The big gundown

by J. A. Johnstone

  “Whoa!” Sean took a step back. “Easy, Kid. It’s just me.”

  The rancher had a cup of coffee in one hand and a canvas bag in the other. The Kid felt a little foolish when he saw that. He took his hand away from his gun and forced himself to relax.

  “Sorry, Sean. I didn’t think anybody else was up and around yet.”

  “You can’t do anything in that house without Frannie knowing about it.” Sean smiled as he came closer and offered the coffee to The Kid, who took the cup and sipped the strong black brew gratefully. “She thought you might want some food to take with you.” He hefted the bag. “It’s just some biscuits left over from last night.”

  “Your wife’s biscuits are mighty good.”

  “And a couple of fried apple pies.”

  The Kid smiled. “Even better.” He paused. “You told her I was leaving this morning?”

  “No, but she figured it out pretty quick when you got up and slipped out. I never told her what Cyrus said yesterday. Didn’t want to worry her. But if she knew, I figure she’d be grateful to you for what you’re doing, Kid.”

  The Kid shrugged. “I had to be moving on sometime. Today’s as good a time as any.”

  “Well, we both appreciate it. I thought I’d give you a hand saddling up, but I see you’ve already done it. How’s your leg?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “You know, most men would’ve been laid up for at least twice that long with a bullet hole in their leg.”

  “I don’t like to stay in one place for too long.”

  “Because of the chance that trouble might catch up to you?”

  “Something like that,” The Kid said.

  “Don’t you get, well, lonely, always drifting by yourself like that?”

  It wouldn’t do any good to tell Sean that he was never really alone, The Kid thought. A beautiful blond ghost rode with him everywhere he went, always at his side even when he wished she wasn’t.

  So he just shook his head and said, “Not to speak of.”

  “Well, I would. Once you’ve got a family, I don’t reckon you’d ever feel right being alone again.”

  The Kid turned toward the buckskin. The shadows were still thick in the barn, but they might not be thick enough to conceal the look of pain and loss that he felt come over his face. He didn’t want Sean to see that. Nobody could see it.

  It was his, and his alone.

  He drank the last of the coffee, handed the empty cup to Sean. Then he took the bag of food and said, “I’m much obliged to you and Mrs. Williams. For this, and for everything else.”

  “You reckon you’ll ever come back this way again, Kid?”

  The Kid shrugged. “Quien sabe? I never know where the trails will take me.”

  “Well, if you do, be sure and stop in for a visit, you hear?” Sean stuck out his hand. “Best of luck to you.”

  “Thanks.” The Kid shook hands with the young rancher, then took hold of the buckskin’s reins, put a foot in the stirrup, and swung up into the saddle. He looped the cord attached to the bag of food around the saddlehorn.

  Sean stepped back to let The Kid ride out of the barn. The Kid looked around in the doorway and lifted a hand in farewell. He didn’t look back again, as he rode away.

  And he pretended he didn’t hear the sudden banging of a door and the plaintive sound of a little boy’s voice somewhere behind him.

  There was an old saying about the dawn coming up like thunder. That’s the way it was out there. One minute the sun was still below the horizon. The next it was a brilliant orange-red ball floating in the sky and flooding the landscape with light.

  The Kid kept the buckskin moving at an easy pace toward the San Pedro River. He was only a couple of miles from the Williams spread, but already he had put the place behind him. It was a part of his past, a part that he would remember fondly in some respects but not in others.

  Out of habit, he kept a close eye on the landscape around him, alert for any sign of trouble. It was pretty dry country, but there were small grassy valleys here and there, where the ranchers in the area grazed their stock. Ranges of low hills framed the valleys. Miles to the north lay the grayish-blue peaks of the Dragoon Mountains. The Kid had never been through those parts before, but he had talked to people who had, including Sean Williams. Up ahead were the towns of Sierra Vista, right on the river, and Bisbee a few miles beyond it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to visit either place, although it might not hurt to replenish his supplies.

  Because he was watching everything around him, he spotted the buzzards circling in the air to his left. The Kid reined in and studied them for a moment as they wheeled through the blue sky and then dropped toward the earth, one after the other. Whatever was down there, the buzzards had decided that it was already dead, not just dying.

  As The Kid studied the terrain from under the broad brim of his brown hat, his eyes suddenly narrowed. He saw a line meandering in a jagged path across a broad flat and recognized it as a dry wash, a common feature in that part of the country. There was nothing unusual about it.

  Frannie Williams had said that her husband Sean had taken the bodies of the four gunmen to an arroyo about two miles from the ranch house and buried them by caving in the bank. The Kid whipped around in the saddle and gazed back toward the Williams spread. He had come about two miles.

  And there were more buzzards arriving in the vicinity, even as he sat there.

  “Son of a bitch,” The Kid muttered under his breath. He tugged on the reins and turned the buckskin toward the arroyo. His boot heels prodded the horse’s flanks and sent it forward at a fast trot.

  When he reached the arroyo, The Kid dismounted and hauled his Winchester from the sheath strapped to the saddle. On the other side of the saddle, an old Sharps rode in a similar sheath, but he used it for long-distance work. He was more likely to need the repeater.

  The Kid stepped to the edge of the wash and looked down, grimacing as the stench reached him. Somebody had been digging down there, and now more than a dozen buzzards were clustered around what had been unearthed, their bald, ugly heads dipping and darting as their sharp beaks ripped strips of rotting flesh off the four corpses. The Kid couldn’t have recognized the men. Their tattered clothing was the only thing that still marked them as human since the skeletons hadn’t been fully exposed yet. The way the carrion-eating birds were working on them, it wouldn’t be true much longer.

  A bitter, sour taste of revulsion welled up The Kid’s throat and filled his mouth. He pointed the Winchester at the sky and cranked off three fast rounds, yelling as the shots blasted out. The racket sent the flock of buzzards soaring into the sky with angry cries and the flapping of leathery wings. The Kid lowered the rifle and wiped the back of one hand across his mouth. It didn’t make the bad taste go away.

  This was a waste of time and bullets, he told himself as the echoes of the shots rolled away over the Arizona landscape. He wasn’t going to bury those bastards. Might as well let the buzzards have them. Buzzards had to eat, too, The Kid supposed.

  The question was, who had come along and uncovered the bodies?

  One obvious answer suggested itself, and The Kid didn’t like it at all.

  He liked it even less a moment later as his head jerked up and he realized that the shots he was hearing weren’t the echoes of the ones he had fired to chase off the buzzards. They were a fresh burst of gunfire, followed by some sort of heavy boom, and they seemed to originate in the direction he had come from.

  The direction of the Williams ranch.

  Chapter 7

  The wind tugged at The Kid’s hat as he leaned forward in the saddle, over the neck of the hard-galloping buckskin. Without really thinking about what he was doing, he reached up to tug the hat down tighter on his head. It was just a reflex action. His brain was full of worry for the family he had left.

  He had covered about a mile, so he was only halfway there. Despite the way the buckskin’s long-legged pace ate up the ground, it
seemed to take forever to get anywhere. The Kid’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace. He shouldn’t have ridden off like that, he told himself. He should have stayed to make sure Sean and Frannie and Cyrus were safe. He should have known that the colonel would be suspicious and would come back to the Williams spread sooner or later.

  The Kid shoved those thoughts out of his head. He knew from tragic experience that all the “should haves” in the world meant nothing. All that mattered was what actually happened.

  A column of black smoke climbed into the Arizona sky that had turned a brilliant blue with the advent of morning.

  The Kid bit back a curse and lashed the buckskin with the reins, trying to get more speed out of the horse. The buckskin responded gallantly, stretching out even more. The landscape flashed by in a blur. Man and horse were one, racing across the flats, bounding up and down the gentle hills, wheeling tightly around obstacles.

  Finally The Kid realized that the horse’s heart might burst if he kept up this pace. The buckskin would run himself to death, if that was what The Kid asked him to do. The Kid hauled back on the reins, slowing his mount a little even though the smoke curling into the sky called out to him with a terrible urgency.

  It wouldn’t do any good if the buckskin collapsed underneath him, he told himself. He held the horse at a hard run instead of the full-out sprint.

  He couldn’t hear the shots anymore, but it was unlikely he’d be able to hear them over the buckskin’s pounding hoofbeats, even if they continued.

  A long rise loomed in front of him. The Kid knew that the ranch headquarters was on the other side of that rise. There was no longer any doubt about where the thick black smoke was coming from.

  He pulled the Winchester from its sheath as he started up the rise. If whoever had attacked the ranch was still there, he intended to make them pay for what they had done.

  As he topped the rise, he saw that the raiders were gone. Nothing was moving around the ranch. Smoke poured up from the house, the barn, and the bunkhouse. Those structures were made of adobe, but their interiors could burn. The corral was empty and its gate open. The raiders had taken the horses with them.

  The Kid’s heart slugged heavily in his chest as he spotted several dark shapes sprawled on the ground near the bunkhouse. The vaqueros must have run outside when the shooting started, only to be cut down. Another body lay face down near the house. The Kid rode hard toward it. Maybe somebody was still alive. He knew it was a forlorn hope, but he couldn’t abandon it.

  As he came closer, he saw a big hole in the wall of the house, as if something had smashed through it. He didn’t know what could have inflicted the damage but it didn’t really matter. He hauled back on the reins and slowed the buckskin, swinging down from the saddle even before the horse came to a halt. The Kid landed running, with the Winchester held ready for instant use if he needed it.

  He recognized the man lying facedown as Sean Williams. The Kid dropped to a knee beside the young rancher and set the rifle on the ground. He took hold of Sean’s shoulders and carefully rolled him onto his back. The Kid’s hard-planed face took on an even grimmer cast as he saw how sodden with blood Sean’s shirt was. The rancher was shot to pieces.

  But somehow, he was still alive. His eyelids flickered open. The Kid slipped an arm under his shoulders and lifted him a little. He peered up at The Kid without seeming to recognize him. “F-Frannie?” he husked.

  “It’s Morgan, Sean,” The Kid said. “What happened?”

  Blood dribbled in a crimson stream from the corner of Sean’s mouth. He still didn’t seem to know who The Kid was, but he answered the question.

  “Men…rode up…started shooting…we’d just sat down…to breakfast…I ran to the door…oh, God!” His face twisted, either from pain or the memory of what had happened or both. “There was…a terrible noise…something came through the wall…Frannie and Cyrus were still at the table…Oh, God! No! No!”

  The Kid glanced at the hole in the wall. If whatever had caused that destruction had gone on through and hit Frannie and Cyrus, there was no way they had survived. And if they were still in the burning house, there might not even be anything left of their bodies.

  Sean’s fingers clutched at The Kid’s arm. “You’ve got to…save them…get them out…”

  “Sure,” The Kid said. “I’ll do what I can, Sean. I swear.”

  But he didn’t get up, knowing that there was no point. He had already seen the light fading in Sean’s eyes, and a moment later, the young man’s grip relaxed and his fingers slid off The Kid’s arm. His breath came out of him in a long, final sigh. The Kid closed Sean’s eyes and eased him back to the ground.

  The Kid stood up and looked toward the house. He had promised Sean that he would do what he could for Frannie and Cyrus, and he fully intended to keep that promise. He would also do the one thing that was within his power.

  He would avenge their deaths.

  The Kid checked on the three vaqueros who lay near the bunkhouse and found that they were dead, also shot full of holes just like Sean. He didn’t see the fourth member of the crew, but he assumed the man’s body was inside the bunkhouse, being consumed by the flames. He couldn’t put out the fires. They would just have to burn themselves out.

  In the meantime, he covered the bodies with blankets from his bedroll to keep scavengers off them, then mounted up and rode in a large circle around the ranch headquarters. He saw numerous hoofprints, and while he wasn’t an expert tracker like his father, he could tell that the men who’d attacked the ranch had approached the place from the southeast.

  The Kid noticed something else that was odd—two parallel lines etched into the sandy ground that looked like the tracks of wagon wheels. They were too close together to be wagon tracks, though. He wasn’t sure what had made the marks, but he was reasonably certain it was something the raiders had brought with them, then taken away again, because the marks turned and went back in the other direction.

  The place where they turned around was on top of a small ridge that commanded a good view of the ranch house. The Kid sat there on the buckskin for a long moment, frowning as he thought about what he was looking at. An idea played around in the back of his mind, but he didn’t know if there was any truth to it.

  The fires inside the buildings were starting to die down. The roofs had collapsed, but the adobe walls still stood. The Kid rode back down there, dismounted, and started looking around for a shovel. He found one in a small shed that stood near the barn but wasn’t attached to it. The fire hadn’t spread that far.

  He walked up a small, aspen-dotted hill behind the ranch house that looked like it might be a good place to dig some graves. He figured Sean and Frannie and Cyrus would like to be laid to rest overlooking the home where they had lived for too short a time. He hadn’t started digging, though, when he heard a sudden rustling noise in some nearby brush. Instinct made The Kid drop the shovel and whirl toward the sound, palming out his Colt as he did so.

  A weak voice said, “P-Please, señor…h-help me…”

  Wary of a trap, The Kid approached the brush carefully, gun in hand. He crouched, moved some branches aside, and saw a man he recognized as one of the Williams vaqueros lying there covered with blood.

  No one else was around. The Kid holstered his gun and moved quickly to the injured man’s side. One glance was enough to tell him that the vaquero was in the same shape as Sean Williams had been—shot to pieces and not long for this world.

  “Did you see the man who did this to you, amigo?”

  The vaquero’s tongue came out and licked blood-smeared lips. His hands moved aimlessly around his bullet-shredded midsection. “The hombres…Señor Sean…warned us about…a dozen of them…maybe more…they had…artilleria…”

  The Kid wasn’t sure he had heard right, but what he thought the vaquero had said fit in with the theory he had come up with. On one knee next to the man, he leaned closer and said, “You mean a cannon?”

  �
�Sí, señor…a c-cannon…” A shiver went through the man, and he cried out, “Aii, Dios mio!”

  Those were his final words. His head slumped to the side. His eyes were open and staring without seeing anything.

  The Kid closed this man’s eyes as he had Sean’s, then came to his feet and looked down at the ranch house. A cannonball had caused the hole in the wall. The words of the dying vaquero had confirmed his suspicions. The cart on which the big gun was mounted had left those tracks.

  What sort of men would attack a peaceful ranch with a cannon and brutally wipe out a family that had done nothing wrong?

  Even as that question went through The Kid’s mind, he knew the answer.

  The sort of men who rode with Colonel Gideon Black.

  He had known as soon as he saw them that they were evil, cold-blooded killers. The colonel himself had seemed different, polite and well-spoken. But he had been in charge, and he had to know the kind of men who were riding with him. To The Kid’s way of thinking, that made Colonel Black just as bad or worse. The Kid had no doubt that it was Black who had ordered the attack on the ranch after finding the bodies of the men buried under the bank of the arroyo. Black hadn’t asked any questions. He had just assumed that those on the Williams ranch were responsible for the deaths of his men, and he had acted quickly and ruthlessly to settle the score for them.

  Colonel Black was going to discover that he wasn’t the only one who could avenge some deaths. The Kid intended to make the colonel and his men pay for what had happened there that morning. He didn’t care how many of them there were, and he didn’t give a damn that they had a cannon. The big gun didn’t matter.

  Before this was over, The Kid vowed as he stood on the hill and looked at the thinning smoke from the ruined ranch, there was going to be one hell of a big gundown.