The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 2 Read online

  With a shock she remembered her present errand, her reckless words to McNab. Despair seized her, in which she realized that she loved Steve Corcoran in spite of all he might be. Chill fear seized her that McNab and his friends would kill her lover. Her unreasoning fury died out, gave way to frantic terror.

  Turning she ran swiftly down the gulch toward Corcoran’s cabin. She was hardly aware of it when she passed through the blazing heart of the camp. Lights and bearded faces were like a nightmarish blur, in which nothing was real but the icy terror in her heart.

  She did not realize it when the clusters of cabins fell behind her. The patter of her slippered feet in the road terrified her, and the black shadows under the trees seemed pregnant with menace. Ahead of her she saw Corcoran’s cabin at last, a light streaming through the open door. She burst in to the office-room, panting – and was confronted by Middleton who wheeled with a gun in his hand.

  “What the devil are you doing here?” He spoke without friendliness, though he returned the gun to its scabbard.

  “Where’s Corcoran?” she panted. Fear took hold of her as she faced the man she now knew was the monster behind the grisly crimes that had made a reign of terror over Wahpeton Gulch. But fear for Corcoran overshadowed her own terror.

  “I don’t know. I looked for him through the bars a short time ago, and didn’t find him. I’m expecting him here any minute. What do you want with him?”

  “That’s none of your business,” she flared.

  “It might be.” He came toward her, and the mask had fallen from his dark, handsome face. It looked wolfish.

  “You were a fool to come here. You pry into things that don’t concern you. You know too much. You talk too much. Don’t think I’m not wise to you! I know more about you than you suspect.”

  A chill fear froze her. Her heart seemed to be turning to ice. Middleton was like a stranger to her, a terrible stranger. The mask was off, and the evil spirit of the man was reflected in his dark, sinister face. His eyes burned her like actual coals.

  “I didn’t pry into secrets,” she whispered with dry lips. “I didn’t ask any questions. I never before suspected you were the chief of the Vultures –”

  The expression of his face told her she had made an awful mistake.

  “So you know that!” His voice was soft, almost a whisper, but murder stood stark and naked in his flaming eyes. “I didn’t know that. I was talking about something else. Conchita told me it was you who told Corcoran about the plan to lynch McBride. I wouldn’t have killed you for that, though it interfered with my plans. But you know too much. After tonight it wouldn’t matter. But tonight’s not over yet –”

  “Oh!” she moaned, staring with dilated eyes as the big pistol slid from its scabbard in a dull gleam of blue steel. She could not move, she could not cry out. She could only cower dumbly until the crash of the shot knocked her to the floor.

  As Middleton stood above her, the smoking gun in his hand, he heard a stirring in the room behind him. He quickly upset the long table, so it could hide the body of the girl, and turned, just as the door opened. Corcoran came from the back room, blinking, a gun in his hand. It was evident that he had just awakened from a drunken sleep, but his hands did not shake, his pantherish tread was sure as ever, and his eyes were neither dull nor bloodshot.

  Nevertheless Middleton swore.

  “Corcoran, are you crazy?”

  “You shot?”

  “I shot at a snake that crawled across the floor. You must have been mad, to soak up liquor today, of all days!”

  “I’m all right,” muttered Corcoran, shoving his gun back in its scabbard.

  “Well, come on. I’ve got the mules in the clump of trees next to my cabin. Nobody will see us load them. Nobody will see us go. We’ll go up the ravine beyond my cabin, as we planned. There’s nobody watching my cabin tonight. All the Vultures are down in the camp, waiting for the signal to move. I’m hoping none will escape the vigilantes, and that most of the vigilantes themselves are killed in the fight that’s sure to come. Come on! We’ve got thirty mules to load, and that job will take us from now until midnight, at least. We won’t pull out until we hear the guns on the other side of the camp.”

  “Listen!”

  It was footsteps, approaching the cabin almost at a run. Both men wheeled and stood motionless as McNab loomed in the door. He lurched into the room, followed by Richardson and Stark. Instantly the air was supercharged with suspicion, hate, tension. Silence held for a tick of time.

  “You fools!” snarled Middleton. “What are you doing away from the jail?”

  “We came to talk to you,” said McNab. “We’ve heard that you and Corcoran planned to skip with the gold.”

  Never was Middleton’s superb self-control more evident. Though the shock of that blunt thunderbolt must have been terrific, he showed no emotion that might not have been showed by any honest man, falsely accused.

  “Are you utterly mad?” he ejaculated, not in a rage, but as if amazement had submerged whatever anger he might have felt at the charge.

  McNab shifted his great bulk uneasily, not sure of his ground. Corcoran was not looking at him, but at Richardson, in whose cold eyes a lethal glitter was growing. More quickly than Middleton, Corcoran sensed the inevitable struggle in which this situation must culminate.

  “I’m just sayin’ what we heard. Maybe it’s so, maybe it ain’t. If it ain’t, there’s no harm done,” said McNab slowly. “On the chance that it was so, I sent word for the boys not to wait till midnight. They’re goin’ to the jail within the next half hour and take Miller and the rest out.”

  Another breathless silence followed that statement. Middleton did not bother to reply. His eyes began to smolder. Without moving, he yet seemed to crouch, to gather himself for a spring. He had realized what Corcoran had already sensed; that this situation was not to be passed over by words, that a climax of violence was inevitable.

  Richardson knew this; Stark seemed merely puzzled. McNab, if he had any thoughts, concealed the fact.

  “Say you was intendin’ to skip,” he said, “this might be a good chance, while the boys was takin’ Miller and them off up into the hills. I don’t know. I ain’t accusin’ you. I’m just askin’ you to clear yourself. You can do it easy. Just come back to the jail with us and help get the boys out.”

  Middleton’s answer was what Richardson, instinctive man-killer, had sensed it would be. He whipped out a gun in a blur of speed. And even as it cleared leather, Richardson’s gun was out. But Corcoran had not taken his eyes off the cold-eyed gunman, and his draw was the quicker by a lightning-flicker. Quick as was Middleton, both the other guns spoke before his, like a double detonation. Corcoran’s slug blasted Richardson’s brains just in time to spoil his shot at Middleton. But the bullet grazed Middleton so close that it caused him to miss McNab with his first shot.

  McNab’s gun was out and Stark was a split second behind him. Middleton’s second shot and McNab’s first crashed almost together, but already Corcoran’s guns had sent lead ripping through the giant’s flesh. His ball merely flicked Middleton’s hair in passing, and the chief’s slug smashed full into his brawny breast. Middleton fired again and yet again as the giant was falling. Stark was down, dying on the floor, having pulled trigger blindly as he fell, until the gun was empty.

  Middleton stared wildly about him, through the floating blue fog of smoke that veiled the room. In that fleeting instant, as he glimpsed Corcoran’s image-like face, he felt that only in such a setting as this did the Texan appear fitted. Like a somber figure of Fate he moved implacably against a background of blood and slaughter.

  “God!” gasped Middleton. “That was the quickest, bloodiest fight I was ever in!” Even as he talked he was jamming cartridges into his empty gun chambers.

  “We’ve got no time to lose now! I don’t know how much McNab told the gang of his suspicions. He must not have told them much, or some of them would have come with him. Anyway, their firs
t move will be to liberate the prisoners. I have an idea they’ll go through with that just as we planned, even when McNab doesn’t return to lead them. They won’t come looking for him, or come after us, until they turn Miller and the others loose.

  “It just means the fight will come within the half hour instead of at midnight. The vigilantes will be there by that time. They’re probably lying in ambush already. Come on! We’ve got to sling gold on those mules like devils. We may have to leave some of it; we’ll know when the fight’s started, by the sound of the guns! One thing, nobody will come up here to investigate the shooting. All attention is focused on the jail!”

  Corcoran followed him out of the cabin, then turned back with a muttered: “Left a bottle of whisky in that back room.”

  “Well, hurry and get it and come on!” Middleton broke into a run toward his cabin, and Corcoran re-entered the smoke-veiled room. He did not glance at the crumpled bodies which lay on the crimson-stained floor, staring glassily up at him. With a stride he reached the back room, groped in his bunk until he found what he wanted, and then strode again toward the outer door, the bottle in his hand.

  The sound of a low moan brought him whirling about, a gun in his left hand. Startled, he stared at the figures on the floor. He knew none of them had moaned; all three were past moaning. Yet his ears had not deceived him.

  His narrowed eyes swept the cabin suspiciously, and focused on a thin trickle of crimson that stole from under the upset table as it lay on its side near the wall. None of the corpses lay near it.

  He pulled aside the table and halted as if shot through the heart, his breath catching in a convulsive gasp. An instant later he was kneeling beside Glory Bland, cradling her golden head in his arm. His hand, as he brought the whisky bottle to her lips, shook queerly.

  Her magnificent eyes lifted toward him, glazed with pain. But by some miracle the delirium faded, and she knew him in her last few moments of life.

  “Who did this?” he choked. Her white throat was laced by a tiny trickle of crimson from her lips.

  “Middleton –” she whispered. “Steve, oh, Steve – I tried –” And with the whisper uncompleted she went limp in his arms. Her golden head lolled back; she seemed like a child, a child just fallen asleep. Dazedly he eased her to the floor.

  Corcoran’s brain was clear of liquor as he left the cabin, but he staggered like a drunken man. The monstrous, incredible thing that had happened left him stunned, hardly able to credit his own senses. It had never occurred to him that Middleton would kill a woman, that any white man would. Corcoran lived by his own code, and it was wild and rough and hard, violent and incongruous, but it included the conviction that womankind was sacred, immune from the violence that attended the lives of men. This code was as much a vital, living element of the life of the Southwestern frontier as was personal honor, and the resentment of insult. Without pompousness, without pretentiousness, without any of the tawdry glitter and sham of a false chivalry, the people of Corcoran’s breed practiced this code in their daily lives. To Corcoran, as to his people, a woman’s life and body were inviolate. It had never occurred to him that that code would, or could, be violated, or that there could be any other kind.

  Cold rage swept the daze from his mind and left him crammed to the brim with murder. His feelings toward Glory Bland had approached the normal love experienced by the average man as closely as was possible for one of his iron nature. But if she had been a stranger, or even a person he had disliked, he would have killed Middleton for outraging a code he had considered absolute.

  He entered Middleton’s cabin with the soft stride of a stalking panther. Middleton was bringing bulging buckskin sacks from the cave, heaping them on a table in the main room. He staggered with their weight. Already the table was almost covered.

  “Get busy!” he exclaimed. Then he halted short, at the blaze in Corcoran’s eyes. The fat sacks spilled from his arms, thudding on the floor.

  “You killed Glory Bland!” It was almost a whisper from the Texan’s livid lips.

  “Yes.” Middleton’s voice was even. He did not ask how Corcoran knew, he did not seek to justify himself. He knew the time for argument was past. He did not think of his plans, or of the gold on the table, or that still back there in the cave. A man standing face to face with Eternity sees only the naked elements of life and death.

  “Draw!” A catamount might have spat the challenge, eyes flaming, teeth flashing.

  Middleton’s hand was a streak to his gun butt. Even in that flash he knew he was beaten – heard Corcoran’s gun roar just as he pulled trigger. He swayed back, falling, and in a blind gust of passion Corcoran emptied both guns into him as he crumpled.

  For a long moment that seemed ticking into Eternity the killer stood over his victim, a somber, brooding figure that might have been carved from the iron night of the Fates. Off toward the other end of the camp other guns burst forth suddenly, in salvo after thundering salvo. The fight that was plotted to mask the flight of the Vulture chief had begun. But the figure which stood above the dead man in the lonely cabin did not seem to hear.

  Corcoran looked down at his victim, vaguely finding it strange, after all, that all those bloody schemes and terrible ambitions should end like that, in a puddle of oozing blood on a cabin floor. He lifted his head to stare somberly at the bulging sacks on the table. Revulsion gagged him.

  A sack had split, spilling a golden stream that glittered evilly in the candle-light. His eyes were no longer blinded by the yellow sheen. For the first time he saw the blood on that gold, it was black with blood; the blood of innocent men; the blood of a woman. The mere thought of touching it nauseated him, made him feel as if the slime that had covered John Middleton’s soul would befoul him. Sickly he realized that some of Middleton’s guilt was on his own head. He had not pulled the trigger that ripped a woman’s life from her body; but he had worked hand-in-glove with the man destined to be her murderer – Corcoran shuddered and a clammy sweat broke out upon his flesh.

  Down the gulch the firing had ceased, faint yells came to him, freighted with victory and triumph. Many men must be shouting at once, for the sound to carry so far. He knew what it portended; the Vultures had walked into the trap laid for them by the man they trusted as a leader. Since the firing had ceased, it meant the whole band were either dead or captives. Wahpeton’s reign of terror had ended.

  But he must stir. There would be prisoners, eager to talk. Their speech would weave a noose about his neck.

  He did not glance again at the gold, gleaming there where the honest people of Wahpeton would find it. Striding from the cabin he swung on one of the horses that stood saddled and ready among the trees. The lights of the camp, the roar of the distant voices fell away behind him, and before him lay what wild destiny he could not guess. But the night was full of haunting shadows, and within him grew a strange pain, like a revelation; perhaps it was his soul, at last awakening.

  Gents on the Lynch

  Blue Lizard, Colorado,

  September 1, 1879.

  Mister Washington Bearfield, Antioch, Colorado.

  Dear Brother Wash:

  Well, Wash, I reckon you think you air smart persuading me to quit my job with the Seven Prong Pitchfork outfit and come way up here in the mountains to hunt gold. I knowed from the start I warn’t no prospector, but you talked so much you got me addled and believing what you said, and the first thing I knowed I had quit my job and withdrawed from the race for sheriff of Antioch and was on my way. Now I think about it, it is a dern funny thing you got so anxious for me to go prospecting jest as elections was coming up. You never before showed no anxiety for me to git rich finding gold or no other way. I am going to hunt me a quiet spot and set down and study this over for a few hours, and if I decide you had some personal reason for wanting me out of Antioch, I aim to make you hard to ketch.

  All my humiliating experiences in Blue Lizard is yore fault, and the more I think about it, the madder I git. And yet it all co
me from my generous nature which cain’t endure to see a feller critter in distress onless I got him that way myself.

  Well, about four days after I left Antioch I hove into the Blue Lizard country one forenoon, riding Satanta and leading my pack mule, and I was passing through a canyon about three mile from the camp when I heard dawgs baying. The next minute I seen three of them setting around a big oak tree barking fit to bust yore ear-drums. I rode up to see what they’d treed and I’m a Injun if it warn’t a human being! It was a tall man without no hat nor gun in his scabbard, and he was cussing them dawgs so vigorous he didn’t hear me till I rode up and says: “Hey, what you doin’ up there?”

  He like to fell out of the crotch he was setting in, and then he looked down at me very sharp for a instant, and said: “I taken refuge from them vicious beasts. I was goin’ along mindin’ my own business when they taken in after me. I think they got hyderphoby. I’ll give you five bucks if you’ll shoot ’em. I lost my gun.”

  “I don’t want no five bucks,” I says. “But I ain’t goin’ to shoot ’em. They’re pecooliar lookin’ critters, and they may be valurebul. I notice the funnier-lookin’ a animal is, the more money they’re generally wuth. I’ll shoo ’em off.”

  So I got down and says: “Git!” and they immejitly laid holt of my laigs, which was very irritating because I didn’t have no other boots but them. So I fotched each one of them fool critters a hearty kick in the rear, and they give a yowl and scooted for the tall timber.

  “You can come down now,” I says. “Dern it, them varmints has rooint my boots.”

  “Take mine!” says he, sliding down and yanking off his boots.

  “Aw, I don’t want to do that,” I says, but he says: “I insists! It’s all I can do for you. Witherington T. Jones always pays his debts, even in adversity! You behold in me a lone critter buffeted on the winds of chance, penniless and friendless, but grateful! Take my boots, kind stranger, do!”