The E.R. Slade Western Omnibus No.1

by E. R. Slade

  “Know ’em?” the sheriff asked at length.

  “No.” There, it was said. Better not be anybody come along and tell the sheriff different. But who could? Only Leanda and Cork. And why would they, anyhow? They had plenty better things to do than talk to the law. That would be about the last thing they would do—you could count on it.

  “Look in their pockets?”

  “No.”

  The sheriff fixed him with a steady, appraising eye. Jeremy studied the gun in the sheriff’s hands, wondering why he used such an old-fashioned weapon, even if it had been converted from percussion to cartridges—it wasn’t like he was short of pistols. Must be he thought a big gun looked more scary.

  “Who’re you?” the sheriff asked, now loading his hand cannon.

  “Jeremy Waite.”

  “Where from?”

  “Texas.”

  The sheriff gave him another stare. Jeremy tried returning the gaze but wound up looking off at the calendar on the wall. The trouble was, he had the feeling the sheriff somehow knew he’d lied.

  “Passing through?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where to?”

  “North.”

  “Didn’t kill these two yourself?”

  “No. Would I be here telling you about it?”

  “I don’t want you leaving town until I say to.”

  “When’ll that be?”

  “When I say to. You and me is goin’ to ride out and get these two bodies tomorrow.”

  “All right.” He should have kept his mouth shut. How could he have been so stupid as to think telling the sheriff was the thing to do? He should have known it would be like this.

  “Where you staying?”

  “Don’t know yet. Probably in the livery. I’m broke. Know any place I can get a job around here?”

  “Cowpuncher?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nope.”

  “It don’t have to be punching cows.”

  The sheriff looked up at that one, appearing surprised, eyebrows raised up like cavalry tents over his eyes.

  “Down on your luck?”

  “About as far down as I can go.”

  “That a gun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you’re not that far down. Leave it here. Town ordinance.”

  “All right.” He took off his gun belt and put it on the sheriff’s desk, eyeing the Whitneyville Walker, now loaded.

  “You want to sell your saddle?” The left corner of the sheriff’s hard mouth lifted just slightly, sardonically.

  Jeremy bristled at that. He might shovel out barns when there were no hands around to see him, and he might even ride that broken down old gelding for lack of anything else, but he was no different from any other hand when it came to selling his saddle. You sold your saddle, you sold out, period. Might as well be dead. Well, almost.

  “I want to set up a store sometime, I’ll let you know,” he told the sheriff, and went out.

  Chapter Seven

  He didn’t have a penny in his pocket. He was hoping to work a little for the liveryman in exchange for lodging the gelding and himself. Maybe he could even make a few dollars.

  The livery was a sprawling, ramshackle, silver-gray- weathered building that had walls which looked as though they’d been put up by a couple of drunks. They weaved and leaned first one way, then the other, the shingles following the ground up and down, more or less, while the eaves rolled up and down their own way. The wall bordering on the street leaned back from it and there were plenty of holes in the walls and a cat perched in nearly every one. Two cats squatted in the main doorway, which was wide open and looked permanently so. When Jeremy approached leading the gelding, the cats bolted into the darkness inside.

  “Anybody home?” Jeremy sang out as he came through the door.

  He stopped, since he couldn’t see anything. The gelding wanted to push on in, smelling the hay and oats and knowing that there would be a nice comfortable stall to lazy around in. Jeremy leaned the gelding back a step.

  A light was struck away back somewhere inside, and pretty soon a lantern was going, showing the man carrying it. He came to Jeremy slowly, a middle-aged man of dour expression, wearing a shirt frazzled over his sharp-pointed elbows. The whole man was sharp-pointed all over, from his chin and his ears to his long feet and knobby knees.

  The man held up the lantern to examine Jeremy. After he’d looked him over a while, he started looking at the horse.

  “Git out of here,” he said. “Git.”

  “No room?” Jeremy was trying to see past the brilliance of the lantern into the dim reaches of the barn.

  “Git.” The man motioned with his hand.

  “You sure you don’t have room? Ain’t that a stall down there?”

  “I ain’t taking no money for puttin’ up that critter.”

  Jeremy looked at the old horse standing there as perky as he ever managed, and felt a rising resentment at the liveryman’s apparent opinion of his mount.

  “There ain’t nothing wrong with him but being old,” Jeremy said. “He ain’t diseased or nothing.”

  The man held up the lantern to Jeremy’s face and looked him square in the eye. With the other forefinger he jabbed Jeremy in the chest in time with his words. “I ain’t taking no money to put up such a critter as that,” he said. “Better to shoot him, buy a new horse tomorrow.”

  Jeremy had run into odd liverymen, but this fellow had it all over the rest.

  “I ain’t got money for a new horse. I wouldn’t be riding this one if I could afford better, now would I? I ain’t even got money to pay you. I was figuring to work it off, and for a place to stay for myself, too. Need a hand around here?”

  The liveryman was looking at Jeremy’s saddle.

  “That’s a fine saddle you got there,” he said. “What’s it doin’ on such a critter as this?”

  “Down on my luck. Looky, I work real hard. I worked in plenty liveries before. If you need a hand for a while, I could use the money.”

  “Ain’t them pretty fine boots you got on?”

  “Brother gave ’em to me a couple years ago.”

  “Them is fine spurs, too.”

  “Pretty good. Had to file the points of ’em. Too sharp, you know. But they’re pretty good now.”

  The liveryman squinted at Jeremy. “I take you for a cowpoke. But that hoss don’t fit, and I never heard of a cowpoke’d work in a livery, unless it was just exercising hosses, or throwing saddles on ’em.”

  “I do what comes to hand. You got a job to offer, mister, I’ll take it and I’ll do it. Now, you got one or not?”

  “I got three cows here, you know.”

  “Sure.”

  “You’ll have to milk ’em.” The liveryman was watching him very carefully for a reaction.

  “I done it before. I guess I can do it again.”

  The liveryman was silent for a long time, looking Jeremy over.

  “It don’t figure. It don’t add up at all somehow.”

  “What don’t add up?”

  “It just don’t, that’s all. You’re the goldarnedest cowpoke I ever did see.”

  “But you got a job for me?”

  “Well, yeah, I got a job for you, if you want it.”

  So that was fixed up, then. It turned out the pay was seventy-five cents a day, and he could keep his horse here and sleep in the loft—so he didn’t smoke. Jeremy bedded down the old gelding and then climbed the ladder, settled himself into the hay, closed his eyes, and went right to sleep.

  ~*~

  When he woke up, five kittens were tottering around, one sniffing the toe of his boot. He waggled it and the kitten sat down and cocked his head, so he waggled it again. This caught the attention of two more of the kittens, who came over to investigate. Jeremy might have idled away the rest of the morning entertaining himself and the kittens if the liveryman hadn’t hollered up to him, “You dead or what?”

  Jeremy went down and milked
cows, forked hay, scooped oats, delivered milk, and cleaned out the barn. Then he and the liveryman, whose name was Jacob T. Pryne, sat down to breakfast, which Pryne had made himself. It was some kind of god-awful mixture of eggs and bacon and onions and slime and grime and maybe old bread crumbs, perhaps some manure, a few stray oats, a stalk of hay, three flies, and, Jeremy was fairly sure, a piece of an old barn boot. He ate and tried to smile when asked how he liked it. He decided that just as soon as he got paid he was going to start taking his meals elsewhere.

  If it hadn’t been for the sheriff telling him to stay around, he could have started looking for some drive trailing north—an outfit with a good cook. But since this was how it was, it didn’t do any good fretting about it. The bed was comfortable, that was one thing. It was funny how a hay mow could make a comfortable bed, while a straw tick wasn’t but a step up from a corn husk tick when you slept in a house or hotel, and you had to be right tired to get any shut-eye.

  “Better start in currying down them hosses,” Pryne said, sitting back from his breakfast, the remains of it dripping unattended from his lips.

  “All right.”

  He worked with a will, stopping only to saddle horses for a couple of customers. He was glad to have a job and didn’t want to give Pryne any excuse to fire him.

  A little later, he heard someone at the door and turned around to look and when he saw her he took a step backwards. Then he took two forward and pulled off his hat.

  “Mornin’, miss,” he said.

  “Morning,” she said and smiled.

  Twice in the same week. And he hadn’t fallen over himself about a girl since Katy Gordon back home, who married Vic Trafe over on the Box TJK.

  But this one was about as different from Leanda as you could get. Where Leanda was all perky curves and masses of black hair, this girl was rounder and blond and very much more smiley.

  “Excuse me,” she said, seeming a little flustered, and her voice made him think of songbirds twittering in the brush. “Are you the owner?”

  If Pryne hadn’t been right over in the little boarded-in corner that did him for an office, Jeremy might have told her, yes, he was.

  “No,” he said. “But I work here. What can Pryne and Waite, hostlers, do for you?”

  “Is that the name of this place?” she asked. “I always wondered, since there’s no name over the door.”

  “Jeremy Waite, of Pryne and Waite, at your service,” he said, grinning at her.

  She looked at him for a few moments with her lively clear eyes moving back and forth between his, and then she laughed. “You’re making it up, aren’t you?” she said, and laughed some more, very merrily.

  He felt heat under his collar. He fumbled with the pitchfork he happened to be holding.

  “Looking for a horse?” he asked her.

  “Actually, no. I have come to ask for donations for the church charity. We’re taking a collection.”

  This made him a good deal more uncomfortable. He hadn’t even a penny to give her.

  “Oh,” was all he could say. He started forking hay around a little with the pitchfork as though it was all that mattered in the world.

  Her face fell and became less smiley. “It’s only if you feel you can give a little something. Even a few cents is a help.”

  “Looky, Miss ...?”

  “Hooper. Sarah Hooper.”

  “Looky, Miss Hooper, I don’t have anything on me just now. But if you was to come back tomorrow I could give you something.” He and Pryne had arranged that he would be paid every day, since he was flat broke, and neither of them knew how long he would be there.

  But he could see that Miss Sarah Hooper didn’t believe him. She thought he was just cheap and on top of that was trying to get her to come back under false pretenses. Her smile was merely polite now.

  “Perhaps I will,” she said. “Is Mr. Pryne here?”

  “In his office. Through that door.”

  “Thank you.”

  He watched her go and knock and be let in. While she was in there, he could hardly keep at his work at all.

  Shortly she came out looking even more soured on the place than before. She barely nodded to him and left.

  She won’t come back, he thought.

  Pryne stumped out of his office, thumbs under his suspenders, glowering.

  “Nerve of some people,” he said. “I git these folks asking for charity all the time. If I was to pay ’em all a dime apiece, I’d a been out of business by now. By gorry, I’m the charity case. Ain’t no money in liverying. Hey, what the hell you doing?”

  Jeremy saw he’d been pitching straw into the mangers and hay onto the floor for bedding.

  “Doggoned if I know what I was thinking about,” Jeremy said, taking on a beetish hue, and hurriedly set to work to put it right.

  “I’ll bet I know,” Pryne said with a sardonic twist of his lip. “That Sarah Hooper.”

  Jeremy said nothing.

  Chapter Eight

  About midmorning, in walked the sheriff.

  Jeremy was just finishing chores, while Pryne took his ease on an old apple crate beside the office door and talked at great length on various subjects, mostly always coming back to how poor he was, and how he couldn’t possibly spare even a nickel to the church charity. Pryne quit talking suddenly in mid-sentence, and that was how Jeremy knew somebody had come in.

  The sheriff stood in the door with his hands on his hips, throwing a wide shadow.

  “Workin’ for your supper?” he asked. Jeremy could see the man didn’t have any higher opinion of him now than he had before.

  Jeremy didn’t answer. The way he saw it, if the sheriff wanted to be snotty, then let him work for everything he got from now on.

  “You and me is goin’ for a little ride,” said the sheriff.

  Pryne glanced at Jeremy, then back at the sheriff. “What the devil’s going on?” he demanded. “This man wanted?”

  “You could say that,” said the sheriff.

  “He means he wants me to show him where the bodies are that I found down on the creek bank,” Jeremy said. “Right?”

  “Now ain’t this fellow bright?” the sheriff said to Pryne. “He got it right the first time.”

  “Bodies?” Pryne came to his feet.

  “I found two men lying dead on the creek bank a day’s ride south of here,” Jeremy said. “You know, Sheriff, I could just as easy give you directions and you couldn’t miss the rock pile over them.”

  “You found bodies, or you make them?” asked Pryne, squinting at him sideways.

  “I just found them,” Jeremy said tiredly, thinking of how much simpler life would have been had he kept his mouth shut.

  “That’s what he says,” the sheriff put in, as though he had some reason not to believe it.

  Pryne looked at Jeremy very critically. “I thought you was a mighty peculiar fellow for a cowpoke.”

  “I’d be mighty peculiar to kill a couple of men and then ride into the very next town and tell the sheriff where to look for the bodies,” Jeremy pointed out sourly. His unaccountably bad luck seemed to just go on and on. Try to do the right thing and look what it got you.

  “It might be a pretty smart thing to do,” the sheriff said. “If it was some knucklehead here in my shoes who believed everything every stranger told him, you’d ride in, let on to have found them bodies and to be a fine citizen and afterwards you’d ride out clean. Now ain’t that so?”

  “That could be,” Pryne said, rubbing his hands. He was looking very undecided.

  “Mr. Pryne has give me a job here,” Jeremy said. “I don’t hardly think it’s fair to come along and haul me off and leave him with all this work to do, when I could just tell you where to go to find those bodies.”

  Pryne took hold of this, Jeremy saw. That was good.

  “It is true I’m paying him to work, and there’s a- plenty of work to do around here,” Pryne said.

  “Waite should have told you before you
hired him that him and me had this to do today. Saddle up, Waite.”

  “Well, looks like you’ll just have to fix that hole in the paddock fence yourself,” Jeremy said to Pryne.

  “Now wait a minute, Sheriff,” Pryne said. “Just hold on. What good is it to bring Waite along with you? Just what good will it do? He can’t no more’n show you where to go, ’stead of telling you, to find them bodies. And I sure can use his help around here. You wouldn’t steal away an old man’s helper from under his nose, now would you, Sheriff?”

  “Save it, Pryne,” said the sheriff.

  “I’m a law-abidin’, tax-payin’ citizen, Sheriff. It’s men like me pay your salary.”

  “I never heard you do anything but squeal at taxes and about how high my salary is, which ain’t hardly enough to live on, come to it. You been gettin’ along without the terrible hardship of payin’ a helper for years, Pryne, so don’t try to tell me one more day’s going to make any difference. Come on, Waite, saddle up.”

  So that settled that. They rode, trailing two extra horses.

  Jeremy noticed that the hanged men had been cut down, and he ruminated on their fate and what his own might be depending on things, as he passed the undertaker’s, where that fellow and his helper were loading pine boxes onto a wagon for the trip to boot hill, a lumpy, barren piece of ground good for not much else just outside town on a hillside. Jeremy ruminated on those men and on Leanda and Cork and justice in Parkersville for quite some while after they had left Parkersville well behind, but the ruminations didn’t lead anywhere, except to more ruminations.

  Finally, Jeremy heaved out a deep sigh and resolved that before he did anything else, or could do anything else, he was going to have to convince the sheriff that he hadn’t made dead meat out of Tyler and Hart, and that what he wanted was only to see the men got a decent burial and that the sheriff had a whack at finding out who killed them.

  “I don’t think I caught your name, Sheriff,” he began respectfully.

  “Watson.”

  “Jack Watson, was it?”

  “Sheriff Watson.”

  Jeremy nodded looking off around the countryside.