Jim Saddler 2

by Gene Curry

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  When Jim Saddler first laid eyes on Jessie James, he thought she was a boy. On closer examination, he realized that he’d made a big mistake. Jessie was all woman, sweet as a prairie flower and deadly as a mountain lion.

  Jessie claimed to be the daughter of the late outlaw Jesse James. She had a crazy scheme for picking up his career when he’d left off – and that scheme included Saddler!

  JIM SADDLER 2: WILDCAT WOMAN

  By Gene Curry

  First Published by Tower Books in 1979

  Copyright © 1979, 2016 by Peter McCurtin

  First Smashwords Edition: November 2016

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Cover image © 2015 by Edward Martin

  Check out Ed’s work here

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  Editor’s Note

  There’s a very good reason why you might experience a sense of déjà vu whilst reading this book. When Peter McCurtin (writing as ‘Gene Curry’) came to write it, he chose to revisit an earlier novel, the Carmody western Screaming on the Wire (also available from Piccadilly Publishing). He changed the names of his characters and swapped a man who believed he was the son of Billy the Kid for a girl who believed she was the daughter of Jesse James. There are plenty of other changes along the way, and about 20,000 additional words.

  However, such is the strength of the story (possibly the very best in McCurtin’s long and prolific career), not to mention the author’s superb, hard-boiled style of writing (in which he constantly throws out lines that even Raymond Chandler would take pride in) that it’s hard not to read the book all over again.

  McCurtin was a true writer’s writer. You can read more about him at my own website, here, or check him out at the official Piccadilly Publishing website, here.

  Now – read on … and enjoy!

  Ben Bridges

  Chapter One

  It’s been a few years now and the miles have rolled away behind me, but I’ll never forget her as long as I live. Now and then I see some girl and am reminded of her, and for a minute I feel that somehow she’s still alive—that I could find her again if only I tried hard enough. That, of course, isn’t possible.

  I guess I loved and hated her at the same time; that’s how it was with us. I don’t know how much love and how much hate went into it—a lot. The nights we had in bed together are still something to remember. The first night she climbed into my bed she had come straight from a long hot bath with delicately scented lilac soap. Her lithe young body was still slightly damp when she slid under the covers and I reached for her.

  She had yellow hair the color of wheat, pale blue eyes; and at twenty she could have been taken for fifteen. She told me who she was, but I wasn’t sure that I believed her. Where she came from I never really knew. None of it mattered, at least not in the beginning.

  Now I’ve known my share of women, but never one like this woman-child. Other men wanted her and other men had her before I met her, but after that, there were just the two of us.

  All my life I’ve been a drifter, a gambler, a troubleshooter—anything that pays a buck—but even after all that knocking around, from British Columbia to the Mexican border, I still wasn’t prepared for Jessie.

  Few men would be.

  Her eyes were so pale they often reminded me of a cat’s eyes. They seemed to look at you from some place you couldn’t reach. Sometimes we’d be making love and suddenly I’d look at her, and there would be those eyes staring at me.

  Then, too, there was something of the cat about her soft, smooth, young body. Like all beautiful cats she was selfish, wanting what she wanted, but when she got it she went back to being affectionate.

  After our first night together—and it lasted until first light was breaking—she warned me that what had happened between us didn’t mean anything. She seemed to be disappointed when I said I didn’t mind. It had been a long, sweet night—and what more could a man want.

  I guess that made her angry. She was always testing a man, trying to see how far she could go with him. If you loved her she said she didn’t care about love; if you didn’t she begged to be loved.

  Oh yes, she was a handful!

  She was difficult, quick-tempered, hard-to-please, and always beautiful—though you could hardly call her a lady no matter how hard you tried. She was full of contradictions, and if you wanted her to share your bed you had to put up with them.

  Just to have her in your bed was worth just about anything; later you might regret some of it—but not at the time you were making love to her. When she really got excited during lovemaking, she would leap like a young trout, and you had to fight hard to control her.

  Making love to her was something of a battle; Jessie always wanted to be the winner, in or out of bed. She wanted to be somebody but wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Other women didn’t understand her, especially in that time and place. Women were meant to bear children and keep house; of course Jessie scorned the idea.

  There was no future for us; we both knew that from the beginning, though at times we pretended it wasn’t so. But there was no getting around it: we were bad for each other. On the other hand, it’s possible that Jessie would be bad for any man.

  There was no way any man could have tamed her; the wildness in her was always there, right under the skin. Other women on the frontier—Belle Starr, Calamity Jane, Little Britches—had done what Jessie only talked about doing, but they had paid a high price for it.

  But Jessie was different from all the others; she was positive of that. She was smarter, tougher, more ambitious than anyone you could name.

  I guess she was.

  But at times she would seem almost scared, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next; as if she couldn’t control what was going to happen next.

  It scared her and I didn’t feel too good about it either.

  Yet, there she was: Jessie with her yellow hair and pale blue eyes. There was nobody ever quite like her and that’s probably a good thing for mankind.

  I could never really get accustomed to her changes of mood. I knew it was hopeless trying to understand her so I didn’t try.

  She was what she was.

  We were never introduced. I saved her life; that was how we happened to meet. Would I have saved her life if I knew how dangerous she was going to turn out to be? I can’t answer that because I don’t … Well, yes, I do know. I probably would.

  But dangerous she was, as dangerous as they come, man or woman. It was hard to believe at first, principally because I didn’t want to believe it, I suppose. But there was no mistaking it as time went on.

  She knew what I was thinking and tried to steer me away from it because, above all, she was determined to survive. First and last, that was all that mattered to Jessie.

  Against all hopes, I knew how it would have to end. I would have to kill her.

  And I did.

  Chapter Two

  It’s a long ride from Goldfield, New Mexico to Dade County, Arizona; and I was almost there when I ran into these three men trading bullets in the desert. The first one was shooting back at the other two. The two with the rifles were waiting out the othe
r feller, counting on the fierce blaze of the sun to fry his brains, figuring he’d probably do something desperate when he was down to his last few shells.

  I was a long way back when I heard the first rattle of gunfire. It went on for a while, and then there was nothing but silence. An hour or so later, riding easy in the heat, I topped a ridge and spotted the little feller lying behind a dead cow pony, the sun flashing on his nickeled revolver in his hand.

  If the two riflemen had given me the chance, I would have ridden away from there. After all, it wasn’t my fight. I could see their point though: I could be a friend of the little man with the shiny gun.

  That was how they saw it. Both rifles cut loose from the cover of some rocks, and for a second I thought I’d never get a chance to know who’d kill me.

  I don’t know why I wasn’t shot out of the saddle because I made a good target, outlined as I was against the top of that ridge. But they fired too fast, and by the time they did it more carefully, I was out of the saddle and pushing my horse down the safe side of the ridge.

  Flat on my belly, I pushed the Winchester over the rim, looking for something to shoot at. By then the little man behind the dead pony was firing again, and from the sound of the gun I could tell that he was using a small caliber pistol. Not that it made any difference—at that range even a Colt with a nine-inch Buntline barrel wouldn’t have done any good.

  I fired at a face under a floppy hat, but if I hit him he didn’t holler. A bullet from his friend spattered sand in my face. I yelled and pulled back out of sight. Both of them had better cover than I did, and if I showed my head often enough I was likely to lose it.

  Out of sight, staying low, I ran along the safe side of the ridge. The shooting started again, the sharp crack of the pistol, the heavy crash of the rifles.

  I shucked my hat when I was fifty yards along the back of the ridge. That part of the ridge was studded with rocks, and from where I was I could see the rifleman on the left, not all of him, just the top of his floppy hat and a wedge of shoulder behind a rock.

  The man they were trying to kill looked more like a kid than a man. He had to be small or the dead pony wouldn’t have given him that much cover. Small but determined—at that distance there wasn’t much more to tell.

  Now the two riflemen were shouting back and forth, trying to figure out who I was. The kid opened up with another cylinder of small caliber bullets, and I wondered what he was doing in dangerous country without a rifle.

  The two shooters must have decided I was done for, because now they were concentrating on the kid. They threw a storm of lead at the kid and when he yelled, they jumped up and started running. One was lighter on his feet, and he was out in front. I jerked the Winchester to my shoulder and fired. The first bullet winged him but didn’t knock him down. Following his run, I fired again, and he dived away from where he thought the next bullet would hit. That was a mistake. I shot him like a bird on the wing. The .44-40 knocked him over in a tangle of arms and legs, and when he got through doing his death dance he smacked into the ground and lay still.

  The other man whirled and started firing back at me. It didn’t do him any good. Steadying the Winchester, I put two bullets through his chest. He was a heavy man, and the two bullets didn’t knock him over. All he did was sag, then sag some more, and I shot him again for good luck.

  The war was over for everybody but the kid. He came up from behind the dead pony holding a sawed-off shotgun. I yelled at him to take it slow, but he kept on coming. I couldn’t see much of his face because of the big hat he was wearing. He was closer to the dead men than I was. I didn’t want to run into a double-barreled, so I let him have his head.

  Raising the sawed-off, he fired one barrel and made mush of the first corpse. He did the same to the other. I started down from the ridge and warned him to stop the shooting. He didn’t do any more shooting, and he didn’t drop the guns.

  Then I was close enough to get a good look at him. Well, sir, you could have knocked me over when I saw that the he was a she, a good looking she at that, even if the thin face had a mean twist to it.

  Yellow hair peeped out from under the big hat; the pale blue eyes would have been pretty if not for the hard look in them. The figure was slight but well made, in striped pants, uncreased gray Stetson, red shirt, Mexican vest. An ordinary gunbelt would have gone around her twice; the one she wore, a fancy rig with silver studs, had been shortened to make it fit. The handgun in the holster was a .38 Colt Lightning double-action.

  I got no thanks for risking my life.

  “Who asked you to mix into this?” she said in a hard voice that wasn’t quite as hard as she wanted it to sound.

  “Next time I won’t,” I said.

  “I could have handled them.”

  “Sure you could.”

  There was a slight flesh wound in her right arm; a little blood ran down the arm to the hand.

  “Here comes the rest of them,” she said. “You’d better get out of here.”

  I turned and there was a cloud of dust back in the distance, not too far back. They would be there in about ten minutes. A lot of them by the size of the dust cloud.

  “You want to stay or go?” I asked her.

  “You mean you’d let me ride double?”

  Suspicion and surprise showed in her eyes. I don’t know where this young lady was brought up, but it sure as hell wasn’t any finishing school.

  “It’s been heard of,” I said.

  “I don’t owe you a thing, mister—remember that.”

  I whistled for my horse. Seen from the top of the ridge, the dust cloud was beginning to take shape. I put her up first because I didn’t want her behind me with that .38.

  “Hang on as best you can, kid,” I said.

  For thanks I got: “Don’t call me kid.”

  I had been riding north when the shooting started; as best I knew, John Wingate’s boundary line would be about five miles from where we were. The six-day ride from New Mexico had taken some of the ginger out of my horse, and it took spurs to get the gray gelding running.

  Between us we weighed three hundred pounds, and that’s a lot for a tired horse to carry. We were moving off at a fair clip when the girl asked, “Hey, where are we going?”

  That was how she was—a real strange one.

  Now me, I wouldn’t be that particular because if a stranger picked me up half dead in the desert and said we were going to Canada I wouldn’t argue about it. I told her to shut up or fall off.

  Another ridge stuck up about a mile away, and the gelding ran easier after we crossed it. Down from there the country ran flat all the way to John Wingate’s wire.

  I figured they would stop to look at the bodies. Or maybe they wouldn’t, not all of them. Most likely, one man would stop to look at the bodies while the others chased us. They wouldn’t spot our dust till they came over the first ridge; after that they would ride like hell.

  I had to ease up on my horse; the big gelding was acting spooky. Some horses act that way when they’re tired. I wasn’t sure that it was; maybe it was the hard-eyed woman he was carrying. I spoke to the animal but instead of settling down, he took off on a wild, half-bucking run. The gut-ripping spikes of a big yucca came at us like a runaway locomotive, and I don’t know how I managed to turn the horse, but I did.

  The wind came out of him like a broken bellows, but he kept running. Twisting in the saddle, I saw them coming, not much more than a mile back, and traveling fast. If the gelding went down we were as good as dead. Everything I had ever learned in my thirty-three years of living told me to shuck the girl. Doing that might not put me in the clear; it would give me a better chance than the one I had now.

  Why I didn’t do it, I just don’t know.

  We were still about three miles from Wingate’s property line, and the gelding was beginning to falter; soon it would be time to make a stand, for what it was worth.

  I coaxed another mile from the gelding, all the time looking for cove
r and hoping I’d find it.

  Up ahead there was a shallow gully, but the way into it was littered with rocks; the gelding would never get through without breaking a leg. I jumped down while we were still moving and pulled the girl after me, and that made her curse like a muleskinner.

  Now the bullets were coming like lead bees, getting closer as the range grew shorter. A push sent the girl rolling over the top of the gully. I dived after her. Down there were plenty of sharp rocks, and we both came up badly bruised.

  The rocks slowed down our pursuers, not much though, and they were coming in fast when I shot the first man out of the saddle. I shot another man without killing him. A spooked horse broke a leg and went down screaming, and the rider joined in when the horse fell on him. I shot the horse, then the man.

  Their fire weakened as they moved back to whatever cover they could find. I kept my head down and let them shoot. They spread out, some keeping me pinned down while the others took up their positions.

  That was just the start of it. The gully was fine cover, but not for just one man and a girl; before long they would circle out wide and come in behind us.

  The sun was at the hottest point of the day; in the gully it was hot enough to fry an egg on a rock. I could hear them moving out there, the clack of metal against rock, the jingle of spurs. Two of them were dead, another wounded, and that left nine or ten, more than enough to finish us.

  I looked at the girl, and she glared back at me. She had the sawed-off and the .38 ready; no fear showed in her eyes.

  Then they were at it again. Rifles opened up, laying down heavy fire; that meant the others were running. I swung the Winchester, and a bullet touched my scalp like a hot feather. I squeezed the trigger and one of the runners died on his feet. The girl killed another with the .38, but it took three shots—damn good shooting with a small caliber handgun at that distance. The attackers threw themselves flat in the dust.

  Lying on my back under the rim of the gully, I reloaded the Winchester. Out on the flat they were moving again, this time crawling instead of running. I told the girl to watch the other side; the rush, when it came, would be from two sides.