"Never got married?" he interrupted soberly. "Well, I suppose it shapes up about like this: Clara walked out beneath an arch of sabers to be married to a childhood sweetheart the day he graduated from West Point. To her he became a living symbol of something fine and great in a young country flexing its muscles. It wasn't a question of her remaining in Pirtman to be near him, and me letting that stand in my way. It was the fact that I couldn't go to a woman who'd lived her kind of life and offer her an assumed name with a background of five dead men behind and the law hunting me for it. She was strong and self-supporting and with a will and intelligence to work out her own future in her own way. Kitty was merely a lonely, helpless youngster, hunting someone and needing someone. Does that answer your question, Carlotta?"
"Yes," she said in a low voice, "that answers my question."
Warmness of a kind he'd never known before stirred through him and with it the strong desire to reach out and sweep her to him. In the back of his mind had been the vague hope that when he slipped into Pirtman some night in the future to get his money from Joe Stovers she'd still be there. She must have read what was in his thoughts, for she suddenly slid inside his arms and buried her face against his chest.
"Lew," she said and looked up at him and smiled, "I've carried a picture inside me of how you looked that first day down in the hotel corridor in Yuma. I felt an ache all through me today when you left Pirtman, thinking I'd never see you again. It's not the proper thing for a Southern lady to say, but would you bend those rough whiskers down just once—"
He buried them against her warm mouth and neither of them felt the pain until a discreet cough came from the curtains over the doorway. Kerrigan released her and looked at Judge Eaton.
"Kerrigan, I must speak quickly," Eaton said, and cleared his throat with a throbbing up-and-down motion of his prominent Adam's apple. "We're trapped by fire that's coming fast. If words will help any at this acute time, I have done you a great injustice. I know Harrow now for what he is, and what he has done. I'm looking at the kind of death tonight I have meted out to other men in the past, and I find myself afraid. Is there any chance that you, knowing those Apaches as friends, could stop this terrible thing that is about to happen?"
"Not any more than you could stop a pack of wolves from pouncing on the one that happened to go down, Judge. They go mad with the lust to kill. I can only try."
"What did you have in mind, sir?" asked Eaton, hope in the sunken sockets of his skull-like features.
"Take all the men and move forward on foot, and let the coach follow behind."
"A fine idea. A very fine idea!" cried out Eaton and actually shook his hand. "Let me assure you, Kerrigan, that if we get out of this place alive tonight you will be a free man tomorrow."
Kerrigan looked at him and thought, Maybe he was right in his way. Maybe I've overlooked the good he's done because Harrow framed me.
"Let's get out of here," he said.
From out in the street came the threshing jangle of harness as men fought the big red horse into the gap left by a dead one. The coach had been turned around, the team to head north. Everybody was out in the street now, clustered around the red coach.
Everybody except Clara Thompson. Kerrigan felt her hand upon his left arm and looked down. She was smiling at what she'd witnessed but a look of dark fear haunted her eyes, the first time he'd ever seen such a thing there.
"Lew, your shadow and Carlotta's were outlined against the curtain from the lamplight and Tom saw it. He rushed outside like a madman. He'll kill you before he'll let you have her."
He said, "All right, Clara," and led her outside. Big Red was in harness in the center span between wheelers and leaders but it took two men to hold the plunging animal by the bit. The fire was beginning to brighten the street as it swept on its way, shacks and tents disappearing into its fiery maw.
As the three women got into the coach Kerrigan said to the frightened driver, "Just keep them moving behind us. If those broncos try to close in, lay on the whip and bust through us and keep going. Hit the old military road cut-off after you get out and then swing south on it to Pirtman. Savvy?"
The light that had gone on over in the Cherokee's dive suddenly went out with a loud crash, as though the lamp had been flung. It had. Flames sprang up from scattered kerosene and Sam Blaze Face came out with several men, a 16-shot Civil War Henry repeating rifle in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.
"Ain't no damned Apaches goin' to burn a Cherokee Indian's saloon," he bellowed into the night and waved the rifle. "I bootlegged liquor to the Indians up in Indian Territory until U.S. marshals chased me out, and I'll live to go back there and do it again. Come on, you free-loadin', whiskey-drinkin' gents. Let's go hunt us some Apache scalps!"
They made a strange-looking group as they moved up the street. A red coach with three women inside and a driver up front and a man walking along with both hands on the bit of a big red horse still fighting the harness. A part-Cherokee Indian and several human dregs of a mining camp striding boldly in front with whiskey courage high. Ace Saunders walking on one side of the coach, leading his horse, and Jeb Donnelly riding his big white horse on the other side. Harrow and Judge Eaton had fallen in directly back of the wheels, the rear boot within easy grasp if the driver suddenly put the whip to the six horses.
In the darkness Judge Eaton looked over at Harrow. Harrow's lips were swollen, his face a mask of the poisonous hatred inside of him. He looked anything but the suave, immaculately tailored man who'd waited for Lew Kerrigan in the hotel at Yuma. To the cool, brightly reflective eyes of Judge Eaton he looked no better than those human dregs out of the Cherokee's dive, and at the moment the judge held him in less respect.
He was an object of contempt, and at the moment he revolted the judge. Kerrigan had sworn a vow to destroy the man and everything he represented, but Eaton had been unprepared for the terrible thoroughness with which the tall ex-ranchman had gone about it.
And now, as though he still wasn't through, Lew Kerrigan came out of the night on noiseless moccasins. "Harrow!" he said sharply.
"What do you want?" came the low, gritted reply. "Haven't you and those Apaches done enough to me?"
"Not as much as Loco would like to do," the tall man answered grimly. "You bought me out of prison because I celled with Kadoba. Through him, Loco has found out you were responsible for this boom camp and what it's done to Apache country. Kadoba told me that Loco wants you worst of all. If he can get his hands on you, he's going to swing you by the heels and burn you."
"Haven't you punished the man enough!" Judge Eaton cried out despite his feelings. "How terrible must your vengeance be, Kerrigan? You've broken him body and soul and taken his woman. What more do you want?"
"Like Ace Saunders, I don't like the idea of a white man being tortured and mutilated by Apaches. Get in the coach with the others, Harrow. The wiping out of Dalyville finishes my job with you. I'm not going to kill you."
He was gone again at a trot, to rejoin Joe Stovers somewhere up ahead. Harrow's shoulders straightened and he wiped at his mouth with his hand, remembered, and removed a handkerchief from his coat sleeve. He used that and then smiled over at Judge Eaton.
"I'm not licked yet, Yeager," he said. "We've got a long way to go."
"Yes," Judge Eaton replied, "we've got a long way to go. But it will be necessary for us to wait until Kerrigan gets us out of this trap. You'd better join the ladies in the coach, Tom. The money is still in there, you know."
The speculative look came again into Eaton's sunken eyes when he found himself alone behind the coach. The contempt for Harrow was still there. The information that Kerrigan not only wouldn't kill him but would try to protect him had worked a new transformation in Harrow.