Mankiller, Colorado
Page 24
A few yards away, Bo found himself facing Thad Devery, who had gone as loco as a rabid wolf. Thad yanked a knife from his boot with his good hand and slashed at Bo with the blade. Bo leaped back to avoid the knife, but he stumbled and fell. Thad changed his grip and leaped after Bo, raising the knife high and then bringing it down at the Texan.
Bo caught hold of Thad’s wrist with both hands and twisted sharply as Thad landed on him. Thad screamed and convulsed as the blade stabbed deep into his own belly. Bo pushed, driving the knife even deeper, all the way to the hilt. Breathing raggedly through clenched teeth, he lay there with Thad on top of him and watched as Thad’s eyes, only inches from his, slowly drained of life. When Bo shoved him away, the man was dead.
Bo climbed wearily to his feet and saw Scratch buckling on his gun belt with the holstered Remingtons. “Got your guns back, I see,” he said.
“Yeah, Luke had ’em.” Scratch glanced around. “Appears that the fight’s just about over.”
That was true. The Deverys had been overcome. Some of them were dead, others were wounded, and others had been battered into unconsciousness.
Unfortunately, the same was true of Mankiller’s citizens and the cowboys from New Mexico. Some of them had fallen and would never rise. Big John Peeler was still on his feet, though, bleeding from several gashes on his face as he grinned at Bo and Scratch.
“Quite a scrap,” he said. “If this is the sort of ruckus you fellas usually get mixed up in, I want you to come back to the ranch with me even more!”
Bo had a good mind to tell Peeler what he could do with that invitation, but at that moment, a harsh voice shouted, “Creel! Morton!”
They swung around and saw Jackson Devery coming out of the café with one arm wrapped around Lucinda’s waist while the other hand held a gun to her head.
“I want you to see what you’ve done, you damned Texans!” Devery shouted into the suddenly stunned silence that fell over the street. “You may have taken my town away, but this bitch will never be the mayor! You bastards stand there and watch while I blow her brains out!”
“You pull that trigger, you’ll be dead two seconds later,” Bo warned.
A savage grin stretched Devery’s mouth. “You think I don’t know that? You think I want to live in a world I can’t bend to my will no more?”
“You’re a sick son of a bitch, Devery,” Scratch said. “A mad dog. You need to be put out of your misery, and everybody else’s misery, too.”
“You go right ahead and do it,” Devery snarled, “but not until I pull this trigger!”
“Jackson, no!”
Edgar Devery pushed through the crowd, coming out to face his brother from a distance of about twenty feet. Jackson Devery looked surprised to see him. Edgar’s face was covered with bruises and blood. One eye was swollen almost shut. Devery had probably thought that he’d left his brother for dead in the old house at the top of the hill.
Edgar was still alive, though, even though he swayed slightly on his feet.
And he clutched a shotgun in his hands.
“Let Mrs. Bonner go, Jackson,” Edgar said. “This is over now.”
“No, it ain’t,” Devery said. “It ain’t over until I say it’s over.”
Edgar grunted. “Still got to be the big boss of everything, don’t you? You was always that way. Had to get whatever it was you wanted, and you didn’t give a damn about anybody else. You still don’t care who gets hurt, do you?” Edgar’s voice shook with grief. “My boy Thad’s dead. Your sons are all dead. You tried to kill me, you could’ve killed Myra, and you destroyed the rest of your family. And still all you care about is more killin’!” He raised the shotgun. “Let her go, or I’ll kill you.”
Devery stared at him. His voice shook when he spoke, too, but with rage and insane hatred. “You’d turn on me, on your own brother?” he demanded.
A hollow laugh came from Edgar. “After all this, that’d be funny, Jackson…if it wasn’t so sad.”
“You…you…” Devery couldn’t even find the words to express his lunacy. He flung Lucinda away from him, out of the line of fire, and jerked the gun in his hand toward his brother.
Edgar pulled the shotgun’s triggers first.
The double load of buckshot smashed into Devery, lifting him up off his feet and dropping him on the porch of the café. The bloody, shredded thing that landed on the planks barely resembled a human being. Even some of the hardened cowboys from New Mexico had to turn their eyes away.
Edgar slowly lowered the shotgun and turned to face Bo and Scratch. “I hated to do that,” he said. “I purely did. But somebody had to stop him, and I figured it was better if it was…if it was…”
He dropped the empty shotgun and would have collapsed if Bo hadn’t caught hold of his arm to steady him. “Take it easy,” Bo said. “We’ll find your daughter. She can look after you.”
“She…she’s alive?” Edgar asked.
“She was,” Bo said as he looked at the bodies sprawled in the street.
A lot of other people had been alive, too, who weren’t anymore. There would be plenty of mourning in the settlement over the next few days.
But life would go on, and for the first time in these parts for a good while, it would be filled with hope and promise instead of fear and tyranny.
Some fights were always worth fighting. Bo and Scratch, along with their fellow Texans, had learned that at the Alamo, at Goliad, at San Jacinto. And it was just as true decades later and hundreds of miles away, in a place called Mankiller, Colorado.
CHAPTER 31
“Sorry I let you down,” Biscuits O’Brien said from the bed where he lay swathed in bandages, in one of the rooms in Dr. Jason Weathers’s house. “I tried to stop ’em when they busted in to take the prisoners, but I didn’t expect ’em to blow the blasted wall down.”
“Nobody did,” Bo told the sheriff with a smile. “That just shows how far Devery was prepared to go to get what he wanted.”
“Loco as a hydrophobia skunk,” Scratch said from the other side of the bed. “Don’t you worry, Biscuits. You done fine.”
“And you’re going to make a good lawman for this town,” Bo added. “The town council has already voted to keep you on.”
“With…a couple of deputies…I hope,” Biscuits said.
“Well…for now,” Bo said. “But Scratch and I came to Mankiller to look for gold. We haven’t forgotten about that.”
They said so long to Biscuits for the time being. The sheriff had been wounded in several places during the fierce gunfight at the jail, but Dr. Weathers seemed convinced that he would make a full recovery.
The Texans left the doctor’s house and headed for the café. Evening had settled down over Mankiller. The bodies had all been toted away, the badly wounded were at the doctor’s place, and the Deverys who weren’t seriously hurt had retreated to the big old house at the upper end of Main Street. Edgar Devery, who was now the leader of the family, had assured Bo and Scratch that there would be no more trouble. Jackson Devery had browbeaten many of his relatives into going along with him, and with Jackson dead, the family might be able to take its place as part of the community. Edgar had promised to do his best to see that that came about.
Bo believed him. Edgar was badly shaken up and grieved by everything that had happened, and he didn’t want it ever happening again.
Plenty of evidence of battle could still be seen in the broken windows and in the bullet holes that pocked the walls of most of the buildings. That damage could be patched up. In a few weeks, Bo thought as he and Scratch strolled through the evening, you wouldn’t be able to tell that a life-and-death struggle had taken place here.
They went into the café and found it busy as usual. Lucinda was behind the counter, pouring coffee and setting plates of food in front of the customers on the stools. Callie and Tess delivered meals to the tables. Charley was whistling in the kitchen as he cooked.
Lucinda pushed cups toward the Texans and filled
them with coffee. “How’s Biscuits?” she asked.
“Doc Weathers says he’ll be all right,” Bo reported.
“You told him we want him to stay on as sheriff?”
“Yep,” Scratch said. “He made us promise to keep wearin’ these deputy badges until he gets back on his feet.”
“You’re not going back to New Mexico with Mr. Peeler?”
“Not hardly,” Scratch said. “Big John ain’t quite as bad as we thought he was, and we’re obliged to him for his help today, but we don’t hanker to work for him no more.”
“Besides,” Bo said, “we have jobs here for a while.”
“And after that?” Lucinda asked.
Bo shrugged. “Like we told Biscuits, we came here to look for gold.”
“There are other ways to find your fortune in life,” Lucinda said softly.
That was true, Bo reflected, but not necessarily in the way that Lucinda meant. For him and Scratch, their real fortune was their freedom, the ability to saddle up and ride on when the notion struck them, to answer the endless call of the frontier that always drew them to see what was over the next hill.
That call could be answered another day. Bo took a sip of the fine coffee and reminded himself that he and Scratch would need to make their rounds soon.
For now, they were still the law in Mankiller.
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