Chapter XVIII

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.