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Show USELESS m - cowboy joMk 7 gjj ALAN Le MAY tt.v, I THE STORY THUS FAR: Melody . Jonel and George Fury rode into Payne-m Payne-m Tllle. strangers. Melody was mistaken lor j the outlaw, Monte Jarrad. As a posse ft wal alter them Cherry, Montc's girl, "1 rushed them out of town. Melody re- turned to Payneville, where he met Lee, ' former pardner of Monte's, who drove toward the ranch with him, running Into 1 Cherry and George. They soon man. J teed to get a gun on Lee and started et for the shack where Monte hid the money from the express robbery. When fj,ey ' entered the shack they were envered by Lake Packer, the insurance arn detective. As Luke went to a window win-dow to recover It, he fell, a gun having st" been fired from the outside. CHAPTER XII all E "It's a funny thing," Luke Packer la,, jaid. "It's easy to tell when a man is lying; but it plumb fails you to jay when he's telling the truth. But that ain't any excuse. A thousand 1(t" things otter told me you was only a stalking horse. No such damn fool could be the real Monte Jarrad. But I never caught on. Until the real Monte fired from the slope." on "I suppose I've done more mean things in my life than one man can ve remember," Luke Packer said. He dt" was speaking with great difficulty lue now. "But the mean things you do lh. are brushed over and forgot. The . one thing nobody ever forgets . . . and nobody ever forgives ... is a baldheaded jackass of a blunder. . . . Not even God'll forgive that. Him least of all." Those were the last words Luke Packer ever said. He died with a strange aboriginal stoicism, without bitterness and without faith. Seemingly Seem-ingly he literally believed, as he had aid, that the death penalty, was a suitable one for a man of his occupa-tion occupa-tion to pay, for the crime of mistak- ing one man for another. Melody Jones shook out a saddle blanket, and laid It over Packer's body; then immediately forgot the whole thing, for now the outer door was pushed open from outside, and flung wide. Melody thought he glimpsed the hand that swung the door; but nobody stood in the open- Ing that gaped blackly into the night. Melody snatched his gun out in what was intended to be a lightning draw. George Fury stepped through the door, and flattened himself against the wall inside, allowing the least possible silhouette of himself in the door-frame until the door was shut. George Fury's eyebrows jumped Dow as he saw the form of Luke Packer under its blanket. He looked et it for a long time, and his face was very grim. "So now they got a corpus delicti," he said at last, hollowly. hol-lowly. "A whut?" "A dead man," George Fury amplified. am-plified. "It ain't legal to hang you on account of a dead man unless they can come up with one. Corpus delicti is some foreign way of say- Ing that soon's they got the corpus you're de-licked." "Oh." "This here is rock - bottom," George Fury said, completely without with-out hope. "Up until now we was in bad shape, but all right. Even if they hung you for Monte Jarrad, we could of proved the mistake. But what good will it do to prove who you ain't, now that you come fitted Up with a corpus delicti of your own?" Melody put away his gun. "Sometimes," "Some-times," he said, iit don't seem to me like we get the breaks." "I suppose you realize," George Fury said saltily, "there's a posse Pretty near on top of us right now?" "George," said Cherry de Longpre ' with deep gravity, "you shouldn't have done this." "Who, me? What? Done which?" "You shouldn't have shot him." "I shouldn't of what? Shot who?" "The man under that blanket is was an express company detective. detec-tive. His name was Luke Packer. He was one of the most feared Peace officers in the West; everybody every-body knows his name. There isn't single man in the whole territory who wouldn't have been a better choice for you to kill than this man." "Yes, but but " "There's going to be such a man-hunting man-hunting hullabaloo as the West has never seen before. I wouldn't give two cents for the chances of either one of you!" George Fury looked from the girl lo his partner, and back again, slowly, with the dreary disillusion of : man who witnesses an all time I low. "So now," he drawled, "you can't neither of you think of no better out than to blame the whole damn calamity ca-lamity on me." "It ain't any question of blaming nobody, George," Melody said sadly. sad-ly. i George reddened. "Why yew be- I fewzled numpus " j "I guess," Melody told Cherry, "e got him on our hands. That's how come he shot Packer." Cherry just stood there looking hleak, and stunned a little glassy-I glassy-I e.ved. The full complication of their j disaster was still soaking its way I too her mind. j "U wasn't the real George done thls," Melody said. "It was a bot-! bot-! tie 0f iiquor snot Packer, just the j same as if it capered in here and Popped him with its cork. When ! George drinks, he ain't nothing but j bottle with laigs." i "I heard you fire the shot that ! droPped him." George was pitying them now, in a weary, embittered way. "I was right outside. And when I come in, you was under the table, your six-gun smoking in your damn hand." "You mean, I shot him?" "You finally got it, son." "Why is a hole in the window, and glass on the floor, if I shot him?" Melody demanded. "You think I run outside, and shot, and sudden run back?" "I don't know nothing about that." "Why is they blood on the floor by the window, where he fell?" Melody Mel-ody insisted. "And how does the corpus get from there up on the bunk, if I'm under the table when I shoot him daid? You think the corpus cor-pus hauls off and leaps up under that blanket, when he hears you coming in?" ' This gave George pause. He grew suddenly very still as something else that was going on, beyond the range of their argument, beyond the cabin clearing, became plain to him. Cherry Cher-ry watched him. "Can you hear the posse?" she whispered. George shook his head. "Something "Some-thing else is tooken place," he said with a new bleak awe. "So that was it! I'm sorry, Melody. It wasn't you shot Packer. I should of knowed you wasn't up to nothing so practical practi-cal as that." "I don't toiler this." Melody said. George pleaded with him, "Don't try to git it through your head. We ain't got time for no such complicated com-plicated projick as that! If you want out of this, will you please, please do like I say, jest for the next few minutes?" min-utes?" "Go catch your ponies," George Fury ordered Melody. All the dead-level dead-level urgency he could put into his SMliUm He went slashing up to the door of the cabin and kicked it in. low tones was there. "Saddle 'em both, yours and Cherry's. Then git mine. He's about forty rods down the crick, in a little meadow. You can't miss catching him because he's close hobbled, and he's also short picketed." Melody stood and waited, so sure that Cherry and George were on his heels that at first he was glad to have got the saddling done before they caught up and found him unready. un-ready. By and by he sat down, his back against a boulder and one ankle on a cocked-up knee. His bullet-nick bullet-nick was hurting very interestingly now; he Idly picked pine needles out of his bloody ear, and wondered if he would lose the whole shebang. Melody Jones now got stiffly up onto his heels, and mounted Harry Henshaw. Riding Harry and leading lead-ing the other ponies, he turned back toward the adobe, on no better theory the-ory than that he had waited long enough. He approached the cabin with some caution, riding with his led ponies in places where the animals' ani-mals' unshod hoofs were least likely to clop upon stone. The three ponies po-nies moved like ghosts as he rode into the little meadow. And now a burst of outrage lifted him in his stirrup bows. The adobe was well illuminated now, as if every ev-ery candle in the place had been lighted. He stopped then and looked around him. Cherry de Longpre and George Fury were not alone. Three interlopers inter-lopers made the cabin seem packed. Their guns were in their hands; and they had so placed themselves that they could keep an eye on George Fury while their guns converged con-verged upon Melody at the door. The body of Luke Packer, however, was no c ger in the bunk. "All right, m'boy," the oldest of the three men said, "I'm Sheriff Thingan the big end of the law in Payneville. Stick your fingers in your mouth," he ordered surprisingly- "Whut?" "Stick your fingers in your mouth. Both hands." "Whut for?" "Because -I tell you to," Sheriff Thingan said, angering. "And be pert, before I let fly!" Melody looked with bewilderment at George Fury, who was staring at him ironically. "I never seed so many crazy people," Melody said; but he obeyed Sheriff Thingan and put his fingers in his mouth, all the fingers of both hands. He rolled an eye at Cherry to see if she was laughing. She was not. J Sheriff Thingan now stepped forward, for-ward, approaching Melody from one side. He pulled Melody into the room by a shoulder, and spun him around, then disarmed Melody from behind. After that he shut the door. "You can collapse now," Thingan told Melody. "Turn around, and take your feet out of your mouth, and start to talk." Melody Jones took a slow look at his captors. Sheriff Thingan was somewhat apple-cheeked, but with deep grin lines, amounting to dimples. dim-ples. He affected 'a neat white mustache, mus-tache, more cleanly trimmed than the old conventional buffalo-horn model, and curled only slightly, after af-ter the manner of the better class of Mexican border desperadoes. His hat not ten gallon, but perhaps two he wore raked at a sporty angle. Sheriff Thingan had the name of being a profoundly wise, infallibly cagey old man. What Melody saw now was that this was a profoundly silly, infallibly eccentric old man. "Lucky you be," Sheriff Thingan said to Melody, "that it was me caught up with you." "Why?" Sheriff Thingan directed a genial question to his deputies. "Ain't this the little punk that's been making out to be Monte Jarrad?" Thingan's number one deputy now spoke. . He was big and coarse fea- J tured, his face crudely and strongly 1 made. He had big aggressive ears, a big craggy nose and jaw; his sparse hair had once been red, but now was grayed to a sandy roan. His rough-cut grin had the expression expres-sion of a pumpkin face, and it showed yellow teeth as big as an elk's, with gaps between. And his eyes, which were a muddy blue, had about the same expression as holes blown in a roof. This man's' name was Royal Boone. "I shore don't know what you fellows fel-lows want," he grinned. "If he ain't Monte, he'll sure do In Monte's place." "You're just rope-handy," Thingan Thin-gan said, his words bumped by a chuckle. "Well, he's virtually volunteered to get hung, ain't he? Why quarrel with the guy?" The second deputy, Mormon Stocker, was a swarthy, beery little man with a broken nose. He had a habit of carrying his chin on his chest, which set his mouth in a line of disgust, and gave a peculiar look to his eyes, which were buttony, and had circular lines about them above and below, like the eyes of an owl. He switched these owl eyes upon Melody through a moment of dark depression. "Nump," he said. "I suppose," Royal Boone said with sarcasm that killed himself, "you aim to fight it out with the Cotton boys to see that they don't hang him." "I do like hell," said Sheriff Thingan. Thin-gan. Cherry de Longpre began to speak rapidly, In a low monotone. "Why don't you let him go? What kind of murderers are you? Give him a chance to run for his life!" She .looked gray faced and desperately tired, but to Melody she had never looked prettier in her life. "This fool kid has nothing to do with anything. any-thing. Let the Cottons catch him for themselves!" Mormon Stocker said with deep dejection, "Let the kid slope." Royal Boone looked at him blankly. blank-ly. "Have you gone out of your head?" Sheriff Roddy Thingan looked at Cherry de Longpre with all kinds of benevolence. "Crime doesn't pay," he told her. "How come you got your foot stuck through the fence like this? I swear, I'm goin' to stop this corrupting American womanhood woman-hood around here if I have to hang fellers right and left!" "Listen you old fool," said George Fury, "don't it never occur to you that you won't never find out where the loot went to, if you let this punk git hung?" "How's that again?" "Who do you think is going to tell you where that strongbox is," George Fury asked him, "once this punk is dead? Monte Jarrad? You don't even know Monte Jarrad is alive! " "Do you," Sheriff Thingan asked Melody cynically, "know what Monte done with that express box?" "Yes," Melody said. "I want you to get it through your haid," Melody said, "that I ain't Monte Jarrad. If I show you where the money is, I want you should turn me free. And mv gal with me, too!" It was only later that Melody found that George Fury's knees had sagged under him, just here. Sheriff Roddy Thingan was ready to deal, and deal quickly. "I know you ain't Monte Jarrad," he said. "It's only the Cottons that get excited, ex-cited, as a general thing. The first minute I get my hands on that express ex-press box, you're free to high-tail In all the directions you want." (TO BE CONTINUED) |