Justice Magazine January 1956 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Crime, Pulp
Publisher: Justice Magazine
Published: 1956-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Backbite

by Frederick Lorenz

Geste had to shoot his way out of an embarrassing triangle.

Through the field glasses, Howard’s red hunting coat was very clearly visible a half mile ahead through the light stand of Australian pine and palmetto. Satisfied, Geste slid the glasses back into the leather case that clipped to his belt. Now he knew exactly where Howard was going. He was heading almost due east toward the big marsh ten miles beyond the Placido River, a two-day trip on foot but there wasn’t any other way to get there. There were no roads, and a plane couldn’t land in that stump-ridden slough. A ‘copter might get in, but the point was that it took a woodsman like Howard to find the spot in the first place. And get back out of it alive.

That was the whole thing, getting back alive. Anybody could have blundered into that marsh, but it took a real woodsman to get back out of it. A woodsman like Howard. Or like himself, Geste thought with satisfaction. He was as good, or better, a woodsman as Howard.

It was a real hunter’s paradise, that swamp. The ducks swarmed there more thickly than mosquitoes, and it had never been shot over because it was too tricky to get in and out of. Men had gotten lost in there and turned up years later as skeletons.

Two of us are going in, Geste thought with grim satisfaction, but I’m the only one coming out this time.

He’d owed this to Howard for a long time, ever since Howard had married Mary Alice Freeman right, so to speak, from under Geste’s nose, because Geste had been courting her at the time. Geste had taken an awful riding at the time, because it had always been his boast that once a woman went out with Clyde Geste, she was spoiled for any other man. And Mary Alice had been no ordinary woman. Her pappy owned the biggest citrus grove in middle Florida, and she was a woman for marrying, not just playing around.

Not, Geste thought sourly, like Beth Savage. He could spit when he thought of her. There wasn’t anymore to her than a handful of feathers, and it had been fun in the beginning. It had taken her quite awhile to come to his way of thinking, and when she did, it was all tears and sobs and clutching and “we belong to each other.”

Beth’s brothers had a ranch about two miles south where they were breeding Brahma cattle, but they were poorer than the poor cousins of church mice. Geste didn’t want to marry into anything like that. But if he hung around, those three big, hardfisted Savage brothers would make short work of him if he tried to back down—specially after telling Beth he would marry her.

Hell, he thought bitterly, you always told them you’d marry them. None of them took it serious. It was just something you said so their conscience didn’t bother them afterwards.

That was why he had sold out his gas station and had five thousand dollars in his wallet.

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