Five – Calamity Sam
Lucy Rose was first to enter. As before, she toted a laden tray, but Jim didn’t take time to observe that she had changed to a gown of sky-blue taffeta, which was probably her Sunday-best. He was more interested in the shotgun. Waldo was hefting that formidable weapon, moving into the shack after his sister, pointing the barrels at Jim—but the hammers weren’t cocked; Jim could afford to make his move.
“More chow,” announced Lucy Rose, stepping to one side.
“You fellers just set quiet,” grinned Waldo, “and ...”
His voice choked off in a gasp of astonishment, as Jim took him by surprise, levering himself on his hands, swinging his bound feet upward. His boots struck the main section of the shotgun so hard that the weapon was almost torn from Waldo’s grasp. The barrels were shoved to the right and upward, catching under the tray held by Lucy Rose, upending it at bewildering speed. Her mouth was open for a scream, when she was momentarily blinded and half choked. A platter of mashed potato struck her full in the face. A dish of stew overturned against her bare flesh, just above the low-cut bodice of her gown.
Waldo was reeling, but still gripping his shotgun, when Jim lurched to his feet and grappled with him. His left hand closed over the barrels of the weapon, keeping the muzzles pointed upward, while he bunched his right and aimed a blow at Waldo’s face. Waldo slumped hastily and the punch sped past his left ear like a darting piston. He yelled in alarm, which was more than his sister could do, as her mouth was still full of mash.
Through the door came Dewey, with Rick tagging him close.
“Grab the ...!” began the eldest brother.
“Look out!” wailed Rick.
Jim’s bunched right flashed out, slamming into Rick’s midriff. As he doubled, Rick lunged towards him. Dewey swung a roundhouse left which missed his sister by less than an inch, missed Jim’s face by more than six inches and landed squarely on Waldo’s right ear. Waldo yelped a protest, flopped and wrapped his arms about Jim’s knees, doing his utmost to shove him off-balance. In a threshing, tangled heap, Jim and the three brothers collapsed to the dirt floor.
“Use your six-shooter!” panted Dewey. “Slug the big ...!”
“I can’t—get to my holster ...!” panted Rick.
“Get your doggone elbow outa my belly!” gasped Waldo.
“Cucaracha!” Instinctively, Jim called to Benito, although there was nothing the little Mex could do. “Don’t just—sit there! Do something ...!”
“Si,” nodded Benito. “I will applaud. With my hands tied, what else can I do? Viva, Amigo Jim! Bravo ...!”
“Aw—shuddup ...!” yelled Dewey.
“Look out, Sis!” warned Rick. “Stay clear!”
“How in tarnation do I know where I’m steppin’?” spluttered his sister. “I can’t see for—all this mash in my eyes ...!”
Her only means of quickly ridding herself of the blinding mash was effective, albeit unladylike. She managed to sidle past the heap of kicking, struggling masculinity and reach the open doorway. From there, she stumbled to the pump in the front yard, thrust her head under it and began working the handle. Water spurted over her head, saturating the top half of her clothing but, after a few moments, washing all the mash from her hair and face. Dripping, disheveled and disgruntled, she quit the pump and hustled back to the shack.
In the end, it wasn’t the combined strength of the Gillerys that forced Jim to surrender. It was the cold muzzle of Dewey’s Colt pressed to his temple, the sound of the weapon’s cocking, the fact that Dewey was trembling with rage and his brothers still heaving and shoving. Under such circumstances, Jim wisely decided against further resistance. He was never lacking in courage, but some Colts were of the hair-trigger variety—and the man holding this Colt was trembling violently.
“All right, Gillery,” he growled. “Take it easy with that trigger-finger. You’ve made your point.”
“Consarn his ornery hide!” groaned Rick, as he struggled to his feet. “He’s a grizzly bear! He’s got rocks in his fists!”
“I ache all over,” mumbled the battered Waldo.
“Set,” Dewey huskily ordered Jim. “Set real quiet, big man!”
He took a pace backward, dipped the muzzle of his six-gun to draw a bead on Jim’s broad chest. Jim shrugged, grimaced and flopped to the floor. From the doorway, Lucy Rose bitterly rebuked her kinsmen.
“Can’t you wooden-heads do anything right? This is the second time he got his hands free!”
“I swear I tied them knots tight enough,” muttered Rick. And then he moved around behind Jim and bent to pick up the frayed ropes and the rusted spur. “Hey! He must’ve cut through the ropes with this doggone spur!”
“That’s loco!” protested Waldo. “Where could he find a spur? We stashed their spurs in the house—along with their other stuff.”
“Take another look at it,” the girl sourly invited. “That’s an old spur.” She gestured to the junk in the corner. “From off that heap, I bet.”
“By thunder!” breathed Dewey. “Ain’t you the persistent one, Big Jim? Really got your heart set on bustin’ loose, ain’t you?”
“Doggone you, Big Jim,” chided Rick. “You pay Lucy Rose a mighty poor compliment. She’s young and purty, keeps a clean house and cooks the best chow you ever tasted—and yet you’d risk your neck to get away from Box G.”
Jim couldn’t resist remarking, with a wry grin aimed at Lucy Rose, “She doesn’t look so almighty pretty right now.”
Lucy Rose flushed to the roots of her saturated hair. Dewey mumbled an oath, but his brothers slapped their thighs and guffawed. The Gillery loyalty was strong in them—but their sister did look somewhat less than pretty at this moment. Also, she was acutely uncomfortable. She had rid herself of the mashed potato, but not of the liberal serving of beef stew that had lodged between her underwear and her epidermis.
“Shuddup, you jackasses!” Dewey barked at them.
“Amigo Jim,” grinned Benito. “You are not gallant to this muy bello senorita.”
“I’m not feeling very gallant right now,” drawled Jim, “and that’s a fact.”
“Waldo,” breathed Dewey, “check the Mex’s ropes. Rick, you fetch a lariat—savvy? A rawhide lariat!”
Waldo and Rick hastened to obey. It took Waldo only a few moments to ascertain that the Mex had made no effort to work free of his bonds. By then, Rick was re-entering the shack, uncoiling a lariat.
“Keep him covered,” growled Dewey. He holstered his Colt, snatched the lariat from his brother. “This time I’ll tie him.”
While Rick drew his six-shooter and pointed it at the big man’s midriff, Dewey forced him to lean forward with his hands clasped behind him. This time, Jim reflected, his chances of escape would be well nigh impossible. Dewey used all of the lariat, tightly securing his wrists, then drawing the residue under his body and knotting it to the ropes that bound his ankles. “You’re here to stay, Big Jim! Best get used to the idea!”
“I’d as soon go live with the Apaches,” Jim retorted.
“As far as I’m concerned,” declared Dewey, “the whole future of Box G depends on us keepin’ you pinned down till Arch gets back with the J.P. I’ll see you wed to Lucy Rose. I’ll see your name on the document that we take to lawyer Green, when we collect that legacy. Or I’ll know the reason why not!”
“Stop lookin’ at me that way!” Lucy Rose breathlessly reproached Jim.
“What way?” he challenged.
“You know what I mean!” she fumed. “You’re laughin’ at me! I don’t admire to be laughed at, Jim Rand!”
Jim was still grinning when he said, “Go look at yourself in a mirror—and then you’ll see why I’m laughing.”
She clenched her fists and, for a brief moment, he wondered if she would lean over him and strike him. He sensed that it cost her a great effort to regain control of herself. Curtly she ordered her brothers to, “Search this shack real careful. Make sure there’s no
thin’ else he could use to work on them ropes.”
To Rick and Waldo, the eldest brother gruffly announced, “I want every piece of junk—every last inch of useless harness—toted outa here! And I mean now!”
“No need to holler,” grumbled Rick. “We ain’t deaf.”
“There’ll be no supper for you this night,” the girl grimly informed the prisoners. “I hope your hunger keeps you from sleepin’.”
“Every female has a mean streak, it seems,” drawled Jim, “and you’re no exception.”
“If you get hungry enough,” she taunted, “you could try scoopin’ up some of that chow that got kicked into the dirt.”
With that, she picked up the tray, carefully gathered the fallen dishes and cutlery and hurried out from the shack. Dewey glowered at his brothers for a long moment, and Jim supposed he would begin cursing them, venting his spleen. But he was wrong. Dewey’s temper swiftly cooled. His tone was gentler when next he addressed his kinsmen, and it occurred to Jim that, of all the Gillerys, the eldest was the most philosophical. Under other circumstances, he might have made a friend of the gruff-voiced, well-meaning Dewey. Well-meaning? Yes. Dewey had ramrodded a kidnapping, but his motives were somewhat nobler than those of the abductor who holds his victim for ransom. At least Dewey was trying to build something, and not only for himself. The welfare of his sister and brothers was his driving motivation. It was all a manifestation of his protective instinct.
“Rick, you set guard now,’” he muttered. “I’ll relieve you some time after midnight.”
“How long are you gonna stay awake?” asked Waldo.
“Clear through till sun-up,” said Dewey. “I ain’t weary. Got too much on my mind. Anyways I can catnap ’tween supper-time and midnight, if I feel the need.” He raised a hand to his jaw, frowned down at Jim. “Consarn you, Big Jim, you punch like the rear hoof of a crazy mule.”
“There’ll be another time,” Jim predicted.
“No.” Dewey shook his head emphatically. “When I hog-tie a man, he stays tied.”
The brothers moved out of the shack. To Jim, the sound of the door closing, the locking of the padlock and the fitting of the bar had become all too familiar. He sighed heavily and remarked to Benito, “Two things I have to do. First, I have to convince myself I’m not hankering for a smoke. Second, I still have to figure a way for us to get free of these damn-blasted ropes and out of this consarned shack.”
“With one Gillery out front—nursing the big gun,” opined Benito, “this will not be easy.”
“That’s for sure,” scowled Big Jim. “That’s for damn sure.”
~*~
On the morrow, the Box G situation and the potential menace represented by Calvin Truscott and his associates was to be complicated by two seemingly unconnected incidents. The first incident concerned the guileless, uncommonly awkward and tangle-footed Sam Beech, an employee of a ranch known as the Double L. The second incident concerned Archer Gillery, who was headed for Byrne City along the same trail used by Truscott and the Holbrook gang.
At a quarter of eleven in the morning, the gangling, shaggy-haired Sam readied his pinto pony for the trail—a journey that might lead almost anywhere. He had been fired this very morning by his employer of five weeks standing, the long-suffering Luke Loomis. Five weeks. A record for the hapless Sam. Usually, he couldn’t hold a job much longer than a couple of weeks. His employers became discouraged, chagrined, irate, dismayed,.ctc., and finally gave up. It had been that way with Loomis, who now straddled a top-rail of the horse-corral and quietly traded comments with his ramrod.
“In all my years of ranchin’, I swear to Betsy I never knew such a useless tangle-foot. I ain’t superstitious, Cole, but I’m tellin’ you that boy is hexed. There’s some kind of curse on him.”
“Well, I reckon you’re right,” drawled the foreman, pudgy, laconic Cole Robinson. “Any young feller that can scarce walk twenty yards without bumpin’ into somethin’, trippin’ over somethin’, bustin’ somethin’—causin’ some kind of commotion—why—I guess he just naturally must be hexed.” He shook his head sadly. “Durned if I ever seen such a case before, Luke. I used to think he was just plain awkward. I recall his first night here. When he was undressin’ in the bunkhouse, he blacked Jake’s eye with his elbow and dug a spur into Holly Radford’s behind.”
“I know,” sighed Loomis. “I know.”
“Next day, Dan Collins was sittin’ outside his cook-shack, chewin’ on that old. pipe of his,” Robinson recalled. “Young Sam sashayed up and offered him a light ...”
“How’s Dan’s beard comin’ along?” asked Loomis. “I haven’t noticed lately. Wonder if it’ll ever grow again.”
“It’ll grow soon enough, and he wasn’t hurt real bad,” said Robinson.
“Lucky he didn’t get his face burned,” mused Loomis.
“Lucky he didn’t drown,” growled Robinson. “The boy should’ve thrown a hatful of water into Dan’s face. He didn’t have to dump the poor old jasper in a horse-trough.”
“Trouble on top of trouble,” said Loomis.
“Yep,” nodded Robinson. “That’s Calamity Sam. And I want to say I admire your patience, Luke. Many another rancher would’ve gotten rid of him after just a couple days. You kept him on the payroll a whole five weeks.”
“I figured the accidents would have to stop, if I waited long enough,” muttered Loomis. “But I was wrong.”
“Well, he’s on his way now,” observed the ramrod. “And that’s a mercy.”
Outside the bunkhouse, Sam Beech tightened the pinto’s cinch-strap, slid a boot into a stirrup and swung astride. He then raised a hand in friendly salute to the three off-duty cowpokes gathered about the bunkhouse doorway. They didn’t return the gesture. They watched him intently, apprehensively. Not until the two-legged calamity was long gone would the men of Double L relax.
Sam turned the pinto and began ambling it across the yard toward open range. In deep and sincere relief, the rancher and his foreman stared after him. It was as though a great weight had been lifted from their shoulders. Soon, Calamity Sam Beech would be naught but a speck, on the eastern horizon, and every member of the Double L community could breathe easily again; there would be peace.
But fate decreed that, before finally departing, Sam would be presented with one opportunity, one last chance to prove that he was a helpful, well-meaning young man at heart; not a bungling, clumsy oaf. Loomis’ spouse, the bulky Dora May, was returning from a brief visit to the wife of a neighboring rancher. She was stalling her surrey just inside the pole and wrought iron archway to the left of the work-corrals. At her stern command, the matched bays stood rigid; no team-horse would dare twitch a muscle after any admonition from Dora May Loomis. She gathered her skirts, shrugged her excess fat to the right side of the surrey seat and prepared to climb down—just as Sam reined up beside her and insisted on helping.
“Allow me, ma’am!” he called, so loudly that he drowned her gasped rebuff.
“No! I can manage by myself! You stay clear of me, young feller ...!”
But her protests fell on deaf ears. Sam managed to dismount without falling on his face. From then on, calamity followed calamity. Showing the pudgy Dora May a reassuring grin, he reached up, got a firm grip on her substantial waist and made to lift her to the ground. She unleashed a shriek of alarm and indignation and her full weight caused him to slump backward. He over-balanced, reeled and fell, losing his grip on the rancher’s wife. With a resounding thud and face-first—Mrs. Loomis hit the dust. Loomis and Robinson hastily descended from the top-rail and came hustling across the yard, tagged by the off-duty hands. As though the alarm signals were contagious, Dan Collins’ old hound-dog began yapping and the chickens started clucking in the coop behind the cook-shack. There was confusion aplenty—because the badly hexed Sam Beech had not quite left Double L.
He rolled over and began lurching to his feet. Loomis and Robinson arrived, nudged him aside and bent to assist D
ora May, each of them seizing a plump shoulder. She was hauled to the perpendicular, panting and disheveled, her round face thickly coated with the alkali dust into which it had been thrust.
“Fire him!” she screamed, pointing a quivering finger at the abashed Sam. “I warned you, Luke Loomis! Three weeks ago, I said get rid of him ...!”
“It’s all right now, Dora May,” soothed her husband. “I already fired him ...”
“But he’s still here!” she accused.
“He’s goin’,” Loomis assured her.
“Goin’ for certain,” declared Robinson.
“Goin’ right now,” sighed Sam.
He turned, slid a boot into a stirrup of the pinto and, as he swung up to the saddle, missed Dora’s face by mere inches with his other boot. She gave vent to an unladylike exclamation and demanded that somebody loan her a six-gun. Sam groaned in despair. There was only one thing left to him to do, and he did it quickly. He heeled the pinto to a run and began putting distance between himself and the ranch buildings. Across Double L range he rode at speed, bound for the trail that would take him to the county seat.
Almost simultaneously, the incident involving Archer Gillery was taking shape. He was still en route to Byrne City and, along a lonely sector of the north trail, his bay colt had suddenly become lame. They were close to a bend. To his right, the face of a cliff soared several hundred feet to the hot morning sky. To his left, the trail fell away in a ninety-foot, rock-littered slant. Until the thudding of hooves reached his ears, it seemed he was the only living human for miles around.
Of all the Gillery brothers, it just happened that Archer was the most talkative; he was even brasher than the youthful Waldo. For the third time, he investigated his pockets. Where in tarnation was his jack knife? What had become of it? He couldn’t recall when he had last used it, but he always carried it in a pocket of his vest, and he sure as heck needed it right now. How else to prise a stone from a hoof? It was obvious this colt wasn’t moving any further until that stone was removed. The bay stood with its left fore hoof raised. Archer examined it again, and then ...
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