Cutthroats

by William W. Johnstone

  “Who, you thinkin’?” Pecos asked, his low-pitched voice strained with anxiety.

  “I don’t know—Pattinson?”

  Lew Pattinson was the La Junta town marshal who’d been off trying to throw a loop around the Snake River Marauders while the gang’s former, aging leaders were breaking out of his jail with the help of two comely showgirls. Slash and Pecos hadn’t ridden directly to Jay’s hideout cabin from La Junta. As was their custom, they traced a circuitous route, taking their time to make sure they weren’t being shadowed.

  At least, they hadn’t thought they’d been shadowed.

  Pecos jerked with a start, swinging his pistol to the right. But the thud he’d just heard had only been a pinecone tumbling from a branch at the forest’s edge. “Uh-uh,” he said. “I don’t think so. Pattinson ain’t cagey enough to have tracked us from La Junta.”

  Jay’s voice rose quietly behind Slash. “You boys see anything?”

  “No,” Slash said, his heart thudding in his chest. He felt a tingling sensation just over his heart, as though someone were drawing a bead on him.

  “Why don’t you two get your tails in here?” Jay urged, keeping her voice down.

  Just then a deep, rumbling male voice vaulted out of the forest fronting the cabin. “Slash Braddock and the Pecos River Kid?”

  Slash and Pecos shared a quick, dubious look.

  Slash lifted his chin and, tightening his grip on both his aimed Colts, yelled, “Who’s out there an’ what do you want?”

  “It’s Jack Penny!” the deep voice rumbled back from the tangle of green, breeze-jostled branches. “And me an’ the boys is here to burn you fellas down!”

  “Penny!” exclaimed Pecos, hardening his jaws and flaring his nostrils.

  “Goddamn bounty hunters!” lamented Slash. “Penny and his raggedy-tailed sons of Satan have been after us for years!”

  Penny bellowed even louder, “Burn ’em down, you men!”

  Instantly, chunks of hot lead sizzled through the air, slamming into the porch’s ceiling support posts and into the front of the cabin. One curled the air a cat’s whisker wide of Slash’s left ear to clang against an iron skillet hanging on a wall in Jay’s kitchen.

  Jay screamed.

  The cacophony of a good dozen or so rifles followed a wink later, smoke and flames stabbing out of the pine forest where the shooters crouched, hurling lead from the cover of the trees. As soon as Slash saw the first smoke puffs, marking the bushwhackers’ positions, he began triggering his own Colt. Pecos fired his Russian, standing sideways atop the porch, revolver extended out from his right shoulder, trying to make himself as slender as a man his size could.

  “Boys, get your asses in here!” Jay screamed above the din of thudding bullets, several of which were breaking the glass out of the cabin’s two front windows.

  Slash emptied his right-hand Colt and glanced at Pecos.

  “Jay’s got a point, partner!”

  “Don’t she always?”

  Slash backed into the cabin, firing two more shots. At the same time, Pecos triggered a couple more rounds at the smoke puffing between the pine branches, then backed up and swung around, cursing, as the ambushers’ bullets plastered the front of the cabin to both sides of him, one nipping the bullet-shaped crown of his snuff-brown hat.

  Pete and Jay had put a large window in the cabin’s front wall, so they always had a good view of the hideout’s front yard. It was through this window that the big, lumbering Pecos plunged head first, yelling, more lead tearing slivers from the frame around him. As Slash slammed the cabin’s front door outfitted with loopholes through which to return fire from inside, he turned to see his partner landing on Jay’s kitchen table in a rain of shattering glass and wood slivers from the frame.

  “Damn you, Pecos!” Jay shouted, crouching down in front of the range, poking two fingers into her ears against the din. “Do you know how much that window cost me—not to mention the work it took Pete an’ I hauling it up here and installing the blasted thing?”

  “Blasted is right,” Slash yelled, crouching against the front wall between the door and the ruined window. “Jesus, Pecos!”

  The bigger cutthroat rolled across the table, grunting and groaning, losing his hat but managing to keep a firm hold on the big, silver-washed Russian in his right fist. He dropped over the table’s far side just as two more bullets slammed into the halved-log table’s thick surface, and he hit the floor with an enormous thud.

  “Ohhh!” Pecos grunted as the air was hammered from his lungs.

  Slash emptied his second Colt out the front window, then holstered both revolvers and dropped to his hands and knees, keeping his head beneath not only the front window but all four windows in the cabin, as bullets were being hurled at the cabin from all sides.

  Jay raised her own head to cast a cautious glance out the broken front window. “Bounty hunters, you say? Those SOBs!”

  “What I want to know,” said Pecos, “is how the hell did they find us here?”

  “We’re too damn old an’ stupid not to keep a better eye on our back trails—that’s how they trailed us here!” Slash snaked across the floor to where Pecos lay between the table and Jay, who was still crouched in front of the range. Pecos was groaning and clutching his right shoulder, bits of glass from the window glistening in his long, stringy, gray-blond hair as well as in his mustache and goatee of the same color. “You hit, pard?”

  “My neck!”

  Slash ran a finger through the blood along the left side of his partner’s thick neck. “Pshaw—I’ve cut myself worse shaving!”

  Slash crawled across the glass- and sliver-littered floor toward where his Winchester Yellowboy repeater leaned against the back wall, near the elk horns from which Pecos’s gun rig had dangled.

  “My shoulder!” Pecos groaned behind him, wincing as more lead stitched the air over his head. “I think it’s dislocated! Or . . . maybe it’s broke. Galldangit, Slash, I think my shoulder’s broke!”

  “My wonderful window is broke!” Jay screeched, cowering low against the floor.

  Slash grabbed the Yellowboy and, sitting on his butt on the floor, swung around toward Pecos and levered a cartridge into the action. “Stop your caterwauling, partner! Ain’t seemly in front of the lady!”

  “I remember Pete talking about a bounty hunter named Penny!” Jay yelled above the zing and whine of bullets threading the air inside the cabin, slamming into the walls and furniture and banging shrilly off pots and pans hanging from kitchen rafters.

  “We sure are sorry about leadin’ ’em here, Jay!” Crawling past his partner, wincing as broken glass nipped his knees, Slash said, “Stop lollygaggin’, now, Pecos. We’re gonna have to hold these SOBs off before they . . . oh, crap!”

  Slash had just pressed his shoulder up against the front wall, to the right of the big window, and edged a look through the broken glass poking out of the frame.

  “What is it?” Pecos asked, crawling toward the wall against which both his Colt revolving rifle and his sawed-off, double-barreled, twelve-gauge shotgun leaned.

  “Trouble,” Slash said. “Big trouble!”

  He turned his wide brown eyes to Jay and said, “They got your wagon—the one you haul wood in.”

  Jay scowled, deep lines etched across her forehead. “It’s not the wagon I care about. It’s the cabin I care about, Slash, you corkheaded fool!”

  “Yeah, I know.” Slash raised the Yellowboy, planted the sights on a stocky gent in buckskins just then making a run toward the cabin, zigzagging between large rocks that pocked the yard. He was heading for the stone well coping over which a shake-shingled roof angled, housing a winch and a wooden bucket.

  The stocky man was triggering a Winchester from his hip as he ran, his face shaded by a floppy-brimmed, leather hat. A red neckerchief billowed across his broad, lumpy chest.

  “That’s Ray Laskey,” Slash said, a devilish glint in his eyes.

  He squeezed the trigger. The s
tocky man dropped to the ground and rolled, clutching his right knee on which dark red blood shone, yelling to beat the band. Quickly, Slash ejected his spent cartridge, seated fresh, and fired again.

  Laskey stopped yelling.

  “Was Ray Laskey, the black-hearted devil!” Slash pulled his head back behind the front wall as several bullets tore into the frame just inches from his nose.

  “Ah, hell!” Pecos had just edged a look out the front window from where he stood near the door, which jerked in its frame as bullets pelted it. “They’re gonna burn us out!”

  He’d just seen the wagon that several of Penny’s men were pushing toward the cabin. They’d piled brush into Jay’s old buckboard and set it on fire. There must have been three or four men at work pushing the burning buckboard, but they were staying down behind its far end, rolling the wagon ever closer toward the cabin’s east front corner.

  “Burn us out?” Jay bellowed. “Those devils can’t do that!”

  “You’re preachin’ to the choir, honey!” Slash triggered his Winchester toward the wagon but had to jerk his head back behind the wall again as more bullets tore into the frame. He glanced at Pecos, who tried to snake his Colt revolving rifle out the window but had to pull it back down or get himself perforated.

  “They’re laying down covering fire for the wagon!” Slash yelled to his partner. “They’re not letting us get any shots off!”

  Pecos swiped his hand across another bullet graze—this one on his right jaw—and turned his blue-eyed, frantic gaze to his partner. “Don’t I know it! We gotta do somethin’ fast, though, Slash, or we’re gonna—!”

  Just then there was a crunching boom that made the whole cabin lurch. The front wall and the heavy door shuddered. A couple of ceiling beams sagged, groaning, threatening to give. Thick smoke billowed just outside the broken front windows and slithered through the cracks between the door’s halved timbers.

  “I do believe the wagon has arrived,” Slash said wryly, coughing against the smoke now billowing through the window—thick, cottony tufts of the stuff, making his nose burn and his eyes water.

  Outside, the ambushers laughed.

  “Gonna be gettin’ mighty warm in there mighty soon, Slash an’ Pecos!” bellowed Jack Penny from somewhere outside, now hidden if not by the trees, then by the smoky fog. “You best come out here an’ let us finish you quick! You’re worth as much dead as alive, an’ we don’t want you to suffer none!”

  “Or not so quick!” yelled one of Penny’s men. “I’m gonna shoot you two cutthroats real slowwww! Then we’re gonna saw your heads off, toss ’em in a croaker sack, and take ’em to Marshal Bledsoe in Denver for the ree-ward!”

  “That’s disgusting!” Jay said.

  “That’s Bart Antrim,” Slash told her. “Penny’s first lieutenant.”

  “You go to hell, Antrim!” Pecos shouted through the window, but then jerked his head back as several rounds plunked into the frame, threatening to blow off his broad, sunburned nose.

  He turned to Slash. “Any ideas, pardner, or is it time to get right with the Lord?”

  “Jay, is there a back door to this place?” Slash had turned toward the range, but Jay was no longer there.

  “What the hell good is a back door gonna do us, Slash?” Pecos shouted above the flames’ roar as the fire from the wagon spread onto the cabin’s roof and east front corner. “They got us surrounded! There must be a good dozen bounty hunters out there—and they do seem to have plenty of ammo, in case you hadn’t noticed! Ouch!” he added as another bullet grazed him—this one streaking across the outside of his upper left arm.

  “Jay, where in the hell are you?” Slash called.

  Just then he saw her running down the stairs that ran along the cabin’s far side, behind the front door. She crouched beneath a window over there, above the stairway, and then dropped into the kitchen. She wore a large Stetson and she had Pistol Pete’s twin Colt Navy .44s strapped around her waist. She held his old Spencer repeating rifle in her gloved right hand.

  She ducked with a scream as a bullet from the far window almost blew her head off.

  As she dropped to all fours and crawled toward the rear of the cabin, she glanced at Slash through the thickening smoke. “You asked about a back door?”

  “Yeah, but it’s no use,” Slash said. “Pecos is right, we—”

  “Come on!” Jay yelled.

  She threw up a braided and dyed hemp rug near Slash’s cot, abutting the cabin’s rear wall. She rose to her knees and, coughing on the thickening smoke, tugged on the ring of what appeared to be a trapdoor that had been built into the floor. She tugged several times, grunting, but the door wouldn’t budge.

  Jay cast her bright, fearful gaze toward Slash and yelled, “Help me!”

  Slash and Pecos shared a wide-eyed look of eager anticipation and then both men scrambled like oversized rats to the back of the cabin.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Pete dug this escape tunnel in case the hideout was ever discovered and attacked,” Jay said, her voice disembodied in the musty darkness beneath the cabin. “I’ve never had to use it . . . till now.”

  Slash and Pecos crouched around her. They’d both quickly grabbed their saddlebags after Slash had pried the door up out of the floor, and now they held the bags over their shoulders in the cool, damp darkness. Slash couldn’t see anything except the stygian black pushing up close around him.

  He heard the muffled shooting through the cabin’s floor above his head, smelled the smoke licking through the cracks in the trapdoor.

  A scraping sound. A match flickered to life in Jay’s hand.

  “Hold that.”

  She handed the match to Pecos, then plucked one of three tree branches, whose ends were wrapped in old flour sacks, from a small vegetable crate. She tipped a rusty can over the flour sack end of the branch, and the acrid odor told Slash that the liquid she poured into the burlap was pine tar.

  She tipped the branch to the match in Pecos’s hand, and the flames grew into a ragged orange ball around the sacking, shoving the coal-black shadows farther back away from the trio hunched there in a tight group beneath the closed trapdoor. Now Slash could see the earthen sides of the tunnel, which was only about five feet high and five feet wide. Wooden steps to his right, coated with grime and spiderwebs, angled up toward the trapdoor through which smoke continued to slither, fouling the tunnel’s pent-up air.

  Jay pushed between Slash and Pecos and, holding the flaming torch out in front of her, began crawling on hands and knees. In her right hand was Pistol Pete’s Spencer rifle. His old Colt Navys bristled on her lean hips.

  “Has this been here all the time?” Pecos asked as, crawling, he fell into line behind Slash, both men following the torch-wielding woman along the musty tunnel.

  “Pete dug it the year after we moved into the cabin. Be glad you never had to know about it,” Jay said, adding dryly, “till now.”

  “We sure are sorry, Jay,” Slash said, crawling and sort of dragging his Winchester along beside him, his saddlebags hanging off his left shoulder. He kept his head low so his hat wouldn’t rake the tunnel’s low ceiling. “I don’t know how in the hell Penny followed us here, but—”

  “Forget it, Slash,” Jay said, breathing hard ahead of him, keeping the flaming torch raised in front of her.

  Slash followed her, staying close on the heels of her high-heeled, high-top leather boots. His embarrassment and self-revulsion at having led bounty hunters here to burn the woman’s home were equaled only by the rage burning just behind his heart. He could feel it tingling in the fingers wrapped around his Winchester’s neck, in his eyes, in his toes.

  He could tell from Pecos’s grim silence that his partner shared his sentiment.

  If they made it out of here and could circle around behind the bounty hunters, Jack Penny would die hard.

  Finally, after about sixty yards of crawling on their hands and knees, they came to what appeared a wall.

  The
end?

  Jay glanced over her shoulder at Slash and Pecos coming up behind her. “We just have to hope nothing has blocked the door over the years.” She hammered the back of her fist against what sounded like wood.

  “Pete only came down here a few times after he dug the tunnel, to make sure it was still open. If a tree or rocks or something has fallen down over the door, we’ll be trapped in here. The only way back is . . .”

  “Through the burning cabin,” Slash finished for her. “Then, thanks to me an’ Pecos, you’ll die with us . . . in Pete’s escape tunnel.”

  “I told you to shut up about that!”

  Jay rammed her shoulder against the door. As far as Slash could tell, the door didn’t move.

  “Let me try.”

  Slash slid around her, and Jay drew back. Slash rammed his left shoulder against the door.

  Nothing. It felt solid.

  He rammed his right shoulder against the door.

  Again, nothing. A dark dread began oozing into his belly, making him feel sick. He was suddenly starting to feel as though they’d all been buried alive.

  He turned sideways and drew back away from the door, glancing at Pecos.

  “Get over here, you big lummox. Your turn.”

  “No need for name callin’.” Pecos’s deep voice sounded brittle, betraying his own anxiety.

  He sidled up to the door and, on his hands and knees, bunched his lips and rammed his right shoulder against the door.

  “Harder,” Slash said.

  Pecos rammed his shoulder harder against the door.

  “Harder!” Slash said.

  Again, Pecos rammed his shoulder against the door, this time with a grunt.

  “Oh, come on, Pecos,” Slash berated him. “You can do better than that. You’re embarrassin’ yourself in front of the lady!”

  “Yes,” Jay said, chiming in. “Why don’t you put a little muscle into it, Pecos? Put those shoulders to good use!”

  Pecos glared at them both, then pulled farther back from the door, giving himself some room with which to build up some momentum. With another fierce grunt, he slammed his shoulder against the door.