Buck Halliday pulled on his boots and stood up. He flexed his wide shoulders and moved to pick up his gunbelt from the end of the bed. Sunlight streamed through the open window, and with it came the sounds of a new day stirring. He had the gunbelt wrapped around his waist and was fastening the buckle when she said;
“Must you go?”
He turned to look at her and saw her shaking out her long black hair. Her dark eyes fixed him in a sultry gaze when she said again;
“Must you?”
“I’ve got things to do, Rena.”
This time she nodded, accepting his answer as casually as she had accepted his body during the night.
Halliday took a deep breath. After four long months of eating dust and nurse-maiding cattle on the trail, the first taste of liquor had hit him hard. From what he remembered, it had been the same with Dave Lester.
They had arrived at the depot together and settled down at the same table to share a meal and what seemed to be a halfway tolerable bottle of whiskey. Sometime after they had worked their way through most of the bottle’s contents, Lester strangely disappeared. The next thing Halliday knew of him was a message delivered by a woman with shining black hair, large eyes and the kind of body men dream about on a four-month stay in country where there were no women.
Rena had come to tell him that Lester had elected to stay the night, and that Halliday was welcome, too.
It had been that easy. He followed her to her private quarters behind the depot. Then he followed her to bed, and all that happened after that came naturally.
That was last night, though, and this was next morning. Rena seemed to understand the difference after that one attempt to hold him a little longer.
Halliday gave her a long, admiring look.
“You sure are a beauty,” he said, “it makes me feel good just to look at you.”
She accepted the comment calmly, knowing that it was true. He settled himself on the chair by the bed and rolled his first cigarette of the day as he watched her pour water into a china basin, wash her sleepy face and step into her clothes.
“I’ll bring you some hot water, if you like,” she said, “and then I’ll make you breakfast.”
“Don’t bother about heatin’ water,” Halliday said, “but I do like the idea of breakfast.”
Even after she had closed the door quietly behind her, the woman’s presence lingered in the room. Halliday wondered vaguely what her life was like.
It couldn’t be much of an existence for a pretty woman, stuck out here in the wilderness with nothing more than chance travelers like Halliday and Lester to happen by and break the monotony of daytime chores and nighttime loneliness.
Rena and Louise Mahoney—two women alone on the frontier, without ties, without pasts, their futures obscure.
Halliday ran his hand through his thick, black hair and put on his hat after carefully reshaping the crown with his fingers. He opened the door and listened for a moment.
Somewhere not too far away, boots clumped on the dry planks of the front porch. Plates clattered in the kitchen to his right. A rooster crowed out back.
Then Louise Mahoney appeared, skirt and long hair swishing, dark eyes gleaming.
“Morning, Buck.”
“Mornin’, Louise.”
Her smile was as bright as the new day.
Dave Lester was waiting on the porch and pacing up and down in his eagerness to be on his way.
He gave Halliday a knowing grin and shrugged his sloping shoulders.
“Man,” he said simply as he shook his head. “Weren’t that somethin’, Buck?”
Halliday drew out his tobacco pouch and began to make himself another cigarette.
Lester returned to his pacing, all the while looking off into the distance. Finally, he jumped down from the porch and disappeared around the side of the building.
He returned in less than five minutes, leading both their horses.
He tethered the two mounts at the hitch rail, and after a careful look to make sure no one was in earshot, he started to whisper;
“I ain’t never gonna believe this, Buck. Nobody else would ever believe it, neither. Way out here, nothin’ but dust and heat and emptiness—and then all of a sudden them two beauties pop up outta nowhere and take us off to bed. I still can’t hardly believe it, ’cept I’m here with scratches all up an’ down my back to prove it ...”
Halliday gave him a tight smile.
“It sure enough happened, Dave,” he said.
“Yeah,” Lester said and jumped up onto the porch again.
It wasn’t long before Louise called them into the kitchen.
The room seemed too small for the two men, who looked as out of place as prairie dogs on a cottonwood branch.
Louise put Lester’s breakfast down on the table in front of him, and Rena served Halliday.
After the men had eaten every morsel of food and pushed their plates away and stood up, the two young women followed them out onto the porch.
Lester turned back to Louise, and his face reddened a little. He gulped uneasily and stole a glance at Halliday, who had simply walked to his horse and swung up into the saddle.
Rena went down the steps and stood looking up at Halliday as he settled himself in leather. Back on the porch, Lester ducked his head and mumbled;
“Well, I have to be goin’ now, girl.”
“Will you be back, Dave?” Louise asked softly as she stepped in closer to him.
Lester’s discomfort was clearly obvious.
“Well, now,” he drawled, “that’s a kinda hard thing to say. You know what it’s like, Louise. I just kinda drift along, and there’s no tellin’ where I might end up. Could be I’ll be back again next year, but then again, who can be sure?”
“I’ll still be here,” Louise said, and squinted off into the distance where the horizon was already wavering in the morning’s heat haze. “Where else can I go? This is all we have.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a fine place with real good prospects,” Lester said as he started to step away from her.
For a moment, he seemed to be having second thoughts. Then Rena came out onto the porch. Lester gave Louise a quick nod and went quickly to his horse. When he was in the saddle, he gave a noisy sigh and put his horse into a run.
Halliday still sat his saddle. It was hard for him to leave, even though they had both known from the start that what they had was never meant to last.
“If you ever happen to get down to Heathaze sometime, well, maybe ...”
Rena gave him a tiny smile and shook her head.
She was another of those women he would remember when he stirred in his blankets late at night on some lonely trail.
There was nothing more to say, and Halliday turned his horse away from the rail and galloped after Lester.
“You know, Buck,” Lester said when they were riding stirrup to stirrup, “in a way, I almost wish—”
“Sure you do, Dave,” Halliday said softly, “but if you stayed, you wouldn’t wish it for long.”
They were going through the gap in the fence when they heard the horsemen behind them. Five riders had come in from the west, pulling up hard outside the depot.
The two women were still standing on the porch, and now they were talking to the newcomers. Halliday raised one eyebrow and dug his heels into the sorrel’s flanks.
It was a warm morning, and it promised to be another hot day. Damned hot. Heathaze was still forty miles away, a full day’s ride in good weather on a fresh horse. The sorrel under him needed some time in a good, green paddock after four months of hard riding and catch-as-catch-can grazing.
Dave Lester drew up beside him again, and they rode at an easy lope along a narrow trail which would take them down to the bottom country. Grass roots had invaded the seldom-used trail which was well on its way to disappearing into the trackless prairie.
Rena had told Halliday that they would find a creek a mile or so away, and they could more or less follow it all the way to Heathaze.
As he rode, Halliday could not keep his thoughts from turning back to the girl at the depot.
Rena’s body had burned like a flame in the night, but he believed her when she said that she did not give herself to just any man.
He wondered if he would ever go back.
They arrived at the creek and sat saddle as they let their horses drink their fill. That was when they heard the horsemen coming toward them at a hard run. When the first rider burst into sight, they saw that his young, hard face was bathed in sweat and drawn tight with fury.
The man hollered something over his shoulder, and his four comrades came up behind them. The men lined up on the rise for a moment, and then they spurred their horses down to the creek and came in yelling, with their guns glinting in their hands.
“What the hell is this?” Dave Lester snapped, and turned to watch Halliday knee his sorrel out of the creek.
When the first bullet fanned his face, Halliday yelled;
“Try for that next hill, Dave. We’ll hold them off until they calm down enough to tell us what this is about.”
Lester needed no further encouragement. Bullets were coming at them in a hail now, and some whined dangerously close. He ducked low over his horse’s neck and whipped it into a run. Halliday had his six-gun out but was more interested in getting behind cover than in engaging in a shooting war with total strangers.
There was a jumble of brush and boulders higher up the hill, and Halliday found a narrow path between the rocks that was wide enough for a horse.
As soon as they were through the rocks, they came out of their saddles and tied their horses in the brush further back. Then they sprinted back to the boulders and waited.
“Just try to make them back off, Dave,” Halliday advised.
“And get killed?” Lester snapped back.
“Give them a little time, and maybe they’ll see they’ve got no quarrel with us.”
“After this, maybe they will have a quarrel with us,” Lester grumbled. “I purely hate the kind of sonuva that shoots first and thinks later.”
Lester was the quiet kind of man who was slow to anger, but a holy terror once someone foolishly managed to get his dander up.
The five riders were swarming up to the first line of boulders when Lester opened fire. Halliday joined in, and they both placed their bullets high and their shots widely spaced.
“No use wastin’ lead,” Halliday said as he stopped to reload the two empty chambers in his six-gun.
“You still figure they don’t mean business?” Lester asked as he slipped in the last cartridge. “I’ve had about enough of this.”
Halliday had already come to the same conclusion. He clamped the cylinder of his gun shut and worked his way around the side of the boulder.
The five had slowed their mounts for a moment, but now they came on at a reckless gallop.
A bullet screamed off the boulder beside Halliday, and he felt the ricochet burn along the line of his collar. Another bullet threw rock grit into his eyes, and he stared at the blurred images of the riders through involuntary tears.
“See what I mean?” Lester hollered. “They’re playin’ for keeps and we better—”
He stopped in mid-sentence and let out a sharp grunt, and Halliday saw him stagger back with blood soaking the front of his shirt.
The riders split up now, with three coming in at them from the right and two from the left.
The two on the left were concentrating their fire on Lester.
Halliday took aim and sent a bullet into the nearest man’s shoulder. The wounded man stayed in the saddle and spurred awkwardly out of six-gun range. The second man’s horse swerved as Halliday fired his next shot, the bullet burying into the rider’s thigh.
With those two temporarily out of the fight, Halliday turned to the three who were closing in on him from the right. Bullets hammered the boulder beside him and sliced through the brush as he changed position. A bullet nicked the top of his leg and sent him diving into the dry brush.
He flailed his way out of the entangling branches and worked his way toward the horses. Lester was leaning against his horse, with one blood-smeared hand clapped to his chest. His face was white but his eyes still burned with an anger that declared he still had plenty of fight left in him.
“Hold the horses, Dave,” Halliday told him, and then he sprinted across an open stretch and drew the fire of the three riders.
When he looked up again, a huge man was glaring down at him from his rearing mare. The man’s bloated face was purple with rage or hate or maybe the simple lust for killing.
There was no time for words.
Both men fired together, but Halliday’s bullet tore a strip of flesh from the man’s neck and sent him reeling in the saddle. The mare reared again, almost throwing its rider. All three horsemen were crowded close together among the boulders now, and Halliday saw his chance.
He backed quickly away, sending lead into the ground all around the wild-eyed horses as he zigzagged his way toward Lester.
The tall cowboy was still on his feet but holding onto one stirrup now to steady himself. Halliday boosted him into the saddle, and when he was sure that the man’s feet were safely in the stirrups, he said;
“Go back to the creek, pard. I’ll come for you just as soon as this is over.”
Lester opened his mouth to protest, but a storm of bullets tore into the brush and Halliday brought the palm of his hand down hard on the horse’s rump.
Halliday swung into his saddle, reloaded his six-gun and waited until Lester had gone from sight. Then he wheeled the sorrel around and galloped back to the slope, firing at anything that moved.
At first, plenty of things were moving. Horses were rearing and squealing. Men were cussing and howling. Bullets were whining and ricocheting in every direction.
Halliday ducked under a low branch and heeled the sorrel out into the open. The big man was backing his horse away from him. His companions were bunching together some distance behind him.
They all seemed to be deciding what they should do next.
“You want me to make up your minds for you, huh?” Halliday snarled, and then he rode straight at them with his gun blazing.
They scattered like headless chickens, each choosing a different route of escape, most of them carrying bullet wounds.
Halliday waited for them to regroup and splash their way across the creek before he guided the sorrel back to higher ground where he could watch them go from sight.
The heat of the day was sapping the strength from his sweating body, and there was still fresh blood coming from the wound on his thigh. When he found Dave Lester, the man was slumped along the rough mane of his motionless horse.
“We have to keep goin’, Dave,” Halliday told him. “We can’t stay here!”
Lester gave him a pained look, but when he saw Halliday reload his six-gun, he gritted;
“I’m no good to you now, Buck.”
Halliday wiped the sweat from his eyes as a rider appeared among the boulders. Moving only his hand, Halliday took careful aim.
The rider slowly turned his head, searching but not finding the men he hunted.
Halliday stayed still as a rock. The thought of the Mahoney girls crossed his mind as he waited. Maybe they weren’t quite so alone and free as they made out ...
The rider slowly circled the boulders, reached up once to loosen the blood-smeared bandanna around his neck.
Then he sat looking, straining his ears for some telltale sound.
Finally, he kicked his horse into a slow walk and rode out of sight.
Halliday still waited, ignoring the baking heat and his concern for Dave Lester. Seconds ticked by to minutes. A little bird hopped out of the bush beside him and speared an insect on its beak.
“Okay,” Halliday said to himself. “You’ve had long enough.”
Halliday began to ride slowly along the bank of the creek. He stopped every few yards to look around for some sign that he was being followed.
When he came around a bend in the creek, he saw Dave Lester lying on the ground near the bank, his horse standing over him with its head down and the reins trailing.
Halliday knew from a distance that the wound was as bad as he had feared, and he brought the canteen with him as he dropped from the saddle.
There was no sign of life until he poured water into his cupped hand and wet Lester’s face. Lester opened his eyes and looked blankly up at him.
“Let’s get you into the shade and see if we can stop the bleedin’, Dave,” Halliday said quietly.
He helped the wounded man to his feet and walked him to the tree growing close to the bank. Then he used a clean bandanna from his saddlebag and a corner cut from his saddle blanket to cover the wound.
Lester lay back against the tree and closed his eyes.
“Thanks, Buck,” he said weakly, “but I don’t reckon I’m worth the trouble.”
“I’ll decide that,” Halliday said as he went to lead the horses into tree cover across the creek. He then brushed away all sign and settled down again to wait.