The Bold Frontier (30 page)

Bodie laughed and crumpled the note and threw it into the crackling fire in the grate.

“I guess the word travels,” he said with a trace of pride. “Maybe I will collect my dozenth.” He raised one hand. “But not on your property, Maebelle. I’ll do it in the street, when this marshal comes to run me out. So’s everybody can see.” His hand went toward the liquor bottle.

Maebelle pushed Tad in the direction of the hall. “Go to the kitchen and get something to eat. And take sister Emma with you.”

Grumbling, the boy took the tiny girl’s hand and dragged her toward the darkened, musty-smelling hallway.

The girl disengaged her hand, and stopped. Curious, she lifted Bodie’s hat from where it rested on a chair.

Maebelle slapped her hand smartly. “Go along, Tad. You follow him, Emma. Honest to heaven, that child is the picking-up-est thing I ever knew. Born bank robber, I guess, if she was a boy.”

“Where the hell’s Lu?” Bodie wanted to know.

“Don’t get your dander up, George,” Maebelle said quickly. “I’ll go see.”

She went to the bottom of the staircase and bawled the girl’s name several times. A girlish “Coming!” echoed from somewhere above. A knock sounded at the door and Maebelle opened it. She talked with the man for a moment, and then his heavy boots clomped up the stairway. As she returned to the parlor Bodie looked at the clock.

“Quarter to eleven, Maebelle. An hour and fifteen minutes before I get me number twelve.” He chuckled.

Maebelle busied herself straightening a doily on the sofa, not looking at him.

Bodie helped himself to still another drink, and swallowed it hastily. “Don’t worry about the whiskey,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m even faster when I got an edge on.”

Light footsteps sounded on the stair. Bodie turned as the girl Lu came into the room. She ran to Bodie and kissed him, throwing her arms around his neck. She was young beneath the shiny hardness of her face. Her lips were heavily painted, and her white breast above the gown smelled of dusting powder.

“Oh, George, I’m glad you got here.”

“I came just to see you, honey. Two hundred miles.” His arm crept around her waist, his hand touched her breast. He kissed her lightly.

“Well, I’m not running this for charity, you know,” Maebelle said.

“I’ll settle up,” Bodie replied. “Don’t worry. Right now though …”

He and Lu began to walk toward the stairway.

Another knock came at the door. Maebelle went to open it, and Bodie heard a voice say out of the frosty dark, “Evening, Miz Tait. Lu here?”

Bodie dropped his arm.

Maebelle started to protest, but the man came on into the lighted parlor. The cowboy was thin. His cheeks were red from wind and liquor, and he blinked at Bodie, with suspicion. Lu gaped at the floor, flustered.

“Hello, Lu. Did you forgit I was comin’ tonight?”

“Maybe she did forget,” Bodie said. “She’s busy.”

“Come on, Fred,” Maebelle said urgently. She pulled the cowboy’s arm. “I know Bertha’d be glad to see you.”

“Bertha, hell,” the cowboy complained. “I rode in sixty miles, like I do every month, just to see Lu. It’s all set up.” He stepped forward and grabbed Lu’s wrist. Bodie’s fingers touched leather, like a caress.

“You’re out of luck, friend,” Bodie said. “I told you Lu’s busy tonight.”

“Like hell,” the cowboy insisted, pulling Lu. “Come on, sweetie. I come sixty miles, and it’s mighty cold. …”

“Get your hands off her,” Bodie said.

Lu jerked away, retreated and stared, round-eyed, like a worn doll, pretty but empty.

“Don’t you prod me,” the cowboy said, weaving a little. His blue eyes snapped in the lamplight. “Who are you, anyway, acting so big? The governor or somebody?”

“I’m George Bodie. Didn’t you hear about me tonight?”

“George Bo …”

The cowboy’s eyes whipped frantically to the side. He licked his lips and his hand crawled down toward the hem of his jacket.

“Not in here, George, for God’s sakes,” Maebelle protested.

“Keep out of it,” Bodie said softly. His eyes had a hard, predatory shine. “Now, mister cowboy, you got anything more to say about not bein’ satisfied with Bertha?”

The cowboy looked at Lu. Bodie and Maebelle could read his face easily: fear clawed, and fought with the idea of what would happen if he backed down before Lu.

His sharp, scrawny-red Adam’s apple bobbed.

His hand dropped.

Bodie’s eyes glistened as the Navy cleared and roared.

The cowboy’s gun slipped out of his fingers un-fired. He dropped to his knees, cursed, shut his eyes, bleeding from the chest. Then he pitched forward and lay coughing. In a few seconds the coughing had stopped.

Bodie smiled easily and put the Navy away.

“One dozen,” he said, like a man uttering a benediction.

“You damned fool,” Maebelle raged. “Abraham! Abraham!” she shouted. “Get yourself in here.”

In a moment an old arthritic black man hobbled into the room from the back of the house.

“Get that body out of here. Take the rig and dump him on the edge of town. Jump to it.”

Abraham began laboriously dragging the corpse out of the parlor by the rear door. Boots, then feminine titters, sounded on the stairs.

Maebelle held down her rage, whirled and stalked into the hall.

“It’s all right, folks,” she said, vainly trying to block the view. People craned forward on the steps. Abraham didn’t move fast enough. “Nothing’s happened,” Maebelle insisted. “The man’s just hurt a little. Just a friendly argument.”

“He’s dead,” a reedy male voice said. “Any fool kin see that.”

Bodie stood in the doorway, his arm around Lu once more, complacently smirking at the confusion of male and female bodies at the bottom of the stairs. He heard his name whispered.

The thin voice popped up, “I’m getting out of here, Maebelle. This is too much for my blood.” A spindly shape darted toward the door.

“Now wait a minute, Hiram,” Maebelle protested.

The door slammed on the breath of chill air from the street.

Maebelle walked back toward Bodie, her eyes angry. “Now you’ve done it for fair. That yellow pipsqueak will spread it all over town that George Bodie just killed a man in my house.”

“Let him,” Bodie said. He glanced back at the clock. “In an hour I got an engagement with the marshal anyway. But that’s in an hour.”

Lu snuggled against him as he started up the stairs. The crowd parted respectfully. Maebelle scratched her head desperately, then spoke up in a voice that had a false boom to it:

“Come on into the parlor, folks. I’ll pour a drink for those with bad nerves.”

Abraham had removed the body, but she still noticed a greasy black stain on the carpet. Her eyes flew to the clock, which ticked steadily.

Bodie awoke suddenly, chilly in the dark room. His hand shot out for the Navy, but drew back when he recognized the boy Tad in the thin line of lamplight falling through the open door. He yawned and rolled over. Lu had gone, and he had dozed.

“What is it, boy?” he asked.

“Mr. Wyman’s in the street, asking for you.”

Bodie swung his legs off the bed, laughed, and lit the lamp. The holster hung on the bedpost, with the Colt in it.

“What time is it?” Bodie wanted to know.

“Quarter of twelve. Mr. Wyman hasn’t got his shotgun. Said he wanted to talk to you about something.”

Bodie frowned. “What sort of an hombre is this Mr. Wyman? Would he be hiding a gun on him?”

The boy shook his head. “He belongs to the Methodist Church. Everybody says he’s real honest,” the boy answered, pronouncing the last word with faint suspicion.

Bodie’s eyes slitted down in the lamplight. Then he stood, scratched his belly and laughed. “I imagine it wouldn’t do no harm to talk to the marshal. And let him know what’s going to happen to him.”

Bodie drew on his shirt, pants, and boots. He pointed to the holster on the bedpost. “I’ll come back for that, if this marshal still wants to hold me to the midnight deadline. Thanks for telling me, boy.”

He went out of the room and down the stairs, a smile of anticipation on his face.

The house was strangely quiet. No one was in the parlor. But Bodie had a good idea that Maebelle, and others, would be watching from half a dozen darkened windows. Bodie put his hand on the doorknob, pulled, and stepped out into the biting air.

Wyman stood three feet from the hitchrack.

He had both hands raised to his face, one holding a flaring match, the other shielding it from the wind as he lit his pipe. Bodie recognized the gesture for what it was: a means of showing that the town marshal kept his word. Wyman flicked the match away and the bowl of the pipe glowed.

Bodie walked forward and leaned on the hitchrack, grinning. The cold air stung his cheeks. Across the way, at Aunt Gert’s, a girl in a spangled green dress drank from a whiskey bottle behind a window.

“You Wyman?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’m Bodie. Speak your piece.”

Bodie saw a slender man, thirty, with a high-crowned hat, fur-collared coat, and drooping mustache. His face was pale in the starlight.

“I started out to see if I could talk you into leaving town,” Wyman said slowly. “I figure I don’t want to kill anybody in my job if I don’t have to.”

“I’ll say you got a nerve, marshal,” Bodie said, laughter in his words. “Ain’t you scared? I got me my dozenth man tonight.”

“I know.”

“You still want to talk me into riding without a fight?”

Wyman shook his head. “I said that’s why I came, why I started out. On the way I heard about the killing. Hiram Riggs ran through the streets yelling his head off about it. I can’t let you go now. But I can ask you to come along without a fight. Otherwise you might wind up dead, Bodie.”

“I doubt it, marshal. I just purely doubt that.”

Bodie scratched the growth of whiskers along the line of his jaw. He lounged easily, but he saw Wyman shift his feet as the rasp-rasp of the scratching sounded loudly in the night street.

“You know, you didn’t answer my question about being scared.”

“Of course I am, if that makes you feel better,” Wyman said, without malice.

“Nobody ever told me that before, marshal. Of course most didn’t have time.”

“Why should I lie? I’m not a professional.”

“Then why are you in the job, marshal? I’m sort of curious.”

“I don’t know. People figured I’d try, I imagine.” Sharply he raised his heel and knocked glimmering sparks from his pipe. “Hell, I’m not here to explain to you why I don’t want to fight. I’m telling you I will, if you won’t come with me.”

Bodie hesitated, tasting the moment like good liquor. “Now, marshal, did you honestly think when you walked over here that you’d get me to give up?”

Starlight shone in Wyman’s bleak eyes for a moment.

“No.”

“Then why don’t you go on home to bed? You haven’t got a chance.”

In a way Bodie admired the marshal’s cheek, fool though he was.

Wyman turned his head slightly, indicating the opposite side of the street. For the first time Bodie noticed a shadowy rider on one of the horses at Aunt Gert’s rack.

“When I come, Bodie, I’ll have my deputy. He carries a shotgun too.”

Bodie scowled into the night, then stepped down off the sidewalk, trembling with anger.

“That’s not a very square shake, marshal.”

“Don’t talk to me about square shakes. I knew that cowboy you shot. He couldn’t have matched you with a gun. And there’ve been others. If you’re trying to tell me two against one isn’t fair, all I’ve got to say is, if I had a big cat killing my beef, I wouldn’t worry whether I had two or twenty men after him.” Hardness edged Wyman’s words now. “I don’t worry about how I kill an animal, Bodie. If you’d given that cowboy a chance, maybe I’d feel different. But I’ve got to take you one way or another. You wrecked the square shake, not me.”

Bodie’s fingers crawled along the hip of his jeans.

“Can’t do it by yourself?” he said contemptuously.

“I won’t do it by myself.”

“Why not? You can’t trust your own gun?”

“Maybe that’s where you made your mistake, Bodie. I’d rather trust another man than a gun.”

“I don’t need nobody or nothing but my gun. I never have,” Bodie said softly. “Where’s your shotgun, marshal?”

Wyman nodded toward the silent deputy on the horse.

“He’s got it.”

“I’ll put my gun up against you two,” Bodie said with seething savagery. “You just wait.”

Bodie started back for the entrance, and from the shadows before Aunt Gert’s came a sharp voice calling:

“He might run out the back, Dale.”

And Wyman’s answer, “No, he won’t …” was cut off by Bodie’s vicious slam of the door.

Maebelle stuck her head out of the parlor as he bounded up the stairs, his teeth tight together and a thick angry knot in his belly. He had murder on his face.

He stomped into the bedroom, was halfway across, when the sight of the bedpost in the lamplight registered on his mind.

His holster—and the Navy—were gone.

Bodie crashed back against the wall, a strangled cry choking up out of his throat, his eyes frantically searching the room.

He lunged forward and ripped away the bedclothes. He pulled the scarred chest from the wall, threw the empty drawers on the floor, then overturned the chest with a curse and a crash. He raised the window, and the glass whined faintly.

He stood staring out for a moment at the collection of star-washed shanties stretching down the hill behind the house. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed, laced his fingers together. His shoulders began to tremble.

He let out a string of obscenities like whimpers, his eyes wide. He jumped to his feet and began to tear at the mattress cover. Then he stopped again, shaking.

He felt Wyman laughing at him, and he heard Wyman’s words once more. Black unreason boiled up through him, making him tremble all the harder. With an animal growl he ran out of the room, stopped in the hall, and looked frantically up and down.

He kicked in the door across the room. The girl shrieked softly, her hand darting for the coverlet.

“What the hell, amigo …” began the man, half-timidly.