Scratch would have gotten mad at that comment—no self-respecting Texan would ever sell his saddle—but Bo had intervened. His bout of melancholia and resentment had gone away—unfortunately not in time to save their jobs on the Circle JP—and he was once again the voice of reason in the duo.
Now, stiff muscles protesting, Bo headed for the outhouse on this frosty morning. Around here, the nights were chilly, even during the summer. He had left Scratch curled up in the hay, snoring, and headed out into the dawn to tend to his personal needs.
He tried not to think about what the rest of the day might bring. He and Scratch were just about at the ends of their ropes.
The privy wasn’t occupied. Bo tried to tell himself that that was a bit of good luck. Maybe their fortunes were turning. He pulled the door with its half-moon cutout closed behind him. The outhouse was just a one-holer. He lowered his trousers and long underwear, then sat down and sighed, trying not to shiver from the cold.
Before leaving the stable to come out here, he had grabbed a few sheets of newspaper from a stack of them, folded them, and tucked them under his arm to warm them a little. He took them out now and unfolded them, idly scanning the stories in the dim light that came in through the half-moon.
Suddenly, Bo felt his heart start to pound faster. He checked the date on the piece of newspaper he was holding. It had been published in Albuquerque three weeks earlier, so the news in it was fairly recent. His eyes fastened on one particular headline, and even though he wasn’t a superstitious man by nature, he had to wonder at that moment if there really was such a thing as an omen.
The headline read BIG GOLD STRIKE! TOWN BOOMS! BONANZA FOUND NEAR MANKILLER, COLORADO!
CHAPTER 4
Bo thrust the ragged piece of newspaper in front of Scratch’s face. He had torn out the story about the gold strike in Colorado and used the rest of the newspaper for the purpose for which God had intended it.
“Wake up, Scratch,” he said as he shook his old friend’s shoulder. “Take a look at this.”
Scratch cracked one eye open a little. “Bo? What the hell are you doin’ up in the middle of the night?”
“It’s not the middle of the night. It’s morning. And I have an idea what we need to do.”
Scratch closed his eye, groaned, and snuggled deeper in the hay. “I was havin’ me the nicest dream. I was surrounded by a bunch of pretty little señoritas…”
“The only things surrounding you in that hay are bugs and rats,” Bo said. “Come on, wake up.”
“You’re gonna keep on pesterin’ me until I do, ain’t you?”
“More than likely.”
Scratch heaved a sigh. He forced both eyes open, rolled onto his side, and pushed himself up into a sitting position. “All right, all right. What’n blazes are you goin’ on about? It ain’t like you to be that worked up about anything, Bo.”
Bo shoved the newspaper story in front of Scratch’s face again. “Read that.”
Scratch grimaced. “My eyes are a mite blurry this mornin’. Why don’t you just tell me what it says?”
“It says there’s a big gold strike up in Colorado, at a town called Mankiller.”
“Never heard of it,” Scratch muttered as he rubbed his hands wearily over his face.
“It’s not far from Durango, according to this story.”
“Well, I still never—Wait a minute.” Scratch looked up with a frown. “Did you say gold strike?”
“That’s right. A real bonanza, the paper says. Mankiller’s gone from being a sleepy little wide place in the road to a boomtown almost overnight.” Bo shrugged. “Of course, this paper was published three weeks ago, so it’s not exactly overnight anymore…”
“So we don’t know for sure if the boom’s still goin’ on, or if the the gold petered out in a hurry.”
“No, but I think it’s worth checking out, don’t you?”
“Gold,” Scratch mused. “Seems like we just got tangled up with a gold mine down yonder in Mexico not that long ago. We could have stayed down there if we wanted to be gold miners.”
“Maybe we made the wrong decision. Things haven’t worked out that well for us since we left Mexico, have they?”
“Well…no, I reckon not.”
Bo tapped a finger against the newspaper story. “Maybe this is telling us that we have another chance. We should go to this Mankiller, Colorado, and see if we can get in on the strike.”
Scratch frowned again. “I never knew you to go chasin’ after gold before, Bo, or any other sort of wealth, for that matter. You’ve gotten downright jumpy these days. You’re supposed to be the calm, steady one.”
Bo looked out the window in the hayloft. It faced east, which meant the view overlooked the Rio Grande and the vast, arid ugliness of the Jornada del Muerto.
“Time’s running out,” Bo said.
“What?”
“You ever think about how many years we’ve drifted, Scratch? And how little we’ve got to show for it? We’re both still in pretty good health now—”
Scratch thumped his chest with a fist. “Speak for yourself. I’m healthy as a horse!”
“Yeah, but what about ten or fifteen years from now? What if we get sick? Who’s going to take care of us?”
Scratch stared at his old friend for a long moment, then exploded, “What the hell is wrong with you? The odds are that neither of us will live to be old and feeble, the way we keep runnin’ into trouble! Blast it, Bo, ever since we left Texas, we’ve worried about today, not tomorrow. We live for right now.”
Bo looked around at the hayloft. Rats scrabbled around here and there.
“Right now doesn’t look like much at the moment.”
“Our lack of dinero is just a temporary setback. We’ll get on our feet again, get us a stake built up—”
“How? We can’t even afford to buy a cup of coffee for breakfast.”
“That’s right,” Scratch said. “So how in hell do you think we’re gonna be able to go all the way to Colorado to look for gold?”
Bo shrugged. “That’s a problem, all right. But I still think we should have a goal—”
“I got a goal.” Scratch heaved himself to his feet and groaned again as he straightened his back and legs and joints creaked and popped into place. “My goal’s to make it to the outhouse. After I’ve managed that, I’ll figure out what to do next.”
Scratch went to the ladder and climbed down, grumbling and muttering as he went. Bo tucked the torn-out newspaper story in his pocket and sighed. He followed Scratch down the ladder. The silver-haired Texan had already disappeared out the rear door of the livery barn.
The elderly proprietor of the stable came out of his office running knobby fingers through a thatch of snowy white hair. “Mornin’,” he said to Bo with a nod. “How’d you fellas sleep?”
“All right, I guess.”
“If you fellas’d like to stay on for a spell, I got some other chores that could use doin’. Roof needs patched, and there are some rotten boards in the walls that ought to be replaced. Things like that. If you boys want to take care of those jobs for me, you can keep on sleepin’ in the loft.”
“How about wages?” Bo asked.
The old man shook his head. “Oh, no, I can’t afford to pay you no wages. This place don’t make that much money.”
“You’d feed us?”
The man’s eyes widened. “Do I look like a rich man? No, a place to sleep in return for the work, that’s all I can offer you.”
“Even slaves got fed,” Bo snapped.
“Don’t get testy with me now. I’m just tryin’ to help you fellas out.”
If that was the old-timer’s idea of helping out, Bo hated to think what he would do to someone he was trying to take advantage of. “No deal,” he said as he headed for the front entrance.
“Hold on just a minute.”
Bo looked back, thinking that the proprietor was going to be more reasonable.
Instead, the man said in
an irritated voice, “Your horses ate some of my grain and drank my water. You got to pay me for that. I’ll take a day of roof patchin’ for what you owe.”
“What we owe?” Bo felt anger welling up inside him. He told himself to get a grip on his temper. Losing control with Big John Peeler had cost him and Scratch that job. It hadn’t been a good one, but it was better than nothing, which was what they had now. “We worked until almost midnight cleaning those stalls. That ought to be enough to care of any debt.”
“This is my livery stable, mister. I’ll be the judge of what’s enough and what ain’t. And if you don’t like it, I’ll fetch the marshal and see what he thinks about it. If you ain’t careful, you and your pard are gonna wind up behind bars as vagrants.”
If that happened, it wouldn’t be the first time he and Scratch had been in jail, Bo reflected. In fact, the accommodations would probably be better, and the local law would have to feed them.
The only problem was that being locked up was hell on both of the Texans because of the wanderlust that always gripped them. They might not have anywhere to go, but their nature cried out for them to be free to ride on any time they chose.
“Don’t get a burr under your saddle,” Bo told the liveryman. “I’ll talk to my partner as soon as he gets back from the outhouse, and we’ll figure out what we’re going to do.”
“That’s another thing. You fellas used my outhouse. That ought to be worth somethin’.”
Bo bit back the angry retort that sprang to his lips. The money-grubbing old-timer was damned annoying, but Bo was determined not to let his temper get the best of him.
He unlatched the big double doors at the front of the barn and swung them open. The hour was still early, but people were moving around and folks could show up at the stable to pick up their horses at any time. Bo stood there, watching the rosy glow in the sky grow brighter as the sun climbed above the horizon.
Idly, he looked down the street and spotted a couple of men walking toward a large, redbrick building a couple of blocks away. One of the men wore a town suit and a hat, while the other was dressed in range clothes, including a battered old Stetson, a cowhide vest, and a pair of chaps strapped over denim trousers. The two men made an unlikely pair, and something about the sight caused Bo to frown.
“Say, is that the bank two blocks down?” he asked over his shoulder. “Big building made of red bricks?”
“Sure is. Why do you want to know?” The oldster cackled. “You ain’t got no money to put in it.”
“Is the fella who runs it in the habit of showing up early?”
“Yeah. Frank Mosely’s the president. He usually gets there about this time of mornin’. Says he likes to get an early start on the day. You ask me, I think he goes in there while nobody’s around and throws money on the floor of the vault and rolls around in it, the danged old miser. I never knew anybody to love money as much as that old skinflint does.”
The old saying about the pot and the kettle occurred to Bo, but he shoved the thought aside. “Mosely’s a portly fella about sixty?”
“That’s him.”
As Bo watched, the two men reached the door of the bank. The one in the suit took a key from his pocket and started to unlock the door. He fumbled with it, missing the hole on the lock several times before he was able to insert the key and turn it.
“Is there any reason for some cowpoke to be going into the bank with Mosely?” Bo asked.
The stableman came up beside him. “What the deuce are you talkin’ about? I told you, Frank goes in there alone so’s he can play with other people’s money. He wouldn’t be takin’ anybody in with him. Bank don’t open to the public for a couple hours yet.”
Bo nodded. “That’s what I thought.” Both men had disappeared into the bank building now, and the door was shut forcefully enough that he could hear it a couple of blocks away. Bo turned and walked toward the tack room where he and Scratch had stowed their saddles and gear.
“Hey!” the old man called after him. “What are you doin’? You ain’t fixin’ to run out on me, are you?”
Bo ignored the questions. He went into the tack room and picked up his Winchester, working the rifle’s lever to throw a cartridge into the firing chamber. As he walked down the center aisle of the barn, holding the repeater at a slant across his chest, the liveryman looked at him, gulped, and stepped hurriedly out of the way.
Bo left the barn and started down the street toward the bank, which appeared quiet and deserted. Anyone would think so, if they hadn’t seen Frank Mosely and his mysterious companion go inside a couple of minutes earlier. Bo knew they were in there, though, so he wasn’t surprised when the door opened again and the man in range clothes reappeared, toting a canvas bag in his left hand. The man’s right hand rested on the butt of his holstered revolver.
Bo’s gaze flicked along the street. A couple of storekeepers were sweeping off the boardwalks in front of their establishments. A man came out of a café and paused to pick his teeth. Another man walked along the street, his head down as he packed tobacco into a pipe. A wagon pulled by a couple of mules and driven by a stocky man in a tall straw sombrero was at the far end of the street, rolling slowly toward the center of town.
It took Bo only a split second to assess the situation. It could have been better, as far as bystanders were concerned, but it could have been a lot worse, too. He walked a little faster as the man who had just come out of the bank turned toward a horse tied at a nearby hitch rail.
Before the man could reach the horse, Bo stopped and leveled the Winchester at him, calling in a loud, clear voice, “Hold it right there, mister!”
At that same moment, Frank Mosely, the president of the bank, staggered out of that establishment’s front door, holding a hand to his bloody head as he yelled, “Stop him! Stop that man! He just robbed the bank!”
The bank robber cursed and yanked his pistol from its holster.
CHAPTER 5
Moving swiftly, Bo snapped the Winchester to his shoulder. He fired, getting off the first shot while the robber was still clearing leather.
Fate took its usual capricious hand, though. As the outlaw clawed his gun out, he swung the canvas bag up with his other hand. Bo didn’t know what the hombre intended to do with it, but as luck would have it, the bullet he fired struck the bag and drove it back against the robber’s chest. The man staggered under the impact and let go of the bag. When it fell to the ground at his feet, Bo saw there was no blood on the robber’s shirt. Something in the bag had stopped the bullet.
The robber jerked his gun up and fired. Bo was already moving, so the slug whipped past his ear rather than blowing his brains out. As he darted to the side, he levered the Winchester and fired a second shot, this time from the hip.
The bullet kicked up dust at the robber’s feet and made him jump, but that was all the damage it did. The man whirled around and leaped back up onto the boardwalk.
Mosely was still squalling for help, but he stopped short as he realized that the robber was lunging at him. The man grabbed Mosely and jerked him in front of him, looping his free arm around the terrified banker’s neck to hold him there.
As the robber dragged Mosely back toward the door, he thrust his gun past the hostage and fired two more shots at Bo, who threw himself to the ground and rolled behind a water trough as he felt the wind-rip of the slugs pass his head. He raised up and coolly took aim with the Winchester, knowing that if the robber succeeded in getting back in the bank with Mosely, it would be hard to get him out of there without the banker being killed.
For a split second, Bo had a clear shot at the robber’s left thigh. He took it, stroking the trigger. The rifle cracked, and blood flew from the outlaw’s leg as the bullet ripped through it. The man howled in pain and stumbled.
Mosely seized the opportunity to twist around and put his hands against the robber’s chest. He shoved hard, breaking the man’s grip on him. As soon as he was free, Mosely dove to the boardwalk to get out of
the line of fire.
Bo’s rifle slammed out another shot. This one caught the robber in the body and drove him back. The man managed to trigger his gun again. The bullet thudded into the water trough. Bo levered the Winchester and fired again, then again. Both slugs punched into the robber’s chest. They flung him backward against the front window of the bank. The collision shattered the glass. Splinters and shards of it flew in the air as the wounded man fell through the window into the bank.
Bo leaped to his feet and bounded onto the boardwalk. He kept the rifle pointed at the window as he cautiously approached it. Glass crunched under his boots. The robber’s knees had caught on the windowsill. His legs from there down hung motionless outside the window.
When Bo reached the point where he could look through the broken window, he saw that the robber would never be a threat to anyone again. The man’s shirt was sodden with blood from the bullet holes. He lay on his back, arms flung out at his sides, and his eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling of the bank.
“Is…is he dead?”
The question came from Frank Mosely. The banker was on hands and knees a few yards away, his hair in disarray and hanging in front of his face, blood from the gash on his forehead dripping on the boardwalk.
“He’s dead,” Bo confirmed. “I reckon he must have walloped you with his gun?”
Mosely gave a shaky nod in reply. “Yes, he…he said I was taking too long getting the vault open, so he hit me. Then after he got the money, he told me to stay inside until he was gone, or he’d kill me. But I couldn’t let him get away with all that money. It would have ruined too many people here in town to lose it.”
The banker didn’t sound like the sort of hombre who would dump other people’s money on the floor and roll around in it. Bo figured the liveryman just thought everybody was as venal and greedy as he was. Lowering the rifle, Bo went over to Mosely to help him to his feet.
Running footsteps made him look around. A man wearing trousers and long underwear, with his suspenders still loose, hurried toward them carrying a shotgun.
Mankiller, Colorado Page 3