Sidewinders#2 Massacre At Whiskey Flats

by William W. Johnstone

  Reilly looked and sounded amazed as he said, “I hit him! I aimed and all, but I didn’t think I’d actually hit him. I just wanted to distract him.”

  “You distracted him pretty much to death,” Scratch said. “And I’m obliged, Reilly. I really am.”

  Reilly looked around, suddenly worried again. “Are there any more of them?”

  “If there were, they’d be shooting at us by now,” Bo said as he walked toward the Indian Reilly had shot. He toed the man over onto his back. “Just a kid. Not more than sixteen, I reckon.”

  Scratch nodded. “Same with the one I killed in the barn. Might’ve been a little older than that, but not much. They must’ve been with the war party last night and couldn’t resist comin’ back today to see the results o’ their handiwork.” The Texan spat. “The older bucks had sense enough to stay away. Comin’ back cost these young ones their lives.”

  Reilly got to his feet. “You killed one in the barn? I killed one in the barn.” His eyes widened. “Hey, I just realized…I got two out of the three of them. How about that?”

  “Who gets how many ain’t important,” Scratch said. “What matters is that they’re dead and we ain’t.”

  Bo frowned. “Wish we could’ve taken one of them alive.” He bent to pick up the rifle the Apache had dropped. “I’d like to know where they got these nice new Winchesters.”

  “Don’t you reckon they stole ’em somewhere?” Scratch asked.

  Bo shook his head. “Not rifles this new. I’d be willing to bet not more than fifty rounds have been fired from this gun. Let’s check the others.”

  They found the Winchesters that had been used by the other two Indians, and the weapons were just as new and shiny as the first one Bo had looked at. A lot newer and shinier than the ones carried by Reilly and the Texans, in fact.

  “Well, son of a bitch,” Scratch said as the three of them gathered around to examine the weapons. “You know what this means, Bo.”

  Sounding irritated and impatient, Reilly said, “He may know, but I sure as hell don’t. What are you two looking so grim about?”

  “I haven’t heard anything about any shipments of rifles being stolen in these parts lately,” Bo said. “That means there’s probably only one way these Apaches got their hands on these guns…somebody sold them to them.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Reilly looked confused as usual. “What do you mean, sold them to them?” he asked. “Who’d sell guns to the Apaches? Surely you don’t mean a white man would do something like that!”

  “A white man who didn’t give a damn about anything ’cept the money he could make from the deal,” Scratch said. He added bitingly, “Fella like you ought to be able to understand that.”

  “What are you—” Reilly’s eyes widened as he figured out what Scratch meant. “Why, of all the—Damn it, I never did anything as bad as selling guns to the Indians! None of my cons cost anybody their lives. These poor people might’ve died because those Apaches had new rifles. If they hadn’t been so well armed, the Thompsons might have been able to fight them off!”

  “You’ve swindled money from people who couldn’t afford to lose it,” Bo pointed out. “You don’t know what effect that had on them. You had your loot, so you took off for the tall and uncut and never looked back.”

  Reilly glared at him. “So what? I’m not responsible for the well-being of every fool in the world! Anyway, you’re a fine one to talk, Creel. You’re the one who came up with the idea of me pretending to be John Henry Braddock so that we could make a killing from the people of Whiskey Flats!”

  Bo shrugged and said, “Maybe so. We all have lapses.”

  “Not to hear you talk,” Reilly shot back as he flung out a hand. “To hear you and Scratch tell it, you’re both perfect! You know all there is to know about the frontier and how real men act! Well, blast it, I’m getting tired of it! I can be just as much of a man as either of you two!”

  Scratch grunted. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  Reilly’s jaw jutted out belligerently. “Maybe you will see it. I say we find out who sold those guns to the Apaches and bring the son of a bitch to justice!”

  “That’s what you want to do?” Bo asked.

  “Damn straight.”

  Bo rubbed his chin, apparently deep in thought. “It might mean postponing our original plans…”

  “I don’t care about that right now,” Reilly snapped. “I’m tired of that superior attitude you and Scratch have all the time. I say we find those gunrunning skunks, no matter how long it takes!”

  “Might help Rawhide run those rustlers to ground, too,” Scratch suggested.

  “Fine by me!” Reilly said.

  Bo nodded. “All right then. We’ll do it. For the time being, we’ll do more than act like real lawmen. We’ll be real lawmen, as much as if you were really John Henry Braddock, Jake.”

  Reilly gave an emphatic nod of his own and said, “Now you’re talking.” He reached out to take the new Winchester Bo was holding. “We’d better play our cards pretty close to the vest, though. Whiskey Flats is the only settlement in these parts, so it’s possible that somebody in town might be mixed up in selling these guns to the Indians.”

  “Somebody like that Emerson fella,” Scratch said. “He seemed pretty slick, like the sort o’ gent who might do something like that.”

  “We’ll find out,” Bo vowed. “But for now, Jake’s right. We’ll keep our suspicions to ourselves. We can tell folks in town about what happened here without mentioning the new Winchesters.” He gestured toward the nearest of the dead Apaches. “We need to do something about these hombres, too. Nobody in town has to know about our fracas with them yet.”

  Scratch jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “We passed a nice deep ravine back that way. Drop ’em in there and nobody’d find ’em for a while…if ever.”

  Bo grimaced in distaste, but he nodded. “It’s the practical solution,” he said. “Let’s take care of that, then head back to the settlement.”

  “Did they have any horses?” Reilly asked.

  “Unlikely,” Bo replied. “Apaches have a taste for horse meat, but not much use for them as mounts. An Apache warrior in his prime can trot all day and cover as much or more ground than a good saddle horse.”

  “We’ll have to haul the bodies to that ravine on our horses,” Scratch said. “I don’t much cotton to that idea, but we don’t have any choice.”

  They loaded the bodies on their horses. The animals were made skittish by the smell of blood, but Bo, Scratch, and Reilly were able to control them. As they started off toward the ravine, Reilly said, “I’ve noticed something about you two.”

  “What’s that?” Scratch asked, sounding as if he didn’t really want to know.

  “Everywhere you go, sooner or later there are dead bodies to take care of.”

  Scratch sighed. “I know, and it’s a plumb vexation, because we’re peaceable men. Ain’t that right, Bo?”

  “Peaceable men,” Bo agreed. “You can ask anybody.”

  “Not anybody,” Reilly said with a shake of his head. He pointed toward the corpses. “You can’t ask them, now can you?”

  It was mid-afternoon when the three men rode back into Whiskey Flats, and one look at the townspeople calmly going about their business was enough to tell Bo that Rawhide and Doc Summers had succeeded in keeping the news of the Apache raid on the Thompson ranch a secret.

  It couldn’t stay under wraps forever, though. The folks who lived here had a right to know that they might be in danger, and besides, as Bo and Scratch and Reilly had discussed on the ride back into town, if someone in Whiskey Flats really was involved with selling rifles to the Apaches, it might be easier to flush him out if they revealed what had happened to the Thompson family.

  Accordingly, they planned to talk to Mayor Jonas McHale and have him call a town meeting, at which Reilly could announce what had happened. Before that, though, they wanted to check in with Rawhide Abbott and f
ind out if anything new had happened while they were gone.

  Naturally enough, folks noticed their return, and as Bo had suspected, Ike had done his gossipy work well. Everyone was curious about why the three lawmen had ridden out early that morning, before most people were up. Reilly turned aside the questions that were called out to them from the boardwalk and asked by people in the street. His strength was responding to anything that called for a glib response. They reined in at the marshal’s office and dismounted, leaving their horses at the hitch rail as they went inside.

  Bo stopped short as he saw that the office was empty. The door to the cell block was open, though, and Chesterfield Pike’s rumbling voice called from back there, “Hey, did somebody just come in?”

  “Where’s Rawhide?” Reilly asked as he stepped into the office. “I thought we told her to stay here.”

  “Might’ve been some trouble elsewhere in town,” Bo said. “She might have felt that as a deputy she had to go see about it.”

  “Some commotion south o’ the bridge, I’ll bet,” Scratch suggested.

  Pike said, “If you fellas’ll just come on back here, I’ll tell you where Miss Rawhide went.”

  Bo and Scratch looked at each other and shrugged. Along with Reilly, they went into the cell block.

  Pike stood there seeming to fill up the cell with his massive body. Both hands gripped the bars of the door, and he looked like he could simply tear it off its hinges without much effort. He said, “It’s gettin’ on past dinnertime. Is Miz Velma gonna bring me my food again? I surely do like her and her cookin’. She brought my breakfast this mornin’.”

  “Forget about eating for a minute,” Reilly snapped. “You said you’d tell us where Rawhide is.”

  Pike scratched his head. “Oh, yeah. A fella came in and told her there’d been some more rustlin’ somewhere…lemme see if I can recollect where…oh, yeah, someplace called the Star Ranch. The fella must’a been the owner, ’cause he sure was mad about his cows gettin’ stole. Said him and his men was gonna ride over to the Rocking B and burn it down ’cause he was tired o’ those no-good rustlin’ skunks o’ Bascomb’s gettin’ away with it.” A big grin stretched across Pike’s ugly face. “Say, I remembered that pretty good, didn’t I?”

  Bo, Scratch, and Reilly looked at each other in alarm. “How long ago did this happen?” Bo asked.

  Pike’s grin disappeared. “Hell, how would I know? I ain’t got a watch, and I’ve dozed off a mite since then. Nothin’ else to do in here. Say, I thought there was supposed to be a trial or somethin’. That tinhorn gambler needs to get what’s comin’ to him.”

  “Never mind that,” Reilly said. “There’ll be a trial soon enough.” He turned to the Texans. “It’s the middle of the afternoon now. North had to have come in sometime after we left.” He looked at the prisoner again. “What did Rawhide say to the man who came in?”

  “Well, she told him not to fly off the handle. Said she’d take care o’things ’cause she was a deputy now. The fella just laughed at that, though, and said he’d never heard of no gal deputy before. He left out right after that, and so did Miss Rawhide.” A worried look began to form on Pike’s face. “Say, Miss Rawhide’s all right, ain’t she? She’s always been nice to me ever’ time I come into town, one o’ the few folks who treat me decent.”

  Reilly ignored him and said to Bo and Scratch, “What do you think she’d do in a situation like that?”

  “You know damned well what that redheaded fire-brand would do,” Scratch said. “She lit a shuck for Bascomb’s place, figurin’ that she’d beat North and his crew there and try to head off the range war.”

  “I agree,” Bo said, a look of concern on his face to rival Pike’s. “We’d better get out there as fast as we can.”

  Reilly nodded, but said, “Yeah, there’s one problem with that. I don’t know where Bascomb’s ranch is. Do either of you?”

  Bo and Scratch looked at each other. Their silence was all the answer that was needed.

  “Well,” Bo said, “we’ll have to ask somebody…”

  “I can take you,” Pike said.

  They turned to look at him again. “You know where Chet Bascomb’s ranch is?” Bo asked.

  Pike nodded. “Sure. I know ever’body in these parts. I just don’t care to have much to do with ’em mostly. And sometimes I have trouble recollectin’ names, mind you, but now that I think about it, I know where to find the Rocking B, and the Star Ranch, too. Lemme out and I’ll show you.”

  Bo wasn’t sure whether to believe the giant or not. It might be that Pike was just looking for a way to get out of the cell without having to bust out. But under the circumstances, they didn’t have much choice. He glanced at Scratch, knowing from long experience that the same thoughts would be going through his trail partner’s head. The silver-haired Texan nodded, signifying that he had reached the same conclusions.

  “I’ll get the keys,” Bo said.

  Chesterfield Pike’s big mule had been taken to the livery stable the night before. Scratch went to fetch it, along with fresh horses for Bo, Reilly, and himself. Their regular mounts had already made the ride to the Thompson ranch today, and they weren’t up to another hard run just yet.

  Mayor McHale was in his office at the stable, but came out when he heard Scratch’s voice. “Deputy Morton,” he said briskly, without any greeting, “I heard that you and Marshal Braddock and Deputy Creel rode out early this morning as if there were some sort of trouble. What’s going on?”

  “Sorry, Mayor,” Scratch said. “Ain’t got time to talk about it right now. Me and Bo and the marshal got things under control, though, you can count on that.”

  McHale frowned. “That doesn’t reassure me much, Deputy. As mayor, I want to know what things you have under control.”

  “You’ll have to take that up with the marshal.” The horses and Pike’s mule were saddled by now, and Scratch took all the reins from Ike. “We got to skedaddle.”

  “Deputy Morton!”

  Scratch ignored McHale as he turned and led the animals away from the livery barn. The mayor could get red-faced and huffy all he wanted to, as far as Scratch was concerned. They had a range war to head off, not to mention keeping Rawhide Abbott from getting her pretty little hide shot full of holes.

  By the time he got back to the marshal’s office with the mounts, Pike had been let out of the cell and stood in the office stretching his back and swinging his tree-trunklike arms around. “Them cells is a mite crowded for a fella o’my size,” Pike complained. “You need to make ’em bigger.”

  “You need to stop doing things to get arrested for,” Bo told him. “That would solve the problem.”

  “I leave folks alone if they leave me alone. I never would’a thrown that gambler through the window if he hadn’t tried to cheat me.”

  Bo shrugged. “I reckon you’ve got a point there. But as big and strong as you are, Chesterfield, you’ve got to realize that you can’t just go around throwing people through windows and things like that. You might kill somebody one of these days, and I don’t think you really want that. You might like to brawl a little now and then, but you’re not a murderer.”

  Pike’s shaggy eyebrows drew down. “I never murdered nobody!”

  “And I’m sure you’d like to keep it that way. So think next time before you let your temper get the best of you.”

  “What are you, a preacher?” Pike looked Bo up and down. “You look a mite like a preacher with that black suit on.”

  Bo smiled. “Nope, just a deputy who just as soon not have to lock you up again any time soon.”

  Reilly was starting to look impatient. “Come on,” he said. “We need to get moving. Rawhide’s out there somewhere, maybe in the middle of a gun battle.”

  That put a look of concern on Pike’s face, too. “The marshal’s right,” he declared. “We’re wastin’ time with all this jawin’.”

  The four men went outside and swung up into their saddles. They drew plenty
of attention as they rode out of town, heading north. For the second time today, Whiskey Flats’ lawmen were leaving with grim faces and determined attitudes, but they were headed in a different direction this time. Not to mention that the notorious Chesterfield Pike was accompanying them. They weren’t just armed for bear this time…they had the next best thing to a grizzly riding with them.

  Bo and Scratch had a general idea where Chet Bascomb’s Rocking B Ranch was located, since they had run into Bascomb’s foreman, Bill Cavalier, and some of the other hands chasing Rawhide on the first day they came to Whiskey Flats. As they followed Chesterfield Pike’s directions, they could tell that the giant was taking them the way they should go. Evidently, Pike had been sincere in his offer to lead them to the Rocking B.

  They kept the horses moving at a fast clip, so there wasn’t really any opportunity for conversation. None of the men were interested in talking at the moment anyway. Bo and Scratch were worried about Rawhide, and Reilly and Pike shared that concern. And if the mutual suspicion and dislike between the Star and the Rocking B spreads flared up into a shooting war, the hostilities were almost certain to spill over into the settlement, since Whiskey Flats was the only place in the area where either side could get supplies.

  When they had ridden for several miles, Pike pulled his mule back to a walk. The others followed suit. Now that the hooves weren’t pounding so loudly, it was possible to talk, and Pike did so, saying, “We’re about a mile from Bascomb’s ranch house. I been doin’ some thinkin’, and since I’m helpin’ you fellas out, it seems to me like I ought to be a deputy, too.”

  “A deputy?” Reilly repeated. “Hell, you’re our prisoner!”

  “Not now. You done let me out.”

  Bo said, “I’m afraid that until there’s a hearing, you’re still considered to be in our custody, Chesterfield.”

  “But you made Miss Rawhide a deputy after she helped you. I’m helpin’ you, ain’t I?”

  “That doesn’t mean you can be a deputy,” Reilly said. “Good Lord, you throw people through windows! A deputy can’t behave like that.”