ranch boss of the P.R.N. staggered and tipped against the bar, elbows hooked over it. He seemed to be nodding, and then his head sagged and he fell to his knees and for another instant tried to gather himself. It was of no use. He was dead before the gun dropped from his fingers.
"I'm out of this!" repeated Grist.
"If you've got a conscience, may God give you pity," said Gillette. "These fellows died at your orders. If you try to rustle another Circle G cow I'll come after you personally."
He passed out. In the darkness of the street he stopped and leaned against the saloon wall. The sand trickled out of him, and the cold air went through him like a knife. He was sick, physically sick, and the muscles of his arms and legs trembled. He wanted a drink, yet he hadn't the heart to go back there and see the ranch boss lying in the puddling blood. What had he done? Only what the country demanded of him, nothing more, nothing less. And as be looked towards the heavens he felt a thousand years old. He was not the man who had come out of the East with fine ideas in his head. How soon all that insecure stuff faded. All that remained now was the simple rules he had been reared in: never to go back on his word, to give all humans the right to live the way they wanted to live in return for the same right for himself. To respect rights and to see his own respected. That was all.
He drew a breath. A man got scarred in the process of passing through the world. That was inevitable, that was life. Only a fool expected to dwell in paradise; nobody had a right to dodge his chores, no matter how dirty they might be. A man paid as he went. He moved from the wall, seeing his crew patiently waiting. Boots scuffed along the walk, and a strange voice arrested his progress.
"You Gillette of the Circle G? Yeah. Was you a-lookin' for a gent by name of San Saba? Yeah. Fella built like a cotton wood an' sorrel by complexion?"
The man was old and seamed and obscured in the shadows. Gillette stared at him. "How do you know?" was his blunt reply.
"Heard you advertisin' same hereabouts some time ago. Well, be you still lookin'?"
"Where is he?"
The man's voice trailed off. "On the trail to Deadwood. Saw him four days ago. With a yaller-haired podner." And the man vanished into an alley.
Gillette mounted and rode homeward with his men. Here was another chore he had staved off as long as he could. Seemed like these things came in bunches. Oh, it was easy enough to forget them, to excuse himself from performing them. Yet if he did he would never have another moment's peace. A man had to play with the rules. On over the ford they went, and along the familiar trail to the ranch house, a light shining out to them. Quagmire already was in from the prairie, morose and subdued.
"A long ride for Nig Akers. Joe Blunt is only pinked. But Nig's done. Man is mortal. Tom, this is val'able country. Texas men is buried in it."
Gillette studied the southwestern sky. Deadwood was over there. He nodded and went into the house. Kit Ballard waited for him, framed in the bedroom door; the girl's black hair tumbled down in rippling ropes, and she held a robe around her.
"Go back to bed, girl. I can't talk to-night."
"To do what—to sleep? How can I sleep? I prayed tonight, and I never prayed before. Whatever you have done, I don't care. Wherever you choose to stay, I don't care. Tom—come here to me!"
He shook his head, the weariness pulling his shoulders down. "I'm leavin' to-night."
"For where?"
"Deadwood. San Saba's in Deadwood."
She knew the story, she knew the purpose of that journey. Her face went dead white, and when she raised her head the higher yellow light pooled in the triangle of her throat. As he looked at her all the loneliness and hunger of his solitary nature rose to torment him. No man living could miss the beauty or the allure of Christine Ballard. What was lacking in her for such a man as he was? What more could he want? The sacrifice was all hers, the surrender all hers. So he thought while the hunger grew to an obsession. A man was only flesh and blood. He pivoted on his heels and started for the door. She was in front of him instantly, throwing herself against him. He had never known what strength lay in a woman's arms once they were around a man's neck; he had never heard a woman cry in this suppressed manner. It seemed to put her on the torture rack. And all the while the incense of her hair and the warmth of her body assailed his senses.
"Kit—why couldn't this have happened a long time ago?"
The crying stopped. She stepped aside, and her echo of his question rang passionately through the room. "Why couldn't it have happened, Tom? People have to live to learn, don't they? Where else will you find another woman any better?"
He stood divided. And it took a full mustering of his strength to walk to the door and let himself out.
"Quagmire—where are you?"
"Here—right in front o' yo', Tom."
"Get me the buckskin. Get it in a hurry. You're boss here. San Saba's in Deadwood."
Twenty minutes later he rode from the ranch on into the darkness lying southwest. He was running away as much as anything else, and he knew it. There would come a time when he must return and face it. But not now. He needed to break the chains Christine was forging around him. He tipped his head to the remote stars and seemed to see there the clear, grave face of Lorena Wyatt looking down at him. He felt the pressure of her hands wiping the blood from his mouth. Where was she?
XII. DEADWOOD
Beyond dusk five days later Tom Gillette stopped on a ridge and studied a camp fire glimmering beside a creek below. He had ridden hard, and his own buckskin was in a strange corral away behind; the pony carrying him now was the second traded horse. Deadwood, according to his estimate, could be no more than ten miles distant, and it drew him like a magnet. Yet he was weary and hungry, for which reasons the light of the fire had pulled him off the main trail—a tortuous, rutted artery along which the freighters carried supplies into the mushrooming mining camps of the hills.
A pair of men sat beside the blaze. Others moved away the moment he topped the ridge, retreating beyond the rim of light. From this distance he saw nothing of the two in view but a blur of bearded faces beneath drooping plainsmen's hats, and for a time he debated about riding down. Out on the prairie every stranger was welcome to the chuck wagon, and hospitality was the unwritten law. A mining camp was something different; another breed of men, a hundred breeds for that matter, inhabited it, all bent on riches and all suspicious.
In the end hunger got the best of him. He quartered down the slope within hailing distance and stopped again.
"Hello, the camp."
One of the figures by the fire spoke over a shoulder. "Come on down, then."
He advanced, swung his horse so that it put him directly toward the fire, and dismounted. He was instantly aware of a hard and prolonged scrutiny, and further aware of the others out in the shadows. It was a quick camp; horses stood a few yards off. A shotgun rested within arm's reach of the nearest man, and Gillette's questing eyes noted that each of the two wore a Colt on each hip. The ivory tip of a knife stuck from one fellow's boot. Heavy armament, even for prospectors.
"Saw your fire," explained Gillette. "I'm bound for Deadwood, from Nelson, and it's strange country to me. How much farther to town?"
"Fifteen miles."
"Straight along that road?"
"Yeah."
He squatted at the fire, warming his hands. A frying pan filled with bacon lay against a rock and a coffee pot sat beside it. Casually he turned his attention from one man to the other and out of the brief survey he received a warning. He knew his own kind, and he also knew the stamp of the border renegade, for he had been raised in a country where outlaw factions flourished their brief day and died suddenly. These men were of that type. Plainly so. The spokesman's