"Loco," Kadoba said again, looking up impassively. "I tell him much you tell to me in prison, Yew. How bring many Pinda-Lick-O-Yi here and take Apache gold. He follow red wagon tonight to catch Harrow. Burn big house up there. Catch Harrow. Hang him by heels and burn him, too."
Over on the narrow road Tom Harrow had ordered cut up the side of the ridge to the big home now licking flame, two horses were coming down carrying two panic-stricken riders. In a clearing where the moonlight lit up a sharp bend around a rocky promontory Lew Kerrigan saw a dot of white flash by. A white horse; and, so far as he knew, there was only one white horse whose rider would have been up there at the mansion.
As though the firing of Harrow's mansion up on the ridge had been the signal, a whole chorus of screaming cries now broke out among the deserted shacks festooning the south end of the gulch a quarter mile below where Kerrigan and Kadoba sat their horses. More torches appeared; at least twenty of them this time. Amid the screaming cries, riders on Indian ponies began dashing here and there firing shacks and tents so rotted their former owners hadn't bothered to take them away.
They had been left as they stood and it would be but a matter of minutes until the whole south end of the gulch, fed by the night breeze from the southeast, would become a ball of fire beginning a slow roll forward up the gulch to sweep it clean.
Kadoba had been excited all evening at the prospect of seeing such a fire. He was not going to be disappointed. Dalyville was going to be wiped out. The decision to burn it had been taken from Lew Kerrigan's hands.
"Now what we do?" Kadoba asked excitedly. "We help 'em, huh?"
That decision, too, was taken from Kerrigan's hands. Tossing their torches aside, Loco's kill-mad broncos came spurring along the rutted road, making a dash for the heart of town where lights from the whiskey dive and Judge Eaton's courtroom could be seen. Kerrigan whirled the big red horse, digging him hard, and jumped from sight back of a building that would soon be caught in the path of the advancing flames.
Nor was he any too soon. More than twenty screaming Apaches slashed by at a run and swept up the street, and when Kerrigan jarred out into the road again Kadoba was gone. The lust to kill had proved too much for the Apache. He'd gone with the others of Loco's hard-riding band.
Kerrigan slapped soft heels into Big Red's sides and began a thundering run along the wagon road, following the Apaches.
General George Crook had referred to them as, "the tigers of the human race." Over a period of twenty years of desert and mountain warfare against them other cavalry leaders had admitted with grudging reluctance that many of their chiefs were possessed of sheer military genius. Kerrigan was seeing a facet of that diabolical genius now.
Loco had sent about six of his dependable broncos up on the west ridge to burn Harrow's great mansion, now turning into a roaring mass of flames and a high, twisting column of smoke. Those six would come down that same narrow, winding coach road and kill anybody trying to escape up it.
And Loco himself was slashing through town, to kill on a run through, and then in all likelihood station himself at the north end of the gulch to await any victims running before the flames.
Nobody but a bronco Apache chieftain would have thought of it.
Kerrigan forced the big red horse to greater speed. He was trapped in the gulch with whoever else was in it, and at the moment he didn't know how they were going to get out of it. He heard a high scream somewhere back there in the flames.
Some unfortunate devil had paid the price for staggering home from the whiskey dive and falling into bed in a drunken slumber.
Judge Eaton and Harrow had stepped across the deeply rutted street at a sharp angle northward to enter the saloon. Around them in the night were the bold outlines of several two-story buildings, mostly stripped of furnishings. The hotel's front door stood wide open and lettered across it was a final message from the former owner, stroked with a sense of typical frontier humor: All beds free. Help yourselves, boys.
Most of the eight or nine men in the place when Eaton and Harrow entered had done just that; making the place home, batching in the kitchen, and loafing in the dirty dive next door. Men enervated by the vicissitudes of bad luck at mining, bad luck at gambling, and drinking bad whiskey. Men who didn't care much any more.
The owner of the place, a part-Cherokee fugitive from Indian Territory named Sam Blaze Face, looked up and grunted at sight of the two visitors. The law had taken many men out of his place during the past two years and he held no love for the judge because of what had happened to two of them. They'd been hanged. The Cherokee didn't like Harrow either. He'd promised to come back with big piles of money to sink shafts all over the mountains and find the mother lode from which flash floods had ripped loose particles of gold and deposited them along the floor of the gulch for thousands of years. He'd come back flat broke, so it was whispered.
The Cherokee grunted again, and it bespoke his feelings, glaring belligerently over a thin sprinkling of black whiskers, the result of his mixture of white and Indian blood. The man who'd been cranking the mechanical music box had tired and the ex-Confederate who'd bellowed Jeb Stuart's favorite song was bent forward asleep across a domino table, bearded face buried in his arms. The place stank.
"What's this, a holdup or are we goin' to have court?" the Cherokee asked sardonically.
"Don't talk to me in that tone of voice," snapped Judge Eaton frigidly. "I'll remind you there is still law here."
"Hell there is? Thought it had left this part of the country. Follered the people."
"Take things slow, Sam," Harrow said. "I've got some more work for you boys."
"They need it," Sam said succinctly. "Credit's run out, whiskey is about out, they spent all the money you paid 'em, so I'm about out, too. Out of business. What's up? That fellow Kerrigan give you another scare?"
"No scare this time, Sam. He rode north from Pirtman this afternoon, got away from the officers. He headed here to burn this place tonight, and there's a five-hundred-dollar reward for any of you who grabs him alive. Alive, you understand."
"Huh!" came the disdainful grunt from the Cherokee. He'd heard many rumors lately. Some of them had to be true. "Heard you ain't got five hundred dollars no more."
Out in the street came the sound of a horse; a very tired horse judging from its broken, irregular stride. It stopped outside the front door and a man grunted as he dismounted. In the silence of men turning to see who the newcomer was Joe Stovers stepped through into the dim light from two smoky lamps with sooty globes.
He looked as though he had been riding hard at a horse-killing pace, as indeed he had. He wore no badge now, and he fixed his gaze upon the two men.
"You sons of bitches!" he stated bitterly. "You rotten, filthy, dirty-souled scoundrels! For the first time in my life I know what makes a man want to kill. I've handled some bad boys in my time but I never killed one for any reason. For two cents I'd start shooting now."
He stepped to the end of the filthy bar where night flies buzzed up and came to rest on the smoky ceiling. "Sam, I haven't had a drink of liquor since before my wife died. Let me have a shot of that rotgut now. I'm tired and I need it."
Eaton started to speak but changed his mind, remembering the stormy scene in Stovers' house when Joe had returned with a fresh horse and been informed that he no longer was an officer of the law. Any man, even one like Stovers, could be pushed to the breaking point, and the ex-lawman appeared to be on the verge of it now. Better let this grim man alone right now, the judge thought. Stovers was dangerous.
He looked at the two with burning eyes. "I might not have almost killed a good horse and broke my own neck making the run here after the lock was finally pried off my log jail door," he said and slid a quarter on top of the bar. "But when I loped over to Clara's and found the place deserted I knew that somehow them womenfolks had got sucked into this mess. I wasn't thinking about you two. I knew the whole pack of you wouldn't be a match for Lew Kerrigan and that 'Pache Indian. You seen any sign of them?"