Those Jensen Boys!

by William W. Johnstone

  He closed his eyes and tried to think. That wasn’t it. He had fallen when they let go of him. Painful though it was, his thoughts were beginning to arrange themselves in their proper order.

  A voice echoed in Ace’s ears like its owner was shouting into an empty rain barrel. It demanded, “What the hell did you bring him here for?”

  “Because Buckhorn told us to,” answered a voice that also sounded distorted to Ace. It gradually became more normal, however, as the man went on. “I’m sorry, boss, but we didn’t want to argue with that crazy ’breed. You know how he can be when he’s riled up.”

  “Indeed I do,” the first man muttered. “Well, I suppose you can take him back downstairs, carry him out in the alley, and cut his throat. Just dispose of the body somewhere it won’t be found anytime soon.”

  “No!”

  That anguished cry came from a woman’s throat, Ace thought. A young woman. Bess.

  The last time he’d seen her, she had been bleeding from a bullet wound in her arm. Fear for her drove the last of the fog from his brain. He opened his eyes and lifted his head.

  “Damn it,” snapped the man with the echoing voice. “He woke up and he’s seen me now.”

  That was true enough, although Ace had no idea who he was looking at. The man looming over him was just a thick-bodied, middle-aged man with a mostly bald head and a brutal face. He wore what appeared to be an expensive suit.

  Ace realized it was probably Samuel Eagleton. The mine owner had caused an incredible amount of trouble for the Jensen brothers, but he had done so without either of them ever laying eyes on him.

  Worry about Bess overrode Ace’s curiosity about their enemy. He looked around and spotted her kneeling beside the unconscious body of her father. At least, he hoped Brian Corcoran was only unconscious. He could see a lot of blood on Corcoran’s shirt.

  Bess had a rag tied around her wounded arm as a makeshift bandage. The wound didn’t appear to be too serious, but Ace sensed they were all in deep trouble and might wind up dead anyway.

  “Get on with it,” Eagleton barked, making a curt gesture to the men who had brought Ace to him.

  Ace assumed he was in Eagleton’s suite. He had become aware that he was lying on a thick rug, and the furniture he could see appeared to be comfortable and expensive.

  “Wait a minute,” a new voice said.

  Eagleton bristled. “I didn’t know you were giving the orders around here, Joe.”

  Buckhorn sauntered into Ace’s line of sight. “I’m not giving orders, boss, just making a suggestion. You’ve almost got everything lined up the way you want it. All you have to do is keep these folks here until tomorrow night. By that time, the mail won’t have reached Bleak Creek when it’s supposed to, and Corcoran’s stage line will be busted. Dump Jensen’s body tonight and somebody’s liable to find it. That’ll just muddy up the waters.”

  “I suppose,” Eagleton said with a dubious frown.

  A man Ace recognized as Jacob Tanner stepped up and declared, “I don’t like this waiting around. Jensen has caused us trouble again and again. You’d better get rid of him while you’ve got the chance.”

  Ace would have smiled at that if his head didn’t hurt so much. Tanner’s words reminded him that Chance was still on the loose somewhere. It would be just like him to show up out of nowhere and turn the tables on the ruthless, greedy—

  A knock sounded on the door.

  Buckhorn turned sharply toward it, his hand going to his gun.

  Tanner leaned closer to Eagleton and asked quietly, “Were you expecting anyone else?”

  “No.” Eagleton nodded toward the door. “Find out who it is, Joe.”

  Buckhorn went to the door with his hand still resting on the butt of his gun. “Who’s out there?”

  “It’s Marshal Wheeler,” came the reply.

  Eagleton visibly relaxed. He nodded. “Let him in. It doesn’t matter what Claude sees. He’s one of us.”

  Tanner looked worried about that, Ace thought.

  Buckhorn did what Eagleton told him and swung the door open. The burly figure of Marshal Claude Wheeler came into the suite’s sitting room. He looked worried, too.

  “What is it, Claude?” Eagleton asked.

  “I thought you’d want to know that Jed Kaiser just brought in a couple prisoners and locked them up in my jail—Emily Corcoran and Chance Jensen.”

  Bess cried out at the mention of her sister’s name. Despair threatened to fill Ace when he heard that his brother had been captured. So much for the idea of him swooping in and saving the day. He was just one more prisoner with a mighty limited life expectancy.

  A frown creased Eagleton’s forehead. “What sort of shape are they in?”

  “They’re all right. The girl is fine. Jensen was knocked out when the posse captured him, but he’s conscious now and none the worse for wear, as far as I can tell. Should I leave them locked up?”

  Eagleton’s frown deepened as he considered the question. He glanced at Buckhorn, but the enigmatic gunfighter didn’t offer any guidance. Finally, Eagleton said, “No, bring them over here. I want everyone in one place where we can keep an eye on them.” He paused. “Not here in the suite, though. I’m, ah, going to be entertaining a guest later. Take them to the room next door. It’s kept empty. Buckhorn can see that the others are taken over there while you’re fetching your two prisoners.”

  Wheeler nodded. “All right, Mr. Eagleton. I reckon you’d prefer that my deputies and I be discreet about it?”

  “Of course.”

  Wheeler left the room.

  Buckhorn’s thoughts took a turn. Originally, he had been hired as a bodyguard. At his suggestion, the room next door was kept empty, and for good reason. That way, nobody could fire a gun through the wall into the suite. And since the suite was at the end of the hallway there wasn’t a room on the other side of it. All strategy to keep Eagleton safe.

  Returning to the task at hand, Buckhorn said flatly, “I’ll get some of the boys to carry Corcoran and this Jensen next door.”

  “Good. Oh, and Joe, see if you can do something about the blood on the rugs, too. I don’t want anyone being upset by the sight of it.”

  Buckhorn was seething inside as he supervised the transfer of the prisoners from Eagleton’s suite into the room next door. He knew good and well the identity of the visitor Eagleton was expecting later—Rose Demarcus—but he wasn’t sure why that bothered him as much as it did. Maybe it was because Eagleton was going to be carrying on his affair while the victims of his scheming were locked up only a thin wall away. It brought all his sordidness too close to her and threatened to soil her with it.

  Well, that was rich, he thought wryly. A half-breed gunfighter with an ocean of blood on his hands worrying about a cathouse owner’s reputation.

  Eagleton had always been careful to keep the truth from her, but would she really care if she found out? He was just trying to make more money, after all. In her line of work, Rose ought to understand.

  But maybe that wouldn’t be the case, Buckhorn told himself. Despite her profession, Rose had something fine about her, something that would draw the line at kidnapping, intimidation, and murder. The boss was doing the right thing by keeping all that away from her.

  The right thing for him, anyway. Buckhorn suddenly wondered how she might feel about everything if she knew the truth. Would it make a difference?

  The question gnawed at him and wouldn’t let go.

  Ace’s legs worked again as two gunmen hauled him to his feet. It was a relief, since he hadn’t been sure. He’d been worried that he was paralyzed.

  As he walked into the empty room and sat next to Bess on the floor, he was also glad to be able to talk to her again and make sure she wasn’t injured too badly.

  As soon as the door shut behind the guards, she told him, “The bullet just plowed a little furrow in my arm. It hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt before, but it didn’t bleed all that much. I’m sure it’ll be
fine. I’m a lot more worried about Pa.”

  Brian Corcoran was stretched out on the floor next to her, still unconscious.

  At Buckhorn’s order, the gunmen had torn strips off the bed and bound them around Corcoran’s torso. That had stopped the bleeding.

  Bess was worried that her father had already lost too much blood, though, and Ace shared that concern. Corcoran’s face was pale, and his breathing was shallow.

  “He’s still alive, and so are we,” Ace told her.

  They couldn’t give up hope. Although it certainly looked like Eagleton was on the verge of victory, maybe they would get an opportunity to change that.

  Leaning against the door, Buckhorn watched them with an unreadable expression on his face. After a while he said, “I haven’t forgotten about you shooting me, Jensen. This shoulder hurts like hell.”

  “I’d say I’m sorry,” Ace replied, “but I’m not. You shouldn’t have thrown in with a snake like Eagleton and agreed to do all his dirty work for him.”

  Buckhorn didn’t say anything in response to that, but Ace thought he saw something in the gunfighter’s eyes, maybe the faintest flicker of agreement. Ace thought again that it might be possible to drive a wedge between Buckhorn and his employer.

  Before he could say anything else, someone knocked on the door. Buckhorn straightened and put his hand on his gun. “Yeah?”

  “It’s Marshal Wheeler.”

  Buckhorn let go of the gun, opened the door, and stepped back.

  Wheeler went in first, carrying a shotgun, then turned to cover the doorway as Emily entered the room next, then Chance, followed by a couple of Wheeler’s deputies with drawn revolvers.

  Emily exclaimed, “Bess!” and ran to her sister, who leaped to her feet to meet her. None of the men tried to stop them as they embraced.

  Ace stood up, too, and nodded to Chance. Their reunion was less visibly emotional, but Ace was mighty glad to see his brother again and knew Chance felt the same way.

  Of course, it would have been even better if one or both of them had been free.

  “It wasn’t easy getting over here without anyone noticing,” Wheeler said to Buckhorn. “The whole town’s still in an uproar over all that shooting earlier. Nobody’s quite sure what happened, but they know some sort of ruckus occurred around the stage line building.”

  “They won’t find anything,” the gunfighter said. “I had the old man’s body taken out of town.”

  Emily turned sharply toward him and repeated, “The old man?”

  Bess put a hand on her sister’s arm and said in a choked voice, “Nate’s dead, Emily. He tried to protect Pa after he was shot, and Eagleton’s men killed him.”

  Emily’s eyes widened. In a voice shaking with rage, she said, “He was just an old man!”

  “An old man with a rifle,” Buckhorn said. “For what it’s worth, I wish he’d thrown it down when he saw the odds were against him.”

  “Nate would have never done that,” Emily snapped. “He was always loyal to Pa. I don’t want your phony sympathy. I just want you to die.”

  “You’ll get your wish sooner or later,” Buckhorn said with a shrug. “I don’t know if you’ll be around to see it, though.”

  With a worried tone in his voice, Wheeler said, “I sure hope the boss knows what he’s doing. Shooting people, holding them prisoner, getting rid of bodies . . . I’m supposed to be a lawman, you know. This is getting a mite hard to swallow.”

  “You’re an employee of the Golden Dome Mining Corporation, just like me,” Buckhorn said. “Your only job is to do what the boss wants done.” He paused, then repeated under his breath, “Just like me.”

  Wheeler tucked the shotgun under his arm “Well, Mr. Eagleton told me to stay here and help you keep an eye on them, so I reckon that’s what I’ll do.”

  Buckhorn was incensed. “I don’t need any help.”

  Wheeler shrugged beefy shoulders. “Doesn’t matter. That’s what the boss said.”

  “Fine.” Buckhorn clearly didn’t like the idea of having the marshal for company, but he wasn’t going to argue. “Where’s Kaiser?”

  “He and the other men from the posse are here in the hotel. They’ve got rooms downstairs. The boss said he’d put them up for the night, as late as it is.”

  “So just about everybody’s here,” Buckhorn mused.

  “Yeah, I suppose you could look at it like that.”

  Once again, Ace thought something more was going on in the gunfighter’s brain than was readily apparent.

  Wheeler’s deputies left, but not long after that someone else knocked quietly on the door. The marshal opened it to admit Jacob Tanner.

  “Eagleton’s kicked me out of his suite, too.” The railroad man had one of his stogies clenched between his teeth and seemed angry as he stalked in. “I’m starting to think he doesn’t appreciate everything the rest of us have done to help him accomplish his goals. He’d be a rich man without us because of that mine, I suppose . . . but he wouldn’t be well on his way to being the richest, most influential man in the whole territory. You wouldn’t know that from the high-handed way he acts.”

  “The man who has the money makes the rules,” Wheeler said. “That’s the way it’s always been in this world. I reckon that’s the way it’ll always be.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s right,” Tanner growled.

  Buckhorn laughed.

  They all looked at him in surprise, even the prisoners.

  Ace thought Tanner and Wheeler acted like they had never heard Buckhorn laugh before, maybe hadn’t entertained the notion that the gunfighter even could laugh.

  “That’s where you’re making your mistake,” Buckhorn said. “Thinking that this world has anything to do with right and wrong. Thinking that life should be fair, at least every now and then. It never has been and it never will be, so what the hell does it matter?”

  Obviously irritated, Tanner snapped, “What in blazes are you talking about, Indian?”

  “This.” The Colt on Buckhorn’s left hip seemed to leap into his hand with blinding speed, and before any of the people in the room had a clue what he was doing, he crashed the gun against Tanner’s head and sent the railroad man sprawling to the floor.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Ace and Chance were as stunned as any of the others by Buckhorn’s sudden action, but they recovered first and lunged toward Wheeler while the crooked lawman was still staring at Buckhorn. If they could get their hands on Wheeler’s shotgun, it could change everything.

  Buckhorn was too fast for all of them. He leveled the Colt at Wheeler before the lawman recovered from his shock and could lift his weapon far enough to use. The gun was also pointed in the general direction of the Jensen brothers.

  “All of you just hold it,” Buckhorn ordered. “Claude, I don’t want to kill you. I don’t have anything against you except your choice of employer, and hell, I made the same mistake. Toss that Greener onto the bed.”

  “Joe, what in the Sam Hill are you doing?” Wheeler asked.

  “Trying to make the world a little more fair, I reckon. Now do what I told you.”

  Wheeler sighed and threw the shotgun onto the bed.

  “Now your pistol, too, and be careful how you take it out of the holster.”

  Wheeler drew the handgun carefully and tossed it onto the bed next to the shotgun, then backed off when Buckhorn motioned for him to do so.

  “I’ve got a hunch you’re gonna be really sorry about doin’ this,” Wheeler said with a sigh.

  “You may be right about that. Sometimes a man just has to do something, even though he knows it’s futile.”

  “No offense, but you’re just about the damn oddest half-breed hired gun I’ve ever come across.”

  Buckhorn laughed again. “None taken, Claude.”

  Ace asked, “What are you going to do, Buckhorn? Are you double-crossing Eagleton?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Buckhorn replied with a sneer. “I told you, I h
aven’t forgotten it was you who shot me, or that you two have caused me a lot of trouble. But I finally realized I don’t really give a damn about that stage line or the railroad that Eagleton wants to build or the fact that he wants to set himself up as the tinpot dictator of this whole end of the territory. I just want the truth to come out for the first time in this whole miserable business.”

  Ace could make no sense of that. “The truth . . . ?”

  “I want one woman to see Eagleton for what he really is. I won’t rest until I find out what she thinks of him after that.”

  Ace and Chance glanced at each other. Neither of them had any idea what Buckhorn was talking about, but clearly, it was important to the gunfighter. Since it offered them their only shred of hope, they were willing to play along with it.

  “Listen to me, Buckhorn.” Ace held out a hand toward the man. “Let me and my brother get those guns on the bed, and we’ll back your play, whatever it is.”

  “That’s right,” Chance added. “As long as it’s not going to hurt Emily and Bess and their pa any more than they already are.”

  Bess took a step forward. “Please, Mr. Buckhorn. My father needs a doctor. If he’s kept prisoner here until tomorrow night and Mr. Eagleton won’t let anyone help him, he’ll die. I’m sure of it.”

  Buckhorn looked at Emily. “What about you, girl? You going to beg, too?”

  “Hell, no. But if you do the right thing for once in your miserable life, I might not kill you.”

  Buckhorn shook his head. “I admire you, Miss Corcoran. You might not have much sense sometimes, but you’re not short on sand, I’ll say that.” He frowned in thought for a couple seconds, then reached a decision. “You boys pick up those guns and keep Wheeler and Tanner covered while I’m gone. Don’t try anything funny, though. Neither of you is fast enough to stop me from killing you if you do. And don’t double-cross me. Even if you think you’ve gotten away with it, I’ll hunt you down and make you sorry.”

  “We’re not interested in a double cross,” Ace said as he moved warily toward the bed. “Just in protecting the Corcorans.”