“That’s a Dakota brand. I recognize it from years back. It’s got to be Monty’s horse,” the old gunfighter said. “Let me handle this one, boy.”
“You just stay out of this, Vonny. It’s me he’s after, and I’ll handle it my way.”
“You go in shootin’, boy,” Vonny told him. “Just like you would a rattlesnake. Don’t give him no chance at all. Listen to me. I know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“I got a better idea,” Matt said. “There’s gonna be plenty of shooting soon enough.”
“What’s your plan?” the gunfighter-turned-rancher asked, questions in his eyes.
Matt grinned. “Monty Brill’s a bad man with a gun, right?”
“That he is, son. One of the best.”
“Watch this.” Matt pushed over the batwings and stepped into the saloon.
The man in black stood with his back to Matt. But he was watching him in the mirror’s reflection.
Matt studied the man. About forty or forty-five, and looked to be in excellent physical condition. He lifted his eyes to the mirror’s reflection to meet the eyes watching him. Cold eyes. Killer eyes. He began his walk to the bar.
“A cold beer, Al,” Matt said, never stopping his walk.
“I’ll have another whiskey,” the man in black said.
“Forget the whiskey, Al,” Matt told him. “Mr. Brill won’t have time to finish it.”
Brill turned, a strange smile on his lips, his hands dropping to the butts of his guns. Matt was right on the man and hit him. A solid straight right that landed like a sledgehammer. Matt jerked Brill’s guns from leather and tossed them on the table.
“Now, Brill,” Matt told him. “Let’s see how good you are with your fists.”
Chapter 21
With a snarl coming from his freshly blooded lips, Brill charged Matt, both fists balled and ready.
Matt tripped him, sending the man crashing to the floor. Matt kicked him in the belly, and Brill grunted and rolled away, coming up to his boots. The men circled each other warily. Brill was just about Matt’s size, and he knew how to box; Matt could tell that by the way he moved.
Brill threw a left, Matt slapped it away, and Brill tried to follow that with a right. Matt busted him in the mouth again and followed that blow with a left that clubbed Brill’s ear and backed him up.
Men had crowded into the saloon, forming a silent circle around the combatants.
Brill got through Matt’s defenses and landed a solid left hook that stung. Matt backed up until his head cleared. Brill followed him and pressed his luck, thinking he had Matt on the run. It was a bad mistake. Matt deliberately lowered his guard and Brill took the opportunity. Matt slipped the punch and landed a left and right to Brill’s head. Brill spat out part of a broken tooth and shook his head.
Matt popped the man hard in the gut, then stepped around and hammered at his kidneys. Brill backed up and Matt pressed him hard, landing body blows that bruised and shots to the head and jaw that stung and brought blood.
Brill swung a wide looping right. Matt stepped inside it and butted Brill with his head, the gunfighter’s teeth snapping together, bringing a howl of pain from the man and a spray of blood from his lips. Brill looked around him frantically, seeking a way out. There was none, the crowd had closed ranks.
Matt bulled in, swinging hard fists and connecting with Brill’s jaw and mouth and belly.
“Time!” Brill panted. “I evoke gentleman’s rules.”
“I’ll honor it,” Matt said, backing up. “Even though you’re no gentlemen.”
“I’ll have a beer, barkeep,” Brill said. “You’ll join me, Bodine?”
“I’ll pass.”
Al pulled a mug for the man and slid it down the bar. Brill drank half of it, then wiped his bloody mouth with the back of his hand. He turned and looked at Bodine, noticing that Bodine was not even breathing hard.
“You’re going to beat me to death, aren’t you, Bodine?”
“I’m interested in how you know me.”
“Oh, I’ve known how you look for over a year. I do that, you know, plan ahead, figuring that someday someone would want you dead. I’m usually right. Are you going to answer my question?”
“I’m not going to beat you to death, Brill. I’m just going to stomp you, then break both your arms at the elbows, so you can never again use a gun.” Matt had been watching Brill as he moved closer, the half-empty beer mug in his hand.
“That would be a death sentence for me, Bodine.”
“How many death sentences have you handed out, Brill?”
Brill smiled disarmingly and swung the heavy mug. Bodine jumped to one side, picked up a chair, and splintered it across Brill’s shoulders, knocking the man down.
“No more gentlemen’s rules, Brill,” Matt told him. “Get up on your feet and fight.”
Brill got up. He got up with a knife in his hand he jerked out of his boot.
Sam laughed. “You didn’t do enough research on my brother, Brill. Matt grew up in a Cheyenne camp. He knows more about knife fighting than any white man I ever saw.”
Matt reached behind his left-hand gun and pulled out a long-bladed, razor-sharp Bowie. “You should have passed up this job, Brill.”
“I almost did, Bodine,” Brill said, then slashed.
Bodine parried and slapped the man, the back of his hard-gloved hand sounding like a gunshot when it impacted.
Again and again, Brill tried to cut Bodine. Each time Bodine anticipated the move, as he had been taught by Cheyenne warriors. Brill’s face was shiny with sweat. He sensed his own defeat—knowing that Bodine was playing a deadly game with him—and his eyes turned wild.
“Finish it, damn your eyes, Bodine!” he yelled.
“All right,” Bodine said, and opened up Brill’s left arm all the way down from elbow to palm, slicing through tendons and ruining the arm.
Brill screamed.
“That’s one hand that’ll never hold another gun, Brill,” Bodine told him.
“Goddamn you!” Brill cursed him as the blood flowed from the long incision.
Bodine brought his knife down on Brill’s right shoulder, the heavy blade slicing through flesh and bone, forever ruining the arm.
Brill howled in pain and fell to the floor, the knife falling from suddenly useless fingers.
“Get the doc,” Vonny said, his hard old eyes holding no pity or compassion for Brill. “I want this scum to live. I want him to live in fear for the rest of his days. Lookin’ over his shoulder for the kin of some of his victims.”
“Kill me!” Brill screamed.
“No way, Brill,” Matt told him.
Dr. Winters pushed through the crowd and took one look at the bloody Brill. He lifted his eyes to Matt, seeing the red-stained blade in Bodine’s hand. “Frontier justice again, Matt?”
“Just plain ol’ justice, Doc. And believe me, he had it coming.”
It was late when Dr. Winters joined Matt and the others for supper.
“Brill will live,” Winters said, taking a chair. “But he’ll have absolutely no use of his right arm and limited use of his left hand. You’ve ruined him, Matt.”
“That is exactly what I intended to do, Doc.”
“Don’t shed no tears over that one, Doc,” Josiah told the young man. “He’s ruint no tellin’ how many lives with them guns of his.”
Dr. Winters slowly met the eyes of all the men seated around the table in the café. “I should be shocked. Appalled. I would have been a month ago. But now . . .” He trailed that off into silence.
“Why not now?” Vonny asked.
“I’ve been listening to those dying gunmen over in my office. Listening to them talk about the evil things they’ve done over the years. They’re not repentant. They’re dying boasting of the blackest criminal acts I have ever heard of. Murder and rape and torture and the foulest of deeds. I’ve had to leave several times. It was . . . disgusting, sickening. I see now why you men hold no compassion for tha
t ilk. I understand it. My college professors would be dismayed at my new attitude, but they can go to hell. They’re out of touch with reality.”
Vonny picked up his hat and set it on his head. He patted the doctor on the shoulder. “You’ll do, Doc. You’ll do to ride the river with.”
He walked out the door and swung into the saddle, his crew with him.
“Was that a compliment?” Dr. Winters asked.
“Of the highest kind,” Sam told him.
Matt and Sam and Josiah hung around town for a week, playing cards and talking and relaxing, knowing that the lid was going to blow off the pot, but not knowing when. Only that it would be soon. Vonny and some of the Circle S hands rode into town several times that quiet week. They had nothing to report. Everything was quiet on both the Circle S and the Flying V range.
“Too quiet,” Chookie said over beer and cards one evening. “Gives me a creepy feelin.’ You know that crazy John Lee is goin’ to pull something, but you don’t know when. Makes a man jumpy.”
The truth was, John Lee didn’t know what to do. He was just about out of ideas. When the news reached him about Monty Brill, he was shocked, as were most of his fighting men. For Matt Bodine to have first stomped the renowned gunslinger-for-hire and then cut him up like a side of beef, crippling him forever, was something that caused a lot of the men on John Lee’s payroll to seriously think about hauling their ashes out of this country. Several already had.
Kingman, the gunhand who had taken lead from Bodine several years back, summed up his feelings while drinking in the bunkhouse one night during the lull in the fighting. “I ain’t runnin’ from Bodine. I aim to see this settled here and now, once and for all. The chips just ain’t been fallin’ right, is all. We got the guns, we got the men. It’ll all come in line for us. It’s just a matter of time, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” Leo Grand agreed, cutting his eyes to Dan Ringold. “You ’posed to be some kind of hotshot with that rifle you’re always cleanin’ and lovin’ on. Why don’t you do what you’re bein’ paid to do and put lead in Bodine and that Injun brother of his?”
“The boss ain’t told me to do that yet,” Ringold replied. “When he does, I will.”
Giddings and Tidwell, still having to soak their feet in liniment and brine several times a day after their long and unintentional commune with nature, looked at the sniper. “Could it be, Ringold, that you’re just scared of them two?” Giddings asked.
Ringold turned cold mean eyes at the man. “I’m hired to do one job of work and one job of work only, Gimpy. Don’t crowd me.”
The bunkhouse door opened and the foreman walked in. “Ringold, the boss wants to see you.”
Ringold smiled and stood up. “Now I get to go to work.” He walked out behind Max, heading for the mansion, which was still undergoing repairs after the bombing and shooting raid.
Bodine swallowed the last of his beer and started to walk out of the nearly deserted saloon. The night man was getting the bucket of water ready for his swamper to mop up. At the batwings, Bodine hesitated, then stepped to one side, standing by the wall. Sam and Josiah had turned in early, and Pen and Bam had made their nightly rounds and were getting ready to hit the bunks. Matt walked back to the bar.
“I’ll use the back way this evening, Jack,” he told the bartender.
Jack nodded, thinking nothing of it. Maybe Bodine had to use the privy.
Bodine cut to his right once outside the darkened storeroom. He pressed up against the outside wall for a moment, adjusting his vision from the lamplit barroom to the night, wondering what had triggered the sudden feeling of danger.
He slipped his guns in and out of leather. Something dangerous was out there in the darkness, some predator lurking. But who, or what?
The town was very quiet, most of its citizens long abed. Matt did not move. He listened. Heard nothing. He reached down and removed his spurs, sticking them in a back pocket of his jeans. He shifted positions, darting across the dark alleyway. He pulled his right-hand .44, thumb on the hammer. He did not want to cock it yet, did not want to make the slightest noise that might give away his position. A back door opened and Matt flattened himself against the building. A man tossed out washwater, stood for a moment breathing in the night air, then stepped back and closed the door.
Matt moved quickly and silently, working his way down the back of the line of buildings. A dog barked from across the street, not a bark of greeting, but a bark of annoyance at something or somebody in its territory. It yelped after the sound of something striking the animal. Something thrown to chase it off? Bodine wondered. Probably.
He peeked around the corner of the closed café, first inspecting the rooftops, and after finding nothing amiss, carefully studied each pocket of darkness on ground level. He put his left hand over the action to muffle the sound and cocked his .44. He began working his way toward the street side of the alley, staying close to the café’s outer wall.
A slight shifting of a shadow from across the deserted street stopped him. He stood very still, knowing that to a hunter, movement attracts more notice than noise. The silhouette of a man appeared from out of the gloom. A man with a rifle in his hands. Matt waited motionless. The man seemed to be studying the other side of the street. If he was after Bodine—and Matt was sure he was—he had seen Bodine appear at the batwings, hesitate, and then back off. He had heard the saloonkeeper closing the doors and knew that Bodine had sensed something amiss and exited the place through the back door. The hunter would also know that he was now the hunted.
It was a wide street, not yet hard packed, due to the newness of the town, but it was rutted and uneven from wheels and hooves. It would too chancy for a shot from a short gun. Matt had to get closer. He began moving toward the front of the alley, carefully putting one boot in front of the other, testing the ground ahead of him with the toe of his boot before moving the other boot, not wanting to step on a bottle or can or sleeping cat’s tail.
He froze when the shadow across the street abruptly moved back into the blackness, away from the alley front.
Matt waited, his eyes straining to pierce the gloom. He saw no more silhouettes. The dog barked again, but this time it was farther up than before, off to Matt’s left. The man was shifting positions, and that would put him behind the general store; Matt hoped he was right in that assumption. Taking a deep breath, Matt ran across the street, exposing himself and expecting the shock of a bullet with each step. None came. He jumped the boardwalk and landed in the now-vacant alley, going down on one knee and catching his breath, breathing through his mouth to cut down on the noise of sucking in air.
The little dog continued to bark. Matt knew which dog it was: the little mutt that Bam and Pen had taken to feeding. A likeable little dog. Matt liked him even more now. He moved to the end of the building and pressed against it, listening and waiting. The dog stopped yapping.
Matt stepped around to the back of the store and stayed close to it as he worked his way up the row of buildings and houses. He saw the little mutt sitting by a back step, looking at him. Matt knelt down and the mutt ran to him, wagging his tail.
Matt petted the dog with his left hand and then patted the ground beside him. The dog plopped down. Matt put his mouth close to the dog’s ear and whispered, “Good boy. Good boy. You stay here.”
The dog stayed put and Matt moved on. He stepped into the next alley and saw the form of the rifleman near the mouth of passageway. Matt walked on for a few yards, then softly called, “Looking for me?”
The man spun around, startled, but not so startled that his rifle wasn’t level and pointed at Matt’s stomach, hammer back.
Matt shot him twice, the booming of the .44 enormous in the quiet night, the magnified sound bouncing off the walls that were left and right of the men.
Dan Ringold got off one shot, the muzzle pointing straight up as he was falling back, the shock of the twin .44’s knocking him backward. The .44-40 boomed in the night, the slug hitti
ng the night air and nothing else.
Matt walked up to the man and kicked the rifle out of his reach just as Pen and Bam were running across the street, pistols in their hands. They wore longhandles, boots, and their hats.
Matt knelt down and took Dan’s pistol from leather, handing it to Pen. “How about it, Dan,” he asked, just as Josiah came running out, Doc Winters right behind him, Josiah in his longhandles and the doctor in a robe. “Tell us that John Lee sent you to kill me.”
“Sorry, Bodine,” Dan spoke past gritted teeth against the pain. “You know the rules of the work.”
Doc Winters tore open the rifleman’s shirt. He stared him in the eyes. “You’re lung-shot, man. Don’t go out with a confession wedged behind your lips. Help us bring an end to this terrible war.”
Dan smiled up at the man. “You got a ridin’ horse, Doc?”
“What?” Winters asked, momentarily confused. “Ah . . . no, I don’t.”
“You do now. My horse is tied out back of the livery. He’s a good horse. You’re a compassionate man. I know you’ll take care of him. And he ain’t stolen neither. The bill of sale is in my saddlebags. He’ll take you down a lot of trails, Doc.”
“Why . . . ah, thank you,” Winters said. “You’re very kind.”
Dan laughed painfully. “First time anybody ever called me that.” He looked at Bodine. “How could you have known I was waitin’ outside for you, Bodine?”
“You know how it is in this business, Dan. We play our hunches.”
Dan nodded and closed his eyes. He would play no more deadly hunches on this side of that dark river.
“I’ll fetch his horse for you, Doc,” Pen said. “And he wasn’t kiddin’ none. That sorrel’s a fine animal.”
Dr. Winters shook his head. “What a strange gesture from such a violent man.”
“I heard he was trained to be a schoolteacher,” Josiah said. “I guess he got tired of it.”
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