by Jory Sherman
GUT IT OUT . . .
Cord cocked his rifle again just as he heard his bullet smack into flesh.
Aikens let out a grunt and his hand slipped from the lever as pain shot through his body in a rush of muscle contractions and screaming nerve endings.
He doubled over as the bullet ripped through his abdomen and smashed a cup-sized hole out his back. His brain flashed with pain signals and he expelled air from his mouth in a guttural grunt. The ground threatened to rush up to him and topple him backward.
He slumped down, braced by his legs, and his rifle fell from his hand. He clawed for his pistol as Cord approached.
“You might think a second or two before you draw that pistol,” Cord said.
“Damn your hide,” Aikens growled.
His fingers wrapped around the butt of his pistol, but he struggled to tighten them or draw his weapon. Blood spurted from his abdomen and he showed signs of weakening.
Cord kept his rifle aimed at Aikens as he strode ever closer toward him.
“You gutshot me, Wild.”
Berkley titles by Jory Sherman
THE WILD GUN
THE DARK LAND
SUNSET RIDER
TEXAS DUST
BLOOD RIVER
THE SUNDOWN MAN
The Vigilante Novels
THE VIGILANTE
SIX-GUN LAW
SANTA FE SHOWDOWN
John Savage Novels
THE SAVAGE GUN
THE SAVAGE TRAIL
THE SAVAGE CURSE
SAVAGE HELLFIRE
SAVAGE VENGEANCE
The Sidewinder Novels
SIDEWINDER
DEATH RATTLE
SNAKE EYES
NEST OF VIPERS
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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THE WILD GUN
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2014 by Jory Sherman.
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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14447-7
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley mass-market edition / July 2014
Cover illustration by Bill Angresano.
Cover design by Diana Kolsky.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
BERKLEY TITLES BY JORY SHERMAN
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
ONE
Two riders on shod horses. Four unshod horses. Four stolen horses. One stallion and three mares. One of the mares was in season. One was carrying a foal.
The tracks were plain to see in the Medicine Bows. All were headed toward the Snowy Range at a slow pace. That was because the stud was mounting the mare in heat every so often.
Cordwainer Wild chewed on the tail end of a rhubarb stalk as he studied the tracks, estimated their age. Less than an hour fresh, now that he had almost caught up with the two rustlers.
A six-hour drive from Jesse Barnes’s JB Ranch in Wyoming Territory. A hard ride for Cord, but one he was used to and took in stride.
There was an added urgency to his mission to catch up to the two rustlers.
A boy, barely fifteen, lay dead in the barn on the JB spread. Billy Wheeler, as innocent and defenseless as a fledgling mountain partridge chick.
Cord leaned to one side. His six foot four stature made it easier for him to study the tracks as he rode. So far, the rustlers had shown no signs of evasion. They followed a well-worn game trail that echoed the tracks they had made when they had come two years before to Wesley Gannon’s 2Bar2 Ranch in the foothills of the Medicine Bows.
The two horse thieves had made the same ride before, not just to Gannon’s ranch, but to others that lay between Cheyenne and Laramie. Those two, or two others cut from the same sorry bolt of cloth.
The tracks veered off the game trail. One or more of the horses had spooked.
Cord sat up straight in the saddle and sniffed the thin mountain air.
Bear scat.
He glanced in the direction of the scent and saw an outcropping of limestone upslope from where he rode.
The bear smell had spooked the horses, and he had to pat Windmill’s neck to keep him from bolting away from the strong scent. The dark sorrel snorted as if to spray the cloying aroma from his rubbery nostrils, and he bowed his neck in protest. But the horse held steady as they rode on until Cord saw the horse droppings where at least two of the horses had heeded a call to nature.
He smelled that pungent aroma, too, and saw tiny wisps of mist from the droppings that told him he was getting close.
He slowed Windmill as he gazed ahead. He knew that the closer he got to the two horse thieves, the more dangerous it would be for him. Beyond the outcroppings, the pines and firs were thick and he saw deadfalls scattered amid the underbrush. The trail angled downward a few yards ahead, down toward water where the deer, elk, rabbits, wolves, coyotes, and other critters drank before bedding down for the day. The game trail was littered with animal tracks. These were mixed in and struc
k over by iron hooves and the unshod horses, but still visible.
A highway through the timber.
The men he tracked were well-known in Cheyenne. They were men he had seen before in the saloons and in jail.
They worked for a man named Horace Weatherall, a horse breeder and cattle rancher who had done prison time for embezzlement, but kept some of the money he had stolen and bought a ranch under suspicious circumstances some three or four years ago, the 2Bar2, from a struggling cattleman named Gannon. Gannon had lost almost his entire herd of Herefords in a blizzard two years earlier.
There were those who swore that Wes’s herd had been chased into the Snowy Range by night riders whose faces were never seen. There were suspicions, but the law could not prove anything. So Horace had bought the ranch for a song. Some said he only paid Wes a small amount of money, promising him the balance within a year’s time.
Wes never lived long enough to get the money owed him. He was found out on the prairie, beaten to death.
But Horace had a bona fide bill of sale and so he took over the 2Bar2.
Cord had his own suspicions. There was a man who swore he had seen Wes thrown from his horse and stomped on by a herd of antelope.
The story sounded far-fetched to Cord, too, but again, there was no proof to counter the claim.
Except that the man who claimed to be an eyewitness worked for Horace and was surely one of the men Cord now tracked.
He thought the man’s name was Larry Dolan. And the other man likely riding with him was a well-known gunfighter from St. Louis named Lester Aikens, who had more aliases than the entire town of Guthrie, Oklahoma.
The names of the thieves and their boss ran through Cord’s mind like ripples in a stream. And he also thought of the dead boy, the senselessness of it. His anger thrashed at those ripples of thought, and he crunched down on the rhubarb and balled up a fist.
A large blue spruce blocked his view, but the game path wound around it and angled downslope toward the creek. He approached the spruce with an added wariness. A man, or two, could be just beyond it, waiting in ambush.
He looked at Windmill’s ears for any warning signs. The horse was attuned to every movement, every sound. Windmill could smell danger, too. But the horse was calm, and Cord gave him his head to continue down the game trail.
Just beyond the blue spruce with its lush, thick boughs, he saw where one man had left the trail. The other had gone on down toward the creek, the four horses in tow.
Cord stiffened in the saddle.
The horse thieves likely knew he was on their trail. He glanced down and saw the circles of dark stains where the horses had urinated. A thin scrim of steam rose from the dimples in the dirt.
The outlaws had been there scant moments before. And one of them was circling to pick up his back trail.
He knew which one, too.
Lester Aikens. He was the more skilled killer of the two. The most treacherous.
Cord stayed behind the spruce, then edged forward to look upslope to see if there was any movement, any sign of where Aikens might be.
Windmill whickered softly. His ears twitched, hardened into cones that twisted in a semicircle as he gazed in the same direction. A forefoot pawed the ground.
Where was Aikens?
Likely he was riding a large loop and would descend back on the trail some yards behind Cord. That’s what Cord would do if it were him, he thought.
Or he could be edging closer, using the pines for cover.
Cord knew he could not wait where he was. Once he left the cover of the spruce, he would be out in the open, an easy target.
He rode past the game path into a thicket of brush, with juniper and spruce trees blocking his advance, and dismounted among the trees bristling with green spines.
He ground-tied Windmill to a juniper and slipped his Winchester ’73 from its sheath. He patted his horse on the neck and walked upslope, away from the clump of trees and thick brush.
He jacked a cartridge into the firing chamber of his rifle and set the hammer to half cock.
He stopped and listened to the silence. It was a silence as deep as any ocean and it surrounded him.
The tracks of Aikens were easy to pick up. He followed them into the timber. The man was riding slow and the tracks led ever higher, away from the game trail.
There was no need to follow them now.
Cord walked straight ahead, certain that he would pick up the tracks as Aikens rode back down to the game trail. That would cut time and distance from his stalking of the man who meant to kill him.
Aikens was a backshooter, like other very cowardly gunnies Cord had run across.
Cord stepped carefully, avoiding branches that would crack or pinecones that would crunch.
Then he heard it.
A soft sound, perhaps a hundred yards ahead of him.
The unmistakable crack of a branch under a horse’s iron shoe.
Cord went into a crouch and headed toward the sound.
As he got closer to where the horse had stepped on that dry branch, Cord stiffened at the sound of metal. Upslope. Somewhere. A shell sliding into a firing chamber, a hammer cocking, a lever being seated.
Aikens had outwitted him. For just a fraction of a second.
Cord hugged a tree just as he heard the explosion some yards upslope from him. Then the whine of a bullet and the rip of bark as the projectile sheared off part of the pine tree at head height.
Splintered bark stung Cord’s face.
He heard Aikens cock the rifle again.
In the silence, the sound was like the opening of an iron tomb.
TWO
Lester Aikens kept turning in his saddle and had been looking down their back trail for the past hour or so.
“What’s eatin’ you, Les?” Larry Dolan asked when Lester’s jitters were getting on his own nerves.
“It’s that Wild Gun,” Lester said, his eyes shining with a malevolent glint.
“What in hell you talkin’ about?” Larry asked. He looked back down the trail. “I don’t see nothin’. What wild gun?”
“That’s what they call him in town. His name’s Wild and he is some kind of damned vigilante or maybe a bounty hunter. I seen him a coupla times. He looks like he eats iron for breakfast and drinks blood out of a Judson boot.”
“Aw, Lester. You talkin’ ’bout Cordwainer. He ain’t no bounty hunter. He’s just another hired gun for some of the ranchers.”
“It’s that glint in his eyes. I know ’em when I see ’em. He ain’t no ordinary hired gun.”
“You think he’s a-follerin’ us?”
“Somebody sure as hell is. Look at them horses we brung. They’re nervous as long-tailed cats in a room full of rockin’ chairs.”
“Pshaw, Lester. I don’t see nobody back there and I been lookin’ almost as much as you.”
Larry was a short, thin man with a sharp-pointed nose and eyes set too close together so that, at times, he seemed cross-eyed. He was thin as a rail, but all sinew and muscle.
Lester had a small paunch, and his upper lip dripped with a scraggly moustache. He claimed it strained his food and caught skeeters at night. He was a rawboned man, nearly six foot in his smelly socks, and wore a dirty bandanna around his thick neck. He had large eyes that he kept half-hooded when he was about to kill a man.
His eyelids were at half-mast now.
“A man gets a feelin’,” Aikens said. “Maybe it’s instinct. Second sight. But I got a feeling that Wild Gun is gettin’ real close.”
“Well, we could maybe find a hidey-hole and wait for him to show up. Then blow him out of the saddle.”
“Nope. I figger Wild’s too smart for that. I got a better idea.”
“What’s that?” Dolan asked.
“One of us could double back and . . .”
/>
“Not me,” Larry said. “I want to get these horses to the 2Bar2 and draw my pay.”
“If Wild is on our track, we won’t neither of us get back to the 2Bar2.”
“You go, then,” Dolan said.
“I’m thinkin’ to do just that,” Aikens said.
“Go on, then. I’ll meet you down at the creek when I water the horses.”
“Trail goes down yonder,” Aikens said. “Just past that big old spruce tree.”
“Yep, it does. You goin’ to double back?”
“I’ll get up into the timber and backtrack, see if can dry-gulch that Wild Gun.”
“Good luck, Lester.”
They rode to the blue spruce and parted company without words. Dolan headed down the game path while Aikens rode up to his left, into the timber.
Lester waited until Dolan was well out of sight. Then he spurred his horse to climb the slope and rode into the heavy timber below the high ridge.
He was a man who could smell danger. He knew, deep down, that Wild was on their track, and that was that. He knew he had such instincts. They had kept him alive a good long while. He aimed to keep it that way.
He picked his way carefully through the timber, the game path below him within sight, within range of his rifle. His pistol, too, if need be. He stopped every few feet to listen. He looked up and down the trail.
Presently, he stopped again. This time he heard something. A soft sound from somewhere behind him, not in front.
Unexpected.
He dismounted and drew his rifle from his scabbard.
He waited and listened. More sounds. Furtive sounds. The trail below was empty.
Had Wild been closer than he thought?
Where was he?
He listened for hoofbeats. He heard none. Just that same soft sound. Like a man walking through the timber.
His heart began to pump faster. He took up a position behind a thick pine tree. He held on to the horse’s reins with his left hand. He looked over his back trail. He saw nothing but pine boughs and tree trunks, thick brush, a juniper, and some small spruce trees.
His pulse pounded steady and strong in his ears.
Aikens let loose of the reins and levered a shell into the firing chamber of his Winchester. Then he slapped his horse on the rump. The horse headed downward toward the vacant trail.
