Hunters

by James Reasoner

  “They’re not hunting,” he said. “They’re fighting.”

  McGinty, Colonel Bledsoe, and the others were under attack.

  Chapter 11

  The idea that they might run short of supplies didn’t sit well with the citizens of Redemption, of course. After the bullwhacker gave voice to that potential danger, a lot of worried, angry complaining broke out among the crowd in the street.

  Bill let the commotion run its course for a couple of minutes before he raised his voice and called, “Folks! Folks, settle down!”

  They ignored him. He had to repeat that request several times, raising his voice even more, before the crowd got quiet enough for everybody to hear him.

  “Nobody’s gonna starve. We have a lot of supplies on hand here in town, and those farms can supply more if need be. But I don’t think it’s going to come to that, because it won’t be long until the army runs those Pawnee to ground.”

  “You don’t know that,” a man said. “It could take them weeks to catch those savages, maybe even months!”

  Shouts of agreement went up from the crowd.

  “Hold on, hold on!” Perry Monroe said as he stepped forward and raised his hands for quiet. He was an impressive figure with his long white beard, and people quieted down a little faster for him, Bill noted.

  Monroe continued, “Marshal Harvey is right. My shelves were stocked not that long ago, and I reckon the other mercantiles in town have plenty of supplies on hand, too. Plus there are all the goods on those wagons our friend here brought into town today.”

  Monroe swept a hand toward the bullwhacker.

  “Now wait just a blasted minute!” the man protested. “Those goods have to be paid for.”

  “They already have been, or you wouldn’t have brought them here to deliver.”

  “Yeah, but they’re worth more now.”

  That brought angry howls from several members of the crowd. “You can’t do that,” Roy Fleming said. “You can’t raise the prices simply because we need those supplies.”

  The bullwhacker folded his brawny arms across his chest and sneered. “I can do whatever I damned well please,” he said. “Those goods are still on my wagons, and they’re gonna stay there until I get the price I want for them.”

  “Maybe we’ll just take them!” one of the townsmen shouted as he shook a fist at the bullwhacker.

  “My teamsters are all armed, and we’ll use our guns if we have to.”

  Bill said, “Hold on now, there’s no need to start talking about guns—”

  It was too late. One of the men in the crowd stepped up behind the bullwhacker, grabbed his shoulder, hauled him around, and slammed a fist into his face.

  The man probably wouldn’t have been able to do that if he hadn’t taken the bullwhacker by surprise. The bullwhacker was too big and strong to be jerked around under normal circumstances.

  As it was, the punch to the face seemed to have no effect on him except to rock his head back a little. He roared in anger, grabbed his attacker by the neck, and lifted him off the ground. The man kicked desperately as the bullwhacker’s ham-like hands around his throat cut off his air.

  Bill yelled, “Hey! Let him go!” but the bullwhacker ignored him. He was about to leap off the boardwalk and try to rescue the townsman, when one of the man’s friends rushed up behind the bullwhacker and hit him across the back of the neck with a piece of two-by-four.

  Bill didn’t know where the man had gotten the board, probably out of a nearby alley, but it made an effective weapon. The bullwhacker staggered forward a couple of steps, let go of the man he was choking, and fell to his knees.

  The townie wasn’t the only one with friends. One of the teamsters from the wagon train shouted a curse and punched the man who had wielded the board. Someone leaped to his defense, and in a heartbeat, chaos erupted in the street as scared, angry people on both sides started trying to whale the tar out of each other.

  Bill grabbed his father-in-law’s arm and shoved Monroe toward the door of the town hall.

  “Get Eden inside!” he said. “And both of you stay there!”

  “These people have gone crazy!” Monroe said.

  Bill couldn’t argue with that. Fear had made the crowd as crazy as a bunch of longhorns that had gotten into the locoweed.

  But it was up to him to stop this anyway. Somehow.

  “Bill!” Eden cried. She tried to get around Monroe to reach his side.

  “Go with your father!” he told her as Monroe caught hold of her. He couldn’t look out for her safety and deal with this riot at the same time.

  By now the tumult in the street was incredible. Everybody was yelling. Fists flew and thudded into flesh.

  Bill wished he had one of the shotguns from the marshal’s office. Nothing settled people down quite like the blast of a Greener.

  All he had, though, was his Colt, and as worked up as those folks were, he wasn’t sure they would pay any attention to it if he let off a few rounds at the sky.

  For now he had to make sure the rest of the town council was safe. “Get inside!” he told them, waving an arm toward the doors.

  “The hell with that!” Josiah Hartnett rumbled. The burly liveryman leaped down from the boardwalk, grabbed a couple of men by the neck, and banged their heads together. They collapsed limply.

  Hartnett was big enough to take care of himself. Leo Kellogg and Charley Hobbs weren’t. Wisely, they scurried into the building behind Monroe and Eden.

  Roy Fleming clutched at the sleeve of Bill’s shirt. “What are we going to do?” he wailed.

  “Get inside,” Bill said again as he pulled free and gave the mayor a hard shove toward the door.

  That left Judge Dunaway. The justice of the peace stood at the edge of the boardwalk bellowing, “Order! Come to order, by God!”

  This wasn’t a courtroom, though, and nobody was paying attention to any judicial edicts. Somebody tackled the judge around the knees and toppled him off the boardwalk. Dunaway fell into the street, flailing his arms wildly as he went down.

  Bill leaped after him. The judge might get trampled in that mad melee.

  He wasn’t the only one in danger of such a fate. There were women and kids in this mob, too, Bill knew. If any of them fell, they might be done for.

  Right now he had to save Dunaway. A man aimed a kick at the judge’s head, but Bill caught the collar of his shirt and jerked him back before the man’s foot could land on Dunaway’s skull.

  The man yelled a curse and twisted in Bill’s grip. Bill’s other fist came up and landed with a solid thud on the man’s jaw. A shove sent him reeling away to fall over a hitch rail.

  Bill bent and grabbed the judge’s arm. Dunaway was too heavy for Bill to lift him without the judge helping some, and Dunaway seemed stunned at the moment.

  “Come on, Judge!” Bill urged. “We gotta get you out of here!”

  With Bill bracing him, Dunaway finally heaved himself to his feet. “Madness!” he muttered. “Madness!”

  “You got that right,” Bill said. “Get in the town hall, Judge!”

  Unsteadily, Dunaway clambered underneath a hitch rail and onto the boardwalk. He staggered upright again and made it to the entrance of the town hall. As he disappeared inside the building, he slammed the doors closed behind him.

  That was a relief, Bill thought, but he didn’t have time to enjoy it, because at that moment somebody leaped on his back from behind and started trying to choke the life out of him.

  Bill stumbled forward under the unexpected weight. His bad leg threatened to give out under him, but he managed to catch himself.

  His attacker had looped an arm around Bill’s neck and now pressed down with it, threatening to crush his windpipe.

  Bill braced his feet and reached up. Pulling hair was something a girl did in a fight…but when a man was about to strangle him, he didn’t care about such things. Bill grabbed a couple handfuls of his attacker’s hair and hauled on it as hard as he could, bending f
orward sharply at the waist at the same time.

  The man let out a howl of pain and his grip on Bill’s throat came loose. He slid over Bill’s head and shoulders and went crashing to the ground, spilling a couple of other men as he rolled into their legs. They all tangled up into a thrashing mess.

  Somebody bumped Bill’s shoulders. He turned, fist cocked to throw another punch, but held off when he recognized Josiah Hartnett. Blood from a cut on the liveryman’s forehead smeared his rugged face.

  “We’ve got to stop this!” he shouted.

  “How?” Bill replied.

  The sudden boom of a shotgun answered him.

  Bill had wished earlier for a Greener. Somebody must have gotten hold of one. He hoped that load of buckshot hadn’t scythed through the struggling crowd. He didn’t want any innocent blood spilled in Redemption.

  The ominous blast did the trick. People stopped in their tracks and looked around to see who had fired the shotgun…and where it might be aimed next.

  Bill was just as curious as anybody else. He didn’t hear any screaming, so he thought maybe whoever had fired the shot had aimed into the air. He turned toward the town hall…

  He wasn’t prepared for what he saw. His wife stood there on the boardwalk, the scattergun clutched tightly in her delicate little hands that were stronger than they appeared. Smoke curled from the barrel she had fired.

  Eden wore a fierce expression on her face and looked ready, willing, and able to cut down the next man who threw a punch.

  “Son of a—”

  Bill forced his way through the mob, shouldering people aside. As he reached the boardwalk, Eden cried, “Are you people insane? You’re fighting each other when you should be getting ready to fight Indians!”

  Bill stepped up onto the planks and reached for the Greener. She let him take it out of her hands. She was trembling, but whether it was from anger, fear, or both, he didn’t know.

  “Everybody settle down!” he roared as he turned back toward the street. “The next person who throws a punch is under arrest!”

  “And you’ll feel the full force of the law, I guarantee it!” Judge Dunaway put in from the doors of the town hall, which stood open again.

  Perry Monroe stepped past the judge and said, “Sorry, Bill. She slipped out the back door and took off for the marshal’s office before I knew what she was doing.”

  Bill had thought he recognized the shotgun.

  Eden snorted at her father’s words and said, “It’s a good thing I did, or those idiots would still be trying to kill each other.”

  Quietly, Bill told her, “I appreciate what you did, Eden, but in the future—”

  He stopped short at the look she gave him. He hadn’t been married long, but he already knew when to hold his tongue.

  He turned back to the crowd instead and went on, “Everybody just needs to calm down. Is anybody hurt bad?”

  Other than some black eyes and bloody noses, everyone seemed to be all right. A lot of angry muttering was still going on, and Bill sensed that violence might erupt again at any moment, but for now the shotgun blast had quelled the riot.

  Bill spotted the bullwhacker whose obstinance and greed had started the ruckus. “You,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Gus Meade,” the man answered with surly reluctance.

  “All right, Mr. Meade, if you don’t want to live up the terms of the bargain you made with the merchants here in town, I don’t reckon you have to.”

  Meade started to sneer.

  Bill went on, “So that means you don’t have any reason to stay here. You can refund any money you were paid in advance, then take your wagons and go.”

  Meade’s forehead creased in a frown. “Go?” he repeated. “Your mayor said we were welcome to stay! You can’t go back on his word!”

  “Reckon if you can go back on your word, we can go back on ours,” Bill said. “You and your men and your wagons be out of town in half an hour.”

  Roy Fleming had emerged from the town hall. He said, “Now, Bill, I’m not sure—”

  “You said I was in charge of law and order in Redemption, right, Mr. Mayor?” Bill asked.

  “Well, yes, of course—”

  “Which means I got a right to run troublemakers out of town.” Bill fixed a stony glare on Gus Meade. “More than a right. I’ve got a duty to do it.”

  “Hold on here,” Meade blustered. “It’s a long way back to Dodge City. If we start back across there with loaded wagons and those Pawnee spot us, they’ll come after us, sure as hell!”

  Bill nodded. “I expect they will. But maybe they won’t see you. Maybe they’re not anywhere around these parts.”

  “We ought to wait a few days, at least, to see if the army rounds up those renegades.”

  “Thirty minutes,” Bill repeated. “Otherwise I lock up the whole bunch of you.”

  That was a mostly empty threat—he didn’t have the room for all the freighters in Redemption’s small jail, and he was unlikely to be able to arrest them, anyway—but Meade didn’t have to know that. A steady gaze and an equally steady shotgun could be mighty convincing.

  “Or you could go in the town hall and talk to the council about living up to your bargain,” Bill went on after a tense moment. “How’s that sound?”

  “All right, damn it,” Meade grumbled, obviously glad for the chance to save face and remain in town where he and his men would be safer from marauding Pawnee. He looked around in the street. “Where’s my hat?”

  Somebody handed him the broad-brimmed headgear, which had been trampled into something that barely resembled a hat. Disgustedly, Meade began trying to punch that hat back into shape as he climbed onto the boardwalk. He disappeared into the town hall with Roy Fleming.

  While Bill had everyone’s attention, he went on, “The rest of you go back to your homes and businesses. Men, get your guns and stay armed from now on. If you want to volunteer to be one of the guards or outriders, come to the marshal’s office. We’ll work out a schedule.” He took a deep breath. “We’re gonna come through this all right. You’ll see. We just have to work together, that’s all.”

  Why they would believe him when he wasn’t much more than a kid, he didn’t know, but he was gratified to see several people nodding in agreement. The crowd began to disperse.

  He turned to Eden and said, “That was a mighty brave thing you did—”

  She stopped him by coming into his arms and pressing her face against his chest as she put her arms around his waist. He felt a shudder go through her.

  “Just hold me,” she said, her voice muffled by his shirt.

  Bill figured the best thing he could do right now was to oblige her.

  Chapter 12

  Bill had stood there on the boardwalk for a minute or so, comforting his wife, when he felt a tug on his sleeve.

  Without letting go of Eden, he looked around, then looked down. The old frontiersman named Mordecai Flint, who was short and scrawny as well as bearded, stood there beside them.

  “You ought to deputize me,” Flint said. “I been to see the elephant, and I reckon I’ve forgot more about fightin’ Injuns than anybody else in this town ever knowed.”

  Bill had a hunch the old-timer might be right about that. Still, he was sort of busy right now.

  “Fine,” he told Flint. “Go on down to the marshal’s office. I’ll see you there in a few minutes.”

  “How much you gonna pay me?”

  “We’ll talk about that later,” Bill said.

  “I don’t come cheap, you know.”

  “Just go,” Bill said through clenched teeth.

  “All right, all right,” Flint muttered as he walked off toward the marshal’s office. “No need to get testy about it.”

  Bill continued to stand there holding Eden, and after a few moments she took a deep breath that made her breasts lift against his chest.

  This was hardly the time to be noticing such things, Bill told himself, but he was only human. A
young, recently married, very-much-in-love-with-his-wife human, to boot.

  So when Eden said, “I’m all right now,” Bill was sort of grateful that he could rest his hands on her shoulders and put a little distance between them before his reaction got too unseemly.

  “I think you and your pa need to go back over to the store and close it up for now,” he told her.

  “Close it? But people are going to be needing supplies.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t know how long this whole thing is gonna last. We don’t want everybody rushing in right at first and cleanin’ out the shelves.”

  Eden was smart and grasped that right away. “You’re right,” she said. “I’ll find Father. I just hope Benjy’s not swamped already. I’m not sure he’d know what to do.”

  She caught hold of Bill’s hand, squeezed it for a second, and smiled at him. She was so blasted pretty at that moment, he wanted to kiss her, but he didn’t figure he ought to delay her. So he just squeezed back and then let her go into the town hall.

  Even though the crowd had broken up, the street was still full of people hurrying here and there. A steady hum of frightened talk filled the air. Bill ignored the questions that were directed at him as he moved steadily toward the marshal’s office.

  When he reached the sturdy stone building that housed the office and jail, he found the front room already crowded. More than a dozen men had already responded to his call for volunteers.

  He was glad to see that most of them were younger, unmarried men, although a few older citizens were there, too.

  The oldest man in the room was Mordecai Flint, and Bill stopped short in surprise as he realized the old-timer was standing on top of his desk.

  “Settle down, settle down,” Flint called over the hubbub in the room. He waved his gnarled hands in the air. “I’m the deputy here, doggone it.”

  The tin star that had once been worn by the previous deputy was pinned to Flint’s greasy old buckskin shirt. That badge had been put away in one of the desk drawers.

  Bill felt a flash of anger. Flint had gone pawing through the desk, and he didn’t have that right.

  Bill raised his voice and said, “Quiet. Mr. Flint, get down from there.”