A Gunman Rode North Read online

  Kerrigan was stripping off his prison shirt. He sat down and began to unlace the iron-hard prison shoes. "Joe Stovers is square. It was his testimony that got me off with a life sentence instead of hanging. It almost broke Judge Eaton's heart to do it, and he told me so in court. He's a Bible-quoting old devil who believes, or pretends to believe, that God sent him to clean out the north part of the territory of every man who ever had to throw a gun for any reason. I've got Joe to thank for being here this morning instead of down there on the Point."

  He shed the remainder of his prison clothes and showered from a bucket-operated water stall in a corner. He put on first the worn brown Stetson, crimping it into a sharp "Montana" peak. The jeans and shirt fitted his lank frame a bit loosely now, and the boots were almost too tight. The weight of wheelbarrow loads of dirt and rock had caused his feet to spread inside the ill-fitting prison shoes.

  His arm ached more than ever by the time he finished dressing and began to soften up whisker stubble with coarse soap and cold water. Bud Casey had finished his smoke and was yawning, arms stretched above his head.

  "Damn it, Lew, if you won't jump the river— if you're determined to stick your head into a wire noose like a rabbit in a trail snare, go down to meet them on a good horse. There's a California horse buyer around town, fellow named LeRoy. Now if you'll…" He looked at Kerrigan busy lathering his cheeks and said, "Ahhh, hell!" in disgust.

  Kerrigan said over his shoulder, "Bud, I want you to do something for me. It's Kadoba. You cell with a man for two years, even if he is an Apache, and you grow to like him because he's become a friend you can trust. So when I get my money this morning I'm going to leave a hundred dollars and a few little things at the Big Adobe Store I want you to pick up. Sneak him a big chunk of half-roasted beef now and then. Get him some horse hair for making hackamores you can sell for tobacco money for him. He never should have been tried by Judge Yeager Eaton, but by military authorities at Globe. But the old Bible-quoting hypocrite bulled his way in and showed 'mercy' when he gave him life, where the military boys would have sent him to Alcatraz Rock for a couple of years."

  "Leave the money," Bud Casey said, yawning after twelve hours of night duty. "I can feed him nights when everything is all quiet."

  Elia Mangrum, a political appointee in a graft-ridden administration in the capital at Tucson, drove up from town in his buggy and turned it over to a Mexican trusty. The territory's population was 30,114, and Mangrum was busy enlarging the newly started prison. Arizona was notorious as a sanctuary for fugitives fleeing California and other vigilantes committees.

  Mangrum came in through a hallway built like a mine tunnel and found Lew Kerrigan lounging in a chair in the office, saddle and bridle and warbag on the mortar floor beside him.

  Mangrum sat down at his desk without speaking; a man in his middle forties with brown hair spit-curled down over his temples. His mustache drooped a full two inches down over his mouth, and it pleased him to have people say he resembled Wyatt Earp, the famed peace marshal up in Kansas.

  He said curtly, "Kerrigan, two years ago you had a small ranch and a hundred head of cattle up in the northern part of the territory near the old abandoned military post of Fort Pirtman. You shot to death a town marshal over a woman named Kitty Anderson. I might as well tell you I stopped her letters and others to you some time back. I didn't want a young woman like that eating her heart out over a lifer," he added sourly. "At any rate, after you fled the law and went to Colonel Harrow's place, Sheriff Joe Stovers finally ran you down. You appeared before Circuit Judge Yeager Eaton, the finest magistrate in the territory for dealing harsh justice to lawless men such as yourself. Instead of hanging you, he sent you down here to serve a life sentence at hard labor. I have been following the court's edict to the letter."

  "No doubt about that," Lew Kerrigan said bitingly. "And with the capable aid of Wood Smith's bottle and billy."

  "Don't get funny with me, Kerrigan," Mangrum snapped coldly. "You might find yourself back in here sooner than you think. And if it happens, you'll find out soon enough that I have a long memory. Colonel Harrow is waiting for you at the hotel. It is the Colonel's impression that you might be leaving prison with the sole purpose in mind of killing him. I want to know what's in your mind."

  "The conditions of my so-called parole to Tom Harrow," Kerrigan answered coolly. "I don't know how much he paid and who he paid it to. It was my money he handed out so generously anyhow. What are those conditions from the Territorial Governor?"

  Mangrum's clean-shaven face flushed angrily. "The Colonel has felt all along that the sentence was unjust. He had to wait two years until feeling cooled down before he could make a successful attempt in your behalf. It worked. He wants you freed into his custody to keep you from going on a rampage, as so many men embittered by prison do. They come out hating the world and ready to lash out in any direction. The Colonel says you're too good a man for that. You're in his custody until he feels you're on the right track again. It's as simple as that, Kerrigan."

  He rose to his feet, unlocked a small side door to a vault, and stepped inside. He came back almost immediately carrying a small canvas sack with a numbered tag tied around the neck. Jerking loose the bowknot, he dumped out the contents on his desk and nodded to Kerrigan.

  A few dollars in silver, a long-bladed jackknife, a shiny leather purse. In thin-lipped silence, Lew Kerrigan counted the money in the purse and began to pocket his belongings. Mangrum had sat down again as though that was all.

  Kerrigan's thin voice cut the silence. "Didn't you forget something, Warden?"

  "I don't think so."

  "You forgot the guns Joe Stovers sent along with this money a week or so ago."

  "I don't remember anything in the papers about giving them to you. Now look here—"

  "Stovers must have known, or he wouldn't have sent them to me," Kerrigan cut in again, still harsh. "I want my guns even though I won't be able to use them for awhile. Wood Smith tried to break my right arm with his club this morning and almost did. Get my guns for me, Warden!"

  And Mangrum, strangely enough, did so without speaking another word. He returned with a .45-90 repeating rifle in one hand and a heavy cartridge belt in the other. Half the loops were filled with brass and lead for the larger weapon, the others, .44's for the worn six-shooter, he chucked into the dusty, covered sheath. Kerrigan slung on the protective belt, the unaccustomed weight heavy upon his hip.

  The warden reluctantly stuck out his hand. "I'm supposed to lecture a man and shake hands with him when he leaves, Kerrigan. But I won't waste words on a man like you. If you follow the inclinations I suspect in your mind, you'll eventually end up back here again. Next time, Kerrigan, it won't be a life sentence. It'll be a new hangman's scaffold out there in the yard and then another grave down there on the Point."

  Kerrigan looked at the warden and then cocked the repeater into its saddle boot and swung the gear to one shoulder. Pain went through his brutally bruised right arm as he bent and lifted the warbag, holding it clear of the floor. The warden walked with him as he carried his belongings through the tunnel-like hallway and outside to where the Mexican trusty, the warden's rig put away under a shed, now waited stoically with a one-horse prison hack.

  "I hope I don't see you back here, Kerrigan."

  Mangrum said after the gear was loaded and Kerrigan had climbed up to the seat.

  "You won't, Mangrum," Lew Kerrigan said significantly.

  The rig creaked out through the wall gate and fell into wet tracks made by the warden's buggy. Kerrigan glanced up at a section of new wall he had sweated to help build, back of which lay an Apache Indian chained in a dungeon.

  He thought, So long, Kadoba. You're more white than some white men I could name.

  And then the realization came over him suddenly that he was a free man. For some strange reason he found himself taking it casually, as though he'd always known that someday he'd have made it over the walls and across that unswim
mable river anyhow. His thoughts swung not to Harrow and the meeting with him this morning, but to Kitty Anderson up north. Perhaps Mangrum had thought himself right in stopping her letters. But he hadn't known Kitty and what such a blow could have done to her.

  He wondered about Clara Thompson, too, up there alone in her boarding house in old Fort Pirtman, in front of which he had killed Havers, in a gun fight before the eyes of both Kitty and Clara. You could never tell what a proud, lonely woman like Clara was thinking. Maybe her cavalry captain husband, buried in a carefully tended grave near her home, would know.

  He shook away such thoughts and turned his attention to the town below.

  The muddied hack wheels crunched on down the slope and came into the mire that was Yuma's main street, and Lew Kerrigan directed the stolid Mexican to drive to a large adobe building, its high, long porch awning built out over the boardwalk for pedestrian street shade.

  The old flea-bitten mare sawed over and Kerrigan stepped down from wheel hub to thick planking. The movement caused the worn gun-sheath to twist out of place. With the instinct of years, Lew's hand automatically dropped and straightened it over a much worn spot on the right hip of his jeans, and pain cut like a hot iron through his arm.

  "Wait here," he said in Spanish to the black-faced trusty, and went into the fetid dampness of the Big Adobe Store.

  For Kadoba he bought buckskin moccasins with curled toe rawhide soles, made and peddled by fat Yuma squaws on the reservation a mile west of the Colorado River, to replace the rotted shreds of footgear the Indian had worn since he'd been brought to prison. He piled on the counter tobacco and several pipes, cheese and sausages and other imperishable edibles, not forgetting to add, with a faint smile, a small bottle of castor oil the Apache taste craved like a white man long without a lemon or dill pickle.

  The big chunks of fresh beef Bud Casey could buy and have his wife cook would be nothing short of heaven to the Indian. That much Kerrigan could do for one of the two men up there on the hill he could call friend. He sacked the purchases for Kadoba, paid for them, and then handed the clerk five goldbacks of twenty-dollar denominations.

  He said, "Sometime today Bud Casey will pick up this money and that second package of food and stuff."

  He picked up his own sack and started out. Just beyond the double doorway he came face to face with a man. Just another cowpuncher dressed in his Sunday best while in town, except for the mechanical, dark-faced smile and a slim brown hand hanging over a gun butt.

  "Kerrigan?" he said softly. "I'm Ace Saunders, remember? I saw you up in the high country at the Colonel's place when you were hiding out after gunning Buck Havers two years ago."

  "Don't tell me you're a friend of Havers," Lew Kerrigan said.

  Saunders shook his head, still smiling. "I'm one of the drivers of Colonel Harrow's private coach, among other things. After the gold strike at Dalyville I rode shotgun on the Pirtman run."

  Whatever the man wanted, the pain was still in Kerrigan's arm, and he knew he didn't have a chance. Years of habit had caused him to sling the .44 into its usual place at his right hip. He thought, too late now, that the gun should have been slipped inside his waistband, with the worn butt turned to the left.

  "I remember you, Saunders, as another of the shady characters the 'Colonel' had around up there in the high country," Kerrigan replied shortly. "What's on your mind right now?"

  "Colonel Harrow," the dark-faced gunman answered softly, "wanted to make sure you two have a talk before you leave. He's over at the hotel, waiting. I won't take your gun."

  Kerrigan said thinly, "I know you won't, Saunders."

  "No use for there to be any fuss. Nothing personal on my part—yet. Just a job for the man who pays me. Will you come peaceably?"

  "I'll talk with him after I ride north."

  "You'll talk with him now, amigo." There was an almost imperceptible shrug of the blue-shirted shoulders. "The Colonel has much influence with many people, including the law, in this town. You go with me peaceable or Jeb Donnelly brings a couple of men down and they carry you away from here feet first. Your move, mister."

  Lew Kerrigan moved on past him, the gunman turning warily. But Kerrigan merely stepped to the prison hack and tossed his sack of supplies over beside the warbag and saddle.

  "Take those to the hotel, the big new one three rooms high," he directed the mustachioed Mexican trusty. "Put them in the corral or stable, and leave them there for me."

  The mare leaned forward into slow movement and Kerrigan turned and jerked his head curtly to the man Tom Harrow had sent to bring him in.

  The massive figure of Jeb Donnelly, marshal and former guard up on the hill, emerged from a nearby doorway and casually fell in forty feet behind them.

  They moved along the muddied boardwalk, eastward toward the end of the street and a three-story hotel already built to await the coming of the railroad between Los Angeles and El Paso. The sun was out, clear and hot, and already beginning its work of baking the soft wetness into hard surface crust. The gunman walked at Kerrigan's right, left hand close to Kerrigan's gun, right hand close to his own weapon. Behind them, Jeb Donnelly shuffled along as though on his way home after being up all night.

  At the east end of the street they turned left and began skirting small water puddles in the raw graded roadbed to reach the big new hotel. In front of it stood an Abbott-Downing stagecoach with red body and yellow wheels. Something cold cut through Kerrigan when he saw the gold lettering on the door.

  Colonel Thomas Harrow, Esq. Dalyville, Arizona Territory.

  Six sleek black horses stood in soft leather harness adorned with white rings under the admiring eyes of two-score people on the high front porch. Waiting up in the driver's seat, his stubby fingers full of lines, sat a towheaded, cherubic-faced young driver.

  He looked down at Kerrigan, read the story of his presence with the slim, dark Ace Saunders, and winked a grin at the gunman.

  Saunders winked back at him and said with a friendly grin, "That's my saddle kick, Stubb Holiday, in case you don't remember him."

  "I saw him a couple of times," Lew Kerrigan said.

  "We came all the way down here atop with the Colonel and his bee-utiful fiancée, Carlotta Wilkerson," a sardonic touch in the words, "all cuddled up below with fancy grub and a few bottles of shampanee. Personally, Kerrigan, I think you had better taste for looks in Kitty Anderson, and no offense meant. Miss Wilkerson is a Southern lady who came all the way out here to marry Harrow. He brought her down with him to meet the right people in Tucson, though 'showing her off' would be a better word for it. They're going to have a big wedding in the twenty-room house Harrow built on the ridge west of the gulch that's Dalyville since you went to prison. The Governor of the territory is coming up from Tucson."

  "Interesting," Lew Kerrigan murmured. "Thanks for the information, Saunders."

  "Not at all. I like to earn my pay. Go inside and up to the third floor. I'll be outside if you make trouble. Nothing personal, like I told you. Just walk up those steps casual-like about one ahead of me."

  From the end suite on the top floor of the new hotel a slender man, a touch of grey along his carefully brushed temples and sideburns, stood gazing out the west window. From it Thomas Harrow could see the wet, unimaginative pattern of the simply slanted street roofs and, directly west, a new section of prison wall under construction over there on prison hill. He unclasped one hand, removed a thin black cheroot from his mouth, placed it in an ash tray on the desk, and resumed his pacing the length of the thickly carpeted room. The glow in the end of the cigar went out and turned to grey ash and Colonel Thomas Harrow paced on.

  He stopped at the big desk long enough to pull open a drawer and examine the pistol he'd already examined twice. He smiled softly.

  There had been that big victory at Bull Run early in the hostilities between North and South—and, or so everybody in the South believed, the war practically over. Only then had he been quick to leave his modest
plantation and other men's wives and hurry into the thick of it, using a modicum of military-school background to obtain a Captain's commission.

  But the war had not ended in a few more weeks; and after a month of hardship and privation, of watching one man killed in battle and two more die of wounds and disease, the man who now called himself Colonel Harrow had had enough. The Great Cause was lost. And afterward... what? Back to an anemic, barren wife and a now weed-grown plantation she had given him as a dowry?

  Not for him.

  In a driving rain he'd ridden out of the thick of a skirmish, remembering even now after the passing of the years how cold he had been. Heading west in the night to begin a new life under a new name. Texas showed him long-horned cattle without brands and with no buyers of hides and tallow. Plain-faced women in homespun doggedly plowing dry land he wouldn't have let one of his five slaves set foot upon—not even soft-bodied Bertha, of whom he'd grown tired and sold as a common field worker. The shells of burned-out sod homes where the arrogant Comanches and Lipan Apaches had left ghastly death and destruction.

  Not for a gentleman plantation owner.

  He wanted a quick fortune, in gold, and California officers who knew the Southwest had said it was down there in a thousand places. Like California itself in '49. War and greed have a way of callousing men, and from a tiny frontier bank in Nacogdoches the man who overnight had become Thomas Harrow obtained with his revolver a few hundred dollars in specie. Gold.

  It had become a burning obsession by the time the long, heavily guarded ox train of two-wheeled carretas, with which he had been traveling by permission of a genial Spanish merchant, reached Santa Fe. There, at a trail's end baile given by the merchant to celebrate a hugely profitable journey safe from marauding Utes and southern Comanches, the flashing ankles and flirtatious black eyes of the merchant's pretty young esposa caught his own. He had fled Santa Fe for his life.

  He left behind his pistoled host and a conscious-stricken young widow, her spurring vaqueros hard on his trail.