He returned the fire. His shot was more accurate, smashing the teller’s shoulder. At least Gabriel hadn’t killed the man.
Emboldened by the teller’s action and perhaps spooked by the slugs flying around, the bank president and two of the male customers produced pistols and started to blaze away at the robbers.
Chaco and a couple men had already cleaned out the tellers’ drawers and the vault. They carried large canvas express pouches full of bills and gold pieces. Since the money was their only objective, Chaco shouted, “Let’s go, let’s go!” as he backed toward the bank’s double front doors, a gun in his hand.
A bullet from the bank president’s pistol whined near his head. Chaco triggered two swift shots in return. The bullets came close enough to the banker’s head that they almost parted his pomaded hair. The man yelped and dived for shelter behind a desk, just as Chaco intended.
The two gun-wielding customers had scrambled for cover, but they continued throwing wild shots after Chaco and his men as the bank robbers fled. Gabriel roared a curse as a slug burned across his upper left arm. A man called Ricardo stumbled as he was hit in the leg.
Close by, Chaco holstered his gun and reached out quickly to grab Ricardo’s arm and steady him. With Chaco’s help, Ricardo was able to stay on his feet and get outside onto the boardwalk.
More shots exploded from both directions as the groups at the ends of the settlement began firing to provide a distraction and keep people off the street. Chaco and his men headed for their horses tied at the hitch rails in front of the bank.
A man shouted in a deep, powerful voice, “I say, I say! Hold it right there, you hombres!”
Chaco’s head snapped around, and he saw a man with a sawed-off shotgun stalking straight toward them. The morning sun reflected off the sheriff’s badge pinned to the man’s vest.
* * *
Slaughter had recognized the signs of an impending bank robbery as soon as he spotted the three groups of men. The shots from inside the bank confirmed his hunch. A moment later, the bunch of Mexicans he had seen going in earlier came boiling out of the bank’s front doors.
Shots roared from the ends of the street. Slaughter figured those for the rest of the gang clearing a path for a getaway.
He couldn’t deal with that. He had plenty of trouble right in front of him. He shouted for the bandits to stop and leveled the scattergun at them.
One of the men yelled, “Policía!” and fired at Slaughter. The bullet kicked up dust a couple feet to his right. Slaughter fired one of the shotgun’s barrels.
The buckshot smashed into the man’s chest and drove him backward off his feet. He fell under the hooves of one of the horses, spooking the animal. The other mounts danced around skittishly as their owners grabbed at them.
Several more bandits opened fire on Slaughter. He heard another man shouting in Spanish, but couldn’t make out the words over the roaring guns. The bullets whistling around Slaughter’s head forced him to throw himself down behind a water trough. It wasn’t much cover, but it was better than nothing.
Rushing a dozen men by himself probably wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had, he told himself. If his deputies had been where they were supposed to be, instead of off in the Dragoons trying to get rich, it would have been a different story.
Slaughter raised up quickly and let loose with the shotgun’s other barrel. At least half of the bandits were mounted, but one fell off his horse as the animal reared up, stung by Slaughter’s buckshot. Slaughter had to duck again as more bullets thudded into the trough, causing little splashes in the murky water.
He was pinned down. In a minute, as soon as all the robbers were mounted, they would sweep past him on their way out of town and probably fill him full of lead.
The sharp crack of a rifle suddenly split the morning air. Three rounds sizzled across the street toward the bandits. A woman’s high, clear voice cried, “John, move! Get behind that wagon! I’ll cover you!”
Startled, Slaughter turned his head to stare toward the hotel. Viola stood on the boardwalk, barefoot and beautiful in a long white nightgown with her thick dark hair falling around her shoulders. The Henry rifle in her hands spouted flame as she fired again at the robbers.
* * *
Viola didn’t hesitate when she saw her husband about to confront the bank robbers. She knew he kept an extra rifle in the room’s wardrobe. She jerked open the door, grabbed the Henry, and headed downstairs.
She knew anybody in the lobby and the dining room would stare at her as she ran past in her nightclothes, but it was not the time to worry about modesty. She dashed out onto the boardwalk and levered a round into the rifle’s chamber.
As she lifted the Henry to her shoulder, she spotted John lying on the ground behind a water trough across the street, not far from where the bandits were trying to bring their milling horses under control. That was a bad spot for him to be.
Several yards in the other direction, someone had parked a wagon. John would be safer behind it, Viola decided. She cranked off three rounds from the Henry as fast as she could work the rifle’s lever, then shouted to her husband and told him to move. She resumed firing.
All the confusion prevented her from being able to tell if she had hit any of the robbers. They were all in the saddle except for the man who lay on his back with his arms outflung and his chest a bloody ruin where he had caught a charge of buckshot from John’s sawed-off.
Viola was ready to duck back into the hotel if they returned her fire, but that wasn’t what happened.
One of the bandits yanked his horse around and charged straight across the street at her. Viola’s eyes widened in surprise as he rushed her. She tried to draw a bead on him, but he leaned forward over the neck of his straining mount as she squeezed the trigger. The shot missed.
She cried out as the man left his saddle in a diving tackle that carried him into her with a breathtaking crash.
* * *
Chaco couldn’t have explained why he charged the woman with the rifle. He was upset to start with because so much had gone wrong. They had gotten the money, which was why they had come to Tombstone in the first place, but his hope had been that they could accomplish the goal without a lot of violence.
That ideal was ruined. Juan Segura lay dead in the street with his life blasted out of him by that lawman. Too many bullets were still flying around. Someone else was bound to get killed or hurt.
The woman with the rifle appeared and added to the chaos. Under different circumstances, Chaco would have been shocked at the way she displayed herself in public in a nightdress, but he was more worried about the .44-40 rounds she sprayed around his compadres. He had to stop her before she killed one of his amigos.
He took the simplest, most direct way of doing so.
Almost before he knew what was happening, he found himself lying on top of her on the boardwalk. She writhed and twisted underneath him as she reached for the rifle she had dropped as they fell. Chaco grabbed her wrist and stopped her from retrieving the Henry.
As she spat angry words at him that he barely heard, he surged to his feet and hauled her with him. Several of his men pounded up alongside the boardwalk.
“Amigo! ” Gabriel shouted. “Bring her! They won’t shoot if we have the señorita with us!”
Steal a young woman? Chaco’s mind rebelled at the very thought.
And yet he knew Gabriel was right. A hostage would put a stop to the melee and save lives in the long run. He would make sure the young woman wasn’t hurt, and they could release her as soon as they were well clear of Tombstone. The townspeople would find her in short order.
Even though doing so went against everything he considered moral and proper, Chaco pulled the young woman with him as he headed for his horse. Gabriel had caught the animal’s reins and held them out to him.
“No!” the woman cried. Realizing what was about to happen, she swung a fist at his head.
She was a fighter, Chaco thought as he avoided
the blow and took the reins from Gabriel.
His big, ugly friend leaned down from the saddle, looped a long arm around the woman, and hauled her up in front of him on the horse’s back. “I will take care of her, amigo!” Gabriel declared with a leering grin.
That was better in a way, Chaco thought. He had already felt how soft and warm the woman’s flesh was under the nightdress, and he didn’t need a distraction of that sort as he tried to lead his men to safety.
Besides, despite the leer, Gabriel wouldn’t harm her. He was a gentleman at heart.
Chaco leaped into the saddle and spurred for the edge of town. With his men surrounding him, Gabriel, and the beautiful hostage, they all galloped out of Tombstone and headed south.
Chapter 5
Slaughter lunged to his feet and broke for the parked wagon as Viola opened fire again, but he hadn’t made it that far when he saw one of the bandits racing hell-bent for leather toward her. He hadn’t had a chance to reload the shotgun, so he dropped it and jerked his pearl-handled Colt from its holster.
Before he could draw a bead on the bandit’s back, several more mounted outlaws surged between him and the man. Slaughter heard Viola cry out. He started across the street, but a hail of bullets all around him forced him to throw himself behind the wagon, anyway.
He crouched there and snapped several shots at the gang, pretty sure he winged a couple men, but none of them toppled off their horses. Except for the man he had downed with the first blast from the shotgun, all the bank robbers were still in the saddle as they swept away from the front of the hotel like a whirlwind.
In the middle of that whirlwind, Slaughter saw to his horror, was his wife.
He caught only a glimpse of Viola perched on the back of a horse in front of one of the bandits, but the flash of white nightgown and the thick, wavy black hair flying in the wind told him without any doubt that it was her. He shouted her name, but had no way of knowing if she heard him.
Several townspeople came out onto the boardwalks holding guns. As they pointed the weapons at the fleeing bandits, Slaughter bellowed, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire, I say!”
With Viola in the midst of the outlaws, there was too great a risk that a stray slug might hit her. Even though he was outraged that they would carry her off, her safety was the most important thing to consider.
Slaughter looked around wildly for a saddled horse at one of the hitch rails. His only thought was to go after the men and rescue his wife.
He didn’t see any horses nearby, and even if there had been, he couldn’t chase down several dozen outlaws on his own. Even if he caught up to them, they would riddle him with bullets and Viola wouldn’t be any better off than she had been.
Worse, really, because with Slaughter dead there wouldn’t be anybody left in Tombstone to put together a posse and go after the bandits.
The fleeing riders had reached the edge of town. As they started out into the semi-desert landscape that surrounded the settlement, their horses kicked up a huge cloud of dust that rose behind them and screened them from view.
Bitter anger filled Slaughter’s heart as he stared after the men who had kidnapped his wife.
“Sheriff Slaughter! Sheriff, they cleaned us out! They took everything!”
The frantic voice made him turn to see Cyrus Stockard, the president of the bank, coming toward him. Stockard was always neatly groomed, but he looked disheveled and half-panicked. He held a Smith & Wesson. 38 in his hand, probably the gun that he kept in a desk drawer in case of robberies.
Not that it had done much good.
Despite the fear he felt for Viola, Slaughter forced his mind back to his job. “Anybody hurt at the bank, Mr. Stockard?”
“They shot Tim Gaines, one of my tellers. I don’t know how badly he’s wounded. I’ve already sent for the doctor.”
“What about you?”
Stockard shook his head. “I’m fine, just cleaned out. They looted the tellers’ cages and the vault and took every dime, Sheriff. Every dime!”
“We’ll get the money back,” Slaughter vowed, although he knew good and well that if it ever came down to a choice between his wife and the bank’s money, he would pick Viola without a second’s hesitation. He intended to bring both her and the money back safely.
“How can you get it back?” Stockard demanded. “You can’t organize a posse and go after them. Most of the men in town are gone!”
Stockard was right about that, Slaughter thought grimly. It wasn’t only his deputies who had run off to the Dragoons to look for silver. Nearly all the men he normally would have recruited for a posse had been bitten by the fortune-seeking bug, too.
“We’ll worry about that a little later,” he said with another glance at the dwindling cloud of dust south of town. “Right now, I need to see if anyone else was hurt in the raid.”
For the next few minutes Slaughter hurried up and down the street, checking with the merchants, even though every moment that passed meant Viola and her captors were getting farther away from him.
Several stores had been robbed during the chaos, as well as the bank. But surprisingly, considering the hundreds of bullets that had flown back and forth during the fracas, none of the townspeople had been killed and only a few citizens were wounded. Tim Gaines’s bullet-shattered shoulder seemed to be the worst injury.
All the outlaws had gotten away except one, and that man was a job for the undertaker. Slaughter stood over the man and looked down at his unfamiliar, beard-stubbled face.
“Ever seen him before, Sheriff?”
The question made Slaughter look around. He recognized Luther Gentry, an elderly beanpole of a man who owned one of the livery stables in town. In overalls, a flannel shirt, and a shapeless old hat, he was an unimpressive figure.
“No, he’s a stranger,” Slaughter said in answer to the liveryman’s question. “From the looks of him, though, I’d say he was a bandido from below the border.”
“That’s what they all looked like to me,” Gentry said. “I seen ’em gallop past my barn on their way outta town. I would’ve taken a shot at the varmints with my old muzzle-loader, but I, uh, saw that they had a lady with ’em. Looked like your missus, Sheriff.”
“That was Mrs. Slaughter, all right.”
“Reckon you’ll be goin’ after ’em?”
“Of course I will.”
“Then I want to come with you.”
Slaughter frowned. “I appreciate that, Luther, but—”
“You think I’m too old,” Gentry broke in. “Could be I am, but I can keep up better’n you think I can, Sheriff. Miz Slaughter’s always been mighty nice to me. She always comes by the stable when she’s in town to check on her buggy team, but I got the feelin’ she mainly just wants to say howdy.”
Slaughter didn’t doubt that. Raised as the daughter of a frontier cattleman, Viola had never been one to put on airs or consider herself better than other folks. She was just as comfortable talking to a liveryman or a chuck-wagon cook as she was conversing with the territorial governor.
He didn’t have much to choose from when it came to a posse, either, Slaughter reminded himself.
“Thank you, Luther,” he told the old-timer. “You say you’ve got a rifle?”
“Yeah, and an old cap-and-ball hogleg, too.”
“Bring them both, and all the ammunition you can carry. Pick out a good horse from your stock and meet me in front of the courthouse in half an hour.”
“I’ll be there,” Gentry said with an eager nod. “We’ll get them varmints, you’ll see, Sheriff.”
“I hope you’re right,” Slaughter said.
For the sake of all that bank money and the other loot the outlaws had carried off . . . but mostly for Viola.
* * *
Slaughter spent the next half hour gathering his posse, for want of a better word, and supplies for the chase after the bandits. He couldn’t afford to wait any longer. The border was less than fifty miles away, and his jurisdiction end
ed there.
Not that a matter of jurisdiction was going to stop him where Viola’s safety was concerned. But he couldn’t ask the men who were going with him to break the law by following the bandits into Mexico.
The only good thing was that the Mule Mountains lay directly between Tombstone and the border. The raiders would have to go around the mountains or through them, and either way would slow them down some.
Slaughter was stalking along the boardwalk like a caged panther when a redheaded kid about twelve years old stopped him and asked, “Can I come with you, Sheriff?”
“What’s your name, son?” Slaughter replied with a frown.
“Sammy Shay, sir.”
“How old are you, Sammy?”
“I’m fourteen,” the youngster declared. Slaughter thought he was probably fudging by a couple years.
“Well, that’s too young to ride with a posse.” Slaughter held up a hand to forestall Sammy’s argument. “But I’ve got a job for you if you want it. Can you ride fast?”
Sammy’s head bobbed up and down eagerly. “I sure can!”
“Got a good horse?”
“Yes, sir, a sweet little mare.”
“Then saddle her up and light a shuck for the Dragoons, Sammy. You know my deputies Stonewall Jackson Howell and Burt Alvord?”
“Sure I do.” Sammy looked down at the ground for a second. “They, uh, chased me when I was shootin’ off firecrackers on the Fourth of July.”
Even under the grim circumstances, Slaughter almost chuckled. “All right. You find my deputies and tell them what happened here today. Tell them I said to rattle their hocks back to town and pick up the posse’s trail. Pass that word to every other man from Tombstone you see up there in the mountains. Can you do that?”
“You bet I can! You want me to go now?”
“Just as fast as you can,” Slaughter said.
Sammy turned and sprinted for home and that mare of his, while Slaughter continued on down the street till he reached the courthouse.
Texas John Slaughter Page 3
