Novel 1954 - Utah Blaine (As Jim Mayo) (v5.0) Read Free Page B

Fuller. If you get back to town alive, I’ll be inclined to believe you.”
    “Thank you, Ma’am,” he smiled at her. “I shall look forward to seeing you when you’ve decided I’m not a liar. I sure hate to have such a right pretty girl think so hard of me.”
    He turned and walked out and Ben Otten looked after him, mightily puzzled. There was a quality about him…Otten was reminded vaguely of something. For an instant there, as the man spoke and then as he turned away, Otten had seemed to smell the dust of another cowtown street, the sound of boot heels on a walk; but then the memory was gone, and he saw Mary Blake turn on him again. He braced himself to meet her anger.
    It was strangely lacking. “Who is he, Ben? Where did he come from?”
    Otten picked up the letters and stacked them together. “His credentials are in order, Mary. Joe Neal is alive. At least,” he amended, “he was alive when these papers were signed. Nobody in this world could duplicate Joe Neal’s scrawl. And those witnesses are names to swear by.”
    “But who is he?” she persisted.
    “His name is Michael Blaine. I reckon we’ll just have to wait and see who he is. Names, Mary,” he added, “don’t account for much. Not out here. It’s action that tells you who a man is. We’ll see what kind of tracks he makes.”
    “Mighty small ones after he meets Lud. I’ll bank on that.”
    Otten fumbled the papers into the envelope. That faint intangible memory was with him again. It caused him to say, “Don’t be too sure, Mary. Never judge a man until he’s showed himself. Unless I miss my guess, that man has smelled gunsmoke.”
    Gunsmoke! That was it! The day that Hickok killed Phil Coe in Abilene! That was the day. But why should it remind him of this? This man was not Hickok, and Coe was dead.
    The afternoon was blistering hot. Utah squinted his eyes against the sun and walked up the street. By now the two loafers at the livery stable would have started their story. By now all eyes would be looking at him with speculation. Yet it was unlikely that anybody in Red Creek would know him. Most of these people had been around for several years. This was a settled community and not a trail town or a wide-open mining camp. They would have heard of Utah Blaine. But there was very little chance they would guess who he was—for awhile.
    He carried his new saddlebags in his left hand and he walked up to the hotel and pushed open the door of the long lobby. The clerk turned and looked at him from under the rim of an eyeshade. Stepping up to the desk the clerk turned the register. “Twelve,” he said, “at the end of the hall upstairs.”
    Blaine pulled the register closer and wrote in a quick, sure hand,
Michael J. Blaine, El Paso, Tex
.
    The clerk glanced at it, then looked up. “Be with us long, Mr. Blaine?”
    Blaine permitted himself a smile. “There seems to be a difference of opinion on that subject. But I’ll tell you—I’ll be here a lot longer than some of them that figure otherwise.”
    He took his saddlebags and went up the steps. Inside the room he doffed his coat, placed the new six-shooter on the table beside him and proceeded to bathe and shave. As he dressed again, his thoughts returned to the girl. She was something, a real beauty. He grinned as he recalled her quick challenge and accusation. She had fire, too. Well, he liked a girl with spirit.
    Glancing from the window he saw a man come out of the saloon across the street and stare up at the hotel. Then the man started across, little puffs of dust rising from his boots. He was a tall, slightly stooped man with unusually high heels. They gave him a queer, forward-leaning movement. He paused in the street and stared up again, something sinister in his fixed scrutiny.
    Blaine turned from the window and opened the carpet bag he had brought with him. From it he took a pair of holsters and a wide gunbelt. He slung the belt around him and buckled it, then took from the bag