“What for?”

  “For taking Sammy’s money away from him at cards.”

  January laughed softly. “Lady, you and I just don’t live in the same world. It may be a mistake, but I’ll tell you something—only one of us was cheating in that game, and it wasn’t me. Your brother needs more practice stacking the deck. Now, I don’t want to hear any more about how the cold-blooded gambler seduced your innocent little brother into a crooked card game. I’ve had enough of that. Do I make myself understood?”

  Her answer was a long time coming. Finally she said, “Are you sure he was cheating?”

  “Quite sure.”

  She sagged back toward the wall; her shoulder rested against the door frame. “Oh,” she said weakly, and lifted her hand to her forehead.

  January said, “Do you want my sympathy?”

  “What?”

  “You want a sympathetic ear, don’t you?”

  She straightened with quick anger. “You have a lot of nerve!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he drawled. But he was regarding her in a speculative way. “One thing puzzles me. Why are you so quick to believe my claim that your brother was cheating?”

  “Do you think I’m disloyal?”

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  “I know my brother,” she said. “You must think I’m a blind fool.”

  “If you think that badly of him, why make such a fuss over him?”

  “I’m all he has,” she said. “He needs someone.”

  January said softly, “I’ve seen a hundred like him. You can’t do anything for him, Miss Preston. In fact, the only thin chance he’s got is to be left alone. If he had no choice, he might be able to straighten up and stand on his own feet. I doubt he would, but it’s possible—and it’s the only way he’ll have any chance at all. If you keep mothering him he’ll never grow up.”

  She was watching him in a very strange way—almost a shameless stare. When she made no reply to his statement he gave her a new appraisal; a knotted muscle rippled at his cheekbone and abruptly he strode across the room and took her elbow, turning her out toward the corridor. He said gently, “I think you’d better go on to your room.”

  Her face was colorless. “Yes, of course.” But she did not leave; she stood close to him, her head turned facing him gravely, and her eyes gripped his. He felt the force of a sudden chemistry between them. He knew, by her face, that she wanted his kiss; there was no mistake about that. He thought, It will be no good for either of us, but with a vague distant feeling of despair he slipped his hand around behind her and drew her forward. Her eyes widened, her breathing quickened, and for a moment she pushed her palms against his chest, drawing back. But her lips parted slowly and the thrust of her hands relaxed; her arms went around him and there was sudden urgency in her hungry kiss.

  Chapter Eight

  He was a strange mixture of brooding anger and gentle compassion. Amy brought coffee to him and watched him sitting on the edge of the mattress. One or the other of his hands was always close to the grip of a gun. He drank, and his eyes watched her over the lifted rim of the coffee cup. She felt stirred up inside, confused and baffled; her own emotions had run away with her and she did not understand any of it. All she knew of him was that he was troubled and bleak, a weary-looking man with a backtrail signposted with dead men.

  He said carefully, “You’d better get up and walk out of here and not come back. You still can.”

  “No,” she said.

  He was very gentle with her: “Do it now, before you lose your way back.”

  She studied the solemn mask of his face. “You’re not the same man the stories tell about. Something’s changed you.”

  “Everybody begins to get old and tired.”

  “It’s more than that, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe it is,” he said.

  She sat beside him and took his thin hand in both of hers; she separated his fingers and touched the rugged bony hardness of his knuckles. “Tell me,” she whispered. “I want to know all of it.”

  He seemed to go a little slack. It was a kind of surrender, as if he did not have the will to continue resisting. He said, “I had a cousin, Chris. He was younger than I was. I suppose he was jealous of my reputation, or maybe he just thought there was a challenge in it. He decided to follow in my footsteps. I tried to talk him out of it. He’d been a deputy sheriff in San Antonio and he was a pretty fair policeman, but he didn’t have the instincts it takes to make a successful gambler. He quit his job and went on the Circuit. A bunch of tinhorns suckered him into a crooked game in El Paso; Chris caught them cheating and called them for it. Well, they were three to one with guns and Chris was no magician. He took one of them with him. One of the others, a cardshark called Mendoza, put a slug low in Chris’ belly. It took him a long time to die.”

  “What happened to the two gamblers?”

  “The constable arrested one of them. Mendoza got away into Mexico. When I found out about it, I went down to Durango looking for him.”

  “Did you find him?”

  January nodded. “He knew who I was and he knew he had no chance to outdraw me. I tried to devil him into drawing his gun but he wouldn’t do it. He just laughed at me and kept his hands up in the air.”

  “Did you arrest him?”

  “No. We were in Mexico and I’m not a law officer.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I shot him.”

  She stiffened. “Without giving him a chance?”

  “He had a chance. He refused to take it.”

  “But that’s murder!”

  “I know,” January said quietly. “For a while I made excuses. Mendoza had it coming, I told myself. If he’d drawn on me, he would have died anyway. I told myself that, too. I told myself Mendoza had suckered my cousin into a dirty game and then shot him where it hurts the worst and the longest. I told myself I had to do it, I had no choice.”

  “But you didn’t believe any of that.”

  “No,” he murmured, “I don’t suppose I ever did. After that, things started to go sour.”

  “I see.”

  “A man gets tired,” he breathed. “One too many killings. When you carry a gun and a reputation, there’s just one thing you can never afford to lose, and that’s your self-confidence.”

  “And you lost yours?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But at least there are times when I question it.” He smiled crookedly. “There’s a certain irony to it. I killed Mendoza four years ago and I’ve only shot one man since then—a horse thief up in Utah. But they put a price on my head for that.”

  “Why don’t you take off your guns and take up a quiet life?”

  “I only know two things,” he said. “Guns and cards. The two go together. And when you live in this country, you can never put down a gun once you’ve picked it up. They don’t let you.”

  “You live by guns,” she whispered, “and yet you hate them. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “That’s it,” he agreed soberly. He stood up and paced across the room, drew one of his guns and looked blankly at it and put it away again. “All I wanted was a chance to laugh again. But I guess I’m past that, now.”

  He wheeled to face her and his face turned strict. He had never talked to anyone this way before; it was a sign, to Will January, that the split in him was cracking wider all the time. He said, “I want to ask you to do something.”

  “What is it?”

  “Get away,” he said. “Stay far away from me. Around me you’re walking on dynamite caps. I can’t give you anything but disaster.”

  She spoke without moving. “I didn’t ask you to give me anything. Not anything at all.”

  He said almost harshly, “Your feelings may not be exactly what you think they are. Don’t make a mistake. Get out of here while you can do it without getting hurt.”

  “Perhaps it’s too late for that.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  She said with sudden earnestness, “We have a mine on the mountain. It’s isolated. You’d never be bothered there.”

  He reached out and swung the door wide open. “Either you leave,” he said, “or I will.”

  She got up and came forward without hurry. When she reached him she said, “You’re so alone, aren’t you?” She reached out to him. “You need someone.” She pulled him to her and with a premonition of tragedy January felt himself, drained of will, moving into the circle of her arms.

  Any number of sorry-looking scrub riders had come down out of the hills to take refuge from the norther in Spanish Flat. One of them was a bloated chinless man called Vince Perrine. An hour before the storm, he had arrived in the Tres Candelas Cantina, which was among the worst of the town’s dives. Vince Perrine had taken a bottle of tequila to a back table and in the space of one hour had killed it. The wicked Mexican liquor had knocked him out, but out of consideration of the storm the bartender had not thrown Perrine out of the saloon. When Perrine woke up, with an awful rotten-cobweb taste in his mouth and a blinding red headache that made his vision almost opaque, the storm was roaring outside and the clock-hands pointed to eight-thirty.

  Perrine groaned and fumbled in his pocket. There were a few coins left there. He lurched out of his chair and stumbled toward the bar, which was a makeshift affair of rough planks laid across empty kegs. Perrine licked his thick lips and ordered a drink, and leaned heavily for support on the plank.

  A short distance down the bar, three men were talking. The racket of their talk, although it was not loud, aggravated Perrine’s headache. He felt a little sick and when his drink came he wolfed it down; the raw tequila burned his insides, but it settled him down and he felt a little better. The talk of the three men filtered into his consciousness and he listened to it at first vaguely and then with heightened interest.

  They were talking about something that had happened over at the Drover’s Rest. Gradually Perrine absorbed the gist of the conversation. Evidently Will January had ridden into town shortly before the storm. It was mention of January’s name that triggered Vince Perrine’s active interest, and he moved down the bar closer to the three men. Deep in conversation, they did not notice him.

  January had had an altercation with Sammy Preston of the Pyramid Mine, according to the three men’s talk. Shooting had been averted. The fact caused Perrine to smile thinly. He had a sloppy smile. He was badly in need of a shave; his eyes were like ruby coals. His head was crisscrossed by strands of black hair that fell across a large bald area. He had no chin to speak of; his belly hung out over his waistband with the loose carelessness of a sack of milled flour. He wore scratched-up jackboots and patched butternut trousers held up by frayed suspender braces. The threaded ends of faded undershirt sleeves showed beneath his coat cuffs. His snub nose was pushed slightly to one side and his teeth were yellow and out of line; there was a wide gap in his lower jaw.

  Perrine listened passively while the three men talked about the run-in that Marshal Six had had with Jack Lime’s bunch two nights ago. Lime and his crew had returned to town early during the storm today. One of them, Orozco, had held Clarissa Vane hostage in her own saloon while the other three had tried to tree the town. Six had arrested them and then had gone off with his deputy and killed Orozco, freeing Clarissa Vane.

  What interested Vince Perrine was the fact that Jack Lime and his two toughs were being kept prisoner in the storage room at the back of the Drover’s Rest. That fact, together with the presence of Will January in town, set rusty machinery in motion in Vince Perrine’s calculating brain.

  He walked forward to the front door of the cantina and stood close to it, listening to the wind howl around outside. This was no time to go outdoors. He smiled patiently. There was plenty of time. He would wait, and while waiting he would work out his plan. Perrine’s smile grew a little, exposing the ugly gap in his teeth, and he went back to the bar and ordered a fresh drink.

  Jeremy Six struggled stiffly into the Drover’s Rest. The air around the door, even after he closed it, remained sharp with chill. He headed directly for the stove, getting his coat off. He glanced at the clock: almost eleven. It was a long, slow night; it seemed to promise to drag on forever.

  Craycroft and Keene had their eyes on the storage room. Six warmed up, taking his time about it, and then moved over to the card table. “What happened to January?”

  Keene looked up. “Said he was tired. Went over to the hotel.”

  Hal Craycroft said, “Just as well, I reckon. Him in bed, we got less chance of war breaking out here.”

  Keene said, “You’re a Goddamn pessimist, Hal.”

  “Not really. I was just lookin’ on the bright side. Suppose I’d mentioned that Sammy’s over in that hotel too? That’d be pessimism.”

  Keene’s rawboned shoulders lifted an inch and dropped. He said to Six, “Want to sit in a few hands?”

  “I may as well,” said the marshal, pulling out the chair January had left vacant. As he sat, Six asked, “How are the birds doing in their nest?”

  “Not a chirp,” Keene answered. “But they’re in there good and tight. I take a look in on them every once in a while. That bullet-furrow you carved under Quirt Ross’ arm quit bleeding awhile ago. I’m afraid the sonofabitch is going to live.”

  “Long enough to hang, anyway,” said Craycroft. He looked at Six. “You don’t figure to let them go again, I hope.”

  “Hardly,” Six said. Absently, he watched the stagecoach division manager shuffle and deal the cards. Six added, “They probably won’t get the rope. But I intend to see to it they have a chance to spend a good long holiday at Yuma. Ten or twenty years apiece.”

  Keene said, “What do you figure to charge them with?”

  “Everything I can,” Six said grimly.

  The stagecoach division manager said imperturbably, “Up to you, Marshal. Want to open?”

  Six glanced at his cards. “Two bits,” he said, and tossed white chips into the pile.

  They played lazy poker for an hour. Midnight came, and with it an audible decrease in the howl of the wind. “Praise be,” Hal Craycroft murmured. “Maybe she’s blowing over.”

  A little while later, a newcomer batted his way into the big saloon. Six’s eyes narrowed. The man was Vince Perrine, one of the shadow-fringe of cheap thieves who always seemed to collect around the periphery of prosperous frontier districts. Nothing had ever been proved against Perrine, but it was accepted common knowledge that he avoided starvation mainly by eating other people’s beef.

  Perrine went directly to the stove to warm up, but Six caught the man’s covert scrutiny. Perrine seemed to be looking around, expecting to see something. His eyes lingered a moment on the locked door of the storage room. After awhile Perrine dumped his coat across the bar and came toward the poker table with an apologetic smile that exposed the rotted hole between his lower front teeth. “Evenin’, gents.”

  “I guess it is,” Hal Craycroft said judiciously.

  “Funny time of night for a fellow to be drifting around,” said Keene, with no evidence of friendliness.

  Nonetheless, Perrine was affable. Without invitation, he hooked back the chair that Sammy Preston had sat in, and lowered his paunchy frame into it. His small red eyes darted around from face to face, and occasionally lingered on the storage room door. Keene and most of the others made a point of ignoring him until Perrine said, “Cold weather sure makes a man hungry. Ain’t got some bar sandwiches or the like, have you?”

  He was talking to Craycroft, but it was Keene who answered; he put bite in his voice. “Seems to me this is perfect weather for you to be out on the prairie rounding up beef, Perrine. You might’ve gathered yourself a whole herd to eat by now.”

  Perrine said amiably, “Now, Mr. Keene, I don’t figure to take that unkindly. I ain’t never stole no man’s beef.”

  “Sure,” Keene murmured. “Those two scrub cows of yours just naturally drop four calves at a batch, and somehow they manage to do it five or six times a year.”

  “Maybe I’ve roped in a few unbranded strays. You can’t hang a man for that.”

  Keene’s jaw tightened. “Perrine, if I ever find you on Spur grass with a running iron in your saddlebags, I’ll consider that evidence enough. I’ll swing you from the nearest cottonwood.”

  Perrine said easily, “You ain’t never going to find me on Spur grass, Mr. Keene. With or without branding irons. I stick to my own bailiwick and I expect others to do the same.”

  “Sure,” said one of the other ranchers, very drily.

  Jeremy Six said, “Ease off, boys.” But he turned toward Perrine and asked his own question: “Storm’s been blowing half the day now. You didn’t just get into town. Didn’t I see you earlier down in the Tres Candelas?”

  “Maybe. I was there, anyhow.”

  “Then what brings you up here?”

  Perrine shrugged. “I run out of money and the barkeep thrown me out of the Tres Candelas.”

  Keene said, “In this storm? What in hell did you do?”

  “Not a thing,” Perrine said blandly. “I’s a little drunk but I wasn’t making no noise. Happen I knocked over somebody’s whisky bottle by mistake. The gent started to argue whether he had to pay for the bottle or not. Barkeep decided to take it out on me. He thrown me out. I went down to the livery stable and tried beddin’ down in the hayloft, but it were too damn cold, and that’s a fact, gents—too damn cold up there. So I come here to get warm. I’s just mindin’ my own business.”

  Six observed, “I don’t see any straw sticking to you.”

  Perrine’s face reddened but he said quickly, “Marshal, that wind out there just about blow the clothes off a man’s back, never mind the straw he slept in.” Suddenly he frowned at Six. “What for you putting me on the griddle all of a sudden? What’d I do?”

  Craycroft said, with a certain snobbish contempt, “Your kind doesn’t hang out in my saloon very often, feller. When one of you comes in here, we naturally get curious.”