Annister had been absent from that room not longer than ten racing
seconds. It was unthinkable that the girl had vanished of her own
volition, even had it been physically possible.
Glancing around the room, he saw that the windows were closed and bolted;
the flooring was solid, substantial; there could be no ingress save by
the door through which he had just come.
There was another door; it led to the next room; but Annister, with a
habit of inbred caution, had tried it, and found it locked. Now, in two
swift strides, he had covered the space between, had tried that door,
setting his weight against it as he turned the knob.
Under his weight it gave outward with a sudden slatting clatter. They,
whoever they might be, had unlocked it; it had been through this
adjoining room that they had taken the girl.
Annister, glancing swiftly around this room, saw that it was obviously
unoccupied; the bed had been made up; there was no sort of clue that he
could see. The invisible assassin had had a key; that was it, of course.
But as to the rest of it, Annister could only speculate. It was an
impasse, and a mystery.
Going downward to the dining-room, as it was now past noon, he glanced
toward the desk, but if he had had any thought of reporting the attack
upon the girl, or her disappearance, he thought better of it; he would
keep his own counsel; a decision helped by a sight of Lunn, the hotel
proprietor, who, lounging at the desk, raised his sleepy-lidded, vulture
gaze at Annister as the latter was turning toward the dining-room.
Annister, in that brief glance, thought to detect in those eyes,
milky-pale, a veiled, sardonic flicker. If, behind this latest happening,
there was the fine, Italian hand of Hamilton Rook, Lunn was in cahoots
with the lawyer, of that there could be little doubt. For, as Annister
was convinced, there had been a menace in those eyes half turned to his,
an insolence, a bright, burning truculence, that, as he turned into the
long dining-hall, brought the swift blood to his cheek in a dark tide.
But at his table another surprise awaited him. Mary Allerton was gone.
The heavy-handed Swede who served him told him that she had left,
suddenly, that morning; a message had come for her, it appeared, but the
substitute could tell him nothing further. Annister let it go at that.
Rising from the table, he went outward to the long bar, a cool, pleasant
oasis, indeed, in the fierce heat of the drowsy afternoon. He greeted the
bartender, a tall man with the wide shoulders of a cowman, with a smile.
The man had been friendly; in fact, he had been the sole friend that
Annister appeared to have made since his arrival in Dry Bone. Now the
bartender leaned forward, speaking in a whisper behind his hand:
“Watch your step, Mr. Annister,” he said.
Annister gave an almost imperceptible nod. Then, his drink before him
upon the stained and battered mahogany, he glanced sidewise along the
rail, to where, at the far end, two men stood together, eying him under
lowered brows.
To Annister it seemed that there had fallen a sudden quiet. Just prior to
his entrance he had heard talk and laughter, the _clink_ of glasses, a
thick, turgid oath. Now there appeared to rise and grow a tension, as of
something electric in the air; Annister felt it in the white face of the
knight of the apron, the sudden silence, the rigid figures of the two men
at the end of the long bar.
Behind him, and a little to his left, three men were seated at a table:
Bristow, sheriff of Dry Bone, a big man with a bleak, pale eye, and a
mouth like a straight gash above a heavy chin barbered to the blood. With
him were two others whom he did not know.
Lunn was nowhere in sight.
The taller of the two men standing at the bar turned, and Annister
recognized him as Tucson Charlie Westervelt, a gunman with a dangerous
record. Westervelt was wearing a high-crowned, white Stetson; Annister
marked it at the distance, beneath it the fierce, hawklike face, turned
now in his direction, the thin lips set stiffly in a sullen pout.
The old West had passed with the passing of the _remuda_, the trail herd,
the mining camps; the wide, free range of the long-horned cattle was no
more; but Dry Bone had not changed save that the loading-pens had gone;
a cow would be a curiosity. But the lawless spirit of the ancient West
remained. “Southwest of the Law,” indeed, Dry Bone was a law unto itself,
and now about him Annister felt the menace; it appeared that he had
walked into a trap.
The judge, the sheriff—what mockery of law there was—Annister knew that
it would be against him, either way, attacking or attacked. He was
certain of it as Westervelt, moving slowly along the bar, halted when
perhaps three paces distant, elbow raised, right hand extended, clawlike,
in a stiff, thrusting gesture above his guns.
It was the gesture of the killer, the preliminary for the lightning
down-thrust of the stiff fingers; Annister knew that well enough. Now the
gunman’s gaze, sleepy-lidded like a falcon’s, bored into his; his voice
came with a snarling violence:
“_Mister_ Black Steve Annister,” he said, without preamble. “I understand
you’re some wizard with a canister, ha? A bad hombre! Musta been a
little bird done told me, an’ that bird was sure loco, I’ll tell a man!
But _me_—” his tone hardened to a steely rasp—“I’m not thinkin’ you’re
such-a-much!”
It was a trap; Annister knew that now, just as behind the gunman he could
almost see the dark face of Rook, with its sneering grin; the lawyer had
inspired it.
His automatic hung in a sling under his left arm-pit, but even if he
could beat Westervelt to the draw, he knew well enough what the result
would be: a shot in the back, say, from the men sitting just behind,
or—arrest, and the mockery of a trial to follow it. Either way, he was
done.
His own eyes held the gunman’s now, glancing neither to the right nor to
the left. He was conscious of a movement from the three men at the table;
Westervelt’s companion, a short, bowlegged man, with the pale eyes of an
Albino, had stepped backward from the bar; Annister felt rather than saw
his hand move even as his own hand came up and outward with lightning
speed; flame streaked from his pistol with the motion.
Once in a generation, perhaps, a man arises from the ruck who, by an
uncanny dexterity of hand and eye, confounds and dazzles the common run
of men. As a conjurer throws his glass balls in air, swifter than eye can
follow, so Annister, crouching sidewise from the bar, threw his bullets
at Westervelt.
The gunman, bending forward at the hips, crashed to the sawdust in a
slumping fall, as the Albino, firing from the hip, whirled sidewise as
Annister’s second bullet drilled him through the middle. For the tenth
of a second, like the sudden stoppage of a cinematograph, the tableau
endured; then Annister, whirling, had covered Bristow where he sat; the
two men with him, white-faced, hands pressed flat upon the table-top,
stared, silent, as Annister spoke:
“You saw, Bristow,” he said, low and even, his eyes upon the cold eyes of
the sheriff in a bright, steady, inquiring stare. “Now—what about it?”
For a moment a little silence held; then Bristow, moistening his stiff
lips, nodded, his gaze upon Annister in a sudden, dazed, uncomprehending
look.
“All right, Mr. Annister,” he said heavily. “They came lookin’ f’r it, I
reckon.... Well, you were _that_ quick!”
Annister smiled grimly, pocketing his pistol. Westervelt lay where he
had fallen, a dead man even as he had gone for his gun, lips still
twisted in a sullen pout. The bowlegged man, stiff fingers clutching his
heavy pistol, lay, face downward, in the sawdust. The bartender, with an
admiring glance at Annister, leaned forward as Bristow and the two men
with him went slowly out.
“They may try to get me for it, Mr. Annister,” he said, “but I’m no man’s
man; well, not Rook’s, and you can lay to that! Bristow and his friends
kept out of it, you noticed? Bristow’ll do nothing, _now_; not yet a
while, at any rate, but—mebbe they sort of savvied me a-watchin’ t’ see
they didn’t run no whizzer on you!”
He lifted the heavy Colt, where it had lain hidden by the bar-rail,
thrusting it in its scabbard with a grin.
“Well, sir, I _aimed_ t’ see that they was sittin’ close, _an’_ quiet,
Mr. Annister,” he said.
“Thanks, old timer,” said Annister. “I’ll not forget.”
But as he went outward into the waning afternoon he was thinking of that
rendezvous of the night. For Rook would be there, and it had been Rook,
he was certain, who had engineered that ambush in the Mansion House bar.
_CHAPTER NINE_