The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

  “So what about it?” asked Quinn.

  “So it didn’t work.”

  “But it’ll work,” Quinn declared. “You will be arrested.”

  “Come ahead, then,” snapped Carson. He half-lifted the sixgun. “I’ll get you first, Quinn. The sheriff next –”

  “Hey,” yelled Jake, “what order do you want me to take ’em in? Plumb senseless for the two of us to be shooting the same people.”

  Quinn moved closer to Carson, lowered his voice. “Listen, Carson,” he said, “you’ve got until tomorrow to disappear.”

  “What?” asked Carson in mock surprise. “No ten thousand?”

  Chapter Two

  Gunsmoke Goes to Press

  Jake scrubbed the back of his neck with a grimy hand, his brow wrinkled like a worried hound’s.

  “You sure didn’t make yourself popular with the sheriff,” he declared. “Now he ain’t going to rest content until you’re plumb perforated.”

  “The sheriff,” announced Carson, “won’t make a move toward me until he’s heard from Fennimore.”

  “I’m half-hoping,” said Jake, “that Fennimore decides on shootin’. This circlin’ around, sort of growlin’ at one another like two dogs on the prod has got me downright nervous. Ain’t nothin’ I’d welcome more than a lively bullet party.”

  Carson tapped a pencil on the desk. “You know, Jake, I figure maybe we won that election right out there on the street. Before tomorrow morning there won’t be a man in Rosebud County that hasn’t heard how Bean backed down. A story like that is apt to lose him a pile of votes. Fennimore can scare a lot of people from voting for Purvis, but this sort of takes the edge off the scare. People are going to figure that since that happened to Bean, maybe Fennimore ain’t so tough himself.”

  “They’ll sure be makin’ a mistake,” said Jake. “Fennimore is just about the orneriest hombre that ever forked a horse.”

  Carson nodded gravely. “I can’t figure Fennimore will take it lying down. Maybe you better sneak out the back door, Jake, and tell Lee Weaver, over at the livery barn, to do a bit of riding. Tell the boys all hell is ready to pop.”

  “Good idea,” agreed Jake. He shuffled toward the back, and a moment later Carson heard the back door slam behind hm.

  There was no question, Carson told himself, tapping a pencil on the desk, that the showdown would be coming soon. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning … but it couldn’t be long in coming.

  Fennimore wasn’t the sort of man who would wait when a challenge was thrown at him, and what had happened that afternoon was nothing short of a challenge. First the refusal of the offer to buy the paper off, then the refusal to submit to arrest, and finally the bluffing that had sent Bean skulking back to the sheriff’s office.

  In his right mind, Carson told himself, he never would have done it, never would have had the nerve to do it. But he was sore clear through, and he’d done it without thinking.

  The front door opened and Carson looked up. A girl stood there, looking at him: a girl with foamy lace at her throat, silk gloves, dainty parasol.

  “I heard what happened,” she said. “I came right down.”

  Carson stood up. “You shouldn’t have,” he said. “I’m a fugitive from justice.”

  “You should skulk,” she said. “Don’t all fugitives skulk?”

  “Only when they are in hiding,” he said. “I’m not exactly in hiding.”

  “That’s fine,” said the girl. “Then you’ll be able to eat with us tonight.”

  “A murderer?” he asked. “Kathryn, your father might not like that. Think of it, a murderer eating with the banker and his charming daughter.”

  Kathryn Delavan looked squarely at him. “I’ll have Daddy come over when he’s through work and walk home with you. Probably he’ll have something to talk with you about.”

  “If you do that,” Carson said, “I’ll come.”

  They stood for a minute, silent in the room. A fly buzzed against a windowpane and the noise was loud.

  “You understand, don’t you, Kathryn?” asked Carson. “You understand why I have to fight Fennimore – fight for decent government? Fennimore came in here ten years ago. He had money, cattle and men. He settled down and took over the country – free range, he calls it now, but that’s just a term that he and men like him invented to keep for themselves things that were never theirs in the first place. It’s not democracy, Kathryn, it’s not American. It isn’t building the sort of country or the sort of town that common, everyday, ordinary folks want to live in.”

  He hesitated, almost stammering. “It’s sometimes a dirty business, I know, but if gunsmoke’s the only answer, then it has to be gunsmoke.”

  She reached out a hand and touched his arm. “I think I do understand,” she said.

  She turned away then, walked toward the door.

  “Daddy,” she told him, “will be over around six o’clock to bring you home.”

  Carson moved to the window, watched her cross the street and enter Robinson’s store. He stood there for a long time, listening to the buzzing of the fly. Then he went back to the desk and settled down to work.

  It was almost seven o’clock when Roger Delavan came, profuse with apology.

  “Kathryn will be angry with me,” he said, fidgeting with his hat, “but I had some work to do, forgot all about the time.”

  Outside, dusk had fallen on the street and the windows of the business places glowed with yellow light. There was a sharp nip in the rising wind, and Delavan turned up the collar of his coat. A few horses stood huddled, heads drooping at the hitching post in front of the North Star. Up the street a dog-fight suddenly erupted, as suddenly ceased.

  Carson and Delavan turned west, their boots ringing on the sidewalk. The wind whispered and talked in the weeds and grass that grew in the vacant space surrounding the creaking, groaning windmill tower.

  “I want to talk with you,” said Delavan, head bent into the wind, hat socked firmly on his head. “About what happened today. I am afraid you may think –”

  “It was a business deal,” Carson told him. “You said so, yourself.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” protested Delavan. “It was the rankest sort of bribery and attempt at intimidation I have ever seen. I’ve played along with Fennimore because of business reasons. Fennimore, after all, was the only business in Trail City for a long time. I blinked at a lot of his methods, thinking they were no more than the growing pains of any normal city. But after what happened today, I had to draw the line. I told Quinn this afternoon –”

  Red flame flickered in the weeds beside the tower, and a gun bellowed in the dusk. Delavan staggered, coughed, fell to his knees. His bowler hat fell off, rolled into the street. The wind caught it and it rolled on its rim, like a spinning wagon-wheel.

  A man, bent low, was running through the weeds, half-seen in the thickening dark.

  Carson’s hand dipped for his gun, snatched it free, but the man was gone, hidden in the thicker shadows where no lamplight reached from the windows on the street.

  Carson slid back the gun, knelt beside Delavan and turned him over. The man was a dead weight in his arms; his head hung limply. Carson tore open his coat, bent one ear to his chest, heard no thudding heart.

  Slowly, he laid the banker back on the ground, pulled the coat about him, then straightened up. The bowler hat no longer was in sight, but a half-dozen men were running down the street. Among them, he recognized Bill Robinson, the new store owner, by the white apron tied around his middle.

  “That you, Robinson?” asked Carson.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” said Robinson. “We heard a shot.”

  “Someone shot Delavan,” said Carson. “He’s dead.”

  They came up and stood silently for a moment, looking at the black shape on the ground. One of them, Carson saw, was Caleb
Storm, the barber. Another was Lee Weaver, the liveryman. The others he knew only from having seen them about town. Men from some of the ranches.

  Robinson glanced over his shoulder at the North Star. “Guess they didn’t hear the shot in there,” he said. “Probably helling it up a bit.”

  “I’m thinking about Kathryn,” said Carson. “Delavan’s daughter. Someone will have to tell her.”

  “That’s right,” declared Robinson. He considered it a moment, a square, blocky man, almost squatty in the semi-darkness of the street.

  “My old woman will go and stay with her,” he said, “but she can’t break the news to her, not all alone. Someone else will have to help her do it.”

  He looked at Carson. “You were going there just now. Kathryn told me when she came in to buy some spuds.”

  Carson nodded. “I suppose you’re right, Bill. Let’s get Delavan in someplace.”

  Storm and two of the other men lifted the body, started down the street.

  “Come down to the store for a minute,” said Robinson. “The old lady will be ready to go in a minute or so.”

  Carson followed Robinson. Weaver lagged until he fell in step with the editor. He stepped close to Carson and pitched his voice low.

  “I got word to Purvis,” he said. “He sent out riders. Some of the boys will be coming into town.”

  “I’ll be back at the office,” Carson told him, “as soon as I can get away.”

  Feet pattered on the sidewalk behind them and a woman’s voice cried out: “Daddy! Daddy!”

  Weaver and Carson spun around.

  It was Kathryn Delavan, running across the street, sobs catching in her throat. She would have rushed by, but Carson reached out and stopped her. “No, Kathryn,” he said. “Stay back here with us.”

  She clung to him. “You were so late,” she said, “that I came to see –”

  He held her close, awkward in his comforting.

  “You don’t know who –”

  Carson shook his head. “It was too dark.”

  Robinson lumbered through the dusk toward them. “Perhaps,” he said, “she might want to come to the store. My wife is there.”

  The girl stepped away from Carson. “No,” she said, “I want to go back home. Martha is there. I’ll be all right there with her.”

  She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “You will bring him home, too?”

  Robinson’s voice was understanding, almost soft. “Yes, miss, just as soon – In an hour or two.”

  She moved closer, took Carson’s arm, and they moved west up the street, toward the house where supper waited for a man who would not eat it.

  The clock on the bar said ten when Carson pushed open the door of the North Star.

  The place was half-full, and in the crowd Carson singled out a handful of Fennimore’s riders – Clay Duffy, John Nobles, Madden and Farady at the bar; Saunders and Downey at a table in a listless poker game. The rest of the men were in from other ranches or were from the town.

  Carson walked to the bar and signaled to the bartender.

  The man came over. “What’ll it be?”

  “Fennimore around?” asked Carson.

  “You don’t give a damn for your life, do you?” snarled the man.

  Carson’s voice turned to ice. “Is Fennimore here?”

  The man motioned with his head. “In the back.”

  For a moment the room had grown silent, but once again it took up its ordinary clatter of tongue and glass and poker chip. One or two men smiled at Carson as he walked by, but others either turned their heads or did not change expression.

  Without knocking, Carson pushed open the back door, stepped into the smoke-filled room.

  Three men stared at him from a single round table decorated by two whisky bottles, staring with that suddenly vacant, vicious stare that marks an interrupted conversation.

  One was Fennimore, a huge man, wisps of black hair hanging out from under his broad-brimmed hat. Quinn and Bean were on either side of him.

  For a moment the stare was unbroken and the silence held. Fennimore was the one who broke it. “What do you want?” he asked, and his voice was like a lash, hard and cold and with a sting in every word.

  “I came,” said Carson, “to see what was being done about Delavan’s murder.”

  “So,” said Fennimore slowly. “So, what do you want to be done about it?”

  “I want the man who killed him found.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “I’ll say that you don’t want him found. On the front page of the Tribune.”

  “Look here, Morgan,” said Quinn, “you’re in no position to say that. When you yourself are wanted for murder.”

  “I’m here,” said Carson. “Go ahead and take me.”

  The three sat unmoving. Fennimore’s tongue licked his upper lip, briefly. Bean’s whisky-flushed face drained to pasty white.

  “No,” said Carson. “All right, then –”

  “Quinn,” interrupted Fennimore, “gave you until tomorrow morning to get out of town. That still holds.”

  “I’m not getting out,” said Carson. “The day when you can tell a man to get out and make it stick is over, Fennimore. Because in another week we’re electing a new sheriff, one who will uphold the law of the country and not the law of one cow-boss.”

  “It’s your damned paper,” snarled Fennimore. “You and your lousy stories that give me all the trouble. Stirring up the people –”

  “What Fennimore means,” said Quinn, smiling, “is that you’ll never go to press again …”

  “But I will,” said Carson. “Tonight. I’m not waiting until tomorrow. We go to press tonight instead of tomorrow afternoon. And I’m going to tell how Delavan was shot down from ambush and nothing’s being done about it. And I’m going to point out that when I killed a man on fair call this afternoon you wanted to run me in for murder.”

  “You can’t blame any of my boys for killing Delavan,” said Fennimore. “Delavan was my friend.”

  “He was your friend, you mean,” said Carson, “until he told Quinn this afternoon that he was all through. After that, Fennimore, you couldn’t afford to let him live.”

  Fennimore hunched forward in his chair. “If you think you can get me to raise the ten thousand ante,” he declared, “you’re wrong. It was worth that much to get you out of the way, but it’s not worth any more.”

  Carson laughed at him, a laugh that came between his teeth.

  “You’re still willing to pay that ten thousand?”

  Fennimore nodded. “If you leave within the hour. If you get a horse and ride. If you never go back to the office again.”

  “I knew I had you scared,” said Carson, “but I didn’t know I could scare you quite so thoroughly.”

  Slowly he backed out of the door, closed it and strode across the barroom.

  Chapter Three

  One Against the Town

  Light glowed in the windows of the Tribune and Carson, hurrying across the street, saw the tiny office was filled with men.

  Cries of greeting rose as he stepped through the door, and he stopped for a moment to recognize the faces. There was Gordon Purvis, the candidate for sheriff, Jim Owens, Dan Kelton, Humphrey Ross and others. Lee Weaver was there and so was Bill Robinson.

  Jake shambled out of the back room, stick of type clutched in one hand, gunbelt joggling on his hip.

  “Ain’t you got that damned editorial writ yet?” he demanded. “Holy hoppin’ horntoads –”

  “Jake,” snapped Carson, “how soon can you get out a paper? An extra?”

  Jake gasped. “A whole paper? A whole danged paper?”

  “No, just one page. Sort of a circular.”

  “Couple, three hours,” said Jake, “if I can use big type.”

/>   “All right,” said Carson, “get ready for it. I’ll start writing.”

  Jake shifted the cud of tobacco to the left side of his jaw, spat at the mouse-hole.

  Owens had risen, was making his way toward Carson. “What you planning to do?” he asked, and his question quieted the room so that Jake’s feet, shuffling to the back, sounded almost like a roll of thunder.

  “I’m going to blow Fennimore sky-high,” said Carson. “I’m going to force him to produce Delavan’s murderer or face the assumption that it was he, himself, that ordered the killing.”

  “You can’t do that,” said Owens, softly.

  “I can’t!”

  “No, you can’t. This thing is getting out of hand. Range-war is apt to break wide open any minute. You know what that means. Our homes will be burned. Our families run out or murdered. Ourselves shot down from ambush.”

  Purvis leaped to his feet. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Owens,” he shouted. “If they want to shoot it out, we have to shoot it out. If we back down this time, we’re done. We’ll never –”

  “You’re safe enough,” snarled Owens, “you’re all alone. You haven’t any family to be worried about. The rest of us –”

  “Wait a minute,” yelled Carson. “Wait a minute.”

  They quieted.

  “Do you remember when you came in here six months ago to talk this thing over with me?” asked Carson. “You told me then that if I went with you, you’d string along with me. You swore you wouldn’t let me down. You agreed this was the show-down. You said you wanted Purvis for sheriff and you’d back him –”

  “We know that,” yelled Owens, “but it’s different now –”

  “Let me talk, Owens,” snapped Carson, his voice like a knife. “I want to tell you something. Something that happened this afternoon. Fennimore offered me ten thousand if I would sell you out – ten thousand, cash on the barrel-head and a promise that I’d get safely out of town. I turned him down. I told him I wouldn’t sell you fellows out. And because I told him that, I have a murder charge hanging over me and Delavan is dead …”

  He looked from one to another of them in the deadly quiet, each of them staring in turn at him.