The Killing Art by George G. Gilman

Author:George G. Gilman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction, Genre Fiction, Westerns, Action & Adventure, Literature & Fiction
Publisher: Lobo Publications
Published: 2014-05-19T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

THE train pulled into the adobe and frame town of Santa Fe as the first light of dawn was drawing the darkness from the eastern sky. A fine rain was falling, but the bitter cold of the high desert country night had diminished.

It wasn’t much of a town, but it was the largest the train had stopped at on the long trip through the night, and the railroad company had its main office there, behind the depot on Main Street. The manager was standing under the office porch, sheltering from the rain, his glowering eyes switching from his watch to the noisy locomotive as the train squealed to a halt. Then he reached back into the doorway, grabbed a yellow slicker and hung it around his shoulders to dash through the rain and climb up onto the boarding.

‘You’re thirty minutes late!’ he yelled up at the locomotive crew.

The train had only the one engine now, the other having been uncoupled at Perry Springs where the spur to Friday Wells started.

‘Weren’t their fault, Mr. Jansen,’ the conductor explained as he hurried to climb down onto the boarding and reach the shelter of the depot awning. ‘Had trouble with some passengers.’

Santa Fe was the end of the line and, along the length of the train, passengers made haste to leave the cars, anxious to feel the solid ground beneath their feet after so many hours of being swayed and jolted by every motion of the clattering cars.

Jansen was a man in his late thirties. Tall and broad, but weak and soft because of his desk-bound job. When his anger was replaced by anxiety, every trace of character went out of his regular features.

‘Trouble? What kind of trouble?’

‘This kind, feller,’ Steele put in before the conductor could reply. He had stepped down from the first day car, Colt Hartford canted to his shoulder. A sideways jerk of his head encouraged Whitfield, Burke and Hart to follow him out into the rain.

Jansen eyed the passing passengers, his anxiety mounting as he saw the expressions of distress, disgust and irritation underlying their weariness. ‘Come inside!’ he said suddenly, pushing open a door and stepping into the depot ticket office.

The conductor went in hard on the manager’s heels.

‘You heard the feller,’ Steele told his three charges.

As they entered the office, where the ticket seller was in process of stoking the fire in a pot-bellied stove, the conductor was already started on a fast-spoken account of the gunfight and hold-up in the mountains. Steele leaned against the wall just inside the door and listened. When the story was finished, Jansen swept his gaze over the faces of the three miserable-looking cowboys and the nonchalant Virginian. The manager was still wearing his anxious frown.

‘Any denials?’ he asked after a long pause in which it seemed he did not know what to say.

‘He told it the way it was, feller,’ Steele replied. ‘All I want to know from you is where I collect the reward for bringing m three hold-up men.

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