“I was goin’ to wait,” he said abruptly, “and let you come to me and ask qusstions, if you ever did, but when I thought it over, rememberin’ what I’d promised your father, I decided I must come back now, lay all my cards on the table, and tell you what happened.”
She started to speak, and he lifted his hand. “Wait. I’m goin’ to talk quick, because in a few minutes I have an appointment outside that I must keep. Your father did not die on the trail back from California. He was shanghaied in San Francisco, taken aboard a ship while unconscious and forced to work as a seaman. I was shanghaied at the same time and place. Your father and I in the months that followed were together a lot. He asked me to come here, to take care of you and his wife, and to protect you. He died of beatin’s he got aboard ship, just before the rest of us got away from the ship. I was with him when he died, settin’ beside his bed. Almost his last words were about you.”
Ann Rodney stood very still, staring at him. There was a ring of truth in the rapidly spoken words, yet how could she believe this? Three men had told her they saw her father die, and one of them was the man she was to marry, the man who had befriended her, who had refused to foreclose on the mortgage he held and take from her the last thing she possessed in the world.
“What was my father like?” she asked.
“Like?” Rafe’s brow furrowed. “How can anybody weigh what any man is like. I’d say he was about five feet eight or nine. When he died his hair was almost white, but when I first saw him he had only a few gray hairs. His face was a heap like yours. So were his eyes, except they weren’t so large nor so beautiful. He was a kind man who wasn’t used to violence and he didn’t like it. He planned well, and thought well, but the West was not the country for him, yet. Ten years from now when it has settled more, he’d have been a leadin’ citizen. He was a good man, and a sincere man.”
“It sounds like him,” Ann said hesitantly, “but there is nothing you could not have learned here, or from someone who knew him.”
“No,” he said frankly. “That’s so. But there’s somethin’ else you should know. The mortgage your father had against his place was paid.”
“What?” Ann stiffened. “Paid? How can you say that?”
“He borrowed the money in Frisco and paid Barkow with it. He got a receipt for it.”
“Oh, I can’t believe that! Why, Bruce would have . . .”
“Would he?” Rafe asked gently. “You sure?”
She looked at him. “What was the other thing?”
“I have a deed,” he said, “to the ranch, made out to you and to me.”
Her eyes widened, then hardened with suspicion. “So? Now things become clearer. A deed to my father’s ranch made out to you and to me! In other words, you are laying claim to half of my ranch?”
“Please …” Rafe said. “I…”
She smiled. “You needn’t say anything more, Mr. Caradec. I admit I was almost coming to believe there was something in your story. At least, I was wondering about it, for I couldn’t understand how you hoped to profit from any such tale. Now it becomes clear. You are trying to get half my ranch. You have even moved into my house without asking permission.”
She stepped to one side of the door.
“I’m sorry, but I must ask you to leave! I must also ask you to vacate the house on Crazy Woman at once! I must ask you to refrain from calling on me again, or from approaching me.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions. I never aimed to claim any part of the ranch! I came here only because your father asked me to.”
“Good day, Mr. Caradec!” Ann still held the curtain.
He looked at her, and for an instant their eyes held. She was first to look away. He turned abruptly and stepped through the curtain, and as he did the door opened and he saw Bo Marsh.
Marsh’s eyes were excited and anxious. “Rate,” he said, “that Boyne hombre’s in front of the National. He wants you!”
“Why shore,” Rafe said quietly. “I’m ready.”
He walked to the front door, hitching his guns into place. Behind him, he heard Ann Rodney asking Baker:
“What did he mean? That Boyne was waiting for him?”
Baker’s reply came to Rafe as he stepped out into the morning light.
“Trigger Boyne’s goin’ to kill him, Ann. You’d better go back inside!”
Rafe smiled slightly. Kill him? Would that be it? No man knew better than he the tricks that Destiny plays on a man, or how often the right man dies at the wrong time and place. A man never wore a gun without inviting trouble, he never stepped into a street and began the gunman’s walk without the full knowledge that he might be a shade too slow, that some small thing might disturb him just long enough!
Chapter VI
Morning sun was bright and the street lay empty of horses or vehicles. A few idlers loafed in front of the stage station, but all of them were on their feet.
Rafe Caradec saw his black horse switch his tail at a fly, and he stepped down in the street. Trigger Boyne stepped off the boardwalk to face him, some distance off. Rafe did not walk slowly, he made no measured, quiet approach. He started to walk toward Boyne, going fast.
Trigger stepped down into the street easily, casually. He was smiling. Inside, his heart was throbbing and there was a wild reckless eagerness within him. This one he would finish off fast. This would be simple, easy.
He squared in the street, and suddenly the smile was wiped from his face. Caradec was coming toward him, shortening the distance at a fast walk. That rapid approach did something to the calm on Boyne’s face and in his mind. It was wrong. Caradec should have come slowly, he should have come poised and ready to draw.
Knowing his own deadly marksmanship, Boyne felt sure he could kill this man at any distance. But as soon as he saw that walk, he knew that Caradec was going to be so close in a few more steps that he himself would be killed.
It is one thing to know you are to kill another man, quite a different thing to know you are to die yourself. If Caradec walked that way he would be so close he couldn’t miss!
Boyne’s legs spread and the wolf sprang into his eyes, but there was panic there, too. He had to stop his man, get him now. His hand swept down for his gun.
Yet something was wrong. For all his speed he seemed incredibly slow, because that other man, that tall, moving figure in the buckskin coat and black hat, was already shooting.
Trigger’s own hand moved first, his own hand gripped the gun butt first, and then he was staring into a smashing, blossoming rose of flame that seemed to bloom beyond the muzzle of that big black gun in the hands of Rafe Caradec. Something stabbed at his stomach, and he went numb to his toes.
Stupidly he swung his gun up, staring over it. The gun seemed awfully heavy. He must get a smaller one. That gun opposite him blossomed with rose again and something struck him again in the stomach. He started to speak, half turning toward the men in front of the stage station, his mouth opening and closing.
Something was wrong with him, he tried to say. Why, everyone knew he was the fastest man in Wyoming, unless it was Shute! Everyone knew that! The heavy gun in his hand bucked and he saw the flame stab at the ground. He dropped the gun, swayed, then fell flat on his face.
He would have to get up. He was going to kill that stranger, that Rafe Caradec. He would have to get up.
The numbness from his stomach climbed higher and he suddenly felt himself in the saddle of a bucking horse, a monstrous and awful horse that leaped and plunged and it was going up! Up! Up!
Then it came down hard, and he felt himself leave the saddle, all sprawled out. The horse had thrown him. Bucked off into the dust. He closed his hands spasmodically.
Rafe Caradec stood tall in the middle of the gunman’s walk, the black, walnut-stocked pistol in his right hand. He glanced once at the still figure sprawled in the street, then his eyes lifted, sweeping the walks in swift, accurate appraisal. Only then, some instinct prodded his subconscoius and warned him. The merest flicker of a curtain, and in the space between the curtain and the edge of the window, the black muzzle of a rifle!