Sudden--Dead or Alive (A Sudden Western #4)

by Frederick H. Christian

  ‘Well, fine,’ the Marshal said, bewildered. ‘Determined to do what?’

  ‘Why — back yore play, yu fine-haired hoss-thief,’ chortled Turnbull, his face breaking into as wide a smile as was possible amid the contusions and congealed blood.

  ‘Back yore play from here to Hellangone, Marshal!’ added Bronc Ogston. ‘Never really liked them Cullanes much anyways.’

  ‘An’ after tonight, why, we positively dislike ’em!’ growled Long, rubbing his stomach with a slow smile on his face.

  ‘Yo’re throw in’ in with us?’ blurted Shearer.

  ‘Shore as Christmas is comin’,’ confirmed Turnbull. We owe Severn here a favor, an’ we owe the Cullanes one, as well. I reckon that means we’re stayin’ until they’re both paid off.’

  ‘In full, boy!’ growled Bronco Ogston, scowling.

  ‘Well, boys, that’s mighty good news!’ Shearer said, with a fair amount of relief in his voice. Severn added a rider, however.

  ‘Yu boys know what yo’re lettin’ yoreselves in for, I’m takin’ it? The next fight ain’t goin’ to be fists an’ feet. The wild bunch is goin’ to ride in here, an’ what they can’t kill they’re goin’ to burn. They’ll be hoistin’ the black flag an’ playin’ the degeuello!’

  ‘Hell or high water, Severn!’ replied Turnbull. ‘We’re stickin’!’

  Thrusting out his hand, he pumped Severn’s up and down, stopping only as the Marshal grimaced in concealed pain.

  ‘Hell, yo’re as beat up on as me,’ Turnbull said, with concern in his voice. ‘Let’s get ourselves patched up an’ have a drink!’

  ‘Good idea!’ added Dickie Drew. ‘An’ mebbe somebody ought to get word to old man Cullane not to send boys on men’s work!’

  ‘Yee-haw!’ Turnbull shouted. ‘C’mon, Don! Let’s find the hoss liniment:’

  The old man had his spy in San Jaime, and the word of what had happened was soon brought to him. For perhaps an hour he raged like some demented demon. No one dared to enter the house; none of his sons would face the white-faced wrath or the mad eyes. But after a while, they were relieved to hear the cursing cease, the ranting slacken. Later, astonished, they heard a chuckle. In a little while young Billy Cullane plucked up enough nerve to peep around the huge oaken door into the room, and saw to his astonishment that the old man was sitting, a glass of whiskey in his hand, rocking contentedly in an old wicker chair by the fireplace, smiling and chuckling, talking to himself.

  ‘Never send a boy on a man’s job,’ the old man muttered, smiling. ‘There’s allus truth in them old saws, Mister Whoever-yu-are - allus truth. Well—’ and here the old eyes went flint-hard and wicked, ‘—I got a better one than that, damn yore interferin’ soul!’

  Chapter Twelve

  Severn was standing by the window, watching the street and listening to Poynton and Rick Main arguing.

  ‘Still say we oughta string ’em up higher’n a kite!’ the old man grumbled. ‘Fool job, cookin’ for the likes of that breed!’

  ‘Ray, they’re our ace-in-the-hole, an’ yu know it,’ the gambler expostulated. ‘Long as we got them locked up tight, ol’ Billy Cullane’s goin’ to tread mighty soft afore he tries bustin’ the town.’

  ‘Rubbish, an’ yu know it!’ snapped the oldster. ‘He’ll know shore as yo’re born that if we didn’t string ‘em up to start with, we ain’t a-goin’ to do them no harm jest fer spite when he comes a-callin’.’

  Without waiting for an answer, he stumped off into his own corner, throwing mumbled insults at the barred window behind which sat the four captives. It was at this moment that the woman came in. Ricky Main leaped to his feet, snatching off his hat, and Severn turned to face their unexpected visitor.

  She was tall, and dark, and although no longer a young girl, quite beautiful. Her hair was short and straight as an Indian’s, black as a raven’s wing, and her eyes were a soft and lovely brown, set in a smoothly-tanned oval of a face, the cheekbones high but not prominent, and her lips full and red.

  ‘Why, good mornin’, ma’am,’ blurted Main.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ The woman’s voice was low and warm, and Severn crossed the room to face her as she introduced herself. ‘You do not know me, although I’ve lived in San Jaime for some years. I had to come and thank you all for what you have done for the town. I’ve—’ she hesitated, and then laid her wicker basket on the beat-up desk in front of Main. ‘I’ve brought you some things. A pie, some cold meat. I thought it was the least we could do.’

  ‘We?’ asked Main.

  ‘Well — some of the other ladies. I talked to them about it, and they all, well, helped.’

  ‘Well, ma’am, that’s right kind o’ yu,’ put in old Ray Poynton, stumping forward. ‘An’ we shore appreciate it. Don, thisyere’s Mrs. Winn. Jennifer, this is our Marshal, Don Severn.’

  ‘I’m happy to meet you properly at last, Marshal,’ said Jennifer Winn. Her hand was cool and firm.

  ‘This other jasper hyar is Rick Main,’ rambled Poynton, ignoring the younger man’s eager attempts to insinuate himself between the old deputy and the woman. ‘He kinda helps me out around the place.’

  ‘Mr. Main,’ acknowledged Mrs. Winn. ‘I am pleased to know you.’ She turned again towards Severn. ‘Marshal, I — we felt sure that you could use some help in feeding your prisoners. Would it be of any use to you if I were to bring you food for them every day? I’m certain you have other things on your mind, and ... well, it seems the least we could do.’

  Her eyes were downcast and shy and protectively, Poynton burst out ‘Why if that ain’t dangnabbed generous, Don, I’m swoggled if I know what is! Miz Winn, that’s right kind, an’ we shore appreciate yore offer.’

  ‘Which we accept with some alacrity, ma’am,’ added Main.

  ‘Will yu — ah — who’ll be bringin’ the grub across here? Or would yu rather I come to yore house to collect it?’

  Jennifer Winn shook her head.

  ‘No, no,’ she replied. ‘Please don’t concern yourselves. I will be happy to bring something across. It will give me something to do. Apart from helping Father Malcolm, I have little to occupy myself.’

  ‘That’s mighty kind o’ yu, ma’am,’ reiterated Severn. ‘I’m obliged.’

  ‘You are surely welcome, Mr. Severn,’ she told him. ‘And that leads me to the second reason for my visit this morning. I wonder if you — and your assistants, of course — would care to have supper at my home this evening?’

  ‘Why, we’d be delighted, ma’am,’ burst out Main. ‘Wouldn’t we, Don?’

  Severn stifled the smile he wanted to release; he had never seen a man ‘smitten’ so completely as Main had been by the entrance of the young woman. And he had to admit, she was far from hard on the eyes.

  ‘Shore,’ he agreed. ‘Except we got to draw lots, I’m afraid, Miz Winn.’

  ‘Oh, won’t yu call me Jenny — Don?’ she said, shyly. ‘I feel as if I know you so well. Everyone talks of you.’

  ‘Shucks, ma’am — I mean, Jenny, beggin’ yore pardon, I’d be proud to. You understand someone has to be here guardin’ our “guests”?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Well,’ she turned, and went to the door. ‘I shall hope to see at least two of you this evening. Gentlemen, good day.’

  There was a moment’s silence after the door closed quietly behind her, and then Rick Main smacked his thigh with a flat palm and let out a whoop like a Comanche.

  ‘Ray, yu ol’ gunnysack!’ he yelped. ‘Whyn’t yu tell me this town had Helen o’ Troy livin’ here?’

  ‘Name’s Jennifer, not Helen whatsis, whoever she might be,’ grumped the old man. ‘Bein’ she’s a widder, an’ full o’ workin’ for the church, I didn’t figger her as yore type, boy. In fact, I’d plumb forgot her existence till she walked in through that door!’

  ‘Hell’s bells, Ray, yu must be older than I thought,’ Main chattered. ‘I shore wouldn’t forget her existence if I lived to be as old as Methusely!’
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br />   ‘Yu ain’t likely to do that,’ observed Ray sourly.

  ‘Aw, go spit in yore hat, yu ol’ grump!’ grinned Main.

  He turned eagerly towards Severn. ‘Don, yu got to come with me tonight! Ray can hold the fort. Man, that’s the most beautiful woman in the world. An’ she’s asked me to supper. Hallelujah!’

  ‘Far as I recall it she asked all of us,’ Severn reminded him. ‘Yu an’ Ray better go. I ain’t in no fix to handle fancy cutlery right now.’ He gestured with his left arm, reminding them of the fact that although no bandages showed to the casual observer, the Marshal’s entire left shoulder was tightly bound, and the movement of his left arm and hand therefore extremely limited.

  ‘Well, Hell’s bells, Don, she ain’t about to pull no gun on yu!’ burst out the gambler. ‘Let’s draw straws an’ see who’s goin’ to be the lucky one.’ He bounded across the room and pulled three bristles from the grubby broom with which Poynton sporadically swept the jail. Laying them on the desk, he trimmed them neatly to the same size, and then cut about three inches off one of them. Tamping them so that they came level at one end, he clutched them in his hand, put his hands behind his back, jiggled them around a moment, and then thrust them forward.

  ‘Pick yore straw, Raymond:’ he crowed. Poynton made a sour face, and plucked at one of the straws. His old face broke into a delighted grin as the straw came away from the younger man’s hand.

  ‘Full size, by cracky!’ chortled Poynton. ‘Looks like I’m a-goin’ to eat some fawncy cookin’ tonight!’

  ‘Don?’

  Main’s face was alight with excitement, tension, anticipation; Severn looked at the young man’s expression, and silently prayed for a shorter straw. He picked and pulled, and stifled an exclamation as the long bristle came up. Main’s face fell about a foot.

  ‘Damnation!’ swore the gambler. ‘It warn’t in the cards.’

  ‘Shucks, Rick, forget it,’ Severn put in. ‘Yu go anyway. I’d as soon stick around here an’ brood some. I ain’t much on bein’ gassed at by a brood o’ females.’

  Main’s eyebrows rose. ‘Yu think she’ll have some o’ them other ladies from the church over there?’

  ‘Shore as yo’re born, boy!’ growled Poynton. ‘Yu warn’t thinkin’ it was going to be yu an’ her an’ candlelight an’ wine, was yu? Hell, I wouldn’t be half surprised if she didn’t have ol’ Father Malcolm there, too.’

  ‘What I meant, Rick,’ pursued Severn. ‘So yu go in my place. I mean, I wouldn’t want to deprive yu o’ no pleasant evenin’ or nothin’.’

  Main shook his head. ‘Don, I wouldn’t hear of it,’ he said stoutly. ‘Why, if any man deserves a quiet evenin’, it’s yu. Nope, I’m right decided about the whole thing, an’ I won’t take no for an answer. Yu won fair an’ square, an’ yu go .That’s my last word on it.’

  ‘But I thought yu was so keen to talk some more with the lady?’ Severn said, in mock puzzlement.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t hear none of it,’ Main said. ‘Fair’s fair. Yo’re goin’, Don, an’ that’s that.’

  ‘Sonny, yo’re as obvious as a horse’s rump,’ grunted Ray Poynton. ‘Yore one o’ those jaspers sees a purty face an’ forgets which way is up. Well, yu’d be wastin’ yore time, an’ I’m here to tell yu that.’

  ‘How come, Ray?’ Severn asked.

  ‘Jenny Winn, that’s a right determined little woman,’ Don Poynton explained. ‘She’d be about thirty now, I’d guess. Live in San Jaime oh, six-seven years. Her husband ran a spread someplace up in the Nueces. Got cut down by some fellers tryin’ to rustle his stock, an’ she moved down here right afterwards. Never talked much about her past. Settled here, an’ became a part o’ the scenery, as it were. She’s one o’ those women allus around when someone’s sick, someone needs help. I’d say there was about fifteen, twenty kids runnin’ around this placita was brought into the world by her. Knows jest about ever’ one in the place. I don’t reckon there’s a woman in the town wouldn’t give her all she owned if Jenny ast for it. On’y she’d never ask. Keeps purty much to herself apart from helpin’ folks. She’s like a right arm to old Father Malcolm.’

  ‘She sounds like a pretty nice person,’ observed Severn, quietly. ‘Goin’ out o’ her way to help us like that.’

  ‘She’s all o’ that, boy,’ confirmed Poynton. ‘An’ about fifteen times too good for a lallyhootin’ layabout like yu, young Main, so watch yore lip when yu talk about her, or I’m liable to button it for yu.’

  Main held up his hands in mock fear.

  ‘Okay, Ray, I’ll holler uncle,’ he said. ‘Anythin’ yu say. No offence.’

  ‘An’ none taken,’ growled Poynton. ‘Damn me to Hell beyond, I better root out a clean shirt or somethin’, if I’m a-goin’ callin’! Mebbe oughta get myself a shave, too.’

  ‘Hell, go as yu are, Ray,’ grinned Main. ‘Yu take off them whiskers, an’ yore ugly mug’ll scare the daylights out o’ them church ladies yu’ll be dinin’ with.’

  Poynton’s reply to this was an invitation which was biologically unfeasible, and the gambler grinned as the old man stumped out of the jail into the sunlit street. When he had gone, he turned to his friend.

  ‘Ol’ Ray is shore full o’ vim an’ vinegar these days,’ he observed. ‘I still can’t get over the way he come after Chapman with that Bowie knife. Don - yu reckon he’s the same Poynton yu once told me about?’

  ‘Could be,’ agreed the Marshal. ‘I ain’t askin’ him no questions. He’s a good man to have around. An’ he’s swore off the liquor like it had never existed - which some folks finds more amazin’ as every day goes by.’

  ‘I like him,’ Main confided. ‘He’s quite an ol’ fox, yu know that?’

  ‘I know it,’ Severn agreed. ‘Twenty men like that an’ I’d be happy to invite the Cullanes to open the ball.’

  ‘Funny, that,’ observed Main. ‘How quiet it’s been. I’d’ve thought ol’ Billy would’ve come stormin’ down here like the wrath o’ God when he heard we’d stuck his precious son into the hoosegow.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with yu,’ the Marshal mused, ‘but I ain’t shore ‘‘funny” is the right word.’

  ‘Whyfore yu reckon he’s held off, Don?’ the gambler asked.

  ‘I can’t figger it,’ admitted Severn. ‘On’y thing I can guess is that the ol’ devil’s got somethin’ up his sleeve we ain’t been let into. I’m guessin’ we’ll find out soon enough, though.’

  With these words, he put on his hat, and thoughtfully checking his guns, pushed out of the jail and into the busy sunlit square. San Jaime lay supine beneath the blasting heat of the midday sun. All around the square the ramadas were empty, and the windows shuttered for coolness and to bar the ever-shifting gypsum dust of the deserts around the town. The citizens of San Jaime were prudently avoiding the blasting heat in the cooler corners of either their own homes or Diego’s cantina, now restored to some semblance of its former state thanks to sterling work on the part of Turnbull and his men, who had proved to be skillful chair menders and adapters of broken furniture. Severn’s eyes ranged swiftly across the little settlement, picking out for perhaps the hundredth time the strong and the weak points in its perimeter. The gap between the livery stable and the jail, on his immediate right, was a weak point, one of the weakest. The two entrances to the northern end of the plaza alongside the church: these were also difficult to block or defend. Gaps between the groups of houses littered with tin cans, discarded bottles, over there a broken, red-rusted old stove which now housed pack-rats, and there a dilapidated wagon-bed, abandoned by some long-departed itinerant. San Jaime would be hard to defend without good men to guard those gaps. Turnbull and his cronies, himself, Rick Main and Poynton, the alcalde, Yope the liveryman - not too many, to be sure. But ten men could do wonders if deployed properly, and Severn now had in his mind the plan he would use when the necessity arose. This thought led him back to the question that Rick Main had just asked him, and he turned and looked towar
ds the mountains off to the south west. Somewhere up there lay the Cullane stronghold. Somewhere in those mountains that evil old man was plotting, planning, weighing and discarding possibilities just as he, Severn, was doing here in San Jaime. He shrugged; the die was cast, and all he could do now was wait.

  ‘Whatever happens, I ain’t got nothin’ to lose,’ he muttered to himself. Hitching his belt with his right hand, he walked across the plaza, a tall lonely figure on the empty square.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Glenn Cullane killed two horses getting back to the stronghold with his news. The third horse, cruelly raked with vicious spurs, lathered and broken, was all but dead when he reined up outside the big stone house in the canyon and ran inside.

  Within ten minutes the old man had summoned his entire brood to the house; they gathered in the huge room and the old tyrant faced them, standing with his legs astride before the fireplace, his eyes glowing with hatred and excitement.

  ‘What’s up, Pa?’ queried his youngest son impatiently. T was fibrin’ to break that little pinto mustang—’

  ‘Shet yore face, Billy,’ snapped the old man. ‘What I heerd today has made all this San Jaime business make sense for the fust time. Glenn — tell ‘em what yu jest told me.’

  Full of importance with the news he had brought, Glenn Cullane let a moment pass to build the suspense before he made his startling announcement.

  ‘That jasper in San Jaime — that Severn. Yu know who he is?’

  ‘Aw, quit play-actin’ Glenn,’ snapped Yancey Cullane, his empty eyes fastening on his brother with contempt. ‘Say you’re piece, dammit!’

  ‘Yeah, brother, I’ll do that,’ leered Glen Cullane, ‘an’ mebbe yu’ll say a prayer o’ thanks that yo’re still around to hear me when I tell yu who yu pulled a gun on in San Jaime.’

  ‘Who, Severn?’ said Yancey, puzzled.

  ‘Severn,’ confirmed Glenn, ‘better known as that damned Texas outlaw, Sudden!’

  Sudden! Nothing Glenn Cullane could have said would have been more likely to create the reaction which this one word effected. Severn was Sudden, the outlaw! Not a man in the room had not heard of the legendary gunfighter, and his astonishing speed with six-shooters. If Yancey Cullane had drawn a gun on Sudden, he was indeed a fortunate man to still be walking the face of the earth. The silence was broken by a snort of derision from young Billy Cullane.