The E. Hoffmann Price Spice Adventure MEGAPACK ™

by Price, E. Hoffmann

  “Can’t haul out without telling Saul I’m not buying and not selling,” Barlow said, and decided to cure his restlessness by taking a sentimental ride to the now deserted flats, and the spot where he and Sally had sat beneath the willows.

  Barlow had just done saddling Alezan when the hostler came in, trailing after the two purposeful men who loomed up in the doorway of the stable. One was a leathery, saturnine fellow with deep set eyes, deeply lined face, and drooping moustaches; judging by boots and vest and hat, a cattleman. The other was Lem Craven, the deputy sheriff who had only a few days previous taken over because of the illness of the town marshal.

  “That’s the mare, Craven! And that’s the thief!”

  “You sure, Lathrop?”

  Lathrop snorted. “Arrest him, man! Now! Course I’m sure! Why do you suppose I swore out a warrant?”

  And Barlow was helpless. Even if he had been the sort ready to shoot it out with a lawman, he would not, could not have risked Alezan’s stopping a stray bullet. Neither could he submit to arrest, and spend weeks, perhaps months in the hoosgow before clearing himself of the unjust charge. Freedom, and without gunplay, looked like a hopeless proposition: the two were loaded for bear.

  CHAPTER II

  Ambush

  Lathrop, who looked as if he’d take his own grandmother’s scalp for a one peso bounty, must have put up a convincing yarn, whether he himself did or did not believe it. Craven, reputed to be pretty much on the level, was probably playing it as it looked.

  Barlow said, “Running a man in for stealing a horse is pretty serious business, sheriff. Reach into the saddle bags and you’ll find my discharge papers, I just done got out of uniform, after serving most of a hitch out at the fort. I’ve had this horse stabled here for over a week, open and above board. Taking me in and locking me up for Lord knows how long, whilst I am proving legally what anyone out to the fort can tell you and a lot of folks in town here will back up, is downright unjust.”

  “Mmmmm…where’d you get that mare?”

  “From a sodbuster, Simon Parker. Captain of the Red Fork Company.”

  Craven smiled crookedly. “And it’s mighty handy, those emigrants being way to hell and gone on the road from here. Got a bill of sale?”

  “Parker loaned me the horse to overtake the wagons. Sheriff, who’s named in the warrant? I’m Pete Barlow and you can prove it a dozen times over.”

  “It’s thissaway,” the law man answered. “The writ is for one Jawn Doe. It’s for the repossessing of such and such a hoss from the hands of party or parties described irregardless of name.”

  Lathrop, Barlow now knew, had been foxy. Whoever the man was, he was gunning for Alezan, who could not speak for herself, claiming to have traced or trailed her; in so doing, he had neatly forestalled Barlow’s proving that he, Barlow, could not have been traced to Kearneyville, since he had been in and about town all the while. Yet Barlow persisted by repeating, “I can prove who I am, and where I’ve been for weeks, months, a couple years.”

  He looked and sounded doleful, futilely indignant. And Lathrop on that account overstepped himself a shade more than he realized.

  “Don’t make a damn bit of difference who you are, you got stolen property in your possession. And I got witnesses to prove that there animal is mine.”

  “That’s the point of the process,” Craven said. “It is receiving stolen property. Serious as doing the outright thieving yourself. Too dang much of it going on, fellows saying they didn’t know a hoss or a cow critter was stolen. Nobody’d buy or sell a valuable animal like this’n, without there being a bill of sale. You come along and if you can prove you didn’t knowingly and willfully and maliciously and intentionally receive a stolen critter, you won’t be fined or strung up or sent to the pen or nothing.”

  This was entirely on the level. Craven was merely trying to do his duty and he was getting impatient. Barlow, having worked up to within arm’s reach of a saving play, felt like a cat walking on eggs. If he fumbled in trying to bait Lathrop, the man might catch on, and the trick would then kick back.

  “Look here, sheriff,” Barlow said, with a show of despair that was all too easy to feign, “it’s up to him to prove this is his animal—it’s not up to me. I’m no thief.”

  “That’s for the jedge, I’m not a-trying this case.”

  And then, from the doorway, another county was heard from. Epstein, chain and fob temptingly displayed, stepped into view and said, “Hey, wait, I am giving you a special price. Or I sell it somewhere else!”

  The lift and quirk of Epstein’s left eyebrow told Barlow that the pushcart man had been dallying outside long enough to have learned what was going on.

  “They claim I stole this mare, Saul! Where I’m going, I won’t need watches and chains, time won’t mean a thing unless I round up a good lawyer. You take my watch and find me one, in case I’m locked up.”

  Epstein regarded Lathrop with an ingratiating smile. He turned on him with the chain and fob. “See how nice it looks across the vest front. Prosperous with dignity—”

  “For hell’s sweet sake, get out, I’m busy.”

  “Officer, the man is busy.” Epstein’s face changed; he backed off. He eyed Lathrop, and then Barlow, and as though with growing recognition of something significant or important. “Sheriff, I been travelling. Every place I go, I pick up wanted posters. You wait, I get them. If you got a wanted man here, we split the reward—”

  He darted for the door, agile as a lizard, all the while chattering about wanted men he had met in his travels. And Barlow noted Lathrop’s change of expression, a flicker of uneasiness. This was Barlow’s moment, and he challenged, boldly, “Lathrop, if that’s your horse, give the sheriff a close description.”

  “He’s done given it, for the writ,” the lawman cut in.

  But Barlow, interrupted, “Describe her teeth. What’s odd about them, or is there anything odd?”

  “Shucks, they’re just like any five-year-old’s teeth,” Lathrop declared.

  Outside, Epstein was muttering in a voice that would carry across a parade ground, “No, this ain’t him—hmmm—but with the moustache shaved—hey, sheriff, how would Mr. Lathrop look with a shave?”

  “She’s a seven year old!” Barlow countered. “Claims he owns the animal, don’t know her age. Never seen her teeth. Me, I’ve seen ’em, every one of, know ’em by heart. Sheriff, you take a look and see who’s right.”

  Craven turned to open Alezan’s mouth for a look at the disputed teeth. Epstein came in, waving a fistful of posters and dodgers. “That’s the man! That’s the man!”

  Lathrop turned; Barlow whipped the Peacemaker from his hip and clouted him. Buffaloed, the man dropped to his knees and clawed the stable floor. And Barlow, pocketing his gun, said to the lawman, “She’s got tusks—look and see! Ain’t one mare in a thousand got tusks in back of her mouth like a stallion or gelding, but this one has, and that coyote couldn’t think of a thing to say excepting about how old she is from her teeth.”

  “By gravy, she sure has tusks!” Craven muttered, and then, turning, “Hey, what’s this?”

  “Good Lord must’ve struck him with lightning, for a liar,” Barlow said, shaking his head as though perplexed by the sight of Lathrop lying face down and mumbling. “Fact is, she’s a four year old. This dirty son didn’t guess any too bad, he must’ve looked her over pretty close, but he skimped the job. If you’d owned her, you’d for sure have known she had tusks.”

  Epstein came in with a dodger. He masked the lower part of the face, looked at Jed Lathrop’s back, looked at the sheriff, and said, as-though crestfallen, “No, this ain’t right around the eyes, this ain’t the same jail bird, sheriff.” He sighed. “And it gives no reward for us to split.”

  “Mebbe not! But if this son ain’t out of town by noon tomorrow,
I’m throwing him in the pokey jest to wait till I can find out where he is wanted, if any. Huh! Didn’t know she has tusks!”

  Jed Lathrop was now scrambling to his knees. Craven repeated his advice about getting out of town. And as the man lurched from the stable, Craven added, “And that goes for your witnesses, too!”

  When the law man left, Barlow let out a long sigh. “Saul, if you hadn’t had that stinker so worried, I couldn’t’ve clipped him, I’d’ve had to shoot it out, and then there’d been the devil to pay. What the blazes are you, toting reward notices? Pinkerton?”

  “Man hunting ain’t my business. But a fellow pushing a cart gets into lonesome places, and he meets all kinds of people—and I lose enough money, without being held up.”

  Barlow chuckled, “I bet you do!”

  Epstein grinned and raised his hat. “But so far,” he said, stroking his gleaming bald head, “I ain’t been scalped. You leaving now? All saddled up?”

  “Just restless, aiming to ride a bit, so I’ll sleep better.”

  “When I was your age, I wouldn’t sleep a wink either, with a race starting in the morning to catch up with such a nice young lady. If you won’t sell me your watch, maybe you will buy a wedding ring—I got a brand new one—wait, I show you!”

  Long before dawn, Barlow was in the saddle; and when the sun reddened the mesquite dotted plain and outlined the iron-purple crags on the horizon, he picked up the ruts left by emigrant wagons. A couple of hours later, he came to the first camp site, which had taken the slow moving oxen a full day to reach. And Alezan stretched her legs, eating up the miles.

  Well past midafternoon, a gentle climb led to a low summit, one side of which was topped by a rocky wall. He had no more than entered the pass when he glimpsed the next water hole.

  The trail swung left, down a narrow valley which for a stretch had grass and a few stunted poplars. Bit by bit, the higher ridges blocked out the wind which had been peppering him with sand. He rode into sweltering calm. Ocatillas, thumb-thick stalks armed with spines half an inch long, found root in the tumbled rocks of a slope which supported no other growth. Each had a crest of red blossoms.

  Barlow looked up and about him from force of habit. The scent of water made Alezan perk up her ears. Out of the oven, and into the coolness—

  Then he noted the stirring of one ocatilla somewhat ahead and well up the wall. The lowering sun’s glare put him at a disadvantage: but that motion, where every thing else was dead still, warned Barlow, and a deceptive patch of shadow seemed to shift a bit.

  There was little enough warning, yet Alezan, sensitive to the moods of which her rider himself was not fully conscious, snorted and made a skittish move. Smoke blossomed from the rocks. Instead of drilling Barlow, the bullet ploughed through the saddle skirt. Coming from a considerable height above him, the angle was such that the slug no more than raked a furrow in the horse’s hide. She reared, and Barlow, half out of the saddle already, and reaching for his carbine, was piled to the rocks.

  Alezan clattered away. Barlow, paralyzed by the fall, rolled helplessly until an outcropping checked him. He was still exposed, with hardly enough cover to protect a jackrabbit. A man came up from cover, rifle in hand.

  Barlow, recovering a little from the crash, got his Colt. He steadied it. The man stepped down out of the worst glare. Barlow fired. The lurker recoiled, stumbled, and lurched downgrade several strides. He won the shelter of a rock and shot again, just as Barlow cut loose.

  The two blasts were simultaneous. Lead screamed and whined. Barlow, however, did not hear the ricochet of his own, or of his enemy’s shot. The glancing slug had dug a long gash which girdled his head. The impact, though cushioned somewhat by the Stetson, nonetheless knocked him out as from a hammer blow, so that he slumped, rolled over his limp gun hand, and across the weapon which had dropped from it.

  * * * *

  The bitter chill of dawn aroused him to thirst and pain. The early light, treacherous lavender gray, found him wondering how he had come to be in a draw, where small pools reached out from beneath the overhang of a dry creek bed. Bit by bit, he recollected the ambush, and realized that as though sleep walking, he had crawled back to the trail from which he had been shot and apparently left for dead. And his enemy had not made such a gross mistake after all.

  Before starting on his half-conscious stumbling, Barlow had holstered his pistol. He still had his hat. It was well jammed down over the inflamed furrow left by the bullet. He knelt to drink and to bathe his eyes. He fell face down in the shallow water. The drenching shocked him to alertness for a moment.

  After tying a piece of shirt tail over the eye injured by chunks of flying rock, he set out to overtake the wagon train, though the easier task of returning to Kearneyville would have been far too much for his strength. The valley soon became a blast furnace. A glimmering of sense told him to turn back toward the water he had left behind. Still out of his head, and getting more so, he worked his way to the emigrant camp site.

  He found among the scattered rubbish a sack from which he shook more than a handful of cornmeal. This he put into one of the tin cans lying about. Presently, he had a mess of mush cooking.

  Elsewhere, he found a bottle and cork. A gob of mush, a quart of water, and the rest depended on his boots. One trouble with a fancy horse: someone was always ready to steal it.

  Barlow moved as in a nightmare. Though making back for Kearneyville, to get a fresh start, he seemed also to be hunting Sally. Every so often, he found her, and talked to her. Most of the time she ignored him, as though she did not hear his voice, or feel the hand which reached for her. And what made it worse, Sally seemed always to be a phantom which would not fill his arms.

  Coyotes yip-yipped, and for a change, they howled eerily. Barlow baked, and then he froze. Sleeping and waking became one continuous confusion. The cornmeal and the water were gone. Buzzards, after long circling, now settled to perch on mesquite and scrubby acacia. Barlow had come within sight of a tinaja, one of the water holes at which the emigrants had camped, when he dropped. It was dusk when someone shook him.

  “Drink only a drop now. Later, it gives soup.”

  And presently, Saul Epstein handed Barlow some jerked beef broth. “I left the morning you did,” the pushcart man explained, “only later. And when I saw the buzzards coming down, I went past the tinaja and here you are. Now I will patch you up where you been shot.”

  “Buy my watch, so I can get myself some sort of critter back in Kearneyville,” Barlow proposed.

  But Epstein wagged his head and countered, “In the morning, that is something to talk about. Not now!”

  CHAPTER III

  One-Man Covered Wagon

  When, after days of hoofing, Barlow finally sighted the dust of the emigrant train, he and Epstein followed in its wake until dusk. Then, leaving his companion well beyond the sight of the herd guards, he left him and made for the fires which outlined the wagon tops.

  Once or twice as Barlow picked his way about the fringe of the camp, a man or woman spoke a civil word of greeting, as to a fellow emigrant not individually recognized in the darkness. For a moment, it was all unreal, doing what he had done so many times before, wandering about in delirium to find Sally. Of a sudden, his being in camp became the foremost wonder of his life, so that he could not believe that it had happened. He choked and his eyes swam, and he leaned against a wagon wheel as though mortally tired, or very drunk.

  Then his eyes focused and his ears heard: and there she was, close at hand. “Sally,” he said, quietly. “I had trouble on the way, but I made it.”

  There was enough reflected firelight to show how little her face changed; it was as though she had known to the minute when he would arrive, and had never doubted that he would rejoin her. “Oh, Pete, I’ve missed you!” She did not raise her voice, or cry out in gladness, lest t
he others hear and intrude. “What happened?”

  Then they were in each other’s arms, and for awhile, neither spoke. Finally, he repeated, “Trouble on the way. Had to walk most of it.”

  She took his hand, and they went toward the fire where the captain sat. “Mr. Parker, look what I found!”

  Horace Parker got to his feet. “Well, Pete! Where’ve you been?”

  Barlow was busy watching Kirby Swift’s face. He did not expect the segundo to join the others who welcomed him, though largely out of curiosity and by way of following the captain’s example. To nearly every one of the emigrants, Barlow was a stranger whose brief appearance in Kearneyville had been a triviality in a long succession of important events. Meanwhile, Sally had become one of the group: and to the young fellows who had had an eye on her, the newcomer was an intruder.

  Barlow said, directly to Parker but to the others as well, “I took good care of your Alezan, boarded her well, and came from the post each evening to see she was getting her oats. The way she ate up the miles the first days was a sight!” He raised his hat. “Right up till a .45 scratched her, and she reared up just as I was fixing to pile out of the saddle for some skirmishing. This here crease in my head is the second shot the bushwhacker fired, and it saved my life. Knocked me out, and the skunk figured no need coming to finish me off. When I come to, I had a piece of walking to do, and I’ve done it.”

  “What’d you eat?” one demanded, having apparently estimated the days it would take a man afoot to overtake lumbering oxen.

  “Shucks, that was simple! Snared quail at the tinajas, and rattlesnake is mighty tasty when you’re hungry.”

  The women insisted on getting him leftovers from supper, but Barlow shook his head. “Fellow shouldn’t over-eat, when he isn’t used to rich living. Captain, you set me to whatever chores you’ve a mind to in the morning.” He dug into his pockets. “Here’s my watch, and here’s what money I’ve got left. I’ll make up the balance I owe you for losing Alezan, one way or another, soon as I see my chance.”