by Brett Waring
In mid-sentence his right hand suddenly blurred and in an instant his Colt barrel was pressed into the startled youth’s side. Hayward’s suddenly cold eyes flicked from Hume to Nash who’s right hand was already closing around his gun butt.
“Don’t! Or the kid’s dead!” the drifter snapped.
Nash froze but kept his hand on the butt. Hume hadn’t moved except to stiffen in the saddle. Larry was pale and tensed with the muzzle against his ribs.
“Do as he says, Clay,” Hume murmured. “Don’t endanger Larry. Not even the gold’s worth that.”
Hayward laughed. “You’re mad, Hume, if you really believe that! But it’s good advice at the moment, Nash. I won’t lose any sleep if I have to shoot.”
“You’re dead if you do,” Nash told him.
“So’ll the kid be,” Hayward pointed out. “That’ll worry you more than me, I assure you.”
Nash shrugged and lifted his hands out from his sides slowly. “What do you reckon this is gonna gain you?”
Hayward jerked his head towards the freight car jutting up out of the mudflats. “The gold, of course. Five-fifths is far, far better than one. Or even the bounty on Idaho. Even you must agree with that, Nash.”
“You’ve got to get to it, yet.”
Hayward shrugged. “It’s only a short ride.” He looked back towards Hume, pressing the gun harder into Larry’s side. “And all I need now are the keys.” He thrust out his left hand, snapping his fingers. “If you please, Mr. Hume.”
Hume didn’t move. His frown deepened. “I don’t get your drift, Hayward.”
The drifter’s face hardened. “Don’t be a fool, Hume. You told me you had a set of keys to open the door of that express car and I want them! Hand them over!”
Hume shook his head. “I can’t. For the very good reason that I don’t have them.”
Hayward’s eyes pinched down dangerously. “Don’t lie to me!”
Hume held up a placating hand swiftly. “I’m not. You asked me how I’d open the express car and I said with the keys. I didn’t say I had them with me. I haven’t. There’re only two sets. One at Wells Fargo’s Head Office in Denver. The other with the bank in Signal. The van wasn’t to be opened until it had been lifted into the bank’s courtyard after the rail journey.”
Hayward looked puzzled and for a moment Larry felt the gun’s pressure ease off. He swiveled sideways in the saddle, already leaning towards the drifter, and hurled himself at the man, using his wounded arm to knock the barrel aside. The gun exploded and although Hayward wasn’t knocked from the saddle, he reeled and snatched instinctively at the reins.
In that split second, Clay Nash’s right hand dipped and came up with a blazing Colt in it. The gun hammered twice and Nelson Hayward’s body was blown out of the saddle. It crashed down and rolled against a rock and didn’t move again.
Nash fought his prancing horse to a standstill, covering the drifter, but he needn’t have bothered. Hume helped Larry back into the saddle; “You all right, kid?”
Larry grinned nervously. “Arm’s throbbin’ some, but I’m okay.”
Nash grinned as he reloaded. “Seem to be makin’ a profession out of bein’ a hero.”
“I was just scared I guess.”
“Well, he located the gold for us, anyway,” Hume said grimly, looking out towards the car on the mudflats. “Let’s get down there and see if McWhirter and Slocum are still alive.”
He led the way down the slope towards the mudflats, Nash and Larry following, only the kid glancing briefly at Nelson Hayward’s huddled body.
Inside the angled express van, Sundance crouched in the gloom, a double-barreled shotgun in his hands.
He had heard the gunshots from the ridge and had seen the three riders making their way down the mountain slopes through the hole left by one of the ventilators when it had been ripped off during the car’s rough passage down the river. He had immediately recognized Hume, Nash—and Larry Holbrook.
Sundance couldn’t believe his luck.
He had found the gold car and there had been a trapdoor in the floor, just above mud level, that had been stove-in by a rock, probably during the wild ride downriver. Inside he had found the bodies of the two guards, McWhirter and Tom Slocum. Both had been dead for days it seemed, crushed under the weight of the eight iron-bound chests of gold which had busted loose from their cage.
There had been their food supply, still intact, and he had been able to fill his belly, while sitting on one of the chests of gold. The guards’ shotgun and rifles were still in the car, scattered around the floor, and he had plenty of ammunition for them.
He had been in the process of dragging one of the boxes of gold through the floor trapdoor when he had heard the gunfire from the hills.
Now, to top off his run of luck, the three men he hated most in this world were riding unsuspectingly towards him.
And he was in a fine position to blow their heads off!
Nash first, then Hume. That would empty the Greener he held. Then he could either finish the kid off with one of the other guns or give him something special for the way he had pulled that double-cross at the trestle bridge. Yeah, that appealed to him.
The kid would die slowly, painfully ...
Then he would load the gold onto two of their horses, fork the third, and ride out of here, a mighty rich man, a mighty satisfied man, with his three enemies lying dead in the mud of the Colorado river bottoms ...
“No sign of life,” Hume said, grim-faced as they rode across the mudflats towards the angled express car.
“Looks like it’s taken a beatin’, Jim,” opinioned Nash, pointing. “Timber’s splintered on the corners, roof’s kind of stoved-in in one part and the vents are gone. I’d say Hal and Tom were tossed around pretty roughly. And if the gold broke loose ...”
Hume nodded, lips pulled into a tight line. He glanced towards Larry Holbrook. “You better stay back, son. May not be pretty.”
“Yessir,” the youth murmured.
“Door’s still locked, leastways,” Nash called. “You say there was some sort of trap in the floor, Jim?”
“Yeah. Might be buried in the mud, though. If it is, might have to ask you to squeeze through one of those ventilator holes, Larry.”
The youth swallowed and licked his lips and he lifted his eyes to the roof of the car. The sun glinted off something.
“Look out!” he yelled.
Nash reacted instinctively, throwing himself out of the saddle, dragging his Colt free, even as the shotgun blasted and his horse reared up whinnying, and pawing the air wildly, before crashing over onto its side to thrash in agony in the mud. Larry had wheeled his mount and was running it away from the freight car, swinging in a wide arc to come in from the high-angled side. The shotgun roared again as Hume raced to get on the blind side of the car. He had his gun out but it fell from his hands as buckshot ripped into his upper arm. He clung desperately to the saddlehorn in an effort to stay on his horse.
Nash slithered through the mud, managed to get his legs under him and dived headlong for the angle between the slanted floor of the car and the ground. He skidded across the mud and even as he slithered to a stop beneath the car, saw the smashed-in trapdoor above mud level.
A gun barrel came through and spat fire and lead thunked into the ground inches from his face. Nash rolled, shooting across his body, crashed into a part of the car and stars burst briefly behind his eyes. Through a red haze of pain he saw Sundance Harmer diving through the trapdoor, his gun blazing wildly. Nash squirmed around and realized he had dropped his own gun when he had slammed into the car. Desperately, he clawed his way out from under the car into the sunlight, ducking as he heard lead whine off the woodwork only inches above his head.
He gathered himself but his boots slipped and he fell flat on his face. Then he rolled onto his back, clawing mud from his eyes, seeing Sundance heaving to his feet, grinning triumphantly as he aimed his Colt down at the prone Nash.
A Col
t hammered three times and Sundance’s body jerked and slammed back against the car. The gun roared a fourth time and the outlaw staggered, fell to his knees, blood spewing from his mouth, and then fell forward on his face.
Nash looked up and saw the white-faced Larry Holbrook sitting his horse a few yards away, holding Hume’s mud-covered Colt. He must have scooped it up, Nash thought, and then ridden back here in time to nail Sundance.
Hume, muddy, his arm dangling, came staggering across. He looked from Nash to the dead Sundance and then to the pale-faced kid sitting his horse, shaking a little.
“By hell, boy, if I don’t recruit you into the service of Wells Fargo I deserve to be pensioned-off!”
Nash thrust upright, shaking mud from himself.
“Amen to that,” he said fervently.
Young Larry Holbrook’s face split in a wide grin.
“Sounds good to me, too,” he allowed.
CLAY NASH 15: SUNDANCE
By Brett Waring
First Published by The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd
Copyright © Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia
First Digital Edition: April 2019
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd.
About the Author
Keith Hetherington
aka Kirk Hamilton, Brett Waring and Hank J. Kirby
Australian writer Keith has worked as television scriptwriter on such Australian TV shows as Homicide, Matlock Police, Division 4, Solo One, The Box, The Spoiler and Chopper Squad.
“I always liked writing little vignettes, trying to describe the action sequences I saw in a film or the Saturday Afternoon Serial at local cinemas,” remembers Keith Hetherington, better-known to Piccadilly Publishing readers as Hank J. Kirby, author of the Bronco Madigan series.
Keith went on to pen hundreds of westerns (the figure varies between 600 and 1000) under the names Kirk Hamilton (including the legendary Bannerman the Enforcer series) and Clay Nash as Brett Waring. Keith also worked as a journalist for the Queensland Health Education Council, writing weekly articles for newspapers on health subjects and radio plays dramatizing same.
More on Keith Hetherington
The Clay Nash Series by Brett Waring
Undercover Gun
A Gun Is Waiting
Long Trail to Yuma
Reckoning at Rimrock
Last Stage to Shiloh
Slaughter Trail
Sundown in Socorro
The Fargo Code
Ride for Texas
Bullet by Bullet
The Santa Fe Run
This Lawless Land
Guns on Big River
Compadre
Sundance
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