Sarasen was at his usual post, whittling on the hotel porch, when Marshal Six came up the street in mid-afternoon and turned in at his office. Six stopped a moment to look across the street, and Sarasen met the marshal’s eyes at that distance. It occurred to the gunfighter that Six was a man to whom justice had more than abstract importance; Sarasen for a moment was envious of the marshal, to whom everything seemed to present itself in more-or-less clear-cut terms of right or wrong.
Six’s strong figure filled the office doorway. His shoulders were broader than the average, though he stood at ordinary height and in spite of his town job still owned the narrowed hips and choppy walk of a horseman. His hair was brown, he had a clean-shaven shield-shaped face with features regular enough to make him good-looking, his jaw made a long level shelf beneath his face, his eyes were cool and impersonal on most occasions but showed a capacity for quiet humor.
Sarasen kept his attention on Six until the marshal went into his office; thereupon Sarasen returned his eyes to the wood in his hands. Taking shape was the whittled form of a Colt .45 revolver. Once in a while, when no one was near to be startled, he would remove his gun from its holster to compare it with the carved model, and begin to make changes. He worked with meticulous care, but his eyes and ears missed nothing.
The wiry deputy, Gutierrez, came along the walk and said civilly, “Afternoon,” and went down the porch steps to go across. Sarasen said,
“Deputy.”
Gutierrez turned slowly to face him. The man’s eyes were very shrewd. They studied Sarasen’s hands and then his face. Sarasen said, “You like working for Six?”
“I like it fine,” Gutierrez said.
“He’s a good man.”
“That’s right.”
“Tell me something,” Sarasen said. “Has he got a woman?”
“No.”
“Now, that’s a strange thing, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said the deputy. “I keep my saddle clean and let other people worry about their own.”
Sarasen accepted the rebuke without protest. Gutierrez was a game little man and had his own brand of pride. He nodded stiffly and went across and disappeared into Six’s office.
Two ladies were coming toward him on the opposite side of the street, a block away, dressed up in long fashionable dresses, carrying parasols; he thought they must be sweltering under that excess of clothing. Then, after they went past the marshal’s office, another figure appeared at the next intersection: a woman in a green dress who drew the whole of Sarasen’s attention. It was Clarissa Vane. Advancing toward the two ladies on the walk, Clarissa held her head high and proud. The two ladies looked upon her with disdain and it became evident that the two of them, walking abreast, had half an intention to crowd Clarissa off the walk. Smiling grimly, she tossed her head back and walked casually right between them, setting both of them off balance and causing them to turn their heads and stare angrily after her. Clarissa was smiling coolly when she stepped down and came across the street, slapping her loose gloves into her open palm.
Sarasen stood up to greet her. His voice was courteous and gave away no emotions. “Hello, Clarissa.”
Before she spoke she looked around, selected the chair next to his, and sat down in it with a proprietary air. She said, “It became obvious you weren’t going to come to me. So here I am.”
He said, “The past is a long time gone, Clarissa.”
“Just gone? Or is it dead, Ben?”
He looked at her with his hooded eyes, making no answer. In a moment he sat down and picked up the whittling block from which the model gun was emerging. Clarissa looked at it and smiled in a faraway manner. She said, “You never stop thinking about those things, do you?”
He looked at the carved gun. “Maybe not,” he admitted. “I’m just a simple man, you know. There’s only one thing I know well.”
“Guns,” she answered. “They’ve shaped your life and you love them for it.”
“No. I hate them.”
It caused her to look up with surprise. “So,” she said. “Ghosts are getting at you at last.”
He was not ready to reply to that. In a softer tone Clarissa said, “Why didn’t you come to me, Ben?”
“I’ve got reasons,” he said vaguely; “it would be better to let it lie.”
“A woman,” she guessed.
“Not in that sense.”
She scoffed, “What other sense is there?”
His smile was cold, though he did not intend it that way; his pale eyes had been cool too long to warm up any more, even when he wished them to. He said, “You and the marshal should get on well. You both think things are simpler than they are.”
“As a matter of fact,” she told him, “I came on Jeremy’s account.”
Sarasen nodded. “I thought it would have to be something like that. By yourself you wouldn’t have unbent your pride enough to come to me.”
“No,” she agreed. “It’s not for a woman to do that.”
“Things are easy for you, aren’t they, Clarissa? You just set yourself some rules and you play by them as if everything was a game. Everything fits into the system; you never ask questions.”
She was looking worried; she leaned forward and spoke in a low, intense voice. “Ben, the bogeyman’s at you. What is it?”
He shook his head. “A man gets older, starts thinking. That’s all. I’m still the same saddle tramp I always was.”
“No, Ben. You’ve changed. You’re scared of something now, and I never thought I’d live to see the day when Ben Sarasen was scared of anything. That’s what’s making you bitter, isn’t it?”
His eyes had gone narrow; they glistened from slits. He said tautly, “First Six, now you; everybody thinks I’ve gotten a scare. Pretty soon word will get around that Sarasen’s lost his nerve. That could be dangerous for anybody who believed it, Clarissa.”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re just as tough as ever, I can see that. But you’ve run into something new, something you can’t cope with on your old terms. Is that what’s gnawing at you?”
“Just let it be, Clarissa,” he said softly. His glance lay gently upon her face and he knew that if he chose to he could put hunger and warmth into it. He did not choose to; he kept his face blank and his eyes distant and cool. He added, “It won’t do either of us any good to rake up old ashes.”
“Even if there’s a spark buried under them, Ben?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Even if there’s a spark.” He said it in a cold impersonal way and put the force of his eyes flatly against her.
She revealed her disappointment and said, “I never thought you’d be pushing me away, Ben. Maybe I had too much pride to believe it would ever happen.”
“It’s not your fault or mine. Nothing either one of us could have done would have made it turn out any different.”
“That’s small consolation,” she said. “It’s not enough.”
“It’ll have to do, I expect.”
She stood up; she looked weary. “All right, Ben. But I want you to do one thing for me.”
“Name it.”
“Go away from here. Before dawn tomorrow.”
He nodded slowly. “You think a lot of Six, don’t you?”
“Enough to ask this of you,” she agreed.
“Well,” he murmured, “that’s all right. He’s a good man.” His eyes were brooding on the model gun.
“Don’t hurt him, Ben,” she insisted; her voice remained level.
“I’ll do my best,” was the only answer he could give her.
“Do you love him?” he shot back at her.
“Why,” she said, “I can’t say, Ben. I don’t know. It was always you.”
“Count me out of it,” he said. There was a faraway hollow ring in his tone. “Act as though I were a thousand miles away or dead, Clarissa. That’s the only way. I don’t matter anymore.”
“Stop talking like a dead man,” she snapped.
He smiled drily. “Go on back to Six, Clarissa. Tell him I’ll be out of town by morning.”
She watched him; her expression changed from tenderness to quizzical wonder to fatalistic repose. She said, “Thanks, Ben.” She said it very quietly and turned away.
“Clarissa.”
She stopped to look back. Sarasen said, “What time does the Overland stage from El Paso come through?”
“Around midnight.”
He nodded. When he said nothing further, Clarissa asked, “Is that all you wanted?”
He looked up. After a pause he said, “I guess it is.”
“All right,” she said. “Hasta luego, Ben.”
“Adios.”
Her eyes lingered on him a moment longer before she turned and went down the steps and crossed the dusty street. Sarasen watched her until she disappeared down a side street toward Cat Town. There was no break in his expression. He picked up his knife and resumed carving on the wooden gun.
Jeremy Six turned up the wick of the lamp on his desk and slowly plugged fresh cartridges into his clean Colt. When it was full with six bullets he snapped the loading-gate shut and carefully dropped the hammer between two cartridges, and slid the gun into its well-worn holster at his hip.
The last shifting layers of violet and indigo twilight faded from the town. Through the window he could see lamplight bloom in buildings across the street. Somewhere out of sight a crowd of horsemen drummed into town and clattered to a halt, and soon thereafter Manny Gutierrez came into the office on silent feet and said without preamble, “That was Oakley Madden and his crew.”
“Where are they?”
“Drover’s Rest.”
Six nodded. “How many?”
“I counted five,” Gutierrez said in his businesslike voice. “Madden, the Bolton brothers, Billy Hatfield, Faro Price.”
“Primed?”
“Can’t say,” Gutierrez replied. “They’re all heeled but they weren’t making much noise.”
“Maybe they don’t want to spook Sarasen,” Six said. “They know he’s in town, I guess.”
“Madden’s pretty salty,” Gutierrez said, “and Billy Hatfield’s brash enough for any three gents. I doubt they’d be making it a point to stay clear of Sarasen or anybody else. It ain’t their habit.”
“Well,” Six observed, “as long as they mind their knitting we’ll let them be.”
“I thought you were making noises about de-horning them?”
“I will if I have to,” Six answered. “They haven’t threatened the peace yet.” He stood up and turned to take his hat off the wall peg. “Drake Ivy wasn’t with them?”
“I didn’t see him.”
“He’s got a pet girl down in Cat Town,” Six said. “Maybe he split off from the bunch to go down there.”
“Maybe. You worried about Ivy?”
“A little,” Six admitted. “Ivy’s the biggest and the stupidest one of the lot. Without somebody to keep a rein on him he’s likely to get into trouble all by himself.” He put the hat on and went to the door. “Hold the fort while I make the rounds.” And went outside into the gathering gloom.
The day’s heat was dissipating rapidly; in its wake a fresh cool breeze came down off the High Mogul. On the arched black-velvet surface of the sky were the pinpoints of stars. Traffic was light on the streets of Spanish Flat. Six turned along the back streets through Cat Town and stepped into the Tin Bucket, which was the first saloon on his route. All was quiet. A few Mexican sheepherders played cards at one table; a livery hostler, a thimble rigger, and two or three tramps stood at the bar. The place had an unpleasant smell; it was the most disreputable bar in town. The bartender needed a shave and wore a filthy apron; the ceiling was low and the air smoky and stale. Six did not linger there.
He inspected two more saloons, presenting himself to view in each of them—sight of a badge sometimes calmed trouble down before it started, he had found—and presently came, in the course of his rounds, to Fat Annie’s. He went up the porch and stood by the door, knocking, remembering the girls sunning themselves on this porch earlier in the day. Fat Annie opened the door to him and presented to him her enormous nose, watering eyes, and loose hanging chins. “The minions of the law,” she announced in loud tones, and let Six into the parlor.
It was a big plush room, deep in carpet, crowded with soft furniture; heavy drapes, paintings, dim soft lights created the atmosphere of the place. The smell of cheap perfumes hung thick in the air. Six looked at the half-dozen scantily clothed girls idling around the place and said mildly, “No trouble?”
“All’s quiet,” Fat Annie said. Her belly jiggled when she laughed. “What you need, Jeremy, is a quart of forty-rod whisky and a girl. You’re too damned serious, even for a policeman.”
One of the girls smiled at him provocatively, synthetically. Six said to Fat Annie, “Oakley Madden brought his bunch in tonight.”
“Ah,” she said. “We’ll take care, then. Thanks, Jeremy.”
Six pushed a playful fist into the deep softness of her shoulder and turned back to the door. Fat Annie said, “Come back when you’re off duty, Jeremy. I got two new girls this week, you know.”
He smiled and went out. The red lamp burned above the door. He was still smiling over Annie’s invitation; she always extended it, and he had never taken her up on it, but just the same it remained her inevitable phrase of parting.
He inspected Madam Lisa’s, down the street, passed the word there, and went on; in time, after popping into half a dozen dance halls and saloons and cribs, he came to Clarissa’s place, the Glad Hand. At one time the old heavy adobe structure had housed Spanish Flat’s first mercantile establishment. That had been before the arrival of the Anglos and the subsequent shift of the town’s commercial center to a newer district; now, in a backwash of time, this whole old section had become Cat Town.
Nimble-Finger Buchler was callously pounding out a barrelhouse tune as if he didn’t know how to play any better. The fiddles and banjo and guitar and squeeze-box melodeon were racked beside the empty orchestra chairs; the musicians were taking a break at the bar. The saloon was pretty well filled with a crush of people, most of them miners from the silver shafts of the Mogul Rim. Some of the independent girls, those who didn’t work for the big cribs, were spotted around in the crowd, a few of them dancing on the sawdust floor, matching the clumsy miners’ grim fury with calculated smiles.
Clarissa was not in the room. She always held herself coldly aloof from the clientele of the Glad Hand. After inspecting the crowd and seeing no danger in it, Six went back toward the office door, using elbows and shoulders when he had to, to make his way through the crowd.
Clarissa was bent over an account book on the desk when he came in. He closed the door against the busy noises of the saloon and said, “Lively tonight.”
“It’s good for business,” she answered, not looking up until she completed totaling a column and wrote down a figure. Then she sat back and regarded him soberly. He could not make out the significance of her expression. He said,
“Thought I’d warn you, Oakley Madden’s around.”
“They never come here,” she said, with a touch of caustic sarcasm at her own expense. “This place isn’t good enough for the likes of Madden, you know.”
“Maybe ... maybe. But Drake Ivy likes it here.”
“I haven’t seen him tonight,” she told him.
“Let me know if you do.” He turned and put his hand on the doorknob.
“Wait, Jeremy.”
He turned with a questioning glance. Clarissa said, “I talked to Ben.”
“Do any good?”
“I can’t say,” she replied. “He asked me what time the El Paso stage gets in.”
Six frowned. “Now,” he murmured, “I wonder what he’d do that for?”
“Maybe,” she suggested, “he’s got an appointment with somebody who’s supposed to be on the stage.”
“It’s possible,” he conceded. He added, “You didn’t have to go to him, not on my account.”
“It wasn’t altogether on your account,” she said, with the hint of a wistful smile.
He said very quietly, “Still carrying a torch, Clarissa?”
“That’s hard to say,” was her reply. It gave away very little. But then her eyes softened and she said, “It’s hard to keep a torch lit for a dead man. Ben acts as though he’s dead. He doesn’t care anymore.”
He considered it. “If that’s true,” he said, “I wonder what’s behind it.”
“A woman,” she said definitely. “I’ll bet my last dollar some woman did this to him. Some sweet little thing in gingham and ribbons who decided to show him the error of his ways. You can’t show his own conscience to a man like Ben Sarasen, not in the light of day. It starts him brooding; in the long run it destroys him. If I could get my hands on her I’d—” She trailed off with a helpless gesture of defeat.
“That’s all strictly guesswork,” he said. “You don’t know anything for certain. Or do you?”
“I guess not,” she confessed. “Just the same I’m damned interested in seeing what gets off that stage at midnight to meet him.”
“How do you know it will come on tonight’s stage?”
“I don’t. Just a feeling, call it a hunch. I got the impression from Ben that if whoever it is doesn’t show up tonight, Ben will ride out of town and maybe camp up the coach road a few miles to meet all the stages. He’s willing to do that much for your sake.”
“Or for yours,” Six reminded her.
“I doubt it. When I looked in his eyes I didn’t see anything to make me think he’s got anything left for me.” She was being painfully frank, perhaps as a defense against the pressures of her own emotions. It made Six uncomfortable to watch her in such a state, with the force of her grief pushing close to the surface, threatening to break through the glazed façade of brittle toughness she had molded about herself. It troubled him particularly because he was beginning to recognize that despite the courteous care with which he treated her, he was becoming fascinated by the many-faceted enigma that was her personality. There was something realistic, uncompromising, truthful about her that appealed strongly to him; and added to that was the strong attraction of her physical beauty, artificially hardened but (he suspected) concealing a vast capacity for warmth.
Perhaps, too, it was heightened by the unconcealed interest with which she looked at him.
But then it quickly occurred to him that he didn’t want to be put in the position of catching her on the rebound. And so he did not let his feelings show; he only said, “Remember about Drake Ivy.”
“I’ll keep my eyes open,” she said. “Do you expect trouble from him?”
“With Ivy, you don’t know what to expect. He’s a little loco in the head. Trouble is, if Ivy starts trouble it might bring Oakley Madden’s whole crew into the boil. With Sarasen still here, rubbing everybody raw, there’s no telling how far things might spread. That’s why I want to find Ivy and put a cork in him before things have time to get rolling.”
“If I see him,” she answered, “I’ll send somebody after you.”
“Obliged,” he drawled, and went out. The musicians were back on the bandstand, plucking tentative sounds out of their instruments, and as he pushed through the crowd they began to play the Varsovianne. He threaded a path through the smoky air and finally found himself outside in the refreshing clear cool of the night.
Beside the saloon door Nimble-Finger Buchler was smoking a cigarette, looking upward idly at the brittle wash of stars. Buchler said in a random tone, “This is a hell of a crummy town, Marshal.”
“It’s just a place, like any other.”
“If that’s so,” Buchler said, “I don’t hold out much hope for the world.” He dropped the cigarette—it made a spray of sparks—and turned back inside.
Six went on along the street in a melancholy mood, his hat tugged low across his eyes. Presently a dogtrotting figure caught up with him—Sammy, the telegraph clerk, with a folded message in his hand. Out of breath, Sammy said, “This just came in, Marshal.”
“Thanks,” Six said. He unfolded the paper and held it slantwise to catch the faint illumination from a window of Fry’s Billiard Academy.
Sarasen has clean bill of health. Molly says hello. Luck.
It was signed by the Chief Marshal at Tucson. Six nodded and put the message away. In his pocket he found a coin, which he put into the clerk’s hand. “Obliged,” he said, and saw Sammy go off into the dark.
He glanced into the billiard parlor and went on, stopping outside the door of the Tres Candelas Cantina. From inside there came the muted melodies of a Spanish guitar, sad mellow notes in the night. A splash of lamplight fell outward through the open doorway across the narrow dusty alley. Six threw his head back and drew a long cool breath into his lungs. Out of a slot between buildings issued a cooler current of air, and then, abruptly, the guitar stopped in the middle of a chord and someone shouted a warning inside the cantina.
Dropping his hand to his gun butt, Six swung inside.