Remington 1894

by William W. Johnstone

  CHAPTER 21

  McMasters never lowered the Remington twelve-gauge as he rode up the hill, his eyes moving, his mind anticipating anything. But all of the prisoners remained in view, even the Mexican, Vasquez. Unconscious, he was lying on the ground and bleeding from his abdomen. The woman, Mary Lovelace, knelt beside Daniel Kilpatrick, who managed to push himself up, but collapsed against the redhead.

  “How bad is he?” McMasters asked, not looking at her or Kilpatrick, but watching the four prisoners standing.

  “I’ll live,” Kilpatrick managed to say. His voice sounded weak, and his face had turned ashen. “Sorry, John. I let the Mex sneak up behind me.”

  “Don’t talk. And lay back down, damn it.”

  “With . . . pleasure.”

  Mary Lovelace eased him back onto the ground, his hat serving as a pillow.

  “I don’t know how deep that knife got him,” the redhead said. “Or what it nicked. I’ve got the bleeding stopped on the outside. Don’t know about the inside. But he needs a doctor.”

  McMasters shot her a look. His eyes touched the two six-shooters—Daniel’s revolver and a nickel-plated hideaway gun.

  Lovelace saw that. “They’re his.” She indicated Kilpatrick.

  “Both?”

  “The small one’s empty.”

  “Then—” He stopped, deciding to wait before taking the big one. He might regret that in a minute, maybe just a second. Swinging down off the buckskin, he asked the black scout,

  “What happened?”

  Alamo Carter told him concisely, like an Army man would. McMasters studied the unconscious Vasquez, and then looked down the hill. The sight of the mules sickened him. So did the dark clouds and the flashes of lightning.

  “I guess,” Carter said, “he figured to shoot the buck you was talkin’ to, so’s it would rile up them others. They’d kill you. I reckon he’d kill the rest.”

  “He didn’t kill them all,” McMasters said. “I had to get two.” He waited.

  Carter shifted the Winchester Yellow Boy. “Couldn’t let an Indian kill you like that.”

  “I’m obliged.”

  “Don’t be,” Carter said. “Likely, I’ll kill you later.”

  “Why not now?”

  He let the Winchester drop onto the dirt. “Because it’s empty.”

  Turning, McMasters looked at the others, Bloody Zeke, Emory Logan, and Marcus Patton. “And you three? You could’ve mounted up, ridden out for parts unknown.”

  “Without ammunition?” The gambler pointed down the hill at the mules. “Fool animals took off once the shooting started.”

  “That’s a government trained animal for you,” McMasters said. “But you could’ve found ammo at Apache Junction . . . or anywhere on the way to Mexico.”

  “Bitch wouldn’t let us leave,” the Reb said.

  McMasters glanced at Mary Lovelace, who refused to look at him and kept bathing Daniel Kilpatrick’s face with a handkerchief. Lifting his head, McMasters found Bloody Zeke.

  He shrugged.

  “She had the gun. Well, the colored cuss had the rifle, but he was too busy saving your hide. She said she’d shoot any one of us who tried to leave here.”

  “And you believed her?”

  Bloody Zeke pointed a wiry finger at the Mexican. “After she shot him, yeah, I believed her.”

  “All right.” McMasters pointed down the hill. “Leave the hardware I loaned you here. Pick up what you can.” He walked over to Lovelace and Kilpatrick, bent and picked up Kilpatrick’s Colt, and shoved it into his waistband. He saw the busted Greener, and, taking the Merwin Hulbert, he checked the cylinder and saw that, indeed, she had fired every round. He started to hand it to her, but stopped.

  “The Remington revolver I gave you . . .”

  “You want it back?”

  He nodded. She pulled it from her waistband, spun it on her finger, and handed it, butt forward, toward him.

  “Lay it down on Dan’s stomach.”

  She grinned without humor. “Think I’d pull a border shift on you, McMasters? With an empty pistol.”

  “The Remington fires the same cartridges as this.” He jostled the Merwin Hulbert, and stuck it behind his back.

  She placed the 1890 Remington on Kilpatrick’s stomach, and McMasters picked it up, stuck it in the front of his waistband, and followed the others down the hill.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry, fellow.” Standing up, McMasters put the barrel of his Colt against the fallen mule’s head, and squeezed the trigger. He never could look at a horse or mule or even a donkey after he had put the suffering beast out of its misery. Turning away abruptly, he moved along the precarious slope and came to the other mule.

  He checked the animal’s legs and hooves, and after a glance behind him, lowered the Remington on the ground, and removed the packsaddle. He patted the mule’s rump, grabbed the canteens, and a sack of jerky and corn dodgers, and dumped most of the grain from another sack for the mule to eat. Once he had the Remington in his hands again, he walked back to where the prisoners sat or squatted, picking up spilled cartridges and depositing them in sacks. He did not look at the mule he had just killed.

  Alamo Carter looked up. “No good?”

  “He’ll live if the wolves or a mountain lion doesn’t get him,” McMasters said, and shot a glance back at the mule, which grazed on the grain. He studied the skies.

  “All right. That’s all we’re getting. Leave the rest, and head back up the hill. We need to find some shelter before that storm hits.” He walked up ahead of the others, and when he got to the pile where they had all placed their weapons, he turned around and waited.

  “The bags with the ammo,” he said once the men had stopped, “will go on Dan’s horse. Put the food on the palomino.”

  “It ain’t much food,” the Reb said.

  “Ain’t much ammo, either,” said the gambler.

  “You can blame that on Vasquez. Go ahead. Get those sacks tied on those horses.” McMasters walked over to Mary Lovelace while the prisoners performed their tasks.

  “Can he ride?”

  “I’ll ride,” Daniel Kilpatrick answered.

  “Not far,” the redhead told him.

  “He’ll catch his death if he stays here,” McMasters said. “We’ll find shelter for the night. Tomorrow we’ll be at Apache Junction. Should be a doctor there.”

  She nodded and pointed toward the Mexican. “What about him?”

  “He’ll ride or I’ll tie him on,” McMasters said before returning to the weapons. There, he waited until the four men had returned.

  “We get our guns back now?” the Reb asked.

  “Sort of.” McMasters pointed the Remington’s barrels at the gambler. “Why don’t you take the Starr?”

  “But I had the Army conversion,” Marcus Patton protested.

  “I know. But change is a good thing, don’t you think?” He grinned. They had been picking up ammunition. There was no way he was going to let them have their own guns back. Hell, every one of them had to have pocketed a few extra rounds for themselves, to load when he wasn’t looking, and to use on him the first chance they got.

  Bloody Zeke laughed. “In that case, I would like to have the redhead’s Remington .44-40. It is a fine gun.”

  “You get the Army,” McMasters said.

  The Burgess went to the Reb. McMasters tossed Carter Kilpatrick’s hideaway pistol.

  “What about the Mex?” Bloody Zeke asked. “Does he get my derringer?”

  “He gets to live.” Picking up the Winchester Yellow Boy and the derringer, he walked over to Emilio Vasquez and toed him with his boot.

  The bandit’s eyes fluttered and he turned his head away.

  “I know you’re awake,” McMasters said. “And if those eyes don’t open in two seconds, they’ll never open again.” He pressed the Remington’s barrels on the outlaw’s neck.

  “Do not shoot, amigo.” Vasquez rolled over and managed a weak smile. “I
am shot in the belly. I am dying. I would like to find a priest . . .”

  “That bullet went through and, unfortunately, I doubt if it took out anything but some fat,” McMasters said. “So you better stand up and get to your palomino.”

  Slowly, the man sat up, looked at his bloody-stained shirt, and grinned. “Who bandaged my belly? The puta who shot me?”

  “Patton,” McMasters answered.

  “Muy bueno. He should be a doctor, not a gambler.”

  “Get up. Get on your horse. And keep your hands out of the bags of food strapped to the horn and your bedroll.”

  Emilio Vasquez managed to stand, and he beat the dust off his hat on his legs before settling the big sombrero on his head. “And what gun do I get now?”

  The killer’s ears were not hurting, McMasters determined. “Well you proved how good you are with the Yellow Boy, so I guess you can have this.” He swung the weapon around and slammed the stock against Vasquez’s head. The man dropped to the ground, screaming and rolling over. He cursed, came to his feet like a cat, and stopped. The Winchester lay on the ground. The Remington twelve-gauge was pointed inches from Vasquez’s face.

  “You pull a stunt like that again and I’ll kill you,” McMasters said. “You even think about it and I’ll kill you. You look at me and make me think that you’re even considering it, and I blow your damned head off.”

  “I am bleeding again.” The killer pointed at his bloody side. “And I cannot see so well.”

  “I can,” McMasters said. “I found my glasses before I came up this ridge. I can see well enough to blow your head off right now.”

  “Por favor.” The killer scrambled to his feet. “I go. I do harm to no one. I go to my horse. I be a good posse from this moment until we have caught and scalped the last member of the Butcher Gang.”

  “You’ll need this.” McMasters lowered the shotgun, pulled the derringer out of his vest pocket, and tossed it at Vasquez’s feet.

  The man grunted and groaned as he bent to pick it up, and, clutching his bleeding side, he hurried toward the palomino.

  McMasters waited until his heart stopped racing and his breathing returned to normal then he picked up the Yellow Boy and walked to Mary Lovelace and Daniel Kilpatrick. He withdrew the 1890 Remington and offered it, butt forward, to Mary.

  “That’s the same gun I had before,” she told him.

  “I figure you can use it.”

  “I shot the Mexican with your friend’s pistol.”

  “I figure you can use any gun you happen to pick up.”

  She smiled. “Not that one.” Her jaw jutted toward the Remington shotgun.

  “Let’s ride,” he said, and moved to gather the reins to Berdan.

  * * *

  It did not rain that afternoon, at least, it did not rain on John McMasters and his cobbled-together posse. The storm skirted off to the northwest, and underneath an overhang, he spent a dry evening with a wounded deputy marshal and six hardened killers.

  The men kept their distance from one another. That had been one of McMasters’s orders. “You get close and I send a load of buckshot your way,” he had told them. “Probably one of you’ll be killed outright. The other’ll just be maimed. So if you’ve been thinking about trading with each other for ammunition you stole that no longer works in your new weapon, think about double-ought buckshot in your belly and arms.”

  “What I’d rather think about,” Marcus Patton said, “is bacon that isn’t covered with sand. That damned Vasquez.”

  “I am the one with a hole in my belly,” the Mexican whined. “You should have stopped that puta from shooting me. We could all be down in the Mescal Mountains, sipping tequila, eating enchiladas. But no . . .”

  “Shut up,” Patton said, spitting out part of his supper. Sand-coated bacon and sand-coated coffee. Hardtack, which tasted like dirt and was harder than granite, even after it was soaked in coffee for ten minutes. That was supper.

  McMasters refilled his cup and settled next to Daniel Kilpatrick, who was still being tended to by Mary Lovelace. “You all right?” he asked the deputy marshal.

  Kilpatrick shrugged.

  “You might consider making a travois,” Mary Lovelace told McMasters. “I don’t like the way that wound looks.”

  “You’re not hauling me behind some horse,” Kilpatrick said.

  “You don’t watch it,” Lovelace told him, “and we’ll be hauling your corpse strapped over your saddle.”

  McMasters sipped coffee, staring at the green-eyed redhead and not at the lawman who had planned to marry Rosalee. “We’ll rig something up in the morning.” He felt Kilpatrick’s eyes blazing through him. “It’s a short ride, Dan, to Apache Junction. Leave you with a doctor.”

  “You know what I’ll do once I’m there,” the deputy said.

  McMasters nodded. “I got a good hunch.”

  “Well, let me spell it out for you, old man.” He tried to sit up, but fell back and kept his eyes closed for a while until the pain subsided enough for him to breathe again . . . and to stare into McMasters’s cold, hard eyes. “I won’t ask the sawbones you leave me with to send that telegraph. Couldn’t trust him. So I’ll do it myself. I’ll put every lawman in the southern part of the territory on your trail. The Superstitions will be filled with federal marshals, county sheriffs, posses from as far away as Tucson and Verde. And I have to think maybe a dozen or so bounty hunters. But they won’t be chasing after Moses Butcher. They’ll be after you . . . and your posse of killers.”

  “A man needs to do what he thinks best.” McMasters waited until the redhead looked up at him. “Same for a woman.”

  Her green eyes did not look away.

  “You must really hate Moses Butcher,” he told her.

  She just stared.

  “That’s why you didn’t let those others skedaddle. You want Butcher as bad as I do. I’d like to know why.”

  “I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” she said.

  He finished the coffee and stood. “I’ll be sleeping out there.” He pointed away from the overhang, glad it had not rained.

  “Not with us?” Bloody Zeke called out.

  “You want me. Try to find me. But guess wrong and you’ll find buckshot instead.”

  Bloody Zeke and the Rebel laughed.

  “If you need to relieve yourselves,” McMasters said, “do it now. One at a time. At separate bushes. Anyone goes to the same bush, I blow him apart. I’ll be watching from the dark. Any of you get close to each other, I blow you both apart. Pleasant dreams.” He walked away from the fire and let the night swallow him.

  “You, too, gringo,” Vasquez called out and chuckled.

  John McMasters knew he would not sleep. He could not afford to. The problem, he understood, was how could he ever go to sleep . . . with those six, seven if he counted Daniel Kilpatrick . . . waiting for their chance.

  CHAPTER 22

  McMasters woke to the grayness before dawn and cursed himself for falling asleep at all. At least he had not dozed for too long. He didn’t ache. And he felt as though he had not even slept more than a minute. He stood, stifled a yawn, and moved around the boulder and through the brush, keeping an eye and an ear wide open for movement or the whirl of a rattlesnake. He heard only snores and one of the horses stamping its feet.

  Stopping, he studied the bedrolls until he felt confident that someone slept underneath all of those covers. Then he moved to the fire, stoking the embers and feeding a few twigs and grass to get it going. A bedroll moved, and the woman raised her head. He studied her a moment, before turning to the coffeepot.

  “What’s for breakfast?” Bloody Zeke asked from a bedroll a few yards away.

  “One cup of coffee,” McMasters said. “Then we ride.”

  Grumbles and curses followed as the convicts slowly wakened. The redhead was the first to actually climb out of her bedroll, which she rolled up, tied up, and tossed near her saddle. She moved over to Daniel Kilpatrick, and once Mc
Masters had the fire going and the coffeepot hanging from a tripod over the blaze, he followed her. First he kicked the boots of Emilio Vasquez.

  The outlaw cursed in Spanish.

  “Get up,” McMasters ordered. “Saddle the horses.”

  “I will saddle my own,” Vasquez mumbled beneath the canvas. “And only after I have had my coffee.”

  “You will saddle them all,” McMasters told him. “Then you can have some coffee.”

  The man sighed and slowly rose, rubbing his eyes and beating some shape back into the sombrero that he had used as a pillow. Slowly, still muttering his curses, he tossed aside his blankets and moved to the horses. McMasters watched him, and then moved over toward Mary Lovelace and Daniel Kilpatrick.

  “I’m not being pulled anywhere,” the deputy marshal said firmly. “I ride that horse.”

  “Till you fall off,” McMasters told him.

  Kilpatrick nodded and repeated, “Till I fall off.”

  When McMasters glanced at the redhead, she shrugged and stood. “I’ll get him some coffee.”

  He watched her go and was about to check on the Mexican when Kilpatrick cleared his throat. McMasters looked at him.

  “I meant what I said yesterday.”

  “I never doubted you,” McMasters said.

  “You think . . . I’m wrong,” Kilpatrick said. “That I . . . didn’t . . . love her . . . enough. Otherwise . . . I’d . . .”

  McMasters held up his coffee cup and shook his head. “We’re different generations. That’s all. You think one way. I think another. You do what you think right. I’m doing what I know is right.”

  “Right for you, maybe. But not right in my eyes. Or in the eyes of the law.”

  He sipped coffee. “We’ll see what a judge and jury say when it’s all said and done.”

  Kilpatrick shook his head. “You ride into the Superstitions or down into Mexico with this bunch, you won’t live to see a judge or a jury.”

  “Maybe so.” McMasters had the Winchester Yellow Boy with him.

  “You trade that shotgun in for a long gun?” Kilpatrick said.

  “No.” McMasters tilted his head toward the rocks and brush. “Remington’s over there.” He laid the rifle by Kilpatrick’s side. “Vasquez broke your Greener. I know you’ve got your Colt, but you might have need of this, too. I loaded it. Vasquez and Carter proved it shoots true yesterday.”