“Culpepper’s Station?” Van Patten asked.
“You know as well as I do, Sheriff, that if you’re hit by a ton of Apaches or Jake Hawkin, the only place you’d want to have to deal with that would be Culpepper’s.”
“That’s what I thought. Find Mr. Red, Mr. Black, and Mr. Blue for me, Vern.”
The station agent almost swallowed his tobacco. Red, Black, and Blue weren’t the real names of those gunmen—nobody knew their true names—but everybody knew their reputations. The reputations stank like a dead skunk.
Red was known for his red hair, and, if you believed all the stories from the saloons, sheriffs, and barbershops, for all the blood on his hands.
Black earned his moniker because of the slick black hair that fell to his shoulders . . . and that he could have been mistaken for an Apache if not for his pale skin and gray eyes. They also called him “Mr. Black” because his soul was blacker than Satan’s heart.
Blue was perhaps the deadliest of the killers. His eyes were the color of the Texas sky, and everyone who saw him said those eyes chilled even the hardest man. They were eyes that ran cold, ever so cold.
They were hired killers from New Mexico, Arizona, up in Colorado and Wyoming, and over in Kansas and Missouri. The county typically frowned when Van Patten hired them for a posse, but the commissioner and the judge and the county solicitor had never said a word about it, publicly—at least back when Kirk Van Patten was alive.
They might say something now, but they wouldn’t know about it till Van Patten was out of El Paso and raising dust for Culpepper’s Station.
“Don’t mention Apaches. Don’t mention Jake Hawkin. Just tell them I’m deputizing them for a little scout. It’ll pay them well. I’ll meet them at my office. I need to pack some grub and get enough weapons to fight Gettysburg. Have them meet me there in a half hour. Tell them to be ready to fight a war. I sure don’t want the county to get cheated out of a good hanging.”
“Yes, sir.”
The sheriff watched the station agent run to the red-light district. Charles Van Patten didn’t know exactly how he felt. If the Apaches killed Gwen Stanhope, well, that would be sort of satisfying. Apaches had their ways of killing people, especially womenfolk. But he had really wanted to see Gwen Stanhope’s head jerked off at the gallows behind the courthouse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“You ought to stay behind the tables, ma’am,” Matt McCulloch said without looking away from the cross in the corner shutter. He didn’t have to turn his head to see who had walked up behind him. His wife might have been dead for years, but McCulloch knew what a woman smelled like—even a woman who had been trapped inside a jail, a crowded stagecoach, and a stuffy stagecoach station during one of the most savage sieges he had ever known.
“Are they out there?” Gwen Stanhope asked.
“Don’t see them. But they’re out there.” A bird screeched from the barn, then was answered from behind the barn, and McCulloch’s head nodded. “Yeah. You don’t have to see them.”
He glanced at Breen’s Sharps rifle leaning beside him, but did not touch it.
Sean Keegan stood at the left window, a single-shot Enfield rifle—the Apaches had left it on the ground after their brief try at breaking Holy Shirt’s edict about not using white man weapons to kill white men—nestled in his arms. The newspaper editor had been ordered to stand behind the shutter on the right, and although Keegan’s Springfield trapdoor was leaning against the wall, Alvin Griffin did not touch it, did not even consider it. Keegan had warned him not to even look at the carbine. Jed Breen sat in the corner with Theodore Cannon, the former taking notes as the actor described all the contents inside the wagon, and how the wagon was held together.
There was no gunpowder left to load bullets, and the three frontiersmen in charge had nailed Harry Henderson’s corpse up against the middle window’s shutter, using more nails this time, thus there was no need to post a guard there.
Stanhope had been left alone, so she had decided to approach the Texas Ranger. “You would think they would have tried to bust open the shutters,” she said, simply to make conversation.
“Can’t.” McCulloch pointed a finger at the cast-iron bolts. He held another weapon abandoned by the attacking Apaches, a cut-down Manhattan Colt that also used the percussion caps. It had only four caps, however, instead of six. “Locked from inside. They could pound all day outside and not knock one of these pieces loose. Try to shoot through it, and they’d find the plate of iron between the wood. Old man Culpepper knew what he was getting into when he built this place. That’s why we’re still alive.”
“Do you think we’ll stay alive?”
He lowered his neck and looked closer through the bar. Still studying the land outside, he said, “I’m not a betting man, ma’am. If you want to lay a wager, try Breen or Keegan.”
“What was she like?” she blurted out.
Now, he did turn, and study her for a second, before he trained his attention on the terrain.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories. It’s just . . . just . . .” She stared at her feet.
He gave her a quick glance before he turned his attention to the Apaches outside, wherever they were.
“You were lucky,” she said.
McCulloch did not look at her. “She wasn’t.”
“Yes, your wife was very lucky. She had you.” Stanhope let out a little sigh.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her head shake and a handkerchief she held in her left hand come to dab her eyes.
“I never had any luck.”
A mirthless laugh escaped his throat. “I don’t believe that, ma’am. You were a gambler.”
“You know what I mean. And don’t call me ma’am. The name’s Gwen.”
He did not look away from the cross cut out of the wood and iron.
“I always wondered what it would have been like,” she said. “My life. My older brother taught me how to shuffle cards when I was nine. By ten I could play blackjack and poker, and deal faro. My mother whipped the tar out of me when she found me playing poker—and winning—against about four other boys from our school. It was on the school porch. You never got such a beating.”
McCulloch managed a weak grin. “You didn’t know my old man.” He turned and added, “Or my mother.” His eyes trained again on the country.
“Well, by the time I was fourteen, I was playing poker with the schoolmaster, the man, Mr. Withersteen, who rented the building that served as our schoolhouse, and the president of the school board. I don’t remember his name. I think he ran the sawmill.”
“Did you win?”
That told Stanhope that he was paying attention.
“Depends on how you look at it, I guess.” She signed again. “We were playing penny ante. Not a whole lot of money to win or lose. Mr. Withersteen, he always said it was for fun. That’s what he said when he asked me to go with him to the barn.”
McCulloch stared harder outside.
“I was sixteen then. And I . . . well . . . I guess I knew what he had in mind. Maybe I was curious.” She wiped her eyes and her nose this time, and studied the piece of silk in her hand as though she could read the future in her dried tears and snot. When she looked at him again, she asked, “What was she like?”
“Spanish,” he said stiffly. “You wouldn’t dare call her Mexican. That would start a ruckus.”
“Black hair?”
“Like tar.”
Her other hand went to her hair, disheveled, dirty, in need of a currycomb and a new brush. “I never liked mine. Blond. And not like corn silk. Just plain, ordinary dirty blond. Dirty . . . like me.”
“You look fine,” he said.
She laughed. “Not now.”
“Sure you do,” he said.
“You’re not a very good liar, Ranger McCulloch.”
“Because I don’t lie, ma’am.”
She cleared her throat and put her hands on her hips.
He smiled. “Missus Stanhope.”
“Try Gwen.”
He remained silent for a long time. “Well . . . Gwen . . . I don’t lie. Breen, Keegan, they do. That newspaper editor, he most certainly does. But me?” His head shook.
“They taught you that as a Ranger?” she asked.
“No. I just never was good at it.”
She stared again at her shoes, breathing in and out, lips flat, every now and then shaking her head at some distant memory. When she looked up, she said, “Mr. Withersteen. Kirk Van Patten. A lot of men between them. Never a decent man. Never a man like you. I’m a gambler, sure, but I’ve never known luck. Not like you have, Ranger McCulloch.” She grinned. “Black hair.” Then touched her own.
“It was showing some gray,” he told her without looking away from the window. “We’d been together a few years. And it wasn’t an easy life.”
“I know all about hard living, Matt.” She waited, and when he did not object, she said, “Your hair . . . it’s nice, too.”
“I still have some. And I’d like to keep it that way. You best go back to the tables, ma’am.”
“Apaches don’t scalp.”
“Usually not, no. But after the hurt we’ve put on them, they might be inclined to act like Kiowas and Comanches . . . and Mexican scalp hunters.”
“Well . . .”
He silenced her as he turned quickly, lowered the rifle, and pulled a cap-and-ball pistol from his waistband. “I’ve admired the companionship, Miss . . . Gwen . . . and the conversation. But it’s time for you to get back inside the hole.” He looked away. “Griffin!”
The newspaper editor jumped.
“Behind the table. Breen!”
Breen took the pepperbox pistol, which had been found in the tiny cellar, from his waistband, and helped the limping Sir Theodore Cannon make it to Fort Hopeless, where the bounty hunter left him and hurried to the window Alvin J. Griffin IV had abandoned.
“What you got?” Breen asked when he slid into his position.
“They’re bunching around the cistern,” McCulloch answered, then yelled, “Keegan?”
“Nothing over here,” the Army veteran answered.
“Then you likely know what that means,” McCulloch said.
“Yeah,” Keegan said. “Breen!”
“Coming.” The bounty hunter left the window, and, ducking so no Apache could catch his movement through the gunports in the front shutters, he ran to the corner window.
“How many shots does that thing hold?” Keegan asked.
“Four. Unless it blows up in my hand. Or shoots all four barrels by accident.”
“No wonder Culpepper’s boys threw that relic in the cellar.” Keegan slid down the wall, crawled past the shutter, and rose. “Good luck, Breen.”
“Yeah.” The bounty hunter moved closer to the shutter. “You, too.”
Once Keegan had crossed to the window Breen had abandoned, McCulloch looked at the tables. “Remember. We’re emptying these guns. They’re the worst of what we have left, and there’s nothing else to load them with once we’ve shot them dry .” He ducked and moved toward Breen.
Huddling behind the tables, Sir Theodore Cannon whispered, “I still do not know what they are planning.”
“A fool’s plan,” Griffin said softly.
“A gamble.” Gwen Stanhope smiled. “I know all about gambling. And it’s a pretty good bet.”
They heard the yips, followed by angry war whoops, and Sean Keegan rammed the Enfield barrel through the slots. “I hope we’re right!” he yelled. “Here they come.”
Thuds struck the shutters outside. Gwen Stanhope listened, but it was hard to hear anything inside the cellar. All she could make out were the whispered curses coming from Griffin and the prayer uttered by Sir Theodore Cannon.
Keegan waited, waited, waited. The shouts of the Apaches increased as they grew nearer. The staked body of Harry Henderson shuddered as arrows managed to slip through the cross and strike his dead body. Finally, Keegan touched the trigger. The Enfield roared, and Keegan left the barrel sticking through the cross at the base. He grabbed his Springfield and took off toward the far window. The .45-70’s barrel poked through the center of the cross. Keegan fired, pulled out the rifle with his right hand while reaching with his left for Breen’s Sharps. After he laid the empty single-shot Army carbine on the floor, he snapped a quick shot with the bounty hunter’s long gun. That left the Sharps empty as well. Lowering that weapon—but not with the care he had shown with his own long gun—Keegan leaped up, took hold of a rafter, and pulled himself toward the low ceiling. He braced his boots against the rocky wall, body hanging above the openings in the shutters.
At the window Keegan had abandoned, the smoking Enfield rammed the hole in the wooden shutter. Apaches must have been trying to pull it through the hole, or maybe clear it so they could fill the inside of the station with more arrows. Arrows did come from the cross carving below Keegan.
Suddenly, Jed Breen was emptying the pepperbox pistol. Four quick shots, and he dropped to the floor. McCulloch stepped around him and pulled the trigger of the Manhattan. He took better aim. Once. Twice. Three times. Finally, the fourth, and last, round fired, and McCulloch moved to the side, trying to shove himself into the hard rocks.
They had guessed right. The Apaches had tried a feint at the front of the station, then sent a charge toward the corner window. The pepperbox and Colt had turned them back.
It had been the shortest attack since the siege began. The arrows stopped coming through the crosses or slamming into a dead man’s body, and the Enfield remained where Sean Keegan had left it.
Breen looked up and peered through the cross. He aimed his finger and said, “Bang.”
“Let them carry off their dead,” McCulloch said, and the bounty hunter studied the Ranger, wondering if McCulloch had been joking. Sergeant Keegan dropped from his perch between the ceiling and the wall, took the Springfield and the Sharps, and moved back down to the side table to reload both weapons.
The pepperbox and the Manhattan Colt were left on the floor.
“All right,” Keegan said. “Sun’s setting. So . . . who’s volunteering to go find McCulloch’s damned horses?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Me.”
Every head stared at Gwen Stanhope.
“I don’t think so, ma’am,” Keegan said.
“Don’t bet against me, Sergeant,” the blonde fired back. “I’m the only one who can go.”
Jed Breen laughed out loud.
“You think I’m joking? I’m not.” She nodded at Matt McCulloch. “He has to go, of course. He’s the only one who knows where he hid those mounts. You can’t go, Mister Bounty Hunter, because you’ll be busy all night fixing up your armor for those two horses that’ll be pulling us out of this hell. Sir Theodore Cannon? He can hardly walk with one toe blown off. Our trusted member of the press? Do you think he’d ever come back with a horse? He’d be at a gallop for El Paso or Sierra Vista as soon as he could saddle up one horse. That leaves you, Sergeant Keegan. But if you go, well, who’d be here to protect us if the Apaches decided to attack at night? Or if McCulloch and whoever goes with him wind up being tortured by those red demons from Hell?”
She sat down and nodded. “I think I’ve made my point. Anyone think they can find any holes in that argument, I’m all ears.”
“Miss Stanhope,” the actor said, “do you know what those Apaches will do to you if they were to catch you?”
“Sir Theodore, do you know what waits for me in El Paso? I’m dead if we survive, and I’m dead if the Apaches keep up this assault. And that’s another reason you have to send me with our brave, fine Ranger. My fate is the same. I have nothing to lose. And nothing to live for, except a hangman’s noose, thirteen coils around my throat, and a short drop to eternity. Yes, gentlemen. Yes, yes, yes, I heard the gallant Mr. Rourke’s screams. I know what’s in store for me. But”—she grinned again—“nobody lives forever.”
>
Breen looked at Keegan, and both men turned to McCulloch.
Alvin J. Griffin IV rose from his seat, cleared his throat, and said, “As much as I admire the lady’s bravery, I’m sure I have no need to remind everyone that once she has gotten a horse, she will most likely ride for the border herself. We must think of that. She has nothing to live for? Horse apples. She has everything to live for. She’ll be riding for her life. She’ll be riding for Mexico to escape justice. Besides, are we yellow enough to send a woman to do a man’s job?”
“I am,” Jed Breen said, and he laughed.
“Galgenhumor,” Sean Keegan said.
“What?” Breen and McCulloch said at the same time.
The old Army veteran shook his head and saw Gwen Stanhope smiling at him. “Nothing. A private joke.”
“This is no time for jokes, Sergeant,” Griffin said. “And that is why I am volunteering.”
“Shut up,” McCulloch said. “You’re the last person I’d trust in this group. In fact, I wouldn’t trust you if you were my only choice.”
“Now see here—”
“Sit down,” Keegan said. “You can write in your yellow rag that you bravely asked to do your duty and save our hides. No one in Purgatory City will believe it, but you can write it. And maybe a hundred years from now, some historian will come across the Herald Leader and write about Alvin Griffin, brave man, hero, a regular Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, Kit Carson, and Natty Bumppo rolled into one.”
For a few long minutes, no one spoke. The room darkened as the skies blackened.
“Breen?” Matt McCulloch broke the silence. “How long will it take you to rig up what we need?”
The bounty hunter shrugged. “I really won’t know until we get all that gear out of the wagon and inside here.”
“The Apaches will be watching.”
Breen nodded. “Yeah. Maybe even attacking. They’ve got to be frustrated as hell after all the hurt we’ve put on those old boys.”
Like a death shroud, another silence descended on the station.
The actor cleared his throat. “As much as I regret saying this, I’m afraid the point Mr. Breen just made is another reason why Sergeant Keegan must remain behind. To help us fight off the Apaches should they risk wandering in the spirit land forever after being killed in the dark of night.”
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