Clifford Simak - Grotto of the Dancing Deer - And Other Stories

“Give me that pail of water,” said a voice. “Damn it, he’s playing possum, that’s what.”

Water sloshed into Packard’s face with stinging force, ran in ice-cold rivulets off his hair and down his neck, sopping his shirt.

Packard shook his head, opened his eyes, stared at the man before him.

Pinky held the bucket in his hand and Hurley stood beside him, one hand on his gun-butt. Marks leaned against a tree, holding the free end of the rope which angled down from the limb above Packard’s head. Sylvester squatted on his heels a few feet from where Hurley stood. Pop Allen was putting wood on a small, newly-kindled fire.

And beyond Pop, hands tied behind her and with the rope lashed loosely around another tree, was Alice Page. There was a streak of dirt across her face and she had lost her hat and her hair had fallen down over one shoulder. Her dress was dusty and bedraggled.

“How do you feel?” asked Pinky.

“Better,” said Packard, “than you’re going to feel when I get through with you.”

“We’re going to hang you,” Pinky told him. “We’re going to string you up and leave you hangin’ here for the crows to eat.”

Marks laughed, showing his teeth through his heavy beard. “You forgot, Pinky. We ain’t going to leave him hangin’. This here is my rope and I ain’t going to lose it. Too good a rope to go away and leave it.”

Alice Page’s face was twisted with horror and across the few yards that separated them, Packard’s eyes caught hers, held them for a moment.

“What you going to do with her?” he asked.

Marks laughed again, a high-keyed, nasty laugh. Pinky said: “We’re holding her until her old man comes to terms. He’s been raisin’ too much hell to suit the boss.”

Packard stared at the girl. Her head still was high, high with that bewitching tilt that he remembered from the other times he’d seen her.

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Preacher Page had told him. “She’s just angry because I’m sending her away.”

But Preacher Page hadn’t said she was leaving the next morning and he hadn’t asked. He should have warned the old man. Should have told him not to send her on the next coach. But there had been other things to think of, other things to say.

Randall had known, of course. Somehow Randall had found out. Hurley, perhaps. Hurley and Page still were friends and Hurley might have known. And Hurley would do anything that would help himself.

It wasn’t only gold that Randall had wanted off the coach. It had been the girl as well … the girl to hold as a whip over Preacher Page’s head. A way to make Preacher knuckle down, make him forget all about martial law, silence his demands for law and order.

Marks twitched on the rope and it tightened on Packard’s throat with a strangling jerk.

“What the hell are we waiting for?” asked Marks. “We might as well string up this saddle stiff and be on our way.”

“Wait a second,” said Packard.

Slowly he rose to his feet, stood leaning against the tree, his head light and giddy with the effort of standing on his own.

“You’re wasting your time,” snarled Pinky. “You can’t talk yourself out of that rope. We got you dead to rights and if you talked a million years we still would run you up.”

Packard looked at Hurley and the man’s eyes moved away, unwilling to meet the stare. Sylvester still squatted on his heels, scratching at the ground with a stick he had picked up, his broad-brimmed hat shading his face.

“If you got anything to say,” said Pinky, “go ahead and spit it out. We ain’t ones to deny a man a last word. Last smoke, too, if you want it. Hurley will roll you a smoke.”

“The hell with it,” snapped Hurley. His hand plunged for his gun-butt and the gun was coming out, a glare of steel in the brilliant sunlight. Packard, startled, crouched back against the tree, his stomach muscles tightening as if by contracting them they might be armor against the coming bullet.

Sylvester went into action from the ground. Like a compressed spring, he rose and hurled himself at Hurley’s arm. The gun coughed sharply and a bullet chunked with a vicious clap into the tree trunk inches from Packard’s head.

The gun flew from Hurley’s hand and Hurley dropped back a pace, caressing his twisted wrist.

“Damn you,” he snarled. “I’ll—”

“Come ahead,” Sylvester invited him. “Come ahead and do it.” His hand hovered like a waiting hawk above his six-gun butt.

Hurley did not move. “Go ahead and haul him up,” he yelled. “What are you waiting for? What—”

“You seem too anxious to have him hauled up,” Marks said. “Maybe there’s a reason for it. Come to think of it, you’re the one he told to climb up and throw down the gold. Seems like maybe he was pretty sure that you would do it without making any trouble. Seems like maybe we ought to have a talk—”

“Talk!” yelled Hurley. “That’s all you hombres do. You sit around and shoot off your yaps and never get nothing done.”

“Shut up!” snapped Pinky.

Hurley glared at him.

Crouched against the tree, Packard closed his eyes, felt the throb of his wounded shoulder shaking his whole body. He had held hopes that Hurley might step in and help. But that was out now. Hurley had dropped him like a hot potato at the moment when his string had been played out. Hurley was not a man who would back lost causes.

“What Marks says is right,” declared Pinky. “What do you know about Packard, Hurley?”

“Not a thing,” said Hurley. “He’s just a new man, that’s all.”

“I can tell you something about him,” said a new voice.

Packard opened his eyes. “You keep out of this,” he warned.

But Alice Page paid him no attention. She was looking at Pinky and there was a challenging defiance burning in her eyes.

“Mr. Packard,” she said, “is a United States marshal.”

A bombshell of quietness broke upon the group, a bombshell of chill and quietness.

Alice Page’s words dripped through the quietness. “If you kill him,” she said, “you’ll be hunted down like mad dogs. The government never forgets a thing like that. It isn’t just like killing anyone, you see.”

Pinky moved slowly toward the girl.

“You lie,” he snarled. “You know damn well that he’s no marshal. He didn’t act like no marshal back there at the stage. He told Hurley to climb up and throw down the bags of dust and no marshal would do that. And he didn’t say a thing about arresting us. A marshal always shoots off his face about arresting someone.”

He halted and stood squarely in front of the girl, but Alice Page stood unmoved, her chin up.

“Go ahead, then,” she challenged. “Go ahead and hang him and see what happens to you. That’s the surest thing that you can do to break up your rotten gang.”

Pinky hauled back his arm. “I have a notion to slap you down,” he snarled. “You dirty little—”

“Pinky!” yelled Packard.

Pinky whirled around.

“Leave the girl alone,” warned Packard. “She’s not mixed up in this. She’s only doing what she can to help me.”

Pinky sneered. “Sweet on you, eh?”

“Damn you, Pinky,” roared Packard. He dug in his heel and thrust himself out from the tree, but Marks hauled smartly on the rope and he was jerked back, heels dragging, noose tighter around his throat. With his one good hand, he clawed erect against the tree, stood gasping.

Across the space that separated them, he looked at Alice Page.

“It was a good try, miss,” he whispered, “and thanks a lot, but it just won’t hold water.”

Deliberately, Pinky whirled around, arm swinging with him. His palm smacked open-handed across Alice Page’s mouth and drove her back, staggering against the tree. Her body slammed hard into the tree, knees buckling beneath her. She fell forward and the rope jerked up her hands and held her in a kneeling position.