Cutthroats

by William W. Johnstone

  Their names would be mentioned in all the eastern newspapers and even in some history books, most likely.

  Not a bad haul even given all the time the bounty hunters had spent waiting to spring their trap. Now they just had to hope there were enough remains of the two outlaws for Luther “Bleed-’Em-So” Bledsoe to identify.

  Heart thudding, Slash quietly levered a round into his Yellowboy’s action. He was about to rise from behind the rock and show himself when he heard the soft crackle of footsteps to his right. He turned that way, expecting to see Pecos walking toward him.

  But it wasn’t Pecos. It was Jay.

  Unable to stay away from the burning cabin, no doubt irresistibly attracted by the thought of witnessing the bushwhackers’ demise, she stepped up to the edge of the forest, holding Pistol Pete’s old Spencer in her right hand.

  “Jay!” Slash hissed.

  Beyond her, he saw Pecos turn toward him. When the big, blond outlaw saw Jay, he looked beyond her at Slash, widening his eyes and throwing out his left arm in exasperation.

  “Jay!” Slash hissed again. “Get back, dammit!”

  But then she must have seen the bounty hunter urinating on the cabin’s ruins, for her mouth opened wide in shock and fury and she bolted forward, striding stiffly out of the trees and into the clearing, yelling, “You son of a bitch!”

  The fire and the bounty hunters’ own voices must have been loud enough that they’d drowned Jay’s yell. Those few who had heard it turned toward the woman as she raised Pete’s rifle to her shoulder, quickly aimed down the barrel, and fired. The bullet sent the urinating man plunging straight forward into the flames with a scream.

  He screamed louder—much louder—when he hit the flames and flopped around, rolling as the flames engulfed him.

  The other bounty hunters had heard Jay’s rifle report as well as their cohort’s screams. They wheeled, bringing weapons to bear on the redheaded woman storming toward them. Jay paused only to work her Spencer’s trigger guard cocking mechanism, sliding another cartridge into the old rifle’s breech.

  “Dammit!” Slash bellowed, heart racing as he frantically ran out from behind the slanting rock, raising the Yellowboy to his right shoulder and going to work hurling lead toward the bounty hunters.

  As he ran, he automatically triggered the Yellowboy and worked the cocking lever, the Winchester leaping in his hands, stabbing flames toward the bounty hunters, who were just then dropping their bottles and cigarettes as they realized their quarry had flanked them.

  “Oh, hell!” Slash said mostly to himself as he ran.

  Several bounty hunters had raised their own weapons and were triggering shots toward Jay.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Jay, dammit, get down!”

  Slash bulled into the woman, and they hit the ground together, Slash sprawling on top of her, shielding her from the bullets that now screeched through the air above them.

  “Fool woman!” he bellowed, rising to a knee and picking out targets.

  To his right, Pecos had gone to work with his own rifle, and several bounty hunters were jerking and dropping. Slash planted a bead on a long-haired man in a cream duster, and fired. His target screamed and inadvertently shot one of his brethren as he twisted around and fell.

  Slash finished the man the long-haired man had drilled in the knee, then swung the Yellowboy to the left and quickly laid out two more of the bushwhackers, his spent cartridges arcing up and over his right shoulder, his own powder smoke wafting around him. Two more men fired on him from his left, off the burning cabin’s west front corner.

  The slugs thudded into the dry grass around Slash and Jay, whom he could feel jerking with frightened starts beneath him.

  Slash ejected another spent cartridge, then planted a bead on the chest of one of the men ahead and on his left, and squeezed the trigger. The man’s head jerked back, lower jaw dropping, eyes widening. A quarter-sized hole shone in the dead center of his forehead. He opened his hands and dropped his Winchester ’73 and flopped backward in a patch of fire-scorched grass, small flames licking around him, causing his shirt and greasy denims to smoke.

  The other man triggered his Spencer, and Slash felt a grinding burn across his upper left arm. He cursed as he returned fire, but he’d jerked to one side with the force of the bullet slamming into him, and his bullet nudged wide. It struck the back of the head of a wounded bounty hunter trying to crawl away, to the right of his intended target.

  Slash’s intended target tried to fire another round toward Slash but his rifle clicked, empty. The bounty hunter cursed, threw down his rifle, rose, and turned and ran straight out to the west of the cabin, leaping over several of his dead cohorts.

  Slash lined up the sights on the fleeing man’s back, but when he squeezed the trigger, he discovered that his own rifle was empty.

  Pecos must have emptied his Colt revolving rifle, because just then Slash heard the dynamite-like explosion of his partner’s sawed-off twelve-gauge, followed by the agonized wail of the gut-shredder’s victim. Slash glanced to his right in time to see Pecos walking out away from him, to the east, toward where one of the few surviving hunters was running toward the trees ringing the clearing and snapping off shots at Pecos with a revolver.

  The revolver leaped and smoked in the running man’s hand.

  Pecos stopped, crouched over his short, stout barn-blaster.

  Pumpkin-sized flames blossomed from the maws of the small cannon, and the running man gave a chortling cry as the double-ought buckshot tore into him, hurling him into the trees where he dropped and rolled, screaming.

  Pecos tossed the shotgun around behind his back, where it dangled from his neck and shoulder by its wide leather lanyard. The big outlaw drew his big, silver-chased Russian as he strode with grim purpose toward the place in the trees where his quarry had fallen, intending to finish the wailing man with a .44 round to the head.

  “Stay down, you hear?” Slash told Jay, who gave a contrite nod beneath him.

  Slash rose and looked around. Only one of the several bounty hunters lying in bloody heaps was moving. Quickly wrapping a handkerchief around the bullet burn across his right arm, Slash drew his Colt, and a second later the last moving bounty hunter in the near vicinity was no longer moving.

  Slash gazed off to the west. He could no longer see the man who’d fled, but he could hear his running foot thuds dwindling gradually in the trees that dropped down a gradual slope.

  “Is that all of ’em?” Pecos asked, walking up behind Slash now. He’d broken open his shotgun and was replacing the spent wads with fresh ones from his cartridge belt.

  “One of ’em is makin’ a run for it,” Slash said. “You stay here with Jay. I’ll finish him.”

  Pecos nodded at the blood showing on the handkerchief on Slash’s upper left arm. “You hit?”

  Slash glanced at his arm. “I been cut worse trimming my fingernails.”

  He shoved his Colt into its holster. Pulling a large hanky out of his rear pants pocket and wrapping it around the bloody burn, he broke into a run to the west. When he gained the forest on that side of the yard, he knotted the hanky, cursing the bite of pain surging up and down that arm, then slowed his pace as he strode into the forest.

  The man who’d fled might be lying in wait.

  When Slash had moved ten yards slowly, he heard the running foot thuds again. He spied movement ahead. The man who’d fled the dustup was running up a low, forested hill about fifty yards beyond. The man was breathing hard, grunting and groaning anxiously. He’d lost his hat, and he cast frequent, wide-eyed glances back over his left shoulder.

  “Coward!” Slash raised his Colt and triggered a shot.

  The bullet plumed forest duff well short of the fleeing man’s boots.

  The man glanced again over his left shoulder. He gave a mocking smile just before he crested the hill and dropped down the opposite side.

  Again, Slash broke into a run. When he gained the bottom of the hill
he scrambled up the next rise, where he’d last seen the fleeing ambusher. As he crested that hill, he stopped beside a large cedar. He heard the thuds of galloping horses. Now he saw the riders on the next ridge beyond—two horse-and-rider-shaped silhouettes galloping along the crest of that western ridge, angling away from Slash.

  The man Slash was pursuing just then gained the crest of that ridge, catching up to the lead rider. He clawed at the man’s saddle, yelling, “Pull me up, Jack!”

  “Get away, Haskell, you fool!”

  Haskell leaped along behind the lead rider’s horse, trying in vain to leap onto the horse’s back. “Dammit, Jack, pull me up!”

  “Let go or I’ll gun ya!” The big lead rider bashed his pistol butt against Haskell’s head.

  Haskell fell and rolled.

  The second rider, a smaller man wearing a bright red neckerchief, reined his calico to a prancing halt, drew his own pistol, and aimed down at where Haskell was rolling up onto his hip and shoulder in a cloud of dust and pine needles. The pistol bucked and roared.

  Haskell screamed, dropped, and rolled down the hill through the trees.

  “There—I gunned him!” said the second rider with an anxious laugh, holstering his six-shooter and ramming his spurred boots into the calico’s flanks.

  Slash gazed in bald fury at the two fleeing riders.

  The lead man was Jack Penny himself. Slash thought he recognized the second, smaller man as Penny’s first lieutenant, Bart Antrim. Somehow, they must have realized even before the shooting had started that Slash and Pecos had the drop on them, and they decided to live to fight another day. They’d hightailed it like the cowards both men were known to be and circled back to their horses.

  Slash hadn’t noticed because he’d been preoccupied with trying to keep Jay from getting her head blown off.

  He dropped to one knee now and, even knowing the Colt was well out of range, triggered three shots toward the two fleeing riders. Both bounty hunters glanced over their shoulders in Slash’s direction. Then they jounced off into the trees and out of sight.

  Slash stood, cupped a hand to his mouth, and yelled, “Some other time, Jack!”

  His voice had just stopped echoing when Penny responded with: “Some other time, Slash!”

  Slash muttered a curse and then, fury still roaring in him, he flicked open the smoking Colt’s loading gate and plucked out the spent shells. He replaced them with fresh ones from his cartridge belt, closed the loading gate, spun the cylinder, and dropped the piece smoothly into the cross-draw holster on his left hip, snapping the keeper thong into place over the hammer.

  Still grumbling about Penny and Antrim getting away but assuring himself he and Pecos would run into them again soon—and that the bounty hunters wouldn’t be nearly as lucky next time—he walked back in the direction of the cabin. As he crested the last hill, Pecos stepped out of the clearing and into the trees to meet him.

  “Penny and Antrim?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I figured. I didn’t see either man’s body, and I looked at all of ’em. Dang!”

  “We’ll get ’em. Eventually.”

  “What a damn mess, Slash,” Pecos lamented, turning back to gaze into the smoky, sunlit clearing. Eleven bounty hunters lay dead around the still-burning cabin. “Look what those devils done to the hideout.”

  “We’ll rebuild the place. For Jay.” Slash looked around, then frowned and turned to Pecos. “Speaking of her, where is she, anyways?”

  A horse whinnied. Hooves thudded.

  Slash and Pecos turned to peer off across the smoky clearing, toward where a small log stable and corral sat back in the brush a good distance from the cabin. A horse and rider bounded out of the trees to the stable’s left and galloped west. Jay straddled her steeldust gelding, which she called Good South, the direction the horse always faced when grazing. Her red hair bouncing on her shoulders, hunkered low over the steeldust’s dark, billowing mane, Jay galloped into the trees and out of sight, hoof thuds dwindling gradually in her wake.

  Pecos turned to Slash. “What in tarnation?”

  “Yeah.” Slash stared off in the direction she’d disappeared. “Where’s she goin’ like a bat out of hell?”

  * * *

  Jay galloped Good South down a long, sloping hill northwest of the clearing in which her cabin was still burning and around which the bounty hunters lay strewn as though they’d been dropped from the sky.

  Not only the cabin was burning. Everything Jaycee Breckenridge owned—except the clothes she wore and Pistol Pete’s two conversion pistols holstered on her lean hips and the Spencer repeater he’d wielded during all his years riding the long coulees of the western frontier—was turning to ashes inside the burning cabin.

  All gone.

  You might say Jay’s very life had burned up in that cabin, along with everything she owned. At the moment she was too enraged to feel grateful that she had escaped with her life, at least. And that her two old friends, Slash and Pecos, had escaped as well.

  She’d been betrayed by the only man she’d allowed to get close to her in the five years since Pete’s death. Betrayed for money.

  Ahead of her, at the foot of a hulking, forested ridge, lay a small ranch headquarters—a long, low, shake-shingled log cabin and a barn, stable, blacksmith shop, and several corrals. A small log bunkhouse flanked the main house, partly concealed by the pines that climbed the northern ridge.

  Jay galloped under the ranch portal in whose overarching crossbar was burned the turkey track brand to each side of the name RITTER.

  CHAPTER 8

  Ed Ritter, owner of the Turkey Track Ranch, had visited Jay’s cabin quite a few times over the past year. And he’d always left with a smile on his face.

  He wasn’t smiling now, Jay noticed, as he stood staring at her from the corral near the rancher’s cabin. He stood near the corral’s front gate with another, shorter, older man wearing a battered, funnel-brimmed Stetson. He was likely Ritter’s hired hand, Howard Long. Ritter himself, in his mid-forties, was a tall, slightly stoop-shouldered man in baggy denims, suspenders, and a light blue work shirt that showed a long, dark patch of sweat down the front.

  He was scowling out from beneath the floppy brim of his shapeless, dark felt hat. He was raising one hand, shielding his eyes from the sun. He stood very still, staring without expression, though as Jay drew the steeldust nearer the rancher and the older man, she thought she saw shock in the rancher’s dark blue eyes. He was tall and slender, appealing of body if not of face due to his small chin and a callow dullness in his eyes that she probably would have recognized as an indication of a weak character if she’d taken the time to be more discerning.

  But there weren’t many men out here. Besides, she’d enjoyed talking with Ed and cooking for him and just having a man about the house from time to time. To spend the occasional night with and to cook breakfast for in the morning.

  Now, however, as he stood staring at her dully, she saw in his face all that she hadn’t taken adequate note of before.

  As he stood staring at her near the gate he and the other man were repairing, one hand holding a hammer, the other hand shielding his eyes, a nail drooping from between his lips, his sunburned cheeks turned a darker red. His rounded shoulders, from which overlong, apelike arms drooped, sagged beneath the weight of his guilt. His eyes slowly widened, accentuating their shallowness and animal stupidity.

  As Jay sat the steeldust sideways to him, thirty yards away from the corral, the man she now saw as an apelike dimwit drew a slow, deep breath that made his shoulders and long arms rise slowly.

  “Did you take money from Jack Penny?” Jay asked in a low, even voice that did not betray the anger roiling inside her. She could not stop her bottom lip from quivering, however. Nor a single tear from dribbling down her cheek.

  “H-hold on,” Ritter said, turning the hand he’d been shading his eyes with palm outward. He dropped the hammer as well as the nail from between his lips and
stepped sideways, away from the gate. “Hold on, now . . .”

  “Did you take money from Jack Penny?” Jay asked again, louder, more firmly.

  The old man who’d been crouching over the other end of the gate straightened slowly and gave a foxy grin as he turned toward Ritter and said, “What’d you do?”

  “Hold on, now,” Ritter said to Jay, tripping over his own big feet as he sidled in the direction of his cabin.

  Slowly, hardening her jaws and ignoring more tears dribbling stubbornly out of her eyes, Jay unsnapped the keeper thong from over one of Pistol Pete’s two Colt Navys bristling on her hips and slid the bulky piece from its holster.

  “Now, just hold on!” Ritter yelled as he sidestepped more quickly toward the safety of the cabin.

  Jay raised the Colt, clicked the hammer back, and aimed down the barrel. She triggered a bullet into the ground six inches left of Ed Ritter’s sidestepping feet.

  “Hey!” Ritter barked, eyes suddenly glassy with terror. “You stop now! Get off my land! You’re trespassin’ on—!”

  “You told Penny where I lived!” Jay triggered another round into the dirt near Ritter’s boots.

  The rancher held both his large, gloved hands up, palms out. “No! No! No, I didn’t!”

  Jay swung smoothly down from the steeldust’s back. “You did!”

  “Hold on, now . . . I never . . . I didn’t know . . .”

  “That he’d burn me out?” Jay glanced over her shoulder. Dark smoke from her burning cabin uncurled in a thinning column from behind several eastern ridges. Turning back to Ritter, she said, “You had to know he was a bounty hunter. What’d you think he was going to do—ask me to a barn dance?”

  Ritter continued to sidle toward his cabin, hemming and hawing, eyes wide in terror beneath his shapeless hat. “I . . . I . . . I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . . !”

  He looked at Jay narrowing one eye down the barrel of her Colt at him, and his eyes snapped even wider in terror. He wheeled and bolted into a shambling run toward the cabin, his hat blowing off his head and dropping into the dirt behind him.