* * *
Seymour had been shocked when Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves brought in the prisoner and tossed him in one of the cells. He had been even more shocked when the blood brothers explained to him about the army rifles that would be on the train when it rolled into the station the next morning at nine o’clock, too tempting a target for both the gang of outlaws and a band of Mexican revolutionaries to pass up. This was the first Seymour had heard about a shipment of guns or Mexican rebels. As he tried to take it all in, he wanted to ask himself what else could possible go wrong.
He managed not to do that. No sense in tempting fate.
Because no matter how bad things were . . . they could always get worse.
The first thing Seymour did after Matt and Sam explained the situation was to walk down to the adobe cottage where Maggie lived and knock on her door. They had parted somewhat uneasily earlier, after Matt’s visit to the marshal’s office and the revelations Seymour had been forced to make to Maggie. Now he wanted to give her the whole story. She needed to know.
“OH, MY GOD,” she said when he had finished explaining. “So soon?”
Seymour nodded. “Nine o’clock in the morning. But we’ll be ready for them, and that includes you, Maggie.”
“Me? What can I do to help fight outlaws and . . . and revolutionaries?”
“You’ll have a school full of students,” Seymour said. “It’s a nice sturdy building, and it’s quite a distance from the train station. Matt and Sam and I are going to pass the word that everyone in town should send their children to school in the morning, even the ones who normally don’t. Once they’re there, keep them there until Matt or Sam or I come to you and tell you it’s all right to let them go again.” “You’re counting on me to protect all the children in town?”
Seymour smiled. “I have confidence in you. And there will be several armed guards there with you, too.”
“Oh, Seymour,” she said as she came into his arms, causing him to reflect wryly that the situation wasn’t all bad. It gave him an excuse to hug her and comfort her.
After leaving Maggie’s a short time later, Seymour had joined the effort that Matt and Sam already had under way, going around town and alerting their makeshift defense force of the impending attack. Not only that, but now that they knew the time of the raid, they began to spread the word even more, knocking on doors and waking people up and recruiting more defenders. Most people agreed to send their children to the school first thing in the morning, with only a few insisting on keeping the youngsters with them. Matt, Sam, and Seymour made it clear that it was important to keep things looking as normal as possible in Sweet Apple the next morning.
Seymour had questioned the blood brothers about that very thing. “Isn’t it possible that if we fortify the town so that Mallory knows we’re ready for him, he’ll decide not to attack us?”
Matt shook his head. “The chances of that happenin’ are pretty slim. If this was one of his normal raids . . . if it wasn’t for those guns coming in on the train . . . he might decide it wasn’t worth the fight.”
“But according to Pine, he wants those rifles so much that he’d risk it no matter how prepared we are,” Sam said. “That’s why our best hope is to take him by surprise. Let him come in thinking that he’s going to ride roughshod over the town…”
“And give him a hot-lead welcome that he isn’t expectin’,” Matt concluded.
That made sense, Seymour supposed. He had to put his trust in Matt and Sam. They knew a lot more about fighting outlaws and killers than he did. They had been at it for years, instead of mere days.
By the time the sky turned orange with dawn and the sun peeked over the horizon, armed men were hidden on the roofs of half the buildings in town. Others waited inside or in alleys. It was still a couple of hours until the train carrying the rifles would arrive, and Seymour knew that time would seem endless. A few men walked or rode or drove wagons along the street, just to make the town look nor- mal in case anyone was observing it from a distance.
Seymour, Matt, and Sam waited in the marshal’s office, watching the performance that was being put on. Seymour felt himself sweating despite the fact that the air was cooler in the morning like this. The ticking of the clock on the wall was unnaturally loud.
“Time sure flies when you’re havin’ fun, don’t it?” Matt asked with a grin.
Seymour’s spectacles had slipped down a little on his nose. He said, “Remind me again why I decided to stop being the most cowardly man in the West. Seymour the Lily-Livered wouldn’t ever get into a mess like this. He’d faint dead away from fear first.”
Matt and Sam both chuckled, but before either of them could say anything, the sound of a whistle cut through the still morning air. All three men stiffened and glanced at the clock. Straight-up nine. The train carrying the army rifles was on time.
And it was about to roll into Sweet Apple.
Chapter 29
“No need to hurry, Seymour,” Matt said a couple of minutes later as they walked down the street toward the train station. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
Matt and Sam flanked the marshal. The blood brothers carried their own Winch- esters, while Seymour’s hands were wrapped around one of the shotguns from the office. There was nothing unusual about a lawman and his deputies meeting a train. Most frontier star-packers would mosey down to the depot whenever a train came in, just to see who got off. It was part of the job.
The engineer sounded the whistle again as the locomotive chuffed past the platform. With a screech and rattle, the train came to a stop as Matt, Sam, and Seymour walked through the station lobby. Steam hissed as they stepped out onto the long platform.
They didn’t know which of the freight cars the crates of the rifles and the troopers guarding them were in, so Matt nodded toward the conductor as the blue- uniformed man hopped down from one of the passenger cars. With Matt and Sam right behind him, Seymour went over to the conductor and said, “I’m Marshal Standish. I have a very important question to ask you.”
The conductor didn’t look too impressed. “What’s that, Marshal?” he said.
Seymour dropped his voice to a hushed tone. “Which of the cars is that shipment of army rifles in?”
The conductor’s eyes widened in surprise. He tried to recover, but it was too late. Still, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Marshal.”
“I think you do,” Seymour insisted. “There’s a shipment of five hundred army rifles on this train, being guarded by a squad of troopers from Fort Sam Houston. The guns are bound for Fort Bliss in El Paso. Now do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Damn it, that was supposed to be a secret!” the conductor hissed. “The army swore to me that nobody would know about it.”
“It gets worse,” Matt drawled. “There’s a gang of outlaws who have their eyes on those guns. They’re liable to attack at any time, so you’d better warn the officer in charge of those guards.”
The conductor jerked his head in a nod and started to swing around. “I reckon I’d better—”
Before he could finish the sentence, a pair of explosions blasted through the morning air. The ground shook from the force of the detonations. The explosions were close by, but not at the station itself. As the conductor ripped out a startled curse, Matt looked around and saw a cloud of dust rising a couple of hundred yards east of the station.
“They blew the tracks to the west, too,” Sam said. “The train’s stuck here.”
Pretty good tactics, Matt thought. If Mallory’s gang hadn’t dynamited the tracks, an alert engineer might’ve thrown steam to his engine and got the train rolling again before the outlaws could take it over.
Matt gave the conductor a push. “Go warn the soldiers!” Then he and Sam and Seymour ran back into the station.
The shooting had started by the time they raced through the lobby. The blood brothers expected as much. Mallory wouldn’t waste any time after setting off those expl
osions. As the three men ran out the front of the station, they saw the outlaw horde boiling down the main street of Sweet Apple toward them. Mallory and his men were firing and yelling as they came. But they were meeting unexpectedly fierce resistance. Shots blasted from the men hidden on the roofs, and those defenders inside the buildings and on the ground unleashed a withering storm of lead, too. Some of the defenders fell from the deadly accurate fire of the outlaws, but more of the raiders pitched from their saddles.
That didn’t stop Deuce Mallory and the knot of men who were right behind him, probably the rest of his most trusted lieutenants. They kept galloping toward the train station, firing as they came. Matt and Sam each dropped to a knee, brought their rifles to their shoulders, and opened up on the outlaws. Flame lanced from the muzzles of the Winchesters. A cloud of gun smoke and dust rolled over the street, clogging the morning air.
Some of the soldiers from the train ran around the station and joined the fight. That was enough to turn the tide for good. Bullets shredded Mallory’s men. The boss outlaw himself, though, seemed to have some sort of mystical shield about him, continuing the attack untouched despite the swarm of bullets in the air around him. He was close enough now so that Matt and Sam could see his face. They saw disbelief there, disbelief that for once his plans weren’t working. Mallory’s intended victims were fighting back rather than dying.
But even stronger was the fanatical hatred that distorted the features of Edward “Deuce” Mallory. For years he had devoted his life to evil and had been convinced that nothing could stop him. Now, without warning, everything was going wrong. Mallory had it coming, Matt thought. Sooner or later, justice caught up to everybody.
So far in the battle, Seymour hadn’t fired a shot. But now Mallory was bearing down on him as he stood there between Matt and Sam. Either of them could have downed the crazed outlaw chieftain, but instead Matt shouted, “He’s yours, Marshal!”
Seymour lifted the shotgun. He was just acting instead of thinking. Instead of being scared of what might happen. Just do what’s right, he told himself. Just do what’s right.
He saw the flash of Mallory’s gun, felt the fiery path that the bullet traced along his side. The impact of the slug twisted him half around. But Seymour didn’t fall, didn’t falter. He lined both barrels of the Greener on Mallory and pulled the triggers.
The shotgun’s boom smashed into his ears, which were already half-deafened from the racket of battle. The butt of the weapon slammed heavily into his shoulder, driven back by the recoil. Seymour staggered but caught himself, and when he looked through the cloud of smoke, he saw Deuce Mallory flying backward out of the saddle, a huge, bloody hole chewed into his chest by the double load of buck- shot. Mallory was dead before his body thudded to the ground and sprawled limply in the dust.
Matt Bodine was on his feet again, catching hold of Seymour’s arm to steady the wounded marshal. Seymour felt a hot wetness on his side. “Am . . . am I hit?” he gasped. His voice sounded strange to his ears as his hearing began to return.
“Looked to me like you just got nicked,” Matt said. “I don’t reckon it’s too bad.”
“Is it . . . is it over?”
All of Mallory’s men were down. Some were dead, and the others were badly wounded.
But the battle wasn’t over, because at that instant more shooting broke out from the other side of the train. “The Mexican rebels!” Sam exclaimed as he and Matt and Seymour turned. “Has to be!”
They ran around the station to the end of the platform and looked through one of the gaps between the cars. Another force of mounted men charged toward Sweet Apple, this time from the south. Matt caught glimpses through the dust of tall, steeple-crowned sombreros.
“It’s Alcazarrio and his men!” he called to Sam. “Let’s get on top of one of those cars! Seymour, get us some help!”
Seymour nodded and turned to run unsteadily back to the street, where he waved and shouted for the defenders who had wiped out Mallory’s gang to hurry to the depot and fight off this second attack.
Meanwhile, Matt and Sam dropped their empty rifles and scrambled up to the top of one of the freight cars, using the grab bars bolted to the car as a ladder. They un-leathered their Colts and started firing down into the mass of bandits who had closed in on the train from that side. Bullets sung through the air around them and plucked at their clothes.
Suddenly, the door on the south side of the freight car on which they stood slid open and a deadly chattering filled the air. Matt let out a whoop as he drew a bead on one of the bandidos, squeezed off a shot, and saw the man pitch out of the saddle. “They’ve got a Gatling gun in there!”
Sure enough, the soldiers sent along to guard the shipment of rifles had brought a Gatling gun with them. Matt and Sam had had no idea that was the case, because they and their fellow defenders from Sweet Apple had stopped Mallory and his gang from ever reaching the train.
But now, with Alcazarrio’s so-called revolutionaries practically overrunning the train, the Gatling gun made all the difference in the world. As one of the troopers turned the weapon’s crank and another fed in the belts of ammunition, a fierce stream of lead hosed out from it and scythed through the Mexican bandits. Men flew from their saddles, some of them almost cut in half by the bullets. Shouting curses in Spanish, many of the ones who hadn’t been gunned down turned to flee. Some of them made it and some of them didn’t. Matt and Sam accounted for some of the ones who didn’t.
Matt was drawing a bead on the big bandit who seemed to be in charge when a bullet clipped him on the thigh and knocked his leg out from under him. As he sagged to the roof of the car, Sam leaped over to him and shouted, “Matt! You’re hit!”
“I’m fine,” Matt yelled, feeling the exasperation more than the pain, at least right now. “Get that big son of a bitch! I’ll bet he’s Alcazarrio!”
Sam snapped a shot at the man, but more dust and smoke swirled as he pulled the trigger, and when it cleared, his target was gone. Sam didn’t know whether he had hit the man or not.
Once the back of this second attack was broken, it didn’t take long for the surviving members of Alcazarrio’s band to take off for the tall and uncut. The town’s defenders and the troopers threw a few last shots after them to speed them on their way. As Sam helped Matt to his feet, Matt grinned and said, “They won’t slow down until the Rio’s a long way behind them. They’re goin’ home empty-handed, too.”
The blood brothers climbed back down to the ground, Matt somewhat awkwardly because of his wound. He leaned on Sam as they went to look for Seymour. They found him sitting in a chair inside the station lobby with Maggie O’Ryan fussing over him, worried to death because of the bloodstain on his shirt. A gray- haired man wearing the uniform of a major ripped Seymour’s shirt open to take a look at the wound. “He’ll be fine, ma’am,” the officer assured Maggie. “That bullet just grazed the marshal. I’ll have one of my men patch it up, if you don’t have a doctor here.”
Ignoring the major’s hand on his shoulder, Seymour pushed himself to his feet as he saw Matt and Sam. “Are you all right?” he asked them.
“Yeah,” Matt said. “I got a little scratch, too, but it’s not any worse than that nick you got, Seymour. And somehow Sam here came through without even that much.”
“Clean living,” Sam said with a grin.
“Dumb luck is more like it.”
“Alcazarrio?” Seymour asked. “Wasn’t that his name?”
“We don’t know if he got away or not,” Matt replied. “But the fight’s over. It really is this time. The bandits who lived through it lit a shuck out of here. They’ll be licking their wounds for a long time.”
Seymour was paler than usual, probably from loss of blood. “And the army rifles?”
“Safe and secure, thanks to you and your friends, Marshal,” the officer said. “I’m Major Stilwell, and I’m in your debt, Marshal . . . ?”
“Standish,” Seymour said. “Marshal Seymour Standish.
”
Stilwell frowned. “Not the—”
“That’s right,” Matt said with a grin. His leg was starting to hurt a little now, but he didn’t care. “Marshal Seymour Standish, who just killed Deuce Mallory and broke up maybe the worst gang of owlhoots and killers west of the Mississippi. Just imagine what he could do if he wasn’t the most cowardly man in the West.”
A booming voice said, “I can assure you, gentlemen, I’ll never be writing that baseless canard again!” J. Emerson Heathcote, editor and publisher of the Sweet Apple Gazette, limped up, using a rifle as a makeshift crutch. He appeared to be wounded in the leg, too. “I owe you an apology, Seymour,” he went on. “This whole town does. We were wrong about you, my boy, completely wrong. Why, we might have been overrun by outlaws from both directions if it weren’t for you! You’re the hero of the battle of Sweet Apple, and that’s the way I intend to write about you from now on!”
In an aside to Sam, Matt commented, “And there’s nothing like a new hero to sell some newspapers, now is there?” Sam just smiled, grunted, and shook his head.
Seymour turned to Maggie. “The children?” he asked. “Are all the children all right?”
She nodded. “The fighting never came near the school. You were right, Seymour. That was the safest place for them.”
“I’m glad.” Seymour put his arm around and drew her against him, being careful to hold her close to the side away from his wound. “But these two fellows deserve all the real credit and thanks,” he went on as he turned toward Matt and Sam.
“They were the ones who made it all possible.”
“We weren’t holdin’ you up when Mallory was practically right on top of you and bullets were flyin’ all around,” Matt said.
“That was all you, Seymour,” Sam added. “Like it or not, you are a hero.”
Seymour summoned up a smile. “Maybe . . . we all are. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s something I’ve been meaning to do.”
Texas Gundown Page 26