by E. R. Slade
“Let’s go, Dolan.”
Coe made one last try.
“Sam, if you let this chance get away from you, you’ll always be a third rate lawman. If you keep your head straight, you have a chance of being famous, and in any case you’ll have earned any star anybody wants to pin you, or you’d like to pin on yourself.”
“What the hell do you mean, callin’ me a third-rate lawman?” Underwood bellowed. His face went red.
“Cool off, Sam. I don’t like rubbing a man’s nose in his own failures, but there’s no time for anything else now. So I’m calling it the way I see it. Now, I’m riding to do like we planned. What are you going to do?”
“Don’t listen to him,” Maria instructed. “Can’t you see he’s trying to railroad you into doin’ somethin’ you don’t want to do?”
Perhaps if she had kept quiet things would have gone her way. But if there was anything Underwood liked less than a man pointing out his failures, it was woman telling him what to do.
“Shut up, Maria,” he retorted. “I reckon the man’s right about one thing. We ought to go watch your father. I still got you under arrest, Coe. When this is over, we’ll sort out this other business.”
“That’s fine with me,” Coe said. “Now you’re making good sense. Let’s go.”
“Wait a minute. What’re we goin’ to do with her?”
“Take her with us until we can leave her where she’s out of harm’s way. I don’t think we ought to let her loose, at least not yet.”
“I guess not,” Underwood agreed.
“I ain’t goin’ anywhere with you,” Maria spat at Coe. “Not me.”
“You’ll go where I tell you,” Underwood said.
“Hell,” Maria said. Her expression and her language belied the dress she wore.
Coe led the way, with Maria driving the buggy after, and Underwood bringing up the rear. Coe went up the ridge, keeping just short of the crown, until there were some trees and then from among them took a look down into the valley at the ranch buildings.
A small group of hands—probably the ones Tower had been about to ride out with, when Coe arrived—were riding down the valley towards open range. As they came opposite, Coe counted them, and decided that either Tower or one of the others wasn’t with them. Under the circumstances, it was plain enough who the missing man was.
The yard of the XBT was empty. A few horses grazed, the cottonwoods moved in the breeze, the sun beat down, and all was quiet.
Out of the corner of his eye, Coe caught sight of a figure on horseback riding up the ridge on which they stood, but perhaps half or three-quarters of a mile back towards the mountains.
“Let’s go,” he said to Underwood, and led the way at a canter along just under the ridge again, going northwest, calculating to cut the trail the man on horseback would have left by the time they got there.
The buggy began to have hard going when the top of the ridge became more heavily wooded.
“Shall we put her up on somebody’s saddle?” Underwood suggested.
“Since she’ll never get to him before we do now, I don’t see the harm in leaving her to do what she wants.”
“Unless she knows a shortcut,” Underwood said.
“She might,” Coe admitted. “But hauling her along will slow us down. We’ll lead off the sorrel a piece. She can walk. It isn’t so far home it’ll hurt her.”
“That makes sense,” Underwood agreed. Then he appeared to consider. “But if she’s tellin’ the truth, it’s you who ought to be left hikin’, not a poor girl that’s been given a hard time.”
Coe quelled his irritation with Underwoods’ vacillations. “If you’re nervous about she might say at a trial, let me tell you, she’ll come off a scheming type—plenty of people must know what she’s like—and folks will figure she was plenty healthy enough to walk. She walked home from clear the other side of the pass, remember. From here to the ranch will be nothing to her.”
Underwood doubtfully acquiesced.
“You’ll pay for your crimes,” Maria spat at Coe, as the horse was unhitched from the buggy. “Wait’ll they find out what kind of yellowbellied coward is lookin’ after this town,” she attacked Underwood. “They’ll want to know how come you didn’t stand up to a low-down rascal that goes around assaultin’ helpless women. You won’t smell very sweet in court, Sam Underwood. That you won’t.”
Underwood started rubbing his chin, looking uncertain.
“I really druther not make a lady walk,” he said dubiously. “She’ll ruin that dress, sure.”
“For God’s sake,” Coe said, exasperated. “Put her on your saddle if you want, but let’s not waste a lot of time. And gag her.”
So that was how it was. Maria rode in back of Underwood, gagged, and Coe led on, following the tracks praying they wouldn’t be too late.
Once in a while, from an overlook or switchback, Coe caught a glimpse of Tower riding ahead. He was quite convinced Tower was unaware he was being followed. Coe wanted to keep it that way, so he stayed well back.
Tower followed the foothills of the mountains north, until he was well beyond the town, and then he cut across the scrubby country towards the stage road. Here, Coe held back even further, to be sure they weren’t observed. Tower crossed the stage road and kept going, now headed southeast. The ground began to dip and rise in washes and shallow arroyos. The sun beat down. Maria’s white dress became powdered with red dust. Once she tried to remove the gag, but Underwood grabbed her arm and told her to keep both of them around him.
Coe had not seen Tower for some time when he came around thicket of mesquite and oak, and found Tower’s horse standing tethered to an old broken-down spring wagon in front of a weathered prospector’s shack. A tiny trickle of a stream wet the parched blow sand yonder, and from somewhere out of sight there came the sound of sand being feverishly shoveled.
Coe held up his hand and halted. The shoveling of sand went on. Coe got down, and motioned Underwood to keep Maria quiet. Then he stepped around the brush carefully, gun drawn.
And there was a sweating, gasping Bert Tower digging a hole under the lee of a greasewood thicket.
Coe said, “Hello, Bert.”
Tower dropped the shovel and spun around, drawing his gun in a lightning motion. But he stopped with it half raised when he saw Coe’s steady weapon aimed at him.
“Now you’ve got it out, just go on and drop it over there in the thicket.”
“My God, Coe, you just about jolted my innards out,” Tower said, making a weak attempt at a smile. It didn’t fit on his face well, looked more out of place on him than it would have on a horse’s rump.
“You can come along now, Sam.” Coe called out. Then, addressing Tower, he said, “Chuck it.”
Tower looked at the gun in his hand, and then pitched it into the greasewood. The smile left his face. “What the hell do you think you’re doin’?” he demanded. “You plannin’ to hold me up, or what?”
“Pick up your shovel and keep digging.”
Underwood, riding his horse, and leading Coe’s, drew rein a few feet away.
“What are you doin’, Bert?” he asked, sounding uncomfortable, irritated.
“My business,” Tower said coldly. “You been followin’ me?”
“The shovel,” Coe directed. “We want to see Pete’s body as much as you do.”
“Is that what you’re up to?” Underwood asked.
“Do you know how little chance you got of becomin’ sheriff if you bother me?” Tower blustered.
“I ain’t runnin’,” Underwood said shortly. He looked disgusted. “Pick up the shovel and dig.”
Maria at that moment slipped down from his horse, and Coe noticed she’d taken Underwood’s gun from its holster. She was lifting it up to shoot.
Coe dove at her. The pistol went off nearly in his face, the lead grazing his cheek, the muzzle flash leaving a powder burn. But he knocked her down, got the gun away from her, and rolled to his feet, a gun in
each hand.
Everybody stopped moving. Underwood had swung off his horse, Tower had taken several steps towards his gun, and Maria had half risen.
“Sam,” Coe said, and tossed the pistol back to him. “Keep her covered.”
While Sam Underwood took wary control of Maria—he was flushed almost purple in his acute embarrassment at having been bested by her—Coe turned back to Tower and said, “Dig.”
~*~
While Tower dug, Coe talked.
“We know what happened, Bert,” Coe said. “Do you want to tell it or shall I?”
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” Tower muttered.
“You’ve given yourself away by coming here,” Coe said calmly. “But if you’d rather I told it, I will.
“The biggest mistake you made was killing Pete there, who you’re digging up. From then on things just led you deeper and deeper, until you had no way to get out. Justin saw you kill Pete, and he blackmailed you. You broke into the lawyer’s office to get the evidence Justin had against you, and then you killed him. Of course, there was more to it than that. Turner and Gordon were involved in the killing of Pete. They were also the men who had been doing holdups for you. They had to kill Mulberry when he got too close. That’s why they ran when Sam tried to arrest them. They thought they’d been found out. You couldn’t afford to have them talking if they were caught, so you managed to get ‘lost’ and kill them. Now, those are the facts. They are clear enough. You want to explain why, or shall I?”
“You’re doin’ fine,” Tower said, trying to make it sound sarcastic, but it came off feeble and hollow.
“You gamble, Bert. And you lose. You were in hock to at least one man you didn’t dare try to kill: William Whittaker. I saw him come and get some heavy saddlebags from your place. That’s what finally helped me sort out why all this happened. You owed him a lot of money. Your ranch only makes so much, fine ranch though it may be, and you needed more dinero for your gambling debts. That’s the reason why you had your men hold up stages.
“But you didn’t intend to pay off all your debts. Not to a man like my brother Pete, who you had no respect for at all because he couldn’t shoot back. I’m guessing both he and Whittaker cheated you at cards, but unlike Whittaker, Pete was no gunhand. So you killed him, and that’s what set off all the troubles.”
Tower’s neck and jaw muscles stiffened. He turned on Coe. “Whittaker cheats?”
“You didn’t know that?”
Tower threw dirt twice as far as he had to.
Pete’s body was not a pleasant sight, but Coe stood looking down at it for some while, thinking about how different they’d been, and yet been brothers. He couldn’t make up his mind whether Pete had deserved to come to a bad end or not. Pete had conned a lot of poor widows out of their livelihoods, but he’d also been generous with whatever he had, and he had saved a man’s life.
“That’s your brother?” Underwood asked.
“That’s him.”
~*~
In the evening, Coe sat next to the hearth with Lynn.
“What about the money?” she asked him.
“I figure getting it back from Whittaker and anybody else Tower paid off is Underwood’s problem—or more likely the new sheriff’s, whoever he turns out to be. I never undertook to clean up the whole town, just get the man who did in Pete.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I guess I ought to go on north and find a place to punch cows.”
“I heard that the Lazy Eyeglass is looking for a new ramrod. Hennesey left.”
“I’ve never been a ramrod before. I don’t see how anybody’s likely to hire me on as one.”
“I think they would. You’ve got a good reputation here. Almost anybody would like to have you around.”
“That so? Do you?”
“Why do you think I’m talking about jobs hereabouts?”
He looked at her and grinned. He noticed her eyes were full of dancing stars, and he thought, by golly she really does like me.
“Well then, guess I’ll have to find somewhere around here to hang my hat,” he said.
However, the adventure does not end here …
Join us for more first-class, action-packed books.
Regular updates feature on our website and blog
The Adventures continue…
Issuing new and classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!
More on E. R. Slade