It struck him that it would be better to be right here on the spot when Devitt found out about it. Maybe the whole thing could be settled one way or another, right then. The thought of spending the night in the hotel didn’t appeal to him, but Hank was out at the ranch, and that was good enough for Clay.
He turned his horse and headed for the livery, feeling a lift of spirit. His mood would have been less agreeable if he had recognized the man who had stopped Devitt.
It was Jack Kilburn.
Chapter 14
The events leading up to that night had been not un usual, and there was about them nothing not to have been expected in the normal course of human relations. Their importance was due to the time of their happening, only indirectly to the events themselves. They were, in many respects, a culmination. Of all those concerned, the one most aware of what was happening was the man only indirectly concerned, Sam Tinker.
Jud Devitt was a man with an eye for a well upholstered blonde, and he had seen Randy Ashton singing in a dance hall. Randy, he had been advised, was hard to get. Jud had permitted himself a smile, and nothing that happened immediately thereafter had caused him reason to doubt the thought behind the smile. He was not the first man to misunderstand the workings of the feminine mind. He had his motives. Randy Ashton had hers.
Jud Devitt was a handsome man with plenty of money. Randy was entertaining in Julesberg. They had talked one evening and Randy had been tempting but evasive. Randy was a girl who knew what she had and knew where it was wanted, yet underneath the glittering appearance and the apparently compliant manner was a girl who had grown up on a cow ranch. The daughter of a rancher and the sister of cowhands, a girl who could cook a meal as good as any man might wish to eat, a girl who could, when necessary, handle a six-horse team or rope a steer, and who had, at twelve, loaded guns for her father and brothers during an Indian attack on their homestead.
Unsuccessful on that attempt the Indians had caught her father halfway to town and left him without his hair. Her brother Ben had been going over the trail to Wyoming when the herd took off in a stampede, and his friends buried what was left of him on the banks of the Platte. Pete, a husky lad and the sole support of his sister, lost a running argument with Apaches and left Randy with no relatives, no money, and no prospects.
One thing she knew how to do. She could sing. All her family had been singers and she had grown up singing the Scotch and Irish folk songs that were the heritage of her people. The songs of the East came west with its people and she had learned those, and so when Pete was killed, Randy began singing. Later she learned to dance. She had always known how to handle men.
Julesberg’s boom slowed to a walk, and Jud, not yet aware that his fiancee was to accompany her father to Tinkersville, had written her suggesting she come on and join him. The letter had been sufficiently ambiguous to imply a lot of things, and his intentions seemed serious.
Not long after her arrival she discovered his intentions were serious enough, but not exactly what she had expected. She had to admit they had not been entirely unsuspected, either.
Yet a climax had been postponed, due to the sudden turn of events for Jud Devitt. Colleen had arrived with her father and the Deep Creek timber had not fallen easily into his hands.
In the meantime, Randy had seen Bill Coffin, just as he had seen her.
Randy made discreet inquiries of Kesterson as to who Bill Coffin was, and Kesterson, dryly but not without understanding, had told her. And the storekeeper, of whom no one suspected a sense of humor, was fully aware of Bill’s weakness for jokes, and appreciated them. So the report on Bill Coffin had not been lacking in color.
Later, when Bill met Randy, he proceeded to give even more glowing and picturesque accounts of himself, and, coupled with wavy hair and an engaging grin, they had their effect.
Randy Ashton was a girl who looked as if bom to a dance hall, but she was a girl whose heart only beat in tune to cotton print and kitchens. She had grown up with cowhands, and Bill Coffin was a cowhand.
Jilted by his fiancee, at least temporarily, Jud Devitt remembered the blonde. He beat a path to her door and was received politely, but his suggestions fell upon ears apparently deaf. A more direct suggestion met with a quiet refusal and the pointed implication that he would find the air agreeable.
This unexpected stubbornness where he had expected compliance had been the final straw. He burst out into the night only to see Bill Coffin dismounting. Their brief encounter had sent him away a poor second, and he could imagine them laughing at him. As a matter of fact, neither had given him another thought.
It was late when Bill Coffin left Randy. He stepped into the saddle and rode slowly down the street. Shorty was around town. They had best get together and start back for the ranch.
Drawing up before the Homestake, Coffin leaned forward and peered into the window. There was no sign of Shorty. The place was crowded with lumberjacks. Nor was there a B-Bar horse tied at Doc McClean’s.
Coffin swung down and checked with the doctor. Garry was restless and had a bad fever. It was better not to disturb him. Shorty Jones had come and gone hours ago. So had Clay.
Stepping back into the saddle, Bill Coffin soft-footed his horse down the street, keeping to the shadows. Clay Bell was in town, and that meant that Rooney was alone at Emigrant Gap! Unless Shorty had started back, and Bill doubted that Shorty would go back without him.
A lumberjack came from the stable leading several teams. He walked with them to the watering trough. Bill Coffin, suddenly alert, waited in the shadows. More lumberjacks came from the stable, all carrying rifles. Other men were already gathering around three wagons.
Bill turned his horse. No time to look for Shorty now. He walked his horse down an alleyway, eased around the livery stable corral, and rode between two haystacks and into the cottonwoods along the creek. The night was cool and there was a faint smell of woodsmoke. He reached the desert and started his horse on a lope for the Gap. Then, changing his mind suddenly, he turned his horse and started across the desert toward Piety Mountain. The cool wind fanned his cheeks and he rode swiftly, holding his horse to a steady pace, weaving among clumps of grease-wood and racing by the looming shadows of mesquite. The trail up Piety was heavy going.
Stacked high on Piety was the dry wood of the signal fire that would bring in the guards and the men riding with the cattle. With Rooney, Rush Jackson, and Montana Brown—He chuckled. They could come! They could come and stand ten deep all across the Pass!
A half-hour later, even as the rumbling wagons rolled out of town, he was dropping to his knees beside the stack of wood. He brushed dried leaves together, a bit more dry grass, then placed a lighted match. Flame caught and curled, smoke lifted, then the tongues of the flame lapped at the dry branches, twisting hungrily about the cedar and the pine. They leaped, caught, crackled. . .
The late stage rumbled to a stop at the stage station and Stag Harvey, loafing on the street with two belted guns, watched a big, loose-jointed man in a rumpled suit get down from the stage carrying a worn leather traveling bag.
“How are you, Stag? Clay around?”
“Down to the hotel, I think.”
“You might as well light a shuck, Stag. The war’s over. At least, it will be when I talk to Judge Riley.”
“Maybe.” Stag smiled past his cigarette. “That’ll be no good news for Jack an’ me. We need money.”
Tibbott started on, then caught by a sudden thought, he stopped abruptly. “Stag, never knew you to wear two guns unless you were working.”
Stag Harvey straightened from the post. “You can tell Clay that, Tibbott. Tell him I’m workin’. Both Jack an’ me.”
“Don’t do it, Stag.”
“You tell him.”
“Stag, he don’t wear that gun for show. He’s no pilgrim.”
“Didn’t figure so.”
Hardy Tibbott walked on, more swiftly now. It was good to be back, but he did not like to think of that man standing back there by the stage station. With either Kilburn or Harvey, Bell might have a chance, but with both? Ed Miller looked up as the tired man dropped his bag. “Hey! Bell’s been askin’ for you, almost every day. He was beginning to believe you were dead.”