Last Train to Bannock [Clayburn 02] Read Free Page B

business when he'd acquired a new partner recently who'd injected fresh money into his firm. The reason Farnell hadn't been able to weather his business losses on his own was that he'd sunk all the profits of his previous successful years into a big spread up north. That was where Farnell had been coming back from on the stage; his wife and children lived on the spread.
        The stage driver couldn't think of anyone with a reason to hire killers to murder Farnell.
        "How about this new partner of his?"
        The driver shook his head. "Remember when he was try in' to tell us who hired them? He said the bastard hired 'em. Never heard anybody call a woman a bastard. Some get called a lot of other things. But not that."
        "Farnell's partner is a woman?"
        "Uh-huh. Don't know much about her except she's mighty good-looking. Makes you sweat just to look at her. That kind. She ain't from anywhere around here. Name's Cora Sorel."
        The name brought back a memory. Clayburn leaned back on the hard, jouncing seat, gazing thoughtfully past the pulling horses, across the flat distances to the southern horizon.
        He didn't know much about Coral Sorel either. But he knew more than the stage driver.
        It was dark when they got into Parrish, a big boomtown sprawled across the railroad tracks that cut through the Jemson Valley. Clayburn knew the place only from what he'd heard about it. Parrish had sprung up when the railroad first began pushing through the Valley, and for a couple years it had been the worst hell-spot in the Territory. But its lawless stage was past, ended by a town-taming marshal named Kavanaugh.
        Parrish was still a wild enough place, with a flourishing red-light district. But now Marshal Kavanaugh, his tough-reputation deputies and a sheriff strong enough to handle the surrounding county kept the wildness under rigid control, confining the red-light goings on to an allotted section of town.
        Within minutes of reaching Parrish, Clayburn had met the marshal and the sheriff. Both lived up to their reputations for efficiency. The wounded station manager was immediately turned over to a doctor, the bodies of the shotgun rider and Harry Farnell to the undertaker. The two passengers-one with a sizeable lump on his head-were questioned and allowed to register into the hotel. Twenty minutes after the stage came in, the sheriff rode out with a posse of six picked men to hunt down the red-haired killer.
        Clayburn didn't think much of their chances. They wouldn't be able to start tracking the redhead till dawn. He wouldn't even have to concentrate on losing his trail so he couldn't be followed. With that much head start, and two horses for speed, he could get beyond the sheriffs jurisdiction before the posse got anywhere near him. If he wanted to do it that way. He'd been heading northwest the last Clayburn had seen of him. That way lay Indian territory and land that still had no law. All he had to do was keep going.
        While Marshal Kavanaugh went off to talk to Farnell's partner, one of his deputies took Clayburn and the stage driver to the jailhouse office. They looked at the pictures on a stack of wanted posters that had come in from all over the southwest during the past couple of years.
        They finished going through the stack, without spotting any picture or description that fitted the red-haired killer, by the time Marshal Kavanaugh returned. He was a big, raw-boned man with a florid face dominated by the kind of eyes to be expected in a man who'd tamed four hell-towns in succession over the past ten years.
        "Any luck?" he asked in a friendly, businesslike voice that didn't go with his eyes.
        His deputy shook his head. "Cora Sorel have any notion who the redhead is?"
        "Nope. Nor who hired him. She says."
        "Somebody," Clayburn said quietly, "must have some ideas about it."
        Marshal Kavanaugh eyed him