The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  “I don’t like this damned place. If you’ve got to talk with me, why here? There’s your cabin, there are other places—”

  “I like it here best, Barton dear. It stirs up sweet memories. Don’t it stir ’em up for you, too?”

  “Do you know, Amanda Grayle,” said Warbuck heavily, “someday I’m going to break your damned neck? Someday I’m going to kill you as sure—”

  “As sure as you killed—”

  “Shut up, you witch! Now, by God—” There was a sound of a scuffle but it lasted not five seconds and was followed by the found of dragging footsteps as two people fell apart, then by the dry rasping of an old woman’s throat, then by her saying in a strangling sort of voice, as though his big brutal hands were still at her throat or else some fury choked her, “You fool! You stupid, blundering fool! Don’t you know what would happen to you?”

  Warbuck laughed at her but his laugh was not convincing. A queer thing had already struck Jeff Cody: Warbuck was afraid of the old Witch Woman, mortally afraid.

  “You know perfectly well, Barton Warbuck,” she rasped out at him, “that I have written down all that I know, and that it’s put away in a safe place—and that inside ten days after I turn up missing or dead, the whole thing will come out and you—”

  “Shut up!”

  “…and you’ll hang, damn you!” snapped the old woman, using her tongue like a whip-lash.

  “If you try to drive me—”

  “I’ve driven you for more than twenty years already, haven’t I?” she taunted him.

  “Well? Even yet you haven’t told me what you want tonight. Spit it out.”

  She spat it out:

  “I want half of Charlie Carter’s gold. Half!”

  “You—”

  “Yes! I’m a black witch and a hell-cat and a viper. Anything you like, dearie. And I am going to have half of Charlie Carter’s gold.”

  “Right now you’ve got more money than you could spend, if you spent hand over fist, in ten times as long as you’ll ever live.”

  “Shucks, boy, I’ll live a hundred years yet—unless somebody kills me, and they’re all afraid to kill Amanda Grayle! Some want to keep her alive until they can find where she keeps her gold—and you’re on pins and needles if I sneeze! Because if I died—Well, you’d die right soon after, wouldn’t you, dearie?”

  “Damn you, Amanda, I don’t even know where—”

  “Don’t lie to me, Barton! You know or you wouldn’t have had Charlie killed until you did know! I know, too—Oh, there’s lots of things I know, ain’t there, Barton? I read ’em in the tea leaves—”

  “I’m going now,” said Warbuck. “I’ll see you again. I’ll talk this over—”

  “Tomorrow night, Barton.”

  “No! I’ve got—”

  “The next night, Barton?” She purred the words out at him like an old sleepy tabby cat.

  “Damn you, no! Not so soon. I—”

  “One week from tonight then, Barton. And you’d better remember. And you better pray for my good health in the meantime.”

  Jeff started to draw back, feeling that this strange meeting was at an end, and as he did so, that other, unseen person so close behind him started also to withdraw. But both were stopped by what happened next, as sudden and unexpected as an explosion. A door opened; they couldn’t see but heard it scraping the uneven floor. It was a door opening from some other part of the house, into the room where Warbuck was with the old woman of Witch Woman’s Hollow. A heavy oncoming tread crashed through the silence and made echoes in the old Pay Dirt Hotel.

  “Hello, Bart,” said Jim Ogden’s voice, ringing out as clearly as his swift steps had sounded. “Hello, Mrs. Grayle. Let’s make it a three-cornered party. I’ve been listening to you two talk old times over. And I’ve learned a thing or two I wanted to know.”

  It was a long while before Warbuck said, “Hello, Jim.” He was a man hard to upset, a man used to mastering situations and not turning tail before them. He knew himself to be a harder man than Jim Ogden, a more seasoned and a brainier and, when you came down to cases, a nervier. Jeff inched forward again; he’d like to look in on those three who were thus far but voices and invisible, antagonistic forces.

  “So you’ve been getting an earful, huh, Jim?” said Warbuck, at long last, and chuckled. Maybe the old woman was right and he was afraid of her; but certainly he wasn’t afraid of Jim Ogden. “They say, Jim,” he added after the briefest of pauses, “that knowledge is a dangerous thing!” And again he chuckled, laughed softly in fact before his mellow rumbling voice was stilled.

  “You been getting me worried lately, Warbuck,” said Ogden. “It’s been kind of hard to guess what you had in the back of your head. But it was open and shut you kept handing me the dirty work to do, and you sat back and stayed in the clear. You sent me out to knock Bob Vetch over, and I did the job. You wanted Charlie Carter out of the way, and then Bud King had to go; you stayed clear of all that, huh?”

  “Seems to me, Jim,” said Warbuck, and sounded good-humored, “that you’re stepping out of the way to brand yourself a killer. Now, if I was you, I wouldn’t do that. Not ever. Not even in the dark in my own room with the door locked. Better tie your tongue, kid. Drunk—or what?”

  “Cold sober, Warbuck. Never soberer, never colder, never thinking straighter along a straight line. You recommend a man keeping his mouth shut, do you, even alone with his door locked? Well, how about you? I’ve been listening ever since you and old lady Grayle here said howdy tonight.”

  “Well?” said Warbuck, and sounded merely amused. But Jim Ogden knew him well. Warbuck now was like a coiled spring.

  “You’ve been getting ready to knife me, Warbuck, as soon as you didn’t need me as much as you have been needing somebody to be a goat for you. I know that and I’ve known it a long spell. Just the way you were ready to kick Rick Voorhees’s carcass around, after he was slaughtered on your pay roll, you’d kick mine. Only you don’t get the chance.”

  “Me, I’m listening now,” said Warbuck. “You’re a fine talker, Jim.”

  “You murdered a man a long time ago, and this old devil woman knows all about it,” said Ogden. “Murdered, I said; and you’re scared even yet she’ll spit out the truth and hang you for it. I’ll check back on that and know all about it myself before you’re a week older.”

  “Sounds good,” admitted Warbuck, and himself sounded in better humor than ever.

  “There’s anyhow three of us,” said Ogden, and all who heard could understand that he had got his teeth into something and meant to hang on, bulldog-fashion, “who know that at last old Charlie found him a gold mine. By now it’s open and shut that a good many others, though maybe they don’t know, anyhow are doing some pretty straight guessing. You told me yourself, Warbuck, how somebody, Young Jeff Cody you thought, lammed a hunk of gold quartz in your window.”

  “I’m listening, Jim. Go ’head; I’m listening,” said Warbuck.

  “You better listen!” Jim Ogden sounded downright ugly, a man raw-nerved, meaning to go on with what he had put his hand to, knowing he might be running into danger, not caring; a Jim Ogden grown openly defiant. “Now this old dame comes to you, having you over a barrel, and says, ‘Gimme. Gimme half,’ she says. And me?”

  “Want the other half, Jim?” said Warbuck lightly.

  “Split it three ways,” said Ogden truculently. “The three of us, you and old lady Grayle and me, even Steven.”

  “Tough are you, huh, Jim?”

  “Tough as hell, Warbuck. You’ve played me for a fall guy long enough. I’m horning in on the good things just like you. Think what you’d do in my boots. Savvy? That’s me.”

  “I savvy, Jim. Well, I got to be getting along. Suppose we ride.”

  “While beans are being spilled,” said Ogden curtly, “why not slit the bag? I heard anothe
r thing or two, listening in. You’re in a pretty deep and black hole, Warbuck; you’d better make a friend while you can.”

  “Yes?” said Warbuck and for the first time sounded dangerous. “What else?”

  “I know that not only this woman but a man—Doc Sharpe, that’s the name, ain’t it?—has got you by the back of the neck. And I can come pretty damn close to knowing what Sharpe’s got on you, what happened nearly twenty years ago when your daughter was born. You didn’t want that baby that came along that night. You would have strangled her—you were trying to smother her. But Doc Sharpe—”

  “Looks like I’m the unluckiest man in seven states,” grunted Warbuck. His feet shuffled, then grew still. Out of a short silence he said heavily, “I’ll talk with you two bloodsuckers later. I’m going now.”

  Again Jeff Cody began a hasty withdrawal; again the unseen and utterly unsensed person who had so stealthily followed him withdrew as hastily. Jeff moved backward, keeping his hand for guidance on the edge of the bar, keeping his eyes on the path of light straggling out from the card room where Bart Warbuck and the old woman and Jim Ogden were. He sensed, without the necessity of seeing or feeling, when he came to the door behind him which opened into the kitchen. He turned and hurried out. Slipping out through the rear door he ran a few steps, headed into the thick of the new growth of pines where they threw the blackest sheltering shadow, not meaning Warbuck or Jim Ogden or the old woman to know that still a fourth person had dropped in at the old Pay Dirt Hotel that significant night. And the fifth of the Pay Dirt’s visitors, having sped ahead of him into that same shadowy haven, was not more than a couple of yards from where he brought up when he wheeled about, waiting for the ruthless trio to go on their ways.

  It was too dark to see much; just the black bulwark of the old building and the wall of the encroaching forest.

  But sounds were all the more clear-cut. He heard steps, the creak and complaint of a door, then hushed voices.

  “Where’s your horse, Jim? Mine’s right over here,” said Warbuck.

  “Good night, boys,” said Amanda Grayle, and began laughing the way she laughed when an evil jest of fate bit somebody else. “Ride lucky, boys.”

  “She gives me the creeps,” grunted Jim Ogden. “I left my horse over by the river bank, where it’s darkest. I—” •

  There was a spit of flame and a crash of sound as a revolver, hidden in someone’s hand, made any voice other than its own of no consequence. Swiftly followed a man’s stifled outcry, then a second shot and the sound of the stricken man’s body falling into a patch of brush.

  “Barton, you hot-headed fool!” screamed the old woman.

  “Shut up, damn you,” said Warbuck’s voice, beating at ear-drums like a sledge. “Get the hell out of here on the run—and keep your mouth shut.”

  For once the old hag of Witch Woman’s Hollow gave him instant obedience; with a frightened screech she was off at a spry run. Jeff’s hand slammed down to his gun; though this was no fight of his, his gorge rose. He, no more than another, liked to stand idly by while cold-blooded murder was done. It was just then that he became conscious of yet another person close behind him; he heard the rustling of dead pine needles stirred by a quick step, and there was a smothered gasp. He whirled about, not to be taken in the rear by some other Warbuck man. As he did so he heard Warbuck rushing away; there was a crashing through the brush somewhere in the blackness, then a sudden quivering silence.

  “Who the devil are you?” Jeff muttered. “What do you want here?”

  There began a third precipitate flight. But Jeff was set on learning all he could tonight, and was of no mind to have a mystery run out on him. His gun in one hand, his other hand outstretched before him in the utter darkness, he obeyed hot impulse and dashed straight ahead after the unseen form breaking through the buck brush. There was another gasp, a sound of stumbling, and his hand struck a shoulder. His trigger finger was all set—but instantly relaxed. It was a slight form his groping left hand had found, coming by chance to rest on a gently sloping shoulder, and his fingers had been brushed by long hair.

  “Let me go, let me go!” a stifled voice demanded. “Oh, for God’s sake let me go! I can’t stand any—” He understood then, and his hard-biting fingers slackened somewhat but he did not altogether let her go.

  “It’s you?” he said wonderingly. “You, Arlene?”

  “And you’re Jeff? Oh, Jeff! I—I—” She began sobbing. “Let me go, Jeff! Let me go!”

  He came very close to letting her have her way. Then he thought better of it.

  “No, Arlene. Wait a minute. You’re not going yet.” She began beating at him with small, hard fists. He jerked her close and locked her within the embrace of his arm, making her wild struggling so futile that a moment later she gave it up and sagged against him, the small strength gone out of her.

  Chapter Eight

  “You come with me,” said Jeff.

  “No!” said Arlene, and grew violent again. “No!”

  “But you will. First, we’ve got to see about Jim Ogden, whether he’s dead—”

  “I don’t care if he is! What is he, what are the rest? They’re all just killers, murderers, snakes. They’re beasts. My own father—”

  “Grow up,” snapped Jeff angrily. “A man within ten steps of us is maybe dying. Anyhow we’ve got to see.”

  “I don’t care, I tell you! Let me go!”

  “Oh, hell,” growled Jeff in disgust, and let her go. He even shoved her away from him so that she tripped in the dark and fell. He paid no attention to her after that; he found matches, struck one, and went groping for Jim Ogden.

  When he found Ogden he supposed him dead, yet could not be sure. So he dragged him the short distance to the old hotel’s rear door, dragged him on inside and let him lie there, while he hurried, striking other matches, into the barnlike barroom, through it and into the room where Warbuck and Amanda Grayle and Jim Ogden had talked. As he hoped, he found a candle. He lighted this, stuck it on the bar, and came back to Ogden. And now he found Ogden sitting up crookedly, propped against the bar, one side of his face red with blood that shone glintingly in the candlelight, the fingers of one lax hand red and making a dark pool in a little hollow in the worn floor.

  “So you’re alive after all, are you, Jim?” said Jeff as one not greatly concerned yet naturally interested in an unexpected phenomenon.

  “Am I bleeding to death?” demanded the wounded man. “Can you somehow stop me from bleeding, Jeff?”

  “Why the hell should I?” said Jeff, and an old anger sent its hot flame searing through him. “You killed Bob Vetch; you killed Charlie Carter and I saw you swing Bud King. What do I care if you bleed to death?”

  “If that’s the way you feel about it—” Jim Ogden began tearing at his shirt, trying to get a strip of cloth out of it that would do for a bandage. The strength left in him was no greater than a kitten’s. He swayed slightly a moment, then began gradually settling lopsidedly, and of a sudden spilled his lank form out on the floor again, thumping down into unconsciousness that was next door to death.

  Jeff looked him over with the candle set in its own drippings at his side lending an inadequate, draft-drawn light. A bullet had grooved Ogden’s skull an inch over his left ear; another had drilled him in the upper body, perhaps splintering the shoulder blade. Left for dead by an over-confident Warbuck who had shot him twice across a mere four or five feet of distance, he still had his chance to live. To live, thought Young Jeff grimly, and go on making better men like Bob Vetch and Bud King stop living.

  “Is—is he dead?” said Arlene in a thin, choking whisper. Jeff finished clumsily, haphazardly the job Jim Ogden had started, ripping Ogden’s shirt, making bandages; they’d partly check the blood flow. He was thinking, “I don’t know what to do with him. Damn him, let him die anyhow. But Still Jeff might know. Or old Bill.”

>   He straightened up, his hands red, and stood frowning down at the scarcely breathing man stretched out so loosely at his feet.

  Arlene came closer, trembling and hesitant, half dead herself with fright and horror.

  “Jeff! You answer me! Is he—is he g-going to die? Is he dead already?”

  “How the hell do I know?” he said roughly. “He ought to be.” And then he realized that after all Arlene hadn’t run off. He said, and his voice sounded troubled, “I’m no doctor. I can’t let him lie on the floor like this. There used to be a bed in the room just beyond the old card room. I’ll take him in there. You run over and get my dad. Get old Bill Morgan, too. Tell ’em both that I want them in a hurry. Tell ’em Ogden’s all shot to hell.”

  “I’ll go, Jeff, I’ll run.”

  He had been only dimly conscious of her nearness; he didn’t even hear the light quick patter of her running feet. Carrying the candle, he went looking for the long disused bed in the nearby room; he found it and looked down on it frowningly. It was still there; that was one thing. It was solid mahogany and had laughed at the years. An old mildewed, rotting mattress was still on it; as he touched the thing little puffs of dust like baby ghosts floated upward. Put a man with raw wounds there, he thought, and all that stuff will get into his blood and kill him sure. So he went back to Jim Ogden and stood looking down at him frowningly and awaited the coming of Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill.

  Still Jeff was the first to arrive, a lantern swinging at his side, his old rifle tucked snugly under his arm. He stalked in, looked at his son with a pair of hawk eyes, then shed his lantern light on the white, blood-streaked face of Jim Ogden. Having pondered a moment, he committed himself to the extent of a grunt. Not just an everyday, ordinary and commonplace grunt, but one that said a pretty good deal. Thereafter he lifted up his shaggy brows to look at Jeff again. It was as good as saying: “Well? What about it? Be better if he was dead, wouldn’t it?”

  Then Arlene came running, and close at her heels, carrying a lantern and cuddling a rifle, came old Red Shirt Bill. Arlene, her tragic hands at her breast, stood transfixed at the door. Old Bill came stamping in; his eyes disposed of Still Jeff with a flick, went swiftly to Young Jeff, then drifted down to the unconscious and altogether dead-looking Jim Ogden. Old Bill snorted like a horse about to run away.