Seven Days to Hell

by William W. Johnstone

The gang was electrified by the mystery gunfire, hauling out their guns, trying to look every which way at once to see where the shot came from. Sam swung the rifle toward Vard to pin him down next. Big Taw stood between Vard and Sam’s rifle, blocking the line of fire.

  Loman Vard caught on quick. He knew there was only one place the shooting could be coming from: “Up there, there on the ridge—shoot!” he cried.

  Big Taw was huge, taking up a lot of landscape. He unknowingly provided a lot of cover for Loman Vard, who was ducking behind him.

  But that worked two ways. He also blocked Vard from getting a shot at Sam. Not that Sam was showing much of himself to shoot at, firing as he was from a prone position with head and rifle protruding above the rim.

  Dick Stratton went into a funk under fire, losing his nerve. He broke and ran for the horses.

  Vard caught sight of him in the corner of his eye. Keeping under cover out of Sam’s line of fire, Vard carefully took aim and shot Stratton in the back. Dick Stratton threw up his arms and cried out, stumbled, and fell. No further signs of motion were seen from him, no further signs of life.

  Big Taw fisted a big-caliber pistol as he craned for a shot at the rifleman. Sam shot him, drilling him square in the center of his blocky torso. Big Taw lurched, staying on his feet. Sam put another round into him.

  Big Taw remained upright.

  Velez and Toplin blasted away at the ridgetop in Sam’s general direction. Some shots came close, kicking up dirt near Sam’s face. He slitted his eyes against the grit.

  Amazingly Big Taw was still standing. That irked Sam, who shot him again. Big Taw finally went down, blindly firing his gun into the air before crumpling into a heap.

  Sam had a split-second to choose between Vard and the kid: Who lives and who dies?

  “Oh, hell!” Sam said, making a choice:

  He shot Toplin.

  It was a rough shot because his sightlines on Toplin were minimal, so he was only able to wing him, clipping him in the side.

  Toplin howled when he was hit and started dancing around like a crazy man, hopping first on one leg, then the other, never both at the same time. It would have been comical if it weren’t so grotesque. Bill grabbed Toplin’s gun.

  “Vard!” Bill yelled. He wanted Vard to know who was taking him down.

  Meanwhile, Velez opened fire at Sam, missed. Sam shot at Velez, not missing, putting a bullet right between Velez’s eyes.

  Bill’s gun, that is, the one he’d taken from Toplin, was empty. He didn’t have much left, either. Exhausted, played out, he slumped to the ground.

  Toplin continued to weave around, doubling loops in a figure-eight pattern. He vented shrill staccato cries like the yipping of a small dog. That was the last straw for Sam, who silenced the other with a well-placed shot.

  On the far side of Dead Lake basin the twister moved on to the north and away.

  ELEVEN

  Sam went down into the basin, rifle in hand. He was not one to leave things to chance, especially not this day when he’d barely survived such a scrape as he’d had earlier in Weatherford.

  First he made sure that all the fallen were really dead. Loman Vard he checked first. He lay on his back, eyes open and staring. An expression of rage and disbelief marked his face as if he couldn’t believe he’d been shot dead.

  “Takes his secrets to the grave,” Sam murmured. Too bad, but that’s the way the deal went down. Sam had admired Longley’s nerve and had decided to give him a break. By shooting Toplin before he could gun the kid, Sam opened the way for Longley to kill Vard. Sam shrugged.

  Sam went the rounds of the rest of the gang but they were all dead gone. The kid was another story. Bill Longley lay where he’d fallen after blasting Vard, Tilson’s gun still in hand. Sam took it from Bill’s unresisting grip.

  It was empty. He tossed the gun away. Bill stirred, moaning. Still alive . . .

  Good, he might have some answers. Sam was powerfully interested to learn what brought Loman Vard and the kid together. Vard had been out to kill him, but why?

  Sam went down on one knee beside Bill. Bill looked like hell. He’d been shot twice, fallen off a horse, been beaten and kicked.

  He’d taken his hardest hit with the shoulder wound. It had bled plenty, soaking through much of his shirt.

  Longley needed patching up but he was in no danger of bleeding out yet. He was breathing regularly and his pulse was steady if not overly strong.

  One eye was swollen almost shut and the other was slitted open. It was watching Sam.

  “Still with us, huh?”

  “Who’re you?” Bill asked through smashed, swollen lips.

  “Your guardian angel, looks like,” Sam said.

  “I don’t see any wings on you . . .”

  “You ain’t likely to be wearing any, either.”

  “That’s okay . . . I’m in no hurry.”

  “Not ever, I mean.”

  “That’s okay, too . . . you the shooter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t like Vard,” Sam said.

  Bill Longley nodded slightly, as though that made perfect sense.

  “Vard’s dead?” he asked.

  “You did for him,” Sam said.

  “Good . . . The others?”

  “They’re dead, too.”

  “A clean sweep? Better still.”

  “Why was Vard after you?” Sam asked.

  “Can’t talk—mouth dry,” Bill said after a pause.

  Sure, Sam thought sardonically. Longley could talk until Sam asked him a question he wanted to know the answer to.

  “I’ll get you water,” Sam said. “I’m going to get my horse, then I’ll be back. Sit tight.”

  “Nothing else I can do,” said Bill.

  Sam rose, brushing dust off the knees of his jeans with his palms.

  “Hey,” Longley said.

  Sam halted, waiting.

  “You’re a Yank,” Bill said. It was not a question.

  “Yup. That rankles in your craw.” Sam’s remark was not a question, either.

  “I can live with it.”

  “Mighty big of you.”

  “I think so.”

  Sam went off, shaking his head, a sour smile playing on his lips. He climbed the easy slope of the rim wall and went down the other side. He went to his horse by the stream, mounted up, and rode back to Bill Longley in Dead Lake basin.

  He tethered the animal and crossed to the youth. A folded blanket under the back of Bill’s head raised it clear of the ground.

  “Water . . .” Bill croaked from between cracked, parched lips.

  “I’ll check your wounds first.” Sam wanted to make sure the other wasn’t gut-shot. He didn’t seem to be but best to be certain. A drink of water was bad for a gut-shot victim. Yet if Longley were gut-shot there was a good chance he’d die before getting somewhere where he could get proper medical treatment . . .

  Bill’s shirtfront was ripped, torn open. Sam used a pocketknife to cut away the cloth from the shoulder wound. There was a bullet hole in his upper left shoulder, an ugly thing that was a puckered hole thick with coagulated red-black blood.

  “Lucky . . . looks like the round missed the bone and went clear through,” Sam said.

  “Lucky . . . that’s me,” Bill said, sarcastic-like. “Takes more than that mangy bunch to do for Bill Longley.”

  Sam cut away the rest of Bill’s shirt, baring him from the waist up. The youth was lean with a long ropy torso. There was no fat on him and hardly much meat. Ribs were outlined against the skin.

  His flesh was piebald with ugly purple-brown-yellow bruises sustained both from his fall from his horse and the beating from Vard’s gang. A long finger-wide furrow along the ribs on the right side marked where a slug had creased him.

  Bill gasped as Sam’s fingers probed the area adjacent to the wound. “You’re damned rough!” His face was pale under his tan and beaded with cold sweat.


  “Checking for any cracks or breaks—can’t find any, which is all to the good,” Sam said. He unknotted his bandana, folding it into a square, and wetted it with water from his canteen. He wet Bill’s smashed lips with it, got an arm under the back of Bill’s head tilting it upward so the other could drink.

  Sam held the canteen spout to Bill’s mouth. “Easy—a little at a time.”

  Bill got some water down his throat. “More.”

  Sam upraised the canteen and Bill drank deeper. “That’s enough for now, got to get you patched up,” Sam said.

  He went back to the doctoring. He soaked his bandana with water and used it to clean the wounds, starting with the shoulder first. Bill Longley took it as stoically as he could, but an occasional moan escaped him.

  Sam said, “There could be fragments in the wound. You’ll have to have it looked at by a real doctor. They’ve got a good one in Hangtree, Doc Ferguson.”

  Bill stirred, restless and heaving not with pain but unease. “Hangtree—how close?”

  “A couple hours’ ride for a healthy man but that’s not you. You’re not going anywhere for a while lest the wound open up and start bleeding again. That’s the last thing you need.”

  Sam had a spare shirt in one of his saddlebags. He used his knife to cut it up into strips and squares. “Make-shift bandages but they’ll do . . . they’ll have to,” he said.

  Sam fished a metal flask out of a hip pocket, unscrewing its chain-fastened cap. Potent alcohol fumes laced the air.

  Bill Longley sniffed, his good eye glinting. “Whiskey! Let’s have a taste.”

  “Later, maybe, if there’s any left. I need it now to wash out the wounds so they don’t get infected. Particularly the shoulder,” Sam said.

  “Don’t be stingy, man, I’ve got a full bottle in my saddlebag.”

  “Oh? Where’s your horse?”

  “The big bay, you can’t miss it.”

  Sam eyed the row of tethered horses. “I don’t see it.”

  “Damn! He ran off when I was shot,” Bill said, crestfallen.

  “You’ve got your pick of the gang’s horses for a replacement.”

  “Sure, but no whiskey.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, let’s get to it.” Sam held a twig in front of Bill’s face. “Here, take it.”

  “What for?”

  “Bite down on it; it’ll help fight the pain.”

  “I don’t need it,” Bill said, waving it away with his good right hand.

  “Think not? The whizz’ll burn like fire.”

  “Do your worst, Yank.”

  “Brace yourself—this’ll hurt,” Sam said, not without a certain zest. He carefully poured some whiskey directly onto the raw bloody shoulder wound. Bill Longley gurgled his agony in the back of his throat, held back by clenched teeth. Breath hissed out from him like steam from a boiling kettle.

  “You all right?” Sam asked. Bill nodded tightly.

  More whiskey went to wet down a thick folded oblong of cloth that would serve as a bandage. It was long enough to drape over the top of Bill’s shoulder, covering the bullet’s entry and exit holes.

  “Hold on, this won’t be any fun,” Sam warned.

  “Hard to believe . . . it’s been such great sport till now,” Bill said, grimacing.

  Sam pressed the cloth in place, covering the wound. Long thin strips of cloth tied over and under Bill’s shoulder and underarm held the bandage in place.

  Bill Longley was stone still throughout the procedure. When it was done his knotted muscles went slack with relief.

  Sam checked the knotted bindings and found them good. He eased Bill’s head down on the pillowed blanket. For an instant he thought the other had fainted, but there was Bill’s one good slitted eye glaring up at him.

  “This rig should hold all right, so long as you don’t work it too hard,” Sam said.

  “What a waste of good whiskey,” Bill said.

  “You never had an infected wound go bad on you or you’d be singing a different tune,” Sam answered.

  Bill sank back down to the mass of leafy branches and boughs that served him as a bed. “How bad are they? My wounds, I mean.”

  “You’ll live,” Sam said. “Most likely,” he added.

  “Most likely? That’s a hell of a way to put it, Doc,” said Bill.

  “I’m no doctor,” Sam said, “and I’m not in the business of writing guarantees, either. You’re young and strong and with any luck you should pull through.”

  “I will—I got things to do.”

  “Such as?”

  “That’s my business,” Bill said, smiling grimly.

  “Something to do with why Vard was chasing you?”

  “Ordinarily I hold no truck with snoops, definitely not Yankee snoops, but since you saved my bacon I’ll just say that I’ll mind my business and you tend to yours.”

  “Fair enough,” Sam said.

  TWELVE

  With shadows falling Sam Heller made camp in the basin. Sam set up the site near where the Vard gang had tied up their horses and upwind from the dead men. The corpses already stank of death. Sam camped where the air was fresh and clean. Light winds from the west helped keep it that way.

  The storm had broken up and gone away as suddenly as it began, taking with it the oppressive air pressure and stifling humidity. The air was light and cool. It proved anew the truth of the old saying: If you don’t like the weather in Texas, just wait fifteen minutes.

  Longley was resting as comfortably as his wounds allowed, which meant not too comfortably at all. He was in no condition to be moved this night and no shape to do much more than sit up in the bed of boughs where he was nesting.

  Sam decided it was a good time to do some snooping, as Bill had accused him earlier of doing. There was truth in his words. He had been snooping, digging for information. Every man-hunter was a kind of snoop, sticking his nose in other folks’ business. The same could be said of every hunter.

  Sam’s first priority was to search the body of Loman Vard. Sam’s searching fingers worked deftly around the gore as he turned Vard’s suit pockets inside out, at first yielding little. Initial disappointment was offset by the discovery in an inside breast pocket of Vard’s jacket of an oblong waterproof billfold-type pinseal document carrier thick with hundred-dollar bills—twenty in all—two thousand dollars in new bills.

  Sam experienced a rising of the hallucinatory excitement that inevitably accompanies the finding of free money. Sam reasoned that his responsibilities as an undercover investigator were in no way compromised by his finding the money. Part of his undercover role as a bounty hunter required him to collect bounties on the heads of the Wanted outlaws he killed. He couldn’t refuse the money or try to return it; such out-of-character actions would expose his role as a covert investigator.

  Confiscating Vard’s cash fell into the same category, Sam believed with all his heart. If this was money stolen from a bank or bilked from a welfare fund collected for widows and orphans, he would have found some way to return it without compromising himself. That would be stealing. That was where he drew the line.

  But Loman Vard’s cash was murder money and Sam felt no hesitation in confiscating it. Sam had been probing Vard’s clandestine activities for several months without being able to put together the final piece of the puzzle. Spud Barker had supplied that final piece today when he identified Loman Vard’s Special line as murder for hire.

  What turned his supposition from theory into fact was the no-less-exciting discovery of a telegram that lay folded and hidden in a secret pocket in the lining of the document holder containing the money.

  Spud Barker had told how Vard used the telegraph company’s national facilities as a vehicle for his murder-for-hire operation. It all made sense to Sam now. Even though lacking the code key used for communicating covertly, Sam had a pretty good idea of what the telegram was all about.

  Sam didn’t know if the two thousand dollars on Vard’s person was a partial payment or
payment in full. From the size of the operation and number of men involved, Sam thought it was partial payment: Vard was likely skimming the cream to have some ready money for any unforeseen expenses.

  The telegram was a vital clue, a storehouse of information that could unlock a national murder-for-hire ring with extensive dealings in Texas and the West. The code breakers in the Department of the Army’s secret Black Bureau cryptography group would really go to town on this message.

  Too bad the telegram contained no clue as to why it was so important that Bill Longley not reach Hangtree alive. But he was alive and Sam had him, so that promising avenue of exploration was still very much open.

  Sam went to check on Bill, who lay uneasy and restless under some blankets on his bed of boughs. Grinding pain left Bill irritable and short tempered—or maybe he was always like that, Sam didn’t know him well enough to say.

  Sam left Bill a full canteen and resumed his chores, tending to his horse Dusty first.

  He unsaddled the animal and gave him a good rubdown with handfuls of weeds clutched in his big fists.

  The saddle contained a secret compartment concealed between a pair of leather flaps. What looked like extensive stitching and binding was merely for show, the overlaid flaps coming apart when tiny interior metal snaps holding them closed were unfastened.

  Longley had no clear sightlines on Sam or Dusty from where he lay at the campsite, but Sam kept the horse’s body between him and the young gunman as an extra precaution.

  Darkness was drawing in. Sam used a dead shrub branch set afire at one end to serve as a torch while he tended the badmen’s horses. His, Sam Heller’s horses now, by right of possession.

  “Two thousand in frogskins and a string of fine horses—not a bad day’s work,” Sam said to himself. Not bad at all.

  Not to mention taking considerable inroads on thinning out Weatherford’s outlaw herd.

  The horses were posted among enough fresh greenery to keep them fed for the night.

  His work here done, Sam set out to tackle an unbroken mustang: Bill Longley.

  * * *

  Sam sat beside the fire warming himself, from time to time puffing on a corncob pipe. Bill Longley lay on his back on bush boughs, with several blankets covering him from shoulder to toe. The blankets had come from bedrolls carried on saddles from some of the Vard gang’s horses.