She was too sharp not to have thought of that. Buckhorn said, “You’d better get out of here. You can slip out the back without being seen. Go back to the saloon and let things play out.”
“Or I could go back and tell my father and Yancy what you’re planning.”
“Do that and you’ll always be under your father’s thumb,” Buckhorn said bluntly. “Or under the heel of his boot might be more like it. He’s so entrenched here already, nobody will ever root him out. Thornton won’t stand a chance in the long run. He may be tough, but he’s not ruthless enough.”
She sighed and said, “You’re right about Hugh. At heart, he’s a good man . . . and a good man isn’t going to defeat a thorough bastard like Dennis Conroy.”
“We’re in agreement on that, then.” Buckhorn put his left hand lightly on her arm to turn her toward the rear of the cottage.
“You won’t tell me where Mr. Garrett really is?”
“Don’t reckon there’s any need for that.”
“So you don’t trust me. Not completely, anyway.”
“I’m not sure I ever met anybody I trusted completely,” Buckhorn said.
Their conversation had been a distraction he didn’t really need. It would have been better if all of his senses had remained alert, as they had been before her arrival. She could have kept him from hearing Madison or some other hired killer sneaking into the house to murder Matthew Garrett. Fortunately, that hadn’t happened.
He led her to the back door and opened it. Everything was quiet and still behind the cottage.
Alexis paused in the doorway.
“What if nothing happens?” she asked in a whisper. “What if nobody shows up to—”
Gunshots slammed through the air, shattering the night’s peacefulness.
Buckhorn’s first instinct was that the bullets were aimed at him and Alexis. Or at him, anyway, but she was in the line of fire. His left arm swept her back out of the doorway. The shove sent her reeling into the kitchen.
At the same time, Buckhorn’s right hand flashed down and came up gripping the Colt. He crouched, looking for a target.
Then he realized that he hadn’t seen any muzzle flashes, and he knew the shots hadn’t been directed at him after all. They came from somewhere else. Close by, though.
The newspaper office.
The thought made a dagger of ice stab through him. He snapped at Alexis, “Stay inside. Lock the doors.”
Then he ran toward the corner and rounded the cottage. Several swift strides brought him to the street. He got there in time to see a man dart out of the newspaper office.
“Hold it!” Buckhorn said.
The figure jerked toward him and stuck out an arm. Flame spouted from the muzzle of the gun in the man’s hand. Buckhorn heard the slug whine past his head. He returned the fire without bothering to aim.
He didn’t need to aim. The bullet was unerring, punching into the man’s chest and driving him backward. He lost his balance and flopped onto the dirt, losing his gun as he did so.
Swiftly, Buckhorn moved closer and kicked the fallen weapon out of reach as the wounded man spasmed, arching his back up from the ground.
Then he went limp, and the grotesque rattle from the man’s throat told Buckhorn that was his final breath.
Buckhorn hurried to the open door of the newspaper office and peered inside. A lamp burned on one of the desks, but at first glance the place seemed to be empty. Buckhorn was about to call Edward Garrett’s name when he spotted a foot sticking out from behind the desk.
He bit back a curse as he rushed into the office. As he came alongside the desk, he saw Edward lying behind it. The young man’s eyes were open wide, and he had his right hand pressed to his chest. Crimson threads leaked between the fingers of that hand as he gasped and twitched.
Buckhorn dropped to a knee beside Edward, grasped his wrist, and moved his hand aside to reveal the bullet hole in Edward’s vest and shirt.
“You’ll be all right,” Buckhorn told him. “I’ll fetch the doc. Who shot you? Was it one of Conroy’s men?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” Edward gasped. “Never . . . never saw him—”
His head slumped back as his words stopped short. For a second Buckhorn thought Edward was dead, then he felt for a pulse and found one. Edward had passed out, but he was still alive. There might be a chance for him.
But he wouldn’t have been shot if he hadn’t agreed to help out with Buckhorn’s scheme, and Buckhorn knew it.
Conroy must have been worried that Matthew Garrett had already said too much to his nephew and didn’t want to take a chance on that. And Buckhorn had planted Edward here in the office, like a sitting duck . . .
There was another possibility. The attack on Edward could have been a distraction, to draw the attention of anyone who might be standing guard over Matthew.
Which meant there could still be danger next door—
Where he had left Alexis.
Edward had already passed out. There was nothing Buckhorn could do for him. The shots would bring other people, and someone would fetch Dr. Cranford right away. Buckhorn straightened, and a couple of long, fast strides brought him to the office door.
As he stepped outside, a woman’s voice called from his left. “Buckhorn!”
He looked in that direction and saw that Alexis hadn’t done as he’d told her and stayed inside. She was out of the cottage, with the front door standing wide open behind her.
Something moved beyond her. Buckhorn flung his gun up and yelled, “Get down!”
But instead of doing that, Alexis took a step toward him.
Colt flame bloomed in the darkness behind her. She let out a gasping cry and staggered. Buckhorn fired as she twisted around and collapsed. He couldn’t tell if he hit the gunman in the shadows, but no more shots came his way.
Not far off, men began to shout. They would be there in a matter of moments to see about all the commotion.
Buckhorn raced to Alexis’s side. She lay facedown with a dark stain spreading on the back of her dress. He took hold of her shoulders and rolled her onto her side.
“Alexis!” he said. “Alexis, can you hear me?”
Her head lolled loosely on her shoulders, and she didn’t respond.
Then a man shouted, “Buckhorn! It’s that gunfighter, Buckhorn! And he’s murdered Alexis Conroy!”
CHAPTER 30
Buckhorn knew that voice. It belonged to Yancy Madison.
He didn’t know if Alexis was dead, although that appeared to be a strong possibility. He couldn’t stop to think about that now, because other men were taking up the outcry. Shouts of “Murderer!”—“There he is!” and “Get the redskin bastard!” filled the air.
A gun blared from the direction of Madison’s original shout. Buckhorn felt the slug sizzle past him as he surged to his feet. He still held his Colt, so he returned the fire, snapping two shots toward Madison as he broke into a run toward the narrow passage between the newspaper office and the Garrett cottage.
His plan to lure Conroy and Madison into acting openly should have worked. Instead, both Alexis Conroy and Edward Garrett might be dead because of it.
Brooding wouldn’t change anything, though, so Buckhorn ducked into the shadows and ran.
More shots boomed behind him, but in his dark clothing, moving as quickly as he was, it would be pure bad luck if any of them found him.
Of course, he hadn’t had an abundance of good luck since coming to Crater City . . .
With buildings between him and his pursuers, he circled toward Sol Baker’s livery stable and the corral where he had left a saddled horse the night before. Somebody might have noticed that and unsaddled the animal before now. They probably had, he realized.
The horse he’d saddled hadn’t belonged to him, and before the night was over most of the people in Crater City would blame him for shooting Alexis. Madison would probably claim that he had gunned down Edward Garrett, too.
So what the hel
l, stealing a saddle as well as a horse wouldn’t be any worse than that, he decided. He doubled back and veered toward Main Street.
A lot of shouting was still going on, but not in the immediate vicinity. Buckhorn slowed his pace and slipped stealthily along the narrow passage between the bank and a hardware store.
He paused where the darkness was so thick he could barely see his hand in front of his face and reloaded his gun, slipping a cartridge into the sixth and usually empty chamber as well. He might need a full wheel if he had to shoot his way out of town, which seemed likely. He had to work by feel, but that was no problem since he had performed this grim chore thousands of times in the past.
He couldn’t stay here in the settlement; there was no doubt about that. The pack of baying human hounds looking for him would find him sooner or later, and even if he didn’t wind up riddled with lead when that happened, they would string him up without ever paying attention to his story. He had to get out of Crater City, and for that he needed a horse.
He paused again when he reached the mouth of the alley. The searchers were yelling at each other at least a block away. Buckhorn holstered his gun and stepped up onto the boardwalk, moving at an angle across the planks toward a hitch rack where several horses were tied.
A voice surprised him from the alcove in which the door to the hardware store was set, saying, “Hey, wait a minute. Is that you, Danny?”
Buckhorn froze, fighting down the impulse to slap leather and blast a hole through the man who had just stepped out of the alcove as he spoke. The man was probably just an innocent citizen of Crater City who had gotten caught up in the pursuit, not one of Dennis Conroy’s hired killers.
Besides, a gunshot would draw attention that Buckhorn didn’t want.
So instead of pulling iron, Buckhorn just grunted noncommittally and waited.
That ploy worked the way he wanted it to. Curious, the man stepped closer in the gloom that shrouded the area under the boardwalk’s awning.
“They told me to wait down here and stop anybody who came along, but so far I ain’t seen—Hey, wait a minute! You ain’t Dan—”
The thud of Buckhorn’s fist against the man’s jaw silenced him. Buckhorn had to aim the punch at the sound of the hombre’s voice, since he couldn’t see him all that well, but the blow landed cleanly and the man dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.
One less gunshot. One less killing. Those things added up, Buckhorn supposed. At least he hoped so.
He bent over the fallen figure, fumbled for a second, found the man’s gun, and tossed it in the stygian alley. Then he straightened and moved to the hitch rack without wasting any more time.
Picking a horse in these circumstances and under these conditions was a pure gamble, so Buckhorn didn’t linger over his decision. He jerked loose a set of reins, put his foot in the stirrup, and swung up into the saddle. Clucking to the horse, he turned it and started moving at a slow walk away from the sounds of the men searching for him.
He would have liked to be able to stop by Miss Quinn’s and let her and Sandra know what had happened, but that was out of the question. They would hear the story soon enough—the story of how the half-breed gunfighter Buckhorn had gone on a killing spree. He hoped they would have their doubts that it was true, but either way, there was nothing he could do about that now except hope that they would continue to watch over Matthew Garrett.
A couple of blocks behind him, someone called, “Hey, who’s that riding down there?”
“Damn it!” The angry bellow came from Yancy Madison. “Nobody’s supposed to leave town. That’s probably Buckhorn! Stop him!”
Guns blasted as Buckhorn drove his heels into the horse’s flanks. As the animal leaped ahead, he heard the sharp crack of rifle reports mixed in with the duller booms of pistols. At this range, he didn’t worry much about handguns, but he didn’t want a Winchester round catching up to him.
“Come on, horse,” he urged as he leaned forward in the saddle to make himself a smaller target. Behind him, the guns continued to roar as death kept up its unholy racket.
* * *
Buckhorn was riding blind. He didn’t know the area around Crater City that well. But he had been up to the Jim Dandy a couple of times and thought that if he could reach the general vicinity of the mine, he would be able to locate it.
That was the only place around here where he might be able to find anybody willing to help him.
The problem was that he’d been forced to flee to the west from the settlement, and Hugh Thornton’s mine lay to the northeast. Crater City was between Buckhorn and the direction he needed to go.
The only answer was to circle around the town and hope that he could give the slip to his pursuers in the process. Already he heard a swift rataplan of hoofbeats drumming in the distance behind him.
He started to swing north, then changed his mind. The terrain soon grew rougher in that direction. He couldn’t move as fast and he was more likely to get lost. He headed south instead, even though that route would be longer, and pushed the stolen horse as fast as he could risk riding in the darkness.
Buckhorn kept the lights of Crater City to his left as he swung wide around the settlement. From time to time he reined in and paused to listen. He didn’t hear anything, which led him to hope that Madison and the other men who’d come after him had continued riding west, thinking that he would want to put the town as far behind him as he could, as quickly as possible.
That was exactly what he would have wanted if he’d been guilty of shooting Alexis Conroy and Edward Garrett.
He wasn’t going to have murder charges hanging over his head for the rest of his life, though. He wasn’t going to let Dennis Conroy and Yancy Madison get away with the crimes they had committed. That meant staying in these parts, despite the danger, until everything was settled.
Or until he was dead, whichever came first . . .
He crossed the trail that led from Crater City to Gunsight Canyon and knew that he was southeast of the settlement by now. Time to head north again.
He stopped again to listen and didn’t hear anything. With any luck, Madison and the other gunmen were miles away by now. Buckhorn heeled the horse into motion.
A moment later he realized that he should have known better than to think he could rely on luck. Several riders burst out of a thicket of chaparral about a hundred yards to his left.
“Over there!” a man shouted. “That’s gotta be him! Stop him!”
Buckhorn grated a curse as he kicked the horse into a gallop. Madison must have sent men out in all directions from Crater City to watch for a lone rider. There were half a dozen in this group, and Buckhorn thought it was unlikely he could outfight them. If he could hold them off in a running battle, though, he might still be able to slip away from them.
Guns began to bang. The riders moved at an angle to him, trying to intercept him. Buckhorn drew his Colt and fired a couple of rounds. The chances of him hitting anything at this range, in the dark, were so slim as to be almost nonexistent.
He wanted to remind his pursuers that he still had teeth, though. That might make them hesitate a little.
More muzzle flashes bloomed in the darkness to his left. The stolen horse was running strongly and seemed to have plenty of speed and sand. Buckhorn had chosen well when he stole this mount, although it was pure happenstance. He twisted in the saddle and threw another slug at the men trying to cut him off.
This wasn’t the first such desperate race in which he had found himself. He had been both hunter and hunted in the past. He leaned forward in the saddle and ducked his head slightly to keep the wind of his speedy passage from blowing his hat off. A glance to his left told him he still had good separation from the other riders, although they were closer now than they had been.
Buckhorn took the reins in his teeth, guided the horse with his knees, and replaced the three cartridges he had fired from the Colt. He would have liked to have a rifle, but there wasn’t one strapped to t
his saddle. A man couldn’t have everything, he thought wryly as he closed the revolver’s loading gate.
A second later an involuntary yell erupted from his throat as the racing horse suddenly plunged into nothingness. Instinctively, Buckhorn kicked his feet loose from the stirrups as he found himself sailing through empty air.
CHAPTER 31
The ground came up to smash Buckhorn with stunning force. The impact drove the breath from his lungs and rattled every bone in his body. Momentum rolled him over several times before he came to a stop. His face had plowed through the dirt. Grit filled his mouth and clogged his nose.
He pushed himself up a little on his hands and shook his head, sputtering and gasping until he could breathe again. The roaring of his own blood thundered inside his skull, and for a second he couldn’t hear anything else.
Then he became aware of shrill cries of pain and looked around. The light from the stars and a low-hanging crescent moon revealed the stolen horse lying several yards away. The animal was thrashing around and trying futilely to get up. Sickness roiled Buckhorn’s stomach as he realized that the animal must have broken at least one leg, probably more, in the unexpected plunge.
It was pretty obvious what had happened: the horse had run full-tilt off the rim of the crater that had given the nearby settlement its name. The fall wasn’t a long one, but it was enough to be devastating. Buckhorn was lucky he hadn’t broken anything.
At least, he thought that was the case. He forced himself to sit up and quickly check for injuries.
He didn’t feel the sharp pain of any broken bones, and all his muscles seemed to be working. As soon as he determined that, his other instincts rose to the fore. He stiffened as he realized his gun was no longer in his hand. He didn’t remember holstering it before the mishap, but he slapped the holster anyway to be sure. It was empty, just as he thought.
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