Gunman

by Lauran Paine

  “He’ll make it,” came the reply. “You take the back corner of this shed and I’ll take the front. Keep up a fire on the main house. Salter’ll be sweating bullets to know how the fight’s going down at the barn.” The man was moving off when Ray caught a foreign sound in the air, an ominously quivering, thundering echo from far off.

  “Wait a minute!” he called, and the posse man turned back. “You hear anything aside from the firing?”

  The townsman cocked his head, frowned in concentration for a moment, then straightened up with a quizzical look and a head wag. “Not a thing but the shootin’,” he said. Ray was looking beyond him toward the west. He said nothing. Suddenly the posse man heard it and sucked in his breath. “I got it,” he said breathlessly. “I got it now. Horse men! A passel of riders comin’ on, Mister Kelly!” The man’s face, un-healthily gray and seamed-looking in this poor light, pushed up close. “It better be the sheriff,” he breathed, hearing with more distinctness the drum-roll beat of many riders hurrying. “Hell, if it ain’t Sheriff Smith an’ a posse, we’re done fer…out here in the yard with dawn comin’ and all…Mister Kelly!”

  Ray shot the man a look, saw mounting apprehension, and wished again he might have had a better posse. It was not, he thought now, that townsmen could not or would not fight; it was simply the difference between rough men inured to fear and discomfort and personal peril, and those whose environment had not so inured them.

  “Go tell the men over by the barn to meet me behind the bunk house.”

  “What for?” the posse man demanded.

  “Because we’ve got to get inside somewhere. Now go on!”

  The Weltonite moved off a few steps, then turned back to call: “You don’t reckon that is the sheriff?”

  “Dammit,” Ray said exasperatedly, “you want to get us all killed with your delaying tactics? No! I don’t think it’s the sheriff. Now, move! Do like I told you!”

  The posse man whirled away, driven onward by Kelly’s harshness. Ray waited until he was certain the man was going to fulfill his mission, and then he ducked around the woodshed, running in a crouched-over, erratic fashion toward the bunk house.

  Chapter Fifteen

  There were three men behind the bunk house, pressing against the dark wall. Dawn had made no appreciable impression there, and, when Ray hissed, then came around the south end of the little log building, two of the three men grew wire-tight and ready. He called forward his name and joined them. The first question was:

  “You hear them riders coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “You reckon it’s Perry an’ a posse?”

  “No. Now, shut up and listen.” The posse men shuffled closer, half heeding Ray, half gauging the distance of the audibly riding horse men.

  “I don’t believe there are more than three or four men in the bunk house. We’ve got to get under cover.”

  A townsman interrupted uneasily. “Someone’s coming,” he whispered, turning toward the barn.

  “It’s the others,” Ray said impatiently. “Listen, now. When everyone’s here, we’re going around front and burst into the bunk house.” He paused, waiting for protests that did not come. Heartened by this, he then went on. “Once inside, we can hold off an army until Sheriff Smith gets here.”

  “Unless our ammunition gives out,” a man growled.

  Another said in an equally despairing voice: “How’s Perry goin’ to know we need him?”

  “Because I sent him a messenger,” Ray replied, straightening off the wall as the balance of the posse materialized out of the watery dawn. “Let’s go!”

  There was a great depth of silence in Salter’s yard. Except for the oncoming riders, dangerously close now but still muffled as they rode in, there was no noise from either the barn or Mort Salter’s house.

  Ray was bent low, moving along the front of Salter’s bunk house when from within came the sound of a chair scraping over rough pine flooring. This was followed by a sound they all knew—the quick, hard-shuttling rasp of a loophole being uncovered. Behind Ray a man gasped, stifled it, and went nearly flat. His breathing sounded as loudly to Ray as the crackling of a crown fire in a forest. It was not audible to the man within whose eye was straining at the loophole because of the louder sound of riders. Ray heard the man close the slot and say strongly to his companions in a voice filled with revived hope: “They’re comin’ boys. I heard ’em plain as day.”

  With a sudden inspiration Ray straightened up, struck the door hard with his gun butt, and called out in an authoritative way: “Open up in there! This is the sheriff! I said open up! If I got to shoot my way in, you won’t live to surrender. I got eight men with me out here and you can hear the rest of the posse coming up!” He struck the door again, harder, and the walls reverberated. “I said open up!”

  For a moment there was total silence. Then, from within, two voices rose sharply, briefly, until they were stilled by a third, bleak and bitter voice. The first two voices were unintelligible to Ray but the angry third voice was clear enough.

  “Open it, Charley,” it commanded. “Damn it, I said open it! I ain’t goin’ to get killed for Mort Salter or anyone else…not against odds like that.”

  That time the protests were louder. “What’re you talkin’ about?” One of them argued. “Mort’s paying us to….”

  “Open it!” the same commanding voice broke out furiously. “Mort ain’t payin’ enough to get killed or strung up. We ain’t done nothin’ the law can hold us for…yet.”

  “What about the cattle?”

  That time, as Ray lifted his weapon to strike the door a third blow, there was a hard slam of boot steps, the creaking rise of a door bar, and the panel swung inward.

  Ray pushed swiftly inside. His men crowded over the threshold to fill the bunk house, every gun up and steady, bearing fully upon three big-eyed cowboys. The man who had opened the door squinted at Ray and said a savage curse.

  “Sheriff?” he snarled. “You’re Kelly…that’s who you are!”

  Ray palmed the deputy’s badge and held it forward. “Good enough?” he challenged.

  Salter’s gunman looked long at the outstretched hand; he appeared to be turning something over in his mind. He finally shot an appraising look at the posse men behind Ray, raised his shoulders, let them fall, and said sullenly: “It’s good enough.” He tossed his handgun on a table. Left no alternative, the other two Salter men did likewise.

  “Tie them,” Ray ordered. “One of you gather their ammunition and guns.” As his men moved out of their tracks, Ray went to one of the three windows, threw it wide open, and listened. The band of horse men was sweeping up from behind Salter’s barn; they were slowing now, breaking over into a choppy trot, scattering slightly, some recklessly bypassing the barn’s rear-wall protection for a view of the yard.

  Ray sighted a blur of bulky movement, raised his carbine, and fired. The rider jerked his horse high into the air, whirled, and raced for cover behind the barn. Until Ray fired there were only horse sounds; now men’s voices sounded quickly, fiercely, calling back and forth.

  From over Ray’s shoulder a posse man said: “We can’t get no good shootin’ toward the barn an’ the back wall of this dog-goned bunk house ain’t got no window. They can slip up on us out there.”

  Ray turned, pushed past the man, crossed to the other windows, and flung them wide, also. This was to minimize injury from flying glass. He then moved along the wall to a safe spot, made a deliberate cigarette, lit it, and gazed at his posse.

  The townsmen were obviously uneasy over the quick reversal of a situation they had all ridden into with excessive confidence, but they seemed a long way from panic. Ray thought this might not have been the case if he had not gotten them into the bunk-house; here, they could not desert if they wanted to. It was, he thought, the best situation possible under the circumstances, and regardless of the numbers opposed to them they were safe at least as long as their ammunition held out.

  H
e was not considering the opposite side of the coin. Mort Salter’s hatred was nothing to overlook; his vindictiveness and ruthlessness permitted no compromise, ever. Ray Kelly was not the first man, however, who had let down his guard for a moment and found Mort Salter waiting to spring.

  Gunshots erupted from over near the woodshed. A ragged volley also came from Salter’s house. Lead slugs struck solidly into the bunk house logs. One or two of the posse men winced at these slashing sounds, but others crept to the windows, poked carbines over the sills, and risked harmless but defiant shots. Ray told them to save the ammunition. Someone stoked up the bunk house stove and put the coffee pot on to boil. Then a bullet knocked the outer stovepipe off and oily smoke guttered briefly to sting eyes and cause choking sounds from the defenders until dawn air sucked it away out the windows.

  Someone, from the vicinity of Salter’s house, was firing deliberately at the bunk house door with a buffalo gun. Each resounding explosion was a bull-bass, great coughing explosion that easily drowned out the lesser carbine cracks. The door was hand hewn of tough fir slab wood and would have withstood conventional lead slugs indefinitely, but Ray soon determined that the gunner firing from somewhere near Salter’s house was concentrating his fire upon the hinges and each slug made the door quiver from impact. This kind of a shoot-out, he knew, could end favorably for the posse men only as long as they were not exposed to a foe that he estimated outnumbered them approximately two-to-one, and that held not only firepower superiority but also gun-savvy wisdom. Some way, therefore, he had to silence the man with the buffalo rifle before the door was shot away and the bunk house’s interior was exposed to Salter’s gunmen.

  Around him and despite three open windows, the bunk house air was becoming difficult to breathe because of acrid black powder smoke. When his men stopped firing to dash tears from burning eyes, he called out: “Keep firing! Don’t give them a chance to rush us!”

  With ears ringing from the increased firing behind him, Ray went to a front-wall loophole, slid back the shingle, and peered out. Dawn was fully up now; Salter’s house stood darkly visible and gun flashes winked at him from various places around the yard. He waited for one particular marksman, and, when the great booming explosion came, he drew back, felt the door on his far right tremble from impact, poked his carbine through the loophole, and sighted. He had the rifleman’s location estimated but he needed another sighting to narrow it down.

  When the buffalo gun blossomed again, Ray snugged back his trigger, leaned into the recoil, and levered up a second shot and a third. He could not see the rifleman so he bracketed the area he knew the man occupied and was rewarded when the buffalo gun was temporarily silenced. He had not hit Salter’s gunman, he knew, but he had forced him to change positions. Each time afterward the big-bored weapon made its telltale plume of red fire Ray was waiting. As he and Salter’s gunner dueled, the fight around them swirled into a deafening crescendo of winking tongues of flame and flat vicious explosions.

  Ray’s posse men took heart from their security and became reckless. One of them was knocked flat by a graze over the right ear and the others, thinking him killed, became careful again, firing swiftly, then dropping away from the windows.

  The fight had been in progress less than fifteen minutes when the defenders heard a voice most of them recognized commanding the attackers to hold their fire.

  Gradually the echoes faded out over the range, and, as Ray drew back, straightening up, to begin plugging fresh loads into his carbine, Mort Salter’s voice knifed into the silence.

  “You fellers from Welton! Listen, there’s only one man in the bunk house I want! Send him out into the yard and you got my word the rest of you can ride off unhurt!”

  A flush-faced younger posse man made a cold laugh and called back: “You can have him, Salter. Just come on over here and get him!”

  Other posse men grinned and laughed. They smiled broadly at Ray, their faces reflecting both confidence and support. Then Salter’s voice came again, softer this time, more ominously menacing.

  “You had your joke,” the rustler chieftain called. “Now I’ll have mine. Want to know what it is, boys?”

  No one in the bunk house replied. Each face lost its smile in a fading way. There was no misunderstanding Salter’s changed tone or his deadly confidence.

  “Well,” he said when no reply came back, “I’ll tell you anyway. That firing wasn’t to drive you out. It wasn’t even calculated to kill any of you.” Another long pause, then: “It was to give my boys time to slip up behind the bunk house. You hear me, Kelly? They hauled up some coal oil and pitch wood an’ put it against your back wall. They’re waiting for my signal now, and then they’ll set it afire…Kelly? That there bunk house is made of pine logs. It’s been standin’ for a good many years. You understand what I’m gettin’ at, Kelly? That bunk house’ll burn like tinder!”

  There was more. Salter’s triumphant tone went into the skull of every posse man in the bunk house. They exchanged glances and looked away, out the window where sunrise was nearing, or at the tied prisoners on the floor, or at the boiling coffee pot— but not at Ray Kelly.

  Half-heartedly someone called to Salter: “Oh, shut up! You talk too damned much, Mort.”

  The distant voice sounded amused. “All right, I’ll shut up. I’ll do better’n that. I’ll give you ten minutes to push Kelly out that door. Ten minutes…an’, if you don’t throw him out, you’ll be boiled alive.”

  The foremost of Salter’s men raised his head off the floor to shoot a desperate stare at Ray. “He means it,” the gunman said sharply. “Kelly, he ain’t kidding. He’ll burn this house down around your ears.”

  “You’ll fry with us,” a Welton man growled.

  “No,” the captive said swiftly. “Listen, you fellers, Mort only wants Kelly. Throw him out the door.”

  “So they can shoot him down like a rag doll?” someone said.

  “All right,” the gunman croaked. “So they shoot him. Listen, ain’t no life on earth worth gettin’ eight or ten men killed over, is there?” The gunman wiggled along the floor, worked his way up the wall until he was in a sitting position, and grimaced at the watching ring of solemn, smoke-grimed, and tear-stained faces. “Disarm Kelly and force him out into the yard. That’s all Mort wants. He said he’d let the rest o’ you ride out and he’ll keep his word.”

  A posse man said—“Shut up.”—and turned his back upon the prisoner, his face showing strong disgust. The same man gazed at Ray. “There’s a loophole in this back wall,” he said half-heartedly, thinking the same thing everyone else in the bunk house was also thinking— it would not be possible to depress a gun barrel far enough downward to fire at the man they knew was crouching there, awaiting Salter’s signal to start the conflagration.

  Ray crossed to the back wall and pressed his ear to it. He heard nothing at all, so he rapped upon the logs with his gun butt. Immediately, clearly audible to every man in the room, came back a sardonically played tattoo with an answering gun butt. He bent low, opened the loophole, and peered out. The scent of coal oil arose at once to his nostrils. Salter had not been bluffing, but he had never thought Salter was bluffing anyway. From the corner of his eye he caught movement. The back of a man’s neck was visible where he crouched, holding a match in one hand ready to strike it and duck away.

  Ray worked his face around the loophole seeking other men. He found none. Behind him a posse man’s fingers brushed over his shoulder, and, as he turned, the man said—“Here.”—holding forth a steaming cup of jet black coffee. “It’s too dang’ hot to drink and there’s no water in here to cool it with.”

  Ray took the cup, found it as blistering hot as he had been told, and turned deliberately with every eye in the room on him, and poured it with a quick and unerring aim through the loophole. The posse men did not at once understand what he was doing, but when they heard the wild cry of pain from below the loophole, they grasped his purpose and broke into full-voiced encourage
ment. One of them hastily secured a second cup and held it out. But Ray, watching the fleeing, writhing figure of Salter’s gunman shook his head.

  “One’s enough,” he said, with his face against the inner wall. “I’ve heard folks say someone ran like a scalded cat but that’s the first time I ever saw it done.”

  Outside in the yard Salter’s riders were shouting angrily. There was no time to make out what they were yelling back and forth because almost as soon as the badly scalded man was among them once more the gunfire was resumed, and this time it came from every direction around the bunk house, more fiercely than before.

  One of the sitting prisoners watched Ray cross to the front wall, bend forward toward a loophole, and thrust his carbine through. His face, dank with sweat, lost its appearance of apprehension. He could not refrain from calling to the closest posse man: “He saved our bacon, that Kelly feller! Mort’d have burnt this bunk house down sure as God made green apples.”

  The posse man might not have heard for all the attention he paid.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Again the fight raged fiercely and Ray, concentrating on the moving marksman with the buffalo gun, did not know a second casualty lay upon the floor behind him until he turned, moving away from the loophole to reload a second time. Simultaneously he saw the posse man sitting in the middle of the room, groaning and holding a bullet-broken arm, and also felt along his cartridge belt to discover that he had no more carbine shells and only half a loop of handgun bullets.

  He motioned for a man standing nearby to bind the injured Weltonite’s arm, then went to the table, picked up a shell belt lying there that had been taken from one of the prisoners—and discovered that someone had been there before him, the belt hung limply in his hand, every loop emptied of cartridges.

  He put his carbine aside, drew his handgun, and tried to estimate the length of time they had been in the bunk house so that he could figure ahead to the time Perry Smith would arrive with a posse. Time, passing too erratically, could not be telescoped with any degree of accuracy; he thought they had been in the bunk house perhaps two hours. He then revised this downward to one hour, and his heart sank as he sighted the distant horizon from his loophole. The sun beginning to show distantly was not even fully up yet.