“Aren't you going to stop? They're headed in this direction.”
Something in Jeff's face went hard. “If they want to talk to us, they can catch up. I don't figure I'm in debt to any law in Plainsville.”
Amy did not show surprise. In a way she could understand Jeff's hostile attitude, because of what had happened to his father. Looking back she saw the horsemen spur to a gallop as they moved west toward the stage road to cut them off. There were seven of them, all Plainsville citizens, headed by Marshal Blasingame and his day deputy, Kirk Logan.
“Thanks for waiting for us,” Logan said with dry anger as the group reined up alongside the buggy.
“You're welcome,” Jeff said flatly, and color rose in the deputy's face.
Then Blasingame kneed his mount in on the inside, between Jeff and Logan. “None of that!” he said shortly, after touching his hatbrim to Amy. “We're looking for a man, Blaine. Heavy-set, about forty. We followed his trail this way out of town but lost it on the shale bed to the south of here. You happen to see anybody to fit the description?”
Jeff raked the riders with a glance, noting the ropes and rifles. “Was he riding a gray?” he asked mildly.
“By hell, that's the one!” Kirk Logan said. “Where'd you see him?”
“Can't say what the rider looked like; he was too far off. Me and Amy were over toward Stone Ridge. Saw him scooting across the prairie like he had a burr under his tail.”
Blasingame wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve.
“Sounds like the one, all right. Which direction was he headed?”
“East,” Jeff said casually. “Due east.”
As he said it, he shot a glance at Amy, stopping the words that were on her lips.
“Thanks, Blaine,” the marshal said, and the riders began pulling their horses around. “He won't get away from us now.”
“Wait!” Amy called. But she was too late. The marshal and his posse were pounding back to the east and her voice was lost in the thunder of hoofs. She fixed Jeff with her flashing eyes. “The man we saw was headed west! You know he was!”
She hardly recognized the man beside her as the Jeff Blaine she had ridden with from Plainsville. “There are a lot of gray horses in Texas,” he said coldly. “Maybe he was the wrong man.”
“But what if he was the right man? What if he's a killer?”
Jeff took her arm and tried to make his voice gentle. “Amy, I'm not the law; that's Elec's job. But remember that I saw them catch the wrong man once and try to bang him. I'm not going to help them catch another one.”
Amy felt futility well up inside her, knowing that nothing she could say would erase his bitterness. An uneasy wall built up between them as the buggy rolled again toward Plainsville. “Jeff,” she said at last, “my father talked to me today. He asked me not to see you again.”
Jeff shot her a glance, waiting for her to go on.
“Maybe he was right,” she said, and he held his silence.
THE NAME THE STRANGER gave was Bill Somerson; he had arrived in Plainsville on the noon mail train the day before. Very little was know about him except that he had come well heeled, and was looking for action at Bert Surratt's poker tables. With the wisdom of hindsight, Surratt confessed later that Somerson had a mean look to him and he wasn't surprised when Phil Costain caught him with a holdout up his sleeve. After the holdout discovery, the stranger shot Costain in the groin, stole the gray from the hitch rack outside the saloon and fogged it out of town. The most surprising thing, the saloonkeeper claimed, was that Costain was still alive to tell it.
Jeff heard the story when he returned from Stone Ridge shortly before sundown. The loafers around the livery barn were full of it when he turned in his hired rig.
To Jeff, it was just another shooting. They were not rare in Plainsville these days. He was still mad at himself for not patching up the fight with Amy before letting her out at her house. But like mules, both of them had refused to give, and they had parted in anger.
If she can't understand the reasons I have for hating this town, he told himself, maybe it's just as well I find it out now.
But he didn't believe it. As he walked toward town from the livery barn, he felt his anger leaving him, the ache of loneliness pulling at his nerves. He tramped the plank walk to the Paradise eating house and made his supper on stew and sourdough bread. He had the thought to go back to the Wintworth house and make it up with her, but he didn't know what to say. Anyway, Ford would probably want to put in his own word and make him madder than he already was.
Well, he told himself, she'll get over it.
But this time he wondered. He had not liked the look of hurt in her eyes, the coldness with which she had drawn away from him. He dropped some silver on the counter and walked out of the restaurant.
The sun had died behind the lip of the prairie; lamps and lanterns were being lighted, and there was the familiar smell of woodsmoke in the air. Jeff's lonesomeness and discontent thrived in the gathering dusk.
He stood in front of the Paradise for a while, watching a group of Snake hands ride whooping in from the north. Jeff envied them their gaiety, the sense of freedom that was always with them. When he first left the Sewell house he had thought to get on as a cowhand with one of the big outfits, as Nathan had done so long ago. But the common hand's pay of six bits a day and chuck did not appeal to him—he had learned quickly that he could do much better at Surratt's gambling tables,.
But his boyhood notion of the cowhand's life was strong within him, and he could still smile at their loud talk, their vanity and swagger. He noted that some of the hands were no older than himself, eighteen or nineteen at
