by John Benteen
“Just as I was goin’ out, a Mexican from the North End just came in. The Cables sent him. They’re on their way into town, the old man, his sons, a bunch of their top gunhands. They sent word that they’ll be here before the sun goes down. And that if you want to keep on livin’, you’d better be long gone by then!”
~*~
A stillness hung in the office for a moment. Then Jim Sundance said dryly, “Is that a fact?”
“That’s the word they sent,” Yance said. He was calmer now, seeing Sundance unruffled. Then he grinned. “Don’t worry, Jim. Art and me’ll stand behind you. And we’ll go round up some good men—”
“No!” Tulso Dart snapped the word.
The Rawlings brothers turned on him. “What—?” Art blurted.
Dart grinned, looking at Sundance. “Remember, Jim? We made a bargain—whichever one of us they came after, the other would back his play. Well, we’ll back yours, me, Pliny, Doc. And—” his grin faded as he looked at Yance and Art. “We don’t want you two in it. We’re professionals. We don’t want amateurs to have to look _ after.”
Sundance was silent for a moment, rolling another cigarette. This whole thing had a rancid stink about it. Part of it was transparent: the Cables had been counting on Evans to out-Apache him in the desert and kill him; as soon as he had ridden into town, someone tied in with them and knowing all about that had realized that it had come out the other way around, sent a messenger on a fast horse to the North End. Since Evans had failed, the Cables would do it themselves, and with the Old Man leading them, there would be no slipup this time. They wanted him dead or gone in a hurry—which in all likelihood meant that somehow they had learned of the enormous gold shipment day after tomorrow. And they were taking no chances of Sundance fouling up their raid on it. He had been right; there was somebody hand in glove with the Cables. Lighting the smoke, he looked at Dart. The marshal was almost twitching with eagerness to take on the Cables and their gunmen, no matter what the odds. Four against—how many? Dart didn’t even know. And maybe it was him, Sundance thought. Reaching for one big score, tied in with the Cables after all, and this could be a set-up, himself caught in a fake gun battle between the Cable faction and the Dart faction. In such a situation, he’d not have a snowball’s chance.
And yet he knew one thing. He would not run. He never had, he never would. It would destroy his reputation, chop the price at which he hired his gun. He had to make a decision. All eyes were on him, waiting for it. But not yet.
“Don’t you see?” Dart said, as he held silent. “It’s the same as if they were coming after us.” His voice was earnest now. “They know goddam well we can’t just stand by and let them ride in and gun you down. That’s why they sent the messenger. It was a challenge to us as much as you. And besides, this is the answer to Art’s prayer. We couldn’t go out yonder after the Cables—but now they come to us.” His blue eyes glittered. “And this is our chance—to get all four of ’em, the Old Man and his sons. Then we’re done with them and all their gang. Cut the roots and the branches wither.”
“Yeah,” Sundance said tonelessly.
Dart stared at him a moment. Then he shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he rasped. “Dog it if you’ve lost your nerve. But I’ll tell you this Sundance. Whether you stay or run, we’ll be here to meet the Cables and have it out with ’em, once and for all. Me, Pliny, Doc. It’s our big throw of the dice. Kill the Cables and the Sheriff’s finished. Then the Darts will run this town—their way.”
“Which would be a lot better than the way it’s gone,” Art said quickly. “Jim, if you’ll stay and fight, Yance and I’ll back you up. I may be the office man, but I can handle a gun.”
“That’s the God’s truth,” Yance said, all argument with his brother forgotten now. “You’ve seen what I can do. Well, Art’s even better. The only reason he’s the office man is he’s got a better head for figures.”
Sundance let smoke dribble from his nostrils. He met Dart’s gaze, and Dart looked at him unwaveringly. And all at once Sundance knew. Dart was not the one. He was a genuine, unwavering enemy of the Cables, playing against them for the highest stakes himself—the chance to be the law and rake in the graft in a roaring boomtown.
“No,” Sundance said. “Art, Yance—Dart’s right. You may know how to shoot, but you’re not professionals. If you were, you’d never have sent for Dart or hired me.” He drew in a deep breath.
“It will be just the four of us.”
Dart said quietly, “That ought to be a’plenty. Then you’ll stay and fight.”
“You didn’t really think I’d run.”
“No,” Dart said. “I never really thought that.”
Sundance said, “It gets dark late. I reckon we’ve got an hour anyhow. Likely more. I’ll be waiting for you at Mrs. Fenian’s boarding house when you want me.” Then he went out.
~*~
Martha Fenian went to the coffee pot on the stove. “Another cup?”
“No, thanks,” Sundance said. “If a man gets gut shot, the less he’s got in his stomach the better.”
“God damn it,” the woman said. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”
“It’s one of those things you have to think about,” Sundance said. “With a doctor handy, could make the difference between living and dying. And—I’m not made out of iron. A bullet will go through me the same as anybody.” Then, sitting at the kitchen table of the boarding house, he grinned. “Only I don’t aim to get shot if I can help it.”
“You’d better not. You’re too much man to lose.”
“I won’t be around all the time. Sooner or later I’ll be moving on.”
“I know that. I know your kind. With you, a woman takes what she can get and lets it go at that. There’ll be no tears when you ride on—I promise. Maybe there’ll even be another man, if he ever comes to his senses.”
“Which other man?”
“The only other man in Coffin City that can come close to matching you—or me. Yance Rawlings.”
Sundance’s brows went up. “I never knew you’d even given Yance a thought.”
“I gave him a lot of thoughts,” she said. “Before you drifted in. But all he could see was that yellow-headed bitch at the Occidental. Maybe someday he’ll come to his senses, though. Or maybe his brother will take her away from him.”
“His brother? Art?” Sundance set down his cup. “He hates her guts.”
“I don’t know how he feels about her guts, but I know how he feels about the rest of her. Haven’t you ever seen the look in his eyes when she and Yance are together in his presence?”
“No,” Sundance said.
“Well, I have. Maybe it’s not something a man would recognize. But he wants her. God, how he wants her. And one of these days, maybe he’ll outbid Yance for her and—” Her voice softened as she came to him. “But it’s not Yance I’m worried about right now. It’s you. If you’d stay on, I’d never give Yance another thought.” She put her hand on his, then took it away. “Damn it,” she said, voice strained, “why do you have to go out and do it? Why don’t you run?”
Sundance stood up, pulled out his watch and looked at it. “Why,” he said, “if I ran, it would mean you had been wrong about me all along, wouldn’t it?” Two revolvers lay on the table; his own, retrieved out there in the desert, and the one taken from Tom Evans. While drinking coffee, he had cleaned them carefully, made sure they were in perfect working order. Now both were fully loaded. He slipped his own in his holster, Evans’ in his waistband. “It ought to be,” he said, “pretty close to time.”
“Then this is for luck,” she said and came to him and kissed him hard on the mouth. At that moment, someone twisted the door bell.
Sundance let it ring. Presently, when he straightened up, he said: “That will be Tulso Dart.” And when he went to the door, they were there on the porch, all three of them—Tulso, Pliny, and Doc Ramsey.
“Sundance,” Tulso said. “The Cables are in town. The Old
Man, his boys, and six gunmen.” He drew in breath. “There is an abandoned corral on the north side of town. They sent word that they’ll be waiting for us there.”
Sundance looked them over. Beneath their frock coats, Tulso and Pliny Dart each wore two Colts, Pliny’s set for cross-draw. Doc Ramsey had a single pistol—and a sawed-off shotgun cradled in his arm. All of them were, like himself, grave but calm.
“They are pretty sure of themselves,” Sundance said. “To meet us straight-up like that.”
“Odds better than two to one, their favor,” Ramsey whispered in that used-up voice. “Why not?”
“No,” Dart said. “Sundance is right. They’ll want even better odds. There’ll probably be two or three more comin’ in behind us to catch us from the rear. We’ll want to watch our backs. That’s your job, Doc.” Tulso rolled the cigar he chewed across his mouth. “Well, gentlemen,” he said. “Shall we go?”
~*~
The last light of a red sun slanted low across the town as the four of them stepped down into the dust of Rucker Street. Word had spread, and there was no traffic on the street now, and the porches and sidewalks before the saloon were jammed with people watching the four of them walk north, all abreast. A strange hush gripped the crowd: there was only the sound of the unceasing desert wind and then, in the distance, the braying of a burro.
Then Yance was there, stepping out of the stage line office, falling in with them. “I don’t care what you say. I’m going.”
“No,” Sundance said.
“God damn it,” Yance began.
“I said no. We’ll attend to it.”
“But the odds—”
“We know all about the odds,” Tulso said in a hard voice. “We have faced longer ones in other towns So has Sundance. We want no amateurs along.”
“Amateur—”
“You’re no gunfighter,” Sundance said. “Leave us alone.”
Yance opened and closed his mouth. Then, face red, he stepped back.
They walked on. Even with the other three flanking him, Sundance felt a sense of intense loneliness. He knew they shared it. It was always this way going into action, when you had time to think about it. Because if you knew your trade, you knew the hazards of it, too. The pitcher could only go to the well so often before it broke; a man could survive only so much warfare before the law of averages turned against him. No human being was made of steel and no man’s flesh could turn a bullet. Sooner or later, everybody’s luck ran out.
Then Sundance laughed inwardly, mocking his own fear. He was thinking like a white man. His mind shifted, and all at once he was a Cheyenne Dog Soldier, one of the Crazy Dogs who wore ropes around their waists so they could picket themselves in the face of the enemy, anchored so that it was impossible to retreat, leaving nothing but to win or die. For the Cheyenne the living or the dying was not important—it was to face the fight itself with a warrior’s courage. Sundance loosened the Colt in its holster as they walked on in total silence.
Then Dart said: “There.”
It lay at the end of Rucker Street, on the outskirts, only three of its adobe walls remaining, the fourth and front one having fallen down. A weathered sign hung askew from a cranky post: Doane’s Corral. Behind it was the charred ruins of a livery stable destroyed by fire, only one wall and a sagging tin roof remaining. The wind flapped the sign, made the tin rattle.
Within the three walls of the corral, ten men waited, scattered out, six in a rear phalanx, four to the front, hands dangling near their guns. One of them stepped forward a pace or two: Old Man Cable with his sons Ash, Mort and Phil just behind him. All of them were spaced so no one interfered with anyone else’s field of fire. Dart halted.
Cable’s voice came jeeringly above the wind. “Well, I see the half-breed’s still here. Well, you had your chance, Sundance. You should have run. Now, we got to come and get you.”
“Yes,” Sundance called back. “You’ll have to do that.” Fanning out, he and the Dart faction walked slowly toward the corral.
“Then—” Cable said and he jerked his head and strode forward. His sons came behind him, and spread out behind them the other six. Slowly the range closed between the two groups.
Sundance said very softly, “Pliny, you watch that old stable.”
“Yeah,” Pliny said, and he fell back a little and to the right.
Sundance said, “I want the Old Man.”
Doc Ramsey coughed. “You can have him. The six behind are my meat. Shotgun bait.” His arms were folded so the sawed-off was concealed beneath the looseness of his long coat, and had been all the way up the street, his attitude that of a man with a hand on the butt of each of two shoulder-holstered pistols.
Dart said, “I’ll take the boys. Likely I’ll need a little help.” They moved forward more slowly now. The Cables came on to meet them, the jingle of their spurs oddly musical against the background of the ugly rattling of the tin.
Sixty yards, fifty, forty—Any time now, Sundance thought. But still none of the Cables made any move for their guns. Thirty-five, thirty—twenty-five, and now Sundance could see the old man’s bullet-colored eyes. He watched them closely—
Then old Cable’s spur rowels stopped their ringing as he halted. Twenty yards, good six-gun range. Sundance and his group stopped dead. There was a pair of seconds when all fourteen of the men could have been carved from stone. The twilight seemed almost peaceful.
Then it exploded. “Now!” Cable yelled, but Sundance had already seen the change in his eyes, was dropping to one knee even as he drew both Colts. Cable’s guns were also out and up, but the first shots came from the ruins of the livery, the sharp, flat crack of rifle-fire from the hidden snipers Cable had planted there. Sundance heard the snap of a bullet by his head, then the sound of rifles was drowned in the roar of Pliny’s sixguns, and then of his own as he fired first with right hand and then with left.
And now there was nothing but gun-thunder, blotting out all other sound, and flashes of vision through powder smoke. Old Man Cable was fast, too fast; in his eagerness to get off the first shot, his aim was bad. Sundance took a fraction of a second longer as Cable’s slug chugged by his ear, made sure, pulled both triggers. The pair of slugs converging smashed Old Man Cable in the chest, slammed him backwards. At the same instant, Doc Ramsey’s sawed-off added its deep double boom. Some of the six in the rear rank of the Cable gunmen screamed as a withering blast of eighteen buckshot slashed into their ranks. Men went down.
Ash Cable stared at his fallen father. “Daddy!” he yelled, threw himself forward, guns flaming. Sundance snapped off a shot that missed, coolly adjusted aim, gambling that those hasty rounds of Ash’s, fired in motion, would go wild. They did, but the next ones would not, and again he took that half second necessary to insure his aim, firing at the prone Ash. Just as Ash raised his guns to shoot again, Sundance’s bullet caught him in the face. Ash’s countenance vanished in a wash of scarlet and the emerging bullet knocked a piece of bone from the back of his skull that flew a short distance before it vanished.
Meanwhile, from the corner of his eye, Sundance saw Dart, standing erect, firing methodically first with one gun, then the other. He caught a glimpse of Mort whirled around by a bullet, saw the one named Phil raise his gun, then stagger backwards, sit down heavily. Three of the other gunmen were running for the shelter of the corral now. Over Sundance’s head Doc’s shotgun boomed so close it made his ears ring; one man fell, left thigh blown into a scarlet mess of butchered meat; another seized his side, dropped his gun, kept on running. The third, like a frightened jackrabbit, almost made it to the rear wall of the corral. As he tried to jump it, Sundance fired instinctively, catching him on the rise like a flushed prairie chicken; the body twisted, fell slumped across the wall.
Then, save for the groaning of the wounded man, everything was suddenly hushed. Clutching his side, another Cable man leaned against the corral wall, then fell suddenly forward on his face. Sundance, trembling slightly with reac
tion, rounds still left in either gun, got to his feet. “It’s over,” he said, his own voice seeming to come from far away, his ears partly deafened by the gun-sound.
“Not quite,” Doc Ramsey said, beside him; and before Sundance could stop him he had fired both barrels of the shotgun into the wounded man.
“Goddammit,” Sundance said and whirled, then froze. Doc stood there with blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. It ran down his chin, dribbled across the immaculate whiteness of his shirt.
“Doc—” Sundance reached out a hand.
“No—” Ramsey tried to step away. But when he opened his mouth to say that single word, blood gushed from it. Gagging, coughing, he swayed and fell.
“Doc! My God, Doc!” Tulso Dart ran to him, dropped beside him, lifted Ramsey’s head, cradling it in his lap. Sundance saw, then, the bullet hole beneath the coat. It had bled very little, all the blood was running inside; Ramsey was drowning from it.
“Hell,” Doc mumbled, words almost indecipherable. “The other way ... it woulda taken ... months. Better like this.” He turned his head, let the blood drain, found words again. “Six thousand in my poke in my shack ... Tulso ... you ... Pliny ... split it … “ His mouth twitched in a ghastly scarlet smile. “Funny thing ... I come ... West... to git well.” Then he died.
Slowly, pants stained with scarlet, Tulso Dart eased the head off his lap, stood up. “God damn it,” he said harshly, and that was the end of his outward grieving. He turned. “Pliny. You all right?”
“A scratch, nothin’ a little spit won’t cure.” Pliny’s voice was steady. “They had two snipers in that shed. They’re still there, only they won’t be snipin’ anymore.” He stared down at Doc. “The poor sonofabitch,” he said. “But he never had no chance anyhow. He was drawin’ to a busted flush from the start.” He broke off as there was shouting, the thud of running feet. Coffin City had come alive; a vast mob of spectators was surging up Rucker Street, with Art and Yance Rawlings at their head.
“Sundance!” Art’s eyes were wide with disbelief. He crowed with joy, slapped the half-breed on the back. “You did it! By God, you and Tulso did it! You wiped out the Cables!” Embracing Sundance with one arm, he hugged him.
