A Gunman Rode North

breakfast, do you? I'll damn well give you something to get sick about!'

Around Smith's hairy right wrist was a slip-on buckskin thong, and dangling from the sweat-slick thong hung a long billy of brightly polished manzanita wood which the head guard habitually swung in a spinning circle. The club snapped up into Wood Smith's hard right hand as he slogged determinedly through more of the mud to a gaping doorway and peered inside.

His reaction was instant. He let out a disdainful grunt and came back. 'Never mind old Martinez, Bud. He's here. Maybe his spirit ain't but his old carcass damn sure is. Not a bad day for us, Bud. A few more mornings like this one and we won't have to work so hard. One killer dead in his cell from sickness and we turn Lew Kerrigan loose in parole custody of Colonel Harrow. Not bad at all,' and Smith laughed.

With the count completed and cells sloshed down with buckets of water to counteract the fetid air, Kerrigan took his place in line with the others from Tough Row. Smith came up, club spinning a circle once more, and stopped behind Lew Kerrigan.

'Some lucky break for you, eh, Kerrigan?'

'I'm not complaining,' Lew said.

'Well, I should hope not! Otherwise, some morning twenty or thirty years from now we'd be dragging you out like old Martinez and planting you deep under the caliche down there in the Point by the riverbank.'

Kerrigan waited for the lock step to breakfast to begin. But Smith apparently had something on his mind.

'Maybe I shouldn't have treated you so rough, Kerrigan,' he said, 'but some men are just plain stubborn. Take you now: you brought it on yourself. I always wondered what you and that damned Apache killer jabbered about so much nights. From what I hear, there ain't a one of them in the whole country who don't know where there's plenty more free gold like Colonel Harrow found up north in Apache country two years ago. I always did sorta figger that Kadoba might have told you where more of it is, the two of you bein' cellmates and in for life, anyhow. But you had to play tight-lipped, so I had to play rough. Like I said, some prisoners are just plain stubborn…'

The blow came from behind with terrific force.

More than two feet of polished brown wood cut a numbing streak of hellish fire across Kerrigan's seat, causing violent and abrupt reaction inside his empty stomach. The sickness from it erupted into his throat, bile sour. He retched hard and then retched again, and his legs began to tremble.

'Hold on there, Wood,' Bud Casey protested mildly. 'Lew'll be out of here as soon as the warden comes up. There wasn't any call for that a-tall.'

'You better keep your trap shut, Bud, if you want the job I'll be resigning one of these days pretty soon,' the head guard advised. 'One word from me to Mangrum that you're too soft on these cell birds and the job's gone.'

Standing behind the frozen men from Tough Row he grinned almost lazily at Kerrigan's back. 'That was a little too much to resist this mornin', Kerrigan. Just a little goodbye rememberer so's you'll not forget ole hard- workin' Wood Smith when you get out and go downtown this mornin'. Sure, I know what's in your mind. It's in all of them the last mornin' when they leave. But you won't be doin' what you're thinking, Kerrigan. You'll be just like the others. You'll find Jeb Donnelly waitin' to have a few words to say real nicelike. You ain't forgot how Jeb worked up here as guard for awhile last year, eh? He swatted your butt a few times himself, now didn't he?'

Kerrigan made no answer. He'd seen this thing happen to other men on the last morning. A freed man, limping in pain, going downtown to find a tough marshal waiting to order him to keep going or get another beating.

And Wood Smith was deliberately baiting him, Kerrigan knew; waiting for words that would bring the gripped club into action again. His big face was flaming with more than early-morning whiskey flush now.

'Maybe you sorta figgerin' on squaring up with Jeb, too, hey?' Smith's voice came again. 'Now that's what you was thinkin', wasn't it, Kerrigan?'

No reply.

The club smashed again, the pain of it more sickening than ever. 'Answer me, damn you!'

'Cut it out, Wood!' Bud Casey said angrily.

'Answer me, Kerrigan!'

'I've no quarrel with the marshal if he'll keep out of my way,' Lew Kerrigan answered quietly.

'Out of your way? I'll damn well fix it where he can get in your way and you won't do a thing about it, cell bird!'

The club began to crash. No more against the buttocks. It struck hard against Lew Kerrigan's right shoulder. Hellish pain tore through the muscles and rained downward through biceps and triceps, all the way to the elbow. Smith finally finished, panting in rage and short-windedness, and bawled at the men to face right.

On legs trembling so badly he could hardly stand Lew Kerrigan stumbled along, his hands on the shoulders of the man in front of him. He needed their support.

Bud Casey was out in the yard when Kerrigan emerged from the tin-roofed mess hall with food for the Apache. Casey fell in alongside, and though he said nothing his glance was sharp when he looked sidewise at the prisoner.

'I was afraid of something like that, Lew,' he finally said, and closed the door as Kerrigan carried breakfast in to the Indian for the last time.

Kadoba sat as he usually sat, back against the mortar wall, knees drawn up.

'So now you are a free man again, Yew,' he said, speaking in a garbled mixture of three tongues.

'When the Giver of All Things rises and the Nantan viene aqui. Maybe three hours.'

'You talk much last night when you sleep poco. Call out name of a squaw Kitty and talk about a White Eyes. 'I gonna kill you, Harrow.' Who this Harrow you zas-tee, Yew?'

'Pinda-Lick-O-Yi. He took my part of much gold and gave me to the White Eyes law to be hanged. Now he frees me.'

The Apache looked puzzled. He'd looked puzzled in the pitch-black darkness last night and said murmuringly, 'The White Eyes are a strange people who walk a strange path.'

'Enyah!' Kerrigan said, and indicated the food. But Kadoba ignored it.

An inner excitement had begun to grip the Indian. He lifted his left foot by the chain around his bare ankle. With an index finger he made sawing motions across the wide but thin band of iron riveted to the end of the long chain.

'You get me knife with teeth, Yew. I go with you. Teach you how to hang him by the feet from a tree and burn him like Apache burn hunters of yellow iron.'

Kerrigan couldn't help smiling. This slender, boyish-looking Indian of perhaps twenty-six had done no wrong in the eyes of his people. He had been taught from babyhood that all other human beings were enemies to be killed; to protect the young and the aged—to hunt and steal food and warm winter clothing for them.

Their laws said it was just and right to hack off the nose or kill the young squaw who had shared her loins with another Indian, and he'd followed those laws. He had cut her throat quickly and painlessly, with a single slash of a knife blade.

Simple generic laws, harsh but quite just to the Apache code of life. So different from the foolish law of the White Eyes who now ruled over most of the bands of Apacheria. Judge Eaton up at Globe, Arizona's notorious 'Hanging Judge,' had shown 'mercy.' Because Kadoba was but 'an untutored young savage,' he'd received a mere life sentence as a good lesson to other Apaches trying to follow their own laws instead of the white man's new ones.

'You cannot escape from here, amigo' Kerrigan said simply. 'Too many guards. Many guns. And the river. No man can cut the waters. The pools swirl around and around in circles and catch a man and hold him in their arms. Sometimes many days later the man is found in the same whirlpools, dancing around and around in the Last Dance in the arms of the water.'

'Send me knife with teeth,' the Apache hissed.

The hinges creaked again and light flooded in from outside as Bud Casey swung back the unlocked door. He was silent as he locked the Apache in again, his sandy-colored face sober.

He turned to Kerrigan, heavy key ring dangling. 'Come on, Lew. Let's get on over to the storeroom and get