Day of Rage

by William W. Johnstone

  Sam Logan was sitting on the edge of the boardwalk behind Rudd, a barlow knife in his hand as he whittled on a piece of wood. Logan always had to be doing something with his hands: whittling, playing cards, cleaning his gun, or just fidgeting until Rudd sometimes wanted to yell at him to just stop it. Usually it was little fellas like Rudd who were nervous and fidgety, but not always. Big, bulky Sam Logan was proof of that.

  “I think maybe I’ll go over to the Silver Spur,” Rudd said.

  Without looking up from the piece of wood he was trying to fashion into a whistle, Logan said, “I thought you said we oughta lie low for a while, Duke. That whore might still be on the prod after what you done to her.”

  “I didn’t do nothin’ that ain’t been done to her hundreds of times before,” Rudd insisted. “Maybe thousands.”

  “I wouldn’t want to have to do the cipherin’ to count it up,” Logan said.

  “Maybe I’ll tell her I’m sorry,” Rudd mused. “I ain’t, really, of course. But I could tell her that.”

  “You think she’d go upstairs with you again?”

  “She might.”

  “But you don’t have ten dollars.”

  “I got three,” Rudd said. “How about you, Sam? You be willin’ to spot me seven until the next time Billy Ray gives us some dinero?”

  “I don’t know,” Logan said. “Seems like I’ve spotted you a few bucks in the past that you never paid back.”

  “I’ll get even with you, don’t you worry about that. Come on, Sam—” Rudd stopped short. He was still looking out into the street, and he had just seen a rider go by whom he didn’t recognize. “Who’s that?”

  “Who’s who?” Logan asked.

  “That fella there on the gray horse,” Rudd said, nodding toward the stranger.

  Logan closed his knife and slipped it and the partially completed whistle into his pocket as he stood up. He stepped over to the hitch rail and stood beside Rudd.

  “Him?”

  “Yeah.”

  The man was average sized, but there was something about him that made him seem a little bigger. Maybe it was the powerful shoulders. He wore jeans, a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled back a couple of turns, and a broad-brimmed, cream-colored hat thumbed back slightly on dark hair. The butt of a Winchester jutted up from a sheath strapped to his saddle. From where Rudd and Logan stood, they couldn’t see the man’s handgun, but they could see the shell belt strapped around the man’s hips so they knew he was packing a revolver.

  “Must be new in town,” Logan said. “I never seen him before, and he don’t look like the sort of hombre you usually find in Purgatory.”

  “No, he don’t,” Rudd said. “He looks like trouble.”

  “But not for us, because we ain’t got nothin’ to do with him.” Logan nudged his friend in the ribs with his elbow. “Hey, there’s Cravens. Why don’t you go ask him for the loan of seven bucks so you can maybe play slap and tickle with Miss Della?”

  Rudd looked around and saw a stout, middle-aged man in a town suit and narrow-brimmed hat crossing the street near them. He appeared to be heading for the bank, which was no surprise since Joseph Cravens was not only the mayor of Purgatory, he also owned the First Territorial Bank.

  “Oh, sure,” Rudd said. “I’m gonna ask the town banker to loan me whore money.”

  “Can’t ever tell,” Logan said with a grin. “He might say yes.”

  Rudd doubted that very seriously . . . but hell, it was something to do, he thought, and it might be good for a laugh just seeing the look on Cravens’s face.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  With Logan trailing him, he moved quickly to intercept Cravens before the banker reached the boardwalk. Rudd lifted his hand, put a friendly grin on his face, and said, “Howdy, there, Mr. Cravens. Talk to you for a minute?”

  Cravens stopped and frowned worriedly. He recognized Rudd and Logan, of course. Just about everybody in Purgatory knew who the members of Billy Ray Gilmore’s gang were, even though the law didn’t seem to be able to do anything about them.

  “What is it you men want?” Cravens asked in a curt voice.

  “Well, that’s no way to talk to a potential customer,” Rudd said. “I want to discuss a business transaction with you.”

  That seemed to surprise Cravens. He said, “Really?”

  “Sure ’nough. I’d like to see about gettin’ a loan from your bank.”

  “A loan? Really?” Cravens still seemed wary, but the instincts ingrained in him by years in the banking business made him ask the question. “What sort of loan? How much money are we talking about?”

  “I need ten dollars for a whore,” Rudd declared. Might as well let Logan keep his three bucks and get the whole shooting match from the bank if he could, he thought.

  “Ten d-dollars,” Cravens said, starting to sputter a little. His face turned red, either from anger or embarrassment, or both. “For a . . . a prositute!”

  “Whore, prostitute, soiled dove, call her whatever you want,” Rudd said. “You should know, though, Mr. Cravens, that she ain’t your run-of-the-mill whore. She’s special. In fact, if you was to loan me twenty dollars, there ain’t no tellin’ what I might be able to talk her into doin.”

  Cravens moved to the side, as if to try to get around them.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I have business to tend to.”

  Rudd put a hand on the banker’s chest to stop him.

  “Now, I’ve made you a fair business proposition,” he said. “You gonna approve my loan or deny it, Mr. Banker Man?”

  “I . . . I can’t. . . . Please, let me by—”

  Rudd stepped back. He wasn’t getting out of the way to let Cravens pass, though. Instead, he reached down to his hip and closed his hand around the butt of his gun.

  “I guess if you ain’t gonna loan me that money, the least you can do is dance a mite to entertain us.”

  He drew his gun and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet smashing into the ground about three inches from Cravens’s left foot.

  Cravens let out a startled, frightened yelp and jumped instinctively away from where the bullet had kicked up dust. Logan laughed at that, shrugged, and pulled his gun as well. Both weapons roared, spraying lead around Cravens’s feet and making him hop frantically as Rudd cackled and said, “Dance, Banker Man, dance!”

  Then Logan yelled, “Oh, hell, Duke, look out!”

  * * *

  When John Henry heard the shots coming from the vicinity of the bank, he figured somebody was holding up the establishment.

  Instead, as he wheeled Iron Heart around, he saw two men standing at the edge of the street firing their revolvers at the feet of a third man, who was leaping around desperately trying to stay out of the way of the slugs.

  The sight of it made John Henry mad. Just downright mad.

  He heeled Iron Heart into motion, sending the big horse galloping toward the three men.

  The two gunnies heard the thundering hoofbeats just in time. One of them let out a warning yell, and they leaped in opposite directions, barely avoiding being trampled. One of the gunmen was a little, rabbity-looking man. The other hombre was big and stolid, slower to move. Iron Heart’s shoulder almost clipped him.

  John Henry reined in and turned his mount again. The smaller man yelped, “What the hell are you doin’? We was just makin’ him dance!”

  John Henry’s Colt flickered out of its holster and roared, sending a bullet smashing through the smaller man’s left foot. The man screeched in pain, flung his arms in the air, and went over backwards. His gun slipped from his fingers, flew up about ten feet, then fell and thudded into the dust of the street.

  John Henry twisted in the saddle. The bigger man was trying to draw a bead on him. John Henry fired first, targeting the man’s right foot. He yelled and started hopping around. He hung on to his gun, so John Henry sent Iron Heart lunging past the man and swung his Colt so that the barrel cracked across the wri
st of the man’s gun hand. The man dropped the weapon, sobbed, and tried to cradle his injured wrist against his body. His wounded foot wouldn’t support his weight, though, so he fell into a heap on the ground.

  “Sorry, boys,” John Henry said. “I just meant to make you dance. Reckon I’m not as good a shot as you fellas are.”

  The man in the town suit stared wide-eyed at John Henry as if struggling to comprehend the sudden violence that had broken out in front of him. He said, “You . . . you shot them!”

  “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s seeing somebody being picked on,” John Henry said. Actually, there were plenty of examples of injustice that he hated, but that was one of them.

  “You don’t understand!” the townsman said. “Those men are part of Billy Ray Gilmore’s gang!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Well, that was interesting, John Henry thought. He didn’t know exactly who Billy Ray Gilmore was, but from the sound of it, the man was a notorious desperado and the leader of a gang of bandits.

  Probably just the man John Henry was looking for.

  The smaller of the two gunnies was rolling around on the ground, clutching his wounded foot as blood leaked through the hole in the top of his boot. He yelled a curse at John Henry and added, “You’ll pay for this, mister! By God, you’ll pay!”

  John Henry ignored him and said to the townsman, “Should I be worried about this fella Gilmore?”

  The man swallowed hard and said, “I . . . I prefer not to talk about him.”

  That response jibed with John Henry’s initial hunch. Gilmore was the man who had this town buffaloed, all right. That meant he was the one Jason True and the other miners were afraid of.

  “Well, if he has a bone to pick with me, he ought to be able to find me. My name’s John Henry Sixkiller, and I aim to be around for a while.”

  That laid it out simple enough and amounted to throwing down a gauntlet. John Henry liked to know what sort of odds he was facing. He hadn’t intended to announce his presence in Purgatory quite so dramatically, but he might as well try to take advantage of the situation, he thought.

  He looked at the townsman, who appeared prosperous enough, and waited for the man to return the favor and introduce himself. After a moment, the man said, “I’m Joseph Cravens. I own the bank here, and I’m the mayor of Purgatory, as well.”

  “It’s good to meet you, Mayor,” John Henry said with a nod. He looked at the two men lying in the street. Both gunmen were whimpering in pain, but they had stopped writhing around. “What about these two?”

  “Their friends will come along and tend to them, I suppose,” Cravens said. “I don’t see any of them on the street right now, but some of them are bound to be around and someone will tell them what happened.” A disapproving note came into Cravens’s voice. “There are people in Purgatory who are eager to curry favor with Gilmore and his ilk.”

  “All right.” John Henry looked around. There were quite a few people standing around on the boardwalks, and more were looking on from the doors and windows of the buildings. “I’m surprised the local law hasn’t shown up to see what all the commotion was about.”

  “Marshal Hinkle?” The mayor’s dismissive tone made it clear he didn’t think that was likely to happen. “He’ll poke his nose out later, when the trouble is all over.”

  “I see. So you don’t think he’ll arrest me for shooting these two?”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Cravens said. “But I can’t say the same about Gilmore.”

  “Like I said, he can look me up if he wants to talk about it.” John Henry started to turn Iron Heart away, but he stopped and said to the two men he had wounded, “You fellas remember my name, too. John Henry Sixkiller.”

  “We’ll remember you, all right,” the smaller one snarled. “And we’ll see you again . . . over the barrel of a gun!”

  “Looking forward to it,” John Henry responded dryly. He lifted his reins and heeled Iron Heart into a walk.

  He didn’t think either of the outlaws would make another try for him right now, but he listened closely for any sounds that might warn him they were scrambling after their guns. He didn’t hear anything except the soft thuds of the horse’s hooves in the dust.

  John Henry rode to the Silver Spur Saloon and dismounted. After most of two days on the trail, he was thirsty, and a cold beer sure sounded appealing right now. Back home, people sometimes looked at him a mite odd when he went into a saloon, because it was well known that Indians could not handle “firewater” very well. He always had to explain to them that it was the white half of him drinking, not the Indian half.

  As he looped Iron Heart’s reins around a hitch rail and stepped up onto the boardwalk, he spotted a young woman watching him through one of the windows. She was a nice-looking honey blonde. Their eyes met for a second before she abruptly turned away.

  He wasn’t totally unaccustomed to having women look at him. Back in Indian Territory, there was a beautiful young lady named Sasha Quiet Stream who had been friends with John Henry since they were both little more than kids. He had risked his life to save her from a vicious killer, and there was a chance that in time their friendship might grow into something more.

  Right now, however, John Henry’s work kept him on the move nearly all the time, so it was difficult to even consider anything serious where the future was concerned. For him, the future had to be about doing the job he had set out to do.

  Which meant that if an attractive woman wanted to smile at him, he certainly wasn’t opposed to the idea, and he wasn’t going to feel guilty for not being opposed to it, either.

  He pushed the bat wings aside and stepped into the saloon. Instantly, he felt the eyes of a number of people on him. That wasn’t surprising, since he’d just been involved in a shooting. The fact that the other two hombres involved in that shooting were members of the local outlaw gang just made him even more notorious.

  He pretended not to notice the scrutiny and strolled toward the long mahogany bar that ran down the right side of the big room. The hardwood gleamed in the light from a number of chandeliers. Tables were scattered to the left. About half of them were occupied by drinkers. The bar was busy, too, but not packed. The rear portion of the room was devoted to gambling, with several poker tables, a roulette wheel that wasn’t being used at the moment, and a faro layout where men could take their chances on bucking the tiger.

  A staircase to the left led up to a second-floor balcony that went around two sides of the room. Judging by the number of women in short, spangled dresses in evidence, there would be rooms on the second floor where fellas could try their luck at another kind of bucking, John Henry thought with a wry smile.

  The blonde John Henry had seen in the window was wearing one of those eye-catching dresses, he noted as he spotted her standing at the bar talking to a man in a suit with a fancy vest and a gold watch chain draped across it. The man looked like a gambler, but John Henry thought there was a good chance he owned this place.

  The bartender was already moving to meet him as he stepped up to the bar. John Henry nodded and said, “I could sure do with a cold glass of beer, friend.”

  “Coming right up,” the aproned man replied. He drew the beer and set it in front of John Henry, then glanced to his right and added, “It’s on the house.”

  “First one’s free, eh? Is that the policy?”

  “Well . . . not always. But this is sort of a special occasion.”

  “It is?” John Henry said. “Some holiday I don’t know about?”

  The well-dressed man who’d been talking to the blonde moved alongside him in time to hear that question.

  “It’s a local holiday,” he said. “I just declared it.”

  John Henry lifted the glass in his left hand and took a swallow of the beer. It wasn’t ice cold, but it was cool and tasted mighty good going down his throat.

  “What are we celebrating?” he asked.

  “It’s not every
day that somebody stands up to a couple of Billy Ray Gilmore’s gun-wolves,” the man said. “That makes it a holiday as far as I’m concerned, and since I own the Silver Spur, I think I can declare one.” He raised his voice and addressed the bartender. “I’m buying the next round for the house, Meade.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Bouchard,” the bartender said as customers began to crowd up to claim their free drinks.

  The man extended his hand to John Henry and introduced himself.

  “Royal Bouchard. This is my place.”

  John Henry gripped his hand and said, “John Henry Sixkiller. I’m drinking in your place.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Sixkiller. You’re new to Purgatory, aren’t you?”

  “Just rode in about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “And rode right into trouble, from what I hear.”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “I was upstairs when I heard the shooting,” Bouchard said. “By the time I got down here, it was all over. But one of the girls who works for me told me all about it. She said Duke Rudd and Sam Logan were shooting at our esteemed mayor, and you came along and shot them.”

  John Henry nodded and said, “That’s about the size of it.”

  “In the foot.”

  “Seemed appropriate, since their bullets were kicking up dust around your mayor’s feet.”

  “Maybe, but it would have been all right with me if you’d put your slugs in their gizzards, instead. They’re dangerous men, and they won’t take kindly to being wounded.”

  “Since I’m the one who shot them, seems like I might be a little dangerous myself.”

  Bouchard chuckled and nodded.

  “Point taken, Mr. Sixkiller,” he said. “Is that an Indian name?”

  “It might be,” John Henry allowed.