to stage robbers out here.”
“They hang.”
Young smiled. “It’s a small world. They hang where I come from, too.”
Wyatt said: “Jase, tell him we don’t want no trouble, that we got a rope handy and anxious, that he has a ten-minute start. As of right now.”
Young was quick to reply. “Jase, tell him I don’t scare easily. I came out here to find out who got my old man and I’m not leaving until I settle the score.”
Wyatt glanced lazily from him to the watch he held. A minute ticked by, then another, each of which was marked by Wyatt’s warning.
“Tell him he’s got nine minutes left, Jase. Tell him he’s got eight minutes, Jase.”
Seven minutes had slipped away when the man next to Wyatt got up and walked outside. He returned shortly with a lariat rope.
“Throw it over the rafter, Bugs,” Wyatt ordered. “Jase, tell him he’s got one minute left.”
“Hell, not in here! Hell, no!” Jase protested.
“In here, Jase, where we can all see it,” Wyatt said, in humoring but firm tones.
The rope swung over the center beam and the tall poke called Bugs tested it with his weight.
“Now, Jase, tell him his time’s up.”
“The hell! Tell him yourself, Charlie.”
Young’s expression had not changed. With a calm that seemed too controlled, a little disconcerting to the crowd and to Charlie Wyatt’s men in particular, he faced them as if he were a mere spectator at their proposed hanging. Then he glanced lazily at the rafter. What happened next was a little too fast for the eye.
His gun came up. A shot sounded and the rope fell in two pieces.
Jase Muench’s bellowing voice had a placating ring in it as he said: “Drinks on the house, boys! Line up! Hit the keys, Big Man!”
Charlie Wyatt annulled the invitation. He said nothing, all he did then was stand up with feet pushed apart and thumbs in his belt. It was enough. His eyes were thin and fixed on Young; they flashed and a cold light played in them, a lusting challenge that seemed to demand a shedding of blood. Slowly his elbows bent upward until his arms were straight out from the massive shoulders and his hands were hovering a foot out from his two guns. He was hunching over, mouth slack, eyes boring, when Young, still calm, elbows on the bar lip, said easily:
“Tell him he’s making a mistake, Jase.”
“Hell, yes, you are, Charlie! I can tell! The Kid’s too calm!”
Young was anything but calm inside, though excitement in him sprang from effect instead of cause: he was weighing the value of victory over McQueen’s foreman and finding it wholly unedifying. To shoot Charlie Wyatt would brand him forever the Sacaton Kid. The town wouldn’t have it otherwise. His mind was made up.
He said: “I reckon he wins, Jase. Take my guns.”
An oath of surprise, scorn, and unslaked desire fell from Wyatt’s lips.
“Damn yellow!” he said. “All yellow! Gut deep yellow. Calm, you say, Jase? Just scared. So we’ll get on with it. Knot the rope, Jones, and hit the rafter. On the first try.”
From the back of the room a commanding voice was heard: “Just a minute, Wyatt.”
Young had not seen Sack move through the batwing door. But there he stood rubbing his red mustache, arresting all movement in the saloon.
“The new deputy,” Bugs laughed before throwing the rope over the rafter.
Sack walked slowly up to the bar. He looked at Young, then Wyatt, and said slowly, convincingly: “Charlie, a man has a right to think what he wants to about a man who won’t draw with him. And about a stagecoach robber. Your opinion is good as mine. But I’m sayin’ this. The Kid here would of dusted you on both sides, expert and proper, before you touched guns. And why he didn’t weren’t yellow. It was good judgment.”
Wyatt laughed. “Yeah. Damn good judgment. But yellow all the same. First he robs the stage, then scares and returns the money. Then he bluffs it up before A. T. with a lot of threats. He was hidin’ behind Miss Bonnie. But she ain’t here, so he ups and quits when I call his bluff. And he ain’t yellow, you say?”
“That’s what I say, Charlie,” Sack replied, in a voice that wiped the grins off faces in the crowd. “What’s more, I guarantee it.”
“That ought to be enough,” Wyatt said, pushing his hat back on his head. “Seein’ as how it comes from the man Luke Mason picked for deputy sheriff.”
As the crowd responded to this surprise with rising conversation, Wyatt said in loud edged voice: “But it don’t. Not quite, it don’t. ’Cause it just don’t make sense.”
“All right,” Sack said. “Granted it don’t make good sense, that’s what it is. You heard the Kid say he was John Hammond West’s boy. We all know West was arrowed just after he struck pay dirt up at Queeny. The Kid wants to know who done it, same as you or me would.”
“Hell, Victorio done it!” Wyatt argued hotly.
“Charlie, you heard the Kid say Victorio’s tribes was on reservation at the time. I’m sayin’ it’s the truth. Look it up yourself.”
Sack went on: “So, you see, he can’t do much lookin’ around if he’s outlawed. And if he put a slug twixt your eyes, Charlie, the folks around here would of outlawed him quicker’n you could bulldog a three-legged maverick in a Texas blue norther.”
Pausing, he added: “So it took guts to make like he was yellow, Charlie.”
Wyatt nodded, and shook his head, perplexed. Shrugging his big shoulders, he said: “Well, even if I ain’t satisfied about the guts of a stage robber, the drinks are on me. Line up, every last damn man of you—even the stage robber.”
So saying, he dropped a hand fast. In the split second his gun roared. The rope Bugs had thrown over the rafter for the second time was cut in half once more.
He looked at Young, and there was nothing friendly in his glance; just challenge deep and undisguised.
Later that night, Young drew Sack aside and said: “Seems I owe a lot to you, Mr. Sack. First you let the stage bandit go free. Now you’ve stopped me from hanging by a rope or running for it. Why did you do it?”
“I like the way you fan a gun and the way you used your head with Wyatt, Kid. A man who can do them two things might come in handy when the time comes.”
Young said nothing and Sack looked intently at him for some time before saying: “I hadn’t been in this town five minutes when I learned something new about that Gutache Mesa massacre. I can’t talk about it yet, no matter how it stinks.”
Young looked puzzled. “If I can ever repay you, call——”
Sack interrupted: “Kid, if what I think is true, I
