THE SHERIFF AND THE WIDOW - THE FINAL PART

The Tainted Archive is proud to bring this long out of print western classic from Chap O'Keefe and Black Horse Westerns to you. Today we have the final part and later in the week a new sidebar will appear on The Archive with direct links to each part.

Let us know in the comments section if you've enjoyed the opportunity to read this online and The Archive will go after other out ot print classics.

Nuff said - on with the show.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Snake McClay Gets Brutal

Snake McClay stood leaning on the porch rail outside the batwings of the Lucky Horseshoe. He'd barged out of the saloon after knocking back as many stiff drinks as it had taken to empty the loaned bits in his pockets. This served not to blunt his evil wits, but to bring it on home to him that he was hard done by in society. In turn, this strengthened his resolve that those held in higher esteem should be made to pay -- and he, Jeremiah McClay, should receive that payment.

Orson Rymer had obligingly pointed him in a couple of directions that promised sport plus financial reward in the wiping of more of his substantial gambling debt.

Which should he go in first?

Ellen Blackwood was a dish that made him positively drool. She despised him, too, he knew, and that would add savour to accosting her. But he'd have to be careful. Her shop, the place where she now lived, was right here in the middle of town, and at this early hour of the evening the goody-goody folks were still up and about. Sound of a disturbance might bring them prying into what promised to be a spicy interlude.

A few female screams much later would be considered nobody's proper business.

So maybe it would be best to keep the best for last and turn his attentions to the Dunbars. "Snake, ol' son, yuh got strong will, that's what it is," he congratulated himself, chuckling.

He straightened his narrow shoulders and swaggered off.

His steps took him to a meaner part of town, where the streets were twisted tracks with tough weeds and clumps of buffalo grass sprouting in deep ruts, and where the houses were no better than clapboard shacks. Many of the poorly constructed dwellings were in disrepair and the district was characterised by a miasma of insanitary smells. It was a quarter where kids never got enough to eat and shivered in winter through lack of warm clothing.

It was also here, according to the saloon gossip he'd overheard, that the Dunbars had come after quitting the Double-B. They'd found a leaky roof at the vacant hovel owned by the woman's widowed Mexican son-in-law who'd gone south -- across the Border, it was said -- to visit family.

"Plenty o' housekeepin' fer the old baggage to do in this neck o' the woods," Snake soliloquised dryly.

A small roofed porch was built across what McClay assumed was supposed to be the front of the Dunbars' retreat. He knew a thing or two about the art of intimidation. Electing to be perverse, he went to the other side of the shack, picking his way under a coppery-black sky past a clump of prickly-pear cactus and a heap of trash in some sort of midden. Disturbed bluebottle flies droned round his head, reminding him of the other touch he'd planned.

He stopped to tug out a crumpled mask from inside his shirt. It was what the westerner knew as a skep and was used by bee-hunters. It was a concial shape which fitted over the head to the shoulders and had slitted eyeholes. The mask was designed to protect the wearer when raiding nests for honey and the wax that was used widely in the manufacture of candles. But McClay's purposes had nothing to do with insect life.

He pulled the skep on and stepped up to a dusty window beside a back door.

A light shone dimly within. McClay rapped on the glass.

At first there was no response, so McClay tried again, applying his horny knuckles more loudly and insistently where a tentative "Hello, the house!" might have been equally effective.

Martha Dunbar's voice called, "Who's there?"

"Carlos sent me. Open up!" he ordered harshly. "Or I'll smash this blasted window."

Fumbling sounds and a thud indicated a bar was being removed, then the latch clicked and the door began to inch open, a woman's work-worn fingers clutching round its edge.

McClay shoved in his boot.

"What's this!" Mrs Dunbar said, stoutly unscared by the shadowy figure in the skep. "Yuh ain't from Carlos. Yuh're up to no good in that stoopid mask."

"That depends, ol' woman."

"We're poor folks and got nothin' to steal. What the devil do yuh want?" The woman kept her bulky figure solidly behind the part-opened door.

"A li'le talk is all," McClay said. Swift as any snake he was named after, the vindictive gunnie withdrew his foot and yanked the door suddenly shut, trapping and smashing Martha Dunbar's fingers.

She was not the screaming sort, but a howl of pain was wrenched from her throat.

McClay shouldered his way in, pushing the housekeeper before him and slamming the door behind him, setting the lantern flame flickering. He drew his gun and made a threatening gesture as though he meant to pistol-whip her, and she cowered.

Hank Dunbar limped forward arthritically. "Yuh hittin' a woman, yuh bastard! Stop that!"

He flung himself on McClay's arm, digging his fingers in with a strength at odds with his deceptively feeble, crooked frame.

McClay bared his tobacco-stained teeth, turned on him and slashed at his head with the gun barrel.

"No!" Mrs Dunbar sobbed. "He's an old man -- let him alone!"

But her husband was incensed. Though his head hurt like blazes and blood spurted from a split between the wrinkles in his forehead, the plucky old fellow threw himself forward again. He'd successfully stopped the intruder from menacing his wife and this time his intention was different, and took McClay by surprise.

Dunbar tore the skep from the gunslick's head.

"Trash from the Double-B!" he roared in astonishment. "Whadyuh want with us, McClay?"

"It might of bin friendly advice, yuh old fart! Like shut your traps an' go join that greaser son-in-law of your'n!" Then McClay hit Dunbar again.

Dunbar's bloodied head snapped back on his thin neck with a sickening crack and he collapsed in a loose heap of bones and oversized clothes beside an iron-framed double-bed.

His wife wailed and, disregarding her broken and throbbing fingers, dropped to her knees beside him.

"Yuh've killed 'im!" she announced, her face ashen. "Yuh wicked, ungodly wretch!"

"Hell!" McClay said disbelievingly. "It was only a tap an' he asked fer it, the stubborn ol' cuss!"

"Yuh're finished, Jeremiah McClay. Yuh allus were no good, I knew it, even if yuh fooled Mr Blackwood. `Snake' -- huh!" she spat. "They'll put a rope round your neck an' then we'll see yuh wriggle!"

McClay saw with startling clarity that he'd done murder. By itself that left him cold. But he'd done it in front of a witness, which stirred something akin to fear in his brain and brought him out in a sweat.

"Shut up, bitch!" he snarled.

Mrs Dunbar lurched to her feet. "Yuh've got it comin'! I'm goin' to fetch Sheriff Tucker," she said, made foolish by shock and grief.

McClay knew that even if he got himself a fast horse and rode like the devil out of the country, he'd be up against it from now on. He was out of money. There'd be a posse, telegraph messages, dodgers. Once the woman spoke out, he'd only be hurtling to the end of the road . . .

A tide of rising anger threw up the answer.

It was obvious. The silly old harridan wouldn't take much killing. Just one bullet. And a single shot in the night on this side of the tracks would bother no one.

Folks this dumb didn't deserve to live, come to think of it.

He swung up the Colt and squeezed the trigger.

The crash of the revolver in the confined dwelling was deafening. The heavy woman was flung back, a crimson splatter appearing on the grey homespun above her left breast. She clutched momentarily at the iron bed-end before she sagged and died without speaking another word.

Powdersmoke spread and made an acrid, reeking layer across the room.

The confidence seeped back into the runty gunman as fast and completely as the hearing came back to his ears.

No one came; no one called out. Before the outcry was raised, he'd be out of here and moving on to his next chore. There'd be no botching that one.

Ellen Blackwood was just a slip of a girl all alone, McClay reassured himself. And when he'd finished with her, she was going to die in any case. Orson Rymer expected it. Besides being a pleasure, it was going to be worth good money.

Yep, he'd do a good job.

McClay ducked out of the drab little house the same way he'd come, leaving it in silence broken only by the persistent phut-phut of a moth hitting the hot lantern glass.

* * *

A change in the chattering rhythm of the train's wheels had Ross Kemp tipping the stetson up off his eyes and taking a slanchways look out the window.

They were traversing a wooden trestle bridge. Far below was a foaming river, starkly white in the coming dusk. That gave Kemp his bearings and warned him it was time to think of quitting his stolen ride.

The train would soon be ending its trip, reaching the end of tracks at Cedar City, where it was likely he'd be recognised almost as soon as he disembarked. If he were fool enough to try it . . .

He stole a glance round the end of the seat, back down the car. The coast seemed clear. He stood up, but didn't reach for the borrowed bedroll or saddle. The train was starting to slow as the locomotive hauled the cars up the gradient away from the river. Smoke and steam blew past the window in coiling drifts.

Kemp walked down the swaying car, availing himself of the fewest and lightest of handholds, and only on the backs of seats that were unoccupied. He picked his way nimbly past carpet-bags and trunks to the very end.

He nodded to the conductor when he put his hand on the knob that opened the door to the small, open deck at the rear of the train.

"Get some air," he drawled casually.

The conductor was engrossed in the study of a much-dog-eared Bible and scarcely looked up.

"Can't say's I blame yuh, mister," he responded, but Kemp was relieved he went right on reading.

Kemp stepped onto the platform and gripped the rail

with both hands, watching the wooden ties moving away from under the train ever more slowly as it panted up the gradient.

The country was familiar to him now, but he was looking at it from a perspective that was different. He had to be sure he made his leap at near enough the place he had in mind. His disappearance from the train would probably cause some action, maybe even a posse would come searching when things got added up. So he needed to be close to somewhere he could collect himself a reliable mount. Limp along afoot like some lame old wolf and he'd surely be trapped long before he could reach Miss Ellen.

He looked for a certain hilltop and eventually spotted it in a gravelly scar off to the right. Half a century earlier, a lightning strike had started a fire which had stripped it of trees and led to erosion which kept it free of vegetation, like a bald spot on top of a man's scalp.

Kemp vaulted over the rail, clung to the outer edge of the platform but momentarily, then flexed his knees and sprang.

He hit the sloping bank below the rail bed with his shoulder and rolled, crunching through scented clumps of sage and yucca spines, till he came to stop in a shadowy hollow at its base.

Above and beyond, the brass-trimmed, red-and-black loco steamed on, belching black smoke from its tall stack as it crawled noisily up the long gradient. When the train reached the top, and its rear end was a diminishing blob in the darkening distance, a shrill whistle came echoing back. Ahead of it lay only the down-run into Cedar City and it disappeared from view, swiftly gathering momentum.

Feeling safe from immediate detection, Kemp picked himself up and brushed himself down. Dusk was settling in

and he set his sights on the distinctive bald-topped peak and made for it in as straight a line as he could.

There, in a remote setting backed by the forest, was a homestead -- a log cabin, log barn and a peeled-log corral. Inside the corral would be mounts, because the homesteader was also a horse-trader.

Some said the man was eccentric, because he shunned the town and seldom visited it. Others claimed he was as mad as his unfortunate teenaged son, who'd been born an idiot. A few, including ex-Sheriff Ross Kemp, suspected he supplied fresh horses to fugitive outlaws, but they'd never had proof, and short of staking the isolated place out, they never would.

Fittingly, Kemp was going there tonight to do business with the contents of an outlaw's wallet.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Innocent Prey

Ellen Blackwood dipped steel-nibbed pen into inkwell and made another entry in her ledger in fine, copperplate handwriting. With a downpour turning Main Street into a muddy mill race in the morning, she'd given up hope of much custom and turned her attentions for the day to stocktaking and updating her accounts. Her millinery and haberdashery business, though modest in appearance, was popular with the ladies, both town and country and of all classes, and turnover continually exceeded expectations.

She was at a loss to explain the success, though the more acute citizens of Cedar City, including the former sheriff, could have told her it had much to do with her own pleasant personality and efficient manner.

Consequently, very late into the evening, she was still hard at it, recording, to her own downright surprise, the shop's astonishing disposal of straw sun bonnets and fancy silk bandanas, not to mention a whole two gross of spools of darning cotton in assorted colours.

With her single-roomed living quarters back of the shop also being her office, it was somehow not easy to break away from the work. Not that she had any overwhelming inclination to do so. Social life for Ellen was limited to visiting a few women friends and a weekly church choir practice.

She didn't have eyes for the men of the town, though every handsome young fellow for miles around had paid court to her at one time or another since she'd turned sixteen. The one man she'd admired had been Ross Kemp. But his life had seemed to revolve exclusively around the badge he'd worn so proudly. And now he was irrevocably lost to her in the state penitentiary, falsely accused and disgraced. She was adamant to herself on the injustice of his treatment, but frustratingly powerless to right it.

Linked as Mr Kemp's fate was to her father's cowardly murder, she also had strong suspicions that a conspiracy had been perpetrated involving her stepmother and the rich legacy of the Double-B property.

Like she'd told Mr Kemp, she'd pursued that line of enquiry with lawyer Isaac Siebert and been rebuffed. She remained sure, however, that the Dunbars had not been mistaken about witnessing a new will.

She was striving to return her troubled thoughts to her work when she heard the thump of footsteps on the boardwalk outside. Instinct as well as reason seemed to warn her this was not as it should be, especially when the late-night walker apparently shambled to a stop.

She turned up her lamp, her ears alert to every sound, a frown creasing the smooth brow beneath the fringe of golden ringlets.

A rattle came. Someone was trying the shop door.

Already in her nightgown, she pulled a wide shawl across her shoulders and wrapped it around her trim body. Bravely, she parted the drapes that cut off her private quarters from the shop and slipped through.

"Who's there?" she asked, loudly enough to be heard.

Through the window she could see the indistinct shape of the prowler on the porch.

A throat was cleared. "From the Double-B, miss. Need to see yuh . . ."

Her immediate and automatic thought was that someone must be gravely ill, or worse.

"Is anything wrong? Is my stepmother --?"

"Yeah . . . Mrs Blackwood," the rough voice answered.

It must be one of the ranch-hands, Ellen thought, though she couldn't recognise which. She quickly unlocked the door and swung it open.

She was instantly aware of two things, both distasteful to her. He'd been drinking -- his breath was laden with alcohol -- and he was Jeremiah McClay, the one they called Snake and whom she found so ugly in looks and nature.

"Thanks, sister," he said, sweeping past her into the little shop and kicking the door shut behind him. "Nice li'le ee-stablishment yuh have here!"

"So it's you, McClay! What's wrong with Mrs Blackwood?"

"Why, I purely wouldn't know. Did any folk say there was?"

"You did! Or you agreed to it." She felt suddenly very vulnerable. "What do you really want?"

"All kinda things," he said with a leer.

She thought from his manner and his liquored state that he was seeking money.

"I keep no coin or bills on the premises --"

"I don't want one measly greenback," he hooted. "You an' me's jest gonna straighten out where yuh bin spreadin' them lies told by the fool Dunbars. That an' have some fun . . ."

Ellen's hands clenched tightly on the hem of her shawl. "Get out of here!" she cried fiercely. "I've nothing to say to you!"

He reached out nonchalantly with a dirty-nailed hand and gripped her cruelly by the arm, preventing her from backing away.

"Let me go!" Ellen blurted, trying to shake off his hold. The shawl slipped, and with his free hand McClay whipped it away. Her skin crawled.

"Waal, there's a dainty sight!" he smirked. "Fact, we won't bother 'bout no talkin' at all!" He jerked her to him, crushing her to his stringy frame in a powerful hug like a bear lean from winter's hunger.

She opened her mouth to cry out again, but he clamped his own over hers and she inhaled a sickening draught of whiskey fumes and fouler odours. She gagged, incapable of speech.

McClay laughed mockingly. "Now c'mon! Yuh kin do better than that."

Sobbing, fighting back a fearful hysteria, she slapped at his face. It was no puny blow, despite the delicacy of her smooth hand, and though it probably stang her palm more than his cheek, the courage of her resistance caught him by surprise. She jerked out of his loosened grip.

"Bitch! I'll tan your hide for that!"

With the lithe speed of a frightened pronghorn doe, she dived behind the drapes that curtained off her living space.

But the retreat was futile, defeating her own best interest. McClay rent the drapes from their rod and plunged after her.

"A bed!" he said, the sarcastic, monkey grin returning. "Mebbe yuh got the right idea after all, gal!"

Seeing nothing that could serve as a weapon to fend him off, she crouched in a corner, desperately curling herself into a defensive ball.

"It was you!" she flung at him. A bid to distract him with wild words brought the truth home to her with amazing clarity. "I know it! You were the one who killed my father!"

In her extremity, she recalled his pride in his marksmanship; his disturbing, debtor relationship with the mysterious Orson Rymer who'd now taken residence at the Double-B as a friend of Jessica; the mention of the Dunbars and what they'd told her. And she thought she saw the links.

The incredible logic of her deduction startled even herself.

"Smart -- too smart!" McClay growled.

He was inflamed by the danger of the knowledge she'd revealed -- and by the urgency of his repressed lusts. He seized her by an arm and a leg, and dragged and heaved her across the bed in the tangle of her disordered nightgown. His callous hands left angry red bruises on the soft whiteness of her skin.

"Oh . . . ! You'll go the gallows, you hateful, contemptible swine!" Ellen panted. But her face was white and her beautiful hazel eyes wide with terror.

"So what's a li'le more blood on my hands?" he scorned. "I'll tell 'em in hell how I had an angel!"

He unbuckled his gunbelt and dropped it to the floor. The haste in which he prepared himself to grab the forced invitation of her sprawled limbs was feverish. And thoughtless.

She lay apparently in breathless defeat and compliance, but the instant his eager hands thrust forward to toss the skirt of her nightgown above her thighs, she rapidly came to screaming life, wriggled free of his clumsy grasp, and rolled to the floor.

Her slim fingers went straight to the butt of his discarded, holstered gun.

Simultaneously, a hammering came on the door of the shop. "Miss Ellen! What's going on in there? Open up!"

McClay swung in confusion. Before he turned back to the girl, snarling in fury at his thwarting, she had the gun trained on him. With a disgusting oath, he promptly lunged to wrench the gun from her.

That was his second and biggest mistake.

What he achieved by this rash action was to trap her slender but strong finger between trigger guard and trigger. His own hand was closed on the barrel, trying to pull the gun away from her, when it went off with a flash and a roar.

McClay gave a great shout of pain and clapped his hands to his exposed belly where it was punctured by the unaimed shot.

"Yuh shot me, yuh vixen!" he groaned, and sank to his knees before keeling over onto his side.

"Open up! Open up!" bellowed the voice at the door. The man sounded beside himself with agitation, and the door shuddered and creaked as he flung his weight at it.

Incongruously at such a moment, Ellen could think only that this was a voice she'd not dared hope to hear in Cedar City ever again.

"Mr Kemp," she said brokenly. "Is . . . that . . . you?"

"It is, Miss Ellen! Are you all right? Quickly -- let me in!"

Ellen dropped the still-smoking gun, snatched up her shawl and gathered it round the ruins of her ripped nightgown. She rushed to unlatch the door.

Kemp burst in. He had a six-shooter in his hand and his jaw was set to a grim hardness. But Ellen noticed most the gauntness of suffering imposed on his features and the tiredness in the faded blue of his eyes.

"What happened?" he snapped, sounding unknowingly terse and rude. "A gun was fired. Are you hurt?"

"No, but Snake McClay is." She gestured toward her inner, violated sanctuary. "He broke in. It was him who shot my father, you see, and he -- he --"

McClay moaned. He was still alive -- just -- but he knew he was done for. He struggled to lever himself up onto his knees. Blood was dribbling into the grossness of his naked groin and down his legs. It was a wonder he'd not already died.

"Kemp, yuh bastard!" he croaked. "Thought I'd got yuh servin' time fer me in the pen . . . but that high-an'-mighty bitch" -- he nodded at Ellen with a twisted grimace -- "won't get the Double-B. My pard Rymer has got it all worked out a treat. Yuh'll l'arn!"

It was his parting shot -- a vainglorious attempt to crow to the end. The guttering flame of pride drove him to resist the brand of inferiority that had marked him all his squalid life. Snake McClay was dying, but for sure he was still on the winning side . . .

Ellen shuddered at horror present and horror immediately past. She felt Kemp's strong, sheltering arm go round her shoulders and unabashedly turned and hid her face against his chest.

"What did he mean, and what will we learn?" she asked, anguish mingling with the relief of her escape.

"You've been cheated, Miss Ellen, and I was framed by the same people," he explained as simply as he could. The ramifications of McClay's bald confession were starting to mesh with everything else they knew.

"After McClay bushwhacked your pa," he went on slowly, "he snuck up on me, brought a gun butt down on my head, fired my saddle-gun and lugged me off with my horse to where I was found by the Double-B crew. Then he rode up hisself, all innocence, and planted the idea in the waddies' brains that I'd killed their boss!"

"The judas! Why did he do this?"

Kemp gave this sombre thought. "Because it was in his nature, I guess. His record bears it out." He drew a deep, ragged breath. "But like he said, the genius behind it is Orson Rymer's. McClay's unwise gambling had made him the tinhorn's pawn, though he'd buck at admitting it."

Ellen was nobody's fool. "And Rymer's game is control of the Double-B . . . Mr Kemp, I fear Jessica has fallen into this man's toils, and Lawyer Siebert has not told the truth either. How can I get to the bottom of it? The Double-B is more than my old home -- it's my poor, foolish father's life work. It mustn't be bled to its ruin!"

"Amen to that. Though I've busted out of the pen, I'll never be a free man until we've gotten the truth out in the open."

A new anxiety struck at Ellen. God, what was she thinking of when Ross Kemp was a fugitive, putting his own life on the line? He was the man she loved and she was sure he had a genuine fondness for her, too. But circumstances seemed always incredibly doomed to keep them apart.

"Mr Kemp, I can ask you to do no more. I'm appalled and sorry about everything you've been through because of the Blackwoods. You should never have come back to Cedar City. You've helped save my life by doing so, and I'm almighty grateful, but now you must look to your own safety. Ride on! Leave the state -- cross the Border before it's too late!"

It was a heartfelt speech, and better than pretty as colour touched her cheeks and her hazel eyes became lustrous pools filled with pleading.

But Kemp said gruffly, "The hell with that! Get on some clothes, Miss Ellen. We're going to shake the truth out of your stepmother tonight."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A Macabre Discovery

Kemp's intention, stated so vehemently that he'd forgotten himself and swore, carried Ellen with him. Her mind was in a turmoil. She was into riding garb and as far as the door before it struck her. This was the hot-headed impulse of a moment. At this late hour, the wide, double doors of the town's livery barn, where she stabled her pony, would be shut for the night.

She yielded to the dictates of common sense and spoke out.

"No matter," Kemp said at her protest. He was steadfast, and his mind was astonishingly sharp and clear despite his long day's exertions and traumas. "There'll be an unclaimed Double-D bronc still hitched outside the Lucky Horseshoe or some other saloon, I'll bet you. Snake McClay won't be riding it back."

It was a clear night, the air crisp and clean after the day's rain. A full moon rode above, its light augmented by the bright points and spots of a thousand stars and planets. But the pair were blind to its beauty.

As Kemp predicted, they found a horse with the distinctive Double-B brand on its flank at the rail outside the Lucky Horseshoe. At fifteen hands, the six-year-old gelding was higher and heavier than the Indian-raised pony Ellen had recently been accustomed to riding. But brought up on the ranch, she was an able horsewoman, and Kemp adjusted the stirrups and cinched up the saddle confident she'd cope without bother.

There was no further parley. They slipped away quietly, out of town, and rode the twelve-mile trail for the Double-B spread at a fast lope.

The big ranch-house was impressive in the moonglow. Its whitewashed, Spanish-style architecture was majestic in scale compared to the other buildings clustered around it, though these were no less mean of their type.

But within, the hacienda was in total darkness. Not a light showed at any of its open-shuttered windows.

Kemp glanced significantly at Ellen, who had made the same observation.

"Do we go on?"

She nodded. "No sense in wasting the ride. And by morning the law will be on your heels, Mr Kemp. Let's speak to my father's widow."

He leaned forward in the saddle to lift the iron latch of the yard gate and they walked their horses on in and swung down.

There were murmurings over in the direction of the bunkhouse, a corraled horse nickered a curious welcome to the newcomers and the windmill clanked slowly in the lightest of breezes. But the big rock-and-adobe ranch-house stayed silent.

They went up to the porticoed entrance and Kemp rapped his knuckles on a polished oak door with blacked iron fittings.

No one came.

Behind them, sensing tension in the air, their horses pawed the gravel of the yard restlessly. The scrape of their hoofs and the jangling of shaken stirrup assemblies and tossed harness rings merely underscored the silence of the house.

Kemp balled his fist and hammered the door. "Hello there! Mrs Blackwood! Rymer!"

Ellen shrugged. "The Dunbars have quit and there's probably no housekeeping staff. Orson Rymer goes to town in a buggy of nights -- well, some nights. But Jessica should be here . . ."

"That so? I reckon we'll be knocking till our knuckles are raw and calling till we're blue in the face," Kemp said.

He put his hand exploratively to a shiny black knob. To his surprise, it turned and the door moved.

"Doesn't that beat all! The door's unlocked, it seems. For Rymer maybe. Why does he go to town?"

"To show off his skills at the poker tables, I understand."

Kemp frowned. "Why in blazes hasn't Mrs Blackwood answered? There's something strange about this whole thing. Shall we go in?"

"It's that or go enquire at the bunkhouse, I guess."

"No," Kemp objected flatly. "I'm a jailbird, remember? Let those cowpokes sight my face hereabouts and they'd likely get to shooting."

Ellen shuddered. "Another death is the last thing I want to see." She added to herself, silently, especially yours.

He found a lucifer and scratched it into life.

"Figure it'll do less harm if 'n we just go in and take a look-see."

Her hand touched his arm as they went forward. "The parlour is on the left."

In the seconds before the match sputtered out, its flickering light showed Kemp the crouching shapes of comfortable armchairs and a sofa ranged round the room. An upright piano stood in one corner with a violin case and framed daguerreotypes atop it. His boot heels sank into the softness of carpet. Paintings were on the walls.

The spacious parlour was beyond comfortable. It was by prevailing standards opulent. But it also was clearly unoccupied.

Ellen moved past him and drew back the drapes at a window. The high-sailing moon cast in a beam of light, adequate to let them move around without stumbling into furniture. It also chiselled planes of harsh white across Kemp's grim, enquiring face.

"She's not here," Ellen said quietly. "Maybe she went out with Rymer. But there's the study and her bedroom, of course. Shall I give us some light?"

Kemp nodded, handing her another lucifer. "The candle on the sideboard. We'll take it with us."

Ellen went quickly through the house that had been her childhood home with Kemp at her heels.

"Nobody! The place is empty," he said with a kind of disgust when the search was done.

Ellen sighed. "I've not seen Jessica in town with Rymer before."

"Maybe there's someplace else she could be. One of the outbuildings . . . ?"

"She would have returned by now, or called out when she heard someone come to the house, surely?" Ellen countered. "I don't like the looks of this. Maybe she's had an -- an accident."

She had just put in words something like the thought that had flashed through Kemp's brain. But he said, "Is there any other place she might go close by? Where she could have tripped or fallen?"

Ellen considered, fingers going to her lips in a gesture that Kemp found oddly stirring.

"Yes, there is . . ." she mused. "It's on the Double-B home range about five minutes' walk from the house and Jessica wouldn't have gone there after dark. It's a secret glade -- well, that is father said it was to be used only by the family."

"Does Jessica go there?"

"Of course. There's a lovely, tree-shaded creek and she and pa went there often in the hot time of summer to -- to bathe, I expect," she said, slightly flustered.

Once again, following impulse, Kemp said, "Show me the way, please. She might have gone before dusk fell and slipped or something. While we're here we should check it out."

Ellen agreed. "If she's there, we should go and find her. It's been dark hours; she should have been back long since."

It took them a spell to find the path. It was overgrown with tall, swaying grasses, and chaparral shrubs had sprouted abundantly since Ellen had last used it.

"It seems more accessible than this by day," Ellen apologised.

Passage got no easier as they went down into the bottom; it was closely filled by a thickening tangle of cottonwoods, willows and mesquites. These trees shut out the moonlight and made every step treacherous.

Kemp heard the gurgle of a fast-flowing stream and when they glimpsed it, a silvery ribbon, he noted it was a good half-dozen yards wide. No doubt swelled by the recent rain, it also looked at least several feet deep.

"Easy now, Miss Ellen," he warned. "If one of us tumbles down there, we'll be in a devil of a fix."

Ellen shivered. "I'm starting to get scared, Mr Kemp. I've never been down here in the dark . . . but it's not that. It's not a childish fear at all. I can't explain it quite, but chills are running down my spine."

Kemp said nothing to that. Because he knew exactly how his companion felt. Inappropriately to time and place and purpose, he wondered if this sharing wasn't part of that greater harmony he'd always sensed in the girl's company -- and had always found reason to deny.

Yet this was no place for warm feelings either.

A disturbed owl took off from above their heads with an angry flapping of wings. Far distant, a coyote howled dismally.

Edging cautiously into a patch of still-deeper blackness beneath some cottonwoods, Ellen said, "We're nearly to the end of the path. There's a small dam of stones and a pool behind for bathing, and that's it. If Jessica was here, she --"

Ellen's words ended in a scream.

"What in God's name -- ?" Kemp cried.

The girl jerked back into him, turning and clinging to him in a way bordering on the unseemly.

Among a maelstrom of other thoughts, Kemp found this was something to which he had no objection. No objection at all.

"Something touched my face!" she blurted. "There, under the tallest tree!"

"All right! All right!" he said. Unthinkingly, comfortingly, he stroked the soft, springy ringlets of her hair.

The warmth of him seeped into her, stilling her shivering. Gently, he disengaged himself.

"Don't look," he warned. "I'm going to strike a match."

The lucifer rasped and flared into life. "God almighty, it is," he whispered in a stricken voice. "It's Mrs Blackwood. Hanged."

Jessica's body still swung slightly from where Ellen had blundered into it in the pitch blackness. She was suspended by a noosed lariat from the limb of the cottonwood that overhung the path. Beside the path was a large boulder from which she might have made a leap. The rope had bitten deep into the white flesh of her extended neck and her lips were purpled and thickened and the tongue an ugly protrusion. Eyes bulged sightlessly.

Jessica had never looked so totally unattractive.

Kemp dropped the match as the small flame reached his fingers.

"C-cut her down," Ellen said, her voice unsteady.

Jessica was clearly past all help, but Kemp felt he should comply with the request, if only for decency's sake. By feel alone, he scrambled up onto the boulder.

From this higher angle and different direction, he could make out the macabrely dangling form in the cottonwood's denser shadows without the help of artificial illumination. But the only knife he had was Pat Maloney's penknife, which was part-blunted with rust, possibly from the rain but probably from neglect, too.

Kemp stretched out a long leg, to plant his foot in the fork in the cottonwood's trunk. He climbed out gingerly onto the tree limb. It creaked under his added weight, and he had to hack and saw at the tense rope for a full, stomach-churning minute before the last joined strands started to unravel due to the full, dead weight of the swinging corpse.

Kemp grasped the lower part of the rope and let the body sag down onto the ground below. It settled with a rustling of leaves and crushed stems.

Ellen was already on her knees beside the heaped form when Kemp jumped down to join her. Bravely, the girl fumbled to loosen the noose around the woman's neck. The terror of their discovery in check, she was filled with horror and despair at the wasting of a life in its prime.

"Quite dead and cold," she said sadly.

Kemp lit another lucifer, the last. He almost wished he hadn't. His glance fell first upon Jessica's neck, the flesh pale and waxen, but with a livid, bluish weal where the rope had done its cruel work.

The second thing he noticed was a folded paper tucked into the top of her dress. This he retrieved.

It was a note of some sort, for certain, so he shoved it into his shirt pocket. "We'll need light to read it, and nothing more can be done here in the darkness," he said. "Let's push on back to the house."

In a sombre silence that was a communion in itself, they returned to the ranch-house. Ellen relit the candle in the parlour and Kemp unfolded the paper.

"It's Jessica's handwriting," Ellen said instantly. "Did she take her own life?"

Kemp nodded. "Yes, she did. I suppose it's what you would call a suicide note," he said, swiftly scanning the scrawled last words of Jessica Blackwood.

"What does she say?" Ellen demanded bluntly, unable to contain her curiosity.

"She sees the sinful error of her ways . . . how such error led her from boredom and frustration into unwanted troubles. Finding a new understanding of right and wrong. Remorse . . . But despair at the fresh form of captivity into which she has delivered herself -- dominated by a depraved Orson Rymer and having to accept the hateful attentions of Isaac Siebert to boot. How it ain't right, and she'd rather die than go on -- uh -- servicing such vile creatures --"

Kemp's grip tightened on the paper, crinkling it as he turned the sheet and read more. He took a deep breath.

"Here, Miss Ellen." He thrust the paper toward her. "Read it for yourself. There's no time for me to examine it thoroughly. It says Rymer is planning more murder -- tonight he's going to kill Siebert and destroy your father's true last will!"

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Rymer's Final Hand

Isaac Siebert sipped at a nightcap liberally laced with foreign brandy and reflected self-approvingly on the satisfying quality of his life. For an attorney in a small cow-town he was doing fine.

He'd been through some uncomfortable moments of late, but now everything was settling down nicely and some of the compensations which had come his way had been mighty tasty. Jessica Blackwood had fallen into his hands like a ripe plum.

He leered to himself and tugged reflectively at his goatee beard. No, "fallen" was not the word. She'd been put there by none other than her late husband -- that besotted old dotard Boyd Blackwood -- when he'd handed over a new will for his lawyer's safe-keeping on the very eve of his death.

It had been most informative, too, to learn of Blackwood's suspicion that his young wife was not averse to bestowing her favours outside the bounds of wedlock.

And how convenient when Sheriff Kemp had taken leave of his senses and shot Blackwood dead! He didn't know whether he believed Jessica's story that she'd not encouraged him, and it had been tricky going through Kemp's trial knowing the widow wasn't the rancher's true heir.

But now the disposal of the Double-B fortunes was virtually in his hands. Of course, the gambler fellow Orson Rymer would need a power of watching and the influence he exercised over Blackwood's widow was a mite regrettable. But never mind -- the will that assigned the entire inheritance to the rancher's naïve daughter was the thing. With that in his possession, he held the whip-hand. It had been very smart of him to suppress it and approach the desirable young widow with his alternative proposition . . .

Siebert had put down his drink and was rising from his armchair to turn out the lamp and retire when he heard shuffling sounds in the next room, which was his office located on the lower floor of his home.

Judging from the noise, Siebert realised the nocturnal visitor was making no attempt to conceal his presence.More in anger than fear, he went to the room and pulled open the door.

"Good God! Orson Rymer . . . what's the meaning of this, sir? How did you get in?"

The gambler jumped up from behind the big desk. Several drawers hung open and the top was littered with papers.

"I opened the door and walked in," Rymer said with nary a trace of guilt. "Opening locked doors is one of my many special talents."

"You've got a damned nerve, sir! Get out, or I've a good mind to call the law!"

Rymer smirked. "I don't think you will, Siebert. Given our shared knowledge you might almost call us -- ah -- partners."

With difficulty, Siebert swallowed his rage. "You overstep, sir. I'm an attorney of reputation; you're a no-account, tinhorn bar lizard!"

"I wouldn't take that tone, Siebert. A word from me would kill the goose that lays your golden eggs."

"That's a rich one! Spill the beans about Mrs Blackwood's possession of the Double-B and your own cosy billet in this country will likewise be cancelled. Moreover, I don't understand why Jessica dances to your tune, but if I tell her to stop it, she'll surely have to, or lose the Double-B."

"Lordy, you're a puffed-up, ignorant bastard, Siebert. Jessica does what I tell her for the same reason she does for you. It ain't just you and that damned will that can dispossess her."

Siebert bristled. "What bluff is this?"

"I got other facts, mister, which can do that same thing anyways," Rymer continued. "So that makes the bit o' paper you're holding worthless to anyone but me. Point of fact, it'd be better if you gave it to me right now, seeing how's Jessica is getting kinda tired of submitting to your will -- no pun intended, I guarantee."

"Go to hell!" Siebert yelled, losing his temper. "And get out of this office! The will is in my safe, and there it stays."

He stood aside and opened the door, gesturing for Rymer to leave.

The smooth gambler shrugged and opened his hands and moved to do. But as he came level with Siebert, he suddenly bunched a beringed fist and smashed it full-force from close range straight onto the point of Siebert's beard-tufted chin.

Siebert's teeth cracked together, his shocked eyes rolled and he slumped senseless to the carpet with a breathy groan.

"Arrogant idiot!" Rymer murmured, rubbing the back of his hand.

He shoved the door shut and tore at, and rummaged through the unconscious lawyer's pockets till he found what he was looking for -- a set of keys on a ring. He crossed to the green-painted safe in the corner of the room and in moments had swung open its door.

Fingers adept at the swift manipulation of pasteboard flicked swiftly through stacks and ribbon-tied rolls of paper. Documents were heaped around his feet before he found what he was looking for.

Rymer nodded to himself. It was crude and amateurish from a legal point of view, and nowhere near as imposing as most of the papers he'd already discarded, but this was clearly the last will of Boyd Blackwood, rancher, witnessed by Hank and Martha Dunbar and bequeathing the entire Double-B holding to his dearest daughter, Ellen Blackwood.

Behind him, Siebert moaned, reminding Rymer his work was still far from done. Quickly he seized up bundles of the papers he'd tipped out of the safe and the desk drawers and heaped them around Siebert's prone form.

Then he pulled a flask from his hip pocket and unstoppered it, releasing to his nostrils the fumes of kerosene. He dribbled a liberal quantity of the fluid over Siebert's clothes, and even onto his hair and beard. The rest of the flask he splashed over the heaped papers.

Finally, he twisted Blackwood's last will into a long spill.

* * *

Ross Kemp borrowed the Double-B mount that had been ridden by Snake McClay and Ellen to hightail it back to Cedar City. It was fresher than the horse he'd previously ridden into town after buying it from the homesteader near Baldhead Peak. But even so, the twelve-mile journey took an hour.

When the lathered horse crossed the railroad tracks, heading at a tired lope for the part of town where Isaac Siebert had his home and office, Kemp, too, was in a sweat.

With the truth brought to light, he was determined to retrieve the will that would bring Ellen Blackwood her rightful legacy. To add to that, a life was at stake. It may be a miserable and undeserving one, but he'd need every witness and every scrap of evidence he could rustle up to clear his own good name.

Isaac Siebert's house was a large one, with a second floor. At the front was a garden enclosed by a neat picket fence; at the rear a yard and a small stable. Kemp noted lights in a couple of windows at the side of the house on the lower level.

Weary and saddle sore from riding again after being removed from horses in the pen, he climbed down with relief and led the blown horse into a patch of darker shadow behind the stable. Inside the outbuilding, another horse nickered.

Ignoring the stiffness in his limbs, Kemp vaulted the low fence and flitted round to the front porch.

From inside the house came a low mumble of voices. Angry voices?

Suddenly, a voice that could have been Siebert's yelled what might have been, "Go to hell!" More words followed, but Kemp couldn't make out what was said. What he heard next was a crisp smack! like a fist striking another man's face.

"What the blazes!" Kemp muttered.

He tried the door and was only mildly surprised when it yielded to his touch. He ghosted in, drawing Maloney's Colt

as he went.

But the house was silent now. Kemp began to wonder if he'd imagined the sound of a blow. Head to one side, he strained to hear evidence of further conversation. There was none, but the door to the parlour was open and a lamp still burned in the apparently empty room, while a crack of light showed beneath another door at one side of the passage. If he remembered aright, this was Siebert's consulting room, his office.

He moved up to the closed door stealthily, acutely conscious of the fall of his boots on the polished floor timbers. He put his ear to the wooden panel. What he heard was the rustling of papers.

Kemp debated with himself whether to barge in. After all, if he'd been mistaken about the voices and this was just Siebert putting in a late stint in his office, he'd do nothing except alert the lawyer to his presence in Cedar City. Then, unless he really wanted a life on his hands, the cry would go up and he'd be a hunted man.

But if, on the other hand, Jessica's scrawled and near-hysterical note was right, if Rymer was here and it was in fact him he heard moving about in the office . . .

He stepped back, frowning slightly, hefting the Colt. He wrinkled his nostrils. The puzzling smell that reached his nose was kerosene. Had someone knocked over a lamp?

Suddenly, his mind was made up. He unlatched the door, flung it open, and stormed in.

Lawyer Siebert was on the floor just about at his feet, groaning and twitching feebly, but to all purposes unconscious. Rymer was jumping back, dropping some crumpled document, his hand whipping inside his coat, no doubt to draw the hideout gun nestled in the shoulder holster favoured by his type.

"Don't try it, Rymer!" Kemp shouted. "Reach, or I'll plug you!"

The gambler's black eyes slitted. "Son of a bitch -- Kemp! What the hell is this?"

"You've overplayed your hand, Rymer -- that's what it is. Jessica is dead. McClay, too. You're on your own, and I'm going to see you hang."

Rymer was recovering from his shock fast. "I don't believe you, jailbird! You've broken out and you're on the dodge, that's what. Your lies don't scare me none . . ."

He'd back-stepped to Siebert's ransacked desk, and keeping his hand clear of his body he flipped open a cedarwood box and drew out a cigar which he stuck between his thin lips at a jaunty angle.

Kemp said, "It's no lies, tinhorn. You were up to your damned eyes in a plot to keep Miss Ellen Blackwood from inheriting the Double-B like her father intended. You'd come here to find and destroy Blackwood's last will, and to silence this crooked specimen of an attorney. I don't doubt he'll be glad to give evidence against you to save his own lousy skin."

Rymer sneered challengingly, but didn't speak. Instead he fished a match off Siebert's desk from alongside the cigars.

Almost too late, just as Rymer went to strike the lucifer, Kemp remembered the reek of kerosene that hung over the stunned man and the papers strewn about him -- and he guessed Rymer's deadly game.

Kemp triggered, the Colt roared, and the match spun out of Rymer's shattered fingers unlit.

But the cornered skunk had sand, that Kemp had to admit. Even as a cry of agony was wrenched from his lips, his other hand went again for his hidden gun and he made a desperate dive to the littered, kerosene-splashed floor, firing a stumpy-barrelled .38 Colt Lightning the instant he drew it.

Kemp reflexively fired a second time, and thought the slug hit Rymer in the head.

Rymer's snap shot missed the ex-sheriff, but its results were beyond wildest prediction. The flash of flame that spat from the .38's muzzle ignited the litter of kerosene-soaked paper in which he'd landed.

Tongues of fire licked rapidly across the papers and carpet toward the semi-conscious lawyer. Oily swirls of black smoke twisted above them.

Kemp holstered his gun and grabbed Siebert under his armpits and began dragging him out the room. The hungry flames plucked at the man's hair and clothes, till Kemp beat at them frantically with his bare hands.

He'd gotten Siebert out the office door, and out of immediate danger, when he recalled how Rymer had dropped a crumpled, twisted-up document when he'd burst in on him.

Disregarding his own safety, Kemp darted back into the room, convinced the paper Rymer had discarded was Blackwood's last will. It took him a spell to locate it among the other debris. But so far it had luckily escaped the full fury of the leaping, crackling flames, though its edges were starting to curl and singe.

Kemp shoved it inside his shirt. Smoke was now rising thickly, chokingly. He dropped to hands and knees and crawled under it, heading back to the door.

Siebert was still barely conscious in the passage when Kemp got back to him.

Meanwhile, inside the blazing office, Rymer had not moved. Kemp was sure he must have died instantly from his second bullet. He had no scruples when he slammed the door on the room in an effort to slow the spread of the fire.

The skunk's rotten carcass could be left to the flames; Siebert's place would be an antechamber to the inferno that surely awaited Rymer in the hereafter.

* * *

One month to the day later, Sheriff Alec Tucker rode out to the Double-B. He was met at the yard gate by Ellen Blackwood and his old boss and friend, Ross Kemp.

Tucker swung down from his horse thinking Miss Ellen looked especially pretty despite the grim experiences she'd been through so recently. She wore an off-the-shoulder dress of blue silk that offset her fair colouring and had on over it a dainty white lace apron. There was a becoming blush on her cheeks.

Kemp looked more relaxed than Tucker had ever known him, though traces of the rigours of prison life lingered in the deeper-etched lines of his face and the tinge of grey in the hair at his temples.

They went on into the house to enjoy a meal that was by way of a celebration of Miss Ellen's homecoming. It was also the occasion to tie up some loose ends.

"When Ellen's pa met Jessica, she was faro dealing in a mining-town saloon in Telluride, Colorado," Kemp told Tucker. "He fell for her in a big way as we all know and brought her home to be his bride -- to live a new life. What Jessica never told Blackwood was that her old life had included a tedious, spendthrift husband she'd deserted in Central City. When Rymer arrived here from Colorado, he recognised Jessica. He shot back to his old stamping grounds to check out civic records and confirm her second marriage was in fact bigamous. From then on, he had a hold over her. And after Blackwood was murdered, that hold tightened, because Jessica, of course, was never legally his widow or next-of-kin."

Tucker shook his head, bemused by the deception and perfidy in others' lives.

"Waal, Ross, I guess it won't be long before yuh'll be standin' for office ag'in. Folks are right glad to l'arn the case ag'inst yuh was baseless."

Kemp shook his head with a small smile. "I'm going to have my hands full doing other things, Alec. I won't wear no sheriff's badge again. Ellen has accepted my proposal of marriage and I never did hold with married law officers."

Later, after Tucker had mounted up and they'd waved him goodbye, Ellen asked, "What's all this about having your hands full, Ross?"

"The Double-B is a big spread," he said solemnly.

"Oh," she said, temptingly. "Are you sure that's all you had in mind?"

Then he laughed and took her in his arms and kissed her.

Copyright © 1994 by Chap O'Keefe

All rights reserved