"Treat, Lawrence - Murder With Mud - (Avenger 4001)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Treat Lawrence)

Tony Bragg could dig up plenty of trouble, but he didn't expect


MURDER WITH MUD
by Lawrence Treat


There was a feud on the night shift, and the men were beginning to bet on who'd win out. Tony
Bragg, who ran the big power tractor with the loading bucket, or Sam, who drove a truck.

They were big, both of them, but in different ways. Sam spread like a tree; he was all girth and
slow solid muscle. But Tony was built like the Matterhorn, tall and rugged, with long sloping
shoulders and a grayness to him. The gray of grimness and an inner resolve. You knew at once that
there was something more to him than hard granite muscles.

Nobody knew how the feud had started. Each of the pair, it seemed, just naturally went out of
his way to annoy the other. Sam, for instance, had stepped on Tony's dinner box and had splashed him
with mud a couple of times. And when Sam had asked Tony to crank up the truck, he'd advanced the
spark and almost snapped Tony's arm.

But Tony was nobody's fool. He didn't seem to get sore or excited, even though he was burning up
inside. He slapped Sam on his broad, oak-like back and said: "Anytime you get your feet on my dinner
again, I'll just twist the neck off you. If I can find it."

The "if I can find it" crack brought a laugh. Sam's head was set low and grew out of his
shoulders. Sam reddened and doubled up his fist, but his fingers straightened out as he faced Tony.
Something in Tony Bragg's gray eyes, eager and grim and aching for an excuse to get his hands on
Sam, made the big truck driver turn away.

Round one, to Bragg.

Sam evened the count with the truck-cranking stunt, and then Tony went way ahead. In the lurid
glare of the floodlights, he dumped a bucket of mud--the bucket on the power shovel that scooped up
three quarters of a cubic yard of wet sticky mud. He dumped it neatly on Sam, the way you drop
chocolate sirup on a mound of ice cream. Nobody was able to say it wasn't an accident.

Sam stood there like a great armored beast, or like a tar-and-feathers victim, and pulled gobs
of mud out of his eyes and ears and his clothing. They had to turn the hose on him, while Tony
leaned out of his cab and rocked with laughter. And yelled: "See if you can wash the smell off him,
too. Something has been creeping up my nostrils the last couple of weeks, and I've got suspicions!"

After that, the showdown was bound to come!

But Bill Rentner, contractor in charge of the job, tapped Tony on the shoulder, and said: "I
want to talk to you. Make it tomorrow night at Haggerty's Bar."

That was how they happened to be sitting on opposite sides of a table with a couple of beers
between them, Tony, big and grave, and Bill Rentner, tall, too, but slender and almost fragile
compared to Tony. His brown eyes were blinking under the intensity of Tony's stare.