Jim Torrance didn’t stop in the barroom downstairs; he looked in at the
door, saw that Murdo wasn’t there, and went on upstairs. On his way he
was thinking: “I came to Sundown for two reasons--to get to ranching
again and to find Steve Bordereau. I hardly know what my ranch looks
like; I’ve scarcely more than clapped my eyes on Bordereau, though
we’ve tried to shoot it out twice.”
He entered the main gambling room on the second story and went up to
the bar. The place was pretty well filled; men were drinking and games
were going full blast. But again he failed to see Clark Murdo.
His thumbs were hooked into his belt as he leaned against the bar. He
was about to call for a drink when he saw Florinda. She was across the
room, standing stock still and looking at him, her eyes enormous, her
face pale, her lips vivid red, her jewels flaming. She made a queer
little gesture, her beringed hands going up to her bosom. But it was
not that that called him; it was the look in her eyes. He went across
the room to a small table and sat down. Instantly she hurried to him;
she gave him a smile which was all too patently made for the occasion,
for he saw that she looked frightened.
“Sit down, Señorita?” he invited. “We might have something to drink.”
“_Gracias, Señor!_ Oh, yes, I will be glad.”
She sat down; a bottle and glasses were brought them; Torrance sat idly
twisting his glass between hard brown fingers while she looked deep
into his eyes in a queer, troubling sort of way.
“You have come back, Jim Torrance?” Only she called him “Jeem” and
put so many r’s into his name, Torrance, that it sounded like water
rippling over smooth stones. “I have heard so many things, such wild
tales about you! You were hurt, no?”
He shrugged. “Nothing to matter.” And then he asked abruptly: “Did you
want to see me? You’ve got something to tell me?”
She snatched up her glass and drank thirstily. She said, as though he
had accused her of something and she were defending herself, “Me, with
something to tell you?” Then she laughed at that. “What could I have to
tell you, Señor Jeem?”
“I imagine there are a good many things you get to hear about here that
I wouldn’t mind knowing,” he said bluntly. And then he asked: “Where’s
Murdo? I don’t see him here anywhere tonight.”
“He has not come yet. Maybe he won’t come tonight.”
“Once you said you were a friend of mine.”
“I am!” Dramatically she pressed both hands to her breast. “With all my
heart, Señor Jeem!”
“You are a friend of Murdo’s, too?”
Those lusciously full red lips of hers hardened and thinned.
“Clark Murdo to me is the same as Steve Bordereau. They are the two
men I hate!”
“Why?”
“There are ten million reasons. Do not ask me, Señor; to talk about it
would make me want to stick a knife in them.”
“The two are good friends, Murdo and Bordereau? They’re on the level
with each other?”
She laughed in his face, and her laugh was a sneer.
“Are you a great big fool, then? Do you think either one of two men
like those could be square with any other man? They are two cheats,
always cheating each other.”
“I thought so,” said Jim Torrance.
“Murdo hates you,” she said, and, whispering, her whisper was almost
a hiss, “for what you did when you brought the dead man here from the
graveyard, and maybe for other things. I do not know, but he hates you.
And he is the kind of man, like Steve Bordereau, who would come up
behind you and kill.”
He nodded. “I generally keep my back to the wall,” he said.
She gave him an elaborate Southern shrug. About to rise and go, for it
was seldom that she tarried long at any one table, a moment she held
poised, uncertain, undecided. Then she said with a quick, savage flash
of her deep black eyes:
“Yes! Maybe I will have something to tell you! _Vamos a ver!_ Oh, but
we are going to see!” She rose then, yet finished her thought: “Men are
such fools! They think when they go in a room and shut a door, no one
can listen!”
“Florinda! Tell me this. Has Bordereau been here lately to see Murdo?”
But she didn’t stop to answer. He watched her go, an enigma now as
ever; he saw her stop hoveringly like a butterfly at another table
where three men were.
He saw that Charlie, the bartender with the bull neck, was watching
him. He was conscious too that two other men--men he didn’t know, yet
whose faces he had seen here before, Bordereau’s men or Clark Murdo’s
without a doubt--were watching him even more narrowly than the man
behind the bar. Presently one of them got up and went out, passing
around the end of the bar and through the door which Torrance knew led
into the hallway that gave upon the private rooms.
“Gone looking for Murdo,” thought Torrance.
After that he didn’t lose sight of the door, but nevertheless out of
the corner of his eye he saw the several men who came into the room
together, having just come up the stairs from the street. They were
Hasbrook and Kibbee and Evans, leading the way, with Curly Redmond,
Dick Pardee, Dave Drennen, Bill Yarbo and Sam Pepper. Their eyes sought
and found him; when he gave no sign of having seen them, they proceeded
to ignore him after his own fashion. Hasbrook, Kibbee and Evans went
straight to the faro layout and into action, three old stagers who,
when they made their bets, bet ’em high. The others, with the exception
of Sam Pepper, stepped over to a long table where dice were tumbling
and rolling, while, as for Sam, he just hovered. He was so tensely
alert, trying to take in everything, that his eyes looked to be on
fire and his ears seemed actually to quiver like a nervous horse’s.
Then the narrow door opened and Clark Murdo entered. He stopped and ran
his eyes swiftly over the room. Jim Torrance pushed his chair back and
stood up, and Murdo’s eyes hardened to a meeting with his. Torrance
went across the room to him.
“Murdo,” he said crisply, “I want a talk with you.”
“Yes? Well, I’ll listen if you make it snappy,” said Murdo. “What’s on
your mind?”
“Two-three things. First, maybe you’ve heard that Rufe Biggs has
decided to quit being town marshal?”
Murdo stepped back through the still open door.
“Come into a room where we’ll be alone,” he said.
Torrance followed him, not saying anything. They went into one of the
small poker rooms. Murdo flung open the door and said, “Come in.”
“After you,” said Torrance, very polite.
Murdo shrugged and went in first. Torrance, following him, saw that the
room was already occupied by two men; one was the fellow who without
doubt had just come to warn Murdo of Torrance’s presence in the main
gambling room, and who looked like a cross between a seedy fox and a
gaunt bulldog, and the other was that gangling, ferret-eyed man so
nearly always at Murdo’s beck and call whom Torrance remembered having
encountered at least twice already. Their eyes were like snakes’
eyes, just that cold and void of expression--snakes’ eyes or bright
hard-polished shoe buttons.
“Sure, let’s talk!” said Murdo, and, having spoken, his jaws suddenly
clamped hard, his lips squeezed together in a bloodless line of hate
and menace; his mouth was then like a frog’s mouth.
Torrance shut the door; there was a key in the lock and he turned it
and drew it out and dropped it into his pocket.
“We won’t want to be disturbed,” he said, and took a single sidewise
step which put him snugly in a corner, his back to the wall. His two
thumbs had again hooked themselves into his belt.
The three pairs of eyes bent so steadily and balefully upon him
flickered then. It had been in Murdo’s mind to lock the door, but
Torrance had been too quick for him; somehow the thing upset him.
“Well, what’s it all about?” he demanded. “Put a name to it.”
“Rufe Biggs has quit, like I told you. I think he was wise at that,
don’t you, Murdo?”
“Biggs is a yellow dog,” said Murdo. “It makes no difference to me what
he does.”
“He told you who the new town marshal is?”
“You won’t last long at it, Torrance. You can take that from me.”
“No, I won’t last long. That’s the way I want it.”
“What the hell? Are you driving at anything or ain’t you?”
“Me, I’m a rancher, not a nursemaid for a sick town. Me, I want to get
my job done and go back to my stock. That’s why I won’t last long here
as marshal.”
Murdo laughed at him, but it wasn’t much of a laugh. Torrance went on
quietly:
“You, Murdo, are not to last here even as long as I am. One way or
another you are getting out of here now, tonight. One way or another
you’re going fast and far. And you’re not to come back.”
Murdo, his mind made up, was temporizing, waiting for a break, and
Jim Torrance was no such fool as not to know it. Murdo, affecting a
sneering sort of manner, said:
“So I’m to just roll my bundle and vamoose, am I? Just let the shop
here run itself--”
“That needn’t worry you. It’s not your joint anyhow; it’s Steve
Bordereau’s, and Bordereau’s on the run, maybe already streaking for
the border, wanted for robbery and murder. You don’t think he’d be fool
enough to ever come back here for an accounting, do you?”
He saw that, while Murdo was watching him like a hawk, Murdo’s two
killers now had their eyes bent on their boss, watching for a sign.
“So I’m invited just to step along and let the place run itself?” said
Murdo. “Maybe you’re thinking of taking it over yourself?”
“The girl out there, Florinda, can run it. Between her and Charlie,
your barkeep, they’ll do well enough.”
Murdo strove for a sort of bantering, good-natured laugh--and Jim
Torrance, knowing full well that there was no laughter in the man’s
heart, grew a notch more tense and alert than before.
“Stop your bluffing, Torrance,” said Murdo, trying to be genial. “Come
on out and I’ll stand you a drink. Why, man alive--”
Somehow Murdo had given the signal, and Jim Torrance knew it, though
he didn’t quite know how. At the same split second Murdo and his two
gunmen went for their guns.
* * * * *
Into the gambling room the noise of a sudden crash of gunfire burst
like rolling thunder through the comparative silence. The first men to
run out of the room and into the hallway were Dick Pardee and Curly
Redmond; close behind them, a sturdy and compact mass of determined
men, came Evans and Hasbrook and Doc Kibbee, with Dave Drennen and Sam
Pepper and Lying Bill Yarbo crowding one another for elbow room, each
striving to get a leap in advance of the others. They came to the door
of the poker room and found it locked; they yelled their demands for
ingress and hurled their weights on the door. Before they could batter
it down, they heard a key shoot the bolt back, the door was opened and
they looked into the small room through a blue haze of powder smoke.
Clark Murdo leaned back, white-faced, against a wall, his left hand
clutching his right shoulder; his gun lay on the floor at his feet. One
of his men, the gangling youngster with the furtive eyes and rabbit
teeth, crouched down, his gun arm broken, blood dripping from his
finger tips. The other of the Murdo men lay on his side, doubled up in
agony.
It was therefore Jim Torrance who had opened the door. There was not a
scratch on him. Already he had slid his guns back into their holsters.
He was finishing the cigarette he had been smoking.
“Boys,” he said as they came in, “can you scare me up a wagon and a
man to drive it? I want these gents hauled out of town. They’re not
supposed to come back any more. Cart ’em out to the graveyard and
dump ’em there. If they’re alive in the morning, they can move on; if
they’re dead by then, we’ll dig ’em under.”
“I’m damned!” said old Doc Kibbee. “All three of ’em had their guns in
their hands--and not a one of ’em fired a shot! Is this man Torrance
fast? Or is he just chain lightning?”
After that for a time Sundown called its new marshal Lightning. But
that was too direct and obvious, and also they grew to like him, and
so after a while Marshal Jim Torrance of Sundown was familiarly and
affectionately known as Slow Jim.