“No other explanation makes any sense, does it?”
“I suppose not,” Buckhorn said.
Doc Cranford looked up from his work on Sol Baker and told Buckhorn and Madison, “I’ve got the bleeding just about stopped, but he lost a lot of blood already. I’ll need some men to carry him down to my house.”
“I’ll get ’em, Doc,” Madison said. “Just hang on.”
Madison left the barn and came back with some of the townspeople who had gathered to see what all the shooting was about. Four men took hold of Sol Baker, lifted him carefully, and carried him out. Doc Cranford followed.
That left Buckhorn and Madison in the barn. Madison said, “Some of the boys tried to chase down the hombre who bushwhacked you, but he got away. Come morning, we’ll take a good look around, see if we can find anything that might tell us who he was, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
“I’m not,” Buckhorn said. “We may not ever know for sure.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I reckon we’ll have another chance to find the son of a bitch.”
“How do you figure that?”
“We’ll get him the next time he tries to kill you,” Madison said with a jaunty grin.
* * *
The gun battle had left Buckhorn without much of an appetite, so he went with Madison to the Irish Rose instead of heading for the café. The place was busy when they came in. Three people were behind the bar: Alexis Conroy, the bartender called Walt, and another bartender Buckhorn hadn’t seen before. Alexis glanced at Buckhorn when he and Madison came in, but no one could have told from her expression what had happened between them earlier.
Madison led the way to a table. One of the saloon girls brought a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. Madison looked at Buckhorn and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s right, you don’t go in for the hard stuff, do you?”
“After everything that’s happened today, I think I’ll make an exception.”
Madison chuckled. He pulled the cork from the bottle and splashed amber liquid in both glasses. He pushed one over to Buckhorn and picked up the other.
“To one more day we stayed alive,” he said.
“The evening’s not over yet,” Buckhorn pointed out. “But I’ll drink to that anyway.”
They threw back the whiskey. Madison poured himself another and then with the bottle poised looked inquiringly at Buckhorn, who shook his head.
Madison sipped from the second glass, then said, “Alexis sure looks pretty tonight, doesn’t she?”
“I imagine she always looks beautiful. I can’t imagine her otherwise.”
“That’s true. But there’s something different about her. Sort of a glow, I reckon you’d say.”
Buckhorn kept his face expressionless as he nodded.
“If you say so. You know her better than I do.”
“But not as well as I’d like to,” Madison said. “The first time I ever laid eyes on her, I told myself that she’s just the sort of woman I’d like to marry one of these days.”
“I guess the fact that her father’s rich doesn’t hurt anything, either.”
Madison grinned and said, “No, it doesn’t. But a gal who looks like that, you’d want her even if her pa was dirt poor.” He took another sip of the whiskey. “I’ve got to admit, though, she put some ideas in my head. You know what this life is like, Joe. Always living from one job to the next, never knowing where you’re going to wind up or even if you’re going to live to see another sunrise.”
Buckhorn nodded slowly and said, “Reckon that comes with the territory.”
“I suppose it does, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. A fella gets tired of living like that after a while. He wants to put down some roots, find himself a good-looking woman, work at something besides killing.” Madison seemed to be looking off into the distance at something, not seeing the inside of the saloon at all. “I could do a mighty fine job of running things around here.”
“Conroy runs things in Crater City.”
“Conroy might not always be around,” Madison said sharply. “If he wasn’t, Alexis would need somebody to step in and take over. I’m just the man for that job.” He paused. “But if I wound up in that position, I’d need a good man backing my play. Somebody I could count on.” Madison’s eyes narrowed. “Somebody who doesn’t go poking around in things that don’t concern him.”
“That sounds like a warning.”
“A warning?” Madison smiled and laughed. “Oh, hell no. Not at all. Just whiskey talk, that’s all. Pie in the sky. Shoot, when this trouble between Conroy and Thornton is over, you know what’ll happen. Those of us who are still alive will drift on to the next dust-up where we can sell our guns. That’s the way it’s always been. The way it always will be, I reckon.”
Buckhorn nodded. Madison had let his mask slip and revealed his true intentions. Alexis had been right. No hired gun could be trusted completely . . . but a hired gun with ambition was the most dangerous kind of all.
Before the conversation could continue, Dennis Conroy appeared at the head of the stairs. He hooked his thumbs in his vest and looked around the room. When his gaze fell on Buckhorn and Madison, he jerked his head to indicate that they should follow him and turned to go back to his suite.
“I guess we should go see what the boss wants,” Madison said as he pushed himself to his feet.
CHAPTER 17
The door to the suite’s sitting room was open. Conroy waited inside with a drink in one hand and his ever-present cigar in the other. Without making any small talk when Buckhorn and Madison walked into the room, he said, “I hear that somebody took a shot at you a little while ago, Joe.”
“More than one shot,” Buckhorn said. “Whoever it was burned quite a bit of powder.”
“But you’re all right?”
Buckhorn shrugged.
“The fella either wasn’t a very good shot, or I was lucky.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“I didn’t get much of any look at him,” Buckhorn said. “A few glimpses in the muzzle flashes of my gun, but that’s all.”
Conroy waved his cigar in the air and said, “Well, it doesn’t really matter. We know it had to be one of Thornton’s men. Nobody else around here has any reason to shoot at you. I thought something like this might happen after that showdown at Thornton’s mine.”
Madison said, “Do you want us to find Gratton and the rest of Thornton’s men and settle things with them? I can gather up all the boys who are in town.”
Conroy chewed on the cigar for a moment as he considered Madison’s suggestion. Finally he shook his head and said, “No, that would just result in the whole town being shot up, and I don’t want that. Not yet, anyway. Not if it can be avoided.”
“You mean we’re going to let Thornton get away with sending bushwhackers after Joe here?” Madison asked angrily. “You told Thornton it was gonna be war, boss, and it looks like he believed it. Now we have to do something about it.”
“We will . . . when the time is right. First I have another job for the two of you.”
Madison still looked angry, but he said, “All right. What do you want us to do?”
“I got word today that Ned Calvert is refusing to get off his ranch. You and Joe and a couple of other men need to ride down there tomorrow and make him understand he can’t do that. The law is on my side in this matter.”
Madison rubbed his jaw and said, “Calvert, eh? I had that damned Confederate figured for a stubborn son of a bitch, so I can’t say as I’m surprised. If I remember right, he has a couple of sons who are old enough to fight, too.”
Conroy nodded.
“That’s correct. The grading crew will be reaching his place in another few days. Earlier today, a couple of men rode up there to check out the terrain, and Calvert and his boys got the drop on them and disarmed them. Calvert threatened to shoot any more of my workers who set foot on what he still considers to be his land. We can’t have that, Yancy.”
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“No, sir, we sure can’t.”
“I don’t know why these people have to be so damned stubborn,” Conroy went on, scowling. “It’s like they don’t understand I have a perfectly legal right to take possession of my own property.”
“We’ll take care of that for you, boss,” Madison said. “Anything else?”
Conroy shook his head.
“No. Just be careful. I’ll be surprised if Thornton doesn’t try something else.”
“Sooner or later—”
“I know, I know,” Conroy snapped. “We’ll have to settle things with him. But I want to be sure we’re legally covered, in case the federal law ever comes in. The last thing we want is some nosy U.S. marshal poking around in our affairs.”
Madison shrugged, signifying his agreement with that sentiment. He and Buckhorn left the suite and started back down the stairs to the barroom.
“I reckon you understood what the boss was getting at,” Madison said.
“Sure. Somebody’s blocking his right-of-way. The railroad can’t go through until he gets rid of them.”
Madison nodded curtly.
“That’s right. Sort of like dealing with a nest of vermin that are in the way.”
“Or a den of snakes.”
Madison laughed.
“Don’t give these little greasy sack outfits too much credit. I guess they’re a little better than sodbusters, because at least they were trying to make a go of ranching instead of farming, but hell, they’re all cut from the same cloth. Little hardscrabble losers who just mess things up for their betters. They’re like cockroaches. It’s not what they carry off, it’s what they ruin.”
“I’ve seen things like this before,” Buckhorn said. “I know how they play out.”
“Just make sure we let them start the ball. That way, whatever we do will be self-defense.”
Buckhorn nodded. His face had grown tight enough that little trenches appeared in his cheeks. He didn’t say anything else to Madison, though, about the job they were supposed to do for Conroy the next day.
He refused another drink, as well, and after sitting at the table with Madison for another few minutes, he stood up and said he was going to turn in.
“It’s a pretty good ride down to the Calvert spread,” Madison told him. “We’ll start early in the morning, around sunup.”
“I’ll be ready,” Buckhorn said.
Instead of going straight back to the hotel, he asked a man he passed on the boardwalk where Dr. Cranford’s house was.
“Go up the street a couple of blocks and turn right for a block,” the townie said. “Doc’s place is on the left. You can’t miss it. Are you sick, mister?”
“Something like that,” Buckhorn said.
* * *
A few minutes later, he knocked on the door of Cranford’s house, which turned out to be a Mexican-style adobe that looked like one of the older buildings in Crater City. A woman answered the door and said, “Yes? Can I help you?”
She was of Mexican heritage, an attractive, middle-aged woman with only a few strands of gray in her black hair. Buckhorn took off his hat and said politely, “I wanted to check on a man who was brought here earlier this evening, ma’am. Sol Baker.”
From behind the woman, a man asked, “Who’s there, Julietta? Not somebody else with a bullet hole in him, I hope!”
The woman moved aside a little so Buckhorn could see Doc Cranford coming toward the door as he wiped his hands on a bloodstained rag. When Cranford saw who the visitor was, he stopped and frowned.
“Buckhorn, isn’t it?” he said.
“That’s right. I wanted to find out how Sol is doing.”
Cranford motioned with his head for the woman to step aside.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “Come on in, Mr. Buckhorn. This is my wife—and my nurse—Julietta.”
“Ma’am,” Buckhorn said with a nod to the woman.
She didn’t seem pleased to meet him. She said, “Do you need me for anything else, Victor?”
“Not right now.”
“I believe I’ll go to bed, then. It’s been a tiring evening.”
She left the room, which was set up not as the parlor it might once have been, but was now more of a place for patients to wait for the doctor to see them.
“I trust you’ll forgive my wife,” Cranford said. “She doesn’t mean to be rude. She’s just upset because Sol was hurt. He’s well liked by everybody in this town.”
“I understand,” Buckhorn said. “Is he going to be all right?”
“I think so. The bullet nicked a bone but didn’t break it, and that wasn’t enough to keep it from passing on through cleanly. I could tell that from the exit wound. I cleaned both wounds thoroughly and bandaged them. Right now the biggest worry is just the shock of being shot and the amount of blood he lost, but he appears to be stable. He’s sleeping right now. He’ll be laid up for a good long while, but I expect him to make a full recovery. There may be some lasting damage to that shoulder and arm, but we’ll just have to wait and see about that.”
Buckhorn nodded and said, “I’m glad to hear that he’s doing so well.”
“I imagine you would be, since the man who shot him was really after you, correct?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Buckhorn’s voice hardened. “I didn’t say I was blaming myself for what happened to him, though. I reckon the gent who pulled the trigger gets the credit for that.”
“Are you saying this is the first time somebody’s gotten hurt just from being around you, in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“I’m saying I’m glad it looks like the old man is going to be all right.” Buckhorn reached in his pocket and took out a twenty-dollar gold piece. “When you’ve used up this taking care of him, let me know.”
Cranford frowned.
“I figured I’d send my bill to Dennis Conroy. He owns the stable now, after all.”
Buckhorn held out the double eagle.
“I’d rather take care of it myself.”
“All right,” Cranford said slowly. He took the gold piece. “I won’t argue with you. Do you want me to keep you apprised of how the patient is doing?”
“Just let me know if you need more money. That’s all.” Buckhorn started to turn toward the door, then paused. “There’s one more thing I’d like to know, Doctor. You’ve been around Crater City for a while, haven’t you?”
“Since before the silver strikes,” Cranford said with a nod.
“So you’ve seen how it’s changed since then.”
“Not for the better, that’s for sure. Conroy and Thornton are both stubborn as mules, and you can go back to your boss and tell him I said so, if that’s what you want to do.”
“How far do you think they’ll go to settle the feud between them?”
Cranford hesitated. “What are you trying to get me to say, Buckhorn?”
“I’m not trying to get you to say anything. I’m just asking for your honest opinion.”
The doctor appeared to reach a decision. He said, “My honest opinion is that Dennis Conroy will crush anyone who gets in his way, once he finally loses patience with a situation. He’s a man who likes to give the appearance of honesty, but frankly there’s not much I would put past him.”
“What about Thornton?”
“Oh, Hugh Thornton will fight, sure enough. He’d probably fight a little dirty if he was forced to it. But there are limits to what he’d do. I’m not sure there are where Conroy’s concerned.” Cranford paused, then asked, “Are you going to run back to Conroy and tell him what I just said?”
“I’m going to the hotel and try to get a good night’s sleep,” Buckhorn said. “That’s all I’m interested in right now. But you don’t have to worry. I asked for your honest opinion, and you gave it to me.”
“I should have kept my damned mouth shut,” Cranford said. “I just hate to see what Crater City’s becoming.”
“You’re not the only one who feels that
way. From what I’ve heard, Matthew Garrett shared your opinion.”
Cranford’s mouth tightened.
“Matthew Garrett was a good friend of mine. Still is, although I’m not sure he remembers me anymore. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
“I suppose you took care of him when he was injured?”
“When he was brutally beaten, you mean? Yes, I did. He’ll probably recover from his physical injuries. He already has, for the most part.”
“What about the rest of it? Do you think he’ll ever come to his senses again?”
Cranford sighed.
“With something like that, it’s almost impossible to say. He might snap out of it one of these days. Honestly, though . . . I really doubt it.”
“His nephew is carrying on in his place, though.”
“If Edward’s not careful, something’s liable to happen to him, too,” Cranford said. “In this town, people who poke around and ask too many questions seem to wind up regretting it.”
“There’s a lot of that going around, all right,” Buckhorn said as he put on his hat.
* * *
He was up before dawn the next morning. The hotel dining room was already open, and Buckhorn was halfway finished with his breakfast and drinking his second cup of coffee before Yancy Madison came in.
“You took me at my word when I said we were leaving early, didn’t you?” Madison asked.
“No reason not to,” Buckhorn said. “Also, I didn’t sleep very well last night. Too restless for some reason. I was ready to get up and move around some.”
Madison grinned.
“Don’t tell me that getting bushwhacked like that got to your nerves, Joe. In our line of work, when it starts to bother a man too much to hear a bullet go past his head, that’s not good.”
“It wasn’t that. I just had other things on my mind.”
“Well, you can stop thinking and worrying for a while. Today’s job is going to be nice and simple.”
Madison sat down and signaled to the waiter for coffee. Buckhorn continued eating.
“So . . . Ned Calvert,” Madison said as he sat back in his chair. “Came out here from Georgia after the war. One of those unreconstructed Rebels. That means he’s touchy. Always on the prod.” Madison grinned. “Makes it easy for us. He won’t be able to keep a tight rein on his temper.”
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