But as to the rest of it, Annister could only speculate. It was an impasse, and a mystery.
Going downward to the dining-room, as it was now past noon, he glanced toward the desk, but if he had had any thought of reporting the attack upon the girl, or her disappearance, he thought better of it; he would keep his own counsel; a decision helped by a sight of Lunn, the hotel proprietor, who, lounging at the desk, raised his sleepy-lidded, vulture gaze at Annister as the latter was turning toward the dining-room.
Annister, in that brief glance, thought to detect in those eyes, milky-pale, a veiled, sardonic flicker. If, behind this latest happening, there was the fine, Italian hand of Hamilton Rook, Lunn was in cahoots with the lawyer, of that there could be little doubt. For, as Annister was convinced, there had been a menace in those eyes half turned to his, an insolence, a bright, burning truculence, that, as he turned into the long dining-hall, brought the swift blood to his cheek in a dark tide.
But at his table another surprise awaited him. Mary Allerton was gone. The heavy-handed Swede who served him told him that she had left, suddenly, that morning; a message had come for her, it appeared, but the substitute could tell him nothing further. Annister let it go at that.
Rising from the table, he went outward to the long bar, a cool, pleasant oasis, indeed, in the fierce heat of the drowsy afternoon. He greeted the bartender, a tall man with the wide shoulders of a cowman, with a smile.
The man had been friendly; in fact, he had been the sole friend that Annister appeared to have made since his arrival in Dry Bone. Now the bartender leaned forward, speaking in a whisper behind his hand:
“Watch your step, Mr. Annister,” he said.
Annister gave an almost imperceptible nod. Then, his drink before him upon the stained and battered mahogany, he glanced sidewise along the rail, to where, at the far end, two men stood together, eying him under lowered brows.
To Annister it seemed that there had fallen a sudden quiet. Just prior to his entrance he had heard talk and laughter, the _clink_ of glasses, a thick, turgid oath. Now there appeared to rise and grow a tension, as of something electric in the air; Annister felt it in the white face of the knight of the apron, the sudden silence, the rigid figures of the two men at the end of the long bar.
Behind him, and a little to his left, three men were seated at a table: Bristow, sheriff of Dry Bone, a big man with a bleak, pale eye, and a mouth like a straight gash above a heavy chin barbered to the blood. With him were two others whom he did not know.
Lunn was nowhere in sight.
The taller of the two men standing at the bar turned, and Annister recognized him as Tucson Charlie Westervelt, a gunman with a dangerous record. Westervelt was wearing a high-crowned, white Stetson; Annister marked it at the distance, beneath it the fierce, hawklike face, turned now in his direction, the thin lips set stiffly in a sullen pout.
The old West had passed with the passing of the _remuda_, the trail herd, the mining camps; the wide, free range of the long-horned cattle was no more; but Dry Bone had not changed save that the loading-pens had gone; a cow would be a curiosity. But the lawless spirit of the ancient West remained. “Southwest of the Law,” indeed, Dry Bone was a law unto itself, and now about him Annister felt the menace; it appeared that he had walked into a trap.
The judge, the sheriff—what mockery of law there was—Annister knew that it would be against him, either way, attacking or attacked. He was certain of it as Westervelt, moving slowly along the bar, halted when perhaps three paces distant, elbow raised, right hand extended, clawlike, in a stiff, thrusting gesture above his guns.
It was the gesture of the killer, the preliminary for the lightning down-thrust of the stiff fingers; Annister knew that well enough. Now the gunman’s gaze, sleepy-lidded like a falcon’s, bored into his; his voice came with a snarling violence:
“_Mister_ Black Steve Annister,” he said, without preamble. “I understand you’re some wizard with a canister, ha? A bad hombre! Musta been a little bird done told me, an’ that bird was sure loco, I’ll tell a man! But _me_—” his tone hardened to a steely rasp—“I’m not thinkin’ you’re such-a-much!”
It was a trap; Annister knew that now, just as behind the gunman he could almost see the dark face of Rook, with its sneering grin; the lawyer had inspired it.
His automatic hung in a sling under his left arm-pit, but even if he could beat Westervelt to the draw, he knew well enough what the result would be: a shot in the back, say, from the men sitting just behind, or—arrest, and the mockery of a trial to follow it. Either way, he was done.
His own eyes held the gunman’s now, glancing neither to the right nor to the left. He was conscious of a movement from the three men at the table; Westervelt’s companion, a short, bowlegged man, with the pale eyes of an Albino, had stepped backward from the bar; Annister felt rather than saw his hand move even as his own hand came up and outward with lightning speed; flame streaked from his pistol with the motion.
Once in a generation, perhaps, a man arises from the ruck who, by an uncanny dexterity of hand and eye, confounds and dazzles the common run of men. As a conjurer throws his glass balls in air, swifter than eye can follow, so Annister, crouching sidewise from the bar, threw his bullets at Westervelt.
The gunman, bending forward at the hips, crashed to the sawdust in a slumping fall, as the Albino, firing from the hip, whirled sidewise as Annister’s second bullet drilled him through the middle. For the tenth of a second, like the sudden stoppage of a cinematograph, the tableau endured; then Annister, whirling, had covered Bristow where he sat; the two men with him, white-faced, hands pressed flat upon the table-top, stared, silent, as Annister spoke:
“You saw, Bristow,” he said, low and even, his eyes upon the cold eyes of the sheriff in a bright, steady, inquiring stare. “Now—what about it?”
For a moment a little silence held; then Bristow, moistening his stiff lips, nodded, his gaze upon Annister in a sudden, dazed, uncomprehending look.
“All right, Mr. Annister,” he said heavily. “They came lookin’ f’r it, I reckon.... Well, you were _that_ quick!”
Annister smiled grimly, pocketing his pistol. Westervelt lay where he had fallen, a dead man even as he had gone for his gun, lips still twisted in a sullen pout. The bowlegged man, stiff fingers clutching his heavy pistol, lay, face downward, in the sawdust. The bartender, with an admiring glance at Annister, leaned forward as Bristow and the two men with him went slowly out.
“They may try to get me for it, Mr. Annister,” he said, “but I’m no man’s man; well, not Rook’s, and you can lay to that! Bristow and his friends kept out of it, you noticed? Bristow’ll do nothing, _now_; not yet a while, at any rate, but—mebbe they sort of savvied me a-watchin’ t’ see they didn’t run no whizzer on you!”
He lifted the heavy Colt, where it had lain hidden by the bar-rail, thrusting it in its scabbard with a grin.
“Well, sir, I _aimed_ t’ see that they was sittin’ close, _an’_ quiet, Mr. Annister,” he said.
“Thanks, old timer,” said Annister. “I’ll not forget.”
But as he went outward into the waning afternoon he was thinking of that rendezvous of the night. For Rook would be there, and it had been Rook, he was certain, who had engineered that ambush in the Mansion House bar.
_CHAPTER NINE_
THE BATTLE IN THE “CLUB”
The time was nearly ripe. The clue of those newspaper items; the canceled check; the somewhat repellant evidence of the battered piece of goldwork picked up in the corridor of the Mansion House—Annister had been able to put two and two together, to find a sum as strange, as odd, say, as five, or seven, or even one.
But that name that had trembled on the lips of Rook’s secretary remained a secret; with it, Annister was convinced, he would be able to pull those threads together with a single jerk, to find them—one.
He had had news from Mojave: the dentist had identified the insane man as his patient by means of his chart, but, with that face, the man could not be Banker Axworthy—it simply could not be. And yet he was!
It was something of a riddle, and more, even, than that, for the thing savored of the supernatural, of necromancy, of a black art that might, say, have had for its practitioner a certain personage with the eyes of a damned soul and a black, forking beard, curled, like Mephisto’s; Annister thought that it might.
Further, the conductor of that train had been able to describe, somewhat in detail, the man who had jostled the derelict and his companion; the man had been a stranger to the conductor; he had been tall and thin, with a small, sandy moustache, and a high-arched, broken nose, and he had been wearing the conventional Stetson. The fellow might have been disguised, of course, but if Annister could find the black-bearded man, discover his identity, he was reasonably certain that he would not draw blank.