“How did you know, Marshal?”
“You learn, Johnny. You learn or you die. That’s your lesson for today. Learn to be in the right place at the right time and keep your own council. You’ll be getting my job.” His cigar was gone. He bit the end from another and continued.
“Jack Thomas was the only man the rider of the gray horse could have visited without crossing the street. No outlaw would have left the horse he would need for a quick getaway on the wrong side of the street.”
When he returned to the eating house Julia Heath was at her table again. She was white and shaken.
“I am sorry, Julia, but now you know how little time there is when guns are drawn. These men came to steal the money honest men worked to earn, and they would have killed again as they have killed before. Such men know only the law of the gun.” He placed his hands on the table. “I should have recognized you at once, Julia, but I never imagined, after what happened, that you would come. I had forgotten about Tom’s ranch. He was proud of you, Julia, and he was my best friend.”
“But you killed him.”
Marshal Moore gestured toward the street. “It was like that. Guns exploding, a man dying almost at my feet, then someone rushing up behind me in a town where I had no friends. I fired at a man who was shooting at me, turned and fired at one running up behind me. I killed my best friend, your brother.”
She knew now how it must have been for this man, and she was silent.
“And now?” she asked finally.
“My job goes to Johnny Haven, but I shall stay here and try to help the town grow. This fight should end it for a while. In the meantime the town can mature, settle down, and become a place to live in instead of just a place to camp for the night”
“I — I guess it’s worth doing.”
“It is.” He put down his unlighted cigar. “You will be driving over to settle Tom’s estate. When you come back you might feel like stopping off again. If you do, I’ll be waiting to see you.”
She looked at him, looking beyond the coldness, the stillness, seeing the man her brother must have known. “I think I shall. I think I will stop … when I come back.”
Out in the street a man was raking dust over the blood. Back of the barn an old hen cackled, and somewhere a pump began to complain rustily, drawing clear water from a deep, cold well.
BLUFF CREEK STATION
The stage was two hours late into Bluff Creek and the station hostler had recovered his pain-wracked consciousness three times. After two futile attempts to move himself he had given up and lay sprawled on the rough boards of the floor with a broken back and an ugly hole in his side.
He was a man of middle years, his jaw un-shaved and his hair rumpled and streaked with gray. His soiled shirt and homespun jeans were dark with blood. There was one unlaced boot on his left foot. The other boot lay near a fireplace gray with ancient ashes.
There were two benches and a few scattered tools, some odd bits of harness, an overturned chair, and a table on which were some unwashed dishes. Near the hostler’s right hand lay a Spencer rifle, and beyond it a double-barreled shotgun. On the floor nearby, within easy reach, a double row of neatly spaced shotgun and rifle shells. Scattered about were a number of used shells from both weapons, mute mementos of his four-hour battle with attacking Indians.
Now, for slightly more than two hours there had been no attack, yet he knew they were out there, awaiting the arrival of the stage, and it was for this he lived, to fire a warning shot before the stage could stop at the station. The last shot they fired, from a Sharps .50, had wrecked his spine. The bloody wound in his side had come earlier in the battle, and he had stuffed it with cotton torn from an old mattress.
Outside, gray clouds hung low, threatening rain, and occasional gusts of wind rattled the dried leaves on the trees, or stirred them along the hard ground.
The stage station squatted in dwarfish discomfort at the foot of a bluff, the station was constructed of blocks picked from the slide-rock at the foot of the bluff, and it was roofed with split cedar logs covered with earth. Two small windows stared in mute wonderment at the empty road and at the ragged brush before it where the Indians waited.
Three Indians, he believed, had died in the battle, and probably he had wounded as many more, but he distrusted counting Indian casualties, for all too often they were overestimated. And the Indians always carried away their dead.
The Indians wanted the stage, the horses that drew it, and the weapons of the people inside. There was no way to warn the driver or passengers unless he could do it. The hostler lay on his back staring up at the ceiling.
He had no family, and he was glad of that now. Ruby had run off with a tinhorn from Alta some years back, and there had been no word from her, nor had he wished for it. Occasionally, he thought of her, but without animosity. He was not, he reminded himself, an easy man with whom to live, nor was he much of a person. He had been a simple, hardworking man, inclined to drink too much, and often quarrelsome when drinking.
He had no illusions. He knew he was finished. The heavy lead slug that had smashed the base of his spine had killed him. Only an iron will had kept life in his body, and he doubted his ability to keep it there much longer. His legs were already dead and there was a coldness in his fingers that frightened him. He would need those fingers to fire the warning shot.
Slowly, carefully, he reached for the shotgun and loaded it with fumbling, clumsy fingers. Then he wedged the shotgun into place in the underpinning of his bunk. It was aimed at nothing, but all he needed was the shot, the dull boom it would make, a warning to those who rode the stage that something was amiss.
He managed to knot a string to the trigger so it could be pulled even if he could not reach the trigger. His extremities would go first and then even if his fingers were useless he could pull the trigger with his teeth.
Exhausted by his efforts he lay back and stared up at the darkening ceiling, without bitterness, waiting for the high, piercing yell of the stage driver and the rumble and rattle of the stage’s wheels as it approached the station.
Five miles east, the heavily loaded stage rolled along the dusty trail accompanied by its following plume of dust. The humped-up clouds hung low over the serrated ridges. Up on the box, Kickapoo Jackson handled the lines and beside him Hank Wells was riding shotgun. Wells was deadheading it home as there was nothing to guard coming west. He had his revolving shotgun and a rifle with him from force of habit. The third man who rode the top, lying between some sacks of mail, was Marshal Brad Delaney, a former buffalo hunter and Indian fighter.
Inside the stage a stocky, handsome boy with brown hair sat beside a pretty girl in rumpled finery. Both looked tired and were, but the fact that they were recently married was written all over them. Half the way from Kansas City they had talked of their hopes and dreams, and their excitement had been infectious. They had enlisted the advice and sympathy of those atop the coach as well as those who rode inside.
The tall man of forty with hair already gray at the temples was Dr. Dave Moody, heading for the mining camps of Nevada to begin a new practice after several years of successful work in New England. Major Glen Faraday sat beside him at the window. Faraday was a West Point man, now discharged from the army and en route west to build a flume for an irrigation project.
Ma Harrigan, who ran a boardinghouse in Austin and was reputed to make the best pies west of the Rockies, sat beside Johnny Ryan, headed west to the father he had never seen.
Kickapoo Jackson swung the Concord around a bend and headed into a narrow draw. “Never liked this place!” he shouted. “Too handy for injuns!”
“Seen any around?” Delaney asked.
“Nope! But the hostler at Bluff Creek had him a brush with them awhile back. He driv’em off, though! That’s a good man, yonder!”