Behind the Iron

by William W. Johnstone

  Fallon waited for the old man to look up. When he did, Fallon said, “I’m going to ask you once, and just once, and you better answer without thinking. Where’s Maudie’s?”

  The old man blinked. “What the hell—”

  The rifle roared, and the old man fell onto one of the unconscious men’s legs, screaming, soiling his britches, and clutching the bloody part in his scalp with his shackled hands.

  Fallon jacked the hammer, sent a smoking brass casing into the sky, and drew a bead on the half-breed with the silver braids.

  “Your turn,” Fallon snapped. “Only my aim might not be as good now. Where’s Maudie’s?”

  * * *

  Smoke wafted from the chimney over the dugout that had been cut into the hill not too far from where the creek bent and turned southeast. From the creek bottoms, where he did not think he could be seen from inside that rank-looking shack, Fallon studied the place run by a woman named Maudie. Maudie, one of the prisoners had told him, was a good spot to sell or trade your stolen horses for other stolen horses. Get drunk. Or just have a little hot food before taking back to the owlhoot trail. Or, if you had enough money, you might be able to occupy yourself for a while with whatever girl Maudie had working for her this week.

  Wood was stacked next to the front door, the only door, to the dugout cut into the hillside. Piles of trash surrounded the stacks of rough-chopped wood, except for a path that led from the door to the pile. A man leaned against the wall, smoking a cheroot. The Winchester rifle leaned against the wall. Fallon recognized the man as the one with the rifle who rode in with the man named Danny. This may have been the man who had killed Holloway.

  A lean-to stood a few yards away near the corral. Fallon counted more than a dozen horses in the big round pen, but none of those horses belonged to the murderers of deputy marshals Beckett and Holloway or to the punk kids called Kemp Carver and Ford Wagner. Their horses were tied to the hitching rail on the side of the hill.

  Fallon wasn’t certain, but he guessed that although the dugout had no windows, a few of those dark spots in the hill were actually gun ports.

  So, Fallon wondered, how to I get from here to that front door?

  The door opened, and a woman walked out. Fallon watched. She was young, black-haired, wearing a camisole, apron, bloomers and beaded moccasins. She carried two buckets, ignored the killer with the Winchester, and headed toward the well between the lean-to and the gate to the corral. The man with the Winchester tossed away his smoke and said something.

  The girl kept walking.

  Maudie? Fallon thought. No, she was too young. She was probably Maudie’s new girl.

  That would explain why the man took off his hat, laid it on a water barrel next to the door, and walked after the woman. His rifle remained against the dugout’s wall. Fallon watched as the man caught up to the woman, helped her with the buckets as far as the well, then took her by a hand and led her to the mountain of hay next to the corral.

  When they disappeared on the other side, Fallon hobbled the dapple and climbed out of the bottoms. He glanced at the dugout, the gun ports, and wet his lips before he started running, crouched, across the flats toward the hay.

  His hat flew off about a quarter of the way across.

  He did not slow down until he rounded the mountain, and as the man who had murdered Holloway pushed himself off the girl and reached for his belly gun, Fallon smashed his face with the butt of the rifle. Bones cracked, blood spurted, and the man let out a whimper as he slammed hard against the ground. The woman—an Indian girl, probably still in her middle teens—simply looked up, wiped the killer’s blood off her cheek, and yawned.

  “Stay here,” Fallon said. He grabbed the pistol the murderer had dropped and stuck that in one of the deep pockets of his trousers. He noticed that the killer’s shirt was the same color as Fallon’s. Fallon loosened his own bandanna, which was beige, and exchanged it with the man whose face he had just smashed. That bandanna was scarlet with yellow polka dots. He also picked up the man’s hat, a dingy white, and shoved it on his head.

  It was too big, so Fallon pushed it back a little.

  He sucked in a breath, repeated to the uncaring Indian girl to stay put, and he walked toward the dugout.

  When he reached the door—surprised to still be standing, to still be among the living—Fallon stopped to catch his breath. He looked back at the hay but saw nothing of the girl or the man who likely would not be waking up for a good long while, and maybe never.

  Fallon saw the man’s Winchester, and thought about grabbing it, too.

  Then he laughed a dry laugh.

  You have three six-shooters already, plus a rifle. You only have two hands, Hank, and . . . if my math’s right—there are only four men you’re after inside there. If Maudie wants to pitch in to help them, then five.

  Five . . . against . . . one . . .

  He tried to spit, only to realize he had nothing in his mouth or throat even remotely wet.

  “Hell,” Fallon said aloud, “you can’t live forever.”

  And he kicked open the door.

  CHAPTER NINE

  When he looked back on it, he saw everything as he had seen it that afternoon. It had felt like he was moving in a waltz, so slow, so easy to see. The inside of the dugout had been dark, with the only light coming in from the doorway he had just kicked open, turning him into some monster of a silhouette. Two candles provided the only light inside.

  It was, Kemp Carver later testified, “so damned dark I couldn’t tell the suits of the cards I was holdin’.”

  Yet to Harry Fallon, it was bright as noon in the middle of Kansas.

  The man with the black hat—Talbot Kidder was his name, or at least it had been the one he was going by, and the one the undertaker had carved onto the headboard back in Fort Smith after no one claimed his body—was smiling, reaching for the latch to the door when it had been kicked open and Harry Fallon had filled the opening.

  The smile vanished. Talbot Kidder spit out the cigar he was smoking and clawed for the gun in his waistband.

  In the trial at Fort Smith, Ford Wagner had cursed, spit, and declared, “Had Kidder had his scattergun, that lawdog would’ve been the one whose guts got sprayed across Maudie’s parlor.”

  Parlor. Hell, there was no parlor.

  But Talbot Kidder had dropped his shotgun while trying to get aboard his horse. That shotgun was in the scabbard of the dapple down in the creek bottoms. Kidder managed to get the pistol up, but the front sight snagged on the coarse wool. The murderer had already cocked the hammer, and his finger was on the trigger, so that when the barrel got caught, the .44 went off, and Kidder’s dark face turned white. The front of his trousers smoldered and burst into flames.

  The .44 fell onto the dirt floor.

  Talbot Kidder stood there, weaving, and he whispered above the deafening echo inside the cramped quarters: “Mother Mary, I am kilt.”

  Yet he still stood there, pants afire, his face growing whiter with each passing moment, until Fallon slammed the Winchester’s barrel against his neck. Talbot Kidder let out a meek groan and toppled onto a round table, overturning the tin dishes and heavy whiskey glasses, as well as a stool and a high-backed chair, and he landed facedown in the dirt.

  Five seconds, if that, had passed since Harry Fallon had kicked his way inside the dugout.

  To Fallon’s right, Kemp Carver sat at a table against the wall, playing blackjack with Ford Wagner. Fallon saw them, but he also caught movement from the back of the darkened room, and that’s where he swung the barrel of the Winchester. Although, again, the room had little light, Fallon remembered seeing Daniel K. Huntington so clearly as the killer leaned against the bar, holding a wineglass toward a buxom blonde woman in a low-cut blouse, men’s denim jeans, and high-heeled stovepipe cowboy boots with spurs. The man set the glass down casually on the makeshift bar and palmed a pistol in his right hand. Fallon saw the flash of the muzzle, felt the bullet zip past his left ear, he
ard it slam into the wall, and felt the splatter of bits of stone and dirt bounce off his shoulder and neck.

  He pulled the trigger. The Winchester slammed against his shoulder. The candle on the bar went out. Both men fired again. Both men would have been killed, or at least desperately wounded, had they not been moving after firing their first shots.

  Fallon’s rifle bullet smashed the glass on the bar.

  Huntington’s round flew through the open doorway.

  Then Huntington was grabbing Maudie, and both of them went over the bar, toppling into a heap. They disappeared in darkness and dirt.

  By that time, Kemp Carver was standing and pulling his pistol off to Fallon’s left.

  Fallon felt as though he had no time to lever another round into the Winchester’s magazine. For some reason—he never quite figured out what his reasoning had been—he brought the rifle out as far as he could with his right hand still in the lever, and slung it forward, releasing it and sending it like one of those wild boomerangs he had read about in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. It zipped across the room and somehow, by luck or God’s guidance, slammed into Ford Wagner’s head as he was drawing his pistol. Ford Wagner crashed against the wall, cried out in pain, clutched his bleeding head, and toppled to the floor. That spoiled Kemp Carver’s aim, and by the time Carver had recocked his pistol, Harry Fallon was diving onto the floor.

  Carver’s second shot showered Fallon’s head with dirt from the wall. The Winchester-shooting outlaw’s hat had fallen off Fallon’s head when he had leaped into the dugout after kicking open the door.

  Fallon rolled onto his side and pulled Beckett’s. 44-caliber Remington from his waistband. His left hand reached for the other pistol he had shoved into his pocket, only to realize he must have dropped that one at some point during all this ruckus.

  He eared back the hammer, brought the barrel up, squeezed the trigger without aiming, and felt the heat, the kick of the big pistol, while the flash of the muzzle made him cringe. Another bullet singed his back. That one had come from Huntington from the ruins of the bar. Fallon ignored him, for Carver was closer. He saw the young punk come up on a knee, trying to hold his pistol steady. He rushed his shot and jerked the trigger. Fallon took his time and slowly squeezed his finger. The Remington roared, and almost instantly Fallon heard the boy wailing for his mother, and, “God, my arm, my arm, my arm, you damned low-down dirty son of a whore.”

  His ears rang from the roars of the weapons. His eyes burned from the gunsmoke and burning woolen pants. His mouth still held no spit. But he could taste the fear, he could hear the commotion from the destroyed bar at the end of the dugout, and he could see Huntington begin to stand out of the rubble.

  Fallon rolled onto his back, cocked the Remington with his right thumb while his left hand reached across his belly and pulled out the Colt in his holster. He saw Daniel K. Huntington step closer. Fallon almost touched the trigger when he realized that his barrel was aimed not at the murdering thug but a blond-headed woman wearing a low-cut shirt.

  His finger relaxed against the trigger.

  Danny Huntington’s voice, two octaves higher than it had been down the road about a million lifetimes ago, wailed: “Don’t you move, lawdog. You move, and I’ll blow this girl’s head clean off. You hear me? You don’t move. Don’t move. You move, and I swear to God, I’ll kill her. And that’ll be on your conscience, you damned dog.”

  Fallon did not lower the .44. He kept the barrel pointed at Maudie, whom Daniel Huntington, coward that he was, kept tight against his body. Huntington’s pistol was aimed not at Fallon but jammed into the big blonde’s ear.

  “Don’t move. I’ll kill her. God as my witness, I’ll blow her head clean off.”

  Fallon did not blink, although his eyes burned even harder from the smoke and dust.

  The Remington kept trained on its mark. Huntington practically dragged Maudie through broken glass, busted chair legs. He turned, keeping the woman rustler’s body in front of his own, in front of Fallon’s gunsights.

  Behind Fallon, Kemp Carver sobbed.

  Fallon also heard the killer in the black hat, whose burning pants had slowly burned out, as the dying man muttered a prayer in some soft, foreign language.

  “Shut up, damn you!” Huntington bellowed.

  Fallon did not know whom the killer was yelling at, but it could not have been Fallon. Harry Fallon had not, to the best of his memory, uttered one word since he had kicked the front door off one of its hinges.

  “Now you listen to me, you damned lawdog.” Huntington kept his gun against Maudie’s head. Fallon thought the man might try to gun Fallon down, but perhaps the addlebrained fool thought Fallon might be willing to shoot Maudie and hope the .44 slug would go through her body and into Huntington’s. Which, Fallon later realized, was fairly likely.

  “I’ll kill her. Swear to God, I’ll shoot her dead.”

  He kicked the dying man in the black hat’s head, silencing him, and stepped over his body and dragged Maudie with him.

  “God, my arm,” Kemp Carver sobbed. “My arm. God. It hurts. It hurts so bad. So bad. Oh, Mama, Mama, Mama please make me feel better. Please, God. I don’t wanna die.”

  “You.” Fallon could see how clear, how wide and how blue, Daniel K. Huntington’s eyes shone. He had stepped into the light shining through the doorway.

  Fallon lay on his side, arm outstretched, but never wavering. The heavy .44 in his hand felt like a quill pen. The killer had reached the doorway and was about to go through it and into the outside.

  “You don’t do nothing, lawdog,” Daniel K. Huntington said. “I’ll blow her damned head off. Clean off. I’ll kill her and anybody else who gets in my way.”

  “Mama,” Kemp Carver sobbed. “Mama. Mama. Mama.”

  “Shut up,” Huntington said.

  Fallon wondered if all outlaws were like this. Brave when you had a man by surprise. Scared as a frightened kitten when you realized how close death was.

  “Shut up!” Huntington barked again. “Don’t you try nothing. So help me, I’ll kill her. I’ll kill everyone.”

  He glanced through the doorway.

  “Danny,” Fallon said softly. At that time, that was the only name he knew the killer by.

  Daniel K. Huntington’s head swung around. His eyes landed on Fallon.

  And Harry Fallon touched the trigger of the Remington. 44 in his right hand.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Chicago

  Dan MacGregor grinned. “I see those names do ring a bell,” he said.

  Fallon let his head nod slightly. Leaning back, he said, “First arrests I ever made.” It had been his first gunfight, too, and he frowned at the memory of Daniel K. Huntington, the first man Fallon had ever killed. Sure, Fallon might have been responsible for the agonizing death of Talbot Kidder, but that black-hearted scoundrel had shot himself. The solicitor in Fort Smith had said he had not enough evidence to convict John Smith, which was the original handle the man with the Winchester had given the court, of murdering a deputy marshal, but he did get fifteen years in the Detroit House of Corrections for accessory to the murders of two lawmen and for his role in the unlawful release of federal prisoners Kemp Carver and Ford Wagner.

  “And Kemp Carver and Ford Wagner hate your guts,” MacGregor said. “After fifteen years, they still hate your guts.”

  Fallon let a wry smile cross his face. “They’re not alone, you know. I arrested many men since who likely hate me more.”

  “Maybe not,” MacGregor said.

  Fallon shrugged. “Perhaps. The man I killed when I arrested those two and another, Danny Huntington, he was an uncle of those two. More like a father, to hear the way they talked in court.”

  “Not the kind of father most of us . . .” MacGregor did not finish but frowned.

  Fallon looked away, thinking that Daniel Huntington probably, as a father figure, was not much worse than Sean MacGregor. At least Huntington never claimed to be fighting for justice
. He was just, as most criminals would never actually admit, too damned lazy to try an honest day’s work.

  The door opened, and both men looked, but it was not Aaron Holderman returning to the saloon from the train depot, but a couple of stooped, dusty workers who made quickly for the seedy little bar and ordered whiskeys.

  Fallon leaned in toward the detective. “So how did you know all about those two boys and me?”

  “Court records,” the young man said.

  “I happen to know those records burned in a courthouse fire some years back.”

  “Newspaper accounts.”

  “I was there. I could read. And, young lawman that I was back then, I read those newspapers.”

  “Then let’s just say I’m a pretty good detective.”

  “All right.” Fallon thought: And once I was a pretty good lawman.

  Maybe not on that little episode. That had been the luck of a dumb green kid’s sheer audacity. He remembered bringing the tumbleweed wagon with the horses carrying the dead bodies tethered behind. He could picture the faces of the citizens of Fort Smith as he led that cargo toward the district courthouse, and he remembered Judge Isaac Parker himself running down the steps with several attorneys and the district marshal, gawking like some of the women and old codgers that Fallon had noticed outside the general stores, grocery stores, and saloons.

  After that, Deputy U.S. Marshal Harry Fallon was never assigned the job as driver of a prison wagon. After that, Fallon usually had a driver for the tumbleweed wagon and sometimes as many as six deputy marshals serving under him. He was the officer who had avenged the murders of two of his own. He was the lawman who had ended Daniel K. Huntington’s reign of terror in the Indian Nations, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas.

  He would become one of Parker’s favorite lawman—until the disgrace and shame and conviction some five years later.

  “They’re in prison, you know,” MacGregor said.