The Black Hills

by William W. Johnstone

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .” Annabelle intoned, staring in shock down the bluff toward the shoot-out. If you could call it that.

  It was a bushwhack, pure and simple.

  Hunter rose quickly. “Are you packing your carbine?”

  Annabelle turned to him, her eyes now filling with tears. She looked at him imploringly. “Please, don’t. You’re outnumbered, Hunter.”

  Hunter gave her a pointed, commanding look. “Stay here. Whatever you do, Annabelle, don’t go down there.”

  She merely gazed up at him through tear-flooded eyes. She didn’t say anything. She knew what he was going to do, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

  He ran down the slope so quickly that he frightened the horses already made jittery by the crackle of the gunfire. He bounded up to the buckskin, shucked Annabelle’s Winchester carbine from its leather scabbard, then grabbed his grullo’s drooping reins and swung up onto Nasty Pete’s back.

  Instantly, he went galloping off around the shoulder of the bluff, bulling through grass and brush. Then he was fairly flying down the front of the bluff, giving Nasty Pete his head, the horse weaving around pines and leaping through shadbush and wild currant shrubs.

  The horse bottomed out on the floor of the hollow in which the ranch lay, and loped through the stirrup-high brome toward the rear of the barn. None of the bushwhackers had yet spied Hunter. They were too busy flinging lead at old Angus in the cabin.

  Hunter saw one just then moving back through the broad gap between the barn and the blacksmith shop. He was moving toward Hunter but he was preoccupied with reloading the Winchester in his hands.

  Hunter recognized him. He was one of Ludlow and Chaney’s bullion guards—a big man with a full beard and a floppy-brimmed canvas hat, twin bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest. Furlong was his name. He’d once prospected on a place near the 4-Box-B.

  Hunter aimed Nasty Pete straight toward him.

  Hearing the grullo’s thudding hooves, Furlong looked up. His eyes grew so wide that Hunter could see the whites clear around them. Hunter took the grullo’s reins in his teeth. He racked a cartridge into the Winchester’s breech, aimed quickly, and fired, punching Furlong straight back off his feet.

  He rolled, howling.

  Jerking the reins in his teeth, Hunter swung Nasty Pete right, then pulled back, momentarily stopping the hard-breathing mount. A man was just then turning from the barn’s far rear corner, his eyes snapping wide as he started raising his own Spencer carbine.

  Another bullion guard.

  Another dead bullion guard.

  Hunter’s .44-caliber round blasted a quarter-size hole through the guard’s forehead and blew the back of his head into the brush behind him, like spilled paint. Dead before he could scream. Dead before he hit the ground.

  The next man too. He’d just lifted his head above a pile of timber scraps leftover from when the Buchanons had built their headquarters, and Hunter tattooed his cheek.

  The man hadn’t finished dropping before Nasty Pete was bounding along the rear of the barn. Hunter swung the horse sharply left, galloping up the side of the barn toward the front. Two shooters were hunkered up at the front of the gap, facing the cabin. Another man lay dead behind and between them, likely sporting one of old Angus’s own bullets in his brisket, which oozed dark red blood.

  One of the men ahead of Hunter cursed as he turned sharply to see Hunter storming toward him. “Behind us!” the man screamed, and took a bullet through his right shoulder, another through his throat.

  Hunter didn’t have time to shoot the other man. Nasty Pete was moving up on him too fast. Hunter let the horse hammer him straight down to the ground and then stomp him a few times, turning his face to strawberry jam.

  Hunter booted the grullo out into the yard, pausing to look around. He couldn’t see anyone on his right. Smoke puffed from several guns on his left, however, those slugs hammering the front of the cabin.

  A rifle report sounded from the lodge, telling Hunter old Angus was still kicking, still fighting. As Hunter swung Nasty Pete hard left and began racing toward where he could see other bushwhackers hunkered around the yard, Angus gave a screeching wail:

  “Hunter, what in the hell you doing, you crazy son of Satan? Get off that catamount an’ take cover!”

  But then the shack was back behind Hunter’s right shoulder, and he was recocking Anna’s Winchester and taking aim at a man hunkered behind a rain barrel off the corral’s left front corner, just beyond the barn.

  “Get him, boys!” one of the bushwhackers shouted beneath the thunder of rifle fire. “Blow that Rebel devil off his hoss!”

  Hunter recognized the voice of Luke Chaney’s old man, Max Chaney. He didn’t bother looking for him. He’d find him sooner or later. In the meantime, he shot two more men who’d been hunkered down inside the corral, hurling lead from over rails or around posts. He killed one outright, only wounded the other.

  As the wounded man fell back, clutching his shoulder, Hunter jerked back on Pete’s reins, ejected the spent cartridge, and tried to seat fresh.

  No doing.

  The Winchester was empty.

  As lead screamed toward him, all the bushwhackers now training their sights on him, he hurled himself off the grullo’s back and rolled toward the corral. As he did, he picked up a rifle discarded by one of the men he’d shot, pumped a round into the action, and, lying prone, snaked the Winchester over the corral’s bottom slat.

  The man he’d only wounded was crawling toward the rear of the corral, cursing.

  Hunter shot him in the left buttock, evoking a shrill howl.

  Bullets hammered the dirt around the big ex-Confederate, spraying grit in his eyes. One grazed his left leg.

  He rolled up on his left shoulder and extended the rifle, throwing lead at three more shooters bearing down on him from the yard’s east side, hunkered in the dun brush or behind the scattered pines and aspens lining a dry creek bed. One man threw his rifle straight up in the air as the bullet punched him backward. Another cursed and rose up out of the brush, staggering forward and yelling and firing his rifle into the ground in front of him.

  Then the bullet that had emptied his belly dropped him to his knees. He lay shaking his head and blubbering.

  As a bullet cut a hot line across Hunter’s neck, he dropped the third man he’d fired at, with a second shot. That bullet hammered the man’s head straight backward on his shoulders, making his hat fly high.

  Hunter rose onto a knee and began triggering lead toward the puffs of powder smoke rising from the tall grass and from behind a pile of brush he and his brother had cut from the yard behind the cabin, to make room for a vegetable garden.

  More men screamed and howled. Several ran.

  One shouted, “Fall back! Fall back to the horses!”

  That was Max Chaney again.

  Hunter saw the old reprobate hightailing it through the brush off the near corral’s rear right corner, heading toward a grove of aspens in which Hunter could now see horses tied to a long picket line. Several other men were also running toward the horses. He thought two of the running men looked like Luke’s two brothers—Billy and Pee-Wee.

  The ambushers’ rifles had fallen silent now as most of the bunch made a hasty retreat.

  Hunter ran forward. When he gained the front corner of the corral, he pumped another cartridge into the Winchester’s action, raised the rifle to his shoulder, and aimed at Max Chaney’s thick, retreating figure. He narrowed one eye as he gazed down the barrel.

  The old buzzard deserved a bullet in the back. He was no better than a chicken-stealing dog, after all. In fact, he was an insult to chicken-stealing dogs.

  It was a long shot at a hundred and fifty yards, but Hunter had taken longer shots during the War of Northern Aggression albeit with a Whitworth, designed for such long-range shooting.

  He led Chaney a hair, centering the Winchester’s sights on the back of the man’s head, up near the crown o
f his bowler hat. He drew a breath, held it, squeezed the trigger.

  A half a blink later, Chaney turned his head and his fat, tan, bearded face to look behind him. As Hunter’s bullet rammed home, Chaney’s head jerked forward, and the old man flew headlong into the brush.

  “Pa!” one of the two Chaney boys yelled.

  Both younger Chaneys ran over to where Max Chaney flopped in the tall grass near the horses.

  Hunter lowered the rifle and smiled grimly as the two Chaney boys converged on their old man and dragged him forward. They cast wary, panicked looks behind them.

  A muffled rifle report sounded from inside the cabin behind Hunter. Old Angus wasn’t firing out the front. He must have been firing out the back, at someone trying to flank him.

  Hunter ran south around an old corral and a big, L-shaped pile of split cordwood, and then over toward the cabin. He stopped and dropped to a knee beside a boulder.

  A man was hunkered behind another boulder just south of the cabin and near the small vegetable garden Hunter had dug and in which pumpkins grew thick and tangled and corn was hip-high. Powder smoke jetted from a rear window of the cabin. The bullet ricocheted off the boulder behind which the flanking attacker was hunkered.

  As the ricochet screamed around the hollow, the flanker rose and snaked his rifle over the top of the boulder, aiming toward the cabin, at old Angus. Hunter didn’t let him get off a shot. Hunter’s bullet plowed through the man’s left shoulder, twisting him around and dropping him.

  Hunter rose from behind his own boulder and walked forward. His jaws were hard, his eyes like cold blue marbles at the bottom of a deep lake.

  The wounded flanking attacker flopped around, groaning. He turned and saw Hunter striding toward him with grim purpose. The man’s eyes snapped wide, grew dark with dread.

  He stopped flopping around and, half sitting, he thrust a gloved hand out toward Hunter in supplication. His name was Gavin Mulgavery—another ore guard. He was short and thick around the waist, with short blond hair and a blond beard and one wandering blue eye. He wore two pistols in shoulder holsters on the outside of his brown leather vest.

  He didn’t reach for either hogleg.

  “Don’t shoot me!” he bellowed. “Please, don’t—”

  Hunter stopped and fired the Winchester straight out from his right hip, the bullet ripping through the man’s wide-open mouth to punch a fist-size hole through the back of his head, leaving him stretched out flat on the ground, quivering as the life quickly left him.

  Walking slowly forward, his face set as hard as a plaster mask, Hunter shot Mulgavery again . . . again . . . and again. Until the Winchester’s hammer pinged benignly against the firing pin.

  The padding of four little feet sounded.

  Hunter watched Bobby Lee run up out of the brush behind the cabin. The coyote stopped near the dead man, gave a low snarl, showed his teeth, and hiked his back leg on the dead man’s head.

  CHAPTER 17

  Bobby Lee sat down before Hunter, lifted his long, gray-brown snout, and hurled several baleful wails skyward.

  Hunter stared down at the dead Mulgavery, wishing he could kill the man—all of these men—all over again.

  Ragged breaths sounded behind him. He wheeled, raising the Winchester with both hands. He checked the motion, lowered the rifle. It was old Angus standing in the window to the left of the cabin’s rear door.

  The old man’s head was bare, his long, gray hair hanging in sweat-soaked tangles to his shoulders clad in a wash-worn balbriggan top and suspenders. Coarse gray hair curled out from between the old garment’s unbuttoned front flaps, from the old man’s bony, liver-spotted chest.

  Angus’s cold blue eyes were on the man Hunter had just sent to hell in a hail of hot lead. The elder Buchanon was breathing hard, and he was holding his only hand to his right side, from which blood bubbled up around a bullet hole about six inches above the waistband of his patched dungarees.

  “He dead?”

  Hunter nodded. “He’s dead, Pa.”

  “He the last of ’em?”

  Hunter looked around. “I think so. The rest lit a shuck, tails between their legs.” He stepped forward, toward the broken-out window in which his stooped, grizzled old father—looking older and more grizzled now than ever—crouched, staring out. Pain shone sharp in Angus’s eyes.

  Physical pain. Mental pain.

  “How bad you hit, Pa?”

  Angus slid his gaze from the dead man to Hunter. His left cheek twitched, and tears glazed his eyes.

  “Shep,” he muttered, upper lip quivering, a tear dribbling down his gray-bearded cheek. “Tye . . .” He stumbled backward against a dresser—he was in his own back bedroom—then turned and ambled heavily toward the bedroom door to the hall. “Gotta . . . gotta see to my boys!”

  “Pa, hold on.” Hunter dropped the rifle and walked toward the lodge’s back door. “You’re bleedin’ bad, Pa!”

  He grabbed the latch handle and pulled, but Angus had barred the door, which had been hammered repeatedly with bullets, from the inside. Having hailed from a war-torn country, and having heard about the viciousness of the Sioux before they’d all come west as a family, they’d built the humble log house as stout as a military fortress, with thick walls of native timber heavily chinked and with loopholes bored through the doors.

  Through one hole Hunter could see old Angus stumbling off down the hall toward the front of the cabin, intent on reaching Tye and Shep lying out in the front yard.

  Hunter hurried around the side of the lodge, Bobby Lee trotting along behind him, panting. He reached the front just as old Angus burst out the lodge’s stout front door and limped onto the porch, stooped forward, pressing his hand to the wound in his side.

  “Oh!” the old man cried, seeing Tye lying about ten feet off the broad, timbered veranda’s front steps. More tears dribbled down Angus’s ashen cheeks. “Tyrell!” he called as he stumbled down the five steps.

  Hunter reached up and wrapped his arm around the old man’s waist, or Angus would have collapsed. Hunter knew there was no way to get the man to sit down, so he kept his arm around him, keeping him from falling, as Angus shuffled out to where Tyrell lay on his side, red hair splayed out on the ground beneath his head.

  “Ty-rell!” Angus fairly bellowed as though ordering his son to rise and get to work. “Ty-rell!” he yelled again before dropping to his knees and staring down in horror at his youngest son, who lay bleeding from a half dozen bullet wounds.

  Hunter dropped to a knee. He stared down in shock at his dead young brother. Tye had probably seen Shep shot after their oldest brother had run out of the blacksmith shop, likely after their ambushers had started yelling threats and shooting.

  Hunter doubted that Tye had gotten off a shot himself, as no empty cartridge casings littered the ground around the young man’s body or his rifle lying near his outstretched right hand. One bullet had drilled poor Tye in the neck. He’d taken two to the chest, near his heart. One had smashed into his hip while the other two had been punched into his right thigh.

  The boy’s eyes were half-open as he lay staring sightlessly at the ground. A fly lit on his bottom lip.

  While old Angus rested his hand on his son’s body, hovering over him, sobbing, shoulders jerking, Hunter brushed his fingers over Tye’s eyes, closing them. Then he rose and walked over to where Shepfield Buchanon lay in front of the blacksmith shop.

  Shep lay on his back, limbs akimbo. He’d taken two shots to his chest. One had likely pierced his heart, the other his left lung. Another had grazed the outside of his left knee.

  The two in the chest had done him in.

  Three cartridge casings lay in the blood-splashed dirt around him.

  Hunter dropped to a knee, placed a hand on his oldest brother’s shoulder. Sorrow was a living, breathing thing inside him. His heart had been torn by a giant, razor-edged knife. The rage of the unbridled berserker he’d known only a few minutes ago had made way for his grief.<
br />
  It would return later. He knew himself well enough to know that fact.

  When it did return, he would welcome it.

  He had tried to live a peaceable life. The men from Tigerville—Stillwell, Ludlow, the Chaneys—hadn’t let him. And, because they hadn’t, and because of what they had done here today, they would all die as bloody as Tyrell and Shep.

  “Good-bye, big brother,” Hunter said now, raking the words out on a long, bitter sigh. “Sleep well. You were a good man. You deserve a good rest. And . . . know that you’ll be avenged.”

  The thunder of hammering hooves sounded from behind the barn. Instinctively, Hunter reached for Shep’s Henry repeater. He rose, both hands on the rifle, ready to cock it and bring it up. He lowered it when Annabelle galloped out from the break between the barn and the blacksmith shop.

  She checked the buckskin into a skidding halt just outside of the break and looked around. Her frightened eyes found Hunter. Her gaze raked him, checking for wounds. Satisfied he’d been grazed a few times but not seriously wounded, she dropped her gaze to Shep before sliding them over to where old Angus was still crouched over Tye, bawling.

  Bobby Lee sat near the old man, yipping softly, miserably.

  Annabelle sat the buckskin stiffly, in silent shock and disbelief, as Angus climbed to his feet and shambled over to where Hunter stood by Shep.

  “Shep!” Angus wailed. “Shepp! Nooooo! Oh God, noooooo !”

  He dropped to his knees and threw himself over his oldest son’s body, wailing, sobbing, and cursing.

  Annabelle swung slowly down from the buckskin’s back. She dropped her reins and walked over to Hunter. She stared up at him, tears filling her eyes.

  She had no words. There was nothing to say.

  She merely moved against him, pressed her cheek to his chest, and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  Hunter held her very tightly as he stared down at old Angus crouched over Shep.