The hanging road, p.23
The Hanging Road, page 23
“Nobody said that,” Charity replied tautly. “I just asked you to go ahead and pay for those beers.”
“Fine.” Braddock took a coin from his vest pocket and slapped it on the bar. “But since I paid for it, I’ll damn well do what I please with it.”
He turned the mug on its side and slowly poured the beer on the floor in front of the bar. Forrest and Jones did likewise, tossing coins onto the bar and then pouring their beers on the floor so that a good-sized puddle formed at their feet.
The saloon was completely quiet now, so that the splashing of the beer sounded unnaturally loud. So did the scraping of chair legs as Matt and Sam stood up and faced the three gunslingers.
The customers who were in the line of fire scrambled to get out of the way.
Braddock sneered at Matt and Sam and said, “What’s the matter, Bodine? Something botherin’ you?”
“You’re making a mess there,” Matt said.
“Yeah?” Braddock looked down at the spilled beer as if he hadn’t seen it until now. “Somebody ought to mop that up. Be a good job for that half-breed. Sorry-ass Injun ain’t fit for bein’ anything more’n a swamper.”
Sam said, “I could mop up that spilled beer, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t help the smell.”
“Yeah, it does stink of redskin in here,” Chuck Forrest put in with a chuckle.
“No, I was referring more to the inevitable result of the relaxation of the sphincter muscle.”
The three gunslingers frowned at him, obviously confused by what he had just said.
“He means you boys are gonna crap your pants when we shoot you,” Matt informed them.
The frowns disappeared, replaced by outraged glares. “Why, you—” Braddock began. He didn’t bother finishing the insult. His hand stabbed toward his gun in a blinding draw. Beside him, Forrest and Jones slapped leather, too.
The saloon erupted in gun smoke and death.
Chapter 26
Matt and Sam both pulled iron faster than the eye could follow. Matt’s Colts cleared the holster just a hair ahead of Sam’s gun. The twin revolvers bucked against his palms, blasting as soon as they came level. Tongues of flame darted wickedly from the muzzles.
The bullets smashed into Chuck Forrest’s chest and threw him against the bar. The impact of the slugs was so powerful that he was bent backward over the hardwood from the waist. He had drawn his gun but never fired it. The weapon slipped out of suddenly nerveless fingers and flew up in the air, seeming to hang there for a second before thudding to the floor.
Even as Forrest was dying, Matt had shifted his aim and triggered again, this time at Warren Jones. The bullet from Matt’s right-hand gun shattered Jones’s left shoulder, turning him halfway around in that direction. The slug from the left-hand gun ripped through both of the ugly little hardcase’s lungs, entering through the right side of his body and exiting from the left to smack into the front of the bar behind him. Jones stumbled and coughed. Blood poured from his mouth. He pitched forward on his face, and Forrest slid from the bar behind him to land sprawled on top of him. Both men twitched a little in their death throes, but other than that, they didn’t move.
At the same time as the shots from Bodine’s guns were ringing out, Sam Two Wolves opened fire on Lije Braddock. Braddock got off a shot that scraped across the top of the table where Matt and Sam had been sitting, ripping the green felt that covered it. But Braddock didn’t fire again, because two slugs from Sam’s gun had torn into his belly, knocking him back a step and doubling him over. He staggered to one side and struggled to stay on his feet. It was obvious he wanted to lift his gun and take another shot at Sam, but he lacked the strength to do so. Finally, he dropped the gun and pressed both hands to his belly instead, but he couldn’t stop the crimson tide that welled out over his fingers. With a groan, he took a couple of careening steps and fell headlong on a vacant table. The table’s legs snapped, making it collapse under him.
Except for the dying echoes of the shots, the Silver Belle was silent again.
Matt holstered his left-hand gun and started replacing the expended rounds in the other weapon he held. “Sorry about the damage, Charity,” he said to the stunned redhead standing behind the bar. “We’ll go through those fellas’ pockets, and if they don’t have enough money on them to take care of it, Sam and I will make up the difference.”
“That’s right, ma’am,” Sam said as he followed his blood brother’s example and began reloading his gun. “Maybe if I’d hit Braddock a little cleaner, he’d have gone down before he got a chance to bust up that table.”
Charity took a deep breath and blew it out. “Don’t . . . don’t worry about it,” she said. “They didn’t give you any choice.”
“Oh, we had a choice,” Matt said. “We could’ve let ’em buffalo us.”
“We could’ve tucked our tails between our legs and run,” Sam added.
“But that ain’t like us.”
“No,” Sam said with a solemn shake of his head. “It’s not.”
Not surprisingly, the undertaker got there before the sheriff did. By the time Sherman Branch came in toting his ubiquitous shotgun, the bodies had already been hauled off and the blood and beer mopped up from the floor. “What happened here?” the lawman demanded anyway.
“A clear-cut case of self-defense—again,” Judge Ashmore told him. “You can go down to the Colorado Palace and tell Junius Cole that the odds have been whittled down by three.”
Branch glowered at Matt and Sam, who were sitting calmly at one of the tables again, and sputtered, “You . . . you can’t keep on killin’ people!”
“Then they should stop trying to kill us,” Sam said.
“Yeah,” Matt added with a smile, “because we don’t cotton to it.”
He knew, though, that Cole wouldn’t stop. Neither would Terri Kelly—or Theresa Kincaid, as she called herself now—or Porter Wood or Lucas Tate. The lines had been drawn in the sand.
The killing was just getting started.
The sun was touching the tops of the Prophet Mountains as Bo, Scratch, and Hector rode toward the Half Moon. It had been a long, eventful, and pure-dee rotten day, filled with death, disappointment, and betrayal.
And it wasn’t over yet, Bo thought. They had to collect the wages they had coming to them from Theresa, then ride back to Buffalo Flat and talk to Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves. Bo intended to throw in with Bodine and Two Wolves to help protect those women at the Silver Belle from Cole—that is, if Bodine and Two Wolves were willing to accept their help. It was possible the two young men might not trust the Texans and Hector, knowing that they had once ridden for Theresa.
They weren’t far from the ranch when a shot rang out and muzzle flame stabbed through the dusky gloom ahead of them. Hector yelped in pain and started to topple from his saddle. He would have fallen if Scratch hadn’t grabbed his arm and steadied him. More gun flashes lit up the twilight. Bullets ripped through the air around the heads of the riders.
“Get out of here!” Bo shouted at Scratch and Hector as he palmed out his Colt and returned the fire, triggering several shots toward the places where he had seen muzzle flashes. “Go! Ride for Buffalo Flat!”
Scratch grabbed the reins Hector had dropped when he was hit. The wounded man held himself in the saddle by tightly gripping the horn. As Scratch wheeled his mount around, he hauled Hector’s horse with him. His spurs raked his horse’s flanks and sent the animal lunging into a gallop.
Bo felt a bullet tug at the sleeve of his coat as he finished emptying his six-gun at the ambushers. There had been an awful lot of bushwhacking going on in this part of the country, dating back to William Kincaid’s murder, he thought as he whirled his mount and kicked it into a run after Scratch and Hector. He blamed that on Cole’s influence. Things always went to hell when somebody like that tried to come in and take over.
More shots rang out as Bo pounded back along the trail. He didn’t know if he had wounded any of the bushwhackers or not. Probably not, considering the poor light and the fact that he had been blazing away with a handgun.
He knew Hector had been hit by that first shot, but he didn’t have any idea how bad the injury was. Bo hoped the little Mexican wasn’t mortally wounded.
The firing died away behind them. The fading light was too uncertain for any long-range shooting. The bushwhackers had had one good chance to drop their targets, and they had failed at that. Bo intended to see to it that they didn’t get another chance.
“Bo?” Scratch’s voice called out through the gathering darkness. “That you?”
“Yeah,” Bo replied as he reined in. “Where are you?”
“Over here at the side of the trail. Since the shooting stopped, I figured I’d better have a look at Hector and see how bad he’s hurt.”
Bo dismounted and led his horse toward the shadowy figures he could now make out to one side of the trail. Hector had taken a seat on a fallen log. Scratch leaned over him, pulling the Mexican’s shirt aside.
“It is nothing, Señor Scratch,” Hector protested. “The bullet, she barely touched me.”
“It touched you hard enough to knock a chunk of meat out of your side,” Scratch informed him. “Bo, keep an eye out just in case them bush-whackin’ varmints come after us.”
Bo was already reloading his revolver. “I’ll be ready for them if they do,” he said as he snapped the cylinder closed. He holstered the gun and then drew the Winchester from the sheath strapped to his saddle. The rifle was fully loaded. Bo worked the lever to throw a cartridge into the firing chamber.
Bo stood guard while Scratch took a flask of whiskey and a roll of bandages from his saddlebags. After giving Hector a nip from the flask and taking one for himself, Scratch splashed some of the fiery liquor on the wound in Hector’s side. Hector’s breath hissed between his teeth at the sharp bite of the whiskey on raw flesh. “Ay, Dios mío!” he said.
“That’ll keep it from festerin’,” Scratch said. He wrapped bandages around Hector’s torso and pulled the bindings as tight as he could. “You ought to be able to ride now.”
“Where are we going? To the rancho?”
Bo shook his head. The bushwhackers hadn’t followed them, but he knew it wouldn’t be safe to try to make it to the Half Moon again. “I reckon we’ll have to forget about those wages we’ve got coming to us, boys. I don’t believe Theresa intends to pay us in anything except lead.”
“You think she was behind that ambush?” Scratch asked.
“Cole or Wood may have given the actual order to send some of those gunslingers ahead of us, but she had to know about it. I reckon they figured we might try to join forces with Bodine and Two Wolves, and they wanted to stop us before that could happen.”
Scratch nodded in the dimness. “Yeah, varmints like that usually want the odds as high on their side as they can get ’em. So we’re gonna try to make it back to Buffalo Flat?”
“Yeah, I guess. But Cole’s liable to have thrown a cordon around the settlement by now. We may have to fight our way through.” Bo paused. “The other option is to pick another direction, ride off toward it, and never look back.”
“You mean let Cole and Miz Kincaid get away with takin’ over the whole damn town? This whole part o’ the country, in fact?” Scratch let out a disgusted snort. “Not damned likely. It took me a while to come around to the truth, but I can see now that woman’s got to be stopped.”
Bo nodded in agreement. “Let’s ride, then. That is, if you’re up to it, Hector?”
“Try and stop me, Señor Bo,” the gritty little ranch hand said. “I, too, have scores to settle.”
Night had fallen quickly once the sun set. The three men mounted up and rode grim faced through the darkness toward Buffalo Flat.
Theresa Kincaid sat across the desk from Junius Cole and said, “I don’t see any point in waiting.”
She had a glass of sherry in one hand and occasionally sipped from it as they discussed their plans. There was an easy elegance about her despite the frontier garb she wore, Cole thought. She was undeniably beautiful, and the ambition and even ruthlessness he sensed in her drew him to her even more strongly than he would have thought possible. For months, he had regarded her as an enemy, an obstacle in the path of his plans, and nothing more.
He could see now how wrong he had been about her. They should have been working together all along.
He didn’t want to start moving too fast, though. He said, “Maybe we should take our time—”
“Why?” Theresa cut in. “Every day you wait to crush your opposition is another day they can get stronger. I know how Bodine and Two Wolves work. I’ve had trouble with them before. They’ll rally the townspeople around them if you give them a chance. You heard what they did to Braddock and Forrest and Jones. Everybody in town will know about it by morning, if they don’t already. That’ll give people the courage to stand up to you. You don’t want that, Junius.”
Cole scowled and shook his head. “Anybody who crosses me will regret it. That’s a promise.”
“I believe you. The question is, do the citizens of Buffalo Flat?”
“They’d damned well better!”
Theresa took another sip of sherry. “Then you have to do something to show them.” She paused, then asked, “Can you count on the sheriff to look the other way?”
Cole waved a hand. “Don’t worry about Sherman Branch. The only reason he’s in office is because of my support, and he knows it. Anyway, he’s a small-timer. He’s not going to interfere.”
“Then as soon as those men get back from disposing of Creel and Morton, our whole bunch should go down and clean out the Silver Belle. You’ll never have a better chance to get rid of Bodine and the half-breed. Once they’re dead, that redheaded witch and the other whores won’t have any choice but to leave town . . . unless, of course, you want to keep them around and put them to work for you.”
“You’re talking about not even making a show of doing things legally,” Cole growled.
“Why worry about that? You already said the sheriff’s not going to interfere.”
“What about outside authorities?” Cole wanted to know. “What if the governor gets wind of what we’re doing?”
Theresa smiled and shook her head. “That’s when Sheriff Branch will earn his keep. No matter what happens, he can make it sound like we were in the right, like we were just defending our own interests. If he can’t, then it’ll be time for another lawman to take over.” She laughed. “How does Sheriff Wood sound?”
It sounded pretty good to Cole. He began to nod slowly. She was winning him over.
Theresa leaned forward and set the glass on the desk. “Hit them now, and hit them hard,” she said, hatred edging into her voice again. “Once Bodine and Two Wolves are dead, no one can stop us, Junius. We’ll run this part of the country like a king and queen.”
Cole smiled. He liked the sound of that.
Especially the king and queen part, he thought as he looked at the beautiful and deadly Theresa Kincaid.
“I tell you, I don’t trust her,” Anna Malone said to Lucas Tate as they sat together at one of the rear tables in the Colorado Palace. “I don’t trust her at all.”
Tate scowled toward the bar, where Porter Wood and the rest of the gunslingers were gathered, drinking and talking and laughing. They didn’t seem bothered by the fact that three of their number had died earlier this evening in the gunfight with Bodine and Two Wolves. Men like that knew their lives could end violently at any time, with little or no warning. That was part of the game. So they didn’t waste much time mourning when one of their fellow gunslingers was cut down.
Anna looked at the closed door of Cole’s office and went on. “You know she’s in there turning him against us, Lucas. Junius never shut us out like this before. Not until she came along and offered to join forces with him.”
Tate laughed harshly. “You’re just jealous,” he said. “You’re afraid the Kincaid woman is going to take your place.”
Anna glared at him. “Don’t try to tell me you don’t feel the same way about Porter Wood. You’re not the top man with a gun around here anymore.”
“I can take Wood,” Tate snapped, but he didn’t sound too convinced of that. “Anyway, we’re all on the same side, ain’t we? I got no reason to be jealous of him.” He didn’t sound convinced of that, either.
Both of them sat up straighter as the office door opened and Cole came out, followed a moment later by Theresa Kincaid. Cole walked across to the table where Anna and Tate sat.
“I’ve got a job for you, Lucas,” he announced. “I want you to ride out to the Diamond C and bring back Barlowe and the crew.”
“You want all the hands in town, Boss?” Tate asked with a frown.
“The gun-handy ones, anyway,” Cole decided. “Barlowe can leave a few men on the ranch, just to keep an eye on the place. Although I don’t think we have anything to worry about out there.”
“Why do you want Barlowe and the others to come to town?”
Cole frowned as if he didn’t like having his orders questioned, even slightly. He said, “We’re taking over the Silver Belle and getting rid of Bodine and Two Wolves tonight.”
“You’re gonna send nearly twenty men to get rid of two?”
“How many men have I sent against those two before?” Cole snapped. “I’m through playing with them. They’re going to die tonight, and I might just run those whores out of town on a rail.” His right hand clenched into a fist and thumped down on the table. “Everybody in Buffalo Flat is going to see that they can’t defy Junius Cole, by God!”
Tate nodded and stood up. “Sure, Boss. I’ll fetch Barlowe and the boys from the Diamond C. Just don’t start the ball until we get back.”
Cole nodded curtly. “Don’t waste any time.”
As Tate left the saloon, Anna glanced toward the bar, where Theresa Kincaid stood talking to Wood. There was a smug, self-satisfied smile on the blonde’s face, and as Anna saw it, she knew that it had been Theresa’s idea to attack the Silver Belle tonight. She wanted to strike right away, while her partnership with Cole was still fresh. Before Cole had a chance to find out for himself just how treacherous she could be.
