you start accusin’ us of murder. We’ve done our share of killin’, but killin’ and murder are bosses of a different color.”
A chill smile that Nevada Jim James didn’t like touched the stranger’s face. “You can tell that to Judge Evans in Tombstone,” he clipped. His direct gaze studied the pards a little more closely. “Seems like I recognize you boys,” he added coolly.
“Aren’t you those famous Hellers from Helldorado who’ve got all the sheriffs chasin’ their tails?” Nevada Jim had his hands shoulder high, palm outward. He had obeyed orders to the letter, because the stranger acted just cool enough to kill him if he didn’t. But he had kept walking forward. Now only some eight feet separated him from the lawman.
“Stop right there,” the cold-eyed man said. Nevada Jim stopped obligingly. “Utah did the same, though Nevada could see that his old pard was just about ready to spring sidewise behind the table and make his desperate gamble for freedom. He shook his head ever so slightly at McClatchey. If his guess was right they were up against no ordinary lawman.
He had started to grin when the stranger ordered them to halt. It was a crooked, ironic grin that would have irritated anybody. The lawman was no exception.
“What’s funny?” he snapped.
“Nothin’,” Nevada drawled. “Nothin’ at all. I was just wonderin’ if mebbe you’d like to have one of our tombstones fer a souvenir? Where you’re takin’ us, we won’t be havin’ much use for ’em.”
The stranger looked interested. It was apparent to Nevada that the fellow was a little surprised at the ease with which he had made his capture. He could imagine the hell-fire and brimstone stories the Tucson sheriff had told him regarding their toughness. Being presented with one of their famous calling cards would be quite a feather in his cap. Watching the man, Nevada could visualize those thoughts passing through his mind.
“I always carry a couple in my pocket,” he went on. “If you’ll let me drap one hand and undo my gun belt, I’ll haul one out for you.”
The stranger nodded. “Make it slow and easy, amigo,” he said crisply. “If you don’t I’ll let you have it right where it’ll hurt worst.”
Nevada Jim looked at the lawman, and that saintly, almost righteous expression crossed his deeply tanned visage. “You know I think you would at that,” he said thoughtfully.
Slowly he dropped his right hand to the hammered silver buckle of his wide double gun belt from which both his heavy guns were suspended, butt forward in their molded holsters. Nevada unlatched his belts and let them fall at his feet. Still moving carefully, he started his fingers into the pocket of his Levis.
“I hope for your sake that you haven’t got a sneak-gun in there,” the man said.
“I haven’t,” Nevada answered. His hatchet face was completely innocent as he brought his hand from his pocket. He opened his fingers. A harmless looking replica of a tombstone a scant two and one half inches high, by an inch and a quarter wide and thick, lay in his palm. The wood was polished until it shone like satin.
Involuntarily the stranger started to step forward, and as his foot lifted, Nevada Jim’s loose wrist nipped like the popper on the end of a bull-whip. The Heller’s calling card left his hand like a bullet.
Even as it struck the lawman between the eyes, Nevada was hurling himself sidewise and down. The automatic coughed twice, gouging splinters from the floor where he had been standing. Then the whole room shook as the stranger caved at the knees, and fell forward on top of his smoking gun.
With the speed of a tophand bulldogging a steer, Utah jerked piggin’ strings from his pocket, and leaped astride the unconscious man’s back. In ten seconds the lawman was trussed hand and foot.
Nevada was just finishing buckling on his gun belt when the stranger opened his blue eyes. There was a lump the size of an egg right between them. Clearly his head ached fiendishly, but there was still something almost like admiration in his gaze as he stared up at the two, tall outlaws.
Nevada scratched his neck with a corner of the little tombstone, and grinned ironically at the lawman, wrinkles closing his pale eyes to the merest slits. He looked as ornery as everybody claimed him to be.
“You’re pretty smart,” the lawman said. “I suppose that tombstone’s loaded with lead.”
Nevada grinned. “Quicksilver,” he said, “it’s heavier.”
“You took a chance,” the lawman said conversationally. “If you’d missed, friend, I’d have killed you on the spot for trying to resist arrest.”
“If you’d practiced flippin’ that thing as much as I have,” Nevada drawled, “you wouldn’t worry about missin’. Mister, I can knock flies off a wall at twenty feet!”
Utah McClatchey thrust his ugly, leathery face forward. “Quit yore braggin’, Jim,” he snapped. “Listen to me, fella,” he addressed the man on the floor at their feet, “we wanta know who you are, and after we find that out, I’m aimin’ to put you straight on a few things you ought to know about this murder bizness. We—”
That was as far as he got, for Nevada Jim, moving like a cat, had stepped to the open front door. Moonlight lit the plateau with a clear radiance. And out there some four hundred yards away were a half dozen horsemen, black dots in the moonlight. Through narrowed eyes Nevada studied them. His ears, tuned to hear the scamper of a pack-rat across a floor, had caught the drum-beat of those horses’ hoofs a moment before.
Now he swung back to Utah’s side, answering the old outlaw’s enquiring stare. “Jess Cloud, an’ a posse,” he said calmly. “Comin’ hell-bent for election.”
Utah grunted his disdain of all sheriffs. He addressed the hog-tied lawman. “You tell that old pot-bellied Siwash to drop in on us down Tres Cruces way if he wants tuh see us soon. Sorry we ain’t got more time tuh make yore acquaintance, young feller,” he ended. “Right sorry. If you weren’t on the wrong side of the fence I bet we could make a fair tuh middlin’ owlhooter outta you!”
Nevada reached in his pocket. His hand came out with another of those small tombstones. “Hyar’s that souvenir I promised yuh,” he drawled. He stooped and laid it directly in the center of the helpless lawman’s chest.
Then his catlike walk carried him back to the front door again. He raked one gun from leather, leveled it and fired six times as fast as he could cock and trigger. As rapidly as it had appeared, the gun slipped back into its holster, and his other Colt came free. Again six shots sped out into the night, rolling like the rat-a-tat-tat of a snare drum.
Grinning evilly, Nevada watched the effect of his shots on Sheriff Cloud’s posse. They were still well beyond effective short-gun range, but it didn’t matter. The shots sent them scattering for cover like a covey of quail taking wing.
He swung back into the room. “Folks is gittin’ soft, Utah,” he complained. “Danged if I don’t think you could scatter ’em nowadays if you said ‘boo’!”
* * * *
Some could be scattered that easily, and some couldn’t. The Hellers found that out almost a week later. They were deep in the Sierra del Lunas now, that high, virtually unexplored range of mountains cutting deep into Chihuahua. Tumbled peaks rose all about them, gashing the pale blue
