William W. Johnstone (22 page)

Authors: Savage Texas

BOOK: William W. Johnstone

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A handler slipped, losing his footing. “Lordy, I can’t hold ’em—”

He fell under the horses’ hooves and was trampled to rags and jelly.

Harper bulled his way to the fore, making a beeline for the wagon, the focus of his hopes, needs and all-consuming ambition. Gun in hand, he railed, “I’ll kill any man turns loose of this wagon!”

An underling pleaded, “Boss, we cain’t stop ’em—”

“You must, damn your eyes!”

“Brock, they’s a-gonna bust loose!”

“Get out of my way, ya yellow-bellied sons of bitches!” Harper made his way to the gun wagon.

It rocked back and forth on its springs as men held to its sides and the traces, trying to restrain the straining team that heaved at the harness in its collective will to run, run, run!

Harper clambered up into the front seat of the wagon, gathering up the ends of the sets of leather reins, clutching them in oversized, hamlike hands. Hauling on them, he leaned back, putting all his considerable strength and weight into the effort. “Whoa! I say whoa, you horses, whoa! Ease up, damn you, whoa! Mangy brainless cayuses, pull back dammit, damn and doubledamn you!”

Arkansas Claude Fenner hauled himself up and over the sidewall, pulling himself on top of the crates of rifles and cartridges. Harper almost shot him until he saw who it was. “Get up here, Fenner, and grab hold of that brake with both hands—give it all you got!”

Fenner threw his legs into the boot, landing hard on the passenger side of the thinly cushioned seat board. He gripped the axe-handlesized and -shaped hand brake. “I got it, Brocky! I got it! The horses, they’s gentling now—”

A second blast followed, coming even closer than the first. Shaking the earth, shivering the pen, it brought the timbered framework and boarded-over canopy down around and on the wagon and team of horses. Raining down on Harper and Fenton, battering, beating and bruising them.

“That does it!” Fenner cried. The team lurched forward, pulling clear of the collapsing shed. Boards and timbered uprights coming apart on all sides, horses and wagon broke free, into open air and space.

The two lead horses in tandem saw their opportunity and took it on the run. The other pairs in the team followed, obedient to the single paramount impulse to flee.

Some of the handlers and gun guards ran alongside or behind the rear of the wagon. They grabbed at it, clutching the top rails, pulling themselves on board or simply holding on for dear life.

A luckless figure loomed up in front of the runaway team, too dazed or slow to react in time to save himself. He threw up his arms and then the horses were on him. He disappeared under them, trampled by iron-shod hooves and run over by wagon wheels.

The gun wagon tore down the rise. It hit a bump on the flat that flung a couple of hangerson loose. A sideman went under the wheels and was cut in two.

The wagon thundered east across the canyon floor. Harper and Fenner were hurled about, fighting to keep from being thrown from the wagon. The hand brake was broken, useless. Its restraining gears and ratchets had torn free, as Fenner discovered when he took hold of it, hauling back on it to no use whatsoever.

A jagged board-end had opened a wicked gash in Harper’s forehead, spilling blood down his face. He pawed his eyes with the back of his hand, trying to keep the blood out of his eyes.

No ordinary man, though, he who was being tossed around in the dice cup of the gods. He was Brock Harper!

That knowledge, the high valuation apportioned to the man in the roster of his own selfworth, spurred the bandit chief to regain control of the situation. Call it pride, the Devil’s own sin. Something in the man caused Harper to win through on this wild ride pulled by runaway horses.

Leaning forward in his seat—a sudden pitch of the wagon’s course nearly catapulting him out of the front of the wagon—Harper braced himself to keep from falling. Groping around on the floor of the boot, he found and gathered up the reins, clutching them so their ends came out the tops of his fists.

A scream sounded as a man who’d been holding on to the side of the wagon lost his grip and went under the wheels.

Blinking through blood and stinging sweat, Harper took stock of the scene. The runaways were plunging north across the canyon floor, racing toward the near end of the Chute.

He glanced back over his shoulder. Four men were in the back of the wagon, holding on to the sides as the vehicle rocked and swayed. Sour-faced Hap Engelhardt was one, and Cy Treadwell, and two more of the gang.

Behind, Ghost Valley was a hellish scene. Smoke, fire, wild horses, bodies strewn about.

Cupping a hand to his mouth, Engelhardt shouted, “Can you stop ’em?”

“No stopping them now,” Harper said. “Got to let them have their heads until they run themselves out and slow down! Could be worse, though!”

“Eh? How’s that?”

“I still got the guns!”

“Yeh—there’s that . . .” Engelhardt was doubtful, his expression more bilious than ever.

One of the others cried, “Look out, we’re going into the Chute!”

“Nothing to do but ride it out!” Harper shouted back. He was getting a little bit of response from the team, enough to rein in the animals a few degrees when they showed a sign of going off course.

The runaway team plunged into the Chute. Harper felt like a lead ball being fired down the length of a cannon barrel. A few feet of play opened on both sides between the wagon and the ravine walls. Noise hammered off the sides of the Chute, rising to deafening levels.

There was a chance of getting clear, though, as long as the team kept to their straightaway course, thought Harper.

The hole at the far end of the Chute widened, nearing. Suddenly team and wagon bulleted out of the pass, zooming past the Door Posts into the open.

Breakout!

Others in the wagon were cheering. Fenner clapped a hand on Harper’s shoulder. “By God, Brocky, we made it! I don’t know how you did it but you did!”

Harper growled, “We ain’t out of the woods yet! The team’s still out of control!”

“Hell, let ’em run till they’s winded, now that we’s in the clear—”

KA-BOOM!

The rest of Fenner’s remark was lost in an eruption of noise. The biggest blast yet, an explosion that literally brought down much of the west Door Post.

Concussion battered those in the wagon, swatting Hap Engelhardt and Cy Treadwell and the other two in the back of the wagon into space, a giant invisible hand brushing away gnats.

An avalanche of crushed rocks, dirt and smoke rained down as the column of the west Door Post cracked asunder, freeing a massive overhang to come crashing down.

A torrent of rock and earth rained down on the flat. A pillar of smoke and fire unfolded into lightening sky.

All the result of the blast triggered by gunpowder and dynamite that collapsed the rocky column.

Moments earlier, after shooting up Ghost Valley, Sam, Johnny and Vasquez had fled through the Chute, reining in just outside it. As the runaway gun wagon closed in on the mouth of the Chute, the three riders joined Luke and Chicory in taking cover behind the curve of the east Door Post, putting the bulk of the rocky spur between themselves and the explosives in the western column.

Luke lit the master fuse, triggering a mighty blast as soon as the wagon broke out into the flat. Thick clouds of dust and smoke obscured the scene. When they began to lift, Luke and Chicory were startled to find themselves alone. Sam, Johnny and Vasquez were nowhere in sight.

“Where’d they go?” Luke said.

Back in Ghost Valley, the dazed remnants of the pack of gun wolves were beginning to recover. Ever on the alert for the main chance, they grasped the essentials of the situation.

“Look! Harper’s running out on us with the gun wagon!”

“Stealing all our loot!

“Mount up, boys, and let’s get after him!”

“I’ll skin him alive, the Judas!”

It took time to round up a handful of horses running loose in the canyon, some of which were already saddled. Eight or ten purposeful riders galloped toward the Chute. A dozen men on foot ran after them, hopelessly trying to catch up.

The haphazard though grimly determined pursuit was barred by sudden destruction at the far end, where a blast brought down a wall of rock and loose dirt twenty feet high.

Closing the mouth of the pass, sealing the exit, it penned the rest of the outlaws inside the canyon.

Trapped like flies in a corked bottle.

T
WENTY-TWO

The team of runaway horses hitched to the gun wagon would have gladly continued running to the edge of the eastern horizon to meet the rising sun. But they lacked the stamina. They’d shot their bolt during the breakneck flight from Ghost Valley.

Nostrils and mouths foaming, sides heaving, flanks glossy with sweat, they were out of breath and exhausted. Their pace began to lag.

Harper relaxed his furious concentration on working the traces of the team to cut a sideways glance at Fenner. The rangy Arkansan sat huddled beside him, haggard, white-eyed, hunched into a ball.

Swallowing hard, Fenner dared to raise up his head, looking around. Looking over his shoulder, he saw that the back of the wagon was empty of all passengers. He began, “Engelhardt, and Treadwell, and the others—”

“Gone,” Harper said flatly.

The team’s pace flagged, the gun wagon slowing. Spirits lifting, Fenner managed to force a halfway grin. “By God, Brocky, we made it!—”

BLAM!

Harper was slapped hard in the face by something wet, so hard that for an instant his face was pushed out of shape. Fenner slammed into him, giving him a jolt.

Fenner now sat slumped beside him, sagging, inert. Still clutching the reins, Harper rubbed the back of a hand against his face to clear it. It came away smeared with red stuff. Blood! Mixed with tissue and bits of bone.

A big hole the size of a silver dollar showed in Fenner’s left breast, wetly red and glistening.

Echoes of gunfire boomed across the flat. A shot, the single shot that had just killed Claude Fenner. Trying to look everywhere at once, Harper could discover no shooter.

Despite their fear, the horses slowed, winded. Exhausted. A horse is a fretful animal. So, at that instant, was Brock Harper.

Fenner had been pounded out of existence as though struck by the Hammer of God itself. A killing round fired by an unseen marksman.

First rays of breaking day came slanting off the planet’s eastern rim. A sunbeam glinted off a reflective surface in the distance near a rocky ridge ahead of Harper and to his right.

The diamond dazzle was accompanied by a glimmer of motion. It was so far away that Harper had trouble making it out. The gun wagon continued its eastward course across the flat.

The blurred image resolved itself into a rifleman on horseback. The marksman who’d shot Fenner. The rifle was pointed at Harper.

The team continued forward, narrowing the gap between Harper and his unknown adversary. Harper had no rifle handy. He’d lost his during the ruckus at Ghost Valley. The wagon was full of crates of rifles, but none were readily accessible. All Harper had was a six-gun and at this range it would be ineffective against a rifle.

Harper reached anyway. He let go of the reins in his gun hand, clawing at the pistol in his holster.

It cleared leather. Harper leveled it at the distant figure ahead. Laughing and crying at the same time, he said, “You son of a bitch!”

A blow slammed him, knocking him sideways to the left and out of the wagon.

He lay sprawled on the ground. The riderless wagon continued east, drawing away from him, dwindling.
Stop, damn you, stop!
he thought. He tried to speak but couldn’t.

The gun was still in his hand. It was too heavy to lift, though. That was funny, since he was used to having an inexhaustable reservoir of strength and energy to draw from.

Harper felt tired. He decided he’d lay where he was for a while, resting until he got his strength back. The bullet hole in his chest loosed his lifeblood into thirsty sands that soaked it up.

Brock Harper was no more.

Sam Heller lowered his rifle and began taking it apart, removing the additions that turned the sawed-off mule’s-leg into a long-range rifle good for sharpshooting. Nimble fingers unfastened the bolts securing the wooden butt stock to the rear of the cut-down Winchester.

He fitted the stock into a long, flat wooden carrying case. Unscrewing the elongated barrel extension attached to the Winchester’s chopped barrel, he put that in the box, too. The telescopic sight had been unneeded at this range. He closed the lid and lowered the box to where it was lashed to the side of his saddle.

The masterless gun wagon rolled past him in his place of concealment and kept going east.

West, far away but coming up fast, were two riders. Sam turned his horse, withdrawing farther behind the rocky outcropping where he’d been lurking. He reloaded the mule’s-leg.

The two riders raced east, chasing the wagon. They were Johnny Cross and Vasquez. Their horses ran neck and neck. Johnny leaned way forward on his horse, bent almost double. Vasquez used a rawhide quirt to lash his horse to greater speed.

They flashed past the outcropping, oblivious of Sam on Dusty hiding behind a tangle of scrub brush. He let them go.

Johnny and Vasquez closed in on the gun wagon, Johnny coming up on its right, Vasquez on its left. Leaning out of their saddles, they each grabbed a harness strap of one of the two lead horses. Control the lead horses and the rest of the team would fall into place.

Riding along, Johnny and Vasquez slowed the horses, finally bringing them to a halt. Dismounting, they faced each other.

“The gun wagon!” Johnny said.

“
Sí,
the gun wagon,” Vasquez breathed, eyes glittering.

“Here it is.”

“And here we are.”

They eyed each other.

“Want it all, don’t you?” Johnny said.

“And you?” Vasquez countered.

Johnny smiled thinly.

Vasquez nodded, as if confirming a thought he’d had. “For such as us, there is no other way,” he said. “My
padrone
needs the guns, not a mouthful of empty promises from the big gringo.”

“Where’d that Yank go, anyway? I lost him after the blast,” Johnny said.

“I hope a mountain fell on him,” Vasquez said feelingly. “No matter. Our business will not take long.”

“All the while I was growing up, I always heard you was fast. But that was a long time ago.”

“You think so, little gringo? Try me.”

Johnny’s smile broadened into a grin of genuine pleasure. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

They squared off, face to face, barely a half-dozen paces separating them.

“Anytime,” Johnny said.

A bullet tore into the ground between them, spraying them with rock chips and dirt. Startled, they both whirled to confront the shooter.

Sam Heller sat on horseback, holding the mule’s-leg leveled. He had ridden up unseen during the face-off, using the gun wagon for cover.

“You’re two of the most ornery cusses I ever saw,” Sam said, shaking his head in mock sadness. “Haven’t had your fill of killing yet?”

“Not quite,” Johnny said. He stepped back, turning, positioning himself so he’d have a line of fire on Sam or Vasquez. His hands hovered inches above hip-holstered gun butts.

Vasquez did the same, stepping to the side. “It’s good that you come along now, gringo. So we can finish it.”

“You feel that way too, Johnny?” Sam asked.

“You ain’t a bad fellow at that, for a northerner,” Johnny said, shrugging. “But I’ll feel better with these guns in the hands of a good ol’ Texas boy like me.”

“You’re drawing against a leveled gun,” Sam said.

“You can get one of us but not both,” Johnny said.

“That’s right, gringo,” Vasquez said. “You try for me, the little gringo gets you. Try for him, and I get you.”

“Tell it to the army,” Sam said.

They came out of the rising sun, out of the bright new dawn. An entire cavalry patrol, fully armed and fresh.

Sam had faced that way, so he’d seen them coming from a long way off. Johnny and Vasquez had their backs turned to that direction and were unaware of the cavalry’s imminent arrival.

The cavalry column came forward, guidons flying, their banners bright. On command, the column parted, one file swinging left, the other right. The horse soldiers fanned out into a rank that curved around the gun wagon, barring it with an arc of armed men with shouldered carbines.

Johnny’s smile melted, his face stiffening. Vasquez bared his teeth in a snarl.

“Best keep those guns holstered, men,” Sam said, pleasantly enough.

Captain Ted Harrison and Sergeant Oakes rode forward. “Here we are on Sunday dawn, as agreed on,” Harrison said. “The gun wagon?”

“This is it,” Sam said.

“Who’re these two?” Harrison said, indicating Johnny and Vasquez.

“Friends of mine,” Sam said dryly. “Couldn’t have done it without them.”

Harrison nodded. “Tell the men to lower their weapons, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir,” Oakes said. He barked out the order at the phalanx of horse soldiers, who stopped pointing their carbines at the trio at the wagon. Johnny and Vasquez breathed easier.

“What about Harper?” Harrison asked.

“That’s him, lying yonder,” Sam said, pointing toward the body sprawled on the ground a hundred yards westward.

“Good,” Harrison said, smiling, showing his teeth. “And the outlaws?”

“What’s left of them are pinned in Ghost Valley. We blew up the Chute. We’ve got six men back there, two outside what’s left of the Door Posts and another four on top of the canyon with rifles and dynamite in case there’s any fight left in the gang. They each come in for equal shares of the reward money.”

“I’ll send some troops there directly.”

“By the way, Captain, this is Hector Vasquez, foreman on the Rancho Grande, the spread I was telling you about.”

“My compliments, Señor Vasquez,” Harrison said. “Please send my thanks to Don Eduardo and tell him that the army would be pleased to contract with his ranch to supply fresh beef to Fort Pardee.”

“I will do so, Excellency. Gracias,” Vasquez said.

“This young fellow is Johnny Cross,” Sam said. “He’s been in it with me from the start.”

“Good work, Mr. Cross.”

“Thanks, Captain.”

“Johnny’s a mustanger and if he can catch and break horses like he shoots you can’t go wrong,” Sam said.

“We can always use plenty of fresh mounts at the fort. We’ll work out the details when you come into my office to pick up your share of the reward money.”

“Much obliged, Captain,” Johnny said.

“We’ll go round up the rest of the outlaws now and settle the financial arrangements later,” Harrison said. “Sergeant, leave a detail here to guard the gun wagon and move the rest of the troops out to Ghost Valley.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’d better come along to identify our bunch at the canyon and make sure there aren’t any wrangles between them and the troops,” Sam said.

“Good idea, Mr. Heller,” the captain said. “And—thanks.”

“All in a day’s work, Captain,” Sam said. “A profitable day, between the reward on the gun wagon and the bounties posted on Harper and most of his gang.”

Harrison nodded, turning his horse and riding off to rejoin his troops, who were forming up to move out. A sizeable detail would remain behind to guard the gun wagon.

“You coming?” Sam asked.

“I ain’t letting you out of my sight until I get paid off,” Johnny said.

“Me, too,” Vasquez said. “You are too full of tricks, gringo.”

He and Johnny mounted up, taking their place with Sam at the head of the cavalry column. They and the troops moved out, heading westward toward Ghost Valley.

“Do me a favor,” Sam said, voice pitched so that only Johnny could hear him. “Don’t sell the army any stolen horses.”

“I’ll try,” Johnny said. “Reckon you’ll be moving on once you collect your bounty money, eh, Yank?”

“Not at all. Nice peaceable place like this, I think I’ll stick around for a while.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Johnny groaned.

Sam laughed. “I’ll put the Heller brand on Hangtree County!”

His vow held a threat, a promise, and the herald of a new day.