THE FRESH SIGN on the intersection where the side track spurred off the main trail to follow the shore of the lake showed that the group of riders with a dead man among them had divided here. About half to head south toward town while the others rode around the western curve of the trail that led to the Rexall quarries and beyond this to the family home.
Steele had expected this would be the case after Duke Rexall made his grandstand play at the Slattery shack and he wasted no time in close examination of the hoofprints. And paid far more attention to the flanking country than to the heavily marked ground passing under his horse as he rode at an easy walk in the wake of the westward bound riders: the Virginian seeking an early warning of a second attempt to bushwhack him. But if the man who planned the abortive attack of this morning had it in mind to try to make good the mistake, he was biding his time. For as this Sunday afternoon inched toward evening the peace of his surroundings was disturbed only by the unobtrusive sounds of his own unhurried progress.
Until he rode close enough to the gated entrance of the Rexall Quarry Company property to hear the mournful music that was being played on a harmonica inside the small stone-built shack to the side of the gate. He was still a considerable distance off when he heard the funereal music and saw the place from which it was coming; as he crested a low rise at the end of a northward swinging curve of the trail that completed an S-bend of something more than two miles in length from the lake. From where he had started in the tracks of the Rexall contingent to where he reined the stallion to a halt on the ridge the country was as good and varied as the terrain between Barclay and the lake—meadowed hills to the left of the looping trail and timber to the right.
From where he sat his saddle atop the high ground with the melancholy music drifting about a half mile through the twilight to reach him, he could see that the mixed timber forest continued to spread richly at nature’s plan to the east and the north. With just a single visible intrusion by the hand of man—among the evergreen tops of a pinewood glade some two miles north and a half mile east of the trail could be glimpsed the slated roof of what was obviously an extensive building, with three chimneys giving off gray smoke into the evening air. Steele guessed this was the Rexall house.
Nobody passing along the trail was left in any doubt that the scarred piece of country to the west was the property of the Rexall Quarry Company. For along the top of the square stone arch that framed the double wrought iron gates that provided an attractive entrance to the ugliness beyond the name was spelled out, also in wrought iron.
A fence comprised of several strands of barbed wire stretched taut between ten-foot-high poles ran off at either side of the impressive gateway, tight to the side of the trail that ran arrow-straight northwards from the foot of the slope below where the Virginian now urged his mount forward, and curving along the base of the hill to the west. Stretching for as far as the eye could see until intervening features of the terrain obscured it, but apparently stretching for many expensive miles around the perimeter of the Rexall Company’s land.
So far, just three man-made canyons had been inscribed into the rich earth and white rock beneath, looking like the crooked spokes of a wheel with an area inside the gateway the hub. Narrow at their shallow beginnings, but gradually broadening as they deepened, so that eventually there would be a massive, fan-shaped depression in the earth after the three quarries became a single one. As yet, none of the quarries had been clawed more than a quarter mile across the hillsides and at its broadest the widest one was perhaps fifty yards from side to side.
From the trail that ran by the gateway at the foot of the slope, the quarries were visible just as unnatural swaths of raw earth and bare rock on the sides of green hills. But if further evidence were needed of the kind of business that operated beyond the barbed wire and wrought iron, now that the company name was not so easy to read against the fading backdrop of the evening sky, it was provided by a fine coating of powder on everything—even the new leaves of the trees—and a dry smell of rock dust laced with the stale taint of old explosions that permeated the cooling and darkening air.
During the ride down from the ridge, Steele’s perspective had constantly changed and he had been able to see better into the oldest quarry, that looked to have been worked out of productive rock. But it was still being used. At its mouth the crushing plant was located, the square top of the hopper on a level with the hard-packed tracks that connected it to the two other quarries and the rest of the property—so that wagons could be reversed to the timber rim and have their loads of blasted rock emptied with ease into the jaws of the steam-powered crusher which tonight was silent and still, its sooted chimney outlet dormant.
Alongside the elongated plant were parked a dozen or so wagons. The stables for the horses that hauled the wagons were on the other side of the quarry. There were a number of other single-story buildings down there. An office, he guessed. And the company store Ed Vincent ran. Probably a cookhouse and a mess hall. Every stone and timber-built structure silent and unlit in the gathering gloom. And covered with the same layer of fine dust that clung to everything else.
It took the Virginian perhaps fifteen minutes to reach the gateway from his initial vantage point. During this time the harmonica player had interrupted his music just once—while he lit a kerosene lamp that spilled a shaft of yellow light from a window on the trail side of the small building. Then he had restarted the same mournful and monotonous series of chords as before. And the wailing music effectively masked the unhurried clop of the stallion’s hooves against the trail. Then the lower sounds Steele made as he reined his mount to a halt and swung down from the saddle, sliding the Colt Hartford out of the boot as he did so.
Even while he was astride the horse he had been able to get a good view of the one-room gatehouse through the undraped window. Now left the stallion standing patiently on the center of the trail as he moved in closer—to confirm there was just the single musically inclined occupant of the office-like room which was furnished with little more than a document littered desk with a chair, a row of storage cabinets that looked disused and a cold stove.
The lone man playing the lonesome sounding music was about fifty with a rough-hewn face and a squat build: not tall, but broad and powerful with the kind of features that warned he was not slow to respond to aggression in kind. He was dressed in a cream shirt that bulged with his muscles and an equally tight-fitting pair of black pants. A battered black Stetson was lodged insecurely on the back of his head of curly red hair. An old looking Frontier Colt was stuck into his belt at his belly, butt to the right.
The desk and chair behind it were in the center of the room, sideways on to the window. The man was sprawled in a comfortable posture in the padded, wooden-armed chair and had his left leg stretched out straight with the booted foot resting among the papers on the desk top. His right foot, which was nearest the window, would have been bare had it not been for the white bandage that encased most of it and held a bulky dressing in place.
The incessant dirge was abruptly curtailed as it reached the softest part of the piece—which was when Steele smashed the rifle muzzle through the window. Then thumbed back the hammer as broken shards of glass hit the cement floor inside the gatehouse and shattered into smaller fragments. The man was in the grip of the fear of sudden death for just a stretched second, unable to move a single muscle of his own volition as his Adam’s apple spasmed. But then, when no rifle shot cracked in the wake of the sound of breaking glass, he carefully lowered the harmonica and pushed it into a pocket of his shirt as he turned his green eyes toward the Virginian. And easily spread a bellicose expression across his weathered features that made it difficult to visualize him as the kind of man who could derive solace from playing sad music.
‘Who the hell are you and what the hell do you figure you’re doin’, mister?’
‘Name’s Adam Steele and I’m starting out by breaking a window,’ the Virginian answered evenly, face impassive. ‘Where it’ll end is up to you.’
The man with the injured foot nodded sagely. ‘I heard of you.’
‘But never did see me?’
The man who continued to lounge comfortably in the chair with his good foot up on the desk seemed to be making a genuine attempt to recognize Steele as he peered intently at him. At length shook his head as a pensive expression became firmly set on his weathered face. ‘Can’t recall that I ever did, Steele.’
‘Reckon you’re Ed Vincent?’
‘Right in one.’ He leaned forward and spat to the blind side of the desk from where Steele stood. The saliva resounded metallically in a spittoon. ‘Run the company store here at the quarries.’
‘Between finding fresh killed bodies.’
A nod. ‘That, too. Presently takin’ a turn at night watchman while the regular guy has fun over at the Rexall place. Ain’t a sociable minded kind, me. Parties and picnics and shindigs of that sort, they ain’t for me, Steele. Especially ain’t sociable minded when I got me a banged-up foot that hurts real bad all the time.’
He had started to lace the pensiveness with sincerity. Now winced—and Steele knew this was a genuine response to actual discomfort—as he shifted his injured foot slightly. This as the opening move in lowering his good foot to the floor and sitting upright in the chair.
‘Hurt yourself trying to get Chuck Naylor clear of the crushing plant, way I was told it?’
‘Way you heard it was right, Steele,’ Vincent growled, and any impulse to anger at the implication the account was untrue was concealed by a more anguished grimace in reaction to a harsher pain as the man half turned in the chair. ‘I heard you could be a dude gunslinger? Can see you’re a snappy dresser. Can you shoot that fancy rifle good as you can smash windows with it?’
‘Been known to put a bullet in a man even when I can’t see him, feller.’
Both Vincent’s feet were under the desk while he remained turned from the waist to face the Virginian. His gnarled hands were draped loosely over the arms of the chair, the right one just two or three inches from the butt of the revolver that was jutted toward it. Tiny beads of sweat stood out on his bristled face and they could have been caused by either pain or tension. With the stove unlit and the window broken, it was cold inside the room.
‘Accidents happen,’ the man at the desk said, and a wan smile came briefly to his face. Then the aggressiveness that had replaced initial fear was back again as he added: ‘And I’ll tell you what surprises me, Steele?’
‘Go ahead,’ the Virginian invited, and began to experience the tension of fear himself. But he was too cold outside in the unsheltered night to sweat. The short hairs on the nape of his neck stood up, though. And as the confidence of the slow-talking Texan expanded, Steele found it increasingly difficult to resist a compulsion to scan the white-powdered timber at his back.
Vincent had taken the makings from the shirt pocket across his broad chest from the one accommodating the harmonica. And, after he had tipped tobacco from the poke into the paper, he rolled the cigarette with his left hand while his right returned to the chair arm close to the old Colt six-shooter.
‘That there ain’t more accidents in this neck of the woods is what surprises me. Was a real freak thing, what happened to the town blacksmith. But people that got no right and proper reason to be here … get onto the Rexall Company property by gettin’ by the regular watchman and ain’t spotted by no other company men … Well, Steele, ain’t no tellin’ what’s likely to become of them. A man could fall off a cliff into one of the quarries. Or get blowed to smithereens if the boys are blastin’. Even take a tumble down one of the bore holes been sunk to see where the right kinda rock is located. And if it was one of them bore holes that went right on down into just plain old useless dirt … well, likelihood is the nosy parker wouldn’t ever be found.’
‘Seems to be a dangerous piece of country,’ Steele said as, one handed still, the man took a match from his shirt pocket, struck it on the chair arm and lit the cigarette that jutted from the center of his mouth.
‘It can be, is what I’m sayin’,’ Vincent responded as he leaned to the side to drop the dead match into the spittoon. Then resumed his upright posture again, hands on the chair arms and cigarette bobbing as he spoke. ‘Local people know it and anyway, unless they work for the company, they got no reason to come pokin’ around out here. Passin’ through strangers, they see the fence and get the message from that. For them that can read, there’s a whole lot of keep out signs hung on the fence. Just didn’t think to put a sign on the window of this place, I guess.’
He drew back his lips in a mocking smile, to show where the cigarette was lightly held between his tobacco yellowed teeth.
Steele remained impassive as he said: ‘Seems like you’re starting to enjoy yourself, feller?’
‘Because you ain’t got the message, Steele. Or should I say, it ain’t the message you came here to get?’
‘What you should say is—’
‘I ain’t through, Steele. Was told you might show up and was told to spell out a warnin’ for you if you acted like it was needed. And if you couldn’t read the way I spelled it out … I was told I could draw you a picture. And it’ll be my pleasure to do that, Steele. A guy is supposed to enjoy what gives him pleasure, ain’t he?’
‘Confession is a good way to—’
‘I still ain’t through, Steele,’ Vincent cut in again, and the grimace that altered the line of his mouth with the cigarette in it and put ice into his green eyes was not related to pain. Physical pain, anyway. His squat frame was held rigid with excitement. ‘Picture I have to draw is colored red, as in blood. And black as in the bottom of a deep hole. Green for the maggots that feed on rotten meat. White for the bare bones.’
‘The pictures you paint are as depressing as the music you play, feller.’
Vincent removed the cigarette from his mouth, checked that it really had gone out before he lodged it behind his left ear under the brim of his old worn Stetson. His hand returned to the arm of the chair, but gripped it tightly now. While the fingers of his right hand remained limp along the other arm, perhaps three inches from the gun butt. ‘Truth time, Steele?’ he asked tautly.
‘It won’t guarantee you a place in heaven, but maybe—’
‘I been shot before now, Steele,’ the man at the desk rasped between his clenched yellow teeth. ‘Ten, a dozen times, maybe. But I ain’t ever been told to let alone someone who caused me even half as much pain as I’ve had today. Let him alone, that is, if he sees sense and goes about his gunfightin’ or horse breedin’ business or whatever. Especially a pint-size dude I could take apart easier than spittin’, almost.’ He shrugged his wide shoulders and deepened the lines of his grimace. ‘If I didn’t have a game leg, that is. So it’s no wonder I wasn’t feelin’ in the best of humors when I heard you ridin’ on down the hill and figured there was a chance you’d just go on about your regular business.’ The grimace changed to another grin. ‘Got to admit, Steele, since it’s truth time: when you busted the window and stuck that fancy rifle in at me … I figured for a second you was gonna blast me outta hand. But soon as I knew that wasn’t gonna happen … well, be my pleasure to draw you the picture. For real.’
‘If you’re all through talking, feller, you’d best draw, uh?’ The Virginian did not alter his expression, his stance or the aim of the rifle. Just raised his gloved thumb up off the top of the Colt Hartford’s hammer.
‘Hey, come on,’ the abruptly apprehensive Vincent said, the grin becoming a frown. ‘You ain’t gonna just blast at me now? When I don’t have a cat in hell’s chance of defendin’ myself? You gunfightin’ guys always give the other guy a chance to …’
Ed Vincent was a little too thoughtfully cautious in the way he took off his hat—lifted his trembling left hand directly from the chair arm to the brim of the Stetson, while he inscribed a half circle with the other hand, so that Steele could not possibly suspect he was going for the gun stuck under his belt at his belly. The Virginian allowed the man to get a grip with the left hand, then shifted the aim of the rifle away from his sweat-run, tension-lined face to draw a bead on his bandaged right foot.
‘I ain’t through, Steele!’ the man shrieked.
The Virginian squeezed the trigger of the Colt Hartford. And as the shot resounded within the confines of the room that suddenly seemed to be filled with swirling, reeking gunsmoke, he could no longer resist the compulsion to glance behind him. And vented a soft groan when he saw the slender, black-clad form of Mary-Ann Slattery standing there, lightly holding on to his horse by the bridle. On her pale-in-the-moonlight face was an expression of mild satisfaction that expanded into the brand of triumph she had experienced when she knew he had shot a man at the scene of the ambush on the trail—the look of fervent excitement that turned her into a ravishing beauty. This as she sidestepped to pointedly peer around the half-turned Steele to see into the room through the broken window.
‘You’re through now, you murderin’ bastard!’ Amos Quinn drawled icily as Steele snapped his head around to view the tableau that so excited the woman. At its center was Ed Vincent who was in process of sliding down off the chair to crumple to the floor beneath the desk—one blood-soaked hole in the bandage around his right foot and a second bullet wound, less gory but far more damaging, in the center of his sweat sheened forehead. With his dying hand he had managed to drag rather than take the battered Stetson off his head. And the hat now hit the floor heavily at his side as he twisted into inert death below the desk, and a small revolver was displayed jutting from a pouch sewn into the underside of the crown. A much smaller gun than the European Lefaucheux that was clutched in the fist of Amos Quinn who stood in the open doorway of the room, the muzzle of the highly decorated gun still wisping with black powder smoke.
For stretched seconds, the old-timer continued to stare fixedly through the diminishing smoke of revolver and rifle at the corpse huddled on the floor in front of the chair and under the desk. And during this time he looked to be as unmoving as Vincent, but rigid rather than limp. Then, as the expression of malevolence drained off his gaunt features and was replaced by a look of apology that he directed toward the scowling Steele, he thrust the fancy gun into the pocket of the dark-colored duster that was two sizes too big for him and explained:
‘Had to steal your thunder, stranger. See, I knew what the sneaky bastard planned to do. On account of I sold him that old hat with the trick gun inside of it.’
There was utter silence within a wide area of the Rexall Quarry Company’s entrance for perhaps a full five seconds. While, once again in this usually peaceful part of the country, the chirp and buzz and rustle of nature was muted by the intrusion of gunshots. This as the old man became quickly afraid of the Virginian’s dark mood, the woman’s triumph was reduced to calm contentment with what had happened and Steele himself entered into an inner struggle to contain anger as an ice-cold ball at the pit of his stomach. Then asked in a brittle-toned voice:
‘You want me to thank you, Mr. Quinn?’
The owner of the grocery store gulped noisily and forced out: ‘I seen you had the drop on him! I heard that we fired so close the two shots couldn’t be separated! But it was me that plugged the bastard plumb center in the middle of his sneaky head, weren’t it? Looks to me like your bullet just went into his foot! Same place you plugged him first time, I figure?’
The thin old man in the oversize coat had started out on the defensive, become excitedly challenging and finished up scornful. The nocturnal creatures of the forest on one side of the trail and the quarry scarred hills on the other had begun to make their unobtrusive presence heard again as Amos Quinn made his rebuttal.
‘He admitted it, Mr. Steele!’ the woman put in quickly, drawing the Virginian’s head around to look at her. ‘He said it was him you shot this morning on the trail from town when he and the others tried to—’
‘What others, ma’am?’
‘What …? Well, I’d say that’s plain enough to figure out. Young Rexall and that fat company clerk …’
‘Jansen, Mrs. Slattery!’ Quinn supplied from inside the room, ‘Ambrose Jansen.’
The woman nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, that’s him!’
‘I’d say we oughta be getting away from here!’ the old man yelled. ‘Just could be the shooting was heard over to the Rexall home.’
The door of the gatehouse slammed closed after he had backed outside.
‘Plus one,’ Steele reminded as he turned fully away from the broken window and started toward his horse and the woman.
‘Yes, you said there were four,’ she allowed, and her composure was seriously undermined as Steele came closer to where she stood holding the stallion. ‘But he could have killed you this time, you know? Mr. Quinn knew it was Vincent in there when he heard the harmonica playing and …’
She interrupted what she was saying and stepped sharply back from the horse when he gestured with the Colt Hartford for her to let go of the bridle. She saw that his element burnished, gray-bristled face was in its usual impassive set without any light at all in the coal-black eyes. But there was still in the way he moved—as he swung up astride the ornately decorated saddle and thrust the rifle into the boot—a less than subtle suggestion that he was a man needing to work at self-restraint. But once he was mounted and she felt herself even more vulnerable as she looked up at him, she switched from defense to attack.
‘Though a man like you would never admit it, would he?’ she flung at him, her light-blue eyes glinting in the light from the moon and that of the lamp that spilled out of the broken window. ‘But it’s pointless to argue about it now, isn’t it? Since there’s no way in the world we can ever know if he’d have managed to shoot you after you merely wounded him? Right …? Now that he’s dead?’
‘Point is, Mrs. Slattery,’ Steele told her softly, and the conscious effort he was having to make to remain calm also sounded in the timbre of his voice. ‘I didn’t want him dead.’
‘Until you’d tortured him into telling you what—’ she started to taunt as he paused in what he was saying while he brought his mount around in a part wheel, heading him northward. But the manner in which the Virginian now peered fixedly in this direction along the moon-whitened, dust-powdered trail between the timber and the barbed wire fence caused her to curtail her angry accusation and look where he looked. And when she saw what had caught his undivided attention her irascibility was abruptly displaced by resignation to whatever fate had in store for her, as she said with an utter lack of concern: ‘So they did hear.’
‘Looks like,’ Steele replied, and now looked and sounded totally composed as he gazed at a point perhaps a mile and a half along the arrow-straight trail. Where, apparently from off a spur that led to the Rexall house, a sizeable group of riders had appeared, and had reined their horses to a halt at sight of the mounted man with a woman beside him, clearly visible in the lamp-augmented moonlight. ‘Quiet party, I reckon.’
‘Hey, you two!’ Amos Quinn yelled, as he appeared on the trail halfway between the gatehouse and the top of the rise to the south. ‘You gonna carry on yakking right up until …’
He left the rhetorical question unfinished when he saw Mary-Ann Slattery accept the proffered hand of the Virginian and allow herself to be lifted smoothly up onto the saddle in front of him—the couple’s actions in response to the lunging gallop to which the bunch of mounts up the trail was suddenly spurred.
‘Thank you,’ the woman said breathlessly.
‘You’re not welcome,’ Steele answered as he tugged on the reins to wheel the stallion, then thudded in his heels to demand an immediate spurt of speed. And the slipstream blew her blonde hair into his face. Until she gathered the flying loose ends in a hand, holding on to the mane of the horse with the other as she turned her head to peer into his dark eyes at close range.
‘I need you!’ she roared above the clatter of the stallion’s pumping hooves that raised an elongated cloud of white dust along the widening gap between the horse and the gatehouse. And, despite the effort she had to put into it to make herself heard, there was nonetheless a plainly discernible depth of feeling in the tone of the shouted words.
Steele allowed his dispassionate gaze to meet the plea for understanding in her eyes for just part of a second, before he peered up at the hillcrest and growled: ‘And I need you and Quinn about as much as Ed Vincent needed that hole in the head.’
‘You’re bound to be angry, I guess, but I—’
Although he was looking at where the old-timer was getting awkwardly into the saddle of a horse on the wooded side of the trail—diagonally across from where he had come through the barbed wire fence where the two lower strands were snapped—the Virginian could not fail to be aware of Mary-Ann Slattery still gazing at him intently, her head craned around so that her face was no more than six inches from his own.
‘That’s right, ma’am,’ he cut in on her through teeth clenched between slightly drawn back lips in an uncustomary scowl. ‘I shoot another feller twice in the same foot and it’s me who ends up hopping mad.’