Ace lunged out the front door, intending to go after Clancy and Ling, but at that moment the same man who had given the order to hold their fire bellowed, “There’s more of’em! Get ’em!”
A storm of lead screamed through the night and smashed into the front of the house. Glass shattered. Ace flung himself backwards through the doorway as bullets sang their deadly song all around him. It was pure luck that he was untouched.
He scrambled up from where he fell but stayed low, crouching as he moved toward one of the windows. From the other side of the foyer where Chance knelt came the question, “Ace, are you all right?”
“Yeah, for now,” Ace replied as bullets whined through the broken windows and slammed into the walls. He didn’t want to have to fight a gun battle against Angus McPhee’s men, but it looked like he might not have much choice in the matter. The Tartan hands didn’t know what was going on, but they knew their boss was gone and there were intruders in the house, so they were pouring lead at it.
“I don’t reckon you’d want to explain exactly what’s going on here,” Chance said dryly over the roar of the gun blasts.
“I’d like to, but I don’t know if there’s time.”
“I don’t think we’re going anywhere for a while, unless it’s to be carried out feetfirst.”
Ace knew that Chance’s grimly humorous comment was accurate. They were pinned down. When he risked a glance through the shattered window, he caught a glimpse of men running through the shadows toward the back of the house, cutting off that possible avenue of escape.
It seemed likely that sooner or later McPhee’s men would rush the house, probably sooner. They would recognize the Jensen brothers and know that McPhee had ordered them shot if they set foot on Tartan range again. Ace figured those gun-wolves wouldn’t waste any time following that order.
The sound of a groan from the staircase distracted him from those bleak thoughts. He swung around, gun ready, and saw Jack Haggarty staggering down the stairs with his right hand clamped to his upper left arm. Blood from a bullet wound welled between his fingers.
“Better stay back, Haggarty! There’s a lot of lead flying around down here!”
Haggarty stopped and peered at Ace in the gloom. “Jensen?” he muttered. His gaze turned the other way and he spotted Chance. “And the other Jensen? You’re both here?” He paused. “Of course you are. You wanted your money. I remember now.” Haggarty had to lean on the wall next to the stairs. “By the way, I’m shot.”
“You’re McPhee’s guest,” said Ace, thinking furiously. “You reckon his men would hold their fire if you asked them to?”
“Possibly. They have no idea why . . . Ling and I are really here.” Haggarty caught his breath. “Ling! Clancy has her—”
“He got away with her,” Ace said, “but we can go after him if we can convince McPhee’s men to stop trying to ventilate us.”
“Wait there. Keep your heads down. I’ll try to make them listen.” Haggarty turned around and started struggling back up the stairs. He disappeared, and then a few moments later he called from a second floor window, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire out there! Listen to me, you men! This is Jack Haggarty!”
The shots continued blasting. Haggarty kept shouting until the gunfire started to tail off.
One of McPhee’s men yelled, “Stop shootin’ for a minute!”
“Thank God!” said Haggarty. “You men know me. I’m Jack Haggarty. I’m your employer’s guest. And I’m wounded!”
“Stay where you are, Mr. Haggarty!” called the spokesman for the Tartan crew. “We’ll clean out those skunks down below and come up to get you!”
“You don’t understand!” Haggarty insisted. “Those men you’re shooting at are friends of mine.”
Flanking the ranch house’s front door, Ace and Chance looked at each other.
Chance raised his eyebrows. “We’re his friends now?”
“He figures I know where Clancy took Ling,” said Ace. “And as a matter of fact, I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
“Well, I’m glad somebody does, because I don’t even know who the hell Clancy is.”
“He works for a man named Belmont. He trailed Haggarty and Ling here from San Francisco because they stole a bunch of money from him.”
“Ah, now things are starting to make sense,” Chance said, nodding.
“Belmont is in Rimfire, pretending to talk business with McPhee. He set that up so I could sneak in here with some of his men and grab Haggarty and Ling.”
“You’ve thrown in with this fellow Belmont?”
“Not really. I was just playing along with him. Actually, I was going to try to help Haggarty and Ling get away from him . . . once I got our two thousand bucks back, of course.”
“And did you? Recover our money, I mean?”
“I sure did,” said Ace.
Upstairs, Haggarty shouted to McPhee’s men, “If you’ll hold your fire, I’ll come down and explain everything! And I’m going to need some medical attention, too!”
Ace heard low-voiced conversation outside, then the spokesman replied, “Come ahead, Mr. Haggarty. We won’t do any more shootin’ . . . for now.”
Chance said to his brother, “I suppose that means we should hold our fire, too.”
“Seems like the only way we’re going to get out of here alive,” Ace replied.
A moment later, Haggarty reappeared at the head of the stairs and started down them.
Now that the air wasn’t filled with bullets, Ace holstered his gun and hurried to help the gambler. “How bad are you hit?” he asked as he slipped an arm around Haggarty’s waist.
“Clancy just winged me, but on top of all the blood I’d already lost, it made me pass out,” Haggarty explained. “He was only pretending to be unconscious. As soon as you left the room and I went to tie him up, he jumped me. I put up the best fight I could, but he was too much for me. He got his hands on the gun and shot me.”
When they reached the bottom of the staircase, Haggarty went on. “You’d better let me go out first. They know how taken with Ling their boss is, and I’m supposed to be her stepfather. They won’t shoot me.”
“We can hope not,” muttered Chance.
Haggarty took a deep breath and stepped out onto the porch. With a rush of rapid footsteps, McPhee’s men closed in on the house.
“It’s all right,” Haggarty told them as he glanced at the bodies of Whistler and Robertson. “I don’t know who these two men are, but I suspect they’re accomplices of the man who kidnapped my daughter. We can’t waste any time going after them.”
“Who are those hombres we chased inside?” asked one of the men.
“Friends of mine. They tried to help Ling. You know them, but you’ve got them all wrong.” Haggarty turned to look through the open door at Ace and Chance and motioned with his head for them to come out.
“Put that gun away,” Ace told his brother. “We’d better go out with empty hands.”
Chance looked like he didn’t care for that idea, but he did what Ace said. Holding their hands in plain sight, the two of them stepped out onto the porch.
“It’s those Jensen boys!” exclaimed one of McPhee’s riders.
Haggarty said, “There’s been a fundamental misunderstanding about these lads. They’re actually friends of ours, and they just want to help. Ace, you know where Clancy took Ling?”
“To the stable in Rimfire,” Ace replied. “He and the others were supposed to take both of you there and turn you over to Belmont.”
“Who in Hades is Belmont?” asked one of the men.
“Our real enemy,” Haggarty assured them. “And now we need to mount up and head for Rimfire—”
Before he could go on, he swayed, his eyes rolled up in their sockets, and he pitched forward to land on the porch in a senseless heap.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The next few minutes were tense but busy ones. McPhee had told his men what to do if they found Ace and Chance on the Tar
tan spread, and they didn’t disregard those orders easily. It didn’t help that Kiley, Stebbins, and Doakes were among those left behind at the ranch when McPhee went into Rimfire. Those three hadn’t forgotten about their run-in with the Jensen brothers in Fort Benton, and they sure hadn’t forgiven it, either.
In fact, Ace could hear the three men trying to stir up the others while he knelt beside Jack Haggarty and ripped the man’s sleeve open to reveal the bullet wound in his arm. It looked like the slug had passed through cleanly without breaking the bone, which was lucky. Damage to the muscles and blood loss were the main things Haggarty had to worry about, along with blood poisoning.
“I need some whiskey,” Ace said as he looked up from what he was doing. He ignored the rabble-rousing from Kiley, Stebbins, and Doakes.
“I could use a drink, too,” one of the men said.
“I need it to clean this wound.” Ace tried not to sound too impatient.
One of the ranch hands took a flask from his pocket and handed it to Chance, who passed it along to Ace.
“Good Scotch whiskey,” the man said. “Mr. McPhee won’t allow anything else on the place.”
Ace had to chuckle a little at that, despite the circumstances. He poured the fiery liquor into the bullet hole in Haggarty’s arm. Even though the gambler was unconscious, he stirred and groaned a little at the whiskey’s bite.
Then Ace tore strips off the bottom of Haggarty’s shirt and bound up the wound as best he could. That was all he could do for now. Haggarty needed the attention of a real doctor.
And they needed to get to Rimfire as quickly as they could if they were going to save Ling from Leo Belmont’s vengeance.
“A couple of you load Mr. Haggarty in a wagon and take him to town so the doc can tend to him,” Ace said as he stood up. “The rest of us need to mount up and get there as soon as we can.”
“You hear that?” Kiley practically yelped. “The kid’s givin’ orders now! He ain’t even supposed to be here, but he thinks he can waltz in and start bossing us around!”
“Shut up, Kiley,” another man growled. “You heard what Haggarty said. The whole thing’s been a big misunderstanding. And if that gal the boss is sweet on is in danger, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna sit around on my hands and not try to help her.”
Stebbins said, “Aw, he never shoulda got mixed up with one o’ them Celestial gals, anyway. They ain’t fit to be nothin’ but washerwomen or soiled doves.”
“You let Mr. McPhee hear you say that and he’ll whip your tail from now till next Sunday,” a man warned him.
Ace turned to Chance. “Come on. Let’s get our horses. These hombres can keep squabbling if they want to, but we’re heading for Rimfire.”
Kiley asked, “Are we gonna let ’em just leave like that?”
“No, we’re going with them,” another hardcase said. “Come on, men.”
Ten minutes later, Ace, Chance, and ten more men from the Tartan spread were riding hard toward Rimfire. Trailing a considerable distance behind them was the wagon carrying Jack Haggarty. Ace hoped they would all get to town in time to keep anyone else from dying tonight.
He sure wasn’t going to count on it, though.
* * *
Most of McPhee’s men were professional gunmen, so Ace didn’t actually expect them to let him take the lead, but since he knew more about what was going on than anyone else in the group, they seemed to be willing to follow his suggestions.
As they rode, he filled them in on Belmont’s desire for revenge on Haggarty and Ling. The men were skeptical at first.
“The boss won’t want to hear any of that,” one of them cautioned. “He’s plumb taken with that girl.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Chance. “She’s very charming. And Haggarty is as slick as can be. But they’re thieves, all right. They stole two thousand dollars from my brother and me.”
“But you want to help ’em, anyway.”
“Belmont’s a criminal,” said Ace, “and his men are murderers. Haggarty and Ling are crooked, but as far as I know they’re not killers.”
Although he wouldn’t put that past Ling, he thought, if she was cornered. However, he was still convinced they weren’t as bad as Leo Belmont and his bunch.
As they neared the settlement, Ace signaled for the riders to stop. “I think one or two of you should go to the hotel and find Mr. McPhee—whoever he’s the most likely to believe. The rest of us will go to the stable, since that’s probably where Clancy took Ling. If Belmont and his men have her there, we’ll hold off on attacking until Mr. McPhee and the rest of his men who are in town show up. The two sides ought to be pretty evenly matched then.”
“Kid, you better not be leadin’ us into some sort of trap,” warned one of the men. “If you do, you won’t live to see mornin’, I can promise you that.”
“Chance and I have told you the truth. About everything. You’ll see for yourself when you get to the stable.”
Men riding into town, even that late at night, weren’t going to draw too much attention in a frontier settlement, but such a large number of riders might. Ace suggested that they split up even more—move into Rimfire one or two at a time—and then converge on the stable. The others agreed and rode off in different directions, leaving Ace and Chance walking their horses toward the edge of town.
Chance said quietly, “You realize we’re about to go to war over one woman, don’t you?”
“The Greeks and the Trojans fought a whole war over one woman,” Ace pointed out.
“Yeah, but Helen wasn’t a thief, and she never threatened to cut anybody’s throat, either.”
Ace had told his brother about what had happened in McPhee’s study. “I know Ling’s a pretty shady character, but we can’t let Belmont kill her . . . or whatever else he’s got in mind for her, which might be worse if Whistler was right.”
“Even if we rescue her, McPhee’s liable to hold a grudge against us. I don’t know if he’ll ever believe the truth about her.”
“Maybe not,” Ace agreed. “But we got our money back, and there’s nothing stopping us from riding away when this is over and letting everything else sort itself out.”
“If we live through it, you mean.”
“Well, yeah, there’s that to consider,” Ace said.
After a few minutes, Chance said, “You know, we might want to head south. Winter’s not that far away, and we don’t want to be up here in this part of the country when it gets cold. We could take our time, wander down through Colorado and New Mexico, maybe find a nice little border town where it’ll stay warm.”
Ace nodded. “We haven’t spent that much time down there. Sounds like a good idea.”
“It’s a deal then. Assuming we live through this mess.”
“Yep.”
By that time they were in the settlement and turned their horses down one of the side streets and then cut into the back alley that ran behind the livery stable. They dismounted, left the horses tied behind a store that was closed for the night, and eased through the shadows on foot.
They came up behind the livery stable and found four of McPhee’s men waiting for them. The other six drifted up in the next few minutes.
“We heard voices inside there,” one of the men whispered. “Couldn’t make out what they were sayin’, though.”
Ace looked up. A small door in the back wall of the barn was high enough that it had to open into the hayloft. It was closed at the moment, but it might not be fastened. “A couple of you boost me up there,” he said as he pointed at the door. “If Chance and I can get into the loft, we can find out what’s going on.”
Quickly, two of the men took hold of his legs and lifted him so he could reach up to the door. Bracing himself with his other hand against the wall, he pulled the door back slowly, not knowing if it would make any noise. When it didn’t, Ace whispered for the men to raise him higher. He got both arms hooked over the edge of the opening and hauled himself up and through it.
They boosted Chance up, too, while Ace was crawling toward the front of the hayloft. He reached a spot where he could look down into the barn’s broad center aisle. What he saw made his guts clench with fury.
Ling was strung up to one of the barn’s crossbeams. She had a rope around each wrist, and they were pulled tight enough that her arms were stretched over her head and her feet barely touched the ground. She had to be in pain, but she wasn’t making a sound. Ace knew she was conscious. Her head was up, and she appeared to be looking straight ahead at Leo Belmont, who paced back and forth in front of her with a smirk on his brutal face.
Belmont’s men, including Clancy, were gathered around watching. A few of them seemed a little uneasy about what was happening. Western men, even the most hardened ones, tended not to like seeing violence carried out against women.
The others had eager, avid looks on their faces, especially the gutter trash Belmont had brought with him from San Francisco. From what Whistler had said, Belmont had promised to turn Ling over to them when he was finished with her, and they were eager to get their hands on her.
“Haggarty’s dead,” Belmont was saying to Ling.
Ace supposed that was what Clancy had told him.
“You might as well tell me where that money is hidden. Things will go a lot easier for you if you do.”
“Go to hell,” Ling said in a low voice.
Chance crawled up beside Ace in time to hear that exchange and whispered, “Damn it. Is that Belmont?”
“Yeah,” Ace breathed.
“He’s as bad as you said he is.”
“Maybe worse,” Ace said.
Belmont turned to one of his men and extended a hand. The hardcase placed a coiled whip in it.
“Last chance,” Belmont told Ling as he turned back to her. “You can die quickly and painlessly . . . or I can spend the next half hour introducing you to the pleasures of the lash. I promise, before I’m done you’ll be begging to tell me what I want to know.”
Chance leaned close to Ace’s ear. “He’s just threatening her, right? He won’t really do that?”
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