“No, thank you. I got no plans to go hang.”
“You’re going to die at the end of a rope, or you’re going to die here today,” Kyle said.
Cummins turned away from the bar and looked toward Odom. Odom and Cummins were at opposite ends of the bar. Jackson and Crack were also in the saloon, Jackson near the piano, Crack by the little potbellied stove. The four men were all spread out, which was going to make them more difficult targets than they would have been if they were closer together.
“Could be that you two are the ones that’s goin’ to do the dyin’,” Cummins said. “You might’a noticed that there’s four of us and only two of you.”
“Marshal, you take Cummins,” Matt said flatly. “I’ll kill Odom.”
Saying that he would “kill” rather than that he would “take” Odom was deliberate on Matt’s part, and it had the desired effect. He saw Odom flinch slightly; then he saw Odom’s tongue slide out to lick his dry lips.
Matt’s comment was followed by a long pause, the silence broken only by the ticking of the clock that stood against the back wall.
“Now!” Cummins suddenly shouted, and he, Odom, Crack, and Jackson all started for their guns.
Matt reacted to the sudden move quickly, drawing his own pistol faster than he had ever drawn it before. He had his own gun out in time to take quick but deliberate aim and shoot Odom in the gut. Odom, the barrel of his own pistol just topping the holster, pulled the trigger, shooting lead into the floor. A red stain began to spread just over his belt buckle.
Cummins had his gun out before Kyle and his pistol shot cracked an instant after Matt’s. The bullet from Cummins’s pistol hit Kyle in the left shoulder, even as Kyle was pulling the trigger of his own gun. Kyle’s bullet hit Cummins in the chest and the outlaw marshal went down.
Even as Odom’s gun was clattering to the floor and he was putting his hands over his belly wound, watching the blood spill through his fingers, Matt was turning his attention to Jackson and Crack. But, because they were some distance apart, he had to be very deliberate in selecting his target, so he went after Jackson first, getting what was his second shot off, even before Jackson could fire his first. Matt’s bullet hit Jackson in the forehead, and he pitched back crashing into the piano, raising a cacophonous and discordant clang before bouncing off and landing on the floor.
An acrid, blue smoke from the discharge of the weapons formed a big cloud that was already beginning to drift toward the ceiling.
Knowing that Crack was behind him and had not yet fired, Matt threw himself down just as Crack did fire. Crack’s bullet fried through the air exactly where Matt had been but an instant earlier.
Firing up from the floor, Matt’s bullet hit Crack under the chin, then burst out through the top of his head, emitting a detritus of blood, skull bone fragments, and brain matter.
Getting up from the floor but still holding on to his smoking gun, Matt looked over at Marshal Kyle. Kyle was leaning against the bar, holding his hand over the bleeding wound.
“How bad is it?” Matt asked.
“It hurts like a son of a bitch, but I’ll live,” Kyle replied.
Hearing Odom groan, Matt walked over to look down at him.
“You know why I shot you in the gut instead of the head?” Matt asked.
“Because you couldn’t hit me in the head,” Odom answered. He tried to laugh, but it came out a barking cough. Little flecks of blood sprayed out on his lips and on his shirt.
“Oh, I could have,” Matt said. He stood up and rammed his pistol back in his holster. “But I wanted you to die real slow.”
“Why?” Odom asked. “Why did you take such a personal interest in killing me?”
“Even if I told you, you wouldn’t understand,” Matt said.
From outside, there came the sound of dozens of footfalls on the boardwalk. Both Matt and Kyle whirled toward the batwing doors, their pistols raised and ready.
“No, hold it, hold it! Don’t shoot!” a man shouted, pausing just outside the batwing doors. He had both hands up to show that he wasn’t armed.
“It’s all right, Jensen, I know him,” Kyle said. “Bascomb, what are you doing here?”
“We came to check up on you, Marshal,” Bascomb said.
“Well, you’d better get out of here before the rest of Cummins’s deputies get here.”
Bascomb smiled. “You don’t have to be worryin’ none about them, Marshal.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Duke, Warren, and Gates are in jail,” Bascomb said. “Soon as the folks comin’ out of the saloon told us what was goin’ on, we figured them boys would probably be goin’ down there to help out Cummins. So we just waited for ’em, and got the drop on them.”
“You got a doctor in this town?” Jensen asked.
“Yeah, we do,” Bascomb answered.
“Well, quit standing here palavering. Go get the doctor for the marshal.”
“Oh,” Bascomb said. “Oh, yes, I didn’t think about that.” Turning, he yelled up the street. “Get Dr. Urban up here! Get Dr. Urban up here to tend to the marshal.”
“To hell with tendin’ to the marshal, let the son of a bitch die!” someone called back.
“I’m talkin’ about U.S. marshal Kyle,” Bascomb replied. “Marshal Cummins is already dead.”
Matt waited until Dr. Urban arrived, then stood by as the doctor examined the wound.
“How bad is it, Doc?” Matt asked.
“Not bad at all,” the doctor said as he began cleaning the wound. “Looks like the bullet just left a little crease. If it doesn’t putrefy, it should heal up quickly.”
“That’s good to know,” Matt said. He took the badge off his shirt and handed it to the marshal.
“You are welcome to keep that deputy’s badge,” Kyle said. “I can always use a good man like you. The law can always use a good man like you.”
“I appreciate it, Marshal,” Matt said. “But I think I’ll just be getting on.”
“Where are you headed?”
Matt paused for a moment, then smiled. “You know—I haven’t really given that any thought.
“What about me?” Odom asked.
“What about you?” Matt replied.
“Ain’t you goin’ to let the doctor look at me?”
“It wouldn’t do any good for the doctor to see you. You’re going to die no matter what he does,” Matt said.
“But you can’t just leave me here to die on the floor,” Odom said.
Matt thought of Suzie Dobbs, and all the others, killed and injured in the train wreck caused by this man.
“You can’t leave me like this!” Odom shouted again.
Matt started for the door. Then, just before he left, he looked back at Odom. “Yeah, I can.”
“You son of a bitch! I’ll see you in hell!” Odom shouted.
“Not likely,” Matt replied. “I’ve done my time in Purgatory.”
TURN THE PAGE FOR AN EXCITING PREVIEW OF
Sidewinders
An Exciting New Western Series by William W. Johnstone and J. A. Johnstone
In frontier literature, the name “Johnstone” means big, hard-hitting Western adventure told at a breakneck pace. Now, the bestselling authors kick off a rollicking, new series—about a pair of not-quite-over-the-hill drifters.
Meet Scratch Morton and Bo Creel, two amiable drifters and old pals. Veterans of cowboying, cattle drives, drunken brawls, and a couple of shoot-outs, Scratch and Bo are mostly honest and don’t go looking for trouble—it’s usually there when they wake up in the morning.
Now, in remote Arizona Territory, they’re caught up in a battle between two stagecoach lines. The owner of one, a beautiful widow, has gotten both Scratch and Bo hot and bothered—each trying to impress her as they fend off the opposing stage line aiming to destroy her. But nothing is what it seems to be in this fight, and two tough sidewinders are riding straight into a deadly trap.
Sidewinders
Coming in September 2008
Wherever Pinnacle Books are sold.
Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble.
—Job 14:1
We’re peaceable men, I tell you.
—Scratch Morton
Chapter One
“All I’m sayin’ is that a man who ain’t prepared to lose hadn’t ought to sit down at the table in the first place,” Scratch Morton argued as he and his trail partner, Bo Creel, rode along a draw in a rugged stretch of Arizona Territory.
“You didn’t have to rub his nose in it like that,” Bo pointed out. “That cowboy probably wouldn’t have gotten mad enough to reach for his gun if you’d just stayed out of it.”
“Stay out of it, hell! He practically accused you of cheatin’. I couldn’t let him get away with that, old-timer.”
There was a certain irony in Scratch referring to Bo as “old-timer.” The two men were of an age. Their birthdays were less than a month apart. It was true, though, that Bo was a few weeks older. And neither Bo nor Scratch was within shouting distance of youth anymore. Their deeply tanned, weathered faces, Scratch’s thatch of silver hair, and the strands of gray in Bo’s thick, dark brown hair testified to that.
The Arizona sun had prompted both men to remove their jackets as they rode. Scratch normally sported a fringed buckskin jacket that went well with his tan whipcord trousers and creamy Stetson. He liked dressing well.
Bo, on the other hand, usually wore a long black coat that, along with his black trousers and dusty, flat-crowned black hat, made him look like a circuit-riding preacher. He didn’t have a preacher’s hands, though. His long, nimble fingers were made for playing cards—or handling a gun.
He had been engaged in the former at a saloon up in Prescott when the trouble broke out. One of the other players, a gangling cowboy with fiery red hair, had gotten upset at losing his stake to Bo. Scratch, who hadn’t been in the game but had been nursing a beer at the bar instead, hadn’t helped matters by wandering over to the felt-covered table and hoorawing the angry waddy. Accusations flew, and the cowboy had wound up making a grab for the gun on his hip.
“Anyway, it ain’t like you had to kill him or anything like that,” Scratch went on now. “He probably had a headache when he woke up from you bendin’ your gun over his skull like that, but he could’a woke up dead just as easy.”
“And what if that saloon had been full of other fellas who rode for the same brand?” Bo asked. “Then we’d have had a riot on our hands. We might have had to shoot our way out.”
Scratch grinned. “Wouldn’t be the first time, now would it?”
That was true enough. Bo sighed. Trouble had a long-standing habit of following them around, despite their best intentions.
Friends ever since they had met as boys in Texas, during the Runaway Scrape when it looked like ol’ General Santa Anna would wipe the place clean of the Texicans who were rebelling against his dictatorship, Bo and Scratch had been together through times of triumph and tragedy. They had been on the drift for nigh on to forty years, riding from one end of the frontier to the other and back again, always searching for an elusive something.
For Scratch, it was sheer restlessness, a natural urge to see what was on the other side of the next hill, to cross the next river, to kiss the next good-lookin’ woman and have the next adventure. With Bo, it was a more melancholy quest, an attempt to escape the memories of the wife and children taken from him by a killer fever many years earlier. All the fiddle-footed years had dulled that pain, but Bo had come to realize that nothing could ever take it away completely.
After the ruckus with the redheaded cowboy, they had drifted northward from Prescott toward the Verde River, the low but rugged range of the Santa Marias to their left. Some taller, snowcapped mountains were visible in the far, far distance to the northeast. Flagstaff lay in that direction. Maybe they would circle around and go there next.
It didn’t really matter. They had no plans except to keep riding and see where the trails took them.
Changing the subject from the earlier fracas, Scratch went on. “I think we ought to find us some shade and wait out the rest of the afternoon. It’s gettin’ on toward hot-as-hell o’clock.”
Bo laughed and said, “You’re right. Where do you suggest we find that shade?”
He waved a hand at the barren hills surrounding the sandy-bottomed draw where they rode. The only colors in sight were brown and tan and red. Not a bit of green. Not even a cactus.
Scratch rasped a thumbnail along his jawline and shrugged. “Yeah, that might be a little hard to do. Could be a cave or somethin’ up in those hills, though. Even a little overhang would give us some shade.”
Bo nodded and turned his horse to the left. “I guess it would be worth taking a look.”
They had just reached the slope of a nearby hill when both men heard a familiar sound. A series of shots ripped through the hot, still air. The popping of revolvers was interspersed with the dull boom of a shotgun. Bo and Scratch reined in sharply and looked at each other.
“Sounds like trouble,” Scratch said. “We gonna turn around and go the other way?”
“What do you think?” Bo asked, and for a second his sober demeanor was offset by the reckless gleam that appeared in his eyes.
The two drifters from Texas yelled to their horses, dug their boot heels into the animals’ sides, and galloped up the hill. The shots were coming from somewhere on the other side.
Bo was riding a mouse-colored dun with a darker stripe down its back, an ugly horse with more speed and sand than was evident from its appearance. Scratch was mounted on a big, handsome bay that was somewhat dandified like its rider. Both horses were strong and took the slope without much trouble. Within moments, as the shots continued to ring out, Bo and Scratch crested the top of the hill and saw what was on the other side.
The rocky slope led down to a broad flat crossed in the distance to the west by a meandering line of washed-out green that marked the course of a stream. A dusty road ran from the east toward that creek, and along that road, bouncing and careening from its excessive speed, rolled a stagecoach.
The driver had whipped his six-horse hitch to a hard gallop, and for good reason. Thundering along about fifty yards behind the stagecoach were eight or ten men on horseback, throwing lead at the coach. Even in the bright sunlight, Bo and Scratch could see spurts of flame from the gun muzzles. A cloud of powder smoke trailed after the pursuing riders.
As if the circumstances of the chase weren’t enough to convince Bo and Scratch that the men on horseback were up to no good, the fact that they had bandannas tied across the lower halves of their faces to serve as crude masks confirmed that they were outlaws bent on holding up the stage. The two drifters brought their mounts to a halt at the top of the hill as their eyes instantly took in the scene.
Scratch reached for his Winchester, which stuck up from a sheath strapped to his saddle. “We takin’ cards in this game?” he called to Bo.
“I reckon,” Bo replied as he pulled his own rifle from its saddle boot. He levered a round into the Winchester’s firing chamber and smoothly brought the weapon to his shoulder. As he nestled his cheek against the smooth wood of the stock, he added, “Since we don’t know the details, might be better if we tried not to kill anybody.”
“I figured you’d say that,” Scratch grumbled as he lined up his own shot.
The two of them opened fire, cranking off several shots as fast as they could work the levers on the rifles. The bullets slammed into the road in front of the masked riders, kicking up gouts of dust. The men were moving so fast it was hard to keep the shots in front of them, and in fact one of the bullets fired by the Texans burned the shoulder of a man’s mount and made the horse jump.
That got the attention of the outlaws. They reined in briefly as Bo and Scratch stopped shooting. It was their hope that the masked men would turn around
and go the other way, but that wasn’t what happened.
Instead, the gang of desperadoes split up. Three of them dismounted, dragging rifles from their horses as they did so, and bellied down behind some rocks. The other seven took off again after the stagecoach.
“Well, hell!” Scratch said. “That didn’t work. We should’a killed a couple of ’em.”
“Come on,” Bo cried as he wheeled his horse. “They’re going to try to pin us down here!”
Sure enough, the three men who had been left behind by the rest of the gang opened fire then. Bullets whined around the heads of the Texans like angry bees, one of them coming close enough so that Bo heard the wind-rip of its passage beside his ear.
They heeled their horses into a run again, following the crest of the hill as it curved to the west. The outlaws continued firing at them, but none of the bullets came close now.
The hill petered out after about three hundred yards. Bo and Scratch started downslope again, angling toward the wide flats and the road that ran through them. They glanced over their shoulders, and saw that the three men who had tried to neutralize the threat from them had mounted up again and were now fogging it after the rest of the gang, which had carried on with its pursuit of the stagecoach.
In fact, the outlaws had cut the gap to about twenty yards, and from the way one of the men on the driver’s box was swaying back and forth and clutching his shoulder, he looked like he was wounded. The other man, who was handling the reins, looked back and appeared to be slowing the team.
“He’s gonna stop and give up!” Scratch shouted over the pounding of hooves. “Those owlhoots got their blood up! They’re liable to kill everybody on that coach!”
“They might at that!” Bo called in agreement. He had rammed his Winchester back in the saddle boot. Now he unleathered the walnut-butted Colt on his hip and said, “We won’t hold back this time!”
Scratch whooped. “Now you’re talkin’!” He drew one of the long-barreled, ivory-handled, .36 caliber Remington revolvers that he carried.
Both men opened fire as they veered toward the road. The hurricane deck of a galloping horse wasn’t the best platform for accurate marksmanship, but Bo and Scratch had had plenty of experience in running gun battles like this. Their flank attack was effective. A couple of the outlaws were jolted by the impact of the drifters’ slugs and had to grab for the horns to keep from tumbling out of their saddles.
Matt Jensen: The Last Mountain Man Purgatory #3 Page 23
