Matt knew where this was going, and he didn’t like it.
“Davey, you’ve been in charge by virtue of being the oldest,” Roman went on. “But perhaps someone else is actually better qualified to be making decisions when I’m not here.”
Pete grinned. He understood what was happening, too.
So did Davey. He said, “I don’t see where it matters who gets rid of him, as long as he’s not a threat to us anymore.”
“But it does matter,” Roman insisted. “A person’s reaction to trouble is always instructive. One can learn a great deal from how they handle a problem. Peter, what do you think needs to be done here?”
“Somebody needs to shoot this son of a bitch in the head,” Pete answered without hesitation.
“I concur. Davey, as the leader it’s your responsibility to take care of this.”
“No!” Josie exclaimed. “You told us we wouldn’t have to kill anybody, Roman.”
“Unless it was necessary, dear girl. This is necessary.”
“Hell,” said Pete, “I’ll do it. Davey, step aside.”
He raised his gun.
Davey’s jaw tightened. His gun came up, too, but it swung toward Pete.
“Nobody’s going to die here—”
“That’s where you’re wrong, my young friend,” Roman said. His hand flickered under his coat like a striking snake and came out clutching a pistol.
But the shot that sounded a fraction of a second later came from a rifle cracking from the darkness. Roman rocked back against the buggy seat and his eyes opened wide in surprise and pain as blood welled out into a crimson stain on the snowy front of his white shirt.
At the same instant, Matt dived at Pete and tackled the young man around the waist. As they went down, Matt’s hand closed over Pete’s gun and wrenched it out of his fingers. Revolvers boomed as Matt rolled to the side. Somebody cried out in pain.
He came to a stop on his belly and angled the gun in his hand toward one of the hardcases on horseback. Both of Roman’s men had yanked their guns out and started blazing away. The Colt in Matt’s hand roared and bucked, and the slug from it ripped into an outlaw’s chest and toppled him from his saddle.
Meanwhile, Davey traded shots with the other hardcase and staggered as he was hit. His bullet tore through the man’s throat. The outlaw dropped his gun and clapped both hands to the wound, but he couldn’t stop the blood spurting from the severed artery. He pitched to the ground as well, spasmed a couple of times, and then lay still.
Salty rushed up out of the shadows and covered the rest of the youngsters with his rifle.
“Don’t none o’ you kids move!” he shouted. “Those of you who’ve got guns, put ’em on the ground now!”
Matt came to his feet and pointed the gun he had taken from Pete at Davey and Josie.
“That goes for the two of you as well,” he said. “I know you gave us a hand just then, Davey, but I’ll feel better about things when that gun’s on the ground.”
Josie placed her pistol on the ground at her feet and stepped away from it. She said, “Do what Matt says, Davey. Please.”
For a second Matt didn’t know what Davey was going to do. He didn’t want to shoot the young man, and if he had to, he would try to wound Davey, but there were no guarantees in a gunfight.
Then Davey sighed, leaned forward, and let the revolver slip from his fingers. He stepped back, too, and said, “I reckon it’s all over, isn’t it?”
“Not quite. Help Pete up, then all of you get over there in a bunch. Salty, keep an eye on them.”
“Durned tootin’ I will,” the old-timer replied. “A bunch o’ kid outlaws! I never saw such a thing in all my borned days!”
Pete had hit the ground hard enough to stun him when Matt tackled him, but he was getting his wits back now. He glared at Matt and Salty, but there was nothing else he could do as Davey helped him to his feet and Salty then herded all twelve youngsters into a compact bunch. SueAnn glared and stuck her tongue out at him, giving in to a childish impulse like the child she was.
She looked surprised when Salty stuck his tongue right back out at her.
Matt ignored that exchange and hurried over to the buggy. Roman was still alive and struggling to lift the gun he had taken from under his coat. Matt reached into the buggy and plucked the weapon from the crooked lawyer’s fingers.
“You ought to be damned proud of yourself,” Matt snapped. “Getting a bunch of innocent kids to hold up stagecoaches for you.”
“You . . . you’re wrong,” Roman gasped as he fought to hang on to life. “There aren’t any . . . innocent people in this . . . in this . . .”
He slumped to the side and his head fell back against the seat. His eyes began to glaze over. He had lost that fight.
Quickly, Matt checked on the two hardcases. They were both dead, as he had thought.
When he returned to Salty’s side, the old-timer asked, “What are we gonna do with this bunch? Turn ’em over to the law?”
SueAnn and Salty weren’t the only ones who could act on an impulse. Matt said, “No, we’re going to turn them loose.”
“What! They’re outlaws, goldang it! Stagecoach robbers!”
“Yeah, but they never killed anybody,” Matt pointed out.
Salty snorted, nodded toward Pete, and said, “That little scalawag would’ve, if he’d had the chance.”
“Maybe. But right now he doesn’t have any blood on his hands, and that’s the way I’d like to keep it. I’d like to at least give them all a chance for that. Besides, the varmint who was behind the whole business is dead, and I’ll bet if we can find out who he is and search his law office, we’ll turn up most of the loot that was taken in the robberies.”
“I can tell you who he is,” Josie said. “His name is Roman Miller, and his office is in Lordsburg.”
“There you go,” Matt said to Salty. “The real culprit’s been brought to justice, we’re going to recover the money, and there’s no reason to ruin the lives of these kids.”
“Well . . . if you let ’em go, it’s liable to make Wells Fargo refuse to pay you that reward.”
“I can live with that,” Matt said with a smile. He was pretty sure he was doing what Smoke would have done in the same situation, and that was good enough for him.
He was still thinking about Smoke a couple of days later in Lordsburg when he checked in at the Western Union office to see if there were any wires for him. Smoke knew the general area of the country where Matt was, and if he needed to get in touch he would send telegraph messages to all the offices in these parts. It wasn’t all that often when Smoke needed to get in touch with him, but when he did, it usually meant trouble.
This was no different, Matt thought as he scanned the words printed on the yellow flimsy the telegraph operator handed to him. A grim cast came over his face.
Salty had wandered into the office after him. The old-timer was waiting for another stagecoach run back to Silver City, and Matt intended to go with him to reclaim the horse he had left there.
They had run into a posse on the way to Lordsburg, just as Matt thought they might. They had the bodies of Roman and his two gunnies in the buggy, bound for the undertaker. The deputies had accepted their story about tracking down the gang of stagecoach thieves and rounding up the ringleader and a couple of his lieutenants. The other members of the gang had gotten away, according to Matt and Salty.
Matt had told Davey and Josie to head for Colorado and take the others with them. They needed to go to a town called Big Rock, he said, because there were folks there who would help them start new lives without asking any questions about what had happened in the past. Matt intended to send a telegram to Smoke and ask his older brother to keep an eye out for the kids.
What he hadn’t expected was to find a wire from Smoke waiting for him, but here it was, and the message it contained affected Matt enough that Salty said, “You look like somethin’s mighty wrong, boy. What’s in that telegram? Somebody die
?”
“No, but somebody’s liable to if I don’t get to Colorado as fast as I can,” Matt replied. “You’ll have to make that run back to Silver City by yourself, I reckon, but at least you shouldn’t run into any owlhoots this time.”
“What’re you gonna do?”
“I’ve got to go buy a horse,” Matt said.
Chapter 20
“Better take your hand away from that gun, mister,” Preacher drawled. “If you don’t, I’d be happy to take it away from you and stick it in a place where it ain’t gonna be comfortable for you at all.” The old mountain man paused, then added, “Of course, a dandy such as your own self might just like it.”
The gambler on the other side of the poker table was already angry. Now his face flushed even darker, and the hand he had started to slip under his fancy coat moved another inch closer to destiny.
A saloon girl with piled-up blond hair and a low-cut red dress leaned over beside the gambler and said something into his ear in a low voice. Preacher couldn’t hear many of the words, but he picked up a few.
“. . . old man . . . kill you . . . crazy . . . Preacher . . .”
He narrowed one eye at the gambler and gave him the old skunk-eye. If the fella already thought he was a loco old codger, it wouldn’t hurt anything to convince him even more.
The gambler drew in a deep breath and said, “All right. No harm done, I suppose. I can be the bigger man about this.”
“What you can do,” Preacher said, “is pull your sleeves back so we can all see the rigs you got for holdin’ cards you want to switch out when you get a bad hand. Then you can push that pile o’ winnin’s in front of you back into the center of the table where the rest of us can divvy it up. That’s what a lowdown, four-flushin’, tinhorn card cheater like you ought to do before he gets hisself kilt.”
The gambler’s breath hissed between clenched teeth. He said, “If you weren’t an old man—”
“If I wasn’t an old man, I’d be dead. I ain’t, so that ought to tell you I know how to stay alive and make sure the other fella don’t. That easy enough for you to understand?”
The other four men sitting at this baize-covered table in the O.K. Saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, had been watching this confrontation with great interest. During the course of the evening, all of them had lost steadily to the gambler, who had given his name as William Gale. The pots had not been huge, but Gale’s “luck” had been such that he’d amassed a pretty big pile of winnings. Clearly, he didn’t want to give them up.
One of the men at the table said, “If you’re a card mechanic, Gale, you’re a pretty good one. I’ve been in Deadwood since Hickok was here, and I’ve learned how to spot a cheat. Let’s have a look up your sleeves, like the old man says.”
It had been less than five years since Wild Bill Hickok was shot by Jack McCall in the Number 10 Saloon, but they had been tumultuous years and anybody who had been there during that time had gained some valuable experience.
A couple of the other players nodded in agreement with the man who had spoken. One of them said, “If you don’t have anything to hide, Gale, you won’t mind showing us your sleeves.”
“An innocent man doesn’t like to have his honor impugned!”
Preacher said, “If you was an innocent man, that might carry some weight with me. But since you ain’t . . .”
“Oh, all right,” Gale said with a look of disgust on his smooth-shaven face. He used his right hand to fiddle with the left sleeve of his coat.
Preacher was ready for a trick. When Gale suddenly thrust out his left arm, Preacher moved even faster. He lunged across the table, caught hold of Gale’s wrist, and shoved that arm toward the ceiling. Not straight up, though, because Preacher didn’t want a bullet going through the ceiling and into a second-floor room to injure a soiled dove or one of her customers.
Instead, when the derringer in Gale’s hand popped, the little slug went harmlessly over the heads of everyone in the saloon and embedded itself in one of the thick beams that held up the ceiling. Preacher’s other hand bunched into a fist and smacked into Gale’s jaw with enough force to send the gambler’s chair over backwards.
Preacher was around the table and kneeling beside Gale before anyone knew what was happening. While he was moving, the old mountain man had drawn his knife. He laid the razor-sharp edge against Gale’s throat.
“That little pissant gun o’ yours has got a second barrel, I see,” Preacher said into the shocked silence that now filled the O.K. Saloon. “If you’re thinkin’ about shootin’ me with it, old son, you got to ask yourself... do you really think a skeeter bite like that’s gonna kill me ’fore I shove this knife all the way through your neck to your spine? It’s sharp enough it’ll go through you easier’n a purty little speckled trout a-glidin’ through a mountain stream. Are you askin’ yourself, Mr. Tinhorn?”
Gale’s hand opened. The derringer with its unfired barrel fell a couple of inches to the floor.
A woman’s voice asked, “Preacher, are you causing a ruckus again?”
“No such thing,” Preacher said without looking around to see who had spoken. He knew the voice. “Just wonderin’ why you let cheatin’ trash like this in your place, Elizabeth.”
A very attractive woman in a stylish dress walked around them. Wings of raven-black hair curled around her face. Her eyes were a beguiling greenish-gray. She had a tiny scar just above the right end of her upper lip, but it didn’t detract from her beauty. If anything, it just made her more lovely. Preacher happened to know that she was in her late thirties, but she looked ten years younger than that.
“No one else has complained about Mr. Gale here,” she said.
Preacher kept the knife at Gale’s throat as he pushed back the man’s right coat sleeve to reveal a complicated arrangement of cables and metal clips.
“I was wrong about one thing,” the old mountain man said. “I thought he had one o’ these contraptions on both arms, but there was a spring holster for that derringer up his other sleeve.”
Elizabeth Langston’s mouth tightened in anger. That didn’t make her any less pretty, either.
“I don’t allow card sharps in my establishment, Mr. Gale,” she said.
“Get . . . get this madman away from me!” Gale gasped. He had trouble getting the words out because of the knife at his throat. “He’s going to kill me!”
“I’m not sure anyone here would particularly care,” Elizabeth said coolly. She waved an elegantly manicured hand toward the pile of money on the table and added, “Gentlemen, help yourselves to Mr. Gale’s stake. I’ll trust you to divide it in the correct proportions. Please, no squabbling.”
“There won’t be any, ma’am,” one of the cardplayers assured her. “We just want back what Gale took from us by cheating.”
While they were doing that, Elizabeth looked down at the gambler again and said, “The only reason I’m asking Preacher not to kill you, Mr. Gale, is because the businesses here in Deadwood are making an attempt to live down, at least somewhat, the town’s rather lurid reputation. Not too much, mind you. It wouldn’t be good for anyone if Deadwood got too tame. But spilling a gallon of blood on the floor isn’t a good thing, either. It’s difficult to clean up, as well.”
Preacher asked, “Is that your way of sayin’ you don’t want me to carve this varmint a new grin?”
“I’d appreciate it, yes.”
“Well, all right, since I’m in the habit of agreein’ when a good-lookin’ gal makes a suggestion.” Preacher leaned over and brought his face even closer to Gale’s. He said in quiet, dangerous tones, “But you better light a shuck outta this town, mister. If I ever see you again, I ain’t gonna be happy, and there probably won’t be anybody as generous as Miss Elizabeth here around to ask me not to kill you.”
Gale started to swallow, then stopped. He nodded his head, barely moving it, just enough to demonstrate his agreement with what Preacher had said.
Preacher took the knife aw
ay from Gale’s throat and stood up. A tiny drop of blood showed on the gambler’s throat where the blade had nicked it. Gale touched a finger to the drop and smeared it across the tip. Fear and hatred warred in his eyes as he looked at Preacher while he climbed shakily to his feet.
“Leave the derringer on the floor and get out,” Elizabeth ordered him.
Gale turned and started toward the saloon’s entrance. His gait was none too steady. He didn’t even try to pick up the hat that had fallen off his head when Preacher knocked him down, let alone retrieve the derringer.
Preacher picked up the little gun instead, once Gale was gone and things began to get back to normal in the saloon. He broke it open, removed the expended cartridge and the live round from the barrels, and snapped it closed again.
“You want this peashooter?” he asked Elizabeth.
She took it and said, “I’ll give it to my friend Andrew. He’s a gunsmith. He can probably sell it.” She nodded to the money left on the table. “The others have already taken what they had coming to them. You need to get what you lost, too, Preacher.”
He grinned and said, “Reckon I’ll leave it for the house. Weren’t really all that much, and I consider it a fair price for the entertainment value of gettin’ to wallop a damn tinhorn.”
“He could have killed you, you know. I happened to be watching. He was pretty fast with that hideout gun.”
“I was faster.”
“By a whisker.”
Preacher chuckled and rasped his fingers over the beard stubble on his grizzled jaw.
“I’d say I had the advantage on him there, for sure.”
Elizabeth laughed and shook her head. She said, “Come over to my table and have a drink with me.”
“Like I said, I always like to oblige pretty women.”
Elizabeth signaled to one of her bartenders and led Preacher to a table located in a small alcove in the rear of the barroom. As they sat down, she asked, “How long have you been in Deadwood this time?”
Massacre Canyon Page 12
