Each boat was filled with well-armed fighting men out for blood: smugglers, River Rats, Tonkawa Indians, Sharkey’s people, and a horde of unaffiliated individuals who bore a grudge to the death over the tyranny of Barbaroux.
They numbered several hundred men in all. Not all were of the boarding party, a large number of them were boat handlers needed to sail their craft alongside Sabine Queen to allow the fighters to board her.
Blackskimmer went to pick up the crew of Gator Al who’d gone overboard before the crash and blast.
The steam-powered cruiser slowed to a halt near Belle Nyad. Because of her nearness to the Queen, she was the last to be picked up, after Mantee and Philpott had already been retrieved.
Those on board the Queen now had more important things to do than waste time shooting at a rescue boat that was not actively engaging them. They were in the fight of their lives . . .
Belle swam the short distance to the boat. Somebody reached down to help her aboard. She gripped the rescuer’s hand.
Sam Heller hauled Belle out of the water and set her down on deck. Her wet garments clung to every curve and hollow of her superbly formed body.
“Well, hel-lo!” Sam said.
THIRTY
“Repel all boarders!”
Barbaroux shrieked the command, wildly waving a cutlass over his head as he attempted to rally the crew of Sabine Queen for a counterattack.
The boarding party flotilla attacked from the starboard side. That was a natural: The starboard side was lower down in the water, making it easier to board. Of course they had to stay well clear of the hole in the side, which was taking in so much water so fast that there was danger of a boat’s being caught in the suction and helplessly pinned to the hull.
The stern side wheel, now stilled, served as a stairway to the main deck for boarders, its paddle spokes functioning as so many steps out of the water and on to the boat.
That was one way of access. Most of the boarders preferred to clamber out of their boats and up the starboard side, throwing feet on deck.
Among the first boarding parties to storm its way into Barbaroux’s wounded floating palace was a longboat marshaling the formidable combined firepower of Johnny Cross, Bill Longley, and Cullen Baker. Busting open Clinchfield Gaol was only a warm-up exercise for these three.
Now came the Big Killdown.
The longboat was a large streamlined rowboat capable of carrying fifteen. Crowded up at the bow out of the way of the oarsmen, the Texas pistol fighters were already in action, mowing down Combine reinforcements rushing to starboard.
An oarsman used the hook on the end of his gaffing pole to grip the steamboat’s starboard gunwale, bringing the longboat alongside the Queen. The rush was on as the boarders came scrambling out of the boat, lusting to fight and kill, with the Texas trio at the fore.
Similar scenes took place along the starboard side from bow to stern.
Bill Longley lost his balance on the tilted deck, starting to slip and fall. Johnny’s free left hand shot out, grabbing Bill by the arm and steadying him.
“Thanks! With that tilt it’s like being drunk,” Bill said.
“You should be right at home then,” Johnny quipped.
“This is one place where going barefoot comes in right handy,” said Cullen Baker.
Johnny’s right hand fisted a gun. He raised it to shoot a charging Combine man in the face, erasing the other’s features in a red splash.
“Yee-hah!” Bill Longley crowed.
“Remember: When we find Barbaroux, he’s mine,” Cullen Baker said, breathing gustily, the kill fever working on him.
“I’ll tell you how we find him,” Johnny said, putting a hand on Cullen Baker’s arm. “Look where the firepower is heaviest, that’s where he’ll be. He’ll be the best guarded. Then we come at him from a different direction, one Barbaroux won’t expect.”
“He’s mine,” Baker repeated, a stubborn mulelike cast stiffening his features.
“You got him,” Johnny said, Bill nodding assent. “And Sexton Clarke is mine.”
“Clarke? That little preacher-looking pissant Barbaroux sent to kill me? I’ll kill him, too.”
“He’s mine, Cullen,” Johnny said seriously. “I done staked my claim and already laid the ground work in on him. Don’t cheat me of my fun.”
Cullen Baker was silent.
“Cullen . . .”
“All right, Johnny, he’s yours.”
“What the hell, Cullen? How many people can you kill at one time?” Bill Longley said, only half-joking.
“I don’t know, but I aim to find out.”
The Sabine Queen was warm with swampers and Combine men locked in mortal combat, shooting, slashing, stabbing, hacking, clubbing, and even using their bare hands.
Below decks, the boiler exploded, loosing a tremendous explosion amidships. The cylindrical, torpedo-shaped boiler blasted vertically upward like a rocket, tearing through the main deck and the next deck above, inflicting huge damage to the superstructure.
A number of fires had broken out on the boat, taking their toll of lives and adding to the chaos. Dawn was breaking, the sky lightening in the east. This only fanned the fighting frenzy on both sides, attackers and defenders. There was more light to kill by.
The Grand Saloon was where Commander Rufus Barbaroux made his last stand, ringed by a hardcore element of his elite personal bodyguard.
The site was brightly lit by chandeliers, rows of wall-mounted flambeaux torches, and ornate many-branched candelabras scattered throughout the big room. They were the illuminants of the nightly revels in the hall, gone unsnuffed because of the surprise attack on Clinchfield Gaol and its fast-developing aftermath.
The floor tilting down toward starboard gave the scene an unreal, hallucinatory quality. A pall of gray-brown smoke gathered in the great hall, fruit of one or perhaps several unseen fires burning throughout the boat. The lights looked blurred and hazy through the smoke. Things were getting hot for Barbaroux, both literally and figuratively.
Sabine Queen was really starting to burn. The forward bulkhead of the Grand Saloon was ablaze, a solid wall of fire. The heat was terrific. Tongues of flame began to lick their way aft along the walls while serpents of fire wriggled their way along the high ceiling.
Smoke was thick in the space, eyes stinging, throat searing, choking. Yet to set foot outside on deck meant death, for out there the boarders had gained the upper hand.
Bodies of Barbaroux’s bodyguards piled up as swampers crowded the Grand Saloon from all sides not already cut off by fire. They shot down Combine men from around doorways and through windows.
Most of the growing number of corpses belonged to Barbaroux’s men, with more swamper attackers making themselves felt with each passing moment.
A tentacle of flame lashed out at Barbaroux. Involuntarily crying out, he ducked barely in time to avoid being smacked by it but lost his commodore’s cap, which went rolling away down the tilted floor.
His once iron ring of bodyguards had been winnowed away to a single thickness, with gaps steadily opening as more of his protectors were gunned down from barely glimpsed shooters flitting from cover to cover through ever-thickening smoke.
The Commander recoiled, jumping back to avoid being run down by a screaming human torch. The burning man rushed past, leaving footprints of fire across a priceless Persian carpet. The floorboards were hot underneath Barbaroux’s feet.
Time for me to make an exit—undignified, perhaps, but necessary, he said to himself. He couldn’t have said it aloud to save his life because he was coughing too hard from the choking smoke.
Leaving what little remained of his personal bodyguard behind to fend for themselves, Barbaroux beat a hasty retreat aft, stumbling past the throne platform, through a passageway and into a shadowy back room.
Set in the opposite wall was a bulkhead door accessing the stern of the boat. Barbaroux pressed against it, eyes red and burning, body sweat drenched, panting and gas
ping for breath like a sow trying to haul itself out of a too-deep mud wallow.
Gathering his reserves for a breakout effort, he flung open the door—
Only to be confronted by Cullen Baker standing on the other side.
Barbaroux froze, paralyzed by shock and fear, the gun in his holster forgotten. Not that it would have done any good.
Cullen Baker had his guns out and leveled, pointing at the Commander.
“Well, Barbaroux!” he said, a towering pillar of cold rage.
He shot Barbaroux in the belly. Barbaroux lurched, staggering backward.
“That one’s for Julie—my wife,” Cullen Baker said.
He fired again.
“Oww!” Barbaroux cried, going down. He hit the floor with a thump.
He looked up, eyes wide and scary. Cullen Baker stood over him. He shot Barbaroux in the right elbow, then the left. Shot him in the right kneecap, then the left.
“Those were for me,” he said, smiling.
“Cullen, Cullen!” Someone was calling his name, softly, insistently.
“Cullen! It’s me, Bill! Bill and Johnny!”
Cullen Baker looked back, seeing Bill Longley and Johnny Cross standing outside, sticking their heads around the edges of the door frame to peek inside.
“What’re you whispering for?” Cullen Baker demanded, frowning, his thick-featured face knotted up like a fist.
“We didn’t want to surprise you,” Bill said in a normal tone of voice.
“Didn’t want to get shot by you,” Johnny added.
“Oh. That makes sense,” Cullen Baker said, tension flowing out of his face.
Johnny and Bill stepped inside and took a look at Barbaroux.
“Help . . . help me . . .” Barbaroux mouthed the words but lacked the strength to say them.
“Sure you shot him enough?” Johnny said.
“Enough for him to last a while and suffer,” Baker said.
“C’mon, Cullen, we’ve got to get out of here,” Bill urged. “The boat’s sinking and the fire’s rising.”
“Finish him off and let’s go,” Johnny said.
“Like hell! Let him burn,” Cullen Baker said.
Johnny shrugged. “That’s your business, ain’t nothing to me.”
Away they went, the three of them, in search of a friendly boat and escape. Roe Brand saw them and gave them the high sign, steering them to a flatboat waiting off the starboard stern.
“Don’t fall in,” Roe warned the Texas trio as they readied to board the boat. “The water’s full of gators!”
They climbed down into the flatboat very carefully indeed.
* * *
Barbaroux lay on his back, agonized, and moaning. Fire had reached the back room, the ceiling was a mass of flames, sagging ominously in the middle. Fiery flakes and chips rained down from it, its underlying framework creaking and straining.
He became aware of the nearness of a presence—
Tanya, Malvina’s creature, silent, wide eyed, staring down at him.
“Faithful to the finish, my last follower,” Barbaroux mumbled.
Dropping to one knee, Tanya began turning out his pockets, her small slim hands swiftly and expertly lifting his hefty overstuffed billfold, several modest-sized pouches of gold, and a diamond and emerald stickpin, making them hers.
She coveted his ornate gold and diamond rings and tried with all her might to pry them off his fat fingers, but they were too tight, too deeply sunken to come off. If she’d had a knife she would have cut off his fingers to get the precious jewelry, but she didn’t. Was there time for her to find a blade?
No! With a heave and a groan the flaming ceiling started to give way, black cracks spiderwebbing through it, swelling out and down, bellying out.
It looked like it would all come down but at the last instant it held—just.
Tanya’s eyes were wide indeed, showing white rings around dark brown irises and swimming pupils. The spooked orbs seemed to fill the upper half of her face.
She rose, darting out the door, not looking back.
“Oh, what an artist is lost to the world!” Barbaroux sobbed.
The blazing ceiling gave way and came down, engulfing Commander Rufus Barbaroux in an Eternity of Flame.
* * *
Malvina the Gypsy Witch had run out of space and time. She stood huddled at the rail of the uppermost deck of the superstructure on the starboard side.
Starboard because it was much lower than the port side, which was correspondingly thrust higher into the air as the opposite side sank lower in the water.
Still it was a dauntingly long drop to the water below, a drop that would have given a well-conditioned adult in the prime of life pause, not to mention an incredibly ancient crone who labored when she took a breath.
But taking the high jump to the river far below was one of only two options Malvina had left. It was that or burn to death in the blazing inferno now turning the superstructure into a fiery witch’s cauldron.
There was nowhere else to run. Heat, flames, smoke surrounded her on all sides, leaving her only a tiny patch of untouched deck on which to cower. It was a race to see which would get her first: the fire or the building collapsing around her. If the latter, the fire would still get her anyway.
She would have jumped sooner but the waist-high safety rail balked her. She lacked the strength and agility to climb it and jump from the top rail.
Now the rail itself was on fire, its uprights and horizontal top rail entwined by vines of flame, the wood charring and blackening.
On the water, Hazard’s Blackskimmer stood a safe distance off Sabine Queen’s starboard, idling, afloat in place.
The other boats on the scene, filled with members of the victorious swamper boarding party, were getting away from the sinking burning steamer as fast as they could.
Crew and passengers of Blackskimmer stood at the rail watching the singular human drama being enacted as Malvina reeled and swirled on the top deck, a black-clad spidery looking thing staggering amidst sheets of red flame that sought to consume her.
“The Conjure Woman!” Belle Nyad exclaimed. A blanket provided by the cutter’s crew was worn wrapped over her shoulders.
“Can you go in closer, Skipper?” Sam Heller asked.
“I could but I won’t,” Captain Hazard said.
“How much . . . ?”
“Not a matter of money, not this time,” Hazard said, shaking his head. “When the Queen goes under, as she will any minute now, she’ll create a whirlpool that’ll suck in anything too close and take it down to the bottom with her. I don’t mind risking my neck, but I won’t risk my boat!”
The safety rail had almost burned through. Malvina took a last desperate chance. She took a few steps back to gain headway, as much as she dared with the flames so close. She wrapped her long black shawl over her white-haired head and living mummy face. She took as deep a breath as her withered lungs and crabbed shrunken rib cage would allow.
Hugging her upper body she scuttled as quickly as she could at the charred blazing safety rail and bumped up against it.
The rail gave way, falling out and down, Malvina falling after. Trailed by folds of her fluttering dark robes, she plummeted downward like a black comet.
She hit the water, raising a spout twice her height. A column of silver bubbles marked her descent into blackwater depths. Rippling circles radiated outward from the point of impact.
A long pause followed.
“Gone! It’s over,” Captain Hazard said.
“And good riddance,” added Belle.
Just when it seemed the world had seen the last of Malvina, she surfaced, floundering and flailing, spitting out water and sputtering.
A mighty unease thrashed below the surface, ringing her. A mass of gators surrounded Malvina, arrowing in for the kill.
Razor-fanged maws gaped, each of them snapping shut on the Conjure Woman. Already maddened by the excess of blood in the water, the gators dragged her
under and tore her to bits.
“Whew! Now it’s over,” Captain Hazard corrected.
Sam Heller swore softly under his breath, shaking his head. “She had a lot of answers,” he said.
“Now they belong to the gators,” Belle Nyad said. “So does she,” she added.
“The Witch Woman, the Fortune-Teller. She must not have seen this in her future,” Captain Hazard remarked.
“It was all a lie. Just like everything on the Big White Boat,” Belle said. She moved away, standing near the steam engine to bask in its radiant warmth.
Captain Hazard nudged Sam with an elbow to the ribs. His voice pitched low so only Sam could hear as he said, “What matter a dead old crone when a live young beauty walks among us, all fire and silk, eh, bucko?”
Sam began giving some considerable thought to the remark.
On the flatboat commanded by Roe Brand, George St. George was enraged that Barbaroux had escaped his personal vengeance.
“Cullen Baker got him. That beats feeding Barbaroux to the gators,” Johnny Cross said.
“You might have something there,” George said thoughtfully.
The sun came up, all scarlet and seething, giving promise of a sunrise as bloody looking as had been the previous day’s sunset.
The Sabine Queen went down, a squalid smoking hulk swallowed whole and without a trace by the Blacksnake.
THIRTY-ONE
Johnny Cross was going home.
He’d said his good-byes. Cullen Baker was a free man . . . as free as any man could be with his appetite for destruction and bottom thirst for raw whiskey. But at least he wouldn’t hang. Not this time, anyway.
Bill Longley was going to stay in Moraine County for a while with Baker. There was still plenty of Combine men and supporters who had yet to clear out of the Blacksnake. Hunting them down promised to be great sport and profitable, too. That crowd had stolen big while Barbaroux was in the saddle, Bill said.
He and Cullen Baker would form a partnership to hunt them down, kill them, and take their stolen loot. A third of it was Johnny’s if he cared to throw in with them . . . all he had to do was say the word and the Texas Trio would be back in business together, hell-bent for leather!
Seven Days to Hell Page 33
