The outlaws reined to a halt in front of the ranch house. Yellow lamplight shone in the windows, despite the late hour. Lottie didn’t come out to greet them, though. Garrett knew she would be waiting inside.
He swung down from the saddle, stepped over to the horse carrying Doolittle, and took hold of the judge’s wildly askew white hair. He used the grip to lift Doolittle’s head, which was dangling over the side of the horse.
“Shut up that bellyaching,” Garrett warned. “It would have been all right with me to put a bullet through your brain, mister, so you’d be wise not to tempt me.”
“You’ll never get away with this,” Doolittle blustered for what seemed like the hundredth time since they had ridden away from Kiowa City.
“Whether we do is none of your concern. You’ll be dead either way.” Garrett let go of Doolittle’s hair.
The judge’s head dropped. He moaned, probably sick to his stomach from riding draped over a horse for so long.
Garrett motioned to a couple of his men and ordered, “Get him down from there.”
When all three prisoners were on their feet and huddled together, Garrett drew his gun and motioned for them to go up the steps. “Let’s go. Somebody’s waiting to meet you.”
The judge looked like he wanted to argue, but quickly realized the futility of it. He was still pretty unsteady on his feet. “Don’t worry, my dears. It’ll be all right.”
He put one arm around his wife’s shoulders and the other around his niece and drew them against him protectively . . . although what he thought he could do with nearly twenty hardened killers surrounding them, Garrett didn’t know.
With guns prodding them, the prisoners trudged to the steps and went up them.
Lottie was waiting inside by the fireplace, as Garrett had expected. She wore her gun and bowie knife and looked fierce. She was a warrior through and through, and Garrett felt a surge of desire go through him.
It wasn’t the time or place for such, and it was probably the last thing on Lottie’s mind. She glared at the prisoners. “Judge Doolittle, do you know who I am?”
The judge drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t all that impressive, and squared his shoulders as he glared right back. “No, madam, I do not, but if you have any influence over these scoundrels you should advise them to let us go right now.”
Lottie walked closer to them. “My name is Lottie Dalmas, Judge. Some people call me the Flame, but what I really am right now is the angel of death.” Moving almost too fast to be seen, she whipped the knife from its sheath at the back of her neck and held the blade to Doolittle’s throat. “Your death.”
The judge’s wife and niece screamed, but Doolittle stood there stolidly. “Kill me if you wish, but spare these two innocents.”
Lottie stepped back, taking the knife away from his throat, and laughed. “You sound like a character from a bad melodrama, Judge. But I suppose I do at times, as well. The hatred I feel makes me get carried away.” She slid the bowie back in its sheath. “You’re here because you sentenced Henry Garrett to death.”
“Garrett sentenced himself to death when he chose to be an outlaw and a killer. All I did was carry out the inevitable result of that choice.”
Lottie ignored that and told Garrett, “Take the women away from him.”
Garrett nodded to his men, and even though the judge tried to hang on to his wife and niece, they were pulled from his grip. Mrs. Doolittle didn’t struggle, but the younger woman did. She was no match for the outlaws holding her arms.
Clarissa, that was her name, Garrett recalled.
Lottie stepped over to her, lifted a hand, and cupped Clarissa’s chin. She moved the young woman’s head from side to side. “You’re pretty. My men are going to enjoy getting to know you better.”
“Leave her alone!” Doolittle raged. “By God—”
Lottie jerked the gun from the holster on her hip and brought it up in a flashing move that slammed the barrel against the judge’s head above his left ear. The blow staggered him. His wife and niece both screamed. Blood welled from the cut opened up by the gunsight, startlingly crimson against his white hair.
“There’s no God on the Silver Skull,” Lottie said. “Only me.”
“The devil herself!” Doolittle gasped.
Garrett figured she might shoot the judge, but Lottie controlled herself with a visible effort and pouched the iron. “Take them and put them in the smokehouse for now. No one touches the women.” Lottie paused and smiled. “Let them think about what’s going to happen to them later on.”
Both women were sobbing as they were dragged out. Doolittle cursed and raved. Lottie watched with a faint smile curving her lips.
When she and Garrett were alone in the room, she asked, “Did we lose any men?”
“Not one. Nobody was even wounded.”
“Good,” she said with a nod. “What about Deputy Baird?”
“We did what you said.”
Garrett felt a faint stirring of revulsion as he recalled the procedure, but he had long since learned to ignore such reactions. There was no point in getting upset about carrying out Lottie’s orders.
“They got the message in town?”
“I’m pretty sure they did, but I can’t guarantee that. Baird’s horse carried him all the way into town. I watched to make sure. And he knew he was supposed to give that note to Rasmussen. I think we can count on the fact that they got the word.”
“The question now is what will they do about it.”
“They’ll give in,” Garrett said. “You know they won’t risk those women.”
“I wish I could be as certain. Those men are cowards. They couldn’t kill Henry themselves, so they had the law do it for them.” Lottie shook her head. “But it doesn’t really matter. Sooner or later they’ll all die.”
Garrett didn’t share her confidence. This play had changed the game. The law now knew where to find them. Garrett had argued against that and tried to persuade Lottie to make the trade—the women for the other jury members and Rasmussen—somewhere away from the ranch. In her arrogance, she had been insistent, and as usual, she had gotten her way.
As far as Garrett could see, everything was now riding on this one throw of the dice.
He rubbed his crippled left hand. One way or another, in less than thirty-six hours it would all come to a head. They would live and have their revenge . . . or they would die.
Either way, Simon Garrett was ready. All he asked was the smell of powder smoke and the feel of a gun bucking in his good hand as he took vengeance on his enemies.
* * *
Several of the men who’d been injured in the outlaws’ raid on Kiowa City had fairly serious wounds, but Dr. Harmon expected all of them to survive. He was going to be busy tending to them for the rest of the night.
John Henry figured the doctor could use the extra room for patients, so he went back to Harmon’s house and gathered up the remainder of his gear.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Harmon asked when he saw John Henry fully dressed again, with the pair of saddlebags slung over his shoulder.
“Figured I’d get a room at the hotel,” John Henry explained. “One of those fellas who was shot probably needs the bed more than I do.”
“You were shot, too, let me remind you.”
“Yeah, but that was a while ago. I’m better now.”
Harmon shook his head and blew out an exasperated sigh. “All right, go on. It’s not like I could stop you anyway, is it?”
“No, Doc, I reckon you couldn’t,” John Henry said with a smile.
By the time he settled down in a hotel bed to catch a few more hours of sleep, he had to admit that he was pretty tired and that his side had started aching. But it was nothing he couldn’t stand, and he assumed that by the time it was all over, he would be a lot more tired and stood a good chance of hurting a lot worse.
He had never been one to have problems haunt his dreams, so he slept well. When he w
oke up the next morning he got dressed and went downstairs for a good breakfast in the hotel dining room.
As he ate, he thought about how Clarissa Doolittle had brought him breakfast the first day he woke up at Doc Harmon’s house. That memory brought a troubled frown to his face.
He was enjoying a hearty breakfast in Kiowa City while she was being held prisoner at the Silver Skull Ranch, certainly terrified and possibly suffering all sorts of degradation and humiliation. Her aunt was in the same perilous position. If he could have gone after them the night before and spared them any ordeal, he would have done so without hesitation.
He was a practical man, though, and knew that his only real chance of saving the women, and Judge Doolittle, too, was the plan he had hatched in the courthouse basement with Sheriff Rasmussen and Nick Mallette. And that certainly wasn’t a sure thing.
It was even possible that Lottie had already killed the judge, although John Henry considered that unlikely. She would want to draw things out as long as she could in order to inflict the maximum suffering on those she hated.
Also, keeping all three prisoners alive might be necessary for her to achieve her goal of having the other jury members delivered to her.
After John Henry finished his coffee, he walked to the doctor’s house where Harmon greeted him with a weary, harried look. “Did you get any sleep, Doc?”
Harmon snorted disgustedly. “I’m accustomed to not sleeping. A doctor who’s on call twenty-four hours a day gets used to it. But it doesn’t help matters that I’ve lost my nurse to a . . . a madwoman.”
“I’m sorry, Doc. I’ll do my best to get her back for you. In the meantime . . . you think you could check these dressings and bandage me up real tight, so if I have to move around a lot there’ll be less chance of those bullet holes starting to bleed again?”
“Madness,” Harmon muttered. “Sheer madness. But of course, I’ll do as you ask. Come into the examining room. . . .”
A short time later, after Harmon had checked the wounds and reluctantly admitted that John Henry’s activities of the night before didn’t seem to have done him any harm, John Henry walked into Sheriff Rasmussen’s office and found it crowded with men he didn’t know.
One of them looked vaguely familiar. The man was dressed mostly in black and had a rugged face, lined and tanned to the color of old saddle leather from years of exposure to the sun. Crisp white hair stuck out from under his black Stetson.
After a moment John Henry realized where he had seen the man before. He had gotten only a brief glimpse of the white-haired man, and that had been from a distance. He had been leading the crew from the J/M as they approached Packsaddle Gap, so he had to be Jed Montayne.
Rasmussen caught sight of John Henry through the crowd. “Marshal, I’m glad you’re here. You can explain your plan to these men. I sent for them this morning, and they’re all anxious to meet you.”
Ten pairs of eyes swung to stare at John Henry with varying degrees of hostility and confusion.
He knew without having to ask who they were. He was looking at the surviving members of the jury that had convicted Henry Garrett.
The men Lottie Dalmas and Simon Garrett had sworn to kill.
Chapter Twenty-six
“You’re all grown men, and you all know what happened last night,” John Henry began. “I’m not going to pull any punches with you. Judge Doolittle and his wife and niece have been kidnapped by the same bunch that murdered Charles Houston and Lucas Winslow. They’re threatening to kill the women unless all of you turn yourselves over to the gang.”
A burst of angry muttering came from the men, dominated by Jed Montayne’s exclamation of “That’s loco, mister!”
“I agree,” John Henry said calmly. “The whole thing is as loco as it can be, because the woman who’s behind it is mad with hate and the need for revenge. Her name is Lottie Dalmas.”
That just drew puzzled frowns from the men crowded into the sheriff’s office.
“She was Henry Garrett’s lover,” John Henry went on. “She runs a stopover for outlaws on an old abandoned ranch northwest of here. The Garrett gang operated out of the place when Henry Garrett was leading it, and even before that when his older brother Simon was in charge, before Simon got sent to prison.”
One of the men turned to Rasmussen and demanded, “Did you know about this . . . this so-called outlaw ranch, Sheriff?”
“I’d heard rumors about such a place, but I didn’t know where it was,” Rasmussen replied honestly. “Now I do.”
“So you can take a posse out there, wipe out those owlhoots, and rescue the judge and his family.”
John Henry held up his hands. “It’s not that simple. There’s not a good way into the place. If Sheriff Rasmussen tried a direct attack with a posse, they’d just wind up being slaughtered.”
“You’re not sayin’ you want us to give up and surrender to that woman, are you?” Montayne growled.
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” John Henry said.
That caused another hubbub that lasted several moments until Montayne’s voice overrode the others.
“Just who the hell are you, again?” he asked John Henry.
“My name is Sixkiller. I’m a deputy United States marshal out of Fort Smith. I work for Judge Isaac Parker.”
“Well, hell. If you’re a federal lawman, just call in the army! No bunch of two-bit desperadoes would be able to keep them out.”
“Probably not,” John Henry admitted. “Although it might take artillery to blast the gang out of there. And that wouldn’t help Judge Doolittle and the two ladies. In fact, it would pretty much guarantee they would die long, slow, agonizing deaths.”
“What should we do, then?” another man asked. “If we give this woman, this Lottie Dalmas, what she wants, how can we be sure she’ll keep her word and release the women?”
John Henry shook his head. “We can’t. In fact, I think there’s a pretty good chance she would kill them anyway. That’s why we have to try something else. We have to make her think she’s going to get what she wants by pretending to turn you men over to her.”
“How in blazes are you gonna do that?” Montayne asked.
“She wants you there by sunrise tomorrow morning. You’ll be there, unarmed—at least as far as those outlaws can tell—ready to ride up the trail to their stronghold. But while they’ve got all their attention focused on you, I’m going to be leading a posse in the back way.”
He explained about the cave that opened into the ravine and his belief that it functioned as an escape route leading to the Silver Skull ranch house.
Montayne’s lined face got even more creases in it as he frowned. “You said you didn’t follow the cave all the way to the house. You don’t know that it goes through.”
John Henry took a deep breath. “For a fact, I don’t. But it’s the only thing that makes any sense. I know air was moving through it from the direction of the ranch house.”
The cattleman snorted. “That don’t mean a damned thing. Could be just a little hole somewhere that lets the air come through.”
“You’re right, that’s possible. But when you don’t have a chance any other way, you take whatever is left.”
“You don’t even know the women are still alive.”
“That’s true, too. But until we know otherwise, we have to proceed as if they are.”
Rasmussen stepped in. “Marshal Sixkiller is right. Luck will have to be with us for his plan to work, but it’s the only chance Mrs. Doolittle and Clarissa have.” The sheriff was standing behind his desk. He leaned forward and rested his hands on it as he continued. “But I’ll be damned if I’m going to force any man to put his life on the line like we’re asking you to. You’re gonna have to agree with it, or as far as I’m concerned, we don’t go ahead.”
More muttering came from the former jury members as they grouped together and talked it over. Most of them were townsmen, unaccustomed to danger. If there was a natural lea
der among them, it was Jed Montayne.
“There’s one other thing you should know, Mr. Montayne,” John Henry said to the rancher. “It was Simon Garrett and his men who rustled your stock the other night and then tried to ambush you at Packsaddle Gap. That was part of Lottie Dalmas’s plan to have her revenge on you, too.” He didn’t say anything about the connection he suspected existed between Lottie and J.C. Carson.
“It’s thanks to me that you and your men didn’t ride into that trap,” John Henry went on. “I’m the one who fired those warning shots. I risked my life doing that.”
“Are you tryin’ to make me feel guilty?” Montayne asked with a frown.
“No, sir, just trying to make you see that I wouldn’t be asking you and these other men to risk your lives if I didn’t think there was a good chance we can pull this off. I don’t want any of the rest of you to die . . . but I don’t want the judge and his ladies tortured and killed, either.”
Montayne glared at him for a moment longer, then jerked his head in an abrupt nod. “All right. Tell us the rest of the plan.”
Just as John Henry hoped, the other men nodded and muttered agreement. He had won them over by getting Montayne to go along with him. “Later today the ten of you, along with Sheriff Rasmussen, will ride out to the Silver Skull. That’s the old ranch where the outlaws are. You’ll time it so that you’ll get there in the late afternoon, not long before dark. Garrett and the Flame will have men watching from the rim of the bluff, and they’re bound to see you. Make camp a half mile or so away from the bottom of the trail. Build a big fire if you want, and move around enough so the watchers will know you’re still there.”
“What if they start taking potshots at us from the rim?” Montayne asked.
“They won’t. That’s not part of Lottie’s plan.”
“You sound mighty sure of that, but you’re not the one bettin’ your life on it.”
“Stop when you’re a little farther away then,” John Henry said. “As long as they know you’re there, that’s all that matters. We want them paying more attention to what’s going on in front of them, rather than behind them.”
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