Between Hell and Texas (22 page)

“People tell me lots of things, Lematte,” said Bouchard. “That doesn’t mean I act on it.” He came to a halt a few feet from Jimmie Turner. The other drovers spread in a half circle on his right. On Bouchard’s left he saw the deputies form a matching half circle.

Lematte nodded. “I understand. Take your man and straighten him out.” He grinned. “No harm done.”

“Come on, Turner,” said Gains Bouchard, “I ain’t telling you again!”

“Boss, damn it!” said Jimmie Turner. “You don’t know what he’s done to those women!’

“Yes, I do know,” Bouchard said firmly. “Now come on, let the law deal with Lematte when the time comes.”

“But damn it to hell, Boss! He is the law!” Turner shrieked. “What kind of men are we, letting him treat these poor women that way?”

With a wide, sarcastic grin Hogo Metacino cut in, his hand resting on his pistol butt, “Yeah, Bouchard, what kind of men are you anyway?”

“Shut up, Hogo!” Lematte shouted. He turned to Bouchard and said quickly, “Take him and go! You see what kind of pot we’ve got boiling here.”

“Come on, Turner,” Mike Cassidy called out, staring hard and cold at Hogo Metacino. “Let these
deputies
crawl back under their rocks.”

“That’s enough, Cassidy!” said Bouchard, half turning toward him. “Lematte is right, we’ve got a bad situ—”

Bouchard’s words stopped short at the sound of a pistol shot exploding. A stunned silence froze everybody in place. Everyone except Jimmie Turner. He staggered backward a step and spun, facing Gains Bouchard. A gout of blood streamed from the center of his chest. Blood spilled from his lips as he said, “Now look what they’ve gone and done to me…” Then he fell forward, splashing facedown in a puddle of mud.

“On the boardwalk Mad Albert Ash stood with his pistol smoking and a strange grin on his face. “I guess that settles that,” he said. “Now can we get back to our breakfast?”

“You murdering bastard!” Gains Bouchard shouted, spitting out his wad of chewing tobacco as his hand streaked to his holster and started back up, cocking his Colt on the upswing. The street seemed to spring back to life all at once. Seeing the deputies respond to Bouchard’s move by reaching for their
guns, Sandy Edelman and the Double D men made their own move to protect the old rancher. Within a split second eleven pistols blazed back and forth with less than fifteen feet between the two warring groups.

Mad Albert Ash’s shot slammed into Gains Bouchard’s chest, sending him backward into the mud as a terrified horse yanked its reins loose from the hitch rail and found itself rearing high amid the fracas. But Bouchard wasn’t done for. He came up onto one knee, his left hand gripping the flow of blood from his chest. With the rearing horse between him and Ash, Bouchard saw the deputies firing on his men. He saw Sandy Edelman go down in a spray of blood, two bullets hitting him at once. Instinctively Bouchard swung his Colt toward them and emptied all six shots into the gunmen.

Lematte took a long dive along the boardwalk and found cover behind a stack of shipping crates out front of the harness shop.

Mike Cassidy took a bullet in his upper left shoulder but kept firing, one shot hitting Rowland Lenz squarely in the forehead and turning him in a backward flip. Another shot sent Hogo Metacino sprawling into the mud, although the bullet only grazed the side of his head. His gun slipped from his hand and sank in the mud. He crawled frantically, reaching for it, only to have it squirt from his grasp as a bullet whistled above his head.

“Look out, Stanley!” Mike Cassidy shouted, seeing Delbert Collins taking an aim at him. But Stanley Grubs didn’t act quick enough. Collins’s bullet sliced through his heart and left him lying dead in the mud.

“Kill him, Delbert!” shouted Hogo Metacino from
the mud, still trying to get a grip on his slippery pistol.

Delbert Collins and Mike Cassidy fired at the same time at one another. Cassidy’s bullet sent Collins writhing in pain with both hands clutching his crotch. Collins’s shot sliced through the center of Cassidy’s right ear, leaving the lower half of it hanging limply. Cassidy clasped a hand to the bloody ear and turned toward Mad Albert Ash, seeing the frightened horse run out from between Ash and Gains Bouchard.

“Get down, Boss!” Cassidy shouted, seeing that Bouchard had gone down again, but that he was struggling back up to his knee, raising his Colt toward Mad Albert with all his effort.

“Whooie!” said Ash, grinning wildly. “What a shootout this
is
!”

Bouchard pulled the trigger on his Colt before realizing he’d used all his shots. As he fumbled for bullets from his mud-covered gun belt, Ash calmly looked at Mike Cassidy and put a bullet in his chest. As Cassidy hit the ground, Ash walked slowly toward Gains Bouchard, taking his time, still grinning. He stopped two feet from Bouchard and held his gun pointed down at his face. Bouchard stared up the long gun barrel. Knowing that it was all over for him, he let the bullets spill from his muddy hand.

“Now tell the truth, old man,” said Mad Albert Ash. “Was all this worth one lousy cowhand?”

“Damn you, sir!” said Gains Bouchard, remaining defiant to the end.

“And you as well,” said Ash. He pulled the trigger and Bouchard’s head snapped back violently, a blast of blood and brain matter raising a splatter of mud in the street.

Lematte came down from his hiding spot and cocked his head sideways quizzically, looking down at Bouchard’s dead, blank expression. “I’m going to miss his business,” he said with regret.

From an outhouse behind the Silver Seven Saloon, Karl Nolly had come splashing through the mud with his holster belt over his shoulder at the first sound of gunfire. But he slowed to a halt a few feet back from where the bodies of both deputies and cowhands alike lay spilling blood. “Good God!” he said, one hand holding his Colt, his other hand holding his unfastened trousers gathered at his waist. He watched Hogo Metacino struggle to his feet like some creature rising from the bowels of the earth.

“Lower that pistol and attend to yourself, Deputy,” said Mad Albert Ash, standing over Gains Bouchard’s body as he reloaded his Colt. “You’re too late to be any help here.”

Nolly stared at him, seething, but he lowered the pistol and began fastening his trousers. “How the hell did all this happen?” he asked of anyone there.

“If you had been here,” Ash said flatly, “we wouldn’t have to tell you. Ain’t that right, Sheriff?” he asked Lematte.

“Yes, that’s right,” Lematte agreed. He had stepped down from the boardwalk and stood beside Ash. “Since you missed the party, you can stay for
the cleanup.” He pointed down at Bouchard’s body, saying, “Drag him away from here. It looks bad, bodies laying around.”

In the middle of the street, Mike Cassidy was still alive and struggling through the mud toward the other side of the street. Ash hurriedly finished reloading and cocked his Colt, taking aim. But Lematte stopped him, saying, “Let him go, Ash. He’s done for anyway.”

“Mercy is low on my list of virtues,” said Ash. Yet he lowered the gun and looked around at the other men rising up from the mud.

Lying dead on the Double D side were Jimmie Turner, Sandy Edelman, Gains Bouchard, and Stanley Grubs. Of Lematte’s deputies only Rowland Lenz lay dead, his blank eyes staring skyward, a bullet hole in the center of his forehead. As the rest of the wounded deputies arose, Delbert Collins stayed balled up in the mud, his hands gripping his bloody crotch as he sobbed and moaned loudly. Lematte winced looking at him, then said, “Somebody get him on his feet! Get him to the doctor’s.”

“No, please!” Collins sobbed. “I can’t stand up!”

In spite of Collins’s pleading, Hogo Metacino pulled him up, saying, “We’re all wounded, Delbert, stop your bellyaching!”

Across the street, out front of the hotel, Mike Cassidy had managed to pull himself up the side of his horse and roll himself up into the saddle. While Lematte and his men were busy taking stock of themselves, Cassidy managed to ease the horse around into an alley and along the back of the town.

Inside the hotel, Tinsdale and Deavers had seen Cassidy slip away. “I hope to God he makes it,”
Deavers said. “Maybe he’ll bring the rest of the Double D boys back with him to avenge Bouchard.”

“Good Lord, man!” Tinsdale remarked. “A vengeance war is exactly what we
don’t
need here right now—not on top of everything else!”

“After what we’ve both just witnessed in the street,” said Deavers, “I think the only way we’ll get rid of Lematte and his band of murderers is to kill them where they stand.”

“Take hold of yourself, Deavers,” said Tinsdale. “We’re civilized men! We can’t stoop to murder. That makes us no better than Lematte.”

“You’re right, Tinsdale,” said Deavers, giving it some quick consideration. “We can’t stoop to
his
level. We have to act fast. We have to get the Double D cowhands on our side while their blood is boiling over what these men did to Gains Bouchard. I’m sure we can count on them now.”

Tinsdale nodded. “And don’t forget Cray Dawson. I understand he and Bouchard were real close.”

“Then that has to be our next move,” said Deavers. “We have to appeal to the Double D and Cray Dawson; see if they’ll take up our fight. That’s the only civilized way to do this sort of thing.”

Dawson and Carmelita had arrived early at the old Dawson place and spent most of the day hanging curtains, sweeping the floors, and checking the place thoroughly for rattlesnakes. The rain had quit at dawn, leaving the land sodden and strewn with wide puddles of muddy water that would take days to seep down into the sated land. Only the trail was dry, the sun having spent the day baking it back to its hardened state.

They had spoken very little since the night Dawson had told her about Suzzette. But now that they had gotten out and gone about cleaning up the old, weatherbeaten house, Dawson could see Carmelita’s attitude softening a bit. By the time they had finished with the house, mounted up, and taken the Old Spanish Trail back toward the Shaw
hacienda
, Dawson could see she felt better about things.

“Tell me this, Cray,” she said as they rode along easily through a cut of high-reaching rock walls. “If you were not with me, would you be staying with this woman?”

Cray looked her up and down, seeing she was getting over any bad feelings she’d had, but still working things over in her mind. “No,” he said. “She is a good woman, I think, in spite of her profession. But we had already talked it over…I had no interest in staying with her. I don’t think she really had any interest in being with me. She had a friend who took up with a gunman. She told me she thought it would be a good life.”

“A good life with a gunman,” Carmelita said, pondering it to herself. “I watched how my sister and Lawrence Shaw lived. I do not think she had a good life.”

“I know,” said Dawson, not wanting to think about Rosa Shaw right then; certainly not wanting to talk about her. “I tried to tell Suzzette that life with a gunman was no way to live. She didn’t want to hear it.”

Casting him a sidelong glance, Carmelita said as if in some sense of personal reflection, “So, you left this woman for her own good?”

“I left her because I didn’t have the feeling a man
ought to have for a woman before he takes up living with her,” Dawson said bluntly. “I could see no good ever come from me lying ‘bout it.”

“I see…” Carmelita rode beside him quietly for a second, then asked, “And do you have this kind of feeling for me, Cray Dawson?”

“Yes, I do, Carmelita,” said Dawson. They rode on in silence for another moment, then he asked her, “What about you? Do you feel as strongly toward me?”

“
Si
,” she said, “I feel very…
strongly
for you.”

Dawson smiled to himself, noting how they both had carefully avoided saying they loved one another. He started to stay something more on the subject, but the sound of a hoof against a rock along the trail ahead caught his attention. He halted his horse and gave a hand gesture, cautioning Carmelita to stay behind him.

“What is it?” she whispered, drawing the red mule over between Dawson and the rock wall.

“Someone on horseback, I think,” said Dawson, staring forward where the trail bent out of sight. They waited quietly as the sound of slow hoofs against rock grew closer. When the horse finally turned into sight, Carmelita gave a short gasp, seeing the rider lying limp in the saddle, bowed forward on the horse’s neck. His right arm hung down the horse’s side, dripping blood.

“It’s Mike Cassidy! Wait here,” Dawson said to Carmelita. He heeled Stony forward, still looking around warily until they reached Cassidy’s horse.

“Easy, fellow,” Dawson said, calming the jumpy dun. Reaching down he picked up the dangling reins, then stepped down from his saddle.

“Daw—Dawson, is that you?” Cassidy said in a weak, broken voice.

“Yes, Mike, it’s me,” Dawson replied, reaching up and pulling him down from the saddle into his arms. He laid him gently onto the ground and motioned for Carmelita to ride forward. “What’s happened to you, Pard?” he asked the wounded drover, opening Cassidy’s shirt and seeing the gaping wounds in his chest and shoulder. The lower half of Cassidy’s ear was dangling and caked with thick, dried blood.