'I don't think so.'
'You forgot the guns Joe Stovers sent along with this money a week or so ago.'
'I don't remember anything in the papers about giving them to you. Now look here—'
'Stovers must have known, or he wouldn't have sent them to me,' Kerrigan cut in again, still harsh. 'I want my guns even though I won't be able to use them for awhile. Wood Smith tried to break my right arm with his club this morning and almost did. Get my guns for me, Warden!'
And Mangrum, strangely enough, did so without speaking another word. He returned with a .45-90 repeating rifle in one hand and a heavy cartridge belt in the other. Half the loops were filled with brass and lead for the larger weapon, the others, .44's for the worn six-shooter, he chucked into the dusty, covered sheath. Kerrigan slung on the protective belt, the unaccustomed weight heavy upon his hip.
The warden reluctantly stuck out his hand. 'I'm supposed to lecture a man and shake hands with him when he leaves, Kerrigan. But I won't waste words on a man like you. If you follow the inclinations I suspect in your mind, you'll eventually end up back here again. Next time, Kerrigan, it won't be a life sentence. It'll be a new hangman's scaffold out there in the yard and then another grave down there on the Point.'
Kerrigan looked at the warden and then cocked the repeater into its saddle boot and swung the gear to one shoulder. Pain went through his brutally bruised right arm as he bent and lifted the warbag, holding it clear of the floor. The warden walked with him as he carried his belongings through the tunnel-like hallway and outside to where the Mexican trusty, the warden's rig put away under a shed, now waited stoically with a one-horse prison hack.
'I hope I don't see you back here, Kerrigan.'
Mangrum said after the gear was loaded and Kerrigan had climbed up to the seat.
'You won't, Mangrum,' Lew Kerrigan said significantly.
The rig creaked out through the wall gate and fell into wet tracks made by the warden's buggy. Kerrigan glanced up at a section of new wall he had sweated to help build, back of which lay an Apache Indian chained in a dungeon.
He thought,
And then the realization came over him suddenly that he was a free man. For some strange reason he found himself taking it casually, as though he'd always known that someday he'd have made it over the walls and across that unswimmable river anyhow. His thoughts swung not to Harrow and the meeting with him this morning, but to Kitty Anderson up north. Perhaps Mangrum had thought himself right in stopping her letters. But he hadn't known Kitty and what such a blow could have done to her.
He wondered about Clara Thompson, too, up there alone in her boarding house in old Fort Pirtman, in front of which he had killed Havers, in a gun fight before the eyes of both Kitty and Clara. You could never tell what a proud, lonely woman like Clara was thinking. Maybe her cavalry captain husband, buried in a carefully tended grave near her home, would know.
He shook away such thoughts and turned his attention to the town below.
The muddied hack wheels crunched on down the slope and came into the mire that was Yuma's main street, and Lew Kerrigan directed the stolid Mexican to drive to a large adobe building, its high, long porch awning built out over the boardwalk for pedestrian street shade.
The old flea-bitten mare sawed over and Kerrigan stepped down from wheel hub to thick planking. The movement caused the worn gun-sheath to twist out of place. With the instinct of years, Lew's hand automatically dropped and straightened it over a much worn spot on the right hip of his jeans, and pain cut like a hot iron through his arm.
'Wait here,' he said in Spanish to the black-faced trusty, and went into the fetid dampness of the Big Adobe Store.
For Kadoba he bought buckskin moccasins with curled toe rawhide soles, made and peddled by fat Yuma squaws on the reservation a mile west of the Colorado River, to replace the rotted shreds of footgear the Indian had worn since he'd been brought to prison. He piled on the counter tobacco and several pipes, cheese and sausages and other imperishable edibles, not forgetting to add, with a faint smile, a small bottle of castor oil the Apache taste craved like a white man long without a lemon or dill pickle.
The big chunks of fresh beef Bud Casey could buy and have his wife cook would be nothing short of heaven to the Indian. That much Kerrigan could do for one of the two men up there on the hill he could call friend. He sacked the purchases for Kadoba, paid for them, and then handed the clerk five goldbacks of twenty-dollar denominations.
He said, 'Sometime today Bud Casey will pick up this money and that second package of food and stuff.'
He picked up his own sack and started out. Just beyond the double doorway he came face to face with a man. Just another cowpuncher dressed in his Sunday best while in town, except for the mechanical, dark-faced smile and a slim brown hand hanging over a gun butt.
'Kerrigan?' he said softly. 'I'm Ace Saunders, remember? I saw you up in the high country at the Colonel's place when you were hiding out after gunning Buck Havers two years ago.'
'Don't tell me you're a friend of Havers,' Lew Kerrigan said.
Saunders shook his head, still smiling. 'I'm one of the drivers of Colonel Harrow's private coach, among other things. After the gold strike at Dalyville I rode shotgun on the Pirtman run.'
Whatever the man wanted, the pain was still in Kerrigan's arm, and he knew he didn't have a chance. Years of habit had caused him to sling the .44 into its usual place at his right hip. He thought, too late now, that the gun should have been slipped inside his waistband, with the worn butt turned to the left.
'I remember you, Saunders, as another of the shady characters the 'Colonel' had around up there in the high country,' Kerrigan replied shortly. 'What's on your mind right now?'
'Colonel Harrow,' the dark-faced gunman answered softly, 'wanted to make sure you two have a talk before you leave. He's over at the hotel, waiting. I won't take your gun.'
Kerrigan said thinly, 'I know you won't, Saunders.'
'No use for there to be any fuss. Nothing personal on my part—yet. Just a job for the man who pays me. Will you come peaceably?'
'I'll talk with him after I ride north.'
'You'll talk with him now,
Lew Kerrigan moved on past him, the gunman turning warily. But Kerrigan merely stepped to the prison hack and tossed his sack of supplies over beside the warbag and saddle.
'Take those to the hotel, the big new one three rooms high,' he directed the mustachioed Mexican trusty. 'Put them in the corral or stable, and leave them there for me.'
The mare leaned forward into slow movement and Kerrigan turned and jerked his head curtly to the man Tom Harrow had sent to bring him in.
The massive figure of Jeb Donnelly, marshal and former guard up on the hill, emerged from a nearby doorway and casually fell in forty feet behind them.
They moved along the muddied boardwalk, eastward toward the end of the street and a three-story hotel already built to await the coming of the railroad between Los Angeles and El Paso. The sun was out, clear and hot, and already beginning its work of baking the soft wetness into hard surface crust. The gunman walked at Kerrigan's right, left hand close to Kerrigan's gun, right hand close to his own weapon. Behind them, Jeb Donnelly shuffled along as though on his way home after being up all night.
At the east end of the street they turned left and began skirting small water puddles in the raw graded roadbed to reach the big new hotel. In front of it stood an Abbott-Downing stagecoach with red body and yellow wheels. Something cold cut through Kerrigan when he saw the gold lettering on the door.
Six sleek black horses stood in soft leather harness adorned with white rings under the admiring eyes of two-score people on the high front porch. Waiting up in the driver's seat, his stubby fingers full of lines, sat a
