"We're only tellin' you what happened," Lyans said defensively.

"You accuse Joe of clubbin' a man to death with an iron. It's a lie. Much as I hate his guts, I won't believe that of him."

Lyans glanced around at the others for support. None came.

Blaze gave only half his attention to what was said after that, for he was puzzled by this change in Yace, in the cowman's defending his son now, where four hours ago he had driven him from home a second time. Trying to see what lay behind the old man's stubbornly defiant att.i.tude, Blaze came to the gradual realization of a truth that had escaped him all these years.

That other time it had been the same, Yace publicly defending his wild and reckless offspring, while privately making Joe's life unbearable. Then, having driven Joe into committing a foolhardy act, having forced him to make that attempt at independence, Yace had turned on his son with an awesome intensity. The reason, Blaze knew now for the first time, was that Yace Bonnyman put a higher value on public opinion than he did on understanding. Just now he was confused, hiding behind his natural belligerence until he made up his mind which way the wind blew. Perhaps he really believed what he claimed, that Joe wasn't capable of coldblooded murder. But stronger than that belief, Blaze knew, was anger at these men for having branded his own flesh and blood with the mark of suspected murder. Yace was being prodded at his most tender spot, his pride, and he rebelled. And Blaze now saw in him not the ma.s.sive symbol of brute strength and power he had always seemed, but simply an old man, harried and uncertain, more to be pitied than admired.

The foreman's glance strayed around the big cavernous living room. Even the dozen men grouped here at its far end were lost in its immensity. It was a dreary room where once it had been gay and cheerful. Most of its feminine touches were gone; its high-beamed ceiling sent back hollow echoes of the subdued voices; its somber emptiness was a far cry from those days when Caroline Bonnyman had filled it with countless guests and parties and good times. Like the night we celebrated their twentieth anniversary, Blaze was thinking. Seven cases of champagne and the table saggin' under all that food. Yace with his arm across Joe's shoulders, both of them bellowin' like a pair of tomcats over there by the piano. Couldn't hear yourself talk for the laughin' and the music. These days the room, always closed, was a striking symbol of Yace Bonnyman's last few barren years.

Yet for a brief moment now, as Yace countered a statement of Lyans's with-"Blast it, he had money! Why would he bust open a safe?"-Blaze had the feeling that the room might once again come awake before a revival of the old carefree days. He was momentarily inclined to think that he had been mistaken, that maybe this time Yace meant what he was saying, that he was with his son once more. They would make an unbeatable pair, come what might. Then, dully, he realized that this was wishful thinking, that Yace was merely keeping a hold on his pride by this defense of Joe, that there could never be a reconciliation between father and son. And it would take that, nothing short of it, to bring alive the haunting memories Blaze always a.s.sociated with this room.

With an effort, Blaze brought his attention around to what Lyans was saying, hearing: "All right, I'll go along with you in hopin' it wasn't Joe. But who was it?"

Blaze himself was speaking before he quite realized it, wording the first idea that struck him: "Why not check on where Neal Harper was tonight?"

The deputy's glance narrowed as it came around to Blaze. "What's Harper got to do with this?" he queried tonelessly.

"He's out of a job, him and his gun-slick crew, now that Middle Arizona's saved itself a sc.r.a.p."

"So he's out of a job," Lyans agreed warily.

"Supposin' he figured it this way." Blaze paused a moment to think the thing through. He looked at the others before continuing. "Winter's on the way and him and his hardcases will be ridin' the grubline. He's sore because Vanover can't pay him fightin' wages any longer, so he decides to collect what he figures the outfit owes him. He blows open the Acme safe. As he hightails, he runs into Merrill."

A weighty silence followed his words. It was Yace who finally said: "Now we're gettin' somewhere. It'd take a cold-blooded devil like Harper to kill that way. When you do find your man, it'll turn out to be something like Blaze says, some . . ."

"Hold on!" Lyans cut in. "What about that hatband of Joe's? We can't just settle on a man we'd like to see guilty and say he done it."

"No," agreed Blaze, "but that hatband don't prove anything. Joe could have lost it. I'm only tryin' to point out that there are other angles to look into. You'll admit Harper's a possibility. He's proddy, dangerous as a sidewinder, and probably riled over bein' fired. He might've found the hatband and worked a frame-up around it. All I say is . . . check up on a few like him."

The eyes of the gathered men left Blaze as the ma.s.sive door leading out to the portal opened and Shorty Adams, an Anchor crewman, gaunt even in the shapeless loose hang of his poncho, came through it and closed it in a hard slam against the rush of wind. His glance drifted over the group, and then swung to the room's far end.

"Where's Sam Thrall?" he queried, frowning.

"Not here," answered Clark Dunne.

"Then Quinn's right," Shorty breathed, and their attention came more sharply to him. "Somethin' mighty queer's happened, Lyans. Quinn says Sam dropped back to fix his cinch a mile or so below Sommers's place. He hadn't caught up by the time you pulled in here. Couple of minutes ago, Quinn says, he wondered what was slowin' Sam, so he took a look out the cook shack door to the head of the lane, to see if he was on the way in. Then he seen somethin' movin' over by the wagon barn, a rider. He swears it was Sam's black, the one with the two white stockings. So he calls out. Instead of answerin', this jasper fades out of sight down by the big corral."

"Quinn's spooked over nothin'," Lyans said. "How's breakfast comin'?" He had delegated Adams and Quinn to cook a meal for the posse in the absence of the cook, who was somewhere up Porcupine Caon with the Anchor chuck wagon and crew.

"It'll be ready in a minute." Shorty's face didn't lose its look of gravity. "You'd better come have a look, Bill. We went over to the shed and found a lot o' gear and harness layin' around, and maybe half a bushel of oats scattered on the floor by the bin. That ain't the way we keep the place, is it, Blaze?"

"Shucks, no," Yace answered for his foreman. Although he wore only underwear, Levi's, and boots, having been roused from bed by the posse's arrival, he was the first to start toward the door.

Following Yace out across the broad portal, Blaze took down the lantern that was hanging on a roof post to light the house's main entrance. He tilted his head against the frigid bite of the wind and buckled his windbreaker tightly at the neck as he and the others started over to the wagon shed. Beyond the far corner of the house he found it hard to walk against the wind and keep up with Anchor's s.h.i.+rtless owner, for there it blew in off the mesa with full force. A foot-deep drift of snow had already piled up at the lee corner of the wagon shed, and Blaze was thankful for the relief of stepping in behind that building's protection. He grunted-"Here, let me."-when Yace fumbled awkwardly with cold-numbed fingers at the door hasp.

As Shorty Adams had said, the floor below the front rack was strewn with a disorderly array of harness. Across the way, by the grain bin, a couple of scoops of oats lay scattered across the worn planks. But Blaze saw something else, something Shorty hadn't noticed, before the others came over to the bin, Yace now carrying the lantern. On a high broad shelf over the door to a side lean-to close by were stored an a.s.sortment of odds and ends, boxes, trunks, two old battered suitcases, and a few tools. As Yace's step sounded behind him, Blaze was seeing a chisel handle projecting beyond the shelf's edge and, directly above it in the shadow along the wall, a freshly gouged mark in the wood. That mark was an arrow pointing upward.

Sight of it made Blaze quickly lower his glance and peer at the spilled oats at his feet. His fervent hope was that no one had seen him staring toward the shelf. Mentally cataloguing what should be up there, he knew instantly that at least one item was missing-Joe's canvas-jacketed bedroll, stored there since he had left five years ago, was gone.

"Now who in tarnation could have been that sloppy?" he growled. "It wasn't this way at noon, when I grained our horses, Yace."

The face of Anchor's owner was a study in perplexity as the others gathered behind him. "Then Quinn wasn't seein' things," he drawled. "Who could it have been?" He had lost some of his certainty, and was as mystified as the others. He seemed to feel Bill Lyans's glance on him and turned. When he caught the studied severity of the deputy's stare, he asked querulously: "Well, who was it?"

Lyans didn't answer that, but turned to the others. He spoke quietly, his voice barely audible over the moan of the wind. "A couple of you make a fast circle south. Shorty, you're good at sign. You and I will swing north. There's enough snow so that we may be in time to spot his tracks showin' through to the ground."

"Whose tracks?" Yace asked, irritable under the deputy's ignoring of him and his ordering around an Anchor man.

Lyans gave a grunt of disgust. "Joe's, of course. He's been here all the time. I'd arrest anyone else who tried to run this kind of a sandy on me, Bonnyman."

"What kind?" Yace bridled.

"Stallin' us while Joe made his getaway."

"Why, you . . ." Yace checked his outburst as the deputy turned his back and headed for the shed's wide door. The others filed out after him, all but Yace and Blaze.

When they were gone, Blaze drawled: "I'd give my right arm if what he said was true about your helpin' Joe make a getaway. Only it ain't."

"How could it be? I didn't know he was here."

"No. If you had, you'd have turned him in."

Yace's jaw muscles corded in sullen anger, but he made no reply. He was plainly too baffled to rise to Blaze's baiting.

"So you're as sure as they are, eh?" Blaze queried dryly.

"Did I say so? Sure of what?"

"About Joe beefin' Merrill."

"He wasn't on that train, was he?"

Here, indirectly, came the admission Blaze had been after, the admission that Yace Bonnyman thought his son a murderer, that his bl.u.s.tering back there at the house had been only a device to gain him time to make up his mind. Now it was made up. Blaze was suddenly angry, so full of emotion that the lantern's light wavered before his eyes.

"Yace," he drawled, "there are times when I wonder why I stay on here lookin' after a bull-headed old fool like you. Them times I wonder what I ever saw in you in the first place. By Satan, I don't know, now that I think of it."

He had wanted to hurt Yace. But now a strange tranquility seemed to be settling over the old rancher's face, and he breathed: "He'll shake 'em, if it was him. They won't lay a hand on him. But why didn't he come to me for help?"

"To you? After the glad-handin' you gave him at the depot tonight?" Blaze laughed. He didn't know what to think. First Yace hinted one thing, the next moment another.

Yace's expression sobered. He shook his head. "No tellin' why I did that," he said in a surprising admission.

Blaze was puzzled, sore. He had an impulse to tell Yace about the mark over the shelf, about Joe's being headed for Hoelseker's abandoned Broad Arrow cabin high along the Troublesome, but he checked it. There was no trusting Yace's hair-trigger moods. A minute ago he had been halfway convinced of his son's guilt; now he was trying to persuade himself that he would have helped Joe had he had the chance, that he didn't believe him guilty. No, Blaze decided, he wasn't going to let Yace in on this, wasn't going to trust him with the safety of a man's life. And he knew it amounted to exactly that. Joe Bonnyman was in a tight spot. So he drawled: "Well, you goin' to let Lyans ride up Porcupine this mornin' and deputize your crew to hunt Joe down?"

Yace's lips drew out to a hard thin line. "No, by Jehoshaphat," he said curtly, and stomped out the door bawling Lyans's name.

Blaze followed more leisurely, letting the wind push him along. As he crossed the barn lot, he turned down toward the cook shack, seeing Clark's shape briefly outlined in the lighted door there. He would take Clark aside and tell him where Joe was headed. It eased his troubled run of thinking when he saw Clark. He had almost forgotten that he wasn't Joe's only friend.

A Warning.

The storm unleashed its full fury as the darkness gave way to the first hint of dawn's opaque dead-gray light. The wind, strong in the before-dawn hours, took on the proportions of a howling gale. And snow came with it, snow so fine that it sifted in around the tightly drawn tarps of the chuck wagons that fed the crews working the roundups, so hard that it made raw the faces of the luckless cowpunchers who had night-herded the bunches of miserable, bawling cattle, holding them in what scant shelter they could find.

The Sierra & Western tracks at the foot of Crooked Gulch were drifted eight feet under so that the through express, due in Junction at six, had to back the twenty miles to Lodgepole to wait out the blow. Anchor's water mason sc.r.a.ped the frost from his shack window and could see enough through the easing gloom to wonder if the br.i.m.m.i.n.g pond's new spillway would be able to handle the overflow when the melt came. For a melt would come, this being early November.

In Lodgepole, Jim Swift, the day hostler, made his solitary way along the darkened street toward the feed barn, the moan of the wind against the galleried false fronts of the stores heightening his unnaturally lonesome feeling that was little relieved by the knowledge that the town would be astir in another forty minutes. Breasting the narrow alleyway between The Antlers and Sayler's Bakery. He heard a horse stomping and guessed that some rider, caught by the storm, had left the animal there to save a 30 board bill at the livery. Shortly he was glad to step in out of the wind's bite through the walk entrance of the barn's tightly closed doors. He set at once about pitching hay down from the loft.

The horse Swift had heard stomping in the pa.s.sageway alongside the hotel was Sam Thrall's. Joe Bonnyman had briefly glimpsed the hostler approaching through the fog of snow and had thanked a momentary lull in the wind's intensity that had let him soundlessly enter the lobby of The Antlers. Once in there, his chilled body soaking in the room's comparative warmth, he had hesitated to set about the thing that had brought him here.

Out there at Anchor an hour ago, Joe had had a bad few minutes, circling the posse men Lyans had put out to look for him in an attempt to spot either Blaze or Clark and have a word with them. He'd missed his chance with Blaze, not recognizing him until he was too close to the cook shack, and after that had put distance between himself and the house. Common sense had told him that the thing to do was to ride for the Broad Arrow cabin and wait for Blaze, for certainly Blaze already knew where to find him. But that might mean a day, possibly two, of prolonged curiosity as to why the posse was hunting him. Blaze might not be able to get away. Joe couldn't wait that long.

In that moment he had thought of Ruth Merrill, remembering Clark's mention of her staying in town overnight. And, as the thought struck him, he was putting the black over toward the Lodgepole trail, judging that he had better than an hour until daylight.

Now he was held tense by acute nervousness, not so much before the threat of discovery as before the prospect of seeing Ruth Merrill again. She would be asleep in one of the rooms upstairs. The thought of seeing her again threw him into a near panic of antic.i.p.ation.

He cat-footed across to the counter, hearing Roy Keech's snores issuing from the cubbyhole room under the stairway. The counter creaked loudly as he leaned on it, reaching across for the register on the desk behind. He breathed shallowly, and his hand dropped to the handle of his Colt as he waited out a brief interval, listening for a break in the clerk's heavy breathing. Then, rea.s.sured, he opened the register and scanned it by the feeble light of the turned-down lamp over the counter. Shortly he found Ruth's name with the number 14 after it.

Halfway up the stairs, he paused as the sound of Keech's breathing suddenly let off. Then, quickly, he climbed up out of the far margin of light into the total obscurity of the upper landing. He judged that room Number 14 lay back along the hall rather than toward the street, and started toward there. He stopped when his groping hand felt the third break in the flanking part.i.tion. He struck a match, snuffing it out at once. He stood before the door numbered 14.

He rapped twice, lightly, and waited. No sound from inside the room came to him. He tapped again, just as softly, but half a dozen times. Then he heard the creaking of a bedspring, the slur of a light step on the floor. A faint glow of lamplight showed from under the door. Then, before he was quite aware that anyone was close, the door swung open abruptly.

A tall graceful girl stood holding the lamp. Her wavy chestnut hair fell about her shoulders, a light robe was gathered tightly at her slender waist. She looked frightened as the lamplight fell across his high shape and she took a step back away from him.

Joe misread her move and thought she was about to scream. Stepping swiftly over to her, he put a hand across her mouth, the other tightly about her waist so that she couldn't draw away from him. He said urgently, low-voiced: "Don't yell. I thought I had Ruth Merrill's room. Just let me get out o' here."

The alarm died out of her eyes. He said-"Goin' to be good?"-and, when she nodded, he took the hand from her mouth.

"I remember you now," she said in a whisper. "You're Joe Bonnyman."

Still he wasn't sure of her. He nodded. "Correct. Ruth's registered for this room. How come she isn't here?"

"She is, asleep," the girl said, and looked down pointedly at his arm without trying to draw away from it.

Joe was keenly aware of her closeness, of the way her willowy body yielded to the pressure of his arm. Yet he couldn't afford to let her go until he knew exactly how far to trust her. "You're a friend of Ruth's?" he asked.

"Yes. I'm Jean Vanover."

"You won't yelp if I let you go?"

"I might." Her look was faintly provocative. When she caught the color mounting to his face, the trace of smile touched her eyes, and she said: "No. I'll be good. You needn't keep your arm there. Now what about Ruth?"

"I want to talk to her." His arm came away.

"She's had a pretty bad time of it. She needs her sleep." Jean looked over toward the bed, only a faint gray shadow in the lamp's edge of light.

"There's something I've got to know," Joe said. "I think she can tell me."

They still stood close to the door, practically in it, and Joe should have attached some significance to her glance going momentarily beyond him and out along the hallway. But he didn't, for he was impatient to have her answer.

"Couldn't I tell you whatever it is?" she asked.

"You might." He hesitated only a moment before coming out with it. "There's a posse out after me. Why?"

Her wonderment was quite genuine. "You don't know?"

"Should I?"

"Better than anyone else, if what they're saying is true."

Again her glance strayed beyond him, and now her hazel eyes showed quick alarm. Wariness flooded through him, and he started to turn and look down the hall. She stopped him with: "They're saying you killed him. You should know."

Her words startled him, as he afterward knew she intended they should. He didn't turn around. "Killed who?" he asked tonelessly.

"Ed Merrill." Her look didn't leave his as shock rode through him in a wave that engulfed his vigilance of a moment ago. Then she was saying in a low, tense voice: "There's a gun on your back. I wouldn't move if I were you."

Getaway.

Joe had hardly time to take in Jean Vanover's warning when he heard Roy Keech's voice close behind him saying: "Watch it, Bonnyman. You might get a busted spine."

Lifting his hands out and upward, slowly, to shoulder height, Joe felt the weight of his Colt leave his holster. Then there had been a reason for the sound of Keech's breathing letting off so abruptly as Joe climbed the stairs. Just as there had been a reason for this girl's strange behavior, her glances past him up the hall that he had failed to read. She had held him here by her evasive talk while Keech made good his surprise.

Joe forgot the indictment she had laid against him in the face of his sudden anger. A girl and a man who would ordinarily have been utterly incapable of this act had taken him as easily as they might have a gullible child.

He stood with hands lifted, not moving, the harsh edge of his glance striking the girl. "Thanks," he drawled. He nodded toward the bed, the foot of which was now outlined by the faint first light of dawn at the window. "You can tell Ruth how much of a help you were."

Her face flushed under the acid sting of his words. He had the satisfaction of seeing her angry and ashamed as he turned away.

"Is the county still feedin' its prisoners the food it used to, Roy?" he drawled.

"You'll eat well enough," answered Keech.

Joe noticed that his voice trembled. Remembering what he did of Roy Keech, the man's almost puppy-like manner of wis.h.i.+ng to please, his ineffectualness, drove home completely his feeling of frustration as he headed down the stairs. He felt no anger toward Keech, only an edge of nervousness at the knowledge that the man held a gun on him. He had a healthy respect for a gun in the hand of a man who didn't know much about using it, and Keech didn't.

Scanning the carpeted stairs ahead, Joe saw the runner bulging loosely away from the two bottom steps, remembering how they had s.h.i.+fted under his weight on the way up. At the bottom of the stairs he paused and turned slowly to face the clerk.

"You might as well tell me what this's all about, Roy," he said casually. "Where was Merrill found?"