The E.R. Slade Western Omnibus No.1 Read online

  But whoever it was didn’t budge. Jeremy didn’t hear any breathing, but then maybe he wouldn’t have heard a horse blowing after a race, either, his heart was ramming his blood past his ears so hard and fast, as though he’d stuck his head into a waterfall.

  The sweaty manure smell was mighty strong. Jeremy suspected something and reached over, felt around until he found bare skin.

  Cold and clammy.

  It appeared Ton Hart was dead.

  With the racket he’d made falling down, it seemed likely that if there was anybody else around, he was dead, too, so Jeremy struck a match.

  Ton Hart all right. Lying on his face with a bullet hole in his back. A few feet off lay Cookie Tyler, also on his face, also with a bullet hole in the back.

  The match went out. Jeremy shivered and lit another, aware of the way deep shadows moved amongst the trees all around him. He squatted by Ton Hart. From the way the man lay and the lack of scuff marks around his feet, it appeared he had been told to lie face down on the ground, and then been shot. A third match let Jeremy come to the same conclusion about Tyler.

  Jeremy stood up in the dark between the two bodies and started thinking, hard.

  The bodies were cold, but they were not starting to stink—except that Ton Hart’s normal smell had gone a bit rancid, maybe. They hadn’t been dead too long. Even here in the shade of the cottonwoods they couldn’t have kept more than a day. The buzzards hadn’t found them yet, and no animal had dragged off any pieces.

  There was no telling who had done it. For all he knew, half the territory might be hunting them. But it didn’t matter. In the morning he could come bury the bodies, then walk away and figure one set of problems was over.

  So, good enough, he thought. He picked his way carefully around Ton Hart and back to his own bedroll. He got off his damp clothes again and lay down, smelling Hart’s special brand of perfume.

  After lying there for a while debating, he got up and moved his bedroll to a place that wasn’t directly downwind of the bodies. He lay down again and tried once more to sleep—but wouldn’t you know it?—the wind shifted and again he was down range of the perfume factory.

  He kept hoping the wind would shift again and he’d be in the clear, but after some time had passed and it still hadn’t, he got up cussing aloud and moved again, this time to a point a considerable distance away.

  “There now,” he muttered at the end of a long tirade of general all around cussing, “that there ought to do it. If it don’t, I’m going to ride off about two hundred mile and spread my roll, and if I still smell that dad-blamed perfumery I’m going to bury that body tonight, and forty-nine feet deep, too.”

  Then he lay down and thought how dark and lonesome it was out here, nobody but him and two dead men, and how he oughtn’t to be profaning the dead, whatever they’d done, or however they’d died, or for whatever reason.

  He closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep. He didn’t smell manure now and breathed deeply in relief. He’d never known manure to bother him so much before.

  Which was a funny thing. He’d spent a good deal of time punching cows and he’d had plenty of occasion to shovel out barns—especially recently (though he never did that when other cowpokes were watching or wherever anybody from back home might see him). The smell of cows had never bothered him before. In fact it had never occurred to him to even notice the smell. So why did it bother him on Ton Hart?

  “It’s the sweat,” he explained aloud to himself. “And where there’s cow smells, there ought to be cows.”

  These being satisfactory explanations, he finally fell asleep.

  ~*~

  In the morning he got up feeling tired and sore all over, though he didn’t remember having done anything to bring on soreness. He hobbled around until it eased off, and then rolled up his bedclothes and recalled that there wasn’t going to be anything for breakfast but the job of burying the corpses.

  And that wouldn’t be easy, come to think of it. He didn’t have any chuck wagon to go get a shovel from.

  He wasn’t thinking too clear these days, and that was worrying him now, making him wonder what else he might be forgetting. All this talk of gold had addled his wits, maybe. That and the killing and Leanda and being mistaken twice in a row for somebody he wasn’t.

  He went back to where the bodies lay, half wondering if he’d dreamed them—he hadn’t. There was a hint of a smell about them which unsettled his stomach.

  He backed away and went hunting around for a good spot to dispose of them, decided on a place where there was a natural depression and some rocks close by. Then he dragged the bodies over, dumped them in, and stood looking down at them soberly.

  Here were two dead men who had been born, grown up somewhere, and now he was burying them knowing nothing more about them than their names. It was a funny feeling and seemed like a big weight of a sudden. Shouldn’t there be a preacher here to mumble over them a little?

  The eyes were staring. He got down gingerly and closed them. That made him feel better, and he started piling rocks. He decided that he would find somebody in Parkersville to come get them and then there could be a real burial and a real preacher and it would all be done right. Which made this not a real burial, more like putting them in a morgue. Just a way to keep the coyotes and wolves away and the buzzards off.

  Thinking of it this way made him feel better still, and made the rock piling lighter work.

  When he was finished he straightened up and looked around. Fine day. Breeze. Going to be hot riding out in the open, though.

  He went to the creek and washed his hands, slopped water into his face, drank, and replaced the water in his canteen with fresh. Then he went hunting the swaybacked old gelding.

  It took him a good while. Among the animal’s other virtues was the tendency to wander off forgetting where camp was—or not really caring where camp was.

  “When I’m in the chips, old buddy,” Jeremy said confidentially into the gelding’s perked ear, “I’m going to unload you to the glue factory.”

  The gelding nuzzled him—there was nothing like sweet talk for getting on the right side of this horse.

  Jeremy saddled up and was about to ride off for Parkersville when he started looking for his bandanna and couldn’t find it. That set off his cussing again—he’d been getting in a lot of cussing lately, what with one thing and another. He was thinking about Leanda and Cork ahead of him, and feeling the urge to try to catch up. The thing that made him still hope he had a chance was the fact that Cork rode the slow mule, and even this old gelding ought to be able to catch up with that mule.

  He went back to camp, but couldn’t find the bandanna there, so he looked around the rock pile over the bodies. When he didn’t see it here, either, his face grew long as he wondered if he’d somehow managed to bury it.

  But then he thought to look at the spot where he’d found the bodies, and sure enough, there was the bandanna, hanging on the limb where he’d left it this morning.

  He was about to put it on when he happened to notice something bright on the ground. It turned out to be a heart-shaped locket. Inside was a little bunch of black hair tied with a piece of thread.

  Engraved on the back of the locket in flowing script were the words, “Leanda Dupree.”

  Chapter Six

  “Oh lordy,” Jeremy said, standing there with the locket in one hand, the bandanna in the other. “Oh lordy lordy lordy.”

  The thing was, since last night there had been a nagging awareness in the back of his mind that something didn’t square about all this. He knew what the trouble was now. Leanda and Cork were the most likely ones to have killed these two.

  “Well, if this ain’t just fine,” he said aloud, glaring at the locket. He felt like throwing the doggoned thing in the creek.

  I could do that, he thought. I could do it, and I could even just leave the bodies where they are, and it might be that nobody would ever know.

  But, he thought, the trouble
is, I know.

  “Well, if this ain’t just fine,” he said again.

  Now what was he going to do?

  That gold was likely stolen anyway, he thought discouragedly. He’d be asking for trouble to go after it. If he had any sense, he’d forget all about the gold and ride into Parkersville, tell the sheriff there what he knew, turn over the locket, and be done with it. Then ride north like he was planning to do before and sign on as a hand somewhere to get up a stake and buy a decent horse. Then go home.

  That was what he should do.

  He thought about it for a while, but somehow he couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for it. The trouble was ... what?

  “It’s always got to happen to me,” he muttered, and stuck the locket in his pocket, strode for his horse. He didn’t know what he was actually going to do yet, but just standing around doing nothing didn’t appeal.

  He pushed the swaybacked old gelding as fast as he could, but it didn’t amount to what you could call speed. Not speed like a good horse from the ranch back home would have given him.

  After he’d gotten along a little, he noticed that the sun was most of the way up toward noon already. Morning shot, and he was not a whole lot closer to Leanda and Cork than he had been sleeping last night. In fact, probably further behind, if they were moving. He was hoping they’d gone to Parkersville and would be there long enough for him to catch up with them.

  It galled him more and more being given such a time over all this. Everybody taking advantage and him getting pushed and shoved and traipsed all over the countryside and promised enough gold to make him as rich as all the bankers in Texas put together, and then just sent off to bed and left behind like a fool.

  Well, he had been a fool. He’d done a lot of fool things in his life, and it seemed like most of them lately. But he was done being the fool. If there was something to salvage out of this mess, he planned to have it. He didn’t figure to let Leanda get away with putting one over on him.

  No sir, he didn’t.

  He thought this through several times over, and every time he came to the point where he made up his mind not to let Leanda put something over on him, he dug in his spurs, and the old horse humped the sway out of his back but didn’t speed up any.

  By and by he got to thinking about what he was going to do, exactly, once he got to Parkersville. He was sure going to do one of two things, he figured, sooner or later. Either he would get his share of the gold, or else he was going to see Leanda paid for killing Tyler and Hart. It was going to be one or the other. The only thing was, he couldn’t figure out which one.

  Tossing it back and forth, he rode on through the rest of the morning thinking first that he would do the right thing and turn the whole business over to the sheriff, only he would stay around and make sure Leanda got caught. That idea would make him come all over comfortable and happy and satisfied and righteous as a deacon at a Sunday school picnic, and he would ride along for a little while smiling to himself as he pictured Leanda being sentenced by a hanging judge. Although, it was unlikely anybody would hang a woman, least of all Leanda. But women had been hanged other places, he’d heard, once in a while. He would be sitting there in the courtroom, and she would look around at him for help, and he would just shrug.

  Then Jeremy would think of the gold and he would start cussing the old horse and digging in his spurs. Suppose there really was a wagonload of gold loose? Just because she had killed Tyler and Hart—and it was still possible that she hadn’t done it, but Cork or somebody else had—it didn’t mean the gold hadn’t been won fair and square by her in a poker game, did it? And she had promised him a quarter of it. Didn’t that give him the right to try to catch up with her first thing and see that she didn’t make off with his share? He could always go the sheriff afterwards. He would hang onto the locket and say nothing to anybody. When he had made sure of what was coming to him, time enough then to help the sheriff catch the killer, whoever it might be. And if it was Leanda, wouldn’t he be more help if he had been watching her up close for a while?

  This all made sense to him, and he would feel pretty well convinced that he really didn’t have any good reason to go to the sheriff right off, so long as he did sometime; and he would ride along as fast as he could make the old horse go, which was slower all the time, especially since it was greener country now and the critter was thinking about eating lunch.

  Actually, Jeremy was thinking about eating lunch, too. The trouble was he didn’t have any with him. He decided to keep going for an hour or so and try to get a shot at some game, stop for lunch then.

  This plan didn’t work out, though, since all he happened on was a toad, and a fox which disappeared as soon as he saw it and was out of range anyway. After a while he decided to keep on and not stop at all.

  This plan didn’t work out either, since the gelding didn’t see it the same way, and just like somebody’s half-deaf old grandfather he figured he was old enough to take liberties and get away with it. Jeremy kicked and hollered until he was worn out and then gave up. At the next little creek he stopped and sat down in the shade of a thicket while the old gelding cropped grass, tail swishing happily.

  Jeremy muttered at the horse now and then, halfheartedly, but mostly kept trying to make up his mind what to do when he got to town. It seemed he just couldn’t settle once and for all on one thing or the other.

  After he’d worked it around and around long enough he was so frustrated he didn’t care anymore what he did, just so he did it and got it over and done with.

  He went and got his horse and started riding again, determined on just one thing: getting to Parkersville.

  ~*~

  He swung around Billy’s Hill and rode into town from the east, just as the sun was burning itself out down behind the mountains. There in the square—one of the embellishments put on the town by the new breed of law-abiding, solid-citizen types who had lately gotten a firm grip on affairs hereabouts—there on a gibbet built of new wood white as bones even in the late light, hung three bodies in a row.

  A wind swept through town, hot and dry and lonesome, and the bodies, tied hand and foot, with heads canted forward and sharply to the right, swung and twisted back and forth on creaking ropes.

  Jeremy rode past the gibbet and glanced up—straight into the eyes of one of the dead men, which were wide and staring with the terror of death, and full of flies.

  Jeremy looked quickly away, his face long and sober. He wondered suddenly if he could be hanged right along with Leanda and Cork if he didn’t say anything about what he knew and it was found out.

  He swallowed hard, glancing back over his shoulder once more at the three unknown men who had been hanged for their crimes—maybe they were the ones who shot the mining tycoon. The wind kept on swaying and turning them, making the staring eyes sweep over the surrounding square, which was mostly empty.

  Somewhat spooked, Jeremy pulled to the hitch rack in front of the sheriff’s office a couple of minutes later, swung down and slung the reins. He pulled in a deep breath and went inside.

  The sheriff’s office was big, but he didn’t do much with all the space except stack hats and pistols and wanted posters and broken pairs of suspenders and old calendars and leaky coffeepots and about anything else you might never want. The stuff was everywhere, especially in the corners and on the tops of the furniture. The furniture wasn’t much either: some old rickety tables and a battered dresser with two of the drawers pulled half out and piled high with old boots and pistols so they wouldn’t close anyway, and a roll-top desk three feet deep in wanted posters, which got yellower and yellower toward the bottom of the piles.

  On a big square desk a pistol was dismantled for repair or cleaning on top of a bunch of papers. An old shirt was slung over the back of the chair behind the desk, but there was nobody around.

  Jeremy considered walking right back out again. He could ride out of town and forget the whole business. How would anybody ever know it was him who found the b
odies and buried them? And if they did figure it out, so what? —if he rode away now and forgot the whole thing like it had never happened. He didn’t need all this. There probably wasn’t any gold anyway, and he’d only get his butt shot off chasing it.

  He was just turning to go back outside when there was a sound behind him and a deep powerful voice said, “Leavin’?”

  Jeremy half turned back and saw the biggest, craggiest-faced, fiercest-eyed, heaviest-browed, most-dangerous-looking man he’d ever seen. The man had thighs like something off a prize bull and hands big enough to make the huge old Whitneyville Walker apart on the desk look like a derringer. He glowered down at Jeremy, and Jeremy decided he’d better not just walk out now and pretend he’d come to the wrong place or something.

  “I was just, uh, looking for the sheriff,” he said.

  “I’m the sheriff.” His mouth didn’t open or move more than it had to to let the words out; then it closed up tight and hard.

  “Oh, well then, you’re just the man I want to see.” This fellow was just the man he didn’t want to see. Jeremy had started trying to think what exactly he was going to say about what had happened to him, and he saw how much like a tall tale it was going to sound.

  The sheriff stood there looking at him, unblinking.

  “I want to report a killing. Two killings, that is,” he added. He decided at that moment that he wouldn’t try to explain anything at all.

  “Killin’s?” Maybe it was Jeremy’s imagination, but he thought he saw eagerness in the fierce eyes.

  “Yeah. A day’s ride south along a creek bank, where there’s a lot of cottonwoods. I camped there last night and stumbled on the bodies. I buried ’em under some rocks to keep the buzzards and coyotes away.”

  The big man took two long strides and was at his desk. He sat and with amazing speed put the gun together, though he didn’t appear to be in any hurry. He just knew that gun very well. Jeremy stood watching, trying to think if there was anything else he needed to say. He was determined now to say as little as he could. If it had been smart to report the killings, that was all it would be smart to do.