A Good Day to Die

by William W. Johnstone

  The two riders waiting outside were Bayle and Lockridge, Dog Star Saloon regulars who often served as posse men for Sheriff Barton. Bayle was a solidly built, brown-bearded six-footer; Lockridge had a thatch of unruly straw-colored hair and a long, bony face.

  “Didn’t know you was coming along, Johnny,” Bayle said, surprised.

  “Okay with you?” Johnny asked.

  “Hell, yeah.”

  Johnny and Sam mounted up.

  Across the street in front of the feed store stood the barricade built along the store’s boardwalk. With wraparound wings on the sides, it would serve as a forward firing platform. The open walkway of the boardwalk between the barricade and the storefront was hemmed in to shoulder height on both sides.

  Dark yellow-brown light showed in the squares where the front windows had been. Shortly after occupying the space, the Ramrod riders had broken the glass out of the windows and built a barricade inside the front of the store—tables turned on their sides, barrels, and hundred-pound grain and feed sacks.

  Quent Stafford stood looking over the top of the bulwark. “Damn, it’s Johnny Cross. Somebody gimme a rifle.”

  “Here you go, Quent,” Marblay said, pitching a rifle underhand at him. Quent caught it in both hands, his meaty paws slapping down on the long gun and pulling it out of the air. He started toward the front of the building.

  Dan Oxblood moved to intercept him. “What’s your game?”

  “I’m gone shoot that sum-bitch Cross,” Quent said.

  “You ain’t got the sense God gave a chicken,” Oxblood said, shaking his head.

  “Git out the way,” said Quent.

  Oxblood stood unmoving. “What’ll you bet I can shoot your guts out before you get that rifle into play?”

  Quent’s face paled, then reddened. He started to swing the rifle barrel up.

  “Why, you—”

  A six-gun filled Oxblood’s left hand, leveled at Quent’s middle. The hammer clicked, a small sound that was very loud in the large, shedlike space.

  Quent froze.

  “You lose,” Oxblood said.

  Quent looked around, eyeing Ramrod riders grouped at the sidelines. He forced a laugh; it sounded sick. “You going up against all of us?”

  “Who wants to get burned down to save yore hide? Anyone so minded, step up,” Oxblood invited.

  Nobody stepped up.

  “Looks like it’s just you and me,” Oxblood said.

  Quent let go of the rifle like it burned his hands. It clattered to the floor, but didn’t go off. “I ain’t no gunfighter.”

  “You’re wearing a gun. Use it.”

  Quent shook his head. Cold sweat beaded on his lead-colored face.

  “I’ll give you the same chance Bliss gave Damon.” Oxblood dropped his gun into the holster. “Now we’re even. What’s stopping you?”

  Vince Stafford came up from the back of the store where he’d been napping, bullying his way to the fore. His men stepped aside, moving well back out of the line of fire. Clay came up behind his father.

  “What is this?” Vince demanded.

  “He’s goin’ against us, Pa!” Quent blurted, his voice thin and squeaky.

  Vince frowned fiercely, white tufted eyebrows forming a V-shape, head thrust pugnaciously forward. He kept his hands empty and in plain sight, though. “Thought you was a professional gun, Red. You’re working for me.”

  “Not when your idiot son tries to bushwhack Johnny Cross,” Oxblood answered.

  “Cross ain’t paying you, I am.”

  “I had a clear shot on Cross, but he stopped me, Pa!”

  “Shut up, Quent. What about it, Red?”

  “Damned right I stopped him.”

  “What for? Cross is a dangerous man. Maybe the most dangerous man siding the gambler.” Vince said.

  “He ain’t siding him. He just left the Spur,” Oxblood told Vince.

  “Now, maybe. But later?”

  “Johnny’ll kill a lot of Comanches.”

  “He could kill a lot of our men too. You think of that?”

  “I’ll worry about it once Red Hand’s whupped.”

  “You’re out of line, gunslinger.”

  “You don’t like it, Vince, you know what you can do about it. You’re wearing a gun, too.”

  “Easy, Red,” Clay breathed. “Knock it off.”

  Ignoring him, Oxblood pressed, “How ’bout it, Vince? You and Quent against me, right here, right now. What d’you say?”

  Vince sneered. “Shoot me, who’s gonna pay you, huh?”

  “You’re pushing it, Red. Don’t push it,” Clay said, half threatening, half pleading.

  “I ain’t so prideful I can’t back away,” Vince said. “I’m no gunman. I got nothing to prove. I don’t want to lose no more sons, neither. I want to live to avenge my boy Bliss. That’s what’s important to me.”

  “That your call?” Oxblood asked.

  “That’s my call. Let it go.”

  “I won’t go against Cross, or that one-legged pard of his. As for the rest of them, they ain’t nothing to me, one way or t’other.”

  “I still want you to brace Teece when the showdown comes with the gambler, if you’re of a mind to.”

  “Want me? You need me.” Oxblood laughed softly. “I’m the only one here can take Teece straight-on.”

  “Prove it,” Vince challenged.

  “I will when the time comes. When the Comanches are dead or on the run. Not before.”

  “All right.” Vince turned his back, going off by himself into the dim depths of the store.

  “Break it up. It’s over,” Clay told the men. “Get to your posts. Don’t let the Comanche catch you napping. Move!”

  The Ramrod riders began to disperse. Sidling away, Quent darted bad eyes at Oxblood, muttering, “You cain’t hide behind Red Hand all the time.”

  “Damn you, Quent!” Clay let his breath out slowly and took off his hat, holding it in his hands. Without warning he slashed the brim at Quent’s face, whipping it across his eyes.

  Quent cried out, raising his hands to his face. Clay kicked him between the legs. Quent doubled over, grabbing his crotch. His eyes bulged, and his face turned fish-belly white. His mouth was a black sucking O.

  Clay lowered a shoulder, slamming it into Quent’s chest. Quent, knocked off balance, fell. Vince rushed forward, throwing a hand out. “Clay, don’t!”

  Clay moved in, lifting a booted foot to stomp Quent. Vince clawed at his sidearm. “Clay!”

  Clay put his foot on the floor. His voice low, ominous, he said, “You gonna draw on me, Pa?”

  “Nobody’s drawing on nobody,” Oxblood said, resting a hand on his gun butt.

  Vince and Clay glared at each other over Quent, who lay rolling on the floor, holding himself between the legs and moaning.

  Vince’s hand fell to his side, empty. Clay ran his fingers through his hair, eyes wild in a stiff face. Vince moved away, off to the side.

  “One big, happy family,” Clay said, then swore. Vince spat on the floor. Quent kept moaning.

  “It’s a new way to fight Indians,” Clay went on. “We scrap like cats and dogs with each other and the redskins are so scared they call off the attack.”

  A couple of men in the shadows laughed.

  “I ain’t here to fight Injins,” Vince said, giving Clay a dirty look. “I’m here to even up on the killers of my son Bliss—the gambler and his whore.”

  Nobody laughed.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Sam Heller, Johnny Cross, Bayle, and Lockridge rode their horses west of town to the church, all unaware of how close Quent Stafford had come to taking a shot at Johnny. Nobody shot at them, neither red men nor white. The two men on duty in the bell tower mounted up and rode back to Four Corners. Nobody shot at them, either.

  The windows of the church were boarded up and shuttered closed, making the inside near dark. A couple lamps burned wanly at opposite ends of the central aisle. The newcomers brought thei
r horses into the building, tethering them in the outside aisle between the front wall and the rearmost wooden pews. Plenty of hay had been spread on the floor where the animals were grouped. It was an act of necessity, but even so, Bayle was self-conscious about it.

  Sam barred the front doors shut, then moved to a window, looking east through a gap between nailed-up boards. The others sat in a pew close by.

  “It don’t seem right,” Bayle said dolefully, shaking his head.

  “You still going on about the horses? What do you want to do, leave ’em outside so Comanches could steal ’em? That’d leave us in a pretty pickle!” Lockridge said.

  “I reckon the Lord won’t mind. If Red Hand wins, there ain’t gonna be no church. No town either,” Johnny pointed out.

  Sam turned away from the window. “Gonna be light soon.”

  “Let’s get to it.” Johnny hefted a sack filled with bundles of dynamite, slinging it over his shoulder so it hung down his side, leaving his hands free.

  Sam slipped his arms into the leather straps of his wooden gun case. It rested flat on his back. The mule’s-leg was holstered at his side.

  He and Johnny went down the central aisle to the west end of the church and through the door in the wall behind the pulpit. It opened on to the well of the bell tower. A vertical wooden ladder was nailed flat to the tower’s west wall, rising to the belfry. Near the top of the fifty-foot shaft was a wooden platform with a square hole in the center. A length of thick hempen rope hung down through the hole, with its fat knotted end dangling a few feet above the floor of the shaft. It was connected to the church bell in the spire atop the tower, allowing it to be rung from the ground floor level.

  “After you,” Johnny invited, indicating the ladder. Sam stepped forward. Looking up, his hat almost fell off. He tied the hat strings under his chin and let the hat dangle down the back of his head. He gripped a rung at shoulder height, giving it a good shake. It seemed sturdy enough. He started climbing, testing each rung before trusting his full weight to it.

  Up he went. The case on his back brushed against the bellpull, setting it swaying, though not enough to set the bell ringing. The shaft smelled strongly of the wooden planks and beams of which it was made.

  The higher he climbed, the less sturdy the wooden ladder seemed, though he told himself that was just an illusion. He was careful not to grip each rung with both hands at the same time. If one of the rungs gave way, he wanted to have a hand on another as backup.

  At the top, Sam reached over and pushed the hatch in the platform open. It rose on its hinges and fell back against the floor, making a dull booming noise in the confined space of the tower.

  He climbed through the open hatchway to the belfry, stepping onto the floor. Like the tower, the belfry was square. Its walls were waist-high. Above them, it was open to the sky. Four massive corner post beams upheld an obelisk-shaped spire. Four feet of open space stood between the top of the balustrade and the bottom of the spire.

  The spire was hollow, its interior shored up by a skeletal wooden scaffolding of beams and braces. A stout horizontal crossbar supported the church bell. The bell rope was secured to a ring in the clapper.

  Sam eased his arms out of the shoulder straps of the gun case and set it down in a corner of the platform. He set his hat squarely on his head.

  The air seemed cool after the close confines of the shaft. The sky was a rich purple-blue dusted with paling stars. The horned moon hung way down in the west, as if seeking to hook a peak rising from the jagged skyline of the Breaks.

  The eastern horizon glimmered with the glow of predawn. The few lights showing at Four Corners shed a hazy yellow blur against gray-black gloom.

  At the bottom of the shaft, Johnny watched Sam climb through the hatch, then started up the ladder. He climbed swiftly, nimbly. Reaching the top, he stuck his head through the hatchway.

  Sam sat in a corner with the open gun case flat on his lap, fitting the barrel and stock extensions to the mule’s-leg, converting it to a long rifle. It was second nature to him to put the pieces together by touch in the dark.

  Johnny climbed up on the platform, shucking off the sack of dynamite and setting it down carefully. He eased the wooden hatch closed. Hands resting atop the balustrade, he took a look around. It was still dark enough to keep him from outlining against the night sky.

  Sam finished assembling the long rifle. Closing the case, he set it down on its side against a wall, out of the way.

  Johnny turned to him. “Now we wait.”

  The wait would not be a long one.

  Darkness faded. The predawn sky took on a clear, colorless hue that was not white, not gray, but a mixture of the two.

  In Wade Hutto’s second-floor office in the courthouse, the air was thick with cigar smoke and whiskey fumes. Rutland Dean stood at a window looking east. He stuck his nose in a space between the nailed-up boards of a barricade, sniffing early morning air.

  It smelled fresh, clean in comparison to the stale smokiness of the office. Dean breathed deep, filling his lungs with the air of outside.

  White light seeped into the sky, the view gradually brightening. Veils and streamers of mist drifted above the ground. The thicket of trees east of town and north of Hangtree Trail was a black-green wall of foliage. At its base were flickering flashes of motion, flitting shadows that showed so quickly before disappearing that Dean was unsure of what he’d seen ... if he’d seen anything at all.

  The screams from the thicket had ended an hour or so earlier—a blessing, for the unseen sufferer as well as for those forced to listen.

  The rim of the eastern sky took on faint shadings of yellow, the first herald of sunrise. A dark blur detached itself from the gloom of trees, crawling west toward town.

  Dean stiffened. “I see something.”

  “What?” Banker Willoughby asked, starting from a fitful half-sleep.

  “Don’t know. It’s coming this way, though.”

  The others went to the windows, crowding around.

  “It’s a rider!” Chance Stillman exclaimed.

  Boone Lassiter stood at the window, rifle in hand. “One side, men. Gimme some room.”

  “Don’t shoot just yet, Boone,” Hutto cautioned. “Something about that rider ... doesn’t look right.”

  “Don’t look like no Injin,” Stillman pointed out.

  The figure on horseback advanced toward the courthouse at a slow walk, almost a crawl. Moving out from the trees, it crossed the fields at a measured pace. The image blurred as curtains of mist rolled across it, clearing as the mists moved on.

  It was quiet in Hutto’s office, the sound of the men’s heavy breathing clearly audible. A commotion below, shouts and half-stifled exclamations from the first-floor courtroom, indicated the apparition had also attracted attention in that quarter. His brow furrowed, his lips tightly compressed, Lassiter eyed the oncoming rider.

  “That’s no Injin,” Stillman said.

  “That’s a white man,” agreed Rutland Dean.

  “It was.” Lassiter had good eyesight.

  The man on horseback closed on the courthouse. He was lashed to a framework of two vertical wooden sticks with crossbars tied to the back of the saddle. It held him upright.

  He was bare from the waist up. Below, he wore brown pants. His feet were bare. A rope tied to his ankles ran under the horse’s belly. His head hung down, chin resting on his chest.

  The horse wasn’t much to speak of. It was old, swaybacked, heavy-footed—crow bait. A disposable animal, one the Comanches could do without. Its legs were hobbled with lengths of rope allowing it to take only slow, plodding steps. The rider tied to the saddle framework swayed and lurched according to the animal’s gait, as much as his bonds permitted.

  “Who is it?” Hutto whispered. His eyes narrowed as he stared at the rider, trying to figure it out.

  “Coleman,” Stillman said.

  One of the two who had set out after dark to try to reach the cavalry out on the
plains west of the Breaks; the other was Hapgood.

  “Coleman? Is that Coleman? That’s not Coleman,” Hutto disagreed.

  “It’s a big man. Coleman’s a big man. Hapgood’s a little fellow,” Stillman said.

  In the dawning light, it could be seen that the field fronting east of the courthouse was studded with a number of irregularly spaced fourteen-inch wooden stakes with red strips of cloth attached to each one.

  “He keeps coming straight-on, he’ll cross one of those dynamite pits,” Banker Willoughby said. “What happens then?”

  “Nothing. The dynamite’s safe,” Hutto said.

  “Unless the horse steps on a blasting cap, maybe,” Lassiter reckoned.

  “You’re a cheerful soul,” Hutto grunted. After a short pause, he asked, “You think that could set it off?”

  “I don’t know. Blasting caps are awful fluky.” Lassiter answered.

  “They can’t be that fluky if our people set them out without any of them blowing themselves up,” Hutto said.

  The rider neared, closing on a red-staked patch. Banker Willoughby panted, as though trying to catch his breath. Hutto was sweating. In this, he was not alone.

  “Something definitely wrong with that jasper,” Rutland Dean said.

  “He wasn’t screaming half the night for fun,” Lassiter bluntly pointed out.

  “It’s Coleman,” Stillman said.

  The mounted man seemed to have been hung with what looked like strings of gray-white sausages, in thicky ropy loops circling his neck and shoulders, hanging down on his torso, gleaming wetly.

  “It is Coleman,” Hutto muttered.

  “What’s that hanging around his neck?” Dean asked.

  “His guts,” Lassiter said.

  Stillman gagged. He put out a hand palm-flat against the wall, bracing himself. He’d gone weak in the knees.

  “No,” Banker Willoughby croaked. “Oh, no. It can’t be.”

  “They pulled out his guts and hung ’em on him like ribbons!” Stillman cried, his voice crackling with rising hysteria.

  Downstairs in the courtroom, somebody started screaming. Hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. Suddently, the screams were interrupted, cut off as if a hand had clamped down over a shrieking mouth, silencing it.