A Gunman Rode North

towheaded, cherubic-faced young driver.

He looked down at Kerrigan, read the story of his presence with the slim, dark Ace Saunders, and winked a grin at the gunman.

Saunders winked back at him and said with a friendly grin, 'That's my saddle kick, Stubb Holiday, in case you don't remember him.'

'I saw him a couple of times,' Lew Kerrigan said.

'We came all the way down here atop with the Colonel and his bee-utiful fiancee, Carlotta Wilkerson,' a sardonic touch in the words, 'all cuddled up below with fancy grub and a few bottles of shampanee. Personally, Kerrigan, I think you had better taste for looks in Kitty Anderson, and no offense meant. Miss Wilkerson is a Southern lady who came all the way out here to marry Harrow. He brought her down with him to meet the right people in Tucson, though 'showing her off' would be a better word for it. They're going to have a big wedding in the twenty-room house Harrow built on the ridge west of the gulch that's Dalyville since you went to prison. The Governor of the territory is coming up from Tucson.'

'Interesting,' Lew Kerrigan murmured. 'Thanks for the information, Saunders.'

'Not at all. I like to earn my pay. Go inside and up to the third floor. I'll be outside if you make trouble. Nothing personal, like I told you. Just walk up those steps casual-like about one ahead of me.'

From the end suite on the top floor of the new hotel a slender man, a touch of grey along his carefully brushed temples and sideburns, stood gazing out the west window. From it Thomas Harrow could see the wet, unimaginative pattern of the simply slanted street roofs and, directly west, a new section of prison wall under construction over there on prison hill. He unclasped one hand, removed a thin black cheroot from his mouth, placed it in an ash tray on the desk, and resumed his pacing the length of the thickly carpeted room. The glow in the end of the cigar went out and turned to grey ash and Colonel Thomas Harrow paced on.

He stopped at the big desk long enough to pull open a drawer and examine the pistol he'd already examined twice. He smiled softly.

There had been that big victory at Bull Run early in the hostilities between North and South—and, or so everybody in the South believed, the war practically over. Only then had he been quick to leave his modest plantation and other men's wives and hurry into the thick of it, using a modicum of military-school background to obtain a Captain's commission.

But the war had not ended in a few more weeks; and after a month of hardship and privation, of watching one man killed in battle and two more die of wounds and disease, the man who now called himself Colonel Harrow had had enough. The Great Cause was lost. And afterward... what? Back to an anemic, barren wife and a now weed-grown plantation she had given him as a dowry?

Not for him.

In a driving rain he'd ridden out of the thick of a skirmish, remembering even now after the passing of the years how cold he had been. Heading west in the night to begin a new life under a new name. Texas showed him long-horned cattle without brands and with no buyers of hides and tallow. Plain-faced women in homespun doggedly plowing dry land he wouldn't have let one of his five slaves set foot upon—not even soft-bodied Bertha, of whom he'd grown tired and sold as a common field worker. The shells of burned-out sod homes where the arrogant Comanches and Lipan Apaches had left ghastly death and destruction.

Not for a gentleman plantation owner.

He wanted a quick fortune, in gold, and California officers who knew the Southwest had said it was down there in a thousand places. Like California itself in '49. War and greed have a way of callousing men, and from a tiny frontier bank in Nacogdoches the man who overnight had become Thomas Harrow obtained with his revolver a few hundred dollars in specie. Gold.

It had become a burning obsession by the time the long, heavily guarded ox train of two-wheeled carretas, with which he had been traveling by permission of a genial Spanish merchant, reached Santa Fe. There, at a trail's end baile given by the merchant to celebrate a hugely profitable journey safe from marauding Utes and southern Comanches, the flashing ankles and flirtatious black eyes of the merchant's pretty young esposa caught his own. He had fled Santa Fe for his life.

He left behind his pistoled host and a conscious-stricken young widow, her spurring vaqueros hard on his trail.

The long years of the Civil War came to a weary end, but the man now pacing the thick carpeting of his magnificent hotel suite had not yet found his hoped-for fortune in gold. A failure as a conscientious plantation owner, it had been inevitable that he would fail in a raw frontier country where iron will and brawn usually spelled the difference between wealth and prominence in the territory or lack of both. The following years found him living in the high country of northern Arizona, a country brought into being by Lincoln during the Civil War, owning a few crude cabins, gambling and drinking with men who knew firsthand about Vigilantes. Men who received no answers concerning the fresh horses some of them now and then needed.

Men like Ace Saunders and Stubb Holiday, who brought in the guns and cartridges sold at fabulous prices to bronco Apaches.

Six hundred dollars each for a rifle! One dollar per round for cartridges! In gold! Raw gold nuggets, the source of which only the Apaches knew and Thomas Harrow dared not ask.

Harrow's great hopes were almost a thing of the past when Lew Kerrigan rode in to his place, fleeing the law for killing Buck Havers—and Harrow had found the key to a great fortune laid in his hand.

Still pacing the floor, the man who now called himself 'Colonel' Thomas Harrow heard a slight sound in the hallway outside the door to his suite. He moved swiftly and seated himself at the big desk a thoughtful management had provided for the use of such a prominent man.

CHAPTER THREE

In the hallway the man Ace stopped and said casually, 'It's time to take your gun now, Kerrigan. You won't need it in there, because I'd only step in and kill you anyhow if you made trouble. If you still want to use it when you get back out here, I'll be very glad to let you have it back with the loads untampered. My job.'

He was already slipping the gun from the worn sheath when a door opposite them opened and a woman emerged. An astonishingly beautiful woman. Her dress was of brown organdie, her shoulders square and tapering down from below the armpits to a slender waist, and then the dress flared out again in flowing lines over thighs probably developed from much horseback riding.

Her blonde hair beneath a small tricorne hat seemed to shine like ripened wheat even in the sunless hallway. She carried a dainty-looking sun umbrella more for style than practical use.

Her eyes widened ever so slightly as the heavy pistol was slipped from the sheath at Kerrigan's right hip.

'Howdy, Miss Wilkerson,' Ace said imperturbably. 'Getting ready to see the sights of Yuma? Couple of Southern Pacific* steamboats bouncing up and down at the landing with the river plenty high. The territory prison is just up on the hill above. They got some real bad whites, Mexicans, and an Apache or two in there, I hear.'

* Author's note: In 1874 Southern Pacific bought most of the boats plying the Colorado River.

'Thank you, Ace,' she murmured. 'Is the coach ready?'

'Stubb's got it waiting in front of the hotel, Miss Wilkerson. I expect there'll be quite a few eyes start poppin' when you and that red coach with them six blacks roll through town.'

'Thank you for the compliment, Ace, and putting the horses last. Is—is this the man Thomas came to Yuma to see?'

'This is him, all right. But you wasn't expected to see this part of it. He's just outa the territorial prison and you got to handle them accordin'.'

Kerrigan saw a slight revulsion come into her face and he knew she was viewing him as some kind of a human mad dog. No telling, of course, what kind of story Harrow had concocted for her benefit. But one thing was certain: seeing him disarmed by Ace told her a part of that story.