One Man's Fire

by Ralph Compton

  “You’ve got a point there.” Looking up at the driver with tired resignation, the first rifleman asked, “What’s the password?”

  “It’s…uh…” The driver started breathing in quicker gulps as sweat trickled down his face.

  “Answer the man,” Hank urged while reminding the driver of the .44’s presence with a gentle nudge. “There’s loading to be done.”

  The driver stammered to himself, not making a bit of sense but enough noise to raise Hank’s hackles. Finally he pulled in enough breath to spit out “I…I don’t recall.”

  “What’s that?” the lead rifleman asked.

  The driver explained, “I don’t recall the password. It’s been a long ride and…”

  “And we’ve been passing a bottle back and forth,” Hank said with a laugh that would have been unconvincing even if it had been honest. “Tends to rot a man’s thoughts, you know.”

  “And you’re the one at the reins?” Matt asked. “Don’t seem drunk to me. Just nervous.”

  The pair of riflemen that had been hanging back moved in while bringing weapons to their shoulders.

  “He can hold his liquor,” Hank told him. “You want to see some fellas that can’t, just take a look in the back of the wagon.”

  “Aw, for the love of Pete,” Matt growled. “Those guards are passed out drunk? Mr. Cobbleston will have them strung up by their thumbs!”

  “Just so long as he knows I was up front where I should be!” Hank said with just the right amount of defensiveness.

  In the space of a minute, the riflemen had gone through a series of emotions, starting at cautious, moving through suspicious and threatening, and arriving at angry. There was bound to be one more stop along that path once the rifleman who now approached the back of the wagon opened its door. Those men got just outside arm’s reach of the bent metal handle before a shrill whistle cut through the cooling air.

  “What is it?” the first rifleman shouted.

  The man who’d whistled stood on the roof of a small barn that was most likely used for storage or as stables for those who weren’t allowed to approach the main house. “Someone’s comin’ in from the back twenty!”

  “Who?”

  “Looks like Akers and Noss!”

  The man who’d been dispatched to check the back of the wagon held steady to see what would develop of the situation. He didn’t have to wait long before the sound of approaching horses rolled in like a calm breeze. A pair of horses drew to a stop near the barn, and one of the riders spoke to the lookout. Hank couldn’t hear what was being said, but their gestures seemed familiar enough as the two men talked to each other. Before long, the man atop the barn turned toward the wagon and shouted, “It’s Akers and Noss! They say—”

  A gunshot blazed through the shadows encroaching on the barn like a machete cutting through a narrow reed. One of the riders near the barn dropped from his saddle, and the second twisted around while drawing his gun. More shots came from beyond Hank’s line of sight to send the second rider to the ground. The man at the barn lifted a rifle and fired as quickly as he could, levering in a fresh round after each pull of the trigger.

  Recognizing the arrival of his partners, Hank stomped on the boards beneath his feet to send an echoing thump through the interior of the wagon. The rear door swung open on metal hinges, sending a metallic shriek through the air that was quickly followed by a volley of gunfire.

  “Dear Lord!” the driver wailed as he wrapped both arms around his head and dropped down.

  Since the driver didn’t have a gun, Hank let him cower. Ever since they’d drawn close enough to see the ranch’s front gate, Hank had kept the pistol in his hand covered by the jacket on his lap. Now he swept the jacket aside while raising the pistol and using his free hand to draw another gun from the collection strapped to his waist. He stood up in the driver’s seat, smiling down at the riflemen like the Grim Reaper himself while pulling the triggers of his .44 and .45.

  The rifleman who’d done most of the talking thus far had been looking toward the barn when Hank’s first round hit him. Hot lead dug into his chest through his back, followed by another round that punched through his heart. He hit the ground in a heap, never to move again.

  Jake and Eli thundered around the barn, firing up at its roof. The man posted there fired back, but was unable to hit either of the moving targets before being clipped in one leg. The shot wasn’t a killing blow, but it caused the man to fall and roll off the roof to land heavily on the ground. He squirmed and moaned in pain, but wasn’t about to pose an immediate threat.

  Hank continued to fire at Matt and a few of the men closer to the wagon. Now that the initial surprise had hit them like a punch to the stomach, the riflemen scattered and filled the air with even more rounds. Hank stood tall atop the wagon until bullets started to spark against the iron plates near his legs. Dropping down to get a real close look at the trembling mass of driver huddled against the footboard, he said, “Best stay put or you might get hurt.”

  The driver didn’t know what to make of the outlaw’s jovial tone and seemed close to breaking down altogether when Hank began laughing like a demon that had just found the hottest coals on which to dance. As Cody fired at the men who’d approached the rear of the wagon, the entire iron structure shook.

  “Got ’em both!” Cody shouted.

  “Good,” Hank replied. “Now let’s put the rest of these fools down while they’re still in a cross fire!”

  Cody’s and Hank’s guns formed a chorus of destruction aimed at the riflemen who’d stepped up to greet the wagon. Gripping a pistol in each hand didn’t do much for Hank’s marksmanship, but it plastered a wicked smile on his face. One of the riflemen fell to a bullet that grazed his left side, but not until more ranch hands showed up to aid in the growing battle.

  “Where did they come from?” Jake shouted over the roar of his Smith & Wesson.

  Eli and the gang leader had steered their horses around the barn after announcing their appearance. He’d seen a few men falling back toward the barn, but more seemed to appear with every passing second. “They must have been hiding inside,” he said. “Probably waiting to see if something like this would happen.”

  Unaffected by the accusatory tone in Eli’s voice, Jake said, “Or guarding enough money to fill them strongboxes. Let’s find another way in!”

  “I’ll draw some of them out so you can get inside. Just try to do more sneaking than shooting.”

  “Too late for that,” Jake replied through the smirk he’d been wearing ever since things at the ranch had truly heated up.

  Eli gripped a .38 in one hand and his reins in the other. As more gunshots raged around him, his world took on a dullness that made him feel as if his ears had been stuffed with cotton and his joints rusted all the way through. The moment he rode around to the front of the barn, he was confronted by men who couldn’t have looked more panicked if they’d been pitched off the side of a cliff. Among those faces, Eli’s was serene. His goal was within his reach. Not in sight just yet, but close enough.

  Just then, the barn doors swung open and men charged outside. The men who fanned out to form a firing line weren’t like the ones that swarmed around the wagon. They held their ground like soldiers and took carefully aimed shots while everyone else pulled their triggers to make a lot of noise and fill the air with gritty smoke. One man in particular stood taller than the rest. That wasn’t due to his stature, which was average among any grown men’s company, but because he didn’t recoil amid the gunshots or even bend at the knees to present a smaller target to the outlaw gang. Instead, he kept his right arm straight in front of him and sighted along the long barrel of an Army-model Colt. When the gun went off, his arm bent at the elbow to absorb the kick before straightening again for his next shot.

  Eli was barely able to garner a quick look into the barn, but saw it had mostly emptied out. Since he didn’t intend to go inside, he pointed his horse’s nose toward the wagon and tapped his h
eels against her sides. The gunshot that brought his horse down didn’t distinguish itself from the others rolling through the air. He felt the impact roll through the horse’s flesh to send ripples beneath his right leg. Despite not having ridden the animal for long, Eli had always had a soft spot where anything on four legs was concerned. As for animals of the two-legged variety, he believed most of them got what they deserved.

  The horse reared up and let out a pained whinny. Eli let go of his reins and pushed away before he was thrown. Although he wasn’t exactly the picture of grace, he managed to get clear of the horse before she came down, crumpled, and flopped onto her side. If not for the shots still hissing through the air around him, Eli would have examined the horse’s wound. Instead, he drew his second .38 to replace the one he’d dropped during the fall and fired before one of the closest riflemen could blow his head off. All he saw was a bulky figure to his left with a gun in its hands. Having propped himself up onto one knee, Eli fired with the .38. He missed, but the shot convinced the rifleman to dive away before pulling his trigger. In response to the gunshots, and possibly cries from Eli’s wounded horse, the wagon’s team had become wildly anxious. Eli had turned to see if Hank was in a spot to keep them under control when he came face-to-face with a man coated in blood and wrapped in a long, dark coat.

  Some of the blood on Matt’s face might have come from another man’s veins, but a good deal of it had spilled from a wide gash in his cheek. The edges of the wound were blackened and skin was peeled back to form a long, messy groove. It wasn’t a serious gash, but would leave a nasty scar after the stitches had been removed. All of those thoughts drifted through Eli’s mind as he stared down the barrel of Matt’s rifle.

  Eli’s legs ached after absorbing the impact of his topple from the saddle. Matt lashed out with one foot to sweep Eli’s bent leg out from under him, sending him back until the ground thumped against his backside and cool dirt scraped against the palm of one hand. When Eli brought his gun hand up in a reflexive motion toward Matt, he was assaulted by a barrage of warnings from the rifleman. Eli’s head was still too clouded for him to make out what was being said, but Matt’s intentions were easy enough to read within the glare etched into his features.

  Whatever Matt was saying, Eli was certain he’d heard it before.

  Stop.

  Don’t move.

  You’re a dead man.

  Surely, it had to be something along those lines. Matt wasn’t the first man to say that sort of thing to him, but it remained to be seen if he would be the last. As Eli looked up and studied the other man’s eyes, he gauged whether Matt had what it took to pull his trigger. When he arrived at his answer, he let out part of a relieved breath. Before the tail end of that exhale could escape his lungs, Matt was knocked to one side by a bullet that clipped the top of his shoulder to rip a portion of his coat a few inches away from its collar. There wasn’t a lot of blood, but the impact of the bullet was enough to draw Matt’s attention away from where it should have been.

  Eli reacted out of nothing but pure reflex. His gun was still in hand and he brought it up. A blind man could have pulled that trigger and blasted a tunnel through Matt’s skull. Just thinking about it made his finger itch.…

  “Stop right there, son,” demanded a stern voice from behind and above Eli. When Eli’s .38 didn’t waver, he heard another sound that was as familiar as the rustle of trees pushed by the winds behind his childhood home. The metallic click of a gun’s hammer being drawn back rattled through the air and was followed by the stern voice from before. “You made the right choice by hesitating,” it said. “Don’t muck it up now.”

  Gritting his teeth, Eli sighed, “Son of a—” and was cut short by a clubbing blow delivered to a spot behind his right ear.

  Chapter 5

  Eli’s dreams were filled with blazing hot fire emanating from the interior of his head and radiating all the way down to the aching joints of his toes. Every so often, he would stir. His feet scraped against a hard, smooth surface, and his hands brushed against something that made them itch. It hurt when he tried to breathe, so he lay still and allowed himself to drift away again.

  He awoke to the grating sound of metal scraping against metal. When Eli tried to respond to those noises, he swore he could hear the inner sound of bone scraping against bone. Some of that could have been his body protesting against the commands it was being given, but another part of the rustling that filled his ears was his own breath clawing its way out from his lungs to grab on to a raw spot at the back of his throat, where it hung as if purposely daring him to set it loose.

  Unlike the other times he’d been challenged while shifting his weight, Eli responded by defiantly pushing the breath out of him amid half of a grumbled curse. That became a cough, which grew into a hacking seizure, which racked his entire body as painfully as a set of fists beating him senseless.

  “Such language,” came a voice from not too far away.

  Eli couldn’t quite place where the speaker was, but he knew she was too far away to get to him. Opening his eyes to find her was a new kind of torture since they’d been sealed shut by a bloody crust connecting lids to his face. Having already committed himself this far already, he didn’t see a reason to stop now, so Eli forced his eyes open as far as he could.

  His surroundings were mercifully drab. The little bit of light that invaded his senses did so through small windows set too high up in the wall for him to catch any direct rays from the sun. Walls the color of cloudy skies surrounded him, and his foot scraped noisily against a floor covered with layers of grit as he pulled in a leg that had been dangling over the side of a rickety cot. Every sign pointed to him being in a jail cell. There were no chains on his wrists or ankles as far as he could tell, however, which was a good sign.

  “You must be starving,” the female voice said.

  “No,” Eli said, despite the fact that her words had sparked thoughts of food that made hunger claw in his belly even worse. “Where am I?”

  “Seedley.”

  “Who are you?”

  She didn’t respond right away, so Eli tried a little harder to clear his vision enough to put a face to the voice. Through sheer force of will and a few more deep breaths, he was able to make out most of what was in front of him. He focused on the shape of a slight figure standing about three paces away. She wore a simple dress that was a color similar to the gray walls around him. White ruffles sprouted from her wrists and neckline, but nothing as fancy as what a woman might wear to church. Her face was rounded in the cheeks, and her nose was just a little on the bulbous side. Even with the haze still lurking in his skull, Eli could see the kindness in her large brown eyes.

  “I’m Lyssa. Are you Eli Barlow?”

  Hearing his full name spoken by a stranger rarely led to anything pleasant, although any excuse to hear her voice couldn’t be all that bad. “Where’d you hear that name?” he scowled.

  “Sheriff Saunders mentioned it.”

  “Sheriff?”

  “That’s right,” she replied with a nod. “He asked me to keep an eye on you while you rested. You might not want to try and move.”

  If Eli was what others might consider to be a rational, even-tempered man, he would have heeded that advice, but he was nothing close to rational by most regular folks’ definitions. After all, most would rather work hard to squirrel their money away instead of working even harder to find where someone else’s money was secreted so he could take it from them. It was just such a defiance in Eli’s soul more than anything else that brought him to an upright position while every one of his aching bones screamed at him to stay down.

  “You’re still healing up,” Lyssa said. “Perhaps you should just—”

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” Eli snapped. “I’ll sit up if I want and go where I please!”

  “Well…you can sit up, I suppose. As for the rest…”

  Following her meandering line of sight, Eli got a better look at his surroundi
ngs. They were cramped, dirty, stank of stale sweat and dirty chamber pots, and were sealed off by a wall of iron bars between him and Lyssa.

  “So I am in jail.”

  “You robbed a stagecoach and were part of a gang that killed half a dozen men,” Lyssa replied. “Where else did you expect to be?”

  Eli had an answer to that, but didn’t think it was appropriate to say to someone like her. “Where’s Jake?”

  “Who?”

  “He should have been brought in with me! Or what about Hank?” When he didn’t get anything but a perplexed look from her, Eli squinted through the storm behind his eyes and asked, “Cody?”

  “I don’t know who those men are.”

  “Am I the only man in this jail?”

  “No. There’s Mr. Gleason in the next cell. He fired at a fellow who was juggling sticks at the theater the other night.”

  Something heavy rattled farther down the hall on the other side of the bars. Eli had to rub the back of his head to make sure something hadn’t just come loose inside his skull. “How long have I been here?”

  “Three days,” replied a voice that was definitely not Lyssa’s. It had come from a man who now stepped into view as Lyssa took a step back.

  “You’ve had me locked up in this cage for three days?” Eli asked.

  Blinking as if Eli had questioned which way he should look to find the sky, the man replied, “You robbed a stagecoach and—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Where would I expect myself to be?”

  The man was one of the fellows who’d emerged from the barn during the last moments of the gunfight at the Lazy V Ranch. Now that he wasn’t brandishing a weapon and leading a group of men to gun him down, Eli was able to take a moment to get a better look at him. The Army-model Colt still hung at his side and a full beard still covered most of his face. He wore a simple denim shirt with sleeves rolled up to expose thickly muscled forearms. The hat he’d worn that other night was missing, exposing an unruly mop of hair that burst from his scalp at various odd angles. Propping his hands upon his hips, he studied Eli with a pair of clear brown eyes before shifting them over to Lyssa.