Ralph Compton Straight Shooter

by Ralph Compton

  “Just bring it tomorrow,” Augustus said. “We won’t need it until we leave.”

  “Very gracious of you, sir. I believe I am in need of a few hours of sleep. And so,” Hayes said with a flourished tip of his hat, “I bid you adieu.”

  The men in suits gave him a much less dramatic farewell before going back to their game.

  There were plenty of other warehouses in this section of town, most of which were used to hold cargo that had either been taken from or was about to be loaded onto one of the many trains passing through. Some warehouses had horse stalls similar to the one used by Augustus’s men, while every other one had hitch rails alongside it. His mare was right where he’d left it. The pair of horses that was tied beside her hadn’t been there before, but it wasn’t the animals that caught his eye.

  His head snapped up and he stopped dead in his tracks.

  “It . . . can’t be,” he whispered.

  First, he looked around in every direction. All he found were murky shadows and a few sputtering lanterns hanging from short poles. The corner in the distance was alive with figures darting from one shadow to another, some staggering and some running. The saloons were busiest at this late hour. Hayes’s immediate vicinity, on the other hand, only echoed with that activity.

  Hayes slowly approached the horse tethered directly beside his own. “Easy, now,” he whispered as he got closer. “Just want to get a look.”

  All of the horses remained calm. The one that Hayes was most interested in looked over and gave him an inquisitive sniff before shifting its eyes back to the trough in front of it. Hayes placed a calming hand on its neck and cocked his head to one side so he could see the rifle in the boot of that saddle at a different angle.

  It was a Sharps rifle with a set of modified sights mounted near the firing mechanism. The plate near the trigger guard wasn’t original, either. In fact, it was similar to the ones he himself used when putting together one of his specialty commissions. Squinting while leaning in closer, Hayes examined the maker’s mark behind the trigger guard.

  It was an H with a Z overlaying it. The rifle was one of his.

  “I’ll be damned!” he said in a harsh whisper. Reaching for the rifle, he pulled it from the boot so he could get a closer look. Everything from the mark to the custom sights and even the carving on the stock told him it was not only one of his custom jobs, but it was the very Sharps rifle that had been stolen from him in Cedar Rapids. Just to confirm that, he checked the number near the lever.

  Hayes felt his stomach clench as if it were in the grip of an icy fist. When he thought about those outlaws, his first instinct was to take the rifle and use it to hunt them down. They had to be around somewhere. And then, almost as quickly as it had boiled up inside him, the rage abated.

  He was no lawman.

  He wasn’t a fighter.

  He was, however, alone.

  As his head cleared, Hayes reminded himself that he couldn’t be certain the horses he’d discovered in fact belonged to the men who had robbed him. For all he knew, those outlaws could have sold the Sharps to someone else or lost it. That horse could even belong to a lawman or a bounty hunter who had put the outlaws down like the dogs they were. Hayes nodded, silently assuring himself that it was best not to lose his head.

  “. . . still in there.”

  Those words drifted through the air from farther down the alley between two warehouses. They were spoken in a quick whisper and followed by scurrying footsteps scraping against packed dirt. Hayes took a quick look in the direction from which those voices came, only to find two hunched figures circling around from behind the warehouse being used by Augustus. He couldn’t make out any faces, but a sudden rush of panic coursed through the salesman’s body, prompting him to move away from the horses.

  There weren’t many places for him to go. If he took off running, he would most definitely be seen. If he ducked behind the water trough, he would be discovered by anyone coming for the horses. Since there were two horses apart from his own and two figures drawing closer by the second, that hiding spot didn’t seem like an ideal one.

  Hayes almost missed the pair of crates stacked against the wall of Augustus’s warehouse. They leaned at a slight angle to create a dark shadow beside them. Before he wasted the few seconds he had left, Hayes darted across the alley, put his back to the wall beside the crates, and slid down into the shadow. When the top crate shifted as if to fall onto him, he used the rifle in his hand to prop it up.

  He still had the rifle in his hand!

  In the excitement to find a place to hide, Hayes had forgotten about the Sharps rifle he’d been examining. If he was concerned about the men coming for their horses, it would have made sense to return the rifle before it was missed. He clenched his teeth and held his breath. The mistake had already been made. There was no turning back now.

  The figures slowed and had stopped talking to one another. Having covered just over half of the length of the long warehouse, they drew close enough for Hayes to hear every one of their steps as they came to a halt.

  Fast, steady breathing filled the air. Hayes prayed he wasn’t the one making those sounds.

  A few more tentative steps were taken.

  Rather than move a single muscle, Hayes turned only his eyes toward the figures. One of the lanterns hanging nearby cast a weak halo around its post. When one of the two figures took another step, some of that light fell onto the face of Wes Cavanaugh.

  “Where’d he go?” Wes snarled.

  The second figure moved with a slower cadence as he turned to look all around him while plodding forward. “I thought I saw someone run toward the street,” Mose said.

  “Which street?”

  “This one right here,” he replied while pointing at the street passing in front of the warehouses.

  The men were approaching the horses, which put them at about five yards away from where Hayes was hiding. As the outlaws got closer, Hayes felt more and more as if he were just standing in the open and exposed.

  Wes stopped near the horses to reach out one hand toward the saddle with the empty boot.

  This is it, Hayes thought. He’ll see the rifle is missing and then find me against the wall near those crates. Odds are, he’s found me already.

  “I told you they’re all still in there,” Wes said. The hand he extended came to a rest on the horse’s rump, where he gave the animal a pat before moving on. His eyes were fixed on the corner of Augustus’s building. “I saw something move up ahead. Looked like he was headed that way.”

  Now Mose was near the horses. Unlike the other outlaw, he turned and took a closer look at the tethered animals.

  Hayes eased a finger beneath the rifle’s trigger guard. The Sharps was resting against the wall with its barrel keeping the upper crate from moving. When he angled his eyes downward, he had a difficult time seeing his own chest, legs, or feet, thanks to the shadows and the dark clothes he wore. As much as he wanted to ease his other hand toward the pistol at his side, he was certain that much movement would give away his position.

  “Take a look around the corner,” Mose said. “Could be someone heard us out here.”

  Wes drew his pistol and stalked toward the corner. Actually, he drew Hayes’s pistol. The nickel-plated .45 filled his hand, causing Hayes to choke back the impulse to rush forward and reclaim it. As Wes approached the corner, he moved dangerously close to the crates where Hayes was hiding. So close, in fact, that Hayes thought it impossible the outlaw hadn’t seen him yet.

  A few more steps took Wes past the salesman’s position. Hayes got a good enough look at Wes’s face to see that his eyes were fixed on the front portion of the building. There were more scraping steps, followed by the brush of a shoulder against the wall.

  The next several seconds passed in silence.

  Both outlaws held their ground with guns draw
n.

  Hayes remained so still that his muscles began to ache. The more they ached, the more he thought he might accidentally give himself away with a twitch. He could just make out the outline of Wes through the slats of the crates. Every so often, Wes would lean forward to glance around at the front of the warehouse. Unfortunately Mose was taking more interest in the shadows beside those crates.

  The bigger outlaw stood in the light being cast from the lantern meant to illuminate the hitch rail. He squinted into the darkness directly in front of him, his eyes drawing closer to the spot where they would eventually lock with Hayes’s.

  “You there!”

  Hayes almost jumped when he heard that. He might have shifted slightly, but the two outlaws moved a lot more.

  The voice had come from the front of the warehouse. When it shouted, “Whoever is there, show yourself,” Hayes recognized it as belonging to Vernon Winter.

  “It’s one of them railroad men,” Wes hissed.

  Forgetting about the crates, Mose raised his pistol and thumbed back its hammer. “Just one of ’em?” he asked.

  Wes waved him back. “There’s more inside and they’re all loaded for bear. Just keep quiet.”

  “Where is he?”

  The steps that were crunching against the ground from the warehouse’s front entrance drew closer. “That you, Zachariah?” Vernon asked.

  Hayes could feel beads of sweat pushing through his skin to trickle down the front of his face.

  “We may have to take this one,” Mose whispered.

  Wes hunkered down. “No,” he said in a voice that was almost too quiet to be heard. “Just get ready to run back to our spot.”

  “Who’s over there?” Vernon shouted.

  Wes stepped back while stretching his free hand behind him to motion to his partner. Mose shuffled into the middle of the alley, his feet making a sound that was like nails on dry slate.

  More footsteps came from the front of the warehouse as more men stepped outside to investigate.

  “What’s going on out here?” Augustus asked.

  “I thought I heard someone sneaking around out back,” Vernon told him. “They ran off and I think they’re down that way.”

  “Take some men to see what it is. I’ll send some more out back.”

  “We can get the drop on ’em,” Mose whispered. “They don’t know where we are or how many—”

  “No,” Wes snapped. “Fighting now will only ruin what we got cooking. We’re too close to spoil it now!”

  “Should we ride out of here?”

  “No,” Wes said as he hurried past the crates on his way to the horses. When Vernon and some of the others could be heard approaching the corner of the building, he hissed, “Just run.”

  And without another word, both men bolted toward the rear of the building. Their steps beat a furious rhythm against the ground. When they approached the other end of the warehouse, more voices called out. Judging by the distance of those voices, the rear entrance was most likely at the corner farthest away from the spot where the horses were tethered.

  Hayes was thinking about leaving his shadows when the steps that had been drawing closer rounded the front corner of the building and stormed toward him. Instead, he pressed himself so flat against the wall that he wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d burrowed all the way inside the warehouse. Vernon and another man tore down the alley, stopping just long enough to get a look at the horses and the trough. When Vernon turned toward the crates, he sighted along the top of his pistol and moved directly toward the darkest shadows.

  Knowing he was seconds away from being exposed, Hayes inched forward.

  “Zachariah?” Vernon said. “Why are you hiding there?”

  “Two men,” Hayes said. “They were just here. They went . . .” Hayes pointed toward the back end of the warehouse just as the men who had emerged from the rear entrance opened fire.

  “Go on!” Vernon said to the man with him who’d been playing cards with Hayes a few minutes ago. When the man ran down the wide alley, Vernon lowered his pistol without holstering it. “What are you doing?”

  “I was coming for my horse when those two men showed up.”

  “Who are they?”

  Before Hayes could answer that question, Wes and Mose ran back around the corner and into sight. They were all the way at the other end of the warehouse covering their retreat with blazing six-guns. They came to a stop, took a look toward the horses, and spotted Vernon right away.

  “Stop where you are!” Vernon said. “What’s your business here?”

  The outlaws ran in the opposite direction, and like a dog seeing a rabbit scamper away, Vernon raced after them. He was quickly joined by the rest of Augustus’s men, who all filled the night with the thunder of gunfire.

  Hayes stood where he was, waiting to see if he would need to get on his horse, duck inside the warehouse, or possibly run in another direction. Although the gunmen were a good distance away, Hayes could see one of Augustus’s men straighten up and fall back as he caught one of the outlaw’s bullets in the chest or head.

  Hayes’s first impulse had been to take his rifle and leave the gunmen to their work. The more firing he heard, however, the more convinced he became that the outlaws were leading their pursuers on a wild-goose chase. Obviously, they’d been scouting out the area around the warehouses and had been hiding well enough to watch Augustus and the others for some time. If they’d planned that far in advance, it was most likely they’d circle back around to reclaim their horses instead of running into the night like a couple of headless chickens.

  After the shoot-out at Cal Overland’s spread, Hayes didn’t want any part of firing at another human being unless there was absolutely no choice. Then again, after being robbed and having his friend beaten by those outlaws, he wasn’t of a mind to just let them go if there was anything at all he could do about it.

  When he thought back to meeting Wes and Mose in Cedar Rapids, Hayes remembered one thing above all else. Wes had wanted that rifle so badly he could taste it. Hayes smiled as he dug into his pocket for a small folding knife. When he found it, he took the knife and the rifle to the hitch rail close to where a lantern was hanging.

  “If he wants this rifle so badly,” he said as he placed the rifle on top of the hitch rail to give him a somewhat steady surface, “then he shall have it.”

  A pocketknife wasn’t much of a tool for working on a rifle, but Hayes wasn’t concerned with precision. He stuck the blade into specific parts of the firing mechanism and scarred the work he’d so painstakingly done. He felt like a painter who knew exactly which lines to smudge to make one of his landscapes look especially flawed. Hayes misaligned something here, scratched in a notch there, and tweaked the trigger just a little bit in the wrong direction. He was admiring his handiwork and touching up a few of the more obvious maladjustments when he heard footsteps approaching the warehouse.

  Hayes used the tip of his pocketknife to gouge a little deeper into the rifle’s innards and then scraped. As his hands worked, his head turned and his eyes darted to find the source of those steps. He couldn’t see who was making them, but they were obviously trying to be stealthy in their approach. The gunshots in the distance had tapered off to a sporadic crackle. There were voices coming from that general area, which told Hayes that whoever was firing had lost sight of their intended targets.

  Having done as much damage as he could without completely disassembling the Sharps, Hayes reached into his pocket for what would be the icing on the cake. There had been three rounds in the rifle when he’d taken it. There were only two of the modified bullets in Hayes’s pocket, but he put both of them in along with one of the original ones. The modified rounds didn’t look much different from the others, but the mixture of powder in them was such that it gave a much bigger kick than a typical round. One of those fired from a rifle
not reinforced to handle it would cause damage. Considering what he’d done to sabotage the Sharps, that damage should be catastrophic.

  The footsteps were drawing closer and Hayes dropped the rifle back into the boot of Wes’s saddle. Since there was nowhere else to hide, he simply took off running toward the back of the warehouse. He’d barely taken four bounding steps when Wes and Mose rounded the front corner.

  “Don’t shoot!” Hayes said as he stretched his hands above his head. “I’m unarmed!”

  The bigger of the two outlaws sighted along the top of his barrel, only to be stopped by his partner.

  “He ain’t one of them railroad men!” Wes snapped. “Just let him go.”

  “But he could give us away,” Mose protested.

  “Not any quicker than you would by firing a shot! We got what we needed. Just get yer horse and go!”

  Reluctant to make any move that might reverse his good fortune, Hayes crouched down low and eased toward a wall. Although he didn’t have anything in front of him that would stop a bullet, he felt better once a wall was against his back and he was no longer in the open.

  The outlaws mounted their horses and pointed their noses down the alley. With the snap of leather, they galloped past Hayes and thundered off into the night.

  Hayes found himself crouched as low as he could get with both arms wrapped around his head. Once it was absolutely clear that the horses weren’t going to turn around, he straightened up and squinted to find them. He only caught a quick glance of movement at the end of the street before they were gone altogether. Although he still didn’t have his rifle or the money that had been taken, he smiled with the knowledge that he’d effectively tossed a wrench into the other men’s plans whatever they might have been. His only regret was that he wouldn’t be there to see how his efforts would pay off.