Sliphammer

Mordecai Gant wiped his nose and looked at Tree with baleful reluctance. Obie Mack-lin put a chaw of tobacco in his mouth; it bulged in his cheek, squirrel-like. He gave a nervous bray of laughter that trailed off into silence.

Tree gave them both his unhappy scrutiny and began to speak.

He got back to his room late that night. He didn’t have to check the tenpe

He pushed the door shut and said, “I want you to go home to your daddy, Caroline.”

With her mouth full she said, muffled, “You set it up for tomorrow night like you pla

“Uh-hunh. I don’t give much for our chances now I’ve seen Sparrow’s two prize boys.”

She swallowed, wiped her mouth, and said matter-of-factly, “I’ve been thinking on it. Suppose you get the Earps out of the hotel. You can’t use the railroad because the Earps’ mining boss friends could have the train held down the line, intercept you. So you’ve got to go out horseback.”

He made a patient grimace.

She gri

“A what?”

“Chaperone, you know-due

“I know what the damned word means,” he growled.

“Well, then?”

“Well what?”

“You can’t get Earp out of his hotel room without her knowing-Josie, his wife. You leave her behind, and she’ll raise a hue and cry they’ll hear from here to Leadville. You’ve got to keep her quiet, and you can’t very well shoot her. So you’ve got to take her with you. Besides, Earp might be easier to handle if she was along-he wouldn’t want to risk getting her caught in the middle of a shooting war.”

Tree glared at her. She was smiling i

“No. Absolutely no.”

She sighed. “Look, Jerr, forget that I’m Rafe’s widow, which gives me a stake in this too. Forget that if you want to, but think of this: you need all the help you can get, and I’m not just a frilly petticoat schoolmarm all aflutter with my-goodnesses. I’m a ranch girl born and bred. I’m full of fight and vinegar. Maybe I don’t shoot so good but I don’t intend to shoot anybody. I can handle horses almost as well as Rafe could. Horse for horse I can probably outride you because I weigh fifty pounds less than you. I’m not dead weight, Jerr. I can help. I mean it.”

She picked up the hunk of cheese and bit off a corner, watching him out of the side of her vision. “You need every pair of eyes you can get to keep watch on those Earps. And one more thing: you don’t know how far you can trust those two bully boys of Floyd Sparrow’s, if you can trust them at all. You do know you can trust me,” she finished, and added after a moment, “all the way.”

He said sourly, “Thought it all out, have you?”

“It’s a couple of hundred miles from here to Denver and you’ll have to horseback across some of the ruggedest mountains this side of Hell. It’ll take a week to get there and you can’t stay awake the whole way. You’ll want somebody on your side that you can trust.”

He said, “Your daddy was right about you.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Damn it,” she said, “I only want you to have the best possible chance of coming out of this alive-I want you to make it, Jerr.”

Her eyes were open wide; her breasts lifted and fell with her breath. Her lips were parted, moist and heavy in repose. She wrenched her eyes away, walked quickly to the door, and went.

When it came time to perform, Macklin and Gant did better than he had expected of them. They were like garrison soldiers who only griped when there was nothing better to do. Once the action started, they did fine.

The operation was as simple as it was desperate. Because of its boldness, and because of the strength of the Earps’ defenses, Tree gave it a fifty-fifty chance to succeed: the Earps were so well defended that their sentries were less alert than they would have been had the situation seemed precarious. Their complacence was a formidable weakness.

The Earps expected a night raid; because they expected it, they didn’t give its success much credence. The Inter Ocean was guarded at every entrance by Cooley’s strike-breaker-thugs. Men were posted on the staircase landings, front and back, and two armed guards stood outside the bedroom doors of Wyatt and Warren Earp, covering the corridor between them in cross fire. It had been no great task to leam that; the whole town buzzed with word of the Inter Ocean’s fortifications, and while Tree made a point of being visible and nonagres-sive all day Saturday, Macklin and Gant gathered intelligence. Once it became clear that there was no way to get into the Inter Ocean by any ground-floor entrance, and that even if somehow such entrance should be achieved there would still be no way to get upstairs undiscovered, Tree knew he had a good chance. They had made it so difficult for him to get at the Earps that they must believe, by now, that he probably wouldn’t even try.

Wyatt and Josie slept in the bedroom of the big second-floor suite at the back corner of the building. Their windows gave out onto gingerbread balconies which overhung alleys at the side and back of the Inter Ocean. Two sentries stood guard in the alley under bright lights. They were expertly posted-too far apart to be taken together, too close to each other to be surprised one at a time. The chance of silencing them simultaneously, to prevent one of them from seeing the other attacked and giving the alarm, was too remote to consider. Nobody was going to get past those two; thus, clearly, nobody was going to climb to the balconies and get in through the windows.

Earp’s generalship was excellent. But the world boasted very few impregnable fortresses, and the Inter Ocean had not been designed with the idea in mind of repelling invasion. There was an obvious chink in Earp’s defenses-Tree hoped it wasn’t so obvious that Earp was waiting for it.

By three in the morning the Saturday night crowds had broken up. Obie Macklin strolled past the front of the Inter Ocean, acting like a drunk on his way home. He peered in the windows as he went by, and ambled the long way around several blocks to report to Tree and Mordecai Gant, who stood in a dim alley at the foot of the two-story Gu

Macklin said in a businesslike tone, “They all gone up to bed. Cooley was makin’ the rounds to check on his bully boys. Barkeep was puttin’ out the lights when I come by.”

Tree said, “We’ll give them forty-five minutes to get to sleep,” and they did.

At the end of that interval the three men went up the bank’s outside staircase. Over his shoulder Mordecai Gant carried a heavy ten-foot plank that would have staggered a smaller man. From the landing, Gant gave Tree a boost up onto the roof. Tree flattened himself by the edge and hauled up the plank. Gant boosted Macklin up, then lifted both arms; Tree and Macklin hauled him up by the arms.

The bank’s roof was six feet lower than the roof of the Inter Ocean, which stood faintly silhouetted above the far end of the bank roof. An eight-foot alley separated the two buildings.

The night, like most Rocky Mountain nights, was clear and starlit. Tree would have preferred a cloudy night but that might have required a month’s wait. The chill air had a bite in it. Tree felt an involuntary tremor. He picked up one end of the ten-foot plank and led the way, crouched to half his normal height, toward the far corner of the roof, with Gant carrying the other end of the plank and Macklin crawling on the right flank with his gun drawn.

There was, of course, a sentry on the roof of the Inter Ocean; that was taken into account. Crossing the roof of the bank, Tree kept his attention riveted to the hotel’s roofline, ready to freeze if a man’s head appeared. It did not; they crossed the bank without alarms and reached the corner which stood directly opposite the south corner of the back of the Inter Ocean. The Earp suites were up at the farther end of the hotel; the guards would not be watching this end with as much care. Tree sat down, removed his hat and both boots, and lifted his head, carefully to look down into the alley. He had time to glimpse the two sentries, fifty feet apart below the far corner of the hotel under gaslights which stood under the Earps’ balconies and threw heavy shadows across the windows above. Obie Macklin suddenly hissed and grabbed Tree’s arm. Turning his head slightly, Tree saw the red button-tip of a cigarette on the far roof corner, above the Earps’ balconies. View of the balconies themselves would be cut off to that sentry’s view by the deep overhanging window cornices. With that man above, and the two alley sentries below, nobody could get onto the balconies from overhead or from underneath; but once a man was on one of the balconies, none of the guards would be able to see him. That was the trick: to reach the balcony without discovery. Tree had considered the idea of a diversionary attack but assumed it wouldn’t work. Earp was smart enough to instruct his men to keep their posts. He had discarded the notion in favor of silence and subterfuge.