by Rory Black
‘He smells bad enough to be an Injun!’ another deputy added from behind the protection of his repeating rifle.
Iron Eyes’ head lowered. He stared down at the deputy.
‘I ain’t no stinkin’ Injun! I’m a bounty hunter!’
The four grim-faced deputies moved all around the thin figure. He felt hands drag out his precious Navy Colts from his coat pockets.
‘Any stinkin’ varmint can say he’s a bounty hunter!’ the sheriff said. ‘All I know is that you just killed people and wounded a lot of honest law-abiding folks. Ya also burned down the Avalon!’
‘I never shot anybody ’ceptin’ the Jardine brothers!’ Iron Eyes fumed. ‘Them outlaws shot the folks in that hotel! I only use lead on folks with bounty on their worthless heads! Ain’t no profit killin’ ordinary folks!’
The sheriff’s rifle barrel was raised until it pressed under the jaw of the famed hunter of men. He stared at the swollen, burned features of the bounty hunter.
‘I’ve never heard of you, boy! But that don’t matter none! I’m gonna make sure you swing for this!’
Iron Eyes blinked hard. He was confused.
‘But them critters were wanted dead or alive, Sheriff! Check the posters in my pockets.’
‘You tryin’ to tell me my job, you ugly bastard?’ the sheriff asked.
‘I ain’t gonna hang, Sheriff!’
Sheriff Brook Payne grunted and turned.
‘C’mon, boys. Let’s take this animal to the jail. I’ll wire the circuit judge to come on over here.’
The deputies pushed the bounty hunter with their rifle barrels. He silently trailed the senior law officer through the crowd of onlookers towards the dimly illuminated sheriff’s office.
‘Judge Travis’11 sure have himself a fine old time trying this worthless piece of garbage,’ Payne said loudly over his shoulder.
These lawmen might not have recognized the name of Iron Eyes, but the injured bounty hunter knew the name of Judge Travis. Franklin Travis was known and feared throughout the south-west.
He was the hanging judge!
Chapter One
Iron Eyes had never been caged before. He did not like it one bit. There was only one cell inside the Rio Concho sheriff’s office. It was less than eight feet square with a high barred window close to the ceiling. Two plastered walls and a wall of bars faced another wall, with an oil-lantern hanging on a rusted nail. To the left of the cell a metal door separated the jail from the office. The walls had recently been painted in whitewash and had a strange aroma.
The bounty hunter sat down on the rickety cot and glared up at the faces of the five smiling men. His narrowed eyes watched as the sheriff turned the key in the lock and secured the barred door.
‘Ya gonna hang, son.’ Sheriff Payne grinned.
‘Yep. Looks that way.’ The bounty hunter sighed.
‘You sure you ain’t an Injun?’ one of the deputies asked from behind the stout sheriff.
Iron Eyes gritted his teeth and tried to fight his anger. They had stripped him of his weathered long coat where he kept most of his valued belongings.
‘Look in my coat pockets, Sheriff!’ he said for the tenth time. ‘I got the wanted posters in them. The Jardine brothers and their two cohorts were all wanted dead or alive. I claim the reward money!’
‘Wanted posters don’t prove a damn thing!’ the sheriff snapped at his prisoner. ‘Any low-life can get his hands on any amount of wanted posters, boy! Ya killed them folks and that’s murder!’
Iron Eyes inhaled deeply.
‘Check out the images on them wanted posters against them dead outlaws’ faces!’
‘Ain’t worth the trouble!’ Payne shrugged.
‘Ya sure are keen on stretchin’ my neck, Sheriff!’ The bounty hunter sighed. ‘Reckon ya must like a good hangin’ in these parts!’
The sheriff nodded.
‘Always draws a good crowd, boy! Good for business! Nothing like a good old-fashioned hanging!’
Iron Eyes touched the throbbing side of his burned face with the palm of his hand. He fell silent as his fevered brain tried to make sense of the situation he had found himself in.
Sheriff Payne looked at his deputies. A wry smile crossed his face as he started to usher them out into his office.
‘I reckon them outlaw carcasses are worth over five thousand dollars, boys.’ He laughed. ‘That’s a pretty penny apiece, and no mistake.’
Swiftly, Iron Eyes rose to his full height as the words penetrated his brain.
Even after the metal door was closed and bolted he could still hear the sound of the men laughing loudly in the sheriff’s office. He now knew what was going on in this remote border town.
These lawmen knew that he was a genuine bounty hunter. They had known that since first setting eyes upon him after he had killed the three outlaws. But they wanted the Jardine brothers’ bounty money for themselves.
There was only one way to ensure that.
Iron Eyes had to die!
None of them would have lasted more than a few minutes in a showdown. But in a court of law the odds were stacked in their favor. He knew that there was no jury in the land that would believe him over men with stars.
The tall man paced around the cell and nursed his throbbing swollen face. He tried to think but his head hurt. It felt as though a hundred war drums were beating inside his skull.
Then he stopped and looked up at the small barred window.
A shaft of moonlight trailed into the cell. He walked into it and stared at the wall of bars. He had never been caged like an animal before. His eyes studied the well-crafted metalwork. It made no sense to him.
Locks and keys had played no part in his existence until now.
He started to wonder.
Were these so called upholders of the law actually going to take him into court? Were they bluffing? His bony hands gripped the bars of the cell door firmly. He strained with all his might but the cell door remained locked.
Then the name of Judge Travis filled his thoughts. The hanging judge was infamous in these parts. He’d hang anyone for anything.
A stack of dead bodies and a fancy hotel burned to the ground might be just the sort of thing to sway Travis into ordering a fresh rope, he thought.
Iron Eyes rested the swollen side of his face against the cool bars. It eased the pain a little, but it did not stop the thoughts which haunted him.
He was trapped!
For the first time in his life, he was unable to defend himself.
Unable to fight.
Was this how it would end?
Would he be hanged by dishonest lawmen simply because they wanted to claim the bounty money he had earned? Could they end his existence by using the law when so many had failed to do the same with guns?
The bounty hunter sat down again on the edge of the cot and did what the sheriff and his henchmen had failed to do. He slid his thin hand down into the neck of his right mule-eared boot.
Slowly he pulled the long deadly Bowie knife out from its hiding-place and stared at its honed blade.
He nodded.
‘It ain’t over yet,’ he whispered to himself. ‘In fact, it ain’t even started yet!’
If they wanted war, Iron Eyes would oblige them.
Chapter Two
Deadman’s Flats was a windswept plain of black sand and rough gravel. Nothing grew on its acidic surface and only dried bones littered ancient long-disused trails. Its entire horizon was made up of distant jagged-spired mountains which touched the clouds and acted as borders to even less hospitable territories. This was a land that even the wildest of animals seldom visited. Yet almost in the very centre of the vast rugged plain six weathered wooden structures were huddled together beside a single line of metal railroad tracks. The water-tower continually sucked the precious and rare liquid up from a vast underground lake.
It was the only reason men were able to remain in this merciless and unforgiving land. Yet it was a vit
al link in the chain of remote places that ensured the two trains a day had their thirsty boilers filled so that they could continue on their journeys both east and west.
The businessmen of Deadman’s Flats had made good and profitable use of the sixty-minute stopovers their twice daily visitors made to their small settlement.
Being so far from any other town, Deadman’s Flats had never had call to hire anyone to protect them. There was no law here and there never had been.
Yet as dawn broke and the sun rose and spread its blanket of light across the huge level plains, exactly as it had done countless times before, the twenty or more people who lived next to the railroad tracks realized that this day would be different from all those that had gone before.
Hoot Dawson opened wide the doors of his saloon and stared out at the familiar, unchanging landscape. As he inhaled and stretched his thin frame Dawson noticed something which seemed impossible. Dust was rising up into the thin air a couple of miles beyond the water-tower.
The fifty-three-year-old man pulled his suspenders up over his shoulders and stepped to the edge of the porch. His eyes squinted as he tried to focus.
‘What ya looking at, Hoot?’ the rotund Frank Mason asked as he sucked vainly on a pipe and walked down from his cafe.
The saloon-owner raised an arm and pointed.
‘Look, Frank. See them?’
Mason pulled out a pair of spectacles and put them on. He too squinted.
‘That’s riders, Hoot!’
‘That’s what I reckoned.’ Dawson nodded. ‘But how could any riders be coming from thataway?’
‘Beats me!’ Frank Mason answered. ‘I thought that no one had ever managed to navigate a trail from the north down to Deadman’s Flats. The nearest water is up in the mountains about twenty miles away.’
Another of the town’s citizens strolled to the boardwalk of the saloon. He too could not believe his eyes.
‘Riders? Is them riders I see?’
‘Yep! It’s riders OK, Dan.’
‘I don’t like the looks of this, Frank,’ Dawson said. He turned and led the men into his saloon. ‘I’m getting my guns.’
‘How come?’ Dan Cooper asked.
Dawson reached beneath his long bar-counter and pulled out a scatter gun. He then filled his pants pockets with large red cartridges.
‘I don’t like the looks of them!’ he responded. ‘You’d better get your own guns. Just in case.’
Dan Cooper shrugged.
‘I ain’t got me a gun, boys.’
The three men went out on to the porch again. The riders were even closer. Now it was possible actually to count them.
‘Seven of the varmints!’ Frank Mason gulped. ‘I got me an old Remington somewhere in the cafe. I’m gonna go find it and see if I got any bullets.’
Dawson glanced to either side of his saloon as more men moved out from other buildings nearby and started to gather near his well-established drinking-hole.
‘Tell them to get as many of their weapons together as they can find, Dan,’ Dawson said firmly.
Cooper did not require telling twice. He rushed to the crowd and told them what the saloon-owner had said. Hoot Dawson felt sweat rolling down his back.
The seven ominous riders had appeared like phantoms out of the heat haze. They aimed their horses at the small railhead settlement and continued to approach silently.
It seemed impossible to any of the onlookers that anyone could have ridden down from the north and survived to reach the middle of the plain.
Yet they had survived and were headed straight towards the small group of buildings.
The riders, like the distant mountains behind them, appeared grey. There seemed to be no actual color on any of them or their mounts. They all wore long, dark, dust-coats which covered most of their clothing. Each sported dark hats with low crowns and narrow brims.
Hoot Dawson knew that it was a style favored by people who lived far to the north where the winds were even more powerful than those that ceaselessly swept across the plain.
But it was not these small details that put the fear into the men who watched the seven horsemen approach.
Each of them held long-barreled rifles which pointed straight up. Their wooden stocks rested on their thighs and the gloved hands were wrapped around the trigger guards.
The light of the rising sun glanced across each of the metal barrels in turn. It was like staring at a swarm of fireflies dancing in the air.
But these riders were no harmless fireflies.
These were men on a mission.
The residents of Deadman’s Flats would soon discover how deadly that mission was.
Hoot Dawson looked at his friends outside his saloon. Only a third of them had anything resembling firearms. None looked as if he had any idea of how to use them.
‘What we gonna do, Hoot?’ Mason asked, trying to hold his gun in hands which refused to stop shaking.
‘C’mon! Let’s go and greet these strangers!’ Dawson stepped down from the boardwalk, moved through the nervous townsfolk and started to walk to where the seven horsemen were headed. ‘They might be just harmless drifters.’
Hoot Dawson was wrong. These were not drifters who had accidentally stumbled upon the remote train-stop. They were here on purpose.
The seven riders drew back on their reins below the water-tower and stepped down on to the wooden platform. The seven dust-caked horses soon surrounded the large water-trough below the tower. A solitary pump next to the trough was used to quench the riders’ thirst as their leader watched the approaching townspeople.
‘Looks like we just drew us a crowd, boys!’ Snake Adams said coldly at the sight of Hoot Dawson and the rest of the men from Deadman’s Flats. He slid his Winchester into his saddle scabbard and moved away from his men.
The other six horsemen all turned and looked to where Adams was staring. They had faced many similar crowds over the years they had ridden together.
‘Fat old men!’ Buck Harris laughed as he chewed on a toothpick. ‘Just a bunch of fat old men, Snake.’
‘I sure hate fat old folks.’ Adams slid his right hand into the loose pocket of his dust-coat. The pockets of the lightweight garment gave easy access to the wearer’s trail gear. His hand found the grip of his gun sitting in its holster. He flicked the leather safety loop off the hammer.
The five other riders walked to either side of their lean leader with their rifles in their gloved hands. Adams glanced to his right.
Coop Starr, Ferdy Mayne and George ‘One Ear’ Brewster gazed in amusement at the men who were walking towards them.
Snake Adams then looked to his left.
Ben Lynch and Kyle Parker cranked the mechanisms of their rifles and stared ahead of them with unemotional eyes.
Hoot Dawson’s step slowed to a halt when he was able to focus on the seven unexpected visitors to their small community. His worst fears had been realized. These men were every inch the sort that no honest community desired to appear within their midst.
Dawson cleared his throat.
‘You boys here to drink?’
Snake Adams smiled.
‘We’re here on business, old man!’
‘What kinda business could Dead-man’s Flats possibly have for your kind?’ Dawson demanded.
Adams lowered his head. His eyes burned across the distance between himself and the twenty men.
‘I don’t like your tone, you fat old man!’
Dawson’s shirt was soaked in sweat as he gripped on to his scattergun. Yet he was a man that would not back down.
‘We own this town! We don’t cotton to trouble! Now answer me and tell me why you’re here!’
The sound of a train’s whistle and bell rang out across the vast flat plain. Adams glanced to both sides of him and chuckled.
‘That’s why!’ he said.
‘The train?’ Frank Mason said aloud. He gripped Dawson’s shoulder. ‘These boys are train robbers, Hoot!’
Snake Adams drew his gun and fired through his coat. The smell of smoldering fabric filled the nostrils of the men who surrounded him. A trail of smoke followed the deadly bullet as it hit Dawson dead centre. It punched its way right through his frame. The saloon-owner staggered backwards and fell at the feet of his friends.
A startled gasp came from every one of them.
The six men to either side of Snake Adams turned the barrels of their rifles on the stunned crowd.
‘Should we kill them all, Snake?’ Buck Harris asked eagerly, his index finger stroking the rifle trigger. ‘We got time to kill them all!’
The crowd backed away a few strides.
Snake Adams pulled his gun out from his coat and hauled its hammer back again. He considered the option for a few endless seconds and the people before him shed their weaponry in terror. He looked straight at the large-girthed Mason and waved the barrel of the Colt.
‘You get these folks to obey orders and you might be alive in an hour’s time. Pick this carcass up and take him someplace,’ Adams ordered. ‘If you don’t, we’ll kill you all right now!’
Frank Mason herded the rest of the townsmen around the blood-soaked body. Four of them reached down and lifted what was left of Hoot Dawson up.
‘Take him to behind the outhouses!’ Mason said as the entire crowd moved as one.
‘Cover the body with sand and rocks so nobody curious sets eyes on it!’ Adams insisted.
Mason nodded fearfully.
‘Sure enough,’ he gasped.
Snake Adams released the hammer and holstered his gun. There was a look of satisfaction etched into his features as he turned and stared off into the distance. He pulled off his gloves and rammed them into the pockets of his trail coat before removing it and tossing it over his saddle.
‘Time!’ he said, snapping his fingers at Ben Lynch. He pulled out a small well-worn book of timetables from his inside vest pocket. He flicked through its pages until he found the one he was looking for.
Lynch lowered his rifle and reached into his vest pocket. He produced a golden half-hunter and opened its lid.
‘It’s nearly seven, Snake!’ he said.
Adams nodded, staring at the book.