course was a winding, upward trail. Moonlight and cliff alternated to reveal their way, and to obscure it. Doc Bogannon’s half-breed wife had said this was a warrior’s road, Athi-ami-owee! Trail of armed ones.
Winters imagined he could see feathered heads flitting from shadow to shadow. Talkative Professor Boro had become mysteriously silent.
Then, where Winters before had heard a voice coming out of a cliff, he heard it again. “Going somewhere, strangers?”
Boro reined back suddenly.
But Winters had anticipated his move and stopped first. Boro was in front of him, lighted clearly by moonbeams. “Did you hear something, Winters?”
“Sure,” said Winters. “Did you?”
“I thought so. Rather strange, don’t you think?”
“Very. I was just wondering if Little Jack Horner heard it?”
“Horner?”
“Yes. This is where you killed him, Professor Boro.”
Boro was silent, stone-still. Their horses were half a length apart. Winters had his six-gun up, pointing and cocked.
“You grossly misjudge me, Winters.”
“Chaney Few, alias Dr. Goodpasture, alias Professor Boro, do you want to go peaceably, or as a corpse?”
“There’s a terrible mistake here, Winters. But to clear matters I, of course, shall go peaceably.” Boro lifted bridle reins and swung his horse.
It was a trick Winters had seen before. Yet, though he had expected it, he hadn’t expected it to come so fast. He triggered as Boro’s hand flashed down, and Boro’s body jerked. But that didn’t stop him. His horse plunged against that of Winters, and his gun roared. For a fraction of a second fire blazed, and fury echoed from canyon walls.
* * * *
Doc Bogannon, sitting alone in his saloon, heard gunfire far away toward Elkhorn Pass. Winters and Boro! To Bogie, it could have been nobody else. This time Winters would not come back. He’d been lucky many, many times, but no man’s luck could last forever.
He heard a horseshoe strike against stone. He was tense, afraid to stir.
Then his batwings swung in.
“Winters!”
Winters stood just inside, pale and shaken. Bogie expected him momentarily to fall on his face, but he didn’t. Instead, he put his fists on his hips, like an irate woman.
“Doc, what will this dang crazy town turn up next?”
Bogie hurried for drinks. “I tried to tell you, Winters. Boro was a voice-thrower. You were too bullheaded to listen.”
Winters eased himself into a chair. “That’s it, Doc; I didn’t want you to tell me. I didn’t want Boro to know we’d caught on. Even so, that voice-throwing baboon was a humdinger. Such a pity he had to be killed.”
A DESERT HIPPOCRATES
Real Western Stories, August 1953
Deputy Marshal Lee Winters, gunfight-weary and homeward bound from Rocky Point an hour before midnight, pulled his horse to an uneasy halt on Alkali Flat. Out of starlit gloom and loneliness had come a weird, far cry. In that eery solitude, it smote upon his fancy as a voice from another world, outside of time.
“Oooooo-rand!” it called. In pitch and plaintiveness, it was feminine; because it evoked no answer, it was heart-rending and forlorn. Yet it persisted—seeming near, then far, as night winds lifted and fell. “Oooooo-rand! Oh, Oooooo-reeeeee!” Northward a couple of miles, lights of Forlorn Gap shone dimly through intervening alkali dust. They were lights of home, a tired wayfarer’s dream come true. But far away across Alkali Flat, a woman’s voice called from immeasurable tenderness and love for someone lost. Here, then, was a tug-of-war between instincts of chivalry and a longing to be safe at home. In Winters’ sentimental bosom, chivalry was a mighty force—in any other than extraordinary circumstances dominant over self-interest, over danger, fear and mystery.
But on Alkali Flat at night, experience had taught him that nothing was ordinary. This desert waste, supposedly, was a place where nothing lived, or could live for long. Yet at night it teemed with life, as if darkness had resurrected its dead; concededly honest men claimed to have seen Indians silently playing games there by moonlight, and herds of buffalo that grazed upon vast green pastures. Wolves howled there, too, though not a wolf track could be found by day. Indeed, by day it was a shimmering white desert, as bare as a floor in a vacant house.
At night it was an abode of owls, of dead things that walked, of voices as disembodied and insubstantial as their spirit origins.
This was night. When sweat popped on his face, and his skin began to sting, Winters knew he was scared stiff. Sweat was pouring, and his skin was stinging now. His big rangy horse, Cannon Ball, too, exhibited much of his master’s demoralization and fear. Like his master, Cannon Ball wanted no truck with Alkali Flat and its nocturnal creatures, real or spectral. Accordingly, when a spur raked his flank, he lifted his hoofs and set them down hard.
In Forlorn Gap’s only saloon, Doc Bogannon, its owner, began to tidy up for closing. As usual, this had been a profitable and interesting evening, an assortment of questionable strange characters contributing to both results.
Because it was a town where busy stage-roads met, Forlorn Gap had for months seen its unfailing quota of strangers. In service to boom-towns north and west, stagecoaches ran day and night—which meant good hunting for road-agents, scoundrels too unimaginative to envisage the inevitable hangropes that awaited them.
There were other types of evil men, too, Bogannon reflected while he put a shine on his bar. He had in mind a gentry more subtle and sinister in their composition and behavior (consequently more dangerous) than those blood-and-thunder badmen who robbed stages and murdered foolhardy adventurers. These were able characters, brilliant in dark inexplicable ways, living in a shadowland of intellect and motive, sometimes consummating evil deeds by devious means, sometimes striking with such simplicity that even a most cautious person could be caught unawares. From where they came, Doc Bogannon did not know. It was if they were spawned in this semi ghost-town of Forlorn Gap, born to spill its blood and to have their own blood spilled into its desert sands.
Bogie laid aside his swabber, selected a clean cloth and gave the glasses their final polish. Then he observed a stranger who had just entered through his swinging doors. Here was a character, thought Doc instantly. He was straight and handsome, swarthy of complexion, smooth of face, his mass of wavy dark hair hanging low on his neck beneath a small black felt hat.
He came up, placed his long-fingered hands on Doc’s shiny bar. “Howdy,” he said, an air about him shading between insult and insanity.
“Howdy,” said Doc, inwardly amused.
* * * *
Doc Bogannon was a tall, broad-shouldered individual with dark hair parted loosely upon a fine head. Physically he was a gentleman fit to walk with kings. He was a man of great mind, too, a philosopher in both intelligence and disposition, understanding men, good and bad, and finding them equally interesting. Despite his obvious fitness for greater things, Bogannon was, for reasons best known to himself,
