Desert of the Damned Read Online Free Page A

of here,” he told them. “I ain’t aiming to come back and I’m not hankerin’ to be followed. What the rest of you do is your own damn business but if our trails ever cross again you’d better not know me. Is that clear?” he said sharply.
    One or two of them grunted. Frenston dropped to a squat and got to work on the division. Crowdy edged in closer, lips silently moving as he peered across Frenston’s shoulder, suspiciously checking the count for himself.
    There was something abysmal in the look of Breen’s stare. The man’s discomfited pride, smarting under the loss in prestige occasioned by that uncompleted grab for his pistols, might yet bring on gunplay. There wasn’t much doubt whose side the rest would take. Too long this bunch had chafed on the leash to have any love left over for Reifel.
    He eased the buckskin backward toward the fringe of blue cedar.
    Breen’s sneer grew more marked. There was something atavistic in the cant of his posture, something in his eyes which left Ben Reifel uneasy.
    • • •
    Seventy minutes of hard riding brought Reifel into the high-growing timber of the mountains’ northern flanks. It would soon be full dark. Where his way led steeply upward between the boles of ponderosa the gloom perceptibly thickened and not even the cry of a disturbed owl relieved the impenetrable stillness. A deep carpet of fallen needles cushioned the buckskin’s travel and the smell of the forest was a pungent aroma laced with cold air rolling down from the peaks.
    He was probably a fool to be returning to the Cherrycows when all the dictates of caution urged flight. But he was damned if he would leave for Bo Breen’s enjoyment what share he still had in the undivided loot put away for times of trouble. The great bulk of his share in former hauls was safely banked under aliases at Douglas and Deming; but close to ninety-eight hundred in currency was cached beneath the feedroom of Cy Turner’s livery at Paradise, and it may have been remembrance of this which had put that smugness in Breen’s parting stare.
    Three thousand dollars would come in mighty handy in turning over that new leaf. Nor was Riefel forgetting it was himself alone who had stopped that westbound stage this evening. Pop Perkins had been held up before by Ben Reifel and would carefully have catalogued the appearance of this buckskin. At Turner’s Ben could swap him for some less conspicuous animal … perhaps even for that blaze-faced roan Cy was fond of.
    That blue roan was of the type dubbed locally a
gambler’s
horse, a strong-legged hustler that for three-eighths of a mile could give three lengths to chain lightning and beat it. Which was just what Ben needed, being minded to be out of here long before dawn. And that roan was an easy keeper of a strain highly regarded for endurance. There were a lot of tough miles wrapped up in that hide and if he could get him, Ben thought, he might yet pull clear of this goddam killing.
    He was in no doubt as to the hell that would be raised once the star-packing brethren got wind of Schmole’s rub-out. Every tinbadge in these counties would go on the prod, for if one lawman’s death were allowed to go unpunished the whole tribe would stand in danger of extinction. They
had
to get this bastard.
    Reifel understood that.
    Perkins knew well enough Ben hadn’t killed the messenger, but that was no matter. They couldn’t chase phantoms. They’d be after the man on the buckskin horse. He was the one who had stuck up the stage. He was the one they would count most important. And if his name was Ben Reifel what the hell would they care! They
knew
about him. They had some clue to his identity.
    He slammed another look behind him, knowing how futile it was even as he did so. There’d be nothing to fear along his backtrail yet. He had gone to some trouble to confuse pursuit, riding when he could across bare ledges; and the first town Perkins could start an alarm from was a good forty miles