The Stranger from Abilene

Kelly pushed the Bulldog forward and St. John immediately reached into his pocket and found a coin.

“Double, Terry. Pay her double.”

“Marshal Kelly, you don’t need to—”

“Shut up, Minnie.”

St. John, badly frightened, dropped money into the girl’s hand.

“Now get out of here, Minnie,” Kelly said.

The girl fled and Kelly motioned with the gun. “Sit at the desk, Terry.”

The fat man did as he was told, his slack mouth twitching.

A moment later the clerk stuck his head in the doorway.

“Are you all right, Mr. St. John?”

Kelly turned on him, his gun up and ready. “Get the hell away from here.”

The clerk squealed and scampered back from the door. Kelly pushed it shut behind him.

He stepped to the desk and threw the paper in front of the fat man.

“Read it,” he said.

St. John glanced at the note. Immediately his eyes popped and his hands trembled. He looked up at Kelly. “What are you showing me? The mayor is dead?”

“Read it,” Kelly said.

The fat man’s eyes dropped to the paper. When he finished reading he looked like a man about to have a heart attack.

“Lies,” he said, his voice a whisper. “It’s all lies. I have lawyers. I can beat this.”

“I’ll let the United States Marshal decide that, Terry. And I’ll wire the Texas Rangers. I’m sure they’ll be interested.”

St. John raised bloodshot eyes to Kelly’s face, the threat of the Rangers scaring him badly. “What will happen to me?”

“I’ll hang you. Or the Rangers will.”

St. John sat in silence for a while, then said, “Do I have an out?”

“Not that I can see,” Kelly said.

“Money?”

Kelly shook his head.

“I should have gunned Quarrels years ago,” the fat man said. “When he first began to squeeze me.”

“Seems like.”

St. John’s hand strayed to the bottom drawer of his desk.

“Open it, Terry,” Kelly said, his eyes glittering. “Please.”

The fat man pulled his hand away as though it had been burned.

“On your feet,” Kelly said.

“Where are you taking me?”

“To jail. Where you belong.”

Chapter 71

There was no letup in the rain as Emma Kelly rode into the Southwell Ranch.

Lightning hissed across a sullen sky, and thunder rolled with the racketing din of a thousand strident drums.

She saw the bodies of three men sprawled on the muddy ground. Clayton she recognized at once, lying on his back, his face turned to the rain.

Emma stepped from the saddle and ran to Clayton. Heedless of the mud, she kneeled, then lifted his head and laid it on her lap.

“Cage, can you hear me?”

The man’s face, pale under his tanned skin, showed no sign of life.

Emma’s hand moved to his bloody chest. His heart was still beating, but hesitantly.

Desperately the girl looked around her, her eyes searching for help that wasn’t there. She saw only the shifting curtain of the rain, heard it chatter on the ranch house roof, smelled the caustic tang of lightning.

There was no one else. She had it to do.

Clayton was a big man, heavy with bone and muscle, and lifting him was out of the question.

Emma stood, grabbed him by the armpits, and dragged his limp body.

It was slow going, a few inches at a time, the man a heavy burden for a slender woman.

Starting and stopping, Emma took almost ten minutes to drag Clayton the twenty yards to the house. She glanced at Quarrels’s body, curled up in death, and felt only anger.

She opened the door, and with the last of her strength, pulled Clayton inside into the hallway.

This was not the time for false modesty. Now, out of the rain, Emma stripped off Clayton’s wet clothes and left him lying naked for a few moments while she ran into a bedroom and returned with a pillow and blanket.

The man was shot through and through, but he was still breathing, and that gave the girl hope.

Cage was strong. He would survive this—he had to.

She walked to the door and looked out into the raging morning.

She badly needed Nook Kelly’s help, his man’s strength.

When would he get here?

To the north of the Southwell Ranch, across the rain-lashed hill country, Marshal Nook Kelly stood in the bank and listened to Lissome Terry’s proposition.

“Let me go to your office by myself, Nook,” the fat man pleaded. “I don’t want to walk through town with my hands raised and a gun at my back. I have friends here, neighbors.”

Kelly glanced into the street. It was deserted, the rain forcing everyone indoors.

“There’s nobody on the street, Terry,” he said. “Now move your fat ass off the chair.”

“For old times’ sake, Nook?”

“Terry, you and me don’t have old times, only bad times. Now move it. I won’t tell you again.”

Years ago, when Bighorn Point was wilder and Kelly more on edge, he’d trained himself to expect the unexpected, to be ready for something he’d never seen before.

That morning in Terry’s office he wasn’t unready—but his edge had been dulled by too many years of easy living.

And the fat man showed him something.

As he raised himself from his chair, he groaned, then slumped to his right, as though suddenly taken ill.