Читать книгу Murder on the Frontier - Ernest Haycox - Страница 4

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As soon as the train dropped him, Sheriff Sudden Ben Drury walked up the street through his own heavy cigar smoke to the marshal's office in the courthouse. Emerett Bulow was marshal of Prairie City that year.

Sudden Ben said: "Howard Durbin came before the grand jury at Two Dance yesterday and presented information against one Conrad Weiser on the charge of murder. The grand jury returned a secret indictment. Where do I find Weiser?"

Bulow murmured: "He's a homesteader fifteen miles down the Silver Bow."

Against Bulow, who was a six-footer with pale blue eyes and a flat-boned face, Sudden Ben Drury cut a rather small figure. He was a carefully dressed man and a shrewd one, having spent the best of twenty years dealing with the politics of a turbulent county. The sense of that knowledge was grained into his smooth cheeks; it was to be detected in the easy affability of his manner. He seemed soft, but this was only part of that outward show, for no man could long be peace officer of Sage County unless there was grit in him somewhere. The news obviously disturbed Emerett Bulow and the sheriff, observing this, was quick to ask: "They got a good case against Weiser?"

Bulow remained silent a long while, as though searching for the exact thing to say. It seemed to come hard, as most speech did for this rather unimaginative town marshal. "Good enough, I suppose. They found Arizona Matt a mile from Weiser's place. He had a bullet in his head. He was one of Howard Durbin's riders."

Sudden Ben's eyes were gray and smart and half hidden by the cigar smoke. He said dryly: "What else?"

"The situation," added Emerett Bulow in his dour way, "is kind of bad here. The hoe-men keep a-comin' in to settle up the Silver Bow flats. It's busted up the flats entirely as free range. The cattlemen are all pushed back into the hills, and they're pretty sore." It wasn't an explanation and Sudden Ben held his peace until Emerett Bulow added more reluctantly than before: "Con Weiser is a sort of head man among the homesteaders."

The sheriff removed his cigar and tapped the ashes and returned it securely to his lips.

There wasn't any need to ask more, for this was still a county run for and by cattle. The sheriff held his office by virtue of beef, and so did the marshal. They looked at each other in long silence, knowing how it was.

"What kind of a man is this Weiser?"

"Why," said Bulow, "not bad at all. I'll go with you."

So presently they were riding out of Prairie in a buggy, with the high flash of a July sun fully beating against them and the flats running all tawny and powder-dry into the south.

Seven miles from town the road reached the hundred-foot canyon of the winding Silver Bow and subsequently followed it. This was on to the left. To the right, a mile away, low foothills lifted up. All along the river bluff nesters' small shacks began to show.

"Not a settler here two years ago," commented the sheriff. "Nothin' but Durbin's cattle and Hugh Dan Lake's cattle and the Custer Company's cattle. Times sure change."

"There'll be trouble."

"Maybe," said the sheriff quietly, "I better come out this way more often," and his eyes were narrowed and full of thought behind the continuing cloud of his cigar smoke. Fifteen miles from town Emerett Bulow drove the buggy into Con Weiser's yard. The family had seen the dusty signals of the buggy from afar and now was lined up against the side of the house.

"Con," said Emerett Bulow, in a regretting voice, "this is Sheriff Drury. I'm sorry." And afterward he put his hands across his knees, leaving the bad news to the sheriff.

The sheriff let the silence go on, laying a sharp and close glance across the interval to the man standing by the house. Weiser was a German of the thin and dark type, turning gray and stooped at the shoulders from work. His attention came back to the sheriff, black and bitter. Sudden Ben weighed him carefully, searching him for the prospects of trouble. After twenty years of man-hunting, he knew this first contact was always the most dangerous. Some men were cool, and some went mad. But presently he had removed his cigar and was speaking with an easy courtesy.

"I don't like to do this, but if you'll get in with Emerett and me we'll drive to Prairie."

Weiser said: "I been expectin' it," and turned through the doorway into the house.

Relaxed in his seat, his glance scanning the family, yet never quite leaving that door's yawning square—he saw Weiser's wife let her formless shoulders droop. She was Old German and misery was in her eyes, but she wouldn't speak. Four children of an in-between age were grouped closely together, as wooden as if they had been told to pose for a picture. An older child stood at the edge of his vision, near the house's corner. Venturing a direct glance that way, Sudden Ben forgot the doorway.

She was Weiser's daughter, he realized for she had the same definite mold of features. She was slim and about eighteen and her face was as clear and proud as any the sheriff had ever seen in the rough wastes of his county; and though the breath of fear touched this yard there was no fear in her. Sudden Ben held her glance a moment and then whipped his interest back to Con Weiser, now coming out the door. There had been that moment of negligence on Sudden Ben's part, leaving its faint shock in him.

Weiser got into the buggy, saying nothing to his family. Emerett Bulow turned the team and drove quickly away, with a deeper and deeper gloom on his face. And then a quick tattoo of a horse turned all three of them in the seat and they watched the girl gallop out of the Weiser yard, bound away into the lower flats. The news, Sudden Ben guessed would travel soon enough. Con Weiser was humped forward in the narrow seat, indifferent and without speech.

It went so all the way back to Prairie. As soon as they came to town Bulow took Weiser to the jail room in the courthouse and Sudden Ben, having two hours to kill before train time, methodically set about paying visits to Prairie's shops and shopkeepers, genially shaking hands all along the route and thereby building up his political fences. Afterward, he crossed to Mike Danahue's saloon and was closeted there a half-hour. It was the saloonmen in Sage County who knew the drifts of public sentiment, and who possessed power.

Emerett Bulow accompanied him later to the train. Gloom rode the marshal's words. "There's going to be hell to pay."

Sudden Ben nodded, having already learned as much from Mike Danahue in the saloon. "Think you can keep Weiser safe until the trial?"

The marshal was touchy about that. "I never lost a man out of my jail yet and I'm too old to begin the habit. The hoemen won't free him and the cattle boys won't lynch him."

"I'll be back for the trial," Sudden Ben assured him and went into the smoking car. Settled deeply in the plush seat he watched the dun earth scud by. Ashes fell on his vest and he seemed asleep. Yet his shrewd mind, packed with the lore of the land and the ways of its men, was closely analyzing the imponderables of Con Weiser's arrest. The cattlemen, he knew, were making a test of their strength against the rising tides of settlers. It didn't make any difference whether Con Weiser was guilty or not. Con Weiser was only a symbol. Trouble would come of it as Bulow had said.

The train took him away from Prairie City at three o'clock. At four o'clock Tip Mulvane, with a thousand miles of riding behind him, came into Prairie and put up his horse at Orlo Torvester's stable.

As a stranger in a distant land, Tip Mulvane followed his instincts and his long training in trouble. He kept still. Sleeping and eating and idling out the days on the shaded hotel porch, his eyes saw and his ears heard. He was a long-shaped man and it was plain to see that he belonged on a horse; for even when he walked there was that faint straddling gait of the rider. His eyes were a gunpowder gray, sometimes almost black when the sun didn't touch them, and his bones were flat and big, and weather had smoothed his face and disciplined it to a saddle-brown inexpressiveness. He was not more than twenty-five but Emerett Bulow, who had watched him with a growing interest from his first appearance, knew that somewhere he had been seasoned and toughened beyond his years. It was to be seen in the slow, careful way Tip Mulvane looked at this town.

So when the trial of Con Weiser took up, Tip Mulvane knew all he needed to know.

The story was clear and the ending already foretold. Standing in the back of the crowded courtroom on the second day of debate, he understood what the verdict would be. He had only to look at the double row of faces in the jury box and guess it; for those were the faces of range riders and not of hoemen, and he knew their kind to the very core. One of the Durbin riders sat in the witness seat and was wearily answering the questions of Con Weiser's young and fretful lawyer. Con Weiser rested in a camp chair beneath the judge, with his hands folded, showing no interest at all. Weiser, Tip Mulvane decided, knew the answer, too. Heat filled the room. Emerett Bulow and the county's sheriff, Sudden Ben, stood at the far edge of the judge's bench.

The trial had dragged its way through the morning without excitement, yet Tip Mulvane could feel the quality of trouble growing. It was like the pressure of an arm against him; and when Howard Durbin, one of the three great ranchers in the valley and the employer of the dead rider, got up to leave the room that pressure stiffened and an unspoken rage whirled up from the homesteaders crowded so gauntly and bitterly against the back wall of the room. They blocked the door and when Durbin got there they didn't move. Tip Mulvane's gray eyes registered that little scene attentively. Durbin stopped, a slim and arrogant man with the sense of power written in every gesture, and he looked at those nesters blocking his way until at last some of them stirred and let him through. Tip Mulvane said to himself, with a touch of admiration, "He's nervy," and then heard the judge's gavel announce noon recess. He shuffled out of the courthouse with the crowd.

Sunlight laid its hard and yellow flash all along Prairie's street. The hitch racks were crowded with teams and saddle ponies and people now rolled in a slow tide beneath the board awnings, not talking much. The feeling had been bad all morning; it was getting worse, with more homesteaders crowding into town and collecting in small groups up and down the dusty way. Durbin's punchers and the riders of Hugh Dan Lake and of the Custer Land and Cattle Company made their headquarters in Mike Danahue's saloon—strictly aloof from the hoemen.

Tip Mulvane stopped opposite the courthouse, watching all this with a cool and attentive eye. The sudden, acute hunger of an active man was upon him, but he waited there, not quite knowing why until Katherine Weiser came out of the courthouse door and turned toward the porch of the hotel where other homesteaders' women had collected. There was, at once, some meaning to his standing so idly in the hot summer's sun. A tall young German settler with very blond hair was with her, but she seemed to Tip Mulvane just then to be alone on this dusty street. It was in the swing of her slim body and the straight and proud turning of her shoulders. Once she looked over the street and he caught the fair, composed glance that touched him for a brief moment and passed on.

There were hoemen behind Tip Mulvane and he heard one of them say: "If Kitty Weiser was a man I'd be sorry to be in Howard Durbin's shoes."

Somebody said quietly: "There's other men to do it."

Tip Mulvane sauntered indolently along the dust, not knowing he made a puzzle to Emerett Bulow and Sudden Ben Drury standing under the gallery of Mike Danahue's saloon. Sudden Ben's eyes followed Tip Mulvane with a narrowing brightness. He said to Emerett Bulow: "Who's that?"

"Stranger come to town."

"Like a man I might have seen somewhere," murmured Sudden Ben and watched Tip Mulvane turn into the little restaurant down by the depot.

Tip Mulvane ate his meal and sat a moment at the stool, shaping himself a cigarette and listening to the talk that ran its brief, half-sullen undertone around him; and later he went back up the street and laid the edge of his shoulder against a street post, and so stood there. A line of hoemen blackened by the prairie sun sat at the edge of the walk, their talk low and brief—and more and more bitter. It was a constant tone in Tip Mulvane's ears while he watched people return to the courthouse. Howard Durbin came from the hotel and stopped to light up a cigar. Old Hugh Dan Lake, the valley's most powerful cattleman, strolled up and stopped to talk to Durbin; and then Durbin beckoned with a finger and two Durbin riders came from the saloon and listened to what he said, and walked back again. A spray of fine wrinkles appeared at each corner of Tip Mulvane's eyes to indicate the quality of his interest just then; and his glance measured Howard Durbin from top to toe and found something that sent a faint constricting motion across the breadth of his lips.

Sudden Ben Drury appeared from the courthouse and went directly to where Durbin and Hugh Dan Lake stood. Sudden Ben spoke to them, and Howard Durbin shook his head instantly, as though the sheriff's talk had been presumptuous. There was, Tip Mulvane could see, no thought of concession in Howard Durbin; the man was driving on for a fight, very certain of its outcome.

A homesteader left the courthouse and advanced on the homesteaders gathered in front of Tip Mulvane. This man's stringy shoulders were hiked up and his eyes looked a little wild. "It won't get to the jury today." A puncher whirled into town and passed the grouped homesteaders with a sidewise stare that was openly insolent, and dismounted in front of the saloon; and suddenly the cattle hands made a silent group yonder and the hoemen made a sullen crowd opposite—with a gulf as deep and as wide as the ocean lying between.

At the head of the street, beyond the courthouse, a few men began idly firing at a target to pass the time, the gunfire echoes riving the heated air like huge wedges. Katherine Weiser walked from hotel to courthouse, her black hair shining in the sullen light. She passed Howard Durbin without glancing at him, but Durbin's head wheeled around and his stare followed her boldly and with a frank appraisal. Tip Mulvane's long body stirred and his lids crept more closely together while he watched Howard Durbin's face. Faint anger turned him restless. He pivoted from the hoemen, his spurs jingling along the boardwalk. All the cattle hands were in front of Mike Danahue's and they watched him advance upon the saloon, their expressions inscrutably blank. His own glance raked them indolently and then he passed into the saloon, got a bottle and a glass and walked to a table and sat down.

He had his drink and sat with his shoulders sliding down against the chair's back, waiting for the whisky to cut the edge of that hard and careful alertness which had guarded his life for so long. Certain things he saw here with the over-distinct vision of a man who knew the ways of trouble too well. Howard Durbin and the other big cattle owners were riding this affair hard. They had Con Weiser, the chief man of the homesteaders, in jail and they seemed to feel that the homesteaders would not rise to fight back. It was, Tip Mulvane conceded, smart reasoning. For he had watched those brown, slow-voiced sod-busters all during the week and could see nowhere a fire that would explode their angers. They needed a fighter to rouse them, and had none.

A faint impulse stirred his nerves and began to lay pressure along his muscles. He straightened in the chair and said to himself, "Be careful." He knew what was going on in him then and regretted it. Far back in Montana that same impulse had led him into trouble; it was why he had put a thousand miles behind him—to escape the consequences of an Irish temper that would not let him alone, a temper that took the injustices done to others as personal affronts. This was his weakness and this was why he ran before the wind now. "I have," he thought, "got to get out of here. Been here too long." His face, at this moment, was smooth and studious.

The long day rolled on while he sat there. Durbin men tramped in and out of the place and presently people were coming from the courthouse, the street boards sounding to their weight. The sun had gone down. A train whistle had looed its hoarse way across the windless air, and a supper triangle began to go "winga-ding-a-wing-a-ding" from the hotel.

He rose then and strolled directly to the stable. He said to the hostler, "I'll be leavin' right after I eat," and made his way down to the restaurant near the depot.

There was a glass-clear, sunless light in the world for a little while; and afterward dusk dropped down in deep powder-gray layers, drowning out the prairie's far reaches. This was the hour of peace; yet, cruising up the street later toward the stable, he felt an old restlessness beating its tom-tom in him. Lights began to throw their long lanes across the dusk, turning that dusk to a melted silver. He paced on by the stable, though he had intended to go in and ride away from Prairie forever.

Beyond town he saw the dusty strip of road undulate luminously southward toward the Silver Bow, with a low moon throwing its pale gush down upon the long-rolling land. On his right the shapes of a cemetery's headboards laid their faint rows before him; and then he saw a woman standing there beside the road, and he heard her crying.

Softly, as though she were ashamed of tears.

But that sound was, to Tip Mulvane's volatile sympathy, like the clap of thunder. It stopped him dead and wheeled him half around. All at once the crying stopped and the woman turned to him with a gesture like defense and he saw it to be Katherine Weiser.

He removed his hat instantly, a deep wonder having its way with him. Through the week he had watched her from afar, the simplicity of her manner and the depth of her calm as arresting to him as a tall pillar of fire shining through a dark night. It was the contrast which hit him so hard now. Her calm was gone.

He said: "What would you want a man to do for you?"

He heard her breath lift and stop, and fall out. Her chin rose and her face was slim and proud and not easily stirred by strangers. She looked at him, no expression there for him to understand. That deep calm controlled her voice when she spoke: "It is beyond your help."

He said candidly: "Why do you figure I have stayed in this town for a week?"

She was listening quietly to the question; she was thinking about it while the moments went by. And then she said, "I have wondered," and turned back toward town. He watched her straight body stir against the town lights, the smell of dust and sage and summer-cured forage grasses rising keenly to his nostrils. The sound of her voice remained in his head, like the memory of a bell that had chimed one melodious note.

He waited until she had entered town before moving. Afterward his long legs carried him in half-haste back to the stable. He said to the hostler, "I have changed my mind," and crossed directly to the courthouse. The marshal's office was at the back end of the building, with a light shining through its open door. Tip Mulvane ducked his head by habit as he passed into the room. Emerett Bulow had been walking around the desk; he stopped and showed Tip Mulvane a morose and half-belligerent expression. Sudden Ben sat with his feet on the desk's top, cigar smoke heavily concealing his expression. Yet it was to Sudden Ben that Tip Mulvane paid his strictest attention. Sudden Ben's eyes showed a faint gleam through the smoke.

Mulvane said: "I'd like to see this Con Weiser a minute."

Emerett Bulow grumbled: "Nobody's seein' Weiser."

Sudden Ben drawled: "Let him go up, Emerett."

Emerett Bulow scowled and thought about it in his long-drawn way. In the end he nodded to Mulvane and swung through another door and tramped up a dismal flight of stairs to the second floor. The light of a bracket lamp threw a sallow glow along a narrow corridor. Coming by Bulow, Tip Mulvane faced the grillwork of a cell and saw Con Weiser seated on the edge of a bunk behind the grillwork. Bulow said, "You got five minutes," and paced backward ten feet and waited like that.

The light was against Con Weiser's eyes. He couldn't see Tip Mulvane. He said, without getting up: "Who is that?" There was a dead, indifferent calm in the man's voice. He was small and dark-skinned, with tight lips and a gray and bitter expression in his eyes. He didn't hope for much. Mulvane said: "Like to ask you a question."

"No more questions," stated Weiser. "It is no use how I answer. The result will be the same. Who are you?"

"It makes a difference to me," murmured Tip Mulvane. "You kill this fellow?"

"You are a fool," said Con Weiser. But long afterward he added indifferently: "There were plenty reasons for him to die, and plenty of men who could have done it. But I didn't. In a land run by cattlemen I know better than to make trouble. But whether I did or didn't, it makes no difference. You go look at that jury and you will see what I mean."

"That's all," said Emerett Bulow from the background.

Tip Mulvane went down the stairs and came suddenly upon the full and interested weight of Sudden Ben's glance. The sheriff had lowered his cigar; he had drawn his feet from the desk, and now sat forward in his chair. He said: "Just travelin' through?" Emerett Bulow walked across the room so that he could have his look at Tip Mulvane's face.

"Just travelin'," agreed Mulvane.

"Tryin' to recall if I've met you somewhere," murmured the sheriff.

"No," said Mulvane. "Montana's my home."

"Big country to be from," judged the sheriff.

"Yes," said Tip Mulvane, and left the room. Silence held on here long after he had gone. Emerett Bulow cleared his throat, his mind toiling its way painfully toward a new thought. "You suppose the hoemen have hired that fellow to do a little professional shootin'?"

Sudden Ben's eyes were bright with speculation. Shrewdness showed itself all along his face. "No," he decided. "But I'd guess he could shoot."

"It wouldn't take much to set off those nesters."

It was a thing Sudden Ben had been debating all during the week. He said: "They're a slow bunch. They'll fight but they don't flame up easy, like cowhands. They need somebody to set off the spark—and they don't have anybody since this Con Weiser's in the jug."

"Trouble's comin'," stated Emerett Bulow. "You wait till that jury turns in its verdict."

"It may come," assented Sudden Ben. "Howard Durbin is ridin' this thing hard." A sudden impulse compelled him to clap on his hat and leave the room. For a little while he stood in a patch of shadow and watched the street with the careful eye of one who had spent his life analyzing and predicting the vagaries of human behavior. He was the product of a fenceless, free cattle land and all his sympathies were with the old order. Yet the intimations of change both disturbed and warned him in the shape of those homesteaders who tramped the walks of this street so solemnly. They had a power they didn't realize; and the day would come when they would control this land. He was smart enough to see that, and human enough to regret it, and politician enough to adjust himself to it.

Passing toward the hotel he saw the homesteaders knotted up around Orlo Torvester's stable, not talking much. Mike Danahue's saloon was full of Durbin's and Hugh Dan Lake's riders, and all the elements of an explosion lay in Prairie, waiting for the fatal spark. Pushing into the hotel he walked directly over the lobby and let himself into a back room where he knew Durbin and old Hugh Dan Lake would be.

They were at a table, with a bottle of good whisky between them. A third man, Gray Lovewell of the Custer Land and Cattle Company, was here also. It was this trinity which held the key to the situation. Sudden Ben stirred the layered cigar smoke with an idle gesture of his arm. All three looked at him, and he could see they wouldn't listen. But he said:

"You boys are a little too sure."

"Let the jury decide," said Howard Durbin, almost scornfully. Lamplight struck the square face of his diamond ring and flashed up a brilliant gleaming.

"It's your jury," pointed out Sudden Ben frankly. "I'm saying you'd better drop it word to change its vote."

Old Hugh Dan Lake's face caught a scarlet ruddiness. Howard Durbin stared at the sheriff with a smiling insolence. "Ben," he said, "you have suited me perfectly as a sheriff. But don't go currying favor with those damned rascals breaking up an honest cattleman's range."

Sudden Ben's eyes were gray and smart. He drawled: "You don't see it, but times change. That Silver Bow country is lost to you. It's a thing you'd better recognize. It would be good business if you'd make a dicker with those hoemen. The flats to them and the bench country to you. Or you may lose both."

"No," said Howard Durbin. "I'll break that bunch."

"For a man using government land without title," said Sudden Ben, "you're a little proud. It don't do no harm to use reason."

"I'll run 'em out," said Durbin vigorously.

Sudden Ben turned to the door and opened it. He looked back a moment, murmuring, "That's what a fellow said about grasshoppers once," and then left.

Up in a room of the Prairie House Tip Mulvane sat before a small table, building up a pile of matches aimlessly, his eyes half closed and a cigarette sagging at the corner of his long lips.

He was standing across from the courthouse—and had been there an hour—when a man came out and crossed to the little knot of homesteaders. Tip Mulvane heard the man say: "Case won't go to the jury until afternoon."

A homesteader said: "They ain't foolin' anybody. That jury had its instructions when it was sworn in."

Tip Mulvane saw all their brown and bitter faces making a swarthy shine in the sunlight. They were slow-tempered men and they were stung by the injustice of Con Weiser's trial, yet there was nobody to set fire to that anger. Marksmen were again banging away at a target beyond the courthouse and presently the homesteaders drifted in that direction, leaving Tip Mulvane alone by Orlo Torvester's stable. Durbin's cattle hands were sitting back in the gallery shade by Danahue's saloon.

It was eleven-thirty then, and a moment later Katherine Weiser came from the courthouse and walked toward the hotel, with the big blond German lad dutifully beside her. For an instant she saw Tip Mulvane across the dust and was aware of him, and during that moment all else on this bright and dusty street faded, as though a fog closed down upon the edges of his vision. She was a straight and resolute shape moving along the boardwalk with a rhythm that struck some deep response in his brain. Pride held her steady against the eyes of this town. That was what hit him this courage to show the world a steady face. She went on into the hotel's doorway and a feeling of regret washed through Tip Mulvane, the regret a man would feel at the vanishing of light from an unfamiliar trail. But before entering she had turned and thrown one quick look back to him. It was the look of a woman who wanted to see and wanted to be seen.

Mulvane tipped his head and his long body swayed away from the gallery post. He was thinking, "I ought to get aboard that horse and go." Yet he knew then he wouldn't. It was, he thought wistfully, his manner to pitch himself into troubles that held no profit for him. The firing lifted beyond the courthouse and on impulse he strolled that way. There were fifteen or twenty nesters standing around a pair of marksmen who idly tried their skill at a tin can ninety feet out on the prairie.

He watched dust jet up after each shot, a critical indifference possessing him; and he noted how awkwardly the two nesters lifted and sighted their guns. Afterward he moved through the crowd until he stood beside these two. One of them had lifted his revolver for another deliberate sight. Tip Mulvane said, "You're wasting your lead," and wheeled his own gun from its holster in one short revolving motion. Sound howled into the hot day and the flittering can ninety feet away rolled and bounced at each bullet's impact and then dropped into a yonder coulee. Tip Mulvane holstered his gun and turned about to find all those brown and patient and inexpressive faces showing him whole-hearted interest.

He said: "Leave the .45 to the riders. It is their gun and you can't beat 'em at it. You boys are shotgun people. A shotgun is a deadly thing anywheres on this street. What the hell you standing back for?"

He wanted no answer and waited for none. Walking back toward the stable at a long, impatient stride he felt an old wildness slowly fill the empty spaces of his body. Suddenly, after a thousand miles of drifting, after a long summer's loneliness, the world was fresh again and life held a color and richness for him. He could not help this. The kickback of the gun against his arm had been a shock to revive a Tip Mulvane he had thought buried in Montana.

There was no more firing up the street. Durbin's punchers, attracted by the sudden wicked burst of his gun, were out in the street, watching him wheel and take stand by Orlo Torvester's stable. The homesteaders were trooping in. And afterward people began to come from the courthouse, released by noon recess. Howard Durbin and Hugh Dan Lake stood beneath the shelter of the hotel's board awnings. The jury appeared in the street, shepherded by Emerett Bulow, and walked double file toward the hotel for dinner.

It was like this, with the street crowded and all eyes focused on the jury pacing toward the hotel, when Tip Mulvane dropped his cigarette into the dust and ground it beneath his foot and crossed over to where Howard Durbin stood. Nothing showed on his cheeks and the sudden brightness of his eyes was half stifled by the closing edges of his lids. He came to the far walk and swung toward Howard Durbin, walking without haste. The jury was fifteen feet away, and coming on; and the weight of attention slowly swung to that little spot in front of the hotel's door. Howard Durbin made a definite stand on the walk, his position careless and arrogant there as though the world could step around him for all he cared.

Tip Mulvane said: "You like this spot?"

Howard Durbin wheeled about in one astonished motion and a sudden anger flamed up and showed through his eyes. He said, "What—" and said no more. For the town's indrawn attention was fully upon this scene now and Tip Mulvane, calculating coolly what it would mean, drove his high shoulder into Howard Durbin's chest and lifted his arms and spun Durbin around and threw him bodily out into the dust. Durbin made one long, wild turning motion with his arms spread-eagled to the hot sky and fell thus grotesquely to the earth.

Shock stunned this town like the enormous strike of thunder. The jury had frozen to a still, double row on the walk. All the homesteaders were bronze statues at the edge of Tip Mulvane's vision and there was no motion over by the saloon where Durbin's punchers had taken root. He heard the hard rise and fall of old Hugh Dan Lake's breathing at his right hand; and then he closed all that out of his mind and, remotely smiling, watched Howard Durbin rise from the dust.

Tall and pale and with a yellow blaze of rage in those sulky, handsome eyes, he said, in a choking voice: "Step into the street! Step away from those women!"

Out of the ranks of the punchers came a sudden warning: "Careful, Howard. I saw him use a gun."

"Step out into the street!" cried Durbin.

Motion swayed the homesteaders in the background like wind ruffling wheat. Somebody yelled and at once more homesteaders charged from Torvester's stable and up the street. A shotgun exploded, its shot rattling high on Torvester's stable wall. A woman screamed and Durbin's punchers came alive and began to spread over the dust. A homesteader's huge shape drove forward, straight toward the punchers, and then all those brawny bitter men broke like a wave and crashed on against the punchers by Danahue's saloon. The shotgun boomed again and afterward Sudden Ben's voice cut its knifelike warning through the howl: "There's women here!" No more gunfiring sounded; but the homesteaders raced on and Howard Durbin went down under that wave and the punchers vanished in its whirl and the howl got greater and the beat of the hoemen's fists made dull, meaty echoes against the targeted Durbin men. The jury had vanished and Emerett Bulow had vanished, and Sudden Ben and Hugh Dan Lake were gone.

Tip Mulvane held his position, watching Howard Durbin rise to his knees and go down again under the full lunge of an on-racing homesteader's heavy boot. Durbin rolled in the dust and came up like a cat and was struck and turned and struck once more. Sudden Ben appeared in the melee and seized Durbin's shoulder and pushed him against the tide, on toward the courthouse. The courthouse bell was ringing. A team bolted from the hitch rack and raced out of town; and the homesteaders were breaking into little knots as they met the Durbin punchers. Ten-gallon hats rolled along the ground and Danahue's windows crashed and inside that place the furious echoes of wreckage arose.

Tip Mulvane moved across the street, pushing men aside with the flats of his hands. He walked into Torvester's stable and found the hostler crouched gloomily there. He said, "I guess I'll use my horse now."

"You've played hell," said the hostler bitterly. "The hoemen have got this town now!"

Tip Mulvane saddled and stood up in the leather and pointed his horse out. The heavy sound of fighting had fallen away. Something crashed massively in Danahue's saloon and here and there men cried out. Somebody came up the street on the run, bent well over. The hostler said again: "The dam' hoemen—"

Tip Mulvane looked at the hostler, smiling with a gentleness and a sadness. "Sure, I know. It's tough to see the old days go."

"Then why in God's name you put in your oar—"

Tip Mulvane laughed outright. He said, "Brother, I wish I knew." Across the street he saw Sudden Ben march out of the courthouse with Con Weiser and Howard Durbin. Emerett Bulow hove into sight and Hugh Dan Lake appeared from the hotel. They made a little group in the harsh sunlight, with Sudden Ben pointing his finger at one and another of those men, in the peacemaker's role. Tip Mulvane rode from the stable and turned southward bound down the Silver Bow. The sheriff saw him and came at once into the street. He said, "Friend, wait." But Tip Mulvane's eyes went backward to the hotel, seeing Katherine Weiser framed in the doorway yonder. The big blond youth was advancing toward her and Tip could see the girl's smile go out to him. Then the smile had gone and her dark glance came down the street and touched Tip, and stayed there.

"Friend," said the sheriff, "don't I know you?"

"No," said Tip Mulvane. But the question sank in and found its mark. He added quietly: "Well, maybe you do. The world is full of strays like me."

The sheriff put up his hand. He said: "Somewhere in this world you made big tracks. It has been a satisfaction to me to watch you. So long," and shook Tip Mulvane's hand. Tip Mulvane lifted the reins and started to go, and looked behind him once more. Katherine Weiser's glance met him, dark and steady. The German lad was beside her. She spoke to him and her hand touched his chest, pushing him away, and afterward she took one step forward and looked at Tip Mulvane in the way of a woman who wanted to see and to be seen. Tip Mulvane lifted his hat and cantered away.

A short way from town he reined in. In the south the land lay yellow and smoky. Far, far down that way lay another thousand miles of travel. He was thinking of the campfires to be lighted along that trail and the howl of the coyotes on other lonely hillsides. There was, he thought, never any end to the trail for a man like him. He folded his hands on the saddle's horn and considered them with heavy thought. "I am running from a shadow. But the shadow is right in front of me now and always will be."

He looked behind him once more and saw dust smoke rising from a wagon coming out of town, following this Silver Bow trail toward the homestead settlement. It would be, he guessed, the Weiser family bound homeward. Excitement brightened the powder-gray glance and afterward he remembered the manner in which Katherine Weiser had pushed the German boy away. It was an omen. He thought, "If I stay here it will never be dull—and never lonely," and reined in the pony, waiting motionlessly there for the wagon to catch up.