by J. T. Edson
Carville opened his mouth to speak but something in Waco’s eyes made him close it again. He watched as Waco tossed card after card onto the table, counting as he did so. The last card fell as the young Texan said twenty-one.
“That’s right, sir, twenty-one,” Waco said. “Now, if you’d go along with the marshal, he’ll arrange for your next show.”
Slowly Reuben turned and walked from the room followed by the marshal. Waco stood silent until the bartender spoke to him.
“How did he do it, Ranger?”
“I don’t know,” Waco confessed. “I reckon the Great Rube’ll take that trick to his grave.”
Waco lowered the glass of whiskey and looked as Elwin rushed up to him in the bar of the theater. The young Texan leaned on the bar and looked moodily into the glass. A man got nowhere riding a bottle, it didn’t even help. He thrust the glass to one side.
“Any word yet?” Elwin gasped.
“We got him,” Waco answered. “The Great Rube and his Circe both played out their last show.”
“I mean with Janice,” Elwin croaked.
It took a full minute for the words to sink into Waco’s mind. There had been little for him to do after the marshal took Reuben away. He went into the other room to talk to Tioga, arranging for her to move into the Creed Hotel, as she did not wish to spend another night in the suite. He had watched the awkward shape being taken out of the rear of the hotel and came to the theater with a desire to get himself stinking drunk. Only after one glass he knew whiskey would not buy him anything.
“I’m sorry, Elwin. I just haven’t been able to go and see.”
“I went,” the juggler gasped distractedly. “But Doc chased me away. I’ve never seen him looking so worried.”
At that moment Doc entered the room. He crossed to the bar and leaned his elbows on it tiredly. He ignored Elwin.
“Four fingers neat,” Doc told the bartender.
Waco watched his partner sink the drink without even giving it time to set in the glass. Sudden panic hit Waco as he watched. Never as long as they had been friends had Doc needed a drink on finishing a doctoring chore. Waco felt tired of death; surely there had been enough dying for one day without this.
“Doc!” screamed Elwin, bringing every eye to him. “How is she?”
“Which she?”
“Janice, of cour—you mean—Doc—you—it’s a girl?”
With that, Elwin threw back his head and let out a wild howl and turned to start for the door leading into the theater, where another act was trying to carry on through his noise.
“Don’t you want to know about your son?”
The words brought Elwin to a halt. He turned to look at Doc, who leaned on the bar grinning.
“Son?” Elwin gasped. “But you said it was a daughter.”
“That too. Mother, son, and daughter, all well and healthy, just waiting to see their pappy.”
“Twins!” Elwin whooped. “Yahoo! I’ve got twins. We got our own double act!”
The show did not matter anymore. The act on the stage gave up and yelled their delight. Show people, stagehands, the orchestra were all up on their feet and yelling in wild delight. The word passed around the audience and suddenly the cheering started.
Waco and Doc stood alone in the bar; even the bartenders and waiters had joined the rush into the theater.
“Hear you’ve been working, boy,” Doc remarked.
“You might say that. Doc, you nigh on scared me out of ten years’ growth the way you came in here. I was sure something had gone wrong. I never saw you that worried about delivering a baby afore,”
Doc grinned. “I never delivered twins afore either. Let’s go along the street, have a quiet beer, and then get some sleep.”
Part Three – The Petition
The sage grouse covey blasted into the air ahead of the three horsemen, sailing up and gliding toward the bushes by the side of the trail. They flashed over the trail, no more than wheel ruts following the old Indian tracks, which in turn used the line taken by the now depleted buffalo herds.
“Sure wish I’d a shotgun,” drawled Waco, watching the birds heading for the rocks and bushes beyond the trail.
Suddenly the leading bird seemed to try to stop his downward glide, fighting up and away from where he aimed to dip into the bush and out of sight.
“Look out,” yelled Captain Bertram H. Mosehan, pitching sideways from his saddle and grabbing at the butt of his rifle as he fell.
The move came not a moment too soon. A spurt of flame licked from the bush toward which the grouse flew. Mosehan heard the flat slap of a bullet passing over his head, then the crack of a rifle.
Jerking the Winchester from his saddle boot, Mosehan lit down rolling, landing at the edge of the trail and diving into the cover of a rock. An instant later Doc Leroy, also holding a rifle, joined him, flattening down at the other side, working the lever and throwing a bullet into the Winchester’s breech.
“Where’s the boy?” he asked.
Mosehan also realized at the same moment that Waco had not followed them. The three horses were running on at a good speed but all were riderless, nor was Waco hanging Comanche style over the flank of his huge paint stallion. The trail lay empty; Waco’s body was not to be seen on it even though the first shot was followed by two more.
At the first sign of trouble Waco had reacted as did the other two. First he came off his horse on the side away from the shots, second he grabbed out his rifle. Then he diverged from their movements. He had been on the side nearest to the ambush. He flattened down under a bush and gave thought to his position.
Seconds ticked by as Waco waited for something to happen. His eyes scanned the country around him, the distance first, then the center ground, and finally really close up. Nothing showed, nothing stirred. Only the three shots, each from a different piece of cover.
The men who laid the ambush were not yearling stock at the game. They knew how to handle such a situation and only bad luck broke their ambush up. Such men could be dangerous as a teased rattler or a starving silver-tip grizzly bear. They would not let having their ambush spoiled spook them and would play the game until the last card fell.
Waco remembered Dusty Fog’s ix often-repeated advice on such a situation. “An army on the defensive is always at the disadvantage.”
Those three men were no army but they stayed on the defensive. They lay up in cover, waiting for a chance to do what they had been paid to do. Waco knew this to be no casual attempt, somebody with a grudge taking a chance on getting the head of the Arizona Rangers. This ambush had been set too carefully, set for one man. Only luck brought Doc and Waco along with their chief; having arrived from a chore earlier that day, Mosehan was in his Tucson office just preparing to ride to Prescott, the territorial capital, to report to the governor. Waco and Doc claimed they had worked hard enough for a spell and needed a rest, so they would join their boss on his way to Prescott. Now it looked as if they had made the right decision. If Mosehan had been alone, he would most likely be dead.
As he inched his way forward, Waco’s keen eyes scanned the rough country ahead. He lay at the top of a slope that ended abruptly with a bush in front of an almost sheer wall. Then the range rolled up, thick cover through which a good man might move without being seen unless watched for with care. From where he lay Waco studied the range, working out the positions of the attackers from what he saw in that hectic few seconds of the ambush. One lay under the shadow of a small clump of scrub oaks. The third had been slightly this side of the trees, in a depression of the land. From where he lay Waco could see the hollow and could see just as well that there was no man in it.
Which same to Waco’s mind meant only one thing. The man had decided against passive defense and was now stalking the young Texan. That did not worry Waco. He had learned the art of silent hunting from a master and perfected it in still-hunting mule deer and the other easily spooked animals, until he would now bet his life on his skill.
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Hefting his rifle, Waco started down the slope, moving slowly, senses alert, keeping to every bit of cover on the way. Somewhere out there the other man also moved. The first to see the other would most surely be the one to walk away from the slope.
“That damned fool boy,” Mosehan growled admiringly. “Trust him to go over there after them.”
Doc did not reply as he rolled from behind his rock and crawled to a place some twenty yards farther on. There he settled down and nodded with satisfaction, for he could see the man among the clump of rocks. Not well enough to get a shot, but sufficient to take sight at him.
“Reckon you could draw their fire, Cap’n Bert?” he asked.
Mosehan nodded in reply. He had the other man spotted now and came up to throw a shot toward the scrub oaks. To do so he gave the man in the rocks a target. Up came the man, aiming his rifle. Only his head and shoulders showed but he was less than a hundred yards away, and Doc’s rifle could be relied on to hold true at that range. The heavy rifle bellowed and the man jerked, then flopped forward to hang as limp as a discarded rag doll.
Even as from the other side of the trail came the crash of shots, Mosehan got his chance. The man among the scrub oaks saw Doc and swung up his rifle. The heavy Winchester in Mosehan’s hands was already sighted, only needing the trigger touched to send out lead. Mosehan’s finger squeezed gently and the Winchester kicked back against his shoulder. He saw splinters kick from the side of the tree and thought he had missed clean. Then the other man came pitching out into sight, landed facedown, and lay still.
“Waco!” Mosehan roared. “You all right, boy?”
Through the bushes and cover down the slope Waco moved. The bottom of the wall was hidden by a thick wall of growth, heavy foliage interlaced with thick branches. He thought he had seen a movement on the top of the wall but could not be sure. The other man might have reached it-
There was a trickle of dirt and small stones still running down a part of the wall. Not much. It took keen eyes to spot the trickle and Waco’s eyes were keen. That meant, unless he was acting tricky, the man had come down the slope and had hidden behind the bushes at the bottom. Either way the man held a momentary advantage if he knew Waco’s position.
Easing forward, Waco kept alert, for to fail would be fatal. A slight movement caught the corner of his eye. He twisted around, going to one side, and not a second too soon. The barrel of a Winchester showed through the bushes, flame lashing from its muzzle. The bullet missed Waco by a scant inch; he felt the wind of it on his cheek. At the same moment he heard the click as the man threw another bullet into the breech. Then Waco’s rifle crashed back as he heard shooting from beyond the trail.
The man must have thought his cover would protect him, that the bushes stood a good chance of deflecting the bullet from a .44-.40 rifle. In this he made a fatal mistake. The rifle in Waco’s hands was undoubtedly a Winchester, had the usual muzzle-long tube magazine under the barrel and the lever action. Yet it did not belong to either the .44-.40 center fire model of 1873 or the .44-.25 rimfire model of 1866. The rifle Waco held bore the name Centennial Model of 1876, .45-.75 in caliber, throwing out a three-hundred-and-fifty-grain bullet by the power of seventy-five grains of powder.
The heavy bullet ripped through bush that might have deflected a lighter load of the more usual model of rifle. Waco saw the other rifle barrel tilt out of line, so its bullet sped off harmlessly. He fired again and this time heard for sure the soggy thud of a bullet striking flesh. The rifle in the bushes jerked upward, there sounded a sudden thrashing behind the bushes, and Waco heard Mosehan shout. “All right, Cap’n Bert,” he yelled back. “I got this one!” “And we got the other two. Coming over now!” “Shuckens, it’s a mite late for that,” Waco whooped. He did not wait to hear if Mosehan made a reply but moved along until he could find a way through the bushes. They did not extend clear up to the wall but left a narrow winding track along the base. Waco’s attacker lay sprawled back against the wall, his hands at his side, his head hung over toward his shoulders. For all that, Waco kept his rifle ready as he went forward. The precaution proved to be unnecessary. The man lay dead, hit twice, once in the chest, the other in the left shoulder. Waco could have cursed. A man wounded as badly as that would have been easily taken a prisoner. A live prisoner might talk.
Then Waco shrugged. This man was a Syndicate gun, one of their better stock from the look of his clothes and the fast man’s rig he wore. Such would never surrender without a fight, even when badly wounded. They also would not talk.
Leaning his rifle against the wall, Waco bent over the man. He appeared to have been in his late thirties; his face was not familiar to Waco and likely did not appear on any recent wanted poster, if it ever had. The Syndicate did not use wanted men for hired killers unless they were pushed hard.
Quickly Waco went through the man’s pockets, but apart from some fifty dollars in gold and small bills, a sack of Bull Durham tobacco, and a few matches there was nothing. No letters, not a thing to identify the man, as had been the case when other Syndicate men died on a kill.
Waco took up his rifle, forced his way through the bushes, and heard Doc call, “This’n’s cashed.”
The young Texan climbed the wall and made his way to where Mosehan stood in the scrub-oak clump looking down at the third killer.
Waco joined his boss, his eyes going to a raw gouge ripped in the side of the tree, then down at the man. The heavy flat-nosed bullet had torn through the wood on the glance, coming out low in a ricochet that caught the man under his collarbone and, spinning like a buzz saw, ripped down into his chest cavity.
“Lord, these new Winchesters are real mean guns,” Waco said quietly.
“He’s Kinsey,” Mosehan answered. “Knew him from back when I first ran the Hashknife outfit. He wasn’t quite dead when I got to him. He said something about telling somebody called Jack Faye that I’d the devil’s own luck.”
Doc came up, rifle under his arm, from checking the man he shot. “Dead. Hit him between the eyes. Never saw him before, or can’t remember him at all. Good stock hired killer from his clothes and gun. Nothing in his pockets.”
“Kinsey’s one of the Syndicate’s top guns, isn’t he?” asked Waco, his earlier thoughts getting confirmed by the second.
“About the top, since Dusty Fog cut down Iowa Parsons in Tombstone three years back,” x Mosehan agreed.
“It don’t look like they cotton on to us taking so much notice of them the last few weeks,” said Doc.
For the past two months the Rangers had mounted a growing offensive against the Syndicate, the unknown organization that ran the crooked gambling houses, saloons, dance halls, and brothels in almost every town in Arizona Territory. In their investigations the Rangers had managed to padlock several places, even in the face of some political opposition and some complaints from local lawmen. Yet the Rangers had gone no further forward than any other group who tried to get behind the face of the Syndicate. Who the men behind it, the powers who ruled the great octopus-like group, might be Mosehan did not know. So thorough was the organization of the Syndicate, so great the fear they held their people under, that none knew, or would dare tell even if they knew, who ran the town for the Syndicate.
In the early days of the Rangers Mosehan tried to ignore the existence of the Syndicate, for there was much crime to take the attention of his thirteen-man force. However, it always nagged at his conscience, always was the thought that he had turned a blind eye to the most powerful criminal force of all. Then a good friend, owner of a straight saloon, received notice that the Syndicate wanted in on his place. His boys smashed one attempt at wrecking the bar, then a few days later he stepped from his house to walk to the saloon and a rifle bullet cut him down.
That proved to be the spur Mosehan needed. He brooded and blamed himself for the killing, thinking that if he had moved earlier, Ed Bulek might still be alive. With that thought Mosehan give his orders. Smash the Syndicate. His men need
ed no further instructions. They moved fast, struck hard. This ambush showed that the Syndicate had felt the sting of the lash and were striking back.
The Syndicate lived by fear, existed only because no man so far dared cross them. Three years before, a Syndicate man tried to run an operation outside their usual line, working alone. He failed in it due to the gun skill of Waco’s old friend and hero, Dusty Fog. It took the Syndicate almost six months, several brutal beatings, and a killing to restore their former hold over the unwilling subjects of their evil empire. Now they would not dare let anybody, even the powerful Arizona Rangers, go against them without striking back.
“You said something about this hombre mentioning a name,” Doc remarked.
“That’s right,” Mosehan agreed. “Faye, Jack Faye. It might have been one of the other two.”
“Likely,” Doc drawled.
“How much do you know about the Syndicate, Cap’n Bert?” Waco asked.
“Not much. Just little things I’ve been gathering ever since I took over the Rangers. One thing I’ve learned is that all the ordering of guns is done by a single man. Who he is and what he is I don’t know. All the Syndicate’s guns get their orders from him, but only the best ever get to meet him.”
“There’s a Faye rides with Curly Bill’s bunch over to Galeyville,” Doc remarked. “I don’t know what his first name is.”
“Tom,” Mosehan answered, “and it’s rode with, not rides. Tried to show the others how tough he was by taking a herd of Texas John Slaughter’s cattle. Don’t reckon he was as tough as he made out. They found him propped against the door of Babcock’s saloon one morning.
A bullet hole between his eyes and no sign to show how he came to be there.”
“That’s Slaughter’s way,” said Waco grimly.
“Yeah,” Mosehan agreed. “That’s Slaughter’s way. But it lets out that Faye!”
“Nothing in their pockets, never is when the Syndicate sends them on a kill,” Doc remarked. “What’ll we do with them?”
