THERE WAS NO gunfire from the group of half a dozen riders on that many horses who chased three astride just two mounts. Which, Steele decided, probably meant the top hand of the bunch had the authority to impose his will on the rest of the men. For, although pursued and pursuers were always out of effective range, there was generally some shooting for the hell of it in such a situation—when the sheer excitement of the chase took a grip on the more highly-strung men doing the chasing.
Then Steele and the woman, with Amos Quinn who had been overhauled on his less burdened but also less powerful horse, were over the ridge and out of sight as well as range of the riders behind them. And the Virginian reined the stallion down to an easy walk along the stretch of trail that inscribed the S-curve between the shoulders of hills toward the intersection in the east where the track cut off through the old silver mining area. Amos Quinn, obviously terrified of being captured by the pursuers, was unaware for several seconds that the pace of the stallion had been slowed. When he did realize he was galloping alone along the wide loop of the first curve, he pulled his gelding to a skidding snorting, half rearing, head shaking stop. Then, in the wake of this raucous series of sounds, with just the steady clop of the stallion’s measured pace to compete, the body of sound from over the ridge was audible to Steele and Mary-Ann Slattery.
At first the thundering of many hooves at a gallop, unvarying in tone and slightly rising in volume as the distance shortened. Then the cadence altered, the horses slowing down. Just for a moment or so, the noise from beyond the hill seemed louder. But then it very rapidly diminished to the point where nothing was said or done loudly enough to carry the intervening distance. Which happened just as the stallion drew level with where Amos Quinn sat his heavily breathing gelding and Steele kept the doubly burdened horse moving on by without pause.
The old-timer cocked his head to the side in a listening attitude for a moment, before a grin drew back his thin lips from his near toothless gums and he growled as he urged his mount forward to catch up with the others: ‘Hey, it sounds like they’ve given up on us!’
‘They’ll have stopped at the shack by the gates, old man,’ the woman said bleakly. ‘To find out what happened to Vincent. All they knew at the start was that there had been some shooting.’
The grin was immediately gone from the thin, time-lined face and he began to cast quick glances over his shoulder; then nervously in all directions as the silence beyond the clop of the hooves of their own two horses lengthened. Until he gazed earnestly at the impassive faced Virginian and tense Mary-Ann Slattery, and was ignored by both of them before he suggested:
‘Shouldn’t we keep on high-tailing it, then? Take the chance they’ve given us to put more space between them and us? Wouldn’t you figure that’s what we should do, Mrs. Slattery?’
‘I, more than you, am in Mr. Steele’s hands, old man.’
‘You have some place in mind to run and hide where the Rexall people won’t be able to find you?’ Steele asked, without interrupting his habitual effortless surveillance of the moonlit and shadowed hills on one side and timber on the other—as yet relied on his sense of hearing to signal fresh pursuit from behind.
Just the sounds of their own easy progress disturbed the night during the pause while the others reflected on what Steele had said. Then the woman allowed after a sigh:
‘That’s right. Even if they didn’t see us clearly enough to recognize us, they’re sure to make the right assumption.’
Amos Quinn shrugged and nodded, then added: ‘Guess that’s right. And what you said is right, too, stranger. Ain’t no place for Mrs. Slattery and me to go where Duke Rexall’s hired hands couldn’t track us down. Well, no place for me, anyway.’ He directed a pointed glance at the two riders on the one horse now. ‘On account of everything I got in the world is tied up in my grocery … and I’m too long in the tooth to even think about starting over. Whereas a fine-looking woman like Mrs. Slattery is gonna have to start thinking about making a fresh start soon as the hurt of widowhood heals.’
Although her back was to him, Steele could sense Mary-Ann Slattery’s embarrassment, almost as if she were suddenly suffused in a head-to-toe blush that generated heat in the coolness of the night. She had to swallow hard before she trusted herself to speak in a natural tone.
‘I’ll leave if and when I’m good and ready,’ she said, and was obviously dissatisfied with the degree of vehemence that coated the words. Added extra force to her voice when she went on: ‘Not when a group of bullying cut-throats try to scare me into going.’
‘Admire your spirit, Mrs. Slattery,’ Quinn said.
‘Mary-Ann, please, old man,’ the woman replied in a manner that suggested she had made the overture several times previously.
‘Right, Mary-Ann it is,’ Quinn agreed, his mood lightening to the same extent as that of the woman as their voices and the sound of hooves on hard-packed trail remained the only disturbances in the peace of the country night. ‘And I guess I oughta quit calling you stranger all the time, Steele?’
‘There’s a lot of names you could call me, feller, and all of them would be the right ones,’ the Virginian replied sardonically.
‘Hell, mister, it wasn’t our intention to get you in deeper when—’
‘That is correct, Mr. Steele,’ the woman cut in, snapping her head around to peer into his face at close range. Eager to get it said her way and for him to see the sincerity in her almond-shaped eyes. ‘The way you left my place this afternoon, the old man and I had no way of knowing what you intended to do. And, in truth, when we came out here we did not have much of an idea of our own intentions.’
‘We didn’t even know you come this way, stranger!’ Quinn put in disdainfully.
‘Precisely!’ the woman agreed quickly, more anxious than ever to do the talking. But she checked herself from blurting what first entered her mind. Peered with greater intensity into Steele’s expectant eyes and said with a husky tone before she faced front again: ‘Although I know I hoped you had.’ The disconcertion went out of her voice and the tension eased from her frame. ‘We simply felt this undeniable compulsion to do something … anything rather than stand by and see the Rexalls get away with murder.’
‘Like Chuck Naylor had nothing fixed in his mind to do when he left town not too long after you and Mrs. … Mary-Ann this morning,’ Amos Quinn said, and this time was allowed to continue by the woman who shared Steele’s saddle. ‘When I see him getting ready to ride out of Barclay, I asked him what he planned to do. All he’d say was that he believed what Mary-Ann said about her husband not killing Jane. And that the entire town knew there was something real wrong. To stay in Barclay, with people closing their eyes to what had happened … well, Chuck told me it was burning at his insides like a disease and there was but the one cure for it. He just had to find out the truth. You know the final words I heard that young guy say, Steele? When he was riding out of town? He said he was going to get over what ailed him. “I’m going to get either killed or cured, old man,” is what young Chuck said to me. And he yelled it real loud, so lots of other Barclay people heard it, too. And you saw and heard how some of them people acted when the Rexalls paraded his corpse out front of Mary-Ann’s place?’
‘We think Mr. Naylor must have seen or heard something at the quarry,’ the woman said. ‘Something incriminating to take to the Rangers. That even the people of Barclay couldn’t ignore. And that he was seen and killed.’
‘Reckon so,’ Steele allowed.
This, his first comment in a long time, encouraged Amos Quinn to continue with his account. ‘Right. When word reached town about Chuck having a so-called accident, I was sure as day follows night that a whole lot of people never believed that’s what it was. But nobody said nor did a thing to go against the Rexalls. So I saddled up and rode out alone. Didn’t ask nobody to come along, but it was plain I was fixing to go looking for trouble, so sure as hell nobody volunteered to join me. What kind of trouble, I didn’t know. Same as Chuck didn’t know before me. Just had the same sort of gut feeling he did. Was ready for the kill or cure treatment, like him. But figured myself to be better able to give as good as I got than Chuck was. Knew the Rexalls was still in a killing frame of mind, of course. But also …’ He moved a hand to caress the contours of the revolver in a pocket of his duster. ‘I’m no fool with a gun. Gunsmith is my trade, Steele. And when I was selling them—and sometimes making them—for a living, I could shoot them better than most men that were my customers. Lady I married hated guns, so I switched to the grocery business. After she’d been passed on for a while, I started to dabble in guns again. Like you know …’ There was a tremor in his tone as he made this oblique reference to the sales pitch that led to the death of his granddaughter and his sunken eyes looked sheened with wetness for a moment. Then he expressed malevolence as he went on: ‘Like that son of a bitch Ed Vincent knew, too. After I sold him that trick hat.’
‘Makes three of us who know one end of a gun from the other, feller,’ Steele drawled as they neared the point where the side track spurred off the trail at the end of the S-curves to go along the lakeshore at the foot of the timbered hill.
‘It’s just something that happened, Mr. Steele,’ Mary-Ann said quickly, on the defensive. ‘I have a natural aptitude for shooting guns. Which I never knew I had until Neil took me out hunting once. In Louisiana before we were married. Of course, I wasn’t such a good shot right away. But Neil didn’t have to spend too long teaching me.’ Without pause to signal a coming change of subject, she went on: ‘You’ll come stay at the place, old man?’
Both horses were reined to a halt at the intersection of the main and side trail and Steele sensed the sudden tension that came to the woman sitting so closely in front of him.
This before she shifted in such a way that it was a tacit request to be allowed to dismount.
‘I’ll ride you home, ma’am,’ Steele told her, which did nothing to calm her uneasiness.
But Amos Quinn expressed relief as he said: ‘If you was gonna be alone, Mary-Ann, I’d surely insist on taking you home and staying with you. Way things are. But seeing as how you’re in such good hands, I’ll take the chance to get done a little unfinished business I left in town. Goodnight to you. And you, Steele. Figured I was doing you a favor, plugging that sneaky bastard Ed Vincent. And don’t you forget now … if you want to hire on official like to see that Tom Rexall pays for killing my Jane, I’m more than willing to put up the cash.’
He looked everywhere but at the man and the woman astride the other horse while he was taking his leave of them and making the offer to the Virginian. Then, with a final anxious glance along the trail they had ridden from the scene of the latest killing, he heeled his gelding into an instant gallop, without giving the woman or Steele an opportunity to respond. Against the thud of the gelding’s pumping hooves, Mary-Ann accused:
‘It’s your fault, Mr. Steele. If you had let me down from the horse, he’d have felt it was his duty to—’
‘Your late husband was a good match for the younger Rexall, ma’am?’ Steele cut in.
‘What?’ She was so disconcerted to be left alone with the Virginian she apparently genuinely did not fully understand what he said when he interrupted her.
‘Old man Quinn is sure Tom Rexall killed his granddaughter. Does he have any reason other than blood being thicker than water to think so?’
‘Blood and water …?’ She remained in a state of confusion as Steele tugged gently on the reins and heeled the stallion along the spur. ‘I’m sorry, I—’
‘Maybe the Rexall Quarry Company looks after certain of its own to the same degree Duke Rexall himself would cover up for his son?’
‘Oh, yes, I see. I can walk from here, you know. I want to make that clear.’
‘That is clear, Mrs. Slattery.’
‘Mary-Ann, please? Yes, I have had time to think about it, Mr. Steele, and Neil and Tom Rexall were alike in height and build. And hair coloration. Nothing else, but then the men who came to the grocery store were masked. But old man Quinn never knew Neil. He has a much sounder reason for suspecting Tom Rexall shot and killed Jane. You see, the girl only came to live in Barclay a year or so ago when her mother died—her father, the old man’s son, was already gone. Tom Rexall went east more than three years ago and returned just last Monday for the wedding. According to the old man he never did come to town before so he had no way of knowing Jane was deaf. Ambrose Jansen knew. And so did Dick Sayers who, the old man is convinced, was the third man at the hold up. As you know, it’s been admitted Tom Rexall and Jansen were involved. He doesn’t have anything but a hunch regarding the third man being Sayers, but …’
She had been talking fast, her body pressed tight against Steele’s, stiff with the tension of nervousness now there was not a third-party present. Her tongue got ahead of her line of thought and she lost the thread of what she was saying.
‘Maybe it was Sayers and maybe it was not, Mrs. Slattery—’
‘Mary-Ann!’ she insisted.
‘Mary-Ann,’ he allowed in the same easy tone as he steered the stallion around the curve of the track, away from the lakeshore and up the wooded slope. ‘Maybe Ed Vincent could have told me one way or another and maybe he couldn’t.’
‘Would you have asked him?’ the woman demanded, still uneasy to be alone in such close proximity to the Virginian. But firm in her rebuttal of his implied criticism. ‘The way I understood it, you were only interested in punishing the men who tried to kill us—you say you!—on the trail this morning?’
‘Three men were at the grocery, Mary-Ann. I made it four took part in the ambush. Duke Rexall operates a quarry company, the way I hear it. Far as I know, he doesn’t run a bunch of desperadoes on the side. So the count of seven men is a little on the high si—’
‘Of course!’ she exclaimed excitedly, and snapped her head around to peer into his face as they reached the clearing with her shack up against the rock face at the rear. And moonlight unfiltered by spring foliage showed clearly the eager comprehension in her blue eyes and the total lack of expression in his black ones. ‘Rexall, Jansen and Sayers, plus Vincent. Although Vincent ran the company store, he was also Duke Rexall’s troubleshooter, Mr. Steele. Neil had told me that, soon after we moved out to here and he began to work on the Rexall place. More than one man warned him to steer clear of Ed Vincent. And tonight the old man told me about him. Said the story was that he used to be a gunfighter a few years ago. Used to taunt his intended victims by playing funeral music on that mouth organ before he gunned them down. So, as soon as we heard the music in the distance, the old man started to worry. Then, when we got to the top of the rise and saw you smash the window and aim your rifle inside … well, the old man managed to babble to me something about Vincent’s hat. Before he left me with the horse and went tearing off down the hill. And through a hole in the fence. I thought about calling out to you, but realized the danger of distracting you and making matters worse. So I approached as silently as I could.’
Only now did she seem to become aware she was home. And she was embarrassed once more. Almost stumbled in her haste to get inelegantly out of the saddle. Then, on the ground and watching him dismount, next the two of them moving side by side across the clearing with the horse behind, she was her usual composed self.
‘What is done is done, Mr. Steele. In this context, from the killing of Jane Quinn to the death of the man Vincent. Both, perhaps, may be termed avoidable if only the perpetrators had been aware of known facts and had not acted in haste. I know only what those men told me this afternoon about the way in which young Naylor died. I may seem hard, but there is little point in pretense. Right now, I am not concerned with any of this. I know for a fact that my husband was brutally murdered in cold blood simply because Duke Rexall required the corpse of a man who bore a passing resemblance to his son. Any one of a dozen or more individuals would probably have served the same purpose. Neil just happened to be available.
‘I’ll start a fire in the stove?’
She had needed to raise her voice as she neared the climax of what she was saying, when she halted out front of the crude shack and Steele veered away from her to lead the stallion toward the mine entrance, outside of which he began to unsaddle the animal. The louder her voice became, the harsher her tone sounded, bitterness dripping from each syllable. Even the final comment with its implication of a request for his agreement to share the meager comforts of the spartan shack sounded hard and sour as the words rang out in the moonlit quiet of the night.
‘Sure,’ Steele told her, and led his horse into the pitch blackness of the adit between the pile of slag and the shack. Emerged a few seconds later with the Colt Hartford sloped to a shoulder. And was surprised to see Mary-Ann Slattery still standing out front of the closed door of the shack, her head tilted back so that her face was toward the cloudless sky. If her hands had been clasped in front of the gentle swells of her breasts instead of hanging loosely at her sides, and her eyes had been tightly closed, she would have looked no less reverential.
But then she destroyed the atmosphere of piety without moving more than her lips as she heard him shuffle to a halt on the threshold of the mine tunnel. Said bleakly: ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Steele. I’m not going religious on you. I hold no firm belief.’ While continuing to tilt her face with its unblinking eyes toward the softly moonlit enormity of the sky, she moved a hand lethargically to point at the fresh grave in a corner of the clearing. ‘Neil’s remains are buried there, I know. But it does no harm to think about his spirit or his soul or whatever being free elsewhere?’
‘Reckon if you get some kind of comfort from believing that, then it doesn’t do any harm, Mary-Ann,’ the Virginian replied.
‘I haven’t suddenly gone religious, Mr. Steele, and I sincerely hope I am not losing my reason. But I felt it necessary to tell him—Neil, I mean—that I can’t do what I must do alone. I need help to avenge him. At whatever the cost. And I have no money.’
She shifted her intent gaze from the sky and turned to open the door of the shack. But held back from entering to look toward the Virginian who had started toward her. Earnest sincerity was inscribed on her freckle-cheeked face in the frame of her blonde hair. And she shook her head almost imperceptibly and formed a hushing shape with her lips when he started to argue:
‘I don’t sell my gun, like I’ve already told you and—’
‘Please, Mr. Steele,’ she interrupted as she stood aside to usher him across the threshold. ‘And did I not tell you I have no intention of becoming a whore? I’m offering you food, drink, warmth and shelter. Within the confines of this very small home. You are a man and I a woman. If, in the darkness and cold and loneliness of the night you find temptation too strong to resist … I have told Neil I will offer no resistance of my own. Subject closed? For now and perhaps ever?’
He had gone into the shack and set down his rifle on the table. Now he struck a match on the underside of the table and lit the kerosene lamp hung from a hook in the ceiling. When he turned to look at her she was waiting patiently for an answer as she stood against the closed door between the shuttered windows.
‘You’re a strange lady, Mary-Ann,’ he said, with a pensive shake of his head as he removed his hat.
The briefest of cool smiles flitted across her face as she moved away from the door to cross to the cold stove. And told him: ‘I’m a realist, Mr. Steele. Neil was the dreamer in our relationship. I always sought to foresee problems before they came, while he constantly hoped for the best.’
‘I’ll do my best to resist temptation and not be a problem,’ Steele said.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean that to sound the way it came out!’ she exclaimed. She was down on her knees before the stove, preparing to rake out the dead ashes. When she half turned toward him, the black dress closely contoured her sloping thighs and the jutting cones of her breasts. And the penitent expression on her face acted to emphasize the sexual attractiveness of her unwittingly submissive attitude. ‘I mean that Neil and I—’
‘I know what you meant, Mary-Ann,’ he broke in, and gave her a quiet smile in a genuinely contrite attempt to ease her discomfiture.
She nodded her acknowledgement and then swung around again to resume the grate cleaning chore. Offered: ‘I’m not usually so careless in the way I express myself.’
All he could see of her now was the disheveled blonde hair and the black-clothed curve of her back from narrow shoulders to the flare of her hips and the slender shanks below.
‘I can believe that,’ he answered, conscious of the strain of huskiness in his tone as he found himself unable to shift his gaze away from the woman as a stirring of desire for her refused to be checked. ‘And maybe you should know something about me.’
She started to turn to look at him once more, but with curiosity mixed in with more than a modicum of desire in her light, almond-shaped eyes this time.
‘Usually,’ he went on, moving to the side so that the table was not between them as she hooked a hand over the cold stove to help herself upright on suddenly weakened legs, ‘I don’t get to make a widow this way.’
‘You don’t?’ Mary-Ann countered, arousal causing her hands and her voice to tremble as she stood to her full height and withdrew the hand tentatively from the support of the stove, like she was ready to reach for it again should the final reserve of strength drain out of her frame.
‘No, Mary-Ann,’ Steele told her, wanting the woman so badly that the anticipation of taking her approached the threshold of pain. But at the same time he was glad he was committed to giving her a final opportunity to reject him. Added ice to his tone and his eyes when he said: ‘Usually I only make a widow by killing her husband.’