He bent his legs just before he hit the roof of the third car. He dropped to his knees and rolled backward, almost losing his rifle and clawing wildly at the corrugations in the tin roofing for purchase. His left hand slipped off the ridge he thought he’d had, and he continued rolling to the end of the car—rolling and sliding perilously toward the outside edge of the car, toward the canyon.
He cursed under his breath, heart pounding, as his legs dropped over the end corner of the car, one foot dangling toward the iron vestibule, the other toward the canyon. As he struggled to pull himself up, his hands slipping off the ridges in the corrugated roof, he heard several more gunshots in the very coach he was fighting to stay on.
Men were whooping and hollering. Women were screaming. A baby was crying hysterically.
“Fork-tailed devils,” Slash said, gritting his teeth and clawing his way back onto the coach roof. “That . . . ain’t. . . the way . . . we do it . . . boys!”
With that, he pulled his legs and feet back onto the roof and clambered up to the peak. He sat there for nearly a minute, catching his breath, the wind and high-altitude sun blasting against him. The Animas slid by on his left now as he faced the rear of the train; the stone wall of the ridge slid by on his right.
He doffed his hat, ran a hand through his thick, salt-and-pepper hair, then snugged the hat down tight on his head so it wouldn’t blow off. He considered a plan of attack.
“Think I’ll start at the end and make my way up toward the locomo—”
He stopped when he heard a shout from the express car flanking the coach car he was on. Answering shouts came from somewhere else. He glanced to his right. The rock wall had slid back away from the tracks, and now in the brush and rocks lining the canyon between the tracks and the wall he saw a half-dozen men and horses. Slash recognized members of his own gang.
They must have split up. Roughly half had leaped onto the train while the others had stationed themselves here to accept the strongboxes, which could only be opened with dynamite from the train itself, which they must have wanted to keep moving throughout the robbery for some reason.
Sure enough. There was a loud thud followed by another loud thud and then one more.
Slash turned to look toward the express car. Someone had just rolled three iron-banded strongboxes out of the express car’s door facing the ridge. The boxes rolled and bounced amidst the rocks, kicking up dust, and the half-dozen gang members ran toward them.
One of those running men recognized Slash riding the crown of the third passenger coach. Donny Landusky pointed toward Slash, yelling, “Hey, it’s him! It’s him! It’s Braddock! That’s Braddock up there!”
But then the men running down the strongboxes fell back away behind the ridge wall that had suddenly shoved up to within a few feet of the tracks again.
Had anyone on the train heard him identify Slash?
Slash slowly gained his feet. He’d forgotten how hard it was to maintain your balance on a train car that pitched and rocked like a baby’s cradle and continually shuddered as the iron wheels clattered over seams. He got close enough to the rear of the coach that he could see the coach car’s front door open. It was the small door opening onto the vestibule between it and the rear of Slash’s passenger car.
Slash ducked, dropped to a knee.
He waited. From his recent dangle over the passenger coach’s end corner, he knew that a ladder ran up the rear wall, on that side, which was on his left now as he faced the rear.
He pumped a cartridge into his Yellowboy’s action, pressed the butt against his shoulder. He aimed toward the rear left side of the car, waiting, staring at where the ladder poked up slightly from the rear wall.
Nothing.
He waited another couple of seconds.
The crown of a brown hat appeared. A bullet had nipped one side of the crown’s crease. That would be “Big C” Chuck Dawkins, who had joined the gang only a year ago, when they were down in Arizona. He’d come from another gang that had disbanded when its leadership had succumbed to the bottle and found itself without a rudder.
Not a bad hombre, Big C. At least, Slash remembered him as a good jake.
Slash waited, caressing the hammer of his cocked Winchester with his gloved right thumb.
The brown hat slid upward until a pair of dark-brown eyes set in sunburned sockets rose just above the level of the coach’s roof. The eyes snapped sharply to Slash, widened in recognition.
Slash smiled, nodded.
“It’s him!” Big C shouted, and raised a cocked Colt over the top of the coach, aimed at Slash.
Or it would have been aimed at Slash if, before he’d gotten it leveled, Slash hadn’t drilled a neat round hole through Big C’s forehead, just above his left eye. Big C’s Colt flared, the slug flying wide of its intended target.
Big C himself sagged backward off the ladder. There was a crunching thud as he fell off the train and apparently was smacked smartly by the front of the express car. The bullet-creased brown hat flew up over the coach car and then was whipped out over the canyon by the wind.
“Oh, boy,” Slash said, hearing men frantically shouting in the car beneath him, ejecting the spent cartridge casing and seating a fresh round in the Yellowboy’s action. “I do believe this dance is about to begin!”
He was right.
A gun barked behind him. The slug screeched over his right shoulder as he whipped around to face the man, Snook Dodge, aiming a Winchester over the top of the coach car at him. Slash threw himself flat against the car’s roof just in time to avoid another bullet exploding out the flame-lapping muzzle of Dodge’s Spencer repeater. As Dodge worked the repeater’s trigger guard cocking mechanism, Slash raised his rifle and fired—a hair too late.
Dodge had seen Slash bearing down on him and jerked his head down below the car’s roof. Slash cursed and pumped another round into the chamber.
Dodge jerked his head back up, swinging the Spencer around once more. Slash fed the man a pill he couldn’t digest, by way of Dodge’s mouth, which he’d opened to hurl a curse at Slash at the same time he hurled lead.
Only, he hurled neither.
Dodge’s head snapped back, eyes wide in shock at the bullet that had just drilled through the back of his mouth and out the back of his head, painting the panel of the car behind him with dark red blood.
He dropped the Spencer. Then he himself dropped away out of sight.
A gun barked in the coach below Slash, blowing a quarter-sized hole in the tin roof two feet to Slash’s right.
“Holy . . . !”
As Slash scrambled to his feet, the gun barked again.
Another hole appeared six inches to his left.
Slash wanted to fire back through the roof at the hombre triggering lead at him from inside the coach, but he could hear the terrified passengers in there, down beneath his boots, and he didn’t want to kill any of them by mistake. That wasn’t what he was about. Never had been. Under the leadership of Billy Pinto, the Snake River Marauders had become a pack of bloodthirsty wolves.
Slash ran forward, avoiding more bullets hammering up from inside the coach, drilling quarter-sized holes through the corrugated tin roofing just behind his boots.
Slash leaped off the front end of the third passenger coach, hurdling the gap between the cars. He landed atop the end of the second passenger coach and dropped to his knees.
He stood there at the rear of the second coach, waiting, staring toward the grated iron floor of the vestibule below, wondering from where the next threat would come. Only vaguely, he became aware of the train picking up more speed as the front end of the long iron caterpillar began dropping.
Only vaguely, he wondered who, if anyone, was at the controls....
Shouting issued from inside the third passenger coach. Slash stared at the closed door, waiting for one of the Marauders to emerge. Instead, there was a loud explosion. Like the triggering of both barrels of a double-barreled shotgun. A man in a blue wool uniform c
ame plowing through the door, turning the door to splinters and smashing up against the rear wall of the coach Slash was on.
The man, a black man, lost his leather-billed conductor’s hat as he sagged to the floor of the vestibule, his entire torso a mass of blood from the buckshot that had torn through him. He groaned and sagged in a lifeless, bloody heap.
A man poked his head out the door and glared up toward Slash.
No, not really a man. A kid. A towheaded kid wearing a low-crowned, black, felt sombrero with a beaded band and holding a sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun in his gloved hands, gray smoke curling from both barrels. The face was lean and clean-shaven but the brown eyes were flat. As flat as a snake’s and twice as mean.
Billy Pinto laughed up at Slash, who snapped the Winchester to his shoulder. Billy drew his head back, laughing girlishly. He grabbed someone behind him—a young girl— and tossed her out onto the vestibule. Slash had been in the process of firing the Winchester at Pinto and couldn’t hold the bullet, but he managed to nudge the shot a hair wide so that it only grazed the girl’s temple before smashing into the wall of the coach over her right shoulder.
She dropped to the vestibule floor, holding her head in both hands, screaming. She was small and frail. She couldn’t have been over fourteen years old, around the same age as Bledsoe’s granddaughter.
Inside the coach, Billy Pinto yammered like a wolf on the first night of a blue moon.
CHAPTER 35
“You little coward!” Slash bellowed toward the half-open coach door beyond which Billy Pinto was laughing. “Don’t shield yourself with an innocent girl, you gutless heap of trash. Show yourself and fight!”
Just then a familiar voice muffled with distance shouted, “Slash!”
Slash glanced to his right. Pecos was sitting his buckskin on a low ridge just beyond the train. He held the reins of Slash’s Appy in one hand. He was waving his other hand and pointing up toward the locomotive. His shouts were drowned by the chugging roar of the train and by the wind blowing over Slash’s ears. But Slash thought he picked out the words “bridge” and “speed.”
Before Slash had time to put the words together, a gun thundered in the car beneath Slash. A bullet tore up through the roof, kissing the outside edge of the sole of his left boot.
“Dang!”
Slash leaped forward, hurdling the gap between the passenger coaches again and landing on the roof of the coach he’d started out on. The wind nearly blew him off the coach and into the canyon. He dropped to the roof and grabbed a tin ridge with his gloved left hand, inadvertently releasing his grip on his Yellowboy, which dropped to the coach roof and slid away before Slash could grab it again. He watched in horror as his prized rifle dropped over the edge of the roof and out of sight.
He cursed roundly, clinging to the ridge for dear life until he got his feet back under him again.
The wind had grown stronger. The train was also rocking more violently.
It was then that Slash realized what Pecos had been trying to tell him.
Somewhere ahead along the severely dropping grade the apparently driverless train was barreling down, a bridge spanned a deep gorge. The train was picking up too much speed to cross the bridge without demolishing the bridge and hurling itself into Wild Horse Gorge, which Slash remembered scouting with Pecos back when they’d robbed the train a few years ago.
If he remembered right, the highest speed the bridge could handle was twenty miles per hour. Any more than that, the rickety wooden structure would rattle and shake and be quickly turned to jackstraws at the bottom of Wild Horse Gorge, making a prickly bed for the train that had destroyed it.
Without a doubt, the train was moving considerably faster than twenty miles an hour, and it was picking up more speed with every clack and chug.
A large, cold rock dropped in Slash’s belly.
He didn’t have time to consider the problem further at the moment, however, because just then another hatted head poked up above the opposite end of the passenger coach. Slash pressed his belly flat against the coach roof. The bark of the shooter’s gun was muffled by the train’s roar and the wind, but the bullet made a grisly screech as it ricocheted off the roof two inches right of Slash’s cheek.
Slash clawed both his six-shooters from their holsters, whipping them up and firing both several times, watching in satisfaction as the shooter’s face, poking up just above the ladder, turned red. The man screamed and fell away.
Billy Pinto laughed shrilly beneath Slash. The kid fired through the roof, the bullet punching a hole just ahead of the middle-aged former outlaw.
Slash cursed and leaped to his feet. He ran—if you could call running the stiff-legged death dance he performed—as he headed toward the rear of the violently rocking coach while Pinto howled beneath him and drilled more slugs into the roof, just a few inches behind Slash’s hammering boot heels.
The car lurched.
Slash’s left boot jolted out beneath him, and he dropped to a knee with a curse. Knowing that Pinto would be honing in on the sound of his footsteps, he lurched to his feet and, sure enough, a bullet was sent hurling straight up through the place where Slash’s boot had been planted a half a blink before.
Gaining the end of the car, Slash looked straight down.
As he’d suspected, two men stood there, pistols raised, grinning up at him, waiting. They were Kansas City Dave Schotz and the one-eyed C.J. Johnson.
Slash lurched straight back as the two pistoleers hurled lead at him. At the same time, Billy Pinto, having followed Slash’s footsteps to the back of the train, punched another slug at him through the ceiling beneath his boots. Slash sucked a breath as the slug burned a hot line up his right leg and across the outside of his right arm.
Suppressing the galling pain of the burn, Slash stepped forward and fired both his Colts down into the vestibule.
“Gnahhh!” Kansas City Dave cried as he flipped backward over the brass handrail, hit the ground, and bounced off the side.
Slash’s second shot had taken C.J. Johnson through the man’s chin, jerking his head back. He’d just started caterwauling and bringing his own pistol back to bear on Slash when Slash drilled two more pills through his chest, making dust puff from the front of his corduroy vest and hickory shirt.
“Say hi to your brother Goose for me, C.J.!” Slash bellowed as the pistoleer did an imitation of Kansas City Dave, rolling backward over the brass rail, dropping to the ground, and quickly bouncing back out of sight.
Slash leaped down onto the ladder as two more slugs were punched up through the roof, again narrowly avoiding making him sing soprano. He slid straight down to the vestibule, kicked open the door, and raised both his cocked Colts straight out in front of him.
“I’ll kill her!”
Billy Pinto stood just inside the coach door, grinning, holding a cocked, long-barreled Smith & Wesson to the head of the young blonde he’d shoved out of the front of the car a few minutes ago. The poor girl was bleeding from the gash Slash’s bullet had carved across her right temple. Her blue eyes were wide and bright with fear.
“I’ll kill her!” Pinto said, backing slowly down the aisle, away from Slash. “You stay right there, or I’ll blow a hole right through her purty head, you old catamount!”
Slash followed him slowly down the aisle, stepping over a dead passenger whom Pinto or one of the other savage Marauders had killed—a fat, gray-haired man in a green suit. The dead man jerked from side to side with the violent rocking and swaying of the speeding train, which must have been doing a good forty miles an hour as it dropped down a steep hill. Slash tried to pull the brake through-chain that ran along the right side of the car, up near the ceiling. No good. Someone had rendered the through-chain inoperable, probably so that the brakes could be applied only in the locomotive.
“Don’t do it, Billy,” Slash warned as he continued moving along the aisle, leaning against the seats to either side of him to keep his balance. “You shoot her, I’ll
kill you quick as sin on a Saturday night in perdition. You know I will!”
“Stay right there, you old fool!” Billy screamed in a shrill girl’s voice.
Slash slowed his pace, not wanting to get the poor blonde hurt any more than he’d already done himself. Around him, the car appeared only about half full, though it was hard to tell. Most of the passengers were hunkered down low or in their seats, mostly out of sight.
Slash could hear a woman sobbing and an injured man grunting. He just then walked past a woman cowering in a seat to Slash’s left, crouching over her two children, shielding the boy and girl with her arms. She squeezed her eyes closed, muttering, praying.
“Don’t kill me,” cried the blonde to whose head Billy’s cocked pistol was pressed. “Please don’t kill me!”
Following her and Pinto slowly, aiming both his Colts straight out before him, Slash said, “Don’t worry—he’s not going to kill you, honey. He’s not stupid. He doesn’t want to die.”
“Shut up you old blowhard!” Billy bellowed. “Didn’t I tell you to stay where you was!”
He stopped suddenly and aimed his pistol straight out over the girl’s right shoulder. Flames licked from the barrel. The bullet tore into Slash’s upper left arm, throwing him backward and causing him to inadvertently dodge the next two bullets, which screamed over him to plunk into the coach’s rear wall.
Slash hit the floor near the dead man, groaning, the bullet searing his arm, filling him with a white-hot agony and fury. He snapped his guns back up but Pinto had just wheeled, dragging the girl along behind him as he bolted out the front door and onto the vestibule.
Slash clambered his way back to his feet and ran shambling, staggering as though drunk with the coach’s violent pitch and sway, to the front door that was swinging loose on its hinges. He bounded out, leaping across the vestibule, then twisting around and slamming his back against the next car’s closed door.
Billy Pinto stood with the girl before him, to Slash’s left.
“Die, you old devil!” Pinto screamed, triggering his pistol at Slash once more. “Die! Die! Die!”
Cutthroats Page 27