High Wild Desert by Ralph Cotton

Author:Ralph Cotton [Cotton, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical, General
ISBN: 9781101608999
Google: MGkjd-MX2w4C
Amazon: 0451239776
Barnesnoble: 0451239776
Goodreads: 15806970
Publisher: Signet
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

On his way to the rocky stretch of ground behind the Number Five Saloon, Sam heard the faint whimpering one more time. This time he heard it clear enough that it sent a dark chill up his spine, knowing that the sound was not that of a cat, or of any other kind of small animal. It was human, it was female and it was the sound of someone in trouble. Yes, bad trouble, he told himself, hastening his steps, his Winchester hanging in his hand.

Fifty feet from the back door of the saloon, he walked along the edge of the recently abandoned public ditch. Since the coming of the newly constructed public outhouses, townsfolk had begun discarding garbage and other worthless items into the ditch in order to fill the wretched twenty-yard cesspool of human waste as quickly as possible. Still the open ditch lay splayed like a violent ax wound welling infection in the belly of the earth.

At a point along the edge—a spot most frequented by patrons of the Number Five Saloon—the Ranger stopped and gazed down into the public ditch, his eyes searching across unsavory streaks of dark waste that had built up over time and spilled into the blackish sludge deepening in the ditch’s bottom.

At first he saw nothing, save for a few greasy-coated rats perched on the rock incline, picking at something of a rat’s interest. Yet as he started to turn his eyes away, he heard the sound again. He swung to his left, where he saw scratching and scrapings in the dirt just above the pool of dark sludge. He made out a tremor of movement, something that rose and fell weakly in the pool of excrement.

An arm? he thought, already stepping down over the edge into the suffocating stench. The terrible smell rose around him, a rancid vapory steam engulfing him. But searching the ditch intently in spite of the smell, the fetidness of humanity’s leavings, he saw the movement again.

My God, yes, it is an arm, he told himself, down there, in all that . . .

Even as he hurried down the stained, soiled wall of the ditch toward what he now more clearly saw was the outline of a body struggling beneath a layer of waste, he raised his rifle. One-handed, he fired a signal shot in the air, then levered and repeated the action twice for good measure on his way farther down into that terrible trench.

At the edge of the blackish sludge, he set his smoking rifle aside, stooped and reached out for a small, pale wrist coated over in a substance too vile to consider, lest his mind and his hand refuse to engage. Without thought or hesitation, he grabbed the wrist and pulled, feeling the woman come unstuck from the sludge’s grasp. She slid upward on her belly onto the rocky ground. When she was out of the sludge, Sam kept her on her stomach as he reached under her face and wiped it as best he could with his gloved hand.

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