Gunslinger 07, p.1
Gunslinger 07, page 1
The Home of Great Western Fiction!
John Ryker. Gunsmith. And killer. Expert in every angle of slaughter – from the workings of a firing-pin to the effect of a slug on a man's gut.
In a small desert town Ryker made an enemy of Quartermain, the English hunter whose fancy accent hid a surging lust for blood. And it was out on the burning sand, in search of human bounty, that the two of them were headed for a death-run. The gunsmith and the dude suddenly ran up against Ciego, brutal, hate-filled chief of the Apaches. Quartermain was out to kill the Gunslinger. Ciego meant lingering death for any white man he found. And Ryker – he was death for just anyone at all...
GUNSLINGER 7: DEATH CANYON
By Charles C. Garrett
First published by Sphere Books Ltd in 1979
Copyright © Charles C. Garrett 1979, 2024
This electronic edition published February 2024
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book / Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Series Editor: Mike Stotter
Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books
This is for Elizabeth, who’s everything to me.
‘Funny how it seems I always wind up here with you.
Nice to know somebody loves me.’
From: ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’ by Paul Williams
‘There can be no doubt that the finest fire-arm in the entire history of this great country has been the Winchester ’73 rifle. Without it the West might never have been won and the further frontiers opened up to the advancement of our civilization and the suppression of hostile elements among the Indian tribes.’
Major Cyrus Fisher in My Travels Along The Yellowstone,
published by Ortyx Press of White River Junction, Vermont, 1894.
‘With the Winchester ’73 they shot quicker and straighter and so they killed us.’
Attributed to the Oglala Sioux leader, Man With Braided Hair, 1892.
Chapter One
SOLOMON KING WAS frightened.
More frightened than he’d been in his entire life. More frightened than he’d ever have believed possible.
‘Let that damned bottle drop, you stinkin’ little son of a bitch and you get a bullet in the gut!!’
‘I’m … I’m tryin’, sir. Truly, I am.’
The rest of the saloon was quiet. Dolly Harman ran the What Cheer in Tucson tighter than a military stockade, but she was out east in Louisiana collecting more girls for the cowboy with money burning a hole in the pocket of his breeches. Her manager, Bart Haggard, was an easy-going guy who didn’t like upsetting folks. Dolly liked him and treated him gently, knowing that he would treat her the same way. And he was honest. But he was too nice to run a tough saloon like the What Cheer in her absence.
Thursday was generally a quiet night, made even quieter by there being no cattle drives around. There were four or five of the usual regulars in, and a poker game for dimes between three of the storekeepers in Tucson. Two cowboys at a corner table. One part drunk and the other all drunk, leaning sleepily across the empty glasses and the spilled whiskey telling each other maudlin stories about a whore they’d both known in El Paso.
The only man that Haggard had been watching close had been the tall stranger in black. The manager had seen him only once before, not long after he’d met Dolly and been taken on as her day-time boss and night-time lover.
Sitting quietly at a table near the bottom of the ornate staircase with the gold cherubs with bare asses, imported clear from France, the stranger was bothering nobody. And there was something about him that kept folks at a distance.
Tall, maybe a couple of inches over six feet. Broad-shouldered with it. Dressed entirely in black, with the only touch of color a fancy vest. Black pants and jacket. Black riding boots, making him look like a dude. He wore a low-brimmed black hat with a narrow band of brown leather. And set at the front of it was a gleaming silver dollar. With a bullet-hole plugged neatly through the middle.
Haggard was something of an expert on gun-rigs. It was one of the things that Dolly Harman had coached him in, and the stranger’s holster and belt interested him.
‘Mexican rig, ain’t it, mister?’ he’d asked the tall stranger.
‘Yeah.’
‘Sure looks nice.’
‘Friend in Pueblo, Colorado made it for me. Double loops. Right rig for a light pistol like the thirty-six Navy Colt.’
And that had been all the man had said. Not even offering his name. One of the girls had drifted over to see if there was anything else she could offer him and he’d politely and coldly turned her down. When she’d tried to push the hustle a little further with him he’d said something quietly to her and she’d walked away white-faced. Poured herself a large drink and wouldn’t tell anyone else what had passed between them.
Apart from them the saloon had been real quiet.
Until the hunting party came in, setting the batwing doors crashing open on their hinges. Eight of them. Wild and mean enough for Haggard to reach beneath the bar-top and check the sawn-down scattergun was safely there on its hooks. But he was a real easy-going man was Bart Haggard and he met the men with a ready smile.
‘Whiskey,’ said a short man with a puckered scar on his right cheek, shouldering up as if the bar was packed instead of him being the only one there.
‘Four dollars a bottle, mister.’
‘Could be that we might not want a whole bottle, barkeep,’ said another man.
‘Then again, we might just want us eight bottles.’
‘Still four dollars a bottle.’
‘How the hell do we know that your rottin’ piss is worth that kind of money?’ asked a lean man in a torn black shirt.
‘Good stuff, sir. Miss Harman ships it clear across country to make sure of it.’
‘Four dollars!’ The speaker spat in the nearest cuspidor, hitting it in the middle with a thick, bubbling splash. ‘By God! Four dollars! This is 1873, barkeep. Not 1900.’
‘Why not try it, mister? Then, if’n you like it, four dollars is a fair price.’
‘But suppose that I and the rest of these sporting good fellows aren’t that keen on it? What then, mine host?’
‘How’s that, mister?’
Haggard had never heard anyone talk like the man who seemed to be the leader of the group. Towering six and a half feet tall, he was wearing a jacket made of fur over breeches of leather. And a hat that must have cost him fifty dollars if Bart Haggard was any judge. And there was an eye-glass kind of screwed into Jus left eye as if it was stuck there with flour and water.
But it was the odd way of talking. Like the man’s mouth had gotten filled with plums that he couldn’t spit out.
‘I said that I would be obliged if you would be so kind as to cease this bickering prevarication and supply the promised liquid refreshments.’
‘I’m sorry, mister. I don’t rightly …’
A young boy with shoulder-length hair, matted and filthy, laughed.
‘Mr. Quartermain means he wants you to give us the damned drink you pig-shit bastard.’
‘Now boy ... I don’t take …’
The gun was out of the holster and rammed under his nose faster than he could believe. ‘Just do like I say, barkeep. Mr. Quartermain don’t like bein’ kept waitin’ by nothin’ folk like you.’
Haggard tried to swallow to ease the dryness in his throat, but there wasn’t any saliva there. His fingers trembled as he slid eight shot-glasses along the polished top of the bar, with two bottles.
‘We only asked for one,’ said the boy with long hair, holstering his pistol.
‘Sure. One’s on the house. Hey …’
The young shootist leaned closer. ‘What is it?’
‘I didn’t mean no offence. Just that I never heard a guy talk like your boss. He come from Boston?’
‘Hear that, Mr. Quartermain?’
‘What is it, my dear young cove?’
‘Barkeep figures you’re from Boston.’ The suggestion was greeted with guffaws of laughter, with the big man joining in.
‘Boston. My Mama will enjoy that when I return home. No, my shaking landlord. I come from the county of Essex in England. And I am here with these hirelings of mine to help me on a hunting trip. We are after mountain lions near the border with Mexico.’
They had begun drinking when Bart Haggard had suddenly noticed the quiet member of the party, right at the far end of the saloon. A flat, dark face, with long hair tied back from the low forehead with a blue band of silk.
‘Just hold on,’ spluttered the barkeeper. ‘That there’s an Indian.’
‘He ain’t,’ smiled the short man.
‘Looks like it,’ said Haggard, grinning with nerves, so that his lips curled back clean over his teeth giving him the look of a spooked mare.
‘Listen good, mister,’ said the man in the torn shirt, enjoying Bart’s discomfiture. ‘Mr. Quartermain here calls him Rupert, ’cos he says he reminds him of his Gr andpa. Now, Rupert’s ’breed.’ He dropped his voice on the last word of the sentence. ‘A ’breed.’
‘That’s the same as an Indian. Miss Dolly don’t allow ’breeds nor …’
‘Rupert!’ called the boy with long hair.
The ’breed looked impassively along the bar.
‘Show the keep here what you done to that fellow back in Fort Yuma said you was some kind of kin to Indians.’
Haggard stammered: ‘I ... I really ain’t that … that …’
The bulky half-breed reached inside his fringed jacket and pulled out a small rawhide bag. Opening the drawstrings and tipping the contents on the bar.
Two pink lumps of gristle, with ragged edges to them.
‘Sweet Jesus!’ breathed Bart Haggard, fighting to stop himself being sick. ‘That’s someone’s ears.’
‘So, don’t call Rupert there a ’breed, that’s all, mister. You savvy?’
Bart Haggard was an easy-going man. And that was why things drifted from bad to worse.
The poker game broke up quickly, the local Tucson traders slipping away to their wives and families, sensing trouble from the rowdy hunters. Quartermain stood towering at their center like a lord of misrule, urging them on to absurd wagers, plying them with more and more drink. Bart Haggard scurried to get extra bottles, tucking away the crumpled dollar bills that came fluttering across the bar. Mumbling a running prayer that they wouldn’t wreck the place. Dolly had a real mean temper and the What Cheer was the apple of her glinting blue eyes.
After three quarters of an hour the saloon had emptied of everyone but the hunters. And the black-clad stranger who still sat at his shadowed table, minding his own business, and drinking quietly.
Then Solomon King had come in.
Solomon ran a small chandler’s business on the west side of Tucson. His wife and three children had all died in the smallpox outbreak a few years earlier and lay buried in the cemetery. Solomon had blinked his short-sighted eyes and wept in private and carried on. The only difference that the outside world saw was that he drank a whole lot more than he used to, coming into the What Cheer most nights and watching the poker game or talking to one of the girls that wasn’t occupied. Trying hard to persuade them to abandon their wicked ways and seek the path of the Lord.
Dolly didn’t mind him. None of the girls took him seriously and after half a dozen shot-glasses of whiskey he’d forget about the Bible and take the girl up to one of the rooms at the head of the wide staircase and spend a few dollars on a different kind of conversion.
That evening he came padding in. Solomon had bad feet and wore low shoes that flapped as he walked across the floor of the saloon. Haggard hadn’t lit all the lamps and the place was darker than usual. Solomon didn’t see well, even with his pebble-thick spectacles and he didn’t notice that none of the locals were in there.
The half-breed, Rupert, was the only member of the hunting party drinking at the bar and Solomon shouldered up alongside him, smiling a thin smile at Bart Haggard. Not even noticing that all of the girls were gone. With the razored senses of hardened whores, they’d smelled trouble long before anyone else and vanished to their rooms. Bolting the doors. Some of the men had watched them go, but Quartermain’s control was total and they said nothing. With the money he was paying them it was better to keep hold of things like that.
‘Evening, Bart. Drop of the usual. Evening, mister. Been a fine day and …’ Solomon paused and squinted unbelievingly at the breed. Haggard saw what was coming and tried to get in first, but the words got knotted up in his throat and never made it out of his mouth.
Rupert gazed incuriously at the stout little shopkeeper, his brown eyes almost buried in their sockets, hand dropping very casually to the taped hilt of a long butcher’s knife at his belt.
‘You’re an Indian. Bart, you got an Indian in … Oh! … Noooo …!’
Steven Quartermain saved the life of Solomon King, barking out the command for his scout to drop the knife, just in time to spare the fat man from having his throat opened up from here to next week. With a look of bitter disappointment, the half-breed sheathed the gleaming blade and turned away. Bart Haggard had made a half-movement towards the scatter-gun, checking it when the wild young boy with the matted hair looked at him. Didn’t do anything else. Didn’t threaten him at all. Just looked at him.
And that was enough.
So that was how Solomon King came to be standing up against the wall of the What Cheer with a full bottle of whiskey perched shakily on top of his head. Feeling more frightened than he ever had in his whole life before.
The wooden floor was pitted around his feet, the timbers gouged up into white splinters where the hunters had shot around his shoes to make him dance. Haggard had stood very still behind the bar, involving himself in polishing a glass until it glittered like a cut diamond. Then polishing it over again.
The stranger sat still and quiet in the gloom at the bottom of the stairs. Saying nothing. And doing nothing. Which seemed to Bart Haggard to be a very sensible way of acting.
‘Let me blast that bottle off’n him?’ shouted the little man with the scar, standing in a drunken parody of a gun-fighter’s crouch, hand hovering over the butt of an Army Colt.
‘I wonder whether dear Rupert here might not relish having the first crack at it, Jim. Or I might exercise my droit de seigneur and use my popper on him.’
‘I use knife, please, boss?’ asked the breed, fingering the hilt of his weapon, a dull fire smoldering in his eyes at the thought.
Quartermain considered, then shook his head. Haggard had watched him drinking and the big man had put away more than a bottle of Dolly’s best four dollar brew and he was still standing and talking normally. If you called the strangled British upper-class voice normal.
‘No, Rupert, my sporting Pathan. I believe I shall have first crack at that little wretch. Stand still, damn your eyes! Now, then, let us prepare for my usual marvelous piece of sharp-shooting.’
He held a glass of whiskey in his left hand, as delicately as if he was making polite conversation at a garden party in Chelsea, while he thumbed the retaining thong off the hammer of his pistol. An unusual hand gun, Haggard had noticed. Not like anything he’d seen before. Didn’t look American to him at all.
‘Please …’ moaned Solomon King, his eyes watering with terror and self-pity. He couldn’t see the men ringing him. Just a circle of blurs, some tall and some short. And one very tall. The man who seemed to be the leader. Who now had something metallic in his fist.
‘Here goes, boys,’ laughed Quartermain, sighting at the bottle on the store-keeper’s head. Finger tightening on the trigger.
Haggard closed his eyes. Hearing the deafening boom of a hand gun, and the splintering of glass.
Chapter Two
‘OH, HELL,’ SAID John W. Ryker, his voice heavy with resignation. The thirty-six Navy Colt rock-steady in his right hand, a tendril of black powder smoke curling from the round, seven-and-one-half-inch barrel.
‘Heavens,’ said Steven Quartermain, his voice showing nothing more than surprise and mild irritation, his own pistol unfired in his right hand, his left hand dripping bright blood from the shattered glass.
‘Blessed Mary,’ sighed Solomon King, eyes rolling up in his skull as he fainted, slumping quietly to the floor of the saloon, lying like a discarded suit of clothes, the whiskey bottle tumbling from its perch and breaking on the scarred timber.
But nobody in the What Cheer was the least interested in Solomon King.
What interested them was the tall man in black standing to one side of an over-turned table, his body shielded by the gold-painted column at the bottom of the stairs. The man and his gun.
‘First man tries to draw dies. Then the big man dies. I can kill five out of eight before the other three get to me.’
There was a tone of confidence that froze the hunters. All of them had been around the South-West long enough to be able to tell when a man was faking and when he wasn’t. Whoever the shootist in black was, he meant what he said. And anyone who could take a shot-glass from someone’s fingers at around fifteen paces in dim light had to be good. Nobody there doubted that the stranger had done what he wanted. And if he could hit a target that small, then a man would be like a fish in a barrel to him.
