Packard hunkered lower in the juniper, carefully slipped the six-guns from his belt, clasped them with sure, deft hands.
The stage swung around the bend, the horses surging into the uphill pull, harness creaking with the effort. The driver slouched forward easily, reins loose in his hands, but his head darted from side to side, watching the bushes along the trail. Beside him the shotgun messenger sat bolt upright, the butt of the gun planted against his knee, muzzle pointing toward the sky, left hand grasping the barrel. Another man knelt one-kneed on top of the lurching coach, rifle at ready.
The coach lumbered past, one wheel squealing, blobs of dust dropping from the slowly moving tires and spatting in the tracks that still smoked from the passing of the iron-shod wheels.
Breath still caught in his throat, Packard watched it pass. His fingers shifted slightly, taking a new grasp on the six-gun grips.
Carefully, he raised his head a bit, stared after the coach, heard the seconds beating in his head as time slowed to an agonizing crawl.
A man rose out of the bushes, like a jack-in-the-box popping up when someone snapped the catch. A man who yelled and raised a gun and fired.
The driver rose in his seat, hauling on the reins while the horses reared, a tangled mass of leather and striking forefeet and flying manes.
The shotgun messenger half raised his gun, jerked forward as a six-gun bellowed, bending in the middle as if he were on a hinge. For a moment he hung there, etched against the morning sun, a bent over man with the gun tumbling from his hands. Then slowly he pitched forward like a diver slanting off a board, pitched forward between the horses, fell beneath their feet.
The guard on top of the coach had leaped to his feet, his rifle coming to his shoulder in one swift blur of fluid motion. A gun spatted angrily behind him, like a snarling cat, and the guard stiffened and staggered, fell and rolled, slid halfway off the coach and hung there, knee caught beneath the low iron railing that ran along the top. His hands hung down limply and swung slowly to and fro, like unsteady pendulums, while blood dripped from his mouth and spattered in the dust.
Then there was no sound except that of the driver talking to the horses, talking in a soothing tone that trilled with hidden terror, trying to quiet the animals that reared and plunged and fought the bits and kicked and shied at the bloody thing that rolled beneath their hoofs.
Packard had risen from the juniper, but had not moved, had not even raised his gun. The action had been too swift, the deadly six-gun execution too well planned.
He looked across the trail at Pinky and above his red handkerchief mask, Pinky’s eyes glittered with excitement. Smoke still trickled from the gun he held in his hairy hand.
“That’s the way we do it, kid,” said Pinky. “Fast and neat. No time or bullets wasted.”
And what he said was true, Packard realized. Only a few seconds had ticked away since Marks had risen from the bushes, only three shots had been fired and two men were dead.
Marks had stepped to the head of the horses, was fighting them to a standstill while Hurley still held his gun on the struggling driver.
Sylvester was talking to someone inside the coach, talking in a voice that was conversational, almost as if he might be chatting with a next door neighbor.
“There ain’t no cause to be alarmed, ma’am,” he was saying. “The boys don’t aim to harm a hair of your head. Just you step out and sit down in the shade while we get the dust. That’s all we want. We’ll just take the dust and be gallopin’ along.”
But he still kept a gun in his hand and he kept it in position as he moved closer, grasped the handle and jerked the coach door wide open.
“Please ma’am,” he said. “Be sensible. Yelling and screamin’ won’t help you none at all.”
“I don’t intend,” the woman told him, “to do any yelling or screaming. And I’m not coming out. I’m staying here.”
The voice sent a chill of fear through Packard—an icy chill that gripped and held him like a mighty hand. For he knew that voice, had heard it only the night before …
“She says,” Sylvester told Pinky, “that she ain’t a-comin’ out.”
“The hell she ain’t,” snarled Pinky.
Swiftly he strode forward, lunged for the door of the coach, reached in. The woman screamed and Pinky yanked, hauling her out of the door, leaping back to escape her clawing hands. She stumbled and fell in the dust.
“Get them up,” yelled Packard. “Get them up and keep them there. I’m taking over.”
Sylvester and Pinky swung around, stared at the gun-mouths that scowled at them from Packard’s fists. “You’re loco!” yelled Pinky. “You can’t—”
One of Packard’s guns drooled flame and smoke and Pinky’s hat lifted in the air, skidded downward in a rapid glide and plopped onto the ground.
“The next one,” said Packard, “will be right between the eyes.”
Wide-eyed, the two of them lifted their hands, high above their heads.
“Get out of the way, Miss Page,” said Packard quietly. “There might be some shooting if these gents should get uneasy.”
“You’re too considerate,” the girl told him. “Why don’t you shoot them down?”
“Get out of the way,” snapped Packard. “Around here people do what I say for them to do.”
He raised his voice. “Marks, you walk down this way. Hurley, climb up and throw down the gold. Both you hombres shuck your guns.”
A sledge hammer slammed into his shoulder, spun him around, and he was falling forward, the ground rushing up at him with express train speed. Through the roaring in his ears came the sullen clap of a high-powered rifle.
Pop, he thought. Pop Allen. I forgot all about the damn old fool. What did he mean by horning in, anyway? He had no business to. He was supposed to be off in the gully holding them horses.
He hit the ground and exploded, sailing off into space, part of him going one way and part of him another … but finally the pieces came back together and he was whole again and he wallowed in a bed of pain and thirst.
A voice said: “He’s coming to.” Another voice snapped: “Quit champin’ at the bit, Marks. Be a damn shame to string him up and him not know about it.”
“Ought to lug him back and hang him alongside Cardway,” someone else suggested.
The voice that had snapped, protested. “Too far. And anyhow, Randall ain’t anxious to give Hangman’s Gulch no bad name. Hangings right in town got to be legal-like … vigilantes and all the fixin’s.”
The words seeped into Packard’s brain, seeped and simmered, thoughts clawing at their meaning.
Packard’s left shoulder ached with a dull, monotonous thud that beat and beat, as if someone were hitting it with a padded hammer. His throat ached, too and when he put his right hand up to feel it, there was something there. Something that was hard and scratchy and was pressing just a bit too tight.
Feebly he clawed at the thing around his neck, trying to loosen it so he could breathe more easily. He was sitting on the ground, with his legs stretched out in front of him and his back against the hard, rough trunk of a good-sized tree. He pressed his back harder against the tree and felt the scaly bark bite into his flesh.
Sitting against a tree, with a rope around his neck. And probably the other end of that rope went over a limb somewhere above his head. One yank … one good, stout yank by a couple or three men and he would be swinging free. He would be a thing like Cardway was … swinging the way that Cardway swung in the breeze that had swooped up the canyon bed.
“Give me that pail of water,” said a voice. “Damn it, he’s playing possum, that’s what.”
Water sloshed into Packard’s face with stinging force, ran in ice-cold rivulets off his hair and down his neck, sopping his shirt.
Packard shook his head, opened his eyes, stared at the man before him.
/>
Chapter VI
A DEAL IN HOT LEAD
Pinky held the bucket in his hand and Hurley stood beside him, one hand on his gun-butt. Marks leaned against a tree, holding the free end of the rope which angled down from the limb above Packard’s head. Sylvester squatted on his heels a few feet from where Hurley stood. Pop Allen was putting wood on a small, newly-kindled fire.
And beyond Pop, hands tied behind her and with the rope lashed loosely around another tree, was Alice Page. There was a streak of dirt across her face and she had lost her hat and her hair had fallen down over one shoulder. Her dress was dusty and bedraggled.
“How do you feel?” asked Pinky.
“Better,” said Packard, “than you’re going to feel when I get through with you.”
“We’re going to hang you,” Pinky told him. “We’re going to string you up and leave you hangin’ here for the crows to eat.”
Marks laughed, showing his teeth through his heavy beard. “You forgot, Pinky. We ain’t going to leave him hangin’. This here is my rope and I ain’t going to lose it. Too good a rope to go away and leave it.”
Alice Page’s face was twisted with horror and across the few yards that separated them, Packard’s eyes caught hers, held them for a moment.
“What you going to do with her?” he asked.
Marks laughed again, a high-keyed, nasty laugh. Pinky said: “We’re holding her until her old man comes to terms. He’s been raisin’ too much hell to suit the boss.”
Packard stared at the girl. Her head still was high, high with that bewitching tilt that he remembered from the other times he’d seen her.
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Preacher Page had told him. “She’s just angry because I’m sending her away.”
But Preacher Page hadn’t said she was leaving the next morning and he hadn’t asked. He should have warned the old man. Should have told him not to send her on the next coach. But there had been other things to think of, other things to say.
Randall had known, of course. Somehow Randall had found out. Hurley, perhaps. Hurley and Page still were friends and Hurley might have known. And Hurley would do anything that would help himself.
It wasn’t only gold that Randall had wanted off the coach. It had been the girl as well … the girl to hold as a whip over Preacher Page’s head. A way to make Preacher knuckle down, make him forget all about martial law, silence his demands for law and order.
Marks twitched on the rope and it tightened on Packard’s throat with a strangling jerk.
“What the hell are we waiting for?” asked Marks. “We might as well string up this saddle stiff and be on our way.”
“Wait a second,” said Packard.
Slowly he rose to his feet, stood leaning against the tree, his head light and giddy with the effort of standing on his own.
“You’re wasting your time,” snarled Pinky. “You can’t talk yourself out of that rope. We got you dead to rights and if you talked a million years we still would run you up.”
Packard looked at Hurley and the man’s eyes moved away, unwilling to meet the stare. Sylvester still squatted on his heels, scratching at the ground with a stick he had picked up, his broad-brimmed hat shading his face.
“If you got anything to say,” said Pinky, “go ahead and spit it out. We ain’t ones to deny a man a last word. Last smoke, too, if you want it. Hurley will roll you a smoke.”
“The hell with it,” snapped Hurley. His hand plunged for his gun-butt and the gun was coming out, a glare of steel in the brilliant sunlight. Packard, startled, crouched back against the tree, his stomach muscles tightening as if by contracting them they might be armor against the coming bullet.
Sylvester went into action from the ground. Like a compressed spring, he rose and hurled himself at Hurley’s arm. The gun coughed sharply and a bullet chunked with a vicious clap into the tree trunk inches from Packard’s head.
The gun flew from Hurley’s hand and Hurley dropped back a pace, caressing his twisted wrist.
“Damn you,” he snarled. “I’ll—”
“Come ahead,” Sylvester invited him. “Come ahead and do it.” His hand hovered like a waiting hawk above his six-gun butt.
Hurley did not move. “Go ahead and haul him up,” he yelled. “What are you waiting for? What—”
“You seem too anxious to have him hauled up,” Marks said. “Maybe there’s a reason for it. Come to think of it, you’re the one he told to climb up and throw down the gold. Seems like maybe he was pretty sure that you would do it without making any trouble. Seems like maybe we ought to have a talk—”
“Talk!” yelled Hurley. “That’s all you hombres do. You sit around and shoot off your yaps and never get nothing done.”
“Shut up!” snapped Pinky.
Hurley glared at him.
Crouched against the tree, Packard closed his eyes, felt the throb of his wounded shoulder shaking his whole body. He had held hopes that Hurley might step in and help. But that was out now. Hurley had dropped him like a hot potato at the moment when his string had been played out. Hurley was not a man who would back lost causes.
“What Marks says is right,” declared Pinky. “What do you know about Packard, Hurley?”
“Not a thing,” said Hurley. “He’s just a new man, that’s all.”
“I can tell you something about him,” said a new voice.
Packard opened his eyes. “You keep out of this,” he warned.
But Alice Page paid him no attention. She was looking at Pinky and there was a challenging defiance burning in her eyes.
“Mr. Packard,” she said, “is a United States marshal.”
A bombshell of quietness broke upon the group, a bombshell of chill and quietness.
Alice Page’s words dripped through the quietness. “If you kill him,” she said, “you’ll be hunted down like mad dogs. The government never forgets a thing like that. It isn’t just like killing anyone, you see.”
Pinky moved slowly toward the girl.
“You lie,” he snarled. “You know damn well that he’s no marshal. He didn’t act like no marshal back there at the stage. He told Hurley to climb up and throw down the bags of dust and no marshal would do that. And he didn’t say a thing about arresting us. A marshal always shoots off his face about arresting someone.”
He halted and stood squarely in front of the girl, but Alice Page stood unmoved, her chin up.
“Go ahead, then,” she challenged. “Go ahead and hang him and see what happens to you. That’s the surest thing that you can do to break up your rotten gang.”
Pinky hauled back his arm. “I have a notion to slap you down,” he snarled. “You dirty little—”
“Pinky!” yelled Packard.
Pinky whirled around.
“Leave the girl alone,” warned Packard. “She’s not mixed up in this. She’s only doing what she can to help me.”
Pinky sneered. “Sweet on you, eh?”
“Damn you, Pinky,” roared Packard. He dug in his heel and thrust himself out from the tree, but Marks hauled smartly on the rope and he was jerked back, heels dragging, noose tighter around his throat. With his one good hand, he clawed erect against the tree, stood gasping.
Across the space that separated them, he looked at Alice Page.
“It was a good try, miss,” he whispered, “and thanks a lot, but it just won’t hold water.”
Deliberately, Pinky whirled around, arm swinging with him. His palm smacked open-handed across Alice Page’s mouth and drove her back, staggering against the tree. Her body slammed hard into the tree, knees buckling beneath her. She fell forward and the rope jerked up her hands and held her in a kneeling position.
From where he stood Packard could see the white imprint of Pinky’s hand across her face and he moved one foot forward, then brought it back.
By sheer power of will, he held himself against the tree, willed his body rigid while the flame of hatred and rage ate through him like a fire.
It wouldn’t do him any good, he knew, to try another lunge. Marks was waiting, watching him, with a grin behind his beard. Marks would like to have him try to reach Pinky or the girl.
“Next time,” said Pinky, savagely, “I’ll break your neck.”
He swung on his heel and looked at Hurley, a scowl twisting at his face.
“Hurley,” Pinky said, “you better talk. And make it fast and straight.”
Hurley didn’t talk. He moved. One second he was facing Pinky, hands dangling at his side and the next he was plunging for the gun that Sylvester had twisted from his grasp. In a single leap he was beside it, stooping over, scooping it up in a lightning motion.
Pinky’s arms pistoned and his guns struck fire in the noonday sun as they came whispering from leather.
At point blank range the guns roared fire and smoke, the three reports blending into one. The handkerchief around Pinky’s throat whipped suddenly as if struck by a tiny gale and out in the sunlight Hurley was tipping over, twisting awkwardly to keep his feet.
His gun slipped from his fingers and feebly he clawed at it, trying to pick it off the ground while his hand was far above it. Then, gently, almost as if he meant to do it, he toppled over and lay huddled on the grass.
Pinky stood on spraddled legs, watching Hurley fall, then calmly tucked the smoking guns back into his belt and turned his back on Hurley’s body.
His face was almost pleasant as he spoke to Packard. “I guess,” he said, “you won’t have time for that smoke, after all.”
He nodded to Marks. “Haul away.”
“Cripes,” protested Marks, “you don’t expect me to do it all alone. Packard there weighs close to a couple of hundred!”
“Pop,” ordered Pinky, “go lend Marks a hand.”
Pop rose slowly to his feet, ambled forward.
Packard straightened, tense against the tree, thoughts racing in his brain. He was going to be hanged. Run up by a brawny bearded man and a shriveled oldster while a man called Pinky stood to one side and watched.