any more news of Lew?' she asked, and placed the sugar bowl within reach. She came back from the stove and sat down with her second cup that morning.
He shook his head gloomily and dropped two lumps into the cup and stirred vigorously. 'Nothing good. The sheriff at Yuma sent me a report by mail that after Lew bashed in their marshal's jaw with a gun barrel, Jeb Donnelly put on a deputy's badge and came after him. Asked me to co-operate.'
'And you will, of course,' she said pointedly.
'Not on account of Lew bustin' a marshal's jaw,' he grunted at her. 'I saw what happened to one prisoner I took down there to the pen and delivered to Mangrum. He was turned over to Jeb, who was working as a guard at the time. As for the sheriff, it was damned strange he wasn't around when Lew was released; everybody in town seemed to know what was going to happen. I figure that Harrow's money bought him, too.'
'Then you won't arrest Lew?'
'I'm going to arrest him on sight, Clara,' he answered uncomfortably. 'Another killing. And if Judge Eaton tries his case again, no power on earth can save him from hanging. Eaton is just as fanatical about trying to emulate the new hanging judge at Fort Smith, Arkansas, Judge Parker, as Buck Havers had stupid ideas of someday becoming another town marshal like Wild Bill Hickock or Wyatt Earp. Any man who quotes the Bible like Judge Eaton does and then sentences some poor devil to get his neck broken from a scaffold is crazy. Why don't you just make sure about Lew by putting a good dose of strychnine in the judge's grub when he comes in today to stuff his gluttonous old belly with enough food to do three men?'
'Just tell me about Lew, Joe. I wrote him encouraging letters for a long time but he stopped answering them some time ago. Whom did he kill this time?'
'One of Jeb Donnelly's so-called 'posse' running him across the desert country northeast of Phoenix. They crowded in on him too close and he turned on them and laid an ambush from some lava beds. He missed Jeb twice. Two stray horse hunters happened along and Jeb sent one of them at a run with a mail message to me. Lew's first thought will be to head straight here to see about Kitty. She up yet?'
She lifted her spoon and placed it alongside the cup in her saucer, her coffee untasted. She shook her head. 'She was tired last night from traveling so far by train and stage. She was very eager for news of Lew.'
'Well?' he demanded almost roughly. 'Are you going to tell Lew when he gets here?'
'What should I tell him, Joe?'
'You women!' he growled at her to cover his feelings. 'Kitty wandered in here from the East over two years ago with the fool idea of finding a father who'd probably been dead for years. Lew was alone up there on his little ranch in the basin, watching his small herd grow. It was natural them two would fall in love, both being alone. But Havers, being too lazy to work, got the people here to pay him twenty-five a month as night 'marshal.' He knew Kitty wouldn't spit on him, that she was crazy about Lew. But he went after her all of a sudden in a way Lew couldn't overlook, and he got himself killed. I've always been puzzled why Buck did it the day Harrow was around.'
'Joe, what in the world is going through that cagey mind of yours?' she demanded, and he saw the new look
