Savage 05, page 1
part #5 of Savage Series
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He put his arms around her and rubbed her back, like a man trying to warm his hands. She seemed to like it, so Savage rubbed some more, giving his hands more latitude. Marylou sighed and grew warm against him. She gave a startled gasp when his lips found hers; she hadn’t even considered the possibility of anything romantic, what with her father snoring not a hundred feet away, and two men laying dead close by. Once implanted, however, the notion took hold of her swiftly. It was no time at all before Clint Savage found that another of his hunches had come true.
There was nothing under her robe but her sweet, soft body.
SAVAGE 5: BIG MAN RIDING
By E. Jefferson Clay
First published by Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia
© 2019 by Piccadilly Publishing
First Electronic Edition: August 2020
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Table of Contents
One – Savage Kills Quick
Two – Spoilers in the Street
Three – Last of the Breed
Four – Just a Hunch
Five – Killers and Thieves
Six – Lucky By Trade
Seven – Town Afraid
About the Author
One – Savage Kills Quick
George Purdee was going to die.
He’d drilled a slug right through Reece Poulter’s arm for messing around with his daughter, and now Poulter and Zeb Conway were going to finish him. It showed in their sweating faces and in the glittering six-guns in their fists. Moreso in the fear-widened eyes of Marylou, watching helplessly nearby.
This was to be George’s last hour. With his work-gnarled hands tied behind his back and a candle sputtering in its own wax on top of his balding skull, he was a lamb ready for the slaughter.
But the ‘lamb’ could still bleat. “You lousy, gutless sons of bitches!” he panted. He winced as hot candle grease ran down his cheek into the corner of his mouth. “Two of you bastards with six-guns agin’ an unarmed old miner, and you still gotta tie me up afore you got the nerve to kill me.” He spat. “I always said you Hashknife jokers was scum, and by God, this proves it.” He lifted his chin defiantly. “Well, go ahead and get it over with. I ain’t gonna beg. I’ll go to Glory cussin’ you with my last breath.”
“Now?” Conway asked eagerly.
“Not yet,” Poulter replied. He grinned wickedly, face slick with beer sweat. “I wanna give the old bastard a sportin’ chance.”
“Why?” Conway didn’t understand.
Poulter ignored him and shouted. “All right, old man, I’ll give you a chance. Run for it, if you’ve got the guts.”
With a despairing glance at his daughter, George took off. He knew they would gun him down, but his instincts for survival, honed by years prospecting in the mountains, wouldn’t allow him to do nothing ... not while there was one chance in a million.
And as he staggered through the gloomy night, Marylou and Conway saw the reason for the candle that Poulter had fastened to George’s head.
The old man was a running beacon.
“Now!” Poulter shouted and his .45 came sweeping up.
“Hold it!”
The voice reached them from the black mouth of the canyon close by where the old mine lay shrouded in darkness. It was a deep voice but not loud, commanding but not urgent despite the life-or-death scene being acted out beneath the faint glow of stars.
The drunken hellions whirled with their six-guns at the ready. What they saw was the silhouette of a man on horseback.
“Who the hell are you?” Conway gasped.
No answer.
The dim, mounted figure came closer. Fifty yards beyond, his candle still burning in the night air with its glow casting a wide pool of shadow around him, George Purdee stopped and stared. He knew he shouldn’t hope, but he was hoping nonetheless. His daughter, mustering the strength to rise from the ground, focused on the rider. She felt her heart sink when she caught the sheen of light on six-gun handles, cartridge rims and saddle rifle.
This man looked like even more trouble!
But the stranger was trouble for the Hashknife men, as Zeb Conway discovered. Conway failed to halt the horseman with his warning shout, so he slipped into a gunfighter’s crouch.
The horseman’s right hand came up holding a thundering six-shooter. The Purdees saw the flash and heard the awful thud as a chunk of lead made contact with flesh and bone.
“Reach!” the rider ordered Poulter as Conway’s body crashed to the ground. This time, he lifted his voice to carry above the echo of his gunshot, but he needn’t have bothered. Poulter was already triggering. The horseman ducked low and fired back simultaneously. His bullet caught Poulter somewhere high in the chest and threw him to one side. Poulter fell to his knees but still managed to get his gun up to firing level before the next bullet drilled his brain.
It was shockingly quiet. The miner and his daughter seemed incapable of movement as they listened to the chinking sound made by empty six-gun shells hitting rocky ground. The horseman was calmly reloading. Then he rode across to Purdee and reined-in, staring curiously down at him. The candle on Purdee’s head threw its light up onto a big, broad-shouldered man with a coal-black mustache and an eagle’s feather jutting cockily from his hatband.
The stranger didn’t speak as he dismounted. He tugged a battered tin case from the breast pocket of his shirt, selected a black cigar and then calmly leaned forward to light it from the candle strapped to George’s hairless head. The Purdees gaped in astonishment.
“By God, but you’re a cool one, mister!” George succeeded in getting out at last.
The big man puffed. “Ain’t that the truth.”
“I’d’ve been a dead man but for you. I’m beholden. What’s your handle?”
The man reached over to pinch out the candle, and he said just one word: “Savage.”
Purdee nodded slowly as he stared past his white-faced daughter at the bodies sprawled lifeless on the rocky earth. “Savage?” he muttered, as though thinking aloud. “I reckon you are at that,” adding hastily, “not that I’m complainin’, mind.”
Savage didn’t reply. As his hands worked on Purdee’s ropes, he glanced at Marylou. She had forgotten that the hellions had ripped her blouse from collar to hem. Hastily, she drew the torn pieces across her breast. She was astonished when Savage winked at her over her father’s waxy dome—as though they’d met by chance at a church social and not in the presence of violent death.
Marylou was angry and strangely excited. She was also curious to find out more about this big man who had saved her father from death and herself from a fate reputed to be even worse.
Savage’s eyelids were growing heavy as he listened to George Purdee’s rhythmic snores coming from the mine shaft. High above, a feeble moon had finally emerged from the clouds to shed a sickly light over Deaf Smith County, a troubled, semi desert region of sand, rock, and widely-scattered townships. The light washed over Savage’s broad-boned face as he rested comfortably on his back with his saddle as a pillow, a Navajo blanket drawn up to his barrel chest and the cherry-red tip of an almost-spent cigar glowing in one corner of his mouth.
He looked like a man at peace with the world, but it wasn’t so. If there were one thing he could have done without at this late stage of his journey to Delta, it was a double shooting. It hadn’t shaken him, but it was inconvenient to say the least.
Suddenly, his right hand snaked under the saddle and came out clutching a Colt as a faint sound disturbed the night. Above the snores of the miner he identified light footsteps. Then his keen gaze picked out the faint outline of a figure coming towards him from the black maw of the mine.
He lowered the six-gun when the robed figure of Marylou moved into the hazy star glow.
“Mr. Savage?” Her voice was high and uncertain. But the rest of her was full grown. “Are you awake?”
He put the gun away. “What’s the matter?”
She came forward and stood above him. The robe was tightly drawn about her full figure. “Are you all right, Mr. Savage? I didn’t get the chance to ask you after what happened ... what with taking care of pa and all. I was just trying to get off to sleep when I remembered that you were shot at. You weren’t hit, were you?”
By way of reply, Savage picked up his hat. He thrust a finger through a hole in the crown and wiggled it at her. Marylou gasped, placing one hand on her breast. She wasn’t to know that the bullet hole was an old one, courtesy of an outraged husband who’d caught Savage under the wrong blankets down in Texas in the winter of ’73. Savage figured that as long as he didn’t say anything, he wasn’t really lying.
“Oh my goodness,” Marylou said, kneeling at his side to peer at him closely. “Were you hit?”
“Negative.” This was about the biggest word in the Savage vocabulary, and he used it often. H e faked a shiver. “It don’t matter how many times a man is shot at, he never gets used to it.”
“Oh, I’m sorry you don’t feel well.”
Savage, feeling strong enough to wrestle a buffalo, smiled wanly, “It’ll pass, Miss Marylou. I guess it’s just a delayed reaction.”
He shook violently. She reached out and touched him. “Isn’t there something I could do? After all, you did save our lives.”
“I guess I just need warmin’ up some. Don’t see what you could do about that ... unless ...” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head, “No, I guess that’s not such a good idea.”
“What isn’t, Mr. Savage?”
Savage gave another shudder and tugged the blanket higher under his chin. With a fine show of reluctance, he told her what she might do that would really help—namely to snuggle in with him under his Navajo blanket until his temperature came up a notch or two. Marylou blushed. She didn’t think she should do that. But she had second thoughts when her rescuer started shivering again like a sinner in torment.
“Well, maybe just for a minute or two, Mr. Savage ...”
“No, it’s all right,” he said through clenched teeth. “No gentleman would suggest such a thing, and I’m sorry. Must be the fever that made me even think it.”
“No, don’t apologize.” She studied him for a moment and then reached for the corner of the blanket. “Please move over, Mr. Savage; I’ll help make you warm.”
Savage was already warm, and dangerously so. But the way he shivered and shook after Marylou was snugly under his blanket prompted her to put her arms around him and press herself close.
“There, there, Mr. Savage; you’ll be all right.”
He put his arms around her and rubbed her back, like a man trying to warm his hands. She seemed to like it, so Savage rubbed some more, giving his hands more latitude. Marylou sighed and grew warm against him. She gave a startled gasp when his lips found hers; she hadn’t considered the possibility of anything romantic, what with her father snoring not a hundred feet away, and two men laying dead close by. Once implanted, however, the notion took hold of her swiftly. It was no time at all before Clint Savage found that another of his hunches had come true.
There was nothing under her robe but her sweet, soft body.
If the town of Delta could ever be described as looking its best, it was in the early morning, before the heat, the flies, the noise and the smells took over. The town had been described more than once as the ugliest spot in the county. The disguising silver light of early morning tended to hide the scars and blemishes to a degree. Delta could have almost passed for your average frontier town, no better or worse than the next one that dotted the plains.
Delta slept as that magic light hung over its streets. With the exception of the water carrier, the baker and the hostlers at the town’s two liveries, it was not an early-rising town. They were hard-working, hard-playing folks in Delta, and because the saloons never closed their doors before one or two in the morning, it rarely began to stir in earnest until well after seven. That, of course, was regarded as damn near the middle of the day by most workers on the outlying ranches.
The dust of the street was a heavy yellow in that uncertain light, the false fronts stood tall and somber and the iron rooftops gleamed the color of gunmetal.
Nobody was around as the three horses clattered across the bridge on the north side of town. The populace slept soundly at the hotel, the jailhouse, the undertakers’ parlor and in the little rooms above the Big River and the Ten Bar saloons. The singing of coyotes from the mesa almost drowned out the muffled sounds of hooves in the deep dust as the rider and his two laden horses came at a walk down Main Street.
The water carter was down at the river pumping his rust-red tank full to begin his never-ending assault on Delta’s eternally-dusty streets. The hostlers worked grumpily in their liveries, and the baker and his spotty helper were making too much noise with their tin pans and the old iron oven. They could not detect the creak of saddle leather and the low snorting of horses as they drew up beneath a sign that read:
J.P. Peaceful: Undertaker.
Out back, behind the dignified furnishings and the adjoining workshop where caskets in various stages of construction rested on tool-scarred work benches, J.P. Peaceful slept the sleep of the just and righteous. Business was always good for Delta’s only undertaker. The happy man did not have to rely solely on such allies of the trade as colic, plague, yellow fever, pneumonia, childbirth, old age and accidents. In Delta, you could always rely on a bloody knife fight, a stage holdup, or a bank robbery to keep business brisk, not to mention the frequent clashes between the Hashknife Gang and anybody and everybody who riled them.
There were times when J.P. had to put on extra help. It was an ill wind indeed that didn’t blow somebody some good.
Peaceful wasn’t the undertaker’s genuine family name. Born Jasper Prendergast Foulsmith, he’d had his name changed to something more appropriate when the pathways of destiny led him to his noble profession. It was undeniable that, say, the widow of some wild cowboy who’d just got himself shot to hell in a violent dust-up over cards, whiskey or women, felt a lot better about calling on a man with the soothing name of Peaceful than she would with somebody called Foulsmith.
It was these attentions to small but important details that had enabled J.P. to out-trade and out-last his rivals. In Delta, he had the death business to himself.
But death was anything but an ugly word to J.P. Peaceful. A happy dream for him was pestilence sweeping across the West, forcing him to hire that extra help to prowl the streets.
And that, indeed, was exactly what he was dreaming when a dull, crashing sound shook awake both himself and most of the citizens within a hundred yards.
A skinny man with a prominent Adam’s apple and a big, beaky nose, the undertaker sat up in bed and jumped a little when the sound was repeated.
It was as if large objects were being dumped on his front porch.
As J.P. drew on robe and slippers, two doors away the sheriff was sitting up on the edge of a bunk in the last of his three cells, frowning and scratching his head.
“What the hell is that racket ...?” the lawman muttered, reaching for his boots. They were handsome Star boots, for Bob Wallace was an immaculate dresser, a square-jawed and square-shouldered man of the law who had won office just a year ago on the promise to keep the constant menace of the Hashknife Gang away from town. He had succeeded in doing that until recently. Wallace’s image in town had suffered as a consequence.
He got to his feet and drew on his shirt, checking his appearance in a mirror before going out. “If that’s Drunky John trying to break into the saloon again, by God, I’ll lock him up for six months!”
But it wasn’t Drunky John that wakened Main Street that silvery morning. Neither was it a wagonload of miners arriving for a rowdy weekend. Or even Hashknife riders coming to town to weave their own special brand of trouble.
The man who was responsible for the racket was a total stranger. One hell of a big stranger, bleary eyes noted.
He was wide in the shoulder and narrow in the hip, with a cigar jutting out from under a villainous black mustache and an eagle feather standing up cockily from a broad-brimmed hat. He wore two guns and looked like he knew how to use them.
The spectators saw three horses with empty saddles, all tied to the undertaker’s hitching rail. But there was only one man standing. They didn’t realize at first that the two blanket-wrapped shapes dumped against the undertaker’s door were the former owners of the familiar-looking paint and dapple gray which stood beside the big stranger’s sorrel stallion.
That discovery was left to J.P. Peaceful who took a startled step back into his parlor after opening his door and almost tumbling over the bundles. He was even more taken aback by the expression on the stranger’s face than by the bodies themselves.
This man looked mad enough to spit chips. J. P. thought it prudent to put on one of his big, horse-toothed grins; the ones he saved for grieving relatives who’d lost somebody they were glad to get rid of.
“Ahh, good morning, sir! And what might the establishment of J.P. Peaceful, Dignified Interments, do for you this bright—”
