Clifton Adams - Boomer

“He is,” Grant said steadily. “I've seen the way he looks at her.”

But the marshal shook his head. “You're forgetting what I said about the two being cut from the same cloth—love and hate. Maybe he didn't know which it was. But it's my guess that Valois killed Zack Muller. It's my guess, too, that Kirk Lloyd was working for Turk.”

Grant's frown deepened. “It was Turk who went to Kiefer and got Lloyd to take the job.”

“And it was Turk, probably, who sent Lloyd gunning for you this morning,” Dagget said wearily. “Now shut the door before we both freeze.”

But that single, circling question was still in Grant's mind and he could not rid himself of it, could not rest because of it. “But why? Valois and I got along all right. Why would he want to kill me?”

“I intend to ask Valois about that,” Dagget said, shrugging. And he started to motion again toward the door when Grant raised his revolver with studied deliberateness.

“I'll have to go back on my word, Marshal.”

Dagget blinked, then retired once more behind his mask of anger. “Walk through that doorway and I'll shoot you, Grant.”

“That's a chance I'll have to take.”

“Don't make yourself a worse fool than you already are!” the marshal snarled. “Even if you did escape this dugout, I'd catch you. Sooner or later I'd catch you, if it's the last thing I ever did!”

They studied each other like two wolves, and at last Grant said, “Yes, I know. But I'm going anyway. If Valois would try to have me killed, there's no telling what else he's got in mind. If he's that full of hate, the least he'll do is try to ruin the Muller well. When Kirk Lloyd doesn't come back, Valois is going to know that something went wrong...”

He paused for a moment, then turned toward the door. “I'm going to stop him before he carries out the rest of his plan, Dagget—if you don't shoot me in the back as I walk out of here.”

He walked out of the dugout, purling the stockade door into place from the outside. Dagget did not shoot.

About fifty yards below the dugout Grant found Lloyd's horse tied up in a stand of scrub oak. As he climbed painfully up to the saddle a dazzling sun began to appear over the edge of the rolling, snow-softened prairie. A new day was beginning. Grant pulled his hat down on his forehead and turned the horse toward Sabo—he hoped this day would turn out better than the last one.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

TOPPING THE RIM of Glenn Basin the new oil field looked clean and sterile beneath its cover of glistening snow. The endless chain of freighters had commenced again like some bright, moving ribbon thrown down among the derricks. And from that great distance the derricks themselves looked like a toy forest of Christmas trees, standing straight and serene, their hard angles softened and rounded now with a frosting of glittering ice.

Everything about the scene seemed quiet and peaceful-even Sabo looked clean and white under the snow—and for a moment Grant almost forgot how much greed and violence lay before him in that derrick-studded saucer.

He rode obliquely down from the rim, his head pulled deep into the collar of his windbreaker. The pain in his shoulder was like a small fire blown to white heat, but Dagget's bandage had stopped the bleeding, and stiffness had not yet had time to set in. Anyway, the pain was a secondary thing now, crowded to the back of his consciousness by more pressing thoughts.

He rode on, circling Sabo, keeping to the ridges and high ground as much as possible, watching for the search party that would soon be starting out to look for Dagget.

Now he could see the tall white cottonwoods that marked Slush Creek's course across the basin, and soon he could make out the Muller derrick on the other side standing tall and proud, the construction of the crown block just begun.

He approached the lease from downstream at a shallow crossing, and the ice cracked like rifle shots as he urged the reluctant animal into the freezing water. From the other side he could see the dark smoke streaming up from the dugout's chimney and from the two stovepipes of the bunkhouse, but the lease itself seemed deserted.

Slowly, like a tired old man, he climbed down from the saddle and tied Lloyd's horse in some brush behind the shack. Beyond this point he had no plan. His only aim had been to return to the lease, and now that he was here he was not sure what to do next.

Then, between the naked girts and sway braces of the derrick he saw a man come out of the belt house and swing under the derrick floor to the cellar. The working crew— the rig builders and roustabouts—were still in the bunkhouse waiting out the tail end of the storm.

All but one man, who worked alone under the floor of the icy derrick. A big man wearing a loud mackinaw and a flap-eared cap, a man who moved with the litheness of a mountain cat, a man who nursed a consuming anger....

Grant felt the hand of caution touch him as he swung wide behind the dugout and headed toward the derrick on the windward side of the belt house. He could not silence his approach on that crackling crust of snow and there was no use trying. He had his revolver in his hand as he stepped into the sheet-iron belt house which housed the huge band wheel, and he could almost feel the rigidity of the sudden silence from beneath the derrick floor.

“Is that you, Lloyd?”

Grant moved as quietly as possible past the band wheel and newly installed sand reel.

“Kirk?” Valois called again, sharply.

Now Grant moved from the floor of the belt house to the derrick. He knelt, grasped the edge of the flooring timbers, and swung down to the rig's cellar. He felt his wound tear open under Dagget's bandage, and the brief knifelike pain that drove through his left side was breathtaking. But he landed on his feet in the gloom of the cellar, revolver ready and cocked, and Turk Valois wheeled sharply, a small bundle of dynamite sticks in one hand.

And Grant said quietly, “Put it down, Valois. Lloyd won't be coming back.”

Surprisingly, Turk Valois smiled, but the expression was as cold as the winter morning. “So Kirk failed again,” he said mildly. “I should have done the job myself.”

“Put it down,” Grant said again, indicating the dynamite.

But the runner held his cold smile and shook his head. “When I put it down, you'll never know it, Grant. Have you ever seen what a handful of this stuff can do at close quarters?”

Now, his eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom, Grant saw three more dynamite bundles, like the one Valois held, lashed to three of the derrick's huge wooden legs. He tried to keep his voice calm and his eyes away from the compact packet of violent death. “So you were going to blow up the derrick,” he said.

“You're wrong. I am going to blow up the derrick!”

Grant thought that he was beginning to understand, and now his voice was edged with bitterness. “So you were working for Farley all along! Even when you brought us the workers. When you hired on yourself. You were doing it for Farley, seeing to it that the Mullers lost their lease.”

The runner's mouth twisted with sudden hatred. “I wouldn't spit on Farley! What I do, I do for myself.” Then he smiled again, as suddenly and coldly as before. “You don't understand that, do you, Grant? A saddle bum like you, a hard-scrabble farmer—you wouldn't know about pride, would you? Pride is the most important thing in the world to some men.”

Like Dagget, Grant found it hard to believe that a man could do what Valois had done for any reason other than greed. But the truth was in Valois' eyes. If he had never told the truth before, he was telling it now.

“I see,” Grant said heavily. “But is pride worth dying for?”