Jornado (An E.R. Slade Western Read online

  Blake Dixon raped and killed Clint Evans’ wife. Clint’s whole life is now about making Dixon pay. Felipe Gonzalez becomes his best lead to Dixon’s whereabouts; but after Felipe’s family is killed and he starts relishing his own revenge against the one man who may actually know where Dixon is, Clint is repelled by Felipe’s grisly plans and has to decide whether or not to help Felipe get his revenge in order to have a chance at his own.

  JORNADO

  By E. R. Slade

  First published by Manor Books in 1979

  Copyright © 1979, 2016 by Bruce Clark

  First Smashwords Edition: March 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.

  Cover image © 2015 by Edward Martin

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

  Chapter One

  Under the star-speckled sky, Dead Flats, ghost town, was just broken shapes. There was not a sound but what the wind made. The place was emptier than any piece of desert, except for the Presence.

  The Presence stalked the empty street, peered from the window and door openings making them seem blacker than eye holes in a skull, rustled with the wind in loose shingles, thumped with unseen untethered shutters, and surrounded the lone rider like a fog.

  Clint Evans rode slowly, carefully, his eyes watchful of the night. His concern was not with the Presence, but with the possible threat of singing lead. Clint never rode into a meeting like this without plenty of care. Twice in the past he’d nearly lost his life in crossfire.

  In the blackness of a saloon’s door opening, there was the slightest movement. Clint swung the barrel of his Winchester that way and drifted his mount into the deeper shadows of an alley just short of the saloon. He swung down with a creak of saddle leather.

  The back door squeaked as he opened it on blackness. He’d seen nothing as he circled to the rear of the saloon. Now, pistol cocked and tipped up in his hand, he stepped inside.

  There was a scurrying in the dark. A board creaked.

  Clint moved forward. There was the faint smell of whiskey and sweat for a moment, then the air currents changed and the smell was gone.

  Clint sensed the bulk of the bar to his left, moved catlike behind it, noiseless as a shadow, and dropped down to rest his pistol hand over the mahogany.

  For some moments he did exactly nothing.

  A breath was drawn, with a slight wheeze in it, somewhere in the dark ahead of him.

  “You alone?”

  “Sí, señor, I am alone.”

  “Strike a light.”

  “Of course, señor. But do not shoot, eh?”

  In the flare of the match, Clint saw a narrow swarthy face with heavy brows and a worried expression. He also saw the crossed shoulder cartridge belts, the rifle and the brace of pistols.

  The match went out, and the large moving shadows that had surrounded them apparition-like engulfed them in total blackness once again. The wind moaned a little under the eaves, scraped blow sand in grasses growing in the dark street beyond the doorway behind the Mexican—Clint heard this, did not see it. A shutter banged lightly away off somewhere, and something scurried in a corner.

  “Talk,” Clint said. “I don’t like wasting time.”

  “You are Señor Evans?”

  Clint drew his knife from his belt and drove its point into the mahogany; then he struck a match and held it cupped in his hand so it lit the initials carved in the handle. Then he blew out the match and returned the knife to his belt.

  “Let us find a lantern,” the Mexican said.

  “No. What’s your business?”

  “It would be much better with a lantern.”

  “No.”

  The Mexican sighed. “Perhaps you are right,” he said. He coughed. It was loud and wracking, startling in the eerie darkness. The Mexican sounded sick. Perhaps he had consumption.

  “I come from el señor Griego. Señor Griego wishes to hire you.”

  “Who the devil is Señor Griego?”

  The Mexican’s breath caught slightly in surprise. “El señor Griego? You have not heard of him? Señor Griego he is the big cattle man. He have a big hacienda. Very beautiful. He has also the mines.”

  “And what does he want of me?”

  “It is the daughter. She is kidnapped. Do you know of the bandito Garcia Valenzuela?”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “He has kidnapped la señorita Pepito Griego.”

  “I don’t know much of Mexico.”

  “You will not have to, señor. The bandito Valenzuela he is in the mountains to the north. He has una plaza fuerte there. Una fortificación.”

  “Tell the señor Griego I am not interested.”

  The Mexican did not speak for a moment, and he coughed.

  A matched flared. There was the Mexican, holding up a large handful of double eagles.

  “It is all American money,” he said.

  The matched went out. Clint had not moved.

  “Go back to Mexico,” Clint said. “I’m not interested.”

  Clint heard his horse stir outside. He was abruptly very alert, knowing his horse well.

  He had already slipped halfway to the rear door when from the gaping opening on the street there came a flash and roar. The Mexican screamed and it was cut short by a second shot.

  It was not Clint’s fight. He was by this time out the rear door and moving swiftly through the dark to the place where he’d left his horse.

  White socks was not there.

  Clint stood still a moment, listening.

  He heard scuffing hooves somewhere along the main street, the careful step of someone inside the saloon.

  Clint glided on down the alley and peered into the street, pistol ready in hand. He could make out the vague shapes of horses being led away south down the street. Clint, who had quit smoking some years earlier because it had made him a target one night and nearly cost him his life, had taken the habit of chewing a toothpick. Unconscious of his action now, he stuck one in the left corner of his mouth and his lips moved so the end pointed up. He was thinking.

  There was a scuffling in the alley behind him, and he pivoted, drawing, firing into the other man’s muzzle flash. There was a sound as of a sack of potatoes being dropped onto the ground, the chink of metal against stone.

  Clint chewed his toothpick a few seconds, then went cautiously to investigate. He took a chance and struck a match. Another Mexican, this one heavyset, wearing a gaudied up gun belt and wide sombrero. The nickeled pistol lay beyond the outstretched hand of the dead man. Clint checked the pockets, found one thing that interested him—a letter, written in Spanish. He pocketed it without taking time to read it as the match went out. Then he moved quickly back to the end of the alley on the main street.

  The horses were dissolved in darkness, but listening carefully he could hear the snorting of an animal—White Socks, he was quite sure.

  He moved with great care along the street keeping to the deepest of the shadows, listening to the wind, the idle slapping of the shutter, the blow sand rattling in the weeds.

  There was only one man with the four horses. He smelled strongly of sweat and tequila. As far as Clint could tell the
Mexican was peering off nervously down the street. Perhaps he was thinking of going to help his compadre.

  Clint tried to slip up on the man from behind, but one of the Mexicans’ horses moved just then and the head under the sombrero turned.

  The Mexican started to go for his gun.

  “Soltelo!”

  The Mexican dropped his gun to the ground with a clatter.

  “Manos Arriba!” Clint added, and could just make out the Mexican’s arms lifting above his head slowly.

  Continuing in Spanish, Clint asked him, “Who are you?”

  “I am just a poor sheepherder,” the Mexican whined, also in Spanish.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I am not lying. I tell you the God’s honest truth.”

  “Would you like a bullet between your eyes?”

  “Please, señor, no. Have compassion on a poor sheepherder.”

  “Where are your sheep?”

  “They are in the care of my young son, on a hillside not far from here.”

  “What are you doing with my horse?”

  “One of these is your horse, señor?” the Mexican asked with exaggerated surprise.

  “Go see to your dead friend.”

  “Pedro is dead? Poor Pedro. He is always so hotheaded. He attempted to shoot you no doubt. He is always doing foolish things. I am sorry you had to kill him, but that is how the world passes, is it not?”

  “Get moving. Your gun will be where you left it when you get back. But do not try to kill me. You may have to follow your friend to hell.”

  Clint rode away into the desert, going north. His jaw was clamped shut hard, the toothpick jutting like a spine from a cactus. He was not pleased at all. He did not like killing, particularly when he didn’t know the cause for it. But the thing was none of his business. He was clear and glad of it. He had not trusted the messenger from Griego. He didn’t like how any part of the thing smelled. He was not interested in getting mixed up in a Mexican feud. It was foolish for outsiders to take sides in those kinds of things.

  He made camp perhaps two miles from town, in an arroyo not far from La Escalera Wells, named undoubtedly for the natural staircase formation leading down into a small canyon to the cistern-like hollows in the rock holding water. One never made camp right at a watering hole, since there were few places in this country more watched by Indians and other would-be ambushers. It was only a couple of years ago that he had learned that the hard way.

  For a few minutes he lay in his bedroll listening to the wind which ceaselessly wore at the landscape, and then he slept.

  ~*~

  In the early morning, as the sun was just lifting above the eastern horizon, a flat hot red disk getting ready to scorch the desert once again, Clint chewed on jerky, watered White Socks from his hat, and made ready to travel on northwest.

  He mounted and looked around the horizon out of habit, saw nothing he didn’t like and was about to set his mount going when he thought of the letter he’d taken from the man he’d killed. Curious, he got it out and read it over.

  “Be jiggered,” he said aloud, glaring out over the cactus studded landscape.

  He swung his horse and rode south again, grim as a man bent on a lynching.

  Chapter Two

  Through his mind went a scene he’d relived many times in the past five years. But the years had not blurred the image nor dulled the sounds of the shots. If anything, the scene had become more vivid.

  He’d been riding home from rounding up some strays off on the southern range of his Colorado ranch, and had just topped a rise from which he could see the ranch buildings. He had always enjoyed this view, liking the way the neat set of buildings nestled against the dramatic backdrop of the big wall of mountains. Small clumps of cattle drifted the range between the rise and the buildings, grazing in the late sun.

  But then the door of the house opened, and he could make out Margaret struggling with a man, and could just catch the sound of her screams, thin and desperate, over the wind.

  He rode hell-for-leather, but was only about a third the way there before smoke began to rise from the ranch house and the horseman rode off with Margaret. Clint fired warning shots in the air, hoping to show he meant business, but the kidnapper ignored him.

  He tried to cut them off, but they swung north into the mountains and it got dark before he could get near them. The next morning he went on following the trail and at noon came across Margaret’s body, battered and naked.

  After that he hadn’t any stomach for ranching and began drifting keeping an eye peeled for the man who’d done it. To pay his expenses, he became a man hunter and sometimes hired out as a guard on gold shipments. In the five years since it had happened, he’d learned only one thing about the man he was after: he was called Blake Dixon.

  The letter in Spanish taken from the man who’d gotten himself dead trying to kill Clint was addressed to Garcia Valenzuela. Translated it said, “Many fine men have been ruined by greed. I assure you that I will settle for nothing less than what is due me.” It was signed, “Blake Dixon.”

  ~*~

  By daylight, the ghost town looked very different. The Presence wasn’t gone, just hidden away in the dark corners and crevices like all other spirits of the night. The town itself was a dried out, broken down bunch of old buildings, a monument to greed, haste, and decay. The wind blew hot in the weedy main street, and there was no way to tell that anyone had been here any more recently than ten years previous.

  Clint rode the whole length of the main street first, just to be sure there weren’t some horses picketed, and then swung down in front of the saloon where he’d met the messenger from Griego.

  He could hear the roar of bluebottles even before he stepped in. The Mexican messenger, soaked with blood, lay where he’d fallen. Clint stirred the flies up considerably rolling the body over and checking the pockets. There was nothing, not even makings. The ammunition and weapons had been taken, the gold coins were gone.

  Clint cleared out and looked for a shovel and a good spot of ground in the small boot hill. Later, sweated up some and needing a sip from his canteen, he took a rest. Then he dragged the messenger’s body, and afterwards the body of the other Mexican, to the hole and over the edge. He was not good at saying things over graves and so he didn’t try. He figured they’d get what they deserved without any help from him.

  Next he went hunting for tracks. But he wasn’t surprised to see that the wind had disposed of even the tracks he’d made just this morning riding in.

  He sat down in front of what used to be the sheriff’s office and fished his pockets for a toothpick, discovered he’d lost the last one and spat in the dust, feeling ornery.

  He got out the letter again and read it more carefully. But it didn’t tell him anything new, so he put it away and pondered.

  After a while, he hunted up his horse, which had found a few scrawny tufts of grass to crop just outside town. Mounting up, he once again rode off northwest, headed for a runt of a place called Crooked Creek.

  It was getting on for nightfall when he rode over a rise, between two of New Mexico’s round hills spotted with brush, and jogged into town.

  Crooked Creek was nothing but miners, stock hustlers, saloon keepers, gamblers, con men, thieves, and a few gaudy women. Mixed in, just to make the place lively and give Crooked Creek a shot at being put on the map, were a few gunhands. There was no marshal or law of any kind, and the folks in Crooked Creek seemed to like it that way just fine. It was very man for himself. Boot hill was filling up rapidly, was soon going to need room to spread itself.

  Clint had grown tired of towns like this, having seen more of them than most men had, on account of all his wandering. With minor differences they were all the same: loud, stale, wild, and dangerous. This one was far enough from the wooded lower slopes of the mountains that there were only three wooden buildings. The rest were wind-flapped tents, with a few adobe or stone-and-adobe buildings scattered in.

 
One of the wooden buildings was called the King’s Arms Hotel, and was run by a mustached Englishman by the name of Kent. He had a booming laugh and was always coming out with an “I say, old chap!” or a “Cheerio,” and his establishment was universally known therefore as Old Chap’s Flea Circus, shortened mostly to Chap’s. It was here that Clint had stayed the last time he was in town, two nights ago, and there being no better place, he checked in again.

  That evening he decided to spend drifting from saloon to saloon with the idea he might hear something or even catch up with the Mexican he’d talked to and retrieved White Socks from. It was his guess that if the Mexican had come to town, word would quickly get around that he was flashing double eagles.

  But if it was so, Clint never heard about it. Maybe even Mexicans around here were flush. He wound up back at Chap’s tired and ready to sack out, with nothing to show for his efforts but a pocketful of toothpicks.

  But sometime in the night he was awakened by a fight going on in the next room, which was separated from his by the thinnest kind of wall, which instead of muffling the sound acted more like a drumhead, his room being the drum.

  He lay there listening to the grunts and then crashing of glass and the splintering of flimsy furniture, and waiting for it to stop.

  It went on.

  He rolled over facing the other wall and closed his eyes, trying to sleep in spite of it. But it was no use. He might as well have been trying to sleep next to a stamp mill.

  It was quite a ruckus. As near as he could make out, there weren’t more than two or three dozen of them in there, along with maybe a few steers and a bull that kept bellowing and snorting. Every once in a while somebody would fetch up against the wall and rattle the boards it was made of like cornstalks in the wind, and the whole building would shift sideways, then settle back gingerly, like a sick horse getting kicked. Clint had a pretty certain notion that the boards wouldn’t take but only so much, and soon the bull or one of the steers was going to come through and land in his bed.

  Clint counted to ten, then reached his gun from under the pillow, ripped back the covers, bounded from the bed, yanked open the door of the room where the party was going on, and strode in.