Essential Western Novels - Volume 10. Zane Grey
Their noisy disputation shattered the sunny stillness like a fusillade in the desert. Plainly they were much the worse for liquor.
Roy felt again the familiar clutch at his throat, the ice drench at his heart, and the faint slackness of his leg muscles. For in the crowd just vomited from the Silver Dollar were Meldrum, Fox, Hart, Charlton, and Ned Rutherford.
Charlton it was that caught sight of the passing man. With an exultant whoop he leaped out, seized Beaudry, and swung him into the circle of hillmen.
"Tickled to death to meet up with you, Mr. Royal-Cherokee-Beaudry-Street. How is every little thing a-coming? Fine as silk, eh? You'd ought to be laying by quite a bit of the mazuma, what with rewards and spy money together," taunted Charlton.
To the center of the circle Meldrum elbowed his drunken way. "Lemme get at the pink-ear. Lemme bust him one," he demanded.
Ned Rutherford held him back. "Don't break yore breeching, Dan. Brad has done spoke for him," the young man drawled.
Into the white face of his victim Charlton puffed the smoke of his cigar. "If you ain't too busy going fishing maybe you could sell me a windmill to-day. How about that, Mr. Cornell-I-Yell?"
"Where's yore dry nurse Dingwell?" broke in the ex-convict bitterly. "Thought he tagged you everywhere. Tell the son-of-a-gun for me that next time we meet I'll curl his hair right."
Roy said nothing. He looked wildly around for a way of escape and found none. A half ring of jeering faces walled him from the street.
"Lemme get at him. Lemme crack him one on the bean," insisted Meldrum as he made a wild pass at Beaudry.
"No hurry a-tall," soothed Ned. "We got all evening before us. Take yore time, Dan."
"Looks to me like it's certainly up to Mr. Cherokee-What's-his-name-Beaudry to treat the crowd," suggested Chet Fox.
The young man clutched at the straw. "Sure. Of course, I will. Glad to treat, even though I don't drink myself," he said with a weak, forced heartiness.
"You don't drink. The hell you don't!" cut in Meldrum above the Babel of voices.
"He drinks—hic—buttermilk," contributed Hart.
"He'll drink whiskey when I give the word, by Gad!" Meldrum shook himself free of Rutherford and pressed forward. He dragged a bottle from his pocket, drew out the cork, and thrust the liquor at Roy. "Drink, you yellow-streaked coyote—and drink a-plenty."
Roy shook his head. "No!—no," he protested. "I—I—never touch it." His lips were ashen. The color had fled from his cheeks.
The desperado pushed his cruel, vice-scarred face close to that of the man he hated.
"Sa-ay. Listen to me, young fellow. I'm going to bump you off one o' these days sure. Me, I don't like yore name nor the color of yore hair nor the map you wear for a face. I'm a killer. Me, Dan Meldrum. And I serve notice on you right now." With an effort he brought his mind back to the issue on hand. "But that ain't the point. When I ask a man to drink he drinks. See? You ain't deef, are you? Then drink, you rabbit!"
Beaudry, his heart beating like a triphammer, told himself that he was not going to drink that they could not make him—that he would die first. But before he knew it the flask was in his trembling fingers. Apparently, without the consent of his flaccid will, the muscles had responded to the impulse of obedience to the spur of fear. Even while his brain drummed the refrain, "I won't drink—I won't—I won't," the bottle was rising to his lips.
He turned a ghastly grin on his tormentors. It was meant to propitiate them, to save the last scrap of his self-respect by the assumption that they were all good fellows together. Feebly it suggested that after all a joke is a joke.
From the uptilted flask the whiskey poured into his mouth. He swallowed, and the fiery liquid scorched his throat. Before he could hand the liquor back to its owner, the ex-convict broke into a curse.
"Drink, you pink-ear. Don't play 'possum with me," he roared. Roy drank. Swallow after swallow of the stuff burned its way into his stomach. He stopped at last, sputtering and coughing.
"M—much obliged. I'll be going now," he stammered.
"Not quite yet, Mr. R. C. Street-Beaudry," demurred Charlton suavely. "Stay and play with us awhile, now you're here. No telling when we'll meet again." He climbed on the shoe-shining chair that stood in the entry. "I reckon I'll have my boots shined up. Go to it, Mr. Beaudry-Street."
With a whoop of malice the rest of them fell in with the suggestion. To make this young fellow black their boots in turn was the most humiliating thing they could think of at the moment. They pushed Roy toward the stand and put a brush into his hand. He stood still, hesitating.
"Git down on yore knees and hop to it," ordered Charlton. "Give him room, boys."
Again Beaudry swore to himself that he would not do it. He had an impulse to smash that sneering, cruel face, but it was physically impossible for him to lift a hand to strike. Though he was trembling violently, he had no intention of yielding. Yet the hinges of his knees bent automatically. He found himself reaching for the blacking just as if his will were paralyzed.
Perhaps it was the liquor rushing to his head when he stooped. Perhaps it was the madness of a terror-stricken rat driven into a corner. His fear broke bounds, leaped into action. Beaudry saw red. With both hands he caught Charlton's foot, twisted it savagely, and flung the man head over heels out of the chair. He snatched up the bootblack's stool by one leg and brought it crashing down on the head of Meldrum. The ex-convict went down as if he had been pole-axed.
There was no time to draw guns, no time to prepare a defense. His brain on fire from the liquor he had drunk and his overpowering terror, Beaudry was a berserk gone mad with the lust of battle. He ran amuck like a maniac, using the stool as a weapon to hammer down the heads of his foes. It crashed first upon one, now on another.
Charlton rushed him and was struck down beside Meldrum. Hart, flung back into the cigar-case, smashed the glass into a thousand splinters. Young Rutherford was sent spinning into the street.
His assailants gave way before Beaudry, at first slowly, then in a panic of haste to escape. He drove them to the sidewalk, flailing away at those within reach. Chet Fox hurdled in his flight a burro loaded with wood.
Then, suddenly as it had swept over Roy, the brain-storm passed. The mists cleared from his eyes. He looked down at the leg of the stool in his hand, which was all that remained of it. He looked up—and saw Beulah Rutherford in the street astride a horse.
She spoke to her brother, who had drawn a revolver from his pocket. "You don't need that now, Ned. He's through."
Her contemptuous voice stung Roy. "Why didn't they leave me alone, then?" he said sullenly in justification.
The girl did not answer him. She slipped from the horse and ran into the arcade with the light grace that came of perfect health and the freedom of the hills. The eyes of the young man followed this slim, long-limbed Diana as she knelt beside Charlton and lifted his bloody head into her arms. He noticed that her eyes burned and that her virginal bosom rose and fell in agitation.
None the less she gave first aid with a business-like economy of motion. "Bring water, Ned,—and a doctor," she snapped crisply, her handkerchief pressed against the wound.
To see what havoc he had wrought amazed Roy. The arcade looked as if a cyclone had swept through it. The cigar-stand was shattered beyond repair, its broken glass strewn everywhere. The chair of the bootblack had been splintered into kindling wood. Among the debris sat Meldrum groaning, both hands pressing a head that furiously ached. Brad Charlton was just beginning to wake up to his surroundings.
A crowd had miraculously gathered from nowhere. The fat marshal of Battle Butte was puffing up the street a block away. Beaudry judged it time to be gone. He dropped the leg of the stool and strode toward the hotel.
Already his fears were active again. What would the hillmen do to