Remington 1894

by William W. Johnstone

  The only shot McMasters heard came from the one after that, and that slug buzzed past his nose. He turned and saw the last of the men working the lever on a Henry rifle. McMasters swung his right arm out. No time to aim because the man’s finger was tightening on his trigger.

  Four shots sounded as one—from McMasters’s Colt and three guns above him. All three struck the last man in the chest, and he squeezed the trigger of the. 44-caliber rifle as he fell . . . but the Henry had been pointing at the clear sky when it discharged. The rifle landed beside his quivering corpse.

  McMasters stepped away from the sandy embankment. He saw Marcus Patton and Bloody Zeke The Younger flanking Mary Lovelace. The gambler was on his knee, the dark-skinned killer still held his left hand over the revolver in his right as though he had fanned back the hammer, and Mary Lovelace gripped the Remington pistol with both hands. All of them kept their eyes on the last man and then looked down at McMasters.

  He waited. They had their guns drawn. Killing him, and thus freeing themselves, would be easy. Lovelace looked at him first, swallowed, and shoved the nickel-plated revolver in the holster. Bloody Zeke leaped down alongside McMasters, and did not even send a glance his way as he headed quickly toward Alamo Carter. The gambler appeared to be the only one who even considered the other option, the one that would leave John McMasters dead . . . but he shook his head and sighed.

  “I’ll catch our horses,” he said, and walked out of McMasters’s view.

  * * *

  “Who pulled on my britches?” Alamo Carter asked through the pain.

  “I did,” McMasters said. He held the giant man up, letting Marcus Patton give him some water from a canteen.

  “Hell,” the black scout said, “I was hopin’ it was the white woman.”

  McMasters shook his head as Patton guffawed, splashing out a healthy dose of water on the Negro’s bare chest.

  “We can leave you here,” McMasters said. “Posse will find you soon enough, take you back—”

  “You ain’t leavin’ me nowhere, McMasters.” The man turned his head, freeing himself. “Leave me here? With six dead white men? They’ll finish what them other cutthroats started. You’ve wasted enough time already. I’m goin’ with you.”

  “You can’t even stand up, let alone ride.”

  “Watch me.”

  McMasters watched the big man rise to his feet, falling once to his knees, but that man had a stubborn streak in him wider than the Sonoran Desert. He held his head down as though bowed in silent prayer for a long while, and then rose slowly. Managing to turn around without falling, he drew a deep breath and glared at McMasters and the gambler.

  “Where’s the girl? Where’s Zeke?”

  “Trying to pick up Butcher’s trail.” McMasters looked back toward Goldfield, searching the sky for dust, but seeing none . . . yet. “Can you put on your boots?”

  “I’ll do that later. Sons of bitches killed my horse. Shot it dead before I even saw them. Where’d their hosses take off to?”

  McMasters pointed.

  The black man nodded. “We’ll find one in a jiffy, I expect. Patton, grab me that big fella’s vest. That’s all I need to protect my back. And that dude won’t need no vest in Hell.”

  He walked into the desert.

  Patton looked at McMasters, shrugged, and walked to one of the corpses. McMasters gathered a few extra canteens and went to his chestnut and the gambler’s bay.

  * * *

  For days, they moved slowly . . . hiding when the sun turned the bleak desert into a dust- and cactus-covered inferno and moving at dark. Posses scoured the area for the Butcher gang and for those strange men who had shot up Goldfield and then murdered six prospectors around one of the trickling branches of Queen Creek. They had to move slowly until Alamo Carter gained strength.

  They skirted a wide path around the town of Florence and followed a series of dry arroyos and empty washes, keeping the Tortilla Mountains over their left shoulders. When they saw Mount Lemon they knew Tucson would be close, so they turned east, disappearing into Cherry Valley Wash and climbing through rougher country until they neared the Rio San Pedro.

  “I should have left you sons of bitches back in the Superstitions,” Bloody Zeke said. “Butcher’s in Mexico by now.”

  “No,” Mary Lovelace told him, “he’s not. He’s avoiding the same posses we are. And he doesn’t have enough money to go into Mexico. He’ll need to rob something first.”

  Zeke laughed. “I know him from a few weeks with him. How long did you know him?” He said it with a sinister grin.

  “Shut up,” McMasters told him.

  They kept along the western bank of the San Pedro, more ditch than river, even after the monsoons. Moving south, between Wild Horse Mountain and Lime Peak, they crossed the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks east of Benson.

  Long ago, they had lost the trail of Moses Butcher. They found it between Benson and Tombstone.

  The ambulance—with U.S. ARMY stenciled in green letters—sat on a turnoff in a dry wash, two mules dead in their traces, the rest of the team cut loose. The driver lay dead in his seat, but the buzzards had not finished with him when the arrival of McMasters, Carter, Lovelace, Patton, and Bloody Zeke frightened them away. There had been no soldier riding for protection, but, well, it was 1896 and Arizona Territory was supposed to be civilized.

  “I guess Butcher has money to spend in Mexico now,” Bloody Zeke said bitterly.

  “Not much,” Marcus Patton said. “If this was an Army payroll, it’s coming away from Fort Huachuca. And if it was hauling soldiers, soldiers don’t have much money to begin with.”

  “It might not have been Butcher,” McMasters said, but he knew better.

  Sighing, Bloody Zeke slipped off his horse, handed the reins to McMasters, and walked toward the coach. He kicked over the empty tin box, sending letters, some unopened, others ripped apart on the off chance someone might have been mailing a check or money. The wind scattered the papers, and Zeke stepped around a depression, stopped, knelt, and fingered the dirt.

  “Driver winged one of them.” He turned his hand and showed darkened sand on his fingers.

  A noise startled him, and he spun, the revolver appearing instantly, cocked and ready, in his right hand. He crouched, moved toward the nearest dead mule, looked up at the mutilated body of the driver, and then slid along the coach. He came to the door, reached for the handle, jerked it open, and stepped around, leveling his gun toward the inside.

  The pop that came from within the coach sounded faintly. McMasters leaped from the saddle, as Bloody Zeke The Younger stumbled away from the stagecoach and fell onto his knees. His revolver landed, unfired, in the dirt.

  McMasters brought up the Remington and charged. He heard Mary Lovelace running behind him. Another pop came from inside the stagecoach, and smoke drifted through the open window and door. He did not run toward that open door, but cut around the dead mules, moving to the opposite side. He gripped the lever to the door in his left hand, held the Remington close and hard with his right, and jerked open the door.

  He swore, lowered the shotgun, and tried to catch the girl as she tumbled out.

  She was young—probably still in her teens—naked, face bruised, lip busted, and a few teeth had been knocked out. She stared at him with unblinking hazel eyes. Blood trickled down her head into her sweat-matted hair. McMasters saw the Remington derringer clutched in her right hand, and his chest heaved. He did not see the dead stranger but Bea . . . and Rosalee . . . and Eugénia.

  Mary Lovelace came alongside him and let out a gasp. It wasn’t in horror or pity or shame but something different. She saw no stranger, either. She saw herself.

  He lowered the young woman onto the ground and stood, finding an Army blouse on the floor of the coach, which he dragged out and draped over her body. He moved past Mary, not wanting to be near the dead girl any longer, and fought his way through the brush behind the coach, and moved back to the other side.

/>   Marcus Patton and Alamo Carter had come closer. McMasters lowered the shotgun and walked to Bloody Zeke The Younger, who slipped onto his buttocks and let out a slight laugh.

  Blood seeped from one corner of his mouth. Both hands clutched his blood-stained shirt. “Hard to figure, ain’t it, McMasters?”

  McMasters caught him before he fell.

  The killer’s dark eyes opened as McMasters lifted his head against his chest. Alamo Carter stood, positioning himself to keep the sun out of the dying killer’s eyes.

  “What happened?” Marcus Patton asked.

  “A girl.” Bloody Zeke coughed out more blood and shook his head. “Butcher’s bunch had their way with her. Guess she thought I was one of them coming back for more pleasures. Is the girl all right?”

  “Yeah,” McMasters lied.

  “You ain’t got enough without me to kill those bastards,” Bloody Zeke said. “Best give it up.”

  McMasters said nothing.

  “You’re one stubborn son of a bitch.” Zeke coughed again and gasped in pain. “Listen,” he spoke in a whisper, knowing death would take him soon. “Mule Pass. Before Bisbee. Right before you get there. A crack in the mountains. Go east. Through it. Till it widens out. Creep along to the north, before there’s a split. Little cut you can’t hardly see. Push through it. That’s where you’ll find Butcher.”

  McMasters waited.

  “I told him it ain’t no fit hideout. But it’s damned hard to find. You catch him there, you might be able to kill him before he kills you. Box canyon. He’ll have to come through you to get out.”

  McMasters waited, and then realized Bloody Zeke would be saying nothing else in this world. He lowered the outlaw’s head onto the dirt, and rose.

  “He wouldn’t hold up in a box canyon,” Marcus Patton said. “That close to Bisbee. When Mexico’s just a hop and a skip away.”

  “He wouldn’t hold up in the Superstition Mountains, either,” Alamo Carter said. “But he did.”

  “What about the girl?” Patton asked.

  She must have been an officer’s daughter, being escorted to Tucson or someplace. The Butcher bunch would have thought it was carrying money. The Butchers were stupid. But, seeing the dead girl’s body, he knew they were worse than stupid. They were evil.

  McMasters shook his head. He was already walking toward the chestnut. Alamo Carter, Mary Lovelace, and the gambler in the yellow vest followed him in silence.

  CHAPTER 35

  The Army must have sent a patrol out from Fort Huachuca, way off to the east. McMasters’ dwindling posse watched from the rocks as the raw young soldiers rode past. It was the second bunch they had avoided that day. Word of the robbery had also reached Bisbee. A dead army soldier and a dead, ravished young girl had raised the ire of not just the U.S. Army—but every man between Douglas and San Miguel.

  Following the main roads, Payson lay around two hundred and seventy miles north. A man could learn a lot in that distance, and John McMasters had learned a few things. He had set out with six hardened killers to take revenge. He had watched three of them die.

  One of those he had killed himself. One had died, “in the line of duty,” or something along those lines. And the last had died needlessly, senselessly. Or maybe they all had been needless, senseless.

  He was so close to Moses Butcher he could almost feel the killer’s eyes on his back.

  They had left the desert and climbed high into the Mule Mountains, where it was cooler, even if miners had chopped down and wiped out most of the forests that once grew in those rugged hills. They weaved through manzanita and juniper, climbed through the canyon, and saw it widen out into a meadow, more or less, where a family of javelinas scurried about. McMasters caught their musky odor, and reined in the chestnut.

  He smelled something other than javelinas.

  “Smoke,” Alamo Carter said.

  McMaster knew that. He also knew something else, and he turned around in the saddle.

  “Carter, take Mary out of here.”

  “Like hell,” she snapped in a whisper. “I’m—”

  “This is my fight, and I’ll go it alone. You got no part in this.” He glanced at the gambler. “You don’t, either.”

  Marcus Patton grinned. “You don’t have to tell me that twice, McMasters.”

  The girl was reaching for her Remington, but Carter reached across his saddle and grabbed her right hand. She swerved, brought up her other hand to slap him, but by then the gambler had slid out of his saddle and grabbed the .44-40. He backed away quickly before she kicked him with her boot.

  “You sons of bitches.” Blood reddened her face. “You can’t take me away. I got more right—”

  “Take her,” McMasters said. “Get to Mexico. You skirt through these hills, the law won’t catch you. Good luck.”

  “Good luck to you, too,” Patton said.

  “There’s seven of them, McMasters,” Carter told him.

  “Maybe the one that caught a bullet back south of Tombstone is dead by now.” McMasters took Mary Lovelace’s Remington revolver and shoved it into his waistband.

  “Maybe,” Alamo Carter said. “But them ain’t good odds.”

  “That’s why he is letting us fold our hand,” Marcus Patton pleaded.

  “I’m going nowhere,” Mary said.

  McMasters smiled at her. “Do this, Mary, for me. Please.”

  He saw her expression change and her muscles relax.

  And he left them in the shadows and pushed through the clearing.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe that little hussy shot me,” Ben Butcher whined. “Can you get me to a doc, Mose?”

  Moses Butcher pulled away the wrapping, which caused his kid brother to squirm, so he pulled it even harder and stared at the little hole the .41-caliber slug had put in his brother’s belly. The smell sickened him, and he quickly shoved the bandage back over the bloody, swollen, rotting hole.

  “Did Milt get the bullet out?”

  “No.” Ben rolled over and vomited. “No. He just dug around in there. I think he done more damage than that little bitch. I shoulda kilt her.” He tried to push himself up, but couldn’t, and collapsed back onto his bedroll.

  “That’s what you say about all the women you rape,” Moses said sharply. “I go to Bisbee, try to get the lay of the land, see where we might sneak over the border. I have to dodge posse after posse, bounty hunters, hell the United States damned cavalry to get back here. You damned near got us killed in Goldfield. And now this.”

  Ben tried again to smile, but the look in his brother’s eyes killed that weak attempt.

  “Goldfield wasn’t my fault. I done told you that.”

  “It’s never your fault, Ben.”

  Already pale from the wound, he knew his face turned even whiter. “You just . . . get me to a . . . sawbones. That’s all I need.”

  “Getting you to a doctor’s out of the question, Ben. Getting our asses into Mexico is going to be hard. Before Mannagan and I left for Bisbee, I told you to head straight here. I didn’t tell you to hold up an army wagon and rape and kill a major’s daughter.”

  “I didn’t kill her. I swear.”

  “She’s dead now.”

  “Well, if you’d done like I told you a couple years back, and let me kill that redheaded bitch, none of this would’ve happened. But you thought it was funny, selling the slut to a gambler. Hell, that gambler told you all about her to begin with. I said, ‘Kill her.’ But you didn’t do it.”

  Staring off into the brush, Moses Butcher made no comment.

  Ben Butcher wet his lips and groaned. “Then just leave me here. I’ll tend myself.”

  “I can’t leave you here, kid.”

  What his brother was telling him registered. Ben Butcher tried to push himself up once more, but again he fell. “You can’t shoot me, Mose!” he wailed.

  “You’re right.” Moses Butcher let out a heavy sigh. “I can’t shoot you, Ben.”

  He
saw the pepperbox pistol Ben was bringing up in his right hand. The kid was game. Always game. And stupid. Moses clamped his left hand on Ben’s weak right wrist, pushing the arm down. The kid still managed to squeeze the trigger, and the little pistol barked, sending a bullet into the bushes. Meanwhile, Moses had the razor-sharp knife in his right hand. He smiled a grim smile.

  Ben Butcher caught the reflection of sunlight as it came to his throat, and he felt a sudden fire across his throat. And then he was drowning, gurgling on the blood that sprayed the bushes as he rolled to his side and tried to gag. But couldn’t. He thought he heard Moses’s spurs as his brother walked away. Then Ben Butcher heard nothing but the demons of hell welcoming him.

  Hearing the gunshot, Dirk Mannagan and Milt Hanks came running. They stopped as Moses Butcher stepped around the bushes, wiping the blood on his knife blade off on his britches.

  “I’m sorry, Moses,” Hanks said.

  “You should be, you damned fool.” Butcher sheathed the knife, and went straight to his horse where he began tightening the cinch.

  The others—Miami, Bitter Page, and Greaser Gomez—gathered around.

  “Maybe nobody heard that shot,” Miami said.

  Moses Butcher jerked the saddle cinch so tight the horse jumped. “Stay here then,” he snapped. “I’m going to Mexico.” He spit. “Hell, Dirk and I should’ve just ridden across the border whilst we was in Bisbee. We’re the damned fools.”

  He took the reins, put his left foot in the stirrup, and climbed into the saddle. “Mount up. Let’s ride,” he barked.

  His men quickly obeyed.

  * * *

  John McMasters pulled hard on the chestnut’s reins. The muffled shot died in the rocks. No echo. He wet his lips and chuckled to himself. What’s that they say? When one sense goes south on you, the others pick up the slack. My hearing’s making up for my failing eyes. He drew a breath and slowly wiped the glasses on his bandanna, reset the spectacles, and leaned underneath a limb as he urged the buckskin into the clearing.