The Hate Trail, page 12
With which in view, he resolved to pay Sheriff Carter a visit and proceeded to do so.
He found that official ensconced behind his desk, smoking the pipe of peace and relaxation. Carter nodded and gestured to a chair.
Rolling a cigarette, Slade sat down and unburdened his mind.
“If we could just figure something that would attract the hellion,” he summed up.
“Uh-huh, if,” grunted Carter. “It’s a darn big if. Right now I’m hanged if I can think of anything. He’d hardly be induced to make another try for the Tascosa stage. Nor for the railroad train, I’d say. Right now they’re loaded with railroad police, and Sosna must know it.”
“I’m afraid you’re right on both counts,” Slade agreed morosely. “Well, if I can’t inveigle amigo Sosna to come looking for me, I’ll have to go looking for him. Which is what I propose to do.”
“Seems to me he’s been looking for you quite frequently of late,” the sheriff commented dryly.
“He’s sent others looking for me,” Slade corrected. “So far I’ve had but one glimpse of him as he skalleyhooted into the brush. Well, maybe I’ll get a break.”
“Or make one, as you usually do,” said Carter.
“I hope you’re right,” Slade replied. He glanced at the darkening window and stood up.
“Now I’m going looking for something more pleasant,” he announced.
“What’s that?”
“Jerry Norman.”
“You’d do well to stick by Jerry,” Carter advised. “She’s all wool and a yard wide.”
“I fear she wouldn’t feel complimented, but I get what you mean,” Slade chuckled. “Be seeing you.”
He had no difficulty finding Jerry. She was sitting in the hotel lobby, waiting for him. He dropped into a chair beside her and rolled another cigarette.
“All set for the Washout?” he asked.
“I am,” she replied. “And, as usual, I’m hungry. Have your smoke and then we’ll go. Don’t rush, now, I’m not that hungry, and I like to watch you smoke, even though then you do seem a million miles away from me. Who is she?”
“She ain’t,” was the ungrammatical response.
“I almost wish she was,” Jerry sighed. “I’d take my chance against competition. When you’re preoccupied like that I know you’re thinking up some way to get into trouble.”
Slade laughed and pinched out his cigarette butt. “Don’t bother your pretty head about it, I’ll make out,” he replied. “Come on, let’s go eat.”
They found the Washout busy, as usual. Thankful Yates escorted them to their table, from which there was a good view of the swinging doors.
“I hope nothing happens tonight,” Jerry said after a waiter took their order. “I’m getting to be like Sheriff Carter; I can stand a little peace and quiet for a while.”
Jerry had her wish gratified. The Washout was gay and boisterous, but harmless. The night passed without incident. But Slade experienced an uneasy premonition that it was the calm before the storm.
He was right.
The following morning, they rode for the spread. When, some miles out of town, they reached a point where the trail forked. Slade slowed the pace a little, his gaze following the right fork which, he knew, led across the Canadian to Tascosa on the north bank of the river.
“I think I’ll take a little ride over there before I sign up with you,” he remarked. Jerry sighed.
“Really, there’s no sense in your signing up,” she said. “You won’t stay, of course. Just remain our guest for as long as you wish.”
“I wouldn’t want to wear my welcome out,” he protested.
“Will you please stop annoying me with such praatjies!” she retorted.
“Praatjies?”
“That’s what Dutch Herman, who keeps the harness shop in Amarillo, calls idle chatter. Somehow it seems to fit.”
“It does,” Slade conceded, with a chuckle. “Okay, I’ll be good.”
“Don’t strain yourself, but it really might be worth a trial,” she replied tartly. Slade moved his horse a little closer to hers.
“That’s better,” she said, when her lips were free for speaking.
With harmony again established, they rode on, reaching the XT ranchhouse in due time without anything happening.
That night there was a poker game in the bunkhouse and Slade was invited to sit in. Jerry made a moue at him when he accepted but did not complain vocally.
Slade liked poker, especially as it always gave him an opportunity to study human nature, bringing out as it did certain attributes that ordinarily were concealed from view.
For instance, normally gay and boisterous Joyce Echols was a conservative player, studying the cards carefully, estimating the odds, the element of chance, endeavoring to balance the one against the other. While quiet old Cale Fenton was a plunger, playing recklessly, following his hunches, drawing successfully to an inside straight with only two cards left in the deck with which to fill it.
With the result that when the game finally broke up, a little past midnight, Echols was a loser, Fenton a winner. Slade managed to break about even, which was what he wished to do. Saying goodnight to the boys, he left the bunkhouse and headed for the ranchhouse and bed.
But before he reached the building, he slowed his pace, came to a halt. He was not sleepy, and he was restless, with an uneasiness of mind he was at a loss to account for. A presentiment of evil hung over him like a faint miasma, indefinable, misty-visioned but very real. He had felt it before and almost always it had been a precursor of some untoward happening. Rolling and lighting a cigarette, he strolled to the far edge of the grove, leaned against a convenient tree and gazed eastward across the shadowy prairie.
It was a still night, with not a breath of wind. There was no moon and the stars were veiled by a thin fleece of cloud through which they filtered a dim light that caused objects to assume an unreal grotesqueness. Such a night as might well be chosen by disembodied specters and elementals and goblins damned to hold high revel and raise blasphemous incantations to the Lord of Ill.
Slade felt that no doubt his mental uneasiness was but a product of the eerie night and tried to banish it as a figment of over-active imagination.
Without success; it persisted, seemed to grow stronger. He muttered disgustedly under his breath and swept the prairie with his gaze.
Suddenly he stiffened, every sense at hair-trigger alertness. Out there on the shadowy expanse, movement had birthed, a drift of shadows amid the shadows. And as he watched, tensely, the shadows took concrete form, resolved to horsemen riding at a slow and deliberate pace. Two horsemen sitting their mounts close together, drawing nearer and nearer.
About a hundred yards from the ranchhouse was a couple of tufts of low growth. A few more minutes and the shadowy horsemen merged with the deeper shadow cast by the thickets and vanished from his sight.
Slade’s eyes never left the dark bristle. He breathed deeply a moment later when from the shadow crept two dimly seen figures, crouching low as if to avoid detection. The riders had dismounted and were approaching the ranchhouse on foot. If they followed their present course they would reach it a dozen yards or so from the silent watcher.
What the devil were they up to? Slade didn’t know, but abruptly he recalled a ranchhouse wrapped in flame of incendiary origin. That might be it—their intention to fire the building. And there had been no rain for an extended period; everything was dry as tinder. Let a blaze get anything like a start and it would be almost impossible to put out. His presentiment of evil abruptly lost its vagueness and became a grim fact.
Keeping in the deeper shadow cast by the trees, he glided forward a few paces, estimating the distance. Now the creeping pair were not more than a score of yards from the south wall of the ranchhouse, their approach slower, even more stealthy. He drew both guns. His voice rang out—
“Elevate! You’re covered!”
The pair whirled at the sound of his voice. Slade’s keen eyes caught the gleam of metal jutting toward him as the pair ducked and weaved. He pulled both triggers, was rewarded by a yelp of pain echoing the reports that rang out like thunder in the great stillness. Answering slugs whined past, but he was still in the shadow and it was blind shooting for the two night prowlers who were backing away from him as they fired.
Taking deliberate aim, Slade fired again, left and right. And blew up the world!
EIGHTEEN
AT LEAST it seemed that way. There was a blinding flash, a terrific roar. Slade was knocked heels over head by the concussion. Prone on the ground, half stunned, blinded, his ears ringing like chiming bells, he vaguely sensed a tinkle and clatter of falling glass.
Not much wonder, though. Every window on that side of the ranchhouse was shattered, the frames of the nearest twisted and splintered by the force of the explosion.
Dizzy, floundering, Slade groped for and found his fallen guns. Then, still dazed, he managed to struggle to his feet and stand weaving, his guns mechanically pointing toward the smoking crater hollowed out in the ground a score of paces from the house. Yells and curses were splitting the night air. The screams of frightened horses in the barn and the nearby horse corral added to the ungodly tumult.
From the bunkhouse, which also had more than one broken window, bellowed the cowboys in all stages of undress. A light flashed on in the ranchhouse. The front door banged open and Jerry appeared in a flowered robe, old Keith in a long nightshirt.
“What the blankety-blank-blank happened?” he bawled. I thought the roof fell in!”
Albeit still somewhat shaken, Slade had recovered his composure.
“If those hellions had managed to plant the dynamite under the house like they planned to do, it very nearly would have,” he replied, gesturing with one gun toward the deep and wide hole which still smoked.
“What happened—why’d it go off?” Norman demanded, looking dazed.
“I guess one of my slugs hit the bundle and set it off,” Slade answered.
Jerry had slipped down the steps and was clinging to him. “Are you all right?” she asked anxiously.
“Perfectly,” he reassured her, bolstering his guns and patting her shoulder. “I wasn’t close enough to get the full effect of the blast, and dynamite tends to blow down rather than up. Sort of addled my thought processes for a moment, but nothing more.”
“How’d you catch on to what they were up to?” Norman asked.
“I didn’t, but figured they were up to no good,” Slade replied. “I had a notion they planned to set the house afire, perhaps. I happened to be standing at the edge of the grove and saw them coming. When I called to them to reach for the sky, they went for their irons and I had to shoot. No, I didn’t think of dynamite, but I should have. Dynamite is a Sosna specialty.”
Old Keith shook his head in bewilderment. “The snake-blooded varmint!” he rubmled. “I wouldn’t have believed there was a man alive who would do such a thing!” Slade repeated something he had said once before,
“Veck Sosna isn’t a man—he’s a devil!”
“I believe it,” growled Norman. Jerry shuddered and pressed closer to Slade.
The cowhands, while listening to Slade explain what happened, had gathered around the hole. Suddenly a voice shouted,
“Hey! here’s an arm!”
“And here’s a head, or what’s left of it,” somebody else whooped.
Slade took Jerry’s arm and urged her up the steps and into the ranchhouse.
“There are things out here not good to look upon,” he said gently.
Her face was pale, her eyes great dark pools of shadow, but she smiled wanly.
“I’m going out to the kitchen and make some coffee,” she said. “I hear Pedro bumbling around out there and swearing in half a dozen different languages; he doesn’t like to have his rest disturbed.”
“Watch out for broken glass on the floor,” Slade cautioned. “I’ll be with you shortly; some coffee wouldn’t go bad.”
Outside, lanterns had been procured from the bunkhouse and the barn, by the light of which the cowboys were conducting a systematic search of the yard. Joyce Echols approached Slade. He looked as if he wasn’t feeling too good in the pit of his stomach.”
“It’s a mess,” he said. “There are chunks of meat scattered all over. We’re trying to get ’em piled in one heap, but I’m scared we can’t assemble the parts. Don’t know what belongs to who.”
“Dynamite usually does a pretty fair job of disassembling, especially at close range,” Slade agreed. “Cover the heap with tarps or blankets and we’ll send for Johnny Davenport and turn ’em over to him.”
“Guess we can get enough together to hold an inquest on,” Echols replied cheerfully as he puffed hard on a cigarette he had rolled, and was apparently feeling better. “Scairt we’ll have to use a blotter to get ’em all,” he added with grisly humor. “But we’re sure all going to need a bath when this chore is over.”
Leaving the cowboys to do the mopping up, Slade returned to the house. He found old Keith, who had thrown on some clothes, sitting in a chair smoking. The lines in his big face seemed deeper.
“So it was a try at evening up the score, eh?” he remarked heavily. “Jerry mentioned that she thought there might be a chance they’d try something.”
“Yes, I was afraid of something of the sort,” Slade admitted. “Veck Sosna never forgets, and he never forgives. Well, his luck didn’t hold overly well this time.”
“Uh-huh, thanks to your foresight and courage,” said Norman. “Guess you didn’t just happen to be out there and see those hellions.”
“Rather, it was just that I didn’t happen to be sleepy,” Slade corrected him. “I was walking around trying to get drowsy when I had the luck to spot them riding this way.”
Old Keith grunted, and didn’t appear much impressed.
“Coffee’s on the table,” Jerry called from the kitchen. “And Pedro’s making his big boiler full to take out to the boys when they’re ready for it. Then I think everybody should go to bed and try and get an hour or two of sleep before daylight.”
Old Keith nodded agreement. “And tomorrow, today, rather, we’ll have a chore of repair work to do,” he said. “Wouldn’t be surprised if the wall’s ready to tumble down, to say nothing of all those windows blowed to smithereens. Well, thanks to Slade, things turned out a heap better than they might have done. If that dynamite had cut loose under the house, right now the chances are we’d be taking up ourselves with a blotter.”
“A somewhat difficult procedure, but I think I gather what you mean,” Jerry observed from the doorway. “Come and get it!”
They drank the coffee, then everybody tumbled into bed, pretty well exhausted by the wild night.
First, Slade walked to the door and gazed for a moment at the grim, blanket-covered mound beside the gaping hole. He drew a deep breath of thankfulness that he had followed what amounted to a hunch and had rendered abortive the devilish scheme to get even Sosna had evolved. Had the bundle of dynamite been exploded under the building, it was quite likely that none of the occupants would have survived and at the very best would have suffered severe injury.
Well, he had scored a point against the Comanchero leader with the odds against him. Perhaps Sosna’s unbelievable luck was running out. Slade believed it was. He went upstairs with his mind more at ease than it had been for some time.
Slade was awakened about mid-morning by a prodigious hammering and sawing and considerable whole-hearted profanity. Evidently the hands were busy at the repair job. He listened for a little while, then arose, made ready for breakfast and descended to the living room, where he found Jerry.
“All right?” she asked. “I wouldn’t let them start their racket until I was sure you’d gotten some rest. You were so very, very tired.”
“Well, it was a hard night, everything considered,” he replied, the devils of laughter in the back of his eyes leaping to the front. Jerry smiled and dimpled and let it go at that.
“Come on,” she said, jumping to her feet. “Your breakfast is waiting for you; I’ll have coffee with you.”
After eating, Slade went out to inspect the damage done by the explosion. After a careful examination, he decided the building wall had suffered only trivial effects and required no attention save a bit of a paint job. The shattered windows were being properly taken care of.
“We sent for the sheriff,” Bolivar, the range boss, told him. “He’d oughta get here in an hour or two. Hope he shows up soon; we can do without that.” He gestured to the blanket-covered mound as he spoke.
“We found a few more hunks when we got up and it was light,” he added. “Guess everything’s cleaned up now, except for filling that hole in the ground. Sensible thing to do would be to dump ’em in that and shovel dirt over ’em, but Miss Jerry seems to want to get ’em off the place. Reckon she don’t want to be reminded of what would have happened if it wasn’t for you. A fine chore, feller, a raunchin’ fine chore.”
Satisfied that everything was progressing satisfactorily, Slade returned to the ranchhouse. A little later old Keith dropped in from his own tour of inspection.
“Lucky we had a cutter and a bit of glass left over from when we enlarged the bunkhouse windows,” he said. “If we need more we’ll get it from Amarillo. Figure we’ve got enough to patch up most of the holes. By the way, the boys rooted out the horses those hellions rode. Good critters; they’re in the barn lining their bellies. Guess we got a right to keep ’em.”
“You certainly have,” Slade agreed. “Will sort of make up for the damage done.”
“Would have been a heck of a sight more if you hadn’t stopped the sidewinders when you did,” Norman growled. “Well, they sure got what was coming to ’em in a hurry. That’s what you call going to hell in a basket, I reckon, and not just talk. The blankety-blank-blanks!”
