Sudden--At Bay (A Sudden Western #2)

by Frederick H. Christian

  Sudden had grabbed a bucket full of water which had been left in one of the stalls ready for the horses and sloshed it on to the rapidly charring timbers. Already the sound of the flames was a steady, solid roar, and the smoke grew ever thicker. The water seemed to check the flames for a brief moment, and then they surged forward again. Sudden sloshed the bucket into the half-full water barrel, and again, and again, hurling the water into the inferno which was now spreading through, and along, the entire wall of the stable. Each time he did so, the flames hissed, spluttered, retreated momentarily; by the time the bucket was refilled they had once more advanced. Sweat streamed off Sudden in the intense heat, and the flames licked out towards him hungrily, singeing his hair and eyebrows, scorching his shirt. Flickering sparks, tiny burning pieces of wood floated in the dusty, smoke-filled air as the puncher labored mightily to stem the flames. There was hardly any water left in the barrel now, although he had the feeling that he was containing the blaze. The flames had hardly advanced at all in the last few minutes and for a second, hope flared in the punchers’ heart. Again he dashed the water into the flames. Was it just imagination? Or were the flames not spreading any further?

  He threw the bucket into the barrel once more. It clunked leadenly against the bottom. A quick inspection revealed that there was only an inch or so of water left in the barrel, and Sudden cursed silently at this reversal.

  With a lithe spring he was behind Billy, who watched the street with eyes narrowed against the coiling smoke.

  ‘Is it out?’ asked the boy, without turning.

  ‘Like hell,’ gritted Sudden. ‘We’re out o’ water.’

  They looked at each other silently.

  ‘No chance, then?’ Billy said finally.

  ‘We could try spittin’ on it,’ proposed the puncher. The boy tried a smile but it fell apart.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ he muttered.

  Now the smoke thickened, laying a level of darkness across the stable floor. The licking flames, quelled for a while in their inexorable march, now began to advance again, moving slowly at first and then more quickly as they caught dry wood once more. Unhampered now by the brief attempt to quell it, the fire crept steadily and surely up the wall, flickering along a beam in the roof, and then another, and upwards into the slatted roof itself. The stink of scorching leather laced their nostrils as the fire, fanned by a faint breeze from the west, moved along the entire length of the northern wall and reached fiery ringers across the back wall. The roof beams were now firmly alight, charring rapidly. Great chunks of wood slithered downwards, flaming, sending up showers of angry sparks which smoldered and caught, caught and burned. The flames licked across the door at the rear, dancing lightly, delicately, almost beautiful. Sudden watched them for a moment, then shrugged. Within only a few more minutes the place would be an inferno. It was already unbearably hot; both men were bathed in sweat, their clothes sticking to them like second skins. Once the flames reached the stacked straw bales ... Sudden’s mind retreated from the pictures his imagination conjured up. There was only one way out left: the front way. The way covered by the waiting guns of Sim Cotton’s killers. His mind worked furiously. To make a run for it would be suicidal. Surrender? Billy would surely never agree to such a humiliation. He would want to die fighting. Sudden planned, discarded, planned again, his brain plotting move and countermove furiously. Billy was down on the floor again, beating at the flickering sparks in the straw with his jacket. Beneath its sooty mask the boy’s face was strained.

  A stentorian yell from outside cut through the heavy crackle of the flames.

  ‘Green! Can yu hear me?’ It was Sim Cotton’s bull voice, coming from the jailhouse.

  ‘I hear yu!’ shouted Sudden. Billy’s soot-speckled face was stiff.

  ‘Yu better surrender, Green! Yu ain’t got a snowball’s chance in hell. That place is goin’ to fall in on yore head in about ten minnits. Yu ain’t got a prayer — an’ yu know it!’

  The refusal sprang to Sudden’s lips, but even as it did, he saw the bright fresh blood on Billy’s shoulder. The frantic attempt to beat back the flames had again opened the wound, and he knew Billy was in no condition to make a run for it.

  ‘Okay, Cotton!’ he shouted. ‘Yu win! We’re comin’ out!’

  ‘No, Jim!’ exploded Billy. ‘They’ll cut us down like dawgs!’ Green made no reply, but gestured at the vivid, tumbling flames which crawled ever nearer to them. Even as he did, a huge roof beam crashed to the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces of flying flame, starting flickering tongues of moving light dancing upon the tiers of straw bales all around them.

  ‘Billy, we got about five minnits an’ we’re goin’ to be dead, anyway,’ Sudden gritted. He put a nervous tone in his words. His voice was thick with smoke but Billy could sense the bitterness underlying the words.

  ‘Throw yore guns out ahead o’ yu!’ came the shouted command from across the street. ‘Then come out with yore han’s up.’

  ‘Do what he says, kid,’ Sudden told the boy.

  For a long moment, Billy Hornby hesitated. He looked at the gun in his hand. He looked, almost wistfully, across the street. Divining his thoughts, Sudden made his voice quaver.

  ‘Throw yore gun out, Billy,’ he ordered. He emphasized the words by cocking his own revolver and aiming it at the boy. Billy’s eyes widened in astonishment, then disgust spread across his face.

  ‘I never thought yu’d chicken out, Jim,’ he rasped bitterly.

  ‘I ain’t about to be no dead hero,’ grated Sudden. ‘Throw it!’

  With a curse, Billy tossed his pistol out of the window into the dust. He scrambled down from the window and stood by the door as Sudden followed his example, sending the two .45’s spinning far out to land half buried in the sandy street. The flames touched the two men as they edged past the smoldering bales of straw, their arms shielding their faces from the murderous heat. Coughing, retching, eyes streaming, Sudden threw back the heavy bar across the door and flung it wide. The new draught fanned the flames back for a moment, and then they surged forward as though in pursuit of the reeling, staggering figures who stumbled out into the street, their clothes dotted with tiny burns, gulping huge deep breaths of clean air into their laboring lungs.

  As their vision cleared, they saw before them the hulking figure of Sim Cotton. Cradled in his meaty paws was a long rifle with an unusual, octagonal barrel and an old-fashioned hammer of the flintlock style. The receiver and stock were heavily chased with silver which caught the light of the roaring flames behind them.

  ‘Hoist yore paws, yu vermin!’ exulted Sim Cotton. ‘I’m goin’ to enjoy this!’

  ‘Yu brung enough guns,’ was Sudden’s remark as he obeyed the Cottonwood owner’s snarled order. ‘That’s a Sharp’s buffler rifle, ain’t it?’

  Behind them there was a rumbling, roaring crash. The roof of the stable was sagging inwards. It would fall at any moment.

  ‘Yu better let us step away a mite, less’n yore aimin’ to fry, too,’ Sudden told his captor.

  For a moment the mad light in Cotton’s eyes flared brighter, but then he nodded. He stepped back a few yards, beckoning the two silent men away from the blazing stable, the reaching flames lighting the twilit street with a red and gruesome cast. Billy Hornby said nothing. He did not even look at his companion.

  ‘Sharp’s buffler gun is right,’ agreed Sim Cotton as he settled himself again in front of them. ‘Throws a fifty-caliber slug. I seen one o’ these knock a man down a half a mile off. Allus wondered what it’d do close to.’

  For the first time since their surrender, Billy Hornby spoke.

  ‘If yo’re aimin’ to kill us, get on with it. Cotton!’ he rasped. ‘Yo’re gloatin’ makes me sick.’

  Sim Cotton smiled, a satisfied, evil smile.

  ‘Yu don’t get off that light, boy,’ he rumbled. ‘I’m goin’ to make an example o’ yu in front o’ this whole town. Take a look!’ He gestured with his head and the prisoners tur
ned to see the remaining two Cottonwood riders herding a crowd of hesitant, nervous townspeople forward, pushing them down the street like cattle ahead of their drawn guns.

  ‘Cottontown is goin’ to watch this,’ gloated Sim Cotton, ‘an’ remember. They’re goin’ to watch yu die. An’ they’re goin’ to see it every time they even dream about crossin’ me again. This was my town afore yu come along. It’s still my town! It’s allus goin’ to be my town! Mine, yu hear?’ His voice had risen to a scream, and the milling crowd a yard or so away, held in check by the guns of Ricky and the burly Rolfe, held their breath in awe at his outburst. Sudden watched Sim Cotton from beneath veiled eyes. The man was quite insane now. There was a chance … a faint chance.

  ‘Yu … yu wouldn’t cut us down in cold blood, Mr Cotton?’ he quavered, ignoring the look of utter contempt that Billy shot at him. ‘Yu wouldn’t just … we was only defendin’ ourselves.’

  Sim Cotton threw back his head and laughed. He turned to the crowd, dominating the street like a mad animal, making those in front edge backwards.

  ‘Yu see him crawlin’?’ he roared. ‘Yu see how tough he is, now he can’t bushwhack my men an’ hide in a barn? Yu see what happens when yu cross a man like Sim Cotton?’ He made a gesture with his left hand. ‘I snap yu — like this!’ He snapped his fingers contemptuously and in that moment, that half-unguarded moment while his left hand was in mid-air and the huge buffalo rifle wavered in his right, Sudden moved. His right arm shot sideways, jarring Billy Hornby off his feet, staggering aside with a look of astonishment crossing his face as his legs crossed and he fell, and saw, as he was falling, the man he had contemptuously called a coward dropping to his left, headlong and rolling, his hand moving towards the glinting metal of the gun which lay half buried in the dirt where he had thrown it from the blazing stable.

  In the same half-second, with Sim Cotton’s grandiose contempt freezing into astonishment as Ricky yelled ‘Sim! Watch out!’ and the townspeople scattered like a flock of quail out of the line of fire, men screeching in panic, bowling Rolfe off his feet. Sim Cotton wheeled, his left hand fanning back the eared hammer of the huge rifle, slanting the barrel down towards the snaking figure of Sudden now rising into a half-crouch with the Colt level and deadly in his hand. With a howl of rage and hatred Sim Cotton pulled the trigger of the long rifle, its dull boom smashing across the panicked shouts, drowning the lighter roar of the .45 in Sudden’s hand. But Sim Cotton was dead on his feet when he pulled the trigger, a neat hole drilled between his rage–knitted brows by Sudden’s unerring shot. Sim Cotton tottered, lurched, fell forward, folding like a broken grass stalk, slamming into the dusty street of the town that had once been his.

  The big caliber bullet whanged off the wall of the saloon as Ricky laid his fire over the scrambling form of Billy Hornby, whipping the dust up as Sudden wheeled in one movement after firing the shot which had downed Sim Cotton, the gun in his hand roaring in a stuttering roll, slashing Ricky backwards with two bullets driven through his heart. In these blurring moments, Rolfe had regained his feet and was now rushing forward as Sudden whirled once more left, but Rolfe’s gun was blazing, and Sudden was momentarily off guard. The breathless watchers saw Green flinch slightly, staggering a pace backwards, his guns blazing even as he did, drilling his remaining two bullets into the running Cottonwood man, one in the heart, one in the head. Rolfe’s screamed curse was cut in two and his gun fired by reflex action as he stopped in his running tracks, hurled back, down, by the smashing impact of the bullets. He tumbled slewed into a broken shape in the dust.

  Sudden was on one knee, supporting himself with his left hand, his right pawing at his forehead. Rolfe’s shot had caught him high on the scalp, just above the point of the hairline, half-stunning him, a thick trickle of blood nearly blinding the puncher. Unsure that he had stopped Rolfe, Sudden fired blindly into the red murk before his eyes, only to hear the hammer fall upon an empty shell. Not fully in command of his senses, he struggled to his feet, swaying, knuckling the blood from his eyes, his blood-slippery hand fumbling at his belt for shells to reload the gun, peering like an old man into the mist before him. He lurched forward a pace as Billy Hornby took a step from the porch of the saloon where he had rolled to escape the heedless bullets. Even as the boy moved, as the townspeople began to get to their feet, a remembered voice cut the hushed silence of the street.

  ‘Green!’

  Trying still to focus his blurred vision, shaking his head to get rid of its steady buzzing, not knowing that Rolfe’s bullet had badly concussed him, Sudden half lifted the empty gun in his hand. The thin, terrible voice cut through the fog.

  ‘Try it.’

  He let his hand drop, shrugging. It had been a brave attempt, but they had beaten him. The voice … which of them was it? Why did he know the voice? And then his eyesight cleared for a moment, enough for him to see the owner of the keening voice, the figure of the man he had thought dead — Buck Cotton!

  The last of the tyrants stumbled down from the porch of the Sheriff’s house. A murmur of hushed awe escaped the clustered watchers for Buck Cotton was a sight to inspire horror, fear and pity. Dried and matted blood caked his hair, his face. His clothes were like those of some blood-spattered scarecrow, torn, trailing in strips and tatters, filthy. The skin of his exposed arms and legs, and the back of his trembling hands was gone, leaving a raw exposed bloody mass, his twitching face was as red and angry as a peeled tomato, and his eyes were glaring with a wild and dislocated light. In his wavering grasp was a cocked rifle covering his quarry. He took three weaving steps forward. Nobody dared to move.

  ‘Yu did this to me, yu swine,’ whined Buck Cotton. ‘Yu did this.’ A sob of possessed rage swept through his frame. ‘Yu killed Sim, too. Yu an’ yore stinkin’ nester friend ruined it all. But yo’re goin’ to pay, damn yu. I’m goin’ to shoot yu to pieces, Green, yu hear? Shoot yu to pieces. Bit by bit by bit by bit.’ He cackled insanely, his laughter ending on a high choked note. ‘Damn yu!’

  His finger whitened on the trigger and Sudden, helpless and unarmed, steeled himself for the shock of the bullet. They said you hardly felt it, you only heard the shot. He winced as the explosion filled the air.

  It did not come from the barrel of the rifle in Buck Cotton’s hands. It came from a battered old Army Colt in the relentless grasp of Doc Hight. The medico, his face swollen almost out of recognition, stood like an angel of vengeance in the middle of the dusty street, the marks of the vicious beating he had received plain for all to see. His shot smashed into the stock of the rifle in Buck Cotton’s hands, tearing it from his grasp, knocking him reeling back two paces. Hight’s stentorian voice shattered the silence.

  ‘What kind of town is this?’ he cried to the watching crowd. ‘Will you stand there and see the man who saved you be murdered? Will you never understand that you must fight to be free?’ An animal sound escaped from Buck Cotton’s mouth. He dived forward to get his hands on the rifle which had been torn from his grasp, a scream bubbling up insanely in this throat.

  ‘I’ll get yu, Green!’ he screeched.

  Sudden took a step forward but as he did so he heard a strange and awful sound, the sound of a feral beast, the sound of men finally, irrevocably committed to a path of violence. Sudden knew that sound. It was the sound of the awakened mob. Fighting desperately against the blackness which swam up into his head, he tried to shout, tried to hold back the violent tide of death, but rough, friendly hands thrust him aside, lifted him, and the sweet warm darkness began to fall and he cried out ‘No!’ to stop them. But even as he did so he heard a terrible, inhuman scream and knew that the men of the town had fallen like ravaging wolves upon the last of the Cottons.

  Chapter Twenty–Three

  Far away, far away in the furthest reaches of his consciousness, Sudden could hear voices, and memory came slowly back into his brain like water spreading across sand. He remembered fire, and then the stable; he remembered the sight of a big man falling, folding
forward like a broken blade of grass. He remembered … he remembered? He opened his eyes. The light was like a knife. Someone said. ‘He’s awake.’

  A face looked down at him. It was a young face, a boy’s face. Next to it was the face of a girl. They looked alike. Brother and sister? They faded out of sight. Another face. Bruised, yellow, purple, green, black. Swollen. Been in a fight.

  Then the boy’s face. He thought the boy was crying.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he said, and then he fell asleep just like that, blackness slipping over him like a soft, comforting blanket. He slept for another three days without once opening his eyes, and then on the fourth morning he looked about him and said to the man beside the bed ‘Hello, Doc’

  ‘Thank God,’ breathed Hight. ‘You’ve come through.’

  It was just ten days since the events which had culminated in Sudden’s being brought, unconscious, to the Lazy H ranch. Now the puncher sat in a comfortable chair and listened to the excited Billy Hornby relate the events which had taken place since the end of the siege. Doc Hight, his arm around the shoulder of Jenny Hornby, smiled indulgently as Billy told his friend his news.

  ‘Yu see, the Cottons was makin’ a last bid to hold on to the town, an’ we never knowed it,’ Billy said. ‘If yu hadn’t o’ happened along when yu did, they’d’ve done it.’

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ smiled Sudden. ‘Why was it so important to them to keep the town under their heels?’

  Hight leaned forward. ‘That’s the most fantastic part o’ the whole story, Jim he said. ‘Shortly after yu — shortly after we got the town back to somethin’ like normal, this gent turns up askin’ for Fred Mott, the banker

  ‘Who’d skedaddled outta town when he seen how things was goin’ interposed Billy. ‘He musta’ been scared — he never even took his clothes.’

  ‘Luckily for the town, the vault was on a time lock and couldn’t be opened. Our savings, at least, are safe smiled Hight. ‘But I was telling you: the man turned out to be a Mr Sandberg, an Inspector of Land from the territorial Legislature. He seemed astonished that we didn’t know about the Government’s plans to build a damn at Twin Peaks — that’s not far from here, up in the hills at the end of the valley.’