A sneer contorted the unshaven face of the man who had run into her as he said, “Watch where you’re goin’, girlie.” His companion, a tall, skinny man, gave an ugly laugh.
Anger flared up inside Seymour. “Stop right there, you two men!” he said.
They came to a halt and glared at Seymour. “What in blazes do you want, mister?” the burly one demanded.
“I want you to apologize to the lady,” Seymour snapped. “You were the one who ran into her.”
“That ain’t the way I saw it.” The man turned and ran his eyes insolently over Maggie. “Anyway, I don’t apologize to greaser whores.”
Maggie gasped in outrage and shock. Seymour’s anger turned into fury as he reached for his gun and said, “By God, sir, you’re under arrest—”
“Seymour, look out!” Maggie screamed.
But the warning came too late. Both of the strangers had reached under the coats of their Eastern suits with surprising speed and pulled out pistols. Shots roared and flame spouted from the weapons as they opened fire.
* * *
Matt and Sam had told Seymour to make his rounds by himself, as he usually did, but that didn’t mean they were leaving the safety of the town to the inexperienced young lawman. They started making a circuit of Sweet Apple for themselves, keeping to the shadows and looking for any indication that Deuce Mallory might be trying something sneakier this time, like infiltrating some of his men into the settlement before attacking with the rest of his gang. “Something’s happened,” Sam mused as he and Matt made their way behind the livery stable. “Mallory wouldn’t change his tactics like this without a good reason.”
“I reckon I agree with you,” Matt said. “Shocked the hell out of me that he hadn’t already hit this place when we got here.”
“You think he’s not even coming?”
Matt didn’t answer for a long moment as he pondered the question. Then he said, “You know how it feels when somebody’s got a gun pointed at you?”
Sam snorted. “You know damn well I do.”
“Well, that’s the way I feel . . . like I’ve got a big ol’ target painted on my chest and somebody’s drawin’ a bead on it. That tells me Mallory’s still out there, and that he plans to raid this place sooner or later.”
Sam thought it over and then nodded. “My instincts tell me the same thing. It’s just a matter of time.”
They moved on, circling the livery stable. Everything about the settlement was peaceful and quiet this evening except for the usual night noises, which in Sweet Apple included tinny piano music and brassy laughter from the saloons.
The blood brothers paused in the thick shadows at the mouth of an alley. Sam said quietly, “Look over there, across the street.”
Matt looked and saw Seymour Standish talking to a young woman who was short and a little stocky but still very pretty with long dark hair. Light from the window of a nearby building shone on the two of them.
“That must be Miss O’Ryan,” Sam said. Seymour had mentioned her a couple of times. Matt and Sam gathered from what he’d said that Maggie O’Ryan was the local schoolteacher. They also knew that Seymour liked her.
“Betcha he kisses her,” Matt said with a grin as he nudged an elbow into Sam’s side.
“Seymour? I don’t think so. I know we haven’t known him that long, but even though he may not actually be the most cowardly man in the West, I think he’s still plenty scared of Miss O’Ryan.”
“What is there to be scared of? She’s just a pretty girl. That’s what a fella does when there’s a girl he likes. He kisses her.”
“Not everyone has your confidence, Matt,” Sam pointed out.
“Yeah, well, they ought to. You can’t go through your whole life worryin’ about every little thing—”
He stopped short as two figures came out of the shadows on the boardwalk across the street. One of them ran into Maggie O’Ryan and nearly knocked her down.
“Did you see that?” Sam said as angry voices rose. “We’d better go over there and see if we can give him a hand.”
But there was no time to do that. Seymour yelled something about the men being under arrest and grabbed for his gun. But the two strangers were faster. Not faster than Matt Bodine, though. As the men had moved into the light, he’d recognized them as the sinister-looking varmints he had spotted earlier. He had no idea who they were, but he had seen enough gun-traps engineered to recognize what was going on here. The two men had bumped Maggie solely for the purpose of angering Seymour and giving them an excuse to kill him.
Matt’s twin Colts flickered from their holsters. Even though the range and the light were a little tricky and Seymour and Maggie were awfully close to the two would-be killers, Matt fired from the hip. There wasn’t time for anything else. Both of the strangers got shots off, but the bullets screamed off harmlessly into the night as Matt’s slugs slammed into the men. Seymour had gotten his revolver out late and fired, too, adding to the sudden deafening racket of gunfire in the street. The two strangers staggered back. The tall, skinny one twisted around several times and then pitched forward on his face. The short, broad one fell to his knees and swayed there for a moment before toppling to the side and rolling off the boardwalk like a log.
Neither of them moved again.
Matt slid his guns smoothly back into leather and said to Sam, “Come on.” They broke into a run as they crossed the street. Seymour still held his gun in his right hand, but his left arm was around Maggie O’Ryan as she pressed her face against his chest and shuddered in fear. “It . . . it’s all right,” he was telling her as Matt and Sam trotted up. “Those men won’t hurt you. You’re not hurt, are you, Maggie?”
She stopped trembling long enough to shake her head. “I . . . I’m fine, Seymour. None of those shots hit me.”
“Me neither,” he said. He sounded like he couldn’t believe that. His eyes were wide with amazement as he looked over at Matt and Sam.
“What happened here, Seymour?” Matt asked, knowing that Sam would follow his lead.
“Those . . . those men,” Seymour said with a vague wave of his gun toward the bullet-riddled corpses. “One of them bumped into Miss O’Ryan here, and they were very rude, and I was going to arrest them for . . . for disturbing the peace, but then they drew their guns and . . . and my God, I never heard so many shots in my life. . . .”
“Yeah, you were blazin’ away at ’em when we came up, Seymour. That was good shootin’.”
Seymour looked at the gun in his hand, then at the dead men, then back at the gun. “I . . . did that?”
“Those varmints are ventilated good an’ proper, and you and the lady are all right, so I reckon you must have.”
“But . . . who are they? Why would they try to kill me?”
“I reckon they must’ve been rude to Miss O’Ryan to prod you into drawin’ on ’em.”
“It was a trap designed to get rid of you, Seymour,” Sam added.
Seymour sounded utterly baffled as he said, “Why would anyone go to that much trouble?”
Matt slapped him on the back. “Because you’re the fightin’ marshal of Sweet Apple, that’s why. Things have changed since you got here, Seymour. You’ve grown up. Might as well get used to it.”
Seymour’s eyes blinked behind his spectacles. “Yes, I . . . I suppose I have,” he said.
Then he jammed his empty gun back in its holster, put both arms around Maggie, and brought his mouth down on hers in a kiss. She was obviously startled at first, but then she relaxed in his embrace and started returning the kiss.
Matt nudged Sam again and said from the corner of his mouth, “Told you.”
Chapter 27
As the blood brothers dragged the corpses down the street to the undertaking parlor, Sam said, “I can’t believe you went through that whole charade just to get Seymour feeling bold enough to kiss Miss O’Ryan.”
Matt chuckled. “That wasn’t the only reason. If he’s gonna be able to deal with Mallory and
all the other trouble he’ll be facin’ as the marshal of Sweet Apple, he’s got to believe in himself.”
“Yes, but now he’s liable to be overconfident and get in over his head. He may try to tackle trouble that he can’t handle. After all, he believes he just gunned down two men who were trying to kill him.”
“We’ll eat that apple when it falls off the tree,” Matt said. “Right now, he believes he can stand up to whatever comes at him. That’s half of actually being able to do it right there.”
“Maybe so.”
They left the bodies of the would-be killers with the undertaker, who had already turned in for the night and answered Matt’s pounding on the front door of his establishment in his nightshirt. From there they went to the Black Bull, talked to Pierre Delacroix for a while, then headed for the hotel and turned in themselves.
As a consequence of the way their drifting usually landed them in trouble, the blood brothers had developed the habit of sleeping lightly. Tonight was no different. Trouble would have roused them instantly from slumber.
But Matt and Sam both slept through the night and woke the next morning refreshed, and with the knowledge that Deuce Mallory and his gang still hadn’t shown up.
What the hell was going on? Matt asked himself. Was it possible that Mallory re- ally had decided to leave Sweet Apple alone?
After having breakfast in the hotel dining room and washing the food down with several cups of strong black coffee, Matt and Sam walked over to the marshal’s office. They found Seymour behind his desk, looking at some papers spread out in front of him.
“One of the desk drawers was full of old wanted posters,” Seymour explained.
“The Texas Rangers and the U.S. marshal’s office must have been sending them out on a regular basis for months, even though Sweet Apple didn’t have a lawman most of that time. Someone stuck them in the desk for lack of anything better to do with them.”
Matt and Sam pulled up chairs, turned them around, and straddled them. “Find anything interesting?” Sam asked.
“Actually, I did.” Seymour turned one of the papers around and pushed it across the desk toward the blood brothers. “There are several wanted posters for Deuce Mallory in here, along with some of the men suspected of riding with him. This one goes back a couple of years and was issued because of a bank robbery Mallory pulled off in Wyoming.”
An artist had drawn a likeness of Mallory on the reward dodger, no doubt based on the testimony of witnesses who had seen the outlaw. Matt and Sam looked at the portrait of a man with a lean but not unhandsome face. The description printed underneath it said that Mallory was about six feet, two inches tall and had dark red hair.
“We never actually got a look at the varmint up in Buckskin,” Matt said. “Let’s see those other posters.”
They studied the pictures for several minutes. Drawn by different artists in different locations, following an assortment of bloody-handed crimes, all the portraits of Mallory bore enough of a resemblance to each other for Matt and Sam to accept them as accurate representations of the outlaw.
“We’ll know him if we see him,” Sam said.
“What about the notices on the other members of his gang?” Matt asked. “Let’s have a look at them, too.”
As best they could, they memorized the features of Mallory’s subordinates. The names of some of the men were incomplete or unknown, but Matt and Sam filed away the names of Jacob Pine, Gus Brody, and Steve Larrabee. They seemed to be three of Mallory’s top lieutenants.
With apparent casualness, Matt asked, “How’s Miss O’Ryan this mornin’?”
Seymour’s voice was stiff as he answered, “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen her since I walked her home last night following that unfortunate incident.”
“By unfortunate incident, you mean those two Eastern dudes who tried to kill you . . . or that big kiss you laid on the schoolma’am?”
Matt and Sam both grinned as Seymour’s ears turned a bright shade of pink. He ignored the question and said, “I spoke to Harry Tallent, the local undertaker, this morning. He went through the belongings of the two dead men.”
“Find enough cash to take care of buryin’ ’em?” Matt asked.
Seymour nodded. “Yes, and he found a letter as well that identified the, uh, large, hairy one as a man named Wilford Grant. There was nothing to say who the other man was. But that’s not the interesting thing. The letter to Grant was sent to an address in Trenton, New Jersey.”
Matt and Sam both looked surprised. “You’re from Trenton, aren’t you, Seymour?” Sam asked.
With an expression on his face that was worried and puzzled at the same time, the marshal nodded. “That’s right. I was born and raised there.”
Matt said, “But you didn’t know that gent?”
“I never saw him before,” Seymour said with a shake of his head.
“There’s got to be a connection,” Sam said. “It’s too big a coincidence to think that those fellows came all the way out here from your hometown, then just happened to run into you and try to bait you into a gunfight so they could kill you.” Matt nodded, frowned in thought, and said, “Somebody sent ’em after you.”
“But that’s impossible!” Seymour said. “I don’t have any enemies back in Trenton. I . . . I was well liked by everyone who knew me.”
“Not everybody,” Sam said.
Seymour gave a stubborn shake of his head. “I refuse to believe that. I’ve been over it and over it in my mind, and no one in Trenton has any reason to want me dead.”
“What about that uncle of yours, the one who sent you out here?” Matt asked.
“Uncle Cornelius?” Seymour was aghast. “I’ve known him my entire life. He’s my uncle, for God’s sake, my father’s brother.”
“Hamlet’s uncle had a few dirty tricks up his sleeve,” Sam pointed out.
“There you go again, bringing up Shakespeare,” Matt said. “You’re not the only one who’s read the classics, you know.”
“I’ve seen those yellow backs you carry around in your saddlebags. I’d hardly call Ned Buntline dime novels classics.”
“Well, that just shows what you know.” Matt turned back to Seymour. “Some- body’s got it in for you. That’s just plain fact, whether you want to admit it or not, Seymour. And that’s on top of the threat from Mallory and his bunch. You’d better keep your eyes wide open all the time.”
Seymour nodded glumly. “I’m afraid you’re right.”
“I know I am. We’ll watch your back as much as we can, but we won’t always be around here.”
A look of alarm came into Seymour’s eyes. “You’re leaving?”
Sam shook his head. “Not until this business with Mallory is over and done with,” he assured Seymour. “But the time will come when we need to move along.”
“We’re fiddle-footed,” Matt explained. “Can’t ever stay in one place for too long. Too many things left to see somewhere down the trail.”
“I couldn’t live like that,” Seymour muttered. “I already find myself putting down roots here, and I never expected that.”
“I reckon there are worse places to settle down,” Matt said with a smile. “Sweet Apple ought to get plumb peaceful before too much longer.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Place has got a gunfightin’, town-tamin’ marshal now,” Matt said.
Seymour looked like he didn’t know whether to feel proud . . . or sick with worry.
* * *
Time dragged, as it always did when men were keyed up to face danger and then it failed to arrive. Matt and Sam spent the day checking with the defenders who were scattered around town, seeing that they were in good positions to fight off an attack and suchlike. As far as the blood brothers could tell, all the men who had been recruited to defend the settlement were doing as they had been asked to and keeping their mouths shut. There was no air of panic to be found in Sweet Apple, only grim readiness among those few who knew about the thre
at that the town might be facing.
The heat became sweltering during the afternoon. The sky turned brassy. Men and animals sought whatever shade they could find, and anyone who ventured out into the brutal sun started sweating within seconds. But the parched West Texas air dried that sweat up almost as fast as it formed. Sweet Apple dozed in the heat. The whole town seemed to heave a sigh of relief as the sun finally set. Evening shadows formed. The air was still hot, but at least the fierce glare of the sun was gone until morning. Matt and Sam sat in tipped-back chairs on the hotel porch with their hats pulled low over their faces and watched under the brims as riders moved slowly along the street. Nobody was going to get in a hurry in weather like this. Suddenly, Matt started to sit up. He forced himself to sit still and not show any reaction to the man he had just noticed riding by. He watched from the corner of his eye as the stranger reined to a halt in front of the Black Bull, tied his horse to the hitch rack, and went into the saloon.
Sam had noticed the tensing of his blood brother’s muscles, even though it wouldn’t have been apparent to anyone else. “Something wrong?” he asked, pitching his voice low enough so that only Matt would hear it.
Matt sat up and let the legs of his chair come down on the porch with a quiet thump. He thumbed his hat up to its normal position. “Did you see that fella who just rode past? He went down to the Black Bull. That’s his grulla tied up in front of the saloon now.”
“I saw him,” Sam said. “Can’t say as I paid that much attention to him.”
“Well, keep an eye on his horse. I’m gonna take a walk over to Seymour’s office. There’s something I want to be sure about.”
“What if the hombre you’re talking about comes out of the saloon?”
“Follow him,” Matt said. “I shouldn’t be long, though. I’m either right or wrong.”
Texas Gundown Page 24