There was no music, but Eddie kept time by pounding his booted heels on the floor, yelling at the top of his lungs a song Fletcher had heard many times during The War Between the States.
Shoo fly, don’t bother me,
Shoo fly, don’t bother me,
Shoo fly, don’t bother me,
I belong to Company G.
It was the saloon girl’s painted smile suddenly changing to a shocked, scarlet O accompanied by a little gasp of alarm that finally drew Eddie’s attention to Fletcher standing grim and terrible in the middle of the floor, his Winchester still hanging loose in his left hand.
The man’s song faltered to a stop as the girl stepped warily away from him, her eyes frightened.
“Hi, Eddie,” Fletcher said. “Remember me?”
Eddie’s face was stricken. “You!” he gasped. “You’re dead.”
“Came close, Eddie,” Fletcher said. “So close, I recollect you asking Conroy if you could finish me off. Well, here I am. Now’s your chance.”
Fletcher swayed slightly on his feet as dizziness took him again. Eddie, observant and sly as a bunkhouse rat, noted this and felt his flagging courage return. The gunman’s eyes narrowed, his small-chinned face wrinkling as his mouth stretched in a sneer.
“I think maybe I’ll just do that,” he said. “I don’t mind being known as the man who cut the great Buck Fletcher down to size. Why, I’m—”
“Are you going to talk me to death or haul your iron?” Fletcher asked grimly.
“Damn you!” Eddie yelled.
And he went for his gun.
Fletcher brought up the muzzle of the Winchester and fired. He cranked another round and fired again. Both shots hit Eddie square in the chest, the bullets clipping arcs out of the tobacco sack tag that hung from his shirt pocket. The man staggered backward, his Colt only now clearing leather. His face was stricken, unable to accept what was happening to him.
Fletcher fired again, and Eddie hit the wall of the saloon with a thud, rose on his toes, his eyes wild and afraid, and fell flat on his face.
The bartender, the man named Caleb Mills, stepped out from behind the bar and looked down at the dead gunman. This time there was no talk of vigilantes.
“That’s Montana Eddie Sinclair,” he said, providing the man with his only eulogy. “He’s killed himself a few, though not a one of them had bullets in the front that I recall.”
Fletcher felt the room spin. He stepped to the bar and leaned heavily on its polished mahogany, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps as he battled against the pain hammering at him.
After a few moments, as the world began to right itself, he looked at the bartender, the dance girl and a few idlers now clustering around Eddie Sinclair’s body.
“A man rides with bad company, he reaps the whirl-wind,” Fletcher said. “He brought the reckoning on himself.”
The bartender nodded, his normally florid face pale. “I’d say he did just that.”
“Where’s Higgy Conroy?” Fletcher asked.
Mills shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s around.”
“There’s another man, goes by the name of Tex Lando. Have you seen him?”
Mills’ eyes flickered to the back door of the saloon. That scared, apprehensive glance lasted only an instant, but Fletcher noted it and guessed at what it implied.
“What’s back there?” he asked, his voice hard and low.
“Nothing,” Mills said. “Ain’t nothing back there, ’cept the outhouse.”
“There’s a shack out there,” the dance girl said, her face vindictive. “Lucy is back there with a feller. I think maybe it’s your man.”
“What’s your stake in this?” Fletcher asked, surprised, as he fed shells into his rifle.
The girl shrugged. “I don’t like Tex Lando. When he gets drunk, he likes to slap women around, and he’s carved up a few in his time.”
“Don’t go back there, Fletcher,” Mills said. “You’re in no condition to draw against a gunman like Lando. He’ll kill you for sure.”
Fletcher ignored the man and walked to the back door of the saloon. He opened the door, then turned. “I’ll take it right hard if someone comes out this door after I close it,” he said.
Nobody moved.
Fletcher stepped outside and shut the door quietly behind him. A low timber-and-tarpaper shack stood about ten yards away, its single window to the front covered over with yellowing newspapers. He heard a man’s raised voice, then a woman’s giggle. There was a sharp slap, and the woman immediately hiccupped into silence.
Fletcher stepped softly to the door of the shack and stood listening.
“Now do like I told you and see what all the shooting was about. And while you’re at it, bring me back another bottle.”
It was Lando’s voice.
Then the woman’s again, the words slow, separated by sobs: “I’ll go, Tex. You don’t have to hit me again.”
“Next time I tell you to do something, you jump right to it, you hear?” Lando said. “I don’t take lip from no two-dollar whore.”
“I’m going,” the woman said. “I’ll bring you back a bottle, Tex. You know I will.”
“See you do.” Lando laughed harshly. “Now git! Hell, maybe I missed all the fun. I bet ol’ Hig has gunned him another pilgrim.”
The door opened, and the girl started to step outside. Fletcher had time only to note the woman’s wide, frightened eyes and the angry bruise on her right cheekbone before he grabbed her by the arm and hauled her out of the doorway.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
Lando was lying on his back on an iron cot and smoking a thin cheroot, his arms behind his head.
“Do I have to slap you around again, bitch?” he snapped without looking up.
“You can try, Tex,” Fletcher said quietly. “It won’t be so easy with me.”
The gunman sat bolt upright on the cot, his naked chest and shoulders stark white against the mahogany brown of his face and hands.
“What the hell!” Lando yelled. “We left you for dead, Fletcher.”
“You made a bad mistake, Tex.” Fletcher smiled without humor. “You should have killed me when you had the chance.”
Lando’s frantic eyes slid to the chair beside the bed where his gunbelt hung. Knowing he couldn’t make it in time, he licked suddenly dry lips and decided not to try.
Fletcher nodded. “Good choice. I’d have killed you before you got halfway there, Tex.”
The gunfighter stepped to the chair and lifted the gunbelt and its holstered Colt, hefting it in his hands.
“Where’s Eddie?” Tex asked. “Did you kill him?”
Fletcher nodded. “Eddie paid the price for his sinful ways. He’s at peace now.”
Tex studied Fletcher closely, his finely honed gunfighter’s instinct telling him that this man had reached the end of his rope, had tied a knot in it and was now barely hanging on.
In this he was right.
The cabin floor was lurching under Fletcher’s feet, and Lando kept swimming in and out of his line of vision, now sharp and defined, now a hazy, indistinct blur. Aware of his growing weakness, Fletcher knew he must do what he’d come here to do. He was fast running out of time.
“Lando,” he said, “it was your idea to drag me behind a horse. You gave Conroy the rope, and you laughed when you were doing it.”
The gunman smiled. “Hell, Fletcher, that was just a prank.”
“It was low down,” Fletcher said, each word coming slow and painful. “As pranks go, that one was the lowest.”
Lando shook his head, grinning, playing for time. “Buck, Buck, let bygones be bygones. Hell, man, it was just a joke.”
“It was no joke to me, Tex. I was the one being drug.”
A few long moments of silence hung heavy and expectant between the two men. Then Fletcher said, “I’m going to give you more of a chance than you gave me, Tex.” He threw the gunbelt on the cot. “Anytime you feeling like
going for it, make your play.”
Lando, a seasoned professional, knew every last grain of sand had run through the hourglass. The time for talk was over.
He clawed desperately for his holstered Colt.
Fletcher let him clear the leather, then shot him.
Unlike Eddie, he had no need to shoot again.
The heavy bullet took Lando square between the eyes, scarlet blood suddenly fanning high on the wall above his head. The gunman slammed back against the cot frame, its iron springs squealing shrilly in protest, then lay still.
Automatically, Fletcher ejected the spent round. The bright brass fell ringing to the wood floor of the shack, and he fed another round into the chamber.
He turned quickly, the rifle coming up fast as someone opened the door and stepped lightly inside. It was Lucy, the angry bruise on her cheek already turning a mottled black.
The whore looked at the dead man on the cot and spat. “Good riddance,” she said. “Tex Lando, you weren’t much.”
Lucy looked at Fletcher, her eyes concerned. “Are you all right, mister?” she asked.
Fletcher nodded, swaying on his feet from exhaustion. “Two down,” he whispered huskily. “One to go. Where can I find Higgy Conroy?”
The whore’s eyes were hard and knowing. “Don’t worry about that, mister,” she said. “I got a feeling he’ll find you.”
Fletcher walked back into the saloon, ignoring the body of Montana Eddie Sinclair stretched out on the floor. The large crowd that had gathered parted quickly as he walked through them. Then men were running around him, dashing out the back door, anxious to see what had become of the fearsome Tex Lando.
He stopped at the bar and said to Mills, “Brandy.”
The bartender nodded, brought out the bottle of Hennessy and poured Fletcher a generous shot. The gunfighter tilted the glass to his lips and drank it down in a single gulp.
The brandy hit his stomach, warming him, and immediately he felt a little better.
He was still very weak, and the pain from his wounds kept hammering at him, draining him. But at least the saloon was no. longer reeling nauseatingly around him, and he could get his eyes in focus.
Matt Baker, who seemed to have thought of everything, had put money in the pockets of his pants, and Fletcher rang a dollar on the bar.
“For God’s sakes, Fletcher, haven’t you had enough?” Caleb Mills asked, picking up the coin. “Can’t you just let it go?”
Fletcher shook his head at him. “This is a reckoning. Once it’s begun, there’s no ending of it. It won’t be over until I kill Higgy Conroy. Or he kills me.”
“Damn it all, man, you’re already dead on your feet,” Mills said. “You’ve been all shot to pieces.”
This time Fletcher nodded. “I know that, but I still have it to do.”
“Then do it outside,” Mills snapped. “You’re bad for business. There were only three big spenders in this town, and you’ve done shot two of them already.”
Fletcher nodded, laid his glass on the counter, then stepped out of the saloon onto the boardwalk. The town was as he remembered it from the last occasion he was here, only this time, when the gunfight came, there would be no little English painter to help him and—
Wait!
Fletcher rubbed his fevered forehead, trying to dredge up something buried deep and impossibly vague from his past. Slowly, almost painfully, he remembered.
Suddenly he knew where he’d seen the little man before.
And he felt a chill run down his spine.
He was—
“Fletcher! ”
Higgy Conroy stood straddle-legged across the street, his thumbs tucked into his gunbelts. The gunman was smiling confidently, relaxed and ready.
Fletcher stepped to the edge of the boardwalk. “I’ve come for you, Conroy,” he said. “There’s a reckoning to be paid.”
As if by magic, frightened townspeople had cleared the busy street. Now Fletcher and Conroy stood alone, facing each other across twenty yards of mud and slushy snow.
An errant wind caught a piece of newspaper and tossed it high in the air. It hung there, fluttering, for a few moments before flapping to the street again like a wounded bird. A lean dog, his muzzle gray, lay outside the general store, head on his outstretched paws, watching what was happening with disinterested black eyes.
“Hell, I thought you’d be dead for sure by this time.” Conroy smiled, his snake eyes ugly. “But I see you’re only half-dead.”
“You should have killed me when you had the chance,” Fletcher said. “Now it’s too late.”
“It’s never too late. I got plenty of time to do it now.”
Conroy, moving easily, stepped lightly off the boardwalk onto the street.
“I’ll always wonder who was faster,” the gunman said. “But I guess now I’ll never find out, all shot up the way you are. Must slow you some.”
“I’m faster,” Fletcher said. “A lot faster. On your best day you couldn’t shade me, you cheap, no-good tinhorn.”
“Then prove it,” Conroy said, stung, his face livid. “Drop that Winchester and haul iron.”
The rifle was hanging from Fletcher’s left hand. He unbuttoned his mackinaw with his right and cleared the coat from his Colt. Then, slowly, he bent his knees and laid the Winchester at his feet.
A triumphant sneer stretched Conroy’s thin mouth. This was going to be too easy.
But the gunman still needed an edge.
He reached for his gun first, his hand streaking downward in a blindingly fast, practiced motion.
Fletcher, in his weakened condition, was maybe half as fast that day as he’d been when he first rode into the Dakota Territory.
But it was enough.
He drew, and his gun hammered, bucking in his hand, as Conroy cleared leather. Fletcher saw two of his shots kick up little puffs of dust on the front of the gunman’s shirt.
Conroy screamed in frustrated rage and staggered back. His face stiff and determined, he steadied himself and fired both guns at the same time. He fired again, and Fletcher felt a bullet burn across the outside of his right thigh.
He couldn’t take hits like that!
Fletcher consciously slowed down and fired again. This time he saw blood blossom like an opening flower just above Conroy’s belt buckle.
The gunman doubled over, his left arm instinctively covering his stomach as a gut-shot man will do. But he was still in the fight, firing unsteadily with the Colt in his right fist. A shot slammed into the front of the saloon, then two more splintered the boardwalk to the right and then the left of Fletcher.
Conroy tried to raise both his revolvers, but they suddenly seemed like anvils in his hands, and he pitched forward on his belly into the mud, his eyes wide and unbelieving.
He was dying and he knew it, and the man who’d killed him was still standing.
It wasn’t supposed to be happening this way. He’d wanted to be known as the man who’d killed Buck Fletcher, and now that chance was slipping away and would soon be gone forever.
Driven by the instinct for revenge, Conroy raised his arm, attempting to lift his gun again, trying for one last shot.
He never squeezed the trigger. Death stilled his finger, and Higgy Conroy was no more, his arm frozen forever in its last shooting position.
The next day, they buried Higgy that way, the undertaker unable to get the stiff, outstretched arm back to his side despite breaking it with a ball peen hammer in three places.
He couldn’t do anything with the look of fear and anger on the dead man’s face either; but then, no family or friends came to view the dear departed, and so in the end it didn’t matter.
As for the people of Buffalo City, they came and saw and didn’t care. They were building a church and a city hall and would soon have a telephone exchange and maybe streetcars.
Higgy Conroy, the feared gunman who once strutted a wide path in their town, would very soon become just a minor footnote in Buffalo City h
istory.
Chapter 21
Buck Fletcher thumbed shells into his gun. He glanced briefly and coldly at the contorted body of Higgy Conroy lying in the street, then holstered his Colt and began to walk along the boardwalk in the direction of the hotel.
“Fletcher, wait!”
The gunfighter turned and saw Mills walking hurriedly toward him, his face flushed and determined, eyes blazing.
But this was no longer the Buck Fletcher who had ridden into Buffalo City a few short weeks before, confused and uncertain about his place in the world. He had reverted to what he once had been, a professional gunfighter, rigid and unbending, a man who must go his own way. There was no longer any give in him; nor, he told himself, would there ever be again.
That realization had come quick and unbidden in the moments before the gunfight with Conroy, and hard and uncompromising though it was, Fletcher knew there could be no turning away from what life and circumstance had made of him.
He had killed as an act of vengeance, true to his harsh code, and now he could not go forward. He could only go back.
Like a gambler desperately trying to outrun a losing streak, Fletcher had attempted to flee his past. It had not worked. The years that lay behind a man had a way of catching up to him the moment he stopped to take a breath. And once caught, the past took a firm hold and would not let him go.
This Fletcher accepted, and he vowed that he would never again permit himself to think it through and perhaps dare to hope otherwise.
- “Mills,” he said, his voice flat and icy, “I will not be run out of town, and I will not be laid hands on. If you call your vigilantes, I swear to God, there will be more dead men in the street today.”
The bartender, shrewd in the ways of those who wore guns, read the warning signs and backed off, suddenly fearful. In the space of less than an hour this man had visited death on Buffalo City, and now, as the clock continued to tick, he was perhaps best left alone.
“Hell, man,” Mills stumbled, trying hard to reach some safe middle ground, “you’re all shot to pieces. You better go see Doc Hawthorne and get patched up. You’re dead on your feet your ownself.”
Fletcher nodded. “That thought had occurred to me.”
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