Parry screamed, and at the sound Stowe, who had climbed one of the cars, fired. The body slid from the top of the car and fell to the roadbed near where Shevlin was standing.
“Ben!” he called.
“You’re talkin’!” “We got ’em both. Now you get on that train and get out of here.” “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Suddenly Ben’s voice changed. “Like hell I will!
I’ll see you dead first!” “Ben… one thing–who =illed Eli?” “I did, you damn’ fool! Merriam thought he did. They were arguing, and I saw Clagg was gettin’ nowhere, so when Merriam shot and missed, I killed Eli–from my office window.” Mike tugged off one boot, then the other. He was wearing thick woollen socks. He felt sure that Ben was creeping closer, for the sound of those last words had been nearby and close to the ground.
Ben had been shooting a pistol, but he still had a shotgun or a rifle… at this distance those shotgun slugs would cut a man in two.
Suddenly Ben Stowe spoke. “You can still cut out, Mike. You don’t need to die.” How far away was he now? Maybe twenty paces. And Ben was without doubt in shelter of some kind, waiting for Mike’s reply, to cut him in two.
Turning quickly, Mike ran back along the track, his socks making no sound on the wooden cross-ties. He heard the train, closer now, whistling for the station. Leaping to clear the cinders of the roadbed, he landed close against the pens, then with a swift lunge he rounded the corner.
The headlight of the train was shining off across the flat, for the train had not yet rounded the bend toward the station. When the locomotive rounded the bend, the headlight would throw the whole area into sharp relief.
The train whistled again, and then the light swung as the engine came around the bend. There was Ben Stowe, standing squarely in the middle of the track, the shotgun in his hands, waiting for that glare of light.
They saw each other at the same instant–or maybe Mike had a bit the best of it, for he was not where Ben Stowe might have expected him to be.
The shotgun came up and Mike fired. Slugs ripped through the air around him, something tugged at his pants. He stepped forward and shot again, and Ben Stowe went down to his hands and knees. The train was thundering down upon him, and Mike rushed forward in a desperate lunge, jerking Stowe free of the tracks with only seconds to spare.
The train roared by within inches of them, then Ben Stowe came up on his knees, a Colt gripped in his fist. “Thanks, Mike!” he yelled, and fired.
Shevlin felt the shock of the bullet, and he knew he had dropped his gun. He had reloaded behind the stock pens, and there were still one or two– Stowe was resting his gun across a forearm for dead aim, so Mike Shevlin drew Hollister’s gun from his waistband and as he swung it around he fired three shots as fast as he could make them roll.
Stowe fired once. The bullet missed, struck the steel rail, and ricocheted off into the night with a nasty whine.
Mike caught hold of the rail and pulled himself around. He was conscious that men had gotten down from the train and others had come up on horseback, but he was concentrating on one thing only: he had to get Ben Stowe.
He twisted around to look at Stowe. Ben’s face was bloody, and his shirt was dark with blood.
“You got me,” he gasped. “You always were shot with luck!” Even as he spoke, he brought his gun up with startling speed, and Mike shot into him again.
Then there was only silence, the hiss of steam from the engine, and, after a moment, a mutter of excited voices and a shuffling of feet.
Someone was kneeling over Shevlin. It was Doc Clagg. “Babcock,” Mike said, “he’s hurt bad, you–was But he was keeping his eyes on Ben Stowe, clutching his empty gun and waiting for him to move.
Only Ben did not move, and never would again.
“He said I was shot with luck,” Mike said slowly. “I wish that was all he had in those guns.” “You’ll live,” Doc Clagg assured him grimly. “Your kind are too tough to die.”
The cattle business around Rafter never recovered, and after the mines played out Rafter became a ghost town. Mike and Laine Shevlin never did live there, for they moved to California when he was able to travel. Shevlin ran cattle there for quite a few years.
Thirty years ago they ripped up the long-unused tracks that had been the only excuse for Tappan Junction. The buildings were destroyed when a tourist dropped a cigarette from his car as it raced along the highway that had been built at the foot of the mountains.
Laine Shevlin lived to a fine old age until one of her grandsons became an ad man on Madison Avenue; after that there wasn’t much to live for. She just wasted away, and after Mike saw her buried he walked out of the cemetery and disappeared.
There was quite a lot of talk, and the newspapers dug up the fact that he had been a Texas Ranger and something of a gunfighter, reprinting some of the old stories, with some confusion as to names and dates.
The only one who could have offered a clue was the last of the old-timers. He had taken to sitting on a bench in the sun alongside a filling station on the new highway, and he was there when the car pulled up and the tall old man called over to him.
“Wasn’t there a place called Tappan Junction somewhere about here?” The old-timer peered toward the driver. “Hey?
Did you say Tappan Junction? She used to lie right out there on the flat.” The sitter’s pipe had gone out and he fumbled in his pockets for a match. “Young folks, they ain’t never heard of Tappan.” “What about Stone Cabin?” the man in the car asked.
“Stone Cabin?” Through the fog of years the words startled the old man. “Did you say Stone Cabin?”
When old Mike Shevlin turned up missing he was still a wealthy man, and there was quite a search for him. The highway police made inquiries, and at the filling station the old-timer was pointed out to them.
“Doubt if he can he’p you much,” the station attendant said. “He’s almost lost his sight, and that one arm, that’s been no good for years. Horse fell on it, I guess, a good many years back. Why, that old feller’s nigh to a hundred years old! Ninety-odd, anyway.” They asked their questions after they found Mike Shevlin’s car abandoned in a cove at the foot of the mountains, but the old man did not pay much attention. Only after they had turned away did he mutter to himself as he sat there.
“Tappan Junction… Stone Cabin.
that’s been a while. “You tell Doc Clagg,” he said, “you tell Doc Clagg I ain’t as tough as I used to be.”” “Stone Cabin?” the attendant repeated in answer to their query. “Never heard of it. I’ve lived around here more’n ten years, and I never heard the name.” The officer looked at the high green hills, rolling back in somber magnificence, wild and lonely. They told him nothing.
“What’s back up there?” he asked.
“Nothin’. There ain’t no road. Ain’t been anybody back in there that I can remember.
Folks don’t stop here for more’n gas and the time of day. They just breeze on through. We hereabouts, we got no time for lookin’ in the mountains.” It was forty miles back to the highway police office, and they could just make it by quitting time.
As they were driving back the officer looked at his companion. “Didn’t you tell me your folks came from this part of the country?” “My granddaddy did. But he never talked about it, or else I didn’t listen. Anyway, I don’t believe it was rough as they say. His name was the same as mine… Wilson Hoyt.” They settled back and listened to the hum of the motor and the sound of the tires, and watched the windshield wiper, for it was beginning to rain.
It was raining, too, up at Stone Cabin, just as it had long ago.
The End