Ralph Compton - West of the Law

Knowles threw McBride one last, scared glance, then scampered along the platform to his office, looking over his shoulder all the way.

It had been in McBride’s mind to fight Donovan and the Allisons at the station. Now he decided against it. He’d only be throwing his life away and that would hardly be of any help to Shannon, or the hundred young girls coming in on the next day’s train.

McBride walked from the station and faded into the darkness. When he was hidden by the night he lay on his back in a clump of tall Indian grass and stared at the spangled stars. He needed time to think.

Less than ten minutes later he heard the flat statement of two shots from the station.

McBride smiled. Apparently Sean Donovan had been most displeased with the talkative Mr. Knowles.

Chapter 29

John McBride spent an hour listening to the night. Finally, when he heard no further sounds of pursuit he climbed to his feet. For a moment his wide-shouldered silhouette stood against the sky and blotted out a thousand stars, but the rest drew closer around him, outlining him in a blaze of icy fire.

Tired of the smiling, silent moon, the prairie wind sought out McBride, eager to tell its tales, tugging at him to get his attention. Unheeding, he walked into the darkness toward the lights of town.

It was time to take the fight to Sean Donovan. There was now no other way to free Shannon and leave behind High Hopes forever.

Wary of the prowling Allisons, McBride kept to the alleys, lost in their secretive shadows. Nothing about him shone or glittered and he became one with the darkness, a tired, hungry, grim-faced man about to battle odds that would make lesser men shudder and choose a different path.

McBride wondered at that. Had the West changed him so much? Only recently, as early as tonight, had he at last come to accept its values. He realized that there were some injustices a man could not turn his back on, no matter how much he told himself that they were no concern of his. To take Shannon and run away from what was happening in High Hopes would be to undo all that he’d once held sacred—honor, courage, integrity. Blinded by his love for a woman and bound to protect her, he’d lost his way. Now he had found it again.

No matter what might happen in the next few hours, he would not run away and piss on his life.

McBride crossed the crowded, jostling street, unnoticed among so many, and took to the alley alongside the Golden Garter. He had seen no sign of Donovan and the Allisons, and the young miner’s body had long since been removed from the boardwalk.

Gamble Trask’s office had been at the back of the saloon, walled off from the rest of the building. On cat feet, McBride stepped through the alley to the rear of the Golden Garter. If Donovan was in the office, he’d find a way to get at the man. A curtained window spilled subdued light onto the ground and gleamed on the blackened, upright beams of the fortune-teller’s shack McBride had destroyed.

He stepped closer to the window.

The curtains were drawn, but one had snagged on a splinter of wood sticking up from the sill, leaving a small, triangular opening at the bottom. McBride got down on a knee at the window and peered inside.

He watched for a couple of minutes, then rose to his feet. A retching pain clutching at his gut. He reeled away from the window and stumbled into the darkness.

There was only one safe place he knew, a place where he could ride out the pain that racked him and bring order to his whirling brain. He would go to Marshal Clark’s barn.

McBride staggered through the cartwheeling night, bent over, his fevered gaze on the ground ahead of him. Finally—he would never know how—he reached the barn and threw himself into a stall. The mustang turned its head, saw him and whinnied softly. Too sick to notice, McBride rolled on his back, his eyes open but staring into nothingness.

The pain had faded, to be replaced by a green sickness that twisted and turned in his belly. He closed his eyes, trying to blot out what he’d seen in Donovan’s office, but the vision stayed with him, stark and painful as sunlight reflecting on ice.

Try as he might, the scene replayed itself in his head, over and over again, a torment reserved for the worst of the damned.

He again saw Shannon in Donovan’s arms, their hungry, open mouths together. He watched Donovan reach with thick, fumbling fingers for the hooks at the back of Shannon’s dress. He saw her throw back her head and laugh, then lightly slap Donovan’s hands away and, one by one, start to undo the hooks herself. Donovan, his eyes hot, nuzzled her neck and finally the top of the dress dropped around Shannon’s hips. Her naked breasts thrust against his chest. . . .

Unable to watch anymore, McBride had turned away and fled blindly into the mocking night.

He rolled on his side and pressed his face into the harsh straw under him. He felt dirty, a lousy, crawling kind of uncleanliness, both from watching what had happened and from the certain knowledge that he’d been used, played for a fool.

Dolly had been right, McBride realized. Shannon Roark loved only herself, and it hadn’t taken her long to figure out that Sean Donovan could do more for her than he ever could.

A big house, servants, expensive jewels, a carriage and four—all those things Donovan could provide and more. She had made her choice.

Sick at heart, McBride pushed his face deeper into the straw, closed his burning eyes and waited, sleepless, for the dawn.

Thin daylight slanted into the barn through the open door, and somewhere a rooster strutted on a dung heap and crowed that he was king of the world.

McBride climbed to his feet and brushed wisps of straw from his clothes and hair. The pain was gone and only a vague anger was left. What Shannon had done to him was just another betrayal in a town where nothing ever was as it seemed.

But he vowed, no matter what, he would not betray himself. Donovan was expecting to score big from the sale of the girls from the orphan train. But McBride would not let it happen. Somehow he would stop it.

‘‘Look at me,’’ he’d told Dolly. ‘‘I’m only one man.’’

But if he’s got sand, sometimes one man is all it takes. McBride took some cold comfort in that thought.

He walked to the door of the barn and looked around. Dolly was standing outside the front of the house, rubbing brass polish onto the door knocker. She turned and saw him. She didn’t smile. Bending, she put the can of polish and the rag at the bottom of the door and walked toward him. The hard morning light was unkind to her and did not allow a single line on her face to pass unnoticed.

‘‘I thought you’d be back for your horse,’’ the woman said. She glanced beyond him into the dark barn. ‘‘Where is Shannon?’’

‘‘She won’t be leaving with me. Today or any other day.’’

It took a few moments for that to register. Then Dolly said, ‘‘You found out about her?’’

‘‘Yes. The hard way. She played me for a sap.’’ There was sadness in his face, but the anger was stronger.

The woman nodded. ‘‘That’s Shannon’s style.’’ Her eyes softened a little. ‘‘I’m sorry, McBride.’’

‘‘So am I.’’

He felt he owed it to Dolly to tell her something, and he told her now. ‘‘I plan on being at the railroad station at noon today when the orphan train gets here.’’

‘‘You’re going to stop it.’’

‘‘I’ll try.’’

‘‘I don’t give two bits for your chances, McBride. Donovan will have plenty of gunhands with him.’’

McBride smiled. ‘‘Not so long ago you told me it was my duty to stop it. Have you used the woman’s prerogative to change her mind?’’