The man beside me finished his drink, turned away from the bar, and went outside.
'Who might he be?' somebody asked.
'Cattleman, I guess,' another answered. 'He's a stranger to me.'
Nobody said anything more for a while.
Presently the bartender said, 'You eaten tonight, mister? You set down over at the table, and I'll fix you up.'
Suddenly I was awful tired. My strength was coming back, but that short fight had been too much, too soon. So I leathered my gun and walked over to the table and dropped into a chair.
The bartender brought me food and a pot of coffee, and I thanked him. I ate and drank, but all the while I was thinking of Ange, and away down inside me something burned like a cold fire.
It gnawed away at my insides until there was nothing else in me, nothing to think of, nothing to dream of ... only the man I wanted to find, the man I wanted to kill.
Man ... or men ... There might have been more than one.
Chapter six.
When I'd eaten my fill and drunk my coffee I went outside and stood where the wind came down the draw. It was a wild night, with clouds racing down the long black sky, lighted weirdly by a hiding moon. I stood there alone on what passed for a street, and felt the loneliness and the pain tearing at me.
Ange! ... Ange had died horribly and alone, attacked while waiting for me, and never a chance at life, for she had spent her years so much alone before I found her high in those Colorado mountains.
Ange, who was beautiful and tender and thoughtful, who could not bear to see nothing suffer, and who was always thinking of what she could do for me to make my life a happier thing. And little enough of happiness had come my way until Ange came.
Now she was gone, and the thought of it was almost too much for me.
Deep down within me an awful rage was burning. I banked the fires of it and waited, knowing my time would come. My horse turned his head and looked at me in a woe-bbgone manner, for the wind was cold and the night was late, so I went over to him and, taking my Winchester from the scabbard, I stepped into the saddle and walked him down the empty street where dry leaves blew, and the dust.
There was no livery stable in town, only a corral with a few horses standing, tails to the wind. Some boulders and the wall of the mountain made a partial break. So I stripped the leather from him and put it under a little shelter built for the purpose, and then I rubbed him all over with handfuls of grass and turned him into the corral, first standing by while he ate a bit of corn from the sack I carried. It was a small sack, but there was enough to give him the extra something he might need for a long stretch of hard going.
Turning away from the corral, I looked toward the lighted windows. It was late, and this was an early rising town, so it was early to bed.
Only a few lights remained, the lights of folks I did not know.
How many such towns had I been in? A lone-riding man is a stranger wherever he goes, and so it had been for me until I met Ange, and so it was again.
There was a bit of a gully where run-off water had cut into the ground, and three times I'd taken care to step over it; but now, so filled I was by my own sorrow, I forgot it. Starting back toward the town I stepped off quickly, put a foot into that ditch, and fell flat on my face ... and it saved my life.
When I hit the ground there was the roar of a shot in my ears, and then silence. Me, I just never moved. I lay there quiet, waiting and listening.
Whoever had shot at me must have figured I was a dead duck, because he just let me lay. After several minutes had passed and I heard no further sound, I eased myself past the corner of the corral and crouched there, waiting. If anybody was going to risk a first move, it was not going to be me.
After some more time I began to feel sure that my unseen attacker had slipped away quietly and was no longer around. But that was a risk I was not prepared to chance. I backed up and got into some brush at the edge of town and circled wide around until I got back to the saloon. No other place in town had a light.
I pushed open the door and stepped in. There were three men inside.
The bartender looked up at me, and then his eyes sort of slipped over to the man at the end of the bar. Not that I mean that bartender was telling me anything, just that he naturally looked toward that man --probably because that man had come in last.
He was a tall man, but on the slender side, with a narrow, tough face.
Walking up to the bar, I held my Winchester in my right hand, and put my left on the bar.
'I'll have rye,' I said, and then under cover of the bar, I tilted my rifle muzzle past the corner of the bar and within inches of the tall man's heart. And I held it there.
Nobody could see what my gun hand was doing, but when I took up my drink I looked over at this gent and said, 'Somebody took a shot at me out by the corral.'
Now, I didn't make a thing of it, I just said it mildly, looking at him. But there was another thing I'd noticed. That man had mud on his boot heels, and the only mud I knew of was alongside the corral where the water trough stood.
He looked right at me. 'Wasn't me,' he said, 'or I'd have killed you.'
'I think it was you,' I said. 'You've got mud on your heels.'
His fingers had been resting on the edge of the bar and when his hand dropped for his gun, I squeezed the trigger on my rifle.
That .44 slug knocked him back and turned him half around. I jacked another shell into the chamber and stepped around after him.
He was still standing, but he sort of backed up, going to the wall, and I cat-footed it after him.
'Were you one of them that killed my wife?'
He stared at me, looking genuinely puzzled.
'Wife? Hell, no. I ... I ... you tried to kill the boss. Back in the ...
Mogollons.' His ^ws came slowly, and his eyes were glazing.
'He lied to you. You're dying for nothing. Who is your boss?'
He just looked at me, but he never answered, nor tried to answer.
When I faced around to the others, the bartender had both hands resting on the bar in plain sight, and the others the same.
'You took advantage,' one of them said.
'Mister,' I replied, 'my wife was murdered. She was strangled trying to defend herself. My wagon was burned, my mules killed, and forty men spent a week or more combing the mountains to kill me. One of them shot me in the back of the head. I'll play this the way they started it. Wherever they are, whoever they are, they got to kill me, light out of the country, or they'll die--wherever and whenever I find them.'
The man gave me a cynical look.
'I've heard talkers before.'
'Mister, the last feud my family taken part in lasted seventy years. The last Higgins died with his gun in his hand, but he died.'
Nobody said anything, so I asked, 'Who did he work for?'
They just looked at me. My troubles were my own, and they wanted no part of them, nor could I lay blame to them for it. They were family men and townies, and I had come in out of wild country, and was a stranger to them.
'You might take a look at his horse,' the bartender said. 'There's likely to be only two at the hitch rail, yours and his.'
There had been another horse at the rail when I tied mine, so I turned to the door and started through. A rifle bullet smashed splinters from the door jamb within inches of my face, and I threw myself out and down, rolling swiftly into the shadows with a second bullet furrowing the boardwalk right at my side.
In the darkness I rolled back and up to one knee, and I settled myself for a good shot. But nothing happened, nor was there any movement out in the darkness. Two frame buildings and a tent with a floor were just across the street from me; there was also a lot of brush close by, and another corral.
I stayed still for several minutes, and then I suddenly thought of that other horse. I went to look, but he was
