Kilkenny 02 - A Man Called Trent (v5.0) Page 6

  Kilkenny shrugged. “Never put too much weight on a woman’s emotions, Rusty. They ain’t reliable…”

  Behind them, in the saloon at Apple Cañon, a door slowly opened. The man who stood in the door looking at Big Ed was even larger than the bartender. He seemed to fill the open door, seemed huge, almost too big to be human. Yet there was nothing malformed about him. He was big, but powerfully, splendidly built, and his Indian face was dark and strangely handsome. He moved down the bar with no more noise than a sliding of wind along the floor, and stopped close to Big Ed.

  The bartender turned his battered, bloody face toward him.

  “No,” Brigo said softly, “you will not betray the señorita.” His black eyes were dark with intent as he stared into Big Ed’s. “If one word of this reaches him, I kill you! And when I kill you, amigo mío, it will not be nice, the way I kill.”

  “I ain’t talkin’,” Big Ed said gruffly through battered lips. “I had enough.”

  Chapter VIII

  Nita was standing in her garden, one hand idly fingering a rose, when Brigo came through the hedge. He looked at her, and his lips parted over perfect teeth.

  “You have found him, señorita,” he murmured. “I see that. You have found this man for whom you waited.”

  She turned quickly. “Yes, Jaime. It is he. But has he found me?”

  “Did you not see his face? His eyes? Sí, señorita, Jaime think he find you, too. He is a strong man, that one. Perhaps”—he canted his head speculatively—“so strong as Jaime.”

  “But what of him?” Nita protested. “He will kill him. He hates him.”

  “Sí, he hates. But he will not kill. I think now something new has come. This man, this Kilkenny. He is not the same.” Brigo nodded thoughtfully. “I think soon, señorita, I return to my home…”

  Trailing a few yards behind Kilkenny, Rusty Gates stared up at the wall of the valley. A ragged, pine-spread slope fell away to a rocky cliff, and the sandy wash that ran at the base of it. It was a wild, lonely country. Thinking back over what he knew of this country, he began to see that what Kilkenny had said was the truth. Someone had planned to engineer the biggest rustling plot in Western history.

  With this Live Oak country under one brand, cattle could be eased across its range and poured down through the mouth of the funnel into Mexico. By weeding the bigger herds carefully, they might bleed them for years without anyone finding out what was happening. On ranges where cattle were numbered in thousands, a few head from each ranch would not be missed, but in the aggregate it would be an enormous number. This was not the plan of a moment. It was no cowpuncher needing a few extra dollars for a blow-out. This was a steal on the grand scale. It was the design of a man with a brain, and with ruthless courage. Remembering the three men dead back at Apple Cañon, Rusty could see even more. The boss, whoever he was, would kill without hesitation, and on any scale.

  Kilkenny was doing some thinking, too. The leader, whoever he was, was a man who knew him. Slowly and carefully he began to sift his past, trying to recall who it might be. Dale Shafter? No, Shafter was dead. He had been killed in the Sutton-Taylor feud. Anyway, he wasn’t big enough for this. Card Benton? Too small. A small-time rustler and gambler. One by one he sifted their names, and man after man cropped up in his mind, men who had never rustled, men who were gamblers and gunslingers, men who had cold nerve and who were killers. But somehow none of them seemed to be the type he wanted. And who had fired at him that night in the hollow as he waited for Mort Davis? Who had killed Sam Carter? Was it the same man? Was he the leader? Kilkenny doubted it. This man wanted him alive, and that one had tried to kill him. Indeed, the man had left him for dead. Someone, too, had killed Joe Wilkins. That would take some looking into.

  Kilkenny walked his horse down a weathered slide, and crossed a wash. The trail led through a low place walled on each side by low, sandy hills, covered with mesquite, bunch grass, and occasional prickly pear. This job of saving Davis’s place for him was turning into something bigger than Lance Kilkenny had dreamed. It was becoming one of the biggest things he had ever walked into. One thing, at least—he had proved to himself that Steele and Lord were out of it. Now if he could bring them to peace with Mort Davis, the only thing left would be to fight it out with the mysterious boss of the gang.

  Somehow, more and more, he was beginning to feel that there was more behind this plan than he imagined. This didn’t seem like even a simple rustling scheme. Try as he might, he couldn’t fit any man into it who he knew. Nor any he had heard of. Yet the fact remained that the leader knew him. Gun experts were as much a part of the West as Indians or cows. It was not an accident that there were so many. And they were, good and bad, essential to the making of the West. Kilkenny was one of the few who saw his own place in the scheme of things clearly. He knew just exactly what he meant, what he was.

  Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, Wes Hardin, Hickok, Ben Thompson, Tom Smith, Earp, Masterson, Tilghman, John Selman, and all the rest were a phase. Most of them cleared out badmen, opened up the West. They fought Indians and they were the tough, outer bark of the pioneering movement. The West was a raw country, and raw men came to it, but there had to be peace. These men, lawless as many of them were, were also an evidence of the coming of law and order, for many of them became sheriffs or marshals, became men who made the West safer to live in.

  There could be an end to strife. It was not necessary to go on killing. It could be controlled, and one way to control it was to put the law in the hands of a strong man. Often he was himself a badman, and sometimes he killed the wrong man. But by and large, he kept many other gunmen from killing many more men, and brought some measure of order to the West. Yet this new outlaw leader, this mysterious man upon the cliff, this man who seemed to be pulling the strings from behind the scenes was not one of these. He was different, strange.

  Shadows grew longer as the sun sank behind the painted hills, and a light breeze came from the south, blowing up from Mexico. There was a faint smell of dust in the air. Kilkenny glanced at Gates.

  “Somebody fogged it along this trail not so long ago,” he said. “Somebody who wanted to get someplace in a hurry.”

  “Yeah.” Rusty nodded. “And that don’t mean anything good for us.”

  “Whoever the big mogul in this game is,” Kilkenny said thoughtfully, “will try to break the trouble between Steele and Lord without delay.”

  “The worst of it is we don’t know what he’ll do, or where he’ll strike next,” Gates said.

  They were riding at a steady trot toward Botalla when they saw a rider winging it toward them. Rusty flagged him down.

  “Hey, what’s the rush?” he demanded.

  “All tarnation’s busted loose!” the rider shouted excitedly. “Lord’s hay was set afire, and Steele’s fence cut. Some of Lord’s boys had a runnin’ fight with two of Steele’s men, and in town there have been two gunfights!”

  “Anybody killed?” Kilkenny demanded anxiously.

  “Not yet. Two men wounded on Steele’s side!” The cowboy put spurs to his horse and raced off into the night toward the Steele Ranch.

  “Well, there goes your cattle war!” Rusty said. “This’ll make Lincoln County look like nothin’ at all! What do we do now?”

  “Stop it, that’s what.”

  Kilkenny whipped the buckskin around and in a minute they were racing down the road toward Botalla.

  The main street was empty and as still as death when they dashed up, but there were lights in the Spur, and more lights in the bigger Trail House. Kilkenny swung down, loosened his guns in their holsters, and walked through the batwing doors of the Trail House.

  Men turned quickly at his approach, and their voices died down. He glanced from one to the other, and his eyes narrowed.

  “Any Steele men here?” he demanded. Two men stepped forward, staring at him, hesitant, but ready for anything.

  “We’re from Steele’s,” he said. “What about it?”

&
nbsp; “There’ll be no war,” Kilkenny said flatly. “Neither of you men is firin’ a shot at a Lord man tonight. You hear?”

  The nearest cowpuncher, a hard-bitten man with a scarred face, grinned, showing broken yellow teeth. “You mean, if I get shot at, I don’t fight back? Don’t be foolish, hombre! If I feel like fightin’, I’ll fight. Nobody tells me what to do.”

  Kilkenny’s eyes narrowed. “I’m tellin’ you.” His voice cracked like a whip. “If you shoot, better get me first. If not, I’m comin’ after you.”

  The man’s face paled. “Then you talk to them Lord men,” he persisted stubbornly, backing off a little. “I ain’t anxious for no gunslingin’!”

  Kilkenny wheeled and crossed to the Spur. Shoving the doors open, he stepped in and issued the same ultimatum to the Lord men. Several of them appeared relieved. But one man got up and walked slowly down the room toward Kilkenny.

  Lance saw it coming. He stood still, watching the man come closer and closer. He knew the type. This man was fairly good with a gun but he wanted a reputation like Kilkenny’s, and figured this was the time to get it. Yet there was a lack of certainty in the man’s mind. He was coming, but he wasn’t sure. Kilkenny was. No man had ever outshot him. He had the confidence given him by many victories.

  “I reckon, Kilkenny,” the Lord cowpuncher said, “it’s time somebody called you. I’m shootin’ who I want to, and I ain’t takin’ orders from you. I hear you’re fast. Well, fill your hand!”

  He dropped into a gunman’s crouch, then froze and his mouth dropped open. He gulped, then swallowed. The gun in Kilkenny’s hand was leveled at the pit of his stomach.

  Somehow, in the gunfights he’d had before, it had never happened like that. There had been a moment of tenseness, then both had gone for their guns. But this had happened so suddenly. He had expected nothing like that heavy .45 aimed at his stomach, with the tall, green-eyed man standing behind it.

  It came to him abruptly that all he had to do to die was drop his hand. All at once, he didn’t want to die. He decided that being a gun slick wasn’t any part of his business. After all, he was a cowpuncher.

  Slowly, step by step, he backed up. Then he swallowed again. “Mister,” he said, “I reckon I ain’t the hombre I thought I was. I don’t think there’ll be any trouble with the Steele boys tonight.”

  Kilkenny nodded. “No need for trouble,” he said quietly. “There’s too much on this range, anyway.”

  He spun on his heel and walked from the barroom.

  For an instant all was still, then the big cowpuncher looked around, and shook his head in amazement.

  “Did you see him drag that iron?” he asked pleadingly. “Where the devil did he get it from? I looked, and there it was!”

  There was silence for a long time, then one man said sincerely: “I heerd he was gun swift, but nothin’ like that. Men, that’s Kilkenny!”

  Rusty Gates grabbed Kilkenny as he left the Spur.

  “Kilkenny,” he said, “there’s a stranger rode in today. He asked for you. Got somethin’ to tell you, he says. Hails from El Paso!”

  “El Paso?” Kilkenny scowled. “Who could want to see me from there?”

  Gates shrugged. “Purty well lickered, I hear.” He lighted a smoke. “But he ain’t talkin’ fight. Just insists on seein’ you.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Kilkenny was thoughtful. El Paso. He hadn’t been in El Paso since the Weber fight. Who could want to see him from there?

  “He was at the Trail House,” Gates said. “Come in just after you took off. Tall, rangy feller. Looks like a cowhand, all right. I mean, he don’t look like a gunslinger.”

  They stepped down off the walk, and started across the street. They had taken but three steps when they heard the sharp rap of a shot. Clear, and ringing in the dark street. A shot, and then another.

  “The Trail House!” Gates yelled, and broke into a run.

  Kilkenny made the door two steps ahead of him, shoved it open, and stepped in. A cowpuncher lay on his face on the floor, a red stain growing on the back of his shirt. A drawn gun lay near his hand. He was dead.

  Slowly Kilkenny looked up. Bert Polti stood across the man’s body, a smoking gun in his fist. He looked at Kilkenny and his eyes narrowed. Kilkenny could see the calculation in his eyes, could see the careful estimate of the situation. He had a gun out, and Kilkenny had not drawn. But there was Gates, and in his own mind, reading what the man thought, Kilkenny saw the momentary impulse die.

  “Personal fight, Kilkenny,” Polti said. “This wasn’t no cattle war scrap. He knocked a drink out of my hand. I asked him to apologize. He told me to go to thunder and I beat him to it.”

  Kilkenny’s eyes went past Polti to a cowpuncher from the Lord ranch.

  “That right?” he demanded.

  “Yeah,” the cowpuncher said slowly, his expression unchanging, “that’s about what happened.”

  Polti hesitated, then holstered his weapon and walked outside.

  Chapter IX

  Several men started to remove the body, and Kilkenny walked to the bar. Looking at the liquor in his glass, he heard Rusty speaking to him softly.

  “The hombre that got hisself killed,” Rusty said, “he was the one lookin’ for you.”

  Kilkenny’s eyes caught the eyes of the cowpuncher who had corroborated Polti and, with an almost imperceptible movement of the head, brought the man to the bar.

  “You tell me,” Kilkenny said. “What happened?”

  The cowpuncher hesitated. “Ain’t healthy to talk around here,” he said doubtfully. “See what happened to one hombre? Well, he’s only one.”

  “You don’t look like you’d scare easy,” Kilkenny said dryly. “You afraid of Polti?”

  “No.” The cowpuncher faced Kilkenny. “I ain’t afraid of him, or of you, either, for that matter. Just ain’t healthy to talk. Howsoever, while what Polti said was the truth, it looked powerful like to me that Polti deliberately bumped the cowboy’s elbow, that he deliberately drew him into a fight.”

  “What was the ’puncher sayin’? Anythin’ to rile Polti?”

  “Not that I know of. He just said he had him a story to tell that would bust this country wide open. He did him a lot of talkin’, I’d say.”

  So! Bert Polti had picked a quarrel with the man who had a message for Kilkenny, a man who said he could bust this country wide open. Kilkenny thought rapidly. What had the man known? And why from El Paso? Suddenly a thought occurred to him.

  Finishing his drink, he said out of the corner of his mouth: “Stick around and keep your eyes open, Rusty. If you can, pick up Polti and stay close to him.”

  Stepping from the Trail House, Kilkenny walked slowly down the street, keeping to the shadows. Then he crossed the alley to the hardware store, and walked down its wall, then along the corral, and around it. He moved carefully, keeping out of sight until he reached the hotel.

  There was no one in sight on the porch, and the street was empty. Kilkenny stepped up on the porch and through the door. His action seemed leisurely, to attract no attention, but he wasted no time. The old man who served as clerk was dozing behind the desk, and the proprietor, old Sam Duval, was stretched out on a leather settee in the wide, empty lobby. Kilkenny turned the worn account book that served as register, and glanced down the list of names. It was a gamble, and only a gamble.

  It was the fifth name down:

  Jack B. Tyson, El Paso, Texas.

  The room was number 22. Kilkenny went up the stairs swiftly and silently. There was no sound in the hall above. Those who wanted to sleep were already snoring, and those who wanted the bright lights and red liquor were already at the Trail House or the Spur.

  Somewhere in his own past, Kilkenny now felt sure, lay the secret of the man in the cliff house, and this strange rider out of the past who had been killed a short time before might be a clue. Perhaps—it was only a slim chance—there was something in his war bag that would be a clue, something
to tell the secret of his killing. For of one thing Kilkenny was certain—the killing of Tyson had been deliberate, and not the result of a barroom argument.

  The hallway was dark, and he felt his way with his feet, then when safely away from the stair head, he struck a match. The room opposite him was number 14. In a few minutes he tried again, and this time he found room 22.

  Carefully he dropped a hand to the knob and turned it softly. Like a ghost he entered the room, but even as he stepped in, he saw a dark figure rise from bending over something at the foot of the bed. There was a quick stab of flame, and something burned along his side. Then the figure wheeled and plunged through the open window to the shed roof outside. Kilkenny went to the window and snapped a quick shot at the man as he dropped from the roof edge. But even as he fired he knew he had missed.

  For an instant he thought of giving chase, then the idea was gone. The man, whoever he was, would be in the crowds around the Spur or the Trail House within a matter of minutes, and it would be a fool’s errand. In the meantime, he would lose what he sought here.

  There was a pounding on the steps, and he turned, lighting the lamp. The door was slammed open, and the clerk stood there, his old chest heaving. Behind him, clutching a shotgun, was Duval.

  “Here!” Duval bellowed. “What the consarn you doin’ in there? And who’s a-shootin’? I tell you I won’t have it!”

  “Take it easy, Dad,” Kilkenny said, grinning. “I came up to have a look at Tyson’s gear and caught somebody goin’ through it. He shot at me.”

  “What right you got to go through his gear your ownself?” Duval snapped suspiciously.

  “He was killed in the Trail House. Somebody told me he had a message for me. I was lookin’ for it.”

  “Well, I reckon he ain’t fit to do no kickin’,” Duval admitted grudgingly, “and I heard him say he had a word for Kilkenny. All right, go ahead, but don’t be shootin’! Can’t sleep no-ways.”