Read Sudden--Troubleshooter (A Sudden Western) #5 Online
Authors: Frederick H. Christian
Tags: #cowboys, #outlaws, #gunslingers, #frederick h christian, #oliver strange, #sudden, #jim green, #old west pulp fiction
Sudden--Troubleshooter (A Sudden Western) #5 (12 page)
The boy looked uncertainly from Cameron to
his employer and back again.
Cameron let a wolfish smile
play on his features.
‘You
wonderin’ if yo’re fast enough, ain’t yu, boy?
Well, I
ain’t … so don’t try it. I ain’t in
the kid-killin’, business. However, I owe yu somethin’’ He fingered
his swollen jaw, and his eyes were merciless. Faster than the
watchers could follow, his hand darted to the cut-away holster and
two shots blasted from his hip. Philadelphia reeled backwards and
fell to the ground; Susan Harris screamed, and a curse exploded
from her father’s lips.
‘Yu murderin’ scum I’ he
ground out, his eyes moving helplessly to the shotgun lying in the
dust about ten feet away.
Cameron smiled. ‘He ain’t
dead, Harris. I just made shore he don’t sneak up on me again for a
few weeks.’
A closer look at the boy,
beside whom Susan Harris was kneeling, showed that the gunman’s
shots had in fact both pierced the thick muscles of the thigh on
both the boy’s legs. Blood stained the youngster’s bleached Levi’s,
but he was already sitting up, cursing weakly. Harris stared at the
gunman, as if trying to divine from the man’s face some secret that
lay behind it. Noticing the old man’s gaze, the gunman
laughed.
‘Yo’re worryin’, Harris,’
he laughed. ‘That’s the first sensible thing yu’ve done since I
came. Yo’re thinkin’ about what woulda happened if I’d come up here
when yu wasn’t around, or if I’d made less noise to let yu know I
was comin’.’ He nodded at the girl. ‘She’s right purty. Yu think
about what I said about the climate up here. Mention it to yore
neighbors. I’ll be around.’
Without another word, he
wheeled about and walked to his magnificent stallion. Mounting, he
turned the horse’s head and thundered off away from the Harris
ranch, while the old homesteader looked at his daughter with
stricken eyes.
The events of the day were
still plaguing him as Susan bustled about, preparing new dressings
for Philadelphia’s wounds. After a solid hour of arguing he had
agreed to allow her to nurse him only when, teeth chattering, he
had been unable to argue more. The fever of shock that had followed
the shooting had now abated and Philadelphia was sleeping in an
adjoining room. Despite his daughter’s outburst Harris still
wondered where the dark-haired cowboy in whom, he realized, he had
come to place such complete faith, had gone. He wanted to seek
Green’s slow-spoken reassurance, for the cold threats that Cameron
had delivered had for once weakened the homesteader’s determination
never to be pushed off his land.
‘It’s one thing when they
fight man to man,’ he muttered. ‘But makin’ war on women … that’s
no better’n Injuns.’ Again he pondered the long talks he had
already had with Green – he could still somehow not quite bring
himself to think of his employee as ‘Sudden’ – about
Gunnison.
‘That ol’ devil could be
playin’ a mighty clever double game,’ he told himself. ‘Mebbe Jim’s
figgerin’ is too simple. Mebbe it’s a whole lot deeper than we all
think.’ These thoughts and others like them occupied his mind as he
paced the floor puffing furiously on his old pipe, a frown of
concentration upon his weather-beaten face. And all the time, in
his mind’s eye, he saw the sneering face of Wes Cameron, and heard
the unspoken threats the man had made upon Susan. The reputation
that was Cameron’s was such that the old man wondered whether even
Sudden, whose speed on the draw was said to be lightning fast,
could match it.
‘He’s the on’y hope I got,’
the old man told himself; but there was a touch of resignation, a
hint of defeat in his voice as he said it.
Eleven
SUDDEN
ARRIVED back at the JH on the morning after Cameron’s visit
and its aftermath. Stunned by the events which the old homesteader
recounted, the puncher listened in silence as Jake told him of
Cameron’s thinly veiled threats.
‘Mebbe we ought to send
Miss Susan away, at that,’ he said thoughtfully, but that young
lady tossed her head spiritedly in dismissal of such a
suggestion.
‘This is my home, and no
thug with a gun is going to frighten me away,’ she said calmly.
‘Jim,
Daddy
,
I appreciate your concern. But I’m
not going. Anyway,’ she added in a lighter voice, ‘who’d look after
our invalid?’
Green went into the little
bedroom where Philadelphia lay. The fever had paled the youngster’s
complexion, and he looked startlingly like the thin-faced
tenderfoot who had so nearly been the victim of Jim Dancy’s liquor
rage that day in Yavapai.
‘Yu shore got the easy
life,’ Sudden told him with a smile. ‘Pretty nurse, good food, an’
no work.’
Philadelphia smiled
ruefully. ‘Any time yu wanta change places, Jim, speak up,’ he
said. ‘I’d give a couple o’ years’ pay to be able to go out huntin’
for that coyote Cameron.’
‘Yu take yore medicine,’
Sudden told him. ‘Cameron’ll keep. There’s bigger fish fryin’ in
these parts. Get yoreself fit: I’ll be needin’ yu.’
‘Yu bet, Jim,’ said the
boy, his face glowing.
Susan Harris bustled in and
shooed the tall puncher out of the room. ‘No more of that war talk,
you two,’ she scolded. ‘Philly, yu’ve got to sleep. Lie down,
now.’
‘Hel – heck, I ain’t tired,
Miss Sue,’ he complained. ‘I just got through sleepin’ a whole raft
o’ hours.’
‘Now don’t you argue with
me, Mr. Philadelphia Sloane’ the girl was saying as Green left the
room, leaving the boy grinning ruefully after him.
‘Take about six months o’
that to make him sick,’ Green told his employer, who smiled
fleetingly.
‘Creates a few problems,
though, Jim,’ the older man said. ‘I can’t talk Susie into goin’
into town, an’ while she’s here I’m not keen on goin’ far from the
house. Yet someone ought to ride over to tell the others that this
Cameron’s skulkin’ around, in case anyone tries to take him on
afore they know what they’re gettin’ into.’
‘Yo’re right,’ Green
agreed. ‘I’ll skedaddle over to Taylor’s now. I can be there an’
back in about two hours. I’ll eat here, then ride over an’ spread
the word to the others.’
Without further ado he saddled up his horse
and in a few more minutes was thundering westward towards the Lazy
T.
Green had been gone about
an hour when the sound of a
wagon
coming
across the open plain brought Harris
once more to the door, his hand shading his eyes as he
scanned the prairie. He recognized the wagon
immediately, and called in to his daughter reassuringly, ‘It’s Reb
Johnstone’s wagon – no need for alarm.’
A few minutes later the
gangling Virginian was jumping down from the wagon seat, his
cheerful Southern drawl bringing a smile to Harris’s face. With him
was his neighbor, Stan Newley, smiling nervously as always, and
saying little. Harris rapidly described the events of the previous
day, and the tall Southerner’s face was dark as he
listened.
‘He better not come
snoopin’ around man place,’ he said. ‘I ain’t afeared o’ no
damyankee gunman an’ that’s whatever.’
‘Yu see him, yu stay away
from him, Reb,’ warned Harris. ‘He’s pizen mean an’ he’s fast
enough with that gun to kill any of us afore we got rightly
started.’
The Virginian’s cheerful
visage was serious as he listened to this warning.
‘Mebbe yo’re right at that,
Jake,’ he admitted. ‘If’n Ah run into him, mebbe I’ll pussyfoot
some. Now: anything I c’n bring yu from Yavapai?’
‘Yo’re goin’ into
town?’
‘Got to,’ Newley said. ‘Reb
an’ me got some fencin’ to fix. We ordered some o’ them reels o’
fencin’ wire from Kansas City, an’ Lafferty’s has got them down
there.’
‘Need some vittles, too,’
Johnstone added. ‘An’ by cracky, I need me a good bottle o’
sourmash. I’m plumb outa drinkin’ likker.’
Harris shook his head. ‘I
hate to sound like a Jeremiah, Reb, but yu be sure an’ tread
lightly in town, hear? Nice an’ easy, like. Any o’ the Saber boys
down there, any sign o’ this Cameron
hombre
an’ yu just turn aroun’ real
quiet an’ head for the Mesquites.’
‘Hell, Jake, yu sound like
an ol’ woman,’ complained Johnstone. ‘We ain’t lookin’ for no
fight.’
Harris nodded and turned to
Newley. ‘Stan, I’m puttin’ it to yu. It’s yore responsibility, yu
hear me? Any sign o’ trouble an’ yu
git
.
Okay?’
Newley blinked nervously
and nodded,
don’t
…
don’t yu worry, Jake. There’ll be
no trouble. We’ll just pick up our stuff an’ …’ As usual, his
sentence ended unfinished.
Grumbling to himself about
being ‘treated like some half-wit infant’, Reb Johnstone mounted
his wagon.
When
Newley was aboard he swung the team around and cursed them up
the trail into the pines at a hair-raising speed.
‘Damn’ fire-eatin’ Rebel,’
muttered Harris, shaking his head.
He stamped back into the
house, where Susan, seeing his frown, asked, ‘Do you think that man
will be in Yavapai, Daddy?’
‘I shore hope not,’ said
her father heavily. ‘I shore as hell hope not.’
When Green reached the Lazy
T, he wasted no time in observing the social niceties but told the
astonished Taylor about the events of the preceding day. Taylor
wasted no more time than his visitor in confirming that he would
take his men across to the Harris place immediately.
‘There’s naught here that
would interest a manhunter, Jim,’ he said. ‘An’ I’ve the feelin’
that we’ll all have a better chance together. I’ll get my boys to
ride over an’ bring Kitson, Newley, an’ Johnstone in to the JH as
well. It’ll be interestin’ if our gun-totin’ friend shows his face
again.’
Green agreed to this arrangement gratefully;
and Taylor agreed to explain to Harris that his rider had one more
chore to do which would probably take him another twenty-four
hours.
‘Get on with whatever yu
want to do, laddie,’ Taylor told him. ‘I’ll tell Jake as soon as I
get over there.’
The dour Scot’s unexcited
reaction to the bad news from Harris’s place was a welcome tonic to
Sudden, for he had been worried that Cameron’s threats had shaken
the old homesteader more than he cared to admit. With his friends
beside him Jake would stand firm come hell or high
water.
Sudden leaned forward and
patted the glossy neck of his mount. ‘Night, we got some hard work
ahead of us, an’ yo’re goin’ to do most of it.’ The horse nipped
playfully at his hand as Sudden extended it, and he pulled
the
horse’s ear, smiling. ‘G’wan, yu
walkin’ gluepot, ’bout time yu worked for yore eats.’ He pointed
the black stallion’s nose towards the northwest, where the frowning
peaks of the Yavapai mountains towered against the sky.
Three-quarters of an hour
later the sound of water echoing in a canyon reached his ears, and,
spurring Midnight forward, the puncher came to a flat, open area.
Ahead of him, like a giant crack in the earth’s crust, was a
canyon. Sudden dismounted and approached the edge. Down below,
perhaps sixty or seventy feet, the waters of the Yavapai River
boiled whitely over rapids.
‘That’ll be Apache Canyon,’
he told himself. ‘We go north.’
Mounting again, he followed the edge of the
canyon northwards, noting that the ground here sloped sharply
downwards. Soon the canyon was behind, and the river was a broad,
flat stream which raced down from the mountains ahead. Trout leaped
like flashes of rainbows out of the water, and once the cowboy
caught a glimpse of a big bear lumbering through the brush. Off to
the right was a spur of the range of high mountains ahead, lying
like the paw of an animal across the foothills. Veering towards
them, Sudden could see that the spur was scored by deep ravines on
its western side; and he nodded to himself at this confirmation of
his own thinking.
‘Some o’ them gullies will
be deep enough to be used for pennin’ cattle,’ he soliloquized. ‘My
Gawd! but ain’t they purty?’
This exclamation was
elicited as the sun, slipping down in the west, touched the rims of
the mountains with fire. The spur of hills which were the object of
Green’s attention turned bright ochre, brilliant orange, deep red,
with dark black streaks where the gullies scored the
rock.
‘Purty or not, however, we
got to take a gander at ’em a mite closer than this, Night. Let’s
get at it.’
Responding to the light
touch of his rider’s heels, the black stallion lifted his heels and
thundered towards their destination.
Twelve
REB JOHNSTONE
and Stan Newley got to Yavapai at about four
o’clock, and the Virginian hitched his wagon team outside the
general store. Stan Newley cocked an eye at the far-off mountains.
The first dark mass of thunderheads that presaged one of the
valley’s sudden summer storms was piling up over the
Yavapais.
‘Better not stay too long,
Reb,’ he told his companion. ‘Fixin’ to storm some come
nightfall.’
‘All right, all right,’
grinned Johnstone. ‘Anythin’ for a quiet life. Let’s get them store
goods.’
