“Don’t pay any attention to her,” begged Page. “She’s angry. Angry because I’m sending her east to school. This isn’t any place for a woman to stay.”
But Packard scarcely heard the old man. He was looking at the girl. “Miss,” he said, “just to get the record straight, I want to tell you something. You maybe won’t believe me, but it really doesn’t matter. Until I killed Stover I never killed a man. But I am getting tired of two-bit gunmen wanting to add me to their kills so they can brag they killed Steve Packard’s kid. I don’t hanker to become a notch on someone’s gunbutt, miss, and I figure maybe the only way to keep from it is to collect some notches of my own.”
She did not speak, but from where he stood Packard could see the blood beating in her throat, could see her lips half open to reply, then close again.
“You’ve had bitter disappointment, son,” said Page. “And you are too impatient. There is good in the world—”
“I haven’t seen any of it,” snapped Packard.
“You came here,” said Page, “with something in your mind. I don’t know what it is, but you best get rid of it. It will bring you nothing but everlasting sorrow.”
“Save your preaching,” Packard told him, “for someone who wants to listen to it. It’s people like you who shove a man along a path he doesn’t want to travel and then use him as a horrible example when he up and follows it.”
He turned to the door and opened it. Then turned back. “You were right, Preacher,” he said. “I did come here for something and I’m going through with it.”
Out on the path he strode rapidly down the hill. Night had fallen and Hangman’s Gulch was a blur of darkness speared with blinking lights, filled with the hum of a fevered humanity.
It was all, Packard told himself, how you happened to be born. It your father killed men and held up stages and robbed banks, you killed men and held up stages and robbed banks. You might try hard not to do it. You might try to live another kind of life, but it would catch up with you in the end. As it finally had caught up with him. A man, after all, had to make a living somehow.
At the bottom of the hill, just before the path broke out on the street, a man stepped from behind a tree. Packard stopped, hands lifted to his guns.
“The horses,” said the man, “are up this way.”
Packard moved toward him, walking softly. Close at last, he asked: “You’re riding with me?”
“That’s right,” said the man. “Blade is the name. John Blade. Put her there, pardner. I’m proud to be ridin’ with you.”
By impulse, Packard put out his hand, found the other’s in the darkness. The man’s handclasp was swift and sure. Swift and sure and warm … a warmth that sent a thrill through Packard, a feeling of comradeship.
“Blade,” he said, “I’m proud to be riding with you, too.”
Chapter IV
DEATH FOR A PINCH OF DUST
The moon was late in rising and the night was dark, dark and chill, with an autumn wind whining along the ridges and whipping down the canyons. Blade seemed to know the way almost by feel and although they went slowly, there seemed no hesitation at the choosing of the path. Packard rode behind him.
Apparently the man who had been set to tail him had not reported back to Randall. For if Randall had known of his visit to Page, he at least would have been called upon the carpet, asked for an explanation.
Randall, undoubtedly, thought that he had him trapped, that he had no choice but to play Randall’s game. Packard smiled grimly in the darkness. Something would happen tomorrow, he felt certain, something that would give him the chance that he was waiting.
Grimly he speculated upon his chance of having defied Randall, knew almost as soon as he posed the question that it would have been no use. There actually had been no choice. Randall had had him dead to rights. Had known who he was and why he came to town. Had known his connection with Cardway. Randall, he knew, would never have let him get out of town alive.
Actually, he told himself, this satisfied him better than the Cardway deal. Even with the connivance of the guard, robbery of the express office under Randall’s nose would have been the height of madness.
Although it wasn’t only the matter of saving his own skin. It was something else as well. A certain bitter hatred that a man like Randall could hold and rule a town, could set up no matter how temporary an empire with the use of six-gun power. That a man like Preacher Page could be placed in danger because he dared oppose such a six-gun empire. That a man could say that if gold were stolen, he was the one to steal it, that he had the right of thievery staked out.
He had not been anxious to tie up with Cardway, he remembered. Only the bitterness of desperation had driven him to fall in with the schemes Cardway vaguely hinted at. Cardway had been all right, of course, but he was a shifty character. Packard found himself remembering the cigarette that drooped from his lips and poured smoke into the squinting eyes.
Cardway, without a doubt, had been ready to use him. Had sat and watched him shooting at those glass balls and sensed the advantage such marksmanship might have. Had found out who he was and worked on that.
“Hell, kid, you haven’t got a chance. No one will ever give you a break, see. The world ain’t built that way. Always looking for someone to kick. And your old man gives them a chance to kick you. Quit being a sucker, kid. With a knack with guns that you live, there’s money to be made …”
There was some truth in what he said. A hell of a lot of truth, in fact. There was the job with the circus and the one before that with the feed store down in Kansas and the two weeks Packard worked as bank guard until the trembling, horrified directors found out who he was.
The moon came up, bulging over the eastern horizon, a huge red ball bisected at the moment by a straggly pine that grew atop a ridge.
Blade drew his horse to a stop and Packard rode alongside and pulled up.
Blade had his makings out and was building a cigarette. Packard sat his horse and stared over the wild and tumbled land, half lighted by the reddish moon-glow, half-buried deep in shadow.
Blade handed over the sack and papers.
“Have one on me,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Packard.
Blade thumbed a matchhead into flame, lit his smoke, tossed the match away.
“So you went to see Page,” he said.
Raising his cigarette to his lips to lick the paper shut, Packard stared across at the other man. Deliberately he tongued the cylinder, put it in his mouth. “Maybe,” he finally said. “that ain’t a question you should ask.”
“Perhaps it isn’t, Packard. But I figured that you would. Randall’s one slick operator.”
Packard nodded, seeking for the meaning in the other’s words. Apparently the man believed that Randall had sent him to Page.
Smoke drooled out of Blade’s nose and suddenly the smoke turned into a bloody spray. Blade opened his mouth to scream, but the scream did not come out and his mouth stayed open, with the cigarette still sticking to his lower lip.
A sound ripped through the night and Blade was falling from his horse, tipping in the saddle and going over and the horse was rearing as if to spill him off.
Packard’s fist drove for a six-gun, whipped it clear of leather, fighting his plunging mount with the other hand.