by Bill Dugan
“Christ, Roy,” one of them said. “You’re bleeding like a damn pig. For chrissakes …”
Roy stuck a hand up, and the man who’d spoken grabbed it, helping the injured man to his feet.
Conlee jerked the reins of his horse and spun around the corner of the house. The man at the front door was still alternating between pounding and shouting. As Ted drew another ten yards closer, the man switched from pounding to kicking.
Roy’s rescuers lifted him and pulled him away from the window. The movement brought a cry of agony from the injured man, and Conlee sat on his horse, watching.
“Stupid bastard,” he shouted. “Roy, you’re too damn dumb to live.”
Roy continued to moan.
“Christ, there’s a piece of glass in his leg, must be eight inches long.”
“Get him up, see if he can walk,” Conlee said.
They hauled Roy to his feet, but the injured leg collapsed under him.
The two men lowered Roy to the ground again. One of them leaned close to get a better look. “There’s so damn much blood, I can’t see nothing.”
A brief flicker of a match being lit threw shadows on the side of the house, but the match guttered out almost at once. Conlee dismounted and walked toward the prostrate form as another match flickered. This time, a handful of dry grass was set on fire, for a torch, and the kneeling man leaned over Roy.
“Damn, the whole back of his leg’s laid open. He needs a doctor.”
“No doctor,” Conlee said. “Ain’t wastin’ time takin’ no damn fool to no doctor.”
“He’ll get gangrene, Major.”
“His own damn fault.”
Conlee bent to have a look. The motion saved his life. A sharp crack sounded from somewhere inside the house. The rest of the window glass showered over the small knot of men.
“Sonofabitch,” Conlee shouted. “Sonofabitch tried to kill me. Come on out of there, you bastard.” He shook a fist at the ruined window. Another blast from a shotgun ripped at the frame, scattering buckshot in a three-foot circle as it blew through the remnants of the glass.
“Give me the damn torch,” Conlee shouted “Give it to me,” and he snatched at the clump of grass, now burnt most of the way down. He threw it through the open window frame. Another shot answered, and Conlee ducked to one side.
“Check the barn, boys,” Conlee shouted, backing away from the window. Roy continued to moan. “Shut up, dammit,” Conlee screamed. “Shut the hell up.”
“He needs a doc, Major.”
Conlee pulled a revolver from his belt and cocked it. Roy moaned again, and Conlee fired twice. Ted saw the wounded man jerk, and his own body nearly bounced with the suddenness of the gunshots.
“He don’t need no doc no more,” Conlee said. He laughed, and one or two of the men on horseback joined him. “Alright, break in the door, some of you birds. The rest of you see what you can find in the barn. Get some coal oil, too, if you can find any.”
The man at the front of the house kicked more viciously at the door, until it fell in with a squeal of screws pulling loose. The crash of the door on the floor sounded like a clap of thunder.
Another blast from the shotgun ripped through the open doorway, tearing into the man who’d kicked it in. The man flew backward and landed on his back in the dirt.
Conlee laughed again, shaking his head as if he just couldn’t understand such stupidity. “How many times I told you, you kick a door in, stay the fuck out of the line of fire?”
The rest of the men swarmed around the house, some racing toward the barn, others looking for windows around the back.
Ted raised his Winchester, trying to get Conlee in his sights, but the big man kept moving like a caged tiger, stalking around the corner of the house and back. The men around him saved his life at least twice, stepping into the line of fire as Ted was about to pull the trigger.
Then he was gone. He sent two men through the doorway and charged in after them. A brilliant light, gone almost as soon as it appeared, flashed in the house. It signaled another blast cracking from the shotgun, this one muffled by something.
A moment later, the brittle cracking of a burst of gunfire from inside the house snapped across the grass like a string of firecrackers. In the aftermath, a woman screamed. Conlee reappeared in the doorway, then stepped onto the porch, dragging a woman by one arm.
The men outside cheered, and Conlee bowed. “Told you boys I felt like havin’ some fun, didn’t I?”
“You can’t do no better’n that?” one of the men asked.
Another one of the raiders laughed. “What do you want, Lily Langtry, for chrissakes? You got to take what you can get. This one’ll do fine fer now.”
The man stepped forward as Conlee let go of the woman’s arm. She lay on the ground, curled into a ball. Conlee prodded her with a foot, and she screamed again. Conlee waved in disgust, then stepped back away from the woman. The other man, a string bean with a mop of hair that made him look like a used broom, bent down and grabbed the woman by the hair. She tried to fight him off and dug her nails into the man’s wrist. He cursed and slapped at her twice, then grabbed hold of her nightdress and ripped it open.
Ted licked his lips, bringing the Winchester around and waiting for Conlee to stand still long enough to draw a steady bead. But long years of warfare had done their work. Conlee paced constantly, the way officers on the front lines had always done, to keep the enemy sharpshooters off balance. A stationary officer was a dead officer.
Conlee was no officer, but he thought like one, and he had more power and more inclination to abuse it than anyone Ted had ever seen. The string bean opened his fly and dropped onto the woman with a grunt as she scissored her legs and kicked at him.
Two more raiders walked over, as casual as if they were standing in line to buy a newspaper, and reached down to take an ankle each. They pulled the woman’s legs apart, and the string bean grinned at one of them over his shoulder. The woman had stopped screaming, knowing it would do her no good.
And Ted couldn’t take it anymore. If he couldn’t get a shot at Conlee, he could nail the string bean. He sighted on the man about shoulder high. The attacker was propped on his hands, as if doing pushups. It was close, but Ted wondered whether it was better to lie there and do nothing or take the chance of hitting the woman by accident. He thought for a moment of Ellie, and how he would feel if she were the one being raped, and he knew he was going to shoot the bastard even before the answer formed in his mind.
He bit down on his tongue, then squeezed the trigger. The shot exploded like a stick of dynamite. Ted heard the sound of it echo off the walls of the barn. The raiders heard it too, and all but Conlee looked around to see where it had come from. Conlee was the only one with enough presence of mind to dive for cover.
Ted heard the woman scream again, and he glanced just long enough to see her scrambling out from underneath the body of her rapist. She ran toward the house, then seemed to change her mind and veered off into the darkness. One of the raiders sprinted after her, and Ted fired again.
He saw the raider fall, then turned and crawled for all he was worth through the grass. He readied the tree line as shouts echoed behind him. He heard footsteps as several of the raiders charged through the grass. Ted turned once and fired quickly, without aiming. He didn’t give a damn whether he hit anyone, as long as he slowed them down. He reached the tree line and raced for his horse.
The shouts drew closer, and he kicked his horse once as he jerked the reins to wheel toward the far side of the trees. He heard hoofbeats as several of the raiders charged across the open field on horseback. He wondered whether he had let his temper get the best of him. But he didn’t wonder long. He knew what the woman would say, and that was good enough.
Scattered gunfire cracked behind him, but he knew it was more to terrorize him than to hit him. No way they could see him, he thought. Not yet. The raiders split into two packs. He heard a half-dozen horses wheel to the right in an
effort to skirt the trees and catch him as he broke through. At least one broke to the left, and he wondered whether it might be Conlee himself.
Whether it was Conlee or not, the odds were better to the left, and Ted broke for a gap in the trees dead ahead. His pony spurted through the opening and out into the grass. The rider to the left hadn’t turned the corner yet and Ted jerked the reins to head straight for the endmost tree. He held the Winchester in one hand as he charged headlong for the corner.
A solitary rider loomed up and Ted fired without waiting to see whether it was the guerrilla chief. The shot went wide, but it spooked the rider, who sawed on the reins and tried to swerve to the right. He skirted close to the trees, just missing the last one in line, and the man’s horse bucked. The rider was skillful, and he steadied his mount as Ted plunged on toward him.
Using the weight of the barrel to reload the chamber, Ted pivoted the carbine with a flick of his wrist. His finger found the trigger almost immediately and he fired again, this time not twenty yards from the rider, still struggling to control his mount. This time, the bullet found its mark. He heard the man groan, and as he dashed past, the wounded guerrilla fell heavily from his horse.
Ted fired once more as shouts broke out behind him. He charged back toward the house. Only three raiders were still there, busily torching the barn. Ted charged past, this time with the Colt, and emptied the revolver into the scattering knot of arsonists. The house was already fully ablaze, and it would be suicide to stop.
Ted galloped between house and barn and off into the open field. He slowed a bit once he was out of pistol range. He thought about looking for the woman, but he had to push the thought aside. He’d done what he could. The rest was up to her.
He broke across the open field, weaving from left to right and back, on the off chance he might stop a wild shot. He wished he were in Texas, where the terrain would have given him some cover. Here, other than the slight ups and downs of the gentle hills, cover couldn’t be had. That made it a flat-out race. Ted liked his pony, but there were limits on what he could, or would, ask the animal to do.
His only hope was that Conlee’s men, used to getting what they wanted when they wanted, might tire of the chase. But Conlee was supposed to be a man who hated, above all else, to be challenged on what he believed to be his own ground. Ted had dared to challenge him. What price would he have to pay?
21
TED THUNDERED DOWN the long ridge, keeping just below the crest as he angled across. He had a big enough lead that he just might be able to double back on them. But he had to reach a gap in the hills before Conlee’s men made the top of the rise. By cutting the angle, he hoped to pick up a hundred or two hundred yards. It would be close, but it might work.
He lashed at the cow pony with the reins. Glancing back every twenty yards, he strained to see through the Kansas night. The steady rhythm of his horse seemed almost too good to be true. The raiders were riding much larger horses, more like cavalry chargers. They had longer strides, and probably greater speed, over the short haul, but the cow ponies were bred for endurance and maneuverability. If he could keep enough distance between them to keep from getting a bullet in the back, Ted knew he could eventually outrun them.
But it was a large if, and the odds were long. And he was only too aware that Conlee and his men knew the terrain. He was just passing through. As a stranger, he might run in circles, for all he would know. That meant he had to keep the guerrillas in sight long enough to be certain they hadn’t outflanked him somehow.
For a brief moment, he thought about running straight for the O’Hara ranch, but he knew it was too close. If he led Conlee and his men there, the momentary relief of having two extra guns on his side might save his skin, but it would doom the O’Haras. Sooner or later, unless Ted killed him first, the O’Haras would be made to pay. And Ted had just gotten a firsthand look at the brutal coin of Conlee’s realm. There was no way in hell he would subject Millie to the risk of that kind of savagery.
Ted dipped lower on the slope. He could sense the ground beginning to flatten, but he couldn’t see well enough in the dark to know whether he was getting close enough to a break between hills to cut through and reverse his course. So far, there was no sign of the guerrillas on the long ridge. He was tempted to rein in, to listen. But if they were on his tail, the delay might cost him every yard he’d already gained. He couldn’t recover quickly enough to make it up again. It was just too much to ask the pony to do.
Swinging slowly right, still on the flat bottomland, he narrowly missed a shallow brook, the pony leaping at the last second. The sudden jump almost threw him, and he had to lean forward to hang on. He cut along the stream on the far side, and it led him through a narrow cut between two hills. A stand of trees suddenly materialized, as if it had grown in seconds, and he skirted it closely, then wheeled the pony in a tight turn.
Ted dropped from the saddle and ran into the trees, pulling the horse after him. He heard hoofbeats approaching as he ducked into the small clump of trees already beginning to lose their leaves. The horse tried to back away, and Ted nearly lost his grip. The thunder of the hooves grew louder as he ducked down behind a small clump of brush.
It sounded as if the raiders were going to ride right over him. They roared past within yards of the trees, and he held his breath, waiting for the inevitable shout. But it didn’t come. The thunder slowly faded, dying away like a flash flood in a dry gully.
Then it was gone.
Ted let his breath out slowly, then sank to the ground. His hands trembled, and his lower lip shook uncontrollably with every inhale. He flattened one palm over his chest to hold his bones in place. It felt as if they were trying to pound their way through his skin. His heart beat in his ears for a few moments, then that thunder, too, faded away.
He got to his feet, still shaking, and his legs threatened to give way as he tried to get a boot into the stirrup. It was closer than he thought, closer than he wanted. And he didn’t know where the hell to go.
He could ride the flat hills all night, but then what? Where would he go? What could he possibly do? Conlee had nearly three dozen men. Even if he allowed for the man Conlee stabbed at the camp, and the hapless Roy, the numbers were overwhelming. Throw in the three men he’d shot, two of whom were probably dead, the other possibly, and he still had more than thirty. He couldn’t do it, and he knew it.
The only way for him to win was to get to Conlee. He knew that if he could somehow sever the head, the body would die. Half of the guerrillas were bound to Conlee by fear, the other half because they looked up to him. Deny them that, take away the fear, and they had no reason to stay.
Or did they?
But he’d never live long enough to find out, if he tried to pare them down a man or two at a time. This nightmare of an army was not a stick he could whittle away a curl at a time. They hadn’t yet made the knife that could do that. You took an ax, and you chopped it quickly, cleanly, and unmercifully. Or you walked away and forgot about it. There was no middle ground.
Ted glanced at the stars to get his bearings. It was well after midnight, and he was exhausted. He felt as if he were getting close, but he couldn’t do it without sleep. And he needed to talk it through. He needed Cookie, someone he could bounce things off until he could sort out the pieces. A mistake now would be costly, maybe even fatal. But there was just so much time. He felt as if a huge, invisible clock ticked off the seconds, and that some deadline drew closer and closer. He didn’t know how much time he had, he knew only that it wasn’t enough.
Goading the pony with his spurs, he rode back along the shallow creek, letting the raiders chase their own shadows. For the moment, every stride of their horses took them farther and farther astray. He wished it also bought him time, but that was too much to ask of fate.
He rode like a man half asleep, letting the pony have its head. Every so often, he had to make a choice, and he chose cautiously, staying as far away from the camp as he could, maki
ng a broad circle back toward the O’Hara farm.
It was nearly sunup when he broke over the last rise. The first red lip of the sun curled in an inverted sneer over the horizon, flooding the endless sea of grass with scarlet. It grew brighter, and the color leached away as the sun rose. And it seemed to shrink, as if it were contracting into itself, curling into a tighter ball like an armadillo to protect itself from something Ted neither saw nor sensed.
The farm spread put below him, like a postcard he’d seen once in a New Orleans store. Then that unreality faded, too, and the grass turned pale green as the sun came the rest of the way up. He rode down the last hill slowly, trying to fit the scattered pieces of the night together in some way that made sense. He had seen the brutality of Ralph Conlee firsthand. It did nothing to reassure him. The man seemed to have no weakness, because he seemed to have no heart and no soul.
Ted kept thinking of Jacob Quitman, and wondering what the old man would say if he had witnessed the things that Ted had seen that night. He found it hard to believe that Jacob would not be the first man in line to spit on Conlee’s corpse.
Or would he?
Maybe that was what made Jacob so special. Maybe the ability to look beyond the gore and the rendered flesh was what gave Jacob his faith. But Ted couldn’t look that far. There was too much blood for that, and too much flesh ripped bleeding from the bone. No man should have to forgive that kind of savagery, he thought.
“I sure as hell don’t,” he whispered as he turned into the narrow, tree-lined lane leading to Kevin O’Hara’s farm.
Cookie was up already. The old man sat by the fire, a pot of coffee just beginning to burble. He watched Ted quietly, waiting for him to dismount before getting to his feet.
“Thought you might not be coming back, Teddy.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“What do you think I mean?”
“You like the rest of them, Cookie? You lost your faith in me, too?”