McAllister Justice (9 page)

In the background a man said: “He's alive.”

McAllister raised a shaking hand to his face and found that it was covered with sticky blood.

“Lie still,” the doctor snapped.

“Get away,” McAllister snarled. “The whiskey fumes'll kill me before a rap on the head does.”

Sime's face came almost into focus and said: “You was creased real good, Rem.”

The marshal did his best to take a look around and found that he was in his office, half on and half off his desk. Jenny Mann hovered near, concern on her face. He liked that. Then he saw the rest of them, crowding in to take a look at the wounded lawman and it looked to him like the whole town was there. He tried to sit up, but he couldn't make it. So he lay flat on his back and growled hoarsely at Sime: “What in hell goes on here? Clear 'em out.”

Sime got to work and McAllister made another attempt to rise and failed again. Jenny Mann took hold of him and held him down, saying: “You must lie still.”

McAllister said: “Stand back, ma'am,” and pushed her clear, reached over and opened a drawer from which he extracted a bottle of whiskey.

The little doctor chirped up: “I forbid it.”

The marshal grinned groggily. “Join me, doc.” He pulled the cork and took a long pull. Some life flowed into him and he offered the doctor the bottle. The little man took it and matched his swallow. Jenny Mann made scandalized noises. She looked annoyed when McAllister made one more try to get up and actually made it. Propping himself up against the wall, he asked: “Has the bleeding stopped?”

The doctor said: “Yes. But it'll start again if you move about.”

“Put a bandage on.”

The doctor obeyed. When he finished, Sime had the office cleared. McAllister turned to his deputy and said: “Get along to the livery and pick out the two best horses there. I want one ready and saddled at dawn. I'll take the other as a spare.”

“What in heck for?”

“To get the man that shot me.”

“Maybe he's here in town.”

“Not after shooting me, he won't be. He knows me.”

Jenny Mann was terrified to make her way through the streets in the small hours of the morning, but she forced herself to do it. Paston's business and schemes were obscure to
her, but the fascination the man held for her was not. Her sharp little mind could not fathom the connection between the attempted shooting of McAllister and Paston, but she knew there was some link there. Her instinct told her that Paston had had something to do with the cutting down of Marshal Diblon. She knew the man so well, could read the flitting shadows over his face. And she was frightened. She wanted to go away with Paston away from this shambles of a frontier to civilization. And she knew that the end to which he was working was the accumulation of enough money for them to live in style. Yet she was not of his breed. Normally there was no recklessness in her, her nature was not a gambler's. Perhaps there lay the secret of the man's fascination for her.

So when McAllister was brought in wounded and talked of knowing the man who had shot him, she at once saw that Paston was indirectly in danger. If men pitting themselves against the law here were a part of Paston's organization, “the business” as he smilingly called it, then in McAllister they had met a man who was a danger to their future. Why, she asked herself, could she not have fallen in love with a man like McAllister? Her pulse quickened at the thought of him? She had thrilled when he had carried her across the street? No, fundamentally, she was a loyal woman. She had set herself aside for Paston. It was up to her to save the situation and to get her lover to leave this place.

For one terrible moment, she could see McAllister killing George. She knew too well that he was capable of it.

She tiptoed silently past the sleeping Joe Diblon and let herself out of the rear door.

On the street, she crouched back in the shadows, watching the street and making certain that the two men sleeping in the office had not heard her departure. After several minutes, she went on satisfied. A drunken miner slouched by, stopped to leer at her and stumbled on. She ran. Crossing the street, she lost a shoe in the mud and lost time hunting for it. When she found it and went on to the sidewalk, she ran into two men talking in the moonshadow of the cover. One reached out a
hand for her, making a coarse remark. She ducked and ran on, not stopping until she reached the outside staircase of Paston's place and panted up it. The door was unlocked, she was thankful to find, and she went in.

The corridor was empty and she hurried along it. Light showed faintly under Paston's door and she opened it quietly.

A lamp on the bureau washed the far side of the room dimly with light. At first she thought the place was empty, but on glancing to her right, she saw a dark figure sitting in an armchair. She thought it was her lover and began to say his name, but the figure rose quickly, shut the door behind her, and, catching her by the arm, dragged her into the light. She was so astonished and outraged that she did not cry out. She froze with horror when she found herself looking into pale and deadly eyes.

Her mouth opened to scream for George.

“Be still,” the man said.

He raised a hand to threaten her and she saw that the thumb was almost totally missing. At once she realized that this was the man for whom McAllister was looking. Suddenly she was very afraid.

“Who are you?” the man demanded.

She thought she would faint. The man's cynical eyes showed his interpretation of her presence here at this hour. Shame and fear paralysed her.

The man shook her slightly and said: “You Paston's piece?”

The door opened abruptly. She jerked her head around to see George standing in the doorway.

“George …”

“Dix!” Paston roared.

“Who is she?” Dix demanded.

“Take your hands off her.” The man spun her away from him.

“Who is she?” he asked again. “What's she doing here?”

Paston rid himself of some of his rage and visibly got some control of himself. “As this is my room, I assume she had come to see me.”

“Will she talk?”

Paston walked across the room to the tall dark man and spoke up into his face, thrusting his head forward like a bulldog. “If you had done like I said, none of this would have happened.”

“I did what had to be done. A couple of days an' you'd of been run outa town if I didn't.”

Jenny Mann said in her coldest voice: “And what did you have to do? Kill McAllister?”

The man swung on her, but Paston barred his way.

“How'd she know that?” he demanded.

Paston said: “You get out of town fast.”

“I don't have nothin' to run for now.”

“Your mistake,” Jenny Mann said.

Now she had Paston's attention as well. Both men looked their alarm as they stared at her. George said in a dead voice: “What does that mean?”

“I suppose this brute imagines that he has killed McAllister,” Jenny said, amazed at her own sudden calm.

Paston turned to look at Dix, saying: “Well?”

“I saw him go down.”

“As the deputy-marshal said, you creased him.”

“She's lyin'.”

“What has she got to gain by lying? I told you not to come back into town. By God …” Paston's rage blew up like a storm. “Get out. Now. And stay out. One more fool move like this and you'll be looked after.” Jenny stared at Paston in horror. Realizing that her worst fears about him were true. “Move.”

Dix took a pace back, his hand dropping automatically to his gun butt. His left hand.

“Nobody don't threaten me,” he said softly.

Paston laughed and the sound showed Jenny how little she knew about the man.

“Stick to your own level, punk,” he said. “Pull your iron.”

Something like puzzlement dimly lit those dead eyes. He had never braced Paston before. He had heard talk of his
ability with a gun, but he had never considered him in the same class as a professional like himself. He licked his lips.

“I don't have to take this kind of talk,” he said.

Paston thrust his words at him. “You have to take it,” he said. “You kill for pennies. You do as you're told. That was what you were born for.”

The door opened.

The three of them turned.

McAllister leaned against the door-jamb, smiling at them.

It seemed that the three men and the woman stood there motionless waiting for a full minute.

McAllister broke the silence.

“It took me a full year, Dix.”

The gunman turned slowly so that he faced the man in the doorway. Paston pushed Jenny Mann to one side so that she would be out of the line of fire. In a calm, conversational tone, Paston asked: “What took you a year, McAllister?”

“To catch up with the man who murdered my wife.”

The terrible words filled the room. The woman's face showed her horror. Paston could not conceal the fact that he was shaken. Dix revealed no emotion at all. He was as still as a striking rattler.

McAllister said: “I'll give you a choice. You can pull your gun and die here or you can unbuckle your gunbelt and stand trial. Make up your mind quick.”

Paston thought:
If he surrenders and talks, I‘m finished.

A clock ticked somewhere in the silence of the room. Paston knew that he had to make a move, but he knew that whatever he did, it would endanger the woman. But his ambition had ridden him too long for it to be sacrificed even for this one. With a feeling of doom, he made up his mind.

McAllister had not made a move. His right hand hung limply at his side. His gun was strapped to his waist, high to the left side, butt forward. It looked impossible to make a fast draw from there, but Paston guessed rightly that McAllister could pull a gun from anywhere fast as any man living.

Paston moved.

With a sweep of his left hand, he hurled the lamp from the bureau top. It struck the top of the table and bounced in McAllister's direction.

Miraculously, the glass smashed and it went out. This left the marshal silhouetted against the light in the corridor. Or it would have done if he had still been there. One moment Paston was hurling the lamp toward him, the next he was out of sight and the whole building seemed to shudder to the deafening roar of guns in a confined space.

Paston, as soon as he had started the lamp on its way, threw himself sideways, grappled with Jenny and flung her to the floor. This startling action and the shock of hitting the floor brought the start of a scream from her lips. As the guns thundered she held the scream unbroken.

As Paston went away to his left, Dix took one long pace to the right in the direction of the open door of the inner room. Before his pacing foot touched ground, his gun was out and firing. Only after he had got off his second shot did he realize that he had wasted both on empty space. There was no time for thought. He knew he had three shots left and that he mustn't waste one of them. McAllister had fired one and missed with it. From the sound of the explosion and the impact of the ball in the wall behind him, Dix knew that the marshal did not have that dreaded weapon with two barrels in action. They'd had a dose of that at the stage hold-up. He squinted at the dim light of the corridor, unable to see the hump of a man's body on the floor of the room. The hair stood on the nape of his neck as fear ran through him.
McAllister was in the room, maybe close to him.

Silence fell, but his ears rang, deafened by the shooting. He held his breath so that he should not cough on the pungent black-powder fumes.

Cautiously, he lifted one foot and backed toward the open door, his mind hurrying to guess where McAllister could be. He wasn't between himself and the corridor. Therefore he must be to the right of the door. The obvious place was near the table which would offer him some cover. Dix dropped to one knee, held his gun low and fired. Terror touched him at once and he hurled himself backward into the inner room. The answering bullet proved his terror well founded. It tore
his hat from his head and smashed into a piece of china in the room beyond.

Two shots left, his mind told him.

He started crawling backward as Paston's voice, shaking with tension, came. “Hold your fire. There's a woman here.”

McAllister's voice said: “Let me hear your gun fall, Paston, or I fire, woman or no woman.”

Paston groaned: “God damn you.”

Dix reckoned he was too far into the room to get McAllister with a shot. He heard a thud and reckoned that was Paston's gun landing. The yellow dog had counted out. The two of them could have finished McAllister easily in their cross-fire.

Glancing hastily over his shoulder, he saw the large window, gleaming faintly in the moonlight. His only way out of this. If only he could kill McAllister, then the fear of the last year would be over and done with. But the present terror was too great. He wanted out. Right now.

A boot scraped the floor in the room he had just left. He pictured McAllister crawling remorselessly toward him. He wondered if there was time to thumb fresh loads into his gun and wondering that he let the seconds tick by until he knew it was too late.

Then something dawned on him.

If McAllister came to the door he would be between him, Dix, and Paston. Then they'd have him.

He swallowed hard and forced himself to call out: “Paston, get him when he gets to the door.”

Very near, McAllister said calmly: “Stay still, Paston.” Dix knew that he was under cover of the wall but he could not prevent himself from firing on the chance that he was in the doorway. The woman shrieked in terror as the bullet came near and smashed into the wall and Paston screamed: “Stop it, stop it.”

One round left,
Dix told himself in almost tearful bitterness.

Then he brightened suddenly.

His eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom and a faint light was coming from the moon through the window behind
him. Dimly he could make out the frame of the door and, as he strained his eyes, he saw something white in the room beyond. If McAllister were to come though the doorway that white patch would disappear. He laid his thumb on the hammer and braced his legs under him.