Savage 02, p.1
Savage 02, page 1
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Savage was beginning to regard this as a dull night. But he changed his mind when he stabled his horse, finished his cigar standing under the big tree by the barn, then made his way to his room to find it occupied.
The lightning draw he executed as he caught the stir of movement in the gloom was as fast as ever. The hammer was back, his finger firm upon the trigger, and he was ready to blow the intruder clear through the wall if needs be.
Then he realized two things simultaneously.
The person in his bed was Charity.
And she was naked ...
SAVAGE 2: THE DAMNED
By E. Jefferson Clay
First published by Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia
© 2019 by Piccadilly Publishing
First Digital Edition: November 2019
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
Chapter One – Test by Fire
In the cold and windless dark, Clint Savage slipped into the shadows of the crumbling shop doorway. Above his head hung a sign advertising freshly-killed meat, but it was plainly ages since anyone had been able to buy a slab of beef along Big Strike Street, Dwarftown.
The town was dead ... but it sure as hell wasn’t empty!
With a .45 in his hand, he moved with animal stealth along the boardwalk towards the Bonanza Saloon. A beam of moonlight slanting down between long-broken roof slats touched him briefly, revealing a man, bigger than most, rigged in dark garb with a low-crowned black Stetson topped off by a jaunty eagle feather.
Beneath the hat brim, his face was broad-boned, taut and handsome in a ruthless way. A drooping black mustache softened the hard lines of his mouth. The eyes that cut restlessly this way and that through the town’s shadows were of a light, penetrating blue.
A sudden wind gusting down the empty street caused him to stop. He watched a yellowed piece of paper flutter half a block on the current before wrapping itself around a pole out front of a barber’s shop. The pole was once a bright red and white, but now, as with the rest of the town, gray was the dominant hue; the weathered gray of age and neglect.
Savage had nothing against gray, or against tumbledown ghost towns for that matter. What really riled him was walking blindly into trouble like some Eastern dude. He’d have a score to settle with that Indian Agent he’d met along the Bristlecone trail just on dusk.
He had been riding west towards Bristlecone when the smartly-dressed fellow on the expensive-looking bay seemed to bob out of nowhere. In retrospect, he believed the man had been waiting for him. In casual conversation, Savage had let it be known that he was making for Bristlecone in search of a comfortable bed, a good meal, a shot or two, and high on his list, a lot of female company.
‘Dwarftown’s only a couple of miles off the trail,’ the man had suggested. ‘You’ll find everything you could expect to get in Bristlecone, only it’s cheaper, prettier, and fifteen miles closer.’
It was the fifteen miles closer that had appealed to Savage most. He’d had a rough time of it in a town called McCoy, due largely to the activities of a certain half-breed Mex named Yaqui Joe, who had been traveling with him at the time, and a stolen horse named Titan. Savage had managed to save the breed from a hanging he’d deserved, then had swung up on his stallion and headed west at high speed, alone. And by the time he met the Indian Agent, both he and long-legged Stud were weary all the way down. But there wasn’t a trace of tiredness in him now as he inched forward.
He was alert in every fiber. Instead of the bustling community the man had described, Dwarftown was a ghoster.
But there was something here.
Savage didn’t quite know what that something was, but suspected from the occasional glimpse of diminutive figures and the tiny footprints he’d seen in the dust, that it was either children or as the name of the town implied, dwarfs.
They had stolen his horse, then tried to drop a twenty-pound mallet on his head from the roof of the hotel.
Savage was now as wary as a canary in a cat yard, but he was also good and mad. And he was not a comfortable man to have around when he was angry, as folks back in McCoy could testify.
His boots made no sound as he glided over time-warped boards. The town was like a graveyard; the tall false fronts like tombstones thrusting high above silent boardwalks, shadow carved and lonely. Overturned wagons, mining equipment and assay offices spoke of the town’s roaring past in the gold rush days.
Savage paused beneath the canted porch roof of the sheriff’s office. Peering through a shattered window he could see faded Wanted dodgers still nailed to the walls.
A faint rustling behind him caused him to whirl. Back several doors, he caught a stir of movement. His finger was on the trigger and it was hard to hold his fire. It was only the possibility that it may be children that stayed his hand.
He broke into a run, charging the building. By the time he reached it, the doorway was empty.
Reaching out with his gun hand, he eased the door fully open, and stepped back.
“Come out of there or I’ll start shootin’!”
There was no response, but he thought he heard from somewhere within the chatter of little voices. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. Had he been a man easily spooked, all this might have been starting to unsettle him.
Then he kicked the other door open and dived inside into the musty dark. He rolled to one side, and it was just as well he did as the big, brain-jarring crash of a six-gun filled the confined space and a bullet hammered into the timbered floor inches from his head.
Lying prone, .45 extended before him, Savage fired at the gun flash. He was rewarded by a sharp cry, a stutter of feet, the bang of a rear door.
He got quickly to his feet but by the time he reached the rear porch, the shop’s back yard was empty under the moon.
Easing back just inside the door, he holstered his gun and took a cigar tin from the breast pocket of his shirt. Lighting up, he drew deeply, the crimson glow illuminating a face that was lean and dangerous. To say he was angry now was a huge understatement.
But he wasn’t reckless. Whatever strange game was being played out in this cobwebbed ghoster tonight, it was a lethal one. Having survived many deadly interludes in a mostly violent life, he had no intention of leaving his bones to bleach in the blazing sun of this rundown burg.
And he was double determined not to just walk out and leave Stud to his fate either. He cared more for that horse than for most people he knew, even some of his women.
And that was saying plenty, for Clint Savage, the iron man of the gun, had a soft spot for a prime female.
He waited.
Ghost-town silences pressed down on him. He struck a match and examined the prints in the dust at his feet. They were indeed very small. Did the town’s title mean that it really was peopled by dwarfs? And if so, why were they acting like a bunch of Cheyenne?
He went back out front, and looked up and down the street. He headed towards the saloon and made it without incident, yet was certain he was watched every inch of the way.
He stood in the silent barroom with six-gun at the ready. Part of the roofing was rotted and moonlight flooded in. Remnants of past finery were clearly visible, from the fading portraits of improbably lush, naked women on the wall, to the quality in the tattered, sun-faded drapes at the windows. Faro and keno tables stood dusty and waiting, their surfaces worn smooth by countless eager hands; there was even a piano in one corner with sheet music curled in the rack.
Savage’s lips compressed as he stared across the room. There was little sentiment in this man, yet for a fleeting second his thoughts dwelt on living, vital townspeople who must have once felt their spirits lift to the piano’s music, who had danced to it, wept to it, and fallen in love to its strains.
And now it was turning slowly to dust.
He was even more puzzled than before. As far as he could tell, there was not a damn thing here worth fighting for. And despite the fact that somebody lived here, there was not a single sign of habitation.
And he waited. He could be as patient as any Indian, and now his anger was replaced by a deadly coldness. He was ruthlessly determined that he would leave here alive.
An eternity passed before he heard the creaking of the stairs. Statue still in the darkest corner of the room, he stood with his .45 at waist level, the hammer on full cock, his eyes cut to a narrow, steely gleam.
He counted five of them, short, stocky figures with misshapen heads and stumpy, bowed legs. Their eyes gleamed like animals’ in the gloom and all carried guns. They moved like hunters, totally familiar with their surroundings.
Dwarfs.
“I know he came in here!” one whispered.
“We shouldn’t have butted in,” said another. “I told you he looked dangerous.”
“They all look dangerous,” opined another. “But not as dangerous as us.”
They had reached the foot of the stairs where the bright light fell. Savage had a feeling of unreality as he stared across at them. It was like paying a dime to see the freak show at a circus. But these midgets were not here to entertain or amuse.
They started to move towards the deeper shadows, fanning out warily. Savage’s voice lashed at them like a whip crack:
“Hold up, runts, or you are dead men!”
They leapt apart like a well-drilled cavalry platoon.
Against his better judgment, Savage held his fire. Then the five started shooting in his direction, and he instantly blanked his mind to the fact that they were little men. A child with a gun could kill you as dead as Wild Bill Hickok, and these were no children.
The heavy, black Colt in his hand belched fire and lead across the dusty room and a small, brown-garbed figure buckled into a ball and slammed headlong into the piano.
Within seconds the Bonanza Saloon was rocking to the sounds of a full-blown shoot-out, such as it perhaps had not known since its days of glory.
The dwarfs may have been skilled fighters, but despite their numbers were no match for Clint Savage. He was a true man of the gun. It was his one real friend. He handled it with the skill of a surgeon and never fired from the same spot twice.
A second man joined the first, and a third climbed eight steps before a bullet broke his spine just below the neck and brought him twitching and dying back to the barroom floor.
The survivors cut and ran and Savage followed. They darted across the porch and onto the street. Savage followed at a zigzag run as rifle fire slammed at him from a tall building. Boards broke and a man screamed as Savage turned his attention to the false front. A tiny figure spun into sight against the moon and when Savage triggered, he somersaulted all the long way to the street, his smoking rifle following him down.
The dwarfs dashed into the hotel yard and vanished. Savage’s breath was tearing in his lungs as he stood at the mouth of the narrow shaft. Now he knew where they lived. Underground.
He whistled, a shrill, piercing blast that sounded from one end of town to the other. Stud’s whicker answered immediately from a back alley. Savage spun away from the shaft, hurdled a fence and ran like hell. He had come out ahead in the short but deadly skirmish, and did not mean to press his luck. There was no way of telling how many there were.
He was beginning to find out by the time he found Stud in a disused barn. As he flung himself into the saddle, he could see through the gaps in the wall the swarms coming from the burrows. Tiny men. Angry men. Gun toting little men howling for his blood.
It was like something from a nightmare, something to jolt a man’s grip on reality.
But Savage knew it was real. The Winchester tucked under his right arm roared like a Gatling as he crashed his horse through the fragile wall on the far side of the enemy. Little figures fell and Savage winced when a leaden hornet shaved his shoulder as Dwarftown dropped away in his dust.
“Dwarftown?” the mail rider exclaimed. “Judas, man, what possessed you to go there? Didn’t you see the signs?”
“It was dark,” Savage explained.
“Signs said trespassers will be shot.”
“Trespass in a town? How can anybody do that?”
“You can’t. But them midgets think you can, and they don’t like it. They figure they own that town, have done for five years.”
“How?”
The mail rider jerked a thumb at the hills. “A few years back, a circus went bust in Bristlecone, strandin’ a whole troupe of ’em. They set up what they called a commune in the hills, and soon it got known and midgets from all over, particularly back East, come there to settle. A vigilante group went out to burn their place down. Done it too, but the dwarfs never left the county. Instead they settled in Hogleg, and renamed it Dwarftown. They live and breed in the mines on what they can scratch out of the tailin’s. They don’t let nobody in there, and that means nobody. You were lucky to get out alive.”
“Won’t the law do anything about them?”
“Tried, but it’s too hard and there’s too many of ’em. There’s miles of tunnels under that town and the runts know ’em all. Folks long ago decided it was best to let ’em be. Like you should’ve done.”
Savage’s face was a rock. “Do you know an Indian Agent named Gray?”
“Sure, what about him?”
“Never mind,” Savage said as he kicked Stud towards Bristlecone. More than ever, he planned to relax. More than ever, he really needed it.
All Savage wanted in Bristlecone that day was a good square meal, a shot of smooth whiskey, and maybe an hour upstairs with the long-legged dancer they called Can Can McBride.
Simple enough pleasures for any man on a Dakota Saturday night. Savage certainly thought so. Yet the same uncertain destiny that had guided him to Dwarftown seemed determined to throw a burr under his saddle here.
Firstly, there seemed no valid reason for the overweight hash house proprietor objecting to being called ‘Guts’ ... yet he did. He even became visibly upset and went so far as to doubt Savage’s parentage. Yet despite the provocation, peace-loving Savage, all six feet and two hundred pounds of him, refused to take offence, settling for tweaking the fellow’s nose between thumb and forefinger on his way out, and letting it go at that.
Then there was the rye.
Savage was no connoisseur, but when he was served something that tasted more like essence of muleskinner’s long johns than the real thing, he felt obligated to object. He failed to see how it could be his fault that Jolly Maisie of the Black Nugget took his objections personally, any more than he reckoned he could be blamed for half-wrecking the saloon in the resulting dust-up with the saloon’s muscle men. And so to Can Can.
Savage wasn’t as dapper as he might have liked when he finally turned his attentions to the lady. He had lost a few pieces of skin in the ruckus, and had acquired a slight limp from laying the boot into the Black Nugget’s top adversary and he had to admit that the elegant black eagle feather that he wore in his hat brim was in need of repair. To say the least, he felt a bit rough around the edges.
Even so, he was determined to do it right. He had bathed before making his play, combed his hair and touched up the luxurious black mustache that in a certain light made him look vaguely like an outsized Mexican bandido. He tossed away his cigar butt, sleeve-shined the silver buttons on his coal-black shirt, and repaired his hat feather. He looked much smoother, yet spoiled the effect somewhat by shoving Can Can’s escort off his stool when he sauntered up and invited her to share a drink or two. Lucky he was her type.
The truth was, just about anybody in long pants was Can Can’s type, although she was particular about those who shared her bed.
She took one look at Savage with his broad, brown face, the blacksmith’s shoulders and the air of total assurance that he wore like a cloak, and was ready to drink muddy swamp water with him. It wasn’t long before he decided that Bristlecone wasn’t as hostile and unfriendly as he had first thought.
But there was nothing friendly about what happened after Topman Tarrant arrived in from the Snake River timber leases around nine o’clock.
Topman, as his name implied, was the champion among lumberjacks from out along the Snake. It was rumored he once felled a tree with a well-directed rabbit chop. He liked to drink his whiskey straight from the bottle, didn’t mind if he smoked cigars or ate them as long as there were always plenty on hand, and was one of the few jacks who actually shaved his big, bull-jawed mug with his razor-sharp woodsman’s ax each morning.
The plain truth was, the only way to describe Topman, was rugged.
Somebody had forgotten to tell Savage that the long-legged dancing girl with whom he was sharing the big four-poster in the lamp lit room directly above the bar, was considered Topman’s private property ... at least by Topman that is.
It was to Savage’s credit that he didn’t lose his temper when Tarrant knocked on the door of Can Can’s boudoir with such force that his mighty fist came right through the woodwork.
Savage even maintained a certain dignified calm as he hauled on his pants while the man invaded the room and threw a two-hundred pound, four-drawer desk at him.
But when the wild man from the Snake hauled a knife and threatened to cure him for all time of his interest in the fairer sex, Savage’s peaceful attitude snapped like a dry stick.
