The E. Hoffmann Price Spice Adventure MEGAPACK ™

by Price, E. Hoffmann

  A tall man with a drooping black mustache stood in the corner, arms folded. He nodded as he watched her accost Slim. This was the proprietor. The girl flashed him a glance as Slim followed her.

  Then he saw a red haired man, long legged and limping a little. Slim remembered his father’s description. He wondered if the cowpuncher had a strawberry roan outside.

  “Listen, Sally,” he whispered, as they approached the table in the corner, “I’m waiting for a fellow, and I can’t see much, from here.”

  A waiter was bringing the drinks Sally had ordered before leaving the bar. One glass, Slim realized, would be cold tea, but he didn’t care.

  The tall redhead’s face went sour, then black when his glance shifted toward Sally. The blonde shrank, caught Slim’s arm. Her hip would have brushed him, but for the holster tied to his thigh.

  The redhead moved swiftly, despite his game leg. He spat and wrathfully said, “Well, you towhaired tramp, I guess he’s handsome, huh?”

  Slim did not want to quarrel and make himself conspicuous; his job was to follow the lame man, “Now, look-ee here, pardner.” He raised his left hand in a placating gesture; Sally still clung to his right arm. “That ain’t no way to talk to a lady.”

  “Please do go away, Randy,” Sally implored.

  Between them, they only managed to get him hostile.

  “Why, you long legged son of a—”

  The music had stopped, and Randy’s voice filled the entire place. Sally cried out, and Slim thrust her away from him. That move was enough to start Randy for his gun.

  He was quick, but he delayed a little, to give Slim a chance to get shed of Sally. This was from over-confidence, and the desire to make it clear that he had not drawn first. His face made that all very plain; Slim knew that this man had moved in for a kill.

  So did everyone else. Men were scrambling, and girls were diving for cover.

  Randy’s eyes suddenly bugged out, and his jaw sagged. That was when Slim snapped, “Drop it, you polecat!”

  The gun in his left hand enforced that. Randy, too intent on timing the kid’s right hand reach for the holster at his right hip, had missed the Colt which Crane had flashed from the waist band of his pants.

  Randy’s smoke pole chunked to the sawdust, Men and women began breathing again, murmuring; it seemed almost funny, that surprised gunner’s gaping mouth and popping eyes.

  But what followed capped a good start. As he holstered his Colt, Slim closed in with his free fist. Randy was cold on his feet, and he had no time to lower his hands to defend himself. He crumpled, cracked his head on a cuspidor, and lay there, not even kicking.

  The spectators shook their heads. A bouncer said, “Shucks, Randy won’t know his own name fer a couple days.” This was as they hauled him to the rear, his scalp deeply gashed.

  Slim said to Sally, “M’am, I’m pow’ful sorry, but I can’t tarry and drink with you.”

  He went to the street. A strawberry roan was hitched at the rack. By the saloon lights, he could plainly see the hoof prints: half the near front shoe was missing.

  “That gent was fixing to kill me,” Slim reasoned, and with certainty. “But ain’t nobody around here that’s got ground for thinking I know it.”

  Randy’s studied attempt to make Slim draw first indicated that the law was biting into this tough town’s hide. Self-defense had to be pretty clearly proved. So, as he headed for his hotel, he chuckled and said to himself, “Nothing to do now but see I don’t get myself shot in the back. And whilst Mistah Randy is trying to recollect what his right name is, there’s a chanct of finding his pardner.”

  Once in his room, he thrust his gun under his pillow, and began unbuckling his spurs. He was thinking, “Mebbe if I fixed myself up like a Mexican, I’d have a better chanct of sneaking up on Randy’s pardner.”

  Winning a few gunfights would not expose the chief of the cattle thieves; that would only block the trail. He sat there, thinking it over; he recollected that Sally knew Randy by name.…

  A furtive tapping at the door brought him to his feet before he removed his boots. A feminine voice whispered, “It’s me. Sally.”

  He let her in, and replaced his gun when he saw she was alone.

  “Oh, I’m in a terrible predicament,” she breathlessly began, a hand on his arm.

  Sally still wore her blue satin gown. Lamplight reached down into her low cut bodice to model the loveliest curves. A backward move as his boot closed the door behind her. She let go his arm when he offered her the only chair in the room. When he seated himself on the bed, Sally resumed, “I’ve been robbed—I mean, someone went through my room—over at the Buckhead Saloon—I’d just saved up enough to pay my fare home—”

  “Ma’am, I sure would admire to help you.” Slim was touched by her distress, “But I’m dang nigh busted. If ten bucks’d help—”

  “Oh, but it’s worse than that!” She buried her face in her hands, and her white shoulders for a moment were shaken by sobs. As Slim seated himself on the arm of the chair and stroked her head, Sally went on, “I married a man—who advertised—he was a wealthy rancher—”

  “What? A gal like you, looking for matrumonyal advertising jaspers? That jest ain’t reasonable.”

  “But I lived in Cross Plains. Everyone that amounted to anything left town, except those that got killed in feuds.”

  He began to catch the point: a lovely girl, one of the many extra women in a town depopulated by adventure and the interminable quarrels of the post oak country, had snapped at the first prospect.

  “Uh—what’s wrong with your—um…mail order husband?”

  “He’s a drunken bum. He’s one-eyed, and positively filthy! Most of the time, he’s in jail. I told him I’d pay his fine and give him a hundred dollars in cash if he’d promise to leave town and never look at me again!”

  Slim, touched to the heart, tried to offer a consoling arm. The chair nearly upset, and in the scramble, Sally ended on his knee. She clung to him, curled up in his arms like a kitten. “Gol dang it, m’am,” he gasped, “in another second, I’ll be busting right out crying myself. But where in tunket I can get the money—onless mebbe I win myself a reward—” He was thinking fast. “For nailing rustlers or road agents or something.”

  “Oh, you’re wonderful!” Her generous kiss made him realize he had really discovered something. “Slim, if you can just keep an eye on things and protect me until I can save up some more money—”

  Sally was built to arouse protective instincts, and her voice encouraged such emotions. That sufficed to start a reckless exchange of kisses; and the fact that her father’s thievery and violent death had erected an impassable barrier between Madge and Slim clinched things.… He turned the lamp low.

  But Slim was surprised when the door slammed open, and Sally screamed, clawed herself out of his arms. “Oh, my God! That’s him!”

  One of the men revealed by the hall light was the proprietor of the Buckhead Saloon. Slim scarcely more than noted his black mustache and twisted mouth and craggy jaw. It was the drunk at the threshold who held his attention.

  So this was Sally’s husband, strangely released from jail? A chinless, one-eyed beanpole whose weak mouth twitched and slobbered tobacco juice as he screeched, “You dirty—Sally, you lousy stinking—!”

  Sally cried, “Look out, he’ll shoot,” and flung herself clear across the room, legs for a moment twinkling as she vanished in a flurry of silken slip and streaming blonde hair.

  But Slim hardly heard that. A fellow hears nothing when a .45 is weaving into line with his gizzard. The drunk lurched a pace. Slim had no time to debate. His hand came from beneath the pillow. The drunk was slow and fumbling. Sally’s boss made a move toward his hip.

  Slim cut loose, and the room shuddered from the rolling blasts of his C
olt. The drunk’s hammer thumb slipped, and he dropped with a cold gun. Men were tramping and shouting down the hall. They had been attracted by the two who had barged through the lobby, hunting trouble.

  Sally’s boss did not shoot or even draw. But a deputy marshal was advancing behind drawn guns. Slim knew that that hard bitten specimen would never back down; they’d kill each other.

  “Hist ’em, bub!” His icy eyes covered everything; the dead man, the disheveled girl who came from cover, crying out that it was not Slim’s fault. “Mebbe ’twarn’t his fault, defending hisself,” the law allowed. “But smoking out a gent that’s pertecting the sanctity of his home is downright murder, m’am, and yo’re a disgrace to yore sex, yuh shameless hussy. Mr. Kenyon bails the pore feller outen jail, and look whut you was doing!”

  Sally’s boss was smiling contentedly, and stroking his mustache. That told Slim a lot. The blonde had not deliberately betrayed him; she had been no more than a cog in the machine. And the marshal was bona fide; also he was stubborn in his notions on a husband’s rights.

  It looked like a hanging. At the very best, more years in the juzgado than any man could endure. Sally was paper white, wide eyed; she made inarticulate sounds as she swayed, uncertain on her feet. Slim wondered when she would collapse, or burst out with insane laughter.

  The marshal was coming forward, one gun now holstered, so that he could search his prisoner. There was no help for this. Slim saw a man approach Sally’s boss, Burt Kenyon.

  Kenyon started, cursed, whirled from the scene. That brief distraction left Slim wondering what had happened. A gun blast shook him. Flame from the marshal’s Colt set his shirt afire. Glass had spattered. Kerosene fumes thickened the air. The lawman was buckling at the knees.

  Slim could not put these details into their natural sequence. Things had happened too quickly, and he was already in motion. Sally was slamming the door, bolting it, screaming, “Run, darling! Before he gets on his feet!”

  She had snatched the lamp from its bracket and smashed it across the marshal’s head. Slim picked up his gun and bolted for the window. Men were yelling in the hall. Sally cried, “They can’t hang me for this! Run, you fool!”

  The door was splintering. The bolt was yielding.

  * * * *

  Slim landed in the alley. They could not do much or anything to a woman who had become hysterical. Sally’s laughter was clear above the uproar in his room. And before the alarm could spread, he was forking his unsaddled horse.

  He was well out of Paso del Norte before a posse combed the town. But Slim Crane’s mission was blown all to hell. Whether a warrant would follow him was another question. He’d better talk it over with his father. That urge drove him toward Arroyo Rojo, the town he had resolved to quit. And quit it he would; he’d get a fresh horse, some money, and his dad’s blessing, then head for New Mexico before Madge could ever curse him for being in on her father’s death.

  As he rode, he wondered what news had startled Burt Kenyon.

  Then, hearing hoof beats far behind him, he had no further time for thought. How in tunket could a posse have picked the trail so surely and quickly! With his start, that was all wrong.

  Someone might have guessed his next move. Certainly, his identity must have been blazoned all over Paso del Norte.

  Slim, however, outwitted his pursuers. His horse, unburdened by a saddle, carried less weight. So he gained for a while, then doubled back; from cover, he watched them swoop past him.

  “Dang funny, only four of ’em!” He shook his head, frowned. “And that damn’ sure of where I’m going, they ain’t bothering to track me!”

  He mulled that over. He could not get the full significance. However, his best guess led him toward home, though along a short cut. It was a toss up whether he’d get there before or after the posse. Still, that really made little difference, so that they did not meet.

  “Just as long as I can put a bug in pappy’s ear. If Kenyon ain’t in the beef business, I’m a polecat’s uncle!”

  When he reached the Diamond C spread, after swinging wide of Arroyo Rojo, it lacked less than an hour of dawn. The cook was not stirring about, nor was anyone snoring in the bunkhouse. Slim guessed that the riders, including his father, were out patrolling the range. That made it bad. He did not know whether to go out to find them, or stay and wait.

  A horse whinnied. Even in the gloom, Slim could plainly enough discern the silvery mane and tail of a palomino at the hitching post; and the Diamond C had no animal of that coloring in its entire string. Then he noted the glow of light from a side window. Something was dead wrong. Whoever the stranger might be, there should have been some sound of conversation, and dominated by his father’s voice.

  But Slim’s unwary approach had given warning. As a window rattled up, he flung himself from his mount and landed behind the grindstone. A woman cried, “Stay right where you are, or I’ll shoot!”

  Madge Daley was at the sill, ready to slide to the ground and get to her palomino; though only Slim would have recognized her in the shadows that blotted out all but the white blurr of face and throat, It seemed that the desire to escape without recognition had spurred her to that desperate outburst; her voice was tense and tremulous.

  She was the last person on earth he wanted to see. He wondered whether, vengeance bent, she had come to assassinate his father. Finally, he contrived to croak, “Madge—what the blazes—what you doing here?”

  “Slim!” She choked, and there was a metallic gleam as she lowered a pistol. “Good God, I thought—I’ve got to get out of here before your father gets back—don’t ever tell anyone—dad would kill me!”

  She was scarcely coherent. Slim vaulted to the sill. “Get back in. I’m alone. What’s wrong?”

  For a moment she clung to him, trembling and groping for words. Then she tugged at his arm, urging him to the lighted room. She said, “Slim, I’m so ashamed. I don’t know what to say. But that—” She gestured toward the table, “That’ll prove—but don’t ever tell dad!”

  She did not seem to know her father was dead. He regarded her disheveled hair, the torn blouse that trailed in tatters, exposing a good deal more than she realized. But as she hid her face on his shoulder, Slim’s eyes popped out of his head.

  On the table were bills of sale, which he recognized from their legal appearance. There were a dozen squares of rawhide, cut from as many freshly peeled hides. Each piece had the Diamond C brand!

  “When we quarreled that night,” she went on, haltingly, “I was furious. But the next night—oh, I hate to say it, but I learned that dad was beefing your cattle. To get even for that fence you cut. And for good measure—well, I realized why he’d bought me so many nice things, so suddenly. So I left, Wednesday night. To steal evidence, in Paso del Norte. I tricked a watchman there, and—”

  She flushed, grimaced wryly. But Slim didn’t notice that. He was too busy with his thoughts. While her father faced fatal bullets on the Diamond C, Madge had been in Paso del Norte, on the prowl. Slim demanded, “You mean you was fixing to sell your own pappy to the law! Why—” He thrust her from him. “Why—you damned low-down—”

  “Slim, don’t look at me that way! Don’t you understand, I came to throw this stuff in through a window. But no one was in. So I put it here, where he’d find it. There’s nothing against father, only against Burt Kenyon. A politician, beef contractor, saloon owner.”

  “Oh.” Slim understood. “Trying to save your pappy, huh!”

  “More than that! Trying to get him out of crookedness and revenge. I’d begun to see the cattleman’s side of it.”

  Then Slim’s misery returned a hundredfold. Madge was honest to the core, and brave as they made them. And he had killed her father. He didn’t know what to say or do. Even if it never leaked out, he could not face her. The glow in her eyes burned him when
she went on, “You and I can make peace between our parents, can’t we, Slim? I hated you for what you said, but it set me thinking.”

  “Sit down, honey,” he muttered, sinking into a chair.

  “I can’t. I’ve got to get home to dad. I’ll lie out of it, somehow, so he won’t suspect, right away, what I did.”

  “I’ll ride with you.” Slim could not evade the issue, or let her go to an empty cabin, to wait until the news reached her. “I got—uh—a heap—to tell you.”

  She regarded his drawn face. She sensed something was dreadfully wrong, and apprehension gripped her. “Slim, what is it? Tell me now. Right here!”

  But Slim had no chance to explain. A rifle blast and the shattering of glass were sounds prolonged by Madge’s scream. His side went numb. He did not realize that the distortion of the pane had spoiled the marksman’s aim. Other slugs thudded against the heavy walls, and sprayed the room with flying splinters.

  As he went for his .45, Madge snatched a poker and swept the lamp from the table. It crashed in the fireplace. She smothered the blazing kerosene with cushions from the lounge. Slim steadied his pistol barrel on the sill to squeeze lead at the tongues of flame that spurted from the woodpile and from the corner of the barn.

  When the fusillade slowed down to futile sniping, Madge crept to Slim’s side and said, “We can slip out the other side. There’s only four shooting at us.”

  “We can’t,” he muttered. “They got my hoss and yourn. It’s too close to dawn, anyway. We’d not get far.”

  A man shouted from the murky shadows, “Throw out those papers, and we’ll go away.”

  Slim leveled the Winchester Madge had located. As he did so, he thought, “Gawd, if I had dad’s buffler gun, I’d bust hell outen the grindstone that son is hiding behind.” He fired, heard the futile whine of a ricochet slug, then a mocking laugh.