“It was back in the Cherokee Nation. I’d just come down out of Tennessee and had come up to this herd Noah Gate’s outfit. They’d had trouble with some herd-cutters, led by a man posing as a sheriff and wearing a badge. I bought in with them, and when this man tried to run a bluff and drew on me, I killed him. He was wearing this gun.”
“Alec Burgess wasn’t that kind of man,” somebody else was saying. “He was decent and law-abiding. Moreover, he was a dead shot with either hand. You’d play hell killing him unless you dry-gulched him.”
“You’ve got witnesses, I suppose?” the marshal suggested to me.
That stopped me. For there were no witnesses any more, none but Queenie, and she would take delight in lying to get me hung. “Noah Gates and his outfit were the only witnesses. They are dead … all of them, so far as I know.”
“Then there isn’t even one witness?”
“Marshal, the only person alive who could testify to what happened is Queenie, that red-headed daughter-in-law to Noah Gates, but she’s running with the wild bunch, the same outfit I’ve been hunting. And she’d swear me into hell any time she got a chance.”
“Drop your gunbelt, Chancy,” the marshal said. “I’m taking you in.”
“Will I get a trial?”
“A trial?” the red-faced man sneered. “You don’t deserve any more of a trial than you gave Burgess. Why wait, Marshal? I’ve got a rope in my wagon. Let’s string him up!”
There were several shouts of agreement, but the marshal turned quickly around. “There’ll be none of that,” he said sternly. “All right, Chancy. Drop your belt or I’ll shoot.”
With careful fingers, I unbuckled, and there was a sinking in me when I did it. What chance was I going to have? I didn’t know any Burgess, nor even where the crime was supposed to have happened, nor how. But I had no witnesses, no defense, and it had happened somewhere back in the Territory or the Nation, and I had been there at the time.
Of only one thing could I be sure. The man of whom they talked, this Alec Burgess, could not have been the man I killed, but how could I prove that? I had been accused and arrested simply because I wore a dead man’s gun.
With the crowd following behind, the marshal took me down to the jail and locked me in the same cell from which I had released Corky Burdette.
When that barred door slammed shut, I just dropped down on the bunk and stared blanky, too stunned to think about what had happened to me. From the muttering of the men outside I had an idea it wasn’t over and all because of picking up a dead man’s gun.
Bob Tarlton was sick in bed, and was not likely to hear of what had happened to me. The boys were out at the herd, and just standing guard over those cows would keep them busy. There was nobody around anywhere to whom I could look for help. But then, I had never been one to expect help. That’s one advantage of always being a loner, you’ve just got to do it yourself whatever has to be done.
The worst of it was, I didn’t even know what had happened. Seemed as if this Alec Burgess had been a well-thought-of man, and he’d gone east and been murdered. Well, that man I’d killed back there seemed a likely one to have done such a thing, but was he? After all, Burgess was some shakes with a gun, they said, and that would-be sheriff wasn’t a man to buck anything like that. A dry-gulch, maybe and they’d as much as said that was the way it was. Still, there must have been more to it.
The marshal had gone back to his desk and seated himself, his rule lying across the desk in front of him. Then he began snuffling through some old “Wanted” posters.
There was one window in the cell, with three iron bars. From the way the jail building stood, that window must look out on open country. Crow Creek was out there somewhere, and there was brush along the creek, and trees. How long would it take a man to cover that distance if he was out of here?
“Don’t you get to thinkin’ you can break out of here,” the marshal said from behind me. “Those boys would hang you to the nearest tree right off. They thought a lot of Alec.”
“Look,” I said, “no matter what bee you’ve got in your bonnet, I had nothing to do with killing this Alec Burgess. I took that gun off a would-be sheriff probably the very star he was sporting came off Burgess. I lost my gun last night, so I dug this one out of my blanket roll. Now, if I’m going to be accused of murdering a man you might at least tell me something about what happened.”
His eyes searched mine, and then, reluctantly, he said, “You know better than me. All we know is that Burgess and four other men started for Fort Smith, escorting a wagon with a woman and her husband in it, and two prisoners who were riding the wagon.
“Nobody heard nothing of Burgess and the others, and then their bodies were found. The prisoners were gone, cut loose. Burgess and the others had been ambushed, all of them killed, including the woman. Finding this gun was the first clue we’ve come across, but everybody will want your scalp now.”
There was nothing in what he had told me that was of any help, but I could understand the feelings of the men who wished to hang me. A well-liked man had been killed, too. But it must have taken more than one man to bring it off, and they must have had a strong motive to try it.
“Who were the prisoners?” I asked.
“Hood Cuyler and Rad Miller.”
“Rad Miller!” I came off the bed with a lunge that made the marshal step back from the bars. “Miller was one of the rustlers we’ve had trouble with! Do you think I’d risk my neck to help him get free?”
“I thought of that, but you might have had a falling out since. Or your whole story may be a pack of lies.”
“Rad Miller is dead. I killed him out on the plains when he was chasing one of the Gates outfit. Handy Corbin can tell you that, so can Cotton Madden.”
“That’s another thing,” the marshal said calmly. “Handy Corbin is related to Prince, and we have reason to believe Prince was in on that deal.”
“It doesn’t make sense. When we had the run-in with that would-be sheriff we’d never met up with Kelsey’s outfit.”
The marshal shrugged. “No? You told me they’d been following the herd that Kelsey was playing patty-cake with Gates’s daughter-in-law. How do you know there wasn’t some tie-up?”
Of course, I did not know, could not know. In my mind they had been separate incidents, and I could not get rid of the notion. Still, that did not mean there mightn’t have been a tie-up. If the Kelsey outfit wanted to deliver Rad Miller, they might recruit help from anybody likely to take a hand and that bunch there where the would-be sheriff tried to cut our herd had been a pack of outlaws.
None of this was likely to do me any good. Folks out west, where there was only occasionally some kind of organized law, had a way of taking justice in their own hands on the least excuse. My neck would probably be stretched before anybody knew I was the wrong man … if they would ever know.
Somehow, some way, I had to get out of this place.
The marshal left me, and I was alone. The sun was warm outside … I worried about my horse, left standing at the hitching rail. I got up and tried the door. It was securely locked. The window bars were set solidly. From up the street I could occasionally hear laughter, the clink of glass, the rattle of a pump at a well, or the slam of a door.
After a while I stretched out on my bunk to consider the situation. There had to be a way out, and I’m a man who has always believed that a man can think his way out of most things if he’ll only try hard enough. But no ideas came to me, and presently I fell asleep. When I awoke it was cooler, the sun was far down the sky … night was coming.
And nighttime meant trouble. Men would be free from their work, they would gather in the saloons to discuss my case, and they would start drinking. I knew very well what a drunken mob could be like. From the barred door I could look across the office and out through a front window. All I could see was dust, brown grass, and the edge of a building.