Part 6

Slowly, protestingly, the great wagon and its monstrous load crept up to the anchor tree and was lashed to it. Rejack had already chosen the course for the second leg of the ascent and had had brush and saplings cleared away. This would be a longer haul than the first. There were two or three trees that the men on the tongue would have to guide the wagon around, and the slope was uneven, mottled with rock outcroppings. Moreover, the forest pressed in from both sides before claiming the top of the hill entirely, just beyond the place where the wagon would rejoin the road.

"If they'd waited yesterday and hit us up here, there wouldn't be enough left of the boiler to hold a drink of water," Rejack said.

Tesno scouted the trees as best he could. But this was deep woods. A wary man could easily avoid being seen or heard among the maze of trunks growing out of carpetlike duff.

Again, the long double file of horses pulled slowly down the mountainside and the wagon groaned upward. It had climbed barely twenty yards when Muckamuck Charlie appeared below, working his horse zigzag up the slope. Tesno yelled for the team to halt and the men behind the wagon to block its wheels.

Charlie slid off his winded horse. "Them son-of-a-gun close by," he grunted. "They watch."

"Where?" Tesno demanded.

They moved a few steps into the woods. Charlie pointed to a little butte that rose out of the pines half a mile to the west. Its face was sheer rock cliff, but it could well have a sloping approach on its far side.

"They go up there," Charlie grunted. "_Halo chako._ Wait. Watch. By and by one go 'way. Come down here someplace. One stay."

Tesno squinted thoughtfully up at the butte. "You get a look at 'em, Charlie?"

"Damn right. Jim Palma. _Cultus_ no good son-of-a-gun."

"You know 'em?"

"Know one," Charley said with stubborn serenity. "Jim Palma. Stomp Umatilla boy down to Selah, one-two year ago. Boy die. Don't know other one."

Rejack came trotting through the trees and demanded to know what was going on. "Maybe we ought to back the thing down, lash it to that cedar," he said when Tesno had explained.

Tesno considered this, then shook his head. "Go ahead with the haul. Let them make their try. Just be sure those boys with the wheel block are on their toes. If--"

A rifle shot rang out from the butte, not much louder than a finger snap, and a ricochet screamed its weird song above them.

"Damn fool," Rejack muttered. "He's giving us a warning. I don't get it."

The rifle cracked again, and now a horse whinnied, plunged in his harness, went down.

"My god," Rejack gasped. "He's shooting at the horses!" He dashed out of the woods, waving his arms and yelling to get the team to cover. As he did so, another shot sounded, and another horse plunged and went down.

Tesno studied the butte, estimating that its top was at least six hundred yards away. Even at that range, it didn't take an expert to hit a twenty-horse team. As he watched, a man stepped into sight at the very brink of the cliff, fired a quick shot which hit nothing, and disappeared into brush and scrub timber.

"Jim Palma," Muckamuck Charlie grunted.

"He didn't have to show himself," Tesno muttered. He began to understand the plan now.

Another shot rang out. A horse screamed and started to buck, a brilliant red streak across his rump. Rejack barked orders and waved his arms as teamsters jumped around frantically, trying to quiet down the horses and unhook the harness of those that were down. The men who had been posted on the wagon tongue to steer now were streaking up the slope to help with the animals.

Jim Palma could sit up there and pot horses till confusion reigned completely, Tesno thought. But of course, the man had an additional purpose. He meant to draw whoever was guarding the boiler up there after him to give his partner a chance to strike. He stepped into the open to fire a quick shot again now. And this time Tesno was ready for him with his rifle rested against the trunk of a tree. He aimed and fired. Palma faded from sight.

"You gottem!" Muckamuck Charlie said.

"I doubt it," Tesno said. "Not at this distance. But he knows we've seen him. Let's go, Charlie."

He hurried down to his horse, mounted, and joined Charlie at the road. They rode down it a few yards and were out of sight of the butte.

"You keep after him," Tesno said, waving Charlie on as he reined off the road. "I'll maybe catch up to you later."

Palma's partner would certainly have been watching, would have seen them leave and would assume they had been decoyed after Palma. He would make his move now--any second, Tesno thought as he worked his horse up through a stand of trees toward the suspended wagon. When he came to more open ground, he dismounted and continued afoot. Within a hundred yards of the wagon he knelt in brush cover.

He waited, wondering why Palma's partner didn't make his play. Then he realized that the man would wait for the horses to be unhitched and moved to cover so the rope would have only the weight of a doubletree at its end. There would be only the wheel block to deal with.

The shooting from the butte came rapidly now, badly aimed. The crew frantically untangled harness and ran the horses into the woods in pairs. Tesno kept his eyes on the wagon. Only the wheel blockers were left with it, and they were standing together watching the pandemonium above them.

A man was suddenly crossing the hillside a few yards from the rear of the wagon. He was a lean, quick-moving man in woolly chaps, and he carried a shotgun. His appearance was so sudden that he could only have been lying in the brush there, not far above Tesno.

He barked something at the pair near the rear of the wagon, covering them with the shotgun as they turned. He gestured with the gun toward the wheel block. The men hesitated, then one stooped to remove it.

"Hold it!" Tesno yelled. "Drop the gun!"

He fired as the man whirled toward him. A sickening weakness seized him as the man flounced and the shotgun discharged wildly at the sky. The boiler-wrecker rose on his toes and pitched forward on his face. The man who had stooped over the wheel block straightened without touching it.

Tesno walked swiftly up the hillside, reaching the scene as the crewmen rolled the body on its back.

"He was dead when he hit the ground," one of them said weakly.

Tesno studied the gaping, vacant face, the blood-stained denim shirt, the shaggy, stained chaps. Here was the end of a life. However shabby, there must have been good in it somewhere, he thought, and regret seized him like a sickness. Yet he hid it, denied it, and as men gathered round he said roughly, "Anybody know him?"

Nobody did. Tesno continued to stare, frowning. The limp, long-legged form stirred a slippery memory that he couldn't quite get hold of.

A bullet rang dully against the boiler, spattering harmlessly against the heavy iron. An instant later, the bark of the distant rifle reached them.

Tesno motioned to the men to move around the boiler so it would shield them from the rifleman. As he did so, another bullet made a little explosion of dust two yards below him. He turned his eyes toward the butte and said, "He saw what happened. He's out for blood now."

Rejack bustled up, red-faced and wild-eyed with anger. He took a quick look at the dead man and seemed to grow calmer. He said, "We can't hitch up till that murdering devil stops shooting. Aren't you going after him?"

"I think I know where he'll head for," Tesno said. "I can get there first, I guess. Maybe I can take this one alive."

He strode down-grade to his horse and headed over the hill in the direction of the hidden cabin. He followed the same course he and Charlie had taken that morning, annoyed at its tedious winding and thinking that there might be a shorter way.

When he was near the cabin, he hid his horse well back in the woods and approached on foot.

Everything was just as he had left it. He closed the door behind him and sat down to wait, rifle on his knees. His lack of sleep caught up with him now, and several times in the space of a few minutes he got up to stretch and move about to ward off drowsiness. He couldn't get the dead man out of his mind. He was reasonably sure he had never seen the face before; yet something about that figure sprawled out on the hillside nagged him.

His eye fell on two canvas bags of supplies resting against the wall. And it all came to him then. Two bags of supplies. Two men. One in woolly chaps. The dead man and Jim Palma were the pair he had seen come out of the back of the townhouse two days ago! It seemed a long guess, on the face of it; yet he was sure.

_All right_, he told himself. _They came out of the far end of the building, the office end. That means that Sam Lester is involved, not Persia._

But why Sam? What did he have to gain by wrecking Ben Vickers' boiler? A little longer life for the town, no doubt. But Persia would profit by that as much as Sam. And it was after the men had left that she had suggested a picnic....

There was the soft sound of hoofs outside. He rose and moved quietly to one side of the door. A saddle creaked as a man dismounted. The door was pushed quietly open.

"You here, Boss?" Muckamuck Charlie asked.

Tesno groaned and stepped forward. "Where's Palma?" he demanded.

Charlie stepped into the cabin, looking past Tesno at the canvas bags. "_Cooley tenas house._ Come this way. See you _elip siah_. Far ahead. Watch. You come to cabin. Him go 'way."

Charlie pushed past and began to rummage in the bags. He extracted a can of beans and held it up admiringly. "Bullet hittum," he said.

"Hit who?"

"Jim Palma. You shoot. Hittum."

"I couldn't have," Tesno said. "He went right on shooting at the horses."

"_Pil-pil._ Him bleed. Maybe just scratchum. You catch other one?"

"He's dead."

Charlie nodded approvingly. He produced a hunting knife from somewhere under his coat and jabbed the blade into the can of beans. He pried back the metal untidily, poured out a handful of beans and tasted them. He drew another can out of the bag and shoved it into a coat pocket.

"We'll go after Palma," Tesno said. "You find trail?"

"Damn right," Charlie said.

Eating beans as he rode, Charlie found the trail a few minutes later. It wound down one gulch and up another, over the spur of a mountain and back through still another gulch.

"Where's he headed, Charlie," Tesno asked finally.

"No place. Him know country. Work into mountains. Maybe by and by go back to _tenas house_, get food."

A little later the tracks led into a shallow creek and disappeared. After several minutes of scouting, Charlie announced that Palma had gone upstream.

"Him know we follow," he said. "Maybe wait, shoot you."

Tesno nodded. There were a dozen places for an ambush every way you looked. He grinned. "Maybe miss me. Hit Charlie."

For the first time since Tesno had known him, Charlie grinned. "_Cultus he-he_," he said, reining upstream along the bank. "Bad joke."

Tesno laughed and followed, grateful for the luck that had provided his guide. Here in this brutal and majestic wilderness the ten thousand years between white civilization and savagery had no meaning. He and Charlie were just two hunters, friends now, following a trail. It was going to be a rough one, but Muckamuck Charlie would do to ride it with.

XIV

Pinky Bronklin unlocked the door of the storeroom on the second floor of the Pink Lady, lighted a candle, and went in. Pushing a wooden box close to a tier of cluttered shelves, he climbed up to examine an array of bottles on the top one; carbolic acid, cough syrup, Dr. Partrey's Male Restorative and Blood Tonic, toothache remedy, Princess Cleopatra's Egyptian Love Stimulant, iodine, linament.... He selected a small blue bottle without a label, uncorked it, sniffed it. Holding it delicately in his crab-claw of a hand, he dribbled two drops into a shot glass. Two drops was the dose. It would hit quick, put a man out for hours. Pinky tipped the bottle again and added three more.

Climbing down from the box, he inserted the shot glass into one of the special pockets sewn to the back of his bartender's apron. There were two of these, a small one inside a larger one. The small one was just the size of the doped glass and held it upright. You took a glass from the back bar and pretended to polish it on the apron. What you really did was drop it into the large pocket and bring out the doctored glass.

Pinky snuffed the candle, locked the storeroom door, and went back down to the bar. It was the busiest part of the night with a fair crowd at the bar and a nice little business at the tables. Pinky motioned to the other two bartenders to move down and began to work the back end of the bar.

After a few minutes, Pete Madrid came in and had a drink. As usual, he didn't pay.

"You sure he'll come in?" Madrid asked, keeping his voice down.

"No, I'm not sure," Pinky said irritably. "How can I be sure? But he almost always does. You got that crazy Willie out of the way?"

"Gave him the night off."

"Only thing is, Mr. O. might go to the Big Barrel. They serve him in there in spite of Willie told 'em not to."

Madrid pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I'll drop in there," he said. "I'll see that they give him a couple of drinks and then cut him off. That'll bring him over here."

Pinky's eyes followed Madrid as he sauntered to the door, his blue silk shirt shimmering in the lamplight, his fingers touching the ivory handle of his low-slung gun with every step. A dangerous man to have for an enemy, Pinky thought--and maybe dangerous to have for a friend, too. Not what you'd call a bright man, he was sure of his ability to kill, and of not much else. He needed somebody else to do his thinking for him, even about small matters, and so far he had seemed to realize this. _God help us if he ever starts thinking for himself_, Pinky mused.

Half an hour later, Keef O'Hara showed up, and Pinky sighed inwardly. He didn't much like what he was going to do to O'Hara; but Mr. Jay wanted it done, and it would be. O'Hara came directly to Pinky's end of the bar.

"Slip me a pint, ye black scoundrel," he said, "before Deputy Willie catches up to me."

"I hear Willie's off duty tonight," Pinky said. O'Hara must have visited the Big Barrel first, he thought. The big Irishman had had a drink or two.

"Willie off duty?" O'Hara looked alarmed. "First time that's happened."

Pinky took a glass off the back bar and appeared to polish it on his apron. "It's a night to celebrate," he said. He made the switch and set the glass in front of O'Hara, along with a bottle.

O'Hara looked uncertainly at the table in a far corner where he usually did his drinking. "Sure, if I've got the sense God gave geese, I'll walk out this minute while I've still got the use of my legs. Give me that pint, Pinky m'lad, and I'll be gone. With Willie off duty, I don't trust myself in this den of iniquity."

Pinky looked under the bar and shook his head. "I got no pints out here. Have to get one from the back room. Sit yourself down, Mr. O'Hara, and I'll bring it to you."

As he left the bar, he saw with relief that O'Hara was filling the glass. He entered the small downstairs storeroom and watched from its dark interior as the Irishman sloughed down the drink and then another. O'Hara looked vacantly around the saloon, started for a table, and just barely made it. He sat for a few seconds with his head in his hands, then slumped forward with his face against the tabletop.

Pinky returned to the bar with a pint of whisky in hand. Nobody was paying any particular attention to O'Hara. Pinky gave him a glance and stowed the pint under the bar. "I guess he ain't going to need that," he said loudly.

He busied himself with the customers, apparently giving no more thought to the unconscious O'Hara. After a few minutes, he consulted a watch that lay on the back bar. "Fifteen minutes to closing time, gents," he announced, chuckling. "Official closing time, that is. I reckon we'll run a bit over tonight."

There was a low cheer of approval from the customers in the immediate vicinity. Pinky stared past them at O'Hara, making a little show of it. "Still here," he muttered and walked around the end of the bar.

He shook O'Hara, spoke to him, shook him again. Finally, he gestured to a couple of the men who were watching.

"Give me a hand, boys, and we'll tote him upstairs to my room, lay him on my bed."

The bystanders set down their glasses and came over. Pinky helped them lug two hundred pounds of sagging Irishman up the narrow stairway. They took him to the large room that served Pinky as living quarters and laid him on the bed. Pinky lighted a lamp, turned it low. He muttered something about the need for air and opened a window wide.

"He's a nice gentleman," Pinky said. "Just drinks too much sometimes."

"He sure musta took on a hell of a load this time," one of the assistants said. "He don't even move."

"He'll sleep it off," Pinky said. He herded the men back downstairs and bought them a drink, secure in the knowledge that O'Hara wouldn't move for hours.

* * * * *

Whisky Willie woke and sat erect, panicked by the thought that he should be on the job. Then he remembered that Madrid had told him to take the night off, and he sank back with a sigh. A sixteen-hour night shift caught up with you, all right. You could doze a bit in the marshal's office between rounds, but that kind of sleep didn't do a man much good.

Now, however, sleep failed to return. His room was above the stage office, smack in the middle of town, and the sounds of the saloons drifted up through his window. He consulted his watch and saw that it was after closing time. Peeved, he went to the window and leaned out. All the saloons were still showing lights. The piano in the Pink Lady was jangling merrily. Well, he decided, he wasn't going to make a fuss about it. He would close the window and.... His train of thought was interrupted by the sight of the mule at the Big Barrel hitching rack. O'Hara was down there, somewhere. He would be soused to the gills by this time, no doubt. Somebody had to see that he got back to the job.

Willie dressed quickly and went down to the street. O'Hara wasn't in the Big Barrel, although a bartender said he had been in earlier. Willie gave orders to close up and crossed the street to the Pink Lady. As he pushed through the batwings, Madrid came clumping up the boardwalk and called to him.

"What the hell?" he said, following Willie inside. "I gave you the night off so you could catch up on sleep."

"I'm l-looking for Mr. O'Hara," Willie said.

"That whisky-head engineer? I'll keep an eye out for him. You get your tail into bed."

Willie surveyed the line at the Pink Lady bar. O'Hara wasn't there. He wasn't at any of the tables. Willie turned and walked into the street.

Madrid ambled up to the bar and beckoned to Pinky. "You better close up, pronto."

Willie checked the Silver Slipper and then the Western Star. O'Hara was at neither one. Pausing in the shadows, he watched Madrid saunter down the street to his office. Willie had a growing conviction that something was wrong and that the marshal knew what it was.

The Pink Lady was closing, and little knots of men straggled out of it, making their way to other saloons or toward the road back to camp. Willie stopped several men and asked if they had seen O'Hara. Finally, he found one who had.

"Hell, he's at the Pink Lady," the man said. "He passed out in there. Bronklin and some others carried him upstairs."

By the time Willie reached the Pink Lady it was locked and dark. He rattled the door and got no response. He made his way round in back and had no better luck at the door there. There was a light in an upstairs room, and the window was wide open. Willie cupped his hands to his mouth to call but something warned him not to.

He ran back to the street, crossing it to the Big Barrel, where O'Hara's mule still stood at the hitch rail. He untied the animal, mounted, and rode back to the alley behind the Pink Lady. Shadows crossing the lighted window told him that somebody was moving around up there. Gently, he worked the mule close to the wall, directly under the window. He carefully knelt and then stood in the saddle. This brought the windowsill within reach. He grasped it, and as quietly as possible he pulled himself up.

* * * * *

When the last customer was out of the Pink Lady and the bartenders were washing glasses and tidying up, Pinky checked in the dealers. Each brought his cash in a canvas bag, which Pinky stowed into the heavy safe under the back end of the bar. First thing in the morning, Sam Lester would be in to count up.

Pinky unbarred the heavy front door to let the dealers and bartenders out, then he swung this closed behind the batwings and slid the bar into place. Alone now, he returned to the bar, tipped up a bottle and took a long drink. He picked up a lamp, the last light in the place, and trudged up to his room.

Keef O'Hara was breathing raspingly. He hadn't moved an inch, and Pinky chuckled softly at the potency of those knockout drops. Setting down the lamp, he moved to the end of the bed and took off O'Hara's shoes. This was a perfectly natural thing to do for a drunk you were taking care of, he assured himself. If the drunk happened to get crazy ideas in the night and wander around and fall out a window and be found with no shoes, well, nobody could criticize the man who had tried to make him comfortable.

Pinky edged around to the side of the bed and rolled O'Hara off it on his face. Dragging so big a man to the window and stuffing him through it was going to be heavy work, but he guessed he could manage it. First, though, there was the other matter to be taken care of. A man falling from a second story window might injure himself quite a bit, but you couldn't quite count on it.

"I don't want him killed," Mr. Jay had said. "There's no need for that. But I want him knocked off that job. Vickers' doctor isn't equipped to deal with anything complicated and he ships bad cases off to the Ellensburg hospital. That's where I want O'Hara to go."

Mr. Jay had gone on to explain that it would take weeks for Ben Vickers to find another man who knew how to set up a compressed-air operation properly. Well, you had to hand it to Mr. Jay for seeing a thing through. Soon as he got word that his hired hooligans had failed to wreck the boiler, he had come up with this plan to knock O'Hara off the job. A smart, smooth operator, Mr. Jay. A good star to hitch your wagon to. Only Pinky wished he hadn't looked so tired and upset....

Pinky made a trip to the storeroom and came back with a two-foot length of iron pipe. He bent over O'Hara's feet, feeling the bones around the ankles. It wouldn't take much of a blow to break some of these. Two broken ankles plus any injuries that might be caused by the fall ought to put O'Hara in that Ellensburg hospital for a good long time. Probably be a good thing for the man, too, when you came to think about it. Keep him off the booze.

Pinky slipped his claw of a hand under one of O'Hara's heels and lifted the foot. He raised the pipe over his head, and he about jumped out of his skin as a voice rang out behind him.

"Hold it, you b-bastard!"