Clifton Adams - Boomer

The marshal was thinking of a search party from Sabo, but Grant had the sudden final hope that the rider might be Turk Valois.

“Open the door,” Dagget said quietly, “but go no farther.”

Grant peered quickly through the crack but could not see the horseman. Then he began kicking away the packed earth at the bottom of the door, and a deluge of powdery snow spilled into the dugout as he pulled the door away from the facing.

“I wouldn't like to kill you,” Dagget said in his measured voice, “but I will if you don't do exactly as I say. Call out; let them know where we are.”

Grant swung half around and saw the marshal's revolver aimed directly at his back, and he knew that Dagget would be as good as his word. Then he called out, his voice strangely muffled on that blanket of snow, like shouting into a feather pillow.

There was no answer, but he still heard the sound of hoofs as a horse stamped nervously on the other side of the creek. “Call out again,” Dagget said, and Grant took a careful step forward, framing himself in the doorway. He cupped his hands around his mouth, but before a sound could escape his throat he sensed, rather than heard, the scream of the bullet. And then, almost instantly, he heard the sodden, matter-of-fact report of the rifle as the slug caught him under his left arm, spinning him around like some giant hand and slamming him to the dirt floor.

There was no pain at first, only shock, and as he lay on the floor he turned numbly to look at the marshal's amazed face. All color drained from Dagget's face as he shoved himself away from the wall and began crawling to Grant's side. Swearing savagely, he pulled Grant over on his back, ripped open the windbreaker, and probed for the wound with his blunt fingers.

“Who was it?” he demanded angrily, as though Grant had got himself shot on purpose in order to make his job more difficult.

“I don't know. I couldn't see.”

Now the pain was beginning to come, a bright flame that started under his left shoulder, reaching up to the base of his skull. The marshal probed harder, keeping his eyes on the dugout's open doorway.

“Who'd want to kill you?”

“I don't know. Farley, maybe.”

Dagget swore again and tried to straighten his own injured leg. “That bushwhacker knew just where you were. He was waiting across the creek for you to show yourself in the doorway. Farley couldn't have known about this dugout, could he?”

The first flare of pain had lessened now as a great ache spread out over the left side of his torso. “Farley couldn't have known. Turk Valois told me about the place just before I got away from the lease.”

Dagget's eyes slitted and his anger became something much more subtle and thoughtful. But he only said, “The bullet went right through the soft part of your shoulder; no bones broken that I can find.”

Now they heard the horse again, heading downstream on the other side of the creek, and Dagget began stripping the windbreaker and shirt away from Grant's shoulder. “Whoever it is, likely he'll head for the downstream crossing and come back to see what kind of job he did.”

With quiet expertness the marshal ripped off the shirt sleeve and bound it about the wound to stop the bleeding. “Do I get your word that you won't try to run if I give you your gun?”

Grant grinned thinly. “You get it... for whatever it's worth.”

Dagget didn't like it, but there was little he could do about it now. One wounded man stood little chance against a killer who'd stoop to bushwhacking.

Now, with a revolver in Grant's right hand, his left side didn't seem to hurt so much. His pain became bewilderment, and the bewilderment anger, as he dragged himself shakily to his feet. He helped Dagget hack to his place in the shadows, listening to the sound of hoofs returning on the dugout side of the creek. Now he heard the screech of cold leather as the rider dismounted, and the slow, careful steps as he approached the front of the dugout. “Grant!”

The voice was flat and toneless, and Grant groped In his memory for the face that went with that voice. He glanced at Dagget, and the marshal was grinning with even more savagery than usual.

“Lloyd,” he said quietly. “Kirk Lloyd.”

A prickle of warning went up Grant's back. He had faced this killer once and survived, but he felt that his luck had run out. You don't give a man like Lloyd a second chance and live to tell about it. Any man who will shoot from ambush is deadly—but Lloyd...

The steps were closer now. With his back against the far wall, Grant could hear the gunman's heavy breathing as he stood at the dugout's entrance. Only one lone thought circled like a soaring hawk in Grant's mind—why did Lloyd want to kill him? A gunman killed for money, not for the mere pleasure of it. Why had the killer gone to all this trouble, stalking him through the storm, to shoot him down from ambush?

Suddenly the dugout itself was a storm of violence as Lloyd fired two fast rounds blindly through the doorway, then stalked into the room. Grant glimpsed Dagget's grimace of pain as he tried to shift to a firing position.

Lloyd saw it, too, and in the same split second wheeled to fire at Dagget when a single explosion of Grant's .45 drove the gunman against the wall. The killer's face was a twisted picture of amazement as he dropped his own revolver and clawed at his chest.

Lloyd was dead before he fell to the dirt floor, before the sound of Grant's shot had ceased to reverberate around the walls of the dugout. And in the sudden silence that followed, Grant stood heavily with the smoking pistol held lax in his hand.

“Why?” he asked, his voice strange and leaden in his own ears.

And Dagget, who had met death face to face only a few seconds before, wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his wind-breaker. “Did Lloyd know about this hideout of yours?” he said at last.

Grant shook his head. “Not unless Valois told him.” Then he turned, his gaze clashing with Dagget's, and suddenly they were thinking the same thing. “Valois...”

The marshal sighed. “It looks like it.” Suddenly he laughed, but the sound was harsh. “You never know what goes on inside a man's head; experience is a poor teacher in that respect. There it was against my nose all the time, and I couldn't see it. I couldn't get my mind off Farley, I guess. He had a top lease on that land; he was the logical one to start trouble. And not only Farley. You were in the picture, too, standing to get rich by getting rid of the old man and marrying his daughter. Or you could have been tied up with Farley some way.” He shrugged. “But I never paid enough attention to Turk Valois.”

Grant stared at the marshal as though he had never seen the man before. Gone now was Dagget's savagery, and in its place was cold, machinelike calculation, as efficient and unfeeling as a Chinese abacus.

“I was looking for a man greedy for money,” the marshal went on quietly, ticking his thoughts off to himself. “I was thinking all along of that lease of Zack Muller's and how much money a good well would bring.” He squinted up at Grant. “I rode into Kiefer that day looking for a bank robber and ran into a murder. Bank robbers—usually they're greedy for money, but there was something I overlooked.”

He motioned with his revolver. “Close the door. We'll have to go on waiting here until the search party finds us.”

But Grant didn't move. “What was it that you overlooked?”

“They say hate and love are cut from the same cloth, they're that close to being the same thing. I figured it was a simple thing when Turk hired on for the Mullers, helped them out with workers, deliberately putting himself on Farley's black list. I figured he was still stuck on Rhea.”