Clifford Simak - Dusty Zebra - And Other Stories

Slowly Humphrey straightened up, then stooped and opened a desk drawer. When his hand came out it held a gun.

“If you so much as open your mouth,” he told Osborne, “I’ll fill you full of this!”

Burns slouched in the doorway. “What’re we going to do with the ornery cuss,” he asked, “now that we got him?”

“Personally,” said Humphrey, “I favor hanging, but we can’t do that without due process of law. And Carson’s crooked judge would turn him loose.”

Osborne’s lips moved in his frightened face, but Humphrey twitched the gun and he did not speak.

“Better tie him up,” said Burns, “and cache him some place. Probably be a good witness against Carson and his gang. His kind always turn state evidence.”

“There’s an old shed out back,” said Humphrey. “Keep my paper stock in there.”

“Good place,” decided Burns. “We got to be careful tying him up. That one arm of his is broke surer than hell.”

The jail office was dark and Burns ducked quickly inside, slid to one side of the door, flat against the wall, and listened. There was no sound of breathing, nothing to indicate there was a second person in the room.

Probably all of them out chasing the Mexicans, Burns told himself. Probably think they are chasing me, too.

Unmoving, he stood flattened against the wall and gradually his eyes adjusted themselves to the darkness until he could make out the dimness of furniture—the battered desk, the swivel chair in front of it, the dull gleam of a spittoon at one corner of it.

Something else gleamed on the desk and Burns sucked in his breath. There they were—just where Egan had tossed them.

Swiftly, he strode across to the desk, picked up the gunbelt and the guns. He strapped the belt around him, took the guns out one by one and checked them. Still loaded, except for two empties in one that he had used back there in the hills before he made the dash for the dry wash. After he had reloaded he put them back in the holsters.

The sound of racing hoofs tensed him where he stood. Instinctively, he started for the door and then turned back. There was no time for that, he knew.

Like a trapped animal, he stood in the center of the room and probed the darkness for some way of escape. A spidery ladder in the hallway between the office and the cell-room caught his eye. A ladder! Probably leading up to an attic above the office, maybe a place for the jailer to sleep and cook his meals.

The hoof-beats were nearer now and there was more than one horse.

Burns leaped for the hallway, scrambled frantically up the ladder. A dark hole loomed above him, just wide enough for his shoulders to squeeze through. His hands clawed at the smooth boards of the floor and he hoisted himself into the attic even as the hoof beats came to an explosive halt just outside the jail.

He lay flat on the floor and listened to the tramp of heavy feet as they came into the office, heard the mumble of many voices.

A closer sound, a stealthy padding, edged into his brain and he moved swiftly, alarm growing in his mind, but even as he moved, hands came out of the darkness and closed around his throat.

Maddened by unreasoning fear, Burns fought to break away, arching his back, twisting, bucking like a locoed horse, tearing at the hands that throttled him. But the fingers held and tightened while the breath whistled in his throat and darkness churned within his brain.

From somewhere far away he heard the rasp of a striking match, a tiny, terrible sound that penetrated through the buzzing in his skull—the rattle of a lamp chimney being lifted. Then light flared in his face and even as he fought he knew that someone in the sheriff’s office had lit a lamp and the light was sifting through the attic hole.

The fingers were steel bands now that shut off even the whistle in his throat and inside his head the black ball grew and even while he still clawed feebly at the constricting fingers, the blackness exploded with a shrieking roar and was a pinwheel of light that hissed within his brain.

He felt himself pitching forward, head slamming on the floor—then, suddenly, the fingers had left his throat and there was an arm around his shoulders, lifting him into a sitting position. He gulped great breaths of air and inside his brain the pinwheel slowed down and there was a soft voice in his ear, a frightened voice.

“Take it easy, bub,” the voice said. “Just take it easy, now. I didn’t know it was you. So help me, I didn’t know.”

Words rose to Burns’ tongue, but his tongue refused to say them. He choked and gasped, gulped for air.

Bob Custer! Custer choking him, not knowing who it was. he sat up straighter and stared at the man who squatted face to face with him.

In the office below boots crunched across the floor.

A voice said sharply: “Be still, can’t you. I tell you I heard something up there in the attic.”

The sheriff’s voice rumbled back: “Ah, hell, Carson, you’re spooky, that’s all. This Burns has got you on the prod.”

“Spooky, eh,” said Carson, viciously. “Where are Burns’ guns?”

“On the desk,” the sheriff said. “Right where I left them, on the …”

His rumble trailed off and ran down. “Maybe,” the sheriff agreed, reluctantly, “you did hear something after all.”

Crouched beside the ladder hole, Burns and Custer heard the sheriff stalk into the corridor, could sense the man standing down below, staring at the hole.

His bellow came up to them. “Burns, you better come down. If you don’t we’ll plumb come up and root you out.”

Custer’s voice was sharp and crisp. “You got two of us to root out, sheriff. You better bring plenty of men along when you come to do it. Men that are ready to die!”

Boots scuffed hurriedly back along the corridor and Carson shrieked angrily: “Go on up and get them! What are you standing there for?”

“First man that does, gets it in the guts,” said Custer and although he did not speak above an ordinary tone, there was no doubt that those in the office heard him.

A gun coughed sullenly from downstairs and a bullet splintered the floor a good ten feet from the attic hole, plunked against the roof.

Burns rubbed his aching throat.

“What was you doing, messing around a jail?”

“Figured you might be in it,” Custer told him. “Ann told me you stood off the posse and when I got there I couldn’t find hide nor hair of you. Figured, then, they hadn’t killed you outright.”

“Why didn’t you bring your men?”

“Couldn’t. Got worried about things, you see, and started back alone. Met Ann on the trail.”

In the office another gun crashed and another bullet chewed its way through the attic floor.

“We sure are in one hell of a fix,” Burns said, dolefully. “Cooped up in this place. Sooner or later they’ll figure out a way to smoke us out.”

Other guns were bellowing now, bullets chunking faster and faster through the flooring.

The sheriff was bellowing. “Stop that shooting! You ain’t doing any good. You ain’t coming within a mile of them.”

Carson’s voice dripped acid at him. “Just how do you plan to get them, sheriff?”

“Starve them out,” the sheriff told him. “They can’t get out, nohow. All we got to do is just sit…”

“I have a better way,” snapped Carson. His feet moved purposefully across the floor.

“Hey,” the sheriff yelled, “you can’t do that. You’ll burn down the place.”

“Sure,” said Carson. “That’s exactly what I mean to do.”

The light that sifted up through the attic hole danced weirdly as Carson lifted the lamp, poised it for the throw.