by Paul Bagdon
The outlaw was taking a twisted cheroot from his vest pocket with his free hand and sticking it in the corner of his mouth. He scratched a lucifer on the cantle of his saddle and lit the cigar. From a haze of smoke he said, “That’s good, lawman. You jist keep your wits about you.” He exhaled a plume of smoke past Lee’s face. “I said I was gonna kill you twenty years ago, but you got lucky. That ain’t gonna happen this time. An’ I’m gonna do it my way—the slow way.” He gigged his horse lightly with his spurs and pulled up directly in front of Ben. “You know somethin’, Marshall?” he continued. “Your pa died real slow—an’ he was yellin’ an’ screamin’ at the end so it like to give me a headache.”
Ben’s hands twitched slightly, but he held them where they were. He could feel the raw, electric tension between him and Stone, as palpable as the steel point of an arrow at full draw and straining to be released. For a full minute the only sound on the street was that of Lee’s constricted breathing.
“Let her go, Stone,” Ben finally said, struggling to control his voice. “If you don’t, I’ll watch you die, and your men too. If you don’t know anything else about me, you know I don’t threaten anything I can’t do. Let her go.”
Stone sucked on his cigar strongly enough so that the end of it appeared white hot, even in the direct light of the punishing sun. He expelled tendrils of smoke through his nostrils and then a tight stream through his pursed lips. “I could real easy kill you right where you stand.”
“If you thought you could, you would.” Ben was relieved to hear that his voice sounded more controlled. “I’m faster than you’ve ever been, an’ a whole lot more accurate. I think I’ve proved that. If it wasn’t for the lady you’re hiding behind, you’d be on your back in the street with flies walking on your eyes.”
Redness suffused Stone’s neck and engulfed his face. His eyes became glinting black diamonds. He spat his cigar off to one side. “You’re nothin’ without your voodoo book, Flood, an’ I’m gonna prove that real soon.”
“My Bible? You’re right—I’m not. But that doesn’t change anything. You’re going down hard and you’re going down to stay the next time we meet.”
Stone didn’t reply, but instead spun his horse and loped back to the bank. His men let him pass and then followed him, leaving their dead comrades where they’d fallen.
In a moment Nick was at Ben’s side. “C’mon! You heard what he said about Mr. Turner! He needs . . . Ben? What’s the matter?”
Ben shook his head, feeling like a man just coming awake. He saw Nick staring at him. “C’mon,” he grunted and set out at a run to the bank.
He found Sam Turner on his back, semiconscious with blood pooling beneath him and onto the polished wooden floor. Marcia Hildebrand, one of the tellers, knelt at his side. Face ashen and fingers trembling, she wiped oily sweat from his forehead with her handkerchief.
Ben eased Marcia back by her shoulders and took her position next to Sam. His fingers gently probed the two wounds. “Get Doc,” he said to Nick. “An’ get him fast. Sam’s bleeding awful bad. Marcia—I need some long strips of cloth.” He looked over at Hiram standing dumbstruck against the wall, his hands hanging like useless appendages at his side.
“Hiram!”
It took a moment for the man to respond. When he did, his voice cracked with emotion. “I . . . opened the safe. He made me do it. He shot Mr. Turner without a word, and he took Miss Morgan with him—”
“There’s no time to talk, Hiram. I need you to run over to the Drovers’ and get a quart of the cheapest, rawest rotgut there is.”
“I . . . shouldn’t have opened—”
“Do like I said, and do it now!” Ben shouted. “Marcia—where’s that cloth?”
Sam’s eyes opened at the sound of Ben’s voice. “Lord,” he whispered.
“He’s here, Sam. You know that.” He took his friend’s hand in his own.
“It hurts . . .”
“Yeah, I know it hurts. Just hold on, all right?”
Sam’s eyes closed. His lips moved slightly, producing the most silent of whispers. Then his lips were still.
“Marcia!”
Ben looked over his shoulder and saw Marcia scurrying over to him with cloth in her hands. He took two strips, wound them together, and fit them around the upper aspect of Sam’s right leg. When he jerked the knot tight, Sam grunted and then lapsed back into unconsciousness. The blood stopped flowing almost immediately.
The shoulder wound, however, was not so easy. Blood pumped from the torn flesh in gushes, in time with the banker’s heart. Ben’s index finger found the wound, and he pressed it closed, feeling solid bone underneath.
At that moment, Hiram burst back into the bank and raced across the floor to Ben’s side, extending an opened bottle of varnish-hued whiskey. Ben shook his head.
“You pour it—right below the tourniquet, directly into the wound. I can’t let go here.”
Hiram tipped the neck of the bottle carefully, dripping the whiskey onto Sam’s leg.
“Pour it, Hiram!” Ben demanded. “Soak the whole area and then start up here on his shoulder—infection will kill him just as dead as a bullet will.”
As Hiram poured the whiskey, Nick banged through the front door of the bank with a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit right behind him.
“Doc!” Ben exclaimed. “Thank God you’re here.”
The doctor’s craggy face creased with a frown, and he ran his fingers through his long, uncombed mass of black and gray hair. “You did the right things, Ben,” he said, his voice deep and throaty. “Shift on out of the way now and let me in where you are. You can let go of the artery.”
Ben rose to his feet and stood at Sam’s head, watching Doc at work. Nick and Hiram stood by his side.
“You boys go now,” Doc said. “If I need anything, I’ll call for you.”
Obediently, the men filed out of the bank. Ben looked at the undertaker’s wagon baking in the sun as two men hefted the bodies of the dead outlaws into it. He turned to the bank teller.
“Hiram,” he said gently, “you go on home. You’ve had enough excitement for one day.”
Hiram nodded and started shuffling away.
“One thing I want you to know,” Ben said loudly enough for those gathered in the street to hear. “You did the right thing earlier today, and you saved some lives by doing it. Ain’t a whole lot of men who would’ve been able to keep their wits under the guns of those outlaws.”
Hiram hesitated midstep without looking back. Then his spine straightened and his shuffle became a stride.
Ben watched him walk away for a moment and then sat on the bench in front of the bank. Nick sat next to him.
“You gonna tell me how that outlaw knew you?” Nick asked. He quickly added, “I heard just about everything that passed between the two of you from over at Scott’s. I couldn’t help it. You wasn’t but ten or fifteen feet from me.”
Ben sighed and looked down at his clenched hands. “Zeb Stone was ridin’ with a gang of border raiders twenty years ago. They ran off a few head of my father’s cattle, an’ he went after them. They killed him. I was workin’ for the Pinkerton outfit in Yuma when I got the telegram from my ma. I came back, and I faced Stone, and I put a bullet in his gut and left him to die. He didn’t.”
Nick was quiet for a long moment. “What’s that voodoo thing he talked about?” he finally asked. “I never heard a Bible called a voodoo book. Fact is, I don’t know what voodoo is, least not for sure. It’s some kind of magic, ain’t it?”
“It’s pure evil is what it is. Calling Scripture voodoo is about the worst insult I can think of for the Word of God.”
The two men sat in silence. The small crowd of townspeople began wandering away from the bank, some to the Drovers’ Inn, some to their jobs, some to their homes. Soon only two men remained, engaging in a drunken push-and-shove match near the beer wagon.
“You want me to take care of that?” Nick asked.
“Le
t it go. Nobody’s going to get hurt. Those two chuckle-heads are the best of friends. They both ride for the Q-Bar, an’ they’re off till the next herd moves out. It’s the beer talking, not the men.”
“Yessir.”
Ben watched the two men until they ceased their bickering and walked back to the Drovers’ Inn. “You did good today, Nick,” he said after a moment. “I’d still rather see you with a rifle than with that shotgun of yours, but I guess that’s up to you.” He paused. “No sense in dancin’ around it—we’re both thinkin’ about Lee being with Stone and his men.”
“Yessir, we are—an’ we can’t trust that snake’s word. He ain’t gonna let Miss Morgan go no matter what he said. I’d like to put together a posse and ride out as soon as we can get provisioned. Maybe we—”
“We can’t do that—not right now,” Ben interrupted. “A bunch of men riding after Stone will guarantee Lee dies. And if we got close enough to fight, the shopkeepers an’ farmers we might gather up would die too. Stone’s men have at least one Sharp’s, an’ it’ll drop a bull buffalo dead at a mile. A good rifleman’d pick us off one at a time.”
Nick stood, his hands forming and releasing fists at his side. “What’re we gonna do then?”
“Well, you’re gonna be the only law in Burnt Rock for a little while. I’m leavin’ you in charge.”
“Leavin’ me in charge? What’re you sayin’, Ben? I ain’t about to let you ride out alone after them outlaws!”
Ben frowned. “I’m givin’ you an order, Nick. I expect it to be obeyed. I’m going to get some gear together and ride after dark. You’re stayin’ to protect the town. That’s the way it’s going to be, an’ I don’t want to hear any argument.”
Nick stood in front of Ben and glared down at him. “There’s no way you can stop me from goin’ with you. You need my gun to take on Stone. The town will keep.”
“You heard what I said.”
“I don’t care what you said! I ain’t one to disobey one of your orders—you know that. But this time I will, an’ you can count on that.”
Ben met Nick’s eyes. “Give me your badge.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Give me your badge. And remember what I told you when I took you on to train as a deputy: If you take off that badge because of a dispute with me, you never put it on again in my town.”
Nick’s right hand began to move to the left side of the leather vest he wore over his shirt. His fingers trembled slightly, although they’d been as steady as those of a surgeon during the gunfight. His fingertips touched the badge, and his thumb and forefinger slid behind it to the clasp.
“This ain’t fair, and you know it.” His voice was tight, as if he had to force each word from his mouth.
“I never said nothin’ about any part of this job bein’ fair.”
Nick’s hand hesitated, faltered, and then dropped to his side quickly, as if it had suddenly lost the power required to remove the star and toss it into the dust at Ben’s feet.
They stared hard at each other for another moment. Ben couldn’t tell which one of them softened first. Probably Nick, whose grin was forced but necessary.
“Seems to me you’re awful feisty for an ol’ man,” he said.
Ben smiled. “Could be you got a good point there,” he said. “Let’s check on Sam, an’ then I gotta saddle up.”
The coppery smell of blood and sweat met them as they eased through the door to the bank. “Doc?” Ben asked quietly from across the room. The physician didn’t turn from his work. Sam was bare from the waist up, his head elevated a few inches by the bank ledger upon which it rested. Doc had prepared a bandage and sling from Sam’s shirt. Another bandage was wrapped around the man’s leg. He seemed to be resting peacefully, but his face was bathed in a sheen of sweat.
“I’ll need a wagon to move him home in a couple of hours,” Doc said. “He’s going to make it. I don’t know how much good his arm will be, but he’ll live.”
Ben released a long whoosh of breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “You need anything here?”
“No. He lost lots of blood. Your tourniquet probably saved his life. And if that didn’t, putting pressure on the artery did. Good work.”
“I doubt that it was me who saved him. But thanks—and thanks for comin’. Once again, we owe you more than we can ever pay.”
Doc nodded as he adjusted the shoulder bandage. Ben watched him tend to Sam for a few more minutes, then turned to walk back outside. Nick followed him.
“I need your help in getting some things together,” Ben said outside the bank. “I need ammunition for my Colt and for my 30.30—and I’m wondering if the bandoleers we took off those bandits last month will carry rifle slugs.”
“30.30s will fit nice an’ tight. I’ll load ’em both up. Four canteens?”
“How many do we have?”
“Maybe six or seven,” Nick said. “Corks’re good on all of them, even the army stuff.”
“Good. Fill ’em all. I’ll need as much jerky as we can stuff in my saddlebags too. I’ll check Snorty’s shoes myself, but he should be OK. I had his iron reset just last week. I don’t know how much grazing there’ll be, so I need to take a feed bag of good oats.” He reflected for a moment. “I guess that’s pretty much it.”
Nick nodded. “I’ll start getting things together. I just . . . I wish I was ridin’ out with you, is all.”
“I know that. But we can’t leave the town without a lawman.”
Nick nodded his head again, then turned to walk away. Rather than going into his office, Ben walked around to the back of the building, where his horse, Snorty, was picking through a quarter bale of hay in the post-and-rail enclosure Ben had built.
He had his mount saddled and ready when Nick clattered into the enclosure with the canteens and other gear. They loaded Ben’s saddlebags and hung three canteens from the saddle horn and three more from the latigo ties behind the cantle.
“Keep your eyes open,” Nick said as Ben mounted.
“Yeah. I will. Take care of my town.”
Then he rode through the alley next to his office and turned left on Main Street toward the open prairie. He put Snorty into a lope as soon as he passed the last building.
* * *
2
* * *
Flecks and strands of spittle from Stone’s horse’s mouth whipped back into Lee’s face as the animal swung his head in an attempt to pull more air into his starving lungs. When the horse stumbled slightly, Stone viciously slashed a length of rein across its neck.
“Can’t you see you’re killing this poor horse?” Lee demanded. “Let him—let all of these horses—rest!”
She heard Stone, who was riding behind her on the horse’s rump, chuckle in response. The next moment, she was airborne, swept from her seat in the saddle. Slamming into the prairie floor, her chin gouged a rut in the sand and grit, and her arms flailed helplessly. The sharp edge of a rock opened a thin, razorlike incision the length of her jawbone.
Outlaws swerved around her, laughing. As she pushed herself to a sitting position, blood cascaded from both nostrils onto her high-collared white blouse. Her slip, petticoat, and ankle-length skirt fluffed around her in the dirt.
Stone hollered to the dozen men behind him and then wrenched his horse into a U-turn and drew rein in front of her. The other gang members followed. Stone took a cigar from his shirt pocket, bit off the end, and spat it next to her. She glared at him, her anger overcoming the fear that had numbed her since they’d ridden out of Burnt Rock two hours before.
“Looks like it’s time to set some rules here,” Stone said, lighting his cigar. “First thing: You don’ tell me nothin’ about nothin’. That clear? You do what I say, an’ I’ll let you live. You don’, an’ I’ll put a bullet right between them pretty brown eyes of yours.” He blew thick smoke into the air between them. “On the other hand, could be I won’t gun you. I might jist let my boys have at you.” He nodded toward the
man Lee had kneed at the bank. “Danny here don’ take real good to bein’ knocked down by a woman. He might want to kinda even up things between you an’ him. Am I sayin’ the truth, Danny?”
The man was hunched forward slightly in his saddle, and his face glistened with a sheen of pain-generated sweat. “Ain’t nothin’ I’d like better, Boss,” he growled.
Stone laughed. “Least your voice ain’t changed too much. If it gits any higher, though, I gotta git rid of you. I don’ want no geldings ridin’ with me.”
The other outlaws laughed loudly, and Danny’s face went from the pale hue of pain to the crimson shade of embarrassment. “I’ll give you my share of what we got from the bank, Boss. Lemme have ’er—sell ’er to me.”
Stone ignored the man. “See what I mean?” he said to Lee. “Ain’t nothin’ you can do about—”
“There’s a lot Ben Flood can do about this—and he will,” Lee said. She was pleased to hear that her voice sounded angry rather than frightened.
Stone’s eyes remained fixed on her as she swept her hand across the front of her face, wiping away blood from her nose. His mouth began to turn up in a mocking grin, but stopped.
“What’s between you an’ Flood?”
“We’re friends. He takes friendship seriously, and so do I.”
Now the grin was completed. “Friends? Aww, that’s real nice. Does that friendship include him parkin’ his boots under your bed, little lady? Don’ his voodoo book say somethin’ against that?”
Lee’s cheeks reddened. She started to speak but then closed her mouth. Stone’s pistol was in his hand faster than she could follow, and suddenly she was deaf and almost blind from the blast of the weapon. For a moment she saw nothing but colors merging together and drifting in front of her, and she could no longer hear the labored breathing of the horses. She swallowed hard. When she spoke, her voice sounded as if she were speaking at the bottom of a well.
“The horses,” she said. “They’re—”
