by Jake Logan
“Well, thank you, ma’am,” said Speer.
“Slocum,” said Helen, holding out her hand, “Dave’s told me so much about you. I’m sorry to have to meet you under such circumstances.”
“Yeah. Me too,” said Slocum. “I thought that he was staying in town last night. He went to my room in the hotel.”
“He must have changed his mind. He’s rather impulsive, you know.”
“I guess so.”
“Why don’t you men sit down and have a cup of coffee?” Helen said. “Edgar will stay with Dave. I could use some company just now.”
“Well,” said Speer, “I really need to go out and check the road. See if I can find any evidence. But I guess it will keep a little longer.”
“I got work to do, Miss Lester,” said Charley Hill. “I’d best be getting to it.”
“All right, Charley,” she said.
Hill left the house and Slocum and Speer sat down at the table. In a moment, Helen had poured three cups of coffee and sat down at the table with them. “I knew something like this was going to happen,” she said. “I told him to be careful. Charley had come by the house last night and said that Dave was going to spend the night in town. I was glad of that. Charley also told me about the store. Bad news comes all at once, I guess.”
“I’d try to look at the good news, Miss—”
“Helen, please,” she said.
“Helen,” said Slocum. “I’d try to look at the good news.”
“And what is that?”
“Well, Davey’s alive. He could as easily have been killed by that shot.”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course. You’re right about that.”
“Miss Helen,” said Speer. “I have to ask you—do you have any idea who might be behind all this trouble?”
“I have to agree with Dave,” she said. “It’s got to be James Ritchie. There just isn’t anyone else, is there?”
“I can’t think of anyone,” said Speer, “but—”
“There just isn’t,” she said.
Speer and Slocum finished their coffee and took their leave. Outside the house, they stood by their horses for a moment.
“What do you think, Slocum?” Speer asked.
“I’m afraid that I’m in the embarrassing position to be agreeing with the law,” Slocum said.
Speer gave Slocum an inquisitive look. “What?”
“There just ain’t no evidence. Not right now. Not yet. Ritchie bears watching, maybe questioning, but just because his business benefits don’t mean that he’s guilty. The evidence, if you can call it that, is all what you lawmen call circumstantial. Ain’t that right?”
“Well, uh, yeah. You’re right. It’s real circumstantial.”
“Let’s ride on down the road a ways,” said Slocum. They mounted up and made their way out to the road. Slocum noticed the drag marks right away. “These shouldn’t be hard to follow,” he said. They had continued down the road for a couple of miles, maybe more, when the drag marks disappeared. The two men stopped and studied the road. “Davey lost his saddle right here,” Slocum said. “The horse started dragging him home.”
“Then the shot had to come from right around here close,” said the sheriff.
“Maybe,” said Slocum. “He might have kept his saddle for a ways before he fell.”
“How do we tell that?”
“I ain’t sure. Let’s ride along a bit farther.”
They moved slowly on down the road another half mile or so, and then Slocum noticed, as they rounded a curve, that there might be a pretty damn good ambush site down the road. He stopped and dismounted. He moved into the brush along the side of the road. He checked out several locations before he found what he was looking for: a near-perfect lurking spot, well hidden, with a great view. He looked around on the ground and found a cartridge shell. “Hey, Speer,” he called out. The sheriff came running.
“What you got?” he said.
Slocum pointed to the shell on the ground. Speer picked it up and studied it for a moment. “By God,” he said. “This is where the shooter stood all right. This looks to be just like the others I found where the wagon was shot at.”
“Look at this,” said Slocum, pushing some brush aside to reveal a boot print.
“I’ll be damned.”
“Pretty small, wouldn’t you say?”
“A little fellow.”
“Maybe.”
They looked around some more but found nothing else. They mounted up and rode into town. When they reached town, Speer headed for the hotel looking for Ritchie. Slocum went to Brenda’s Place. There were no customers, and Brenda was seated at a table alone with a cup of coffee. She looked up anxiously as Slocum approached.
“He’s alive,” said Slocum. “That’s about all I can say for him, though.”
“Oh, no,” said Brenda.
Slocum sat down. “Someone shot him in the back from ambush as he was riding home. If he’d have gotten attention right away, it might not have been so bad. But he didn’t. His horse dragged him home. Beat him up pretty bad. Then he lay there in front of the house all the rest of the night before anyone saw him. He lost a lot of blood. His cook out there patched him up.”
“Edgar’s pretty good at that,” said Brenda. “Oh. Let me get you a cup of coffee.”
She was back in a minute putting a cup in front of Slocum and pouring it full, then refilling her own. She sat back down, leaving the pot there on the table.
“Davey’s pretty tough,” said Slocum. “I expect he’ll recover all right. It’ll just take a while.”
“He’ll get good care from Helen and Edgar,” said Brenda.
“I think so.”
“Slocum?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you stay around?”
“I wasn’t sure till someone shot my ole pard,” he said. “I can’t leave now.”
“Do you still suspect James Ritchie?”
“I never did. I mean, it might be him, but there’s no evidence against the man.”
“Are you hungry?” Brenda said. “Folks’ll be coming in for lunch before long.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I could eat.”
“Look, Sheriff,” Ritchie was saying. “I know what it looks like. I know what people are thinking. There’s no one to gain by Mix’s problems but me. If I was over on the other side looking in, I’d suspect me too. At first I was glad to hear about his losses, because they were all in my favor. But now I sure do wish you’d catch the one who’s been doing all this. Dave Mix has been shot and damn near killed. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I swear it to you. I didn’t have anything to do with it. You catch who did it, and that will clear me.”
“Well, I hope so, Mr. Ritchie. I find it hard to believe that you’d be in on anything like what’s been going on here. But I got to check, you know.”
“Of course. Listen. If there’s anything I can do—”
“I’ll damn sure let you know.”
The door to Ritchie’s office opened and Cal Strother, the clerk in Ritchie’s hardware, poked his nose in. “Oh, sorry, Boss,” he said.
“That’s all right,” said Speer. “I was just fixing to leave.”
Speer got up and Strother stepped in. “Come to think of it,” Strother said, “you might be interested in this too.”
“What is it?” said Speer.
“A big man come into the store. A total stranger far as I know.”
“Go on,” said Ritchie.
“He bought a whole mess of supplies. Like he was going on some kind of expedition or something. Spent a hundred dollars.”
“Did he leave town?” said Speer.
“Drove out in a wagon,” said Strother.
“Which direction?”
“Drove out headed west.”
“What did he look like?” Speer asked.
“Well, like I said, he was a big man. Six-two or three. Weighed, I’d guess, two hundred forty pounds. He was wearing jeans and a red-a
nd-black plaid shirt. Hobnail boots. One of those funny-looking little caps, you know, that snaps down in front. He didn’t have no mustache or beard, but he sure did need a shave.”
“Was he armed?”
“Not that I could see.”
“Thanks, Strother,” said Speer. “This might bear looking into.”
Speer got his horse and started out of town going west. It wasn’t difficult to find the wagon tracks. He followed them for quite a ways out of town. Then they turned off the road and headed across an expanse of prairie toward some low-lying hills beyond. There had been some mining there years before, but it had all played out. Could be, Speer thought, that some knucklehead still thinks he can find some color up there. Could be. He kept following the path of the wagon. It was nowhere in sight, and that meant that it must have gone into the hills. It was a hot day, and Speer wiped his forehead with his sleeve. I should have brought a canteen, he thought. He still had quite a ride ahead of him.
As he moved along, he rehearsed in his head what he would say to the man when he caught up with him. He had to try to find out the man’s business. That much was certain. He was just trying to figure out his best approach. He couldn’t just ride up and say, “Howdy, I’m the sheriff. What’s your name and what’s your business?” Or maybe he could. Why not? He plodded on. He sure did wish he had some water with him. He thought that his horse was thinking the same thing. He thought about the hills up ahead. He had ridden into them before, but it had been sometime back. There was nothing up there but a couple of abandoned mines and two or three old shacks that were about to fall in. It had been so long since he’d been up there that maybe they had fallen in by now. There wasn’t much of a place for a man to go. And those hills just didn’t seem to get any closer.
But he did reach them at last. He stopped and dismounted and mopped his brow. He looked up the winding trail that led up the hill. It showed signs of a wagon having recently gone up, but it looked like nothing else had used it for a while. Well, he was on the right track, but he wasn’t at all sure just what he was on the track of. It might be just a scatterbrained miner. He mounted up again and started up the trail. The hillside was covered by a growth of scrawny trees and thick brush, and here and there it was trying to reclaim the road. In a couple of places, it must have been a tight squeeze for the wagon, but the tracks were still clear. It had gone up ahead of him.
Speer rode cautiously, looking from one side of the road to the other, looking always a bit ahead of himself. Suddenly, he felt as if someone was watching him. He could not explain the feeling. It just came over him. He stopped his horse and looked all around. He saw nothing but the scrawny trees and the brush. Something made him pull the Winchester rifle from the saddle boot, and he cranked a shell into the chamber. Holding the rifle ready, he urged his horse along slowly. Suddenly, there was a loud crack, and a bullet smacked into a tree trunk there just to his right. He dismounted quickly and ran for the cover of the thick brush on the side of the road. His horse nickered and turned and started back down the hillside road. Speer looked around, trying to locate the shooter. Another shot sounded, and the bullet hit not too far away. The man was either a bad shot or he did not have a good idea where Speer had squirreled himself away. But Speer had nothing to shoot at. He had seen no one.
It was suddenly quiet, too quiet. The shooting had stopped. Speer had to do something. He needed to get an idea where the shooter was so he could fire back. He was wondering just who the hell the man could be. He had been spotted buying supplies. That was no reason to go shooting at a lawman. There was something mighty fishy about this whole business. Speer made a quick decision. He stood up in a low crouch and ran across the road, and when he did the shots came again. This time there were four of them, and he could tell they came from two different rifles. Some of the lead kicked up dust just behind his heels. He crashed into the brush on the other side of the road and snugged down fast, thankful that he had not been hit.
But he had an idea now where at least one of the shooters was located, and he took careful aim. He fired, and he heard a yelp. He had hit one of them. But return fire came rapidly. Now there were at least three rifles, maybe four. He couldn’t be sure. He could only be sure that he was damn well outnumbered. He wondered how far his horse had gone. He sure didn’t need to be trapped out here on foot, but he couldn’t fight three or four men, not when he couldn’t even see them. He was afraid to go out into the road, so he started working his way down through the brush. It was rough going.
He made it down around a slight curve, and he thought that the road might be hidden from their view above, so he boldly moved out into the road and started down as fast as he could go. No shots were fired after him, so he figured he had gotten out of their sight. He ran faster, and he stumbled, rolling head over heels, turning several somersaults before he could stop himself. “Goddamn,” he said as he stood up. He ran again, but a little more carefully. He could feel some scrapes and bruises on various parts of his body. He stopped and ducked into the brush again, looking back up the hill. There was nothing. He waited for a moment, then moved out onto the road again.
He trotted a little farther before stopping again. This time it was because he had to catch his breath. He was more than a little overweight, and he had not had a long run for years. He never went very far except on horseback. At the side of the road, he leaned on a skinny tree trunk and panted. At the same time, he looked up the road to make sure no one was following him. He seemed to be safe. His right hand happened to drop to his side against his holster. He slapped the holster and looked down. Damn. He had lost his Colt, probably when he took that tumble. He thought for a moment about going back up the hill to look for it, but quickly discarded that idea. He was worn out already from going down the hill. He did not think he could get very far going back up. And then there were those three or four men up there. Hell, he had another sidearm back in his office, and it would have to do.
He stepped back into the road and started down, but not so fast as before. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that he was almost to the bottom. Then he could see the bottom of the hill, and he could see his horse grazing out on the prairie as if nothing was in the least out of the ordinary. “Knot-head,” he said. He staggered the remaining steps down and onto the prairie. His feet were hurting him by this time, and so were the muscles in his legs. He was still panting from the exertion. And he began to feel the sting of the scrapes he had gotten tumbling down the hill. He stood for a moment staring at his horse. Then he started walking toward it.
He had a terrible feeling that if he were not careful enough about approaching the beast, he would spook it, and it would run away from him. He kept moving slowly and began talking low to the horse. “Don’t you run away now,” he said. “Just keep on eating that good grass. You don’t get good grass like that in town, do you? You like that good grass? No. No. Don’t move away from me like that. My feet are hurting me something fierce. You ought to walk on over this way. You would if you were a really good horse. No. Now I didn’t mean that. You are a good horse. Yeah.”
He was close enough. He reached out and stroked the horse’s neck. He patted it, and he kept talking to it. He reached slowly with his other hand and took hold of the reins. Then he moved into position and mounted. “Goddamn,” he said. “You knuckleheaded son of a bitch. Take me home.” He kicked the horse in the sides and turned its head toward Hangdog.
5
When Sheriff Speer got back to town, he headed straight for the saloon in Ritchie’s hotel. He found Slocum in there eating a sandwich and drinking a cup of coffee. As Speer walked by the bar, he called for whiskey and headed straight for Slocum’s table, pulled out a chair, and collapsed in it. Slocum looked up at the wretched man. Slocum swallowed, and then he said, “What the hell happened to you?”
“When we split up a while ago,” Speer said, “I went to question Ritchie, just like I said I would. Remember?”
“Sure. So?”
�
��So while I was talking to him, Cal Strother comes in. You know, his clerk over in the hardware store.”
“I guess I do now. Go on.”
“Strother says that some stranger came into the store and bought a whole shit-pot full of goods. Hundred dollars worth or so.”
“Anything wrong with that?”
“Well, yeah. No. Not just in itself, but there ain’t no reason for anyone to be buying up a mess of stuff like that around here.”
Slocum recalled his own welcome to Hangdog and shrugged. “All right,” he said. “Go on.”
“Well, I went and followed the son of a bitch’s tracks. Wasn’t hard. He was driving a wagon. Followed him out of town and off the road. He went up into the hills where there’s some old played-out mines.”
“So he’s a prospector who don’t know they’re all played out, or he knows something you don’t know.”
“I never seen no prospector outfitted like that. I got about halfway up the hill when they opened up on me.”
“They?”
“At least three of them. My horse got off down the hill, and I had to lay and trade shots with them for a spell. I think I nicked one of them. Anyhow, first chance I got I scooted out of there. And I mean scooted. I took a tumble down the hill. Finally caught up with my horse and got back to town. Just now.”
“If he was a prospector,” said Slocum, “and if he knows something you don’t know, something nobody else around here knows . . .”
“Like what?”
“Like them hills ain’t played out. Like there’s some real color up there.”
“Not likely.”
“If that’s the case, then he could easy have partners. If there’s at least three of them, like you said, they’d need more supplies than just one lone prospector.”
