When Paradise rode out of town, shortly before midnight, he had it in mind to give the palomino a leg-stretch, and at the same time he wanted to go over the race course once again. He wanted to be as familiar as possible with the route of the race. He had seen some of the others doing the same thing during the day, notably Chandler on the big black and Morley and Halleran on their entries. He had had a chance in the last two days to study all the competing horses, and it was pretty clear that the competition was limited to the top three horses—Chandler’s, Rose’s, and Chavis’. And, Paradise found, his judgment had been confirmed by the betting odds-makers.
The race would start, perhaps fittingly, at the intersection of streets in front of the Drover’s Rest. That was where the finish-line was, as well. From the Drover’s Rest, the horses would travel north along the main street, straight out of town. At the far end of Zimmerman’s big pasture, the route turned sharp to the east, and followed the twin-rutted Turkey Track ranch road three-quarters of a mile around a series of easy bends. At the base of the foothills, below the shadow of the Mogul Rim, the course once again turned to the right, and wended southward, climbing into the foothills along what had once been a Butterfield Overland road. The road was now fallen into disuse; its surface was rocky and broken.
The half-way point was the top of a bald hill which overlooked Spanish Flat from the east. From this point, a horseman could see the town quite plainly: and, in turn, he could be seen from the town. The spectators would be able to follow the course of the race at its half-way point—those of them with field glasses, at least.
From the hilltop the path went down through a tight succession of hairpin switchbacks that brought it, finally to the property line of a dairy farm in the lowlands. Into this meadow the marked route turned, humping across little grass hills until it arrived belly-up against a low white fence. The horses would have to jump the fence here, make a sharp turn twenty yards beyond, pass between two close-set sycamores and then leap across a drainage ditch. After that it was a quick series of back-and-forth swings to thread a grove of trees. And then, finally, breaking out of the meadow, the route turned toward the southern end of town, swung into the lower end of main street, and covered the last quarter-of-a-mile along the straightaway of the street itself, ultimately arriving back where it had started, at the finish line.
That was the route Paradise followed tonight. He rode at a canter, letting the horse get used to the terrain and the turns. The ground was dry and hard-packed most of the way, and that troubled him slightly; a brief rain would have made the earth softer and might have given him an advantage. The palomino had been a wild horse until recently, accustomed to all kinds of terrain but unaccustomed to the weight of saddle and rider, unaccustomed to the hoof-protection of horseshoes. It might have had a more comfortable run on softer ground. On the other hand, Rose’s thoroughbred was definitely a hard-track racing horse; rain would have slowed the big sorrel down.
But there was no rain, and no chance of it from the look of the sky.
Coming down out of the foothills, he let the palomino have its head entering the dairy-farm meadow. The moon was up, in its first quarter; the light was poor, but good enough for riding. The palomino carried him across the grassy undulations of the ground toward the heavier massed silhouettes of the trees. Where was that fence? It was hard to see in the night. Not wanting to risk the palomino’s legs, Paradise reined back to a slow trot.
Surely that fence was near. Then, abruptly, he spied it, faintly aglimmer in the shadows. He walked the palomino up to the fence and let the horse get used to it; then he backed off, gigged the stallion, and made his run at the fence.
The palomino cleared it handsomely with a graceful spring. Its leap was so smooth that Paradise hardly felt it bunch up. On the far side, he slowed the pace sternly, swept around the marked bend, cantered between the two sycamores, and urged the palomino to a gallop. Stretching out its long legs, the palomino cleared the seven-foot drainage ditch without losing stride, and galloped forward into the grove of trees.
Highly satisfied, Paradise slowed down to a trot and threaded the grove, following the red-flag-marked path with difficulty in the deep shadows. But that would be no problem in daylight.
He dropped the knotted reins onto the saddlehorn and leaned forward to pat the horse on the neck. “You’ll do fine,” he said aloud.
Then, suddenly, he was aware of motion ahead of him. Someone else was on the trail. Straightening in the saddle, Paradise let his hand fall to his gun butt.
It was, he saw, the little jockey, Jay Macquarie. Paradise relaxed his grip on the gun, reached for the reins and picked them up to halt the horse.
Macquarie reined around to face him. It was hard to see his face in the night, but he seemed to be smiling amiably. His abrasive Brooklyn voice cut through the dark:
“Tryin’ out the turf, eh? Me likewise. I don’t know if you noticed it, but there’s a hell of a chuck hole up there on the hill, just before you hit the top. Over on the left-hand side of the road. If you get pushed over to that side, watch out for it.”
“Why,” said Paradise, “I’m obliged.” He had, in fact, seen the chuck hole; but that didn’t make Macquarie’s gesture any the less genuine.
Macquarie said, “Another thing. I watched you go over this section this afternoon. You’re a good man on a horse, and that stud of yours is going to be hard for me to beat. But there’s a few things you still need to learn. One thing, lean over a little more when you go into a turn. Give the horse as much help as you can. And don’t forget you may be hitting some of these narrow places neck-and-neck with somebody else, so don’t figure on having the whole trail to yourself. You may have to make your knees pretty skinny to get past them trees without smashin’ a kneecap. If that happens, lift your knees up and forward and clamp them around your pommel. It’s narrower than the girth. That way if anything gets scraped, it’ll be your boots, and that won’t hurt so much. Get me?”
Paradise said, “Why are you telling me this?”
Macquarie cupped his hands to light a thin cheroot. The match’s flame reflected frostily on the surfaces of his eyes. He said, “This is the sport of kings, pally. Maybe we ain’t all of us to the manor born, but I never in my life ran a crooked race. I like this game, but there ain’t no kick in it unless the competition’s as good as it can be. I intend to beat you, pally, but I want to beat you the honest way. Get me?”
“I guess I do,” Paradise said, and smiled briefly.
“One other thing,” Macquarie said, “and this is the most important. Don’t let that horse run away from you. Keep him down to a nice easy pace the first four and a half miles or so. That’s bring you right up to here, where we are now. From here on, let him go. Give him everything you’ve got to give him, because it’s from here to the finish line that you’ll have to make a run for it. Up to here it’s a long-distance race and you’d be smart to jog it. Otherwise your horse’ll be windbroke by the time you hit the home stretch. So don’t try to outrun everybody else on the first half-mile. If you do, you’ll lose the race before you get started.”
“Uh-huh.”
Macquarie pointed to Paradise’s holstered six-gun. “You figure to wear that gun in the race?”
“I guess I will.”
“Gun, holster, and gunbelt with cartridges. That’s maybe six pounds extra weight. Could make a difference.”
Paradise thought, You may be right, friend, but I’ll have to take that chance. He wasn’t going to ride naked through a big crowd. On that empty race-track he’d be a sitting duck for any trigger-happy gunman waiting to pick him off from the sidelines. And, he recalled, the Lockharts were still in town.
He said, “I’m obliged to you again.”
Macquarie abruptly reached into his left sleeve with his right hand. Moonlight glinted fragmentarily on metal. Paradise stiffened: his spine became rigid, his hand became wholly still.
Macquarie said easily, “You’ve seen these before. Derringer. Why don’t you carry one of these? Only weighs a few ounces.” He grinned and put the little gun back into his sleeve.
Paradise said, “You came within a half-second of dying, right there.”
Macquarie’s eyes widened. “Holy Judas,” he muttered. “I didn’t think. Sure, I heard about you—”
“All right, forget it. But never pull a gun on a man unless you intend to use it.”
“I never shot anybody in my life.”
“Try to keep it that way, then.”
“Yeah.” Macquarie swallowed, visibly shaken.
“Thanks again for the advice,” Paradise said gently. “I’ll give you a good race, friend.”
“I hope you do, pally.”
Paradise nodded briskly, rode around the little jockey, and headed into town.
Connie brought her husband into Spanish Flat early on the morning of July Fourth. He lay in the back of a wagon, wedged into mattresses and propped on down pillows. At the hotel, which stood at the corner of Center Street, she stopped the wagon and got down. Two men helped Chavis off the tailgate and he smiled apologetically. “I’m not supposed to jar anything loose just now.”
“Sure, Tracy,” said one of the men. “You just take it easy.”
Jeremy Six came along the walk. It didn’t miss Chavis’ attention that Six was wearing two guns this morning—a highly unusual practice for the marshal.
Connie greeted Six, and Chavis said, “You’re carrying as much armament as a gunboat.”
“Just trying to impress the townsfolk.” Six was trying to dismiss it with a joke, but Chavis didn’t buy it. Still, he said nothing further about it.
He went up onto the porch, arms over the two cowboys’ shoulders. Connie said, “Would you boys mind helping us upstairs? We’ve taken the corner room so that Tracy can watch the race from the windows.”
Six said, “How’re you making it, Tracy?”
“I’ll be fine,” Chavis said gruffly. “Just takes a little time to heal up, is all.”
Six said softly, “All the luck in the world with this horse race, feller.”
“Who said I ever needed luck?”
You’ll need it this time, Six thought. But he said, “Sure. Well, make yourself comfortable up there. I’ll be up to see you when I get a chance.”
Connie smiled at him and turned to follow the others into the hotel. Six stood on the porch, teetering on the balls of his feet, looking down both streets visible from here on the corner: down the main street he could see the crowd, already starting to gather at the cross rope of the finish line. And, to his left a block down Center Street, he could see the front of the Wells Fargo office.
From scattered quarters of town came the sporadic popping of firecrackers and skyrockets. Sometime today, if things went true to form, Six would have to arrest half a dozen kids for malicious mischief, and the doctor would be treating one or two of them for burned faces and hands. Kids had a way of letting firecrackers blow up in their faces. Two years ago one of the children had put out one eye. Three kids in town sported shortened fingers where homemade fireworks had blown off a knuckle or two.
But there was no stopping it, and perhaps no desire to. It was still a raw frontier country, and it was far better to let them blow off steam with fireworks than to wait for them to grow up and turn into—turn into John Paradises, he thought seeing the wiry little gunfighter walk out of the stable leading Chavis’ palomino stallion.
Paradise seemed to know where to look. He lifted his head toward the upstairs windows of the hotel, grinned and waved his hand. Six glanced upward, and saw a hand waggling within the parted curtains.
Firecrackers sputtered and crackled, several blocks away. Just beyond the Drover’s Rest, the side street was blocked off by a big ribbon-draped speakers’ stand. There would be speeches and toasts later in the day, capped by a box-supper social at the schoolhouse. But the morning’s entertainment was fare for the men: the horse race. Six took out his big snap-lid pocket watch and glanced at it. Eight-thirty. The race would be starting in an hour.
Up-street he saw Paradise mount the palomino and ride it out of town to limber it up before the race. Jay Macquarie came out of the stable, leading Rose’s sorrel. Mr. Clete was with him, talking angrily, but Macquarie paid him no attention. In the upstairs hotel window, beside Chavis’ corner suite, Harry Rose bulked for a moment, frowning down, then he retreated from sight.
Hal Craycroft came down the walk, stiff in a high collar and cravat and black hat. He was grinning broadly, inspired by the heady spirit of the holiday. The back-street hitch rails were jamming up with horses; the town quickly began to fill with incoming cowboys and ranchers, miners, hill hunters and prospectors and farmers and drifters. Since it was a holiday, all the commercial travelers who happened to be in town set themselves up on the porch of Mrs. Murphy’s boarding house and played checkers and whist, and awaited the horse race.
Ladies in bright-hued costumes cruised the walks, twirling parasols over their shoulders. Men dressed in their best Sunday finery told hearty jokes to one another and began to group against the crowd-ropes that cordoned off the main street, where the big race was to be commenced and climaxed.
Chunky and confident, Ben Chandler came out of the hotel with a nod and a grin for Jeremy Six; Chandler dropped off the walk, ducked under the rope and walked catty-corner to the opposite walk, heading for the stables to saddle his big black horse.
The other ranchers had congregated down there at the stable, and while the seven or eight race-entries came out one by one and paraded back and forth before trotting out of town to warm up, the crowd of kibitzers stood around giving the horses last-minute critical examinations.
Hal Craycroft was down there, busily collecting wagers and making entries in his pocket notebook. There was a spirit of high cheer in the air. The sun was bright, the sky was crystal clear, and at this early hour the oppressive heat had yet to arrive.
For the second time that morning, Jeremy Six walked down Center Street as far as the gun shop, turned casually inside and walked across the shop to the door at the side of the room. He rapped three times, said, “Six” and opened the door.
Dominguez sat sleepily by the window, feet propped up and shotgun across his lap. Bill Dealing, the town’s night marshal (a misnomer, since his hours were 3 a.m. to 3 p.m.), lay curled on a mattress in the front corner of the room.
Six lifted his eyebrows and Dominguez said quietly, “Calm as a horse trough.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way.”
Bill Dealing began to stir and Six said, “Better wake him up. The race will start in forty-five minutes and if anybody’s a mind to rob the Wells Fargo office, they might pick just that time to do it. Hoping the confusion will cover the robbery.”
Dealing grumbled and ground knuckles into his eye sockets. “I’m awake,” he muttered. “God, I feel like we’ve been buried alive in here for three days.”
“Won’t be too much longer,” Six told him. “The army boys will start showing up tomorrow to pick up the payroll.”
“That won’t be any too soon for me,” Dealing replied.
“Sorry you boys have to miss the race,” Six said. He backed out of the room and pulled the door shut, and went back up the street toward the center of town. A casual glance both ways indicated that no one seemed to have seen him go into the gun shop or come out again.
At the corner by the hotel he almost bumped into big Mr. Clete. Clete gave him an expressionless look and went on inside. Six crossed the street, ducking the ropes, and met Hal Craycroft on the far walk. Thick pedestrian traffic flowed past. People were beginning to take their places along the ropes. More enterprising spectators had climbed to building roofs.
Craycroft said, “I’m holding almost six thousand dollars in side bets. And that don’t count all the private betting that’s going on. This damn race has attracted a hell of a lot of attention for a town this size.”
Six nodded. “Seen the Lockharts around, Hal?”
Craycroft thought about it. “Now you mention it, no. I ain’t seen any of them since last night.”
“All right. Thanks.” Six went on down the walk, threading a path through the swirling crowds.
He made a swift circuit of the town, stopping briefly at the Glad Hand. The place was completely deserted except for its owner: Clarissa sat on the piano bench, picking out a tune with one finger on the keys.
Six said, “You’re missing the fun.”
“The good ladies in town wouldn’t appreciate it if I took up a front-row place to watch,” she said. “Never mind, Jeremy.”
“I thought you liked racing.”
“Sure. But not enough to get somebody’s husband in trouble.” She gave him a weary, stoic smile.
“No,” he said, “I guess I won’t let you get away with that. Come on, I’ve got just the place for you.” He took her by the hand.
She didn’t object. Her smile was wistful and agreeable. Six led her up through the tangled streets of Cat Town, listening to the voice-rumble of the crowd up ahead and the occasional banging of firecrackers on the outskirts of town; he brought her up Center Street from the west, led her through the crowd and across the intersection to the hotel. People parted to let them through. If anyone had harsh thoughts about the marshal and the Cat Town saloon mistress traveling the streets together, no one spoke: the town owed Jeremy Six too much to quarrel with him over such a small matter. The truth was that Clarissa had made her peace with the ladies of Spanish Flat; and, specifically, it had been Six who had made her peace with them.
He took her into the hotel, up the stairs and along the corridor to the front corner room. When Connie opened the door, Six ushered Clarissa inside ahead of him. He said, “How about a space for the lady, Connie?”
Surprised but not offended, Connie grinned. “Of course. Come in, Miss Vane. We’re glad to have you.”
Clarissa’s face colored. “Thank you. I really didn’t expect—”
“Nonsense,” Connie said.
Tracy Chavis was propped in a pillow-stuffed chair near the corner where he could see out through both of the corner windows without shifting his seat. Merely by turning his head he had a view of the main street in both directions and the first two blocks back along Center Street, past the Wells Fargo office.
Looking around casually, Chavis said, “Morning, Clarissa. Make yourself at home.”
“Why, thanks, Tracy.” Clarissa glanced at Connie. It was evident that Connie was very sure of her husband, very much in love with him. If she had not been, she would have resented Clarissa’s intrusion, as all the town’s ladies resented her. But there was none of that in Connie’s welcome: it was completely free of distrust.
Connie said, “If we stand right behind Tracy’s chair we’ll have a good view of the whole thing.”
“This is very good of you both,” Clarissa said.
“Don’t be silly.”
Clarissa smiled. “I think what makes most of the other women hate me is that I’m not ashamed of myself. But you almost make me begin to wonder.”
Six cleared his throat; he felt uncomfortable in the midst of woman-talk. He said, “I’d better get back down there.” Chavis said, “Come on up after the race and we’ll celebrate my victory. Mine and John Paradise’s.”
I hope there’ll be something to celebrate, Six thought moodily. But he said, “Sure, Tracy,” and bowed himself out of the room.