“Here we go,” he whispered as he sighted along the top of the stolen Sharps rifle. The outlaws had been so busy trying to escape Omaha and then keep up with number 24 that Wes had almost forgotten what it felt like to heft the fancy rifle. He worked the lever and noticed it felt a bit strange. There were a few rough spots around the trigger as well, but he chalked it up to the Sharps being custom made. Wes was used to models that came straight off the shelf, and he’d fired this one enough times before getting to Omaha for him to be plenty comfortable with it.
Before he could fidget with the rifle any further, he saw one of the three remaining gunmen step onto the balcony behind the third car. As luck would have it, the man was Augustus himself, leader of the gunmen hired by Union Pacific to safeguard the payroll shipment across the country.
“Kiss it good-bye, railroad man.”
The shot was lined up.
Wes squeezed his trigger.
The hammer dropped a bit sooner than he’d expected and the gun in his hand exploded.
Wes hollered as he turned away from the edge of the rooftop. His eyes burned and there were fresh cuts on his hands and face. He was deafened by a loud ringing that filled his entire head. On the platform below, Mose stuck to the plan by charging at the train as soon as he heard Wes’s gunshot. Unfortunately Augustus was not only alive and kicking but alerted by the misfire.
Augustus drew his pistol and brought it up before Mose could figure out things weren’t going as he’d hoped. Men swarmed from the train as well as from the saloon across the street. In a matter of seconds, all five of the remaining Union Pacific gunmen had converged on the platform.
“Now, what did you intend to do here?” Augustus asked. “Might you be Mose Robins?”
Mose’s eyes widened and he nodded as if he’d just witnessed a miracle.
“So that would mean the man up there is Wes Cavanaugh,” Augustus said. Pointing toward the rooftop of the old feed store, he looked over to one of his men and said, “Get up there and see what all that screaming is about. Sounds to me like he might have hurt himself.”
Two men rushed toward the building where Wes was cursing up a storm.
“H-how did you know us?” Mose asked.
“Friend of mine told me you’d be coming. Name’s Jimmy Stock out of Cedar Rapids. He knows an awful lot of things. Good fellow, too. A real straight shooter.”
“That’s the man who told us about this train!” Mose snarled. “I’m gonna kill that two-timing snake!”
“I doubt you’ll be doing much of anything. I been told you and Wes Cavanaugh like to rob banks. That’s the sort of thing that gets you locked up for a real long time. Come on, now. Let’s get you fitted for some shackles and leg irons.”
Wes and Mose wound up getting a real good look at the inside of number 24 when they were chained and tossed into one of the cars by Augustus’s men. The outlaws were left with the U.S. marshals in Cheyenne. After that, the only glimpse of a train they got was when they spotted smoke on the horizon from the small square windows of their federal prison cells.
Jimmy Stock received a healthy reward for providing information that prevented railroad money from falling into the wrong hands. It wasn’t a fortune, but he still retired from selling good information to bad men and became a partner at Tennison’s Saloon. He wasn’t certain it was a wise thing to do, but it felt right. In the end, that was the only choice worth making.
Read on for an excerpt from another rip-roarin’ Western
Ralph Compton The Hunted
A Ralph Compton novel by Matthew P. Mayo
Coming from Signet in August.
“That’s what you got for me? That?” The dealer nodded toward the cards laid before him. His words came out too loud, and as if he’d been waiting long minutes to say them. The thin man with oiled mustaches, black visor, and arm garters shook his head and winked at the gawkers gathered about his table.
Across from him, his customer sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. He was a mammoth man with a broad back turned to the rest of the room.
The dealer and the others clustered by the table flicked eyes at one another, then settled back on him. The player’s rough-spun coat, the dark color of axle grease, strained across the shoulders as he brought a hand up to scratch the stubble on his face. “I’m out,” he said quietly, nodding toward the table.
“You about were anyway.” The dealer shifted his cigarillo to the other side of his slit mouth and winked at the watchers. Their soft laughs chafed Charlie, but he’d earned them. Coming in here half lit and feeling as if he knew more about playing blackjack and bucking the tiger than any man alive. Heck, three hours and he’d spent more time running from it than wrangling the tiger, and what did he have to show for it? A whole lot of empty in his pockets.
He had his emergency five-dollar piece in his vest and that, plus his mule, Mabel-Mae, and his meager kit, was about all he had in the world now. Three hours earlier he’d been halfway to owning a sizable chunk of land in a pretty mountain valley. Now he’d set himself back by two years—that was how long it had taken him to earn that two thousand dollars. Those two years had all but killed him, he’d worked so hard. And now? Now he was two years older, and as his father used to say of his family’s lot in life, he was poorer than an outhouse rat.
“Hey, how about letting someone else take up space in that chair?” The dealer squinted one eye against the slow curl of silver smoke rising up the side of his face from the cat-turd cigarillo. Charlie wanted to smear the smugness off his face, but he’d avoided jail for too long now to cozy up to the idea of being near broke and tossed in the calaboose in Monkton, Idaho Territory.
He pushed away from the table, the chair squawking back on the boot-worn boards. He kept his eyes on the dealers the entire time he stood, taking longer than he needed to. It wasn’t much, but showing off his height was about all he had. It worked. The dealer’s grin sagged at the corners and his cigarillo drooped as his eyes followed the big man’s progress upward.
He’d not been there when Charlie sat down at the table, so he didn’t know how big the fellow he’d been mocking was. And what he saw was a giant of a man, closer to seven feet than six. He was wide enough at the shoulder that by now, at thirty-eight years of age, he naturally angled one shoulder first through doorways and ducked his head a mite. It didn’t guarantee he’d not rap his bean on the doorframe—there weren’t too many weeks of the year when he didn’t have a goose egg of sorts throbbing under his tall-crowned hat.
Charlie’s stubbled jaw—he’d not taken time to clean up before hitting the saloon for the first time in many months since he’d sold off his latest claim—was a wide affair beneath a broad head topped with brown curls, tending to silver, forever trapped beneath his big hat. It added nearly another foot to his height, but he didn’t mind. It suited him somehow. His hands too were wide, callused mitts with thick tree-branch fingers more suited to dragging and pounding and stacking than tapping out cards. He should have known better than to think he could best the house.
The dealer eyed Charlie’s hands covering the entire top of the now-wobbly wooden chair he’d been seated in. He swallowed once, began to speak, gulped again as the big man took his time straightening his coat, squaring that mammoth hat. The big man still didn’t look away from the dealer’s face.
The dealer finally managed to whisper, “Thank . . . thank you for your patronage, sir.”
Charlie nodded once, turned, and heard the dealer let out a stuttering breath of relief. Despite his new financial situation, Charlie half smiled. At least he had his size. It wasn’t worth much, but this big body could, by gum, still earn him a day’s honest wage most anywhere labor was needed.
The big man strode the length of the narrow room, making the long walk toward the front of the saloon, the floor squeaking and popping under his weight. Everyone he passed gave him the har
d stare. He felt certain they all knew he’d lost all but his shirt.
Midway to the door he passed a cluster of men at the end of the bar. He felt relief that they were chattering among themselves and not concerned with him. Then he heard a voice that about stopped him in his tracks.
“Shotgun? Why, by God, it is! As I live and breathe, it’s my old friend Shotgun Charlie Chilton!”
Though it had been many long years since he’d been called that, Charlie’s step hitched, as if out of dusty reflex. He paused right there in the middle of the room and closed his eyes. He knew a couple, three things: He should have kept on walking, he’d never had many friends and most of them had died away in the war, and the man who all but silenced the room with his drunken shouting was no friend. Anybody who called Charlie by that old name was no one he wanted to know anymore—and should by all rights be dead by now anyway.
Charlie knew he should have kept right on going out that door, headed to the livery where he’d intended to bed down for the night in the stall beside Mabel-Mae, his old mule. And then come tomorrow he’d lick his wounds out on the trail, put some distance between himself and the town of Monkton. And once he did, he’d cipher out a way to earn money again, make up for the last couple of years’ wages he’d blown at the faro table.
Though Charlie knew all these things and thought all these things, he still opened his eyes and slowly turned to face his past. And that’s when what had begun as one of the best days of his life, which had gotten pretty bad, got a whole lot worse.
For who he saw annoyed him to no end. Jacob “Dutchy” Erskine. They had called him Dutchy because he looked as though he might be a Dutchman, though he wasn’t any more Dutch than Charlie was the king of China. But the fool was grinning at Charlie, and judging from his rheumy eyes and leering mouth, his boilers looked to be half-stoked with liquor too.
Charlie turned back to the door. He hadn’t gone another step before the voice stopped him again. All eyes were on them both now. Even the lousy banjo player in the corner had stopped.
“Shotgun Charlie, as I live and breathe!” Dutchy slid away from the elbow-smooth bar top and stumbled the few steps toward Charlie.
The drunk man was still a good couple of strides away when Charlie held up a hand. “I . . . I don’t know who you are, nor what you’re after, but you’ve mistook me for someone else.”
The man halted, weaving in place, his smile drooping. “What? Charlie . . . aw, you’re funnin’ me.”
Charlie pinned a broad forced smile on his wide, windburned face. He looked left and right, nodding and smiling at the staring faces. Seemed as though there were a whole lot more people in here than when he’d come in. He felt his cheeks redden even more. Curse Dutchy for a fool.
“I’m telling you . . . fella,” he said in a lowered voice, “I ain’t never seen you before. Now do us both a favor and back off.”
“No, no, I ain’t neither. Come on over here and meet my new chums. You can buy us all a drink with your faro winnin’s.” Dutchy’s smile turned pinched; his wet eyes narrowed. “Unless you’d rather reminisce all about the old days right here in the middle of the bar.” He raised his arms wide to the room.
Charlie saw the two missing fingertips on Dutchy’s left hand. They had healed poorly after they’d been shot off long before Charlie ever knew him. The hard pink scar nubs looked like pebbles or warts, and Charlie had always wanted to pare them off with a knife. If they had been on his fingers, he’d not have been able to live with the look, nor, he suspected, the feel of them.
Dutchy giggled, looked around at the silent, expectant faces. “Maybe you’d like to tell ’em all about the last time we seen each other. Wichita, wasn’t it? Something about a lousy Basque, wasn’t it? All them sheep running all over the place, and Charlie here, he . . .” Dutchy stopped and leaned forward. “What’s the matter, Charlie? You look like you seen a ghost. Maybe one of a little girl? One who’s been all trampled by a . . . horse?”
It had been a long, long time since Charlie had dreamed of the little girl. But it hadn’t been any longer than that afternoon that he’d thought of her. He’d been walking on into town leading Mabel-Mae when he’d seen the children playing before a white-painted schoolhouse a few streets away from Monkton’s main street. He thought of her every day, in fact, and this man, this damnable Dutchy, was fixing to rip it all wide open again.
Big Charlie Chilton had tried hard since that accident to make sure he was slow to start a thing. But once he set to a task, he dedicated himself to it and rarely gave it less than his all. But when his great ham-sized right fist drove like a rock hammer square at Dutchy’s grinning face, Charlie hadn’t known it would happen. Like the old days he’d worked so hard to put behind him. No warning, just action. He hated the fact that it felt good when his tight knuckles jammed hard against Dutchy’s leering face.
The strike happened so fast that the entire room was still silent, listening with rapt attention to the drunk’s account. The next thing they all heard was a muffled snap and Dutchy’s head whipped to one side as if he were gawking at a passing bullet. His body followed suit and spun in a dervish dance before slamming into the bar leaners behind him. They parted fast and let Dutchy drop, his head clunking against the mud-scraped brass rail.
The early gasps had given way to scraping chairs and now yammering as standing people leaned, trying to get a look at the collapsed victim.
“He dead?” someone asked.
As if in response, Dutchy groaned and rolled his head to and fro, the left side of his face already swelling and purpling.
An old man with a cob pipe leaned close over Dutchy. “Naw. It was his jaw that cracked.” He plucked the pipe from its customary spot in his mouth, the groove worn by it in his teeth. “He ain’t dead, but he ain’t gonna be right by a long shot for a long time to come, mark my words. . . .”
That was the last thing Charlie heard as he bulled his way through the double front doors, the glass panes rattling as he pawed them shut behind him. His big granger boots punched squelching holes in the slushed mud of the early October street as he stepped off the sidewalk. The livery. That’s where he had to get to. Had to get on out of here before someone set the law on him.
Charlie didn’t hear the doors open and close again behind him, fast footsteps hammering the boardwalk in the opposite direction, toward Marshal Watt’s office.
Ralph Compton Straight Shooter Page 26
