by Paul Lederer
Two men?
Where was the third? He yanked the horse’s head hard to the left and ducked low as the outlaw fired at him from concealment. It saved Laredo’s own life, but meant the end for the army bay who took the bullet behind his front shoulder and went down with an awkward lurch. Laredo kicked free of the stirrups and leaped from the saddle before the horse could roll on him. He hit the ground hard. The rifle was jolted from his hand and the breath was driven out of him. A second shot was fired in the night as Laredo dragged himself to the cover of a clump of stunted willow brush. Then three or four more apparently randomly-fired bullets were loosed into the darkness.
Then the night was utterly silent again. Crouched with his pistol in his hand, Laredo squinted into the darkness as if by looking hard enough he could see better, His hat had fallen off and his hair was in his eyes. His back and chest were soaked with perspiration. Nothing moved. He decided that they were probably trying to encircle him.
‘Hey, Laredo!’ someone called out. ‘Are you all right?’
Recognizing the voice, Laredo relaxed enough to smile. ‘Is it all clear?’ he called back.
‘Far as I can tell,’ Wage Carson answered. ‘I got this one. The other two never stopped or even slowed down.’
Laredo walked to where Wage was standing on the sandy bluff and took a moment to crouch beside the dead man and flick a match to life with his thumbnail.
‘Do you recognize him?’ Wage asked.
‘Yes,’ Laredo said, rising. ‘A man named Broderick Dent out of Tennessee with a stop-over in Fort Leavenworth Federal Prison.’
Laredo retrieved his rifle and hat, stepped past the dead horse and scrambled up the rocky face of the bluff to find Wage sitting on his gray horse, rifle in hand.
‘What are you doing out here?’ Laredo asked.
‘Doing my job, deputy,’ Wage said, flashing one of his boyish grins. ‘Climb aboard, I’ll take you back to your horse.’
‘Did you see which way they went?’ Laredo asked.
‘Not in the direction I would have expected,’ Wage answered, as Laredo swung up behind him. ‘They’re headed straight back toward Hangtown. I might have tried to follow them, but then I heard the shot and knew they had tried to set an ambush for you.’
‘It just about worked,’ Laredo said. ‘I sure am glad you’re conscientious about your job.’
They further discussed matters after Laredo had recovered his buckskin. Wage was still puzzled, ‘I don’t see why they’d head back to Hangtown after committing murder there.’
‘Simple. They didn’t have the money with them. That’s what the fourth man was doing – guarding it.’
‘Money?’ Wage’s confusion deepened. ‘I think there’s a few things you haven’t told me, deputy.’
Laredo enlightened him along the trail. Wage listened thoughtfully. ‘You might have told me sooner,’ he said, when Laredo had finished telling him about the four men and the bank hold-up in Tucson.
‘I didn’t see the need for it. They were bound to continue on their way in a day or two. I meant to take care of business out on the desert – at a place of my own choosing.’
‘We could have rounded them up at the seep,’ Wage suggested.
‘When? No, Wage, things never worked out for us to have a chance at them. Besides Virgil Sly is hell on wheels with a gun and Jay Champion is as mean as they come. There would have been blood spilled. I couldn’t risk having Hangtown lose its marshal in what was my fight.’
‘So what will they do now? Collect their loot and ride off again?’
‘I don’t see that they have any other choice, do you? If there was a sober soldier in town I might consider taking some of them up there to help out. But there isn’t one, and besides, who am I to give orders to an army unit – and maybe get another of them killed?’
‘So what do we do now, Laredo?’
‘What we can, Wage. We just do what we can.’
Bert Washburn was getting more than a little nervous. Earlier there had been a single shot, but Jay and the others could not possibly have had time to complete their mission when it sounded. They had had to fight their way out of Hangtown, it seemed. Later there had been other shots – far distant, but these could not have been signal shots either. He could think of nothing to do.
After the first shot he had seen someone he thought was the tall stranger, racing his horse the length of the street, and later still the big marshal who was unmistakable even in the dark and at this distance because of his bulk.
At the same time he had seen a body of men, the soldiers, obviously, emerge from the saloon. Bert wondered what he should do now. Jay Champion had given him his instructions, but he had not been told what to do if everything fell apart. All he could think of doing was to remain in place and guard the loot. Of course he could have just grabbed the saddle-bags and taken off on his own.
If he felt like committing suicide.
In silent desperation, Bert hunkered down behind a boulder and waited.
‘All right,’ PFC Cherry was saying inside the saloon, ‘maybe when Coleman was shot over that girl he was in the wrong, but now they’ve gunned down Dan Osborne.’ Cherry was a big man with a ruddy complexion. Just now his face was nearly the color of his name. He was holding forth to the gathered soldiers, some of whom were trying to dress as they listened.
‘Not only that,’ a soldier named Boggs put in, ‘they stole our horses. Anyone feel like walking back to Fort Thomas and trying to explain to the colonel how we let that happen?’
‘That’s what I mean,’ Cherry said. ‘We got talked out of fighting before. Now, there’s no other choice.’
‘Who is there to fight with us on foot?’ a slender private named Lassiter asked.
‘There’s horses in the stable,’ someone suggested.
‘No saddle horses,’ Cherry replied as if the soldier were a fool.
‘Maybe there’s still some of the raiders in that camp up along the mesa,’ Boggs suggested.
‘Could be,’ Cherry said, stroking his jaw. ‘And maybe they’ve left some horses behind as well.’
‘Makes no sense to me,’ Lassiter dissented. ‘Going up to an armed camp when we know that the men with our horses, the ones who killed Dan, are far out on the desert by now.’
Cora, Rebecca and Madeline were wide awake now, but Cora made no attempt to interfere this time. She knew the soldiers felt justified in wanting to fight and there would be no stopping them. Besides, she was as bitter at Dan Osborne’s shooting as any of them. Dan was a little wild, but he had been a friend for many years. The other two women only stared blankly, red-eyed, at the knot of grumbling soldiers. More fun with liquored-up men! Both were wondering how they had gotten into this line of work and why they continued. Nothing but shooting, brawling, drinking and mauling. No matter where they wandered it was the same.
Cherry said, ‘We can at least take a look, men. It beats sitting here doing nothing at all.’
That struck them all as logical, and so in various stages of undress and different levels of sobriety, they determined to approach the outlaw camp.
In the gloom of the mesa’s shadow, Bert watched as the soldiers boiled out of the saloon. It didn’t take many brains to know where they were headed. Bert still had his horse, and by leaving now he could be long gone before they reached him. Otherwise he was risking either a hanging or being shot down where he stood. He thought of the hidden bank loot again, but decided that finding it in the night, concealed as it was in a pitch-black mine shaft, he would just be wasting time when he should be fleeing. Besides, no one who was not a member of their gang was ever going to stumble across the hiding place.
He sprinted for his pony, tightened its cinches with fumbling fingers and spurred away toward the west.
‘Now what?’ Sly asked. The Texas gunman was breathless as they finally slowed their hard-running horses and approached Hangtown once more.
‘We gather up the loot anad get the hell out of
here,’ Jay Champion said.
‘We might have to fight our way in,’ Virgil Sly said, ‘and fight our way out again.’
‘We might at that,’ Jay replied as if that were obvious. ‘If we can do it quick enough, the soldiers will see nothing but our horses’ dust.’
‘What about those two behind us?’
‘Dent might have gotten the tall man. He was laying for him.’
‘He might not have. There was more than one shot.’
Jay Champion shrugged. ‘He might not have. Let’s keep moving.’
Jay wasn’t particularly concerned about Dent one way or the other. If the Tennesseean had been careless and gotten himself killed, that was one fewer way the money had to be split. They were nearly on top of Hangtown now. Various dim lanterns burned across the dead town. Jay automatically catalogued them: marshal’s office, stable, saloon and hotel were all alight.
Slowing their horses to a walk, Sly commented, ‘I don’t hear any shooting, Jay. Bert should be firing if the soldiers had it in mind to charge the camp.’
‘Unless he rabbited,’ Jay said sourly.
‘Would he take the money?’
‘Not unless he’s dumber than I thought,’ Jay Champion muttered. ‘Come on, Sly, we’ve got to find out what’s happened sooner or later, and I don’t want it to be in broad daylight.’
Standing at her upstairs hotel room window, Liza shivered in her light chemise as the night-time desert temperature plummeted. At the sound of the shot that had killed Dan Osborne, she had sprung from her bed, heart racing. From her window she had a view of the street, and she saw the raiders hieing the army horses away. Seconds later, it seemed, the deputy marshal was on their heels, then after another few minutes, as the soldiers milled and cursed on the saloon porch, she saw Wage Carson driving his gray horse the length of the street, in pursuit. Her heart sank as she watched him disappear into the night.
Maybe he wasn’t much of a man as far as handsomeness went, that thick-shouldered marshal, but she knew him as kind, shy and generous, so different from the men she ran across in Cora Kellogg’s employ. She had to admit it, she was drawn to his simple goodness.
And she thought that her heart would die if he were to be shot down.
Across that terrain in full darkness it was dangerous to ride at speed, but Bert Washburn was in a hurry to put distance between himself and the onrushing soldiers, and so he pushed his pony on at a pace that was on the borderline of hazardous. The horse was nimble enough, but it could see no better in the darkness than Bert could and he felt the animal’s jarring misstep under him, heard a cracking sound, and the horse went down. He did not know if the horse had stepped in a squirrel hole or stumbled over a rock, but it was halted with a broken foreleg and Bert was afoot before he had even reached Hangtown.
Cursing, he staggered on down the rocky slope. He did not take the time to put the horse down; a shot would have brought the soldiers on the run. Nor did he pause mentally to pity the animal. There was blind panic riding him now and Bert meant to get away out on to the desert no matter what it took.
Reaching Hangtown, he looked up and down the street. He was now hatless, carrying his pistol in his right hand. He needed a horse, and the only possibility was the stable. He started that way, moving in a low trot through the deep shadows.
There was a lantern lit, burning low, in the stable and he searched the stalls frantically. All of the horses were dray animals, used to pulling coach or wagon, but unsuitable for riding. Cursing again, growing still more frantic, Bert considered taking one of these animals anyway.
Then he spotted, standing in the farthest stall, a white-eared mule. There was a saddle thrown over the stall partition, and a bridle hanging from a nail on the wall. With a faint smile, Bert started that way, hope building.
The mule only blinked at him dully and did not pull away from his hand as he reached for the docile animal.
‘I wouldn’t do that was I you,’ the dry voice said from behind him. Bert froze. He still had his pistol in his hand and there was a wild determination in his eyes now. He spun, crouched, loosed off two rapid shots from his Colt in the direction of the voice, but he missed with both bullets.
Josh Banks did not miss with his rifle and Bert Washburn staggered back to collapse nearly at the feet of Josh’s mule, his mouth moving soundlessly as he died.
SEVEN
‘The pony soldiers are up at the camp,’ Virgil Sly said as he and Jay Champion drew their horses up within sight of the seep where they had been staying. ‘Why isn’t Bert firing at them? Think they got him?’
‘I think he rabbited,’ Jay said, scowling.
‘Think he took the money?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jay answered, stroking his thick black beard. ‘We’re going to have to take a look.’
‘In the dark?’ Sly said.
‘Do you want to wait until daylight when the marshal and the deputy are back here as well?’ Jay asked angrily.
‘No,’ Sly said, shaking his head. ‘That’s no good of course, but we have to make our way past the soldiers to get into the mine.’
‘I realize that,’ Jay said coldly. ‘I didn’t say I was eager to do it – I said we had to unless we’re willing to lose the money and let all of this count for nothing.’
‘What do you have in mind, Jay? Storm in among them and cut loose?’
‘We might be able to do that. There’s only four of them. If we caught them by surprise it might work. They’re half-drunk still and afoot, but I think we’re better off trying to reduce the odds a little more. See if we can pick a few off one by one. What do you say?’
‘That’ll use up more time, Jay, and we still have the marshal and his deputy on our trail. But,’ he admitted with a sigh, ‘I guess we have no choice.’
‘No,’ Jay Champion said, coolly removing his Winchester from his saddle scabbard, ‘I guess we don’t. Let’s get to higher ground and see how far they’ll scatter. Never did know a horse soldier who could fight worth a damn afoot.’
‘They’re gone,’ Private Boggs was saying. He, Cherry, Lassiter and Reese had scoured the campsite and nearby area in the gloom of night, finding nothing. ‘For good, it seems. There’s nothing left behind.’
Lassiter said, ‘That was the point in driving off our horses. They’re long gone out on to the desert and we’re standing here like fools. This is the last time any of us will ever talk the colonel into a three-day pass.’
It was the last time Lassiter would ever do anything. They saw him slap at his throat and simultaneously heard the near report of a rifle. The remaining soldiers dove for cover.
‘Guess I was wrong,’ Boggs said, panting as he lay next to Cherry behind a large boulder.
‘Go up and get them!’ Cherry said angrily. No one paid any attention to him. Charge unseen riflemen in the dark when the enemy had the high ground and, presumably, horses! Not likely. Cherry had shouted the order only out of frustration. He knew as well as anyone that it was an impossible task.
‘We can’t just stay here pinned down,’ Boggs gasped. He lay on his back now, rifle held across his chest. ‘They’ll pick us off one by one.’
‘What’d they come back for?’ Reese asked.
‘Us, it seems,’ Cherry muttered.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe they don’t like the army. Maybe they’re plain crazy.’
Boggs asked, ‘What do you think, Cherry?’
‘I think our best chance is just to split up and make our way back to town. When the sun comes up we can formulate a new plan, maybe pick them off from cover if they show themselves.’
Boggs glanced toward the east. There was a narrow band of the faintest gray along the desert horizon. False dawn. If they did not make their break soon, they would find themselves pinned down in broad daylight. It would be a pure turkey shoot for the outlaws.
‘If we’re going to do that,’ Boggs said, his breathing rapid and shallow, ‘we’d better try it soon
.’
‘You’re right,’ Cherry agreed. His head was beginning to throb with the dull beginnings of a massive hangover. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was sprint for cover, but there was no choice. ‘Did you hear that, Reese? They’ll start shooting as soon as we rise up. Don’t make it easy for them. Every man take a different route. We’ll meet back at the saloon!’
Boggs was considering hopefully. There had only been one shot taken at them. Maybe the bandits had pulled out with sunrise not far away. He didn’t believe it himself, but a man holds tightly to futile hopes in such a situation. Cherry raised his arm in a signal to be ready, and when his hand dropped the three remaining soldiers sprang to their feet and started at a dead run away from the mesa.
Four rapidly fired bullets followed them in their flight. Boggs glanced to his right and saw Reese fold up and crumple to the ground. He ran on as if the devil was on his coat-tails, fighting his way across the rough ground, through sagebrush, his only thought on the safety of the saloon. He didn’t stop to see if anyone else had been hit. The soldiers were in full retreat.
The colonel would not be proud of them. Thank God he wasn’t there to see his men, half-dressed, half-drunk, fleeing in the night like frightened children.
Boggs reached the flat ground first, stumbled and fell, slamming the breath out of his lungs. He scrambled to his feet, ducked into an alley and bolted toward the saloon, not pausing to look back for his comrades. Feet pounded behind him and he glanced that way to see Cherry on his heels, his bull-like body struggling for speed and breath. They hit the front door of the saloon nearly together and burst through to find three frightened females, their faces pale, eyes wide, waiting for them.
Cora Kellogg asked anxiously, ‘Did you get them?’
Cherry said, ‘Get me a glass of whiskey. Now!’
