A Gunman Rode North

the goodness of your big heart you buy me out and come all the way down here, bringing along your Southern fiancee, to carry me back in style. Get to the point and stop stalling, Tom: what do you want of me?'

Harrow sat down and laid the cigar in an ornate ash tray. He grinned faintly and then his mouth beneath the clipped mustache hardened.

'No use beating around the bush with a man like you, Lew. I should have known better. With Carlotta on her way out here to take up life with a supposedly rich husband, I was desperate. I got to thinking about Loco and all the raw gold he used to bring me for guns and cartridges. Old Bear Paw found his source of supply, but I know enough about Apaches to know there's more somewhere else. To prove it, I had a friend of mine get him some more guns recently and they were, of course, paid for in more coarse grain gold!'

He leaned forward with his elbows on the desk, gazing at Kerrigan intently. 'I've known for some time that for two years you've been in a cell with one of Loco's top young warriors. With both of you doing life and little chance ever to escape, I know in my own mind he told you where to find another strike like Dalyville. I spent the last twenty thousand dollars I could rake up to buy you out of prison.'

'And you couldn't sleep nights because of the fear that I'd smash out over the walls someday, come north and kill you?' Kerrigan grinned at him. 'Maybe you didn't miss it too far at that, Tom,' he added softly.

'Exactly,' Harrow admitted with a deprecative shrug. 'I had no choice in the matter and, frankly, neither have you. I've had Wood Smith watching you. He put your gun arm out of order this morning at my instructions, to make it more certain that Ace Saunders could bring you here alive.'

'In other words,' Kerrigan grinned thinly, 'for the past two years you've lived in fear I'd get free and come after you with a six-shooter in one hand. And now if I refuse to accept your terms of 'parole,' you're still so afraid to take me back up there to Mangrum and Wood Smith— afraid that I'll escape again—that you brought along a couple of dependable men from the old mountain hideout to do a gun job. Softening the marshal and sheriff here probably like you paid off the Territorial Governor to stretch and bend the law. I know it was bribery when I was sentenced by Judge Eaton, a United States District Court judge, my keep paid for by the Government. Twenty-five cents per day keep, thanks to a gold-mad man like you, Tom,' he added savagely, his face dark.

Harrow tried a new tack. He said patiently, 'Does anything matter except that you're free again? Play things my way and ride out free. Meet me in Pirtman and get Kitty back, while the two of us clean up a fortune and you get back, in addition, what I lost. I'll sell stock back East this time, one million dollars' worth in a new strike—and who cares if it plays out this time!'

Kerrigan grinned a hard grin at Harrow's anxiety. He stepped to the desk; leaning over to pinch out the brown paper butt in the silver ash tray. Harrow sat unmoving, only his desperate eyes showing what he might be thinking.

'You won't change your mind, Lew?'

'No,' Kerrigan said.

'Then damn you,' Harrow cried out in desperation, 'I'll make you change it!'

His hand flashed into the open drawer of the big desk but Lew Kerrigan's thin body whip-lashed in a twisting motion. Fingers calloused from gripping a wheelbarrow handle clamped down so hard around Harrow's wrist that a grunt of pain came from the surprised man. Kerrigan stepped back with the pistol in his left hand. The pin points in his brown eyes grew smaller and his low voice slashed through the room.

'I'm riding north to Kitty, Tom. I'm going to wait for you up there while I take care of a few things and maybe even deliver a message for Kadoba. Don't stake out my little ranch up in the basin, because I won't go back there. And don't try staking out Clara's place either, because maybe in the past two years I've had infused into me a little bit of Apache.'

'You're forgetting Joe Stovers,' Harrow grunted back, a new light of hope flickering for a moment in his eyes. 'Joe got you once. He'll get you again.'

'Joe won't get me this time because he won't have you to tip him off again. I'm going to destroy you, Tom. You wanted me to meet you in Pirtman instead of riding back with you, because you're afraid of what your woman will find out. If Clara Thompson won't tell her what you are, then I intend to let her find out anyhow. I'm not going to shoot you right through that window, as I should. I want you to enjoy your return trip up north with the woman you thought you were going to marry.'

He backed on the soft carpeting to the door, the gun still in his uninjured left hand. He opened it and whirled through, and the thin barrel of Harrow's gun rammed savagely deep into the surprised Ace Saunder's lean stomach. It brought a grunt from the gunman.

'I'll take your pistol, for a change, Saunders,' Kerrigan said coolly, and did so, slipping his own and Harrow's pistol into his belt.

Saunders said calmly, 'I told Tom he shouldn't have had a gun in the same room with you. Your move now, Kerrigan.'

He took back his emptied weapon, accepted the cartridges in the palm of a slim hand, dropped them into a pocket of the blue silk shirt and grinned. 'Looks like it's my turn to walk a step ahead of you now.'

They went down two flights of stairs and through the huge, high-ceilinged lobby, coming to a halt on the long veranda. The red coach with its six sleek blacks was gone and the spectators, gathered to ogle a beautiful lady, had melted away.

'I'm going to hunt up a horse and get out of town,' Lew Kerrigan informed Saunders. 'But from what the 'Colonel' intimates, I'm to stay here. Permanently. So maybe you better go back upstairs and find out how Harrow wants you to do the job.'

'Maybe I'd better,' Saunders breathed out softly. 'I earn my pay, Kerrigan.'

He turned and went back into the hotel and up the carpeted stairs once more. But Tom Harrow had already acted.

He had stepped to the open window three stories above the street and waved a white handkerchief in signal to a lone man waiting in the muddy alley at the rear of one of the buildings fronting the north side of Yuma's long main street.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kerrigan made his way back, again skirting the small water puddles. He stepped onto the muddied boardwalk again, wondering where he could find the California horse buyer LeRoy, the man Bud Casey had mentioned.

It was too late to go back to the hotel clerk and ask, with Saunders probably on his way down again from Harrow's suite. But there was one place you could always find out. It was about four doors down from the end of the street.

The odor of stale beer roiled out through the open doorway of the Escondido Saloon and Kerrigan went into the dank interior. Never much of a drinking man in the past, he hesitated now. His stomach hadn't been hit by liquor in more than two years. But the coffee that morning on the hill had been just as rancid and the bacon just as greasy as ever. He needed a drink to cut the foul taste of it. Twenty-five cents a day didn't buy much food, and Mangrum had to make himself some profit.

The adobe-walled building was quite narrow but went back deep to the rear door and the muddy alley beyond. The few gaming tables, deserted this early in the morning, were in a disorderly row along one dirty white- washed wall. Three drunks were sleeping off an all-nighter. The air held the peculiar odor and dankness of the desert country after a hard rain, as fetid almost as it had been up there in the dungeons before Wood Smith and Casey had unlocked the doors.

Kerrigan stepped past a Mexican swamper leisurely pushing a small knoll of floor trash sprinkled with cigar butts toward the back doorway and a soggy litter of trash and bottles in the alley. A man came out of nowhere, seemingly, his big shoes leaving muddy tracks on the freshly swept floor. After following Kerrigan and Saunders up the street, Jeb Donnelly hadn't gone on home to sleep through the heat and sweat of another hot day.

Donnelly ignored Kerrigan but Lew caught the bartender's knowing look. He said coolly, 'Yes, I know I probably look it. I just came down off the hill a little while ago.'

'I know who you are, mister. Strictly your business and none of mine. What'll you have, Mr. Kerrigan?'

'Brandy.'