McAllister Justice (13 page)

A mile down the gulch he came on a long low shack and halted, mildly surprised that nobody had either commented on his presence or challenged it. He gazed past the building and saw that even yet he had not come to the end of the work of the human moles. But this was as far as he would go right now. On the front of the shack was a notice: “Meals One Dollar”.

The door was open and a pretty alluring smell came out of it He went to it and looked inside. This was the day for surprises. A woman stood at the stove with her back to him. She looked right shapely.

“Howdy, ma'am,” he said.

Without turning her head, she said: “Don't put a foot inside. It's a house rule.”

McAllister grinned. “If I do, reckon it'll be my belly drivin' me.”

She glanced over her shoulder quickly and he saw that her face was as good as her figure. Now what in hell was a woman like this doing in a miners' camp? He trembled for her. He touched his hat. She ran a quick professional eye over him and said: “You can't eat, you don't have no irons.”

“You produce the grub, I'll produce the irons.”

“One dollar,” she said and went back to stirring. He went to the sorrel, off-saddled and tied it to a tree stump, got irons, plate and mug from his war-bag and went back to the door. She came and took his plate from him and close-up he saw that she was around twenty-five-years-old and tired to the bone. Her eyes were blue and very beautiful. The mouth was large and generous. She looked gently bred and didn't look as if she had done this work for long.

“My God, ma'am,” he said, “you ain't here on your lonesome?” It was none of his business, but he had to ask just the same.

For a moment that came and went with the speed of a blinking eye, he glimpsed the woman behind the mask of the face. This was a woman who was frightened and was hanging on by her grit alone.

“I have a hired man,' she said. Her hand took his plate and mug. She marched back to the stove and heaped his plate, filled his mug with steaming coffee. When she handed them to him she said with a glimmer of a smile: “You're lucky. Tomorrow, it'll cost you two dollars.”

“How come?”

“Hank, my hired man, is not too enthusiastic about hunting with the Indians around.”

McAllister put plate and mug on the ground, found her a dollar and gave it to her. Then he carried his meal over to the plank stretched between two logs and wolfed down the finest stew he'd had in years. His belt tight against his belly, he belched luxuriously and built a smoke. After he had washed his utensils in a stream nearby, he strolled back to the shack and stood in the open door.

“Ma'am.”

From the stove, she asked: “Do you have your plate? One dollar, please.”

“It's me, ma'am.”

She gave him a look. “Was there something?”

“I'd like a word.”

She gave him a long cool glance. “I'm here to sell meals. Conversation is not a part of my business.”

McAllister grinned. “Give me a dollar's worth of words and show a real profit today.”

She looked as though she would liked to have smiled, but she didn't. She said: “Look, I'm the only woman in this camp. Around a hundred men a day would like a little light conversation with me. If they all had what they wanted, I wouldn't cook a single meal.”

McAllister said: “I don't want conversation.”

“What do you want?”

“Information.”

“I see no reason –”

“I'm the law.”

“There's no sheriff here.”

He took a blank piece of paper from his pocket and waved it
under her nose. “United States marshal, ma'am. An' I'm looking for a man.”

She backed up. “I'm afraid I can't help you.”

“Tall man, dark. Lost a thumb and had a deep scar down one side of his face.”

Her gaze flickered. Possibly she had seen a man answering that description. But this wasn't the kind of woman who would enjoy handing a man over to the law.

“There are a great many men here,” she said. “I haven't seen them all.”

“But you've seen a good many. Most will come here for a hot meal soon or late.”

“I can't help you.”

“I ain't askin' you to. All I want is to sit inside and watch them come here.”

She bridled. “Nobody steps inside here except my hired man.”

“You know somethin', ma'am?”

“What?”

“You're right pretty when you get all riled up that way.”

Her eyes came wide in anger and the door was slammed in his face. He stared at it a moment, then walked away, a rather silly grin on his face and thinking:
That's one hell of a woman. Nice too.
Maybe she'd make out in a camp full of men at that. He led the sorrel into timber, carrying the saddle, and tied it. He lay down in the shade of a conifer and tilted his hat over his eyes. He could wait. Time didn't matter when it came to coming up with the man he had followed for a year.

The woman heard Hank come in the rear door of the shack and she found that she was suddenly frightened. She did not know for sure if the man she had served with a meal an hour or more back was indeed a law officer. But she remembered the hard look to his eyes and the set of his Indian mouth. She remembered his questions and searched over them in her mind. And as she heard Hank moving around behind her, putting something heavy down on the floor and sighing with the effort, she dare not turn to look at him.

Glancing out of the window, she saw that the man under the tree hadn't stirred. She wondered if he was sleeping, but she had an uneasy feeling that those dark eyes had not moved from the door of her shack. She trembled to think what would have happened if her hired man had come to the front door.

Finally, driven by a morbid fascination, she turned and looked at once at his right hand with its missing thumb, then lifted them to gaze at the deep scar down the side of his face. His pale dead eyes lifted and met hers.

He pointed to the filled gunny-sack he had placed on the floor. “One of the diggers brought in a steer. I got a cut from him. Twenty dollars.”

She tried to stop her voice trembling as she said: “That was high.”

“The way things are, he could of asked twice that. It bein' you, he said twenty dollars.”

“I'll give you the money.”

She went to the blanket-cubicle in which she slept and fetched the money. He stood waiting, motionless. When she handed him the money, her hand touched his briefly and she could not suppress a shudder at the contact. He did not appear to notice, but turned at once and headed for the front door.

“No,” she said urgently.

He stopped and turned slowly. “Huh?”

“Not that way. Go out the rear.'

He cocked his head, suddenly tense, stiff with the wariness that is natural to a man who has lived in danger. His flat gaze held her.

“Why?” he asked.

She hesitated. She did not want any trouble. At last she was starting to make money. She wanted no more trouble.

“There was a man here, asking for you,” she said at last and, though the expression on his face did not alter, she felt the reaction to the news to him.

“Should that mean something to me?” he asked with false mildness.

“He described you.”

“What was he like?”

“He was a federal marshal.”

He frowned, puzzled and worried.

“A tall dark hombre. Face like an Indian.”

“That could be him.”

He went to the window, cautiously lifting back the print curtain. He saw McAllister's prone figure and let out a long sigh.

When he turned bads to the woman, his mouth twisted in a sardonic smile. “What made you think he was a lawman?”

“Isn't he?”

“If he is, I'm the president of the United States.” But he made no attempt to go out the front way. Soft as a cat he walked to the rear door and remarked before he went out, “You want to duck trouble, tell him I wasn't here.”

She watched him walk quickly into the rocks and ran back to the front window to look at McAllister. Her heart leapt in alarm when she saw that he was no longer there.

Dix, once he was under cover and out of earshot of McAllister, broke into a run. He worked his way along a ledge above the workings and did not climb down till he was a half-mile down-gulch. Here he found two miners at work. He whistled them and they came at once from their labors and joined him in
their little leanto. The three of them squatted and Dix said, grinning: “Found any gold?”

One man, with a broken nose and large yellow teeth said: “What if we did?”

Dix sobered quickly. “Trouble,” he said. “The Malcolm marshal's here.”

The second man, thickset and bearded, said: “How the hell?”

“The bastard smells trouble.”

“Did any more diggers come through today?”

“Must have rid in on his lonesome.”

They looked at him in awe, unbelieving.

The bearded man said caustically: “So - what does this make us?”

With a little heat Dix said: “It could make us dead men. I know this jasper. I reckon we don't wait for word from the boss. We clean up what we can tonight and get out.”

“Christ,” the man with the broken nose said, “they's Indians out there.”

Dix said: “There'll be eight of us. All well-armed. The Indians ain't born that can stop us.”

The bearded one said: “All for one Goddam marshal? Knock the sonovabitch off and take our time about the other.”

Dix thought it over and didn't like it. “See here,” he said, “you ever know me turn yellow?”

Broken-nose said: “Can't say I have.”

“Then for Gawd's sake listen and give your ass a chance.” He talked. He put all he had into what he said and they listened to him. He had the ear of the boss and he had to be listened to. By the time he finished, he had them convinced. There was enough gold in the camp to make the venture worthwhile. The boys had kept their ears and eyes open and knew a good many men who had reasonable amounts of gold cached away already. The gulch was rich. If they managed to stay here there would be even better pickings later. But gold in the hand was worth gold in the other man's pocket anyday. The other two nodded. “Besides,” Dix ended, “working for the woman, I seen and heard some useful stuff.”

They started listing names, they fixed times, then the two men went back to work and Dix stretched out on their blankets and slept. He wasn't going to put his head outside this shebang till it was good and dark.

There was no moon and the stars gave a man just enough light to move around so long as he knew the locality well. And all the men who gathered that night at the little leanto knew it well.

Dix gave the orders. They would work in pairs and would preferably use clubs. Finish with the knife if necessary. But absolutely no guns unless a man was really pushed into a corner. They nodded, excited, cramped in the little structure. They were all old hands at the cut-throat business. If anybody could do this quietly and efficiently, they could. Dix paired them off and chose a tough little halfbreed named Camm as his sidekick.

Their first victim was a man named Smith who worked a claim not fifty yards from the cook-shack of Eleanor Tyson. Which reminded Dix that he still had her twenty dollars for the cow-meat in his pocket. That made him smile. He would be riding out of here tonight without paying it over. He regretted leaving the pretty widow. She would surely be something worth shacking up with.

This Smith had a partner who had fallen the day before and broken a leg. And this whittling down of the likely opposition made this first steal doubly attractive. Neither Dix nor Camm were men who liked danger for danger's sake.

Now, going warily in the starlight, they moved along the lip of the gulch, clubs ready in their hands. If their luck was right, there would be no trouble. Camm had planned this one carefully. He had done his own spying and noted that on a clear night, Smith was a great one for looking at the night of an evening while he smoked a last pipe of tobacco. To do this he stood on a ledge a good thirty yards from his shebang. Here his partner, Wayland, lay immobilized. Smith could be clubbed without Wayland hearing. All that was left then was to use a
knife on the injured man till he revealed where the gold was hidden. And all miners hid their gold well. Distrust was king here.

They climbed down from the rimrock and took up a position among some brush right near Smith's favorite evening spot. Both men were calm. They were old hands at this game.

They waited an hour and still they did not grow impatient.

Smith came, climbing slowly up the steep gulchside, his pipe glowing redly. A stolid, slow-moving man, a leader in the councils of the miners, often appointed a judge by common consent in their disputes. There would be hell to pay when he was discovered come daylight with his skull cracked open. Camm reckoned he had struck the richest vein in the gulch. He had been the first to dig out solid ore, instead of sifting dust from the creek bed. They might lift enough here to make any more attacks that night unnecessary.

They froze, gripping their clubs.

Smith reached the ledge a little puffed and stood legs wide, staring out over the gulch. Took his pipe from his mouth and spat contemplatively.

Camm touched Dix on the arm and squeezed as a signal. Quiet as an Indian, he slipped from cover and advanced half to the digger's rear. Dix prepared to follow him. Rising to his feet, he saw the halfbreed lift the club.

What followed was so unexpected that he was never quite clear what happened.

He thought he saw the club fall on Smith's head as the shot rang out, but he must have been mistaken. The halfbreed took a little tripping run forward, barged into Smith, turned slightly and fell off the ledge. He made a noisy and lethal descent down the gulchside. If the bullet hadn't killed him, the trip down the steep slope did.