Stovers' handcuffs clicked into place on Tom Harrow's wrists. 'I'm taking Tom over to Judge Eaton and I'll find where we all stand, Lew. Will you give me your word you won't leave Pirtman?'
'I wouldn't mind talking first. And thanks for my guns. We'll see.'
'Good. I'll get back as quick as I can. Keep a sharp lookout for Jeb Donnelly and Ace Saunders… And for God's sake,' he rumbled, 'don't get into any more fracases. I don't want to resign to keep from arresting you again. Don't want to get my fool head shot off either. Come on, Tom, let's get walking.'
Kerrigan spoke sharply to the Apache, telling him to bring in the horses and to saddle Big Red. He heard Stovers bellowing in a far-reaching voice, waving his arms to several men over among the trees and log buildings to stay over there; that everything was all right.
Kerrigan slid the six-shooter into the worn sheath and found two women coming toward him.
'Hello, Clara. Thanks for the letters you wrote.' He nodded and touched the brim of his hat to Carlotta Wilkerson.
Clara looked up at him, her eyes searching over his clothing. 'Lew, are you hurt? Did any of those shots —'
'No, Clara. LeRoy was over-anxious and missed twice. That other hardcase—Pete Orr— should have stuck to stealing horses and never come down here when Tom struck it rich.'
'You'd better come over and try to eat some supper. Carlotta and I will bar the doors until Joe comes.'
Kerrigan looked at Carlotta and a faint smile came to his lips. He found an answering one as she extended a slim hand. She said, 'I didn't think you were capable of it—looking anything but grim, I mean, Mr. Kerrigan.'
'Lew,' he corrected her as the three of them walked toward the gap in the old wall. 'You offered me your friendship in Yuma, Miss Wilkerson—'
'Carlotta,' she said. 'I'm offering it again, Lew. I suppose both of us have found out quite a number of things within the past few minutes. Somehow I feel much better.'
He didn't answer that one and he didn't see the brief question that came into her eyes. They went up the path to the porch and on into the kitchen. Clara left them there and almost immediately he heard the faint jar of a front door being closed. He sat down in the same chair Joe Stovers had occupied that morning and Carlotta came with the same coffee pot. From somewhere upstairs came muffled whimperings like a frightened kitten locked outside and trying to get in.
'I had expected to find you married to Tom Harrow by the time I finally got here,' he said.
She was pouring coffee for him, and to his nostrils came the clean, womanly smell of her and the awareness of how very close she was. Something he'd never felt before stirred inside him. He'd just killed two men in front of her eyes, although she didn't appear to be terribly shocked. He put it down to the fact that perhaps she'd witnessed much of it as a teen-age girl during the war Tom Harrow had fled from.
'And suppose I had been married to him, Lew?'
'It would have saved his life,' he answered, looking down as he used the spoon inside the rim of the white cup. 'I figured while I was making the long ride north with LeRoy and the others on my trail that you'd got a bad break you didn't deserve. I didn't want to make it worse by making a widow out of you so soon. I was going to let him live.'
'And now should I overlook his sordid affairs with other women, his greed and dishonesty, his murder of an old man, and be noble? I'm afraid you don't know me very well, Lew. Thomas' destiny is now in his own hands. But I do wish to exact a promise from you: don't kill him. Will you promise me that?'
He felt a chill begin to course through him. He thought she was pleading for Harrow's life no matter how the man had turned out, what he had done to her.
The man was rotten to the core, but was his record to be compared to five dead men strung along a trail several hundred miles long? Killed by a man now branded an ex-convict and gun fighter?
Now that she'd had time to think, it looked as though she were viewing him in that light. Trying to save the life of an evil man at the hands of one still more evil. He drank the warm coffee and rose and brushed at the whisker stubble that made his mouth look so suddenly unfriendly.
'I don't happen to be noble either, Miss Wilkerson,' he said quietly. 'I'm traveling along a road where there is no turning back. The man I know as a Confederate deserter killed an old one-armed fellow for his share of a gold strike. He sent me to the pen and got my share. I swore I'd destroy him and burn the town he built.'
'Haven't you already destroyed him?' she asked gently. 'Better than killing?'
He shook his head and went into the dining room. Clara said almost cheerfully, 'Everything storm proof, Lew. Joe can handle things over in town, and Tom's men wouldn't dare fire on a house with women in it. Now how about some good food?'
'Where's Kitty's room?' he asked her.
'It's—upstairs,' she said faintly. 'The one on the southeast corner.'
'Thanks,' he said, and moved into the parlor, which showed the hard effects of stage travelers during the two-year boom. He disappeared on moccasined feet and Clara found the other woman beside her.
'Why?' Carlotta whispered. 'For what reason would he go to her, Clara?'
'I don't know, my dear. He might feel that after prison and five dead men…'
Kerrigan moved soundlessly on the worn carpeting. He was almost to Kitty's door when another beside it opened behind him and a man's voice, barely audible, said, 'Hold it, Kerrigan. Turn slow and don't try anything.'
Kerrigan turned and looked into the muzzle of the six-shooter in Ace Saunders' slim hand; saw the odd, twisted smile on the dark, handsome face.
'Seems like we're always meeting in front of stores or in hotel hallways,' Saunders remarked softly, keeping his voice down. 'No matter what I got to do, I'm glad you got loose from that war party of Apache bucks. The farther away we got from them the more panicky I got.'
'I know the feeling, Saunders. Sort of like a hangover, with a bad case of shakes afterward. It's sheer luck I didn't burn. Where do we go this time? Back to Tom, I suppose.'
'I wanted to go back and get you. If Jeb and Hannifer had backed my play, we'd have split that war party wide open. A few flying shots would have scattered them like quail.'
'But you came on and waited here for me?'
Saunders nodded and casually slid the .45 into its sheath. It was a newly developed weapon, only recently put on the market by Colt, and Kerrigan thought,
'That's right,' Saunders replied. 'I was strolling back from the saloon over there along the road. I saw you ride in with the Indian and slip into the shed. When Pete Orr didn't make it collecting the five hundred Harrow promised to pay us all, I slipped in through the front door here and hid. I knew you'd be over.'
Kerrigan studied the dark, youthful face and found himself puzzled. The man had been in the party that had been trailing Kerrigan ever since he had left Yuma. Saunders saw the question in Lew Kerrigan's eyes.
'I've got just one question to ask you, Kerrigan. You going in there to get righteous with Kitty?'
Kerrigan shook his head. 'I'm in no position to get righteous with anybody.'
'I'm glad. It just saved your life. I was listening downstairs just now when you told the Wilkerson woman— she's a real beauty, ain't she?— about travelin' along a road you couldn't turn back on. Things just naturally happen to people sometimes. Like they happened to Kitty. She wasn't happy with Tom—I could see that. Kitty wasn't bad. You were in the pen for life and she was just lonely, with nobody to turn to. That's about all I got to say, Kerrigan. Maybe I'm on one of them roads you were talking about a little while ago. I can't turn back either. I'm not in Tom's pay any more. I'm just a gent who led another gent named Stubb Holiday along a six-year trail he sometimes didn't want to go. He didn't want to go up on that ridge alone either, because he was afraid of you. I made him go. Make your peace with Kitty, Kerrigan.'
He went down the stairs loudly and into the kitchen, to grin good-humoredly at Clara's surprised look. Kitty's door opened at the noise. Her eyes were wet. A look of shame and humiliation came into them as she saw Kerrigan.
'What do you want of me now, Lew?' she whispered.
'I wanted to talk with you, of course, Kitty,' he said gently.
She opened the door wider and stood aside and then closed it behind him. The bed was rumpled, one of the pillows twisted into a dampened ball. She came and stood beside him and then reached up a hand to touch the
