“Maybe not,” I said, not feeling as confident as I sounded. “I think I can bring them in on this.”
I let them talk all they wanted. It was wild, scared, excitable talk; not much of it made sense. For a while, I thought they were going to start work on that balloon.
The mayor tried to suck in his belly; the effort made him red in the face. “You do that, we’ll fight.”
“Spoken like a man,” I said. “Now I want you to round up every gun, old or new or broken, in town. Every stick of dynamite—damn, no dynamite— then every roll of barbed wire. Then I want pine boards and all the six-inch nails you can find. Then shovels and wagon covers and plenty of rope. You got all that, Dunstan?”
The banker had a head for facts and figures.
“Start piling it in front of the jail right away,” I said. “I’ll need wagons too. Should be back by sundown. I got an important call to make.”
If the Eldredges didn’t come with the town, it was as good as over. Zack’s boys could turn back a first attack with no trouble. In other parts of the state, Thornton couldn’t afford to take his time; out here on the edge of the badlands he could sit back and try every sneaky trick he knew.
I rode south at a good clip and turned off to the Eldredge place. Instead of waiting to be shot at, I slowed my horse and started yelling for Zack. I made an awful lot of noise, my voice rolling back to me from the end of the box canyon. I climbed down off my horse and sat in the shade of a big rock, sitting on my heels, my back to the cool stone. They were watching me all right, but they didn’t answer my hollers, and they didn’t show themselves. It was fine if they thought I was a bit tetched; mountain folk are superstitious about harming softheaded citizens.
I rolled and lit a cigarette. It was about burned to the end before I heard them coming—tough bare feet scraping over shaly rock. Just like the first time, they came in from all sides; when I looked up from grinding out the cigarette, I was ringed by rifles and wild faces.
“Howdy, boys,” I said.
I guess they had no orders to cover a man passing the time of day. They were like hostiles waiting for the only Indian who spoke white lingo to get there. For them that was Zack, and he came loping along on that glue factory nag, the brass framed ’66 Winchester shining bright in his hand. He slid off neat and easy for such an old man.
“That’s my rock you’re squatting under,” he started. “My land you’re hollering on. I’m getting heartsick of looking at you, Carmody. Now, mister, before I put you in with a lot of hungry hogs will you kindly explain what you’re doing?”
He didn’t bat an eye when I told him how I’d done for Fallon’s two gunmen and the three fake Rangers.
“No big thing with that goose-gun,” he stated.
“It’s a good gun, nothing like it,” I said, thinking of something. “Two big shells, five dead men. You didn’t know about it?”
“None of my business, mister. Now if you’re through bragging how good you are, suppose you say the rest. You didn’t kill Fallon. What’d you do—take his money and turn him loose?”
“Fallon’s going to hang for killing a boy,” I told him. “Money won’t help this time.”
Zack’s answer to that was a gob of tobacco juice that came close to my boots. “You count on hanging a man like Fallon you’re a fool. He’ll just buy that judge and jury and laugh in your face. You want him dead, do it yourself.”
“That’s what I’ll do, Zack. If he beats the rope I’ll come back and do it myself. Now here’s the rest of it.”
While I talked, Zack rooted in his pocket for a fresh chew. He had to chase it with his tongue before he could get it under the few teeth he had left.
He was like a sin-hardened reprobate who’d been dragged to church to listen to a sermon. His bitter old eyes were turned in on his own thoughts.
“That’s it,” I said. “First he’ll burn the town and come after you, after your girl. He’ll box you in and wait you out. He’ll kill you one by one.”
“Then let him,” the old man said at last. “Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. If we have to die, we’ll die together on our own land.”
I asked him what about the girl.
“I’ll save one bullet,” Zack said. “Then Thornton can stop looking.”
There was an edge in my voice. “Don’t suppose she has any say in this?”
“Not a bit,” Zack said. “Now, mister, you just been lucky again. What you said about hanging Fallon—or killing him—for that dead boy just saved your life. Twice is the limit. My advice— head south while there’s time. You want Fallon hung before you go, fetch him out here and the boys’ll do a job on him. Won’t you, boys?”
The boys thought that’d be more fun than taking the hide off a Mexican.
“What about money? I don’t know how much, that’s up to the town. Dunstan and his friends won’t argue about price, I’d say. Then there’s Fallon’s money. You’d be helping save the town, but they’d hate you worse than ever. I guess you’d like that.”
The thought of squeezing the banker and his friends had some interest for the old man. He grinned and jetted tobacco spit while he worked it over in his mind.
“They’d never live it down,” I prodded him.
“Don’t be sneaky, mister,” the old man growled. “Playing on my hates won’t work. The hell with their dirty money. No more money talk or you’ll lose a finger. No more talk about nothing—you just git.”
I started to climb onto my horse.
“Hold on there,” the old man said. “Maybe there is something.”
Turning the animal, I said, “Yeah, Zack?”
“That goose-gun,” he said. “Five men with two shells, you say?”
“Five men with one shell if they’d been together. A good gun and hard to get. Costs money and not many made. Luke’s gun’s the second one I came across in a year.”
“You say Luke’s gun. Then it ain’t yours to give away?”
“Sure it is,” I said. “Would hate to do it though. You’d like to own that gun?”
“I just might,” the old man said. “Got me just about all the other guns there is. Don’t suppose you’d consider selling it?”
I grinned and threw his own words back at him. “The hell with your dirty money. Now I got to be going.”
That’s what I said, but I didn’t move out.
“Would have to own it free and clear,” Zack haggled. “Put down clear on a piece of paper so Luke can’t argue later I stole his gun.”
I mentioned Judge Flanders. “Signed, sealed, stamped and sworn to, then the gun delivered,” I said. “Can’t be more legal than that.”
“I’ll do it,” the old man said. “Come on, boys, let’s head for town.”
Zack was trading their lives for a shotgun; the boys didn’t mind. The yelling they started was like Dodge City on a Saturday night in the old days.
Zack waved them quiet with the rifle. “What’s bothering you?” he asked.
“I’m the general in this army,” I said. “You want that gun, I’m the general. You can be a general too, but I’m the head general. That sound all right?”
Zack had an important question. “What’s lard-belly Dunstan?”
I said Dunstan was an assistant private second class. “We’ll make him a full private if he works out. Now, General, you round up all the guns and ammunition, then the women, and we’ll head for town. You don’t want the women out here if Thornton decides to circle around and hit your place first.”
I sat on the steps of Zack’s falling-down house while he saw the women and the other things loaded into wagons. Sally came out of the house and asked me what in hell was going on. “We’re going to argue with your husband,” I said. “If it works you won’t have to get a divorce. There’s still time to kiss and make up so a lot of men don’t have to get killed.”
It wasn’t a serious suggestion; anyway she was against it. “They’d get killed one way or the other,” she said. “Where do
you plan to go after this, if there is an after this?”
“Mexico,” I said. “That was how it started. How about you?”
She looked at me. “I’m thinking about it.”
“Next time do your folks a kindness,” I said. “Marry a man you can bully. Go north and east—lots of them there.”
Zack saw us talking and he came over looking mad. “You, girl, get in the wagon. Ain’t no time you ain’t shaking it at some man.”
“You ready?” I wanted to know.
“Ready enough.”
We started off for town, me and the old man at the head of damnedest bunch of scarecrows you ever saw. For some of the Eldredges, boys and men, this would the last time they’d see the old place. They knew that too, but you’d never know from their long, silent faces. Ignorant, dirty, pea-brained, vicious, the Eldredges would do fine when the shooting started.
“You got any more unusual weapons you’d like to trade?” Zack was saying.
Chapter Thirteen
There were seventeen Eldredges and nine men from the town. Old Zack’s bearded face twisted into a sneer when I finished the short count. He didn’t say anything except with that bitter, town-hating face. Dunstan didn’t say anything either; just put out his fat hands and shrugged.
That made it twenty-six men and boys; and there were too many boys and too many old single-shot rifles. Old or new, every rifle carried by an Eldredge was clean as that whistle; the guns gathered up in the town didn’t make me too happy. There was some dynamite, none of it new, but it wasn’t sweated yet. Dunstan had worked hard to round up the barbed wire and the other stuff—the six-inchers, the lumber, the canvas covers.
I herded them over to the saloon because the jail office was too small to hold all of them. The saloonkeeper was one of the runaways, but he hadn’t been able to run off with his liquor. Dunstan, the nondrinker, wasn’t much of a hand behind the bar, and I went behind the wood to help.
“One drink on the house—that’s it,” I said for the benefit of the Eldredge boys.
Old Zack knew what I meant. “One drink,” he said.
“Later you can drink it all,” I announced, free with the coward’s liquor—and why not? “Now, gents, here’s how we’re going to do it. Get in close.”
It was a simple plan, but I used a piece of soap to draw it on the mirror behind the bar. I made a sketch of the main street, the only street, the trail coming from the north. The Eldredges were more impressed with my drawing than the rest of the folks.
“They’ll come in from the north trail, no reason not to,” I said. “Fifty hired gunmen with a crazy man, a killer, at their head. I say that one more time so you won’t forget it. They’re strong and they know Salter City is nothing, so they won’t be too cautious. Now we don’t want them to come in too casual because that’s too slow. They got to come in fast with Thornton whipping them up. A party of men have got to be doing something north of town, not far, just a ways. This party can’t seem like a decoy because Thornton’s too smart for that. Let them be doing something, maybe righting a turned-over wagon. They’ll see Thornton and they’ll run. If they do it right Thornton’s men will start after them. Some of those men will get killed.”
The men from the town didn’t like that; the Eldredges, one and all, didn’t give a damn.
“We’ll decide who goes later,” I said. “The ones not killed will run back to town yelling like bastards. They won’t have guns so the only fire will come from Thornton. Then Thornton’s men will come charging in to level the town. We let them come in about half the length of the street before we open fire. The first heaviest fire will be from the north end of the street. That way they won’t try to turn—they’ll ride on through. Only they won’t get through because of the two trenches dug in the street.”
Zack Eldredge held up his hand. “What is this, Carmody—a fight or a sack race? What’s this trench foolishness?”
“Deep, wide ditches dug the width of the street, Zack. Pine boards on the bottom, six-inch nails through them, the top of the trenches covered with wagon covers, with dirt covering the canvas. Where we don’t have nails—two-by-fours planed to a point and set in the bottom of both trenches. Pine’s not the best lumber for that, it’s all we got, it’ll have to do.”
“Then what, Gin’ral?” Zack sneered, and most of his boys hee-hawed about that.
“Some of them’ll get over the two trenches,” I said. “Has to be. Before they do, coiled-up wire laying hidden to one side of the end on the street will be dragged across the street. By ropes. The ones that go through that won’t be much good when they do. The rest of them will turn and try to make it back, and some of them will try to get out through the alleys between the buildings, and they won’t get out that way because every opening off the street will be blocked with rocks, barrels, wagons—anything. They won’t get out that way, so they’ll head back the first way—north. The same thing that end—wire pulled across the street by ropes ...”
“The damage?” That was Dunstan’s question.
I knew they were worried about that; no matter how threatened their lives were, storekeepers never stopped figuring the losses.
“Won’t be too bad,” I said. “Thornton’s men will be mounted on animals that won’t spook with gunfire. Got to help them along. We’ll start digging and fixing things at first light. Any rider comes into town you tell me you don’t know gets locked up, and if he objects to that too hard, he gets killed. Any objections?”
Dunstan looked miserable; I guess he was still a Goddamned banker. “All this killing, Sheriff Carmody—I don’t like it. Suppose after it starts they try to give up, surrender, throw down their guns?”
“Not likely,” I said, “but if the guns get dropped we agree—and then we kill them.”
“My God!” the Mayor said.
“Nearer my God to Thee—if we don’t kill Thornton,” I said. “For Salter City anyhow. No prisoners, Mr. Mayor. We got Fallon. He’ll do for everybody. The best way to lose a campaign is trying to guard too many prisoners. Kill Thornton or you’ll never sleep safe again. He’ll see to that. Now’s the time for all good men to turn, unless you want another drink, that is.”
Some of the men from the town took the free drink; the rest ducked out of there. Zack, abiding by our agreement, told his boys to take a drink, to find themselves a place to sleep.
I guess the one drink didn’t apply to him by his figuring. I didn’t think so either. It was well on into the night by then. I was tired and tensed up at the same time; you know how it gets. Everybody was gone but Zack and me—and Dunstan. That fat man was a surprise to me.
The saloon was empty and the night cold came in the door. A night wind stirred the dust in the street and brought some dust in with it. Eldredge and the mayor were in front of the bar; I was barkeeping.
Zack was a silent drinker and so was Dunstan till he got warmed up. “My wife’ll kill me.” he mumbled.
Zack looked at me, but it wasn’t a night for taking sides.
“The funny thing—I’m not afraid,” Dunstan burbled.
Zack was using a beer mug to drink his whiskey, I guess when you drink hour-old moonshine a beer mug doesn’t seem so big.
“You don’t think so?” asked the mayor.
“You ought to be—I am,” I said. “Thornton’s easy to fear.”
That answer got the mayor to laughing; and— when the laughing stopped—hiccupping. “Not Thornton, not him, not him a bit—my wife, I mean. I’m afraid of my wife. I mean, I’m not afraid of my wife.”
A painting of some bulging naked lady hung over the bar, above the mirror, and the mayor raised his empty glass, then remembered it was empty, and filled it. He raised it, spilling some of it, “To you, Kathleen, my own,” he said, drippy-voiced, quavering, and still spilling fair whiskey.
Dunstan brought down his glass and found his mouth. He got some of it, about half, into his mouth. “You wouldn’t understand, men. Around the rugged rocks the ragged rasc
als ... ”
“Don’t take that personal, Zack,” I said.
“Not because you say so, Carmody.”
Dunstan’s glass was full again. “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen, me darlin’,” he told the bulging lady.
“He must be Irish,” Zack Eldredge growled.
Dunstan was staring at the naked lady, the nakedest part there was. For me it was silly as sin, standing behind the bar, the bellied banker and the coveralled mountaineer in front of it. I looked up at the bulging lady and winked.
“Certainly not, sir—not Irish but Scotch,” Dunstan explained, going at the bottle again. I was supposed to be the barkeep, but I didn’t try to stop him.
The mayor turned his bleary-eyed attention to Zack Eldredge. “Do you know the Lady of the Lake, sir?”
“You look Scotch,” Zack growled.
“Obviously you do not, sir,” Dunstan said, holding hard to the bar. “Sir Walter Scott, sir, that’s who that’s by. Ruined by the failure of his publisher, he worked night and day, year in, year out, to pay off the debt.”
I emptied my glass. “His wife’ll kill him.”
“Not before I do,” Zack Eldredge said. “In a minute, that’s what I’ll do.” The old man’s new goose-gun lay on the bar in front of him. Maybe he thought killing the banker was a good idea. Anyway, he put his knobby hand on the gun.
Whiskey made Dunstan a bigger fool than he was naturally. He tried to strut and nearly fell down. “Easy,” I said to Zack. “Let the man have some fun. This is Dunstan’s night to kick the gong.”
“Tell him button up,” Zack said.
“Have a care, sir,” Dunstan droned. “As a boy I had the honor to serve in the Ohio Volunteers under General McClernand. You, sir, what was your regiment?”
Eldredge showed his few remaining teeth in a snaggled grin. It was a smile that could make a baby go into convulsions. “We stayed neutral in that one, you fat fool. Took on both sides when they climbed the mountain and got in our hair. Took them on and took from them. That was a good war. Sorry it ended so soon.”
Before Dunstan could start up again, I told him to go home. The banker hadn’t put away more than a pint, but he was ready to enlist all over again. I didn’t want to take a grip on his fat neck and toss him into the street. My own drinking had put me in a better mood. I said, “Go home and put that woman in her place. On the double now, Colonel.”
The Killers Page 9
