Parker read, hastily skimming until he came to, “…shall be flogged; or expelled from the party, with or without refund of what monies he has paid in, according to the merits of the case, which will be decided by vote… Gentlemen, understand that that is what may be done. It does not have to be done. There is provision for a fine assessed by the group.”
“Fines, my eye!” one shouted. And another, “Whale him within an inch of his life!”
Parker rapped on the barrel head for order. Order was restored long enough for there to be a sentence, by acclaim and not by vote, of one hundred lashes. The hostile faces made it plain that the penalty would be as final as hanging, except not as quick. Parker got up to protest. He was shouted down, until Swift restored order. In another moment, Barlow would be tied up to a wagon wheel.
When a soldier was flogged, the post surgeon stood by to supervise the punishment, and there was also an officer;—remote, aloof, neither for nor against the culprit. Here there was a mob.
Barlow demanded, “Give me a word while I can talk,” and when this was granted, he went on, “Let Mr. Frazer do the flogging. He has the grievance. None of you have.”
A mutter of approval greeted this logical quirk of justice. Swift, however, could endure nothing which impaired his vengeance. He loomed up more as the man actually in command, and before Parker had a chance for a word, Swift took charge.
“This is not a matter of revenge at all. It is a matter of law and order. Is that not right, Mr. Parker?”
Calling deferentially on the captain established more than ever that Swift, the polite man, was also the important man. But the moment Parker agreed with words which in form could not be disputed, Barlow snatched at his next risky chance.
“Swift, you’re not captain, but you are the law around here. So you take the whip. Then it won’t be personal at all. It won’t be a man getting even because he likes Mr. Frazer.”
“Lay it on good!” Swift’s admirers chorused. “You got the heft, Kirby, you can peel him!”
Barlow, unrestrained, held his hands out before him, and took a step toward Swift, and a second. Looking the man full in the eye, he said, “The harder you hit, the bigger name you’ll make. Your bunkies expect a lot of you.”
Barlow’s voice was soft. He cocked his head a little, and his eyes became pointed; a small, twisted smile, almost as of triumph, prodded the segundo with its mockery. It was almost as if Barlow had actually said “The harder you hit, the more surely you are through with Sally. You’ll be showing yourself up for a skunk!”
And Swift’s face changed. Those watching him shifted and choked back exclamations. They had understood, as clearly as if Sally’s name had actually been spoken.
Parker took heart. He cleared his throat. “This has gone too far. This—”
“Let him be,” Barlow broke in quietly. “He has to finish me this chance. He is afraid to meet me man to man, at Red Fork. He knows he’s going to meet me. On horse or on foot. With guns or knives. Here’s his chance of being sure to win.”
“Fight him now, Kirby!” someone shouted.
“Silence! Quit this!” Parker protested.
“Oh, shut up! Shut up, Cap’n!”
And then a stranger intervened, Epstein, parking his cart at the fringe of the crowd, spoke up. “Vait, this ain’t constitutional. It ain’t right, making a man defend himself. He didn’t have counsel to advise him. You didn’t do it American style.”
“It’s all in the bag!” Swift retorted, eager for a change of subject. “Plain as the nose on your face, and he didn’t need a lawyer, we heard him out.”
The quip about noses got a splendid guffaw, and restored Swift’s power. Epstein rubbed his nose, and grinned quizzically, playing up to the laugh. Then he declared, “The sentence is wrong.” He faced them for a moment, standing as though about to review a regiment; he stood so that the width of his shoulders could counter-balance his paunch. The firelight exaggerated the deep lines of his face, the sag of his jowls. He was no longer funny; he was no longer a man offering bargains; and the nose, broad and lordly, had ceased to be amusing.
Epstein took off his hat. For a moment, he held them with pose and gesture. Then he grinned, inviting them all into his confidence and his generosity.
“You wait, I show you something!” He got a solid, black covered book, well worn and well thumbed, from his push cart. He opened it and read a few lines which not a man of them could understand. “That means in English,” he interpreted, “that the Good Lord don’t allow more than forty stripes on a man at one whipping.”
Swift flared up, “Oh, to hell with that! What’s a Yiddish bible count around here—we’re Christians!”
Epstein smiled benevolently. During a scene stealing pause, his deep set eyes twinkled, catching and holding the eye of this one and that. “What I read is written in your Bible, my friend. In your own. In the fifth book, chapter twenty-five, second and third line. Mine is just like yours. What I got is the first edition, that’s all.”
Several chuckled appreciatively. Parker said, “Epstein’s right. And there’s hardly a man of you here who isn’t familiar with the Scriptures. Forty lashes—”
And then Swift saw his chance to regain the lost hold. The darkness of his wrath faded, and he shouted triumphantly, “This Daniel coming to judgment is exactly what we need! I am not doing the flogging, and I am not meeting this loud mouth for a knife or gun fight. It’d look like spite-work, account he and I had words, back in Kearneyville. Get a whip, and let Epstein do the job!”
“Let Epstein fix it!” several cried, thoroughly enjoying the big fellow’s neat twist. “Do it good, Saul, or we get our money back. We’ll take it out of your hide if you don’t do it good!”
“Hey, vait a minute!” Epstein protested. “You ain’t heard everything
“Go shove your book, we’ve heard enough!”
Half a dozen sodbusters swooped in on Barlow, to hustle him to a wagon wheel. Others crowded forward with cords and bull whips. They swept Epstein from his cart and took him with them in their rush. By the time Barlow was jammed up against the wheel and secured, his shirt had been torn from him.
“Eye, wye, wye!” Epstein muttered, and mopped his forehead, when the pressure eased off. “This ain’t right, I tell you.”
The butt of a bull whip was thrust into his hand. He shoved it aside. “That ain’t for whipping a min, it iss for an ox. I won’t do it. A cat with nine tails, yes, but not this here.”
Swift pulled the Peacemaker he had taken from Barlow at the time of arrest. “Listen, pushcart man! You’re getting to work and doing as you’re told, understand? You talked him out of sixty lashes, so you are damn well going to give him the forty he still has coming.”
Epstein’s eyes bulged perceptibly. He shrank from the pistol as though it had been a rattlesnake ready to strike; and he cringed as he took the whip and edged away, and toward Barlow.
“Pete, I can’t help it. I won’t make it too easy, I won’t make it too hard. It is better I do it instead of somebody else. Anyway, I got to. He pulled a gun. He’s still pointing it at me, he won’t put it in his pocket.”
“Go ahead, Saul!” Barlow said. “Get it over!” He added, in a whisper, which none but the executioner could hear, “I can take forty good ones, and the harder you hit now, the better I’ll do when I cut his guts out and wrap ’em around his neck!”
Epstein backed away. He gestured for space, and he got it. He flexed the long whip, fingered the lash, hefted the grip. He seemed less apprehensive about Swift’s revolver. After all, it was no longer dead center on him.
“Someone count, so I don’t give him too many.”
He unleashed the whip. The bitter cold hiss and explosive smack of the lash made Barlow wonder why he had been able to flinch, when he should have been slashed to
the verge of paralysis. Hot iron seemed to have been streaked across his back; he could feel that, but no weight or shock at all. He heard the involuntary gasp of the spectators.
“One!” Epstein called.
Again, the hiss and blast. The man was a fancy performer. All bite, sting, welt, but no tearing and shredding of the flesh; nor that feeling of having one’s ribs collapsed and one’s breath knocked out as though forever, the way the army’s “cat” did the job for a chronic trouble maker.
“Two!” Epstein announced.
What followed perplexed Barlow. A man cried out in pain and bewilderment. “Don’t move!” Epstein commanded. “It is loaded.”
Then the peddler was beside Barlow. A knife flashed, and the haft was thrust into his liberated hand. When he turned about, he understood: Epstein, whip in one hand, and an enormous Smith & Wesson .44 in the other, stood there like a lion tamer. He commanded the close packed crescent of spectators. He had bunched them up with his neat handling of the whip—and he had with his third blow slashed Swift’s gun hand instead of Barlow’s back.
Epstein made the whip ripple like a living snake. The Colt he had torn from Swift’s grip engaged in the lash. Epstein drew the weapon right up to his feet.
“Take it, Pete,” he said. “Two heads are better than one.” Then, to the sod-buster, “Instead of the other thirty-eight lashes, it gives exile instead. We are going to Red Fork, faster than an ox.”
Barlow quickly reached to the ground and scooped up the gun.
CHAPTER VI
Gold for Dead Men
The following day, Epstein parked his cart at a tiny spring far off the emigrant route. “We got no oxen to graze,” he explained, “so it gives a shortcut to Red Fork for a one man covered wagon.”
Barlow, having taken his turn, was ready to drop. Pushing a cart took skill as well as beef. “Be damned!” he muttered, as he helped make camp. “How do you stand up to it?” And then, as they hunkered down to bake sourdough with chunks of bacon in it, he went on, “I hate like snakes to run out this way on Sally.”
“There you are wrong. This gives her time to get good and sore at Mr. Swift. People always get sore at what is closest to them. And when we get to Red Fork first, you and I pick out the best homesteads for you and her. Maybe I even stake one in my own name, even if I won’t work it. A fellow is crazy, killing himself with farming!”
They tramped on, each day’s march covering half as much again as even a well managed ox train. Looking back from a high crest, could see not even the dust of the emigrants.
Toward noon, four dusty riders hailed them. They were leather faced, unshaven, and heavily armed. They had the wary eyes of scouts, which was what they proved to be. They were trailing horse thieves, and they’d get and forthwith hang them, if they had to go all the way to Mexico to do it. Satisfied that neither Barlow nor Epstein had information, they spoke of doings far west, in the Red Fork country.
“Some bad Injuns snuck off the reservation,” the spokesman said. “Raising sand with emigrant trains, freighters, and such like. But now the army’s patrolling the route and probably driving the varmints off this way. You all better watch your hair.”
With that, the four rode on. Ahead, barren ridges loomed up. The way, though clear, became harder. There were stretches of black lava flow. It had thin spots which concealed blowholes big enough to swallow a wagon. More and more, this shortcut became country which demanded a good piece of knowing. Long windrows of tumbled fragments looked as if hundreds of cars of coal had been dumped. The trail wound in and out among these.
“Over there,” Epstein announced, near sundown, “it gives a basin your hat can hide. If you don’t know where it is, you go thirsty for a whole day.”
When they rounded a ridge, they saw that two men had already made camp near a tiny basin which had scarcely a trace of green growth to betray its presence. The pair had burros. Prospecting gear made up most of the packs laid out on the ground. Epstein hailed them, and in a moment, the bearded desert rats were plying the newcomers with questions.
Grover and Phelan they called themselves, and they were gold-drunk. They had to talk. Any audience would do. They showed ore specimens. “Rich as all git out,” they babbled. “From the Muleshoe Mountains, yonder.” Grover handed Barlow a chunk. “Scads of it! a ring-tailed heller of a lode. Free milling ore—”
The threads and flakes of wheat colored metal spoke for themselves. This had not the glitter of fool’s gold; it had the mellowness of the real article. “Looks good, Saul,” Barlow observed, and handed him the specimen. “Too bad it isn’t pushcart country over yonder.”
Phelan cried out, “The devil it ain’t! This canyon here, this draw betwixt the lava, it leads right into the Muleshoe Canyon, and that’s lousy with float.”
Epstein’s hand and voice shook as he surrendered the sample. “It gives a town there before you know it. Eye, wye, wye! I can get a load of bargains in Yuma and come back in time for the first business. Come now, Pete, we got no time to lose!”
The prospectors stared. “Gosh, man, you loco? Figuring on trading when you can stake a claim?”
“We’re running short of grub,” Barlow contended.
Epstein filled the canteens. “It gives another hour of daylight, hurry up, Pete, no time to lose.”
Once they were on their way, Barlow said, “I got your play so strong I could taste it. What was wrong with the outfit?”
“With those fellows, something smells. I been in plenty camps. Some prospecting men don’t talk even to burros, some talk like magpies and drunks. But there ain’t any ore like that in these parts. And that ain’t the only lie they told. Some of the fresh sign is horses. And the burros’ hoofs and the men’s boots don’t look right for the kind of country they say they been working.”
Once darkness fell, they camped in a swale. It was not until after supper that Barlow’s uneasiness came to a point, and he said, abruptly, “Saul, a fake gold strike would be enough to drive sodbusters crazy as coots, particularly with a fellow like Swift. He’d get his crowd to head this way, a far piece from the route the army is watching.”
Epstein let out a long breath. “I been waiting to see if you caught on by yourself. What do we do?”
“I aim to sneak back for a look-see and listen. Find out what those jiggers are really thinking. If there is sure enough dirty work, I’ll risk going back to warn Horace Parker, and take my chances on what I get.”
“What do I do?”
“I’d admire to meet anyone who ever figured out what you are fixing to do!”
“Most of the time I don’t know it myself until I do it,” Epstein admitted. “But better I wait to see how it goes with you.”
Barlow accordingly set out along the back-trail. The silhouette of the lava ridge against the stars guided him. He did not slow down until he could smell the mesquite root fire of the prospectors. Wind whine and the incessant spatter of driven sand made a curtain of sound to mask his approach. The subdued glow of embers warned him that he was within sight of his goal. On working his way closer, he decided that the pair had decamped.
The ash filming the coals suggested that the two had left soon after he and Epstein had moved on. He wondered if they had aimed to bushwhack him and Saul. While this was an uncomfortable thought, he realized that his companion would hardly be caught napping. “Having us go yonder, instead of on our way,” he reasoned, “couldn’t do ’em a bit of good unless they knew we’d meet someone up the draw who’d keep us from coming back.”
The moon’s first glow was reaching into the draw whose general direction was toward the distant Muleshoe Mountains. He worked his way along an earth bottom which before long began to dip from its first steady rise. As he rounded a bend, he smelled horses and tobacco. There were men lounging about a small fire in a sheltered alcove.
As the fire flared up, he saw many more horses, further up the draw, than the men in sight could possibly need. And then he recognized Horace Parker’s mare. Alezan stood out like a torch light procession among the bangtails and scrubs of the remuda. The man who had bushwhacked Barlow in the pass outside of Kearneyville was now sitting in on a game involving fake prospectors and a fake gold strike. There was far more to this than Barlow could possibly figure for the moment.
One thing however was certain: he had to recapture Alezan. Doing so would not only cancel a debt, but would lend weight to his words when he rejoined the wagon train and outlined his suspicions to Horace Parker.
He considered half a dozen plans which would have a chance if he went back to get Epstein. He ended by rejecting them all. It took only one man to steal a horse. He remained in hiding, shifting at times when moonlight invaded the shadows of the rocks which sheltered him. He watched the strangers spread their blankets. And he kept his eye on Alezan…
* * * *
The approach was infinitely harder than the act. He was shaky, sweating, and dry-mouthed when he left, leading the mare and shouldering saddle gear. He had fed her rock candy and ginger snaps during the week she was stabled in Kearneyville, and she remembered him. She made no disturbance at all on being taken from her companions.
Once Barlow told Epstein what he had done and learned, he muffled Alezan’s hoofs with pieces of blanket. The peddler said, “Don’t worry about me. Lots of times, I have walked by moonlight. And if someone trails you to this camp, they won’t go further after me. Not even Epstein can carry a horse in a pushcart.”
The E. Hoffmann Price Spice Adventure MEGAPACK ™ Page 33