The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 1 (32 page)

Even as I said it, I felt like a cad, and yet this was what I had been building toward. Tallman stared at me and his face darkened with angry blood. He started to speak, so I let a string of gold eagles trail through my fingers and their metallic clink arrested him, stopped his voice in his throat. His eyes fell to the gold. His tongue touched his lips.

“Only for collateral,” I suggested.

“No!” He sank back in his seat. “I'll be damned if I do!”

“Suit yourself.” My shrug was indifference itself. Slowly, I got out my buckskin money bag and began gathering the coins. “You asked for a chance. I gave it to you.” I'd played all night for this moment but I was now afraid I'd lost my chance.

Yet the sound of the dropping coins fascinated him. He started to speak, but before he could open his mouth Carol Houston got suddenly to her feet and walked around the table.

“If he won't play for it with you, maybe he will play with me.” She looked at Tallman and her smile was lovely to look upon. “Will you, Sam?”

He glared at her. “Sit down! This here's man's business!” His voice was rough. “Anyway, you got no money! No tellin' what you'd be doin' if I hadn't paid off for you!”

Dutch Henry's face tightened and he started to get to his feet. John was suddenly on the edge of his chair, his breath whistling hollowly in his throat, his eyes blazing at the implied insult. “Sir! You are a miserable scoundrel—!”

“Wait!” Carol Houston's voice stopped us.

She turned to John. “Will you lend me six hundred dollars?”

Both Dutch Henry and I reached for our pockets but she ignored us and accepted the money from the smaller man.

“Now, Sam. One cut of the cards. One hundred dollars against the agreement and my IOUs … Have you got the guts to do it?”

He started to growl a threat, but John spoke up. “You could play Duval again if you win.” His soft voice drawled, “He gave you quite a thrashing.”

Yet as John spoke, his attention, as was mine, was directed at the face of Carol Houston. What happened to our little lady? This behavior did not, somehow, seem to fit.

Tallman hesitated, then shrugged. “Yeah? All right, but I'm warning you.” He shook his finger at John. “I'm paying no more of my wife's debts. If she loses, you lose too. Now give me the damn cards.”

She handed him the deck and he cut—a queen.

Tallman chuckled. “Reckon I've made myself a hundred,” he said. “You ain't got much chance to beat that.”

Carol Houston accepted the cards. They spilled through her fingers to the table and we helped her gather them up. She shuffled clumsily, placed the deck on the table, then cut—an ace!

Tallman swore and started to rise.

“Sam, wait!” She put her hand on his arm. He frowned, but he dropped back into his seat and glared at me.

Carol Houston turned to me, her eyes quietly calculating. The room was very still. A drop of rain gathered on the ceiling and fell into the bucket—again that fat
plop
. The window was almost white now … it was day again.

“How much did you win from Sam, Mr. Duval?”

Her face was without expression. “Six hundred dollars,” I replied.

“Not more than that.”

She picked up the cards, trying a clumsy shuffle. “Would you gamble with me for that money?”

John leaned back in his chair, holding a handkerchief to his mouth. Yet even as he coughed his eyes never left the girl. Dutch Henry was leaning forward, frankly puzzled. Neither Wilson nor Haven said anything. This seemed a different girl, not at all the sort of person we had—

“If you wish.” My voice strained hard not to betray my surprise. I was beginning to understand that we had all been taken in.

She pushed the entire six hundred dollars she had borrowed from John into the middle of the table. “Cut the cards once for the lot, Mr. Duval?”

I cut and turned the card faceup—the nine of clubs.

She drew the deck together, straightened it, tapped it lightly with her thumb as she picked it up, and turned—
a king!

Stunned, and more by the professional manner of the cut than its result, I watched Carol Houston draw the money to her. With careful hands she counted out six hundred dollars and returned it to John. “Thank you,” she said, and smiled at him.

His expression a study, John pocketed the money.

Haven, who had left the cabin, now thrust his head back into the door. “All hitched up! We're goin' on! Mount up, folks!”

“Mr. Haven,” Carol asked quickly, “isn't there a stage going west soon?”

“ 'Bout an hour, if she's on time.”

The six hundred she had won from me she pushed over to Sam Tallman. Astonished, he looked at the money, and then at her. “I—is this for me?”

“For you. It is over between us. But I want those IOUs and the marriage contract.”

“Now wait a minute!” Tallman roared, lunging up from his chair.

He reached across for her but I stopped him. “That money is more than you deserve, Tallman. I'd take it and get out.”

His hand dropped and rested on his pistol butt and his eyes narrowed. “She's goin' with me! I'll be
damned
if I let any of you stop me!”

“No, suh.” It was John's soft voice. “You'll just be damned. Unless you go and get on that stage.”

Tallman turned truculently toward the slighter man, all his rage suddenly ready to vent itself on this apparently easier target.

Before he could speak, Dutch Henry spoke from the doorway. “You'll leave him alone, Tallman, if you want to live. That's Doc Holliday!”

Tallman brought up short, looking foolish. Doc had not moved, his right hand grasping the lapel of his coat, his gray eyes cold and level. Shocked, Tallman turned and stumbled toward the door.

“Henry Duval, you quit gambling once, did you not?”

She held my eyes. Hers were clear, lovely, grave. “Why … yes. It has been years … until tonight.”

“And you gambled for me. Wasn't that it?”

My ears grew red. “All right, so I'm a fool.”

Until that moment I had never known how a woman's face could light up, nor what could be seen in it. “Not a fool,” she said gently. “I meant what I said by the fire—up to a point.”

We heard the stage rattle away, and then I looked at Carol.

A smile flickered on her lips, and then she picked up the cards from the table. Deliberately, she spread them in a beautiful fan, closed the deck, did a one-hand cut, riffled the deck, then handed them to me. “Cut them,” she said.

I cut an ace, then cut the same ace again and again. She picked up the deck, riffled them again, and placing them upon the table, cut a red king.

Picking up the deck I glanced at the ace and king she had cut. “Slick king and a shaved ace,” I said. “Tap the deck lightly as you cut and you cut the king every time. But where did you have them?”

“In my purse.” She took my hands. “Henry, do you remember Natchez Tom Tennison?”

“Of course. We worked the riverboats together a half dozen times. A good man.”

“He was my father, and he taught me what I did tonight. Both things.”

“Both things?”

“How to use cards, and always to pay my debts. I didn't want to owe anything to Sam Tallman, not even the money you took from him, and I didn't want to be the girl you won in a poker game.”

Dutch Henry, the Cherokee Strip outlaw, slapped his thigh. “Women!” he said. “If they don't beat all!”

It was almost two hours before the westbound stage arrived … but somehow it did not seem that long.

Duffy's Man

Duffy's man had been on the job just six days when trouble started. Duffy, who was older than the gnarled pin-oak by the water hole, knew there would be trouble when he saw Clip Hart riding up to the stable. Duffy had covered a lot of miles in his time, and had forgotten nothing, man or animal, that he had seen in his travels.

Clip Hart had killed a man seven years before in El Paso, and Duffy had seen it happen. Since then there had been other killings in other towns, and three years in the state pen for rustling. From time to time Hart had been investigated in connection with robberies of one kind or another.

Hart was older, heavier, and harder now. He had the coldly watchful eye of a hunted man. There were two men with him and one of them rode across the street to the Pine Saloon and stood alongside his horse, watching the street.

Hart looked at the sign on the livery stable and then at the fat old man in the big chair. “You're Duffy?” Hart measured him as he spoke.

“I'm Duffy.” The old man shifted his bulk in the polished chair. “What can I do for you?”

“The use of your stable. I've seven horses coming in tonight. They'll be kept here in your stable, saddled all the time.”

Duffy shifted himself in his seat. “None of that here. I'll not want your business. Not here.”

“You'll keep them. You don't move very fast, Duffy.” Clip Hart struck a match on the seat of his pants and held up the flame. “Your barn can't move at all.” He lifted the flame suggestively. “Where's your hostler?”

Duffy turned his head on his fat neck. He was no fool, and he knew Hart was not bluffing. He opened his mouth to call for his hostler, and as he turned his head he saw him there, standing in the door, his hands on his hips.

Duffy's man was tall, lean, and wide-shouldered. His face was still. Sometimes his eyes smiled, rarely his lips. The stubble of beard he had worn when Duffy hired him was gone now, but he wore no hat and he still wore the worn, badly scuffed shoes, unusual foot gear in a country of boots and spurs.

There was a small scar on one cheekbone and sometime long ago his nose had been broken. He was probably twenty-five but he looked older, and the years behind him had probably been rugged years.

Clip Hart stared at him. “There'll be seven horses brought here tonight. Keep them saddled and ready to go. Understand?”

Duffy's man jerked a thumb at Duffy. “I take my orders from him.”

Hart's anger flared. He was a man who could not accept resistance of any kind. It drove him to a killing fury and Duffy knew it, and was worried. “You'll take my orders!” Hart said. “Get back inside!”

Deliberately, the hostler glanced at Duffy and the old man nodded. Duffy's man turned on his heel and went back inside.

“You'll get paid, and plenty,” Hart was telling Duffy, “but no arguments, understand?” Then, his tone thick with contempt, he added,

“Who in this town could make trouble for us?”

When Hart crossed the street to the saloon, Duffy's man returned to the door. “You goin' to take that?”

“We've no choice. I'm no gunslinger. There's no more than seven men in town right now, all quiet, peaceful men. Anyway, their womenfolks would be scared. We've been expectin' something of the kind for a long time.” He looked around. “You're new here. Those men are bad, real bad.”

Duffy's man merely looked at him. “Are they?” he asked.

He walked back into the stable and climbed to the loft, forking hay into the mangers, then put corn into seven feed boxes. Walking out he said, “I'll eat now,” slipping into his coat as he spoke. He did not look at Duffy. The three horses were still across the street.

There was a sign that said ma's kitchen and when he went inside there were two tables eight feet long with a bench along each side and at each end. Clip Hart was sitting at the end of one table with his back to the wall. Duffy's man sat down alongside the table near the opposite end.

He had been born in the West but left with his mother when he was ten and had grown up in the streets of New York. At fifteen, after two years working on a fishing boat he had shipped out around the Horn. He dealt monte in a Barbary Coast dive, fought a series of bareknuckle fights, and won them. He had become friendly with Jem Mace and learned a lot about fighting from him, the master boxer of his time. At seventeen he was on a windjammer in the China Sea. Back in New York again he fought several more bareknuckle fights and won each time.

Discontented with his life he found an interest in books and began to study with an eye to bettering himself, although without any definite idea. Running out of money he worked his way West on the railroad and finally, dead broke, he dropped off the stage in Westwater.

Westwater had one restaurant, one saloon, a livery stable, a blacksmith shop, a crossroads store, and a stage station which doubled as a post office.

Julie came around the table and put a plate before him. He thanked her and watched her fill the cup. She was a slender girl with Irish blue eyes, black hair, and a few freckles. She left him and went around the table, picking up several dirty dishes. It looked like at least three men had left without finishing their meals when Hart came in.

“More coffee!” Hart looked at the girl as he spoke, boldly appraising. When she went to fill his cup he slipped an arm around her waist.

She stepped away so quickly that it jerked Hart off balance and his face turned ugly with anger.

“Put that pot down and come here!” he said.

“Keep your hands to yourself !” Julie flared. “I'll serve you, but I won't be pawed by you!”

Clip started to rise but Duffy's man grabbed the table and shoved hard. The end of the table hit Hart's hip as he was turning to rise, and it caught him off balance. He staggered, the bench behind tripped him. He fell hard, his feet flying up.

Duffy's man stood over him. “Let her alone,” he said. “A man in your business can't afford to fool around.”

“You're tellin' me my business?” He gathered his feet under him but he was in no position to argue, and something in the face of Duffy's man warned him.

At the same time he realized that what the hostler said was true. He could not afford trouble here and now. He could wait. He got carefully to his feet. “Aw, I was just foolin'!” he said. “No need for her to be so persnickety.”

Then as he started to brush himself off, his anger flared again. “You shoved that table!” he exclaimed.

“You catch on fast.” Duffy's man spoke calmly, standing there with his hands on his hips, just looking at Hart. The outlaw grew more and more angry. At the same time he felt an impulse to caution. No trouble here and now. That could wait.

Without another word he drew back his bench and sat down. When he had finished eating he threw a half-dollar on the table and went out without so much as a backward glance.

Julie filled his cup again. “He won't forget that.”

“I know.”

“He'll kill you. He's killed other men.”

“Maybe.”

Duffy's man finished his meal in silence, ever conscious of her presence. When he got up he dropped two bits on the table to pay for the meal, then went to the door. “You be careful,” she warned.

He crossed the street and saw the horses the men had ridden into town were gone. It was dark now, but he could still see Duffy seated in his big old chair.

“Horses come?”

“Not yet.” Duffy's chair creaked. “What happened over there?”

“He got fresh with Julie, and I shoved him down with a table. He didn't like it very much.”

“He'll kill you.”

“I'm not ready to die.”

“Take a horse,” Duffy advised. “Take that little bay. If you ever get the money you can send it to me. If not, forget it. I like you, son.”

“I don't need a horse.”

“You won't have a chance.”

“You go home, Mr. Duffy, and don't come out tomorrow. Leave this to me. It's my fight.”

Duffy's chair creaked as he got up. “The bay's in the box stall if you want it.” He paused near the corner of the barn. “Have you got a gun?”

“No, I don't think I'll need one.” He was silent, and he was aware that the old man had not moved, but stood there in the shadows.

“The way I see it,” he said, “they've got this town treed. They can do as they please. First they will use it as a way station for fresh horses, then they'll take over the town's business, then the people. Men will be killed and women taken.”

“Maybe.”

“You go home now, Mr. Duffy. You stay out of this.”

Duffy's man listened to the slow, retreating steps. Duffy must be nearly eighty. The storekeeper was well past sixty. The tough young men of the town were all gone on a cattle drive. They would be back next year, or maybe they would never come back. The hardships of a cattle drive being what they were. It made no difference now. He was a man who knew what had to be done and he was not accustomed to asking for help.

He sat down in Duffy's chair and waited. There had been a man in a railroad construction camp who was always quoting, and those quotations had a way of sticking in the mind. Duffy's man stirred in the chair, remembering one the fellow had loved to quote. Time and again he had said it.

They tell us, Sir, that we are weak, unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be next week? Will it be next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed and a guard stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Sir, we are not weak if we make proper use of those means which the God of nature has placed in our power.

The words had a nice sound and he said them aloud, but softly, listening to the smooth sound of them on his lips. He had the Irishman's love of fine sounding words and the Irishman's aptitude for rebellion. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. The fellow in the construction camp who quoted that, he had been better than a book, and all he needed to start him off was a bit of rye whiskey.

It was past midnight when the horses came. Two riders led them up under the trees and then across the street to the stable. One man remained outside in Duffy's chair while the other helped Duffy's man tie them in the stalls. They were all fine, beautifully built animals.

The man was stocky and not very tall. He lifted the lantern to the hostler's face. “New?”

“Drifting.”

“You take good care these horses are ready. You do that and you'll have no trouble. You might even find a few extra bucks in your kick when this is over. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

The man walked back to the door but did not step out into the light. There was a lantern over the door that was kept burning all night, and it threw a pale glow around the stable door.

Duffy's man watched the glow of their cigarettes and then he went to the harness room. There were several old saddles, odds and ends of harness, and in a corner, behind a dusty slicker there was something else.

It was a Colt revolving shotgun.

He peered out a crack of the door, then put the lantern on the floor between himself and the door. Taking up the shotgun he wiped it free of dust, then he took it apart and went to work on it.

Several times he went to the door to peer out. After almost two hours of work he had the shotgun in firing condition. The cylinder would no longer revolve of itself but could be turned by hand. Duffy's man fed shells into the four chambers. They were old brass shotgun shells, and he had loaded them himself. Then he stood the shotgun back in the corner and hung the slicker over it.

The short, stocky man was in the chair now and the other one was asleep on the hay just inside the door. Duffy's man stopped inside the door. “What time tomorrow?” he asked.

The fellow looked around at him. “Maybe noon. Why?”

“Wonderin' if I should feed them again. They won't run good on a full stomach.”

“Say, that's right. Feed 'em now, I s'pose. All right?”

“Yeah.”

Duffy's man walked back inside and fed the horses. “They tell us, Sir, that we are weak,” he repeated, “but when shall we be stronger?”

He thought it over as he stood there, rubbing the sorrel's neck. “It has a nice sound,” he told the horse, “a nice sound.”

He walked to the door. “Soon be daylight,” he said, “the sky's turning gray.”

“Yeah.” The stocky man got to his feet and stretched. Duffy's man hit him.

It was a backhand blow with his left fist that caught the stretching outlaw in the solar plexus. Duffy's man stepped around in front of him and with the practiced ease of the skilled boxer he uppercut with the left and crossed a right to the chin. The outlaw never had a chance to know what was happening, and the only sound was a gasp at the backhand to the solar plexus.

Duffy's man pulled him out of sight behind the door. Then he tied his hands and feet and stuffed a dirty rag into his mouth for a gag, tying it there.

Leaning over the sleeping outlaw he very gently lifted the man's hand and slipped a loop over it. His eyes flared open but the hostler grasped his upper arm and flipped him over on his face before he realized what was happening.

Shoving the man's face into the hay and earth, he dropped on one knee on the man's back and jerked his other wrist over to receive a second loop. Quickly, with a sailor's skill with knots, he drew the wrists together and bound them tight, then tied his feet and gagged him.

They might, he thought, get themselves free just when he was most busy. He dragged them to the center of the barn where there was no loft. It was almost forty feet to the ridgepole. Climbing the ladder to the loft he then mounted a ladder that led to the roof and rigged two ropes over a crosspiece, then went back to the floor.