The guns of c c ellis, p.20
The Guns of C.C. Ellis, page 20
“Are you feeling better some?” Scotty asked.
The evening before, the very thing Scotty had come along to guard against had happened. Sven Handley, weak, wounded, had fallen from his horse. He slid twenty feet down a slick, mushy path and would have gone over a cliff, had he not managed to hang on to a clump of wild grass until Scotty climbed down and saved him.
“I’m lots better. Thanks,” Handley said.
He sipped and swallowed, set his cup down and raised his binoculars to his eyes. “Okay, here we go,” he said under his breath.
He watched a man in a long raincoat and bowler hat come out of the big shiny Pullman car. The man looked up toward the hillside, got in his saddle and rode slowly away, six waiting riders falling in behind him.
“Scotty, I think we’ve got company headed our way,” Handley said.
Scotty squinted with his naked eyes to make out the toy-sized figures.
“Don’t see the colonel. Do you?” he asked.
“No,” said Handley. But I’d like to. “The colonel hasn’t shown his face in quite a while,” he observed.
He took off the binoculars and offered them to Scotty. “Want to take a look through these?”
“Naw, that’s all right,” Scotty said, watching the men ride down the trail. “If you say he’s not there with them, there’s no point in me looking.”
Handley looked at Scotty for a moment. It was strange knowing that soon enough he would kill him. It was difficult knowing he would soon kill a man who had saved his life only the night before, but he called upon his darker side to dismiss the glimmer of goodness he’d seen and remember instead the man who had torturously beaten him, then buried him alive.
All of this, he reminded himself, on the orders of the demented fool down there in the shiny new Pullman car, Colonel Randolph Doss, security chief of Colorado Western Express Railroad.
“How long have you been the colonel’s trail scout?” Handley asked.
“Since before the Civil War,” Scotty replied. “Every decision he made was based on my personal assessment of the field and the battle ahead. I felt responsible for the colonel and every man under his command.”
“You must be very proud,” said Handley.
“Maybe sometimes,” said Scotty, “but not always. We did things I knew would likely haunt me the rest of my life, and I was right. They have.” He stood up and stepped close to the edge of the overhead canvas.
“Looks like this confounded rain’s finally moving out,” Scotty said. “Maybe this time it’ll keep on moving.” He paused for a moment, then asked, “Am I going to see another sunny day?”
“No,” Handley said flatly.
Scotty sighed a deep breath.
“I knew you were him,” he said quietly. “Are you going to ask me if I knew or not?”
“No,” said Handley. “I thought about it. But I’d as soon never know.”
“I understand,” said Scotty. “I expect you ought just as well go ahead. I don’t like to stand here wondering, waiting to—”
His words stopped as Handley’s Colt roared out with one single shot.
Sven Handley limped slightly as he walked down the hillside to where Scotty Dowell had fallen. A string of dark blood slung wildly as Scotty rolled end over end. When he stopped, he sat slumped against a wet tree trunk, his head bowed on his chest.
Handley could see the .45-caliber bullet in the back of Scotty’s head. No need to check this one. He flipped out his spent round and replaced it, spun the cylinder and slipped the Colt down into its holster. Knowing that the single gunshot would draw the riders in his direction like a pack of wolves, he hurried back to break down the campsite. He took down the canvas overhead and rolled it up. He put out the small fire, gathered the rest of the meager camp and tied it down atop Scotty’s horse, making it his pack animal.
On his way down a hidden game path, he heard the colonel’s riders coming up the hillside. When he knew they were getting very close, he swung wide and rode around, down toward the main trail. At the wider track of broken rock, down-washed and mud-covered gravel, he stopped and sat his horse silently.
At the distant sound of a mule braying, he backed his horse into wet trailside brush and waited until he saw Doc Gray and the medical supply wagon struggling up the muddy trail. The wagon mules, Elton and Champ, trudged forward, braying now and then in protest. On the driver’s seat beside Doc sat Cal Lindsey, knocked out on laudanum, swaying with the slightest movement of the wagon. Farther up the hill in the direction of town, rifle fire, which had slowed almost to a stop earlier, now resumed as if in greater malice.
Fifteen feet in front of the wagon, Handley saw two of the colonel’s riders, Ave Pettigo and Menard Baggs, scouting ahead, their clothes and horses streaked with mud.
Leading Scotty’s horse beside him, Handley tapped the animal forward onto the trail at a walk. When he knew the two men could see him clearly, he turned his animals sideways to them and stopped.
“Hello the trail,” he said, not too loud, but enough to be heard by the two scouts and the wagon driver.
“It’s the quiet stranger,” Pettigo muttered to Baggs. To Handley he said, “Hello, traveler.”
The two tapped their horses forward. From New Water Stop One, gunfire resounded.
“Sven Handley!” said Doc Gray. “Glad to see you and Scotty made it!”
“Just me, Doc,” Handley said, stepping his and Scotty’s horse closer to the wagon. “Somebody shot Scotty in the head. He’s dead.”
“Damn!” said Doc. “Who would shoot Scotty?”
“There’re lots of the colonel’s men riding around, flexing their gun hands,” said Handley. “I wouldn’t be surprised to hear one of them did it.” He tugged the lead rope a little. “You can see I’ve got his horse. I didn’t know where to take his body, so I left him right there. To tell the truth, I was a little concerned about being seen hauling him, the way all the rain has everybody acting.”
“I don’t blame you a bit,” said Doc, his eyes a little watery and glazed.
Blue River? Yes, Handley thought.
There was no question Cal Lindsey, sitting limply and as pale as a corpse, was deeply under the laudanum’s influence.
“Looks like the rain is out of here now,” Doc said. “Let’s hope so anyway.”
Handley looked back along the trail, then at Doc Gray.
“Are you in trouble, Doc?” he said. “It looks like there’s a couple of pirates following you.”
“Pirates?” Doc chuffed, almost dreamily. He glanced back. “Aw, hell, they’re not pirates. They’re Comancheros. They came over with Baggs and Pettigo to deliver my Blue River. They found the three of us in a bad spot. They helped us get this rig up some slick hills back there.”
“No offense to them, Doc,” said Handley looking at the two men riding forward, “but they look like pirates.”
“All right,” said Doc Gray, “but there’re seven more of them back there. All of them from their old stronghold in New Mexico.”
Sven sat his horse, watching closely, ready for any trouble, but the two Comancheros didn’t ride all the way up to the wagon; instead, they stopped fifty feet back and waited until Pettigo and Baggs rode back to them. After talking a few minutes, the two raised an openhanded adios to Doc Gray.
“Looks like they’re headed home,” Doc Gray said, returning their wave, then watching them fade into the wet brush and disappear.
“Must be they’re wary of strangers,” offered Handley.
Baggs and Pettigo returned to the wagon.
“They seemed bent on getting out of here,” said Doc Gray. “Was something wrong?”
Pettigo eyed Handley as he spoke.
“Danke, their leader, said he’s seen the quiet stranger before. Said him and some of his men saw Sven climb up out of a grave, black vultures flittering around him like they were cousins from some otherworldly place!”
“What do you say to that, Sven?” Doc Gray asked with a curious look.
A tenseness set in. The three stared at Handley, who sat slumped and silent in his saddle.
Suddenly, Handley sprang upright and yelled, “Booo!” causing Baggs and Pettigo to jerk back in their saddles, almost causing their horses to spook and rear up beneath them. Doc Gray, also taken aback, caught himself quickly and laughed aloud.
“That ain’t a damn bit funny!” Pettigo shouted angrily.
“Hell no, it’s not!” said Baggs, his hand wrapping tight around the grip of his holstered Colt. “That’s the kind of thing gets a man killed. We talked to those two! They were seriously upset!”
“All right,” said Doc Gray, “everybody hold on to their water.” He looked at Handley. “Black vultures flittering around you? You coming up out of a grave? Have you any idea what this is about?”
Handley saw the slightest shine of Blue River in Doc’s eyes.
“I told you already what happened to me, Doc,” said Handley. “I was caught off guard, waylaid, beaten, robbed, dragged and left for dead. I don’t remember much else. Comancheros, maybe some of these who just left here, found me and kept me from dying.”
“And that’s all you remember?” said Doc.
“That’s all,” Handley replied. “Being dead and rising from the grave, I’m sure I’d remember all that.” He looked at Pettigo. “I don’t recall any vultures flittering, as you called it.”
Pettigo’s anger flared. “The hell’s wrong with the word flittering?” he asked.
“Nothing at all,” said Handley. “I’m just trying to recount the story. I don’t remember any vultures. Not blaming you, but it sounds like some details have been stretched some.”
He nodded in the direction the Comancheros had taken. “Are you saying I scared them off?”
“I don’t know,” Ave Pettigo said. “Why don’t I go bring them back and you can ask them?”
“All right, I’ve had enough, Pettigo!” Doc said firmly.” I remember when I met you, Sven. You couldn’t talk. Your throat was sore and swollen from being choked.”
“That’s a fact,” said Handley though he was lying.
His throat hadn’t been sore from being choked; it had been from yelling so hard from the grave, hoping someone would hear him. But he’d stay with choking for now.
“If I could remember anything else at all, I’d tell you. I’m sorry to say, this is all I’ve got.”
“And it’ll do,” Doc Gray put in.
He looked at Baggs and Pettigo in turn, holding their gaze until each of them nodded grudgingly.
“Ave?” Doc asked.
“Yeah, I’m good with it,” he said, not even recalling now why the strange Comanchero story had upset him so bad. He tried forming a friendly smile. “Hell, these Comanchero traders have some big imaginations anyway.”
“Good enough, then,” said Doc Gray.
Rifle fire still resounded sporadically from the direction of town.
“Stick with us, Sven. Nobody will give you any trouble. We’ll keep going while this rain is stopped. I bet we’ve got a dozen wounded men waiting in line for us.”
“Likely that ain’t all we’ll find waiting for us,” said Ave Pettigo. He nudged his bootheels to his horse’s wet sides.
They rode on.
* * *
* * *
Reese Donovan and his six riders had worked their way quietly up the soaked hillside. They’d shed their raincoats and tied them loose and unrolled across their saddle cantles now that the rain appeared to have stopped. At the three trees where Handley and Scotty Dowell had boiled coffee and heated elk broth over a small fire, Donovan signaled his men down from their saddles.
With one man leading their horses thirty feet away into a stand of juniper, the other five spread out around the campsite until one called quietly, “Uh-oh, there’s a dead man over here, Mr. Donovan.”
Reese Donovan and his men moved quickly and gathered around the body of Scotty Dowell slumped against a large pine tree.
“Poor ol’ Scotty Dowell,” said Reese Donovan. “This must’ve been the single gunshot we heard coming up the trail.”
“The colonel’s going to take this awfully hard,” said one of the men. “Him and ol’ Scotty rode many a hard frontier trail together.”
“For a lot of years,” said another.
“All right,” said Reese Donovan, trying to remain coolheaded. This was his first time being in command of armed security men. “One of you go to the horses and bring back a spare raincoat. We’ll wrap him and take him to the colonel.”
A newer man named Darvin Settles hurried away to the horses. The others remained close together among the three trees.
A few minutes later, Donovan said, “Somebody go see what’s taking Settles so long.”
As a second man trotted away toward the horses, Donovan looked all around suspiciously and said, “Everybody spread out. We’re standing too close—”
From behind a tree, a voice called out, “Everybody drop your guns! We’ve got you surrounded. We’ve got your horses and we’ve killed three of your men. You four are next if you don’t do as you’re told.”
Four of them left! Reese Donovan glanced around wildly.
“Show yourselves, you cowards!” he shouted at what looked like a vacant hillside.
But as he swung his Colt up from its holster, he heard gunfire from close up, all around him, in every direction, pounding him and his three remaining men lifelessly to the ground.
“Hold your fire, men. They’re dead,” the same voice called out.
Sonny Ryan stepped out into the open, his Colt smoking in his hand. He spun around when he heard wet brush rustle, and saw one of the men who’d gone for a raincoat stagger out, his bloody hands spread wide. The front of him drenched with blood from his cut throat, he staggered forward, his lips moving soundlessly.
To his left, a gunman stepped out of the brush holding his gun at arm’s length, and fired a bullet though his head. The man fell limp. A fountain of blood rose high, then diminished. In seconds the thick blood shut down like a spigot turning off inside his head.
Chapter 24
Inside the small jail, the sheriff’s three prisoners were housed in the cell on the left, two of them standing in the far corner, as far from the cell full of wet, muddy horses on the right as they could get. The third man sat on the hard, ragged bunk against the back wall, his hand wrapped around a tin cup of coffee. Because they had refused to tell Sheriff Boyd their names, the sheriff assigned them the first that came to his mind: Freeman, Arnold, and Big Boy.
“Sheriff,” said one, “we don’t like to complain about your jail, but these wet horses are stinking to high hell.”
“Good thing you don’t like to complain, Freeman,” Boyd said. He sat at a window gunport with his double-barreled shotgun resting on his crossed knees.
“Why’s that?” the man asked, one hand around the bars, his other holding his cup of coffee.
“Run your hand up and down the outside of those bars,” said Max Boyd. “Then ask me what caused it.”
With a smirk, the man ran his free hand up and down the bar. “It’s rough as hell, Sheriff,” he observed. “What caused it?”
“Those’re buckshot scars, if you’ll notice,” the sheriff said, also sipping his hot coffee. “What caused it is I had a fella in there who, unlike yourself, did not mind harping and complaining. I threw a round of buckshot through the bars at him just to get him to shut the hell up.”
The prisoners looked at one another and shut up instantly, having already decided that Sheriff Max Boyd was crazy. Boyd smiled subtly to himself. At the other battered desk, turned up on its end against the side door, Jackson Hoyt and Bailey McCool sat on wooden stools, cleaning their rifles.
On the floor, with saddles for pillows, lay the wounded Harvey Brewer and Poker Joe Elliot, both sleeping. Kid Santa Cruz and C.C. Ellis had been keeping a path clear between gunports in the window shutters and the middle of the thick front door.
Looking around the crowded jail, Kid Santa Cruz said to Ellis, “May-ma-maybe we should have gone on and taken the Pullman car like we started to?”
“No, Kid,” said Ellis, “we had to turn back when the sheriff took on these prisoners. He had his hands full. He needed us—whether he knew it or not. Anyway, we’ve got a long shooter up in the hills taking our side. Now’s the time to stick and see where it takes us. Don’t you think so?”
The Kid nodded instead of trying to talk.
“We’re good here, Kid,” said Ellis. “When the time comes, we’ll still take that train ride.”
Somewhere along the front street, Deputies Wade Parnell and Robert Flitz were silently patrolling the town with shotguns.
They moved from one position to the next, every few minutes, staying out of sight, keeping watch on the roofline and either end of the street and always, of course, close watch on the big saloon tent, where the bartender occupied a low seat behind the long, thick bar. With a twelve-inch round mirror on the end of a stick, he managed to wait on customers and keep them coming and going. It hadn’t rained now for a couple of hours and the town was drying, making a sucking sound like large insects breathing underground. The bartender kept a sawed-off shotgun on a shoulder strap. Near his left hand, under the bar top, lay a large ball-peen hammer. Beside it lay a pair of thick, studded knuckle-dusters.
Inside the new Pullman car at the rail platform, the colonel jumped to his feet at the sound of the wagon mules braying. “What the blazing hell?”
He looked out the small window, past his posted guards, and saw the mud-streaked faded green supply wagon swaying up the hill. On the driver’s seat, Menard Baggs was struggling to keep Elton and Champ moving forward. On one side of the wagon rode Doc Gray, on Baggs’s horse. On the other side rode Ave Pettigo and the man some of his security men referred to as the quiet stranger. Cal Lindsey lay facedown in the wagon, an arm hanging limply over the side.
