"NOW
there's a purty sight," murmured Deputy Sheriff Alec Tucker, and raised the
sun-yellowed paper blind an extra inch or two in the front window of the
Cedar City law office.
Across the room, his boss, Ross Kemp, deposited a steel-nibbed pen in the
inkstand on his battered mahogany desktop and stretched his cramped arms.
He was a big man in his early thirties with wide shoulders and muscular biceps
– a man built for action – and paperwork was not among his loves. He uncoiled
his frame smoothly from the swivel chair and joined Tucker at the window,
moving on his feet with a lightness uncommon for a man of his bulk.
"The surrey, huh?" he said, tongue in cheek. "Yeah, it sure is a smart rig."
Every word was true enough. An artist's hand had decorated the shiny black
paintwork with ornate scrollwork and gold leaf. Its four, smooth-running
wheels were a yellow blur, tinged orange by fine red pinstriping on the spokes.
Two matching thoroughbreds, sleek and black, were in the harness. Highly
polished brass trimmings glinted in the sunlight.
"Aw, you're joshin' me, Ross," Tucker said. "You know I was referrin' to
the handsome couple ridin' it . . . specially that Mrs Blackwood. Wow! She's
one hundred percent, blood-heating woman!"
There was no denying that, either. But Kemp didn't really care to chin about
Mrs Jessica Blackwood with his sidekick. A frown creased his bronzed brow.
Tucker was right about the Blackwoods being handsome, but it was as individuals
not as a couple.
Rancher Boyd Blackwood was in his fifties, under-average in height, but a
man of stature with a broad chest and a square-shaped head of dark hair shaded
a distinguished grey at the temples. He was also possibly the richest man
in the territory, owner of the fine Double-B spread and a shrewd cattleman
and businessman.
His wife, shielded by a parasol, was indeed something else. The phrase femme
fatale came to Kemp's mind. He scarcely knew what that meant, but he'd heard
it someplace and despite its foreignness it seemed to fit all the same. Jessica
Blackwood was a darkly beautiful woman in her mid twenties, tall, slim and
mature – and half her husband's age.
"This little old cattle town ain't never seen the likes of such class," Tucker
pressed on, licking his lips with enthusiasm for the subject.
"That's for a fact," Kemp grunted. "Maybe old Boyd should of thought twice
before he brung her here. Grown men are apt to act like half-baked kids when
she's around, you may have noticed."
Tucker dragged his ogling eyes back into the room. Kemp wasn't a sour man,
and the deputy thought he knew why the sheriff begrudged his admiration of
the rancher's wife.
"Never did understand why she and Miss Ellen never hit it off," he stated
openly. "Women can take the damnedest attitudes, I guess."
Kemp's back stiffened and his lips thinned into a staight line.
"Boyd Blackwood's daughter can't be blamed for wanting to steer clear of
her stepmother. She can be plumb blatant and provoking where menfolk are
concerned. I seen it and Miss Ellen has, too. It'll lead to a mess of problems
and Miss Ellen wants no part of it."
Tucker shrugged. He knew his boss well enough to know when to back off. It
was the popular contention that Ross Kemp was sweet on Ellen Blackwood, the
rancher's offspring by his long-departed first wife, and had been for these
last several of her teen years.
So Tucker lapsed into silence on the matter of the second Mrs Blackwood.
"You know," he continued presently, and a mite tentatively, "you know, that
young Ellen is gettin' to be a fine prospect for some feller, what with the
success she's made of her little shop an' all. A mighty – uh – weddable lady,
I reckon . . ."
"God! I swear you're worse than a matchmaking old woman, Alec Tucker! You
seem to be forgetting Miss Blackwood is a rich man's daughter and a frontier-town
badge-packer ain't exactly wise material for a husband."
"Trouble with you, Ross, is you work too hard," Tucker opined owlishly. "That,
and you've gotten a too well-honed sense of duty."
"Drop it, will you!" Kemp retorted.
He gestured toward the far side of the office where a fold-down cot with
a neat pile of folded blankets stood against the wall beneath a survey map
of the county. This was where he customarily slept.
"I'm already wedded," he said, blue eyes flashing. "To the job. I figure
a law officer's only legitimate concerns are to keep his bailiwick peaceable
and law-abiding. That's why folks elected me and what I've been sworn in
for."
"Yeah, I suppose that's right," Tucker said placatingly. "But I dunno there's
many would uphold the same views. Cedar City appreciates it." He pondered
a moment, then finished more boldly, "Leastways, most of its folks does,
though I'm damned if Ellen Blackwood would appreciate bein' passed over on
account of public duty."
Kemp scoffed. "If she doesn't realise she deserves better, then it's only her youth deceiving her and sometime she'll learn it."
The sheriff returned his gaze to the glare of Main Street and the gleaming
surrey, now pulled up outside the livery barn and receiving the diligent
attention of not one but two hostlers.
Boyd Blackwood was already strutting away in the direction of the railyard
and the town's commercial sector. This, Kemp surmised, he would quickly traverse
till he came to the quieter, part-residential street where he was a regular
caller at the home and office of his lawyer, Isaac Siebert. A tradesman carrying
a bag of tools touched the brim of his hat to Blackwood as he passed. The
act of recognition visibly pleased the rancher. He threw back his square
shoulders, the deference balm to his ego.
Jessica Blackwood, with a shopping basket looped over her arm, had mounted
the plank sidewalk and was sashaying beneath the awnings, ostensibly inspecting
the wares on offer in the town's stores.
She wore a thigh-moulding skirt of fine calico, printed in many colours with
a swirling floral pattern, and a black satin blouse cut low across the shoulders
in a lace-trimmed style Kemp thought should have been more appropriate to
a Mexican peasant. But she affected an air of challenging superiority which
allowed her to get away with it. And no one could deny the blouse drew attention
to the full swell of her breasts and gave tantalising hints of the concealed
ripeness of a perfect body.
As always, she had an audience. Dozing loafers jerked out of their siestas;
a boy at Baker's Mercantile found a sudden devotion to the sweeping of a
doorway; a hotel clerk positioned and repositioned a vacancy sign in a window.
Even the horses at the hitching rails, switching their tails at the flies,
seemed to sense the vibrations in the air. They shifted their weight from
one side to the other and slewed heads around as though to catch a glimpse
of the passing phenomenon.
Kemp scowled on it all from his window. "Sheep-eyed idiots," he muttered
under his breath. But he noted, too, the pair of respectable matrons who
sucked in their cheeks and clucked their disapproval. He couldn't hear them,
but could imagine the words they exchanged: "No good can come out of her,
the hussy . . ."
He didn't think for one moment Jessica was unaware of the vacuous, mooning
looks she attracted. Damnit, she was enjoying it, relishing the power she
had over the fools. She was torturing their glands and their minds with her
untouchability, wrapped in the secure but invisible cocoon of her husband's
power and influence.
The other thing Kemp noticed about Jessica's passage was that she took good
care not to linger in the vicinity of the modest millinery and haberdashery
shop run by her stepdaughter. Ironic, he thought, since Ellen's business
was one place that could normally be counted on to draw the respectable wives
of visiting ranchers.
A pair of roughnecks lurched out through the batwings of the Lucky Horseshoe
saloon. Comings and goings in Cedar City were something Kemp made it his
business to keep track of. This pair were itinerants, part of a crew of trail
herders who'd ridden in yesterday, red, sweating and dusty from driving a
four-hundred-head bunch of three-year-old beeves to the cattle pens at the
railyard.
The cowpunchers had collected their pay and, as was the wont of their kind,
had done the rounds of the town's pleasure spots ever since, whooping it
up in all the ways denied them on a hard, late-summer drive.
To some townsfolk these hombres were riff-raff. They frowned on their animal
lusts even as they catered to their wants and helped thin the fat green rolls
tucked in the pockets of their weather-faded Levis.
But Kemp recognised that they were part of the town's lifeblood.
He never forgot the place's history. Cedar Crossing had been a small, isolated,
dead place – just a dozen log huts – before a land speculator and an entrepreneurial
liquor dealer had bought up the district and sold it off in small parcels
to hopeful settlers enticed by the promoters' optimism, expressed in the
settlement's renaming as Cedar City.
The new owners moved in and a farming community began to develop. Then local
businessmen induced a railroad company to extend its line to the town, to
realise an ambition to cash in on the lucrative cattle trade. The town boomed
after the fashion of others of its like.
In the wake of the free-spending, footloose cowboys came their predators:
the hucksters, the gamblers, the ladies of the night (and all other hours),
road agents, horse thieves, cattle rustlers . . .
And dismayed respectable citizens raised an outcry that needed the calming
of a strong and diligent lawman. The job had fallen to Ross Kemp, who'd built
a reputation for being tough and fair.
Because of the kind of man he was, keeping rowdy cowpokes in line was among
the least onerous of his chores. Kemp didn't miss much that went on in Cedar
City, though this pair of out-of-town drunks, weaving now along the sidewalk,
might have seemed beneath the notice of a busy peace officer.
Kemp's instant wariness, he allowed, had more to do with the fact that in
their path stood the bounteously-endowed and daringly-attired Jessica Blackwood.
A man with any sort of intuition didn't need a fortune teller to prophesy
the set-up augured trouble.
The first hint was an incredulous slackness in the trail drovers' jaws, an
added glazing of their eyes. Kemp buckled on his gunbelt and got moving.
"Gawd! She ain't real, pard – she can't be," the biggest of the two drunks
slurred. He tipped back the stetson on his simian, black-bristled brow and
blinked.
His companion, leaner and with a wolfish cast to his eyes, growled crudely.
"Hey, sister, come a li'le closer, will yuh? My amigo figgers yuh ain't nothin
but a mirage!" He guffawed and caught at her wrist with a horny hand. "Jest
lemme put a kiss on them luscious lips an' I kin tell Max yuh's all solid
flesh!"
Jessica wrenched her arm free and retreated backwards into the space between
a rack of women's dresses and the plank wall-cladding of Baker's Mercantile.
"Get your filthy paw off me!" she jerked out in indignant disbelief at the man's effrontery. "My husband will kill you!"
But her accoster was undeterred. He squeezed after her, trapping her against
the store wall and imposing his outspread, groping hands over her prominent
breasts, rubbing the slippery black satin over swelling nipples.
She squirmed and sobbed. His big partner Max giggled – a high-pitched, incongruous
sound like a schoolgirl would make, till it was cut off by a hiccuping belch.
"Save a handful fer me, Lew!"
"You leave me alone, you – you beast!" Jessica stormed. The deeper breath
this forced her to draw was tainted with the rank odour of spirits and sour
gastric juices emanating from her tormentors.
That was when Ross Kemp made the scene.
"Lay off, you lousy bums!" he snapped. "The place for you's the calaboose!"
He grabbed Max by the shirt collar and big as he was flung him out of his way.
Max tottered unsteadily on his high-heeled riding boots, then reeled against
the dress rack. He sat down heavily on the walk, pulling the display on top
of him in a suffocating rainbow cascade of cottons and silks.
Lew whirled round in a crouch, hand clawing for the holstered Colt at his right hip. "Why, you god-damned interferin' bast–!"
His cussing ended in a yelp; Kemp's booted toe had sent the shooting iron
spinning from his grip out into the street and left his fingers curling uselessly
with knuckle-whitening pain.
Max scrabbled free of his fabric bonds. He wasn't so drunk any more. Anger
and his spine-jarring fall had evacuated some of the alcohol fumes from his
brain.
A gathering audience saw Max go for his gun and gasped a warning to Kemp.
"Behind yuh, Ross!" one man found the presence to cry hastily.
Kemp saw he was too late to stop the other man's draw. He plunged sideways
like a massive oak that had been suddenly felled. And his big right fist
closed at the same time on the butt of his own Colt.
He hit the boards with a crash that spectators would afterwards swear rocked
the awning supports. A deafening shot from Max's gun fanned over his head
and whistled out across the emptiness of the main drag.
He rolled like a mountain cat. His Colt left the smooth leather. A finger
tripped the hammer onto a cartridge – and a bullet sped to its mark. At such
close range, he could scarcely miss the target. But he hit bullseye, too,
the lead smacking deformingly into the iron of Max's weapon.
Disarmed, Max staggered back, agape at the limpness of his broken wrist. He was out of the fight.
But Lew wasn't. He was maddened by drink and frustrated lust. His wolfish
face contorted in a snarl of fury, he whipped out a Bowie knife. It was a
full, vicious fifteen inches long, the glistening blade sharpened on both
sides from the curve to the pointed tip, and it had a handguard of brass
to assist its handler to drive home a murderous thrust.
Any lesser man would have been intimidated, but Kemp leaped to his feet, wading in fast and furious.
It all happened in split seconds before the echoes of the gunshots died or
the acrid whisps of burnt gunpowder cleared. Kemp seized the barrel of his
smoking Colt in his left hand and swung it like a club.
The sharp Bowie knife chipped a deep notch in the gun's walnut butt and burred
its edge on the steel frame, but the deadly blade was smashed from Lew's
hand. Next instant, Kemp's big right fist slammed into Lew's jaw.
Thunk! The would-be molester's teeth crunched together with an audible snap
and his eyes rolled. He fell in a rag-doll heap at Kemp's feet.
"That's larnin' 'em, Ross!" Alec Tucker said, rushing up to lend a hand no longer needed. "That's larnin' 'em good!"
Jessica looked straight at Kemp across the prone man, a gamut of emotions
running through the contours of her even features. Her full red lips quivered
with the last traces of fear, her cheeks gained new colour that replaced
the whiteness of terror and disgust. Then she became quite still, drawing
herself up with a renewed air of her majesty, and her amber eyes sparkled
with satisfaction and unquenchable mischief.
She was the centre of Sheriff Ross Kemp's attention. It was an achievement
she'd often desired but never accomplished. Why, the man paid more attention
to that foal-like daughter of her husband! Ellen let him pay her his chaste
affection like some big brother she'd never had; was too silly and inexperienced
to whet the virile man's appetite for more.
"I'm truly sorry about this, ma'am," Kemp said, respectfully dipping his
head. "Do you want to lay a complaint against these galoots?"
"Oh, Mr Kemp, thank you so much!" she gushed breathlessly. "You were simply
magnificent – " She broke off, never getting to answer his question.
A murmur had risen from the onlookers and they broke their circle. Boyd Blackwood,
his face congested with fury, shouldered his way through their rubbernecking
ranks.
[Read on in UNDER A MINUTE!]
