CHAPTER 32
Donnigan and McCreary were given a little extra time to rest after more sandbags had been piled into the backs of the wagons. Then Forbes Dyson called the competitors back to their marks.
“This has been an epic battle, ladies and gentlemen,” he told the crowd, “and it will continue as long as necessary until we have crowned a winner! If both men reach the finish line, more sandbags will be added to the load!”
A groan came from Seamus Donnigan.
“Are you tryin’ to kill us, Mr. Dyson?” he asked, but the big grin on his face seemed to indicate that he didn’t mean the question seriously.
“Not at all, not at all, Donnigan,” the saloon owner replied. “We just have to make certain that the winner is truly worthy of the hand of one of these fine ladies!”
He waved toward the five young women at the railing of the hotel porch. That brought more cheers from the crowd.
“Let’s get on with it,” McCreary rumbled. “I’m ready to send this bumpkin packing.”
“Bumpkin, is it?” Donnigan demanded. He was still grinning, but the fires of competition burned brightly in his eyes. “Get ready to eat my dust, you stumpy little varmint!”
They pulled on the rope harnesses and leaned against them, ready to start pulling.
Over on the hotel porch, Scratch said, “I don’t think they’ll be able to budge those wagons. The fellas put too many sandbags in ’em. I ain’t sure a team of mules could pull ’em!”
“I hope those poor men don’t give themselves apoplexy,” Jean said.
“They can do it,” Rose said, and Beth and Luella nodded agreement.
Frowning, Cecilia muttered, “This is getting a little barbaric.”
Scratch heard her and said, “Wait until the bare-knuckles boxin’ matches tomorrow evenin’.”
“I may not be able to watch those,” Cecilia responded with a shake of her head.
In the street, Forbes Dyson shouted, “Go!”
Donnigan and McCreary surged forward against the ropes. Their legs drove hard. They leaned so far ahead, their bodies formed a sharp angle with the ground. The thick ropes were drawn so taut, they fairly hummed.
The wagons remained motionless.
Lips drew far back from teeth as the two men grimaced from pain and effort. Donnigan clenched his fists and slowly swung his arms back and forth in an attempt to build up more force. McCreary just grunted and strained. Donnigan’s face was as red as his hair, and McCreary was equally flushed.
Donnigan’s wagon suddenly moved about an inch.
He stumbled and tried to right himself in time to keep the wheels turning, but the wagon had already settled down again and didn’t move. A great bellow came from Donnigan as he strove to budge it a second time.
McCreary’s wagon inched forward. Donnigan’s began to move again, as well. Bit by bit, the wagons crawled toward the finish line.
That fifty feet had to feel more like fifty miles to the two contestants, Bo thought as he watched them with pity in his eyes. He wondered if their hearts might give out before they reached their goal.
Donnigan’s wagon drew ahead slightly. Bo wasn’t sure, but despair appeared to flicker in McCreary’s eyes for a second. There wouldn’t be another round. If any more weight was loaded onto the wagons, the men would have no chance of moving them.
Forbes Dyson must have known the same thing. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled over the shouting and whistling and stomping of feet, “First man to the line wins! First man to the line wins!”
McCreary pulled even with Donnigan. The muscles in his thick legs bulged out so much from the effort that it seemed like his trousers might split at the seams.
At the same time, Donnigan’s massive chest rose and fell like a bellows. McCreary was probably slightly stronger, but would Donnigan’s superior wind bring him the victory?
The roar of the crowd was so deafening that it seemed to make the very ground tremble underneath Silverhill. Step by step, inch by inch, Donnigan and McCreary approached the finish line. With the goal only five feet away, Donnigan moved ahead of McCreary again.
Bo saw the excitement on Donnigan’s face and thought for a second that overconfidence might take hold and cause the rugged miner to ease up and then fail, but Donnigan continued pulling until his feet blurred the redrawn line in the dirt.
Only inches behind, McCreary saw that he had lost and fell to his knees with a huge groan. Just on the other side of the line, Donnigan flung his arms up and shouted in triumph.
No one heard the shot, but everyone in the crowd saw the result as Donnigan suddenly jerked back and blood welled from the hole that had appeared in his chest. He pawed at the wound for a second, and then, still attached to the wagon by the ropes, he pitched to the ground.
McCreary saw him fall. Eyes widening in shock, the man tried to struggle to his feet, but before he could make it, a piece of his skull leaped in the air as a bullet struck him in the head. He toppled sideways and was dead by the time his massive body hit the ground.
The shots might have gone unnoticed at first, but the two brutal deaths did not. Screams ripped from the throats of several soiled doves who had taken the afternoon off from their normal work to watch the strongman contest. Men shouted curses and questions at the top of their lungs.
Chaos erupted along the boardwalks and in the street as people scrambled to get to cover in case the deadly gunfire continued.
The possibility that whoever had shot Donnigan and McCreary had done so as a distraction immediately occurred to Bo. His hand dropped to the Colt on his hip, but he didn’t pull the iron just yet. With two men cut down by a mysterious gunman in front of practically the whole town, if he started waving around a revolver, he’d just add to the panic.
And some hombre might decide he was to blame for the killings and open fire on him.
“Spread out so we can keep a better eye on the girls,” he told Scratch. “Let’s get them back inside.”
That order might be easier given than carried out. The porch was packed with hotel guests and townspeople, and they suddenly surged around the Texans and the five young women, like quicksand enveloping them and trying to pull them down in its deadly embrace.
Scratch tried to shoulder through to the other end of the area where the ladies had been lined up at the railing. He hadn’t made much progress when he spotted several men in sombreros who, instead of scrambling to get inside the hotel for protection against the hidden killer, seemed to be trying to reach the young women.
Bo noticed the same thing and called to his old friend, “Look out for those Mexicans!”
One of the men darted through a sudden gap in the crowd and grabbed Luella’s arm. She screamed as he jerked her toward him. His other arm whipped around her waist and closed tightly.
Scratch palmed out the Remingtons, but in this mob of innocent bystanders, he couldn’t even think about shooting, nor could he get a shot at Luella’s captor without endangering her, too.
But as more Mexicans sprang in front of him to block his path, he didn’t hesitate to lash out at them. The long barrel of a Remington smashed one man’s jaw and sent him staggering back. The other gun thudded against a man’s skull and made his knees buckle. He went down under the trampling feet of the mob.
Bo took a different route. Leaving his gun in its holster for the moment, he swung up onto the railing that ran along the front of the porch. That top rail was only about three inches wide, but Bo was able to stay balanced on it and slide along for several feet before he saw the opening he was looking for.
He dived off the railing, flew through the air, and crashed into the man who was trying to wrestle Luella out of the crowd.
With so many people around, the impact was like a game of ninepins. Bo and the would-be kidnapper fell, and so did the people with whom they collided. A tangled sprawl formed at the end of the porch.
The good thing was that the man’s grip on Luella had been jolted loose. She pulled away.
The whole business knocked the air out of Bo’s lungs. He knew he was way too old for such daredevil stunts, but there hadn’t seemed to be any other way to reach Luella in time.
He was still lying on top of the man he had knocked down, trying to catch his breath, when the man writhed and Bo caught a glimpse of a knife blade flashing toward his face. Bo jerked his head aside. The knife missed his face but raked along the top of his left shoulder, cutting through his coat and shirt and leaving a fiery line drawn across his flesh.
Bo’s left arm and hand still worked just fine despite the minor wound. He grabbed the wrist of the man’s knife hand to hold the blade away from him and hammered a punch with his right into the Mexican’s snarling face. Bo hit him again, fast and hard, and the man went limp.
A scream made Bo jerk his head up. Another man in a sombrero had hold of Luella and was trying to drag her away. She was putting up a fight, though.
More shots blasted, enough that it seemed like a small war was breaking out on Silverhill’s main street.
* * *
“Stop fighting!” Philip Armbruster cried. “I’m not going to hurt you!”
The dark-haired young woman struggling in his grasp twisted her head around so that her face was only inches from his. As he peered into her wide, frightened eyes, he asked himself again what in the world he was doing.
Armbruster had acted totally on impulse. He had seen one of Mendoza’s men trying to drag the young woman away, only to be knocked down by one of the old men who had proven to be such thorns in the bandit chief’s side. Armbruster wouldn’t have believed that an old-timer was capable of such athletic derring-do, but clearly, even the old men were tough out here on the frontier.
When the woman had pulled free of the bandido’s grasp, however, she had stumbled right into the reporter’s arms. He’d grabbed her without thinking and started trying to drag her off the porch. If he succeeded in capturing her, Mendoza would be pleased. Maybe Armbruster wouldn’t abandon this assignment, after all . . .
But then she writhed around, and he gazed into her eyes, eyes such a dark blue that they were like the night sky or a bottomless lake, and in that moment, Philip Armbruster was lost. All he could do was stare helplessly at her.
Now he understood why Jaime Mendoza had become so obsessed with this woman.
Only a split second passed, even though it seemed much longer to Armbruster’s addled senses. Then the woman’s hard little fist came up and cracked sharply into his nose.
He exclaimed in pain as he drew back from the punch. Blood spurted hotly from his nose. He had never been a fighter. He was a physical coward, and he knew it, which was one reason why he had decided to make his living with the words that flowed from his brain.
He tried to keep hold of her, but she hit him again, slugging him in the chest. Armbruster’s grip loosened even more. She put her hands on his chest and pushed him away. She whirled to flee.
That took her right into the arms of Jaime Mendoza, who scooped her up and carried her, kicking and screaming, off the porch and into the chaos of the street.
CHAPTER 33
With all the incredible racket going on, Bo was never sure what made him notice one particular scream, but just as he fought his way back to his feet, he heard it and swung around.
Another Mexican had hold of Luella and had lifted her off the ground so that her feet kicked wildly as he reached the street with her.
A glance over his shoulder told him that Scratch was trying to struggle through the fear-crazed mob toward him, but his old friend wasn’t going to reach him in time to help. Another few seconds and Luella and her captor would vanish into the chaos.
Bo thought about trying to vault over the railing, but he knew he wasn’t up to that. He ducked under it instead and dropped to the street.
He grabbed people by the shoulders and thrust them aside as he went after Luella and the Mexican. Panic-stricken hands fumbled at him, but he shrugged them off. Through the bobbing heads around him, he tried to keep an eye on Luella and the man who had hold of her, but it was growing more difficult to do so.
Bo didn’t think there had been any more shots, but it didn’t really matter. This mob couldn’t be any more crazed than it already was. All the spectators had been worked up into a frenzy over the strongman competition, and then sudden, unexpected death had pushed them over the edge into temporary madness.
At least Luella was putting up a fight, Bo saw. She kicked and hit at her captor, and her struggles made him stumble a little, slowing him down. Bo drove through a narrow gap in the crowd, widening it with his shoulders, and then he was right behind them.
He tackled the man around the waist, driving him off his feet. Still caught in his grasp, Luella went hard to the ground, too. As they landed, Bo rammed his elbow into the small of the would-be kidnapper’s back, hoping to paralyze him momentarily. The man cried out in pain.
Feet thudded against Bo’s ribs and tromped on his back. The people who did that weren’t trying to hurt him. They just wanted to get away before somebody shot them. Bo knew that, but he felt like he was caught in a stampede, anyway.
He looked around for Luella and saw that she had rolled away. She tried to get up, but people kept running into her and knocking her down again. Bo crawled to her and hovered protectively over her.
“Grab on to me!” he told her. “I’ll get you out of here!”
Her arms went around his neck. He got his feet underneath him somehow and heaved upright, bringing her with him. As they both stood, someone screamed close by. A gun roared. A man running past Bo and Luella cried out as a bullet struck him in the back of the shoulder.
Bo turned, thrusting Luella behind him as he continued trying to protect her with his own body. The gunshot had opened a narrow path as terrified people scrambled out of the line of fire. Bo saw that the Mexican he had just tackled was back up on one knee, gun in hand, ready to fire a second shot.
No matter how fast you were, beating an already drawn gun was nearly impossible. Bo wasn’t sure if even Rose’s hero Smoke Jensen could do that.
But right now, he had to try. His hand flashed to the holster on his right hip.
It was empty. In all the fighting and jumping around, the Colt had fallen out of the holster.
In the fraction of a second that passed, Bo saw the face of the man who was about to kill him, and recognized Jaime Mendoza. Judging by the grin on the bandit chief’s face, he recognized Bo, as well, and was glad for the chance to drill one of the men who had thwarted his will earlier. His finger tightened on the trigger.
Before the gun went off, the barrel of one of Scratch’s Remingtons crashed down on Mendoza’s head. The bandit slumped forward just as he pulled the trigger. The gun in his hand roared, but the bullet went into the dirt right in front of him.
Mendoza followed, collapsing in the street from the blow, which had knocked him cold.
Bo nodded his appreciation to Scratch. With two such old friends, that fleeting moment was enough to acknowledge what had happened.
“Are you all right?” Bo asked Luella.
She seemed to be having trouble catching her breath, but she managed to nod and say, “Yes, I . . . I think so.”
Bo looked at the hotel porch, the last place he had seen the other four young women. None of them were in sight now.
“Scratch, the other ladies—”
“I saw all of ’em make it inside the hotel,” Scratch replied as he kept the Remington trained on the senseless Jaime Mendoza. “Miss Cecilia sort’a took charge, the way she usually does. She mother-henned ’em out of harm’s way, looked like.”
That was a relief, thought Bo, but he wanted to see the other young women for himself. He wasn’t sure how many more of Mendoza’s men were still lurking around. With their leader unconscious and captured, though, they might decide to cut their losses and get out of Silverhill as quickly as they could.
The chaos in the street was beginning to ease as the cr
owd thinned. Bo looked around, but although he saw some Mexicans running here and there, he didn’t spot any that he recognized as Mendoza’s men. Mostly, they were farmers and their families who had come into Silverhill for the excitement.
Bo wanted to search for his gun, but right now it was more important to check on the other ladies. A Colt could be replaced.
He put a hand on Luella’s shoulder and told her, “Go on in the hotel and join the others. I’ll be there in just a minute. Scratch and I need to figure out what to do with that fella he buffaloed.”
“Are you all right, Mr. Creel?” Luella asked.
Bo smiled. “I reckon I’ll be a mite stiff and sore in the morning from being knocked around,” he said, “and I’ve got a cut on my shoulder, too, but nothing that I won’t get over. It won’t slow me down any, either.”
“Thank you. You saved my life, you and Mr. Morton.”
“That’s our job.”
“Not really. Not now. Or have you adopted us from now on?”
Bo patted her shoulder and said, “I doubt that. You go on and find the others. Make sure they’re all right.”
Luella nodded and headed for the hotel. Bo walked over to Scratch, and they both peered down at the still unconscious Jaime Mendoza.
“What are we going to do with this varmint?” Bo asked.
“I was thinkin’ a bullet in the head might be just what he needs.”
“It’s tempting,” Bo admitted, “but that would be cold-blooded murder.”
“More like shootin’ a snake ’fore it has the chance to bite somebody again,” Scratch muttered. “But I suppose you’re right. We been accused of a lot of things and been guilty of some of ’em, but we ain’t murderers.”
Bo looked up as Jack Bouma strode through the stragglers from the mob. The gunman’s Colt was holstered, but his hand rested on the butt, ready to draw.
“Who’s this?” he asked curtly.
“Jaime Mendoza,” Bo said.
Bouma cocked an eyebrow. “The bandit boss who’s been raiding from below the border? He’s got a sizable price on his head.”
“One and the same. Is there somewhere he can be locked up, Bouma?”
Have Brides, Will Travel Page 22