I moved back to the wall of the saloon. The mass slaughter he had worked on Mariposa seemed to have pushed McCarty that last inch to the edge, then over it. What I had to do was to knock some of the cockiness out of him; get him rattled. I don’t recall what he said next. I didn’t have to yell hard to make myself heard:
“I want to see you hang, Tex. What you did here, you got to hang. Think on that. No glory, no big name, no legend. Just you and the hangman and six feet of dirt in your face. They won’t plant you in Boot Hill with decent folks. No mound, no marker, just a rough-dug hole out on the desert … ”
I stopped to let him get mad, but he didn’t do anything. Sam wouldn’t have liked how I was treating that poor homeless boy-killer. I thought a badly managed hanging was about right for him. I hoped he’d dangle blue-faced until they had to crawl under the gallows and pull hard on his legs.
“You hear me, Tex? I’m going to sit you out and wait you out. You want to change that—there’s a way. You come to me, sonny. Maybe you’ll get lucky and kill me. If I kill you—you’ll still be lucky. Better than the rope.”
Suddenly he let fly with a storm of dirty names that could get a book burned. Listening to him was like going back to the day I first crossed that night-crawler’s trail, and I could just about see his grinning mask of a face as the spit flew with the bad language. Then, just as quickly, he left off the cursing and yelled, “That’s a son of a bitching thing to say to any man … ”
He gave out more a scream than a yell when the piano started up without warning. It had stopped of its own accord; now it was off again. McCarty gave that wild cry and killed the piano with two quick shots. He got both shots off in less than a second, then put two more through what was left of the bat-wing door. I wasn’t anywhere near the door when he fired.
Wooden crates were stacked high in the alley between the saloon and the general store. I climbed fast, got a grip on the top rail of the balcony that fronted the saloon, and pulled myself over. Going through a room to the upstairs landing I heard him yelling right under my feet. When I eased open the door the first thing I saw was Noah Saxbee doubled over on a blood soaked bed. The old man’s six-shooter was still in its holster on the back of a chair. Judging from the mess, it looked like friend Tex had used more than a double blast of buckshot on the old man. That figured.
The hallway was nothing but bare boards and I had to move like a man with nitro in his hip pocket. In the room next to Saxbee’s a dead whore was jammed into a corner like a kid trying to hide from a thunderstorm. Her head was turned away from the door, as if she didn’t want to see what was coming through it. This once, the kid had been a real gentleman; no bloody shotgun blast, just a small neat hole in her left temple.
I got to the end of the hallway where it became a balcony hung over the barroom. McCarty wasn’t where I thought he would be. If he’d been quicker, or if I wasn’t so shy of scatterguns, my head would have been blown away in a fan shaped cloud of buckshot. He was behind a heavy, upturned gaming table. The blast ripped through wood and plaster and I went crashing back with eyes burning with dirt. Trying to rub the muck out of my eyes, I heard the shotgun snapping open, the hollow pop of fresh shells going in.
My eyes burned and watered, and if McCarty had nerve enough to finish the job he could have made a run for the stairs and done it in seconds. At first I thought that’s what he was doing, because he fired another blast of buckshot. He aimed low and blew away a big section of railing. That one did no damage to me, but I still couldn’t see well enough to shoot straight if he came up the stairs.
He yelled something I didn’t understand, and then I heard him making a break for the back door. I let him go; for a few minutes I was glad to let him go. The back door banged open. I tried to listen for sounds, but the only sound was the faint squealing of rusty hinges as the wind blowing through the empty saloon caused the back door to swing back and forth.
Chapter Eleven
It was quiet as an undertaking parlor after closing time and, leaving out the stink of chemicals, it was beginning to smell the same way. A search through the other rooms would probably turn up extra corpses. I didn’t make a search. I went into the dead whore’s room and found a jug of stale water on the wash-stand.
Tilting the jug and my head at the same time, I ran water into my eyes, blinking hard to loosen the dirt. In the corner the dead whore slumped a few inches. I was wiping off my face when I heard the sound. I thought it was friend Tex coming to visit. When I pulled my gun and opened my eyes I was able to see.
I went down the stairs watching the open door that led into the back room. Beyond that the creaking back door opened out into darkness. At the bottom of the stairs Morgan’s shotgunned body was providing a feast for a swarm of flies, and across the big room, at the end of the bar, the barkeep had a hole in his forehead. It looked like Tex had his own notion of etiquette: a gut ripping buckshot blast for his enemies, a dandy little .38 slug for people who just happened to get in the way.
I figured the last man on McCarty’s list was the judge. Unless the little killer planned on wiping out the whole county, all the principal targets had been shot clear through. To let the Judge live, from the kid’s point of view, would be to leave the job unfinished.
I shot out the lights, first in the barroom, then in the back room. After that I felt for a chair and when I found it, I threw it through the back door. It crashed and broke in the darkness, but nothing else happened. Holding another chair, the Winchester gripped high under my arm, I edged closer to the door. I threw the chair and dived after it before it struck the ground.
Rolling away from where I landed, I came up in a crouch holding the rifle. A shotgun boomed and flashed—one barrel at where I landed, one at where I was. If I had been standing up the clump of buckshot would have blown my lungs out through my back. It came close enough; I felt hot streaks laying open the top of my head. The blasts came at me from behind a wagon, but I drove him from cover with four quick shots from the Winchester.
I chased him with bullets, and didn’t get any return fire until he got behind some kind of storage shed. With the wagon between us I thumbed shells into the rifle. I was hardly started when I heard the shotgun snap shut.
Loading on the run, I started out from the back of the saloon. I stumbled and fell in a pile of old harness just as he fired one barrel of the scattergun. He fired again to keep me down, then he was off and running. The night was still as dark as an Indian Agent’s heart, and none of the bullets I pegged brought him down.
Still moving out wide, I heard his boots crashing through broken bottles and empty cans in an alley that went through to the main street. Just before he broke into the light of the street he wheeled and the sawed-off thundered again. He was across the street and running into another darkened alley beside the sheriff’s office by the time I fired low, still trying to bring him down. If I hit him it wasn’t bad because once he was out of the light he started popping with that Colt Lightning. Unless I got closer he couldn’t do much with the shotgun, and I wasn’t about to be that brave.
I lay flat in the junk strewn alley and, once again, I drove him back with fast rifle fire. The way I kept coming after him drove him crazy. Most likely, without all that hanging talk he would have showed himself and made a fight of it. What gnawed on his guts was knowing that I wouldn’t kill him if he failed to bring me down.
Thinking about the shotgun was what stopped me from getting him before he reached the horse. It was too dark to see at the far end of the alley. I didn’t know the animal was tied there until he climbed into the saddle and went away at a fast clip.
Running down the street to get my mount I thought it was time I stopped playing hangman. When it first came to me it seemed like a fine idea, and if I caught him I’d still hang him. But now he had a start on me, and I wasn’t about to chase him across the whole Southwest.
Spurring my horse through town I could still see him heading north on the trail from town. Out pa
st town the trail made a fork, and he was out of sight when I got to the fork, but his dust said he wasn’t heading north toward Sam’s boundary wire. The trail he took ran out to Saxbee’s place, then went due west after that. Up ahead I could still hear his pony making good time. This time there was no doubling back to slow me down, and by the time the moon knifed through the, storm clouds I was beginning to gain on him.
The first drops of rain hitting my face felt good; a moment later the bulging black clouds gave way and tried to drown the world in water. Lightning made a jagged crack in the sky and thunder rolled in like massed artillery. In the next vein of lightning I spotted McCarty about five hundred yards ahead. He was spurring his pony up a long rise in the trail, and before he got to the top, he turned in the saddle and squeezed off bullets with the .38. A man who knew so much about guns should have known that using a handgun at five hundred yards is worse than throwing soggy corn dodgers.
I saw the flame streaking from the gun; the thunder buried the sound of the shots. He went over the slope with me pressing hard behind him, and every second it was getting harder to push a horse through the churned up mud. Dangerous too, because the wagon ruts were running like creeks in flood, and the crown of the road between the ruts was turning to mush.
I eased up on my horse and crossed the top of the slope between lightning flashes. Storms at that time of year usually get finished in a hurry; this one was shaking the sky as if it would never get another chance. On the other side of the slope I saw him again, and the distance between us had lessened.
Now it wasn’t more than three hundred yards, and when another lightning flash picked up the glint of new barbed wire in the distance I should have slowed my horse, because now there was no place the son of a bitch could run. That was Saxbee’s boundary wire up ahead and it ran away, high, close strung and tight, as far as the eye could see. A high, wired gate blocked off the trail.
Like I say, I should have eased up on my horse, but when I saw the wire and knew the end was near, I got a hard hot feeling that put my belly in a knot. The next thing I was flying through the rain as my horse stumbled, then screamed as a foreleg broke. Landing in anything more solid than mud would have broken something. I hit the mud and came up spitting but still holding the rifle.
I turned and killed my horse—and that was one more score to settle with McCarty. That was a pretty good horse, and losing that horse made me madder than all the other misfortunes friend Tex had brought about. I took my rope when I started after him again.
Damn, I don’t know why he headed straight for the wired gate. When he turned and spotted me still following him on foot, he could have skipped the gate and gone off along the edge of the wire. I guess he thought the gate could be opened. Until they got word of Saxbee’s murder, it was peace on earth at the ranch; there was nobody guarding the wire.
Slogging through the mud, the rain beating in my face, I saw him reaching down to pull at the chain that held the gate shut. The storm was beginning to break and at the tail end of a thunder roll I heard his crazy yelling. Again, he twisted around to see how close I was. I was close enough to drive him clear out of his skull. He must have been to shoot that way at a heavy fence chain. One of the ricochets struck the pony. The pony screamed and the next scream, higher pitched than the horse’s, came from McCarty when he was pitched forward into the rolls of bright new wire.
There was no more need to hurry, not for me. McCarty, slashed and bleeding as he buried himself deeper in the wire, was in an awful hurry. It was like the Promised Land was right on the other side of the gate. Lord, how that little killer screamed!
I killed his horse, and McCarty jumped deeper into the wire when he heard the shot. It would be one awful chore getting him unhooked from the barbs. I sat on a rock, sleeved water from my face, and looked up at the kid. I was too tired to hurry, so Tex would have to wait. Taking my time wasn’t meant as cruelty; I was plain exhausted after all my labors.
The thunder rolled away to the west, and by the time it crossed the mountains it sounded no louder than a far away battle. Miles off, over the horizon, lightning still forked from sky to earth, but there was no noise. The rain was losing some of its force. Before long the rain would stop, the moon would break loose. Already you could take in the clean smell of desert country after a storm. Take away McCarty—and it would have been a real nice night.
It was time to get started. “You stop that, Tex,” I said, getting up. My rope was ready for when I got him down from the wire. “You won’t kill yourself that way.”
He started kicking at me with his legs when I moved in close to look for the best place to start. In my time I had seen men snagged on barbed wire; usually it was just single strand fence wire. Had I a wire cutter I could have freed him in minutes, but—not to make a joke about it—McCarty had got himself wrapped up in a real mess of trouble.
I told McCarty to stop kicking, or I’d leave him there till the buzzards came in to snap at his eyes. That’s just what they’d be doing come morning, and the sun was up.
“Kill me, shoot me!” McCarty had changed his mind about asking favors from no man.
I told him—sorry, Tex.
Using the Bowie, I got some of his clothes cut away, but I couldn’t even begin to pry him loose till he stopped struggling. He mixed prayers with curses; the prayers didn’t surprise me; that kid was one foul mixture of a man. Finally, when he wouldn’t hold still, I had to reach up and hit him across the back of the neck with my Colt. After that he sagged, and I had to work fast before his weight sank the barbs in too deep.
I got him down from the wire and let him lie in the rain. The places where I was slashed by the wire hurt bad; Tex would be feeling a whole lot worse when he woke up. I sat on the rock and without thinking reached in my pocket for the makings of a smoke.
I threw the soaked fixin’s away. Nothing to drink, nothing to smoke, nothing but a long walk with McCarty at the end of my rope. The moon came out and the rain went away, and before I roped McCarty I looked for his stubby shotgun. Both cartridges had been fired, but I got them out before I smashed the sawed-off on a rock. I shattered the stock, then beat the twin barrels out of shape. I did the same for his Colt Lightning.
He groaned and opened his eyes when he felt the rough touch of the rope. His hand reached for the gun that wasn’t there, and for a wire-ripped man it was a smooth fast draw. I guess he had worked an awful lot of hours perfecting that draw, his pale tight face grinning in front of hotel room mirrors.
“Time to go, sonny,” I said, cutting off a short length of rope to bind his wrists together. I made a running noose and put it around his neck. That wasn’t meant as cruelty either; there would be plenty of that when the law put him in a cell to wait for the hangman.
Naturally he didn’t want to go, and that’s what the running noose was for. I put him on his feet, and though his injuries weren’t bad enough to make him fall down again—that’s what he did. He fell down—that poor boy cried.
I walked away tightening the noose, and when it got tight enough he got up. With the trail still mushy with rain the going was tough. Walking any distance is something I can do without; I guess it was a lot harder on McCarty.
Some men faced with the gallows shut their mouths and never speak again, not even while they’re going down through the trap. Others don’t do anything else but talk. McCarty, always a talker, was talkier than most.
The things that son of a bitch came up with! Stumbling at the end of the rope, he said he knew where big money from an express company robbery was buried. I didn’t have to trust him, he said. Didn’t have to take off the rope. Didn’t have to give him a gun. All I had to do was not walk him into Mariposa. For that little favor he’d make me a rich man.
My answer, then and later, was—sorry, Tex.
Darkness was thinning to the east when we got within hollering distance of Mariposa, and I guess he wasn’t altogether convinced until he saw some of the lights still lit, the breakfast sm
oke rising from the houses.
They must have posted guards when they crept back into their town, those gutless storekeepers and dry goods clerks. Somebody fired off a rifle, and when the top of the sun showed itself, I saw the flash of binoculars at the edge of town.
I got McCarty back on his feet, and we started in, roped together in eternal friendship. We got closer and I knew they were watching us, but they didn’t get brave until they saw that McCarty was tied like a Christmas turkey.
I didn’t know a single one of those town livers who stood watching, bunched together like sheep, at the north end of the street. Nearly everybody there had a gun; one sickly looking kid had a hay-fork. Nothing was said till I got within ten feet; they wanted to be good and sure about McCarty. When they were certain-sure they started to crowd around.
“Stay back,” I said. “The time to be brave was yesterday.”
Then the jabber started, the way it always does.
One bulky gent in a check suit who might have run the games at the saloon pushed his way forward until he was blocking my path. Now that McCarty was roped, this fool was playing the stern man of action. “You brought him in—we’ll handle the rest. We seen you just one time, mister, but we don’t know you. Don’t you get in the way.”
I jabbed him hard in the belly with the rifle and moved back beside McCarty. “No lynching,” I warned them. I pulled the Bowie and cut the rope that held McCarty’s wrists together.
“Dirty crawling cowards,” McCarty snarled.
“Move away, folks,” I said. “Say no and I’ll give this boy a gun. You want that?”
I had brought in the boy killer on the end of a rope, but they didn’t think of that. McCarty was the one they feared, so maybe he was going to get his left-handed legend after all.
I said move—and they moved. “You in the loud suit,” I said to the bulky gamester. “You go and fetch the Judge. Do it quick.”
Carmody 6 Page 9
