Showdown at Gun Hill (8 page)

“You keep me alive, Ranger . . . and let me go free,” Bowlinger threw in as an afterthought, “I'll tell you everything you want to know about where they hole up over there.” He gestured a weak nod toward the Mexican border. “I give you my word on it.”

“His word, ha!” Stone called out.

Sam didn't bother replying. Instead he half stood up, as if to cut the conversation short. But Bowlinger stopped him.

“Wait, Ranger,” the wounded outlaw said, his strength appearing to wane as quickly as it had surged. He dropped onto his back and coughed and settled himself. “All right . . . will you tell the judge to go easy on me?” He paused, then said, “I had a terrible time growing up. You wouldn't believe—”

“I'm done with you,” Sam said, cutting him off. He stood the rest of the way up. “I'll tell the judge you cooperated—gave us valuable information about the Bard Gang. That's all you'll get from me.”

Bowlinger sighed and closed his eyes.

“That don't sound like much,” he said.

“Then how about this?” Sam said. “I'll keep the colonel's men from killing you all the way to Yuma.”

“And I'll help him do it,” Stone put in, his strength also starting to wane.

Bowlinger kept his eyes closed. The wounded sheriff and the Ranger only stared at him.

“So what? That's your job. . . . You've got to do that anyway. . . . ,” Rudy said, his voice trailing, slurring as he drifted back to sleep.

“Wake that bummer up—wear his head out with a
gun barrel, Ranger,” Stone said, still up on his elbows, but starting to look a little shaky again. “Help me up. I'll do it.”

Sam watched the sheriff melt back onto his blanket, his voice trailing away into a low grumble.

With both wounded men back to sleep, the Ranger emptied broth from his coffee cup, refilled it with strong black coffee and sat watching the sun drop low on the jagged western hill line. He wasn't going anywhere tonight. Three men on two horses, two of the men wounded, traveling at night with the smell of blood on them.

Huh-uh . . . too risky,
he warned himself. His best move would be to ride to the nearest mining town or Mexican hill village and get whatever help was available there for these two. Whatever reckoning was to come between him and the colonel's men would have to wait for now. The main thing now was to keep both the sheriff and the outlaw alive, if it was within his power to do so.

He sipped the coffee and watched the red fiery sky fade under a cloak of darkness. But the reckoning was coming, he reminded himself, as surely as the coming dawn. Colonel Hinler and his men were not above the law. They had shot a lawman. Whether the act was intentional or by slip of chance in the heat of battle, that would not stand, he told himself, staring out at the far edge of the darkening sky.

No, that would not stand.

When the four black-suited detectives left the spot overlooking the ambush site, they rode three miles without stopping, hoping to catch up to Parker Fish, whom they'd seen ride away. When they gave up on catching the fleeing outlaw, the fourth detective, Bo Anson, stopped his tired horse beside Duke Patterson and looked out over a rugged rock valley.

“I say let the fool go,” he said. “Like as not a rattlesnake will spike him before nightfall.” He crossed his wrists on his saddle horn and spat a stream of tobacco. Dust covered his long, drooping mustache.

But Duke Patterson was having none of it.

“Like hell we'll let him go,” he said angrily. “The colonel said kill them both. That's what we're going to do.”

“Then you go on and chase him through there, Duke,” Anson said with a dark chuckle. “I'll have myself a nice dinner of jackrabbit, ride back come morning and tell the colonel what a fine job you done out here.” He nodded at the jackrabbit hanging down the side of his horse by a strip of rawhide. Then he turned and looked at the two detectives behind them with a flat
grin. “What about you fellas? How does some rabbit on a spit sound to you?”

“I could eat my saddle,” said Thurman Bain in a serious tone.

The other recently hired detective, Quinton Carlson, nodded in agreement.

“We come to kill two thieves,” he said. “One out of two ain't so bad.”

“Not for you maybe,” said Patterson, “but I've got to answer to the colonel, tell him why one of them got away.” He looked at the rifle lying across Anson's lap, a long brass scope running the length of the barrel. “I'll also have to explain how the sheriff got shot.”

Anson gave a dark chuckle and spat again.

“I'd like to hear that myself,” he said. He and Carlson both laughed. Bain sat watching.

“I see nothing funny about it,” Patterson said angrily.

“I can see how you wouldn't,” Anson said, “you being the one who shot him.”

“In all that shooting how can you say
I
shot him?” said Patterson. He nodded at the rifle with its long scope. “How do you know it wasn't your bullet that hit him?”

“Because I didn't
aim
at him,” Anson said, stifling a laugh. He gave Carlson a look; Carlson grinned and looked away.

“Neither did I!” Patterson raged.

“That's even worse,” Anson said coolly. Again he grinned, the lump of tobacco in his cheek twisting his face sideways. “Maybe he'd been safer if you had.”

“I've had enough of this,” said Patterson. “I'm in charge, and I say we're going in there after him.” He
gestured toward the endless tangle of brush and up-reaching stone.

Anson and Carlson only stared at him with grins frozen on their faces. Patterson looked away from them, at Thurman Bain.

“What about you, Bain? Are you coming?” he barked.

“Righto,” Bain replied, putting his horse a step forward.

Righto . . . ?

Anson and Carlson gave a chuckle at Bain's snappy reply.

“Then let's go,” said Patterson, jerking his horse around toward the trail. But he hesitated for a moment, then slumped a little in his saddle. Anson and Carlson gave Bain a look that stopped him.

“All right . . . ,” Patterson said. “Maybe it would be a good idea to rest these horses overnight—get a fresh start come morning.” He backed his horse a step and looked at the three men. “I expect what the colonel don't know won't hurt him.”

Bo Anson spat tobacco and grinned as he raised a black-handled Colt from the holster on his side.

“You should have said something sooner, amigo,” he said. He fanned three shots into the detective's chest. Patterson, wide-eyed, flipped out of his saddle and landed facedown on the rocky ground.

Thurman Bain started to swing his horse around and make a run for it, afraid he was next. But Carlson's big Smith & Wesson slid free of its holster, cocked and aimed at his belly.

“Not so fast,
Righto
,” Carlson said. “When the colonel asks how this fool died, what's your answer?”

Bain looked back and forth at the two in terror.

“We—we got caught up in a shooting with the lawmen and their prisoners! A wild shot killed him?” he offered quickly.

“Did you believe that, Bo?” Carlson asked Anson.

“Not for a minute,” Anson replied. He turned his horse as he spoke. “Go on and shoot him. I'll go skin this rabbit and rustle us up a cook fire.”

“Wait!” Bain pleaded as Anson rode away at a walk. “I can say something else. Tell me what to say—!”

Anson grinned to himself, hearing the young detective's voice cut short beneath two rapid gunshots.

“Want me to tie them over their saddles, Bo?” Carlson called out, seeing that Anson wasn't going to slow his horse a step.

“Naw, leave them where they're lying,” Anson called back. “All that shooting, dry-gulching and carrying on, we were lucky to get out of here with our lives—don't you see?”

Carlson watched as he stopped his horse a few yards away before riding out of sight around a boulder.

“Yeah, I see. But do you think the colonel will believe us?” he called out.

“That's hard to say, Quinton,” Anson replied with a slight chuckle. He picked the rifle up from across his lap and propped it on his knee. “I might have to wing you a little just to make it look real. Sit real still now.”

Carlson stared, stunned for a moment.

“That's not a damn bit funny, Bo,” he called out. “Don't fool around!” He fidgeted in his saddle seeing the rifle come up in Anson's hands.

“You're right, Quinton, ol' pal,” he said, taking aim through the long brass scope. “The colonel's too smart to fall for a
winging
story.”

“Jesus, Bo!” said Carlson. “Stop joshing me. This ain't the least bit fun—” His words stopped as the rifle bucked in Anson's hands and smoke billowed up around the barrel. Anson lowered the smoking rifle. He stared at where Carlson lay limp in the dirt, his horse shying back a few feet in confusion. He studied the area, then spat tobacco and smiled in satisfaction. “Yeah, that looks about right,” he said. Then he turned his horse and rode away, the dead rabbit flapping at his horse's side.

*   *   *

Dewey Lucas and Russell Gant, the two outlaws who'd managed to escape the battle at the rail siding, lay high on a rock ledge watching the four detectives on the trail below. They both looked at each other in surprise when they saw the familiar face of Bo Anson. Their surprise heightened when they saw him raise a gun from its holster and shoot the lead detective out of his saddle. From their rocky, lofty perch they lay in rapt silence as he rode off a few yards and blew Quinton Carlson from his saddle with his big scoped rifle.

“Holy thunder!” Russell Gant said after a moment, watching Anson ride away with his rabbit swinging at his knee. “What the blazes are Anson and Carlson doing riding for the railroad?”

Lucas scratched his scraggly gray beard stubble, contemplating what they'd just seen.

“Beats the devil out of me,” he said, still staring at the bodies on the trail below. “I'm stuck at seeing Bo kill ol' Quinton. They was best of pals, I always thought.”

“Ol' Quinton must have aggravated him about something,” said Gant, rising from his stomach onto his knees, dusting the front of his shirt and his brush-scarred jacket. “Bo could never stand much aggravation, as I recall.”

“Well,” Lucas said, standing, dusting himself off and adjusting his battered gray cavalry hat, “whatever that was, we'll have to jaw about it on the trail. I'm just glad this bunch won't be dogging us all the way home.”

“I expect somebody will be dogging us, though,” said Gant, the two of them walking back a few steps to where their tired horses waited. “Colonel Hinler only does the bidding of Curtis Siedell—–King Curtis we call him. Siedell ain't giving up until we're all lying dead somewhere. The colonel is just his striking rod.”

As the two stepped into their saddles, he turned and looked at Lucas. “I'm new here, Dewey,” said Gant. “You've been with this bunch from the start. I've heard stories, but just how strong is this grudge between Bard and Curtis Siedell?”

“It's as strong as it is long,” said the older gunman. “It started when we all rid guerrilla for the Galveston Raiders back in the war. The colonel was no different than the rest of us then. He was a guerrilla to the core, same as us. We robbed Northern trains, payrolls, gold
shipments and whatnot together,” he explained. “But then the colonel got himself captured and got himself converted, turned into a Yankee. I can't blame him none, sitting there in Andersonville, waiting to hang—eating rats when he could catch one. It turned him into a galvanized Yankee.”

“A galvanized Yankee from the Galveston Raiders . . .” Gant pondered the coincidence, then said, “That would have sure converted me if they offered it.”

“Me too.” Lucas nodded and went on. “Siedell became the North's highest-ranking
galvanized
officer at that time. It was quite a feather in Abe Lincoln's hat, bringing a Southern regular colonel over to his side. When the war started swinging toward the Yankees' favor, Grant commissioned Siedell as a colonel in the army of the North. Hearing about it nearly killed all of us ol' rebel freebooters—him and Max Bard was best of pals until then. We'd been looking for a chance to bust him out of prison.”

They turned their horses and rode along at a walk; Gant listened closely and shook his head as Lucas continued.

“Imagine,” he said, “switching over and becoming a Yankee officer.”

“I know,” said Lucas, “but switch over he did, and he never looked back. At the end of the war, one word from him and Bard and all of us would have been pardoned. But Siedell wouldn't lift a finger. He was busy building himself a fortune by then.”

“Did you want to be pardoned?” Gant asked.

“Hell no,” said Lucas, “but that ain't the point.
Everything else Siedell done could have been overlooked as trying to stay alive. But when he turned his back and was willing to let us all hang when he could have cleaned the slate, so to speak, it was all that Max and Holbert Lee and the rest of us ol' boys could take.”

“The son of a bitch,” Gant said in a lowered tone. “Nobody does his friends that way.”

“We was the only friends King Curtis Siedell ever had that he could trust,” said Lucas. “Maybe that's why it suited him to see us all dead—figured whatever we knew about him would die right along with us. He made himself rich. They say a man gets rich enough he don't have friends he can trust anymore. He's just sitting on a mountain of riches that he thinks will be taken from him at every turn.”

Gant rode along in silence, letting it all sink in.

Lucas paused and let out a breath.

“Anyway . . . that's where it started between us and Curtis Siedell. The War of Northern Aggression ended and our own private war began. Siedell and us have been out to kill each other ever since.”

“And nothing's ever going to make things right?” Gant said.

Lucas just looked at him.

“Have you not been listening to me?” he said. “We're making it right. We're killing each other at every chance. These are matters of
wronged
honor. Killing and dying is the only things that ever settles
wronged
honor.” He gazed at Gant. “You ever heard of any other way?”

Gant shook his head, not even having to consider the question.

“No, I expect I haven't,” he said.

The two turned forward in their saddles, but before going three more yards, they stopped abruptly, seeing the three figures on horseback spring into the trail facing them. Both men grabbed for their holstered revolvers, then caught themselves and eased down when they recognized Max Bard, Holbert Lee Cross and Worley staring at them from ten yards away.

“Damn it to
bloody hell
!” said Dewey Lucas to the three. “I wish you wouldn't do that—jump out and spook a man that way.”

“We heard gunfire, Dewey. Besides, you're too old to be spooked by anything,” Cross said, smiling, nudging his horse closer.

“The gunfire wasn't us,” Lucas said.

“But we didn't know that, did we?” said Cross. “What if it was the colonel's men, instead of us, catching you unawares?”

“Then I expect you'd be dead instead of sitting there grinning like a possum on a pine nut,” said Lucas. As he spoke he and Gant noted the dried blood down the front of Pete Worley riding toward them. “What happened to Kid Domino?” he asked.

“Scalp graze,” Cross said matter-of-factly.

“Ouch,” said Lucas. He and Gant put their horses forward again as Cross sidled up to them. After they met Bard and Worley, all five of them rode on as if nothing had ever happened to scatter them all over the desert hill country.