Pistols For Nobody, page 1
PISTOLS FOR NOBODY
MANLY WADE WELLMAN
Table of Contents
PISTOLS FOR NOBODY
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2020 by Wildside Press LLC.
Originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, May 1960.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com
INTRODUCTION
Manly Wade Wellman (1903–1986) was an American writer. While his science fiction and fantasy stories appeared in such pulps as Astounding Stories, Startling Stories, Unknown, and Strange Stories, Wellman is best remembered as one of the most popular contributors to the legendary Weird Tales, and for his fantasy and horror stories set in the Appalachian Mountains, which draw on the native folklore of that region. Karl Edward Wagner referred to him as “the dean of fantasy writers.”
A long-time resident of North Carolina, he received many awards over his lifetime, including the World Fantasy Award and Edgar Allan Poe Award. In 2013, the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation inaugurated an award named after him to honor other North Carolina authors of science fiction and fantasy.
Three of Wellman’s most famous recurring protagonists are John the Balladeer (a.k.a. “Silver John”), a wandering backwoods minstrel with a silver-stringed guitar; the elderly “occult detective” Judge Pursuivant; and John Thunstone, also an occult investigator.
In addition to fantasy fiction, Wellman also wrote in a wide variety of other genres, including historical fiction, mysteries, westerns, juvenile fiction, and non-fiction. Much of his best short general fantasy work over the years was collected by Karl Edward Wagner in Worse Things Waiting (1973), which won a World Fantasy Award and revived interest in Wellman’s work. His 1975 novel Sherlock Holmes’ War of the Worlds was collected from a series of Holmes pastiches (co-written with his son Wade Wellman) originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
At age 82, Wellman suffered a serious fall and sustained severe fractures of his left elbow and shoulder which made him an invalid. Due to the onset of gangrene in his legs following double amputation, Wellman’s health failed further and he died at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on April 5, 1986. Before passing on he had been able to finish his historical novel Cahena, about an African warrior princess. Cahena was published in 1986, as was the final John the Balladeer short story “Where Did She Wander.”
—Karl Wurf
Rockville, Maryland
CHAPTER I
When they tried young George Tebow for murder at Moshawnee, folks vowed up and down there hadn’t seen anything to equal it since Squire William Mitchell Murphy got down on the courtroom floor at Marengo to inquire things from a killed man in hell. Maybe there’d never been the beat of it in all the twenty-seven states of this Union. But Major Trumbitt, who’d done business in Illinois the autumn before, allowed that a lawyer up there handled cases some way the same.
A long tall man, that Illinois lawyer, and an outdoing wrestler and tale-teller, who was fixing to run for Congress. His name, let’s see, was Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, and he was a big man inside his head, too, said Major Trumbitt, just as hard to defeat in a courtroom as Squire Hud Mottram who’d defended George Tebow.
The evidence for murder and robbery sounded right heavy against young Tebow, who’d been reading law in the office of Squire Joseph Huckleroy and had just passed his examinations. Squire Huckleroy testified to Solicitor Smith Rakeshaw how, the early dawn after Tebow’s passing the questions of Judge Newlands, Milas Clavering had been found dead in the office with his head knocked in and beside him laying a bloody bent-handled cane that belonged to Tebow.
Squire Huckleroy went on to tell the jury that Clavering and Tebow, both law scholars together, hadn’t been on kindliest terms because the both of them wanted to court Squire Huckleroy’s blue-eyed daughter Allie Sue. And not only was Clavering dead of his head broken, but broken open also was a desk drawer where only Squire Huckleroy and Clavering and Tebow knew lay six hundred gold dollars in a long green purse.
The purse was gone, but in that drawer where it had been lay a handkerchief embroidered with G. T. for George Tebow.
That talk made the gentlemen of the jury sit up on their two home-nailed benches, but more was coming. Little Dr. Shumake squeaked out his expert word that one whack of the cane had laid Clavering low from behind, and another whack had broken his skull open and killed him.
Miss Allie Sue Huckleroy, her blue eyes bluer with tears, had to testify to the truth that she’d embroidered that very handkerchief, one of six, to give George Tebow for passing his examination, and she’d sent all six to George Tebow’s boarding house by her second cousin Virgil Croslin.
And Virgil Croslin, the captain of the Moshawnee militia company who owed near about everybody, got up slim and spruce in his roll-collar coat and varnished boots to agree with Miss Allie Sue.
Finally Squire Dandridge Duckett swore that, on the night Milas Clavering was head-knocked, Tebow had bought drinks several times over for all folks at the Moshawnee Tavern.
Young Squire Hud Mottram didn’t much cross-question those witnesses. From Squire Huckleroy he got the reply that Tebow had been a smarter law scholar than Clavering, and that the Squire had favored him, up to now, to run for the State Senate when he himself retired next term.
Miss Allie Sue sobbed and cried while Hud Mottram got her to tell that George Tebow was the cleverest and likeliest young man who ever came calling on her. Virgil Croslin said that Tebow was a right good sergeant in the militia company. Squire Duckett admitted that Tebow hadn’t been anything like drunk at the tavern, just buying for the others.
And Dr. Shumake gave a straight answer to a straight question, that he thought Tebow was a sensible, intelligent young fellow.
For the defense Hud called only Tebow himself, a middle-sized, pleasant-faced boy, to say on the stand that he’d not been near Squire Huckleroy’s office that night of murder, that he’d left his cane behind him when he’d gone to Judge Newlands’ chambers to take his law examination and get his certificate, and that he couldn’t speak to getting but five of those six handkerchiefs Miss Allie Sue swore she’d put his initials on.
As for the money he’d spent at the tavern, that was to celebrate getting his certificate and it was his own saved-up money, not thieved money. But when Solicitor Rakeshaw cross-examined him, Tebow couldn’t prove for certain where he’d been at the murder time.
When he stepped down and the arguing started, Tebow looked to most folks in court as good as hanged by the neck till he was dead, and might the good Lord have mercy on his soul.
But up jumped Hud Mottram before the jury, tall, skinny-hipped and splay-shouldered in his black frocktail coat, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his open-gate collar like a well sweep in a windstorm, and his black hair waving on high with the bob and wag of his head. His voice near about sprung the old axe-cut rafters of the courthouse roof as he talked just the one thing to the jury—George Tebow’s sanity.
“Hark at me now, gentlemen,” he sang out like a dinner horn, “you all heard what Squire Huckleroy and his lovely daughter and Captain Croslin and Squire Duckett and Dr. Shumake vowed on the stand yonder. They vowed, each and all, that George Tebow was sane and clear-headed and sober. And Mr. Tebow his own self spoke before you, and you all can judge your own judgments if he talked sense or nonsense. So much for so much.”
He put up his big long finger to them. “Now, reply me this—what sane, sober man on this whole earthly footstool would fling down his cane for folks to find and trace to him after he’d used it to crack a fellow-man’s skull? What man with a mustard grain of sense would steal money from a drawer and then put down his handkerchief, given him by his own fond love, where the money had been?”
Hud wiped his big broad young brow with his coat sleeve. “Gentlemen,” he dinner-horned out, “you all can’t answer those questions, nor either can I. Nor yet can His Honor, Judge Newlands, up there seeing that the rights of law are being done here in Moshawnee. Because, gentlemen, there’s no sensible answer to be made to them.”
He flung his black hair from his eyes, grinned, and yelled the louder: “Mr. Solicitor Rakeshaw’s witnesses told you all that Mr. George Tebow was no way simple in the head. You saw and heard yourself that he’s got a head on his shoulders, not just a knot to keep his spinal column from unraveling.
“The evidence shows that he’s a right smart-thinking young man, who’s learned the law and won a pretty girl’s fair hand and been sergeant to the brave gentlemen volunteers of Moshawnee and able to hold his liquor at the tavern. Is that the way of it or not? But they’d let you all think George Tebow did all those mindless things in Squire Huckleroy’s office.”
Folks on the jury and off were gaping by then, and two-three of them grinning. Hud grinned, too, he grinned right easy.
“If he’s mindless,” said Hud, “he can’t tell black from white or right from wrong, and it’s your duty to find him so and send him to the crazy-folk house at the State capital. But if he wasn’t mindless, and did that killing and thieving, he must be just purely accommodating to a way beyond any murderer and thief in all this world’s long years.”
Somebody did laugh then, and Judge Newlands rapped for order.
“Why!” bawled
Jurors four and five laughed then, and Judge Newlands blew his nose.
“If George Tebow did such fuzzy-eared fool things,” said Hud, smacking his big right fist into his broad left palm, “he’s too silly for the gallows.”
He waited for the laughter to quiet down. “You’ll just purely have to name him for a gone gump and ignoranter than a pet ’possum. But now, my friends, if you all do that, look out—because that’ll be giving the lie to Squire Huckleroy and all the rest.”
He had to stop again, for the hee-hawing everywhere. Judge Newlands might have rapped for order, but he was snickering himself.
“So why don’t you all take the easy, safe polite way?” Hud inquired the jury. “Why don’t you all say that George Tebow isn’t guilty, because somebody else did those things and tried to nail the guilt of them on George Tebow?”
Further Hud didn’t talk, and the jury was chortling as it went to its room, and chortling again as it came out in ten minutes to tell Judge Newlands that George Tebow was found sane and in his right mind and innocent of murder and robbery.
The fuss that old axe-raftered courtroom raised—cheers and hollers, but mostly laughing. Miss Allie Sue had her arms around George Tebow and her yellow head on his shoulder, and he was drying the tears from her blue eyes with one of the five embroidered handkerchiefs he had left.
Solicitor Rakeshaw was shaking Hud’s big hand, and Judge Newlands, walking to his chambers, shook his shoulders in his robe, but not because he was grief-stricken or outraged. And half the town, it seemed as if, followed Hud and Solicitor Rakeshaw to the big log tavern to drink about it.
CHAPTER II
The solicitor had just paid for the first round and Hud Mottram was just ordering a second, when Captain Virgil Croslin’s spruce figure came in on its varnished boots. His curly hair came about to Hud’s shoulder as he held out a folded paper.
“From Squire Joseph Huckleroy,” he said. Hud asked the company’s pardon and opened the note to read it.
Mr. H. Mottram, Esq.
Sir:
You have derided my intelligence and sneered at my judgment, and I demand the satisfaction due a gentleman, though as to whether you yourself are a gentleman I entertain grave doubts. You may choose your weapons and distance. My friend, Captain Croslin, who will hand you this, is ready to make the necessary arrangements with any person you care to appoint.
I am, sir,
Joseph Sherfessee Huckleroy, Esq.
“I declare, that’s a high-toned letter,” allowed Hud, with everybody looking at him. “Gentlemen, please fill your glasses at my charge. Captain Croslin, I’m puzzled.”
“Squire, you don’t strike me as being slow of wit,” the Captain replied. “You made fun of the prosecution’s witnesses in court just now, and among them was my valued friend, Squire Huckleroy.”
Hud glanced out at the open door, looking at the green trees and the bright sun. “Did he take me to mean him personally.”
“I assure you that he did.” The Captain shrugged gracefully. “I did my best to dissuade him. I said that of my own knowledge you are the best hand with a pistol in your native town of Portici.”
“I’m no better than third best,” objected Hud, “and Portici isn’t what you’d call any great seething community.”
“Perhaps you are too modest,” went on Captain Croslin, smooth as old peach brandy. “In any case, Squire Huckleroy felt that he could not but challenge, lest he seemed to stand in dread of your marksmanship.”
“By your leave, Squire Mottram,” said a voice from behind, and it was Squire Dandridge Duckett at Hud’s elbow. He was a wide-set, pink-faced man, with a big mustache and sorghum-colored side-whiskers that mixed into each other. His fine tail coat was green, and his white vest was nappy, like a store-bought bath towel.
“I could not but hear,” he said, “and since you are an attorney riding the circuit, and perhaps without a friend here present to act for you, I make bold to tender my services.” He bowed. “Squire Huckleroy and I are on terms of mutual respect and esteem, though thrice I have opposed him for his seat in the State Senate. If you will suffer me, I can properly represent you in this affair.”
“Let’s sit down,” said Croslin, and raised his voice. “Gentlemen, excuse the three of us. I request that you honor me by drinking at my expense.”
He threw money on the three-inch plank of the bar, and he and Hud and Duckett went to a round table in the corner. Cards were strewn there, where folks had been playing spoil five. The aproned landlord fetched them a bottle of golden yellow whiskey and three tumblers.
“Captain Croslin feels that it would be useless to seek composition of this difference,” observed Duckett, filling for them.
“That’s how it sounded to me,” Hud agreed. “Squire Huckleroy wouldn’t scare out at that talk about my pistol practice.”
“Not he,” spoke up Croslin. “As a sober fact, Squire Huckleroy’s right gilt-edged with the pistol himself.”
“Don’t go on about that, Captain,” begged Hud, “or I can’t step back either, for fear of being called a coward.”
“As to that,” said Croslin, still brandy-smooth, “Squire Huckleroy is prepared, should you decline to meet him, to post you as recreant and beneath contempt. He told me he will nail up written statements to that affect, at the court house and here at the tavern.”
“Now, I call that wise,” approved Hud. “A many more folks are apt to come to the tavern than to the court house, I reckon. But don’t pester yourselves, gentlemen, I don’t aim to step back. It’s just the shortness of time.”
“Shortness of time?” Croslin raised his eyebrows.
“Squire Mottram means, court week’s over here and the whole troop of lawyers is riding on to the next county seat, tomorrow at dawn,” said Duckett.
“I see,” said Croslin, heavy as hog liver. “Then we’d better get at things promptly. What’s the time, Squire?”
Hud dug out his big silver watch. “Past four of the clock.”
“We’ll have light past six this time of year,” said Duckett. “Shall we say six, then?”
“I’ll take it as a favor,” said Hud. “If we can move so promptly.”
“Oh,” Croslin said, tipping up the bottle over his glass, “we’re fortunate to be in this State, where laws and customs so well accommodate gentlemen in swift settlement of their disagreements.”
“Amen to that,” quoth Duckett. “If we were in one of those Northern States like Virginia or North Carolina, we’d be obliged to cross the border into more civilized country—say Tennessee—to keep officious interferers at a distance. At six, then?”
“Settled,” nodded Croslin. “Now as to weapons.”
“Pistols, I think,” said Duckett, “since both my friend and yours are handy with them.”
“Distance?” was Croslin’s next inquiry.
“Let the distance be close,” urged Hud brightly. “Neither Squire Huckleroy nor I would want our work to turn out ragged.”
“Ten paces, Captain?” asked Duckett.
“Ten paces it is.”
Hud flung up his big right hand. “Landlord! Could I have a pen and paper?”
He wrote quickly, in big sprawling handwriting:
Joseph Sherfessee Huckleroy, Esq.
Sir:
Your note of this date, just to hand, seems to read that your big hope of life is to fight; and so I assure you that I’ll be proud and pleasured to accommodate you the best I can.
I send this by the hand of Mr. Dandridge Duckett, Esq., who is arranging things with Captain Croslin.
I take leave to add my hope that you will get as much profit and instruction out of our meeting as I figure to.
I am, sir, your admiring and well-wishing servant, Hudibras Jonathan Rokeby
