Hardcase

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Hardcase

Luke Short

I

Yellow Jacket's post office was a rack of pigeonholes in the front corner of Badey's Emporium. Around eleven o'clock each morning after the mail stage from Sabinal got in the loafers lounged on the dry-goods counter while old man Badey sorted out the mail.

This morning the procedure was no different than usual. In the drift of idle talk and low laughter from beyond the rack of pigeonholes old Badey squinted through his bifocals at the topmost letter of a stack he held in his left hand, and with his right hand he deliberately placed it in its correct box. Fred Curtis, the clerk, was taking care of the trade beyond the post office.

Nobody saw old Badey when it happened. He had just read the address of a letter and had his hand halfway to the general-delivery cubbyhole when his hand paused. And then as the name he had read sank into his consciousness he dropped the letter like he would have dropped a hot iron. Gingerly he picked it up again and read: “Mr. Dave Coyle, General Delivery, Yellow Jacket, New Mexico Territory. Hold till Sept. 1, and return.”

Old Badey's panic was immediate and complete. The first thing he did was natural enough. He poked his head out of the wicket and surveyed the loafers in the store. He knew them all, men, and women, and children, and still he was uneasy. The second thing he did was explainable; he looked at the feed-mill calendar on the wall behind him, and it said August 31. The third thing he did was pure instinct. He called up to the clerk, “Finish sortin' this mail, Fred,” and left the store, taking the letter with him.

Across the wide and dusty street, wedged in between two wooden-awninged buildings, was the sheriff's office, and old Badey made for it. He tramped into the small office to find Sheriff Harvey Beal, his feet cocked up on the roll-top desk, in conversation with his deputy, Ernie See.

Old Badey put the letter on the desk and said hoarsely, “Take a look, Harve.”

Beal was a bland-faced, heavy-set man whose wide and innocent blue eyes were trusting and affable. He was also a slow-moving man, but now, because he read the excitement in old Badey's face, he moved with alacrity. He picked up the letter, read the address, and came out of his chair like he'd been kicked out.

“Where'd you get this?” he demanded swiftly.

Old Badey, besides being testy, was scared, too, and he said truculently, “It's got a stamp on it, ain't it? I didn't print it. It come in the mail.”

Ernie See reached over and took the letter from the sheriff's hand. Ernie was a slow reader, but it didn't take him long to read this name, because it was familiar enough to him. He dropped the letter and said, “Wow!” and looked blankly at the sheriff, his young face surprised.

Beal said, “Did you look at the crowd in the store?” Without waiting for an answer he went to the door and looked swiftly up and down the tie rails on both sides of the street, then closed the door.

Badey said, “I knowed everyone in the store.”

“Ernie,” Beal said swiftly, “you go camp on Badey's counter till I get this fixed up.”

“Not me,” Ernie said slowly. “Hunh-unh. I got a three-day vacation comin', Harve. I'm takin' it—startin' now.”

Beal eyed him with deceptive mildness. “You're a deputy of this county.”

“That's right. A live one,” Ernie said. “I aim to stay alive too.”

Beal stepped over to the desk and pulled out a lower drawer and rummaged in it. He was a somewhat ridiculous figure to a stranger, a fat and rotund and polite man in outsize pants, half boots that were run over at the heels, and a buttonless black vest over a too-small calico shirt. But a careful man might consider this: Beal's hands were soft and uncalloused, which argued he had done no manual work in a long time. Which argued he had been sheriff for a long time. Which argued, since Yellow Jacket was a cattle county with a reasonably high homicide rate, that he and his office managed to take care of any trouble that came up. And since he seemed anything but a scrapper, a careful man might consider the deputy. He would have been right, too, for Ernie See was the sheriff's office.

Beal found what he was looking for and laid it on his desk and looked at his deputy. “Read it,” he said.

“I read it,” Ernie said stubbornly. “Hell, I know it by heart. Seven thousand dollars, alive or dead, for Dave Coyle.”

Beal wheeled to face old Badey. “You read it.”

“I got one in the post office,” Badey said sourly.

“Well, divide it by three and see what each of us'll make,” Beal said.

Old Badey looked carefully at him and said, “Harve, I'm goin' to be sick tomorrow, sick in bed. I'm already sick now.”

Beal looked from Badey to Ernie and back to Badey. “One of you on vacation and one of you sick,” he murmured scornfully. “Where's all the men in this town?”

“I know where they will be when you tell 'em,” Ernie said. “They'll be out of town.”

“He ain't so tough,” Beal countered.

“If I was you I'd whisper that,” Ernie said dryly.

“He's little. He's a runt,” Beal said.

“A stick of dynamite's only eight inches high,” Badey said. “He's over five feet, and the same stuff.”

“But he's a kid—just a tough kid,” Beal insisted. “You afraid of a kid?”

Ernie said dryly, “Don't look at me. I didn't print that reward notice. It's the U.S. commissioner that's afraid of him. Me, I just don't aim to bust up a three-day fishin' trip to meet him.”

Beal said grimly, “All right, Ernie. But make your trip longer than three days. Make it three months. Make it three years. Why not? Because you don't have to get back to work.”

“I'll get back to work,” Ernie retorted. “I've got a date here for September second.”

“Not here.”

“No, I'll call at your house.”

Beal looked blank. “Why?”

“That's where a funeral usually starts, ain't it?” Ernie said. He waved his hand at Sheriff Beal, grinned, and stepped out onto the walk. Badey started after him, and Beal said, “Wait a minute, Badey. I'll go with you.”

“No, you won't,” Badey said. “I sleep in a single bed, and that's where I'm goin'.”

Sheriff Beal settled down into his chair and watched Badey leave. He didn't feel exactly cheerful himself, and he looked around to see if the door was closed. There was a kind of hot and greedy urgency within him, but he knew this would take a little thinking out. As long as the letter, the bait, was in his possession, Dave Coyle couldn't get it. He put the letter in his pocket, just to make sure, and then considered.

Was it a fake? He didn't know, but it seemed as if Dave Coyle had told somebody he'd drop in at Yellow Jacket before September 1 to get his mail. That was the way Dave Coyle did things—like the time he'd gone into the Governor's mansion the night of the inaugural ball and picked the blossom from a century plant of the Governor's wife to wear in his buttonhole during the dance. He'd do anything that took gall, preferred to do it that way, and somehow this letter business seemed typical.

Beal pictured seven thousand dollars in gold. That was a lot of money. For ten dollars apiece he could get twenty men to watch Badey's store day and night, and when Dave Coyle called for his letter it would be like shooting a clay pigeon.

Sheriff Beal thought of something then. He remembered the return notation on the envelope. He pulled it out and looked at the back of it, where the return address was given.

“Return to Box 73, Wagon Mound.”

Sheriff Beal grinned faintly then. The return was wrong. It should have read, “Return the box to Wagon Mound,” the box, of course, meaning the coffin. He went out, then, to start gathering recruits.

Just after dark that night a man rode up to the outskirts of Yellow Jacket and dismounted in the deep shade of a cottonwood tree that overhung the south road. He stretched with the smooth clean movements of a cat, then set about a job that came easily to him. He knotted the reins, looped them over the horse's neck, slipped the bit, lifted the stirrups and tied them together with a piece of string over the pommel, and let out the cinch an inch or so.

Afterward he walked away, for this wasn't his own horse he'd been riding. He didn't like to own a horse, hadn't owned one for years, and didn't intend to. It was a borrowed horse, which he had taken in the last town. When he got ready to leave here he would borrow a fresh one.

He scuffed along silently in the dust of the road, a slight and shadowy figure, and long before he reached the section of town where the stores lighted the street he paused and studied it.

To a man less concerned than himself with the appearance of things the scene looked typical enough. There was usually one store in any town that stayed open at night and whose lamps laid bright squares of light far out into the street. But it went beyond that here. There were, he noticed, lights on only one side of the street. And why weren't there horses at the tie rail in front of the store? And why weren't people moving in the street; why were they all loafing, sitting around? It all shaped up into the old familiar face of trouble, but he wanted to be sure. He vanished in an alley.

Some minutes later he again looked upon the street, this time from a position in the narrow weed-and-bottle-cluttered space between two buildings. He had already tried three similar spaces farther up the alley and had found men with rifles across their knees squatting in each of them. He already knew what to expect; all he wanted now was to make sure this brightly lighted store was also the post office. Through Badey's window he could see the mail racks, and he turned and went back to the dark alley.

A man was walking up the alley, coming toward him. The man stopped. He stopped too.