His own numbed hand reached instinctively for the gun at his thigh and then suddenly he remembered. His last cartridge had gone to save his poor pony from the torture of freezing. His gun was empty and there were no more cartridges in his belt.
Once more the automatic staring pointblank into his face moved threateningly, and the black whiskered face snarled again in a voice somehow faintly familiar, “Git back! Don’t come no nearer or I’ll shoot yer damned head off!”
But Mart Elkins felt the sifting of fine snow upon the little strip of neck between his coat collar and his hat, and a shiver ran convulsively down his spine. He knew he must get in to warmth soon, or freeze. He faced the gun barrel steadily.
“I’m coming in,” he said. “Shoot me down if ye want to!”
The hairy faced man shifted hesitantly as Elkins shoved the door open wide enough for his entry, expecting every moment to have a bullet come whizzing into his head. But the man in the door did not shoot. Instead he blocked Elkins’ way and growled sullenly.
“Then hand over yer gun,” he ordered, “an’ come on in!”
But Mart Elkins, warned by some vague intuition that he must keep his gun, empty though it was, and must keep this man from knowing it was empty, looked the strange yet oddly familiar human derelict steadily in the eye, and pushed on into the warm cabin, slamming the door shut behind him. He was frankly surprised that the man did not shoot him, for he could see a wild, desperate look in the bush browed eyes. The cabin man started toward him menacingly in the yellow light of a stubby candle on the table. Suddenly his eyes lighted in recognition.
“By God! You’re Mart Elkins, ain’t yuh?” A sudden light of fear, the flicker of a haunted, hunted look came into his eyes. Then they narrowed redly as if in determination.
“Mart Elkins! Then out yuh go! Freeze an’ be damned! Yuh will come huntin’ a feller, will yuh?” He turned to the door and flung it open again, stepped and once more leveled the automatic at Elkins’ head not an arm’s length from it.
“Out!”
The warmth of the cabin had begun to tingle pain into Elkins’ cold numbed fingers. So, too, had this huge, hulky, whiskered man’s voice and eyes begun to tingle recognition into his memory. Then with a flash he realized who it was, and he no longer wandered that the man had tried to drive him away.
A year and a half ago he had seen this man shoot down a deputy sheriff in cold blood. Unarmed himself at the time, Mart Elkins had been unable to prevent his escape, and so Shack Teeman had disappeared somewhere into the hills, and the searching officers had never found him. They had given him up finally and reckoned he had escaped to Mexico. And now Mart Elkins, the only man who had seen the shooting of Deputy Griggs, the only eyewitness against Shack Teeman, stood facing him in a lone, snowbound cabin in the blizzard bitten mountains.
“Git, now! Out!” snarled Teeman, his finger crooking upon the trigger of his automatic.
But when Elkins, preferring the chance of sudden death here to the torture of freezing outside, instead of obeying, took an unsteady step toward the fireplace, the snarl vanished from Teeman’s face and there grew in its place a slow, calculating grin He slammed the cabin door shut in the face of a grasping gust of cold that came driving through it
“By God, Elkins, it is a kinder chilly night an’ I reckon yuh might’s well stay. But yuh needn’t think yuh’re ever a-goin’ tuh take me back to Los Vigiles with yuh, sabe? I got the drop an’ I aim to keep it. Better hand over that there gun, now, pronto!”
“I keep my gun, Teeman. I ain’t never handed it oyer to nobody yit an’ I’m too old to start a-learnin’ new tricks now!”
Elkins watched his unwilling host keenly. It would never do to let him know his gun was empty. Better bluff it out now. But he did not need to carry the bluff further. Teeman gave in.
“Suit yerself, Elkins,” he said with a suspicious air of unconcern. “Only I warn yuh; lay a hand on it jest oncet an’ yer guts’ll be tryin’ to digest bullets pronto!”
Teeman backed to the cabin door and cautiously scooped up a washpan of snow, shut the door and brought the snow over to where Elkins sat on a log hewn bench.
“Here!” he growled roughly. “Better rub them hands good in this, case they’re frostbit. No, don’t thank me. Not now anyways. After while, after we’ve et some supper—I ain’t got nothin’ left but venison—I aim to give yuh a real chancet to return the favor. Yuh’ll do it, too, by God, or I’ll—well, yuh sabe what I’ll do, I reckon, Elkins! Only thaw them fingers out keerful fer yuh’ll need to use ’em some after a bit.”
He grinned and winked, patting his gun significantly.
* * * *
Mart Elkins set about rubbing the cold numbness out of his hands. Teeman kicked a bootjack made of the fork of two limbs toward him and he yanked off his boots slowly and painfully. Though not actually frozen, his feet were numb with the cold.
He watched his ragged, unwilling host slice off fat chunks of venison and broil it over the open fire. Teeman seemed now to be good humored, even amused in a nervous sort of way. He kept a wary eye on Elkins and every now and then he chuckled hoarsely as he watched him.
Although he held, in fact, a deputy sheriff’s commission, Mart Elkins had not come into the mountains looking for Shack Teeman. He had been taking an unknown short cut across the mountains to Glorieta where he had heard of some strays from his cattle herds when the storm had overtaken him and bewildered him. His stumbling upon Teeman’s hiding place had been purely accidental. Still he realized that it would now be his duty, his sworn obligation, to arrest Teeman and take him back to stand trial. As soon as the storm should abate he must try it. Yet how could he?
Even if he could somehow obtain the man’s gun and get the upper hand over him, how could he bring himself to repay Teeman for sheltering him and saving him, albeit unwillingly, from freezing to death, by taking the fugitive back to jail and possible hanging? He almost wished now that he had not found the cabin or that he had obeyed when Teeman had ordered him to leave. He wondered why Teeman, whom he knew to be a coldblooded killer, had not shot him down when he had the chance. What did the man have up his sleeve now that made him grin with such horrible assurance?
Old Mart Elkins sensed treachery in the man’s newly assumed hospitality. He watched the meat sizzling on sticks over the fire to make sure Teeman would not poison it. When they sat opposite each other with the fragrant broiled venison between them on the hewn puncheon table, Elkins hesitated despite his hunger. Teeman laughed derisively.
“Eat, damn yuh!” he ordered. “Scared o’ poison, eh? Here, then, take half o’ this piece!” He tore a piece of meat in two, chucked half of it into his mouth and shoved the other at Elkins, who took it and began to eat.
“Sorry they ain’t no bread fer yuh, but it’s yer own damn’ fault, you fellers houndin’ a man outa the world like this jest fer shootin’ a nosin’ deputy sheriff, damn his dirty soul! I’d oughta plugged you at the same time, oughtn’t I?” Teeman chuckled evilly.
Mart Elkins stood up suddenly, his old eyes blazing. “Then do it now, ye dog!” he exclaimed. “Ye’ve got me covered! I ain’t a-goin’ to set here an’ listen to no sech talk about Bill Griggs by the skunk which killed him! Here, see if ye can plug that!” He tapped the shirt pocket over his heart with the fingers of his left hand. “Come on, shoot, an’ let’s git it over with!”
Something almost like panic showed suddenly in the hairy man’s eyes, but he made no move to shoot. “Aw, don’t git riled, Elkins,” he said in a crafty, cautious tone. “Set down an’ eat yer supper!”
But although he did sit down again, Mart Elkins ate no more supper. Teeman ate lefthandedly, keeping his automatic trained upon Elkins with his right. Presently he got up, backed up to a saddlebag hanging on the log wall, delved into it with his left hand and brought out a stubby indelible
pencil and several sheets of grimy but blank paper. He laid them before Mart Elkins on the table.
“Now, damn yuh,” he snarled, poking the automatic menacingly into the old cattleman’s face, “git busy! Take that there pencil an’ write what I tell yuh. Write it out plain how yuh killed ol’ Bill Griggs yerself, sabe, an’ how yuh lied when yuh blamed it onto me, an’ how I—Shack Teeman—am a innocent man today and should go free! Write it out plain now an’ sign it or I’ll—by God, I’ll blow holes through yer brains so fast yer head’ll look like a tea strainer! Git busy now! Write!”
Mart Elkins’ eyes narrowed and his lace stiffened grimly as he looked into the ugly mouth of Teeman’s automatic. So this was his game, was it? He gazed at the hairy face of Shack Teeman steadily.
“Ye mean—” he began.
“I mean write! Write what I tell yuh to quick, sabe? I mean if yuh want to go back to Los Vigiles alive, write! I mean I aim to go back to Los Vigiles myself sometime—a free man and not no prisoner, sabe? Who but me an’ you knows how come Bill Griggs to git killed? Who done it, me or you? This here little pal o’ mine—” he patted his automatic—“says you done it, sabe? So git busy an’ write yer confession like I tell yuh!”
Mart Elkins shook his head slowly but definitely. “No!” he said quietly. “Never! Ye know, Teeman, an’ I know, that ye shot down Bill Griggs in cold blood, an’ I don’t aim to write no such of a consarned lie as that me or anybody else done it. They’s worse things, Teeman, than dyin’, an’ if ye aim to plug me, go ahead! I ain’t goin’ to write one doggone’ word!”
* * * *
For a second the two men eyed each other in silence. Elkins’ wrinkled old face was set and grim. Teeman’s paled under his bristly beard and then flushed red as hate and anger blazed in his eyes.
“I’ll give yuh one more chancet! Write down as how I done it in self-defense, Elkins—justifiable!” he commanded.
Elkins made no move, either of hand, body or face, but looked steadily past the menacing automatic into the face of the killer of Bill Griggs who had been his friend.
“That’d be a lie, Teeman!”
“Then yuh won’t?” Teeman snarled. “Then, by God, here goes yer ticket to hell!”
As his hand tightened on the automatic and a grimy finger started closing slowly on the trigger there was a swift, sudden movement of Elkins’ hand to his side and back up, and before Teeman could fire he, too, was looking into the barrel of a gun. Sensing the other man’s hesitating cowardice Elkins had dared to draw his own empty .45 in the face of a cover.
The two men and the two guns faced each other for a moment in tense silence. Yet neither fired.
“Who’s got the drop now, Teeman?” said Elkins evenly. “Ye may kill me if ye like, but if I die so do you! I’m ready to shoot! If you fire, my finger pulls the trigger jest the same whether I’m alive or dead. D’ye see? If ye want to trade lives thataway come on, shoot! If ye want to give up an’ come on back with me when the storm’s over to face trial like a man fer the murder o’ Bill Griggs, then hand over yore gun an’ I’ll see to it ye git yore fair day in court. Which’ll it be, Teeman?”
Shack Teeman’s hand trembled ever so slightly, but he could see that Elkins’ .45 across the table was steady. Then something peculiar about the .45 caught his eye, even in the doubtful candlelight. The chamber holes showing beside the barrel were empty. He forced an ugly laugh.
“Yuh can’t bluff me, Elkins, yuh greasy liar! Don’t yuh reckon I can see yer gun’s empty? Now I have got yuh, an’ I reckon yuh’ll write what I tell yuh now or yuh’ll be deader’n Bill Griggs in a heap less time! Drop that there empty gun, flat, now, Elkins!”
Mart Elkins’ steady gaze did not waver a hairsbreadth and his right hand held the empty .45 steadily.
“Don’t fool yoreself, Teeman,” he saind between tight lips. “Them chambers is empty all right, like ye say. But the one shot in the barrel is all I’ll need to make ye pay clean fer the murderin’ o’ Bill Griggs. My hammer’s back ready to let fly. An’ I still give ye yore choice!”
Doubt, and with it fear, showed plainly in Teeman’s bristly face. For minutes neither man moved nor spoke, but stood facing each other in grim silence, each one waiting, watching for a sign of weakening in the other.
Deathlike quiet reigned in the dim candlelight of the cabin as they stood there facing each other above their guns.
But outside the snow no longer sifted down in silent coldness. With the passing of the clouds a great wind came swooping down from the bleak steeps of the Truchas Peaks, and suddenly boomed and howled in the spruces. The two men in the cabin could hear the unearthly groaning of strained timber fibers as the gale wrestled the snow burdened trees nearby. A whirling swoop found its way down the chimney and scattered ashes out upon the cabin floor. The candle guttered and flickered, and still the two men stood stone still watching each other and listening uneasily to the rumbling outside that meant falling trees. In summer both of them had seen regular swaths of great uprooted spruces and firs here in the high mountains where a sudden twisting wind had laid them low sometime in the dead of winter. There was something fearful, awesome about the gusty crashing and rumbling sounds of wind wrestled trees in the cold night.
Mart Elkins saw Teeman flinch as a tree crashed down somewhere so near by that its falling shook the cabin. The pale light of a new fear seemed to creep into the man’s eyes. Elkins felt a pang of pity for this haggard fugitive standing ready to shoot him there across the table. Killer though he knew him to be, he somehow was sorry for him. Evidently the long months of hiding up here alone in the black woods had broken the murderer’s nerve, for even the booming of the wind seemed to frighten him now.
As for Elkins himself, the silent tensity of the moment, the warmth of the cabin, his own fatigue, the groaning rhythm of the wind outside—all somehow combined to throw drowsiness suddenly upon him like a cloak. He stood ready, apparently alert and yet as in a daze, wondering vaguely why Teeman did not shoot him now and have it over with.
All at once a fresh swoop of snowy wind whistled down the chimney and into the cabin. Without warning the lone candle on the table guttered out. In the same instant Elkins felt one huge hand of Shack Teeman clutch viselike upon his wrist while the other wrenched the heavy .45 from his hand.
Before he could rouse himself to resistance he felt the muzzle end of the Colt’s barrel jammed into his own ribs.
In that instant that his ears caught the snap of the Colt’s hammer falling futilely upon the emptiness of the unloaded gun as Teeman pulled the trigger, there came also the great resounding crash of a tree falling upon the cabin. Dirt and ceiling timbers tumbled in from the roof, stunning him.
Yet, dazed as he was, he heard Teeman’s sudden bawling cry of terror, the cry of a man suddenly gone mad, shrill with the anguish of both pain and fear, and saw the big hairy man jerk open the cabin door and leap out into the swirling, thunderous darkness.
Another and another tree came crashing to earth outside and then the air, within the space of two minutes, became suddenly almost still and silent. For, as quickly as it had come, the great whirlwind from the peaks had departed, howling its havoc off down the next ridge south.
Mart Elkins somehow pulled himself to his feet and stumbled his way to the cabin door. The branches of a fallen spruce blocked the way out.
“Teeman! Teeman!” he called as loudly as he could. There was no answer except the swooming of the whirlwind down the ridges.
“Pore devil!” he muttered as he stepped back into the cabin and somehow forced the door shut. No fugitive could live long in the bitter cold that had come with the passing of the wind.
Lighting matches and cupping them in his hands, he surveyed the all but ruined cabin. After storm stars shone through where the great tree had crashed in through the dirt roof. But the stone chi
mney and the fireplace were untouched, and soon he had a roaring fire leaping up the flue. By it he sat, dozing fitfully, until morning.
In the white rays of winter dawn he found Teeman frozen only a short distance; because of his circling, from the door whence he had fled, a frightened madman, into the night. Later, from the debris upon the table Mart Elkins picked up the automatic he had faced in Teeman’s hands the night before. He examined the magazine.
“Good Lord!” he whispered with sudden realization.
It was empty. Its last cartridge, had he but known it, had gone to kill the very venison they had eaten the night before for supper…
CROOKED, by James H. Hull
It was still early in the afternoon, and Ray Peoples had finished mucking out. Hank Roebuck, the machine man, was on his last hole, and there was plenty of time to finish the round. He turned off the compressed air, rolled a cigarette, lit it from Ray Peoples’ candle, and spoke jokingly. “Think you’ll ever amount to anything, kid?”
“I do already,” Ray Peoples retorted. “Anybody can tell that just by lookin’ at me. It’s all in the way you hold your mouth.”
Hank Roebuck smiled. “I’ve got it figured out different. Work like a horse, and live like a puppy dog, and if you’re crooked enough you’ll get rich. Ain’t that a fact?”
“All but the crooked part. Play the game, according to the rules—” But Ray Peoples broke off abruptly, for he realized that he was moralizing again. “It’s all in the way you hold your mouth,” he repeated lightly. “The way to be a millionaire is to think you’re one. As a man thinketh—and what’s the use in being poor, when you can be rich for a dollar and a half?”
Ray Peoples was twenty. He had recently come west to seek his fortune. He looked slight and fragile, but was really stronger than the average miner. Regular features, sound teeth, and a trace of pink in his cheeks made one wonder if he were really as tough and wicked as he was forever trying to appear. He enjoyed being alive; and although he did not realize it, he possessed a certain superabundance of physical and mental energy which gave him poise and personality. He was once heard to remark that he was glad he didn’t have any money, because that would deprive him of the fun of making a million. He was mucking on six hundred, the lowest level of the Fool’s Luck, and Hank Roebuck, the machine man, was the only other miner on that level.
The Third Western Megapack Page 57
