Authors: J. A. Johnstone
Brutal Vengeance (7 page)
Chapter 11
That was plenty of time for The Kid to react.
The Winchester snapped to his shoulder. With a round already in the chamber, all he had to do was settle the sights on the gunman’s forehead and squeeze the trigger.
The whipcrack of the shot filled the air.
The man’s head jerked back as the bullet smashed into his forehead, bored through his brain, and exploded out the back of his head in a grisly pink spray of blood, gray matter, and bone shards. His knees came unhinged, dropping him straight to the ground. The pistol fell from his limp fingers, unfired.
“Move, Nick!” The Kid shouted. He didn’t know if there were any more would-be killers lurking inside the barn, but if there were, he wanted the youngster out of the line of fire.
Nick rolled onto hands and knees and scrambled to his feet. As he did, shots erupted from inside the barn.
Plumes of dust geysered into the air around Nick’s feet as he ran toward the barn’s far corner. The Kid slammed three fast shots through the open door of the barn and then ran across the space between it and the house, angling for the nearest corner of the barn. There might be another way in around back.
From the sound of the shots, probably two or three men were inside, he guessed. He and Nick were outnumbered, but only for the moment. The shooting would bring Culhane and the rest of the posse in a hurry.
The Kid saw Nick vanish around the other corner of the barn. From the way the young man was moving so quickly, he wasn’t hurt. That was pure luck ... luck, and Kid Morgan’s fast reflexes and deadly aim.
The Kid ducked through the bars of the corral and trotted along the side of the barn. When he reached the rear corner, he peered around it.
There was a door back there, all right, big enough for a man to lead a horse out through it.
The corral extended around to the back of the barn as well, forming an L-shape around the building. The horses, spooked by the shooting in front, had all retreated back there and were milling around nervously.
The rear door burst open and three men rushed out, obviously intent on getting to their horses and fleeing. From the corner, The Kid opened fire, cutting down one man. He had to pull back when the two still on their feet started blazing away at him with six-guns as they ran.
“Hyaaah!”
That shout came from Nick, The Kid realized. What in blazes was he doing?
Hoofbeats pounded. The Kid risked a look. Nick had climbed into the corral from the other corner and was driving the startled horses toward the gunmen by running at them, shouting, and waving his hat.
One of the men twisted and fired at Nick. Clouds of dust had started to billow and swirl in the air, and The Kid couldn’t see if Nick was hit.
A bullet from the other man’s gun sizzled past his ear. He fired the Winchester again and saw the man double over as the slug punched into his guts.
The last man yelled in alarm as he tried to get out of the way of a running horse. The animal clipped him with a shoulder anyway, and the impact knocked the man off his feet.
He dropped his gun when he hit the ground. Scrambling after it, he’d just picked it up when Nick came out of the dust, his own revolver clutched in both hands.
It was a double-action weapon, and Nick fired it again and again as fast as he could pull the trigger, as the bullets pounded down into the outlaw on the ground.
Nick didn’t stop jerking the trigger until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Even then he tried to shoot a couple more times before he realized he was out of bullets.
“Take it easy, Nick,” The Kid said in a steadying voice as he walked up. “It’s over.”
Tears ran down the young man’s face, cutting wet trails in the dust that coated his features.
“I ... I killed him.”
“You sure did,” The Kid said. “I’ve got a hunch he had it coming.”
“If you saw ... if you saw what I did inside ...”
Nick dropped the empty gun, fell to his knees, then curled up on his side and sobbed.
Quickly, The Kid checked the three men on the ground to make sure they were dead. Satisfied that they were, he stepped through the rear door into the barn.
It smelled like a typical barn full of hay and manure, but underlying those familiar scents was something else, something grim, a coppery smell The Kid recognized ... and wished he didn’t.
Freshly spilled blood. A lot of it.
His eyes adjusted quickly to the dimness inside the barn. It didn’t take him long to find the nude bodies of two young women.
Little more than girls, really, they would never grow any older. Both were dead, butchered savagely. They had been beaten, probably assaulted repeatedly, and their throats were cut. Even with their faces twisted by agony, The Kid could tell they were twins.
Yeah, the bastard that Nick had shot to doll rags had had it coming, all right, and so had his three companions. The Kid knew Nick would probably be haunted by nightmares over what he had seen, but hoped the youngster never lost a second’s sleep over exterminating vermin like that.
A new sound caught The Kid’s attention. He turned and brought up the rifle as a growl came from a shadowy stall on the other side of the barn. Carefully, he moved toward it.
When he could see into the stall, he made out the body of another woman lying on a pile of hay. The front of her dress was dark with a huge, dried bloodstain. It looked like she had been shot or stabbed in several places.
A large, shaggy black-and-white dog sat at her feet, snarling and growling at The Kid. The dog didn’t make any move to get up and attack him. It stayed planted right where it was, protecting the body of its mistress.
“It’s all right, fella,” The Kid said. “I won’t hurt you. I didn’t do this.”
The dog couldn’t understand the words, but The Kid’s calm tone seemed to get through to it. Moving awkwardly, it lay down and rested its head on its paws.
Hoofbeats thundered up outside. The rest of the posse had arrived.
“Morgan!” Culhane shouted. “Morgan, where are you?”
The Kid walked to the front of the barn and pulled the partially open door back farther. He stepped out, and looked up at the Ranger and his men. “I hope you brought some shovels with you, Culhane. You’ve got some burying to do.”
Culhane insisted they bury the four dead outlaws, too.
“I ain’t gonna just leave ’em here to either rot or get drug off by scavengers,” the Ranger said. “We’ll put ’em in the ground ... but I damn sure ain’t sayin’ any words over ’em. Wouldn’t make any difference, anyway. I reckon the Devil’s already got ’em.”
All four of the outlaws were dumped in a shallow mass grave. With the women it was different. The posse members all pitched in and dug three deep graves for them. Culhane found blankets in the house in which to wrap the bodies.
“I wish we could take the time to nail together some coffins for these poor ladies,” he said as he stepped back from the shrouded shapes. “But we got to get back on the trail of the sons o’ bitches who did this.”
“You think Latch and his men are responsible for what happened here?” The Kid asked.
“You saw the tracks yourself,” Culhane said. “A big bunch rode up here and then rode out again in the last twelve hours. It’s got to be them.”
“And those men were part of the gang?” The Kid nodded toward the mass grave.
“Bound to be.”
“Why did Latch leave them behind?”
Culhane shook his head. “I don’t know. Don’t reckon it really matters, either.”
He was right about that, The Kid supposed.
When the bodies had been lowered gently into the graves and the holes refilled, the members of the posse gathered around and took off their hats. The old dog sat at the foot of the graves, whining softly as if he knew what was going on.
“I’ll say somethin’,” Culhane said, “unless somebody else wants to.”
No one volunteered, so after a moment the Ranger began to pray. He asked for mercy on the souls of the three women, and justice for the evil men who had harmed them. The prayer was short and simple, and when it was over several of the men muttered, “Amen.”
As they put their hats on and started to turn away, Nick Burton spoke up. “What about the dog?”
The sound of a shot startled everyone. The old dog crashed to the ground, shot through the head.
A few feet away, Vint Reilly stood with his revolver in his bandaged hand. A tendril of smoke curled from the barrel.
The Kid heard a terrible cry but didn’t realize it was coming from his own throat. He wasn’t aware that he was moving, either, until he had batted the gun out of Reilly’s hand, grabbed the front of the burned man’s shirt, and started shaking him.
“You bastard!” The Kid roared at Reilly. “What did you do that for?”
“Morgan!” Culhane yelled. “Morgan, stop it! Somebody grab him, damn it!”
Reilly wasn’t putting up a fight. He just stood there, his head jerking back and forth as The Kid shook him.
A second later, a couple men grabbed The Kid’s arms behind him and dragged him away from Reilly, who didn’t show any more reaction to being rescued than he had to being attacked.
The Kid stood there panting with anger as the men hung on to him. Reilly bent down slowly and picked up the gun The Kid had knocked out of his hand.
Culhane had his Colt out, pointed in Reilly’s general direction. “You’d better holster that hogleg, mister.”
Reilly calmly replaced the bullet he had fired, then slid the gun back into leather.
“And you’d better have a good explanation of why you did that,” Culhane added.
“It was a kindness,” Reilly rasped, forcing the words from his smoke-tortured throat.
“A kindness?” Culhane repeated. “How in blazes do you figure that?”
“You saw ... how old and crippled ... that dog was. What were you going to do? Leave him here ... to starve?”
“You didn’t have to kill him,” Nick said. “We could have taken him with us.”
“He never could have ... kept up.”
As much as The Kid hated to admit it, Reilly had a point about that, he thought as the red haze of rage that had fallen over his brain began to recede. But the callousness of the man’s action still bothered him.
“Besides,” Reilly went on, “everything the dog loved ... was dead. What reason did it have ... to go on living?”
Several members of the posse turned to look away uncomfortably, obviously thinking the same thing that went through the mind of everyone there.
Reilly was in pretty much the same shape as that dog, wasn’t he?
And hadn’t The Kid thought just the day before that the kindest thing anybody could do for the man was to put a bullet through his head?
“Let me go,” The Kid said quietly to the men holding him. “I’m all right now.”
Culhane nodded for the men to release him. As they did so, one of the cowboys from the M-B Connected suddenly said, “Riders coming fast!”
Everyone turned and saw three men on horseback galloping toward the ranch. Men riding that fast usually meant trouble, and this time was no exception. A second later a bullet whistled overhead, followed instantly by the sharp crack of a shot.
Chapter 12
“Take cover!” Culhane bellowed. The posse members hotfooted it for the barn, which was the closest structure.
The three riders continued to shoot. Firing from the backs of running horses at a distance of a couple hundred yards made their bullets go wild. As far as The Kid could tell, all the posse men reached cover without being hit.
He found himself just inside the barn door with Culhane. The Ranger peered out. “It takes men who are powerful foolish—or powerful mad—to charge a force that’s got ’em outnumbered eight to one.”
“You think they’re some of Latch’s men?” The Kid asked.
“I reckon it’s more likely they’ve got some connection with this ranch. The menfolks who live here, maybe.”
“Is that the reason you ordered everybody to take cover instead of shooting back at them?”
Culhane nodded. “I ain’t gonna make things worse here by killin’ somebody who’s got every right in the world to be mad.” He turned his head and called, “Everybody hold your fire. No shootin’ unless I give the word.”
The Kid hoped the members of the posse followed that order better than they had the day before, when Clyde Fenner and the others had opened fire on him as soon as they spotted him.
The shooting stopped, and The Kid couldn’t hear hoofbeats anymore. The three riders must have reached the graves.
Culhane seemed to have drawn the same conclusion. “I’m goin’ out there. Somebody needs to talk to those fellas and find out just what’s goin’ on here.”
“Not by yourself,” The Kid said. “I’m coming with you.”
“I ain’t askin’ for volunteers.”
“Didn’t say you were.”
Culhane shrugged and nodded. His gun was already in his hand as he said, “All right, come on.” He raised his voice. “The rest of you stay here.”
“What if they kill you, Culhane?” Ed Marchman asked from where he crouched behind the wall of a stall. “What are we supposed to do then?”
“I reckon that’ll be up to you. If it was up to me, though, I’d be careful not to get any innocent blood on my hands.”
“Anybody who shoots down a Texas Ranger isn’t innocent,” Marchman snapped.
“You got a point,” Culhane agreed, “but I still say don’t get trigger-happy.” With that, he stepped out into the open.
The Kid was at his side, Colt also drawn.
They moved carefully to the corner of the barn, and as they did, they heard sobbing.
When they reached a spot where they could see the three graves where the women were laid to rest, they stopped. One of the men had thrown himself on the ground at the foot of the graves, next to the body of the dog. The other two stood protectively over him, rifles raised.
“Hey, you fellas!” Culhane called. “Don’t shoot! We need to talk to you.”
The two men with rifles snapped the weapons up and pointed them toward the barn.
They were young, probably in their early twenties, The Kid saw at a glimpse before he and Culhane pulled back. Both were blond, with a definite resemblance not only between them but also to the two young women who had fallen victim to the outlaws. The Kid figured they were brothers to those two sisters.
He had already pegged the older woman for their mother, so that meant the man sobbing wretchedly over the graves was probably her husband and the father of the twins, as well as the two young men who had ridden up with him.
“Hold your fire,” Culhane went on. “We didn’t do this. I give you my word on that. I’m a Texas Ranger, name of Asa Culhane, and I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“How do we know that?” one of the young men asked.
“If you’ll let me step out where you can see me without shootin’ me, you’ll see the badge on my shirt,” Culhane said.
A moment of silence passed, broken only by the continued crying.
Finally, the one who had spoken said, “All right, come on. But you’d better have empty hands, mister.”
“That’s fine.” Culhane holstered his Colt. He glanced back at his companion. “Stay here, Morgan.”
The Kid nodded. Culhane lifted his hands so they would be in plain sight and stepped away from the barn, moving so the men at the graves could see him.
It took a lot of guts to step into the sights of two rifles like that, The Kid thought. But courage was something Texas Rangers had never been short on, according to everything he’d heard.
The two young men spoke quickly and quietly to each other. The Kid couldn’t make out the words. Then one of them asked, “You’re really a Ranger, mister?”
“I am,” Culhane said. “I’m leading a posse after a gang of owlhoots. We figure they’re the ones who ... did this.”
The young man’s voice broke a little as he asked, “What ... what did you find here?”
“Three women,” Culhane said, making his voice as gentle as he could. “One older lady and two gals who looked like twins.”
“Oh, Lord ... I thought maybe ... we hoped ...”
“But we knew all along it had to be them,” the other one said, “as soon as we saw the graves.”
“I’m sorry, boys,” Culhane said. “I can’t tell you how sorry we all are.”
He glanced over at The Kid and moved his head, indicating The Kid should come out from the cover of the barn wall. The Kid did so, but only after holstering his gun.
“This here is Morgan, another fella from the posse,” Culhane went on. “He can tell you more about it than I can. Him and another fella ridin’ with us caught some of the varmints who did this.”
The Ranger pointed at the mound of dirt that marked the mass grave. “That’s the four bastards lyin’ over there.”
“You killed them?” one of the young men asked. Both of them were crying now, too.
The Kid nodded. “They didn’t give us much choice. They must have been members of Latch’s gang.”
The man lying on the ground finally stopped sobbing enough to look up and say, “Latch? Warren Latch?”
“You know him, mister?” Culhane asked quickly.
“No, I ... I’ve just heard of him. The newspapers say he’s a madman.”
“I reckon they’re right,” Culhane said grimly. He started forward. “Lemme give you a hand. We’ll get in out of this sun.”
“My wife and my girls can’t,” the man said, his voice bitter and hurt. “They have to lie out here in it.”
“I know it ain’t much comfort, but they’re past hurtin’ now.”
The man struggled to his feet and pawed at his eyes with the back of a work-roughened hand. He was an older version of the two young men, with graying fair hair and a mustache.
“I’ve forgotten ... my hospitality. Come on in my house. I’ll see if we can ... rustle up something to eat.”
“That ain’t necessary,” Culhane assured him. “But we’ll go in and talk about this.”
Culhane put a hand on the man’s arm. He didn’t pull away. The Ranger led him toward the house.
One of the two young men asked The Kid, “What happened to old Tip? Looks like he was shot pretty recent-like.”
The Kid answered the question honestly. “One of our men put him down. We didn’t know if anybody was coming back, and he didn’t want to leave the dog here to starve. It was his idea. Ranger Culhane didn’t order it. But the hombre was just trying to ... do a kindness.”
He didn’t mention Reilly’s other comment about how the dog had nothing left to love.
Reilly had been wrong about that.
The young man knelt beside the dog and stroked a hand over the shaggy coat. His voice was choked as he said, “So long, Tip. I know you did everything you could to protect Ma and the girls.”
“Come on, Thad,” the other young man said. “We ought to go with Pa and make sure he’s all right.”
Thad nodded, forcing himself back to his feet.
They started toward the ranch house with The Kid. Thad said, “My name’s Thad Gustaffson. This is my brother Bill. Our pa’s Abel.”
“Morgan,” The Kid introduced himself.
As they passed the open barn door, he called to the men inside. “The trouble’s over. See to your horses. We’ll be riding soon.”
Ed Marchman stepped into view, crading his rifle. “Mighty quick to start giving orders, aren’t you, Morgan?” the man asked in an unpleasant tone.
“It’s not an order, Marchman,” The Kid said. “Just common sense.”
Nick Burton stepped out of the barn and nodded. “We’ll do what you say, Mr. Morgan.” He turned and called to his grandfather’s hands. “M-B Connected, let’s go!”
It wasn’t the strongest tone of command The Kid had ever heard ... but it was a start, he thought with a faint smile.
“My wife’s name was Molly,” Abel Gustaffson said. “The twins were Helen and Paula.” He took a gulp from the glass of whiskey in front of him as he sat at a rough-hewn table in one side of the double cabin. He had taken the bottle from a cabinet. “They were seventeen.”
“I’m sure sorry,” Culhane said. “For what it’s worth, which I know ain’t a whole hell of a lot, I don’t reckon any of ’em suffered much.”
“They weren’t ... mistreated?”
“No, sir, not a bit.”
That was a bald-faced lie, The Kid thought ... but he would have answered Gustaffson the same way Culhane had. It wouldn’t change a damned thing for the man to know the sort of hell his daughters had gone through before they died.
And at least it was true about Molly Gustaffson. The Kid had found a pitchfork in the barn with dried blood on the tines and assumed she had been killed with it. He figured she had died fairly quickly.
“The boys and I drove some cattle down to the shipping pens on the railroad, about thirty miles south of here,” Gustaffson went on, obviously feeling the need to explain why the three women had been alone. “I knew we’d only be gone for a few days, and we’ve never had any trouble before. It’s not like we have to worry about Comanches or anything like that, the way folks used to.”
“No, sir, that’s right,” Culhane said from the other side of the table. “There was no way you could have known what was gonna happen. No way on God’s green earth.”
“Molly is ... was ...” Gustaffson had to stop and draw a breath before he could go on. “She was cool-headed, and a good shot. She’d killed wolves with that old Henry before. I thought ... they would be all right.”
“We all did, Pa,” Bill Gustaffson said.
The rancher looked across the table at Culhane. “Did you say proper words over them?”
“I tried, sir. I did my level best. We all did. They was laid to rest with respect.”
“Thank you for that,” Gustaffson murmured. He looked over at The Kid, who had turned around one of the chairs and straddled it. “And thank you for killing the miserable scum that did this.”
“They got what was coming to them,” The Kid said. “Probably more mercy than they deserved, because they died fast.”
Gustaffson nodded. “But the rest of that bunch of devils ... they got away.”
“Not for good,” Culhane promised. “We’re fixin’ to get on their trail again, Mr. Gustaffson. We’ll see to it they’re brought to justice.”
“You won’t go alone,” Gustaffson declared. “We’re coming with you.”
“That’s right,” Thad said, and Bill nodded.
“Now hold on.” Culhane said. “You can’t—”
“Why not?” Gustaffson cut in. His face was still streaked with dried tears, but his terrible sorrow had settled down into a deep and abiding rage.
The Kid recognized that. He had experienced the same thing more than once in his life.
“Are you gonna say we can’t go with you, Ranger?” Gustaffson asked. “Why in blazes shouldn’t we?”
“I know you want vengeance, Mr. Gustaffson, but you should leave that to us,” Culhane insisted.
“Didn’t you say half the men in your posse came along because Latch and his men burned down their homes and businesses and killed their loved ones? My house is still standing, but the pain these boys and I feel is just as deep as anybody else’s in that posse!”
“We’re not out for vengeance any more than they are, Ranger,” Thad added.
Culhane couldn’t argue with that. After a moment, he nodded. “All right. You’re welcome to come along, and I’ll be honest with you, I’ll be glad to have three more guns. But what about your ranch?”
“You’re headed east, right?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll pass a neighbor’s spread a few miles from here. I can get him to look after the place while we’re gone.”
Bill Gustaffson suddenly looked alarmed. “Doris!” he exclaimed.
“That’s the gal my brother’s been courtin’ on that other spread,” Thad explained. “He’s worried Latch and his men might have stopped there, too.”
Culhane put his hands on the table and shoved himself to his feet. “We’d best get a move on then, so we can find out. You fellas best pack some supplies, if you got ’em. Do you have any fresh horses?”
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