MARY-ANN SAID THROATILY: ‘But never for money, Mr. Steele?’
And the Virginian did a double take at the woman as she moved away from the stove toward where he had come to a cautious halt beside the table. Where, for a stretched second, he experienced unfamiliar emotional turmoil. He had tried to shock her into revulsion for him at a moment when he ached with lust for her while he attempted to pretend he was indifferent to her response. Now, as his judgment was clouded, he could not decide if the look in her eyes and the tone of her voice were born of malevolence or animal desire. And he felt torn between pride and contempt for himself and respect and disapproval of her.
Then she came to a halt, an arm’s length in front of him, and started to bring up a hand for him to hold. And a gentle smile turned up the corners of her mouth slightly and generated a faint light in her eyes as she said with just a trace of thickness in her voice:
‘If anyone ever finds out, they’ll say it happened before Neil was cold in his grave. But the still warm dead no longer have wants and needs. Like the living … some of whom don’t give a small damn for what others say about them?’
‘Die you bastard, die!’ a man roared, just before Steele’s slowly rising gloved hand was about to make contact with that of the woman.
He saw the encouraging and understanding smile suddenly wiped from her face by a look of mixed fear and hatred as she snapped back her head to look upwards once more. A woman as pragmatic as she was, never for part of one second experiencing the irrational dread that it was the soul of her dead husband taunting her from limbo. She looked up at the smoke blackened ceiling because it was from above this that the raucous words were directed.
High above, Steele knew, as his lust was displaced by momentary self-anger before an ice-cold fear took over—formed his features into an impassive set and triggered a series of smooth actions: swung him away from the woman to scoop up his rifle off the table. His intention then was to complete the turn, douse the lamp and stride to the doorway, wrench open the door and explode as many shots as he could at the muzzle flashes of the enemy’s guns before he died.
‘No, this way!’ Mary-Ann rasped, and got the harshly whispered command issued just before a downpour of tumbling rocks crashed onto the roof of the shack and bounced to the ground on three sides.
The Virginian was still coldly contemplating imminent death and the prospect of killing as many as six of those responsible for his doom. If there were that many men at ground level out front of the shack, eagerly waiting for the woman and him to lunge through the doorway. Panicked by the bellowing voice of the man perched on top of the cliff against which the shack was built—who now attempted to heighten the terror of the couple in the tiny building by sending the minor avalanche of rocks down onto it. This as Steele froze his move toward the doorway and turned just his head to peer at the woman—in time to see her bending over as she struggled to shift a storage chest from the base of the cliff that formed the rear wall of the shack. The chest was obviously too heavily packed for her to move unaided and during the stretched seconds while the rocks pounded deafeningly on the roof, he was host to a hatred for Mary-Ann Slattery that threatened to expand into a white-hot anger with her.
For it was her fault as much as his that he was just seconds away from death. A stupid, futile death at the hands of a bunch of clannish Texans who made a living from digging rock out of holes in the ground. A death at the end of a life in which he had survived countless times against the highest odds when the Union army, hostile Indians, and professional gunmen had been intent upon killing him. Or men not unlike the Rexalls and their hired hands had tried to kill him for less impersonal reasons. But most of those reasons had been good and valid ones. And, by the same token, most times the Virginian would have gone down fighting for some kind of cause for which he considered it worth dying. Now though, he was about to go to his death because he had lusted after a woman. A woman who, as a new widow, should not have knowingly stoked his desire for her body. But who had done just that. Almost from the moment of their first meeting when he had been certain that behind her mourning veil she had not been ignoring him while she talked with Chuck Naylor. Then, he was again certain, the bogging down of the wagon wheel behind the fallen tree stump had been deliberately staged. Afterwards, studied looks and carefully chosen words and phrases had encouraged him to suppress the warnings of his better judgment and submit to the lascivious line of thought that each sight of her attractive face and alluring form acted to make more irresistible. Then had come the tandem ride from the Rexall Quarry Company to the shack, with the woman perforce seated with legs apart in a sexually provocative attitude as she was pressed hard against him on the constantly rising and falling back of the stallion.
It was little wonder then, that he was in a constant state of arousal that made it difficult for him to think of anything other than the body of the woman and his lust to possess it. Particularly after Amos Quinn went his own way back to Barclay and left them alone to head for the isolated shack on the timbered hillside and the prospect of having Mary-Ann Slattery became more attainable with every step the horse took. If the woman had signaled just one tiny token of resistance—made it known she was going to raise the most insignificant objection to sharing her bed with him—he would have closed his mind to her as a sexually desirable woman: given greater thought to the possibility that pursuit had not ended at the entrance to the Rexall quarries. It had merely become secretive.
‘Help me!’ Probably she shrieked the plea at the top of her voice as she wrenched her head around so that Steele could see the strain of physical exertion and the tormented frown of emotional entreaty on her face. But he knew what she said only because he read her lips that formed the words. For the barrage of sound as the man-made rockfall continued to pound the roof of the shack totally masked her voice. As he admitted the fallacy of the premise behind the thoughts that had been flashing through his mind, and his rage at the woman withered when he whirled and moved to do as she pleaded.
She knew she was going to die as uselessly as he and there was something in back of the heavy trunk she was desperate to see or hold before the end. He had been entirely wrong to attach any blame for the present situation to her. He either was responsible for his own actions and their consequences or he was not true to himself. And to blame a fine-looking woman for getting him into this mess because he was too horny to be concerned with anything other than screwing her … well, the least he could do for even entertaining the wretched notion for just a few seconds was to abandon his own intention of dying with the empty-chambered Colt Hartford in his hands in favor of helping Mary-Ann Slattery to indulge a final feminine whim.
‘Okay, that’s just the start, you son of a bitch and you bitch!’ the man up on the top of the cliff roared. ‘Gonna hot things up a little now!’
The trunk was six feet long by about four wide and deep. It needed all the Virginian’s strength in addition to that of the woman to start it folding away from the rock face at one end.
‘What the hell is—’ Steele started to groan, a scowl of effort giving way to one of bitterness as he recognized the voice of Dick Sayers.
‘Just books,’ she answered. ‘Neil and I both read a lot. There, that’s enough, I think.’
He had been going to ask her what she wanted from behind or under the weighty chest rather than the reason it was so heavy. Then, as she began to answer him on the wrong assumption, he turned his head away and frowned in concentration. Listening intently to another sound from outside the timbered walls and roof of the small shack. A sound far less intrusive than the crashing of falling rocks. But somehow far more menacing. A kind of rushing and subdued roaring noise, interspersed with muted sounds of debris a great deal lighter than rocks impacting with the roof. Then, just before a wisp of smoke infiltrated from the foot of the door, he realized that flaming brush was being dropped down on and around the shack.
‘I’ll go first, all right?’
She sounded utterly matter-of-fact and when he snapped his attention back to her he saw that her tone did not match the expression on her face. That the indifference of her voice was to emphasize the brand of triumph she was experiencing, as she smiled faintly at him and then came near to laughing out loud as she tilted her head back to peer up at the ceiling above which the roar of flames was now unmistakable.
Then she turned, dropped onto all fours and crawled into the gap between the rock face and the dragged-aside corner of the trunk—to go from sight through a crudely hewn hole at the base of the cliff.
‘Broiled bastard and baked bitch!’ Sayers screamed in high-pitched excitement as more smoke wafted into the shack, at the shuttered windows as well as the closed door now. ‘Any of you guys hungry enough to eat a meal like that?’
‘She looked good enough to eat when she was alive, Dick!’ a man yelled. From ground level, in the clearing out front of the shack.
‘And the dude!’ another man called from a different area of the clearing. ‘He looked pretty damn easy to chew up! And then spit out!’
There was a chorus of laughter, impossible to judge from how many throats against the increasing ferocity of the roaring flames.
‘Hey, don’t you worry inside there!’ Sayers mocked from above as smoke began to pour inside more rapidly after a hole was burned in the roof. ‘Just jokin’! We ain’t cannibals! Anyway, don’t figure there’ll be any meat left fit to be chewed on after … well, let me put it this way you bastard and bitch! It’s not me and the boys that are gonna have a blow out here tonight!’
The hole in the wall that had been concealed by the trunk was just two feet wide by maybe two and a half high. The rock through which it tunneled was three feet thick and the Virginian speeded his belly crawl to get out the other end as he recognized the implication of what the man on the top of the cliff was saying.
It was not pitch dark beyond the end of the short tunnel, even while his wriggling body blocked off the light from the kerosene lamp that continued to glow steadily in the smoke-filled shack. And as he pushed his rifle clear of the hole and started to drag himself into the larger tunnel, he realized what caused the faint and flickering red-tinged light: it was the fringe glow of the flames that were flaring on and around the doomed shack—reaching into the entrance of the old mine and down the tunnel that ran parallel with the base of the cliff face.
While rock and distance and the roaring of the voracious flames distorted beyond the point of comprehension the taunting voice of Dick Sayers, Steele adopted the same squatting posture as Mary-Ann in the perhaps four-foot-high by four-foot-wide mine tunnel. She on one side of the shack’s secret exit and he on the other. In the meager light of the fire from the mine entrance some fifty feet to their left, he could see the shine of her eyes and teeth as the woman continued to relish the triumph of outwitting the men trying to kill them. For long moments, while Sayers continued to hurl malevolence down through the flames to where he had every reason to believe Adam Steele and Mary-Ann Slattery were helplessly trapped, the woman sat on her haunches with her back and the back of her head pressed against one wall of rock, her glinting-eyed gaze fixed upon the constantly moving pattern of faint light and black shadow on the other. This as smoke began to curl lazily in through the mine entrance. And to billow out of the hole between her and the Virginian.
Then Sayers’ rising tone suggested he was reaching a virulent crescendo. His voice was curtailed. There was just the steady roar and intermittent crackle of burning. Until the woman coughed on the thickening smoke and her pleasure in the situation was replaced by fear of the just recognized new danger. ‘We could choke to death!’ she gasped, and covered her mouth and nostrils with both cupped hands as she turned her no longer tacitly laughing eyes to stare in horror through the swirling smoke at Steele. ‘We must get—’
She made a move to half rise and turn away from him—intent upon staggering through the thinner cloud of smoke toward the mine entrance and the promise of clean night air beyond.
‘They’re not the kind of men to believe in ghosts, lady!’ Steele rasped. And he turned in the same direction she faced. Firelight was stronger than that of the lamp as it shafted now through the smoke that coiled out of the hole from the house. He lunged across the light and smoke, thrusting forward the Colt Hartford to press it between her ankles. A coughing fit gripped him and he was forced by the stinging assault of smoke against his eyes to close them. This a part of a second after he heard her scream of alarm and saw her start to tumble forward. Then, perhaps a full second later, a massive explosion made a deafening impact on his eardrums. And, as he felt the blast of rushing air from the hole flatten him into the floor of the mine tunnel, for the second time this night he was convinced he was at the violent end of his turbulent life. Smoke, heat and a million particles of debris filled his world to the exclusion of all else. While the pain of deafness expanded until it threatened insanity, but then withdrew the threat. And the stench of the detonation was such that it seemed impossible for him to keep from retching, but he did. His world remained confined, though, and he was forced to wait for the ceiling and walls of the mine tunnel to cave in.
As he did so, he blamed only the men who had sprung the trap for what was about to happen to him. Not himself, nor Mary-Ann Slattery, not the series of events that had led to him being in the trap, nor any ethereal ruling fate that had steered him on to the course of those events. He stoked his hatred for the men responsible for his imminent death. Then abandoned this as a futile exercise. And found himself in the grip of a melancholic sense of regret. Not for the past, though. He was in a well of sadness that he never had gotten to start up the horse stud—the dream for the future that had given purpose to his present and negated the wasteful emptiness of so much of the past.
‘How’s about that, Tommy old buddy! Have we raised hell or have we raised hell?’
‘We sure as hell raised the roof, Dick!’
‘And flattened every frigging thing else, seems like!’
Dick Sayers opened the high-pitched, gloating exchange. Tom Rexall was the next to make himself heard. Then Ambrose Jansen made a crowing contribution. All three of them at ground level now. And all bursting into raucous laughter. Then other words were uttered, but Steele did not listen intently enough to hear what was said, let alone recognize the speakers. For, in the stretched seconds after he became aware that he had again cheated a violent death, his prime concern was to guard against new danger. Which, for the moment, entailed keeping quiet and out of sight—and ensuring that the woman did the same.
‘It’s all right, Mr. Steele,’ Mary-Ann said. And her warm breath against his ear was the only bearing he had on how close she had moved to him. ‘I know what you meant about ghosts. It’s best we make a pretense of being dead.’
His ears still hurt and the acrid pungency of the explosion continued to keep bile in his throat. But the blast had cleared the tunnel of smoke and, once he had fisted grit from his eyes, he was able to see the woman, as a crouched silhouette against the faint moonlight that entered through the mine adit about forty feet beyond her. He could not see his horse or gear in the same meager light, even after he had picked himself up off the rocky floor to squat once again in the same way as Mary-Ann.
‘I’m sorry I—’ she started to go on.
But interrupted it in response to the Virginian pressing a gloved forefinger to his own compressed lips. Next she complied with his signal that she should move aside. Then trailed him toward the mine entrance, the both of them bent forward from the waist beneath the low ceiling of the tunnel.
There had been no sound of voices from out in the clearing for some time, and Steele thumbed back the hammer of his rifle when he was still several feet short of the opening where scant moonlight and blessedly fresh air came into the tunnel. Behind him, the woman heard the movement of the Colt Hartford’s cocking action and vented a low gasp. She reached forward to catch hold of Steele’s jacket, tugged on it to stop him as she came to a halt. Opened her lips to speak as he turned his head to direct a warning frown at her. But it was another voice that ended the lengthy pause.
‘Tell you something, Tom?’ It was the heavily-built, acned-faced Jansen, sounding childishly excited and on the verge of giggling laughter.
‘What’s that, buddy?’ the pale-faced and average-framed younger Rexall countered, in a tone that suggested he was experiencing a sense of grim satisfaction.
‘It can never be said we didn’t send you off into married life without a bang.’
‘That sure is right,’ the good-looking, green-eyed and blond-haired Sayers yelled across Jansen’s shrill laughter.
‘I’ll drink to that, you guys!’ Rexall said, and it sounded to Steele and Mary-Ann as they moved stealthily closer to the entrance that the rich man’s son was being infected by the good humor of the others.
‘We all will!’
‘Damn right!’
‘Beats that crazy idea of holdin’ up old man Quinn’s grocery, Tom!’
‘It wasn’t so crazy, Am!’ Rexall retorted, on the verge of suppressing his newly found high spirits under the weight of embittered anger. ‘That old bastard’s sitting on a damn fortune in that store of his someplace!’
‘The hell with it, that don’t matter a shit no more!’ Sayers exclaimed happily. ‘All our friggin’ problems are over now. Hell, we even managed to get away from that stuffed-shirt shindig with all them highfalutin future in-laws of yours, Tommy old buddy!’
Steele and Mary-Ann had reached the mine entrance from where, in the shadows beyond the reach of the pale moonlight, they were able to peer safely out across the clearing. At the trio of dark-suited young men who were picking their way among the detritus of the devastated shack to where their horses were hitched to a clump of brush on the far side of the trail. Each of them carried a rifle, carelessly gripped in a single hand as they moved in a swaggering gait, arms about each other’s shoulders. Even when the neatly attired men reached their mounts and booted their rifles, then drew bottles from their saddlebags and swung around to survey the scene of destruction across the clearing, the couple in the mine entrance were safely out of sight.
The bottles were uncorked and raised, then tipped to tilted heads. White-shirted, necktied and jacketed chests were unwittingly presented as inviting targets to a man and a woman who both possessed the skill with a rifle to put a bullet squarely into the heart of each liquor gulping man.
‘We have proof enough, Mr. Steele?’ the woman whispered, and her breath was warm in his ear again.
‘You, me and the horse are enough for me?’ he answered, his voice mere scratches on the silence as he fleetingly glanced into her face through no more than three inches of darkness.
‘Thank you,’ she answered, catching the intonation that invited a positive response. ‘Sometimes it is important what other people know.’
He acknowledged with a nod that he was prepared to go along with what she wanted. Then spared a hopeful glance at his horse before he returned his attention to Rexall, Sayers and Jansen. The stallion, like his saddle and accouterments and bedroll, was where he had left him earlier, some dozen feet or so into the higher and wider main mine tunnel that was driven into the cliff at a right angle from the rock face. The animal, that would certainly have reacted in noisy panic to the explosion, continued now to stand in docile and unmoving silence. Perhaps on the verge of fresh hysteria: but only if pushed to it by another outbreak of violent sound.
‘What about that skinny old bastard, Dick?’ Jansen growled as he interrupted his drinking and drew the back of a thick hand across his fleshy lips and chin.
‘It’s a damn shame he wasn’t in that place with the other two,’ Rexall snarled, his mood of sourness returning again as he glowered at the remains of the shack.
‘Forget about him,’ Sayers announced in a light tone of reassurance as he corked his bottle and returned it to the saddlebag. ‘Most Barclay folks have thought he was a crazy old man for a long time. Tommy old buddy. After him blamin’ himself for the way you gunned down his kid granddaughter, hell—’
Rexall was taking another drink. He almost choked on the liquor in his throat, as he ripped the bottle away from his mouth and yelled in high rage: ‘Not me, you crazy bastard! Never say it was me! That guy … the one that lived—’
‘Slattery, Tom, Neil Slattery,’ Jansen supplied as he turned from putting away his bottle.
‘Yeah, Slattery. He’s the one pulled the trigger that killed the girl!’
He glowered at Sayers, who took his time about lighting a cigar before he nodded and allowed:
‘Sure, Tommy old buddy. With just the three of us being around, I forgot to keep it in mind. But, like I was sayin’, if Quinn tries to stir the shit about anythin’ that means trouble for us, every last person in town will say that he’s crazy as a coot.’
Sayers’ placating tones and Jansen’s eager nods of agreement failed to entirely convince Rexall. His anger diminished, but he was still disgruntled as he stowed his bottle and climbed slowly into his saddle.
Mary-Ann whispered in bitter tones and with a catch in her voice: ‘The son of a bitch couldn’t even remember Neil’s name.’
Steele made no response as the two of them watched Sayers mount his horse lithely while the fleshy Jansen was clumsily awkward in getting up astride his saddle. Rexall was talking again, but in low tones that failed to carry clearly to the eavesdroppers through the sounds of the mount. Then it was Dick Sayers who became the unopposed self-appointed leader of the trio—wheeling his horse ahead of the others and riding into the timber on the far side of the trail with confident speed.
‘A short cut over the hill to the Rexall property?’ Steele asked.
She shrugged; the look of embittered hatred still firmly set on her pale face. ‘I suppose it must be. Neil always rode the trails to and from work. I expect he would have discovered the cut-off in due course. If he had been allowed to live for any length of time.’
Steele turned from peering into the dark timber on the far side of the trail beyond the clearing as the diminishing sounds of three horses being ridden over soft ground finally faded from earshot. And he looked quizzically at the woman, who had seemed to be talking absently out of a deep mood of detachment—which might have signaled the onset of total withdrawal from the real world that was violently collapsing around her.
‘I’m glad you knew of another way out of the shack, Mary-Ann,’ he said evenly.
She detected concern in his tone or sensed it in his attitude. Said without a sign or sound of tension as she started toward the mouth of the mine: ‘It’s all right, Mr. Steele. I’m all right now. But I have this dread, a horror, of choking to death on smoke. Of being asphyxiated, you know? When I have nightmares, that’s the one that causes me most terror. After what happened in the explosion, I was still feeling …’ She had stepped out into the open night air and she shrugged. ‘Well, it was fortunate I didn’t have such easy access to your rifle this time, Mr. Steele. Because when that Rexall boy couldn’t recall Neil’s name …’
She was still talking too much, and in a way that warned she was still close to losing her grip on reality. But now she realized the danger without turning to look at the Virginian.
‘Anyway, I’m glad temptation was out of reach. You asked about the back way out of the shack. Neil and I couldn’t fail to see it when we moved into the place. There was no furniture of any kind to conceal it then. Neil and I put the trunk across the hole to block out the draft. He was going to fill it in properly after he got through with more urgent chores on the place.’ Only now did she turn her head to look at what remained of the shack for which she and her husband had made plans. And she said something, but her voice was too low for Steele to even detect its tone.
This as he finished checking on the stallion, having found the horse as calm and fit as he had looked when he first glanced at him in the wake of the explosion. He had sweated a little and some of the dried lather of this was crusted to his coat, that was all. Moving back towards the mine entrance, he saw just why he had failed to be aware of the side tunnel when he brought his horse and gear into the adit earlier. For, with the pale moonlight entering at the angle it did, the unevenly hewn hole appeared as just one more patch of dark shadow on the wall.
Outside, standing beside the woman in black whose paleness of face and blondeness of hair was emphasized by this same moonlight, the Virginian first looked at her. And saw he had been right to trust that she was capable of maintaining her self-control without interference.
‘After losing a husband, Mr. Steele,’ she murmured sadly without glancing at him, ‘a home is nothing.’
The shack, he saw, had been completely razed, the fabric of the building and the entire contents reduced to a state of blackened disintegration. Much of the stone and the timber and the metal fragments had been hurled in three directions across the clearing by the powerful blast. But enough of the exploded shack had been tossed straight up and then came down again to pile against the base of the cliff and hide the hole through which the occupants had escaped. Only as he looked at the heaped and strewn wreckage did Steele become aware of the dry smell of the explosion that continued to permeate the cool night air. No flames or even smoke rose from the ruin, the force of the detonation having smothered the fires.
The woman suddenly sighed and said with grim determination: ‘I know what I must do now is not lose my reason.’
Steele tried a faint smile on her as he answered: ‘Have to admit, I thought you were close to misplacing it a while ago.’
She nodded and returned his smile, but there was still a clear-to-see hint of hard resolution in back of her moonlight glinting eyes and the sardonic twist of her lips. Or maybe, the Virginian reflected as Mary-Ann returned her unblinking gaze to the wrecked shack and then swung her head slowly to peer at the timber into which the three men had ridden, the bleak smile was a sign that the woman was being drawn closer still to the fine line between brooding grief and derangement.
‘I was, but I’m all right now,’ she assured him yet again. And smiled brightly—too brightly?—at him as she whirled to add: ‘Only trouble is, I can no longer offer you the hospitality I promised.’
There was not a trace of sexuality implicit in her tone or expression. And the glittery smile went from her eyes and left her mouth in the shape of cynicism as she looked once more at the heap of charred rubble at the base of the cliff.
‘It’s not all bad, Mary-Ann,’ Steele told her, needing to make a conscious effort at a lightness of tone.
‘No?’ she posed absently.
‘You said it. Losing your place is nothing. And, anyway …’ He jerked a hooked thumb at the adit and brightened his smile when she looked questioningly at him. ‘There’s still mine.’