“What’s going on?” Starkey asked as they left the saloon and stepped out into the street.
“The boss has got a job for us,” Buckhorn answered curtly.
“And he put you in charge, Joe?” Byers drawled. “Hell, you’ve been shot.”
“I still have one good arm,” Buckhorn growled. “And it’s better than either of yours.”
Both men bristled. Men who made their livings with their guns had to have a lot of pride in order to go about their business knowing that someday they would run into someone who was faster on the draw.
And on that day, more than likely, they would die.
“You can get your dander up later,” Buckhorn went on. “We don’t have time for it now. Eagleton wants us to grab Brian Corcoran and his daughter and take them to his suite without anybody seeing.”
Starkey let out a low whistle of surprise. “So he’s tired of messin’ around, is he? Gonna just kill both of ’em and be done with it?”
“That’d be a shame,” Byers said. “Bess Corcoran’s not as pretty as her sister, but she’s still a nice piece of woman flesh. You reckon the boss ’d let us have a little fun with her before we finish ’em off?”
Buckhorn swallowed the bitter taste that climbed up his throat as he listened to Byers. “The plan isn’t to kill them. We’re just going to hold them until Corcoran fails to deliver the mail to Bleak Creek. That’ll cost him his government contract and finish the job of ruining him. He won’t be able to hold out against the boss after that.”
Byers made a face. “Good Lord. Times have changed, haven’t they? I remember when if somebody was standin’ in your way, you just hired fellas like us to wipe ’em out. Sure was a hell of a lot simpler back then.”
“I don’t think the boss has got the guts to do that,” Starkey said. “He’ll stoop to outright murder, but he doesn’t want to get his own hands dirty doin’ it.”
That was sure right, Buckhorn thought. And he was liking it less and less.
They reached the stage line office. The men standing guard out front nodded, and Buckhorn asked them, “Everything quiet?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” one of the gunmen replied. “We heard a noise behind the buildings a while ago, but when we looked there was nothin’ back there. Could’ve been a dog or a cat, some critter like that.”
Buckhorn frowned. Anything out of the ordinary was a potential problem, and he would have preferred it if the men had found what caused the noise. But logically, they were right. It was probably just some night-roaming animal.
“You’re liable to hear some other ruckus in a few minutes,” he warned the men. “The boss has sent us to fetch Corcoran and his daughter to the hotel. You’d damn well better keep that under your hats, though.”
“Sure thing, Joe,” the man agreed readily. “We don’t question the boss’s orders. The girl’s not in there, though. I saw her go into the barn earlier this evening, and I’m pretty sure she hasn’t come back out.”
Buckhorn’s frown deepened. Again, something unusual. He didn’t like it, I left them no choice but to deal with it as best they could.
“Fine. We’ll grab the old man first. The girl won’t give us any trouble, if she doesn’t want anything to happen to her pa.”
“You need help?” the guard asked.
Buckhorn snorted. “I think we can handle one old man.”
“The hostler’s in there, too, I think.”
“All right, two old men.” Buckhorn jerked his head at Starkey and Byers. “Come on.”
When they reached the shadows behind the office, they drew their guns. Buckhorn figured they could kick the back door open, rush in, and grab Brian Corcoran before he knew what was happening. If Nate tried to stop them, that would just be too bad for the old-timer.
Buckhorn had just put his foot on the bottom step leading up to the back porch when the door swung open without warning and Brian Corcoran shouted, “Get out of here right now or I’ll blast you!” He punctuated the threat by thrusting the twin barrels of a coach gun out the door.
“Look out!” Byers yelled. “I’ll get him!”
Flame flashed from the muzzle of his gun.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Bess’s fingers tightened on Ace’s arm as she exclaimed, “That’s Pa! It sounds like trouble!” She and Ace turned as one and charged toward the rear barn doors.
Ace lifted the bar from the brackets on the rear doors, still cautious about showing himself on the streets of Palisade. Too many of Eagleton’s gunmen were lurking around to risk that. Hearing a gunshot followed by the heavy boom of a shotgun changed that.
Bess cried out in alarm at the sounds. Ace threw the bar aside and yanked one of the doors open. More shots blasted as he and Bess charged out of the barn.
Ace spotted the muzzle flashes right away and pulled his gun. Three men were spread out around the back door of the building that housed the stage line office and the Corcoran family’s living quarters. They crouched and fired six-guns toward the building’s rear door in a fierce barrage.
Risking the storm of lead, a figure popped up and unleashed one barrel of a coach gun. The blast caused one of the attackers to buckle. Ace barely had time to recognize Brian Corcoran’s face in the back-flash from the scattergun before Corcoran jerked back and collapsed, evidently struck by one of the slugs flying around.
“Pa!” Bess screamed.
Ace fired his Colt as one of the gunmen twisted toward him. The man’s revolver spouted flame, but Ace’s bullet had already ripped through his body and twisted him halfway around. His shot went wild.
Over the racketing gun thunder, Ace heard men shouting somewhere nearby. A second later, several of Eagleton’s men charged around the corner of the barn and ran toward the gunfight at the rear of the buildings. As they opened fire, Ace grabbed Bess and pulled her behind him, shielding her with his body. He triggered more rounds toward the men joining the battle and one of the guards spilled off his feet.
A rifle cracked from inside the building.
Probably Nate joining the fight, Ace thought. He was convinced Corcoran had been wounded and was out of action. Ace backed toward the barn, still trying to stay in front of Bess as bullets screamed around them and kicked up dust at their feet.
What felt like a red-hot poker suddenly raked across his right forearm. He grunted in pain as his arm and hand spasmed and the Colt slipped out of his fingers. He knew a bullet had just burned across his arm.
Another slug whined past his head from the right. He glanced in that direction and recognized Joe Buckhorn, crouching behind a barrel and taking aim at him again. Obviously the half-breed gunfighter could use his left hand almost as well as his right when it came to gunplay.
Bess cried out. Ace turned toward her in alarm and saw blood on her sleeve. He couldn’t tell how badly she was hurt, and as he reached for her, a hammer blow crashed against his head. He staggered and tried to stiffen his legs but couldn’t keep his knees from buckling.
He heard Bess screaming as he hit the ground, but there was nothing he could do to help her. A black wave had him in its grip, and it washed him away.
Buckhorn’s heart pounded as he straightened behind the barrel. He kept his gun trained on Ace Jensen even though the young man had fallen to the ground, either dead or passed out. Buckhorn thought his last shot had struck Ace in the head, but he wasn’t sure about that.
Starkey and Byers were both dead, Starkey with half his head blown away by the first load of buckshot from Corcoran’s coach gun, Byers shot through the body by Ace.
Bess struggled in the grip of two of the guards Eagleton had posted all around town. As Buckhorn stalked toward them, he gestured with his gun toward the office building and told the others, “Get in there and grab Corcoran. Be careful. That old hostler is in there, and he may still have some fight in him.”
They had to hurry. The people of Palisade were, by and large, scared little sheep who would draw their curtains closed tighter and hudd
le in their beds when they heard gunshots and screams, but a few might be curious enough to investigate the ruckus. Eagleton had made it clear that he didn’t want any witnesses to the abduction of Brian Corcoran and his daughter.
Ace Jensen had fallen on his side. Buckhorn dug a boot toe into the young man’s shoulder and rolled him onto his back. A bloody welt showed in Ace’s thick dark hair above his left ear but no bullet hole. His chest rose and fell, so Buckhorn knew Ace was still alive. The graze on his head had knocked him out.
The gunslinger looked back to Bess. She was wounded. Blood seeped between the fingers of her right hand as she clutched her left arm.
The injury didn’t look too bad, Buckhorn thought. Certainly not fatal.
“Let me go!” she shrieked. As he approached, she cried, “Stay away from me, you monster!”
He holstered his gun, then his left hand flashed up and cracked across her face with enough force to jerk her head to the side and stun her into silence. “Take her to Eagleton’s suite in the hotel,” he told the men holding her, barking the order. “Go in the back door and don’t let anybody see you.”
“Sure, Joe,” one of the men said.
Bess sagged in their grip, so they half-dragged, half-carried her toward the rear of the hotel.
Buckhorn swung back around toward the stage line office as several more shots roared. He put his hand on the butt of his gun in readiness as he waited to see who would emerge from the building.
A couple of Eagleton’s men came out carrying Brian Corcoran’s senseless form.
Buckhorn couldn’t tell if the man was alive. He moved closer and asked, “Is he still breathing?”
“For now,” one of the gunmen replied. “Looks like he got a slug through the side. Can’t really tell how bad it is.”
Buckhorn repeated the same order he had given concerning Bess and turned to the two gunnies who came out of the building “What happened with the hostler?”
“The old pelican put up a fight. We had to ventilate him.”
“Dead?”
“Dead as can be.”
Buckhorn grimaced. He didn’t care about the old man, but his death seemed sort of senseless. The gunman had never cared about that before. If whoever paid his wages wanted somebody dead, that had always been motivation enough.
For some reason, the rampant bloodshed struck him as a waste. It all should have been handled in some other way, he thought. Eagleton had allowed the whole situation to deteriorate until it was just a mess.
One way or another, it would be finished soon, the gunfighter sensed. Brian Corcoran was wounded, maybe seriously, and Bess had caught a slug, too. Emily was somewhere up on the mountain above the Golden Dome, hiding out from the law along with Chance Jensen. They couldn’t do anything to stop Eagleton’s plans any longer.
And Ace Jensen was out cold from that bullet graze.
Buckhorn looked down at the young man for a moment, then waved two guards over and gave the same order again. “Pick him up and take him to the hotel. Be sure to go in the back and haul him up to Eagleton’s suite.”
The simplest thing would be to cut Ace’s throat and be done with it, but Buckhorn held off, deciding that Eagleton ought to have to deal with his victims. He shouldn’t be able to shield himself from all the results of his ruthless scheming.
Let the man who would gain the most get a little of the blood on his own hands for a change, Buckhorn thought grimly.
Several hundred yards above where he and Emily had had the brief gun battle with Marshal Kaiser and several members of the posse, Chance blew on his hands to keep them warm as he sat on a rock and watched her pace back and forth on the little ledge where they had paused to rest. He could see her fairly well in the starlight, especially her mane of blond curls. “You might want to stop moving around so much,” he cautioned. “That’ll just make it easier for somebody down below to spot you.”
“Right now, I’m so mad I don’t hardly care. Anyway, that trail is only wide enough for one person at a time to come at us, so I reckon we can hold them off.”
“Yeah, well, what if they break out their rifles and start blazing away at us from down there? There’s only so much lead we can dodge if it starts bouncing around this ledge.”
She stopped her pacing and looked at him, then sighed. “You’re right. The last thing we need is that damn posse taking potshots at us . . . pardon my language.”
Chance grinned. “It’s understandable, after everything that Eagleton and his bunch have put you and your family through.”
“We’ve got a mighty big score to settle with him, that’s for sure.”
The climb had been hard and precarious. A missed handhold or a slippery foothold meant a disastrous plunge down the slope. Chance wasn’t sure how much higher they could go. It seemed like they ought to be pretty close to the top of the mountain. Just them and the bighorn sheep, he thought wryly before turning his thoughts to what would happen next. It was even money what would happen first, he supposed—he and Emily would fall off the mountain, they would freeze to death, or the posse would catch up to them and they would have a fight on their hands again.
He got an answer to that conundrum sooner than he expected. While he was sitting there trying futilely to warm up a little, he heard a clatter somewhere nearby and recognized it as the sound of a falling rock.
And it came from above him and Emily.
Chance shot to his feet and twisted around as alarm bells clamored in his brain. Maybe one of those sheep he’d been thinking about had kicked a rock loose, he told himself wildly. Reality quickly replaced his wild thinking as he realized if any members of the posse had gotten above them somehow, they were in real trouble—caught between the two prongs of a trap.
The next second, a shape hurtled down out of the darkness and crashed into him. The impact drove him off his feet.
He felt the ledge gouge painfully into his back just below his shoulders when he landed, making his head dangle above hundreds of feet of empty air.
The weight of the man pinned Chance to the ledge. He tried to heave himself up and throw his attacker off, but he couldn’t get any leverage. The man slammed a fist into his face.
Somewhere nearby, Emily yelled a curse and then screamed, “Let go of me! Oh!” The sounds of a frantic struggle followed her cries.
Spurred by her desperation, Chance threw a punch of his own at the dark shape above him and connected solidly. He grabbed the front of his attacker’s shirt as the man rocked back, using it to haul himself up. He lowered his head and drove it into the man’s face.
Grappling with each other, the two of them rolled away from the brink. Chance flattened the palm of his hand against the man’s face and tried to dig hooked fingers into his eyes, but the man jerked back. The side of his hand slashed across Chance’s throat, making him gag.
Gasping for breath, he writhed free of the man’s flailing arms, surged halfway to his feet, and launched a roundhouse punch that crashed into the man’s jaw with enough force to drive him back against the rock wall behind him.
Chance stood all the way up and looked around for Emily. His heart stopped as he saw Marshal Jed Kaiser standing at the edge of the path, his left arm around Emily’s waist and his right clamped over her mouth. She struggled against his cruel grip, but Kaiser’s feet were well-planted and she couldn’t gain any traction against him.
Chance took a step toward them, but Kaiser called out in a clear, arrogant voice, “Stop right there, Jensen! If you come any closer, you might cause me to lose my grip on this young lady, and you wouldn’t want that!”
“You leave her alone! If you hurt her, I’ll kill you!”
“Threatening an officer of the law . . . I’m afraid that’s one more mark against you, son. One more crime you’ll have to answer for.”
“I haven’t committed any crimes,” Chance raged. Aware that several other members of the posse had slid down onto the ledge from somewhere above them, he figured one of the men was
familiar with the mountain, had figured out where they were going, and knew a way to get around them.
“That’ll be up to a judge to decide,” Kaiser said. “My job is to bring in the lawbreakers and let the court deal with them. Where’s that brother of yours?”
“I don’t know,” Chance answered honestly. “You don’t see him here, do you?”
Kaiser frowned. “We’ll catch up with him later. Right now, we’re going to take you back to Palisade and put you behind bars where you belong. I’m sure Marshal Wheeler will be glad to have you as a guest in his jail until we can round up your brother.”
Generally, Chance was cool-headed in times of trouble and not given to panic. As he looked around at the grim-faced posse men surrounding him, he felt like his nerves were stretched so tight they were going to snap. With the odds so high against him, especially in a precarious location like the ledge, he didn’t see any way out. Certainly not one that would allow him to free Emily, too.
“We’ve wasted enough time,” Kaiser said abruptly. “Take him!”
Men leaped at Chance. He tried to dart away, but one grabbed his arm and jerked him around. Another tackled him around the waist. A third slashed at his head with a gun.
Chance couldn’t get out of the way of the vicious blow. It landed solidly and set off bright red explosions in his brain. He sagged in the grip of the men who held him, and they forced him to the ground.
Fists and feet slammed into him for what seemed like a long time before Kaiser called, “That’s enough. Get him up and tie his hands behind him. Justice has prevailed!”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Consciousness seeped back into Ace’s brain. His head hurt. It felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to his skull. He opened his eyes and realized he was moving, but his legs weren’t working.
Time wasn’t flowing in its normal manner, either. The strong hands gripping him dragged him along for what seemed like hours, then suddenly released him. Something jumped up and smacked him in the face.
Those Jensen Boys! Page 22
