THE SHERIFF AND THE WIDOW PART THREE

THE TAINTED ARCHIVE PROUDLY PRESENTS PART THREE OF THE FULL LENGTH NOVEL, THE SHERIFF AND THE WIDOW BY CHAP O'KEEFE.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Blackwood's Will

Ross Kemp was hustled aboard a train, locked up in a smelly freight car like an animal in a cage. It was like even the pair deputed to ride shotgun on him preferred to have him out of sight as soon as possible.

The whole damned town was down on him. Even those -- mostly womenfolk -- who had no time for Jessica Blackwood, had listened to the shameless bitch's lies, hypocritically finding prurient relish in his dishonour. The Cedar City populace had followed his circus of a trial with awful fascination but now wanted nothing more to do with its fallen hero.

"It's over with . . . get him out of our sight," they might have said.

At the junction of the spur line that served the cowtown, Kemp was delivered into the keeping of prison guards sent to collect him.

He was incarcerated in a closed, plank-sided, windowless wagon that was in effect a box on wheels and taken to the grim, stone-built fortress of the penitentiary. Here his clothes, noisome from the mode of his transport, were taken away and he was rigged out in striped convict's garb little cleaner.

They also took away his name and reduced his identity to a six-digit number.

His bug-ridden cell was to be shared with a train robber called Seamus Maloney who never stopped bragging -- about his strength, his marksmanship, the women he'd bedded, the bets he'd won, the loot he'd taken. According to Maloney, the notorious gang led by his brother had brought dynamiting trains to a fine art and was the terror of the Middle West.

Kemp soon recognised the habit of mendacious self-promotion was Maloney's way of bolstering his courage in this soul-destroying place. Maloney craved company and talk like a backwoodsman making out miles from civilisation.

Occasionally, Maloney asked questions, but Kemp was not to be drawn. Maloney accepted his new cell-mate's taciturnity without resentment. "To be sure, seein's it's nothin' you'd be havin' to say at all, at all, let miself tell you about the time 'twas when I . . ." And so he would grab the chance to brag some more.

The fit prisoners spent their days in work gangs, out under the blazing sun, breaking rocks. Besides rocks, swinging the heavy sledges was also seen by the authorities as a way of breaking any spirit of rebellion that might linger in their charges.

The guards watched over the punishing activity with carbines draped over bent arms. No let-up was allowed. No talking. No singing. Just the gruelling work in the blistering heat.

One night, about two weeks after Kemp's arrival, Maloney told him about visiting day. They'd been returned to their cell from the dining-hall and Maloney had lit the solitary candle.

" 'Tis every fourth Sunday I'll be tellin' you, an' t'morrer's the day. Sure 'twill be no surprise to miself if you'll be havin' folks a-droppin' by."

"Nope. The place I was at ain't got time for a convicted murderer. I'll not be having no visitors."

"Miself neither," Maloney said. "I'll be havin' you know it's a forgotten man you -- "

"Lights out!" a warder's harsh voice bellowed, and Maloney's sounding-off was postponed.

After Maloney had blown out the candle, Kemp huddled in his musty blankets. Like he'd said, he was certain everyone in Cedar City had abandoned him. Renegade lawmen were a shameful disgrace to a community.

The eerie white light of a full moon shining through the barred window heightened Kemp's feeling that he was no longer part of a real world. The next ten years were to be a living death, during which he would be crushed, and ground and destroyed as surely as the rocks he smashed each day.

Then the anger started to bubble within him, swiftly coming to a boil. He wanted to yell and rage. "I'm innocent -- innocent, you fools!"

In his short time here, he'd already seen prisoners crack and bang their crazy skulls against the stone walls before they were dragged away by the jeering guards to solitary confinement or worse. He hoped he could stay strong enough not to resort to such imbecile futility himself.

His one silent prayer was that at least Ellen Blackwood would know in the depth of her good heart that he'd faced a trumped-up charge and was the victim of a cynically calculated frame-up.

* * *

"Visitor for Prisoner 679135! Move, will yuh!"

The warder turned the heavy key in the lock of the cell door and pushed Kemp out at the point of his carbine.

Kemp grunted and shambled into the bleak corridor.

"Sure, 'tis a foine thing, you'll not deny -- a visitor unexpected, you sly dog!" Maloney teased. "A handsome woman, I'll be bound!"

But Kemp was genuinely surprised to find no mistake had been made. Seated behind the barred grille waiting to see him was Ellen Blackwood!

His heart leaped. In this instant, he knew at last that the girl mustn't believe he'd cold-bloodedly murdered her father.

One of her small, smooth hands crept to her throat, clutching the strings of her black bonnet. Though he didn't guess it, she was shocked by his changed appearance. The injustice he'd suffered and the rigours of life in the pen had already hollowed his cheeks and stooped his broad shoulders. And his once-blue eyes had taken on a leaden look.

He managed a smile of sorts. "Hullo, Miss Ellen. I'm right glad to see you."

She coloured a little. "I hope you don't mind my coming."

"Mind! It's the answer to my prayer that you've come, though I find it shaming that an honest young woman like yourself should have to step within these walls."

He responded with an intensity Ellen had never heard from him before. That was a measure in itself of his changed circumstances. But also, still there, was the same rough honesty and openness that had always appealed to her in him.

"I had to come. To let you know that my faith in you stands; that I'll never be able to believe you committed the terrible crime you've been imprisoned for."

Her hazel eyes filled and glistened, so that Kemp longed to tear down the barrier between them with his bare hands. But he knew that the strongest thing he could do was not give way to his powerful emotions.

"I got to think of some way to prove my innocence and restore my honour, Miss Ellen," he said, clenching his fists so that the torn nails gouged the work-blistered palms. "To get out of here and hunt down the devils who really did kill your father. There's been a conspiracy of some kind, that I'm sure."

Ellen fidgeted uncomfortably on the hard wooden chair. "My stepmother lied, of course." She let go a trembling sigh. "Since you were -- taken away, other disturbing things have come to light that I think affect her. It's possible they have a connection with her despicable conduct, yet I hardly know what I should do . . ."

"You can start by telling me, Miss Ellen. It'll get it off your chest is all, I guess. But it could -- just could -- resolve my own suspicions."

Ellen clasped both hands in her lap and though

tfully began her story.

Kemp listened, and a sinking sensation claimed the pit of his stomach. Jessica had automatically inherited the rich Double-B holdings as Blackwood's widow. But Ellen was far from sure this was in accordance with her father's last wishes.

"You remember pa's old housekeeper, Mrs Martha Dunbar?"

"Indeed I do, Miss Ellen. And her husband Hank, that stove-up waddy your pa kept on to do chores around the home-lot."

Ellen nodded. "Those are the people. A grand old pair. After I left the Double-B and came to town to live, Mrs Dunbar kept in touch with me. We retained an affection for each other, you see." Ellen's eyes fell to her restless hands. "Mrs Dunbar said I favoured my mother a lot, and her memory was precious. She also had little time for Jessica."

"Many of the smarter Cedar City womenfolk hadn't. Her manner spelled trouble."

A smile tugged at Ellen's lips. "Mrs Dunbar said her name should have been Jezebel, not Jessica."

"She weren't far wrong," Kemp said soberly.

"Maybe the prejudice coloured the story Mrs Dunbar has told me, but the facts speak for themselves and are disturbing nonetheless."

Ellen paused, as though still uncertain that she should burden the ex-sheriff, before plunging on. "Mr Kemp, Mrs Dunbar maintains that Jessica, tho

ugh father's widow, has inherited the Double-B illegally. On the evening before his death, pa drew up a new will, and Mrs Dunbar and her husband put their marks on it as witnesses."

"Lord sakes! Do the Dunbars know what it said?"

"Only a broad idea. They're both illiterate, you see."

"Yeah, I see."

"So they couldn't read the paper they signed. But Mrs Dunbar says she assumed `Jezebel' was being cut out due to what father said was her alley-catting with -- with you!"

"The hell with it! Them damned notes again!"

"Exactly. Father said Jessica's infidelity was proven by the notes you'd writ her."

"I didn't write no notes."

"No, but someone did, and father vowed to deposit the new will with his lawyer, and to `settle your hash' as he put it."

For several seconds Ellen and Kemp stared at each other in silence. Finally, Kemp shook his head. "This doesn't make sense. Why hasn't Isaac Siebert produced that will? Has he spoken to you about it?"

"He hasn't. The will that was read in Mr Siebert's office following father's death was one drawn up several years ago, after the occasion of his second marriage."

"You've mentioned Mrs Dunbar's story to the lawyer, maybe?"

"Yes. And Mr Siebert denied receiving any such document. But I thought there was something a mite odd about his manner."

Kemp recalled Isaac Siebert's s

hifty demeanour at the trial. It tied in. Dirty work had been afoot . . . and the shyster had known it!

"I figure the sonofabitch could tell us a whole lot more than he's letting on," he choked. "It sure riles a man being cooped up in here. Ten years!"

Ellen flinched at his pent-up rage.

"I'm sorry if I've added to your troubles, Mr Kemp."

Kemp observed her distress and took a hold of himself, determining not to dwell on the topic of his imprisonment. When he spoke again, he said, "Don't fret yourself. I want to know what's happening in Cedar City now I've been put away. Keep me posted on Siebert. Also, I want to keep up with your father's widow -- what's she's doing and who she sees."

Ellen drew a quick breath. "That reminds me of another thing I have to tell you. About that gambler man who appears to have taken up residence at the hotel."

"Orson Rymer?" Kemp said directly, attentively. "I've always thought the scum had his finger in this pie somehow. Ever since you told me about him meeting Jessica on the sly."

"He's seeing her openly now," Ellen said with a rush, fearful of re-awaking Kemp's agitation. "The scoundrel is unconscionable. He's a frequent visitor to the Double-B. Comforting Mrs Blackwood in her bereavement, he's told the hotel workers."

"That figures, too," Kemp remarked. "The notes that got your pa fired up were signed `R'. For Rymer, I reckoned. But Deputy Tucker found out Rymer had a solid alibi for the time of the murder. Which like to knocked the guts outa that ide

a."

"Time's up!" barked the voice of a prison guard behind him.

Ellen abruptly looked pale and small and scared.

This was an unhappy spell for her, too, Kemp realised. He burned to ask if she'd visit him again in four Sundays' time. But the dilemma seemed crazily familiar. It wasn't right and proper to expect a desirable girl like Ellen Blackwood to take an interest in a man like himself. No longer because he was sheriff and all, but because he was branded a murderer -- a convict with no hope of release for ten years.

"I'm powerful obliged for all you've told me, Miss Ellen," he began. "You must --"

Another guttural voice broke in. "Get that prisoner back to the cells, warder!"

The guard behind him clapped his hand roughly on his shoulder and tugged. "You heard, feller!"

"Goodbye, Miss Ellen. And thank you again."

He had a last brief glimpse of brimming eyes. "Take care, Mr Kemp!" she struggled to say. Then he was pitched through an open door back into the numbing horror of his spartan prison life.

Kemp looked haggard when he was returned to his cell.

Maloney clucked his tongue.

" 'Tis bad news you've been hear-r-rin' of, is it not?"

"Never mind, never mind," Kemp said curtly, waving a dismissive hand.

He slumped onto his bunk and clasped his throbbing head. All he'd learned span in taunting review through his troubled mind.

"That'd be right now. Set your good self down for a spell," said his garrulous cell-mate, forever strong on giving advice. "Sure an' I was after-r tellin' before how 'twas when me an' me brother was told how our poor-r-r mother, who was the foinest woman as ever drew breath . . ."

But Kemp wasn't listening to a word. Silently, inevitably the resolve to escape, or die in the attempt, hardened within him.

He'd had his gutsful of the pen.

CHAPTER NINE

"Not More Killing, Please!"

Jessica Blackwood paced the room that had been her husband's office in the big rock-and-adobe ranch-house of the Double-B. A cool breeze wafted through the open windows, carrying the rhythmic clank-clank of the steadily turning vanes of a windmill. From across the broad sweep of the yard, a small chorus of work sounds was contributed by those labouring in the whitewashed cookhouse, barns and smithy.

Despite Boyd Blackwood's

death, the rich spread's life went on for the present with the forceful momentum he'd lent it. Closer at hand, within the room, his presence lingered in the deer-head mounted on the wall above the fireplace and the bearskin rug on the floor.

Jessica's dark hair was parted at the centre and drawn severely to a bun at her nape. As a concession to mourning, her full skirt was black, but her loose bodice was white and frilled and there were sandals on her bare feet.

None of this garb made her feel comfortable. Things were weighing heavily on her mind. The sweet fruit of her wealthy widowhood, she'd rapidly discovered, was rotten at the core.

A rapping of heavy knuckles on the door interrupted Jessica's contemplation, and the door was thrust open before she could answer. She ran a cold glance over the woman who intruded on her privacy.

"Mrs Dunbar! What is this?"

"It's enough, ma'am, an' more. Me an' Hank are quittin' this same day!"

The two women stood face to face, feet apart, but worlds and a generation yawned between them. Martha Dunbar was a barrel-shaped, grey-haired woman with a steely glint in her eye. She was a survivor of frontier days before any sort of civilisation was in place -- when a woman's life was always hard and frequently brutally short.

Jessica coloured. "I don't

understand your outburst. Explain, if you will!"

"I'll not keep house under a roof where the dead are disrespected and Christian ideals mocked."

Mrs Dunbar's indignation found an echo in Jessica's own disquiet, but it was something the younger woman couldn't yet admit, even to herself.

"You over-reach yourself, Mrs Dunbar!" she said, her tone icy.

"That I do not," the housekeeper maintained stoutly. "The master's corpse is barely cold an' yuh let that fancy man in to live here, as if it ain't been enough him callin' at all hours with his damned inquiries after your well-bein'. It's unfittin', I reckon!"

"Mr Rymer is an -- an old friend, and I'd ask you to mind your sanctimonious tongue, Mrs Dunbar!"

"I'll speak me mind clear, ma'am, like I've ever done, an' it'll please me for yuh not to have the honest hearin' of it no more. I declare me an' the good Mr Dunbar, who worked for your husband thirty-some years, are shiftin' out pronto. It's high time yuh learned how to behave like a respectable widder-woman -- but then yuh're like to be no better at that than being a decent wife!"

Jessica looked as though she could throw herself at Mrs Dunbar and tear her eyes out. But Mrs Dunbar, though her senior in years, was still a formidable and heavily-muscled person, and she bottled up her rage.

"How dare you!" she stormed, hands clenched.

"I dare it for Boyd Blackwood's memory!" Mrs Dunbar said with the air of a woman who had more to say and wasn't in the least afraid to say it. "He knew your stripe in the end, for a fact. An' I know the game yuh've played with his new will, an' o

thers are goin' to, I figure. I told Miss Ellen, so yuh can watch out, Mrs High-an'-Mighty!"

Much of this was supposition and bluff on Martha Dunbar's part, but it gratified her to throw a scare into the worthless widow. It could all be wrong, but it sounded right the dark way she put it and the way Jessica reacted.

"Get out of my sight!" Jessica screeched. "If you're not off the Double-B by nightfall, I'll have you thrown off!"

Mrs Dunbar scoffed. "Plumb useless losin' your temper, lady. We're quittin', that's for sure. If yuh had a lick o' sense, it's that tinhorn yuh'd throw out. Yuh playin' with fire thar, `ol' friend' the moreso. Yuh'll git burned, an' badly!"

Having got in the last word, the miffed housekeeper stalked out, slamming the door behind her.

* * *

Orson Rymer choked when Jessica Blackwood told him about the bombshell delivered by Martha Dunbar. Not with wrath, nor even

on the cheroot he was smoking with a connoisseur's placid enjoyment, but on his mirth.

"The Dunbars! Damn it, Jessica my dear, there's no threat to us from those two drivelling old no-accounts. How much do they really know anyway?"

Jessica bit her lip. "They witnessed the new will."

Rymer was scathing. "They put their marks on some bit of paper. They're too dumb to read or write."

"But Boyd told them what it was. They'll gab."

"A precious lot of notice anyone's gonna take of their bleatings. Folks know they're illiterate. They got hold of the wrong end of the stick, see? Let them gab all they like!"

Jessica's mind was not put at rest. "The woman let slip she's spoken to Ellen, and she'll believe them."

"Sure, and we know she's already approached Isaac Siebert who stalled her about any fresh will. He done that because he's another of the suckers susceptible to your luscious charms, my dear, and he's suppressed that goddamn will." Rymer laughed. "You got him twisted round your finger like a bit of cotton!"

Jessica shuddered. "A

t a cost. I can't abide having his fumbling paws on me."

"Aw, c'mon -- a spunky gal like you knows how to handle the boys, and you've got to take the rough with the smooth. You've got shucked of a dotard of a husband, and look how you sorted out that fool sheriff. Don't deny it -- you enjoyed that set-up. It was smack-dab made to order!"

"Ross Kemp was rude and horrible to me," Jessica muttered.

"Well, he's paying the price in the state pen, I guess. His feud with the old man was right handy and he's got put out of our way into the bargain. He had the makings of an interfering bastard."

"And so has Isaac Siebert. He might start making other -- demands."

Beneath the dark line of his moustache, Rymer's fleshy lips twisted. "Yeah, Siebert is the real problem, not the Dunbars." His black eyes glittered ruthlessly. "And we can't have you being scared of him, can we?" he added with heavy sarcasm.

A fresh fear widened Jessica's amber eyes, and her lower lip trembled. "What are you going to do?" she asked, a dread suspicion taking hold.

Rymer drew on his cheroot and studied the glowing ash. "Not to put too fine point on it, my dear Jessica, I'm going to -- uh -- secure your legacy and thataways my own financial prospects."

His words were emphatic and quietly incisive, bringing a gasp from the beautiful widow.

"No!" she said. "Not more killing, please!" She tried to keep the sob out of her voice and turned from him and faced the window, hoping he'd not notice the quickening of her breath and the heaving of her bosom.

"You betcha there's going to be killing," he promised. "I've already decided we can't be at the mercy of a two-bit, cowtown lawyer. He's shoved that second will in his safe, and he can get you disinherited any time he likes. We won't be sitting pretty till his mouth's shut and that damned paper's in ashes."

Jessica swallowed hard. Ever since she'd lied about the notes that had fallen into her husband's hands, she'd known Orson Rymer was back of her husband's death. She'd tried desperately to ignore facts and persuade herself that the hypocritical Sheriff Kemp really had pursued and shot Boyd Blackwood down. She'd acted from defensiveness -- unable to face that she'd been, even in the smallest degree, responsible for her uncongenial husband's death. But it was no good.

Rymer wasn't only a bloodsucking leech of a blackmailer who'd made her dance to his tune. He was a self-admitted murderer!

"Mrs Dunbar said I was playing with fire, letting you come here," she blurted.

The gambler slid up behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders, his smooth fingertips intruding beneath the edges of her loose white collar.

"Now then!" he commanded. "Enough of this tomfoolishness, Jessica. Nothing so terrible has befallen you that you have to pity yourself." He smirked. "I'll look after your interests and you'll look after mine. A man's needs get awful neglected in a dump like Cedar City. It's time to loosen up a mite with your adviser and future partner."

Jessica stiffened, doing her best to pay no mind to the hands now dipping shockingly inside her bodice. But it was a tactic clearly to no avail, and when she tried to shrug free, he ripped the light material open with a vicious tug.

She was exposed to his greedy gaze.

It was one thing to tease and provoke unlovely men made squirmingly impotent by the public eye that policed them on Main Street. It was another to choose to flirt with a dashing man who unconsciously awakened curiosity, not to say desire in the female mind.

But it was something different altogether to be subjected in the privacy of her home to an outrage.

"You beast!"

In answer to her affronted cry, Rymer chuckled lewdly. "Now there's a sight the tongue-hanging riff-raff'd like to get an eyeful of!"

She clutched at the tatters of her bodice, weak from the unfamiliar sensation of degradation. This was a thing that didn't, in Jessica's experience, happen to women who were white, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Americans. And unlike when she was accosted by the stumbling drunks in Cedar City, there was no one to save her from Rymer's depravity.

She hadn't led a particularly sheltered life, but she'd never been forced into giving herself unwillingly, except perhaps inside marriage she'd chosen. In the cities and towns, in the gambling houses she'd once worked in, so-called "easy virtue" and its questionable rewards had been the lot of those considered inferior by reason of race, creed or colour. The Indians, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the Blacks . . . only these, creatures of low morals assuredly, were obliged to release their pathetic bodies with neither the right of choice nor the benefit of matrimony to the pleasure of rampant menfolk.

Once, when she'd been living in Colorado, she'd been taken to the gold rush town of Leadville, where she was told that in 1880 there was a bordello for every 150 inhabitants. She'd found the painted, brightly dressed whores -- and the atmosphere of cheap perfume and hopeless slavery that clung to their haunts -- sickeningly repugnant.

These thoughts of her imminent debasement and its comparison to prostitution, paralysed Jessica, turning her knees to water.

Then Rymer pushed her savagely, so that she went sprawling onto a horsehair sofa.

"You'll not come the stiff and haughty madam with me, Jessica my precious! There's too much I know. And I mean to know everything about you before the hour's out!"

He lunged after her, trapping the supple, struggling richness of her once-proud body.

* * *

Orson Rymer, his lusts for the present sated, swung a blanket, a saddle and his own aching loins across the steeldust roan formerly ridden by Boyd Blackwood and went to seek out Jeremiah "Snake" McClay.

He was in a generous mood and thought he might profitably put some pleasure similar to that he'd latterly enjoyed himself in the way of his runty dogsbody.

Snake was a totally unattractive individual in both appearance and character, and Rymer had been quick to note women found it hard to disguise their repulsion for him, which left him with a hell of a chip on his shoulder. Verily, Snake had something of a complex, and his evil, dirty mind was at its most inventive, his conversation at its most colourful, when he was describing what he might do to some saloon-girl or other, given the chance.

Rymer found his man alone, over the spine of a hogsback several miles north of the ranch house, on the fringe of the brush and chaparral country. Snake was lazing in the grama grass, smoking; his mount was left to graze nearby with reins hanging down beside its drooping head.

"So this is how you drive the mavericks out of the brush," Rymer greeted him.

McClay got to his feet, glowering. "Since when've you bin the range boss, Rymer?"

"Just kidding, Snake. I'm no cattle baron. I live on my wits -- and other people's lack of them. And I got easier chores in mind for you, too, friend. Reckon you'll like 'em a whole lot better than punching cows."

He told McClay that trouble could be brewing in the shape of Blackwood's lawyer, his daughter and the Dunbars.

"Siebert I'll take care of personally. But it'd do no harm if a scare was thrown into those quitting hicks, and I'd pay you back one of them IOUs to know just how much Ellen Blackwood has figured out."

Snake straightened his narrow shoulders and gave his monkey grin. "The ideas you put into my head!"

"Mebbe you could go calling on Miss Ellen one night soon as part of her dead pa's old crew . . . I'll leave the details to your judgement. Deal to her how you like, but there must be no slip-ups. When you've finished, you may have to kill her, of course. A great pity, her being such a comely gal. But I guess you'll see to it her charms aren't purely wasted."

"I'll teach her a bit o' life first, sure thing," McClay said.

Anticipation had already set the warped gunslick's mouth watering.

CHAPTER TEN

Death Canyon

Ross Kemp had an early premonition that the day was going to be like no other. For a start, his cell-mate Maloney got bawled out for talking out of turn in the penitentiary dining hall. There was nothing unsusual in that, but for once Kemp figured the offending confab had been instigated not by the loose-tongued train robber, but by the other party -- a new prisoner he'd not seen before.

"Button yore lip, prisoner!" a guard snapped. "Or yuh'll do forty days in solitary!"

The pow-wow was cut short but Maloney's spirit was far from squashed. In fact, he seemed cock-a-hoop as he wolfed the tasteless slops from his plate. "Today's a loikly day, me kiddo!" he whispered with a confiding wink.

Kemp didn't know what to make of that, nor of the weather. Commonly, morning arrived with a swift dazzle of yellow light that presaged the sapping heat the convicts would labour in on the work gangs. But today, the sun didn't come up. During the night, a murk of dark cloud had stolen in. The sky was a uniform, solid grey. From such overcast, sooner or later, rain seemed probable.

The gloomy half-light was appropriate to Kemp's mood of depression. He'd thought much about escape; he'd also come to realise what his brain-racking produced was useless dreams, not plans.

The whole boiling of his thoughts was further agitated by a growing concern for Ellen Blackwood. Every time he came to thinking about the injustice he'd suffered himself, her beautiful face got in the way of the righteous anger that simmered inside him. The more he considered the surprising news about Boyd Blackwood's missing will, the more certain he became that Ellen was in peril.

If there had been a new will, as Martha Dunbar claimed, it was silver cartwheels to bone buttons Ellen would be the main benefactor, since his widow had clearly fallen from the cattleman's favour. Mindful that a ruthless, back-shooting killer still roamed the Cedar City range, Kemp fretted constantly and futilely as he endured his unearned sentence.

He yearned to get his itching hands on Jessica Blackwood again -- this time to shake out of her the truth he was convinced she could tell.

" 'Tis indeed a boon this cloud will be," Maloney said with a mirthless grin. "The poor-r-r light will be a-hidin' a multitude of sins, and our brows will be the less sweaty from our exertions. Begorra, a cool head can be a wonderful thing, you understand?"

Kemp thought he did, but only partly. It wasn't particularly like Maloney to be cryptic. He agreed, though, that obliteration of the blistering sun would be a huge relief. It made a hell-hole of the box canyon where they were forced to labour.

The prison was set in a bleak, treeless landscape. Outside its walls stretched a vast, rocky mesa. A short march to the west was a bowl, its shallow sides treacherous with loose shale and rocks. The bowl's rough centre was fractured by a deep rift -- the sheer-sided box canyon where the state pen's inmates broke the rock and loaded it onto sturdy wagons, to be hauled out by teams of massive oxen.

The canyon was ideally suited for penal purposes.

A short way down from its one open end and entrance, a ledge jutted out from the side of the almost-vertical rock face. Here a guardhouse had been built. Its roof was the raw rock of the ledge, hammered back on the underside to some sort of level plane. Its front and side walls were heavy logs. Loopholes were let in between the logs and through these slits, those manning the stronghold could command a wide view of the entrance and its approaches and cover the area comprehensively with their guns.

Nobody could enter the canyon -- or, more relevantly, leave -- without being apprehended.

The whole structure was bullet-proof and amounted to a small fort. Inside, a big man with outstretched arms could touch the back wall of rock and the front wall of logs and his head might brush the roof. But it was a grand observation post, gave shade and shelter and was seemingly impregnable.

There was a blind spot, but if its constructors had realised it they had discounted it. They were correct, too, in assuming that while the post stood, it would unfailingly fulfil its purpose of putting an invisible seal on the canyon.

The convict party was marched in the gloom, chained together, to its workplace. The clouds hung low over the mesa as rolling, broken banks of mist. Without knowing why, Kemp thought an army could skulk up there and not be seen.

At the canyon, to allow them to swing their heavy sledges and not decimate their own ranks, the prisoners were released from the chains before starting their gruelling work.

But there was nowhere a man could run to before he would cut down by carbines held on him and his fellows by the hardbitten guards overseeing their strivings from on horseback.

"Git yore backs inta it, yuh straggedly-assed bastards!" cried the detail's leader.

No one argued with the order.

Kemp smashed rocks with a will, taking out his frustrations in the violence of the rugged exercise. When a wind whipped up and the first, big, fat drops of rain fell from the ever-darkening sky, he rejoiced.

"The stinking air could do with some cleansing, an' it'll settle the dust." Kemp's choked words rumbled up from his deep chest to be drowned out by the splintering impact of the sledge.

More raindrops fell, less gently than the first. Instead of being soaked up by the all-pervading, suffocating dust, they spattered it with deeper, sand-coloured splotches.

Soon, Kemp's thin convict overalls were clinging soggily with a chill wetness quite unlike the sweat damp that regularly plastered them to his muscular body.

The guards shrugged into the yellow slickers they carried lashed to their saddle cantles. The four of them conferred with one another.

"Much more o' this an' we'll be ketchin' pneumonia," one grumbled. They had no reason to stay out in the wet when they could retreat inside their log-fronted stronghold. There, they could still keep their eyes and weapons trained on the prisoners and any possible line of escape.

"No lettin' up, yuh rats . . . or yuh'll dance to some shootin' practice with yore heels fer targets!"

With these last admonitory words to their charges, they withdrew into the guardhouse.

The rain was ceasing to be pleasant, even for the toiling convicts, glad of the change from sweltering heat. The ground around their feet became puddled and riven with rivulets. It was quickly churned by their efforts into a quagmire of cloying mud. This sucked at their sodden boots with the stickiness of glue and made the hafts of their heavy sledges slimy and hard to grip.

"Like ever, it's a lousy deal we get!" Kemp grunted, flicking the wet hair from his forehead.

But Maloney was fairly jigging with repressed excitement. " 'Tis a blessin', I tell you!"

"You don't mind this damned cloudburst?" Kemp stared in blank disbelief.

"I'm not mindin' at all, at all!"

Kemp spat out the gritty water that had gotten into his mouth. "Then you must've turned plumb crazy," he said disgustedly.

"You'll see, you'll see! To be sure you will!" the train robber lilted.

A mighty crash suddenly rent the turbid air.

"Thunder!" Kemp exclaimed, though there been no hint of it approaching and it seemed an unsatisfactory explanation. "Close an' all!"

Maloney laughed outright. Kemp couldn't figure whether it was tears or rain that ran down his cheeks.

"No, me boyo, no! 'Tis me brother Pat an' his bunch a-comin' to me rescue!"

A second explosive roar left Kemp's ears ringing and, looking up to the canyon rim above the guardhouse, he saw chunks of mud and rock flung into the grey sky.

Then the rumbling began, and a fall of shale and boulders and stormwater began trickling over the top of the crumbling rim. For a moment it looked like some giant leak from a piece of broken spouting, splashing down out front of the guardhouse, pounding the terrace in one spot, raising clouds of misty spray.

But rapidly -- in seconds -- it developed into a torrent, and next a gigantic landslide.

Tons of rock debris and shale boiled over the edge of the canyon down onto the guardhouse, burying it from sight. The surprise was so complete that not one occupant recognised quite what was happening; not one quit the place, though had he tried, it would have been a no less dangerous option than staying put.

For several minutes, the entire slope of broken terrain above the rim must have been on the move.

"God Almighty! What triggered that?" Kemp asked his cell-mate when the noise of it subsided.

" 'Tis Patrick Maloney, begorra! An' he's done us proud," the outlaw bragged. "There's none better at layin' a charge o' dynamite. That bowl o' shale mayn't be no railroad nor Wells Fargo bullion car, but when its results you're wantin', Pat's your man!"

From that, Kemp raked out the explanation of what he'd witnessed. The train-robbing gang of outlaws led by Seamus Maloney's brother had blasted an avalanche of rock onto the guardhouse to clear the way for freeing their convict compatriot.

The rain was still slashing down in sheets, but Kemp still had enough of his wits about him to figure that though the storm and its preceding, dusk-like gloom had masked the activities of the Maloney gang, it might not have deafened ears at the penitentiary to the dynamiting.

Also, so violent a downpour couldn't last.

"It's time we lit out while the going's good," he advised.

Maloney didn't disagree. "When they come out lookin' from the pen, sure 'tis they'll not be appreciatin' o' me brother's handiwork. An' wild stallions couldna be draggin' me back to the place!"

Four warders were already dead, or buried alive. "Soon as the governor hears of this, all hell will bust loose, Maloney!"

Kemp was wrong. Hell wouldn't be held off that long.

They weren't the only pair with thoughts of flight. Fourteen other convicts, wild-eyed and wondering, saw that they were unguarded. One of them, a strong-armed, tow-headed fellow with a scarred face, got smart fastest. Of the guards' four horses, two tethered to a hitch rail had been caught in the landslide. The other pair, spooked by the thunderous din, had bolted up to the dead end of the canyon. Scarface set off toward them.

About half the convicts sloshed across the wet slurry after him.

The scared horses nickered and tried to elude the strange, violent hands that grabbed for their trailing reins. One put its right front hoof in a watery hole and its leg buckled. It tried to recover, but stumbled and went crashing to the uneven ground.

The shrill screams of a horse in pain filled the air, chilling Kemp's blood so that the rain trickling down his back seemed like icewater.

Instantly, the convicts were fighting amongst themselves for the one remaining chance of a mount. Fists flew and men picked up rocks and smashed them mercilessly into each other's faces.

These were the brutalised dregs of late nineteenth-century American society, devoid of all morals and compunctions. They fought to no code and gave a damn for no one, including their own honourless peers.

Badmen's agonised cries mingled with the stricken horse's screams and blood flowed freely.

Kemp was appalled, but Maloney gave no mind to the mêlée. He was heading the other way -- for the draw that was the beginning of the box canyon.

The ex-sheriff saw why when four riders swept into view around the twisted upthrusts of slag and stone. A fifth horse followed at an obedient canter, responding to the tug of a long lead rein fastened to the saddle cantle of one of the riders. It was no pack animal but a saddled mount.

"Saint Patrick hisself, an' with a hoss for me! 'Tis time I bid you a fare-thee-well!" Maloney called back. "Good luck!"

Some of the bloodied convicts who'd not been killed or bashed unconscious in the fight for the surviving prison horse, gave Seamus Maloney pursuit, yelling to the arriving bandits to let them ride double.

The Maloney bunch, set for riding hot-foot from the scene, weren't having a bar of it.

"Outa th' road, yuh bums!"

Kemp's former cell-mate was putting his foot in the stirrup, when clutching hands grabbed him from behind.

The leading outlaw, a black-bearded giant Kemp assumed to be Pat Maloney, thrust his gloved hand through a slit in his slicker. It came out in less than an instant, wrapped around the grip of a Colt. He fired point-blank into the face of the man hindering his brother. A tongue of flame spat from the six-shooter's muzzle.

The bullet drilled straight through and redly, messily out the back of the convict's skull.

The shot was the signal for the rest of the mob to draw handguns, and three more of the convicts were cut down while Seamus Maloney swung aboard the led horse.

Unarmed, Kemp was in the thick of what was shaping up to be a wholesale massacre. All hope of escape was fast disappearing. He'd be lucky to come out of this with his life.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

On the Dodge

Kemp was surrounded by ricocheting slugs. They smacked viciously against the canyon's rock walls and sang wickedly around his ears. All around him was the cussing of wounded men and the hoarse shouts of the unhit's anger.

The outlaws wheeled their dripping horses and prodded savagely with their spurred heels.

"Fan the breeze, me boys!" Pat Maloney ordered.

At this late stage, the scarfaced convict came lumbering up. He'd apparently failed to win the prison horse and was attracted by what his spiteful brain figured were the new pickings. But after being thwarted before, he'd paused to crudely arm himself, picking up some convict's discarded sledge.

He shoved Kemp roughly to the ground. "Git lost, mister, afore yuh's topped!"

Scarface swung the heavy tool around his head like a hammer made for throwing. Kemp heard the iron head whipping through the soggy air above him and laid low.

With a grunt, Scarface let the sledge go hurtling towards its target. Pat Maloney!

The outlaw bunch's boss was hit in the back. It was a spine-breaking blow. He slipped from the saddle like a loosely filled sack of flour, bending in the middle.

"Dropped the bastard!" Scarface swore. And he rushed forward to claim his prize -- the startled bay mare which was trailing its limp and dead rider from the stirrup where the reinforced instep of one boot was still trapped.

He never got to the horse.

With howls of rage, Maloney's three followers clawed still warm six-guns from their holsters and, turning back to the fray, emptied the remaining filled chambers into the convicts still on their feet. They were out for blood.

"Eat lead, yuh dirty swine!"

Scarface was the first to go. A third, red eye appeared at the bridge of his nose, stopping him dead in his hasty tracks.

Kemp, already sprawled in the dirt of the canyon bottom with yellow run-off swirling around him, froze. He didn't let a muscle twitch as the furious Maloney mob wreaked their vengeance on the convicts still running amuck. He knew nothing short of total annihilation would now satisfy them.

Weaponless, unable to intervene, Kemp didn't like what he had to do one damned bit. "Oh, hell!" he murmured, playing dead.

The wailed pleas of innocence, for mercy, were ruthlessly ignored. Kemp's ears rang to the cruel cracks of gunfire and the splashy thuds of falling bodies. Even the convict who'd caught the prison horse wasn't spared. Both he and the hapless bronc were gunned down when they tried to charge by, out of the box canyon.

Finally, it was done. "Dead, every lousy man jack of 'em," a guttural voice said, thick with angry emotion. "Let's ride!"

The retreating clatter of the horses' hoofs was swallowed up in the noise of the steady rain. Soaked to the skin, shivering with cold and horror, Kemp raised his head.

What he saw was like a battlefield. Corpses were everywhere. Not one prisoner had been omitted from the outlaws' killing frenzy.

A groan of black dismay escaped his lips.

Pat Maloney's bay mare had run off with the bunch but in the interests of speed, they'd left Maloney's body behind amongst the others, including the owlhoot's own first victim. "What's a decent burial up against saving your own neck from the hangrope?" Kemp muttered acidly.

That reminded him he'd no time to waste himself if he was to avail himself of the opportunity so fantastically thrown at his feet.

"I'd be a locoed fool not to get going real quick," he said, coming to his feet.

But he needed to do something unpleasant first, otherwise his efforts were doomed to be worse than useless.

Squelching over to Maloney's body, he unfastened the slicker and eased it off the still warm and flaccid corpse. Grimacing, he continued with the work till the man was naked. Then he stripped off his own striped prison garb and shrugged into the dead man's clothes. His skin crawled, but he knew it was something he had to do.

Kemp snorted. "The britches ain't too bad a fit, but they stink high as a mountain cat's den."

The last touch was to pull the convict uniform onto the dead outlaw. That mightn't past muster for very long, but with any luck hours could be converted into at least the same number of extra miles before the law enforcers put out word that ex-Sheriff Ross Kemp of Cedar City was on the dodge.

He'd also be heading for the last place they'd expect -- his old bailiwick itself.

His own ordeal and present discomfort fled from consideration. Instead of rain easing to drizzle under a sombre sky, he saw sunlight dancing through the gold ringlets of Ellen Blackwood and the tender smile that reached right into her hazel eyes.

But he also saw a terrifying, unspelled danger looming over her.

He broke open Maloney's Colt and spun the cylinder, sending the spent shells from its chambers rattling to the rocks under his feet. Then he thumbed new bullets from the loops in the appropriated gunbelt and reloaded the Colt in all six chambers.

He felt better then than he had in an age. It was a long way to Cedar City. But he was one hell of a determined hombre and he felt pretty sure he could make it.

"Now then, which way's the railroad? Due east, I reckon. Without a horse I think I'll have to take the train . . ."

* * *

Working across country, alert every tense step of the way for the clangour of alarm from the state pen, Kemp struck his objective with unexpected ease. He near stumbled into a cut that carried the iron rails.

He scrambled down through thorny brush. It had stopped raining but the spiky twigs clawed wetly at his borrowed clothes. Yhen he made faster progress along the way itself, loping from tie to wooden tie.

The murky cloud was breaking up and the instant he came in first sight of an isolated whistle-stop and water tower, he left the track and detoured, so he approached the halt's buildings through cover, along the cottonwood-clustered banks of a creek which ran behind and below.

Stealthy as an Indian, he sneaked up. Two men were talking in the gap between a shed and a ramshackle section office.

One, an old-timer with a drooping dragoon moustache and in a badged peaked cap and braces, was conspicuously the railroad employee who manned the outpost. The other was a young cowpoke in faded range clothes, a saddle and bedroll at his feet.

Kemp figured him for a tumbleweed who'd somehow lost his horse and bought a ticket to ride the train.

"Too bad, feller, that ticket's gonna be mine!" Kemp promised himself.

He moved in on the pair fast, Colt drawn and levelled, his thumb on the smooth hammer. He cocked the heavy gun the moment he opened his mouth. It made a threateningly loud click that underlined the grimness in his voice.

"Hold it, gents!"

A high sun was breaking through the clouds and his words cut like a whipcrack through the steam curling off the drying timbers of the unpainted buildings.

The old-time gaped, but the young 'poke moved his right hand instinctively. It was hovering over the yellowed ivory butt of his kicker before he, too, froze into shocked immobility.

Kemp clamped his teeth on a sigh of relief.

"All right," he gritted. "Lift 'em, the both of you!"

"Lordsakes, mister!" the old-time quavered, his raised arms shaking like he'd got palsy. "What is this?"

"A feller in a little trouble is all," Kemp said.

A distant hoot of a train's whistle reached his ears. He'd not been a moment too soon. In fact, he was going to need to move with the speed of a striking cobra!

He gestured with the gun. "Inside, and quick about it!"

The cowboy shrugged and turned to go into the run-down office, but as the old railroad man followed suit and was momentarily between him and Kemp, the spunky sprout yanked down a lantern above the porch with his raised left hand. The heavy fitting ripped free, hook and all, from the rafter, showering splinters and spilled coal oil.

The old-timer went to his knees with a cry and the cowpoke swung the lantern at Kemp's head.

Kemp raised his gun-hand to protect himself and caught the makeshift weapon with bruising force on his forearm. Glass smashed and tinkled, and more oil splashed. But some of it was thrown back into the cowpoke's eyes and that was Kemp's saving.

The youngster had grabbed out his gun. It boomed, and a wild, blind shot screamed over Kemp's head as he swung his bunched left fist. It contacted jarringly on the point of the 'poke's jaw. The stinging fog that obscured the young man's sight and had ruined his aim became suddenly absolute. His legs buckled.

"You chose to play it the hard way, son!" Kemp said as his assailant crashed to the porch boards. He turned to the trembling railroader, levelling his unfired gun again. "Any more fancy stuff and I won't be so lenient," he growled. "Drag that feller inside!"

The old-timer scurried to obey. Kemp stooped to snatch up the lariat coiled round the cowpoke's saddlehorn and went after him.

A second, louder whistle warned him the oncoming train was still making progress.

He roped the pair of them together, working fast, trussing them up like chickens. "Sure am mighty sorry about this, but I gotta do it. Now talk fast, old-timer -- what happens when the train arrives?"

"She stops jest long enough to take on water an' any passengers. Drop the mail . . . She runs on a purty tight schedule . . ."

Kemp gagged the old man with a ripped signal flag and the young man with his own kerchief. That left him with seconds to fish the railroad ticket out of the cowpoke's vest pocket before the arriving train was pulling in.

"Adios, gents. And thanks for the help."

The big brass engine bell clanged. Brakes groaned and locking loco wheels spun against the slick wet rails till the engineer kicked the sandbox lever, releasing grit onto the track in front of each drive wheel. With a loud hissing of steam, the iron beast shuddered to a halt alongside the water tower.

While the engineer and the fireman set to taking on water, the conductor leaned out from the rear car.

"Howdy, mister, yuh ketchin' the train?" he greeted Kemp.

"Sure thing," Kemp said.

He hefted the cowpoke's saddle and bedroll onto his bent back. His face he kept as much shielded by his hat brim as he could, hoping he'd not be remembered too well later.

"Seems powerful quiet hereabouts," the conductor observed, scanning the neglected, seemingly unoccupied buildings. "Where's old Henry today?"

Kemp lurched up the steel steps into the car and shoved the cowpoke's ticket under the man's nose.

"Henry's got sick," he mumbled. "Gone down with the ager -- the shakes, you know? The doc ordered him to bed for the day."

The conductor shook his head. "It's a scourge when the weather turns wet," he said with conventional wisdom. "Quinine's the best thing, mister. Stops them chills an' fever."

"The damp rises from that creek down yonder something awful," Kemp went on, turning and nodding out the door.

Kemp was acutely conscious that it was vital to keep the inquisitor occupied and on the train till it moved off. If he climbed down and took his curiosity over to old Henry's office, Kemp would be forced to run. On foot, he'd never get clear of the state pen and its environs before his escape was discovered.

The conductor rubbed his chin reflectively. "Mebbe Henry'd better git the railroad company to fix a new timetable special for rain and the ager! When I was a boy, we had a reverend that got the shakes so reg'lar, he scheduled his preachin' to avoid 'em. His favourite text was `And the prayer of faith shall save the sick.'"

Kemp made what he hoped would be taken for a murmur of interest. "Is that so?"

"That's from the Good Book, mister."

"Yeah? And would you know chapter and verse?"

"James, chapter five, verse fifteen," the conductor shot back, proud to display his knowledge as well as his righteousness.

At last, the engineer pulled the whistle cord, the brakes were released and the train creaked and clanked into rumbling motion.

With relief, Kemp essayed a laugh of admiration at the conductor's last sally and lugged his borrowed saddle and bedroll down the long, nearly empty car to the farthest left-hand corner, where he sat on the last wooden seat with his back to the conductor.

"Cedar City, here I come!" he breathed.

He slumped down on the hard seat, letting his stetson fall concealingly over his eyes. It would suit him fine if the conductor and his fellow passengers were to think of him only in the part he'd taken on -- an insignificant, drifting cowhand, down on his luck and without a horse.

But though he looked like a sleeping bum, and the events of the past hours had been exhausting, there was no rest at all in his brain.

The second he closed his eyes, Ellen was there again, filling his mind's eye with her youthful beauty and intelligent composure.

And the possibility of some grave outcome to the news she'd brought him in the pen kept on worrying him half to death.

Next week: Rymer's Final hand

Copyright © 1994 by Chap O'Keefe

All rights reserved