The Big Front Yard and Other Stories

CHAPTER ONE Hit the Trail, Or Die!

Morgan Carson, editor of the Trail City Tribune, knew trouble when he saw it – and it was walking across the street straight toward his door.

Dropping in alone, either Jackson Quinn, the town’s lone lawyer, or Roger Delavan, the banker, would have been just visitors stopping by to pass the time of day. But when they came together, there was something in the wind.

Jake the printer clumped in from the back room, stick of type clutched in his fist, bottle joggling in hip pocket with every step he took, wrath upon his ink-smeared face.

“Ain’t you got that damned editorial writ yet?” he demanded. “Holy hoppin’ horntoads, does a feller have to wait all day?”

Carson tucked the pencil behind his ear. “We’re getting visitors,” he said.

Jake shifted the cud of tobacco to the left side of his face and squinted beneath bushy eyebrows at the street outside.

“Slickest pair of customers I ever clapped an eye on,” he declared. “I’d sure keep my peepers peeled, with them jaspers coming at me.”

“Delavan’s not so bad,” said Carson.

“Just pick pennies off a dead man’s eyes, that’s all,” said Jake.

He spat with uncanny accuracy at the mouse-hole in the corner.

“Trouble with you,” he declared, “is you’re sweet on that dotter of hisn. Because she’s all right, you think her old man is too. Nobody that goes around with Quinn is all right. They’re just a couple of cutthroats, in with that snake Fennimore clear up to their hips.”

Quinn and Delavan were stepping to the boardwalk outside the Tribune office. Jake turned and shuffled toward the back.

The door swung open and the two came in, Quinn huge, square-shouldered, flashy even in a plain black suit; Delavan quiet and dignified with his silvery hair and bowler hat.

“This is a pleasure,” Carson said. “Two of the town’s most distinguished citizens, both at once. Could I offer you a drink?”

He bent and rummaged in a deep desk drawer, came up empty-handed.

“Nope,” he said, “I can’t. Jake found it again.”

“Forget the drink,” said Quinn. He seated himself on Carson’s desk and swung one leg back and forth. Delavan sat down in a chair, prim and straight, like a man who dreads the job he has to do.

“We came in with a little business proposition,” said Quinn. “We have a man who’s interested in the paper.”

Carson shook his head. “The Tribune’s not for sale.”

Quinn grinned, pleasantly enough. “Don’t say that too quickly, Carson. You haven’t heard the price.”

“Tempt me,” invited Carson.

“Ten thousand,” said Quinn, bending over just a little as if to keep it confidential.

“Not enough,” said Carson.

“Not enough!” gasped Quinn. “Not enough for this?” He swept his hand at the dusty, littered room. “You didn’t pay a thousand for everything you have in the whole damned place.”

“Byron Fennimore,” Carson told him levelly, “hasn’t got enough to buy me out.”

“Who said anything about Fennimore?”

“I did,” snapped Carson. “Who else would be interested? Who else would be willing to pay ten thousand to get me out of town?”

Delavan cleared his throat. “I would say, Morgan, that should have nothing to do with it. After all, a business deal is a business deal. What does it matter who makes the offer?”

He cleared his throat again. “I offer the observation,” he pointed out, “merely as a friend. I have no interests in this deal myself. I just came along to take care of the financial end should you care to sell.”

Carson eyed Delavan. “Ten thousand,” he asked, “spot cash? Ten thousand on the barrel-head?”

“Say the word,” said Quinn, “and we’ll hand it to you.”

Carson laughed harshly. “I’d never get out of town with it.”

Quinn spoke softly. “That could be part of the deal,” he said.

“Nope,” Carson told him, “ten thousand is too much for the paper. I’d sell the paper – just the paper, mark you – for ten thousand. But I won’t sell my friends. I won’t sell myself.”

“You’d be making a stake out of it, wouldn’t you?” asked Quinn. “Isn’t that what you came here for?”

Carson leaned back in his chair, hooked his thumbs in his vest and stared at Quinn. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you or Fennimore could understand why I came here. You aren’t built that way. You wouldn’t know what I was talking about if I told you I saw Trail City as a little cowtown that might grow up into a city.

“Gentlemen, that’s exactly what I saw. And I’m here, in on the ground floor. I’ll grow up with the town.”

“Have you stopped to think,” Quinn pointed out, “that you might not grow up at all? Might just drop over dead, suddenlike, some day?”

“All your gunslicks are poor shots,” said Carson. “They’ve missed me every time so far.”

“Maybe up to now the boys haven’t been trying too hard?”

“I take it,” said Carson, “they’ll try real hard from now on.”

He flicked a look at Delavan. The man was uneasy, embarrassed, twirling the bowler hat in his hands.

“Let’s stop beating around the bush,” suggested Carson. “I don’t know why you tried it in the first place. As I understand it, Fennimore will give me ten thousand if I quit bucking him, forget about electing Purvis for sheriff and get out of town. If not, the Bar Y boys turn me into buzzard bait.”

“That’s about it,” said Quinn.

“You don’t happen to be hankering after my blood, personally?” asked Carson.

Quinn shook his head. “Not me. I’m no gunslinger.”

“Neither am I,” Carson told him. “Leastwise not professionally. But from now on I’m not wearing this gun of mine for an ornament. I’m going to start shooting back. You can noise that around, sort of gentle-like.”

“The boys,” said Quinn, sarcastically, “will appreciate the warning.”

“And you can tell Fennimore,” said Carson, “that his days are over. The days of free range and squeezing out the little fellow are at an end. Maybe Fennimore can stop me with some slugs. Maybe he can stop a lot of men. But he can’t stop them forever.

“The day is almost here when Fennimore can’t fix elections and hand-pick his sheriffs, when he can’t levy tribute on all the businessmen in town, when he can’t hog all the water on the range.”

“Better put that in an editorial,” said Quinn.

“I have,” declared Carson. “Don’t you read my paper?”

Quinn turned toward the door and Delavan arose. He fumbled just a little with his hat before he put it on. “You’re coming to the house tonight for supper, aren’t you?” he asked.

“I thought so, up to now,” said Carson.

“Kathryn is expecting you,” the banker said.

Quinn swung around. “Sure, go ahead, Carson. Nothing personal in this, you understand.”

Carson rose slowly. “I didn’t think there was. You wouldn’t have a man planted along the way, would you?”

“What a thought,” said Quinn. “No, my friend, when we get you, it’ll be in broad daylight.”

Carson followed them to the door, stood on the stoop outside to watch them leave. They crossed the street toward the bank, the dust puffing up from their boots to shimmer momentarily in the slanting rays of the westering sun.

A horse cantered down the street, coming from the east, its rider slouching in the saddle. A hen scratched industriously in the dust and clucked to an imaginary brood. The sun caught the windows of the North Star Saloon, directly opposite the newspaper office, and turned the glass to glittering silver.

Trail City, thought Editor Morgan Carson, looking at it. Just a collection of shacks today. The North Star and the bank and sheriff’s office with the jail behind it. The livery stable and the new store with the barber shop in one corner.

A frontier town, with chickens clucking in the dust and slinking dogs that stopped to scratch for fleas. But someday a great town, a town with trains and water tower instead of a creaking windmill, a town of shining glass and brick.

A man was coming down the steps of the North Star, a big man stepping lightly. Carson watched him abstractedly, recognized him as one of Fennimore’s hired hands, probably in town on some errand.

The man started across the street and stopped. His voice came quietly across the narrow stretch of dust.

“Carson!”

“Yes,” said Carson. And something in the way the man stood there, something in the single word, something in the way the man’s face looked beneath the droopy hat, made him stiffen, tensed every nerve within him.

“I’m calling you,” said the man, and it was as if he had asked for a match to light his smoke. No anger, no excitement, just a simple statement.

For a single instant time stood still and stared. Even as the man’s hands drove for the gun-butts at his thighs, the street seemed frozen in a motionlessness that went on forever.

And in that timeless instant, Carson knew his own hand was swooping for his gun, that the weapon’s butt was in his fist and coming out.

Then time exploded and took up again and Carson’s gun was swinging up, easily, effortless, simple as pointing one’s finger. The other man’s guns were coming up, too, a glitter of steel in the sunlight.

Carson felt his gun buck against his hand, saw the look of surprise that came upon the other’s face, heard the blast of the single shot ringing in his ears.

The man out in the street was sagging, sagging like a slowly collapsing sack, as if the strength were draining from him in the dying day. His knees buckled and the guns, still unfired, dropped from his loosened fingers. As if something had pushed him gently, he pitched forward on his face.

For an instant more, the stillness held, a stillness even deeper than before. The man on the horse had reined up and was motionless, the scratching hen was a feathery statue of bewilderment.

Then doors slammed and voices shouted; feet pounded on the sidewalks. The saloon porch boiled with men. Bill Robinson, white apron around his middle, ducked out of the store. The barber came out and yelled. His customer, white towel around his neck, lather on his face, was pawing for his gun, swearing at the towel.

Two men came from the sheriff’s office and walked down the street, walked toward Carson, standing there, still with gun in hand. They walked past the dead man in the street and came on, while the town stood still and watched.

Carson waited for them, fighting down the fear that welled within him, the fear and anger. Anger at the trap, at how neatly it had worked.

The door slammed behind him and Jake was beside him, a rifle in his hand.

“What’s the matter, kid?” he asked.

Carson motioned toward the man lying in the dust.

“Called me,” he said.

Jake shifted his cud of tobacco to the north cheek.

“Dang neat job,” he said.

Sheriff Bert Bean and Stu Leonard, the deputy, stopped short of the sidewalk.

“You do that?” asked Bean, jerking a thumb toward the dust.

“I did,” admitted Carson.

“That bein’ the case,” announced Bean, “I’m placin’ you under arrest.”

“I’m not submitting to arrest,” said Carson.

The sheriff’s jaw dropped. “You ain’t submittin’ – you what!”

“You heard him,” roared Jake. “He ain’t a-going with you. Want to do anything about it?”

Bean lifted his hands towards his guns, thought better of it, dropped them to his side again.

“You better come,” Bean said with something that was almost pleading in his voice. “If you don’t, I got ways to make you.”

“If you got ways,” yelped Jake, “get going on ’em. He’s calling your bluff.”

The four men stood motionless for a long, dragging moment.

Jake broke the tension by jerking his rifle down. “Get going,” he yelled. “Start high-tailing it back to your den, or I’ll bullet-dance you back there. Get out of here and tell Fennimore you dassn’t touch Carson ’cause you’re afraid he’ll gun-whip you out of town.”

The crowd, silent, motionless until now, stirred restlessly.

“Jake,” snapped Carson, “keep an eye on that crowd out there.”

Jake spat with gusto, snapped back the hammer of the gun. The click was loud and ominous in the quiet.

Carson walked slowly down the steps toward the sidewalk, and Bean and Leonard backed away. Carson’s gun was in his hand, hanging at his side, and he made no move to raise it, but as he advanced the two backed across the street.

Quinn pushed his way through the crowd in front of the bank and strode across the dust.

“Carson,” he yelled, “you’re crazy. You can’t do this. You can’t buck law and order.”

“The hell he can’t,” yelped Jake. “He’s doing it.”

“I’m not bucking law and order,” declared Carson. “Bean isn’t law and order. He’s Fennimore’s hired hand. He tried to do a job for Fennimore and he didn’t get away with it. That man I killed was planted on me. You had Bean sitting over there, all ready to gallop out and slap me into jail.”

Quinn snarled. “You got it all doped out, haven’t you?”

“I’m way ahead of you,” said Carson. “You used a man that was just second-rate with his guns. Probably had him all primed up with liquor so he thought he was greased hell itself. You knew that I’d outshoot him and then you could throw a murder charge at me. Smart idea, Quinn. Better than killing me outright. Never give the other side a martyr.”

“So what about it?” asked Quinn.

“So it didn’t work.”

“But it’ll work,” Quinn declared. “You will be arrested.”

“Come ahead, then,” snapped Carson. He half-lifted the sixgun. “I’ll get you first, Quinn. The sheriff next –”

“Hey,” yelled Jake, “what order do you want me to take ’em in? Plumb senseless for the two of us to be shooting the same people.”

Quinn moved closer to Carson, lowered his voice. “Listen, Carson,” he said, “you’ve got until tomorrow to disappear.”

“What?” asked Carson in mock surprise. “No ten thousand?”

CHAPTER TWO Gunsmoke Goes to Press

Jake scrubbed the back of his neck with a grimy hand, his brow wrinkled like a worried hound’s.

“You sure didn’t make yourself popular with the sheriff,” he declared. “Now he ain’t going to rest content until you’re plumb perforated.”

“The sheriff,” announced Carson, “won’t make a move toward me until he’s heard from Fennimore.”

“I’m half-hoping,” said Jake, “that Fennimore decides on shootin’. This circlin’ around, sort of growlin’ at one another like two dogs on the prod has got me downright nervous. Ain’t nothin’ I’d welcome more than a lively bullet party.”

Carson tapped a pencil on the desk. “You know, Jake, I figure maybe we won that election right out there on the street. Before tomorrow morning there won’t be a man in Rosebud County that hasn’t heard how Bean backed down. A story like that is apt to lose him a pile of votes. Fennimore can scare a lot of people from voting for Purvis, but this sort of takes the edge off the scare. People are going to figure that since that happened to Bean, maybe Fennimore ain’t so tough himself.”

“They’ll sure be makin’ a mistake,” said Jake. “Fennimore is just about the orneriest hombre that ever forked a horse.”

Carson nodded gravely. “I can’t figure Fennimore will take it lying down. Maybe you better sneak out the back door, Jake, and tell Lee Weaver, over at the livery barn, to do a bit of riding. Tell the boys all hell is ready to pop.”

“Good idea,” agreed Jake. He shuffled toward the back, and a moment later Carson heard the back door slam behind hm.

There was no question, Carson told himself, tapping a pencil on the desk, that the showdown would be coming soon. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning … but it couldn’t be long in coming.

Fennimore wasn’t the sort of man who would wait when a challenge was thrown at him, and what had happened that afternoon was nothing short of a challenge. First the refusal of the offer to buy the paper off, then the refusal to submit to arrest, and finally the bluffing that had sent Bean skulking back to the sheriff’s office.

In his right mind, Carson told himself, he never would have done it, never would have had the nerve to do it. But he was sore clear through, and he’d done it without thinking.

The front door opened and Carson looked up. A girl stood there, looking at him: a girl with foamy lace at her throat, silk gloves, dainty parasol.

“I heard what happened,” she said. “I came right down.”

Carson stood up. “You shouldn’t have,” he said. “I’m a fugitive from justice.”

“You should skulk,” she said. “Don’t all fugitives skulk?”

“Only when they are in hiding,” he said. “I’m not exactly in hiding.”

“That’s fine,” said the girl. “Then you’ll be able to eat with us tonight.”

“A murderer?” he asked. “Kathryn, your father might not like that. Think of it, a murderer eating with the banker and his charming daughter.”

Kathryn Delavan looked squarely at him. “I’ll have Daddy come over when he’s through work and walk home with you. Probably he’ll have something to talk with you about.”

“If you do that,” Carson said, “I’ll come.”

They stood for a minute, silent in the room. A fly buzzed against a windowpane and the noise was loud.

“You understand, don’t you, Kathryn?” asked Carson. “You understand why I have to fight Fennimore – fight for decent government? Fennimore came in here ten years ago. He had money, cattle and men. He settled down and took over the country – free range, he calls it now, but that’s just a term that he and men like him invented to keep for themselves things that were never theirs in the first place. It’s not democracy, Kathryn, it’s not American. It isn’t building the sort of country or the sort of town that common, everyday, ordinary folks want to live in.”

He hesitated, almost stammering. “It’s sometimes a dirty business, I know, but if gunsmoke’s the only answer, then it has to be gunsmoke.”

She reached out a hand and touched his arm. “I think I do understand,” she said.

She turned away then, walked toward the door.

“Daddy,” she told him, “will be over around six o’clock to bring you home.”

Carson moved to the window, watched her cross the street and enter Robinson’s store. He stood there for a long time, listening to the buzzing of the fly. Then he went back to the desk and settled down to work.

It was almost seven o’clock when Roger Delavan came, profuse with apology.

“Kathryn will be angry with me,” he said, fidgeting with his hat, “but I had some work to do, forgot all about the time.”

Outside, dusk had fallen on the street and the windows of the business places glowed with yellow light. There was a sharp nip in the rising wind, and Delavan turned up the collar of his coat. A few horses stood huddled, heads drooping at the hitching post in front of the North Star. Up the street a dog-fight suddenly erupted, as suddenly ceased.

Carson and Delavan turned west, their boots ringing on the sidewalk. The wind whispered and talked in the weeds and grass that grew in the vacant space surrounding the creaking, groaning windmill tower.

“I want to talk with you,” said Delavan, head bent into the wind, hat socked firmly on his head. “About what happened today. I am afraid you may think –”

“It was a business deal,” Carson told him. “You said so, yourself.”

“No, it wasn’t,” protested Delavan. “It was the rankest sort of bribery and attempt at intimidation I have ever seen. I’ve played along with Fennimore because of business reasons. Fennimore, after all, was the only business in Trail City for a long time. I blinked at a lot of his methods, thinking they were no more than the growing pains of any normal city. But after what happened today, I had to draw the line. I told Quinn this afternoon –”

Red flame flickered in the weeds beside the tower, and a gun bellowed in the dusk. Delavan staggered, coughed, fell to his knees. His bowler hat fell off, rolled into the street. The wind caught it and it rolled on its rim, like a spinning wagon-wheel.

A man, bent low, was running through the weeds, half-seen in the thickening dark.

Carson’s hand dipped for his gun, snatched it free, but the man was gone, hidden in the thicker shadows where no lamplight reached from the windows on the street.

Carson slid back the gun, knelt beside Delavan and turned him over. The man was a dead weight in his arms; his head hung limply. Carson tore open his coat, bent one ear to his chest, heard no thudding heart.

Slowly, he laid the banker back on the ground, pulled the coat about him, then straightened up. The bowler hat no longer was in sight, but a half-dozen men were running down the street. Among them, he recognized Bill Robinson, the new store owner, by the white apron tied around his middle.

“That you, Robinson?” asked Carson.

“Yeah, it’s me,” said Robinson. “We heard a shot.”

“Someone shot Delavan,” said Carson. “He’s dead.”

They came up and stood silently for a moment, looking at the black shape on the ground. One of them, Carson saw, was Caleb Storm, the barber. Another was Lee Weaver, the liveryman. The others he knew only from having seen them about town. Men from some of the ranches.

Robinson glanced over his shoulder at the North Star. “Guess they didn’t hear the shot in there,” he said. “Probably helling it up a bit.”

“I’m thinking about Kathryn,” said Carson. “Delavan’s daughter. Someone will have to tell her.”

“That’s right,” declared Robinson. He considered it a moment, a square, blocky man, almost squatty in the semi-darkness of the street.

“My old woman will go and stay with her,” he said, “but she can’t break the news to her, not all alone. Someone else will have to help her do it.”

He looked at Carson. “You were going there just now. Kathryn told me when she came in to buy some spuds.”

Carson nodded. “I suppose you’re right, Bill. Let’s get Delavan in someplace.”

Storm and two of the other men lifted the body, started down the street.

“Come down to the store for a minute,” said Robinson. “The old lady will be ready to go in a minute or so.”

Carson followed Robinson. Weaver lagged until he fell in step with the editor. He stepped close to Carson and pitched his voice low.

“I got word to Purvis,” he said. “He sent out riders. Some of the boys will be coming into town.”

“I’ll be back at the office,” Carson told him, “as soon as I can get away.”

Feet pattered on the sidewalk behind them and a woman’s voice cried out: “Daddy! Daddy!”

Weaver and Carson spun around.

It was Kathryn Delavan, running across the street, sobs catching in her throat. She would have rushed by, but Carson reached out and stopped her. “No, Kathryn,” he said. “Stay back here with us.”

She clung to him. “You were so late,” she said, “that I came to see –”

He held her close, awkward in his comforting.

“You don’t know who –”

Carson shook his head. “It was too dark.”

Robinson lumbered through the dusk toward them. “Perhaps,” he said, “she might want to come to the store. My wife is there.”

The girl stepped away from Carson. “No,” she said, “I want to go back home. Martha is there. I’ll be all right there with her.”

She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “You will bring him home, too?”

Robinson’s voice was understanding, almost soft. “Yes, miss, just as soon – In an hour or two.”

She moved closer, took Carson’s arm, and they moved west up the street, toward the house where supper waited for a man who would not eat it.

The clock on the bar said ten when Carson pushed open the door of the North Star.

The place was half-full, and in the crowd Carson singled out a handful of Fennimore’s riders – Clay Duffy, John Nobles, Madden and Farady at the bar; Saunders and Downey at a table in a listless poker game. The rest of the men were in from other ranches or were from the town.

Carson walked to the bar and signaled to the bartender.

The man came over. “What’ll it be?”

“Fennimore around?” asked Carson.

“You don’t give a damn for your life, do you?” snarled the man.

Carson’s voice turned to ice. “Is Fennimore here?”

The man motioned with his head. “In the back.”

For a moment the room had grown silent, but once again it took up its ordinary clatter of tongue and glass and poker chip. One or two men smiled at Carson as he walked by, but others either turned their heads or did not change expression.

Without knocking, Carson pushed open the back door, stepped into the smoke-filled room.

Three men stared at him from a single round table decorated by two whisky bottles, staring with that suddenly vacant, vicious stare that marks an interrupted conversation.

One was Fennimore, a huge man, wisps of black hair hanging out from under his broad-brimmed hat. Quinn and Bean were on either side of him.

For a moment the stare was unbroken and the silence held. Fennimore was the one who broke it. “What do you want?” he asked, and his voice was like a lash, hard and cold and with a sting in every word.

“I came,” said Carson, “to see what was being done about Delavan’s murder.”

“So,” said Fennimore slowly. “So, what do you want to be done about it?”

“I want the man who killed him found.”

“And if we don’t?”

“I’ll say that you don’t want him found. On the front page of the Tribune.”

“Look here, Morgan,” said Quinn, “you’re in no position to say that. When you yourself are wanted for murder.”

“I’m here,” said Carson. “Go ahead and take me.”

The three sat unmoving. Fennimore’s tongue licked his upper lip, briefly. Bean’s whisky-flushed face drained to pasty white.

“No,” said Carson. “All right, then –”

“Quinn,” interrupted Fennimore, “gave you until tomorrow morning to get out of town. That still holds.”

“I’m not getting out,” said Carson. “The day when you can tell a man to get out and make it stick is over, Fennimore. Because in another week we’re electing a new sheriff, one who will uphold the law of the country and not the law of one cow-boss.”

“It’s your damned paper,” snarled Fennimore. “You and your lousy stories that give me all the trouble. Stirring up the people –”

“What Fennimore means,” said Quinn, smiling, “is that you’ll never go to press again …”

“But I will,” said Carson. “Tonight. I’m not waiting until tomorrow. We go to press tonight instead of tomorrow afternoon. And I’m going to tell how Delavan was shot down from ambush and nothing’s being done about it. And I’m going to point out that when I killed a man on fair call this afternoon you wanted to run me in for murder.”

“You can’t blame any of my boys for killing Delavan,” said Fennimore. “Delavan was my friend.”

“He was your friend, you mean,” said Carson, “until he told Quinn this afternoon that he was all through. After that, Fennimore, you couldn’t afford to let him live.”

Fennimore hunched forward in his chair. “If you think you can get me to raise the ten thousand ante,” he declared, “you’re wrong. It was worth that much to get you out of the way, but it’s not worth any more.”

Carson laughed at him, a laugh that came between his teeth.

“You’re still willing to pay that ten thousand?”

Fennimore nodded. “If you leave within the hour. If you get a horse and ride. If you never go back to the office again.”

“I knew I had you scared,” said Carson, “but I didn’t know I could scare you quite so thoroughly.”

Slowly he backed out of the door, closed it and strode across the barroom.

CHAPTER THREE One Against the Town

Light glowed in the windows of the Tribune and Carson, hurrying across the street, saw the tiny office was filled with men.

Cries of greeting rose as he stepped through the door, and he stopped for a moment to recognize the faces. There was Gordon Purvis, the candidate for sheriff, Jim Owens, Dan Kelton, Humphrey Ross and others. Lee Weaver was there and so was Bill Robinson.

Jake shambled out of the back room, stick of type clutched in one hand, gunbelt joggling on his hip.

“Ain’t you got that damned editorial writ yet?” he demanded. “Holy hoppin’ horntoads –”

“Jake,” snapped Carson, “how soon can you get out a paper? An extra?”

Jake gasped. “A whole paper? A whole danged paper?”

“No, just one page. Sort of a circular.”

“Couple, three hours,” said Jake, “if I can use big type.”

“All right,” said Carson, “get ready for it. I’ll start writing.”

Jake shifted the cud of tobacco to the left side of his jaw, spat at the mouse-hole.

Owens had risen, was making his way toward Carson. “What you planning to do?” he asked, and his question quieted the room so that Jake’s feet, shuffling to the back, sounded almost like a roll of thunder.

“I’m going to blow Fennimore sky-high,” said Carson. “I’m going to force him to produce Delavan’s murderer or face the assumption that it was he, himself, that ordered the killing.”

“You can’t do that,” said Owens, softly.

“I can’t!”

“No, you can’t. This thing is getting out of hand. Range-war is apt to break wide open any minute. You know what that means. Our homes will be burned. Our families run out or murdered. Ourselves shot down from ambush.”

Purvis leaped to his feet. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Owens,” he shouted. “If they want to shoot it out, we have to shoot it out. If we back down this time, we’re done. We’ll never –”

“You’re safe enough,” snarled Owens, “you’re all alone. You haven’t any family to be worried about. The rest of us –”

“Wait a minute,” yelled Carson. “Wait a minute.”

They quieted.

“Do you remember when you came in here six months ago to talk this thing over with me?” asked Carson. “You told me then that if I went with you, you’d string along with me. You swore you wouldn’t let me down. You agreed this was the show-down. You said you wanted Purvis for sheriff and you’d back him –”

“We know that,” yelled Owens, “but it’s different now –”

“Let me talk, Owens,” snapped Carson, his voice like a knife. “I want to tell you something. Something that happened this afternoon. Fennimore offered me ten thousand if I would sell you out – ten thousand, cash on the barrel-head and a promise that I’d get safely out of town. I turned him down. I told him I wouldn’t sell you fellows out. And because I told him that, I have a murder charge hanging over me and Delavan is dead …”

He looked from one to another of them in the deadly quiet, each of them staring in turn at him.

“I refused to sell you men out,” said Carson, “and now you’re selling me out. You won’t back my play. I should have taken that ten thousand.”

Their eyes were shifty, refusing to meet his. A strange fear was upon them.

Kelton said, “But you don’t understand, Morgan. Our wives and kids. We never thought it would come to this –”

From the street outside came wild shouts and the sound of running feet.

“Fire!” the single word ran through the startled night, crashed into the lamp-lighted Tribune office. “Fire! Fire!”

Carson spun toward the window, saw the leaping flames across the street.

“It’s my place!” yelled Bill Robinson. “My store! Every dime I have – every dime –”

He was rushing for the door, clawing at the jamb, sobbing in his haste.

The room exploded in a surge of men leaping for the door. Across the street dark figures of men, silhouetted against the windows, hurdled the porch railing of the North Star, hit the street running. At the hitching posts the horses reared and screamed and pawed at the air in terror.

Flames were leaping and racing through the store, staining the whole street red. Smoke mushroomed like an angry cloud, blotting out the stars. Glass tinkled as a window was shattered by the heat.

Carson pounded through the dust. Running figures bumped into him. Voices bellowed – yelling for pails, for someone to start the windmill.

The flames shot through the roof with a gusty sigh, curled skyward, painting the pall of smoke with a bloody hue. One peak of the roof crumbled in as the fire raced through the seasoned timber. In the back something exploded with a whoosh, and for a moment the street was lighted by a garish flare that seemed to illuminate even the racing flames, then thick black clouds of smoke blotted it out.

The kerosene drum had gone up.

The building was dissolving, tongues of fire licking through the solid wall. Someone screamed a warning and the building went, the upper structure plunging in upon the flame-eaten nothingness that lay beneath it. Burning embers sailed into the street and the men ducked as they thudded in the dust.

For a moment the crowd stood stricken into silence, and all that could be heard was the hungry soughing of the fire as it ate its way into oblivion.

Men who had been rushing from the windmill with water to douse the side and roof of the sheriff’s office to keep it from catching fire, lowered their buckets and as the fire died down a new sound came: the clanking of the windmill.

Through the crowd came Bill Robinson, face white, shirt smoldering where a brand had fallen. He stopped in front of Carson.

“Everything is gone,” he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. His eyes were looking beyond Carson, scarcely seeing him. “Everything. I’m ruined. Everything. …”

Carson reached out a hand and gripped the man by the shoulder, but he wrenched away and shook his head, and plodded down the street. Men stood aside to let him pass, not knowing what to say.

Gordon Purvis was at Carson’s elbow. He said quietly: “We’ll have to figure out something. Pass the hat –”

Carson nodded. “We may as well go back to the office. Nothing we can do here.”

A man came leaping through the open door of the Tribune, saw them and headed toward them at a run. Carson saw that it was Jake. And as the man drew near he knew there was something wrong.

“The type!” gasped Jake. “All over the floor and throwed out the door. And someone’s used a sledge on the press –”

Carson broke into a run, heart down in his stomach, his stomach squeezing to put it back in place, the cold feet of apprehension jigging on his spine.

What Jake said was true.

The back shop was a shambles. Every type case had been jerked out of the cabinets and emptied, some of it heaved out of the door into the grass along the path that ran to the livery stable. The press was smashed as if by a heavy sledge. The same sledge had smashed the cans of ink and left them lying in sticky gobs upon the floor.

The work of a moment – of just the few minutes while the fire was racing through Robinson’s store.

Carson stood slump-shouldered and stared at the wreckage.

He finally turned wearily to Purvis. “I guess,” he said, “we don’t print that extra after all.”

Purvis shook his head. “Now we know that fire was no accident,” he declared. “They wanted us out of here, and they picked a way that was sure to get us out.”

They went back to the office and sat down to wait, but no one came in. Outside, hoofs pounded now and again as men mounted their horses and headed out of town. The hum of voices finally subsided until the street was quiet. Sound of occasional revelry still came from the North Star. The windmill, which no one had remembered to shut off, clanked on in the rising wind. The embers of the fire across the street still glowed redly.

Purvis, tilted back in his chair, fashioned a smoke with steady fingers. Jake hauled a bottle from his pocket, took a drink and passed it around.

“I guess they aren’t coming back,” said Purvis, finally. “I guess all of them feel the way that Owens felt. All of them plumb scared.”

“What the hell,” asked Jake, “can you do for a gang like that? They come in here wantin’ help, and now –”

“You can’t blame them,” said Carson, shortly. “After all, they have families to think of. They have too much at stake.”

He picked up a pencil from his desk, deliberately broke it in one hand, hurled the pieces on the floor.

“They burned out Robinson,” he said. “Cold-bloodedly. They burned him out so they could wreck the shop. So they could stop that extra, scare us out of town. A gang like that would do anything. No wonder the other fellows didn’t come back. No wonder they high-tailed for home.”

He glanced at Purvis. “How do you feel?” he asked.

Purvis’ face didn’t change. “Got a place where I can stretch out for the night?”

“Sure you want to?”

“Might as well,” said Purvis. “All they can do is burn down my shanty and run off my stock.” He puffed smoke through his nostrils. “And maybe, come morning, you’ll need an extra gun.”

Carson awoke once in the night, saw Jake sitting with his back against the door, his head drooping across one shoulder, his mouth wide open, snoring lustily. The rifle lay across his knees.

Moonlight painted a white oblong on the floor and the night was quiet except for the racing windmill, still clattering in the wind.

Carson pulled the blanket closer around his throat and settled his head back on his coat-covered boots which were serving as a pillow. In the cot, Purvis was a black huddle.

So this is it, thought Carson, staring at the moonlight coming through the window.

The press broken, the type scattered, the men he had been working for deserting, scared out once again by the guns that backed Fennimore. Nothing left at all.

He shrugged off the despair that reached out for him and screwed his eyes tight shut. After a while he went to sleep.

It was morning when he awoke again, with the smell of brewing coffee in his nostrils. Jake, he knew, had started a small fire in the old air-tight heater in the back. He heard the hiss of bacon hit the pan, sat up and hauled on his boots, shucked into his coat.

The cot was empty.

“Where’s Purvis?” he called to Jake.

“Went out to get a pail of water,” said Jake. “Ought to be good and cold after running all night long.”

Somewhere a rifle coughed, a sullen sound in the morning air. Like a man trying to clear a stubborn throat.

For a moment Carson stood stock still, as if his boot-soles were riveted to the floor.

Then he ran to the side window, the window looking out on the windmill lot, half knowing what he would see there, half afraid of what he’d see.

Purvis was a crumpled pile of clothes not five feet from the windmill. The pail lay on its side, shining in the sun. A vagrant breeze fluttered the handkerchief around Purvis’ neck.

The town was quiet. The rifle had coughed and broken the silence and then the silence had come again. Nothing stirred, not even the wind after that one solitary puff that had moved the handkerchief.

Carson swung slowly from the window, saw Jake standing in the door to the back room, fork in one hand, pan of bacon in the other.

“What was it?” Jake demanded. “Too tarnation early in the morning to start shootin’.”

“Purvis,” said Carson. “He’s out there, dead.”

Jake carefully set the pan of bacon on a chair, laid the fork across it, walked to the corner and picked up his rifle. When he turned around his eyes were squinted as if they already looked along the gun-barrel.

“Them fellers,” he announced, “have gone a mite too far. All right, maybe, to shoot a hombre when he’s half-expectin’ it and has a chance at least to make a motion toward his own artillery. But ’taint right bushwhackin’ a man out to get a pail of water.”

Jake spat at the mouse-hole, missed it. “Especially,” he declared, “before he’s had his breakfast.”

“Look, Jake,” said Carson, “this fight isn’t yours. Why don’t you crawl out the back window and make a break for it? You could make it now. Maybe later you can’t.”

“The hell it ain’t my fight,” yelped Jake. “Don’t you go hoggin’ all the credit for this brawl. Me, I’ve had somethin’ to do with it, too. Maybe you writ all them pieces takin’ the hide off Fennimore, but I set ’em up in type and run ’em off the press.”

A voice was bawling outside.

“Carson!” it shouted. “Carson!”

Stalking across the room, but keeping well away from the window, Carson looked out.

Sheriff Bean stood in front of the North Star, badge of office prominently pinned on his vest, two guns at his sides.

“Carson!”

“Watch out,” said Jake. “If they see a move in here, they’ll fill us full of lead.”

Carson nodded, stepped out of line of the window and walked to the wall. Drawing his gun, he reached out and smashed a window-pane with the barrel, then slumped into a crouch.

“What is it?” he yelled.

“Come out and give yourself up,” bawled Bean. “That’s all we want.”

“Haven’t got someone posted to pick me off?” asked Carson.

“There won’t be a shot fired,” said Bean. “Just come out that door, hands up, and no one will get hurt.”

Jake’s whisper cut fiercely through the room. “Don’t believe a word that coyote says. He’s got a dozen men in the North Star. Open up that door and you’ll be first cousin to a sieve.”

Carson nodded grimly.

“Say the word,” urged Jake, “and I’ll pick ’im off. Easy as blastin’ a buzzard off a fence.”

“Hold your fire,” snapped Carson. “If you start shooting now we haven’t got a chance. Probably haven’t anyway. As it is they’ve got us dead to rights. Bean, over there, technically is the law and he can kill us off legal-like. Can say later we were outlaws or had resisted arrest or anything he wants to. …”

“They killed Delavan and Purvis,” yelped Jake. “They –”

“We can’t prove it,” said Carson bitterly. “We can’t prove a thing. And now they’ve got us backed into a hole. There’s nothing we can gain by fighting. I’m going to go out and give myself up.”

“You can’t do that,” gasped Jake. “You’d never get three feet from the door before they opened up on you.”

“Listen to me,” snapped Carson. “I’m going to give myself up. I’ll take a chance on getting shot. You get out of here, through the back. Weaver will let you have a horse. Ride out and tell the boys that Purvis is dead and I’m in jail. Tell them the next move is up to them. They can do what they want.”

“But – but –” protested Jake.

“There’s been enough killing,” declared Carson. “A bit of gunning was all right, maybe, when there still was something to fight for, but what’s the use of fighting if the men you’re fighting for won’t help? That’s what I’m doing. Giving them a chance to show whether they want to fight or knuckle down to Fennimore.”

He raised his voice. “Bean. Bean.”

“What is it?” Bean called back.

“I’m coming out,” yelled Carson.

There was silence, a heavy silence.

“Get going,” Carson said to Jake. “Out the back. Crawl through the weeds.”

Jake shifted the rifle across his arm.

“After you’re safe,” he insisted. “Until I see you cross that street, I’ll stay right here.”

“Why?” asked Carson.

“If they get you,” Jake told him, “I’m plumb bent on drillin’ Bean.”

Carson reached out and yanked the door open. He stood for a moment in the doorway, looking across at Bean, who waited in front of the North Star.

The dawn was clean and peaceful, and the street smelled of cool dust and the wind of the day had not yet arisen, but only stirred here and there, in tiny, warning puffs.

Carson took a step forward, and even as he stepped a rifle barked; a throaty, rasping bark that echoed among the wooden buildings.

Across the street something lifted Bean off his feet, as if a mighty fist had smote him – struck so hard that it slammed him off his feet and sprawled him in the dust.

At the sound of the shot, Carson had ducked and spun on his heel, was back in the room again, slamming shut the door.

The windows of the North Star sprouted licking spurts of gunflame and the smashing of the Tribune’s windows for an instant drowned the crashing of the guns. Bullets snarled through the thin sheathing and plowed furrows in the floor, hurling bright showers of splinters as they gouged along the wood.

Carson hurled himself toward his heavy desk, hit the floor and skidded hard into the partition behind it. A slug thudded into the wall above his head and another screamed, ricocheting, from the desk top.

Thunder pounded Carson’s ears, a crashing, churning thunder that seemed to shake the room. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jake crouched, half-shielded by the doorway into the back shop, pouring lead through the broken windows. Shell cases rolled and clattered on the floor as the old printer, eye squinted under bushy brow, tobacco tucked carefully in the northeast corner of his cheek, worked the lever action.

From the corner of the desk, Carson flipped two quick shots at one North Star window where he thought he saw for an instant the hint of shadowy motion.

And suddenly he realized there were no sounds of guns, no more bullets thudding into the floor, throwing showers of splinters.

Jake was clawing at the pockets of his printer’s apron, spilling cartridges on the floor in his eagerness to fill the magazine.

He spat at the mouse-hole with uncanny accuracy. “Wonder who in tarnation knocked off Bean,” he said.

“Somebody out in the windmill lot,” said Carson.

Jake picked up the cartridges he had dropped, put them back in the apron pocket again. “Kind of nice,” he declared, “to know you got some backin’. Probably somebody that hates Fennimore’s guts just as much as we do.”

“Whoever he was,” declared Carson, “he sure messed up my plans. No sense of trying to surrender now.”

“Never was in the fust place,” Jake told him. “Damndest fool thing I ever heard of. Steppin’ out to get yourself shot up.”

He squatted in the doorway, rifle across his knee.

“They didn’t catch us unawares,” he said. “Now they’ll be up to something else. Thought maybe they’d wipe us out by shooting the place plumb full of holes.” He patted the rifle stock. “Sort of discouraged them,” he said.

“It’ll be sniping now,” declared Carson. “Waiting for one of us to show ourselves.”

“And us,” said Jake, “waiting for them to show themselves.”

“They’ll be spreading out,” said Carson, “trying to come at us from different directions. We got to keep our eyes peeled. One of us watch from the front and the other from the back.”

“Okay by me,” said Jake. “Want to flip for it?”

“No time to flip,” said Carson. “You take the back. I’ll watch up here.”

He glanced at the clock on the wall. “If we only can hold out until dark,” he declared, “maybe –”

A furtive tapping came against the back of the building.

“Who’s there?” called out Jake, guardedly.

A husky whisper came through the boards. “Open up. It’s me. Robinson.”

The man slipped in, dragging his rifle behind him, when Jake eased the door open. The merchant slapped the dust from his clothes.

“So you’re the jasper what hauled down on Bean,” said Jake.

Robinson nodded. “They burned my store,” he said. “So they could bust up your shop. They burned everything I had – for no reason at all except to let them get in here and stop that extra you were planning.”

“That’s what we figured, too,” said Jake.

“I ain’t no fighting man,” Robinson declared. “I like things peaceable … like them peaceable so well I’ll fight to make them that way. That’s why I shot Bean. That’s why I came here. My way of figurin’, there ain’t no peace around these parts until we run out Fennimore.”

“Instead of coming here,” Carson told him, “you should have ridden out and told the ranchers what was happening. Told them we needed help.”

“Lee Weaver is already out,” said Robinson. “I was just over there. The stable boy told me he left half an hour ago.”

A flurry of shots blazed from the North Star, and bullets chunked into the room. One of them, aimed higher than the rest, smashed the clock and it hung drunkenly from its nail, a wrecked thing that drooled wheels and broken spring.

“Just tryin’ us out,” said Jake.

To the north, far away, came the sound of shooting. They strained their ears, waiting. “Wonder what’s going on up there?” asked Jake.

Robinson shook his head. “Sure hope it isn’t Lee,” he said.

After that one burst there were no further shots.

The sun climbed up the sky and the town dozed, its streets deserted.

“Everyone’s staying under cover,” Jake opined. “Ain’t nobody wants to get mixed up in this.”

Just after noon Lee Weaver came, flat on his belly through the weeds and tall grass back of the building, dragging himself along with one hand, the right arm dragging limply at his side, its elbow a bloody ruin bound with a red-stained handkerchief.

“Came danged near lettin’ you have it,” Jake told him. “Sneakin’ through them weeds like a thievin’ redskin.”

Weaver slumped into a chair, gulped the dipper of water that Carson brought him.

“I couldn’t get through,” he told them. “Fennimore’s got men posted all around the town, watching. Shot my horse, but I got away. Had to shoot it out with three of them. Laid for two hours in a clump of sage while they hunted me.”

Carson frowned, worried. “That leaves us on the limb,” he said. “There isn’t any help coming. They got us cornered. Come night –”

“Come night,” suggested Jake, “and we fade out of here. No use in tryin’ it now. They’d get us sure as shootin’. In the dark we’d have some chance to get away.”

Carson shook his head. “Come night,” he declared, “I’m going into that saloon the back way. While you fellows keep them busy up here.”

“If they don’t get us first,” Weaver reminded him. “They’ll rush us as soon as it’s dark.”

“In that case,” snapped Carson, “I’m starting now. That weed-patch out there is tall enough to shield a man if he goes slow, inches at a time, and doesn’t cause too much disturbance. I’ll circle wide before I try crossing the street. I’ll be waiting to get into the North Star long before it’s dark.”

CHAPTER FOUR The Plans of Mice and Men …

The doorknob turned easily, and Carson let out his breath. For long hours he had lain back of the North Star, his mind conjuring up all the things that might go wrong. The door might be locked, he might be seen before he could reach it, he might run into someone just inside. …

But he reached the door without detection and now the knob turned beneath his fingers. He shoved it slowly, fearful of a squeaking hinge.

The smell of liquor and of stale cooking hit him in the face as the door swung open. From inside came the dull rumble of occasional words, the scrape of boot-heels.

Holding his breath, he moved inside, slid along the wall, shoved the door shut. Standing still, shoulders pressed against the wall, he waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the dark.

He was, he saw, in a sort of warehouse. Liquor cases and barrels were piled against the walls, half-blocking the lone window in the room. Straight ahead was another door and he guessed that it opened into a hallway that ran up to the barroom, with another room, the one in which he had faced Fennimore the night before, off to the side.

A gun crashed ahead of him. A single shot. And then another one. Then a flurry of shots.

He felt the hair crawl at the base of his scalp, and his grip tightened on the gun in his hand. There had been occasional firing all afternoon, a few shots now and then. This might be just another fusillade, or it might mean that the kill had started, that the office would be rushed.

On tiptoe he moved across the room, reached the second door. And even as he reached for the knob, he felt it turn beneath his hand before his fingers gripped it.

Someone else had hold of the knob on the other side – was coming through the door!

Twisting on his boot-heel, he swung away, staggered back against the piled-up cases. The door swung open and a figure stepped into the room.

With all his strength, Carson swung at the head of the shadowy man, felt the barrel of his sixgun crash through the resistance of the hat, slam against the skull. The man gasped, pitched forward on buckling knees.

Moving swiftly, Carson scooped the guns from the holsters of the fallen man. He bent close to try to make out who it was, but in the dark the face was a white splotch, unrecognizable.

He straightened and stood tense, listening. There was no sound. No more shots from up in front.

He reached up to place the two guns he had taken from the holsters on top of the whisky cases, and as he stretched on tiptoe to shove them back away from the edge, something drilled into his back, something hard and round.

Rigid, he did not move, and a voice that he knew spoke just behind him.

“Well, well, Morgan, imagine finding you here.”

Mocking, hard – the voice of Jackson Quinn. Quinn, hearing the thud of the falling body, coming on quiet feet down the hallway to investigate, catching him when he was off guard.

“Mind if I turn around?” asked Carson, trying to keep his voice easy.

Quinn gurgled with delight. “Not at all. Turn around by all means. I never did like shooting in the back.” He chuckled again. “Not even you.”

Carson twisted slowly around. The gun muzzle never left his body, following it around from back to belly.

“Drop your gun,” said Quinn.

Carson loosened his fingers and the gun thudded on the floor.

“You’ve given me so much trouble,” Quinn told him, “that I should bust you up a bit. But I don’t think I will. I don’t think I’ll even bother.” He chuckled. “I think I’ll just shoot you here and have it over with.”

Iron squealed against iron, an eerie sound that leaped at them from the dark.

Quinn jerked around, and for the first time his gun-muzzle lifted from Carson’s body.

Carson moved like lightning, clenched fist coming up and striking down, smashing against the wrist that held the gun; striking entirely by instinct, for it was too dark to see.

Quinn cried out and the gun clanged to the floor.

The back door was open. A figure stood outlined against the lesser dark outside, a crouching figure that carried a rifle at the ready.

Shoulders hunched, head down, one foot braced hard for leverage against the whisky cases, Carson hurled himself at Quinn. He felt the man go over at the impact of the flow, knew he was falling on top of him, hauled back his arm for a blow.

But a foot came up, lashing at his stomach. He sensed its coming, twisted, caught it in the ribs instead and went reeling back against the whisky cases, limp with pain.

Quinn was crouching, springing toward him. A fist exploded in his face, thumped his head against the cases. He ducked his head, ears ringing, and bored in, fists playing a tattoo on Quinn’s midriff, driving the man out into the center of the room.

A vicious punch straightened Carson, rocked him. The white blur of Quinn’s face was coming toward him and he aimed at it, smashed with all his might – and the face retreated as Quinn staggered backward on his heels.

Carson stepped in, and out of the dark came piledriver blows that shook him with their viciousness.

The face was there again. Carson measured it, brought his fist up almost from the floor in a whistling, singing loop. Pain lanced down his arm as the blow connected with the whiteness of the face and then the face was gone and Quinn was on the floor.

Feet were pounding in the hallway and shouts came from the barroom. Behind him a rifle crashed, thunderous in the closeness of the room, the red breath of its muzzle lighting the place for a single instant.

The rifle crashed again and yet again and the room was full of powder-fumes that stung the nostrils.

“Jake!” yelled Carson.

“You bet your boots,” said the man with the rifle. “You didn’t think I’d let you do it all alone!”

“Quick!” gasped Carson. “Get in here, back by the door. They can’t reach us here!”

A sixgun blasted and bullets chunked into the cases. Glass crashed and the reek of whisky mingled with the smell of gunsmoke.

Jake came leaping across the room, crouched in the angle back of the door.

Scraping his feet along the floor, Carson located his sixgun, picked it up.

Jake’s whisper was rueful. “They got us bottled like a jug of rum.”

Carson nodded in the dark. “Been all right,” he said, “If Quinn hadn’t found me.”

“That Quinn you had the shindy with?”

“That’s right.”

“Had a mind to step in and do some work with the gunstock,” Jake told him, “but decided it was too risky. Couldn’t tell which of you was which.”

Guns thundered in the passageway, the explosions deafening. Bullets thudded into the cases, chewing up the boards, smashing the bottles.

Carson reached up and grasped a case from those stacked behind him. Jake’s rifle bellowed. Carson flung the case over his head. It smashed into the doorway. He heaved another one.

Jake blasted away again. The guns in the hallway cut off.

“Keep watch,” Carson told Jake. He heaved more cases in the doorway, blocking it to shoulder-height.

From across the street came the sound of firing – the ugly snarling of a high-powered rifle.

“That’s Robinson,” said Jake. “Some of them buzzards tried to sneak out the front door and come at us from behind, but Robinson was Johnny at the rat-hole.”

“Robinson can’t stop them for long,” snapped Carson. “They’ll get at us in a minute or two –”

A gun hammered almost in their ears and something stabbed Carson in the face. He brushed at it with his hand, pulled away a splinter. The gun roared again, as if it were just beside their heads.

“They’re in the back room,” gasped Jake, “shooting at us through the partition!”

“Quick!” yelled Carson. “We got to get out of here! Here, you grab Quinn and haul him out. I’ll take the other fellow.”

He grasped the man he had stuck down with the gun-barrel, started to tug him toward the door.

“Why don’t we leave ’em here?” yelped Jake. “What in tarnation is the sense of luggin’ ’em?”

“Don’t argue with me,” yelled Carson. “Just get Quinn out of here.”

The gun in the back room was hammering, was joined by another. Through the holes already punched by the bullets, Carson could see the red flare of the blasting runs. One of the bullets brushed past Carson’s face, buried itself with a thud in the stacked cases. Another flicked burning across his ribs.

Savagely he yanked the door open, hauled his man through and dumped him on the ground. Reaching in, he gave the panting, puffing Jake a hand with Quinn.

“Pull them a bit farther away,” said Carson. “We don’t want them to get scorched.”

“Scorched?” yipped Jake. “Now you’re plumb out of your head!”

“I said scorched,” declared Carson, “and I mean scorched. Things are going to get hot in the next five minutes.”

He plunged his hand into a pocket, brought out a match, scratched it across the seat of his breeches. For a moment he held it in his cupped hand, nursing the flame, then with a flip of his fingers sent it sailing into the whisky-reeking room.

The flame sputtered for a moment on the floor, almost went out, then blazed brilliantly, eating its way along a track of liquor flowing from one of the broken cases.

Carson lit another match, hurled it into the room. The blaze puffed rapidly, leaping along the floor, climbing the cases, snapping and snarling.

Carson turned and ran, Jake pelting at his heels. In the long grass back of the North Star they flung themselves prone, and watched.

The single window in the building was an angry maw of fire, and tiny tongues of flame were pushing their way through the shingled roof.

A man leaped from one of the side windows in a shower of broken glass. Beside Carson, almost in his ear, Jake’s rifle bellowed. The man’s hat, still on his head despite the leap, was whipped off as if by an unseen hand.

From the Tribune office across the street came the flickering of blasting guns, covering the front windows and the door of the burning saloon.

“Listen!” hissed Jake. His hand reached out and grasped Carson by the shoulder. “Horses!”

It was horses – there could be no mistaking that. The thrum of hoofs along the dusty street – the whoop of a riding man, then a crash of thunder as sixguns cut loose.

Men were spilling out of the North Star now, running men with guns blazing in their hands. And down upon them swept the riders, yelling, sixguns tonguing flame.

The riders swept past the North Star, whirled and came back, and in their wake they left quiet figures lying in the dust.

Jake was on his knee, rifle at his shoulder, firing steadily at the running, dodging figures scurrying for cover.

A running man dashed around the corner of the flaming saloon, ducked into the broken, weedy ground back of the jail. For a moment the light of the fire swept across his face and in that moment, Carson recognized him.

It was Fennimore! Fennimore, making a getaway.

Carson leaped to his feet, crouched low and ran swiftly in the direction Fennimore had taken. Ahead of him a gun barked and a bullet sang like an angry bee above his head.

For an instant he saw a darting darker shape in the shadows and brought up his own gun, triggered it swiftly. Out of the darkness, Fennimore’s gun answered and the bullet, traveling low, whispered wickedly in the knee-high grass.

Carson fired at the gun-flash, and at the same instant something jerked at his arm and whirled him half-around. Staggering, his boot caught in a hummock and he went down, plowing ground with his shoulder.

He tried to put out his arm to help himself up again and he found he couldn’t. His right arm wouldn’t move. It was a dead thing hanging on him, a dead thing that was numb, almost as if it were not a part of him.

Pawing in the grass with his left hand, he found the gun and picked it up, while dull realization beat into his brain.

Running after Fennimore, he’d been outlined against the burning North Star, had been a perfect target. Fennimore had shot him through the arm, perhaps figured he had killed him when he saw him stumble.

Crouching in the grass, he raised his head cautiously. But there was nothing but darkness.

Behind him the saloon’s roof fell in with a gush of flames and for a moment the fire leaped high, twisting in the air. And in that moment he saw Fennimore on a rise of ground above him. The man was standing there, looking at the flames.

Carson surged to his feet.

“Fennimore!” he shouted.

The man spun toward him, and for an instant the two stood facing one another in the flare of the gutted building.

Then Fennimore’s gun was coming up and to Carson it was almost as if he stood off to one side and watched with cold, deliberate, almost scientific interest.

But he knew his own hand was coming up, too, the left hand with the feel of the gun a bit unfamiliar in it.

Fennimore’s gun drooled fire and something brushed with a blast of air past Carson’s cheek. Then Carson’s gun bucked against his wrist, and bucked again.

On the rise of ground, in the dying light of the sinking fire, Fennimore doubled over slowly. And across the space of the few feet that separated them, Carson heard him coughing, coughs wrenched out of his chest. The man pitched slowly forward, crashed face-first into the grass.

Slowly, Carson turned and walked down to the street, his wounded arm hanging at his side, blood dripping from his dangling fingers.

The guns were quiet. The fire was dying down. Black, grotesque figures still lay huddled in the dust. In front of the Tribune office the horses milled, and inside the office someone had lighted a lamp.

Voices yelled at him as he stepped up on the board sidewalk and headed for the office. He recognized some of the voices. Owens, Kelton, Ross – the men who had ridden away the night before, afraid of what might happen to their homes.

Owens was striding down the walk to meet him. He stared at Carson’s bloody arm.

“Fennimore plugged me,” Carson said.

“Fennimore got away. He isn’t here.”

“He’s out back of the jail,” Carson told him.

“We’re glad we got here in time,” said Owens, gravely. “Glad we came to our senses. The boys feel pretty bad about last night. It took Miss Delavan to show us –”

“Miss Delavan?” asked Carson, dazed. “What did Kathryn have to do with it?”

Owens looked surprised. “I thought you knew. She rode out and told us.”

“But Fennimore had guards posted!”

“She outrode them,” Owens declared. “They didn’t shoot at her. Guess even a Fennimore gunman doesn’t like to gun a woman. They took out after her, but she was on that little Star horse of hers –”

“Yes, I know,” said Carson. “Star can outrun anything on four legs.”

“She told us how it was our chance to make a decent land out here, a decent place to live – a decent place for our kids.”

“Where is she now?” asked Carson. “You made her stay behind. You –”

Owens shook his head. “She wouldn’t listen to us. Nothing doing but she’d ride along with us. She said her father –”

“You left her at the house?”

Owens nodded. “She said –”

But Cason wasn’t listening. He wasn’t even staying. He stepped down into the street and walked away, his stride changing in a moment to a run.

“Kathryn!” he cried.

She was running down the street toward him, arms outstretched.

Jake, prodding Quinn and Clay Duffy toward the Tribune at rifle-point, saw them when they met. He watched interestedly, and spat judiciously in the dust.

“Beats all hell,” he told Quinn, “how that feller gets along with women.”