The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  Oppressed by a sense of failure, Logan returned to the back room where Gulbrandsen had joined the sheriff.

  “Take these swine down to the jail, Sheriff,” the deputy marshal said glumly. “Leave Buckring here for the coroner to pick up. They got Hartnig.”

  Staring down at the dead Ringbone rancher, something else impinged itself on Logan’s eye. Buckring’s carpetbag was missing. Perris, then, had had the guts to snatch up the bag containing the rancher’s payoff before joining Marengo in a getaway.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ambush at Dawn

  Mitzi LaMotte of the Palace Casino was a faded enchantress of indeterminate age. Salvaging her vanished beauty for the customers took considerable artful use of powder puff and rouge jar to conceal the ravages of time and the youth-eroding demands of her profession.

  From four o’clock until the Palace closed its doors, usually around sunrise, Mitzi LaMotte and her scarlet sisters cruised the floor of the Palace dance hall, enticing the trade barward where she matched their drinks with sips of tea that looked like whisky.

  If a patron was well-heeled financially or was sufficiently in his cups, Mitzi LaMotte was expected, for a certain percentage of the proceeds, to either signal the bartender to include chloral hydrate crystals in his next drink—in which case the patron wound up in the back alley with a sore skull and a missing purse—or, in the case of Owlhorn regulars from the Ringbone or other ranches, who might resent a repetition of such drastic treatment, Mitzi would use her feminine wiles to persuade her victim to visit the Palace’s roulette layout, rondo-coolo games, or cliuckaluck cages.

  Tonight business had gone sour. An explosion of unknown origin in the back poolroom had frightened out most of the sodbusters in the house. Much later, an outbreak of gunfire next door had finished emptying the Palace.

  This was shortly after three o’clock in the morning. Opal Waymire, the new proprietress of the deadfall, had her floor men empty the barroom of such drunks as were incapable of locomotion and make the rounds blowing out lamps. This was the signal which permitted the Palace dance-hall girls to retire to their sleeping-rooms on the upper floor, to spend the following daylight hours in the oblivion of well-earned slumber.

  Mitzi LaMotte, fitting her key into the lock of Room 12 at the extreme end of the upstairs hall, was not too far gone with weariness to notice that some unknown intruder had, sometime this evening, kicked the door in. Too physically depleted to bother her head about what belongings she might find stolen, Mitzi limped into the room and kicked off her gold pumps with their tinsel pompons.

  Hobbling painfully on feet which had taken their usual bruising from cowpunchers’ Justins and homesteaders’ clodhopper brogans, Mitzi crossed over to her dresser, fished in a tray of hairpins for a match, and lighted the brass lamp in its wall sconce beside the blemished mirror.

  She was in the act of removing a switch from her hair when her blowzy eyes focused on the image of a man reflected in the mirror, a man standing with his back to the door she had just closed. The man was Duke Perris’s henchman, Blackie Marengo.

  Mitzi LaMotte wheeled around to face the roughneck, her painted lips twisting as she ground out a barroom obscenity.

  “You’ve come to the wrong room, Blackie. There’s no red light burning over my door. Get out!”

  Blackie Marengo leered as he gave the girl’s lumpy figure a discriminatory appraisal.

  “You flatter yourself, you washed-out slut. Go downstairs and send Opal Waymire up here. And don’t let any of the girls know I sent you or I’ll wring your skinny neck.”

  Mitzi reached behind her to pick up a heavy silver hairbrush. This man did not appear to be drunk and, having recently assumed Toke Grossett’s role as Duke Perris’s bodyguard, was due a respect not enjoyed by the average Palace customer.

  “You go to hell, Blackie,” Mitzi retorted, brandishing the hairbrush like a club. “I’m tired out. You want Opal, go fetch her your own self.”

  Blackie Marengo reached for the rubber-stocked .44 slung for cross draw at his flank. The hammer made its ominous double click as he thumbed it back to full cock. “Rattle your hocks before I shoot your ears off.”

  Mitzi LaMotte fled for the doorway, and her bare feet pattered off down the corridor.

  At this juncture the curtains which partitioned off a corner wardrobe closet stirred, and Duke Perris emerged into the glare of lamplight. Slung across one arm was the carpetbag which the late Jubal Buckring had brought out from the Ringbone.

  Hearing a commotion out on the street, the fugitive promoter crossed the shabby cubicle and tipped back a corner of a green window shade for a look at the street below.

  “Well, there goes the sheriff with Gulberg and our Lewiston friends,” commented Perris indifferently. “By the time they get through squealing, Logan will have enough evidence to put a bounty on my topknot.” Blackie Marengo, guarding the door of Room 12, shifted the weight of his splinted arm in the greasy sling, worry furrowing the corners of his deep-socketed eyes.

  “Every minute we stay here, the more our chances of stretchin’ hemp, boss,” the convict grumbled. “What’s to hold us? Five gets you fifty Logan’s already got this saloon surrounded with vigilantes.”

  Perris turned from the window, his tall frame wholly at ease except for the hand which plucked nervously at his gold-bullet luck piece. His ruddy face was paler than usual, making the tobacco-colored freckles stand out like polka dots.

  “What chance would we have had to fork a horse?” he demanded testily. “Ten to one the sheriff has every livery barn in town guarded. Besides, I’m not pulling out and leaving Opal behind.”

  A sound of high-heeled slippers coming up the outer hall brought Marengo wheeling around to face the door, gun in hand. The door swung open, and Opal Waymire, dressed in a revealing satin gown of emerald-green garnished with sparkling brilliants, stepped into Room 12. Her heavily mascaraed eyes were round and full of fear as Duke Perris walked across the room and kissed her.

  The girl’s iron self-control wavered for a moment, and she leaned against the big man’s shoulders, her body quivering.

  “It’s all right, Opal,” Perris consoled her. “I thought we’d killed or wounded Logan and we hadn’t. But Blackie and I got away with Buckring’s payoff, so we got what we came to Owlhorn for.”

  Opal Waymire plucked a wispy lace handkerchief from the cleft of her bosom and dabbed at her eyes as Perris stepped back and lifted Buckring’s carpetbag before her.

  “Better than a hundred thousand in greenbacks in this bag, Opal. Easy to carry. What difference if we leave Gulberg and those Lewiston bums to fry in their own juice? Logan’s got nothing he can hang me for.”

  Opal Waymire lurched over to Mitzi LaMotte’s bed and slumped down on it. She turned her tragic eyes on Perris and whispered huskily, “That’s where you’re wrong, Duke. You overstepped yourself tonight, leaving a dead man behind you.”

  Perris laughed softly. “I didn’t shoot Buckring, if that’s what the talk is. Farnick did that. He wouldn’t frame that killing on me.”

  Opal shook her head. “No, Duke. I heard the talk outside. You killed Tex Kinevan. Logan will hunt you to the ends of the earth to avenge his friend.”

  A break came in Duke Perris’s insouciant calm. His eyes shot over to Blackie Marengo and back to the girl.

  “Who says I killed Kinevan?”

  “Logan himself.”

  “That’s a damned lie. I mean, he’s bluffing, Opal. I shot Kinevan. I had to get rid of him. But my only witness was Jeb Ames and he’s blind.”

  Opal said, “But he isn’t deaf, Duke. Jeb Ames says he heard the voice of Kinevan’s murderer and he’s almost positive it was your voice. If he ever heard you speak again, Duke, the jig would be up. There isn’t a judge or jury in the land that wouldn’t take the sworn testimony of a clergyman, especially a blind clergy
man.”

  Perris dragged a sleeve across cheeks that suddenly glistened with sweat.

  “All right,” he said, desperation touching his voice. “The reason I sent for you was to get help, Opal. We’ve got to get out of Owlhorn tonight. Before this storm lets up. Is the Palace under guard yet?”

  “By now it is. Logan and the sheriff are going to search this building as soon as they get their prisoners in jail. You haven’t more than five minutes, Duke.”

  Perris took a quick turn around the floor.

  “We’ll go through the wine cellar and out the ventilator shaft, Marengo,” he told his bodyguard. “Opal, have one of the bouncers get horses for us and picket them in the ravine back of the church.”

  Opal heaved herself off the bed. At the door she turned to put her imploring eyes on Perris.

  “You—you are taking me with you, aren’t you, Duke?”

  He kissed her, with a tenderness that was rare in him. “Later. It would be best if you were around while the law is searching the Palace. Come on. We can’t be trapped upstairs.”

  They left Mitzi LaMotte’s room, going down the unlighted hall and descending the main staircase into the black pit that was the barroom. A rifle-toting guard’s shadow was on the colored-glass windows in the Main Street door, proof that Logan had the Palace under guard.

  Behind the bar was a trap door which opened on a short flight of steps descending to the wine cellar. Into this redolent gloom Opal and the two men groped, shivering in the dank cold of the subterranean room.

  “This is the plan,” Perris whispered, holding the girl close. “We’ve got to figure that Farnick is already burning up the telegraph lines out of Owlhorn, tipping off Yakima and Pasco and every other settlement in a hundred-mile radius of here. We can’t risk a run through Satus Pass to meet the Sacajawea down at the river landing. Our best bet is to head for the hills and lie low a few days till Logan’s manhunt cools off.”

  He felt Opal’s breast crushed against him, her shoulders tremoring. “But where then? Where?” she asked frantically.

  “Blackie tells me of a place he camped after he left Winegarten’s ranch on the river. The ruins of old Fort Rimrock on the bluff overlooking the Columbia. It’s a day’s ride from here, southeast across the Horse Heaven divide. You’ll find it on the county map in your office, Opal. Fort Rimrock. That’s where Blackie and I will wait for you to show up in a day or so with food and ammunition. Just make sure you aren’t trailed out of Owlhorn.”

  Opal left them in the wine cellar then, going back up to the barroom to look up a floor man she could trust with the all-important business of getting saddle horses ready for the fugitives.

  She was back in a few minutes, invisible in the complete darkness of the cellar.

  “Leedom will have the horses waiting beyond the church,” she whispered. “With a pair of deer rifles in the boots. When do I join you, Duke?”

  “Not tomorrow. You’ll be watched. Stick around in plain sight of the town. Logan will question you. Tell him you haven’t seen me since the shoot-out tonight. I’ll be waiting for you at the fort, Opal. And depending on you.”

  She clung to Perris for a long moment, kissing him passionately. When they broke apart, conscious of Blackie Marengo’s impatient breathing in the darkness, Opal said, “You’d better go now. Logan will be certain to investigate this cellar.”

  Hooking his arm through the handles of Buckring’s carpetbag, Perris groped off into the cellar, feeling his way past tiers of beer kegs and cased liquor in storage here.

  A delivery tunnel slanted upward from the cellar, its ground-level entrance protected by a plank door locked on the inside. But attempting a getaway by that route would be too risky; if Logan had the Palace exits guarded, he would be sure not to overlook the tunnel door.

  A ventilating shaft, the roof of which was overgrown with back-lot weeds, was now directly overhead. After a moment’s bickering Marengo lifted Perris to his shoulders, heard the speculator opening the louvered vent.

  Crawling out into the weeds, Perris leaned down through the ventilator housing to give Marengo a lift out of the tunnel. In a moment they were in the open, searching the night for hostile sounds.

  The storm was abating as dawn approached, but there was still enough dust flying to obscure their flight as Perris and Marengo scuttled off up the hillside.

  Dawn’s first light was a lantern glow in the east as they passed the steepled church and continued on over the hump of the hill into the brushy ravine beyond.

  Waiting for them there in a thicket of dwarf locusts were two saddled and bridled horses on picket, a shad-bellied bay gelding and a coal-black mustang. Leedom, the Palace bouncer who had taken the horses out of a town stable, was nowhere around. As Opal had promised, the saddle scabbards were filled with .54 caliber Ballard rifles.

  Mounting the bay, Perris heard Marengo’s suspicious voice. “That bouncer trustworthy, boss? He could sell us out to the law.”

  Perris said, “Holger Leedom is as square as a section corner or Opal wouldn’t have chosen him. Besides, I’ve got too much on Leedom for him to dare a double cross.”

  They spurred out of the locust clump, day’s light beginning to show the roundabout rolling horizon. The old army outpost Marengo had recommended as a hide-out lay to the southeast, some fifty miles distant by crow flight.

  “Marengo, wait here!” Duke Perris said suddenly. “I’ve got one more chore to attend to before I leave Owlhorn behind.”

  Marengo bit out a profane protest. “If you think you can tally Logan and not draw a posse down on us—” But Perris was already gone, putting his shad-bellied bay up the ravine slope within view of the church. The spectral glow of the dust-obscured sunrise showed him the dim shape of the parsonage at the opposite corner of the churchyard, and toward that house Perris headed his mount.

  Reining up outside the fence when he came abreast of the parsonage, Perris dismounted and pulled the Ballard .54 out of its boot. In the act of climbing the fence he saw a tall, angular figure emerge from the rear door of the parsonage and walk directly toward him, one hand sliding along a rope which was held between stakes as a blind man’s guide across the yard. The rope ended at a wood-pile.

  The man was Jebediah Ames, and he was on his way to get an armful of firewood for cooking breakfast.

  Perris drew back, steadying the rifle barrel across the top rail of the fence. He slid a finger through the brass trigger guard, waiting until Jeb Ames had loaded his arms with wood and, keeping one hip on the rope guide-fence, turned to retrace his steps to the parsonage.

  For a full five seconds, Duke Perris held the blind clergyman’s back under his gunsights. When he squeezed off his shot he did not wait for the wind to sweep the powder smoke aside, but turned to snatch his horse’s reins and vault into saddle.

  He reached the uphill corner of the churchyard and was behind the shelter of a box-elder clump before he saw Dr. Nease and two women—the doctor’s wife and Alva Ames—leave the Nease house farther along the ridge to investigate the shot.

  Roiling dust clouds blotted out a picture of that group running into the churchyard toward the motionless shape of Jebediah Ames, sprawled over his armload of firewood.

  Behind that dust Duke Perris dipped down the far ravine slope to where Blackie Marengo was waiting.

  “I cashed in the chips of the only man living who could pin a murder charge on me, Blackie,” Perris said. “That’ll be a comfort in case I ever find myself behind bars in future.”

  No one was abroad in this ruddy dawn to see the two riders vanish down the ravine trail, putting Owlhorn behind them forever.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Into the Hills

  Noon of the new day found Owlhorn Valley basking under an enamel-blue sky, scoured clean by the seasonal windstorm.

  The opening of the government’s former I
ndian land for settlement was less than twenty-four hours away, and already queues of land hunters, many of them who had camped along the Rawhide for nearly a month now, had begun to form along the street in front of Gulberg’s land office.

  These homestead candidates would take turns throughout this Sunday night ahead holding their places in these lines, each family keeping a representative there.

  What the sodbusters did not know was that the Federal registrar, Gus Gulberg, would open his books tomorrow morning as an official already under arrest pending trial for attempting to defraud the government.

  The witnesses who would clinch Gulberg’s conviction in circuit court were under heavy guard at Sheriff Vick Farnick’s jailhouse, riffraff imported from distant Idaho to play their abortive roles in a land-steal plot which had been nipped in the bud only last night.

  For Cleve Logan, the morning had been spent in an exhaustive house-to-house search of Owlhorn, a manhunt which had started with the Palace Casino and had extended to the uttermost wagon camp along the river, covering every conceivable hiding-place the valley afforded.

  The hunt had yielded no trace of the missing Duke Perris or Blackie Marengo, as Logan had expected would be the case. But one thing he knew, at least—the fugitive pair had left town. Now he could only sit back and await the developments of the Territory-wide dragnet he had established by telegraph, alerting the law to cover every town and road and trail around the compass from Owlhorn. This chore had kept the local Overland Telegraph operator on duty well past dawn. Knowing Perris, Logan was skeptical of baiting the elusive promoter into any trap.

  At noon, physically spent, Logan returned from his check of the riverbank camps and retired to his room at the Pioneer House. He flung himself on his bed, fully clothed, and was asleep almost instantly.

  It was four o’clock when Logan was shaken awake by grizzled Sheriff Farnick. With the old lawman was Alva Ames, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen from weeping.