by Paul Bagdon
“No, it isn’t gonna win a war,” I said. “But there’s three of us and maybe forty or so of them. Those aren’t real good odds.”
“Dammit, Pound,” Don said vehemently, “we gotta quit slapping wrists and do somethin’ that counts.” There was a hardness in Don’s voice I hadn’t heard before. “Powers ain’t gonna run ‘cause we beat up an’ kill a few of his men. He don’t give a good goddamn about them—they’re easy enough to replace with any saddle bum or outlaw that comes along.”
The bottle came to me, and I was about to pass it on when I reconsidered and took three good glugs and let them settle in my gut for a few moments.
“One thing that’s to our advantage,” I said, “is that there’s no more loyalty to that band of cutthroats than there is in a nest of water moccasins.” I passed the bourbon to Lucas.
“I can move decently,” I said. “Even though I got a solid ass kicking. I’ll do some thinking, and then we’ll do something that counts—something that makes a difference.”
Both my deputies brightened at that. “ ‘Bout time,” Lucas said. “Whatta ya got in mind?”
“I need to think it through a little more. Just keep your drawers up and we’ll get something done in Gila Bend,” I said.
The fact was I had exactly nothing in mind to accomplish what I’d just told Don and Lucas we would. Every little thought or idea I had came down to one hard fact: the goddamn odds.
“We’ll hit ‘em hard?” Lucas asked.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “We’ll hit ‘em hard.”
My men were satisfied—at least for now.
Don went to the mercantile to buy some cigarette makings, and Lucas wandered off to wherever it was he decided to go. I suspect he meandered over to visit Miss Tillie Broadman’s Gentlemen’s Club and Lounge, which was a whorehouse.
I attempted to doze, but my mind was going far too fast for me to nap. I went out back, brushed down my horse, and cleaned out each of his hooves. He poked me with his snout, obviously looking for a treat. I had nothing to give him, but it made me feel good that whoever had owned the buckskin before me cared enough to give him an apple or some such every so often.
I saddled him up and rode out of the end of Main Street—if that’s what they called it—and got a couple of miles between me and the town. I checked behind me frequently; no one was following. I cut sharply to the northeast and easily enough found my stash. I took a thousand or so—I didn’t bother counting it—and went on with my ride.
Those two good men are going to leave me if we don’t do more than punch a few thugs around and shoot one every so often. Don and Lucas needed more, and so did I. I hadn’t done a damned thing beyond spend government money, rebuild the office, and sit around sucking beer.
I was thinking as I rode—not that I really cared to, but it was the sort of thing I couldn’t control. I was turning everything over in my mind, attempting to find an angle I’d missed or some way to fix things in Gila Bend. I didn’t know what the hell to do.
I approached a scattering of fairly large boulders, most higher than the top on my hat as I rode, and many smaller rocks. I would have turned away from it, given it some room, as I rode by. But I was too far into myself and my problem to pay much attention to the terrain.
My horse picked up his pace without me asking to, and I could feel him tighten, harden, under me. He snorted and shook his head and I took a tighter rein on him. When his head was in a position I could see his face, I saw that his eyes were damned near as big as dinner plates. I gathered yet more rein.
Then I heard what was bothering the horse, and the realization jerked me out of my daze. Rattlesnakes hereabouts grow large, and this boy was large. He was a fat six-footer pulling himself into an attack coil, and his buttons, rattling frenetically, sounded much like a shaken tin can with a handful of pebbles in it.
For a moment, that was the only sound. Then all through the rocks and boulders the same frightening sounds emanated. My horse reared, and I didn’t blame him. I gave him the rein he wanted and we hauled ass, putting maybe three-quarters of a mile between us and the rattlers.
It was far too hot to run a horse that hard, but I hadn’t asked for the speed; the buckskin had run as he was commanded to by his instinctive fear.
I eased him down to a walk and then stopped. I took a very small sip of water from my full canteen and poured the rest into my hat. The buckskin sucked my Stetson dry in two pulls. I mounted up and continued my aimless ride.
For some reason the relay system of the rattlesnakes stayed in my mind. It was the first time I’d seen or heard such a thing.
I lit a cheroot, but my mouth was too dry to enjoy it. I tossed it aside; sand was all around me, and sand doesn’t burn. I decided to go back to Gila Bend. And those damned snakes buzzing to one another stayed on my mind.
I dunno. It seemed one snake told another, and that one told a couple more and pretty soon the whole neighborhood was threatening the intruder, ready to take him on. It seemed like there was something there for me—and there was. It struck me like a kick in the ass, but it brought a big smile to my face.
You see, during and after the war there were a bunch of very hard men in the West. Some ganged up, but the most dangerous of them were loners. There were some pretty strong restrictions to being considered a part of the group of wandering gunmen.
Billy Powers, for instance, would never be involved with these hardcases. He was a coward, a man who had a following of similar cowards riding with him for the booze, money, and women. Not one of them had the balls of a boll weevil.
I’d heard about the group several years ago, when I was partnered up with Zeb Stone. There might be fifty or more—or fewer—of the group. All were killers and all had money on their heads. They weren’t what you’d call an affable bunch; they were prone to lynching anyone trying to infiltrate the group, or to use the spy for target practice. Human life—including their own—meant little or nothing to these men.
The point of the group was that they’d help one another to bust out of jail or step into a range war. They scalped a few Indians who paired up with white women, but not too many. In fact, a couple renegade Indians were members.
The way one reached these boys was a wire to St. Bartholomew’s Seminary, care of Father Smith, Lubbock, Texas. How this fellow got the message out and disseminated is beyond me, but he did.
I rode the rest of the way into Gila Bend composing my message to the good Father in my mind. I’m not much of a writer, but I think my message was abundantly clear:
Pound Taylor needs help retaking the town of Gila Bend. Will pay. Come now. Need is desperate. Outgunned and outmanned.
It wasn’t much on aesthetics, but it said what needed to be said. Payment, by the way, was optional. It wasn’t necessarily expected, but it didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings.
I put my horse in the enclosure behind the jail, rubbed him down good with an empty grain sack, and gave him a flake of hay. Then I went to the tiny telegraph office and sent my wire. The clerk looked at me as if I were a little strange, but said nothing.
I’d been thinking of a cold beer since I sent the wire, which was only a few minutes ago, but still, I wanted that beer. I went into a saloon, bellied up to the bar, and watched the bartender draw a couple of brews. He did a fine job of it, handling his foam-dashing stick with the skill and dexterity of a surgeon. I motioned him over to me. “A cold one,” I said, “and let’s keep them coming.”
He avoided my eyes as he spoke. “I got no cold beer.”
“Sure you have,” I said. “Those two barrels are packed in ice.”
“Don’t matter. I still ain’t got no cold beer.”
A hand fell on my shoulder. “Maybe you don’t hear good, but the ‘tender says he don’t have no cold beer.”
I turned to face the speaker. He was a kid, for crissake—maybe twenty-five at the outside. He wore a pair of .45s butt out, in a fancy, nicely tooled gunbelt. His boots looked new—as did his s
hirt and his denim pants. He wore one of those ridiculous string ties. His face was large and round and looked like it’d be better at laughing than it would be at threatening.
I chose my words carefully. “This isn’t going to end up well at all for you, boy. I’ll most likely kill you, and I don’t want to do that.”
“My name’s the Yuma Kid,” he said, as if that explained something.
“And mine’s the Persimmon Porkchop,” I said. “And you’re pissing me off.”
The kid picked up a full shot of whiskey the bartender had set in front of him and dashed the contents in my face.
“OK,” I said. “Out in the street and we’ll have at it.”
“You betcha,” the Yuma Kid said.
There’s a feeling that comes to a man when he knows he’s in a situation where he can’t possibly lose, and this was just such a time. For one thing, this boy would no doubt cross-draw, and by the time he had a good grip on his pistols, he’d be dead. It was possible that he could shoot well, but he wouldn’t get an opportunity to do that.
I knew I’d kill this silly pretender, and that made me sad.
I followed him through the batwings. “Lookit, boy,” I said quietly, “I’ll go my way and you go yours, and no one has to die here, OK?”
“Chickenshit,” he snarled.
I took some steps back but let the boy choose his distance.
I don’t want to do this.
He walked out about thirty or so paces; the damned sun was directly behind me. The population poured out of the saloon to watch the action.
The boy set himself up. He was crouched slightly—making a cross-draw yet slower and more difficult—with his left boot a foot behind his right.
“I don’t want this to happen,” I said, “and just look at that, will you?” I’d darted my eyes back to the saloon and the boy’s followed mine.
“Ahhh, Jesus,” I said.
He brought his eyes back to me, now angrier than before, his face flushing red. “Your goddamn tricks ain’t gonna save you,” he said.
I sighed audibly.
The flinch of his shoulders told me he was about to draw.
I wanted to give the boy an out, a way to end this thing without me killing him.
In the dime novels, the heroes frequently shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. That, of course, is impossible. I’d learned early on to shoot at the biggest target—that broad rectangle that made up a man’s chest and abdomen. There are more than a few fellows in the ground who’d testify I’d done the right thing.
I beat the boy in the draw, just as I knew that I would. The barrel of my Colt automatically flicked up to his chest. I brought it down and fired a round that spurted dirt into the air a foot in front of the boy. My second shot was to take him in the leg. It didn’t, and I no longer had a choice.
The boy had finally made his draw and both his pistols were swinging toward me. I put a pair of bullets in his chest. His pistols spun out of his hands and he was thrown backward by the double impact. I holstered my pistol and ran to the Yuma Kid. “I did all I could, but you wouldn’t let up. I told you this would…”
A gush of frothy blood erupted from his mouth. He spit it away as well as he could. “Next time…” he managed to get out.
There won’t be a next time, son.
I watched the life seep out of his eyes to leave behind the cold flatness of death. I stood up. The boozers were already going back to the bar. I saw a couple of them eye the boy’s .45s and his boots. The mortician and a couple of his flunkies hustled out, carrying a stained stretcher.
I felt as if I was going to vomit. I walked back to my office with bile burning in my throat and mouth—but I wasn’t going to give those vultures the opportunity to see me puke. I made it inside to a slop bucket.
Don had brought back several bottles of the whiskey he and his family made, and there was one of them in the big drawer of my rolltop. I pulled the cork with my teeth and hit the bottle hard.
Winter in West Texas is about as subtle as finding a scorpion in your bed.
It generally happens in one of two ways: a late August or early September day is pleasant enough, but there’s a sort of a tang to the air—not cold, exactly, but it somehow smells different. Then, that night, it snows and winter has arrived and isn’t going to go away for a long time.
Usually, horses and dogs get fidgety for no reason, horses pacing in their pastures or nervous in their stalls, and dogs slinking about as if they’d just snatched a roast of beef off a family table and their crime hadn’t been discovered yet. Some folks say the birds fly lower, too. That didn’t happen this time ‘round.
Then, late afternoon, maybe, or into the evening, the wind begins to howl like a wolf bitch in heat and snow seems to come from all directions. Men who’ve seen this sort of thing before lash a stout rope between their barn and their house, knowing full well if the rope breaks or somehow becomes loose, he’s liable to die as he goes to his barn to tend the stock. Lots of farm families keep a special rope that’s used for nothing else neatly coiled on a shelf in the barn. That first storm is generally a real pisser; cattle have been known to freeze to death where they stood—and horses, too, for that matter.
The strange thing about a northwester is that the wind comes from all directions at once. That doesn’t seem possible, but it is. If the snow breaks long enough to see out a window, a tumbleweed will appear to be zipping back and forth like a ball kicked in a kid’s recess game as it’s buffeted by the wind.
Quite fortunately, the stove we’d ordered for the office arrived a couple of days before our first winter storm in Gila Bend. “Drop ship” meant precisely that: a couple of railroad employees shoved the stove and its components out a boxcar onto the loading dock in town. We rented a wagon and draft horse from the livery and loaded the stove onto the wagon. The leather springs protested with a shriek and one snapped, listing the wagon slightly to the left. We didn’t pay much attention to that. After all, as Lucas said, “Ain’t our wagon.”
The stove didn’t weigh much more than a couple of mountains lashed together. We muscled it inside, grunting and cursing, placing it in the largest open space in the front of the office, which was a few feet from the desk, fairly close to the wall. We faced the loading door toward the office door, figuring it’d make access with armloads of wood easier.
Don took careful measurements of the placement of the stove, using as reference points the walls, door, and so forth. He climbed up onto the roof with his measuring stick and followed the calculations he’d made inside to the smallest part of the roof. Then he whacked a hole in the roof and used a hacksaw to create the opening we needed to run the stovepipe outside. The company had included a nice cap affair for the top of the top of the pipe to keep rain and snow out of fire below in the stove.
Don’s measurements were about four inches off, and the pipe wasn’t bendable. After damned near busting a gut getting the stove into the office, we needed to move it again.
I should point out here that our temperaments weren’t what one would refer to as sweet.
“Ya dumb sonofabitch,” Lucas bellowed at Don. “You screwed the pooch on all your fancy-assed measurements an’ now we gotta move this goddamn thing again.”
Lucas, quite possibly the strongest men I’d ever met, wrapped his arms around the stove. His face became progressively more scarlet as he lifted and shoved, but nothing much was happening. Finally, with his last burst of energy, he skidded the stove a few inches—away from where it needed to be.
“Well,” he gasped, “how the hell do you like that?” Then, for his own sanity or revenge or whatever you care to call it, he drew his .45 and shot the stove. The slug didn’t even leave a mark on the behemoth, but it did ricochet and punch into our rifle cabinet.
Wordlessly, he holstered his pistol and banged out the door, moving right along to the nearest saloon.
“Anyone in the gin mill who gives him grief is gonna die,” Don said.
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br /> “I suppose,” I said. “Now come on, let’s line this thing up before Lucas comes back and breaks a hand punching it.”
It took some doing and a whole lot of sweat, but we finally got the stove aligned with the hole in the roof. Don climbed back up and pushed the pipe through the hole and the stove and the pipe mated like a bull and a heifer.
We’d made a deal with a local to supply us with firewood, and there was already a couple cords stacked outside, just beyond the front door.
‘Course, we had to try the stove. We loaded her up and used kindling to get the fire going. It started nicely, without an argument. There was some smoke leaking from the seams in the pipe and at the hole in the ceiling, but we glopped those up in good order.
“Darn fine stove,” I said.
“She’s a real beauty,” Don added. After a few minutes, he said, “Gettin’ a bit warm in here.”
I had to agree. “How do we put it out?” I asked.
Don pondered my question. “Beats hell outta me,” he said. “Only experience I’ve had with stoves is keepin’ ‘em stoked an’ goin’, not puttin’ ‘em out.”
“We probably shouldn’t have put so much wood in,” I said.
“Yeah. Look, she’s turnin’ red on the sides. That’s a hell of a fire.”
We looked at one another for a long moment, said “Cold beer” in unison, and then began to move to the door together.
We joined up with Lucas, one of us on each side of him.
“All set?” he asked.
We nodded proudly. “Thing is,” I said, “we gave it a try. It works real good, but it’s warm in the office just now.”
“That means we have to stay here for some time until she burns down that load of wood we stuck in,” Don added.
“Well,” Lucas said, grinning, “that ain’t all bad now, is it?”
A fellow at the bar with a grizzled gray beard that reached his belt buckle remarked to the man next to him, “It’s comin’, I tell ya. Two days, maybe three, an’ you’re gonna wish you’d gathered up your beef near the barn. Hell, I already got my rope strung—you should, too.”
