Spur wondered how he should play this and didn’t know the answer. Should he just breeze in and play it by ear? Should he try another entry? He decided on the latter. Backing up, he gently closed the door.
To the right of the kitchen door was a window. He tried it and found it locked. This made him curse a little. Further to his right was another window. He tried this and found the upper half unlatched. Sliding this down he managed to raise the lower half. Throwing his leg over the sill he stepped into the darkened room. He found and struck a match. The place looked like a small parlor and it was empty. He sighted the door, dropped the match and headed for it. When he opened the door, he discovered that he was at the foot of the stairs. So far so good.
Somebody was coming down the stairs. He ducked back into the room.
The footsteps came right up to the door and stopped. Spur held his breath.
The door started to open. Spur backed up hastily behind it.
The bulk of a man showed in the light from the hallway and moved to the table in the center of the room. A match scratched. Before the flame touched the wick of the lamp the man was bent over, Spur was around the door and out into the hall. He went up the stairs two at a time.
He ran into the bouncer.
This time, the man’s reaction was quicker than his.
The man hit him full in the face with his clenched fist and knocked him head over heels down the stairs. He seemed to hit every step going down and when he hit bottom, he hit hard. All his wind was knocked out of him and every bone in his body seemed broken. This coming on top of the blow on the head practically finished him. He tried to pull himself together and pull his gun, but somebody kicked his wrist and the gun went flying. He was dragged to his feet and a fist smashed into his face again. He reckoned his beauty was ruined forever. He bounced off the wall and landed in a heap on the plush carpet. At least that was soft.
A man’s voice said in a not unfriendly manner: “So it’s you again.”
He looked up with eyes that didn’t want to focus and saw Straffer standing there. It was the man he had put a gun on during his last visit here and he guessed the man’s identity.
“Howdy,” he said.
“My God,” said the bouncer fervently, “I’ve been praying for this moment, but I never guessed it would come so soon. Brother, I’m going to take you apart so your darling mother wouldn’t know you.”
Straffer waved the bouncer off.
“Later,” he said. “Now, who are you?”
Spur’s pride was that he never hid his identity. It had nearly cost him his life on more than one occasion.
“Sam Spur,” he said.
Straffer nodded.
“Some of it adds up now,” he said. “What’s the purpose of your visit exactly?”
“Girls?” Spur said, trying.
Straffer shook his head.
“Won’t do,” he said. “Try me again.”
Spur knew he couldn’t fool this man. He decided to take a gamble.
“I’m looking for the men behind the killing of Wayne Ulster,” he said.
Straffer looked interested.
“Strange for an outlaw to be doing that,” he said. “I thought that would be more in the marshal’s line of country.”
Spur decided to spice the truth with a judicious lie.
“It’s personal with me,” he said. Which wasn’t too far from the truth when you came to think about it.
Straffer said: “And you expect to find him here?”
“I know he’s here.”
Footsteps sounded on the stairs. They all turned. Jenner was coming down the stairs with the Kid behind him. Jenner caught sight of Spur in a heap on the floor. The Kid’s eyes nearly started out of his head.
Jenner smiled.
“Well, well, Ranee,” he said. “You just saved me a lot of trouble.”
Straffer said: “He’s mine, Mike.” They were both smiling. They were both deadly.
Through mashed lips, Spur said: “Now don’t quarrel over me, boys.”
Jenner said: “You want to push this all the way, Ranee?” He was still being gently friendly, but even Spur with his pounded brains couldn’t miss the menace in the voice.
Straffer apparently got the message. His smile stayed on his face, but behind the smile, he was thoughtful.
“Not all the way,” he said. “But I shan’t forget you did this to me, Mike. Not ever.”
Jenner said: “I didn’t expect you to, Ranee.”
“Can a man ask why you want this outlaw so badly, Mike?” Straffer enquired.
“He can ask,” Jenner said. “The answer’s obvious. This man’s wanted. It’s my duty to hand him over to the law.”
“You—a bounty hunter?” Straffer showed slight surprise.
Spur got slowly to his feet. His eye caught sight of his gun on the floor. He thought of making a try for it, but he knew the Kid was fast enough to stop him. The Kid was an unknown quantity and Spur had no idea which way he would jump. The bouncer was close to him. He didn’t doubt that Jenner and Straffer carried hidden guns. He couldn’t risk it.
“If you have him,” Straffer was saying, “get him off my premises. This is a respectable house.”
A door opened and Spur heard feminine chatter. He knew that the girls were coming from their supper in the kitchen. They came along the hall, laughing together.
They stopped and stared. Spur saw the girl Jenny. For a moment, their eyes met. He wondered whether she would say anything. But she stayed silent and moved on past him. Straffer was telling the girls to run along, to get ready for the evening.
Jenner said: “Let’s go.”
Spur looked at the Kid. He came down the stairs and gave Spur a defiant look. Spur reckoned there was no hope of any help there. The chances were that he would be taken into a dark corner and killed after they had got what they wanted out of him. Only they wouldn’t get what they wanted. They’d have to kill him and stay ignorant.
Jenner shoved him toward the door.
The bouncer said: “A pity. I was going to have fun with him.”
Straffer looked as though he regretted Jenner had got his hands on Spur. But he was out of the running. It wouldn’t pay him to help Spur.
Then they were out on the street. Jenner and the Kid seemed to be carrying their guns quite openly. But there were few people about and they didn’t seem to notice the guns. They herded him toward the livery stable.
There was a man in front of them. They stopped and Spur saw it was Goodyear. So there was another to join in the fun. Goodyear grinned.
“So you got him.”
“Now we make him talk,” Jenner said. He started off and the Kid and Goodyear followed him.
They went into the yard of the livery stable and there the old man met them.
“Oh, it’s you again,” he said to Spur. He seemed to know Jenner and Goodyear and didn’t seem to think it strange that they should bring a man here with guns in their hands.
They took him into the barn. It was warm in there with a strong smell of horses, dung and hay. They circled him and Jenner said: “Now the fun starts. You’ve given me a hell of a time and this is where you pay for it. When we finish with him, Kid, you can show us where you have the prisoners hidden.”
Spur looked at the Kid and the boy didn’t meet his eyes.
Spur said: “Even you ain’t this low, Kid. I can’t make out how you can be so damn foolish. You got a chance to go straight. Maybe you’ll never have another.”
The Kid said: “I’m goin’ straight. I’m on the right side. I got a lot of influential friends now.”
Without taking his eyes off Spur, Jenner said: “Keep your mouth shut. You talk too much, Kid.”
The Kid looked sulky.
Goodyear said: “We have the Kid. He can take us to Strange and Offing. We don’t need Spur anymore.”
“True enough,” said Jenner. “But we can’t do it here.”
“Take him out of town a ways,”
Goodyear suggested.
Jenner agreed that was a good idea. Jenner kept his gun on Spur while the other two rustled up the horses. They brought the mare, saddled and she came and put her soft muzzle on Spur’s face.
The Kid said in an uncertain kind of a voice: “There ain’t no call to kill him, Jenner. I can take you to Strange an’ Offing. We don’t need Spur dead.”
“He knows too much.”
“He don’t know any more’n I do,” the Kid protested.
Jenner smiled.
“That’s something worth bearing in mind,” he said.
The Kid went very still, letting the full meaning sink in. He didn’t seem to like the sound of it. He got the message fully. They led the horses out into the yard and mounted. Spur felt a little better now he was astride the mare. That gave him a slight edge on his captors. At least he was mounted on the fastest horse. But he knew that he was in a poor condition to put up a fight even if he had the chance to do so.
They rode slowly down Frazer and out of town, turning east.
Inside fifteen minutes or so they were pushing out into open country. Spur was feeling pretty hopeless. There was always one interesting point about a situation like this. He was going to be killed anyway, so he might as well risk the life that was almost certainly going to be lost in trying to escape.
They came to the mouth of an arroyo and turned along it. There was no sound but the steady tramp-tramp of the horses’ feet. A slight breeze blew from the north. It softly touched Spur’s face and it helped to revive him a little.
Finally, Jenner halted his horse.
“This’ll do,” he said. “Kid, you dig a grave.”
“Let him dig his own grave,” the Kid snarled.
“Good idea. Get going, Spur.”
Spur stepped down from the horse. He still felt pretty bad from the beating he had taken.
“What do I dig with?” he asked, wanting to get any kind of a weapon in his hands.
“Your hands.”
He got down on hands and knees and starting shifting the soft sand. For one unpleasant moment he considered the possibility of their pulling this off. He saw himself lying there in the shallow grave with the back of his head blown off. It gave him quite a turn.
Chapter Nine
Roach made an impatient sound with his tongue. He was seated behind his desk. He had been there for an hour since Jenner had left. Jenner was starting to worry him. The man was all right while things went in his favor, but now things had turned out a little awkwardly, Roach thought the man was showing signs of losing his nerve. That would never do. The real strength of a chain lay in its weakest link. If Jenner started to show signs of weakness, he would have to be dispensed with.
When he looked at the matter coldly, he reckoned there was only one person he could rely upon utterly and who would never lose her nerve and that was the girl Ruby. Certainly, she was nothing more than a whore, but she had brains and she didn’t scare. She didn’t have a lot of feelings either. She was a woman with an entirely cold mind, a rarity in itself. She could think cold and money bought her entirely. Roach paid her well for she was at a point of great advantage. She had ears and eyes and she used them. It was she who had heard the first whisper of the suspicion turned on himself. It was she who had the contacts.
Roach found that he had become more and more dependent on her, in more ways than one. He needed her contacts and he needed her as a woman. He had been married for the last ten years to a cold and ambitious woman. Madeleine had enormous social ambitions and an untiring capacity for spending money. Sometimes he wondered with something like amazement if that excessively foolish woman were not really the source of his own ambition. Madeleine was a decoration. She performed the duties of a hostess with grace and charm, she could organize a political dinner party to perfection, she could make endless small talk and knew how to cultivate people who could prove useful. Socially, she was a great success; in bed she was a failure.
Marcus Roach himself was a curious mixture of coldness and passion. In most things he was a man under control. His body for the most part was a machine over which he held complete control. He ate with care and drank very moderately. He had never eaten a mouthful more than he needed and had never been the worse for drink in his life. Women, however, were a different matter. So far as they went, he was insatiable. He could never get enough of them.
He had, he remembered with some triumph, in the last year experienced every girl at Straffer’s place. Thank God that Ranee Straffer and the girls were discretion itself or he could have been ruined. But Straffer’s cost money and his one vanity was that he liked to be generous to women, particularly of that sort. He must have spent a fortune on Ruby since he first met her and found in her the physical satisfaction that he had failed to find in his own bed at home. He knew, however, that he had successfully bought the girl. While the money lasted she would be on his side.
His mind ranged into the future.
He would not last forever here, he knew. He could cover this affair up and stay with the governor until this territory reached statehood. That would give him time to make his pile and when he had finished with the books he would guarantee that nobody short of a genius could tell that he had milked the territory of a fortune. His success pleased him enormously, not only because it had brought him wealth, but because it had proved to him that he was smarter than other men.
He ruled the social life of the capital, the governor didn’t make a move without his advice and he ruled many of the elements who were outside the law. He chuckled when he thought of the number of illegal enterprises he had financed. No longer was crime in the territory a thing that just happened because, a cowboy found himself short of cash or fancied some of his boss’s stock. Crime now was properly organized and financed from the center. He had an intelligence system which would have been the envy of governments.
And Ruby was the center-pin of his organization. It was her information that had brought him to affluence, her contacts that had provided him with the tools to carry out his work. And it was she who had relieved the angry appetites of his body. He was not a man who knew gratitude, but he knew fully how much the woman meant to him.
Thinking of her, made him ache for her. He licked his dry lips at the thought of her body. He would go over to Straffer’s now and mix business with pleasure.
He stood up and reached for his hat. He had a social engagement later in the evening. His wife was giving a little dinner for about twenty people to keep the wheels of his polite political machine well oiled. He would be a little late for it, but would plead pressure of work as an excuse. He was known as a demon for work.
On the stairs he met Ruth Stirling, the governor’s wife. She was dressed for dinner at his place and she looked magnificent. She was always a source of frustration to him, for he was always a little helpless with respectable women and she was far too desirable for a respectable woman. Ten years younger than her husband, she was a tall, statuesque blonde with a figure that drove men crazy. Among them was Marcus Roach. To add to his frustration, she disliked him.
But she greeted him brightly enough now. He was indispensable to her husband and she knew that she must treat him with politeness.
“Why, hello, Marcus,” she said. “You’ll be late for your own dinner.”
“I fear so, Ruth,” he said. “I have a pressing business engagement.” They smiled, they went on their way and Roach left the house, the image of the woman in his mind.
He walked to Straffer’s place in a roundabout way, not wishing anybody to see him enter. He had a key to a side entrance that was inconspicuous. It was dark there and nobody could have recognized him at a distance of a foot. He let himself in, found the stairs and went up them.
Ruby was in her room alone, preparing herself at her dressing-table for the evening that would last into the early hours of the morning.
He thought she looked wonderful, her dark hair set off by the Persian blue of her dress that brought
out the blue of her eyes. Her black hair was swept back from her face and piled high on the top of her head in the fashion he admired so much. At her throat was a single velvet ribbon with one small diamond in it. It contrasted dramatically with the whiteness of her skin. Straffer certainly knew his job—he never chose anything but a beauty.
She saw him in the mirror and turned her head as he entered. Her bright professional smile came. He didn’t mind that she didn’t mean it. He paid for what he got. She was a professional and he expected professionalism from her.
She stood up and turned around for him to survey her as she knew he liked to do.
“Well?” she asked, giving him the benefit of her bright eyes over one bare shoulder.
“Charming,” he said.
“I didn’t expect you this evening. I thought you had a dinner engagement.”
“I couldn’t endure it till I had seen you first, my dear,” he told her.
She smiled a little; there was genuine amusement there.
“Now the truth,” she said. “Something came up.”
He nodded and smiled with his small mouth.
“I never can fool you,” he said. “Yes, something came up. This man Spur is proving dangerous. It is regrettable that we couldn’t buy him. Whoever heard of an outlaw who couldn’t be bought?”
He sat on her bed and she came and sat down beside him. He had a sudden impulse to take her in his arms and throw her down and ... He jerked his mind back to the business on hand.
“No call to be scared of Spur anymore,” she told him. “They took him tonight.”
“What?”
He sat bolt upright.
“Jenner and the Kid took him right here in this house.”
“Are you sure?”
“Saw them with my own eyes.”
“Good heavens, this is wonderful news.” He started to think. The Kid would lead any men he chose to Strange and Offing now. He could wipe out all evidence against him. Then the Kid could be killed. Everything would be neat and tidy. He could continue his usual way till the end of the governor’s term. Mentally, he rubbed his hands together.
Trail West (A Sam Spur Western Book 6) Page 8