Adam steele 36, p.9
Adam Steele 36, page 9
‘It’s somebody I don’t see, feller.’
All the mounted men were looking at Duke Rexall, seeking his signal to move out. Now all eyes swept their quizzical, resentful or frightened gazes toward the Virginian.
‘How’s that?’ Duke Rexall asked, his tone coarse and his expression suspicious.
‘Man who runs your company store. Ed Vincent, as I recall?’
Tom Rexall, Jansen and Sayers all showed a reaction to the name. The boss’s son was abruptly as visibly frightened as the company clerk was most of the time. While the green eyes of Dick Sayers became filled with an almost palpable malevolence.
‘That is correct,’ Duke Rexall replied, managing to sound unnaturally refined again. ‘But I fail to understand why—’
‘He was on hand when Neil Slattery died …?’
‘Ed found the stiff with his brains blown out!’ Sayers snarled.
Mary-Ann Slattery was unable to check a groan of misery.
Duke Rexall snapped: ‘Keep your mouth shut, Sayers!’
The townspeople and the wedding guests expressed sympathy for the woman and scorn for the blond-haired man.
Steele added: ‘And you just said this Vincent feller was at the quarries when Naylor was killed. The others who were there—they’re here rooting for you, Rexall. I just wondered if the company store man gets a fit of the vapors whenever he sees a dead body?’
‘It just so happens, gunman!’ Tom Rexall hurled at Steele, ‘that Ed got a bad gash in the leg dragging the blacksmith off the endless belt! He saw Naylor first and tried to drag him off before Dick stopped the engine!’
‘That is correct!’ the Rexall father confirmed. ‘And as for our trip to Barclay last night, there was no reason for Ed Vincent to be along since he was not involved in the trouble at Quinn’s grocery.’
‘Bad gash, was it, Dr. Preston?’ the woman asked, recovered from the shock of looking at the mental image Sayers had created for her.
‘The wound had been treated and Mr. Vincent told me there was no need—’ the short fat man began.
‘Let’s go, Dad,’ Tom Rexall urged. ‘He’s just a gun for hire looking to make some blood money out of the widow—’
‘Don’t look to me like she has too much of that,’ Sayers added with a sneer as he looked pointedly around the clearing. Then the expression became a leer as he gazed fixedly at the woman. ‘But she sure is one of those females who looks good in black.’
‘Young man!’ Sternwood blurted as his fellow wedding guests and the town doctor and Bart Parsons either gave vent to inarticulate shock or glowered at Sayers with contempt.
‘Yes, we’ll leave!’ Duke Rexall agreed, his intonation making it a command.
But then he froze and was silent—and the entire line of riders became similarly held in the grip of debilitating fear after looking at what had terrified him. Which was the sight of Mary-Ann Slattery as she stood, almost rigid, after a flurry of activity. At her feet was the Virginian’s suit jacket, dropped to the ground as she snatched his Colt Hartford from where it had rested against the rock face. She held the rifle with the stock against her left hip, her right hand under the barrel and her left around the frame: finger to the trigger and thumb over the hammer. The weapon was angled slightly upward, so that the muzzle drew a bead on the torsos of the mounted men as she swung smoothly from the waist—made one complete sweep along the line before she started back and halted the move with the rifle aimed at Sayers.
‘Mrs. Slattery,’ Dr. Preston said at little more than a hoarse whisper.
‘Ma’am, I urge you to put up the gun!’ John Bluell added squeakily, and Bill Davis and Buck Sternwood nodded vigorous agreement.
‘Stranger?’ Duke Rexall pleaded.
Sayers brought his initial impulse to fear under control and spread the more familiar expression of contempt across his good-looking face. Taunted in a matching tone: ‘My guess is she couldn’t hit dirt if she aimed the rifle at the ground.’
‘Ma’am!’ Steele called, and moderated his voice. ‘Don’t do anything you could be sorry—’
‘This gentleman is a horse breeder looking for the right spread,’ the woman cut in on him evenly, not shifting her gaze or the aim of the rifle away from Sayers whose newly recovered confidence was fast draining out of his handsome face. ‘I’m nothing. But if I ever considered becoming a whore, it would be because I needed something I didn’t have. And I certainly don’t require the services of a gunman.’
She abruptly wrenched the Colt Hartford away from the anxious human target, just part of a second after her unblinking eyes had glimpsed the movement they had been seeking on the periphery of her vision. Her thumb cocked the hammer an instant before the rifle stock thudded into her shoulder, the weapon held rock steady and almost vertical. Not until she squeezed the trigger and the gunshot cracked to silence the creatures of the woodland did every man wrench his shocked gaze from the woman to look at what she aimed for.
And were in time to see one of a pair of high-flying Sage Grouse take the bullet and alter from graceful level flight to an awkward plummet earthwards. Then, perhaps a second later, another bullet exploded from the muzzle of the rifle and the other bird was hit and began an ungainly fall into the timber to the south of the clearing.
‘Well, what do you know?’ the woman announced with mock disappointment as everyone looked at her—saw her carefully stoop to pick up Steele’s jacket and hang it on the Colt Hartford before she leaned the rifle against the rock face. ‘I aimed at the sky and couldn’t even hit it because of those two—’
‘Most impressive shooting, ma’am,’ Duke Rexall said, a little thickly. ‘But be sure to confine such exhibitions of your marksmanship to game. And there will be no reason why this should not return to being the kind of peaceful and pleasant country it was before you and your husband came to settle here. Good afternoon to you.’
He tipped his hat. The other older men, and Ambrose Jansen, did likewise. Before the exodus away from the stretch of track at the front of the clearing got underway without further encouragement from the elder Rexall: who, because he had led the way here, was now at the rear of the retreating line.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, and reined in his mount while the other riders kept their horses moving. ‘I was sorry to hear you had to put down that old gelding Neil used to ride. But he wasn’t—’
‘Just go, Mr. Rexall,’ the woman cut in on him.
He shrugged. ‘Since you declined my offer to pay for a decent burial for Neil, I was going to suggest you accept a replacement horse. But …’
He shrugged again, and gave a good impression of being hurtfully spurned as he shared a parting glance between Steele and Mary-Ann Slattery, then spurred his mount to catch up with the others. Against the diminishing clop of hooves on the track, the woman rasped bitterly:
‘Now I feel guilty.’
‘How’s that?’ Steele asked, reaching into the buckboard for his saddle and bedroll.
‘For shooting down two harmless birds instead of that evil man and as many of his apple-polishing cronies as there were bullets in the rifle.’
‘You handle a gun real well, Mrs. Slattery,’ he told her as she picked up his rifle and jacket again and brought them toward him. ‘But it takes more than just skill to kill people.’
She shook her head. ‘No, not in the frame of mind I was in for a few moments just then. But maybe you’re right. It needs a powerful hatred as well as the ability.’
‘And a hide as thick as the Rexalls have to live with yourself afterwards, lady,’ Amos Quinn announced as he entered the clearing from the trees on the south side, leading his horse by the bridle while in the other hand he clutched the legs of one of the downed Sage Grouse.
‘Who …?’
‘Grandfather of Jane Quinn, lady,’ the tall and skinny newcomer interrupted. ‘Just call me old man. We both of us have lost loved ones on account of the Rexalls. And got no hope of seeing justice done to their memory unless we take care of it ourselves. Us and this young man here that has all it takes to see that the guilty are punished without him having any qualms about it. So why don’t you hang this brace of birds, lady? And when they smell as bad as the business Duke Rexall’s trying to cover up, we can maybe all sit to your table and have us a supper to celebrate. What do you say, lady? And you, Mr. Steele?’
Amos Quinn talked faster than he walked from the side of the clearing to the side of the shack where the woman listened with rising interest and the Virginian continued with the chore of reloading the two discharged chambers of the Colt Hartford.
‘Mrs. Slattery’s provided the food and it’s my intention to pay the fee,’ the gray-haired almost toothless man added as he ambled to a halt, his dark eyes alight with the same kind of excitement that sounded in his voice.
‘Grateful to you,’ Steele told him and swung into his saddle after booting the rifle. ‘But hung game is too rich for my taste.’
‘And you’re too rich to want the kind of money I’m prepared to pay you, mister?’ the grocery store owner taunted, trying to mask his disappointment behind false indifference.
Steele tipped his hat to the woman. ‘Reckon we’re even, ma’am?’
‘Even?’
‘Reckon the ambush was meant for me. If they hadn’t shot your horse, I might have taken a bullet. And I helped you bury your husband who wasn’t so lucky.’
‘So that’s what you meant about me saving your life?’ she said, and made no attempt to hide her sad disillusionment that he was leaving. ‘But surely, we both have the same fish to fry?’
The Virginian gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head and then heeled the black stallion away from the buckboard toward the track. And Amos Quinn said to Mary-Ann Slattery in an over-loud voice:
‘You figure this big fish we’re after is also maybe too rich for his taste, ma’am?’
‘Could be,’ Steele responded with a glance over his shoulder at the two people who were gazing after him. ‘And don’t they say that anyone who can’t stand the eats should stay out of the kitchen?’
Chapter Eight
THE FRESH SIGN on the intersection where the side track spurred off the main trail to follow the shore of the lake showed that the group of riders with a dead man among them had divided here. About half to head south toward town while the others rode around the western curve of the trail that led to the Rexall quarries and beyond this to the family home.
Steele had expected this would be the case after Duke Rexall made his grandstand play at the Slattery shack and he wasted no time in close examination of the hoofprints. And paid far more attention to the flanking country than to the heavily marked ground passing under his horse as he rode at an easy walk in the wake of the westward bound riders: the Virginian seeking an early warning of a second attempt to bushwhack him. But if the man who planned the abortive attack of this morning had it in mind to try to make good the mistake, he was biding his time. For as this Sunday afternoon inched toward evening the peace of his surroundings was disturbed only by the unobtrusive sounds of his own unhurried progress.
Until he rode close enough to the gated entrance of the Rexall Quarry Company property to hear the mournful music that was being played on a harmonica inside the small stone-built shack to the side of the gate. He was still a considerable distance off when he heard the funereal music and saw the place from which it was coming; as he crested a low rise at the end of a northward swinging curve of the trail that completed an S-bend of something more than two miles in length from the lake. From where he had started in the tracks of the Rexall contingent to where he reined the stallion to a halt on the ridge the country was as good and varied as the terrain between Barclay and the lake—meadowed hills to the left of the looping trail and timber to the right.
From where he sat his saddle atop the high ground with the melancholy music drifting about a half mile through the twilight to reach him, he could see that the mixed timber forest continued to spread richly at nature’s plan to the east and the north. With just a single visible intrusion by the hand of man—among the evergreen tops of a pinewood glade some two miles north and a half mile east of the trail could be glimpsed the slated roof of what was obviously an extensive building, with three chimneys giving off gray smoke into the evening air. Steele guessed this was the Rexall house.
Nobody passing along the trail was left in any doubt that the scarred piece of country to the west was the property of the Rexall Quarry Company. For along the top of the square stone arch that framed the double wrought iron gates that provided an attractive entrance to the ugliness beyond the name was spelled out, also in wrought iron.
A fence comprised of several strands of barbed wire stretched taut between ten-foot-high poles ran off at either side of the impressive gateway, tight to the side of the trail that ran arrow-straight northwards from the foot of the slope below where the Virginian now urged his mount forward, and curving along the base of the hill to the west. Stretching for as far as the eye could see until intervening features of the terrain obscured it, but apparently stretching for many expensive miles around the perimeter of the Rexall Company’s land.
So far, just three man-made canyons had been inscribed into the rich earth and white rock beneath, looking like the crooked spokes of a wheel with an area inside the gateway the hub. Narrow at their shallow beginnings, but gradually broadening as they deepened, so that eventually there would be a massive, fan-shaped depression in the earth after the three quarries became a single one. As yet, none of the quarries had been clawed more than a quarter mile across the hillsides and at its broadest the widest one was perhaps fifty yards from side to side.
From the trail that ran by the gateway at the foot of the slope, the quarries were visible just as unnatural swaths of raw earth and bare rock on the sides of green hills. But if further evidence were needed of the kind of business that operated beyond the barbed wire and wrought iron, now that the company name was not so easy to read against the fading backdrop of the evening sky, it was provided by a fine coating of powder on everything—even the new leaves of the trees—and a dry smell of rock dust laced with the stale taint of old explosions that permeated the cooling and darkening air.
During the ride down from the ridge, Steele’s perspective had constantly changed and he had been able to see better into the oldest quarry, that looked to have been worked out of productive rock. But it was still being used. At its mouth the crushing plant was located, the square top of the hopper on a level with the hard-packed tracks that connected it to the two other quarries and the rest of the property—so that wagons could be reversed to the timber rim and have their loads of blasted rock emptied with ease into the jaws of the steam-powered crusher which tonight was silent and still, its sooted chimney outlet dormant.
Alongside the elongated plant were parked a dozen or so wagons. The stables for the horses that hauled the wagons were on the other side of the quarry. There were a number of other single-story buildings down there. An office, he guessed. And the company store Ed Vincent ran. Probably a cookhouse and a mess hall. Every stone and timber-built structure silent and unlit in the gathering gloom. And covered with the same layer of fine dust that clung to everything else.
It took the Virginian perhaps fifteen minutes to reach the gateway from his initial vantage point. During this time the harmonica player had interrupted his music just once—while he lit a kerosene lamp that spilled a shaft of yellow light from a window on the trail side of the small building. Then he had restarted the same mournful and monotonous series of chords as before. And the wailing music effectively masked the unhurried clop of the stallion’s hooves against the trail. Then the lower sounds Steele made as he reined his mount to a halt and swung down from the saddle, sliding the Colt Hartford out of the boot as he did so.
Even while he was astride the horse he had been able to get a good view of the one-room gatehouse through the undraped window. Now left the stallion standing patiently on the center of the trail as he moved in closer—to confirm there was just the single musically inclined occupant of the office-like room which was furnished with little more than a document littered desk with a chair, a row of storage cabinets that looked disused and a cold stove.
The lone man playing the lonesome sounding music was about fifty with a rough-hewn face and a squat build: not tall, but broad and powerful with the kind of features that warned he was not slow to respond to aggression in kind. He was dressed in a cream shirt that bulged with his muscles and an equally tight-fitting pair of black pants. A battered black Stetson was lodged insecurely on the back of his head of curly red hair. An old looking Frontier Colt was stuck into his belt at his belly, butt to the right.
The desk and chair behind it were in the center of the room, sideways on to the window. The man was sprawled in a comfortable posture in the padded, wooden-armed chair and had his left leg stretched out straight with the booted foot resting among the papers on the desk top. His right foot, which was nearest the window, would have been bare had it not been for the white bandage that encased most of it and held a bulky dressing in place.
The incessant dirge was abruptly curtailed as it reached the softest part of the piece—which was when Steele smashed the rifle muzzle through the window. Then thumbed back the hammer as broken shards of glass hit the cement floor inside the gatehouse and shattered into smaller fragments. The man was in the grip of the fear of sudden death for just a stretched second, unable to move a single muscle of his own volition as his Adam’s apple spasmed. But then, when no rifle shot cracked in the wake of the sound of breaking glass, he carefully lowered the harmonica and pushed it into a pocket of his shirt as he turned his green eyes toward the Virginian. And easily spread a bellicose expression across his weathered features that made it difficult to visualize him as the kind of man who could derive solace from playing sad music.
