“So, you’re gonna be the new lawman?” the big, rawboned kid asked Hawk, his eyes shy, his big, red, work-callused hands nearly ripping the brim of the watch cap he worried against his chest.
“For a while.”
“You really that Rogue Lawman, I heard tell about?”
“I reckon I am. How ’bout that tour of the sheriff’s office?”
“Hot-diggidy-ding-dong damn!” the young man said, spittle flying across his fat lower lip as he fired the words out like bullets from a half-jammed Gatling gun. “Right this way, Mr. Hawk!”
“Call me Gid, Reb.”
The younker snorted delightfully, mashed his hat onto his head, and took improbably long strides toward the stairs. “Right this way, Gid!”
12.
REB
ON the street, Hawk followed the stuttering youngster, Reb Winter, westward, noting the curious, sometimes cautious glances tossed his way from both men and women alike.
Three blocks beyond the hotel, they walked up the three steps of the gallery fronting the jailhouse, which was apparently one of Trinity’s original buildings, constructed as it was of adobe with the ends of straw protruding from the walls. The back of the place was built of stone. The front door was constructed of split pine logs. It was scarred and sun-silvered, and the knob was rusty.
Reb Winter fished around in a pocket of his coveralls for a key on a large steel ring, and jammed the key in the door’s rusty lock. It took considerable jerking and grunting, the kid cursing under his breath, before the bolt opened with a rusty scrape and a click. Reb sighed, swabbed sweat from his brow with the back of his wool shirtsleeve, pushed the door open, and ducked inside.
“Here’s your office, Gid.” Reb stopped to one side of the doorway, glancing around at the dusty, rough-hewn office, then tossing his head at the door at the rear. “The cell block’s through there.” He blinked and screwed up his face before he could manage: “Sheriff Stanley . . .” He blinked hard as he fought the words through his lips. “Wh-when he had prisoners, he always hired me to haul-haul-haul’em food and to swamp out their cells, haul s-s-slop buckets an’ such. I’ll do the same for you, G-Gid.”
“Obliged, Reb.”
“Well, here’s the key.” Reb gave the ring to Hawk. “If there’s n-nothin’ else you need, I reckon I’ll h-h-head back to the hotel. They’ll be needin’ wood split for the s-supper stoves.”
“Appreciate the help, Reb.”
“Let me know if you need anything else, Gid.”
“Thank you.”
The young man lumbered on out of the sheriff’s office and drew the door closed behind him. Hawk stood near the potbelly stove in the middle of the room, flanked by a box half filled with split wood, and looked around. The office was like other such offices he’d seen about the West. Sparsely, simply furnished with a desk, a map of the county on the wall behind it—in the building’s right rear corner—and a dozen or more wanted posters nailed to two old doors, which in turn were nailed to the room’s walls around the desk.
A large bobcat hide was stretched across the back of the front door. A gunbelt with an old Schofield pistol hung from the square-hewn center post near the stove, beneath a nail from which another key ring hung. There were two keys on the ring, and when Hawk had tested out the keys, he discovered, as he’d suspected, that one fit the door to the stone cell block while the other one worked in the locks to all five cells that lined the narrow rear corridor.
There was a one-by-one-foot window in each cell, barred and with shutters closed over the bars from the inside. The cell block was almost eerily dark, the only light being that from the late afternoon sun pushing around the sides of the shutters or slithering through cracks in the ancient stone walls.
Hawk left the cell block, hung the cell block keys on the hook above the Schofield, and walked over to the desk.
It was actually two desks—the main oak one abutting the east wall while a secondary desk, made of what appeared to be the bed of a small farm wagon, angled off of it, forming the short leg of an L. Both desks were a mess of papers—wanted circulars, pink telegraph flimsies, letters from other lawmen and judges, writs, tax bills, and court documents of all shapes and sizes.
There was a moldy half of a meat and cheese sandwich poking out from a scrap of waxed paper, and a half-smoked cigar lying beside a box of kitchen matches. A box of .45 shells protruded from a pigeonhole it shared with a small knife-sharpening stone.
The usual fare of a local lawman’s office.
There was a green Tiffany lamp on the desk, betraying a woman’s influence. Hawk’s eyes slid away from the lamp and dropped to an oval daguerreotype beside it. His gaze held on the picture of a young family—a handsome, young, mustached man in a brown suit and bowler hat seated in an upholstered arm chair and flanked by his standing, pretty, young wife in a conservative day frock, stylishly embroidered and with a ruffled neck and sleeves.
The girl was a brunette, probably not much over twenty. She had a generous mouth and soulful eyes. Her hair had obviously been curled for the picture. It hung down from a small, flowered hat consisting of the same material as the dress.
The young man’s left arm supported a small child. A toddler. Probably not much over a year old. The boy was dressed in a little sailor’s outfit, and his big eyes were rolling off to the side, probably following a cat or something else in the photographer’s studio. They were slightly blurred.
Likely a Laramie or Cheyenne studio photo, Hawk thought. The family picture had probably been made not long ago, in celebration of the couple’s starting a family in the form of a handsome baby boy.
The young parents looked proud.
With his thumb, Hawk brushed away a cobweb that a spider had spun from the shade of the Tiffany lamp to the daguerreotype. He felt a thickness in his throat, and he sagged down into the swivel chair behind the two desks arranged in an L before him, and heaved a bereaved sigh. He stared at the picture for a long time, until he could bear the eyes staring back at him no more—so full of vain optimism and foolhardy dreams, they were—and then he turned to the office’s front windows.
At the same time, he gave a violent start, closing his hands over the arms of the chair. It took him a moment to realize that he’d just heard a gun blast. Another blast followed, and then several more, and Hawk was out of his chair and reaching for the Henry he’d set against the front wall.
Hooves pounded, men whooped and hollered and shouted, and amidst the snapping and crackling of pistols and rifles, slugs hammered woodenly into buildings and awning posts. One thudded into the sheriff’s office door just as Hawk reached for the knob. He hesitated, then pulled the door open quickly, and racking a shell into the Henry’s chamber, he stepped onto the office’s weathered gallery.
“Get the hell outta the damn street, pilgrim!” a man shouted to Hawk’s right, where several horses were dancing and prancing in front of the small stone building whose large wooden sign identified it as the TRINITY BANK AND TRUST CO.
It sat a block away from the sheriff’s office, between a drugstore and TARWATER’S TACK & FEED on Wyoming Street’s opposite side. Hawk quickly counted five men, two continuing to fire rifles from their saddles while three dismounted. Two of the three stormed into the bank with pistols raised high while the third held the reins of his and two other horses, and whooped and hollered and waved a big, silver-chased pistol around, ordering men and women off the street.
“This here’s a holdup!” one of the mounted men shouted from behind the neckerchief covering his mouth and nose. “And if you don’t wanna get a bad case of the lead poisonin’, I suggest ya haul your mangy asses off the street!”
One of the apparent bank robbers—a tall man clad in a green duster and high-crowned hat astraddle a stocky Appaloosa—triggered a shot toward an elderly, stoop-shouldered gent in a green visor and arm bands looking out the door of a small law office to Hawk’s right. The man ducked his head with a startled yelp as the bullet tore a
dogget of wood from the doorframe above his head, and lurched back into his office, screeching, “Robbery! Robbery! The bank’s bein’ rawwwwbbbbbed!”
“You got that right, ya old codger,” the man on the Appy roared, laughing, as he triggered a slug through the law office’s door.
For Hawk, the shot was muffled by the bulk of the sheriff’s office as he strode down the opposite side of the building from the bank, casually shouldering his cocked Henry rifle. When he reached the rear of the jailhouse, he heeled it west along the flanking alley, past the back of the law office and the log cabin abutting it, in which the attorney no doubt resided. Hawk stopped at the rear western corner of a land company office and edged a look up the side of the chinked log hovel toward the main street.
He was a little west of the bank, which was good. The bank robbers were all milling directly in front of the bank, still yelling and howling crazily, laughing and triggering their pistols to keep the good citizens of Trinity off the street and out of their way and to think twice about trying to become heroes.
Hawk could see a horse’s tail waving, and dust billowing, but that was about it.
Still, he stayed close to the side of the land office cabin as he strode south toward Wyoming Street, the sounds of the skitter-stepping horses and the men’s howling and shooting growing louder with every step. Near the front of the cabin, off the corner of the roofed porch fronting the place, he dropped his hat in the dirt, and crouched behind a rain barrel.
There was a patch of dirty, icy snow beneath his boots, and he ground his heels into it for adequate purchase.
From here, Hawk had a good view of the bank robbers—two mounted, one on foot and holding the reins of his own horse and the horses of the two men who’d gone inside the bank. From inside the bank, female screams rose amidst angry shouts and a single pistol blast. Meanwhile, Hawk rested the barrel of his Henry over the top of the rain barrel and pressed his cheek up against the stock, narrowing an eye as he lined up the bead at the end of the barrel with the V-notch atop the receiver.
He set both on the chest of the man facing the street astraddle the Appy and squeezed the trigger.
Boom!
As the bullet slammed into the robber’s chest, he sagged back in his saddle, his eyes growing so wide in shock and exasperation that Hawk could see the whites around the irises. He threw his arms out to both sides, releasing his rifle.
Before the Winchester hit the ground, Hawk drew a bead on the other mounted rider fronting the bank and squeezed the trigger. The slug plunked into the side of the man’s head, just above his left ear, spraying bright red blood over the bank’s narrow boardwalk and against the stone wall beside the double front doors.
The second robber lost his black hat and dropped his rifle. As his startled steeldust wheeled and twisted, the man flopped down the horse’s right side. He would have tumbled to the ground, but his left boot got hung up in its stirrup, so his lifeless, hatless body flopped across the cantle of his saddle as the horse, shrieking, galloped west along Wyoming Street, heading for the high and rocky.
Hawk ejected the smoking shell casing from the Henry’s breech. It arced over his right shoulder and thumped into the snow at his boots as he racked a fresh cartridge into the chamber.
Now the man who’d been standing and holding the reins of the three horses, having released the reins when the contents of the second man’s skull had painted the front of the bank, triggered his pistol straight out from his shoulder.
Calmly, Hawk noted the smoke and flames stabbing from the barrel of the man’s Remington, and then the slug ripping into the corner of the land office above and left of Hawk’s head. He didn’t so much as flinch as he pressed his cheek once more to the Henry’s stock and applied deadly pressure to the trigger, leaving the man with the pistol writhing and flopping around on the street in front of the bank, as though he’d been dropped from a high cliff.
The three horses he’d been holding scattered, one inadvertently kicking this last downed man’s head with its right rear hoof.
From inside the bank, a woman screamed. A man shouted. A pistol popped. In the relative quiet that fell over Wyoming Street in the wake of the gunfire and the cacophony of the fleeing horses, boots thumped and spurs chinged. A woman sobbed.
In the bank’s open doors, a broad-chested man in a cream duster appeared, holding a young woman in a cream dress in front of him with one arm while holding a cocked pistol to the girl’s head with his other hand. He and the girl stepped out onto the boardwalk.
Another, taller man also dressed in a bandanna mask and duster stepped out behind him then shuffled to one side, crouching over the rifle he held straight out from his right shoulder.
“Hold your fire, Mr. Whoever the Hell You Are!” ordered the broad-chested gent who was using the girl as a shield. “You squeeze that trigger one more time and this girl here’s gonna have an extra hole in her head.”
“Don’t shoot!” This from a man just now ducking out of the bank—a rotund gent in a long buffalo coat and a crisp, high-crowned, Montana-creased John B. Stetson hat. He pointed at the girl and the bank robber. “That’s my daughter in that killer’s arms!”
Hawk slid his eyes back to the two bank robbers and the girl.
The broad-chested man stretched a savage grin and canted his head toward the man standing in front of the bank. “You heard him. That’s Mr. Boatwright. Owns the Burnt Creek Ranch. This here’s his daughter—the plain-faced one, Miss Jane. Not the purty one, Miss Callie. But I think it’ll piss burn Boatwright, just the same—won’t it, Mr. Boatwright?—to see his daughter’s plain-faced head rollin’ around in the dirt of Wyoming Street.”
Hawk kept his rifle aimed at the man’s head and growled through clenched jaws, “Let her go, or I’ll kill you.”
The broad-chested man’s fleshy, mustached face turned brick red, and his blue eyes spat fire. “You drop that hammer, you’ll likely kill me, amigo. I see how you can shoot. But my finger here’s wrapped tight around the trigger of my Smithy, and I’ll pop a slug through this child’s brain plate, sure enough!”
“Mister,” shouted Boatwright stepping down from the bank’s boardwalk and thrusting a demanding finger at Hawk. “You lower that rifle and let these men go. I demand it!”
The man with the rifle and with a pair of bulging saddlebags hanging over his left shoulder was backing slowly eastward along Trinity Street, apparently heading toward three horses hitched in front of a small adobe cantina a half a block away. He had his chin dipped low, mean yellow eyes riveted on Hawk. The lower half of his face was painted umber by the sun going down behind the Rogue Lawman while his forehead was shaded by his broad hat brim.
Hawk slid his Henry at the man, and drilled a .44 round through the tongue of purple shade licking down from the man’s hat.
The man triggered his own rifle into the front of the land office cabin flanking Hawk as he went down hard on his butt before flattening out on his back, bending his knees and shaking his boots as though he’d been struck by lightning.
13.
THE MAYS GANG
“JESUS Christ!” shouted the broad-chested bank robber, who’d swung a quick look at his suddenly dead partner. “What’d I tell you, you crazy son of a bitch? You got wax in your ears?”
Hawk quickly levered a fresh shell into the Henry’s breech.
“Stop! Stop!” Boatwright walked out farther into the street, holding his gloved hands to his head as he shuttled his horrified gaze between the lone living bank robber and the dead man who continued to shiver and shake and grind his boot heels into the half-frozen street. To Hawk, he said, “Lower that weapon and let this man go! He’ll kill my daughter, you arrogant fool!”
“He’s got that right, mister,” shouted the broad-chested bank robber, the wide-eyed girl sobbing in his arms as the man half-dragged her backward, her high-heeled cloth half boots catching on the man’s scuffed toes. “I’m gonna shoot her now—now, you hear? Less’n you toss that He
nry down in the street!”
Hawk said, “You let her go, you’ll live. You continue to hold her, you’re gonna die. It’s as simple as that.”
Hawk expected Boatwright to try to intervene again and was vaguely surprised when the rancher stood in shocked silence in front of the bank, turning his head from Hawk to the bank robber then back again. Silence had fallen over the street so that the girl’s hushed sobs and grunts as she struggled in the bank robber’s arms sounded like distant screams.
“I’ll kill her,” the bank robber said, holding his position now in the middle of the street. “I swear I’ll kill her. Mr. Boatwright, you tell him.”
Boatwright switched his horrified gaze between the bank robber and Hawk.
The bank robber looked back at Hawk, who narrowed a hard green eye as he stared down the barrel of the cocked Henry. Fear dampened the exasperation and fury in the broad-chested man’s eyes as he stared back at the Rogue Lawman, a nerve in his sunburned right cheek twitching.
“Good lord,” he said softly, barely audible above the girl’s groans. “You aim to kill me no matter what I do—don’t ya?”
Hawk lifted his mouth corners slightly, but his eyes remained granite-hard.
There was another sound. The sound of dripping water. Hawk glanced quickly down to see urine dribbling down the side of the man’s right boot, forming a yellow-brown puddle that lifted tendrils of pale steam from the street. Hawk lifted his gaze to the man’s face, saw the bald-assed fear in the man’s pale blue eyes, and knew he had to move now or the girl would die.
He flicked a glance behind the man—a quick look as though at someone trying to flank the bank robber. Just as the man began to turn his head around and give a little slack in his trigger finger, Hawk’s repeater leapt and roared.
The bank robber jerked his head back and let both his arms fall slack to his sides, triggering his Smith & Wesson into the ground at his feet and blowing up a dogget of ice-crusted mud and half-melted snow. The girl screamed, bolted to her left, got a foot tangled with one of the backward stumbling bank robber’s, and fell in a heap.
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