The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “All right. All right.” I hadn’t intended stirring up any old quarrels. But evidently I had struck a sensitive nerve. Mobo started off, then turned back to glare at me.

  “Wise men,” he said, “know when they’re in danger of overplaying their hands. I don’t need to give you and Ben Addis any more hints that you’d better lay off me. I can stand just so much sarcasm.”

  “Am I addicted to sarcasm?” I asked blankly.

  “You were the one that started all that monkey talk, telling Ben Addis to buy a pair of brothers for me.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “Let’s find that girl or we’ll all be in trouble. Why don’t you have the men station themselves in the darkness and wait? With daylight she’ll creep toward the entrance to try to find a way out.”

  “Damn it, we can’t wait till daylight,” said Mobovarah.

  “You’re in command, Mobo,” I repeated. “But if necessary we can wait till we starve her out—as long as the car tracks aren’t traced to these parts. Go on, Mobo. Leave me to my own strategy.”

  “What strategy?”

  “Never mind. It would probably sound like sarcasm to you.”

  He went back into the tunnels, and I walked out to the narrow canyon entrance. I called to the guard to bring my horse.

  “Are you certain she’s had no chance to get past you?” I asked.

  “Not a chance.”

  “Good. Now where is her car?”

  “A few yards west of the foothill trail, hidden among the thickets. I have the key.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

  You see, I had the advantage of these other Scarlet Swordsmen. I knew Faye Landreth. One flashlight view of those red rock walls had assured me. Mobovarah and the others wouldn’t have believed that any girl would attempt to climb over those rugged, almost perpendicular walls in the dark. But they didn’t know Faye Landreth.

  If there had been just a little more daylight I might have made it in time. Or if my beautiful brown and white Arabian horse had been more congenial to my purpose.

  “Step along, pony, step along. It’s ten to one she’s already dashed away—but if she hasn’t, you’ll be a hero, pony. Step along. I don’t know this trail, but you ought to.”

  It was no good, talking my brand of English to this smart Arabian horse. Animals have a keen sense of who is their master and who isn’t. This horse, accustomed to Alashee, seemed to know what the men didn’t know—namely, that I was not Alashee—at least not the Alashee it was used to.

  I found the foothill road. On the gallop, I headed down the line toward that dark patch of vegetation. Yes, here was a thicket. Careful, now. If the car was still there, then I’d bet my spurs and jeweled dagger that Faye Landreth was there too, trying to figure how to make the thing go without the benefit of a car key.

  And yet I should have known that Faye was the sort of girl who would always carry an extra key.

  Car lights flashed on within fifteen yards of me. The motor roared, and the dark red coupe leaped out of the thicket. It shot into the narrow road. It gave me and my horse a wide berth. It crackled over a line of low bushes, careened, straightened up, swung back into the road beyond me.

  It was occupied by one blonde bombshell. She saw me, and she rolled up the window as I shouted at her.

  “Faye! Faye! FAYE! Come back!”

  CHAPTER VI

  South Bound Bus

  By George, she heard me, and she gave me a look.

  A few minutes before, it was the darkness that did me wrong. Now it was the light. If there hadn’t been quite so much dawn in my face she might have stopped to see who it could be calling her by name.

  But she got one square look at my whiskered face and tiger-fierce eyes, and that was enough. I saw the flash of terror and hatred in her expression. She bore down on the foot feed and turned the foothill trail into a serpent-line of dust.

  For one brief moment that look she gave left me stunned. I should have felt complimented. The terror was the very feeling she should have toward a person like Alashee. The hatred was for Alashee, of course, for what he had done to me. And yet I, wearing Alashee’s body, was bound to be cut to the quick, catching the slap of that expression full in the face.

  I reined my horse and cut back to the upper trail. Here was one of the shortcuts that Alashee and his men had taken on the previous night. My horse knew the way, and daylight was coming on swiftly.

  “Move along! Move along!”

  My words, practiced on my donkey, had no charm whatever on this fiery Arabian mount. But a light slap of the reins on the neck got results. I leaned forward from the stirrups, and the ground sped beneath me.

  The serpent-line of dust was coming toward me, some twenty minutes later. Again I would have a fighting chance to make contact with one red coupe occupied by one blonde. I winced at the thought of having to take horrified expressions from her pretty face. I groped for words—the most believable words I could muster—to prove, in one breath, that I was a friend, not a terrorist.

  Here my trail led down to the road. She swung through the nearest curve. She must have seen me, for she suddenly throttled down. The brakes tore up the earth.

  But I would be at her window before she could turn around, and she knew it. So she came on. And then and there I knew I was going to do the daredevil stunt you’ve seen done a hundred times in the movie. I would gallop right into her path and leap from my horse to the car.

  Any errors in my calculations were food for thought afterwards. Error number one, the movie boys rehearse their acts beforehand. Error number two, the movie cars have open windows or other conveniences for outstretched hands to hang onto. Error number three, movie cars may be depended upon not to jam the brakes too soon. Number four, a movie horse knows better than to leap ten yards ahead of the car at the crucial moment. But as I had noted before, my Arabian mount was not responsive to my donkey talk.

  I leaped. That’s about all I can say for myself.

  I leaped because, after I was all set to leap, my horse suddenly sidestepped and galloped out from under me. I flew forward, I was too surprised to go into a roll, I landed on my chest and the points of my toes.

  The screech of brakes was the most welcome sound I ever heard. The car came to a stop within inches of me. I rolled in the dust and scrambled to the edge of the road.

  “Get up! On your feet!”

  Faye Landreth was giving me orders! The car window was down, now, and an automatic pistol was leveled at me over the door.

  On my feet I marched.

  I don’t know what sort of sarcasm Alashee might have employed if I had been in possession of his mind as well as his body; but I will say that Faye would have put his talents to a test. For the next few miles she practically burned me to a cinder—the more so because I couldn’t make her listen to me. There were simply no words to penetrate the wall of hatred that she built against me.

  “Listen to me, Faye. You’re in terrible danger. You’ve got to believe me!”

  “I’ll be in danger when I relax my grip on this gun,” she said. “March along. We’ll make the village in an hour, at this pace, and they’ll find a nice comfortable cell for you until they can string up a rope.”

  She drove as slowly as she had driven the night before when Wonder and the two monkeys had accompanied us. I walked.

  “Faye, you’ve got to listen.”

  “Where did you get my name? Never mind, it’s been in the papers. You’re probably able to read. Many murderers learn to read. It’s a convenience when their names are in the headlines.”

  “You think I’m Alashee, but I’m not,” I said. “Alashee is dead. He died when he murdered me—and I lived. I’m Val Roman.”

  Crack! The pistol spat a bullet at my heels. I had been warned to keep a distance of five yards between myself and the front bumper. Perhaps I had lagged a matter of four or five feet. But no, it was something else that had earned that little harbinger of death—my mention of the
name Val Roman!

  “Don’t speak that name again,” Faye Landreth said, and she meant it. “From your ugly lips I won’t stand for any such sacrilege . . . So you are Alashee. That’s what I suspected when you followed me on horseback.”

  “I had to see you—”

  “Yes, I can understand that. For the same reason you had to kill Val Roman, you think you’ll have to kill me—to save the ugly necks of all your Scarlet Swordsmen. Let me look at this map. Ah, here it is, a little sketch—”

  “I made that sketch!” I shouted. “I can tell you what it is. And that will prove—”

  “What is the sketch?”

  “It’s the face of Alashee,” I said. I drew it—last night—before he got me—there! Don’t you see? That proves—”

  “It proves nothing,” said Faye Landreth, gesturing with the pistol. “Keep moving. . . . It proves that whoever moved my car last night discovered this sketch and recognized it as you.” I fell silent. My blunt attack was doing me more harm than good.

  “So you’re one of Ben Addis’ men,” Faye said presently.

  “Aren’t you tired of driving with one hand?” I said. “I’ll march for you without the encouragement of a pistol. I’m used to walking—with Wonder and Squinty and Sober.”

  “So you know their names?” Faye didn’t like this. “Val would have been happy to know that. He’d have given you a jolly punch that would have curled your whiskers . . . What will your master Ben Addis think when he reads the court reports and discovers that he has been associating with a Scarlet Swordsman?”

  “He knows all about that—I’ll swear to that in court.” I tried to put this idea over with a vengeance, for now I thought I was getting somewhere. “Give me a chance in court and I’ll burn Ben Addis’ hide off. Believe me, Faye, something very strange happened when Alashee stabbed me last night—”

  “You’re no ordinary desperado. You’re insane. You’ve got everything the newspapers will want for a big story with bold, black headlines. ‘Afghan Bandit Claims To Be Victim of His Own Murder.’ Yes, you’ve got everything—including big talk.”

  “I’ve got a way with monkeys,” I said.

  “No doubt. Do you prefer to choke them or stab them in the back?”

  “Where are you going to go,” I asked, “after you’ve turned me over to the village marshal?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I want to know whether you’ll be safe from the men who intend to run your car off into the canyon.” I waited for her response. I looked back at her, sensing that I had at last made an impression. She waited for me to say more. “If there was a chance for you to live I’d ask you to take care of Sober and Squinty.”

  “You’re very clever at trying to weave your way into my confidence,” she said presently. Her tone was a trifle less bold. “What do Sober and Squinty mean to you?”

  “Why should I tell you, when you won’t believe me?”

  “I’m in no mood to believe any Scarlet Swordsman,” she said bitterly. “After what you did last night—”

  “Believe me, your friend is not dead—not entirely!”

  “You’re mad,” said Faye. “But as soon as I’ve delivered you to the police, I’ll accompany the coroner . . .”

  There were tears in her eyes, but a fighting strength was in her voice. I knew she was thinking, with pity, of the body that had lain in the doorway since last night, unattended except for the presence of two bewildered little monkeys in red overalls and jaunty feathered hats.

  I had made some sort of impression on her with my knowledge of Val Roman and my interest in the monkeys. How deep an impression it was hard to say.

  Meanwhile I had been watching for my chance to break and run for freedom.

  Now we were coming to the main highway. My chances for a getaway would be considerably lessened from here on. Had it not been for her, I would have welcomed a cozy cell. But for all I knew, the band of Swordsmen might already be riding to overtake us. They would come the instant they realized that Faye, not I, had driven away in the car.

  I kept my ears tuned to horses’ hoofs. But as luck would have it, a very different turn of events came about. The red coupe ran out of gas and came to a choking stop at the side of the road.

  When the coupe stopped, I didn’t. I made the break for the scrubby underbrush toward the foothills, taking my chance against the shots from the pistol. Two bullets came close enough to my heels to give me the jack-rabbit jumps. A third bullet nipped my green turban. I fell on my face and lay on the ground long enough to catch my breath.

  I squirmed about to see whether that little blonde desperado was following me.

  To my surprise she was not. A bus was coming up the road. She hailed it. It stopped, and she got in and rode away.

  “So she doesn’t want me, after all!” I muttered. The situation left me flat on my back in more ways than one, “Now why did she do that?”

  The answer was that she had believed me, in part, at least. She was in danger of being murdered by the other Swordsmen before she could deliver me to the authorities, and she knew it. Capturing me was not-quite so important, on this bright and shining morning, as retaining her own life. In fact, nothing could be wiser than for her to report back to her father at the English Agency, a scant one hundred miles to the south.

  I suspected the bus was southbound. I knew that the buses on this line were running in pairs, and that was my cue—my chance to look out for the welfare of the blonde dynamite that had just taken three potshots at me.

  Five minutes later I hailed the second bus, paid my fare, and asked the driver to step on it. But he wasn’t too optimistic about overtaking bus number one.

  “I have to make all the local stops,” he said. “We won’t catch up till we hit the other highway, a hundred miles to the south.”

  “And the other bus goes straight through?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And there’s an English Agency when we reach the town?”

  “Indeed there is, right in the heart of Ricklasha, and you’ll find a sturdy gentleman in Sir Morrison Landreth.”

  “Drive on, friend,” I said. “And I’ll have a pocketful of shillings for you if you make it ahead of the other bus.”

  CHAPTER VII

  Morrison Landreth Turns a Deaf Ear

  The nightmares that haunted me on that one-hundred mile journey were something terrible, for I sank into a half-dead stupor soon after boarding the bus. It was Val Roman who did the dreaming, but it was the evil deeds of Alashee that terrorized my dreams.

  The final nightmare came upon waking at the bus terminal at Ricklasha. The first bus had arrived just a few minutes ahead of us (in spite of my driver’s breakneck efforts—for which I tipped him generously) but to my dismay the other bus did not contain a passenger by the name of Faye Landreth.

  “Yes, I remember her,” the bus driver said to me. “Sure, she got on between towns, and I would have brought her all the way. But some men on Arabian horses raced us toward Ruklah and charged across the road. There was nothing for me to do but stop. A little fellow with a twisted face, a Hindu, was the one that coaxed her to get off.”

  “Coaxed her!” I mocked. “Threatened her with a gun or a knife, most likely.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said the driver. “She went without a word.”

  “Hell, man, have you come all the way into Ricklasha without stopping to report this business?”

  “I’ll make my own reports as I’m required to make ’em and no other way,” said the driver.

  So I was stranded a hundred miles from Ben Addis’ camp, and Faye had fallen into the bandit’s hands. At the rear of the bus terminal depot a radio was blaring the news, and I listened with trepidation . . . The European situation . . . Salt imports . . . The American congress . . . the local fairs of India villages. . . But no reports of any banditry or murders in the vicinity of Ruklah, and no automobile accidents. Well, these were pretty sure to come in time.
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br />   In fact, at any hour or minute, the story of Val Roman’s murder might hit the front pages, and the newspapers would soon piece together a description of me as a suspect. When that happened, my life wouldn’t be worth more than the price of a bullet. Any further traveling I needed to do had best be done quickly.

  One place I would be safe: in the camp of Ben Addis—until the lid blew off the whole band of Scarlet Swordsmen!

  I glanced at the bus schedules. An hour and a half to kill. To kill! The very words conjured up the horrified association of an automobile plunging over a cliff.

  I approached the grounds of the

  English agency, I was stopped by the shout of a young man in distress. “Lend a hand, there, stout fellow!” He pointed to the tennis ball that he had just struck out of bounds. If I hadn’t been the sort of person who would help a cow out of the ditch, I might have passed William Oleander without noticing him. But as quick as we had exchanged a couple of words and he told me that he had just come from England to see Faye Landreth, I took very particular notice of him.

  He was about my age—that is, Val Roman’s age—an exceptionally well-built fellow with a harmless face, large clear eyes, rather prominent nose and jaw, and a mop of dark brown hair. His muscles worked well on a tennis racket.

  “So you’re practicing to win a game or two from Faye Landreth,” I said.

  “Oh, I’ll beat her, all right. I’m a sort of all round champion when it comes to ‘love one.’ The old technique, if you know what I mean. This is my big chance. Two weeks of tennis to put her in the right frame of mind for a proposal.”

  He nudged me as if to imply that it was all over but the congratulations.

  “You’re pretty sure of yourself,” I said. “Maybe she has a boy friend over here.”

  “Maybe that’s the reason her folks sent for me. I’m an old friend of the family. Confidentially, her old man cabled me the money to fly down for a visit. She’ll swoon when she sees me again, I’ll bet.”