Tobin grinned, saliva stranding between his small, pegged teeth. He tapped the side of his nose with a forefinger. “That’s between me and the snubbin’ post, boy, or maybe I should say between me and the party of the third.” As though suddenly bored with the whole business, Tobin pushed the pile of bills toward Tyree. “Now take that and you git. If Mr. Laytham or Luther Darcy happen to ride into town, you’re a dead man.”
“No, it’s your turn to listen, Tobin,” Tyree said. “Hand that money back to whoever gave it to you and tell him I’m staying right here until I settle a score with Quirt Laytham. On his orders, his men, your deputies, hung and then shot me and me just a stranger—”
“I know, I know,” Tobin interrupted, his irritation evident. “Just a stranger passing through. I’ve heard all that afore. See, it was an honest mistake and Mr. Laytham surely regrets it. Clem Daley and Len Dawson took ye for a friend of Fowler’s, another damned rustler like the one I got locked up here.” Tobin waved his pudgy hands. “Well, what’s past is past. Let bygones be bygones, I always say. Forgive and forget. After Fowler came back and started to rustle Mr. Laytham’s cows, everything was topsy-turvy, all kinds of regrettable things were happening. But now Fowler is gone and the rustling ended, we’ll get back to normal pretty damn quick.”
A hot anger flaring in him, Tyree placed his hands on the desk and leaned toward the sheriff. “Tobin, I believe you had nothing to do with what happened to me back there at the brush flats. If I thought you did, I’d have put a bullet into your fat gut by this time.”
Tobin opened his mouth to interrupt, but Tyree waved him into silence. “I want you to give a message to Laytham from me. Tell him I expect him to leave the territory, taking only what he can carry on a horse. Tell him if he doesn’t go, I’ll come after him and destroy him.”
The sheriff shook his head. “Hard talk, Tyree, mighty hard talk. But Mr. Laytham isn’t going anywhere. He’s backed by twenty guns and one of them is Luther Darcy. You won’t find Darcy as easy to handle as you did the Arapaho Kid. He’s good—the best there is.”
Tyree straightened up and looked down at the sweating lawman. “Tobin, I’m all through talking. You take my message to Laytham and tell him to be gone by the end of the week. You tell him that and make it real clear.”
“I’ll tell him.” Tobin shrugged. “It’s your funeral.”
He picked up the money from his desk and tossed it back in the drawer. “The party of the third,” he said, “is going to be powerful disappointed in you.”
Tyree booked a room in the Regal Hotel, wondering why he was doing that instead of riding back to Boyd’s place. Then the answer came to him—he was doing it to avoid Lorena, unable to take the hurt, accusing looks she threw at him when he talked about Quirt Laytham.
He needed some time to himself, to think the thing through. He didn’t believe that Lorena was in love with Laytham, but she did seem attracted to the man, and she had not given the big rancher an outright refusal when he’d asked her to marry him.
And what about himself? If he succeeded in destroying Laytham as he planned, would Lorena ever forgive him? More to the point, would she forgive him enough to fall in love with him? Only time would answer those questions.
Yet there was another question, and this one demanded an immediate answer—was he really in love with Lorena?
Surprising himself, Tyree admitted that he did not know.
Lorena was so beautiful, sometimes it hurt him just to look at her. And she had sand. She’d proved that when she washed and cared for poor Fowler’s body back at the cabin.
But was it enough? Was beauty and grit a solid basis for love?
As he led the steeldust away from the hotel hitching rail to the livery stable, Tyree told himself that he didn’t know and gloomily admitted that he was more confused than ever.
He ate at the restaurant again that night, aware of the stares of the other diners, some curious, others frankly horrified, then went directly back to the hotel.
Wary of being bushwhacked, he kept away from the windows and placed the back of a chair under the doorknob. He had shamed Clem Daley in front of other men and, unlike Tobin, the big deputy was not the kind to forgive and forget.
Tyree stripped, gave himself a cold sponge bath from the pitcher and basin on the dresser, then turned down the oil lamp and got between the sheets. He laid his gun close to hand on the bedside table and closed his eyes, willing sleep to come.
The wound in his side was healing well, but it still pained him, and his run-in with the Arapaho Kid had taken more out of him than he realized. But gradually he relaxed, his breathing slowed and he drifted into the healthy young man’s deep slumber. . . .
A single revolver shot woke Tyree, blasting apart the fabric of his sleep, hurling him into wakefulness.
He grabbed the Colt from the bedside table and stepped quickly to the window. His room was at the back of the hotel and looked out on the flats where the dawn light was lacing the branches of the sage and antelope bitterbrush. In the distance the buttes, mesas and broken rocky ridges of the canyon country were fantastic blue silhouettes against a pale lemon sky.
Nothing moved out there. The landscape was serene and peaceful.
Tyree eased his thumb off the hammer of the Colt and smiled to himself. “Getting jumpy in your old age, Chance,” he said aloud. “That was just some rooster coming home drunk and letting off steam.”
But a few moments later, running feet pounded on the stairs outside, and from somewhere, a woman’s voice rose in a stifled shriek.
What was going on?
Tyree put on his hat, then dressed quickly and buckled his gun belt around his hips. He opened the door and went to the top of the stairs, passing a man wearing a red velvet robe on the way. “What happened?” Tyree asked.
The man—a drummer by the look of him—shrugged and brushed past. “Go see for yourself,” he said.
Tyree ran downstairs and elbowed his way through a clump of hotel guests who were standing at the door, looking out into the street. He stepped onto the porch then stopped in his tracks, scarcely able to believe what his eyes were telling him.
His zebra dun lay sprawled in death at the hitching rail, a bullet hole in its forehead oozing a trickle of blood. A white scrap of paper was tied to the horse’s mane, fluttering slightly in the morning breeze.
Tyree undid the paper and read. The note was short, scrawled on a page torn from a tally book.
HEERES YOUR HOSS
—ENJOY THE RIDE
Clem Daley had kept his promise. He had delivered the dun.
The man had obviously regained his confidence after talking to Quirt Laytham. Tyree’s own cartridge belt and holstered Colt hung over the top rail of the hitching post.
By returning the gun, Laytham was sending him a message.
He was telling Tyree that he wasn’t afraid of him.
Chapter 13
Tyree decided there was nothing to be gained by remaining in Crooked Creek where every man’s hand was turned against him and he was friend to none. It was time to head back to Boyd’s ranch—and Lorena.
Laytham had until the end of the week, three more days, to leave the territory. Of course he wouldn’t, that much was clear. But what then?
Tyree had no plan of action, not even a vague idea sketched out in his mind. He only knew that when the time came he would act.
After picking up his saddlebags from the hotel, Tyree walked to the livery stable, on the way passing the firehouse volunteers who were busy removing the dead horse from the street, dragging it with chains behind a mule-drawn pump wagon.
The loss of his horse tugging at him, he saddled the steeldust and was walking him toward the barn door when his toe accidentally hit an upturned iron bucket and sent it clanking across the floor.
Immediately an angry voice bellowed from the hayloft. “Hey, you!”
Tyree looked up and saw bloodshot eyes in an annoyed, freckled face, glaring at him. “Do you need to make all that damned noise?” It was a girl’s voice and when he looked closer, Tyree saw a pert, upturned nose and a tangled mass of corn yellow hair. “Ooh,” the girl groaned. “I shouldn’t have hollered like that.” She clutched her head and rocked back and forth, obviously in the throes of a massive hangover.
“Sorry.” Tyree grinned. “I’ll be more careful next time.”
“Well, see you are. First there was all that shooting. Then you start kicking buckets around.” The girl shook her head. “Ah, the hell with it. I’ll never get back to sleep now. I need a whiskey. Do you have any?”
“What you need,” Tyree said, “is a gallon of coffee and some bacon and eggs.”
“Mister, I asked you if you had whiskey. Do you?”
“No.”
“Then why the hell am I wasting my time talking to you?”
Tyree’s grin widened. “I don’t know. I kinda figured you liked my company.”
“Yeah, that will be the day.”
Tyree waved to the girl. “Well, since you don’t care for my company, I guess I’ll be on my way.”
“Wait!”
The girl’s feet thudded on the boards of the loft then Tyree watched her climb down the ladder. At the bottom she stood for a few moments, her hand on a rung, and clutched her head, groaning. “What kind of who-hit-John rotgut,” she asked herself, “did that damned bartender at Bradley’s serve me last night?”
She was dressed in striped pants three sizes too large for her, tucked into down-at-heel, rough-out boots. She wore a man’s canvas coat, and under that a blue gingham shirt open at the neck. Despite her baggy clothes, her taut, well-curved figure was very obvious, and her eyes were brown, shot through with tiny flecks of gold. Her hair, tangled with wisps of straw, fell in loose curls from under a battered black hat and her lips were full, pale pink and inviting.
“What you looking at, mister?” she asked. “Ain’t you never seen a woman before?”
“Not one that just fell out of a hayloft.” Tyree smiled. “Besides, you’re a girl, not a woman.”
“The hell I’m not. I turned nineteen in the spring.”
“You’re sixteen, maybe seventeen,” Tyree said. “And that’s giving you the benefit of the doubt.”
The girl opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it, then said finally, “Look, mister, I need a drink real bad. Could you loan me a dollar?”
Tyree shook his head. “The last thing you need is more whiskey. Tell you what. I was going to be on my way, but I’ll take the time to buy you breakfast.”
Whatever the girl was about to reply died on her lips. Her eyes, widening in surprise, slid over Tyree’s shoulder to the door of the barn.
Tyree turned. A man stood straddle-legged in the doorway, a black flat-brimmed hat with a low crown pulled low over his eyes. He wore an ivory-handled Remington on each side of his chest in ornately carved shoulder holsters. The morning was already hot and he wore no coat, just a frilled white shirt, string tie, brocaded red vest and black pants tucked into expensive boots of the same color. His cold blue eyes slanted slightly and his skin had a yellowish tinge, giving him the look of an ancient Mongol conqueror who expected lesser men to grovel at his feet.
The man’s chin jutted arrogantly toward Tyree. “You the one they call Chance Tyree?”
“Who wants to know?”
The man ignored the question, his icy eyes searching Tyree’s face, measuring him. “Nick Tobin told me you have a message for Quirt Laytham. You want to give it to me?”
“Like I asked you already,” Tyree answered, suddenly tense and ready, “who are you?”
“Name’s Luther Darcy. If the name don’t mean anything to you, it should.” Beside him, Tyree heard the girl shriek, not a cry of fear but one of raw anger.
“You son of a bitch, that name means something to me,” she screamed. The girl turned and ran back to a stall where a paint pony was penned. A saddle with a booted Winchester hung over the stall partition and she grabbed the rifle and racked a round into the chamber, striding toward Darcy, her eyes blazing.
Using a movement too fast to follow, the gunman crossed his arms and drew his Remingtons, the big revolvers coming level in a single, flashing instant.
“No!” Tyree yelled. He quickly stepped in front of the girl and wrenched the rifle from her hands. “You little fool, he’ll kill you!”
For a few seconds, the girl fought him like a tiger; then she gave up, realizing the futility of her struggles.
“Darcy,” she yelled, jumping to look over Tyree’s shoulder, “remember this—I’m coming after you and I’m going to kill you one day.”
The gunman’s lips stretched in a grin under his sweeping black mustache. “Now that really scares me. Hell, I could gun both of you right now, then go eat breakfast.”
One arm holding the girl back, Tyree turned on Darcy. “Then why don’t you try?”
The man waved a negligent hand. “Now is not the time.” His eyes again wandered over Tyree from boots to hat, summing him up in his own mind. “Heard about you, Tyree,” he said. “Heard some wild stuff about when you were running with Wes Hardin and them, and later. They say you’re good with a gun, mighty slick and sudden. Don’t know if that’s the truth or not. But anyhow, I’m letting you live, at least for the time being. Call it”—he thought for a few moments—“call it professional courtesy.”
“Darcy, did you kill my horse?” Tyree asked, his voice level and cold.
The gunman shook his head. “Tut, tut and tut, Tyree. You ought to know that’s not my style. Clem Daley shot your horse. Him and a couple of others.”
“I know what your style is, you damned murderer,” the girl snapped. “Shooting down poor cowboys in the street.”
“Now what cowboys would that be?” Darcy asked, his voice a soft, menacing hiss. “There have been so many.”
“My brother for one,” the girl said. “His name was Tom Brennan and you killed him in Cheyenne a year ago. He was all I had in the world and you murdered him.”