“Come in,” a man’s voice said to the youth’s knock.
The massively obese man behind the desk smiled. He looked self-satisfied and as sly as the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
“Close the door behind you and sit yourself down, Steve,” he said. “It’s good to see my old friend and business partner again.”
After McCord closed the door behind him, he parked in an uncomfortable wooden chair opposite the banker and said, “Well, I did it, Mr. Tweddle. It’s started.”
Lucian Tweddle placed his linked hands on his great belly, and his thick, fleshy lips twisted into his repulsive reptilian smile.
“What did you start, dear boy?” he said.
The youth giggled. “Killed the cook. Gunned the Circle-O biscuit shooter, by God.”
Tweddle took time to absorb this, his piggy little eyes thoughtful. “That will hurt them,” he said finally. “A hungry man is an angry man, or so I’m told.”
“Damn right it will. The fat is well and truly in the fire.”
“Steve, how did you make it clear that the shot came courtesy of the McCord ranch?” The banker’s voice was low, almost menacing.
McCord was taken aback. Well, I . . . I didn’t. I mean, I figured my father will be the number one suspect. He’s got everything to gain by a war with the Circle-O.”
“Really? Then I’m totally confused. A missed shot from a deer hunter. A passing Indian taking a pot just for the hell of it. A disgruntled ex-employee nursing a beef with the cook. One of the Circle-O’s own punchers for a similar reason. A vengeful and scorned lover. There’s all kind of motives for a murder like that, and not all of them point to Trace McCord.”
The youth looked crestfallen and he hung his head.
“I never thought—”
“Don’t think, Steve. Write your poetry, dream of the day the ranch will be yours and leave the thinking to me.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Tweddle.”
“No real harm done. But don’t make any further moves against the Circle-O until you hear from me.”
He steepled his fat fingers, gold signet rings on all of them save the thumbs.
“Is that perfectly clear?”
The youth nodded.
“Good. Then go home and I’ll be in touch.”
“My father’s home is not mine,” Steve McCord said.
“I know. But with my help it soon will be.”
Tweddle waited until the boy was clear of the bank, then uncomfortably shifted his huge bulk in his red leather chair. His face, blue-chinned and pendulous in the jowls, revealed his anger. The McCord boy was an idiot, but he’d just discovered a hidden talent, that of cold-blooded killer, and it could make him hard to handle or a valuable asset, or both. Tweddle allowed that Steve was right about one thing, though. There must be war to the finish between Trace McCord and old Brendan O’Rourke.
After the violence was over, the boy would inherit the smoking ruins of both ranches.
And then, Tweddle smiled, it was all too simple. He’d get rid of Steve McCord and pick up the pieces.
His business contacts in Washington had assured him that the railroads planned to lay tracks this way and soon the land would become immensely valuable. There was a fortune to be made for a man with the guts and vision enough to reach out and grab it all.
And Lucian Tweddle considered himself such a man.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
By Sam Flintlock’s watch, the nickel case knife-scarred on the back where a drunk Navajo renegade had near gutted him, it was twenty minutes to midnight when Clifton Wraith tapped on the door.
“Good way for a man to get himself shot,” Flintlock growled as he let the Pinkerton inside.
“You always were a welcoming man, Sammy,” Wraith said. He nodded, acknowledging McPhee.
“What’s the latest?” Flintlock said.
“You know the latest. You leave at midnight then head for Frank Constable’s old place over to Bobcat Ridge.”
“I don’t cotton to riding night trails. He said we’d have a guide.”
“You have, a Pawnee breed by the name of O’Hara.”
Wraith smiled. “I’d like to say he’s a nice feller, but he isn’t.”
“Does he know the trail to Bobcat Ridge?”
“He surely does.”
“Then he’s a nice feller,” Flintlock said.
“Mr. Wraith, did you learn anything yet?” McPhee said, hope in his voice.
“Only that a lot of angry people want you dead, Jamie,” Wraith said. “But then you already know that.”
“It seems Polly Mallory was a popular lady,” Flintlock said. “I’ve never seen a town this riled up over a school ma’am’s death.”
“Apparently, but to me that’s very strange.”
“Why is it strange?” Jamie McPhee said.
“Because Polly Mallory was popular, but she wasn’t that popular,” Wraith said. “From what I’ve been told she was more than a mite standoffish and her students didn’t like her much. Their parents didn’t care for her either, especially the mothers.”
The Pinkerton rubbed his chin. “But she was a looker, every man in the town agrees on that.”
“Maybe a jealous wife or girlfriend killed her,” Flintlock said.
“Maybe, but I doubt it. It took a lot of strength to crush the girl’s throat. A man’s strength.”
“Then it’s all up with me,” McPhee said. “I’m surely doomed.”
Not for the first time Flintlock was struck by what a colorless, timid man the clerk was. What the hell had a skirt-swisher like Polly Mallory seen in him?
But aloud he said, “What happens after Bobcat Ridge?”
“I’ll arrange for Jamie’s transportation to Texas,” Wraith said. “I’ve got a friend in Amarillo where he can stay until he makes plans. And he’ll be safe there. My friend has five tall, fighting sons.”
“Wish you had them here,” Flintlock said.
“Indeed. Even for a few days.”
Wraith consulted his watch.
“Better get ready, Sam. O’Hara will have your buckskin and a horse for Jamie. Be warned, he doesn’t talk much and he’s standoffish, at least to white folks.”
“Where will you be, Cliff?” Flintlock said.
“Around.”
“You aren’t armed.”
“Got me a derringer in my pocket.”
“That ain’t much good in a gunfight.”
“There won’t be a gunfight. O’Hara will see to that.”
“You got more confidence in the Pawnee than I have,” Flintlock said.
He shoved his Colt into his waistband then picked up the Hawken and Winchester.
“Let’s get it done and over with, McPhee,” he said. The youth looked scared, green around the gills.
“One more thing, Sam,” Wraith said. “Frank Constable has some kind of infernal machine at his place. Stay away from it. From what he told me the damned thing is dangerous and you could get your fingers burned.”
“Yeah, he told us too,” Flintlock said, stepping to the door. “At length.”
“That French feller Jules Verne filled Frank’s head with all kinds of nonsense,” Wraith said. “Flying machines, horseless carriages and a big bomb that can wipe out an entire city.”
“Sounds like ol’ Jules drinks too much of that there French wine and Green Fairy,” Flintlock said.
“That would be my guess,” Wraith said. “Ha! Flying machines. What far-fetched nonsense will Frank spout next?”
The witching hour had come and Open Sky slumbered in darkness.
Only the Rocking Horse saloon showed lights where the local chess club drank coffee and pondered their next moves.
The night desk clerk, paid off by Constable, studiously ignored Sam Flintlock and McPhee as they silently descended the stairs and walked to the back door.
Flintlock motioned McPhee to stop and handed him both rifles. He then drew his revolver and slowly opened the door.
&nb
sp; A tall, slender man emerged from the darkness like a gray ghost and stepped toward him.
“O’Hara?” Flintlock whispered.
“Who asks?”
“Flintlock, damn it. Who else would ask?”
A grunt. Then a wave of the hand.
Flintlock motioned McPhee forward and followed the breed.
O’Hara wore a buckskin shirt, elaborately beaded and much finer than Flintlock’s own, U.S. Cavalry breeches and boots and a traditional Pawnee otter fur turban covered his head. He carried a battle-worn Spencer rifle.
Flintlock followed the man into the gloom, McPhee holding close to him, to a patch of open ground where the horses were tethered under a gibbous moon.
Without a word O’Hara swung into the saddle and waited until the others had done the same.
Finally Flintlock broke the silence. “Lead on, Mr. O’Hara.”
To his surprise the breed answered. “Barnabas walks with us,” he said. O’Hara held a forefinger to his lips and said, “Shh . . .”
The night was full of insect chatter and timid, gibbering things scuttled in the long grass. Juniper, piñon and sagebrush bestowed their scents on the breeze.
O’Hara led the way and Flintlock followed. Jamie McPhee’s face was as white as parchment in the somber darkness and he sat his saddle with all the grace of a junior bank clerk.
Shadowed eyes that seethed with a murderous hatred watched Sam Flintlock ride into the night. Hamp Collins left the darkness of the parked freight wagon behind the store adjacent to the hotel, then collected his horse from the alley between the two buildings.
He grinned as he swung into the saddle. This was perfect. Flintlock and McPhee were together and he could kill them both at his leisure.
McPhee represented money, but Collins had a more exquisite plan for Sam Flintlock. Thanks to the butcher’s knife in his belt, the man’s dying would not be quick, easy or painless. In fact, it would be horrific.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There was no trail where the Pawnee rode, just a deer path between the trees. Apart from the creak of saddle leather and the soft pad of the horses’ hooves on a carpet of pine needles there was no sound.
The wan moonlight lit the way and the ozone smell of lightning tinged the air.
After an hour O’Hara drew rein and pointed into the distance ahead of him. “Frank Constable’s cabins are close,” he said. “Over the rise.”
“Glad to hear it,” Flintlock said. “It’s getting up to rain.”
“Thunderstorm by and by,” O’Hara said. He fixed Flintlock with a stare, his black eyes glittering. “Barnabas says you are an idiot,” he said.
“Sounds like him,” Flintlock said. “Barnabas has a way with words.”
“He say go find your ma and your name. He says you should kill McPhee and then leave here.”
“I stopped listening to Barnabas as soon as I stood taller than a Hawken rifle,” Flintlock said. “Best move I ever made.”
“Then more fool you, Flintlock. There is evil in this wind. Its chokes me like the smoke in my grandfather’s lodge.”
O’Hara kneed his horse into motion as a few fat raindrops ticked among the pine canopy. Ten miles to the north lightning flashed over the peaks of the Sans Bois Mountains and thunder rumbled like a dim distant drum. The air was cool, edged, but Flintlock could sense no evil on the wind, but then he was a white man.
As the moon hid its face behind clouds, he could barely make out the buildings ahead of him. A cabin and two larger structures for sure and probably three or four smaller shacks.
O’Hara led the way directly to the cabin. The rain was heavier now, the thunder closer.
He pointed to one of the large buildings.
“Barn, Flintlock. Put your horses there. O’Hara goes now.”
Without another word or a farewell wave, the breed swung his horse and rode away into the teeming, glittering night.
“Right sociable feller,” Flintlock said to McPhee, rain drumming on his hat.
“I’ll take the horses to the barn,” the young man said. Then, “I guess he figured his job was done.”
“I guess you’re right,” Flintlock said. He looked around him. “But I think mine is only beginning.”
He swung out of the saddle and stepped into the darkness of the cabin. After allowing time for his night vision to adjust, Flintlock made out a table with an oil lamp in the center of the floor. A box of lucifers lay close by. He lit the lamp and its orange glow spread throughout the cabin but angled shadows remained in the corners where the spiders lived.
Imagine a genteel Victorian parlor, relentlessly middle class, set down in the middle of the wilderness and that was Frank Constable’s cabin.
A prime indicator of social status at a time when clutter meant class, the cabin was packed with vases, lamps, china ornaments, lace doilies, tea services and, what old Queen Vic herself considered the ultimate display of good taste and breeding, several stuffed birds and small animals under glass domes.
A portrait of a very young soldier in Confederate gray struck a somber note, draped as it was with black crepe, and a dark red curtain adorned with a Chinese dragon cunningly wrought from colored, metallic threads separated the parlor from the kitchen. The room was cozy enough but a little threatening, as though a murder had been committed there.
Flintlock found the shelves amply supplied with canned and dried food and by the time McPhee returned, the stove was lit and coffee simmered.
“You’ve been gone a long time, McPhee,” Flintlock said.
The young man was white to the gills. “You’d better come see this, Sam,” he said.
Something in McPhee’s expression stilled the question on Flintlock’s lips. The man was thoroughly spooked, his lips pale from fright.
“Lead the way,” he said.
The barn was a spacious building with eight stalls and it smelled clean. McPhee had lit a lantern and it sat on an upturned barrel at the door. “There’s plenty of hay and I found some oats,” he said. “Well, as much as the rats had left.”
“Is that what you wanted to show me? Oats?” Flintlock said.
“No. Come follow me.”
The young man led the way to the last stall and held the lantern high. “When I was looking for oats I discovered this.”
“What the hell is it?” Flintlock said. He peered through the dim orange gloom at a charred object on the barn floor.
“Can’t you see? It’s right in front of you.”
“McPhee, are you showing me a burned tree trunk?”
“No. It’s human, or it was. Look closer. You can see the teeth.”
Flintlock took the lantern from McPhee’s trembling hand and bent over for a closer look. “My God,” he said. “It is human. I think.”
“It’s human and he, she, whatever it was, died a terrible death,” the younger man said.
“Uh-huh. You got that right. Burned to a crisp.”
Teeth gleamed white in the blackened skull and the body’s right hand was raised as though in defensive posture. Most of the skin had burned from the fingers so that yellow bones showed. The entire body looked as though it had been transformed in an instant from a living, breathing human being into a cylinder of black, carbonized flesh and bone.
Flintlock looked around him and instinctively his hand strayed to the handle of the Colt in his waistband. Restless rats rustled in the corners, but there was no other sound, only the steady munching of the horses.
“How did it happen, Sam?” McPhee said.
In the lantern-splashed gloom the young man’s eyes looked like black buttons sewn on to a flour sack.
“How the hell should I know?” Flintlock snapped. His fear made him irritable.
“I think I know,” McPhee said. “It was the infernal machine.”
Flintlock stared hard at the young man. “You don’t believe all the crap that Constable told us, do you?” he said. “About men in the moon and sich.”
“Yes. Ye
s, I do.”
“The only infernal machine I ever saw was back in ’64, a Gatling gun that executed a bunch of black Yankee prisoners down Alabama way,” Flintlock said. “When the damned thing started to shoot it sounded like a rusty iron bed dragged across a knotted pine floor.” He nodded to himself. “Now that was an infernal machine.”
“A Gatling gun shoots only bullets, Sam. Mr. Constable said his infernal machine hurls bolts of fire, and fire harnesses the power of hell.”
Rain slanted across the open barn door and lightning seared and flashed and shimmered like sheets of polished silver. Immediately thunder crashed, as though angry at the lightning for stealing the show.
“Let’s get out of here,” Flintlock said. He glanced at the charred body. “Maybe he—”
“Or she.”
“Was struck by lightning.”
“Not a chance,” McPhee said. “This person was roasted by hellfire.”
The way to the cabin lay past another barnlike structure, but a chain and a massive iron padlock secured its double doors. The building had an air of foreboding about it, like a crypt in a story by Mr. Poe.
“I bet the infernal machine is in there!” McPhee yelled above the roar of the storm and the serpent hiss of the relentless rain. “That’s why the place is chained and padlocked.”
“It’s not bothering us, so we’ll leave it alone,” Flintlock said. Lightning shimmered around him and the rain pounded.
“Don’t you want to see it, Sam?” McPhee yelled above the storm.
“Hell no, I don’t. And neither do you.”
“It could be interesting. I think it killed the poor soul in the barn.”
“Maybe so, but I’m not messing around with infernal machines, McPhee. Keeping you alive is hard enough without any distractions.”
“Roasted him or her alive it did. One moment a human being, the next a charred, lifeless corpse.”
“Quit with that, McPhee,” Flintlock said. “Now you’re spooking the hell out of me as well.”
“It’s a terrible weapon. Mr. Constable told us that.”
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