Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) - Mickey Spillane (classic novels .TXT) 📗

Then in the middle of the night, he spoke in his sleep, dreaming.

One word.

“Willa,” he said.

With whom Rita suddenly had something in common, too, because she was another strong woman in tears.

CHAPTER TEN

Deputy Sheriff Jonathan P. Tulley had never been versed in the notion of three meals a day, till of late.

Back in his prospecting days, the staples of his diet had been coffee, hardtack, and jerky. And since he’d come to Trinidad two years or more ago, when he was living under the boardwalk, he’d settled for what scraps he could wangle from back of the café and the hotel restaurant.

After he got himself cleaned up and dried out, thanks to Caleb York, Tulley had got that job sweeping out and doing general chores and such at the livery stable, where blacksmith Clem Hansen shared his stew and chili beans and such like, midday, which was generally enough to keep a skinny creature like Tulley going. And did that Clem make a mean cornbread! The smoke of it cooking had darn near drowned out the manure smell.

But these here days, Tulley was a working man, with a monthly paycheck and clean clothes, and a once-a-month customer at the bathhouse behind the mayor’s barbershop, where he also got his whiskers and what growth remained on top of his skull tended to. Even got splashed with bay rum, and the barbering mayor used some kind of daubing stick on wherever Tulley got nicked.

These things the deputy settled up for out of his pay, and happy to; but other things were what Caleb York called “perquisites.” The main one of these was the three meals a day Tulley partook of, which were the cause of the small paunch he was growing that was challenging the button at the front of his store-bought britches.

The café donated his breakfast, eggs, and taters and a biscuit or sometimes oatmeal and cornbread (not as good as Clem’s, however). This privilege came because the folks running the place was paid for serving up food for the jailhouse prisoners, which San Miguel County didn’t have any of right now. Tulley would partake of that fare, in such cases. Visitors to the calaboose only et twice a day, though—coffee in the morning was all they got. Maybe some hardtack, if they had the teeth for it.

The restaurant at the hotel let Tulley have a plate of things they had left at closing, which tallied with when he started his nightly rounds. The dining room was closed and they let him sit in that fancy space all by hisself, chowing down on beef and more taters and even sometimes pie. This was fare he was used to, as he’d often sampled their menu in his under-the-boardwalk days, taking potluck out of the refuse can. The hotel folk was always nice to him back then, letting him sit on the rear stoop and just help himself. They even thanked him—said it helped keep the dogs away.

So that was breakfast and supper. And in between was lunch over to the Victory. The saloon served up free cold cuts to drinking men, also yellow cheese, rye bread, celery stalks, pretzels, peanuts, smoked herring, and dill pickles, all good and salty, to make a body good and thirsty. Now in Tulley’s case, being on the wagon as he was, “drink” only meant coffee or maybe sarsaparilla, but Miss Rita didn’t charge him nothing for either of them.

This perquisite stuff weren’t a’tall bad, he told himself.

Things were slow at the Victory, even for a weekday, as Tulley sat at one of the tables opposite the bar, tended to only by Hub Wainright currently. Just a handful of cowboys was on hand, though a good share of clerks and such on their lunch hours were tossin’ back a beer or two with their free lunch.

The deputy sat alone, just nibbling at the cold cuts and cheese, barely chomping on the celery, hardly tasting the dill pickle, even if it did make his eyes water.

Caleb York had not been in to work today.

Not yet. The desk in the office had sat empty all morning. Tulley hadn’t got worried till about ten. The sheriff often took his time coming in, particularly when they didn’t have any guests checked in to the “Hoosegow Hotel.” Like now.

For a man who didn’t talk much, Caleb York had a sociable side. He would stop in at stores and see how folks was doing, find out if any trouble were afoot. Stop by businesses like the bank and the undertaker’s, maybe stick his head in at the Enterprise newspaper, if he was irritated with the editor at the time.

But Tulley had stopped in at most of those places himself today, asking after the sheriff, and nobody said they’d seen him. And Tulley himself hadn’t seen him since yesterday afternoon, when his boss said he was riding out to see the Hammond woman.

Now, he had a way with the ladies, Caleb York did, and Tulley had heard tell the Hammond woman was a fine figure of a handsome female of the species, which could mean that was where the randy, badge-wearing so-and-so may well have spent the night.

But it wasn’t likely he’d wound up at the hotel, and his room there, because Wilson, the chinless clerk, said he hadn’t seen the sheriff, not last evening nor this morning. And the stairs were right next to the check-in desk.

Of course, Miss Willa lived out that general direction, and that was probably the answer. Several times in recent weeks, Caleb York had stayed out to the Bar-O till dawn, or anyway so Tulley figured (not wanting to pry). So probably nothing to worry about.

Probably.

Problem was, Caleb York lived an eventful kind of life, and Tulley could not stop his imagination from bucking like a bronco. Never mind the tales they told about the sheriff in his Wells Fargo days, or what they wrote about in the dime novels—that man attracted trouble like Tulley had