Max Brand (4 page)

Perhaps, in the final analysis, Riley Sinclair would not be condemned
for the death of Lowrie or the killing of Quade, but for singing on the
trail to Sour Creek. And sing he did, his voice ringing from hill to
hill, and the echoes barking back to him, now and again.

He was not silent until he came to Sour Creek. At the head of the long,
winding, single street he drew the mustang to a tired walk. It was a
very peaceful moment in the little town Yonder a dog barked and a
coyote howled a thin answer far away, but, aside from these, all other
sounds were the happy noises of families at the end of a day. From
every house they floated out to him, the clamor of children, the deep
laughter of a man, the loud rattle of pans in the kitchen.

"This ain't so bad," Riley Sinclair said aloud and roused the mustang
cruelly to a gallop, the hoofs of his mount splashing through inches of
pungent dust.

The heaviness of the gallop told him that his horse was plainly spent
and would not be capable of a long run before the morning. Riley
Sinclair accepted the inevitable with a sigh. All his strong instincts
cried out to find Sandersen and, having found him, to shoot him and
flee. Yet he had a sense of fatality connected with Sandersen. Lowrie's
own conscience had betrayed him, and his craven fear had been his
executioner. Quade had been shot in a fair fight with not a soul near
by. But, at the third time, Sinclair felt reasonably sure that his luck
would fail him. The third time the world would be very apt to brand him
with murder.

It was a bad affair, and he wanted to get it done. This stay in Sour
Creek was entirely against his will. Accordingly he put the mustang in
the stable behind the hotel, looked to his feed, and then went slowly
back to get a room. He registered and went in silence up to his room.
If there had been the need, he could have kept on riding for a
twenty-hour stretch, but the moment he found his journey interrupted,
he flung himself on the bed, his arms thrown out crosswise, crucified
with weariness.

In the meantime the proprietor returned to his desk to find a long,
gaunt man leaning above the register, one brown finger tracing a name.

"Looking for somebody, Sandersen?" he asked. "Know this gent Sinclair?"

"Face looked kind of familiar to me," said the other, who had jerked
his head up from the study of the register. "Somehow I don't tie that
name up with the face."

"Maybe not," said the proprietor. "Maybe he ain't Riley Sinclair of
Colma; maybe he's somebody else."

"Traveling strange, you mean?" asked Sandersen.

"I dunno, Bill, but he looks like a hard one. He's got one of them
nervous right hands."

"Gunfighter?"

"I dunno. I'm not saying anything about what he is or what he ain't.
But, if a gent was to come in here and tell me a pretty strong yarn
about Riley Sinclair, or whatever his name might be, I wouldn't incline
to doubt of it, would you, Bill?"

"Maybe I would, and maybe I wouldn't," answered Bill Sandersen
gloomily.

He went out onto the veranda and squinted thoughtfully into the
darkness. Bill Sandersen was worried—very worried. The moment he saw
Sinclair enter the hotel, there had been a ghostly familiarity about
the man. And he understood the reason for it as soon as he saw the name
on the register. Sinclair! The name carried him back to the picture of
the man who lay on his back, with the soft sands already half burying
his body, and the round, purple blur in the center of his forehead. In
a way it was as if Hal Sinclair had come back to Me in a new and more
terrible form, come back as an avenger.

Bill Sandersen was not an evil man, and his sin against Hal Sinclair
had its qualifying circumstances. At least he had been only one of
three, all of whom had concurred in the thing. He devoutly wished that
the thing were to be done over again. He swore to himself that in such
a case he would stick with his companion, no matter who deserted. But
what had brought this Riley Sinclair all the way from Colma to Sour
Creek, if it were not an errand of vengeance?

A sense of guilt troubled the mind of Bill Sandersen, but the obvious
thing was to find out the reason for Sinclair's presence in Sour Creek.
Sandersen crossed the street to the newly installed telegraph office.
He had one intimate friend in the far-off town of Colma, and to that
friend he now addressed a telegram.

Rush back all news you have about man calling self Riley Sinclair of
Colma—over six feet tall, weight hundred and eighty, complexion dark,
hard look.

There was enough meat in that telegram to make the operator rise his
head and glance with sharpened eyes at the patron. Bill Sandersen
returned that glance with so much interest that the operator lowered
his head again and made a mental oath that he would let the Westerners
run the West.

With that telegram working for him in far-off Colma, Bill Sandersen
started out to gather what information he could in Sour Creek. He
drifted from the blacksmith shop to the kitchen of Mrs. Mary Caluson,
but both these brimming reservoirs of news had this day run dry. Mrs.
Caluson vaguely remembered a Riley Sinclair, a man who fought for the
sheer love of fighting. A grim fellow!

Pete Handley, the blacksmith, had even less to say. He also, he
averred, had heard of a Riley Sinclair, a man of action, but he could
not remember in what sense. Vaguely he seemed to recall that there had
been something about guns connected with the name of Riley Sinclair.

Meager information on which to build, but, having seen this man, Bill
Sandersen said the less and thought the more. In a couple of hours he
went back through the night to the telegraph office and found that his
Colma friend had been unbelievably prompt. The telegram had been sent
"collect," and Bill Sandersen groaned as he paid the bill. But when he
opened the telegram he did not begrudge the money.

Riley Sinclair is harder than he looks, but absolutely honest and will
pay fairer than anybody. Avoid all trouble. Trust his word, but not his
temper. Gunfighter, but not a bully. By the way, your pal Lowrie shot
himself last week.

The long fingers of Bill Sandersen slowly gathered the telegram into a
ball and crushed it against the palm of his hand. That ball he
presently unraveled to reread the telegram; he studied it word by word.

"Absolutely honest!"

It made Sandersen wish to go straight to the gunfighter, put his cards
on the table, confess what he had done to Sinclair's brother, and then
express his sorrow. Then he remembered the cruel, lean face of Sinclair
and the impatient eyes. He would probably be shot before he had half
finished his story of the gruesome trip through the desert. Already
Lowrie was dead. Even a child could have put two and two together and
seen that Sinclair had come to Sour Creek on a mission of vengeance.
Sandersen was himself a fighter, and, being a fighter, he knew that in
Riley Sinclair he would meet the better man.

But two good men were better than one, even if the one were an expert.
Sandersen went straight to the barn behind his shack, saddled his
horse, and spurred out along the north road to Quade's house. Once
warned, they would be doubly armed, and, standing back to back, they
could safely defy the marauder from the north.

There was no light in Quade's house, but there was just a chance that
the owner had gone to bed early. Bill Sandersen dismounted to find out,
and dismounting, he stumbled across a soft, inert mass in the path. A
moment later he was on his knees, and the flame of the sulphur match
sputtered a blue light into the dead face of Quade, staring upward to
the stars. Bill Sandersen remained there until the match singed his
finger tips.

All doubt was gone now. Lowrie and Quade were both gone; and he,
Sandersen, alone remained, the third and last of the guilty. His first
strong impulse, after his agitation had diminished to such a point that
he was able to think clearly again, was to flee headlong into the night
and keep on, changing horses at every town he reached until he was over
the mountains and buried in the shifting masses of life in some great
city.

And then he recalled Riley Sinclair, lean and long as a hound. Such a
man would be terrible on the trail—tireless, certainly. Besides there
was the horror of flight, almost more awful than the immediate fear of
death. Once he turned his back to flee from Riley Sinclair, the
gunfighter would become a nightmare that would haunt him the rest of
his life. No matter where he fled, every footstep behind him would be
the footfall of Riley Sinclair, and behind every closed door would
stand the same ominous figure. On the other hand if he went back and
faced Sinclair he might reduce the nightmare to a mere creature of
flesh and blood.

Sandersen resolved to take the second step.

In one way his hands were tied. He could not accuse Sinclair of this
killing without in the first place exposing the tale of how Riley's
brother was abandoned in the desert by three strong men who had been
his bunkies. And that story, Sandersen knew, would condemn him to worse
than death in the mountain desert. He would be loathed and scorned from
one end of the cattle country to the other.

All of these things went through his head, as he jogged his mustang
back down the hill. He turned in at Mason's place. All at once he
recalled that he was not acting normally. He had just come from seeing
the dead body of his best friend. And yet so mortal was his concern for
his own safety that he felt not the slightest touch of grief or horror
for dead Quade.

He had literally to grip his hands and rouse himself to a pitch of
semihysteria. Then he spurred his horse down the path, flung himself
with a shout out of the saddle, cast open the door of the house without
a preliminary knock, and rushed into the room.

"Murder!" shouted Bill Sandersen. "Quade is killed!"

Who killed Quade? That was the question asked with the quiet deadliness
by six men in Sour Creek. It had been Buck Mason's idea to keep the
whole affair still. It was very possible that the slayer was still in
the environs of Sour Creek, and in that case much noise would simply
serve to frighten him away. It was also Buck's idea that they should
gather a few known men to weigh the situation.

Every one of the six men who answered the summons was an adept with
fist or guns, as the need might be; every one of them had proved that
he had a level head; every one of them was a respected citizen.
Sandersen was one; stocky Buck Mason, carrying two hundred pounds close
to the ground, massive of hand and jaw, was a second. After that their
choice had fallen on "Judge" Lodge. The judge wore spectacles and a
judicial air. He had a keen eye for cows and was rather a sharper in
horse trades. He gave his costume a semiofficial air by wearing a
necktie instead of a bandanna, even at a roundup. The glasses, the
necktie, and his little solemn pauses before he delivered an opinion,
had given his nickname.

Then came Denver Jim, a very little man, with nervous hands and
remarkable steady eyes. He had punched cows over those ranges for ten
years, and his experience had made him a wildcat in a fight. Oscar
Larsen was a huge Swede, with a perpetual and foolish grin. Sour Creek
had laughed at Oscar for five years, considered him dubiously for five
years more, and then suddenly admitted him as a man among men. He was
stronger than Buck Mason, quicker than Denver Jim, and shrewder than
the judge. Last of all came Montana. He had a long, sad face,
prodigious ability to stow away redeye, and a nature as simple and kind
and honest as a child's. These were the six men who gathered about and
stared at the center of the floor. Something, they agreed, had to be
done.

"First it was old man Collins. That was two years back," said Judge
Lodge. "You boys remember how Collins went. Then there was the drifter
that was plugged eight months ago. And now it's Ollie Quade. Gents,
three murders in two years is too much. Sour Creek'll get a name. The
bad ones will begin to drop in on us and use us for headquarters. We
got to make an example. We never got the ones that shot Collins or the
drifter. Since Quade has been plugged we got to hang somebody. Ain't
that straight?"

"We got to hang somebody," said Denver Jim. "The point is—who?"

His keen eyes went slowly, hungrily, from face to face, as if he would
not have greatly objected to picking one of his companions in that very
room.

"Is they any strangers in town?" asked Larsen with his peculiar,
foolish grin.

Sandersen stirred in his chair; his heart leaped.

"There's a gent named Riley Sinclair nobody ain't never seen before."

"When did he come in?"

"Along about dark."

"That's the right time for us. You found Quade a long time dead, Bill."

Sandersen swallowed. In his joy he could have embraced Larsen.

"What'll we do?"

"Go talk to Sinclair," said Larsen and rose. "I got a rope."

"He's a dangerous-lookin' gent," declared Sandersen.

Larsen replied mildly: "Mostly they's a pile more interesting when
they's dangerous. Come on, boys!"

It had been well after midnight when Mason and Sandersen got back to
Sour Creek. The gathering of the posse had required much time. Now, as
they filed out to the hotel, to the east the mountains were beginning
to roll up out of the night, and one cloud, far away and high in the
sky, was turning pink. They found the hotel wakening even at this early
hour. At least, the Chinese cook was rattling in the kitchen as he
built the fire. When the six reached the door of Sinclair's room,
stepping lightly, they heard the occupant singing softly to himself.

"Early riser," whispered Denver Jim.

"Too early to be honest," replied Judge Lodge.