THE LAST DAYS OF WOLF GARNETT

Gault was not surprised to find there were no vacancies in New Boston's only hotel, due to the holiday atmosphere brought on by the funeral and burying of a famous outlaw. "Mister," the desk clerk beamed at Gault, "we ain't had a room for rent since before suppertime yesterday. Seems like the whole county's gathered here. Just to be able to say they was on hand when the famous Wolf Garnett was planted, I guess. You might try the wagon yard at the end of the street. If they ain't got a camp shack for rent, they might allow you to sleep in the loft."

As Gault was turning to leave, the clerk said, "Mister, maybe I ought to tell you somethin', for your own good. About that .45." He looked at Gault's wood-handled weapon. "We got an ordinance in New Boston against carryin' firearms. The sheriff don't like it."

Gault smiled his heatless smile. "What does the town marshal say about it?"

"Ain't got a town marshal, just the sheriff. And Dub Finley, that's Olsen's deputy."

Handy, Gault thought silently. A million-acre county, with only two lawmen to look over it. That kind of job called for strong men.

There was no problem finding the wagon yard. A group of men were gathered by the livery corral beside the barn. Town loafers, and a few visiting cowhands and farmers. Gault lowered his saddle to his hip as he moved in to see what it was that interested them. "What's the excitement about?" Gault asked a cowhand who was just leaving.

"Wolf Garnett's outfit," the cowhand told him. "His gun and the rig he was wearin' when the sheriff found him." He grinned and strolled away toward the nearest saloon.

Gault stood like stone for several moments. Then, without a word, he bulled his way through the crowd, oblivious of the hostile looks and the grumbling. He stood gazing down at the items of curiosity that so fascinated the citizens of Standard County.

"Them boots," someone was saying. "Only pair like those anywheres in the country. Hand-made by a saddler over at Fort Worth. Best money could buy—that was Wolf Garnett."

Gault lowered his saddle to the ground, knelt in front of the boots and inspected them minutely. They were white rimed now and stained by their long soaking in gyp water, but Gault would have recognized them anywhere. Once they had been richly black, with fanciful butterflies stitched above the vamps. They had been soft and smooth and expensive, and they had somehow smacked of the arrogance that had possessed the man who had worn them. And there was the cartridge belt, also black and probably bench made to order, for Wolf Garnett had not been one to stint on the necessities of his calling. The bone-handled .45, cast in the same mold of a thousand other Colts, was somehow distinctive because it had belonged to Wolf Garnett. And the foreign-looking Montana Stetson with its narrow brim and four-sided crease.

Gaunt studied the items one by one with great care. There was no doubt that they were real and that they had belonged to Wolf Garnett. The outlaw had worn these very items on the day, not quite a year ago, when he had so casually and offhandedly murdered Martha Gault.

In the back of Gault's mind he heard someone saying, "Mister, is somethin' the matter with you?" There was just the beginning of uneasiness in the voice. "You ain't about to have a fit, are you?"

Gault did not know what kind of expression had been on his face, but it was clear that this group of idlers had found it disturbing, if not outright alarming. They had quietly and without a word, started backing away from him, as they might have backed away from a dog that had suddenly started foaming at the mouth. Gault looked at them without actually seeing them. Then he got slowly to his feet and picked up his saddle.

He found the hostler filling feed troughs in the rear of the barn. "Have you got anything in the way of a camp shack for rent?" Gault asked him.

The hostler, a gimpy, buckshot-eyed little man of undeterminable age, was instantly alert and oozing greed. "Might be," he said cautiously. "How many of you?"

"Just myself. Tonight, and maybe tomorrow. I don't know how much longer."

"Won't come cheap," the little man warned him.

Gault made an inaudible sound in his throat and then gestured to indicate that the expense was of no importance. He owned no cattle now, no home, no land, no roots. But he did have money enough to see him through the next few months. After that it didn't matter.

Gault's shack was one of several green lumber boxes that had been built against the side of the barn to catch the overflow from the hotel on Saturdays and holidays. And days like today. Gault washed up at the livery pump. His face felt numb as he sloshed it with cold water. His insides felt numb too. And had for a long time.

He went to his shack, which was just big enough to hold the pole-and-rope bunk, and a few clothing pegs on the wall. There was no stove and no provision for one. Well, it was April, and the weather was mild in Texas. And there was an open fireplace next to the pump for guests who wanted to do their own cooking.

Gault sat on the bunk and began emptying the cartridges from the magazine of his Winchester. When the magazine was empty he began cleaning the weapon, swabbing and oiling and polishing until it shone like dark silver. One by one he cleaned the cartridges as meticulously as he had cleaned the rifle. Then he reloaded.

"The way you work on that rifle," a voice said, "a-body would guess you had some important work to put it to."

Gault looked up and quietly studied the man who was watching him through the open doorway. He was young— in his mid-twenties, Gault guessed. He was well rigged-out in California pants, gray flannel shirt and a pony hide vest. A nickel-plated star was fixed to the left side of the vest. So this, Gault reasoned, had to be Dub Finley, Standard County's one and only full-time deputy sheriff. "Did Olsen send you to keep an eye on me?"

Deputy Finley scowled. "Why would Sheriff Olsen want me to do that?" Gault noticed that Finley's thick black hair, which grew low on his forehead, formed a V between his eyes when he scowled. The eyes themselves were dark and wet-looking and without expression.

"I don't know," Gault said mildly. He gave the Winchester's breach a few wipes and put the rifle away. "What do you want?"

"I've had complaints about the pistol you're wearin'. New Boston ain't one of your rowdy trail towns, in case you landed here with that mistaken notion in your head. We're civilized. We got subscription schools, circuit courts, Methodist church, just like towns back East. Folks hereabouts don't feel called on to carry guns."

Gault heard the deputy's spiel out with a certain fascination. "All right," he said obligingly, "I'll take off the .45 and leave it with the hostler until I'm ready to leave."

"When will that be?"

"Hard to say right now. It depends."

Something crossed the deputy's mind and he frowned again. "You just mentioned the sheriff's name. Are you some kind of pal of Grady Olsen's?"

"No," Gault said with a thin smile. "I don't think you could rightly say that."

Finley worried this for a moment and then decided to take it up later with Olsen. He stepped up to the door of the shack and held out his hand. "I'll take that .45 now and leave it with the sheriff."

"I said I'd leave it with the hostler."

"That won't do." The deputy shook his head, and his hairline formed a black arrowhead that pointed straight down his narrow nose.

Gault hesitated for a moment, making no move to remove his cartridge belt. Still, there didn't seem to be much sense in making trouble for himself over the revolver. Like most plainsmen, he had never had much faith in hand guns anyway. He unbuckled the belt and handed the holstered weapon to Finley.

The deputy took it with a cool smile that seemed to imply that he had won some sort of victory. With a curt little nod, he tucked the holstered Colt under his arm and strode away.

The shadows in front of the camp shacks were growing longer and darker. The day was dragging to a close and Gault could sense that the excitement of the day was beginning to pall. The funeral was over if not forgotten. The newspaper reporters, for the most part, had taken the noon stage out of New Boston. Visiting cowmen and farmers were beginning to straggle off in various directions.

It would be a day to remember, for most of them. The day they buried Wolf Garnett. For Frank Gault the day hadn't rightly started yet.

He went to the barn and left his rifle on the rack with his saddle. "I may want to rent a horse later," he told the hostler.

The rawhide little liveryman grinned and nodded his head. "That's what we're in business for." He squinted out at the dusty street. "Crowd's beginnin' to thin out some. I got an end shack now, closer to the pump, if you'd like to make a change."

He was afraid that a good-paying cash customer might move to the more convenient hotel. But it didn't matter to Gault where he stayed or how he lived. A man with a hot coal in his gut doesn't complain about a lumpy mattress. "Whereabouts is the graveyard from here?" he asked suddenly.

"You mean where they planted Wolf Garnett? Off to the north, on the slope there, maybe quarter of a mile. You can see it from the back of the barn."

As Gault was walking out of the barn the hostler called, "There's a smart little buckskin in the rent corral. I can put him back for you, if you want."

Gault hesitated, his gaze resting on a long-handled shovel in one of the feed stalls. "Maybe," he said, "you better do that."

They rode the long grade down from the graveyard and reined up in the almost deserted street. "Now," Gault said indifferently, "you've got your duty to do, I guess."

"What duty is that?"

Gault lifted his head and studied the big sheriff for a moment. "From the way you talked up there, I figgered you just couldn't wait to get me to town where you could arrest me for grave-robbing."

The sheriff's smile was stiff and hostile. "That depends on what kind of plans you got. How long you figger to stay with us in New Boston?"

"It would be fine with me if I could leave on the next stage north."

"That won't be till day after tomorrow. You figger you can stay out of trouble till then?"

Gault allowed himself a taut smile. "I intend to work at it, Sheriff." The two men gazed at each other quietly. There didn't seem to be anything else to say, and finally Gault, with a little nod, reined away and rode toward the wagon yard.

So this, he thought emptily, is the way it ends. After almost a year of fury and grief, his only satisfaction was a grave on a barren hillside, a horror that had once been a man.

But had it been Wolf Garnett?

The hostler was not to be found, so Gault stripped the buckskin and turned the animal back into the rent corral. He went to his shack and methodically removed his boots and pants and shirt and stretched out on the rope-strung bunk. It would only be a matter of minutes, he knew, before armies of bedbugs began their inevitable attack—and he was not disappointed.

But not even the swarming insects could hold back those months of blackness that haunted him. When he closed his eyes Martha's face was there before him as he had last seen it, her eyes wide, glittering with terror. A few seconds later the stage had plunged off the mountain road. Gault had not seen his wife alive again.

Martha Henderson Gault, Beloved Wife of Franklin Kearny Gault, Born September 4, 1864, Died March 12, 1885, Rest in Peace.

Rest in peace, Gault thought darkly as the night wore on, for I cannot. A body in an unmarked grave was not enough—he had lost too much to have the debt balanced out so easily.

Before morning came he had made up his mind not to wait for the Thursday stage out of New Boston. At first light of a new day he got his meager gear together and found the hostler.

"Get the buckskin saddled. I'll be pullin' out directly after breakfast."

"If you aim to take the animal out every day you'd do better rentin' by the week."

"I'm not lookin' to rent. If the price is right, I'll buy." He walked off, giving the hostler a chance to settle on a price that would be at least half again what the buckskin was worth—but many months had gone by since Gault had given any thought to practicalities of business.

In the half light of the prairie dawn there was already one eating house open for business. NEW BOSTON RITZ CAFE, announced the sign on the flyspecked window, Chili 10¢. Gault walked into a classic Southwest eating house. Six stools at an oilcloth-covered counter. Behind the counter there was an oldtime cowhand, too stove up to ride, who had decided in his later years to take up the art of cooking. The air was hot and heavy with grease.

The cook sidled up the counter, eying Gault narrowly. It was a trait of the New Boston citizen, Gault had noticed, to view any and all strangers with suspicion. "Ain't got the biscuits in yet," the cook announced sourly. "Want some coffee while you wait?"

Gault nodded. "Coffee. And never mind the biscuits. Bring me some flapjacks, three eggs and some bacon."

"Eggs come a dime apiece," the counterman said, as if he had serious doubts as to Gault's ability to pay for them.

"I'll take three," Gault insisted flatly. Then, as the only customer in the New Boston Ritz, he took an end stool and prepared to wait. The cook accepted the order grudgingly and sidled back to his grease-burning stove at the end of the counter. In his younger days, Gault guessed, the Ritz restaurateur had been a bronc buster. He had stayed with the job too long, too many rough rides had shaken his insides loose, which explained his bad disposition and his crablike movements behind the counter.

Gault was adding sugar and stirring his black, gritty coffee, when the figure of Grady Olsen loomed like a thunderhead in the cafe doorway.

"The usual, Andy," Olsen called to the counterman. He took a stool next to Gault and said absently, "The wagon yard man says you're buyin' one of his rent animals. That mean you'll be pullin' out of New Boston ahead of the stager."

"You get yourself up at first light just to ask the wagon yard man what I was up to?"

"Guess maybe I did, at that," Olsen admitted. "After all, you got some mighty queer habits, mister. It ain't every day we get grave-robbers in New Boston."

"You thinkin' about changin' your mind about arrestin' me?"

The sheriff chuckled quietly, adding canned milk and sugar to his coffee. "I ain't changed my mind, long's you behave yourself. But I couldn't help wonderin' why you're in such a big hurry to leave this little town of ours."

"I thought you wanted me to leave."

"And you thought right." The sheriff nodded and noisily sipped his coffee. "But when a man buys a rent horse from a wagon hostler, knowin' he's goin' to get skinned, just to save a few hours' time, well, it strikes me a mite queer. It strikes me you've got mighty little respect for cash money, or you're in a mighty big hurry to get out of New Boston. Am I barkin' up the right tree, Gault, or ain't I?"

The counterman brought Gault's order, slammed it down in front of him and gimped back to his stove. Gault gazed learily at the leathery flapjacks, the watery sugar syrup, the slabs of fat side meat, the puddles of grease already congealing in the cold platter. The eggs, also coated in congealing grease, were cooked to a peculiar bluish color, the whites curled, as if in pain, the yolks as hard as grapeshot. Gault cut into the flapjacks and began to eat. "No," he told the sheriff, "you're barkin' up the right tree. I'm ready enough to leave New Boston."

The sheriff sighed. It might have been a sigh of resignation, or it could have been in anticipation of a hearty breakfast. He folded his heavy arms across his chest and waited patiently until his meal arrived. "Andy's the best cook in Standard County," he said, taking up his knife and fork. He dug into his platter of hardcooked eggs and side meat and sour dough biscuits. "Where you aimin' to go?" he asked after the first rush of eating had taken the edge off his appetite.

"I don't know. Back to the Nations, maybe."

"Goin' back to runnin' cattle?"

" . . Maybe. I haven't thought much about it since…"

"Best forget about that," the sheriff said with as much gentleness as his big voice would allow. "It's a bitter dose to swaller, I reckon, but there's nothin' to be done about it now."

For the first time since their meeting, the sheriff seemed to warm to Gault and talk to him almost as a friend. Gault wondered why. Simply because he had decided to get out of New Boston? Could it really be that important?

Then something occurred to Gault. "Sheriff, about the two pals of Wolf Garnett's, that you mentioned yesterday. The ones that helped identify the body? Where are they now?"

Grady Olsen paused in his eating. Suddenly he wasn't so warm and friendly. "They ain't here. They was over in Sancho County takin' a herd up the Western Trail when they heard that Wolfs body'd been found. So they decided to ride over and have a look and make sure it was actual their old pard. It was."

"Did Wolf Garnett have many old pals like that? Good, law-abidin' gents, I take it, that would make a two day trip cross country just to look at his corpse?"

The sheriff's gray eyes became distant and cold.

Gault said, "It strikes me queer that a lobo like Garnett would have friends that would go to so much trouble to help out the law."

The sheriff mopped up some cold grease with a biscuit and put it in his mouth. "Gault," he said wearily, "are you goin' to give me more trouble?"

"No, but I'd like to talk to those helpful pals of Garnett's."

"Can't be done," Olsen told him with feeling. "They went back to the herd. Must be halfway to Kansas by this time."

"What herd was it?"

"… I don't recollect."

"What were the men's names?"

Olsen speared his last piece of side meat and chewed thoughtfully. "Colly Fay," he said reluctantly. "And Shorty Pike. The Fays and the Pikes used to farm on the Little Wichita, but they moved over to Sancho County a few years back. They was boys together with Wolf Garnett."

"When was that?"

"Five, six years ago."

"A long time," Gault said dryly. "They must have might good memories to be able to identify that body as Wolf Garnett."

The sheriff made a sound under his breath. It might have been a sigh, or a curse. "There was some talk of Colly and Shorty runnin' with Wolf's bunch, up till a year ago. Since that time they've been workin' at honest jobs. I can see what you're thinkin', but there was never any proof that the boys went outlawin' with Wolf. Just talk. Anyhow, the Pikes and the Fays are good, hardworkin' families, and I don't aim to bring them any trouble."

There was another question in Gault's mind, but he decided not to ask it now. He counted out some silver and left it beside his plate. "You pullin' out?" the sheriff asked.

If the hostler doesn't hold me up over the buckskin."

Remember what I told you. It's a sorry business about your wife, but let it drop. Best thing all around, for everybody."

Gault's smile was the strained expression of a man who hadn't tried it in a long while. "I'll think about it." He shoved himself away from the counter and walked out of the eating house.

After what seemed a very long time but could not have been more than a few minutes, Gault became aware of an almost endless expanse of startlingly blue sky. He lay on his back against a stone outcrop that had eventually stopped his rolling and tumbling. There was fire in his side and no air in his lungs. Fighting for breath, he tried to push himself erect. The toe of a dusty boot planted itself in his chest and pushed him back on the damp earth.

Deputy Dub Finley moved in to stand up against the shimmering backdrop of blue sky. From Gault's position, he looked as tall as a mountain. He had drawn his .45 and was holding it in his right hand, thoughtfully tapping the muzzle in the palm of his left hand while he gazed unblinkingly down at Gault.

As if from a great distance, Gault heard Shorty Pike say, "Somebody comin'."

Then the picture became confused. The sky turned dark. The figure of Deputy Finley loomed huge and tilted at a sickening angle. Gault closed his eyes in an effort to keep the sky from spinning. From a void he heard voices and echoes of voices. Some were angry and excited. Others cool and dangerous. Gault didn't open his eyes to see where the voices were coming from. At the moment it didn't seem to matter. In spite of his efforts, the world began to spin. Darkness came down on him like the lid of a coffin.

Gault had been awake only a few minutes when he became aware of the tall figure darkening the doorway. Deputy Dub Finley came into the shed, his face scowling and thoughtful, his hairline pointing straight down the slender bridge of his nose. "You're a lucky man, Gault," he said quietly. "You ought to be a gambler. With your luck."

Gault looked at the deputy's dark countenance and decided that, unpleasant as it was, it was not the face of a man bent on immediate murder. "I guess," he said harshly, "there ain't much sense in askin' if you're goin' to arrest Shorty Pike for shootin' me."

"Arrest Shorty Pike?" The young lawman was amused. "We seen you clear as day, down in the riverbottom, fixin' to run off two of the Garnett milk cows. We hollered at you, and that's when you started shootin' at us. Shorty fired in self-defense. No two ways about it."

Gault forced himself to speak without shouting. "What did I use for a gun when I was doin' all this shootin'?"

"Why your Winchester, of course."

"Maybe you'd tell me how I could fire a rifle that didn't have a firing pin?"

The deputy grinned. "There ain't nothin' wrong with that rifle, Gault. I checked it myself. The firin' pin's good as new."

Gault had no doubt that it was new, but there was no way he could prove it. If he wanted to be stubborn and take the matter to court, it would be his word against Finley's. And he didn't have to guess which side the judge would believe. Still, it was a fact that the deputy had tried to kill him. Would have killed him, if Esther Garnett hadn't happened along when she had.

"See what I mean, Gault?" The deputy favored Gault with a one-sided smile. "Maybe next time Miss Garnett won't happen along in time to help you. Luck, they say, has a way of runnin' out."

"Finley," Gault said wearily, "would you tell me somethin'?"

"Be proud to," the deputy said dryly. "What is it you want to know?"

"The sheriff, what I saw of him, didn't strike me as a scalp hunter. What does he aim to do with the bounty money when he collects?"

This was not the question that Finley had expected, but he shrugged and answered without hesitation. "Why, he'll give it over to Miss Esther. What did you figger he'd do with it?"

Suddenly Gault was tired of the deputy and tired of talking. Finley hunkered down next to the straw bed, studying Gault with curiosity, as a small boy might have studied a horned toad sleeping in the sun. He felt for makings and meticulously built and lit a cigarette. "Like I say," he said mildly. "You been runnin' in luck. But a smart gambler knows when the cards're startin' to turn on him. What kind of a gambler are you, Gault?"

"A curious one."

Finley shook his head sadly. "The worst kind." He finished his smoke and shoved himself to his feet.

"I take it," Gault said acidly, "that you and the sheriff, and some others, don't want me in Standard County any longer. Might be I'd leave, and save you the trouble of killin' me, if I knowed why it was that you didn't want me here."

Finley smiled. It was a chilling expression on a humorless face. "Miss Esther ain't had much schoolin', but she's a tolerable good doc. She'll have you up and around inside of two, three days. Your buckskin's in the horse pen on the other side of the shed. My advice is get saddled soon as you're able to ride, and strike for some direction away from Standard County."

The deputy nodded and strode out of the shed. Gault lay for a long while, his mind milling in aimless circles. He saw Shorty Pike and Colly Fay pass in front of the open doorway, heading for the Garnett cornfield with long-handled hoes on their shoulders.

Gunhands hoeing corn. It made a bizarre picture. And it raised bizarre and disturbing thoughts in his mind.

He drifted into a troubled sleep, and when he awoke Esther Garnett was standing over him with a large crock bowl in her hands. "Deputy Finley said you was in a hurry to get well so's you could start back to your homeplace. You won't be doin' much ridin' for three, four days. And not then, if you don't start eatin'." She pulled up the milking stool and sat down and handed him the bowl.

"Sorry to put you out," he said with lingering bitterness. "I didn't aim to go and get myself shot on your property."

She ignored his heavy sarcasm. "Wasn't your fault," she told him. "All a misunderstandin'. Deputy Finley and Shorty and Colly thought you was drivin' off my cows."

There didn't seem to be any point in arguing about it. Gault gazed down at the soup, a rich brown broth swimming with grease and chunks of marrow. The thought of eating any of it caused his stomach to curl. What he wanted was a large glass of whiskey and some rest. More than anything else, a night of dreamless sleep. A night of oblivion in which Martha's terrified eyes did not haunt him.

"Eat," Esther Garnett said briskly, those clear eyes watching him from beneath the hood of her sunbonnet.

Gault dipped a spoon through the layer of grease and took some of the broth in his mouth. It was as bad as he had feared. After a few spoonfuls he put the bowl aside.

"Come breakfast time," she told him, "you'll feel more like eatin'." Gault lay back on the hay. For some time those clear eyes continued to look at him from beneath the hood of the sunbonnet. Then, in a gesture of mild irritation, she shoved the sunbonnet back with her forearm and let it hang down her back.

The change was startling. At first Gault was struck by what appeared to be her extreme youth. Her oval face was as smooth and as delicately tinted as Dutch china. She's only a child! Gault thought in amazement. He saw almost immediately that this was a mistake—there was something childlike in the blue clearness of her eyes, and in the delicacy of her complexion—but she was no child. Gault wondered about her age and guessed it at eighteen. Almost immediately he revised it upward to twenty, and finally settled on twenty-four or -five.

It took him several minutes to find the right word to describe her, and it came as something of a surprise when he realized that the word was "beautiful." It had not occurred to him before that beauty was such a rare thing on the frontier. Martha had not been beautiful—she had been pleasing to look at, and he had loved her—but she had not been beautiful.

He realized that he was staring. But apparently Esther Garnett was used to being stared at. She smiled and picked up the bowl. "Deputy Finley said your name is Gault."

Gault nodded. The thing about her that fascinated him was the rosy tint of her skin. In the Southwest a woman's face tended to become dark and leathery. At the age of thirty she was an old woman. Mostly because of the heat and the wind. At forty they began losing their teeth, and often their hair. It had something to do with not getting enough of the right things to eat, Gault had heard. He wasn't sure about that, but he did know that Southwest summers were hell on women. Or on anything at all, for that matter, that was delicate and lovely to look at. Wild flowers that sometimes dotted the prairie lasted only a few days. And Gault was sure that Esther Garnett too would soon begin to fade. But for the moment she was beautiful.

Yorty's line shack was a crude half-dugout affair nestled in the sprawling bottomland next to the Red. In Gault's honor, the cowhand carved a whole tenderloin out of the dressed venison and cooked it on a spit over a greenwood fire. "There's a monkey stove in the shack," Yorty explained, "but I never quite got the hang of cooking on it."

They ate with relish, hunkering around the fire as the cool spring night settled around them. A line rider lonesome for company, Yorty celebrated this occasion by opening a treasured can of tomatoes, and even produced some condensed milk for the coffee. In the time honored tradition of the frontier, they ate in silence, giving their entire attention to the meal at hand. Then they moved back a little from the fire and lit their smokes and sipped their scalding, faintly rancid coffee.

Gault cocked his head, listening for a moment with all his attention. If Colly was anywhere nearby he wasn't letting that fact be known. Gault thought with grim amusement that Colly must be getting pretty tired of cold grub and fireless nights.

"One lobo," Elbert Yorty was saying, "don't make a wolf pack. The Garnetts was a first-class family before Wolf started givin' it a bad name. Did you know his folks?"

"No. Esther Garnett told me her parents died four years ago."

"About that." Yorty nodded to himself. "I've been workin' cattle in Standard County longer'n I like to think about— and back in them days the Garnetts was as good as anybody in these parts. Even if they did start out as squatter farmers." This, from a cowman, was praise of the highest kind. "Even after Wolf started to go bad, nobody blamed it on the rest of the family. Course," he added after a moment's thought, "they was always thick as molasses."

"Who was?"

"The Garnetts. Everybody said that Miss Esther and Wolf was closer than most brothers and sisters. And the old folks, they never said anything against Wolf, even after he'd gone bad. But then, I guess nobody expected the Garnetts to say anything out loud against their own…"

Gault looked at his host thoughtfully. It almost seemed that Yorty was trying to tell him something without actually putting it in so many words. He said offhandedly, "Happened I was in New Boston the day of the funeral. Miss Esther didn't come."

"Pretty broke up, I guess," Yorty said, helping himself to more coffee.

"I guess." After several weeks of riding line by himself, it was clear that the cowhand was eager for human company. Still, it occurred to Gault that Yorty had talked a good deal without saying much of anything. Yorty had made no secret of his admiration for Esther Garnett, but he was no wet-nosed pup to dance a fandango—or hoe an acre of corn—just because a pretty woman smiled at him. Yorty was well into his fifties. An old man, considering the business he was in.

Gault sat for a moment, lost in his own dark memories.

Suddenly he asked, "Was you well acquainted with Wolf Garnett when he was livin' in these parts?"

"Well acquainted?" Yorty rubbed his bristling chin. "I wouldn't say that. I knowed him, like most folks did."

"Tell me about him." Gault was surprised at his own question. Until this moment his only thought had been to find Wolf Garnett and kill him.

Yorty methodically built and lit another smoke. "Not a whole lot to tell. Wolf was a bad apple from the very beginnin'. In trouble of some kind nearly all the time. Hot temper. Fist fights. A cuttin' scrape or two. But folks in Standard County figgered he was just young and a little wild. Course, it begin to look some different when we got the reports from Kansas, when he killed his first man."

"Did he ever come back to his homeplace after that?"

"Folks said he did, but I never seen him."

"Can you tell me somethin' about the county sheriff, Olsen? And the young deputy that works for him?"

Elbert Yorty finished his smoke in silence. He snapped the dead butt into the fire and said, "Don't get me wrong, I'm proud to get somebody to talk to. But it does seem like you ask some queer questions, Gault."

Gault realized that he had been pushing too hard; it was a bad habit of his. "I've got an interest in Wolf Garnett," he said slowly.

"What kind of interest?"

"Not quite a year ago he killed my wife."

Gault had not meant to put it so bluntly and coldly. But there it was, where even the dullest kind of intelligence could understand it. Now he would see just where Yorty stood.

The cowhand rocked back on his heels like an Indian and stared at him for several minutes. "I'm sorry about your wife. But I can't help you about Wolf; I already told you ever'thing I know."

"What about the sheriff?"

The cowhand spread his hands. "Nothin' there to tell. He's a good hand far's I know, and he's been on the job a long time. As for Dub Finley, he's just a young pup that likes pony hide vests and nickel-plated badges, but he'll grow out of it in time."

"Is he in love with Esther Garnett?"

The oldtimer blinked his surprise. "Maybe." Then he stretched his arms and yawned extravagantly. "It's been a long day. I think I'll throw my bed."

"Just one more thing. Deputy Finley's got two possemen riding with him. Colly Fay and Shorty Pike. Can you tell me about them?"

"Like I say," Yorty said with a humorless smile, "it's been a long day." He got to his feet and walked off toward the shack.

Gault sat for some moments in silence. Finally he got his own bed and threw it beside the fire, and for a long while he lay gazing up at the gunsteel sky while, in his mind, a driverless stagecoach went off a mountain road.

Gault entered the Day and Night Bar with his Winchester cradled in the crook of his right arm. He paid for a schooner of sour beer and said, "I want to talk to Harry Wompler."

The barkeep, a fat, sleepy-eyed ex-muleskinner, looked him over carefully. Gault had learned early that Wompler was not an easy man to locate. For more than an hour he had been passed from saloon to saloon, and now he was at the end of the line, in the dirt-floored Day and Night.

"Take a beer for yourself," Gault said blandly. "And draw one for Harry." He put some silver on the bar.

"You a pal of Harry's?"

"Not a pal, exactly. But we may have the same enemies."

The barkeep grinned and drew himself a beer. It was clear that any enemy of Olsen's was a friend of the barkeep's. "There's Harry Wompler, over in the corner, but don't be surprised if he won't talk to you. Harry ain't been none too sociable since he lost his deputy's badge. Put great store in that nickel-plated star, Harry did, before Grady Olsen took it away from him."

The former deputy sheriff of Standard County lay facedown across the table, his head on his arms, snoring lustily. Gault put a beer on the table and pulled up a chair. "I want to talk to you, Wompler."

Harry snorted and grunted and went on with his snoring.

"About Grady Olsen." Gault shook him gently. Wompler's head dangled lifelessly on his scrawny neck. He snored on.

"And Wolf Garnett."

Harry didn't budge. Gault shoved the full schooner toward him and said, "I brought you a beer."

A muscle alongside the former deputy's neck began to twitch. He lifted his head and stared blearily at Gault. He pulled the beer to him, with all the tenderness of a new mother holding her first child, and he fumbled it to his mouth and drank steadily until the heavy glass mug was empty.

"Who are you?"

"Frank Gault. An old line rider called Yorty told me to look you up when I got to New Boston. I'm tryin' to find out about Wolf Garnett."

"Find out what?"

Gault couldn't bring himself to talk about Martha in a place like the Day and Night. "It's personal." Then, because Wompler seemed to be drifting back to sleep, he asked, "Can I buy you another beer?"

Harry nodded heavily, as if he were carrying the weight of the world on the back of his neck. "Make it whiskey."

The barkeep knew his customers well. He had already set two glasses and a full bottle on the table. The former deputy forced himself erect, sloshed some whiskey into a glass and downed it. "Nothin' to tell," he said haltingly, like a crippled man learning to walk. "About Wolf Garnett. He's dead."

"About the sheriff then?"

Wompler stared at him for a full minute without making a sound. He was a youngish man, still in his twenties. Once he might have been considered handsome, but a steady diet of the Day and Night's raw corn whiskey had taken care of that. His lower lip protruded curiously, giving him a pouting look. His face bristled with a week's growth of beard, but it was round and strangely youthful. He looked, Gault thought, to himself, like a sixty-year-old baby with pouchy eyes. "Why," he asked, "do you want to know about the sheriff?"

"I think he's mixed up somehow with the Wolf Garnett bunch. What's left of the bunch, anyway."

Wompler stared at him, blinking his watery eyes. Suddenly he began laughing. The sound was eerily hollow coming out of that bearded baby face.

Gault's own voice turned cold. "I didn't know I'd said somethin' funny."

"You did, though. I didn't think there was a man in Standard County—or Texas, for that matter—that didn't know about Grady Olsen and the Garnetts." He poured himself another drink and Gault noticed that his hands were steadier now.

"Tell me about them."

"Simplest thing in the world. For four years Olsen's been makin' moon eyes at Esther Garnett. Him old enough to be her pa. And then some."

Gault stared at the derelict in amazement. Since the night of the thunderstorm he had often tried to explain the sheriff's odd behavior—but this possibility had not occurred to him. "Olsen's in love with Miss Garnett?"

"Like a moon-eyed calf." Harry helped himself to another drink. "It's the reason he fired me."

The story was taking some unexpected turns. Grinning loosely, Wompler wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "Me and Esther—I guess ever'body in the county knowed she took a shine to me. That's why he had to get me out of the way. Took away my badge." The old baby face turned ugly. "I guess that ain't the way you heard it, though."

"I heard that Olsen let you go for bein' too thick with a gang of rustlers."

Wompler's eyes were losing their focus. "Believe anything you please. It's all the same to me."

Gault sat for a moment digesting what he had heard. "Do you know a stock detective named Del Torgason?"

"Torgason?" Wompler's tongue was beginning to thicken. "Torgason and me are the only ones in Standard County that'll talk back to Olsen."

"Why would Torgason want to make an enemy of the sheriff?"

"It ain't that he wants to. He just don't give a damn. The big men in this part of Texas are the cowmen, and they're the ones that pay his salary. Not even Olsen would go out of his way to rile a cowman."

"I was beginning to get the feelin' that everybody in the county kowtowed to Olsen. The cowmen don't?"

"Cowmen," the former lawman smiled slackly, "don't kowtow to anybody."

"Where can I find Torgason?"

Wompler sensed that the period of free liquor was about to end. Quickly, he sloshed himself another drink. "In the Association office, if he's in town. At the far end of the street, over the bath house."

The bath house occupied a space in the broad back alley behind the New Boston Gentlemen's Barber Shop. The county office of the cattlemen's association was a boxlike structure atop the bath house, sitting alongside a metal hot water tank. It was reached by an outside stairway, as were most second story establishments in New Boston.

Gault climbed the stairs and stepped through the open doorway. There was a rolltop desk, a battered oak chair. On the plank wall there was a large calendar for the year 1882, an advertisement for Dr. J. J. Simpson's Electric Bitters. Beside the calendar, dangling from a length of bit chain, was a North Texas Stock Raisers' Brand Book. There was no sign of stock detective Del Torgason.

A handyman from the bath house came up the stairway with an armload of cowchips and dumped them into the firebox beneath the hot water tank. Gault stepped out to the landing and asked, "Can you tell me where to find Torgason?"

The handyman looked him over. "Who's askin'?"

"My name's Frank Gault."

That was all the handyman needed to know. "Nope," he said shortly, and stumped back down the stairs. It was clear that the sheriff had not been pleased by Gault's return to New Boston, and it hadn't taken long for the word to get around. Gault picked up the buckskin and moved on to the wagon yard.

The hostler, Abe Tricer, was waiting for him with a vindictive grin. "Sorry, Gault, I just rented out the last of my camp shacks."

The shacks stood against the livery barn with their doors wide open and obviously vacant. "How about I throw my bed in the loft."

"Town passed an ordinance against that."

"Ordinance?"

"Drifters sleepin' in the loft like to burn the place down."

Gault knew it would be useless to argue the matter. "Do you think you could feed and water the buckskin?"

The hostler shrugged. "Price of oats has gone up since the last time you was through here."

"Somehow," Gault told him, "I figgered it would." He stripped the buckskin and put the animal in a stall. Then he returned to the Day and Night.

Wompler was at the same table, staring into space. Only after Gault set a full bottle in front of him did he begin to look alive. "Torgason ain't in his office," Gault said. "I tried askin' some New Boston citizens about him, but it didn't get me anywhere."

Wompler downed a drink and chuckled. "They know the sheriff wouldn't like it. And what Sheriff Olsen don't like we don't get much of here in Standard County."

"You know where I might find Torgason?"

The former deputy closed his eyes, and for a moment Gault was afraid he'd fallen asleep. At last he said, "This mornin' I was down at the livery corral. Torgason came by to get his horse. There was somethin' said about the Circle-R."

The name had a familiar ring. The oldtime cowhand, Elbert Yorty, rode line for the Circle-R. Also it had been an injured Circle-R hand that Doc Doolie had been tending the night of the thunderstorm—according to Doc Doolie. "Is there anything queer about the Circle-R? Or about Torgason heading that way today?"

Wompler looked at him blearily. "Nothin' I can think of."

"You ever have any trouble with the outfit, when you was deputy?"

The ex-lawman shook his head. "Nope. What you lookin' for?"

It was a reasonable question, but Gault didn't have a reasonable answer. What was he looking for? Gault only knew that the fire in his gut wouldn't let him rest until something was done. "What I'm lookin' for is not something I can put a finger on. It's a feelin'."

"About the sheriff?"

Gault nodded. "That's part of it."

"Is it true what they're sayin'? That Wolf Garnett killed your wife?"

The former deputy, Gault decided, was more alert than he appeared to be. "It's true." He waited a full minute for Wompler to go on, but the ex-lawman only shrugged and let the matter drop. Gault said, "What's the best way for me to get to the Circle-R? I want to talk to Torgason."

"He's close-mouthed. You won't get much out of him, even if he knowed somethin' to tell." Wompler brightened slightly as a thought occurred to him. "Have you got the money to pay for a rent animal over at the livery corral?"

"I guess so. Why?"

"If there's a chance of puttin' somethin' over on Olsen, I'd like to deal myself in. You pay for the rent animal and I'll ride with you to the Circle-R." Gault hesitated, and Wompler added flatly, "I ain't as useless as I might look. I can use a gun, if I have to."

Gault was vaguely disturbed by the way he said it. "Do you expect to have to?"

"Don't expect nothin' but tricks and slick dealin' when doin' business with Grady Olsen. Will you pay for the horse?"

Wompler was not the kind of man that Gault would have chosen to ride with. But he found himself nodding, reluctantly.

Wompler sighed, smiled crookedly, and with considerable effort pushed himself to his feet. "One more thing," he said, tucking the bottle of liquor under his arm. "You might pay the barkeep for this."

Against his better judgment, Gault paid for the whiskey. They left the Day and Night and walked the short distance to the wagon yard. The exertion left Wompler winded, but his watery eyes had cleared a bit and his speech was not so slurred. "Of course," the former deputy said, "I don't aim to drink this down all at once." He fondly caressed the bottle. "It's just that I've been promisin' myself for a long time that I'd kill Grady Olsen if I ever got the chance. And I might just do it if I was to catch myself completely sober."

By sundown Gault was tired of the saddle and sick of the company of Harry Wompler. They arrived at the banks of the Little Wichita as the sun was touching the dark green horizon. "We can make camp here," the ex-deputy said. "Or we can make it on to the Circle-R camp in maybe another hour."

Gault's side was aching. "We'll camp here. I've had enough of the saddle for one day." They staked the horses downstream, boiled coffee and ate what was left in Gault's grub sack.

Wompler held one heavy biscuit to the fading light and said, "Don't have to ask where you got these. Esther never was no prize as a cook. Even I would admit that much."

"Did you know Miss Garnett long?"

The ex-deputy smiled his slack smile. "Long enough."

They finished the meal in silence, then Wompler dug the bottle out of his saddlebag and downed a carefully measured ration of whiskey. He put the bottle away without offering it to Gault. A faded army blanket and a yellow slicker known as a "fish" had come with Wompler's rented horse and saddle. He dumped it beneath the budding branches of a cottonwood, then walked up the grade from the river and stood for a while, building and smoking his highly combustible cigarettes, gazing upstream toward the Garnett place.

Gault decided the former lawman was not an easy man to know. In the Day and Night he had been a common drunk. At the Circle-R headquarters he had been ill-tempered and brutal to the old wrangler. Since that time he had shown flashes of sensitivity and the rudiments of education, neither of which were very common in a place like Standard County.

Gault sat beside the dying fire, smoking, trying to keep his mind away from the past. Wondering what he was going to say to the stock detective, Torgason, when he found him. How could Torgason help him? How could anybody help him?

When Wompler came back down the slope and stood beside the fire, Gault said, "Tell me about Torgason."

"Torgason…" Wompler considered his subject. "He's an old hand, good at his job, no nonsense. I don't like him, but he knows his business. And he ain't afraid of Olsen." With a curt nod, Wompler got to his feet and went to his bedroll. Tugging off his boots, he said, "You might not think it, Gault, but I used to be a man of ambition. I read law with old Judge Tabor at Gainsville. I set myself the task of learnin' the law, and then politics, and then…" Gault could not see his face, but he knew that Wompler was smiling that loose-lipped smile of his. "There wasn't no limit to the ambition I had in those days. A year ago I lost more than a job and a woman. I lost the man that used to be Harry Wompler. And I guess I won't be satisfied until I find out where he went."

The horses plodded heavily over the spongy sod along the river. The men rode northward along the crest of the riverbottom, and soon they could see the field of young cotton, and the smaller one of corn, spread out below them, the neat rows standing in water and silvery in the moonlight.

The arroyo where they had found the calf lay like an open wound behind the farmhouse, slanting southward to the river. The house stood dark and sullen on the unfenced ground, but in one of the larger outbuildings, which Gault knew to be the main barn, the reddish light of a coal oil lantern shone through the cracks around the door.

The horsebackers reined up and studied the light. "What do you make of it?" Wompler asked at last.

"Shorty Pike," Gault said, more concerned with the arroyo than the barn. "Most likely that's where he throws his bed."

The wet clay walls of the gully glistened in the moonlight, but most of the water had already rushed headlong into the river. The riders got down and led their animals along the wash. Gault was the first to see what they were looking for. "This is where the calf was buried."

Wompler grounded his reins and eased himself down the slick wall of the arroyo. "This is it. Not much of a burial job, whoever done it. The calf's almost washed out."

He grunted several times and swore to himself. "Wait till I light a match."

A match flared on Wompler's thumbnail, and for an instant the floodswept bottom of the wash, the dead calf, and part of what lay beneath the calf, were etched with steelpoint sharpness. Wompler pulled away from that shallow grave, his face looking white and drawn in the sulphurish light. Then the match went out.

"Give me a hand, somebody."

Gault and Torgason slid down to the muddy bottom of the arroyo. They had seen what Wompler had seen, but they did not completely believe it. "Grab one of the forelegs," Wompler said with unaccustomed authority. "We'll have to get the calf out of the hole before we can be sure of anything."

Gault grabbed a foreleg and Torgason and Wompler took the hind quarters and pulled the animal out of the hole. With great care, Wompler dried his hands on the seat of his pants, then struck another match. Once again, by the light of that tiny sulphur fire, they looked into the grave. The dead eyes of Wirt Sewell looked back at them.

The three men seemed to breathe together. In and out. Then Wompler spoke. "Now I think I'd like to see about that light in the Garnett barn."

"Later," Torgason said quietly. "After we attend to Sewell."

"There ain't nothin' we can do for him."

They looked at one another, two men surprisingly equal now, and strong willed. Not dedicated enemies, exactly, but not friends, either. "First," Torgason said again in the same quiet tone, "we'll attend to Sewell."

Gault avoided further argument by climbing out of the wash and stripping his own bedroll of its tarpaulin cover. "Pass him up here. We'll cover him up and lay him out somewhere, out of the weather. The rest will have to wait till later."

After a moment's hesitation the two men in the wash nodded together. With gentleness that might have been surprising to some, they lifted the body out of the hole and passed it up to Gault who covered it with his tarp.

As if motivated by a single mind, the three men wrapped the body in its canvas shroud and tied it on behind Wompler's saddle, because Wompler was the lightest of the three men and his rented gelding was the most docile of the animals. "Now," Gault said stiffly, "I think it's time we saw about that light."

But first they tied their horses at one of the small sheds and laid the express agent's body out on the straw-covered floor. The three men looked at one another and Wompler asked dryly, "Is there anything anybody wants to say?"

What was there to say? The shot that Gault thought he had heard—he had heard. Sewell had put his hawkish nose into a place where it wasn't welcome. And someone had killed him. And buried him. And then, as an added safety measure, they had killed a calf to fill the grave, in case somebody found it. But they hadn't counted on a flash flood.

"Why would they bury Sewell in a wash so close to the house?" Wompler asked.

And Torgason answered softly and calmly, having thought it all out beforehand. "Because it was handy. An easy place to dig. And because they didn't care about makin' a good job of it, because they didn't figger to be around when he was found. If he was found." He started to build a cigarette, but his hands were not quite steady and he tore the paper. He put the makings away in disgust. "Then somebody got worried and decided to hide the body with the calf." He nodded to himself. "It wasn't a bad notion. If it hadn't been for the storm."

Gault was seeing the posseman's face as he came out of the wash that morning with the shovel. "Shorty Pike," he said.

"That's what I aim to find out." The stock detective smiled coldly at Wompler and Gault. "If you gents want to come along, that's all right with me."

They circled wide around the sheds, keeping out of sight of the house. Torgason and Wompler arrived at the barn well ahead of Gault. His side was beginning to hurt again; his breathing was ragged. Torgason looked at him. "You all right?"

Gault nodded, sagging against the side of the barn until he recovered his breath. Then they moved to the double plank door and Wompler said, "Stand back out of the light when I open it." Quietly, Gault and Torgason levered cartridges into their rifles.

No sound came from inside the barn. Well, Gault reasoned, it was well past bedtime, they were probably sleeping.

With the lantern burning? "Open it," he told Wompler.

The former deputy set himself, then suddenly flung the doors wide and dived for darkness. Torgason and Gault snapped their rifles to their shoulders. Nothing happened. No sound, no movement. After a moment Gault edged around one side of the door, Torgason around the other. Behind them, somewhere in the darkness, they could hear Wompler breathing. There was no one in the barn.

Without turning his head, Gault snapped to Wompler, "Keep an eye on the house and the other sheds." Then he and Torgason made an inspection of the barn. On the pole rack that served as a hay loft they found an area of packed hay where someone had been bedding down. But there was no sign of occupation now. Gault eased himself down on the hay platform and held his side. Torgason eased his Winchester hammer to half cock and called to Wompler. "Anything movin' out there?"

"Quiet as a graveyard," Wompler called from the gaping doorway.

Gault shoved himself to his feet. "I want to see the house."

Esther Garnett was not in the house. No one was. The three men stationed themselves as they had at the barn. Wompler pounded on the door several times. Then Gault stepped forward and kicked the door open.

"Miss Garnett?"

A muslin curtain sighed at one of the front windows. Nothing else moved. Gault felt along his hatband, found a match and lit a coal oil lamp. Wompler, who in better times had been in this house as a guest, stepped inside and made a sound of surprise as he stared around at the blank walls. "There used to be pictures over there…" He pointed. "Of Esther's ma and pa. And there was other things, too…"

Gault moved across the room to a closed door and kicked it open. It was a bedroom—black oak dresser, washstand, bed. But the bed had been stripped, the drawers of the dresser pulled out and emptied.

He moved to the kitchen where the iron cookstove was in place, and several pots and pans, but most of the dishes had been taken from the upright kitchen safe. Wompler came to the doorway and stood there, his face puzzled. "Esther set great store in them dishes. Her grandma brought them from across the water, she told me once."

"Look at this," Torgason called from another part of the house. Gault followed the voice to a small, boxed-in porch, sometimes called a sleeping porch. What had caught Torgason's attention was a rude knock-up bunk, a thing of blackjack poles and haywire, strung with frayed well-rope. More interesting than the bed, which might have been accounted for, was the litter of burnt matches and brownpaper cigarette butts on the floor.

The three men studied the room, sized it up in their minds, but did not discuss it at the moment. "Probably a waste of time," Torgason said finally, "but we might as well see if there's anything in the sheds."

They found a heavy breaking plow, almost new, and other farm tools. But no wagon, and only odds and ends of harness. The milk cow had been turned out; the mule was gone. At last they returned to the house where Wompler's instinct led him to a fruitjar half full of clear whiskey, tucked away beneath the rope-strung bunk.

Gault and Wompler sat at the cooktable, which was still in place. Torgason stood in the doorway glaring at the box walls of the sleeping porch. Wompler drank deeply of the raw liquor and passed it to Gault, who tasted it, but Torgason would not touch it. "Wompler, you and Miss Garnett was thick once, they say. What do you make of this?"

The whiskey worked rapidly on Wompler's taut nerves. He sagged in the chair, his eyes going slightly glassy. "She's pulled out. That's clear enough, ain't it?"

"Why?" the stock detective demanded.

Wompler had another go at the fruitjar. "I don't know. It's been a long spell since Esther and me…" He sighed and smiled his crooked smile. "Pulled out, that's all there is to it. Took the wagon, the mule, the dishes, a few other things."

"How about this bunk on the sleepin' porch."

This was the thing that disturbed them. More than the missing mule and wagon; more, even, than Esther Garnett's disappearance. Esther was what was known as a "decent" woman; none of them had any doubts on this point. But that extra bunk, and the whiskey, and the litter of cigarettes and matches… Even in Gault's mind it made a jarring picture.

"Shorty Pike?" Torgason asked at last.

Wompler snorted. "A highbinder like Shorty, sleepin' in the same house with Esther Garnett?" he grinned loosely to show that the idea was ridiculous.

Gault had an idea that wasn't so ridiculous.

"Wolf Garnett," he said.

They stared at him. "Once," Wompler said, after a long silence, "I knowed an old galoot that got hisself in a scrap with a band of Kiowas. They killed his woman and his two boys, and then they strung him up over a torture fire and would of cooked him like a fat dog, except some horse soldiers from Belknap happened along before they finished him. From that time on, that old geezer seen Kiowas everywhere he looked. Behind every manure pile and fire-barrel, a Kiowa. Around every bend, behind every tree. Kiowa." The former deputy took a long drink from the fruitjar. "That's the way you are, Gault. Everywhere you look, there's Wolf Garnett."

"Then who's been sleepin' on that bunk? Sleepin', smokin', and drinkin' clear corn whiskey?"

Wompler was silent for several moments. "Wolf," he said at last, "is dead. Everything points to it. Still," he went on thoughtfully, "if he wasn't dead, and if this is the bunk where he's been sleepin', it would clear up a lot of things in my mind. It would explain why Esther all of a sudden didn't want me on the place. It would explain why Olsen drummed up that rustlin' story and then fired me."

From the doorway Torgason looked at the former deputy and said, "Comes mornin' we'll know more about it. Just as soon as it's light enough to track that wagon."

Gault and Torgason and Wompler rode upstream, with Wompler taking the lead. The greedy light of gold was in the former deputy's eyes. Torgason, despite a conscious effort to stay disinterested, allowed his wooden mask to slip from time to time. Even Gault, whose obsession was revenge, not riches, could not escape the fascination of $200,000.

"What do you make of it?" Gault asked the stock detective. "About the sheriff and the deputy showing up here, so far from New Boston?"

"The sheriff," Torgason said dryly, "don't let hisself get hemmed in much by county lines. State lines neither, for that matter." He shrugged and smiled his brittle smile. "When Olsen seen that watch, I figger he started thinkin' just the way we did. About that army gold. And he aims to get it."

"Wompler tells me that Olsen is in love with Esther Garnett."

The stock detective looked as if he might be laughing on the inside, though his wooden face never changed expression. "Our Sheriff Olsen is a sensible man. He knows he could buy a whole pack of women, maybe some of them even better lookin' than Esther Garnett, for almost a quarter of a million dollars."

It was Wompler who saw the wagon first. The three men reined up sharply and studied it for some time without speaking.

The driver, apparently, had lost control of the wagon before it had ever reached the rock crossing. It had skidded off the near bank, plunging off the shoulder of sand and landing in one of the shallow channels on the Texas side of the river. There it lay now, on its side, the bows shattered, the dirty white sheet trailing in the reddish water. Several yards from the wagon a broken wheel was partially imbedded in the sand. There was no team.

"Like Gault says," Wompler said excitedly, "that gold's heavy stuff. She couldn't of took it with her. It must still be in the wagon."

"We don't know there was ever any gold in the wagon," Gault reminded him.

But Wompler was already spurring his horse down the sandy embankment. The former lawman swung out of his saddle and clambered into the half-submerged wagon box. After a moment his head appeared over the sideboards. "Everything's a mess in here. Get a loop on this wagon box and pull it right-side up, then we'll see where we stand."

Obediently, Torgason and Gault tied onto the submerged bow brackets, then backed their horses in the shallow water and pulled the wagon upright. Wompler scrambled back inside and began tearing away what remained of the canvas sheet.

Esther Garnett's prized china dishes lay shattered in the bottom of the wagon. A bundle of clothing had broken open and odds and ends of female attire floated on the dirty water. What appeared to be a bedroll was wedged in mud beneath the driver's seat. If there had ever been any gold in the wagon, it was not there now.

Wompler stared at the waste of useless articles floating in the wagon box. His face was crumpled in disappointment, and for one uneasy moment Gault thought he might break into tears. "There ain't nothin' here!" he exploded. He grabbed up an unbroken plate and smashed it against the sideboards. "No gold! Nothin' at all!"

Torgason put his sturdy claybank into deeper water and slowly circled the wagon. He leaned over in the saddle, looking intently at something beneath the front wheels. "Not quite nothin'," he said without expression. "Here's Shorty Pike."

The stock detective eased the claybank against the front of the wagon box and rocked it gently in the shallow water. The body of the stocky posseman came to the surface, floating face up, the wide eyes staring unblinkingly at the blue spring sky.

Wompler made a whistling sound as he sucked in his breath. He stared over the side of the wagon. "Has he been shot?"

"Can't tell," Torgason said matter of factly. He shook out his loop and expertly caught one of the corpse's feet and dragged it onto the sandy beach. With cool competence, the detective got down, turned the body over and examined it. "He wasn't shot," he said at last. "He didn't need it." He pointed to the saucerlike dent in the back of Shorty's head. "Pitched out when the wagon went off the bank. Hit a rock, maybe. Whatever it was, he never knowed what hit him." With a faintly surprisingly show of delicacy, he closed the dead man's eyes.

Wompler's eyes widened in alarm. "Maybe somethin' happened to Esther, too."

"Maybe the sheriff and his deputy," Gault offered.

Torgason nodded but made no comment. They put their horses across the river and picked up some tracks on the north bank. "But whose tracks are they?" Wompler asked. "Esther, or Olsen and Finley?"

Gault rode up to the crest of sandhills that lined the north bank of the Red. "What're you lookin' for?" Wompler wanted to know.

"The mule that was in the traces with Shorty's animal. It don't make sense that she'd hang onto that mule when she had a perfectly good saddle horse to ride."

Wompler had a bright idea. "Maybe that's what happened to the gold. She packed it on the mule."

Torgason regarded him with contempt. In the back of Gault's mind he heard the two men bickering angrily, but his thoughts were somewhere else. He rode along the collar of the sandhills and picked up more tracks, but again it was impossible to say whose they were.

Lord, Gault thought wearily, I feel like I've been traveling half a lifetime. Without sleep or rest. Sometimes he almost forgot why he was doing it. There were even times when the face of Wolf Garnett became mingled with other faces in his memory. "It's because I'm tired, Martha," he said aloud. "It ain't that I'm forgetting. It ain't that I've got any notion of lettin' it rest—you can depend on that." He looked up to see Torgason and Wompler staring at him strangely.

They pressed on to the north, following what may or may not have been trail left by Esther Garnett.

They were in Comanche country now, somewhere below the west branch of Cashe Creek which, in places, was more of a river than the Red. They crossed one of the many small streams that fingered out from the west branch. They were now in a country of gentle green hills and valleys, country that would one day be rich farmland but was now leased pasture.

Suddenly Wompler came up in his stirrups and said, "What's that?" He pointed to a small piece of broken ground in the valley below. The crooked rows of poorly planted corn could only mean that the Quaker Indian agents had converted a Comanche to farming.

Gault told them that it was an Indian farm, and Torgason said quickly, "You used to run cattle in this country. Talk to the Indian, ask if he's seen anything of a white woman horsebackin' it this way."

Gault shrugged. "If I remember any Comanche."

The Indian's name was Watch Horses and he was a Quahada Comanche which, according to white horse soldiers, made him one of the best light cavalryman in the world. But not any more. His people were beaten, scattered, and there was defeat in his dark Indian eyes as he leaned on his hoe and looked up at Gault.

With the aid of sign and a few words of Comanche, Gault asked if a woman horsebacker had passed this way.

Watch Horses said that his wife had gone to the Indian agency that morning to trade some skins. "No," Gault corrected himself. "To'savit. White woman."

Watch Horses considered for a moment. It was possible, he said at last, that a white woman had passed this way. But he had not seen her.

"Did he see Olsen and Finley?" Torgason asked.

Gault relayed the question, and Watch Horses shrugged. Yes, two white men passed this way not long ago, heading north. But nowdays Indianland was overrun with white cowmen; the Quahada had not paid them any particular attention.

"Let's go," Wompler said impatiently. "It was Olsen and Finley. I can feel it in my bones."

This time they did not bother with tracks, they struck due north, in the direction indicated by the old Comanche. There was an electric urgency in the air. For Torgason and Wompler it was the prospect of sudden riches. For Gault it was something more insidious; there were times when he thought it was madness. A man must be loco, he told himself, to spend the best part of a year chasing after ghosts… But then he would see that stagecoach going off the mountain road, and Martha's eyes wide with terror. Loco or not, he could not stop now.

They topped one of those many grassy hillocks that punctuated the flat prairie between the Wichitas and the Red. Torgason, riding a little ahead of the others, raised one hand. With a nod he indicated a distant stream, a small creek clearly defined by the lacy green of budding timber. "A little to the right of the tallest cottonwood. Tell me what you see."

Squinting, Gault and Wompler leaned forward in their saddles. Gault shook his head. "I don't see anything." Wompler grunted, indicating that he didn't either.

Torgason scratched the bristling beard on his chin. "Maybe it was nothin'. A flash of light. Sunlight hittin' a piece of mica, maybe."

"Or gunsteel?" Gault asked.

"… We'll see."

They spread out as they started down the slope to the creek, spacing themselves out, making the target less tempting. They moved to within two hundred yards of the cottonwood—easy rifle range. Still there was nothing to be seen.

Gault turned in his saddle to look at the detective. Torgason was again scratching his chin in an unconscious show of concern. He made pushing motions with his hands, telling Gault and Wompler that they would approach the cottonwood from different directions. It was then that Torgason's horse fell.

Gault heard the animal grunt—then he heard the report of the rifle. The sturdy claybank stumbled, tossed its head in a moment of wildness, and pitched to the near side. Torgason was grabbing for his own rifle and trying to free his right foot from the stirrup when the horse crashed on top of him.

Acting on his cowman's instinct, Gault ignored for the moment the danger from the creekbank. He grabbed his Winchester, dumped out of the saddle and raced to Torgason's aid. Wompler obeying his own instincts, ignored Torgason and spurred to the bottom of the slope, which put him below the rifleman's line of sight.

"Don't be a fool!" Torgason grated. "My leg's busted. I can't move. Get away from this hilltop before that rifleman finishes both of us."

The distant rifle barked twice, as if in anger. Gault dived for the ground as the two bullets seared the air over his head. Using the dead horse as a breastworks, Gault said, "I'll try to get the weight off of you. When you're clear, haul yourself back out of the way."

The rifle barked again; this time the bullet slammed into the dead horse with a sickening thud. Gault got his shoulder beneath the cantle of the saddle and lifted with all his strength. Grunting with pain, Torgason pulled himself up to a sitting position, freed his foot from the stirrup and crawled back from the dead animal.

The detective lay on the springy sod, panting shallowly, great beads of sweat on his forehead. "What happened to Wompler?" he asked at last.

"Spurred to the bottom of the slope where the rifleman can't see him."

Torgason smiled grimly. "He ain't as big a fool as I thought." He panted some more and wiped his forehead. "I don't reckon you got a look at whoever's doin' the shootin?"

"They're hid back in the timber along the creekbank." A bullet plowed into the ground alongside the dead horse. "It must be the sheriff." Gault eased his head over the edge of the saddle and saw Wompler waving to him from the bottom of the slope. "Wompler's signalin'. I better see what he wants."

"And get yourself shot for your trouble?"

"I think he wants us to split up and see if we can get the creekbank in a crossfire."

"Listen to Wompler and he'll get you killed." The detective sighed and lay back and stared up at the dazzling sky. "On the other hand, if Olsen aims to finish us, he'll finish us. It don't matter much what we do."

Gault considered for a moment. "From what I seen of Olsen, he didn't strike me as a murderer."

"Gold makes men do funny things," Torgason said softly, still looking at the sky. "Gold and woman."

Gault snaked his arm around the claybank's shoulder and eased the saddle rifle out of the boot. He checked it quickly and put it in Torgason's hands. "Stay down out of sight. I'll come back soon's I can."

Before Torgason could speak, Gault lunged to his feet and began zigzagging down the grassy slope.

It was late that afternoon when Gault overtook Wompler on the upper reaches of Cashe Creek. The former deputy's eyes were glittering with excitement, "I picked up their tracks almost an hour ago. They're up there somewheres…" He pointed toward the heavy timber that bordered the creek. "I've been figgerin' it out while you was away. The place where the gold escort was robbed ain't more than half a day from here. They must of hid the gold here along the creek somewheres, figgerin' to come back for it when some of the excitement wore off. That's what they're doin' now—goin' after that gold!"

Never a question about Torgason. Wompler's one thought was of the gold.

They were dismounted, leading their horses through the heavy underbrush, when the attack came. It hit with a fury that for a moment left them stunned. Within the close confines of the creekbottom the roaring of rifles was almost deafening. Bullets ripped through the weeds and brush like a slashing rain. One lead slug snatched the hat from Wompler's head and hurled it over the bank into the water. Another bullet nicked Gault's buckskin; the animal reared in panic, jerked its rein free and disappeared into the brush. But not before Gault had hauled his Winchester out of the saddle boot.

Wompler was shouting something, but the sense of what he was saying did not penetrate Gault's consciousness. He threw himself to the ground, scrambled to a thicket of sumac and fired at puffs of gunsmoke on the upper bank. He ducked again into the thicket and crawled upstream on his hands and knees. There was no sign of Wompler, but he saw the black gelding racing ahead of them and disappearing in the timber.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the firing stopped. Gault lay in what he hoped was a covered position, listening to the almost silent rustle of new leaves and, from some unseen place nearby, the furious cursing of Harry Wompler.

After a moment Gault called quietly, "Wompler, are you all right?"

"Fine and dandy," Wompler said in a cold rage. "There's a bullet hole in my leg, I lost my hat, and my horse ran off with my rifle."

"How bad are you hurt?"

"I'm still alive, but maybe not for long." Then, grudgingly, "Not bad, I guess."

It was hard to believe that either of them was still alive. Apparently, the rifleman on the upper bank had decided that they were dead, or at least out of action. From beyond a gaudy thicket of redbud, Gault heard someone say, "They're done for. Nobody could of lived through a crossfire like that."

Gault recognized the voice immediately; it belonged to young Deputy Finley. Then, from some unseen position to the right of the redbud, Sheriff Grady Olsen said flatly, "The horses lived through it." After a meaningful pause, he added, "We'll work our way down toward the water. Shoot anything that moves."

The sheriff of Standard County had declared himself. He was a murderer. He had sent an ambush, the single aim being to kill Wompler and Gault. It was not easy for Gault to believe—but it was a fact, harsh and ugly, and it was not likely to go away.

Slowly, like a bull buffalo rising up in a mud wallow, Grady Olsen rose up in a stand of pale green weeds. His rifle was to his shoulder, the muzzle moving snakelike, back and forth, searching the creekbottom for the enemy. Until now Gault had not thought of himself as the sheriff's enemy. Antagonist, perhaps. Or opponent, in this dangerous game that they were playing. But it was no game now.

Not any more. Gault, gazing fixedly up through a curtain of underbrush, could see that rifle muzzle, like one-eyed Death, searching the creekbottom for him.

Moving with great care, Gault began actuating the lever of the Winchester and then realized that the hammer was already cocked and a cartridge in the barrel. Cautiously, planning the move inch by inch in advance, he brought the weapon to his shoulder.

From his hiding place, Wompler spoke anxiously, "Do you see him, Gault?"

"Yes." Not much more than a whisper.

"He's out of short-gun range. Have you got your rifle?"

"Yes. Be quiet now."

Apparently Olsen had not seen Gault's gunsmoke. Or, if he had seen it, he didn't know whether it was Gault or Wompler. For that matter, there was no reason for the sheriff to know that Torgason was out of action, unless he had been watching their backtrail. A dead horse didn't necessarily mean a dead rider.

"Gault." It was Wompler again.

"Be quiet."

"Over to the right of the redbud. I think it's Finley."

Gault turned his gaze to the right of the redbud but could see no sign of the deputy. There were a few moments of silence. Olsen was still scanning the creekbottom.

Then Wompler exploded again with suppressed anger. "What're you waitin' on? Kill him! With Olsen out of the way, Finley'll lose interest in the sport soon enough!"

"Shut up!" Gault said through clinched teeth.

Olsen's head came up, his eyes slitted. He made a slight movement with his right hand and then, completely unexpectedly, he ducked into the brush again and disappeared. Gault could hear Wompler cursing disgustedly, and this time he couldn't blame him. He had had Olsen dead in his sights. A slight pressure on the trigger would have removed the threat. And killed a man.

That was the trouble, Gault thought grimly. He was a cowman, not a killer.

Wompler was hissing again between his teeth. "Gault! Do you see him?"

Gault was instantly alert. He scanned the area on both sides of the redbud and saw the movement—a very slight one—where Wompler had seen the deputy. "Yes," he said. "All right. Just see if you can be quiet a while."

He could feel himself sweating. The ground was damp and cold, the air was fresh with springtime, with still an aftertaste of winter in it—but he was sweating. Olsen and the deputy were moving in closer with their crossfire pattern.

Over on Gault's right a clump of green mullein trembled. Was it a vagrant breeze mysteriously channeled across that particular part of the bottom, or was it a rifleman? Gault pushed his hat back and wiped his forehead on his sleeve.

"Gault," Wompler hissed. "Did you see that?"

"Be quiet."

For a time they lay like logs, and the creekbottom was silent. No breeze stirred the leaves on the trees or the weeds on the ground. It was an electric silence that set Gault's scalp to prickling. Then, in the midst of that silence, there was an eruption of sound. In Gault's startled ears it sounded as if a boulder had suddenly fallen out of the sky and was hurtling through the underbrush.

It had been a pebble, probably no larger than a man's thumb. Olsen, or possibly Finley, had thumped it into the brush to distract them. The ruse was as ancient as history's hunt—and it still worked.

It was Wompler, not Gault, who reacted first to the noise. He lurched up in the underbrush, swinging his .45 in a wild arc, firing shot after shot at the harmless undergrowth.

He died almost immediately. Olsen and his deputy fired at almost the same instant. For just a moment Wompler looked over at Gault, appalled to find himself at the center of that deadly pattern of fire. Then thunder rolled down through the bottom, and the former deputy fell back into a stand of weeds.

And that, Gault thought with an eerie bleakness is the end of Harry Wompler. And his frustrated ambitions. And dreams of riches.

This strange mood of disinterest had taken hold of him when he saw the bullets tearing into Wompler, and he was hardly conscious of firing the Winchester until he felt the stock leaping against his shoulder. As in a vaguely remembered dream, he saw the dead face of Deputy Dub Finley passing in front of his sights. Going down slowly, like a ship sinking. Or a tree falling. And that, Gault thought again—still in the grip of that eerie detachment—is the end of Deputy Finley. Pony hide vest, fancy pistols and all.

The numbness lasted only a moment. Wompler was dead and Finley was probably dead, but Olsen was still very much alive. Gault dived for the ground, and knives drove into his wounded side. He tried not to think of the pain. He brought up the picture of a stagecoach going off a mountain road—and the pain was tolerable. He could almost welcome it.

Olsen fired two well-spaced, thoughtful shots into the area where Gault had been, but by that time Gault had scrambled a dozen yards away through the undergrowth. There he crumpled to the damp ground, gasping for breath. He heard the bullets ripping through the weeds. One of the lead slugs struck a rock and went screaming off into the blue-gray afternoon.

For the moment he was helpless. The breath had been knocked out of him; he couldn't even raise his rifle to his shoulder. He did have his covering of tender green leaves, and Olsen still could not be sure whether he was alive or dead. After the two shots, Olsen had again ducked back into the lacy greenery out of sight. The echoing thunder of riflefire slowly died in the bottom. Again an expectant silence settled on the shady undergrowth.

Then Olsen spoke. One quiet, reasonable man speaking to another. "Gault, this is a lot of foolishness. And damn dangerous foolishness, at that. We can't do one another any good like this; what say we try to strike a bargain?"

Gault started to speak, then realized that that was just what Olsen wanted. It was no bargain that the sheriff wanted; he was hoping that Gault would give his position away. Gault inched his rifle to his shoulder.

"Gault," Olsen said threateningly, "you ain't got nothin' to gain by gettin' me sore. Just hold your rifle where I'll know you won't try to shoot me, and we can talk this thing out."

Gault smiled bitterly and gazed at the wall of weeds over the Winchester's sights. Where was the sheriff's voice coming from? On the upper bank somewhere, beyond the redbud. It was hard to tell, with both of them wrapped in blankets of greenery.

The long silence stretched into minutes. To Gault they seemed like hours. Then the sheriff spoke with a sigh, and for the last time. "Don't be a fool, Gault. What has happened has happened; there ain't no way you can change a thing."

Gault said nothing. He hardly dared to breathe. Then, after another long silence, he heard a quiet rustling in the weeds. Olsen was backing out of the creekbottom. He still couldn't be sure whether Gault was alive or dead; but he was pulling out just the same.

From somewhere in that pale green jungle there was the nervous stamping of a horse. After a moment the sound of hoofs faded away to the north. Soon there was no sound at all.

For whatever reason, Grady Olsen had broken off the fight. Long after the sound of Olsen's horse had faded away, Gault lay in the tall weeds, painfully aware of his injured side. He knew in his mind that Wompler was dead, but he told himself that he ought to get up and make sure. Still, he lay there. The bandages had slipped and his side was bleeding again; he could feel the blood moving warm and wet over the point of his hip. Still, he couldn't bring himself to move just yet. There was too much mystery attached to the actions of Grady Olsen. Too many questions yet to be answered.

Automatically, his hands began unbuttoning his windbreaker and shirt and readjusting the bandage, but his mind was on the sheriff. Why had Olsen left the safety of Standard County to venture into Indian country and commit murder? Why had he broken off the fight, knowing that he might be leaving a rifle-armed enemy to dog his backtrail?

Wearily, Gault pushed himself to his knees. "Wompler?"

The former deputy lay back in green weeds spattered with crimson. His eyes were blind, his ears deaf. Gault turned his gaze toward the upper bank and called uselessly, "Finley?"

The deputy lay face-down in a stand of dark mullein. First Colly, and now you, Gault thought bleakly. Two men he had killed in almost as many days. It was not a comfortable knowledge to live with. For several moments he stood there, dumbly wondering if there was anything else he could do. There wasn't.

He finished buttoning up his shirt and windbreaker. Then he picked up his hat and brushed it off and started climbing the steep grade away from the water.

When he reached the upper bank he sat on a rotting log and tried to get his bearings. Fort Sill was about a half a day's ride northwest. To the east was the Chickasaw Nation, where a U.S. deputy marshal was headquartered— but too far away to be of any help to Gault. Far to the north was the Cherokee Outlet where more cattlemen were leasing grass—again, too far away.

Night was coming down on the prairie, and the horses were nowhere to be found. Gault made his way to the outer fringe of timber and stumbled on to the north for as long as there was light to see by.

At last he sank beneath the darkly gleaming spread of a liveoak tree. In exhaustion he sat for a long while, his mind a blank. Get some rest, he advised himself, while you can. Tomorrow will look better.

After a long while sleep overtook him. Immediately, Martha was with him. With terror in her eyes. Silently begging him to save her. As the stagecoach went off the mountain road.

The night wore on. The boy slept fitfully, waking from time to time in fits of terror. Esther Garnett coolly ignored him and kept her unblinking gaze on Gault. Once Gault said, "You've told me what Olsen hopes to gain out of this. But what about the others."

"The others?" She looked puzzled. "Shorty and Colly knowed about the gold. That's what they was after. And Deputy Finley…" She smiled an icy smile of recollection. "I'm afraid Deputy Finley had the notion I'd put Grady Olsen off, once we was all safe in Mexico, and marry him."

"I thought maybe it was somethin' like that," Gault said with a grim smile of his own.

Wolf Garnett lay like a dead man, and from time to time his sister would bathe his forehead with a damp rag—but in one hand she always kept the revolver, and the muzzle never strayed more than an inch or two from Gault's chest.

At last the iron-hard light of dawn sifted down on the derelict shack. Outside, there was a waking and stirring of small things that lived near the water. A raucous bluejay shattered the stillness with its chattering. Then, in the distance they heard the sound of horses.

Esther touched her brother's shoulder and said excitedly, "It's Grady; he's comin' with the doc!"

Wolf opened his feverish eyes and looked at his sister. "Is there any of that tobacco left?"

Watching Gault, Esther placed the cocked revolver in her lap and rolled the cigarette. Wolf smoked in silence, and it seemed to Gault that his face looked even drier and deader than it had the night before. To relieve the oppressive silence, Gault said, "I don't understand why you're goin' to all this trouble because of a doctor. There was Doc Doolie in New Boston—he was lookin' after your brother, wasn't he?"

Esther's eyes narrowed angrily. "Doolie ain't fit to doctor a sick mule. He admitted hisself there wasn't nothin' he could do to help Wolf."

"Still, Doolie was a doctor and a respected citizen of the county. Why would he involve himself with an outlaw like Wolf Garnett?"

Esther answered his question with a shrug and a sneer. "The doc does what the sheriff tells him. Like everybody else in Standard County."

The horsebackers were going around to the back of the shack. Gault mopped a fine bead of sweat from his forehead and looked at the man who had killed Martha. "There's one more thing that bothers me."

Wolf Garnett chuckled dryly. "I bet. You got a right curious turn of mind, Mr. Gault."

"I warned him it was apt to get him killed," Esther said, and her brother smiled.

"Shorty Pike bothers me. The way he died," Gault went on stubbornly. "When me and Torgason and Wompler found the wagon, Shorty was wedged under the box with his head stove in. It wasn't no accident. We found the wagon bow that was used to kill him."

Wolf Garnett sighed. "I'm afraid Shorty Pike was cursed with greed, Mr. Gault. He was bound and determined to get his hands on that army gold. And I guess he would of, too, because me and him was the only ones left that knowed where it was." He closed his eyes, listening to the horsebackers behind the shack. "Tell you the truth, I would of killed Shorty myself, if I'd had the strength. Turned out I needn't of worried about it. Grady Olsen found Shorty addled by the wreck and attended to it hisself."

Gault stared at him. "The sheriff murdered his own posseman?"

Wolf grinned wearily. "Happens all the time, Gault. You'll see."

A figure loomed suddenly in the doorway. Gault turned to see a stocky, plumpish young man in a ridiculous Burnside beard, blinking at the gloom inside the shack. "Timmy?" he said anxiously. "Are you all right?"

The young boy began sobbing. The man stumbled into the room and knelt beside his son and took him in his arms.

"I thought I said we'd have no fires," Sheriff Olsen said angrily, standing in the doorway.

"Wolf was cold," Esther told him defiantly. "Anyhow, who's to see the smoke, way out here on the edge of the prairie?"

"I saw it. More'n a mile away. And the Fort Sill stage road ain't more'n five miles to the north of here." He looked at Gault, obviously disappointed to see that he was still alive. "You die hard," he said grimly. "But I'll fix that." He came on into the shack and dropped a pair of saddlebags on the floor beside Wolf. "How you feelin'?" he asked the injured man.

"All right, I guess." It was barely a whisper. The hot eyes moved about the cabin. "Gettin' a little crowded in here, ain't it?"

"I aim to thin it out before long," Olsen said meaningfully, with a look at Gault. He nudged the doctor with the toe of his boot. "Don't fret over the boy. You do your job good and he'll be fine."

The doctor looked up at Olsen. "Untie my son and let him go. I'll do what you want."

"You'll do what we want, and then we'll bargain," the sheriff told him bluntly.

The doctor set his jaw and turned back to his son.

"Everything's goin' to be all right, Timmy. Try to rest, and don't be afraid. I'll be here with you." Reluctantly, he left his son and turned to his patient.

"This here's Doc Sumpter," Olsen told the room in general. "He's had plenty practice fixin' up busted troopers. Before you know it he's goin' to have Wolf fixed up ready to travel. Ain't that right, Doc?"

Dr. Sumpter placed the back of his hand to Wolf's forehead, then began opening his saddlebags. The sheriff hunkered down next to the fireplace and looked hungrily at Esther Garnett. "How did he get here?" Nodding in Gault's direction.

Esther told him how they had met. "I didn't know what to do with him. So I just kept him here, waitin' for you to come back."

"I told her to kill him," Wolf said with a tired sigh. "But you know how women are."

"Never mind," the sheriff said coldly. "I'll attend to it."

The doctor had frozen in the act of laying out his instruments. Olsen and Wolf were discussing the subject of murder as coolly and disinterestedly as another person might discuss the vagaries of Southwestern weather. It was coming to Sumpter—slowly at first, and then with a rush—that they had no intention of letting him and his son go after he had attended the patient.

"Get on with it, Doc," Olsen said impatiently. "The sooner you get him on his feet the better it'll be for all of us."

The doctor glanced quickly at his small son. "You'd better get the whiskey," he said to Olsen.

"I almost forgot, Wolf. I brought you some whiskey from the doc's own stock." The sheriff smiled coolly, rose to his feet and went to get the whiskey.

Dr. Sumpter unbuttoned Wolfs shirt. "Tell me if this hurts." He applied pressure with his fingers near the center of Wolf's chest. The outlaw screamed. It was a shrill, piercing whisper of a scream that shredded the air like a flight of arrows.

Esther Garnett lurched to her feet and shoved the muzzle of her .45 in the doctor's face. "You do that again I'll kill you!"

The doctor, showing a courage that Gault had not noticed before, glanced at the revolver and said, "It's the only way I can tell how badly he's hurt."

"There must be some other way."

"Possibly." Sumpter shrugged. "But this is my way."

Sheriff Olsen stepped through the doorway carrying a bottle of whiskey. "He's the best doc in these parts, according to Doolie," he told Esther. "Besides that, he's the only doc around. Why don't you go outdoors a while, and I'll call you when he's got Wolf fixed up." He uncorked the bottle. "Here," he told Wolf, "take some of this."

At one time during this brief scene, when there were no guns pointed toward him, Gault had started to push away from the cabin wall. Olsen had met the move with a flinty smile. "Try it," the look seemed to say. "It will be the last move you'll ever make."

Wolf drank some of the whiskey and lay panting shallowly. Olsen spoke to Esther again, gently, "Go outdoors now. I'll see that everything's all right."

She took a deep breath, handed him the revolver and nodded reluctantly. "Here," the doctor said flatly, when she was gone. And he touched another place. "Let me know if it hurts."

The probing and the muffled cries and the cursing went on for a small eternity. Suddenly Wolf gasped and went limp. His hot, dark eyes rolled up in their sockets, and for one savage moment Gault thought he was dead.

"Fainted," the doctor said, looking at Olsen. "It's just as well. There's nothing I can do for him."

Olsen's face became a mask. "He's goin' to die?"

The doctor nodded. "He's bleeding to death inside. No one can help him now." He began replacing his instruments. "Do you want me to inform his wife?"

"His sister," Olsen said absently. His mind was on other things. "I'll tell her, when the time comes. How long has he got?"

"Not long. A few hours at the outside. May I untie my son now?"

"Later." The sheriff had a frustrating problem to solve. If Wolf died now, the secret of the army gold would die with him. Olsen would be a rogue sheriff, dishonored and hunted in his own land. "Can you bring him around so I can talk to him?"

"It would be more humane to leave him the way he is."

"He'll be a long time dead; he can rest then. Bring him around."

The doctor uncorked a small bottle of ammonia salts and held it beneath Wolfs nose. "Listen to me, Wolf," Olsen said with ponderous sincerity. "The doc's got you fixed up now. You're goin' to be fine, but it'll be a day or so before you can travel. So why don't you tell me where to find the gold, and I'll get everything ready…"

Wolf was smiling a cold, thin knife-edge of a smile. "I ain't goin' to make it. Is that the way it is, Doc?"

The doctor folded his arms and looked at him and said nothing.

"I'm tellin' you, Wolf," Olsen said quickly, "you're goin' to be fine. But the quicker I get that gold ready to travel, the quicker we can bee-line it to Mexico."

"You want that gold pretty bad, don't you, Olsen?"

"It ain't for me, it's for Esther. You got to think about her, Wolf. It would be mighty hard on a woman, throwed out on her own, without family or money."

"Family? I'm family, Sheriff. And you just told me I was goin' to be fine."

The sheriff was sweating. Wolf Garnett was about to die, and nobody knew it better than Wolf himself. He was toying with Olsen, enjoying watching him squirm.

The doctor said, "There's nothing more I can do. Let me untie my son."

Olsen's temper boiled over. "You fix up your patient, and the boy gets let go. That was the bargain."

"I told you how it is. I can't work miracles."

"Doc," Wolf told him through clinched teeth, "you better learn. The sheriff wants that gold mighty bad, and he knows he won't get it if I die." The effort of speaking left him breathless. He lay back panting, little rivulets of sweat plowing along his bone-colored face.

The doctor sized up the situation. What at first had been incredible was now a brutal matter of fact. Even if he could save the injured outlaw—which he couldn't—Olsen would still kill him and his son. Alive they would be witnesses, and a rogue sheriff couldn't afford to have witnesses haunting his future. Still, Sumpter reasoned, he might postpone the inevitable if he could make Olsen believe that he was accomplishing something. While there was life there was hope, of sorts. "There is something… I don't know how much use it will be to you…"

Olsen grinned. "I figgered you'd think of somethin'."

The doctor reached into one of his saddlebags and took out a bottle of brownish liquid. "Liquor morphinae citralis. Morphine, citric acid, cochinel, alcohol, and a little distilled water."

Olsen eyed the bottle dubiously. "What does it do?"

"Relieves pain. It also induces a sense of dreamlike well being. The patient, after taking a few teaspoons of Liquor morphinae citralis often says things that he would not say otherwise."

Olsen digested this slowly. "Why didn't you give him a drink out of that bottle when you seen what kind of shape he was in?"

"I believe your friend has a punctured lung, in which case morphine would only aggravate the condition."

The sheriff thought about it, then nodded. "Give him a drink."

"It could kill him."

"He's goin' to die anyhow. Might as well let him go in peace."

They had been talking back and forth across the body of the injured outlaw, as though he were already dead. Dr. Sumpter stared at the big sheriff and swallowed with difficulty. "Medical ethics would not permit me…"

Olsen raised his .45 and aimed it at the doctor's head. "Give him the medicine or I'll kill you."

"Even with the morphine there's no guarantee that he'll tell you what you want to know."

"Give him the medicine, or I'll kill the kid."

The doctor paled. He bent over Wolf and looked into those burning eyes. "You heard?"

"I heard," the outlaw breathed. "It don't make any difference. I don't aim to tell him anything."

"Listen, Wolf," the sheriff said anxiously, "it's on account of Esther, your own sister, that I want that gold."

Wolf grinned faintly. The doctor held the bottle to his lips and he gulped almost half the medicine.

"Give him the rest of it," Olsen said.

"It will kill him."

"Give it to him."

Resignedly, the doctor put the bottle to Wolf's lips again and he gulped until it was empty.

Several minutes passed. The sheriff stirred uneasily. "How long before it takes effect?"

"Not long now."

Wolf's eyes began to glaze. They turned curiously blank, as if an opaque curtain had quietly been drawn over his burning brain. "Wolf," Olsen said impatiently, "can you hear me?"

The outlaw sighed. "I hear."

"You've got to help Esther, Wolf. Think of all your sister's done for you. Tell me where the gold is and I'll see that she never wants for a thing."

"Go to hell, Olsen," the outlaw whispered.

The sheriff flushed. "Don't you care what happens to her?"

Wolf's pale lips twitched in a smile that said plainer than words that his hate for Olsen was stronger than his love for his sister.

"Wolf, listen to me!"

"Goddam you all," the outlaw said faintly but distinctly. It was the last thing he said. He closed his eyes and began gasping for breath. In a fury, Grady Olsen grabbed his shoulders and shook him savagely. But Wolf Garnett was dead.

They made their way upstream on foot, Esther Garnett leading, followed by Gault and Dr. Sumpter. Olsen, with the frightened Timmy Sumpter tucked under one arm like a sack of meal, brought up the rear.

After several minutes Esther stopped and pointed. "There it is."

The procession came to a stumbling halt. Olsen, with Timmy still under his arm, pushed forward impatiently. "Where?"

"There at the overhang." Esther pointed toward a many-layered shelf of slate jutting out from the creekbank. Olsen squinted but could see no sign of the gold. "It's on the underside of the shelf," she told him. "I'll show you."

Gault was beginning to get a strange feeling about this sudden, almost casual surrender of Esther Garnett. He looked at the doctor for verification, but Sumpter only had eyes and thoughts for his helpless son. Impatiently, Olsen motioned them forward. "I don't see anything."

"Wolf hid it under a tarp—most likely it's covered with dirt, after all this time."

The sheriff moved cautiously out on the tiered roof of black slate. Suddenly he dropped Timmy Sumpter and thrust him toward Esther. "You watch the kid, and no monkey business. I'm still the only one here with a gun, in case anybody's forgot."

Esther took the sobbing boy, coolly, with no change of expression, as she might have accepted a lifeless bundle of rags. Then for just an instant, she looked at Gault. There was a certain glitter in her eyes. Light from the fires of hate that burned inside her, Gault thought. It was a cold, still look that said, This is your chance Gault. The only one you'll get.

"I still don't see it," Grady Olsen was saying with the beginning of anger and suspicion. He was bending slightly over the edge of the shelf when Esther Garnett threw herself at him.

Olsen was big and heavy, solid as a stump, and no bit of a woman like Esther Garnett was going to upset him. But it did surprise him. He blinked once, scowling and angry, as he brushed her aside. And then, before he could pull himself erect or fully regain his balance, Gault hit him.

A shower of pain went through Gault's injured side as he drove his shoulder into the small of the sheriff's back. It was like throwing himself at an oak tree. Gault could almost believe that he had taken root to that roof of slate. Nevertheless, in some impossible way, he did move. Gault dropped to his knees, gasping. The sheriff was standing on one foot, clawing the air with his free hand and cursing as he fell backward into the still water.

"Hurry!" Esther Garnett said hoarsely. "Maybe we can get to the horses before he hauls hisself out of the water!"

For a moment Gault looked at the world through the splintered light of pain. Sumpter, blind to everything else, rushed to his son and was holding the boy in his arms, rocking and crooning to him, tears of relief streaming down his dirty cheeks.

Gault pulled himself to his feet and got the doctor and the boy started downstream. "On the other side of the shack, where the horses are!"

But Olsen was faster than any of them would have believed. Somehow he had worked his way to the top of the opposite bank and was cutting off their retreat with riflefire.

Bullets ripped through the green mullein. Esther threw herself to the ground beside a cottonwood log. Gault and the Sumpters dropped a few paces behind. Olsen's voice, wild with rage, came from the other bank. "There ain't no gold under that shelf, missie! There never was! It's a sorry day for the Garnetts that you ever thought to trick me!"

Gault wormed his way through the weeds and lay down beside Esther. "Are all the horses on the other side of the shack?"

She nodded. "We'd stand a chance if we could get to the guns."

Gault searched back in his mind. How far was it to the shack? Four, five hundred yards? It might as well be five hundred miles. Olsen would simply move ahead of them, cross the creek below the shack and wait for them to come into the clearing. Gault inched his way back to the Sumpters and asked, "Is there any chance of help comin' from Fort Sill?"

The doctor, still looking dazed and clinging to his son, shook his head. "I don't think so. Some people saw me leaving with Olsen, but they don't know where we were going."

"No one at the fort knew that your son had been taken?"

Sumpter shook his head. "Timmy had the run of the post; it wasn't unusual for him to wander about the grounds for hours at a time."

"His mother didn't mind?"

"His mother has been dead almost three years."

Gault lay with his face against the cool ground. By this time the doctor and his son would probably be missed; it was even possible that a detail had been sent to look for them. But that wasn't going to be any help. With Olsen and his rifle just on the other side of the creek. "How," he asked, "did Olsen get the boy in the first place?"

Sumpter looked blank. "Olsen just came on the post and told Timmy that his father wanted to see him. Somebody must have seen them leaving together, but…"

"I know." Gault sighed to himself. None of it made any difference now.

On the other side of the creek Olsen was strangely quiet. Was he playing patient sharpshooter, waiting for someone to give his position away? Or had he moved downstream to where the horses were?

Esther Garnett glanced back at him. She was wondering too. Then, cautiously, she began crawling toward the shack. Almost immediately the sheriff opened fire. Esther scrambled to a shallow gully and lay there panting.

"What are we going to do?" the doctor asked worriedly.

Timmy, frightened by the burst of riflefire, began sobbing. "Keep him quiet!" Gault heard himself snarling. Then, in a quieter, gentler tone: "For the sake of all of us, try to keep him quiet." He began inching through the weeds, heading again toward Esther Garnett.

"The sheriff's in love with you," he said, as though he were continuing a conversation that had been going on for some time. "You can still talk to him and get yourself out of this, even if the doc and I can't."

She shot him an icy smile. "The sheriff never was in love with anybody but hisself. He wanted me, maybe, but that ain't the same thing, is it?"

"I guess not. But it's something. It could still save you."

"No." The word had the ring of finality to it.

Gault shrugged. It was her life; if she was bent on throwing it away, he couldn't stop her.

For some time Gault studied the opposite bank of the creek. Like the near side, it was a thicket of budding cottonwoods and weeds. "Is there a place upstream where I could cross over to the other bank?"

She thought for a moment. "There's a rock crossing just above the shelf. Most likely that's how Grady got across after he fell."

"I'm goin' back and see if I can surprise him. Do you think you and the doc can hold the sheriff's interest for a few minutes without gettin' yourselves killed?"

She looked at him levelly. "Grady Olsen ain't an easy man to take by surprise." For a moment she closed her eyes and looked the way she would look in about ten years—slack faced, dull, and in no way desirable. "But if you're bound to try it, I'll do what I can to hold his attention." She lobbed a small pebble into the weeds ahead and instantly a rifle bullet ripped through the spot.

Gault was sweating. It didn't seem possible that he could make it all the way back to the shelf without giving himself away. Esther Garnett was looking at him in a way that gave no indication of what she was thinking. There didn't seem to be anything else to say. Gault nodded and continued his inch by inch journey toward the shelf.

Dr. Sumpter watched him silently. He had the frightened Timmy tucked under one arm, the other hand ready to clap over the boy's mouth if he started to cry.

The way back to that jutting overhang seemed endless. Every weed, every pebble in the path, every dappled bit of shade and dazzling shaft of sunlight had to be considered before every move. Along the way the rifle on the opposite bank fired only once. That might or might not be a good sign. Gault hoped it meant that Olsen was running low on rifle ammunition.

At last he reached the overhang and lay for a moment breathing shallowly. Then he slipped around the slate roof and began easing himself down the clay bank to the water. Progress was much faster now. With a bend in the creek between himself and Olsen, the need for caution was not so great. He slipped into the cold water and found the rock bottom at thigh depth and started toward the far bank.

Intuition must have prompted Esther to cause some minor disturbance up ahead. Olsen's rifle blazed again as Gault reached midstream. Then, somehow, he was on the bank, caught in a tangle of cedar roots. He parted the roots and made his way to the top of the bank and lay there until he was breathing normally.

The rifle cracked again, sounding muffled and relatively harmless, now that Gault was behind it instead of in front of it. He began moving toward the sound, picking up a stick as he went. It was not much of a weapon—a rotting gnarled end of tree root—but it was better than nothing.

Now he could see the side of the creek that he had just left. The wall of wide, green mullein leaves stood motionless. At least, Gault thought, Sumpter was keeping Timmy quiet. He slanted closer to the water and cautiously parted a tangle of wild grapevines—and it was then that he saw Olsen.

The sheriff was lying on the edge of the bank, patiently watching the other side over the barrel of his rifle. Directly below the sheriff Gault could see the shallow water shimmering like glass over a bed of mud. He eased his way through the maze of vines and lay in the weeds, about twenty yards behind the sheriff.

He lay there for several minutes, wondering how long it would take him to cover that twenty yards, and how much noise he would make doing it. Too long, he decided. And too much noise. The sheriff had only to flip over on his side and redirect the rifle and fire. A younger, quicker man could do it all in one second. It might take Olsen two. It was still too fast.

Gault held his silence and waited for something to happen on the opposite bank. Something that would seize and hold the sheriff's attention for slightly longer than two seconds. The silence became oppressive. Gault became aware of the hissing of his own breathing, and he tried to stop it. Then, quite suddenly, a cluster of mullein on the far bank bent with an unfelt breeze. Or a flipped pebble.

Olsen saw it and fired immediately.

Gault was on his feet and running. Grasping his inadequate club, he threw himself the last short distance, just as the sheriff, snarling, was beginning to turn. Gault flailed with the stick. With almost no effort, the sheriff knocked it aside with the stock of his rifle. Gault lunged, driving his shoulder into Olsen's chest as both men grappled for the rifle. Then they were falling.

Slowly at first, in the impossible way of dreams, they went off the edge of the bank, still fighting for the rifle. The Winchester flew off toward the far bank, hung for a moment in the still air, then fell to the water and disappeared. Gault and Olsen, snarling like prairie wolves, splashed onto the shimmering bed of mud.

His face curiously distorted, the sheriff was grabbing for his .45. But Gault lunged at him, and that weapon also flew out of his wet hand and struck the water and disappeared. Both men forgot their hand to hand struggle for the moment and threw themselves at the spreading circles of water where the revolver had disappeared. It was then that they realized that they had not fallen onto an ordinary mudflat—they were already waist-deep in quicksand.

Gault froze. Standing as still as possible, he searched for a root, a vine, anything to hold to until help came from the far bank. There was nothing. The slick water gathered at his hips. He could feel himself going down, inch by inch, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Not ten yards away Olsen was thrashing about in a fury. When he stopped at last, panting for breath, he was almost chest-deep in the sucking mud. Esther Garnett appeared on the far bank and looked down at them coldly, unconcernedly. Gault started to speak, but knew instinctively that his voice would be shrill with panic. He made himself pause and take a deep breath, and then he said quietly, "The rock crossing upstream from the shelf is solid. You can cross there with no trouble. When you get on this side, look for a tree with grapevines in it." He pointed. "Over there. It'll take a little time, but we can still get out of here. With the help of those vines."

She looked down at them and didn't move. A chill went up Gault's spine. He made himself stay calm and move as little as possible. "Ma'am," he said hoarsely, "without help we're not goin' to last much longer. What do you want me to do, beg?"

"That wouldn't do no good," Olsen said quietly. "That no-account brother of hers is dead—she don't give a damn about anything now."

She looked at Olsen with an icy smile. "I had it in mind to get Wolf buried just as soon as I could. But I think I'll stay here a while and watch you sink in that mud."

Olsen threw his head back and shouted a word that made her blanch. But she quickly took control of herself. "You said the army doc would fix Wolf up," she accused him. "It was a lie. You just wanted the gold. Well, you won't get the gold now, Grady. Nor the bounty money that you put in for, for killin' that drifter. Go on and sink in the mud; you got it comin' to you!"

Dr. Sumpter appeared beside Esther and stared at them with wide eyes. "What is it?"

"Quicksand," Gault told him quickly. "We're goin' to need your help gettin' out of here."

"What can I do?"

"Take the rock crossing just upstream from the shelf. When you get to this bank, pull down some of those grapevines, just behind us, where we went off the bank."

"What can I do about Timmy?"

Gault felt himself sink another inch. "Bring him with you. The crossin's safe."

"I'll be there as soon as I can."

The doctor disappeared, and Gault turned to the sheriff, sinking a little deeper. "We're done for," Olsen grinned savagely. "Both of us. It'll take that doc till sundown to figger out a way of gettin' them grapevines out of the tree. If he don't turn gutless and decide to forget the whole thing." He looked up at Esther Garnett. The mud was less than three inches from his chin. "It's a shame," he said ruefully, "that things had to work out the way they did."

She looked at him coldly. Suddenly she spat.

The sheriff grinned crookedly, then seemed to lose interest in her. The shallow, slick water was touching his jutting chin. "Don't stir about any more'n you have to," Gault told him. "But keep your hands free. For grabbin' the vine when Sumpter comes."

Olsen turned his head and looked at Gault with a weary grin. "You don't understand me, Gault. I was finished the minute I decided to throw in with the Garnetts. I guess I knowed it at the time…" He sank another inch. "But a man gets tired tryin' to live on a sheriff's pay. He wants somethin' better. A pretty woman. And, for once in his life, all the money he can spend." The water had reached his mouth. He tilted his head back to keep from swallowing it. "There was a time when I seen myself as a lucky man. Boss of the county. Lots of folks that looked up to me—or maybe they was just scared of me. I don't know now. But I do know that it was the cowmen—the men with money—that everybody respected. Well, sir…" He spat some water out of his mouth. "Well, sir, one day it come over me like a fever. It seemed like I couldn't live another day scrimpin' along on a lawman's pay." He laughed, then ended by coughing on the muddy water. "Anyway," he went on, "you come a long way and waited a long time to find out some things, and it seems like you ought to know. One day Esther came to me with a proposition. I was to get a share of the gold, and her as well, if I'd help her get Wolf to a proper doctor and then out of the country. Funny, ain't it… ?"

Several minutes later, when Sumpter appeared on the bank with a length of tough green grapevine in his hand, Gault's head was the only one in sight.