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ODDS - AND THE MAN · The Jailer of Souls

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  Chapter eight of The Jailer of Souls by Hamilton Craigie. This Libery Box recording
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  is in the public domain. Read by Yoganund The Jailer of Souls, Chapter
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  eight, Oughts and the man Anister had been absent from the room not longer
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  than ten racing seconds. It was unthinkable that the girl had vanished off her
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  own volition, even had it been physically possible. Glancing around the room,
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  he saw that the windows were closed and bolted. The flooring was solid,
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  substantial. There could be no ingress saved by the door through which he had
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  just come. There was another dough. It led to the next room,
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  but anist with the habit of inbred caution had tried it and found it locked.
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  Now in two swift strides, he had covered the space between had tried
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  that dough, setting his weight against it. As he turned the knob under
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  his weight, it gave outward with a sudden slatting clatter. They, whoever
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  they might be, had un locked it. It had been through this adjoining
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  room that they had taken the gull Anister. Glancing swiftly around this room saw
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  that it was obviously unoccupied. The bed had been made up there was no
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  sort of clue that he could see. The invisible assassin had had a key.
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  That was it, of course, But as to the rest of it,
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  Anister could only speculate it was an impasse and a mystery. Going downward
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  to the dining room, as it was now past noon, he glanced toward
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  the desk. But if he had had any thought of reporting the attack upon
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  the girl or her disappearance, he thought better of it. He would keep
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  his own counsel, a decision held by a sight of Lund, the hotel
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  proprietor, who lounging at the desk, raised his sleepy lidded vulture gaze that
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  Anist. As the latter was turning toward the dining room. Anister, in
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  that brief glance, thought to detect in those eyes milky peeled a wailed,
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  sodonic flicker. If behind this latest happening there was the fine Italian hand of
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  Hamilton Droke Lunn was in cahoots with the lawyer. Of that there could be
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  little doubt, For as Anester was convinced there had been a menace in those
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  eyes half turned to his an insolence, a bright, burning truculence that as
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  he turned into the long dining hall brought the swift blood to his cheek in
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  a dark tide. But at his stable another surprise awaited him. Mary Allerton
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  was gone. The heavy handed swede who served him told him that she had
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  left suddenly that morning. A message had come for her, it appeared,
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  but the substitute could tell him nothing further. Annestor let it go at that.
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  Rising from the table, he went outward to the long bar, a
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  cool, pleasant oasis, indeed, in the fierce heat of the drowsy afternoon.
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  He greeted the bart and a tall man with the white shoulders of a
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  coal man, with a smile. The man had been friendly, in fact,
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  he had been the sole friend that Annister appeared to have made since his
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  arrival and tryborne. Now the bartender leaned forward, speaking in a whisper behind
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  his hand. Watch your step, mister, Anist, he said. Anister
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  gave an almost imperceptible nod, then his shrink before him upon the stained and
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  battered mahogany. He glanced side voice along the rail, to where at the
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  far end two men stood together, eyeing him under lowered browse. To Anist,
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  it seemed that there had fallen a sudden quiet. Just prior to his
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  entrance, he had heard talk and laughter, the clink of glasses. A
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  thick targeted oath now there appeared to rise and grow attention, as if something
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  electric in the air. Anister felt it in the white face of the night
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  of the apron in the sudden silence, the rigid figures of the two men
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  at the end of the long bar behind him. A little to his left,
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  three men were seated at a table bristow sheriff of drybone, a big
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  man with a bleak, pale eye and a mouth like a straight gash above
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  a heavy chin barbered to the blood. With him were two other men whom
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  he did not know. Lund was nowhere in sight. The taller of the
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  two men standing at the bar turned and Anister recognized him as Tucson Charlie Westerwald,
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  a gunman with a dangerous record. Westerwald was wearing a high crowned of
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  white steedston. Annister marked it at the distance beneath it. The fierce hawk
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  like face turned now in his direction, the thin lips set stiffly in a
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  sullen thought. The Old West had passed. With the passing of the remoda,
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  the trail herd, the mining camps, the wide free range of the
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  long horned cattle was no more. But Drybone had not changed, save that
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  the loading pins had gone. A cow would be a curiosity, but the
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  lawless spirit of the ancient West remained southwest of the law. Indeed, Drybone
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  was a law unto itself, and now a bottom Anister felt the menace.
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  It appeared that he had walked into a trap. The judge, the sheriff.
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  What mockery of law there was? Anster knew that it would be against
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  him either way, attacking or attack. He was certain of it. As
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  Vesterbilt, moving slowly along the bar, halted when perhaps three paces distant,
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  elbow raised right and extended, claw like in a stiff, thrusting gesture of
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  bowis guns. It was a gesture of the killer, the preliminary for the
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  lightning down thrust of the stiff fingers. Anister knew that well enough. Now
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  the gunman's case, sleepy lidded like the falcon's, bowed into his His voice
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  came with a snarling violence. Mister black Steve Anister, he said, without
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  preamble, I understand you're some wizard with the canister e a bad hormbrey master
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  been a little bird done told me, And that bird was sure lock.
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  I'll tell a man, but me. His tone hard into a steely rasp.
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  I'm not thinking o such a much. It was a trap. Anister
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  knew that now, just as behind the gunman he could almost see the dark
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  face of rogue with its sneering grin the lawyer had inspired it. His automatic
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  hung in a sling under his left armpit. But even if he could beat
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  Vestibult to the drawer, he knew well enough what the wristlet would be as
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  shot in the back, sigh from the men sitting just behind, all arrest,
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  and the mockery of a trial to follow it. Either way, he
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  was done. His own eyes held the gunman' snow, glancing neither to the
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  right nor to the left. He was conscious of a movement from the three
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  men at the table. Vesterbill's companion, a short, ballic man with the
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  pale eyes of an albino at, stepped backward from the bar. Anister felt,
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  rather than saw his hand move, even as his own hand came up
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  an outward with lightning speed flames straight from his pistol with the motion. Once
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  in a generation, perhaps a man arises from the ruck, who, by
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  an uncanny dexterity of hand and eye, confounds and dazzes the common run of
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  men. As a conjuror throws his glass bowl on air swifter than I can
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  follow. So Anister, crouching sideways from the bar, threw his bullets at
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  vesterbuilt. The gunman, bending forward at the hips, crashed to the sawdust
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  in a slumping fall, as the albino, firing from the hip, whirled
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  sideways. As Anister's second bullet thrilled him through the middle. For the tenth
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  of a second, like the sudden stoppage of a cinematograph, the tableau endured.
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  Then anster whirling had covered Bristow Warey's set. The two men with him,
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  white faced, hands pressed flat upon the tabletop, stared silent as Anister
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  spoke. You saw Bristow, he said, low, and even his eyes
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  upon the cold eyes of the sheriff in a bright, steady, inquiring stare.
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  Now what about it? For a moment a little silence held. Then
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  Bristow, moistening his stiff lips, nodded his gaze upon Anister in a sudden
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  tased uncomprehending. Look all right, mister Anista, he said, heavily,
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  they came looking for it. I reckon, well, you were that quick,
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  Anister smiled, grimly, pocketing his pistol. Vesterbilt lay where he had
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  fallen a man even as he had gone for his gun, lips still twisted
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  in a sullen tot. The bow legged man, stiff fingers clutching his heavy
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  pistol, lay face downward in the sword dust. The bartender, with an
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  admiring glance at Anista, leaned forward as Bristow and the two men with him
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  went slowly out. They may try to get me for it, mister Anister,
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  he said, But I'm no man's man, well not Rooks, and
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  he can relate to that. Bristow and his friends kept out of it.
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  You noticed. Bristol will do nothing now, not yet to wile at any
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  rate. But maybe they sort of savvied me of watching to see they didn't
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  run no whizzer on you. He lifted the heavy cold where it had lain
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  hidden by the bar rail, thrusting it in its cupboard with a grin.
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  Well, sir, I aim to see that they were sitting close and quiet,
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  mister Anist, he said, thanks, old timer, said Anista,
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  I'll not forget. But as he went outward to the waning afternoon, he
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  was thinking of the rendezvous of the night, for Rooke would be there,
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  and it had been Rooke he was certain who had engineered at ambush in the
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  mansion house bar the end of chapter eight