the Strong Shall Live (Ss) (1980) (15 page)

"Yeah."

Duffy's man walked back inside and fed the horses. "They tell us, sir, that we are weak," he repeated, "but when shall we be stronger?"

He thought it over as he stood there, rubbing the sorrel's neck. "It has a nice sound," he told the horse, "a nice sound."

He walked to the door. "Soon be daylight," he said, "the sky's turning gray."

"Yeah." The stocky man got to his feet and stretched. Duffy's man hit him.

It was a backhand blow with his left fist that caught the stretching outlaw in the solar plexus. Duffy's man stepped around in front of him and with the practiced ease of the skilled boxer he uppercut with the left and crossed a right to the chin. The outlaw never had a chance to know what was happening, and the only sound was a gasp at the backhand to the solar plexus.

Duffy's man pulled him out of sight behind the door. Then he tied his hands and feet and stuffed a dirty rag into his mouth for a gag, tying it there.

Leaning over the sleeping outlaw he very gently lifted the man's hand and slipped a loop over it. His eyes flared open but the hostler grasped his upper arm and flipped him over on his face before he realized what was happening.

Shoving the man's face into the hay and earth, he dropped on one knee on the man's back and jerked his other wrist over to receive a second loop. Quickly, with a sailor's skill with knots, he drew the wrists together and bound them tight, then tied his feet and gagged him.

They might, he thought, get themselves free just when he was most busy. He dragged them to the center of the barn where there was no loft. It was almost forty feet to the ridgepole. Climbing

the ladder to the loft he then mounted a ladder that led to the roof and rigged two ropes over a crosspiece, then went back to the floor.

The outlaws, both conscious now, stared at him, horrified.

"Going to hang you," he said cheerfully, grinning at their agonized expressions. "But not by the necks ... unless you struggle."

Twenty minutes later he looked up at them with appreciation. More than thirty feet above the hard packed earth of the barn floor he had suspended the two outlaws. Each man had a loose noose around his neck. If they struggled to get free and the knots started to slip they would hang themselves.

"It's up to you," he explained. "You can hang there quietly and when this shindig is over I'll let you down easy. You struggle and you'll both be dead."

He strolled to the door. Smoke was lifting from Ma's Kitchen and Julie was sweeping off the step. He walked across and she glanced up, smiling at him. He saw her eyes go past him to the barn door. The chair was empty.

She got the coffeepot and filled his cup, stealing a glance at his face, which revealed nothing. She had heard the riders come in with the horses, and she knew it meant a bank holdup somewhere near.

The outlaws could run their horses at top speed, switch to fresh horses and be off to the mountains. The fresh horses would assure them of escape, for any posse would have to run their horses hard to try to catch them, and those horses would have been extended to the utmost before reaching West-water.

Duffy's man ate in silence. When he arose he dropped a quarter on the table. "Better stay inside today," he told Julie, "and tell Ma."

She stopped at the end of the table. "Whatever it is you're planning," she said, "don't do it. You don't know Clip Hart."

"There are Clip Harts wherever one goes. If you start running there's no place to stop. I have it to do or I have to run, and I don't run easy.

"Anyway"--he spoke in a lighter tone, not look-fag at her--"a man has to stop somewhere and make a start. This seems as good a place as any. A man might even start a ranch of his own."

"That takes money."

"A man who is good with an ax might make some money cutting ties for that branch line they're about to build. They will need ties," he added, "or they'll have to ship them a long way."

He went out without looking back, but he heard Ma say, "I like that young man."

Julie answered, "He won't live long if he bucks Clip Hart."

At the foot of the steps Duffy's man stopped, thinking. How did one man handle seven men? And how far behind the outlaws would the posse be? How long would it take them to get to West-water?

Duffy's man considered a half dozen ways of delaying the outlaws and still staying alive. Tying their horses with hard knots? They would cut the ropes. Opening fire as they entered the street? He didn't have shells enough to kill them all if he scored with every shot, and they were too many. He would himself be dead.

There was no way. He had been foolish to begin what he could not end, and he was very glad he had not tried to enlist help in his foolhardy scheme. It had been all too easy to think of doing something, all too easy to say they would never be stronger.

Nonetheless, having started it, it was not in him to quit. What he had begun he would finish, and he would hope to do enough damage in the process that they would come no more to Westwater.

It was natural that he did not consider his own situation. Not that he had not thought of it before, but he had known what his chances were, and now that he had decided to go ahead he simply would have no chance at all. At least, none worth considering.

Finally, he brought the horses out and tied them, according to plan, at the hitch-rail. He' tied them with slipknots, tying Clip Hart's horse a little closer to the stable and just a little apart from the others. Then he brought the shotgun from the harness room and placed it beside the bam door, but out of sight.

He knew then he had done what he could do, and there was nothing to do but wait. He dropped into Duffy's chair and relaxed.

Word seemed to have gotten around, for no one appeared on the street. The store was open, as was the saloon, but nobody was in either place. Several times Julie came to the door and looked across the street at the young man in the chair by the barn door. Each time he was whittling. Once he even seemed to be asleep.

It was almost eleven o'clock when they heard them coming. They thundered across the bridge just outside of town and came racing around the bend and through the trees. They came at a dead run, piled off their horses and rushed for the fresh horses at the hitch-rail. Hart reached his horse and grabbed at the slipknot, and Duffy's man hit him.

There was no warning. Duffy's man had tied that horse within an easy step and his left hook caught Hart on the chin and he went down, spun halfway around, and grabbed for his gun.

Duffy's man slapped away the gun hand and smashed Hart with a big, work-hardened fist Knocking him back against the rail he proceeded to slug him in the belly, then on the chin with both hands. Hart went down, battered and bleeding. Only then did Duffy's man disarm him.

The other outlaws had leaped for their saddles and no sooner did they hit leather than all hell broke loose. The horses were big, fresh, and full of corn, and they began to pitch madly as if on signal. A girth broke, and then another. Men plunged into the dust, and as they hit, men rushed from the stores and ran among them, clubbing with gun barrels and rifle butts.

Duffy himself was there, moving with surprising agility for one of his age and bulk. Only one man made a break for it. He was near the stable and his cinch did not break. He got his horse turned and as he did so he lifted his pistol and took careful aim at Duffy's man.

The hostler sprang for the shotgun beside the door, knowing he would never reach it in time. Then a rifle shot rang out and as Duffy's man swung around with the shotgun in his hands, he saw the outlaw topple from his saddle into the dust.

He glanced around and saw Julie standing in the door with an old Sharps .50 in her hands, a thin wraith of smoke issuing from the muzzle.

As suddenly as that, it was over. Clip Hart was staggering to his feet, his jaw hanging and obviously broken. There was a deep cut over one eye, and his trigger finger was broken, apparently when he fell or when the gun was slapped from his hand.

One man was dead. Duffy himself had killed him when he stepped from the store. The man Julie had shot had a broken shoulder and an ugly wound where the bullet had ripped the flesh. The others had aching heads and one a broken collarbone.

Herded together in front of the livery stable, they were standing there when the posse arrived, staring at their captors who proved to be four old men, two boys of fourteen, a girl with an apron, and Duffy's man.

"They held up our bank and killed a cashier," the man with the badge told them. "If they'd gotten on those fresh horses they'd have gotten clean away. What happened?"

Duffy had been removing saddles from the horses and now he lifted a saddle blanket and lifted an ugly-looking cocklebur with blood on its stiff spines. "Somebody," he said, "put one of these under each blanket, and then cut the cinches halfway through."

The badge wearer looked at Duffy's man. "You did that?"

"Picked the meanest-looking burrs I could find. What else could I do? I'm no gunfighter!"

The sheriff looked at Hart. "Well, you're some kind of a fighter, and whatever it is, you'll do. Thanks."

Duffy looked at his holster. "Thought we was too old, did you? Well, we got fight left in us yet, ain't we boys?"

The storekeeper gestured toward the saloon. "I'm standing for the drinks, young or old."

"Have your drink," Duffy's man said, "I'll be along soon."

He looked over at Julie. "As I said, this seemed a good place to stop."

"Are you a good man with an ax?"

"I am. But you know, it gets mighty lonely up there in the mountains. And it would help if I had somebody to cook for me, too."

"Can you cook at all?"

"No, ma'am."

"I can."

He gestured toward the church, half-hidden among the cottonwoods. "The preacher will be home tomorrow. We should make an early start."

"I will be ready." Suddenly, she was embarrassed. She dried her hands on her apron. "You go along and have that drink now."

At the saloon the men lifted their glasses to him. "Not me," he said, "I might never have done it but for something a speaker once said."

He lifted his glass. "We drink to the speaker. To Patrick Henry," he said.

"To Pat Henry," they replied.

*

Cherry Noble rode into Wagonstop on a blade mule. He was six feet seven in his socks, and he habitually wore boots. He weighed three hundred and thirty pounds. He swung down from the mule and led it and his three pack animals to water. As he stood by the trough with his mules, the bystanders stared in unadulterated amazement.

Noble looked up, smiling in a friendly fashion. "What's off there?" He indicated the country to the west with a bob of his head.

From where he stood nothing was visible to the west but the sun setting over a weird collection of red spires and tabletopped mountains.

Lay Benton replied. "Nothin' but wilderness, some of the wildest, roughest country on earth and some bloodthirsty Indians."

"No people?"

"None."

"Water? And grass maybe?"

"Could be a little. Who knows?"

"Then that's where I'll go. I'll go there so when folks do come there'll be a place waiting for them. Sooner or later people come to most" every place, and mostly when they get there they are hot and tired. I'll have grass, water, and beef a-waiting."

"You'd be crazy to try," Benton said. "No white man could live in that country even if the Indians would let him."

Cherry Noble's laugh boomed, his face wrinkling with the memories of old smiles. "They'll let me stay, and I guess there's no place a man can't liveif he sets his mind to it." He slapped a bulging saddlebag. "Know what I've got here? Cherry pits, that's what I When I stop I plan to plant cherries I Ain't no better fruit, anywhere, and that's why people call me as they do. Noble's my name and folks call me Cherry. You could trail me across the country by the trees I've planted."

Lay Benton was a trouble-hunter, and he did not like Cherry Noble. Lay had been the biggest man around until Noble arrived, and he still considered himself the toughest. The big man's easy good humor irritated him. "If you go into that country," he said contemptuously, "you're a fool!"

" 'Better to be a fool than a knave,' " quoted Noble. He was smiling, but his eyes were measuring Benton with sudden attention and knowledge.

Benton came to his feet ready for trouble. "What was that you called me?"

Cherry Noble walked to the foot of the steps where Benton stood. "Friend," he" spoke gently, still smiling, "I didn't call you, but if you heard your name just keep a-coming."

Benton was irresolute. Something in the easy movement and confidence of the big man disturbed him. "You don't make sense !" he said irritably. "What's the matter? Are you crazy?"

Noble chuckled, his big hands on his hips. "Now as to that," he said judiciously, "there's a division of opinion. Some say yes, some say no. Me, I've not rightly decided, but at any rate I'm not a very wise man.

"Feller back in Missouri when I was about hip-high to a short burro, he give me five books, he did. He said, 'Son, you take these books and you read them. Then you read them through again and then you ponder on 'em. After that you give them to somebody else, but there'll be something that will stay with you all the days of your life. I'm giving you the greatest gift any man can give to another.'"