by JR Roberts
When his Darley Arabian horse, Eclipse, was stolen, Clint Adams saw red. But no sooner had he set out in pursuit of the thieves than he found himself up to his neck in even bigger trouble. A bunch of mad revolutionaries were set on wrenching New Mexico away from United States, and it seemed that The Gunsmith—with a little help from bounty hunter Jarred Hall—was the only man who could stop them. Before long Clint was seeing red again ... only this time it was the stark crimson of spilled blood.
NEW MEXICO POWDER KEG
THE GUNSMITH 401
By J. R. Roberts
First published by Piccadilly Publishing n 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Robert J. Randisi
First Smashword Edition: May 2015
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
Cover image © 2015 by Tony Masero
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Mike Stotter
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author.
Chapter One
West Texas
When Clint Adams rode into Texas from Oklahoma, his intent had been to visit some old friends, toss back a few beers and kick up his heels for a while. That jovial mood had followed him like fragrant smoke around a cooking fire and lasted almost as long. He’d made camp, fallen asleep while counting the stars and woke up with his supper still warm in his belly.
It wasn’t unusual for Clint’s slumber to be interrupted unexpectedly. Any man who lived his life by the gun had his share of ghosts to contend with. The faces of all those dead men didn’t fade like any other memory. They lingered and grew silent at times, only to come back and howl in the dark at others. On this occasion, Clint twitched and reached for his modified Colt, fully expecting to hear the remnant of some old nightmare rattling around in the back of his mind.
There were no ghosts vying for his attention and no echoes of gunfire from one of the many times in his past when Clint had nearly met his maker. For a moment, Clint wondered if the twitch had merely been the result of gobbling down that last bit of pork and beans from dinner he should have tossed aside. Rather than sit up or stretch his legs, he kept still and waited.
Another few seconds passed and then he heard it.
Rustling.
It came from nearby and was just loud enough to catch his attention. More than that, it sounded as if whatever was creating the sound was trying not to be heard. When animals moved like that, they did so gracefully and easily. It was instinct. When men moved with the same intentions, it was more deliberate. The sound Clint heard was the latter. He’d had more than enough people try to sneak up on him over the years to know that sound better than almost any other.
His hand eased a bit closer to his holstered pistol, while his eyes searched the shadows at the edge of his campfire for any hint of movement. He quickly picked out two shadows that hadn’t been there when he’d rested his head upon his bedroll earlier that night. As his fingers curled around the grip of his Colt, Clint listened to every rustle in the breeze and stared through the slits of his eyelids at the men hunkered down over his saddlebags.
Since it seemed the intruders weren’t aware that he was awake, Clint used that to his advantage and rolled away from his resting spot. Almost immediately, a shot blasted through the chilly air and a piece of lead scorched through the spot that Clint had just vacated. Dirt from the impact was still flying in all directions when Clint answered back with a shot of his own.
The Colt bucked against his palm, spitting its fiery retort in the direction of the sparks that had accompanied the first shot that had been sent his way. Knowing he most likely hadn’t hit anything, Clint scrambled to his feet so he could move away from the dim light of the dying fire.
“He’s awake!” a man said from the direction of the first gunshot.
One of the shadows Clint had picked out from the darkness replied, “I can see that! Put him down, fer chrissakes!”
A second plume of sparks erupted from nearby, briefly illuminating the man who’d set this fight into motion. He was a skinny fellow with a long face covered in stubble and dirt. Clint stayed low and took a few quick steps before planting his feet and squeezing off another shot. While his first bullet had been meant to buy him some time, the second wasn’t about to be wasted. Keeping steady even as a panicked shot was fired in his direction, Clint took aim to send his round straight through the skinny man’s chest.
As one of the intruders spun on a heel and fell over after being hit, the other two answered back by pulling their triggers again and again. One of them proved to be smarter than the rest by hurrying to get behind solid cover. That left one of the strangers in the open and he took a rushed shot while wailing in a voice that sounded like rusty iron being dragged over dry slate.
“Where the hell you goin’, Laird?” the stranger said as he pulled his trigger one more time.
“Leave my property where you found it,” Clint announced, “or I’ll drop you right beside it.”
The man with the grating voice was short in height and thick around the middle. For a moment, he looked around as if he didn’t realize he was the one still holding Clint’s saddlebags in one hand. Tightening his grip on the hand-tooled leather, he held the bags close and said, “You want your things? Come and get ’em!”
“Suit yourself,” Clint replied as he stood up.
Obviously not accustomed to anyone calling him on that particular taunt, the man holding Clint’s saddlebags gawked at him and took a step back. To his right, the third man poked his head up from behind the boulder he’d found and sighted along the top of his pistol.
Both of the remaining intruders moved at the same time. Clint was watching them carefully, waiting for a juicy target to present itself. When one of the men fumbled to thumb back the hammer of his pistol while the other straightened his arm to take a more careful shot, Clint’s choice was practically made for him.
Clint took half of a second to steady his arm before squeezing his trigger. As soon as the gun went off, he immediately shifted his aim to the next target in line and fired again. Both shots came in quick succession and when they were done, the crack from the pistol’s barrel rolled through the air to disperse into the night like so much thunder.
The intruder that had been hunkering behind a rock had been the recipient of the first of those last two shots. He flopped backward to land sprawled on the ground, his brains leaking out through the hole that had been freshly drilled through his skull. The man who’d tried to lay claim to Clint’s saddlebag gnashed his teeth and slowly wilted as he reached down to his right leg. Blood from the wound he’d just received glistened in the dim moonlight as the pain slowly seeped in.
Clint was about to tell him to drop his gunbut the pistol slipped from the intruder’s hand to land heavily at his feet. As he stepped forward, Clint looked around for any other shadows that might have been trying to creep in on him. Although he couldn’t find any other shapes in the darkness, he quickly realized one shape wasn’t where it should have been.
Eclipse, Clint’s Darley Arabian stallion, was gone.
Chapter Two
For the first couple of minutes, Clint didn’t speak. He kept himself busy, first by dragging the wounded man closer to the campfire, and then wrapping him up in rope that had been coiled near the saddle
that was lying on the ground. He did these things slowly and deliberately, without responding in the slightest to anything the other man said. And that man did say an awful lot.
“This was just a mistake,” the man said. “Just a big mistake. We … we thought you was someone else. Yeah! It was supposed to be a joke. All right … well … not a joke so much as a …”
Clint stopped what he was doing and glared intently at him.
“It’s like I said,” the man continued in a meeker tone. “Just a mistake. No harm done. Leastways, not to you.”
Now that the man was getting some wind back into his sail, Clint picked up his pace a bit. If the man so much as twitched the wrong way, Clint was prepared to draw his Colt and finish the job he’d started. It turned out that all he really needed to do was cinch in the ropes around the man’s legs to put him back in his place. Once the weathered binding scraped against the man’s bullet wound, he was too busy squirming to do much else.
“You killed two men here tonight,” the prisoner said. “Let me go and we’ll call it even. If you push me, mister, I warn you I can make things pretty damn rough!”
The prisoner’s gun was still where it had landed when he’d dropped it. Just to make sure he wasn’t in for any surprises, Clint patted him down for any other weapons. All he found was a hunting knife hanging from his belt and a flat rock in his pocket. Clint removed both, palming the rock in his left hand and sending the knife whistling through the air with a snap of his right.
The blade spun one complete rotation before digging into the dirt squarely between the prisoner’s legs. Having a close call with that much sharpened steel was more than enough to shut him up.
“What’s your name?” Clint asked.
Recoiling as if he’d heard a voice come from the trunk of a petrified tree, the prisoner replied, “Sven. Svenson.”
Since he didn’t give a damn if the other man had stuttered or just possessed a boring name, Clint said, “All right, Sven. Now tell me where to find my horse.”
“I … I don’t . . .”
“And before you try to pass yourself off as some innocent bystander, remember I saw you shooting at me while you tried stealing my saddlebags.”
Suddenly, Sven’s face brightened. “That’s right! That’s all I meant to do. I swear! Just take some supplies. I didn’t have no part in taking a horse. That’s a hangin’ offense.”
Clint stood up so he loomed over the other man. Placing his hand upon the Colt at his side, he said, “Being hung is the least of your worries right now, Sven.”
“How do you know your horse was taken? Maybe he just ran off.”
“Honestly,” Clint replied dryly. “That’s the story you’re hitching your ride to?”
“I’m here and your horse ain’t. What do you want from me?”
“You can start by telling me where to find those men you’re riding with.” Clint glanced over to the nearest carcass and added, “Or … the men you were riding with.”
Looking back and forth from the gun at Clint’s side to the blade that had been stuck between his legs, Sven acquired a distinct desperation in his eye. “I just signed on with them a week ago,” he sighed. “Honest.”
“Who are they?”
“That one over there,” Sven said while nodding in the direction of the man who’d fired the first shot, “was Laird. A killer from Missouri.”
“And the other one?”
“I just knew him as Cort.”
“What’s his last name?” Clint asked.
Sven shook his head. “We didn’t give no last names. Didn’t need them or want ’em. We were just put together for this one job for a quick payday and then it was to be on to the next. I didn’t intend on getting to know any of these men very much at all until I worked with them some more and that’s the truth, mister.”
Clint had plenty of experience in reading the truth in other people. While it wasn’t an exact science by any stretch of the imagination, he had enough confidence to know that the man in front of him now was too tired and scared to tell a convincing lie. Besides that, there was something else that interested him even more. “Who put you three together?”
Like any drowning rat, Sven was all too happy to grab on to the first lifeline that was tossed his way. His eyes widened and he said, “Andy Bennelli is the man’s name!”
“Where can I find him?”
“Just across the border in New Mex. I’ll take you straight to him. He’ll have your horse, mister. I can get it back for you without a hitch.”
“I’ll get him back all right,” Clint snarled.
Sven was grinning now. “That’s right. I guarantee it. First, my leg will need tending. Seeing as how it was shot and all.”
The wound on Sven’s leg was nothing serious, which was exactly what Clint had intended. After just a few seconds of observing the cowardly sheen in the other man’s eye, he’d known that if anyone was going to spill his guts about what had happened, it would be Sven. He hadn’t expected it to be a complicated story and he was right about that. Unfortunately, Eclipse was already gone by the time Clint had woken up and it was too dark to track the stallion right away. The three men he’d caught red-handed hadn’t been muchbut whoever had gotten Eclipse was slicker than pond scum.
Sven’s face was turning paler by the moment and blood was still seeping from his leg. Grudgingly, Clint told him, “I’ll bind that wound and stop the bleeding.”
“Thanks, mister. Don’t worry about me tryin’ nothin’ either. Now that we’re seeing eye to eye—”
“I’m not worried,” Clint said as his hand snapped out to crack the butt of his Colt against Sven’s temple. Once the thief was unconscious, it was a simple matter to keep him from bleeding out. After all, Sven still had work to do.
Chapter Three
There wasn’t much of a chance that Clint would get any sleep that night. He may have nodded off once or twice for a few minutes here and therebut he wasn’t about to relax enough to do much more than that. His only concern was waiting for daybreak so he could get a jump on finding Eclipse. Knowing the stallion as well as he did, Clint was sure whoever had taken him wasn’t having an easy time of it.
“Hold on, boy,” he said to himself as the first rays of dawn brightened the eastern horizon. “I’m coming.”
The first thing he did when he was able to see more than a few feet in front of him was to check the ground for tracks. They were easy enough to find in the dry Texas dirt. Clint smirked when he found deeper gouges in the earth along with sharp, jagged scrapes in some parts of the terrain where rocks were close to the surface. Those, along with the erratic prints left behind by a set of boots shuffling around the hoof marks, told Clint a struggle between man and beast had taken place there.
Seeing that the tracks clearly led toward the West, Clint surveyed his surroundings even further. Three horses were tethered a short distance away, just far enough for them to go unnoticed in the dark of night. He went to the horses, gathered them up and brought them back to his camp. By the time he returned, Sven was awake.
“Holy hell,” the thief grunted. “I got a damn bad headache.” He squinted, strained at the ropes binding him and then winced. “Awww shit. I remember now. You bushwhacked me when I wasn’t lookin’.”
“And I recall you taking a shot or two at me while your partners tried to rob me blind.”
“Yeah. There was that, I suppose.”
“Not to mention that those same men also tried shooting me dead.”
Sven showed Clint a crooked grin. “All right, then. I suppose we’re even, huh?”
“Not by a stretch.”
When Clint loaded Sven onto one of the horses he’d found, he wasn’t at all gentle about it. Apart from griping that he wasn’t on his own horse, Sven complained about everything under the sun including an aching emptiness in his belly.
“You got some sand, I’ll grant you that much,” Clint mused. “After all you did, you still get around to complain
ing about your accommodations.”
“If you’re gonna kill me, then do it. If not, then at least treat me civil and give me somethin’ to eat!”
Clint approached Sven who was now draped over one of the dead men’s horses like a load of flour. Staring dead into his eyes, Clint said, “There’s a whole lot of wiggle room between being treated civil and being dead.”
Sven’s imagination told him enough to make him swallow hard and cool his heels a bit.
After sifting through the saddlebags of all three horses, Clint condensed their contents into two sets of bags so he could place his own gear across the back of the horse he’d chosen to ride. It was a young mare with an easy manner that took to him more than the other two. Collecting the reins for all three animals, Clint led them away from the camp so he could follow the tracks left by the men he was hunting. Soon, he came to a conclusion.
“It was only one man that took my horse,” Clint said.
“That’s right,” Sven replied.
“Who was it?”
Sven wasn’t anxious to part with that name but he seemed even less anxious to get on worse terms with his captor. Reluctantly, he said, “Victor Howlett.”
“I’ve heard that name before.”
“So you know I ain’t lying!”
“I heard he was dead,” Clint added.
Sven’s spirits dropped so low that Clint could almost hear the crash. “If he is, then someone’s lying and it ain’t me.”
“Last I heard he was strung up in San Antonio for horse thievery.”
“Oh, see there’s your mistake,” Sven quickly said. “He was caught in San Antone and given a date with the noose but he slipped away before he was forced to keep it.”
“Is that so?”
Sven nodded furiously. “He was busted out by the same folks he works with right now. I must’a heard the story a dozen times if I heard it once. You wanna hear the whole tale from start to finish?”
“No,” Clint snapped. His instincts told him that Sven was telling the truth as far as he knew it, but having him tell his story wouldn’t do much of anything, other than make a lot of noise when he wanted to keep quiet. In the end, Clint hadn’t heard more than a few passing rumors himself on the matter.