Sidewinders#2 Massacre At Whiskey Flats

by William W. Johnstone

  He shook the match out and dropped it, then slipped his Colt from its holster. “Let’s have a look,” he whispered. “Chesterfield, stay behind Scratch and me.”

  They catfooted toward the door. Bo put his hand on it and eased it open more. The low sound of voices came to his ears. One of them was familiar, but he couldn’t make out the words.

  Then they became clearer as the man moved closer to the rear of the barn, and Bo suddenly knew who the voice belonged to. That realization came as no real surprise, considering that the man who was speaking owned this place.

  “—careful,” Mayor Jonas McHale was saying to someone. “Once things have quieted down, we can dig up those crates. My plans have been postponed, that’s all. We’ll still make a fortune off those rifles.”

  Scratch heard it, too, and looked over at Bo, mouthing McHale? Bo nodded. Jonas McHale owned the freight line that ran between Whiskey Flats and Santa Fe. He could have bought the rifles in Santa Fe and smuggled them into Whiskey Flats along with the regular freight his wagons carried. Then they could be slipped out of town a few at a time and sold to the Apaches. It made sense.

  Bo pushed the door back a little farther. He saw McHale now. The mayor stood holding a lantern while two men struggled to move a heavy crate into a hole that had been dug in an empty stall. Bo recognized both men. The last time he had seen them had been earlier today, out in the breaks. They were the rustlers who had been holding the horses, the pair of varmints who had gotten away.

  Their presence here in the livery stable, following McHale’s orders, was proof that the mayor was behind both the rustling and the gunrunning. Just as Bo had begun to wonder about in the marshal’s office, one man had come up with both plans. Obviously, having a successful business and being the mayor of Whiskey Flats wasn’t enough for Jonas McHale. Greed and ambition had prompted him to cross the line into lawbreaking.

  “Too bad about Ike,” McHale commented as the two rustlers wrestled the crate of rifles into the hiding place. “Usually, he sleeps like a log. Once he saw what we were doing there, though, I knew we couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut.”

  One of the rustlers grunted. “I’m a mite surprised you took care of him yourself, Boss. Fella like you usually don’t want to get his own hands dirty.”

  “Just get those guns covered up now,” McHale snapped.

  Scratch had filled his hands with his Remingtons, and by the look on his face, Bo knew that his partner was ready to crash in there and settle the score for everything McHale had done. Since the two rustlers had their hands full and McHale didn’t appear to be armed, Bo figured he and Scratch could get the drop on the men fairly easily. He was about to nod when somebody pounded on the front doors of the barn.

  “Mayor!” Jake Reilly called. “Mayor McHale, are you in there?”

  “What the hell’s he doin’ here?” Scratch asked in a whisper.

  Bo just shook his head. They had left Reilly and Rawhide at the marshal’s office, and had figured that the young man would stay there until they got back.

  McHale was just as surprised as the Texans. He turned quickly toward the door and motioned for the two rustlers to keep quiet. Carrying the lantern, he went to the door and called through it, “Marshal? Is that you?”

  “Yeah. Sorry to bother you, Mayor, but have you seen my deputies, Creel and Morton? They came over here to put up their horses, but I thought they’d be back by now.” Reilly gave a clearly audible yawn. “They were supposed to come back to the office—”

  “I haven’t seen them, Marshal,” McHale cut in. “Sorry.”

  “Damn it,” Reilly said. “I wonder where they could be.”

  Bo nodded to Scratch and Pike and then stepped forward, leveling his Colt. “We’re here, Marshal!” he called. “McHale, unlock that door!”

  The two rustlers were half in and half out of the hole where they were burying the rifles. At the sound of Bo’s voice, they dropped the crate with a resounding crash and clawed at the guns on their hips. “Kill them!” McHale shouted, and then he did the one thing Bo hadn’t been expecting.

  He slung the lighted lantern right into a big pile of straw.

  The dry stuff went up almost like it was as combustible as coal oil. The rustlers opened fire as the flames leaped up. Bo called, “Pike, get down!” Then he went one way and Scratch went the other, outlaw lead whistling through the air between them where they had been a heartbeat earlier.

  Bo dropped to a knee and squeezed off two shots, both of them hitting the rustler closest to him. The man cried out in pain as he slid all the way into the hole. He landed on top of the crate, and struggled to bring his revolver into line for another shot. Bo fired again, and this time the man’s head jerked back as the slug bored a hole in his forehead and exploded out the back of his skull.

  Meanwhile, both of Scratch’s Remingtons roared as he limped hurriedly to the side. The bullets hammered into the other rustler, who folded up and collapsed on top of his dead comrade.

  That left McHale to bring to justice, but the fire had already spread across the stable so that the flames blocked the Texans’ view of the entrance. They heard shots, but couldn’t see what was going on. Bo whirled to Chesterfield Pike, who was scrambling to his feet after having dived to the ground when Bo warned him.

  “You all right, Chesterfield?” Bo asked.

  “Yeah, fine,” the giant rumbled.

  “Go around the back of the barn and spread the word about the fire. We need to get a bucket brigade going before it spreads!”

  Pike nodded in understanding and dashed out the rear door of the barn.

  “You see McHale?” Scratch asked.

  “No, he must have gone out the front. Maybe the marshal stopped him.”

  Even as Bo spoke the words, though, he felt doubt strike him. Jake Reilly had grown up a lot since coming to Whiskey Flats, but he still had a lot to learn and he wouldn’t be expecting trouble from the town’s mayor. McHale might have knocked the bar loose from the front door, rushed out, and gotten his hands on Reilly’s gun before the young man knew what was going on.

  Those shots Bo had heard could have been Jake Reilly dying.

  “We can’t get through that fire,” he said. “Come on!”

  They ran out the back as Pike had done and circled toward the street, hoping that they wouldn’t be too late.

  As they rounded the corner of the big building, smoke began to boil from the doors and the opening into the hayloft. The garish orange light of the flames spilled into the street. Its glare revealed Jonas McHale backing away, a desperate look on his face as he pressed a gun to the head of Rawhide Abbott. His other arm was looped around Rawhide’s neck, pressing cruelly against her throat. Facing them about twelve feet away was Jake Reilly, gun in hand, an anxious expression on his face.

  Bo and Scratch hadn’t seen what had happened, but it was easy enough to figure out. That was Rawhide’s pistol McHale gripped in his hand. She must have been with Reilly when he came over to the livery stable in search of the Texans, and the renegade mayor had grabbed her when he rushed out, jerking her gun from its holster and taking her hostage with her own weapon.

  “I’ll kill her!” McHale threatened. “I swear I will unless somebody brings me a horse!”

  “But…but you’re the mayor!” Reilly said.

  “Not until this little bitch’s father finally died! I worked as hard for this town as Norman Abbott ever did, but never got any of the credit! I couldn’t even get elected mayor until he was dead!”

  Bo came up on one side of Reilly, Scratch on the other. “So you decided to make as much money as you could and get your revenge on the town at the same time,” Bo said. “You tried to start a range war between Bascomb and North that would have spilled over into the settlement, and you got the idea of selling rifles to the Apaches, too. Maybe you thought you could prod them into attacking the town and wiping it out.”

  Reilly didn’t take his eyes off McHale and Rawhide, but he ye
lped, “What? McHale did all that?”

  “That’s right,” Scratch said. “He’s plumb loco with hate and greed, and now maybe he’s gonna be responsible for the whole town burnin’ down.”

  McHale grinned over Rawhide’s shoulder. “It’s what the place deserves.”

  Behind Bo, Scratch, and Reilly, the street was filling up with people as the settlers rushed out of their houses in response to Chesterfield Pike’s thunderous shouts of “Fire! Fire!” Men yelled and ran to get buckets to form a bucket brigade that would stretch from the public well to the stable. Flames were eating at the building’s roof by now. With all the chaos ensuing from the blaze, nobody seemed to be paying any attention to the small drama being played out by the light of the flames.

  “Get me a horse,” McHale demanded again. “I’m riding away from here, and nobody’s going to stop me!”

  “Let go of my deputy,” Reilly said, sounding for all the world like a real marshal.

  “The hell I will! This redheaded bitch is coming with me, so you won’t get any ideas about chasing me down. You’ll give me a day’s head start, or she dies!”

  Reilly shook his head. “No. You’re under arrest, Mayor.”

  Quietly, Bo asked, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Marshal?”

  “I know exactly what I’m doing,” Reilly said. “I’m doing my job, Deputy.” He raised his voice. “Are you going to surrender, McHale?”

  McHale jabbed the pistol’s barrel harder against Rawhide’s head, so she cried out in pain. “Go to hell!”

  Reilly lifted his gun and sighted carefully over the barrel. “Here’s the thing,” he said with a faint smile playing about his lips. “I figure I can put a bullet through your brain and kill you before you can pull the trigger, McHale. You know why I believe that?”

  McHale didn’t say anything, just bared his teeth in a grimace of rage and insane hatred.

  “I figure I can do that,” Reilly went on, “because I’m John Henry Braddock!”

  “You son of a bitch!” McHale screamed. He jerked the gun away from Rawhide’s head, whipped it toward Reilly, and fired. At the same time, Rawhide twisted in his grip, slammed an elbow back into his belly, and tore free. She lunged away from him, throwing herself to the street out of the line of fire.

  Reilly rocked back as McHale’s bullet crashed into his body. He held off on the trigger of his own gun, though, until Rawhide was clear, then he fired. Bo’s Colt and Scratch’s twin Remingtons roared at the same time, the shots all coming so close together they sounded like one. McHale was lifted off the ground and thrown backward a good five feet by the impact of four slugs smashing into him at once. The gun flew out of his hand. He landed hard on his back. His arms and legs twitched a couple of times, and then he lay still, staring sightlessly at the night sky as it was lit up by the hellish glare of the flames.

  As Rawhide scrambled to her feet and ran to Reilly’s side, Scratch stalked forward, keeping both guns trained on McHale just in case the man had any fight left in him. Scratch toed his shoulder, making McHale’s head loll loosely on his shoulders. “Dead,” the silver-haired Texan announced.

  “That’s good, I reckon,” Reilly said as he slid his gun back in its holster. “I never would’ve taken McHale for the man behind all this, but he made it pretty clear that he—”

  His head tipped back and his knees folded up underneath him as he dropped to the ground. “John Henry!” Rawhide cried. She fell to her knees beside him and ripped his coat open. “Damn it, his shirt’s all bloody! He’s hurt! John Henry, blast your hide, don’t you die!” She looked around wildly, her eyes wide with fear. “Somebody get him to the doc’s house!”

  Chesterfield Pike stepped up, bent over, and picked up Reilly, cradling his body gently in massive arms. “I been helpin’ out with the bucket brigade,” he said, “but it looks like they’re gonna keep the fire from spreadin’. I’ll take the marshal down to the doc’s, Miss Rawhide.”

  “Be careful with him,” Rawhide urged as she went with them, half running alongside Pike to keep up with the giant’s long strides.

  Scratch watched them go and asked, “Reckon he’ll be all right?”

  “I hope so,” Bo said. “If he is, I’ve got a feeling that Whiskey Flats has found itself a marshal for real.”

  “Did you see the way Rawhide was fussin’ over him?”

  “I saw,” Bo said, smiling now. He started reloading his Colt, and Scratch began thumbing fresh cartridges into each of his Remingtons in turn as the two Texans walked down the street toward Dr. Summers’s office.

  Behind them, the livery stable continued to burn, casting the light of its destruction over the body of Jonas McHale.

  CHAPTER 29

  “I swear, if you two stay in Whiskey Flats much longer, I’m not going to have room for any more patients,” Dr. Edwin Summers said with a smile as he wiped blood from his hands with a clean rag.

  “What about Marshal Braddock?” Bo asked, thinking that the news must be good; otherwise, the sawbones wouldn’t be smiling.

  “He’ll be fine,” Summers said. “The bullet missed anything important and went straight through him. He lost enough blood so that he’ll be laid up for a while, regaining his strength, but in a month or so he ought to be fine…especially with Pamela Abbott helping me look after him.”

  “I heard that, Doc!” the pretty redhead called from the other room. “My name’s Rawhide, dang it!”

  Bo smiled and asked, “Can we see him?”

  “Of course. Just don’t tire him out too much.”

  Bo, Scratch, and Chesterfield Pike all crowded into the little room where a bandaged-up Jake Reilly lay in bed with Rawhide perching a hip on the mattress beside him.

  “How’s things in town?” Reilly asked, only a slight tremor in his voice betraying the weakness he had to be feeling.

  “Pretty quiet now,” Bo said.

  “Livery stable’s burned to the ground,” Scratch added, “but the buildings around it got wet down enough so that they didn’t catch on fire. Mighty lucky, if you ask me.”

  “Yeah,” Reilly agreed. “And it was lucky that you and Bo discovered what McHale was doing.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Bo said as he held his hat in front of him. “He would have overstepped himself sooner or later. Fellas who let greed get the best of them always do, sooner or later. With McHale, it just happened to be tonight.”

  “Say what you want,” Reilly replied, “but you and Scratch have a knack for running smack-dab into trouble.”

  Scratch chuckled. “I don’t reckon we can argue with that, Marshal.”

  Reilly turned his head to look up at the young woman. “Rawhide, you don’t mind if I talk to Bo and Scratch alone, do you?”

  Rawhide frowned. “You heard what the doc said. You’re not supposed to tire yourself out.”

  “It’ll just take a minute.” Reilly got a solemn look on his face. “Anyway, all the representatives of law and order in Whiskey Flats shouldn’t be here together. What if there’s some more trouble tonight? I want a couple of deputies out there keeping the town safe. You and Chesterfield there are elected.”

  “Well…all right.” Rawhide reached out and smoothed back Reilly’s blond hair with unaccustomed tenderness. “But I’ll be back to check on you later.”

  She stood up and left the room, taking Pike with her. Reilly gestured toward the door and said to Bo, “Shut that, will you?”

  Bo eased the door closed and turned back to the man in the bed. “Something on your mind, Marshal?”

  “Yeah.” Reilly motioned the Texans closer and lowered his voice even more. “I…I don’t think I can go through with it.”

  “Through with what?” Bo asked, although he knew perfectly well what Reilly was talking about.

  “You know…swindling the folks in town by pretending to be John Henry Braddock.”

  Scratch said, “Seems to me you meant it when you told McHale you were Braddock.”


  Bo nodded. “That’s the way it sounded to me, too.”

  “Well…” Reilly looked back and forth between them. “Who’s to say it couldn’t really be that way?”

  “You mean you’d just keep on pretending?” Bo asked.

  “It’s not exactly pretending,” Reilly argued. “The real Braddock is dead. Nobody would ever know the difference, especially if…if I could be a good marshal for these folks. And I think I can. I’m learning how.”

  “You are, at that,” Bo agreed.

  “And I’d have Rawhide and Pike to help me, and a good judge in Harry Winston.”

  Scratch nodded. “Sounds like it just might work out.”

  “And you fellas, too, of course.”

  “Now, there’s where you’re wrong,” Bo said.

  “We got to be ridin’ on,” Scratch said.

  “But why?” Reilly insisted. “If I can settle down here, there’s no reason you can’t, too.”

  “We’ve been on the drift a lot longer than you have, Ja—” Bo stopped himself. “I mean John Henry. Putting down roots is something that Scratch and I…well, we just can’t do it.”

  “There might be a place out there we ain’t seen yet,” Scratch explained, adding with a grin, “and some trouble we ain’t got into.”

  “But…but…” Reilly sighed. “I can’t change your minds, can I?”

  “Not hardly,” Scratch said.

  Reilly pushed himself a little higher in the bed and asked, “Is it because of that wanted poster?”

  “Wanted poster?” Bo repeated.

  “You can’t fool me. I saw the way both of you reacted when you saw one of those reward dodgers, the one you put in your coat, Bo. It had your pictures on it, didn’t it? You’re wanted, and you don’t want people here to find out about it.”

  Bo chuckled. “That’s not quite it, John Henry. But I reckon you’ve got a right to know.” He reached inside his coat, took out the paper he had put there earlier, unfolded it, and smoothed it out so that Reilly could see it.