“Yes.”
“Then it’s simple. I can nail Holly without committin’ suicide, and if you play the game straight with me, lawman, then maybe I’ll ride off leavin’ you and your two pards still with an outside chance of rescuin’ your lady love.”
Just the way Caleb Flint spoke told Tom Fallon that whatever hope of success he might be left with after the gunfighter had had his reckoning with Holly would be a slender one. But a drowning man is in no position to reject even the flimsiest floating straw.
“What do you mean, Flint?”
“Sit down and I’ll tell you, Marshal.”
Shoulders looking enormous in his faded purple shirt, Hank Brazos walked through the night. He passed the noisome cabins of the wretched poor and entered the alleyway between the bulk of the store and the lighted windows of Quinn’s Saloon.
Hunkering down in the blackness, he touched Bullpup’s scarred head to caution him to silence, then waited. Minutes passed with no sign of the two gunfighters assigned to watch his door at the hotel. The Texan had retired early, claiming exhaustion, then had paced the confines of his room for two hours before making his escape through the window.
Five minutes later, a silent, hulking shadow drifted from the rear of the saloon and made its way from one cover spot to another towards the river. Brazos knew exactly where the sentries were; he’d made it his business to know. He’d first learned the art of stealth during the Apache wars in Texas, had developed it to the level of a craft in four years in Confederate gray, and hadn’t let the skills rust any during his adventurous partnership with Duke Benedict.
He made it all the way across Pearl River and across the starlit open country to Mick Jory’s farm without affording the hell-town’s nighthawks even an outside chance of sighting him.
Halting before the gate, Brazos stared back at the cluster of lights that offered a frail barrier to the gloomy encirclement of the badlands plains. He swabbed the sweat from his face with an enormous spotted kerchief. So far so good. He only hoped that Benedict and Holly could lie convincingly should his absence he discovered before he got back. But both men were talented in the gab department, he reassured himself, Benedict in particular.
Stuffing the kerchief back into his pocket, he spoke to the hound, then pushed through the gate. Now that the escape was behind him, he wasn’t too worried about what might happen when he re-entered town. He would simply tell Shacklock he’d gone off for a walk, and that the sentries must have been asleep on the job to miss him. He didn’t expect Shacklock to be anywhere near as concerned with his return to Drum as he would be had he been caught sneaking out. The thing that lay heaviest on the Texan’s broad shoulders now, was the awareness that he had to run these risks just to report to the marshal, when he had virtually nothing to report.
There had been no sign to suggest that Rachel Arnell was in Drum. Both Benedict and Holly believed she was here, but as far as practical-minded Brazos could figure, the governor’s lady might just as well be in Capital City, Old Mexico, or en route to California.
The ranch house was a battered, sorry affair of weathered plank and sod roof. Around the house straggled a wire fence with tumbleweeds piled along its length and the posts leaning as if they were weary of heat and dust.
A man, dark-faced, shabby and furtive appeared in the side doorway. Jory looked Brazos up and down with the expression of a man who didn’t much care for what he saw, then thrust out a hand, palm upwards.
Brazos grinned humorlessly as he dug the money from his pocket. Holly had told him that Jory was money hungry, but could be relied on to do a job of work if the price was right.
The job which Holly had lined up for his sometime rancher friend was the vital one of supplying Brazos with a mount, no questions asked.
Stuffing banknotes in his hip pocket, Jory led the way down a weed-lined path to the unpainted barn where a saddled horse stood waiting. A scrawny dog emerged as Brazos swung up and came close to a heart attack when Bullpup growled with a sound like a buzz saw and showed his teeth. The horse spooked but the rider steadied him expertly then nodded to the rancher.
“Figure I’ll be back in about two hours, Jory.”
“It’ll cost you fifty bucks iffen anythin’ happens to that hoss,” replied single-minded Jory.
“Fifty dollars? Back in Texas, a plug like this wouldn’t fetch ten.”
“Texas? Where’s that?”
Brazos shook his shaggy head. It was true what they said, when you hit a losing streak, you lost all the way. Now he was getting verbally bested by somebody who didn’t look like he had the brains of a gnat.
“Two hours, sweetheart,” he said gruffly. And used his spurs.
Chapter Seven – Sudden Death
THE BARROOM CLOCK ticked towards eleven. The match in Kain Shacklock’s fingers was steady and bright. He lit the cheroot, flicked the lucifer into the cuspidor near his boots. “Bart Craney,” he said. “You must know him.”
“Tall fellow with sideburns?” Benedict asked, taking another wild stab in the dark.
“Short pilgrim with a big belly.”
“Oh.”
Another awkward silence ascended with Duke Benedict carefully studying the spartan austerity of the saloon’s decor while Kain Shacklock studied him. In the far corner, the piano player, having just murdered Swanee River in cold blood, blew the froth off a fresh beer, cracked his bony knuckles, then launched into an unspeakable version of Rock of Ages on the open-topped piano.
Behind his bar, master of his military array of bottles and glasses, Barney Quinn winced visibly as the piano player hit his stride, but made no attempt to silence him. Quinn had read once that ‘music soothes the savage breast,’ and there were a few savage breasts beneath his smoking oil lamps tonight that could use some soothing.
Tension was building up. The saloonkeeper had been aware of it ever since the kidnapping of the governor’s wife, but it seemed more pronounced than ever tonight. Some of the gunfighters disagreed with the whole idea of abducting a woman, and there were others who believed the course of action would ultimately bring down retribution on Drum, probably in the shape of the army. Disagreeing with both these factions, were the fifteen to twenty gun packers who were unfailingly loyal to Kain Shacklock and who approved the kidnapping all the way.
Being essentially a weak man behind his piratical, eye-patched exterior, Barney Quinn didn’t know whether he was for the kidnapping or against it. All he knew for sure was that the mounting tension was setting friend against friend, and that internal trouble was bound to explode unless Shacklock did something about the stalemated situation pretty quick.
At the moment, however, Kain Shacklock was more interested in Duke Benedict. Shacklock had accepted Benedict and Brazos as new recruits because it was Holly who had brought them in. In the Drum hierarchy, Holly was number two, and would have been number one had not the bunch voted overwhelmingly for Shacklock when Flint vanished two years ago. Shacklock had had to accept Holly’s recruits or risk conflict with the man whom most believed to be the fastest gun hand in the Territory. But that didn’t mean he had to accept them unquestioningly, and right now Shacklock was busily probing Benedict’s background, searching for common outlaw acquaintances that might make him feel easier about this flamboyant man who certainly didn’t look or act like any gun-for-hire he’d ever known.
So far, Benedict had scored badly and knew it. Now he shook his head at another Shacklock query and was forced to admit that he had never worked for, ridden the trails with, nor even so much as shared a drink with some benighted character named Bitter Creek Wilson.
“Curly Wolf Jackson?”
“No.”
“Billy Kid Lucas?”
“Sorry.”
Shacklock’s brooding eye drifted across the room to where Holly stood with one arm around Pretty Dulcie, watching Crane and Piper playing two-hand stud. The barrel-chested outlaw leader clawed his jaw stubble and frowned harder still. Holly was yet to furnish
a satisfactory explanation concerning his movements over the past week, and the longer Shacklock thought about that strange absence, and about Holly’s return with two ‘gunfighters’ who didn’t look or act that way, the stronger grew his conviction that there was something going on he should know about.
“Again?” Dave Piper said loudly, his tone attracting the attention of Shacklock along with most of the others in the room.
“Yeah, I win again,” growled Shad Crane. “So?”
The wrangling went on and Duke Benedict breathed an inward sigh of relief. He didn’t care what distracted Shacklock’s attention, providing he stayed distracted. Sooner or later the gunman was bound to ask just who he’d hired his gun to in the past, and that was going to prove damned awkward.
Easing away from Shacklock’s side as the man turned his head to speak to Quinn, Benedict glanced at the clock. It was now past eleven. All being well, Brazos would be on his way to the canyon. Too bad they hadn’t been able to send any good news back to Fallon, but at least the Johnny Reb could reassure him that they were still very much on the job.
“Never seen such luck,” Dave Piper snarled again, throwing down yet another losing hand.
“Good players make their own luck,” countered Crane, and that didn’t seem to soothe his opponent one little bit.
Drawing up alongside two other men, Benedict was taking out his cigar case when the batwings opened and Link Callaway came in. Benedict had been taking meticulous note of the comings and goings of all the Drum gunmen since his arrival, and he’d noticed that the gangling, hook-nosed Callaway seemed to come and go more than most. He’d seen Callaway quietly quit the barroom an hour earlier, now he was back looking both dry and dusty.
Benedict examined the tall man’s garb as he ranged up alongside him and called for a beer. There was a faint film of dust on the man’s boots and trousers and even fainter traces on his shoulders. Dust of course, was as natural to Drum as fresh air, but to Benedict’s observant eye, this dust was different in some way, a different color, of a different talc-like texture.
He blew a smoke-ring and tried to remember where he had seen dust like that before ... while across at the poker table, Dave Piper’s anger was mounting in direct ratio to the speed with which his pile of silver dollars was diminishing.
Both Dave Piper and Shad Crane were old hands by Drum’s short-lived standards. Piper had killed a crooked deputy sheriff in Denver, then ambushed the posse that came after him with a shotgun. Piper had killed, and found he had a liking for it. To come to Drum had been a natural step. Now he was a rotund, baby-faced man of thirty with sixty-year-old eyes. A veteran of three years in the gun trade, nine kills.
Shad Crane was the same age as Piper but looked ten years older. A Kansan who’d ridden with Quantrill in the war, old before his time with the youthful fires banked, but still burning. A man who genuinely liked to kill, lonely and morose. Seven official kills.
Crane and Piper had disagreed about the kidnapping. But that was nothing unusual. They could disagree about anything under the sun and mostly did. Now they were in conflict over the most dangerous thing men could disagree over in all Drum, cards.
“That does it, Crane,” Piper said suddenly in a way that sent a tremor through the entire room. “Just one too many of your slick deals. And now we’ll see what we’ll see.”
Two cards lay before each player, one face up, the other face down. Piper turned over his hole card.
“Aces,” he said. “Back to back. What did you give yourself? Your up card’s a queen. I’m bettin’ your hole card is, too. I’m bettin’ you a slug in the belly, that is. If it ain’t, I’ll apologize. If it is, you get that slug.”
“Hey!” Shacklock called from the bar. “Cut that kind of talk. No game’s that serious!”
“A hundred dollars is plenty serious enough to me when it’s slickered away in a crooked game,” Piper mouthed. “Aces back to back. You figured I’d bet heavy didn’t you, Crane? And you settin’ there with two queens. Before the hand was done, you’d have put down a third queen for yourself. That’s how you’d work it—if your hole card’s a queen. I’m bettin’ it is.”
He reached out swiftly and flipped over Shad Crane’s hole card. It was a queen.
So Dave Piper moved, lurching from his chair, lightning right hand raking the Navy Colt from the holster at his hip. He was still playing by the rules. But Shad Crane had been cheating ever since he sat down and saw no reason to change his style now. Suddenly the table erupted as Crane fired upwards through it with the Colt he’d drawn as Piper reached for his damning hole card. Glasses, cards and silver dollars flew high as the big head-splitting roar of the Colt filled the room and Dave Piper stumbled and fell, as dead as a man could be with two .45 slugs driven upwards through the mouth into the brain.
Uproar!
Suddenly men were running everywhere, barflies and towners streaking for the exits, gunfighters converging on the overturned poker table to either upbraid or defend deadly Shad Crane, depending on their allegiances.
Shacklock waded through the press of shouting, gesticulating men and took Crane’s gun before indulging in some plain and fancy cursing. Behind the bar, with just his eyes and the top of his head showing, Barney Quinn surveyed his shelves, realized that nothing had been broken, then cautiously got to his feet. Then staring with his one wide black eye at Dave Piper’s long, outstretched legs he told himself shakily that he’d just known there would be trouble tonight.
Shacklock had sensed it too, and was mentally cursing himself for having paid more attention to Duke Benedict than to Piper and Crane as he now set to work to defuse a situation that could possibly lead to open conflict between the various factions if unchecked.
Shacklock did a good job, and the dangerous tensions were beginning to ease by the time he had two men tote Piper’s body out. Then he took Crane to the bar for a drink.
“He was beggin’ for it, Kain,” Crane growled, grabbing his drink from Quinn’s shaky hand.
“Maybe he was, at that,” Shacklock said placatingly, then suddenly turned sharply with his gaze sweeping around the room.
“Hey,” he said sharply, “where’s Benedict?”
“He was here a minute back, Kain,” frowned Monroe McGuire.
“Find him,” rapped Kain Shacklock with a sudden onrush of uncertainty.
But Duke Benedict was nowhere to be found.
“Marshal!”
Brazos’ voice drifted down from the canyon rim.
“Here, Brazos!”
Touching his horse with his heels, Brazos went down the canyon slope in the direction of the voice. Hoof echoes came back from the walls as the rider crossed a wide slab of stone, then faded as he slowed.
“Where are you, Marshal?” he called.
A tall figure rose from behind a star-sheened boulder directly before him. Brazos started to grin, but it faded when he realized that Fallon had his hands at shoulder level.
“Marshal! What the blue blazes—”
“Afraid you’ll have to shuck your gun, Brazos, on account I’ve got a gun on me.”
Instinctively Brazos’ hand streaked towards gun butt, but a deeper voice from the shadows behind Fallon’s figure halted him.
“Do like he says, Texan. If you don’t, I’ll kill Fallon, then you.”
“He can do it, too, Brazos,” Fallon said in a hollow voice. “It’s Caleb Flint.”
Brazos’ hand fell from his gun handle. Nobody had ever accused the giant young Texan of a shortage of nerve, but he had no taste for suicide. And he’d ridden enough dangerous trails to know that his own gun talents didn’t put him in the same class as real professionals like Benedict. Or Caleb Flint.
He unbuckled his broad leather gunbelt one-handed and let the rig drop to the ground. Bullpup growled menacingly as he sensed the tension in the air, but Brazos silenced him with a word. He swung down as the second figure rose behind Fallon.
“Wise man,” Flint approved, then beck
oned him closer.
Brazos’ face was stony as he moved forward. His eyes searched Fallon’s pale features, then moved onto the man with the gun. He found himself trading stares with a man almost as big as himself with a broad brown face and eyes of piercing gray.
The Texan nodded silently to himself as he halted. From experience, he knew that more often than not, famous men failed to measure up to their reputations when seen in the flesh. Caleb Flint however, looked big enough and hard enough to fit his violent legend.
“I’m sorry, Brazos,” said the marshal, lowering his hands. “I want you to believe that I wouldn’t have suckered you in for him, only for Rachel.”
“What’s the score, Marshal?” Brazos asked quietly.
Fallon shrugged. “I was careless and he jumped me. He’s after Holly and he thinks that we should help him. But tell me, man, what news of Rachel?”
“None.”
“What?”
“Nary a sign. Holly and Benedict seem to reckon she could be in Drum, but that’s all I got to tell you, Marshal.” Shoulders slumping, Fallon lowered himself to a boulder and rested his hands on his knees.
“She must be there,” he said. “She has to be.”
“Holly’s still there, Texan?” asked Flint.
“Yeah.” Brazos’ brow furrowed. “The marshal says you’re after him, Flint. Does that mean you want to kill him?”
“Mean to, and will.”
“Why?”
“What does it matter?”
“What’s to lose by tellin’ us?” Brazos countered.
Flint glanced from one to the other, then shrugged. “Nothin’ I suppose,” he said. “Holly tried to kill me early last week, came mighty close. He did kill some people I knew ... a woman and child, as a matter of fact.” The gunman lifted his dark brows. “Satisfied?”
“Do you believe him, Marshal?” Brazos asked.
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