by Judd Cole
“Sure you won’t have a drink, miss?” he slurred. “Does wonders for the boredom.”
“No, thank you,” she practically snapped. Although she had indeed been tempted to accept a drink hours earlier, when all that shooting erupted.
She felt tired from her eyes to her insteps. Never again would she travel by one of these infernal conveyances. How did people endure it? She had been unable to eat the slop they called food, and by now her stomach was pinched from hunger. And despite the evening chill outside, her face felt hot and sticky. Oh, how she wished she could wash it with a cool cloth.
Reverend Peabody’s knee once again “accidentally” bumped hers, and she jerked back from the unwelcome contact. Both of these men were getting on her nerves. Even the preacher—for a man of God, he seemed to have a worldly fascination with staring at her bosom. And both men had a musty, unwashed-animal smell that forced her to breathe through her mouth.
Indeed, the three men outside were among the only halfway-clean specimens she’d seen since crossing the Mississippi River. The young reporter, Joshua, was most definitely a gentleman, although no doubt learning coarse habits from the company he kept. So, too, was the Negro guard, although, like Wild Bill, he had the haunting eyes of men who had seen ugly things in their time. However, Hickok obviously valued good cloth and excellent tailoring.
“Yard lamps up ahead,” Lawton reported, hanging his head out one of the windows. “Looks like we’re finally pulling in to a way station.”
“Thank God,” Charlene couldn’t help saying as relief flooded through her.
“Yes, the Lord provides,” Peabody intoned solemnly.
But once again Charlene detected an almost ironic thread in his tone. And again, after he spoke, his eyes seemed to send an unspoken signal to Lawton—as if they were sharing a joke between them. She also noticed that both men carried revolvers under their coats. They had pulled them out during all the commotion, and even the Reverend seemed eager to use his.
She was too tired, however, to care much about anything but the prospect of a hot bath and—she hoped—clean bed linens. The stage swung into the station yard, and she read the sign with gilded wooden letters that extended over the front door: Thompson’s Canyon Station.
The conveyance rocked to a stop and Reverend Peabody leaped out first, lowering the iron step for her and handing her down. She could feel that her clothes needed “a good pull-down” as her long-departed mother used to say. But Charlene felt too tired to bother.
“You’ll feel better after a good night’s rest,” the Reverend assured her, removing his hand from her arm much later than he needed to.
But again his eyes sent some secret message to Lawton, and Charlene felt a vague stirring of apprehension.
~*~
Wild Bill climbed down off the box, weary and sleepy, his throat scratchy from trail dust. He hung back from the others, watching while a young Mexican boy drove the stage into the barn and began unhitching the team.
Leland had warned Bill that, even after cleaning house at Overland, he couldn’t guarantee the honesty of all the new workers. But Hickok was not unduly worried about the gold being secretly seized at layovers. The new combination-lock strongbox was bolted to the floor of the coach, and it required a special tool only the Denver Mint possessed to remove it—that or an explosive charge.
Hickok waved off the stock tender and took care of the two-horse saddle band himself. He curried off the dried sweat and rubbed them down, then turned them out into the paddock after hanging nose bags of crushed barley on them.
All of the extra work was really just to get the lay of the place. Race Landrieu, the man he had killed back at Martin’s Creek, had worked here before Leland cashiered him. For no specific reason, that made Bill want to look around.
He ducked under the tie rail out front, grunting wearily at the effort, and headed inside the station.
“Well, bleeding Christ!” exclaimed a stout man in a dirty apron who was serving drinks behind the raw-plank bar. His next remarks suggested he didn’t realize Hickok was driving for Overland. “It is Wild Bill Hickok! I heard a rumor you were in the territory. What brings you to these parts?”
“Six tired horses, a Concord coach, and a splintery ass,” Bill retorted, for no women were in the barroom. “Set me up a jolt of Old Taylor, wouldja, Bottles?”
“I’d admire to, Wild Bill. Touch you for luck? The name’s Harney McDowell. And this hombre just walked in is my boss, Dave Soss.”
Bill shook hands with both. Harney was one of those overly jolly types who showed too many teeth when he smiled. In contrast, Soss, the station agent, was a serious, sickly man in his fifties with skin like yellowed ivory.
“I knew you were coming, Bill,” Soss confided. “Leland told me. But I figured you weren’t eager to have the fact paraded around.”
“’Preciate that, Dave. Hit me again, Harney. Not so much glass this time, okay?”
“Just give him the bottle,” Soss told the bar-dog.
Bill nodded his thanks. “They setting out some grub in the dining room?”
“Nothing fancy. Just bean soup and biscuits. But there’s plenty, and it’s hot.”
“Sounds like a feast.”
Jimmy and Joshua came in through the back door. Jimmy nodded once, letting Bill know he’d taken a walk out back and all looked secure.
By now Hickok was starting to feel that pleasant floating sensation that meant the liquor was taking effect.
“I guess our princess from Chicago has finally got hungry,” Jimmy reported with a grin. “She’s in the dining room, working on her second bowl of soup.”
“She even added salt,” Josh chimed in, and all three men shared a good laugh.
“Boys, I’m beat out,” Hickok told his companions. “I’m eating and then turning in. But I’ve got a hunch this place will mean trouble before the night’s over. We best take turnabout on guard duty out in the yard. Joshua, you take first stint, since you look rested. Use my rifle. Wake up Jimmy for the dog watch. Jimmy, you roust me out for the last stint.”
His companions nodded.
“Bill,” Josh said as he accepted Bill’s Winchester, “isn’t it about time for Calamity Jane to butt in? After all, she usually does when you’re in the company of a pretty girl.”
Bill winced slightly at mention of Jane—a topic that made him as nervous as a Sioux naming the dead.
“Last I heard,” he replied, “she’s serving three months in an Amarillo jail for assaulting a law officer. Three, actually—I’m told she also put both his deputies out of commission.”
Actually, Josh thought as he tucked the repeater across the crook of his left arm and began strolling out in the moonlit yard, having Jane around right now would be a comfort. That strike back on the Denver Road, and especially those explosive arrows, made him understand just how determined and ruthless this new enemy was.
He walked a slow, unpredictable pattern as Bill had taught him, circling the house, corrals, and outbuildings. The stock tender finished his last chores and retired to his shakedown in the hayloft. The last voices trailed into sleepy silence out in the male passengers’ bunkhouse.
The individual lamps showing from the house also winked out one by one. Josh saw Wild Bill framed once in a window of the left front bedroom. Then the lamp was blown out, and only Hickok’s cigar could be glimpsed, a glowing red dot.
Only one light, at the opposite end of the house, still glowed. Charlene’s room, he guessed. It always took women longer to get ready for bed.
The autumn night chilled considerably, and Josh could glimpse his breath rising in steamy puffs in the moonlight. He shivered under his thin wool coat, especially when the mournful, ululating howl of coyotes sounded from the surrounding hills.
A horse nickered from the back of the corral, and Josh veered over that way, just making sure. Probably just a snake or a prowling raccoon—
A shadowy form suddenly lunged at him from behind a tool sh
ed, and Josh had no time to bring Bill’s ’73 up to the ready. But a year spent traveling with the best survivor in America had taught Josh a few useful tricks in a pinch.
He dropped the rifle and applied a rolling hip-lock to break the man’s charge. Before his attacker could overcome the sudden counteroffensive, Joshua managed to flip him over his back with a flying mare.
But he didn’t know about the second attacker behind him, only waiting for an opportunity. Just as Joshua was about to scoop up the Winchester, a solid brass butt-plate smashed down hard on the base of his skull, just above the neck, and he dropped as if his legs had been deboned. The world went black even before he finished falling.
~*~
Hickok was almost across the threshold of deep sleep when a horse whinnied outside, the sound somehow wrong against the quiet backdrop of the night.
His eyes snapped open, his senses instantly alert. One hand reached for the gunbelt dangling off a bedpost even as he sat up, swinging his stockinged feet to the floor. He had gone to bed with his trousers on, expecting trouble. Now he quickly tightened the belt as he crossed to the window and knuckled the curtains aside, peering out into the blue-tinted moonlight.
All seemed quiet at this end of the yard. Too quiet—why weren’t there horses milling in the corral? Then, from the end of the corral he couldn’t see, came the frightened whicker of a horse that had smelled death blood.
He cursed as he raced out of his room and down the long hallway, charging into the bedroom at that far end without bothering to knock.
He heard a frightened scream from the bed.
“Get down on the floor!” he barked even as he threw open the window. “And don’t light the lamp!”
Bill spotted a form moving quickly away from the corral. But he held his fire, uncertain who it was and unwilling to endanger Joshua.
“Josh!” he called out. “Sound off, lad, so I know who to shoot!”
He heard nothing from Josh, but the fleeing figure immediately opened fire on the window with a repeating rifle. The glass shattered, showering Bill in slivers and shards, and chunks of the sash blew into the room as lead hammered his position. A second rifleman had opened up, too, and Wild Bill cursed as he sprawled flat in the broken window glass, unable to get off even a shot.
The volley seemed endless, the intruders taking no chances at letting Hickok get off a shot. Only when Charlene screamed again did Bill realize she hadn’t followed his order—she still lay in bed. That left her dangerously exposed.
“Damnit!” He low-crawled over, cutting his forearms and elbows, until he could grab one of her slim ankles. One quick, hard tug brought her onto the floor only moments before several slugs punched into the feather mattress, sounding like polite coughs, and puffing little white feathers all over the room.
The defensive barrage ceased, and moments later a fast drumbeat of shod hoofs told him the attackers were escaping.
Still cursing, Wild Bill groped around a little nightstand beside the bed until he felt a few loose lucifers. He thumb-scratched one and lifted the glass chimney of the lamp, lighting the wick and turning it up.
Bill’s hands, arms, and bare chest were bloody with numerous glass slices, none of them too serious but stinging like the proverbial death of a thousand cuts. Despite the fear still thudding in his temples, his first glimpse of Charlene made him forget his next breath.
She lay among the bedcovers on the floor, a stricken look on her pretty face. She wore only a chemise of thin muslin—so thin he could trace the dark, swollen protuberances of her nipples. The chemise had ridden high up on her legs, so scandalously high that Bill glimpsed a golden triangle of silky hair before she tugged the chemise lower, managing to sit up.
“You!” she got out with difficulty, still so frightened that he could see her pulse in her creamy white throat. “This ... this is an outrage!”
Bill heard Jimmy out in the yard, calling Josh’s name. In spite of his own urgency to get outside, Wild Bill was momentarily bolted in place by the erotic vignette before him.
“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,” he roweled her. “You’re safe from my ‘unbridled lust.’”
Bill got that choice phrase from Wild Bill, Indian Slayer—one of the more popular dime novels that told the “true story” of James Butler Hickok.
“I surely don’t feel safe,” she assured him, boldly matching his stare although her tone revealed hurt dignity. But besides pulling the chemise down a few modest inches, she made no further attempt to cover herself.
He folded his arms over his chest, watching her with a sly frankness. Then he laughed outright.
“So much for the boarding-school priss. If you were really outraged, you’d have covered up by now. But the truth is, you’re proud of what you got, and you like me looking at you.”
Anger firmed her features, but Wild Bill was gone the very next heartbeat, racing out front of the house.
“Jimmy!” he sang out even before he spotted his friend. “All secured?”
“Best I can tell.”
“What about the kid?”
“Over here, Bill, behind the tool shed. Somebody conked his cabeza a good one, but I think he’ll be all right.”
Joshua did revive quickly enough, although he complained it felt like he’d been kicked by a mule. However, the true extent of the damage was discovered when they turned to the corral.
“Well, God kiss me,” Hickok said quietly, even his jaded eyes shocked by the carnage.
A total of twelve horses had all been quietly and efficiently throat-slashed. Even as the dazed men walked among the dead and dying animals, one began emitting a fluttering trumpet sound as air rushed out if its collapsing lungs.
“This is their answer,” Bill announced, “to my killing of those horses earlier.”
“They missed our saddle band, at least,” Jimmy pointed out. “They didn’t see them up in the paddock. And they missed a few others, too. Guess you spotted them in the nick of time to save those.”
“You’ve missed the mark,” Bill corrected him in a grim voice. “Notice how many, and just which, horses they left, Jimmy.”
Jimmy looked closer, then softly swore a mild oath. “Jerusalem! It’s the six team horses.”
Wild Bill nodded. “They deliberately left the tired animals. They knew one night’s rest wouldn’t be enough. That means they plan to attack us again, boys, between here and the next station.”
Chapter Nine
Gil Brennan, Sandy Urbanski, and Rick Collins met in a deserted soddy just three miles off the Denver freight road, surrounded by the rolling grazeland of eastern Wyoming. It was a damp, chilly morning under an overcast sky the color of bog water. Brennan’s mood seemed to match the weather.
“I’m not being ‘womanish’ about it,” he told Urbanski coldly. “I don’t see what you’re acting so cocksure about, is all. Race is dead, and you two have had your horses shot out from under you. You made your brag, just a few days ago, how Hickok would be worm fodder by now and that gold in our hands. Remember?”
Urbanski’s dead, obsidian stare unnerved Brennan, and despite his anger he glanced away first.
“Race ain’t no loss,” Urbanski countered sarcastically. “Man was a useless drunkard—it leaves more swag for the rest of us. As for them two horses, we evened that score last night, and then some.”
Brennan’s voice yielded to his anger. “The horses aren’t the point, Sandy, can’t you grasp that? It’s control. I told you we want to make Hickok think he’s in control—that way we can catch him off his guard. But so far he really is in control.”
“Yeah, well, ‘so far’ won’t mean squat once we plug Hickok,” Urbanski insisted belligerently. “You best pull that pinecone outta your ass, Brennan. Out here your ‘authority’ ain’t worth a rusted trace chain.”
Brennan’s tight-lipped smile seemed to cost him an effort. But he suddenly realized the danger he was in here. These two men were both killers wearing the tie-down hols
ters of their profession and either man would gladly shoot him for his diamond belt buckle.
“All right,” Brennan conceded. “Hell, you boys are right. Hickok’s clover is deep, but on this line his luck is bound to play out.”
“Damn straight,” Urbanski replied. “He can strut and bluff and bluster all he wants. But Bill Hickok is a done-for case.”
“Don’t keep selling him short like that,” Brennan warned, keeping his tone more reasonable. “I think you boys are being fooled by Hickok’s dandy appearance. He may wear perfume, but that man is rawhide tough.”
“Tough, my sweet aunt,” Rick Collins spoke up from the doorway, where he was keeping watch for any unwanted company. “He’s just sneaky, that’s all, see? One of them cowards who learns how to sneak so’s they avoid a fight.”
Brennan knew better but refused to push these two anymore—the derringer in his breast pocket was utterly useless against them, and he knew it. They were edgy and primed for action, especially Urbanski.
“Hickok’s sneaky, all right,” he conceded. “They say he learned his tactics from studying Stonewall Jackson: Always mislead, surprise, and confuse your enemy. But we’re going to turn his own tactics against him at Silver Wolf Pass. You boys remember what to do?”
Urbanski scowled even though he nodded. “We start to attack, then run like hell after they start some resistance. Sneaky,” he added sarcastically.
Brennan ignored the sarcasm. “That’s the gait. Both the soldiers are going to make it look like they’re fighting wildcats. You fade, then ride ahead to the rendezvous point at Miller’s Creek. No way in hell will Hickok and his crew be ready for a second strike only ten minutes down the road.”
“Now who’s sounding ‘cocksure’?” Urbanski demanded. He took off his old campaign hat and showed Brennan a bullet hole near the crown. “That buffalo soldier siding him is a helluva shot—he damn near tagged my brainpan at six hundred yards. From a moving coach.”
Brennan smiled like a magician with plenty more in his topper.
“I told you Hickok would select a crackerjack shootist for the box seat,” he told Urbanski. “That’s why we’re going to institute another plan before we pull the false heist at Silver Wolf Pass.”
