Waiter, There's a Clue in My Soup! Five Short Mysteries

Chapter 1 -- Too Many Donkeys

  The town was full of donkeys.

  Which you’d expect since it was also full of drunken miners. Casey and I were dusty and tired as we rode into town, and so were our horses. The livery stable was full up, and though they offered us some space in the corral, that was full of donkeys too. They even offered to sell us a donkey of our very own. We said no thanks.

  We turned around and looked at the town of Newton, and didn’t see much—just a patchwork of old boomtown shacks and more respectable buildings strewn along a single street, but an old fella across the street was waving at us. He had some corral space behind his store, which used to be part of the stage stop. The railroad hadn’t come through this town yet, but the stage company was still a lot smaller than it had been. Seemed to be doing pretty good business just now though. Lotta men arriving, buying shovels and mules.

  “I thought this town was panned out,” I said to the old guy, as we led our horses around to the back of his store.

  “Yeah,” he said, giving me a sly little smile. “I thought so too.”

  Casey went on ahead, striding along with a little kick in her step so her new spurs would jingle properly. She was inordinately proud of those spurs. And me, I was inordinately pleased at the way they made her swing her hips.

  At the back of the store was a little corral that had been split into three. Two had horses in them. The third was empty. Casey scrambled up the fence and over. She kicked at the slats and checked out the ground, all business.

  “Not much room,” she said.

  “But you got it to yourselves,” he called back to her.

  “Gear?” I asked.

  He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “You can stow it inside where I can keep an eye on it, but you can only get at it while the store is open. You get me out of bed, you pay a quarter extra for the privilege.”

  I nodded and looked around, as Casey vaulted back over the fence. She checked out the hay in an open shed behind the corral.

  “Hay’s good!” she called, and she pitched a couple of armloads into the corral. Then she opened the gate and led the horses in.

  I turned to the old man, who wasn’t really so old, I guess. He was just a little bent, and had wild gray hair whisping out from in front, in back, and inside his ears. Not much on the top of his head, though. He had clear gray eyes that looked me over narrowly, and a smile on the edge of showing itself. That’s all I really remember about him. He looked at the pistols slung on my hip, and then over at Casey, who was small and young and female, and therefore even more heavily armed to make up for it.

  “If you’re looking for work from Hoonstra,” he said, “you’re in the wrong town.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “’Cause we ain’t.”

  “Think you’ll get work with Addley?”

  “You say that like it isn’t likely.”

  “It ain’t.”

  “That’s fine too.”

  Lester Addley wasn’t the sort of man we liked to work for. Not that we could be too picky. I didn’t know who Hoonstra was. A rival, maybe. Somebody else who was trying to fool people into believing there was an undiscovered strike in his town.

  I grinned at the corral man, and gave him his two dollars, which I thought was an exorbitant price for something hardly any bigger than a stall, with no shelter. But the hay was good, and our horses wouldn’t have to fight their way to it. He hardly looked at the money. He kept looking at me.

  “So what did you come up here for?”

  “Saw a road we never took before,” I said.

  “Saddle tramps.” He didn’t say it like an insult, just like he’d pegged us. He wasn’t far off. He looked at me for my reaction, and I shrugged at him.

  “I been called worse.”

  That response seemed okay by him. Maybe he’d been pushing a little to see if we were trouble, and I guess we weren’t.

  “If you need anything, just let me know,” he said.

  “For how much?” I asked.

  He smiled and just waved his hand like it wouldn’t cost us, and headed back toward the front of the store.

  We settled our horses and strolled up to the street. The sun was easing to an early dusk over the mountains, sending streaks of orange light across the town. The spring air had the donkeys and miners all stirred up and there was laughing and braying and shouting. Lot of singing, and music from the saloon. I thought I even heard a hurdy gurdy off in the distance. Casey hopped along, working to make her spurs heard in all that sound.

  “You know,” I said, “you’ve got to be careful with those things. Your horse has sensitive flanks....”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said firmly. So I didn’t. She loved that horse, although I didn’t see how she was going to manage it and the spurs both. She scowled and raised her head to look down the street. “I want a drink.”

  “You’re too young for a drink,” I said.

  “Am not.”

  She stepped off the sidewalk, and turned around to look for the saloon. I followed, pulling the money out of my pocket.

  “Come on, Case, we spent too much on stabling the horses. If we want a bed for ourselves....”

  “Not in this town!”

  I looked at her in disappointment, and then again down at the money.

  “A bed is softer than the ground,” I tried. She just looked at me like I was crazy, which I found offensive. “But it is.”

  “I ain’t sleeping in a bed with six dirty miners and lice.”

  That cleared that up. It wasn’t one dusty husband she was objecting to. I shifted my weight and tried again.

  “Maybe we could get us some privacy in the cathouse....”

  “There they’d have ten miners in a bed. And crabs!”

  I gave her a shocked look, and she ignored it because she knew it was fake.

  “You’re too young to talk like that,” I told her.

  “Am not.”

  This was how a lot of our conversations went. She was too young. She was also too small and too female to do just about any of the things she wanted to, but that didn’t stop her either. I think she was seventeen. She wouldn’t tell me her birthday, but she’d said she was sixteen a year ago, when we’d met. And she looked younger, even with all the gear she wore: a little hazel-eyed girl with a dark braid, wearing two silver pistols on a big silver gunbelt, and a big hat and spurs.

  Me, I was twenty, and looked maybe a little older, which was fortunate because nobody wanted to hire a pair of kids as gunslingers. And no outlaw was ready to respect a kid as a bounty hunter. At least not until Casey had put a couple of holes in his hat. She was good at that. A regular sharpshooter.

  I put the money back in my pocket. If it wasn’t going to buy us some privacy—and get me laid—I had no objection to drinking it down. We turned toward the saloon, but before we could take a step, we heard the sound of gunshots. It was not an unexpected sound in a town like that, but I turned to look anyway, because anybody shooting off a gun in a crowd was likely reckless at the least.

  There were half a dozen men galloping up the street. They weren’t just whooping and shooting in the air. They were aiming for windows and barrels, and one of them shot out a street lamp, spilling flaming oil down the post on which it was hung. Men and donkeys scattered out of their way.

  I stepped back, my hand over my gun. Casey was already half crouched. But even as we turned to look—before we could react—I saw one of them was taking careful aim. It wasn’t at me, but it was close enough. I started to draw as he shot, and I realized that he had been aiming at the fellow who had rented us the corral.

  The corral man fell. He was closer to Casey, so she bent down to him, while I drew and started shooting back. I missed the guy that shot him.

  Two of them slowed and turned toward me, while the rest galloped on. I pulled back behind the corner of the building. I looked at Case, but she wasn’
t there any more. I guess that meant our friend was dead. I shot one of the men who had paused to shoot at me. He twisted and fell as his buddy aimed at me, so I ducked back. The rest were already down the street, engaged in a battle with guys at the other end of the stage station.

  Casey came out of the store with her Winchester, and picked off the guy shooting at me before he saw her. Her eyes were hard and her face was still and mean. She had spent most of her childhood watching men gallop around and shoot people she knew. She cocked and aimed down the street at the men who were now milling in front of the station. I thought for a minute she was just going to start walking down the street shooting, like she was shooting paper ducks at a carnival, not caring that these ducks would shoot back. She looked at me, though, and the cold left her. She nodded toward the other side of the street were there was some cover.

  Our shots had caused some confusion among the outlaws down the road. They stopped shooting and started to look around, wheeling their horses this way and that. Casey made it to the other side of the street before they spotted her. Then somebody in the bank across the street from the station shot at them, and they all set up to shooting again, now at the bank as well as the station.

  Casey was working her way to the corner of the livery stable, which sat forward just enough to conceal her. I dashed back down the alley to go behind the store so I could come up on the other side of the station.

  The horses in the corrals milled in panic as I scrambled over each of the fences in my way, dodging hooves and horse shit. When I reached the station, I paused to glance inside. A couple of guys were huddled behind a desk, heads covered. Somebody else inside was shooting, but he was keeping so far to cover himself, that I couldn’t see it doing any good for him.

  I moved on to the corner and looked. As I expected, this was where they brought the teams in and out. It was a wide open space between the station and the next building, but there was a big trough and an iron pump. I realized my heart was thumping, and it wasn’t just from running. Not that I was scared. I didn’t feel scared at all. I generally don’t, which is stupid, but that’s me. I guess that’s how I became a gunslinger in the first place.

  I slipped up to the front, and ducked behind the watering trough and watched the four men, their horses skittering back and forth as they took aim on the guys inside. I could see some of the stage men lying dead outside, and the outlaws were pretty much in charge, but they were nervous and sweating, probably because they had lost two of their guys and weren’t sure how.

  I glanced over and saw Casey, just the edge of her, taking aim but not shooting, ready to do her job and maybe waiting for me to do mine.

  And it was my job to do the talking. Maybe that wasn’t what she had in mind, but we were supposed to be the good guys. I took a breath and jumped up from behind the trough and aimed both barrels.

  “Hold your fire!” I yelled. “In the na....”

  I didn’t get to name of the law, because two of them swung around toward me, and it wasn’t the two I was aiming at, so I let off a wild shot and dropped back down. I heard a bullet sing off the iron pump, and I heard the crack of Casey’s rifle. By the time I rolled and popped back up behind a rain barrel, the three that were left were galloping off. The horse stumbled under one of them, and he took a fall. His horse took off and he jumped up, wheeling around with his gun, but not shooting. He was scared, and I think he realized he was in trouble. He started to lower his gun, but it was too late. A shot from the bank killed him.