“Maybe he’s still on the hunt.”
“Him? Dave never wasted a shot in his life that I know of. Sure, we all do, soon or late, but Dave … he’s a careful man with a gun. He never shoots unless he’s got his man dead to rights. I’m sure he’s dead.”
John Lang poked at the earth with a stick, offering no comment. Charlie shifted his feet and started to speak, then thought better of it. That there Ruble Noon, he reflected, must be the real old bull of the woods, because killing Dave Cherry was no easy trick. “We going to set here?” Kissling asked. “We’re goin’ to wait,” Ben Janish said. “If you want to go up there, you go ahead. I’ll put a marker on your grave.”
After a long silence, he said, “We’re going to let him sweat. If he can wait, so can we.”
“What about the judge? What’s he hornin’ in on this for?” Kissling asked.
Ben Janish glanced at him. “He’s all right. It’s good to have a judge on our side. We may need him.”
Kissling was not satisfied, but he could sense the irritation in Janish and kept his silence. There seemed more to this than he had thought.
Judge Niland had ridden into the ranch shortly after daybreak and had had a long talk with Janish, with nobody else sitting in. After that, he had gone up to the house and was still there, probably talking to Fan Davidge. Kissling had the feeling something was going on that he had no part in, and he didn’t like it.
He got to his feet abruptly and moved off among the trees. Somewhere on the slope above them the man known as Ruble Noon waited, holding them all here by the threat of his presence. Kissling looked up through the trees. Noon angered him, and why Ben Janish should decide to wait he could not guess. Was the great Ben Janish afraid. Ruble Noon was only one man. He could not watch everywhere.
“I’m going up,” he said suddenly.
“Go ahead.” Janish did not even look up.
Kissling hesitated. When he had spoken he had not really expected to go; he had half expected Janish to tell him to shut up and forget it. Now his bluff had been called and he stood there irresolute. He could go back and sit down and nobody would be apt to say anything, but he would know their contempt. On such small things are the lives of men decided.
Angrily, he stepped out and started up the slope. Away from the path the slope was steep and grassy, or sometimes rocky. Much of it was covered by trees where he could move from one to the next, scrambling, holding on with one hand, pulling himself up. When he had gone a little way he stopped and listened, sweat pouring down his face.
What the hell? Now that he was away from them, why go up there at all? This was no fight he wanted. He did not like Ruble Noon, and Noon was a threat to them, but it was a big country and he need never come back this way again.
Even as he thought this he knew he was not going to do it. He found a steep path through the trees and climbed up. Ben Janish wasn’t the only man who could use a gun. He would show them a thing or two. He had watched Ben Janish, and he knew that he himself was just as fast. What he was not allowing for was sureness of hand and accuracy in shooting. He knew he could be just as fast in drawing against Janish, but what he did not know, and was never to know, was that had they been in a gun battle Janish would have beaten him fifty times out of fifty.
He knew little about Ruble Noon except that he had heard he was a gunfighter, a killer of men. He thought of him in the same terms as he thought of himself, or Dave Cherry or John Long. He knew nothing of Ruble Noon’s past. He did not know that in another life he had been a hunter, a skilled stalker of wild game, a man as at home in the forest as a leopard, and as deadly.
He moved up the slope now, his eyes searching the trees and brush, but his were eyes trained for open country, for riding after cattle, or for using guns in towns or in ranch yards.
He believed that he was moving silently. He paused from time to time, unaware of the rifle muzzle that tracked him along the slope and up through the trees. He had seen nothing, and believed he was unseen. Suddenly he emerged in a small sun-filled clearing where no shadows fell, and as he stepped out from the trees he reached up to pull his hatbrim down. When he took his hand away, Ruble Noon was standing where a moment before there had been no one, and he was holding a rifle in his hands.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Ruble Noon said conversationally, almost as though they were sitting over their beers in a saloon. “I wish you would turn around and go back.”
“I can’t do that,” Kissling said, and he was surprised at his own words. “I told them I was coming after you.” And then he added, “I made my brags.”
“Tell them you couldn’t find me. I have nothing against you, Kissling. You moved against me down there, but I did not come looking for you. I don’t want you.”
An hour before, even a few minutes before, Kissling would have said such conversation was impossible, yet here he was, talking with Ruble Noon without animosity.
“My fight is with Janish,” Ruble Noon said. “I want all of you to leave the Rafter D and let Fan Davidge lead her life the way she wants to. Her father paid me to see that you left. I have it to do, Kissling. I took his money.”
“Are you going to kill Janish?”
“If I must.”
“What about me?”
“Go back down the hill, and just say you couldn’t find me. After all, it was I who found you. Or if you want to, go back down to the ranch, get a horse, and ride out of the country.”
“They told me you never gave anybody a break.”
“Maybe you’re an exception.” As he spoke he was listening, one part of his attention on those others, on Ben Janish and John Lang. “I don’t want to kill you, Kissling, but you can see the odds. You might miss with a six-shooter, even if you got it out … at forty feet I am not going to miss with this rifle.”
Kissling could feel the sweat trickling down between his shoulder blades. He had an out, and he was going to take it. Maybe there was a lot of money here somewhere. Maybe. But a corpse doesn’t spend very much, and a corpse isn’t welcome in the red-light districts or in the saloons.
“I think I’ll walk,” Kissling said quietly. “You won’t think less of me?”
“If you want to know, I think you’ve just grown up. A kid would have grabbed for his gun and died.”
Kissling turned his back and walked back into the trees. He did not point himself back toward Janish, but started working his way back down the steep slope, using the trees for hand holds. He moved almost as if in a trance, his mind empty, conscious only that he was pulling out, he was going to live.
Ruble Noon watched him go with relief. Kissling had been a borderline case … there was a chance for him, bull-headed as he seemed to be. There would be no such chance for Ben Janish or Lang. They were hardened, and steeped in evil.
Ghostlike, he eased back into the shelter of the trees. From where he now waited he had a diagonal view of the trail, and he would be able to see the men as they came into view. He could get at least one of them before they could drop from sight, and the man he had been would have done just that.
Farther down the slope Ben Janish swore. He had heard no gunshot. “He’s missed him! That calf-eyed Kissling couldn’t find a saddle in a lighted barn.”
“Give him time,” Lang said dryly. “That ain’t no pilgrim he’s huntin’.”
But no sound came down the sunlit hill, no movement disturbed the leaf shadows. “All right,” Janish said finally, “we’re movin’ up. Walk easy, an’ be ready to shoot. We ain’t likely to get too many chances.”
Janish moved ahead, and started working his way up the trail. Better than the others, he knew what a woodsman Ruble Noon probably was. A cautious man, Janish had read whatever items had appeared in the newspapers about gunfighters and gunmen whom he might someday meet, and he had listened to the campfire and barroom stories of gun battles. He had heard a great deal about Ruble Noon, and the one factor that stood out was that he was a man to be feared.