Nightfall at Little Aces by Ralph Cotton

Author:Ralph Cotton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2008-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

Outside on the dark street, the colonel and his men walked straight to the sheriff’s office and shoved the door open. Inside the empty office, Colonel Elgin walked to the cell where Frank Skimmer stood with his hands wrapped around the bars. Skimmer looked down in shame under the colonel’s gaze.

“I was relying on you to keep Mitchell and Vane in line. You disappointed me,” Elgin said.

Skimmer looked up and said in his own defense, “I had things under control until that damned Ranger Burrack showed up with a scattergun.”

“Burrack again,” the colonel said, his fists clenching at his sides. “It appears our entire mission is going to be plagued by him, if we don’t do something about it.”

“Get me out of here, I’ll do something about it, Colonel,” said Skimmer. “You can count on that.”

“Yes, and that’s the same thing Strap and Bloody Vlak said,” the colonel replied. “They’re still trying to catch up to us after he took their horses out from under them and left them afoot.”

“There’s no cause to compare me to them two, Colonel,” said Skimmer. “What happened to me could’ve happened to anybody. Besides, I was mindful of how it would look on our posse, me burning down a couple of lawmen right in the street.” He gave the colonel a dark look. “If you don’t think I could’ve handled them both, you had no business ever hiring me.”

The colonel shook the barred door with both hands, then called out to the posse men milling about the sheriff’s office, “Where is that blasted cell key, Woolard?”

“I don’t know, Colonel, we’re all looking,” Woolard called back to him. His defense of the sheriff had changed now that he’d found himself surrounded by railroad detectives. “Gale is going to get a piece of my mind over this!”

Turning back to Skimmer, Elgin finally answered him, saying bluntly, “I hired you to get a job done. You won’t get it done from inside a jail cell.” He considered things, then said, “As for the ranger, I have yet to meet him face-to-face. Once I do, we might just find out that for a price he’ll willingly shake the stone from my boot and get the hell out of our way.”

“He ain’t that kind of lawman, Colonel,” Skimmer warned. “The only way he’ll get out of our way is for us to kill him.”

“We’ll see.” Elgin shook the cell door again in frustration. “Where’s that key, blast it!” he bellowed out to the posse men as they continued ransacking the sheriff’s office.

“We’re looking for it, Colonel,” Pale Lee shouted in reply.

Sheriff Gale stepped in through the open doorway, a cloth-covered basket in his hand. He looked all around at the posse men, then at Woolard, who had gotten down on his hands and knees to look up under the desktop. “I can save all of you some time,” Gale said quietly, a shotgun hanging over the crook of his arm. “You won’t find a key in here anywhere. I hid it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.