He jerked again when the Henry spoke again . . . again . . . and again.
The sound of running footsteps sounded on the far side of the camp, maybe two hundred feet away, beyond the horses that were nickering and prancing around in fear, the mule doing the same, braying softly, all three tugging on their picket line.
“What is it?” Devries yelled, his heart pounding. “What do you see, Vern . . . I mean, Rocky Mountain?”
The running footsteps stopped suddenly.
Wade said something too softly, or maybe he was too far away, for Devries to hear.
Pete did hear the sudden gasp, however. It was loud as gasps go and it was followed by what sounded like a strangling sigh. The sigh was followed by a shrill, “Ahh . . . ohhh . . . ohhhh, gawd! Oh, you dirty, low-down . . .”
There was a light thump.
“What is it, Wade?”
Devries ran toward the sound of the commotion. He sprinted through the weak light thrown by the fire and then out of the light again and into the darkness near the whickering, skitter-hopping horses and mule. A deadfall pulled his right foot out from under him, and he hit the ground hard.
He lifted his head, sweating, his heart thundering in his ears. “What is it, Rocky Mountain?”
He stared into the darkness, breathing hard from the short run and the fear that verged on panic.
Footsteps rose on his left. Devries whipped his head in that direction. Someone was moving toward him, taking heavy, lunging strides. He saw the man’s thick shadow.
“Wade?” he called. “Rocky Mountain, that you?”
No reply except for the heavy, lunging steps. The thick man’s shadow moved through the forest, crouched slightly forward.
“Wade?” he called again, panic a living beast inside of him.
He looked around quickly, not hearing anything but the big man’s approach. Still, he had the sense that he was surrounded and that men were tightening their positions around him.
He turned again toward the camp. The light from the fire began to reach the approaching man. Devries swung around from the darkness and, squeezing his cocked Winchester in both hands, hurried back into the camp just as the thick figure stepped up to the fire on the camp’s opposite side.
Devries stopped.
“Rocky Mountain?”
Vernon Wade stood with his knees bent. He was crouched forward, chin dipped toward his chest, his arms crossed on his belly. Slowly, Wade lifted his head. He wasn’t wearing his hat. His shaggy, unwashed hair hung in his eyes, which flashed in the fire’s umber light. His gaze found Devries gaping at him from the other side of the fire.
“Th-they’re . . . they’re . . . here,” Wade said in a strangled voice.
Devries sucked a breath when he saw what appeared to be blood—what else could it be?—oozing out from between his partner’s crossed arms. Blood and Vernon Wade’s innards.
Devries shuddered as though racked with a violent chill. Cold sweat pasted his shirt under his leather jacket against his back.
“Who’s here, Rocky Mountain?”
“Oh . . . oh, gawd!” Wade sobbed, dropping to his knees. He lifted his head and stretched his lips back from his teeth. “They killed me! ”
His arms fell to his sides. As they did, the guts he was trying to hold inside him plopped onto the ground before him. He fell face forward and lay across his bowels, shuddering as he died.
Devries stared down at the big, dark lump of his dead partner. “Who killed you, Rocky Mountain?” he whispered, rolling his eyes around, trying to peer around to all sides at once.
He glanced toward where he and Wade had placed the panniers filled with bullion from the Reverend’s Temptation, between their two saddles, one on each side of the fire. Devries blinked his eyes as if to clear them.
The panniers were gone.
Again, his poor abused heart gave a violent kick against the backside of his sternum.
Someone laughed behind him. It was a high, devilish squeal. It was followed by the crunching of running feet.
Devries whipped around, raised his Winchester, and fired.
“Who are you?” he shouted, ejecting the spent shell from the Winchester’s breech and seating a fresh one in the action.
He fired again. Again. The rocketing blasts shattered the night’s heavy silence and made his ears ring.
More squealing laughter, like the laughter of a devilish boy pulling a prank, rose on his right. It mingled with the laughter of what sounded like a woman.
Devries slid the rifle in that direction, cocking it, the spent shell pinging onto the ground behind him. The rifle leaped and roared in his hands, flames stabbing from the barrel.
More laughter—this time on Devries’ left.
Pete fired.
He fired until he had no more cartridges left in the Winchester’s magazine. He winced when he heard the ping of the hammer dropping benignly against the firing pin.
He stared through his wafting powder smoke into the darkness around him.
No more laughter now. No more running footsteps. No more sounds of any kind. Not even the breeze.
The horses and mule must have pulled free of their picket line and hightailed it, for he did not see their bulky silhouettes on his left, though in his anxious shooting he hadn’t heard them bolt.
The empty rifle shook in Devries’ hands.
He dropped it as though it were a hot potato. It plopped onto the ground at his feet.
He reached across his belly with his right hand and pulled the big, top-break Russian .44 positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip. His hand was shaking so badly that he had trouble unsnapping the keeper thong from over the hammer, raising the heavy pistol, and cocking it.
“Show yourselves!” he screamed. “Show yourselves, you devils!”
His own echo washed over him, further chilling him. It sounded like the echoing cry of a terrified old widder woman.
A man’s voice said casually behind him, “You boys sure can cook a good pot of coffee.”
Devries whipped around so quickly that he almost fell.
He swung the big Russian around, as well, and aimed toward the fire. The blaze had been built up a little so that the light shone on the face of the man crouched over the opposite side of it. The man held a smoking tin cup in his gloved hands.
Devries moved slowly toward the fire. His heart was like a giant metronome in his chest, the pendulum assaulting his heart like a sharpened steel blade.
Devries stopped about ten feet away from the fire, staring aghast at the man hunkered there on the other side of the flames, on his haunches. He had a devil’s grinning face with high, tapering cheeks obscured beneath a thick, sandy beard, and wicked slits for eyes. Coarse, sandy blond hair poked out from beneath the battered Stetson stuffed down on his head. He wore a buckskin coat with a fox fur collar. A Colt’s revolving rifle leaned against the log to his right, within an easy reach.
The man smiled his devil’s smile at Devries. He raised his coffee to his lips, blew on it, and sipped. Swallowing, he straightened to his full height, which was maybe six feet, if that. He was not a tall man. But, then, Harry Seville had never needed to be.
What Seville lacked for in height, he made up for in pure cunning and black-hearted meanness and storied savagery.
Footsteps sounded around Devries. Squeezing the big Russian in his hands, he swung the pistol from right to left then back again, that metronome in his chest fairly shredding his heart. Men stepped into the firelight around him by ones and two and threes and fours . . . until well over a dozen men aiming rifles or pistols at him surrounded him, grinning beneath the brims of their battered hats.
Make that over a dozen men and one woman, a big one who looked very much like a man except she wore a long, black skirt. She was laughing beneath the round, wide crown of her man’s felt hat.
“Ah,” Devries heard himself say in a small, defeated voice. “Ah . . . hell . . .”
The big man laughed hearti
ly, his devil’s eyes slitting so much that they were nearly closed. The other men laughed as well. They laughed and elbowed each other and pointed out the object of their mockery. They snorted and brushed fists across their noses and poked their hat brims back off their foreheads.
Devries had just begun to feel warm water trickling down his leg before a hand slugged his hat from his head from behind then grabbed a fistful of his hair. Pete cried out as the brusque hand pulled his head back by his hair until he found himself staring up at a big, dark man towering over him from behind. Devries tried to raise the barrel of the Russian, but then he felt an icy line drawn across his throat, and all strength left him at once.
He sank to the ground, gasping, lifting his hands to his neck to try to remove the cold noose that had been drawn taut around him. His fingers touched only the oily slickness of blood.
There was no noose. His throat had been cut.
Lying on his back, Devries stared up from the ground at the man who’d killed him. He was a tall, broad-shouldered gent in a bearskin coat and a bullet-shaped black hat from beneath which twin black braids trailed down over the front of his broad shoulders.
Seville.and his half-breed Sioux partner, Louis Raised-By-Wolves. He knew their dastardly reputations.
Devries had done some lousy things on this earth, but he didn’t believe he’d ever committed an atrocity horrible enough to warrant the last thing he saw on this side of the sod be Louis Raised-By-Wolves staring down at him, chuckling at him and licking Devries’ own blood from the blade of his bowie knife as though it were the sweetest nectar he’d ever tasted.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over 300 books, including the bestselling series Smoke Jensen, the Mountain Man, Preacher, the First Mountain Man, MacCallister, Flintlock, and Will Tanner, Deputy U.S. Marshal, and the stand-alone thrillers The Doomsday Bunker, Tyranny, and Black Friday.
Being the all-around assistant, typist, researcher, and fact-checker to one of the most popular western authors of all time, J. A. JOHNSTONE learned from the master, Uncle William W. Johnstone.
The elder Johnstone began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or researching his massive American Western History library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts. J.A. worked hard—and learned.
“Every day with Bill was an adventure story in itself. Bill taught me all he could about the art of storytelling. ‘Keep the historical facts accurate,’ he would say. ‘Remember the readers—and as your grandfather once told me, I am telling you now: Be the best J. A. Johnstone you can be.’”
Visit the website at www.williamjohnstone.net.
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