Silas never saw the gunman who emerged from the shadows behind him, but Luke did.
He broke into a run and shouted, “Silas, get down!”
Silas dived to the ground as Harmon’s man opened fire. Luke was close enough to let loose one of the barrels. The shotgun went off with a boom and threw the gunman back against a hitch rack. He flipped over it and landed in the limp sprawl of death.
Harmon’s men in the saloon chose that moment to break out, slamming through the batwings with guns blazing. They charged across the street, which turned into a hornet’s nest of flying lead. Luke went flat on his belly to avoid the deadly storm and fired the shotgun’s second barrel, bringing down two of the hired killers. The other gun-wolves spun off their feet as shots from Silas, McGill, and other townsmen ripped through them.
As the gun-thunder died away, echoing into the nearby mountains. Luke heard hoofbeats. He remembered McCluskey and the wagon loaded with the strongboxes full of gold.
Every instinct in his body told him that McCluskey was getting away.
He broke into a run back toward the hotel, feeling in his pocket for more shotgun shells. When he didn’t find any, he threw the empty Greener aside.
He reached the place where the wagon had been parked. It was gone, just as he expected. The sky was light enough for him to spot the vehicle heading south, away from Pine City. He had a revolver tucked into his waistband, but the wagon was already too far away for a handgun to have any chance of hitting its driver.
Two dead men lay on the ground nearby, murdered by McCluskey so he could take the gold. Luke looked around, knowing that cowboys never liked to be far away from their horses, and his heart leaped as he saw two shapes in the shed where the mule team had been kept.
He ran to the shed and swung open the gate in the fence around it. The horses were unsaddled and skittish, but he didn’t let that stop him. He managed to calm down one of them enough that it let him grasp its mane and swing onto its back. He dug his heels into the horse’s flanks and sent it racing after the wagon.
Loaded down the way it was with the gold, the wagon couldn’t go as fast as the horse Luke was riding. He urged the mount on, and slowly the gap began to shrink.
Some instinct warned McCluskey that he was being pursued. He twisted on the seat, and flame spurted from a gun barrel. Luke leaned forward to make himself a smaller target, but he wasn’t really worried about McCluskey hitting him. Going fast in a bouncing wagon, that would be pure luck.
Luke was going to trust his luck over McCluskey’s. The outlaw’s uncanny good fortune had to run out sometime.
Luke drew closer and closer until he could see the strain on McCluskey’s face when the man looked back. He emptied the pistol toward Luke, but none of the shots came close.
Luke brought the galloping horse alongside the wagon bed. He could see the strongboxes as he left the horse’s back in a dive that carried him into the wagon, landing hard enough to knock the breath out of him and stun him for a second.
McCluskey seized that opportunity to abandon the reins and dive over the back of the seat. He tried to slam his empty gun down on Luke’s head, but Luke twisted aside at the last second and grabbed McCluskey’s wrist. He banged the outlaw’s gun hand against the edge of a strongbox, causing McCluskey to cry out in pain and lose his grip on the revolver.
It was a desperate hand-to-hand battle in the back of the careening wagon as each man gouged, kicked, tried to gain strangleholds, and basically fought for their lives. McCluskey broke away from Luke and surged to his feet. Luke followed and clung precariously to his balance as he and McCluskey stood toe-to-toe, slugging away at each other.
McCluskey buckled first, his wounded leg giving way underneath him. Luke straightened him up again with a left hook and added a roundhouse right that landed on the outlaw’s jaw with smashing force. McCluskey went backward, tripped over one of the strongboxes, and flipped completely out of the wagon.
Luke leaped to the seat, grabbed the trailing reins, and brought the runaway mules to a halt as quickly as he could. He turned the wagon and drove back to where McCluskey lay motionless on the ground, afraid the outlaw might have broken his neck in the fall.
He was relieved when McCluskey groaned and lifted his head. Luke picked up the gun that had fallen from his waistband during the fight and checked the cylinder. It still held three rounds. He vaulted to the ground and approached McCluskey. “Get up,” Luke said harshly.
“Why don’t . . . why don’t you just . . . go ahead and shoot me?” McCluskey asked.
“Because I want to see you hang.”
By the time they got back to Pine City with McCluskey lying in the back of the wagon next to the strongboxes he had desired so badly, his hands and feet tied with strips Luke had forced him to tear from his own shirt, the fighting in the settlement was over.
It didn’t take long to confirm which side had won the war. Silas Grant emerged from the marshal’s office, carrying a rifle and grinning. “Mr. Jensen! We were all hopin’ you were all right. Did you get him?”
“I got him.” Luke looked around. “What about here?”
Silas leaned his head toward the marshal’s office. “All the cells are plumb full in there, between the outlaws left over from that riverboat, Harmon’s gunnies we rounded up, and ol’ Marshal Kent his own self. He ain’t the marshal no more.”
“I can think of someone else a lot more suited to wear that badge . . . if you think you can fit a lawman’s duties in with your work at the livery stable.”
“I was thinkin’ on it,” Silas admitted. “Mr. McGill, he done said somethin’ about that already.” He looked into the back of the wagon. “What are you gonna do with this one?”
“Think we can cram one more prisoner into those cells?”
“Oh, we’ll find a place for him,” Silas said, nodding. “We’ll find a place. And as soon as we do, you best get over to the café. Miz Walton and my Tillie, they’re already gettin’ breakfast ready.”
Luke looked at the café, thought about Georgia Walton’s smile—and her coffee—and decided that was about the most appealing combination he had heard in a long time.
None of the townspeople had been killed in the fight with Harmon’s men. The element of surprise had helped them, along with the fact that Luke had accounted for several of the enemy himself. Three days later, a rider who’d been sent to the county seat on a fast horse returned with not only the sheriff and a posse of deputies, but also several railroad detectives who were trying to track down that stolen gold.
They promised Luke a sizable reward for recovering it, but he told them, “You’ll be splitting that reward between me and the good folks here in Pine City. They deserve it as much as I do. Maybe more.”
The sheriff approached him later about Dave Harmon’s death. “Harmon was an influential man in these parts,” the lawman said. “Some of his friends are liable to say what you did was murder, Jensen.”
Luke frowned. “He had just gunned down a woman, and he was trying to shoot me. That’s a pretty clear-cut case of self-defense.”
“You don’t have any witnesses to that. Harmon and the woman are both dead.”
“Then there’s nobody to testify against me, is there?” Luke pointed out.
The sheriff looked at him for a long moment. “I’ve been talking to Ben McGill, Silas Grant, and a bunch of other folks in town. I’m pretty well convinced that Harmon had Tom Walton murdered and had a hand in the deaths of several other men, as well. So I’m not going to push this any further than it’s already gone. But I’d suggest that’s what you should be, too, Jensen—gone. Get out of this part of the territory and don’t come back for a good long while.”
“That’s all right with me, Sheriff,” Luke said honestly, although he was going to miss eating at the café, and Georgia’s company, to boot. “I’ve got a prisoner who has an appointment in Cheyenne.”
While McCluskey sat in prison in Cheyenne, Luke returned to Rattlesnake W
ells on the train as soon as the railroad bridge was repaired, to pick up his horse and see how Sundown Bob Hatfield and the other friends he had made were doing. He used part of the reward money to pick up a new pair of Remingtons, a new gun belt, and a set of holsters. He was breaking in the weapons, and it felt good to be fully armed again.
There was just one more thing to do before he left that part of the country. With his horse in the animal car, he rode the train back to Cheyenne. McCluskey was scheduled to be hanged, and Luke intended to be there. He took no pleasure in it. It was more like something he had to do to close the last page of a book.
All the way from the jail, up the thirteen steps to the gallows, while a black-suited preacher droned a prayer and the federal marshal in charge of the hanging asked McCluskey if he had any last words to say, the outlaw looked around, jerking his head from side to side as if waiting for something to happen.
Waiting for someone to come along and save him from his fate.
But Delia wasn’t there. She was buried two hundred miles away in Pine City’s cemetery, with a plain marker giving only her name and date of death. There was nobody else to help a vicious, two-bit owlhoot like Frank McCluskey.
McCluskey was still waiting for that miracle, though, as the hangman put the black hood over his head, fitted the noose around his neck, and nodded to the marshal who held the lever. From under the hood, McCluskey said in a muffled voice, “Wait! This isn’t—”
The marshal shoved the lever, the trapdoor dropped out from under McCluskey’s feet, and Luke heard the sharp pop of the outlaw’s neck breaking as he hit the end of the rope.
So much for visions, Luke thought as he went to his waiting horse. He swung up into the saddle and rode out of Cheyenne without looking back at the figure dangling from the gallows.
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CHAPTER 1
“You had to do it, Miz Kerrigan,” Sheriff Miles Martin said, hat in hand. “He came looking for trouble.”
Kate Kerrigan stood at her parlor window, stared into moon-dappled darkness, and said nothing.
“I mean, he planned to rob you, and after you fed him, an’ all,” Martin said.
Kate turned, a tall, elegant woman. Her once flaming red hair was now gray but her fine-boned, Celtic beauty was still enough to turn a man’s head.
She smiled at Martin.
“He planned to murder me, Miles. Cover his tracks, I guess.”
“Where is Trace?” Martin said.
“Out on the range, and so is his brother,” Kate said.
“And Miss Ivy and Miss Shannon?”
“My segundo’s wife is birthing a child. Doc Woodruff is off fly-fishing somewhere, so Ivy and Shannon went over to Lucy Cobb’s cabin to help. Lucy has already had three, so I don’t foresee any problems.”
Then as though she feared she was tempting fate, Kate said in the lilting Irish brogue she’d never lost, “May Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and all the saints in heaven protect her this night.”
“He was a city slicker,” Martin said.
The sheriff, a drink of water with a walrus mustache and sad brown eyes, stood in front of the fire. He had a Colt self-cocker in his holster and a silver star pinned to the front of his sheepskin.
The fall of 1907 had been cold and the winter was shaping up to be a sight worse.
“He had the look of one,” Kate said.
Martin looked uncomfortable and awkward, all big hands and spurred boots. He chose his words carefully, like a barefoot man walking through a nettle patch.
“How did it happen, Miz Kerrigan? I need to ask.”
“Of course, Miles,” Kate said. “Why don’t you sit and I’ll get you a brandy. Only to keep out the chill, you understand.”
The big lawman sat gratefully in the studded, leather chair by the fire.
“I’m right partial to brandy,” he said. “Warms a man’s insides, I always say.”
Kate poured brandy in two huge snifters, handed one to Martin and settled herself in the chair opposite.
The lawman thought she sat like a queen, and why not? Kate’s range was larger than some European kingdoms.
Martin played for time.
He produced the makings and said, “May I beg your indulgence, Ma’am?”
“Please do. My son Quinn is much addicted to cigarettes, a habit he learned from our vaqueros who smoke like chimneys.”
“Doctors say it’s good for the chest,” Martin said.
“So I’ve heard, but I do not set store by what doctors say.”
Kate sipped her brandy, and then stooped to poke the logs into life. She didn’t look up.
“I’ve killed men before, Miles.”
“I know, Miz Kerrigan, but I was trying to spare you a lot of fool questions.”
The woman’s emerald green eyes fixed on Martin’s face.
“I’ll tell you what happened here earlier this evening and you can ask your questions as you see fit.”
The lawman nodded.
“I’d given the servants the night off, and I was alone in the house when I heard a horse come to a halt outside.”
“What time was that, Miz Kerrigan?”
“It was seven o’clock. I was here, sitting by the fire eating the cold supper the cook had prepared for me, and heard the grandfather clock chime in the hallway. A few moments later a knock came to the door.”
Kate’s blue silk day dress rustled as she sat back and made herself more comfortable.
“I answered the summons and opened to a man, an ordinary looking fellow wearing an old dark jacket that was several sizes too large for him. He had no overcoat; the evening was cold and he shivered.
“He said he was hungry and could I spare him a bite of food? Since I’d no kitchen staff available, I opened the door and let him come inside.”
“That was a mistake, Miz Kerrigan,” Martin said.
Kate smiled.
“Miles, over the years I’ve let many men into this house. Geronimo once sat where you’re sitting. We had tea and cake and he wanted to talk about old Queen Vic.”
The lawman stirred uncomfortably in his chair and glanced over his shoulder, as though he expected to see the old Apache’s ghost glowering at him from a corner.
“Well, I led the way to the kitchen and the man followed me. He said his name was Tom and that he was looking for ranch work. He had the most singular eyes, rather mean and foxy, like those I used to see in some Texas gunmen back in the old days. I must admit, I did not trust him.
”
“You did right,” Martin said. “Not trusting him, I mean.”
“Thank you, Miles. I’m sure your approval will stand me in good stead should you consider hanging me.”
“Miz Kerrigan! I have no intention . . . I mean . . . I wouldn’t . . .”
Kate gave the flustered lawman a dazzling smile.
“There, there, Miles, don’t distress yourself. I’m certain the facts of the case will speak for themselves and banish all doubt from your mind.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sorry. Please proceed.”
Martin was fifty years old and Kate Kerrigan could still make him blush.
“I fixed the man some beef sandwiches, and indeed, he was as wolf hungry as he professed,” Kate said. “It was after he’d eaten heartily that things took a dangerous turn.”
“Was the sugar scattered all over the kitchen floor part of it?” Martin said.
“Indeed it was. A small sugar sack had been left on the counter by a careless maid and Tom, if that was really his name—”
“It wasn’t,” Martin said.
Kate looked at him in surprise.
“Please go on, Miz Kerrigan,” the lawman said.
“Well, the man jumped up, grabbed the sugar sack and threw the contents over the floor. He shoved the empty sack at me and said, ‘You, fill this. The jewels you’re wearing first.’”
“‘Mister,’” I said, “‘I’ve been threatened by more dangerous bad men than you.’”
Martin reached into the pocket of his coat and withdrew a revolver.
“Then he drew this on you.”
Kate glanced at the gun.
“Yes, that’s it, a Hopkins and Allen in thirty-two caliber. He said to fill the sack or he’d scatter my brains.”
“Oh, Miz Kerrigan, you must have been terrified,” Martin said.
Bad Men Die Page 21
