A FAT WOMAN and a thin man, each holding the hand of a red-headed little boy of about five, were suddenly standing in the doorway of the store. Their backs were toward the interior of the place, but each head was screwed around so they could peer in at Amos Quinn and Adam Steele. The child was giggling with high excitement while the adults expressed ashen-faced shock.
‘They stick you up, old man?’
‘Land sakes, what a thing to happen right here in Barclay!’
‘Get outta the goddam way of the man!’ Quinn bellowed, frantically flailing his arms like he was trying to physically sweep the trio off the threshold, clear of the line of fire. ‘Jane’s dead and we—’
‘Oh, my God!’ the woman shrieked and tried to go to the left.
‘Jane Quinn’s been shot and killed!’ the man roared. ‘One of ’em’s still in the old man’s place!’
He attempted to get clear of the doorway to the right. But both kept a firm grip on the hands of the child, who abruptly vented a shrill cry of pain as he was simultaneously jerked in opposite directions. And the boy’s screaming, the yelling of the fat woman and the thin man and the other raised voices from further away served to mask the diminishing sound of galloping hooves as the three hold-up men made their escape. But they were still in view above the auburn-haired head of the pained child and between the shoulders of the flanking adults as Amos Quinn urged:
‘Man that totes a fancy rifle like that oughta be able to—’
Steele reached the threshold just as the thin man surrendered his hold on the child and the fat woman plucked the weeping boy up into her fleshy arms so that she could move faster to get clear of the store front. While the man came to a sudden halt and froze, half turned toward Steele with both his arms half raised, his elbows pressed tight to his sides.
‘Please, mister, this ain’t none of my business,’ he implored, blinking his eyes at a rapid rate.
‘Mine, neither,’ the Virginian replied with a nod, and made no move to shift the rifle from where he held it in a double-handed grip across his lower belly. For although the woman and child were no longer exposed to the danger of being caught in a crossfire, they had gotten into cover at the same time as the retreating riders went from sight beyond an escarpment at the end of the street.
‘But old man Quinn said—’
‘Quit shaking or you’ll wet your pants, Charlie Cromwell!’ the store owner growled disdainfully as he reached Steele’s side and peered through scowling eyes at the settling dust where the street became a trail at the base of the seventy-five-foot-high cliff. ‘This young feller ain’t guilty of nothing except for keeping me from taking a crack at them sons of bitches that gunned down my little girl.’
The old man in the brown dungarees and striped shirt that were freshly laundered but dull stained and badly frayed, looked at Cromwell and Steele with much the same degree of malevolence he had directed along the street. But could not sustain such a powerful emotion against an attack of grief, and turned to re-enter his store as a sob burst from his slack throat and a tremor shook his thin frame.
‘Gee, I’m sorry, stranger,’ the denim-clothed, middle-aged, blinking-eyed Cromwell blurted. This as the fat woman with the child emerged from the barber shop next to the grocery and many other Barclay citizens came tentatively out into the afternoon sunlight now that they sensed the danger of more gunfire was past—or became aware for the first time that all was not as it should be in their town.
‘Best you save your sympathy for those in greater need of it, feller,’ the Virginian answered, recognizing the stockily-built, curly-haired Chuck Naylor among a loose-knit group of men striding toward the store.
‘In which event, thank you, mister,’ the once pretty and now bloated faced woman offered as she continued to hug the weeping child protectively in her arms. ‘If you had tried to stop those—’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Steele acknowledged with a curt nod, and swung around to go back into the grocery where the mixture of appetizing food fragrances in the warm air was now tainted by the acrid aroma of stale gunsmoke and the much more subtle smell of fresh blood. Amos Quinn could be heard, but not seen until the Virginian reached the counter.
‘Figure I got to say I’m sorry, as well,’ the old-timer rasped thickly after he had curtailed the inarticulate moaning sounds he was directing at his dead granddaughter.
‘All that’s owed is money, Mr. Quinn,’ Steele said evenly, as he turned a piece of paper on the countertop so that he could read the column of figures that the girl had penciled on it. ‘By me for the supplies.’
The owner of the store was down on his knees, cradling the bloodied head of the corpse in both his hands. He had closed the blue eyes and it also looked like he had smoothed out the fabric of the cheap cotton dress which encased the girl’s slender body—dark in color so that the blood did not stain it too vividly. Now Amos Quinn closed his own eyes as he needed to make a conscious effort to keep himself under control as he insisted: ‘There was nothing anyone could’ve done that wouldn’t have made it worse, young feller. I shouldn’t have cussed at you the way I did to Charlie Cromwell.’
‘Whatever you say, feller,’ Steele allowed as he finished totaling the column of figures and made it come out at the same amount as Jane Quinn. And footfalls thudded up off the street and across the boarding of the sidewalk, then a group of men entered the store. While voices continued to call back and forth both near and far, as Cromwell shouted his excited account of what he knew.
‘Where are they?’ the fresh-faced, dirty-from-his-forge Naylor demanded. ‘Where’s Jane? Is she really …?’
Steele nodded as he counted out the precise amount he owed for the supplies, in bills and coins. But did not see the final light of faint hope die in the young man’s dark eyes until Amos Quinn rose into sight behind the counter and held out his blood-stained hands as he confirmed:
‘Yeah, boy. They killed her stone dead. Not a hope did she have. And it was my fault, what happened.’
‘Let me take a look at her, old man,’ a short and plump individual who looked as pompous as he sounded demanded.
‘You want to say it official, Doc, you do that,’ Quinn invited dully, backing away from the corpse, moving carefully to avoid tripping over the fallen stepladders. ‘But Vern Dexter’s the only one can do anything for her now.’
More people crowded into the store, women as well as men, shuffling their feet and talking in low tones. And now it was the odors of stale sweat and unwashed clothing that permeated the atmosphere to almost negate the mixture of food smells. Despite the fact that Cromwell’s mistake had been corrected and no one inside or immediately out front of the store believed Adam Steele had anything to do with the killing of Jane Quinn, the Virginian was viewed with a degree of suspicion by many pairs of eyes as he threaded his way through the press of people—the sole stranger in this group who all knew each other. Then, clear of the store, he was either ignored or the object of inquiring glances as he moved unhurriedly along the sunlit street, the Colt Hartford canted to his left shoulder and the gunnysack of supplies under his right arm. But he made no response to any of the tacit queries.
‘Am I needed?’ a man in the same age group as Amos Quinn asked anxiously from a shaded doorway beside a black-draped display window, above which was a sign that proclaimed in gold lettering on a black background: V. Dexter and Sons - Funeral Directors. ‘Yes, I see that I am,’ the old-timer announced before Steele could reply—having peered up the street and seen a signal. ‘Bob, pass me my hat and coat! Oliver, hitch the horse to the wagon!’ He snapped the orders into the parlor. Then moderated his voice to a funereal tone to say with a shake of his gray-haired head: ‘What a tragedy. That one so young and alive should be …’
But he saw that Steele had gone on by and was not paying him any attention. And then one of his sons was at his side, offering a high hat and frockcoat. The younger man, who was perhaps past fifty, had already donned his mourning garb and as soon as Vernon Dexter was identically attired, father and son moved off along the street without waiting for the wagon. This workaday buckboard without any funereal trimming and a battered pine box riding in the back appeared from an alley as the Virginian reached the blacksmith forge diagonally across from the funeral parlor. And when Oliver Dexter, who might have been the twin of Bob, had driven the buckboard in the wake of his father and brother, Steele was alone on the northern end of what was Barclay’s only street. So that he could have spoken aloud an uncharacteristic obscenity and there would have been nobody near enough to hear it. As it was, he simply mouthed the curse and there was just his stallion close by to sense the Virginian’s ill-humor and vent a snort to deny that anything which was bad was his fault. Or, Steele allowed with a sigh of resignation as he set down the rifle and sack of supplies, maybe the horse was trying to convey gratitude that the blacksmith had not completed his work before the violence along the street interrupted him. The stallion content to remain shoeless amid the creature comforts of the forge, rather than be out on another stretch of dusty trail covering more aimless miles until nightfall called the next halt.
‘Looks to me, feller,’ Steele murmured as he moved away from the radiant heat of the forge fire and into the cool shade of the doorway, ‘that we could be stuck here for some time.’
This time there seemed to be a plain-to-hear note of equine glee in the nicker as the horse tossed his head within the confining restraint of the hitching rope. While the Virginian continued to look down the empty stretch of street toward the scene that had caused him to voice the opinion to the horse. It was a broad street that curved gently from the high cliff and timber stand where the open trail started at the north side of town, swinging gradually toward the west as it ran south. This bend in the street was dictated by the contour of a low rise to the west of Barclay—those travelers in years gone by who had trodden the trail that was to become the street preferring to detour around the lushly meadowed and sparsely timbered hill on level ground rather than to climb up and over the ridge. Because he had ridden into this Texas town from off the south trail this afternoon of a fine spring Saturday, Steele knew the street ended on that side of Barclay about three quarters of a mile away: at the white painted church that was just out of his sight from where he stood, beyond the final part of the curve.
Squarely in view was the large gathering of townspeople on the street before the grocery: the crowd comprised maybe every citizen of Barclay, drawn by violent death out of all the buildings that flanked the hundred-foot-wide street. Houses and business premises, a school, a meeting hall, the church, a jail without an adjacent law office. Built of brick and stone and timber, all single-story and many with vacant lots between them. None of them opulent but almost all well cared for. Many of the houses had neat gardens within fences. A good many shade trees had been left standing as the one-street town expanded northwards from the area of the church to where a halt was called several years ago a few yards short of the cliff and the expanse of mixed timber across from it.
When Steele had first ridden into this town and been offered friendly greetings by so many of its citizens while he moved slowly along the quietly animated street, he had felt himself pleasantly infected by the sense of contentment and wellbeing that imbued the warm and clean air of Barclay. Now, tragedy had soured the place and its people and he was being made to feel very much the stranger he was: distanced from the common grief shared by the people down the street by more than the mere space between. Or was he distancing himself? Electing to stay detached from this new outbreak of violence that was none of his business? On past experience in many towns—some of them very similar to this one—it was his own attitude in the wake of the shooting of Jane Quinn that had sparked the switch to disaffinity among Barclay citizens. Such an attitude toward other people’s trouble a defense mechanism that made it easier for him to remain uninvolved in the consequences of such trouble. Sometimes.
Today it looked like it was going to be one of those times, he reflected, as he spoke to the horse and saw a ripple of movement in the crowd down the street. Heads were bowed, hats were removed and some hands inscribed the four extremities of the cross when Vernon Dexter appeared on the threshold of the store and signaled for his twin-like sons to bring the oblong box out of the store. The transfer from grocery to buckboard was made with a professional smoothness amid guileless dignity that seemed somehow to gain from the lack of funereal frills on the box and the wagon.
Only Amos Quinn and Chuck Naylor were left in the store after the corpse was removed and they stepped out onto the sidewalk boarding to watch as Vernon Dexter drove the wagon with his sons riding in the back, unnecessarily holding the temporary casket steady as it was conveyed up the smoothed-by-constant-use street.
Just for a few seconds everybody turned to gaze sorrowfully after the slow rolling buckboard, and in this time it would have been easy for the Virginian to imagine that some of the people in the crowd were looking beyond the mortician’s wagon toward where he stood in the doorway of the blacksmith forge, with animosity germinating from melancholy. But then the young man who had been engaged to Jane Quinn captured the attention of the entire crowd; the sound of his voice reaching to Steele, but the words he was speaking indistinct. Even after the creaking and rattling buckboard had been driven to a halt out back of the funeral parlor, the Virginian was still not able to hear what the young blacksmith was saying. But he could see that Naylor was vehemently intent upon convincing his audience that they should listen to him—then became angry when some of his fellow citizens moved away from the crowd and others began to give him an argument. But Amos Quinn stepped forward to calm Naylor and the diminished crowd: and was able to hold the silent attention of all who remained until he was through saying what he wanted. After which, all except for six men dispersed. And, as Quinn went back into his grocery and closed the door on the outside world, Naylor stepped down from the sidewalk and said something to the half-dozen men who remained that caused them to move off more quickly and with a greater sense of purpose than their fellow citizens who had broken away from the group earlier.
Two of the men who had obviously agreed to fall in with Naylor’s plan came part way up the street with him: one to go into the Lone Pine Saloon and the other to enter the Barclay Livery Stables which was just two vacant lots and a small house away from the forge. Close enough for Steele to hear the young blacksmith say to the much older man:
‘Five minutes at the most, Ned.’
‘You bet, Chuck,’ the dungaree-clad man of more than fifty affirmed. ‘Just need to locate my iron and saddle old Rusty.’
Grief and a determination to avenge the violent and needless death of the girl he was to marry had within just a few minutes acted to impress a stamp of maturity on the face and even the gait of the blacksmith who could be no older than twenty-five. He no longer looked nor moved like a curly-haired, fresh-faced kid with more energy than he knew what to do with in his muscular, five-nine-tall frame. Now there was a slow-burning fire in his dark eyes and grim resolution in his thin mouthline. His soot-smeared, faintly sweating face seemed to have suddenly developed lines of character that had not even been hinted at earlier that day. And he walked with a determined stride that issued a tacit warning for anybody who might consider trying to block his path.
‘Just me and six of the best hunters and shooters from town are goin’ after them, Mr. Steele,’ Naylor announced as he unfastened the ties at the rear of his leather waist apron and swung around the Virginian to enter the forge. ‘The old man figures that a man who carries just a fancy rifle the way you do … he’ll be a crack shot with it?’
Naylor tossed the apron over a workbench and went to a table in a corner of the fire-heated, horse-and-hot-metal-smelling room. There was a wooden tub of water on the table and the young man soaped his face and rinsed off the discolored lather; toweled his hands and face dry before he looked at Steele for a response.
‘I get by,’ the Virginian answered from where he still stood in the doorway. ‘This town doesn’t have any law?’
‘Barclay’s a law-abidin’ community, Mr. Steele,’ Naylor answered, and went to a door in the rear wall that gave on to a fenced yard where four horses were penned, adequately shaded by two oak trees and amply provided for by a trough of fresh water and a broken-open hay-bale. He took a saddle off the top rail of a stretch of fence and saw, as he prepared a sorrel gelding for riding, that the Virginian had moved into the open rear doorway of the forge. And he concluded: ‘You maybe saw the little stone shack with bars on the window up alongside the Lone Pine? Only prisoners it’s ever held were men that got fightin’ drunk in the saloon. Passin’ through strangers, mostly. Except on some holidays when a local youngster might make a hog of himself on more liquor than he can handle. Was in there once myself.’
Steele nodded, suspecting that Chuck Naylor was talking so much as an aid to keeping a fingerhold on his unstable composure. ‘When somebody’s murdered, a hunting party gets organized?’
Naylor checked the tension of the cinch and did a double take at Steele as he straightened up. Then said with a quizzical expression that made him look his true age again: ‘You don’t seem like the kind that would care about somethin’ like that?’
‘Maybe I’m just worried about where the line is drawn, feller? If I should forget my manners and spit on the sidewalk or curse in front of a lady or—’
‘Any minor stuff can’t be sorted out amongst ourselves, Duke Rexall handles for us, Mr. Steele. Real crime, when it does happen in Barclay, we send down to the Ranger station at Amarillo for help. This here that’s happened today, it’s somethin’ different. A lot of folks don’t agree it is, but enough of us do so that we can get together a vigilante group to go after the men that killed Jane. Goin’ to hunt them down, sure enough. What happens when we find them … well, that’s up to them. They surrender to me and Ned Butler and Bart Parsons and the rest, we’ll turn them in to the Rangers and they’ll get to stand trial by due process. And be hanged. If they put up a fight, we’ll just as soon give them one back. And blast them to hell. I guess you ain’t comin’ along with us?’
He posed the question and went with the gelding toward a gate in the side fence of the yard as hooves clopped on the street out front of the forge.
‘Had my fill of vengeance rides, feller. Nobody else in town can attend to shoeing my horse?’
‘Just Matt to come, Chuck, and he’s on his way!’ one of the riders on the street yelled.
‘I’m sorry, Mr. Steele. Not closer than a hundred miles of here. But I’ll get right on it just as soon as I get back.’ Naylor closed and fastened the gate as he made the apology and the promise. Then swung up into his saddle and rode, hatless and unarmed, along the side of his forge and out onto the street. The Virginian closed the door on the yard and moved to the open double doors at the front. Was in time to see the young blacksmith strap on a gun belt with a revolver in a hip holster handed him by one of the other six mounted men—all of whom also packed six-guns. Four had rifles jutting from boots slung from their saddles. Then the vigilante group moved out, grim faced and stiff in their saddles. Storekeepers and tradesmen aged from twenty-five to almost sixty. Acting in tacit concert with no apparent leader at this early stage in the manhunt: their resolve to succeed rock firm and seemingly unshakeable as they rode out of town in double file, with not a single backward glance at those of their fellow citizens who eyed them with emotions running from anger to anguish.
Then the riders were gone from sight beyond the rock escarpment and those people who had come onto the street to witness their departure went back indoors. Except, Steele saw as he moved down the street burdened only by the Colt Hartford sloped to his shoulder, for Vernon Dexter. For the undertaker, no longer wearing his high hat and frock coat, continued to stand on the threshold of his premises shaking his almost bald head as he kept his deep-set dark eyes fixed on the point where the horsemen had last been in sight.
‘No good will come of it, you mark my words, stranger,’ the undertaker said morosely as the Virginian drew level with his doorway on the other side of the street. ‘No good ever comes of it when folks meddle in business they aren’t fitted for.’
Just as he was about to offer a response, Steele saw the gray-haired and gray-faced old woman at the open window of the small house immediately opposite the funeral parlor. And quickened his pace briefly to step from between her and the undertaker as she answered:
‘Be more work for you, I’m thinking, Vernon. Who’d have thought it, in Barclay of all places?’
‘Been many a long year since I had to make arrangements for a client that died at the murdering hand of another, Mrs. Brady,’ Dexter countered, starting across the street. ‘Never liked it. Especially not gunshots. Very messy business.’
‘Coffeepot’s on.’
‘I’m obliged.’
The undertaker pushed open the gate in the recently painted fence at the front of Mrs. Brady’s flower bedded garden.
‘You’re most welcome, you know that.’
‘No, I much prefer to undertake for those who die peacefully, Mrs. Brady.’
‘Only natural.’
Steele directed a glance over his shoulder as he started to cross the street toward the Lone Pine Saloon. Saw not the slightest crack in the solemn expressions on the time-lined faces of the elderly couple to indicate either had spotted the vein of black humor Mrs. Brady had unwittingly struck. Saw rather than heard now, that they continued to talk back and forth in the same mournful manner as the man let himself in at the door while the woman withdrew from the window. Then he faced the way he was going again before he murmured for just his own ears:
‘Well, they do say the art of conversation is dead.’