A Gunman Rode North

that came into her startlingly blue eyes.

'Harrow was always after money. He'd bought Buck a couple of drinks in the Pine Knot. He was aware I'd have to put a territorial reward on Lew's head when Lew rode out. Clara, you might as well know the truth after two years: Tom collected that reward. Ace Saunders brought me word where Lew was, outfitting a pack train to go hunt some gold. Tom Harrow found that gold, Clara.'

'Merciful heaven,' she said softly. 'I never dreamed there might be a connection.'

'Right after the strike that made Dalyville, Tom took Kitty up there to work for him in the office. You know as well as I do, Clara, that Tom's sudden wealth and smooth manners were too much for a girl like Kitty. In the months that followed she was more than a woman working for him. To put it bluntly, she became his mistress. And you know it, too, though you'd never let it get through that poker face of yourn. She traveled with him when he went back East to sell gold stock. But he left her there, probably tired of her as a man like him always tires of such a woman after awhile. He met Carlotta Wilkerson, a real Southern lady, and made plans for a big summer wedding out here. Miss Wilkerson didn't know Tom long enough to see him for what he is. And if Lew hadn't been a lonely man, if he probably hadn't seen your own heart buried over there in the cemetery, he'd have seen through Kitty in a hurry.'

Relief went through her when he changed the subject. 'Harrow is going to be one hell of a surprised gent when he finds out Kitty came back to Pirtman last night.'

'And you planned it that way, every bit of it,' she said accusingly, and rose. She went to the stove and slid a warmed frying pan over the firebox plate.

'All right, I planned it that way,' he growled defensively. 'I wrote her that Tom Harrow was arranging to get Lew out of prison, although I admit I was puzzled at what he expected to profit from it. I didn't want Lew writing Kitty to come West and marry him. He's got to find out the hard way, and I knew a poker face like you would never tell him what kind of a woman she turned out to be!'

She said, laying strips of bacon in the hot frying pan, 'Lew met Carlotta in the hallway outside of Tom Harrow's suite in Yuma. She doesn't say much but I think from that moment she began to have doubts about the man she is supposed to marry. She's a lovely woman, Joe.'

'Harrow thought you were, too, until you sent him packing,' he retorted, and grinned.

'Did you know she has expressed a desire to buy this place from me?'

'The devil she did! A woman like her, come here to marry into wealth—how much you suppose she's found out about the kind of man Tom Harrow really is?'

'Quite enough, I think,' Clara replied; and then, because she was a woman, she added, 'We women have a keen perception for such things.'

'You women!' Joe Stovers snorted again.

He finished his breakfast in silence, a frown on his usually good-humored face. Afterward he took the north road toward Dalyville. Kerrigan had sent word to Harrow that he was going to burn the town, and a dozen unemployed, hastily sworn-in miners were patrolling the place day and night. Loco was on the rampage again, after a breather over in New Mexico Territory. He'd picked off an occasional traveler after Harrow went East; people rapidly turning Dalyville into a ghost town. A trickle of them had been coming through Pirtman almost every day. A troop of cavalry from Fort Whipple, Captain Rawlinson commanding, was patrolling roads. More troops from Fort Stanton, New Mexico, had been reported on the way, hoping to intercept the bronco fleeing north.

A mining-boom camp drained of its gold, and its people, into a shell of empty shacks in a gulch. A grim, determined man fresh out of prison and on his way to put the torch to it. And the law said Joe Stovers had to arrest him again for murder.

Three miles north of Pirtman the brooding sheriff rounded a sharp turn in the mountain road and met the red coach. He spurred his horse aside and scowled up at the armed driver, Pete Orr, a man he'd arrested numerous times. Orr scowled back as he hauled hard on the lines and brake blocks squealed against rear wheel tires.

On top of the coach, also heavily armed, were three more of the shoddy characters who'd hung around Harrow's mountain hangout in the days before the 'Colonel' had struck it rich.

Behind the coach Captain Rawlinson, red-bearded and thirtyish, halted his detail of nine blue-clad troopers acting as escort.

As Harrow opened the door to the red coach, Stovers saw the trim figure of Carlotta Wilkerson inside. He looks like he ain't slept in a week, the sheriff thought and felt better. He went East to sell a crooked million in worthless gold stock and came back fleeced of all his money. He got Lew Kerrigan out of prison to help him out of some kind of trouble. But Lew turned on him and is coming north with a gun in one hand and probably a box of matches in the other. And when Tom gets to Clara's place in Pirtman with that lovely woman I should stop him from marrying, he'll find Kitty's come back all full of love for either him or maybe hoping to marry Lew now …

' 'Morning, Joe,' Harrow said as the pudgy sheriff tipped his hat to Carlotta.

He looked haggard and he was haggard. He'd told the woman who'd come so far to marry him in the great mansion in Dalyville that Kerrigan had no valid claim against the diggings. He'd painted for her a picture of a gun- throwing outlaw present when Bear Paw Daly whom Harrow had grubstaked, came in with news of the strike. He had hired Kerrigan to pack-train in for him, but the law in the grim person of hard-riding Joe Stovers had caught up with him and sent him to Yuma prison as an embittered killer blaming Harrow for everything.

She'd believed him, but there was something in her quiet reticence that worried him. She'd taken an immediate liking to Clara Thompson, the respect of a clean woman for another woman who at nineteen had married her second-lieutenant husband the day he graduated from West Point and at twenty-seven had seen them bring back her captain face down across his cavalry mount.

Captain Rawlinson of the gay manners and red beard had filled in a few more details, including those of a well-kept grave in the little military cemetery not far from Clara's back door in Pirtman. He'd been a lieutenant second-in-command under Captain Thompson in that vicious tangle with Loco's well-armed broncos.

Now Carlotta Wilkerson sat beside Harrow in the coach, thinking of Clara, her mind made up. There was nothing to go back to in the South. Her home had been in the path of Sherman's 'March to the Sea,' and it had not been spared. The long years afterward had not been good, and when the distinguished Western mining man, Colonel Thomas Harrow, met her he represented the aristocratic South she had known as a small girl and an opportunity to leave behind forever the postwar South she did not care for. She had accepted his proposal without any particular feeling. No feeling at all except the calm acceptance of a secure marriage with untold wealth. Not until she had looked into the hard-bitten face of a man named Lew Kerrigan in the hallway of a new hotel in Yuma. He'd struck a new, strange fire inside of her, and she hadn't been able to get him entirely from her thoughts.

She sat there in the comfort of the coach, listening to Harrow talking with the sheriff and Captain Rawlinson; now calmly accepting the fact there would be no marriage to Harrow, and somehow very much relieved. Too many people in Dalyville were asking the whereabouts of the girl Kitty, the same Kitty who had carelessly left behind some of her clothing, possibly expecting to return to the big mansion.

Carlotta suddenly wanted to get on to Pirtman; to ask an understanding Clara how much Kerrigan had really loved the girl.

'Have you heard any word of that hard-headed madman yet, Joe?' Carlotta heard Tom Harrow ask. 'The frame of mind he's in, he'll kill again, Joe.'

'He already has,' Stovers said matter-of-factly.

'Seems like when Lew pulled out of Yuma and headed up this way Jeb Donnelly followed him. Jeb and a supposed horse buyer named Hannifer LeRoy who'd been hanging around Yuma but hadn't bought but a couple of good mounts and a pack mule. Ace Saunders is with 'em, along with maybe a couple other gents. I don't suppose you'd be knowing anything about all this, Tom?'

'Why should I?' snapped Harrow angrily, his face flushing.

'Just wondering, that's all,' came the unruffled reply. 'Sorta noticed, too, that Stubb ain't drivin' you this morning.'

'He went south to try to find Lew and give him a message from me.'

The coach got under way once more and Carlotta looked at the man sitting beside her. Harrow didn't see the faintly amused smile on her soft mouth.

The coach wheels were spinning a yellow blur of bright-painted spokes down the winding mountain road. The