Sally's in the Alley by Norbert Davis (top 100 novels of all time .txt) 📖

hadn’t thought of it,” Doan said, “but I believe you’re right. Why don’t you have a drink?”

“Drink?”

“Of wine.”

“Ain’t a bad idea.” Dust-Mouth groped around under the piano bench. “You want some? Here’s a cup for you.”

It wasn’t a cup. It was a horn—evidently a prop for some Viking drinking scene. Doan looked in it, expecting to find at least a spider lurking around somewhere, but it was only slightly dusty. He blew in it and then said: “Okay.”

Dust-Mouth poured wine out of a glass gallon jug. “This here’s port. It ain’t as good as sherry, but it’s better than nothin’.”

“I guess so,” Doan agreed.

“Here’s how,” Dust-Mouth said. He raised the jug expertly on his forearm, and wine gurgled.

Doan tasted his, and Carstairs growled at him. “This is strictly business,” Doan said. “Believe me.”

“Glum,” said Dust-Mouth, lowering the jug at last. “What say?”

“How about my ore location?” Doan asked. “I got it all right,” said Dust-Mouth. He groped around in his overall pocket and extended a cupped, incredibly dirty hand. “Samples.”

Doan got as close as he dared, and saw a drift of shiny particles hidden among the other visible debris.

“That there,” said Dust-Mouth. “That right there will win the war for you. It’s carbo-carbo-bezra… It’s the stuff. You can look it up, and then take it to an assayer and ask him if it ain’t. And do I know where there’s plenty of it! Man, you can scoop it up with a steam shovel. Ain’t more’n eighteen inches below surface. Millions of cubic yards. Pure.”

“Where is it?” Doan asked.

Dust-Mouth looked all around him cautiously and tilted his head to listen with a sort of groggy concentration. The set had been provided with no windows, but whoever had made a hidey-hole out of it by nailing in a back wall had left a gap in the rough boards about two feet square. It was covered with a mildewed piece of burlap.

“Now we got to talk serious,” said Dust-Mouth. “Now we got to strike us a deal. Pull up a little closer.”

“I like it here,” said Doan. “Go ahead.”

“Doanwashi, this is gonna be hard for you to believe, but I’m tired of the desert. Fact. I’m just durned tired of dust and cactus and Gila monsters and all such. I crave to see rivers and creeks and green grass and corn growin’ in rows. You ever consider what a purty sight corn is when it grows in rows?”

“I like it better in bottles.”

“It ain’t bad there, neither,” Dust-Mouth admitted. “But what I mean is—I gotta admit it—I wanna go back where I come from and set. I wanta go back to Ioway.”

“It’s still there,” Doan told him.

“You Japs figurin’ on conquerin’ it?”

“Oh, sure. We’ll go through that way on the way to Washington.”

“What you gonna do with the people?”

“Kill ‘em.”

“All of’em?”

“Oh, we’ll leave a few. Have to have somebody to spit on when we feel mean.”

“I’ll tell you what I figure. I want some of that Ioway land. I figure it’d be nice to have a belt of it runnin’ along the Mississippi from about Davenport up to about Clinton and about a hundred miles deep. That’d give me plenty of room to move around in, and I could use the river if I got tired of travelin’ on the roads. I’d have to have some people to farm it, too, of course. I ain’t gonna work.”

“Naturally not,” Doan agreed. “I guess we could arrange for you to have some peons.”

“What’s them?”

“Slaves.”

“You mean, I wouldn’t even have to pay ‘em?”

“No.”

“Man, you’re makin’ this sound like the stuff to me. Just think of me sittin’ there like a king…Could you arrange that for sure, Doanwashi?”

“Right. If this ore deposit is what you say it is. Otherwise we won’t even give you ten acres of Texas.”

“It’s there! There’s a million tons of it!”

“Okay. It’s a deal. Where’s the ore deposit?”

“We got to shake hands first,” Dust-Mouth specified cagily.

Doan took a deep breath and held it. “Okay.”

“Now we got to drink on it.”

Doan let his breath out and sighed. “Okay.”

He raised his horn, and Dust-Mouth tipped the jug up on his forearm. The burlap sacking over the back window ripped with a little soggy sound, and in the same split second there was a sharp, smacking report.

The bullet hit the jug of wine and shattered it, and the whole of its contents cascaded down over the lantern. That was too much for the lantern. It went out with a weary gulp, and the darkness moved into the room in a sudden, silent rush.

Dust-Mouth screamed like a lost soul. Doan was up and on his way to the door, the Police Positive ready in his hand. He tripped and fell into the dresser and broke more of the mirror, and then Carstairs snorted, and he followed the sound to the door.

“Right,” he said, nudging Carstairs on that side with his knees.

He pulled the door open and dodged to the left. Carstairs faded away in the other direction. Doan fought his way clear of the stairs and staggered into the side of a thatch-covered hut that collapsed with a soggy puff. He stepped over and through the hut, caromed off the edge of a platform, and then was in the open.

“Hi!” he said.

Carstairs’ voice bellowed in answer. Instantly there were two more shots. Doan swore loudly and ran straight ahead. He slammed head on into a brick wall that gave way with a tearing crash.

“Hi!” he yelled.

Carstairs bayed. There was another shot. Doan saw the dim, sprayed flash of it this time and fired back, shooting high. The bullet hit something and snapped off into the air with an angry_ wheee._

A door made a hollow thump. Carstairs bayed angrily.

Doan plowed into another brick wall and went through it like Superman, spraying balsa bricks in all directions. Knee-high weeds clutched at him chummily, and he dodged under a hitching rack and rattled the length of a boardwalk. He whirled around the corner of a saloon front and came face to face with a decayed colonial mansion.

Carstairs was on the veranda with both front feet against the closed front door.

“Go around, you fool!” Doan shouted. “There’s nothing behind it! It’s a set! Left! Left! Hike!”

Carstairs’ claws skittered on the porch, and he leaped over the railing at the porch edge and disappeared again. Doan ran the other way. The colonial mansion was edged cozily in against the front half of a yacht, and Doan squeezed in between them, breaking the yacht’s anchor chain in the process.

“Hi!” he called.

Carstairs bayed straight ahead. Doan ran along the narrow street of an early English village, detoured around an igloo, and came out on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street. He paused, blowing, and the iron side gate clanged to his right.

Doan went that way fast. He found Carstairs with his head stuck between the bars, peering vainly out and down the street.

“Get away,” said Doan, pulling him back.

The gate opened inward, and Doan jerked at it. It was locked. Doan swore eloquently. He dropped his revolver in his pocket, took hold of two of the iron bars and heaved back. The lock didn’t give, but the hinges did. They pulled loose with a shriek of tortured lath, and Doan went down with the gate on top of him.

Carstairs hopped nimbly through the opening and raced down the street. Still swearing, Doan crawled out from under the gate and went out into the street. There was nothing in sight but the Cadillac. Doan sat down on the curb, holding his revolver in his lap, and waited.

In about five minutes Carstairs came ambling out of the shadows and shook himself in a distasteful way.

“It’s a damned shame you aren’t a bloodhound,” Doan told him. “I’ve got a notion to trade you in on one.”

Carstairs merely looked at him.

“I wasn’t so hot, either,” Doan admitted. “Let’s go pick up Dust-Mouth. He’s probably having a katzenjammer all by himself in the dark.”

They went back through the wrecked gate and down the lane around the mud puddle. Doan leaned under the stairs.

“Hey, Dust-Mouth. The enemy retired to a previously prepared position.”

No one answered.

Doan went into the hideout. “Dust-Mouth.”

The scent of wine was overwhelming. Doan took a match from his pocket and snapped it on his thumbnail. The sudden spurt of flame reflected gorily from the spilled wine and the pieces of shattered jug, but there was no sign of Dust-Mouth.

“Hey!” Doan yelled.

The echoes came back sullenly—alone.

“Oh, hell,” said Doan.