“Andy Lanning.”
Lefty Gruger took off his hat. He had become suffocatingly hot, and the perspiration was stinging his eyes.
“You get me now,” murmured Scottie. “You see why I called you off him? Pal, you’ll quit Lanning’s trail?”
“I can’t,” said Lefty doggedly. “I give my word, and I stick to my word. I drop Lanning, or he drops me.”
“But suppose,” suggested Scottie softly, “that I show you how you make a barrel of loose coin and tie up Lanning at the same time. How would that suit you?”
“We’ll talk about it, pal.” He reverted to the last fascinating subject. “But this Lanning, how could he be so fast?”
“Listen,” said Scottie, “and I’ll tip you off. Allister and Hal Dozier are brave, you see? At least, Allister was, and Dozier is. They’re afraid of nothing. They’re plumb confident every time they fight. So’s Larry la Roche, there. So’s almost every gent who has a record as a gunman. But Lanning is different. He isn’t hard as steel. He’s all of a tremble when it comes to fight. I’ve seen him turn white as a girl and shake like a leaf before he went into danger. And he’s always sure the other fellow will get him. He thinks it all out. He feels that he’s as slow as a wagon wheel turning. He feels the other fellow’s slug tearing through his body. He goes through agony before he fights, but when the time comes for the pull of the gun, he’s a bundle of nerves, and every nerve is like loaded electricity. Well, partner, there’s one thing faster than anything else, and that’s the jump of an electric spark. That’s what Lanning is when he fights.”
“But he’s a coward?”
“Don’t fool yourself. He’s just enough of a coward to get a thrill out of every time he pulls a gun. What booze is to some and cards to others and money to the rest, that’s what gunfighting is to Lanning. It’s the lion, and he’s the trainer. It’s fear that brings the trainer into the cage every day, and it’s fear that brings Lanning into trouble.”
“But me and him …”
“He says he’s trying to go straight, curse him. He wouldn’t fight because of that. Because, no matter how the trouble started, he knew that he’d be blamed for it. But you’ve crossed him, Lefty, and sooner or later, you lay to this, he’ll get you and fill you full of lead unless you get him first. And the rest of us, the three of us, we all crossed him, too. We made this play tonight to try to get him back on our side. He wouldn’t come. So we know he’s going to try to get us, and our scheme is just to get him first.”
“How?”
“By standing all together and using the law. Sit down, and I’ll tell you how.”
While he talked, the moon slid high and higher and slipped into a cloud, and still the chief of the gang was outlining his plan. But, whatever that plan was, it did not develop that night. Martindale did not waken the next morning with the shudder that Scottie had planned for it the day before. It wakened calm and tired with the heat of the night and drifted into another blazing-hot day as peacefully as ever.
The night had been terrible for Andrew Lanning, and the day was more awful still, for he came to it physically exhausted, ragged nerves on edge. Sally came and put her head in at the window as he washed his breakfast things, and afterward she glided at his side as he went to the shop. But aside from Sally, there seemed no cheering note in all the universe, and the dark sense of defeat gathered more and more thickly in the corners of his brain.
That day dragged out, and another, with every waking hour filled with the suspicion of the men of Martindale and by Andrew’s fear of himself. He had to fight to keep himself from hating these people for once that hate took him by the throat, he knew that the killing would swiftly follow. It was in the very late afternoon of the second day that Hal Dozier came hurriedly to his shop, Hal Dozier with a drawn face of excitement.
“I got a surprise for you, Andy,” he said. “Come along.”
Andrew followed sluggishly to the door of the marshal’s office. The marshal here bent to do something to his right spur.
“Go on in, Andy. I’ll follow right on as soon as I get this spur fixed.”
Andy mechanically opened the office door and stood slouched against the wall. A full moment elapsed before he sensed another presence in the room and came suddenly erect, his nerves twitching. He turned, fighting himself to make the motion slow, and then he saw her. She was rising from her chair, big -eyed, as if she doubted her reception, half smiling, as if she hoped for happiness. She was more flower-like than ever, he thought, and her beauty struck him with a soul-stirring surprise, as something remembered, and yet with all the exquisite details forgotten. The difference between Anne Withero remembered and Anne Withero present was the difference between a dream and reality.
His eyes went down to the slender hand and the bending fingers that rested on the table. He found nothing to say, but he shut the door, always keeping his hungry eyes on her. And now Anne grew afraid, for she was looking at a new man, not the smooth-cheeked, careless, fire-eyed youth she remembered, but a man stamped with a starved look of suffering and dull, melancholy eyes.
At last she managed to say: “You wouldn’t come to me, you know, and so I had to come to you, Andrew.”
“Oh, Anne,” he whispered, “are you real? Is it you?”
“Of course. But, Andy, you’ve been terribly sick.”
“That’s all past, and …”
They seemed to fumble their way around the table, as if they were walking in sleep.
“You’ve kept one touch of belief in me, Anne?”
“Kept it? Ah, don’t you see that I’ve never doubted you even?”
This much the marshal heard, for he had stayed guiltily near the door, but at this point, he was mastered by a decent respect for the rights of lovers and walked reluctantly away. It was still terribly hot, but the sheriff took off his hat to the full blaze of the slant sun and smiled, as if a cool breeze were playing on his face.
Dozier came back, after what he thought was a painfully long time, and found them sitting close together, their dim, frightened eyes avoiding each other. The marshal was one of those lucky men who keep close to their youth, and his heart jumped at what he saw. He even understood when Andy Lanning rose and strode out of the room without a word to either of them.
The marshal closed the door after him and stood fanning himself with his hat and grinning shamelessly at Anne Withero. He liked her blush, and he liked her dignity, and he admired a poise that enabled her to smile back at him, as if she knew that he understood.
“If you knew,” he said at last, “what it means to me. That kid has been a load that’s nearly busted my back. And now it’s settled.”
“But it isn’t, you know,” said Anne Withero, growing anxious again.
“You mean to say that, after you’ve come, he doesn’t know that he has to go straight?”
“You see,” she explained, fully as worried as the marshal, but determined to make Andrew logical and plausible, “he feels that he hasn’t gone through a sufficient test. There is a bit of wildness in him, you know, Mister Dozier.”
“Not much more than there is in a hawk,” said the marshal dryly. “But what mischief is he up to now?”
“I tried to make him feel that he has been tested sufficiently. I told him that I knew about his meeting with the terrible man who struck him, and what a glorious thing I thought it was that he had endured it, and he wouldn’t agree. He says that he came within an inch of doing something terrible. And he wants a little time still, you see, to make these stupid people accept him. He says that if he could do something that would make half a dozen of these men about the village come to him and shake hands with him, then he’d feel that he had restored himself, and then he would be willing to go anywhere.”