The Curse of Iron Eyes (2 page)

Liquid fire cascaded
over the girl as they both fell backwards and hit the floor.

Iron Eyes saw her hair
ignite only inches in front of his face as his back hit the
wall.

She screamed in agony.
It was the most chilling sound that he had ever heard.

The bounty hunter
reached out and pulled her blazing head into his jacket. He
smothered the flames with his own shirt and leather coat.

Iron Eyes could feel
his own skin burning, but did not acknowledge the pain. He watched
the outlaw slam the door opposite them.

Iron
Eyes released the screaming girl. Her hair was still smoldering. It
was a stench that sickened even him. He rose to his feet and heard
the sound of the bolt being pushed into place behind its solid oak
door.

He knew that he could
waste a lot of expensive bullets trying to get into that room and
still not achieve his goal.

Iron Eyes ignored the
wailing hysteria of his terrified audience and marched down the
corridor until he found a window.

He turned its latch and
then pushed the window away from him, staring out into the
darkness. A balcony went all the way around the side and front of
the building.

Iron Eyes tore the lace
drapes from the window and then poked his long left leg out and
followed it. He was still gripping on to his Navy Colts. Then saw a
window roughly fifteen feet away from him opening.

That was the window to
the room that the outlaw had locked himself into, he thought.

He began to walk
silently towards the open window.

As the outlaw clambered
out on to the balcony with his gun in one hand and his clothes in
the other, he did not even think to look behind him. His eyes were
fixed on the bolted door which he expected the bounty hunter to try
and shoot his way through at any moment.

It came as quite a
shock to the outlaw when he heard the eerie voice behind him.

‘
Going
someplace, Dale Smith?’

Iron
Eyes’ breath chilled the man’s naked spine.

Smith turned and saw
the gruesome sight before him. He had heard tales of the bounty
hunter who, it was claimed, was more dead than alive.

As his eyes adjusted to
the darkness, Smith knew that there was no description which could
come close to describing the way this man looked. The long, limp,
black hair over the scarred features did not make this creature
look any less horrific.

‘
Are you Iron
Eyes?’

‘
Yep.’

‘
I ain’t got no
beef with you.’

‘
This ain’t
personal, Smith,’ Iron Eyes said coldly. ‘You’re wanted dead or
alive and as far as I’m concerned, that means dead.’

‘
So you’ve made
yourself judge and jury, huh?’

‘
Yep.’

Smith’s gun barrel began to move.

Both Navy Colts fired.
Smith went spinning on his heels. His clothes flew over the balcony
and floated down into the street as he bounced off the balcony
rail. Smith raised his gun and squeezed its trigger. His bullet
seemed to pass through the bounty hunter as Iron Eyes fired both
his weapons again.

Smith was thrown
backwards. His body hit the wooden boards hard.

Iron Eyes pushed one of
his Navy Colts into his belt and then ran his fingers across his
stinging side. He stared at the blood on the tips of his fingers
and sighed.

‘
Close, but no
cigar, Smith. You’ve obviously bin used to shooting much fatter
men.’

It was a vision that
would have frozen the blood in the veins of most men. Marshal Tad
Barker stared hard at the foreboding figure before him trying to
convince himself that it was indeed human and not something from
dark depths of his nightmares.

As the
flickering street-lanterns tried to fend off the blackness of
night, sweat traced down the side of the seasoned law officer’s
face. He held on tightly to the cocked scattergun in his weathered
hands and tried to swallow. Barker was thankful that he had not
been foolhardy enough to satisfy his curiosity on his
own.

For the strange figure
before him was not the sort of man any sane person would wish to
meet alone.

He had
mustered every single deputy within the streets of Waco when he had
heard the sound of gunfire emanating from the Red Garter House,
before daring to venture towards it. The sight of Iron Eyes
standing on the raised porch amid the array of bodies chilled even
his cold heart.

The tails of the trail
coat flapped in the evening breeze in tune to the beat of his long,
matted black hair.

The marshal raised the
primed scattergun across his chest and strode purposefully towards
the bounty hunter with his six deputies spread evenly to either
side of him.

In his long eventful
life, Barker had faced hostile Indians and the cannon of a bitter
enemy during the war, but he had never faced anyone who looked
anything like Iron Eyes before.

For the first time in
his life, he felt totally afraid. Iron Eyes still held one of his
Navy Colts in his bony left hand as he bent over his victims and
added up the financial tally he had just earned.

It was like witnessing
a vulture in human form checking the carcasses it was about to feed
upon.

The bounty hunter
squinted through the lantern light at the seven lawmen who
approached him and then stood upright. He lowered his pistol and
stepped to the edge of the boardwalk as Barker reached it.

‘
Marshal.’ The
word came through Iron Eyes’ small sharp teeth.

‘
You seem to
have bin on a killing spree, stranger,’ the marshal said carefully.
‘I hope you got yourself a darn good reason.’

‘
I’m a bounty
hunter. I claim the bounty on these varmints’ heads,’ Iron Eyes
said. He reached into his deep pocket and pulled out the crumpled
Wanted posters.

Barker
signaled to one of his deputies. There was no way that the marshal
was about to release his grip on his weapon to accept anything from
the terrifying figure, just in case it was a trap and he started
killing again. A cautious deputy stepped forward and took the
posters from the thin skeletal hand and unfolded them.

‘
What they say,
Clem?’ Barker asked as his index finger remained on the twin
triggers of the scattergun and his eyes remained glued to the
bounty hunter.

The deputy named Clem
looked up from the posters.

‘
Looks like we
have us the remains of the Calhoon boys here, Tad.’

Barker raised an
eyebrow and took his eyes briefly away from the tall figure of Iron
Eyes and glanced at the bloody pile of corpses stacked before him.
It was impossible to identify any of the bodies clearly in the
shadows that bathed the front of the whorehouse.

‘
If this is the
Calhoon gang, it looks like you’ve made yourself a lotta money this
night, stranger,’ the marshal said, spitting at the ground beside
him before starting to chew the tobacco plug in his mouth once
more.

Suddenly, Iron Eyes
looked troubled.

‘
The name’s Iron
Eyes, Marshal,’ he said coldly. He turned back towards the bodies
again He stuffed the pistol into his belt beside the other and then
paced around the blood-soaked corpses again.

‘
What’s wrong,
Iron Eyes?’ Barker asked. His hooded eyes watched the bounty hunter
bending over and lifting each of the outlaws’ heads off the
boardwalk in turn.

‘
How many
posters have you got there, boy?’ Iron Eyes asked the deputy called
Clem as he studied his handiwork.

Clem cleared his throat
and hastily counted the crumpled sheets of paper in his hands.

‘
Ten, Mr. Iron
Eyes. Why?’

‘
Damn!’ Iron
Eyes kicked the lifeless head of Rob John Floyd in anger. ‘I missed
one of the bastards.’

Marshal Barker looked
at the equally confused faces of his deputies on either side of
him, then returned his gaze to the strange, tall figure above
him.

‘
What you mean,
Iron Eyes?’

‘
There are only
nine here. That means that one of the Calhoon boys got away by the
looks of it.’ Iron Eyes snatched the posters from the deputy’s hand
and methodically compared each dead outlaw face with the crude
images on the paper. ‘Harve Calhoon!’

‘
What about
him?’ Barker piped up before spitting out another dark lump of
spittle.

‘
He’s the one
that’s missing.’ Iron Eyes rammed the posters back into the hands
of the nervous Clem and drew both his Navy Colts again. He cocked
their hammers, then turned and marched back into the large
building.

Barker
trailed the bounty hunter into the gunsmoke-filled saloon. There
was blood and chunks of flesh covering everything. The aroma of
death hung on-the air. The marshal trailed the long-legged man up
the flight of stairs to the landing. He maintained a respectable
distance between himself and the snorting Iron Eyes.

Marshal Barker paused
at the top of the stairs and watched the bounty hunter kicking open
every door. The screams of the terrified women inside the rooms
echoed all around the building while Iron Eyes continued his
frenzied search.

When he could not find
any sign that the outlaw had ever been in this place with his
brother and rest of his gang, the tall brooding man stopped and
rested his back against the wall which was still wet from the blood
of his victims.

Barker
walked slowly toward Iron Eyes and nodded at each of the females
huddled in the rooms as he passed them. The keen eyes of the lawman
then spied the sobbing girl with the smoldering hair crumpled in a
doorway.

He paused and knelt
down beside her. She was burned down one side of her face and
across her shoulder. The injuries were already festering in the
humid air.

‘
Katie?’ Barker
whispered.

She
looked up into his fatherly eyes and then glanced across at the
silent Iron Eyes who was deep in thought at the end of the
corridor.

‘
I ought to get
you over to Doc Harper, Katie,’ the marshal said lowering his
scattergun on to the floor and removing his jacket and placing it
carefully around her shoulders.

She winced as the
lawman lifted her to her feet.

‘
Who is that?’
Katie asked quietly.

‘
No need to be
afraid of him. He’s just a bounty hunter.’

‘
I’m not afraid
of him, Marshal,’ she said as Barker scooped his scattergun up off
the bloodstained carpet. ‘He smothered the flames when the oil-lamp
spewed burning oil all over me.’

Barker glanced at Iron
Eyes.

‘
He
did?’

‘
He must have
been burned himself doing it,’ Katie added. ‘He risked his life to
help me in the middle of the gunfight, Marshal Barker.’

Iron Eyes pushed
himself away from the wall and marched past the two talking
figures. They watched as he ran down the flight of stairs and out
into the street.

By the time Barker had
led the injured girl out into the dimly illuminated street, the
bounty hunter was fifty yards away checking the horses that were
tied to the hitching rails.

‘
Take Katie over
to Doc Harper, Clem,’ Barker told the deputy as he waved his hand
at the rest of his men. ‘Drag them bodies over to my office, boys.
I want to match them to them Wanted posters before paying out any
bounty.’

Iron
Eyes ran his hand along the neck of the last of the horses and then
squared up to the lawman as he walked up to him. ‘I figure that
Harve Calhoon was never here with the rest of his gang, Marshal,’
Iron Eyes said, pushing the pistols back into his belt. ‘But why
not?’

Barker stared at the
pearl-handled gun-grips that poked out from the almost flat stomach
of the bounty hunter. He then noticed the burned shirt and the
visible scars across the chest of Iron Eyes. He found it hard to
comprehend that this strange creature would have helped Katie in
the middle of a blazing gun battle. But he had.

‘
What the hell
are you, Iron Eyes?’

Iron
Eyes ran his long bony fingers through his limp hair and pushed it
off his face. The sight was enough to make the marshal’s throat go
dry. It was a face that had endured many battles and each of them
was carved into his scarred features. If Iron Eyes had ever truly
resembled other men, it must have been a very long time ago, Barker
thought.

‘
I’m just a
bounty hunter. Why?’

‘
I’ve met a
lotta bounty hunters. They weren’t nothing like you,’ Barker
croaked.

Iron Eyes shrugged and
looked at the bodies being carried by the deputies. He then glanced
back at Barker.

‘
Whatever the
tally for them critters comes to, give it to the girl you called
Katie.’

Before
the marshal could respond, the long legged man had walked away into
the darkness.

The
trail led due south. Iron Eyes was backtracking the Calhoon gang’s
route to Waco, but it was not an easy task. A sand storm had been
threatening for hours and at last started to blow. The dusty
surface layer of the dry sand was blowing hard and fast across the
arid prairie as the bounty hunter forced his weary pony
on.

The mount was spent and
needed food and water but Iron Eyes cared little for horses. He
just kept ramming his razor-sharp spurs into its already bloody
flesh. He wanted to catch up with the outlaw who had somehow
slipped away from the rest of the now dead gang.