It had taken John Paradise two miles of ground to catch up with the field of racing horses. Paying out the palomino’s energy with conservative care, he had given the big stallion only just enough rein to narrow the distance slowly. If he could catch Macquarie by the time they reached the dairy meadow, he felt he had a good chance of winning; and the palomino’s strong pull on the reins encouraged him: the horse had more speed in it than he was allowing it to use.
They had been turning into the ranch road when he’d heard the gunshots in town. There was no time to get curious about that, at the time. The shooting had kept up, and then had quit a few minutes ago. Now, approaching the crest of the bald hill that marked the halfway point of the race, Paradise felt a hearty pleasure in the way the powerful palomino swarmed up the hill, hardly slowing stride, to close the last distance between himself and the running field.
He passed Morley’s appaloosa on the down-side of the hill. There was a lot of flying dust; it was hard to make out exactly what was happening in the tight-knotted field of horses, but he could easily make out Macquarie’s green silks twenty yards head of him. The big horse on Macquarie’s heels had to be Chandler’s black. That meant Paradise was now number-three; he had passed six horses in a bunch, and coming past the appaloosa had now put Paradise in third place.
The palomino was doing fine, he thought with satisfaction. In spite of its bad start, it had caught up and re-entered the running, without sacrificing its wind.
The saddle pounded under him. Hoofbeats racketed in his ears, dust slapped his face. One of the other riders was shouting hoarsely; there was no understanding what he said. The road pitched down through a severe, tortuous cycle of switchbacks where Paradise had to slow down to a canter and lean far to the inside on the turns, so that on one bend his stirrup actually scraped the ground; but he was heartened to see that Chandler and Macquarie had slowed their pace as well.
Coming down into the lower foothills, the road straightened out and made a line toward the fence of the dairy farm. Here the terrain was packed harder, and the dust consequently diminished. For the first time, Paradise had a wholly clear view of the race. It assured him that there were only two horses ahead of him, and neither of them had more than a fifty-foot lead on him. Macquarie was slightly in the lead, but Chandler was pressing him hard.
It was time to catch up, Paradise judged. He let the reins out and leaned forward, and spoke gently to the palomino. Wind rushed his ears. The palomino seemed to spring forward; it made Paradise grin fiercely.
The gap closed to forty feet, then thirty. But then a movement in the corner of his ever-alert vision made Paradise glance to his right, where he saw three galloping horsemen ramming forward toward the hills, on a course that would just about intersect with his own.
With his full attention on the race and only a part of his mind on the advancing trio of horsemen, he became gradually aware while he closed the distance that the three men were being followed by three more men, just now breaking out of the town and ramming forward full-tilt.
There wasn’t much time to think about that. Paradise was eating Chandler’s dust, now. It was time to challenge the big sorrel and the black. He spoke again to the palomino, and felt it respond.
Hoofs clattered in a powerful rataplan. Behind him, the others had fallen almost a hundred yards behind, all except the tough little appaloosa, which held to its fourth position some forty yards behind Paradise. Then, rounding an easy little bend, Chandler’s black hit an unseen soft spot in the road. The horse careened to the left, losing balance.
Chandler cried out. Macquarie glanced back, his eyes bright and wide with surprise. Chandler’s horse broke stride, crashed off the road and smashed into a creosote bush, crushing the bush flat and tangling up the black’s hoofs. The black, tripped up by the bush, went into a somersault.
Wheeling far to the right to avoid the stumbling horse, Paradise just managed to keep the palomino on the road. There was no question of stopping to help Chandler; the man didn’t seem hurt, he was cursing at the top of his lungs.
Just the two of us now, Paradise thought, and looked off to his right. The three onrushing horsemen were clearly recognizable now—the Lockharts, father and sons. Their red hair was impossible to mistake. And the riders behind them, giving chase—one of them was Jeremy Six.
The Lockharts seemed to recognize Paradise in that same instant. Suddenly a shout went up from Seth’s throat. A gun glinted, lifting in Malachi’s fist, and as Paradise cursed bleakly and laid himself low over the palomino’s withers, he heard Ike Lockhart’s shout drowned out in a roar of gunfire.
Paradise knew what they wanted. They wanted him. And he had no right to risk the lives of the other riders in the horse race. Without giving it any further thought than that, he swung the palomino off the road and drummed forward, directly toward the three Lockharts, carrying the fight to them. With the reins in his teeth he whipped up his gun and cocked it—and held his fire. He knew better than to shoot at a hundred-yard target from the back of a running horse. Let the Lockharts waste their ammunition.
His whole attention narrowed like a cone until the only thing in his awareness was the brutal dead-running advance of those three grim horsemen. Ike’s pistol was up, Seth’s was up; Malachi was shooting, his bullets going wide.
Paradise knew he had to catch them off guard somehow. At odds of three against one it was his only chance.
And so, deliberately, when he was still fifty yards from the galloping Lockharts he took down the reins and hauled back cruelly, leaning far back in the saddle. The palomino came to a precipitate halt that would have thrown him from the saddle if he had been any less anchored.
Dropping the reins, Paradise sighted along his gun barrel. The Lockharts were beginning to slough away, spreading out, slightly confused by his sudden tactic.
With battle-hardened calmness, Paradise balanced his gun on Malachi’s wire-thin shape and fired a brace of shots.
The palomino bucked, almost spilling him to the ground; he had forgotten its gun shyness.
Paradise fought the rearing horse down and dismounted while Ike’s bullets flew around him. Seth had cut across a corner of the dairy meadow; now, seeing Six and the deputies advancing fast, Seth wheeled around in panic and came back toward his father. Malachi was reeling in his saddle, badly wounded by Paradise’s bullets.
Paradise got down on one knee and deliberately fired twice at Ike. With the second shot, Ike threw up his arms and fell from the saddle. Seth cried out in blind, panicked rage: Seth reined his distraught horse savagely around and spurred forward, firing madly. It was plain he intended to run Paradise down.
Paradise coolly held his fire. The palomino shied away. Seth came pounding forward and, with an instant’s clear shot, Paradise pulled trigger. Without waiting to see the effect of his shot, he threw himself in a dive to one side, to avoid the hoofs of Seth’s horse if he could.
The horse whirled by, slinging dirt-clots in Paradise’s face. And the rider pitched to the ground almost on top of him.
It was obvious, by the way he fell and lay still, that Seth was dead.
But Malachi was still alive, with two bullets in him: Malachi was turning his horse toward Paradise again, riding forward at a loose trot, with blood flowing out of the corner of his mouth: Malachi was plainly a dying man, and knew it, but he also knew that Paradise was responsible for the death of his father and all his brothers. The madness of that anger gave Malachi the will he needed to live, long enough to avenge himself and his family.
And Paradise stood and watched him come.
Paradise had fired his last shot at Seth. And now his gun was empty.
A bleak glance across the flats told him that Six and the deputies, still a quarter of a mile away, were too far away to help.
Malachi’s gun lifted. Paradise braced himself. The only chance he had was to judge the time of Malachi’s shot, and try to dodge to the side at exactly the right moment. He watched Malachi’s eyes, and the whiteness of Malachi’s trigger finger.
It wasn’t much of a chance, he knew with bleak certainty.
Now! He threw himself to the ground, and heard two shots. Two shots, from different guns, and that was strange. But when he looked up, Malachi was folding forward at the waist, leaning over, falling limp from the saddle.
Paradise looked around slowly.
Not twenty yards behind him, Jay Macquarie sat in his racing green silks on the big sorrel thoroughbred. Macquarie’s face was expressionless. His hand held the little snub-nosed over-and-under derringer. Smoke lifted from its upper bore.
Macquarie said, “I never shot a man before.”
Paradise got to his feet, drunk in the legs. He had to swallow several times.
Behind Macquarie, the other horsemen stood uneasily by their mounts. Macquarie turned around and said, “You guys better not forget I’ve still got one slug left in this gun. We’ll all just wait right here until Mr. Paradise gets back on his horse.”
When he looked again at Paradise he said in a flat, lifeless voice, “We’re going to finish the race now.”
Awestruck, Paradise only watched him. For a moment he could not move. Jeremy Six came up with his deputies, splitting up to attend the three redheaded bodies on the ground. Six spoke to Paradise:
“You deliberately carried the fight away from the rest of these men. That took a lot of guts.”
Macquarie said again, “Come on, Paradise. Get back on that horse. We’ve got a race to finish.”