“Wh-what do you want?”
“I’d like to buy a few sticks of dynamite.” He didn’t get an immediate reply. “Why’re you so skittish?”
The clerk looked ready to bolt through the door and go screaming down the main street.
“I heard what you done last night. Mister Underwood’s tellin’ everyone who’ll listen how you almost killed him.”
“Stories grow the more they’re told. It’s like some people’s noses.” A quick look around the store showed a little bit of everything for sale, but a small keg of gunpowder was as close to explosives as anything. There wasn’t even a keg of Giant Powder.
“And Geoff Nelson. You tried to plug him with that six-shooter of yours. Don’t go sayin’ that’s not true!”
“I settled accounts at the saloon and want to buy Nelson—Geoff—a drink. Bury the hatchet. Make things right.”
“Then let him get you the dynamite. We don’t carry anything like that. Mister Bellamy’d never permit it. He’s the owner. We don’t even sell pistol or rifle cartridges. For them you’d have to go across the street to the gunsmith.”
“Does the gunsmith sell kegs of powder?”
“Not that I know. What he’s got is for reloading. From what I hear, he’s the best there is within a fifty-mile radius of Crossroads. But you want a case of dynamite, he won’t have it to sell.”
“Now, why would I want to let Nelson get me dynamite?”
“That’s what he does. He peddles it from a shed at the edge of town. The mayor run him out of town trying to set up shop along the main street. If Nelson gets soused and decides to smoke, the mayor didn’t want the whole danged town to blow up. His shed’s far enough out, so that’s not a concern.” The clerk pointed north.
“Much obliged.” Luke heard the clerk’s gusty sigh of relief at not getting killed. He let out one of his own. Benedict had put in an order for dynamite with Geoff Nelson when they met in the saloon last night. Who else would want it but Rollie Rhoades?
Luke considered going directly to the store, then considered another mystery to solve first. Once he tracked down Nelson, there’d be no turning back. Walking slowly, he kept a sharp eye out for a woman wearing a floppy-brimmed hat. Most of the ladies wore hats, but nothing like the one he had seen through the jailhouse window the night before. After twenty minutes he had yet to spot anyone who might have been responsible for pumping him for information about Nelson, then freeing the dynamite salesman.
He realized the dark had masked more than the woman’s face. He wasn’t even sure what color the hat had been. Black? A dark blue? Something else? The closest he came was a woman wearing a bright red hat whose brim flapped about in the rising wind whipping down the street.
He counted four hotels in Crossroads but saw no way to get information from the clerks in any of them about their customers. Bribery might work, but without a better description of the woman, who did he ask to find? Forking over a lot of money to find a solitary woman wasn’t a plan designed to work. If anything, the hotel clerks would take his money and then lie before summoning the marshal.
The best hotel in town struck him as the place the woman would stay. He had nothing to base this gut feeling on other than how quickly she’d forked over a hundred dollars to spring Nelson, and if he found her, luck had to be a big part of the search. Settling in a chair on the boardwalk across the street from the Mercator Hotel, he tried to think through everything he knew. The woman had helped him back in Preston but now shifted her allegiance to men working for Rhoades. That meant she was either one of the gang or had dealings with them. That struck him as wrong. A better explanation was that she worked for her own best interest and nothing else.
“A bounty hunter?” Luke wondered aloud if the mystery woman sought Rhoades to turn him in for the reward. How she intended to capture the outlaw was a poser. Luke walked a dangerous trail, but his goal was more limited. He wanted his wife back. And because Benedict or Rhoades had stolen her away, he’d bring them to justice at the end of his barrel.
He forced himself to relax. Thinking about what he would do to the outlaws caused him to tightly clench his fists. Audrey had to be alive. What would he do if—when—he rescued her? Turning the gang over to the law was one choice. But pulling the trigger, especially on the man who had gunned him down at his own wedding, felt like justice.
His trail was clear and straight. What path did the woman take?
Luke heaved to his feet. Waiting for a woman he couldn’t identify to show up at one of four Crossroads hotels got him nowhere. Turning northward, he walked quickly to the edge of town. Where stores were jammed wall to wall with an occasional alley between them in the center of town, stores were now scattered among boardinghouses and even a few private homes. Since this was the major road out of Crossroads, he doubted he would miss Nelson’s store.
Less than a quarter mile farther, he spotted the man before he came to the shack with the “Dynamite for Sale” sign dangling from a tree limb. Nelson put his back to a buckboard that had slid off the road into a ditch. Luke watched the man struggle, taking some pleasure in how increasingly futile his efforts were. The more Nelson tried to keep the buckboard from slipping deeper into the muddy ditch, the deeper the wheels sank.
Whatever he hauled was covered by a tarpaulin in the back of the buckboard. Giving up, Nelson stepped away and kicked at the wheel. He kicked a second time, then unhitched his horse and led it to the ramshackle one-room building just beyond the sign. Luke let him get almost to the shed before going to the buckboard. His boots sank deep in the sticky mud as he edged over to see what freight Nelson carried. Leaning over, he caught the edge of the tarp and tugged enough to show a wood crate.
Luke recoiled, then calmed down. A box of dynamite was safe enough to carry. He had used a stick or two when he proved his farm. Stumps were stubborn to remove without enough explosive. But this much—four crates—was enough for a miner to blast into a mountainside. Only there wasn’t any mining going on in the vicinity that Luke knew of. This much explosive could clear a couple sections of land.
He edged his way out of the ditch and scraped off as much mud from his boots as he could. As he turned toward Nelson’s store, a slug sailed past his head. As if he had been shot, he dropped straight down. He hit the road and rolled away from the buckboard. He flopped into the ditch on the far side of road. It was only a little less muddy.
Poking his head up, he got his hat shot off. Nelson ran toward him, six-gun blazing.
Luke rolled to one side, dragged out his own smoke wagon, then settled down on his belly. Supporting his gun hand against a rock, he returned fire. Nelson had been lucky. Luke was accurate. His first round hit Nelson in the leg and sent him tumbling.
“All I want is to know where he is!” Luke rose enough to see that Nelson wiggled like a snake for cover. “I’ll let you go if you tell me.”
“Who are you talking about? You’re trying to rob me! It wasn’t enough to get me locked up last night. You want to kill me!”
There was something in what Nelson claimed. Luke wanted to get to his feet and rush forward. But that was a good way to get killed. Nelson’s original attack had been blunted by buck fever, but now he calmed down and became increasingly dangerous since he was wounded. A trapped rat, a trapped, wounded animal with a six-shooter. Patience won this fight, as hard as that was for Luke to accept.
The Schofield’s hammer came back in full cock. Luke pulled just a little on the trigger to take up the play. The next shot would come almost instantly if Nelson showed his ugly face.
“Is Benedict coming around to pick up the dynamite? Or were you going to deliver it to him?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Go away or I’ll fetch the marshal and he’ll lock you up and throw away the key.”
“Who bailed you out last night? What’s her name?” Luke shifted, knowing Nelson was
also on the move to get a better angle of fire.
“Whoever you are, you’re crazy. Go on, get outta here. Leave!”
Luke heard the change in Nelson’s voice and was ready when the man popped up like a prairie dog. In spite of knowing this would happen and preparing for it, Luke jerked at the trigger instead of squeezing it. His shot went wide. Nelson moved a little closer on the far side of the road. It took only a second for Luke to realize Nelson wanted to get to the buckboard and its explosive load. From his own position in the other ditch, he couldn’t stop him by making a frontal attack.
Nelson would cut him down if he did that.
The crown of Nelson’s hat slowly rose above the edge of the opposite ditch. Luke started to fire, then relaxed. Nelson tried to get him to waste ammo. A bullet through the hat would hit a stick and not the man’s forehead. Luke kept moving, slipping and sliding in the gooey mud. Jockeying for better position got him nowhere.
“Are you delivering the dynamite to Rhoades? What’s he going to do with it? Four crates is enough to . . . blow up a bank.” That realization caused him to freeze in place. Rhoades was loco enough use that much to reduce the bank to rubble and destroy the vault. The greenbacks might turn to ash but the waist-high stacks of gold would survive. The scrip meant nothing to the outlaw if it was issued on the local bank. Even if those were federal notes, Rhoades likely shared most westerners’ disdain for any money that didn’t give a metal clink when dropped on a bar.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Nelson moved his hat toward the shed. Luke was ready when the man popped up in the opposite direction, finally leaving the protection afforded by the ditch bank. He fired. The bullet skimmed along the roadbed. He got dirt in Nelson’s face but didn’t touch him with the bullet.
“The marshal will be along to see what all the gunfire’s about,” Nelson called. “I’m local. You’re not. He’ll believe me when I say you tried to ambush and rob me.”
“You’ve only been in town a couple months. And you’re no stranger to that jail cell. Unless I miss my guess, you’re the one who’ll be waiting for the circuit judge.”
Luke cautioned himself to patience. Nelson would make a mistake and he’d have him, but how hard would it be getting him to spill his guts about Benedict? And about the woman who had bailed him out the night before. The gang and the woman must be connected in some way.
Nelson reversed course and bolted for the buckboard. Luke rose to his knees and started firing. Every shot missed. Nelson flopped into the mud by the buckboard, daring Luke to come for him.
“Patience,” Luke whispered. He broke open the six-shooter and reloaded. He’d had a chance and muffed it. Then a different tidbit of wisdom came to him. He started toward the shed. If he got inside, he might swap Nelson’s livelihood for the information he required to find Audrey.
“You can’t go there. You can’t!” Nelson shouted in rage when he realized Luke’s strategy.
“I’ll burn it to the ground and everything in it. Tell me what I want to know and I’ll leave you alone.”
“I can’t trust you.”
“You can trust me to destroy everything you’ve worked for.” Luke realized he had struck the mother lode. Nelson had been on the run most of his life and had settled down in Crossroads. This shack contained all his hope for the future. “Tell me!”
“All right, all right, don’t shoot.” Nelson stood, using the buckboard as a shield. He held up his hand. His six-gun pointed toward the sky. From the way his shoulders slumped, he was defeated.
Luke climbed to his feet, dripping mud.
“I want to know where Rhoades and his gang are holed up. The dynamite’s for Rhoades, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, he paid me a pretty penny, too. Or his partner Benedict did. I ain’t never seen Rhoades, but Benedict talks about him all the time like he’s some kind of genius.” Nelson sagged even more. “You won’t let me deliver to him now, will you? I need to get paid the rest of what he owes me. There’s nobody else around here who’d take this much explosive off my hands.”
Luke played it by ear.
“I’ll let you deliver the load and get paid. Then we’ll ride in different directions.”
“I—” Nelson cut off his sentence and looked over his shoulder. Thundering down the road from town came a rider bent low so his head and his mount’s were side by side.
Luke shifted his attention to the rider. Recognition hit him like a sledgehammer.
“Benedict!”
The outlaw began firing, but not at Luke or Nelson. Every round tore up a bit of the buckboard. Then he hit the jackpot. A bullet slammed into a crate of dynamite and detonated it. The shock wave lifted Luke off his feet and threw him into the ditch. A second explosion rolled above him, but he was deaf and stunned and could not appreciate how powerful the blast was.
After a few seconds, he shook himself and got to his feet. His knees almost buckled. He lifted his gun and tried to find Benedict, but the outlaw was long gone. The only evidence of his handiwork lay in the deep blast crater. Nelson, or what remained of him, would never betray the Rhoades gang now.
His ears began to ring. He regained his hearing slowly and when he did, he heard a horse neigh. Luke homed in on the sound. It took a few more seconds for understanding to penetrate the shock.
“Benedict!” He stumbled a few steps before regaining his strength. He ran for Nelson’s shed. A saddled horse stood off to one side. When Benedict came from the shack carrying a gunnysack, Luke began firing. The distance was too great, but he wanted to slow the outlaw down.
Crazy Water Benedict was too cagey for that. He slung the gunnysack over his horse’s rump and vaulted into the saddle. Spurring the animal, he rocketed away. Luke barely got halfway to the shack when it erupted in an explosion that shoved him flat on his back again. He stared up at the sky, deafened once more. Bits and pieces of fiery debris floated through the air.
All he could think of was that he watched the destruction of his chance to find his lost love. Then the ash and soot and burning rubble began raining down on him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DON’T YOU GO bleeding on my floor. I just washed it.”
Luke Hadley stirred. The slightest movement sent waves of white pain lancing through him. To make matters worse, the town doctor had stitched up some deep cuts. Going to the town seamstress would have given him better results. He flexed his arm, then balled his fingers into a fist. The stitches pulled and tore at his flesh, but he wasn’t bleeding around any of the unbandaged sutures. The doctor began wrapping them up with white cotton strips. He sewed better than he wrapped.
“You still got ’em all, no thanks to being so close to that explosion. What were you doing playing with fireworks? Not even the young ’uns in these parts are so careless, and that’s saying a mouthful. There’s one last cut to suture. This’ll hurt a mite.” The doctor dropped his needle onto a metal tray with a dull clank. With a practiced move, he swung Luke around on the operating table and poked and prodded spots that hurt more after the examination than before. Finally satisfied, he pointed to a straight-backed wood chair with a thin cushion tied to it.
“Sit. And mind your bleeding on the upholstery. I had that brought all the way from Boston last year. It cost me an arm and a leg, but it’s worth it.”
The doctor settled into a matching chair facing the one Luke writhed about in. Finally finding a pose that didn’t make him cry out, Luke took a look around. He was in a doctor’s surgery and had no memory of how he got here. A cursory examination showed how his coat, vest and shirt had burned. The three layers of cloth saved his hide. Other than a few raw spots and where the doctor had patched him up, his skin was intact.
“The marshal says that Nelson fellow wasn’t so lucky. I always thought he was a damned fool playing with nitroglycerin the way he did. He fancied himself quite the chemist, always mixing th
is with that. This wasn’t the first time he blowed himself up, either. When I was a sprout I worked in a tin mine. Just like Nelson, the blaster thought he was smarter than his nitro.” The doctor got a distant look in his eye. “I was only twelve and he was my first patient.” The look went away and he sighed. “He was the first one I lost, too. Blew his fool arm off and would have left him crippled in both legs if I had saved him. I reckon that made him luckier than he deserved.”
“I’m glad you learned your trade enough to save me.”
“You weren’t in any danger. The explosion blew you into mud. That plugged up the worst of your bleeding wounds. I checked for broken bones.” The doctor shook his head. “There weren’t any I could find, but you’re going to have one bruise.”
“One?” Luke hardly believed that.
“Only one, but it’ll be all over your danged body.”
“It feels as if my chest has been crushed.” Luke delicately probed and traced the outline of the shrapnel inside him. He wondered if it had saved his life again. Somehow, he doubted it from the way he hurt now.
“I saw plenty of scars all over your body while I worked. Were you a soldier during the war?”
“I got shot up by the Border Ruffians. By the time I healed enough, the war was over.” Luke kept the bitterness from his voice. Charles Hamilton had led the Ruffians on the raid, but his right-hand man, Rollie Rhoades, had been responsible for the explosion that blew the piece of heavy metal into his chest. Rhoades had blown up an entire townful of civilians just to watch the fireworks. There hadn’t been any real strategic reason, other than to frighten Free Staters.
And Crazy Water Benedict had learned well from his boss. He must have lit the fuse that blew up all of Nelson’s supply.
“But he got away with a sackful of . . . explosives?” Luke remembered more of the fight now. Nelson. Benedict riding past and detonating the dynamite. And he stole a bag of something from Nelson’s shack before blowing it up, too. Every detail came to him etched in acid and flame.
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