Desert of the Damned by Nelson Nye Read Free Book Online

skreaked off in mid-career and he stiffened. The upper half of him leaned forward to peer at Reifel disbelievingly.
    “I ain’t goin’ to fool with you much longer,” Reifel told him. “Put my pile in your pockets and get out of them duds.”
    Breen licked his lips. He sidled off a step nervously. “Y’ mean plumb nakid?”
    Reifel, scowling, started forward. Breen almost tore the shirt getting out of it.
    Three minutes later, with Breen’s clothes on him, Reifel called out to Turner, “I’m leaving your six hundred right here in the doorway.”
    He didn’t bother hunting for the gun Breen had dropped but he picked up the gunbelts and Breen’s other pistol and heaved them through the feedroom window.
    He went outside then and untied the blue roan.
    He never looked back. He acted like a man who couldn’t get away fast enough. Almost before he’d settled into the saddle he was slashing the horse with the knotted reins. He left town, pointed west, with the roan wide open.

4. CANYON CROSSING
    N OT FOR an instant did Reifel imagine he could escape by heading west. He was laying the foundation for an appearance of panic which he hoped might deceive — at least for the moment — not only Bo Breen but anyone else who’d taken note of his departure. He’d done some pretty dumb things in his time, he suspected, but trying to fool himself hadn’t ever been one of them.
    He was in a tight spot.
    Schmole’s killing, out of all relation to its actual significance, would be seen as the culmination of a trend the civic-minded of this region had long been threatening to wipe out. They would envision it as a challenge and it would band them all together in a spirit of indignation. Where erstwhile they’d been muttering they would now become vociferous. Past connections would be abandoned, past relationships forgotten. The Law would be spurred to action and it took no effort on Reifel’s part to understand what would happen.
    There’d be hell along the owlhoot.
    And this was only a part of his problem. Turner he could forget about but powerful needs would be at work in Breen. The man’s need to cover his own trail would spur him on where shame might not.
    And Ben was graveled by his own code of conduct. While perhaps not strictly orthodox, this was strict enough to rub his pride raw. He had never been able to abide the kind who dug for the tules at the least hint of danger. Yet here he was backed into a corner from which flight seemed the only plausible answer.
    It turned him furious, for by his own way of looking at things this placed him too exactly on a footing with the country’s untouchables.
    Yet he saw no way around it. He knew he couldn’t in his present condition expect to stand off the law and Breen too. Nor could he stand many grueling hours in the saddle.
    The hole Breen’s shot had torn through his chest looked pretty damned ugly. The slug hadn’t lodged and he had patched the thing up as well as he’d been able, but he could tell from experience there was going to be fever and the only safe place for a man with a fever was flat on his back.
    Ben Reifel cursed.
    It would be sheer suicide to hole up here. Within two days these roundabout mountains would be crammed full of scalp-hunting jaspers. Nor would Breen be content to keep his mouth shut when a few choice words dropped in some dim barroom could so effectively get Ben taken care of for him. All the law had to go on right now was what Perkins and his passengers might happen to remember of his probable height and general build plus, of course, his clothes and the horse he’d been forking. If he had paid Breen off in the coin his duplicity so richly merited he’d be having no occasion to remain in the saddle. He’d be free to go or stay as he chose. The law would be hunting a buckskin horse and the duds he’d dropped, rock weighted, in the creek behind Tim Foley’s.
    Chicken hearts had no place on the owlhoot. He should have turned that new page