“I couldn’t agree more.”
Smoke was smiling, nursing his beer. He’d already figured who the stranger was.
One of Cat Jennings’s men lifted his leg and broke wind. “That’s what I think about you, stranger.”
“How rude!” Parnell said.
“Sissy-pants,” the man who had made the coarse social comment stood up. “I think I’ll just kill you. ’Cause I don’t believe you’re the Reno Kid.”
“Of course, he isn’t,” the stranger said. “I am!”
TWENTY-FOUR
That news broke the spirit of a couple of men who had already been toying with the idea of rattling their hocks. They stood up and walked toward the door. Charlie Starr and them old gray-headed he-cougars with him was bad enough. Add the Moab Kid and Lujan to that mixture and you was stirrin’ nitro too fast with a flat stick. Smoke Jensen was the fastest gun in the West. Now here comes the Reno Kid, and there goes anybody with a lick of sense.
The batwings squeaked and two gunnies were gone.
The gunhand facing Parnell didn’t back down. Without taking his eyes from Parnell, he said, “Did anybody pull your chain, Reno?”
“Nope,” Reno answered easily.
“You gonna fight Sissy-pants’s battles for him?”
“Nope.”
“You ready to die, Sissy-pants?”
“Oh, I think not.” Parnell had turned, facing the man, his right hand hovering near the butt of the holstered sawed-off. “But I do have a question?”
“Ax it!”
“What is your name?”
“Readon. What’s it to you?”
“I just wondered what to have carved on the marker over your grave.”
“Draw, damn your eyes!” the man shouted, and grabbed for his six-gun.
Parnell was calm and quick. Up came the awesome weapon, the right-side hammer eared back. Across went his left hand in a practiced move, gripping the short barrels. The range was no more than twelve feet and the booming was enormous in the beery, smoky room. The ball bearings and rusty nails and ragged rocks hit the gunhand in the belly and lifted him off his boots while the charge was tearing him apart. He landed on a table several feet away from where he had been standing, smearing the tabletop with crimson and collapsing the table. He had never even cleared leather.
The hurdy-gurdy girls began squalling like hogs caught in barbed wire and ran from the room, their short dresstails flapping as they ran.
Parnell, seeing that no one was going to immediately take up the fight, but sensing that was only seconds away, broke open the shotgun pistol and tossed aside the empty, loading it up full. He snapped it shut and eared back both hammers.
The gunhand Smoke had first seen at that little store down on the Boulder stood up. “Me and Readon had become pals, Jensen,” Dunlap said. “You a friend of that shotgun-toter, so that makes you my enemy. I think I’ll just kill you.”
He grabbed for his guns.
Smoke shot Dunlap in the chest just as his hands gripped the butts of his guns. Dunlap looked puzzled for a moment, coughed up blood, and sat down in the chair he should never have gotten out of. He slowly put his head on the tabletop and sighed as that now-familiar ghost rider came galloping up, took a look around, and grinned in a macabre fashion. He decided to stick around. Things were quite lively in this little town.
The ghost rider put a bony hand on another’s shoulder as half the men in the barroom grabbed for iron and Lujan shot one between the eyes.
Mulroony jumped behind the bar and landed on top of the barkeep, who was already on the floor. He’d been a bartender in too many western towns not to know where the safest place was.
Parnell’s sawed-off shotgun-pistol roared again, the charge knocking two gunnies to the floor. Johnny picked that time to make his move. Just as he was reaching for his guns, Parnell stepped the short distance as he was reversing the weapon. Using it like a club, he hit Johnny in the mouth. Teeth flew in several directions and Johnny was out cold. Parnell dropped to the floor and once more loaded up.
The Reno Kid was crouched by the bar, coolly and carefully picking his shots.
Charlie had dropped two before a bullet took him in the shoulder and slammed him against the bar. He did a fast border-roll with his six-gun and kept on banging. When his gun was empty, Lujan grabbed the older man and literally slung him over the bar, out of the line of fire.
The Moab Kid took a round in the leg and the leg buckled under him, dropping him to the floor, his face twisted in pain.
But it was Parnell who was dishing out the most death and destruction. Firing and loading as fast as he could, the schoolteacher did the most to clear out the room and end the fighting.
The gunnies and tinhorns gave it up, one by one dropping their still-smoking six-guns and raising their hands in the air. Cord, Del, Ring, and Cal stepped through the batwings, pistols drawn and cocked, Ring with his double-barrel express gun.
“Get Doc Adair,” Smoke said, his voice husky from the thick gunsmoke in the saloon.
Cal was gone at a bow-legged trot to fetch the doctor.
Lujan helped Charlie to a chair. The front of the old gunslinger’s shirt was soaked with blood.
“Did I get the old bassard?” a gunhawk moaned the question from the floor. He had taken half a dozen rounds in the chest and stomach and death was standing over him, ready to take him where the fires were hot and the company not the best.
“You got lead in me,” Charlie admitted. “But I’m a long ways from accompanyin’ you.”
“If not today, then some other time. So I’ll see you in hell, Starr,” the gunny grinned the words, his mouth bloody. He started to add something, but the words would not form on his tongue. His eyes rolled back in his head and he mounted up behind the ghost rider.
Smoke had reloaded. He stood by the bar, his hands full of Colts, his eyes watching the gunnies who had chosen to give up the fight.
Johnny moaned on the floor and rolled over on his stomach, one hand holding his busted mouth. The other hand went to his right-hand gun. But it was gone.
“Are you looking for these?” Parnell asked, holding out the punk’s guns in his left hand. His right hand was full of twelve-gauge sawed-off blaster.
Johnny mumbled something.
“Your diction is atrocious,” Parnell told him. He looked at Smoke and smiled. “My, Cousin, but for a few moments, it was quite exhilarating.”
Smoke grinned and shook his head. “Yeah, it was, Parnell. I’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with you anytime, Cousin.”
Mulroony had crawled from behind the bar and waved his photographer in. The man set up his bulky equipment and sprinkled the powder in the flashpan. “Smile, everyone!” he hollered, then popped his shot, adding more smoke to the already eye-smarting air.
Beans had cut his jeans open to inspect the wound, and it was a bad one. “Leg’s busted,” he said tightly. “Looks like I’m out of it.”
The flashpan popped again, the lenses taking in the bloody sprawl of bodies and the line of gunhawks standing against a wall, their hands in the air, their weapons piled on a table.
While Doc Adair tended to Charlie and Beans, Smoke faced the surrendered gunhandlers. His eyes were as cold as chips of ice and his words flint-hard.
“You’re out of it. Get on your horses and ride. If I see any of you in this area again, I’ll kill you! No questions asked. I’ll just shoot you. And no, you don’t pack your truck, you don’t get your guns, you don’t draw your pay—you ride! Now! Move!”
They needed no further instrucitons. They all knew there would be another time, another place, another showdown time. They rushed the batwings and rattled their hocks, leaving in a cloud of dust.
“You tore up my place!” a woman squalled, stepping out of a back room.
“Howdy, Harriet,” Beans called. “Right nice to see you again.”
“You!” she hollered. “I might have known it’d be you, Moab.” Her eyes flicked to the Reno
Kid. “You back gun-handlin’, Reno?”
“I reckon.”
She looked at Smoke. Took in his rugged good looks and heavy musculature. “Remember me, big boy?”
“I remember you, Harriet. You were one of the smart ones who left Fontana early.”
“Did you kill Tilden Franklin?”
“I sure did.”
“Man ever deserved killin’, that one did. You gonna run me out of Gibson?”
“I didn’t run you out of Fontana, Harriet.”
“For a fact. See you around, baby.” She turned and pushed through a door.
“He can’t sit a saddle,” Adair said, standing up from working on Beans’s leg. “And I’d rather he didn’t for a few days.” The doctor pointed to Charlie.
“I’ll put some hay in the wagon,” Cal said, and left the saloon.
The undertaker and his helper, both of them trying very hard to keep from smiling, entered the saloon and walked among the dead and dying, pausing at each body to go through the pockets.
“Does I get my guns back?” Johnny pushed the words through mashed lips and broken teeth.
Parnell looked at Smoke. Smoke nodded his head. “Give them to the punk. He’d just find some more. One of us is gonna have to kill him sooner or later.”
The flashpan belched once again.
“What a story this will make!” Horace chortled, rocking back and forth on his feet. “I shall dispatch it immediately to New York City.”
“Do try to be grammatically correct,” Parnell reminded him.
Horace gave him a smile. A very thin smile.
* * *
Sandi hollered and bawled and carried on something fierce when she saw Beans in the back of the wagon but then brightened up considerably when she realized he’d be laid up for several weeks and she could nurse him.
Reno had checked out of his room and rode back to the Circle Double C with the men. He had strapped on his other Peacemaker and was in the fight to the finish.
Charlie bitched about having to be bedded down in the main house so the ladies could take proper care of his wound. Hardrock told him to shet his mouth and think about what a relief it would be to the others not to have to look at his ugly face for a spell.
“It works both ways,” Charlie popped back, smiling as the ladies fussed over him.
Parnell had taken a slight bullet burn on his left arm. But the way Rita acted a person would have thought he’d been near killed. She insisted on spoon-feeding him some hot soup she fixed—just for him.
“What did we accomplish?” Cord asked Smoke.
“Damn little,” he admitted.“Seems like every time we run off or kill a gunhawk, there’s ten to step up, taking his place.”
Cord added some more numbers in his tally book and shook his head at the growing number of dead and wounded. “Why did the Reno Kid toss in with us, Smoke? Charlie says he’s married, with several children.”
“So am I,” Smoke reminded the man.
* * *
Something good did come out of the gunfight inside Harriet’s saloon: many of the hangers-on decided to pull out; the fight was getting too hot for many of the tinhorns and would-be gunfighters. They’d go back to their daddy’s farms and be content to milk the cows and gather the eggs, their guns hanging on a peg.
But it left the true hardcases, many of them on no one’s payroll. Like buzzards, they were waiting to see the outcome and perhaps pick up a few crumbs of the pie.
Johnny and his punk sidekick, Bret, were still in town, swaggering around, hanging on the fringes of the known gunslingers, talking rough and tough and lapping up the strong beer and rotgut and snake-head whiskey served at most of the newer saloons.
Crime had increased in Gibson, with foot-padders and petty thieves plying their trade on the unsuspecting men and women who had to venture out after dark. And the hardcases were getting surly and hard to handle, craving action.
There were several minor run-ins among the gunhawks, provoked by recklessness and restlessness and booze and the urge to kill and destroy. The leaders of the gangs had to step in and calm the situation, reminding the outlaws that their fight was not with each other, but with the Double Circle C.
“Then gawddammit!” Lodi snarled. “Let’s make war on them!”
The Hangout, jammed full of hired guns, shook with the roars of approval.
Dad Estes did his best to shout his boys down while Jason Bright and Cat Jennings and Lanny Ball tried to calm their people.
They were only half successful.
The leaders looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders. Dad jerked his head toward the boardwalk and the men stomped outside, to stand in the night.
“We got to use them or lose them,” Dad summed it up. “My boys ain’t gonna stand around here much longer twiddlin’ their thumbs.”
The others agreed with Dad.
“So you got some sort of a plan, Dad?”
“We hit them, tonight.”
“What does Dooley have to say about that?” Jason asked.
“I ain’t discussed it with him.”
The others smiled, Dad continuing, “Look here, we could turn this into a right nice town, and if we was all big landowners, why, we’d also own the sheriff and deputies and the like.”
“We got to kill Dooley and them first,” he was reminded by Cat Jennings.
Dad shifted his chewing tobacco to the other side of his mouth. He took out an ornate pocket watch and clicked it open. “Well, boys, I got some people doin’ that little thing in about an hour.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Dooley came awake, keeping his eyes closed. The slight creaking of the hall door had brought him awake. He had drank himself to sleep, sitting in the big chair just inside the living room. The first time he’d ever done that. Now wide awake, he sat very still in the darkness and opened his eyes.
“I tole you to oil that door!” his oldest boy, Sonny, hissed the words.
“Shet your mouth,” Bud whispered. “The old fool was prob’ly so drunked up when he went to bed a shotgun blast wouldn’t wake him up.”
Conrad giggled. “A shotgun blast is what we’re goin’ to give him!”
Cold insane fury washed over the father as he froze still in his chair. If he’d had a gun in his hand, he’d have killed all three of them right this minute. But his gun belt was hanging on the peg in the hall.
Sonny shushed his brothers. “Stay here and keep watch, Conrad. Me and Bud will do the deed.”
“I don’t wanna keep no watch! I wanna see it when the buckshot hits him. And what the hell is I gonna be watchin’ for anyways? There ain’t nobody here but us. The others is all back in town.”
“Do what I tell you to do.”
Dooley carefully drew his feet up under the chair, hiding them from view should any of his traitorous offspring look into the living room. The sorry sons of bitches.
The dark humor and irony of that thought almost caused him to chuckle.
The stillness of the house was shattered by twin shotgun blasts.
Then he remembered he hadn’t made up his bed from the past night; the pillows and covers must have fooled the boys into thinking their dad was lying in bed.
Boots ran up the hall. “Got the old nut-brain!” Sonny shouted. “The ranch is ourn. Let’s go join the other boys and finish the deed.”
The front door slammed shut.
What deed? Dooley thought.
The thunder of hooves hammered past the house. Dooley moved to the window and watched his bastard sons gallop out of sight.
That damn Cord put them up to this! Dooley’s fevered brain quickly reached that conclusion. He jerked on his boots and ran into the hall, pausing to yank his gun belt from the peg and belt it around his waist. He ran to the kitchen and filled a gunnybag with cans of food, a side of bacon, some hardtack. He took a big canteen and filled that at the kitchen pump. Then he ran to the study and quickly opened his safe, stuffing a money belt full of cash money he�
�d just received from the army cattle buyer. He belted the money bag around his middle. In his bedroom, he rolled up some clothes in a blanket and slipped out the back of the house, stopping only once, to fill his pockets with .44 rounds and pick up a small coffeepot and skillet.
Dooley saddled a horse and stuffed the saddlebags full of supplies. He hung the canteen and bag on the saddle horn and took off into the timber of the Little Belt Mountains. When his boys come back, they’d find that what they’d shot was only a bed, and they’d come lookin’ to kill their pa.
“Come on, you miserable whelps,” Dooley muttered, talking to his horse. His best horse. His favorite horse. Dooley could sleep in the saddle and his horse would never falter. The horse also knew where Dooley was going as soon as Dooley guided the way toward the old Indian trail that wound in a circuitous route to the base of Old Baldy, the highest peak in the Little Belts, which ran for some forty miles from southeast of Great Falls to the Musselshell. Dooley and his horse had come here often, just to think—to let the hate fester over the past few years.
“Goddamn you, Cord,” Dooley muttered. “You heped take my woman from me and now you done turned my sons agin me. I’m a-gonna kill ever’ one of you. Ever’ stinkin’ one of you!”
* * *
“Here they come!” the shout from Smoke was only seconds before the mass of riders entered the Circle Double C ranch complex. But it was enough to roust everybody out of bed.
Smoke’s shout was followed by a war whoop from Hardrock that echoed across the draws and hollows and grazing land of the ranch.
“Hep me clost to that winder.” Charlie told Parnell. “I’ll take it from there. I can shoot jist as good with my left hand as I can with my right.”
Across the hall, Beans told Sandi, “Get some help and shove my bed to that window and hand me my rifle. Then you and Rita get on the floor.”
The girls positioned the bed and reached for their own rifles.
“Cain’t you wimmin take orders?” Beans asked over the thunder of hooves.
“We stand by our men,” Sandi told him. “Now shut up and shoot!”
Live by the West, Die by the West Page 18
