Slattery's Range by Richard Wormser

Author:Richard Wormser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2019-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Cyanide was quiet; it didn’t take a practiced lawman to see that the natural wildness of the mining camp was missing. Off-shift muckers and wagon drivers stood around the main street, their shoulders polishing the scaly paint of the stores and deadfalls; the saloons were open, but their batwing doors seldom fluttered.

Wade Lane passed the sheriff chatting with a group of men, waved, and rode around the office to put his horse in the county shed. He spread his blankets on the low roof, cocking an eye to the southwest against rain, and when he came around to the street again, Larry Graves was just letting himself into the office.

From back in the cells somebody was making a hooraw, and Sheriff Graves yelled: “Shut up,” before putting out his hand for Wade Lane to shake.

“What’s that?” Wade Lane asked.

Graves chuckled. “Full house,” he said. “Breaking and entering, drunk and disorderly. Two men to a cell.”

“Sounds like you’d had a lively time.”

“Sounds like, but wasn’t. First they broke, then they entered, then they drank, and they didn’t get disorderly till they woke up in their cells. All one gang eight of ’em. They got tired of waitin’ for payday, they didn’t have jawbone at the saloons, so they tried the back window of The Pisco Punch. Worked, too.”

Wade Lane said: “How long since there was a payday?”

“Since you brought that coach in. Nobody’s tried it, all the time you’ve been scouting The Breaks. Find anything?”

“I’ve got our man, Sheriff.”

Larry Graves let his face break into a long slow smile. His usual air of slight sadness went away; he couldn’t have looked happier if he’d heard that the grizzlies had come back into the country.

He said: “Come give me a hand. We’ll heave those bums back there into a horse trough, and call their sentences off. You’ll want all the cells, no doubt.”

Wade Lane said: “I know who our man is. But how he does it and with whom—I haven’t figured out yet. He calls himself Slattery up in The Breaks, and Dale Shattuck when he comes into Cyanide. It’s his house I’m living in.”

“Yeah, Shattuck,” the Sheriff said. “I can’t say I’m surprised. There’s a dozen or more men in town without any way you can see of making a living; he’s one of ’em. But—I dunno. How far can a sheriff go in looking into people who haven’t done anything?”

Pretty far, Wade Lane thought. But this sheriff was old and tired; he might as well be the night marshal riding law and order on the streets, for all the good he did the county. Still...

“Listen to this,” Wade said, and told him what had happened up in The Breaks.

When he finished, Larry Graves leaned back in his chair. “You don’t know any more than I do,” he said. “This man says he has a gold mine. Can you prove he ain’t?”

Wade Lane said: “You don’t think it’s funny he showed up just when the boy was shot?”

“I’d say it was lucky for the boy,” Larry Graves said.

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