Remington 1894

by William W. Johnstone

  “Gentlemen,” the gambler said in a pleasant enough voice, “if you would step out for a little bit, just long enough for me to get outside, well, then, I’d be obliged and will leave this cheerful establishment to you boys.”

  “Sure friend.” Ben Butcher moved his left hand from the top of the door and gently placed it on Cherry’s shoulder. Cherry, still the novice at such things, had been about to draw his revolver. Brother Moses would not care for any violence in Goldfield that brought a posse after the boys.

  Ben grinned. “Boys, let the gents leave. We don’t want any trouble, just some whiskey and some other kinds of refreshment.” He tugged on Cherry and let go of his hold on the door. As he backed down the boardwalk to the end of the large plate glass window he told Milt Hanks, “I told you we should’ve gone to The First Saloon.”

  All five men positioned themselves against the large window, so the gambler could see them and know that they posed no threat . . . which was Ben’s intention all along. They would let the man in the yellow vest and his hostage alone. After all, it wasn’t their fight.

  The man in the denim jacket and miner’s cap stepped through the doors. The boardwalk creaked underneath his then he stepped to the ground. Quickly, the gent with the two guns, spun the bigger man around and got behind him. He shoved a double-action revolver into his holster, but kept the derringer against the man’s head.

  “First man who pokes his nose through the doorway gets this idiot killed,” he called to the Dismal Saloon’s occupants. “Back up,” he whispered to the idiot.

  They backed up.

  Ben Butcher glanced through the window, but no one seemed to have any inclination to call the gambler’s bluff. Pretty soon, Ben figured, the stranger would be riding out of Goldfield and then Ben and the boys could finally get a whiskey to cut the dust. He watched the gambler backing his way across the street where other fellows were watching him. An ugly lot. A big black man. A man with only one eye, wearing patched pants. Some decent horses. A dark dude who sat in the saddle on a bay horse with his hands close together. Handcuffed.

  “Son of a bitch!” Ben Butcher said.

  * * *

  “Jimmy,” the clerk called, “help this gentleman with his supplies.”

  A pockmarked teen, more bones than meat and with a mane of yellow hair, dropped his dust mop and hurried to the counter. He picked up the supplies and walked ahead of McMasters, whose arms were filled with more sacks and a double-barreled shotgun.

  As they stepped outside, a voice on the streets called out, “McMasters, ya might want to get yer ass out here now!”

  * * *

  McMasters. That name sounded familiar, but Ben Butcher could not place it. Suddenly he saw the woman in the sharp-looking riding outfit as she stepped away from the store and toward the horses.

  He recognized her. Lady Luck or Fate or God, but mostly Mary Elizabeth Carmen ruined everything.

  CHAPTER 29

  Mary Lovelace moved toward her bay mustang. Thanks to the gambler’s foolishness—had he been caught cheating?—they would be riding out of town at a high lope.

  She froze when she got a look at the riders who stood on the boardwalk in front of the bucket of blood’s large window, watching Patton and his hostage. One of them stepped closer, studying the scene with a mix of amusement and resentment. He looked toward the general store, and eventually his eyes landed on her. She recognized him. And the chill left her paralyzed. But only for a second.

  “Son of a bitch!” she roared, cursing herself for not loading the 1890 Remington in her holster, for being such a damned fool, for listening to that hard-rock McMasters’s orders, or maybe even trusting him. She knew where she could find bullets and hurried to the chestnut gelding, jerking open the saddlebag.

  She caught a glimpse of a gangling teen in front of the store doorway, and then saw high and mighty John McMasters. Her hands came up with a handful of cartridges.

  The Remington twelve-gauge swung toward the gambler and next at Mary.

  “That’s Butcher!” she bellowed. She no longer saw the kid, just merchandise scattered by the store’s door. “His kid brother!”

  Even before she’d shouted, McMasters understood something violent was about to happen. He grabbed the teenage clerk and shoved him backwards, hard and furious, sending him into the store, leaving bacon and flour and coffee sacks by the doorway.

  “Toss me some!” the Negro commanded. His Merwin Hulbert fired the same .44-40s as her pistol.

  She threw a handful in the black giant’s direction, seeing them bounce across the rough plank boards, thumbed open the chamber gate, and began feeding brass shells into the empty cylinders.

  McMasters’ face hardened and the shotgun came up as bullets splintered the column above Mary’s head and another slammed into the wooden sign announcing ABSOLUTELY LOWEST PRICES IN GOLDFIELD!

  The streets of Goldfield were about to turn into bloody chaos.

  The Remington roared, slamming savagely against McMasters’s shoulder. He stepped away from the smoke, opening the breech, discarding the remnants of the two shells he had fired simultaneously, and reloading both barrels with more buckshot. A bullet sliced through the crown of his hat, shattering a windowpane behind him. Inside the store, women screamed, and the store owner yelled for everyone to find cover on the floor.

  Gunfire on the streets of Goldfield, like most boom towns, was not what you would call common. But nor was it rare.

  The sudden roar of shots sent Bloody Zeke The Younger’s bay horse into a fit of bucking. Despite the handcuffs on his wrist and death singing all around him, Zeke kept his seat in the saddle.

  Emory Logan leaped off his horse, leaving the Burgess in the scabbard, and wisely grabbed the reins of three other mounts—his own, the one they’d picked for Patton, and Mary Lovelace’s mustang—that pulled, reared, and snorted. All those years riding with Quantrill and other murderous gangs had prepared the one-eyed killer for such events. Few people would have been able to keep three horses from charging away. Mary held the reins to McMasters’s gelding, and Carter kept the reins to his horse wrapped tightly around his thick left hand. His right hand held the Merwin Hulbert.

  Patton dropped to the street, rolling over and over as bullets tore up the ground around him. Bullets and buckshot shattered the big window of the saloon, and McMasters could see men inside diving behind the bar or turning over tables. He swung the barrel toward the man across the street who had leaped onto a horse and gripped the reins with his teeth. He turned the horse around and worked pistols with both hands.

  McMasters started to squeeze both triggers, but stopped. The large man in denim—the one Patton had been using as a piece of human armor—was in the way. McMasters found another target, aimed, fired . . . and cursed. His man had leaped on another horse, but the horse had reared. Instead of blowing the outlaw in half, the buckshot tore into the horse’s neck and underbelly. It toppled over, crushing the hitching rail and slamming into a water trough. Its rider fell behind the trough and disappeared in gun smoke.

  Down went McMasters as more bullets tore over his head. He kept his calm and his resolve, and reloaded the Remington.

  Rushing her shots, Mary Lovelace emptied her pistol but didn’t hit anyone. Unable to reload with both hands, she cursed McMasters as she struggled to keep his chestnut from pulling free from her grip and leaving him afoot.

  Alamo Carter held his pistol cocked, but kept waiting calmly for the right target and a sure shot, or as sure as one could have with a left arm being jerked this way and that by a screaming horse.

  McMasters stood up beside the far wooden column at the end of the boardwalk. Two of the five riders had already raised dust out of town. A third ripped shot after shot with a Marlin rifle while kicking free of one stirrup and allowing the killer whose horse had been shot dead to swing up behind him.

  McMasters brought them into his sights, but something caught his eye and he dropped down face-first, slamming hard against
the boardwalk as a shotgun blew chunks of wood from the column.

  Alamo Carter saw it, too, and turned around, leaving his broad back open for any of the gunmen across the street. “Get back in your shop, you damned fool!” the former slave shouted. He snapped a shot—his first—at the citizen next door. The man dropped the single-shot scattergun, yelped, and dived through the open door.

  Carter turned around, aimed, and the .44-40 belched flame and smoke. Rolling onto his back, McMasters glanced at the two riders on the one horse and thought he saw dust pop off the vest of the one in the back. He tilted the barrels of the shotgun up, thinking about trying a desperate shot—shooting from a supine position, through dust—at the riders galloping away, but reason took hold. Colonel Berdan had always stressed Make sure of your target before you fire. Don’t rush your shot. And never take a damned fool shot.

  The two riders on the one horse disappeared in the dust. Only one of the bandits remained. McMasters rolled back onto his stomach, came to his knees, and aimed the 1894 Remington across the street.

  Bastards. Gutless wonders. Ben Butcher watched Miami carry Cherry out of Goldfield, leaving him alone as he tried to control his horse enough to get his foot in the stirrup. That was a problem. Stealing horses when on the run meant you didn’t have horses trained to stand still when lead was flying and Hell’s doors were opening right before your eyes. Cherry’s horse lay dead over what had been a hitching rail, and the stink of blood and the roaring gunfire frightened Butcher’s horse.

  Milt Hanks and Bitter Page had been the first to get out of town, but, well, that’s the main reason Milt Hanks and Bitter Page had lived so long.

  Bastards. Gutless wonders, he thought again.

  Ben fired, aiming in the general direction of the man with the shotgun. For some reason, he was doing most, if not all of the shooting. The gambler in the yellow vest had come up to his knees, but he didn’t seem to know what to do, and the gun he held was just a four-shot derringer that would not be so reliable at that distance. One of the dudes was on a bucking horse. It was like that damned rodeo he had seen in Prescott a few years back . . . only nobody had been shooting up the town back in ’89.

  He raked the spurs across the blue roan’s ribs. The horse squealed and turned, and he sent another shot toward the woman. It smashed a pane of glass behind her, about the last piece of glass in the general store’s window that had not been shattered.

  That was all he had time to do. The damned fool in the denim jacket was still at his stirrups, reaching up, screaming something. It made not one lick of sense, but Ben Butcher had learned after all his years of riding around the Western states and territories with his big, mean, crud of a brother that when the shooting starts and a town turns into hell, people will do the damnedest things.

  Not about to lose a stirrup, Ben turned the short-barreled pistol at the miner and shot him in the chest. The man staggered back, still standing, and Ben Butcher cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger again. That one took the dude in his cheek, blew out the eyeball above the wound from some sort of pressure, and sprayed the ground with blood and brains—what the dead dude hit when he dropped to the ground.

  Ben Butcher wasn’t certain how many shots he had left, but he gave the roan its head, felt the wind rushing past his face as lead tore through his suspenders strap on his back. Another scratched his left shoulder. He cocked, fired, and felt the pistol buck in his hand. Cocked and fired again but felt nothing and knew it was empty. He looked ahead, saw dust, and cursed his brother a blue streak.

  He’d told Moses all those years ago that he should have killed that petticoat they had taken off the stagecoach to Florence. But Moses hadn’t listened. The son of a bitch never listened. And now Mary Elizabeth Carmen had almost gotten Ben Butcher killed.

  Another bulled buzzed past his head and he realized that he still might wind up dead.

  “What the hell!” Patton was not sure how he had not been shot to pieces. He wasn’t sure what was going on.

  In front of the general store, the redheaded killer fired at the last of the bunch leaving town, cursed, holstered the shiny pistol, and tried to leap onto her mustang being held by Logan. McMasters came up, too, aimed at the last rider, then turned back, saw something behind Patton, and the twin barrels of the Remington roared.

  “Stay down!” McMasters yelled. “Stay down! That’s the Butcher Gang. And we’re going after them.”

  Patton swung back, saw people diving out of view from the shattered remnants of the Dismal’s window, and then saw the bloody carcass of what had been the straw boss. “Hell.” He started toward Logan and his horse.

  A figure appeared in the doorway of a business, gun in hand. The derringer came up and Patton snapped off a shot. He saw the single-shot scattergun drop onto the boardwalk, and heard a man scream out like a school kid.

  “Don’t shoot at civilians!” McMasters roared. He grabbed the reins of his chestnut and leaped into the saddle.

  “I ain’t letting them shoot at me!” Patton took the reins of the gelding and put one foot in the stirrup before it was running down the street, away from the Dismal Saloon and the dead straw boss. But his hands were on the horn, even while his left gripped the derringer. Don’t let me slip, he prayed. Let me somehow get into this damned saddle.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Bloody Zeke The Younger’s horse had stopped bucking. Finally under control, Zeke leaned low in the saddle and let his horse carry him into the dust.

  Behind him came the redhead’s cursing. “After them, damn you! After them! Don’t let those damned butchers get away!”

  CHAPTER 30

  Reaching the bottom of the hill where the road from Goldfield met with the trail, Alamo Carter and Emory Logan stopped their horses alongside Marcus Patton, who had reined in and stood in his stirrups, looking at the trail of dust that led into the desert and toward the Superstition Mountains. They waited for John McMasters.

  McMasters brought his chestnut to a hard stop and glanced behind him and up the hill toward Goldfield. Swinging back, he glared at Patton. “You’ll answer to me later, Patton, but first, let’s get going.”

  “I don’t think so,” Alamo Carter said.

  McMaster brought the shotgun up to his thigh, but did not aim at the giant.

  “We just got caught with our pants down, capt’n,” the black scout said. “Like to have gotten us all shot to hell and gone. That ain’t happenin’ again, suh.” With his left hand, he slowly pulled out the Merwin Hulbert, spun it around, and offered it, butt-forward, to McMasters. “You ask us to ride with you, to fight with you. But you ask us to do that with empty weapons. Pants down. That ain’t no way to fight a war, mister. Load it.”

  McMasters looked past him at the dust.

  “It didn’t stop Zeke and Mary.”

  “They got a stake in this fight,” Carter said. “Personal. We don’t.”

  “And ’em two is damned fools,” said the one-eyed Reb.

  McMasters watched the dust.

  “They’ll be easy enough to follow and catch, capt’n,” Carter said. “But we don’t skedaddle here right quick, we’ll be answerin’ to the citizens in Goldfield.”

  “Posse’ll be down directly,” the Reb said.

  Carter waved the gun. “Load it, capt’n.”

  McMasters sank into his saddle. “Load it yourself,” he said in a weary voice. “All of you. But be quick.” He broke open the Remington to reload its double barrels. “And I’m no captain, Carter. I was a private.”

  “You’re capt’n of our bunch.” Carter handed the reins to Logan then shucked out the spent casings from the .44-40, and filled in all six chambers on his revolver. Extra shells he shoved into the pockets of his trousers.

  The gambler took a tin of percussion caps and box of paper cartridges for his Starr.

  The slave took the reins back and asked Logan,

  “That Burgess shoots a .44-40 caliber, right?”

  “That’s right.�
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  Carter brought out a box, about half-filled, and handed it to the bushwhacker. “Here you go, Mr. Logan,” he said with no sarcasm in his voice. “Thanks for holding my horse just now and up yonder during that set-to.”

  “My pleasure,” the bushwhacker said and began feeding shells into the rifle.

  “We’re still short on ammunition,” the gambler said, “since our captain dropped most of his supplies in front of the door of the store. What the hell was that about? I thought you’d be waitin’ for me to bring you what I won in cards. Didn’t you have no faith in me?”

  “What was that all about on the streets? Using a man in front of you as a shield?” McMasters snapped the Remington’s breech shut.

  “A sore loser from my last visit to Goldfield.” Patton grinned.

  “You said you didn’t shoot anybody when you were here last,” McMasters said.

  The gambler swung back onto his horse. “I said I didn’t kill anyone.”

  The lever cranked a round into the Burgess, and the old Rebel brought the rifle up to his shoulder, aimed up the hill, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle roared, and Logan cocked and fired twice more. McMasters’s chestnut spun around, and Patton’s kicked once before the gambler regained control and urged the horse into a lope. He rode after the dust.

  “That won’t keep ’em hidin’ up yonder forever.” Logan took off right behind the gambler, tapping his bay’s rump with the hot barrel of the Burgess repeater.

  “He’s right, capt’n.” Carter urged his gelding into the desert.

  McMasters shot one quick glance toward Goldfield then followed his prisoners—his posse.