The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  He let it hang there through a silent while and just let his eyes, talking with her eyes, say the rest. It was as good as saying, “If you were mine, if you gave yourself to me, it would be different.”

  After that there was a silence disturbed only by the crackling noises of the fire. No one spoke or stirred, and then Buck Nevers pulled out his Durham bag and started a cigarette and the contagion of his act spread; nearly every man in the room was rolling a cigarette when the door opened and Andy Coppler showed up.

  “The horses are all right, Jim,” he said from the doorway. “Funny, but they was all tied proper. I guess—” Young Jeff came up off his bench like something shot out of a cannon; he hurled himself in a long dive, his shoulder crashing into Coppler’s knees. Coppler went over backward, disappearing in the outside dark from which he had just emerged, and with him, on top of him, went Young Jeff Cody. And Young Jeff’s hands, his muscles set like hair triggers, clamped down on Andy’s thighs where his guns hung.

  He got the guns, dragged them out of their loose holsters and his first act was to bring one of them crashing down on Andy’s head. Then he leaped backward into the deeper dark and sent a shot in through the open door. That was to tell them. A message rode on that bullet that Jim Ogden would understand.

  Maybe Arlene would understand too.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jeff Cody’s precipitate act was so utterly unexpected that it brought something very like consternation in its wake. It was like an explosion. And small wonder that all hands were taken by surprise; Jeff was as much surprised himself. For here he had done a thing which he had thought he had got out of his mind, that he had just been thanking his stars that he hadn’t attempted. And he had got away with it.

  At least for that palpitant moment he had got away with it. Andy Coppler still sprawled inert like a dead man, and was not to be concerned with. There were the two boys who had stepped out for their smokes, for a whispered conference most likely, and Jeff didn’t know exactly where they were. And there were those others in the house. Altogether, when he had drawn his first deep breath of freedom, there were matters aplenty to think about.

  One of the men inside made a move to slam the door shut. Jeff saw him and sent a quick shot to put a stop to that; he called out sharply, “No you don’t! Leave that door open!” A score of shots then answered him, men firing wildly, not seeing him, concerned chiefly with leaping to right or left of the open door. They, in the full light of the fire, made the best of targets, whereas he was nothing but a voice in the outer dark.

  “Put out that fire! Throw a blanket on it!” That was Jim Ogden giving orders. He himself didn’t take a step toward the fire since, had he done so, he must have crossed the room and exposed himself in all likelihood to sudden death. Then shouting, he called out, “Benny! Johnny! You two out there! Slam your lead into Jeff Cody. You can—”

  “Jeff!” screamed Arlene. “Run! Save yourself! Bring help! They’ll kill—”

  Someone snatched up a blanket and hurled it toward the fireplace. Jeff saw it flying across the room like an enormous bat.

  An eerie screech came from the Witch Woman.

  “Jeff! Save me and I’ll tell you things you’d give a million dollars—” He heard Jim Ogden storming, and another volley of bullets shrilled out into the night like a swarm of hornets. Another blanket was thrown at the fire; this one more deliberately. It must have landed where it was aimed for; the light was somewhat dimmed but not blotted out.

  He kept thinking of Ben Williams and Johnny Smith. They might be anywhere; they might be creeping up close behind him. They’d be nervous, jumpy, hair-trigger set. He whirled about. He couldn’t see hide nor hair of them; he couldn’t hear a sound.

  And he kept thinking also, “There are so damn many of ’em; a round dozen. Ben Williams and Johnny Smith somewhere outside; ten of them inside. And there’s only one of me. Better watch out what I’m doing.”

  Then at last he thought of the horses! What would they do up here without horses? They’d have one merry hell of a time doing anything, going anywhere.

  To establish the fact that he was still on the job, he slammed two more shots in through the door, seeing no one, not even faintly hoping to hit anyone. That done he went swiftly yet in all silence toward the spot they had tethered their horses. And he hadn’t gone three steps before he saw Ben Williams and Johnny Smith; he heard them first, for the two were running, breaking through patches of brush, making old dead branches crackle underfoot, as they came scurrying back toward the cabin, drawn by their wonder as to what all those shots meant.

  They almost ran into him before they saw him. He said, “Sh!” and in a harsh whisper, “I’ve got you both covered; wiggle an eyebrow and I’ll blow you clean to hell where you belong.”

  Each of the two youngsters felt the business end of a gun deeply indenting his belly and four hands, all uninvited to do so, shot starward. Deftly Jeff jerked their weapons out of their holsters and hurled them as far as he could.

  “Now,” he commanded, “let’s go where the horses are. And let’s go fast!”

  They went on a run, Jeff, close behind them. The horses had been unsaddled and tied to convenient trees. As a watchful Jeff directed, the tie-ropes were jerked off their necks, the horses turned loose. Only one was not freed, Jeff’s horse. He didn’t tarry for saddle, nor even for bridle; there was an uproar in the house behind him which made him decide he had better be on his way. He used his tie-rope, threw a double hitch over his horse’s nose as an improvised hackamore, and climbed aboard. Then he was off at a run, herding the Warbuck horses ahead of him down trail, yelling at them like a Comanche on the war path, sending them along at a speed which seemed to increase like that of an avalanche getting well under way. He heard shouts of consternation from Ben Williams and Johnny Smith as they started running back to the ruin of a house; he yelled back in a voice which he was sure would carry to all those still at the cabin:

  “You’re right, Arlene! I’m bringing an army! And these rats can’t get away—and they won’t dare lay a finger on you—because every man of them would hang before morning.” And his voice must have been faint in the distance, muffled by the thunder of running hoofs, when he called, “It won’t be long now!”

  And he proved to be a true prophet: it wasn’t as long as he was sure it must be. For he was bound, headlong, for Halcyon—and he was so astounded that he nearly fell off his bare-backed horse when he realized who it was that he met before he had gone a good five miles. By that time he had sent his small herd of horses out of sight and out of mind. They were well scattered, well frightened, and it would take some rounding-up to get them under saddles again. He was streaking on south when he heard clanging hoofs coming uptrail to a meeting with him. His first thought was, “Warbuck coming back!” But it wasn’t Bart Warbuck.

  Down in Halcyon a strange thing, an unprecedented thing had happened.

  The Pay Dirt barroom was quiescent. A dollar a drink is a lot of money. Men had dribbled in and had dribbled out. Behind the bar Still Jeff and old Red Shirt Bill Morgan had things pretty much to themselves.

  Red Shirt Bill cleared his throat a time or two. Then he poured himself a drink of generous proportions and downed it like a shot. He made a face, stood uncertain a moment, nodded to himself and shot the second drink down the way the first had gone.

  “I got to talk to you,” he said to Still Jeff.

  Still Jeff started like a man a bee had stung. He reached for a bottle then let his hand slide down.

  “What can’t be cured must be endured,” said Still Jeff.

  Red Shirt Bill mopped his forehead with a damp bar towel.

  “I’d rather be shot for suckin’ eggs,” he growled.

  Still Jeff made a faint groaning noise, like a man in pain.

  “It hurts me too,” said Red Shirt Bill. “It would come easier to cut my throat th
an to talk to you.”

  Then Still Jeff, with one shaggy eyebrow cocked up and the other dragging down, yanked a big pocket knife out of his pocket and obligingly opened it, bringing to light a six-inch, razor-sharp blade and laid it on the bar.

  “Like hell, I will,” snorted Bill Morgan. “I’d rather cut yours.”

  “That all you got to say?” said Still Jeff mildly. “Shucks, I’ve known that for twenty years.”

  Old Red Shirt Bill released one of his resonant snorts. But, after a mighty struggle, he held himself in check.

  “I’m worried about Young Jeff,” he said. “Me, I like Young Jeff. And I’m worried about Arlene Warbuck, too. Maybe she’s only a Warbuck, but dammit I like her pretty near as much as I like Young Jeff.”

  Old Jeff heard him through, tugged at the drooping horns of his mustache and awaited what might come next. Instead of saying, “What’s got you worrying?” he shot his heavy eyebrows upward in two question marks.

  “I’d just stepped out to see a man about a dog,” said old Bill, “when Arlene came a-runnin’ downstairs. She said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute; I want to talk to you and Still Jeff. It’s important.’ Then she run off, outside. And I see who was with her; that little she-scorpion, her sister Miriam.—Well, that was three-four hours ago, and she ain’t come back.”

  Still Jeff nodded. He could see the drift. Yet, obviously, it didn’t mean much to him. Girls were like that; they changed their minds as niftily as the vagrant spring winds shifted from one quarter to another.

  “We had a mite o’ trouble here not so long ago, as mebbe you’ll remember,” said old Bill, as stiff as the barrel of his rifle. “A Warbuck crowd come a-swoopin’ in, hell-bent to grab Arlene and Young Jeff, both. Well, when Warbuck starts something he don’t stop it. That’s him.”

  Reasonable, that; quite reasonable. So Still Jeff made no dissent. He just went on waiting.

  “Doc Sharpe was in there tonight,” said Bill Morgan. “Even you, old and feeble as you are, would remember Doc Sharpe. I throwed him out.”

  Yes, Still Jeff remembered Doc Sharpe distinctly. But he got to thinking, “I remember Bill Morgan when he was young; he had sense then. Must be, getting old, he’s got softening of the brains.”

  “Sharpe went on his way, where I dunno,” said Red Shirt Bill. “About some devil’s business, of course, and of course it was deviltry that brought him back here to Pay Dirt—and you’n me know how somehow he’s tangled up with both Warbuck and the old Grayle woman. Now, all these things mebbe don’t fit together to make any sense when you first look at ’em, not one-by-one they don’t. But get ’em all strung together and they might mean a lot. For Young Jeff himself was here tonight—and where’s he at now? He didn’t say a word about goin’, not that I heard. But I noticed he went outside right after Nosey Sharpe ducked out. Might be that them Warbuck hellions we chased off didn’t keep on goin’ far.”

  After brooding a moment, Still Jeff nodded. Reluctant to concede that Red Shirt Bill could be right in anything, still there was reason in his contention that whereas no single item that he had mentioned meant much, take them all together and they made a man uneasy. And he, too, had caught a glimpse of that little she-devil, Miriam Warbuck, and she had looked as though she were up to some particular bit of wickedness and was gleeful over it.

  It wouldn’t do any harm to look around a bit. He reached for his rifle. He called to one of the few men in the room, “Come over here, Dutch, and take my place. I’ve got to step out a minute.”

  Red Shirt Bill emulated him to the final detail. Another man was called behind the bar so that if trade poured in later all might be accommodated. Then with his rifle tucked under his arm he went out with Still Jeff.

  They got their horses, saddled and rode up valley toward Witch Woman’s Hollow, for Red Shirt Bill felt sure that that was where Doc Sharpe had gone, and that Young Jeff had followed Sharpe. By that time it was late afternoon, with sundown not far off, almost dark in the heart of the Hollow.

  They found the house deserted, even the old woman gone. That in itself was odd: She hadn’t appeared in Halcyon, she wasn’t used to going far afield—but she had taken her old white horse and gone somewhere. No sign of Sharpe, none of Young Jeff. They looked around, as outdoor men are forever doing, for “sign.” And signs were ample. There were the fresh tracks of several horses; those tracks said clearly to both of them, “Warbuck men.”

  They remounted, groped through the gloom in the hollow, and followed the tracks which had a furtive way about them, penetrating still deeper into the laurels and buckeyes, not seeming to head anywhere that a crowd of men could be expected to ride, keeping always under cover. On the more open slope beyond the house, where there were pines and buckbrush, the tracks kept saying the same thing: This way some ten or fifteen riders had gone only a few hours earlier, riders who were at some pains, winding this way and that, in the thickest of the timber; tracks never striking either right or left for any main trail or road, but bearing north all the while.

  “My hunch was damn right,” muttered Red Shirt Bill angrily. “They swooped in here, grabbed what they wanted, struck out the back door so nobody would see ’em. Warbuck’s got the old woman for sure, and for all of me he’s welcome to her. It’s a ten-to-one bet he’s got Sharpe too, and that he’s goin’ to shut a couple of mouths for good and all. Likely he’s done such a’ready. Then what about Young Jeff? Was he here? What about Arlene Warbuck? Was she here?”

  When Still Jeff merely tugged at one end of his big mustache and said never a word, Red Shirt Bill burst out stormily.

  “Can’t you open your head for once, man? It’s your son, not mine. Can’t you shake a word out? It won’t strangle you.”

  “It ain’t necessary,” said Still Jeff mildly. “You’ve said it all. You generally do.”

  Well, old Jeff was right. He always had been like that and in the fact resided one of no end of good reasons why he and Red Shirt Bill in the long ago had got along through thick and thin as few other pardners did. Bill had done all the talking; the other man, who had been called Still Jeff before he was the age of Young Jeff now, had done little more than nod or shake his head; most of the time he hadn’t done either. When pressed he’d say, as now, “It ain’t necessary.”

  A few times in the old days Red Shirt Bill boiled over and did his one-man best to raise an unholy row: he had stormed, “Dammit, man, lots o’ things ain’t necess’ry, like a man combin’ his hair or takin’ a drink o’ good licker or scratchin’ his shin when it itches or laughin’ at a good joke or eatin’ pie—dammit, Jeff, lookin’ at things your way there’s almighty few things I can think of offhand that is necess’ry!” And there he would have Still Jeff. Only the devil of it was that Still Jeff, after considering the matter, would just nod his head in agreement. And then Red Shirt Bill would burst out into that laugh of his which a man could hear a mile away.

  But all that belonged to the past, as dead and buried as Halcyon had seemed to be all these years; and right now, with the late afternoon hurrying and the twilight creeping into the lowlands and wooded places, there was some riding to do. The two kept steadily on, following the tracks which presently began to take a pretty definite trend. Before it got too dark to see the scuffings the many hoofs had made, both Still Jeff and Bill Morgan, like Young Jeff before them, had their inkling of the likeliest spot the Warbuck men would be headed for, those lonely, desolate barrens where so few men ever went.

  “It would be just the place to take your prisoners if you just wanted to keep ’em prisoners,” said Red Shirt Bill. “Likewise a mighty safe an’ handy spot for murder.” He peered through the gloom to see whether Still Jeff nodded or shook his head; he did neither. Red Shirt Bill added lugubriously, “Only there’s a couple of hundred square miles of them badlands, and what particular hide-out Warbuck would head for—that’s what we don’t know.”

  S
till Jeff, without being asked anything, spoke up. He said, “There’s that old house up at Devil-Take-It.”

  Red Shirt Bill slapped his thigh with an enthusiasm which caused his startled horse almost to jump out from under him. And the two pushed on through the night, on and on, always watching on every hand for a light, always headed as straight as the wicked, rocky terrain would permit, to the old house at Devil-Take-It.

  And so it came about that Young Jeff, meeting them, almost fell off his horse with the shock of the thing: Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill Morgan were riding together!

  Chapter Sixteen

  Young Jeff was so glad to meet these two that at first the meeting seemed to him in the nature of a miracle.

  But whether the explanation lay in miracle, coincidence or plain cause-and-effect, the response to it was the same: There were things to be done, and done in a hurry.

  “Boys,” sang out Young Jeff, “I was never so glad about anything! There’s hell to pay tonight, and you boys are in on it. Listen to this!”

  He told them so swiftly, in so few words, that they had to ask a question or two. When they had it all clear, “Let’s go get ’em,” said Red Shirt Bill. “Let’s do it so damn quick and fast they won’t even be lookin’ for us. That kid of a girl Arlene, we’ll grab her out of this mess in a hurry. Then give me a chance at that skunk Sharpe.” Old Still Jeff didn’t have anything to say—but his horse was already a length ahead of Red Shirt Bill’s. Young Jeff, kicking his own horse along after them with his boot heels, said, to remind them, “There are three of us and a dozen of them. Watch your steps, you two old hellers.”

  “Shucks,” snorted Red Shirt Bill.

  So the three went rocketing through the night to the old house at Devil-Take-It. For Young Jeff, with no saddle under him, it was hard work keeping up with those two old stagers. But they came at last, the three abreast in an open glade, to a spot from which they could see a warm, rosy glow through the dark; the fire was not yet all dead in the old house and a faint reddish light shone through an open door.