MORE GLASS SHATTERED under the impact of perhaps more than one bullet. And the door of the house was slammed closed as the fusillade of shots thudded into wood or ricocheted off the stone wall. Steele saw this because he just happened to be looking toward the house when he demanded and got the controlled bolt from his mount. He was crouched in the saddle—leaning far forward in an instinctive attitude that simply meant he was a horizontal rather than a vertical target, but nonetheless made him feel a little safer.
As he saw the door crashed shut and the other window in the front of the house shattered—the shards showering inside the room this time—he got his bearings on where the barrage of gunfire was coming from. And he snatched a glance back up the hill. Had to crane his head around to the limit since the stallion was bolting flat out in the direction he faced when the order to wheel was countermanded. Which meant he was racing across the overgrown fields, heading wide of the south west corner of the house. And although he felt a painful snap in his neck because he had elected to look over the wrong shoulder in the heat of the dangerous moment, he saw enough to know why the Begley boy had taken the shot at him after the claim that an army was about to launch an attack on the house.
It was the posse of vigilantes from Rosarita who were galloping their mounts down into the hollow, rifles and revolvers directing a continuous fusillade of shots at the front of the house. Steele saw only part of the line of advance, and this through a veil of gunsmoke. But in the second before he forced his head painfully around to face the way he was going he recognized a half dozen men he could not name, in addition to Fraser Sorrel, Doc Bascomb and Matt Hope.
None of the Rosarita men was firing at him, as far as the Virginian was able to tell. And the incessant gunfire that poured toward the house served to force those inside to stay back from the smashed windows. But Steele did not trust this situation to last from one moment to the next. And he decided to make for cover by the fastest means before a stray shot, a ricochet or a deliberately placed bullet tore into his body.
He sat suddenly upright in the saddle and stepped down hard against the stirrups as he hauled back on the reins with both hands. The stallion snorted in rage at the brutal abruptness of the demand. But, well-schooled by his rider over a long period, the animal responded to the best of his ability and began to slither to a halt through the lush green weeds that grew so thickly in the unworked soil. Then the rider jerked sharply on the left rein to command a turn. At the same time as his right hand left the other side of the rein to clasp into a tight fist around the frame of the booted rifle. The horse did his best to make the asked-for turn, but the angle was always too sharp for the speed. And the surface beneath the pumping hooves was slippery with the sap of trampled weeds.
Steele abandoned the final control he had on his mount—released the rein and kicked his feet clear of the stirrups. Then, as the sideways tumble of the stallion became inevitable, he thrust against the horn with his free hand and so was powered out of the saddle. Was thus pitched into a sideways half-somersault across the thick growth of weeds, cushioning to some extent the impact as he crashed to the ground at the same moment as his horse—safely out of danger from the animal’s crushing weight.
Just for a second he lay where he had fallen, tensed to experience the agony that would warn of an incapacitating injury. But just a few of the former pains from the beating were given new fire. And this level of discomfort left him ample awareness to realize that he was still exposed to the field of fire from the guns of the men galloping their horses down into the hollow. And maybe from a side window of the house in which there were doubtless now three people who were convinced he had set them up for the surprise attack.
He raised his head to get his bearings and vented a grunt of satisfaction when a joint in his neck clicked and at least one area of pain was relieved. Then he briefly smiled when he saw his horse getting up on all fours again, apparently not seriously damaged by the cruel fall he had been forced to take. A glance in the opposite direction as the horse trotted away drew another grunt from Steele as he saw that the chimney end wall of the house had no windows in it.
The barrage of gunfire, already considerably diminished, slackened still more as he rolled onto his belly and moved snakelike toward the rear corner of the house. Now the thudding of hooves on the hard-packed dirt and the more muted sounds of horses in the flanking fields was more obtrusive than the cracking of gunshots. The speed of the advance slowed and there was a period of seconds when all the guns were silent.
Steele made it into the cover of the rear wall of the house and rose up onto his haunches, pressing his back against the wall as he took a series of deep breaths and peered across the empty animal enclosures toward the barn that looked as if it might collapse in the first strong wind of winter. He heard men out front of the place yelling at their horses to pull up. Two shots exploded and only now did Steele thumb back the hammer of his rifle.
‘Hold it, Dunc!’ a Rosarita man bellowed in an angrily commanding tone. ‘That’s a flag of truce that’s bein’ shown!’
‘I ain’t about to talk terms of surrender with the dirty, lowdown, murderin’ skunks that killed my boy!’ the saloonkeeper retorted and, in the surrounding stillness that seemed to become more palpably heavy with each word spoken by Duncan Nelson, his voice sounded like it was drawing nearer to cracking.
There was a stretched second of total silence in the wake of the threat. Before Dale Begley defended:
‘What the frig’s he talkin’—’
‘Dale, let Fletcher—’ the boy’s mother broke in and was herself interrupted by Arness.
‘There’s nobody in here who has killed anybody since we came to these parts! And I intend to defy any man who insists I am a liar by stepping out of the house! Unarmed, I should add! If the man who considers me a liar and one of us a murderer chooses to kill me, then I hope for his sake that he has no conscience to torment him for the rest of his life.’
Steele eased to his full height with the aid of the rifle as a makeshift crutch while he kept his back to the wall—the rough surface of the stonework digging into him through the fabric of his vest and shirt. He discovered he felt no worse discomfort standing than in any other attitude. As he came to his feet, he recognized the voice of the stage and telegraph office manager responding to the arrogant eloquence of Fletcher Arness.
‘Hold on, mister! When that door opens, we want to see all of you out here. And all with your hands high so we can see you all have no weapons.’
‘Really, sir! Do you honestly feel that a man, a woman and a boy would attempt to get the better of such a large number of—’
‘I’m no boy, Fletch!’ Dale Begley cut in to protest.
‘I’m hardly correctly dressed to meet so many gentlemen and—’
‘Quit with the fancy talk mister!’ Nelson snarled. ‘And I don’t care if you’re bare-assed naked, woman! We ain’t about to trust anythin’ about a bunch of city slickers that would gut shoot a kid and toss him into the brush to die!’
There was some more yelling back and forth between the trio trapped in the house and the vigilantes who continued to sit astride their horses in the front yard. And harsh words were also exchanged among the people in the house and on the yard as each group failed to agree on a spokesman and their tactics. But Adam Steele had found his attention diverted elsewhere: and the furor of excited voices was diminished in his mind as he moved away from the rear wall of the dilapidated house and went between the hog pen and chicken run toward the tumbledown barn. But when he reached the center gap of the part-opened double doors he took the time to glance over his shoulder at the rear wall of the house, in which there was a firmly closed door and no windows. And he knew now that neither the intervening building nor a trick of his mind was muting the raucousness of the quarrelsome voices. The heat had been taken out of the situation at the front of the house. An exchange was still in progress but just two men were talking to each other.
At the front of the barn, the Virginian took a tighter grip with one hand around the frame and the other round the barrel of the Colt Hartford. And felt beads of sweat standing out on his forehead and along his bristled upper lip. When he had first sensed the presence of somebody watching him from within the barn there had been no warning of hostility. But, now that an impression of the threat of violence receding elsewhere had become a reality, he felt less sure of his own safety. He had not been able to pinpoint the spot from where he was being watched in the facade of the barn, and the closer he got to it the more cracks and knot holes he saw through which a malicious eye could be watching him. He saw, too, many areas of rotted timber that would hardly reduce the velocity of a bullet fired through it.
Now that he stood on the threshold of the barn and the main body of noise from beyond the house had subsided, he was aware of the sounds of horses moving in their stalls. He could hear, too, the humming of flies and insects that foraged among the debris within the vacant hog pen and chicken run. And his own measured breathing—that he sought to maintain at the same cadence as he pushed the rifle between the doors before he stepped into the barn.
‘You sure are one persistent bastard, aren’t you?’ Orville Kyle rasped.
The barn was bright with the sunlight that streamed in through the part-opened doors, two almost glassless windows and holes of varying sizes that the elements and neglect had worn into the roof, the floor of the hayloft and all four walls. Thus were the Virginian and the Rosarita sheriff able to see each other with harshly unflattering clarity.
Steele standing in a half-turned, half-crouched attitude at the doorway: his rifle aimed from the hip toward the source of the taunt as his face froze with an expression midway between a grimace of fear and a scowl of anger.
Kyle curled up into a fetal position in the front left corner of the barn, Remington in his holster and his arms akimbo. His head propped up by the angle of the corner and face now turned away from the knot hole through which he had been watching Steele. His features looked to be drained of blood in back of their element burnish, and suffering had cut deep lines into his skin. He seemed to be trying to express smirking contempt for the Virginian, but his duller-than-ever blue-green eyes revealed the awesome level of pain he was experiencing.
‘I’m just being myself, feller,’ Steele answered, straightening and untensing himself as he canted the Colt Hartford to his shoulder and eased forward the hammer.
‘I haven’t been myself since that crazy Nelson kid put a bullet in my chest,’ the lawman said, and pain acted to mask all trace of his Deep South accent as he cautiously unfolded his arms and used his unbandaged hand to pull open his sheepskin coat. Displayed the large stain of dried blood on his shirt front in the area of his silver star.
Steele moved toward the badly injured man as the installed horses—just those that had hauled the buggy and flatbed from town yesterday—accepted his presence in the barn and stood in unmoving stillness, but with ears pricked as if they were eager to hear what the intruder had to say.
‘Way I read the sign; you stayed around long enough to know the boy isn’t feeling anything anymore?’
Now that the Virginian was standing directly over him, Kyle found it difficult to crane his neck into the angle of the walls to look up at him. And he chose to peer out through a knot hole—perhaps seeing the scene beyond or maybe surveying a series of images from his memory—as he confirmed:
‘That’s what I did, mister. Least I could do, but I’m not sure it made it any easier for the kid. Sure hasn’t—’
He grimaced in response to a present physical pain rather than at an ugly memory, and it was forceful enough to curtail his earnestly-spoken response to the Virginian. But then the expression became suddenly less self-centered as a burst of angry talk sounded from out front of the house.
‘I only came out here to see about maybe buying—’
‘Yeah, I got the drift of that,’ the lawman rasped through gritted teeth as somebody—it sounded like Fraser Sorrel—shouted down the townspeople who had become even angrier than before. ‘And if I get the drift of what’s happening out there, those men from town could finish up as a lynch mob. Stringing up innocent people.’
Now he forced his head around and up to direct a questioning look at Steele, who nodded and augmented:
‘Reckon so, feller,’
‘And I’m the only one that can maybe keep it from happening.’
‘Sure.’
He had to lower his head for a moment to relieve the pain, but forced it up again to rasp: ‘I’ll need help?’
‘Reckon you could die if you moved that far, feller. Best I bring them to you in here?’
‘I’d appreciate that, Steele.’ He now stared unseeingly at the area of wall with the knot hole in it. Physical pain continued to mold the expression of his gaunt face beneath his totally hairless head, but a different brand of feeling sounded in his tone. ‘And especially so because I guess it would suit your purpose better those kin of Avery Begley and the dude gunslinger were dead and gone? Along with me?’
‘That wouldn’t amount to being myself at all, feller,’ Steele said tautly as he turned and went to the door.
‘Especially for another reason, as well,’ Orville Kyle pressed on, and when the Virginian met his dull-eyed gaze he thought that he could see dejected remorse in back of the predominant physical suffering. ‘On account of you can’t feel you owe anything to anyone in Rosarita? Me most of all? Way you were treated there?’
‘Take another look at where that bullet went into you and be grateful you’re such a mean bastard, Sheriff.’
The lawman showed an expression that could have been a scowl or a soured grin as he rasped: ‘You’ve lost me, Steele. But I can tell you one thing for sure: I don’t have to look. I can feel this chunk of lead brewing up a mess of poison.’
‘Right,’ the Virginian responded as he stepped out of the doorway, but knew Kyle could still hear what he said as he moved off across the yard: ‘So you know you’d be a dead man already if you were the big-hearted kind.’