Missing

by Sevenstars

Sent to buy horses up north, Jess is reported killed, and Slim takes the buckboard to "fetch him home." But when he gets there, the body isn't Jess.

Missing

by Sevenstars

SUMMARY: Jess, on a trip to buy horses in another town, is reported killed, and Slim takes the buckboard "to fetch him home and put him on the hill with Ma and Pa." But when he gets there, the body isn't Jess. What has become of his pard? My second Laramie fic, and the first full-length one. Takes place after the four canonical seasons. Thanks to Lisa for the beta.

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Slim had just seen off the last stage of the day, the afternoon inbound, when Mort Corey came riding into the yard, passing the coach as it thundered out onto the road. Slim smiled and waved. "Hey, Mort! What brings you by?"

The sheriff drew his horse up and gazed at the rancher with solemn eyes. Slim felt a chill strike him and something settle with an unpleasant heaviness in his gut. Mort's expression was more generally serious than not, a natural outgrowth of having spent most of thirty years earning his living with a badge and a gun, but there was something sadder and more personal about it now. Only one thing could bring him out here lookin' like that, Slim thought, without wanting to. "Mort?" His voice stuck in his throat. "What is it?"

Corey bit back a sigh. "Slim, I'd give everything I own not to have to tell you this, but I'm afraid I've got bad news."

Slim had to swallow twice hard before he could get his voice to work. "It's Jess, isn't it?" His partner had left about ten days ago to head up to the Big Horn Basin and visit a rancher who was offering mares for sale. Slim had been considering for some time the possibility of getting deeper into horse-breeding: the beef market was as iffy as Wyoming weather, but everybody always needed horses and probably always would. Now that he had Jess around—Jess was the best he'd seen at breaking and training, except maybe for an Indian or two—it seemed like a good time to put the thought into action. He'd given Jess a draft on their account at the bank, so he wouldn't have to carry vulnerable cash, wished him luck haggling with the northern rancher, and watched him ride out.

Mort nodded solemnly. "Got the telegram not an hour ago. Came as soon as I could saddle up."

"How bad?" Slim asked. Jess did have a way of getting himself banged up—look at that time with Branch McGarry, they'd almost lost him then. But, as Jess said, you couldn't live your life on what-if. If you didn't take chances you'd never get a dad-gum thing done.

And this time Mort did sigh. "Bad as you can get, I'm afraid." He thumbed the wrinkled flimsy out of his vest pocket and held it out. Slim took it with that heaviness settling ever deeper, unfolded it and read:

SHERIFF MORT COREY, LARAMIE

MAN KILLED HERE LAST NIGHT CARRYING DOCUMENTS IDENTIFYING HIM AS JESS HARPER=INFORM INTERESTED PARTIES AND FORWARD THEIR INSTRUCTIONS=MARCUS KINDRY, CITY MARSHAL, WAVERLEY, WYOMING

"No..." Slim whispered. No. Not Jess. It couldn't be. He wouldn't believe it.

"I'm sorry, Slim," Mort said quietly. "He was a good man."

"Why, Mort!" came a voice from behind him, and he whirled to see Daisy standing in the open kitchen door, her hands covered in flour. "You haven't stopped by in weeks. Step down, I'll get you a cup of coffee, and I've just been baking—"

"Daisy." Slim's voice was hoarse, half strangled, but somehow there was something in it that stopped her almost in mid-word. "Daisy, I..." He put the telegram in his pocket and crossed the yard to where she stood. It felt like he was walking through quicksand. This is gonna kill her, he thought. Maybe Daisy thought he'd never noticed, but he had: Jess was her favorite, always had been, ever since she'd first come here.

She knew him too well. That look on his face could only mean that someone very dear to him was... "Slim?" she ventured, barely audible.

He put his hands very gently on her upper arms, to support her. "Daisy, we—there's bad news."

"Jess?" she guessed in a small voice.

There was no easy way to say it, no way he could make it less painful, to her or to himself. "I'm sorry, Daisy. I'm so sorry. He's dead."

She promptly fainted.

**SR**

He carried her inside, with Mort going on ahead to open the door of her bedroom. "She's gonna take this hard," the sheriff observed quietly; any experienced lawman learned over time how to read people, and he'd seen as clearly as Slim had how special Jess was to the housekeeper. "Maybe I better get back to town and send a doc out."

Slim thought about that for a minute, then nodded. "Yeah, maybe you better. And send a telegram to that marshal in Waverley, will you?"

"Sure. You going up there?"

"First thing tomorrow. I'll take the buckboard, so you better warn them it'll take me a day or two to get there."

"The buckboard? Wouldn't the stage be faster?" Mort asked. Being an employee (or more accurately a contractor) of the line, Slim could travel on it free of charge any time he wanted to.

"I've gotta fetch him home," said Slim. "We'll put him on the hill with Ma and Pa. It's where he belongs. If he hadn't come here we'd have lost the place half a dozen times over by now." He looked up at the sheriff, his handsome face bleak, stripped. "You tell those people, if they give him some ten-dollar county funeral they'll have me to deal with. He deserves better."

"I'd agree with that," said Mort. "Say, where's Mike?"

"Finished his chores early and rode out to the lake to see if he could get a mess of trout for supper," Slim said absently, drawing a light blanket up over Daisy's unconscious form. The boy was eleven now—they'd marked his birthday only the day before Jess left—and allowed to venture farther afield alone than when he'd first come to them; his last growth spurt had even left him with legs long enough to begin comfortably riding Ember, the six-year-old sorrel his father had traded for in the last winter of his life. Mike. How am I gonna tell him about Jess? And how am I gonna write Andy and Jonesy the news?

I've gotta be strong, Slim thought. Give me your strength, pard. I'll need to take over for both of us now.

"If I see him on the way I'll send him back," Mort promised. Then he looked steadily at the rancher. "Slim. I won't insult you trying to say I know how you feel. I almost wish I could—you were a lucky man to have a friend like Jess. But Marshal Kindry said he was 'killed.' That means somebody did it. When you get there... don't do something that's gonna ruin your life. You've still got people depending on you," and he glanced at Daisy. "Jess wouldn't want you to risk that, and this place, to settle scores for him."

Slim stood up abruptly, turning away from the sheriff sharply as he did. It suddenly seemed hard to breathe. "I know what you're sayin', Mort," he said softly. "I wish I could promise you... but I can't." He pulled in air, his whole body shuddering with the depth of it. "If it had been me... you know Jess wouldn't have promised you either. He couldn't have, and still gone on bein' who he was."

"I know that," and there was a deep note of compassion in the older man's voice. "I'm not even saying that you—or he—would be wrong. All I'm saying is... just think before you do anything that can't be mended."

Slim stood very still for a long minute, then slowly nodded. "I'll try," he said, so low even he could scarcely hear the words. "It's the best I can do for you, Mort."

"You need anything, anything at all," Corey said, not trying to pursue the issue, "you message me. And when you get back..."

"I'll send word in by the stage," Slim agreed. "That reminds me. After you telegraph Kindry, find Ben and send him out here, will you? He'll have to take over for me."

"I can do that. I'd better be on my way." Slim knew it wasn't because of the errands he'd been asked to do. The Sherman Ranch family would need some time alone, to start grieving over their loss.

He turned to face his friend. "Thank you for takin' the time to come out, Mort. It means a lot to me that you did that."

Mort shook hands. "You go and bring Jess home," he said. "I'll find my way out."

**SR**

The doctor got there about three hours later. By that time Mike had come back from the lake and heard the news. Daisy had regained consciousness, but when she saw Slim sitting by her bed with Mike at his side, saw the expressions on their faces, she turned on her side and began to weep. They tried their best to comfort her, but there really wasn't anything they could say.

"She's had a terrible shock," Doc Phillips said when he joined them in the main room. "I gave her a sedative to calm her down, but at Daisy's age, a loss like this one... I'd advise you not to leave her alone."

"I'll sit with her," Slim said. "I don't figure I could sleep anyway."

"I don't mean just tonight," Doc told him. "Women have been known to start having fainting spells, even seizures, from this sort of thing. I know you've got range work, but..."

Slim hesitated. He had to go get Jess, he couldn't let his pard be buried in a strange town where nobody knew him... "Somebody's comin'," said Mike suddenly, and Slim realized he was hearing hoofbeats—two horses. Ben? Who'd be with him?

He went to the door. Two people were just tying their horses up in front of the porch in the gathering dusk. "Evenin', Slim," came a thick hill drawl. "We done heared the news in town. Pete sent me out, said do whatever you needed."

"Len," Slim said.

Len Dixon faced him, still lanky and thin-faced, though beginning now to fill out a bit at twenty. "Pete said, iffen weren't for you and Jess, no tellin' what would've become of us. And you holdin' that money for us, helpin' us to spend it right, it's done made all the difference t'our spread—we got a good bull now, some good heifers, Pete's a-gettin' hisself hitched—" Pete Dixon, having become what he called "a critter o' property," had started courting Junie Lockwood, off one of the homestead farms, and she'd finally said yes a couple of months ago. Len shuffled his feet, looking down at the ground. "Just seemed as how it was time we done somethin' to even things out, is all," he finished.

The two Dixon boys had come out here right after the war, from somewhere in southwestern Missouri, with their father and a bunch of scrub longhorns they'd picked up around Baxter Springs. The old man had claimed a tract of the rising upland just east of the Sherman place, probably because it reminded him of home, and that had been about the extent of his ambition; he'd died when Len was fifteen. For a time Pete and Len had looked likelier to finish up on the gallows than anything. But then, four years ago, they'd taken out after a fugitive outlaw when they saw him, as they thought, pitch Slim off a rock outcrop to his death; they'd followed the man with the doggedness that only Southern country folk could summon, and when they found a good place they'd started banging away at him with the only gun they had, their father's old percussion revolver. They'd delayed him long enough for Slim—and Jess, who'd found and rescued him—to come up and finish the job, both getting wounded in the process, and that and the $4000 reward the four of them had split for the stolen money they'd recovered had apparently turned the pair around. Slim remembered what Pete had said the night Jess came back from town to tell them how much they'd be getting in return for the blood they'd shed: See, for the longest time we was scairt that we'd end up like you'n'Jess... only now, we're scairt that we won't. He managed a painful smile. "Thanks, Len. We can use you. Ben's comin' out and he'll have Mike to help him, but he's not young, and another pair of hands will make a difference. Mike, you help Len see to these horses, and then get him settled in the bunkhouse, will you?" He looked to the other rider, who was just removing a canvas telescope bag from behind her cantle. "Celie."

"Sheriff Corey stopped by our place," she said, "and told us what happened. Pa said for me to come out—he and Ma'll be along in the morning. Others too, like as not—he sent Joe and Henry around to pass the word. But he said I was to stay as long as needed."

"I'm obliged to you," Slim told her. "Somebody has to stay with Daisy, Doc says." Celia McCaskey and her family were the Sherman Ranch's closest neighbors, some five miles along the trail to town. He wasn't surprised they'd offer their help. That was the way of it in the range country—when someone had a need, whether it was from sickness or childbirth or a burned barn or a death in the family, the neighbors rallied around. No speeches were made about it; it was expected. "Let me take that bag," he said. "I'll put you in Mike's room and he can move in with me."

"Doc inside?" she asked, passing him the bag. "Maybe best I talk to him."

"Good idea," Slim agreed, and went in. He'd always had more than a suspicion that Celie was interested in Jess, though Jess had never been any more attentive to her than to any of the other girls in the district; had in fact, for a time, had a regular rivalry going with her as to which was better with a rifle. She was twenty-three now, coming twenty-four in September, the last still at home of four sisters, a self-reliant range girl with the same aquiline face and rusty-red hair as her father. Maybe it's a good thing, her bein' here, he thought. For Daisy's sake. If they've both lost somebody they cared about... that might make a difference.

He saw her settled by Daisy's bed, made sure there was a coffeepot keeping warm on the stove, sent Doc off with thanks and ordered Mike to bed when he came in from the barn, then stirred up the fire and settled in one of the chairs with a cup of coffee. Neither he nor Mike had had any appetite, and he knew he wouldn't be sleeping. He looked sideways at the rocker that, over the years, had come to be acknowledged as "Jess's spot," and wondered. If we go on after we die, the way I've always been taught... will he come back, even for a little while? Just to let us know he's all right and waitin'?

So much I wish I'd told you, pard... only I guess you already knew most of it, didn't you? Friends don't keep score—you taught me that; they just know.

He sank deeper into the chair and gave himself over to the memories.

**SR**

Dawn found Slim climbing steadily up the high slope behind the corral. He'd spent part of the night packing what he figured he'd need, food, camping gear, a bedroll, a bag of grain, loading it into the buckboard and checking over the harness. He'd be ready to go as soon as Ben got here; the older man probably hadn't trusted his eyesight to the road by night. Right now he had one last job to do.

His parents lay side by side under an old cedar tree. For many years all they'd had to mark their graves had been wooden markers that Jonesy had nailed together, with their names and dates burned into the surfaces with a hot poker by their older son. It wasn't till Jess came, and Slim with his help was able to really buckle down to improving the place, that he'd managed a couple of proper tombstones. He'd had them brought out only a couple of years ago. He stopped before the graves, spread his feet and took off his hat. "Morning, Ma... morning, Pa," he said softly. "I know I don't get up to see you as often as I should, but... it takes a lot of work to keep this place going. You'd know that, both of you." He sighed. "Probably won't get any chances to speak of at all, now. Not with Jess gone. I'm goin' up to Waverley to get him... gonna lay him here, with you. You won't mind, will you? He's... he was... special to us. Part of the family. Like havin' another brother, one you couldn't give me." He sighed. "I know he may seem a little rough around the edges... we did our best to polish him some, but we wouldn't really have wanted to change him too much. If he... if he hadn't been who and what he was, I... maybe I'd be here with you today, for good. He saved my life so many times..." Pause. "Of course I saved his probably just as many, so it made us even—I think we stopped keepin' count after about the third."

He tipped his head back and drew in the chill morning air in a long sniff, tasting it in his sinuses. Jess had never been one for mornings, much: Slim himself could greet the dawn bright-eyed and bushy-tailed without so much as a cup of coffee, but Jess always needed plenty of priming before he could do more than grunt and shuffle around half-conscious. "He is rough," he went on after a moment, "and stubborn as an Army mule, and he's got a temper like a keg of gunpowder, always ready to blow. He holds onto grudges like nobody I ever knew, and he's not a man you want mad at you, because he just never gives up till he gets what he thinks is due him. But he's not afraid of anything on two legs or four—well, except a dentist; his word's his bond, he's loyal and he's a good man with a horse. And I can't remember a time that he wasn't ready to do whatever he had to, to balance out a debt he owed—one time he even let a man out of jail when he was standin' deputy for Mort, because that man cut him down after some people tried to lynch him in Texas." Pause. "We didn't talk about it much, but... I know he thought of this place as his home. And he needed a home—he'd been through some bad times before he came here, and I don't rightly know how he found the strength to keep from slidin' over the line, it's such an easy thing to do when you're like he was once, a young man with no one and nothing except a fast gun and a crawful of grit.

"I don't mean to say we always got along. We were like any two brothers, I guess—sometimes we disagreed, argued, even fought, and sometimes we couldn't even talk to each other for fear we'd both blow up. But when push came to shove, I knew he'd be there for me, and he knew I'd have his back against anybody who tried to do him harm. I knew I could count on him to do whatever he said he would, even if sometimes it was somethin' I wished he wouldn't. He was an all-around top hand, too, could do just about anything that came up—smithery, carpentry, drive stage, fix running gear, string fence, handle cattle with the best of 'em and horses better than most. We got into a rhythm so fast—I worked better with him than I had with any three of the hands I hired after you were gone. It was like... like we'd known each other before, somewhere, somehow, and it only took a few months for us to realize it and get used to each other again..."

He suddenly realized that his eyes were burning and the two tombstones were getting blurry, sliding in and out of focus. "I miss him," he said unsteadily. "He's barely been gone a day and I feel... like somebody's ripped the heart out of me." One knee gave way and he sank down, crossed forearms braced on the other, his head bowed. "You've got to help me... Pa, Ma, you've got to help me get through this. For Andy's sake, and Mike's, and Daisy's... and his, because it's what I owe to his memory. Because he wouldn't have given up, and I can't do less than he'd have done... but you've got to help me."

And alone on the hill, with the new summer sun washing over his shoulders, he wept for his friend.

**SR**

Ben rode in just before the morning stage was due, bringing with him a letter of introduction Mort had written for Slim to Marshal Kindry. Slim made sure he knew that Len was around for any use he needed to make of him, and Celie was with Daisy, and there'd be neighbors coming; then he climbed onto the buckboard seat and slapped the reins across the horses' backs, sweeping out of the yard in a rattle of trace chains and running gear.

He'd looked in on Daisy before he left, to let her know he'd be bringing Jess home. Even in the short time since she got the news, he could see how it had aged her: she looked drawn and frail, her eyes red with tears. He'd held her and felt the tremoring of her in his arms and thought, Don't you go too, Daisy. Don't you leave us now. Mike and I are gonna need you more than ever... we're all gonna need one another.

He wasn't familiar with Waverley, but he figured it had to be somewhere on the road from Laramie to the Big Horn Basin. Given the timeframe, Jess must have been on his way home when... The buckboard could reel off sixty miles between daybreak and sundown if it had a good road, and the stage road was about as good as you got in this country. He let the horses have their heads; they knew that roads always led to oats sooner or later. Driving more or less by rote, he let the pictures and memories come and go in his mind, the same ones that had filled the long sleepless hours of the night for him. Jess the first time he'd ever seen him, dozing by the lake, looking as inoffensive as an old houn' dog in the sun—and the way he'd changed, just like that, and gotten Slim's gun away from him. The second time, sitting at Slim's own table and showing his kid brother how he could stack a deck and deal himself four aces. Jess sharp-voiced and indignant the time Slim came back from that wrangle with the tumbleweed wagon, mad as hops because he'd had to take on all the chores for longer than he'd planned. Jess kneeling by Lady's head as she tried to bring her filly, his gravelly voice quiet and soothing. Jess stunned and unbelieving his first Christmas Day at the ranch, when he began to understand, perhaps for the first time, that they all thought of him as one of the family. Jess standing at Slim's side, grim and tense—no, not tense exactly, but strung to his highest fighting pitch, ready for anything—any of the many times they'd faced high odds together; the flash of that black-gloved hand when he went for his gun, the way his fists blurred and his body twisted when he got into a brawl. The way he could tease and joke when he was relaxed. The focused, competent look of him working at the forge. The rhythm of the two of them stringing fence or rounding up stock. The quick, deft movements of his hands as he whittled or braided rope or leather of an evening before the fire—and the brightness of his eyes as he listened to Slim reading aloud, soaking it all up as only an unschooled man does, eager to learn, to understand. His patience as he taught Mike to read sign and play checkers. The sheer gritty toughness of him, walking fifty miles across the desert to Rawlins with Scotty and the passengers after his stage was held up by Shelly Stack's gang, going into the saloon there with a gun in each hand and killing the outlaw at the bar when he could just about stay on his feet—Lottie had told Slim about that, it wouldn't have occurred to Jess to do it, he didn't hold with boasting about his own accomplishments, unless he was yarning. The way he'd held his tongue about what Scotty had done, never let the stage company know that in a moment of weakness the old driver had betrayed them to the outlaws. The day Slim had come home and found him in the bathtub in front of the fire, getting fixed up to go court the schoolmarm—and the sight of him standing up in it with his longjohn britches on, fishing his shirt and pants out of the soapy water at his feet, asking if Slim had expected him to heat up the water and not wash his clothes while he was at it, as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world. The way he ate, sometimes, not just with the good healthy hunger of an outdoorsman, but as if having enough food on his plate was something he hadn't entirely gotten used to yet. The look he'd get on his face when he came over a hill and found himself looking at some especially beautiful scenery—and the note of yearning that sounded in his voice sometimes when he talked about "the Big Open" and the years he'd spent as a drifter. The way he could move through the woods or over rocks, silent and graceful and using every bit of cover with near-instinctive skill, when he was after deer or elk—or man. The soul-deep pain in his voice when he told Slim how his family had died. The gentle, reassuring tone of it when he found Slim with a broken arm at the foot of that outcrop. The way he'd stood up for Fred Powers, persuaded Slim to give him a job—I was straight off the high trail with a greased holster and trouble in both pockets, he'd said, and you took me in, made a friend of me. The way he could turn almost as young as Andy or Mike—or as old as the mountains around him. To meet him casually, you'd think of him as a pretty straightforward sort of man, but when you got to know him—if he trusted you enough to let you—you realized that he was really very complex, a multi-layered personality shaped by poverty and loss, war, bitterness, a few good friendships and a lot of things gone awry. And yet Jess was always true to his code. He never broke his word, never turned his back on a friend—or an enemy—and never provoked a fight unless he was so downright blazing mad he couldn't see straight. He paid his debts even when the prospect of it made him uneasy, like the time Roney Bishop came to town. His ideas of right and wrong weren't always in line with Slim's, but he clove to them; he didn't have but a few things in the world that were worth anything, his good name and his own image of himself first among the rest, but he treasured them. He'd barely made it to his thirtieth birthday, but he'd touched so many lives in that short span—at least as many for good as otherwise, Slim thought, and Slim's own, and those of the people he cared about, more than any. The ranch, the world, wasn't going to be the same with him gone. Slim had paced out, this morning, where he'd dig the grave. Len could help him with that.

He spent the night in Medicine Bow, asking at the livery if the stableman recognized the name of Waverley and learning that it was about another seventy miles along, on the North Platte, not far below where the Sweetwater joined it. Wanting to make it before night, he got on the road again at first light, breakfasting as he drove off some of the cold food he'd brought from home. He stopped at midday to rest and grain the team, shot a fool hen for dinner and made a little fire for his coffee, then went on. It was just getting well dark when he drove up the main street of the town; the stores were closed, but there were lights in the saloons, a lantern dangling over the doorway of the livery, and after a minute or two he located the distinctive stripey shadow of lamplight falling between window bars that marked out the local peace officer's domain. He considered going there, then decided to wait. He'd need his strength when he said goodbye to his pard. Better to get something to eat and a night's sleep first.

In daylight Waverley proved to be not unlike Laramie, but smaller, a typical cowtown with maybe ten businesses strung out along the main drag. It was farther north than Slim's stomping ground, but already he could feel that the day would be warmer than down around home. His stomach felt tight and he decided to postpone breakfast, getting only a cup of coffee at the one restaurant, which was a sort of franchise affair that also served as the hotel dining room; on the other side of the building was the "better" saloon, which wasn't open yet. When he figured that the marshal would be in his office, he headed that way.

The marshal was in, and so was his deputy. It didn't take Slim more than a few seconds to decide which was which. Marcus Kindry had probably served an apprenticeship in tougher towns, trailheads or mining camps, or perhaps in the Texas Rangers, then settled in this one where he'd be less likely to run into large-scale trouble; he was maybe Mort's age, maybe a few years younger, a bit of a dandy with mustache and sideburns in one and a fawn-colored suit-coat with flaring skirts. But there was a certain look in his eye, a certain grace and balance in the way he moved when he stood to meet the rancher, and Slim hadn't lived more than half his life in the West without knowing how to read them. "Marshal Kindry?" he said. "Slim Sherman from Laramie. I came to take my partner home. I've got a letter here from Mort Corey—" He handed it over. Kindry opened it, unfolded it, scanned it and nodded.

"We got Sheriff Corey's telegram," he said. "Our undertaker saw to the body, the embalming and all; he's got it coffined and ready for you. Harry," he told the deputy, "get that stuff out of the back room, will you, and I'll open the safe. Your partner was leading a string of about a dozen mares," he went on as he turned to do so. "We put them up at the livery, in the back pen; you can claim them any time you're a mind to. His personal horse is there too." From the safe he produced an envelope and handed it across the desk. "These are his valuables; Harry's gone for the rest of his effects, no room in the safe to put 'em."

Slim opened the flap and shook out the contents. A flat leather wallet with, when he opened it, the letter he'd given Jess for the man with the horses to sell inside it, a couple of hundred cash, and a bill of sale that carefully described the mares, signed by the owner and underneath, in the space headed For Sherman Ranch, by Jess's muddy scrawl. A silver-plated watch with the initials JH on the case. Some coins, a double eagle, a few silver dollars, a handful of small change: Jess had never been in the habit of carrying his hard money in a "poke," the way most cowboys did. Slim shuffled the coins around on the surface of Kindry's desk. He hadn't quite realized, till that moment, how somewhere in his heart of hearts he'd been hoping it would turn out to be some kind of mistake. But no more. These were Jess's things. His pard was gone. "How did it happen?" he asked, his voice thick.

Kindry was watching him carefully, and Slim wondered just what Mort had put in that letter. "He was in the saloon," the lawman said, "and he got in a poker game." That would be like Jess, Slim thought. He'd made a good deal on those mares, I can see from this paperwork; he'd feel like cutting loose a little. "There were two or three of our local boys at the table, men whose word I trust, and a stranger, a professional card man—he'd come in on the stage a day or two before. Your friend called him, accused him of dealing off the bottom. The way it was told to me, they both got their guns out at the same moment."

I guess it was bound to happen someday, thought Slim sadly. There's always somebody faster than you are, and Jess was probably out of practice. "And the gambler?"

Kindry shook his head. "Harper got him through the lungs; he died twenty minutes later. Him we buried already."

At least you took him with you, pard, Slim thought. "Did Jess... did he suffer?" he asked, dreading the answer.

"No," Kindry said, and Slim heard the same note of compassion in his voice that he'd heard in Mort's. "Two minutes, three maybe. He tried to say something, but he didn't have the strength."

Harry came back. "Here's the rest of your friend's gear, Mr. Sherman," he said, laying it across the visitor's chair alongside Kindry's desk.

Slim looked at it and felt something rise inside him. A pair of spurs, nice ones, of the long-shanked Texas model, with eight-point rowels—but not plain silver; these were inlaid with copper, and the leathers trimmed with silver conchas. A pair of chaps, but not Jess's short-fringed ones with the buckskin-laced seams: the right model, shotgun style, but of stained dark leather. A practical black-metalled, walnut-handled sixgun—but it was a Smith & Wesson, not Jess's familiar Colt, and it rode in a tilted-forward Missouri holster hung off a beaded gunbelt, with a nine-inch hunting knife balancing it on the other side. And a gray hat with a long crease from the top down the front, a woven horsehair band minutely patterned in black and white checkers around the crown—not Jess's alkali-stained black Stetson with the jauntily curled brim, the circular crease and the band brightened with silver ornaments. From somewhere he heard a voice say, "These aren't Jess's things." It was his own voice. "They're not Jess's things," he repeated.

Kindry came alert like a hound on point, and so did the deputy. "You're sure?"

"I've seen Jess almost every day of my life these last five years and more," Slim said, his voice shaking a bit with renewed hope. "You think I wouldn't know his hat, his gun, when I saw them? I tell you these aren't his things!" and he almost shouted it. "Where's the undertaker's place? I've got to see the body."

"I'll take you," Kindry said at once. "Harry, you watch the office." He grabbed a cream-colored fifty-dollar Boss Stetson off the hat-tree.

Waverley was too small a town to have a specialized undertaker: the office was filled by the hardware dealer, who kept a facility in a back room of his store. There was no reception room or viewing room, just a combination workroom and storage for the black palls, trestles, plumes, mourning streamers, and such. It smelled of creosol and pine and formaldehyde, though a dark narrow stairway at the back probably led to a cellar room where the actual preparation was done. The coffin rested on a couple of sturdy sawhorses; it wasn't cheap pine, but neither was it the kind of fancy cedar or mahogany box that would have been selected for a prominent person—it looked like oak, but thick, and tightly joined. Slim made a guess the funeral attached to it would have been priced around thirty to thirty-five dollars all told, counting the coffin itself, which would account for maybe half of that.

The undertaker wasn't too happy to be asked to unbolt the lid, but he did it. The body inside was the right size within ten pounds and an inch or two, the right build, with the right dark hair; the features were similar, angular, a bit harsh, but broader across the jawbones, with a kink in the nose as if it had been broken once and not set right, and the man was older than Jess by probably ten years. The bandanna around his neck wasn't knotted in Jess's casual side-style, but threaded through a slide fashioned from the skull of some small bird. And of the hands folded on his chest, the left was missing the last two fingers. "It's not Jess," Slim whispered, almost afraid to believe it, and then, in a whoop of sheer relief, "It's not Jess!"

The undertaker flinched at the outburst. Then Kindry asked the question. "All right, the man was your partner, you knew him; if you say this isn't him, that's good enough for me. But then how did this feller come to be carrying Jess Harper's watch and wallet?"

Slim's joyous mood vanished as suddenly as it had come. "You're right," he said slowly. "Jess wouldn't... he must be in trouble." Or worse, he thought, with a stab of renewed grief. Just because his body isn't here, doesn't mean it's not somewhere between here and the Big Horn Basin.

"Come on," said Kindry. "We'll go back to my office and do some brainstorming about this. I got a bottle of brandy in my desk drawer, I think you could use some."

**SR**

"I have to admit," said Kindry a little later, "when I read the name on that bill of sale, I wondered. I'd heard of Jess Harper—who hasn't?—but I'd had the notion he was younger."

"He is," Slim agreed. "He's maybe two years younger than I am, turned thirty a few months ago." He played restlessly with the wallet on the desktop. "He'd never have given these things up, not to speak of the horses. That man must have held him up, or bushwhacked him, or something."

"You say he was coming down from the Big Horn," Kindry went on. "With a string that size to lead, he'd have done best to stick to the road, not cut across-country. You won't be able to follow his tracks on it, it's too well-travelled. But you'll find folks living along it who might have seen the real Jess Harper before—well, whatever—happened, or who might have found him and taken him in."

"That's true," Slim said thoughtfully. "And Jess is tough—rawhide and piano wire. A couple of times he's walked out of country that would have killed a lot of men. Next to some of what he's been through, this around here is nothing."

"Always supposing," Kindry pointed out, "that our John Doe over at Cowan's place didn't kill him with the first shot and maybe roll him into a ravine and cave the bank in on him. If he was meaning all along to take Harper's horse, he wouldn't want to leave a man alive who could name him as a horse thief."

"Do you have any paper on him?" Slim asked. "A bushwhacker..."

"I been checkin', Mr. Sherman," put in the deputy, Harry. "I'm in charge of the dodgers, like most deputies. I don't recall ever seein' one that fits that feller. There were a few came close, but I found those and checked. None of 'em's got those two fingers off. No, this man wasn't wanted for anything—not yet, at least."

He'd have been wanted by us, if he hadn't gotten himself killed, Slim thought grimly. "All right, then. I'd better not waste any more time gettin' on the road, every hour could make all the difference. It's been at least four days. I'll take the horse Jess was riding, it's one of mine anyway." Jess's personal pony, the bay Traveller, had taken a fall a couple of days before he was due to leave, twisted a ligament and put a deep cut in his shoulder; nothing he wouldn't recover from in time, but not as fast as he might have when he was younger, and rather than postpone the trip Jess had thrown his own saddle on a tough, long-legged, hard-mouthed buckskin out of the Sherman Ranch string, a good distance animal with a reaching road pace that they often used for circle work and such. "And, my Lord, I've got to send a telegram back to Laramie—I've got to let our family know he might still be alive."

Fifteen minutes later the Waverley telegrapher was clicking off a message to Mort Corey:

BODY NOT JESS=HEADING OUT TO LOOK FOR HIM=TELL DAISY AND MIKE=SLIM

**SR**

Jess had never quite known what hit him. There were probably two things that saved him. The shooter had had to take the best concealment he could find, which meant a tall rock about a hundred yards back off the road: that was well within a carbine's range, but it put him higher than his victim, which usually means shooting high the first few times. And even if he'd known enough to aim just below the waistband of Jess's pants, to counter the overshoot, he couldn't have allowed for the buckskin suddenly shying in a skittery little bounce when a black-billed magpie burst out of the brush and flashed across the road in a flurry of black-and-white feathers. Traveller wouldn't have done that—he had more sense—but when he thought it over later, Jess decided he was grateful he hadn't been riding his old friend.

He heard the shot—which meant he wasn't killed, because, as they said in the Army, you never heard the one that got you—and felt the blow somewhere under his left shoulderblade; felt the buckskin break under him, felt the hard-packed surface of the road come up and hit him, and the world flashed and spun into darkness. He came back to semi-consciousness, he wasn't sure how much longer, to awareness of a figure bending over him, pulling at him, pulling at the wound too; he groaned and made a try for his gun, but the other man slapped his hand away from it as you might slap a child's away from a candy jar in the store. "None of that, friend," he heard someone grunt, "I ain't got the time to be tryin' conclusions with you," and then, as he rolled onto his back, an astonished, "Well, the Lord love Jesus!"

He knew that phrase from somewhere, knew he'd heard someone use it—knew that voice too, a Missouri twang not quite as thick as the Dixon boys', maybe from one of the river counties. He gasped and blinked, trying to see. A gray hat with a long crease from the top down the front, a woven horsehair band minutely patterned in black and white checkers around the crown; a big green bandanna threaded through a slide made of the skull of a small bird; and between them, just barely distinguishable because of the shadow of the hatbrim and the way his vision kept sliding in and out of focus, a face not terribly unlike his own, but older, harsher, more weatherbeaten and experienced, with wary dark eyes and a kink in the bridge of the nose, like it had been broken one time and not set quite right. "Hah... aaaah—Hal? Hal Owen?"

"Yeah, Jess, it's me." The other man sat back on his heels, but not before quickly slipping Jess's Colt out of the holster and setting it between his feet, where Jess couldn't get to it without a lot of scrabbling around. "I'm sorry, if I'd known it was you I'd of maybe held my fire and let you go on."

"What—" Jess swallowed down the nausea that came as the bullet-shock wore off, the sick weariness he'd felt so many times before. "What... are you... doin', shootin' a man in... the back, Hal? Ain't... your style... never was."

"I know it," Owen said. "But a man comes to things, Jess..." He flashed a look past his victim, up the slope on the side of the road. "If I had a choice..."

"Always... a choice, Hal," Jess managed. "You... you taught me that. Why...?"

"Got some people after me, Jess," Owen explained, hands quickly searching through Jess's vest as he spoke, "people I ain't exactly anxious to have catch up to me, and I lost my horse about half a day back—wouldn't have got as far along as I did except I cached my saddle and came on with just my rifle and my saddlebags. When I saw you comin' along with that string, I thought, there's my chance; even if they can follow me on this road, they'll be lookin' for a man alone, not with livestock. Where you takin' them good horses, boy?"

"Laramie," Jess husked. "I'm... partner in a... a ranch there... we... we want to start raisin' more bloodstock..."

Owen's brows went up. "You? Partnered in a ranch? Settled down? Well, I'd have never thought it. Always figured you'd go on ridin' the Big Open till it finished you, or somebody with a faster hand did."

Dizzily, Jess realized too late that he shouldn't have answered the question; now Owen would know not to pass through that part of Wyoming. But he had Jess's wallet out now, all he'd have to do was look at the papers in it and he'd know that anyway. "Made... the right... friend," he said. "Like I... made the... wrong one in you, it... looks as if."

Hal Owen paused and shook his head. "I said I was sorry, Jess. I ain't forgot if it wasn't for you I'd have lost a lot more than just these," and he gestured with his maimed left hand.

"No way... to pay a... a debt," Jess grated, struggling to hold onto consciousness. "What are you... gonna do now, put a... a bullet in my head like... like I was a horse with a busted leg?"

"If I was what them fellers lookin' for me think I am, that's just what I'd do, Jess," Owen told him. "Only I ain't that far gone, not yet. And you ain't dead, and I don't mean to put you any nearer bein' so than you are now. No, this is a good road, lots of traffic. I'll slide you under that juniper scrub off the side of it, where the sun won't cook you, and if somebody finds you, well and good. Best I can do for you. Reckon that'll make us even."

Jess remembered Harry Markle and how he'd told Slim much the same thing after confessing to his friend that he'd let the man out of jail to pay a debt of his own—and then had headed out to see if Harry was really the killer he was accused of being. Setting him free had squared the debt; after that Jess had had his own good name to redeem, and Mort Corey's trust in him. "You do... that and... and if I make it, Hal, I'll... I'll be comin' after you," he promised. "You... you know that."

"Sooner you than them," grunted Owen, getting a grip on his vest. "All you'll do is shoot me. They'll hang me." Then he began tugging on Jess to get him shifted, and as the road surface grated against his wound he passed out again.

**SR**

The next time he came back to awareness of his surroundings, it was to find himself in the thick fragrant shade of a little clump of juniper, which, he knew, was probably the best place for him to be: he'd known, from the time he'd worked on the DeWalt spread over Casper way, that in this part of Wyoming at this time of the year it got warmer than it did around Laramie, and a wounded man in hot sun would have that much less chance to survive. Cautiously, he tried to take stock of his situation. He found his hat, his gun and belt, a well-used Yellow Boy '66 Winchester—not his own; it must have been Hal's, he'd have figured that with Jess's in the boot under the buckskin's stirrup leather he wouldn't need it. Found his canteen, too; Hal had probably left it there to salve his conscience, on the principle that where there was a road there would eventually be houses and towns, and where there are human folks there has to be water. Given that the wound was in his back, he couldn't get a look at it, but by the absence of any exit wound in the front of his shirt he understood that the slug was still in there. He could feel the blood oozing from it—a slow flow, which was good as far as it went, but would kill him just as sure as the faster kind if he didn't get himself some help somehow, and soon. It hurt, in sharp kicks of pain, like a cramp, and he guessed the lead was lodged in one of the thick muscles, which was knotting up on him in spasms, like a charley horse, trying to rid itself of the foreign object. That, at least, was cause for hope; it wasn't stuck in, or probably even near, anything vital.

Trying not to move any more than he had to, for fear he might increase his blood loss, he got the cap of the canteen unscrewed and sucked down a couple of swallows, rationing himself—no telling how long he'd have to make it last. Slim'll peel my hide off for losin' them mares, he told himself wearily. Probably Hal would get some good distance away—it might look suspicious for a man to try to sell horses so close to where they'd been raised—and then dispose of them; if he was on the run like he'd hinted, they'd fetch him enough money to get a good long ways away from whoever was after him. And having the bill of sale for them would make the thing easy as fallin' off an oily elephant.

After a time he heard the steady pound of hoofbeats, not the sharp-edged sound that meant they were on the packed-down road, but muffled by grass, coming down the slope somewhere behind him. Painfully he pulled himself around so he could peer out between a couple of branches, just as a man on a mulberry roan pulled up almost dead in front of him. "Hold it up!" he heard someone say. "Dang-blast it, he's led us right onto the Laramie road."

"Must've figured that was the best way to lose his tracks," said a second voice.

"Well, it is," agreed the first, "but he'll be a lot likelier to run into folks that can tell us they seen him." A moment's silence while he pondered the situation. Jess understood, through the buzz of pain in his head, that these had to be the people Hal had said were following him. Could he get their attention, get them to help him? But that would help Hal too, give him more chance to get clear. And would they even bother to stop? Hal had said they wanted to hang him. They wouldn't want to delay any more than they had to.

"Which way you reckon he went, Clint?" came a third voice. From his perspective Jess wasn't sure how many of them there were all told, but to judge by the noise their horses were making, he'd guess a good dozen, maybe more.

"He wouldn't have turned north," answered the first man, "that'd just loop him back around the way he came from. He'd go south, then maybe turn off at the first fork he comes to, or take to the Platte when he gets down to Waverley. Either that, or he'd figure we'd guess on him stickin' to the road, and he'd just cut across it and try to hide his trail better. All right. Hart, you take three or four and see if he did that. The rest of us'll head south. If you don't find his sign inside five or six miles, turn back, cut across and catch up with us around the Pole Creek relay station, we shouldn't get much farther than that—we'll have to stop at any place he might have passed, ask if he's been seen."

"Consider it done, Clint," agreed yet another voice, which must have been Hart, and, "Jack, Raul, Warren, come with me." Horses lunged and scrambled over the ditch along the roadside, followed a moment or two later by Clint's larger group, which Jess could hear turning down the road. Then the dizziness swept over him again and the pain went away.

**SR**

When he woke again, there was a different quality to the light, a deepening of it that told him the afternoon was getting on. Even on a warm day, in the dry Wyoming air, the nights got chill, and he had no covering against it. And then he realized he was hearing a new sound, a very familiar one. Jingle and rattle, creak of leather thoroughbraces, the distinctive rhythm of horses at a moderate gallop, and the "Hah! Git up there!" of a driver trying to make time. A stagecoach. He cranked himself around, clawing for his gun; aimed it up through the branches above him and squeezed off three shots, one after another.

"What in—" he heard someone say, and then, "Whoa! Whoa!" and the dry sound of the brake grabbing. The horses streamed on by him, the first pair, slowing; the second, slower again, and then the stage itself, rocking and lurching as it came to a stop. He could hear the snap of hammers being drawn back as the guard cocked his coach gun, ready for the possibility that the distress signal might be some kind of trick, intended to do just what it had, make them stop the stage—even on a clear road, the weight and inertia of a coach, to say nothing of the passengers and their luggage, would make it impossible for the team to go from a standing start to full speed, and while they were building up to a gallop some well-concealed lone outlaw with a rifle could pick off the guard and maybe the driver as well.

"Here," Jess croaked. "Here. In the junipers." He wasn't sure they could hear him over the stomping and blowing of the team. He dragged himself toward the edge of the growth. If they didn't spot him, if they went on, likely he wouldn't make it through the night—

And then he heard it: a woman's voice shouting, "Charlie! Pete! There's a man in the juniper scrub—I think he's hurt!"

The next thing Jess knew there were hands grasping him, pulling him free of his covert. "Steady, Mister. We got you. Where you hurt?" somebody was asking.

"There's blood on the back of his vest," came the woman's voice again. "Come on, put him in the coach. You'll have to lay him on his side on the floor and fold his legs up."

"You reckon he can last to Sentinel?" one of the men asked. "That's where we stop for the night, closest place with a doctor—"

"No." Brisk, decisive—Jess wished he could get a good look at her. "The buckboard will be waiting for me at the Honey Creek crossing. We'll take him with us, back to the ranch."

It's all right now, Jess thought. They're gonna take care of me. I can rest. And he let go and slid into the quiet darkness again.

**SR**

Slim didn't get on the road till nearly midday. Kindry insisted on buying him a good (if early) dinner, and apart from the telegram he had to make arrangements for the buckboard and the team, give instructions about the mares and get some supplies to add to what was left in Jess's gear. He'd use his partner's bedroll and rifle; his own could stay with the buckboard. Kindry offered to keep Jess's valuables in his safe, as he'd been doing. Between what he had on him, what he'd bought, and the hospitality of the folks along the road—nobody was ever turned away in the West, because of the distances; even if you had to bed a stranger down in the barn, you offered him a meal and a place to sleep—Slim figured he'd be all right.

It wasn't fast going, despite the good road. There were relay stations like his own to stop at—most of them, like his own, farms and small ranches that had gotten the contract, so they'd have some regular money coming in regardless of what the weather, the beef market, or the crops did; there were branch-off trails that had to be investigated, in case they might lead to someplace whose people had found Jess hurt and taken him in, as Kindry had suggested; there were regular houses to stop at, and occasionally a rider or vehicle to meet and inquire of briefly. Nowhere did he find his partner, but several people agreed that they had seen a man in a gray hat pass by with a string of mares; one or two remembered him stopping to ask for water for them. When they learned that the man Slim was seeking was his best friend, they all promised to pass the word on to their neighbors and to the stage drivers and guards, who heard all the gossip along the route.

Sundown at this season came about seven-thirty, but it was a good idea to stop at least an hour before that and make camp: it took time to choose a good spot where there was water and grass, to gather firewood and maybe knock down a bird or pull in a few fish to amplify supplies. By late afternoon Slim was skirting the end of the Rattlesnake Range, which divided Waverley's part of the country from the next basin, and being reluctant to risk his horse's legs in that terrain in the fading light, he decided to quit for the night. Full light found him on the way again, not wanting to waste time. He'd barely made the flat on the other side than he picked up his first word of Jess heading back south—"he was here, young feller wearin' a black hat, silver cockles on the band of it." So, he thought, balancing around in his saddle to look back at the mountains he'd just skirted, whatever it was, it happened between here and the other side, and he thanked his informant and turned around.

Much might be said of the memories of elephants, but Slim, like any man who worked closely with horses, knew that theirs were even better: no horse ever forgot anything that did him an injury, even just a bruise or some skinned-off hide, and he also had splendid recall for anything that scared him. Just before they hit the fringe of the Rattlesnakes again, the buckskin tensed, snorted, and made a little skipping sidewise motion, and Slim checked, one hand dropping to the gun at his side. "What is it, fella?" he asked quietly, watching the animal's ears and nostrils. They were wide awake, a sign that at this spot he'd recently encountered some wild thing and gotten a scare from it. Was it possible that the animal, whatever it was, had caused him to throw Jess and take off? No, that didn't make sense, not towing those mares behind him, not unless it had been a lion or something, and even then they'd have been almost more likely to all pull against one another, each thinking a different direction was safest; and it didn't explain that dead man in Waverley having not only the horses (which any opportunist might have picked up) but Jess's valuables. "Whoa, now, whoa," he murmured, and rose up in his stirrups, looking all around. "Jess?" he yelled. "Jess!"

No answer. The buckskin was still alert, but not so tense, as he saw that whatever he'd met before wasn't here now. Carefully Slim eased down out of the saddle, found a sturdy sapling to tie him to, and began quartering around.

He wasn't the tracker Jess was, but he'd learned some tricks from his father, and later from the young Cheyenne braves he'd known in his youth; and in any case you didn't work beef for a living and not pick up some trail skills—or develop an alertness to your surroundings. The first thing he found, just behind a big granite outcrop standing off the west side of the road, was a bright flash in the grass—a cartridge casing. He knelt and picked it up, turning it in his fingers. It was a .44 rimfire, not the center-fire .44-40 that the newer Winchesters used—a Henry, maybe, or one of the early Winnies, a '66 model. Slim stood, gazing down past the outcrop toward the road and the buckskin standing there, quite at his ease now as nothing had appeared to reinforce his earlier scare. It was, he estimated, about a hundred yards, and Winchester '66 carbines were sighted for three times that. One shot, he thought. A bushwhacker, like I figured. He must've been lyin' along the backside of this rock, waitin'. Knew his business, too, if he could take a man down with just one try on a downhill pitch like this one.

Maybe Jess had been hit, but had managed to scramble off into cover. Maybe the shooter had been reluctant to beat the bushes for him, knowing that a man in concealment always has the advantage, and had decided to content himself with the horses—no; he'd had Jess's watch and wallet. His stomach feeling like a rock, Slim began searching.

The road, as always, was too hard-packed to hold sign, but under some juniper scrub, sheltered from wind and weather, he found what he'd been hoping for. The earth was disturbed where something of a good size had been shifting around, and more than once. Slim found a mark where the pointed toe of a rider's boot had dug into the softer surface, trying to get leverage. And blood. Not fresh, but still a little damp thanks to the shade of the scrub.

He was here, but he isn't now. Nothin' except a bear or a lion could've dragged him off, and they'd have broke the branches gettin' to him, or gettin' him out. That means he left on his own, or somebody took him. And in this stuff, they'd've never spotted him unless he had the strength to call out. So he was alive. Maybe he still is.

Nobody south had seen him, that means they took him north, back the way he came. And that one place I stopped at, he'd been there goin' down, but they hadn't seen him since. Maybe somebody came by in a wagon or somethin'; if he was lyin' in the back of it and they were makin' time, hopin' to get him to someplace where they could tend him, folks lookin' up casually wouldn't have seen him, even if they saw it.

He crossed the road quickly, pulled the knot out of the buckskin's reins and swung up. "Come on, Rival," he said, swinging the horse around, "we've got a friend to find."

**SR**

He crossed a stream—he thought it might be the South Fork of the Powder—around five o'clock, after coming up dry at every place he stopped to ask after his friend, and about five miles further on he came to a fork in the road. There was a signboard there, with two arms. One pointed east and read, Riverside, 12 miles; the other northwest, Sentinel, 10 miles. Slim studied the road surface. It looked as if the Sentinel branch might be the heavier travelled, which suggested the town it led to might be large enough to have a doctor. Maybe Jess's unknown rescuers had taken him directly there, or maybe they lived somewhere beyond and had to pass through anyway to get him home. He turned Rival that way. If I don't get any word of him in Sentinel I can cut cross-country and go down to Riverside.

**SR**

Jess came to, again, with the steady rolling sway of a stagecoach under him, the familiar symphony of its sounds in his ears. Reflexively he tried to roll over, to push up on his elbow, to get some sense of where he was, and a hand fell on his shoulder, a small hand, but very firm, the kind of hand that has been tugging on reins for years. "Easy," said a voice, a woman's voice, and there was a quick rustle of skirts as she changed position; she'd been sitting behind him, in the front seat, he figured. "Don't try to shift around. I got the bleeding stopped, but it wouldn't take much to start it up again."

He became aware of a gentle pressure against his back, a tight cinch of fabric wrapped around his torso, and guessed she'd ripped up a petticoat or two; he'd known women to do that for bandaging, if there was nothing else to be had. He looked up, blinking in the dimness of the coach—somebody had pulled down the leather drapes, maybe so the light wouldn't wake him. She was bending over him, a palm on his forehead, checking for fever. She straightened, and he looked into light golden-brown eyes, a face more handsome than beautiful, not the rounded contours of prettiness, but the straight, clean lines you often saw in range women, as if the elements had burnished them down the way they did the buttes and mesas and chimneys. Generous mouth, long graceful throat, cheekbones with a touch of hollowness beneath. Maybe twenty by his estimate. She wore the kind of travelling suit he'd often seen on lady passengers, a dark, rich-looking one, black hat with pink roses and black ostrich plumes on it, flame-colored kid gloves to add a dash of color, a brooch edged with pearls pinned at her throat, earrings with pearl pendants; she had auburn hair with a heavy net pulled over it. "How are you feeling?" she asked.

"Like... like I'd been shot," he said before he thought.

She didn't quite smile. "You can't be on death's doorstep if you've got that much spirit," she said, "though you're a bit warmer than I'd like. Want some water? Charlie gave me the canteen to carry inside here, just in case you woke up."

"That'd be... real good, ma'am, and... I'd be obliged," he said.

She leaned over with the vessel, slipping an arm deftly behind his neck, supporting his head as he drank. "Not too much," she cautioned. "We don't know how long you were in that scrub."

"Since... since midmornin', maybe," he said, wanting to be of help. "Ma'am—that bullet, it's still in me—"

"I know," she interrupted, and put a hand down to her waist for a heavy gold watch pinned there. "It won't be too long now, we should be making the Honey Creek crossing in about another fifteen minutes. There's to be a buckboard waiting there for me. We'll be home inside an hour or two. You just hang on, my aunt will see to you better than I could. I'm Audrey Ballantine, by the way."

"J—Jess Harper, ma'am, and—and beholden to you for... for your help. But I got to—"

"You don't 'got to' do a thing except lie still, not for a while yet," she said firmly. "You rest."

He'd heard that same tone of voice often enough from Daisy to know there was no fighting her. "Yes ma'am," he agreed, and tried to make himself comfortable, which was hard enough in a coach when you were sitting up but dad-gum near impossible when you were lying crossways on the floor of it, though he reckoned it was good sense they'd put him there; it wouldn't have helped him much if a lurch had thrown him off the seat, and he was sure in no case to hold himself on it. The swaying motion was hypnotic, though, and he was halfway back to slipping off again when he heard the driver calling to the team, felt the coach slowing under him. They must have come to Honey Creek.

"You're late, Charlie," came a voice from outside, and a reply from up on the box: "Couldn't rightly help ourselves, picked up a hurt man out on the road—Miss Audrey's got him inside, says she'll take him back to your place."

The door opened; from his angle Jess couldn't see who was there, but he heard Audrey's voice, warm: "Hello, Slant. It's good to see you again."

"Miss Audrey... ma'am, you hadn't oughtta come home, not now..."

"If there's going to be trouble," said Audrey, "the place for me is with my family," and Jess found he liked her all the better for that. "You and Charlie get this man into the buckboard, then we'll set my trunks around him so he doesn't roll—he's got a bullet in his back."

The cowboy must have looked down for the first time, because he yelped and, from the sound, jumped back. "What—that's the no-good snake who—"

"Slant!" Audrey again, sharp. "Put that gun away this instant!"

Instincts aroused, Jess groped for his Colt. "But, ma'am—" Slant protested.

"Stop it!" Audrey ordered, with that confident ring that comes to people with the habit of command. "Charlie, come here and help us."

Hands on Jess's shoulders, drawing him out of the coach—Audrey's voice, "Don't stand there like a cigar-store Indian, Slant, help him"—and then, as the light touched him, Slant again: "What—no, this ain't him after all. I'm plumb sorry, Miss Audrey, reckon it was my eyes mistakin' themselves, but from the back, like that, he just—I thought—"

"You can tell me all about it later," said Audrey. "Get him into the buckboard."

And then the weariness he'd been fighting for so long claimed him again, and he never knew it when they laid him down.

**SR**

It was getting dark when Slim rode into Sentinel. He checked Rival and paused, well-honed instincts sounding a warning. He'd half lost track of the days since he'd been on the road, but he was almost sure it was Saturday, which in a cowtown usually meant a good bit of noise and hilarity. This town was much too quiet. There were lights in the saloons, a few moving sparks on the boardwalks under the awnings marking where men walked with cigarettes in their mouths, but only a faint, desultory rumble of speech barely impinging on his hearing, and somewhere a piano on which a bored saloon girl was picking out a Chopin nocturne with one finger, stripping the melody down to its unadorned beauty, a lost, lonely and haunting sound in the echoing quiet.

Somethin' here's not right, he knew. But he had to find out about Jess, if he could, and Rival, despite his toughness, was weary and deserved a feed and a rest. He slipped the bucking thong off his Colt, loosened the gun a bit in the holster to make sure it would slide easily, then squeezed the horse's sides with his legs and pointed the animal at the gape of the nearest barn door. The stableman was just pulling the big leaves shut when he drew rein. "Evening," Slim said, cautious. "Got room for one more?"

"Sure do," was the reply. "In or out?"

"Put him in a stall and give him a good feed, he's had a long day," Slim replied, swinging slowly down, alert in every sense—he'd stood deputy for Mort too many times not to know that something was brewing in this place. As the light from the lantern hung over the doorway fell on his face, on his long body and the Colt worn at his side like it was grafted there, he heard a sort of squeak from the stableman, but he was too busy thinking out his next move to pay attention. He dug into his vest pocket and thumbed out a dollar. "I'll be back for my gear. What's the best saloon?"

"Uh—the Rosebud, half a block, other side."

"Thanks," said Slim absently, flipping the coin his way, and set off, not looking back, in a rangeman's long easy strides. He didn't see the stableman quickly tie Rival's reins to a ring in the barn wall and cut across the street behind him, vanishing up an alley.

**SR**

The Rosebud was like the rest of the town—too quiet. No games going on, no music, only a few uneasy-looking girls in sight. Most of the men Slim saw might almost have passed for cowboys—they were dressed right for it, had the seedy, unshaven, self-reliant look and that certain tough wariness in their faces—but his experience as a deputy told him they weren't: their guns were too low-hung, several in cross-draw holsters, and they were too alert, all eyes swinging to him as he came in the door. He checked an instant, breath tight in his chest, not consciously realizing that he'd fallen into his fighting stance, balanced, ready, hand dropping to his side—but nothing happened, nobody said anything; they turned back to their drinks and their quiet talk, though he could feel them keeping cases on him. He walked slowly up the length of the bar, slipping into a spot at the far end, where his right side would be toward the room and he could watch the door and the tables. He'd had whiskey in mind, but by the time the bartender reached him he'd changed his mind. "Beer."

The man brought it, saying nothing. Somewhere Slim heard a door close quietly. "I'm lookin' for a man," he said. "A little younger than I am, about half a head shorter, dark hair, blue eyes, Texas accent. Might've had a bullet in him. Might've needed a doctor."

The barman shook his head. "Ain't heard of nobody like that," he said, and his eyes flicked sideways, toward Slim's right. The rancher came alert, turning slightly to follow them.

The man eyeing him could have been almost any age from thirty-five on up, one of the kind—they were very common on the range—who from long exposure to the elements develop a leathery, durable look in their full manhood and don't change much thereafter till they die. He wore a tailor-made suit of soft brown corduroy, pants tucked into glove-fitting riding boots with the Lone Star worked in beads on the uppers, brightened up with a yellow silk brocade waistcoat over a good lawn shirt, a starred red bandanna knotted under the closed collar like a necktie. His hat, like his boots, proclaimed him a cattleman, and one with some money; it was fawn-gray, a silver cord knotted about it. His clipped spade beard was just starting to turn gray. He wore a gun, but carried waist-high, cowboy-fashion, as if just in case of need. "Couldn't help but overhear," he said, and Slim remembered the sound of that door closing and suddenly knew—though he didn't know how he knew; maybe it was something he'd picked up from Jess—that this man had come out of wherever he'd been on purpose to find him, to learn why he was here. "Why would you happen to be lookin' for this gent you mention, stranger?"

"Who's askin'?" Slim retorted, voice flat, but quiet.

"Name's Austin Gentry. This is my place, so I take an interest in folks askin' questions in it."

"You look more like a cattleman to me," Slim observed mildly.

"Well, that too," Gentry agreed. "Boxed G, east of town. Just stopped in to look my interests over, you might say. You didn't answer my question."

"No," Slim agreed, "I didn't." And left the challenge there, hanging, to see what Gentry would do with it.

He heard a chair scrape, and Gentry, without even looking over his shoulder, spoke calmly: "Stand easy, Knox, this is my play."

Knox—he was no more than twenty, a lean youngster with green eyes and something of Gentry's nose—was standing beside one of the tables, a couple of others, older, in the other chairs, all of them dressed range-style but in a better grade of it than most cowboys would bother with. Sons? Slim wondered, and had the guess confirmed, almost immediately, when he said, "Just wanted you to know we'd back you, Pa."

"Never doubted it," said Gentry, and returned his attention to Slim. "Now, then," he went on, "let's don't dance around. I know who you are, and I've got a proposition for you. Want to listen?"

"That might depend," Slim answered quietly, "on who I am."

Gentry grinned briefly. "Dave Eastburn, of course," he said. "Not that I ever saw you, but you'd be hard to mistake. Tall man, blond, good-looking, well-spoken, ivory-handled Colt, rides a buckskin. I just had word you'd rode in. Kind of far off your range, aren't you?"

Slim's thoughts moved fast. Eastburn. He was active down around the Border, with excursions into California and once or twice as far up as Oregon. Jess had talked of him; had seen him in action one time, somewhere in New Mexico. Had said he was fast. "Fast as you?" Slim had asked, mildly curious. And Jess, with that grim look he got sometimes, had said, "Maybe. Maybe, on my best day, I could match him."

It's my gun, he told himself. Many men wore their sidearms in the gunfighter style, tied down, as he did—not because they were gunfighters or even wanted to be, but because the tiedown kept the gun from pounding hip or saddle-cantle or flying up over the armpits when riding, especially if your horse took a notion to buck, and helped insure a fast draw under circumstances ranging from Indians to rattlesnakes. It might almost be said that any man who didn't carry high up, the way Gentry did, or for a cross-draw, would do it. He remembered the time Tom Bedloe's gang had come to Laramie and he'd pretended to be an outlaw, trying to get on their unguarded side so he could keep them from doing what they'd planned on; remembered his conviction that something nasty was cooking in this town. Whatever it was, if Jess was around here, he might already be in the middle of it. Slim knew he needed to find out more, and a man like Gentry would be in a position to have the kind of information he required. "Cows stay on their range," he said. "Man doesn't have to."

"True enough," said Gentry. "You want to talk?" He nodded back over his shoulder. "We don't have to keep it so public, if you'd rather not."

Slim gave it just the right interval, then nodded. "All right."

"This way. Bring your beer," Gentry invited, and Slim picked it up—in his left hand—and followed him, casting a cold eye at Knox and his brothers as he went by, trying to imitate the warning way Jess had of wordlessly telling people not to mess with him. Apparently it worked; Knox sulled a bit and sat down, and the rest of the room relaxed just a degree or two.

They went into a room at the back, furnished as an office, and Gentry secured the door and ostentatiously took his gun off and hung it on a hat-rack before he said, "Make yourself comfortable," and took the chair behind the neat oak desk. He's dealt with Eastburn's kind before, Slim understood. I've got to be careful.

"So," Gentry began. "You going to answer my question?"

"The man I'm lookin' for," said Slim, "is Jess Harper. Let's say I... have some unfinished business with him."

"Harper," Gentry repeated. "Heard of him. Heard a rumor he'd settled somewhere south of here, given up the trade."

"I heard the same," said Slim meagerly, and waited.

"Oh," drawled Gentry after a moment, "I see. That bullet you said he might have in him... yours?"

"Might be," said Slim.

"What I hear of Harper," Gentry went on, "it would take some man to put him down."

"On his best day," said Slim, quoting his partner, "he might've matched me. He was out of practice."

Gentry nodded. "And you think he's in these parts?"

"Might be," said Slim again.

"Well," Gentry observed thoughtfully, "I haven't seen him, and I haven't heard anything of anyone who looks like him being around. But that might not signify. You may have noticed Sentinel ain't quite as lively as you might figure for a Saturday night?"

"I noticed."

"There's a reason for that," Gentry told him, and Slim throttled the impulse to lean forward eagerly. "Lot of folks don't want to get caught in something that's not their business, and it's just possible some of them would be folks who could point you to Harper, if they wanted to. And—I mentioned my brand, Boxed G. There's another, some bigger, north and west—Two Bar Four, it's called. Family called Penfield runs it. Came up here from Texas before the war—Unionists, Houston party, didn't hold with all the talk of secession. Figured to just get away from it."

Slim nodded. "All right. What's it got to do with Harper—or me?"

"Old Carl Penfield's been dead now—it must be thirty years," Gentry continued. "His sons ramrod the place, but the real boss is his widow—Edith, her name is; 'Miz Edie' is what most call her. There's... call it a history... between their family and mine; has been since Texas." Slim nodded again, knowing better than to say the word feud. For an outsider to speak of his feud to a feudist, or even to mention the term in his presence, was a serious breach of etiquette in the West as in the South—not shooting grade, maybe, but not something a careful man would do. "I came up here after the war—you know how it was in Texas back then. Didn't rightly know the Penfields were around till I'd settled on where I wanted to make my place. Good country; wasn't about to let that old disagreement scare me off. Stayed. They didn't like it, but they didn't start anything either. Then there was some trouble over a land title; details aren't important." They would be to Jess, Slim thought. "There's been things goin' on ever since. Fence-cutting and such. Not much shooting yet, except about four-five days ago, youngest Penfield boy came down with a case of lead in the back. Some say," he added, "that it was a set-up; that a man they'd hired, a fellow in your line, Eastburn, did it—that he was really working for me. Last I heard he'd left the country with the next oldest Penfield and a bunch of their cowboys on his tail."

"Was he workin' for you?" asked Slim.

"No, he wasn't," Gentry replied. "But that doesn't mean I didn't have something to do with it. No, it was the oldest Penfield boy that hired him, went up to Great Falls in person to talk to him. His ma didn't like it; she doesn't hold with hiring guns, figures that's the kind of thing a family should take care of itself."

"So," Slim guessed shrewdly, "you took advantage?"

"I did. Figured if she thought a man like that was a turncoat, she'd make sure no more came on her land. Fact is, there's been quite a few men with guns for hire—or sometimes not—drifting into this country ever since the spring thaw; you know the way word gets around. She wouldn't have a one on her payroll. So they hung around, some of 'em, thinkin' to make the best of conditions, the way that kind does. Some I hired, some I chased off, but I'm a practical man; the longer this goes on, the more chance of others coming in. I don't want it to go on that long."

"Smart," Slim observed. He knew Gentry was right. Invariably, whenever a war broke out, rustlers and horse thieves would start sidling in, picking up and running off what the fighters were too busy to watch or take care of. And fence wars were especially bitter wars, each outfit having to match the other man for man and gun for gun. Cowboys were brave—their work bred it into them, and a man who "lost his ridin' nerve," as the saying was, might just as well pack it in—and their loyalty to "the brand" was proverbial, but they were ranchhands, men whose first job was working stock, not hired warriors. If the Penfields refused to add at least one or two professionals to their roster, they were asking to be taken down.

"The thing of it is," Gentry went on, "the men I got were about what you'd figure on: tough men, better with guns than the generality, but not too smart. Not your grade. They need direction, somebody to give orders."

"Seems to me," said Slim mildly, "you could do that."

"True enough, but I'm just a man with cows and money. They respect me, and they know which side their bread's buttered on, but they need somebody who thinks closer the way they do, somebody who's been in fights like this before. Somebody like you."

"Are you offering?"

"Said I had a proposition," Gentry reminded him. "There it is. You boss the whole thing, under me and my boys, of course—Luther and Calvin and Knox, you saw them out there just now. Hundred a month and your keep."

Slim thought quickly. He wasn't a gunfighter—sure wasn't in Jess's league—but he was, as Gentry had put it, "better than the generality;" even Mort had once observed that "given a halfway even chance he'd be better than most," though against a real professional he'd be outmatched. He knew somebody had picked Jess out of that juniper scrub, wounded, and that meant he'd be taken care of, wherever he was. He also had a pretty strong feeling that whoever had done it had come from either here or Riverside, and for choices he'd take here, on account of that better-used road. Fact was, he had the strongest hunch he'd ever had in his life that Jess was in these parts somewhere.

Slim wasn't ordinarily an intuitive man. He made most of his decisions carefully, rationally, based on logic; it was one of the most important ways in which he differed from his partner, who tended to think with his heart, or sometimes his still-active gunfighter's instinct. Yet when he did listen to his intuition, invariably the results were good. It had been intuition that had led him to invite Jess to stay—and for all the troubles the Texan had brought with him, Slim had never once in five years regretted that decision. Not down deep, where it mattered most. It was, perhaps, the first of the many important lessons Jess had taught him. So now, when he had a hunch, he listened to it, examined it carefully before he dismissed it. He was doing that now.

Logic, too, played its part. Gentry had said he hadn't seen anything of Jess, and there was no reason for him to lie; he'd heard of Jess's rep, he admitted that, so if he had found Jess, or knew where he was, he'd more than likely have wanted to recruit him for his own cause. And if he'd succeeded in that—or shamed Jess into working on his side, to pay the debt—even then, he might still have tried to hire the man he thought Slim was, even knowing that it might mean a showdown; he could still make use of the survivor, one way or the other. That meant one of two things. Jess was with the Penfields, or with someone supporting them, if there were any such people; or he was with some peaceful neutral, one of those "folks who didn't want to get caught in something that wasn't their business." In the first case, if he wasn't hurt near to his death, he'd find out soon enough what was going on. And once he did, his sense of right would require him to pay the debt by taking their side. If Slim was on Gentry's, he might be able to help—he'd owe a debt too, for his pard's sake. Gentry wouldn't expect trouble from the man he thought was his own hired gun... Slim's conscience prickled, just a bit. You didn't shoot a man after eating his food—that would be why the Penfield boy's brother had taken off after the other gun, the one he thought had done the killing. But from the way Gentry was talking, he'd set the whole thing up, and Slim didn't much like people who resorted to that kind of sneak-in-the-grass tactic. Besides, he told himself, I won't have to be the one who shoots him. I'll leave that to Jess, or the Penfields. All I'll do is try to see fair play.

He didn't have to take Gentry's offer. As Eastburn, he was a free agent, and no one was likely to question if he decided to stay around. Doing that kind of thing, around a man with Eastburn's name, was a good way to get dead, really fast. Yet Slim knew his pard was hurt, and he might not be able to travel yet a while, even if Slim could get a line on where exactly he was. The best thing Slim could do, then, would be to get himself into a position where he could delay the inevitable explosion at least long enough to get Jess clear—not that he thought that hardhead would go, not and leave a life-debt owing. Gentry was offering him a chance to do just that. "As long as it's understood," he said, "that if Harper turns out to be in this thing, he's mine."

"And if he's not? Don't you want to get on his trail?"

Slim shrugged. "If he's not dead yet, he won't be that hard to find. And if he is, the money will make the trail easier."

"That's a point," Gentry agreed, and Slim realized the cattleman had been testing him. Watch your step, he told himself. Just because he doesn't much care what he has to do to get his way, it doesn't mean he's stupid. "All right. It's getting late. Let's get out to my place."

**SR**

He was warm, and the pain no longer kicked at him; it was more a diffuse soreness, an ache, something he could bear—almost familiar to someone who'd been banged up as often as he had. He took a breath, testing, and felt the sharp little hitch that meant stitches. "Mh," he grunted tightly, before instinct took over.

"Easy, son," said a woman's voice—not Miss Audrey's; lighter, with a soft flavor of Texas in it. "Don't pull that embroidery out. Done a fair job of it if I do say so as shouldn't."

Jess opened his eyes cautiously, squinting in the light of the low-turned milk-glass kerosene lamp. "Ma'am?"

"Well, now," she said, with just the hint of a smile, "it's nice to see them pretty blue eyes with some knowin' in 'em." She was sixty or so, a tall old woman, close on six feet if he was any judge, though the fact that she was sitting down, in what looked like an ancient slat-back chair, might fool a man's eye. Her face was seamed with wrinkles, as much from exposure as age, and she had a wise, experienced look about her. Light-blue eyes, like Slim's, keen and bright as a hawk's; nose a little hawky too, as if the rest of her face had sunk back away from it over the years, leaving it thrusting out like a promontory. Gray hair in a loose bun at her nape. Calico shirt, wide divided skirt of green corduroy. "Seems to me," she continued, "that it's the custom for a man in your position to ask where he is."

"Was gettin' to that," he admitted, and waited.

"My house—my family's, actually. Two Bar Four ranch, outside Sentinel. I'm Edith Penfield. You call me Miz Edie, everybody else does, 'cept my kin, of course." She reached for a pattern-glass pitcher and tumbler set beside the lamp. "Better have some water. You just been two days fevered; we weren't quite sure you'd pull through it." She helped him sit up and held the glass to his lips. He took it gratefully, slow sips.

"I'm obliged, ma'am—I mean Miz Edie," he said when she took it away. Diffidently: "Uhm... there was another lady, younger... Miss Audrey?"

"I sent her to bed hours ago," was the reply. "She got right territorial about you, son, which bein' as she was the one spotted you don't surprise me, but a young girl needs her sleep; I don't, not so much anyhow, not at my age. She said you told her your name was Jess?"

"Jess Harper, yes ma'am. Out of Laramie. Headin' home with a string of breedin' mares when I got bushwhacked."

"Hmpf," said she. "That I figured on, seein' we took a bullet out of your back. You're a lucky man, son; a little to the right, or down, you wouldn't be talkin' to me now."

He sighed, cautiously. "I know it. Horse shied just as he pulled the trigger, I reckon."

She tilted her head. "Texas?"

His lips quirked. "Yes'm."

"Thought as much. Been hearin' it these two days, you mumblin' away... who's Slim, son?"

"My... partner," he explained. And with a sudden kick of adrenalin tried to sit up, only to fall back with a gasp that was almost more a cry.

"I already told you," she said, in a much firmer voice, "stay still! I didn't patch you back together to see you kill yourself out of carelessness."

Jess was panting, shallowly, knowing what deep breaths would do to him with a healing bullet wound in his back. "S... sorry... just... just gotta... get word home... them mares... Slim might still... be able to get 'em back..."

"You're in no shape to be doin' any such thing," Miz Edie told him. "Man can buy more mares, can't buy himself a new life. You ain't out of the woods quite yet, son, it'll be a day or two before you're even strong enough to sit up. Besides, we got no telegraph up this way yet; you'd have to write him a letter, or line it out for one of us."

He lay still, not debating the point, just concentrating on getting his lungs and heart back under control. She produced a cool cloth and wiped his face and throat. The respite gave him time to collect his scattered faculties and bring some order to his memories. That cowboy who'd met the stage—he'd thought, at first, that Jess was someone he wasn't. Hal? From the back, maybe, the two of them would look some similar, Jess reckoned. And Hal had said somebody was after him, lookin' to hang him... and the cowboy had said Miss Audrey shouldn't have come home... "Miz Edie?"

"Still here, son."

"You... y'all in some kind of trouble?"

For just a moment she looked startled—and something else; as if she'd let her mask slip out of line and a gleam of pain had shown through. "What makes you think that, boy?"

"Just some... some things I heard... at Honey Creek, and... and other places... you didn't answer me, Miz Edie."

She hesitated. "That's a long sorry story, and it's late. Best you get some more sleep."

"No," he said. "I—I owe you, I gotta know."

Her eyes slid sideways, and he followed them to see his gunbelt hung over the headpost of the bed. When she looked back to him, there was something in her expression that hadn't been there before, something hard and sad both. "This ain't the time or the place," she said, and even in his mazy condition he realized it was almost the first time she hadn't added some affectionate nickname. "You sleep." She pulled the yellow-rose quilt up to his chin, tucking it close. Jess suddenly noticed he was getting drowsy. Aw, shoot, he thought, must'a' been somethin' in the water...

The light blurred, everything got kind of fuzzy, and that was all he knew.

**SR**

It was daylight, and something smelled fine. Jess opened his eyes again, and Audrey Ballantine was there, smiling down at him across a wooden tray with a Wedgwood creamware bowl on it. "Hello, sleepyhead," she said.

He managed a grin, but was genuinely surprised, and pleasantly, at how much better, stronger, he felt: nowhere near up to any square dances just yet, but sure not like he was hanging onto his senses by the skin of his teeth. "Miss Audrey. Was hopin' I'd get to have a real look at you."

"Well, now I know you're from Texas," she said, and sat down in the same chair Miz Edie had been using—was it last night, or longer? "Even flat on his back, there's no man as gallant as a Texan. Think you could eat something? I've got some thick potato soup here, and fresh bread."

"Sounds real good, ma'am."

She put the tray on the stand next to the bed, leaned over and began arranging the pillows so he'd be able to half sit up against them. His left arm, he suddenly realized, was in a sling. "Miss Audrey?"

"What?"

"What's today, ma'am?"

"Friday," she said at once. "Third day since you've been with us. Why?"

Hal's probably out of the Territory by now, he thought in despair. Slim's gonna skin me, or maybe break my jaw... "Nothin'. Just wondered."

He let her feed him, surprised a little at how hungry he was. When he'd finished the soup, she buttered the bread and let him eat that on his own. He took his time at it, thinking about the questions he wanted to ask.

"You're doing really well," she said.

"Yeah. Like Slim says, I'm tough."

"Slim—that's your partner, Aunt Edie said. Is he really? Slim, I mean?"

He chuckled, and winced. "Puttin' on a little weight, but not as much as I let him think."

That fetched a brief laugh. "More than a partner, I'd say. A friend?"

Jess sobered. "Yes'm. Best I ever had. More'n I've deserved, I reckon." He looked her over. Like Miz Edie, she was dressed for the range: a divided tan riding skirt, fringed with leather and decorated in a neat pattern of nailheads, with a homespun plaid shirt and silk bandanna. A jacket that matched the skirt hung over the back of the chair. Her hair was dressed in a single long braid, with a couple of dark blue ribbons to hold it. There was, he thought, a shadow over her that he hadn't seen aboard the stage. "Ma'm?"

"Yes." Not a question; as if she'd expected it.

"I asked Miz Edie, but she slipped me somethin' that put me to sleep... you all got some kind of trouble, Miss Audrey?"

She hesitated; looked, as her aunt had, to the gun on the bedpost, and sighed. "Yes. More than I'd known."

He waited. She was range-bred—one can always tell another; she'd know why he asked, and what he needed to know.

"She's not really my aunt," Audrey began— "not by blood, anyway. I was eight years old when her oldest boy and some of her hands rescued me from an Indian war party that had attacked my wagon train. The plains were ablaze then, the war, you know..."

"Yes'm." He'd gotten in on the tail end of it, after the hospital and the prison camp; had signed up for the Fifth U.S. Volunteers, the "galvanized Yankees," as some called them, rather than go on languishing in those terrible conditions where so many men died. His service had been down New Mexico, Mescalero country—that was where he'd first known Billy Jacobs and Major Stanton—but he'd heard enough to know it wasn't any better up north.

"My parents had been killed, so they took me in, rather than taking me back to the train and obliging some other family to assume the responsibility," she went on. "I grew up here; the boys were like brothers to me. There are—there were—four of them: Clay, Clive, Clint, and Clark, the baby; he was seventeen when I came, ten years younger than Clay.

"When she started out, Aunt Edie was just a ranch wife, running the house, dosing the boys when they were sick, keeping the ranch books. Then one day a loco steer's twisted horns made her a widow and her boys fatherless. Clark wasn't born till the next spring.

"She took over, ran the spread the way her husband had been doing. Texas, the '50's... you're from there, maybe you remember how it was, all the hard feeling over states' rights and such. Aunt Edie decided to move north. Six thousand head they drove up, over six hundred horses counting the broodstock; eight wagons to carry everything, besides calf wagons. Clay and Clive were twenty-two and eighteen then; they've told me about it many times—the cattle alone stretched out going on four miles from point to drag. The first few years they survived by driving down to the mining camps in Colorado and the forts along the Oregon Trail. Now they ship east and north, beef and breeders. It hasn't been easy, but we're doing better every year.

"Just after the war, a new cattleman came into these parts. A man named Austin Gentry, and his three sons. The Gentrys and the Penfields were both from Texas, and Tennessee before that; they'd hated each other both places. It hadn't been one of your shooting feuds, just something that simmered on for generations, not much violence, just cold hate. We were willing to let it go the same way here; there's room enough for all, Aunt Edie said, and if they'd leave us be we'd return the favor."

Jess remembered Slim telling him about the Sherman-Parkison feud, about the five Parkisons and three Shermans who'd been killed in it over the years, one of them his father's cousin, Jonathan. She stood suddenly, beginning to pace. "Well, but they didn't leave us be. At first, yes; maybe they just needed time to get settled, recover from the journey. Then, about three years ago, it began getting... more serious. Little things, things that could as well have been accidents—a waterhole turning up foul, well, waterholes do that, the groundwater changes course and comes up through a vein of arsenic; a grass fire or two, not big ones, maybe lightning to blame; cattle counts coming up short, that could be rustlers, or Indians. Nothing anybody could prove, except... except most people suspected.

"I told you about Clark, the youngest of the boys. His brothers are all married now, with children. When he was twenty-five—the age each of them was when he took a wife—he asked me to be his.

"I tried to explain that I loved him, but only as a brother, just as I did the others. He wouldn't give up. I told Aunt Edie. She offered to send me to school back East for a couple of years. Maybe Clark would get to feeling differently if he wasn't seeing me every day, she said. But he didn't; I could tell from his letters—he was the only one besides Aunt Edie that wrote me individually. So I stayed on back there, teaching, two more years. Met a lot of men, some of them very nice, some who proposed. I couldn't say yes to any of them. I started thinking, maybe Clark had seen something in me that I didn't know was there; maybe I didn't really love him the same way I loved his brothers.

"Then Clay wrote me, the first time he'd ever done that over his own signature. He said things were getting worse with Gentry. Fence-cutting, he said, and guns being hired. I knew I had to come home. This is my family—do you understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said quietly. "I got a family like that myself. Slim, and a kid named Mike that was in kind of your case a few years ago, and Daisy who looks after us."

She sighed a little. "Then you know how it is." She was silent a minute or two. "When we got to Honey Creek... how much did you hear?"

"Enough to know that cowboy—Slant, was it?—he mistook me for somebody. Somebody that done somethin', only he didn't say what."

"No, he didn't," she agreed. "He felt that was Aunt Edie's place. She told me when we got here, after we'd seen to you. Clay had hired a gunfighter of his own, a man named Hal Owen. Had a terrible fight with Aunt Edie about it; she doesn't hold with that kind of thing, but he said Gentry was hiring so many guns, we had to have at least one. I don't know how he finally talked her around, but he did.

"Four days ago, two of our men were out on the range—Clay makes everybody ride in pairs now—when they heard a shot. They went to see. It was Clark. He'd been paired with Owen that day. He was dead—shot in the back from close distance, a hundred yards or so. Owen wasn't in sight.

"Five minutes later Owen rode up. He'd seen some cattle down in an arroyo, he said, a place that floods every time there's a rain, and he went to chase them out. By that time our men had found the shell casing. It was a .44 rimfire, the same kind Owen's rifle took—a '66 Winchester, he had. One of them braced him, called him a backshooter. There were shots. The other cowboy got away, ruined his horse bringing the news. Owen took off; by the time Clint and some of the crew got there, he was long gone. They went after him; they were still out when we got here. They didn't straggle in till past ten o'clock. They'd lost him."

So that's how it was, Jess thought. What was it Hal said— 'If I was what them fellers lookin' for me think I am...' He'd been the victim of a setup or two in his time; this might be another, though he wasn't quite sure how it would have worked.

Audrey had turned away from him, her shoulders quivering. He gave her some time, then said slowly, "Miz Edie wasn't wearin' mourning when I saw her."

Audrey sniffled. "No," she agreed, voice thick, "she wouldn't. That's another thing she doesn't hold with. She says the Lord knows her heart, and her family does; she doesn't need to drape herself in black crape for other folks' sake." A moment's pause; he heard her breathe in hard, heard the juicy sound of sinuses clearing. Then she turned back to face him, wiping her face with a man's red-and-yellow handkerchief. "When Slant saw you, from the back, he thought at first you were Owen—you're about his size and build, and you've got the same color hair. That's why he said what you heard him say. He thought, maybe, Clint and the others had gotten in range of Owen long enough to put a bullet in him from far off, knock him off his horse..."

"I savvy," he said. "Kinda can't blame him. How come this Owen shot Clark, you reckon?"

"Clay and Clive think he was... they think Gentry got to him before he reached us, offered him better money than Clay had done, to pretend to be on our side and cut us down from within."

"And he'd et your grub, so that was treason, sort of," said Jess. "Yeah, I can see how Clark's brothers'd want to get him... hang him, most likely."

"They would have, I think, if they could have caught him," Audrey agreed. "But they decided they shouldn't keep so many men away from here. If it's coming to backshooting... Gentry must be getting really serious."

Jess frowned. His body might not be up to snuff yet, but his head was clear, the fever gone, and there was nothing wrong with his brain, and the more he let the notion of a setup brew, the surer he got that there was something stirring around under the surface. "Somethin' don't make sense," he said slowly. "You said Owen carried a rimfire Winchester. A lot of folks nowadays like the new ones, with the centerfire cartridge that shoots truer and works in sixguns too. But if you just dig a bullet out of a man's body, you can't tell which kind it is, just maybe caliber. Man like Owen, him bein' a professional, he'd know that. Why didn't he pick up his brass after? Like leavin' a mile-high sign, and him with Clark's three brothers still to take down. Havin' to run like that, it don't help this Gentry much."

She blinked. "Maybe he didn't think they'd look for it, or find it if they did. A shell casing isn't big; it's easy to overlook in thick grass."

"Maybe," said Jess, not sure he believed it. Gotta think on this some, he told himself, and then: That's a kick in the head, ain't it? Owen shoots me in the back, and here I am wantin' to prove he didn't do somebody else the same. But like I said, that was never his style. "So," he said, "what happens now?"

"That's what we'd like to know," she admitted. "If Clay and Clive are right... it means everything's in the open now. Killing..."

"Yeah," he said softly. "It ain't just a feud now, it's war."

**SR**

The Gentry ranchhouse was a big, square-shouldered place with a gallery running around three sides. It stood in a shallow valley, with a stream off to the west about a quarter mile, and some well-grown cottonwoods left standing around it for shade. Slim discovered that he was expected to sleep there, not in the bunkhouse. "I'll be wanting you where we can talk," Gentry said, "and besides, a man of your quality shouldn't be bunking in with them common gunslingers."

Slim wasn't entirely sure he wasn't being mocked, just a little, but he decided it wasn't worth pursuing. Over the next few days he got to learn the way things were set up. Gentry had, as he already knew, three sons: Luther was thirty or so, Calvin twenty-seven, and Knox eighteen—there'd probably been a couple in between who hadn't lived, as there had been between Slim and Andy. Their mother had died four or five years ago, pneumonia. Luther was married, and he and his wife, Kay, had a five-year-old daughter, Prissy; Slim politely did his best not to notice, but being a stockman he could hardly have helped seeing that Kay's waist was thickening with a coming baby. Calvin was courting a girl from a neighboring ranch. There were, at this high working season, about three dozen cowhands, besides the gunmen, ten or twelve of those. And gunmen they were—nothing like Jess's class, or Eastburn's. There was an important distinction. A gunman was likely to be a criminal gunhand, sometimes (at least part of the time) an outlaw, not at all averse to robbing a bank or a stage if poverty pressed, a barroom brawler who liked close-quarter fights because he was, first, last, and always, fast; if he didn't run with a gang, he was at least more comfortable in a bunch. He was the kind who shot people in the back, or shot the unarmed—and, if caught, ended up on a gallows, or maybe the nearest tall tree. A gunfighter was usually a lone hand, or maybe he had a partner or two, though not often permanently; his code demanded that he give every man an even break, and the best of the breed never killed from behind or if their victims weren't carrying. Some were simple mercenaries, some born swashbucklers, but none in the West held themselves with more pride than they. For the most part, though they were certainly fast on the draw, they could also shoot with deadly accuracy and might sacrifice speed for aim and range. They tended to prefer to keep their enemies at least thirty feet away, sometimes up to 150, which was pretty fair shooting for any handgun, even at a standing target; in such circumstances it wasn't the first shot fired that mattered, as much as the first one that hit.

His first day on the place, after breakfast, Gentry took him into the ranch office at the back of the house and showed him a map of the country, which was exactly what Slim had been hoping he'd do. The centerpiece of it was the Boxed G holdings, though it also included the other ranches roundabout, on both sides of the town. Slim observed the colored areas indicating the many strategically located parcels of deeded lands controlling hay meadows and line camps and water, which in turn gave Gentry command over a good many thousand acres of unfenced (or possibly not) open range, spread out over an area of perhaps 500 square miles all told.

In any given area of range, there were likely to be maybe seven to ten major ranchers, about twice as many lesser ones, a scattering of squatters and homesteaders, and maybe a horse spread or two. The designation was more or less arbitrary, or at least elastic: a "big" rancher might own 5000 to 100,000 head of cattle, a "small" one (like Slim) 100 to 2000; anything under that was usually a "stock farmer," a homesteader raising a little bunch of cows for a hedge. Estimating from what he saw on the map, he figured Gentry had the space to run between fifteen and twenty thousand, which even on these northern ranges was considered a good size. He eyed the other holdings portrayed. Several bounded on the Boxed G; Two Bar Four didn't—it was, as Gentry had said, to the north and west of Sentinel, while Gentry's land lay well to the east. So this wasn't about boundaries, or water—the Penfields had good streams of their own, which, judging by the map (Gentry had used the same coloring system to show owned and patented ground), they controlled from end to end. It was, as Gentry had hinted in the Rosebud, an outgrowth of the old feud. "You said," he recalled, "that the Penfields' spread is 'a' bit bigger' than yours. Meaning acreage, or stock?"

Gentry nodded, pleased. "Good question. Meaning stock. Spring roundup, they branded just over 3500 calves; my count was a little under 2570."

You could generally figure you owned five head of grown stock for every calf, and that many cattle—something like 21,000 under the Penfields' brand—would take a good thirty-five men to work even if all the land was fenced, which it probably wasn't. If Two Bar Four was like Boxed G, part open range and part enclosed, it would be more like fifty, though in winter they'd let all but about fifteen go. "So," he mused, "that gives their crew the edge, as far as cowhands go."

"But," Gentry observed with a gleam in his eye, "cowhands aren't gunhands, as you and I both know. Oh, they'll fight, if they're pushed to it, but mostly only in defense, or to try to get something back that belongs to their boss. For offensive action they're not much good. That's part of why I took on them boys you saw in my saloon last night. That, and figuring it was cheaper to pay 'em and feed 'em than chance having 'em skirmishing around making off with my cattle while I'm trying to deal with the Penfields."

Slim nodded. "Yeah. You mentioned Penfield's sons. They'd be the heart and head of the thing, if it came to fightin'. How many?"

"Three now. Clay's forty; he acts as foreman. Clive's thirty-six, and Clint's thirty-three."

"Not kids," Slim murmured.

"No, not kids. Good cowmen, I give 'em that, and good fighters, if they have to be. Experienced, too; the family came up here before the war, like I said—eighteen years ago now, I reckon it must be. They know the country, they've drove trail herds all over it from Pueblo up to Montana and west to the Idaho mining camps, and their men are loyal. But," he added, "they are married, all of 'em, and they've got youngsters to think about. Oh, and there's a girl too—sort of a foster daughter; she's twenty."

Slim eyed the older man measuringly. "That better not mean what I think it might, Mr. Gentry. I don't harm women."

"Didn't say you did," Gentry returned evenly. "If it comes to that, it'll be a good few miles down the road yet. And there are rough characters aplenty for the job—if it comes to that, like I said. Don't figure it'll have to. We've only just moved into the second stage, you might say."

Slim gave it a beat or two, then nodded and returned his attention to the map. "Could you get 'em through money?" he asked. "Buy up their paper at the bank, maybe?"

Gentry shook his head. "Penfields don't believe in banks. Back when they lived in Texas, there weren't any, at least not under that name; state law didn't allow it. Of course that don't mean they can't still be broken. It'd be easy enough to rustle their stock till they got nothing left worth selling. They wouldn't be able to pay their taxes or support their families, and I could force 'em out. But rustling on that scale takes time, and it's chancy. You can't take all that many head at a time, on account of the way cows graze, kind of spread out; and when you do gather 'em up, even on free range, anybody sees the tracks'll know what's gone on. Then you got to get the stock out of the country, even if you ain't being chased, and change their brands and sell 'em; you can't keep 'em on your own land even if you got enough of it, you get caught with that many of somebody else's beef on your property and you're just asking for a noose. Don't want to kill their stock, either; supposing I can whip 'em, I'll have to pay taxes on that land just like they do, and that means I got to have something on it that I can sell."

Slim realized once again that he was dealing with a man who was clever as well as ruthless, a thinker. Careful, Slim, he told himself. "We'll get back to that, then," he decided. "I might want to ride over that way, sort of scout out the place. What about the law?"

Gentry snorted. "District sheriff's over in Casper and got a good twelve hundred square miles to cover. Besides, he won't move till somebody complains to him, and as long as I can keep this between me and the Penfields, their pride won't let 'em. Marshal in town's a fence-sitter, and his authority don't extend past its limits anyway."

"So," Slim mused, "that leaves you pretty much free to do as you like."

"Pretty much," Gentry agreed, with a grin. "What do you think so far? Any suggestions?"

"Give me a few days to get the lay of the land, like I said," Slim replied. "Maybe somethin' will come to me. It always helps to know just how far the man payin' me is willing to go, but it's good to get a picture of how the other side might be most vulnerable, too."

"All right," said Gentry. "I don't want to draw this out, like I told you in town; it'll be hard enough defendin' what I got from the Penfields, let alone the off-scourings of the range that'll be filterin' in as time goes by. But I can give you as much as a week, maybe."

"I'll get on it first thing tomorrow," Slim agreed.

It didn't take him long to begin getting a feel for the people he was dealing with. Bunkhouse gossip helped: many of Gentry's cowhands had been with him year to year, some as far back as the big drive up from Texas, staying over the winters, being kept on because the boss knew what they were made of, knew he could depend on them in all weathers and situations. Gentry was tough, ruthless in his way, but also smart and smooth. Luther, the oldest boy, didn't really like the way things were going: the Penfields had left Texas before he was old enough to be counted a man, and he'd never really gotten indoctrinated into the feud—he'd known about it, but given that it had been simmering away for who-knew-how-many generations, maybe as many as a hundred years if it dated back to Tennessee, he was having a hard time getting his mind around the concept of suddenly forcing it to bloom into a full-blown fight. His wife, nervous about her daughter and unborn baby, was even less happy. But family loyalty was strong, and neither was willing to go up against Luther's father.

Knox was a different case entirely. He'd been ten when the family moved up here, and as he grew into manhood and began working on the ranch, he'd grown also into the feud. To him it was very real: he'd spent almost half his life knowing that the family his family hated lived only some few miles away. The land-title trouble that Gentry had mentioned had erupted just as he was beginning to carry a gun, and that just ripened it. What was worse, he was eighteen, and that can be a dangerous age: a youngster has vanity and arrogance, but little or no self-control or -discipline, and can easily do murder if he gets into a white-hot temper. He's proud and often deliberately seeks trouble, and he's sometimes inclined to be rash, impetuous, and hotheaded, with little tendency to think things through to a definite conclusion before plunging headfirst into the kind of trouble that may lead to gunplay and perhaps death. If he has a too-quick temper and a too-fast gun hand, he may well become a killer.

And Knox had another weakness: he wanted to be known as a gun. He was a swashbuckler, inclined to little touches of sartorial vanity—a fringed buckskin shirt with buttons made of silver dollars, tight plaid pants, French calf boots—and when he was done practicing with his Colt, which he did at least once a day, he liked to give it the fancy spins that marked a showoff. He fell into that class of rider who was rough with his horse by nature, and the fancy silver-headed quirt he carried was often snapped or swished to emphasize a point he was making. The Shoshoni girls who helped out around the house were scared of him. Slim didn't like him, and he didn't think the real Eastburn would either. And the feeling was mutual. Knox probably thought he was both smart enough and tough enough to do what Slim had been hired for, and resented that his father didn't see it. That, and his hunger to make a name for himself, meant he was looking for trouble. Slim had scarcely settled in than the kid started needling at him—nothing too obvious, he had too much respect for his father's authority to do that, but hints plain enough, for an experienced man, that he wasn't afraid of Slim, didn't put a lot of stock in his—or rather Eastburn's—reputation, and wouldn't mind at all if he could get the older man angry enough to draw on him, or call him out. Fortunately a gunfighter of Eastburn's class was always cool and self-controlled, and nobody would think it strange that he'd consider Knox's sort just a minor nuisance, about on a par with a yapping dog. Slim soon got in the way of ignoring him, looking through him, or pinning him with a quick, cold stare and stepping around him when he didn't get out of the way fast enough.

Among the crew, Slim soon discovered, was a trio of brothers, half-Shoshoni, he thought, by name Frank, Tom, and Matt Rohner. They hunted meat for the house and the cookshack, had charge of seeing to any predators that might start dining on Gentry beef, and took a large part in breaking in horses. Frank, the oldest, carried an old Henry rifle, and Tom had a yellow-boy '66 Winchester. By this time Slim had quietly gotten the details on Clark Penfield's death and knew that one kind or the other must have been used to do the deed. When Gentry assigned the Rohners to take turns guiding him around the country, he knew he was on the trail of the truth about the murder. They knew Penfield range much too well, given that it didn't rub elbows with their own boss's. If Gentry had known that Hal Owen carried a '66 Winchester, as gossip told Slim he had, it might well have occurred to him to set the Rohners to keeping an eye on him, quietly, from a distance, until the opportunity arose to hang a frame on him.

It also didn't escape Slim that he was carrying in his vest pocket the casing from a .44 rimfire cartridge that could have come from either kind of rifle. Was it possible, then, that the dead man in Waverley, the one who'd had Jess's papers and horses, was Owen? Did that mean something? He filed the question away, but let his mind keep chewing on it.

He didn't let them take him too close to the Penfields' headquarters, not yet; just near enough that he'd know roughly where it was and what landmarks to look for. He kept busy getting a feel for the Two Bar Four range—and ducking the pairs of heavily armed cowboys who patrolled it; he had to admit the Rohners were real good at keeping themselves, and him, from being spotted.

But he knew he couldn't string this out too long, or Gentry would start to get suspicious.

And he still had to find Jess.

**SR**

By Sunday night Jess was strong enough to sit up in bed, and by Tuesday—though Miz Edie didn't altogether approve—he was on his feet, pushing a chair in front of him for support as he moved around his room. It was part toughness and part necessity. He owed these people, and the sooner he got himself back in fighting shape, the sooner he could try to discharge the debt. Bitter experience with nasty little bits of his past surfacing at the Sherman Ranch had left him reluctant to leave such things lying around to come back on him later. Not that he thought the Penfields would go to the lengths some of his old enemies had, but... well, he had a life of his own now, a good life, that he wanted to be let live in peace.

It never occurred to him that Slim might already be on his trail. Given time to get up to the Big Horn, time to bargain for the horses and choose the ones he wanted, and time for the trip back down, with the string to hold him back, his pard wouldn't be expecting him home till he'd been away at least two weeks, and probably wouldn't start to really worry about him for three or four days beyond that. He wished he could let his family know he was all right, but he knew what would happen if he wrote them, or (given his terrible handwriting) got Miss Audrey or one of the Penfields' wives to do it: Slim would drop everything and come storming up here, loaded for bear and ready to jump in. That was how it was with them. Look at that time he'd took off after Tad Kimball and Wes Darrin when they robbed the stage, Slim had followed him all the way up to Billings. It wasn't that he didn't appreciate the loyalty and concern of the best friend he'd ever had; it was just that, this time, he couldn't let that happen. He understood why Slim would feel the obligation, but his obligation went farther.

His room, he found out, was on the first floor of the Penfield ranchhouse, to make it easier for people to tend him during the day. The house itself was made of squared timbers, so thick nothing short of a cannonball could pierce them, and so heavy and well-seasoned that even if somebody could have got up to the foundation and laid a torch against them, they'd have taken halfway to forever to do much more than char. It might have begun as a simple cabin, but had taken the gout: wings thrust out in all directions, with porches. The roof was tin laid over planking and spiked down tight with galvanized nails, impervious to Indian fire-arrows, and all the windows swung in on pins, with big iron shutters built into the walls that could be slid across the openings, pierced through with firing ports; the odd layout of it insured that every bit of it could be raked with defensive fire and no angle could go uncovered.

It was big, and it had to be. Clay Penfield, the oldest of the three surviving boys, acted as foreman and lived in a commodious cabin near the crew's quarters, but he and his family ate at least one meal at the Big House every day, and his brothers, Clive and Clint—Jess was sure, now, that the horsemen who had passed him while he lay in the juniper scrub had been the impromptu posse sent out after Owen—lived in the house itself with their wives and kids; the cousins were growing up more like siblings. Clay's wife's name was Phyllis; her father had been the Penfields' first foreman, and like Audrey she'd literally been raised with the family. They had three children: Marc, who was fourteen and reminded Jess a good deal of Andy when he'd first met him; Mary, who was ten; and Mike, five. Clive was married to a woman named Cathy who had come to Sentinel to teach school, and like most schoolmarms hadn't lasted long; they had two boys, Earl and Jim, aged ten and six. Clint's wife, Lucy, was the daughter of the doctor in town and also had two, girl and boy, Anne, seven, and Peter, four and a half. The three wives between them, with the help of several Mexican girls whose families had come up from Texas with the Penfields, looked after the house, the poultry, the garden, and the children, while Miz Edie bossed the spread, from a buckboard now, her old saddle stiffening and gathering dust in the shed. The crew, around fifty of them, was a patchwork of Mexicans, two or three Indians, maybe half a dozen blacks, and Anglos both American-born and otherwise, some of them old hands, others youngsters just learning the trade; one was an Englishman who spoke in a clipped upper-class accent but could do just about anything with cattle and ride like a Comanche. The house cook was Chinese, the bunkhouse one a former bronc-stomper with a twisted leg and a hunch to one shoulder.

The house stood on a low knoll, looking south as if in salute to the family's place of origin. To the east, where the prevailing winds would blow the flies and odor away from it, was the barn, with the usual surrounding maze of corrals, blacksmith shop, wagon and saddle sheds; to the west, the bunkhouse, with cookhouse built on at one end, and Clay's cabin; to the north a big storehouse connected to the main building by a half-walled woodshed, and beyond it a scatter of small houses for the Mexican staff families, each with its little plot of ground; scattered around in between, an assortment of sheds and other ancillary buildings; and swinging around the whole thing on three sides was a broad creek, very probably pitted with boggy spots, that would serve almost like one of those moats around the castles in Mike's books—any attacking force coming in from any of those ways would have to cross it, wide open, and try to avoid falling into a hole in the bed. Given that the family had come up here in the later '50's, after the Harney campaign of '55 kicked off the Sioux wars, Jess could see why they'd designed the place the way they had, and he soon got confirmation of his guess: Clay told him one night after supper, sitting out on the porch, that they'd beaten off three Sioux attacks in as many years when they first settled here. After that the Indians had let them be, respecting their prowess; sometimes they ran off a few head of stock, but they didn't come raiding around the compound any more.

He found out something else, too, something that chilled him, just a little. Tuesday night Miss Phyllis's father had ridden in. He'd long ago run enough cattle on Penfield range, under his own brand, to justify pulling out and setting up on his own, and he had a little spread somewhere off east and north, where he lived with his second wife and their three sons, Phyllis's kid brothers. He brought word from Sentinel that Austin Gentry had apparently decided a crew of general-utility toughs wasn't quite enough. He'd hired a gunfighter who'd drifted in Saturday night; somebody from town had slipped out to give Phyllis's pa the word Monday. Dave Eastburn, he'd said, was on the Gentry payroll now.

Jess and Eastburn had never met face to face or worked together, but Jess knew and respected the man's reputation, and he'd seen him in a fight once. He was good. Better than Jess was, maybe.

"If you want our help, Miz Edie," the ex-foreman said, "you say so. You gave me my start, you and Carl, and I'm grateful for that."

"No, Boone," the old woman told him, "grateful don't mean you got to get yourself killed for our sake, nor your boys neither. This has always been between Penfields and Gentrys, and that's how it has to stay. We won't draw others into our trouble."

Jess understood why she'd put it that way; he was a Texan himself, after all. But when he learned about the exchange, he knew what he had to do.

Somewhere or other Miss Audrey had found a knotty gold-headed walking stick that could serve him as a crutch of sorts; not that there was anything wrong with his legs, but with a wound in the back, sometimes, if you moved wrong, you could end up on the floor quicker than spit. Wednesday night, after supper, he went back to his room and buckled his gun on, not without difficulty, then limped out to the porch outside his window. He already knew that Miz Edie liked to sit out there by herself in the cool of the evening and reflect a while, before she joined her family inside or on some other part of the gallery that ran around all sides of the house—another bit of defensive design: in time of attack it kept the sun, wherever it might happen to be, from shining into the eyes of the defenders. He'd heard her out there, humming softly, her rocking chair creaking.

She was there, as she'd been the previous few nights. As was her habit, she'd changed for supper, and instead of the mannish blouse and riding skirt she favored daytimes, she wore a deep purple calico dress, starched till it rustled. A white crocheted snood contained her gray hair, and around her neck hung a heavy gold-and-ebony cross on a string of matching beads, which she was fingering absently. "Miz Edie," Jess said quietly, out of the shadow.

She didn't seem surprised or startled; only glanced around, her sharp old eyes picking out the lighter blotch of his faded blue chambray shirt and his face in the darkness, and nodded, almost as if to herself. "Evening, son," she said easily. "Set yourself down and join me."

"Yes, ma'am." Her chair was a homemade hickory rocker with a rush seat, very like his own favorite by the fireplace at home. There was another like it set at an angle, as if prepared for someone else. He eased himself into it and rested his back carefully against the Turkey-red cushion.

"It's a good land, this," she said quietly. "Yours in Laramie anything like it?"

"Some, I reckon," he agreed. "Basin, same as this, but our range is right on the edge of the risin' country; a good share of it is up on the mountain, or else it's hills with little valleys in between. Slim, he was fifteen when they settled there, he says it took months for him to get used to havin' 'mountains in his yard'—that's how he says it. We like to sit out like this, nights, me and him, after work's done, and talk—he calls it our 'business meetin's.' "

"How long you been in these parts?"

"Me? Came five years ago, up from Kansas. Slim, his pa started the place... must be seventeen years now. Ain't big, nothin' like yours. We run a little under a thousand head, and it's taken all this while to build up to that. We'll ship I reckon a hundred, hundred-ten this year. Up till about seven, eight years back, Slim was just about scrapin' by, breakin' horses and sellin' hay and pickin' up any kind of work he could find to pay the bills while he growed his herd, and then the stage company come through—they'd just took it in mind to shift the route, drop the old Tolliver Station cutoff—and asked if he'd like to contract to run a relay station, change teams, maintain some of the equipment, maybe have coffee and snacks for the passengers and drivers. He jumped at it. It's a heap of extra work, but it's seventy-five dollars in his pocket first of every month, plus they supply forty ton of grain and twenty-five of hay a year, some bar and strap iron for smithin', and give us somethin' toward the grocery bill. It made all the difference for him—give him enough to hang on by till I signed on. He made me a full partner a couple years ago—best twenty-eighth birthday present a man could ask for."

The rocker's runners—or maybe it was the porch floor under them—creaked gently under her. "It's not much like Texas, this land," she mused, "but there's ways it's better; you bein' Texan, you'd have noted the same. We settled here... would've been the year before your partner's family. I kind of hated leavin' my husband's grave, but I soon found I hadn't left him. I sit here nights, in this chair that he built me the first year we were married, and often and often I can hear his voice. 'Woman,' he says to me, 'you have done a good job of work.' And I know he's proud of his boys, and his grandies, and of what we've built up here."

It was the opening he'd hoped for; he wondered if she'd given it to him a-purpose. "Ma'am—Miz Edie. You know why I come out here, don't you?"

He saw the flash of those keen blue eyes. "Yes, son, I know." A little nod toward the cut-down holster at his side: "I ain't blind, and I'd have to be, not to see that."

"Miss Audrey told me you don't hold with hirin' guns," he went on. "And from what I know of this fix you're in, I reckon maybe I see why. But Miss Phyllis's pa... what he told you last night... up till now all this Gentry's had is just average-tough guns, not more'n a notch or two above renegades, if they're that much. Now he's got Eastburn... I know him, not personal, but enough to know they ain't nowheres near his league. Clay told you if Gentry was takin' on fighters, you'd best have at least one; that's why he went up to Great Falls and hired Owen. Now you ain't got him neither."

"And with good cause," said she tightly.

"Yes, ma'am, I know that. But even with me havin' been in that same line once... it ain't the same, ma'am. If Miss Audrey hadn't spotted me in that juniper scrub... ma'am, I reckon I'd be long done by now. I owe you, Miz Edie."

"Yes," she said quietly, "I reckon you feel you do."

"Ain't no feel about it. It's plain fact. If somebody had helped one of your boys out of the kind of spot I was in, you know you'd say they had to even the books. That's what I need to do, Miz Edie. No hirin' involved. No money. Just... just honor, I reckon."

She was silent for a minute or two. "There's not but one of you, son."

"Don't matter," he said stubbornly. "Ain't but one of Eastburn, neither. He'll be the brain. Reckon that's why Gentry signed him on; them guns he had already, that kind's just fine for cuttin' fence and runnin' off stock and maybe pickin' a fight with a man in town or jumpin' him out of an alley and beatin' him up some, but they ain't thinkers. Gentry needs somebody that can plan. Without that, all he's got is a gang. Gang needs a boss. Met up with enough of 'em that I know," he said, thinking of Bud Carlin and Calvin Hawkes, among so many others. "And, ma'am, no offense meant, but you and yours, good as you all are, you ain't warriors. Not the way they are, the way Eastburn is. You can't let this drag on or Gentry'll just bring in more and pick you clean."

He hesitated a moment. "Told you I know Eastburn, or anyhow know of him. Reckon the same holds for him. He finds out I'm here—and he will, ma'am—he'll figure you changed your mind behind Gentry's back and decided to bring in another gun. So he'll want to move first. Unless you're set to meet him and Gentry on their terms... Miz Edie, you can't stand up to what'll happen. Not without somebody like me, somebody that's been in scraps like this before." He allowed himself a sigh. "Been tryin' a long time to leave all that behind, ma'am. But there's times life won't let you have it the way you'd like. Reckon you know that already."

A silence fell. Then she said, "It ain't that you want this, is it?"

"No, ma'am. Only to even the score. And there ain't but one way I can do that. A man's got to keep good in his own eyes; I told Slim that once. If... if sometimes it means he's got to do things that... that he don't rightly want to... well, that's the price he pays for bein' who he is. Not a gun, necessarily. Just... just a man tryin' to do right as he sees it. I got a notion that's what sets a lot of men on the trail I used to ride. Only trails double back, sometimes."

"Yes," she said, almost sighing it, "they do."

Jess waited. If she wouldn't take the gift he offered, which was her right, there would be only way remaining to him. He didn't want to take it, but he'd have to. He'd have to find Eastburn and the Gentrys and call them, one after another. He thought she understood that. He'd made it as plain to her as he could.

"What would you want us to do?" she asked after a minute.

"Just let me do what Eastburn's doin'. Boss that end of things. And—if it comes to that—be the one to face him."

"You'd risk that, son? With your folks down in Laramie waitin' for you?"

"They'd be waitin' a lot longer, if it wasn't for you all," he reminded her.

"That's true," she said.

He waited again.

"It's not something I want, any more than you do," she said. "After all, this feud ain't mine; I'm only a Penfield by marriage, not blood. I said when Gentry first came here, he leaves us be, we'll leave him be. But he didn't."

"Yes, ma'am." Softly. "I know it. Life don't ask, ma'am. It just kind of tells you, 'Here I am; now, what do you aim to do about it?'" Like the Bannisters, he thought. Like the war. Like what happened all them years in the Big Open, before I found Slim.

"It does that," she said. "And you'll do what you have to, if I say no. Won't you?"

"Yes, ma'am. I won't like it none. But I won't have no choice."

She nodded. "I got a notion you're a good man at heart, son. So I reckon I know what it costs you to say that. And I don't want to be the one to make you do a thing that goes against your grain. That'd be almost as bad as not lettin' you settle things at all. My husband had a saying: 'Let's twirl or get off the piano stool.' I reckon the time's come to start twirlin'."

Then he knew, and the weight shifted a little off his heart. There'd be rough times ahead in plenty, and he didn't look forward to what he saw at the end of the road. But at least, if it came to that, Slim would know he'd tried to do right as he saw it. He'd ask Miss Audrey to write a letter for him, to send if the worst happened.

**SR**

Slim had been with Gentry almost a week now. He knew he couldn't stall much longer. But today was Saturday, and the outfit was going into town. He saddled up to ride along.

On the way out, last time, he'd spotted the other saloon, the one he supposed the Penfield outfit used; they sure as sin wouldn't walk into their enemy's den just to get a drink, not unless one of them was like Knox, wanting to push something. He wondered if, maybe, he could make an excuse to visit it. If Jess was with one of the other ranchers—not even the Penfields themselves—someone there would probably know by now, even though whoever had him apparently hadn't troubled to send for the doctor—that, Gentry's bartender would likely have heard of. He could make it seem that he wanted to deliver an ultimatum...

Gentry sent him and Knox with Luther and Kay and Prissy to the store; not that the family needed bodyguarding as such—nobody would deliberately start up a fight with women and children around, and nobody with any pride would try to use them as leverage—but there was always the chance of a stray shot taking down some innocent bystander. Knox wasn't happy, Slim could see. He'd ridden in alongside the rancher, taking every chance to bang his stirrup against Slim's, until it was beginning to look as if Slim wouldn't have any choice but to say something. Finally he just spurred Rival and galloped up to fall in alongside Gentry; he knew the kid wouldn't push it right under his father's nose.

He wished he could send a telegram to Mort, let Daisy and Mike know he was all right, but they didn't have telegraph in Sentinel. Then it occurred to him that they did have a stagecoach, twice each week in each direction, and a post office here in the store. He bought a seven-cent writing tablet, borrowed a pen from the storekeeper and persuaded him to break a packet of envelopes—he paid another ten cents for the favor—and went over to the notions counter where he could rest the tablet on the display case and stand behind it, facing the door. Dear Daisy and Mike, he began. Just a few lines to let you know I'm sure I'm on Jess's track. I found where he'd been ambushed, but he wasn't there; somebody must have gotten to him first and taken him home with them. I haven't got him located yet, but I'm almost certain he's somewhere around the town I'm in—it's called Sentinel, up north past Waverley.

He paused, trying to decide how to proceed, and then, over a distant rumble of wagon wheels and horses' hoofs, came a clatter of boot heels against the boardwalk, and one of Gentry's common guns burst in. "Knox! Eastburn! The Penfields are comin' in! Gentry said to let you know."

"Are they all here?" Knox asked sharply.

"No," the other man told him. "It's just one of the boys—Clint, I think—and his wife, and that broken-down grub wrangler of theirs, and about twenty of their crew."

"Well, now," drawled Knox. "Clint, of all people. Looks like we can go on the way we began, workin' up from youngest to oldest."

Slim laid his pen down, but not without thinking to quickly slip the tablet, with the possibly-suspicious half-written note on it, into his inside vest pocket. "Just what have you got in mind, kid?" he asked.

Knox gave him a look that would have killed flies. "They've been cuttin' back on their trips to town, ever since the trouble started," he said thinly. "They send in a little bunch, like this, about once a month, and really load up—bring in two or three wagons so they can buy feed and wire and whatever else they need, besides grub and such. Stay just long enough for that, then head home before it gets dark. Sort of like a snail pullin' back into its shell, I reckon. Pa thinks the old woman don't want to take no more chances of her side and ours buttin' heads than she has to."

"Sounds like she's got a brain," Slim observed. "So?"

"What do you think?" Knox demanded. "Are you comin'?"

Slim shot a look at Luther and Kay and Prissy. "We were told to stay with your brother and his family."

"So do that, if you want to," snarled Knox. And headed for the door, swishing his quirt.

Slim hesitated only a moment, then touched his hat to Kay. "Sorry, ma'am. Guess I've got to make sure he doesn't do somethin' stupid."

"He will," Luther observed wearily, "if somebody don't stop him. You go on, Eastburn. I'll look after my family, and make it right with Pa if need be. He knows what Knox is the same as you do, it's just he don't care—not with things like they are."

Slim didn't bother to reply. He stepped out the doors and paused on the boardwalk just in time to see Knox take up a position in the very middle of the street, about thirty yards from the oncoming string of big two-and-a-half-ton wagons. A cordon of cowboys rode on either side of it, grim-looking and alert. On the seat of the lead wagon, next to the driver, was a woman of, maybe, twenty-seven or -eight, soft brown hair gathered loosely at the back of her head under a flower-trimmed straw hat, wearing a red-and-green gingham dress under a lightweight green shawl. Out front, on a silver-maned gray, rode a man a year or two older than Slim, with an expensive Mexican-silver band around the crown of his black Stetson. That, Slim told himself, would be Clint Penfield.

Penfield saw Knox blocking the way and checked his horse back, shooting one hand up quickly in a signal to the rest of his party. "Hold it up!" he yelled, and Slim heard the voices of the drivers calling to their teams.

Slim slowly descended the steps in front of the store, letting his right hand hang beside his Colt. He'd always worn it a bit low, not sure why, just that it seemed to fit best there. When Jess had come, he'd explained why. "A gunbelt's got to fit, right down to the width of the last hair, if you want to be good; that's more'n half your speed in a draw," he'd said. "And the holster's got to be in just the right place, 'cause when you draw you ain't got time to grope or guess: if it's hung too low you got to reach, and that wastes time; if it's too high, the muzzle's gonna catch on the top of it, and that's even worse. Best place to wear it is just below your hip, so the grip's about halfway between your wrist and your elbow when your arm's hangin' limp. That way it's right close by your hangin' hand, and you can draw as you bring it up, with room left to clear the holster without havin' to lift the gun too high. Plus, a Colt sixgun weighs better'n four pounds, and it's better to have that weight supported by your hipbone than your middle."

Penfield nudged his gray with gunmetal-trimmed silver spurs, holding the horse in just a bit, and stopped again when he was about thirty feet from Knox. Slim was aware of people pausing on the boardwalks—it was Saturday, after all, and the Gentrys and Penfields weren't the only outfits that had come in to do their shopping—and of some of them edging toward cover. He eased a little nearer to Knox, having to come up on his left because of the direction from which the Penfields had driven in. Not too close, he thought. If you keep back a bit, he'll figure you're there to back his play, but not to stick your oar in.

"Hello, Knox," said Penfield evenly.

"Clint."

"You're kind of blockin' the street there, you know," said Penfield mildly. "A man might get run down, a fool thing like that."

"He might," Knox agreed, flicking his quirt against the shaft of his boot, "if he was a mind to let it happen."

Penfield drew a breath and let it out again, slow. He was at a disadvantage, and he knew it: when gunfire is being exchanged—or even if there's only the prospect of it—a man on the ground always has the jump over one on horseback, not only because the rider, shooting at the other, is apt to shoot high, but because the horse is a lot bigger target than the man, and if you can bring it down you may pin the rider under it, or at least shake him up pretty severely. Slim rolled his weight on the balls of his feet, easing just a little closer. "Back off, Knox," he said quietly.

"This ain't your butt-in, Eastburn," the kid grated.

"Every man's entitled to his opinion," Slim observed. "Just two things you might think about. First, you start throwin' lead around, that woman on the wagon might stop a bullet. You want that, kid? I hear she's town-bred, a doctor's girl. It's not good thinkin' to get a doc mad at you, least of all when you're fightin' a war, to say nothin' of any friends the family might have. So far this is just two spreads. What's the percentage pullin' half the country into it? Second, you take him down, his crew won't let you get out of range—not if they're any good."

"I'll take that chance," Knox retorted. "There's plenty of cover." He settled his feet, letting his hand almost touch the knurled-ivory butt of his gun. "I'm callin' you, Penfield."

The other man shot a quick look past him, at Slim, as if wondering whether he was facing one man or two. You could see that he wanted to glance back at his wife and his men, but knew that if he took his attention away from Knox he was asking for it. Slim met those eyes an instant—they were blue, he noticed, about halfway between the lightness of his own and the vivid darkness of Jess's—and tipped his head by just half an inch. There was a pause that felt long enough for God to create the world in.

Knox's hand started to move, and Slim brought his Colt up, fast, and clouted him at the top of the spine with the barrel. He went down in a heap, like a big puppet with its strings cut.

Somebody on the boardwalk whistled softly in astonishment. Slim met Penfield's eyes again, gave his gun a little upward snap, and dropped it back in the holster.

"What was that for?" asked Penfield.

"This isn't a good place. Or a good time," Slim told him, with a nod toward the woman on the wagon. "Ma'am," he added, touching his hatbrim.

Penfield looked him over. "You're Eastburn."

"So they say," Slim replied.

"Well," the other said. "Well, now. If anybody'd told me this was goin' to happen, I'd have said they were drunk. Or worse'n that, maybe. Obliged to you." He looked at Knox. "His pa won't be happy about this."

"You let me handle his pa," Slim suggested, "and you handle your business here. Just give me time to get him out of the dirt—and Luther and his family are inside; maybe you'd wait a bit, till I get them out."

"Sure," said Penfield. "And later?"

Slim shot a quick look toward the store doorway, where the gunman who'd brought the word was goggling at him like a frog. "No later," he said. "Not today. I'll see to it." He knelt, dragged the unconscious man's arms over his shoulder, and horsed him up, limp as a boned chicken. "Five minutes."

"We'll wait," said Penfield. "Thanks again."

**SR**

Gentry, as Penfield had predicted, wasn't happy. "Just whose side are you on, Eastburn?"

"Whose do you think?" Slim retorted. Lying had never come easy to him.

"Right now, I'm not too sure," the man admitted. He looked as if he would have liked to draw, except he knew Slim would nail him before his gun was clear of the waist-high holster.

"Let's put it this way," Slim suggested. "You hired me for something. I've been workin' on it, in my mind. I think I see how we can get what we want. That out there, that was part of it. Ever hear of throwin' a man off guard?"

He saw Gentry's mind start to turn over. "Who ain't?"

"Wait till we get back," Slim told him, "and I'll tell you all about it. Walls might have ears."

"Not in my own place."

"I don't stay alive by takin' chances, Mr. Gentry," Slim reminded him. "Not the kind I can avoid."

Silence, then: "I see your point. All right. We get back, you'll tell me everything you got in mind—and why this. And, Eastburn—when Knox wakes up, he won't be too pleased with you."

"And this should matter to me?" Slim retorted. "You know what he is, Gentry—a tinhorn. He doesn't scare me. And if he had a quarter the brains of you and his brothers put together, he'd know why. Ask anybody who was out there. I can beat him any time he says the word."

"I reckon you can, at that," Gentry agreed, "by what Snowden said. But this better be good, Eastburn."

"It will be. It is." At least I've given myself a few hours' grace, Slim thought.

**SR**

Matt Rohner was waiting at the Boxed G ranchhouse when they got in, a little after sunset. "Something went wrong, boss—big time," he said. "Owen's back at the Two Bar Four."

That diverted Gentry's attention from Slim. "What? How?"

"I don't know how," said Matt in an ill-tempered tone, "but he's there."

"Luther, Eastburn, Knox, come with me," said Gentry. "Matt, find Calvin and bring him with you to the office." Knox, spared a concussion (though not a bruise) by Slim's spine-top blow, had recovered some hours earlier without ill effect; he'd been watching Slim ever since like he wanted a rematch, but he knew better than to try it.

Slim handed Rival off to one of the men who'd ridden in with them, and followed the Gentrys as they stamped up the steps and into the house.

"I was scoutin' around the Penfield place," Matt began, when he had the five men in the office, "and I heard shots. Not like a fight—steady rhythm, like somebody squeezin' off shots at a target. So I went to see. I couldn't get no closer than that tree growth along the stream, but there was a man out by the barn, shootin' at bottles and cans and practicin' his draw. He had his back to me, but it had to be Owen. Same size, same build, same dark hair. And fast—faster than anything I've seen."

"How in the name of good common sense did he get them to take him back?" Gentry demanded. "We set him up for Clark's death just as neat as you please."

"I don't know," said Matt. "But I know what I saw, and I saw a man with a fast draw. Don't seem too likely he's a new one. We'd have heard of any driftin' into town like Eastburn here. Anyway, you know how the old woman feels about hired guns; that's why you wanted to do it that way."

Quite suddenly everything fell into place for Slim. He knew he'd picked up a .44 rimfire cartridge casing at the place where Jess must have been ambushed, and he knew that a similar one had been found near the site of the youngest Penfield's murder—and when a man was shot in the back, that was murder. It was just a little thick for coincidence that two men with rimfire rifles, one on the run from a posse, the other shooting down passersby on the road and taking their horses, should be running loose in the same general tract of country at roughly the same time, which suggested that they'd been one and the same, that the ambusher, the dead man in Waverley, had, as he'd speculated, been Hal Owen, either set afoot and desperate for a mount, or willing to abandon his own horse and try to pick up someone else's to confuse his trail. He also knew that Owen had looked enough like Jess that, from behind and at a distance, it would be very possible to mistake one for the other. And it had been almost two weeks, now, since his pard had been shot—plenty of time for a man as tough as Jess was to get on his feet. Of course he'd want to start getting his condition back, especially once he found out about the war. It's Jess! he thought, barely throttling the impulse to shout. I was right—he's at Penfields'!

He's alive, he's on his feet—he's all right! Now if I can only get to him...

But he won't go, not with things like they are. I knew that all along. That means I've got to force it—or else fight all four of the Gentrys and Rohner besides, now, and take my chances on gettin' out of here with my skin in one piece.

"Maybe it isn't Owen," he said.

The other men looked at him as if he'd grown an extra head. "Matt knows what Owen looks like," Gentry retorted.

"Let me guess," Slim suggested. "Lean-built, compact, just under six feet, dark hair. It could also be someone else." He looked challengingly at the cattleman. "You guess."

"Harper?"

"Matt said he didn't see the man's face," Slim reminded him.

"That's true," Gentry agreed, after a moment.

"I told you he might have a bullet in him," Slim continued. "Since he caught it, there's been time for him to get on his feet, provided he had shelter and care. If the Penfields took him in—" And he left Gentry to make the obvious connection.

"He'd figure he owed them one," Gentry realized. "If somebody's told him about the trouble... and that you're here—"

"Exactly," said Slim.

There was a silence as father and sons processed that. "So," said Gentry presently. "What now?"

"He didn't come to town with them today, I'd have seen him—or he'd have spotted me and called me," Slim said. "He stayed home to practice. Knox told me the Penfields don't come into town more than once a month any more—not for supplies or fun, at least. That doesn't mean they wouldn't come in for somethin' else—but you're not usually there, except Saturdays."

"So?"

"So," said Slim, "we get the jump on them, before they expect us."

"How?"

"You said," Slim recalled, "that you didn't want to draw this out. Take the fight to them, then. They won't be lookin' for that."

He saw it hit them, the understanding of what he was suggesting. "You mean," said Calvin slowly, "hit their headquarters?"

"That's just what I do mean." Slim tipped his head in Gentry's direction. "I told you I had a plan, didn't I?"

"You did," the cattleman agreed, "but, good Lord alive and watching, man, a head-on raid?"

"Why not?" Slim pressed. He knew how very rare it was for a range war to involve a shooting fight between large groups of men; more usual was a solitary man being bushwhacked from a doorway or caught off guard with the weight against him and killed or severely injured—or killed in a "fair shootout," as Knox would have killed Clint Penfield today. "Look. Their crew's about the same size as yours, when you count in Snowden and the rest. But they have to keep men out on the range; you've cut enough wire that they can't be sure from one day to the next that you haven't done it again. That means, even allowin' that they might also keep some at home all the time in case there's some kind of alarm, like the day Clark was shot, there might be twenty or so around the ranch, and maybe half that close enough to it to hear the shootin' and come in. We'd have the numbers on 'em."

"That house of theirs is like a fortress, Eastburn!" Calvin objected.

"Fortresses have been taken lots of times," Slim noted. "And it's the one thing they'd never expect, never be prepared for."

"There'll be the women and children there," Gentry began—and then his face changed. "Oh. Now I see."

"Do you? Tell me what you see," Slim dared him.

"You pulled that stunt in town a-purpose," said Gentry. "Made a big thing of it not bein' the time and place, with Lucy Penfield there. To throw 'em off guard, like you said."

And Slim smiled—not his usual bright grin, but a tight, unpleasant smile. "Now you get it. Besides, we'll know how we mean to go in. Matt, can you draw me a map of the layout over there?"

"I reckon I can," Rohner agreed.

"Do it," Slim told him.

**SR**

Clint Penfield hadn't exactly started out being one of Jess's favorite people. He'd asked a couple of pretty pointed questions about the '66 Winchester that had been found with Jess in the juniper scrub, knowing as he did that Hal Owen had carried one of the same model; fortunately Hal hadn't been the kind to put his initials on things. Jess, quite honestly, had told him that the fellow that bushwhacked him had left it behind—"Reckon he thought the newer one on my saddle was better." Clint thought about that for a minute, then nodded; he had to admit it made sense. Jess reckoned he understood what was eating at the youngest surviving Penfield: he'd been the one to lead the pursuit of the man he thought had killed his brother, and he'd failed to get him. That would be hard on a man, Jess knew.

For all that, Jess would never have cast doubts on Clint's truth, even when he came home from town with the incredible story he told just before supper that evening—less so when Lucy confirmed it.

"Who was this man?" Miz Edie asked, when her son and daughter-in-law had finished.

"From what we heard around town after," Lucy said, "we think it must have been Dave Eastburn, that gunfighter Phyllis's pa told us was working for Gentry now."

It was Clive who looked in Jess's direction. "Eastburn's in your line, Harper. Would he do something like that?"

"He ain't in my line, Clive, he's in the line I used to follow," Jess corrected him firmly. "And... shoot, I ain't sure. He's tough, but he's known to've killed at least one man for disrespectin' a woman, let alone puttin' one in danger. Maybe. Maybe he would. But he'd have to know Knox's pa would have somethin' to say about it when he heard. Maybe..." He paused, thinking it over. "Eastburn's smart," he continued, after a moment. "Smart as my pard Slim, I reckon. He might have some kind of a plan, and this might be part of it."

"So what do you reckon he might do?" Clay asked.

Jess shook his head and sighed quietly. "I wisht I knew, Clay. I wisht I knew." And I wisht you was here right now, pard, he thought to Slim, suddenly not caring that it was his debt to pay and not his friend's, only longing for the presence of the man he knew better than anyone else alive, knew he could count on and trust when the going got rough. Been three weeks now I been gone... you on your way, maybe? Lord, I hope so. I got a hunch things are gonna bust wide open just about any minute now...

**SR**

Slim's plan might not, as plans went, be the best he'd ever had; but, especially now that he knew for certain that Jess was at Two Bar Four, it was the best he could come up with on short notice. He had to force this thing to come to a head, give Jess the chance he needed to pay his debt to the Penfields, and settle the war so he could take his pard home. He'd pull the Gentrys and all their crew over there, and just before they were set to leave he'd slip away and give the warning. The Penfields would be ready for the attack when it came, the Gentrys would ride into a trap, and he and Jess would do the rest.

He and the four cattlemen leaned over the map Matt Rohner had produced, and Slim sketched out his idea. "We want to wait till it's well light and any men goin' out on the range for the day have left," he said. "We'll ride in on this side, where the creek isn't—it's so shallow, it's probably full of bogs." He looked to Rohner for confirmation, and the halfbreed nodded. "Soon as we get into that oxbow, we'll spread out, use the Penfields' buildings for cover. Leave our horses back here—" He went on in that vein, showing where the detachments of men should place themselves. "I'll ride ahead while it's still dark, find a good spot, and count the men as they go out. Then I can meet you here, and you'll know just how many you've got left to deal with." That would cover his absence, and when he didn't turn up at the meeting place, they'd figure maybe some Penfield had caught him unawares. By that time, even if they thought he'd been taken alive and forced to tell what was coming, they'd be strung to a high pitch and unwilling to back off. I hope, he added silently.

When he was sure they all understood, he folded the map and gave it to Gentry. "All right. Let's see if we can get some sleep. I'm goin' down and check on my horse, no use wastin' time in the morning."

Austin Gentry looked at him with genuine respect. "I'd heard you were smart, Eastburn, but this is better than I'd hoped for."

"Just doin' my job, Mr. Gentry. Oh—you better send somebody down to the bunkhouse to let the crew know what's on the slate."

"Knox, you go," Gentry told his youngest. "Take Matt's map."

It wasn't fifteen minutes later, when Slim was in the barn with a lantern, looking over Rival's feet to make sure all his shoes were on tight, that the roof fell in.

**SR**

"You told me you were Dave Eastburn!" Austin Gentry shouted.

Slim winced at the echoes the voice woke in his still aching head. He'd come to back in Gentry's office, tied to a chair. It hadn't taken long for him to figure out what had happened: the slyly triumphant look on Knox Gentry's face was all he really needed. Knox had figured that now that they had a plan, they didn't need Slim: that he, Knox, was smart enough and tough enough to make that plan work according to Slim's scenario—and, at that, maybe he was. So he'd sneaked up behind Slim in the barn, and... Slim still wasn't quite sure why the kid hadn't killed him then and there, but he figured he'd find out pretty soon. People like Knox never could resist crowing.

"No, Mr. Gentry," he replied evenly, "I never said that. You said that. Think about it."

He saw the words hit the man, saw him pause and leaf back through aural memory, and then Gentry nodded grudgingly. "I reckon that's so," he admitted, "but if you ain't Eastburn, why'd you let me think you were, and who are you really?" He waved Slim's seven-cent writing tablet in the rancher's face. "Knox was searchin'

you for hideouts when he found this. I don't reckon the real Dave Eastburn would be writin' to somebody named Daisy."

"No," Slim allowed, still calmly, "I don't suppose he would. Name's Slim Sherman, Sherman Ranch, outside Laramie. And I am lookin' for Jess Harper, just the way I told you I was; he happens to be my partner. Somebody—I'm pretty sure it was Hal Owen—bushwhacked him a couple of weeks ago on his way home from the Big Horn, took his papers, but got killed in Waverley a day or two after. The marshal there telegraphed me. I went to get him, saw the body wasn't my pard, and came huntin'."

Gentry listened, then nodded again. "That makes sense, I reckon. And, like you said earlier, you think the man Matt saw at Two Bar Four is him. What were you thinkin', that when you went to count the Penfields you'd just slip down and warn 'em, figure your friend would vouch for you? Pull us into a trap?"

"Yeah, that's about what I was thinkin'." Slim knew it wouldn't do him much good to deny it; they'd just beat on him till he admitted the truth. Not that he was a coward, but as long as he was still in reasonably good shape there'd be a chance he could get away...

"Well, you won't," said Gentry. "That's a good plan, Sherman. You must'a' done some time in the Army, to come up with it. We'll use it."

"Yeah," Knox added viciously, "and you'll go along. And after I kill Harper in front of you, Sherman, it'll be your turn."

**SR**

Luther Gentry eased quietly into his bedroom, sat down on the Elizabethan slipper chair beside the bureau, and began pulling off his boots. He started at the flare of light from the other side of the room, then settled as he realized it was Kay, sitting up in bed and lighting the lamp. "Sorry, honey," he said. "Didn't mean to wake you."

"You didn't," she said. "I wasn't asleep. I've been waiting for you. Something's going to happen, isn't it, Luther? And don't try to lie to me."

He hesitated a moment; sighed. "Yeah." And he told her about the evening's events.

"And Austin's going through with it?" Kay asked when he was done. "Raid Two Bar Four, let Knox kill Sherman?"

"He reckons it's too good a plan not to use," Luther agreed. "As for Sherman, he shouldn't have pretended to be somebody he wasn't, least of all somebody like Eastburn; he brought it on himself."

"Only because he was following an obligation to his partner," Kay replied. "Luther... you can't let him. Women and children..."

"That Penfield house is a fortress," Luther reminded her. "We'll make a show of force, let 'em see they got no chance against a siege, and draw out Clay and the others and maybe Harper, settle this thing once and for all."

He saw her lips tighten, and then she threw back the Pincushion quilt and swung her legs over the edge of the bed, sliding her feet into the soft slippers that waited on the red-and-green rug alongside. "No," she said. "No, you won't. Luther, don't you see this has gone on long enough?"

"What do you mean, Kay?"

"I mean I'm riding over there and warn them, just as soon as I can get dressed," she said, already opening the doors of the towering walnut wardrobe and searching among the riding clothes that hung there.

He stared at her a moment. "Kay, no! I can't go against Pa, you know that—"

"So you always said," she agreed, "but you're not. I am. And he's not my pa."

"What about the baby?"

She turned to face him. "I'd rather risk losing it than know it would grow up with a father who'd be part of something like this." At the slack look on his face she softened; she really did love him. "Luther, this is nothing but murder and you know it. If it were about water, or rustling, or boundaries, I'd stand beside you; you know that—I was raised in cow country too. But this feud... nobody even knows what started it! It's time to make an end, and Sherman is showing us the way to do that."

He stood. "I reckon even a woman's got to do what she thinks is right," he said slowly. "And what about afterward?"

"I'll know how you're all coming," she reminded him. "I'll swing wide and be back here before you've even gotten over there." She went quickly to him and put her arms around his waist, her head against his chest. "I'm still your wife, Luther, and your daughter's mother. Nothing changes that. But I can't stand by for murder—not the Penfields', or Jess Harper's, or Sherman's. I can't."

He turned her face up to him and kissed her. "I wish I had your courage, honey."

"You do," she said. "You're letting me go when you know what it could mean, know you could stop me if you really wanted to. Sometimes it takes more courage to do something like that, than to fight." Then she pulled back. "Let me get dressed, there's no time to waste. Even if I take the road, rather than cutting the short way across the range, I won't be able to go as fast as I'd like to; it's dark out."

"I'll set you out to the barn with a lantern," he offered, "and saddle your horse for you. Pa will have sent everybody to bed by now—he wanted to get an early start, as soon as we could see."

**SR**

Jess came out of a deep sleep with a start, not half-conscious the way he usually was in the early morning, but wide awake and fully alert. Outside his window it was still dark. For a moment he wondered what had disturbed him, and then he heard it again: somebody was thundering on the front door of the Penfield ranchhouse. Somewhere upstairs he heard a door open and close, then another. He sat up, reaching for his gunbelt.

Ten minutes later he was in the foyer with Clay and Miz Edie, listening as Kay Gentry poured out her news. The rest of the family was filtering down the stairs and in from Clay's cabin—Miz Edie had sent Clive down there—as she spoke; he saw fourteen-year-old Marc, Clay's son, among the rest of them, his young face somber, looking more like Andy Sherman than ever.

"Slim?" he demanded, pushing forward. "They got Slim?"

"You're Jess Harper?" She looked him quickly up and down. "Yes, they've got him. Knox meant to bring him along, to kill him after he'd seen you dead."

Jess dropped a hand reflexively to his gun, then hesitated. Even if he could get across the range to Boxed G before the Gentrys set out for here, he wouldn't have a dog's chance of getting Slim out, not against fifty-odd men. He'll be safe enough, he thought. If this Knox wants him to see me dead—

Miz Edie was saying something, and he focused his attention on her. "Child," she said, "we're beholden to you, and we'll do our best not to leave you a widow; you've got my word on that."

"Thank you, Miz Edie. I'd better get back now; I don't want anyone to miss me."

"Your horse must be done up, ma'am," Jess observed. "Clint, you go down to the corral with her and rope one of ours out for her. She can turn it loose after she gets home."

The Penfields looked at him, hearing the iron in his voice. "You asked me to let you boss this end of things, son," Miz Edie recalled. "Here's your chance. Clint, go do what he told you," she added, and Clint gently took Kay's arm and turned her toward the door.

Jess thought furiously. "We got a couple things goin' for us," he said. "Like Calvin said, this place is built like a fort. And they'll be figurin' by the time they get here a lot of the crew'll be out on the range, or on its way there. We keep everybody here, we'll have 'em pretty well matched, plus we'll all be in one spot; they won't be able to tell some off to keep us penned up while they pick off the rest of the outfit a couple at a time." He began giving orders. "Clay, send down to the bunkhouse, get all the men up here. Tell 'em to bring their rifles and every round of ammunition they got—grub too, clean out the cookhouse. Clive, you go turn all the stock out of the barn and the corrals—I don't reckon they'll try to fire it, it's too good for cover, but there's no point takin' chances on it, or on some good critter gettin' hit by a stray bullet. Miss Phyllis, get the Mexicans up and bring 'em here, their families too. We'll put the kids and the old folks in the cellar—some of the women can stay with 'em, and the rest can load and tear bandages."

Everybody scattered, except Miz Evie and Miss Audrey. They looked at each other as if with one thought, and then the younger woman said, "You do realize we're staying upstairs, don't you, Jess? Phyllis too, probably."

He nodded. "Never reckoned you wouldn't, ma'am. You all start gatherin' up guns and spreadin' 'em out around the place, you know best how it's built and set, where we'll need to have our best shots."

**SR**

Boots thundered on the stairs, and Jess paused in the round he was making of the house as Marc Penfield nearly barrelled full-on into him. There was a hatch from the attic onto the roof, like the one they had at the Sherman house; he'd sent the boy up to keep watch. "They're comin', Mr. Harper," Marc gasped.

"Thanks, Marc. How far out?" Jess asked.

"Four miles maybe, comin' easy, a trot. Be here in half an hour or less."

"Good. You go around and pass the word, then get down cellar with the others."

The boy faced him. "I'll pass the word, Mr. Harper. But I ain't goin' down cellar. I can shoot as good as Aunt Audrey, near as good as Pa—he taught me."

Jess remembered that time the Indians had come and Andy had stayed with him and Jonesy and Slim, scared but doing everything he could—and he'd been younger then than Marc was now. Remembered his own twelve-year-old brother Johnny helping him and Francie as they tried to stand the Bannisters off. "Yeah," he said huskily, "I reckon you can. Go, now."

"Where'll I tell Gran you'll be?" Marc asked, understanding that permission had just been given.

"Upstairs front, just till the fun gets started," Jess told him. "I got a little message for Austin Gentry, and I can give it best from there."

**SR**

They'd tied Slim's wrists to the pommel of his saddle, so he could keep his balance more or less. Knox rode half a horse-length behind him, a rifle held crossways; Rival wasn't fastened to any of the other horses—didn't have to be, he was herd-broke and happy to stay in the middle of the pack, where he'd been put—but even if Slim thought he could break free, he'd be nailed before he could get a hundred feet. Sorry, Jess, he thought. I guess this time I made as bad a mistake as some of the ones I've climbed you about.

**SR**

Jess steadied the binoculars, sweeping the gang of mounted men as they filtered into a patch of cottonwoods about a quarter-mile from the house, just where the creek turned to begin its oxbow. He was looking for Slim, but in all that mass he couldn't make him out. He waited as they began emerging, on foot, in small bunches. He let them start finding their positions, watching. There, he told himself, that's gotta be Austin Gentry. "Hold these, will ya, Hart?" he said, passing the glasses sideways.

Hart was the Englishman, a tall man, as tall as Slim but thinner. He was a bit of a dandy, with a close-cropped mustache and a good blue-and-red-checked shirt of high-quality cotton, under the collar of which he'd punctiliously knotted a wine-red ribbon tie, like he was going to church. Jess had met an English remittance man or two in his travels, and he wasn't fooled; a lot of these fellows had done service in the British Army, and even the ones who hadn't could fight like tigers—he'd heard that came out of the schools they went to, where fighting and bullying were rampant and physical sport almost more reverenced than academics. Hart was straw boss of the outfit, under Clay—segundo, they called it down in Texas—and that took a top hand, looks notwithstanding. Jess glanced at the businesslike black-metalled gun hung at Hart's side and the big seven-shot Spencer carbine he held—the man was one of the best shots on the place, Clay had said. "What have you got in mind, Harper?" asked the clipped, cultured accent.

Jess grinned, ferally. "Gonna show 'em they ain't gonna have it quite as easy as they're figurin' on," he said, and brought Owen's old '66 Winchester up to the firing port in the shutter.

**SR**

"Something's not right, Pa," said Calvin Gentry uneasily. "There oughtta be men movin' around by now, not to speak of the Mexicans."

That was when the bullet kicked up sand fifteen feet in front of them. "GENTRY!" came a harsh shout from the house. "AUSTIN GENTRY! YOU HEARIN' ME?"

**SR**

Jess smiled tightly as he watched the two men hit the dirt. He waited, and after a moment a response floated back, thin on the cool morning air. "I hear you! Who's talkin'?"

"Name's Jess Harper," Jess responded. "We got you pretty good, Gentry. We didn't send none of our men out this mornin'. We're ready and loaded for bear. You want to go through with this, or what?"

**SR**

Knox eeled up to his father and brother on elbows and knees. "How'd they'a' known?" he demanded furiously. "Sherman sure didn't get no chance to tell 'em."

"Maybe he's bluffing," Calvin suggested.

"No," his father replied. "If you look close you can see they've swung the windows in and set the shutters."

"Gentry!" Jess yelled. "Gentry, I'm waitin'!"

Austin Gentry was a lot of things, but not a coward and not a man easily turned from his purpose once set on it. "Wait all you like!" he shouted. "We're stayin'!" He glanced at his sons. "They may have a good position there, but they've only got as many rounds as they had to begin with. We can send someone to the house, or to town, for more if we have to. We can still outwait them. Harper may not have thought of that."

**SR**

Jess paused a moment. Reckon it had to come to this in time, one way or another, he thought. "All right, Gentry, it's your funeral! But you got a pard of mine with you—Slim Sherman. You send him up here. One more gun won't make us that much difference."

It wasn't Austin Gentry's voice that responded, but a new one, harsh and shrill with hate, and Jess bet himself half his share of this year's profits that it was Knox. "Come and get him, if you want him!" And a bullet slammed against the outer surface of the shutter, making it ring like a gong, before it rebounded.

Then the shooting started.

**SR**

Gentry had set up horse lines in the cottonwoods, leaving a few of his older hands to watch the animals. Slim was there too, tied to one of the trees. He heard the sound of the words, though not their sense, and wondered if it was Jess or one of the Penfields. He didn't expect Boxed G to accept any terms their enemy offered, and he was right.

Luck, pard, he thought. Sure wish I was up there with you like I'd planned to be.

**SR**

Jess left Hart at the center upstairs window with instructions to fire only at targets beyond the three-hundred-yard mark: his Spencer would shoot about a hundred yards flat before the bullet started to arc, but if he allowed for that—and Jess figured he would—he could kill at five or six times the distance. No point letting the Gentrys know just what kind of long-range capability they had, not before time. Jess himself, having delivered his message, headed downstairs to join the main body of the defenders. Clay and Miz Edie had distributed them shrewdly about the house; scarcely a window lacked its rifle. Between every two positions was a loader, with open boxes of ammunition laid out conveniently. Jess wasn't sure how many rounds they had, but maybe, just maybe, if they could last till nightfall, he and a few of the others could get out and start a little Indian-fighting, Indian-style. Jess had learned a few tricks from Billy Jacobs and the Apache scouts. He just wished he could have persuaded the Gentrys to let Slim come up—he'd have felt a lot more comfortable with his pard at his side. We slip out of here, he told himself grimly, I'll head down to them cottonwoods with a knife. Reckon they left their horses there, him too likely.

He didn't have much time to think, after that.

For a while it wasn't too bad. The word must have run round the Gentry forces that their surprise had failed, and at first their offense was tentative, almost desultory. But they had plenty of good cover and had distributed themselves well. As they got used to the range and started figuring out where the firing ports were, they began getting shots through them every so often. Men fell, mostly wounded, but Jess saw a couple of cowhands carrying one of their fellows between them with a big blossom of red on his shirt front.

Not that it mattered whether they could get shots in or not. They could move around; the defenders couldn't. They could send men for more cartridges; the defenders were restricted to what they had at hand. For that reason Jess had given orders that nobody shoot unless he was sure he had a target. They had to make their ammunition last as long as they could. Their best chance lay in the fact that they were concentrated, that they couldn't be picked off one or two at a time, that they had good cover; their best strategy was to take down as many of the enemy as they could, forcing them to move and firing at anything that did.

But there was another thing, one he didn't quite let himself think about...

Miz Edie was at the window directly left of the main door with a huge old Sharps Big Fifty. Jess had grinned when he saw that: she had an even better range than Hart. She had the heavy octagonal barrel rested hunter-style on a couple of three-foot sticks fastened together so they could move like a pair of scissors, the crotch about two and a half feet off the floor; that window happened to be full-length, and there was a port just at that point, so she was set to do some nasty damage if she could get a sight of something worth shooting at.

Clay had command in the east wing, which looked out toward the barn complex, the largest piece of cover the attackers had and therefore the one that most needed watching. Miss Audrey, Jess thought, was somewhere in the kitchen; Marc was with her—Jess had known she'd watch out for him, so he'd sent the boy to find her and "side her," as he'd said, mindful of youthful pride.

Jess himself had settled in his own room, from which he could see the bunkhouse and the other buildings near to it. There was really surprisingly little gunfire, he thought, for a siege, and remembered that time down at Fort Defiance. Not too much different in a lot of ways, he thought, exceptin' only this time there wasn't nobody on the other side that he'd sworn to kill.

Just a friend—a brother—that he had to get out of the spot he was in, on account of Slim had most likely come up here lookin' for him.

For a moment Jess wondered at that. He'd figured Slim wouldn't get worried enough to come huntin' till... well, maybe two-three days back. And yet Miss Kay had said he'd been passin' himself off as Dave Eastburn, which was a bonehead thing to do if ever Slim had come up with one, and Miss Phyllis's pa had said that 'Eastburn' had come to Sentinel back last Saturday. How in perdition had ol' Slim got all the way up here so early?

A hat moved at the corner of the cookhouse and Jess quit chewing on the problem and squeezed off a shot. The hat vanished; he didn't reckon he'd done any damage. Get back to business, Harper, he told himself. You get Slim out of there, you can ask him then what fetched him. Right now, you got a debt to pay, and a job to do.

**SR**

Around midday the firing slacked off for a while: even the attackers needed to get some grub and water and maybe send somebody back to their horses for more cartridges. No, thought Jess, as he heard Hart's Spencer bellow from upstairs, make that they did send somebody. Likely Hart didn't hit him at that distance, but maybe he made'im jump some. He wondered how many of Gentry's they'd taken down so far. They had two dead in the house, none of the family so far, thank the Lord, and five or six wounded, not bad for the most part. Miss Audrey and Miss Phyllis and a couple of the Mexican girls went around with coffee and sandwiches, and everybody rested and ate. Jess found himself thinking of some of the battles he'd been in during the war, the informal truces that broke them. Funny, the turns a man's mind would take...

**SR**

Long before midday Slim had figured out that something hadn't quite gone the way the Gentrys had been figuring on. This thing was taking too long, and there was too much gunfire. It might have been around four o'clock when he heard it: a voice behind the tree hissing his name. "Sherman? Don't turn around. Keep facing front."

Slim swallowed and did as he was told. He felt a sort of tugging at his wrists where the thongs held them behind the tree, felt the bonds loosening. "Who's there?"

"Luther. Pa thinks I'm getting ammunition—well, I am, but I took a detour. Here's your gun, Knox had it in his saddlebag." He felt the smooth ivory of the Colt's butt under his fingers as it was pressed into his hand, and grasped it reflexively.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because I can't let my wife be more of a man than I am," came the reply. "Bet you didn't guess she was the one who took the word to the Penfields."

Keeping a careful eye on the nearest of the horse-guards, Slim eased his arms out, tucking the Colt through his waistband as he quickly chafed his numbed wrists. "No," he agreed, "I did wonder about that. Thanks, Luther, I'm obliged."

"If you fade straight back," Luther told him, "you'll hit the edge of these trees in about twenty yards. Everybody's facing the house, they'll have no cause to turn around and see you. Get inside the loop of the stream, but keep close to it so the trees'll break up your outline. When you think you're in the right place, make your move." Pause. "Good luck." Then a rustle, and silence.

Remembering Matt's map, Slim recognized the advice as the best he was likely to get on the subject. He had to make it to the house... to his pard. He started moving, careful and easy, drawing back with his eyes on the guards. If one of them turned he'd have to shoot, though most of the attackers would probably figure the sound as coming from one of their own guns.

**SR**

Jess had turned over his bedroom window to Miss Phyllis and was making a quick circuit of the house, checking on things, when he caught a flash of movement outside and stepped quickly up to one of the higher firing ports to look. A man had just broken past the corner of the cookhouse and was running flat out toward the house. For just a heartbeat Jess remembered that half-suppressed thought he'd had—if the Gentrys thought of dynamite, even a building this stout might not hold—and then he heard an outraged yell and the gunfire started up, not at the house, but at the running man.

"Hold fire!" he yelled to the defenders, and looked again. He knew that hat, soft-brown with a curled brim, and he knew that reaching stride. How Slim had gotten away from wherever they'd been keeping him—he must have been restrained somehow—Jess didn't know, but he was so glad to see his partner that for a moment he could scarcely breathe. Then a bullet kicked up dirt half an inch from the rancher's bootheel and he threw himself forward, rolling; turned and came up, leg thrown out for a brace, fired back and fetched a scream. For a man that don't earn a livin' with a gun, Jess thought, not for the first time, he's sure took to the moves of one. "SLIM!" he bellowed hoarsely. "Slim, make for the side door, I'll cover ya!"

The man's face flashed quickly his way, the gun-barrel lifted in a quick little salute, and he knew Slim had heard. He thrust the Winchester through the port in the window—it happened to be the one where Miz Edie was—and started laying down fire. A little lower down the old Sharps went off with a roar, and a man who'd shown himself just too long literally flew backward as the 525-grain slug, powered by 125 grains of black powder, took him high up in the chest. Slim skittered as somebody rose up from behind a watering trough, took evasive action, firing as he went, and angled right, aiming for the side of the house as he'd been told. Jess bolted that way too, keeping even with him, stopping at each window he passed to squeeze off a round or two. He hit the kitchen at full speed, pressing fresh cartridges into Owen's rifle as he did, and made for the door. He dragged out its bar, pulled it open six inches, and set himself, ready to throw it back all the way.

Barely five yards from safety, Slim seemed to trip, then went down sprawling, losing his Colt. No! Jess thought, and that was really the last coherent thing that went through his mind. The next he knew he was out the door and crouching on the steps, the old Winchester at his shoulder, spitting lead as fast as he could pump the lever. He heard a scream and saw the shooter fall, and darted out to grab Slim's shoulder, hauling at the bigger man's dead weight, feeling the recently healed scar on his back pull and twist. "Come on, pard," he gasped, "come on, hard-rock, you gotta help me out here—"

Then the door banged on its hinges again and Clay was there. "On three," he said, "together now—one, two, three!", and they pulled Slim half up, hoisted his arms over their shoulders and supported him between them. Another carbine started spanging from the window alongside the door. They struggled up the steps and all but hurled themselves inside, falling flat, driving the air out of their lungs. The door slammed shut behind them and the bar crashed into place. Jess gulped air and looked up. Miss Audrey was at the window, sighting along the barrel of her .44-40; as he watched she squeezed off two quick shots.

He heard a groan and snapped his attention around to the long form lying on the floor between himself and Clay. Slim's head was up, he was shaking it and blinking. Their eyes met and Slim grinned broadly. "Good to see you, pard."

"Dang, Slim, you about gi'me heart failure!" Jess scolded. "You hurt?"

"Stunned mostly, I think—kinda got the wind knocked outta me when I fell—" Slim tried to push up, and grunted. "No—no, I guess not just."

"Blood on his pants leg, Jess," said Clay. "Two sides, looks like the bullet punched right through his calf."

Marc thumped down on his knees beside his father, offering a canteen. Jess gave him a quick nod of thanks and unscrewed the cap, holding it up for Slim, steadying him. "Here ya go, pard. Get your breath. Marc, get somebody up here with a knife and some bandages."

"Yessir," and the boy scrabbled off, keeping low.

**SR**

Dusk.

In that light there wasn't much percentage in the attackers keeping up their fire. It had begun slacking off around half an hour before sunset, and by now things were quiet. Jess had sent Marc back up onto the roof (the boy had come down again, fifteen minutes later, to report campfires across the opening of the oxbow) and begun setting up watches; he'd put his lookouts on the second floor, where if anything started moving across the open yard they'd be sure to see it. He'd let the folks up from the cellar, and grub was on.

Audrey Ballantine, a tray in her hands, paused partway across the main downstairs room—they usually called it the sala, Mexican-style—to look at the two men occupying Carl Penfield's huge old leather chair in the corner by the fireplace, talking quietly as they caught up with each other. Slim Sherman sat at full stretch, one foot up on a spool-legged stool, his cut pant leg flopping open to show the bandage wrapped neatly around his calf. He was looking up at Jess, a kind of soft wonder alternating on his handsome face with relief and—something else, something Audrey wasn't sure she had a name for. His hand lay gently on Jess's forearm, as if he needed the physical contact to reassure himself that his partner was really here, really alive. Jess was perched sideways on the chair's broad arm, gunbelt still strapped around his hips, Winchester leaned up alongside his leg; his face was turned down to Slim, and though his expression was serious in deference to the ongoing siege, there was a quirk to his lips that Audrey had never seen there in all the days he'd been with them, a special little hint of shine in his eyes, and a warmth in his gravelly Texas accent that she'd never heard till now. It's as if, somehow, he wasn't quite complete before... and now he is, she thought. I wonder if he knows? As she watched, his black-gloved hand went out to settle on Slim's shoulder, almost as if by its own will. Audrey smiled to herself, happy in his happiness. Yes. He knows. Growing up as she had with the four Penfield boys, who'd always stood together against anything and everything outside their own household, she knew what a good brother relationship looked like, and she knew she was seeing one now. Better even than the Penfields', maybe, because this brotherhood didn't come from blood; it was something Slim and Jess had chosen, had made for themselves.

"Well," Slim was saying, "at least we made it to nightfall. Don't think they'll try anything for a while."

"No," Jess agreed, "no, reckon not. They got to know they couldn't take none of these doors down without a batterin' ram. They could make one, cut one of them cottonwoods, but they'd hafta send back to Boxed G for axes and saws. Anyhow, they won't make the try, not havin' to come at us across all that open space. Be plumb suicide."

"So we got a breather," Slim finished, marvelling a little at his pard, at the competent, take-charge manner he'd displayed as he told off his watches. It was a side of Jess he couldn't recall ever seeing before; he knew the I'm-doin'-this-and-ain't-nobody-gonna-stop-me stubbornness, the cold courage, the flashing temper, the easy good humor—so many sides of this surprisingly complicated man—but he'd never suspected that Jess was a strategist. General Lee would be proud of him, he thought.

"Yeah." They were both silent a moment, just taking the time to drink in each other's presence. "But we can't let this go on," Jess continued after a bit. "We got plenty of grub, and the well in the kitchen'll give us all the water we need, but the ammunition ain't gonna last forever. Gentry can send for more. And if he thinks to try dynamite—"

Slim nodded. "That occurred to me too. Wish we knew how many of 'em are left. I don't figure Gentry's cowhands are too happy about all this to begin with, too much chance of women and kids gettin' hurt. Probably more scared of the Gentrys and those gunmen than they are of us. If we could do somethin' to shake 'em up—and as for the hired guns, that kind take chances for their money, but they like the odds a little in their favor."

"More'n a little," drawled Jess, "when it comes to them mudsills that's all Gentry's got now that you ain't with him—Eastburn," and he grinned briefly. "They ain't but paid killers. Their instinct's always to take the other man at a disadvantage. Easy game, that's the kind they like."

"Maybe," Slim offered, "we could get down to where their horses are, run 'em off. Nobody's likely to walk out for cartridges."

"Mmm," said Jess thoughtfully. "That might just make 'em more desperate, though. 'Sides which, they know you know where the horses are—they could just move 'em."

"Any chance somebody could get out and bring help?" Slim ventured.

"Don't reckon," Jess replied, with a brief headshake. "Said yourself, marshal in Sentinel ain't like to take no part in this, and sheriff in Casper's a good hundred miles away as the crow flies, even supposin' he'd be in his office when our rider got there. Even supposin' we could get somethin' for a rider to ride on," he added, briefly regretting his decision to turn the stock out.

"Neighbors?"

"Miss Phyllis's pa, maybe. He offered once already. But the rest of 'em, they don't want to get mixed up in a private feud. Can't rightly blame 'em. You and me wouldn't be mixed up in it neither, if Owen hadn't put that slug in my back."

"And one man, even with his sons and hands, wouldn't make a lot of difference," Slim observed. "We'd need to catch Gentry's people in a strong crossfire to have any hope of cuttin' the odds."

"Yeah." Silence again, as they pondered the situation. "Sounds like maybe we got a couple friends on th'other side, though."

"Who'd have thought it?" Slim mused. "Luther Gentry, of all people. Well, I knew he wasn't too happy with this feud, but to cut me loose... and Kay ridin' out to give you the word..."

"They'd'a' likely had it all their own way if she hadn't," Jess mentioned quietly. "They'd'a' took us plumb flat-footed, and had us a good two to one."

"Glad they didn't," said Slim.

"Yeah, hardcase. Me too."

"There might be one way," Slim told him, after another pause.

"Well, don't keep it to yourself, pard."

"It's Austin Gentry and Knox, mostly, that are drivin' this," the rancher said thoughtfully. "Luther doesn't really want any part of it. Calvin might stick, but I never got the feel that he was a lot more enthusiastic about it than his brother."

"So?"

"Knox wants a piece of me. Of both of us," Slim said. "He meant to kill me—after he made me watch him take you. It's that ambition of his, wanting to make a name. And as for his pa..."

"Now you hold it," Jess interrupted sharply. "You ain't goin' up against the two of 'em, not with that hole in your leg, pard."

"Don't shoot with my leg," Slim pointed out. "And I kind of figured you'd be with me."

Jess considered that. "Don't like it none," he muttered presently. "But you might be right. Boil it down to just man on man, that might be the only way to end this without a lot more dyin'." Pause. "How'd we let 'em know?"

"Easy enough. Send out a man with a white flag."

"Hart could do that, maybe," said Jess. Then: "But the Penfields... they'll want to be part of it too. And they got the right, pard. It was their fight long before we got here."

Slim sighed. "Guess that's so." He looked across the sala, to where Clay and Clive were in quiet discussion with the Englishman over who-knew-what. "You tell 'em, or me?"

"I'll do it," said Jess. "Better send somebody to find Miz Edie, though. And Clint."

"That's quite some old lady," Slim observed with a smile. "Reminds me of Aunt Ella, a little."

Jess made a face; he and Slim's aunt didn't get along. "Yeah, she is that, pard. Texan down to her boots, too. That's how we grow 'em, down where I come from."

"Remind me never to cross a Texas woman, then," said Slim, chuckling.

Jess slapped his chest gently. "Sure thing, hard-rock." He slid off the chair arm and gathered up the old Winchester. "You rest a bit. I'm gonna take a turn through the house, check on them guards upstairs, then I'll fetch everybody back here."

**SR**

They gathered, an hour or so later, in the dining room, around the heavy-legged, graceless oak table that could seat as many as twenty people at a time: Miz Edie and her sons, their wives, Miss Audrey, Hart (who, as straw boss and the probable bearer of the challenge, Jess figured had a right to be there), and young Marc (who, being an armed defender, had proved his), looking a bit heavy-eyed with fatigue, but stubbornly concentrating on the matter at hand. Slim and Jess took turns telling the full story of what had happened to bring them here, and Slim laid out what he knew about the enemy's strength and character, including his theory that either Frank or Tom Rohner had been the real killer of Clark Penfield. Then they explained what they had in mind and why they thought it was the best plan. "If anybody's got a better idea," Slim finished, "this would be a good time to mention it."

The Penfields and the Englishman exchanged a complicated tracery of questioning glances, but it was clear that nobody could come up with one. Miz Edie, as the matriarch, spoke for them. "Reckon you got the right of it," she said. "I wish it hadn't had to come to this, but maybe it always did have to, all the way back all them years to Tennessee."

"You really think Luther would let it drop, if he was in charge?" Clint asked.

"I'm sure of it," and Slim's voice was as positive as Jess could ever remember hearing it. "He let his wife ride out here to warn you, didn't he? And he cut me loose, gave me the chance to get to you. He had to know I wouldn't keep shut about what I knew of his side, but he did it, just the same."

"The man's got a point, Clint," Hart observed. "Luther may be a good many things, but he isn't a fool, any more than his father is." He smiled tightly. "I've been bouncing about this West of yours these ten years, and it's been my experience that fools don't last."

Jess nodded. "Hart's right."

"So," said Clay, "it's Austin and Knox that we have to give mind to, most of all. Calvin's sure to be there, and I don't reckon Luther's pa will let him hang back either, but them two, they're the mainspring of it all, like Slim says. If they know there'll be five or six of us, they'll want that many themselves. Who else?"

"Their foreman, maybe," Jess guessed. "Sure thing at least one of them hired guns. And we got to keep it in mind, Gentry don't play fair; he proved that when he set Clark up to get shot in the back and Owen to take the blame for it. Barn ain't but about three hundred feet from the house, and we won't be right by that to begin with. Be just Gentry's style to have men in it with rifles, ready to take out any of us left standin'."

"All right," said Clive, "then we'll have to be ready to break back to cover as soon as we've taken down as many of them as we can. Ma, you'll leave the front door unbarred?"

"I will," Miz Edie agreed, "and I'll have rifles coverin' from at least two windows on each side of it, besides the ones upstairs."

"One thing we better decide," said Slim, "is who takes which. This is gonna be fast and dirty. We can't be wastin' our lead all goin' for the same man—much as each of us might think he's owed a piece of Austin."

"Yeah," Jess growled. "Hadn't been for him and his setup, Owen'd'a' never been on the run, and he wouldn't'a' shot me, and I wouldn't be here, nor Slim neither."

"Something of that," Hart said, "will depend on how they come, but I believe we'd all agree that Knox belongs to Mr. Sherman. Or perhaps that he'll be operating on the principle that Mr. Sherman belongs to him."

"Good enough," said Slim, looking grim. "Austin, I think, will be in the middle, maybe a step or two out. And keep it in mind, he's not a gunman, not with that high-strapped holster. He may have a shotgun or a rifle to even things out."

"So he's our first target," Clay declared. "Like Slim says, he's the head of this snake anyway; he's the one we got to cut off no matter what. I'll take center and set my sights on him; I'm head of this family after Ma, it's my right."

"Slim and me do best together," said Jess. "We'll take left. You and Clint, Clive, you'll be on the right. Hart, if you want in, you stand next to them. And like you said, Knox is Slim's."

"Well," said Miz Edie, "I reckon that just about covers it, then, don't it? We best all get some sleep. We'll want to be up early to get the message ready for Hart to carry."

**SR**

Just at full light, Hart stepped out on the Penfields' front gallery with a large square of sheeting, originally intended for bandages, knotted to the ramrod from an ancient Kentucky flintlock that hung on braces over the sala fireplace. He waved it, descended one step, waved it again, counted thirty, and repeated. Then he walked slowly about a hundred feet out from the steps and waved it a fourth time. He stopped, standing erect but easy, and waited. There was a long pause.

It took a good ten minutes, but eventually curiosity won out and Austin Gentry came striding up to meet him from the mouth of the oxbow where his forces had set up their night camp. Luther and Knox were with him, like a general's aides-de-camp; they'd all left their sidearms behind. "Well, now," said the senior Gentry, stopping about ten feet from the Englishman, "what's this? Don't tell me you're ready to surrender so soon."

"I don't intend to tell you that," Hart retorted, "especially as it isn't the case." He was wearing the same checkered cotton shirt and ribbon tie he'd had on yesterday; his shiny fancy-cuffed boots had been buffed and polished, and his dark corduroy pants were tucked neatly into their tops. He'd shaved, too, and under the sweep of his hatbrim his hair was slicked back with lilac-scented oil. "I am," he continued, "if you will, a herald. I wish to deliver a message from my principals, the Penfield family, Mr. Slim Sherman, and Mr. Jess Harper."

Gentry's eyes sparked. "Go on, then," he said.

"My principals," Hart proceeded, "feel that it is unworthy of persons of our standing to continue endangering the lives of inoffensive noncombatants, to say nothing of the waste of gunpowder and the work that will go undone as this affair proceeds. They suggest, therefore, that we settle it decisively, today, here."

"What are you doin', limey," snarled Knox, "challengin' us to a duel?"

"Quiet, boy," his father ordered, not looking around at him. "The gent was talkin' to me."

Hart gave Knox one quick, cold look that, for just an instant, made the youngest Gentry's stomach quiver. "Your son expresses the concept somewhat crudely," he said, "but, in essence, he is correct. We propose a meeting at the center of the yard at ten A.M. The Penfield brothers, Mr. Sherman, Mr. Harper, and I will act for Two Bar Four. You are free to choose whomever you wish to serve the same capacity for yourself. What is your answer?"

If Calvin had been there, he might have advised his father not to accept, to hold in mind that they could still wait the Penfields out. But Luther, who had never really wanted the feud to come to this, was eager to get it settled and over with, even at the risk of his own life, and Knox was just yanking at the leash to get a crack at Slim, to pay him back for that clout with his gun barrel in Sentinel two days earlier. So neither said a word; they knew Austin Gentry well enough to be pretty sure what he'd say. Feud or no feud, Gentry was a rancher and a businessman, and as he'd told Slim, he knew that extended hostilities would only leave him vulnerable. "My answer?" he drawled. "I say come on and take your best shot. We'll be there."

"Very well," agreed Hart. "Until then." And he turned his back and casually, almost contemptuously, strode back to the house. Someone pulled the front door open as he ascended the steps; he vanished inside and the door thumped shut, and bars could be heard dropping into place.

"They won't fire on us now," said Gentry. "Come on, boys."

**SR**

About twenty to ten the lookout at the center front upstairs window reported the Boxed G forces emerging from the cottonwood grove, mounted. With binoculars he counted twenty-seven of them. "Sounds like we done them more damage than they done us," Clint observed.

"Maybe," said Jess. "It's true they was more out in the open than us. But remember, what we're seein' might not count any Gentry's left ambushed, like we figured on last night."

Slim was sitting in Carl Penfield's chair, sparing his wounded leg till the very last possible minute, carefully checking the loads in his Colt (Clay had thought to scoop it up in the process of helping Jess get him inside), fitting a sixth round into the chamber usually left empty for the hammer to rest on. "Speakin' of which, Miz Edie," he added, looking up from his task, "you better get your coverin' rifles into position."

"Marc, Audrey, Slant, Warren, Lloyd, Jerry," the old lady said, and the six she'd named moved to the front windows and spread out along them, each finding a spot in front of a firing port. She shook hands with Slim and Jess and Hart, hugged each of her sons briefly—their wives had already said their private things. All six had had coffee, but no food: food slowed a man down in a fight, and a full stomach was almost a death sentence if you happened to get hit in the middle. "The good Lord hold His hand over you, boys," she said. "Now, go and show 'em what you're made of."

Jess gave Slim a hand up out of the chair, watched as his pard gathered up the same knotty gold-headed walking stick that he himself had used briefly, and touched his gun butt with his fingertips in the little gesture he often used before a fight—not nerves exactly, almost more a prayer for good luck. "Everybody ready?" he asked, voice deep and harsh.

"Let's do this," said Clay.

"Bloody well right," murmured Hart.

It was the Chinese house cook who pulled the bars out of their sockets, and Miz Edie who opened the door to let them out. As they stepped onto the gallery they could see a little knot of men coming up from the front line of the watching riders. They moved down the wide front steps, all six abreast. "Looks like eight of 'em," Jess murmured, just loud enough for everyone on his side to hear. He found himself thinking, suddenly, of that day he'd walked up Laramie's main street to the livery corral, toward the showdown with Milt Lane and his hired guns, with Tom Wade and Mort abreast of him, and Mort's daddy a few yards back, covering them with his rifle. He'd thought, that afternoon, that the only thing missing was Slim. Now Slim was here, and much though he still disliked being forced to do what he was going to have to, it still, somehow, made things right. Balanced. Because they were pards, and neither of them could fight as well with anyone else, no matter how trusted or how good a friend, at his side. And because, if it came to that, after having Slim in his life these five years and more, he wasn't willing to live in a world that didn't have both of them in it. The Sioux, he remembered, had a saying: It is a good day to die. With a friend—a brother—at your side, it was. Jess felt utterly calm, at peace.

"All four Gentrys," Slim added. "Like we figured. And that one on the end, in the brown hat, that's Snowden, one of their hired guns. Healy alongside him is another."

"Good enough. You leave them to me," said Jess.

"Looks like Austin's got a long gun, same as you figured on, Slim," Clive noted. "Can't make out is it shotgun or rifle."

"I shall attempt to remove Luther from play without killing him," Hart offered.

"Done," Clay agreed. "Put him down fast, first thing, and get him out of the crossfire. Slim, Knox is yours like we decided. I'll go for Austin; if I don't get him, Clive, Clint, you take him."

"Best get that long gun of his first, if you can hit it," Clive suggested.

"If I can hit it," Clay repeated in a faintly mocking tone. "Just which of us is the better target shooter in this family, little brother?"

"A'right," said Jess, a bit sharp. "Time's done for talkin'. They're almost to the scratch."

"Be safe, pard," said Slim quietly.

"Safe as I can, hardcase," Jess promised. "Watch that leg."

Then they had reached the center of the yard. The Gentry contingent—eight, as Jess had estimated—stopped forty feet away, a distance that required aimed fire and could nullify the speed of a fast draw. That was going to put Snowden and Healy at a bit of a disadvantage, Jess knew: their sort was best at up to about half that. He didn't think they'd be particularly happy about the prospect; they might even be nervous. Good. Bad nerves had killed at least as many men as bullets had, in his experience.

Austin's long gun was a Winchester .30-06, lighter bullet and powder load than the commoner .44-40, but quite adequately deadly at this distance. He'd placed himself at the middle, as they'd anticipated. He looked them over, his gaze lingering an instant on Slim's stick and the fluttering pant leg with the bandage showing underneath it. Slim stared back at him coldly, finding his balance; once he was set, he didn't propose to move unless he had to, not with the wound to think about. Then he turned his attention to Knox, remembering what Jess had taught him about aiming before you went for your gun.

"Whenever you're ready, boys," said Gentry, lightly.

Clay's eyes narrowed. "All right," he said.

Silence. Then Knox, as Slim had somehow known he would, opened the ball as his hand stabbed toward his sixgun's ivory butt, a wordless scream of defiance bursting from him.

But Slim was older and had the advantage of experience, even if he wasn't quite as fast as an eighteen-year-old kid who spent an hour or two every day practicing. And one of Jess's maxims—Never be mad when you draw, it stiffens you up in the wrist—held true. Knox knew enough to pivot on his right foot, turning profile-on, gun side toward Slim, to present a smaller target, but he was so white-hot furious that his first bullet whined harmlessly past the rancher's ear. Slim didn't let it faze him; calm and in control, he took his time, chose his spot, and fired before Knox could try again. His shot caught Knox just behind the point of the shoulder, spinning him, and that gave him the target he was really looking for. The second bullet hit the kid under the breastbone and slammed him to the ground.

Clay's first bullet had smashed into the receiver of Austin's Winchester, driving it against his body with such force that he sat down hard. That gave Clay the chance to put a bullet in Calvin, left side near the waist, and bring him down too. Hart had nailed Luther with a shot to the right hip—a bone shot, so painful that it not only knocked him off his feet but put him out of action altogether. Jess's first three shots took down Snowden and Healy, one after the other in less time than it might take to draw an ordinary breath. Slim exchanged a quick round with the Gentry foreman, on the other end of the line, then holed his wrist—he didn't really have a quarrel with a plain working cowhand doing what his duty required. He heard a sharp grunt on his left, as if Jess had been hit, but didn't have the time to look as he pivoted just the exact number of degrees necessary to cover the third gunman, the one to the foreman's right, and dropped him with a round just above the waist. Meanwhile, Austin struggled back to his feet, clawing out his sixgun. The three Penfields, as if by an unspoken arrangement, let him get all the way up, then cut loose. One bullet took him in the throat, two in the chest; any of them by itself would have been enough to kill him. He got off one shot of his own, more by reflex than anything as his finger spasmed on the trigger, and Clive was thrown back, blood on his shirt. The sudden silence that fell was like a theater curtain dropping.

Slim stood quite still a moment, waiting to see if anyone would move, then used the walking stick in his left hand to pivot, looking for Jess. His partner was down on one knee, blood on his left cheek and sleeve. "Jess? You hit hard?"

The younger man shook his head tentatively. "Do I still got an ear? Felt like that last one took it plumb off."

"No, it's still there..." Slim holstered his sixgun and put his hand under his partner's chin, tipping his head back. "Looks like all it did was skin along the ridge of your cheekbone. What about your arm?"

"Didn't even lodge. Went right through." Then Jess's eyes widened and he screamed, "Slim, look out!"

On reflex Slim spun and dropped, going for a belly-down position, but the stick tripped him and a shaft of pain half blinded him for a moment as he landed on his wounded leg. Gasping, he rolled, searching frantically for whatever Jess had seen.

Knox was up on one knee and his left hand, blood on his lips, hard hit, but his rage and hate still fuelled him. Three shots—his, Slim's, and Jess's—went off in one nearly continuous stutter of sound. His bullet passed harmlessly over the rancher's head; Jess's took him in the belly; and Slim's, his last, caught him at the bridge of the nose as he went down again. That finished it.

Behind them, the heavy bark of long guns sounded, like a bass-register string of firecrackers, with Miz Edie's old Sharps buffalo gun providing the foundation. Someone screamed and there was a crash. Slim looked around. At some point the door of the house had opened and Marc, Audrey, Miz Edie, and a couple of cowhands had stepped out onto the porch. Slant and the boy were facing toward the bunkhouse, where a dead man lay in the doorway and another draped across the ridgepole, his hand out of sight in the chimney, as if he might have been trying to hide behind it. Opposite, a man hung out the door of the barn loft, face down; as Slim watched, a yellow-breeched rifle fell from his relaxing hand and landed on the ground below. A pair of legs hung over the side of a wagon parked before the doors. Miz Edie slowly grounded the butt of her Sharps and looked toward Slim. "Two fellers with brass receivers to their rifles," she said. "Figured they had to be them Rohners, the ones you reckoned killed Clark. I was his ma, and he was my youngest, the last thing I had of my husband. I took one of 'em."

"And I might have married him," Audrey added. "I got the other."

"Ma!" Clay shouted. "Clive's hit bad!"

There was a rush of people out the door, including a round dozen heavily armed men to provide cover. They gathered around the spot where Clive had fallen, and Slim could hear their voices as they exchanged warnings and instructions: "Careful with him... Watch his shoulders, watch his head... All together, on three..."

Slim struggled to his feet, aware of a warm wetness trailing down his leg where his wound had broken open. Down by the mouth of the oxbow, the Gentry fighters watched in stunned dismay; none of them made an aggressive move.

Calvin, an arm held tightly against his lower left side, was kneeling beside Luther, who was white with pain but conscious. He looked up as Slim's shadow fell across them, Jess a half-step behind him with his gun levelled on the two of them. "What now?" he asked, his voice harsh and thick. "Gonna finish the job?"

Jess looked disgusted. "I don't kill men that can't fight back. And I don't kill for fun, neither." He snapped the Colt up and holstered it.

"Your pa's dead," Slim added, "and so is Knox. The war's over—if you'll let it be."

"Cal..." Luther gasped.

"What? What is it, Luther?"

"He's right," said Luther. "Like Kay said, we don't... even know what started this feud, why... don't we let it end? I'm... head of this family now, Cal. I say... it's time."

Slim didn't give Calvin a chance to object. "Miz Edie," he called, "we got a couple more wounded over here. They're ready to talk peace."

**SR**

Clive had been lucky. He was the most severely wounded of the Penfield party, but the bullet hadn't hit anything vital; he'd be laid up for a while, but he'd probably survive, if he could keep from picking up an infection. Hart had a bullet in his shoulder, but he was more upset about the fact that, as he said, "The bloody beggars have ruined my favorite shirt!" Clint had taken a round a few inches above the knee, easily extracted and not life-threatening. Jess needed only a bandage around his arm and a dressing on his cheek; Slim had to have his wound re-stitched and bandaged. Miz Edie had the Gentry foreman brought in to watch as Luther and Calvin were made travel-worthy, then sent down to the barn for a wagon; the besiegers had brought some mules to carry their supplies, and these, in borrowed harness, could be used to take the two home. Slim lent his recovered buckskin to the horse wrangler, who went out to see if he could find some of the turned-out stock; when he came back he had about a dozen of the horses, and that allowed more men to be mounted and help look.

One of the Penfields' Indian hands followed the Gentry party home, at a distance, and kept watch for a time. He returned the next day to report that seven men in a group—presumably the surviving gunmen—had ridden off headed north. Slim and Jess, meanwhile, took a day or two to rest and recuperate as the family's honored guests, but Slim was soon itching to get on the road. "We've got a long trail ahead of us, Miz Edie," he reminded her, "and our buckboard and mares to pick up at Waverley, too. And I won't feel easy in my mind till I get Jess home and Daisy can see he's all right. She took it hard when she thought he was dead."

"Yes," the old woman agreed, "I can see how you'd feel that way. He told Audrey you all were his family."

"We are," Slim confirmed, "and he's ours."

"You take care of that boy, Slim Sherman," she ordered.

He smiled. "We will, ma'am. Count on it. And he'll take care of us."

She insisted on giving Jess a horse, and Clark's old saddle to put on it, and provided them with supplies for their journey. On the third morning after the fight, the household assembled to bid the pair farewell. "You keep in touch, Jess," she told him. "I don't hear from you at least a couple times a year, I'll be takin' a ride down your way with my buffalo gun."

He grinned, wincing as the skin pulled over his healing facial wound. "I ain't much hand at writin' letters, Miz Edie. But a couple a year, I reckon I can handle that." Slim marked how his eyes turned briefly toward Audrey before he firmly faced front again to shake hands with Miz Edie, with Clay, with Hart.

They rode the first hour or so in silence, digesting what had happened to them. "She's real fond of you, pard," said Slim presently.

"Who?" Jess wanted to know.

"Miz Edie."

He sighed. "Yeah, I kinda noticed. I dunno, Slim... maybe it's I ain't much older'n Clark, and I got shot in the back like him..."

"Well, if that's how it is," Slim observed, "she'll get over it, I guess. What about Miss Audrey?" he added casually.

"What about her?" Jess snapped defensively.

Slim was startled at the vehemence of his friend's response. "Seemed to me there was something a little different there than I've seen between you and most girls, that's all."

Jess brooded over that for a quarter of a mile or so, his lean features somber, closed off. Slim was beginning to worry when he finally said, as if there had been no interval, "Maybe there is. Maybe there could be. She saved my life—if she hadn't'a' spotted me in that juniper scrub, you wouldn't be talkin' to me now. I seen a lot of fellers fall in love with the women that nursed 'em, in the hospital..." He trailed off, and Slim remembered that that time in his life wasn't one of his happiest memories. "Only..."

"Only what, pard?" Slim prompted gently, as the younger man seemed to have lost his train of thought.

"Only it's kinda like Miz Edie. There's Clark between us. She come home partly on account it is home—like our ranch is mine—and she thought it was right for her to be there when trouble come to it. But she was thinkin', too, that maybe she felt somethin' more for Clark than she thought she did. Four years she'd been thinkin' on that, Slim. And in the end he died the day before she got there, and she never had the chance to know if—" He fell silent again, then: "I can't... I got to give her time. It wouldn't be... right, or fair, not to—you savvy?"

"Yeah, Jess," Slim said quietly. "Yeah, I do."

**SR**

Mike sat on the rails of the corral, looking up the road. He'd made this his spot ever since Sheriff Corey had brought Slim's telegram. He'd do his chores, feed his pets, and then climb up on the fence where he could see the road that Slim and Jess would take to come home. He'd go in for midday dinner, come out again and take up his watch. After the first day or two he'd taken to laying a folded blanket over the top rail to cushion his bones, but he didn't stop watching.

Stagecoaches, single riders, private vehicles with only a single person aboard, he ignored. When they came home, there'd be two of them, with the buckboard, and probably the mares; he'd know them at a distance. Yet for all his faithfulness, when they finally did come into view, he almost didn't believe it. He had waited so very long, sometimes it seemed he'd been doing it all his life.

He shaded his eyes against the glare of sun off the packed white-beige surface of the road. He rubbed them and blinked and looked again. Surely that was Jimmy and Rusty, their buckboard pair, whom he'd helped hitch up so many times? And that was a string of horses haltered on behind the wagon? And that was Slim's familiar light-brown hat on the driver? And the rider on the buckskin alongside—

He flung himself off the rail and pelted for the house, screaming the news. "Aunt Daisy! Celie! Everybody! It's Slim and Jess, they're home, they're home!"

Len Dixon, who'd just gathered up an armload of the firewood he'd been splitting, dropped it in a tumbled clattering heap. Celie McCaskey, hanging out laundry, froze with a clothespin between her lips and her hands in the air. Old Ben popped out of the barn like a cuckoo out of a clock. And Daisy flung open the front door, stood a moment on the porch with her palm shading her eyes, and then picked up her skirts in both hands and ran, shouting, "Jess! Jess!"

The rider on the buckskin swung his heels back and the animal lunged into a gallop. He brought it to a sliding stop, almost sitting down, out of the saddle before it had fully stopped moving, with that lithe, graceful swing Mike and Daisy knew so well, and caught the woman in his arms as she reached him. He held her close, her head against his chest. "Oh, Jess... Jess... oh, I've prayed and prayed... Jess, you're home!"

"Yeah, Daisy." His voice was deep and warm and rough with the tears he wouldn't let himself shed openly. "I'm here. I'm home."

She looked up at him, drinking in every feature of his lean tanned face, lifting trembling fingers to the raw pink scar on his cheek. "Oh, Jess, what have you done to yourself? Your poor face..."

"It'll be okay, Daisy. Slim had the doc in Waverley look at it. He said in another couple weeks it won't be any worse'n the one Slim's got." He gently brushed his thumbs down her cheeks, wiping away the tears. "Hey, now. Don't cry, I'll be thinkin' you ain't glad to see me. Why is it women always gotta cry when they're happy?"

Mike had wrapped both arms around the wanderer's waist and was clinging like a barnacle to a pier. Slim brought the buckboard to a halt, swung down and asked with a laugh in his voice, "Hey, don't I get one of those?"

"Oh, Slim, don't be ridiculous, of course you do!" And Daisy hugged him too. "It's been so lonely without you boys... I truly don't know how much longer I could have borne it."

"Sorry, Daisy," Jess apologized. "We kinda had... some business to take care of, up north."

"What happened to you, Jess?" Mike demanded. "Why did that marshal in Waverley think you were dead?"

"On account of the feller that was had my gear, and the horses, and the bill of sale, that's why, Tiger," Jess explained. "Looked a little bit like me, too... if you was somebody that didn't know me real well."

"But how did he get 'em?" Mike persisted.

"By bushwhackin' me on the road," Jess told him, "only a lady on a stagecoach found me and took me home with her. 'Ceptin' home was north, so I was goin' farther away from here all the time."

The boy looked solemnly up at him. "You got hurt again, didn't you, Jess?"

Slim burst out laughing. "See, even Mike's got your number, pard."

"You hush!" Jess snapped at him, only half jokingly. "Yeah, Mike, I got hurt again—twice; once on the road and once this here... Slim, quit that brayin' or I'm like to take you for a jackass and put a pack on you!"

Slim caught his breath, and regained his self-control, with difficulty; he really couldn't help himself, it just felt so good to be home again, on his own land, in his own front yard, with his family all in one place, the way it should be. "Sorry, pard. You know I wasn't really laughin' at you, don't you?"

Jess glared at him, and he had an instant to think that maybe he'd gone too far, but then the chambrayed arm swept out and knocked the hat off his head, and his partner's face lit with his inimitable smile, the special smile that only five people in the world ever got. "'Course I know that, you big galoot. Daisy, what's to eat? I been chowin' down on Slim's cookin' so long I'm about to forget what real food tastes like."

"Len!" Daisy called. "Len, I need you to kill some chickens, please, and get me some fresh corn out of the garden. I'm going to stuff both you boys with everything you like best," she declared, turning back to the two of them. It didn't matter what had happened to them. All that mattered was that her boys were home. "And you're both going to get in the shower and wash off about ten pounds of road dust before you set foot in the house!"

Slim and Jess grinned at each other. "Yeah," said Slim, "I'd say we were back home, wouldn't you, pard?"

"Yeah, hardcase," Jess drawled, luxuriating in the warm feeling of belonging and completeness that the concept brought to him, "yeah, I'd say so." Home, he thought, and remembered the long years without one and the many nights he had tried to convince himself it didn't matter. Home. I reckon that's about the greatest word there is. Greater'n God, or country, or love. Home. I'm home.

Mike turned sideways, arm still locked about Jess's waist, getting one around his own shoulders in return. Without really thinking about it the two men each put one arm around Daisy's shoulders, holding her between them. The Sherman Ranch family, complete again after far too long, turned and started across the yard.

-30-