by Judd Cole
Bill thumbed the hammer to full cock and handed Josh the weapon.
“It’s got a long trigger pull. Fire it once to check your battle sights and get the feel.”
Bill pointed toward a heart-shaped boulder about two hundred yards out into the draw. “Aim dead center on that rock. Remember to squee-eeze that trigger gradual—don’t jerk it and buck your aim.”
Josh’s wounded hand made it difficult to grip the wood stock securely. But his thumb and fingers were free of bandages. Finally, the old rifle kicked hard into his shoulder. Below, a spray of rock dust shot up from the designated target.
“Not bad,” Bill praised. His own Winchester was propped against a nearby boulder. “Low and to the left. So raise the rear sight a click or two, and tend to lead right when you shoot at moving targets.”
Josh did as told, his stomach nervous but his hands steady. Hickok, meantime, kept his gun-metal eyes in constant motion, watching the approach below.
“Bill?”
“Hmm?”
“It just sank through to me,” Josh admitted. “Now that we’re up here to stay, we’re sort of. . . trapped. I mean, either we win or we die, there’s no retreating?”
Bill nodded. “That rings right. We’ve got to play this game through, kid. You sure you want a story this bad? You’re free to leave, but you’d best do it quick.”
Josh’s mouth felt stuffed with cotton. But he managed to answer. “It ain’t just the story, though that’s important. It’s just. . . I’m your partner. A man doesn’t desert his partner, not out west. It just ain’t done, not if a man wants to look himself in the eye ever again.”
Hickok looked at the kid, admiration clear in his eyes.
“By God, you have learned something since high school, haven’t you? But you may regret it yet, Joshua. Now, clear out your head of them lofty ideas and get your thoughts bloody. We got a set-to coming.”
“God a’mighty! I know where Wild Bill would go in a hard fight.”
Chama Bluffs, Jane told herself. Any set-piece battle in these parts ended up at the bluffs. Wild Bill had defended that position before, taking out three of Turner’s gang and wounding two more before they retreated. Bill got shot, too, but his thick leather belt kept the hole shallow.
Jane’s Humpback Battalion were performing flawlessly. Right now, as they loped in a skirmish line, they held precise alignment like the best-trained regimental horses. It was as if they sensed the fight coming, and their cantankerous natures longed for the conflict.
However, Jane was still well south of the bluffs when she heard it: the first rifle cracks echoing across the open lowland. And amazingly, the clear, mellow, reverberating ring of a bell!
“Haul ass, Ignatius!” Jane urged her ugly steed, leaning far forward to speak lovely phrases into his wrinkled ear. She pulled the long-barreled Smith & Wesson from her bright red sash and waved it over her head like a battle guidon.
“My Bill’s in the thick of it, darlin’s! Anybody ever kills that purty critter, it’ll be me. Haw! Gee up, Ignatius! We got to settle some hash!”
“Hijo de puta,” El Lobo swore in his low, whispering voice. Jemez had just returned with the news that Hickok had taken up a position on Chama Bluffs. “Just the two of them, you say?”
The Apache nodded. These hair-face idiots, he thought, always waste words on what is obvious and has been said once already. Only women and children wasted talk.
El Lobo glanced over his shoulder, into the bed of the buckboard. Between the bell and the box seat, a piece of ratty canvas covered the Gatling gun. Hickok must not know they had a Gatling. Not even a fool would try to hold those bluffs against eleven riders with firepower like that.
“Benito!” he shouted.
“Si, Jefe?”
“Get into the buckboard. Fill the hopper with shells. Then cover the gun again. Wait until my command. Then uncover the gun and rain hell on Hickok!”
uSi, Jefe.”
“Jemez!” El Lobo called to the leader of the Apache renegades. “I want you on point. Two of your men wide on each flank. Diego!”
One of the Mexican riders responded.
“Diego, I want you, Juan, Paco, and Javier in a tight ring around the buckboard. Benito showed all of you how to crank and aim the gun. Any questions? No? All right then. If Benito gets shot, one of you takes over immediately. I don’t want that gun falling silent until all of you are dead.”
“Nine ... ten ... eleven of them,” Bill finally confirmed, watching the riders approach below. “Eleven we can see, anyhow.”
Josh knew Bill meant Frank Tutt, who made it an even dozen, although it wasn’t clear where he was right now. Bill’s theory held that Tutt was holding back to see how El Lobo’s gang fared.
“Christ, they ain’t even troubling to slow down,” Bill complained as he threw his Winchester into his shoulder. “They know we’re up here, and they don’t give a tinker’s damn. We’ll see if this slows ‘em down.”
Bill steadied the repeater’s barrel on a boulder, laying the notch sight center of mass on the bone breastplate of one of the Apaches. The Winchester kicked, and the slug, arcing a bit high, punched through the Indian’s throat. The bullet not only knocked him from the saddle—it still had enough force to ring the bell smartly as it ricocheted off.
“Target!” Josh exclaimed, as he had heard Bill do before in a gunfight. “Good one!”
“Little high,” Bill muttered, his vanity wounded even in the face of death. If they survived this, the kid would describe that sloppy shot for all to read.
“Joshua, take out the team on that buckboard! We got to slow ‘em down, or they’ll be past the draw in two shakes!”
Joshua began laying down his bead even as Bill shot a second Apache off his mount. But before Josh could take up the endless trigger slack, all hell broke loose below.
That Gatling opened up with hellish fury, a stuttering and shattering burst of fire. In an eye-blink, bullets were thumping in on their position nineteen to the dozen. Besides the deadly lead itself, the bullets sent up a dangerous spray of flying debris. In seconds, both defenders’ faces were pocked with small, bleeding cuts.
No science to it—that Gatling clearly and dramatically cut down on the time either man dared expose himself to fire while aiming. El Lobo brilliantly seized the advantage: With the Gatling still stuttering behind him, and the two men above still shaken, he sent four men rushing up the front slope.
“Team!” Wild Bill repeated frantically to the cowering Josh. “Nerve up! Shoot the team! We got to slow that buckboard!”
Bill himself had an even greater priority to shoot. He recklessly rolled out from cover, braving a windstorm of bullets pounding in at the rate of seven hundred and fifty per minute. He levered his Winchester and fired on the roll, dropping one of the Mexicans who was advancing up the slope. Again Bill rolled, levered, came up briefly to shoot, and knocked a second man from the saddle.
This broke the charge and sent the other two riders back to join the main formation. Bill, scuttling crab-fashion, rushed back toward cover. Josh, meantime, entrusted his soul to God Almighty and raised his old breechloader even as shells hummed and whiffed past his ears. Bill’s crazy rush had fired him up.
There were four horses in the traces. Josh sighted on the right front animal, shooting at the bay’s heaving flank. A puff of dust sprang up when the bullet struck well behind the shoulder.
A thin rope of blood spurted out, and the animal staggered, then lurched to a halt.
There were two immediate results of Josh’s single, well-placed shot: the buckboard, too, lurched hard, throwing the gun’s aim off the men above, and the conveyance came nearly to a stop, the dying horse all but braking the others.
“Good shot, but damn it, gloat later, kid! Recharge that piece!” Wild Bill admonished the gaping youth. “I count seven of ’em still alive, and they look more pissed off than scared.”
“Six!” Bill amended a moment later as he blew a flank rid
er in a splaying heap to the ground. The acrid stench of gunpowder hovered in a blue cloud over their position. Josh felt his ears still ringing from the Gatling burst.
Josh was frantically chewing open a cartridge when Bill suddenly slapped the Winchester into the youth’s hands.
“Never mind that old gun, kid. We got to stop that Gatling before they open up again. I’m rushing their position. Here.”
About ten shells clinked into the grass beside Josh. “It’s up to you, slick. Keep that air whistling down there without hitting me. You’re the only cover I got.”
Josh glanced below. The skinny man in the shako hat, probably El Lobo, was frantically helping another man realign the Gatling. The others kept a lively wall of slugs whanging in on the nest of rocks where Bill and Josh were pinned down.
“Bill, are you crazy? There’s too many, they’ll kill you!”
“Crazy is exactly what it is, kid, so it just might work. Crazy is never in their battle plans. With odds like this, and that damn gun, we won’t survive on the defensive. Now listen. The very second I hit that slope, you start peppering them. Make it lively, mister! Don’t let up until you’re out of ammo. Now!”
Wild Bill didn’t even try to run down that dangerous, exposed, precipitous slope. Instead, he simply hurled himself out in a somersault and started literally tumbling down the grass like a loosened boulder.
The rest happened so quickly that only later, when Josh recounted it for millions of American readers, could he sort it out.
Despite his throbbing hand wound, Josh smoothly levered and fired the Winchester, keeping the heat off Wild Bill for those first moments. When Bill’s wild tumbling and rolling body was perhaps halfway down the slope, the Gatling opened up on him.
Josh watched divots of grass fly all around Bill as shells chunked and thumped in near him. Josh sent two shells into the back of the wagon, making the gunner duck for a moment.
Bill thumped to a stop, came up dizzy and disoriented, but with a short iron in each fist. Josh was out of shells now, down to his pinfire revolver—useless at this range. His jaw dropped in pure astonishment as Hickok stood up tall, guns blazing in the face of certain death.
El Lobo had leaped behind the bell. Bill’s first shot opened a neat hole in Benito’s forehead, and he slumped dead over the Gatling.
Still standing in the open, Wild Bill’s clothing and hair actually flapped like a storm flag as the five survivors threw lead at him. Bill’s Colts blazed and Josh watched one, two, three men die quicker than he could swallow his amazement.
It was down to El Lobo and one of the Apaches. But Bill’s Colts fell silent, and Josh knew the gutsy frontiersman was out of ammo. Josh was frantically recharging the breechloader, even as Bill drew his knife and rushed the Indian, steeling his muscles for the leap.
Josh saw a brief, frantic struggle of thrashing limbs. Bill’s knife hand moved up and down in several vicious stabs, the blade turning red in that merciless, glaring sun. But El Lobo had moved in, six-shooter aimed at the struggling Hickok point blank. And Josh, hands clumsy and trembling now, would never get reloaded in time!
But in that racket of blazing guns, shouting men, and frantically crying horses, Josh had not heard another noise, approaching from the south of the bluffs: the thunder of charging hooves.
“Hii-ya! Hii-ya!”
Calamity Jane, yipping the fierce war cry of the Northern Cheyenne, came flying around the shoulder of Chama Bluffs, bouncing on the uneven back of Ignatius. Her camel battalion, braying raucously, surrounded her.
Calamity Jane was the second-best female shootist in America, bested only by the young phenomenon Annie Oakley. Even as El Lobo took up his trigger slack to kill Hickok, Jane’s Smith & Wesson spat an orange streak of muzzle fire. Her bullet punched the shako hat off El Lobo’s head— and took the top of his skull with it.
Josh ran blindly down the slope, tripping several times before he reached the draw below. Dead men lay sprawled everywhere.
Bill, exhausted, sides heaving, lay in the grass beside the Apache he had just killed. El Lobo’s body lay only a few feet away.
Jane dismounted and knelt beside her blond hero. His bloodied and bruised face flashed her a weak but grateful smile.
“What’s cookin’, good-lookin’?” Jane greeted him with her gap-toothed grin.
Josh rapped the big bell a good one with his knuckles, making it ring a little.
“We got it, Bill,” he said triumphantly. “And El Lobo’s worm fodder. You completed Marshal Baxter’s last mission.”
But Josh knew they couldn’t breathe easy just yet—not with Frank Tutt out there somewhere, obsessed with vengeance.
“Fun,” Josh heard Wild Bill mutter before he passed out. “That’s why I came down here. Get some goddamn fun.”
Chapter Thirteen
As Josh had suggested they might, the Cavalry did finally arrive, alerted by the U.S. marshal at Springer station. But just as Bill predicted: The soldiers arrived too late to offer any combat assistance.
In fact, their horses went loco on them the moment they spotted the camels, scattering to the four directions. Only when Jane had driven her spitting, foreign-smelling beasts over the next ridge could the blue coats even approach the battlefield.
Nonetheless, the twelve-man detail from Fort Union would soon render a valuable service. The officer in charge, Captain John Guidry, turned out to be Elena Vargas’s fiancé.
Wild Bill sized up the young officer. Guidry was a West Point man, a timber man’s son from the placid shores of Lake Erie. Though young and inexperienced, he was also bright and capable. He struck Bill as a fast learner—a good quality for surviving out here. Hickok took him aside.
“Captain, obviously you officially represent the U.S. government. If I turn that bell over to you, I will have fulfilled Sam Baxter’s last wish. But the thing of it is, the bell don’t really belong to our government. Not legally or any way else. Sure, Sam had some tit for tat in mind. But you know what that bell means to the folks in Chimayo— and, of course, to Elena?”
Guidry nodded. “Believe me I know, Wild Bill. It’s all she talks about lately.”
“So take the bell back to Chimayo and hang it in the belfry at El Santuario. That way, I help Sam, you help Elena and Chimayo. And no regulations broken.”
“Yes, sir!”
Guidry’s strong white teeth flashed in a wide grin. Everyone knew Wild Bill Hickok was a great favorite with Army brass, including some top generals. Guidry knew he was safe from any disciplinary actions.
However, the young officer indicated the dead bodies with a wave of his arm. “After us soldiers bury this sorry bunch, that is. I’d leave them to the carrion birds, myself. But the Army has to abide by the sanitation code. Burn or bury all human remains.”
Bill nodded. “That’s always been a problem in my profession,” he said with a straight face. “Disposal, I mean. I’m damned if I’ll ever bury any man that tried to kill me. I’m a freethinker, but I’ve got my pride.”
From Chama Bluffs it was only a half day’s ride back to the Lazy M. Somehow, though, Wild Bill didn’t expect to make it back without one final encounter with Frank Tutt.
Bill was right. About three miles northeast of Pecos, the two horsebackers topped a creosote hill and saw a solitary figure, standing hip-cocked out in the trail ahead of them—obviously waiting. Perhaps five hundred yards still separated them.
“Tutt,” Bill said calmly, knocking the long duster away from his Colts. “No tricks this time, junior.”
Wild Bill and Josh trotted their mounts perhaps half the distance.
“Far enough, Longfellow,” Bill said, reining in. “You wait here. Step well to the side, though.”
Bill swung down and handed his reins up to Josh.
“Careful, Bill,” the reporter warned. “That holster of his is jury-rigged somehow. I saw some queer-looking rivet deal when I held it at Polvo.”
Hickok nodded, adjusting his hat in the gl
aring, late-afternoon sun. His eyes closed to slits as he watched Tutt approach.
“Yeah? Thanks, kid. I’d figure him for a quick-shot rig. He’s a blowhard coward like his brother was. Won’t matter, though. Also like his brother, he’s about to eat lead.”
Josh had seen this cool, unshakable confidence come over Wild Bill before. He feared no man who faced him openly; Hickok had already predicted he would die from a bullet to the back before he turned forty.
The two men advanced closer, heads lowered, hands out at their sides.
“I been waitin’ a long time, Hickok!” Tutt shouted.
“Shoulda waited even longer,” Bill replied in a quiet voice that nonetheless carried.
Now Josh could make out Tutt’s stone-hard eyes and the crooked slash of his mouth.
“You back-shot my brother, you Yankee nigger lover!”
“Not only back-shot him,” Bill lied, goading, “but I topped his woman and made him watch me have fun while he died.”
Tutt’s handsome face crumpled into a mask of rage. “Shut up, you disgusting son of a bitch!”
Wild Bill visualized the pain starched into Sam Baxter’s dead face. “Know how I’m going to kill you, Frank?” Bill continued to taunt him. “Two slugs about two inches under your belly button. Low in the entrails. It’ll hurt like the dickens, but take you hours to bleed out.”
Josh saw the color drain from Tutt’s face. He stopped, and so did Wild Bill. The two men were now about thirty yards apart. The sound of cicadas seemed to rise to an unbearable shriek in that dust and heat.
“Ah, you’re just whistlin’ past the graveyard, Hickok! Damn you and all your kin to hell! Make your play!”
“Oh, I’ll kill you. But right now I’m enjoying watching you piss yourself like a scared little puppy. The big, bad Tutt boys, white livers all.”
That tore it for Frank Tutt. With a snarl of out-of-control rage, he abruptly slapped the butt of his Navy Colt, swiveling the still-holstered weapon up into firing position. And it did go off— but Tutt’s slick gadgets could not match Hickok’s killer instinct and animal reflexes. As Bill promised, Tutt did indeed have two bullets deep in his guts by the time his gun fired, bucking slightly.
