Two days later, Rae Marsh saw before him once again the decaying log fort and scattered buildings of Bent’s Crossing. He had ridden carefully, warily, back through Fletcher’s Hole, taking time to learn more about the terrain, memorizing the run of streams, the hills and canyons and gulches of the place. It was necessary that he know the ground well: it was going to be his battlefield.
There was no doubt about that now, he thought, looking down at the town. With Tom Ford behind him—and he did not discount Crystal, either—he had his army, and the war could begin.
The way Rae had handled the fight with Boots Hobbs had been the credentials Ford had been waiting for. He was a man who respected strength, nerve, gun speed. He was also, Rae had learned, in his own way a levelheaded, cold-blooded businessman. He was chary about making a deal, tough about terms. But he had the organization—the guns, the way-stations at which rustled cattle could be held until blotted brands had healed, the buyers —and there was no way Rae could do without him.
And now the next move was— Well, he would consult with Crystal about that. In the meantime, he’d had a long ride; he was dirty, tired and hungry. He jigged the bay with spurs and set it at a high lope into town.
As its hoofs thudded on the hard-packed dirt of the main street, he was aware of eyes on him. Cleve Anders had done a good job of spreading the word about him. Well, the hell with Anders, too; Rae Marsh had his warpaint on today.
He pulled up in front of Crystal’s place and swung down. The bay snorted and tugged its head toward a nearby watering trough, and before Rae tethered it, he led it to drink. While the animal dipped its muzzle in the water, he stood alertly, his eyes sweeping the street.
They were all watching him, the people of Bent’s Crossing, all staring at him as if he were some sort of freak. He grinned wryly and deliberately let one hand swing near his gun butt, staring at a group of busybodies directly across the way. Immediately the knot of loafers broke up, faded back, intimidated. Marsh chuckled softly; but there was no mirth in the sound, and a nagging sense of danger kept his muscles taut. It was that sixth sense that made him turn and look in the other direction before he led the bay back to the hitch rack. And he was not even surprised; it was as if he had expected to see two figures clumping down the board sidewalk toward him, two men whom he recognized immediately—Cleve Anders and his own half brother, Will Marsh.
They were a hundred feet away and coming steadily, purposefully. Rae let the bay’s reins drop; it would stand ground hitched. Then he moved clear of the watering trough and faced them.
As they approached, he could hear Will Marsh’s voice, low but excited. “Now, listen, Cleve,” the kid was saying. “There ought to be a way to settle—”
“Shut up,” Anders said. Then he stepped down off the sidewalk and into the street. Rae felt a peculiar kind of aliveness in his right arm and hand. I could kill him now, he thought. I could kill him and then I’d be clear of all this. But the thought went as quickly as it had come. Anders would have to draw first, and even if Rae beat him, there would still be Will. Suppose he drew, too? Something in Rae rebelled at the thought of facing the boy over the muzzle of a gun. It was not that he couldn’t beat Will, but this was his own father’s son, his own flesh and blood. . . .
So Rae slowly raised his right hand well away from the gun and stood spraddle-legged, with arms folded, waiting for them to come up.
As Anders covered the last few feet between them, he was grinning with that contemptuous twist of lips Rae had seen before, as if everyone but himself was dirt.
Anders stopped almost arm’s length away, with Will behind him. “Well,” he said. “You are the hard-haided one, ain’t you?”
Rae said nothing. His eyes met those of Anders.
Anders did not flinch from his gaze. He said quietly, “I thought I told you to git the hell out of Fletcher’s Hole. And to stay got.”
“I’m particular about who I take orders from,” Rae said.
Anders drew in a long breath. “Then it looks like you got to be taught another lesson, don’t it?”
Rae’s back was against his horse. He said, very softly, “You got another gunny sneaking up behind to hold the drop while you have your fun? It won’t be so easy for him this time.”
“There’s nobody sneaking up,” Will Marsh said shrilly. “What do you think we are?”
“I know about Anders,” Rae said tersely. “I ain’t made up my mind about you, yet.”
“Don’t take time to,” Anders said. “Jest git on that horse and ride.”
“Sorry,” Rae said. “But I’m visitin’ a friend here. So I guess I’ll stick around.”
Anders’ eyes narrowed. “Hombre,” he grated, “we’ve talked long enough. A little gun-whippin’—!” And his hand shot downward.
Rae did not even try to draw. But his body hurtled forward like an uncoiling spring. As Anders tried to pull out the gun, he locked his arms around Anders’ body, pinioned him. His weight bore Anders rocking backwards. Anders tripped on the edge of the sidewalk; and the two of them crashed down onto the boards, Anders beneath, Rae on top. In that instant, Rae caught a glimpse of Will Marsh standing indecisively, hands spread. “Stay out of this!” he bawled desperately, and then his left hand locked on Anders’ right wrist, as the big man tried to finish dragging his weapon from the holster.
They rolled there on the boards for a moment, then, fighting for the gun. Anders was strong as a bear; Marsh was a cougar of a man, whipcord tough, wiry. They rolled over and over along the sidewalk and all the strength years of hard range work had built into Rae’s arm and wrist and hand went into the squeezing pressure he applied. Anders’ gun went off once, firing skyward, and then, as Rae felt the bones of Anders’ wrist shift beneath his grasp, Anders dropped the Colt.
Something leaped in Rae as he saw a boot-toe— Will Marsh’s toe—kick the gun and send it skittering out of reach down the sidewalk. Rae pulled loose from Anders’ grip, lurched panting to his feet, backed into the middle of the street. “All right,” he heard himself rasp, and there was no thought of his own gun. There was just the insane desire in him to use his fists to deal out to Anders what the other had dealt to him. He wanted to beat Anders, hammer him, drive him down … “All right. Now, come on. Now. I won’t draw.” Hardly realizing what he was doing, he yanked the gold plated Colt and in a single motion flipped it toward Will Marsh. “Hold that. Come on, damn you, Anders. . . .”
Anders scrabbled to his feet, rubbing his wrist. He looked sideways at his stepbrother. “All right, Will, you’ve got his gun—”
The boy looked from Anders to Rae. His thin face was dead white, but there was color over his cheekbones. “Maybe you’d better see what you can do all by yourself, Cleve.”
Anders sucked in a long breath. For an instant, his face was furious. Then it broke into a wolfish grin. “Maybe,” he said, “you’re right!” And he threw himself at Rae Marsh, fists clubbed.
Marsh was waiting for him, feet planted. He ducked low; Anders’ first punch slammed into his shoulder. It had enormous force, but he was braced for it, and he was throwing one of his own. It went under the big man’s guard, caught him hard-on in the belly. Rae heard Anders’ breath whoosh by his ear. He struck again.
Then he stepped back, his whole right side numb from the force of Anders’ blow. For a clock tick, they faced each other, both more wary now, appraising. Then Rae took the offensive, moved in quickly, tigerishly.
Anders was a fighter, and Anders hurt him. Anders rocked him with a right and a left, but Rae was dealing out punishment of his own, and that was all he cared about. He was not worried about Anders hurting him—not so long as he could hurt Anders worse. Weaving, snakelike, he bore in under the barrage of blows, his own arms hammering mercilessly, pounding Anders in gut and chest and face. Anders stepped back, gave ground, and Rae bore in harder.
But Anders grappled him this time, and in that bear hug Rae was bent back until at last he had to kick his feet out to keep his spine from snapping. He hit the ground hard, with breath-jarring impact and Anders on top of him, one hand on his throat, a thumb reaching for his eyes.
There was no time to recover his breath. Rae put every ounce of muscle into a pitching twist as wild as any outlaw horse could muster, felt Anders’ weight shift, unseat. Then they were both rolling over and over in the dust, and there was no more give or take of fists; this was a savage, dirty battle for survival.
Cleve Anders had the size, but Rae Marsh had one crucial advantage. He’d been living a wolf’s life for so long that he was hardened, he had endurance. And Anders, top dog of Fletcher’s Hole, had taken it too easy in his royal role. His wind gave out while Rae’s was still strong; his muscles went lax while there was iron left in Marsh’s.
Rae felt that yielding, put everything he had into one final surge. Then he was on top of Anders, pinning him, and there was red mist swimming before his eyes; he knotted his hand in the shag of Anders’ hair, began slamming the man’s head against the hard packed dirt. “Boot me,” he heard himself snarl, and it did not sound like his own voice at all. “Boot me and run me off my own range—”
Probably he would have killed Anders then and there, if a voice hadn’t finally cleft through the fury that blotted out reason. “Rae! Rae, quit!” And then, “Will—you, somebody, drag him off!” Hands were clawing at him. He rose, turning, ready to club the owner of those hands, but then he found himself looking into Crystal’s wide-eyed but determined face.
And Will Marsh was dragging at him, too, jerking him to his feet. He came fully erect, shook off all those hands, stepped away. He looked down at Anders, sprawled on the dirt. The man was out cold, a trickle of blood running from each nostril.
“Rae!” Crystal was saying over and over again. “Rae, Rae, come out of it!”
Rae shook his head, dragged a dusty sleeve across his face. Crystal was dabbing at the blood on his chin with a bit of white lace. “Are you all right?” she whispered. He could smell the fragrance of her perfume through the dust and blood that clogged his nostrils.
“I’m all right,” he grated. He looked at Will Marsh. The boy stood there over the body of his stepbrother, staring at Rae Marsh in awe. Rae walked toward him unsteadily and held out a hand. “I’ll take my gun now,” he said harshly.
For a moment the eyes of the half brothers met. Rae would have given a lot, then, to have been able to read what was in Will’s gaze, but he could not. Wordlessly, the boy drew the golden gun from his waistband and thrust its butt toward Rae. Rae took it and eased it into his holster. Their eyes stayed locked for a second longer; then Will Marsh spun away and bent over Cleve Anders.
Crystal’s fingers dug into Rae’s arm. “Come on,” she said urgently. “We’ve got to get you upstairs and patched up.”
“So that’s the deal,” he told Crystal later. He had washed and she had patched his splits and bruises with arnica and courtplaster, and though he ached in every muscle he would be all right with rest. Just now, he had finished putting away a monstrous steak and a heap of fried potatoes and he was drinking scalding black coffee. “Thanks to you, I’ve got Tom Ford with me now.”
“I hope you’re still saying thanks later on,” Crystal murmured. She sat across from him; and he thought he had never seen anything lovelier than the way she looked in her white summer dress. All this had just about been worth it just to meet somebody like her, he thought.
“What do you mean?” he asked as the import of her words sank in.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just had some second thoughts later about sending you to Ford. It might have been a mistake; I don’t know. But he was the only help I could think of.”
“We’ll make do with him,” Rae said. “I think I know what you mean, though. He’s a tough one. And with a mind of his own. But I think that as long as his interests are our interests, we can depend on him.”
He set down the coffee cup. “Anyway, we’re between a rock and a hard place. Where else can we turn but to Ford? He’s got the men and the setup we need . . . and I’ve got to have the money from my share of those cattle if I ever hope to fight Anders in court and get clear title to my third of the place.” He reached for his cigarette makings. “I can take a third of the beef, one way or the other. But I can’t make off with a third of the range. Court is the only way I’ll ever get that.”
“You’d have got a hanging if you’d kept on banging Anders’ head against the ground,” Crystal said.
“I appreciate your pulling me off of him,” Rae said. “If you hadn’t, Will would have had to move in, and then it would have been me against Will. I wouldn’t have wanted that.”
“That’s what I meant,” she said. “Will couldn’t just stand by and see you kill Cleve. You’d have had to take him on, too, and you’d have killed him and then they’d have hanged you.”
Looking at her through cigarette smoke, he said, “You sound kind of like it might upset you for that to happen.”
She did not answer. Rae went on quickly, “But it might have saved a lot of trouble in another way if you hadn’t stopped me. When Anders gets wise to the fact that he’s losing cattle, Ford thinks he’ll hire on gun hands and there’ll be killing anyway.” He stood up. “I don’t much like the thought of that. I’ve just come through one fight down in Lincoln County and—Dammit, of all the people in the world I had to find ruling the Circle M roost when I came here, why did it have to be Anders?”
He broke off as the corridor door opened and Crystal’s sister, Hallie, came in. She stood there shyly, her face a little flushed. “There’s a ... a man out here who wants to see Mr. Marsh,” Hallie said.
Rae’s hand instinctively dropped toward his hip. “Who is it?”
“Will Marsh,” Hallie said.
Rae and Crystal looked at each other quickly, blankly, and then Rae strode to the door, gently pushing Hallie aside. He opened the door. Will stood there, thumbs hooked in belt. He removed them quickly as the door swung open. He looked past Rae to Crystal and Hallie and seemed faintly embarrassed.
“I want to see you for a minute,” he said softly to Rae.
‘Then come in,” Rae said, standing aside.
Will entered hesitantly, removing his hat. He bowed slightly to Crystal and then to Hallie. “Mrs. Crystal. Miss . . .”
“Blaine,” Crystal said. “Her name’s Hallie Blaine. I was a Blaine before I married, and she’s my sister.”
“Miss Blaine,” Will said. Rae noticed that his eyes lingered on Hallie’s face for a moment; she flushed beneath his gaze and said something inaudible.
Then Will turned toward Rae. “You doggone near killed Cleve this morning,” he said, and the softness had gone out of his voice.
“He asked for it,” Rae said.
“I’m not saying he didn’t,” Will said. “I had to send him back to the outfit in a buckboard; he was too banged up to ride.”
There was a moment of silence then. Rae said, presently, his voice tense: “Well? You here to take up the fight?”
The boy shook his head slowly. “No. I came to tell you that you ain’t got a Chinaman’s chance if you hang on around here any longer. Cleve’s swearing to kill you on sight now, and he means what he says. He’ll do it if he has to hire half a dozen gunslingers to get it done.”
“And you?” Rae was still tense.
“Me?” Will’s voice faltered for a moment. In that instant, he looked very young, despite the guns on his hips. “Me? I—” He spread his hands. “What can I do? I think that letter you had was straight. I think we’re brothers. But Cleve’s my brother, too—I was raised up with him. If he says . . . if he says no, I can’t make him say yes.” He broke off; his face changed. “I wish you’d go away,” he said. “I wish you’d go away and not crowd us. Maybe with you gone I could talk Cleve into—”
“You couldn’t talk Cleve into anything,” Crystal said harshly.
Will hesitated. Then he said, “No, I reckon not. I reckon nobody could.” His hand moved; only then did Rae notice that Will had a third gun stuck in his waistband, and he recognized it immediately. Will took it out and held it toward Rae.
“I guess the only real reason I had for coming was to give this back to you,” he said. “It’s the one we took off you out at Circle M.”
Rae took it slowly, looking his half brother in the eyes. “Thanks.” He turned to Crystal, fishing the gold plated gun from its holster. “I guess you can have this back now.”
She looked at him strangely. “Maybe you’d like to keep it a while longer.”
Rae thought a second. Then he said, “I can always use an extra iron.” He dropped the golden gun back into its scabbard and thrust his own into his waistband. Turning back to Will, he said, “I’d like to talk to you a little more. In private. If you got the time.”
Crystal arose, touching her sister’s elbow. Hallie had been standing there staring at Will Marsh; she came alive with a start. “We’ve got things we can do in the other room,” Crystal said.
When the women had gone, Rae motioned to a chair. “Sit down. Cuppa coffee?”
Will shook his head, as he dropped into a chair. Rae looked at him a moment. Then he said, “That’s a lot of iron you’re packing. Two guns. About twice as much as most folks get along with.”
Will’s face came suddenly, boyishly, alive. “I can use ’em both, too. I’ve practiced. I can draw as fast left-handed as I can with my right.”
“So what?” Rae said.
“Huh?” Will looked at him blankly.
“I said, so what? Don’t you know if you pack that kind of hardware around, sooner or later somebody’s going to make you use it?”
“I hope they do,” Will said. “I’d like to see anybody get the drop on me.” He rocked forward in his chair excitedly. “I’ll bet not even the Kid could do it. Look, you know the Kid. Bonney. Is he really as fast as they say?”
Something in Rae curled up sickly at Will’s glittering eyes, the look of obsession that came over his face. It was a look he knew—he’d seen the same look on a buck-toothed face not much older than Will’s, the face of another man completely obsessed with guns, the face of a man who sooner or later was bound to die by gunfire.
“He’s fast,” Rae said coldly. “But he’s also a cowardly little back-shooter when he gets the chance.”
“I don’t believe that about him,” Will said quickly.
“I know him,” Rae said. “I fought alongside him, till I got a belly-full of him. Dammit, why don’t you leave those guns at home and forget about ’em? In another ten years maybe things will be so nobody will have to pack a gun no more. In the meantime, you don’t want to—”
Will stood up, face flushed. “I want people to know my name,” he said angrily. “Like they know Bonney’s.” He paused. “Like they know yours,” he finished.
“They don’t know mine,” Rae said quickly.
“You think not? I’ve done some inquiring around. You’re known. A top gun hand, everybody says. And yet you stand there lecturing me—”
Rae saw he was getting nowhere. He waved a hand wearily. “All right. Kill your own snakes. I just hope one of ’em don’t kill you.” His voice changed. “I want you to do me a favor.”
“What?”
“I want you to tell me,” Rae said softly, “all about how John Marsh died.”
A shadow, pain-filled, crossed Will’s face. “Don’t make me talk about that,” he said. “It wasn’t . . . pretty.”
“I want to hear about it,” Rae said. “I’ve got to hear about it.”
Will hesitated, gnawing his lower lip. Then he looked down at the floor. “They call it cancer,” he said. “It gets started inside you and it eats you up.”
“I know what it does,” Rae said. “Go on.”
“He got to feeling bad. He went to Chicago for an examination. They tried to make him stay there, but he wouldn’t. He came home, said by God he was going to die on his own home range. He was a tough old man.”
“Yeah,” Rae said.
“So damned tough,” Will went on, “that for awhile we thought he was whipping it. Hell, even the doctor was surprised. Why, just the day before he died, the doctor said he ought to last for sixty days longer, anyhow.”
“Was he doped up?” Rae asked.
“A good part of the time,” Will said. “That stuff hurts.”
“Yeah,” Rae said. He thought of the old man dying in agony, waiting for him. Sixty days longer . . .and then dead. “Did he ever say anything about me?”
Will hesitated. “Maybe so, maybe no.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he said a couple of times there was something he was waiting for before he died. Then . . .” Will’s voice trembled. “Then . . . the day before it happened, he was about half under the dope, half out of it. . . . Cleve and I was there. He got to talking about . . . about our brother. About how our brother we had never seen was coming soon. And that we had to . . . treat him right . . . treat him like a brother . . .”
“Did he tell you any more? About how I come to be separated from him?”
“No, only that, that I heard. He was giving out then. Cleve bent over him, says, ‘Dad, what’s that? What do you mean?’ And he whispered something to Cleve, but I didn’t git it. I asked Cleve later, but he said it was nothing; just the dope talking. Anyhow . . . next morning we come in his room and found him dead. The doctor said it wasn’t even the cancer—that to take him off that quick, it must have been his heart, failing under the strain.”
“I see,” Rae murmured, feeling oddly cold, his mind reaching for something it could not quite grasp, not quite believe.
“And then a few days later you show up,” Will said. He put on his hat. “I wish . . . really, maybe if you’d go away, there’d be a way to work this out.”
“We’ll work it out while I’m here,” Rae said harshly.
“What do you aim to do?”
“Nothing that’s going to hurt you,” Rae said. “But I aim to have what’s coming to me. What my father wanted me to have.”
“Uh-huh. Well—” Will started toward the door.
“Wait,” Rae said.
Will turned.
“You stand clear of it,” Rae said. “For God’s sake, will you do that? Take off those two damned guns and stand clear?”
Will just looked at him a moment. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do yet,” he said. “But I told you— Cleve’s my brother, too.” Then he turned and went out.