They went down two flights of stairs and through the huge, high-ceilinged lobby, coming to a halt on the long veranda. The red coach with its six sleek blacks was gone and the spectators, gathered to ogle a beautiful lady, had melted away.
"I'm going to hunt up a horse and get out of town," Lew Kerrigan informed Saunders. "But from what the 'Colonel' intimates, I'm to stay here. Permanently. So maybe you better go back upstairs and find out how Harrow wants you to do the job."
"Maybe I'd better," Saunders breathed out softly. "I earn my pay, Kerrigan."
He turned and went back into the hotel and up the carpeted stairs once more. But Tom Harrow had already acted.
He had stepped to the open window three stories above the street and waved a white handkerchief in signal to a lone man waiting in the muddy alley at the rear of one of the buildings fronting the north side of Yuma's long main street.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kerrigan made his way back, again skirting the small water puddles. He stepped onto the muddied boardwalk again, wondering where he could find the California horse buyer LeRoy, the man Bud Casey had mentioned.
It was too late to go back to the hotel clerk and ask, with Saunders probably on his way down again from Harrow's suite. But there was one place you could always find out. It was about four doors down from the end of the street.
The odor of stale beer roiled out through the open doorway of the Escondido Saloon and Kerrigan went into the dank interior. Never much of a drinking man in the past, he hesitated now. His stomach hadn't been hit by liquor in more than two years. But the coffee that morning on the hill had been just as rancid and the bacon just as greasy as ever. He needed a drink to cut the foul taste of it. Twenty-five cents a day didn't buy much food, and Mangrum had to make himself some profit.
The adobe-walled building was quite narrow but went back deep to the rear door and the muddy alley beyond. The few gaming tables, deserted this early in the morning, were in a disorderly row along one dirty white-washed wall. Three drunks were sleeping off an all-nighter. The air held the peculiar odor and dankness of the desert country after a hard rain, as fetid almost as it had been up there in the dungeons before Wood Smith and Casey had unlocked the doors.
Kerrigan stepped past a Mexican swamper leisurely pushing a small knoll of floor trash sprinkled with cigar butts toward the back doorway and a soggy litter of trash and bottles in the alley. A man came out of nowhere, seemingly, his big shoes leaving muddy tracks on the freshly swept floor. After following Kerrigan and Saunders up the street, Jeb Donnelly hadn't gone on home to sleep through the heat and sweat of another hot day.
Donnelly ignored Kerrigan but Lew caught the bartender's knowing look. He said coolly, "Yes, I know I probably look it. I just came down off the hill a little while ago."
"I know who you are, mister. Strictly your business and none of mine. What'll you have, Mr. Kerrigan?"
"Brandy."
"Well, that's something anyhow," the bartender smiled at him. "It shows you've got some sense. Most of the men who come down from up there order a double whiskey and then a few more. Not being used to it, they end up on the floor almost before the marshal can—" He broke off, his face coloring.
"I won't," Kerrigan said easily.
"You're damned well right you won't, Kerrigan," Jeb Donnelly spoke up. "Not if you know what's good for you. Wood Smith ain't the only one who knows how to handle you cell birds."
He was eyeing Kerrigan's worn .44; looking at the queer way Kerrigan's right arm hung so stiff and awkward at his side. Wood Smith had said last night he'd do it up right on the arm, and Wood had kept his word. Kerrigan was badly hurt, and the damned fool still wore his gun in its accustomed place in the sheath, instead of his belt, where he'd at least have a chance to get at it with his left hand.
"So I seem to remember, Jeb," Kerrigan said thinly. "Under the expert tutelage of Wood Smith you got to be pretty good at handling unarmed men who couldn't help themselves. Almost as expert with a billy club as Wood Smith."
The bartender was pouring the brandy into a small glass with studied carefulness, something in his manner indicating that he had seen this kind of thing happen before to men fresh from behind the walls on the hill. Kerrigan sensed what was coming, wondering if Donnelly was going to make a stab for it or merely soften him up still more until Ace Saunders could move in and finish the job later that morning. The thought seemed to accentuate the pain in his swelling arm and stiff elbow.
But he picked up the glass with his right hand. The sip he took was vile tasting and smoking hot to his mouth and throat. The man back of the bar slid across change for a silver dollar and grinned sympathetically.
"It'll taste better on the second round," he said.
"Not in here it won't," the marshal grunted.
Another man entered the place and stepped to the bar not far from where Kerrigan stood waiting for Jeb Donnelly to make his move. The newcomer's light summer suit was cloud-grey, calfskin boots red, but on his head he wore an expensive low-crowned beaver hat of a bygone era in the West. Kerrigan classified him as a gambler in town for a quick cleanup. And yet the man was tall and well built, with a definite military set to his shoulders.
Kerrigan had seen many men like him riding Grimley saddles captured from Union forces during his own four years as a Confederate officer with Terry's famed Texans.
The man spoke politely to the bartender. "An after-breakfast constitutional, if you please, sir."
"Anything you wish, Mr. LeRoy. Any luck yet buying some good Arizona horses?"
LeRoy. The man Bud Casey had mentioned. Kerrigan had come into the Escondido seeking information as to where he could find LeRoy. He'd found him.
He flicked a glance at both the front and rear doors of the deep, narrow saloon. Ace Saunders would have new orders from Tom Harrow by now…
"A bourbon straight with a touch of sweetened water, if you please. And drinks for the other two gentlemen with my compliments. Gentlemen?"
"Thanks, friend," Kerrigan smiled in return, his eyes still watching both doors. "This one will do me for the present."
Jeb Donnelly spoke again; "You damn' right it will. You got a half-hour to git outa Yuma, Kerrigan. Drink up an' git goin'!"
Kerrigan guessed shrewdly that inasmuch as there had been no shooting in front of the Big Adobe, the marshal figured Kerrigan had bowed to some kind of an agreement with Harrow. Donnelly's job, it now appeared, was to harry Kerrigan on out of town and head him north to Pirtman. And Donnelly was doing his part of the job in his own way.
The pupils in Kerrigan's eyes began to pin point as they had when he left Harrow. His piercing gaze locked with the marshal's belligerent, red-shot eyes.
Kerrigan said almost softly, "Wood did a pretty good job with the club this morning, Jeb. But when you see him tell him it wasn't quite good enough."
He moved in closer to the heavy, scowling face; in toward the man who was a brutish bruiser lacking the cool courage of the slim, ever-smiling Ace Saunders.
Whatever had been in Donnelly's mind when he entered the Escondido, his courage was now whiskied to the apex and a big hand with blunt end fingers crept downward to the butt of his pistol; and yet the flame of a new fear lay burning amid the alcohol inflaming his brain. Something had gone amiss in the handling of this tall man towering above him; the man who had just come out of prison for killing another town marshal.
Donnelly didn't carry a club. He'd have to make his pistol barrel do now.
A wave of fear began to wash through Jeb Donnelly's brain. He'd overplayed his hand and pushed the wrong man too far. He weighed his chances against a club-beaten arm a second time.