By the Neck

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

“The mayor’s mercantile looked to be closed up tighter than a bull’s backside. You know he can’t be happy about that.”

  “I wish I cared,” said Rollie. “Hey, that tree look thicker than you remember it being?” Pieder and Pops looked southward toward the edge of the stump field to where the pines hadn’t yet been felled.

  “By that pile of slash?”

  “Yep, to the right.”

  Pops nodded. “Good eye you have there.”

  Rollie knew coming from Pops that was a compliment. Pops didn’t brag on his own ability, but as Wolfbait had put it not long ago, “He could see the pecker on a bluebottle at a hundred paces.”

  “Okay, they’re getting in position. I expect they will try to wait us out.”

  “It might work,” said Pops. “I don’t get my afternoon coffee, I will be surly and apt to leave this hole in search of a hot cup.”

  “You there!” came a voice from the shade of the same tree line. “We know you’re there in the trench. Come on out or we will kill the locals off one at a time.”

  Pops and Pieder looked at Rollie.

  He sneered and shouted, “I’ve heard that before. Get on with it!”

  “You think that was wise?” said Pops.

  “No, but—” Rollie didn’t have time for more because they heard hooves thundering. Two men on horseback appeared to rise up out of the earth fifty yards to the north. The visual trick could be blamed on the lumpy hill leading up to where they lay protected at the top.

  “Pops, watch the woods. They’re trying to distract us. Pieder, you take behind us. I’ll get these two and watch the downslope below us.”

  The riders dipped down almost disappearing, then reemerged before slowly coming into full view, silent and bent low in the saddle. As they crested the plateau, they broke apart, the one on the left veering wide. He held his reins in his teeth and levered a round into a carbine. His black hat’s brim flattened against the crown as they ran, his horse wild-eyed and huffing hard at the sudden pain the man’s ramming rowels caused.

  Pops left the blacksmith to keep an eye on the downslope and the tree line to their left that held the shadowed form by the tree. He laid the Greener gently by his left knee and pulled the Colt free. He’d checked moments before that it was loaded, and thumbed back on the hammer, aiming at the rider. “Come on then. I’ll give you something to chew on, jackass.”

  As if the rider heard him, he cut wider and raised his rifle, propping the fore stock on his left arm. Pops fired at the same time the rider did. He didn’t like to shoot at a man on horseback, especially at a dicey range and with a pistol. No call to be hurting a horse with a bad shot.

  He heard the blacksmith shout a quick, clipped word that sounded like German. Pops spun to his left and saw the leather-clad man bent low, his pistol at his knees, the fingers of his big left hand clamped over his right shoulder. Blood sluiced between the fingers. The man caught Pops’ eye and shook his head, his teeth gritted.

  Pops wasn’t certain if the man was about to bite him or if he was ticked off that he’d been hit. He chose to think the latter. But that was all the time he could give the man. Pops had an invader to deal with.

  By the time he turned back around, he saw that the rider had used the moment to thunder closer, that rifle’s snout pointed right at him. Pops heard a shot from Rollie’s rifle but had no time to see if his pard had dealt a useful blow. He ducked low, snatched up Lil’ Miss Mess Maker, and cocked both barrels as he raised her and triggered them, all in one slick move. He had to because the rider was about to squeeze a rifle round in his face.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Rollie ignored the other rider making for Pops and concentrated on the fat man bearing down on him. The man’s ample paunch slopped up and down in time with the pouches of his thinly whiskered cheeks. A fawn hat lifted free of his fleshy topknot and whipped away, revealing a jouncing, wide head, mostly bald and pink, and trailing long, wispy strands of ginger hair above two egg-shaped eyes staring right at Rollie with undisguised bile.

  Rollie’s shot caught the man in the throat and he jerked upright, gazing at the sky as his blood spattered outward to both sides. His arms flipped upward as if he were tossing the rifle into the air in celebration and then he flopped to his left and his left boot spun down, caught in the stirrup. His fat body slammed the sparse grass hard before he reached the gulley.

  The horse veered right. Rollie saw its eyes wide and white and bugging, its teeth showing in a foam-flecked mouth as it struggled with the sudden, flopping deadweight. The cinch snapped, and the fat man’s weight pulled the saddle free of the horse. The entire affair slopped to a rolling stop a foot from the gulley, pushing a dust cloud over the three crouching men.

  The retreating horse cut a wide loop and galloped toward the meadow beyond the blacksmith shop, puffs of dust rising from its hoofbeats. Rollie watched it go with regret. One of them might have been able to use it to make it to the tree line.

  * * *

  Right beside Rollie, Pops heard a slicing zing and felt his hat whip from his head. His world bloomed in an explosion of shotgun blast, of screams and bellows, of vivid colors of blood and hair and bone, of grit and dust. And the stink of hot horse breath and smoke and gunpowder.

  A whoosh of hot air and dust and dirt boiled over the gulley. Something hard pounded into Pops’ chest, caromed off, then followed with something larger. It shoved him backward, and any air in his lungs pushed out.

  I’m done, thought Pops. I’m done and I haven’t even taken care of what I promised my wife I would do. Dammit.

  But he wasn’t knocked unconscious. He was slammed backward into the far slope of the gulley, felt the vague softness of another body beside him, thought maybe it was Rollie or the blacksmith.

  He heard only a steady, dull pounding, not with his ears but with his entire body—boom boom boom—sounded like his blood pumping hard to do its job in his body. Then the world opened up a little bit more, and he heard a horse in howling agony, and the disaster of previous seconds came clear. Pops knew right away what had pounded into him. He thanked whatever god was responsible for such things that the horse hadn’t—as yet—collapsed on him.

  Had he hit the horse? He thought he’d aimed high enough. And then he felt another hard thing hit him twice quick in the chest and the side, a horse’s hoof? And it kept on doing it. Finally when he had decided it was either a steady volley of bullets or a horse’s hoof rapping away as if knocking on a front door, he heard a voice close by his face.

  “Pops!”

  Something slapped his face.

  “Pops, come around!”

  “Rollie?” It felt to Pops as if he was trying to talk through mud. And he’d barely heard his own voice. He felt something pulling him upright to a sitting position, arms tugging under his. “Huh?” he tried to shake his head to stop the buzzing. It didn’t work.

  “Getting you out from under that horse, Pops. Don’t fight me.”

  The pain in his thigh bloomed deeper, hotter. He gritted his teeth and used the pain to help rouse himself from feeling fuzzy-headed.

  “No use, you’re pinned. You with me?” It was Rollie.

  “Yeah, just a minute.” Pops breathed deep. His chest was sore but nothing felt mortally wrong yet. “How’s Pieder?”

  The blacksmith leaned over, and despite his bullet-chewed shoulder, he gave Pops a toothy smile and a nod. “Good.”

  “Okay, I think I’ll join you, then.” Pops tried to push himself up to a higher sitting position but Rollie was right, the horse had him pinned. He heard a sound and looked to his right.

  The bloody stump of a man mewled and shivered on the gravel before them. One wide, white eye was visible. It looked to Pops as if the man’s eyelids had been peeled off and tossed aside, the ripped flesh at their base burned with a match. Other than that, there was little recognizable to the man’s face.

  The lips and nose were gone. The teeth, much like the lone eyeball, glared white and qui
very and snapping. A tongue stump slowly flicked like the tail of a stomped snake. The wreck of a man shuddered and was dead.

  “What in the hell . . .” said Rollie.

  “Had to,” said Pops.

  “I know!” Rollie’s response came out as a quick shout, because he’d lunged at the thrashing horse with his hip knife.

  “Did I hit it?”

  “I don’t think so—but this dead man’s weighing it down!” Rollie kicked and stomped on the man’s shoulder. It helped stretch the cinch, make it taut enough for him to slice through. But the horse wanted none of it and thrashed harder.

  “Settle down!” shouted Rollie, to no avail. The beast was lusted with frenzy and thrashed all the more, eyes rolling white and mouth champing and foaming. The stink of fear rising off the beast clouded the men’s faces. Pops shook his head to dispel the clinging vestiges of dizzying sound and bent to settle the beast.

  He received a knock to the head by the horse’s own thrashing head, and it dizzied him further, but he maintained his grip on the slick-hided beast. He spread his arms wide, hoping to buy Rollie the quick moment he needed to slice though the cinch without cutting the horse.

  It worked. As soon as the knife freed the saddle, the horse seemed to know it and shoved hard upward with all four hooves. One of the hooves was braced against Pops’ right thigh, and he howled as the huge, desperate beast regained its legs. The horse whipped its head to the left, then it made to lunge upward.

  “Grab those reins!” shouted Rollie, even as he dove over Pops for the trailing lines.

  The blacksmith was quicker and snatched them with a bloodied hand, gripping them tight. He thrust them at Rollie with a tight nod, then clamped the hand back over his shot-up shoulder, glaring down at the dead invaders littering the ground at their feet. He spat on the bloodied, pulped mess that had once been the man’s face, and growled a word they couldn’t make out.

  “Get on!” shouted Rollie to Pops. “Get on the high side of the ditch and climb on! We’ll use it as a shield and fire to cover us! To the trees!”

  “Not me! I can’t make it!”

  Rollie looked quickly down at Pops’ leg. Where the horse had stepped, his trousers were torn and the muscle and meat of his thigh were visible. “No!”

  The blacksmith grabbed a thrashing, cursing Pops and shoved him upward, onto the quivering horse’s back. Resigned to his status of momentary invalid, Pops bent low and snatched for the reins. “My Greener!” he shouted, and Rollie slapped the bulky brute of a shotgun into Pops’ waiting hand. He ejected the spent shells and thumbed in two fresh shells.

  There was no time to consider the finer points of what struck them all as a fool’s game, but they had little choice. They were sitting ducks in the gulley. With Pops in the saddle, Pieder and Rollie crowded the horse’s left side. Pops kept low, hugging the horse’s neck, the Greener cocked and balanced behind the saddle horn.

  Pieder walked first, bent low and threatening to outdistance the horse with each angry stride. Rollie crouched behind him, trying to keep his steps measured enough so as to not stomp the back of the blacksmith’s boots. It wasn’t easy walking for Rollie, as his boot heel had been all but removed by that bullet, but he compensated, altering his usual limping gait.

  The awkward caravan angled toward the tree line to the south at the fastest pace it could manage, Pops keeping an eye on the blacksmith’s shop, Pieder watching the tree line toward which they were running and where they hoped to find cover, and Rollie watching the slope toward town. As soon as they began their odd little trek he knew they’d be visible from Main Street.

  Couldn’t be helped. They had to make it to the trees. What was waiting for them they didn’t know. Pops had spied one shady shape moving in there, and with vermin, Rollie knew if you could see one, a dozen others might be lurking behind.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Rollie had been gnawing over in his mind who might be the attackers. It seemed like a well-organized band, and a lot more of them than he’d experienced thus far. The whole damned mess could have been avoided had he trusted his gut and left Boar Gulch behind. As he hobbled forward, scanning the downslope terrain, he cursed himself for listening to Pops.

  The fusillade began again.

  The horse was the first to get hit. Rollie heard the hard, tight smack as the bullet slammed into its flank behind his own shoulders. Instinct pushed him down farther in his crouch and with his inner hand he grabbed the front of the saddle and shouted, urging the horse to move faster. “Work her, Pops! We’re in trouble!”

  They were five yards from the trees when Pieder shouted a word Rollie had never heard, hoisted his shotgun, and running, launched himself at a dark shape in the trees. The leather-clad man’s gun barked flame and smoke and then he was on whoever was in there.

  Good luck, thought Rollie. He had all he could do to return fire in the direction he guessed the shots were raining from—his side. Someone was below the top of the slope that led down to Main Street, hiding like a coward and peppering them as they ran.

  They reached the trees, and the horse kept going, neighing from down deep in its chest. Rollie saw a bleeding wound midflank ooze a thick rope of crimson blood. Already the beast’s leg was drawing up, but it barreled gamely into the trees.

  He heard Pops doling out shots from his Colt as they ran. At least they had given themselves an option. In Rollie’s long experience, as long as you had an option, you didn’t have to resort to the final possibility, which was to put a bullet in your own head. Or do it Alamo style and go down, overrun, howling for blood, and blazing away.

  Rollie peeled off away from the retreating horse with Pops jostling atop, doing his best to stay in the saddle and not get scraped off by a pine.

  Rollie darted low, angled around a clot of logging slash, brambly branches, and sags of crumbling bark jutting in every direction. It had been piled there some time ago by whoever had cut the trees to build a cabin. Might even have been Pieder, seeing as how they weren’t all that far from his shop.

  Shots volleyed, but the cover of the woods likely confounded the shooters. A branch cracked behind him and Rollie spun, the Schofield a breath away from speaking the only way it knew how.

  Pieder’s grim face peeked around a pine. “Okay?”

  Rollie nodded, motioned for him to come ahead, join him behind the slash mound. Once the man made it beside him, Rollie nodded toward his shoulder. “Bad?”

  “No, okay.” The blacksmith flexed his fingers and offered a quick smile. “Good.”

  Rollie spied through gaps in the branches. “Wish I knew how many there are.”

  Pieder nudged him with an elbow. “Come.” He jerked his head toward the direction he’d come from. “Come,” he said again.

  Rollie shrugged. Why not? He trusted the man, though he had no idea what Pieder was talking about. Rollie found out the moment they rounded a cluster of boulders a few paces behind a big pine. Sprawled against the rocks leaned a young stranger with a bloodied gut. Had to be one of the invaders. He’d been shot, but his chest rose and fell. The young man’s eyelids fluttered, fought to open.

  “You do this?” Rollie said to the blacksmith.

  Pieder nodded.

  “Thanks. Keep an eye. I’ll try to get him to chat.”

  The blacksmith nodded and crouched down. Eyeing the dappled woods about them, he poised his gun for action.

  “Hey!” Rollie grabbed the wounded man’s boot and jiggled it. “Hey!” He jerked it back and forth.

  The young man groaned and his eyes fluttered open, lazed back and forth. As Rollie kept jerking the foot, the eyes focused on his face.

  “No . . . stop it!”

  “Sure.” Rollie crouched low and leaned closer to the man’s face, his pistol ready to bark if the man made an unexpected move. “Glad to, once you answer a few questions.”

  “No, no way. The boss, he’d kill me.”

  “Guess what? My friend here beat him to it.”

/>   “Huh?”

  “Look, son, you’re gut shot. About to meet your Maker. Or not.”

  “What do you mean?” the man’s eyes widened.

  “I mean, you shuffle off as you are now, you’ll be going down, not up.” Rollie hoped the fool was at least raised by Christians who’d laced his youth with the fears of sizzling brimstone, of the might and mayhem of heaven and hell.

  “Why?” The young man swallowed, fought to keep his eyes open. His left cheek twitched and he groaned as pain surged his insides.

  “Hey, stick with me, kid.” Rollie snapped his fingers and lightly slapped the man’s face. “Tell me something I can use. Something that will help me save all those innocent people in town might earn your place way upstairs. You follow me?”

  The young man tried to nod, grimaced, then said, “Boss was hired—”

  “By who? Come on, who?” Rollie smacked the kid’s face again, harder this time. He knew he was losing him.

  “Kid! Who’s your boss?”

  The young man’s eyes opened again. “Cleve . . . Cleve! Oh, I don’t wanna go to hell . . .”

  And that was it. The kid sagged into himself. Rollie was tempted to shake the damn fool by the shirtfront but it would be fruitless.

  That odd name the kid said, Cleve, told Rollie more than he could have imagined. If it was who he suspected, that explained a whole lot about how the day was going.

  Cleve Danziger was a hired gun, perhaps the most famous of all alive or dead that Rollie was acquainted with. He sold his services to anybody who met his high-end rates. He was employed by wealthy absentee ranchers, railroad owners, and lumber, gold, and silver tycoons. Eastern banker types.

  Danziger had been pointed out to him perhaps six years before, in Sheridan, Wyoming. Rollie had been at a cattlemens’ luncheon as an unofficial keeper of the peace between the ranchers and the farmers whose land the ranchers wanted. Try as Pinkerton and the law might, nothing stuck to the oily Danziger.

  In hiring Danziger, an employer would also get a gang of killers, rapists, and thieves Cleve hired to help him enforce his employers’ wills. And they would help him track down the gimped-up old former Pinkerton detective who caused the employer grief years before. But to risk bracing an entire town in pursuit of one man? Surely he wasn’t that ruthless.