5.0
Comment(s)
39
View
39
Chapters

The Killer by Stewart Edward White

Chapter 1 No.1

I want to state right at the start that I am writing this story twenty years after it happened solely because my wife and Se?or Buck Johnson insist on it. Myself, I don't think it a good yarn. It hasn't any love story in it; and there isn't any plot. Things just happened, one thing after the other. There ought to be a yarn in it somehow, and I suppose if a fellow wanted to lie a little he could make a tail-twister out of it. Anyway, here goes; and if you don't like it, you know you can quit at any stage of the game.

It happened when I was a kid and didn't know any better than to do such things. They dared me to go up to Hooper's ranch and stay all night; and as I had no information on either the ranch or its owner, I saddled up and went. It was only twelve miles from our Box Springs ranch-a nice easy ride. I should explain that heretofore I had ridden the Gila end of our range, which is so far away that only vague rumours of Hooper had ever reached me at all. He was reputed a tough old devil with horrid habits; but that meant little to me. The tougher and horrider they came, the better they suited me-so I thought. Just to make everything entirely clear I will add that this was in the year of 1897 and the Soda Springs valley in Arizona.

By these two facts you old timers will gather the setting of my tale. Indian days over; "nester" days with frame houses and vegetable patches not yet here. Still a few guns packed for business purposes; Mexican border handy; no railroad in to Tombstone yet; cattle rustlers lingering in the Galiuros; train hold-ups and homicide yet prevalent but frowned upon; favourite tipple whiskey toddy with sugar; but the old fortified ranches all gone; longhorns crowded out by shorthorn blaze-head Herefords or near-Herefords; some indignation against Alfred Henry Lewis's Wolfville as a base libel; and, also but, no gasoline wagons or pumps, no white collars, no tourists pervading the desert, and the Injins still wearing blankets and overalls at their reservations instead of bead work on the railway platforms when the Overland goes through. In other words, we were wild and wooly, but sincerely didn't know it.

While I was saddling up to go take my dare, old Jed Parker came and leaned himself up against the snubbing post of the corral. He watched me for a while, and I kept quiet, knowing well enough that he had something to say.

"Know Hooper?" he asked.

"I've seen him driving by," said I.

I had: a little humped, insignificant figure with close-cropped white hair beneath a huge hat. He drove all hunched up. His buckboard was a rattletrap, old, insulting challenge to every little stone in the road; but there was nothing the matter with the horses or their harness. We never held much with grooming in Arizona, but these beasts shone like bronze. Good sizeable horses, clean built-well, I better not get started talking horse! They're the reason I had never really sized up the old man the few times I'd passed him.

"Well, he's a tough bird," said Jed.

"Looks like a harmless old cuss-but mean," says I.

"About this trip," said Jed, after I'd saddled and coiled my rope-"don't, and say you did."

I didn't answer this, but led my horse to the gate.

"Well, don't say as how I didn't tell you all about it," said Jed, going back to the bunk house.

Miserable old coot! I suppose he thought he had told me all about it! Jed was always too loquacious!

But I hadn't racked along more than two miles before a man cantered up who was perfectly able to express himself. He was one of our outfit and was known as Windy Bill. Nuff said!

"Hear you're goin' up to stay the night at Hooper's," said he. "Know Hooper?"

"No, I don't," said I, "are you another of these Sunbirds with glad news?"

"Know about Hooper's boomerang?"

"Boomerang!" I replied, "what's that?"

"That's what they call it. You know how of course we all let each other's strays water at our troughs in this country, and send 'em back to their own range at round up."

"Brother, you interest me," said I, "and would you mind informing me further how you tell the dear little cows apart?"

"Well, old Hooper don't, that's all," went on Windy, without paying me any attention. "He built him a chute leading to the water corrals, and half way down the chute he built a gate that would swing across it and open a hole into a dry corral. And he had a high platform with a handle that ran the gate. When any cattle but those of his own brands came along, he had a man swing the gate and they landed up into the dry corral. By and by he let them out on the range again."

"Without water?"

"Sure! And of course back they came into the chute. And so on. Till they died, or we came along and drove them back home."

"Windy," said I, "you're stuffing me full of tacks."

"I've seen little calves lyin' in heaps against the fence like drifts of tumbleweed," said Windy, soberly; and then added, without apparent passion, "The old--!"

Looking at Windy's face, I knew these words for truth.

"He's a bad hombre," resumed Windy Bill after a moment. "He never does no actual killing himself, but he's got a bad lot of oilers[A] there, especially an old one named Andreas and another one called Ramon, and all he has to do is to lift one eye at a man he don't like and that man is as good as dead-one time or another."

This was going it pretty strong, and I grinned at Windy Bill.

"All right," said Windy, "I'm just telling you."

"Well, what's the matter with you fellows down here?" I challenged. "How is it he's lasted so long? Why hasn't someone shot him? Are you all afraid of him or his Mexicans?"

"No, it ain't that, exactly. I don't know. He drives by all alone, and he don't pack no gun ever, and he's sort of runty-and-I do'no why he ain't been shot, but he ain't. And if I was you, I'd stick home."

Windy amused but did not greatly persuade me. By this time I was fairly conversant with the cowboy's sense of humour. Nothing would have tickled them more than to bluff me out of a harmless excursion by means of scareful tales. Shortly Windy Bill turned off to examine a distant bunch of cattle; and so I rode on alone.

It was coming on toward evening. Against the eastern mountains were floating tinted mists; and the ca?ons were a deep purple. The cattle were moving slowly so that here and there a nimbus of dust caught and reflected the late sunlight into gamboge yellows and mauves. The magic time was near when the fierce, implacable day-genius of the desert would fall asleep and the soft, gentle, beautiful star-eyed night-genius of the desert would arise and move softly. My pony racked along in the desert. The mass that represented Hooper's ranch drew imperceptibly nearer. I made out the green of trees and the white of walls and building.

* * *

Continue Reading

Other books by Stewart Edward White

More

You'll also like

Rising From Wreckage: Starfall's Epic Comeback

Rising From Wreckage: Starfall's Epic Comeback

Huo Wuer
4.5

Rain hammered against the asphalt as my sedan spun violently into the guardrail on the I-95. Blood trickled down my temple, stinging my eyes, while the rhythmic slap of the windshield wipers mocked my panic. Trembling, I dialed my husband, Clive. His executive assistant answered instead, his voice professional and utterly cold. "Mr. Wilson says to stop the theatrics. He said, and I quote, 'Hang up. Tell her I don’t have time for her emotional blackmail tonight.'" The line went dead while I was still trapped in the wreckage. At the hospital, I watched the news footage of Clive wrapping his jacket around his "fragile" ex-girlfriend, Angelena, shielding her from the storm I was currently bleeding in. When I returned to our penthouse, I found a prenatal ultrasound in his suit pocket, dated the day he claimed to be on a business trip. Instead of an apology, Clive met me with a sneer. He told me I was nothing but an "expensive decoration" his father bought to make him look stable. He froze my bank accounts and cut off my cards, waiting for the hunger to drive me back to his feet. I stared at the man I had loved for four years, realizing he didn't just want a wife; he wanted a prop he could switch off. He thought he could starve me into submission while he played father to another woman's child. But Clive forgot one thing. Before I was his trophy wife, I was Starfall—the legendary voice actress who vanished at the height of her fame. "I'm not jealous, Clive. I'm done." I grabbed my old microphone and walked out. I’m not just leaving him; I’m taking the lead role in the biggest saga in Hollywood—the one Angelena is desperate for. This time, the "decoration" is going to burn his world down.

The Billionaire's Cold And Bitter Betrayal

The Billionaire's Cold And Bitter Betrayal

Clara Bennett
5.0

I had just survived a private jet crash, my body a map of violet bruises and my lungs still burning from the smoke. I woke up in a sterile hospital room, gasping for my husband's name, only to realize I was completely alone. While I was bleeding in a ditch, my husband, Adam, was on the news smiling at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. When I tracked him down at the hospital's VIP wing, I didn't find a grieving husband. I found him tenderly cradling his ex-girlfriend, Casie, in his arms, his face lit with a protective warmth he had never shown me as he carried her into the maternity ward. The betrayal went deeper than I could have imagined. Adam admitted the affair started on our third anniversary-the night he claimed he was stuck in London for a merger. Back at the manor, his mother had already filled our planned nursery with pink boutique bags for Casie's "little princess." When I demanded a divorce, Adam didn't flinch. He sneered that I was "gutter trash" from a foster home and that I'd be begging on the streets within a week. To trap me, he froze my bank accounts, cancelled my flight, and even called the police to report me for "theft" of company property. I realized then that I wasn't his partner; I was a charity case he had plucked from obscurity to manage his life. To the Hortons, I was just a servant who happened to sleep in the master bedroom, a "resilient" woman meant to endure his abuse in silence while the whole world laughed at the joke that was my marriage. Adam thought stripping me of his money would make me crawl back to him. He was wrong. I walked into his executive suite during his biggest deal of the year and poured a mug of sludge over his original ten-million-dollar contracts. Then, right in front of his board and his mistress, I stripped off every designer thread he had ever paid for until I was standing in nothing but my own silk camisole. "You can keep the clothes, Adam. They're as hollow as you are." I grabbed my passport, turned my back on his billions, and walked out of that glass tower barefoot, bleeding, and finally free.

Chapters
Read Now
Download Book