Blaze! Ride Hard, Shoot Fast

by Wayne D. Dundee

  "That's for you and your conscience to deal with," J.D. said somewhat tersely, starting to grow impatient. "Grab what gear is reasonable to bring along, then climb up here behind me. Shouldn't be much longer to the first checkpoint, we can ride double that far."

  * * *

  Scarcely a half hour after putting the buffalo wallow behind them, J.D. heard another gun shot. There was nothing distant about this one. It was too close, in fact, and with it came the punch of a heavy caliber bullet.

  Charger took the slug square to his chest and then straight through his game heart. J.D. heard the meaty impact and felt the horse stagger under him a fraction of a second before the crack of the rifle reached his ears. Charger stumbled forward another step and a half before his front legs folded completely and he toppled to one side. J.D. kicked out of his stirrups and both he and Blaylock pitched themselves opposite from the way the horse fell.

  More shots cracked in the still air and more slugs sizzled in tight, repeatedly thudding into what was now Charger's carcass as the two men squirmed down behind it for cover. The washboard landscape had finally smoothed out only a short time ago and now they were caught on a flat patch of ground with no other concealment anywhere close by.

  The shots kept coming, holding them pinned down. J.D. had his Colt drawn, Blaylock was clutching the Winchester he'd pulled with him when he dove to the ground. J.D.'s Winchester was still in its saddle scabbard, pinned underneath the fallen Charger.

  "There's at least two shooters makin' it hot for us," Blaylock said.

  "Yeah, that's the way I make it," agreed J.D. "They're up there on that grassy hump, ahead and to the left. I can see the haze of their gunsmoke but so far they haven't shown a target to shoot back at."

  Almost as quickly as it started, the rifle fire stopped. Everything went quiet, the way it had been before.

  "What are they up to? Have the bastards cut out?" Blaylock wanted to know.

  "Maybe. Or maybe that's just what they want us to think."

  They continued to keep low and stay quiet for a time. Four or five minutes passed. The sun, nearly straight overhead in a totally clear sky now, hammered down hard.

  "Think they might be circlin' around on us?" Blaylock asked.

  J.D. squinted and swept his gaze a hundred-eighty degrees. "I don't see how. Except for that damn hump, everything's pretty flat on all sides...I'm thinkin' the varmints got what they mainly wanted, to put us afoot, and have hightailed it."

  Blaylock licked his lips. "Sounds right. But I gotta admit it makes me mighty itchy to think about goin' ahead and standing up."

  "Yeah, I know what you mean."

  Blaylock shifted his position some. "Tell you what. See that wind blow-out over there a piece?" He pointed to a pocket of ground where a swirling dust devil of wind had at some point scooped out a small depression, tearing away the prairie grass and leaving a spot of bare sand. "I can scramble over and flatten down into that pretty dang quick. If the shooters are still up there, just waitin', it'll draw their fire. You keep my rifle, you're a better shot than me. If they make a try for me, it'll give you a target to nail at least one of the sonsabitches."

  "That'd be takin' quite a risk for yourself."

  Blaylock twisted his mouth wryly. "Trust me, I can move quicker than a hiccup if I think a bullet might be chasin' me." He held out his Winchester.

  J.D. hesitated for a beat, holding Blaylock's eyes, then holstered his Colt and took the Winchester. "They show one hair of their ambushin' damn heads, I'll split it for 'em."

  "You do that."

  Blaylock shifted around some more, got his legs coiled under him. "You ready?"

  "Whenever you are."

  Blaylock took a couple deep breaths, held the second one, and then pushed off, hurling himself up and forward into a low-crouching run. A yard and a half ahead of the blowout, he stretched into a dive and skidded onto the sand, immediately flattening himself in the shallow depression.

  Nothing happened.

  No shots came.

  Blaylock lifted his head and shoulders and propped himself on his elbows. "Well," he said, "I guess that made me look pretty foolish, didn't it?"

  "Not by a damn sight," J.D. replied, rising to his feet. "What you did took guts. Just because it didn't draw any fire, don't ever sell it short."

  Blaylock rose also and walked back over to the slain horse. J.D. handed him back his rifle.

  "What now?" said Blaylock.

  The corners of J.D.'s mouth turned down grimly. "More important than ever that we make it to that checkpoint as soon as we can...When we get there, I got a hunch we ain't gonna like what we find."

  * * *

  Young Charley Tiltman frowned over at the man riding next to him, Iron Nose Ed Gratt. "You sure we did the right thing back there?" Charley questioned in a voice that was just a few months beyond the squeaking, squawking stage of puberty. "Colfax said we was supposed to plug both the horses and the men, especially that Blaze fella."

  "Yeah," Gratt growled in response, "and 'that Blaze fella' is exactly why I didn't see much future in stickin' around to trade lead. You've heard the stories about J.D. Blaze, ain't you?"

  "I guess so."

  "You guess so," Gratt snorted. "He's only one of the fastest guns and overall toughest hombres you're ever likely to run across. Hell, you heard Colfax himself tell how, just the other night, he set a fella on fire and then bullet-chased him into the path of a locomotive, right?"

  "Yeah," Charley allowed. "But we had him pinned down pretty good."

  "Yeah, and a pinned-down gun twirler like Blaze can be even more dangerous than any other way. No sir, no future in feelin' cocky about tryin' to play that card, says I. You want to go back and take him on yourself because you figure we got all the bark skinned off him, you go right ahead. Me, I say puttin' him and that other jasper on foot clear out here in the middle of no goddamn where is good enough."

  "But what'll we tell Colfax?"

  "We tell Colfax we 'put 'em down'. Just like that—we put 'em down. It ain't exactly a lie and it ain't sayin' more than we have to. Get it?"

  "I guess. If you say so."

  "I say so." Gratt set his jaw firmly. "Now quit askin' so dang many questions and give my ears a rest. The others will have made it a ways north and west by now, we need to concentrate on catchin' up with 'em."

  Chapter Sixteen

  J.D.'s hunch turned out to be tragically accurate.

  When he and Blaylock made it to the checkpoint, they found the rest of the race riders already there waiting...well, most of them. There was no sign of Estelle Grigg or Curly Nesbitt, and Charles Flood, the Englishman, lay dead with a bullet hole in the side of his head. Also shot dead were the two race committee employees who'd been manning the checkpoint. The pair of horses the men had ridden out to assume their post had been killed, too—along with Estelle Grigg's Midnight Shadow.

  It was a stunning scene and, when J.D. and Blaylock came walking up, everyone present seemed to be shuffling around in a state of shock.

  "What in God's name happened here!?" J.D. demanded.

  Jeremiah Baker gazed at him dully. "God's name? Surely you can't believe God had anything to do with any of this...It was none but the Devil Himself who visited here!"

  J.D. stepped around the dazed young man and grabbed Joshua Hope by a wiry arm. "Who did this? Why?"

  "Eight men," Joshua related in a flat tone. "They got here before any of us racers started showin' up. Killed the regular fellas mannin' the checkpoint, then two of 'em took their places while the rest hid in those trees and rocks over there. When we started ridin' in one by one—the pack had gotten pretty well spread out this mornin'—they swarmed out and jumped us."

  The spot chosen for the checkpoint had a stand of scraggly cottonwood trees and a nearby upthrust of sandstone boulders, rare features for the generally stark Sandhills and so well suited for the ambush that had been set up.

  "Somehow they knew you and Blaylock had bran
ched off and were lagging behind," Joshua continued. "The leader—Colfax, I heard him called—sent a couple men after you. 'Take care of 'em', I heard him say."

  "They put us on foot. That's as close as they came," J.D. said.

  "Anyway, once they had the drop on us, they rounded up all of the racin' horses, along with Mrs. Grigg, and some of the men started herding them away. That's when Flood pulled out a peashooter he had hidden in his shirt and tried to turn the tables. As you can tell, the poor fool didn't make out too good. After they'd killed him, they shot the horses you see lyin' dead. The only one they left alive, besides those they herded off, was Curly Nesbitt's Rebel Rouser. They left him for Curly to ride to Ogallala, the nearest town to south, and deliver the ransom demand."

  "Ransom? That's what this is all about?"

  The rest of the men had all gathered around close by this point.

  "That's right," answered Earl Dykstra. "They're asking a cool million for the whole lot—the woman and the prime horseflesh."

  J.D. gestured. "If they wanted the horseflesh value to tally up to its highest, why did they kill Midnight Shadow?"

  Dykstra shook his head. "Something mighty curious there. None of us have figured it out for sure. That horse looks like Midnight Shadow, right enough. But Mrs. Grigg was still on the horse she's been riding all along in the race. One of 'em must be a phony, a duplicate. Reckoning Colfax and Kanelly know what the hell they're doing, I figure it wasn't the real Midnight Shadow they put a bullet in."

  "Kanelly?" J.D. echoed. "He's in on this too?"

  "That's right. Looked like he was calling the shots—no pun intended—right along with Colfax."

  "I thought it was you Kanelly was partnered up with."

  Dykstra twisted his mouth wryly. "Yeah, I kinda thought the same." His expression took on a deep frown. "Look, I know by the way your wife has been asking questions about Kanelly and me that the two of you already had your suspicions about us. Since what happened here, I've gone ahead and admitted some things to these other fellas so I'll 'fess up to you, too. You see, I got thrown into this thing as a ringer for the Chicago crime syndicate. How a fair-haired Texas lad like me, who was practically born on a horse, allowed himself to let those weasels get their clutches in me is too long a tale to go into. The thing is, it happened.

  "So when those syndicate boys heard about this race, they cooked up the phony background story about me bein' some dumb Polack workin' in the slaughterhouses and havin' a dream of ridin' in a big horse race. That's how they entered me. The horse Eightball, by the way, is a thoroughbred from the east coast. I forget his real name. Anyway, with that phony cover, they figured they could make some good money on side bets as long as I gave a strong showing."

  "And, as extra insurance, they threw in Kanelly too."

  Dykstra nodded. "That's right. He was supposed to keep me in line and do whatever he had to—nothing specific was called out as far as I ever heard, but he was supposed to know it if and when something presented itself—to help make sure I finished like they wanted."

  "Is this ransom thing some kind of change-up by the syndicate boys to grab an even bigger chunk of money?"

  "I don't think so. It don't feel like that to me," Dykstra said earnestly. "I think this is a flat-out double-cross on everybody, cooked up by Colfax and Kanelly. Colfax is out of Omaha these days, Kanelly out of Chicago—but they knew each other from something they'd worked together on in the past. What it smells like to me is a couple of low rung thugs tired of getting their hands stomped on by slobs climbing over them to make it higher, and all of a sudden seeing this as the chance to make a big score strictly for themselves."

  "Could be," J.D. allowed. "But double crossing the crime outfits in Chicago and Omaha both...Whew! That's a mighty risky play."

  "You're telling me," Dykstra groaned. "My stomach's doing flip-flops just being caught on the edges of it. What if the Chicago boys don't buy my story that I was included out by Kanelly?"

  "I do not understand," spoke up Nassir. "All this talk of big city crime organizations...This thing that has happened, this treachery and blood-letting—it is out here in the vast emptiness that surrounds us. What has these places with such strange sounding names—Omaha, Chicago—to do with what happens out here so very far away from them?"

  "It's a long story, pal. But trust me," Dykstra tried to explain, "the people who run those organizations in those far away cities have power and a long reach that goes far beyond just the spot they happen to be standing in."

  "Yet while they are reaching from so far away, should we not be doing something in the here and now?" Nassir asked. "As soon as my companions who are traveling with the train receive word of what has happened, I assure you they will come with arms in hand and fire in their bellies to counter this outrage. El Numa was chosen by our emir for me to ride in this race. To tamper with and threaten such an honored animal is an affront to the blessed emir himself. My companions and I will be prepared to chase these villains to the gates of Hell and spill our last drop of blood if necessary to make them pay for their evil!"

  J.D. arched one brow sharply. "Well, now. That's a real feisty and admirable outlook. So happens I got a partner who'll also be comin' from the train and I expect she'll be packin' pretty much that same notion. And I ain't sayin' I'm one to disagree...But there's also the Grigg woman to keep in mind. I figure the reason those lowdown bastards took her was to give some added incentive for forkin' over the money, but also to keep her close as a kind of shield against some hell-for-leather posse chargin' in just the way you're talkin'. Anybody plannin' to go after 'em had better take that into consideration."

  "So what are you sayin'?" Blaylock said. "That the safest way is to meet their demands, hand over the ransom?"

  "Can the race committee and the big wheels involved even raise that kind of money?" asked Dykstra.

  "My emir possesses such wealth and more," stated Nassir. "But that is not the way. Would you give the wolf a lamb to save a sheep? What would happen when the wolf got hungry again? Would you give another and another until you had no flock left to give? You cannot appease a wolf. The only way is to drive it away or kill it."

  J.D.'s eyes narrowed. "I'm inclined to agree. Takin' precautions where Mrs. Grigg is concerned don't mean not goin' after those skunks at all. To my way of thinkin', payin' 'em what they're askin' for only means one thing: Payin' 'em in lead!"

  Chapter Seventeen

  With no horses and far short of firepower, there was nothing the abandoned race riders could do for the time being except wait until Curly Nesbitt returned. The possibility was discussed of striking out on foot in order to shorten the time before they'd re-connect with Nesbitt and whoever he was on his way back with. But given that the ambushers had made sure not to leave the men any water and there was the potential for two groups traveling in opposite directions over the rolling hills to actually miss one another, general consensus was that the best bet was to just sit tight and wait for Nesbitt to return with horses.

  Ogallala, they figured, was about a dozen miles to the south. That meant that the race train, by the time Curly reached the town, would in all likelihood have gone on by and started to set up the next overnight encampment about fifty miles farther down the line. A standing arrangement had been made to keep a telegraph operator traveling with the train. At each siding stop, this man was able to tap into the telegraph line on one of the poles that ran alongside the tracks and thereby allow the reporters and others traveling on the train to send and receive messages. By this means, J.D. and those with him reckoned, Nesbitt could send word of what had happened on ahead to the train and then, by the time he and some townsmen had fetched the stranded riders and got them back to Ogallala, everybody would be there waiting.

  That was the reckoning. The way it turned out was considerably different.

  When the men in the bloodied cottonwood grove saw Nesbitt returning with a mass of people accompanying him, it wasn't just Ogallala townsfolk—i
t was also the Grigg brothers and other race committee officials, Nassir's traveling companions, Harlan Hudson, a whole gaggle of reporters, and more. And last but far from least, shining with a special radiance in J.D.'s eyes, there was Kate.

  When their gazes met, she immediately raced ahead of the others, fell into J.D.'s waiting embrace, and for the next minute or so everything and everybody else around them sort of faded away while they kissed. When their lips finally parted, Kate drew her head back and gave him a mock stern look, saying, "I can't leave you alone for a minute without you getting into trouble, can I?"

  J.D. grinned. "A minute maybe. Anything more is too dang long!"

  "And isn't a ransom the way we started out with this job? Doing the same thing over and over again is apt to get a little boring."

  J.D.'s expression sobered. "I don't think you're gonna find anything boring about the nasty turn that's been taken here, babe."

  What followed after that, in a fairly orderly manner but sometimes with one excited voice trying to talk over another, was a comparing and sorting and piecing together of facts. Until the same picture had been painted for everyone. With the exception of how J.D. and Blaylock had arrived at the cottonwood grove, which happened after Nesbitt left for Ogallala, the tale of the way the race riders got ambushed was pretty clear in everybody's mind. How everyone from the race train was so readily available for Nesbitt to bring back with him boiled down to a delay in the train's departure from the previous night's siding encampment. When they got ready to leave, it was discovered that the storm had washed out a key section of tracks where the siding re-coupled with the main line so it had taken a sizable chunk of time to make the repair. Therefore, when Nesbitt arrived in Ogallala, the race train hadn't passed through yet so they were able to flag it down when it did show up. Naturally, once they heard the news of the ambush, a large contingent of those from the train had insisted on coming along to fetch the stranded men.