Blood at Sunset (A Sam Spur Western

  Once again, the deadly trio – Sam Spur, Cusie Ben and the Cimarron Kid – ride the death trail, reluctant upholders of the law, bringing their own kind of violent justice to a wild land.

  Sam Spur found guilty of murder by a power-hungry sheriff, waiting for the noose. Throw in a couple of beautiful women, a bloody manhunt in the hills of Arizona, a United States marshal murdered in cold blood, Spur, Ben and the Kid cornered by a posse without a bullet between them, and you have the perfect recipe for ... Blood at Sunset.

  BLOOD AT SUNSET

  SPUR 7

  By Cy James

  First published by Panther Books in 1970

  Copyright © 1970, 2016 by P. C. Watts

  First Smashwords Edition: March 2016

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

  Chapter One

  When Sam Spur reached Sunset he and his horse were tired, but he didn’t have any time to waste so he dismounted and hitched outside the saloon without seeking the livery. Sunset wasn’t anything special, in fact it was about the most unspecial town he had ever been in. It consisted of one street bordered by several saloons, a handful of stores and a few houses. It didn’t rate a church or a lawman’s office.

  The saloon he stopped at was called simply Ranhan’s. When he entered it showed itself to be a typical frontier establishment. It was there for the consumption of hard liquor and nothing more. Which meant it was small, it didn’t boast tables or chairs and the bar was a plank laid across two barrels. The liquor was snake juice and the snake must have been a poor specimen. There were six men present and that included the unwashed unshaven and unappetizing man behind the bar.

  When Spur greeted the company as was the custom, the answers he received were surly, short and left him in no doubt that around here a stranger was an object of suspicion. He didn’t let the fact throw him.

  When he asked for Rube Daley, they looked at each other and stared back at him. When he grew insistent, one fellow with a knife scar down the side of his face and an eye that seemed permanently closed in a grotesque wink admitted that he knew Rube. Spur bought a drink and probed gently. After ten minutes, he learned that if he rode on through the town and headed into the hills, branching left when he came to the rock shaped like an Indian’s head and then followed his nose, if he didn’t get lost, he would eventually find Rube Daley’s diggings. Slightly shaken by the drink and warmed by it, though not by the welcome he had received, Spur thanked the company politely and walked out. He mounted Jenny his strawberry mare and rode on out of town, that is he rode out of the white man’s town that was composed of a mixture of adobe and lumber buildings and dropped down on to lower ground where there stood the homes of the Mexicans. Little more than a huddle of adobes with an ancient and decaying Spanish church that looked as though it had been neglected since the days the conquistadores had built it.

  Here, walking on sandaled feet through the thick dust of the street, he came on the priest.

  Spur halted his horse and greeted the holy man politely in his excellent Spanish. The priest smiled to find a gringo who spoke his language so well.

  The priest confirmed that the men in the saloon had not lied to him. They nodded, smiling, and Spur rode on into the east, left the adobes and the half-naked children behind him and rode through the muddy trickle that boasted when it called itself a creek. The land was like crinkled brown paper before him, stretching away into the dusty hills. It all looked bereft of every ounce of moisture it had ever contained. It seemed impossible that even a blade of grass could have survived.

  Above him towered the immensity of the sierra, the twisting spine of the country that ignored the limitations of national boundaries and marched down into Mexico to the south. Between Spur and the main ranges, there scrambled the lesser, but still forbidding foothills. Here, not so long before, the Apaches had reigned supreme, holding their untamed land against all comers. Whitemen paid a toll for their passage with their lives and the fives of their women and children.

  The land was wrung-out, dead. The sound of the mare’s hoofs sounded leaden in the still air. There seemed not a breath of air. Just the same, the little mare moved forward briskly as though she had not come a day’s journey already.

  An hour later, they were in the foothills. Not long after, Spur sighted the rock which could have appeared to a drunken man to be like the head of an Indian. The main trail drove ahead into the heart of the hills, the minor trail that Spur wanted swung left and took him to the north. He turned along it, climbing gently. Now, in the close heat of the hills, the mare began to heave a little. Spur wiped the sweat from his face and looked forward in anticipation to what he hoped would be the cool of the evening.

  Dusk was closing in when he sighted the trees and saw for the first time in several days the glitter of clear water. He had never experienced such a welcome sight. He at once turned Jenny toward it. They both drank at the crystal-clear stream and greatly refreshed, pushed on.

  Five minutes later, they sighted the diggings and the cabin. It was nearly full dusk now and Spur might have ridden on without sighting the small log construction had it not been for the brightly burning lamp.

  He climbed the rise on which the cabin stood and called: ‘Rube’, slightly puzzled that the sound of the hoofs had not brought his friend out.

  There was no reply. Nobody appeared.

  He stepped down from the saddle and let a line drag. The mare would stand.

  As he approached the cabin door, a premonition of danger hit him. The old instinct that had governed his life as an outlaw came flooding back, fresh as the day it was born. Strange, the way the past could reassert itself. His right hand drew the Colt’s gun from leather, his thumb rested on the hammer.

  The door was ajar.

  The interior of the cabin was a dark maw cut across by a single beam of light.

  Spur flung the door wide to guard against the possibility of a man being behind it, then jumped forward.

  The place was neat and tidy – chair and table in place, bunk neatly made up. The lamp was on the floor to the left. Something was wrong all right.

  Spur took two paces to the left and saw the two booted feet. He lifted his eyes. The man lay on his face, head and shoulders in shadow. Just the same, he didn’t have to be told that this was Rube Daley.

  He picked up the lamp and took a good look. Rube had been shot through the back of the head and was very dead. His brains were on the hard-packed earth floor and the wall beyond. He had been shot at close range. Spur had seen dead men before a-plenty, but just the same his stomach heaved a little. Rube looked a real mess.

  Spur put his gun away and turned his friend on to his back. The gray eyes were open and he closed them gently with the tips of his fingers. The face belonged to a man who had lived hard, the skin wrinkled and dried with years of wind and sun. The stubble on the chin was dark and shot through with white. A man no longer young, but still strong and vigorous.

  Rube had been a loner. A good friend, a good drinking companion and one who liked a woman now and then, but a loner just the same. A gold-seeker, a man dedicated to the search for the yello
w metal like a man who gave his life to the search for truth. A man content with his own company, who did not fear the barrenness of his own mind, because his mind was rich. In his way a good man. He never welched, he didn’t lie and fear was a stranger to him. He had gone his own way and asked only that other men should go theirs.

  And he had sent for Spur.

  Why?

  The letter hadn’t come to Spur in Crewsville through the regular mail, but had been brought by a young Mexican mounted on a ganted down bay pony. What had been the boy’s name? Spur sought back through his memory ... Pepe something. Pepe Rodriguez. That was it.

  Carrying the lamp, Spur looked over the cabin. He found nothing that would arouse his curiosity. Maybe, in the daylight he would find something that would tell him what had happened here.

  When a gold-seeker was killed, it was usually for gold. Spur found no sign of gold in the place.

  He started thinking.

  He had arrived here as dusk was falling. The lamp was lit. If Rube had lit it that meant that he had been alive only a short while before. Spur inspected the dead man again. The blood was dry. So Rube had been killed a fair time ago. Certainly Spur had heard no shot. So the killer had lit the lamp.

  Where did this get Spur?

  Precisely nowhere, except that the murderer was most likely miles away by now.

  He sat down on the one chair in the place and mulled over the few facts he possessed and didn’t get any further. His mind drifted over Rube and probed through the few facts he knew about the man. Sure, the man had been a good friend, but that didn’t mean he knew much about him. You either liked a man or you didn’t, it didn’t mean you knew all about him. In this country, you didn’t ask personal questions. If a man wanted you to know the facts about him he told you. If he didn’t, you left them alone. It had been like that with Rube.

  Spur found that he was depressed. A man who had done no harm to anybody was dead,

  Food for thought.

  If he didn’t know anything about Rube, how did Spur know he had never done any man harm? Maybe an enemy. What man lived who didn’t boast an enemy?

  He heard a faint sound behind him.

  His mind dragged itself away from his thoughts into the present. A sudden chill ran through him and his right hand slapped down on to the butt of the Colt’s gun at his hip.

  Something hard struck him on the base of the skull.

  He felt his face strike the table. His gun hit the edge of the table and dropped to the ground. Desperately, he pulled himself off the table and groped for the gun. Another blow on the head drove him to his knees. His understanding of the world was shattered violently. He fought unconsciousness that came sweeping over him like a scarlet cloak. Something struck him in the face, hard. He heard a hoarse cry and floundered on his back, still fighting to keep his senses, knowing that he was on the edge of death.

  His limbs refused to obey him. His will soared up through his utter helplessness and he lost his grasp upon it.

  He heard a voice vaguely –

  ‘Goddammit, you killed him.’

  He was dropping at a terrifying speed into a bottomless pit.

  He lost consciousness.

  Chapter Two

  It was night.

  The lamp still burned. He learned that when the light hit his eyes in searing agony.

  He lay there assessing himself.

  His skull felt as if it had been shattered. His brains felt as if they were agonized pulp. His belly was filled with cold clay that heaved and his limbs were made of limp damp cotton. He fought for a long time and got himself on to his knees and started retching. After a while he managed to get himself on to the chair. He heard himself groan.

  He looked across the room and saw that Rube’s body lay where he had left it.

  Something teased his nostrils – a familiar smell. After considering it for some time, he knew that he could smell burned gunpowder. A gun had been fired in here recently.

  He tried to remember exactly what had happened to him. He had been sitting here in this very chair and somebody had hit him from behind. More than once. Then that somebody had kicked him in the face. Nice. Only the pain in his head outdid the pain of his face. His left cheekbone felt as if it had been crushed.

  He tried standing up and the retching started again. He cursed himself weakly and emptied the contents of his stomach on the floor. The great Sam Spur was reduced to practically nothing. Some of the men who feared him should see him now. That would give them a good laugh.

  He found a bucket of water in a corner and washed his face. That made him feel a little better, but not much. He needed some fresh air. He staggered to the door and stood outside the cabin gulping air hungrily into his starved lungs. That improved him a little.

  So whoever had killed Rube had not finished his business in the cabin. Spur’s arrival had interrupted him and he had slugged Spur so that he could complete it. Spur hoped that the business was completed now.

  It wasn’t, as he knew in the next second.

  A voice said -

  ‘Hold it right there, mister.’

  A gun came to full cock at close quarters.

  Spur froze.

  Another voice said: ‘Lift your hands.’

  Spur lifted them, high. A man didn’t want any misunderstanding at a time like this.

  Men were coming out of the gloom. Several of them, surrounding him like dark wraiths. He counted five, but he could have been wrong.

  One man said, ‘Git inside.’

  He was turned by strong hands and pushed inside the cabin. He was so weak that the push nearly put him on his face. He stood by the table and looked at the men by the light of the lamp.

  Just ordinary men, nothing unusual about them. The kind of men one would expect to find in a country like this. All of them armed. Their faces were cast with strong shadows in the lamplight, exaggerating their characteristics.

  One man crossed the room and looked down at Rube.

  ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘The bastard killed poor ole Rube. Shot him from behind through the back of the head.’

  He came back and looked at Spur. He was a tall man with a fine black beard, neatly trimmed. His clothes were a little better than the others, his boots were almost clean. He wore a neck-tie and he hadn’t worn his shirt more than a day. His eyes were a cold blue and they were intelligent. The nose was aquiline and gave the face some force. Half-hidden by his coat and fastened to the vest beneath there faintly glittered a badge. A lawman.

  ‘What’s your name, friend?’ he asked in a level voice.

  ‘Sam Spur,’ said Spur.

  The man stared at him for a long time.

  Spur added: ‘I’m a Deputy United States Marshal.’

  A man said: ‘Christ.’

  The man with the black beard said: ‘This makes things interestin’. I never arrested a federal officer before.’

  He reached forward and drew Spur’s gun from its holster. He checked the loads and smelled the barrel.

  ‘One shot fired,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t fire it,’ Spur said.

  The lawman said: ‘Take note of that, men. He claims he didn’t fire the shot.’

  They stared at him. Their eyes called him a liar. He knew it wouldn’t do him any good to say more He could tell from their faces that they had him hanged already.

  ‘Why’d you kill ole Rube?’ the lawman asked.

  Spur thought: This must be Gaylor, the county sheriff. He had never met him, but he had heard about him.

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ he said.

  ‘You asked for him in town,’ Gaylor said. ‘You came up here an’ killed him.’

  ‘You have it your way an’ I’ll have it mine,’ Spur said.

  ‘Any sass from you,’ the sheriff said, ‘an’ you’ll be pickin’ the teeth outa your throat. Sure, I’ll have it my way. Your way don’t carry too much weight. Not anymore.’

  Spur said: ‘Do we stand here all day jawin’?’ He
wanted to lie down and sleep. Nothing else mattered right now. For a moment, Spur thought Gaylor would knock his teeth in as he threatened, but the man didn’t. He said: ‘Git him on his horse.’ They pushed Spur outside and the sheriff laughed and said: ‘Fancy now – we just took the great Sam Spur. Folks’re sure goin’ to talk about this here for a mighty long time to come.’

  Spur thought the same thing.

  Somebody led up the mare and he stepped into the saddle. The world turned over a couple of times, then became fairly steady. There were tom-toms going in his head and every beat was an almost unbearable spasm of pain.

  Men were bringing horses. Each man sought out his own animal and mounted. Somebody had found Rube’s mount, a mule, and tied the dead body across it, feet one side, head the other. The load swayed grotesquely on the little animal. The horses didn’t like the smell of death and fought to get away from it. Gaylor led the way and they trotted down the trail. Every step the mare took was murder to Spur. He prayed for the journey to end quickly.

  It seemed to last an eternity, but at last they crossed the trickle of water they called a creek and walked their horses into town. The part where the Mexicans lived was still awake. He heard the soft chords of a guitar, the nasal voice of the singer singing of an undying love. They rode slowly down Main and turned right between the houses. At the rear of the buildings they halted outside an adobe with barred windows. This was something Spur had missed when he had ridden through previously. This was the calaboose.

  Somebody caught him by the arm and pulled. He didn’t have enough strength in him to resist. His legs weren’t strong enough to hold him when his feet hit dirt. He measured his length on the ground. Somebody kicked him lightly in the ribs and told him to get to his feet. He got to his feet and waited while somebody went into the calaboose and lighted a lamp. Then he was pushed toward the light.

  The calaboose was one large room. It was empty of furniture except for a bucket if that counted as furniture. There were two barred windows high up near the roof which was supported by heavy wooden beams. No doubt a man could dig his way out of here if he had something to dig with and if he had long enough without interruption.