But he still kept a gun in his hand and he kept it in position as he moved closer, grasped the handle and jerked the coach door wide open.
“Please ma’am,” he said. “Be sensible. Yelling and screamin’ won’t help you none at all.”
“I don’t intend,” the woman told him, “to do any yelling or screaming. And I’m not coming out. I’m staying here.”
The voice sent a chill of fear through Packard—an icy chill that gripped and held him like a mighty hand. For he knew that voice, had heard it only the night before …
“She says,” Sylvester told Pinky, “that she ain’t a-comin’ out.”
“The hell she ain’t,” snarled Pinky.
Swiftly he strode forward, lunged for the door of the coach, reached in. The woman screamed and Pinky yanked, hauling her out of the door, leaping back to escape her clawing hands. She stumbled and fell in the dust.
“Get them up,” yelled Packard. “Get them up and keep them there. I’m taking over.”
Sylvester and Pinky swung around, stared at the gun-mouths that scowled at them from Packard’s fists. “You’re loco!” yelled Pinky. “You can’t—”
One of Packard’s guns drooled flame and smoke and Pinky’s hat lifted in the air, skidded downward in a rapid glide and plopped onto the ground.
“The next one,” said Packard, “will be right between the eyes.”
Wide-eyed, the two of them lifted their hands, high above their heads.
“Get out of the way, Miss Page,” said Packard quietly. “There might be some shooting if these gents should get uneasy.”
“You’re too considerate,” the girl told him. “Why don’t you shoot them down?”
“Get out of the way,” snapped Packard. “Around here people do what I say for them to do.”
He raised his voice. “Marks, you walk down this way. Hurley, climb up and throw down the gold. Both you hombres shuck your guns.”
A sledge hammer slammed into his shoulder, spun him around, and he was falling forward, the ground rushing up at him with express train speed. Through the roaring in his ears came the sullen clap of a high-powered rifle.
Pop, he thought. Pop Allen. I forgot all about the damn old fool. What did he mean by horning in, anyway? He had no business to. He was supposed to be off in the gully holding them horses.
He hit the ground and exploded, sailing off into space, part of him going one way and part of him another … but finally the pieces came back together and he was whole again and he wallowed in a bed of pain and thirst.
A voice said: “He’s coming to.” Another voice snapped: “Quit champin’ at the bit, Marks. Be a damn shame to string him up and him not know about it.”
“Ought to lug him back and hang him alongside Cardway,” someone else suggested.
The voice that had snapped, protested. “Too far. And anyhow, Randall ain’t anxious to give Hangman’s Gulch no bad name. Hangings right in town got to be legal-like … vigilantes and all the fixin’s.”
The words seeped into Packard’s brain, seeped and simmered, thoughts clawing at their meaning.
Packard’s left shoulder ached with a dull, monotonous thud that beat and beat, as if someone were hitting it with a padded hammer. His throat ached, too and when he put his right hand up to feel it, there was something there. Something that was hard and scratchy and was pressing just a bit too tight.
Feebly he clawed at the thing around his neck, trying to loosen it so he could breathe more easily. He was sitting on the ground, with his legs stretched out in front of him and his back against the hard, rough trunk of a good-sized tree. He pressed his back harder against the tree and felt the scaly bark bite into his flesh.
Sitting against a tree, with a rope around his neck. And probably the other end of that rope went over a limb somewhere above his head. One yank … one good, stout yank by a couple or three men and he would be swinging free. He would be a thing like Cardway was … swinging the way that Cardway swung in the breeze that had swooped up the canyon bed.
“Give me that pail of water,” said a voice. “Damn it, he’s playing possum, that’s what.”
Water sloshed into Packard’s face with stinging force, ran in ice-cold rivulets off his hair and down his neck, sopping his shirt.
Packard shook his head, opened his eyes, stared at the man before him.
Chapter VI
A DEAL IN HOT LEAD
Pinky held the bucket in his hand and Hurley stood beside him, one hand on his gun-butt. Marks leaned against a tree, holding the free end of the rope which angled down from the limb above Packard’s head. Sylvester squatted on his heels a few feet from where Hurley stood. Pop Allen was putting wood on a small, newly-kindled fire.
And beyond Pop, hands tied behind her and with the rope lashed loosely around another tree, was Alice Page. There was a streak of dirt across her face and she had lost her hat and her hair had fallen down over one shoulder. Her dress was dusty and bedraggled.
“How do you feel?” asked Pinky.
“Better,” said Packard, “than you’re going to feel when I get through with you.”
“We’re going to hang you,” Pinky told him. “We’re going to string you up and leave you hangin’ here for the crows to eat.”
Marks laughed, showing his teeth through his heavy beard. “You forgot, Pinky. We ain’t going to leave him hangin’. This here is my rope and I ain’t going to lose it. Too good a rope to go away and leave it.”
Alice Page’s face was twisted with horror and across the few yards that separated them, Packard’s eyes caught hers, held them for a moment.
“What you going to do with her?” he asked.
Marks laughed again, a high-keyed, nasty laugh. Pinky said: “We’re holding her until her old man comes to terms. He’s been raisin’ too much hell to suit the boss.”
Packard stared at the girl. Her head still was high, high with that bewitching tilt that he remembered from the other times he’d seen her.
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Preacher Page had told him. “She’s just angry because I’m sending her away.”
But Preacher Page hadn’t said she was leaving the next morning and he hadn’t asked. He should have warned the old man. Should have told him not to send her on the next coach. But there had been other things to think of, other things to say.
Randall had known, of course. Somehow Randall had found out. Hurley, perhaps. Hurley and Page still were friends and Hurley might have known. And Hurley would do anything that would help himself.
It wasn’t only gold that Randall had wanted off the coach. It had been the girl as well … the girl to hold as a whip over Preacher Page’s head. A way to make Preacher knuckle down, make him forget all about martial law, silence his demands for law and order.
Marks twitched on the rope and it tightened on Packard’s throat with a strangling jerk.
“What the hell are we waiting for?” asked Marks. “We might as well string up this saddle stiff and be on our way.”
“Wait a second,” said Packard.
Slowly he rose to his feet, stood leaning against the tree, his head light and giddy with the effort of standing on his own.
“You’re wasting your time,” snarled Pinky. “You can’t talk yourself out of that rope. We got you dead to rights and if you talked a million years we still would run you up.”