And Packard, gripping Sylvester’s hand, stared at the left eye which no longer glinted.
Suddenly he knew Sylvester, his mind filling in the face as he had seen it before … a face with some sort of plastic material worked into the cheeks and in front of the gums to puff out the cheeks and lips, to distort the face so that once the silly little mustache had been pasted on no one would ever recognize the man.
He spoke low, lips scarcely moving, so that no one else might hear.
“I see,” he told Sylvester, “that you found your eye.”
Chapter V
WE DON’T WASTE LEAD!
From far down the canyon came the faint clatter of wheels, the muffled clop of horses’ hoofs.
Crouched in the clump of juniper beside the trail, Packard stared out across the rock-ribbed cleft that climbed, twisting deep into the mountain range.
Again came the far-off squeal of wheels and Packard, straining his ears, tensed, then relaxed again. Eyes narrowed against the morning sun, he took stock of the situation.
Pinky was across the trail, almost opposite where Packard crouched in the juniper. Marks was farther up. Sylvester and Hurley were between himself and Marks, each on their own side of the trail. Pop Allen was back in the little side canyon, a quarter mile away, holding the horses.
The four of them, Pinky had told them, were to let the stagecoach pass, were to remain out of sight until Marks stepped out and fired a shot, the first one over the driver’s head, the second one in his head if he made a hostile move.
Sylvester was to cover the shotgun messenger up on the seat beside the driver, with Hurley to back him up. Packard and Pinky were to take care of other guards, if there should happen to be any. There probably would be, Pinky had said … up on the roof.
Packard felt perspiration trickling down his face behind the blue handkerchief which served him for a mask.
He was nervous, he told himself, somewhat surprised. And he shouldn’t be nervous. Never had there been a time when he needed the rock-hard sureness of hand and eye that he might need in the next few minutes.
The chance he waited, he knew would come in that first moment of swift action when Marks stepped out into the trail and flung up his gun.
Cautiously, Packard squinted up the trail, trying to make out the positions of the others. He knew where they should be but there was nothing to betray them. No single flutter of a wind-blown handkerchief, no hint of color in the tangled shrubs, no stirring bush.
Hurley would be up there somewhere. Hurley, who had shot down Blade when the man wasn’t even looking and thus dealt himself a hand. Hurley, he knew, would be watching him, waiting for the sign that would send him into action. Hurley was no fool. Hurley knew there was something in the wind, probably was more than a little nettled that the son of his old friend and trail partner hadn’t let him in on it.
And yet, Packard told himself, he couldn’t have let him in on it, for there wasn’t really anything … no well-defined plan, no thought-out course of action. Just a hunch that a chance would come, waiting for the break that would give him the upper hand. And when it came there’d be no time for thinking, no time for planning … he’d have to act by what would amount to instinct.
And there was Sylvester. Just where did Sylvester fit? The man had a glass eye, but one that was so perfect his companions of the owlhoot trail had never found it out. If they had he would bear a nickname that would have marked him as a man of certain distinction. That eye would have furnished more than one jibe, more than one good-natured joke, more than one tall tale.
If Sylvester was a bona-fide member of the Canyon gang, why should he have been in Hangman’s Gulch, tricked out with facial disguise and checkered suit? And even if he did want to promenade around without anyone knowing who he was, why all that ridiculous hoorah about losing his glass eye? A thing like that wouldn’t accomplish a single thing except attract attention to him.
The rattling wheels were closer now and the clop of the horses’ hoofs were distinct sounds in the dust. Around the bend a filmy cloud arose, the slowly drifting dust disturbed by the coach’s passing.
Packard hunkered lower in the juniper, carefully slipped the six-guns from his belt, clasped them with sure, deft hands.
The stage swung around the bend, the horses surging into the uphill pull, harness creaking with the effort. The driver slouched forward easily, reins loose in his hands, but his head darted from side to side, watching the bushes along the trail. Beside him the shotgun messenger sat bolt upright, the butt of the gun planted against his knee, muzzle pointing toward the sky, left hand grasping the barrel. Another man knelt one-kneed on top of the lurching coach, rifle at ready.
The coach lumbered past, one wheel squealing, blobs of dust dropping from the slowly moving tires and spatting in the tracks that still smoked from the passing of the iron-shod wheels.
Breath still caught in his throat, Packard watched it pass. His fingers shifted slightly, taking a new grasp on the six-gun grips.
Carefully, he raised his head a bit, stared after the coach, heard the seconds beating in his head as time slowed to an agonizing crawl.
A man rose out of the bushes, like a jack-in-the-box popping up when someone snapped the catch. A man who yelled and raised a gun and fired.
The driver rose in his seat, hauling on the reins while the horses reared, a tangled mass of leather and striking forefeet and flying manes.
The shotgun messenger half raised his gun, jerked forward as a six-gun bellowed, bending in the middle as if he were on a hinge. For a moment he hung there, etched against the morning sun, a bent over man with the gun tumbling from his hands. Then slowly he pitched forward like a diver slanting off a board, pitched forward between the horses, fell beneath their feet.
The guard on top of the coach had leaped to his feet, his rifle coming to his shoulder in one swift blur of fluid motion. A gun spatted angrily behind him, like a snarling cat, and the guard stiffened and staggered, fell and rolled, slid halfway off the coach and hung there, knee caught beneath the low iron railing that ran along the top. His hands hung down limply and swung slowly to and fro, like unsteady pendulums, while blood dripped from his mouth and spattered in the dust.
Then there was no sound except that of the driver talking to the horses, talking in a soothing tone that trilled with hidden terror, trying to quiet the animals that reared and plunged and fought the bits and kicked and shied at the bloody thing that rolled beneath their hoofs.
Packard had risen from the juniper, but had not moved, had not even raised his gun. The action had been too swift, the deadly six-gun execution too well planned.
He looked across the trail at Pinky and above his red handkerchief mask, Pinky’s eyes glittered with excitement. Smoke still trickled from the gun he held in his hairy hand.
“That’s the way we do it, kid,” said Pinky. “Fast and neat. No time or bullets wasted.”
And what he said was true, Packard realized. Only a few seconds had ticked away since Marks had risen from the bushes, only three shots had been fired and two men were dead.
Marks had stepped to the head of the horses, was fighting them to a standstill while Hurley still held his gun on the struggling driver.
Sylvester was talking to someone inside the coach, talking in a voice that was conversational, almost as if he might be chatting with a next door neighbor.
“There ain’t no cause to be alarmed, ma’am,” he was saying. “The boys don’t aim to harm a hair of your head. Just you step out and sit down in the shade while we get the dust. That’s all we want. We’ll just take the dust and be gallopin’ along.”