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  He filled a glass to the brim and dashed the contents off deftly. The crowd was watching him, its attitude a mixture of indifference and hostility.

  “That tip you had was certainly red hot, just as you said,” Sam Swift volunteered. “Suppose you’ve heard the news.”

  “I didn’t only hear it, but if I’d had some fresh horses I would have been right in it,” Beaudry enlightened them. “We covered some country since mornin’. Our broncs was staggerin’ when we ran into Tas Cummings’ outfit camped at Cherokee crossing on the Cimarron. I commandeered their horses, but they wa’n’t none too fresh after comin’ up all the way from the North Fork. We kept on down the river until we came to the Skull. We’d just turned up the creek when we heard shootin’. … I knew what it meant.”

  “You must have missed them by just a few minutes,” Sam suggested. His tone was solicitous to the point of being mocking. Beaudry failed to catch it.

  “I’d had Smoke dead to rights tonight,” he ground out savagely. “I didn’t intend to waste no time tryin’ to take that bunch alive. It was just the damnedest luck a man ever had that I missed ’em. We came on, best we could, but the train had pulled out before we got there.” He shook his head to express his bitterness. “Wa’n’t no point in tryin’ to overhaul Smoke’s bunch with the stuff we was ridin’.”

  “Guess you was doin’ well to get back to Bowie,” Sam declared solemnly.

  “Just about crawled in,” Cash agreed. “But I’m promisin’ you I ain’t done!” he burst out with a sudden show of spirit. “This thing’s personal between Smoke and me now! I’ll fetch him!” He banged the bar with his fist to emphasize his words.

  “Luck can’t be against us always,” Blackie Chilton, his chief deputy, declared.

  “That’s what I say, Blackie!” There was a calculating light in Beaudry’s eyes as he glanced furtively up and down the bar. He was intent on ascertaining what sort of an impression he had made. An interruption from the end of the bar did not add to his. pleasure.

  “Why don’t you deputize Waco?” a raucous voice demanded.

  “Say, that’s no joke!” the sheriff reprimanded the speaker. “I don’t yield to no man in my respect for what he did tonight!” He forced his way up to the old man. “I certainly want to shake your hand, Waco,” he declared humbly. “I never heard of a gamer thing—standin’ up in front of a gang of recognized killers and doin’ what you did! I’m mighty proud of yuh.”

  Waco let him pump his hand. He liked Beaudry as little as did his sons.

  “I’m buyin’ for the crowd now!” Cash boomed. “I want you to drink with me to Waco!” He had said nothing about his difficulty with Little Bill. He felt the time was hardly propitious for mentioning it. “Well, here’s to you!” he exclaimed as he raised his glass.

  “ ’Bout time you made a speech, Waco,” Sam Swift urged. The crowd took it up, but Waco refused to warm to the idea.

  “His modesty is right becomin’!” Cash laughed. He slapped Waco on the back familiarly. “I bet Smoke Sontag is livin’ up to his name right now. Can you imagine him, boys, when he found that all he’d got was a bunch of Otto Hahn’s Purity Market billheads? I bet his eyes popped!”

  It won a laugh from the crowd. As for Waco, his eyes seemed about to pop too. Cash had just recalled a fact that had escaped him until now. It was nothing less than that the label he had so hurriedly destroyed before tossing the package of billheads into the safe was addressed to Otto Hahn, the local butcher. Having forgotten it, he could not have spoken about it to anyone. How, then, did Cash Beaudry come by his information?

  It suddenly dawned on Waco that Blackie Chilton, the deputy, was regarding him narrowly. Blackie had caught the slip. Too late the old man tried to cover up with a dissembling grin. Waco could have kicked himself for his carelessness.

  “I’m goin’ along now,” he said presently. “Chalk will have supper waitin’ for me.”

  “All right, Waco,” Beaudry exclaimed. “See you at the inquest in the mornin’.”

  With his hair pulling a little from the four or five drinks he had imbibed, Waco continued on home. A light burned in the kitchen of the little house he occupied. Little Bill and Luther called it home when they were in town. The real head of the establishment, however, was not Waco nor his sons, but Chalk Whipple, a scolding old tyrant who did the cooking and looked after things in general, and who would have risked his life at a moment’s notice for any one of them.

  Like Waco and old Tascosa, Chalk had been a cowboy in his younger days. Years back, he had lost his left leg in a railroad smash-up while on his way to Kansas City with a train-load of beef. He had been stamping around on a wooden substitute ever since and bossing Waco and the boys and managing to keep the little house spotless. He flung open the door now before Waco reached it.

  “Here at last, eh?” he scolded. “You can’t keep things hot forever.”

  “Quit snappin’ now,” Waco protested. “This is a kinda unusual night.”

  “I know; I heard the news,” Chalk retorted as he turned to the stove. “I suppose you’re a hero now. You look out that you ain’t a dead one before the week is out.”

  “Yeh, I been thinkin’ of that,” Waco sighed as he lowered himself into a chair. “I reckon the Sontags will be out to git me for sure now.”

  “If you don’t know it you’re crazy!” Chalk glared at him. He put a platter of ham and eggs on the table and poured out the coffee, with a cup for himself. “Why didn’t you let ’em have the money? You didn’t stand to lose nothin’.”

  “Not so fast there,” Waco argued as he picked up knife and fork. “I figger I had plenty to lose. It was my duty to stay with that money as long as I could. I’ve made it a rule with myself, and I tried to hammer it into the boys too, that when you pass your word—stick to it.”

  He ate a mouthful or two.

  “Bill and Luther will be here in the mornin’,” he told Chalk. “Beaudry saw ’em on the Cimarron this evenin’.”

  “I bet they’ll have somethin’ to say about this.” Chalk shook his head thoughtfully. “I bet they agree with me that you hadn’t ought to done what you did.”

  “Mebbe. When I saw Grat Sontag shoot that boy down without givin’ him a chance I made up my mind that they wouldn’t get that money unless they killed me too.”

  “That’s what they’ll try now. They’ll be layin’ for yuh.”

  “If that’s the case, I better try to get them before they get me. I ain’t exactly on the shelf yet. I’m packin’ my old guns from now on.”

  The talk turned to Beaudry.

  “What do you figger he was doin’ down there?” Chalk asked.

  “I reckon he was coverin’ their stand and get-away —if you want it straight from the shoulder,” said Waco. “He says he was tipped off that the Sontags was out of the Strip, but he don’t say how he got the tip. I don’t know why he should have been anywhere near the Skull crossing tonight lookin’ for outlaws unless he knew we was goin’ to be stuck up.”

  “You bet he knew,” Chalk declared emphatically. “Beaudry and his possemen and the Sontags is one outfit if you ask me. Him bein’ sheriff, he hears things. How do you know it wa’n’t Beaudry that learned the money was comin’ through tonight?”

  “Most likely it was,” Waco agreed as he sat down his empty cup. “He was spreadin’ himself down the street a few minutes ago. Gave himself dead away.”

  “Yeh? How do you figger that?”

  Waco had been on the point of confiding fully in Chalk, but he thought better of it now; Chalk often went downtown in the evening and talked too much if he had a few drinks in him.

  “Oh, just by all of his talk,” he answered vaguely. “It was too loose for me. Heck Short will be here in the mornin’ to take charge of things.”

  “He’s a good man,” said Chalk. “Chances are he may start somethin’.”

  “I reckon so,” Waco murmured, and to himself he added, “and finish it too when he hears what
I’ve got to say. Cash sure talked himself into an awful hole tonight.”

  Across town in Beaudry’s little office Blackie Chilton was echoing that very thought to Cash.

  “I tell you old Waco got it!” he growled. “I could see it on his face! It was a damn fool crack to make!”

  “You’ve said that before,” Beaudry snarled back. “I know it was a damn bad slip. I shouldn’t have opened my mouth until I found out what he had been sayin’. But don’t keep throwin’ it into me. I ain’t worryin’ about that old juniper.”

  “You’re dumber than I thought you were if you think that,” Chilton rifled at him. “That old bird is poison if I know anythin’. You do a lot of chin waggin’, but I’d like to hear you explain how you knew them billheads was in the package and had that Dutchman’s name on ’em.”

  “Maybe I won’t have to do much explainin’,” Cash grumbled. “If I forget what happened on the river this evenin’ Waco will listen to reason. It’ll get down to keepin’ Little Bill out of the jug, and that will interest the old man.”

  “I’ll be everlastin’ly damned!” Blackie exploded. “On the level, Cash, you’re so thick I can’t figger why Smoke ever bothered with yuh. What difference does it make whether Waco Stillings forgets what you said or not? Didn’t two dozen men hear it? Have yuh got any idea Heck Short won’t have it repeated to him? If that’s your idea of coverin’ us, I’m pullin’ out of this town tonight.”

  “There’s nothin’ to stop Waco from sayin’ he told somebody what was in the package, is there?”

  “And yuh got the story from that certain party, eh?” Chilton sneered. “I’m tellin’ yuh that’s a lot of nonsense—even if yuh got the old man to play along with yuh. Who was that unknown party who heard all this talk that he told you? That’s what Short will want to know. He’ll run it down; I know him. He’ll have you so mixed before noon tomorrow that you’ll wish you had wings to git you out of Bowie.”

  “There’s another way of doin’ it,” Cash muttered darkly.

  “Yeh, and that’s the way you better take. Just be sure you git him. Ever’body’ll say it was Smoke who done it.”

  Beaudry’s flabby face was damp with perspiration. He and Chilton had been wrangling for half an hour. The penalty for the slip he had made was not confined to his fear that he might presently find himself afoul of the law; there was Smoke Sontag’s displeasure to be reckoned with, for as the sheriff of Cimarron county he was important to the gang, and anything that interfered with that arrangement would not be overlooked. It hurried him to a decision.

  “All right,” he wheezed, his eyes steeling. “He had this comin’ to him. He always walks over to the tracks just after daylight to get the Kansas City papers they throw off to him from the California Limited.”

  “Yeh, follows that old drywash,” Chilton monotoned. “Kinda lonely there; nobody around at all.”

  Beaudry swallowed heavily.

  “I’ll be waitin’ for him tomorrow mornin’.”

  Chapter VI

  SINCE boyhood Waco had rolled out of his blankets at sun up. It followed that he was astir early the following morning. He had a pardonable interest in seeing the papers this day, a fact that he was at some pains to conceal, and he even lingered to build the fire before starting off across the flats to the tracks. He had only a quarter of a mile to go.

  The haze of early morning was beginning to rise as he stepped out of the kitchen door. He had strapped on his old gun-belt with its pair of long-barrelled •44’s. Settling it about his hips, he strode off. It felt good to feel the old guns slapping against his legs once more. Unconsciously his grizzled face wrinkled into a grin.

  The Limited rolled out of the Bowie yards while he was yet within a short distance of the house. A low toot of the whistle told him that Ed Myers, the engineer, had tossed off his papers.

  He felt free to quicken his step now and he was soon swinging along. Lulled to carelessness by the familiarity of the scene, he had no thought of danger. The path he was using brought him to the brink of the arroyo in a few minutes. It turned there and followed the wash. He made the turning but he took only a step or two when a gun roared from the opposite bank. The bullet struck him high enough in the shoulder to spin him around.

  The suddenness of it had caught him all unprepared, but he had his guns out of the leather before the impact of the slug had swung him completely around. He knew what he faced now. His eyes drilled holes into the chaparral across the wash. It was not over twenty yards wide, but he could find no sign of the man who had fired at him.

  Suddenly a gun barked at him a second time. The bullet carried his hat away. This time he caught a little puff of white smoke. With his guns only hip high he fired instantly at the spot. He took it for granted that he was facing one or more of the Sontags.

  “They didn’t wait long,” he thought even as he glanced hurriedly about for cover of some sort. Finding none, he threw himself into the arroyo, rolling to the bottom.

  His shoulder was bleeding freely. He was not worrying about that. He knew that unless he could get under the cut bank across the wash he was done for. Scrambling to his feet, he made a rush for it. Something warned him to throw himself flat on the ground just before he reached it. He was dropping when a gun cracked viciously on the bank above him. The bullet found its mark this time. He felt the slug burn through his lungs. Rolling over and over, he reached the overhung cut bank and propped himself up against it.

  “Got me good that time,” he gasped. His shirt was a bloody smear already. “This may be keno for me.”

  Something moved up on the bank. He fired at it with both guns.

  “Come on and git me I” he taunted. “You got me down, damn yuh, but I’m still throwin’ lead at yuh!”

  He blazed away again and his fire was returned. He knew by now that he faced only one man. His assailant was becoming bolder. Waco understood why. Certainly the shooting was being heard in town. It couldn’t be long before someone would be investigating the meaning of it.

  The first shot fired had brought Chalk Whipple to the door. Waco’s answering blast was explanation enough for Chalk.

  “The Sontags are after him!” he screeched.

  Beside his bed he kept an old U. S. Army carbine. Almost tearing the door from its hinges in his haste, he stamped into the house, grabbed the gun and a belt of cartridges and popped out again. In another second he was in full flight for the arroyo, his peg leg fairly flashing back and forth.

  He was beyond the barn when a horseman rode into the yard and hailed him. Chalk recognized his voice and he spun around dizzily on his wooden leg to face him.

  “Bill—is that you for a fact?” he cried.

  “It ain’t no one else, you old buzzard,” Little Bill grinned. “What’s all that shootin’ goin’ on down the arroyo?”

  “It’s your pa! The Sontags are after him, Bill!” Chalk shouted at him.

  “The Sontags?” It didn’t make sense. “What’s the Sontags got to do with Pop?”

  He caught the words “Rock Island,” “stick up”—and “Waco tricked ’em so they didn’t get a cent!”—in Chalk’s excited explanation. He didn’t wait for more. For the first time in his life he raked Six-gun with the spurs. The gelding leaped away as though shot out of a gun.

  Chalk hopped along in his wake like a wounded fighting cock, cackling fiercely to himself, every bit as forbidding as he was grotesque.

  From the arroyo came another exchange of shots. All was still then. Little Bill passed from sight only to reappear on the far bank a moment later, riding like a madman.

  “Luther was right,” he groaned, his eyes everywhere. “I only hope I’m in time!”

  The bluejoint and patches of catclaw made a veritable thicket. A man on foot could crawl through it without being seen. Once he thought he saw the grass move. He fired instantly. Nothing happened.

  “Just a breath of wind,” he muttered glumly as he reached the spot and saw that the grass was not brok
en down. His blood began to run cold as he went on without drawing a shot. He knew he was a good target. The fact that no one banged away at him argued that whoever had jumped his father was either dead or had flown. The silence from the arroyo told its own story too.

  White-lipped, he made his way to it, afraid of what he was to find.

  “Pop!” he shouted. “Where are yuh?”

  There was no answer. He called a second time and only a throat-tightening silence rewarded him.

  “They got him,” he despaired, a sob in his throat. “He’d answer if he could.”

  With a rush he came off the bank into the wash and began to work back toward the house. He saw a man’s head appear. He almost banged away at him before he realized it was only Chalk.

  A moment later he found Waco under the cut bank. With a stifled cry of anguish he flung himself out of the saddle and rushed to his father’s side. The blood-bathed body, the wide, staring eyes told him his answer even before he clutched the stiffening hands.

  “Oh, my God,” he groaned. “They got you, Pop … I got here too late ….”

  He had been raised in a hard school, but there was a streak of tenderness deep-seated in him. His eyes filled with tears, and he was not ashamed of them.

  Chalk came clumping up, snorting wildly. What he saw staggered him. It was seconds before he could speak.

  “Snuffed him out,” he gasped. “Right here in sight of the house …. The murderin’, black-hearted rats!” The rest of what he said can not be printed here, and it deserved a better fate.

  “I guess this is the way he wanted to go,” Little Bill murmured. “He always said he wanted to kick off with his boots on.”

  “Yeh, he must have liked all this excitement at the end,” Chalk agreed. “His guns is empty, Bill; kept bangin’ away until the last.”

  Little Bill shook his head sadly.

  “Me and Luther had this on our minds last night,” he said. “I didn’t sleep much for worryin’ about him. Now you tell me what happened.”