Adam Steele 42, page 12
Silently screaming. While the guns in the hands of his sadistic tormentors made no sound as the bullets exploded from their muzzles.
And because of the utter soundlessness of it, the image seemed to stand out with a greater degree of stark clarity.
‘Drummer!’
In the moment he yelled the word, Steele felt he was on the verge of insanity: for he was not even sure that he had spoken it aloud. Thought it could have been a part of the same silent tableau that was being played out in his mind.
But then that moment was gone: just as the picture in his mind was no more, as Makepiece snapped his head to the side. To stare fixedly at the Virginian after the stream of blinking glances. And mere fear had suddenly become terror.
Steele snapped the rifle down from his right shoulder and brought up his left hand to fist it around the barrel. Leveled it from the hip toward the man on the wagon seat who for one moment considered taking an insane action of his own. Was on the point of cracking the reins and yelling at the horse in the shafts to demand a gallop. Until realization of the indisputable spread across his sweat-sheened face: if he did that he was dead.
So he hauled on the reins, kicked the brake lever to lock the wheels. Then flicked his gaze toward a point behind and above the stalled wagon.
And Steele suddenly knew that his instinct for impending danger had been right this time. He had not simply been the object of faintly interested curiosity by a bunch of hard men and of trepidation by the medicine drummer. People wanted him dead.
Marvin Makepiece … sure.
And somebody else: whoever was hidden up on the roof of the rooming house, waiting for the drummer’s appearance on the square to spark a reaction from Steele.
‘Oh, my sweet …’ Harlan Grout exclaimed in a strangled tone. And his gaze flicked to a point to Steele’s left. So the Virginian added a third to his fast-growing list of men who were a part of the plan to sucker him into a gunfight he could not win. To catch him out in the open, in a situation that made him as responsible as his enemies for his own fate.
The Colt Hartford was cocked and aimed: at a man who was not a professional gunslinger and who did not even have a weapon in his hands right now. While up on the boarding house roof and off to the side behind him—
‘Watch out, Steele!’ Grout yelled. And whirled away from the horse, pointed a shaking hand to where the third man had shown himself between the corners of the saloon and the stage line depot. Then the door of the bank began to open and the liveryman hurled himself toward it. And a shriek of mixed alarm and pain was vented by Ethan Brady as the banker was knocked flying into his premises by the frightened man.
Not for the first—or maybe the hundredth and first—time during his life, Adam Steele was convinced he was moments from violent death.
In this instance, if two gunmen were backing Makepiece, why not a whole bunch of others? Including Shumaker, even? For if a troublemaker was shot down making trouble, then that maybe placed the killing outside of the fast gun’s edict?
Instinctively Steele swung round, to hurl himself to the ground on his side. Reacting as fast as he ever had in a move based upon long experience.
Marvin Makepiece had a Winchester but he did not have a hand to it at the moment.
Someone was supposed to be on the boarding house roof, primed to cover the drummer. But he had to fire over some distance and, anyway, Steele could not see him.
He knew, from the degree of fear that had been on the face and in the reaction of Harlan Grout, that the man to the side was in plain, terrifying sight and just a few feet away: maybe his revolver out of the holster and aimed.
It was Jeremiah Sharpe. The skinny, blond, twenty-year-old with the deep-set green eyes who mostly had an arrogant set to his face. But he did not look arrogant now. He looked like a scared and shaking kid who seemed for part of a second to be paralyzed except for that uncontrollable trembling of his every muscle after his hand fisted around the butt of the Russian in his holster.
‘I didn’t want no—’ he started to excuse.
But then his voice dried up as he applied every iota of concentration to drawing the revolver out of the holster. And knew he had failed. For the hammer of the gun was back, but the muzzle was not quite clear of the leather when the rifle of the man on the ground was fired. Blasted a killing bullet into the left side of the narrow chest of the man who was not a fast draw. Who doubtless knew his limitations very well and perhaps had been trying to say he had wanted no part of what was happening. Had been persuaded against his better judgment by his stronger-willed partner.
Was hit by a high caliber bullet fired at short range on an upward trajectory: lifted off his feet and hurled backwards. The revolver slid down in the holster as he let go of it. To bring up both hands to where a black hole in his shirt front was beginning to seep blood. Which suddenly spurted as his heart pumped a final time. Then spurted again, when he landed heavily on his back.
Steele did not clearly see Sharpe’s body slam into a spreadeagled attitude on the rock-hard ground. He received just a blurred impression of it. In the same fuzzy way that he saw other aspects of his surroundings as he wrenched around his head, then his body and lastly the Colt Hartford. While he struggled to get to his feet.
Indistinct faces above the batwings of the saloon. Others at the window of the stage line depot. Two figures at the doorway of the bank. Marvin Makepiece on the wagon, half turned toward him, bringing up his arms in front of him.
Then, with total clarity, the Virginian saw the familiar form of Joel Shumaker. Standing in a part crouch, the ivory-butted Remington in a double-handed grip—but not aimed at Steele.
The young gunslinger stood, rock steady, some ten feet away from the base of the steps of the boarding house porch. The revolver thrust high as he swung his head from side to side in a short arc, searching for a target.
Then the Remington exploded a shot. And a moving shadow showed on the square as an extension of the static shadow of the house roof: a shadow which threw itself upwards and flung out its arms to the sides, cross-like.
Steele shifted his gaze from Shumaker to the man on the roof. Recognized the skinny Clyde Garrett, with blood pouring from a neck wound, a bandage covering the bald area of his hatless head, as the unfired rifle sailed away from a lifeless hand. Close to death, the shot man stumbled against the chimney behind which he had been crouched, bounced off it and plunged into an almost graceful dive from the roof.
Shumaker tracked the limp body down with the Remington, the revolver re-cocked. Then turned just his head to look toward Steele: in time to see the Virginian swing the rifle away from its aim at him. Next, as the dead weight of Garrett thudded to the ground in a billow of dust, he turned his head even further: to peer over his shoulder at the wagon.
Just as the Colt Hartford cracked out a second shot. And Marvin Makepiece took the bullet in his panic-stricken face as the drummer got his Winchester leveled at Steele.
The shot tunneled into the cheek, beneath one of the bright eyes, and sent the snappily garbed man sprawling backwards across the seat of the wagon as his rifle clattered to the dusty ground.
The horse in the shafts of the rig made to bolt: but the braked wheels were dragged only a few dust-trailing yards before the animal abandoned his instinctive struggle.
The Virginian’s gelding, unhindered after Harlan Grout plunged into the cover of the bank, galloped toward the far southwest corner of the square, tossing his head and whinnying with fear.
Shumaker looked from Garrett’s body close to where he stood, to the wagon on which Makepiece was slumped, to Sharpe sprawled a few feet away from Steele. Was grimly silent as he began to extract the spent shell case from his revolver, then gave a curt nod of satisfaction before he said: ‘What could be called waste-not-want-not shootin’, I guess, Steele? Three bullets, three dead men.’
The Virginian thumbed aside the loading gate of the Colt Hartford and spread a flint-eyed grin across his face as he replied: ‘Yeah. Reckon now no one’s in any doubt about what kind of real mean killers we are.’
Chapter Twelve
VOICES BEGAN TO sound from many directions but most of them were stilled when Shumaker, after pushing a shell into the empty chamber and sliding the Remington into his holster, announced:
‘That wasn’t nothin’ personal, you people!’ He swung his head slowly to look around the square, making it plain he was addressing himself to everyone within earshot. ‘I took sides on account of I can’t abide bushwhackin’, and Steele was set up to get bushwhacked by Clyde Garrett, Jerry Sharpe and that piece of shit Makepiece! Guys like that, they give guys like me a bad name!’
Somebody in the livery vented a ragged guffaw. The man was obviously not in a position to see the expression of hard-set earnestness Shumaker wore. And the gunslinger snarled in response:
‘You think I’m makin’ a friggin’ joke about what I do, shithead? You figure that, you step outside that lousy stable and we’ll see who’s gonna get the last friggin’ laugh, you hear me?’
Steele’s horse had finished his gallop and there were stretched seconds of brittle silence on the square. Until a man called from within the livery:
‘Gee, Joel, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it, honest I never!’
There followed another few moments of the same kind of high-tension stillness during which, perhaps, many of the apprehensive watchers did not even dare to breathe aloud. Before Cowper Love called genially from an open upper story window of the rooming house:
‘Okay now! That’s the curtain raiser over and done with! Figure Joel’d like to see the arena cleared of the trash before the main event takes place?’
‘That’s right,’ Shumaker responded to the implied query. And his slitted eyes glinted as his thin lips parted to display a sardonic grin with which he completed another imperious survey of the facades of the buildings lining three sides of the square. Then looked levelly at the Virginian as he claimed: ‘I want you to know, I didn’t know a damn thing about this until I smelled a rat: and saw that instead of a rat, it was that piece of shit Makepiece I was smellin’. Ridin’ his wagon, large as life.’
‘Large as life is a well-chosen bunch of words in your case!’ the fleshy Blanche Knight proclaimed caustically from the doorway of her boarding house. ‘The way you and your kind think death is such a small thing!’
Shumaker needed to work hard to broaden his grin as a mask for anger while he advanced on the steps at the top of which the heavily built woman stood. Then he countered with cruel sarcasm: ‘If that’s so, lady, the size of you, I figure you’ll live forever.’
He went up the steps without a backward glance across the square on which three newly dead men were sprawled. While Blanche Knight backed away from him into the house, cursing her hapless husband for a weakling and a coward who never took her part when she was insulted.
‘I’m sorry, Mr. Brady,’ Harlan Grout blurted, and started to brush the banker’s suit jacket where it was dusty from his enforced fall to the floor of the bank.
‘Never mind!’ the pale faced, gray haired little fat man snapped, urged the liveryman away from him and mopped at his face with a handkerchief. ‘What’s a little dirt—and a few minor bruises, I’m sure—compared with mass slaughter on our streets?’
Grout mumbled more apologies to the incensed banker, then said to Steele; ‘Sorry I let your horse go and ducked outta the way of the shootin’. But I never had no gun.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll go bring him back. And make sure I give him an extra good curry, uh?’
Steele nodded as he completed reloading the Colt Hartford. Replied: ‘I’m grateful you did the right thing, feller. A winded horse is better than a bullet in the back, I reckon.’
The low-pitched buzz of desultory discussions of apparently mundane matters had re-started in the saloon, livery and boarding house after the diversion of a shoot-out which had left three men dead on the sunbaked, dusty surface of the town square. But there was a harsher, more insistent tone to the voices that sounded from the stores. As people began to come onto the square from Main Street, and gave vent to their shock at the scene of carnage there.
Ethan Brady growled in a tone of mild rebuke that gradually became more pronounced: ‘I’m very much afraid I’m beginning to feel we made a mistake in approaching you for the only kind of help that you seem able to offer, sir.’
His reproachful gaze shifted pointedly from Steele to the bodies of Sharpe and Garrett, to the wagon on which a third corpse was slumped and back to Steele. But before the Virginian could respond, the door of the stage line depot creaked open and Michael Morrison answered the banker in sour tones.
‘How’d you like somebody in some other line of business to tell you how to run a bank, Mr. Brady?’
‘Don’t interfere in what’s none of our concern, son!’ his mother advised anxiously.
Morrison was a short, ineffectual-looking, confirmed bachelor of something over thirty who was often the butt of humor because of how he usually always did as his mother told him. But now he ignored what she said as he stepped out of the depot and offered: ‘You want me to see about the corpses, Mr. Steele? Put them in the meetin’ hall for now?
Providence did not have its own undertaking business. Usually, Billy Baxter earned a few cents for digging graves in the cemetery beside the church on the south side of town. But two brothers came up from Broadwater to take care of the skilled side of the business when necessary.
Steele nodded. ‘Why not?’
‘Hey, I’ll give you a hand,’ Harry Krim said eagerly and pushed out through the batwing doors of his saloon, prepared to let it take care of itself for a while.
‘And count me in,’ Harlan Grout hurried to add. ‘Just as soon as I’ve put Mr. Steele’s mount in the livery.’
Shaking his head sadly, Ethan Brady interrupted his patting at non-existent sweat to sigh and say: ‘I thought it was just that benighted Baxter man who hero-worshipped you, sir. But it seems that so long as you continue to stir up the dirt, you won’t have any difficulty getting sycophants to help sweep it under the rug, so to speak?’
Steele told him: ‘You know the kind of money I’ve been promised, Mr. Brady. I’ll just say that if I was paying it, I sure wouldn’t want the man who was getting it to waste his time on street cleaning.’
The banker vented another doleful sigh before he turned to go back into his premises. Mrs. Morrison remained on the threshold of the stage line depot for a few more moments: like she thought the mere sight of her skinny frame there might lure her son away from the unsavory chore he had elected to do. Then she directed a withering stare that spoke a volume of ill-feeling for Steele before she whirled and slammed the door behind her.
The Virginian, a lip-chewing, pensive expression on his faintly sheened face, started away from the corner of the square where Morrison and Krim were trying to keep their eyes averted from what they were doing, as they lifted the limp corpse of Jeremiah Sharpe off the ground by the ankles and armpits.
As he moved unhurriedly toward the line of stores, he pointedly avoided meeting the no longer eager gaze of Harlan Grout, who passed close to him leading the runaway gelding.
And he found he felt unconcernedly conscious of the fact that, despite the new way of life he was seeking to establish in the Providence River Valley, he nonetheless had to allow that he had much more in common with the gun toting strangers who treated violent death so lightly than with the people who were his fellow citizens.
Fellow citizens with more or less fixed ideas, who could mostly be sub-divided into two groups and a center section which often overlapped and sometimes merged with either of the main bodies of opinion.
In one clearly defined group were those like Harlan Grout, Harry Krim, Michael Morrison and a few more who were prepared to accept a violent solution to a violent situation, and even take some kind of hand in it once they could see no alternative.
In the other sub-division were Len Fallows, Abe Steiner and Mrs. Morrison and, Steele was ready to think, maybe the majority of Providence people. These were against meeting force with force on principle, because they did not regard an eye for an eye as being an Old Testament tenet to which they could subscribe: whatever the situation.
Then there was the floating middle ground of opinion, represented by Ethan Brady, Huey Attrill, Roland Decker and maybe most of the storekeepers: people who either swayed in the currents of their own changing minds or went along with what the majority thought. They were anxious to see action taken against the unwelcome visitors to town, but most clung to reservations about the ways and means. Perhaps some even condoned violence: provided it took place where they did not have to look upon its effect. To watch as bullet-riddled corpses crumpled to the ground and flies settled in the wounds to forage on freshly spilled blood before it soaked into the parched ground. While drifting black powder-smoke polluted the clean country air and reached acridly into the nostrils of the most elevated noses.
When he had sunk his roots deep enough into the soil of the Providence River Valley to be accepted as a solidly respectable member of the community, in which group would he be numbered, he wondered. Should a similar circumstance be repeated in the future?
None, of course. For he had already reached the conclusion that while he might well change his way of life he could never alter the kind of man he had become. So he would always stand apart from his fellow citizens. Much like Lavinia Attwood …? Who had no place in any of the subdivisions. And neither was she aligned with him. For most of the time she remained as a kind of wise kibitzer, unwilling to voice an opinion unless invited: or she felt urged to do so by the weight of her own highly personal feelings.
