He came up to the three men guarding The Notch before they heard him. He had come upon them over the pine needles where his horse made no sound. He saw them with the firelight on their faces, heard their laughter, and smelled the smoke of their fire, and the fine smell of coffee.
He came out of the shadows like a ghost and drew up, and Tripp looked around. Shocked, he came to his feet.
Clay Bell sat hunched in the saddle, his face a gray mask of savagery, his shoulder and shirt blood-stained, his eyes wild from the throbbing in his skull and the solid agony from his wound.
In his left hand he held a negligent Colt. “Take off your boots.”
He did not seem to lift his voice yet it boomed hollowly against the black walled cliffs. Bob Tripp stared at him, his mouth opening and closing.
“Take ’em off!” He punctuated the order with a bullet into the fire.
“What’s the idea?” Tripp demanded, fighting for time.
“Tripp,” Bell’s voice was dangerously calm, “take off your boots or I’ll break both your knees.”
Tripp saw the wildness in Bell’s eyes. He backed up abruptly and almost fell into a sitting position. There was insanity in this, but . . . When all three had their boots off they looked up at Bell.
“Start for town.”
“What?” Tripp’s face turned sickly. “By the Lord, Bell, you-!”
“Start moving, Tripp, or you can die right here. Your boys stomped Garry, they’ve tried to kill me. Now start going or you can lie in a pile, right here.”
There was crashing in the brush and then Duval burst through, followed by the others from the upper camp. “Tripp!” Duval was bawling the words as he ran. “That Bell, he—”
They had rifles. Clay Bell swung his gun. “Drop them!”
A lean redhead started to swing his rifle to shooting position and Clay Bell’s gun bucked. The red-headed man turned half around and dropped, clutching a smashed shoulder.
“You, too. Off with your boots!”
Lining up the nine men in the two groups, he started them for town, moving them down the rocky Notch Trail in their sock feet.
He did not let them leave alone. A few yards behind, he followed, keeping them hustling. The socks tore, they wore out on the lava of the trail, their feet became bloody. When they reached the desert he started them well away from the shelter and shade of the hills, then let them go.
“You came hunting it,” he said, “now see how you like it. Come back if you want . . . I’ll be ready.”
He was swaying from weariness, scarcely capable of keeping his eyes open. He turned the appalousa then and started at a canter toward the home ranch. His mind was a blur. Had anyone seen him then he would have been a sitting duck. His shoulder throbbed, his head felt like a half-filled bucket in which the blood slopped from side to side. He muttered and talked, but the palouse was going home now, and he kept moving.
Hank Rooney ran to meet him. “Boss! We figured you was dead!”
He clung to the pommel. “Sheriff been here? After Brown?”
Rooney was puzzled. “The sheriff? No—ain’t seen him. What’s wrong with Brown?” Tripp had managed to get some of his men up over The Notch on foot. They had come down on Brown and Jackson from behind and driven both men off. Bell ordered the two men back to The Notch. This time they would hole up in a cave that offered good cover and an almost impregnable position.
Hank Rooney stripped off Clay’s shirt and worked over his shoulder. Long before he had finished cleansing the wound and treating it, Clay was asleep.
Two quiet days passed, and nothing happened. Shorty Jones nursed his injured wrist and grew steadily more ugly and morose. Whether Bert Garry was alive or dead no one had any idea.
Clay Bell slept, awoke to scout around the ranch, ate and slept again. There was no move from the lumberjacks beyond the white stone. They sat still, waiting, nobody knew for what.
Angry at their enforced idleness, and undoubtedly angry at what had happened at The Notch, they yelled at the guards from time to time, trying to start trouble. One came halfway up the trail, in a swaggering walk. When he came a step too far, Hank Rooney dusted his toes with a bullet and he wheeled and ran. More bullets helped him on his way.
There was no word from Hardy Tibbott. More days went slowly by. Bell worked over his accounts, rode twice to The Notch. His wounds were on the mend and he felt better. He could use his right hand, but not without pain and discomfort.
Bill Coffin checked the cows on his way back from Piety. “Fattenin’, Boss. Be good beef there, mighty soon.”
Nothing was reported from The Notch. Devitt had made no further attempt on that side.
Restlessly, the B-Bar riders patrolled the limits of their range. The ring of hills around the Deep Creek area made their problem relatively easy, for much of it was abrupt faces of rock or steep, rugged slopes over which a man might scramble with hand and foot, but where no wheeled vehicle or even a horse might be taken.
The B-Bar riders rode with their rifles across their saddie-bows, and in the mind of each man was a picture of Bert Garry with his scarred face and lost eye, laboring to breathe with a punctured lung.
Jud Devitt entered the musty office where Noble Wheeler sat behind his desk and dropped into a chair. He looked smug and pleased this morning. He was freshly shaved, and Wheeler caught a whiff of shaving lotion. Devitt bit the end from a black cigar and leaned back. For the first time since his meeting with Bell in the street, he felt that the situation was completely in hand.
“We’ve got him, Noble. Judge Riley’s issuing an injunction that will force Bell to allow free passage over the old stage route until the case can come to trial.” He chuckled. “By that time it won’t matter. We’ll have logged off that piece and have the logs cut into ties.”
“That injunction—who will enforce it?”
“A Deputy United States Marshal we’ll have appointed.”
“You namin’ him?”
“Who else?”
Devitt smoked quietly for several minutes, considering the situation. Suddenly a thought occurred to him. “Wheeler, who is Hardy Tibbott?”
Noble Wheeler turned his face to Devitt. He was alert, suddenly anxious. “He’s a lawyer. An able man. Knows folks.”
“He’s in Washington, trying to get a permanent grazing right for Bell.”
Noble Wheeler came around sharply in his chair. His heavy face was shadowed with worry. “I should have guessed it! He’s liable to trouble us!”
“Chase will handle that end.” Devitt had been interested, but he was not worried.
Wheeler muttered and fumed, and Devitt stared down at the back of his hands, wishing he had an hour alone in this office. There might be some clue as to what the banker planned. He dared not even hint at the subject, for Wheeler was shrewd. Whatever it was he had in mind, he would do no talking.
It was time for some action now. When the marshal was appointed he would ride to Emigrant Gap and Bell would be forced to give right-of-way through to Deep Creek. It had shaped up like a battle, and that move would end it.
Or would it? Irritably, Jud Devitt realized that it was no certainty. Clay Bell was a man who could plan as well as fight. There was, too, a noticeable lack of eagerness among some of the men. The Bell who had attacked them at The Notch had put the fear of God into them.
He glanced out of the bank window and saw a man standing in the door of the Homestake Saloon. He was a tall man, lean-bodied and tough, with black hair that looked like a skull cap on his head. This was Stag Harvey.
It might come to that. Devitt had seen the other one, too. Jack Kilburn was a short, thick-set man with a round, plump face. He looked like anything but a killer. Yet they waited as if they knew their time was coming.
Queer places a man’s ambition got him to. He had never liked western towns . . . the hotels and polish of the East, that was more like it. Even San Francisco or New Orleans, but not these ramshackle towns on the edge of nowhere at all.
Here he sat in this musty, unaired bank office, looking across the street at a man who killed for hire. He dropped his hands to his knees. Time to be moving.
“Tibbott can be a trouble,” Wheeler said suddenly, “but it’s Garry who worries me.”