The Third Western Megapack

by Barker, S. Omar

  Cursing as he sleeved blood from the head-gash out of his eyes, Price jumped from cover to throw more lead poisoning into the kitchen. The back door was slammed against the wall as somebody beat it outside. No more shots came from the kitchen.

  Curtis wheeled to the front once more. Yucca was shouting and waving down the trail outside the ranchyard. A posse, marshals’ badges glittering on their shirts, was pounding in, already throwing down on the gun pack in front. Curtis, primed to eat fire now, found his one gun empty. He had thumbed in a few fresh shells hurriedly before. Now he fumbled at the job with his injured left hand.

  “Smoke!” Vin Price’s sharp voice stabbed through the racket of guns. He, too, was reloading. “Down in the corner!”

  It was the door of the end room beyond the kitchen, the bedroom where Brunnermann had gone. Now it was opened a scant few inches. A gun muzzle was at the crack. Behind it glittered Slip Brunnermann’s eyes. His guffaw came as he realized both men had empty guns.

  Curtis drew back his arm and let fly with his heavy .45. Brunnermann fired, but his aim was distracted and the bullet missed. The big weapon hit the door panel and skidded across it, catching Brunnermann on the shoulder, knocking him off balance.

  Rushing at him, Smoke Curtis grabbed the whisky jug from the table and hurtled that at the open door. It caught Brunnermann across the knees as he tried to level again. He stumbled. And before he could slam shut the door, the onrushing Curtis seized a chair and let go with that. It smashed the door all the way open.

  * * * *

  Brunnermann had dropped one gun. He stabbed down for his other one in its hip holster. But Smoke Curtis was stopping for nothing that day. All the pent-up fury in him was demanding release now.

  Grabbing a knife off a plate as he passed, he rounded the table and sprang. A sweep of his arm and Brunnermann’s face was laid wide open under an eye, down across the jaw, and to the neck. Another plunge of the arm and the knife ripped deep into Slip Brunnermann’s left arm that held the second gun. It clattered to the floor.

  Smoke Curtis went to work even as Price shouted at him to stand clear and let him shoot. Though one of his own arms was useless, Curtis lifted Brunnermann off his feet and threw him against the wall of the main room. Dropping to his knees, the dazed lobo leader plucked a derringer from a coat pocket. Curtis’ boot swung. The kick smashed into Slip’s wrist and the gun was flung away.

  Very purposefully, Smoke Curtis lifted the vicious little killer, the man who had ordered the cold-blooded murder of Deputy Hanning back on the Wagon Wheel trail. He laid him back over the edge of the table.

  “I could kill yuh, Brunnermann,” the sheriff panted. “But I’d rather see yuh hang. So would yore victims.”

  A gun popped once down by the creek. It was all suddenly silent in contrast to the last few minutes. And in that silence there was the rattle of a spur chain from the top of the stairs. Stan Bridger was crouched up there, steadying a gun through the railing. When they had tossed him into that room before and locked it, they had been too hurried to note that it had a second door connecting it with the room behind.

  “All right,” he called down huskily. “Yuh’re still hostages! Tell ’em to stay out, them John Laws. I go free, or I’ll blast yuh!”

  “That hogleg happens to be empty,” Price stated calmly.

  Stan Bridger hesitated, unsure, eyes twisting down to the gun. He had picked it off the hall floor where it had been dropped by the gunman Curtis had bowled down the stairs. And in that split second, with a superb exhibition of raw nerve, Price whipped his gun to level and pulled a snap-shot.

  He couldn’t be accurate at that speed. His shot hit the handrail beside Bridger. A splinter flew from it and sliced him over the forehead. Stan Bridger had been a tinhorn, a brow-beater, and he lacked real nerve. He thought he was really shot.

  Dropping his Colts, he threw up his hands, rearing to his knees, mouthing that he surrendered. He did it so quickly he lost his balance and came sliding down the stairs.

  “Are yuh all right in there?” A tall man built like a fence-post, trailed by a deputy marshal, was leaping in through the front door. Beyond him, four-five of the Brunnermann gun-wolves stood with hands lifted under the guns of the posseman.

  As the lanky man came in the doorway, the still panting Smoke Curtis recognized him as Harry Windson, rated as one of the smartest U. S. Marshals in the Southwest. Windson looked around the wrecked room, smiled, then strode over to Vin Price hand outstretched.

  “Well, Sells, you did it again, I see,” Windson said.

  Sells. The name rang a bell in Smoke Curtis’ brain. Then he almost reeled with astonishment. The famed Hellfire Sells who’d been reported coming into the Wagon Wheel country. This so-called Price was him!

  * * * *

  The loose ends had been cleaned up. The last Brunnermann man had been run down and caught. Slip Brunnermann himself, now handcuffed for a change, sat slumped in a corner, staring woodenly at the floor. Upstairs, they had located old Matt Bridger in a room, bare of furniture, whose windows had been boarded up on the inside. He had been chained to a ring in the floor. Emaciated, gasping for water, and weak from repeated floggings, he had been given some grub and put in a bed, too weak to be moved. A sawbones would be brought out from town for him.

  Curtis and a bleak-smiling Hellfire Sells, the one-time Price, and a few other marshals were seated around the table, washing away the acrid taste of gunpowder with a couple of drinks.

  Smoke Curtis, still half stunned to find himself alive, was getting things explained to him. Sells had explained that the government officers had been enabled to step into the case when Brunnermann made the mistake of stopping a stage carrying government mail some months ago. The man posing as a Brand County deputy who’d brought in Sells pretending he was Vin Price, a horsethief, was a deputy marshal, of course.

  “But I already had Brunnermann behind bars—or, at least, I thought I did,” Sheriff Curtis put in, baffled.

  Sells nodded, going on in his quiet unassuming manner. “Yes. But we weren’t sure of that because the Law never did get an accurate description of the man. We had a hunch he might have a substitute posing as him. Besides, we wanted to locate his hideout so we could grab the whole pack.”

  He went on to relate how, up in his cell, he had fed the Brunnermann men the tale of the gold cache. Sells had figured that perhaps they might give him the name of one of the bunch outside to communicate with. Then that man could be followed back to the hideout. Instead, there had been the jailbreak.

  “We knew that might happen, since Brunnermann had busted out of so many jails,” Sells said. “So we had marshals posted on the trails outside of Wagon Wheel just in case. The outlaws took me with them because they wanted to get that gold I’d talked about.”

  From that point on, it had just been a case of playing out the game. He explained those bright rifle shells he had habitually flipped and dropped. They were trail markings to his fellow marshals picking up the trail. A couple of times he had even contrived to get a scribbled note wadded in the shell.

  Smoke Curtis sucked in his breath as he appreciated now why this Hellfire Sells enjoyed such renown as a man-hunter.

  “Then, it was just a case of going with Brunnermann till he ultimately reached his hideout?” Curtis asked, and when Sells nodded curtly, he added, “You knew yuh might be killed, of Course.

  “Men die every day,” Sells answered without any bravado.

  Then Curtis’ face tightened. “But yuh did gun my deputy, George Flowers, back there last night when he might have escaped.”

  Flowers had been found a little while ago out in the corral, shot through the head when he tried to get himself a horse to escape.

  “Flowers was a wanted man,” Sells said. “He was a deputy up in Montana and used to take bribes to let wan
ted men slip through his hands.” Little wiry Sells shrugged. “His pulling that fool move—knowing too you might have been shot—gave me the break I’d been looking for, the chance to put myself in with the outlaws. It did. Once I had guns back in my holster, the rest was simple.” The three faint shots earlier had been the signal of the posse when they closed in.

  When Sells had lifted his hat high off out on the porch, it was the signal to a distant watcher with binoculars that he was ready to play his hand.

  Smoke Curtis rose and put out his hand. “Sells, you pack more nerve than any man I ever met,” he said simply but earnestly.

  Sells made a sheepish grimace. “Forget it. My luck’s good. And I think we’ll still call the prisoner yores, Sheriff. After all, yuh’ve got a murder charge over him.”

  “Thanks,” the sheriff said. That made him feel a heap better. He could still finish out his term with honor.

  Sells stood up and shook the sheriff’s hand again then. “Shucks, after all, you actually recaptured him yourself—walk-ing into his guns unarmed like that. We marshals like to have local lawmen of yore breed around, Curtis. Reckon they don’t call yuh Smoke because yuh consume a heap of tobacco.”

  Smoke Curtis glowed deep inside then, for he could feel the respect of this tough-minded little gent who was rated one of the greatest executors of the law in the whole Southwest. As Curtis watched him walk to the door, he wondered how he could ever have believed Sells was the meek, beaten horsethief he’d looked.

  “And yuh’re one danged fine actor,” Curtis called grinning.

  Then he turned toward Brunnermann for the ride back to jail. There would be no snaky bunch to snag him out of the jailhouse this time.

  SIXGUN AND PENCIL LEAD, by Ben Frank

  Marty DeLong was nobody’s fool—even if old Zim Yager, the sheriff, said he was. Maybe Marty didn’t know when not to draw pictures, but he did know when to keep his mouth shut. He didn’t argue with old Zim. Instead, he unpinned the deputy’s badge from his shirt and laid it on the sheriff’s desk.

  Zim turned the badge over in his horny fingers, emptied a stream of tobacco juice into a dented spittoon and shoved up on his Stubby legs.

  “Hang it, Marty,” he fumed, “if yuh’d stuck to business, I wouldn’t be rippin’ the hide off yuh an’ firin’ yuh like this! But when a deputy gets to drawin’ mountains and sunsets instead of keepin’ his eyes an’ ears peeled for a owlhooter, it’s time to do somethin’ about it.”

  “I know,” Marty said unhappily. “But, Zim, you got no idea how that sunset looked over old Flattop. There was some clouds an’—”

  The rising color in Zim Yager’s leathery face stopped him.

  “Clouds and sunsets!” Zim bellowed. His shaking fingers lifted a square of paper from the desk. On it was the drawing which Marty DeLong had been making when the masked bandit had slipped up behind him.

  “I’m gonna frame this an’ hang it above my desk,” the sheriff went on hoarsely. “Ever’ time I look at it, I’ll know better’n to hire me another deputy with a talent for drawin’ pictures!”

  Marty DeLong turned toward the door. He was a medium-sized hombre in his early twenties, with a lean, brown face and a pair of sensitive gray eyes. This was it, he knew. The end of his chance to prove to old Zim and Katy, Zim’s daughter, that he could do something besides draw pictures.

  “So long, Zim,” he said hollowly, and went out into the street.

  He lifted his eyes to the small house next to the jail, and saw Katy standing framed in the doorway. Zim’s daughter was a rather small girl, pretty and warmeyed, with fine features and a crown of light brown hair that was almost golden in the afternoon sunlight. Her blue eyes were fixed on Marty’s shirt where he’d worn the deputy’s badge until a few minutes ago.

  She didn’t say anything.

  He moved toward her uncertainly, stopped and twisted his big hat in his fingers.

  “You’re a picture, Katy,” he said softly. “The sun on your hair an’—”

  “You think too much about pictures, Marty,” she interrupted. Then she smiled, but it was an unhappy smile. “I’m sorry, Marty, but—” her voice broke, and she turned and ran back into the house.

  Marty knew what she’d intended to say, and inside he felt as empty as an old, discarded and wornout boot. Katy was through with him, not because she wanted to be, but because she was a sensible girl. She knew better than to get tied up with someone like him who couldn’t stick to business when there was beauty in the sky and he had a sheet of paper and a pencil in his hands. Blindly he stumbled across the street to where he’d left his pinto groundhitched in front of Appleton’s Feed Store.

  Some people said old Zim Yager had been a fool to give Marty DeLong the deputy job in the first place. Others said Zim was smart, for almost everybody liked Marty, and even if he wasn’t much good with a sixgun, he got along fine with the boys who liked to ride into Cat-tail Springs on payday and shoot the corner street lights out.

  A few tongue-waggers said that Zim had given the job to Marty because of Katy; Zim wanting to prove for once and all that Marty was, or was not, made of the stuff that a girl like Katy should marry.

  But as things stood now, Marty knew he’d muffed his chance. All because of his fool passion for drawing pictures.

  * * * *

  Ever since he’d been able to hold a A pencil in his fingers, he’d been drawing pictures. They were pretty good, too, even those first ones, and as Marty grew older, his drawings got better. People, around Cat-tail Springs admitted he was good, and got quite a kick out of having him sketch their houses and barns and saddle horses and, now and then, themselves.

  But most everybody allowed that Marty wasted too much time with a paper and pencil, and that he wouldn’t amount to shucks. They said that if he’d spend more time drawing water for his small string of cattle instead of drawing pictures, he’d be better off in the long run. Which was all true enough, but Marty had to draw pictures just as some people have to play the fiddle, or bet on horse races.

  Marty reached his pinto, tossed the reins over the animal’s arched neck and caught hold of the saddle horn.

  “Hi’ya, deputy,” a voice drawled, and Marty turned slowly to face the speaker.

  “Chillie” Walrath stood with one wide shoulder against Ed Trotter’s barber pole. A smirk tugged at one side of his handsome face, and there was a malicious gleam in his frosty eyes.

  Chillie was one hombre that Marty never got along with. Even when they were kids, they’d had trouble. And then Katy Yager came into the picture, making things worse between them. Especially when Katy began to show a preference for Marty.

  Chillie lifted himself away from the barber pole and hooked his thumbs under his wide gunbelt. He had big hands. Hands that knew their way around the slick handle of his Colt.

  “What’s this I hear about the masked bandit catchin’ yuh asleep an’ tyin’ yuh up, Marty?” He grinned.

  Marty let his eyes run over Chillie’s long frame. He remembered back to the fights they’d had when they were kids. Chillie always got the better of him then. He wondered if the man still could lick him bare-fisted. His eyes rested on Chillie’s sixgun. Chillie could shoot, too. He’d proved that the time he’d had trouble with a couple of hombres in a card game. Marty couldn’t out-gun him, there was no doubt about that.

  “I got tied up, all right,” Marty answered tightly. “But I reckon that owlhooter’s days are numbered. As soon as I get a little time, I’m goin’ to set a trap for him.”

  Walrath’s grin widened.

  “I reckon yuh’ll have plenty of time,” he said. “I see yuh ain’t wearin’ yore badge.”

  “I’ll be wearin’ it again!” Marty retorted. He swung into the saddle. “Don’t ever forget it. I ain’t through with that masked owlhooter. The last laugh is al
ways best!”

  “Don’t let him tie yuh up again,” Chillie sneered. “Next time he might tie yuh by the neck. Tight.”

  Chillie’s laughter followed Marty along the street. Marty felt his face burn, and a deep anger stirred him. That’s the way it was when he met up with Chillie Walrath, a tight feeling hitting him in the pit of his stomach, stirring up his anger and making him talk too much.

  Now he cursed himself for boasting that he’d set a trap for the masked bandit and wear the deputy’s badge again. The fact was, things had happened so fast the night before that Marty had only the haziest memory of the bandit’s appearance. And as for wearing the badge again, he reckoned he didn’t have a chance. Not the way he’d muffed things.

  For some time, the masked bandit had been operating in Pinto County, always striking with a quickness that dazed his victims so that they were never able to describe him clearly. He’d turned peaceful Pinto County into a place of terror.

  “Marty,” old Zim Yager had said, “sneak out to Cutter’s Pass an’ lay for that jasper. If yuh spot him, shoot to kill. I’ll plant myself in Butte Pass. Sooner or later, he’ll strike again in one place or the other.”

  Marty rode to Cutter’s Pass, hid his horse in a wooded gully and stationed himself among the tumbled boulders along the trail. But the setting sun with the clouds ruffling up behind Flattop Mountain made him forget his mission. He spread a sheet of paper on a boulder, dug out a pencil stub and started to sketch the scene before him.

  He didn’t hear or see a thing until the swish of a rope jerked him to his feet. And then it was too late. The rope pinned his arms to his sides. The next thing he knew, he was bound and gagged.