Deadly Road to Yuma (8 page)

Shade hadn’t eaten the breakfast that Flagg had brought him that morning, nor had he touched the food on the tray the sheriff carried into the cell at midday. Both times, Matt and Sam had stood just outside the cell door with rifles trained on the prisoner as Flagg took the food inside.

When it came time for supper, Flagg said, “Damned if I’m gonna waste more o’ the town’s money on feedin’ that vicious son of a bitch when he don’t eat none of what I bring him.”

“There’s food in there if he wants it bad enough,” Matt pointed out.

“I’ll stay here for a while. Why don’t you boys go get you something to eat? I’m sure you wouldn’t mind bein’ out o’ this place for a while.”

The blood brothers looked at each other. Matt shrugged and said, “Might as well. We can get back here in a hurry if there’s any trouble.”

“That’s right,” Flagg agreed. “If you hear a scattergun go off, though, I’d be obliged if you’d come a-runnin’.”

“I could use a cold beer, too,” Matt said as they left the jail. He grinned. “And I’ll bet that girl Amelia at the Ten Grand would be mighty pleased to see you again, Sam.”

“I think we should just get the beer and then something to eat,” Sam said.

“Whatever you say,” Matt replied with a chuckle.

Archie Cochran was behind the bar again when they entered the Ten Grand this evening. He lifted a hand in greeting and started drawing two beers without being asked as Matt and Sam headed for the bar.

As he set the foaming mugs in front of them, Archie said, “On the house, boys. After what you did last night, I’m not sure your money’s good in here anymore.”

“Is that your decision to make?” Sam asked.

Archie laughed. “I own the place, so it damned well better be!”

Matt took a long swallow and sighed with satisfaction as he lowered the mug to the bar. “We’re much obliged,” he said.

“Nothin’s too good for the men who captured Joshua Shade.” A worried frown briefly crossed the bartender’s face. “Of course, some folks in town aren’t so happy with you boys. They figure Shade would be rottin’ on the end of a rope by now if it wasn’t for you backin’ up Sheriff Flagg.”

“No one has the right to take the law into their own hands,” Sam said.

“Maybe not under normal circumstances…but I reckon most folks feel like these ain’t normal circumstances. A lot of people are grievin’ tonight.”

“Like Stan Hightower?” Matt suggested.

Archie cast a nervous glance from side to side. He leaned forward over the bar and lowered his voice as he said, “You didn’t hear it from me, but I’ve got a pretty good idea that Stan’s not gonna wait for that judge to get here. I don’t want to see old Cyrus get hurt. What he ought to do—what you boys ought to do, too, if you’re still helpin’ him out—is to take a ride out of town for an hour or so this evenin’. It’d all be over by the time you got back.”

“We can’t do that, Archie,” Sam said. “Neither can the sheriff.”

Archie sighed. “Yeah, I figured as much. But I didn’t think it’d hurt anything to mention it.”

Matt and Sam finished their beers, then left the saloon. They walked down the street to the hash house where Sheriff Flagg had been getting their meals. The food had been good so far, so they didn’t see any reason to change horses in midstream.

They were polishing off platters of thick steaks and mounds of German potatoes when they heard a racket from the street. A large number of riders were passing by outside.

Matt and Sam looked across the table at each other. Matt said, “I don’t reckon we ought to wait for the sound of a shotgun blast, do you?”

“Not hardly,” Sam agreed. “Let’s go.”

Matt dropped a greenback on the table to pay for their meals, and they headed for the door…but not before casting regretful glances at what was left of their food. As they emerged from the café, they looked toward the sheriff’s office and saw that the riders had reined to a halt in front of the blocky stone building.

One man edged his horse to the forefront of the group and yelled, “Open up in there, Sheriff! Nobody has to get hurt here!”

Quite a few townspeople had heard the commotion and were now heading toward the jail. Most of them were grim-faced men who carried rifles or shotguns, Matt and Sam noted.

They exchanged worried glances. The situation was developing just as Sheriff Flagg and Archie Cochran had predicted it would. The members of the lynch mob that had been turned back the night before were ready to join Stan Hightower and his men for another stab at hanging Joshua Shade.

“We should’ve brought those Greeners with us,” Matt muttered as they started walking toward the jail.

“We’ll have to make do with what we have,” Sam said.

As they got closer, they saw that the men who had ridden into town with Stan Hightower were all tough, competent-looking hombres. They bristled with hardware, too. Each man was armed with a rifle and at least one handgun.

If it came to shooting, both Matt and Sam knew that they couldn’t stand up to those odds for very long. And some innocent folks would be killed, too. Although you could argue that if they were all that innocent, they wouldn’t be joining lynch mobs, Matt thought.

Still, with all the hell Shade had raised, all the innocent folks
he
had killed, it was easy to get carried away with the desire for vengeance.

“Damn it, Cyrus, open up!” yelled the man who had to be Stan Hightower. “Don’t make us bust in there!”

The inside shutters had been closed over the windows, Matt noted as he and Sam drew closer. Now one of the shutters was pulled back a little and the barrel of a rifle thrust through the opening. Guns came up in the hands of Hightower’s punchers in response to the threat.

“Go home, Stan!” Sheriff Flagg shouted from inside the jail. “You know good an’ well I can’t let you have Shade!”

“He doesn’t deserve to have a good man like you protecting him!” Hightower replied.

“Maybe not, but he’s my prisoner and I ain’t lettin’ anything happen to him! You and your boys just turn around and go home! Margery’s already grievin’. You don’t want to make it worse on her.”

“I don’t see how hanging that murdering bastard Shade could make it any worse on her!” Hightower replied.

“Because she’ll be a widow, too!”

Hightower stiffened and sat up straighter in the saddle as the implications of Flagg’s words obviously hit him. “Hold on there, Cyrus,” he said. “You and I have always been friends.”

“That was before you came stompin’ up to my door and told me to turn a prisoner over to you! I got this rifle pointed right at you, and the first man takes a step toward this door, I’m pullin’ the trigger!”

A man in the crowd shouted, “Don’t let him talk to you like that, Stan! He wouldn’t dare shoot you, and you know it!”

Hightower might have his doubts that Flagg would shoot, but he couldn’t be sure of that. And having a gun pointed directly at him had a wonderful way of clearing the fog of emotion from a fellow’s mind.

“Hold on now,” Hightower said as he gestured toward the men in the crowd. “Don’t go doing anything foolish.”

“Shade killed your own wife’s pa,” a man argued. “You can’t let him get away with that.”

From inside the jail, Flagg called, “He won’t get away with it! He’ll hang! But it’ll happen legal-like!”

“You can’t stop us by yourself, Cyrus!” another man shouted.

Matt nodded to Sam and shucked his irons. Beside him, Sam drew his Colt as well. They eared back the hammers on the weapons, and even in the noisy street, the men closest to them heard those ominous metallic sounds.

“Oh, hell!” one of those men exclaimed as he glanced over his shoulder. “It’s Bodine and Two Wolves! They’re behind us!”

That news flashed through the crowd like wildfire. Men turned and started to reach for their pistols or lift their rifles they held, but they froze as they found themselves staring down the menacing barrels of the blood brothers’ revolvers.

“I’ve got six in each wheel, gents,” Matt said into the sudden silence, “and so does Sam here. That’s eighteen shots. Tell me…which eighteen of you want to die?”

“You can’t kill a man with every shot!” one of the mob blustered.

“Care to bet
your
life on that, amigo?” Matt drawled as a reckless grin played around his wide mouth.

Hightower turned his horse and forced his way through the crowd until he confronted Matt and Sam. Glaring at them, he said, “I’ve always heard that you two were law-abiding men. Why are you taking the side of a vicious murderer?”

“Because we
are
law-abiding men,” Sam replied. “We want to see Shade hanged just as much as you do, Mr. Hightower, but you should leave it to the law to do it.”

“The law!” Hightower made a slashing motion with his hand. “You can’t count on the law! Out here the only real law is what a man carries on his hip!”

“I reckon that’s always been true,” Matt said. “But things have started to change. I don’t like it all the time either. In the long run, though, there’s nothin’ we can do about it, because nothin’ stays the same forever.”

Hightower stared at them for a long moment, then said, “You really think the law will take care of Joshua Shade?”

“I do,” Sam said.

“So do I,” Matt said.

Hightower hesitated a moment longer, then sighed and nodded. “All right. I know Cyrus Flagg is an honest man, and I’ll trust him—and you boys—for now.” The rancher’s voice hardened. “But the law had better do its job…or the rest of us will take care of it ourselves.”

“You mean there’s not gonna be a hangin’?” one of the men asked in a disappointed tone.

“Not tonight,” snapped Hightower. “We’ll see about tomorrow or next week.” He lifted his reins. “Come on, boys. Diamond H, follow me!”

Loud mutters of discontent came from the crowd, but it began to disperse rapidly once Hightower and his punchers had galloped off. Matt and Sam lowered the hammers on their guns, but didn’t holster the weapons until everyone had drifted off to the saloons or their homes.

The jail door swung open. “Get in here while the gettin’s good,” Flagg urged from inside.

The blood brothers went into the jail. Flagg slammed the door behind them, lowered the thick bar across it, and heaved a sigh of relief. Back in the cell block, Shade was yelling, but the three of them had learned not to pay any attention to that.

“How long do you reckon we can keep dodgin’ this particular bullet?” Matt asked.

“Until the judge gets here, I hope,” Flagg replied. “Once folks see that Shade’s gonna get what’s comin’ to him, I think all this lynch fever will settle down.”

Matt grunted. “Yeah, well, I’ve got a hunch it’s gonna be a
long
week.”

In the deep gully cut by the San Francisco River, about a quarter of a mile from Arrowhead, Willard Garth asked, “Damn it, when’s the shootin’ gonna start?”

Gonzalez, who was the stealthiest of them all now that the men who had slipped into the settlement the previous night to dispose of the lookouts were dead, said in a tone of disgust, “There ain’t gonna be no shootin’. That mob of gutless gringos broke up and went home because they were afraid of Bodine and Two Wolves and the sheriff.”

“No lynching?” Jeffries asked.

Gonzalez put his sombrero on and shook his head.
“Nada.”
Using the shadows for concealment, he had slipped into the town on foot and gotten close enough in an alley to see and hear everything that went on during the confrontation in front of the jail.

Jeffries turned to Garth. “Now what the hell are we going to do? We’re in the same situation we were in before. We can try to break Joshua out of that jail—”

“And get the gang shot to pieces in the process,” Garth interrupted. “I know, damn it, I know.”

It wasn’t fair. He had come up with a plan all on his own, a plan that actually might have worked, and now it was ruined because a bunch of cowards wouldn’t stand up to an old sheriff and a couple of cheap gunslingers.

He became aware that all the men were staring at him in the moonlight, waiting for him to make a decision. All he could think of to say was, “We’ll just have to wait for a better time.”

“And how will we know when that is?” Jeffries asked. “We can’t just waltz into town and ask somebody what’s going on.”

“We’ll find somebody to, uh, to spy for us…”

“Like we did before?” A cold laugh came from Jeffries. “Maybe we’d better stop killing our informants so quickly.”

“But the last ones died so
good,
” Gonzalez said.

“Don’t worry none about that,” Garth said. “Ain’t never gonna be a shortage of folks to kill.”

Despite Matt’s ominous prediction, the next few days passed relatively peacefully in Arrowhead. There was still considerable muttering going on in the town about how Joshua Shade ought to be taken out and strung up, Flagg reported when he came back to the jail from his forays outside a couple of times a day, but without somebody powerful like Stan Hightower to back them up, the men who would have been eager to form a mob settled for grousing in their beer.

The part-time deputy Flagg had sent to Tucson arrived back in Arrowhead five days after he left, bringing good news with him.

“The judge is about a day behind me,” he told Flagg as he lowered his weary body into one of the chairs in the sheriff’s office. “He’ll be here sometime tomorrow, and he said he’d hold the trial right away.”

Flagg sighed in relief. “And we’ll have Shade strung up as soon as the trial’s over, I’m bettin’. But at least it’ll be legal.”

Shade had quieted down considerably the past couple of days. He sat on the bunk in the cell, constantly muttering to himself. Matt and Sam didn’t know if he was praying, calling down curses on his enemies, or just raving maniacally, but any time one of them stepped into the cell block, day or night, he could hear the soft voice from Shade’s cell.

The outlaw had started eating, too. The blood brothers supposed it was so he could keep his strength up for whatever he was doing in there.

Now, after hearing that the trial was imminent, Sheriff Flagg said to Matt and Sam, “I reckon you boys will be glad when this is all over and you can be on your way.”

“We were in no hurry to get anywhere,” Sam said,

“Just driftin’,” Matt added.

A knock sounded on the thick front door. All four men in the office tensed at the sound, but they relaxed as they realized how unlikely it was that a lynch mob would knock so politely. Flagg went to the door and called through it, “Who’s there?”

“It’s Matthew Wiley, Cyrus.”

Flagg grunted in surprise and turned to look at Matt and Sam. “The mayor o’ Arrowhead,” he said by way of explaining who Matthew Wiley was. “Wonder what he wants.”

“Only one way to find out,” Matt drawled.

He and Sam had their hands on their guns as Flagg unbarred the door, just in case this was some sort of trick. Flagg swung the door open and said, “Come on in, Mayor. What can we do for you?”

Wiley was a thin, pale, fair-haired man in a brown tweed suit. Matt and Sam knew from talk they had heard that he owned the bank, which was not surprising since political power always followed the money.

“I saw Deputy Johnson ride past the bank,” Wiley said with a nod toward the man who had just returned from Tucson, whose name was Randy Johnson. Wiley pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead with it. As he put it away, he went on. “Does that mean the judge is on his way?”

Flagg nodded. “It does. With any luck, by the time the sun goes down tomorrow, this whole ugly business will be behind us.”

“That’s just it,” Wiley said. “The town council and I have been talking about it, and we’re afraid that the trial won’t bring an end to our problems.”

Flagg frowned. “You ain’t afraid that Shade’ll be found not guilty, are you, Mayor? There’s too many witnesses against him for that to ever happen.”

“No, that’s not it.” Wiley began to pace worriedly. “But what’s going to happen
after
we’ve hanged him? What will his gang do then? Will they try to avenge him by attacking the town?”

Matt had been leaning casually against the desk with his arms crossed over his chest. Now he straightened and said, “No offense, Mr. Mayor, but wait just a doggoned minute. We had to stand up to lynch mobs twice, and now you’re sayin’ you don’t
want
Shade to be hanged?”

Wiley reached for his handkerchief again. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. After what Shade and his gang did to our town, I’d like to see that son of a bitch dancing at the end of a rope as much as anybody would. But I’m not sure it would be the wisest thing for Arrowhead if it happens here.”

“Because you’re afraid of his gang,” Flagg said.

“It’s not just me,” Wiley said. “All the businessmen in town are worried, and with good reason.”

Sam said, “You can’t be suggesting that we just…let him go.”

Wiley shook his head. “Not at all. We can go ahead and have the trial, find him guilty and sentence him to hang, but I think the sentence ought to be carried out somewhere else.”

“Like where?” Matt asked.

“I don’t know. Tucson perhaps?”

With a frown, Flagg sat down behind the desk. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I figured we’d just take care o’ things right here. I was about to go tell Cassius Doolittle to start hammerin’ together a gallows.”

“The town council and I just don’t think it’s wise,” Wiley insisted.

“Well, I reckon we’ll have to wait and see what the judge says,” Flagg said with a sigh. “If you can talk him into it, I’ll go along with whatever he decides.”

“Thanks, Cyrus. That’s all we’re asking.”

Wiley left the office, and Matt barred the door after him. He shook his head and looked disgusted as he turned back to the others.

“You can’t blame them for feeling that way,” Sam said, knowing what his blood brother was thinking. “They’re worried about their businesses, their homes, and their families. They’ve been through one attack by that bunch, and they don’t want to have to go through another.”

“I suppose.” Matt shrugged. “And in the end it doesn’t really matter where Shade gets hanged, as long as he winds up at the end of a rope.”

“You can count on that,” Flagg said.

The next day dawned bright and hot. The air was so clear that Willard Garth had no trouble seeing with the naked eye what was going on in the town from the top of the hill where he hunkered about half a mile away.

He used a spyglass anyway, just to give himself a better view. He was careful to stay in the shade of a scrubby pine tree, though. He didn’t want the sun to reflect off the glass and maybe warn the townspeople that somebody was watching them.

“Have they started building a gallows?” Jeffries asked. He was sitting below the top of the hill with his back propped against another pine tree. His legs were stretched out in front of him, with the ankles crossed casually.

“No, no gallows,” Garth replied. A frown creased his forehead. “I thought they would’ve started by now.”

“Maybe they’re just going to hang Joshua from a cottonwood limb, or something like that,” Jeffries suggested.

“They ain’t gonna hang him at all,” Garth snapped. “We see anything like that fixin’ to happen, and we’ll be down there on top o’ those damn townies before they know what’s goin’ on.”

They had been unsuccessful at finding anyone else they could force to go into the settlement and spy for them. Garth had made the same mistake Shade had made before him—he had gotten rid of prisoners when they might have still been of some use to him.

But brooding over that misjudgment wouldn’t do any good. All they could do now was wait to see what happened…and hope that they got a chance to free Shade before it was too late.

The rest of the men, except for Gonzalez, had gathered at the bottom of the hill to wait for Garth’s orders. They were playing cards, checking over their guns, or just sitting on rocks and logs.

Gonzalez had ridden off a short time earlier to check on some dust he had seen rising in the distance to the northeast. Garth had agreed when Gonzalez told him he wanted to go have a look.

Garth was still peering through the spyglass when Jeffries suddenly muttered, “What the hell?” A commotion started down the hill among the other men.

Garth moved back so that he would be below the level of the hilltop before he stood up and turned to see what was going on. Up a draw that led to the bottom of the hill, a covered wagon trundled along. Gonzalez rode beside the wagon, his gun out and covering the man at the reins.

A grin creased Garth’s rugged face. A woman with a baby in her arms sat beside the driver of the wagon.

Gonzalez had found them another spy, a man who would be willing to do anything they asked in an effort to save the lives of his wife and child.

Of course, in the end, it wouldn’t do the poor bastard a damned bit of good…but he didn’t have to know that just yet.

Jeffries had gotten to his feet, too. “That Mexican’s got a nose for trouble,” he said with a grin of his own.

“Yeah, and now we got somebody to go into Arrowhead and find out what’s goin’ on down there,” Garth agreed. The two outlaws strode down the hill to join the others.

The wagon had come to a stop by the time they got there. The outlaws crowded around it, leering at the young woman on the seat, who was quite pretty and had blond curls peeping out from under her sunbonnet.

She probably would have been even prettier had she not been so pale and frightened-looking.

“Look what I found, Garth,” Gonzalez crowed with a big grin on his face. “These pilgrims were bound for Arrowhead. Gonna make a fresh start for themselves,
sí!
”

Garth studied the face of the young sodbuster, who was as scared as his wife but also had anger lurking in his eyes.

“Forget about tryin’ anything funny, mister,” Garth warned him. “You wouldn’t have a chance, and then there’s no tellin’ what might happen to that wife and young’un o’ yours.”

“What do you want?” the man asked tightly. “We don’t have any money, if that’s what you’re after. It took all we had to outfit for the trip West. But if there’s anything in the wagon you want, it’s yours if you’ll just let us go.”

“You’ll be goin’, all right,” Garth told him. “Right on to Arrowhead, in fact. But you’ll be goin’ alone, and on one of our horses, not in this wagon.”

“Why shouldn’t he take the wagon?” Gonzalez asked. “As long as we keep the señora and the
niño
here, he got to come back.”

“People might notice a fella drivin’ into town in a wagon and then leavin’ a little while later,” Garth said. “But the town’s crowded today. They won’t pay no attention to a man on horseback who wanders in for a while and then wanders back out again.”

Jeffries nodded. “That’s a good point. I think you’re getting smarter, Willard.”

Garth felt like backhanding the smug son of a bitch, but he controlled the impulse. Instead, he reached up, grabbed the pilgrim by the shirt, and jerked him off the wagon seat. The woman screamed as Garth flung the man on the ground.

Garth pulled his gun, pointed it in the man’s face, and eared back the hammer. “You listen to me, and listen close,” he said. “I’m gonna tell you what to do, and if you do it, you and your family will be all right.”

Knowing smiles passed among several of the outlaws. They were well aware that Garth was lying to the young man, and were looking forward to everything that would happen later on, when they were through with the poor bastard.

The man didn’t seem to notice, though. He just nodded and said, “A-all right. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it. You don’t have to hurt anybody.”

Garth nodded, lowered the hammer on the revolver, and slid it back into leather.

“Here’s what we need you to find out,” he said.