day down in the hotel corridor in Yuma. I felt an ache all through me today when you left Pirtman, thinking I'd never see you again. It's not the proper thing for a Southern lady to say, but would you bend those rough whiskers down just once—'
He buried them against her warm mouth and neither of them felt the pain until a discreet cough came from the curtains over the doorway. Kerrigan released her and looked at Judge Eaton.
'Kerrigan, I must speak quickly,' Eaton said, and cleared his throat with a throbbing up-and-down motion of his prominent Adam's apple. 'We're trapped by fire that's coming fast. If words will help any at this acute time, I have done you a great injustice. I know Harrow now for what he is, and what he has done. I'm looking at the kind of death tonight I have meted out to other men in the past, and I find myself afraid. Is there any chance that you, knowing those Apaches as friends, could stop this terrible thing that is about to happen?'
'Not any more than you could stop a pack of wolves from pouncing on the one that happened to go down, Judge. They go mad with the lust to kill. I can only try.'
'What did you have in mind, sir?' asked Eaton, hope in the sunken sockets of his skull-like features.
'Take all the men and move forward on foot, and let the coach follow behind.'
'A fine idea. A very fine idea!' cried out Eaton and actually shook his hand. 'Let me assure you, Kerrigan, that if we get out of this place alive tonight you will be a free man tomorrow.'
Kerrigan looked at him and thought,
'Let's get out of here,' he said.
From out in the street came the threshing jangle of harness as men fought the big red horse into the gap left by a dead one. The coach had been turned around, the team to head north. Everybody was out in the street now, clustered around the red coach.
Everybody except Clara Thompson. Kerrigan felt her hand upon his left arm and looked down. She was smiling at what she'd witnessed but a look of dark fear haunted her eyes, the first time he'd ever seen such a thing there.
'Lew, your shadow and Carlotta's were outlined against the curtain from the lamplight and Tom saw it. He rushed outside like a madman. He'll kill you before he'll let you have her.'
He said, 'All right, Clara,' and led her outside. Big Red was in harness in the center span between wheelers and leaders but it took two men to hold the plunging animal by the bit. The fire was beginning to brighten the street as it swept on its way, shacks and tents disappearing into its fiery maw.
As the three women got into the coach Kerrigan said to the frightened driver, 'Just keep them moving behind us. If those broncos try to close in, lay on the whip and bust through us and keep going. Hit the old military road cut-off after you get out and then swing south on it to Pirtman. Savvy?'
The light that had gone on over in the Cherokee's dive suddenly went out with a loud crash, as though the lamp had been flung. It had. Flames sprang up from scattered kerosene and Sam Blaze Face came out with several men, a 16-shot Civil War Henry repeating rifle in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.
'Ain't no damned Apaches goin' to burn a Cherokee Indian's saloon,' he bellowed into the night and waved the rifle. 'I bootlegged liquor to the Indians up in Indian Territory until U.S. marshals chased me out, and I'll live to go back there and do it again. Come on, you free-loadin', whiskey-drinkin' gents. Let's go hunt us some Apache scalps!'
They made a strange-looking group as they moved up the street. A red coach with three women inside and a driver up front and a man walking along with both hands on the bit of a big red horse still fighting the harness. A part-Cherokee Indian and several human dregs of a mining camp striding boldly in front with whiskey courage high. Ace Saunders walking on one side of the coach, leading his horse, and Jeb Donnelly riding his big white horse on the other side. Harrow and Judge Eaton had fallen in directly back of the wheels, the rear boot within easy grasp if the driver suddenly put the whip to the six horses.
In the darkness Judge Eaton looked over at Harrow. Harrow's lips were swollen, his face a mask of the poisonous hatred inside of him. He looked anything but the suave, immaculately tailored man who'd waited for Lew Kerrigan in the hotel at Yuma. To the cool, brightly reflective eyes of Judge Eaton he looked no better than those human dregs out of the Cherokee's dive, and at the moment the judge held him in less respect.
He was an object of contempt, and at the moment he revolted the judge. Kerrigan had sworn a vow to destroy the man and everything he represented, but Eaton had been unprepared for the terrible thoroughness with which the tall ex-ranchman had gone about it.
And now, as though he still wasn't through, Lew Kerrigan came out of the night on noiseless moccasins. 'Harrow!' he said sharply.
'What do you want?' came the low, gritted reply. 'Haven't you and those Apaches done enough to me?'
'Not as much as Loco would like to do,' the tall man answered grimly. 'You bought me out of prison because I celled with Kadoba. Through him, Loco has found out you were responsible for this boom camp and what it's done to Apache country. Kadoba told me that Loco wants you worst of all. If he can get his hands on you, he's going to swing you by the heels and burn you.'
'Haven't you punished the man enough!' Judge Eaton cried out despite his feelings. 'How terrible must your vengeance be, Kerrigan? You've broken him body and soul and taken his woman. What more do you want?'
'Like Ace Saunders, I don't like the idea of a white man being tortured and mutilated by Apaches. Get in the coach with the others, Harrow. The wiping out of Dalyville finishes my job with you. I'm not going to kill you.'
He was gone again at a trot, to rejoin Joe Stovers somewhere up ahead. Harrow's shoulders straightened and he wiped at his mouth with his hand, remembered, and removed a handkerchief from his coat sleeve. He used that and then smiled over at Judge Eaton.
'I'm not licked yet, Yeager,' he said. 'We've got a long way to go.'
'Yes,' Judge Eaton replied, 'we've got a long way to go. But it will be necessary for us to wait until Kerrigan gets us out of this trap. You'd better join the ladies in the coach, Tom. The money is still in there, you know.'
The speculative look came again into Eaton's sunken eyes when he found himself alone behind the coach. The contempt for Harrow was still there. The information that Kerrigan not only wouldn't kill him but would try to protect him had worked a new transformation in Harrow.
Let him get Kerrigan, the judge thought. Let Kerrigan find the source of further wealth for them. But Harrow could never again be trustworthy…
Scattered firing broke out somewhere up ahead and Eaton heard men running as though the Cherokee and his followers were scattering to take cover. The coach surged forward under the panicky driver's whip and then was hauled up short again at Lew Kerrigan's harsh order to the man holding the lines.
Judge Eaton found himself fifty yards to the rear, and he lengthened his pace to catch up again. Thanks to Kerrigan's actions since the man had been freed from prison, this thing had gotten completely out of hand. A man like that was hard to stop, as Harrow and his men had found out to their fear and sorrow, and yet that same quality of determination gave the judge confidence now. Someway, somehow, the man he'd sentenced to life at hard labor would get them out of this, the judge was certain.
After that, of course, appropriate action would have to be taken. Self-preservation was the first law of man, and the judge had to protect his name and reputation in the territory…
A shadow glided out of the night on noiseless feet; five feet six inches of young Apache Indian, crouched and leaning forward like the black weasel that had shot out of the dungeon doorway and lunged at Wood Smith. In the dim light the smoky-black eyes of Kadoba were burning.
He closed the distance between them with terrible swiftness. His left arm reached out and locked itself across the judge's throat from behind. Eaton felt the black steel band of forearm sink deep into his prominent Adam's apple and went down into a sitting position, helpless and silent and watching the back end of the red coach move out of sight. To his fear-dilated nostrils came the odor of something not unlike a wild animal and he felt like a rabbit in the firm jaws of a desert wolf.
One of Loco's band had him and he knew he was going to die.
The Apache shifted his grip and twisted around until the terrified 'Hanging Judge' saw a face he hadn't seen in two years. He recognized it quite readily despite the streak of white bottom clay now drawn below the fierce black eyes and thin dark nose.
He'd looked down at that same face in the courtroom in Globe, thundering his apologue against lawless white
