American Gun Mystery (6 page)

“La-dees and Gentle-men,” he bellowed, and the words carried far distances, so that those in the topmost tiers heard clearly: “Per-mit me to wel-come you to the Grrrand Open-ing of Wild Bill Grrrant’s Rrro-deo! (Applause) The Larrrgest Ag-gre-ga-shun of Cow-boys an’ Cow-girrrls in the Worrrld! (Cheers) Frrrom the sun-baked plains of Tex-ahs to the Rrrroll-in’ Rrrranges of Wy-oming, frrrom the Grrreat State of Arrrizo-nah to the Mount-ins of Montanah, these Darrre-devils have come for Yore Enter-tain-ment! (Wild Stamping of Feet) To risk Life an’ Limb in Dange-rrrous Con-tests of Skill in Rrrropin’, Rrrridin’, Bull-doggin’, Shootin’—all the stunts that go to make the Grrreat-est Sport in the Worrrld—the Good Ole-Fashion’ Rrrrodeo! An’ T’night, La-dees and Gentlemen, in ad-di-shun to my reg’lar show, I have the Grrreat Hon-or to pre-sent to the Grrreat Cit-y of Noo Yawk
A SPECIAL EXTRAH ADD-ED AT-TRACTION!
”

He stopped with something like triumph, and the echoes rolled forth majestically, to be drowned in a cataract of approval.

Wild Bill raised a meaty hand. “An’, folks, he ain’t no Drrrug-store Cow-boy neither! (Laughter) Folks, I know you’re rrrar-in’ to see ’im, so I won’t take up no more of yore time. La-dees and Gentle-men, I take Grrreat Pleas-ure in intro-ducin’ the Grrreat-est Cowboy in the Worrrld, the hombre who put the Rrrrroarin’ Ole West on the Silv-ah Screen! …A-merri-cah’s Grrrand Ole Man of the Mo-vies—
THE ONE AN’ ON-LY BUCK HORNE!
Let ’er rip!
”

They tore the roof down. And, of course, leading the chorus of assorted bellows, roars, thunders, screams, and shrieks was one Djuna Queen, yelling himself a lovely olive-green in the face.

Ellery grinned and glanced at Kit Horne. She was sitting tensely forward, an anxious expression on her soft brown features, watching the eastern gate of the arena with eyes of troubled gray-blue.

A uniformed attendant, very small and puny at this distance, manipulated the doors, they swung back, and out into the glare of the amphitheatre galloped a magnificent horse, a powerful animal with shining tight flanks and proudly tossing head. On his back sat a man.

“Buck!”

“Buck Horne!”

“Ride ’im, cowboy!”

Horne leaned forward in his saddle, riding with fluent ease, the gallant old buckaroo. In a roped-off section of the box-tier a band struck up. There was an unearthly din. It was like opening night of the circus in Kankakee, or West Tannerville, Ohio. Djuna was banging his palms together madly. Kit had sunk back with a smile.

Ellery leaned forward and tapped her knee. She turned, startled. “Nice animal he’s riding!” shouted Ellery.

She threw back her head and laughed from a full throat. “He certainly ought to be, Mr. Queen! He cost five thousand dollars.”

“Phew! A horse?”

“A horse. That’s
Rawhide,
my favorite, my gorgeous pet. Buck wanted most especially to ride
Rawhide
tonight. Said it would bring him luck.”

Ellery sat back, smiling vaguely. The man on horseback had doffed his splendid black ten-gallon hat, bowing right and left, and had urged his animal forward with his knees until they pulled up near the eastern turn of the oval after almost a complete circuit of the track, below and a little to the right of the guest-box in which the Mars party sat. He sat astride like an old god, with perfect ease; the brilliant lights caught the metal and leather glints on his rich Western regalia, the glints on his white hair where it blanketed his neck below his hat-brim. The horse posed like a model, proudly, his sleek right forefoot delicately extended before him.

Kit rose, a smartly gowned young woman, filled her deep chest with air, opened her red mouth, and gave vent to a long ululating cry which raised the short hair on Ellery’s nape and brought him, blinking, to his feet. The Inspector grasped the arms of his chair. Djuna jumped a foot. Then Kit quietly sat down, grinning. In the din the man on horseback half-turned his head as if searching for someone.

Someone behind Ellery said venomously: “Slut!”

Ellery said hastily to Kit: “The call of the wild, eh?”

Her grin had vanished. She nodded pleasantly, but her little brown jaw tightened and her back was soldier-stiff.

Ellery turned casually. Big Tommy Black was sitting forward, elbows resting on his knees. He was whispering to Mara Gay. Julian Hunter smoked a cigar silently in the background. Tony Mars was staring as if hypnotized at the arena.

Wild Bill was roaring frantically against the surge of noise. The band played:
“Ta-ra!”
several times,
fortissimo,
its uniformed conductor waving his baton desperately. Then Horne himself held up his hand for silence, and it came with a gradual subsidence of sound after the lapse of mere seconds, like a thunderous sea receding swiftly from a deck.

“La-dees and Gentle-men,” shouted Wild Bill. “I want to thank ya, an’ Buck wants to thank ya, one an’ all, for this Won-der-ful Rrrrecep-shun! Now the first e-vent will be a Rrrrip-Snortin’ Ride aroun’ the A-re-nah, with Buck leadin’ Forrrty Rrrri-ders in a Hell-Bent-fer-Leather Chase! Just the way he used to lead th’ posses after the Dirrrt-y Vill-’ins in his movin’ pitchers! That’s just a starter, an’ then Buck’ll get down to bus’-ness, per-formin’ In-div-id-u-al Feats of Horrrse-man-ship an’ Sharrrp-shoot-in’!”

Buck Horne pulled his hat firmly down on his forehead. Wild Bill hefted his revolver from the holster, pointed it at the roof, and once more pulled the trigger. At the signal the eastern gate swung open again and a large cloud of riders, men and women on wiry Western horses, charged out on the track, whooping and waving their hats. At their head rode Curly Grant, his head bare and his hair gleaming; and One-Arm Woody, upon whom for the moment all eyes centered; for his mastery with one arm of the dappled brute he was riding was amazing. Then the chapped and throat-swathed cavalry swept on around the farther, northern length of the track, racing toward the west. …

Ellery twisted his neck and said to the Inspector: “Our friend Wild Bill may be heaven’s own gift to the great outdoors, but he really should brush up on his arithmetic.”

“Huh?”

“How many riders did Grant bellow would follow Buck Horne on this epic-making charge around the arena?”

“Oh! Forty, wasn’t it? Say, what in time’s got into you?”

Ellery sighed. “In my unreasonable way—probably because Grant was so specific about the number—I’ve been counting ’em.”

“Well?”

“There are forty-one!”

The Inspector dropped back with a snort, and his gray mustaches quivered with indignation. “You—you. …Oh, shut up! By God, El, sometimes you get my goat. What the devil if there are forty-one, or a hundred and ninety-seven!”

Ellery said placidly: “Your blood-pressure, Inspector. At the same time—”

Djuna whispered with ferocity: “Oh,
shush!
”

Ellery shushed.

The milling riders came beautifully still on the southern length of the oval, and once more silence fell. They were lined up in twos, a long string of them; Curly Grant and the one-armed Woody at their head were still some thirty feet behind the lone figure of Buck Horne.

From the center of the arena, where he sat his horse like an elevated ringmaster, Wild Bill rose in his stirrups and bawled: “Ready, Buck?”

Behind him on the trestled platform Major Kirby had disposed all his cameras; the photographers were taut, motionless, awaiting the word.

The single rider on the track swung his body a little, drew a big old-fashioned gun from his right holster, poised it muzzle roofwards, pulled the trigger, and out of the explosion came his voice:
“Shoot!”

Forty-one arms dipped into forty-one holsters behind him, forty-one guns leaped into view. …Wild Bill from his commanding position shot straight up in the air, once. Then Buck Horne’s broad shoulders hunched, he leaned slightly forward, and his right arm still pointing the gun at the roof, hurled his horse ahead on the tanbark track. At the same instant the entire cavalcade swirled into a roaring motion picture of sound, uttering piercing cowboy yells. In an incredible flirt of time’s tail the horses had sped along the track to almost directly below the Mars box, led by that gallant figure on
Rawhide
some forty feet ahead now, just rounding the farther side of the eastern turn.

And as the troop followed, their big revolvers, uniformly pointed upward, came alive as one, belching toward the roof, enveloping horses, men, and women in a momentary explosion of gun-smoke. That single fusillade in answer to the one shot from the gun of the man riding swiftly before them. …

Twenty thousand pairs of eyes were fixed on the man riding ahead. Twenty thousand pairs of eyes saw what followed, and did not believe what they saw.

At the instant the fusillade cracked out, Buck Horne had been leaning sideways out of his saddle to the south, his revolver raised high above his head in his right hand, his left hand high above the pommel as he clutched the reins.
Rawhide
was finding his huge stride and had now advanced around the turn to a position directly in line with the troupe of riders and the Mars box.

And at that very instant the body of the man on
Rawhide’s
broad back jerked, sagged, slipped from the saddle, and crashed to the tanbark … to be trampled upon all in a moment by the cruel hooves of the forty-one horses behind.

T
HERE IS A STORY
somewhere of a man for whom time stood still; or perhaps for whom time stretched, so that what was the blink of an eye to a normal being, a beat of the heart, the flick of a finger, was to him a full slow hour. This is not so fantastic as it sounds. There is indeed a garden between the dawn and the sunrise; and it may be found only at such rare cosmic moments when the normal activity of the real universe ceases. In human crowds, for example, such a moment solidifies and reigns to the exclusion of all coarser phenomena; it is a time when a molecular instant becomes an infinite interval—the interval between mass realization and mass panic.

It was such a manifestation of infinity which caught the densely peopled
Colosseum
at the instant when Buck Horne tumbled to the tanbark track and was swallowed up in a tangle of snorting, rearing horses. In that instant, which lasted only a second and yet endured for hours, no breath was drawn, no muscle twitched, no tiniest sound was made. The tableau below stiffened into phantasmagoric stone; and the tableau above was eternal. Had there been an observer perched at the apex of the vast ceiling, looking down upon the petrified thousands below, he might have thought himself the lone spectator of some gigantic museum-group in complex marble, fixed to the sides and bottom of a titanic well.

Then the real world pushed through and the instant flashed on into eternity. There came a wordless noise, a plutonic sound, a rising groan of pure horror which rumbled from the
basso
of the gamut up the scale until it keened off beyond the perception of human ears into an eerie vibration sensed rather than heard. And the screams of the fighting riders broke through, and the terrified cries of the horses as they made spasmodic efforts to avoid trampling upon that invisible figure on the spot where the man on horseback had plunged to the ground.

As one, twenty thousand people sprang to their feet, shaking the
Colosseum
to its foundations.

As in a dream, the dream passed.

What followed was normal for what should follow. There were cries, thin shrill questions, restless movements toward the exits—movements instantly halted by the jack-in-the-box appearance of attendants at the gates and runways. In the arena some semblance of order was crystalizing. The horses were drawing off, apart. Out of the eastern gate ran a bareheaded man carrying a black bag, and under his arm a hurriedly snatched Indian blanket. Simultaneously in the center of the arena Wild Bill Grant—whose horse, whose hat, whose hand, whose very eyes had not moved—came to life and kicked his animal toward the nucleus of the confusion.

The occupants of the Mars box had been tiny members of the large tableau of silence—all of them, without exception. But there were four persons there who, for significant reasons, came out of their trance before the others, whose nerves were more sharply attuned to the exigencies of the moment. These were the Queens, father and son—the one a policeman to his neat shoe-tops, trained to respond to emergencies; the other a mental machine whom no amazement could paralyze long; Tony Mars, the sensitive creator of this monument to sport which of an instant had changed into a mausoleum to a sportsman; and Kit Horne, who more than all the others was to feel the full anguish of reaction. These four, in pairs, vaulted the rail of the box to thud onto the tanbark ten feet below, badly jarred but unmindful of the shock—leaving their fellow-occupants of the box behind, too stunned to move. Julian Hunter’s cigar had dropped quite out of his mouth, and his mouth remained open; Mara Gay’s thin body was quivering, and the blood had drained out of her cheeks; Djuna sat utterly bewildered; and Tommy Black stood rocking on his toes like a dazed pugilist warding off a rain of blows.

The riders had dismounted now; some were busy soothing their horses.

Kit and Ellery were in the van, leading the Inspector and Tony Mars by a dozen feet. The girl sped on wings of fear toward the scene of the accident, closely pursued by Ellery, whose brow was furrowed and whose eyes were still blinking at the suddenness of the tragedy. They dashed into the group surrounding the still crumpled figure on the tanbark, and stopped dead. The man with the black bag, who had been kneeling by the side of the figure, rose hastily at sight of Kit Horne and flung the blanket over the thing on the floor.

“Uh Miss Horne,” he said in a hoarse voice.

“Miss Horne. I’m so very, very sorry. He’s … dead.”

“Doctor, no.”

She said it very quietly, as if by remaining calmly sane she might alter the physician’s verdict. The rodeo doctor, a shabby rugged old man, shook his head slightly and backed away, keeping his earnest eyes on her white face.

Ellery stood thoughtfully by her side, watching her.