Death Rides the Night (8 page)

The heavy night silence persisted unbroken. Not a sound came from inside the lighted office, and there was nothing to indicate that two other armed men were waiting in front of the door of the office on the other side.

Sam couldn't wait any longer. Every fiber in his tough frame craved for action. He nudged Winters with his left elbow, straightened up and smashed the single square pane of glass with his gun-barrel.

Winters came erect simultaneously, and as the broken glass clattered inward noisily he thrust the short muzzle of the shotgun through the aperture and warned loudly, “Put up your hands quick.”

He and Sam stood in the full glare of a lantern hanging from the ceiling inside and blinked stupidly at the interior of the office before their eyes focused so they could see clearly.

Then Sam muttered, “I'll be damned. Do you see what I think I see?”

Winters chuckled at his tone and said, “We can't both be seeing things, Sam.”

They were staring in through the unglassed window at an unexpected and curious scene. The two deputies lay on the floor with bandanna gags tied over their mouths and their hands bound behind them.

The door was flung open as Winters and Sam stared at them, and Pete and John Boyd stood on the threshold brandishing their guns. Their mouths hung open as they saw the helpless deputies on the floor, and the two pair of would-be jail-breakers stared at each other in utter incomprehension from opposite sides of the building.

With a disgusted grunt, Sam stepped back from the window and hurried around to the door. By the time he got there, Boyd and Pete were jerking the gags from the mouths of the VX riders who had been deputized to guard Ezra.

They sat up, sputtering incoherently, and the story tumbled from their lips while Boyd cut their hands free.

They hadn't more than settled down to guard the jail, they told the amused Dutch Springs deputation, before a masked man walked in the door and covered them with a .45 before either of them could go for his guns.

He disarmed them and then bound and gagged them securely, got the key to the jail from them and left them lying there while he went around and freed the prisoner they were supposed to be guarding. Both of them bitterly averred that Dutch Springs was one hell of a town, and being a deputy was one hell of a job. They couldn't tell what the masked man looked like except he was tall and dressed like any rancher and handled his gun like he knew what it was made for.

The Powder Valley quartet was shaking with helpless inward laughter when they withdrew from the jail office and the two discomfited deputies.

“It was
Pat,”
Sam breathed happily as they hurried away. “Doggone his ornery hide, he musta planned it that way all thuh time. We orta knowed Pat had somethin' up his sleeve. He figgered Tripo an' the others would leave town soon as they thought Ezra was locked up good, an' he'd have a better chance of gettin' him loose afterward than I woulda had of shootin' a way out of the Gold Eagle with all them around.”

“It looks that way,” Winters agreed soberly. “Makes us look like a bunch of danged fools, slipping up on the jail when the prisoner was already gone.”

“Pat could of told some of us an' let us help him,” protested Boyd angrily.

“It's better thisaway,” Sam chortled happily. “Wearin' a mask, can't nobody swear 'twas him. With Harlow an' all the rest thinkin' Pat was takin' it laying down, him an' Ezra will have a chance to cut them VX cows outta Ezra's herd before Harlow ever proves his frame-up.”

The others dubiously agreed that Sam was probably right, and Mr. Winters for one was much relieved when he went back to the store and put up his lethal shotgun. For a brief period tonight he had been a man of violence and he was glad to turn the job back to men who knew much more about such things than he.

7

The younger child was restless, and Nancy Page was up with her when Ethan reached home a little before midnight. Ethan Page was a tall, raw-boned, young rancher with big-knuckled hands that showed the marks of hard work. He and Nancy had been married seven years and were one of the most completely happy young couples in Powder Valley. She was a ranch girl from near Pueblo, sturdy and uncomplaining, and very much in love with her young husband.

The first years of their marriage had been difficult, taking over a small run-down ranch on the western end of the Valley after the death of Ethan's shiftless father, and both Nancy and her husband had toiled hard and uncompromisingly to get the ranch restocked and the house fixed up, building for the future and the snug security of their family.

There was nothing unusual about Ethan and Nancy Page. They were like thousands of other young couples throughout the west who married and settled down to rear a family and wrest a living from the land. It was a rugged land and it resisted those pioneering efforts, trying the hearts and the souls of the pioneer men and women who sought to conquer it.

Only the strong were able to survive, and Nancy and Ethan had proved themselves more than a match for the land that didn't want to be tamed. Years of privation and of constant toil had transformed the run-down ranch into one of the neatest spreads in the Valley, and after seven years it looked as though the Pages had earned the right to settle back and relax and reap the rewards of those years of privation and struggle.

Ethan Junior was six, and little Molly Page was just a little over two years old at this time when the Valley was meeting a new challenge in the person of Eustis Harlow. The boy was a chubby lad with brown curls like his mother, and his father's dark, serious eyes. He was sound asleep in the small bedroom opening off his parents' room, but two-year-old Molly was flushed and seemed to have a slight fever, and she had wakened her mother an hour earlier by gasping for breath in her small crib beside her brother's bed.

Nancy Page hurried in and lifted the child from its crib and carried her back into her own bedroom so the lamp wouldn't waken Junior. She closed the door between the two rooms and went to work on Molly with simple home remedies, rubbing her little chest with goose grease and feeding her a spoonful of soothing sirup to relax the spasmodic contractions in her throat.

When her husband came in an hour later Molly's fever had gone down and she was breathing easily. She had just dropped off to sleep in her mother's arms, and Nancy hadn't carried her back to her crib yet. She sat on the side of the bed with the baby cuddled in her arms, and with her brown hair in two long braided plaits hanging down on each side of her face she looked no older than a schoolgirl herself.

She lifted her head and smiled reassuringly at Ethan when he stopped in the doorway. “There's nothing to worry about,” she told him softly. “Molly was restless and I took her up, but she's gone back to sleep now.”

Some of the worry went away from Ethan's dark, serious face, but Nancy noted instantly that some of it remained. He said, “I hurried right in when I saw the light burning. If you're sure Molly's all right I'll go back and put up my hawse.”

Nancy nodded and said, “Go ahead, Ethan. I'll put Molly back in her crib while you're gone. Then, would you like it if I boiled up a pot of coffee. There's some of those fresh doughnuts left.”

Ethan Page said, “I reckon not. Somehow I haven't got any hankering for food tonight.” He turned and went back out the front door to take his horse to the stable and unsaddle him.

Nancy's smooth girlish brow knitted in a little frown of unease as her husband went outside. It wasn't like Ethan to refuse coffee and raised doughnuts late at night. His voice sounded different too. To Nancy, who' knew and loved every tonal shading of his voice, it sounded harsh tonight. Not as though he was merely tired from his long ride into Dutch Springs and back after a hard day on the ranch, but as though some new difficulty had arisen in town, some new development to plague him just when it seemed that things were going smoothly.

Nancy Page sighed as she got up from the edge of the bed and carried Molly in to her crib. She settled her gently and tucked in the covers about the sleeping body, hovered over her for a moment with a cool hand on the small forehead to assure herself that the fever was indeed gone, and then went back into the other bedroom.

She was a tall, sturdy girl, not yet twenty-five though the mother of a six-year-old son. She was preoccupied as she got into bed, moving over to the far side to give Ethan room to lie down when he came in. She wondered if anything had gone wrong with the loan Ethan had arranged to get from Mr. Harlow. The thought brought a sharp stab of fear to her heart. That loan meant so much to them. In the beginning, Ethan had been dubious about the wisdom of putting a mortgage on the small ranch as security, but in the end had decided it would be foolish not to do so.

There had been so little cash in the seven years of their marriage. Every penny Ethan could get his hands on had gone back into the ranch, and there were always a dozen places for every dollar. Since her marriage, Nancy had had two new dresses. Both were cotton and she had made them both herself. Often, they had been unable to buy the food they wanted and the things the children needed from Mr. Winters' general store. Oh, it wasn't that Mr. Winters had refused them credit. He trusted the Valley ranchers implicitly and never bothered them about their bills. But Ethan and Nancy were young and desperately determined to get ahead, and in the beginning they had entered into a solemn compact that they would never allow themselves to get over a hundred dollars in debt at any one time.

Somehow, Ethan Page had a horror of being in debt. His father had been a shiftless man who stayed deeply in debt all his life. After his father's death it had taken every penny Ethan could scrape together to clear the estate of debt and pay his father's funeral expenses. And on that day Ethan had sworn a solemn oath that
his
family should never be burdened with debts as his father's family had been.

Nancy agreed with him when they discussed it soon after their marriage. She didn't mind being without cash and going without things. She was as fiercely anxious as her husband to build up some measure of security for the future, and she never complained as the years went on and they deprived themselves of things they needed to stay clear of debt.

Well, that policy had finally paid off. As Ethan explained it to her last month, they had now reached the point where they could afford to owe money. Particularly at the generous interest rates offered by Mr. Harlow who appeared to be a sort of philanthropist interested in helping out all the ranchers in the Valley.

“The way Mr. Harlow figures it,” Ethan. explained to her when he came back from town after discussing the proposition with the Texan, “it's good business for him to help the other ranchers in the Valley improve their beef stock and get modern equipment and make their ranches more profitable. He wants to raise the standard of all the beef going out of the Valley so we can begin to ask premium prices for anything we ship from here. That's why he's willing to loan money at two per cent for us to use for the things we can't do now because we haven't got the cash money. Like he says, he can't lose because we're sure to start right in making lots more money and we can pay him back out of our profits.”

It all sounded sort of garbled to Nancy, but then she didn't have any head for business or figures. She was glad because Ethan was glad, and all she could think of was that there would be a little something extra to fix up the house with, and get a new brooder for her chickens, and maybe a ready made dress from one of the big stores in Denver for her and some of that new patent medicine she had read about that relieved women of backaches.

She told Ethan he was to do whatever he thought best about it, and she wasn't even frightened when he carelessly mentioned the sum of two thousand dollars as the amount Harlow had offered to lend him. This was enough, he explained, to enable him to go right ahead and do all the things he had been putting off for years because he could never get enough money ahead.

Nancy trembled now as she wondered if anything had happened in Dutch Springs tonight to upset the anticipated loan. There had been something rather mysterious about the summons that took Ethan to town. One of Harlow's riders had come by about dusk and told Ethan he was expected at some sort of a meeting. Ethan told her about it at the supper table. He admitted he didn't know what the meeting was about. The rider hadn't told him. Except that it had been arranged by Eustis Harlow and Ethan was expected to attend.

She heard her husband come in the front door and close it behind him. His footsteps were slow and solid across the living room. Her heart contracted with love and with fear for him. She didn't mind for herself. She could go on being poor and doing without things and making over dresses for the third or fourth time, but she closed her eyes and prayed briefly to God not to let Ethan be disappointed about the loan.

When she concluded her prayer and opened her eyes, Ethan was in the room. He smiled down briefly at his wife and began unbuttoning the leather jacket he wore over his flannel shirt. When the smile flickered away from his face he looked older and graver than he had ever looked before.

She asked, “How was the meeting tonight?”

“Not so good.” He threw his jacket aside and didn't look at her.

Nancy lifted herself on one elbow. “Something's bothering you, Ethan.”

He said, “Yep.”

“Don't be worried about Molly. I don't think it was anything but a little touch of indigestion.”

“That's good.” Ethan Page stripped off his shirt and sat down on the edge of the bed with his back to her. He leaned over to tug at his boots and his voice sounded muffled, “We're not going to take that loan from Harlow, honey.”

She remained very still, her body lifted on one elbow, staring at his bent back. Something went dead inside her. Something that rose up in her throat and choked her so she couldn't speak. She could hear her heart pounding loudly in the stillness. Slowly and carefully she lowered herself back to the pillow.