Contract in Cartridges (A John Benteen Western) Read online

  “Beneath his thighs, he could feel the sorrel’s flanks pumping like bellows as the animal fought to crest the ridge with the last of its flagging strength. The horse was dead-beat, finished, after two fiercely cruel days of flight through the heat-blasted nightmare of the low border country with the posse always just a little behind. And because his mount was finished, Clell Yates knew now that he was finished, too.”

  That was the story of Clell Yates—a man with a rep, a man always on the run from somewhere, a man who seemed to draw posses like vultures to a rotting carcass. Now they had him cornered and it appeared that Clell would do no more running. In another minute, the posse would open up, and, this time there was no way out. ...

  CONTRACT IN CARTRIDGES

  By Ben Elliott

  First published by Ace Books in 1964

  Copyright © 1964, 2015 by Benjamin L. Haas

  First Smashwords Edition: April 2015

  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.

  Cover image © 2015 by Tony Masero

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  Chapter One

  “Yates,” the town marshal said.

  Clell Yates reined in his dusty sorrel, shoved back his sweat-stained hat, and looked down into the leathery face of the lawman, who stood planted in the middle of the street, a double-barreled riot gun cradled in his arm. The marshal was in his late forties; his cowhorn mustaches were touched with gray; nevertheless, Yates immediately sensed a dangerous quality in the man.

  Yates sat stiffly, not betraying any of the tension that filled him. “Howdy,” he said, pleasantly enough, his voice a little harsh with the dryness of a long ride.

  “Howdy.” The marshal’s cold, jet eyes moved over Clell Yates slowly, not missing a thing. The marshal gazed over Yates’ hard-featured, hawk-nosed face, aged beyond its twenty-seven years by trouble and weather; he saw the six muscular feet of rangy body that sat loosely in the saddle, wide-shouldered, lean-hipped, not an ounce of fat on it. The marshal kept careful tabs on the whereabouts of Yates’s hands, one on the reins, one on the horn.

  A little impatiently, Yates waited for the marshal to go on. He knew what was coming—the same thing he went through sooner or later when he entered any town that had a conscientious lawman. He hoped the marshal would not be long-winded. He was hot and tired and thirsty, and for the past five miles he had been able to think only of how good a cold beer would taste when he hit Sutler’s Springs.

  The marshal motioned with the shotgun. “Hitch up your horse and come talk to me a spell.”

  Yates opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again. “Shore,” he said and he reined toward the hitchrack.

  Sutler’s Springs, he thought, was not a hell of a lot of town to boast such a razor-sharp badge-toter—a few wood buildings, a few adobe ones, a street three inches deep in hot, red dust. Nobody much was stirring at this time of day, unless you counted the redbone hound scratching fleas in the shadow of an alley or the razor back shoat rooting at a pile of garbage somebody had tossed into the road. A dribbled-out nothing of a town—but it had a couple of saloons and a hotel-cafe and a barbershop, and it would do for a stopover. That is, if he and the marshal didn’t lock horns …

  He swung down off the sorrel a little awkwardly, being bound up with saddle stiffness, and he looped the reins around the hitch-rack. His big hand patted the horse’s lather-ridged neck. “Won’t hurt you to cool a few minutes before you drink, anyhow,” he told the sorrel, and he walked up on the board sidewalk where the marshal was waiting.

  The marshal was a half head shorter than Clell Yates. “My name’s Whipple,” he said, and Yates knew immediately from the truculence in his voice that the marshal was stretching hard to give the impression that he was every bit as big as any other man.

  “Glad to know you,” Clell said mildly. “’Pears like you’ve already recognized me.”

  “I’ve seen you before,” Whipple said. “Saw you in a gunfight in Tascosa once.”

  Yates’s eyes shadowed slightly. “Yes,” he said.

  “You burned down two men,” Whipple said.

  Yates said nothing. He was beginning not to like Whipple at all.

  “Come on in my office,” Whipple said abruptly, and he turned and entered a small adobe building.

  Clell followed him slowly, blinking to accustom his eyes to the dimness inside. It was not much cooler in here. Whipple sat down on the edge of a battered table that obviously served as his desk. He still had the shotgun cradled in his arms.

  “Two men,” he said. “In four shots. Outside Hampton’s Saloon.”

  Yates’s lips made a thin line. “That was three years ago. They tried to whipsaw me. It didn’t work. Besides, I didn’t start the fuss. One of them was drunk and proddy. His cousin backed him up. It was shoot or get shot. They had a hearing—I come off with self defense.”

  “Tascosa ain’t Sutler’s Springs,” the marshal said tersely. At last he laid aside the shotgun and stood up. “Look here, Yates. You’re a gunfighter. We don’t need no gunfighters in Sutler’s Springs.”

  Yates let out a long, fluttering sigh. “I ain’t no gunfighter. I do a cowhand’s work—when I can find it.”

  “You got a rep like a snowball,” the marshal went on, ignoring him. “Gits bigger all the time.”

  “Range gossip. Riders talk like old granny-women. Build a thing up yarning around a fire.”

  “Gossip or no, you’re fast with a gun and you’ve killed men. Five years ago you were mixed up in a range war over in the Big Thicket country. You must have played it cagy, because nobody ever brought charges against you—but the story’s got around. You were the head gunny for the outfit you rode for.”

  “Old John Wheless over there raised me,” Yates answered slowly, distinctly, trying hard to make the marshal understand. “That’s good sheep and goat country over there. John brought in some sheep. He ranged ’em on his own land, but even so he had some neighbors that started crowdin’ him about it. One day John’s team come home with him lyin’ dead in the buckboard—cutbanked by somebody with a Sharps needle gun. Nearest law was two hundred miles away. I didn’t aim to be the next one cutbanked. There was some shootin’ before matters was settled, yes. Again, a man’s got a right to protect his own hide.” His voice went harsh. “Besides, I done told you, John was like a daddy to me.”

  “Be that as it may,” the marshal said. “I reckon Billy Bonney could tell a pretty good story about the Lincoln County mess over in New Mexico, too, if you was to ask him. The thing is, Yates, from that time on you’ve had a tough rep. Now I run a quiet town here. I don’t aim to have any trouble.” His hand dropped to the stock of the shotgun on the table beside him. “So I’m telling you, while you’re in Sutler’s Springs, you check your hardware with me.”

  The dim interior of the little office was silent for a long moment. Then Clell Yates shook his head slowly.

  The marshal picked up the shotgun and cradled it in his arms again. “You tellin’ me you won’t?”

  “I ain’t tellin’ you anything,” Yates said softly. “But let
me ask a question first. This a town rule? Everybody checks a gun?”

  The marshal hesitated. “Everbody ain’t Clell Yates,” he said.

  “The rest of the town goes heeled if it wants to huh?”

  “The rest of the town ain’t gunfighters.”

  Clell Yates heaved a big sigh. “No, marshal. If it ain’t a town rule, I don’t check my gun.”

  Whipple’s blown-out breath made his mustaches flutter. His black eyes went hard and shiny as obsidian, and for a moment Clell thought the marshal would stand on tiptoes, trying to intimidate him by looking face to face. But Whipple didn’t.

  Clell said quickly, “I ain’t trying to be hard to get along with. But you saw that mess in Tascosa. All right, I’ll admit I have got a rep. You ain’t the only one that knows it. Seems like every so often there’s a local hardcase feels like he’s got to stand up to me and make me back down. I’ll take a lot to avoid a shootin’, marshal, but sometimes it can’t be avoided, and when it can’t, I don’t aim to be standin’ there helpless and without an iron. I don’t know what kind of bully-boys you maybe have in this town. I don’t know what likkerhead is liable to try to fatten his own rep or show off for his girl by bracin’ me. No, sir. If the rest of the town totes guns, I tote one too.”

  For a moment he thought Whipple was going to bring the issue to a head. He felt an old, familiar vibrancy in his own body, a quickening of every sense, a loose, efficient poising of his muscles. It would be hard to fight that goddamn Greener at such close range, but he knew by hard experience that, unarmed in a strange town, his life wouldn’t be worth a plugged ’dobe dollar anyhow. So if he had to do it …

  Then Whipple seemed to relax. The muzzles of the shotgun pointed downward at the dirt floor. Whipple blew against his mustaches. “All right, Yates.” His voice was like the strike of flint against flint. “All right, there’s no ordinance allows me to disarm you unless you’re mixed up in trouble or you give up your gun voluntarily. But you’ve been warned. Trouble here and I’ll show you what nine buckshot to the barrel can do to a man.”

  Clell Yates did not relax his tension. He had a feeling that this marshal had set out to crowd him deliberately. He said, “There won’t be no trouble unless somebody else starts it. I’m riding through, and all I want from this town is water and grain for my horse and a bath, bed and beer for me. This time tomorrow, I’ll be long gone. But if you know the local hotshots, you give them the same warnin’ you gave me. You tell ’em to stay off my corns and I won’t step on theirs. Nice meetin’ you, Marshal Whipple.”

  And he turned deliberately and went out into the hot, bright scale of the sunlight, the space between his shoulder blades uncomfortable from the presence of that ten-gauge riot gun behind him.

  He felt sour inside and he was cursing softly to himself when he mounted the sorrel and rode it down the end of the street to the livery stable. The hostler was an old man with a pinched face and mischievous little eyes. He watched Yates as Yates stripped saddle and blanket from the sorrel and turned the sorrel into the corral and watched it roll. When the sorrel went over on the third try and got up and trotted to the watering trough, Yates turned back to the hostler. “Oats and hay—and I want good cured hay that’s plenty dry, none of this green and musty stuff.”

  “Yes, sir,” the hostler nodded. “You bet, Mister Yates.”

  Yates tensed. “How’d you know my name?”

  The hostler grinned. “I was comin’ back from buyin’ a plug of chewin’ tobaccy when you went in the marshal’s office. I heerd him talkin’ to you.”

  Clell Yates grunted disgustedly. The little man had big ears. Probably a big mouth, too. The marshal might not have spread Yates’s identity around, but there was no doubt that the hostler would go through Sutler’s Springs like the town crier. Well, if the hostler would talk in one direction, he’d talk in another, too. Yates said, “This Whipple, the marshal. What kinda man is he?”

  The hostler gave a happy little chuckle at the opportunity to gossip. “Mr. Whipple’s a mighty short-tempered sort of man, Mr. Yates. Seems like he used to be a lawman in some really big towns. But people with bigger names come along—people like Earp and Masterson and customers like that—and he kinda got shoved off here into the backwoods. I don’t think Mr. Whipple’s happy here in Sutler’s Springs. I kinda think he misses bein’ where the main show’s goin’ on.”

  Yates nodded. That was sort of the impression he’d gathered himself. He flipped the hostler a silver dollar. “That’ll cover it for the night, I reckon.”

  The hostler nodded. “Yes, sir, shore will.” He craned his neck.

  “What the hell you starin’ at?” Yates asked, irritated.

  “Nothin’.” The hostler drew back quickly. But Yates knew. The hostler had been looking to see how many notches were cut in the butt of Clell Yates’s now famous Colt.

  “Well, you gonna throw your neck out of joint if you ain’t careful,” Yates grunted and strode angrily out of the barn.

  Even the cold beer did not help any. His reception to this town had put him on edge and made him nervous and jumpy. He sat at a table in the narrow, dingy little saloon, his back to the adobe wall, and nursed the beer. He wanted several, but he knew that he did not dare drink more than this one. Not until he had the lay of the land and knew whether he was going to get out of Sutler’s Springs without running into trouble.

  Trouble … His lips twisted, and he took another swallow of beer. Trouble had been following him like a dog at heel for five years. He didn’t regret a damn bit what he’d done down in the Big Thicket country. When somebody killed a fine old man like John Wheless, somebody had to pay. And the somebody had paid, and so had the somebody’s hired bodyguard. That was water over the dam. If it happened again the same way, he’d do again what he had done—take vengeance for old John in blood.

  But what wasn’t water over the dam was the aftermath of the trouble. Trouble seemed to feed on itself. You got a reputation as a gun hand and suddenly that was all you were good for. Maybe you were a top hand rider, but nobody would hire you to work cows. Any damn fool could work cows, but there weren’t many men who could throw a gun like Clell Yates. So when an employer took you on, he wasn’t hiring just a rider. He was hiring a Colt .45 and a man to use it.

  There were too many needs for a man who could use a Colt these days. The country was building up, and it turned out that there wasn’t enough range to go around after all. Or even if there was enough grazing, there wasn’t enough water. So that you had these little spurting fights blossoming all over, and there was plenty of demand for a gun hand. Because he owned nothing—he’d been John Wheless’s heir, but John had died in debt, the sheep and goats a last-gasp try to stave off bankruptcy—he’d had to take what work he could get, and it had been mostly gun work. He generally tried to line up on the right side, but a stranger couldn’t always tell about those things until it was too late.

  There was, too, the matter of the little men who wanted to get big in a hurry. Little men who thought the shortcut way to get big was to kill a man with a big reputation. They crowded you when you least expected it, and that was why he’d had to kill the two men in Tascosa—and why he wouldn’t give up his gun here. And why, too, he was so jumpy and nervous right now, wondering, each time a man came in the saloon, if it were somebody who had heard that Clell Yates was in town and who had made up his mind to try his luck.

  Yates finished the beer and set the glass aside disgustedly. Well, he’d had enough of it. He’d be riding on in the morning, and if possible, he’d keep riding until he’d outridden his reputation. Maybe there was work for a hand out in California. He’d never seen the ocean, and he’d always had a hankering to; and there was a good chance that in California nobody would know Clell Yates from Adam’s off ox. It was a kind of sanctuary that his mind grasped at, a place that seemed to him now like the Promised Land, where he could slough off the past and live like any other human being and maybe build up a stake and fi
nd a woman and settle down and raise kids …

  A shadow fell across the table and he looked up. A big, florid-faced man in white shirt and vest was looking down at him. “Clell Yates?” the man asked crisply.

  “Uh-huh.” Clell moved his hand under the table, so that it was closer to his holster.

  “Mind if I sit down?” The big man pulled out a chair.

  “All right,” said Clell. “What’s on your mind, mister?”

  The big man leaned forward. “My name’s Jacoby. I’m Marshal Whipple’s brother-in-law, married his sister.”

  “Good for you,” said Clell with more acid than he intended.

  Jacoby’s face shadowed, but he took no offense. He leaned close to Yates. “Listen,” he said, “can I give you some advice?”

  “Assuming it don’t cost nothing.”

  “It’ll be the best damned advice you ever got,” Jacoby said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Yates, why don’t you go saddle up and ride on out of Sutler’s Springs?”

  Yates frowned, anger rising in him harshly. “Goddamn it, I’ve been ridin’ for two days. I dry-camped last night and I’m dirty as a billy-goat. I don’t want this goddamn town for breakfast; all I want is a chance to git a little rest.”

  “Shh. Now don’t git all excited.” Jacoby made a monitory gesture. “This is for your own good. Look, Yates, I don’t know you. You may be a fine feller, the salt of the earth, or you may be just the opposite—I don’t know and I don’t care. Thing is, I do know Doyle Whipple. Doyle’s a proud man, Yates. He likes bein’ a peace officer, but he don’t like bein’ a peace officer in a one-horse town like this. He wants to get back to work in a bigger place, but he feels like he can’t do it unless he’s got the kind of rep that’ll make him draw some water alongside of people like Masterson and Earp and Tom Smith and that kind. Listen, Yates, I know Doyle Whipple like the back of my hand. He’s got you sized up as the opportunity he’s been needin’. If he could hang you up by the heels, he’d be known all over the state overnight.”