Authors: Jonas Ward
Then came the high point of the young evening, the en
trance by Ruby Weston, which could be described only as
splendiferous.
Ruby was dressed just right for the occasion, in a skin
tight gown of shining scarlet satin that boasted the most
intriguing and ingenious
décolletage
Bella had ever seen.
She came into the room from the rear, on the arm of a
bow-tied, check-suited Little Joe, and amid standing
applause was seated at the dealer's place. There was a stampede to gamble at that table, or merely to gaze, and
those who weren't quick had to content themselves with
the other games. This was not without its own pleasures,
for the sportive, mischief-eyed barmaids circulated every
where, averaging three friendly pats on their uncorseted
rumps for every glass of whisky they served. The Happy
Times, everyone agreed, was indeed a happy place to be.
If there was a dissenter, that was Little Joe. Up until
the last he had held out hope that Buchanan would step
through those doors. Now, with the grand opening an
accomplished fact, with the games in full swing and the
bar a bedlam, the man still glanced that way. What wor
ried him about Durfee he couldn't say. He looked capable,
he moved around, the gun slung low on his hip seemed to
say "Professional—No Nonsense." But Durfee was simply
not Buchanan in Little Joe's eyes, and soon now—when
he came back—Frank Power would move against them.
And that was all Mike Sandoe was waiting for, word from Frank Power. He had ridden into Bella, his mind
sullen, and gone directly to Troy's to give Power his ver
sion of the incident at Indian Rocks. But from Bernie
Troy he got the curtly spoken news that Power had left
hours earlier, in company with the meat-buyer and a crew.
Sandoe realized then that that had been the party he had
avoided on the trail, and he didn't like the development
at all. It wasn't going to look good when they came into
th
e canyon cold, seeing the
end of it without anyone to expl
ain the beginning.
"What's your trouble, gunfighter?" Bernie Troy asked
hi
m. anxious to know if Sandoe's mean expression re
f
l
ected any grief for Power.
*'Nothing I can't take care of. Put a bottle of your best :~ the bar
,”
Dudey little bastard, he thought, remember
ing
that he owed Troy something for his part in arming
Moose
Miller this morning.
Troy set the bottle and a glass before him, watched him
sl
ug it from the neck
,
morosely. Then there was a commo
tio
n out on Signal Street, and that turned out to be Billy
Bur
ke crossing the deadline with his wagonload. The
exodu
s from Troy's began and Bernie himself went out to
hav
e a look at the competition. He came back to Sandoe.
"What are you waiting for, gunfighter?"
Sandoe set the bott
le down, wiped his mouth, and loo
ked down at the gambler curiously,
'"What am I
what?"
he asked.
"The deadline
is
broken. What are you going to do
a
bout it?"
"'I'm gonna do what the money man says to do. And
if
you know what I think about you," Sandoe added
,
you'll get in that office of yours and hide."
Troy smiled thinly. "I'm safe," he said. "The custom
protects me." He pulled the lapels of his coat apart,
showed he was weaponless.
"Get away from me, Troy. Hide from me." He turned
his
back, tilted the bottle another time.
'You're the one that's hiding, gunfighter."
Sandoe looked over his shoulder. "Frank Power calls
t
he plays," he said. "If you're in such a goddam hurry to kill Buchanan, go down there and do it your own goddam
s
elf."
"Buchanan? Buchanan left town. They've got some
body named Durfee waiting to meet you."
“Y
ou said
Du
r
fee?
Durfee's here in Bella?"
"Know him from somewhere?"
"Yeah," Sandoe said, setting the bottle to one side.
"Yeah, I know Bill Durfee." He was walking away as he
spoke, and as he walked he hitched at his
h
olstered gun,
made it ride easily with the roll of his stride. He went out
of Troy's, turned down Signal Street, and kept to the
shadows until he was opposite the noisy, riotous Happy
Times. He crossed over, catlike, peered inside, and then
slipped through the batwing doors.
Durfee had just finished a tour of the room, had just arrived back at the bar to accept the offer of a drink from
a customer. He and his benefactor were chatting, all out
shouting to be heard above the din, when all at once
Durfee found his own voice to be the loudest sound in
that suddenly quiet place
.
He broke off in mid-sentence and turned around.
"Durfee
,”
Mike Sandoe said into the hushed and nerv
ous silence, "
you're a
l
y
in
g son °f a bitch
!"
Durfee stepped away from the bar, cleared his right arm.
He was calm and sure, and the liquor he had just drunk spread a warm confidence that reached from his belly to
the tips of h
is fingers. He took in the spread-legged, bel
ligerent figure some thirty feet across the room, and what
his eyes saw was not the killer on the ledge at Indian
Rocks this afternoon, but the punk kid he had taken on
five years ago, ridden herd on, cracked the whip over and
watched jump. Man to man, Mike Sandoe just didn't stand a chance,
"Come on, Durfee! I'm waiting on you!"
Durfee knew too much about gun
fighting to let himself
speak, It was all concentration, concentration on one
thing only: drawing. He drew, actually cleared the Rem
ington. Sandoe's gun thundered three times before Dur
fee triggered once.
And it wasn't murder. Everyone who saw the shooting
saw that Durfee lost his life with his gun out and up. Over
matched
, fighting out of his class, that was what the crowd
deci
ded about Bill Durfee.
Then Sandoe did a curious thing—or at least Little Joe
thought it was. Instead of ordering the Happy Times to
sh
ut down, the gunfighter merely backed his way to the
d
oors and left the place without uttering another word.
"Now what do you make of that?" Billy Burke asked his partner.
Little Joe shook his head. "Don't know, Billy. The feller
acted like he was paying Durfee a visit personal. Trouble
is
he'll be back."
The shooting had sobered Burke considerably. Now he
nodded agreement to Little Joe's gloomy prediction,
"Maybe we can recruit another guard
,”
he said.
"After that exhibition?"
"No, I guess not." Burke swung from Little Joe and
faced the subdued room. "Ladies and gents," he an
nounced, "for your own safety we are suspending business
as
of right now. Please cash in your chips and have the
la
st drink of the night on the house!"
Frank Power returned to
Bella
within the hour, and as
he pushed his tiring mount along Signal Street he noted
w
ith satisfaction that the Happy Times was shuttered. At
least one thing had gone right today, he thought bitterly,
p
u
lling in to the hitch-rail before Bella House, dismount
ing, and going inside the hotel. There were other matters
to be set straight, including Mike Sandoe and Ruby
West
on
, but not until he had rid himself of this trail dust and
these clothes, and settled his jangling nerves with several
hookers of private sour mash.
Chapter fifteen
Doc Brown heard himself being overtaken fast, and
when he twisted around on the wagon seat he was vastly
surprised to see the tremendous figure of Buchanan,
"How goes it, Doc?" Buchanan asked cheerfully.
"Fine
,”
Brown told him. "At peace with the world. Didn't expect to see you again, though."
"Why not?"
"Had you figured for the cattle business
,”
he said.
"Thought you'd cut out what critters one man can man
age and push on to another country."
"Wish I could
,”
Buchanan said. "But I owe a week's
work in Bella.
"
"Where you been the past hour, then?"
"Chousing those strays back into the box. Kept think
ing about them mavericks—-ten thousand dollars wander
ing around footloose."
The doctor laughed. "Man's got to protect his inter
ests
,”
he said.
"Yeah," Buchanan said. "Mine comes to a nifty four
hundred."
"Good for yo
u
. And listen, son—if you're in a hurry,
ride on. This horse knows the way home even if I don't."
"Much obliged, Doc. Fact is, I'm late as hell." He
leaned down and wrapped his great arm around both the doctor's shoulders, and there was a moment of comrade
ship that the older man would never forget. Then Bu
chanan was riding away, swallowed by the dark night, and
soon he arrived in Bella, which looked no different to him
this night than it had last. The activity, what there was
of it
;
was confined to the north end of the street, to Bella
House
and Troy's. The south end was subdued and quiet,
sub
missive-looking, but of course he could not know about
th
e torchlight parade, the grand opening of the Happy
T
imes
and its sudden closing with the sudden death of
Bill
Durfee. Buchanan was fooled by the apparent same
ness
of the town just as Frank Power had been before
him
and like Power, he wanted first to bathe the dirt out
of
h
i
s skin. He went directly to his room at the Green
Lantern.
Pretty Carrie James watched him ride up, looked down
it him from her window as he tied the horse to the rail,
h
eard his sure, man-sized f
ootsteps as he mounted the stairc
ase to the second floor.
The sight and
sound
of Buchanan disturbed the girl fo
r
som
e reason that she didn't understand mad£ her feel
re
stless, uncomfortable. She realized th
en
th
at
she had
felt
tha
t way, more or less, all this da
y. The trouble was
r
o
oted in the fact that she had been left out of the ex
ci
tement tha
t
gripped South Signal Street, that despite
t
h
e fact that she lived on this side of the deadline, it was
assumed that her sympathies and loyalty were owned by
Troy's.
But they weren't. In Carrie's thinking, the right people
i
n
Bella were all located on the wrong side of the dead
lin
e. When she first learned of the plan to compete with
Troy's, she wanted to pitch right in, do what she could
to
help Little Joe and Billy Burke make a go of it.
The stumbling block was Buchanan, Buchanan and
that ad h
e'd run in the paper. Imagine—
"Wanted:
nice-
loo
king girl wit
h
good shape!'' The redhead just guessed
h did
and just as brazen as printing such an announcement
is the way he held interviews in his room like some sul
tan
out of the Arabian
Nights.
She turned from the window impatiently, trying to
channel h
er thoughts into some other direction. But she
cou
ld
hear him retreating down the corridor, hear the
door to his room open and close behind him, and she
remembered how the two of them had looked to her in that room—Buchanan and Ruby Weston.
Either Mrs. Weston didn't see him for what he was—
a common barroom brawler, a Peeping Tom at the bath
room keyhole—or else she didn't ask an
y
more of a man
besides that lazy grin and those impossible shoulders.
Carrie'd had two skirmishes with Mr. T. Buchanan-
last night in the corridor, this morning in court—and if
there was one to keep at full arms' length, he was it. For
a single girl In a wild town like Bella it was vital to main
tain poise and self-confidence. Buchanan had chipped
away some of that precious reserve, very nearly made her
lose her temper twice. Him and that expression in his eyes, as though they shared some secret. . , .