Free Oliver Strange - Sudden Westerns 02 - Sudden(1933) by Oliver Strange Page A

an’ crawl my hump, an’ in sifts a ornery little runt like yu.”
                 Yago’s
face creased up. “I shore declared war, didn’t I?” he grinned, and then another
aspect of the affair occurred to him. “Say, Jim, yu’ll have to let me tell the
boys who yu are.”
                 “Yu
breathe a word o’ that an’ I’ll take yu to pieces an’ put yu together again all
wrong,” the foreman threatened.
                 “But
I gotta explain,” the little man protested. “Hell’s bells, Jim, they’ll laugh
the life out’n me.”
                 “Yu
can say I’m an old friend, an’ seem’ yu’ll be my segundo, I reckon they’ll let
yu off light,” Sudden conceded.
                 “Can’t
I just mention how yu stood up the posse that time an’ kept my neck out of a
noose?” Bill pleaded.
                 “Yu—can—not,”
was the decided answer. “Time yu forgot it yoreself. Yu an’ me rode the same range back in Texas, an’ so yu let me off that callin’ over yu
promised. Sabe?”
                 “Awright,”
Yago said resignedly. “Yu ain’t told me why yu come here.”
                 “For
the same reason yu did, yu of pirut. The climate down
south was gettin’ hotter an’ hotter, an’ my medical man advised a change.”
                 “Yu
ain’t on the dodge, Jim, are yu?” Bill asked anxiously. “Yu see, I heard o’ yu
from time to time.”
                 Sudden’s
face grew grim. “I’ll bet yu did—an’ nothin’ good,” he said bitterly. “Bill,
I’m shorely the baddest an’ cleverest man in the south-west; I can rob a bank
with one hand an’, at the same time, hold up a citizen two hundred miles away
with the other. I expect they are still fatherin’ felonies on me right now.”
                 Yago
nodded understandingly; he knew how it was. Though his own past had been fairly
hectic, he was credited with crimes he had not been guilty of. In the West, if
the dog got a bad name he was hanged—if they could catch him. It was Sudden who
broke the silence.
                 “D’yu
figure Luce Burdette shot young Purdie?”
                 “Nope,”
was the instant reply. “Luce ain’t like the rest of
‘em— don’t know how he come to be in Ol’ Burdette’s
litter a-tall. More likely one o’ the other boys, or some o’
that gang o’ cut-throats ridin’ for ‘em.”
                 They
had reached a point on the mountain-side where the trees thinned and became
more stunted. Far below they could see the town, a huddled, unlovely collection
of tiny boxes; a blot on the beauty of the valley with its varied green of
foliage and grass; and stretches of grey sage.
                 Behind
them rose the bare, rocky fastnesses of Old Stormy.
                 “The
C P range reaches to four-five miles out o’ town,” Yago explained. “Thunder
River is our south boundary, an’ our east line is Dark Canyon, the other side
o’ which lies the Diamond S, the marshal’s lay-out.”
                 Sudden
nodded. He was studying the salient features of the mighty panorama before him;
Battle Butte, bold and forbidding, at the far end of the valley, a fitting home
for the Burdettes, unless their reputation belied them; the craggy, broken,
jumbled country to north and south, with the black forests, stony ridges, and
deep ravines. His first impression had been correct—it was a fierce and
spacious land.
                 “Who’s
doin’ the rustlin’?” he asked abruptly.
                 “How’d
yu know ‘bout that?” Bill said. “Purdie tell yu?”
                 “It
was just a guess,” the foreman admitted. He waved at the surrounding scenery.
“The durned place was made for it.”
                 “Yu
allus was a good guesser, Jim,” Yago told