by Yes Jack
The farmer was carrying and was not in the least a coward. He hadn’t always raised hogs for a living and in fact, had served as a scout for some years on the frontier. Although he realized that the man facing him had, for purposes at which he could only guess, manoeuvred him into fighting in this way, the farmer was not about to back down. He went for the pistol which he habitually wore when in town. He had almost cleared the holster when the first of Tom Hilton’s bullets took him in the chest. The second followed a fraction of a second later, passing straight through the man’s forehead. He was dead before he even hit the ground.
When the echoes from the roar of gunfire had subsided, Hilton turned to those in the saloon and said, ‘You all saw him draw first. I ain’t answerable for his death.’
From a strictly legalistic viewpoint, this was perfectly correct, but it did not alter the fact that those in the Silver Dollar that evening had seen cold-blooded murder committed and there wasn’t a thing any of them were either willing or able to do about it.
There was not a lawman within thirty miles of Indian Creek and even if there had been one nearer at hand, it is doubtful in the extreme if he would have taken any action against Tom Hilton. After all, what had been witnessed by two dozen men? Two fellows had bandied a few words with each other and then one of them had gone for his gun with the evident aim of killing the other. The man who had been in danger of death had then proved quicker than the other and shot down the aggressor. It was as clear-cut a case of self defence as you could hope to see.
The killing of Joe Sutton, for that was the name of the unfortunate fellow who had been so needlessly gunned down, set the tone for the rest of the Hilton brothers’ stay in Indian Creek. Having shown that they would kill a man for no better reason than that he was on his way home to feed some hogs, others in town began to take good care not to annoy either the Hiltons or the men who were riding with them. If eyebrows were raised by one of the Hilton gang about the cost of some provisions they were buying, then the storekeeper hastily lowered the price. When they took their horses to the smithy and remarked that they didn’t look to be chiselled out of too much for the farrier’s work, then the bill was adjusted until it barely covered the cost of the materials used; never mind the labour involved.
This was how the Hilton gang lived from day to day. They preyed on anybody weaker than themselves and by killing somebody the very day that they rode into town, they ensured that the other citizens of Indian Creek got the message good and early. Supplying goods and services at a loss to this bunch of cutthroats struck most of the folk in town as a pretty good bargain when the alternative was being shot down in some trifling dispute about leaving the saloon early.
The Hilton gang had been in town for less than a week when one of the men revealed that he had heard some interesting intelligence about the Butterfield mail coach which was due to pass twenty miles south of the town the next day. The rumour he’d picked up was that there might be a bunch of bearer bonds in the mail sack being carried to El Paso. These were as good as cash and it was worth hitting the stage, just on the off chance that there was some truth in the story. If nothing else, they would be sure to pick up some jewellery and cash from the passengers and so Bill Hilton, Ramon Mercador and three others set off to see what they might get on such an enterprise.
Chapter 3
Talbot Rogers was not a man to put himself forward, but he could plainly see that unless he took a hand, the surviving passengers from the stage would just wander around like headless chickens until they died of thirst or were massacred by hostile Indians. It was a nuisance, but he would not feel easy until he had guided them all to safety. The fact that there were three ladies in the case clinched the matter for him. He would never rest easy again in his bed if he just rode off and left them to their fate.
Despite deciding that he should aid them, Talbot’s diffidence caused him to say tentatively and apologetically to the group at large, ‘I don’t rightly know what you all plan to do next. For my own part, I have business in Fort Williams and so I’d be happy to accompany any of you who are heading in that same direction.’
Talbot’s offer was met with such an immediate response, that he knew at once that he had been right and that all the others had been looking to him for a lead and half expecting him to rescue them from their present predicament. One matter demanded his attention before they set off and that concerned the young man he had been sitting opposite during the journey. He was satisfied in his own mind that he had been right about the youngster and that he had displayed cowardice when danger threatened. Since the shooting had ended though, Talbot had, to his disgust, noticed the young man winking and smiling at the young girl who had come so very near to being raped. It looked to him as though the fellow was flirting with the girl, and one who could scarcely be more than sixteen. That, thought Talbot to himself, was something which he would need to nip in the bud without further delay. Before discussing any plans for their progress to Fort Williams, Talbot approached the young man and asked if he would favour him with a few words in private.
Having drawn the boy out of earshot of the others, Talbot said in a friendly voice, ‘You saw how I served the last fellow as troubled that young lady, I suppose?’
At first the young man did not seem to catch Talbot’s drift. When he did, he stuttered a denial. ‘Hey, I didn’t mean nothin’ by all that. I’s only joshing with her, tryin’ to keep up her spirits and such.’
Talbot Rogers said nothing more, but simply looked searchingly into the man’s face, until he felt that he had got his message across. During this scrutiny, the boy flushed and began to look uncomfortable. At length, he said, ‘Yeah, all right. I get the idea. I’ll steer clear of her.’
Talbot patted him on the arm in a fatherly way, saying, ‘That’s right. I knew we wouldn’t fall out about it.’
Before setting off, Talbot suggested that they introduce themselves to the others. He began by telling them that he was a travelling salesman and that he was on his way to Fort Williams. The young man was called Tim Hogan and didn’t seem to be travelling anywhere in particular. ‘Just movin’ along’ was how he put it. The middle-aged man and his daughter, who was fifteen, were on their way to El Paso, where the man was to take up some clerical job with the customs service. His name was Clarence and his daughter was Melanie. After the fat, cheerful woman had introduced herself as a singer of some kind, the couple whom Talbot had assumed to be farmers confirmed him in that view. They were on their way to visit relatives near Fort Williams. The two men who had been travelling atop of the stage gave no clear information about themselves and Talbot guessed that they were escaping some trouble or other.
‘Question is,’ said Talbot, ‘how we’re going to travel. There’s four horses tacked up and ready to go and we can take two of the others from the stage, use them to carry our water and such like.’
‘What of our bags?’ said Mrs Littlechild, the farmer’s wife.
‘We travel light,’ said Talbot. ‘It may happen that you see your luggage again, but I wouldn’t lay odds on it.’
The woman seemed disposed to argue the point, but Talbot thought they’d delayed long enough for introductions and other such niceties. He said firmly, ‘Ma’am, you mistake me. I’m not telling you that you must leave your bags behind. Nothing of the sort. I’m only setting out how those as want to throw in with me will be arranging matters. If you and your husband, or any of you others for that matter, wish to strike out alone, why, you go right ahead.’
Her husband said in a low voice, ‘Hush up now, Marianne. This gentleman’s offered to guide us, we must go by his rules.’ Marianne Littlechild bridled a little, but said nothing more. Nobody else objected to abandoning their belongings in that way and without further ado, Talbot directed the order in which they would be travelling.
The girl Melanie was set on one of the horses and Belle, the singer, had another. It seemed only right that the man who had been wounded in the gun battle should a
lso ride, although Talbot Rogers’s private opinion was that he wasn’t that badly hurt. From all he could see, there was no more to the case than a scratch to his thigh.
Mrs Littlechild flatly refused to straddle a horse and announced that she would sooner walk on her own two feet. Since there were no saddles for the other mounts, Talbot got Tim Hogan to lend a hand and they cut loose the traces of the horses which had been pulling the stage. Then they loaded these two and the other spare mount up with water kegs, the little food that was being carried and also the rifles and other weapons which had been carried by the driver and his companion. Talbot detached the tarp which had been covering the boxes and trunks and rolled that up too and slung it over one of the horses, figuring that they might be able to rig up some kind of shelter for the ladies.
Before they began, Talbot asked if anybody had any maps or knew where the next settlement along the way might be. It appeared that nobody did and so the six men, three women and half dozen horses set off south-west in the general direction of Fort Williams and El Paso. Young Melanie and the older woman who had mounted up cut a ridiculous and faintly indecent spectacle with their petticoats all rucked up and almost displaying their drawers. One was too young to be bothered about the impropriety of their position and as for the older, Talbot had a shrewd notion that she might be in the habit of revealing considerably more than just her underthings to the world.
A mile from Indian Creek, Mercador reined in his horse and thought carefully about what he was going to say to Tom Hilton about the death of his beloved brother. They might have been as rough as all get out, but nobody who knew the Hiltons ever doubted for a moment that they thought the world of each other. It might have been different if it had been Tom who was dead and Ramon Mercador was bringing the news to Bill. Bill had been a mite slower to take umbrage than his brother and considerably less likely to kill a stranger over some fancied slight. Not that Bill Hilton had been a weakling, far from it. He’d just taken a little more time to turn matters over in his mind before reaching for his gun.
Mercador’s chief worry was that Tom Hilton would somehow find a way to blame him for his brother’s death and shoot him out of hand. Nor was this an exaggerated fear; Hilton had killed men for a good deal less than that. After thinking it over for a few minutes, Mercador rode back again in the direction from which he had come.
When he had got a half mile further back from the town, Mercador found a little copse of trees. There didn’t seem to be anybody around so he dismounted and walked with his horse in among the trees and then tethered the mare to a low-hanging branch. He wasn’t overly keen on the course of action which he was about to take, but it surely beat being gunned down by Tom Hilton.
Now during his military career, Mercador had seen more men killed by blood poisoning than any other cause. Sometimes, even a tiny scratch could turn septic and bring about a man’s death, if some piece of crap or other got into the wound. For that reason, Mercador carefully rolled up his sleeve, so that he wouldn’t end up with threads of filthy cotton being driven into the wound he was about to make. Then he drew his pistol, gritted his teeth and fired a glancing, superficial shot across the biceps of his left arm. It hurt like hell, far more than he had expected. Sometimes in the heat of battle, one might scarcely notice a trifling wound of this sort until things had quietened down a little. Receiving the same injury cold-bloodedly in the still of this little wood, with nothing to distract his attention was something else again. There was surprisingly little blood; the ball having just grazed a shallow groove, taking off the top few layers of skin and bruising the muscle which lay beneath. To make the whole thing look perfectly authentic, Mercador then fired another shot through the sleeve of his shirt, in a position roughly corresponding to the wound on his upper arm.
Once he’d rolled down his sleeve again, Mercador flexed his muscles a couple of times, causing the blood to start flowing from the injury and staining his shirt sleeve. He toyed briefly with the notion of inflicting a similarly artistically staged bullet wound to his horse, but decided against it. Instead, he saddled up and headed back to Indian Creek, composing in his head the story that he was going to spin to Tom Hilton.
The road towards El Paso ran through gently undulating country, with hills and woods visible here and there in the distance. There was no sign that Talbot Rogers could discern of either Fort Williams nor any other settlement. He walked on ahead of the others a little, with George Littlechild, who seemed a sensible enough fellow and probably closest in age to Talbot himself.
‘What do you reckon,’ asked Talbot, ‘you think we’re liable to come across any town between here and Fort Williams?’
‘Couldn’t say,’ replied the other. ‘Can’t say as I know the land hereabouts. I guess we could sleep out in the open at a pinch.’
‘Might have to. It’ll be coming on dark in another hour. If we don’t see any sign of life soon, I’m minded to call a halt and we can get off the road to find shelter.’
Littlechild shot the man walking along at his side a strange look and said, ‘Shelter from what? You mean wolves and such?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Talbot.
After they had been travelling along for another ten minutes, Talbot stopped and announced that they would be moving off the road and seeking shelter for the night in a rocky bluff which towered away to the right, perhaps two or three miles from the road.
‘Can’t we just set down here?’ asked young Hogan.
‘That’s not a smart move,’ said Talbot, without giving any reasons or offering any sort of explanation.
‘Why not?’ said Tim Hogan. ‘Seems mad to add so much to our journey. ’Sides, suppose some stage came by in the night or troop o’ cavalry or something like that? We might find help that way. What for you think we should be hiding up in those rocks?’
Talbot Rogers shrugged indifferently and said, ‘If you people want to take my advice, you’ll come off away from this road and hunker down on that bluff.’
‘Young fellow’s got a point,’ observed George Littlechild. ‘Can’t you tell us why you want us to trudge all the way over yonder?’
If there hadn’t been women involved and it had just been a question of abandoning a bunch of men, Talbot wouldn’t have bothered to say a word. He would simply have walked off and left those who wished to sleep right there, to their own devices and made off alone. He knew though that he couldn’t behave so on this occasion, not if it meant placing the girl and the two grown women in hazard. He sighed, for he was a man who loathed and detested having to explain his motives.
‘My current job is acting as a representative of the Colt Firearms company in Hertford, Connecticut,’ said Talbot, ‘but that’s what you might term a recent development. For better than fifteen years, I worked for the provost marshals’ department.’
‘That some kind o’ law?’ asked one of the boys who had been riding the roof of the stage.
‘Something of the sort. Military police. Keeping order in the army and tracking down offenders.’
‘Where does that lead us?’ asked Tim Hogan, an aggressive edge to his voice. Talbot understood this to mean that he was nursing a grievance for having been ticked off about his attentions to young Melanie. Now that he was in a group of men once more and others seemed to support his view of the case, Hogan was full of beans again.’In the main, my job was tracking down fugitives,’ explained Talbot patiently, ‘men who were fleeing from some wrongdoing. I don’t like to blow my own bugle, but I was good. The best, if I’m truthful. Nobody ever caught me napping and I always found the man I was looking for. Found them and brought them back.’ He paused and then went on. ‘Early on in the game, I found that I had some kind of a sense for when danger threatened. I couldn’t explain it all to you folks, even if we had the time and leisure to sit here for a spell. Which, by the by, we don’t. But I can tell you right now, there’s a storm cloud heading our way and if we don’t get off the road right this minute, you are all liable to be
struck by the lightning.’
When Talbot Rogers had finished speaking, there was a deathly silence and then, without any more ado, the others began sheepishly moving off in the direction which he had indicated that they should go. Only young Tim Hogan was apparently dissatisfied about this turn of events, remarking to the man who had been involved in the shooting from the roof of the stage, ‘Sounds to me like a gallon of hogwash in a pint pot!’ The wounded man made no reply to this observation, being concerned only with the throbbing pain from the wound in his leg.
Back in Indian Creek, the interview with Tom Hilton that Mercador had so been dreading went more smoothly than he could have dared hope. Naturally, Ramon Mercador had not revealed that after shooting the horses, he had left the ambush to Bill Hilton and the other three. In the version of events which he had spun for Tom Hilton and the other eight remaining members of the gang, Mercador had rode down from the hills to join in the attack on the stage. There had been the fiercest gun battle imaginable, with hot lead flying through the air like it might have been a hailstorm. Only when he had seen his four companions fall in battle and it was clear that they were hopelessly outgunned had he fled the scene.
Tom Hilton watched him narrowly while he was telling this tale, his eyes running over Mercador. When the story was ended, Hilton said nothing for a space and then shrugged, as though the thing was of little import. He said, ‘You played your part. I would have turned and rode off myself, had I been there. How’s your arm?’
‘Hurtin’.’
‘You want to get a doctor?’
‘Hell, no!’ exclaimed Mercador. ‘I taken worse than that and never needed no sawbones.’ Hilton nodded and the matter was ended. Ramon Mercador felt giddy and weak with relief. He had more than half expected Tom Hilton to shoot him down in a fury for coming back alive. He had a sudden and overpowering urge to visit the outhouse. Having the fear of death abruptly lifted from one did strange things to a man’s bowels.