The E.R. Slade Western Omnibus No.1

by E. R. Slade

  She shook her head, eyes cool and calculating on Coe.

  Coe could see he wasn’t going to get anywhere this way. He’d better take a look for tracks leaving here. But now he thought of something else.

  “Look,” he said, relaxing his face into a friendly smile, hoping he was making it convincing, “I’m sorry I came off sounding suspicious. It’s just that the tracks do lead here, and you can see what it would make me think, when you both say you never saw him return. It’s my guess he was trying to get something here. Maybe he couldn’t get in and get it and left it behind. Do you mind if I take a look at the room where he slept?”

  Tower suddenly became hearty again.

  “Of course not,” he said. “Come on.”

  But Maria stopped him, with a hand on his arm.

  “You’ve still got all those accounts to go over,” she said. “I’ll show him.”

  Tower looked at her quickly, but seeing the apparently sincere expression on her face, the hardness around his mouth relaxed and he nodded. “I’ve got to get them balanced by Monday,” he said. “My banker’ll by lookin’ ’em over.”

  Coe followed Maria down the short hall and through the door into Justin’s room. The bed was neatly made. There was one chair and a desk, and a chest of drawers. The window looked out towards the mountains over the scrubby land between. He went through the drawers, found some fancy duds, a Jew’s harp, and nothing else. He checked under the bed and in the closet. There were two extra pairs of boots, one new and shiny, to go with the fancy duds, and one ancient and ratty, with holes for toes to leak. He found nothing else. Like a razor or strop or comb or soap. It backed up the idea that Justin had not returned. It was hard to tell from what was left behind whether he meant to return again at some later time or not.

  Coe turned around to ask Maria some questions, and was startled to see her standing there with her sweater half unbuttoned. She came and wrapped her arms around his neck, pressed herself against him and said, “Unbutton me,” in a hot, breathy kind of way.

  Coe was suddenly angry. He pushed her away roughly.

  “Quit acting like a damned slut,” he said. “Don’t you have any respect for yourself at all?”

  He stalked out.

  Chapter Seventeen

  After leaving the house, the first thing Coe did was take a look for the dapple’s distinctive tracks, leaving. Down on the stream bank, he found them. There were what might have been wagon ruts as well, but they’d been trampled over by a bunch of horses and weren’t clear at all.

  He followed the dapple’s tracks to the trail, and saw they headed for the pass. Coe scratched his head, thinking. He decided that he might as well stay on the trail, and if he found Justin, then he could go get Underwood. Underwood probably wouldn’t budge from his town until there was something more for him to do than follow tracks that might lead all the way to the border, or the west coast.

  Before going far, Coe ran into a man driving a wagonload of produce and meats to sell in Killer Ledge. Coe bought half a side of bacon, some beef jerky, a small sack of flour, and an array of other miscellaneous foods, like a bag of apples, and some dried beans. Actually, he bought more than he really should have, considering he wasn’t leading a pack horse, but he was ravenous, and couldn’t resist.

  He sat down under an oak tree, built a fire and cooked up a feast. The sun was throwing long shadows by the time he set off on the trail again.

  The tracks, though trodden over by a few other users of the trail, were still easy to follow. He saw the wagon ruts clear enough, too, among others, and wondered about them, though not too much, since he was concerned mostly with Justin, not the comings and goings at the XBT. He got a good way up towards the pass before the light gave out. He then decided to assume the tracks would stay in the trail until at least the other side of the pass. He might be wrong, and it would cost him backtracking through a lot of the following day if that was the case, but if he was right, he’d be a long way ahead of the game.

  He stopped quite late in the night and took a short nap, then went on. He stayed awake by singing songs, and eating apples.

  In the morning he halted again, took another rest, let his horse crop grass. They were most of the way to the bottom of the western side of the mountains and the grass was lush and thick in the meadows. He ate another big meal and then, as the light came strong enough, looked for tracks.

  The dapple’s tracks were still there all right. But then he noticed an odd thing. The dapple appeared to be in traces with another horse, one with the large hooves of a workhorse. The dapple’s tracks showed that the poor animal was having a bad time in the traces, not being brought up to it. And there were wagon marks. The same wagon? Or a different one? He thought a different one – the rims looked wider. Another horse, with a limp, seemed to have been hitched on the rear of this wagon.

  He squatted there munching on his last apple and squinting along the trail. He was quite sure that wagon marks had not been associated with the dapple before, at least the dapple had not been pulling one. The marks were side by side with the narrower-tired wagon much of the way, but that was hardly the same thing.

  He stood, looked back up the pass, wondering what to think. Had Justin hitched his horse to a wagon that had been waiting for him somewhere along the trail? Or had someone else ridden the dapple out of the yard? Or what?

  None of it made any sense at all.

  The next question to be answered was, should he go on following the tracks, or turn back and try to figure out where and how the dapple had changed over from a riding mount to a draw horse?

  He looked one way, then the other, and decided to keep on for a while.

  Around noon, he saw a wagon pulled off into a creek bed, out of the trail. When he drew up, he found a round-faced man with a well-meaning expression trying to get a fire going with a few bits of deadwood. Next to him was a pleasant-looking woman with two small wide-eyed children clinging to her dress, one sucking his thumb. The dapple, along with two other horses, both chunky harness animals, was cropping grass nearby.

  “Howdy,” he said, tipping his hat to the woman, but addressing both of them. “Mind if a join you folks?”

  “Of course not,” the woman said.

  “We’ll have some coffee on in a minute, the man said. “Get down and take a rest.”

  Coe dismounted, feeling sore. He helped them get the fire going, and watched while the woman put on the coffee pot.

  “You on the way to Tucson?” the man asked. “By the way, the name’s Lake, Paul Lake. My wife Clara. From New Jersey.”

  Coe introduced himself, and they shook hands. Then he said, “I’m interested in where you got that horse.”

  The man looked surprised, but not at all offended by the question. He said, “Why, it’s strange you should mention that. Are you related to the girl? I thought at the time that perhaps I shouldn’t buy it from her, no matter how much she wanted to sell it. After all, a girl alone in a mountain pass, wanting to sell her horse! My wife, she said it was strange—too strange—and I shouldn’t buy the animal, but that one I bought in town came up lame, and as I told Clara, if we didn’t buy the horse we’d have to leave half our belongings behind, and did she want to do that? There was really no choice, we had to buy the horse. We talked it over afterwards, and we decided that it wasn’t right for us to be complaining, and that we ought to be grateful, that it was Providence. But something’s wrong, Mr. Dolan, I can see that. What is it?”

  “A girl sold you that horse? What did she look like?”

  “Well,” Lake said, and glanced involuntarily at his wife, who suddenly scolded one of the children hanging onto her dress for some infraction Coe hadn’t noticed. “Well,” Lake repeated, now looking at Coe, “she was a bit shorter than me, maybe to here.” He indicated a level even with his nose. “She had dark hair, and, well ...” He trailed off, looking again at his wife, kind of hopelessly.

  “She was something to look at?” Coe asked.
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  “Quite something,” Lake admitted, with another glance at his wife, who was now giving him a penetrating examination.

  “She rode up to you last night then, in the pass, and sold you the dapple?”

  “Early yesterday morning, just at sunup.”

  “There was no one with her?”

  “No. But she didn’t want a ride back home. She said she lived nearby and that she didn’t mind walking, even would rather do so.”

  Coe stood up.

  “Well, thank you,” he said. “Been a big help.”

  He got out of range before Lake could ask Coe any questions of his own.

  Coe rode for the pass. One thing was clear. Justin had stayed in the area, and Maria had helped him do so, and, perhaps with the help of her father, had covered for him. Why?

  He rode, bone-weary and nearly falling from his saddle, all afternoon, stopping just over the top of the pass to eat supper. Then he stretched out, intending to take a short nap while his horse grazed a small meadow beside the trail, but instead didn’t awake until the sun was well up, and his dun came ambling over to nuzzle his face curiously.

  Too bothered to be hungry, he skipped breakfast, got back in the saddle and jogged down the trail, confused and asking himself if perhaps he hadn’t done enough for his brother. He knew there was at least one other thing he could do: confront Tower and his daughter with what he’d found out and watch for a reaction, but the idea didn’t seem too promising, and likely would gain him nothing but bad feelings. He sure was tempted to just quit, ride for other parts. What had Pete ever done for him to deserve all this effort?

  But then something dawned on him.

  “Holy crow,” he muttered, and set his spurs.

  ~*~

  The dun kicked through trash in the main street of Killer ledge some way into the afternoon. The wind blew up dust devils and gritted Coe’s eyes and mouth. He left the dun eagerly eating oats and getting a rubdown at the livery, and hiked along the street to the sheriff’s office.

  Underwood wasn’t there. Where Coe finally found him, after asking around, was in the Dizzy Lizzy bellied morosely up to the bar, beer in hand, studying the reclining nude over the mirror. There was a suspicious gap around him, which nobody seemed inclined to intrude upon, though the place was as crowded as usual. Coe stepped into the space and got a glare from Underwood.

  “Got to talk to you, Sam.” he said.

  “So talk.”

  “Not here. There’s a lot to it.”

  “Can’t you see I’m havin’ a drink?” Underwood was belligerent.

  Coe, irritated, said, “Look, Sam, I think I have this thing figured out. You ought to know about it.”

  Underwood slammed his tumbler on the bar top, so that beer spilled over and puddled around the base of the glass.

  “Dolan,” he bellowed, “I don’t need your advice, or your troubles. I got plenty enough to keep me busy. Now git away from me, before I lock you up for obstructin’ justice.”

  Underwood was clearly not on his first beer of the day. Coe decided it called for something strong to get Underwood’s attention.

  “I know who killed Mulberry, and who killed Turner and Gordon, and I know what happened to my brother—he’s dead too, I’m sure—and I know why. Now, are you going to listen up, or am I going to have to ride for the U.S. Marshal and tell him you can’t manage your town?”

  Underwood glared, but then he frowned, as though what Coe had said had finally sunk in.

  “Let’s go to my office,” he said, and a way opened up respectfully in the crowd as he headed for the door. He must have gotten rowdy with somebody not long before Coe arrived.

  Once settled in the office, Underwood said, “This better be good, Dolan, because I got another mess to clean up, too. The theft of a safe.”

  Coe said, “Sorry to hear about that, but this is murder we’re talking about here. I think it ought to come before theft, don’t you?”

  “Not this theft,” Underwood said flatly. “It was a lawyer’s safe, discovered when he opened his office this morning—must have happened over the weekend. There’s two things missing. There’s gold, about three thousand dollars. And then there’s an envelope which Justin gave him and told him to open only in the event of his death or disappearance.”

  Coe stared at Underwood. His mind was working on this, fitting it into the pattern. Finally he let out a long breath and said, “I was afraid of that. There goes my last hope of a witness.”

  “Is that a fact.” Underwood said laconically, and belched, creaking back in his chair.

  “Let me lay it all out, and you tell me how it strikes you.”

  “Let ’er rip.”

  It took about fifteen minutes, and when he was all through, Underwood had sobered up quite a bit. He first scratched his chin, and then tipped his head forward and scratched his ear. Then he stood up and went to the window, looking out at the busy street.

  Then he turned Coe.

  “I guess it all makes sense. Except it ain’t like Tower. He just ain’t a crook. I know. I worked for him for years.”

  “I know he doesn’t seem like one, and probably in most ways he isn’t. I doubt he thinks he’s one. But that’s just what makes him so treacherous and dangerous. He thinks what he’s doing is perfectly natural and right. Now, there’s two things I can think of to do. One is go hunt for the place where they buried Justin’s body, which might take months to find and wouldn’t be likely to tell us anything we don’t already know. The other is a crazy idea that’s been buzzing around in my head like a fly. It might not work, probably won’t. But since all the witnesses are dead, and I don’t see much chance of Tower confessing on his own, I think it’s worth a try.”

  Once he’d laid out his plan for Underwood, the deputy said, “Don’t let me ever hear you say your brother’s the only slick-tongued snake in the family, for that’s the beatenest harebrained scheme I ever did hear of in my born days, and I reckon it’s as foolhardy as any two things your brother ever dreamed up.”

  “Whether it works or not, I’ll at least have something to tell my conscience.” He smiled halfheartedly at Underwood. “Never underestimate the trouble a conscience will cause you. There’s nothing more pesky than what a tetchy conscience is. It’ll keep you from sleeping, from eating, and get you in wrong with about everybody, and make you risk your neck. If somebody’d given me a choice, I’d have done without mine.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  After obtaining Deputy Sam Underwood’s reluctant and marginal agreement with his plan, Coe figured he needed a solid night’s sleep before putting it into effect. He decided he would go down to Kittie’s boarding house and eat a good meal and relax for a couple of hours, and then go get a room at the Big Time and sack out. He felt very virtuous having gone to so much trouble for his worthless brother, who was surely dead and probably deserving of it. He didn’t have all that much confidence in his plan, but it didn’t matter, since it was the best he could do under the circumstances. He felt good now, all easy and comfortable, and he figured he was going to enjoy his free evening.

  When he knocked on the door of Kittie’s, it was opened by Lynn, and though he shouldn’t have been, he was caught off guard, his head so full of the details of his plan, which he kept revising and adjusting and evaluating, in spite of his determination to forget it all until morning.

  For a moment they just looked at each other. And then Lynn smiled broadly, her wide mouth full of white teeth looking somehow very friendly and pretty to him. He smiled back, and suddenly recalled his hat, which he took off and swatted against his knee to rid it of trail dust. It was even dustier than he’d thought, and swatting it raised a regular cloud of fine grit.

  Lynn laughed merrily and waved it away, and he said, “Sorry,” and that was all they said as she led the way inside. He left his hat on a hook beside the door, and wished he’d bought some clothes and gotten a bath and shave before coming here. His appearance had not even crossed his mi
nd until he looked into Lynn’s eyes. It wasn’t that she seemed to mind—though she certainly must notice, being neat as a pin herself and in any case a woman—but that he was suddenly aware that he cared what she thought of him.

  “You’ve been busy, I hear,” she said.

  “That’s so,” he agreed.

  “After supper you’ll have to tell me everything. But Kittie won’t like it if I socialize with the customers while I’m supposed to be working.”

  Her brown hair bounced slightly as she went briskly off to help bring food onto the table. Coe was just in time. The table was crowded with hungry men who knew where to come in town for a good meal. Coe had to bring up an extra chair from the wall, and crowd it in at a corner of the table. Lynn brought a setting for him, and then on came the food. Mountains of fluffy baked potatoes surrounded a huge roast, and there were side dishes of carrots, beets, broccoli and three huge salads, two tossed and one a potato salad. Then there were two large bowls of baked beans, and smaller dishes of a number of other delectables—pickles, hot biscuits with butter and honey, baked pears in brown sugar and the like. It was an impressive array, but then there were a lot of hungry men to feed, and Coe was sure all the food would disappear, and most everybody would want a piece of one of Kittie’s freshly baked pies, which were locally famous, according to what he’d overheard the last time he ate here.

  He unabashedly feasted. He asked for and was allowed two pieces of pie, one pumpkin, one cherry. There was also an apple pie, but it disappeared before he got a chance at it.

  He sat on after the other men had gone. It seemed mighty good to sit still in a comfortable chair in a comfortable house and know he could afford to do nothing for a whole evening. The plan for tomorrow had receded finally—if not completely out of mind, then at least to a back burner, where it could simmer while he regrouped his strength and force of will.

  For a while he could hear the clatter and rattle of Lynn doing dishes, and thought of getting up and helping her, drying them, but since he lacked ambition, and since she’d mentioned before that normally all the dishes just sat on the drain board anyway until they were needed for the next meal, and there was plenty of room, he stayed where he was.