Deadly Road to Yuma (23 page)

It was the steam pressure gauge, Matt realized as a narrow stream of the white, scalding stuff suddenly shot out. It washed right over Shade’s gun hand, and Shade screamed as the burning pain made him drop the gun.

Matt vaulted over the top of the tender and landed lithely in the cab, neatly avoiding the bodies of the dead men that lay there. He swung his pistol in a backhanded blow that slashed across Joshua Shade’s face and drove the outlaw away from the controls. Matt lunged for the throttle and pulled it back, then grabbed the brake and hauled on it as hard as he could. With jolting shudders that rattled his bones and threatened to shake his teeth out of his head, the locomotive began to slow.

Sam swung around into the cab and kicked away the gun Shade had dropped, just to make sure the lunatic didn’t get his hands on the weapon again. Then both of the blood brothers stood there covering Shade as the train gradually stopped.

“Looks like you’ll live to hang after all, Shade,” Matt said as the four strangers who had survived the battle with the outlaws galloped up alongside the cab.

“That’s where you’re wrong, mister,” the bearded leader said as he and the others suddenly trained their guns on Matt and Sam. “You’re all dyin’, right here and now.”

Matt and Sam reacted instinctively. Sam kicked Shade’s feet out from under him and dropped into a crouch next to the outlaw as the strangers opened fire and sent bullets screaming through the air over his head. Matt filled both hands with his irons and backed against the tender as he blazed away at the would-be killers.

Neither of them knew who these men were or why they wanted them dead. Neither of them cared.

It was a fight to the finish.

Sam drilled one of the men and knocked him out of the saddle. Matt ventilated another, then staggered as a bullet creased his thigh. His guns had each held only a few rounds when he slapped leather, but those bullets would have to be enough.

Matt’s last round blasted a hole in the middle of a gunman’s forehead, but that left the bearded man still alive, and Sam’s Colt had just clicked on an empty chamber, too. The bearded man chopped down with his gun, ready to fire again, but before he could pull the trigger, the whipcrack of a rifle sounded.

The man jerked in the saddle, arching his back. He grimaced as his grip on the gun butt slipped. The barrel dropped as the weapon pivoted on the man’s trigger finger. Then it slipped off entirely and thudded to the ground.

The man followed it a second later, falling off his horse to land beside the locomotive’s cab.

Matt leaned out to look back along the tracks. A man on horseback sat about a hundred yards behind the locomotive. Matt recognized him as Marshal Asa Thorpe. Smoke trickled from the barrel of the rifle Thorpe had pressed to his shoulder.

Slowly, Thorpe lowered the rifle and then rode forward. As he came closer, Matt saw the dark stain on the lawman’s shirt and knew that Thorpe was wounded.

Matt turned and saw that Sam was checking on Shade. “Was he hit?”

Sam shook his head. “No, he’s fine, just out cold from hitting his head on the floor when I knocked him down. Matt…what just happened here?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Matt said.

He thumbed fresh shells into his gun, and then climbed down from the cab as Thorpe rode up and reined to a halt. “How bad are you hurt, Marshal?” Matt asked.

Thorpe grunted. “I’ll live. Some son of a bitch pretending to be the conductor creased me and knocked me out. I reckon he thought I was dead.” The lawman shook his head. “He killed Everett, though, I’m sorry to say, then got away with Shade.”

“Shade’s up here in the cab,” Sam called down. “He’s all right. But who are these hombres?”

“This one’s still alive,” Thorpe said as he knelt beside the man he had shot. “Let’s ask him.”

Matt hunkered on the other side of the bearded man and lifted his head. The man’s eyes flickered open. Thorpe said, “Who are you, mister, and why did you just try to kill Joshua Shade?”

The wounded man struggled to speak. Finally, he got out, “Wasn’t Shade…we were really after. We were paid to kill…Thomas Jeffries.”

“Who in blazes is Thomas Jeffries?” Matt asked.

The man lifted a shaky hand. “I saw him…up there…in the cab…dressed like…a conductor.”

“He was one of Shade’s men, all right,” Thorpe said.

“He had…a fifty-thousand-dollar…price on his head,” the dying man gasped.

“Who would put a bounty that big on some owlhoot?” Matt wanted to know. “He wasn’t even the leader of the gang!”

“It was…his father.”

“His father!” The exclamation came from Matt, Sam, and Thorpe all at the same time.

“Yeah.” The bearded man grimaced. “Senator…Jeffries. Bastard got me and all my men…killed…don’t figure we owe him…any loyalty anymore.”

Thorpe leaned over the man and said urgently, “Don’t die, you son of a bitch! You’ve got some more explaining to do!”

But it was too late. Thorpe was talking to a dead man.

Two days later, at dawn, Joshua Shade was led out of his cell at Yuma Prison and taken under heavy guard to the courtyard where a gallows awaited him. Under an arched door at the edge of that courtyard stood Matt Bodine, Sam Two Wolves, and Marshal Asa Thorpe.

“As best we’ve been able to piece it together,” Thorpe said, “Senator Jeffries knew his son had turned outlaw and had been trying to find him. He got word that the boy was riding with Shade’s gang just about the same time the news reached Washington that Shade had been captured and was going to be put on trial. The senator figured that Shade’s gang would try to rescue him, so he hired that killer, LaFollette, to put together a group of gunmen and follow Shade’s gang.”

“So they could get Jeffries away from the gang?” Matt asked.

Thorpe shook his head. Out in the courtyard, Shade and his guards had almost reached the thirteen steps that led up to the gallows.

“No, that fella Winslow overheard enough while he was with LaFollette’s bunch to put it together with the other things we know and figure that they were supposed to kill Thomas Jeffries, Shade, the rest of the gang, and anybody who knew anything about Jeffries riding with them.”

“That explains the bounty,” Sam said. “My God, to think that a man would pay to have his own son assassinated just to spare himself some political trouble.”

“The senator didn’t want it known that his son was an owlhoot,” Thorpe agreed. “He was willing to go to any length to cover that up, including putting pressure on the Justice Department to set me up as a Judas goat.”

Matt shook his head in awe at the brutal plan. “So you weren’t ever supposed to get Shade here. The senator figured Shade’s gang would kill you and free Shade, and then LaFollette and the rest of those hired guns could wipe out the gang.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Thorpe agreed. “They had to wait until Shade was back with the gang before they made their move, though. Senator Jeffries couldn’t risk leaving Shade alive to maybe reveal the truth.”

“Did Shade even
know
that Jeffries was related to a senator?” Matt asked.

“I couldn’t tell you,” Thorpe said with disgust in his voice. “Shade won’t—or can’t—answer any questions. He’s completely lost his mind now.”

They heard the outlaw’s ranting as he was led struggling up the steps to the platform. It was a mixture of Scripture, obscenity, and pure gibberish.

“That hombre’s crazy as a hydrophobia skunk,” Matt said. “Something must be rottin’ his brain.”

“It won’t have a chance to rot much longer,” Thorpe said. “Or, in one way, I guess it will. It’ll rot along with the rest of him.”

The grim-faced hangman lowered a black shroud over Shade’s head, muffling the incoherent shouts.

“What about the Winslows?” Sam asked. “Will they be facing any charges for helping Shade’s gang try to rescue him?”

“The federal government’s not going to prosecute them.” Thorpe looked at Matt. “You want to press charges against the lady for trying to take a shot at you?”

“After what she went through? Hell, no.”

“What’s going to happen to the senator now?” Sam asked.

Thorpe gave a grunt of grim laughter. “I suppose they’ll bury him. According to a telegram I got just a little while ago, he put a bullet in his head last night when he realized the whole thing was coming out in the open.”

Sam shook his head. “All that killing over politics.”

“It wasn’t
all
about politics,” Matt said. “Some of it was because Shade and his men were a bunch of low-down skunks.”

“Well, yeah, that, too.”

They looked out into the courtyard. The hangman had the noose around Shade’s neck now. A preacher—a
real
preacher, not a loco outlaw—finished whatever he was saying and stepped back, closing the Bible in his hands.

“Do you really want to watch this?” Sam asked.

“You know,” Matt said, “I don’t reckon I do. So long, Marshal.”

“Where are you two headed?” Thorpe asked.

“Someplace a long way from here,” Matt said.

He and Sam turned and walked away along a passage that led to the prison’s front gate. They heard the clatter of the trapdoor dropping open in the courtyard, followed an instant later by the sharp snap of a broken neck, but neither of the blood brothers looked back.

They were thinking about how good it would be to leave this behind, to find someplace where the air was clean and eagles soared through blue skies high overhead.