The words came quite clearly to the listeners in the coach and Tom Harrow stirred and broke the silence among them, his voice strange and faraway, as though he was seeing something out of the past.
'That was General Jeb Stuart's favorite song,' he remarked. 'He always closed his gay parties with that song, and sharply at midnight if the day was Saturday. He went to church Sundays when there was an opportunity.'
'Probably an ex-Confederate soldier down there and a long way from home,' Carlotta replied softly. 'I didn't think you'd remember, Thomas. I thought you deserted the war long before that.'
He stiffened beside the small, huddled figure of Kitty, and said sharply to the judge, 'Looks like we arrived in time. Jeb Donnelly and Ace are hidden in my house by now, waiting for Kerrigan. I told them he'd probably set fire to that first, to draw the men out of the gulch. Let's get on over there.'
'No,' Judge Eaton disapproved sharply. 'If they're hidden inside, let them wait for him up there. Take the coach down into the gulch to my office. I dare say that if Kerrigan sees it—and the presence of three ladies here— he'll hesitate before firing the town.'
Harrow leaned out the window, head twisted up. 'All right, boys, we're in time. Take the coach down to the judge's office and hold a tight line on those horses. We don't want to roll down the side of the mountain.'
The coach broke into jerky movement and the brake block began to bite at the rear tires like a rusty nail drawn across a pane of glass. It tilted forward as the driver began a cautious descent.
They came at last to the floor of the gulch and entered town at the narrow north end. They passed the lone saloon where the music still tinkled out and eight or nine men drank whiskey to alleviate boredom. Two or three looked out as they passed and then disappeared again with surly oaths as they recognized the outlines of the red coach. Harrow had gone East to get more money to find more gold. He'd come back and done nothing. Not one damned thing, except ride around with a pretty Southern lady he'd brought back. What had happened to that yaller-haired Kitty? Now there was a woman…
A few doors past the saloon the driver stopped the coach on the opposite side of the deserted street in front of a single-story building unadorned by a false front. Harrow had built the place as a courtroom for Judge Eaton, with small living quarters, plus a jail of sorts in the back. During the heyday of the boom the man appointed Deputy United States Marshal had made a fair living making arrests at five dollars each, two dollars for serving papers, and six cents per mile going after a prisoner, ten cents the mile to bring him back.
But there was no deputy marshal in Dalyville now. Like the miners and gamblers and others, he'd faded away to more prosperous diggings.
They got out of the coach stiffly and the judge opened the front door with a key from his pocket and soon produced a light. In the yellow rays of the lamp he looked more gaunt and cadaverous than ever. To Clara he looked like some kind of vulture. A hungry one.
'You ladies can find food in my living quarters behind the rostrum and jury box,' he said. 'Some coffee would be especially good at the moment. Tom, I think we'd better go over to that rotten sink of iniquity and inform those Godless creatures sober enough to understand that their services as guards will be needed again.'
They went out on the narrow porch to where the three men who'd ridden guard atop the coach were waiting. 'Spread out and hide under cover near the coach,' Judge Eaton instructed them. 'If Kerrigan goes to Tom's mansion first, Saunders and Jeb Donnelly will bring him in. If he descends into the gulch first, he'll go straight to the coach here to investigate. Shoot at close range and shoot for his right shoulder. Kill the Apache, by all means, but Kerrigan
The same late moon looked down upon the two dismounted figures of a tall white man and an Apache Indian. They had come out on a ridge above the lower end of the gulch, because in Arizona the night breezes always blow from the southeast. In the distance, on the opposite ridge and looming up like a black square box in the moonlight, stood the house Carlotta Wilkerson had referred to as an architectural monstrosity. Twenty rooms and two stories high, and otherwise doomed to become an eyeless, weather-beaten haven for bats in the years to come had not the embittered man standing beside the Apache Indian willed different.
Kerrigan stood there pondering his next move. He could hear the faint tinkle of the piano far up the gulch, but the sounds themselves registered only vaguely in his mind. The main street of the gulch was a good half-mile long and the night breeze blowing up through it wasn't too strong. Those men up there, unless sleeping off a drunken stupor, would have plenty of time to evacuate after they saw the flames.
Kadoba stirred impatiently, the excitement of a lifetime beginning to grip the Indian. This would be a fire that all the White Eyes and Indians in Arizona would never forget.
'We go now, Yew, huh? Burn big house first?'
'The sheriff will think of that and perhaps be hidden there waiting for me,' Kerrigan said. 'He'll try to put me in irons to keep the gulch from being burned.'
The Indian made no reply. He laid a hand on Kerrigan's arm and stood rigidly, face to the west across the gulch, sniffing the air like a night-hunting animal. He pointed. Kerrigan could see nothing.
'Wagon over there,' Kadoba said hissingly. 'Many people, many horses.'
Wagon? No wagon entered the gulch except by the old military road cut-off from the north end. No freight wagon, at least. A freight wagon didn't come into an abandoned mining camp at night.
He heard, then, the faint jangle of harness and the distant squeal of a brake block against tires, and the answer came to him in a flash. Nothing but a coach or buggy could come down the steep west side of the gulch at night.
Harrow's coach, of course, and Lew Kerrigan knew that somehow the man had regained his freedom. The judge probably had been so obsessed with the idea of getting his hands on Kerrigan again he had ignored Stovers' charges.
Kerrigan squared his shoulders and something terrible came into his face. He'd fought his way free of Yuma. He'd killed only because he'd been forced to kill. He'd wanted only to come on up here, free his soul once and for all by burning out this place, and then pull out. In the back of his mind was the thought that he'd like to slip back in a few months and get his money from Joe Stovers; in his heart the hope that when it happened a woman would still be in Pirtman.
But where Judge Eaton apparently was obsessed with the idea of hanging him, so apparently was Tom Harrow obsessed with the idea of getting his hands on Kerrigan and more gold.
Harrow would get no second chance this time. Kerrigan was going straight in for the kill. He said, ''We're going down in the town.'
'No burn?' asked the Indian, and pointed into the south mouth of the gulch where the night breeze rustled through.
'I'm going to kill a man first,' Lew Kerrigan said.
They mounted and began to work their horses down through the scrub pine. A rock rattled here and there as they took their time quartering back and forth along the sharp declivity. They half slid past two or three shacks perched precariously upon painstakingly placed rock foundations buttressed to levelness, and finally came out at the lower end of the street.
A coyote barked somewhere off in the night and then another. Kerrigan saw the Apache jerk up the head of his horse and sit with a hand shading his eyes, sniffing like a hound.
'What is it?' asked Kerrigan.
'Loco.'
'What!'
'Loco is out there, Yew. Maybe follow red wagon of Harrow. He come kill more White Eyes
From far over across the gulch, at Harrow's mansion, a sudden burst of firing broke out and a man let out a yell. It sounded like a white man, and Kerrigan thought of Stovers; presuming him to be alone up there. A series of sharp animal-like cries rent the night air, followed by more firing and yells that definitely were those of white men.
Light appeared up there in a half-dozen different places, pin points in the night. The faint thunder of two
