Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories Read Online Free Page B

From the corner of his eye Vern saw
Harry Keller and Marshall Preston standing together watching him,
their faces troubled. I’ll give them a last good show,
anyway , he thought.
    He considered the possibility of dodging the
first shot. A slim one—besides, once beaten by Johnny Benson he was
finished as a gunfighter, and what was left for him beyond
that?
    He had been walking slowly, musingly, and
now he was closer than he realized. Johnny Benson was standing with
his feet apart, a grin on his face, waiting for him.
    Somewhere behind Lennox there was a
commotion. Judge Macklin was coming, all the joviality wiped from
his face, pushing his way through the people on the boardwalk with
Lars Holcomb close at his heels.
    “Are you ready?” Johnny Benson called
out.
    Vern Lennox did not deign to reply. He gazed
straight at Benson, his dark, shadowed eyes seeming to look on and
through him and see more besides.
    He saw Johnny tense, straining more and more
with excitement, and knew that at the pitch of that excitement he
would break for his gun. It came. Vern’s hand moved automatically
for his own gun but he knew it was too slow. Johnny’s bullet
slammed into him like a hammer and his gun spilled from his hand as
he fell, pain blurring the moment until his head thudded on the
ground. He waited for the second shot, but it did not come. Truth
be told, Johnny Benson himself had been paralyzed for an instant at
the sight of Vern Lennox going down before his gun, and in that
space of time Judge Macklin plunged off the boardwalk into the
street and got between them.
    “Stop!” he shouted.
    Johnny had already recovered. “No!” he
yelled back. “You idiot! What d’you think you’re doing?”
    It was indeed a sight that would be recalled
in the town long afterwards—Judge Macklin standing in the middle of
the street with his cane held aloft like a sword, holding the irate
young gunman at bay.
    “Get out of my way!” yelled Johnny,
advancing a step. “I beat him! You saw!”
    “Yes, you did!” shouted Judge Macklin. “You
beat a man with a crippled hand!”
    There was a stunned silence. People looked
at each other—and at Johnny Benson. He stood stiff, his gun still
clutched out in front of him, his eyes distended, though the rest
of his thin face had fallen slack.
    The Judge nodded, satisfied with the effect
his words had created. “You make the most of it, Johnny.”
    People moved now, spilling forward off the
boardwalks, a number of them clustering around the wounded man.
Vern could see little from where he lay, but he sensed the crowd
around him, their voices an earnest clamor and their shapes
blocking the light. Harry Keller was leaning over him, a hand on
his shoulder. “Bad, Vern?”
    “I don’t know.” Vern grimaced slightly at
the pain in his side. “Bad enough.”
    “We’ll get the doctor. Take it easy, old
boy, you’ll be all right.”
    “What sort of a stunt under the wide blue
heavens was that ? ” demanded Judge Macklin, arriving on the
fringes of the group. “Do you realize you’ve taken ten years off my
life?”
    “You shouldn’t have done it, Vern. It was as
good as suicide, anyone could have told you that!” Marshall
Preston’s voice came from somewhere overhead.
    “When Lars came and told me I almost had a
conniption,” said the Judge. “I was so certain you’d handle Johnny
I wasn’t even coming to watch. Whatever possessed you to try and
make a martyr of yourself, without even bothering to bid us
goodbye?”
    Their voices held irritation, reproof,
concern…spreading a warm feeling through him that made him want to
laugh in spite of the pain. They hadn’t changed. He had failed,
been humiliated, had made a fool of himself three times over, and
they were still his friends.
    “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” said
Lars. “I figured maybe the Judge might be able to make you listen,
so I went for him. You didn’t owe nothing to Johnny or anybody
else, and don’t you