Harrow straightened with a look of poker-faced patience on his well-groomed countenance and picked up the dead cheroot and reached for a match. He struck it into flame and then stood holding it in one hand and looked over at Kerrigan.
"You forget," he reminded him quietly, "that Joe Stovers put a five hundred dollar territorial reward on your head, Lew. Even Kitty knows that. Why don't you ask Joe who collected it?" He removed the cigar from his mouth. "And aren't you going to ask about Kitty?"
"I'm asking if you have anything more to say."
"Quite a few things, if you'll listen, Lew. I always intended to see that you got one half of the cleanup in the Dalyville strike. But a few months ago I took a trip back to the South. People were dead or had forgotten many things, and it was there that I met Carlotta. Then I went on to New York to promote some mining stock for gold exploration. But the Robber Barons of Wall Street were milking millions in the stock market and I went after some of it. Railroad stock. It took two days for the Robbers to manipulate the stock to nothing and fleece the mining lamb from Arizona. Three hundred and forty-five thousand dollars! I'm sorry about your part of it, of course. I might have made a million for us."
Kerrigan grinned a hard grin and reached for a chair. "I think," he said bitingly, "that I'll sit down and have the first decent smoke I've had in two years."
Harrow flushed at the implication and shed some of his suaveness, a desperate note creeping into his voice. "I got back practically broke, and knowing that Dalyville's gold was cleaned out, the place about to become another Arizona ghost mining town."
"Tough luck, eh?" Lew Kerrigan grinned at him. "You went to New York to sell a million dollars of worthless mining stock in played-out Dalyville claims to the lambs, and ended up a fleeced lamb yourself. You come back pretty well broke and suddenly remember that the pardner you double-crossed is still in the pen doing life. So out of the goodness of your big heart you buy me out and come all the way down here, bringing along your Southern fiancée, to carry me back in style. Get to the point and stop stalling, Tom: what do you want of me?"
Harrow sat down and laid the cigar in an ornate ash tray. He grinned faintly and then his mouth beneath the clipped mustache hardened.
"No use beating around the bush with a man like you, Lew. I should have known better. With Carlotta on her way out here to take up life with a supposedly rich husband, I was desperate. I got to thinking about Loco and all the raw gold he used to bring me for guns and cartridges. Old Bear Paw found his source of supply, but I know enough about Apaches to know there's more somewhere else. To prove it, I had a friend of mine get him some more guns recently and they were, of course, paid for in more coarse grain gold!"
He leaned forward with his elbows on the desk, gazing at Kerrigan intently. "I've known for some time that for two years you've been in a cell with one of Loco's top young warriors. With both of you doing life and little chance ever to escape, I know in my own mind he told you where to find another strike like Dalyville. I spent the last twenty thousand dollars I could rake up to buy you out of prison."
"And you couldn't sleep nights because of the fear that I'd smash out over the walls someday, come north and kill you?" Kerrigan grinned at him. "Maybe you didn't miss it too far at that, Tom," he added softly.
"Exactly," Harrow admitted with a deprecative shrug. "I had no choice in the matter and, frankly, neither have you. I've had Wood Smith watching you. He put your gun arm out of order this morning at my instructions, to make it more certain that Ace Saunders could bring you here alive."
"In other words," Kerrigan grinned thinly, "for the past two years you've lived in fear I'd get free and come after you with a six-shooter in one hand. And now if I refuse to accept your terms of 'parole,' you're still so afraid to take me back up there to Mangrum and Wood Smith— afraid that I'll escape again—that you brought along a couple of dependable men from the old mountain hideout to do a gun job. Softening the marshal and sheriff here probably like you paid off the Territorial Governor to stretch and bend the law. I know it was bribery when I was sentenced by Judge Eaton, a United States District Court judge, my keep paid for by the Government. Twenty-five cents per day keep, thanks to a gold-mad man like you, Tom," he added savagely, his face dark.
Harrow tried a new tack. He said patiently, "Does anything matter except that you're free again? Play things my way and ride out free. Meet me in Pirtman and get Kitty back, while the two of us clean up a fortune and you get back, in addition, what I lost. I'll sell stock back East this time, one million dollars' worth in a new strike—and who cares if it plays out this time!"
Kerrigan grinned a hard grin at Harrow's anxiety. He stepped to the desk; leaning over to pinch out the brown paper butt in the silver ash tray. Harrow sat unmoving, only his desperate eyes showing what he might be thinking.
"You won't change your mind, Lew?"
"No," Kerrigan said.
"Then damn you," Harrow cried out in desperation, "I'll make you change it!"
His hand flashed into the open drawer of the big desk but Lew Kerrigan's thin body whip-lashed in a twisting motion. Fingers calloused from gripping a wheelbarrow handle clamped down so hard around Harrow's wrist that a grunt of pain came from the surprised man. Kerrigan stepped back with the pistol in his left hand. The pin points in his brown eyes grew smaller and his low voice slashed through the room.
"I'm riding north to Kitty, Tom. I'm going to wait for you up there while I take care of a few things and maybe even deliver a message for Kadoba. Don't stake out my little ranch up in the basin, because I won't go back there. And don't try staking out Clara's place either, because maybe in the past two years I've had infused into me a little bit of Apache."
"You're forgetting Joe Stovers," Harrow grunted back, a new light of hope flickering for a moment in his eyes. "Joe got you once. He'll get you again."
"Joe won't get me this time because he won't have you to tip him off again. I'm going to destroy you, Tom. You wanted me to meet you in Pirtman instead of riding back with you, because you're afraid of what your woman will find out. If Clara Thompson won't tell her what you are, then I intend to let her find out anyhow. I'm not going to shoot you right through that window, as I should. I want you to enjoy your return trip up north with the woman you thought you were going to marry."
He backed on the soft carpeting to the door, the gun still in his uninjured left hand. He opened it and whirled through, and the thin barrel of Harrow's gun rammed savagely deep into the surprised Ace Saunder's lean stomach. It brought a grunt from the gunman.
"I'll take your pistol, for a change, Saunders," Kerrigan said coolly, and did so, slipping his own and Harrow's pistol into his belt.
Saunders said calmly, "I told Tom he shouldn't have had a gun in the same room with you. Your move now, Kerrigan."
He took back his emptied weapon, accepted the cartridges in the palm of a slim hand, dropped them into a pocket of the blue silk shirt and grinned. "Looks like it's my turn to walk a step ahead of you now."