Hard Ride

by Elmer Kelton

Genres: Literary Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

Bandits, outlaws, romance, and adventure abound in Hard Ride, a collection of tales of the American West from renowned, seven-time Spur Award-winning author Elmer Kelton

Each of Elmer Kelton’s superb stories of the West showcase the strength and power western spirit. They are filled with marvelous characters—from a rodeo clown who seeks redemption via romance, to an outlaw who comes to the aid of ranchers with no other recourse to justice. Powerful Western women feature as importantly as the menfolk here, including a cattle buyer’s daughter who can hold her own with any man on the trail, a renowned lady outlaw who rules her gang with her gun, and a judge’s daughter who is determined to end local mob rule, as “the day of the gun is almost over.” You will meet characters whose devotions and decisions enthrall you long after you put the book down.

Imbued with an adventurous spirit, Hard Ride is filled with many heartfelt glimpses into the authentic experience of the American West. These stories encompass an enormous array of scenes from the early days of the Wild West into the twentieth century. Readers of all ages can enjoy these tales, each one filled with a passion for life that’s as vast as the Texas prairie.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: September 24, 2019

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 400

Sample

MY GUN IS THE LAW


Sheriff Maury Chance looked out the curtained window into the night. He could see nothing except the glow of distant lamps, but he could hear it well enough. They were throwing a big one tonight down at the Legal Tender. Resentment simmered in him, but there was nothing he could do about it now—nothing legal.

A sympathetic hand touched his shoulder. “Come on over and sit down, Maury. Don’t let them get to you this way.”

Chance turned away from the window, but the shadow of slow anger still lay in his face. It was a square face, older in experience than in years, with something in it that was always tense, always expectant. Most noticeable were his restless eyes that never missed a thing.

The man who had spoken to him lifted a box from a table and pushed up the lid. “Cigar, Maury? Help take your mind off what happened today.”

Chance took it. He reached for his shirt pocket to get a match, and encountered instead the coat of his suit. The suit felt unnatural to him now. He hadn’t worn it much the last few years. The most unnatural thing about it was the absence of the gun that usually rode his hip. Thought of the gun made him look for it urgently, before he remembered. He had taken it off in deference to his host. His gun belt dangled from a nail near the door.

His host spoke again. “Like I said, Maury, I regret what happened today. But as a judge, I have to rule according to the verdict of the jury.”

Maury Chance nodded. “I understand, Ashby. It’s not your fault we can’t raise an honest and impartial jury in this town.”

Judge Ashby Dyke drew deeply on his cigar, his heavy brows knitted in thought. He was a large man in his fifties, his hair rapidly graying, the first deep lines of age beginning to gully his strong face.

“It’s always hurt me when I had to send a man to the gallows,” the judge said, “but I believe it hurt me worse today when I had to turn Joe Lacey loose.”

Maury Chance frowned. “You don’t know how long it took me to get Joe Lacey where he was today. You don’t know how many cold camps I made, how many miles I rode, how many times I almost got myself shot. I didn’t want to settle for Joe Lacey alone. I wanted to get his big brother Boyd, and Hugh Holbrook, and their whole cow-stealing, throat-cutting bunch.

“But I had to start somewhere, and I started with Joe. I thought if I got him and sent him away, maybe hanged him, it’d scare off a lot of the other riffraff that’s been hanging on around here. What was left I could take care of. Now Joe Lacey’s loose, and the riffraff is making the most of it.”

Far down the street someone fired a gun, a saloon girl squealed, and half a dozen voices lifted high in laughter.

A young woman walked into the doorway that led from the judge’s small, comfortable parlor back into the equally small kitchen and dining room. She wiped her hands on her apron and said, “Dinner is ready, Dad.”

The judge stood up smiling. “Thelma stayed in that school too long, Maury. She calls dinner ‘lunch’ and supper ‘dinner.’ Keeps me so mixed up I’m never sure whether I’ve eaten or not.”

He motioned Maury into the dining room. The sheriff paused a moment and looked at the judge’s daughter. She was a striking young woman, not altogether pretty, but more attractive than a man usually found out here on the frontier of Texas. She had been born in Missouri somewhere, when that, too, had been frontier, and her father had been a struggling young lawyer. She had followed the frontier all her life until her father had sent her east four years ago to attend school, to become the kind of lady her mother had been.

The school had been successful, Maury thought. She had the grace of the grand ladies he had known as a boy and a young man, in the South before the war. He liked the way she wore her black-and-white lace dress. But her manner and her dress seemed out of place here. They were incongruous with the raw town, with that raucous mob he could hear at the Legal Tender, with the hand-polished .44 in his gun belt against the papered wall.

Her dark blue eyes met his, and in them he sensed disapproval. She had a disturbingly frank way of staring at him, as if she could see into his soul and didn’t like what she saw there.

Thelma Dyke’s slender hands gripped the back of a chair and pulled it out. “Your place, Mr. Chance.”

Her lips smiled, but it was a smile without warmth.

Maury bowed. He wished she didn’t dislike him, but he never wondered why she didn’t. He could see the reason himself, when he looked into a mirror. He could see the bitter lines cut into a face that seldom smiled any more, a face that once had known genteel ways but now was better acquainted with harshness and sudden violence.

As they ate, Maury tried to make conversation with her. “I believe Ashby said you went to school in Boston.”

“Philadelphia,” she corrected him.

Judge Dyke broke in. “Maury had some schooling in Philadelphia too, Thelma. He took some of his law work there.”

That surprised her a little. “Law work? I thought you were only a peace officer.”

Maury said, “I used to practice law as an attorney. But that’s a long story. You wouldn’t be interested.”

She didn’t contradict him. But Ashby Dyke said, “Sure, she’d be interested, Maury.”

“I’ll tell her some other day, if she wants to hear it. Not now.”

Maury hoped she would never want to hear. It was a hard story to tell, or even to think about.

* * *

They ate quietly awhile. Thelma Dyke finally broke the silence. “I should think, Mr. Chance, that it would be a hard transition to make, from attorney to gun-carrying lawman.”

He looked levelly at her. “You don’t approve of the gun, do you?”

She shook her head.

“Neither do I, Miss Dyke,” he told her quietly. “On the contrary, I hate it. I never knew how hard a man could hate until I learned to hate that gun.”

“Then why keep on wearing it?”

“Because it’s necessary, Miss Dyke. Those law books of your father’s are useless out here unless there’s a set of guns somewhere to back them up. There are many men here who have no respect for the law, but they do have respect for the gun.”

She said, “I suppose you’re right. But I can’t respect the gun.”

“Nor the man who wears it,” said Maury Chance.

Judge Dyke broke in. “She didn’t say that, Maury. You’re in a terrible mood tonight, even for you. She didn’t say that or mean it.”

Maury managed a smile. “I’m sorry, Miss Dyke.”

Hard knuckles rapped on the front door. The judge stood up quickly, then walked to the door and opened it. A thin-framed man in worn clothes walked in. He wore a badge on his dusty vest.

“Maury,” he said, excitement rippling in his voice, “things are taking a bad turn down at the Legal Tender. Old Vic said I’d better tell you.”

Maury pushed away from the table and walked out into the little parlor. “What is it, Calvin?”

Deputy Calvin Quillan remembered he still had his hat on, and he took it off as Thelma Dyke walked out of the kitchen. “Joe Lacey’s down there tanking up on Vic’s liquor. He’s got a crowd of his friends with him. I guess you’ve been able to hear that.”

Maury nodded.

“He’s getting real brave now. He’s telling them he’s going to hunt you down and make you run. He’s telling them that what happened in court today showed that the Laceys have the law hog-tied. He’s saying that from now on the Laceys will run this county.”

Maury’s lips went hard in anger. He clenched his fists and cast a glance at his gun. “I guess I’d better put a stop to it, then.”

Ashby Dyke caught Maury’s shoulder. “Don’t pay any attention to it, Maury. It’s drunk talk. It’ll wear off and be forgotten tomorrow.”

Maury shook his head. “No, Ashby, it won’t wear off. If I don’t do something about it, that riffraff will get to thinking he’s right. There won’t be any stopping them then, not until it’s gone too far. So I’ll stop it now, tonight.”

The judge said, “The decent people around here know where you stand, Maury.”

“It’s not the decent people I have to worry about.”

He buckled his gun belt around his waist and reached for his hat. Then he bowed. “My apologies, Miss Dyke, for spoiling the dinner. Maybe I can do better another time.”

She said, “Perhaps.” But she was looking at the gun, and her eyes said that she hoped there wouldn’t be another time.

Ashby Dyke got his hat and reached into a desk drawer. He pulled out a .38 pistol and shoved it into his coat pocket. “I’ll go with you, Maury.”

“No, Ashby. This isn’t your fight.”

The judge was adamant. “I turned him loose.”

Thelma Dyke tried vainly to stop the judge. When she couldn’t, she turned angry eyes on Maury Chance.

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” Maury said. “It’ll be all right.”

They walked out into the darkness. It was cool and there was a faint fragrance from the green grass that had risen after the spring rains.

Enough lanterns burned at the Legal Tender to light half the houses in town. The roar of laughter and the harsh voices carried far up the street. Maury Chance and Judge Ashby Dyke walked abreast. Deputy Quillan followed a pace behind them. But as they stepped up onto the porch and shoved through the door, he moved to his place beside them. Small in frame, Calvin Quillan was not small in courage.

A sudden and complete hush fell over the saloon. Maury’s gaze swept the room, found Joe Lacey, and stopped there. Lacey set down his glass and began to laugh.

“There it is, boys,” he said, “the whole law of Reynoldsville in one package—sheriff, deputy, and judge.”

He picked up his glass again and held it high. “Here’s to the law, for it won’t be with us long.” He took a liberal swallow, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

Joe Lacey hadn’t been shaving for more than two or three years. Drunk or sober, the devil was always looking out of his eyes. He was a good man with a gun, and with a rope—especially on other people’s cattle. He wasn’t simply a cowboy gone bad; he had been brought up that way. It ran in the family.

Maury started walking toward him. Though his eyes were on Lacey alone, he knew the judge and Quillan were with him. Two paces from Lacey, he stopped.

“You’ve made some big talk here tonight, Joe,” he said evenly. “But that’s all it was, just talk. Now you’re going to leave and go home.”

Joe Lacey said, “I’m not ready to go home yet, Sheriff. You had your chance at me today in court, and all you got was a kick in the britches. Now get out before you get another.”

Ice was on Maury Chance’s words. “I’m not going, Joe. You are. You’ve had your laughs. Now go.”

Joe Lacey lost all pretense at humor. His eyes glowed with a long-built hatred. “I’ll go when I’m ready, Chance. And I’ll be ready when I’ve knocked you off of your high horse. You had your chance at me, and you flopped. Now I’m giving you another chance. Draw that gun, if you’re man enough. Kill me if you think you can.”

Maury made no move for his gun. Instead he eased a little closer to Lacey. “I won’t draw on you.”

Lacey’s lips drew up defiantly. “I told them you wouldn’t. I told them I’d show them what a yellow coyote you really are.” Lacey was tasting triumph, and it had a heady, intoxicating flavor.

“Try me, Chance, if there’s any manhood left in you at all!”

Maury’s voice remained calm but still. “I’m not going to draw because I know I could beat you, Joe. I don’t want to kill you and make a martyr out of you. I want to be able to keep hounding you, to put you behind steel bars and make you look like the cheap, common crook you are.”

Every word made the red flush of fury grow deeper in Joe Lacey’s face. When his hand started to the gun at his side, Maury Chance was ready. With a fast forward stride he grabbed Lacey’s hand as it drew the gun. He gripped the gun barrel, gave it a savage twist. Lacey cried out and jerked his hand away, blood running where the sharp trigger guard had chewed into his fingers.

Maury lifted Lacey’s gun by the barrel and swung the butt of it at Lacey’s face. The outlaw cried out again as he slid back against the bar. His hand went up to his cheek, where the gun had ripped a raw gash.

A long-held fury was driving at Chance. He hadn’t wanted it this way, but now he had to show these toughs that he meant what he said. He slashed at Lacey again. The outlaw spun and fell.

Lacey’s gun barrel in his fist, Maury whirled on the rest of the crowd. “Anybody else?”

Nobody made a sound. He had taken them by surprise, and now his animallike fury held them cowed.

“Maury, look out!” The cry came from Calvin Quillan.

Maury whipped around, and saw a gun come up in Lacey’s hand. But before Maury could change his grip on Lacey’s weapon, Quillan stepped in front of him, an old .45 swinging into line.

Lacey’s shot roared like a dynamite blast. Quillan heaved backward. A second shot came from Judge Dyke’s .38. It whipped Lacey around. The outlaw slumped onto the floor, his shoulder shattered.

Quillan swayed, then began to fold at the knees. Maury grabbed him and eased him to the floor. He glanced at the splotch of blood high in Quillan’s chest. A glance was enough.

“Calvin,” he said hoarsely, “you shouldn’t have.”

Quillan tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. In a moment he was dead.

Maury’s burning eyes lifted to the crowd. A knot tightened painfully in his throat. He looked with hatred at Joe Lacey, who was doubled up in a knot, blood spilling around the hand he held to his shoulder.

“I had his gun, Ashby,” Maury said to the judge. “Where did he get another?”

“Somebody passed it to him. I didn’t see who.”

Maury stood up, gripping Lacey’s gun as if he meant to crush it in his fist. “Who was it?” he demanded. “Who gave him the gun?”

No one answered. His gaze searched hotly from one face to another. Then he started looking for empty holsters. He found one. He looked up into the man’s face. He saw guilt there, and fear.

The man whirled and ran for the door, desperately shoving people out of his way.

“Stop!” Maury ordered.

The man kept going. Maury raised the gun and squeezed the trigger. The man fell like a sack of rocks. He lay on the floor sobbing, holding his bleeding leg. The fury drained out of Maury then. Calmness slowly came back to him.

He turned to old Vic, the man who owned the saloon. “Take care of Calvin for me, Vic.”

The whiskered old man nodded. Though the violence had taken place in Vic’s saloon, Maury could not look upon the old man as an enemy. Vic stayed neutral, siding no man, blaming no man.

Roughly Maury took Joe Lacey by his good shoulder and jerked him up. “Come on, Joe. You might’ve gone free today, but you won’t get loose any more. You’ve just hung yourself!”

His blood-smeared face blanched in shock, Joe Lacey was sobering fast. He was crying. “Get me to a doctor. I need a doctor.”

Maury gritted, “You’ll get a doctor in jail.” He jerked Joe Lacey along toward the door, then paused beside the man who lay on the floor, gripping his wounded leg.

“I need somebody to help me get this man to jail, too.”

A couple of cowboys stepped out of the crowd. Maury knew them as punchers from Jess Tolliver’s Rafter T. They had been watching the excitement, taking no hand in it. “We’ll bring him, Sheriff.”

Quickly they commandeered a wagon from the street and loaded the two wounded men into it. One of the cowboys took up the reins. Maury kept looking back over his shoulder, expecting trouble to come boiling out of the Legal Tender.

Judge Dyke read his thoughts. “It came too quickly, Maury. They’re still in a sort of shock. I don’t believe there’ll be any trouble.”

A woman came running toward them from out of the shadows. She stopped in a shaft of lantern light to watch the wagon come by. Thelma Dyke’s face was tight with fear. She looked at Maury Chance first, then saw the judge.

“Dad, are you all right?” The judge nodded, and a sigh of relief escaped her lips. Her shoulders sagged a little. She followed the wagon afoot.

Maury looked back at her once. He was glad he had no one to worry about him, to wonder fearfully if he would walk home tonight or be carried in. If Maury Chance were to die, there’d be no one to mourn him but a few scattered friends. Even they wouldn’t think of him long. It was a satisfying feeling.

But sometimes, in the dark of night and in the quiet of his own room, in his sleepless bed, a terrible loneliness moved in upon him like the wail of a blue norther. At such times he would have given his life to have turned back the years for just a little while to know the comfort of his family back home, the mother, the father, the brother, who was four years older than he.

But they were gone now. The brother was lost on the battlefields of Northern Virginia, the mother and father long since buried. There was no one now to care whether Maury Chance lived or died.

The doctor arrived at the jail within a few minutes. He was a gruff little man of short patience who lived alone and seldom shared his thoughts with anyone. If he ever had any emotion other than perpetual cynicism, he kept it well buried.

“Looks like a lot of useless work to me,” he grumbled, repairing Lacey’s shoulder. “I patch him up and get him healed so you can hang him. Would’ve been better if you’d killed him in the first place.”

“I didn’t do it, Doc,” Maury said. “The judge did.”

He wished immediately he had bitten off his tongue instead of talking. He saw the sudden surprise, then the deep disappointment in Thelma Dyke’s face. “Dad, you didn’t!”

The judge nodded. “I did. That man killed Quillan, the deputy, and he was about to kill Maury. So I shot him.”

She stared at her father as if she still couldn’t believe it. Gently the judge placed his big hands on her slender shoulders. “Don’t fret over it, Thelma. There’s no reason why I should feel sorry about it. I don’t.”

“That’s just it,” she said. “Maybe you did have to do it, but you certainly shouldn’t act as if it were nothing.”

The judge made no reply. Maury Chance moved over beside the young woman. “Don’t blame your father, Miss Dyke. He did the only thing that could be done, and you’ll realize it when you’ve had time to think it over. You were brought up on the frontier. Surely those four years in the East didn’t make you forget everything you learned as a girl.”

Her dark blue eyes leveled on his. “You think I learned to hate guns while I was in the East, Mr. Chance, but you’re wrong. I learned it a long time before that. I was just a little girl. Did Dad ever tell you how I lost my mother?”

Pain came into Ashby Dyke’s eyes. “Thelma, please.”

She went on, “There was a bank robbery in the little Missouri town where we were living. The bandits had a hard time getting out. Bullets started flying everywhere. My mother threw me down onto the floor. Then a stray bullet smashed through a window and struck her.

“We never did know whose bullet it was. It might have been from a bandit, or it might have been from a lawman. It didn’t make much difference. She was dead.”

Her eyes burned with a quiet hatred as she looked at Maury’s .44. “It makes little difference whose hands they’re in. Guns make trouble for everybody. Do you think Joe Lacey’s friends will forget that Dad shot him? They won’t. He’s put himself in line for trouble. And what did it? That gun, Mr. Chance.”

That whipped Maury Chance. He knew no answer and tried none.

Thelma Dyke’s slender shoulders were squared and aloof as she walked out the door with her father and disappeared into the darkness.

Basically, she was right. He granted her that. She was just carrying the idea to an extreme, Maury thought.

Long after she was gone, he found himself still watching her in his mind, still thinking of those proud shoulders, of the ease and grace with which she walked. Most of all, he thought of her face. It could be a pretty face if she smiled. He knew that she must smile a lot. It showed in the little crinkles at the edges of her blue eyes, at the corners of her soft mouth.

But there had never been a smile for him. And he wanted very much to see one.

Joe Lacey’s lawyer was late in learning about the shooting. But as soon as he heard, he came on the run. Maury let him into Lacey’s lamp-lighted cell. A few minutes later, when the lawyer came out, Maury explained the situation briefly.

“Looks like there’s no way for you to wiggle him out of it this time, J.T.,” Maury said, with a hint of satisfaction.

J. T. Prosise wasn’t exactly a crooked lawyer, but he could teeter on the brim of crookedness as expertly, without falling in, as anyone Maury had ever seen.

Prosise eyed him narrowly. “Are you sure you’re not just harboring a grudge because of what happened in court today?”

Maury shook his head. “No grudge, J.T. You did your job, and I can’t hold that against you. But I can’t forget it, either. I know that next time you’ll try to discredit my evidence just like you did today. But next time it won’t work. There was a whole roomful of witnesses tonight.”

“You had a gun in your, hand,” Prosise pointed out. “You had struck him twice. I think my client would be justified in pleading self-defense.”

Maury managed to keep the growing anger out of his voice. “You can try it, but it won’t hold water, J.T. It won’t suit a jury.”

Prosise smiled wisely. “I think it would suit a jury in this county,” he said pointedly. “Don’t you?”

Maury’s jaw went hard in anger. Prosise’s point was plain enough. There were too many of Joe Lacey’s kind in Reynoldsville, and there would be plenty of them on any jury panel that might be made up.

“I’m going to convict him, J.T.,” Maury said stubbornly. “This time I’m going to get him.”

Prosise only smiled. “We’ll see, Chance. We’ll see.”

Next morning the town was extra quiet. Maury made a tour of the saloons, just to look around. He found them almost empty. Old Vic’s was like the rest.

“How does it look, Vic?” Chance asked.

Old Vic was polishing glass with a clean white cloth. He took a long time sizing up Maury, but his gray eyes expressed no judgment.

“They’re waiting, keeping their eyes open,” he said. “They’re waiting to see if you try to make it stick. If you could, they’d start drifting out. They’d know their day was about over. But you won’t make it stick, and they know it. They know you’ll stick by the law, and the law in this case happens to work for Joe Lacey.”

Maury gritted his teeth. “So I’m going to lose. What happens then?”

Vic said, “Some say you’re going to die. Joe Lacey’s a young, hotheaded fool. His brother Boyd is just about like him. When Joe gets out …

“But most say it won’t happen that way. Most of them are thinking about Hugh Holbrook. It’s Hugh that really runs the Laceys, and he’s a smart man. Talk is that the toughs are going to run him for sheriff this summer, against you. And they’ll run J. T. Prosise against Ashby Dyke. They’ll win. There are too many of them not to win.”

Maury pondered that, keeping his face blank. “How do you stand, Vic?”

The old man’s face was as expressionless as the bare walls of his saloon. “It’s not my place to worry about it, one way or the other. But I’m glad I’m not you.”

* * *

Maury expected it, but he didn’t know in what manner the visitation would come. He was considerably surprised, then, when Boyd Lacey and Hugh Holbrook came riding up the middle of the main street in broad daylight. Not a person in town missed their coming. All along the street men stood and stared. But as the two riders reached the courthouse square and dismounted, the spectators began to pull back, to watch from doorways and windows.

Maury had seen them from the window of his office in the jail building. Hitching his gun belt, he stepped out into the doorway and waited.

He caught the hot hatred in Boyd Lacey’s eyes, and thought he saw a sudden impulse to try to kill him then and there. But Lacey changed his mind. Like his younger brother, he was a man of impulse. But unlike Joe Lacey, Boyd didn’t follow every impulse that came to him.

Maybe the calmness of Hugh Holbrook had something to do with that. Holbrook was a man of cool thinking, of long deliberation, then of positive movement. More than once, Maury had seen a disapproving glance from Holbrook stop the Lacey brothers from launching into some hasty, ill-considered notion.

It was Holbrook’s leadership that had built one of the smoothest-operating bands of rustlers and all-around thieves in the Texas Panhandle.

The two men stopped three strides from Maury Chance. “I’ve come to see my brother,” Lacey said at length.

“You can see him,” Maury answered, “but I take the guns first.”

Lacey started to make some protest, but Holbrook calmly unbuckled his gun belt and held it out. Lacey looked at him, then grudgingly followed suit.

Holding the belts, Maury stepped back inside the doorway to give the two men room. “You know the way, Boyd,” he said. “You’ve been here before.”

Lacey’s eyes flickered at the insult, and he said something under his breath. A thin smile played on Holbrook’s lips.

Where Boyd Lacey was carelessly dressed and left an odor of tobacco and sweat as he walked by, shoulders hunched, Hugh Holbrook carried himself erectly. His military bearing betrayed him. Anyone could tell he had been a soldier—an officer.

He was freshly shaven. His clothes were clean, except for a few dust streaks gained on the ride to town. He was a handsome man, older than forty. When he spoke, it was evident that he was well educated.

An awful waste, Maury always thought when he saw Hugh Holbrook. With the Laceys it was a case of their following their natural bent. They’d never been anything but outlaws. That was all they could ever be.

Who then merited the most contempt, Maury had asked himself many times—the men who were outlaws because it was their nature, or this man who would have been something better, had been something better?

Maury said, “I’m a little surprised you came in this way, Hugh. I’d expected you, all right, but I was afraid it might be different.”

Holbrook grinned. “It could have been, but I prevailed on Boyd to do it this way. I’ve always believed men could talk things out over a calm cup of coffee much better than over the point of a gun.”

Maury nodded. “That’s sensible. But there’s not much to talk out. Yesterday there might have been; today it’s gone too far.”

“It’s never too far gone, Maury. Stop and look at it objectively. If you take this to court, what chance have you?”

“I have plenty of evidence.”

Holbrook grinned. “You had evidence yesterday, too. Joe still won acquittal. He’ll win next time, and you know it. Where will you stand in this town then? After two defeats in a row you’ll be finished here.”

Maury’s eyes narrowed. “What would you want me to do?”

“Don’t ever let it come to trial. Talk your friend the judge into setting a reasonable bail. Let Joe out. Keep putting the trial off. In time the fuss will die down and you can forget about the trial altogether.”

Maury said, “I know what you’re working at, Hugh. Keep putting the trial off until you’re the new sheriff and J. T. Prosise is the judge.”

Holbrook’s eyes were smug in triumph. “It’s not a question of choice, Maury. There isn’t any choice. This is the only thing you can do and save your face. Take another whipping and you won’t be able to make a stray dog run from you.”

Maury stared angrily at Hugh Holbrook a long moment before he answered. Then he clenched his teeth hard and slowly shook his head.

“No dice, Hugh. Sink or swim, I’m going to take him to trial. I’m going to do my best to hang him. If I fail, it won’t be because I didn’t try.”

Holbrook’s grin was gone. His eyes had gone the color of gun steel. “Then try your damndest, Maury. I’ll see you leave this town like a cur dog, with your tail between your legs.”

* * *

Anger was still roiling in Maury Chance when he walked into the judge’s house. Ashby Dyke put down a heavy law volume and stood up to greet him. Maury told of the visit of Boyd Lacey and Hugh Holbrook.

“We can’t get a jury that’ll convict him, Ashby,” Maury said bitterly. “I know that now. And we can’t afford to lose again.”

The judge nodded agreement. “I’ve done lots of thinking about it.”

Maury said, “I know of only one way out, Ashby. I’ve decided to take it. We have a lot of support from the ranches that Holbrook and the Laceys and the rest of this mob have been preying on. Jess Tolliver of the Rafter T was in to see me this morning, as soon as he heard about Calvin Quillan.

“We have only one chance to win this trial, Ashby. That’s to clean out this town first—drive out the cow thieves, the gamblers, the small-time crooks, the whole bunch. They outnumber us, but we can do it if we move fast