CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Dan Caine woke with a dull headache and a What the hell happened? question in his scrambled brain. It took him quite a spell to remember. The events of the night came back to him slowly, piece by piece, like one of those wooden jigsaw puzzles he’d seen kids put together back in Thunder Creek. Then after several minutes of struggle, things started to fall back in place. Yeah, that was it, now he remembered. He and Violetta had killed Shadow Beck . . . and . . . and . . . Dan remembered that he’d dropped Nancy Calthrop’s ring into his shirt pocket just before somebody put his lights out. Was it still there? When he tried to lift his hand to make sure that the band was still in his pocket . . . he couldn’t. Damn it. He couldn’t move any part of himself. His legs were bound together by a heavy chain and his wrists were tied to a horizontal beam a foot above his head.

It seemed that killing Beck didn’t set right with somebody, probably Misty Maguire. The outlaw had been one of her regular customers, and in that wilderness of grass such men were hard to find.

Then a ray of hope. Clint Cooley would come searching for him and charge to the rescue. But the thought gave him little comfort and less reassurance. As matters stood, he was a prisoner in the High Time mansion and without a doubt hard times were coming down. No matter how he cut it, things weren’t looking so good. There was an excellent chance he could wind up dead.

The morning sun slanted through the timbers of a carelessly boarded, round window. Dan looked around and figured it wasn’t a window but the place for the long-gone steam clock. To his right, covered in gray spiderwebs, was a jumble of rusted metal, some sort of wood furnace, a clutter of brass and copper pipes of various sizes and piles of gears and cogs. The black Roman numeral VII was painted on a rectangular ceramic tile that lay on the floor, and like everything else in the room it was coated with dust. A pile of junk and the number that indicated seven o’clock twice a day was all that was left of the fabled clock that could be seen for a hundred miles.

But Dan Caine wasn’t about to shed tears over a timepiece. He had to get out of there. And for a solid hour he tried, but the ropes that bound his outstretched arms were cruelly tight and would not budge. He fought to pull himself free until his wrists bled, but his bonds held firm. Finally, breathing hard and so thirsty his mouth was as dry as mummy dust, Dan gave up the useless struggle. His head hung, a man facing a lingering death from crucifixion in a whorehouse.