Dark Trail (12 page)

Guild's gaze dropped to her purse. She had her hand stuffed inside. He didn't have to wonder what she was holding in there.

“Afternoon, Sarah,” Rittenauer said, somewhat grandly, given the situation.

“You smell wonderful,” Sarah said. Her voice was flutey and girlish and sad.

“Sarah—” Guild started to say.

“I wondered if we could talk, Mr. Rittenauer.”

Rittenauer glanced at Guild then back to Sarah. “I don't see why not, Sarah. As long as you quit calling me Mr. Rittenauer. Ben'll do fine.”

Sarah went right on. “Ben, I want you to have a happy life.”

“I appreciate that, Sarah.”

“You and Beth will be able to start all over again.”

“I certainly hope so.”

“So, you shouldn't risk the gunfight this afternoon. You should leave town before it starts, forget all about it.”

Rittenauer frowned in Guild's direction, then said to Sarah, “I appreciate your advice and your concern, Sarah.”

She smiled. “I knew you'd see the right way, Ben.”

Guild started circling, tiny steps that brought him closer to Sarah.

“But I'm afraid I can't do that, Sarah,” Rittenauer was saying.

“But why not?”

“Because I need the money. I'm not any different from Frank. I'm just another broken-down gunfighter. I don't have a hundred dollars to my name.”

Guild took a few more steps. Sarah was pulling again on the object inside her purse.

“Don't you love Beth?” Sarah said.

“Of course I do.”

“Then why put her through this?”

“She wants the money, too.”

“It's not fair,” Sarah said.

“I'm sorry,” Rittenauer said.

Just then Guild grabbed her.

He got her shooting arm good and tight and pulled her to him. “Give it to me, Sarah.”

She tried to fight him. “No, Leo, you leave me alone.”

“Come on, Sarah. You know how you hate people to stare.”

And people were staring, crowding on the sidewalk now to see the gunny Ben Rittenauer watch a man and woman fight each other.

She jerked away from Guild and got the Colt out before he could stop her.

The crowd was excited; almost grateful to the woman for providing such a show. They fanned out even wider now. Stray bullets killed as many people as carefully aimed ones.

In the sunlight, the barrel of the Colt looked long and all business. She held it with a steady hand. I'm giving you a choice, Ben.”

“Put it away, Sarah. I'm warning you.” Ben's face had gone quickly from concern and kindness to hard anger. Nobody should ever pull a gun on Ben Rittenauer. When that happened, he was all reflex, a man with only one thought: kill the other person.

Rittenauer's hand dropped to the walnut handle of his gun.

“He isn't fooling, Sarah,” Guild said.

“I want you to promise me that you won't fight Frank,” Sarah said.

Obviously she had the impression that because she held a gun on Rittenauer, he could do nothing. But Guild knew that a man like Rittenauer could draw and fire in the time it would take Sarah to get one shot off.

“Sarah,” Guild said softly. He stood at her side. He had only one chance to stop her. He got himself ready.

“She mustn't love you if she'd let you fight, Ben,” Sarah said.

“I don't talk to anybody who's holding a gun on me,” Rittenauer said.

He glanced at Guild. He could see what Guild was about to do. He still kept his hand on the handle of his .44.

Guild moved. In two steps, he was knocking into her and slapping her wrist hard; the gun fell from her hand. It discharged, the bullet ripping into a piece of the overhanging roof to Sarah's right. The single shot was loud and ringing in Guild's ears, and the smell of gunsmoke was tart in his nostrils.

Ben Rittenauer came right up to her and pushed his face into hers. “That was a goddamn foolish thing to do, Sarah. Don't ever point a gun at a man like me, do you understand?” He was so angry, he was trembling.

But if Sarah heard or understood, she didn't let on. She stood dazed, staring at something distant that only she seemed able to see.

Rittenauer took his face from hers and said to Guild, “Get her out of here, Leo. She was lucky she didn't get killed.”

Guild nodded and said gently to Sarah, “Come on. I'll buy you some coffee.”

She was crying. “I don't want any coffee, Leo. I just want you to leave me alone. He's going to kill Frank this afternoon and you don't give one good damn.”

She fell gently into Guild's chest, still crying. Above her head, Guild looked at Rittenauer. The man seemed to be losing his anger. He once more looked sorry for Sarah. He shook his head then walked off. Most of the onlookers watched him. Not even a crying woman was as big a draw as a gunfighter.

“You shouldn't've stopped me,” Sarah said into Guild's chest.

“I'm glad I did.”

“But he's going to kill Frank.”

“That's their business, Sarah.”

She started sobbing again. The crowd seemed to love sobbing almost as much as it did gunplay.

“But I love him so much,” Sarah said into Guild's chest. “You can't know how much, Leo. You can't know.”

Frank Evans was out behind the livery stable. The black man who worked there had set up bottles and cans on the top railing of the small corral for Evans to shoot off. At the sound of the first shot a small crowd of kids had gathered and now watched Evans put round after round into the targets.

“My pop says Ben Rittenauer'll kill him easy,” one kid said.

Another kid said, “My old man's betting three dollars on Rittenauer. My ma said she's never seen him bet that much before.”

Evans, who heard all this, kept shooting, of course. You couldn't let some goddamn kids get to you.

The dusty sunlight was richer now as late afternoon turned to dusk. An old roan, sad-eyed as only a dying horse can be, watched Evans from inside the corral; a sweet-natured collie sat a few feet from him. Every once in awhile, when the chatter of the children and the bright, vivid loss of Beth got to him again, Evans would lean down and pet the collie. Back on the farm, he'd had an animal this sweet and loyal and true, and every time he petted this animal he thought of Sarah, because she was also sweet and loyal and true.

Then he'd think maybe he should get on the train, the way Rittenauer suggested, and hold Sarah's hand till they were in some new land all shiny with promise and hope. He did not want to die, in fact was quite afraid to die. The irony was that, with Beth gone, he felt dead already. He wanted to cry, right here in front of the goddamn kids, bawl his eyes out because he felt sick inside, sick in a way no disease could ever make him feel, the sickness of irrep­arable loss.

“See, I tole ya. He ain't fer shit. He missed that can clean. Sh—it. Fancy fuckin' gunny.”

The kid, a towhead with fiieckles and big buck teeth, spoke these words at exactly the wrong time. Because Evans could no longer abide them crowding him this way with the stupid opinions they'd gotten from their parents.

He whirled, thrusting his gun back into his holster, and picked up the loudmouth by the front of his shirt, slamming him against the oak tree that provided leafy shade for the horses.

“You say that to my face, you punk, and see what happens!”

But before the chubby twelve-year-old could say anything—he was just dangling there in Evans' iron grip—an ironic male voice said, “My, my, Mr. Evans. One would surely hope that your nerves are steadier when you face Mr. Rittenauer this evening.”

Evans turned to see Tom Adair's man Hollister walking toward him. There was a certain switch in his gait and a certain sweetness in his smile that troubled Evans. Maybe being around a powerful, angry man all the time made you into a woman.

Evans set the boy down.

The boy said, “He's gonna kill you, Evans. Just like my old man says.”

“Then you can come out to the cemetery and piss on my grave, can't you?” Evans said harshly.

All the other boys laughed. Evans asked, “Anybody here think I'm going to beat Rittenauer?”

No hands showed.

Evans looked at Hollister. “Somebody could make a lot of money betting on me.”

“Yeah,” the chubby towhead said, “but you ain't gonna win.”

“You boys git now,” the old black man said. Even in this heat he wore his coarse blue button-up sweater. He was the color of mahogany, and he had eyes as brown and sad as the roan in the corral. “Git and git good and git now,” he said again, clapping his hands as if he were scattering chickens.

The boys ran away, tossing curse words over their shoulders.

Hollister said, “I thought I'd come over and offer you a ride out to the ranch.”

“I can find my own ride.” There was a harshness in Evans' voice. Definitely something about Hollister that he didn't like or trust. “Anyway, that isn't why you're here.”

“It isn't?”

“No. You wanted to see if I was gonna go through with it.”

The too-sweet smile was back on Hollister's too-sweet lips. “You're a very observant man, Mr. Evans.”

“Well, for your information, I'm not backing out. I'm going out to Adair's ranch and get that ten thousand dollars.”

Hollister said, the smile almost but not quite gone, “I'm told the woman went back to him. What's her name—Beth?”

Evans could have gotten angry, even slapped Hollister for pushing him this way. But he just said, “You like to push people, don't you, Mr. Hollister?”

Hollister smiled. “I suppose I do, now that you mention it.”

“Be careful who you push,” Evans said. “They might push back.”

He left Hollister standing there. He went back to his room to wash up for the ride out to the Adair ranch.

By 1886 it had all started to end for many large cattle ranchers. With bank failures and big Eastern investors nervous about the cattle industry, dollars were tight and banker lending boards conservative. And without a banker, and a ready line of credit, even the most swaggering of cattlemen were reduced to meekness.

Tom Adair remained the exception. His ranch claimed nearly 800,000 acres in four different counties, with nearly 95,000 head of cattle. It was boasted—at least by Adair himself in moments of whiskey pride—that he had invested in more than 4,000 miles of barbed wire to keep his claim inviolate. When he stood on the hill where he'd buried two generations of blood kin, including an irascible yet beloved father, everything he saw sprawling to the line of the horizon belonged to him.

The ranch house itself was the centerpiece of his spread, a Victorian fortress so exotic in its layout and decoration that a woman from Chicago had taken a train out here just so she could write about it for her newspaper. Adair liked to stand on the hill just at dawn and look at the sun rising just over the edge of the spired roof. In the early morning, the red roof tiles were still damp with dew and they shone like fire in the slanting golden sun rays.

Because of the ranch, he'd become a favorite of the wealthy and the powerful. A short-haul train line had built a leg of track that came within six miles of the westernmost edge of his spread. Surreys, stagecoaches, and wagons picked up an unending stream of passengers, important men in dark suits, walrus mustaches, and top hats; women beautiful in bustles and picture hats and small steady smiles meant to please.

Many nights, beneath an arc of midnight sky and furious western stars, violin music could be heard on the prairies. Or there was the voice of a celebrated diva, or the lively cadences of a marching band, the trumpets bright as Fourth of July fireworks.

You could tell a rancher's importance by the kind of people he could attract to his ranch. Tom Adair, twice married, twice divorced, restless, a man who'd once paid a Negro one hundred dollars to shoot three Chinese in cold blood because one of Adair's friends had never actually seen a living person die—Adair got only the top of the list, from governors to businessmen to the whores most popular in any given season.

Yet for all the amusements he'd brought to his ranch, the gunfight this evening was perhaps his best idea yet. As the guests arrived throughout the day, he teased each with a promise of “something very special tonight.” His guests knew enough to be excited. If Tom Adair said something was very special, it would indeed be.

Down by the horse barns there was a big corral where Adair often staged rodeos, particularly in the fall when breeding stock was being rotated. It was here that he had built a small grandstand, replete with colorful pennants crackling in the cool prairie winds. The grandstand, as he never tired of pointing out, easily sat two hundred.