“Sure you do. I've just been hired to ramrod this operation. The first thing I aimed to do was run you out of the Territory, but it looks like I can save my breath.” He leaned back on the cot, gingerly favoring his left side, but the muzzle of his revolver held steady. “All right,” he said flatly, “get packed up and clear out. You're lucky I didn't decide to kill you.”
Grant tried to overlook the gunman's implication. “I'm clearing out, but not because you told me to, Lloyd!”
The gunman laughed; it was a curious sound, completely without humor. “You can believe that if you want to, but not me.” And his voice was suddenly harsh. “Now get your plunder together and don't let me see you again on this lease!”
Grant could see the bitter humor in the situation but that did not make it easier to swallow. He could not explain what had happened in the dugout after Lloyd had left—it would only make him look more ridiculous than he already did.
But it was not pleasant looking into Bud Muller's wide, bewildered eyes as he said, “Good-by, Bud.” The boy turned his face away in anger, and the gunman laughed.
Grant felt the anger piling up inside him and knew that he had to get out fast if he was to go out at all. He shouldered the saddle, took up his roll, and tried to make the door before Lloyd could say anything else.
“Just a minute.” The gunman stood up beside the stove. “This is almost too easy. I kind of had the feeling there was something between you and the kid's sister, but I guess I was mistaken. She's the kind of girl a man fights for, if he has to.”
Grant shoved through the door and stood for one long moment against the bunkhouse, turning his face to the cutting wind, hoping that it would cool the anger inside him.
A part of his mind told him that he was smart, and he congratulated himself for that. What chance did he have against Lloyd with a drawn pistol? The gunman had been waiting for an excuse to kill him. Besides, what difference did it make if Lloyd thought he had been buffaloed?
And if Rhea got herself into trouble—well, she had asked for it when she put a killer on her pay roll.
Walking away was not easy, but walk he did. Past the shuttered, mud-daubed dugout, past the derrick. Two thousand dollars in his belt and he didn't even have a horse to ride. He paused briefly to shift his saddle to the other shoulder, then headed doggedly toward Sabo.
Sabo now was something of a city in its own right and had ceased to be a mere stopover between the discovery well and Kiefer. Less than a month ago there had been nothing here but a single frame building known as the Sabo Mercantile Company, a lonesome place in a lonely land, catering to the Indians and a few scattered ranchers; now there were close to a thousand tents, shanties, and buildings overlooking this strange new forest of man-made derricks sprawling out along the rim of the Glenn Basin.
It was shortly after noon when Joe Grant tramped cold and stiff into that maze of noise and confusion. He had no plan except to get away from the Nation, away from the Territory as fast as possible.
Unlike Kiefer, with its mile-long main street of shanties, Sabo lay sprawling and shapeless, milling with freighters and hacks and saddle horses. Here in canvas and sheet-iron flophouses the roustabouts gathered, the smell of Bartlesville and Bowling Green still in their grimy corduroys. And in the more pretentious clapboard “hotels” tool-dressers and drillers mingled with land speculators, gamblers, businessmen, and a few of the more adventurous eastern dandies, all acutely aware of the acrid smell of illusive wealth that swirled like some exciting fog over the basin. Here sharp eyed land men dealt for quarter sections near the discovery well which they would cut, with the precision of a skilled surgeon, Into a thousand small and worthless pieces and peddle them as vain able properties to gullible investors in Massachusetts or New York.
Here was a boom town, loud and crude as any trail town, unpredictable and dangerous as a tiger. Grant shifted his saddle and waited while a giant freighter with a twelve-mule hitch rattled past over the frozen ground. He felt the excitement here, and the greed, and the lust for sudden wealth was etched in every face and stared out from every eye. Even the cowhands from the Cherokee country and the old Outlet had been drawn away from routine herding jobs to sniff this new smell of oil and taste the excitement. And many of them had not returned.
Grant smiled thinly, continuing his plodding march toward a livery barn, dodging tents and shanties, wagons and impatient teams as he went. He told himself that he was glad to be leaving. Violence and greed were the urge of youth... and he was no longer very young. Maybe, after it was all over, he would look back on this day and consider it the luckiest day of his life—the day he had pulled away from Rhea Muller.
But he didn't feel lucky now, and he didn't dare look back. He kept his steps and thoughts going straight ahead.
Now, he had to stop again beside the flapping canvas of a tent restaurant while another freighter rattled past. And a voice behind him said:
“You aiming to leave our fair city, Grant?”
He wheeled as though a gun had been shoved in his back. Jim Dagget,' dry, humorless, perpetually angry, gazed flatly at him from under his wide-brimmed hat. Slowly Grant lowered his saddle and rested it on his hip. “Is there a law against leaving Sabo?”
“Maybe there ought to be,” the marshal said tonelessly, his pale eyes digging at Grant's face. “Why're you leaving?” Grant shrugged and unconsciously tugged his hat down on his forehead. “I'm not working on the Muller lease any more.”
“Why?”
The way he said it shot a chill of warning up Grant's back. “Would that be any of your business, Marshal? Officially?”
Surprisingly, Dagget shrugged and let the subject drop. “Maybe not. It's kind of a coincidence, though, running into you like this today. I was just on my way to the lease to pick up Turk Valois.”
The warning went up Grant's back again, colder this time than before.
Dagget smiled faintly and it seemed that his grim face would crack with the effort. “Surprises you, doesn't it? Well, it surprised me, too. You'd think Valois would be too smart to try passing stolen money this soon after a robbery.”
Those pale eyes kept darting at Grant's face and he couldn't meet them. Although the wind was bitter cold, his palms and forehead felt sweaty. “What,” he asked, “is that supposed to mean?”
“The money Valois gave Battle in payment for the Muller derrick timbers, remember? It made me curious. So I checked with a bank up in Joplin—one that was robbed not long ago— to see if they had the serial numbers of the stolen money.”
There was a numbing ache in Grant's chest and he realized that he had been holding his breath.
“What did the bank have to say?”
“They had the numbers, all right, and they matched the bills that Turk gave to Battle. Well...” And he stood there for a moment, unsmiling, his face showing nothing. “I guess that's all there is to it. Sooner or later we catch them, Grant. All of them.”
Grant stood frozen, and all he could think to say was: “I haven't seen you catch the man that killed Zack Muller.”
Dagget's face cracked again with that tortured smile. “I will. You can bet your life on it!” And he wheeled suddenly, a squat bulldog of a man hunched into his shapeless, fur-lined windbreaker. Then, almost as an afterthought, he turned again and said, “I hear Kirk Lloyd went to hire on with the Mullers. I hope Rhea had the good sense to turn him down; Kirk's got a reputation with women. And it's not a good one!”
Grant stood motionless for one long moment, watching Dagget's broad back bob and weave among the wagons and teams and finally disappear in the confusion of clapboard and canvas. Urgency was on the wind, an impulse to run grew up inside him, but he stood there motionless, trying to make sense out of what Dagget had said.
For the moment, he told himself, he was safe. But Dagget would not be fooled long. Ortway, the banker, would not identify Valois as the robber—and anyway, the runner would yell his innocence at the top of his lungs and then the whole story would come out.
Quickly Grant shouldered his saddle again and headed once more toward the livery barn. No, Dagget would not be fooled for long, but with a little luck it would be long enough for him to buy a strong saddle animal and get a
