Lassiter Tough Page 19

  The last Lassiter saw, she was tucking her body into a curl. And then a great cloud of dust erupted like a blinding midnight fog.

  Hurt as he was, bleeding from a dozen or more shotgun wounds, Lassiter was barely able to fling himself away from the forefeet of the terrified team. On down the street they raced, the buckboard tilting unsteadily. A great geyser of dirt and dust was hurled into the air from the left rear axle that was digging into the street.

  As the dust began to clear, Lassiter saw Sanlee step suddenly into view from a slot between buildings thirty feet away. The gun he had taken from Pinto George hung straight down his side.

  “All right, you son of a bitch!” Sanlee screamed. His hat was gone and coarse, reddish hair hung down on either side of his face. “You killed my sister, as sure as if you shot her with a gun!” Tears streamed into his beard and ran through the rust-colored hairs to lips stretched across bared teeth.

  Lassiter, sickened by what Sanlee had yelled about his sister, dug for the revolver he had thrust into his waistband. A bullet sliced across his right thigh like a hot iron. He stumbled and nearly went down.

  Sanlee was lurching toward him, drawing back the hammer of his weapon for another shot. That was when Lassiter emptied the .45 he had jerked from Semple’s holster. Sanlee’s image was as if viewed through heat waves. But the blurred vision received at least two of the bullets; the rest smashed into the wooden parapet above the building, which had lost its awning pole. One end of the wooden awning sagged precariously.

  “He’s down!” a man shouted. “Sanlee’s down!”

  Men swarmed around Lassiter much as they had the day he had beaten Shorty Doane with his fists. Letting the empty gun slip from his fingers, he pushed through the growing crowd over to where he had seen Millie hurled into the street. She was sitting up, supporting a broken arm.

  She looked up at him with a shocked, white face. “I tried my best to kill him. To kill my own brother.” Then the tears sprang from her eyes in a flood. “Oh, Lassiter …” was all she could manage.

  And when he turned to stumble over to where Sanlee lay at the edge of the street, she saw the bloodied back of his shirt and nearly fainted.

  Sanlee was staring up. A man fanned him with a hat.

  “Tell ’em about Buck Rooney,” Lassiter said, breathing hard.

  “Go to hell.”

  “I didn’t kill him. You know damn well I didn’t.”

  Sanlee was laughing when the light went out of his gray eyes and they stared, unblinking, up into the noonday sun directly overhead.

  It was found that both Clayburn and Luis Herrera had received superficial but painful wounds from a peripheral buckshot that had exploded from Doane’s shotgun. A bandaged Doc Clayburn gave instructions to Señora Herrera, who had come from Box C in a wagon and now was ready to take the wounded back to the ranch. One dead one, Rudy Ruiz, who had survived the ambush and stampede, had his luck run out in Santos.

  Lassiter didn’t go with the wagon. Isobel Hartney took charge of his care, putting him in her big bed above the store. Under the tragic circumstances, no one mentioned the moral implications of such an arrangement. Because of the wounds in his back, Lassiter was forced to sleep on his stomach. But one day he was able to turn over, which brought a smile of delight to the one who had been nursing him for a week.

  “My darling,” Isobel whispered. She started to take down her hair so that the sweet scent of it was in his nostrils. She whispered, “I’ve been thinking. We’ll run the store together. It’ll be yours as well as mine.”

  But he regretfully pushed her away and had a long talk. And when he had finished, she said bitterly, “It’s Millie Chandler, isn’t it?”

  He shook his head. And that gave her some satisfaction.

  That day he rode out to Box C. It seemed that a hundred miles had somehow been added to the trip. When he arrived, he was exhausted. Luis Herrera was sitting in a chair outside his small house, looking wan. He waved and Lassiter waved back. He found Millie sitting on the sofa, the bandage of her splinted arm only slightly whiter than her face. “I see you pried yourself away from Lady Bountiful.”

  “How are you feeling, Millie?”

  “Like hell.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. “How else? Without you.”

  He sat beside her on the sofa in silence for a few moments while he got his breath after the ride. He stared at the maw of the big stone fireplace. Somehow it reminded him of his own future—dark and without purpose. Then he flung aside the feeling of depression. He couldn’t help the way he was built. As he had once told Rep Chandler: “To see what’s on the other side of the mountain.”

  “I heard what you told the sheriff,” Millie said. “That Doc had been in some trouble back East and that you wondered if Brad had ever said anything about it. And when the sheriff said he hadn’t, you said something about letting sleeping dogs lie, that it hadn’t been Doc’s fault, the old killing. And the new killing couldn’t be blamed on you. Buck Rooney. You spoke right up to the sheriff.”

  “I did.”

  “And Sheriff Palmer was in his best baby-kissing, electioneering mood because you had reminded him that I, as Brad Sanlee’s only living relative, would take over his ranch. And that Diamond Eight in addition to Box C would make me a power in Tiempo County.”

  “So I did.” He gave her a rueful smile.

  “Damn it, Lassiter, I’d trade it all… . If only you were different. I don’t know how many times you’ve told me that you’re a drifter, that you can’t stay in one place very long… .” Her voice was shaking.

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking. Marcus Kilhaven …”

  “Oh, yes. Brad had spoken to him about me. I was to be bartered again as I was with poor old Rep. But Marcus said he told Brad right out that he didn’t want me that way, that I had to want him for himself. Not just to please my … my brother.” She put a hand to her eyes. “Brad’s dead and the horror is finished. But, my God, at what a price. The dead, the wounded …”

  “I wanted it to be just between the two of us—Brad an’ me. But it didn’t quite turn out that way.” He gave a deep sigh. “I better get over to my own quarters… .”

  “Stay the night, Lassiter. I want to argue against your leaving.” She bit her lips and tried to smile. “And I just might win out in the end.”

  But she didn’t. He rode out one midnight. He had left her a long note. One thing he dreaded was a tearful good-bye. But he would always remember the Santos country and the price of avenging the death of his friend, Vince Tevis, and of leaving behind two beautiful women. It would have been damned hard, had he been so inclined, to choose between them. But now he didn’t have to. His nature as a drifter was too strong.