Savage Gun (A Piccadilly Publishing Western Book 13)

by Neil Hunter

  After the trial Cord let everything go. He got drunk for a week and when his senses cleared he took out after Chantry. He found him in Tucson. With deliberate intent he goaded Chantry into a gunfight and then coldly shot him to pieces.

  It satisfied his vengeful urge but it created problems.

  Almost before the gun smoke had cleared Matthew Cord found himself a wanted man. He became hunted and he ran, because he needed time to think and sort out the confusion in his mind. The running only made things worse. It made him look guilty in the eyes of those who pursued him. For almost three months he evaded them but the odds were too great and they finally caught him.

  His trial was short and decidedly ironic. By some twist of fate the presiding judge happened to be one of the few who did not ascribe to the leniency of the reformers. He was an unrepentant hardliner and he practically told the jury what he expected them to say. There was no hesitation. Matthew Cord was found guilty and sentenced to thirty years hard labor, to be served in Yuma Territorial Prison.

  Darkness began to flood the rain-swept sky. Heavy clouds were drifting in. Before it got too dark Matthew Cord found himself a place for the night. He tethered his horse near a strip of grass, then he set to and built himself a rain-proof lean-to out of branches, spreading his slicker on the ground underside up. He made a small fire and put on coffee to boil, warmed a pan of beans. By the time he’d eaten, the coffee was ready. He drank three cups, moved the pot away from the flames and built up the fire. Pulling his blanket over him he lay down and listened to the rain drumming on the foliage overhead.

  Lying there brought back thoughts of Yuma Pen and he remembered how he’d lain in that cold cell listening to the wind whipping in across the river, pulling the dry desert dust with it. The wind made a low moaning sound, a sad, despairing cry that told all there was to tell about the grim prison standing on the rocky bluff above Yuma Town. Yuma Pen, they said, was the last stop before hell. A man might as well give up his soul once they took him through the gates. There was no hope at Yuma. No compassion. Just deprivation, pain, and suffering, and where death was often a welcome diversion.

  Matthew Cord quickly found that most of the things he’d heard about Yuma Pen were true. It was a terrible place. It was hard and unrelenting. By day it was an oven of heat with no escape, infested by flies, and with the stench of despair. At night the temperature dropped alarmingly, leaving a man shivering in the foul-smelling cubicles they called cells. Everything about Yuma was bad. The food was the worst kind of slop ever passed off for human consumption but a man soon learned not to complain. If he did he went without altogether and bad as it was the food was at least a kind of nourishment.

  As if there wasn’t enough to put up with, there was still the human element to add to the list. The guards of Yuma Pen were a collection of misfits in their own right. It was to be expected that they would be as hard, if not harder, than the men they were watching over. Yet it seemed also that a requirement of a guard’s makeup was an inborn capacity to hurt and humiliate. Matthew Cord found that the guards of Yuma were all experts and seemed to be men who enjoyed their work.

  None more so than Reb Warner. On Cord’s second day in Yuma he had a taste of Warner’s technique and found the man to be a sadistic, brutal bully. Warner carried a foot-long weighted club which he could use with terrible effect. In his first week Cord felt the bite of that club countless times. Reb Warner liked to use it often and Cord’s unconcealed hatred of him only spurred Warner on. Cord stood it for as long as he could and then one day, almost a month after his arrival, he said to hell with it and hauled off at Warner. He got in a few powerful blows to the guard’s face and body before he was set on by the other guards. They beat him to the ground and just before he passed out Cord had the satisfaction of seeing Warner on his back in the dirt, his face a bloody mask.

  That brief attack cost Cord a thirty-day stretch in solitary. He was thrown into one of the barred holes they called the tombs. Here he was burned by day and frozen by night. He was fed scraps of dirty food and a mug of water once a day. He wasn’t allowed any blankets and there were no sanitary arrangements. On the sixth night of his time in solitary Reb Warner and three other guards paid him a visit. They took him out of the hole and methodically beat him until he couldn’t stand. Afterwards they tossed him back and locked the grille covering the hole. For the next three days Cord just lay against the wall of the cell, not moving, not doing anything but clinging onto life.

  He emerged from solitary even more determined than before not to let them grind him down. If Reb Warner had been expecting a beaten man to come out of the cell he was disappointed. Cord was filthy, unshaven and physically weak, his body a mass of bruises and half-healed cuts but he walked away from that dark hole on his own, blinking his eyes against the blazing sunlight. For a moment his gaze met that of Warner’s—and the guard realized that he was looking at a man he’d do well never to turn his back on.

  In the long weeks that followed Matthew Cord adjusted to the harshness of life in Yuma. He adjusted but in no way did he succumb to the malaise that affected many of the inmates. He saw it in their eyes, in their attitudes, even in the way they talked. They had resigned themselves to an existence wholly centered within the walls of the prison. The world outside had ceased to exist. It no longer interested them. All they had, all they wanted was here, in Yuma Pen. Many of them would die here and if any did find themselves on the outside again they would begin to yearn for the closeness of the prison walls.

  For Matthew Cord all that mattered was the outside world. He had no intention of spending the greater part of his life in this forgotten place. There seemed to be only one way of achieving that—a way he was fully prepared to attempt. It was said that no man could ever escape from Yuma...for even if he got beyond the walls the only escape route lay across the desert land. There it would be a constant battle against the brutal heat, a lack of water, and the ever-present Apaches. Matthew Cord took all that as part of the price of getting out and figured that if he could get over the prison wall, whatever else had to be faced would be easy going after surviving in the man-made nightmare of Yuma Pen.

  But his escape bid was not to be. Events dictated that he had no need to break out. His key to freedom came in the form of a man named Murdoch, who offered him a chance to go back to work, hunting wanted men, his own way, and with no restrictions as to how he did it.

  Cord sat up suddenly, his hand reaching for the big Colt. Just as suddenly he relaxed as he realized the cause of his interest. The rain was easing off, the heavy sound of the downpour fading. It was the lack of sound that had roused him and he’d reacted automatically. He lay down again and listened closely to the diminishing rainfall. Soon it would stop altogether. By morning the heat would be back.

  His mind was too active to let him sleep. He thought about Ben Shelby and his bunch. From what he could make out they were heading southwest. If Shelby kept to that route he was going to end up in the Hatchets. Thinking about it Cord had to admit that he would have done the same in Shelby’s boots. Down in that no-man’s-land, where a sizeable section of New Mexico spilled over into Mexican Chihuahua, the Hatchet Mountains, and the surrounding country offered much to a man like Ben Shelby. The area was wide and barren and empty. Nothing grew there save a few cacti and a few species of hardy scrub. A few ranches dotted the rim of the Hatchet country, close to the Rio Grande as it wound its way down into Texas and on to where it eventually emptied into the Gulf of Mexico at Bagdad, Texas. The interior of the Hatchet country was empty, save for lizards and snakes—and roving bands of warring Apaches who had used the unmarked trails for countless years when they raided Mexico and the U.S. alike. Shelby and his bunch could hide out for years in the sprawling canyons that crisscrossed the Hatchet range. Once in the vaulted, silent mountains they could vanish for as long as they wanted and an army wouldn’t find them.

  Matthew Cord knew the area well. He’d once spent two months in the Hatchet country, tra
cking a renegade Apache who had kidnapped the young wife of a diplomat from Washington. Cord had eventually cornered his man. The Apache had put up savage resistance and Cord had come close to losing more than just the fight. But finally he had ridden out of the silent canyons, with the woman at his side, and an unmarked grave behind him. A lasting memory of the assignment had been provided by the young woman. It had been a long ride back to where her middle-aged husband waited and during the trip she showed her appreciation for what Cord had done more than once, and in an extremely personal way.

  Recalling a woman out of his past made Cord think about the four female hostages riding with Shelby’s bunch. Whatever lay ahead there was no doubt in Cord’s mind that it would mean discomfort for the women. A long ride in this desolate terrain was no picnic, even for a man conditioned to the extremes of weather as he was. For women, especially ones who were neither dressed or equipped for the conditions, it was going to be brutal. Cord knew he had to do something to alter that situation. If he didn’t, there were going to be more of those pitiful, unmarked graves that dotted the length and breadth of the Southwest.

  Cord reheated the coffee and filled a mug. He sat nursing it as he debated various approaches to the situation. He finally had to admit he was faced with one of those problems requiring moment-to-moment action. All he could do was act according to the way things developed. The snag was the four women. There was no way of anticipating how they might react once any action started. Without them Cord could have moved in and picked off Shelby’s men one by one. But the outlaws would use the women as shields. Any strategy Cord devised would have to take the women into consideration. It would be too easy to endanger their lives Cord was reluctant to do anything that might such a possibility.

  He emptied his mug, noticing it had stopped raining. Cord lay back, ready for sleep.

  When he opened his eyes the sun was rising and the land was bathed in that oddly bright light that comes with the dawn. Cord rolled out of his blanket. With economical movements he built up his fire and cooked a quick breakfast of salt-bacon and beans, washing it down with half a pot of coffee. He knew the possibility lay ahead that he might have to go for a long time without food and he’d learned long ago to prepare for such events by eating well whenever the chance presented itself. As soon as he finished eating he cleaned his utensils, packed his gear and moved out.

  He picked up the trail soon after moving off. And later he found the place where they had made camp the night before. By mid-morning he had them spotted.

  From the crest of a sandstone ridge he had a clear view across an undulating stretch of semi-desert. And in the far distance, seen through shimmering heat waves, a slow-moving group of riders travelling in a southwesterly direction. Cord stayed where he was and watched them. He’d gain nothing by letting them spot him. As far as he knew they were not aware of his presence. Cord wanted it to stay that way—for the present at least.

  He stayed on the ridge for a couple of hours, sheltering beneath an overhang of rock from the harsh rays of the sun. Waiting came easy to Matthew Cord. He’d done enough during his years as a lawman. There had been times when it seemed he did little else but sit and wait. Waiting for something to happen—for someone to show. And many times the waiting was for nothing. Yet over the long years he’d developed the technique that enabled him to stay motionless for long periods, his body immobile while his senses stayed alert.

  Only when the distant riders had been long gone from his sight did he move. Mounting up he rode down off the ridge and across the flatland, following a wide swath of tracks a blind man couldn’t have missed.

  Out in the open he felt the full force of the high sun. It bathed the dry land with a fearsome intensity and the land threw the heat back. The very air trapped the heat and Cord felt smothered. It was as if he were being cocooned in a thick, enveloping blanket. There was no escape from it. The heat burned a man dry, stretching his flesh tight over his bones, while the ever-present dust etched itself into the very pores of the skin.

  Midday. The sun was high now. A pulsing orb in the blue curve of a cloudless, crystal-clear sky. Silence covered the land. It was absolute, all embracing, as ancient as the land itself.

  Cord reached the far side of the plain. The trail he followed led into a low range of sandstone hills. A dun-colored ripple of naked slopes, devoid of vegetation. Cord took his horse along the dried-up bed of some age-old river; his mount picked its way carefully along the cracked, stone-littered channel which had high, crumbling banks on either side.

  The shot came suddenly from out of nowhere. A flat, whip crack of sound. Cord felt something tug at his shirt, over his ribs on the left side. There was a flash of burning pain across his side. He kicked free of the stirrups and threw himself towards the ground, snatching his Colt free as he went down. As he slammed to the ground he drew the cocked gun in close to his body.

  He lay still. The sound of the shot quickly faded. The silence fell again. Somewhere he could hear the muted sound of his horse picking its way along the riverbed. There was nothing else. No sound, no movement. But Cord knew that somewhere close by there was a man with a gun and he would be watching Cord and waiting.

  Matthew Cord could play that game too. Like it or no he was going to have to play. It all depended on who got tired of waiting first!

  Four

  Sweat beaded Cord’s forehead and trickled down into his eyes. He blinked furiously against the stinging sensation. There was nothing else he could do. Almost twenty minutes had passed, with him lying motionless, exposed, and then the faintest of sounds had reached him. It was off to his left and above him. Cord reckoned it was someone on the rim of the bank maybe twenty-five feet away. He’d tightened his grip on the sweat-damp handle of the big Colt and he’d waited again. Another five minutes slid by before he heard sound again a soft whisper of fine gravel disturbed by a light footstep. He knew now that his unseen assailant was no white man. Only one breed of human animal could move in such a fashion.

  Apache.

  At the back of his mind he had already given thought to the chance of his man being an Apache. There were not many white men who would sit for twenty minutes before checking to see if they’d hit their target. Most who shot from ambush would simply mount up and ride on, not even bothering to take a close look. But not an Apache. They were born and bred fighters and they were far too dedicated not to make sure they had a kill. There was also another factor much more practical, and forced on the proud Apache by his situation. The possibility of a weapon to add to a warrior’s supply. There might be ammunition as well. All those things were worth waiting for.

  Matthew Cord listened as his would-be killer approached. Even now the man moved with caution. Cord knew that there would be a cocked gun aimed at him all the time. Until the Apache was certain that Cord was dead he would treat him as a potential source of danger. That fact was clear in Cord’s mind. He knew that when he made his move it had to be at the right moment. There would only be one chance and he had to make the best of it. If he misjudged he wouldn’t get another chance.

  A shadow fell across the pale, sandy ground. As Cord’s eyes registered the fact the shadow stopped all movement. The Apache didn’t move for awhile. When he did he began to circle Cord’s body. Cord swore inwardly. One thing he didn’t want was the Apache behind him.

  Aware that time was slipping away, Cord faced the Apache, his cocked revolver exposed. He thrust his arm out, aiming and firing in one fluid motion. Cord’s two shots merged with the single one from the Apache’s rifle. He felt the bullet slam into the ground inches from his face. And in that same split-second he saw the Apache, lips drawn back in a snarl of anger from crooked teeth. Then his two shots hit. The first punched a ragged hole high in the Apache’s chest. The second bullet hit an inch away from the first. The instant he fired, Cord rolled away from the spot, coming quickly to his feet. He ran for the first cover he spotted, throwing himself down behind a shelf of rock. Twisting his body round
he searched the area. He saw nothing, heard nothing. There was only the dead Apache, sprawled on the hard ground.

  Cord decided the Indian had been alone. If he’d had companions Cord would have seen and heard them by now. But there was nothing. He was alone with the dead man. He stood up and moved into the open, eyes searching the area, he turned away and began to walk to where his horse stood waiting for him.

  He thought about the Apache. One Apache here meant others in the area. There was the possibility that this one had been a loner, a renegade. He considered the likelihood and dismissed it. It was more logical that the Apache had been a scout, ranging far ahead of his raiding party. He’d spotted Cord and had decided to do some personal killing—and had almost succeeded, Cord thought sourly. He had suddenly become aware of his aching side.

  He reached his horse and unslung his big canteen. The water inside was warm but it washed away the taste of dust from his mouth. Cord found some clean rag in his saddlebag. Opening his shirt he washed out the shallow gash in his side.

  When he’d finished he mounted up and rode on. Farther along the riverbed the trail veered off sharply. Cord followed on. He pushed his horse now. The possibility of Apaches in the area made it necessary to force the pace. He didn’t need hostile Indians as well as the Shelby bunch, though it looked as if he might get them anyway. As always circumstances seemed to alter every time he blinked his eyes. One thing had proved itself though—the need for moment-to-moment reactions. He was definitely going to have to play it that way now whatever the outcome—which was anybody’s guess. Cord didn’t waste time trying to figure what it might be. Whatever was likely to happen then would do just that.

  Five

  Things were not going right and Ben Shelby was angry. It wasn’t that he found himself unable to master the situation. He could keep control. The irritation had been caused by their being forced to vacate Gray’s Creek in such a hurry. Shelby had figured on a reasonable spell in the town. There had been a chance for them to rest, to relax. But it hadn’t happened that way. Shelby had just begun to enjoy himself with the redhead when Morgan LeGrand had showed, telling of Bo Redford’s disappearance. After that things had happened fast. Whoever it was out on the street, he, or they, had no intention of giving Shelby and his bunch any rest. When Shelby sent his men out they saw nobody but Sam Colton had got himself killed. It was then that Shelby decided Gray’s Creek wasn’t such a good place after all. He’d lost two men before they’d known what had happened. So he saw that a quick retreat was the only answer. Isha Cooley had silenced the bartender and then using the four girls as protection the bunch had taken to their horses. They had left Gray’s Creek behind, cutting across country, their final destination the barren wasteland of the Hatchet Mountain country. Ben Shelby had used the desolate emptiness of the Hatchets before and he was confident that once they reached the place he could lose any pursuit.