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  Her robe slipped from her shoulders and she stood naked before him. Savage reached for her gently, almost reverently. The light was turned down and a silver haze of moonlight drifted through the window of the hotel room.

  “Help me forget, Clinton.”

  He drew her to him and their mouths met. At first, they were hesitant with each other, for the only man she had ever known had been her husband, while Clint Savage was not totally sure how a man went about making love to a real lady.

  But he soon found out that women were all wonderfully the same when the door was locked and moonlight flooded the quiet world outside. And it seemed that for both of them, all the harsh and bloody realities of the past were erased as they lay quietly in each other’s arms making plans for the days ahead.

  SAVAGE 4: THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

  By E. Jefferson Clay

  First published by Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia

  © 2019 by Piccadilly Publishing

  First Electonric Edition

  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.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Table of Contents

  One – Echoes of Bull Run

  Two – The Violent Ones

  Three – To Kill a Bounty Man

  Four – Ride the Red Hills

  Five – Deadlier Than the Male

  Six – Death on Wolf Range

  Seven – The Long Rifles

  Eight – Killer’s Woman

  Nine – Bounty Killers

  Ten – Slaughter River

  About the Author

  One – Echoes of Bull Run

  Savage checked his sorrel as he approached the bridge and looked at the towner who’d started across ahead of him.

  “Howdy!” Savage called. His voice was deep and resonant and packed power ... like his body.

  The man walked faster. He was around five two and wore pince nez, an ill-fitting green waistcoat and a ridiculous derby hat. He was probably scared, thought Savage, who sometimes had that effect on people. Particularly like today when he was unshaven, unwashed and travel-stained.

  “Hey you!” he barked. “I want to talk to you!”

  The towner hesitated and turned around with obvious reluctance, eyes bugging. Even at a distance of fifty feet in the uncertain light of dusk, Savage could see he was shaking.

  “What’s the name of this town?” Savage asked impatiently.

  “It sure ain’t Paradise.”

  Savage frowned darkly. This was the scowl of a former Union sergeant who’d been able to intimidate raw recruits with that look at a hundred paces. It was the look of a man in whose presence a stranger would instinctively step wary. Clint Savage’s sense of humor had never been one of his strong points, and he was in no mood for sass from any sawed-off town-Johnny tonight.

  “I asked you a straight question, runt,” he declared. “Does this dump have a name?”

  The man gulped. His response had been his way of trying to conceal a bad case of the jitters. But thoroughly intimidated now, he became a source of information.

  “This is Tarryall, mister. Last decent town afore the high plains and the Red Hills.” He gestured towards the gloomy row of buildings whose looming false fronts were silhouetted against the twilight sky. “Not a bad town for them that likes peaceable livin’.”

  The speech exhausted the towner’s meager supply of nerve and before Savage could respond, he was crossing the bridge and vanishing amongst the cluster of shacks and tired old trees.

  The horseman sat his saddle, aware of an old, familiar prickling sensation as he stared across the river at the town. He’d been pushing steadily westward since receiving a wire several days ago to the effect that a certain evil-smelling, half-breed horse thief was languishing in a Territory jailhouse, anxiously awaiting deliverance.

  Savage was in no big hurry to get to Quentonville Jail—if he got there at all. His ‘friendship’ with Yaqui Joe was all on the breed’s side. He’d pulled Savage out of a few tight spots in the past and figured that comprised a basis for lifelong attachment.

  Yaqui Joe reckoned that Savage was the stuff of which heroes were made. To Savage, the breed was just a low-down, horse-thieving greaser.

  But Yaqui Joe and his problems were far from Savage’s mind as he built a cigarette, protecting tobacco and paper from the evening wind with his broad back. There was an air of tension about this Chad River town, and he had a gut feeling he was the cause of it.

  The flare of his match revealed clear green eyes under arched brows, a drooping black mustache and skin burned by the western sun. There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and here and there, a scar traced a white line beneath his tan.

  He looked, and was, the kind of man it was easier to walk around than through.

  After a minute, he grunted impatiently and pushed his horse across the bridge—a tall, heavy-shouldered rider on a mean-looking sorrel stallion.

  The shot rang out the moment the horse’s hooves hit the dust on the town side of the bridge. Savage leapt from his saddle and plunged for the cover of a boulder. Bullets powdered the crown of the boulder as he dived from sight. He landed on one shoulder and rolled with dust coating his black shirt, a six-gun in his hand. As he came up in a crouch, he sighted gun flashes belching from the gloom of a stables doorway. Savage fired back, and didn’t miss.

  The ambush rifle fell abruptly silent, then it clattered to the earth in the darkened doorway, followed moments later, by the buckling figure of a man.

  There was anger in Savage’s eyes as he crouched there with the smoking Colt in his fist, waiting to see if there were any more.

  There weren’t.

  On that sultry summer’s night in Tarryall on the Chad River, there was only one bounty killer who had mistaken the stranger for one of Morgan’s Marauders, with big money on his head. And that man was dead.

  “Buy you a drink, Mr. Savage?”

  “No.”

  “A cigar, mebbe?”

  “Cut a vein!”

  The citizens of Tarryall were reacting to the death of Champ Walker in an unexpected way. The sheriff who had questioned Savage had told him the dead man had few friends in town, and the attitude of the towners since confirmed it.

  They seemed to want to make amends to Savage for having been forced to blow Walker apart. But they didn’t find him in a receptive mood. Standing tall and brooding under his flat-brimmed black hat with its snakeskin band and jutting eagle feather, Savage’s dominant expression was disgust.

  “Give me breathin’ room, or I might take it into my head to do some more ventilatin’,” he grated, after the mayor had offered to buy him a drink. He let his right hand drop to his gun butt with a slap, and this achieved the desired effect.

  Suddenly he was alone with his bottle—just as he wanted.

  “Goddamn bounty killers and goddamn Morgan!” he muttered as he poured another drink. He stared broodingly at his reflection in the bar mirror. “Don’t the dumb sons of bitches know it’s been over almost a year?”

  It was, indeed, nearly a year since Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee had met at a place call Appomattox Courthouse, and emerged some time later to announce the end of the bloodiest Civil War in history.

  It had taken months to find and bury the last of the dead, and it would take longer for the scars to heal. But nothing could alter the fact that the War was well and truly over.

  Except, maybe, in a place called Tarryall County.

  “I don’t get it,” Savage muttered to the barrel-gutted bartender, after several stiff shots had calmed him. “They settled with Charlie Morgan long ago, didn’t they?”

  “Sure did ... about the time you was through here last, guidin’ that miner’s outfit west, Clint,” supplied the bartender. He leaned his elbows on the bar. “Trouble was, they never got all of Morgan’s bunch. Around ten days ago, word went out that Ives and Clanton was flushed out in the Red Hills. Straight off, the government doubled the bounty on their heads, and ever since, the county’s been crawlin’ with soldiers, lawmen and bounty hunters lookin’ for ’em. Guess you can understand that?”

  Now it had been explained, Savage understood only too well. Clanton and Ives were notorious former members of the infamous Morgan’s Marauders who had taken advantage of the Civil War holocaust to attack and plunder both North and South.

  Savage had thought the pair had perished in the Federal ambush that had caught up with the remnants of the fugitives six months earlier in the Dakotas. But it seemed this wasn’t so.

  He said, “The sheriff reckons Walker mistook me for Ives.”

  “Well, Rogan Ives is said to be a big man with barn-door shoulders.” The bartender shrugged. “Just lucky for you you’re so blamed fast, I guess, Clint.”

  “Right now, I don’t feel so lucky.”

  But luck could be a relative thing, as Savage was to realize before that nig ht was out. Quitting the saloon an hour later with just the right amount of whiskey under his belt to dull the sharp edge of what had taken place at the bridge, he suddenly found himself confronted by a woman wearing widow’s weeds.

  Barbarella Walker had a question she wanted answered. Had it been necessary for Savage to kill her husband? They were saying he was a gunfighter, amongst other things. Surely a gunfighter could have merely shot to wound.

  Savage now wished he’d followed an earlier impulse to shake the dust of Tarryall off his boots the moment he was through with the sheriff’s questioning.

  But somehow he managed to appear both sympathetic and tactful as he explained. “Ma’am, your husband was a crack shot.” He fingered a fresh cut on his neck where a rock chip had grazed him. “And he was doin’ his level best to blow me apart. I didn’t have a chance for any fancy gun work. It was him or me ... and for your sake, I’m sorry that it was him.”

  She sighed, and he saw in the half-light of the street that she was pretty. Pretty and buxom.

  “I guess I understand,” she said after a silence. “Hell, I’ve been waiting for them to bring Champ home on a plank ever since the day I married him.”

  Savage was surprised by her tone. “You loved him, ma’am?”

  “Love Champ?” She snorted. “Of course not. I was scared of him, just like everybody else.”

  “But you braced me about shootin’ him ...”

  “Why, that was just an excuse to meet you ... so I could say thanks.”

  “Thanks?”

  “The only way I was ever going to be free of Champ was if somebody gunned him down.”

  Savage took a closer look at her. Behind the veil he saw she was honey-blonde, around thirty, with full, sensuous lips and black-lashed brown eyes.

  The drifter was not famous for either tact or self-discipline where pretty women were concerned, but for once, he was at a loss for words. The best he could come up with was, “Can I buy you a drink, Mrs. Walker?”

  “Barbarella.” She looked him up and down. “Why not?”

  That was how it started. It finished in an old four-poster in a solid timber house at the south end of town as a big yellow moon burned itself out in the early morning sky.

  It was the first time that Clint Savage had killed a man and made love to his widow the same night. Had Yaqui Joe been present, he would have given Savage a severe tongue-lashing for such depravity before rushing off to arrange for prayers to be offered up for his immortal soul.

  But luckily, Yaqui Joe was a hundred miles away cooling his heels in the jailhouse of a mean-tempered sheriff who hated horse thieves bad, and greasers even worse.

  At daybreak, when he left the sleeping woman, saddled his horse and rode from the house, Savage didn’t feel quite so bad about having been forced to gun down a bounty-hungry drygulcher.

  He planned to leave Tarryall right away, but Julian Coder had other ideas. Coder was a young Eastern college professor who was looking for a guide to take him onto the high plains in search of reference material for a scholarly tome he was preparing, dealing with ‘the customs, modes and mores of contemporary Western society’.

  “You’ve come to the wrong man,” Savage growled.

  But when the ruddy-cheeked young academic mentioned money, Savage decided the least they could do was talk it over.

  The trail was a year and a half old. A lot of rain and snow had come and gone since the first war-weary Easterners had blazed this wagon track from east to west across the high plains. The pitiless Nebraskan sun had burned and baked the earth, and homesteaders had quit their claims in droves.

  Yet the trail was still well-worn and clearly defined as it wound across the plains, its tracks no longer churned and pounded by the journeyings of men of the land, but by the new, hungry breed that had moved in since the previous spring—the miners.

  Gold had been discovered in the Red Hills since Savage had last crossed the plains as scout and wagon master to a party of Norwegians bound for Wyoming. He had heard of fortunes being made and lost, and violent deeds perpetrated in the name of greed. He’d heard all the stories and shrugged them off with indifference. He always expected a certain class of men to act with greed and violence, and was seldom disappointed.

  He’d been called a cynic, but that bothered him no worse than being labeled a gunslinger, drifter, opportunist, troublemaker, womanizer, and even government spy. He’d worn those tags since War’s end and with luck, might wear them again.

  But today he was an escort and guide—soft trades for this hard man.

  Or would this job be all that soft?

  That thought jumped into his mind as suddenly, on the balmy plains wind, an ugly sound faintly reached his ears. The muttering of distant thunder.

  The professor thought it was thunder, and looked up in puzzlement at the blue, cloudless sky. Then, when he looked across at Savage and saw him reining-in to check his guns, he realized he was mistaken.

  “Shootin’,” Savage supplied. He pointed west. “From over yonder.”

  The professor was both thrilled and chilled at the same time—thrilled at the prospect of exposure to the violent West that intrigued him, apprehensive at the prospect of personal danger.

  The sounds faded with the breeze then strengthened again. Savage listened, head cocked to one side. After a minute he nodded.

  “Gunfight,” he said.

  “How can you be sure? Might it not be somebody hunting or even practicing?”

  “It’s a gunfight.”

  “But how do you know, Mr. Savage?”

  “When you’ve been in enough, you get to know. C’mon.”

  Coder watched, wide-eyed, as Savage heeled his horse westward. He started after him, his face turning a little pale.

  “Are we going to investigate?” he asked nervously.

  Savage just grunted. He didn’t consider himself any sort of Samaritan by nature, but on the other hand, he wasn’t a man who could just turn his back if somebody might be in trouble. He was aware that the discovery of gold had brought a tremendous influx of both honest and ruthless men to this region. Many unsuccessful gold-seekers who were starving, desperate and unwilling to return home, had turned to crime on quitting the diggings. Out here, you could never be sure whose throat might be getting cut by whom these days.

  The crash of guns grew louder as they approached a series of grass-covered rises. Savage watched the haze of bluish gunsmoke rise into the sky to be carried away on the breeze. He identified the sounds of six-guns and rifles from just beyond the next rise.

  “Better stay back and keep your head down while I take a look.”

  “I’ll do no such thing, thank you, Mr. Savage. I might be a tenderfoot, but that doesn’t necessarily make me a coward.”

  Savage scowled. “Sorry I spoke. Go ahead and get yourself shot up if you want.”

  “I have no intention of getting—”

  That was as far as Coder got as a ricochet howled overhead, causing them both to duck. Savage hauled his Winchester from its scabbard and jacked a shell into the chamber. They slowed as they approached the crest, then reined-in as the battle scene came into sight.

  At first glance, it appeared that the two men sprawled in the gully with their backs to them were pouring lead into an empty hillside. Savage was first to realize that this was not the case. The object of the gunfire was, in fact, a shelter built into the face of the hill.

  Through the drifting veils of gunsmoke, he could see a sturdy oaken doorway set into the base of the hill and overhung by a beard of prairie grass. There were two deep-set windows, and from each of these came sporadic bursts of gunfire.

  Savage sighed as he watched the conflict. They called it the Wild West, and everywhere he traveled it seemed to be growing wilder. First, that trigger-happy bounty man back in Tarryall, now roaring guns on a balmy, high plains morning, and he was damned if he could see why.

  “Got your notebook handy, Professor?” he asked with a wry grin.

  “I hardly feel this is the time for mirth, Mr. Savage.”

  “You’re right, of course.”

  After a pause Coder said, “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “What are we going to do about this?”

 

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