And maybe he was right, Brazos reflected glumly now as he leaned against an upright on the hotel porch. Two weeks without so much as a whisper. It was enough to take the edge off even his iron determination. Maybe Benedict had the right idea after all; forget the whole thing and amuse yourself with a woman ...
The big man sighed and flicked his cigarette away. He was tired, but he needed sleep even more than he knew, for if his danger-honed senses had been as razor-sharp as usual, he would have felt the menace that stalked Whetstone’s gloomy night. But there was no intimation that things weren’t exactly as they should be, no suggestion of lurking danger as he made his heavy-footed way down the badly lit corridor to his room—until Bullpup suddenly propped and pricked his ears.
Brazos halted. The door opposite his was ajar. Through the narrow crack, he saw the faint sheen of light on steel.
Alarm bells of danger, clanging in his head, the giant Texan grabbed for his gun, then flung himself violently at his door as the six-gun angled through the crack and went off with a cannon’s roar.
Brazos felt the hot slug burn along his back as his shoulder hit his door, which exploded open. He rolled on the floor as three gun-toting men burst into the corridor and opened up. Coming to a stop at his bed, Brazos jerked off two shots. A lunging figure buckled at the waist and jack-knifed through the doorway.
As the man fell, another dropped low and sent a red tracer of death searing over his curving body. Brazos seized his dog with his left hand, hurled him through the open window, then lunged to his feet to follow. A bullet snarled past his side, chopped into the sill and wood splinters ripped through the air. Brazos blasted through the doorway, then dived through the window.
The solid wood stanchion stood directly in his line of flight. It said a lot for the iron hardness of his big head that the four-by-four shattered under the impact of the airborne Texan, but he didn’t know about that. There was one massive burst of fire in his skull, then the sensation of plummeting into a bottomless pit of blackness.
And nothing.
An outlaw with a bloody shoulder lifted himself from the floor and staggered into the room. He tripped over his dead companion and the third man, a blocky-shouldered fellow with a black spade beard, shoved him roughly aside and lunged towards the window. He caught a glimpse of the motionless figure sprawled across the broken butt of the stanchion and was lifting his Colt when a black-and-white shape streaked up at him and sharp teeth fastened onto his wrist.
Sam Macall’s smoking gun spilled from his grasp and he screamed as the dog’s teeth drove deeper. Flailing wildly, he banged Bullpup’s body hard against the window frame. The terrible teeth came loose and the outlaw staggered back to crash into Brick Whitehead who’d just managed to regain his feet. Both men went down in a tangle of arms and legs.
“Judas Priest!” the hatchet-faced Whitehead shouted, kicking free. “Did we get him?”
Macall was clutching his mangled wrist as he got to his knees on dead Terry Stack’s bloody chest, his face ashen in the dim light. “I ... I think so. Take a look.”
Whitehead started towards the window. A ferocious growl from the blackness brought him up short. He fired at nothing, started forward again, then baulked as the big hound sounded his challenging roar again. Whitehead turned. “I reckon he’s done for, Sam. Nobody could have lived through that.”
Macall was in the doorway now, clutching his wrist with crimson seeping through the fingers. “Mebbe he is at that,” he said. “And mebbe we’d better head for the saloon fast.”
Whitehead couldn’t agree more. The giant Texan had to be dead; besides, it was too risky to stick his head out there with that ugly hound lurking in the darkness. Apart from that, they were supposed to have taken the Texan out quietly, and they’d been anything but quiet. Bo was going to be good and mad, especially when he heard that Stack was dead. Only for that damned dog ...
“Come on!” Macall shouted, and they sped down the corridor and into the street as a thunder of guns rolled out from the Big Horn Saloon.
It was the hammer that awakened him. It was a small hammer, but it hurt like the hobs of hell as it banged against the inside of his skull. It was pounding at the same place on the top of his head. Pain, it banged out. Pain. Pain. Pain.
Hank Brazos groaned at what the hammer was doing, even though the act of groaning was agony in itself. Then he opened his eyes to curse the man with the hammer, and the hammer became the sound of a dripping faucet and the sound of the faucet hurt as much as the hammer had done. A brilliant light flashed, he gasped, and then things came into focus. He was sprawled on the floor of the hotel bathhouse and a dim figure was bent over him.
He lashed out instinctively, and hands seized his wrist.
“Easy, big fellow, easy.”
Brazos blinked and then he stared into the thin, sick face of the dapper little man he’d been drinking with at the saloon, Doc Skine.
Then he remembered. Shoving the man aside, he staggered to his feet, only to crash against the wall as dizziness hit him. When his stomach stopped heaving, he lurched to the washstand and poured a pitcher of water over his head. Slowly the pain muted to an ache, insistent but bearable, like a too-tight boot. He turned slowly, his blond hair plastered to his face, then he grinned with relief when he saw Bullpup standing beside Skine, wagging his fool tail off.
“How do you feel now?” asked Skine.
Sober again, Brazos hauled out his Colt. “Like hell is a mile away and all the fences are down.” His gaze went to the door. “Those polecats who jumped me—are they still about, Skine?”
The little man shook his head. “Long gone, Texan. All except the one you killed.”
“Who were they?”
“They were with Rangle.”
Brazos stiffened. “Bo Rangle?”
“That’s the party,” Doc Skine said, and Brazos could see now that the little man’s face was white and drawn. “I thought I’d seen just about everything in my time, big feller, but what happened here tonight …” His voice trailed away.
“You mean them jumpin’ me?” Brazos said.
“Hell, not only that. What they did at the saloon was a mile worse.”
Benedict! Suddenly Brazos was lunging for the door, but a small hand grabbed his arm.
“Too late, Texan.”
A chill feeling of dread ran down Brazos’ spine as he halted. “Too late?”
Skine nodded. “Your partner’s dead, Brazos. They burned the saloon down after they jumped you. Benedict and the girl never came out.”
Brazos couldn’t believe him, wouldn’t believe him. On rubbery legs, he lurched from the bathhouse and staggered through the gloom with Skine at his heels. Reaching the corner of the hotel, he stared across the street and his heart skipped one full beat before starting up again, hammering hard and painfully against his chest. Dark figures stood in the street, their silhouettes outlined against the glowing pile of rubble that had been the Big Horn Saloon.
There was an overturned packing crate nearby. Brazos just made it to the seat before he was sick. He wiped his face with his kerchief, then he stared woodenly ahead again as two towners emerged from the gloom to stare down at him sympathetically.
“How’d it happen?” he asked in a voice that didn’t sound like his own.
Skine took out a cigar and set it between his teeth. His hands shook as he struck a match and sucked the stogie into life. “Well, I can only guess at some of it, big man.” He sighed. “But I reckon what happened was that Rangle and about a dozen others showed up here to put paid to you and Benedict. I guess Benedict was still upstairs with that girl when the guns started goin’ off. I was in the bar when these gun-toters came charging through just after the shots sounded and took to the stairs. Five of ’em went up, there was a hell of a shooting match, then three of ’em came pounding back down. Your pard had gunned the other two. They were actin’ crazy wild, and then this tall feller with the bright green eyes came in—”
&nbs
p; “Rangle!” Brazos breathed.
“Yeah. We found out later that that’s who he was. Well, he started barking orders, and next thing we knew they were pulling the lanterns down and throwing them at the walls. Joe Barber the barkeep tried to stop them and they pistol-whipped him good. That was enough for the rest of us—we took to our heels. The saloon went up like a fire stack, and the outlaws had it ringed, swapping shots with Benedict who was blasting away from the top floor. It was plain that they hoped to smoke him out, but he never showed. They watched the place burn to the ground, then they mounted up, had a bit of a look around for you, then rode out.”
It was a long, painful moment before Brazos could get his voice working again.
“How come they didn’t find me?”
“Doc dragged you off and hid you under a sheet of canvas in the tack room,” supplied town drunk Clancy Doolin in his thick Irish brogue. Then he added, “He was for wantin’ me to help him, but I was too afraid they’d see me. Mother of God, but I nivver saw such divils ...”
Brazos turned to little Doc Skine who was coughing into his kerchief. He’d heard at the saloon that Skine was an ex-gunfighter who’d come to Utah for his health. Skine, a tuberculosis victim, wouldn’t weigh more than one-twenty, and it wasn’t difficult for Brazos to imagine what a Herculean task it must have been to drag his big bulk to safety.
“Thanks, Doc,” he said.
Skine shrugged as he replaced his kerchief. “You’ve got nothing to thank me for, Brazos. If I’d been half a man I’d have tried to stop that bunch doing what they did ... but all I did was stand and watch like the rest ... I suppose that’ll be to our everlastin’ shame.”
Brazos shook his head as he got to his feet. There was no shame to be sheeted home here. He and Benedict were both rated as good gunfighters, but Rangle’s men had ground them under. What chance would a bunch of broken-winded towners have against such men?
The three towners fell in silently behind Brazos as he walked slowly towards the street. Brazos was no longer aware of them. He was aware of nothing but the cold leaden weight in the pit of his stomach ...
Benedict dead? He’d always believed that Duke was too fast and clever to die. How many times had he seen the dude walk out again, with dead men behind him, without even his fancy hair mussed? How many times had he given him up for dead, only to have him show up, grinning around a cigar and asking sarcastically where Brazos had been when he’d needed him? He’d lost count. And now he was dead, a charred cinder in a dirty little nowhere town ... and he’d died the hardest way ... at the hands of the man he’d so often vowed to see dead at his feet ...
Brazos halted with one big boot propped up on a piece of timber that had escaped the conflagration. By the glow of the dying coals, his face was a white mask, seemingly etched from stone. He didn’t move and he didn’t speak. Behind him, a score of shocked men and women stood in silence with the cold night wind whistling about them. Sensing his master’s grief, Bullpup whimpered uneasily, but there was no comforting word, no reassuring pat. Hank Brazos was saying goodbye to the most arrogant, superior, hard-tongued man he’d ever known—and he knew that if he lived a thousand years, he’d never be lucky enough to meet another like him ...
Long minutes dragged by and the cold was growing intense. Mrs. Mulroney finally shook her head and took her husband home to bed. The townspeople began to drift away in ones and twos until only a handful were left to hear the deep, muffled sound that suddenly erupted, seemingly from the very heart of the ruins.
Brazos came jarring back from the distant place his thoughts had been leading him.
“What the hell was that?” young Billy Dixon gasped at his elbow. “It ... it sounded like a shot.”
For a brief moment Brazos felt his hopes lift, then reason dashed them flat. “Just a bullet goin’ off, kid,” he growled. “There’s likely—”
His voice was swallowed by another muffled explosion, then his narrow-eyed gaze raked over the smoking ruins. If loose shells were being set off by the heat, why weren’t they kicking up ashes?
He waited. A minute passed in silence, then two more shots sounded—and there was still no sign of an explosion in the wreckage.
“Good God!” Doc Skine suddenly breathed. “I wonder …?”
“Wonder what, man?” Brazos demanded.
“The cellar!”
Brazos’ eyes widened. “There’s a cellar?”
“There surely was—”
Skine stopped. Another two shots had boomed out. Brazos stood staring disbelievingly into the smoke for dragging seconds, then he exploded into furious energy.
“Get me a shovel, goddamn it!” he yelled. “Get every shovel in this damn town!”
Men rushed off to do his bidding, but the giant Texan wasn’t waiting for them to return. Seizing the heavy timber at his feet, he started to plow a deep furrow through the rubble. Working like a madman, he’d cleared an area some ten feet wide by a few feet deep by the time Clancy Doolin came panting back with a shovel. Flinging his timber aside, Brazos snatched the tool and started shoveling furiously. The towners pitched in with a will despite the heat, and soon they had ripped a wide track through the length of what had once been the Big Horn’s barroom. Doc Skine stabbed at the ashes with a crowbar searching for the steel lid of the cellar trapdoor.
He was still at it when the muffled report of a gun sounded again almost under Clancy Doolin’s feet. Brazos shouldered the drunk roughly aside and his shovel blurred with furious speed until it clanked against steel. Another two shovelfuls revealed the trapdoor. Brazos wedged the handle of the shovel under the pull ring. Muscles rippled under the purple shirt and then the door was hurled back to reveal the stone stairway leading down.
“Benedict!”
There was a cough, a stir of movement, then Duke Benedict’s smoke-blackened face appeared from the gloom.
“What kept you, Johnny Reb?”
Chapter Three
Gold or Grave
Bo Rangle’s brown hands caressed the big Colt as he worked the polishing cloth over the blued steel surface. He held the weapon up and watched the moonlight glint on its surface, then he spun the weapon with his finger in the trigger guard, letting the butt slap smoothly into his palm. He held the barrel close to his lips and blew a speck of dust from the foresight.
He’d been at it for half an hour, ever since they’d halted in the canyon to tend to Chaney South’s bullet wound, and it was beginning to get on their nerves.
Finally Jack Clanton growled, “Do you have to play with that fool thing all the time, Bo?” Clanton was the biggest man in the bunch, a three hundred pound Kansan with legs like tree trunks and the dull eyes of a simpleton.
Bo Rangle gave no indication that he’d heard the remark. He produced a silken bandanna and commenced polishing the weapon again, his long, strongly-boned face a study in concentration.
A full minute passed. Then, without looking up from his task, Rangle asked softly, “It bothers you some, does it, Clanton?”
Clanton couldn’t read Rangle’s tone. Rangle had been with the Stonehill gang for only a week and he was still pretty much a mystery to all. Seated on a deadfall log watching redheaded Ward Bishop digging for Duke Benedict’s slug in Chaney’s thick thigh, big Clanton caught a warning look from Stonehill and shrugged.
“Well, it ain’t exactly botherin’ me, I suppose, Bo,” he mumbled. “I guess I’m just a little nervous after what happened back there.” Clanton looked around at the silent figures squatting or standing in the moonlight about him. “I guess we’re all a little nervous, eh, boys?”
Heads nodded all around. Nervous was right. When Rangle had laid out his plan to get rid of his old enemies before striking into Arapahoe Valley in quest of his cache, it had all seemed simple enough. Rangle’s girl was going to lure Benedict upstairs at the Big Horn, get him disarmed and off-guard while Macall, Whitehead and Stack took the giant Texan out quietly. This done, Benedict could be killed—as noisily as
they liked. But things had gone wrong at the Frontier Hotel, and though Rangle couldn’t be held responsible for that, the way he’d handled the situation after Benedict had been alerted by the gunfire, had been a little too rich for even their violent tastes.
If they hadn’t known the girl, their reaction might have been different. But wild and lovely Tara Killane had been with Rangle when he’d joined up with them in Wyoming, and by the time they reached Utah, there were few in the fifteen-strong band who weren’t at least a little in love with Bo Rangle’s handsome paramour. They were rough, hard veterans of the owlhoot one and all, but it was doubtful that any of them would have been ruthless enough to give an order that would result in a vibrant, lovely girl being burned to death, just to be certain of getting rid of an old enemy. It took a unique breed of hard case to do something like that, and they were just beginning to understand how unique Bo Rangle really was.
Now, narrowed eyes watched warily as Rangle spun the chamber of the Colt several times with his forefinger, head cocked as he listened to the rhythmic clatter of its well-oiled mechanism.
He stood up lazily and with practiced skill flipped the revolver into the air in a glittering arc, caught it and drove it into the tied-down holster all in the one fluent motion. Then he stood with his hands on his hips, hat tipped back, his cruel face a hard mask.
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