William W. Johnstone (6 page)
Read William W. Johnstone Online
Authors: Savage Texas
Dutchie Hiltz reached over the shoulders of some of the others, proffering a bottle of red whiskey. “Here go, Brock!”
Harper grabbed the bottle. It was one-third full. “Didn’t leave me much did you, ya greedy bastards,” he said.
“It’s a wondernation that there’s any left a-tall,” Fenner said. His hat was back on his head.
Harper pulled the cork out with his teeth and spat it out. He upended the bottle, taking a long pull, gulping greedily, draining the bottle. Gripping the empty bottle by the neck, he flung it out high over the creek.
He drew his gun and fired, one lightning-fast move. The bottle exploded in midair, raining shards of broken glass into the water.
“Now that I have your attention,” Harper said, “let’s get back to work. There’s plenty that needs doing. You’ve all had a chance to paw that gun. Now give it here. Come on, give it up!”
Groans and protests sounded from those complaining they hadn’t had time to examine the goods.
“There’ll be plenty of time for that later,” Harper said. “Every mother’s son of you will each get his own personal rifle at the share-up at the hideout, along with plenty of cartridges. I know you’ll put them to good use!”
The rifle was passed hand over hand to Harper, who put it back in the crate from which it came. He closed the broken lid as best he could, hammering it into place with a thud from his clublike fist. “Load it back in the hopper,” he said.
A couple of men hefted the crate into the wagon. The tailgate was closed, locked in place. The flap of the tarp was pulled down, covering the crates.
“We’re taking the gun wagon to Ghost Canyon,” Harper said. “Too bad we’ve got to travel by day but there’s nothing for it but to do it. Those of you picked for the cleanup—you know who you are—will have to load the bodies on the flatbed wagon, cover ’em up, take them north into the hills and get rid of them. Then join us at the hideout.
“Kimbro! Fenner! We’ve got to get rid of these bluebelly duds, get them all gathered up for burning later. That’s important. Make a clean sweep of it. Any scrap or rag of bluecoat is a ticket for a oneway ride to the gallows.
“Remember that, all of you—no mistakes! No slip-ups! Each must do his part else all of us will have our heads in the noose!
“Move!”
S
IX
IX
Seven men stayed behind at Mace’s Ford for the mopping up of the massacre site. Jeff Parr, one of Kimbro’s sidemen, headed the crew. With him were Neal, Remy Ballew, Wilse, Gordy, Ralph and Dutchie Hiltz.
Brock Harper and the rest of the bunch were gone. They mounted up and rode out, taking with them the gun wagon and a string of horses that had belonged to the dead men. They went west on the trail and were soon lost from view.
The blood in the creek took care of itself. The current carried it away downstream, leaving no trace of the gore that had been spilled. That was the good thing about using the creek for a killing ground: it was self-cleaning.
The flatbed wagon which had been hidden around a bend in the woods trail now stood on the muddy creek bank near the bodies. The four-horse team harnessed to it was unnerved by the presence of blood and violent death. They snorted, pawing the ground. The handbrake on the wagon was set tight.
A wooden keg was stowed up front in the boot of the wagon. Handpainted red lettering identified its contents:
GUNPOWDER
.
GUNPOWDER
.
“Move that black powder out of the way,” Jeff Parr said. He was big, tough, stolid—a hard case. They were all hard cases, the outlaws of Harper’s Raiders. Jeff was harder than most. He had brown hair and a brown beard and wore leather chaps and a gun on his left hip. He was a left-handed draw.
Neal hefted the keg with a grunt. “Where you want it?” he asked.
“Put it on top of that rock for now,” Jeff said. “Out of the way where no damn fool can touch off the powder with a stray match or careless cigar butt.”
Neal toted the keg to a grassy shoulder on the north side of the trail and set it on top of a flattopped, waist-high boulder.
“That’ll do,” Jeff said.
Wilse pushed his hat forward and scratched the back of his head. “What’s the gunpowder for?”
“You feel like digging a grave deep enough for all these bodies?” Jeff countered.
“Hell, no!”
“That’s what the gunpowder is for. We take the bodies north into the hills, dump them in some ravine and blow it up, bringing the sides down on it.”
“Huh. I get it,” Wilse said. “Pretty good.”
“The boss’ll be glad to know it meets with your approval,” Parr said. He addressed the others:
“You men start loading them bodies on the wagon. And be quick about it! We don’t want to spend all day here. Not when the others’ll be long back at the hideout eating up all the grub and drinking all the whiskey.”
It was early afternoon, hot. There were a lot of bodies, twelve in all. They were dead weight and smelled bad. Fat black flies were starting to swarm them. The buzzing sounded loud as a sawmill.
Wilse stood at one end of the pile of bodies, the one nearest the wagon. “Somebody lend a hand here. I ain’t gonna do it all by my lonesome.”
Dutchie Hiltz took up a stance opposite Wilse at the head of the body. Wilse stooped down to take hold of the dead man’s legs. His gun fell out of his holster to the ground. “Damn!”
He picked up the gun and wiped the mud off on the side of his pants. Holstering the sidearm, he fastened the rawhide loop over the top of the gun to keep it in place.
He and Dutchie picked up the corpse, Wilse holding it by the feet, Dutchie hooking his hands under the dead man’s arms. Handling it like a heavy feed sack, they heaved the corpse up on to the flatbed wagon.
“I don’t need no help, I can do it all by myself,” Neal announced.
“What are you waiting for, applause? Get to it,” Jeff said.
One of Neal’s big hands grabbed a fistful of a dead man’s shirtfront, the other gripping its belt at the middle. With a grunt Neal lifted and jerked, hefting the body off the ground and swinging it up and onto the flatbed, where it landed with a thud.
Gordy and Ralph slung-heaved a third body up on the wagon. Wilse and Dutchie returned to the corpse mound for another.
Remy Ballew stood around with his nose in the air and his arms folded across his chest. “You ain’t working, Remy,” Jeff said.
“Neither are you.”
“I’m ramrodding this job.”
Remy Ballew held up his hands in front of him, palms-out. They were white and smooth, uncallused. “I can’t damage these,” he said.
Somebody swore and another made a rude noise.
Ballew, sharp-eyed and sharp-featured, with what seemed to be a permanent sneer on his thin-lipped mouth, wore a black hat, black jeans, and a black leather gun belt with twin holstered .44s. The holsters were tied down. He fancied himself a gunslinger. He showed his hands palms-out, turning them over to display the backs of them, as if exhibiting them for admiration.
“These hands are my stock in trade. I can’t risk anything that might affect the speed of my draw,” he said.
Jeff Parr laughed, a harsh cawing noise. Remy’s face colored. The back of his neck reddened. He was touchy.
“We all depend on our gun hands. What makes you so special?” Jeff asked.
“I’m fast,” Remy said.
“Not that fast,” Jeff said, resting a hand on his gun butt.
Remy thought it over, making quick calculations. He thought he was faster than Jeff, he was sure of it. Trouble was, Jeff didn’t seem to share that surety. Remy toted up the pluses and minuses and reached a decision not to press the point.
He reached into the side pockets of his vest, pulling out a pair of wrist-length black leather riding gloves. He pulled them onto his hands. The gloves were thin, tight. He flexed his fingers in them.
He stood over a corpse. “I can’t do it by myself.”
“Help him out, Neal,” Jeff Parr said.
“Okay,” Neal said. He and Remy loaded the corpse on the flatbed, Remy huffing and puffing.
“Whew! This is hard work—”
“How would you know, Remy? You never did an honest day’s work in your life,” Jeff said.
“No, and this is a hell of a time to start!”
“It’ll give you something to tell your grandkids. If you have any.”
Most of the outlaws wore bandannas tied over their noses and mouths to mask the stink. They worked up a pretty good sweat loading the corpse cargo on the flatbed wagon. The more bodies that were loaded on the wagon, the harder the job got, because the flatbed filled up pretty quick and each successive body had to be thrown on top of an ever-higher pile.
Jeff eyed the results with a critical eye. “You’re getting sloppy, men. Them deaders are all over the place. Soon as the wagon crosses a rough patch of ground, some’ll start to fall off. Dress ’em up, there.”
Gordy, a gangly, raggedy man out of Natchez, demanded, “What’d you get a flatbed for? It’s no good for the job. You need something with a hopper to hold the load in place.”
“That’s the only wagon we could find to steal on the way over here,” Jeff said.
“This is no work for honest outlaws, Jeff,” Dutchie Hiltz complained.
“Quit bellyaching!”
The work got done. Jeff Parr circled the flatbed, studying it from different angles. “Tie ’em down with some rope so they don’t fall off.”
This was done.
“Best cover ’em up, too. Can’t go traipsing around the countryside in broad daylight with a wagonload of corpses,” Jeff said.
“Why not? Anybody sees us, it’ll be their tough luck,” Remy said. “We’ll burn them down—what’s another body more or less?”
Jeff thought there was some merit in that view, but since Remy had said it he was moved to take a contrary position. “No sense asking for trouble. We’ll cover ’em with a horse blanket or two,” he said.
This, too, was done. Blankets secured by ropes masked the flatbed’s unsightly load. Mostly. A few hands and legs stuck out past the edges of the covering.
Remy Ballew went to the creek, hunkering down beside it. He took off his bandanna, dipped it in the water, and mopped his face with it. He rose, a flicker of motion on the other side of the ford catching his eye.
He whistled softly. “Get a load of this,” he said
A rider was approaching the edge of the eastern bank. A lone rider on a gray horse.
Remy turned, calling to the others. “Somebody’s coming!”
“How many?” Jeff Parr asked.
“One man, alone.”
“One of ours?”
“No, a stranger.”
“Too bad for him,” Jeff said. “You boys know what to do.”
Gordy said, “I’ll get my rifle and drop him from here.”
“Wait’ll he crosses over and comes to us. That’ll be one more for the pile,” said Jeff. “Come back here, Remy, before he sees you and gets suspicious.”
Remy joined the others in the shadows of the overgrown trail. He took off his gloves, pocketing them. He flexed his fingers, working some of the stiffness out, loosening them up.
The stranger on the gray crossed the ford, coming at a walk.
“He don’t suspicion nothing,” Gordy said, smirking.
The gray stepped out of the creek, climbing up on to the west bank, advancing several paces into the shade under the trees. The outlaws stood in a loose line across the trail, blocking it.
The stranger reined in. He blinked a couple of times; otherwise his face was utterly impassive, betraying no sign of surprise or alarm. He was a blond, blue-eyed giant.
The badmen’s faces were cruel, mocking. Remy Ballew took it on himself to do the talking. He liked to run his mouth. “Hello, friend,” he said.
“Howdy, gents,” the stranger said. “This the road to Hangtree town?”
“A Yankee!” Gordy exclaimed. Some of the others laughed.
The stranger’s eyes were restless, in constant motion scanning the scene. They took in the number and weaponry of those who faced him; the arms and legs protruding out from under the blankets covering the mound on the flatbed wagon; and, on top of a boulder, the wooden keg with the legend
GUNPOWDER
blazoned across it in red letters.
GUNPOWDER
blazoned across it in red letters.
“The road to Hangtown? That depends, friend,” Remy said.
“Depends on what?”
“On who you are.”
“And who might you be?” the stranger asked, pleasantly enough.
“Us? Why, you might call us the toll keepers.” Remy was playing to his compadres.
“Didn’t know this was a toll road. What’s the fare?”
“Your life,” said Remy.
That got a laugh from some of the others. Not Jeff Parr, though. He was all business. “Cut the cat-and-mouse crud and get on with it,” he said.
The stranger must have reached a similar conclusion. He struck first. His hand streaked to the pistol stuck butt-out in the top of his pants on his left side, drawing and firing it. He put two slugs into the keg of gunpowder.
A tremendous booming blast followed, as if a lightning bolt had suddenly emerged from out of the clear blue sky, smashing into the west bank with a thunderclap.
Earlier, Sam Heller had come southwest out of the hills across the plains to Swift Creek. His path struck the more northerly Mace’s Ford rather than Flatbridge. That suited him fine. He preferred to make a quiet entrance into the country by a roundabout route, rather than approach Hangtown directly.
He’d neared the ford well after the carnage was over. Shadows hid the depths of the trail tunneling through the trees on the west bank.
One thing he could see from a long way off, though: buzzards circling high above the site. A half-dozen or so of them hung way up in the sky, black V shapes wheeling and soaring on the thermals. Hovering. Waiting.
Sam knew what that meant well enough—death. Buzzards have keen eyesight. They can sight dead meat from a long way off. They’re scavengers, carrion eaters, shunning live prey in favor of the remains of another’s fresh kill.
Their gathering over the west bank meant that there was something dead below. That they still remained aloft, rather than descending to feast on the remains, meant that the predator that had made the kill was still in place.
Sam decided to investigate, crossing the creek to the other side. The gray advanced steadily. It was a war horse, used to blood, violence and death through long exposure.
The clearing in the trees was full of all three. Sam saw that it was thick with armed men, lurking back in the shadows. He made out seven of them. Gunmen. Outlaws. Cocky bastards, sure of themselves. A type he knew and didn’t like.
He could feel the rage within him, ever-present just below the surface, begin to freeze into a ball of burning ice.
There were more of them than he expected, but he didn’t find their numbers particularly daunting. He trusted to skill and nerve to see him through. And if not—what the hell?
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