The Big Front Yard and Other Stories (11 page)

“It's your damned paper,” snarled Fennimore. “You and your lousy stories that give me all the trouble. Stirring up the people –”

“What Fennimore means,” said Quinn, smiling, “is that you'll never go to press again …”

“But I will,” said Carson. “Tonight. I'm not waiting until tomorrow. We go to press tonight instead of tomorrow afternoon. And I'm going to tell how Delavan was shot down from ambush and nothing's being done about it. And I'm going to point out that when I killed a man on fair call this afternoon you wanted to run me in for murder.”

“You can't blame any of my boys for killing Delavan,” said Fennimore. “Delavan was my friend.”

“He was your friend, you mean,” said Carson, “until he told Quinn this afternoon that he was all through. After that, Fennimore, you couldn't afford to let him live.”

Fennimore hunched forward in his chair. “If you think you can get me to raise the ten thousand ante,” he declared, “you're wrong. It was worth that much to get you out of the way, but it's not worth any more.”

Carson laughed at him, a laugh that came between his teeth.

“You're still willing to pay that ten thousand?”

Fennimore nodded. “If you leave within the hour. If you get a horse and ride. If you never go back to the office again.”

“I knew I had you scared,” said Carson, “but I didn't know I could scare you quite so thoroughly.”

Slowly he backed out of the door, closed it and strode across the barroom.

Chapter Three
One Against the Town

Light glowed in the windows of the
Tribune
and Carson, hurrying across the street, saw the tiny office was filled with men.

Cries of greeting rose as he stepped through the door, and he stopped for a moment to recognize the faces. There was Gordon Purvis, the candidate for sheriff, Jim Owens, Dan Kelton, Humphrey Ross and others. Lee Weaver was there and so was Bill Robinson.

Jake shambled out of the back room, stick of type clutched in one hand, gunbelt joggling on his hip.

“Ain't you got that damned editorial writ yet?” he demanded. “Holy hoppin' horntoads –”

“Jake,” snapped Carson, “how soon can you get out a paper? An extra?”

Jake gasped. “A whole paper? A whole danged paper?”

“No, just one page. Sort of a circular.”

“Couple, three hours,” said Jake, “if I can use big type.”

“All right,” said Carson, “get ready for it. I'll start writing.”

Jake shifted the cud of tobacco to the left side of his jaw, spat at the mouse-hole.

Owens had risen, was making his way toward Carson. “What you planning to do?” he asked, and his question quieted the room so that Jake's feet, shuffling to the back, sounded almost like a roll of thunder.

“I'm going to blow Fennimore sky-high,” said Carson. “I'm going to force him to produce Delavan's murderer or face the assumption that it was he, himself, that ordered the killing.”

“You can't do that,” said Owens, softly.

“I can't!”

“No, you can't. This thing is getting out of hand. Range-war is apt to break wide open any minute. You know what that means. Our homes will be burned. Our families run out or murdered. Ourselves shot down from ambush.”

Purvis leaped to his feet. “You don't know what you're saying, Owens,” he shouted. “If they want to shoot it out, we have to shoot it out. If we back down this time, we're done. We'll never –”

“You're safe enough,” snarled Owens, “you're all alone. You haven't any family to be worried about. The rest of us –”

“Wait a minute,” yelled Carson. “Wait a minute.”

They quieted.

“Do you remember when you came in here six months ago to talk this thing over with me?” asked Carson. “You told me then that if I went with you, you'd string along with me. You swore you wouldn't let me down. You agreed this was the show-down. You said you wanted Purvis for sheriff and you'd back him –”

“We know that,” yelled Owens, “but it's different now –”

“Let me talk, Owens,” snapped Carson, his voice like a knife. “I want to tell you something. Something that happened this afternoon. Fennimore offered me ten thousand if I would sell you out – ten thousand, cash on the barrel-head and a promise that I'd get safely out of town. I turned him down. I told him I wouldn't sell you fellows out. And because I told him that, I have a murder charge hanging over me and Delavan is dead …”

He looked from one to another of them in the deadly quiet, each of them staring in turn at him.

“I refused to sell you men out,” said Carson, “and now you're selling me out. You won't back my play. I should have taken that ten thousand.”

Their eyes were shifty, refusing to meet his. A strange fear was upon them.

Kelton said, “But you don't understand, Morgan. Our wives and kids. We never thought it would come to this –”

From the street outside came wild shouts and the sound of running feet.

“Fire!” the single word ran through the startled night, crashed into the lamp-lighted
Tribune
office. “Fire! Fire!”

Carson spun toward the window, saw the leaping flames across the street.

“It's my place!” yelled Bill Robinson. “My store! Every dime I have – every dime –”

He was rushing for the door, clawing at the jamb, sobbing in his haste.

The room exploded in a surge of men leaping for the door. Across the street dark figures of men, silhouetted against the windows, hurdled the porch railing of the North Star, hit the street running. At the hitching posts the horses reared and screamed and pawed at the air in terror.

Flames were leaping and racing through the store, staining the whole street red. Smoke mushroomed like an angry cloud, blotting out the stars. Glass tinkled as a window was shattered by the heat.

Carson pounded through the dust. Running figures bumped into him. Voices bellowed – yelling for pails, for someone to start the windmill.

The flames shot through the roof with a gusty sigh, curled skyward, painting the pall of smoke with a bloody hue. One peak of the roof crumbled in as the fire raced through the seasoned timber. In the back something exploded with a whoosh, and for a moment the street was lighted by a garish flare that seemed to illuminate even the racing flames, then thick black clouds of smoke blotted it out.

The kerosene drum had gone up.

The building was dissolving, tongues of fire licking through the solid wall. Someone screamed a warning and the building went, the upper structure plunging in upon the flame-eaten nothingness that lay beneath it. Burning embers sailed into the street and the men ducked as they thudded in the dust.

For a moment the crowd stood stricken into silence, and all that could be heard was the hungry soughing of the fire as it ate its way into oblivion.

Men who had been rushing from the windmill with water to douse the side and roof of the sheriff's office to keep it from catching fire, lowered their buckets and as the fire died down a new sound came: the clanking of the windmill.

Through the crowd came Bill Robinson, face white, shirt smoldering where a brand had fallen. He stopped in front of Carson.

“Everything is gone,” he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. His eyes were looking beyond Carson, scarcely seeing him. “Everything. I'm ruined. Everything. …”

Carson reached out a hand and gripped the man by the shoulder, but he wrenched away and shook his head, and plodded down the street. Men stood aside to let him pass, not knowing what to say.

Gordon Purvis was at Carson's elbow. He said quietly: “We'll have to figure out something. Pass the hat –”

Carson nodded. “We may as well go back to the office. Nothing we can do here.”

A man came leaping through the open door of the
Tribune
, saw them and headed toward them at a run. Carson saw that it was Jake. And as the man drew near he knew there was something wrong.

“The type!” gasped Jake. “All over the floor and throwed out the door. And someone's used a sledge on the press –”

Carson broke into a run, heart down in his stomach, his stomach squeezing to put it back in place, the cold feet of apprehension jigging on his spine.

What Jake said was true.

The back shop was a shambles. Every type case had been jerked out of the cabinets and emptied, some of it heaved out of the door into the grass along the path that ran to the livery stable. The press was smashed as if by a heavy sledge. The same sledge had smashed the cans of ink and left them lying in sticky gobs upon the floor.

The work of a moment – of just the few minutes while the fire was racing through Robinson's store.

Carson stood slump-shouldered and stared at the wreckage.

He finally turned wearily to Purvis. “I guess,” he said, “we don't print that extra after all.”

Purvis shook his head. “Now we know that fire was no accident,” he declared. “They wanted us out of here, and they picked a way that was sure to get us out.”

They went back to the office and sat down to wait, but no one came in. Outside, hoofs pounded now and again as men mounted their horses and headed out of town. The hum of voices finally subsided until the street was quiet. Sound of occasional revelry still came from the North Star. The windmill, which no one had remembered to shut off, clanked on in the rising wind. The embers of the fire across the street still glowed redly.

Purvis, tilted back in his chair, fashioned a smoke with steady fingers. Jake hauled a bottle from his pocket, took a drink and passed it around.

“I guess they aren't coming back,” said Purvis, finally. “I guess all of them feel the way that Owens felt. All of them plumb scared.”

“What the hell,” asked Jake, “can you do for a gang like that? They come in here wantin' help, and now –”

“You can't blame them,” said Carson, shortly. “After all, they have families to think of. They have too much at stake.”

He picked up a pencil from his desk, deliberately broke it in one hand, hurled the pieces on the floor.

“They burned out Robinson,” he said. “Cold-bloodedly. They burned him out so they could wreck the shop. So they could stop that extra, scare us out of town. A gang like that would do anything. No wonder the other fellows didn't come back. No wonder they high-tailed for home.”

He glanced at Purvis. “How do you feel?” he asked.

Purvis' face didn't change. “Got a place where I can stretch out for the night?”

“Sure you want to?”

“Might as well,” said Purvis. “All they can do is burn down my shanty and run off my stock.” He puffed smoke through his nostrils. “And maybe, come morning, you'll need an extra gun.”

Carson awoke once in the night, saw Jake sitting with his back against the door, his head drooping across one shoulder, his mouth wide open, snoring lustily. The rifle lay across his knees.

Moonlight painted a white oblong on the floor and the night was quiet except for the racing windmill, still clattering in the wind.

Carson pulled the blanket closer around his throat and settled his head back on his coat-covered boots which were serving as a pillow. In the cot, Purvis was a black huddle.

So this is it,
thought Carson, staring at the moonlight coming through the window.

The press broken, the type scattered, the men he had been working for deserting, scared out once again by the guns that backed Fennimore. Nothing left at all.

He shrugged off the despair that reached out for him and screwed his eyes tight shut. After a while he went to sleep.

It was morning when he awoke again, with the smell of brewing coffee in his nostrils. Jake, he knew, had started a small fire in the old air-tight heater in the back. He heard the hiss of bacon hit the pan, sat up and hauled on his boots, shucked into his coat.

The cot was empty.

“Where's Purvis?” he called to Jake.

“Went out to get a pail of water,” said Jake. “Ought to be good and cold after running all night long.”

Somewhere a rifle coughed, a sullen sound in the morning air. Like a man trying to clear a stubborn throat.

For a moment Carson stood stock still, as if his boot-soles were riveted to the floor.

Then he ran to the side window, the window looking out on the windmill lot, half knowing what he would see there, half afraid of what he'd see.

Purvis was a crumpled pile of clothes not five feet from the windmill. The pail lay on its side, shining in the sun. A vagrant breeze fluttered the handkerchief around Purvis' neck.

The town was quiet. The rifle had coughed and broken the silence and then the silence had come again. Nothing stirred, not even the wind after that one solitary puff that had moved the handkerchief.

Carson swung slowly from the window, saw Jake standing in the door to the back room, fork in one hand, pan of bacon in the other.

“What was it?” Jake demanded. “Too tarnation early in the morning to start shootin'.”

“Purvis,” said Carson. “He's out there, dead.”

Jake carefully set the pan of bacon on a chair, laid the fork across it, walked to the corner and picked up his rifle. When he turned around his eyes were squinted as if they already looked along the gun-barrel.

“Them fellers,” he announced, “have gone a mite too far. All right, maybe, to shoot a hombre when he's half-expectin' it and has a chance at least to make a motion toward his own artillery. But 'taint right bushwhackin' a man out to get a pail of water.”

Jake spat at the mouse-hole, missed it. “Especially,” he declared, “before he's had his breakfast.”

“Look, Jake,” said Carson, “this fight isn't yours. Why don't you crawl out the back window and make a break for it? You could make it now. Maybe later you can't.”