Eight Hours to Die

by William W. Johnstone

  Two men stood next to an anvil. One of them held a horseshoe with a pair of tongs while the other man hammered it into shape. Both of them wore thick leather aprons to protect their clothes from sparks. Long gloves came almost to their elbows and served the same purpose.

  The man wielding the hammer was the older of the two. He was only medium height but powerfully built, with broad, heavily muscled shoulders. His graying dark hair was a wild tangle, and the beard that jutted out from his jaw was bushy, as well.

  The man with the tongs was younger and even bigger. John Henry saw the resemblance between them right away, even though the younger man didn’t have a beard. He knew they were father and son.

  The older man glanced over at Miller and John Henry, and the blows he struck with the hammer seemed to fall a little harder, as if he were taking out some anger on the horseshoe. His son looked toward them, too, and glared.

  The smith didn’t stop what he was doing until he was satisfied with the shoe. Then he stepped back and nodded to his son, who plunged the still faintly glowing horseshoe into a bucket of water. The water sizzled, and a few wisps of steam rose from the bucket.

  Still holding the hammer, the smith turned to the two visitors and asked in a gravelly voice, “What do you want, Miller?”

  “That’s Deputy Miller to you, Farnham. Anyway, I’m not lookin’ for you.” Miller nodded toward the younger man. “It’s your boy I need to talk to.”

  The blacksmith frowned.

  “Nate’s got nothing to do with you,” he said.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Miller said. “Deputy Ralston brought a horse with a loose shoe by here yesterday, and the boy refused to fix it.”

  Nate Farnham shook his head and said, “No, I didn’t, Deputy. I was busy with another job, and I just told Ralston he’d have to wait until I was finished with it. Then I would have fixed that loose shoe. But he just got a mean look on his face and left.”

  In listening to the young man speak, John Henry realized that Nate Farnham maybe wasn’t quite right in the head. He sounded more like a ten-year-old than a grown man in his midtwenties.

  “You call him Deputy Ralston or Mr. Ralston, you hear?” Miller snapped. “And you should’ve dropped that other job and tended to what he wanted right away. Don’t you know that the needs of the law come first?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Miller,” Nate said.

  “You don’t have anything to apologize for, son,” his father said. Farnham’s rough voice was almost a growl as he looked at Miller and went, “The boy was just doing what I taught him to do. When I’m not here he takes each customer in turn. That’s the only fair way to do it.”

  “No, what’s fair is respectin’ the law,” Miller said. “You’re gonna have to come with me, Nate.”

  Farnham stepped forward.

  “Wait just a damned minute,” he said. “What are you plannin’ on doing with him, Miller?”

  “He’s got to spend a night in jail. That’s what Sheriff Dav decided. That’ll teach him not to say no the next time one of us asks him to do somethin’.”

  Nate’s eyes got big, and he started to shake his head back and forth. John Henry thought the young man looked terrified.

  “You can’t do that,” Farnham said. He looked a little scared, too. “You know Nate couldn’t stand that—”

  “The decision’s been made,” Miller said flatly as he took a step toward Nate. He put his hand on the butt of his gun. “You come along with me, kid—”

  That was as far as he got. Nate howled, “Noooo,” put his head down, and charged at Miller, swinging the tongs.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Edgar Wellman had stayed at the Hammond mansion with Lucinda until the man who had been brought into town by Carl Miller and the other deputies emerged from the sheriff’s office with Miller and walked off leading his horse.

  “Well, I guess they’re not going to kill him after all,” Lucinda said as she stood in the foyer with her arms folded. She sounded relieved.

  “No, it appears not,” Wellman agreed. He didn’t know who the stranger was, and in anything other than the most basic human terms, he didn’t care. He was just glad to see Lucinda taking an interest in something again.

  True, it really hadn’t been that long since her husband was killed, and you couldn’t expect someone to bounce back from that right away. But Wellman had worried that Lucinda would never truly recover, and he didn’t want that.

  She would have to get over losing Milton before he could begin trying to convince her that she ought to turn to him for comfort and affection.

  Once Miller and the stranger left the sheriff’s office, Lucinda lost interest in things again. Her eyes turned dull, and Wellman knew he had overstayed his welcome. He tipped his hat to her and said, “I’ll say farewell again, I suppose.”

  “Good-bye, Edgar,” she said. She closed the door in his face before he could even try to add anything else.

  Wellman knew when he was beaten . . . for the moment. He turned and left the mansion, walking along Main Street toward the newspaper office. His living quarters were behind the office, in the same building.

  As he walked, he thought about Lucinda Hammond, as he often did. At her best she was a gorgeous woman, absolutely breathtaking. He had wanted her from the very first time he saw her, four years earlier when he first came to Chico to take over the Star.

  But she was married, of course, and seemed to be genuinely in love with her husband, something that Wellman had found to be relatively rare among married couples, most of whom, it seemed to him, barely tolerated each other after they’d been together for a few years.

  Not only that, but as Wellman got to know Milton Hammond, he found that he actually liked the man. Wellman wasn’t above setting his sights on a married woman, but circumstances like that made it more difficult.

  A married woman, in fact, had been a partial influence on his decision to leave Dallas rather hurriedly, along with the pending discovery of how he had embezzled a bit of money from the newspaper where he’d been working as a reporter. He had gotten out of Texas quickly and used his ill-gotten gains to buy a defunct newspaper, press and all, in Chico. He thought that might be far enough away from both the Texas authorities and a jealous, irate husband.

  All in all, it had been a splendid move, his best so far. He had gotten out of New Orleans one step ahead of the law, too, just as he’d made a hurried departure from Boston and from Liverpool before that. His appetites had always had a habit of leading him into trouble.

  But he was clever and had a knack for turning a phrase, so he could always get work anywhere there was a newspaper. Having a paper of his own had been the best, though, and he had given some thought to staying here in Chico and turning his façade of respectability into the real thing.

  Then Samuel Dav had come to town.

  The previous sheriff, Buck Tannehill, had been well liked, but he was an amiable incompetent and everybody knew it. When a gang of outlaws robbed the bank a month or so before the last election, Tannehill had dithered around about forming a posse until it was almost too late to go after the robbers.

  That was when Dav stepped in, volunteering to take over, and after being deputized he had led a group of men in pursuit of the outlaws, catching up to them before they were able to slip away in the mountains. A fierce exchange of gunfire had broken out, and although none of the robbers had been captured, the one carrying the loot had dropped it in all the confusion, and Dav had recovered the money. Upon his return to Chico with the posse, he had been hailed as a hero.

  When he announced that he was going to run for sheriff, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The voters wanted a real lawman to be in charge of things, not the pleasant but ineffective Buck Tannehill. Wellman himself had editorialized frequently about the need to elect Dav.

  It was a landslide.

  And then, as soon as Dav was in office, he’d begun to surround himself with new deputies, men who were clearly not
much better than outlaws themselves . . . if indeed they were any better. Wellman suspected that many of them were wanted elsewhere and regarded Chico as a sort of safe haven. In short order, intimidation, extortion, and mysterious disappearances became common. Dav paraded around town with an arrogant smirk on his face, confidently secure in his new power.

  After a while, Wellman began to suspect that there was something fishy about the bank robbery that had started Dav on his path to the sheriff’s office. Wellman wondered if the men who had held up the bank now strutted around Chico wearing tin stars. After all, none of the robbers had been captured in the battle. They could have put on a good show for the honest citizens who had gone along with the posse, the citizens who had come back to Chico and enthusiastically supported Dav in his campaign because he had recovered the money.

  They had all been used and manipulated, himself included, Wellman finally concluded. He felt a little guilty for his part in it, for letting himself fall for Dav’s spiel, but it was too late to do anything about it now, other than slipping a few veiled suspicions into the newspaper.

  He had folded quickly when the sheriff took offense to the things he’d printed. He had never been a courageous man, nor had he ever felt the noble calling some journalists claimed they did. It was easier just to go along with those in power, even though he sometimes woke up with a sour, bitter taste in his mouth.

  When he reached the newspaper office, he went around to the back to let himself into his living quarters, rather than unlocking the front door and going through the office. He didn’t want to look at the empty desk up there where he used to write the news stories and his fiery editorials, or at the press sitting unused and growing dusty.

  In the back room with its stove, table, and bunk, he hung his hat on a nail and took a bottle and a glass from one of the shelves. He poured himself a shot of whiskey, looked at the amber liquid for a second, and then tossed it back. The stuff warmed his insides and dulled some of the pain in his soul.

  A knock sounded on the door.

  Wellman’s fingers tightened on the empty glass. Only one person came to visit him in these quarters. None of the townspeople wanted much to do with him these days, anyway. They saw him as a coward who had buckled under to the corrupt sheriff. That was right, of course, but it ignored their own kowtowing to Dav.

  Nothing unusual about that, Wellman thought. People were always much quicker to see the flaws in others than they were to recognize their own.

  He went to the door and asked, “Who is it?” even though he already knew.

  “Let me in, Edgar.”

  Wellman sighed and opened the door.

  Sheriff Samuel Dav stepped into the room and heeled the door closed behind him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  As Nate Farnham charged him, Miller clawed at the gun on his hip, and John Henry knew exactly what was going to happen here in the blacksmith shop in the next couple of seconds.

  Miller was going to pull his gun and blow a hole in Nate before the young man could bash his brains out with those tongs.

  John Henry wasn’t going to let that happen. He threw himself forward, bulling into Miller and taking him by surprise. The impact knocked the deputy to the side and sent him sprawling off his feet.

  That put John Henry right in the path of Nate’s charge. The heavy metal tongs swept at his head. With the power of the young man’s massive form behind them, they would crush his skull if they landed.

  John Henry made sure they didn’t by ducking swiftly. The tongs hit his hat and knocked it flying off his head, but that was all they hit.

  Nate was still plenty dangerous, though. He barreled into John Henry like a runaway freight. John Henry flew backward and crashed to the ground.

  “Nate, no!” Farnham yelled. “Stop!”

  Nate didn’t listen. He roared in defiance—defiance motivated more by fear than by anger, John Henry knew—and brought the tongs down, still intending to crush the skull of the man on the ground. John Henry managed to roll aside just at the last second. He felt the tongs as they swept down past his ear.

  He lashed out with a foot, hooked it behind one of Nate’s ankles, and heaved. Nate stumbled, thrown off balance by the move. John Henry launched a kick with his other foot. The heel of his boot drove against Nate’s thigh.

  It was like kicking a tree and did about as much good. Nate yelled in pain but didn’t budge.

  He dropped the tongs, reached down, and dug sausage-like fingers into the front of John Henry’s shirt. Suddenly John Henry felt himself lifted. Nate Farnham handled him like he didn’t weigh anything. John Henry found himself flying through the air.

  An instant later he slammed into a wall of the blacksmith shop with stunning force.

  The world spun crazily around John Henry as he bounced off the wall and dropped to the ground again. He couldn’t marshal his thoughts, and he couldn’t force his muscles to work as Nate stampeded toward him. In a matter of seconds, John Henry would be trampled under that charge.

  And there wasn’t a blasted thing he could do about it.

  At the last moment, Carl Miller loomed behind Nate. The gun in his fist rose and fell, thudding against Nate’s skull when it landed. Nate stumbled. His feet got tangled up, and he fell to his knees. Miller hit him again with the gun. Nate pitched forward.

  John Henry saw that through blurry eyes. His vision cleared just in time for him to see the blacksmith come up behind Miller with the hammer lifted. That big hammer would shatter the deputy’s skull like an eggshell. John Henry pulled his Colt and fired, hoping that his shaky condition wouldn’t make him miss.

  Instinct guided his shot, which was as unerring as ever. The slug burned through the air past Miller’s head and struck the hammer’s head with a ringing report. The bullet’s impact tore the handle from Farnham’s grip. It must have stung, because Farnham yelled in pain.

  Miller’s eyes were wide. For a second he must have thought that John Henry was shooting at him, because the bullet had passed so close to him. The clang of bullet on hammer and Farnham’s subsequent outcry told a different story, though. Miller whirled around and thrust his gun at the blacksmith.

  “Don’t kill him!” John Henry said as he used his free hand to push himself up to a sitting position. “I’ve got him covered!”

  Miller hesitated with his finger on the trigger. Then his face contorted in a snarl and he stepped forward to slash the gun across Farnham’s face. Farnham staggered back a step as blood flowed from the gash on his cheek the gunsight had opened up.

  John Henry climbed wearily to his feet. Nate Farnham lay senseless on the ground, still stunned from the pistol-whipping Miller had dealt out to him. John Henry circled the big form and kept his gun pointed at Nate’s father.

  Farnham rubbed the tingling fingers of his right hand with the other hand and snarled at Miller, “You didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to hurt my boy!”

  “He was about to stomp Deputy Cobb to death,” Miller said coldly. “You saw it with your own eyes, Farnham.”

  “I could’ve stopped him if you’d just given me the chance!”

  “I don’t take chances with addlepated animals like that boy of yours.”

  “Don’t talk about him like that,” Farnham said. His voice shook with emotion. “Nate’s a good boy. He’s sweet and obedient and he’d never hurt anybody unless he was pushed into it.”

  Miller sneered and let out a contemptuous snort.

  “Yeah, he looked harmless when he was tryin’ to stove our heads in with those tongs,” he said. “Drag him over to the jail, Farnham. He could’ve just spent one night behind bars for disrespectin’ the law. The attempted murder of two peace officers is a lot worse. He may not see the outside of a cell for a long time.”

  “You can’t do that,” Farnham said. Desperation crept into his voice. “You just can’t.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. You’ll be keepin’ him company. You tried to kill me, so you’ll be locked up, too.
You came at me with that hammer.” Miller glanced at John Henry. “You’ll testify to that, since you’re the one who shot it out of his hand.” He added, “That was mighty good shootin’, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” John Henry said. His insides were in a turmoil, but he made an effort not to show it. The idea of locking up the two Farnhams and charging them with attempted murder went against the grain. Technically, he supposed the charges were true enough, but Miller had goaded the father and son into reacting violently.

  John Henry couldn’t do anything to try to stop it, though, without casting suspicion on his pose as John Cobb. He didn’t want to do that when his mission here in Chico was just getting underway.

  At gunpoint, Farnham reached down, grasped Nate’s ankles, and dragged him out of the blacksmith shop. The few citizens on the street scattered at the sight of them, not wanting to get involved in whatever was going on, John Henry supposed.

  As he and Miller followed with their guns still drawn, Miller frowned and asked, “Hey, what was the idea of runnin’ into me like that, Cobb?”

  “I didn’t really mean to,” John Henry replied. “I was just going for the kid, trying to stop him from jumping you. Sorry about knocking you down.”

  Miller appeared to accept that explanation. He said, “All right, but we’ll just keep that part of the story to ourselves, you hear?”

  “That’s fine by me,” John Henry agreed.

  Farnham stopped halfway to the sheriff’s office and jail. His chest heaved. He was winded from the effort of dragging his unconscious son that far.

  “Blast it, Nate’s too big to do him this way,” Farnham complained. “Not only that, but shouldn’t he be waking up by now? I swear, if you’ve done him any real harm, Miller—”

  “You think threatenin’ a law officer’s gonna make things better for you, Farnham?” Miller interrupted. With a flourish of the gun in his hand, he went on, “Take him over there and dump him in that horse trough. That ought to wake him up.”