by Paul Bagdon
He laughed. “Clever how they’re sneaking up on us,” he said.
I watched the two who were coming up from behind. I levered a bullet into the chamber of one of my .30-30s and set myself up in a nice position to blow the two outlaws to hell. I let them get real close before I fired. Don had been right about sighting in the rifles; my first shot ripped the horn off my target’s saddle.
“Well, hell,” I grunted in disgust, and aimed high and slightly to the left and fired again. The outlaw was plucked out of his saddle like kids make puppets jump around by pulling on the strings. The torch dropped to the dirt, flaring, illuminating the other rider quite clearly. Him I got with my first shot.
Downtairs, Don was cranking off rounds. I saw a horse go down in a mishmash of horse legs, a twisted human shape, and a blazing torch. The downed rider quickly caught fire.
Some slugs pinged on the roof around me, but nothing came too close. I picked up my second rifle and began firing at the few men stupid enough to keep riding hell-bent for leather toward our office. I picked one off easily. I heard the glass in our street window shatter and Don snarl, “Shit! That glass ain’t cheap.”
The remaining riders flung their torches futilely, the flames hitting the ground several yards from the office, and turned tail, hauling back down the street. I stayed on the roof for maybe another half hour peering up and down the street, looking for any action. The outlaw charge was so stupid, so poorly planned—if there was a real plan at all—that it was hard for me not to think that it was ruse of some kind. If it was a ploy, was it worth losing several men for? What did it accomplish?
The only thing I heard was a couple of shots from down toward the livery. Other than that, nothing was happening.
I came down the ladder, my face burning a bit from the blowback of the rifle. Don was still picking up shards of glass from in front of the window.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He shook his head as he dumped the broken glass into our wastepaper basket. “I dunno, Pound. I’d have to say that the whole damned thing smells fishy. No matter what else Powers is, he ain’t stupid, an’ that charge was just plain stupid.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I can’t figure it, either. He has lots of men, but he can’t throw them away like he did tonight.”
Don went to the desk and took out a bottle of his whiskey and a two glasses. Without asking, he poured each glass four fingers full. I sat in the chair behind the desk with my feet up, lit a cheroot, and took a good swallow of the whiskey. “Damn,” I said, “that’s good stuff. I’ve had ‘shine before and it was grain alcohol and whatever else the maker tossed in a pot. A fellow in Mexico told me that they’ll throw a hog’s head or a handful of snakes into the big pot to add flavor.”
“Makin’ pulque, no doubt. Shit. That stuff would strip the paint off a wall.”
I got up and carried my glass to the window frame. It’s a good thing I did. A single rider was approaching, riding hard, hunched over his saddle. I saw a quick flicker of light in whatever it was he was clutching. I grabbed a rifle and stepped out of the office. I had plenty of time to take a good bead and did so before I fired. I don’t know where the hell the bullet went—but it didn’t go where I aimed it.
Don handed me another rifle. “This here one is right, dead on,” he said.
I took aim again. The rider was a lot closer—maybe fifty yards out. I fired and in the smallest part of a second I was thrown to my ass on the dirt by the concussion of the explosion of the dynamite the outlaw was carrying. The outlaw himself and his horse were blown to bits and shreds of flesh. For all I know, it might still be raining outlaw in some part of West Texas.
“Jesus,” Don said, standing in the doorway. “Dynamite. I never gave it a thought.”
“Me neither. We should have.”
“I figure three sticks, maybe four,” Don said. “One would be plenty to take us and our office out.”
I finished my drink. “We’re gonna need at least a couple of new men,” I said. “We need to keep watch all the time—every minute—or we’re dead. I’m not all that worried about an attack with rifles and pistols, but that dynamite scares the piss out of me.”
“I can get a couple good men,” Don said. “I got a pair of cousins, Jack and Joe, who live maybe a day out from here, raisin’ some longhorns. Maybe they’ll come.”
“This isn’t their fight…”
“Don’t matter. They’re family. I’ll ride out soon’s there’s enough light.”
It made sense. With two more men who could cover the office all the time from the roof and downstairs, Don and I would be freed up to make some changes in the town of Gila Bend. Don’s “They’re family,” gave me a strange feeling. I had no one in the world I could call on for any kind of help, much less put their lives on the line.
“I guess you better get some sleep, then. I’ll wake you as soon as there’s a glimmer in the east.”
Don took the rifle I’d used to blow up the outlaw and the horse. “This baby’s goin’ with me,” he said. “An’ let’s bring the other ones outside town to true them up ‘fore we need them again. Hell, one of ‘em I used last night I couldn’t hit a barn with if I was standin’ five feet away from it.”
Don left at very early daylight and the office seemed terribly empty as I sat there alone, with nothing in particular to do.
A sheriff who sits on his ass in his office isn’t accomplishing anything. I ought to be out on the street—visible to both the honest citizens and the outlaws—and show them that the law had come to their town.
I hadn’t gotten any real sleep, but I didn’t feel at all tired. I was, however, hungry enough to eat a sack of horseshoes. I walked down to the hotel restaurant. I suppose it was something I need to get used to, but I felt the sights of a long gun lined up with my back with each step I took.
I took the back table where my back would be to the wall. That’d become a habit a long time ago, but I was getting a tad lax about it—like standing at the bar in the saloons. The girl who took my order—four eggs, a decent-sized sirloin, hashed potatoes, and plenty of coffee—looked around the place, saw that the other diners had no interest in what she was doing, and whispered, “Great job last night, Sheriff.”
I ate every scrap on my plate and had four cups of coffee to wash the whole mess down.
I stopped at the mercantile, and the owner found he could spare me a box of thirty of those cheroots I’d gotten fond of. When I handed over the dollar fifty, he tried to refuse to take my money. “It doesn’t work that way anymore,” I said. “Anything that goes out of here is paid for first or put on an account by you. If one of Powers’s men or anyone else tries to walk out without paying you let ‘em go, but send a stockboy over to my office to fetch me or my deputy. OK?”
The storekeeper’s smile was as broad as the desert horizon. “Yessir,” he said. “I’ll sure go ahead an’ do that, Sheriff. Been too long that we…” The bell over the door rang and he cut off his sentence. That was fine; I knew what he was going to say.
I’d barely sat down behind my desk and was in the process of lighting up a cheroot when the door opened and Billy Powers strode in. I looked beyond him. It appeared that he was alone.
“I heard you had some trouble last night, Pound,” he said.
I blew a very nicely formed smoke ring. “No, I can’t say that we did. A little noisy late in the night, but that’s about it. Just some drunken miners and cowpokes showin’ their stupidity, is all. It was easy enough to quiet them down.”
A flush of anger showed on Powers’ face but his voice remained calm, almost affable. “You know you’re fightin’ a loser battle here, don’t you?”
“No,” I smiled, “I don’t know that at all.”
“There’s plenty of pie to cut up here, Pound—enough for all of us.”
“Out,” I said.
Powers looked perplexed.
“Get out of my office—do it now or I’ll pick you up and throw yo
u out.”
Powers forced a grin. “You’re mine,” he said. “No matter what else happens, you’re mine.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
He stomped out of the office, slamming the door behind him.
Time, once again, began to drag. There were almost no street sounds and only a few horses tied in front of the various gin mills. My eyes fell on the rifle closet and the five weapons in it. I grinned. Sighting them in would be a job I’d enjoy and one that needed doing. I filled my front pockets with cartridges and wrapped the rifles in my blanket from the cell I’d been sleeping in.
I’d almost walked by the apothecary without seeing it. It was in the front of what looked like a warehouse or storage facility of some kind. The only thing that indicated the business was a brass plaque with the word APOTHECARY. Out of curiosity, I walked in. All the standard patent medicines, potions, and elixirs were placed neatly—almost precisely—on shelves behind the glass-fronted counter. On the counter itself was a ledger, and a mortar and pestle. Behind the glass were several different types of trusses and supports.
The elderly lady who came out from the back of the building was the perfect grandmother: slightly chubby, a cherubic face and a wide smile, wearing a pristinely white apron over her dress. “Help you?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. I’m just looking right now, but I’ll sure keep your store in mind should the need arise.”
“Why, thank you, son,” she said.
I felt guilty for not buying anything.
As I approached the stable, the owner came rushing out to meet me. “Mr. Pound,” he said, “I’m terrible awful sorry. There was nothin’ I could do. I…”
I shifted the wrapped rifles to my left shoulder, freeing up my right if I needed to pull my Colt. “What’s the matter? What happened?”
“Well, see—it’s your horse…”
I pushed by the old guy and rushed to the stall where my horse had been kept when he wasn’t out in the pasture. He was dead, crumpled in a clumsy position on the straw bedding. There were two bullet holes in his head.
Chapter Four
I stood there at the stall staring at my horse. The metallic-sweet scent of blood was strong and cloying in the close air of the barn. He was positioned more or less on his left side, but any horseman knows that when a horse is down and dead the rigor mortis tugs their legs into positions they’d never take in life. There’s a lot of blood in a horse—mine must have been killed several hours ago—yet there were tiny streams of blood still seeping from his head.
He’d been a hell of a horse—there seemed to be no bottom to him, nothing he wouldn’t do if I asked him to do it. “Heart,” horse people call it. This boy had more heart than any horse I’ve ever owned or come across in the course of my life.
I called the stableman over. “Here’s what I want,” I said. “I want a hole dug out in the prairie at least five or six feet deep—no less. It needs to be wide enough to take this horse. I’ll check on this. You don’t want me to find my orders haven’t been followed.”
“Well, yessir,” the liveryman said, “I can do that, but it’s going to cost you. I’d say maybe…”
I handed him a fifty-dollar bill. “Just get it done. Go out and hire some diggers right now. Enough men can heft him onto a farm wagon. If this horse is here after dark, you’re going to regret it.”
He hustled off, leaving me with my horse.
That fire in me had been banked and tempered a bit. Just now it erupted, flaring and burning as strongly as it ever had, so that I could barely contain it. My palms were sweating so much the grips of my Colt were wet. I hadn’t realized I’d reached for my .45, but I obviously had.
I walked away from my good horse for the last time. There was a throwin’ rope hanging on a peg and I took it as I walked to the door that led to the pasture. The lariat felt good in my hands, although I hadn’t worked beef in a good long time.
I went out to the pasture. Most of the horses the stable owner had were remounts for the army cavalry—which meant, almost by definition, that they were either doped-up mustangs, had really bad habits such as chewing on riders, or were docile plugs that were presented to be seven or eight years old but in truth were closer to twenty.
There were, however, a few good animals in the small herd. I dropped a loop over a muscular black stud and looked him over. I liked him. But there were a couple of things wrong. His pasterns had no slope to them—he’d be like riding in a buckboard with square wheels. And he was a tad jittery. Still, he was a pretty good horse—just not the one for me.
I roped a pretty mare and found that she was skittish and more than a little crazy. When I followed down my rope to her, she swung her ass around, dropped her head, and kicked out with both rear hooves; either hoof connecting with a man’s head would have killed him.
I dropped a loop over a nice buckskin’s neck. The rope didn’t seem to bother him at all. He was well-built: lots of chest, good withers and back, and good, broad, strong hindquarters. He’d lost his eggs to a gelding knife a long time ago. That didn’t bother me; I had nothing at all against a good gelding. On the spot, I decided to buy him. If I had riding, reining, or control problems, I figured I could bring him into line. He had that look of intelligence in his deep chestnut eyes. I turned him loose and went to talk with the stable owner, who was loading pickaxes and shovels onto a small wagon.
“What do you need for that buckskin?” I asked.
“Oh, him,” the old fellow said. “He’s a pure goddamn jewel, is what he is. Why, he…”
“Cut the shit,” I said. “How much?”
“I gotta get eighty dollars for that horse—not a penny less.”
“Your ass.” I counted out sixty-five dollars and handed over the cash.
“Sold,” the ol’ guy said.
“I want new shoes on him all the way around before I come back a little later. I’ll pay the blacksmith. And tell him to leave plenty of frog. I could be riding through some rough country.”
The stableman grinned. “Damned if you don’t know your horses, son,” he said. “That tissue on the underside of the hoof is right important in keeping a horse from laming up. I’ll have a kid fetch the smith right off.”
The fire inside me was still blazing as I fetched the buckskin into a stall and fit my saddle on his back and cinched him up. He stood well, without drawing in air to make his gut expand like some horses will do. He took my low port cutting horse bit easily.
I searched the bottom of my saddlebag and found what I was after: a cylinder of solid steel about four inches long and an inch in diameter with slight indentations in it so that it fit my clenched right fist perfectly. I plucked a crab apple from a basket of them the livery kept around as training rewards and walked out of the barn.
The heat was already strong enough to make my neck sweat. I ignored it. I walked toward my hotel with that lump of cold steel in my hand.
Sometimes things work out as they should, and this situation did just that. Three men from Powers’s crew rode up from behind me and jigged their horses to match my stride. They were already drunk or close to it, but not falling out of their saddles—just all mouth, laughing too much and too loud.
“Hey, Sheriff,” one said, “how come you’re walkin’? That busted down ol’ plug of yours finally croak?”
“Shit,” another said, “that there horse was three-quarters dead when this silly sumbitch rode him into town.”
“You’d best have the carcass dragged way the hell outta Gila Bend,” the third said, “ ‘fore he gits to rottin’ good an’ stinks up the whole town—just like a lawman does.”
I stopped walking, and the three outlaws reined in. I untied the latigo that tied my holster and pistol tight to my leg, then unbuckled my gunbelt.
“As you litter of pigs can see,” I said, “I’m unarmed. I’ve got a couple hundred dollars and a bit more in my pocket. You cowards care to step down and settle things out with our fists—an
d get my cash, too?”
“An’ our boots, too,” an outlaw said. “Our fists an’ our boots.”
“Sure. Boots, too. That’s fine with me.”
The inferno was now burning too hot for me to even begin to control. While the three outlaws were joking among themselves about kicking my ass as they swung down from their horses, I grabbed the one closest to me and hit him in the face as hard as I could with my right fist. There was a crack of bone or cartilage or whatever. As he was going down, I kicked him square in the eggs.
The other two were moving fast at me. The first one made a dive-type tackle attempt, but I stepped aside easily and landed a truly powerful shot to the back of his neck. He went down and stayed down.
The third was the fighter of the group. He danced around me in classic boxing form, fists tight, protecting his face. He hit me with a left that I didn’t even see coming, shaking me, opening a cut over my right eyebrow. I backed, but the outlaw stayed with me. A right split my lower lip, and another left widened and deepened the slash over my eye.
I kept my fists up to cover myself and backed again. The outlaw laughed and came on. I kicked him in the knee and then as he collapsed, I laid into his face with my right fist. My left was in there, too, but it wasn’t doing near the damage my right and my lump of steel were doing. I purely took him apart. I worked his head like it was one of those punching-bag things. His nose splayed on his face, gushing blood, both his eyes were swollen and cut, and a few of his front teeth littered the dirt of the street. I hurt him bad, and that’s what I wanted—needed—to do. My own knuckles were torn to hell and the cut over my eye still bleeding, but that was a small enough price to pay.
My personal fire receded.
I was in control again.
I was a little shaky, and my knuckles were bleeding. I’d taken a few good shots from the third outlaw, the cut over my eye was still pouring blood, and there was a buzzing-running water sound in my head. But I was OK. I’d been hurt a lot worse in my day. I picked up my gunbelt, tied my holster down, and set out to the livery to fetch my new horse.
