Free Death Rides the Night by Brett Halliday Page A

like any rancher and handled his gun like he knew what it was made for.
    The Powder Valley quartet was shaking with helpless inward laughter when they withdrew from the jail office and the two discomfited deputies.
    â€œIt was Pat,” Sam breathed happily as they hurried away. “Doggone his ornery hide, he musta planned it that way all thuh time. We orta knowed Pat had somethin’ up his sleeve. He figgered Tripo an’ the others would leave town soon as they thought Ezra was locked up good, an’ he’d have a better chance of gettin’ him loose afterward than I woulda had of shootin’ a way out of the Gold Eagle with all them around.”
    â€œIt looks that way,” Winters agreed soberly. “Makes us look like a bunch of danged fools, slipping up on the jail when the prisoner was already gone.”
    â€œPat could of told some of us an’ let us help him,” protested Boyd angrily.
    â€œIt’s better thisaway,” Sam chortled happily. “Wearin’ a mask, can’t nobody swear ’twas him. With Harlow an’ all the rest thinkin’ Pat was takin’ it laying down, him an’ Ezra will have a chance to cut them VX cows outta Ezra’s herd before Harlow ever proves his frame-up.”
    The others dubiously agreed that Sam was probably right, and Mr. Winters for one was much relieved when he went back to the store and put up his lethal shotgun. For a brief period tonight he had been a man of violence and he was glad to turn the job back to men who knew much more about such things than he.

7
    The younger child was restless, and Nancy Page was up with her when Ethan reached home a little before midnight. Ethan Page was a tall, raw-boned, young rancher with big-knuckled hands that showed the marks of hard work. He and Nancy had been married seven years and were one of the most completely happy young couples in Powder Valley. She was a ranch girl from near Pueblo, sturdy and uncomplaining, and very much in love with her young husband.
    The first years of their marriage had been difficult, taking over a small run-down ranch on the western end of the Valley after the death of Ethan’s shiftless father, and both Nancy and her husband had toiled hard and uncompromisingly to get the ranch restocked and the house fixed up, building for the future and the snug security of their family.
    There was nothing unusual about Ethan and Nancy Page. They were like thousands of other young couples throughout the west who married and settled down to rear a family and wrest a living from the land. It was a rugged land and it resisted those pioneering efforts, trying the hearts and the souls of the pioneer men and women who sought to conquer it.
    Only the strong were able to survive, and Nancy and Ethan had proved themselves more than a match for the land that didn’t want to be tamed. Years of privation and of constant toil had transformed the run-down ranch into one of the neatest spreads in the Valley, and after seven years it looked as though the Pages had earned the right to settle back and relax and reap the rewards of those years of privation and struggle.
    Ethan Junior was six, and little Molly Page was just a little over two years old at this time when the Valley was meeting a new challenge in the person of Eustis Harlow. The boy was a chubby lad with brown curls like his mother, and his father’s dark, serious eyes. He was sound asleep in the small bedroom opening off his parents’ room, but two-year-old Molly was flushed and seemed to have a slight fever, and she had wakened her mother an hour earlier by gasping for breath in her small crib beside her brother’s bed.
    Nancy Page hurried in and lifted the child from its crib and carried her back into her own bedroom so the lamp wouldn’t waken Junior. She closed the door between the two rooms and went to work on Molly with simple home remedies, rubbing her little chest with goose grease and