Blood for Blood

by William W. Johnstone

  Rasmussen asked, “We wait for the morning before we break camp and go on in?”

  “That’s right. The longer this lasts, the better Lottie will like it, so we’ll give her what she wants . . . and that’ll give me and the men with me all night to get into position.”

  “Let’s say you’re right about the cave,” Montayne said. “Don’t you reckon it’s likely this Dalmas woman will have the door at the other end locked, or at least guarded?”

  “More than likely,” John Henry agreed. “But I’ve got a plan to deal with that, too.” He didn’t explain that he was counting on Nick Mallette to handle that problem. It would be Nick’s job to make sure John Henry and the men he led through the cave could get into the house.

  “Once we’re there, if it’s possible we’ll free the prisoners and some of the men will take them back out through the cave. The rest of us will hit the outlaws from behind. When we do that, when you hear all hell break loose up on the bluff, that’s when you charge up the trail and we catch Garrett and his gang between us.”

  “And wipe ’em out,” Montayne growled.

  “Well, since I’m a duly appointed officer of the law, I sort of have to give them a chance to surrender.” John Henry shrugged. “But for all practical purposes, yeah, that’s when we wipe ’em out.”

  Montayne pointed a finger. “I like that part of it. But there are a hell of a lot of things that can go wrong with that plan.”

  “Yes, there are,” John Henry said. “We’ll just have to hope that enough of them go right. If they do, we’ll be able to bring those men to justice and make sure they don’t murder anybody else.” He looked around the group. “Is everybody still in?”

  One by one, the men nodded or voiced their resolve. They might not be professional fighting men, but they were willing to stand up and do what was right.

  John Henry left Sheriff Rasmussen to go over a few more details with them while he headed downstairs to the cell block. Nick Mallette was still the only prisoner. He stood up and came to the bars as John Henry walked down the aisle between the cells.

  “Well?” Mallette asked with a look of nervous anticipation on his face. “Did they agree to do it?”

  “They did. I don’t think they were too fond of the idea, but they went along with it.”

  Mallette smiled. “I don’t know whether to be happy about that . . . or be disappointed.”

  “You’ve got a chance to help save those women, and to do yourself some good at the same time. I think you should be happy.”

  “And all I have to do is put my life in the hands of two dozen bloodthirsty outlaws and a crazy woman.”

  “Well . . . try not to look at it like that,” John Henry suggested with a smile.

  They talked awhile, going over the plan and the story Mallette would tell when he showed up again at the Silver Skull.

  “There’s probably a trapdoor or something like that somewhere in the house,” John Henry said. “It’ll open into a shaft that leads down to a tunnel, and that tunnel will connect with the cave I found. Did you hear any of the gang gossiping about anything like that while we were there?”

  Mallette shook his head. “No, I don’t recall that at all. Maybe it just didn’t come up.”

  “Maybe . . . but I think it’s more likely that Lottie never told any of them about it except maybe Simon Garrett. And it’s possible he may not even know. So I doubt that she has a guard posted on the door. But it’s pretty likely she’ll have it bolted on the inside. It’ll be up to you to find it and unbolt it so we can get in.”

  Mallette wiped a hand over his face and shook his head. “If she catches me snooping around the house, she’s liable to have me killed. That’s her domain. All the outlaws except Garrett stay in the old bunkhouse.”

  “I know. But when the sun comes up in the morning and those jury members start riding toward the trail, Lottie’s going to want to be there to see it. The rest of the bunch will probably be with her. That’ll be your chance to slip away, get to the house, and find the trapdoor. If you can free the prisoners, so much the better, but at the very least you’ve got to find the door and get it open for us.”

  “That’s going to be cutting it mighty close.”

  “I know.” John Henry’s face was grim. “We don’t have any other choice.”

  “In other words, the plan works or everybody dies.”

  John Henry grimaced. “Well, yeah, but I sort of wish you hadn’t put it quite like that.”

  “At least there’s one good thing about it.” The gambler let out a hollow laugh. “I don’t have anything to lose in this game.”

  “And everything to win.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Simon Garrett was sitting in a chair on the porch of the ranch house, a stub of a cigar smoldering between his lips and his right foot propped on the railing, when he saw the rider galloping toward him from the direction of the rim.

  The rider’s apparent urgency prompted Garrett to stand up. He threw his cigar away and put his hand on the butt of his gun. “Lottie!” he called through the open door. The temperature had been rising steadily ever since the sun had come up several hours earlier.

  Lottie came out onto the porch. “What is it?”

  “One of the rim guards.” Garrett nodded toward the rider. “Coming fast like that, it looks like he’s got something to tell us.”

  The outlaw drew rein in front of the house and nodded to Garrett and the Flame. “We spotted a fella on horseback comin’ out on the flats, boss.”

  “Someone from Kiowa City?” Garrett asked tensely.

  “No, not exactly. We put the spyglass on him. You won’t believe this, but it’s that gambler, Mallette.”

  Garrett stiffened in surprise. “Mallette?” he repeated. “I didn’t figure we’d ever see him again.”

  When Mallette and the three men who had gone out to search for Saxon hadn’t come back, Garrett had sent more men to look for them. They had found the bodies of the three outlaws, but no sign of Mallette. The welter of hoofprints around the corpses hadn’t told them anything.

  Garrett hadn’t known what to think about that. Even though he had never fully trusted Mallette, it seemed highly unlikely the gambler could have double-crossed his companions and gunned them all down. Not without losing his own life in the process, anyway.

  A more reasonable explanation was that Saxon had bushwhacked the bunch and killed the three outlaws. Mallette might have turned tail and run. If that was the case, he would probably keep running for a long time and try to put the whole affair far behind him.

  Garrett trusted the men he had guarding the rim. If they said Mallette was approaching, then he believed them. “If he comes up the trail, bring him on in,” he ordered.

  “You don’t want us to shoot him?” the guard asked.

  “Not until I’ve had a chance to talk to him, anyway.”

  The man nodded, wheeled his horse, and rode back toward the big rock formation that gave the place its name.

  Garrett looked over at Lottie. “That suit you?”

  “Yes. I want to hear what Mallette has to say, too.” She went back in the house, but Garrett waited on the porch.

  A short time later, three riders came from the direction of the trail. Nick Mallette was in the center, flanked by two guards.

  The gambler didn’t seem nervous. In fact, he appeared to be calm and icy-nerved. As the men came to a halt, Mallette smiled faintly and lifted a hand in greeting. “Howdy, boss. I’ll bet you never expected to see me again.”

  Garrett frowned. That was what he had been about to say to Mallette, but the gambler had jumped the gun on him and gotten it in first.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Garrett snapped. “I sent you and those other men to look for that damn double-crosser Saxon.”

  “And we found him. Or rather, he found us. He jumped us. I reckon he was pretty desperate to take on four-to-one odds. But he was wounded, you know, so I guess he figured he didn�
��t have much chance of getting away unless he did something bold.”

  “But he did get away, didn’t he?”

  “As a matter of fact . . . no, he didn’t. And I have proof. More than that, I now know who he really was.”

  Lottie had come out on the porch in time to hear most of the conversation. She told the gambler, “Come inside. I want to hear this.”

  Mallette didn’t wait for Garrett’s okay. He swung down from the saddle and handed his reins to one of the guards.

  Garrett made an impatient gesture and told the guard, “Take care of his horse.”

  The three of them went into the house. Lottie asked, “Would you like a drink, Nick?”

  “It’s a little early in the day,” Mallette said with a shrug, “but I suppose it’s already afternoon somewhere. Sure, Miss Dalmas. Thank you.”

  Lottie poured him a shot of whiskey and handed the glass to him. Mallette tossed back the drink.

  “Now, what’s this about Saxon?” she asked.

  “Like I said, he ambushed us. Knocked one of the men out of the saddle with his first shot. But the rest of us fought back.” Mallette touched a finger to a little mark on his cheek. “That’s how close I came to dying. One of his bullets did this. But I was lucky. He downed the other two men. We got more lead into him, though, and he took off.”

  “And you went after him?” Lottie guessed.

  “That’s right. Maybe I should have stayed to tend to the others, but I could tell they were done for.” Mallette shrugged again. “And in the heat of battle, especially since Saxon had pretended to be my friend and then tried to kill me, I wanted to catch up to him and give him what he had coming to him. So I . . . what’s the expression? I lit a shuck after him.”

  “That was three days ago,” Garrett said. “Where have you been since then?”

  “I just told you. Trailing Saxon.”

  Garrett sneered. “No offense, Mallette, but that just doesn’t seem like something you’d do.”

  “Hey, it surprised me, too. But I guess I’ve changed some since I’ve been around here. And like I said, I had a score to settle with Saxon.”

  He paused, and Lottie urged him to go on.

  “It took me until late yesterday to catch up to him,” Mallette said. “I don’t mind admitting that I’m not the best tracker in the world. I lost the trail a few times, but I always found it again. And when I did find him, a long way north of here—”

  “Let me guess,” Garrett said. “You shot it out with him and killed him.”

  His tone made it clear that he was going to have a hard time believing that.

  “No,” Mallette said quietly with a shake of his head. “I didn’t have to do that. He was already dead. He was wounded at Packsaddle Gap and then winged again later on when he bushwhacked us. I guess he finally lost enough blood that it killed him. I found his body in a little dry wash.”

  The gambler grimaced as if he were remembering something distasteful. “The, uh, coyotes and buzzards had already been at him. There wasn’t much left, but enough that I knew it was him. John Saxon . . . except that’s not who he really was.”

  “What do you mean?” Lottie asked.

  Mallette reached in his vest pocket and took out a couple things. “I found these on him.” He held out his right hand. A deputy United States marshal’s badge rested on the palm.

  In his other hand was a small leather folder. “There are identification papers in here. His real name was John Henry Sixkiller.”

  “A federal marshal!” Garrett said. “And we let him waltz right in here.”

  “He was pretty shrewd about it,” Mallette said. “From what I heard back in Kiowa City, he really did gun down that Deverill fellow . . . probably because Deverill recognized him as a lawman, if I had to guess. He certainly fooled me, or I never would have helped him escape from jail. I think that’s what he wanted all along, to pretend to be an outlaw so you would take him in.”

  “Why would he be after us?” Garrett asked.

  Lottie answered that question. “Because somebody in Kiowa City, either Rasmussen or that damned judge, figured out that we were after them for what they did to Henry and sent for help. A federal lawman could get involved because of those train holdups where you robbed the express car and stole the mailbags.”

  “Damn it!” Garrett said. “I never planned on getting Uncle Sam after us.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lottie told him. “It’s all right. Saxon . . . I mean, Sixkiller . . . is dead and won’t bother us anymore. By the time the federals can send in anyone else, we’ll have our revenge.”

  “You believe Mallette’s story?”

  “I don’t have any reason not to.”

  “Thanks,” Mallette said dryly.

  “Besides,” Lottie went on, “he’s got that badge. How else could he have gotten it if he didn’t take it off Saxon’s body?”

  “I don’t know,” Garrett said. “Maybe he’s really the deputy marshal.”

  That brought a genuine-sounding laugh from Mallette.

  Lottie smiled. “No offense, Nick, but you don’t strike me as the sort to be a lawman.”

  “None taken,” he told her. “And I’m not, you can count on that.”

  “All right, all right,” Garrett said in a surly tone. “So maybe you’re not really a lawman.”

  “No maybe about it.”

  “That still doesn’t mean I’m prepared to trust you all the way.”

  “If I’ve been lying to you, would I even come back here?” Mallette argued. “What reason would I have for doing that? If I didn’t feel some loyalty to you and the rest of the bunch, I would have just kept going.”

  That was exactly what Garrett had thought earlier, so he couldn’t really argue with what Mallette said. And Lottie obviously believed the gambler, so maybe there really wasn’t any point in continuing to be suspicious.

  “All right,” Garrett said again. “Let me see that badge.”

  Mallette handed it over. Garrett studied it, turning it over and over in his fingers. It certainly looked authentic. Despite what he’d said earlier, he knew it was ridiculous to suspect Mallette of being a deputy U.S. marshal.

  That left the gambler’s explanation of where he had gotten the badge as the only one that made any sense.

  Garrett tossed the badge back to Mallette, who plucked it deftly out of the air. “You’ll probably want to keep that as a souvenir, I reckon. Since you’re the only one left from the bunch that went after Saxon, I suppose you deserve it.”

  “Thanks, boss.” Mallette slid the badge and the leather folder back in his vest pocket. “So what are we doing now? The fellas on guard out at the rim seemed a little jumpy, like maybe something’s going to happen.”

  “We’re going to have our revenge on those men who are responsible for Henry’s death,” Lottie said. “That’s what’s going to happen. Do you still want to be part of that, Nick?”

  “Sure. I’ve been on my own long enough. I like having partners.”

  “All right. Sometime between now and tomorrow morning, the rest of those jury members and Sheriff Rasmussen are going to show up here and surrender to us.”

  A surprised frown creased Mallette’s forehead. “Why in the world would they do that?”

  “Because we have hostages locked up in the smokehouse. Judge Ephraim Doolittle and his wife and niece are our guests for the moment.”

  Mallette let out a low whistle of admiration. “You’ve been busy while I was gone, haven’t you? You plan to wipe them all out at the same time?”

  “That’s right,” Garrett said. “And when we’re done with that, we’ll start the job of taking over this part of the state. It won’t be easy. We’ll have plenty of lawmen and maybe even the army to deal with. Could be a lot of blood spilled before it’s all over. You still want to throw in with us, Mallette?”

  The gambler took a deep breath and nodded. “You can count on me.”

  “We had better be able to,�
�� Lottie told him. “Otherwise some of the blood that gets spilled will be yours.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  With the help of Sheriff Rasmussen and Jed Montayne, John Henry put together a force of twenty men to take with him through the cave. Most of the volunteers were J/M cowhands. Because of his ongoing trouble with J.C. Carson’s Anvil spread, Montayne kept a pretty salty crew working for him, so John Henry was confident they would be gun-handy fighting men.

  A few townsmen were also in the bunch, including one leathery old-timer in buckskins who had a black patch over his left eye. He was a former army scout and buffalo hunter named Ezra Jenkins.

  The old frontiersman informed John Henry, “Lost this here eye o’ mine when a Pawnee buck carved it out with a knife, back in ’66, ’fore I opened him up from gizzard to gullet with my own bowie. Hope that don’t rub you the wrong way, you bein’ part redskin and all.”

  John Henry was glad to have the old Indian fighter coming along. He knew he could count on Ezra to have cool nerves under fire. “That’s fine, Mr. Jenkins. When two men are trying to kill each other, skin color doesn’t matter anymore. All that counts is survival.”

  “You’re sure right about that, youngster.”

  John Henry gathered his men together at the courthouse and went over the plan with them, answering any questions they might have. “If any of you are bothered by being in tight, enclosed places, we’d all be better off if you’d speak up now and stay behind. I don’t know what we’re going to find in that cave, but it may not be easy to get through it.”

  No one said anything, so John Henry assumed they were all willing to venture in there. He hoped none of them would panic once they were inside the cave. Sometimes a man didn’t know he couldn’t stand being closed in until it actually happened.

  They waited until nightfall to saddle up and set out for the Silver Skull. John Henry intended to lead them in a wide circle to the north, so they ought to strike that ravine a good long way from the ranch. It would have been nice if he’d had a day or two to reconnoiter, but there just wasn’t time for that.