The E.R. Slade Western Omnibus No.1

by E. R. Slade

  Lee went into the body of the ore wagon, tripping and falling over some jumble of objects in the bed which made it difficult to navigate sure-footedly. He tried to see where Riley was.

  Something moved suddenly, quickly, on the left, and Lee reeled to a blow to the side of his head. The wagon swayed as the galloping team raced around a sharp curve, and objects shifted under Lee’s feet, tripping him.

  Riley was on top of him, hands finding his throat. Lee kneed over, got free of the iron grip of hard, sinewy hands and stood. He saw the dim form rise up, come at him, and Lee swung hard with his right, missed and came back with his left, missing again.

  Then the hands back at his throat. Lee felt his consciousness slipping away quickly and fumbled at Riley’s arms, the muscular shoulders, got hold of Riley’s throat and squeezed. Ineffectually. Riley’s throat seemed made of iron.

  Lee was desperate. He punched Riley’s face, once with the right, then the left, then the right, then the left again. Then the wagon slammed hard sideways against something, knocking them apart from each other. Lee realized that he wasn’t a match for Riley, fighting Riley in Riley’s way.

  He tripped again in trying to stand up and then had an idea. He reached down and picked up one of the extremely heavy objects in the bed of the wagon, lifted it over his head and brought it down towards Riley’s head. Riley wasn’t there. The object landed heavily on the bed of the wagon. Lee was just looking for Riley again when an arm went around his neck and he felt the muscles work like steel bands against his throat. Lee was weakening and knew it would be only a brief while before he passed out.

  He gritted his teeth and staggered as the wagon slammed into something again. Riley’s grip remained iron-tight. Lee took the arm in both hands, turned to face the side of the wagon and put his last effort into one final try.

  As he bent forward quickly at the waist, he yanked down on the arm with both hands, so that it would not break his windpipe or his neck. Riley went up, over, and there was a horrible moment when Lee was sure that iron arm was going to take his head with it.

  Then Riley was gone. Lee grasped the side of the wagon to remain upright and get his breath back.

  He was looking down over a cliff into the ominous darkness of the lower fork of the canyon. Even Riley could never have survived that fall.

  The wagon slammed into a rock, nearly knocking him over the side, and he realized abruptly that if the team wasn’t slowed down, the wagon would soon be following Riley over the cliff. He hurried forward, climbed into the seat, and barely noted Carmen hanging on for dear life, unable to do anything to stop the horses for all her pulling on the reins.

  With all the brake he could muster, sawing the reins back and forth, shouting whoa, the wagon finally began to slow down. The canyon was passed, and the ground leveled out. Lee pulled to a halt.

  For moments he simply listened to his heart beat. Then he felt the warmth of Carmen’s breath against his neck. He put an arm around her. They stayed that way for a long time.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sheriff Lee Calloway, of Golden Gap, New Mexico, closed the cell door on the last of the gang. It was good to finally have an end to the business, he thought. There were still more trials, but his part was mostly done. When he’d accepted the sheriff’s job, which was offered on the basis of Walter Bingham’s description of what he’d seen and heard of Lee’s actions, he did so mostly because it gave him a convenient way of getting help finishing the job he’d started when he first backed Riley’s gang off Carmen in the desert. He’d hired on three deputies, one of whom was Harold Ford, after he got up and around again. Ford was going to be quite a lawman one day.

  But now, having finished the job, for all intents and purposes, he didn’t think he wanted to be sheriff forever and ever in this little town. It was a nice town now, and folks said they liked the way he’d cleaned it up and all that, but what did he have for roots here? He was beginning to feel the need of roots for the first time in his life. He wanted to have some wherever he lived. He was considering going back home to Maine, though the idea didn’t in itself enthuse him very much.

  Actually, he supposed he had it pretty good right here. He had a paying, steady job, and he had gotten out from under the business in San Pablo when the witness admitted making a mistake, after seeing the dead body of Riley. He had it made, folks would say. Only, somehow, something seemed missing.

  He heard the door of the sheriff’s office open and close. He went back out front to see who it was.

  Doc Morris was sitting down across the desk from his chair. Lee sat down and offered the doc a cigar from the box on his desk. He never smoked them himself, but he’d found it made some folks more comfortable and easier talkers to be offered a cigar, so he’d gotten into the habit. The doc waved it aside.

  “I’ve got something I want to tell you,” he said. “It’s about the way you found that wagon all loaded up with the golden statues.”

  “You’ve heard something?” He’d wondered about the question, but since the gold had all been recovered, he figured it didn’t really matter anymore.

  “I did it.”

  Lee just looked at the doctor, not exactly sure if he’d heard right.

  “I did it, I said. That’s right.” Doc Morris swiped at imaginary dust on his knee and looked at him. “I want to turn myself in. I got greedy. I ought to be locked up. I killed Tracy. He and I discovered the gold in the cave, and I killed him so he wouldn’t talk.”

  Lee thought a while. Then he said, “I reckon I’ll have to arrest you, then. I don’t hardly believe it though.” He looked hard at the doctor.

  “I’m guilty. I can’t live with it anymore.”

  Lee felt depressed. If you couldn’t trust a man like the doc, what was the world coming to?

  “Let me tell you somethin’,” he said to Morris. “If that wagon hadn’t been there just then, I wouldn’t be settin’ here talkin’ to you right now. I’d be dead, most likely, and so would Carmen.”

  “That doesn’t make what I did right.”

  “That’s true,” Lee admitted heavily. “I guess you’ll have to stand trial. I don’t know what the jury will say. But I know that I’ll have to tell them how you saved my life and Carmen’s, even if you didn’t intend it, and then Spike Littleton’s and Harold Ford’s. The way I heard it, after you got back to town that night and they told you about them two that was hurt, you went out to the ranch and stayed up for two days runnin’, seein’ to them, pullin’ them through.”

  “Guilt. It’s my job anyway. Once you drove off with the wagon, I got to thinking. I saw that what I had done wasn’t right, but at first I thought I’d just keep quiet and not let on. But the more I thought it over, the more I knew I couldn’t live with it. I want to make up for it. Besides, if I’d been where I was supposed to be,” Morris said sharply, “Spike and Harold wouldn’t have had such a bad time of it.”

  “Well, I reckon you got a point there. Though I’ll be locking you up, that won’t be nothing compared to the way you’re already locked up in your own guilt.”

  “I know,” Doc Morris said, and Lee took him back to a cell.

  Afterwards, Lee went outside into the hot sun and looked up and down the street. Quiet, peaceful. Someone was playing a guitar somewhere. The music drifted through the town like the gentle sound of running water. Lee sat down on the bench in front of his office and took up his whittling.

  The doc! It was the last straw. Everything had a sour taste about it now. He didn’t want to stay around. He needed to think what he should do next.

  But then he was interrupted again. Here came Carmen. She sat down beside him on the bench.

  “Why haven’t you been out today to make sure I’m all right?” she asked. There was a peculiar look in her eye, sort of twinkly. He wasn’t sure he liked it. Dealing with her was getting to be harder than dealing with Riley had ever been. Trouble with a woman was, she was never direct like a man. She had to come at you sideways and ma
ke you think she was up to one thing while she was really up to something else. It wasn’t his kind of battle. He was sure to lose every time.

  “I reckon I got a few things more to do than check on you every day,” he said.

  “Then why have you been out to the ranch every day—until today? I had lunch all ready for you, and you didn’t come.”

  She was, he noticed, more prettied up than usual. She had on a hat that looked ridiculous, just like the ladies around town who considered themselves very fashionable wore. Carmen wasn’t normally like that.

  He decided that he’d do best to keep his mouth shut. If he opened it, something was likely to come out that would make trouble for him.

  “Lee,” Carmen said, looking down at her hands in her lap. He watched her warily. She glanced up at him, and her eyes were watery. It made him as uncomfortable as if he had sat on a beehive.

  “Lee, oh, Lee,” she said, and she seemed to be waiting for him to do something, or say something. “Isn’t there ...? Wouldn’t you like ...?” She stared down at her hands. Suddenly she looked different to him, as if she were a small girl who wanted something and was disappointed. It wrenched at him. He wanted to do whatever it was she wanted. If only he could figure out what it was she did want.

  “Well,” he said, taking a long drink of air and trying to cheer up the conversation by getting it onto something neutral, “I reckon that I’ve done all I came here for. I expect I’ll be moving on shortly, after the last of the trials. Turn the sheriff’s job over to Harold, if the town’ll have him. I expect they will. He’s a good man.”

  She began to cry. Now what he said? Blamed if he knew what went on in these pretty little heads.

  “Lee, don’t you want a family?” she said finally. “I thought ...”

  So that was it. The realization hit him with near enough force to blow his head clean off. He was cornered, sure enough. Had bought trouble, and now he was going to have to pay for it.

  Someday he’d have to learn himself not to buy trouble in the desert.

  THE MAN IN THE BIG FOUR HAT

  Chapter One

  Ben Gordon had not planned to stay in town more than a day, just long enough to have his pony’s feet reshod and get some supplies. He also thought it time to get a bath, a shave and haircut, and a new hat to replace the one which had blown into the mud and been run over by a freight wagon before he could retrieve it. He’d washed it in the nearest stream and punched some of the shape back in, but even so nobody recognized it was supposed to be a hat unless it was on his head.

  Ben went along the muddy street to the blacksmith shop, about halfway down, and dismounted. The smith, true to type, was a huge man in a leather apron wielding a ten-pound sledge with one hand as though it were a tack hammer. The smithy was also typical, with a massive forge built of brick, lots of scrap iron piled in the corners of the dark shop, and the place to come if you were looking for a missing boy. Two of the several boys on hand looked like half-sized copies of the smith himself and were huddled over a portable farrier’s forge by the shop door, one of them pumping the blower handle.

  The smith said something, but a sudden barrage of gunfire from within one of the buildings across the street obliterated the smith’s answer to Ben’s question.

  The odd thing was that while the smith and all the boys hanging around looked curiously across the street, none of them seemed even slightly cautious, let alone alarmed.

  “I’ll do your pony in just a minute,” said the smith, as the last of the dozen pistol shots echoed away.

  Across the street a couple of doors down, the batwings of a saloon slammed open and out swaggered a fellow with a pair of nickel-plated six-shooters ostentatiously low on his hips. He had his hat pulled down low over his eyes and Ben couldn’t make out anything much of the face, only the jutting belligerent chin. After a moment he went away down the board sidewalk, the handles of his guns bobbing.

  Furtive faces appeared over the batwings. A few moments later a man stepped partway out, then went back inside. The man with the nickeled guns had gone into what looked like a house down at the far end of the street.

  “What was that all about?” Ben asked, as the smith hitched Ben’s pony to a post and lifted the gelding’s near foreleg to take a look at things.

  “Kid Clauson. Runs wild. Likes to shoot up saloons but he mostly can’t hit much he aims at, when he aims at all. Wings somebody once in a while, but that’s about it. Looks to me like these shoes are about played out. Need new ones.”

  “Go ahead and replace them. I don’t see any marshal or deputy coming to find out what the shooting was about.”

  “Ike Clauson’s the marshal. Leastways, he says he is, and nobody thinks he’s bad enough to try to convince him he ain’t.”

  “Clauson? Didn’t you just say ...”

  “The Kid’s brother. Kid does what he wants.”

  “So that’s the way of it.”

  “Yep.”

  The batwings were opening, and somebody’s backside came through, and then Ben could see why. Two men were carrying a length of two-inch plank on which lay a fairly well dressed middle-aged man with his arms dangling limply. A Stetson rode on the man’s chest. Several other men followed them out of the saloon. One of them attempted to make the man’s arms stay folded across his belly, but they wouldn’t. They all went in the direction opposite the way Kid Clauson had gone.

  The smith let down the pony’s hoof and straightened up, watching. There was excited murmuring amongst the boys hanging around the smithy. First one, then all the rest slogged through the mud in the street to follow the men into a general store a few doors along with the name, “O.T. BAILEY,” in big letters across the tall false front.

  “Looks like he might have done more than just winged that fellow,” Ben observed.

  “So it does,” said the Smith. The thick black brows on his broad face had drawn together. “Otis Bailey’s well-liked around here. If Kid Clauson killed him, maybe the town fathers will finally decide to try to do something about self-appointed Ike Clauson.”

  “Why have they put up with him at all?”

  “Ike’s the best gun handler in these parts, and this town has a reputation far and wide amongst the hard case element as good place to stay away from. Ike don’t like competition.”

  “Competition?”

  “He’s a man that’s got to be top dog. And he don’t want any of the rowdy crowd bothering his gambling establishment. High-toned kinds come from all over, and they say big money changes hands at the card tables.”

  “How’d he come to be here?”

  “Rode in about a year ago and shot down the marshal and deputy and told the town fathers he was setting up as marshal and was going to keep a clean town, and it wouldn’t cost them a cent so long as they didn’t interfere with him. But if anybody disagreed with this proposition it would cost him his life.

  “There was private talk about it, and some wanted to hire gunfighters out of Texas or somewhere to take the town back, but nothing come of it. Then Ike Clauson did just like he said he was going to do, and paid his own way with his gambling house, and people decided maybe they were as well off as they needed to be.”

  “With the kid brother running around shooting up saloons?”

  “That came later, just a couple of months ago. Appeared here from nobody knows where, and after he shot up his first saloon there were complaints. So Ike made him his deputy and said that made whatever the Kid did legal.”

  The smith had started working on a shoe by this time, and having it hot, lifted the pony’s hoof to see where it needed to be shaped. For a minute or so he was occupied with tapping the shoe here or there and checking his progress against the hoof the shoe was meant for.

  Now here came a couple of the boys back across the mud in the street.

  “Dead,” one of them said, and the other said, “Old Bailey’s dead all right. Shot right through the heart. Clerk’s gone for his daughter.”

&n
bsp; “Everybody’s talking about lynching Kid Clauson,” said the first boy excitedly. “Buddy Winston’s tying the hang knot now.”

  “They’re going to round up everybody they can and tell them to fetch along their guns,” added the second boy. He looked scared.

  “Where’s Ike Clauson?” the smith asked them.

  “Don’t know,” said the excited boy. “Somebody thought he might be out at the Kincaid place sparking Patty.”

  “They’d better stop to consider what they’re getting into, lynching the Kid.”

  “Ike’ll shoot ’em all when he finds out, won’t he?” she scared boy said, in awe.

  “Hard to say what he’ll do, but don’t you two get mixed up in this.”

  Ben had intended to leave his pony with the blacksmith and go get his bath and shave and acquire a new hat, not to mention supplies. Now he wasn’t rightly sure just what he ought to do. This town seemed a good place to get away from as soon as possible.

  But after he’d hung around a bit longer and nothing more seemed to happen, and the town was quiet, he asked where the best place was to get his bath and shave and went several doors down on the same side of the street to the recommended establishment.

  The barber had a bathtub in a back room and Ben made use of it, taking the precaution of keeping his loaded pistol and rifle within reach, just in case. But nothing exciting happened, though men came and went in the front room and there was a lot of talk about the shooting. Ben had the impression that talking about the lynching might be as far as anybody was going to go. When he was cleaned up he went out for his shave and haircut and set his weapons handy again.

  “Won’t anybody try to shoot his way in here, young feller,” the barber said with dry amusement. “The Kid never gets drunk enough not to be able to tell this place from a saloon.”

  “Well,” Ben said, “I’m new here and how would I know that?”