Steel and other stories [SSC] Page 7

  “Tell him he’s a dirty Rebel,” he said in a breathless-sounding voice. “Tell him—tell him I’m a Yankee and I hate all Rebels!”

  For another moment he stood before us in wavering defiance. Then suddenly he was gone.

  George broke the spell. We heard the clink of glass on glass as he poured himself a drink. We watched him swallow it in a single gulp. “Young fool,” he muttered.

  I got up and went over to him.

  “How do you like that?” he asked me, gesturing one big hand in the general direction of the doors.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him, conscious of the two men now sauntering with affected carelessness for the doors.

  “What am I supposed to do?” George asked me. “Tell Selkirk, I guess.”

  I told George about my talk with young Riker and of his strange transformation from city boy to, apparently, self-appointed pistol killer.

  “Well,” George said when I was finished talking, “where does that leave me? I can’t have a young idiot like that angry with me. Do you know his triggers were filed to a hair? Did you see the way he slung that Colt?” he shook his head. “He’s a fool,” he said. “But a dangerous fool—one that a man can’t let himself take chances with.”

  “Don’t tell Selkirk,” I said. “I’ll go to the sheriff and—” George waved an open palm at me. “Don’t joke now, John,” he said. “You know Cleat hides his head under the pillow when there’s shooting in the air.”

  “But this would be a slaughter, George,” I said. “Selkirk is a hardened killer, you know that for a fact.”

  George eyed me curiously. “Why are you concerned about it?” he asked me.

  “Because he’s a boy,” I said. “Because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  George shrugged. “The boy came in and asked for it himself, didn’t he?” he said. “Besides, even if I say nothing, Selkirk will hear about it, you can be sure of that. Those two who just went out—don’t you think they’ll spread the word?”

  A grim smile raised Shaughnessy’s lips. “The boy will get his fight,” he said. “And may the Lord have mercy on his soul.”

  George was right. Word of the young stranger’s challenge flew about the town as if the wind had blown it. And with the word, the threadbare symbol of our justice, Sheriff Cleat, sought the sanctuary of his house, having either scoffed at all storm warnings or ignored them in his practiced way.

  But the storm was coming; everyone knew it. The people who had found some reason to bring them to the square—they knew it. The men thronging the Nellie Gold who seemed to have developed a thirst quite out of keeping with their normal desires—they knew it. Death is a fascinating lure to men who can stand aside and watch it operate on someone else.

  I stationed myself near the entrance of the Nellie Gold, hoping that I might speak to young Riker, who had been in his hotel room all afternoon, alone.

  ~ * ~

  At seven-thirty, Selkirk and his ruffian friends galloped to the hitching rack, tied up their snorting mounts, and went into the saloon. I heard the greetings offered them and their returning laughs and shouts. They were elated, all of them; that was not hard to see. Things had been dull for them in the past few months. Cleat had offered no resistance, only smiling fatuously to their bullying insults. And, in the absence of any other man willing to draw his pistol on Barth Selkirk, the days had dragged for him and for his gang, who thrived on violence. Gambling and drinking and the company of Grantville’s lost women was not enough for these men. It was why they were all bubbling with excited anticipation that night.

  While I stood waiting on the wooden sidewalk, endlessly drawing out my pocket watch, I heard the men shouting back and forth among themselves inside the saloon. But the deep, measured voice of Barth Selkirk I did not hear. He did not shout or laugh then or ever. It was why he hovered like a menacing wraith across our town. For he spoke his frightening logic with the thunder of his pistols and all men knew it.

  Time was passing. It was the first time in my life that impending death had taken on such immediacy to me. My boys had died a thousand miles from me, falling while, oblivious, I sold flour to the blacksmith’s wife. My wife had died slowly, passing in the peace of slumber, without a cry or a sob.

  Yet now I was deeply in this fearful moment. Because I had spoken to young Riker, because—yes, I knew it now—he had reminded me of Lew, I now stood shivering in the darkness, my hands clammy in my coat pockets, in my stomach a hardening knot of dread.

  And then my watch read eight. I looked up—and I heard his boots clumping on the wood in even, unhurried strides.

  I stepped out from the shadows and moved toward him. The people in the square had grown suddenly quiet. I sensed men’s eyes on me as I walked toward Riker’s approaching form. It was, I knew, the distortion of nerves and darkness, but he seemed taller than before as he walked along with measured steps, his small hands swinging tensely at his sides.

  I stopped before him. For a moment, he looked irritably confused. Then that smile that showed no humor flickered on his tightly drawn face.

  “It’s the grocery man,” he said, his voice dry and brittle.

  I swallowed the cold tightness in my throat. “Son, you’re making a mistake,” I said, “a very bad mistake.”

  “Get out of my way,” he told me curtly, his eyes glancing over my shoulder at the saloon.

  “Son, believe me. Barth Selkirk is too much for you to—”

  In the dull glowing of saloon light, the eyes he turned on me were the blue of frozen, lifeless things. My voice broke off, and without another word, I stepped aside to let him pass. When a man sees in another man’s eyes the insensible determination that I saw in Riker’s, it is best to step aside. There are no words that will affect such men.

  A moment more he looked at me and then, squaring his shoulders, he started walking again. He did not stop until he stood before the batwings of the Nellie Gold.

  I moved closer, staring at the light and shadows of his face illuminated by the inside lamps. And it seemed as though, for a moment, the mask of relentless cruelty fell from his features to reveal stark terror.

  But it was only a moment, and I could not be certain I had really seen it. Abruptly, the eyes caught fire again, the thin mouth tightened, and Riker shoved through the doors with one long stride.

  There was silence, utter ringing silence in that room. Even the scuffing of my bootheels sounded very loud as I edged cautiously to the doors.

  Then, as I reached them, there was that sudden rustling, thumping, jingling combination of sounds that indicated general withdrawal from the two opposing men.

  I looked in carefully.

  Riker stood erect, his back to me, looking toward the bar. It now stood deserted save for one man.

  Barth Selkirk was a tall man who looked even taller because of the black he wore. His hair was long and blond; it hung in thick ringlets beneath his wide-brimmed hat. He wore his pistol low on his right hip, the butt reversed, the holster thonged tightly to his thigh. His face was long and tanned, his eyes as sky-blue as Riker’s, his mouth a motionless line beneath the well-trimmed length of his mustaches.

  I had never seen Abilene’s Hickok, but the word had always been that Selkirk might have been his twin.

  ~ * ~

  As the two eyed each other, it was as though every watching man in that room had ceased to function, their breaths frozen, their bodies petrified—only their eyes alive, shifting back and forth from man to man. It might have been a room of statues, so silently did each man stand.

  Then I saw Selkirk’s broad chest slowly expanding as it filled with air. And as it slowly sank, his deep voice broke the silence with the impact of a hammer blow on glass.

  “Well?’ he said and let his boot slide off the brass rail and thump down onto the floor.

  An instant pause. Then, suddenly, a gasping in that room as if one man had gasped instead of all.

  For Selkirk’s fingers, barely
to the butt of his pistol, had turned to stone as he gaped dumbly at the brace of Colts in Riker’s hands.

  “Why you dirty—” he began—and then his voice was lost in the deafening roar of pistol fire. His body was flung back against the bar edge as if a club had struck him in the chest. He held there for a moment, his face blank with astonishment. Then the second pistol kicked thundering in Riker’s hand and Selkirk went down in a twisted heap.

  I looked dazedly at Selkirk’s still body, staring at the great gush of blood from his torn chest. Then, my eyes were on Riker again as he stood veiled in acrid smoke before the staring men.

  I heard him swallow convulsively. “My name is Riker,” he said, his voice trembling in spite of efforts to control it. “Remember that. Riker.”

  He backed off nervously, his left pistol holstered in a blur of movement, his right still pointed toward the crowd of men.

  Then he was out of the saloon again, his face contorted with a mixture of fear and exultation as he turned and saw me standing there.

  “Did you see it?” he asked me in a shaking voice. “Did you see it?”

  I looked at him without a word as his head jerked to the side and he looked into the saloon again, his hands plummeting down like shot birds to his pistol butts.

  Apparently he saw no menace, for instantly his eyes were back on me again—excited, swollen-pupiled eyes.

  “They won’t forget me now, will they?” he said and swallowed. “They’ll remember my name. They’ll be afraid of it.”

  He started to walk past me, then twitched to the side and leaned, with a sudden weakness, against the saloon wall, his chest heaving with breath, his blue eyes jumping around feverishly. He kept gasping at the air as if he were choking.

  He swallowed with difficulty. “Did you see it?” he asked me again, as if he were desperate to share his murderous triumph. “He didn’t even get to pull his pistols— didn’t even get to pull them.” His lean chest shuddered with turbulent breath. “That’s how,” he gasped, “that’s how to do it.” Another gasp. “I showed them. I showed them all how to do it. I came from the city and I showed them how. I got the best one they had, the best one.” His throat moved so quickly it made a dry, clicking sound. “I showed them,” he muttered.

  He looked around blinking. “Now I’ll—”

  He looked all around with frightened eyes, as if an army of silent killers were encircling him. His face went slack and he forced together his shaking lips.

  “Get out of my way,” he suddenly ordered and pushed me aside. I turned and watched him walking rapidly toward the hotel, looking to the sides and over his shoulder with quick jerks of his head, his hands half poised at his sides.

  I tried to understand young Riker, but I couldn’t. He was from the city; that I knew. Some city in the mass of cities had borne him. He had come to Grantville with the deliberate intention of singling out the fastest pistolman and killing him face to face. That made no sense to me. That seemed a purposeless desire.

  Now what would he do? He had told me he was only going to be in Grantville for a while. Now that Selkirk was dead, that while was over.

  Where would young Riker go next? And would the same scenes repeat themselves in the next town, and the next, and the next after that? The young city man arriving, changing outfits, asking for the most dangerous pistolman, meeting him—was that how it was going to be in every town? How long could such insanity last? How long before he met a man who would not lose the draw?

  My mind was filled with these questions. But, over all, the single question—Why? Why was he doing this thing? What calculating madness had driven him from the city to seek out death in this strange land?

  While I stood there wondering, Barth Selkirk’s men carried out the blood-soaked body of their slain god and laid him carefully across his horse. I was so close to them that I could see his blond hair ruffling slowly in the night wind and hear his life’s blood spattering on the darkness of the street.

  Then I saw the six men looking toward the Blue Buck Hotel, their eyes glinting vengefully in the light from the Nellie Gold, and I heard their voices talking low. No words came clear to me as they murmured among themselves, but from the way they kept looking toward the hotel I knew of what they spoke.

  I drew back into the shadows again, thinking they might see me and carry their conversation elsewhere. I stood in the blackness watching. Somehow I knew exactly what they intended even before one of their shadowy group slapped a palm against his pistol butt and said distinctly, “Come on.”

  I saw them move away slowly, the six of them, their voices suddenly stilled, their eyes directed at the hotel they were walking toward.

  Foolishness again; it is an old man’s trademark. For, suddenly, I found myself stepping from the shadows and turning the corner of the saloon, then running down the alley between the Nellie Gold and Pike’s Saddlery; rushing through the squares of light made by the saloon windows, then into darkness again. I had no idea why I was running. I seemed driven by an unseen force which clutched all reason from my mind but one thought— warn him.

  My breath was quickly lost. I felt my coattails flapping like furious bird wings against my legs. Each thudding bootfall drove a mail-gloved fist against my heart.

  I don’t know how I beat them there, except that they were walking cautiously while I ran headlong along St. Yera street and hurried in the backway of the hotel. I rushed down the silent hallway, my bootheels thumping along the frayed rug.

  Maxwell Tarrant was at the desk that night. He looked up with a start as I came running up to him.

  “Why, Mr. Callaway,” he said, “what are—?”

  “Which room is Riker in?” I gasped.

  “Riker?” young Tarrant asked me.

  “Quickly, boy!” I cried and cast a frightened glance toward the entranceway as the jar of bootheels sounded on the porch steps.

  “Room 27,” young Tarrant said. I begged him to stall the men who were coming in for Riker, and rushed for the stairs.

  I was barely to the second floor when I heard them in the lobby. I ran down the dimlit hall, and reaching Room 27, I rapped urgently on its thin door.

  Inside, I heard a rustling sound, the sound of stockinged feet padding on the floor, then Riker’s frail, trembling voice asking who it was.

  “It’s Callaway,” I said, “the grocery man. Let me in, quickly. You’re in danger.”

  “Get out of here,” he ordered me, his voice sounding thinner yet.

  “God help you, boy, prepare yourself,” I told him breathlessly. “Selkirk’s men are coming for you.”

  I heard his sharp, involuntary gasp. “No,” he said. “That isn’t—” He drew in a rasping breath. “How many?” he asked me hollowly.

  “Six,” I said, and on the other side of the door I thought I heard a sob.

  “That isn’t fair!” he burst out then in angry fright. “It’s not fair, six against one. It isn’t fair!”

  I stood there for another moment, staring at the door, imagining that twisted young man on the other side, sick with terror, his heart jolting like club beats in his chest, able to think of nothing but a moral quality those six men never knew.

  “What am I going to do?” he suddenly implored me.

  I had no answer. For, suddenly, I heard the thumping of their boots as they started up the stairs, and helpless in my age, I backed quickly from the door and scuttled, like the frightened thing I was, down the hall into the shadows there.

  Like a dream it was, seeing those six grim-faced men come moving down the hall with a heavy trudging of boots, a thin jingling of spur rowels, in each of their hands a long Colt pistol. No, like a nightmare, not a dream. Knowing that these living creatures were headed for the room in which young Riker waited, I felt something sinking in my stomach, something cold and wrenching at my insides. Helpless I was; I never knew such helplessness. For no seeming reason, I suddenly saw my Lew inside that room, waiting to be killed. I made me tremble without the s
trength to stop.

  Their boots halted. The six men ringed the door, three on one side, three on the other. Six young men, their faces tight with unyielding intention, their hands bloodless, so tightly did they hold their pistols.

  The silence broke. “Come out of that room, you Yankee bastard!” one of them said loudly. He was Thomas Ashwood, a boy I’d once seen playing children’s games in the streets of Grantville, a boy who had grown into the twisted man who now stood, gun in hand, all thoughts driven from his mind but thoughts of killing and revenge.

  Silence for a moment.

  “I said, come out!” Ashwood cried again, then jerked his body to the side as the hotel seemed to tremble with a deafening blast and one of the door panels exploded into jagged splinters.