by Brett Waring
The Home of Great Western Fiction!
Clay Nash went undercover with orders to infiltrate the gang of a cold-blooded outlaw named Zach Forrester. To do that, he assumed the identity of a dead man. But from the very start, nothing about his mission went right. To begin with, Clay’s trail crossed that of an enemy from his past who was still itching to get revenge for an old score. Then he wound up behind bars, mistaken for the outlaw he was pretending to be. And then Zach Forrester broke him out of jail, figuring he was an old friend from Yuma Pen. That was enough to tip the balance altogether … against Wells Fargo’s toughest troubleshooter!
CLAY NASH 4: RECKONING AT RIMROCK
By Brett Waring
First Published by The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd
Copyright © Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia
First Smashwords Edition: June 2017
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd.
Chapter One
Three Trails to the Border
The Alamogordo train didn’t stand a chance and that was the way the Forrester gang wanted it. The less resistance to their efforts to snatch the gold bullion in the Wells Fargo express car the better, they figured.
Under the leadership of Lem and Zack Forrester, twin brothers who had been reared on lawlessness and killing by their outlaw parents, the gang had pulled off two successful train robberies so far, one in Colorado Territory and one outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Both had been accomplished with brutal simplicity and the same plan was going to be put into operation on this job. The Forresters were perfecting their technique and it bothered them not at all that it usually resulted in the loss of several lives.
As long as they rode away with the bullion, that was all that mattered.
The train to Alamogordo rolled across the flats, smoke belching, sparks spitting into the air like fireflies. The locomotive swayed and rocked on the narrow-gauge rails and the following wood tender and cars jolted and clanked. The engineer poured on the steam, throttle almost wide open, enjoying the chance to open up on this straight, level stretch. Once across the flats, there would be the start of the rise into the Sierras with a pause at the water tower and, after the boiler was topped up, the long haul through the ranges, following the tracks where they clung to the mountain face, a sheer drop of a thousand feet on one side. The Alamogordo Trail, as they called the Sierra section of track, was a feat of engineering that would bring admiration even a hundred years into the future. It must have taken sophisticated engineering techniques to throw that iron arrow across the face of the steep mountainside, blasting a few feet at a time through solid granite. No wonder it took seven years just to complete the Sierra section. Seven years, four tunnels, two hundred and eighteen bends in eleven miles, climbing near four thousand feet, then dropping down the other side in a long, long slant. It cost over nine thousand dollars a mile according to some estimates, making it close to a hundred thousand dollar stretch of track. All that, plus the lives of over one hundred men, mostly Chinese labourers.
And that same stretch of track was about to claim more lives, but not through any accident or natural disaster.
Clem Lester was the gang’s lookout and as soon as he spotted the locomotive’s smoke entering the heavy timber of the foothills, he quit his high vantage point, leapt aboard his pinto and raced down the mountainside to where Lem and Zack Forrester waited with the rest of the gang.
“She’s comin’, Zack!” Lester yelled, his words stirring the lounging outlaws.
Thirty yards up the rail track from where they waited the high wooden water tower reared against the sky. The Forrester twins, big-shouldered men with heavy features and hair so black it was almost blue, led the way to the tower. A half-dozen ropes already dangled from the tower’s platform. The supporting legs had been hacked just over half-through.
The men picked up their assigned ropes and took dallies swiftly around their saddle horns. At a signal from Lem Forrester, they jammed home the spurs into their mounts and there were protests from the animals as they surged forward, straining against the pull of the ropes. The men cursed and lashed with quirts, raked with spurs, urging the animals on. The hoofs dug in, muscles strained and pulled and whinnies shrilled through the timber.
Then another sound was heard above the general din: the creaking, splintering crack of timber starting to split.
Zack Forrester looked back and up over his shoulder, and saw the water tower begin to shudder.
“Once more, boys!” he yelled.
The splintering grew louder. There came the hollow boom of water sloshing around in the big wooden-staved tank on top of the platform. The tank itself began to take on odd shapes as the moving water surged back and forth against the wooden staves. A shingle popped off the conical cover. One of the support posts let out a sound like a crackling volley of rifle fire and a great vertical split slashed from top to bottom as if from the blow of a giant, invisible axe. The other three supports split only seconds later and there were yells from the men as the ropes went slack and they swiftly threw the dallies off the saddle horns and spurred their mounts up the slope out of the way.
They spun around to watch as the heavy tower collapsed and came crashing down across the twin iron rails, the conical roof of the tank spinning off as water surged out and hung, briefly suspended, like a giant silver teardrop. Then the whole structure smashed down with a dull boom that was lost in the splintering of woodwork and the flood of twenty thousand gallons of water hitting the landscape like a bomb. It surged up the slope after the men like some raging sea, tearing up small trees and brush, rolling rocks aside as if they were rubber balls, ripping at the earth and gouging a great gash in the mountainside before falling back and pouring down the slope in a brief cataract, uprooting more trees and boulders on the way, but leaving a pile of wreckage across the rail tracks that no locomotive could hope to plow through.
The outlaws looked at their handiwork with awe and Lem smiled crookedly at his sober-faced twin.
“Always like to see a water tower come down, Zack!” he said. “Kinda like smashin' up the neighbors’ chicken coops when we was kids ... Only better!”
“Nice to know you’re havin’ fun,” Zack said, deadpan. He rarely smiled or allowed his face to show much emotion. He glanced around at the other men. “Chuka,” he said to a blocky man with a dark longhorn moustache, “go pace out one hundred seven feet exactly and plant your charge. Link, lend a hand.”
Link Magee was a lanky young ranny with a prominent Adam’s apple and sunken cheeks that gave him a corpselike appearance. He nodded at Zack’s words and followed Chuka Cox down the muddy slope to the track where the timber from the water tower lay. They dismounted and began pacing out the distance.
“Clem,” Zack Forrester said to Lester, “you go bring up the mules with Chuka’s load. Careful now, man. We don’t want to have to scrape you off the mountain face.”
Lester nodded and licked his lips as he turned his mount and rode across the slope and into thick timber. The Forresters and the remaining outlaw, Taggart, waited, watching, listening. By the time Chuka Cox and Link Magee had paced out the distance,
Lester was leading a mule carrying packs on an alforjas frame out of the trees. He was walking his mount carefully, riding half-hipped in saddle, tugging the lead rope gently, giving the mule plenty of time to find a firm footing. Cox and Magee waited impatiently by the mark on the track and Cox undid the straps on the nearside pack, reached in and brought out a small wooden box that had straw protruding from under the lid. He opened it and took out a bundle of four dynamite sticks with a long coil of fuse protruding from the center. Lester moved away swiftly with the mule after Magee took a miner’s shovel from the pack and began to dig a shallow hole between the rail tracks. Cox glanced up to where the Forresters sat their mounts.
“How long you reckon, Zack?” he called.
Zack Forrester stood in stirrups and looked out across the Sierras to where the first pall of black smoke from the locomotive climbed above the ridge.
“Ten minutes ...” Zack called, then pointed to moss-covered rocks up the slope from the tracks. “In there ought to give you enough cover. How much fuse you reckon you’ll need to reach there, Chuka?”
Cox made a swift calculation. “One minute. Maybe a mite longer. I figure I can hunker down there without movin’ and be safe enough from the explosion.”
Zack nodded. “I’ll leave it to you. Pick somewheres safe. We’ll be up yonder, in the trees.” He pointed up the slope to where Lester was disappearing amongst heavy timber with the pack mule. “That ought to be about in line with the express car.”
“Well, it all hinges on you gettin’ the distance right,” Cox said, measuring his fuse as he spoke. “If the cars have been rearranged, we’ll blow up a passenger or boxcar instead.”
“I don’t make mistakes!” Zack growled, an edge to his voice and Cox nodded, not saying anything more as he cut the fuse and then gingerly planted the dynamite in the shallow hole Magee had scraped out between the rail-track ties.
Magee stood by, watching closely. He had a lot of confidence in Cox’s ability. He had seen the man at work before and knew he didn’t make mistakes with explosives. He had all his fingers to prove it, which was more than could be said about most powder monkeys who had been in the game as long as Cox. Of course, he wasn’t allowing for the five years that Cox had spent in Yuma Territorial Prison for blowing the Wells Fargo safe in Tucson.
The explosive planted, Chuka Cox paid out the fuse and covered it over with a thin layer of dirt, laying it so that it took the shortest possible route to the moss-covered boulder clump where he would be hunkered down with vesta heads held against the fuse-end, ready to fire it up at the right time.
The distant whistle of the train screeched eerily up the mountainside.
Minutes ticked by and the hot sun began to dry out the earth that had been soaked by the water tower’s collapse. Insects droned and a small animal screamed as a hawk swooped on it over in the next valley. The laboring, hollow panting of the locomotive could be heard now as it climbed up the mountainside and the iron tracks began to tremble. Soon they began to ‘sing’, making that strange, melodious ringing sound that was just audible as the wheels spun, iron against iron, dragging the long line of cars behind.
The express car was easy to pick out: it was painted in the dark green of the Wells Fargo Company with the name written on the side in white, framed in yellow. There were rifle and shotgun slits cut in the sides of the heavily timbered car and there were bars over the two small windows. The door was solid iron, banded and riveted, and a battering ram would be needed to knock it down. Inside, the four Wells Fargo guards played a dreary game of poker and cursed the sweltering heat and the flies that had somehow gotten inside the car and were making their monotonous journey pure hell. Their weapons—rifles and shotguns and pistols—were in a rack close to hand, but none of them were expecting trouble on this run. For, although the express car itself was prominent enough, few people knew there were flour boxes of gold bullion aboard, ready to be transhipped at Alamagordo for Santa Fe. And the guards’ job was to stay with that gold and see it delivered safely. They played poker for dimes.
Chuka Cox, crouched amongst his boulders, set his eye to a gap between the rocks and watched the polished brass lantern on the front of the locomotive sway into view around a clump of trees as it started down the slight slope towards where the water tower should have stood. He nodded to himself as he saw the engineer’s head suddenly disappear back into the cab as he spotted the pile of splintered timber across the track. A moment or two later, showers of sparks spurted out from under the loco’s wheels as the brakes were clamped on hard. Iron screeched against iron and the loco swayed drunkenly at the sudden change in speed. The tender and cars behind rocked and jolted as the train slid down the incline along the rails towards the wrecked water tower.
Chuka Cox counted carefully to himself, scraped a vesta across the rock face and held it against the two vesta heads he held tightly to the end of the fuse. They flared instantly and the fuse began to burn. Cox watched it only long enough to make sure it was burning evenly, then turned to look at the train. He nodded slowly. Zack Forrester knew what he was about, all right. That engineer was good and he would likely stop the loco with the cowcatcher just touching the first of the splintered logs where it lay across the tracks. He looked for the express car, spotted it easily, third hitch behind the tender. Right where they wanted it to be.
Passengers were looking out the windows, startled, wondering what was wrong as the train slid along the rails towards the piled-up, splintered wreckage of the water tower. The engineer and his fireman looked out the cab windows anxiously. Then the engineer blew out his cheeks in relief as he saw the train would stop in time: only just, but in time.
The iron cowcatcher nudged into the first log and steam hissed and the wheels spun as the engineer threw the throttle into reverse to help stop the train’s forward motion. The loco shuddered and couplings clashed. A severe jolt ran all the way down the cars, throwing passengers and Wells Fargo guards in heaps on the floor, but not hard enough to injure anyone.
Then, just as everyone was getting up, cussing mildly, glad that they had come through without a major disaster, there was a shattering explosion directly beneath the floor of the express car and the floor heaved upwards almost exactly under the guards. The blast blew out the walls and sent planks flying into the timber and rocks of the mountainside. The roof split and burst open and debris pattered down on the roofs of other cars. Splintered and twisted rifles and shotguns from the express car were flung high in the air.
Papers and baggage were scattered all across the mountainside. Shattered bodies disintegrated.
The Wells Fargo safe toppled off its floor-bolt mountings and the door jarred off one hinge, revealing the four boxes of gold bullion inside.
Through the acrid powdersmoke, six masked men rode up and began clambering through the smoldering, shattered wreckage of the express car.
Guns covered train-crew and passengers. Then there was another, smaller explosion as Cox blew the safe door completely off the vault and, fifteen minutes after the train had first stopped, the outlaws rode out, leading their laden mule, on the start of a long trail that would take them down to the Texas-Mexico border.
~*~
The San Angelo Prison was, in reality, the old Fort Concho area, with the stockade repaired and extra guardhouses added. The cell areas were built of stone and had been constructed by the convicts themselves under the strict supervision of armed guards. Cells were slanted deep into the earth for maximum discomfort as well as security. With sloping floors, a guard had only to give the inmate a shove and the man was instantly off-balance.
The prison had been designed by a sadistic superintendent and only the State’s toughest and most desperate criminals were sent to San Angelo. Their daylight hours were spent on the rock-pile or digging ditches that would be filled in again when the warden figured they needed a change of pace, anything to make them so dog-tired each day that they had no energy left for thinking up mischief.
But they made a mistake with Matt Dundee. He was a killer and bank robber, a man who not only used dynamite and gunpowder for blowing open bank vaults, but as weapons, too. He set traps for his pursuers, blasted down canyon walls on them, rigged tripwires that would bury them under tons of rubble or blow them sky-high in small pieces. He was known as the Mad Bomber and had been in San Angelo Prison for eight months and seventeen days as part of a life sentence, when Dundee figured he didn’t want to be there for eight months and eighteen days. But he was. In fact, he was there for one day short of nine months before he was ready to break out.
It took him that long to get together the things he needed. Amongst them was black powder and he was able to obtain this through the sadism of the superintendent. The rock in the quarries required periodic blasting but the superintendent figured using dynamite would make it too easy for the prisoners. All they had to do was dig a hole with a few pick strokes, plant the stick, and light the fuse. So he made them use black powder. This entailed making deep, narrow holes in the rock with steel drills, driven in a quarter-inch at a time with strokes of a heavy sledgehammer. Men were often injured, their fingers or hands crushed, and this suited the superintendent. Maimed men were easier to handle. When the hole was considered deep enough, it would have to be carefully packed with black powder and a detonator cap eased down into it on the end of the fuse. Quite often it exploded prematurely and that meant there were a few less prisoners to worry about. The superintendent enjoyed the idea of making his men sweat some.
But not Matt Dundee. Black powder was an old friend of his and he was able to carry away a little each time in the cuffs of his trousers, back to his cell. Over the days, it mounted up into several ounces and he was smart enough to place his drill holes so that they shattered as much rock as a full charge of powder would be expected to. He didn’t need a detonator cap and he suspected that the superintendent knew it wasn’t necessary when blasting rock, but it was used just as an added hazard to keep the men sweating. The fuse was no problem: Dundee made his own out of threads pulled from his frayed denim prison shirt, rolled into a string and covered with grains of black powder. He didn’t even need a vesta, something that was extremely hard to come by in the prison. The stone floor of his cell was flint and he had worked loose an iron bolt from the frame of his cot to use as a striker.
