The Fury of Iron Eyes (An Iron Eyes Western #4) (2 page)

It was still wet — wet from
the hard ride it had endured as its master had vainly tried to get
away from the dogged pursuer, a man who did not know how to give up
once he had the scent of his prey in his nostrils.

Iron Eyes rubbed his hand
dry on his jacket and began walking back towards the light, which
cascaded out from the saloon doorway and reached to the buildings
opposite.

He had to be inside, Iron
Eyes thought. Drinking and waiting for him to arrive. Maybe the
outlaw had convinced himself that he had managed to lose his shadow
out there on the massive range of sagebrush. Perhaps he was sitting
with his back to the wall with both guns in his hands, waiting for
death to walk through the door of the saloon and try to kill before
being killed.

Whichever way it panned
out, Iron Eyes was ready.

Stepping up on to the
boardwalk, Iron Eyes glanced through the window at the half-dozen
people who were milling around. Two females of dubious age appeared
desperate to make a few dollars from the four men still drinking
before they either ran out of money or interest. A bartender seemed
more asleep than awake as he leaned on the counter, watching his
customers with eyes that had seen it all before so many times.
Without pausing, Iron Eyes walked straight into the noisy building
and stopped in his tracks.

Within the space of a mere
heartbeat, the saloon was silent. Every person within its four
walls stared at the gruesome sight before them.

The bounty hunter hovered
with his hands above his belt buckle and the two gun grips as his
eyes darted around the large room. He knew the face of the man he
had chased across the baking-hot range although they had never met.
The photographic likeness was on the crumpled Wanted poster in his
deep pocket amongst the bullets and cigars. A likeness which was
branded into his mind.

Then Iron Eyes saw
him.

The outlaw slowly began to
stand up from behind the table as he watched the lethal Iron Eyes
standing just inside the doorway of the saloon. Reaching his full
height, his keen eyes watched the other five patrons vanish from
the vicinity. Even the weary bartender managed to slip out from
behind the long bar and disappear into the relative safety of a
back room.

In the time it took for the
second hand on the wall clock to move less than halfway around the
clock face, only two men remained in the saloon. Two very different
men.

‘
Dan Creedy!’ The name
seemed to drip from the lips of Iron Eyes as he stepped closer. The
outlaw’s face was now visibly more frightened than the image which
was emblazoned on the Wanted poster buried deep in one of Iron
Eyes’ bullet-filled pockets.

The man walked slowly from
behind the round card-table towards the bar. With every step he
kept at least one eye fixed on the bounty hunter. Creedy knew that
it paid to be cautious of this sort of man.

‘
Do I know you, stranger? I
think I’d have remembered your face if n we’d ever met
before.’

‘
They call me Iron Eyes,’
came the slow, deliberate reply from the thin, emotionless face.
‘We ain’t ever met but I know who and what you are,
Creedy.’

The man seemed to recognize
the notorious name and the description of the living ghost who
hunted men. He gritted his teeth as he dragged an abandoned whiskey
bottle towards him before turning over a small
thimble-glass.

‘
The bounty
hunter?’

‘
The same.’
Iron Eyes took another step towards the man, who pulled the cork
from the neck of the bottle with his
teeth before spitting it into
the sawdust at his feet.

‘
I heard of you,’ Creedy
said as he poured himself a full measure of the brown
liquor.

‘
I’ve heard of
you too. You’re worth
a thousand dollars,’ Iron Eyes said coldly, ‘dead
or alive.’

Creedy felt sweat trickling
down his face as he rested the bottle down, and then lifted the
drink to his lips before pausing to stare at the gruesome sight of
the man he knew intended to be his executioner. No wonder the room
had cleared at the sight of Iron Eyes, he thought. He had seen a
thousand faces, but none like the one staring at him from behind
the limp black hair. This was not the face of a man that it was
possible to bribe or bluff from his intended course of action. Iron
Eyes had only one thing on his mind, and it was the price on Dan
Creedy’s head.

‘
Mind if I take me a drink
before we get down to business?’

‘
Nope,’ Iron Eyes
replied.

Dan Creedy swallowed the
whiskey in one go and then placed the glass back down on top of the
wet bar. He had killed more than a dozen men with his Colt, but for
the first time in his entire life, knew his luck might just be
about to run out. After taking several deep breaths, Creedy turned
away from the long, wooden counter and faced Iron Eyes.

‘
I heard stories about you,
Iron Eyes,’ Creedy said as he pushed his coat over the handle of
his gun. ‘They say you ain’t a living man. They say you’re a
ghost.’

The bounty hunter
nodded.

‘
It’s all true.’

Creedy flexed his fingers and
swallowed whilst watching the almost skeletal figure before him. He
noted the two gun grips sticking out of the broad belt strapped
around Iron Eyes’ middle, and wondered how any man could possibly
be a quick draw if he had to pull guns from a belt. The more Creedy
thought about it, the more convinced
he became that no living man could draw
weapons from a belt with any speed. It was impossible.

‘
I guess this is it,’
Creedy said as confidence returned to his troubled soul
again.

Iron Eyes nodded
again.

‘
Reckon so.’

The ancient clock upon the
wall of the saloon suddenly began to chime.

Dan Creedy threw himself to
the left and reached for his trusty Colt. His experienced fingers
found its grip and drew it from the leather holster tied securely
to his thigh. Before the barrel of the pistol had cleared the lip
of the holster, his index finger had found the trigger as his thumb
cocked its hammer until it locked. Then he squeezed off his first
shot.

A cloud of smoke breached
the distance between the outlaw and the bounty hunter. It was so
dense that both men lost sight of one another. Iron Eyes had pulled
both his Navy Colts from his belt and dragged their hammers back
before firing. Dropping to the floor, Iron Eyes heard the groaning
sound of Creedy as another shot came through the gunsmoke like a
bolt of lightning towards him. The bounty hunter felt the heat on
his scalp from the bullet as it passed through his hair. He knew if
he hadn’t dropped on to his knees, the bullet would have gone
straight into his middle.

Instinctively, Iron Eyes
fired both his pistols again into the cloud which faced him. This
time Iron Eyes heard his opponent scream and stagger back into the
wooden bar before tottering towards him. Choking gunsmoke filled
the distance between the two men as their shots echoed around the
wooden building. Then Creedy staggered towards the kneeling bounty
hunter, staring with eyes which could no longer see. The gun fell
from his fingers and bounced on the floor as the outlaw stopped and
hovered.

Iron Eyes stood up again
and looked at the four neat bullet holes in the shirt of the
unsteady man. Any one of his shots could have killed the outlaw on
their own. Together, it was only a matter of how long it would take
for Dan Creedy’s body to realize that it was dead.

It had not been a long
duel. It had ended almost as soon as it had begun.

Slowly, Dan Creedy slumped
forward and fell heavily on his face in the stale sawdust. There
was a huge gasp as his life seemed to escape like swamp gas from
his being. He had been wrong. It was possible to draw guns from
your belt if you were Iron Eyes. Creedy had made a mistake. It was
to be his last.

Walking up to the body,
Iron Eyes placed his guns back into his belt and leaned on the bar.
It was over and yet he felt nothing. It had been too
easy.

As he picked up the whiskey
bottle and raised it to his lips he noticed spots of blood dripping
on to his hand. Looking up into the cracked, dirty mirror behind
the bar, he saw the wound on his scalp. There was a parting in his
long, matted mane which had never been there before.

One of Dan Creedy’s shots
had dug out a chunk of his scalp as it passed over him. Blood was
running freely down his face before he managed to finish the
contents of the liquor bottle. It was cheap, rotgut whiskey which
had probably been made in a tin bathtub out back, but Iron Eyes did
not care. Liquor had never managed to make him drunk, however much
of it he consumed. Even the most expensive brands had no effect on
his pitifully lean frame.

Yet Iron Eyes was confused.
He was bleeding badly, but there was no pain from the ugly wound.
It did not even sting. It just bled.

Touching his scalp with his
long fingers, Iron Eyes found the deep wound in his straggly hair.
Dan Creedy’s final shot had only been an inch too high, he
thought.

Iron Eyes stared at the
sticky red blood on the tips of his fingers and paused. Could
Creedy have been right when he called the bounty hunter a ghost?
Ghosts were already dead and that meant they could not feel pain.
But he was bleeding like a stuck pig.

Did ghosts bleed? Why was
there no pain? Something just did not add up.

As he turned to face the
corpse, he suddenly felt giddy. It was a strange feeling which made
him rest his lean frame against the wooden bar. Blood ran down the
strands of hair before his eyes and dripped. It was a continuous
flow of crimson droplets which meant the wound was probably far
worse than he had first thought. Yet it still did not
hurt.

Why didn’t it hurt? Iron
Eyes was troubled by this strange truth. His head was filled with a
fog that seemed reluctant to clear.

Stepping away from the bar,
Iron Eyes stood over the body of Dan Creedy and looked down at it
for several seconds. He waited until his thoughts became sharp
again. There was something strange about the outlaw that Iron Eyes
had noticed just before they had drawn their guns and fired. Dan
Creedy had seemed to be totally unafraid. Not at first when Iron
Eyes had entered the saloon, but a split second before they had
gone for their weapons.

Why was the outlaw
unafraid? Did he know something which Iron Eyes had yet to
learn?

Iron Eyes leaned over,
grabbed the collar of his prize and then lifted it off the ground
and hauled it out into the deserted street. Looking around the
wooden structures he finally saw the sheriff’s office.

Above the locked office door,
Iron Eyes spied a small window and a dim light behind its lace
drape. Dragging the body of his prey across the street towards the
office, Iron Eyes felt his long, bony legs buckling for a moment.
Somehow he managed to continue until his mule-ear boots found the
opposite boardwalk and mounted it. Then he released
his grip and
dropped the lifeless body at his feet.

Resting his bleeding head
against the wall, he began hitting the door with a clenched
fist.

Iron Eyes wanted his reward
money. He also wanted to know where the nearest doctor was. As his
fist struck the door for the tenth time, he saw a man through its
glass pane, carrying a candle inside the building, walking
hurriedly towards him.

As the man in the white
nightgown slid the bolt across on the door, Iron Eyes felt his legs
buckle again.

This time, as the door was
opened, he was unable to prevent himself from falling at the man’s
naked feet.

Iron Eyes had stubbornly
refused to lie down on the leather couch within the back room of
the doctor’s office. Even when only half-conscious, he had refused
to submit to the demands of either the sheriff or the doctor. The
bounty hunter had sat bolt upright on a hardback chair since a
half-dressed sheriff had helped him from the boardwalk outside his
front door, along to the dimly illuminated building.

There was a silence about
Iron Eyes which kept both the lawman and the physician on their
toes as his scalp was carefully stitched back together. Neither man
had heard him say anything during the long operation.

It was an unnerving sight to
see anyone covered in so much of their own blood, but on Iron Eyes,
it seemed an even worse apparition. Both the doctor
and the sheriff
might have thought he was dead if it had not been for the cold,
staring grey eyes which continually watched them.

Iron Eyes stared
occasionally at the floor during the procedure, and kept looking at
the pools of blood which covered it. It was his blood. He also
wondered why he could not feel the long needle as it was forced
through the skin on his scalp, dragging it back
together.

For two hours the sweating
physician had toiled over the head of Iron Eyes until he finally
satisfied himself that he had stemmed the flow of blood.