Deonte’s voice on the phone in the dark of the trailer. Jake sat up too fast and came close to banging his head on the curved surface of the wood panels.
His second home while he worked on a third, parked in the backyard of a historic home.
“Where?” Jake mumbled.
His voice was thick with whiskey, the after affects of it at least. He had closed down the honky tonk, as was his habit and knocked off the best part of a half gallon of Kentucky’s finest all by himself.
A liter of water before passing out on the memory foam mattress pressed against his bladder.
He hitched up and stumbled to the bathroom the size of a small closet, held the phone against his ear with one hand, and managed to aim with the other.
“Got a problem down the jail,” Deonte said.
“You?”
That’s how they met.
Jake in jail on a trumped up murder charge, and his big black friend in on something else.
Both out a few hours later and a few drinks into a brand new friendship after the man kept him from a jailhouse murder.
No way he was going to deny him.
Deonte was one of the few friends he had left in the world.
“Not me,” Deonte answered, his voice calm and smooth.
It helped Jake wake up, helped him keep his head and get it straight.
Calm and smooth was the way to be. It made things move faster, allowed the neurons to fire and figure out solutions.
Panic put the body in fight or flight mode, and it was hard to think of other options when every instinct screamed run or destroy.
“Unc,” Deonte continued. “You don’t know him. Big old brother of my momma. He good people.”
Just like that.
Good people was a ringing endorsement in the tight knit community.
Didn’t mean he was on the wrong side of the law, just meant he didn’t hurt women, children or innocent people.
It qualified him for Jake’s help.
He didn’t bother to ask what he did. Every one he worked with was innocent and picked up by a corrupt police force, no matter what.
He could discover the particulars later.
“Let me get dressed,” Jake was saying.
“I’m down front.”
Jake shuffled to the blinds by the round porthole in the metal door and peeked through.
Down front was relative.
The Knox House had three stories in the historic structure he was rehabilitating, but Jake’s trailer was parked on a concrete slab added in the seventies where a shed had stood.
Deonte beeped the horn of a Caprice Classic, propped up on extra large rims, with glowing lights that ran the length of the car.
“Give me a minute.”
Jake swiped the phone off and shuffled into pants and a coat. He ran a toothbrush over his teeth and swished with mouthwash to get that fuzzy coat off his tongue, and debated washing it all off with a couple of slugs of Jack Daniels just sitting in a bottle on the counter.
He decided against it.
If he showed up at the station with bourbon on his breath, the cops might try to throw him in with Deonte’s uncle.
“Unc,” he said after he locked up and slid into the velvet covered seat cover next to his tall friend.
Deonte wore a cowboy hat tilted back on his head.
He called it a homage to Burbank’s propensity to drink in a honky tonk off Main Street, and he wore it to fit in.
Jake never asked why he wore it so much away from the bar. It didn’t make him fit in out in the hood, or the barrios around Pine Bluff.
Too easy to recognize.
“They got him up on a murder charge,” Deonte explained. “Said he shot his neighbor.”
“Did he?”
“Not that I think of,” he said. “The man was with me when his neighbor took two to the head, one to the chest.”
“I’m not questioning your credibility,” Jake said.
“Yeah, yeah, we got other witnesses. We was out PJ’s. They had a seventies theme night, you know it?”
Jake shook his head.
“Play all that good shit we had when we was kids and had that Saturday Night Fever. You remember Dance Fever?”
“Watched it with my grandparents,” Jake said.
“Yeah, that Danny Canada on channel eleven. Came on after the news. Me and mine would line up and dance, momma watching and clapping.”
“I didn’t do much dancing.”
“Yeah, well, you got the white man’s burden, so I don’t blame you none.”
“I’ve got rhythm,” Jake defended.
“Sure you do, Lawyer Man. I believe it.”
“PJ’s?” Jake turned him back to the story.
“Yeah, must have been bout a hundred people seen us. So this ain’t gonna stick. Still, they picked him up about thirty minutes ago.”
“He call you?”
“Nah,” Deonte shook his head. “Neighbor’s wife.”
“The man that got shot?”
“Same.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah, cops gonna think so?”
“Yeah. But someone told them something. Why else are they gonna pin it on him?”
“They had beef.”
“What kind?” Jake opened the door as they pulled into the station parking lot.
Deonte shrugged.
“Unc didn’t say much. You know how it is, these two been side by side going on twenty years. Could have been the fence, could have been the pecan tree dropping limbs. Thing is, they had words is all I know and they weren’t talking.”
“How long?”
“Words or talking?”
“They’re related,” said Jake.
The two men stopped in front of the glass double doors that led into the basement of the police department on the lower level of the Civic Center.
Jake could see their reflection in the heavy mirror tint.
Deonte in a pressed black suit, purple shirt open at the color, straw cowboy hat looking like it was part of a fashion ensemble, the man wearing it as good as any fashion model.
The lawyer next to him, thin, too skinny from too many liquid dinners, more worn. Jake had a lot of miles, and they were starting to show.
“You know, back on earth, they had this game they used to play,” said Maggie. She settled her oversized frame into a simple wooden chair and ignored the squeaks of protest from the well worn joints where the pieces came together.
“It’s from Russia, if you can believe it, and I guess you should cause the game itself is kind of like the whole Russian outlook on life. It’s bleak. Depressing if you ask me.”
Maggie ran her hands across her cheeks and down the front of her ample bosom. Her fingers settled under the frock she wore over the stretched fabric of a worn jumpsuit. She pulled out a snub nosed revolver in one hand and a single bullet in the other.
“They called the damn thing Russian roulette. Like a gambling game of sorts, you know, like they used to have in Las Vegas. They would put one bullet in a chamber, spin the cylinder and point the barrel at their head,” she demonstrated through each step, ending with the gun pointed at Daryl.
He swallowed.
“Now you know they don’t allow projectile weapons in space,” he licked his lips and watched the black barrel of the gun dance from the tip of his nose to his brown eyes and back again.
“Allow?” Maggie scoffed. “Seems like it’s already out here. Too late to be allowed anything.”
“Miss Maggie,” he licked his lips again.
“Daryl, you know it’s Ms. Miss is the unmarried form or for a much younger woman than myself.”
“Ms. Maggie.”
“We don’t call it Russian Roulette up here, Daryl,” she said as the barrel stopped moving and held steady at a pointe just under the tip of his nose. “Do you know why?”
“Cause Russia’s gone?”
She nodded.
“Up here, there’s no Russia. No America, no nothing. Just us. The men up there who want to take all we have, all we work hard for, and us down here, fighting for every scrap we can get. You know what we call this game now?”
He shook his head, just a fraction, afraid that too much movement might set off the gun.
“Martian Roulette,” she guffawed. “All the new things on this whole planet we come up with and we can’t even come up with an original name for an old game.”
She laid flipped out the calendar and showed him the head of the bullet, three chambers away from the barrel.
“Lucky,” she said.
Daryl eased back in his seat, the tension from his shoulders falling off like a fog as he sighed and grinned back.
“The name’s the same, but there is a little difference when you play up here,” Maggie said.
“What’s that Ms. Maggie?”
She lifted her hand from her lap again.
Daryl stared at the coiled barrel of a short blaster.
Maggie pulled the trigger and sent a beam of light through a small spot over his right eyebrow.
The body flipped over backwards out of the chair and plopped on the floor.
“You don’t get any chances to win up here.”
She spit on the body and heaved her bulk out of the seat.
“Clean up this mess,” she rasped to the men standing in the shadows on the edge of the room.
None of them moved until she made her way through the sliding doors and disappeared into the space beyond.
Sterling walked through the door of Fenix station and nodded to Madge behind her desk as she tried to ignore him.
“Morning Madge,” he tipped the brim of his hat.
The action earned him a sniff of disapproval and what sounded like a harrumph as she cleared her throat.
“Sterling!” Pete yelled across the almost empty room.
Dominique glanced up from the file in front of her and watched as Sterling ambled back to the Chief Deputy’s office.
“You bellowed?”
“Hell yeah I bellowed. You see, I have to yell Sterling. It’s the only fucking way to get through to you.”
Sterling glanced at the digital clock on the wall.
“I’m not late, Pete.”
“You dragging ass in half way through a work day is not the issue here,” Pete pushed back from his desk.
The wooden chair creaked under his weight as he shifted to put his feet up on the desk.
“Then what is?”
“What is what?” Pete put both hands behind his head and gave a satisfied smirk of a grunt.
“You’re just messing with me?”
“How was your coffee this morning Sterling?”
“A couple quarts low,” Sterling answered. “But I aim to make up for it in the next hour or so.”
“That sounds like a hell of a plan,” Pete kept smirking.
“But?”
“But I think I’ve got something better for you to do.”
He used the heel of his shoe to shove a manila folder across the smooth surface of the plank desk. Sterling picked it up and folded it open.
“Wit-Sec is sending us a squealer,” Pete crowed.
“That ain’t normal,” said Sterling, eye crinkled in concentration as he studied the single sheet of paper ensconced in the folder.
“Nothing normal about this witness,” said Pete. “Seems they need extra safe keeping.”
“And the powers that be think that’s going to happen out here?”
Pete moved his feet and sat up.
“Hell, the powers that be are in the crosshairs. These are some of your old buddies.”
“That’s not in the file.”
“I know,” Pete grinned. “I redacted it.”
“Redacted?”
“That means to pull out a lot of information.”
“I know what redacted means,” Sterling grumbled.
“I’m doing this as a favor to the Chief in Musk. Man, you are grumpy without your coffee.”
“I tried to warn you.”
“Yeah, well, you can pick up another round on your way to the station. The witness is going to be on the next train in.”
“And you want me baby sitting? What the hell am I supposed to do with a witness way out here?”
“Find a room and lay low I suspect,” said Pete. “It’s protocol.”
Sterling waved the thin folder in the air.
“This ain’t protocol.”
Pete cackled.
“Don’t I know it. But I’m told this witness is a golden egg, and since you nearly got my station burned down again, you’re pulling the duty.”
“It’s still here, ain’t it.”
Pete glanced over his shoulder at the clock.
“You better hurry, or you won’t get your coffee.”
“Damn it Pete,” said Sterling.
But he dropped the file on the desk and hurried through the long row of desks past Madge. She growled at him as he left, but he ignored her. If he hurried, he could still get two to-go cups of Jamil’s finest dark roast.
And that nectar just might make the day get a little better.
The Dragonships dropped from orbit and lit the night, streaking like comets toward the capital city. Steele occupied a high ledge on the edge of a cliff, one side dominated by a gentle ocean, the other by a long vale that stretched for miles to the end of city proper before turning into green pastures of waving grass.
There were twelve of them moving in a loose grouping formation that gave a strategic advantage against the anti-spacecraft batteries that guarded against just such an incursion. A diamond pattern flown at multiple altitudes, so that if one ship were hit and exploded, it would not harm the others.
The lead vessel pulled ahead, streaking over the city. The name, FIRECRACKER, was painted in black on the nose of the ship, though it was impossible for the inhabitants to read at the speed it was going. It wasn’t until the FIRECRACKER stopped to hover above House Steele that they could make out the name, and by then, it was too late.
A red plasma beam zipped from a portal under the nose and rained hell on the Palace proper. Battlements and towers melted and dripped until the rock ran like candle wax under a noonday sun, cooling into brittle glass.
In space, the plasma cannons were silent, but in atmosphere, the air cracked and crackled with a million sonic booms. The superheated air ripped the sky like the shriek of the beast that was the Ship’s namesake.
The howl of the Dragonships roared even in the depths of the Keep, making the earth rumble and tremble under the relentless pounding cannons.
The man behind the captain’s chair stood as stiff and straight as his nickname. His strong legs were braced wide on the deck as the Dragonship swooped through the atmosphere and hovered over Steele Keep.
“General,” the helmsman acknowledged. “It’s time.”
General Rodney Caine was called Ramrod, not just for the way he stood, but for his actions in battle, both on the field and in court. “Ramrod” Caine would jam through his agenda or his troops no matter who stood against him.
He made a motion with his gloved right hand that sent a ripple over the decorative polycarbonate layered armor he wore. It was patterned on the ancient woodwork cuttings of Japanese Samurai on old earth, although shorter and more flexible.
He wore a short ceremonial sword on his left hip, no more than a long knife really, but it balanced the weight of a laser blaster holstered on his right.
The sword was a gift from the High King to all the men who served in his personal guard, and General Caine was Warlord of those who served.
Plasma bolts belched from portals on the underside of his ship and bathed the Keep in crimson blasts. Rock and steel melted under the intense onslaught, running molten down the side of the Keep, like dribbling bits of blood.
Caine couldn’t hear the screams from inside the ship, though is imagination supplied them well enough.
First, the High King Council chambers melted away.
Then, the residence itself ignited in an eruption of sparks and smoke that plumed into the sky and blanketed the city.
“General?” his second in command asked.
Caine shook his head.
They could have stopped then, could have allowed the inhabitants of the Keep to regroup and escape into the city. Thousands of lives would be saved.
Not the High King, of course.
He had been in the Council chambers along with the rest of the sycophants who nodded their bobbing heads to agree with whatever the King said.
The Council would be gone.
The High King would be gone.
And with a motion of his head, Caine ensured that the Keep would be gone, the House Steele burned to nothing more than a sheet of hardened glass and a name in the annals of history.
This weekend, a record setting 500,000 people attended the Arkansas State Fair.
It was two years in the making, thanks to Covid.
A pent up rush to spend millions in the city of Little Rock.
I don’t know what the city and state get from the Fair, but this once a year affair brought a lot of people into the city limits and by all accounts, worked wonders.
Blame the marketing team, which did a great job, and will win the contract again next year.
Blame people who wanted to get out on an amazing weekend with no humidity and decent temperatures.
No matter who gets the blame, it was a win for Little Rock.
A win we’ve needed for a long time.
Because 500,000 people coming for a weekend visit bring their tax dollars to a place in need.
And it also brings a lesson city leaders need to memorize and learn from and encourage.
What lesson?
People want to party. They want something to do with their children. They want safe fun and are willing to spend a little of their money doing it.
We saw the same thing happen in North Little Rock when they hosted the Pulaski County Fair along the riverbank.
Thunderstorms and wet weather soaked the region that weekend, and yet, when the clouds cleared out on Sunday morning, people still went.
This venue wasn’t even ¼ the size of the State Fair, yet people trudged through muddy grass, sloshed through puddles and bought tickets and funnel cakes and candy apples by the hundreds.
It’s not just a Fair though.
The Main Street Food Truck Festival is an event hosted by the Downtown Little Rock Partnership and this year, lined up food trucks for six blocks downtown.
They brought in bands on every corner, and invited thousands of people to attend a record setting event.
Maybe the record was set because of Covid, and people just tired of hiding and distancing.
Or maybe, the DLRP knows something that city leaders need to learn.
Give the people something to do and they will.
I look at the City of Pine Bluff.
Why aren’t they hosting or encouraging an organization to host an event once a month designed to bring thousands of people to a part of the city?
Downtown Main Street. Regional Park. Jefferson Square. Zebra Stadium.
Every weekend packed with bands and entertainment and food and fun and people spending money that the city gets a slice of the revenue, which they in turn can use to fund police, fire department, city streets, and more.
Because not all festivals are the same?
Because not every festival will attract a 10% of a half a million people to come play?
That’s true. It’s right.
So let’s take a small little block party held every year in the historic McArthur Park district in Little Rock.
Four blocks long. A dozen food trucks. A half dozen beer tents. Some local businesses and sponsor tents set up to do games and fun stuff. Six bands from noon to ten pm.
Five thousand people showed up.
It doesn’t seem like much, until you add it up with an average spend of $40 per person on food, drink and merch.
Now repeat that scenario six times a year and suddenly you’re looking at a strong community building set of activities that people can get behind and look forward to.
When I was growing up in PB, we had the Fair every fall.
There was the Pine Bluff High School homecoming parade. The UAPB Homecoming Parade. There was a parking lot carnival in Jefferson Square at least once per year. And the big Christmas Parade downtown every December.
That’s four times per year that areas in town were packed with thousands of people.
I’m sure there were at least two more, because we grew up poor and didn’t go to many things that required an entrance fee.
But I know I went to a dozen church events around the city where we paid a few dollars to play games for safe and fun trick or treating.
Or Christmas fairs. Or Summer Fun Cookouts.
I know Florida had those all of the time when I lived there as an adult, so I know these things still go on.
Hell, we still run across Festivals every so often. Hillcrest in the Heights comes to mind, which I’ll miss this year due to a trip to Branson.
We went the year before the Pandemic and had a blast, along with a couple of thousand of our closest friends.
I can hear some naysayers in PB arguing that people in that city are too poor to go to a bunch of Festivals all the time.
But it doesn’t have to be a big price gouge or a shock to the pocket book.
If you get one thousand people to spend an average of $20 per person over a weekend, and the city gets permit fees and tax, and you repeat it, the numbers add up.
It doesn’t have to be one big shock to the system either, it can be spread out over different demographics and different parts of the city so that the foot traffic benefits all.
The fact that this isn’t being done tells me no one wants to take charge of it, and looking at the average age of the City Council in Little Rock and Pine Bluff, I know why.
They are old. They are tired. And they spend more time worried about “problems” than searching for solutions.
It’s not their fault. Problems are the purview of City Councils and old people have seen a lot. They’re good at identifying problems.
What they might not be as good at is identifying solutions that solve money problems.
The old answer of raising taxes may be the only thing they know.
But in a brand new world with brand new opportunities, maybe the way we’ve been doing things isn’t working how it should.
Tell folks what to do. Tell them how to do it. And if they need a little more “instruction” then charge them for consulting.
I’m not sure how that works as an author.
Most of my time is spent creating content for web 3.0.
I write books and publish them in Ebook, paperback and some hardcovers.
I have them done as audiobooks, and give away snippets on Youtube and Anchor and Spotify.
I even give away whole books on Youtube as a vlog, for folks who like to listen to their stories.
Every month, I send out around 5,000 free books across three genres, if you count the book promotions I’m in, plus the special days to readers.
That’s $10,000 worth of free words ($2.99 per book, my royalty is $2.03 per book).
Sometimes it’s more.
I’ve got to learn how to write that off on taxes.
Better yet, I’ve got to learn how to make it up in other ways.
Because I just realized something.
I’m having a pity party moment.
There’s a reason for it, but that’s no excuse.
The reason is I see a world full of opportunity right now and it requires a little cash to grease the wheels.
A little more than I have access to at the moment.
Like yesterday. I know I’ve been talking about crypto and nft a lot.
I’d like 1000 extra dollars to pour into some speculation over the next two months.
But I also get stock alerts from the regular old stock market.
I got one yesterday. DWAC. Trading at 12.
It was a company folded into Trump’s new social media platform.
I suspect there were some shenanigans on the timing, and who owns how much stock, etc, etc.
But the stock itself ran up from 12 to 62 at close of bell.
Would have been a nice ride. Some are predicting it’s going to keep going up, especially as we ramp into a very hot and angry election cycle in 2022 and 2024.
You guys know how I feel about politicians on both sides of the aisle, but money is the great equalizer.
This particular stock might go up to Amazon levels.
It will at least go to Facebook levels. (which means there’s an upside of $100 per share.)
Probably.
I share all my ideas with you guys.
It’s not just stock though.
I had a friend send me a message on LinkedIn. The Endeavor Holding Group is buying 12 – 24 minor league baseball teams.
He said my made up minor league marketing plan might work for them.
I just need to build a presentation deck and start pitching.
Endeavor is part of the William Morris Endeavor agencies, a Hollywood powerhouse that would be a good fit for me, in that I have books that can be turned into movies, content that can be non-fiction, and the marketing wherewithal to help them turn two dozen minor league stadiums in small town America into premier destinations.
The question is, how do I get into the right hands?
How do I build the right presentation?
How do I make something so big, so cool, so in the moment right now that they come to me?
So guess how I’ll be spending some of my Friday.
But back to money.
I get so focused on the wrong thing sometimes, that I forget where I should be looking.
At you.
With gratitude.
Because even though I get frustrated at how slow the wheels turn sometimes.
Even though I see NFT’s and books and everything spinning off at the speed of light around me, the thing that makes me happy in my heart is you.
Writing stories for you to enjoy. Getting them into your hands and hearing things like “I can’t put it down.”
Or even, “Get this guy an editor, cause he can write. He just can’t spell.”
HA!
God, I love you guys. I love that you are with me on this strange trip, and you get that I can like creating Content and Business and the Future.
That my interests intersect with a lot of yours, and we would probably drink some drinks together and listen to some tunes and just vibe.
I can focus on all the things in this world that make me wince, or I can remind myself to be grateful.
And sometimes, I need reminding.
I woke up this morning. I have hot coffee. The sun is gorgeous and I got to see a Hunter’s moon still up an hour after sunrise.
Today, there is a long walk with the dog, and words to put to page.
There is an NFT series to build and content to put up on Youtube.
All the things you allow me to do, just by being here.
I wakened with a start, and thought: How was Caldwell taking it?
I must have moved physically, for blackness edged with pain closed
over me. How long I lay in that agonized faint, I have no means of knowing. My next awareness was of the thrusting of the engines that drove the spaceship.
Slowly this time, consciousness returned. I lay very quiet, feeling the weight of my years of sleep, determined to follow the routine prescribed so long ago by Pelham.
I didn’t want to faint again.
I lay there, and I thought: It was silly to have worried about Jim Caldwell. He wasn’t due to come out of his state of suspended animation for another fifty years.
I began to watch the illuminated face of the clock in the ceiling. It had registered 23:12; now it was 23:22. The ten minutes Pelham had suggested for a time lapse between passivity and initial action
was up.
Slowly. I pushed my hand toward the edge of the bed. Click!
My fingers pressed the button that was there. There was a faint hum.The automatic massager began to fumble gently over my naked form.
First, it rubbed my arms ; then it moved to my legs, and so on over my body. As it progressed, I could feel the fine slick of oil that oozed from it working into my dry skin.
A dozen times I could have screamed from the pain of life returning. But in an hour I was able to sit up and turn on the lights.
The small, sparsely furnished, familiar room couldn’t hold my attention for more than an instant. I stood up.
The movement must have been too abrupt. I swayed, caught on to the metal column of the bed, and retched discolored stomach juices.
The nausea passed. But it required an effort of will for me to walk to the door, open it. and head along the narrow corridor that led to the control room.
I wasn’t supposed to so much as pause there, but a spasm of absolutely dreadful fascination seized me : and I couldn’t help it. I leaned over the control chair, and glanced at the chronometer.
It said: 53 years, 7 months, 2 weeks. 0 days, 0 hours and 27 minutes.
Fifty-three years! A little blindly, almost blankly : Rack on Earth, the people we had known, the young men we’d gone to college with, that girl who had kissed me at the party given us the night we left — they were all dead. Or dying of old age.
1 remembered the girl very vividly. She was pretty, vivacious, a complete stranger. She had laughed as she offered her red lips, and she had said “A kiss for the ugly one, too.”
She’d be a grandmother now, or in her grave.
Tears came to my eyes. I brushed them away, and began to heat the can of concentrated liquid that was to be my first food. Slowly, my mind calmed.
Fifty-three years and seven and one half months, I thought drably.
Nearly four years over my allotted time. I’d have to do some figuring before I took another dose of Eternity drug. Twenty grains had been calculated to preserve my flesh and my life for exactly fifty years.
The stuff was evidently more potent than Pelham had been able to estimate from his short period advance tests.
I sat tense, narrow-eyed, thinking about that. Abrupt consciousness came of what I was doing.
laughter spat from lips. The sound split the silence like a series of pistol shots, startled me.
But it also relieved me. Was I sitting here actually being critical?
A miss of only four years was bull’s-eye across that span of years.
Why, I was alive and still young. Time and space had been conquered. The universe belonged to man.
I ate my “soup,” sipping each spoonful deliberately. I made the bowl last every second of thirty minutes. Then, greatly refreshed. I made my way back to the control room.
This time I paused for a long look through the plates. It took only a few moments to locate Sol, a very brightly glowing star in the approximate center of the rear-view plate.
Alpha Centauri required longer to locate. But it shone finally, a glow point in a light sprinkled darkness.
I wasted no time trying to estimate their distances. They looked right. In fifty-four years we had covered approximately one tenth of the four and one third light years to the famous nearest star system.
Satisfied, I threaded my way back to the living quarters. Take them in a row, I thought. Pelham first.
As I opened the air-tight door of Pelham’s room, a sickening odor of
decayed flesh tingled in my nostrils.
With a gasp I slammed the door, stood there in the narrow hallway,
shuddering.
After a minute, there was still nothing but the reality.
Pelham was dead.
I cannot clearly remember what I did then. 1 ran; I know that. I flung open Caldwell’s door, then Blake’s. The clean, sweet smell of their rooms, the sight of their silent bodies on their beds brought
back a measure of my sanity.
A great sadness came to me. Poor, brave Pelham. Inventor of the Eternity drug that had made the great plunge into interstellar space possible, he lay dead now from his own invention.
What was it he had said : “The chances are greatly against any of us dying. But there is what I am calling a death factor of about ten percent, a by-product of the first dose. If our bodies survive the
initial shock, they will survive additional doses.
The death factor must be greater than ten percent. That extra four years the drug had kept me asleep —
Gloomily, I went to the storeroom, and procured my personal spacesuit and a tarpaulin. But even with their help, it was a horrible business. The drug had preserved the body to some extent, but pieces kept falling off as I lifted it.
At last, I carried the tarpaulin and its contents to the airlock, and shoved it into space.
I felt pressed now for time. These waking periods were to be brief affairs, in which what we called the “current” oxygen was to be used up, but the main reserves were
not to be touched. Chemicals in each room slowly refreshed the “current” air over the years, readying it for the next to awaken.
In some curious defensive fashion. we had neglected to allow for an emergency like the death of one of our members ; even as I climbed out of the spacesuit, I could feel the difference in the air I was
breathing.
I went first to the radio. It had been calculated that half a light year was the limit of radio reception, and we were approaching that limit
now.
Hurriedly, though carefully, I wrote my report out, then read it into a transcription record, and started sending. I set the record to repeat a hundred times.
In a little more than five months hence, headlines would be flaring on Earth.
I clamped my written report into the ship log book, and added a note for Caldwell at the bottom. It was a brief tribute to Pelham. My praise was heartfelt, but there was another reason behind my note.
They had been pals, Caldwell, the engineering genius who built the ship, and Pelham, the great chemist- doctor, whose Eternity drug had made it possible for men to take this fantastic journey into vastness.
It seemed to me that Caldwell, waking up into the great silence of the hurtling ship, would need my tribute to his friend and colleague. It was little enough for me to do, who loved them both.
The note written. I hastily examined the glowing engines, made notations of several instrument readings, and then counted out fifty-five grains of Eternity drug. That was as close as I could get to the amount I felt would be required for
one hundred and fifty years.
For a long moment before sleep came, I thought of Caldwell and the terrible shock that was coming to him on top of all the natural reactions to his situations, that would strike deep into his peculiar, sensitive nature —
I stirred uneasily at the picture.
The worry was still in my mind when darkness came.
Almost instantly, I opened my eyes. I lay thinking: The drug! It hadn’t worked.
The draggy feel of my body warned me of the truth. I lay very still watching the clock overhead.
This time it was easier to follow
the routine except that, once more,
I could not refrain from examining
the chronometer as I passed through
the galley.
It read: 201 years. 1 month, 3 weeks, 5 days, 7 hours, 8 minutes.
I slipped my bowl of that super soup, then went eagerly to the big log book.
It is utterly impossible for me to describe the thrill that coursed through me, as I saw the familiar handwriting of Rlake, and then, as I turned back the pages, of Caldwell.
My excitement drained slowly, as I read what Caldwell had written. It was a report; nothing more: gravitometric readings, a careful calculation of the distance covered, a detailed report on the performance of the engines, and, finally, an estimate of our speed variations, based
on the seven consistent factors.
It was a splendid mathematical job, a first-rate scientific analysis. But that was all there was. No mention of Pelham, not a word of comment on what I had written or on what had happened.
Caldwell had wakened; and, if his report was any criterion, he might as well have been a robot.
I knew better than that.
So — I saw as I began to read Blake’s report — did Blake.
Bill:
TEAR THIS SHEET OUT WHEN
YOU’VE READ IT!
Well, the worst has happened. We couldn’t have asked fate to give us an unkind kick in the pants. I hate to
think of Pelham being dead — what a man he was, what a friend — but we all knew the risk we were taking, he more than any of us. Space rest his great soul.
But Caldwell’s case is now serious. After all, we were worried, wondering how he’d take his first awakening, let alone a bang between the eyes like Pelham’s death. And I think that first anxiety was justified.
As you and I have always known, Caldwell was one of Earth’s fair-haired boys. Just imagine any one human being born with his combination of looks, money and intelligence. His great fault was that he never let the future trouble him. With that dazzling personality of his, and the crew of worshiping women and yes-men around him, he didn’t have much time for anything but the present.
Realities always struck him like a
thunderbolt. He could leave those three
ex-wives of his— and they weren’t so ex,
if you ask me — without grasping that it
was forever.
That good-by party was enough to put
anyone into a sort of mental haze when
it came to realities. To wake up a hundred years later, and realize that those
he loved had withered, died and been
eaten by worms — we
(I put it baldly like that because the
human mind always thinks of the worst
angles, no matter how it censors speech.)
I personally counted on Pelham acting as a sort of psychological support to Caldwell ; and we both know that Pelham recognized the extent of his influence over Caldwell. That influence must be replaced. Try to think of something, Bill, while you’re charging around doing the routine work. We’ve got to live with that guy after we all wake up at the end of the five hundred years.
Tear out this sheet. What follows is
routine. Ned.
I burned the letter in the incinerator, examined the two sleeping bodies — how deathly quiet they lay !— and then returned to the control room.
In the plate, the sun was a very bright star, a jewel set in black velvet, a gorgeous, shining brilliant.
Alpha Centauri was brighter. It was a radiant light in that panoply of black and glitter. It was still impossible to make out the separate suns of Alpha A, B, C and Proxima, but their combined light brought a sense of awe and majesty.
Excitement blazed inside me ; and
consciousness came of the glory of
this trip we were making, the first
men to head for far Centaurus, the
first men to dare aspire to the stars.
Even the thought of Earth failed to dim that surging tide of wonder, the thought that seven, possibly eight generations, had been born since our departure; the thought that the girl who had given me the sweet remembrance of her red lips,
was now known to her descendants
as their great-great-great-great
grandmother — if she was remembered at all.
The immense time involved, the whole idea, was too meaningless for emotion.
I did my work, took my third dose of the drug, and went to bed.
The sleep found me still without a plan about Caldwell.
When I woke up. alarm bells were ringing.
I lay still. There was nothing else to do. If I had moved, consciousness would have slid from me.
Though it was mental torture even
to think it. I realized that, no matter
what the danger, the quickest way
was to follow my routine to the
second and in every detail.
Somehow I did it. The bells clanged and brrred. but I lay there until it was time to get up. The clamor was hideous, as I passed through the control room. But I passed through, and sat for half an
hour sipping my soup.
The conviction came to me that if that sound continued much longer, Blake and Caldwell would surely waken from their sleep.
At last. I felt free to cope with the emergency. Breathing hard. I eased myself into the control chair, cut off the mind-wrecking alarms, and switched on the plates.
A fire glowed at me from the rear-view plate. It was a colossal white fire, longer than it was wide, and filling nearly a quarter of the whole sky. The hideous thought came to me that we must be within a few million miles of some monstrous sun that had recently roared
into this part of space.
Frantically, I manipulated the distance estimators — and then for a moment stared in blank disbelief at the answers that clicked metallically onto the product plate.
Seven miles! Only seven miles!
Curious is the human mind. A moment before, when I had thought of it as an abnormally shaped sun, it hadn’t resembled anything but an incandescent mass. Abruptly, now, I saw that it had a solid outline, an unmistakable material shape.
Stunned. I leaped to my feet because —
It was a spaceship! An enormous. mile-long ship. Rather — I sank back into my seat, subdued by the catastrophe l was witnessing, and consciously adjusting my mind— the flaming hell of what had been a spaceship. Nothing that had been alive could possibly still be conscious in that horror of ravenous fire. The only possibility was that the crew had succeeded in launching lifeboats.
Like a madman. I searched the heavens for a light, a glint of metal that would show the presence of survivors.
There was nothing but the night and the stars and the hell of burning ship.
After a long time. I noticed that it was farther away, and seemed to be receding. Whatever drive forces had matched its velocity to ours must be yielding to the fury of the energies that were consuming the ship.
I began to take pictures, and I felt justified in turning on the oxygen reserves. As it withdrew into distance, the miniature nova that had been a torpedo-shaped space liner began to change color, to lose its white intensity. It became a red fire silhouetted against darkness.
My last glimpse showed it as a long,
dull glow that looked like nothing else than a cherry colored nebula seen edge on, like a blaze reflecting from the night beyond a far horizon.
I had already, in between observations, done everything else required of me; and now, I re-connected the alarm system and, very reluctantly, my mind seething with speculation, returned to bed.
As I lay waiting for my final dosage of the trip to take effect, I thought: the great star system of Alpha Centauri must have inhabited planets. If my calculations were
correct, we were only one point six light years from the main Alpha group of suns, slightly nearer than that to red Proxima.
Here was proof that the universe had at least one other supremely intelligent race. Wonders beyond our wildest expectations were in store for us. Thrill on thrill of anticipation raced through me.
It was only at the last instant, as sleep was already grasping at my brain that the realization struck that I had completely forgotten about the problem of Caldwell.
I felt no alarm. Surely, even Caldwell would come alive in that great fashion of his when confronted by a complex alien civilization.
Our troubles were over.
Excitement must have bridged that final one hundred fifty years of time. Because, when I wakened, I thought:
“We’re here! It’s over, the long night, the incredible journey. We’ll all be waking, seeing each other, as well as the civilization out there. Seeing, too, the great Centauri suns.”
The strange thing, it struck me as I lay there exulting, was that the time seemed long. And yet . . . yet I had been awake only three times, and only once for the equivalent of a full day.
In the truest sense of meaning, I had seen Blake and Caldwell — and Pelham — no more than a day and a half ago. I had had only thirty- six hours of consciousness since a pair of soft lips had set themselves against mine, and clung in the sweetest kiss of my life.
Then why this feeling that millenniums had ticked by, second on slow second ? Why this eerie, empty awareness of a journey through fathomless, unending night ?
Was the human mind so easily fooled?
It seemed to me, finally, that the answer was that 1 had been alive for those five hundred years, all my cells and my organs had existed, and it was not even impossible that some part of my brain had been horrendously aware throughout the entire unthinkable period.
And there was. of course, the additional psychological fact that I knew now that five hundred years had gone by, and that —
I saw with a mental start, that my ten minutes were up. Cautiously, I turned on the massager.
The gentle, padded hands had been working on me for about fifteen minutes when my door opened ; the light clicked on. and there stood Blake.
The too-sharp movement of turning my head to look at him made me dizzy. I closed my eves, and heard him walk across the room toward me.
After a minute, I was able to look at him again without seeing blurs. I saw then that he was carrying a bowl of the soup. He stood staring down at me with a strangely grim expression on his face.
At last, his long, thin countenance relaxed into a wan grin.
“’Lo, Bill,” he said.
“Ssshh!” he hissed immediately. “Now, don’t try to speak. I’m going to start feeding you this soup while you’re still lying down. The sooner you’re up, the better I’ll like it.”
He was grim again, as he finished almost as if it was an afterthought:
“I’ve been up for two weeks.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed, and ladled out a spoonful of “soup.” There was silence, then, except for the rustling sound of the massager. Slowly, the strength flowed through my body; and with each passing second. I became more
aware of the grimness of Blake.
“What about Caldwell?” I managed finally, hoarsely. “He awake ?’
Blake hesitated, then nodded
His expression darkened with frown ; he said simply :
“He’s mad, Bill, stark, staring mad. I had to tie him up. I’ve got him now in his room. He’s quieter now. but at the beginning he was a gibbering maniac.”
“Are you crazy?” I whispered at last. “Caldwell was never so sensitive as that. Depressed and sick, yes; but the mere passage of time, abrupt awareness that all his friends are dead, couldn’t make him insane.”
Blake was shaking his head. “It isn’t only that. Bill — ”
He paused, then: “Bill. I want you to prepare your mind for the greatest shock it’s ever had.”
I stared up at him with an emptY feeling inside me. “What do you mean ?”
He went on, grimacing: “I know you’ll be able to take it. So don’t get scared. You and I. Bill, are just a couple of lugs. We’re along because we went to U with Caldwell
and Pelham. Basically, it wouldn’t matter to insensitive chaps like us whether we landed in 1.000,000 B. C. or A. D. We’d just look
around and say : ‘Fancy seeing you here , mug !’ or ‘Who was that pterodactyl I saw you with last night ? That wasn’t no pterodactyl ; that was his bulbous brained wife.”
“For Mars’ sake,” I whispered, “get to the point. What’s up?”
Blake rose to his feet.
“Bill, after I’d read your reports about,
and seen the photographs of, that burning ship, I got an idea. The Alpha suns were pretty close two weeks ago, only about six months away at our average speed of five hundred miles a second. I thought to myself: ‘I’ll see if I can tune in some of their radio stations.’
“Well,” he smiled wryly, “I got hundreds in a few minutes. They came in all over the seven wave dials, with bell-like clarity.”
He paused; he stared down at me, and his smile was a sickly thing.
“Bill,” he groaned, “we’re the prize fools in creation. When I told Caldwell the truth, he folded up like ice melting into water.”
Once more, he paused ; the silence was too much for my straining nerves.
“For Heaven’s sake, man — ” I began. And stopped.
And lay there, very still. Just like that the
lightning of understanding flashed on me. My blood seemed to thunder through my veins. At last, weakly, I said : “You mean — ”
Blake nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the way it is. And they’ve already spotted us with their spy rays and energy screens. A ship’s coming out to meet us.
“I only hope,” he finished gloomily, “they can do something for Jim.”
I was sitting in the control chair an hour later when I saw the glint in the darkness. There was a flash of bright silver, that exploded into size. The next instant, an enormous spaceship had matched our velocity less than a mile away.
Blake and I looked at each other.
“Did they say,” I said shakily, “that that ship left its hangar ten minutes ago?”
Blake nodded. “They can make the trip from Earth to Centauri in three hours,” he said.
I hadn’t heard that before. Something happened inside my brain.
“What!” I shouted. “Why, it’s taken us five hundred years— ”
I stopped; I sat there.
“Three hours!” I whispered. “How could we have forgotten human progress?”
In the silence that fell then, we watched a dark hole open in the cliff like wall that faced us. Into this cavern, I directed our ship.
The rear-view plate showed that the cave entrance was closing. Ahead of us lights flashed on, and focused on a door. As I eased our craft to the metal floor, a face flickered onto our radio plate.
“Cassellahat!” Blake whispered in my ear. “The only chap who’s talked direct to me so far.”
It was a distinguished, a scholarly looking head and face that peered at us. Cassellahat smiled, and said :
“You may leave your ship, and go through the door you see.”
I had a sense of empty spaces around us, as we climbed gingerly out into the vast receptor chamber. Interplanetary spaceship hangars were like that, I reminded myself.
Only this one had an alien quality that —
“Nerves!” I thought sharply.
But I could see that Blake felt it, too. A silent duo, we filed through the doorway into a hallway, that opened into a very large, luxurious room.
It was such a room as a king or a movie actress on set might have walked into without blinking. It was all hung with gorgeous tapestries — that is, for a moment, I thought they were tapestries; then I saw they weren’t. They were —
I couldn’t decide.
I had seen expensive furniture in some of the apartments Caldwell maintained. But these chesterfields, chairs and tables glittered at us, as if they were made of a matching design of differently colored fires.
No, that was wrong; they didn’t glitter at all. They —
Once more I couldn’t decide.
I had no time for more detailed examination. For a man arrayed very much as we were, was rising from one of the chairs. I recognized Cassellahat.
He came forward, smiling. Then he slowed, his nose wrinkling. A moment later, he hastily shook our hands, then swiftly retreated to a chair ten feet away, and sat down rather primly.
It was an astoundingly ungracious performance. But I was glad that he had drawn back that way.
Because, as he shook my hand so briefly, I had caught a faint whiff of perfume from him. It was a vaguely unpleasant odor ; and, besides — a man using perfume in
quantities !
I shuddered. What kind of foppish nonsense had the human race gone in for?
He was motioning us to sit down. I did so, wondering: Was this our reception ? The erstwhile radio operator began:
“About your friend, I must caution you. He is a schizoid type, and our psychologists will be able to effect a temporary recovery only for the moment. A permanent cure will require a longer period, and your fullest cooperation. Fall in readily with all Mr. Caldwell’s plans, unless, of course, he takes a dangerous turn.
“But now” — he squirted us a smile — “permit me to welcome you to the four planets of Centauri. It is a great moment for me, personally. From early childhood, I have been trained for the sole purpose of
being your mentor and guide; and naturally I am overjoyed that the time has come when my exhaustive studies of the middle period American language and customs can be put to the practical use for which they were intended.”
He didn’t look overjoyed. He was wrinkling his nose in that funny way I had already noticed, and there was a generally pained expression on his face. But it was his words that shocked me.
“What do you mean,” I asked, “studies in American? Don’t people speak the universal language any more ?”
“Of course” — he smiled — “but the language has developed to a point where — I might as well be frank — you would have difficulty understanding such a simple word as ‘yeih.’ ”
“Yeih?” Blake echoed.
“Meaning ‘yes.’ ”
“Oh!”
We sat silent, Blake chewing his lower lip. It was Blake who finally said:
“What kind of places are the Centauri planets? You said something on the radio about the population centers having reverted to the city structure again.”
“I shall be happy,” said Cassellahat, “to show you as many of our great cities as you care to see. You are our guests, and several million credits have been placed to your separate accounts for you to use as you see fit.”
“Gee!” said Blake.
“I must, however,” Cassellahat went on, “give you a warning. It is important that you do not disillusion our peoples about yourselves. Therefore, you must never wander around the streets, or mingle with the crowds in any way. Always,
your contact should be via newsreels, radio, or from the inside of a closed machine. If you have any plan to marry, you must now- finally give up the idea.”
“I don’t get it!” Blake said wonderingly; and he spoke for us both.
Cassellahat finished firmly: “It is important that no one becomes aware that you have an offensive physical odor. It might damage your financial prospects considerably.
“And now” — he stood up — “for the time being, I shall leave you. I hope you don’t mind if I wear a mask in future in your presence. I wish you well, gentlemen, and — ”
He paused, glanced past us, said :
“Ah, here is your friend.”
I whirled, and I could see Blake twisting, staring —
“Hi, there, fellows,” Caldwell said cheerfully from the door, then wryly: “Have we ever been a bunch of suckers?”
I felt choked. I raced up to him, caught his hand, hugged him. Blake was trying to do the same.
When we finally released Caldwell, and looked around, Cassellahat was gone.
Which was just as well. I had been wanting to punch him in the nose for his final remarks.
“Well, here goes!” Caldwell said.
He looked at Blake and me, grinned, rubbed his hands together gleefully, and added:
“For a week I’ve been watching, thinking up questions to ask this cluck and — ”
He faced Cassellahat. “What,” he began, “makes the speed of light constant ?”
Cassellahat did not even blink. “Velocity equals the cube of the cube root of g over d,” he said, “d being the depth of the space time continuum, g the total toleration or gravity, as you would say, of all the matter in that continuum.”
“How are planets formed ?”
“A sun must balance itself in the space that it is in. It throws out matter as a sea vessel does anchors. That’s a very rough description. 1 could give it to you in mathematical formula, but I’d have to write it down. After all. I’m not a scientist. These are merely facts that I’ve known from childhood, or so it seems.”
“Just a minute.” said Caldwell, puzzled. “A sun throws this matter out without any pressure other than its — desire — to balance itself?”
Cassellahat stared at him. “Of course not. The reason, the pressure involved, is very potent, I assure you. Without such a balance, the sun would fall out of this space. Only a few bachelor suns have learned how to maintain stability
without planets.”
“A few what?” echoed Caldwell. I could see that he had been jarred into forgetting the questions he had been intending to ask one by swift one. Cassellahat’s words
cut across my thought ; he said :
“A bachelor sun is a very old, cooled class M star. The hottest one known has a temperature of one hundred ninety degrees F., the coldest forty-eight. Literally, a bachelor is a rogue, crochety with age. Its main feature is that it permits no matter, no planets, not even gases in its vicinity.”
Caldwell sat silent, frowning, thoughtful. I seized the opportunity to carry on a train of idea.
“This business,” I said, “of knowing all this stuff without being a scientist, interests me. For instance, back home every kid understood the atomic-rocket principle practically from the day he was born. Boys of eight and ten rode around in specially made toys, took them apart and put them together again. They thought rocket-atomic, and any new development in the field was just pie for them to absorb.
“Now, here’s what I’d like to know: what is the parallel here to that particular angle?”
“The adeledicnander force,” said Cassellahat. “I’ve already tried to explain it to Mr. Caldwell, but his mind seems to balk at some of the most simple aspects.”
Caldwell roused himself, grimaced. “He’s been trying to tell me that electrons think ; and I won’t swallow it.”
Cassellahat shook his head. “Not think; they don’t think. But they have a psychology.”
Caldwell groaned : “I know. Any child of six could tell me.”
He turned to us. “That’s why I lined up a lot of questions. I figured that if we got a good intermediate grounding, we might be able to slip into this adeledicnander
stuff the way their kids do.”
He faced Cassellahat. “Next question.” he said. “What — ” Cassellahat had been looking at his watch. “I’m afraid, Mr. Caldwell’,” he interrupted, “that if you
and I are going to be on the ferry to the Pelham planet, we’d better leave now. You can ask your questions on the way.”
“What’s all this?” I chimed in.
Caldwell explained: “He’s taking me to the great engineering laboratories in the European mountains of Pelham. Want to come along?”
“Not me,” I said.
Blake shrugged. “I don’t fancy getting into one of those suits Cassellahat has provided for us, designed to keep our odor in, but not theirs out.”
He finished: “Bill and I will stay here and play poker for some of that five million credits worth of dough we’ve got in the State bank.
Cassellahat turned at the door; there was a distinct frown on the flesh mask he wore. “You treat our government’s gift very’ lightly.”
“Yeih!” said Blake.
“So we stink,” said Blake.
It was nine days since Cassellahat had taken Caldwell’ to the planet Pelham; and our only contact had been a radio telephone call from Caldwell on the third day, telling us not to worry.
Blake was standing at the window of our penthouse apartment in the city; and I was on my back on a couch, in my mind a mixture of thoughts involving Caldwell’s potential insanity and all the things I had heard and seen about the history of the past five hundred
years.
I roused myself.
“Quit it,” I said. “We’re faced with a change in the metabolism of the human body, probably due to the different foods from remote starsthat they eat. They must be able to smell better, too, because just being near us is agony to Cassellahat, whereas we only notice an unpleasantness from him. It’s a
case of three of us against billions of them. Frankly, I don’t see an early victory over the problem, so let’s just take it quietly.”
There was no answer; so I returned to my reverie. My first radio message to Earth had been picked up; and so, when the interstellar drive was invented in 2320
A. D., less than one hundred forty years after our departure, it was realized what would eventually happen.
In our honor, the four habitable planets of the Alpha A and B suns were called Caldwell, Pelham, Blake and Endicott. Since 2320, the populations of the four planets had become so dense that a total of nine- teen billion people now dwelt on
their narrowing land spaces. This in spite of migrations to the planets of more distant stars.
The space liner I had seen burning in 2511 A, D. was the only ship ever lost on the Earth-Centauri lane. Traveling at full speed, it’s screens must have reacted against our spaceship. All the automatics
would instantly have flashed on; and, as those defenses were notable at that time to stop a ship that had gone Minus Infinity, every recoil engine aboard had probably blown up.
Such a thing could not happen again. So enormous had been the progress in the adeledicnander field of power, that the greatest liners could stop dead in the full fury of mid-flight.
We had been told not to feel any sense of blame for that one disaster, as many of the most important advances in adeledicnander electronic psychology had been made as the result of theoretical analyses of that great catastrophe.
I grew aware that Blake had flung himself disgustedly into a nearby chair.
‘‘Boy, oh, boy.” he said, ‘‘this is going to be some life for us. We can all anticipate about fifty more years of being pariahs in a civilization where we can’t even under- stand how the simplest machines work.”
I stirred uneasily. I had had similar thoughts. But I said nothing. Blake went on:
‘‘I must admit, after I first discovered the Centauri planets had been colonized, I had pictures of myself bowling over some dame, and marrying her.”
Involuntarily, my mind leaped to the memory of a pair of lips lifting up to mine. I shook myself. I said :
“I wonder how Caldwell is taking all this. He—”
A familiar voice from the door cut off my words.
“Caldwell,” it said, “is taking things beautifully now that the first shock has yielded to resignation, and resignation to
purpose.”
We had turned to face him by the time he finished. Caldwell walked slowly toward us, grinning.
Watching him, I felt uncertain as to just how to take his built-up sanity.
He was at his best. His dark, wavy hair was perfectly combed. His startling blue eyes made his whole face come alive. He was a natural physical wonder ; and at his
normal he had all the shine and swagger of an actor in a carefully tailored picture.
He wore that shine and swagger now. He said :
“I’ve bought a spaceship, fellows. Took all my money and part of yours, too. But I knew you’d back me up. Am I right?’’
“Why, sure,” Blake and I echoed.
Blake went on alone: “What’s the idea.”
“I get it,” I chimed in. “We’ll cruise all over the universe, live our life span exploring new worlds. Jim, you’ve got something there. Blake and I were just going to enter a suicide pact.”
Caldwell was smiling.
“We’ll cruise for a while anyway.”
Two days later, Cassellahat having offered no objection and no advice about Caldwell, we were in space.
It was a curious three months that followed. For a while I felt a sense of awe at the vastness of the cosmos. Silent planets swung into our viewing plates, and faded into remoteness behind us, leaving nostalgic memory of uninhabited, wind lashed forests and plains, deserted, swollen seas and nameless suns.
The sight and the remembrance brought loneliness like an ache, and the knowledge, the slow knowledge, that this journeying was not lifting the weight of strangeness that had settled upon us ever since our arrival at Alpha Centauri.
There was nothing here for our souls to feed on, nothing that would satisfactorily fill one year of our life, let alone fifty. Nothing, nothing.
I watched the realization grow on Blake, and I waited for a sign from Caldwell that he felt it, too. The sign didn’t come. That of itself worried me ; then I grew aware of
something else. Caldwell was watching us. Watching us with a hint in his manner of secret knowledge. a suggestion of secret purpose.
My alarm grew and Caldwell’s perpetual cheerfulness didn’t help any. I was lying on my bunk at the end of the third month, thinking uneasily about the whole unsatisfactory situation, when my door opened, and Caldwell’ came in.
He carried a paralyzer gun and a rope. He pointed the gun at me, and said:
“Sorry, Bill. Cassellahat told me to take no chances, so just lie quiet while I tie you up.”
“Blake!” I bellowed.
Caldwell shook his head gently.
“No use,” he said. “I was in his room first.”
The gun was steady in his fingers, his blue eyes were steely. All I could do was tense my muscles against the ropes as he tied me, and trust to the fact that I was twice as strong, at least, as he was.
I thought in dismay : Surely I could prevent him from tying me too tightly.
He stepped back finally, said again. “Sorry, Bill.” He added: “I hate to tell you this, but both of you went off the deep end mentally when we arrived at Centauri; and this is the cure prescribed by the psychologists whom Cassellahat
consulted. You’re supposed to get a shock as big as the one that knocked you for a loop.
The first time I’d paid no attention to his mention of Cassellahat’s name. Now my mind flared with understanding.
Incredibly, Caldwell had been told that Blake and I were mad. All these months he had been held steady by a sense of responsibility toward us. It was a beautiful psychological scheme. The only thing was: what shock was going to be administered?
Caldwell’s voice cut off my thought. He said:
“It won’t be long now. We’re already entering the field of the bachelor sun.”
“Bachelor sun!” I yelled.
He made no reply. The instant the door closed behind him, I began to work on my bonds; all the time I was thinking:
What was it Cassellahat had said?
Bachelor suns maintained themselves in this space by a precarious balancing.
In this space ! The sweat poured down my face, as I pictured ourselves being precipitated into another plane of the space-time continuum— I could feel the ship falling when I finally worked my hands free of the rope.
I hadn’t been tied long enough for the cords to interfere with my circulation. I headed for Blake’s room.
In two minutes we were on our way to the control cabin.
Caldwell didn’t see us till we had him. Blake grabbed his gun ; I hauled him out of the control chair with one mighty heave, and dumped him onto the floor.
He lay there, unresisting, grinning up at us. “Too late,” he taunted. “We’re approaching the first point of intolerance, and there’s nothing you can do except prepare for the shock.”
I scarcely heard him. I plumped myself into the chair, and glared into the viewing plates. Nothing showed. That stumped me for a second. Then I saw the recorder
instruments. They were trembling furiously, registering a body of infinite size.
For one long moment I stared crazily at those incredible figures.
Then plunged the decelerator far over. Before that pressure of full-driven adeledicnander, the machine grew rigid; I had a sudden fantastic picture of two irresistible forces in full collision.
Gasping. I jerked the power out of gear.
We were still falling.
“An orbit,” Blake was saying. “Get us into an orbit.”
With shaking fingers, I pounded one out on the keyboard, basing my figures on a sun of Sol-ish size, gravity and mass.
The bachelor wouldn’t let us have it.
I tried another orbit, and a third, and more — finally one that would have given us an orbit around mighty Antares itself. But the deadly reality remained. The ship plunged on, down and down.
And there was nothing visible on the plates, not a real shadow of substance. It seemed to me once that I could make out a vague blur of greater darkness against the black reaches of space. But the stars were few in every direction and it was impossible to be sure.
Finally, in despair, I whirled out of the seat, and knelt beside Caldwell, who was still making no effort to get up.
“Listen, Jim,” I pleaded, “what did you do this for? What’s going to happen?
He was smiling easily.
“Think,” he said, “of an old, crusty, human bachelor. He maintains a relationship with his fellows, but the association is as remote as that which exists between a bachelor sun and the stars in the galaxy of which it is a part.”
He added:
“Any second now we’ll strike the first period of intolerance. It works in jumps like quantum, each period being four hundred ninety-eight years, seven months and eight days plus a few
hours.”
It sounded like gibberish. “But what’s going to happen?” I urged. “For Heaven’s sake, man!”
He gazed up at me blandly: and looking up at him, I had the sudden, wondering realization that he was sane, the old, completely rational Jim Caldwell, made better somehow, stronger.
He said quietly,
“Why, it’ll just knock us out of it’s toleration area: and in doing so will put us back — ”
JERK !
The lurch was immensely violent.
With a bang, I struck the floor, skidded, and then a hand — Caldwell’s — caught me. And it was all over.
I stood up, conscious that we were no longer falling. I looked at the instrument board. All the lights were dim, untroubled, the needles firmly at zero. I turned and stared at Caldwell, and at Blake, who was ruefully picking himself from the floor.
Caldwell said persuasively:
“Let me at the control board, Bill. I want to set our course for Earth.”
For a long minute, I gazed at him; and then, slowly, I stepped aside. I stood by as he set the controls and pulled the accelerator over.
Caldwell looked up.
“We’ll reach Earth in about eight hours,” he said, “and it’ll be about a year and a half after we left five hundred years ago.”
Something began to tug at the roof of my cranium. It took several seconds before I realized that it was my brain jumping with the tremendous understanding that suddenly flowed in upon me.
The bachelor sun. I thought dazedly. – In easing us out of field of toleration, it had simply precipitated us into a period of time beyond its field.
Caldwell had said . . . had said that it worked in jumps of . . . four hundred ninety-eight years and some seven months and —
But what about the ship? Wouldn’t twenty-seventh century adeledicnander brought to the twenty-second century, before it was invented, change the course of history? I mumbled the question.
Caldwell shook his head. “Do we understand it? Do we even dare monkey with the raw power inside those engines? I’ll say not. As for the ship, we’ll keep it for our own private use.”
“B-but — ” I began.
He cut me off.
“Look, Bill,” he said, “here’s the situation: that girl who kissed you — don’t think I didn’t see you falling like a ton of bricks — is going to be sitting beside you fifty years from now, when your voice from space reports to Earth that you had wakened on your first lap of the first trip to Centaurus.”
He caught the scent of sheep up on this ridge, and with the scent of sheep was always the scent of trouble.
They came out through the timber with a sliver of silver moon shining down on them—a straggly line of woollies with a half dozen riders herding them along.
Rip Campbell sat on the buckskin horse, keeping in the shadows of the rock ledge.
With his left hand he snubbed out the cigarette, rubbing it against the wall.
his right hand rested on the hickory butt of a heavy Navy Colt.
He knew these sheep herders hadn’t seen him, and they wouldn’t know him if they had because this was strange. country to him.
But men who drove sheep at night did so for a reason, and their trigger fingers might be itchy.
The flock passed within twenty yards of where he sat, shying away instinctively as they caught his scent.
This was something Rip hadn’t — counted on, but he was ready for the next move.
The herder nearest to the rock ledge swore aloud, and then his gun cracked, orange flame spitting into the black of the night.
Rip could see him dimly, a high shape against the dull white of the sheep flock.
The slug ricocheted off the ledge, and Rip heard it whine as it fled away.
His own Navy roared, making the echoes bounce back and forth across this pass.
He fired high, not wishing to kill the man.
The shot had its effect as the herder put spurs to his horse and raced back toward the tail. other shot after the herder for his own protection.
Then, with a word to the buckskin, he fled toward the north end of the pass, the direction in which the flock had been pointed.
Sliding down through loose rock and shale, he turned the buckskin into a fringe of pine, listening for sounds of pursuit, and hearing none.
He grinned as he thought of the scare he’d put into the sheepherders.
These men, he knew, were bringing sheep into a cow country, and they’d been afraid, anticipating trouble.
Now they’d be convinced that a passing or waiting rider had spotted them and they’d be jittery. all night.
The woods petered out at the base of the divide, and Rip sent the buckskin across open plains until he hit more timber with a stream flowing through it.
He made his night camp by this stream, picketing his horse a little way down among the trees.
According to the saloonkeeper at Carl Rock, the big Arrow Ranch was hiring help for the fall roundup, and the Arrow was supposed to be two hours’ ride over the pass.
“Arrow is the biggest brand in these parts,” the saloonkeeper had said.
“You work for Cade Morrison, friend, and you’re sitting high.”
Rip didn’t particularly care where he sat at the present time.
He’d had his shot at the silver mine fields in Nevada and he’d served a year as town marshal in the tough town of Leesville.
He was drifting back now to these new ranges which had been opened up in Montana and Wyoming.
The saloon man had noticed that big Navy hanging at Rip’s right side and he’d grinned, half-closing one blue eye.’
“Cade’s kind of anxious to hire boys that know how to handle them things,” he murmured.
Rip hadn’t asked why because he knew he’d find out if he stopped at the Arrow Ranch or in Metropole, the next town.
Vaguely, now, he had an idea what the bartender meant.
That flock of sheep coming over the pass in the dead of night meant one thing—trouble.
Every cowman in the county would be up in arms when it was learned that sheep were in.
Changing his mind about stopping at the Arrow Ranch immediately, Rip lingered in the hills till high noon the next day, and then rode leisurely toward Metropole.
Before a man dropped his anchor he should know all the coves and harbors along the coast.
It was nearly two o clock with a hot sun boiling overhead when he rode into Metropole, a tall, loose-limbed man, swaying easily in the saddle, faded black sombrero pulled down over a pair of smoky-gray eyes.
There was a break in the bridge of his nose, and a tiny whitish scar on his left cheekbone, indicating the close passage of a bullet. Metropole’s main street was nearly deserted when he came in, studying the lay of the streets, noting the position of the main buildings.
On more than one occasion such knowledge had saved his life.
This road on which he entered the town became the main street, passing the big Chesterfield Hotel on the left, and the red brick building of the Metropole National Bank on the right, and ending abruptly at an intersection a cross street going right and left, forming as it were, a bad giant T.
He’d passed six saloons before he reached the head of the
“T,” and at three of the six, men had come to the batwing doors to stare out at him as he rode by.
Rip Campbell’s eyes flickered.
This, and that sheepherder firing at him the previous night, was the gauge by which he judged the temper of the town.
Metropole was anticipating trouble, and every passing rider was regarded with suspicion.
Rip dismounted outside a small restaurant a few doors down from the Chesterfield Hotel.
He was tying the buckskin at the rack when a girl came out-of the hotel door and stood on the porch staring at him grizzly.
The tall rider didn’t look directly at her, but he could read the anger in her dark eyes as he slapped the buckskin on the flank and went up the two wooden steps to the restaurant.
She was slender built, with dark hair and a small, almost blunt nose.
With his hand on the restaurant door knob, Rip Campbell glanced at her deliberately, feeling the coldness in the eyes.
She was still watching him, hands on hips.
There was a faint smile around the corners of the tall man’s mouth as he went inside.
He chose a seat near the window so he could look out and see what effect his entry had made on this town.
The window was dirty and they couldn’t see him from the outside.
The girl with the dark hair had swung up on a black gelding and was riding furiously around the corner of the
“T” intersection.
A baldheaded old man hurried out of the Plymouth Saloon, crossed the road and disappeared in the side door of the Metropole Bank building.
There were windows above the bank, and this second floor probably served as offices.
Indistinctly, Rip saw two men standing by the middle window, looking across at the restaurant in which he sat.
A gaunt, middle-aged woman came out from the rear of the restaurant and took his order.
She said little, but her lips were tight and definitely unfriendly.
Rip ate the bacon and eggs served to him and sipped his hot coffee with relish.
The bald-headed little man came out of the bank building and scurried back to the saloon again, having finished his errand.
A gaunt man with a thin face and sloping shoulders came around the corner on a dapple-gray horse, dismounting outside the restaurant.
This man wore a five-pointed silver star on his calfskin vest.
His arms were unnaturally long and they hung loosely as he came toward the door.
Rip Campbell watched him with interest, realizing that this man had just received the news of the entrance of a stranger and was paying his respects, The sheriff of Metropole ae the door, glanced around the room and then came toward Rip’s table.
The woman restaurant keeper watched him from the door of the kitchen, saying nothing.
The restaurant was empty except for these three.
Rip rolled a cigarette, leaned back in the chair, and regarded the law officer quizzically.
It wasn’t the usual custom, he knew, for a sheriff to greet all strangers.
“Name’s Cranston,” the sheriff stated blandly.
He stood at the other side of the table, both hands caressing the wooden top of a chair.
This man, Rip knew, had seen trouble before, and he was expecting it again, wearily, regretfully, and knowing it couldn’t be avoided.
Rip Campbell nodded, but didn’t offer to give his name.
He lit the cigarette and blew out smoke.
A half dozen riders passed outside, dismounting at one of the saloons up the street.
The horses kicked up a cloud of dust and it hung over the street, but Rip could still see the two men up above the Metropole National Bank.
“Riding through?” Cranston asked.
Rip shrugged.
“Quien sabe?”
“This town ain’t healthy,” Sheriff Cranston stated.
“Not for strangers.”
“Why?” asked Rip.
He watched the way Cranston’s long fingers coiled around the top of the chair.
“It’s hot,” Cranston told him,
“If you ain’t got business here, I’d advise you to ride.”
Rip smiled and regarded the cigarette.
“I’ve been in hot towns before,” he said.
Cranston gave him a long looks before straightening up.
“I wouldn’t doubt that, friend,’ he murmured.
“Just thought I’d tell you.”
“Thanks,” Rip acknowledged.
He watched this tired sheriff pass out the door.
Cranston knew what must come to pass when sheep men and cattlemen mixed.
Rip Campbell puffed on his cigarette, watching the sheriff climb into the saddle and move away.
Both sides, Rip realized, had started to bring in new hands—men quick on the draw—to substantiate their claims.
This town of Metropole didn’t know as yet which side the stranger was only Rip Campbell paid his bill a few moments later and went out. He stood on the walk, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully, giving the whole town a good look at him.
Several of the riders who had come in earlier were outside the saloon, smoking, watching him carefully.
Sheriff Cranston rode by again, but this time didn’t look at Rip.
Rip strolled up the street toward the saloon, knowing that trouble lay in that direction, and not caring much.
One of the punchers outside the saloon stepped over to the edge of the boardwalk. He was a chunky man with a barrel like body and bow legs.
His hair was a tawny red under a battered flat-crowned sombrero. Pale, greenish eyes stared at Rip Campbell through slits.
Rip returned the gaze levelly, and then looked straight up the street. The red-headed puncher’s next move was one Rip had encountered before, and he smiled inwardly, thinking how strange it was that these things never varied.
This town wasn’t sure about him as yet and they had to find out. The redhead spat directly in Rip Campbell’s path, the spittle missing the toe of the tall man’s boot by an inch as Rip pulled up. The three other riders lounging outside the saloon watched, saying nothing, faces expressionless.
Rip Campbell saw Sheriff Cranston sitting astride his horse a block up the street, shoulders hunched, staring at them, but not coming down.
“Your move,” the redhead said.
Rip glanced down at his boot with interest, and he made his move very swiftly, without even looking at his man.
Steel springs coiled inside his body and then recoiled as Campbell hit the blocky man with his right shoulder, catching him in the chest as he plunged forward.
The redhead gasped as he staggered back into the gutter, Rip after him, raining savage blows into his face, sending him reeling directly across the road, between two horses at a rack, and against that rack.
The puncher tried to fight back, hold his ground, but Rip kept on top of him every instant, never stopping.
Hard fists gouged the redhead’s face, cutting it, beating him into the dust as he sagged against the hitching rack.
Sheriff Cranston came down the street, riding slowly, rubbing his jaw in a characteristic gesture.
The three punchers on the walk hadn’t moved from their positions. One of them was rolling a smoke nervously as the red-headed man went down, groveling in the dust, face bleeding from several wounds.
Rip Campbell walked back across the road, stared at these three men quietly, and went inside.
His knuckles were raw from the contact with the puncher’s hard face.
Few people had seen the fight which had ended as abruptly as it had begun.
Standing at the bar, Rip heard horses moving out a few moments later, and he knew the punchers were leaving.
The story would travel very quickly from now on.
He would have a reputation in this country and other men would try to tear it down.
Some would come with guns because it had ever been so.
Cranston came through the door, heading for the bar. He edged beside Rip and spoke quietly as he poured himself a drink.
“That was Carl Groggins,” the sheriff of Metropole said.
“Ramrod for the Arrow outfit. If you’re a sheep man, mister, you better get the hell out of town.”
“You speaking as sheriff?” Rip asked easily.
Cranston shook his head.
“I like to see a kid with guts,” he stated flatly, “and I don’t like to see him shot in the back.”
“That the way they play in this town?”
Rip wanted to know. Sheriff Cranston’s reply was all comprehensive.
“This is a sheep war, mister,”’ he observed.
Rip had his drink and then registered at the Chesterfield Hotel, the clerk giving him a quick look as he wrote his name on the book.
The clerk was nervous, a youngish man with spectacles, and a receding chin.
“Staying long?” he asked, and then acted as if he regretted the question.
Rip placed the fen back on the rack and tipped his hat up.
“This town’s damned interested in how long I stay,” he murmured. Hurriedly the clerk shoved a key at him.
“Room 7,” he gulped.
Rip had a question for him.
“Who was the dark-haired girl came out of here when I rode in?” he asked.
He knew the clerk had seen him because the desk faced an open window.
“Miss Sara Black,” the bespectacled young man stated.
“Ed Black’s sister.”
“Black a cattleman?” Rip wanted to know.
The clerk moistened his lips.
He smiled a little.
“Hard to tell these days,” he stated.
Rip Campbell went up the stairs and found his room.
It was quite evident from the clerk’s remark that the poorer ranchers were bringing in sheep, or had threatened to bring in sheep, and the old cattlemen were fighting it.
Which side was the stronger was another matter, but from the hints that had been dropped by Sheriff Cranston, it would seem the cattlemen had the upper hand.
It was four o clock in the afternoon and Rip slept till seven.
He washed his face from a white porcelain basin and walked over to the window.
Night was falling in Metropole, and the air was cooling, reviving.
Rip Campbell watched the lights going on, and he saw the riders coming in, moving in down the road he’d ridden earlier in the day, swinging into the main street from those two angles of the
“T.”
Two men paused outside the bank building across the way and glanced up toward his room.
This town knew he’d registered at the hotel, and they were awaiting his next move.
Rip grinned, not quite knowing what that would be himself.
At eight o clock he went downstairs and sauntered into the hotel dining room, taking a seat near the fireplace.
This room was half-filled now, and men looked up at him curiously, giving Rip Campbell the impression that he’d been expected a long while.
After awhile he went into the Kingdom Come Saloon, getting here the same vague impression.
At the long bar men turned to look at him as he wagged for a drink. One small man with a wrinkled brown face slid up alongside of him, studied him in the mirror, and then remarked:
“Cade will see you, friend, in the office.”
Rip downed his drink before replying.
“Where?” he asked.
“Over the Wells-Fargo building,” the puncher murmured.
Rip didn’t say any more, and the small man ambled away without haste.
The Wells-Fargo building was at the head of the “T” intersection, a small brick building.
Rip had noticed it as he was going into the restaurant.
He stood in front of the darkened building a few minutes later.
The windows were heavily barred, but Wells-Fargo had closed for the night.
One light twinkled in the windows up above.
Standing here Rip saw the rider coming out of the darkness, moving at a furious pace.
The man yelled drunkenly, but Rip was on his guard, — having seen this stunt before also.
The horseman cut around the corner just as Rip stepped into the shadow of the doorway.
He flattened himself against the wall, hearing a revolver crack.
The slug passed through the open doorway and thudded into the wooden staircase beyond.
Rip Campbell slid the Navy out of the holster, but it was already too late for a shot.
The rider had kept going and was turning into an alley.
Rip saw men come out of saloons up the street and stare in his direction.
Rip listened to the rider until the sound was gone.
Then he went up the stairs.
A light glowed at the . head, and then a man came out of a door and nodded to him.
It was the small man who’d spoken to him in the Kingdom Come Saloon.
“What’s the shooting?” he asked.
“A drunk,” Rip said quietly, knowing that the man who’d fired that shot had been no more drunk than himself.
The small man held the door open for him and Rip saw the tobacco smoke thick in the room, indicating that more than one man was inside.
He hesitated for a fraction of a second while the small puncher murmured.
“Reckon mister,” Rip Campbell grinned and went in.
Five men were in the room, and one of them was Carl Groggins, several pieces of adhesive tape stuck on his battered face.
With him were the three men who’d watched the fight outside the saloon.
Another man was there—a tall man with powerful shoulders and a shock of golden hair. the strong mouth of a bulldog.
His eyes were amber-colored, narrowing now as he studied the man before him,
“That’s not Dilson,” he said flatly.
He had a cigar in his hand and he stuck it in his jaws now, placing his hands in his pockets.
He rocked on the soles of his shoes, beginning to grin a little.
“Who the devil is he, Morrison?” Carl Groggins snorted.
“A range bum,” you ain’t so tough, Cade Morrison
He had a heavy jaw with’ observed coolly,
“Or one of Black’s’ new riders. I didn’t get your name, friend,” he said to Rip.
“Reckon I didn’t give it,” Rip Campbell told him.
He stood with his back to the door, making sure that he’d closed it behind him.
His hands were at his sides and he watched this Arrow crew intently, seeing the strength in this Cade Morrison.
The mouth was a brutal one, wide, thin-lipped, and the jaw was the jaw of a man who had his own way in many things.
“That won’t get you anywhere, Morrison’ smiled.
“Black send you?” Rip shrugged.
He had these six men in front of him and he intended to keep them there.
The small chap who had brought him in was walking toward the wall, getting over at Rip’s right.
“You can get back where you were, friend,’ Rip observed.
The small puncher stopped and looked at Rip curiously.
There was another room up here with a curtain across the entrance, and Rip Campbell didn’t like that.
“I asked you a question,” Morrison snapped.
“You can go to hell,” Rip told him.
“That’s how far it’ll get you.”
Morrison ripped the cigar from his mouth and took a step forward, the light in his eyes.
Rip Campbell’s right hand dropped to the butt of the Navy Colt and rested there.
“You want some of what your ramrod got?” he asked casually.
“You can step into the street. mister. This place is kind of stuffy,” Cade Morrison started to laugh, big shoulders heaving.
A voice called from the other room:
“Better drop it, kid.”
Rip saw the blue muzzle of a .45 sticking out from behind the curtain, trained on his stomach.
A lean, grizzled man with sun bleached yellow hair poked his face into the room. He was smiling.
“Take his gun,” Cade Morrison said,
Rip Campbell’s fingers lingered on the Navy, weighing his chances. They were very slim at this time.
That tall man with the bleached hair had him covered very completely, and Morrison was probably strong enough in this town to back up any play his punchers might make.
Rip’s fingers slid away from the sun and he watched Carl Groggins moving up to him, a wicked grin on his face.
One of the redhead’s eyes was closed and he peered out of the other as he slid the gunbelt from Rip’s hips and tossed it across the room. Then, rearing back, the Arrow ramrod threw a terrific punch for Rip Campbell’s face.
It was entirely unexpected, but Rip managed to get his head back a little.
The blow was a glancing one, knocking him back against the door. The small puncher came up from the other side, pushed Rip away from the door and stood in front of it.
Cade Morrison was grinning, saying nothing.
“All right,” Rip grated, knowing what was coming.
He lunged toward Groggins, lashing out with his fists.
Groggins had drawn a gun and was trying to slash it across Rip’s face.
“Get him,” Morrison said coolly.
The other punchers closed in.
Rip knocked Groggins to his knees with a blow to the cheek.
He was turning when a gun slapped against the back of his head.
A haze started to lift in front of him.
He whirled around, trying to punch at these men seeing their faces indistinctly.
They were striking at him, knocking him to the floor.
He grabbed the knees of one man and tried to pull himself up, but they threw him off.
Again he heard Cade Morrison’s voice:
“Get him.”
Carl Groggins was up on his feet, plunging in, fists beating into Rip Campbell’s face.
The tall man could feel the, pain and the bite, the taste of blood in his mouth.
They beat him to his knees again, and he felt a sharp boot in his ribs.
The voices were becoming blurred and the haze was thicker.
The darkness rolled around him until all he could remember was Carl Groggins’s leering, brutal face in front of him and how much he wanted to hit it.
Someone had Rip by the shoulders now and he tried to get up and swing.
A man was talking, coolly, soothingly:
“You should have listened to me, friend,” Sheriff Cranston said. Rip Campbell found himself sitting against the wall of the Wells-Fargo building.
It was still dark, and Cranston was squatting beside him.
He felt the pain from his bloodied face, and the bruises on the body where he’d been kicked.
Cranston helped him to his feet and Rip felt for his gunbelt, remembering then that it was gone.
“I’m not asking who did it,” Cranston observed dryly, “but I got my own opinions.”
He started to walk Rip along the street.
“You can wash up in my place, son,” he said.
Rip walked stiffly, saying nothing now, anger making him hot and then cold.
He let Cranston lead him into the office and he sat down while the sheriff got out a basin of water and a towel.
“You’re alive, and’ that’s something.”
“Is it?” Rip asked quietly. “How long was I out there?”
Cranston shrugged.
“I saw you go out of the Kingdom Come at nine o clock,” he said.
the sheriff of Metropole observed. “It was ten when I found you sitting against the wall of the Wells-Fargo building.”
“Any Arrow riders in town?” Rip asked next.
Cranston shook his head.
“Cade Morrison rode out ten minutes ago.”
He wet the towel and washed the blood from Rip’s face.
“This wasn’t your fight to begin with, kid,” he added.
“You’re in the middle of a big war and you’ll get burned.”
“That might be,” Rip agreed tonelessly.
“Nobody knows whose side you’re on,” Cranston grinned, “and they’re both gunning for you.”
“I picked my side,” murmured Rip. “a few minutes ago.”
Sheriff Cranston stepped back and stared at him.
“You’re no sheep man,” he said.
“Where do I find Ed Black?” Rip Campbell wanted to know. Cranston didn’t say anything for a few moments.
“I reckon if I were to pick sides,” he said at last,
“I’d side with Ed myself. Wearing a badge I have to ride the fence, and it’s hell.”
He went on cleaning the cuts on Rip’s face,
“Now that you’re staying, kid.” he said, “you should know what you’re up against. Young Black is bringing sheep into the Basin and he’s got every right in the world to do it, Ed represents the small cattle owners who have been bucking the big Arrow outfit for a dozen years or more, This thing started years ago when Ed’s father and big Jude Morrison, Cade’s uncle, were gunning for each other. Jude got Bill Black, and now the descendants are carrying on the fight.”
Rip Campbell nodded.
Most cattle wars began in much the same manner.
“Cade’s. after Black’s range,” Cranston went on,
“and he’s been squeezing him hard for years. Ed lost a lot of stock. Maybe they strayed, and maybe Cade knows something about it. Anyway, Ed Black knows there’s money in sheep these days and he sees a way to get back on his feet. At the north end of the Basin are a dozen small ranchers who think the same way he does.”
“So the sheep came in last night?” Rip asked,
Cranston’s eyes widened.
“You saw that?”
He went on quickly.
“The small ranchers are up at the north end of the Basin and Arrow is at the south. A hundred and fifty feet of the Metropole River runs between ‘them. In this kind of country cattle and sheep can go together. I’m not saying it’s so all over.”
“Morrison has to drive Black’s woollies out of the country,” Rip smiled.
“Pronto.” Cranston nodded.
“Ed Black is the first to run against Morrison’s orders for the Basin. If he holds out the others, will be running sheep within a few weeks.”
He paused.
“Cade might even make his play tonight. He’s built like that; he has old Jude’s blood in him.”
Rip Campbell purchased another six-gun in the hardware shop at the far end of town.
He was riding out of Metropole in another ten minutes, heading north toward Ed Black’s Flying Cross Ranch.
His face still hurt from the pounding the Arrow men had given to him, but the greater pain was inside and that had to be assuaged. Cranston had given explicit instructions and Rip hugged the west rim of the Basin, splashing across the Metropole River at the fording place.
There was a moon tonight, a thin sliver, sliding in and out of the cloud banks.
Another hour, hugging this low rim of hills which bordered the basin, and he raised the lights of Sam Vane’s Hat outfit.
About a mile beyond Vane’s place was the Flying Cross.
“Sam,” Cranston had said, “might work in with Ed Black in the showdown, but I couldn’t say for sure. They all know what’ll happen if Ed is wiped out by Morrison.”
Rip Campbell sighted the lights of the Flying Cross spread shining on a slope dead ahead.
He pulled up now, proceeding at a more leisurely pace.
Young Black might be expecting unwelcome visitors tonight, and the sight of a man who was supposed to be working for the cattle interests, might set off a nervous gun.
A line of willows grew along the roadway here, terminating at the Flying Cross corral.
Rip walked the horse easily, listening for sounds in the night.
This ranch was very quiet, and then another thought struck him. Black and his crew were most likely out with the sheep for that was where Cade Morrison would strike.
Within twenty-five yards of the silent house, Rip pulled up and scratched his head.
There were lights in the house, but otherwise it seemed deserted. Vaguely, he wondered where Black was grazing his woollies.
The young rancher had probably picked out one of the protected valleys which ran into the basin proper.
Rip was about to lift his voice in a call to the house when a rifle cracked from the darkness of the porch.
The slug kicked up dust at his horse’s feet, and the animal bucked until Rip got it under control.
“I’m alone,” he sang out quickly.
“What do you want?” a woman’s voice demanded.
Rip grinned, remembering the girl on the porch outside the Chesterfield Hotel.
“Ed Black here?” he asked.
He was riding forward when the rifle cracked again.
“Keep your hands up,” the girl said tersely.
Rip Campbell lifted his hands over his head.
He stopped a few yards from the porch.
A slim shadow darted down the steps, rifle in hand.
The girl came around in back of Rip and slid the six-gun from the holster.
“Kind of nervous,” he said mildly. “This is a friendly visit, ma’am.”
The horse stepped into the light from one of the windows and Rip suggested she could see him clearly.
“You’re one of Morrison’s gun hands,” Sara Black said accusingly. “I should shoot you down.”
“Morrison’s crew nearly did that for you,” Rip told her. She could see his battered face and she was silent.
“T rode in here looking for a job,” Rip went on.
“Everybody thinks I’m either a cattle or a sheep man.”
“What are you?” she asked curiously.
“Sheep now,” Rip said quietly,
“I’m looking for Ed Black.”
“You could be a spy sent out by Morrison,” Sara Black observed coolly.
Very distinctly, Rip Campbell heard the thud of horses’ hoofs coming down that willow-lined road.
He slid out of the saddle, slapped the buckskin on the flank and watched it trot away toward the corral.
Without a word he reached forward and took the six-gun from the girl’s hands.
“Get up on the porch,” he murmured.
She obeyed without a word, but she held her ground when Rip suggested that she go inside the house.
“This is my home,” Sara Black stated. “I was born here.”
Rip heard the two horsemen stop out near the corral.
Like himself, they were evidently puzzled by the fact that there had been no challenge.
He could hear them whispering out there in the darkness, and then a voice called sharply.
“Hello, the house.”
Rip Campbell stiffened, and Sara Black murmured,
“Groggins—Arrow foreman.”
“Inside,” Rip whispered tersely.
“There’ll be gunplay.”
This time she didn’t hesitate, catching the chillness in his voice. He heard the door slide shut, and he was sure the two men had heard it also, They’d been walking toward the house, but they stopped now— twenty yards away. Rip caught the glint of metal, moonlight reflecting on the barrel of a six-gun. He stood up in the shadows, his own gun in hand. The buckskin had pulled up by the corral and one of the two men went over to look at him. age
“Here’s the horse that bucko was riding,” a man whispered.
Rip recognized the voice as belonging to the small man with the wrinkled face.
“What in thunder’s he doing here?”
Groggins growled.
“After your hide, Carl,” Rip Campbell called softly.
At the same time he skipped across the porch.
Carl Groggins’s gun exploded just as Rip reached the porch steps. The leaden slug slammed into the boards, and Groggins yelled as he saw Rip coming down the steps.
He tried to shoot again, swiveling his gun quickly to line it on the running cowboy.
Rip Campbell threw two shots, both of them going home.
He was still running forward, feeling the hot breath of a bullet as the small man opened on him, and then ran around the corral. Groggins was down, muttering to himself, a gurgling sound in his throat which could not be simulated.
Rip moved around him, hearing the door open to the rear.
A horseman hammered away up the road.
“Mister?” Sara Black called. *Mister … you all right?”
“Damn him,” murmured Carl Groggins. “He is.”
When Rip knelt down beside Carl, the man was dead.
Sara ran up breathlessly.
Rip Campbell struck a match and held it up to Groggins’s face. When the match went out he stood up.
“I reckon you’d better tell me where your brother is,” he said slowly. ‘Morrison will be on the way with his crew now. He sent these two chaps to see whether anyone was here.”
“I’ll take you,” the girl said.
She was looking at him askew, as if she were wondering what manner of man he was.
“It ain’t a nice thing,” Rip said moodily, “when five or six go on one.”
“No,” Sara whispered.
She came out of the barn a few minutes later with a saddled horse.
“Ed’s up at the mouth of Long Valley,” she explained. “He’s holed up in the ruins of old Fort Hartley with three-men. There is no other way into the valley except past the fort.”
Rip Campbell slid into the saddle and followed the girl as she led him away from the house.
“It’ll be a fight to the finish now,” the girl observed, “with Groggins dead.”
“Didn’t your brother expect that?” Rip asked quietly.
“Yes,” she said.
They reached the old fort in twenty minutes and a man rose out of a heap of broken rock to challenge them.
“All right, George,” Sara said.
“Jehoshaphat!” George growled.
“What you doing’ here, Miss Black?”
“Where’s Ed?” the girl wanted to know.
George sang out.
“Ed.”
Rip Campbell sat on the buckskin noting the position of this fort.
A stream of water, probably a brook running into the Metropole River, flowed past the abandoned fort.
The walls were down for the most part, but there were a few brick chimney places and heaps of rubble scattered about. Beyond, in the valley, Rip heard the bleating of sheep.
He caught the smell and he grimaced.
This was his fight, he remembered, not because he liked sheep but because Cade Morrison disliked them.
Ed Black came up, a slim, youngish man with a lean face.
He walked back with them to a fire they had burning in a gutted cellar, and Rip could see the lines around the man’s mouth.
“You shouldn’t have come here, Sara.” Black said sternly.
“I brought another hand,” explained Sara.
Rip studied the three men with young Black.
George, the sentinel, seemed to be the oldest, a grizzled long-jawed man with faded blue eyes.
A kid of about eighteen, but with a hard face and carroty hair, stood back in the shadows glaring at Rip suspiciously.
The third man Rip had heard called Nevada.
He was short, sawed-off, with very broad shoulders, and a perpetual smile on his face.
Rip Campbell watched these three —Black’s crew, seeing only Nevada as potentially dangerous.
The kid wanted to be hard, but he might break and run.
George had shot his bolt years ago and he wouldn’t be a match for the tough crowd Cade Morrison would bring out with him this night, or the next.
Ed Black himself was no gun fighter, but he was stubborn.
he’d sworn that he would bring sheep into the country and he’d done it.
Now he had to back up his bluff with cold lead.
“You were one of Morrison’s men,” Black said quietly.
“What happened?”
“He just killed Carl Groggins,” Sara cut in. “In our front yard, Ed. Groggins fired first.”
Rip saw the tough kid’s eyes widen.
Nevada’s smile broadened.
George rolled a cigarette and studied the tall man with interest.
“I rode into the Basin, looking for a job,” Rip Campbell said without emotion.
“Morrison figured I was one of his men—a gun hand he’d hired, sight unseen. When he found out I wasn’t, he had his boys take me on.”
Ed Black looked into Rip’s bruised and battered face and nodded sympathetically.
“I’m fighting Morrison from now on,” Rip said. “I fight with you or I fight alone.”
He shrugged.
“Alone it will take longer.”
“We can use you,” Black assured him.
“Get a man back up on those rocks,’ Rip told him.
Young Black blinked and then nodded to George.
Nevada was still smiling.
“Seems like I run across you in the silver hills,” he said at last.
“Around Leesville?”
“I was in Leesville,’ Rip said briefly.
“Town marshal.” Nevada chuckled. “Ed, you better let this hombre run the fight from now on. He lives on it.”
Black stared into the fire.
“We intend to hold the valley as long as we can,” he stated.
“Morrison can bring out two or three times as many men as I have, but we’ll try to hold it anyway.”
“The girl should be home,” Rip said, without looking at Sara.
“I’m thinking’ Morrison will come out tonight when he learns Groggins is dead. He’s not the kind can let that stand till the sun comes up. Guess you know that.”
Sara looked at Rip, and then at her brother.
She was holding a riding quirt.in her hands, swinging it.
“Nobody at the house,” Nevada stated, “but a dead man, and he ain’t much company for a pretty gal.”
“Ride to Sam Vane’s place,” Ed Black told his sister. “You’ll be safe there.”
Rip Campbell watched the girl walk her horse away into the darkness..
She wasn’t excited, and she wasn’t afraid.
She’d seen Carl Groggins die and there had been no hysterics.
“Sam should be in this,” the red haired kid grated.
“Damn his soul.”
“We’ll fight them alone.” Ed Black said. “I started this.”
“But the rest of these small ranchers will reap the rewards,” Nevada smiled.
“Horses!” George sang out from his post.
“Plenty of ’them.” Rip stepped forward and kicked out the fire.
“Where are your horses?” he asked suddenly.
Black was about to run up and join George.
He stopped now,
“We’re not leaving this place,” he said flatly.
“These other boys have a right to live,” Rip said, “so they can fight another day.”
“We got the animals upon the slope behind the fort,” Nevada told him.
“We can get out that way if Morrison breaks through and surrounds us.”
“Up front,” Rip called sharply.
“Scatter out and let them fire first.”
“Coming fast.” George called urgently.
Rip Campbell squatted among the rocks a few yards from the older man.
He could hear the beat of many horses now, and he saw the dark shapes bobbing in the saddles.
“Must be a dozen of ’them.” George said laconically.
“All right,” shouted Black.
“Pull up, Morrison.”
The horsthemen stopped abruptly.
Rip could hear them talking.
Cade Morrison’s voice came softly.
“Ride ’them down.”
The Arrow men scattered and came straight forward, one flank moving toward the valley entrance, and the others heading for the fort.
The kid, to Rip’s left, let out an oath, and then began to fire wildly. Rip opened up on the riders in front of him.
The light was bad and they were moving fast, presenting poor targets.
A rider came within fifteen yards of his gun, and Rip shot him from the saddle.
He heard the kid still swearing, and then Nevada’s gun started to boom from the rear.
“They’re getting in behind us,” the blocky man yelled.
Rip raced back, stumbling over the rough ground.
He emptied the six-gun at the charging men, saw them break and swerve to the right.
“It’s hot,” Nevada chuckled.
A slug had grazed his cheek, cutting the skin.
Blood slid down from his chin.
“Coming again,” George called softly.
Morrison’s men had gone back, but they were charging once more.
“Where’s the kid?” George wanted to know.
“Where’s Alfie?”
Ed Black was swearing now.
“He took a piece of lead, George.”
Rip Campbell made his way over to where Black was crouching beside Alfie.
“Bad?” he asked.
“He’s still breathing,” muttered Black.
“I don’t like this.”
“You wanted a war,” Rip said. “You got it, friend.”
He reached down and grabbed Alfie around the shoulders.
“We’re pulling out,” he added.
“Get the boys up on the slope.”
George and Nevada were firing steadily from their hiding places.
“They’re crawling up,” Nevada told Rip.
“Can’t see a damn one of them out there.”
“We’re taking the kid up to the horses,” Rip whispered, ‘We’ll wait for you.”
“Where we going?” asked Nevada curiously.
“We’ll see,” Rip said.
They crawled up the slope, having a hard time with the wounded Alfie.
The kid started to groan once, and Rip felt the blood on his chest.
“I figured we got at least two of them,” George observed.
“That makes maybe ten to worry about.”
The horses were concealed in a little hollow up beyond the brim of the hill.
Rip got Alfie into the saddle and waited until Nevada came up, panting.
Ed Black wasn’t saying anything.
He just sat in the saddle and waited for Rip to do the talking.
“You won’t have any sheep after tonight,” Rip stated.
“You knew that, Black.”
“I had a thousand head in that flock,” the rancher said.
“It was a test to see if Morrison could drive me out. If he couldn’t I figured on bringing in another thousand, and that’ll break me.”
“You figure on running?” Rip Campbell asked next.
“I’ve been run out now,” Black ‘muttered miserably.
The crew waited restlessly.
They heard a score of shots far up the valley and Ed Black winced as he heard the Arrow men shooting down his sheep.
“This Morrison licks a man by knocking him down,” Rip Campbell observed. “He stays on top because the other man don’t get up.”
“What would you do?” asked Black almost listlessly.
“I’m heading for the Arrow Ranch,” Rip told him quietly.
“Any of you boys feel like coming’ along?”
Nevada let out a soft whoop, and George swore.
Rip Campbell swung the buckskin around and headed south.
He didn’t look back but he knew they were all coming, even Alfie, rocking in the saddle, but conscious now.
George had tied up the bullet hole in the kid’s shoulder and he’d be able to hold out until they reached a doctor.
“Where we going?” Alfie’ whispered once.
“Arrow Ranch,” George chuckled.
“We’re going to welcome Cade Morrison when he comes home.”
“Damn!” Alfie grinned.
Then they were out in the Basin again with Rip relinquishing the lead to Nevada.
“This is the last place they’ll be looking for us,” the stocky man said as they rode past the big Arrow corrals.
There were no lights in the bunkhouse, but a cook came out of the kitchen door, blinking, a white apron round his waist.
“Pack your stuff,” Rip “Move into Metropole.”
The cook was still staring at him when Rip kicked in the bunkhouse door and fumbled around till he found the table and the lamp.
The Flying Cross men watched him as he kicked a few mattresses and blankets together on the floor and then dropped the lamp on the heap.
In a few moments the flames were leaping toward the ceiling.
“We’re burning ’them out.”
Ed Black stood in the firelight outside the door, a worried look in his eyes.
Rip Campbell paused beside him.
“This building worth as much as your sheep?” he asked grimly.
“No,” Black answered.
“They asked for a war,” Rip’s voice was brusque.
“Now they got it. I’m fighting them here, and I’m fighting them in the hills. I’ll fight Arrow wherever I find the brand.”
“You got a man with you,” Nevada told him.
“And another,” George chimed in.
“I stick with my outfit,” Alfie said weakly.
Only Ed Black said nothing as the flames broke through the roof and they had to retreat because of the heat.
“Hold tight, Alfie,”’ Rip told the kid,
“We’re hanging around till Morrison comes back. Then we’re heading for a doctor.”
“I’m all right,” Alfie growled.
“Sounds like them,” George said.
They heard a distant shout.
“Scatter,” ordered Rip. “Let ’them come into the light.”
The Flying Cross crew took cover behind the corral and the barn. Rip squatted down behind one of the pillars on the porch.
The Arrow yard was lit up with the light of day.
Sparks flew across the intervening space between the bunk house and the barn, catching the hay in the open loft.
That, too, started to burn.
“Give them blue blazes!” Alfie yelled shrilly, and Rip Campbell smiled.
This kid was finding himself in the heat of battle.
He had been trying to be tough all along, but he wasn’t sure of himself.
Now with a piece of lead in his shoulder he was ready to face the big boss of Metropole.
Several riders spurred up almost into the light, and then swerved away.
Rip heard the hoof beats around the back of the house, and then Cade Morrison’s yell.
Bursting through the door, Rip tumbled through the darkened rooms and into the kitchen.
The cook, a fat man with a queue, was coming out of an adjoining room.
Rip waved the gun at him, chased him back inside, and then opened the screen door leading to a smaller back porch.
It was darker back here but there was sufficient light for him to see two men hopping out of their saddles.
As they hit the ground, six guns in hand, Rip called softly:
“Hold it.”
“One of them was a lantern-jawed man Rip had seen in the room over the Wells-Fargo office.
This chap had come at Rip with a gun barrel.
He hesitated now for a fraction of a second, blazed one fast shot toward the porch, and then tried to zip into the shadows.
Rip Campbell’s slug caught him with one foot in the air.
He died before the toe touched the ground again.
The other man had darted away to the left and was behind a stalled buckboard.
Rip saw the flare of his gun and he heard the slug dig itself into the wall of the building.
He fired at the flare, missed, and then stepped back inside the door. There was an open window, looking out on the rear yard, and Rip stood beside it until the Arrow man made an attempt to cross to the corral.
He picked this man off, dropping him within a few feet of the lantern-jawed fellow.
The shooting was heavy again in the front of the house, and Rip retreated through the rooms.
Coming out the front door, he saw George on the ground, shaking his head stupidly, gun in hand.
Nevada was crouching behind the burning barn, refilling his six-gun.
Ed Black had his rifle up and it shot orange flame as an Arrow rider tried to charge into the enclosure.
A man had crept around the barn and was coming up on Nevada’s rear.
Rip Campbell let out a loud whoop.
He shot hastily to warn the Flying Cross man.
His shot missed, but Nevada, spinning around very fast, didn’t.
“All right, bucko,” another voice called from the end of the porch. Rip Campbell had heard that voice before.
Cade Morrison, big, blond haired, hatless, face tight with hatred. was looking over the low railing, his six-gun resting on the wood. The distance was only about twenty feet and a man couldn’t miss at that range.
Rip made his play, knowing that he was holding the short end.
He looked into the muzzle of Morrison’s gun and swung his own around.
Something struck him on the left side, spinning him around, but he retained his grip on the six-gun, managed to get it up, and emptied the cylinders,
He was sinking down against the wall, looking for Morrison’s head over the railing, but not seeing him.
Nevada was yelling, and then Ed Black came up on the porch.
“Riders coming!” Black shouted.
“You all right, Campbell?”
Rip looked at him stupidly.
There was no strength left in his body.
He felt blood sliding down his chest and he tried to locate the wound.
Nevada came up on the porch, face flushed.
“Sam Vane’s here,” he roared,
“and Fretheman Brown— and a lot of the other ranchers from our end. They’re making’ Morrison call his bluff.”
Rip Campbell saw the riders coming in, more than a dozen of them. Thea he saw a dark-haired girl, hatless, face white.
“Hey!” George called softly.
He was up on his knees, holding his right arm.
He pointed to the body of a man sprawled out on the ground at the far end of the porch.
“I reckon Cade got it this time.”
Ed Black ran over and looked down.
“He’s dead,” he muttered.
“One of your shots got him, mister.” Rip smiled wryly.
“One of his got me too, friend.” he asserted.
Sara Black leaped from her horse and came toward them at a run. Alfie came up the steps also tottering, gun in hand, grinning foolishly.
Ed Black was down beside Rip cutting open his shirt.
“You can’t kill that hombre.” Nevada said, “He’s too tough.”
“This is close enough,” muttered Black.
“It’s low in the shoulder but Doc can fix him up.”
Rip took a deep breath and grinned up at the girl who was kneeling beside him.
“I reckon this wasn’t my day, ma’am,” he said. “Your brother can run all the sheep he wants to now.”
“We’ll have no trouble on that score,” Black assured him.
“I’m calling a meeting of the ranchers at the north end of the Basin. We’ll establish our line so that sheep can graze in the valleys and slopes of the Basin, and cattle on the best grass.”
He paused.
“I’m running cattle as well as sheep, Campbell,” he stated quietly.
“If you want a job. I need a good foreman for the beef.”
“My line,” Rip told him, “I don’t like the smell of the other things.”
“You’ll take the job?” asked Black.
Rip nodded.
He looked at Sara Black, seeing the smile break out on her face.
Gold fever ran high in Mammoth Camp, touching all save Rip Campbell, the piano player and the old outlaw, Ned Jones.
As his fingers flashed over the keyboard of the battered piano in the Tamarack House, Rip tried to make himself believe that music was his life.
That guns and death would claim no part.
And yet as he stared out at the crowd which packed the big smoke-filled room, his blue eyes were troubled and there was a set, strained expression on his young face, as if he didn’t believe his own thoughts.
Without missing a note, Rip leaned over to the bald-headed oldster, who sat next to him, scraping away on an ancient fiddle.
“You shouldn’t have come here, Ned,” Rip said sharply, his voice carrying above the clatter of the piano and the squeak of the violin.
“If he can’t be happy, he’s better off dead.”
“Or in the penitentiary at Carson City,” Rip said bluntly.
“It’ll be life this time if they catch you.”
“They won’t.” Up on the small stage above the piano, Happy Hinds, a juggler, was doing fancy things with Indian clubs,
“It was too early to come out of the hills. You should have waited another month,”
Old Ned Jones looked at Rip over the top of the violin.
He was as ancient and battered as the fiddle under his chin.
“I’m through running, Rip. Me playing fiddle to your piano is the only happiness I got left.”
While Rip and old Ned Jones played soft music, no one paid much attention to the act.
Night in Mammoth Camp meant only an interlude when men could drink and gamble and await the rise of the sun, so that they could return to their diggings for more gold.
The hooded overhead lamps caught the feverish light in the eyes of every gambler, every miner, every dancehall girl in the Tamarack House, as their thoughts turned to the yellow metal which men were digging out of the earth, here at the foot of the Sierras.
Rip Campbell’s thoughts were not on gold or his claim at the foot of Cloudy Mountain.
He was thinking of the debt he owed Ned Jones.
His forehead was pinched in a frown and a lock of yellow hair fell across his brow as he bent to pound out a chord for the finish of Happy Hinds’ act.
There was a splatter of applause and the juggler ducked into the wings off the small stage.
Old Ned Jones put down his fiddle and ran a hand over his seamed, leathery face.
He still showed signs of the prison pallor put there by seven years spent behind the walls of the pen at Carson City.
“I got lonesome up there in the hills,” Ned said, as if trying to justify his sudden appearance in Mammoth Camp.
“We’re partners, ain’t we?” Rip stared moodily at the crowd which milled around the big place.
“What about the Lancaster brothers?” he asked Ned.
The old man lifted a mug of beer from the floor by his chair. He took a sip and sat there, staring at Rip, ignoring the fuzz the foam had put on his long gray mustache.
“If the Lancaster’s come, I’ll be ready for them,” he said in his wheezy old voice. “Don’t be mad, Rip. I had to come.”
When Rip thought of the Lancaster his cheeks grew hot and a cold rage simmered in his stomach.
Automatically his hand went to his left side, where a bullet from Mitch Lancaster’s gun had almost taken his life.
And as he sat there before the piano, he could not forget that he was alive only because of Ned Jones.
He remembered the adventure of coming across the mountains from San Francisco with a theatrical troupe, six months before.
The dazzle and glitter of Virginia City; the fabulous Piper’s Opera House.
The old man with the pale face, who was Ned Jones, hanging around with a battered fiddle under his arm.
Then the night backstage when Mitch Lancaster had come in feeling mean and full of whiskey.
He came to take out one of the girls in the show.
Seeing that Mitch Lancaster was drunk, Rip said,
“Better wait until another night. Rose told me to tell you she doesn’t feel well.”
Whereupon Lancaster cursed at Rip and accused him of horning in. The two men went at it, and when Rip knocked Lancaster spinning, the man came up with an oath and a smoking gun in his hand.
His bullet dropped Rip to the floor.
That was when old Ned Jones who had been hanging around the stage door with his fiddle, threw a slug from a big gun that caught Lancaster in the leg.
And as he lay there on the floor Rip remembered Lancaster’s words:
“Damn you, Ned Jones. I’ll get you for this. Me and my brother will be on your tail till hell freezes over!”
The show moved back to San Francisco, but Rip was weak and sick.
And as the weeks passed, he got back his strength in the little shack where Ned lived on the edge of Virginia City.
There was blood poisoning and a long battle, but the old man pulled Rip through.
All those things Rip remembered and he knew he owed a debt.
But he believed there was a way to pay that debt.
Pay it without guns, without the smell of powder smoke and the letting of blood.
And he must find a way.
Bert Tolliver, who owned the Tamarack House, came over, leaving a trail of cigar smoke in his wake.
He put his big hands on the brass rail that set the musicians apart from the vest of the crowd.
“Nice fiddling, old-timer,” he said to Ned Jones.
“All the musicians who come here to work quit to dig gold after the first day. That is, all except Rip. He does his digging in the daytime, his playing at night. Rip’s a smart boy.”
Rip let his fingers run over the keyboard as he looked up at Tolliver, trying to read what lay behind those black eyes.
He saw the sheen of expensive cloth in his black suit, the sparkle of the diamond in his shirt.
For the month that Rip had been playing the piano in the Tamarack House, he had never gotten close to Tolliver.
The man was cold, aloof, and yet there were times when his eyes seemed to lose their frost and a human smile touched his lips.
Rip said, “He’s a friend of mine, of Ned Jones. Passing through. He isn’t staying in Mammoth.”
“We’ll let the old man decide that,” Tolliver said coldly.
He turned to Ned Jones, who sat hunched in his chair, his old eyes wary.
“Stick with me and do your fiddling. I’ll make it worth your while.” Before Ned Jones could answer, Tolliver turned his broad back and held up his hands, bellowing for silence.
The noise in the big saloon tapered off, as all eyes swung to the big man.
Folks said that Tolliver had won the Tamarack House on the turn of a card.
Since that time, his was the only voice of authority in Mammoth.
So far no one had questioned that authority, Tolliver’s voice was a rumble in the big room.
“We’ve got some hard-working boys here,” he said, jerking a heavy thumb over his shoulder at Rip and Ned behind the brass rail.
“If you gents want to dance, don’t forget to pay off.”
From then on, silver dollars and gold pieces were tossed over the brass rail at Rip and Ned Jones.
And Rip saw the old man’s face light up as he tucked his fiddle under his bony chin.
The dance floor was crowded as miners and cowboys and Easterners in white shirts and low-heeled shoes, swung Tolliver’s percentage girls to the music.
And as the music rolled on and sweat put a shine on Rip Campbell’s tanned face, he forgot about the Lancaster brothers and their guns.
Then when he and Ned Jones paused for breath and the dance floor cleared, it was all brought back to him.
Ned pulled a long-barreled gun from his belt and laid it on the floor by his chair.
“Can’t get my wind with that shooting iron poking me in the belly,” Ned Jones said with a grin.
Rip’s eyes were on the gun and he felt his mouth go dry.
He was thinking of Mitch Lancaster and the pain and shock of the bullet from his gun.
He went over to where Bert Tolliver leaned against the wall, his somber eyes on the drunken crowd.
When Tolliver saw him, he asked:
“Come to take my offer for your claim?”
Rip shook his head.
Tolliver looked down at the piano player, seeing the clean-cut features, the yellow hair and metallic blue eyes.
“You say you want music here,” Rip said.
“Will you help my friend, the fiddle player, if there’s trouble?”
For a minute Tolliver didn’t answer.
Then he said:
“I reckon a man like Ned Jones can take care of himself.”
Rip’s blue eyes showed their surprise.
“You know Ned?” Tolliver grunted.
“Who hasn’t heard of the fiddle-playing curly wolf who used to ride as tough a bunch as ever come out of the hills? His boys rode into a bushwhack trap one time and Ned was the only one to come out alive. He just got out of the pen at Carson City after doing a stretch.”
“That isn’t any sign he isn’t all right now.”
For a minute, Tolliver didn’t answer, then he looked over at the railed-in enclosure beneath the stage where Ned Jones was sawing away on his old fiddle.
“I wouldn’t bet a plugged dollar on him, I hear the law’s looking for him again.”
Rip’s face whitened.
“You know the story. I guess there’s no use in trying.”
He turned to go back to the piano and Tolliver said,
“Who wants Ned’s hide nailed to the fence this time?”
Rip swung back, new hope showing in his eyes.
“The Lancaster brothers, They’re detectives for the Mountain and Central Line. A month ago the station agent at Washoe Junction was held up and five thousand in bullion that was waiting to be shipped, was stolen. The Lancaster brothers say it was Ned and one of his old partners.”
A cold smile rippled for a moment on Tolliver’s lips.
“That sounds like Ned Jones, all right.”
Rip shook his head emphatically.
“He didn’t do it. Washoe Junction is a good thirty miles from Virginia City, where Ned and I were living. He was with me the night of the robbery, dead drunk.”
“You’ve got a good claim up on Cloudy Mountain; you’ve got a good job here,” Tolliver told him.
“You’re a smart kid, Rip, but you’re wasting your time with Ned Jones. You can’t reform an old coot like him. He’ll drop that fiddle and go gunning for some gent’s poke the minute the sign is right. I’ve seen too many of them.”
Rip’s face went tight.
“He saved my life and stuck by me when my friends pulled out and left me for dead. I haven’t forgotten that.”
Only by a slight lift of his heavy black brows did Tolliver show that the earnest note in Rip’s voice had touched him.
“What you want me to do?” he asked finally.
“You want music here.
“Why can’t you discourage the Lancaster’s if they show up? You just about run things in Mammoth Camp.”
Tolliver smiled thinly at the lasts
“Thanks for the compliment.”
He put a match to the cigar he took from his breast pocket. When he had it going. he said:
“You’re taking it the hard way, teaming up with Ned Jones. But if that’s the way you want it, I’ll see what I can do.”
Dawn was graying the eastern sky when Rip and old Ned Jones trudged down the main street of Mammoth Camp toward Rip’s claim on Big Fish Creek.
“You stay out at the diggings,” Rip told Ned.
“Keep out of sight until we’re sure the Lancaster’s didn’t follow you when you quit the hills.”
But Ned Jones was stubborn.
And that night when Rip went down the slant toward the garish lights of Mammoth Camp, old Ned Jones walked at his side, fiddle case under his arm.
Rip made another plea as they neared the town.
There was a new light in Ned’s eyes as he looked at Rip.
“After a gent’s spent most of his life riding a smoky trail and took seven years at Carson pen, he ain’t worried about the future.”
Ned patted the old fiddle case with a weathered hand.
“I can drop this and make my music with a six shooter, if the Lancaster’s come!”
“You should have stuck to music instead of the gun,” Rip said and regretted his words the moment they were uttered.
But Ned Jones only smiled as they walked on down toward Mammoth Camp.
“Music and guns do mix, Rip. A drunk schoolteacher come out to-our ranch when I was a kid. He left St. Louis to get away from his wife. He was a long-haired duck with a solemn face and he taught me to play the fiddle. But afterwards he took another name, and folks got to know him as Smoky Jack Rogers, as tough a gun-slammer as ever rode a long trail. Smoky Jack Rogers liked the owl hoot; I never did. It was badge-toters like the Lancaster’s that pushed me into it.”
Rip was thoughtful for a moment, as they swung into the main street of Mammoth Camp.
“I still say you can keep out of trouble and avoid using guns. But you have to hold in your temper and figure another way out.”
Ned Jones laughed at that.
“Mitch Lancaster wasn’t bothering with such fancy stuff the night he put a slug in you at Virginia City.”
And Rip felt his cheeks grow hot, for he knew the old man spoke the truth. Rip Campbell expected trouble.
He could tell by the way his fingers tightened over the piano keys, by the tense feeling in his wrists.
It was just before midnight when the Lancaster’s walked in and sat with their backs to the wall by the front door.
Rip shot a quick glance at Ned; but the old man had not seen the pair of railroad detectives.
“Going to stretch my legs,’ Rip told Ned.
“Scratch out a number on your fiddle.”
He wondered if Ned caught the strained note in his voice.
He guessed not, for the old man swung into a tune and the dance floor filled up.
Rip’s knees felt weak as he walked over to where Bert Tolliver stood at the end of the bar.
He looked up at the big gambler and nodded toward the front door.
“The Lancaster’s just came in,” he said, and stood there, waiting for some emotion to show on Tolliver’s cold face.
“Anybody can come here and that includes the Lancaster’s. But he can drink as long as he doesn’t start trouble,” Tolliver said.
“That goes for railroad detectives as well as anybody else.”
“But you said you’d help.”
Tolliver looked at the end of the cold cigar he took from his lips.
“I only said that I’d see what I could do.”
“What if Ned and the Lancaster’s shoot it out here?”
There was a thread of tension in Rip’s voice. “Ned won’t go to prison without a fight.”
“You’ve got to play the cards the way they fall,” Tolliver said.
“You’ll learn that after you’ve been in this country a while.”
Anger brought dark blood to Rip Campbell’s cheeks.
He turned on his heel and threaded his way through the crowd.
So far, the jam of customers in the big saloon had screened Ned Jones from the eyes
But any minute they might spot the old outlaw.
When Mitch Lancaster saw Rip walking toward him, his narrow, vicious face went tight with rage.
He started to get out of his chair but Carl Lancaster put a big hand on his brother’s wrist, forcing him — back down.
Carl Lancaster was a good seventy pounds heavier than his brother. His face was square and his eyes were a dirty green, murky as unwashed bottle glass.
“You’re the damn piano player that got me a bullet!” Mitch Lancaster said.
He glared up at Rip who stood beside the table.
Then he turned to his brother.
“Ned Jones put a slug in my leg on account of this gent.”
A cold smile touched Carl Lancaster’s big mouth.
“That slug was worth a lot of money,” he said softly. Rip leaned forward, his slim hands resting on the table top. His stomach seemed to get hollow and cold, but he fought to keep his voice level.
“I know why you’re here, so let’s not beat around the bush.” Mitch Lancaster’s thin lips curled.
“You know a hell of a lot then.”
At Rip’s words. Carl Lancaster’s green eyes had narrowed.
He lifted a big hand to silence his brother who was at the point of speaking again.
“Go ahead, let’s hear some more,” he said to Rip.
“Why don’t you give Ned Jones a chance?” Rip said earnestly.
“I know he didn’t pull that holdup at Washoe Junction.”
At mention of Ned name, both brothers stiffened.
Carl Lancaster’s eyes showed mild surprise.
“How come you’re sure Ned ain’t guilty?”
“He was with me the day of the holdup. And he was too drunk to move.”
The two brothers exchanged glances.
A tight smile played over Mitch Lancaster’s lips and there was a light of sudden understanding in his eyes.
He cocked his head to one side, as if hearing the squeaky fiddle for the first time.
“That, I take it. is Ned Jones, sawing away as usual,” Mitch Lancaster said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed. Rip’s face went tight, whereupon Carl, Lancaster said:
“We’re on our way to Los Angeles. But we can take time out to haul Ned Jones back to Carson City.” Mitch Lancaster’s mouth was a thin line across his face.
“The Mountain and Central will pay good money for Ned Jones dead or alive. It don’t matter which to me. Personally I’d like to put a slug in him, sort of to pay him back for what he did to me.”
All the time Mitch Lancaster had been talking, horrible realization was dawning slowly on Rip Campbell.
He tried to swallow the hard lump in his throat.
“You didn’t follow Ned here?” he asked, a note of strain in his voice. Carl Lancaster shook his head.
“You talked too soon, kid.”
Then he leaned his heavy arms on the table, his voice lowering to a confidential tone.
“The Mountain and Central Line is quite a ways from here, kid. This is California, not Ned. We might forget about Ned Jones—if the price was right.”
Rip licked his lips and Mitch Lancaster took his cue from his brother.
“All we’re interested in is the dinero Ned’s hide will bring.”
There was a moment when Rip tried to get his thoughts into a sensible pattern.
Ned Jones had quit playing and the dance floor was beginning to clear.
Cold fear lodged in Rip’s stomach when he thought of what might happen if Ned spotted the Lancaster brothers.
Then somebody yelled for more music, and the old fiddle began its sing-song wail once again.
Rip let the air out of his lungs and looked down at the pair of railroad detectives at the table.
Rip pushed back a chair, sat down at the table with the two men.
“I’ll raise the money. How… how much will you take?”
“Three thousand,” answered Carl Lancaster.
“The Mountain and Central price is five. We’ll take a loss because we’re in a hurry to get to Los Angeles.”
“Give me until tomorrow,” Rip said.
There was no emotion, no feeling at all showing on Carl Lancaster’s face.
‘‘Might be we could make a deal. It’ll be tomorrow morning or nothing, kid.” Rip nodded.
“But keep out of sight. If Ned sees you he might start shooting.” Mitch Lancaster grinned crookedly.
“Suits me.”
His brother shook his head.
“We’ll take the three thousand. And don’t forget. There was two in on that holdup at Washoe Junction. You admitted that you was with Ned Jones that night.”
A flash of heat and cold passed through Rip’s body.
He opened his mouth to say something, but Mitch Lancaster didn’t give him a chance.
“Don’t forget, you may be buying’ your own freedom with that three thousand.”
Then they were gone, pushing through the crowd that milled around the swing doors.
Rip started for the piano, then changed his mind.
He went down a corridor that branched off the hall leading to the dressing rooms behind the small stage.
He was conscious of the cold sweat on his brow when he knocked on the door of Bert Tolliver’s office.
Inside the small office, he found the owner of the Tamarack House counting stacks of gold coins.
Tolliver looked up at Rip and at the gold.
“Beats digging it out of the ground.”
Rip nodded and Tolliver took a cigar from a box on the desk, licked the wrapper and settled back in his swivel chair.
“What’s on your mind, kid?”
“You told me that if I ever wanted to sell my claim, you’d buy it. I’m here to sell.”
Rip was conscious of old Ned’s screeching fiddle, the mumble of voices, the clink of glassware from the big room.
A fleeting smile crossed Tolliver’s lips.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said bluntly.
“I’ve got more money out now than is safe. I don’t want to extend myself any more at the present time.”
Dark blood touched Rip’s cheeks and he leaned forward in sudden anger.
“Listen, Tolliver, you didn’t change your mind that quick. You’ve got something up your sleeve.” Tolliver stared at Rip through the blue sereen of tobacco smoke from his cigar.
“I’m a gambler. I only bet on a sure thing.”
The words of the big man stung Rip, but he fought to control his_ temper.
While he gathered his thoughts, he forced his eyes from Tolliver’s face, seeing the big wall safe in the corner, the glass gun case above it filled with all sorts of fancy weapons.
“I guess out here it’s dog eat dog. San Francisco was bad enough. But it was never like this never this rotten.”
For an instant Tolliver’s eyes glittered, then he shrugged his heavy shoulders.
“Remember what I told you about playing the cards as they fall?” Rip shook his head.
“Yesterday you wanted my claim, Today you’re backing down.”
“1 felt sorry for you, kid, that’s all, You’re a piano player, and a good one. You’ll stiffen your fingers in time, digging in that muck all day, But it looks as if your claim at Cloudy Mountain isn’t worth the price of the land. No claim at that end of the creek has paid out. The gold’s at the other end.”
“Then you don’t want it?”
“I don’t want it. You’ve got to play it smart out here. And that’s what you’re not doing. Teaming up with Ned Jones will get you nothing but a bullet in the back or a hang rope.”
Anger was shooting a flame into Rip’s mind.
He backed to the door.
“You won’t buy my claim because you saw me talking to the Lancaster’s, You think I’ll either leave with Ned or get killed by the Lancaster’s. Either way you think you can step in and take over my claim.”
Bert Tolliver flicked the diamond in his black tie and seemed to be thinking of something to say.
“You better watch your tongue, kid. Some men would kill you for that.”
Then that fleeting smile returned to his lips.
“Get out there and play something. You’ve got plenty of time to figure a way out. And remember what I told you. Play the cards as they fall.”
Rip Campbell went out into the rush and roar of the Tamarack House.
He stood there, trying to figure out what to do next.
And he wondered just how far loyalty went.
Did he owe all this to Ned Jones?
Before he had a chance to think further on the subject, Bert Tolliver came by.
“Better get to work, Rip. I’m paying you to play the piano, not stand around.” Rip saw the man beckon to one of his bouncers.
They went outside and Rip walked to the piano.
Old Ned Jones seemed to sense that something was wrong, but he said nothing.
He just sat there on his chair, a troubled light in his old eyes.
Rip’s fingers refused to work right when he sat down at the piano and he muffed several notes when Lily Malone came out on the stage for a song.
She glared down at him over a full bosom when she finished her first song. ~
“You trying’ to ruin my act, or are you drunk?” she snapped,
“Neither, Lily,’ Rip said and played the introduction to her next number.
“And tell grandpa to lay off the fiddle. He’s worse than you, if possible.”
She took a hitch at her corset to take a deep breath.
When she finished her song, the crowd applauded.
Lily went back into the wings after giving Rip an icy stare.
Old Ned put his fiddle down on the floor beside his chair.
“What’s wrong, Rip?” he asked.
Rip got up from his chair and walked back toward the dressing
rooms at the rear of the stage, Ned at his heels.
Rip’s heart was pumping wildly.
He had to make a decision and make it fast.
He reflected how peaceful his life had been in San Francisco and he longed for the comparative protection a big city afforded one who was not used to the ways of violence.
He waited until Ned was back in the dark corridor before he spoke.
“There’s no use in not telling it straight,” he said tensely.
“The Lancaster brothers are here. We’ve got to move on.”
Rip started to pull Ned toward the dressing rooms, but the old man balked. It was dark here and one side of the hall was lined with barrels and empty packing boxes.
“There ain’t no use you getting in on this,” Ned said.
“I should have known the Lancaster’s would follow me. An old coot like me with a fiddle under his arm is too easy to trail.”
Rip shook his head. ‘The Lancaster’s didn’t even know you were here. If I’d kept my mouth shut, things might have worked out differently.”
He was thinking of what Bert Tolliver had said about playing the cards as they fell.
For a moment Ned Jones didn’t answer.
Then he squared his shoulders.
“You been a good friend, Rip. You was only trying to do what you thought was right. You stay. I’ll go.”
“We’re in this together. The Lancaster’s are trying to make out that we both were in on that holdup at Washoe Junction. Come on.”
Rip was conscious of Ned’s sharp intake of breath.
Out front, the crowd was beginning to yell:
“We want music! We want music!”
Then Ned said:
“I done a lot of things in my life, Rip, but I never let down a friend.”
“I believe you,” Rip said, a note of irritation in his voice.
“But come on… .”
It was then that he felt a premonition of danger.
In the faint light that seeped in through the heavy curtains covering the front end of the corridor, Rip saw movement.
He tried to duck the down sweep of the gun in Ned’s hand.
The barrel slanted expertly behind his ear.
That was the last thing he remembered, for it seemed as if the roof had fallen in on him.
Darkness pressed around Rip Campbell when he finally opened his eyes and consciousness returned like a finger of light in his brain, ever-widening as the seconds passed.
As if from a great distance, he could hear the buzz of many voices and the rattle of glassware.
His strength began to return and he was able to get to his knees, but the movement brought a stabbing pain to his head.
He got to his feet and found that he had been lying behind an empty packing box in the corridor.
Then the whole picture came back with startling clarity.
The Lancaster brothers . . . Ned Jones.
“The old fool,” Rip thought in sudden panic. “He’ll try to gun them down.”
And the thought brought sweat to his forehead.
He knew that in that old derelict of the dark trails he had found a companionship that had been welded in gun smoke.
This was the first time in his life that someone had needed him.
For the first time in his life Rip realized that there were more important things than music and the easy life.
There was the debt that one man owed another.
He groped down the hall toward the heavy drapes that covered the entrance to the barroom.
And at that moment a door opened and Lily Malone came out of a dressing room.
She half turned, saw Rip and her fat cheeks quivered.
Her mouth opened but no sound came and her eyes were wide and dark with fright.
Rip stepped forward. wait…”
But at that moment the buxom singer found her voice and she let go with a scream that could have been heard at Ringer’s Peak, nine miles up the canyon.
“Its him! The killer! Help!”
And for a shattered second there was silence in the saloon.
Then boots pounded the floor and chairs were overturned as men rushed toward the corridor.
Rip saw Lily Malone dash into her dressing room, slam the door,
“Lily, _ and heard the clatter as the bolt went home. Instinctively he whirled and rushed out the back door.
There was a shout in the hallway and a gun flamed.
Window glass shattered and a sliver cut Rip’s cheek.
He lurched across the alley, grasped the overhang of a shed roof and pulled himself up.
He lay flat as men came pouring out the rear door of the Tamarack House.
Men spread out in both ‘directions along the alleyway. Lantern light cut a yellow glow into the shadows. Lying there, Rip tried to figure out what had happened since Ned Jones had laid that gun barrel over his head.
He got the answer when two men came down the alley, evidently from the diggings.
And to their question, one of the men who had been hunting for Rip, supplied the answer.
“The piano player and the old coot who played the fiddle, jumped the Lancaster brothers, a couple of railroad detectives. The fiddler is Ned Jones. They both got away, but the Lancaster’s will get them.” Then Bert Tolliver came to the rear door of the Tamarack House.
“I got a hunch that Ned Jones is still in town,” he said to the men in the alley.
“When you find the piano player, bring him here and lock him up in the storeroom.”
Tolliver went back inside the saloon.
There was darkness and silence in the alley now that the men were moving up to continue their search in other parts of Mammoth Camp.
Ten minutes later Rip dropped to the ground beside the shed.
The sudden jar set his head to throbbing, but he fought off the nausea which swept over him.
He guessed that Ned Jones had tried to gun down both the Lancaster’s, trying to save his partner Rip. I shouldn’t have told him that the Lancaster’s figured me in on the holdup, too. He did it to save my skin.”
Rip pushed those thoughts from his mind as he went in the back door of the Tamarack House.
Cautiously he stole down the gloomy passage, ready to flatten himself against the wall if anyone appeared.
There was no light under Lily Malone’s dressing room door.
Peeking through the faded green curtains at the end of the hall, he saw Carl Lancaster, his arm in a sling, sitting at a table with his brother.
There was a crowd around the table, but a lane had formed momentarily as a waiter came up with bottle and glasses.
Mitch Lancaster was saying:
“Ned Jones jumped us in the hotel room. Lucky my brother knocked the lamp off the table. Ned put a slug in Carl’s arm, but we both nailed him. There was blood in the hall.”
“But he got away,” a man said.
Carl Lancaster took a drink, his green eyes bright with hatred.
“We’ll get Ned. And we’ll get the piano player that was with him,” Mitch wiped his lips on the sleeve of his coat.
“The railroad wants Ned Jones and the piano player dead or alive. I’m thinking it’s dead they’ll be.”
Some of the men laughed nervously.
Back in the corridor, Rip’s heart was bumping his ribs and there was that hard lump back in his throat again.
He moved down the hall to Bert Tolliver’s office.
No light showed under the door.
He tried the knob and found that he could open the door.
Inside, he struck a match and made his way to the gun cabinet he had seen over the safe.
He didn’t even fumble with the big padlock.
He waited until the noise out front was loudest, then smashed the glass with a paper weight he found on the desk.
Striking another match, he surveyed the guns and picked a loaded five-shot bulldog pistol.
He put this in his pocket.
Sweat was cold on his forehead as he stood there thinking of what the Lancaster brothers had said.
It was plain that Ned Jones had tried to jump the pair in their hotel room.
He had been shot.
There was blood on the hall carpet.
And as he stood there Rip asked himself what he could possibly gain by all this.
Why not run while he had the chance?
Panic swept over came in through the door him but he managed to quiet the wild beat of his heart.
He slipped out of Tolliver’s office and, through the crack in the curtains, saw the Lancaster’s prepare to leave.
A man in a wide-brimmed hat
“Stage for Los Angeles pulling out, folks,” he announced.
The Lancaster’s got up and headed for the door.
Rip knew what he had to do.
He went out through the back door and into the alley and around the far side of the Tamarack House.
He knew that all the pieces of this puzzle didn’t fit.
The Lancaster’s were going out on that stage.
Yet he knew that if there was a chance of collecting a bounty on Ned Jones, they wouldn’t be leaving.
It didn’t add
up.
But he didn’t have time to think of that.
And right then at there he saw a familiar figure lurching down the boardwalk toward him.
It was old Ned Jones, and he was holding his left hand.to his side, dragging one leg after him as if it was weighted down. At the front of the Tamarack House stood the stagecoach, the driver on top, the four-horse team ready to go.
Rip saw the gun in Ned’s hand.
He ran forward, tried to pull the old man into the shadows.
But Ned shoved him aside.
“The Lancaster’s they got me. It didn’t work out. I got to kill them, Rip.”
Then: Rip Campbell’s heart seemed to crowd up into his throat, for standing there on the boardwalk were the Lancaster brothers.
Without thinking of his philosophy that guns and music didn’t mix, Rip went into action.
The boardwalk cleared suddenly, leaving the Lancaster’s in full view. Guns whipped up and Rip didn’t wait for anything.
He just began to fire his short barreled gun.
He was conscious of the roar of Ned’s weapon at his side.
He saw Mitch Lancaster pitch sideways, as if hit by a stone, Old Ned triggered again, then dropped.
Rip saw Mitch Lancaster roll over on his back and lift his gun.
The man fired and Rip felt the bullet chew into his right leg.
He fell to the dusty ground and as he looked up, he saw Carl Lancaster standing there, both legs braced, his gun held steady. There was no time to think, no time to aim.
Rip pulled aside, conscious of the rearing stagecoach team, the shouting men trying to get out of the line of fire.
Rip pulled the trigger as fast as he could.
He saw Carl Lancaster stumble and put a bullet into the ground.
It was so close that gravel stung Rip’s face.
Carl didn’t move, but Mitch Lancaster was trying to lift his gun from where he lay prone in the gutter beside the boardwalk.
Rip knew he didn’t have the strength to fire another shot.
Mitch Lancaster’s face was close, then far off.
Blackness cut into the corners of his vision.
A pencil point of flame lanced out from the shadows, touched Mitch Lancaster’s body and the man died there in the dusty street of Mammoth Camp.
It was Bert Tolliver who came into view, a smoking gun in his hand. After a crowd had gathered and Ned and Rip were carried to the doctor’s office, Tolliver looked down at the cot where Rip was lying.
“You almost played your last piano, kid. I didn’t buy your claim because I knew the Lancaster’s would only double-cross you. The station agent at Washoe Junction was in on that holdup. He confessed his part in it when railroad officials confronted him. He piled the deadwood on the Lancaster’s.”
Rip tried to grin, but he couldn’t quite make it, the pain in his leg was so intense.
“Guess I overplayed my hand.” Tolliver smiled.
“You sure did. The Lancaster’s were heading for new range because the law was on their tail for that holdup.
They were the murmured boys who got off with the five thousand in bullion.”
Old Ned looked up from the cot across the room and grinned at Rip.
“I’m honing to tuck my fiddle under my chin. Maybe Tolliver will give us our jobs back.”
“Soon’s you can hobble down to the Tamarack House, you can go to work,” Tolliver told him.
“Meantime, the two of you can loaf up at your claim and maybe dig out a little gold. You got the best piece of dirt on the creek.”
While the doctor probed for the bullet in his leg, Rip gritted his teeth and looked up at Tolliver.
“I reckon everything would have been all right if I’d kept my mouth shut.”
“Next time remember to play the cards as they fall,” Tolliver said. Just before he passed out, Rip.
“I guess that guns and music mix, but it’s doggone uncomfortable at times.”
Chris Lowry Books 