Chapter XI

Three men lay sprawled in the house from which Bordereau had fled so precipitately, all three looking to be dead. In fact one of them was beyond ever stirring again; that one chanced to be Turkey-trot Smith, shot close under the heart.

When, after no little reconnoitering, after many hesitancies and withdrawals, little Sam Pepper at last came inching into the room still lighted by three or four candle ends and also by a flickering light which came from an adjoining room, he saw Bill Yarbo lying on his face across a threshold, his gun near his lax hand, and saw Jim Torrance lying half in and half out of another door, as still as the already dead Turkey-trot Smith. Sam Pepper thought in agony, “Oh, my God, they’re both dead--and me, me, I’m all alone up here!”

That flickering light from the next room impressed itself on him. He went tiptoeing to make out what it was, who was there. It was a lively young fire just getting well under way. Bordereau, as he ran out, had thrown a burning candle onto a heap of rubbish in a corner, meaning to let the house burn down behind him and thus to leave no definite evidence to the nosey ones, whose bodies, burnt to cinders, lay on the living room floor, nor when and how they had expired. Sam Pepper, just in time, began stamping out the flames. He ran to the kitchen, found two buckets of water, doused the fire with them and so put it out. Then, slack-jawed in awe, he came back gingerly to the scene of the indoor battle.

Two minutes later he and his kind fate were crowning him hero. His emotions were like those of a proud conquering monarch going to his coronal, or like those of a young girl being crowned Queen of the May. Most definitely little Sam Pepper was “Aces.”

And he had his audience. For Jim Torrance reared up and took stock of things, and presently Bill Yarbo rolled over and groaned and made it emphatic that he too was still alive. Both men had been shot, Torrance once and Yarbo twice, yet neither was in any grave danger. Sam Pepper saw that immediately. Lying Bill, falling, had struck his head against the door jamb and was for some few moments out cold. Torrance, taking a bullet groovingly along his skull, had been within a hair’s breadth of reaching the end of his earthly trail, yet would be as good as new in a few hours. He had lost blood, he had suffered shock, but otherwise he was unimpaired.

Both men, pulling themselves up into a sitting position, groped for their guns, then looked in a dazed and questioning way at Sam Pepper. Bill Yarbo, as soon as he was able to speak, began to curse the little man. That was because, most of all, he knew that it was his own awkward blundering that had precipitated disaster, and the words were sweet on his tongue that strove to put all blame on Sam Pepper.

Bill Yarbo said:

“Here me and Jim Torrance has been fighting, doing men’s work, and you--you little runaway rat! If you’d stuck with us, if you’d done your part-- Go get out of my sight! You make me sick.”

“Here’s a dead man,” said Sam Pepper. “It’s old Turkey-trot. He’s been shot square through the heart, looks like. Must of shot himself, huh?”

“Why, damn you!” roared Bill Yarbo in weak thunder. “It was me that plugged him--else it was Jim-- It was me, that’s who. And you! Sticking your head in a snow bank!”

Sam Pepper inflated himself.

“If you two boys,” he told them pompously, “had did your parts as well as I done mine, you wouldn’t be laying here now for me to have to tend to. I guarded the trail, like I promised. When two fellers come storming in, Barty Evans and Butch Vorich they was, why I stopped ’em!”

“You stopped ’em? Oh, my eye!” groaned Yarbo. “You--”

“Sure,” said Sam Pepper vaingloriously. “I kilt ’em. Both of ’em. They’re laying out there in the trail; you can go see for yourself.”

“Of all the liars I ever knew!” growled Bill Yarbo in disgust.

He managed to get to his feet and then would have toppled over in a dead faint if Sam Pepper hadn’t run to him and helped ease his big bulky body down onto a bench before the fireplace. Jim Torrance looked at Pepper strangely; he had heard those shots outside and had wondered about them. He too pulled himself up, retrieved his fallen gun, and went staggering across the room and out through the front door. He went weaving along the porch, lurching down the steps, stumbling along the trail beaten through the snow by several running horses, and came presently to the spot where Sam Pepper had experienced his great adventure. There, black blots on the pure white of the snow, lay two men. It was as Sam Pepper had said, and Jim Torrance, still swaying slightly though the clear cold outside night air was beginning to steady him, swore softly under his breath.

He stood there a while, leaning against a pine, breathing deep, getting his head clear and his unwilling muscles under control. Then he went on a few steps, just to make assurance doubly sure about Bordereau’s departure. The trampled snow told the story; Bordereau and those with him had ridden on their spurs, going somewhere else.

* * * * *

It was Sam Pepper who stabled the horses in a wreck of a shed behind the house, and who brought their packs in and spread blankets before the fireplace and made a roaring fire of splintered boards that cluttered up the place. And it was Sam who made a sort of broth out of scraps from their provision stock, bacon mostly with beans mashed up in the concoction; and it was Sam who, despite his patient’s curses, did the major job of binding up Lying Bill Yarbo’s wounds. Yarbo hadn’t said much until then; he had looked his questions at Jim Torrance and had said a bleak:

“Well? He was lying as usual, I suppose?”

Torrance leaned against the chimney and stared a long while at Sam Pepper, then shifted a penetrating gaze to Yarbo.

“It’s the way Sam says, Bill,” he said. “He shot the two men, one square between the eyes, the other close to the throat. Damn straight shooting, if you ask me, with what little light there was. I found his gun in the trail.” He tossed it to Sam. “Looks like, after he’d emptied it, he’d thrown it in somebody’s face. If he’d had another gun, likely he’d have got Bordereau and the whole crowd.”

Sam Pepper blushed. Bill Yarbo began turning red; he had swallowed some unwanted pills in his life but never one harder to get down than this.

“What was happening in here, while I was heading the others off?” asked Sam, brisk again. He looked all about him cheerfully and wonderingly.

Torrance told him. Wider and wider did Pepper’s eyes stretch open.

“With all the noise outside,” Torrance concluded, “Bordereau thought there was a posse bearing down on him. I guess he thought he’d done for Yarbo and me anyhow; he was burning down the house to make sure. And he got away with Sally Dawn’s gold, enough of it, from the looks, to put her up on easy street again.”

“Gosh, I’m a sick turkey,” muttered Yarbo. “Bring me a bed and led me die in peace. After what’s happened tonight--” His roaming eyes rested for an instant on Sam’s perky face; then he shut them tight. “After what’s just happened,” he said faintly, “me, I’d ruther be dead anyhow.”

They holed up there at the old King Cannon mountain house, and were grateful for its shelter. Sam Pepper was nurse, kitchen hand and general roustabout. He went down to Pocket Valley for more provisions and for odds and ends; he kept the fires burning; he ministered to Lying Bill Yarbo when that bull of a man was delirious and threatened to tear the house down. Torrance came and helped when Bill was at his worst, and gave Pepper a hand with his labors. The two of them at times talked, Sam doing most of the speculating, as they wondered whether Bordereau and his men were clean gone for good, King Cannon’s gold along with him.

From Pocket Valley they sent a man secretly, Andy Stock’s helper, to carry word to Mrs. Sam, who would pass it along to Sally Dawn, that all was well and that they would be showing up before very long. The women were to keep their mouths shut if possible; if Steve Bordereau liked to consider both Torrance and Yarbo wiped out of the picture, let him.

“He tried to play dead on us,” said Jim Torrance. “If we sort of do the same for him, maybe he won’t hurry out of the country. Maybe we can meet up with him again.”

“How much in gold do you suppose there was?” asked Sam, on edge. “A thousand? Ten thousand? Maybe a hundred thousand?”

It was Torrance who, when he could, went out and scooped shallow graves for Turkey-trot Smith and the two men Sam Pepper had brought to the end of their trails; Sam wouldn’t go near them. Torrance got the job done of a windy afternoon with a storm threatening; it did snow that night but by morning cleared and a glorious blue sky hung over them. The sunlight, warm and golden, fell across Bill Yarbo’s bed and heartened him.

“Hell’s bells,” he said, “I’ll be up and around tomorrow sure.” Then he glared at Sam who just then was departing in his chipper fashion toward the kitchen. “That is,” he said confidentially to Torrance, but loud enough to make sure that Sam heard him, “I would if I was fed right instead of being shoveled out the stingy messes that lying little lizard feeds me.”

* * * * *

“I’ve been thinking about things,” said Torrance.

The three had made themselves as comfortable in the big living room as circumstances permitted. There was a genial fire going on the hearth, windows had been blanketed, some of the splintered floor boards replaced. Bill Yarbo lay in a corner on the bed they had made down for him; Sam Pepper squatted on the wreck of an old chair, and Torrance had humped over on the bench at the side of the fireplace.

“Me, too, I been thinking!” spoke up Sam. “Gosh, if I only knew--”

“There are some things we do know,” said Torrance. “Steve Bordereau came here by night, went out in the dark and hasn’t come poking back; it’s clear enough he’s still playing dead and doesn’t want it generally known that he was ever up this way. We know, too, that he’s got quite a gang with him; and that seems sort of funny when you first think of it, since he is playing dead; and men do talk. Another thing is this: Those two men that Sam stopped out in the trail were coming straight here; they were Bordereau men; it’s a ten to one bet Murdo sent ’em racing with word and warning for Bordereau, and--”

“Sure,” said Sam, and rubbed his hands, “that’s why I kilt the son-a-guns!”

Bill Yarbo, who had given no sign of life, groaned. Torrance ignored both the little man’s boastfulness and the big man’s pain at having to swallow it.

“And so,” Torrance continued, “even yet there’s a chance Bordereau is pretty much in the dark about what’s happened around Sundown while he was up here. He’s not apt to know about his grave being opened and about the stir that made at the Stag Horn.”

“That’s likely, Jim,” agreed Sam, and could not help adding, “Good thing I did stop them two messengers of Murdo’s.”

“What I’m getting at is this,” said Torrance, frowning into the fire and speaking to himself as much as to the others, “what is Bordereau up to now? And why those several men with him? He’s got King Cannon’s gold, and it looked like a sizable pot. Is he running out with it, skipping the country while the going is good?”

“No, he ain’t,” said Sam, and sounded cocksure. “For one thing, you said you thought you nicked him last night before they downed you; well, that’s two pretty fresh wounds he’s carting around. Another thing is, like you say, he’s got all those hard hombres along with him; it means that he plans still playing dead and so playing safe, to do a bit more hell-raising before he drifts and, when he goes, to go with all his pockets full. He’s been down in Mexico before; well, likely he’s headed back there when he’s made things too hot to hold him up here. Likely he’ll buy him half the damn country and set himself up like a king. That’s the sort Steve Bordereau is. One thing about him, Jim, he don’t shoot nickels.”

Torrance nodded.

“That’s sort of the way I’ve been figuring it, Sam,” he said. “But there’s this: When he does find out about Doc Taylor being found in his grave, what then? It’s going to look to most folks like Bordereau had a hand in that, huh? And I gather that Doc Taylor was pretty well liked. Bordereau might do some lively stepping out of here if a lot of the doc’s friends started looking for him.”

Yes, there were a good many things to think about, and in the silence which shut down--broken only by the faint crackle of the fire and a dull, rhythmic thumping of a board loose somewhere and flapping in the night wind--they were thoughtful and uncertain. Presently Sam, who could never be silent for long, started to say something; but he hadn’t gotten out the first half dozen words when he leaped to his feet, his eyes goggling, and scurried into a shadowy corner of the chimney behind Torrance’s bench.

“Oh, my gosh!” he gasped. “What’s that?”

Bill Yarbo strove to rear up on an elbow in order to glare at him. He was in a good bit of pain and his voice was thick and faint, yet he managed to mutter scathingly:

“The brave little fighter and man-killer is scared out of his britches by the wind blowing! Of all the--”

“Shut up!” commanded Torrance in a whisper. “There is something--”

All Sam’s terrors, which had left him in peace for a few hours while he had gloated over his heroism of last night, came back to clutch him by the throat so that he could scarcely get the whispered words out:

“It’s s-somebody trying to break in! Somebody at the back door--t-trying to get in through the k-k-kitchen--”

Jim Torrance heard it too now and knew that Sam was right. He rose and, gun in hand, stepped softly toward the kitchen door.