All eyes swung back to the lawman. Vint Evers glanced at Nelly Rosell, then at the doors behind him, and finally at his own hands, which he clenched and unclenched. Swaying like a tall tree, he said softly, plaintively, “Not now!”
“Marshal?” the homesteader said. “People are bein’ beat, and homes are burnin’. There’s not a minute to lose.”
Vint wavered. At long last he had let down the mental shield he had put up to blunt his outrage at Nelly’s plight. At long last he had let his affection for her rule his actions. And now, when he had finally broken the chains that bound him, at the very moment when the woman he cared for needed him most, the bloodbath had begun.
Lee saw the torture his friend was going through, and felt deep sympathy. Any man who had ever loved a woman would feel the same. Duty or devotion? Which would the tall Texan pick?
The moment of indecision passed. Vint Evers strode to Nelly and clasped her by the wrist. “Your days of workin’ for Frank Lowe are over. You’re comin’ with me.”
Budding joy clashed with harsh reality in Nelly’s breast. “But the contract I signed?”
“To hell with it!” Vint said, pulling her after him. “You told me once that you loved me, that you would go anywhere I went, and I’m holdin’ you to your word. From here on out, we’re two halves of the same coin. And I pity the hombre who claims different.”
Ike Shannon hurried to fall into step beside Evers. “What are you aiming to do?”
“You need to ask?” Vint responded. “The nesters need my help.”
“But you’re the town marshal,” Ike remonstrated. “The hills south of the valley are out of your jurisdiction. It’s a job for a federal marshal or the Army, not for us.”
Vint Evers never slowed. “It would take days for a rider to get word to the Army, days more for a patrol to get here. A federal lawman wouldn’t show for weeks.” He shook his head. “No, when I pinned on this badge, I didn’t vow to protect some of the people some of the time. I gave my word to protect all of the people all of the time.”
“But it’s out of your jurisdiction,” Ike insisted. “You won’t have any legal standing.”
Vint patted his left-hand pistol. “These are all the legal standin’ I need.”
Barreling outdoors, the Texan paused to thrust Nelly’s wrist into the startled gambler’s hand. “I’m countin’ on you, pard, to watch over her until I get back. If Frank Lowe tries to take her, blow him to kingdom come with that big Sharps rifle of yours.”
Ike was horrified at the thought of Vint riding off to face Kemp’s pack of killers alone. “Who’s going to guard your back if I stay here?” he protested. It wasn’t that he disliked the dove. He had nothing against her other than she was a prime distraction to Vint and might get him killed.
The Texan grinned at the Tennessean. “How about it, Lee? You feel like givin’ Allister Kemp a dose of his own medicine?”
Lee was flattered by the confidence the famed lawman showed in him. And, truth to tell, he was itching for a chance to pay the Englishman back for the heartbreak Allison had endured, and the ambush. “There’s nothing I’d like more.”
~*~
Great billowing clouds of thick, dark smoke were visible from miles off. Borne high into the sky, they formed a hazy gray ceiling over the foothills that rimmed the valley to the south, shrouding the hills in false twilight.
A frantic exodus was under way. Scores of homesteaders were fleeing pell-mell. In wagons, on horseback, and on foot, men, women, and children, many dazed by the loss of their homes, quite a few weeping pitiably, filed urgently by.
Lee rode alongside Vint Evers, staring grimly at the terrified, anguished nesters, then at the dusty ribbon ahead where the line strung out for as far as he could see. On their right flowed the Diablo River, which bore westward at the southeast corner of the valley.
Off to the left a cabin was engulfed in crackling flames. Farther down the road another home site lay in smoldering ruin.
“I reckon there’s no turnin’ back for Kemp now,” the Texan commented.
Lee nodded, rising in the stirrups to scour the countryside for some trace of those responsible. Instead he spied a riddled sow and her eight young ones, flies buzzing thick over them.
A clattering buckboard approached. Vint Evers moved into the middle of the road and reined up. “Hold on there, hoss! I’d like a word with you.”
The driver was a stocky farmer whose homespun clothes were sooty, whose face was layered with grime. His wife and two small children were with him, the children weeping, the woman in tears, too, but trying hard not to let her trickle turn into a deluge. The farmer halted, then glanced anxiously over his shoulder. “Make it quick, Marshal! They might be after us!”
“Who?”
Gnawing on his lower lip, the homesteader shifted to stare westward again.
“I need to know what I’m up against,” Vint said patiently. “Tell me what you’ve seen.”
“Hell on earth,” the man answered forlornly. “Everything we owned is gone except for the clothes on our backs and this buckboard and team. And we would have lost them, too, if we hadn’t been fixing to head into town when the devils struck.”
Dejected nesters tromped past on either side of the wagon, one a mother with an infant clasped to her heaving bosom, another a homesteader whose back and left arm had been badly burned. Their eyes were wide with horror; they shuffled numbly along as if they were animated corpses.
“Tell me what happened,” Vint prodded.
“A bunch of masked riders swept onto our place, whooping and hollering and firing in the air,” the man said. “Some of them had torches, and they set fire to our house and the barn. When I tried to run inside for my rifle, one of them knocked me down with his horse.”
“How many were there?”
“Ten or so, but we’ve spotted others since. There must be two or three bands of these Regulators, as they call themselves.”
“They spoke to you?”
“A big one did. He told us that we were trespassing on private range, that after today the Regulators will kill anyone they find in these hills.” The farmer wiped his sweaty brow with a sleeve. “I’m no coward, Marshal, but I’m not about to get myself killed, not when I have a family to support. They can have this damned valley, and welcome to it!”
Lashing his reins, the man hurried eastward, his children bawling louder than ever.
Vint trotted westward. “That Kemp doesn’t miss a trick. I’ll bet he appointed his whole outfit as Regulators, just so he can pretend to be actin’ legal-like.”
Lee knew all about Regulators from his days in Lincoln County. It was not uncommon when two sides were embroiled in conflict for one or both to set up vigilante committees. Regulators, they liked to call themselves, but they were vigilantes, plain and simple. It was done to lend their actions a certain degree of legitimacy.
“This accounts for all the cowboys,” Vint said. “For the past week or so, groups of them have drifted through Diablo on their way to Kemp’s spread. And I heard tell that he’s been hirin’ a lot of new hands who are better with guns than they are with ropes or brandin’ irons. Now we know why.”
Lee remembered the riders he’d noticed in town earlier. “What can we hope to do against so many?”
Rather than reply, Vint urged his bay onward, his expression cast in steel.
The number of refugees dwindled the farther west they went. Evidently most had already fled. Spirals of dark smoke curled skyward from dozens of burning buildings. It was as if the lawmen were passing through a war-ravaged landscape, blighted by a plague of human locusts.
In many low areas between hills the smoke was as thick as fog. It got into their eyes, into their lungs. They had to pull their hat brims low and cover their mouths with their hands.
As yet they had not come on any bodies, and for that Vint was grateful. Allister Kemp was being cagey. So long as the Regulators refrained from murder, the territorial authorities
would be disposed to view the clash as a simple dispute over range. In that case, possession was nine-tenths of the law, as Kemp well knew.
The lawman came to a bend. Here the road skirted the base of a low hill thick with cottonwoods and willows. Through the trees Vint glimpsed six riders galloping from the west. “Quick!” he said, turning his mount into the stand and sliding to the ground.
Lee followed suit, loosening both revolvers in their holsters as he stepped back out onto the road. By rights he should be nervous, but he felt only an icy calm. No one had the right to set himself up as the Almighty, as Kemp had done.
Vint Evers adopted a wide stance smack in the center of the rutted track and pushed his hat back on his head. “I wish I had a Greener,” he said wistfully.
“A shotgun would be right handy ’long about now,” Lee agreed, flexing his fingers.
Hoofs drummed loudly. In a swirl of dust, amid tendrils of smoke, the six riders swept around the bend. Voicing oaths and exclamations, the Regulators drew rein. Each wore a bandanna covering his face from nose to chin.
“Marshal Evers!” one declared.
Lee was as tense as an alley cat about to tear into a rival. By their size alone he knew that Jesse Bodine was not among them. Nor was Allister Kemp, which was to be expected. The Englishman would not soil his own hands when he could pay others to do his dirty work for him.
“What the hell are you doing here, Evers?” demanded a rider on the right. “This ain’t your bailiwick.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Vint said good-naturedly, but not a man there was blind to his poised iron frame, set to explode at the slightest provocation. “Can’t help but notice your animals are all in a lather. Are you gents in a hurry to get somewhere?”
“We were,” answered a cocky hawk in the middle, “but not no more.”
The voice tugged at Lee’s memory. His gaze narrowed as he noted the Regulator’s blazing green eyes and curly blond hair. Those eyes were locked on him in intense hatred.
“As I live and breathe,” the man said. “Just the hombre I’ve been itchin’ to see again. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed of buckin’ you out in gore, Scurlock. There’s unfinished business between us.”
Vint Evers was watching the Regulators’ hands. Long ago he’d learned that the old adage about always watching a man’s eyes was so much bunk. Some gunmen, the really good ones, had a knack for adopting a poker face, for making their eyes go blank so they would not give themselves away when they grabbed for their hardware. “Do you know this jasper?” he asked.
“Allow me to introduce Nate Collins,” Lee said. “He fancies himself a pistolero.”
“Don’t they all,” Vint said with a sigh.
Predictably, Nate flushed with anger. “That badge of yours doesn’t mean a thing out here, Texas. You’d best skedaddle while you still can. In case you can’t count, there’s six of us and only two of you.”
Vint chuckled. Another lesson he had learned was that it paid to use his head. A mad enemy was a careless, sloppy enemy, so he responded, “Can I help it if the odds are in our favor?”
“Funny man,” Nate bantered. He was savoring the situation for all it was worth. It wasn’t every day that a man boosted his reputation by slaying a shootist of the Texan’s caliber. The Tennessean was icing on the cake, as it were. Nate pointed at Scurlock’s left-hand pistol. “Still packin’ my iron, I see.”
“You gave up your right to it the day you tried to kill me,” Lee responded.
Nate’s lips curled like those of a serpent about to strike. “Stealin’ a man’s gun is almost as bad as stealin’ his horse. You can dress it up in words any way you like, but that won’t change the fact it’s mine, Reb. I want it back, and I want it back now.”
An older Regulator shifted in his saddle. “What the hell are we palaverin’ for, Collins? I didn’t hire on to jaw people to death. Mr. Kemp will be waitin’ for us. We’d best get this over with.”
Smirking, Vint said, “So Allister Kemp is behind these raids. Much obliged for the proof I needed.”
Upset by his blunder, the gunman growled, “I never claimed Mr. Kemp is behind anything. All I said was that we have to meet up with him later. That’s hardly against the law.”
Vint saw a man on the left edge a hand toward a Remington. “All right. Let’s get this over with,” he declared. “Unstrap your gunbelts and throw them down.”
Brittle laugher burst from Nate Collins. “All this smoke must have addled your brain, Marshal. The only way you’ll take our irons is off of our dead bodies.”
“That can be arranged,” Vint said.
For several seconds the tableau froze, the tigerish forms of lawmen and gunmen alike rigid with impending violence. Nate Collins broke the spell by twisting to grin at a companion and pretending he was about to say something while lowering his right hand toward the new pistol on his hip. Then, in a burst of lightning motion, he drew.
It was the signal for the rest to slap leather.
Chapter Twenty
It was not all that unusual among the social circles of blue-blood easterners to hear them brand the lurid tales in the penny dreadfuls as bald-faced lies told for the benefit of dull-witted common rabble.
“No one could be that skilled with a gun!” they would say when reading the vivid exploits of a renowned gunman, completely unaware that many gunmen spent hours daily practicing their deadly stock-in-trade.
“No one could shoot a dime at twenty paces!” they would say with a laugh, oblivious to the fact that among the hill folk of the Deep South, the feat would hardly merit attention.
For the plain truth was that those who lived and died by the gun made it a point to be as proficient as natural talent and dogged practice could make them. They honed their ability to a razor’s edge, and beyond.
So it was that men like James Butler Hickok, more commonly known as Wild Bill, could throw a tomato can into the air and put three holes into it before it hit the ground. Or stand midway between two fence posts on opposite sides of a country road and put bullets into both simultaneously.
Easterners scoffed. Blue bloods who had never touched a gun in their lives believed that they knew all there was to know about gun handling and marksmanship.
Ignorance has always been a breeding ground for arrogance. Those who don’t know flaunt their empty heads, while those who do know nod theirs in silent understanding.
Had any of the doubters been present that hot afternoon in Diablo Valley, they would have shaken their heads in disbelief and been skeptical of their own senses. For what they would have seen was an uncanny exhibition of speed and accuracy in the opening moments of the gunfight.
Lee Scurlock whipped out his right-hand Colt and snapped off a shot that tore into Nate Collins even as the blond gunman cleared leather. The jolt threw Nate from his mount.
Lee heard Vint Evers cut loose, but he could not afford to hazard a glance to see how his friend was faring. He had plenty to occupy him.
For as Collins went down, the Regulator to the right brought a Smith & Wesson into play. Lee fired up into the man, then dived for the ground, landing on his right shoulder. Slugs smacked into the dirt around him. He rolled to make himself harder to hit.
The shrill whinny of frightened horses and the lusty curses of incensed killers were punctuated by the boom of six-shooters.
At the edge of the road, Lee shoved to his knees. And as he did, a gigantic cloud of smoke swirled down around him, blotting out the Regulators and Vint Evers alike. It happened swiftly. All of them were enveloped in a span of seconds.
A few more shots rang out, then the gunfire died. Horses pranced and nickered, but the men on them were as quiet as churchgoers during a sermon.
The smoke burned Lee’s nose. At the last second he checked an urge to cough. Dozens of feet to his left someone was not as diligent and paid for his carelessness by having lead sprayed in his direction. There was a grunt and the thud of a falling body.
<
br /> Lee did not move a muscle, not even when a vague shape reared in front of him. It was a horse. His right hand elevated, but the pressure of his trigger finger lessened when he realized that the saddle was empty.
How many Regulators were left? Lee figured at least two, with maybe another two lying wounded.
A fluttering groan wafted through the cloud. Someone was hit hard.
Spurs jangled nearby. Lee spun, but the smoky veil hid whoever was stalking two-legged quarry. He had to breathe shallow in order not to sear his lungs. His eyes watered, and he wiped them with a sleeve.
The gray soup was so thick that Lee could not see his hand in front of his face. Behind him a twig snapped. Whirling, he waited for someone to appear. A horse nickered instead, its position leading him to suspect that it was Vint’s or his.
The groan changed to a gurgling snarl, the sort of death rattle a stricken bear might make. A scraping sound attended it.
Then for the longest while there was no noise, absolutely none whatsoever. Those horses that had not run off were standing completely still.
The smoke eddied and whirled like currents in the sea. Occasionally the veil would briefly part, allowing Lee to see clearly for a few yards. No one appeared.
Lee tried to ascertain exactly where he was in relation to where the Regulators had been when the firing commenced, but it was hopeless. Crouching low to the ground, he sidestepped slowly, placing each boot down lightly so his spurs would not jingle.
Deep in the cloud a flurry of movement erupted. Someone cursed. A hogleg boomed. Another responded in kind, not once but three times. A heavy thump indicated that a man had lost his life.
Tempted to call out to learn if Evers was still alive, Lee bit his lower lip. An outcry would doom him as surely as if he walked up to one of the cutthroats and asked to have his brains blown out.
Lee took another step, and yet another. Without warning something wrapped around his ankles and clung fast. Startled, he glanced down into the ghostly visage of a human, a Regulator whose chest oozed blood but whose eyes flickered with vitality and menace.
Diablo (A Piccaddilly Publishing Western Book 6) Page 22