A Colt for the Kid

by John Saunders

  And there was a target, a man who had moved swiftly from the shadow of the bunkhouse to the slighter shadow cast by the windmill pump. A man who carried something bulky under one arm and seemed bent on reaching the horse barn. Two more slugs ripped through the shutter and the fusillade from upstairs reached to a greater capacity. Then the man with the bundle moved. He went at a run towards the horse barn and for a moment he seemed to stand on Johnnie’s gun sights. Only for a moment but it seemed minutes to Johnnie before he could steady himself into slowly squeezing the trigger. He felt the Springfield kick against his shoulder, then from outside came an explosion that made the stout walls of the house shudder whilst the darkness in front of Johnnie was split with a blinding, white light. There followed a blast of air that sent Johnnie reeling. The single light on the table snuffed out and where the shutter had been, a square of starlit sky showed. Dazed though he was, he reacted to Lucy’s cry of alarm and jumped to her side.

  ‘What was that, Johnnie?’

  Her hand gripping on his arm brought a feeling that was new to him. A sense that he was needed. He felt the desire to protect this slender girl who clung to his arm and knew an exultation in his own size and strength.

  ‘I don’t know, Lucy. I saw a man running with something in his arms and fired, just like you told me.’

  There was a sound of feet running down the stairs and Sam rushed into the darkened room. ‘That blast was dynamite,’ he shouted. ‘The front door’s off its hinges.’

  He turned and ran back into the hall, Johnnie and Lucy following close on his heels. The heavy door was flat on the floor and the hall a swirl of dust. There was no shooting now and the silence seemed ominous after the racketing of the guns. Sam and Johnnie lifted one end of the door and had it half raised when a single shot broke the silence and Sam, with a cry of pain, dropped his side of the door and fell backwards. Johnnie, overbalanced by the sudden shift of weight, found himself falling sideways. He dropped his hold on the door and fell on top of it as a six-gun hammered shots through the opening. Sprawled as he was on the floor he got a clear, skyline silhouette of the man using the gun. He felt rage surge within him, rage at the fact that Lucy was somewhere behind him and in peril from the slugs that sang low over his own head. He came bounding up from his sprawled position with the red mist of fury swimming in front of his eyes. The gunman was fifteen or twenty yards from the doorway when Johnnie came leaping out and directed his last two shots at the figure that was flying towards him. Johnnie felt the wind of one slug fan his cheek and for some reason saw clearly again. The rage was still with him when he closed with the man, but it was clear-headed anger, one that enabled him to swerve and evade the clubbed sixgun that the other swung at his head. He took the gunman at waist level and his long arms wrapping round the man, lifted him from his feet and dashed him to the ground. Johnnie followed up by diving on top of the gunslinger, received a knee jab in the stomach as his left hand reached the other’s throat, then he was astride the man and his bunched right fist was punching the other into insensibility.

  In a minute or two he got to his feet, satisfied that the other was unconscious. He heard guns begin again their erratic banging and saw the red flashes coming from the house. Then came the pounding of hoofs and he saw the silhouettes of four riders gallop past the shattered door and fill the space with their lead. Instinct, more than any knowledge of gunfighting, told him that the riders would circle the house and repeat the manoeuvre. Sharply aware of the danger of being shot by one of the defenders, Johnnie swung away from the direct line of the doorway and made a rush towards the house. He came to a crouch at the side of the veranda just as someone in the upper storey took two quick rifle shots at him. He had barely recovered from his forward rush when the hoofs sounded again and almost on the top of the sound he caught sight of the shadowy figure of the first of the riders. He let horse and man come almost abreast of him then left the ground in a long leap. He grabbed at the bridle and as the horse plunged and swerved, lifted his feet clear of the ground. He heard the oaths of the rider then a gun banged close to his head. The horse he was clinging to reared as far as his weight on its bridle permitted, then another horse thudding into it sent it staggering and pawing for a footing. For the next few seconds it seemed to Johnnie as he clung fiercely to the bridle, that the world was full of stamping horses, swearing men and guns that were being fired close to his head. Then the bridle broke and he hit the ground with a bump, saw hoofs that were apparently going to stamp him flat and rolled quickly to one side. A moment later he was on his feet and throwing wild punches at the head of a man who hit him so often with bunched up fists that it seemed to Johnnie that his adversary possessed more than one pair of arms. He made several attempts to close with the man and wrap him with his arms but each time a savage punch slammed him backwards. Guns were still banging but the racket of them went unheeded by the milling pair as they stamped about. Johnnie went down to a blow on the side of the head that caught him as he was boring in for about the twentieth time. He came bouncing to his feet again and rushed at his man who was standing with a slight forward droop, arms pendant as if he was too weary to raise them. Johnnie heard, as he closed in, the man’s gusty, laboured intake of breath and the sound filled him with glee. He had this man beaten to a standstill and had done it without losing his own head. He chopped down the other’s feeble guard and for the first time in his life aimed a timed and directed punch. It took his adversary just under the ear and he dropped like a poleaxed steer.

  Johnnie stood for a moment gazing down on the man he had felled. He was so filled with satisfaction at having punched this man to the ground that he failed to notice either that the dawn was steadily spreading across the sky or that there was now no sound of guns. It was Sam’s shouts that jerked him to the present and turned his head towards the veranda. There he saw Sam and Lucy standing with Burt Sanders and Abe Thomas. All four had rifles in their hands but their grips were relaxed as if they no longer needed the weapons. Johnnie saw the reason why as he moved towards them and he sickened a little at the sight of four obviously dead men sprawled a few paces from a dead horse. Of the four on the veranda, only Lucy was not entirely jubilant at their victory. She had little to say but watched Johnnie critically as the others slapped him on the back and proclaimed him as a great fighter. It took Johnnie a few minutes to understand that it was his pulling to a standstill of the horse and rider that had really turned the battle in their favour. In his own excitement he had not seen the confusion it had caused among the other riders or been aware that Sam and Lucy in the doorway had been provided by his action with easy targets. The Regan brothers coming up to the veranda made it necessary for a fresh telling of Johnnie’s efforts and in the middle of that the rider who had been knocked out got uncertainly to his feet. He saw the group on the veranda, hesitated for a moment, then walked towards them.

  Sam eyed him grimly. ‘Jeff Talbot, I didn’t think to see you in on a business like this. I’ve a notion to drop you where you stand.’

  Talbot eyed the ground in front of him. ‘Didn’t want to come, Sam, but you know how it is. Donovan gives orders and we’re kinda scared to refuse to carry them out.’

  ‘Even if it means someone’s death. Maybe your own as well,’ Sam said sourly. ‘Well, there’s a message you can take to Donovan and anyone else that fancies clearing us off the range. You won’t have to say anything, just take these four dead men back to MD and everyone will understand what I mean.’

  ‘There’s two more a little ways out,’ Mike Regan cut in. ‘Me and Sean got ourselves one each.’

  ‘Six dead!’ Sam exclaimed. ‘That makes the price of land grabbing pretty high. Talbot, how many were in your raiding party?’

  ‘Ten. Harper was supposed to be leading us.’

  Sean’s eyes ranged over the four corpses in front of the house. ‘Harper ain’t among that lot. I’d know those fancy stitched boots of his a mile off. He ain’t one of those we got either. Looks like Harpe
r will be able to tell the news to Donovan himself.’

  ‘Just the same, we’ll load these bodies into a rig and Talbot can drive them back to MD. Digging graves might cool down any others who want to carry out Donovan’s orders.’

  ‘I’ll go harness a rig up,’ Johnnie said.

  ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Lucy told him sharply. ‘For a man who’s only just gotten over one mauling, you’ve done enough for the time being. You get inside the house and I’ll bathe as many of those bruises on your face as I can count.’

  Johnnie grinned, then his face set into hard lines. He faced about to Talbot. ‘I’ve got a message for Donovan as well. Tell him that Johnnie Callum had almost forgotten about his parents until the other day. Then say that I’m taking up their old patch of land as soon as I can locate it.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Harper reached the MD spread just after dawn. There were three other riders with him but none of them had anything to say to him. They were ordinary range hands with no pretensions to being gunmen and had little liking for the night’s business they had been engaged on. They had gone to the Stevens’ place because Donovan had given the order and they considered range warfare as part of their ordinary job, but now they were filled with disgust both for themselves and for Harper who had been their leader in what was supposed to be the comparatively simple job of cleaning up a small timer. Shooting up the place so that the occupants of it would turn and flee in terror they thought of as comparatively harmless, although of course there was the chance that someone would get killed in the process, but using dynamite did not amount to fair play. The three had been genuinely shocked when Harper had produced the dynamite from a sack he carried and told them of his intention to blow, first, the horse barn and then the house, and had refused to have anything to do with the idea. Harper had threatened and cajoled, then finally turned the job over to Morris, with Dayley and Savage to give him covering fire. Morris had died terribly in the attempt and the only result had been shattered windows and doors to the house. Still, it looked as if it had made it easier to throw enough lead into the house to scare the defenders into running and the three had taken their part in circling the place and pumping shots into it, then out of it had come the madman who had pulled one horse to a stop and thrown the rest into a confusion. A confusion that had left three dead men. Harper had been elsewhere when the dynamite exploded prematurely and was similarly out of the way when the three riders had been shot down. It looked to the men who climbed from their saddles at the same time that Harper did, suspiciously like cowardice.

  Harper himself knew it was cowardice and wondered how he could explain the failure of the enterprise to Donovan without disclosing the fact. It was a peculiarity of Harper’s make-up that although he could stand with an unwinking stare within ten paces of any man who wanted to draw against him, he could not face up to the wild shooting that went on in a general battle between men. Conscious of the hostility of his companions, Harper left them and walked across to Donovan’s huge, stone and log-built house. Donovan stepped out on to the porch at his knock on the door.

  ‘Well?’ There was neither friendliness nor compromise in the rancher’s booming tones.

  ‘We didn’t do too good, Boss.’

  ‘How’d you mean? You didn’t do too good.’

  ‘There was more men than we expected. I guess a dozen. There was five or six of our men killed and—’

  ‘Five or six! Hell’s bells. Don’t you know what went on? How many men rode back with you?’

  ‘Three, Boss, but it was that dark—’ Harper realized he had made a trap for himself.

  Donovan took a step forward until he was almost against Harper. ‘Four of you came back, eh? and ten of you went and you don’t know for certain whether they’re alive or dead? Harper, that makes you a lily-gutted coward, the sort I don’t want around here. Now get the hell off my ranch.’

  Harper’s face went livid and immediately he made a lightning grab for his gun. ‘No man calls me coward—’ he began, when Donovan’s massive fist smashing into his mouth ended both the quick draw and the speech at the same time as it sent him grovelling in the dust.

  Donovan, moving quickly in spite of his bulk, drove a boot into Harper’s ribs then stooped and snatched the six-gun from his holster. He stepped back a pace and cocked the gun.

  ‘Now get going before I drill a hole between your ugly eyes.’

  Harper picked himself up painfully and hobbled away and Donovan stalked towards the bunkhouse. He found the three riders who had come back with Harper and wrung from them a halting story of the night’s events as far as it was known to them. In a black rage at the seemingly easy defeat of his men, he went back to the house and flung himself heavily into a chair on the veranda. For a while he chewed on an unlit cigar then after a time the anger faded from his face. Of course, he had acted too quickly, that was all. Stevens, after the way he had threatened the man, had got himself help from somewhere to guard his place. He had only to wait, perhaps a week, perhaps two, and the guards would get tired of sitting around and go back to where they came from. An alternative was to find out who they were and arrange raids on their places. A night firing or something like that would send them scuttling fast enough. He tossed away the chewed cigar, took another from his pocket and lit it. Yes, a little patience was all that was needed and he would superintend the next raid on the Stevens’ place himself. He smoked for a while then jerked his head round at the sound of wheels rumbling nearby. His first impulse was to curse at the driver of the rig for bringing it so close to the house, then he saw Hennesey riding alongside the rig and he got to his feet. Hennesey, a rare enough visitor, could only spell trouble of some kind.

  The rig stopped a few yards away and both the driver and Hennesey got down to the ground. They covered the remaining space slowly, like men with something heavily on their minds. Hennesey spoke first.

  ‘Mr Donovan, there’s six of your riders in that rig. All of them dead from gun shots, except one. He was killed in an explosion and there isn’t very much left of him. Talbot here gave me the story and said they were acting on your orders. I’m asking you if such is the case.’

  ‘You’re asking me! Well I must say you’ve got more sand in you than I ever reckoned on. What makes you think you’ll get an answer from me, Mr Marshal?’

  ‘I didn’t think I would get an answer. Just hoped, that’s all. If I can’t get an answer I’ll have to leave it to higher authority. I’ll make myself plain, Mr Donovan. If you were any other man I’d take you in and charge you with promoting a range war and attempted murder.’

  ‘But being me, you’re afraid.’

  ‘I guess you could put it that way. I know darned well I can’t arrest you and if I could I wouldn’t be able to hold you.’

  ‘You’re damned right you couldn’t. What the hell made you come here?’

  ‘To give you a chance to quit on this range war before I send for State help.’

  ‘State help! So that’s your game. I suppose you reckon on that so-called judge backing your plea. Well, you can get to hell from here and tell Bohun that I can block any of his attempts to bring troopers this way. As for you, Talbot, I’ll find ways of teaching you that it doesn’t pay to go snivelling to the marshal.’

  ‘You’ve got things the wrong way round,’ Hennesey said. ‘Bohun isn’t backing my idea for State help and Talbot didn’t come snivelling to me. I saw him coming through town with that rig and forced the story from him.’

  Donovan grinned. ‘So you’re on your own, eh? Talbot, you take that rig away and have some men help you with the burying. I’ll see you later. Hennesey, I advise you to get to blazes out of this and think things over.’

  As Hennesey mounted and rode away, Donovan dropped back into his chair. For almost an hour he sat thinking. Hennesey, since Belle had regained control of the saloon, was a different man, a man to be reckoned with. He would undoubtedly ask for State help and Donovan was not at all sure that he
could block the application in spite of the fact that he was paying certain officials heavily not to pry too closely into his land grabbing dealings. The thing to do was get rid of Hennesey before he sent his message asking for help. The odds were that that message would go by the stage, in three days from now. Could he find a way of getting rid of Hennesey before that happened? For a moment, Donovan regretted his hasty dismissal of Harper. He would have been just the man to force a quarrel on the marshal then beat him to a quick draw. Either one of the other three gunslingers would have been equal to the task, of course, but as he had not seen them he presumed they formed part of the rig’s grisly load. A pity he himself had lost control of the Silver Dollar. If he had hung on to that it would have been easy to have Hennesey fired. The notion set his mind on a fresh track. Why should whoever owned the saloon have the hiring and firing of the town’s marshal? Only because the remaining property owners in the town were either too poor or too disinterested to pay the marshal’s wages. Suppose he, himself owned most of the property, that would give him a right to a say in the marshal’s appointment or his dismissal. Donovan got to his feet and strode towards the horse corral. There he saw Talbot and called the man to him.