The Black Muldoon Read online

  “Boys,” he said, continuing that frankness that only a truly formidable man can show, “I didn’t know they grew like you out in this part of the woods. I’m glad I bumped into you. But what’s this got to do with me and young Lanning? How does this prove that he’s a better man than I am?”

  Scottie rubbed his chin, then he turned to Larry la Roche. “Larry, you tell him.”

  Larry thought a moment, taking off his hat and turning it slowly in his hands, while his eyes wandered slowly along the back, sharp-cut line where the hills met the mysterious haze of the sky.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said at length. “I been born and raised with a gun, and I took to it nacheral. It was a long time before I met a gent that was better’n me. But I met one. Yes, sir, he was sure a dandy with a gat. He could make a big gun talk to him like a pet. I can handle a gun pretty fair, but he didn’t handle his gun. It was just a part of him. It growed into his hand … it growed into his mind. He just thought, and there was a dead man. Seemed like it, anyways. He was so fast with a gun and so straight that he didn’t hardly ever shoot to kill. But he’d plug a gent in the arm or the leg and leave him behind.”

  Larry sighed.

  “Say,” said Lefty Gruger, tremendously impressed, “I’d have give ten years out of my life to seen him. I guess there never was a better’n him, eh?”

  “There was,” said Larry la Roche calmly. “Yep, there was a better man than Allister. We never thought his equal would come along, but he came, and the man that beat him and killed him was Hal Dozier. He wasn’t so fancy as Allister. He wasn’t so smooth. Allister was fast as a cat’s paw, but Hal Dozier is like the strike of a snake. He just explodes powder all the time, and when he fights, they’s a spark added, and he blows up. Well, he was faster than Allister and straighter with his gun, and he beat him fair and square.”

  “Boys,” said Lefty Gruger, laughing uneasily, “I figure this ain’t any country for me. This Hal Dozier is the champion of champions, eh? I’d hate to have him soft footing after me.”

  “He ain’t the champion,” said Larry la Roche, “not by a long sight he ain’t. They’s a gent that beat Hal bad. Met him clean, man to man, and dropped him, shooting in moonlight dimmer’n this. A snake strikes plumb fast, but the end of a whip when it cracks is a pile faster. And that’s the way with this other gent. He beat Hal Dozier.”

  “And who’s he?”

  “Andy Lanning.”

  Lefty Gruger took off his hat. He had become suffocatingly hot, and the perspiration was stinging his eyes.

  “You get me now,” murmured Scottie. “You see why I called you off him? Pal, you’ll quit Lanning’s trail?”

  “I can’t,” said Lefty doggedly. “I give my word, and I stick to my word. I drop Lanning, or he drops me.”

  “But suppose,” suggested Scottie softly, “that I show you how you make a barrel of loose coin and tie up Lanning at the same time. How would that suit you?”

  “We’ll talk about it, pal.” He reverted to the last fascinating subject. “But this Lanning, how could he be so fast?”

  “Listen,” said Scottie, “and I’ll tip you off. Allister and Hal Dozier are brave, you see? At least, Allister was, and Dozier is. They’re afraid of nothing. They’re plumb confident every time they fight. So’s Larry la Roche, there. So’s almost every gent who has a record as a gunman. But Lanning is different. He isn’t hard as steel. He’s all of a tremble when it comes to fight. I’ve seen him turn white as a girl and shake like a leaf before he went into danger. And he’s always sure the other fellow will get him. He thinks it all out. He feels that he’s as slow as a wagon wheel turning. He feels the other fellow’s slug tearing through his body. He goes through agony before he fights, but when the time comes for the pull of the gun, he’s a bundle of nerves, and every nerve is like loaded electricity. Well, partner, there’s one thing faster than anything else, and that’s the jump of an electric spark. That’s what Lanning is when he fights.”

  “But he’s a coward?”

  “Don’t fool yourself. He’s just enough of a coward to get a thrill out of every time he pulls a gun. What booze is to some and cards to others and money to the rest, that’s what gunfighting is to Lanning. It’s the lion, and he’s the trainer. It’s fear that brings the trainer into the cage every day, and it’s fear that brings Lanning into trouble.”

  “But me and him …”

  “He says he’s trying to go straight, curse him. He wouldn’t fight because of that. Because, no matter how the trouble started, he knew that he’d be blamed for it. But you’ve crossed him, Lefty, and sooner or later, you lay to this, he’ll get you and fill you full of lead unless you get him first. And the rest of us, the three of us, we all crossed him, too. We made this play tonight to try to get him back on our side. He wouldn’t come. So we know he’s going to try to get us, and our scheme is just to get him first.”

  “How?”

  “By standing all together and using the law. Sit down, and I’ll tell you how.”

  While he talked, the moon slid high and higher and slipped into a cloud, and still the chief of the gang was outlining his plan. But, whatever that plan was, it did not develop that night. Martindale did not waken the next morning with the shudder that Scottie had planned for it the day before. It wakened calm and tired with the heat of the night and drifted into another blazing-hot day as peacefully as ever.

  * * * * *

  The night had been terrible for Andrew Lanning, and the day was more awful still, for he came to it physically exhausted, ragged nerves on edge. Sally came and put her head in at the window as he washed his breakfast things, and afterward she glided at his side as he went to the shop. But aside from Sally, there seemed no cheering note in all the universe, and the dark sense of defeat gathered more and more thickly in the corners of his brain.

  That day dragged out, and another, with every waking hour filled with the suspicion of the men of Martindale and by Andrew’s fear of himself. He had to fight to keep himself from hating these people for once that hate took him by the throat, he knew that the killing would swiftly follow. It was in the very late afternoon of the second day that Hal Dozier came hurriedly to his shop, Hal Dozier with a drawn face of excitement.

  “I got a surprise for you, Andy,” he said. “Come along.”

  Andrew followed sluggishly to the door of the marshal’s office. The marshal here bent to do something to his right spur.

  “Go on in, Andy. I’ll follow right on as soon as I get this spur fixed.”

  Andy mechanically opened the office door and stood slouched against the wall. A full moment elapsed before he sensed another presence in the room and came suddenly erect, his nerves twitching. He turned, fighting himself to make the motion slow, and then he saw her. She was rising from her chair, big -eyed, as if she doubted her reception, half smiling, as if she hoped for happiness. She was more flower-like than ever, he thought, and her beauty struck him with a soul-stirring surprise, as something remembered, and yet with all the exquisite details forgotten. The difference between Anne Withero remembered and Anne Withero present was the difference between a dream and reality.

  His eyes went down to the slender hand and the bending fingers that rested on the table. He found nothing to say, but he shut the door, always keeping his hungry eyes on her. And now Anne grew afraid, for she was looking at a new man, not the smooth-cheeked, careless, fire-eyed youth she remembered, but a man stamped with a starved look of suffering and dull, melancholy eyes.

  At last she managed to say: “You wouldn’t come to me, you know, and so I had to come to you, Andrew.”

  “Oh, Anne,” he whispered, “are you real? Is it you?”

  “Of course. But, Andy, you’ve been terribly sick.”

  “That’s all past, and …”

  They seemed to fumble their way around the table, as if they were walking in sleep.

  “You’ve kept one touch of belief in me, Anne?”

  “Kept it? Ah
, don’t you see that I’ve never doubted you even?”

  This much the marshal heard, for he had stayed guiltily near the door, but at this point, he was mastered by a decent respect for the rights of lovers and walked reluctantly away. It was still terribly hot, but the sheriff took off his hat to the full blaze of the slant sun and smiled, as if a cool breeze were playing on his face.

  Dozier came back, after what he thought was a painfully long time, and found them sitting close together, their dim, frightened eyes avoiding each other. The marshal was one of those lucky men who keep close to their youth, and his heart jumped at what he saw. He even understood when Andy Lanning rose and strode out of the room without a word to either of them.

  The marshal closed the door after him and stood fanning himself with his hat and grinning shamelessly at Anne Withero. He liked her blush, and he liked her dignity, and he admired a poise that enabled her to smile back at him, as if she knew that he understood.

  “If you knew,” he said at last, “what it means to me. That kid has been a load that’s nearly busted my back. And now it’s settled.”

  “But it isn’t, you know,” said Anne Withero, growing anxious again.

  “You mean to say that, after you’ve come, he doesn’t know that he has to go straight?”

  “You see,” she explained, fully as worried as the marshal, but determined to make Andrew logical and plausible, “he feels that he hasn’t gone through a sufficient test. There is a bit of wildness in him, you know, Mister Dozier.”

  “Not much more than there is in a hawk,” said the marshal dryly. “But what mischief is he up to now?”

  “I tried to make him feel that he has been tested sufficiently. I told him that I knew about his meeting with the terrible man who struck him, and what a glorious thing I thought it was that he had endured it, and he wouldn’t agree. He says that he came within an inch of doing something terrible. And he wants a little time still, you see, to make these stupid people accept him. He says that if he could do something that would make half a dozen of these men about the village come to him and shake hands with him, then he’d feel that he had restored himself, and then he would be willing to go anywhere.”

  “Even East with you?” asked the marshal still dryly. “And do you agree with this infernal nonsense?”

  “I think Andrew knows best,” said Anne gravely.

  XI

  The existence of Martindale was peaceful enough, but it contained citizens who habitually slept with only one eye closed. Some of these men were wakened in the middle of the night by a dull, muffled noise, as if a vast volume of tightly compressed air had suddenly expanded to its full limits. The sound was strange enough to bring them out of bed, and among them was Hal Dozier, buckling on his gun as he ran. Other figures scurried down the street, and presently an outcry guided him through the moonlight to the bank.

  The door was open, and a dozen people were gathered in the room around the wrecked safe. The empty steel drawers were scattered here and there. The marshal cast one glance at it.

  “Neat work,” he murmured. “If it weren’t for facts, I’d say Allister had a hand there. What’ve you found, boys?”

  “This!” They threw a coat to him. “We found this in the corner.”

  The marshal looked it over carelessly, then stiffened. “This!” he exclaimed chokingly.

  “That’s Andy Lanning’s coat,” said Si Hulan importantly. “Murder will out, Hal. We’ve got your fine bird at last.”

  “Go look in his shack,” said the marshal, sick at heart.

  He could not understand it. More than once he had seen the impulse to break the law, dammed up in a man like water swelling in the banks of a stream, burst forth at the most unlooked-for moment. But Andrew Lanning had nothing in common with the criminally inclined lawbreaker. All the man’s impulses were for honesty, and the marshal knew that Anne Withero alone, in any case, should have been a sufficient motive to have held the boy to his self-imposed discipline of moral regeneration. He shook his head in sad perplexity.

  Two or three in the crowd had run down the street toward the Lanning house. The marshal trotted across to his office, firing orders that sent the rest of the crowd in haste for saddles and horses. It was the newly installed telephone that brought the marshal to his office, but with his hand on the receiver, he was stopped by a shouting farther up the street. The outcries shot down on the far side of the town and then veered up the valley.

  Hal Dozier ran to his door to be met there by half a dozen excited men.

  “We found him sitting on his bunk, pretending he’d just heard the noise and was dressing to go out to see what was the matter. Cool, eh? Hulan shoved a gun under his nose, and he put up his hands and looked dazed. Good actor, he is. Then we told him what had happened … that we’d found his coat, and that we had him dead to rights. He looks over at a chair by the window, as if he’d just missed the coat that minute.

  “‘That’s what they’ve done to get even,’ he says.

  “We told him to lead us to the money first.

  “‘All right,’” he said. “‘Right outside.’”

  “Looked as though he was going along easy and peaceable. Then, as he turned for the door, he made a flick of his hand and knocked the gun out of Hulan’s hand and dived into the rest of us. He went through us like an eel through water. I got my hands on him, but he busted loose, strong as steel.

  “He ran out, and we jumped our hosses and started after. Looked easy to run him down while he was on foot, but he let out a whistle, and that mare of his come tearing out of the shed and run alongside of him. Up he jumps on her back, as easy as you please, and away down the valley. Two or three of the boys headed after him.”

  Dozier heard this with the pain slowly dying out of his face and a red rage coming in its place.

  “Boys,” he said at the conclusion of the tale, “this is the end of the great Andrew Lanning. He’s taken the valley road with the fastest horse that ever ran in the mountains, but they’s one thing faster than horseflesh.” He tapped the shoulder of Si Hulan. “Hulan, you’ve got sense. Use it now. Get onto that telephone and ring Long Bridge. Tell them what’s happened. Tell them that I’m chasing Lanning with a half dozen men. I want Long Bridge to send me men if they please. Above all, I want good horses, and I want them ready and waiting before the morning, on the other side of the hills. They’ll have lots of time to get them together. I want horses more’n I want men. You make sure you tell them that. I’m going to run Lanning down with relays.

  “After we get the fresh horses from Long Bridge, we’ll send a man with the played-out horses back to Long Bridge to wire on to Glenwood. He can tell them where the hunt is heading and where to meet us with a second relay. Sally is a great horse, but she can’t outlast three sets of horses. We’ll catch her this side of the Cumberlands. Now, the rest of you that want to follow, come along. We got to ride tonight as we never rode before, and the end of our trail is the end of Lanning.”

  The marshal had spoken the truth when he said that there was no horse in the mountains that could pace with Sally, and it was never shown so clearly as on this night. With her master riding bareback and without bridle, guided only by the touch of his hand on one side of her neck or the other, she went down the only easy way out of Martindale, the long, narrow gorge that shot north into the mountains. She flew along well within her strength, but it was a dizzy pace for the three staunch little cow ponies that followed, and they dropped rapidly to the rear. Lanning became a flickering shape in the moon haze ahead, and finally that shape went out.

  After that, they drew their horses back to a canter to wait for the main body of the pursuit to overtake them. They were courageous men enough, but three-to-one was not sufficient odds when one man was Andrew Lanning.

  The clatter of many hoofs down the ravine announced the coming of the marshal. The thick of the posse overtook the forerunners on a rise in the floor of the valley, and they told briefly of what they had se
en and done.

  The marshal cursed briefly and effectively. They should have pressed boldly on, for the respite they gave Lanning would enable him to pause at the first ranch house for a saddle and bridle and, worst of all, a rifle. When the first house loomed out of the night, Dozier urged his men on ahead and dropped back himself to exchange a word with the people of the house. He was well enough mounted to overtake the rest.

  He had hardly tapped at the door without dismounting, when the rancher appeared, revolver in hand.

  “And who now?” he asked furiously.

  “Dozier,” said the marshal. “Who’s passed this way?”

  “Lanning and four men ahead of him.”

  “Four men ahead of him! Who were they?”

  “Don’t know. They didn’t stop, and they rode as if they was careless about what become of the horseflesh. But Lanning stopped long enough to grab my best saddle. Stuck me up with a gun and stood over me while I done the saddling for him, and then he got my rifle.”

  The marshal waited to hear no more, but rode on with a groan. Mounted on Sally bareback, with a revolver strapped to his hip, Lanning was formidable enough, but with a rifle in addition and a comfortable saddle beneath him, the difficulties of the task were doubled and redoubled.

  Who the four men might be, he had no idea. It was not common for four men to be riding furiously through the night and the mountains, but he had no time to juggle ideas. Lanning rode ahead, and Lanning was his goal.

  When he regained the posse, Lanning had still not been sighted. The mountains on either side of the ravine now dwindled away and grew small, and it was possible that Andrew might have turned aside at almost any place. But something told Dozier that the fugitive would hold on due north. That was the easiest way, and in that direction Sally’s dazzling speed would most avail the rider. Accordingly the marshal urged his men to the fullest speed of their horses.