by Gene Curry
“Jesus Christ, it’s Saddler,” Cassidy said, only a burly shape in the darkness to me. Just as I lost consciousness, I felt myself being dragged and I think I heard Pearl’s girlish voice.
A wet bandanna on my face woke me up. Water trickled into my mouth and I coughed. First light was showing in the eastern sky and the desert was peaceful and cold. It was so cold I shivered though I was covered by blankets. Butch and the others were huddled around me, silent in their misery. The Kid was up on the rock with his hat pulled low over his eyes. He didn’t take his eyes away from where he was watching.
Pearl trickled more water in my mouth, then Butch lifted my head and Pearl let me drink my fill. “We thought you were going to die,” she said.
“What in hell happened?” Butch asked. “We was going to go back and get you.”
I was able to talk better then. I must have sounded like a rusty hinge, but the words came out all right. “I’m sure I hit him in the thigh. I don’t think he’s faking. Any sign of him?” Butch shook his head. “Harry’s been up on the rock since it got light. No sign.”
Butch helped me to sit up. Pearl gave me more water until I told her to stopper the canteen. There couldn’t have been much water left.
“Then maybe he thinks we’re gone,” I said. “Wounded he may be. Just don’t count on him being dead. I didn’t shoot so good.”
Butch dusted sand off me until I told him to stop it. “We’ve got to get to the next waterhole,” I said. Butch and Pearl got me to my feet. “If he’s wounded there’s a chance he’ll die there.”
“Amen to that,” Cassidy said. He squeezed my arm. “Goddamn it’s good to see you, Saddler. Holy Christ! I’m looking at the man that shot Tom Horn!”
“Maybe the man that shot at Tom Horn. A lot of men have shot at Tom Horn. Let’s be off.”
The Kid said he’d stay behind and give us cover in case Horn hadn’t been hit. Nobody argued because Horn had more tricks than a carnival magician. Besides, I wasn’t able to travel very fast and Butch had to support me a good part of the way. We were resting in the shade of a barrel cactus when the Kid caught up to us. We all waited for the bad news.
Instead, the Kid grinned. “Not a sign of him,” he said, unstoppering his canteen and allowing himself a small drink. “Whatever else he’s doing, Tom Horn isn’t walking around today. I watched good and he didn’t show an inch of himself. I’m beginning to cheer up, ladies and gentlemen.”
“Don’t get too cheerful,” I said.
Butch glared at me. “There you go again, Saddler. Always looking on the dark side of things. What the hell, what am I saying! You did it, you Texas son of a bitch. You stopped Tom Horn dead in his tracks. Anyway—wounded him if he’s not dead.”
Butch dragged himself to his feet. Some of his old cockiness had returned. “On to California,” he said, yanking me to my feet. “We still got the money and we still got our health.”
It was only about five miles to the next waterhole. The old man had described it as “a good un.” It was only five miles away, but in the condition I was in it might have been fifty. More than rest I needed water, an awful lot of water, because the hours under the blanket in the sun had just about drained the life out of me.
It took us half the day to travel those five miles. By early afternoon we could see the rocks that sheltered the waterhole from the ever-blowing sand. There was so much shade at the hole that the water was close to cool. The hole was deep and the water clear. Butch lay beside the hole and reached down with his hand.
“I can feel it coming in,” he yelled. “You know what that means?”
Pearl filled a canteen and brought it to where I sat with my back against a rock. I drank until I couldn’t drink any more. Then Pearl poured the rest of the water over my head. The horses drank until their bellies were swollen, then lay down in the shade. Now all the canteens were filled and stoppered and the hole was filling up again. Butch was standing guard and, without turning his head, he called out, “Not a sign of our friend, Mr. Horn.”
I slept and when I woke up Etta was watching for Horn. I called up to her and she shook her head without turning it. Full of life-giving water, Pearl was beginning to swagger again, to regain her bad-kid jauntiness. There was so much water that she had washed her face and poured water over her short-cropped hair. I lay there wondering if this would be the last place I’d see on earth. Butch and I had talked about Horn, and we decided that it was best to take a chance and stay at the waterhole until people and horses were strong enough to travel again. There was some dried beef, so there was no danger of starvation.
We stayed at the waterhole for two days and Horn didn’t show up. On the second morning Butch was in a cheerful, bloodthirsty mood and was all for going back to see if he could cut off Tom Horn’s head. Pearl giggled but Etta looked disgusted.
“It’s only five miles,” Butch yelled in great good humor. “Nobody else has to go. I’ll go myself. I want to express that head to the Pinks, from the first town we come to. I have a yearning to express that bastard’s head—salt it first, of course—all the way to Chicago. ‘Dear Mr. Pinkerton: I think you lost something so I’m sending it back. I know we can’t never be friends, but here’s hoping you will think more kindly of me in the future. Yours truly, Butch Cassidy.’ What do you think of that, ladies and gents?”
Etta glared at him. “I think you’re losing your mind. What mind you have left. You’re turning into a savage, Cassidy. That’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard of in my life.”
Pearl just giggled.
It was pretty disgusting, but I wasn’t as high-toned as Etta, the ex-schoolmarm. So I grinned. Damn! It was good to be alive.
“That’s a dumb idea,” I said, grinning. “Besides, it wouldn’t look like Horn by the time the head reached Chicago. Maybe we got lucky with Horn. That remains to be seen. But I don’t think he’ll be coming after us.” The Sundance Kid called down from the guard position. “I vote no on that head business too.”
I had finished filling my canteens and was ready to go. “You’re out-voted, Butch. Now everybody drink till you leak and we’ll be on our way.” I pointed toward the mountains in the distance. “California starts on the other side.”
Butch looked disappointed at not being able to express Tom Horn’s head to Chicago, but he accepted the majority decision. “Horn may be just wounded. But if he’s wounded he’ll die. Out here he will.”
“There’s a good chance of it,” I said. “But we can’t get careless and we can’t slow down too much.”
We moved out toward the mountains. All the next day we led the horses to save their strength. In time the desert gave way to arid country, still hard and dry but nothing like the blistering hell we had come through. In the clear, dry air you could see the mountains from a long way off. On the far side of those mountains lay northern California, good, green country full of lakes and well-watered valleys. The plan at present was for Cassidy, Sundance and Etta to make their way to San Francisco, and from there to go by ship to Central or South America.
Pearl decided she was coming with me. That part had been agreed on long since, though it hadn’t been put into words. I knew taking her with me might be a mistake. What the hell! I’d made mistakes before. Anyway, she had no place with Butch and the others. Etta was a two-man woman and Pearl wouldn’t fit in.
In slow stages, Pearl and I drifted down to Texas, and from there to Mexico, to lay low for a bit. I wasn’t too worried about the Pinkertons. I never did see any wanted posters on us, not that far south. We lived high for as long as the money lasted, which wasn’t all that long. After a few months we found ourselves back in Texas, and with the money gone it was back to gambling for me. Pearl kept at me to teach her how to play poker, and I did my best to show her how. I tried hard, but it didn’t pan out. Poker is like no other card game, and it takes a certain temperament to be good at it. Pearl didn’t have it. She giggled when she was winning and pouted when she wasn’t. And as we a
ll know, that is no way for a gambler to be. It got so that the other players could read her like a book, and she lost more than I won. I always made enough for us to get by on, no matter how much she lost. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was Pearl. The wildness in her could never be quenched.
Toward the end—we were in El Paso—she got restless and spoke of going back into the bandit business. Pearl had a lot of ideas. One of them was to go east and rob banks that hadn’t been robbed before. She urged me to go along, but I had to say no. I had robbed one bank and gotten away with it. I wasn’t about to press my luck. Besides, I prefer poker.
I knew she wanted to take off for parts unknown, and I didn’t try to stop her. One night I came back to the hotel after a two-day poker game and she was gone. She didn’t even leave a note. Maybe by this time she’s married, with kids, and lives in a rose-covered cottage. But I wouldn’t bet a dime on it.
Tom Horn, limping badly, got hanged up north for murdering a twelve-year-old boy. Some kind of bushwhacking job for a few dollars. Old Tom said he thought he was back-shooting the boy’s father. He kept saying that until he dangled.
All this happened to me a long time ago in Wyoming and other places. And don’t ever ask me how I like piano music or you’re likely to get shot.
JIM SADDLER 6: ACE IN THE HOLE
By Gene Curry
First Published by Tower Books in 1981
Copyright © 1981, 2018 by Peter McCurtin
First Smashwords Edition: April 2018
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.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Cover image © 2018 by Edward Martin
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.
About the Author
Peter J. McCurtin was born in Ireland on 15 October 1929, and immigrated to America when he was in his early twenties. By the early 1960s, he was co-owner of a bookstore in Ogunquit, Maine, and often spent his summers there.
McCurtin’s first book, Mafioso (1970) was nominated for the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, and filmed in 1973 as The Boss, with Henry Silva. More books in the same vein quickly followed, including Cosa Nostra (1971), Omerta (1972), The Syndicate (1972) and Escape From Devil’s Island (1972). 1970 also saw the publication of his first “Carmody” western, Hangtown.
McCurtin’s view of the frontier is harsh and unforgiving, a place where a man with any sense looks to his own safety, and to hell with everyone else. His westerns are fast, violent and chauvinistic, but the violence and sex are seldom overtly explicit.
McCurtin’s editor at Leisure Books remembers that he was “a terrific, fluent, natural writer of action, and a solid researcher for his westerns and mysteries. Leisure did not, in my time (1979-1981), let anyone else write under Peter’s name, but Peter wrote under other names in addition to his own byline. He was a real workhorse with, unfortunately, an alcohol problem (like so many), and without question the very best writer that Leisure was publishing at the time. Perhaps he could have been better and more prolific under better circumstances.” For a while, McCurtin himself also worked as an editor at Leisure Books.
An acquaintance adds: “When he wrote most of his books, he lived in a studio in Murray Hill, on 39th Street, only a few blocks from the New York offices of Tower Books, which at the time were located at 2 Park Avenue. His building was called the Tuscany Towers back then. It’s now a W Hotel. He had a Murphy bed, a kitchenette, and a desk with manual typewriter. There was no phone except for the payphone in the building basement. He liked eating at Automats, he went to the movies several times a week and spent a lot of time reading.”
Peter McCurtin died in New York on 27 January 1997. His westerns in particular are distinguished by unusual plots with neatly resolved conclusions, well-drawn secondary characters, regular bursts of action and tight, smooth writing. if you haven’t already checked him out, you have quite a treat in store.
You’ve reached the last page.
But the adventure doesn’t end here …
Join us for more first-class, action-packed books.
Regular updates feature on our website and blog
The Adventures continue…
The Home of Great Western Fiction!
More on Gene Curry
