Deadly Road to Yuma (6 page)

The men had almost reached the door of the sheriff’s office when Flagg pointed his rifle in the air and pulled the trigger. The crack of the Winchester made the men stop in their tracks. Some of them whirled around and started to raise their weapons, but they froze when they saw the muzzles of two shotguns pointing at them.

“What the hell, Sheriff!” one of the townies yelled.

“Back away from there!” Flagg rumbled. He jerked his rifle in a slashing motion to emphasize the order. “That’s my jail, by God, and nobody sets foot in there without my say-so!”

“There’s a rumor you got Joshua Shade locked up in there, Cyrus,” another man said. “A couple fellas saw you and those drifters draggin’ him into the jail.”

“Don’t you worry about who I got locked up,” Flagg snapped. “That’s the law’s business. Now, I want you all to break it up and go on about your business…except for a couple of good men who are willin’ to serve as lookouts on top of the bank and the hotel.”

Some uneasy muttering came from the crowd. “That’s where Harlan and Charlie were, and they wound up dead,” one of the men said.

“That’s not gonna happen again.”

“How do you know that, Sheriff?”

“Because Shade’s men know that we’re ready for ’em now. They’ll have more sense than to try to attack the town again tonight.”

“But they might some other time,” another man declared, “because they know that Shade’s a prisoner!”

“If we go ahead and hang him, they won’t have any reason to come back here!”

Cries of agreement went up from most of the men.

Sam’s voice rose powerfully to cut through the hubbub. “What about vengeance?” he asked. “If you lynch Shade, you’ll just give his men even more reason to come back to Arrowhead!”

That reasoning quieted the mob for a moment. Flagg took advantage of the opportunity to say, “I’m gonna send a rider to Tucson first thing in the mornin’. We’ll have a judge out here in less’n a week, so we can give Shade a proper trial…and
then
hang him!”

The sheriff was no longer making any pretense that Shade might not be in the jail. He had just admitted it, for all intents and purposes.

But the mob had been convinced of that already, so the admission didn’t really make any difference.

“You sure he’s gonna hang?” a man asked.

“He’s got to be found guilty first,” another pointed out.

“Hell, we got dozens o’ witnesses who saw him lead that charge into town, shootin’ all the way,” Flagg said. “He’s been seen in other towns, too, raidin’ and killin’. No jury’s gonna find him innocent. You know that.”

More nods and mutters of agreement came from the crowd.

“So go on home,” Flagg continued, “unless you want to volunteer to take a shift on lookout duty.”

Several men stepped forward, and Flagg picked two of them to climb up on the hotel and the bank.

“We gotta get poor Charlie and Harlan down from there, too,” Flagg said. “Maybe some of you boys could help out with that.”

The local undertaker already had his wagon parked in the street, and he and a helper were loading up the bodies of the outlaws that had been left behind.

The crowd in front of the jail began to disperse. Matt, Sam, and Flagg watched them go.

“Looks like you may not need our help after all,” Matt said.

“You did a good job of talking some sense into their heads, Sheriff,” Sam added.

Flagg shook his head sadly. “They listened to me for now, but once they get back in the saloons and take on a snootful o’ Who-hit-John, they’ll get mad again. They’ll egg each other on until sooner or later they decide not to wait for the judge. Might not happen tonight, but sooner or later they’ll make another try for Shade.”

“If they do, we’ll be here to stop them,” Sam said.

“But I’m gonna hate like hell to maybe have to shoot some honest folks just to protect a crazy polecat like Shade,” Matt added.

“You and me both, Bodine,” Sheriff Flagg agreed with a sigh. “You and me both.”

“They were waitin’ for us!” one of the outlaws raged. “We got the signal to come in, but the bastards were still waitin’ for us!”

“You ain’t tellin’ me anything I don’t already know,” Willard Garth growled. “And you all should’ve knowed there was a chance o’ that happenin’, since we heard those shots beforehand. Somebody caught our boys after they got rid of the lookouts that old desert rat told us about.”

“The reverend should’ve known that,” a man named Jeffries said. He was more educated than most of the gang, but just as ruthless. “We never should have attacked the town.”

“Don’t you say nothin’ bad about the rev’rend!” Gonzalez said. “He’s made us all rich men!”

In truth, they weren’t all that rich, Garth thought, but they had done all right for themselves. And it was Joshua Shade’s planning, as well as his sheer audacity and his ability to inspire the men, that had made it all possible. Gonzalez was right about that.

The members of the gang had scattered as they fled from Arrowhead, rendezvousing in the hills where their last camp had been, according to the plan laid out by Shade before the attack. Shade didn’t like the idea of acknowledging the possibility of defeat, but he was too smart not to plan for it in case it happened.

However, this was the first time one of their raids had not gone exactly the way Shade had told them it would. The men were upset because some of their fellow outlaws had been killed and their leader had been captured.

Garth himself had seen Shade being disarmed and knocked out, but hadn’t been able to get to him because of the heavy gunfire from the townspeople. He assumed that by now they had locked Shade up in the local jail, but he didn’t know that for sure.

He was confident that Shade was still alive, though. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that the reverend would come to such an ignominious end as to be killed by a bunch of pathetic townies.

Jeffries said, “The question now is, what are we going to do about this, Garth? Those yokels are liable to try to lynch the boss.”

“And they got to pay for what they did to us!” Gonzalez added.

“I know, I know.” Garth took off his high-crowned hat and wearily scrubbed a hand over his rough-hewn face. He didn’t like having to do a lot of thinking, which was the main reason he had starting riding with Joshua Shade in the first place. Over time, he had risen to the position of Shade’s segundo because he was tough and trustworthy, not because he was all that smart.

Now the rest of the men were looking to him to figure out their course of action, and it was an uncomfortable feeling. He took orders well, and he could give them, too, when somebody else came up with them. He could ride all day and all night when he had to, and he didn’t mind killing without mercy.

But he wasn’t a leader.

Not by choice anyway.

Even in the moonlight, Garth could see ambition gleaming in Jeffries’s eyes as the man crowded his horse forward. “Well, how about it?” Jeffries prodded.

Garth knew what Jeffries was thinking. Jeffries sensed an opening. He thought that
he
should be in charge now that Shade was a prisoner down in that backwater cow town.

Garth was damned if he was going to let that happen, no matter how uncomfortable he was in the role.

“They’re ready for us down there,” he said harshly. “We go chargin’ back in tonight, they’ll cut us to ribbons. We got to wait. Bide our time and see what’s gonna happen.”

“You mean leave the rev’rend a prisoner?” Gonzalez shook his head. “I don’t like that, Garth.”

“I don’t like it either,” Garth snapped, “but we don’t have much choice. We’ll get him loose, but we got to wait until the time is right.”

“How are we going to know that?” Jeffries asked.

Garth chewed on his mustache where it hung over his lips. “I wish the boss hadn’t killed that old prospector. We could’ve sent him back in to spy for us, like he did before.”

“Maybe what we need to do,” Jeffries said, “is to find another spy.”

Gonzalez looked over at him. “Where we gonna do that?”

“There are ranches around here,” Jeffries said with a shrug. “Find a small one where it’s just a man and his family, maybe a hand or two, and take it over. A man will do whatever you tell him to when it’s a matter of protecting his wife and kids.”

That was a good idea, Garth realized. He wished he had thought of it himself. But he couldn’t afford to ignore the suggestion just because Jeffries had come up with it.

“All right,” he said. “That’s what we’ll do. Half a dozen men ought to be plenty. The rest of you stay here and patch up any wounds you got during the ruckus in town.”

Jeffries and Gonzales volunteered to go with Garth, who quickly picked out three other men to accompany them. The six of them mounted up and rode off into the night.

“I don’t like the way you said the rev’rend made a mistake by killin’ that old man,” Gonzalez grumbled. “He thought he was doin’ the right thing.”

“I didn’t see any reason not to kill that desert rat either…at the time,” Garth said. “It just goes to show you that nobody can think of everything, at least not all the time.”

“The rev’rend can,” Gonzalez insisted.

If that was true, thought Garth, then Shade wouldn’t be sitting in some little cow country jail right now. He kept that sentiment to himself, though. No point in making the Mexican even proddier than he already was, or in encouraging Jeffries to be even more ambitious.

He was going to have his hands full running the gang, Garth told himself. He just hoped that he would be up to the job until they freed Joshua Shade so that he could take his rightful place as the boss outlaw once again.

Garth hoped that day came soon, too.

The dogs barking woke Tom Peterson. His wife Frannie stirred in the bed beside him. They were spooning, and it felt good when her rump moved against him.

He couldn’t think about that right now, though, because the dogs were upset about something. Might be a wolf or a bear had wandered down from the mountains and was nosing around the stock.

Better get up and check, Tom told himself. It would be a lot more pleasurable, though, to just lie here, maybe wake Frannie up the rest of the way for a little slap an’ tickle. The young’uns were sound asleep in the loft.

With a sigh, Tom moved away from his wife and swung his legs out of bed. Wearing long underwear, he stood up and moved across the darkened room to twitch aside the curtains over the window. Frannie was mighty proud of those curtains, having bought the material for them at one of the mercantiles in Arrowhead.

A lantern was burning in the little shed next to the barn where Felipe slept. The old vaquero was the only hand Tom had hired. He and Felipe took care of things around the spread by themselves, helped a little by Tom’s boys, who were eleven and eight and turning into pretty fair hands themselves.

Felipe would see what had the dogs so stirred up, Tom told himself. He turned to go back to bed.

Before he could get there, he heard one of the dogs give a yelp of pain.

Frowning, Tom swung toward the door instead of the bed. No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t ignore the fact that something was going on. He took down the Henry rifle from the pegs beside the door and levered a round into the chamber. Then he pulled the latch string and pushed the door open.

As the door swung back, Tom heard Felipe’s voice start to rise in a startled shout. It was cut off a second later, and the abruptness of it made Tom’s heart thud heavily with fear. He rushed outside, holding the gun ready.

Something cracked across his ankles. He cried out in pain and dismay as he felt himself toppling forward. The impact as he hit the ground jolted the Henry out of his hands. He reached for it, only to have a boot come down hard on his fingers. He yelled in pain.

“Tom?” Frannie’s sleep-fuzzed voice came from inside the house. “Tom, what’s going on out there?”

He wanted to call out and warn her, but someone grabbed him by the hair, jerked his head up, and pressed the keen blade of a knife against his throat.

“Not a sound, Señor,” a voice hissed in his ear.

A second later, Frannie cried out, and only the knife at his throat kept Tom from moving. He felt a warm trickle of blood down his neck, and knew that the least bit more pressure would send the blade slicing deeply into his flesh.

“Get him up,” a rough voice ordered.

A hand tugged on Tom’s long underwear, urging him upright. The knife remained at his throat as he climbed to his feet. To his horror, he saw his wife in the moonlight with a man standing behind her, one arm around her throat and the other hand holding a gun to her head.

“Do what we tell you, hombre,” the man said, “and nobody’ll get hurt. But if you give us any trouble, we’ll just kill everybody on this spread and move on.”

“But not before we have some fun with this pretty little wife of yours,” another man said as he came forward, and as Tom’s eyes gazed around wildly, he saw several other shapes emerge from the darkness. He was surrounded. Helpless, not only because he was outnumbered, but because these strangers were threatening Frannie.