Hunters

by James Reasoner

  “Those dressings will need to be checked and changed every day,” she said, “but I think he’ll be all right.”

  Fraker said, “We’re sure obliged to you, ma’am. That was some fine doctorin’.” He smiled. “Maybe you should hang out your shingle.”

  Eden frowned. “You mean be a doctor?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I have to patch up enough wounds just being a marshal’s wife.”

  They stepped out of the cell. Bill clanged the door closed and told Fraker and Macauley, “You fellas can go on now. We’ll take care of your friend.”

  Something stirred in Fraker’s dark eyes. Anger at Kipp being locked up, maybe.

  But he nodded and said, “Thanks again for not killing him, Marshal. I can promise you, there won’t be any more trouble.”

  “Not with him behind bars, I reckon.”

  “Yeah, but when he’s out, we’ll be leaving Redemption and movin’ on. Assuming, of course, that the threat of those savages is over by then.”

  “That’s a big assumption,” Bill said as he ushered the two men out of the cell block and into the marshal’s office. Eden and Flint followed them, and the deputy closed the heavy wooden door between the office and the cell block.

  Fraker said, “The army’s bound to round up those Indians sooner or later. Didn’t I hear that a patrol’s out looking for them?”

  “Several patrols,” Bill said. “And the one that came through here to warn us is out there somewhere, too. They could’ve run into the war party, I suppose.”

  “I reckon we’ll get word any day now that it’s all over,” Fraker said.

  “Can’t be too soon to suit me,” Bill said.

  Chapter 24

  “What the hell are we going to do now?” Macauley demanded, low-voiced, as he glared across the table at Fraker.

  They were back in the saloon. The tables and chairs that had been overturned were upright again. The broken glass and other debris left over from the fight had been swept up and thrown in the trash, and the bartender had mopped up all the spilled booze. The smell of raw liquor still hung in the air. Fred Smoot must have gone upstairs after all, because he wasn’t in the barroom.

  “Don’t worry,” Fraker told his partner. “Everything is still all right.”

  “All right, hell!” Macauley snapped. “You’ve been saying that for days, Jake, and we’re no closer to the money in that bank than when we rode in here.”

  “Keep your voice down. We’re going to get that money. The right time—”

  “The right time is never going to come,” Macauley said. “We’ve been waiting on those damned redskins, and you said it yourself…there’s no guarantee they’ll ever show up. Your plan to stir up the town even more didn’t accomplish a blasted thing—”

  “I killed that boy just like I said I did. Are you callin’ me a liar, Luther?”

  Macauley held up a hand. “You know I’m not. But you’ve got to admit, whatever happened, it didn’t work out like you planned.”

  Fraker shrugged and said, “I don’t understand it. That should’ve worked.”

  “Now Oscar’s in jail, and with bullet holes in his leg, to boot! He’s not going to be any good to us if we need him, Jake.”

  “That is a shame,” Fraker said.

  “You should’ve plugged that marshal before he could shoot Oscar.”

  “Oh, and gunning down the town’s lawman wouldn’t have ruined our plans?” Fraker snorted in disgust. “We’d have had to shoot our way out of town, otherwise these people probably would’ve strung us up. I tried to knock Oscar out before things got that far, but I couldn’t get close enough to him until then. At least I kept the marshal from killing him.”

  With a grudging nod, Macauley said, “That’s true, I suppose. But it still doesn’t change the fact that everything’s gone wrong since we got here.”

  “We can still empty the safe in that bank, just you and me,” Fraker insisted. “If the Indians cooperate, we can do like we planned, only without Oscar.”

  “And then we bust him out of jail while the rest of the town is busy fighting the Pawnee?”

  “If we can,” Fraker said. “If we can’t…that’ll be Oscar’s bad luck.”

  “You’d leave him here?”

  “You think he wouldn’t run out on us if things were the other way around?”

  Macauley looked uncomfortable with the idea, but after a moment he said, “Well, yeah, he might. But you’re forgetting, Jake…if we leave him behind, he can tell the law who we are.”

  “The marshal already knows who we are.”

  “Only because you told him.”

  “There aren’t any reward posters with our names on them,” Fraker said. “And you and the rest of the boys have me to thank for that. All the jobs I’ve planned have gone off so well nobody knows who pulled them.”

  “Until now,” Macauley insisted.

  Fraker shook his head. “There’ll be so much confusion in town that no one will be sure who robbed the bank. They may have their suspicions, but they won’t be able to prove it.” He tossed back the shot of whiskey he had poured a few minutes earlier, before Macauley started complaining. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what we can do to make it even less likely that anybody will come after us.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a good chance the Pawnee will set the town on fire.” Fraker smiled. “And if they don’t, we will. I’m gonna make sure we get away with this, Luther…even if it means burning Redemption to the ground.”

  Costigan rolled his shoulders in an attempt to ease the aching weariness that gripped them. He put his hands on his saddle horn and arched his back, feeling bones pop and muscles stretch.

  He had been in the saddle too long, no doubt about that.

  What he really needed right now was to crawl into his tent, stretch out on his bedroll, and sleep for twenty-four hours straight. Probably wasn’t going to happen, though, and he was resigned to that fact.

  He peered off to the west and squinted against the afternoon sunlight. Was something moving out there? He thought he had caught a flicker of motion.

  After a minute he shook his head. Nothing. Maybe he had imagined it. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, or his eyes letting him know that they were too tired to keep this up.

  Or maybe whatever he’d seen had gone to ground.

  Just to be sure, Costigan turned his horse and rode in that direction. He didn’t think he was particularly nervous, but he realized that his hand was gripping the stock of the Henry tighter than before.

  When he had gone a quarter of a mile, he saw more movement in the corner of his eye. He reined in and looked to the north.

  No mistake about it this time. A rider was angling in from that direction. After a moment, Costigan’s keen eyes recognized him as Dave McGinty.

  Costigan raised a hand, just in case McGinty hadn’t already seen him. He thought that was unlikely. McGinty was an observant man…at least most of the time.

  Costigan stayed where he was and waited for McGinty to come to him. When the bearded man rode up, he reined in and asked, “Did you see something out this way, Ward?”

  “Thought I did,” Costigan replied. “You, too?”

  “Yeah. Just a hint of something. Never could figure out what it was.”

  Costigan reached inside his saddlebags for his spyglass. “Let me take a better look.”

  He extended the telescope and lifted it to his eye. He swept the glass slowly along the horizon from north to south and then back.

  Costigan lowered the telescope and shook his head.

  “Nothing. Just empty prairie.”

  “Damn it, I’m sure I saw something.” McGinty licked his lips. “You reckon I’m goin’ loco, Ward? Seein’ things that ain’t there?”

  “If you are, then the same thing has happened to me, and I don’t think being crazy is contagious.”

  Although the way men acted sometimes, it was hard to be sure. The war
was proof enough of that.

  Costigan nodded toward the west. “Let’s ride a little farther out.”

  McGinty looked over his shoulder toward Redemption and said, “We’re gettin’ a pretty good ways from the settlement.”

  “I know. We won’t go much farther.”

  “All right,” McGinty said, but he sounded like he thought it might not be a good idea.

  Costigan wasn’t sure it was, either, but if there was anything out here to worry about, the people back in Redemption would need all the warning they could get.

  The two men rode side by side, scanning the landscape around them. Costigan didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything, but still his skin crawled. He knew his instincts were speaking to him, trying to tell him that something was wrong.

  Costigan wasn’t the only one who felt that way. McGinty said, “Aw, hell, Ward, I’m startin’ to get a mighty bad feelin’…”

  “So am I,” Costigan said. “Let’s get out of—”

  The dozen or so riders seemed to charge out of nowhere. As soon as Costigan saw them erupt into sight, he knew they must have been hidden in some arroyo or coulee. The ponies’ hooves pounded the earth, but that was the only sound. The Pawnee warriors attacked in silence, instead of whooping and yipping, and somehow that made them even more frightening.

  McGinty yelled a curse and yanked his horse around. Costigan hauled on his mount’s reins and brought the animal around, too. They kicked the horses into a desperate gallop.

  “We were right!” McGinty yelled over the hoofbeats as he held his hat on.

  “Yeah!” Costigan said.

  He would have rather been wrong.

  Now it was a race. The Indian ponies were lighter and might be fresher, but the two white men had a lead. The Pawnee had jumped them a little too soon, thought Costigan. If they had waited until he and McGinty were a little closer, the two of them wouldn’t have had a chance to get away.

  But they had already slowed down and were thinking about turning back, and the Indians might have sensed that and figured that if they were going to attack, it had to be now.

  The important thing was going to be maintaining that gap, and Costigan didn’t know if they could do that. When he looked back, he saw that the pursuers had already closed in a little.

  “Give it all you’ve got, Dave!” he shouted.

  McGinty slashed his horse with the reins. “I’m tryin’!”

  Costigan saw an arrow fall about ten yards to his right. He hadn’t thought the Pawnee were within bowshot yet, but obviously he was wrong.

  They were just firing wildly, though. At that range, and firing from galloping ponies, any sort of real accuracy was out of the question.

  No sooner had that thought gone through Costigan’s mind than McGinty yelled and jerked forward in the saddle. Costigan’s head whipped toward him. He saw the arrow shaft sticking out of McGinty’s back. The arrow had struck him just below the left shoulder and lodged there.

  “Hang on, Dave!” Costigan shouted. He brought his racing horse a little closer to McGinty’s mount and reached over with his left hand to grab his friend’s arm and steady him.

  McGinty let out a groan and clutched at the saddle horn. “God!” he said. “It hurts!”

  “I know! Just hang on!”

  Side by side, a single misstep away from disaster, they raced on toward the settlement with the Pawnee closing in on them from behind.

  With Oscar Kipp locked up and not giving any trouble now except for the droning curses that came through the window in the cell block door, Bill gave in to his exhaustion and yawned.

  “Why don’t you go home and get some real sleep?” Eden asked as she paused in the office doorway.

  Bill shook his head. “No, there’s too much to do. If I stretch out and get comfortable, I’m liable not to wake up for ten or twelve hours.” He motioned toward the old sofa that sat against the front wall of the office. “I’ll just catch a nap here. I won’t sleep as long that way.”

  “I don’t like to see you wearing yourself out.”

  “Goes with the job, I reckon,” he told her with a smile. He stepped over to her and bent to give her a kiss.

  At the desk, Mordecai Flint cleared his throat.

  Bill looked back at the deputy with a grin. “As old as you are, I’d have thought you’d seen a husband kiss his wife before now.”

  “Just remindin’ you two youngsters that I’m still here,” Flint said. “I know how the hot blood o’ youth gets carried away sometimes.”

  “I’m going back to the mercantile now,” Eden said with a smile. She slipped out of the arm that Bill had slid around her and was out the door before he could stop her.

  “I’ll go take a turn or two around town,” Flint said as he stood up. “That way you’ll have some peace and quiet in here.” He looked at the cell block door. “Except for that varmint’s cussin’. Want me to go knock him in the head and shut him up?”

  Bill shook his head. “As tired as I am, I reckon that cussin’ will sound just like a lullaby to me.”

  That prediction proved to be true. As soon as Bill stretched out on the old sofa, Kipp’s curses faded away. So did everything else. Bill was asleep in moments.

  He didn’t dream, at least not that he remembered. But he came awake with a gasp, the same way he would have if a nightmare had jolted him out of his sleep.

  It was no nightmare…or maybe it was. Mordecai Flint stood beside the sofa, leaning down with his arm extended. Bill realized that the deputy had just shaken him awake.

  “What is it?” Bill asked as he sat up. He didn’t know how long he had been asleep, and at the moment he didn’t care. The worried look on Flint’s whiskery face had banished all such thoughts.

  “Riders comin’ toward town, movin’ fast,” Flint reported.

  “From which direction?”

  “West.”

  That was bad. Of course, the Pawnee could circle around and attack the town from any direction, but they had been west of Redemption the last time they’d been seen. That made it more likely the war party was here at last.

  Bill swung his legs off the sofa and stood up. He had left his boots on, so all he had to do was grab his hat from the nail and he was ready to go. As he started out the door, he asked, “Who spotted the riders?”

  “Spotted the dust, you mean,” Flint said. “The riders were too far away to make ’em out. But it was that Ramsey fella, the newspaperman. He’s standin’ watch on top of the bank.”

  Phillip Ramsey had been one of the volunteers right from the start. That kept him in the middle of things, and Bill had a hunch that played a part in him agreeing to stand guard. Scared though he might be, Ramsey wanted to be where he could get the best story for his paper.

  As he and Flint hurried toward the bank, Bill looked around. Not many people were on the street, but that wasn’t unusual these days. With the threat looming over the town, most folks stayed pretty close to home.

  The few people he saw moving around didn’t seem to be panicking, though. Bill asked Flint, “Ramsey didn’t spread the alarm, did he?”

  “Not yet,” the deputy replied. “He wanted to let you know first. He saw me passin’ by and called down and told me to fetch you.”

  Bill nodded. “You did good. This might be a false alarm.”

  “You really think so?”

  Flint didn’t sound like he believed that, and to be honest, neither did Bill. His pounding heart told him this was the real thing at last.

  A ladder was propped against the side wall of the bank, in the alley that ran next to the brick building. Bill went up the ladder in a hurry with Flint following him.

  The roof was flat, with a short wall around its edge. Phillip Ramsey stood at the western wall with a pair of field glasses at his eyes. He must have heard Bill and Flint coming, because he lowered the glasses and turned to meet the two lawmen.

  “Thank God you’re here, Marshal,” he said as he held out the glasses. “
You’d better have a look.”

  “Got your big story, eh, Mr. Ramsey?”

  “I wish I didn’t,” the newspaperman said, and somewhat to Bill’s surprise, he believed him.

  Bill lifted the field glasses and peered through them. He had already spotted the dust plumes west of town with his naked eyes, a mile or so out and coming closer with every second. He pointed the glasses in that direction and tried to find the riders.

  After a moment, he was able to focus on them. His breath caught in his throat as he recognized Ward Costigan and Dave McGinty. The two buffalo hunters were riding close together. It looked like Costigan was trying to hold McGinty in the saddle, so Bill figured the smaller man must be hurt.

  As fast as they were riding, they had to be running away from something. Bill took a deep breath to steady himself and raised the glasses so he could look beyond Costigan and McGinty at whoever was chasing them.

  That breath seemed to stick in Bill’s throat. “Dear Lord,” he choked out.

  “What is it?” Flint asked.

  Bill answered the question honestly. It was too late for anything else.

  “Looks like the whole blasted Pawnee nation.”

  Chapter 25

  Bill handed the field glasses back to Ramsey and hurried toward the ladder. “Stay up here,” he called to the newspaperman as he swung a leg over the wall around the edge of the bank roof. “You’ll have a good vantage point for your story.”

  Ramsey put the glasses on the roof and picked up the Winchester that lay there. “I don’t care about that, Marshal. I’ll be ready to help fight them off when they get here.”

  Bill nodded and started to descend the ladder. Flint came down after him.

  When the two lawmen reached the ground, Bill said, “Ring the fire bell and start gettin’ folks organized, Mordecai.”

  “Where are you goin’?” the deputy asked.

  “To meet Costigan and McGinty. I’ll start spreadin’ the word along the way, too.”

  It was too late now to worry about preventing panic. The town had to be alerted. As Bill ran toward the western edge of the settlement, he called to everyone he saw, “Get off the street! Indians comin’! Get off the street!”