The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  He said, “Get out of here, Joe,” and tried to push the big redhead aside.

  Alford didn’t budge. He turned and saw Perry. “So Bert Lynden pinned a badge on him. What’s this mean, Clay?”

  “It means I’ve got about ten seconds to either give myself up or shoot my way out.”

  CHAPTER 21

  A frothy layer of clouds lay against the mountains behind the town. A breeze had come up, blowing hot off the Sink. Despite the heat, Clay felt a cold gnawing fear in his stomach. He glanced to the south end of town where the herd was penned. He thought of Kate. To come this far and lose it all to a man like Elkhart. God.

  He swiveled his head, expecting to see Sheriff Bert Lynden somewhere near Elkhart and Perry. There was no sign of the lawman. And then Clay knew why. In this showdown Lynden had delegated his authority to Lon Perry. Lynden was not only an inefficient sheriff; he was a coward, letting someone else run the risk of a gunfight.

  Elkhart and Perry were standing still now, one on the walk, one in the street, watching him. Some of the crowd sensed the tension. The walks miraculously cleared. There were frightened squeals from women as they herded their children to safety.

  Ed Ruskin’s voice reached Clay. “Looks like Elkhart’s goin’ to make you sweat for this one, Janner. Perry’s got a badge. If you shoot him now you’ll really be up against the law and no foolin’. Back off, Janner. You still got time.”

  Clay shifted his gaze, saw the small, plump cattle buyer in the doorway of the Frontier House. He shook his head at the man and turned to look again at Elkhart and Perry.

  “I’m with you, Clay,” Joe Alford said at his elbow. He sounded scared but grimly determined. “I’ve got that cat off my back, Clay.”

  “You’re no hand with a gun, Joe. Keep out of it. You’ve got a wife to think of.”

  “She’d hate me sure if I didn’t side you. I’d hate myself—”

  Elkhart began edging along the walk, cradling his rifle. “Unbuckle your gunbelt, Janner,” he ordered, and Lon Perry started to pace slowly forward.

  At the same instant Clay spied Nina and Kate French hurrying across the street. “Keep back!” he shouted, and saw Elkhart raise his rifle.

  Clay dug for his gun just as Kate seized Nina by a wrist and dragged her out of the line of fire. And Clay sensed movement beside him and knew Alford was drawing with him. He felt a flash of pride for Joe and also a vast fear. There was a crash of guns. An orange-red streak of flame leaped from Elkhart’s rifle and Alford, spinning, slumped against Clay, spoiling his aim. Clay’s bullet whined off a metal sign above the drygoods store.

  Clay leaped aside and saw Joe Alford drop to the edge of the walk.

  Lon Perry yelled, “I’m arresting you, Janner!”

  “The hell you are!” Clay swung his gun and the movement brought a stab of pain to his left arm. The wound slowed him perceptibly and he knew he could never get set before Elkhart caught him in a crossfire.

  He was aware of Nina screaming, of men in the saloon ducking below the window. He fired, but Perry had already lined his gun and he felt a savage blow at his right leg. He fell into the street, rolled over, still holding his gun. He heard a roar behind him and saw Elkhart stumble back against a building front. Elkhart dropped his rifle and pitched forward across the walk.

  Lon Perry risked a glance at Elkhart, seemed to hesitate, then began firing. Clay squeezed off a shot, but Perry still kept coming. Perry had lost his hat. His face was slick with sweat, his yellow hair loose about his face. Desperately Clay flung himself aside as a bullet struck the ground, peppering his neck with grit.

  As he came to a sitting position he fired the gun as fast as he could lift the hammer and drop it. At each shot Perry wavered. But still he came on, staggering drunkenly now. Clay watched him, numbly knowing his own gun was empty. If Perry had one more bullet and had the strength to lift the gun for a final shot, it was all over.

  And then Perry’s legs seemed to collapse. He folded up in the street and didn’t move.

  For what seemed like an age Clay just sat there letting the tension drain out of him. He watched the crowd gathering but ignored the jumbled, shouted questions. Then Kate was kneeling beside him, weeping.

  All he could say was, “Joe, is he—”

  “He shot Elkhart. He was lying face down and somehow he managed to shoot—” Kate buried her head against his shoulder. “Oh, Clay, I was so scared.”

  Clay watched some men pick up Joe Alford and carry him down the street. After a minute or so they picked him up too.

  There was a doctor’s office above the dry goods store, and there the doctor removed a bullet from Clay’s leg. For several hours they did not know whether Alford would make it. But at last the doctor gave his assurance that he would pull through.

  A crowd kept milling in the street and in the hallways outside the doctor’s office, all gabbing about the gunfight. Elkhart was dead, shot between the eyes by a bullet from Joe Alford’s gun. Lon Perry lived for an hour. Before he died he confessed that Elkhart had paid Baldy Renson to ambush Clay Janner. And Renson probably got caught in his own trap. So they all said, over and over again.

  Sheriff Bert Lynden came along the hall, and the crowd fell silent. In the doorway of the doctor’s office Lyndon removed his hat and looked in at Clay, and at Kate, and at Joe Alford, who was propped up in a cot with Nina in a chair beside him.

  “I just want you to know,” the sheriff said, clearing his throat, “that I didn’t swear in Perry as a deputy. He stole that badge from me and pinned it on.”

  “And you let him,” Clay said.

  “He threatened me,” Lynden said.

  Nobody said anything at all after that, and the sheriff turned around slowly and went back along the hall. He was through and he knew it.

  Kate leaned close to Clay. “Don’t be a fiddle-foot any more. Please stay and help me run Spade.”

  “It’s your ranch,” Clay said, and looked across the room at Nina and Alford, who were talking earnestly. “Joe married a woman with a ranch. It just doesn’t work out.”

  “But they’re going to get along now,” Kate said.

  “I’ll stay if you let me buy a half interest in Spade. Maybe when I sell the herd it won’t be enough. But one of these days I’ll have the cash and—”

  “You’re going to be only a partner?” Kate said, drawing back.

  He gave her a faint smile. “Anything the matter with marrying your partner?”

  According to Kate, there wasn’t.

  POWDER SMOKE, by Jackson Gregory

  Copyright © 1937 by Jackson Gregory.

  Chapter One

  It was young springtime in the Tecolotes, with skies at their bluest and delicately tinted mountain flowers lifting in the upland meadows, and the sunshine so softly bright over the wilderness world that it did not seem there could be a place anywhere for shadow and gloom. Yet shadows there were. Young Jeff Cody, riding down a steep cut-off trail to bring him the shortest way from Spire Mountain Flats down through Witch Woman’s Hollow and so on to Halcyon, had shoved his hat back and the sun was on his tanned face, yet a shadow was there, too, and in his brooding eyes. It was only a few hours since he had come upon a sight in Pocket Canyon that had made his blood run cold.

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a word or two with Still Jeff,” thought Young Jeff as his rangy sorrel slid stiff-leggedly down the last bit of the steep descent into the lower trail. “And with old Bill Morgan, too.” A queer quirk twitched at the hard line of his lips. “Darn those two old devils, anyhow.”

  Tall was Young Jeff, and lean and brown, a sort of golden-brown from the wind and sunshine of the high places, supple and vigorous and graceful in the saddle. Just as from some fastidious women there emanates an elusive, almost fancied fragrance, so from young Jeff Cody there seemed to issue some faint essence of the mount
ains themselves, a hint of sun-warmed resin from the big-boled pines, of crushed laurel leaves; his boots had trod on wild mint in Pocket Canyon; the coat now rolled up behind the cantle of his saddle had served him many a time as a pillow, placed atop newly cut cedar or fir tips.

  From the timbered slope he cut into the lowest quarter of Deer Valley and struck south down in the grassy valley bottom where the wagon track was. He and Wandering River, the flowers and grass and sunshine, had the place pretty much to themselves; most of the wild things that came down here to feed and prey were now taking their sheltered ease in their favorite hidden shady nooks. There’d be deer here later as there were sure to be in the early mornings. A couple of miles ahead of him he saw a brindle cow and an old white horse dozing companionably; both belonged to the Witch Woman.

  The valley narrowed crookedly at the point where the horse and cow were, with a ridge running down into it from the west, the wagon track winding about its base among pines. Just beyond was a shadow-filled basin with a small tributary creek glinting darkly across it, a place so thick with willow and alder, laurel and buckeye, that the sun failed to penetrate it save with glancing rays which only emphasized the brooding gloom which filled Witch Woman’s Hollow as a dark fluid may fill a cup.

  With no fence to stop him Young Jeff was half across the hollow when a voice hailed him. He frowned impatiently, muttered something altogether ungallant under his breath, but pulled his horse down to a slow trot and then, reluctantly, to a full stop.

  “Hello, Mrs. Grayle,” he said, and touched his hat though he seemed half of a mind not to do so.

  She had been squatting under a leafy laurel close to the wagon track, idling in the shade when one would have expected an old woman like her to be hunting out the warmest spots in the sunshine. She got up stiffly but moved spryly enough when she had risen, walking toward him with her long willow staff which she used but lightly. His horse pricked up its ears, snorted and shook its head, and was restrained from backing off only by Young Jeff’s spurs.

  “What’s your horse scared of me for?” she asked. There was hardly more than a hint of a quaver in her voice, which was as hard and sharp as a knife blade. “Haven’t been telling him ugly stories about me, have you, Jeff dear?”

  Jeff didn’t smile at her sally, but then neither did she. Nor did he show any resentment at her calling him “Jeff dear.” She had always done that; she knew that as a boy he hated it and so kept it up.

  “Something’s got you worried, Boy,” she said, peering up at him with a deep-set pair of glinting black eyes set in a dark face which, crisscrossed with a thousand lines and wrinkles, looked to be a hundred years old. She fell to chuckling as she laid a hand like a claw on his knee. “Something’s gouging you, Jeff Cody, and gouging you deep.”

  He shrugged; the bleak hardness of his eyes remained unchanged and the stern set of his mouth unsoftened.

  “I’ve got some riding to do—”

  “You’ve been doing some riding already! Let me look in your eyes, Jeff; let me read what’s there, past and present and future.”

  His snort was reminiscent of his horse’s a moment ago.

  “I thought you’d given up trying to work that sort of thing on me,” he said impatiently. “We ought to know each other too well.”

  Her chuckle became a sort of evil cackle; she pushed back the ragged old black shawl from her face, peering up at him more intently than ever; her squinting eyes seemed overflowing with some secret, wicked glee.

  “So you’re too smart to believe me the witch that everybody else calls me? Can’t fool Young Jeff, can I? When folks say that I make a brew by the dark o’ the moon, of frogs and deadly night shade and—”

  “I’ve got to be riding,” said Jeff. “I thought there might be something you wanted.”

  The spite brimming her eyes got into her shrilling voice too as she spat out her next words at him; he had always known that she hated him as she hated everyone else; now any stranger, had he looked at her and heard her, would have known as well as did Jeff Cody. It had never been any secret to Jeff, either, that she took pride in her reputation and in being shunned and talked about; she looked like a witch, there were many of the backwoods folk who more than half believed she was a witch, and now Jeff began to wonder if she didn’t think so herself! At her age, living the solitary life she led, harboring all the universal spite and malice which were such integral parts of her, small wonder if she was a bit mad.

  “You’re a fool, Jeff Cody!” she railed at him, and beat his knee with her skinny fist. “You’re as big a fool as even old Still Jeff Cody ever was, as big a fool as old Red Shirt Bill Morgan.” She began laughing, showing the few discolored teeth which the hard years had left to her. “Fools, all three of you!—Do you know why Still Jeff and old Red Shirt hate each other? Friends once, weren’t they? And they let a dead man come between them!”

  The thought moved her malevolent mirth a notch higher. Jeff started to ride on but she clutched at him and detained him even more by her words than her grip.

  “Talking of dead men,” she mouthed at him. “It’s a good day to talk of dead men, think so, Jeff dear?” She began to sniff like a dog smelling a man over. “I seem to get a whiff of death on you! Haven’t just been visiting with a dead man, have you, Jeff? Didn’t find him back up yonder in the mountains, did you?” She sniffed again, her nostrils flaring, her eyes squinted almost shut. “It wasn’t murder, was it? What are you trying to do, Boy, sitting up there so stony-faced? Trying to hide things from old Mother Grayle? It can’t be done, Jeff! Nobody can hide the truth from me, not when I hanker to find it out. Yes, I smell murder just as plain as you’d smell a rose if somebody stuck it up under that long nose of yours. But why take it so to heart, Jeff dear? Most folks have got to die sometime, haven’t they? And he was an old man anyhow, wasn’t he, dead up yonder in Pocket Canyon?”

  By the time she had finished his eyes had narrowed to slits. Twenty hard mountain miles lay between Witch Woman’s Hollow and Pocket Canyon. How on earth did the old hag know?

  He did his best not to betray his thoughts by the slightest quiver of a muscle. There were to be noted only the narrowing of his eyes and the hardening of his jaw. He did not treat the woman to an expression of his amazement; he did not ask a single question. He knew her well; she would say just as much or little as she chose, and no urging from him would drive her a jot further. So he sat silent waiting for her.

  But she grew as silent and her old face was as set and rigid as his own. So he said, “Guess I’ll be jogging along now.”

  She sucked in her lips so that bony chin and nose came closer together than ever.

  “I was going to tell you something else, Jeff dear, and it was going to be a warning about the future. That’s why I was waiting here for you, for you can be mighty sure, young man, that I knew you’d be coming along this way today! But you’re such a fool! Go ahead; it won’t be long before there are others lying in some gully, shot in the back—and you’ll be one of them!”

  Then she laughed in his face, turned agilely and moved swiftly off toward the dark old stone house half glimpsed in the heart of Witch Woman’s Hollow, her rags fluttering about her, her long stick thumping viciously. Young Jeff Cody dipped his spurs and was on his way, facing straight ahead.

  Passing swiftly out of the Hollow he caught a first glimpse of the incredible town of Halcyon only a mile farther down the valley.

  Chapter Two

  Halcyon had had many names in its time: Pay Dirt, Jump Off, Hell’s Bells, Valley City. It had been very much alive during its brilliant and hectic few months of life. One of the oldest of Western mining towns, it was as dead now as a door nail. All that remained at Halcyon were a score of time-defying buildings, empty now, sturdy old structures of rock and rough-hewn timbers, with iron shutters, once green and latterly brown-streaked; grass-grown mounds where once houses had stood;
what was long ago a street was now grown up in lusty young pine trees and brush and thistles. It was a place which had boldly invaded the Wilderness and which in the end had been gobbled up by that same patient but predatory Wilderness. Lost in the mountains, far from any other town, it reeked of desertion and desolation, and exuded that queer atmosphere of a haunted region which has caused it and its like to be labeled Ghost Towns. They stand queer, impressive monuments to the old West.

  It clung to the past and withdrew farther year by year from the outside world of today; even the road from the lower lands had vanished, for the hard winters with their snow and ice, and the warm springs with their millions of freshets and landslides, had rutted and gouged it and made nothing of it; there had been no call to rebuild it; pines and firs and brush had found root and smothered it; it had been drawn back into the embrace of the wilderness.

  So now Halcyon was a dead town reeking with desertion—and yet it was not altogether deserted. And that was the strange thing about Halcyon. True, in the winter months never a soul came near it; it belonged then to the white silence, to a hungry timber wolf or a restless old brown bear touched with insomnia. But in spring and summer and fall it was different. There were two men, old timers, who had never deserted ship and who never would. The whole countryside knew about them; and those who knew the two men personally were always speculating: How long before one of them would kill the other? And would it be Still Jeff Cody who shot Red Shirt Bill Morgan? Or would it be Red Shirt Bill who potted old Still Jeff? For it could never be a secret that the two, once friends, hated each other with a deep and still and murderous hate.

  Young Jeff riding into “town,” following the crooked trail that snaked through the pines, circled about the most pretentious building Halcyon had ever known, the timeworn hull of the Pay Dirt Hotel, a place given over now to bats and small rodents, and got his broken view through the trees of what used to be the Square. On its western rim an old man sat on the porch of a moss-grown, shake-roofed cabin, a rifle resting in companionable fashion across his knees. Across the Square from him, thinly screened by scattering young timber, another old man, square-white-bearded, husky and red-shirted, sat on a very similar porch at the door of a cabin almost a twin to the other, and for companionship had a rifle standing against the wall within easy reach. He sat lounging in a creaking rocking chair; the first man, as lean as a rail and as straight as a ramrod, had deposited his lanky frame on a sway-backed bench. He scorned beards, white beards in particular, that beard across the Square most of all, but wore a mustache, fiercely impressive for all its snowy whiteness, which must have won a prize in any mustache competition.