The E.R. Slade Western Omnibus No.1 Page 3

  She led the way into the maze carrying a candle. They stopped in a tiny compartment with a slanting floor and leaning, crooked walls. There was a shelf bunk with a straw tick on it and just room to walk along one side. Leanda put the candle in a drip of wax on a bit of board which stuck out as by chance over one end of the bunk, and reached into the dark underneath to pull out some blankets.

  “Unless you prefer your own roll?” she asked.

  Jeremy looked at the blankets, which were a little ratty but otherwise seemed all right, and said, “This is fine.”

  She flung them out on the straw tick. “See you in the morning,” she said, and left.

  Jeremy almost stopped her to ask questions about the gold, but reconsidered. She had said she wanted to sleep on it: that was the best thing for him to do, too. So much had happened so fast that he hadn’t had time to stop and think. Maybe after a night’s sleep things would look different, and he would see flaws where he didn’t now.

  He lay down on the scratchy tick and stared up at the candle flickering on the wall above. The last thing he wanted to do was sleep. It was all very well to try to be sensible and think clearly, but he didn’t have to wait for morning to know which questions to ask. He wanted to know: Who was Blue, who were Tyler and Hart, and most of all, how could any or all of them be best used to find the gold?

  Jeremy got up to blow out the candle, then he lay down again. He could hear odd little creakings and stirrings all around him, which might have been the wind, or rats and mice; but whatever it was made the dark seem darker, and turned Jeremy’s thoughts from gold to Cork’s bottle of severed fingers.

  Chapter Four

  Jeremy woke to a slight careful pressure on his belly. The first thing he saw were the gold eyes of a coal-black cat three inches in front of his face. The dim light of early morning came through a tiny, triangular window he hadn’t noticed last night.

  The cat sank to it haunches and commenced to scratch, and its claws dug all the way through the blanket and Jeremy’s shirt and into his chest. Jeremy jolted up, swatting the cat away. It streaked through the door, and Jeremy lay back a moment, thinking.

  The gold. Had that been just a dream? Must have been. Had they given him anything to drink last night?

  There had been a bottle, but only Cork had drunk from it. In fact he himself had had nothing at all to drink, and he felt thirsty remembering, and also remembering the heat of the little cramped kitchen.

  He had given Leanda a long recounting of the last few days—twice. That was no dream, he was pretty sure. And he had done it because of the promise of a quarter of a wagonload of gold.

  So it was real.

  Well, wait a minute. What was real was that Leanda talked about it as though it was real.

  Not quite the same thing.

  It might be reasonable to suppose Leanda wanted something in a wagon, and that whatever it was, was valuable to Leanda. But this was the most you could say. You couldn’t say it was gold.

  Maybe there wasn’t even any wagon and all this had to do with something else entirely.

  But it was true that Tyler and Hart thought there was a wagon with something valuable in it. Did they know anything? Or had they been told some tale by Leanda, too?

  “I guess I was pretty hot and fuddled last night,” he muttered aloud, and shook his head. It all comes, he thought, of too much cow punching and futile gold panning and too little socializing. Leanda had had him ready to say most anything just to make her smile.

  This won’t do at all, he thought. His jaw took a set as he clambered out of bed.

  After two tries, he finally found the kitchen. It was empty. The fire was out, and the room cool. It didn’t look like anything had been touched since the previous night, so he sat down to wait for Leanda and her uncle to appear.

  Jeremy turned things over and over for quite a while, getting nowhere, until it struck him that the sun was a good ways up now, and hadn’t Cork and Leanda ought to be awake by this time? Besides, he was getting hungry.

  He had half a mind to go looking for where they were bedded down and stir them out, but thought better of it, and instead he started clattering around amongst the pots and pans in the cupboards, making plenty of noise. He lit a fire in the stove and didn’t bother if the lids clanged. Then he found a side of bacon in a little shed just outside the kitchen door and cut some strips off, got them started in a frying pan. After some hunting, he finally discovered eggs in an old ammo box under the sink and cracked some of them in with the bacon. There was still no sign of anybody, and not a sound, either.

  “Well, now,” Jeremy said, and sat down to eat, skipping the plates and eating right from the pan, carefully wiping off a fork on his pants before using it.

  When he finished, he wiped the fork again on his pants and put it in the rack. The cat had jumped onto the table and was sitting watching him unblinkingly.

  “Get out of here, cat,” he said, and chased it off, just because it made him feel uneasy.

  But he had a better reason to be uneasy: the sun was half way to noon, and there still had not been a sound anywhere in the place.

  Jeremy licked his lips, rubbed his jaw, and then stepped through the door leading into the maze. For about ten minutes he tried to find his way around, and every time he thought he understood the layout he wound up somewhere he didn’t expect and had to start over. He finally decided there were eleven rooms, or maybe twelve, unless there were thirteen. About three or four of them seemed to be bedrooms, but there was nobody in any of them or in any of the other rooms, either—unless he’d missed some.

  He finally tried hollering, which brought no answer. Although he figured he’d have to burn the place down to be sure, it appeared there was nobody here but him. He went out to the corral: Cork’s mule was gone, and so was the little dapple horse he’d noticed in there last night.

  He sat on the corral fence and considered. This was a right funny business. Just what was going on here? Leanda had said she wanted his help. He recalled the way she seemed to pounce when he agreed to her deal. But here they’d up and skipped out.

  The wheels in Jeremy’s head turned slowly until a certain cog finally dropped into place. Then he jumped off the fence, all hot, and started down the street.

  But he thought of something and went back to the house. After twice getting lost, he found the gun belt he’d noticed hanging on a hook in one of the rooms. He yanked out the weapon and looked it over, jaw outthrust: it was a ’73 Peacemaker, just like his own. He located ammunition and strapped the Peacemaker on, strode out of the house.

  A few steps down the street he paused, thinking. Leanda had just wanted to make him talk, that was plain. But suppose she had found out something? Suppose he knew something he didn’t even know he knew? But if he didn’t know he knew it, it was no good to him without knowing her end of things, was it?

  “Pesky little heifer,” he muttered, setting off again. “If she thinks she’s going to get away with that and cut me out ...” His jaw took a set for a moment. “I got it comin’,” he said.

  The first place of business he came to was the undertaker’s. Jeremy passed him up and went into the next place, a saloon. Only the barkeep and the sheriff’s deputy were in there, so he ducked back out and tried his luck on the other side of the street, a place called “Hendson’s Saddles, Lumber, and Forging”—tall false front with a low-ceilinged office just inside the door.

  Behind the desk sat a stout man yawning over a pile of papers. He looked up like he was plenty glad to have somebody walk in and interrupt him.

  “Help you, sir?” he asked, going to all the trouble of getting to his feet. He had a quiver to his hands, and eyes that acted like they needed glasses to see anything at any distance, since they squinted and widened and the fellow came around from behind his desk stretching his neck forward. Then, sure enough, out came the specs, and he seemed to see fine.

  Jeremy asked, “You know Hamilton Cork and his niece Leanda, live up
the street a piece?”

  “Everybody knows Leanda,” the man said in a way that somehow irritated Jeremy. The man smiled, and this Jeremy found even more irritating. “And Cork, too, of course. Ain’t another man like him in the country. We got the only one of his kind there is.”

  “You seen either one of them this morning?”

  “Matter of fact, yes I did. Only it was before sunup. I rolled out early on account of a ruckus in my chicken coop, but was too late again—this place is plumb full of varmints, mister, I’ll tell you that; and one of these days me and some of the boys around here is going to launch a campaign and clear ’em out once and for all. I’ve already lost three chickens just in the week since I put up my coop, and it’s a tight coop. I’ll be derned if I can figure how them varmints is getting in. I tell you, mister, I’ve gone over that coop and over it and nailed up every last little hole and crack, but it don’t do no good. But come a day pretty soon, a bunch of us is going to get together and load up our guns and ...”

  “Notice which way they was headed?”

  “Which way who was headed?” the man asked, suddenly blank as a white sheet of paper laid out to write a letter on when you don’t know what to say.

  “Cork and Leanda.”

  “Oh, that. Yes, I did notice. Like I was saying, I was up to see about the ruckus in my chicken coop, and I went out there and started looking around ...”

  Jeremy wanted to get behind this fellow and start pushing him along, get him to the point, but there was nothing to do really but wait for him to out with it in his own time, if he was ever going to.

  Finally, the fellow said, “Well, I was coming back to bed, and had got inside and upstairs to the landing in front of the window which looks out on the street—I live down about fifty yards. Well, I was looking out and thinking about these golderned varmints and wondering what to do about them and watching an ore wagon go rolling up the street, when I happened to see two riders going by, and I says to myself, that must be old Cork—nobody but him around here rides a mule—and that can’t be nobody by Leanda, looking like that, even in those man’s clothes she mostly always wears, and I wonder where they’re going, this time of night. They rode off up the street and that was all I saw of them.”

  “What time was it?”

  “Well, it’s funny you should ask that, because just before I went out, I happened to look at the big grandfather clock in the parlor—I went into the parlor to get a look out at the coop from inside the house, but I couldn’t see nothing in the dark. But I happened to look at the clock, and it said five after four. Now that clock runs a little fast, and I don’t remember whether it was last week or the week before I checked it, so it could have been four, or even five of four or thereabouts when I went outside. I went out to the coop ...”

  Jeremy stepped impatiently from one foot to the other, thinking of Leanda and Cork knowing something he knew but didn’t know he knew, riding hell-for-leather for the wagonload of gold.

  “Which way was they headed?” Jeremy broke in.

  “Huh?” The old guy was all blank again.

  “Leanda and Cork.”

  “Up the street, like I told you before. North. After Leanda, are you?” he asked, smiling. “Join the club. About every man in the county who ain’t married is after her, and about half the married men, too.” He guffawed, a little nervously. Jeremy figured him for one of the married ones chasing her. It didn’t sit too well, but seeing what a gabber this guy was, and how old and blind and fat, and knowing how Leanda was, it would be surprising if she took any interest.

  Not that it mattered. What mattered was that gold he’d been promised. If there was any to be had, he intended to see to it he got his share.

  “Carrying anything?” he asked the man.

  “Carrying anything? What? You mean like guns?”

  “Guns, or bedrolls like they was planning to do some traveling.”

  “I guess they had bedrolls. Yes, I remember them. I don’t know about guns. Yes, seems to me Cork was carrying that old Henry across his pommel. I’m sure he was, now I think about it. He’s right good with it, too. I seen him shoot a wolf once, so far away I could just tell it was a wolf and not some stray dog, and he hit it straight between the eyes. When we go varmint hunting, we’ll have to bring him along, that we will, if the others’ll have him. They mostly don’t care much for him. Call him the pack rat and a varmint himself. Well, maybe he is, but I say a varmint’ll know better where to look for other varmints ...”

  Jeremy heard to more. It had occurred to him that he had learned all he needed to from this fellow, and he shot out the door and down the street.

  North. Riding north. What was to the north? He stopped running at the corral fence and leaned on it, thinking.

  Parkersville! Of course. If they planned to pick up the trail of Blue—or see what they could find in Jeremy Waite’s hotel room—that was the place they’d head for. There was no other place to hope to pick up Blue’s trail, was there?

  Feeling sharp and certain, he saddled his horse, slung his roll, and rode north, hard as he could plug it.

  ~*~

  At noon he stopped briefly to water his mount, sip from his canteen, munch on an apple he’d brought from Cork’s house, and consider the wisdom of what he was about to do. Hurt pride and the wagonload of gold prevailed. He rode on all afternoon and found the same creek bank he and Cork had stopped at coming south.

  There was nice shade here under some cottonwoods, and the creek ran clear, cold, and full of fish. Cork had caught a couple by scooping them out just so, and in the last of the light, Jeremy tried doing the same. He got plenty wet and plenty of advice from a squirrel who watched from an overhanging limb, but he didn’t catch any fish.

  Disgusted, hungry, and thinking about shooting the squirrel instead, he clambered out onto the bank. The squirrel prudently disappeared.

  Jeremy, thus saved the further humiliation of shooting and missing, muttered, “Wouldn’t have been enough left to eat anyways.”

  He took off his wet clothes and hung them over a limb to dry, and then he got into his blanket roll.

  A rumbling belly and thoughts of food he could have packed along tormenting him, he said aloud, belligerently, “I don’t care. I really ain’t that hungry.”

  He rolled over, let out a long sigh. After a time, he let out another long sigh, and muttered, “Glad Pa and the rest ain’t along. I’d never hear the end of it.”

  There was a slight shift of the wind; the cottonwoods moved gently overhead, and Jeremy closed his eyes to go to sleep.

  Suddenly he smelled it.

  He sat bolt upright, gun in hand, looking all around. That had been a whiff of manure pile.

  One thing was sure: there shouldn’t be any manure piles setting around out here. He hadn’t seen any cows on this land, nor even any sheep, for that matter.

  There it was again, the little whiff of manure—sweaty manure.

  Jeremy didn’t hear anything but the wind in the cottonwoods, and it was a very light wind. He listened hard, and kept sniffing, and off and on kept smelling the smell. That was Ton Hart, or somebody who smelled just like him. Jeremy knew the aroma well enough, after what had gone with it to impress it on his memory.

  Was Ton Hart standing off in the cottonwoods waiting for him to lie back down again, so as to come and jump him? It was too dark to see. Maybe Hart was waiting until all was plenty quiet, and then he’d walk into camp?

  Or what?

  Jeremy, gun in hand, trying to make no sound at all, got slowly out of his bedroll and to his feet. He listened and smelled some more, still heard only the wind, still caught a whiff of sweaty manure pile now and again. He took a chance and cocked his gun, looking upwind, half expecting gunfire, but none came.

  Finger quivering a little on the trigger, he attempted to follow the smell. For a few feet he advanced without anything happening. Then his toe caught under a root and he made noise keeping his balance.

&nbs
p; He stopped, listening, heard only the pounding of his heart.

  Suppose these two were camped a little way off, and didn’t even know he was anywhere around?

  If that was true, he was mighty lucky, having splashed around so much in the stream and turned his horse loose on the grass in the open outside the cottonwoods.

  Funny he hadn’t heard anything of them. How far would a smell like that carry? It seemed close—but sometimes you could smell a town miles away, and Ton Hart smelled most as much as a town.

  He stood there a while, pondering what to do. Good sense told him to leave well enough alone. It wasn’t them he wanted to talk to, it was Leanda.

  But there was one thing: if he walked into their camp ready to shoot and demanded to know why they thought he was Blue, wouldn’t that make it pretty clear that he was not Blue? And wouldn’t it be good for his health, setting them straight on that point?

  This struck Jeremy as the best and brightest idea he’d had all day, and made him feel fairly sure in the back of his mind that he was about as smart as any man in the country to think up such a trick. He went and got his clothes on, double-checked the load in his gun, and then stalked back upwind.

  After a bit he stopped, thinking. If they figured he was after the gold, they’d want his hide never mind who he was: they wouldn’t want competition.

  Well, come to that, he didn’t either.

  Chin jutting out, Jeremy stepped boldly forward, gun in hand.

  Chapter Five

  He’d taken only two bold steps when he caught his toe again and fell over something sizable.

  He cussed roundly under his breath and lay still, the pistol ready in his hand—fortunately it hadn’t gone off.

  All was quiet. Sound sleepers, Tyler and Hart.

  He started to move his feet, to get them under him, and as he did so his heart shot up his throat like a cat trying to get through the door before it closes.

  He’d fallen over somebody.

  Holy old varminteer, he thought, and drew his knees in, rolled away, aimed the pistol.