Broken Star (2006) (5 page)

John Thurston, the town’s doctor, went further in condemnation of Vejar. ‘That man is nothing but a damned outlaw himself, Harker.’

‘That is true, Doc,’ Harker conceded. ‘In fact, up to a few days ago he was riding with the Klugg gang.’

‘What?’ the doctor snorted in disgust. ‘Where
is the damned fellow now?’

‘In the jail,’ Harker said.

‘Best place for that scoundrel,’ Walter Randall opined, and the other councillors voiced their agreement enthusiastically.

‘He’s not a prisoner,’ Harker informed them. ‘He’s just sleeping in the jail because Ma Cousin’s place is closed.’

‘Hogwash! There are rooms vacant at my hotel,’ Joseph Behm pointed out.

‘I reckon Fallon didn’t want to pay your tariffs, Joe,’ the sheriff commented wryly.

Picking up a claw hammer, Walter Randall banged it on the table like a judge with his gavel. ‘I call this meeting to order.’

‘You sceered me half to death with that racket, Walter,’ Henuy Drake protested.

‘It’s this whole caboodle that has me afeared,’ Randall countered. ‘Tell me, Sheriff Harker, how do we know that this Vejar isn’t in town to set up the raid?’

‘Because I say he’s not,’ Harker replied.

‘That’s good enough for me,’ Hiram Anstey said.

‘And me,’ Henry Drake agreed. ‘George deserves our backing on this.’

‘And I’ll go along with you, providing Vejar doesn’t play any part in protecting our town,’ Walter Randall stipulated.

Harker shocked them with an announcement. ‘I asked Vejar to do so, but he won’t. Yancey could well do with a man like Fallon Vejar right now.’

‘I can’t agree with that,’ Dr Thurston said firmly.

‘Neither can I,’ Randall muttered grumpily. ‘You have your deputy, Dan Matthews, Sheriff, so what is your plan.’

‘You don’t pay old Dan enough for me to let him risk his life, Walter,’ Harker answered. ‘Dan will be a lookout at Macadam Point. He’ll be able to ride back in and warn me that Klugg is on his way to town, then Dan will take himself home and stay there. That will allow me at least half an hour to prepare for the gang’s arrival. I’m borrowing six men off Jim Reynard out at the Lazy J. That’s all Jim can spare me this time of year. All I can do is have three of them under cover at each end of the street.’

‘And you’ll be at the bank, George?’ Hiram Anstey checked nervously.

‘I won’t let you down, Hiram.’

‘You don’t have to tell me that, George.’

‘Is there anything that we can do to help, George?’ Henry Drake enquired.

‘Thanks for the offer, Henry,’ Harker said. ‘But I want all four of you to keep yourselves and everyone else out of harm’s way. As soon as I give
the warning that Klugg and his band are
heading
for town, take all the women and children and put them in the school.’

‘Is it likely to be that bad?’ Randall asked tremulously.

‘Where Klugg’s concerned it would be foolish not to expect the very worst,’ Harker advised.

‘I must say that this business has me worried, George,’ Hiram Anstey admitted.

‘You are not on your own in that, Hiram,’ Sheriff George Harker confessed.

The five of them sat round the shack’s crude table eating bacon and beans that Gloria had prepared reluctantly. As the only woman among the outlaws she was expected to cook for the others and clean the dirty dishes afterwards. That was something she resented. Except for Klugg himself, she was the fastest gun and a better shot than any of them. That being so, she objected to having to do such menial chores. However, it would be plumb crazy to take a
head-on
protest to Ken Klugg. Maybe after the bank job at Yancey she would make a stand, somehow establish her rights as Klugg’s second-
in-command
. Nerves wouldn’t be so strained then as they were now, and the outlaw boss might well be swayed by her quiet rebellion.

Finishing his meal, Klugg took out and
studied
a pocket watch that he stolen from a
passenger
during a train hold-up. First sucking noisily
on his teeth, he then said to Richie Deere, ‘You head off once you’ve cleared that plate, kid. It will be dark by the time you ride into Yancey. That’ll give you the whole evening to set up what you have to do.’

The kid raised his head of black curls, his youthful, good-looking face expressionless as he stared unafraid at the intimidating outlaw boss and said, ‘It ain’t my way to go sneaking about in the darkness, Klugg, shooting a man without warning. You wouldn’t ask Fallon Vejar to shoot a man down like a dog.’

‘Vejar isn’t here, so I’m not asking him, and I sure as hell aren’t asking you, kid. I’m
telling
you. Now, eat up and hightail it out of here.’

With the kid appearing ready to argue further, fear for his safety made Gloria intervene. ‘It’s got to be done, Richie. There isn’t one of us here who doesn’t badly need that money in the bank at Yancey. With Harker out of the way the town will be wide open.’

‘I knows that,’ the kid acknowledged, ‘but I can face that sheriff or anyone else man-to-man, Gloria.’

‘Nobody doubts that, Richie, but there’s too much at stake for any of us to take risks,’ Gloria pointed out. Being aware of the hero worship problem the kid had, she added, ‘Fallon knows that you would want to call the sheriff out,
Richie, and that you got what it takes to beat George Harker to the draw.’

Close to being pacified by this, the kid had one final question for her. ‘Are you right sure that Fallon will understand when he hears about it?’

‘I’m absolutely certain that he will, Richie.’

To her relief, the kid cleaned his plate and then stood up despondently to buckle on his gunbelt, reach for his rifle and shrug into his coat. The cold way in which Klugg watched the kid as he went out of the door confirmed Gloria’s worst fear. If the kid had objected further, then the outlaw boss would have shot him right there in the shack, without
compunction
.

‘That’s Harker taken care of,’ a satisfied Klugg said to Gloria, when Richie Deere had closed the shack door behind him. ‘This girl in Yancey is certain about Vejar not backing Harker?’

‘Absolutely,’ Gloria said, with an emphatic nod. ‘Vejar will never forgive Harker for taking her from him.’

‘What about when Harker is no longer on the scene?’

‘I don’t understand, Ken?’

‘Vejar comes from Yancey, so what I’m asking is whether he’s likely to help the townsfolk when they have no sheriff to protect them?’

‘The last thing they’d want is help from Vejar,’ Gloria assured Klugg. ‘He’s an outcast, Ken. A man they would never trust.’

‘Good,’ Klugg said.

One of the other two outlaws, a scar-faced man known only by the single name of Jack, with an immediate ancestry so abstruse that even he was unsure of it, spoke up truculently. ‘You’ve been doing a lot of talking, Klugg. When do you stop talking and we all start doing?’

‘Are you looking to run things, Jack?’ Klugg asked, in a deceptively casual tone.

Tension among them always built to a
dangerous
level immediately prior to a robbery. It had grown even worse of late. Gloria guessed they all realized that after so many years on the outlaw trail, virtually untouched by the law, they were pushing their luck to the edge of an abyss of disaster. The chances of the next raid being their last was greater each time. The atmosphere in the shack was now so taut that she was nervous about intervening. But Mitchell Staley, the remaining outlaw, and a surprisingly
mild-mannered
, gentle man saved her from doing so.

Recognizing that Jack was provoking the volatile Klugg, Staley spoke up. ‘There’s no call to get riled up, Ken. Jack’s just anxious to get some of that Yancey money in his pocket.’

‘As we all are,’ Gloria said, as a contribution
towards keeping the peace.

Though still holding Jack in a steely gaze, Klugg’s aggression abated. He addressed all three of them. ‘We need to make some changes. Without Fallon Vejar, our usual tactics won’t work at Yancey. We’ll run through how to manage with a man short in the morning, but even then we may have to alter things when we get to town.’

‘Why should that be, when the sheriff won’t give us any trouble and there is no real deputy?’ Gloria asked.

‘We are going to hit what is probably the wealthiest bank in the territory, Gloria,’ Klugg explained. ‘Even the most craven coward in Yancey won’t let us walk away with his money unopposed. We could find ourselves up against a citizens’ committee blasting away with
scatterguns
, and there is only five of us now.’

‘I was only asking out of interest, not
criticizing
,’ Gloria said.

That was true. For all his many faults, Ken Klugg was a man whom Gloria could follow with a wordless faith. He was a natural-born leader. If serving in any army he would have risen to the rank of general. A brilliantly fast thinker, who on occasions when they had been pinned down under a hail of lead, had instantly come up with a plan that succeeded in them getting away from
town unscathed and with the proceeds from a raid intact.

‘If any of you have any more questions, save them until the morning,’ Klugg advised. His head drooped like a tired horse, and he appeared to be staring at something that Gloria and the others couldn’t see.

All three of them knew their leader well enough to accept that this was a time to stay silent.

It was payday at the local ranches, and the saloon was full of noise and movement that night. The gambling tables were frantically busy, and
half-drunken
cowboys were enthusiastically jumping and foot-stamping around in what they
considered
to be dancing with less enthusiastic but sweating saloon girls. Fallon Vejar, his damaged face healing so that the injuries were hardly noticeable in the saloon’s flickering lighting, stood apart from the festivities, drinking at the bar with Sheriff Harker.

Using a thumb to indicate the boisterous crowd, Harker said, ‘Normally this is as bad as it gets in Yancey, Fallon. Before this night is over I’ll probably have to crack a few skulls and lock up one or two would-be hard men, but that’s it. So you can understand why I’d prefer not to have this bank raid about to spoil the quiet life for me.’

‘The quiet life wouldn’t have suited you at one time, George,’ Vejar reminded his friend. ‘Maybe it’s time you were stretched, just so you keep the old reflexes in working order.’

‘We were both wild ones in our day,’ Harker agreed. He did so looking straight ahead as if addressing the whole world and not Vejar in particular. ‘But right now I sure am ready to settle down.’

This sent a shaft of emotional pain through Vejar. George Harker would be settling down with Raya, who, for Vejar, was a dream that now would never be realized. Though he had forced himself to accept this since his return to Yancey, it still didn’t sit easily with him. Had his rival been anyone but George Harker, then things would be different, very different.

‘Whether you settle down with your
memories
, or have them ride the trail with you, George, they make sure that you never sleep good,’ Vejar said.

‘I’ve found myself a new philosophy,’ a slightly embarrassed Harker confided in Vejar. ‘I intend to build myself a whole new batch of happy memories to kill off the old bad ones.’

‘I sure hope that works, George.’

Draining his glass, the sheriff made no comment, but said, ‘When trouble breaks out it will be in this place, but I’d better look in on the
two other saloons before the night is much older. Do you want to tag along, Fallon, even though it may mean you get caught up in any bother that comes my way? Right now there is no way of telling where your allegiance lies,
amigo
, and that worries me.’

‘I’ll walk with you, George,’ Vejar replied, adding, ‘And if it was any gang other than Klugg’s outfit, I’d be standing right at your side when the bank is hit.’

Harker made no reply as they headed to the door together and went out into the night. They turned right, heading for the Ace of Spades saloon. The sheriff strolled unhurried and unworried, but the thought that the Poole brothers could be lurking anywhere in the
shadows
made Vejar vigilant. Bent on vengeance, they had a cunning that made them formidable foes.

When he and Harker were about halfway between the two saloons, he sensed that
something
was amiss. He slowed, edging in close to the wall of the building they were passing. Moving nearer to him, Harker whispered a
question
, ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m not sure, George.’

‘The Pooles?’

‘Could be,’ Vejar whispered back, as he tried to identify what had disturbed him. Had it been
a furtive movement, or the click of the hammer being thumbed back on a six-shooter? He stood motionless. The night was cool, overcast, but he felt a quick dampness on the back of his shirt.

Vejar took stock of their surroundings. The street up ahead was illuminated enough by the lights of Joseph Behm’s hotel to satisfy Vejar that it presented no problem. The two-storey
building
across the street was in darkness. A parapet about eighteen inches high ran along the front edge of the building’s flat roof, and Vejar
studied
it for any irregularity in its shape that would indicate someone was crouching behind it. There was nothing unusual there.

‘What do you think, Fallon?’ Harker asked in a low voice.

Not answering while he studied the upper storey of the building across the street, Vejar asked, ‘Who owns Ned Jessup’s place over there?’

‘When old Ned died, Walter Randall bought it from Ned’s son. Randall uses it as a kind of warehouse for his surplus stock.’

‘Does Randall use the first floor that used to be Jessup’s living-quarters?’ Vejar enquired.

‘No, that part of the building is vacant now.’

Looking again at the two sashed windows of the upper storey, Vejar was puzzled. There was something out of place, but what it was
continued
to elude him. Then it clicked suddenly into his head. The horizontal frame dividing the upper and lower window on his left was a single length of wood, whereas even in the poor light he could see two lengths of wood at the division of the panes of the window on his right. He judged there was a distance of about six inches between the two frames. It must have been the sound of the window being raised that had alerted him.

He was about to convey this to Harker, when the perceptive sheriff hissed a warning. ‘The upstairs window on the right is open at the bottom.’

‘I’ve just noticed that, George. My guess is that one of the Pooles is up there.’

Reaching out to touch Vejar’s arm lightly, Harker informed him, ‘From here it’s
impossible
to see, Fallon. Keep your eye on that window. I’m going to move to the right to get a better look.’

‘Careful, George. The hotel lights reach to within a foot or so from us.’

‘I won’t move out of the shadows,’ Harker reassured him. ‘But cover me, Fallon.’

Drawing his .45, Vejar lined it up on the top window as he heard the sheriff’s furtive
movements
. He called in a hoarse whisper, ‘Can you see anything, George?’

‘No,’ came Harker’s reply. ‘If there’s a Poole up there, then he’s well—’

The sharp crack of a rifle brought an end to the sheriff’s sentence. Firing at the flash he had seen up at the window, Vejar heard the glass shatter and fall tinkling to the boardwalk. Then, in the new silence, there was a heavy thud at his side and an agonized groan came from Harker. Hunkering in the darkness, he found the sheriff lying on his side with a fast-growing stain
darkening
the front of his shirt. He had been shot in the chest and badly wounded. Vejar was
mortified
that a bullet intended for him had brought down his friend.

The sound of gunfire had brought people cautiously out on to the street. Unaware of the danger he was putting himself in, Dan Matthews came running wheezily up to Vejar, asking, ‘What’s happened?’

Grabbing the oldster’s shirt, Vejar pulled him into the shadows, saying tersely, ‘George Harker’s been hurt real bad. Wait till I say, then run to fetch Doc Thurston. Keep in the shadows when you go.’

Bending to make a quick check on Harker, who was still unconscious, with blood now
trickling
ominously from the corner of his mouth, Vejar called a muted order to Matthews ‘Go, Dan, go!’

As the old man scurried away, Vejar leapt off the boardwalk and ran across the street,
targeting
the upstairs window with five rapid-fire shots as he went. There was no return fire.

Not slowing his pace, Vejar jumped up onto the boardwalk and hurled himself at a glazed ground-level window. While in the air, he curled up into a ball, tucking his head tight into his chest. The windowpane shattered explosively under the impact of his shoulders. Somersaulting into the room, Vejar hit the ground, rolling down an aisle between stacked boxes. Coming up into a sitting position with his back against a wooden crate, the sleeves of his shirt slashed to ribbons by the window glass, he deftly flicked the used cartridges from his Colt and reloaded it. Holding the gun in his hand, he sat for a few moments to allow his eyes to adjust to the dimness of the interior of the building.