Texas Gundown

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  Mallory had observed enough badly wounded men in his lifetime—many of whom he had shot himself—to recognize what he was seeing now. “Anybody else out there?” he asked the sentry as he swept his eyes over the brown, semi desert landscape that stretched from the canyon on down to the Rio Grande. He didn’t see any signs of movement, but he wanted that estimation confirmed.

  “Nobody, Deuce,” the lookout agreed. “And I’ve been watchin’ mighty close all afternoon. Whoever that hombre is, he’s alone.”

  The rider kept coming straight for the canyon. Mallory watched him for a moment more, then gave a curt nod. “It’s not a trick,” he said, trusting his instincts.

  “I’m going to see who that fellow is.”

  With that, he slid down the rock slab to its base, landed lightly on his booted feet, and strode out from the jumbled boulders at the canyon mouth toward the rider. Larrabee, Brody, and Henderson exchanged worried glances and then hurried after their leader.

  Mallory thought there was something familiar about the man on horseback. As he came closer, he was sure of it. He had seen the hombre somewhere before. The man’s face was gray and lined with pain under a brown Stetson. He wore a buck- skin jacket and denim trousers. The jacket hung open, and Mallory caught a glimpse of a dark stain on the gray woolen shirt underneath.

  The man had been wounded, all right. Seriously, from the looks of the blood.

  The horse shied as Mallory approached. That roused the rider from his semi stupor. He raised his head and looked directly at Mallory, who felt a shock of recognition go through him. “Nick?” he said. “Nick Carlisle?”

  “Edward,” the man called Carlisle croaked. He had to be one of the few men left alive in the world who called Mallory by his given name. “I was . . . hoping I’d . . . find you.”

  Then he swayed, and was about to fall out of the saddle when Mallory sprang forward to reach up and steady him. “Give me a hand here!” Mallory called over his shoulder. “This man is an old friend!”

  Several of the other outlaws ran to help. They lowered Carlisle from the horse’s back and carried him up the canyon to their camp. Mallory barked orders. Carlisle was lowered carefully onto a thick pallet made of blankets.

  Mallory dropped to a knee beside him and pulled back the jacket and blood-stained shirt to reveal an ugly black bullet hole in Carlisle’s torso. A check of the man’s back revealed no exit wound. The slug was still inside him.

  Carlisle coughed and blood flecked his lips and chin. “I knew you were . . . on your way . . . to Sweet Apple,” he said. “Hoped I would . . . run into you.”

  Larrabee hunkered on the other side of the wounded man and asked, “Who is this hombre, Boss? How’s he know about our plans?”

  Mallory felt a surge of anger. He didn’t like being questioned, even by a trusted subordinate like Steve Larrabee. “I already told you he’s an old friend,” Mallory snapped. “Nick Carlisle and I were in college together back East, before the bastards who ran the place kicked me out. As for how he knows where we’re headed, he and I have kept in touch over the years.”

  That was true. Through an elaborate set of blind addresses designed to keep their connection a secret since neither man wanted it revealed, Mallory and Carlisle had exchanged letters on a fairly regular basis every few months. In the last letter he had sent to Carlisle, posted in Pueblo, Colorado, Mallory had mentioned his intention to visit Mexico by way of Sweet Apple. That plan had already been in his head although he had yet to share it with the rest of the gang at that time. He had mentioned making a few stops along the way, knowing that Carlisle would under- stand what he meant by that—raiding, looting, and killing.

  “Nick’s in the army,” Mallory went on. He grinned. “But don’t take that the wrong way. He’s as crooked as any of us are and has been for as long as I’ve known him. Isn’t that right, Nick?”

  “G-guns,” Carlisle said, not answering Mallory’s rhetorical question. He fumbled at Mallory’s sleeve. “Shipment of . . . repeating rifles.”

  Mallory’s grin disappeared. He leaned closer to the dying man with a look of intense interest on his face. “Tell me about it, Nick.”

  “G-going from . . . San Antonio to . . . El Paso . . . train stops for water . . . in Sweet Apple.”

  “A shipment of army rifles?” Larrabee said. “That’s what he’s talkin’ about?”

  “That’d be worth a fortune,” Brody put in.

  “Shut up,” Mallory told them. “Let the man talk.”

  Carlisle’s fingers pawed feebly at Mallory’s arm. “Partner of mine . . . Major Trevor . . . set it up with . . . with some Mexicans . . . revolutionaries . . . D-Diego . . . Alcazarrio. . . steal the rifles . . . but Alcazarrio . . . double-crossed him . . . killed him . . . I saw what . . . what happened . . . damn greasers . . . can’t let ’em . . . get away with it. . . .”

  As Carlisle’s voice trailed off, Mallory asked, “Did they shoot you, too, Nick?”

  Carlisle managed a weak shake of his head. “I decided to . . . ride up here . . . see if I could find you, Edward . . . but I ran into . . . some Apaches . . . had to fight my way loose from them . . . brought a bullet with me . . .”

  “Yeah, I noticed that.” Mallory didn’t pull any punches. He had known Carlisle too long for that. “You’re dying, Nick.”

  “Y-yeah . . . I know. . . .”

  “You want me and my boys to steal those rifles so that this Diego Alcazarrio doesn’t get them, is that right?”

  “Figure he’ll . . . hit the train . . . when it’s stopped at . . . Sweet Apple . . . won’t be expecting . . . you to hit him.”

  Mallory nodded. “That’s right. We’ll take the bastard by surprise.” Mallory’s voice took on a more urgent tone. “But when will the train be at Sweet Apple, Nick? I have to know when the train will get there.”

  “In my pocket . . . train schedule . . . details about the shipment . . .” Carlisle laughed, then was wracked by another cough that sent more blood flowing from his mouth. “You can make . . . a big clean-up . . . Edward . . . just kill . . . Alcazarrio . . . for me.”

  “Sure, Nick, sure,” Mallory promised. He lifted one side of the wounded man’s jacket and reached inside it to search for the papers Carlisle had mentioned. He found them in an inside pocket, a little bloodstained around the edges but still legible. A quick scan of them told Mallory everything he needed to know. The train carrying the shipment of army rifles in one of its baggage cars wasn’t due to arrive in Sweet Apple for another week.

  He had delayed this long, Mallory thought. For the sort of payoff he could get for five hundred brand-new repeating rifles, he could wait another week to strike, and the rest of the outlaws would be willing to do that, too, once they heard what was at stake.

  Plus there was the matter of avenging the double cross that Diego Alcazarrio had pulled on Carlisle and his partner, a Major Trevor. Nick had been promising for years to use his military connections to let Mallory in on something big; that was the main reason Mallory had stayed in touch with the man and kept him up to date on his plans, just so that something like this could be worked out someday. Now the stars had finally lined up right . . . except for the fact that Carlisle wasn’t going to be alive to enjoy the fruits of his efforts, of course. But that didn’t matter all that much to Mallory. Sentiment only went so far. He was willing to carry out Carlisle’s wish for revenge on the treacherous Mexicans, but in the end the man’s death really meant one less share of the profits to be divvied up.

  “Don’t worry, Nick, we’ll get those guns,” Mallory said, but then he noticed that Carlisle’s eyes had turned glassy. His old friend was dead.

  Larrabee asked, “What the hell’s goin’ on here, Deuce?”

  Mallory smiled. “I’ll explain everything, Steve, but the short answer is that we’re going to wait a little longer before we hit Sweet Apple. But when we do, it’s going to make us even richer than we’d thought. . . .”

  * * *

  Reb
ecca Jimmerson carried the telegram into Cornelius Standish’s private office and laid it on his desk. The message was in a sealed envelope, as Standish had instructed. He didn’t want anyone except Rebecca to get wind of his plans for Seymour. She was the only one he trusted—and he didn’t have complete confidence in her.

  As he glared at the yellow envelope, he asked, “Is that from Texas?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “It was sealed when the messenger brought it.”

  Standish picked up the envelope and tore it open with eager fingers. Rebecca knew what he hoped to find in there: the news that his nephew Seymour had been killed in Sweet Apple.

  But as Standish read the message, an angry frown appeared on his face. One hand crumpled the telegram while the other clenched into a fist and thumped down on the desk. “Damn it!” he burst out.

  “Something wrong?” Rebecca asked.

  “You always were a perceptive little bitch,” Standish snarled at her.

  Rebecca kept a tight lid on her own anger. One of these days he would regret how he treated her, she told herself.

  But even as the thought went through her head, she knew how unlikely it was to ever come true. She liked the comforts and luxuries that money provided too much to ever risk losing the position she had. Besides, she was afraid of Cornelius Standish, most likely with good reason.

  “I know you hired private detectives to keep an eye on Seymour,” she said. “Is that wire from one of them?”

  Standish nodded. “Yes. He’s in San Antonio. He says that Seymour has become something of a celebrity in a very short time. Some newspaperman dubbed him the most cowardly man in the West.”

  Rebecca’s smile had a touch of sadness to it. Poor Seymour, she thought. The description certainly suited him.

  “But here’s the worst thing,” Standish went on. “Those idiots in Sweet Apple have made him the town marshal!”

  Rebecca’s perfectly plucked eyebrows arched in surprise. “The town marshal!” she repeated in amazement. “Seymour?”

  “That’s right. It’s ludicrous! It’s insane!”

  “Of course it is.” Rebecca was puzzled about something. “But I don’t understand why you’re upset about that. You . . . you wanted Seymour to . . . run into trouble, didn’t you?”

  “I wanted one of those Western gunmen to blow holes in him,” Standish snapped in as blunt a fashion as possible. “But according to the detective in San Antonio, the Texas newspapers say that so far he’s been successful in facing down several gunfighters. He saved a woman’s life and even fought off an ambusher!

  What the hell is wrong with those Texans? They can’t even kill one quivering little mouse of a man like Seymour?” He slammed a fist down on the desk again. “Bah! I should have known that if I wanted something done about this problem, I’d have to take more direct action myself. You simply can’t rely on anyone to do what they’re supposed to these days.”

  Rebecca found herself wondering if the woman Seymour had saved was young and pretty. Not that it mattered to her, of course. She’d had her moment of pity and weakness when she took that gun to him before he left Trenton. Since then she had hardened herself to the possibility that she would never see Seymour Standish again. That was just the way things had to be.

  But from what Seymour’s uncle was saying, not only was Seymour surviving in Texas, he was thriving. Flourishing even. Was it possible that there was really a man under that meek exterior after all?

  The question was more intriguing to Rebecca than she would have expected it to be.

  “Send for Wilford Grant,” Standish said, breaking into Rebecca’s thoughts. “I want to see him.”

  Rebecca frowned. She didn’t like Wilford Grant. Standish had hired him on a couple of occasions in the past, when some of the employees of Standish Dry Goods, Inc., had started talking about forming a union. A few broken legs and busted heads had persuaded the employees to abandon that foolish notion. Wilford Grant and a few of his equally brutal friends had provided the incentive. Rebecca knew that Grant could usually be found in the bar of the Metropole Hotel, several blocks away. She said, “I’ll find a boy to take a message to him.”

  “Right away,” Standish snapped.

  Several boys hung around the lobby of the office building, seeking work as messengers. Rebecca quickly wrote out a note to Grant, summoning him for an audience with Cornelius Standish, and then gave one of the boys a dime to deliver it. She went back to her desk and the work that waited for her, but a feeling of worry nagged at her. She could still hardly believe the things Standish had told her about Seymour. She wished she could see them for herself, with her own eyes.

  A half hour later, Wilford Grant sauntered in, accompanied by one of his henchmen, a cadaverous Italian named Morelli. Grant was a little below medium height, but more than broad enough to make up for it. His shoulders were massive, and his arms hung down like an ape’s. He wore a brown tweed suit and had a brown derby shoved back on a thatch of coarse black hair. What appeared to be several days’ worth of beard stubble fuzzed his thick jaw. He always looked that way, more like an animal than a man, Rebecca thought. But he had plenty of human cunning.

  “Go right in,” Rebecca told the two men. “He’s waiting for you.”

  “You sure you don’t want us to visit with you for a while?” Grant asked with a leer. He always looked at Rebecca with open lust in his eyes, and today was no different.

  “No, Mr. Standish is waiting for you,” she said again.

  Grant shrugged and went to the door of the inner office. He opened it and went through. Morelli followed him and left the door open.

  “You got some work for me and Spike, Mr. Standish?” Grant asked in his rumbling voice.

  “Indeed I do,” Standish replied. “How would the two of you feel about taking a trip west?”

  “If the money’s right, we’ll go anywhere you want. And do anything you want.”

  Even though Rebecca couldn’t see Standish, she could imagine the evil smile on his thin lips as he said, “That’s just what I wanted to hear. You’ll be going to Texas.

  My nephew Seymour is there, and there’s a message I want you to give him.” Standish paused, then added, “Morelli, close that door.”

  The Italian shut the door, so that Rebecca could hear only the low rumble of voice from the inner office without being able to make out any of the words.

  But it didn’t matter. She knew exactly what Cornelius Standish was explaining to Wilford Grant and Spike Morelli.

  He was telling them to go to Texas and kill Seymour.

  Chapter 22

  Seymour crouched. His eyes narrowed in a determined squint, and his hand hovered over the butt of the gun on his hip. His upper lip drew back in a snarl calculated to strike fear into the heart of the man he was facing.

  “You’ll rue the day you ever rode into Sweet Apple, you . . . you miscreant. You see this badge? This is my town. I’m Marshal Seymour Standish. Now slap leather!”

  He grabbed the pistol and jerked it out of the holster. He had figured out that he didn’t have to cock it in order to fire it. All that was required was that he point it at the target and pull the trigger. He did so, still snarling.

  The hammer fell on an empty chamber with a metallic click! that resounded in the office.

  That wasn’t too bad, Seymour decided as he lowered the weapon. He had gotten the gun out fairly quickly, or at least it seemed so to him. And he hadn’t dropped it this time. That was a plus.

  The words he had spoken were ridiculous, though. He wished he had read more dime novels so that he would know how a Western lawman was supposed to talk. Somehow he couldn’t imagine a real frontier marshal calling someone a miscreant. Seymour holstered the gun and got ready to try his draw again. He had been practicing for half an hour and his arm was beginning to ache, but it was important that he become more proficient with a firearm. So far he had been lucky. In the week that he had been the marshal of Sweet Apple, no mor
e gunfighters had braced him, and there had been only the one bushwhacking attempt. The professional shootists didn’t want to have anything to do with him because of the potential damage to their reputations if they killed him. And since he had been fortunate enough to not only survive the ambush but also to wound the man who had hid- den in that alley, anyone else who wanted him dead must have been thinking twice about risking another attempt.

  Seymour knew he was lucky to be alive. But what was the old saying? Fortune favors the bold? Well, if he could grow bolder, perhaps fortune would favor him even more. It was worth a try.

  He was thinking about his name—Seymour Standish didn’t really sound like the name of a Texas lawman—when the office door opened. Seymour swung around to see who was there, and as he did, he realized that he should have loaded his gun. Carrying it around empty probably wasn’t too wise.

  But his visitor was only Miss Maggie O’Ryan. Although he shouldn’t think of her as “only,” he told himself. Ever since he had first met her, he’d been drawn to her. She was smart, beautiful, courageous . . . everything, in short, that made her much too fine a woman for the likes of him. But he couldn’t help the way he felt.

  “Good evening, Miss O’Ryan,” he greeted her. He noticed that she looked worried. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve just been to visit one of my students,” Maggie said. “He wasn’t in school today, so I thought I’d go by and see if he was ill.”

  Seymour nodded. “Very conscientious and commendable of you.”

  Maggie’s face was grim as she went on. “He wasn’t in school because yesterday his father beat him so badly that the poor boy couldn’t walk today.”

  Seymour’s eyebrows went up. “How terrible! I hope you’re going to report this to the proper auth—” He stopped short, then said, “Oh. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? I’m the proper authorities.”

  “You may not have noticed, Seymour, but people in Sweet Apple are starting to respect you instead of laughing at you. You’ve done a good job as marshal.”