Gunsmoke Talk: A Walt Slade Western. Bradford Scott
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BRADFORD SCOTT
GUNSMOKE TALK
WILDSIDE PRESS
This book is fiction. No resemblance is intended between any character herein and any person, living or dead; any such resemblance is purely coincidental.
| Copyright, © 1963, by Pyramid Publications, Inc. | All Rights Reserved |
“We’re going to hit!”
Slade’s cry warned the others to brace themselves as the train bucked, then seemed to leap in the air, grinding to a halt with the cars angled crazily across the track.
From in front came a booming sound, followed by a crackle of gunfire. Bullets whizzed through the shattered windows.
“It’s a holdup!” Sheriff Serby bellowed. He and Slade hurdled the sprawled passengers in the aisle and in an instant were on the ground outside the train—facing half a dozen masked men!
Immediately the concentrated fire of the bandits’ guns was turned on Slade—with no shelter from the sizzling lead, the Ranger had only one defense against sure death—ATTACK!
GUNSMOKE TALK
1
TO THE NORTH RISE the Franklin Mountains, a range of bare, craggy peaks. To the east is an arid area that extends for hundreds of miles, broken by flat desert tablelands—austere, desolate, forbidding, a bewildering contrast to the verdant Middle Valley of the Rio Grande.
To the south and west the mountains again shoulder the valley, the Sierra Madre a drop curtain for Juarez across the river in Mexico. A mile or so west of the Texas-New Mexico Line looms the Sierra de Cristo Rey.
El Paso, the City of the Pass—and such it has been since the conquistadores passed that way nearly four centuries ago in their search for fabled treasure—lies directly under the crumbling face of Comanche Peak, spreading out fan-shaped around the foot of the mountain. City of the Mountains might well be a more fitting name for this international town, for on all sides mountains pierce the sky in breathtaking beauty.
Where Ranger Walt Slade, he whom the Mexican peons of the Rio Grande river villages named El Halcon—The Hawk—sat his tall black horse, suddenly, almost incredibly, the valley bursts on the eye like a vision of paradise viewed from hell’s mouth; fair indeed as a Garden of the Lord after the region of deserts and rugged mountains he had traversed.
“Shadow,” he said to the horse, “I’ve a notion that this valley must be what the Garden of Eden looked like to Adam when he glanced back over his shoulder.”
Shadow snorted and did not otherwise argue the point.
“But the difference between Adam and us,” Slade resumed, “is he was going out, while we are going in. When Adam departed from the garden, he left the snake behind, but from what we’ve heard there are quite a few of the two-legged descendants of that footless critter in the ‘Eden’ down there. Which really is a comparison unfair to the snakes, who don’t bother anybody so long as they are left alone.”
It was not the first time Walt Slade had viewed this marvelous transition, but for him it never lost its charm, although it did evoke memories of violence and death so out of keeping with the peaceful scene.
Comedies do not necessarily require a wide stage, nor tragedies an amphitheater, for their enactment. And ruthlessness and greed do not necessarily reflect their surroundings. The wastelands to the east would have seemed more fitting for dark deeds and the callous disregard for suffering and the sanctity of human life, but wherever men gather together is fertile ground for lawlessness and strife.
Which was why Captain Jim McNelty, the famous Commander of the Border Battalion of the Texas Rangers, dispatched his lieutenant and ace man to El Paso and the Middle Valley in answer to pleas from local law enforcement officers for help in remedying a situation with which they frankly admitted they were unable to cope.
From the elevation where Slade sat his horse, the wide reaches of the valley were spread before his eyes like a map, until they faded into the blue mystery of the horizon. Here to the east they were lonely and apparently devoid of human life—grasslands upon which grew mesquite thickets, trees and other clumps of chaparral growth.
To the west, beyond that retreating blue line of the horizon, the trail Slade rode would run past farms and orchards and vineyards, but here the empty loneliness was relieved only by occasional clumps of peacefully grazing cattle. Here, to all appearances, was a no man’s land, as devoid of human tenancy as when the dawn light of Creation glowed upon it.
No, it was not the first time Walt Slade viewed the terrain, its wild beauty in its surroundings of weird austerity. He rolled a cigarette with the slim fingers of his left hand and sat smoking and drinking in the panorama spread before his eyes.
Slade made a striking picture sitting his magnificent black horse on the crest of the rise, the late afternoon sunshine etching every line and detail. He was tall, more than six feet; the breadth of his shoulders and the depth of his chest, slimming down to a sinewy waist, matched his height. A rather wide mouth, grin-quirked at the corners, relieved somewhat the tinge of fierceness evinced by the prominent, high-bridged nose above and the powerful jaw and chin beneath. His cheeks were lean, deeply bronzed, his forehead broad. His pushed-back “J.B.” revealed crisp, thick black hair.
The sternly handsome countenance was dominated by long, black-lashed eyes of a very pale gray—cold, reckless eyes that nevertheless always seemed to have little devils of laughter lurking in their clear depths.
His dress was that of the rangeland, homely and efficient, worn with careless grace. A critical observer might well conclude that chain mail or evening dress would be worn with that same careless grace of the man who does not wear clothes that are becoming but “becomes” what he may don.
So bibless overalls, soft blue shirt with vivid neckerchief at the throat, well-scuffed half-boots of softly tanned leather and the broad-brimmed rain-shed appeared eminently fitting to the moment and the mood.
Clasping his lean waist were double cartridge belts. From these carefully worked and oiled cut-out holsters protruded the plain black butts of heavy guns. And from those protruding gun butts his slim, powerful hands seemed never far away.
Carefully pinching out his cigarette and casting it aside, Slade addressed the tall black horse with his glorious rippling mane and eyes full of fire and intelligence—
“Guess we might as well be ambling, Shadow; can’t spend all day loafing up here and admiring the scenery. About time we both put on the nosebag, too. Long time since breakfast, and not much of a breakfast, either. Maybe somebody can spare a handout for ornery El Halcon and his ornery cayuse.”
El Halcon! “The good, the just, the compassionate, the friend of the lowly!” said the Mexican peons.
El Halcon! “A blasted owlhoot too smart to get caught!” vowed quite a few folks who didn’t know the truth.
“Anyhow—blast it!—no matter what he is or what he ain’t, he’s the singingest man in the whole dadblamed Southwest, with the fastest gunhand. You take it from there!”
With Shadow traveling at a fast pace, Slade rode down the long slope to the valley floor and continued on his way. He had covered perhaps ten miles of steady going when he reached a point where the trail curved through a bristle of tall and thick brush that extended for some distance. Shadow ambled on, his master lounging comfortably in the hull, his thoughts elsewhere so far as time and place were concerned.
He was jerked back to the present and his immediate surroundings by a sound unexpected and alien to the peaceful hush of the dying day—the hard, metallic clang of a rifle shot. It was followed by two more, evenly spaced.
“Now what the devil!” he wondered. Shadow snorted and pricked his ears. Slade listened intently for more shots. He heard none, but he heard something else that steadily loudened, a low