Holly ...
The name turned in his mind like a sluggish snake. Flint had tried to kill him that day in Dodge when the gunslinger had senselessly shot down a towner and started a blood bath. Flint and Holly had gone to Dodge to kill the woman-killing Bick brothers, and had wound up being responsible for eleven deaths, all because of Holly’s vicious temper and touchy vanity. “Lookit the dude!” was all the drunk had said, and Holly had gunned him down. Naturally the man had friends, and they hadn’t known that the two strangers, one slim as a whip, the other built like an oak tree, were widely regarded as the deadliest gunmen in the Territory, the cream of the crop from dreaded Drum.
Blurred memories of a street full of howling lead and screaming people, the pain of three bullet wounds in his powerful body, the burning flash of his gun as he swung on Holly and gunned him down ...
Flint shook his big head and the ugly memories faded. Pain, desperation and rage had caused him to miss killing the man he hated that hellish day, and Holly had patiently waited two years to square accounts.
He smiled grimly as the irony struck him. He’d had his chance to kill Holly in Dodge and failed, while the same thing had happened when Holly had him under his sights on the farm. The men whom the newspaper scribes said were the best in the gun trade, had each notched up a failure at the thing they did best of all.
His hand brushed the butt of the black Colt and the smile faded. There would be no more failures. There was little left in Caleb Flint’s life that was important any more, but this, his first gun mission in two years, was important enough.
He kept pushing his sorrel towards the heavy blue line of the Eternal Mountains.
Beyond the mountains lay the Cherokee Badlands. And Drum.
Chapter Five – Drum
THE COLD NIGHT wind was sweeping across the trackless wastes of the Cherokee Badlands and spattering dust against the rooftops of Drum when Kain Shacklock returned from the north.
Link Callaway challenged him at the town marker, and Gene Street was there to check out the night-rider when he came around Dockerty’s Barn. Shacklock nodded in approval and found himself glancing upwards as he approached the looming bulk of the hotel.
“Who goes?”
The voice came down from the upper balcony before he could make out the silhouette with the rifle.
“Shacklock!” he called, then struck his heart with his clenched fist in their secret sign.
“Good to see you back, Kain!” came the muffled response, and Dave Piper went back to the boring but vital job of watching over Drum’s windy night.
Shacklock rode on to Quinn’s Saloon, dismounted and went in. He paused just inside the doors, his eyes taking in every detail before he tugged off his hat. Banging dust from his rig with the hat, he headed for the unplaned bar where Barney Quinn was reaching for a bottle of sour mash.
The gunfighter king of Drum was a big man, not tall, but blocky and big-boned and he moved like a man walking in mud. His arms were very long, his hands dangling almost to his knees and he had a habit of carrying his head to one side as though listening for something. His face was dark and cruel, the rocky jaw revealing the strength required to maintain authority over a bunch of the hardest men in the country.
The outlaws were present in numbers to witness Shacklock’s return from Capital City tonight. Normally, anything up to half of Drum’s floating population could be expected to be absent on various gun jobs at any given time. But these times were anything but normal. They were now playing for the highest stakes yet, in a game which, if won, could see a sympathetic man installed in the governor’s chair and full pardons granted all around. No man wanted to be away from Drum these days with such vital affairs hanging in the balance.
Barney Quinn poured sour mash into a clean glass and had it waiting on the bar when Shacklock reached him.
“Welcome back, Kain,” he said. With his black eyepatch, and lantern jaw, Barney Quinn looked as dangerous a man as one might encounter in the outlaw town. But it was all sham. Quinn had plied the gun trade once, until a lawman’s bullet had taken out his eye and his courage. Now he served drinks and arranged meetings between clients and his friends who still were what he had once been; men with fast guns for hire.
Shacklock sampled his drink. Every expectant eye in the place was on him, but they knew better than to approach him until he was ready.
Quinn’s Saloon was in a tall, narrow, two-storied building, which of all the seedy constructions that comprised the town, had weathered the elements best. The barroom was some sixty feet long by thirty wide, high walled and gloomy without decoration of any kind. Around the rough tables sat the gunfighters of Drum along with the townsmen, a scattering of Mexicans, and one fat Indian wearing a stovepipe hat eighteen inches tall. Even strangers coming here for the first time to arrange some deadly business had no trouble picking the outlaws from the towners. It was like the old trail scout who, when asked by a tenderfoot how to tell the difference between tame and wild Indians, replied, “Sonny, when you’re able to see an Indian, you’ll know he’s tame!”
Shacklock drained his glass, placed it down on the bar for a refill, then nodded.
“Good likker, Barney. Needed that.”
That was the signal. Slim, narrow-hipped men rose from their tables and crossed to the bar. Turning to face them, Shacklock rested his elbows on the bar, nodded to his top lieutenants, then spoke in a bitter voice that twanged like a Kentucky banjo.
“Governor Arnell’s still in office,” he said. “Nobody even knows about the kidnappin’.”
A circle of faces stared at him incredulously. How could the wife of the Territorial governor be kidnapped without the news being hollered all over the country?
“They’re playin’ games,” said Shacklock. “Arnell, Fallon—the bastards are up to somethin’. The governor’s goin’ about his business like nothin’s happened, and Fallon ain’t been seen in five or six days.”
“Don’t Larsen and Whitney know what’s goin’ on, Kain?” asked Monroe McGuire.
Shacklock shook his head. “No. They both keep pressin’ Arnell to resign, and I gave Whitney another note to hand the governor while I was there. But he won’t give a direct answer, won’t even tell Whitney what he plans to do.”
The gun packers looked at one another in a disturbed silence. Shacklock’s ambitious scheme to help Larsen and Whitney unseat the Arnell administration had seemed foolproof on paper. All knew Arnell was devoted to his wife, all knew that Deputy Governor Jake Larsen was ready to take over the governor’s job at a moment’s notice. The killers had been confident that all they had to do was to stage the abduction, then sit back and wait for the government to fall. Naturally they had been doubly alert against any attempt to rescue Rachel Arnell, but nobody had anticipated this seeming indifference from Capital City.
“So Arnell thinks we’re playin’ games, does he?” Shad Crane spat at length. “So why don’t we cut off her ears and send them to him and see how that gets to him?”
It sounded a logical step for desperate men, yet glancing around swiftly as Crane spoke, Shacklock realized that no more than three or four seemed in agreement. The others didn’t say they were against such an extreme measure, but the leader knew they were. The reason for this, Shacklock suspected, lay deeply hidden in the Western makeup. Ever since the migrant trains had come across the Mississippi, there had been a crucial shortage of women in the West. This had led to a kind of veneration for the opposite sex on the frontier, and a woman killer or woman beater was universally despised, even amongst brutes like these. Indeed, no less than five veteran gun packers had quit Drum in protest when the scheme had been first hatched, amongst them Notch Mallone, a top-flight gun packer who had been Caleb Flint’s lieutenant in what were generally referred to now in Drum as “the good old days.”
Shacklock scowled and reached for his drink. He wasn’t squeamish. He’d be prepared to send Arnell a pair of severed ears, or a corpse, if it came to that. But
with some division in the ranks concerning the governor’s wife already, he didn’t want to risk anything that might split them wide open. Not yet.
But something had to be done, and not for the first time did he find himself wishing that he had Holly and his sharp brain to call on. Which reminded him ...
“Any word from Holly yet?” he growled.
Heads shook all around. The biggest mystery around Drum these days was why Holly had vanished on the same day that had seen Notch Mallone and Stacey Briggs quit. Mallone and Briggs had objected to the kidnapping, but Holly had no more scruples than a rattlesnake. Holly could be an uncomfortable man to have around, but he certainly had a smart head on his shoulders.
A gust of wind shook the clapboard building and set the smoking oil lamps trembling. The night wasn’t cold yet, but Shacklock rubbed his arm vigorously as though feeling a sudden chill. The barrel-chested killer knew he’d done a tolerable job of bossing Drum since that eventful time when Flint had vanished and the men had voted him in as leader in preference to Holly. Yet deep down, Shacklock knew he had presided over a steady decline. Nothing had been the same since Flint had gone. In some mysterious way, Caleb had seemed able to invest everything they had done in the old days with meaning, and had certainly given them dignity and standing with his iron presence. His going had left a gap that Shacklock had never ceased to be aware of. It seemed to have also heralded a decline in the quality of jobs offered the Drum gunfighters, marking the end of the big range wars in which they’d participated with distinction and ushering in the day of the petty killings and minor holdups that had robbed Drum of much of its status.
Shacklock had seen the writing on the wall for some time. Jobs were growing fewer, dirtier and more poorly paid. On the other hand, the law enforcement agencies in the Territory were slowly but surely growing stronger. Soon the day would come when thirty gunfighters and a sweep of open plain would not be enough to keep out the manhunters who would come for them, and it had been this that had prompted Shacklock to grab with both hands when Larsen and Whitney had come to him with their great scheme. The chance to leave Drum forever and take up new jobs for the new government—that had been the bait Kain Shacklock had snapped at.
Reaching for his refilled glass, Shacklock threw the contents down his throat and then they began to talk, hashing the whole operation over, considering possibilities, attempting to out-guess the governor and the feared Fallon. The marshal bothered them most, for he was the implacable enemy of every man in Drum. They’d known from the beginning that Fallon was the man they must rid themselves of if they were to be successful, and it had been the accidental discovery of the affair between Fallon and the governor’s wife that had first directed the plotters’ attention to lovely Rachel Arnell. They must have Fallon dead, and it was disturbing to speculate on what that hard man might be doing tonight while they were holding the woman he loved.
Suddenly Shacklock broke off what he was saying as hoof-beats sounded above the whine of the wind. All heads turned as they heard the horse draw up out front, then came the sound of quick, light steps on the porch boards.
Moments later the batwings banged open and Holly stood there, bathed in yellow light against the backdrop of the black night.
Though it was past nine, it was still early by Duke Benedict’s book when he stepped from the doors of the Frontier Hotel in Drum. The facilities at the Frontier were primitive, yet somehow he had managed to spruce himself up to a standard that would have been acceptable in the better hotels of Kansas City or Chicago. He’d shaved and tubbed and changed into fresh linen, while the hotel’s desk clerk had done a good job brushing his suit and putting a shine on his thirty-dollar boots. The prospect of violent death seldom preoccupied Duke Benedict for any length of time, but the possibility of going to meet his Maker unshaven or in dusty boots filled him with genuine horror.
There was jauntiness to Benedict’s stride as he walked the short distance along what passed for a main street in Drum and turned into the diner. His experience was that nothing put an edge on a man’s appetite like the uncertainty of knowing whether he’d ever get to eat another meal, so naturally he was hungry today.
The ham and eggs were passable, but the hospitality at the diner was nothing to get excited about. Having been introduced to the gunmen of Drum by Holly as a new recruit, and presumably accepted, he naturally expected the five hardcases he encountered in the diner to show friendly attitudes—and hopefully yield information.
Such was not the case. The best the outlaws could manage were a few curt nods in response to his cheery greeting, and one solitary “howdy.” That was it. They ignored him pointedly for the remainder of the meal hour, though Benedict was aware of their covert glances and the subdued murmuring behind raised hands.
He believed he’d grasped the general idea by the time they got up and jingled out, six-guns flopping in oiled holsters. They would accept him because he and Brazos had been brought in by Holly, but they certainly weren’t about to go out of their way to make him feel welcome.
The sullen waitress told him she had seen Brazos heading towards the bridge some time earlier, and lighting up his first Cuban cigarillo of the day, he headed in that direction.
He may have seen uglier places than Drum, but couldn’t recall one off-hand. Isolated, heat stricken, dusty and unpainted, the outlaw town had been erected in the center of a wide and featureless plain with only the shimmering ridges of the Eternal Mountains to the south and the raddled hills to the west to break the monotony of the view.
The drabness of unpainted frame and thick-walled adobe was unrelieved. Dull-eyed women ground corn in the scant shade of brushwood ramadas, scowling at his passing elegance as though he were a rapist on the prowl. Mangy dogs and scraggy hogs rooted in the rubbish and naked children tumbled about them. Here and there, propped up in a doorway or squatting on the top rail of a fence, was a cluster of better-dressed men, gentry of the owlhoot, for sure. Benedict didn’t know if the original inhabitants of Drum objected to the influx of fast guns that had made their town notorious throughout the West; they looked too violent to worry about much more than where their next meal or drink was coming from.
Drum had begun life as a mining town and the old abandoned shafts pocked the landscape on the southern side. Passing the old assay office, Benedict paused curiously, then walked across to rub dust from a grimed window and peer in.
A soft chime of spurs heralded the arrival of Monroe McGuire, a gunman with glittering eyes and a long nose.
“What do you think you’re doin’, Benedict?”
“Just getting to know the place better—friend,” he smiled. “Anything wrong with that?”
McGuire took a straw from his tobacco-stained teeth and leant the point of his shoulder against the wall. He looked Benedict up and down from the tips of his shiny black boots to the top of the gray, low crowned Stetson. His expression suggested strongly that he didn’t much care for what he saw.
“Mebbe,” he grunted. “Don’t pay to be nosy hereabouts.”
Checking out Monroe’s great beak of a nose, Benedict thought of several sarcastic replies. But suppressing them, he mildly said, “I’ll remember that, friend,” and went on his way. He doubted that they were holding the governor’s wife in the dilapidated assay office, but made a mental note to check the building out when the opportunity offered.
Strolling past Quinn’s, where some of Shacklock’s bunch sat smoking and taking their ease, Benedict continued on round Dockerty’s Barn corner, bringing the river and Hank Brazos into view.
The Texan was throwing sticks for Bullpup to chase down by the bridge. As usual, Brazos had his battered hat perched on the back of his head, the harmonica slung around his muscular throat reflecting the sun. Powerful slabs of muscle strained against the thin cotton of his faded purple shirt as he stooped to retrieve a stick from Bullpup’s fearsome teeth. Straightening, he hurled the stick into the river and the hound went in like a porpoise, throwing up a
burst of spray. Brazos laughed as he stepped back from the flying water, the complete picture of an easy-going drifter, which was precisely the impression he wanted to convey to the watchful men of Drum.
“Howdy, Yank,” he greeted as Benedict strolled up. “Some sweet mornin’, ain’t it?”
“Indeed it is, Johnny Reb.” Benedict bared his teeth at Bullpup as the sodden hound came thumping back with his stick, and the dog retaliated by sidling up close to his well-pressed pants before shaking himself violently Benedict swore and Brazos laughed. Situation and background might change, he mused, but the Benedict-Bullpup feud remained the same.
“Have you seen Holly this morning?” Benedict asked, brushing water from his pants.
“Yeah, saw him about an hour back. He was on his way to see Shacklock at the saloon.”
“Were you talking with him?”
“For a minute or so.” Brazos stared up the slope to where three gunmen watched from the shade of a crumbling old adobe wall. He smiled for their benefit, but there was nothing funny in what he said. “He seems to be sweatin’ some, Yank. Seems Shacklock don’t exactly trust him after him takin’ off that way.”
“I sensed that last night. Did you hear Shacklock say Holly had been missing a week?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“Did he tell you where he’d been all that time?”
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