Play a Lone Hand (16 page)

Kearie said harshly, “Stop that now! You've got to get to work. Tomorrow's press day.”

Mary leaned back in her chair and only shook her head slowly from side to side. “It
was
press day, you mean. Lord knows when the next one is.”

“You won't do it?” Kearie asked unbelievingly.

“No,” Mary said flatly. “Not even if you give me the newspaper.”

This was what Giff had been waiting to hear. He moved quietly across the room, put a hand on the door and raised his other hand to his hat brim in salute to Mary before he stepped out.

Kearie had been watching Mary so intently that he did not notice Giff's departure. He heard the door close, swiveled his head, saw Giff had gone, then returned his attention to Mary. “You can't quit!”

Mary said coldly, “Is Sebree in town?”

Kearie stared at her blankly. “What? I don't know—oh yes, he is. What's that got to do with what I'm talking about?”

Mary said, “Have him at Deyo's office in half an hour. You'd better be there too.”

Slow suspicion mounted in Kearie's face. He was torn between the wild need to persuade Mary to stay and between dread at this new and undefined threat of Mary's.

“Look,” he began persuasively, “let's settle this now. You've got …”

“Go away,” Mary said coldly. “You be at Deyo's.”

At ten o'clock Mary mounted the steps of the land office and went in. A few feet beyond the door her way was barred by a long counter. Plat books were stacked helter-skelter on its surface; an elderly Mexican clerk wearing alpaca sleeve guards had left his desk under the big front window to confer with a man at the counter. Beyond the racks of files and in the back wall were two doors. One was closed and on its opaque glass was painted RECEIVER; the other was open and Mary saw Ross Deyo sitting at his desk. He was talking earnestly to someone Mary could not see except for his boots, and Mary identified those as belonging to Sebree.

She was a familiar in this office and she lifted the counter gate, stepped inside and closed it, then crossed the big room and stepped into the register's office. It was a large room holding, besides the roll-top desk, four barrel chairs lined against the wall. Sebree and Earl Kearie occupied two of them. They rose along with Deyo at her entrance and Mary, nodding indifferently, closed the door behind her.

A pleasant feeling of malice came to Mary as she accepted the chair Sebree offered her and sat down. Deyo's jowly face held an uneasy apprehension; Kearie looked worried and beaten. Only Sebree, as he sat down and drew a pale cigar from his shirt pocket and lighted it, seemed at ease.

He puffed his cigar until it was burning evenly; then regarded Mary with a fatherly expression that Mary knew was wholly false. “I hope you aren't serious about leaving Kearie,” Sebree said mildly. “He's in a hole.”

“One hundred feet deep,” Mary agreed.

“It's too late to get a printer up from Vegas in time for tomorrow,” Sebree went on reasonably. “Why don't you stay on until he comes? If Kearie misses this issue, you know, he'll be in trouble with the government, since he's contracted to publish all these legal forms on specified dates.”

“Can't he talk?” Mary asked dryly nodding toward Kearie.

Sebree looked at Kearie, “Of course.”

“Well, I don't want to hear him then,” Mary said. “You either. I didn't call you here to listen to you bargain with me about working.” She paused. “It's about the other.”

There was a short silence, during which Kearie and Deyo exchanged brief and worried glances. Sebree, however, merely raised an eybrow and continued to regard her.

“What about it?” Sebree asked.

“The price has gone up,” Mary said quietly.

There was another silence. Both Kearie and Deyo looked helplessly at Sebree.

“What put that in your mind?” Sebree asked.

“You're offering five hundred dollars for each copy of the April seventeenth issue, aren't you?”

Sebree nodded.

“That makes my copy—or Albers' copy if you like—at least five hundred dollars more valuable,” Mary said.

Sebree stroked one side of his mustache with the third finger of the hand which was holding his cigar. His mild gaze was almost reflective and certainly unworried. “There's a difference in the two, my dear,” he said then. “If I offer five hundred dollars for that issue, I pay when it's delivered into my hands. You won't deliver your copy. You'll simply threaten to turn it over to the government unless I keep paying. There's a difference, you see.”

“I do see,” Mary said sweetly. “But it's too fine a difference to bother with.” She paused to isolate this, “The price has gone up to one thousand dollars.”

“Which I will pay on delivery of your copy,” Sebree answered.

Mary sighed and stood up, “Well don't ever say I didn't give you a chance.”

A faint thrust of alarm came into Sebree's mild eyes but he chuckled softly. “That's no way to bargain, Mary.”

Mary looked down at him and said coldly, “That's what you don't understand, Grady—I'm not bargaining. I simply want another thousand dollars from you three. In return I promise not to deliver the paper to Welling.”

“But you retain the paper,” Sebree said stubbornly. He leaned forward in his chair now and said earnestly, “You make a poor crook, Mary. The very essence of blackmail is not to crowd it too far. You're crowding it.”

Mary nodded in agreement. “I have to.”

Sebree's eyebrows lifted. “Why? Has something happened?”

“Not yet, but it will,” Mary said. “You of all people should see that.”

Sebree frowned and his gaze still held hers. “Explain that to me.”

“Giff Dixon,” Mary said slowly. “He's going to pull down the roof on all of us.”

“And whose fault will it be if he does?” Sebree asked coldly. “
You
were the one who accepted his reward notice for the April seventeenth copy.
You
printed it without showing it to Kearie or me or Deyo. That started him out.”

“Are you scolding me again?” Mary asked calmly. “I explained that. I printed it because I knew it would scare you. I knew it would double the value of my copy or make it worthless. It's doubled it. That's what I'm telling you now, thanks to Dixon.”

“But now you're scared of him,” Sebree pointed out. “He's stampeding you.”

His tone was mildly scoffing and, hearing it, Mary felt a sudden and unexplained anger. She spoke with a corrosive scorn then. “What kind of a judge of men are you, Sebree? He knows you killed Albers; he told the whole town. He laid that bully boy-foreman of yours flat on a saloon floor with a broken jaw. He went right into your cookshack and beat up one of your hands. He put Kearie out of business just as surely as if he had taken a sledge hammer to the press. And you aren't worried!”

Sebree's faint smile lifted a corner of his mustache. “He'll be taken care of at the right time.”

A cold alarm touched Mary then and held her mute for a moment. “Oh no he won't! Not by you!” Her voice had a faint quaver in it that she could not suppress, as she went on, “That's why I keep the paper. If anything happens to Dixon, Welling gets my copy. You could get away with his murder as far as Edwards is concerned, but try it and the big, bad federal government has caught up with you.”

“Sit down, please,” Sebree said wearily.

Mary had regained some of her composure by now and she sat down again. She had the upper hand now and she intended to keep it. “I would like my thousand dollars, in cash as usual, at five o'clock tomorrow night.”

“Do you want the bank notes perfumed before delivery?” Kearie asked sourly.

Mary did not bother to answer him. She said, “Is that understood?”

Sebree was watching her with sober attention. “This is your last demand, of course,” he said dryly, “or do you reserve a woman's privilege of changing her mind?”

“Yes, it's the last. I'm just getting it while you've got it, Sebree. Or can you write checks in jail?”

Deyo said fretfully, “I wish you wouldn't keep saying that.”

Sebree said slowly, “I'm willing to pay this time if I had some assurance that you wouldn't take the newspaper straight to Welling after you had collected the money.”

“Did I before?” Mary countered.

Sebree's gaze was searching. “No. But before, you didn't claim to see the end in sight. Now you do. Is that because you intend to bring the end yourself?”

“You'll have to take my word for it that I'm not. Once you're in jail, I'll burn the paper.”

“Don't say that!” Deyo's voice was high and almost hysterical.

Mary stood up, looked at Deyo and said, “Poor little man! You've been a nice puppy to Sebree. I wonder if the government will have a special kennel for you?”

She glanced at Sebree then. “Tomorrow night,” she reminded him.

Sebree nodded. Neither of the three men stood up as she walked across the room and let herself out, closing the door behind her.

After she had gone, there were long seconds of gloomy silence. Deyo and Kearie watched Sebree. He puffed unhurriedly on his cigar, frowning in concentration.

Kearie burst out, “Damn the day she found that newspaper!”

“Stole it, you mean,” Deyo said sourly.

Sebree glanced over at Deyo and said quietly, “You're doing her an injustice, Ross. She's a nice tough-minded girl. She's no petty thief.”

“What's petty about the money she's got from us?”

Sebree smiled, “I take the ‘petty' back. But she's no thief.”

“Well, damn the day anyway, no matter what she is!” Kearie said. “Albers could have kept it for a year and would still have been scared to use it. I wish he bad it now.”

Sebree said softly, “I don't.”

The two men regarded him with an expression of puzzlement on their faces. Kearie finally asked, “Why not?”

“Albers was the kind who would hunt up a man tougher than he was to blackmail us, and then claim a split of the profit. We are lucky we are dealing with a woman.”

When neither man answered, only looked at him as if he had uttered blasphemy, he smiled slightly. “We'll have that paper back.”

Deyo said, “When we're all flat broke, sure!”

“We'll have it back soon and without paying any more money for it,” Sebree stated.

Kearie and Deyo watched him a morose minute, disbelief in their faces. Sebree looked from one to the other and then his glance settled on Deyo. “Ross, were you listening carefully when she threatened to turn over the paper to Welling if anything happened to Dixon?”

Deyo nodded.

“How carefully?” Sebree insisted.

“Why—she was mad,” Deyo said. He frowned as he tried to recollect her words.

“No, she wasn't,” Sebree said softly. “She was scared.”

“Of what?” Kearie asked.

Sebree spread his hands, “Of what might happen to Dixon. Are you blind? She loves the man.” He looked at each of them as they considered this.

It was Kearie who spoke first. “Suppose she does? How does that get us the paper? She'd give it to him if she were going to give it to anybody.”

Sebree leaned back in his chair and sighed, “You're thick, Kearie. So are you, Deyo. Good God, how plain does it have to be?” Now he thrust forward in his chair and spoke earnestly to them both. “All we have to do is get hold of Dixon and keep him; then let her ransom him back with a copy of the newspaper!”

He waited, watching the vast relief flood into the faces of his confederates. Finally Kearie threw back his head and laughed. Just as suddenly he sobered and said glumly, “I don't know why I'm laughing. That won't put out my paper tomorrow.”

Closing the door behind him, Giff lighted the lamp on his dresser, then crossed to the window and opened it. The imprisoned heat of the day began to escape from the room as he moved over to his bed and, sitting on the edge of it, pulled off his boots. Rising, he unstrapped his shell belt and hung it over the back of the chair beside his bed. Then, yawning widely, he stripped off his shirt. He was hanging it on the chair back when the hushed knock came at his door.

Reaching for his gun, he said, “Come in,” and watched the door open quickly. A tall puncher in worksoiled clothes slipped into the room and, with one last look into the hall, closed the door behind him and regarded Giff.

“You still want that newspaper?” he asked.

Giff's heart gave a leap of excitement. “Have you got it? The April seventeenth issue of last year?”

The puncher nodded, “Good as. My old pappy found a copy.”

“Where is it?”

“Why—home,” the puncher said. A crooked grin broke the surface of his unshaven face. “You don't think I'd bring it with me. There's three Torreon hands watching the lobby now.”

Giff said, “Then they know you are here, don't they?”

The puncher shook his head. “Not me. I took a look into the lobby and then come up the back way.”

Cass's prediction had been fairly accurate, Giff thought. People were afraid to approach Welling, knowing Sebree would be watching him. Giff regarded the man before him in silent judgment. He did not like the looks of the puncher; he was needlessly dirty and was uneasy under Giff's close examination. But this was no time for judgment. If the man had the paper that was all that was necessary. “Where do you live?”

“Florence Creek, four miles west.”

Giff hesitated, a wariness he could not define making him reluctant to move. He said presently, “Welling advertised for the paper. Why didn't you hunt him out?”

The puncher was shaking his head before Giff had finished, “Huh-uh. He'd get drunk and tell Sebree who sold him the paper.”

“What's Sebree got to do with it?” Giff prodded.