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CHAPTER 17

      ALTHOUGH THE hour was late and he was tired, Purdy couldn't sleep.

      It was snowing and bitter cold, and he thought it was a bad night for a man to curl up in the thin blankets and piece of canvas Pike had brought him.

      Then he heard the thin clink of a horseshoe on stone, and he saw a man ride furtively between the mostly dark tents and shacks that choked the gulch.

      Purdy got to his feet and followed him, staying well back.

      The man tied up his horse near Lem Beeme's tent where a lamp burned with the wick turned down low. He looked around to see if anybody was watching, but he failed to see Purdy, standing in the shadows. Then he drew a knife and cut the ties that held the Beeme's tent flap shut and went in.

      Purdy, quickly moved to the tent and heard him whisper "If you move, I'll stick this blade through your neck. Tell me where your gold is!"

      Through the partly-opened tent flap, Purdy could see Dipp, the little deputy he had seen with Amhearst yesterday, sitting on Beeme's chest, pinioning the miner's arms under his blanket. Dipp had his gun pressed against Beeme's head with one hand, and the point of a thin-bladed knife against his neck. A trickle of blood was already dripping on the blanket.

      Beeme said in a hoarse voice, "I don't have any gold."

      Dipp cursed him, and twisted the blade a little deeper and the blood gushed out of Beeme's neck, and his eyes took on the look of a man who knows he's doomed.

      Purdy thought Dipp was on the verge of losing control of himself, because he was trembling with either rage or terror, Purdy couldn't tell which. Clearly, if nothing was done to stop him, he would kill Beeme, gold or not.

      Purdy picked up a large rock and held it against his chest. He cleared his throat, and called out, "Hey Lem, I'm comin' in with the gold," and he flung open the tent flap and strode inside, hunched over as though the rock weighed fifty pounds. Dipp's eyes flicked from Purdy's face to what he was carrying, and as Purdy heaved the rock at him, he squeezed off a wild shot before the rock hit him in the chest and knocked him against the tent wall. Purdy followed up with a single punch that knocked Dipp in a heap, unconscious, his legs twitching.

      Beeme sat up holding his neck. "Man's crazy for gold, ain't he?"

      "Pretty crazy all right. Couldn't tell it from a rock," Purdy agreed. "You okay?"

      Beeme nodded gingerly and cleared his throat with a rasping sound. He moved his head back and forth. "I do believe, another quarter inch and I'd be breathing through a new hole."

      "You look like you could use some needle and thread," Purdy said.

      Pike came running into the tent, carbine in hand. "I heard a shot —" Seeing the blood on Beeme and swung his rifle toward Purdy.

      "Whoa, not him," Beeme said. "He saved my life."

      The small tent began filling up with other miners who had heard the shot. While Beeme told them what happened, one of them got some thread, waxed it with a candle, and closed up the hole in Beeme's neck with a few stitches.

      Dipp lay still where he landed, trickling blood out of his mouth, his eyes closed.

      "What you hit him with?" Pike asked.

      "Rock," Purdy said.

      "Naw, it was his fist. The rock just knocked him off balance," Beeme said. "Clean a blow as I've ever seen. Like to took his head off."

      One of the miners said, "Too bad he didn't. Now we're going to have to stretch that ugly head right off his neck."

      And now Dipp, who might have only been feigning unconsciousness, groaned loudly. "What happened?" he asked.

      "You tell us," one of the miners said.

      Dipp sat up and held his jaw and spat out a tooth. "I just came in here to talk to Beeme, and this man attacked me," he said, pointing to Purdy. But a look at their faces told him they didn't believe it. "Wait a minute, wait a minute!" he cried. "I was just follerin' orders! Just doin' my job!"

      "How's that?"

      "I was working in my capacity as deputy, doin' what Sheriff Amhearst tole me to do." Dipp looked imploringly from face to face. "Sheriff said I was supposed to take some gold in payment for services done for him. I swear to God!"

      "What do you think?" one of the miners asked Beeme.

      "You know Elmer Watson and me had words the other day and this guy and the sheriff came nosing around yesterday morning," Beeme said, his sense of fairness corroborating the trembling deputy's story.

      "See!" shouted Dipp. "I'm tellin' you the truth!"

      Beeme fingered his neck gingerly. "On the other hand, if he was doing his job, should he have stuck me in the neck with knife?"

      "Not the way any lawman I ever saw anyplace else would act," said one of the miners.

      "I say string him up anyway." said one of the miners who could be described as a stringy-looking fellow.

      "We just need six good men," said a judicious-looking miner wearing a bulky sweater under a tattered frock coat. "Who among you wants to serve in the name of justice?"

      Most of the men volunteered, and he took the first six.

      As Dipp watched his bravado evaporated, and he let out a whimpering moan as they tied his hands behind him and walked him outside where they lit a fire among the boulders. They sat him down on a rock and the jury stood by the fire, their breaths white plumes. The snow coming down in large flakes disappeared above the fire. They stamped their feet and warmed their hands while the man with the frock coat went back to the tent.

      "I hate to disturb you gentlemen, but you have to come out and tell what happened."

      So Beeme and Purdy followed him and each of them told what had taken place.

      Then the man in the frock coat, who somebody said had once been a lawyer before becoming smitten by the gold fever, walked up and down, outlining the case against Dipp, and Dipp defended himself as best he could, half frozen, his senses almost knocked out of him, so afraid he stuttered and cried as he talked. Then he fell on his knees and began crying for the Lord to help him.

      "The trouble with you is, you don't believe in our great judicial system," said the man in the frock coat, resuming his pacing and his tirade.

      Purdy and Beeme went back into the tent. Beeme sat down on his cot, his head back, and his bloody shirt sticking to his chest.

      "Not much of a trial," Purdy said. "I got no stomach for a hanging."

      "It's better justice than you know," Beeme said. "He deserves it, if not on my account, on the account of many other better men than me he's probably snuck up on and killed."

      Purdy shrugged, shook his head, and groped around in his coat pocket for the cigar he had taken from Nugent's desk. It was slightly bent and a little unraveled. "Smoke?"

      "Don't mind if I do," Beeme said.

      Purdy took out his knife and cut the cigar in half, then measured them against each other and generously gave Beeme the longer half. They lit up and breathed in the smoke of his compatriot. "Ever killed a man?" Purdy asked.

      "One time. Came upon a man stealing my father's horses, and I shot him where he stood. You?"

      "I was in the war." Purdy said. "But I don't like killing — and I'm afraid there's going to be a good deal of it around here. soon."

      "You goin' after the Law and Order Committee?"

      Purdy nodded.

      "You just going to murder them? That's sort of against the law, even if they do deserve killing."

      Purdy smiled. "Well, it turns out I am the law, Lem." He took out Feeney's papers and the badge and handed them to Beeme. "But I expect that any killing I have to do will be self-defense, since I doubt they'll just come in peaceably when I arrest them."

      Beeme looked at the papers and the small tin badge, and his voice took on a new respect. Well, it you need a hand, Marshal . . ."

      "Just keep on calling me Bill Purdy. I'm workin' undercover here, and that's the name I'm going by. But if things don't go so good, I'll certainly call on you. I'd appreciate your help."

      "Hell, I'd be pleased to give it," Beeme said. "If you want, you can sleep inside my tent the rest of the night. Least I can do for somebody who saved my neck and wants to get Nugent and his cutthroats."

      Outside there was the sound of a vote taken, then of a horse getting a good slap on the rump. Then there came a whispery sound, as a lot of men sighed softly at the same time. Purdy and Beeme stepped out of the tent and saw the mortal remains of the late Deputy Dipp floating ghostlike on the frigid air.

      During the night, Purdy awoke cold and shivering. When he put on his coat and went outside to relieve himself, he saw they hadn't cut Dipp down. He looked no bigger than a boy, still swaying in the cold wind from a rope suspended from a length of lodgepole pine tied crosswise between two bigger trees.

      Jimson McClamus was asleep in the livery. He was warmed by a covering of old straw and an old blanket from without, and by rotgut liquor from within, and his dreams were of a greener friendlier place than this God-forsaken West. In his sleep he ran across swards of green grass, beneath green trees with leaves instead of pine needles. Instead of the snuffling of horses he heard the soft baaing of sheep, and his mother was waiting for him with love and a warm dinner.

      And then he was being kicked awake and he roused to see Sheriff Amhearst holding a lamp over his head, looking down at him as though from a mountaintop. McClamus reached for his bottle. After fortifying himself, he managed sit up, his mouth open, his hand wiping the whiskey from his chin where it had dribbled. Amhearst's voice came to him as from a great distance. "Mr. McClamus, I have a job for you."

      People often had work for McClamus. Sometimes he was astonished at the great variety of things he did for people who didn't want to do them themselves. He rubbed his eyes, searched around for his hat, and found it crushed atop his head, and stood up unsteadily on creaking knees awaiting his orders.

      "I want you to take something to Frank Nugent. Do you know who Mr. Nugent is, McClamus?"

      Again McClamus nodded. He pointed delicately with an index finger in the general direction of the hill where Nugent lived.

      "The big house on top of the hill. That's correct. Now McClamus, I want you to put Mr. Watson here over your burro, and take him up to Mr.Nugent's house and knock on his door and tell him this is a parcel that was sent by me. I'm sure he will reward you." And Amhearst bent down, and grasped Watson by his coat collar and slid him off his horse so he landed at McClamus' feet. "You'd better hurry," Amhearst said. My former friend appears to be stiffening up from the cold. Where is your burro, Mr. McClamus? I'll help you load up."

      McClamus led the burro to Watson's body, and Amhearst slung the dead merchant on its back while the McClamus bridled it. Amhearst pinned a note on Watson's coat, and stuffed a couple of greenbacks into McClamus' coat pocket. The liveryman fortified himself once more against the cold and left the warmth of the stable. He thought wistfully about that lovely dream. Ah, Ireland, how he wished that he could someday go there. What a lark it would be. He had heard so much about it.

      As Amhearst left the livery, he saw Nugent's Chinaman riding hell for leather out of town on Nugent's best horse.

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