The Stranger from Abilene

Chapter 71

There was no letup in the rain as Emma Kelly rode into the Southwell Ranch.

Lightning hissed across a sullen sky, and thunder rolled with the racketing din of a thousand strident drums.

She saw the bodies of three men sprawled on the muddy ground. Clayton she recognized at once, lying on his back, his face turned to the rain.

Emma stepped from the saddle and ran to Clayton. Heedless of the mud, she kneeled, then lifted his head and laid it on her lap.

“Cage, can you hear me?”

The man’s face, pale under his tanned skin, showed no sign of life.

Emma’s hand moved to his bloody chest. His heart was still beating, but hesitantly.

Desperately the girl looked around her, her eyes searching for help that wasn’t there. She saw only the shifting curtain of the rain, heard it chatter on the ranch house roof, smelled the caustic tang of lightning.

There was no one else. She had it to do.

Clayton was a big man, heavy with bone and muscle, and lifting him was out of the question.

Emma stood, grabbed him by the armpits, and dragged his limp body.

It was slow going, a few inches at a time, the man a heavy burden for a slender woman.

Starting and stopping, Emma took almost ten minutes to drag Clayton the twenty yards to the house. She glanced at Quarrels’s body, curled up in death, and felt only anger.

She opened the door, and with the last of her strength, pulled Clayton inside into the hallway.

This was not the time for false modesty. Now, out of the rain, Emma stripped off Clayton’s wet clothes and left him lying naked for a few moments while she ran into a bedroom and returned with a pillow and blanket.

The man was shot through and through, but he was still breathing, and that gave the girl hope.

Cage was strong. He would survive this—he had to.

She walked to the door and looked out into the raging morning.

She badly needed Nook Kelly’s help, his man’s strength.

When would he get here?

To the north of the Southwell Ranch, across the rain-lashed hill country, Marshal Nook Kelly stood in the bank and listened to Lissome Terry’s proposition.

“Let me go to your office by myself, Nook,” the fat man pleaded. “I don’t want to walk through town with my hands raised and a gun at my back. I have friends here, neighbors.”

Kelly glanced into the street. It was deserted, the rain forcing everyone indoors.

“There’s nobody on the street, Terry,” he said. “Now move your fat ass off the chair.”

“For old times’ sake, Nook?”

“Terry, you and me don’t have old times, only bad times. Now move it. I won’t tell you again.”

Years ago, when Bighorn Point was wilder and Kelly more on edge, he’d trained himself to expect the unexpected, to be ready for something he’d never seen before.

That morning in Terry’s office he wasn’t unready—but his edge had been dulled by too many years of easy living.

And the fat man showed him something.

As he raised himself from his chair, he groaned, then slumped to his right, as though suddenly taken ill.

Kelly holstered his gun and started to step around the desk to help Terry to his feet. But the man suddenly straightened and stood up. It was very fast for a grossly overweight man, and Kelly was taken by surprise.

He drew as Terry’s Colt came up, but the fat man surprised him again.

Instead of turning his gun on Kelly, Terry shoved the muzzle against his temple and pulled the trigger.

The Colt roared and blood and brains splattered the marshal’s face.

“You killed him!”

The bank clerk ran inside and cast a horrified look at Terry’s body. The fat man lay facedown on his desk, a pool of blood spreading around his head.

“He killed himself,” Kelly said. “Damned coward couldn’t stand proud and take his medicine like a man.”

“Hell, what did he do?” the clerk said.

“Everything,” Kelly said. “Everything that’s bad.”