The E.R. Slade Western Omnibus No.1

by E. R. Slade

  Thunder crashed again, this time closer, but the lightning was still invisible. They rode on. Jeremy felt cold, even though the wind was hot blowing up from the low country. His stomach was near forcing him off his horse to spill his guts into the bushes.

  The first lightning they saw flashed brilliantly right overhead with an earsplitting crack of thunder, like very heavy artillery, and left the air smelling of ozone and hammered granite. They all put on their slickers.

  The rain started just like somebody had opened a sluice gate away up on the crag somewhere. It fell thick as a waterfall, roaring and whipping past their ears on the wind.

  Jeremy hunched down between his shoulders in absolute misery. Rain ran down his neck, soaking him, despite his efforts to pull the slicker tight. The dappled horse under him trudged along slowly, head down, mane plastered flat with running water. The rain came so hard that Jeremy couldn’t see more than ten yards, trees at a distance being nothing but dark blurs.

  The downpour, accompanied by bolt after bolt of lightning, right overhead, ripping up the air this way and that like heavy charges going off, went on for ten minutes or so without pause, and then suddenly stopped. The whole area was drenched, the ground running with little streams everywhere, the trees dripping. The clouds overhead broke up and there was a spot of blue sky.

  Jeremy felt a whole lot better all of a sudden, and pulled off his slicker. Even his headache was fading a little.

  They had pulled up together in a meadow to put away slickers and take a rest. Jeremy was interestedly watching Leanda removing her slicker when the shooting started.

  The first shot sounded to Jeremy like a miniature crack of lightning: he didn’t react until the second shot came whistling past his ear and whined off stone.

  The horses began to shy, Cork’s backing into some tree branches, which spooked it. Leanda jumped off her horse, and Jeremy did the same, after fighting the dapple a little to get control.

  By this time three more bullets had sailed by, coming, Jeremy thought, from somewhere below amongst the trees.

  Their horses trotted off out of sight. Cork, last seen aboard his horse, was also out of sight. Jeremy and Leanda squatted under the low limbs of a group of seedling fir.

  “Courtland’s men again?” Jeremy asked.

  Leanda, pistol in her hand, looked grim. “Yes,” she said.

  Jeremy checked the load in his own gun, waited for movement below.

  Things were very quiet, except for a low moan and rustle of the wind, now flowing downhill.

  As he squatted beside Leanda, Jeremy began to think more about her than about the men who had been shooting at them. He was quite close to her, close enough to smell her. It wasn’t a smell he could place exactly. Not perfumy, or like much of anything else he remembered. The gun in her hand bothered him somehow—seemed all wrong. Yet she held it firmly and like she knew what she was doing. He suddenly remembered cowpokes saying it was bad luck to work for a woman. Most wouldn’t work for a female boss no matter what the pay. And here he was, doing just that—in a shooting situation.

  There was a shout from Cork somewhere off downhill and to the right.

  “What’d he say?” Jeremy asked.

  “I don’t know. Shall we go see?” She looked anxious.

  Jeremy reflected that this was the first he’d seen Leanda not on top of things.

  “I’ll go,” he said. He started to stand up.

  She put a hand on his arm. “You be careful. I need you to get to that gold. And I could be in trouble left alone out here.”

  Jeremy licked his lips, looking at her. He thought the second part was pure hogwash—she could take care of herself anywhere, anytime, it appeared to him. Which made him wonder again why she made out to need him for anything.

  “You stay put and don’t show your nose,” he said. “I need you to get to the gold just as much as you need me.”

  Leanda didn’t react to that. He stepped out of the thicket of fir and started across toward the place where Cork had shouted from. He got a surprisingly long way, considering, before bullets began to fly again.

  He realized, as he dove for the cover of a lone pine tree all of six inches through the butt, that Leanda was shooting back.

  He peered around one side of the tree, well aware that his backside was in full view around the other. He fired off a couple of rounds, but only to keep them honest. He couldn’t see anybody to shoot at, and anyway, his purpose was to try to get on out of sight and range and look for Cork.

  The shooting stopped and the smoke from his pistol and Leanda’s drifted off into the next group of trees. Jeremy took a deep breath, crouched and ran. The distance to the trees was not far and he made it without a shot being fired. Sweating, he lifted his hat, used the upper sleeve of the same arm to rub his forehead dry. Then he put his hat on again at a new angle and listened a few more moments, hoping for something helpful, but there was only the wind wafting fitfully, brushing mysteriously in the branches.

  “Huh,” he said in a low voice, and crept to the far side of the stand of trees to look down a little slope of meadow at the next stand. All quiet, empty. Nothing. Nobody. And if he stepped out there?

  He reloaded and thought about it. The thinking didn’t help him much, so he took another deep breath and edged out from his cover.

  Quiet. Sun on the hillside; the rolling hills and then the Great Plains spreading out miles and miles to the horizon.

  He set off carefully, keeping a weather eye and ear out for movement or unusual sounds. It was sweaty work, walking across that meadow, but it appeared nobody could see him.

  He moved downhill, and to the right. He went through another stand of trees, and peered out the far side.

  “Yep, just like I suspected,” Jeremy muttered, looking at the men guarding Cork and the horses—all three of their horses. Jeremy turned around to go back and tell Leanda, and there stood a fellow with a Colt Frontier six-shooter aimed at Jeremy’s gut.

  “Aw, shoot,” Jeremy said, disgusted.

  “All in good time,” the fellow said with a grin. “But first Mr. Courtland wants to talk to you.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  They brought in Leanda only a few minutes later. She didn’t come quietly. She was snarling and biting, eyes flashing, making all kinds of threats. The two men who held her by the arms seemed to be having about all they could do to keep hold of her.

  The leader of the group was a hard-looking man, about forty, balding slightly, with muttonchop whiskers. His mouth was closed mostly, and made a straight thin line. He only opened it to give commands, which were always sharp and disgusted-sounding, like he thought he was a good deal of a ways above everybody around him and didn’t see why he should have to put up with them. He took one look at Leanda and barked out, “Lash her belly-down over her saddle,” and then turned to check the cinch on his own horse.

  Leanda gave four men plenty of work lashing her. Jeremy at first thought they might lose patience and shoot her, but it didn’t happen. The boss gave a curt nod of satisfaction and mounted his own horse. It turned out his name was Stevens. His first name was never used, everybody careful to call him Mister Stevens.

  The other men—there were seven of them—were an ornery-looking lot. Hardcases all. One was missing most of the fingers of his left hand, another carried two pistols in his belt, and three knives—one a Green River knife, one a regular Bowie, and one a great fearsome monster with a curved blade more than two inches wide and over a foot and half long with a handle of ornate silver. Two of the men were Mexicans, swarthy, black-eyed men who said nothing, watching all the proceedings like cats. They wore sombreros and fairly bristled with weaponry. Their horses were a pair of the finest Jeremy had ever seen anywhere.

  Stevens led the way downhill, with the prisoners grouped in the middle, three men ahead, the rest behind.

  Leanda, tied belly-down over her saddle, had stopped struggling. Jeremy was riding behind her, and could see her gritting he
r teeth and closing her eyes against the constant jolting. He felt sorry for her, but there wasn’t much he could do.

  It was a long ride. They got down into the foothills by nightfall and made camp on a creek. The three of them were lashed to a log, and the men sat around the fire telling stories of fights they’d been in or made out to have been in. Stevens sat propped against the bole of a tree, looking with glimmering eyes into the fire, silent as a dead Indian. The man tending the coffee brought him some without being asked, and refilled the cup whenever it was emptied. There was no drinking, Jeremy noticed. Which was odd, given what a bunch of hardcases this was. It had to be Stevens’ orders.

  “You feel okay?” Jeremy asked Leanda quietly.

  “Better now,” she said tiredly. “I never rode that way before. I thought it was going to kill me.”

  “Play along and maybe they’ll let you ride setting up tomorrow.”

  “How about you?” she asked. “How do you feel?”

  “Headache’s almost gone.”

  “We have to get away,” Leanda said urgently. “We have to think of something.”

  “I ain’t been thinking about anything else all day,” Jeremy said. “But I come up dry so far. Looky, did you really win that gold fair and square?”

  “Yes, I did,” Leanda said, seriously. “But Courtland is a bad loser.”

  “How come he let it out of his hands in the first place?”

  “There were some of his high-toned friends there, and he had to show them he keeps his word. Also,” she added offhandedly, “Blue had his gun on him.”

  “Don’t look like it set well with him, how you handled it. What do you figure he’ll do to us? It ain’t like we can give him the gold, since we don’t have it and don’t know where it is.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I don’t like the way you said that.”

  She looked at him. “All right, Jeremy, I’ll tell you what I think he’s going to do. I think he’s going to torture us until we tell him where that wagon is. He does things like that.”

  “Oh, now,” Jeremy said, and looked off across camp at the shadows moving in the trees.

  “That’s why we have to get away,” Leanda said. “We got to think.”

  “I should ’a’ known better than to get caught like that,” Cork said. “I should ’a’ seen it comin’.”

  “Well, so should I,” Jeremy said. “I thought there was something suspicious in the way they quit shooting at me. They knew I was coming right into their hands. It ain’t no use worryin’ over what we done wrong, we got to start thinkin’ about what we’re going to do now.”

  There was a long silence. The talk around the fire went on, the men guffawing once in a while.

  “Whereabouts you figure Courtland is?” Jeremy asked Leanda.

  “I don’t know. But probably in Parkersville. It’s the nearest town. He could be in Red Canyon, I guess. But I think he’s more likely in Parkersville. He’s probably sitting around in the fancy Grand Saloon of the International Hotel drinking Scotch whiskey and trying to cheat somebody else out of his money. Oh, he’s a real smooth character, he is.”

  “So we’ll be talking to him tomorrow, probably, we don’t find some way to get loose.”

  “We’ll be talking or screaming,” she said.

  ~*~

  In the morning Jeremy found, when he was untied to eat breakfast, that he couldn’t stand up very well, and his arms were almost useless from the tight ropes. He felt dizzy. He had gotten very little sleep. His throat was still sore from the previous day’s encounter with Cork’s brew.

  They were ordered onto their horses. Leanda was allowed to ride sitting up this time, however, since she didn’t make any struggle. They rode on down out of the foothills and toward Parkersville. They stopped once for lunch, and then continued on into town. Jeremy wondered if Watson would try to take him away from Courtland’s men.

  They rode right up Main Street and through the square where the men had been hanged, and passed the sheriff’s office. Watson wasn’t in sight. They rode on down to the International Hotel and Stevens went inside, leaving them all sitting their horses in the street. Jeremy considered setting his spurs, but a Mexican had the reins looped around his saddle horn. He wouldn’t get far, and he might get shot. They didn’t appear to be all that worried about the law.

  “Just like you figured,” Jeremy said to Leanda.

  “Huh?”

  “International Hotel.”

  “Oh. Well, as you can see, it’s the only place like it in town.”

  They waited for some time. Then out came Stevens.

  Stevens said nothing. He got on his horse and led the way down the street.

  They left the town and went east through the gentle rolling hills toward the plains. Not more than three or four miles out of town they came over the brow of a hill and saw a ranch house in the valley.

  It looked mighty peaceful and pretty sitting down there with a creek running by and some oak trees standing along the bank. But there weren’t any cows or sheep or horses grazing anywhere around, no sign of folks going about their business, and when they rode down closer, Jeremy could see that the yard was all grown to weeds.

  They forded the creek under the oaks and pulled up before the tumbledown steps. Glass was out of some of the windows, and birds flew in and out.

  “Couple you men take care of the horses,” Stevens said. “Rest of you bring these three inside.”

  The house hadn’t been lived in for some time, the outside weatheredness creeping in through the missing window panes to turn the tattered remnants of lacy curtains grayish. Chunks of plaster and broken whiskey bottles littered the bare floor.

  “Chairs,” Stevens said, and men scurried off into other rooms with an eagerness Jeremy didn’t like. The hardcase with the curved cutlass was keeping unblinking watch over them. Stevens kicked trash and the remains of a broken-down table out of the way like he had something in mind he wanted plenty space for.

  Men came back, bringing three chairs.

  Jeremy caught Cork’s eye, and Cork just shook his head slightly. Leanda looked at Jeremy and pursed her lips. There came the lowest kind of moan from the wind once in a while, like somebody that had died here was trying to communicate. The chairs were set in a row in the middle of the room, facing the door. The men doing it looked at Stevens and he nodded. They grabbed Cork first and tied him into a chair, then Leanda in the one in the middle, and Jeremy in the one to the left, as they faced the door. There was no talk at all. Just the scuffing of shoes on the floor, the grunts as the men pulled the ropes up tight, the creak of the chairs and the manila. Jeremy was beginning to sweat.

  A bird came in a broken window, fluttered around a little and flew out. Then it was quiet.

  Stevens stood at another window with his hands on his hips, looking in the direction of town.

  The sweat rolled off Jeremy in regular streams. His mind was full of visions of things done with knives and ropes.

  Courtland’s men spread themselves around the room, some sitting down against the wall. Two of them got out knives and started sharpening them.

  Stevens turned from the window and went out the door. Jeremy was fairly sure nothing would happen with him outside, and relaxed slightly; but he was worried about what Stevens was doing out there. Not just taking a walk. Stevens was not the kind of man who did things for no particular reason.

  Stevens was gone for what seemed quite a while, and nobody said a word. Two stones slithered in methodical harmony over shining steel blades. Jeremy couldn’t keep his eyes away from the knife sharpening.

  One of the men looked up at him, and studied his face for a long unblinking minute, and then the corners of his mouth lifted just a little, while his eyes remained unchanged, and he looked back at his sharpening, which hadn’t missed a stroke.

  Jeremy shifted, feeling how tight the ropes were that bound his arms to his sides and him to the chair back. He heard Cork let
out a long breath.

  Then Stevens came back in. He had a small black bag with a buttoned flap. In his deliberate way he moved to one of the windowsills and put the black bag on it.

  “Table,” he said.

  One of the men jumped up quickly and darted into another room, came back in a minute or so carrying a small rickety table such as Jeremy remembered his aunt liked to put flower vases on. The man set the table in front of the three seated prisoners, about five feet away, and Stevens moved his small black bag to it. He glanced at them like a surgeon might at a patient, then unbuttoned the flap of the bag.

  At this point one of the men said, “Here he comes, Mister Stevens.”

  Stevens, who had been about to reach into the bag, withdrew his hand and went to look out the window. Jeremy, straining to see through the window, caught sight of a pair of men riding gleaming black horses. One of the men was very substantial-looking, dressed all formal in black. The other was not quite as fancy, and a good deal more hard-looking, wearing a low-slung pair of ivory-handled six-guns in polished leather holsters.

  The pair rode into the yard and two of Stevens’ hardcases stepped outside. In a few moments Jeremy saw the two hardcases leading the horses, riderless, off toward the corral. Stevens was at the open door. He stepped back out of the way, and in came the two men.

  The distinguished fat man came first. He wore a waxed mustache, black as coal, and he smelled of something Jeremy didn’t recognize. Jeremy guessed it was something the man wore on purpose, like cowpokes put on lilac water to court dance hall girls. The man wore a gold watch on a chain in his waistcoat pocket, and the first thing he did on coming inside was look at it and put it away. Then he turned his unreadable little gray eyes on Leanda. He breathed hard through a slight wheeze, and looking at Leanda made it worse, whether because of the gold or because of Leanda herself Jeremy didn’t know. Maybe some of both. Anyway, the man looked at her quite a while before glancing briefly at Cork and Jeremy, neither of whom he seemed to find too interesting.