Curly Bill and Ringo (16 page)

Of course, he could see now what a fool he had been, and he resented both Ringo and Miss Sarah for trying to keep their affair a secret. They had just let him go on making a fool of himself.

But he realized it was just like Ringo to pull a stunt like that. He probably thought it was funny, like the Hatcher boys did. Curly felt certain Miss Sarah had told Ringo about him trying to court her. She was smart enough to know that if she didn’t tell him, he would soon hear it from someone else and might draw the wrong conclusions about her silence.

Curly and Cash left town and followed the stage road east in silence. The morning was cool and breezy. The desert was green and looked more like a vast orchard than a barren waste. But Curly scarcely noticed it. As they rode on through the early morning chill he saw only one thing—Miss Sarah, the way she had looked in the hotel dining room, with the light and shadows in her eyes and the spots of color in her pale cheeks.

At last the memory was shattered by the sudden roar of a gunshot echoing through the hills.

“I wonder who we’ll find this time,” Cash said.

Time was running out for Scar-face Harry and Rattlesnake Sam. Something had spooked their horses and they were on foot—and someone was following them! They had heard shod hoofs on rock, and then silence. They had called out, thinking it might be Pike or some of the others. But there was no answer, and the same thought, the same dreaded name, seared itself in the mind of each.

Ringo!

They hid in a willow thicket in a sandy wash and hoped they wouldn’t be found.

“You hear anything, Rattlesnake?” Scar-face Harry asked.

“Be quiet, dammit,” Rattlesnake hissed.

“Huh?” Scar-face Harry bent his huge head toward the alarmed Rattlesnake, “What did you say?”

“Shut up!” Rattlesnake cried.

Scar-face Harry finally made out what his friend was saying, and his ugly face got red. “You got no call to say that, Rattlesnake. I only ast—”

Rattlesnake Sam suddenly put one hand over Scar-face Harry’s mouth and pointed with the other hand. Through the willows Scar-face saw the dark legs of a horse walking slowly down the wash toward them, not making a whisper of sound in the soft sand. None that he could hear anyway. He noticed that the horse’s legs were dark all the way down to the black hoofs.

Once he caught a glimpse of the rider through the willows and saw that he was dressed in black and carrying a sawed-off shotgun in one hand, held at waist level and ready to fire, his thumb on the hammers and his forefinger through the trigger guard. But neither of them could see the man’s face clearly enough to tell anything about it.

They eased out their guns and waited. Scar-face cocked his .45 as quietly as he could and Rattlesnake cursed softly and bitterly when the man on the dark horse suddenly turned aside and disappeared into the thicket. He was much too close for comfort and the two men scrambled off through the willows on their hands and knees. But they knew they couldn’t go far without being spotted and they soon stopped again to watch and wait and pray for a miracle to save them. Barring that, they meant to save themselves or go down fighting like the desperate characters they were.

For a time they didn’t see or hear anything. Then Rattle-snake heard the hammer of a gun being drawn back off in the willows behind them. He cried out and whirled around with his Colt up and ready. But he didn’t see anything to shoot at. Just the green willows stirring in the breeze.

Then a shotgun roared and he felt himself torn apart by the charge of buckshot. Scar-face grabbed him as he fell and blundered off through the thicket carrying him in his arms like an overgrown baby.

When he had gone about fifty yards Scar-face eased his bloody burden to the sand and turned about to make a fight, his eyes searching the screen of willows, his gun ready in his big fist.

“You hear anything, Rattlesnake?” he asked hoarsely, when he had caught his breath.

There was no answer that he could hear and he turned his head to look at the man on the ground. Rattlesnake lay staring at the sky with empty eyes and Scar-face gasped in horror.

For a long time Rattlesnake had been his ears and now Rattle-snake was dead, just when he needed him so desperately.

Scar-face swung his head looking wildly about in every direction, and he thought he saw a shadowy movement off through the willows. He froze and fixed his gaze on that spot. He didn’t see anything else for a few moments, but then once again he saw a dark horse approaching at a slow, silent walk. As before, he couldn’t see anything clearly but the horse’s legs. He watched those legs in horrified fascination as the horseman approached closer and closer to the spot where he crouched.

The horse was now moving along a sandy cow trail at a slow trot, and Scar-face saw that the animal had three white stockings. That didn’t seem right somehow, and after a moment it came to him. The horse he had seen before didn’t have any stockings! So there were two of them and that meant the danger was doubled.

But one at a time, Scar-face told himself grimly, watching the shadowy outline of the rider over the long barrel of his Colt. The man in black suddenly rode into full view and Scar-face found himself looking into Ringo’s hard, handsome face and cold blue eyes. He bared his yellow teeth in a wolfish grin at the look of surprise on Ringo’s face and started slowly taking the up the slack on the trigger, determined to make his first shot count.

He saw only a blur of movement and Ringo’s gun was suddenly in his hand, before Scar-face could think or react or increase the pressure on his own trigger. In another instant, Ringo’s gun would roar and he, Scar-face Harry, would be dead, to go with all his other troubles.

But the explosion that filled his head with the first loud noise he had heard in years came from behind him and he felt as if he had stepped in front of a cannon loaded with shrapnel, just as the thing went off. Then he felt himself falling, and that was the last thing he ever felt.

Ringo held his cocked gun in his hand and sat his horse staring at the tall lean man who stepped out of the thicket breaking his shotgun open and replacing the empty shells. The man’s face was hard and his blue eyes were cold, reflecting Ringo’s expression.

“You’re getting sort of greedy, Wyatt,” Ringo said. “Three of them are dead and you’ve killed all three of them. And if you were out to save my life you sure took your time about it.”

Wyatt shrugged. “I meant to let you have him, but it looked sort of close.” Then he glanced at Ringo and said, “I’ll trade you all the others for Curly.”

Ringo shook his head, glancing at the mess the shotgun had made of Rattlesnake Sam and Scar-face Harry. “You’re getting a little bloodthirsty, aren’t you, Wyatt?”

Wyatt’s jaw rippled with impatience. “Let me kill him, Ringo! If I don’t no one will. He’ll go on laughing at the law and getting away with whatever he wants to do.”

“No, dammit!” Ringo said. “We made a deal! Now live up to your end of it!”

Wyatt groaned. “I’ll try. But it won’t be easy. I don’t know why I ever made you that damn promise. I lay awake thinking about it half the night. That man had too much fun at my expense when I was in Tombstone, and I’m still not so sure he didn’t help kill Morgan. Indian Charlie swore Curly was one of them.”

“He also swore I helped do it,” Ringo said.

The blond man studied Ringo quietly for a moment, hiding whatever was going on in his mind. Then he said, “Did you, Ringo?”

Ringo’s jaw swelled out in anger, but he kept his voice soft—soft and deadly. “You know damn well I didn’t.”

“Yeah, I reckon I do,” Wyatt said, turning to go back through the willows for his horse. “But I sure hope I don’t see Curly. If I saw his grinning face it would be mighty hard to keep from letting him have it.”

Curly and Cash got to the wash only a few minutes after the second shot roared through the hills. After the silence that followed the first shot, they hadn’t expected to hear a second, and they halted in surprise. Then they rode on more slowly and halted again at the lip of the wash, studying the willow thicket below. But they saw no sign of life, so they put their horses cautiously down the steep bank into the wash.

There were tracks all over the place, because some of Pike’s boys had been in there earlier chasing cows. It would be a waste of time to try to figure out a trail in such a maze of tracks, no set of which was firm and distinct in the loose sand. But it didn’t take them long to find Scar-face Harry and Rattlesnake Sam. Rattlesnake was lying on his back and nearby Scar-face was doubled up with his knees under him, his butt in the air and his head almost buried in the sand. Both were dead and covered with blood.

Curly stood looking down at the two dead men with haunted pale gray eyes, remembering when he had come very close to being in the same condition himself. Nor was he sure it couldn’t happen again—that was what worried him. “Looks like somebody shot them both at close range with a shotgun,” he said. “Scar-face got it in the back.”

“Somebody, hell,” Cash said. “Your friend Ringo.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if Ringo is my friend,” Curly said. “He ain’t been acting much like it.”

“He sure as hell ain’t.”

Curly saw two empty shotgun shells in the sand and picked one of them up. It was a 12 gauge. The same gauge as the shotgun that had vanished in Mexico.

He studied the ground with narrowed eyes and saw some long boot tracks leading away through the willows.

“Stay here,” he said to Cash, and followed the tracks on foot, his boots whispering in the sand, the words of his song going through his head. When I get to hell, I know what they’ll say…. The tracks paralleled other long tracks going in the opposite direction, and soon led past a sprinkle of blood where one of the dead men must have been shot.

Here comes old Curly ...

He stopped to study the blood and the tracks around it, and at that moment a horse nickered softly in the thick willows directly ahead of him.

He rode with Ringo and Billy the Kid. And now he’s got to pay ...

His haunted eyes searched the willows. He felt certain there was someone in there with the horse. But he didn’t draw his gun. He figured it was Ringo, hiding because he didn’t want Curly to know who he was. Ringo couldn’t trust him to keep quiet.

Curly’s eyes brightened with anger and resentment. He was tired of Ringo’s secrecy and of the game he was playing.

“You might as well come on out,” he said. “I know you’re in there.”

Nothing stirred in the willows. He didn’t hear a sound. He waited a few minutes and then started straight toward the spot where he had heard the horse. He meant to see whatever was in there. If there was only a horse, he wanted to see if it was Ringo’s.

He had taken three steps into the thicker growth of willows when he heard the click of a gun hammer being drawn back. It sounded like the click of a shotgun, not of a rifle or a pistol, and he stopped in his tracks, remembering what a shotgun could do to a man. He didn’t think Ringo would shoot, if it was Ringo. Curly figured the gunfighter was just trying to scare him away—and he succeeded. Curly decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The Ringo who had returned as if from the dead was like a stranger, and Curly could not be sure he wouldn’t fire.

For that matter he couldn’t be sure it was Ringo, for he still couldn’t see either the horse or the man with the shotgun. But it was possible that the man could see him, so he was careful not to make any sudden move. He just turned around and went back the way he had come, whistling a little tune as if he hadn’t seen or heard anything and had other things on his mind. His back felt like a mighty big target, but the man in the willows resisted the temptation to fill it full of buckshot.

He was wet with sweat and his legs felt weak when he got back to where Cash was. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said quietly. “I ain’t in no mood to hunt cows. Looks like it’s going to rain anyway.”

He hadn’t even noticed it before, but the sky was completely overcast. There was no sun to drive away the shadowy dimness of the lingering twilight.

“I reckon I better go on home and get them dogs, while I’m this close,” Cash said.

Curly turned away and got back in the saddle. “Well, I’ll see you back in town.”

“I was hoping you’d ride along,” Cash said, “in case I run into them Apaches.”

“You’ll be safer without me,” Curly said, his face bleak and somber. “It’s my scalp and horse they’re after, not yours. It looks like my luck has about run out all around.”