The Avenging Angels

by Michael Dukes

  Across from Zeller was a long-faced man with a droopy mustache, sipping rye. With what looked like a well-used gun on his hip, he was something of a badman, but his reputation had yet to reach beyond the borders of Mason County. His name was John Peters Ringo, and he’d recently been turned loose from the hoosegow, his hands washed clean of the blood he’d spilt during the Hoodoo Range War of ’75. Five months of freedom under his belt found him here, in Refuge, in the middle of an all-out, thrill-seeking tear through West Texas, with the Arizona Territory in his near future.

  The fourth player was a lanky cowhand, nobody famous and destined for anonymity except on whatever ranch he could find work. Clearly in over his head, he was down, judging by his stack of chips, fifty dollars or so.

  Tom Seward, unreadable behind his cards and his chips, was well ahead of the others, but Yankee Dave was more than a little distracted. He was no cardsharp anyhow—not really—and his primary purpose was to ensure that his dandy companion stayed alive. He played halfheartedly, making careless bets, tossing in chips at random. Either way, whatever Seward won would be split between them.

  Zeller had come back to Refuge to do just what Kings hoped he wouldn’t—to settle the score with Ned Spivey and take Jeannie away from this pit. He had intended to execute his plan earlier in the evening, but so far had seen neither hide nor hair of Spivey, and Jeannie wasn’t in her room. The game had been going for three hours, and he’d sat through every one of them with the patience of a cat, but that patience had run its course. He glanced up every five minutes, it seemed, hoping to catch a glimpse of one or both of the people he sought. The thought had crossed his mind, in the second hour, that maybe one of Kings’s shots had killed the saloon man, but that didn’t seem likely. Zeller remembered where Kings’s bullets had landed—arm and leg—and neither had looked like death wounds.

  No matter. He could wait a little longer.

  Outside, a sudden wind called to Seward, who was now more than $300 ahead of the rest of the players but sweating heavily. He went to the window and tried to raise it, only to find it wouldn’t budge. Seward listened to the howling, contemplated folding and getting out of this sauna of a saloon. It seemed as good a time to walk away as any.

  When he turned back to the table, though, Seward found that the cowhand had dropped out of the game and another gent had taken his seat. This man—sun-browned and dressed in trail clothes—smiled and said, “Evenin’! Too late for another hand?”

  For a moment, Seward remained standing, for, despite his hot streak, he very much did not care to play another. In the end, though, his craving for cash won out as the newcomer, still smiling, dropped crinkled U.S. greenbacks on the felt. Zeller dealt the man in.

  Over the next half hour, it became apparent that the stranger was anything but strange to the pasteboards. Tom Seward would have caught on and cut him down if he was able to, but by and by he noticed a semblance of a pattern emerging. The stranger would bluff nearly as often as he folded, and he had a poker face to rival Seward’s. He would raise the limit when he had good cards, then play more conservatively until the pot had been built up before calling. Of course, he turned up the winning hand—four of a kind in nines.

  After another hour of losing, John Ringo had had enough. He knocked back one last shot before shoving away from the table. He got up, shuffled across the floor, and disappeared into the dark beyond the batwings, moving ever onward toward his destiny in Tombstone, Arizona.

  “Guess tonight was my lucky night, gents,” the newcomer said, sweeping chips into his hat. “I’ll be hanged, though, if I let a man walk away without standin’ him to a drink. Come on to the bar.”

  Seward hesitated but collected what remained of his winnings and followed the stranger. Still seated, Zeller took one last look about the room. Nothing, by damn! Every other girl, it seemed, was working the late shift tonight, every girl but Jeannie.

  And still no sign of Spivey.

  Up against the hardwood, the stranger, who introduced himself simply as Smith, paid for two drinks a man.

  “You boys frequent this dive much?” he asked.

  “Not all that much,” Seward replied, keeping his eyes forward. “We’re just passing through here, truth be told.”

  “Where you headed, if I ain’t pryin’?” This Smith was just full of questions.

  Seward, for his part, was full of answers. “Not sure exactly where, Mr. Smith, just driftin’. Itinerant, I suppose you could call us.”

  “What about you?” Zeller asked.

  “I’m driftin’ south, more or less,” Smith replied, “if I don’t find a reason to stick around. You boys know of any action here?” He explained that the cattle outfit he’d been working for had gone bust at the end of last season, and he was again living out of saddlebags.

  “I hear the faro dealer a few doors down took sick with lead poisoning so the house is lookin’ for a new man. You know the game like you do five-card, I’d ask around there,” Seward suggested.

  “Oh, that kind of work ain’t quite for me.”

  Smith didn’t drink whiskey like Zeller and Seward, but beer, and he was in no hurry to finish. He was friendly enough, sure, but Zeller stayed on his toes, listening close for the slightest hint that this character was more than he said he was. He’d bet a bundle that Smith wasn’t the name marked in the family Bible. On the other hand, who was Dave Zeller to be building crosses for a man who enjoyed the convenience of an alias?

  Seward extended an unlit cigar. “Smoke, Mr. Smith?”

  “No, thanks. I can’t abide the devil-weed.”

  By now the Bull’s Eye was mostly deserted, with only a handful of scattered women and their clients mumbling sleepily to one another. The barman was stationed at the far end of the counter, polishing a glass and humming a tune.

  Standing out from the remaining hangers-on were three unkempt, rough-looking types in a tight knot near the storeroom. One of them, a heavy-shouldered, sandy-haired hulk of a man, looked down the length of the bar at Smith. He grumbled something to the others, who did not hold in their laughter.

  Smith stiffened a little at the sound but did nothing—only raised his glass for another sip. Zeller and Seward watched him closely, curious to see how Smith would handle himself. The men were types well-known to the two outlaws—troublemakers, easy to anger. They were easy to outsmart and easy to whup, too, when it came down to it. Still, there were three of them, and this was neither Zeller’s nor Seward’s fight.

  The sandy-haired man rolled a cud from the right side of his jaw to the left before calling out to Smith. “Hi-dee! That su-uuure is an adm’rable bandana you got yourself, mister. Silk, ain’t it?”

  Smith swallowed his beer, said equably, “That’s right.”

  “How much that set you back, fancy man?” one of the others asked.

  “Whoa, now, Joe, ain’t no call to insult the gentleman!” The big fellow turned to Smith with a hangdog look. “He didn’t mean nothin’ by that, mister.”

  “No offense taken,” Smith said. He was breathing calmly through his nose. His mouth, or rather, one corner of it, was lifted ever so slightly, and his gaze was steady upon the three—not locked on anyone in particular, but avoiding none.

  “Say, mister.” That was the sandy-haired man again. “Where in the hell didja come by that pretty little pistol? Don’t that nickel just shine like the stars, fellas? And that pearl?” The man honked drunken laughter, but it was a hollow sound, with no feeling behind it—he was testing the waters, trying to see what he was dealing with. And then he pressed his luck. He leaned forward and extended one huge hand. “Can I touch it?”

  “You must be touched in the head, mister.”

  The big man’s face went still, the grin no longer there. “What’d you say to me, huckleberry?”

  Smith may as well have reached out and slapped him. Zeller prodded Seward with an elbow, signaling that now was as good a time as any to step away.

  Smith’s voice was lo
ud in the sudden quiet of the room. “I’m just havin’ a beer, mindin’ my own, and here you’re startin’ in to cause a fuss. Now, you can do the smart thing, and have one on me, or we can do the stupid thing. Come on, mister. Let’s have that drink.”

  The big man’s eyes went again to the pretty pistol on Smith’s hip. He was sober enough to recognize that before him was no tenderfoot, but there were too many witnesses, too many people who had heard the insult, for him to swallow his pride and accept a free drink. He came around the end of the bar, closing the distance slowly. The angle of his neck and the stiffness of his shoulders showed what he was thinking—he was going to rip Smith apart with his bare hands.

  He’d done it before, to what he’d taken for tougher men.

  “Suppose,” he said, finally stopping, “I don’t wanna drink with no mother-lovin’ dandy like you?”

  Too fast to follow, Smith planted his left fist in the big man’s gut, sending him to his knees. Sucking wind, the big man looked up, shock showing in his eyes just before Smith drove downward with his right. Knuckles to the temple will put out the lights of even the most seasoned bare-knuckle champion, and the big man was no champion. He hit the ground cold, and, before either of his friends could react, Smith jerked his pistol and had them covered.

  One of them wobbled, in the midst of going for his own gun but thinking better of it. The pair hesitated, suddenly uncertain, and stared dumbly when Smith asked, “What do you wanna do, fellas?”

  “What if we wanna keep pushin’?” said the taller fellow.

  “I’d advise against it,” Smith replied. He didn’t lower his gun, and he didn’t blink as he said it.

  Eventually, the shorter man nodded and said, “Hell, I don’t fancy meetin’ St. Peter tonight. If you’re buyin’, I’m havin’ red-eye.”

  Before following through on his offer, Smith bent at the knees to disarm the felled Goliath. He sent the pistol across the hardwood to the barkeep, then produced two coins from his pocket with that same hand. “Sorry this happened, friend,” he said. “I’m buyin’ drinks for those two but leave that sleepin’ beauty thirsty.”

  When he turned around, Yankee Dave Zeller and Dapper Tom Seward were nowhere to be seen.

  Three figures came together under a corner streetlamp, their collars turned up against the cold of the new day. Three more were approaching from the direction of the marshal’s office—a man, a woman, and a shorter man using a cane. Once they’d crossed the invisible border of the Deadline, the hobbler and the woman branched off without so much as a parting word to the other. They started for the Bull’s Eye Saloon a block away, unaware that, had they left the marshal’s ten minutes earlier, the man would have been dead and the woman, in the arms of the killer.

  The sky to the west was blue-black, a slightly lighter shade to the east as the sun continued its long climb up the curve of the globe.

  Features illuminated as matches cracked. Smoke wafted and gathered in cancerous patches above the circle of four. A passerby would have heard them conversing in low voices. Every now and then, one took a look around, as though trouble lurked around the nearest corner.

  “You boys have any luck?” asked Caleb Stringer, just back from the marshal’s.

  “Better than expected,” said Pat Delaney.

  “How many’d you get, Walter?”

  “Five men, only two of whom are bachelors, but they’re dyedin-the-wool believers in law and order. They want Kings brought to justice just as bad as us.”

  “Bully. How ’bout you, Pat?”

  “Three, Captain. Each of ’em swore they can sit a horse and shoot with any man in Texas.”

  “That makes twelve. Twelve is good.”

  A short distance up the street, a stray dog bayed, and somewhere out beyond the city limits, a coyote answered.

  “You manage to learn anything, Paul?”

  “Not so you’d notice. It seems like there’s an epidemic of lockjaw takes hold of folks around here, you so much as mention the Kings crew.”

  “Lot of ’em have prob’ly crossed paths with some of them fellas. Some have mebbe even done a little bit of ridin’ with them. You never can tell.”

  “They seem to have an awful lot of loyalty to one another, don’t they, for a bunch of low criminals,” Delaney observed.

  “Some do. But there’s enough who’d gladly tell what they know for a share in the reward money, if they knew anything. Only thing that keeps their mouths shut is the fear of Kings himself comin’ down on ’em. Whatever else can be said about him, our boy’s been known to bring the wrath of God.”

  Mincey grunted. “You get him alone, strip away all the guns, he’s just one man.”

  “That’s what I aim to prove to this country.”

  There was a pause, then Leduc said, “Did run into a couple of men, though, who I’ve reason to suspect run with him.”

  “Who, for instance?”

  “Tall fella, kinda edgy. Played a hand of cards with him and a smaller gent wearin’ a black city hat. Talker of the two, sounded book-learned. Dave Zeller and Tom Seward, mebbe.”

  “Twenty-five-hundred-dollar reward for that first one,” Mincey said.

  “Union man, wasn’t he?” Delaney asked.

  “That’s what the warrants say.”

  “Whaddayou suppose he’s doin’ runnin’ around with these graybacks?”

  “Money,” Mincey replied. “Politics don’t have one thing to do with it.”

  “What about them two fellas, Paul? No prisoners?”

  “No, sir. I looked away for a minute, and they’d taken their leave of the place. Tell you somethin’, though—I been walkin’ these boards since midnight, and I ain’t spotted ’em in any of the other dives. I wouldn’t know what their horses look like, but somethin’ tells me they ain’t in town anymore.”

  “No?”

  “My guess is they already lit out. With daylight comin’ on, I say we can track ’em without much trouble.”

  “There’ll be plenty of trouble waitin’ for us when we find them,” Mincey said.

  “If we find ’em, you mean,” Delaney grumped.

  “Gents, out here, all a man can hope for is a fifty-fifty chance.”

  “Well, Cap, I say we better the odds.”

  The baying up the street stopped, and the land lay quiet and still around them, around Refuge.

  “All right. You men go pack up, get your things set. How soon those volunteers say they could be ready?”

  “Hour, at the most.”

  “Tell ’em we ride in thirty.”

  Two thousand dollars, silver coin, split four ways came to $500 a man. Two-fifty up front and they would be paid the other half when the job was done.

  “Dead or alive,” the saloon man had said, “don’t mean a speck of owl crap to me. I just want that sumbitch to know it was Ned Spivey had him killed. You tell ’im that, when you got ’im bleedin’ out, stuck-hog, in the dirt. You tell ’im Spivey sends his regards.”

  “Oh, yessir, Mr. Spivey,” Frank Wingate had sworn, “you can count on that.”

  And so, for a meager $500, he shook hands with a man who wanted Gabriel Kings dead as Julius Caesar. Spivey’s very words, and Wingate would see to it.

  Kings was a wizard with a six-gun—not exactly the speediest, but definitely one of the nerviest gunhawks Wingate had ever seen—and he’d ridden with some of the most madcap killers ever to come out of Dixie. Sure, he may have owed the man for the time he saved Wingate’s hide from a permanent tanning up there on the Canadian, and Wingate fully intended to make good on that debt. What better way, after all, than to pay Kings back with a bullet, do him the ultimate favor? Ease that sodbuster’s pain and send him down. Lay down a cactus flower, drink a little whiskey, and pour some onto the grave—Vaya con el diablo and count your pesos for the boatman, Kings—then beat for the border with the money in hand.

  He’d buried bona fide amigos with less ceremony.

  Always wanted to fight him, Wi
ngate did, to pull back and throw down for all the cards. Never really got the chance, though. But here it finally was—the chance to see if there was any truth to all the stories, the chance to call the legend out, so that he, Frank Wingate, could shoot him dead.

  It was high noon, two days’ ride out from Refuge. A west wind howled, shaping and herding the blanket of clouds through the sky and casting clots of shadows upon the plain below. Dry brush rattled, thorns clicked like talons tensing for a kill.

  Ahead of them lay over sixty miles of desolation and emptiness, sixty miles they’d only recently crossed and were now inclined to relive for the second time in as many weeks. Though this crossing had proven more lucrative than the last, it would be anything but easier this time around. No matter which way it was navigated, no matter how wide one rode around one thicket of mesquite, hoping to avoid the knifelike cut of the groping thorns, around the next bend was another thicket just as impenetrable.

  Wingate felt his white-shouldered bay horse shift beneath him and watched as Lightfoot continued to examine the ground. He’d been at it for minutes now, shifting like a crab, sniffing, licking the fingers he stuck into one depression or another, and mumbling freely even as he refused to answer any questions.

  Carver scratched at his neck-beard. “We dally here any longer and Kings’ll die of old age.” He glared down at the long-haired tracker. “You been starin’ at them tracks long enough to write a book, professor.”

  Ignoring him, Lightfoot walked back and swung aboard his gelding without the use of stirrups. Seeing that, Wingate had to remind himself the man was half white.