Doc Spence was with Hub Wheaton. Lew and Amy Morgan were still there. Two men, who Parker did not know, were standing silently glum and awkward at the bedside, too. The little room seemed crowded. It seemed funereal because none of those people was talking or moving when Parker opened the door, pushed Johnny Fleharty in ahead of him, then closed the door.
Morgan said: “Where were you? I looked…”
“I was in Fleharty’s bar,” replied Parker. He gave Johnny another shove, harder this time so that Fleharty stumbled onward and kept himself from falling only by nimble footwork.
“I was having a heart-to-heart talk with Mister Fleharty.”
Lew’s brows drew inward and downward. He looked in a puzzled way from Parker to Johnny and back again. “I don’t understand,” he murmured.
“You will, Morgan. You will.” Parker looked at the other men over by the bed. “Who are they?” he asked.
“One is Mike Pierson, the other one is Les Todhunter. They’re members of the town council.”
Both councilmen nodded. Parker ignored that. He stood there in the center of the room considering both Pierson and Todhunter. Finally he said: “You need a temporary replacement for Sheriff Wheaton.” He made a statement of it.
The two men nodded again, still without speaking.
“I’ll take the job without pay,” said Parker. “All right?”
The councilmen looked at one another. They looked over at Lew Morgan. But it was Albigence Spence who spoke up. He was peering about over his spectacles, his ancient, rheumy, shrewd old eyes bright and bold. “You could do a heap worse.”
He chuckled. “You’re always worrying about saving money…that ought to make your minds up for you, if nothing else can.”
Todhunter cleared his throat. “All right, Mister Travis. You’re sheriff of the county until Hub is back on his feet again.”
“Then,” said Parker, “Mister Fleharty here is my first arrest.” Johnny put an anguished look roundabout. His lips lay slackly and his face was gray. He looked at Hub Wheaton and looked swiftly away. Parker put forth a hand, let it lightly lie upon Fleharty’s shoulder. “Tell them, Johnny. Tell them what you told me down at your saloon.”
Six sets of inquiring eyes swung to bear. Johnny hesitated, and Parker’s gentle hold upon his shoulder tightened, tightened until Fleharty squirmed under it.
“Tell them, Johnny.”
“Let go,” Fleharty gasped. “Please let go.”
Parker removed his hand. He was standing behind his prisoner, looming large behind the lesser man. Across the room Amy was staring at Parker. Then Fleharty spoke up.
“It was Charley robbed the express office.”
Fleharty paused after saying that. There was a congealed hush broken only by the sharp intake of Lew Morgan’s breath.
“He got the twelve thousand dollars. He had it planned so’s he wouldn’t make a run for it at all. Then Ken Wheaton got up that posse and went racin’ out, lookin’ for lone horsemen on the plains, and that feller, Frank Travis, took it from there. You all know what happened after that. Young Travis an’ Ken got killed, an’ everyone figured young Travis was the robber…except for that three thousand dollars. Then along come this other Travis, an’ everyone got all upset over again. Charley said, if he’d tried, he couldn’t have planned it any better’n that.”
Amy spoke up: “He said…explain what you mean by that. Did Swindin tell
you
that?”
“Yes’m, he told me that.”
“Then you were in on it?”
Johnny put an imploring look around. “No’m. Not at first, I wasn’t. Not until last night. Charley hid the money here in town.”
“Ahhh,”
said Lew Morgan, “I’m beginning to understand something now. That’s why Charley wouldn’t leave the country. He had to get his cache first. Is that it, Fleharty?”
“Yes, sir, that’s it. Last night he come to my saloon.” Johnny’s voice turned bitter and accusing now. “He was riding that damned blood bay horse. Hell, everyone knew that cussed animal. It was a foolish thing he done, an’ I told him so. He said it wasn’t foolish, said he wanted the fastest horse in the country under him after he killed the other Travis, got his money, and left the country.”
“It
was
Swindin who shot Hub?” exclaimed Amy.
Parker nodded over at her from behind Fleharty.
Johnny said: “Yes’m, it was your foreman. I told
him it was crazy. I told him to forget Travis and get out of the country while he could.”
“That,” said Councilman Pierson dryly, “was real solicitous of you, Johnny, wantin’ to save a man’s life like that. Only you wanted to save the wrong life, didn’t you?”
“Listen, Mister Pierson,” whined Fleharty, “I was scairt stiff. I didn’t want no…”
“Never mind that,” growled Lew Morgan, his gaze deadly and his powerful shoulders hunched forward as though to spring. “Why didn’t you go find Hub and Travis and warn them?”
“Mister Morgan, I didn’t dare. I was scairt an’ confused. Charley was out there in the night with his Winchester. I know him, Mister Morgan. He’d as soon shoot me as Travis here, if I tried anything.”
From behind him Parker said mildly: “Come on now, Johnny. Tell it the way it really happened. Tell it the way you told it to me with my cocked gun on you.”
Fleharty put out a hand to the back of a chair. He steadied himself this way. “Charley promised me five thousand in gold if I’d help him.”
From the bed a weak, unsteady voice said: “How did Charley manage to join my brother’s posse so soon after he robbed the express office?”
Every head turned; every person in that room looked down at Hub. He was drilling a hole in Johnny Fleharty with his bitter stare. There was perspiration on his upper lip. Doc Spence put a hand upon Hub saying softly: “Easy now, Hub. No excitement for you. Just listen, boy, just listen.”
Parker jabbed a rigid thumb in Fleharty’s back. It must have felt like a six-gun barrel because Johnny
jumped and gushed words, running them all together.
“He knew Ken would make up a posse. He had his horse tied in back of my saloon just like last night. When the express clerk run out into the roadway hollering that they’d been robbed, Swindin was all set. Just like he figured, Ken called for a posse…Charley mounted up and joined it.”
Amy was staring hard at Fleharty. She quietly said: “You know where he hid that money, don’t you, Mister Fleharty? You told us just now that he had his horse behind your saloon. You indicated that he ran to his horse immediately after the hold-up. He hid that money somewhere in the vicinity of your saloon, didn’t he?”
Johnny stepped to the chair he’d been using as a support and oozed down on to it. He bobbed his head up and down at Amy, saying nothing.
“Well,” exclaimed Lew harshly, “do you know or don’t you know where he hid it?”
“I know, Mister Morgan.”
Before anyone else spoke after this revelation, though, Parker said, with a quick, slashing look at Lew and the others: “You’re overlooking something, gentlemen. When Charley Swindin ran my brother down, he knew he was going to commit murder. He did that deliberately and cold-bloodedly. He didn’t know my brother had nine thousand in gold on him, but he
did
know that, if he killed Frank, the folks hereabouts would be satisfied that my brother was the express office bandit…because dead men tell no tales. That was premeditated murder, deliberately thought out and deliberately executed.”
When Parker stopped speaking, the room was totally silent. After a while Hub whispered to Doc
Spence. The medical man twisted to a chair with Wheaton’s clothing on it, caught up the blood-stiff shift there, unpinned Hub’s badge, and took it gravely over and handed it to Parker.
Hub said throatily: “Go get him, Park. He’s your second arrest. Get him any way you want to…dead or alive.”
Parker looked long at Hub before pinning on the nickel star. When he finished doing this, he looked at Hub again. Wheaton made a weak smile and dropped one eyelid. “Dead,” he whispered. “Get him dead, Park. There’s no one else in this room who understands why Swindin should die as well as you do…and as I do.”
Doc Spence pursed his lips and made a little sound at Wheaton. “No more talk now,” he muttered. “You need rest, boy, and complete silence.”
Parker caught Johnny Fleharty by the shoulder, lifted him bodily from his chair, and swung him around as a dog might swing a rat.
“The money!” exclaimed Councilman Todhunter. “Johnny, where did Swindin hide the money?”
“That’ll keep,” Parker said, speaking ahead of Fleharty. “If he tells you, I’ll have half this greedy damned town in the way.”
Amy glided out ahead of the others. “In the way of what?” she breathlessly asked, perceiving ahead of the others that Parker had a definite plan in mind. “Parker, what is it?”
“It’s Swindin, Amy. He’s still in Laramie.”
Todhunter, Pierson, and Lew Morgan looked surprised at this. Albigence Spence said dryly: “If that’s so, Swindin is a bigger fool than I thought he was.”
Lew Morgan agreed with this. It was Amy who
struck at the point of Parker’s statement. She said simply: “Are you sure of that?”
Parker nodded his head at Johnny Fleharty. “Tell them,” he directed. “Tell them what you told me.”
Johnny rolled his eyes; they came to rest upon Travis. Johnny looked like a man who had failed himself and could not bring himself to accept this, like a man who was making excuses to himself about himself. His voice was vibrant with self-pity.
“Charley’s in town. He’s aimin’ to lie over until nightfall. He won’t risk running for it with Laramie all stirred up over the Wheaton shooting. He told me that. He said, if it was just him, he’d chance it…on the thoroughbred horse…because there’d be only one other horse around that might be able to catch him, an’ he’d like to have it that way. He said he wants one more crack at Travis. But, mainly, he’s afraid the weight of that gold bullion will slow him down. In this heat his weight an’ the weight of all that gold might make it easy for riders to get him. He’s goin’ to wait until dark, then ride out.”
“And in the meantime…,” Amy asked. “Where is he?”
Johnny began to look genuinely worried. “That I don’t know. Mister Travis asked me that, too, but I don’t know where he is.” Johnny looked imploringly at all those closed, grim faces. “I’ve told you everything. All of it. I’d tell you where he was if I knew.”
“Would you?” asked Les Todhunter, looking very doubtful. “Believe me, I would,” Fleharty said with force. “What would I hold out for? I’ve already told you enough to get me killed. A little more wouldn’t make any difference, an’, if I knew where Charley
was hidin’ in town, I’d sure tell you now…because, if you don’t get him, he’ll find out what I’ve done an’ he’ll get me.”
There was the same ring of truthfulness in this as when Fleharty had said the same thing to Parker Travis in his saloon. Parker believed him; the others read this much in his face. They exchanged glances, looking baffled now more than doubting.
“The bullion,” spoke up Parker, “was cached under the rear stoop of Fleharty’s saloon. Fleharty told me that and I looked under there before coming up here. It was there, all right, but it’s not there now.”
Pierson began to scowl. “I thought Fleharty said he knew where the money was!” he exclaimed.
Parker nodded, placing his big paw upon Johnny’s shoulder again. “That’s exactly right. He knew where it was. Not where it now is.” He gave Johnny a little tug. The two of them went toward the door. None of the others moved until Parker had the door open. Then Amy stepped away from her uncle, crossed over, and said in reply to Parker’s questioning look: “I’ll walk over to the jailhouse with you.” She closed the door gently, leaving her uncle, the doctor, and the town councilmen behind in Hub Wheaton’s room.
Downstairs, in the hotel lobby, people who had obviously been furtively speaking before these three came down among them turned quiet. They watched Parker herd the saloon owner out into the furious morning heat. Afterward, they slipped to the door and watched Amy, Parker, and Johnny Fleharty step out into the roadway, heading toward Sheriff Wheaton’s sturdy building with the barred windows.
“That’s Travis,” said a bearded cowman. “Damned if he ain’t wearin’ Hub Wheaton’s star.”
Another man added to this by saying: “That rumor must have been true. The one about Fleharty being mixed up in Hub’s shooting. I heard it early this morning. I was told by a feller, who seen ’em, that Charley Swindin an’ Fleharty were talkin’ together out behind the saloon last night only a little while before Hub got shot.”
The bearded cowman growled malevolently: “I know how to take care of fellers like that an’ I don’t need no courtroom, either…just a sixty-foot lariat and a stout tree limb.”
A thoughtful-looking elderly man said: “You try that, Clint, and you’ll likely wind up stiffer’n a plank. That Travis’s got the look to him of a man who’d be hell on wheels if he got really stirred up.”
A woman among the onlookers, watching Fleharty being driven along, made a little sniffing sound. “’Pears to me,” she said acidly, “that Amy Morgan’s making a spectacle of herself, walking out there with that man in plain sight and all…like a hussy.”
All the men turned when Fleharty, Amy, and Parker Travis entered the jailhouse and were lost to them, and gazed in deep silence at the woman who’d said this.
She furiously blushed under their stares. “It’s not seemly,” she uttered, blustering now, “for a young woman to go tagging after a man like that. It’s not lady-like.”
That thoughtful-looking elderly man chuckled. “You know, Nettie,” he said, “nowadays, if a pretty girl’s going to catch her man, she’s got to trot a lit
tle. It isn’t like it used to be. Waitin’ can make a girl wind up a spinster.”
There were sly smiles over this remark; the men knew Nettie Fellows and her acid tongue. Nettie, at thirty-five, had never been married. She drew herself up, said: “
Hump
!”—and flounced back into the hotel lobby.
Parker locked Fleharty in a strap-steel cell, closed the intervening door on him, and returned to Wheaton’s little stuffy office. There he got a dipper full of water from a bucket, drank deeply, and observed Amy over the dipper’s blue rim. She was standing half in shadow over by the sheriff’s desk watching Parker, and as before her gaze did not falter under Travis’s regard. As Parker was putting aside the dipper, she spoke.
“You know something you didn’t mention up in Hubbell’s room, don’t you, Parker?”
He turned, walked over closer, and stopped to cock his head a little at her, looking critical. “You’re smart, Amy. As smart as any man in town. I was impressed with your looks the first time I laid eyes on you. But upstairs at the hotel just now, it dawned on me that you’re smart along with it.”
“If that’s a compliment,” retorted Amy without smiling, without lowering her eyes before that critically masculine stare, “I thank you for it. But the tone of voice was wrong. I think it wasn’t so much a compliment as an appraisal.”
“You’re dead right.”
“I didn’t measure up, did I?”
Parker removed his hat, dropped it upon Hub Wheaton’s desk, and carefully put together the words for his reply to that question. “You measured up all right, but not particularly as a woman.”
She dropped her eyes now, not uneasy under his stare but so that he would not see that sad and knowing look in their smoky depths. She stood thus for a moment, darkly in thought. Light from the little barred window came into the room, glowing against the coppery darkness of her hair, putting its barred pattern across the fullness of her breasts. She was thinking of him; he knew that much even though her face was averted.
“You’ve been a smart woman in a man’s world too long, Amy,” he said, paused, and went on, a faintly rough edge coming to his voice. “Standing as you are now, half in light, half shadowed…you’re a picture a man could take with him over the years, because this minute you’re a full woman, and that’s the substance every man’s dreams are made of.”
“You’re telling me to be more woman and less…whatever else I am…aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
She raised her eyes to him, showing a tenderness, a good warmth. “I couldn’t change, Parker, any more than you could. But for the right man that would be no problem.”
“What kind of a right man?”
“The kind you are. Not the kind my uncle is, or those others. You think calmly. You don’t do rash things. You didn’t ride in here like other men would have…with hate like a banner in your eyes and a cocked gun in your fist. You came quietly and you felt your way. You were more interested in truth than in killing.”
“You didn’t think that before,” he said.
“Yes, I did. I’ve thought that ever since we first talked in the dell. But several times you wavered.
I know why you wavered, because you loved your brother so. You don’t show things to the world. You keep things inside you. When you wavered, I was cruel to you because I couldn’t bear the idea of your abandoning fairness and becoming hair-triggered like the others are.”
She had a little stain of color in her face as she faced him, as she saw him as he was, not yet at peace with himself but near to it, his strong, dark face with its tough set to the mouth, handsome, his dead-level eyes deeply thoughtful, his expression more gentle than anything else.
“You see a lot,” he murmured. “Maybe you see too much.” A shadow appeared in his eyes. “Why should I show the world that it hurts like hell to think of Frank’s dying like he did?”
“The world knows anyway, Parker. All people aren’t blind. Hub Wheaton for instance…he knows how you feel.”
“He’s the only one, Amy.”
“No. I also understand.”
She swayed toward him a little, fighting down a powerful impulse to reach forth and touch him. Tenderness and want came out of her deepest thoughts. Yet she held herself away for a reason; he’d need her more later on, when the anguish and the things he’d set as his goal were done with.
“I wish,” he softly said, “Frank could have known you. He’d have laughed at you, Amy. It would have taken him a long time to understand that beauty and brains can go together in a woman. Then he’d have loved you.”
Her eyes showed a quick break in their dark depths. She recklessly said: “Parker, I want that from only one man.”
He watched her, balancing a thought and a decision in his mind. She saw the reflection of this in his face and she breathlessly waited. Then the light faded. He took up his hat, gazed at its dusty crown, and turned the thing in both hands.
“I reckon I’d best go do what’s got to be done.” He looked at her almost sadly, moved doorward, and said: “Maybe we can talk some more later, Amy.”
“I’ll be with Lew in Hub’s room, Parker.”
“I’ll walk you over there.”
She shook her head at him. There was a wet brightness to her gaze now. “No. You go on. But I’d like to see you when you…when it’s over.”
He nodded a little, put on his hat, and walked out of the jailhouse.
Wagons from out over the Laramie Plains drifted into town for supplies. Occasionally a rider or two also loped in, and generally, although these men had been sent after a badly needed tongue bolt or a new length of hard-twist lariat rope, or perhaps the ranch mail, they tied up before one of the saloons first, entered with the free-swinging stride of willing imbibers, then emerged a few minutes later with the same closed faces, the same wariness, which otherwise gripped the town, for the word of what was in the offing filled Laramie’s very air. There were two exceptions to this; they entered town from the south. One was a gaunt, battered cowboy; the other was a swarthy, raffish man with a slouched posture in the saddle, but whose quick, sharp eyes belied his general attitude of lazy indifference.
Parker saw these two because they walked their mounts past the jailhouse where he stood. He did not know them, yet a little warning flashed along
his nerves as they looked over, then looked on again, too casual and too disinterested.
He did not see another two of the same brand of men amble into town from the north, and another two ride in quietly and separately, one from the glittering west, one from the hot, dry east. Still standing in the shadowed heat under the jailhouse overhang, he watched those first two draw up before Fleharty’s Great Northern Saloon, tie up, and pass on inside. He stepped out into the roadway, crossed over, and swung north, heading for Fleharty’s place. A man stepped forth from a doorway, looking worried. It was Councilman Pierson.
“Have you found him yet?” Pierson asked, meaning Swindin.
Parker shook his head looking past, up toward Fleharty’s place.
“Have you some idea where he might be?”
Parker’s gaze came back. He said: “I can tell you where he isn’t. He’s not watching the roadway or he’d have taken a shot at me. I stood in front of the jailhouse, waiting for him to try that.”
Pierson’s long face grew longer. “I know. I saw that an’ stood over here, holding my breath. I’ve passed the word around.”
“What word?” asked Parker, beginning to look annoyed. “Listen, Mister Pierson, I’d just as soon not have a lot of trigger-happy store clerks slipping around town with guns in their hands.”
“You can’t do this alone, Mister Travis.”
Up the road those two men walked out of Fleharty’s saloon and stopped on the plank walk, looking right and left. Parker stepped away from Pierson and started onward. Pierson, seeing the look on the larger man’s face, seeing also his destination—
those two loafing range riders on ahead—said a quick swear word to himself and ducked back into the doorway from which he’d emerged.
Parker’s footfalls echoed upon the boardwalk. He saw one of those men ahead speak to the other from the side of his mouth. Both men turned fully and watched Parker approach them. The shorter, darker of these two hooked both thumbs in his shell belt, looking nonchalant. His raw-boned companion, though, was clearly a rough man. He had a high-bridged nose that had been broken at least once and lay bent a little. His eyes were challengingly hard and the color of a wintry dusk. He gave Parker look for look without moving or shifting his glance except to once make a little flickering appraisal of the way Travis wore his gun. There was a reckless slight droop at the outer comers of this man’s long mouth.
“You boys looking for Johnny Fleharty?” Parker asked, coming to a halt ten feet away.
“Now we might be, Sheriff,” said the gaunt man. “And then again, we might not be. Why, you got a law against it?”
In the face of this antagonism Parker wintrily smiled. Matching the other man’s insolent drawl, he said: “Well, now, boys, Fleharty’s in jail, and maybe you’d like to visit him there…or maybe you wouldn’t like that. It’s up to you.”
The battered man’s eyes drew out narrowly. He kept studying Parker as one stray dog studies another. His unkempt swarthy companion said smoothly, with an apologetic little smile: “No call to get hostile, Sheriff. No call at all. We just thought we’d have a drink, is all.”
“With Charley Swindin?” asked Parker, keeping
a close watch for reaction to this. He got it, not from the tall man who was concentrating on only one thing, taking the measure of this big man wearing the badge, but from the raffish man. His eyes registered abrupt surprise, then turned oily again and slyly deferential. He chuckled, saying: “No, just a little drink for the two of us…unless you’d care to join us, Sheriff. Cold beer’d go mighty good on a day like this ’n’s promisin’ to be.”
“No thanks,” replied Parker dryly. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” He paused, saw the gaunt man’s eyes show dawning curiosity, took a step closer to this man, and said: “I’ll escort the pair of you down to see Fleharty at the jailhouse.”
Neither of those rough men spoke and their faces settled gradually into skepticism, into suspicion. “You,” said the gaunt man very softly, “ain’t goin’ to escort us nowhere, Mister Tin Badge.”
Parker had both these men under his gaze; he had taken that step closer to the gaunt man for a purpose. The swarthy rider was slightly behind his friend; he could not throw down on Parker without first stepping around his companion.
“Care to make a little bet?” Parker asked the gaunt man.
He thought this would trigger action and it did. The gaunt man’s right hand blurred in a whipped-back draw. Parker, bracing into this for the past few moments, was faster. When the cowboy’s gun was clearing leather, Parker’s own weapon made a vicious short arc, struck down meatily, and there was the unmistakable sound of steel grating on bone. The gaunt man gasped; he dropped his weapon and wilted from pain. Parker stepped clear, leveled his weapon upon the raffish rider, and coldly smiled.
That man’s hand was resting tentatively upon his undrawn six-gun.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Draw it.”
But the raffish man instead let off a long breath and removed his hand, let it glide downward easily. He shook his head, looking out of wide eyes.
“Help your pardner and let’s go,” directed Parker.
The injured man called him a hard name. “It’s broke!” he exclaimed, holding out one hand with the other hand. “Broke at the gawd-damned wrist.”
Parker considered the broken flesh, the blue swelling that was already coming on. “There’s a doctor around. He’ll set it for you. Move along.” But when those two would have stepped down into the roadway, he said: “Stay on the sidewalk. Go south until you’re directly across from the jailhouse, then stop.”
The raffish man screwed up his face at these orders. “You afraid of something?” he asked.
“Yeah, a bullet in the back. Get along now.”
The three of them stepped out southward. No one appeared upon the plank walk as far as they went, but Parker saw from the corner of his eye the faces glued to store windows as they went along.
The gaunt man’s broken wrist was losing some of its numbness and the pain was coming on strong by the time they halted across from the jailhouse. He swore helplessly in a singsong manner, a lot of the starch gone out of him. He said to Parker when they were no longer moving, “I owe you something for this. We weren’t doing anything. Just come in for a drink and got buffaloed by a damned gun-drunk tin badge. I’ll pay you back for this an’ a damned sight sooner than you think, too.”
Two men drifted out of a northward dog-trot to stand slouched, looking down at Parker and his pris
oners. Two more came walking out of a saddle shop across the way. Those four were strangers to Parker; they were cowboys by the looks of them, tough and hard and reckless. It was the still way they stood, all their attention on Parker’s prisoners, that made him particularly notice them, that and the fact that those four men suddenly appeared like that, the only men in sight along the roadway. He stepped closer to his captives, putting their bodies between him and those four motionless watchers.
The raffish man made an oily smile. “You’re smart,” he said. “Smart enough to use us for shields. But, Sheriff…how you goin’ to get across the road with us? There’ll be two on one side of the road an’ two on the other side o’ the road. Either way, lawman, your back’s goin’ to be facin’ someone.”
Out of a nearby doorway stepped several armed men. Councilman Todhunter was in front of them. He moved gingerly up and said: “Go ahead, Travis. We watched it build up against you. We’ve got shotguns. Go ahead, and, if those four try it, they’ll get fiddled.”
“That answer you?” asked Parker of the raffish men. “Move along, both of you.” He touched their backs with his six-gun. “Keep closed up. Make a wrong move and I’ll open the thing by killing you.” He pushed harder with the gun barrel.
The raffish man made a quick, negative wag with his head, stepped down into roadway dust, and went walking onward with the hurting weight of that fierce overhead summer sun fully on him. At his side the gaunt cowboy plodded along, ignoring everything but the agony each jarring footfall brought him through his shattered arm.
Parker stayed close enough to these two so that
no one firing at him, even if he was hit, could escape also hitting one of his prisoners. He had a peculiar, cold feeling between the shoulder blades as he made that crossing, as though venomous eyes were burning a hole in him with their icy determination to kill him.