The crowd roared approval, and mopping sweat and blood from his face with a torn sleeve, his opponent threw an arm over his shoulders and the whole crowd trooped back inside.
On the butt end of a log near the placer claim a drunk sat with his forearms resting on his knees, staring down the street through a haze of alcoholic wonderment and doubt. Someone at the other end of town fired a pistol into the air.
“Like it?” Barney squeezed her arm.
“Like it?” she looked about her with bright, excited eyes. “Oh, Barney, I love it! It’s duty, dusty, bloody and sort of awful, but it’s wonderful!”
He nodded. “That’s just the way I feel, Sis! Gosh, I’m sure glad Dad decided to come west! This is so much better than sitting around getting stiff and old in that town of ours! It was pretty, but this is a man’s world!”
A man shoved by them, then turned and grabbed Barney’s arm. “You’re young Coyle, aren’t you?” He glanced left and right. “Have you seen Bardoul? You know, that big fellow who runs with Buffalo Murphy?”
“Don’t think I know him,” Barney said, hesitantly.
“I do!” Jacquine said quickly. “What’s the matter?”
“Somebody started the story around that Spinner Johns is gunning for him. For God’s sake, if you see him before I do, warn him in time! Johns is a killer!”
Barney scowled, torn between excitement and duty. “Sis,” he said doubtfully, “maybe I’d better take you back to the hotel. If there’s going to be a gun fight I don’t want you to get hurt!”
She caught his sleeve. “Barney, who is Spinner Johns?”
Barney looked at her, worried. “Sis, I don’t know much about him, just sort of talk around town. He’s a gunman. The kind we’ve heard Uncle Jack tell about, like those fellows down in Texas or Kansas. He killed a man just a few nights ago over in Spearfish.”
He scowled. “Did you say you knew Matt Bardoul?”
“He was at our table last night for awhile and he’s one of the men who are going on the trip with us. He rode up from Cheyenne alongside the stage I came up on, too. He seems nice.”
As she spoke, she seemed to see him again as she had seen him last, rising from the table in the IXL Dining Room. How tall he was! And how easily and gracefully he moved!
She remembered the day she had seen him at Pole Creek Ranch, and how strangely the expression in his green eyes changed, eyes that could look so humorous and amused as if he always found something that brought a smile almost to his lips, yet they were eyes that could be filled with such fire that it startled and excited her. Yet she recalled the look she had seen him throw at Clive and there had been no softness or fire in his eyes then, only a cold green light, flat and deadly.
“He’s a gunman, too, I think,” she said, her eyes scanning the street for a glimpse of him, “but we should warn him, Barney. He’s one of us, in a way.”
“Come on, then! Let’s find him!”
Barney took her arm once more and they started through the crowd, and as they moved she glanced up at this new brother of hers, amazed at the change in him. He seemed altogether different from the goodlooking boy who had courted the girls in Virginia with such casual grace and ease after they had come down from Washington. There was new strength in him, new snap in his step, and a new confidence in his voice.
“Look!” Barney stopped, awe in his voice. “There’s Spinner Johns now!”
She thought then that he need not have told her, for she would have known.
He was walking slowly down the very center of the street, a man just a little taller than she herself with a long, lantern jaw and flat, deadly looking eyes. He wore two guns tied down on his thighs and in his step there was a certain arrogance that seemed to command and empty the street before him.
Her uncle, Black Jack Coyle who had been in the west since before the War Between the States, had spun many yarns of gunmen, and their names were legend to her. Most of them were men alive now, men who had become legends in their lifetimes, men who had blasted fame out of a hard world with six-guns.
Wild Bill Hickok, Clay Allison, Wyatt Earp, Wes Hardin, Manning Clements, Ben Thompson, Luke Short, Billy the Kid … all were names she had heard, even as she had heard the stories of Bill Longley before them. Spinner Johns was a name new to her, but seeing him now, there was something about him that frightened her.
He wore a gray hat, and a gray shirt under a dark and rather dirty vest. A white handkerchief, an incongruous touch, fluttered from his left breast pocket. There was something slow and purposeful in his walk, and in his eyes as they swung side to side of the street, probing, judging, warning.
“I wonder where Matt is?” she whispered.
“I don’t know, but I hope he gets away.”
“Gets away?” she was astonished. “He won’t try to get away, Barney!”
“He’s a fool if he doesn’t!” Barney spoke sharply. “Johns is poison mean.” He frowned, and a puzzled tone came into his voice. “I wonder why he’s after Bardoul?”
Her eyes, straying down the street, saw something visible to her that the gunman in the street center could not yet see. It was Buffalo Murphy!
She remembered seeing him in company with Matt in the store, and once later she had glimpsed them together on the street, walking with another man, a younger man.
Murphy had come out and was leaning now against the wall of the store, his rifle carelessly in the hollow of his arm. Then she saw the door push open, and the young man she had seen with them, Ban Hardy, came out and strolled casually across the street where he sat down on a box near the hitching rail. He lighted a cigarette.
“Barney!” she tightened her grip on his arm. “Something’s going to happen! Stay here!”
They had walked on a few steps, going in the same direction as Spinner Johns now. At her tightened grip, Barney stopped, and just in time. Matt Bardoul stepped from a space between the buildings near them.
Johns was a good thirty yards away, and his eyes swung left, right. Then they swung back right and he stopped dead still in the center of the street.
He had seen Matt Bardoul.
The Spinner’s feet were spread a little, and he stood there, poised and ready, on the balls of his feet, every nerve and sense keyed for what was to come.
Matt Bardoul said nothing, nor did he stop. He knew that to stop would be a signal and Johns would go for his gun, but Matt knew that standing only a few feet behind him, and right in the line of fire, was Jacquine Coyle!
He strolled across the boardwalk, his boots sounding clearly in the now silent street, his hands swinging easily at his sides. He stepped down into the thick dust.
Barney pushed his body in front of his sister’s, his heart pounding with excitement.
Matt took another step before he spoke. “Hear you are lookin’ for me, Spinner.” His voice rang like a bell in the narrow, false fronted street. All along that street life seemed to have been suspended, caught suddenly by some strange wave and stricken into stark immobility. Standing in front of the DCL, a man heard his boot leather creak, and he could feel his heart pounding like a drum. “I heard you were huntin’ me an’ reckoned we’d ought to get together.”
He continued to walk toward Johns with the same easy, careless stride. “Don’t calculate to keep a man waitin’, Johns, leastwise a man who wants to see me so bad he’ll come a huntin’ me.”
Johns said nothing, only he seemed to crouch a little lower. Every nerve tingling, her eyes wide with fright, Jacquine watched Bardoul walk. Was he never going to stop? Was he going to walk right up to the muzzle of that awful man’s guns?
Scarcely a breath was drawn on the silent street. Awed, men watched as step by step the tall man in the buckskin shirt and black hat drew nearer to Spinner Johns.
“They tell me you’re a bad man, Spinner. They tell me you’ve killed some men. Old men, no doubt. They tell me you’re quite a bad man, Spinner, but I’m wondering what you do, when you face a man who isn’t afraid? Is that the same thing, Spinner?
“I’m wondering who sent you after me, too. There had to be somebody. We’ve never had any words, Spinner. In fact, I never saw you until you were pointed out to me a few minutes ago.”