“Then where’ll we find him?”
“If he tried to get Lanning once, he’ll try again. Maybe he’s simply been waiting for the dark. I’ll wait down the street and stop him on the way. You stay here.”
They obeyed, and Scottie turned the corner of the shed and sauntered around to the front of the shack, taking his position leaning against a hitching post, a little distance down the street from the hotel.
His reasoning about Lefty had been simple enough, and being simple, it was also justified. He had not been waiting in the place for twenty minutes when he saw a burly, little figure come swaying through the twilight with short, choppy steps. Scottie stopped him with a soft hiss as he passed.
“One minute, partner.”
“Eh?”
“Gruger,” he said, “my name’s Scottie. I know where you’re going, and I’m here to stop you.”
“Oh,” murmured Lefty Gruger. “You think you’ll stop me?”
“Because I hate to see a good man wasted. Gruger, he’ll kill you if you force him to make a gunplay.”
“Say,” asked Lefty, stepping close, “who are you, and what makes you think I’m going to force a gunplay on anybody? Where do you come in?”
“By needing you for another job that’ll pay more.”
“Hmm,” said Lefty Gruger, peering through the shadows, apparently more or less satisfied by what he saw.
“I’ll undertake,” said Scottie, “to prove that Lanning is a better man than you are with a gun. And then I’ll prove that my job is worth more than the Lanning job.”
“And suppose all this chatter meant something … suppose I was really after Lanning … how would doing your job help me to get rid of Lanning?”
“I have an idea,” said Scottie smoothly, “of a way we can ruin Lanning with my job.”
“Pal,” said Lefty, after an instant of thought, “I like the sound of your talk. Start in by showing me how good Lanning is with a gat.”
“Follow me,” said Scottie.
He led the redoubtable Lefty Gruger around behind the shed and presently introduced him with a wave of the hand to Clune and Larry la Roche. Scottie then asked Lefty to accompany the trio over the hill and into the valley beyond. Lefty followed willingly enough, for there was sufficient mystery about this proceeding to attract him. They halted a full mile away in a broad, moonlit ravine, paved with pale-gray stones that gave the valley the brightness of twilight.
“Now,” said Scottie to Larry la Roche, “I want you to get out your gun, Larry, and do a little shooting for us. You’re the best of us with a gun.”
“Thanks,” replied Larry la Roche, “but I guess that don’t make Clune none too happy. But what’s there to shoot at? I’m willing.”
“I’ll give him a mark,” suggested Lefty Gruger. He bent, picked up a piece of quartz, and shied it carelessly into the air. “Hit that.”
As he spoke the gun came into the hand of Larry, and the glitter of the falling quartz went out as though it had fallen out of the moonshine into shadow. Lefty Gruger remained staring where the quartz had last been seen, flashing dimly down through the air.
This was marksmanship indeed. But Lefty was not yet convinced. As a snap shot, he was a rare man himself.
“Turn your back,” he said to Larry huskily, almost angrily.
Larry shoved the weapon back in the holster and obediently turned his back.
Lefty picked up a smaller rock and threw it high in the air. Not until it had reached the crest of its rise and was beginning its glinting descent did he calclass="underline" “Now nail her!”
Larry la Roche whirled, the gun conjured mysteriously into his hand before his long body was halfway writhed around. His eye wandered, and the muzzle of his gun wandered, also, as he searched for the target. Then he fired. The rock glanced down again and was dropping into the shadow of a boulder when Larry fired the second time, and the little rock puffed into dust, white and glittering with crystals in the moonlight.
“All right,” said Larry. “That was a hard one. What next?”
“What next?” asked Lefty Gruger. He passed his finger beneath his stiff collar, as if to make his breathing easier. “There ain’t any more.”
He continued to stare at Larry la Roche for a moment and then suddenly approached and held out his hand. He wrung the long fingers of Larry.
“Pal,” he said, “I’ve seen shooting, and I’ve done some, but you got me beat.”
It was the hardest speech that Lefty Gruger had ever compelled himself to make, but there was a basic honesty in the bottom of the soul of the killer, and it rang in his voice. He made a secret reservation, however, that shooting at a falling rock was far different from shooting at a human target. The latter might strike back at unknown speed. But it was not only the exquisite nicety of the marksmanship that stirred him. It was the careless grace with which the heavy gun had slipped into the bony fingers of the tall man; it was that lightning speed of mind that, having missed his elusive target once, enabled him to readjust to a new direction and fire again in the split part of a second later. The bullets had followed one second later, almost as swiftly as though they had spat from the muzzle of his automatic, and each had been a placed shot. No wonder that Lefty Gruger stepped back with a chilly feeling of awe descending upon him.
“Boys,” he said, continuing that frankness that only a truly formidable man can show, “I didn’t know they grew like you out in this part of the woods. I’m glad I bumped into you. But what’s this got to do with me and young Lanning? How does this prove that he’s a better man than I am?”
Scottie rubbed his chin, then he turned to Larry la Roche. “Larry, you tell him.”
Larry thought a moment, taking off his hat and turning it slowly in his hands, while his eyes wandered slowly along the back, sharp-cut line where the hills met the mysterious haze of the sky.
“I’ll tell you,” he said at length. “I been born and raised with a gun, and I took to it nacheral. It was a long time before I met a gent that was better’n me. But I met one. Yes, sir, he was sure a dandy with a gat. He could make a big gun talk to him like a pet. I can handle a gun pretty fair, but he didn’t handle his gun. It was just a part of him. It growed into his hand … it growed into his mind. He just thought, and there was a dead man. Seemed like it, anyways. He was so fast with a gun and so straight that he didn’t hardly ever shoot to kill. But he’d plug a gent in the arm or the leg and leave him behind.”
Larry sighed.
“Say,” said Lefty Gruger, tremendously impressed, “I’d have give ten years out of my life to seen him. I guess there never was a better’n him, eh?”
“There was,” said Larry la Roche calmly. “Yep, there was a better man than Allister. We never thought his equal would come along, but he came, and the man that beat him and killed him was Hal Dozier. He wasn’t so fancy as Allister. He wasn’t so smooth. Allister was fast as a cat’s paw, but Hal Dozier is like the strike of a snake. He just explodes powder all the time, and when he fights, they’s a spark added, and he blows up. Well, he was faster than Allister and straighter with his gun, and he beat him fair and square.”
“Boys,” said Lefty Gruger, laughing uneasily, “I figure this ain’t any country for me. This Hal Dozier is the champion of champions, eh? I’d hate to have him soft footing after me.”
“He ain’t the champion,” said Larry la Roche, “not by a long sight he ain’t. They’s a gent that beat Hal bad. Met him clean, man to man, and dropped him, shooting in moonlight dimmer’n this. A snake strikes plumb fast, but the end of a whip when it cracks is a pile faster. And that’s the way with this other gent. He beat Hal Dozier.”
“And who’s he?”