The E.R. Slade Western Omnibus No.1 Page 2

  “Yoo-hoo, girlie!” old Whiskers bellowed, and he must have been heard to the far end of town. “Gotcher man back!”

  The tiny shack-house looked hardly tall enough to stand up in, and it was all over little odd-shaped windows that appeared to be the accidental result of patching holes in the siding boards with broken bits of glass.

  It was hard to picture anybody bothering to make more than one room out of such a small building, but the front door let into a cramped space less than half the size of the closets in the ranch house back home. There was a chair and a stool, and the walls were hung with Indian scalps—mostly old, curled, dried up things. There were also some objects in whiskey bottles, which on closer inspection turned out to be severed fingers.

  The old man saw him looking, grinned in an unsettling kind of way and said, “Souvenirs.”

  Jeremy was about to ask, souvenirs of what? when hinges creaked and he looked square into the eyes of a stunner of a black-haired beauty.

  The girl looked back, and for a moment neither of them did anything.

  Then Jeremy swallowed, remembering that most likely she was merely startled to find out he wasn’t who her uncle claimed he was.

  She looked at her uncle, the fire gone from her eyes, now cool and collected. “Where is he?”

  “What d’you mean, girlie? You’re lookin’ at ‘im.”

  The girl sighed, Jeremy drinking in every little move and change of attitude. His jaw was hanging open, but he wasn’t aware of it.

  “I hope you didn’t drag this poor fellow from anything important,” Leanda said. “You’ve got the wrong man.”

  It suddenly crossed Jeremy’s mind that Leanda wasn’t acting very much like a girl pining away over anybody. She took the disappointment right in stride. As she naturally would, thought Jeremy. Obviously, his own charming presence had swept away all memory of the absent Blue.

  The old man looked at her, at him, at her, and then said, “Now that don’t hardly make no kind of sense at all.”

  But Jeremy wasn’t paying much attention to the old man. He remembered his hat, which brushed the low ceiling anyway, and swept it off. “How do, Miss Leanda,” he said, pouring on all his charm. “Nothing I could have been doing could possibly be as important as meeting you.” He grinned at her, disremembering that this grin of his was the same one which had always gotten him caught when stealing cookies in years past.

  She smiled at him; he took it for evidence of success, and pressed on. “The name is Jeremy Waite, from Texas. That’s a mighty pretty dress you got on, Miss Leanda.”

  “Forget the Miss Leanda stuff, Jeremy,” she said. “Lee’ll do.” She turned on her uncle again. “How did you find Jeremy?”

  Whiskers lifted his battered hat—he being short there was room for it under the ceiling—and with the pinkie of the same hand scratched his head.

  “Follered Cookie Tyler and Ton Hart, like you said I ought to. They hauled him out o’ bed down to Parkersville and they all rode off into the mountains. Blue here—Jeremy, I mean—got away from ’em somehow on the trail, and I brung him back. They figured him for Blue, I know it.” Whiskers was plainly puzzled. He kept on scratching his head in the same place with his pinkie.

  Leanda’s eyes, bright with intelligence and calculation but probably unseeing, danced back and forth between those of her uncle. Then she turned to Jeremy and smiled warmly, which made Jeremy’s knees get rubbery.

  “You’ve had a long trip and have wasted a lot of time,” she said. “We’re about to eat supper. Why don’t you stay? The night, too. If you don’t mind my uncle’s crazy little house.”

  “The house? Most wonderful house I’ve ever seen,” Jeremy said, meaning every word of it, yet only half aware of what he was saying. “It’s right nice of you to invite me to stay. Reckon I will.”

  “Good,” she said, with the air of one having settled some piece of business satisfactorily. She turned around and led the way through a series of tiny rooms to a kitchen which was large enough to contain a trestle table and a battered old wood stove, with the pipe—of various sized pieces overlapping to plug most of the holes—going this way and that until it found an opening in the wall and went out.

  There was room enough around one side of the table to walk, if men with broad shoulders, like Jeremy, went sideways. You had to slide in on the bench on the other side.

  There was a large vat of something steaming on the stove, and it smelled good, though vaguely of skunk. It was hot enough in here that it didn’t at all surprise Jeremy to see that the heat waves rising from the stove filled most of the room, making everything you looked at swim, worse than on the desert in the heat of the day. It didn’t seem to bother old Whiskers, or Leanda either as she stood over the stove stirring the vat. She looked like an apparition with all the waveriness of the atmosphere, but to Jeremy’s mind a mighty fine apparition. He kept watching her, the cookie-stealing grin still on his face, as she served out platters full of stew.

  “Wal, Jeremy,” old Whiskers said. “Mighty sorry I got the wrong man. But you see how it come about. Reckon I never rightly introduced myself.” He hitched up on his toes, thumbs under his suspenders. “Hamilton J. Cork’s the name,” he said. He reached out a thick little hand, and Jeremy shook it, finding it crusty and dry and warm.

  “Set down,” Cork said expansively, waving a hand at the table. “Might’s well git comfortable.”

  Jeremy sat, his attention again on Leanda. He was not at all sure that he was sorry Cork had gotten the wrong man.

  Leanda set out the platters of food, and right proper platters they were, too, being a forearm’s span across and filled to capacity, except for hers which was less than a quarter full. She set the whiskey bottle between the two men, who were sitting next to each other, and produced three glasses, filling hers with milk.

  Then they set to and ate. Meanwhile, Leanda began asking questions, offhand-like, but serious. While he answered, Jeremy was congratulating himself on having attracted so much of her interest. He thought: let old Cork consider how handsome his niece finds Jeremy Waite.

  “How come Tyler and Hart were interested in you, Jeremy?” she asked.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s a funny thing. I don’t have the faintest idea. I was just lying asleep one minute, and the next, a hand hauls me out of bed and these two are asking me, where is it, Blue? I told them I wasn’t Blue and they slammed me around until I gave it up and let on to be this fellow. Then we traipsed off across the countryside. Who is this Blue? Is that his real name?”

  He watched her very carefully for a reaction and was gratified to see that mention of the name did just the opposite of what it should have, if she was pining for him. She waved the question aside with a regal waggle of her spoon as though impatient with the subject.

  “They didn’t give you any reason why they thought you were him?” she asked.

  “Not a single one. But it’s all over now. No harm done. In fact, like they say, every cloud has a silver lining; and now I believe it, coming here and seeing you.”

  She smiled fleetingly, and then looked thoughtfully at her uncle, who was shoveling the huge meal down with the steady, practiced regularity of a fireman shoveling coal into a steam engine boiler. Jeremy was doing some shoveling himself; when he was worked up about something either good or bad he crammed his face.

  “Where did you last see them?” Leanda, not shoveling, asked Jeremy.

  “Up a canyon north of here.”

  “How far?”

  “Two days ride, little more.”

  “How’d you get away from them? Did you kill them?”

  Jeremy grinned at her.

  “You did?” Her voice had gone sharp.

  “No. I just give them the slip. Warn’t hard. They ain’t too quick. I ducked behind a rock and let them go by, then rode back the way we come. Until I run into your uncle here.”

  “Oh,” she said, sounding a little dubious.

  “Mighty fine meal
, Miss Leanda,” he said. “I mean, Lee,” he added.

  “Sure,” she said. “Look, did they say anything while you were with them? Anything at all?”

  Jeremy began to see, finally, that she was really not so interested in him as in what he knew, and felt let down and betrayed. Still, he wasn’t the man to give up easily.

  “Looky, Leanda,” he said, leaning confidentially over his nearly empty platter of food. “How about you and me going for a ride tomorrow, have a picnic up on top of the canyon rim? I’ll bet there’s a nice view from there.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, her pretty mouth stretched into a thin, straight line, the ends of which indented her cheeks.

  “Jeremy,” she said finally, “I think we should get something clear. I’m engaged to Blue Yanuk. I believe someone has kidnapped him. I thought it was Tyler and Hart. But perhaps it was someone else connected with them. Anything you can tell me about these two may help me find him.”

  Jeremy sat back in his chair feeling hot and tired and disgusted. But now his mind started to work a little on this thing, and somehow it seemed to him that what she said didn’t square with her attitude.

  “You sure don’t look worried for a woman who thinks her boyfriend has been kidnapped,” he said. “To hear your uncle talk, a man would think you were about to faint because this fellow Blue pulled out on you. Now which story is it. He pull out, or was he kidnapped? And what is it you really want with him? I don’t believe you’re pining away for him.”

  This speech made Cork laugh, and brought an exasperated noise from Leanda’s throat.

  “I think she’s after that wagon you talked about,” Cork said. “I knowed she was after somethin’.”

  Cork’s mention of the wagon brought Jeremy a quick, penetrating look from Leanda. Then she heaved her shoulders in a sigh. “All right,” she said. “Since we’re all putting our cards on the table, I’ll tell you the real reason. But first, I want to make a deal. You’re a Texan, right, Jeremy? How good are you with a gun?”

  “Fair. What’s the deal?”

  “How fair? Are you fast?”

  “Fast enough,” he said. Fast enough to empty his gun into the broad side of a barn before it could rot away—but why elaborate to Leanda about that?

  She appraised him carefully for a few moments, and then she said: “You tell me all you know and agree to use your gun if we need it, and I’ll cut you in for a quarter—you do have a gun, somewhere?”

  “In my hotel room in Parkersville.”

  “Where was it when Tyler and Hart kidnapped you?”

  “Under my pillow. I was sound asleep. I already told you about that.”

  “Uh huh.” Leanda was noncommittal. She turned to her uncle. “Uncle Ham, you know I would have cut you in anyway, don’t you? I was keeping quiet because I didn’t want to get you involved unless I really had to.”

  Cork scrunched his face at Jeremy. “She means my drinkin’. Hard telling what I’ll do. You know I lost two fortunes that way? First time was that Dragoon Mine ...”

  “Never mind that now,” Leanda said. “Don’t worry too much about Uncle Ham, Jeremy. It takes a lot of very strong stuff to bother him. Now, about the deal. Are you interested? I promise it’ll make you rich.”

  It was Jeremy’s turn to be noncommittal. He looked her over speculatively, absently tapping his spoon on his plate. “I dunno,” he said. “How rich?”

  “Richer than rich. You’ll be able to buy Texas after this.”

  “Uh huh,” he said dubiously. “What bank got robbed?”

  “Oh, there’s nothing illegal about it. Nothing’s been stolen. It’s mine by rights. I won it in a poker game.”

  Now he looked at her with a different kind of interest: curiosity.

  “You won a poker game?”

  “You bet I did.”

  “And ... but ... how much did you win?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Plenty, take my word for it.”

  “Well, if that ain’t the ... And this money is in a wagon?”

  “That’s right. Only it’s not actually money. It’s a wagonload of gold bullion.”

  Chapter Three

  Jeremy let out a low whistle.

  “You mean a wagonload of gold? A whole wagonload?”

  “Yes.”

  He had sat forward with the jolt of this news, but now sat back again. A quarter of a wagonload of gold bullion would make him richer than a railroad tycoon. He could buy any ten ranches he wanted and use what was left over to gold plate everything on them, including the cows. And wouldn’t it be just bully to see the looks on the faces back home then!

  On the other hand, suppose she was just spinning out a line of talk? Who would play for stakes like that? —with a woman? Or suppose there was gold all right but she was lying when she claimed it wasn’t stolen? Did he want to get himself jailed or killed?

  No indeedy he didn’t.

  But a quarter of a wagonload of gold ...

  Whew, it seemed to be getting hotter and hotter in the little room.

  “Now suppose you tell me more about this here wagonload of gold,” he said. “Just who did you win it from?”

  “A man in Santa Fe.”

  “Where’d he get it?”

  “How should I know? I suppose he mined it.”

  “How do you know it ain’t stolen?”

  Leanda waved a hand to dispose of any question about that. “Because he’s a very rich man. He wouldn’t have to steal it. I’m sure he hardly missed it.”

  “That so,” Jeremy said, studying Leanda, pursing his lips as the wheels spun in his mind like clockworks with the pendulum unhooked. He was getting hotter and hotter, sweating regular gully washers.

  “Where exactly does he mine, exactly?” asked Jeremy, mopping sweat with his bandanna.

  “Oh, a place down in Mexico, I think.” She shook her long black hair away from her eyes impatiently. “Are you in or out, Jeremy?”

  What was he going to do, walk out on a quarter of a wagonload of gold?

  “I’m in,” he said.

  “Good,” pounced Leanda, smiling in a way that Jeremy didn’t care for. “Now, tell me all about these two who kidnapped you. Tell me everything, every last little detail. You never know what could be important.”

  So, Jeremy set to and told her the whole thing from one end to the other, trying to make sure he left out nothing; but when he was through, Leanda just looked at him a few moments, licking her lips as though he were a chicken in a coop being sized up for a meal. Then she said, “Tell me again.”

  If it hadn’t been Leanda, shifting her curves in her dress, Jeremy would have made a fuss about being asked to start all over after having gone to so much effort to try to tell her the whole story completely and accurately. But as it was, he gave old Cork a look, got one in return, and then began again. Actually, he did think of some things he hadn’t the first time.

  This time when he finished, Leanda heaved a great sigh and shook her head.

  “Well, I don’t think there’s anything there that can help us much,” she said. “But thanks for trying.”

  “Anything for a wagonload of gold,” said Jeremy.

  She flashed him a quick smile that disappeared immediately, and returned to her musings.

  Jeremy remembered that he still had some food left, but he no longer felt hungry. He was too full of the mixture of Leanda and a wagonload of gold. His head kept crowding with images of himself riding into some arroyo and coming on the wagon: he’d pull back the tarp, see the glare of gold. And always overlaying this was the enticing way Leanda moved and smiled, renewing the conviction that wouldn’t go away under threat of good sense that Leanda liked him and that fine things were in the future for them.

  “So these two—Tyler and Hart—are mixed up in this business of the gold,” Jeremy said to Leanda. “And then there’s this fellow Blue that they thought I was for no good reason. Just how does he fit in?”

  Leanda asked, “Are yo
u finished?”

  “What? Oh. Yes.”

  She cleared away the dishes and dumped the remains of her and Jeremy’s meals back into the big vat, clattering the heavy iron lid on after. Then she rinsed the plates by dipping them in a rusty sink three quarters full of a murky, grease-scummed liquid; she swished them once this way and once that before pulling them out marginally cleaner. Jeremy, whose habits were no more fastidious than the average cowpoke’s, and who had eaten a good many meals off the point of the same knife he dug pebbles out of his horse’s hooves with, was concerned that she was going to give the dishes no further attention. But she wasn’t done. She reached a towel from a nail under the sink, which looked like something last used to swab axle grease, and industriously rubbed away the rinse water. When she put them in the cupboard, the plates were reasonably smooth, with all the large gobs of food removed or thoroughly flattened.

  Jeremy shifted in his seat and looked elsewhere, which unfortunately happened to be old Cork, who was grinning at him broadly.

  Jeremy finally recalled the question he had asked about Blue and what connection he had to this business, and he asked it again.

  “Jeremy,” Leanda said, finished with the dishes and now giving an abbreviated version of the same treatment to the forks, “Uncle Ham and I get to bed early most nights. If you don’t mind, I’d like to sleep on this. We can talk it all over first thing in the morning and decide what to do. Is that all right with you?”

  “Well, I guess,” he said, and shrugged, looking at Cork, who went on grinning.

  “Good,” she said, smiling at him. Then she said, “Come on, I’ll show you to your room.”