you in hell with a horsewhip.”
MacLane called from outside. “Your last chance, Conners.”
Conners didn’t answer. He sent his son a savage glance. Gordon’s palms were clammy.
“I can’t go,” he said. “Ma, you git out. Please. You git out.”
There was a smash of a shot. The bullet cracked the door and thudded into the clay behind Gordon. Conners smashed the bottles out of the narrow window with his rifle butt.
“Git out,” he shouted. “Sarah—git out!”
He fired through the opening. The shot made a roar in the room. The shock of it seemed to shake Gordon’s whole body. It was answered from outside by a barrage. Bullets cracked through the door, smashed through the broken bottles of the window. The deafening sound sent a senseless panic through Gordon. He saw his father clap his hands to his face and stagger backward. Then Gordon couldn’t see any more. He couldn’t see or think. His only sensation was the noise, the shattering crash of guns, the roar in his ears that was so close to pain and yet not a pain.
He found himself in the tunnel, stooped over, clawing his way through like some wild animal in a trap. He didn’t know how he had gotten there. He couldn’t remember leaving the room. He was halfway through the narrow tunnel when he realized he was alone. His mother had not followed. There was no more shooting.
The shots still seemed to echo through the corridors of his mind, but he realized it was inside, some trick of his brain. The shooting had stopped. He crouched against the wall, holding his head, shaking violently.
“Ma,” he called. “Ma. . . .”
There was no answer. He wanted to run. He knew the shooting would begin again. He had to run. Hating himself, hating his weakness, he forced himself to turn back. He crawled along the tunnel. He was drenched with sweat, suffocated by his panic. He came out into the room, fighting for control. His father lay in the shambles below the broken window, hands still held against his bloody face. His mother lay huddled in the corner against the wall. Gordon went to one knee beside her. She had been hit twice. He saw that she was dead.
“Gordon . . .” It came from Bob Conners. He still had one hand held blindly to his smashed face. Gordon saw that he had been hit in the body too. His chest was soaked with blood. He was fumbling for something beneath his shirt, pulling out a thin wallet. He made a rattling sound in his throat. “Blackhorn . . . last I heard . . . up in the Wind Rivers somewhere—near South Pass City . . . the Indians will know . . .”
Gordon realized he would have been lying beside his father and mother if he hadn’t thrown himself into the tunnel during the firing. A sense of guilt swept him. He saw that his father meant him to take the wallet. It was wet with blood, in his hand. A convulsion shook Conners. He made a choking sound, clawed feebly at Gordon’s arm. He sagged back. The hand slid off his wrecked face.
“Conners,” MacLane called from outside. “You’ve killed one of my men. You come out or we come in!”
Gordon stared at his father. His brain seemed numb. He couldn’t feel anything. His father was dead. There was something wrong with him. His father was dead and his mother was dead and he couldn’t feel anything. He looked at the Sharps his father had dropped. He reached out. He made a broken sound. He couldn’t pick it up.
The shooting started again.
He fought it for a moment. The effort brought a sob from him. Then he lost control. He turned and ran. He couldn’t help himself. It was inside his head again, the sound, the roar, the crashing of guns, louder than reality, engulfing him with a primitive terror. He was in the tunnel, his head scraping dank clay from the low roof. He was at the other end, clawing to unbar the door. He was so panicked that he didn’t even wait to see if anybody was outside.
He plunged into the brush that screened the door. The low ridge of earth hid him from the riders as he ran for the creek. Nobody knew about the back way out and apparently the fight had kept them all around front.
Gordon reached the river, his shirt half torn off by the clawing brush. He was still wild with panic. He turned downstream in the shallows of the river. He ran like an animal.
Chapter Two
ROLAND BAYARD’S HOUSE was two miles across the basin from the Conners’ homestead. Gordon knew he would have headed that way even if his father hadn’t told him to. Bayard was the only one he could turn to in Table Rock.
The man had been a close friend of Bob Conners in the past. Gordon had been a baby, too young to remember, and his folks had never talked much about it. But when the family was in debt or sick or up against it in any way, it seemed to Gordon that his mother was always telling his father to “look up Roland, he’ll help you.”
Gordon’s father hadn’t done it till this year, only a few months ago, when things had turned so bad that they didn’t even have the fare to Table Rock, and had to walk the last hundred miles from Laramie. Bayard was division superintendent for the railroad in Table Rock. He had taken the day off to help, going with Conners to file on a homestead, obtaining credit for him at the store for the plough and stock and seed and supplies he would need. Bayard had come out to the homestead several times after that. Gordon had thought it was downright human for such an elegant man to sit in a dirt room and drink chicory coffee with his old friend. He had even invited the Conners family up to his place. It was a big house, whipsawed lumber shipped from a Laramie mill, tall hip roof to shed the Wyoming snow, a long gallery of smooth round stones cemented with grout.
Gordon would never know how he reached the place that night. He guessed he must have run all the way from the dugout. He stumbled in through the grove of poplars. A whiskey jack scolded him from the branches and the trees shed their feathery tufts on him like a snowfall. He dropped to his knees and sagged across the stone steps, so spent he couldn’t move. He ached all over. It hurt so much to breathe he thought he was going to cry.
The Bayards must have heard him from inside, sobbing for breath. The door was open and a yellow path of light fell across his dirty, bleeding figure sprawled on the steps.
He saw figures silhouetted in the doorway. Curiously enough it wasn’t Roland Bayard who first crossed the porch to him. It was a gaunt man in a cranberry-red fustian. Gordon had met him here once before. He was Adam Chaney, Bayard’s brother-in-law. Although he looked anything but a cattleman he ran a few cows west of town in the Double X iron. Gordon had gotten the impression he was some sort of family black sheep. His long face had a yellow tinge, the same ague-color Gordon had seen in so many bottomlanders along the Missouri.
“Pa” Gordon gasped. “Pa. Crazy Moon—out there. Saw ’em in the draw. He didn’t do it—”
Roland Bayard crossed the porch after Chaney, saying sharply, “Snap out of it, Gordon. Settle down. I never saw a kid so spooked.”
“Give him a chance, Roland,” Chaney said. He knelt beside Gordon, gripping his arm. He had a strange voice, almost like an echo. “Settle down now, Gordon. You’re with friends. You’re safe.”
“They shot,” Gordon gasped. “All that shooting—”
Bayard made an impatient sound. He was a big man, moleskin trousers the color of sassafras, a steel pen coat that must have cost a hundred dollars. Gordon was aware of Chaney shaking him gently, talking to him, until the fog of panic seemed to shred. Haltingly, in broken sentences, Gordon told them
