The guns of c c ellis, p.5
The Guns of C.C. Ellis, page 5
As the thin veil of sleep stirred from her consciousness, she realized this had nothing to do with her imagination! The hand still rested at her throat; then she felt it move ever so slowly, so gently, loosening the top of her sleeping gown and burrowing softly down under it.
Dr. Gray? she almost asked herself aloud, yet the same self-preservation she’d taught herself as a child was still strong and well inside her.
She managed to remain silent, knowing that the small dinner knife she’d stuck between the two folded blankets padding the cot was still there, easy for her to grab when and if that time arrived.
Was it Dr. Douglas Gray? Yes, she was certain of it. The hands that traveled over her were smooth, soft, almost feminine. The hands of the young doctor, not those of Cal Lindsey.
She remained lying perfectly still in the wake of the passing storms, even for a good while after the hands had taken satisfaction in their full account of her. Even when she felt certain whatever she’d been involved in was over, she still refused to allow herself to so much as raise her fingertips and wipe the welling of tears from her eyes. Instead, she closed her eyes tighter and let tears run down her temples onto the flat, misshapen pillow.
In the grainy morning hour, she reminded herself that these were not real tears in the present moment. These were tears from a long ways off, tears of a frightened child in some distant place and time.
Stop it! she told herself.
She had heard nothing from that frightened child for a long time, and she didn’t want to hear from her now, knowing full well she had taught that child when to cry and when to stop. She sat up on the side of the cot.
As a silver-gray mist crept in and surrounded the wagon and water dripped from its canvas cover, she stood up and stepped out of the gown, naked in the shadowy morning light, knowing that if he wanted to see in full what he had fondled and taken pleasure in, he would never have a better chance than now.
“Are you asleep?” she whispered. She took her time, dressing in the clothes she’d been wearing during the gun battle. Without buttoning her shirt, she stepped over to his small bed, her feet bare. “Are you asleep, Dr. Douglas?” she whispered again. “Dr. Douglas Gray?”
She paused for a second. When the doctor still didn’t answer, she picked up an open bottle of Blue River and took a longer-than-usual drink. Seeing the doctor had left an open crate padded with wood shavings and unopened bottles of Blue River, she immediately wrapped the crate in the sheet from her cot, and in spite of the pain from her injured side, she hiked it up over her shoulder.
When the doctor still didn’t make a sound, she corked the open bottle, stuck it down behind her waist and leaned down over him, her breasts dangling out of the shirt and close to his face. She swooned from a soft, warm rush of the laudanum.
“Too bad,” she whispered. “You got me all warmed up.”
She stepped into her boots and picked up the unloaded Navy Colt he’d carelessly left on a small table beside his bed. She buttoned the fly of her trousers and shoved the Navy Colt down into their waist. Beside the Navy Colt, she shoved another unopened bottle of Blue River and walked down the steps from the wagon.
Taking her time, she walked from the wagon to a rope line of seven horses, where a guard sat atop a pine stump dozing, his chin on his chest. In the dark distance, she knew the two wagon mules had been hobbled some fifty yards from camp, grazing on sweet wild grass. Rather than taking a chance on their temperament, she left them there.
Still in no hurry, she looked all around, growing giggly on the dose of laudanum. With little effort, she slipped the guard’s rifle from the crook of his arm and held it while she walked to the line of horses. Setting the sheet-wrapped crate on the ground, she loosened the rope line and fashioned it quickly and expertly into a lead rope, which she then ran from horse to horse. When she’d finished, she reshouldered the sheet-wrapped crate and climbed atop the horse she’d chosen for herself. With the guard’s rifle across her lap and the lead rope in hand, she leaned forward close to her horse’s ear and chuckled almost uncontrollably through an aching, fun-filled laudanum glow.
“I don’t know about you,” she said merrily with only a minimum effort at restraint, “but I’m ready to leave if the rest of you are.”
Chapter 5
Near dawn the two hobbled mules, Elton and Champ, had short-stepped their way, ten inches at a time, until they’d reached the empty blanket bedroll of Cal Lindsey near the waning campfire. Elton, the elder of the two mules, raised his snooping nose from Lindsey’s empty bedroll and looked back to where Champ stood watching in the grainy light twelve feet behind him.
In the silence of morning, for reasons no one was likely to ever understand, Elton raised his head to the sky and without warning began braying loudly, as if rough hands had sprung up and were suddenly attempting to skin him alive where he stood.
“My God, man!” a voice shouted. “Lindsey! Shut that sumbitch up or I’ll cut his throat!”
“Shoot him!” another sleepy voice shouted.
The sounds of the men’s voices caused Champ to join in, braying straight up. His head, between brays, pointed somewhat in the direction of the brook where Cal Lindsey had tied his horse to a pine the night before. Later it would be discovered that Lindsey’s horse was also gone.
A pistol shot streaked upward in warning, yet neither mule gave an inch. If anything, their braying grew louder.
The security squad leader, Detective Lawrence Sterns, jumped into the firelight, a shotgun in his hands.
“Cal Lindsey!” he shouted. “Shut them up before they get the horses riled!”
When Lindsey didn’t reply, nor did the horses get riled, Sterns yelled, “Somebody’s ass is going to swing from a tree over this!”
“Where are the horses?” a voice called out.
When the shot had been fired, the man guarding the horses had jumped up from the stump where he’d sat sleeping and looked all around.
Nothing!
The horses were gone! His rifle was gone! He gripped a half cup of cold coffee in his hand.
“Where in the living hell are the horses, Baggs?” Sterns bellowed in his face.
“The horses are gone!” Menard Baggs replied. “Everything’s gone! We’ve been robbed!”
“And you saw nothing? Heard nothing?” Sterns shouted.
“They were like ghosts, Mr. Sterns! I never heard them or saw them!” The cup of coffee trembled in Baggs’s hand.
“He was asleep,” said a man named Ave Pettigo. He stuck a finger in the tin cup of coffee, then raised it and flicked it in Baggs’s face.
“Look at this!” Pettigo said, yanking the cup away from Baggs and thrusting it toward Sterns. “This coffee’s colder than a witch’s teat!”
Sterns dipped his fingertip into the coffee.
“Yes, so it is,” he said, staring hard at Baggs in the first rays of sunlight. “You’re lucky I don’t want to waste a bullet on you,” he added. “I would blow your brains into the next territory!”
Pettigo raised a big Starr .44 from his waist and nudged it to Sterns, butt first.
“Here you are, Mr. Sterns,” he said. “I’d be honored if you use my gun.”
Baggs came slightly out of his frightened stupor and glared at Pettigo with pure shock and hatred. Pettigo gave him only a smug look.
Sterns took Pettigo’s big Starr and turned it back and forth in his hand as if considering Pettigo’s suggestion. He raised the gun and reached his thumb up to cock the hammer. But the hammer was taller than he was used to with his Colt. Instead of readjusting his grip in front of the men, he handed the Starr back to Pettigo, butt first, looking a little embarrassed.
“Obliged for your offer, Ave, but I won’t use it today,” said Sterns. “Maybe Baggs has learned his lesson.”
Looking at him curiously, Pettigo took the Starr back but said almost insistently, “Are you sure, Mr. Sterns? I don’t mind at all.”
“You son of a bitch!” Baggs shouted, awake now and fired up.
He knocked Pettigo’s pistol from his hand and fell upon him, taking him to the ground, beating him in the face with the coffee cup. Cold coffee flew. The edge of the metal cup left a bloody half-moon cut every time it struck Pettigo’s cheek, his chin, his forehead.
“Hold it, damn it!” shouted Sterns.
He and three other men jumped in and pulled apart the two on the ground. The cup was so battered, Baggs couldn’t turn it loose. He yelped loudly when someone tried taking it from him, which caused the mules to start braying again, this time more angrily.
Another man jumped in and shouted to Sterns, “Cal Lindsey and his horse are gone too!”
“The hell?” said Sterns.
Except for the braying mules, the camp fell silent for a moment in contemplation.
“So is the woman,” said Dr. Gray. He had flipped the canvas up from the rear of the wagon and stood there shoving his shirttails into his trousers. “She’s gone, and so is my new shipment of medical supplies.”
“This settles any question I had about whether or not she’s one of the long riders!” Sterns shouted. “She’s in with them up to her pretty little neck!” He pointed at Dr. Douglas Gray. “And you thought she was just some traveler who got tangled up in our ambush!”
“I was giving the young lady the benefit of the doubt,” the young doctor said in his own defense. “After this, I might very well have to change my mind about her!”
“Change your mind while you’re walking your sorry ass down the trail!” Sterns barked. “You are fired, Doctor! Never show your face in my camp again, or I will have you—”
Sterns stopped abruptly as if stricken to silence at the mere sight of Security Chief Randolph Doss, his trail scout, Scotty Dowell, and the railroad guards Andrew Maggen and Billy Tobin. The four sat their horses abreast, staring down at him.
“What brings you here, Chief Doss?” Sterns managed to say in his best subservient tone of voice. He raised a hand toward his gathered men, quieting them.
The colonel kept completely silent until every eye was upon him and not a single sound could be heard among the men. Finally, he said, “I heard gunfire.” He inclined his head toward Elton and Champ and added, “And these two mallet heads, of course.”
“We were robbed in the night, Chief Doss,” said Sterns. “I hate to admit, we had a prisoner—a member of the long riders, I’m certain. But the gang swept through in the night and sacked us. Took our prisoner, took all of our horses. Even took our former doctor’s medical supplies!”
“Your former doctor?” said Doss, looking over at Gray.
“Yes, that’s correct, Chief,” said Sterns. “I have fired him. He’s lucky I haven’t flogged and hanged him—”
Doss cut him off, saying to the doctor, “You lost all of your medical supplies to these long riders?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” said Dr. Gray.
“And a single prisoner is responsible for all of this?” Doss gestured around the campsite.
“Yes, one prisoner,” said the doctor. “That is, if she was even in on it. We have nothing to prove she was.”
“Oh! She was in on this!” shouted Sterns. “Believe you me!”
“Scotty,” Doss said to his scout, who had inched up on his left side, “if Sterns opens his mouth again, mash it good and hard with your rifle butt.”
Sterns shut up, trembling with rage.
“One of our men—my personal trail scout, Calvin Lindsey—might very well be on the woman’s trail right now,” the doctor continued. “Both he and his horse are gone.”
Doss shook his head.
“In union with the woman, perhaps? This is all very bad,” he said to Sterns. “You’ve blindly allowed a woman to come in, set you up for a gang of outlaws, take off with your trail scout, your medical supplies and every damn horse you had in camp?”
Sterns raised his hand like a child in school.
“May I say something?” he asked.
“Yes, by all means, please do,” said Doss.
He gestured to Scotty to stand down on cracking Sterns in the mouth with his rifle butt.
He listened to Sterns’s version of what had happened overnight, shaking his head now and then in critical disapproval. Yet nothing being said came close to what he and his men had done, beating the railroad owner’s son-in-law to death. Or if they had not beaten the ill-fated young man to death, they had, perhaps even worse, washed his tortured face, combed his hair, dusted him off and buried him alive.
As an experienced leader of men, first in the military and now in civilian life, Doss knew that just as important as assigning the mantle of duty was tactfully attaching the yoke of blame.
“Sterns,” he said gravely, “owing to the terrible mess the young woman has left you in, I’m assuming your command until we can get everything straightened out.”
My command? Sterns felt a cold slap of defeat across his reddened face.
“Chief Doss,” he said quickly, “if I may impose on one of your men for the use of his horse, I’m certain we can continue discussing matters while we ride—”
Doss cut him off, motioning toward the supply wagon, where the two mules were now being hitched.
“Men, listen up!” Doss called out a little louder than necessary to Scotty and the two guards, who had sat their horses a few feet behind him. “Would any of you like to ride aboard the mule wagon and volunteer your horse for Mr. Doss to ride?”
“In the mule wagon?” Scotty chuckled. “I don’t think so.”
Waiting no more than a second for any further reply, Doss said, “There you have it, Mr. Sterns. No volunteers. My men know the value of a good horse. They keep their mount close at hand and allow no one to slip away on it in the dark of night.”
He looked around at the faces of Sterns’s men, seeing how well they had taken his words.
Sterns stood crestfallen at how mercilessly he had been maligned by his superior in front of every man in camp.
“From now on,” Doss continued, “anything that you felt you needed to say to Sterns, you will bring instead to one of these three men gathered around me.” Doss indicated the two guards and Scotty Dowell. “I am taking charge of this outfit until it is once again being run properly!”
His words brought some whistles and applause. Dr. Gray gave a quick cheer, but hurried back inside the wagon to let up the canvas side flaps and clear space for himself and whoever else would be reduced from horseback to riding in the mule-driven rig.
New Water Stop One
At daylight, C.C. Ellis, Sonny Ryan and Jax Hoyt stood drinking coffee out front of the large ragged tent saloon. They watched for arriving members of their group and gave them directions to an abandoned mining camp a few miles out of town, up off of the main trail. The new arrivals followed their directions, turning their horses and leaving, but they did so with dark grumblings and hard stares at the ordinary-looking railcar sitting at the siding platform. The railcar had not been there a few days earlier when they’d robbed the safe on the train that had stopped to take on water. This railcar, which had appeared there mysteriously, would draw any train robber’s attention at first glance, the way it had C.C.’s and the other two’s.
“How long are we going to stand here telling our own people to leave town? Even the saloon owner is getting the jaws over it. He keeps looking out here.”
“He’s losing some money,” said Sonny. “But not much. Our riders always spend like money’s gone out of style.”
“But he hasn’t lost a dime on us yet,” said C.C. “We bought two cases of his rotgut and sent it on up to the mine camp first thing. He knows our riders will be back for more.”
“Yeah, we draw more business here than we run off,” said Jackson. He started to say more but Sonny interrupted him.
“Want to see some no-account sumbitches, look who’s coming right at us,” Sonny said.
They all stared at the far end of town, where the sheriff and his two deputies, Wade Parnell and Robert Flitz, came riding in slowly. The deputies and two other men rode on either side of Sammy Kendricks and Kid Santa Cruz, with Sheriff Max Boyd bringing up the rear. Bystanders slowed and watched from either side of the street.
“Looks like we’re fixing to have a parade,” said Jackson, smiling.
“We’re about to bury every lawman this dung heap has,” said Sonny Ryan. He lifted his rifle from his side and laid it in the crook of his arm for easy reach.
“At least the sheriff was smart enough not to try taking their guns,” said C.C.
“He’s making a show for the townsfolk,” said Jackson, “bringing in some wildlife for them to look at.” He chuckled and muttered, “Sheriff, you have no idea how close you are to meeting Jesus right now.”
“I’ve met the sheriff. I might be able to talk to him,” C.C. said over his shoulder to Sonny.
“Be my guest,” replied Sonny. “I know you’ve got us covered.”
“You’re right.” C.C. nodded. “One of you take the street. One drop back behind me.”
Without a word, Sonny casually veered away from the other two and stepped off the boardwalk into the dusty street. Jackson slowed his pace and let the distance between himself and C.C. lengthen.
C.C. Ellis stopped at the edge of the boardwalk and waited until the sheriff and his two deputies took note of him and rode over closer. Kendricks and Kid Santa Cruz stopped their horses dead in their tracks until a short nod from C.C. got them moving along with the deputies.
Sheriff Max Boyd swung his horse forward and rode around from behind the deputies in time to make an impressive stop where Ellis stood waiting at the boardwalk, a cup of coffee in his left hand.
“Morning, Sheriff,” said Ellis.
“Morning,” Sheriff Boyd replied in a restrained, tight-lipped manner. He looked at the cup in C.C.’s left hand, then at his right hand resting close to the butt of his big Colt. “As you see, I met a couple of your men on the trail and brought them here under guard.”
