Thank you for nothing,’ McAllister snarled with genuine displeasure.
Hickok raised a magnanimous hand – ‘Wait, my friend. All will come well in the end. Just bear with Uncle Jim. I have in my possession the exact information we need to nail this Lawson in short order … and in the act of murder, so that, when we gets his deserts, it will be an act of self-defense on our part.’
‘Get on, for God’s sake,’ McAllister said, ‘don’t make such a song and dance about it.’
Hickok’s smile of self-congratulation did not leave his face.
‘Rem is anxious to get at the enemy,’ he cried. ‘It was ever thus. How I like to see keenness in a man!’
‘Jim,’ McAllister said with some menace in his voice, ‘if you don’t – ’
‘Very well, here’s the long and the short of it. Lawson will take up his position at an angle to this building on the far side of the street in the mouth of the alley there. When McAllister comes out of the main entrance of this hotel, Lawson will fire. Now, we all know that he is a superb shot. It is his opinion and mine also that he will need no more than one shot, even with a revolver.’
‘This gets better and better,’ McAllister muttered blackly. ‘I suppose he has a cover gun somewhere.’
‘That’s true. Bright of you to guess.’
‘There had to be the way this is stacking up against me. Who is the cover gun?’
Hickok hesitated and pulled his nose, a habit of his when he was attacked by indecision.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there’s the rub.’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘Marvelous,’ said McAllister.
‘May I continue?’
‘I never learnt of any way of shutting you up.’
Hickok went on: ‘But we’re prepared, Rem. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.’ He smiled amiably. ‘I shall be behind you. A long way behind you, but there just the same.’ McAllister looked uneasy and asked: ‘When does all this happen?’
Hickok took his watch from a vest pocket, glanced at it and said: ‘In about fifteen minutes. I hope your gun is cleaned and ready.’
McAllister stood up and asked: ‘Do you know what Lawson will be wearing?’
‘No.’
‘What’s the light like on the far side of the street at the mouth of the alley?’
‘Not good.’
‘But I shall be in the light when I come out of the hotel?’
‘That’s right.’
McAllister gave his friend a bitter look and said: ‘You sure you’re on my side?’
Hickok grinned. ‘Brevington tried to bribe me, but he couldn’t meet my price.’
‘What was that,’ said McAllister, ‘five dollars?’
Steiner asked. ‘We know what you two will be doing, so what do the rest of us do?’
McAllister and Hickok glanced at each other. Hickok gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head and McAllister said: ‘Soldiering and such, we leave to you, gentlemen. This kind of thing is also for professionals. In this case, that means Jim and me.’
Steiner said: ‘But we must do something, man. I can hear from what you say that you don’t like this at all.’
McAllister nodded. ‘Jim expects it. If I welcomed his plan, he’d think there was something seriously wrong with me.’ Newton said: ‘Why not just go into hiding? Avoid the shooting.’
‘Because,’ said McAllister, ‘I have been through this kind of thing before. We have a smart enough lawyer, but they have more money so they get them a smarter lawyer. He’d worm them out of this. These men are villains. Let’s catch them flat-footed in the middle of a crime so that law and order can see it all happening. What is cleaner and juster than me defending my life?’
Newton said: ‘Still and all, I don’t think this is really the correct way to do it. This kind of thing should be settled in court.’
McAllister said: ‘Maybe you’re right. I wouldn’t argue about it. But if all turns out well, you for one will not have to go into the witness box and testify and answer a lot of questions which will get folks to believe all sorts of bad things about you. Thrown mud always sticks.’
‘That’s true,’ said Newton. ‘I can’t deny it. But what am I to feel if you get shot down?’
Hickok said briskly: ‘We don’t allow that kind of talk before a fight, major. Bad luck. Rem’s going to come through this. You’ll see. Him and me’ve seen all this before. A good many times. You just stand at that window there and watch it all. Maybe you’ll be watching a little bit of history.’
McAllister and Hickok heaved on their buffalo coats. They were some kind of protection, for they could deflect an angling bullet. McAllister buttoned his, then checked the loads of his gun. It was loaded in every chamber, a thing unusual with him, for he normally kept the hammer on an empty one for safety. He then dropped the gun into his pocket. The others watched him. He put his hands into his pockets so that he had his hand on the gun.
Hickok left his coat open and also the jacket beneath. His two Colt revolvers he wore over his pants, high and with butts forward. This made some men think that he used the cross draw, but he did not. He used the reverse draw, a movement which seemed awkward and, to some, almost impossible, but it was his natural way of drawing and he did so with unequalled speed.
McAllister said: ‘Now, let’s get this straight, Jim. Lawson will be taking up his position just around now?’
Hickok checked his watch again and said: ‘Right.’ McAllister sat down and produced his pipe. When he had filled it with his rank, black tobacco, he fired it, saying: ‘It’s cold out there. We can’t make Lawson sweat, but by God, we can make him freeze.’
Hickok looked delighted. Steiner offered McAllister another drink, but it was refused. McAllister looked calmer as the minutes ticked by. When he had smoked his pipe out, he looked positively tranquil. He rose, put on his hat and said: ‘Ready, Jim.’ The others wished him luck, he thanked them and walked out of the room. Hickok followed him. When they reached the foot of the stairs, Hickok stopped his friend with a touch on the arm – ‘Give me time to go out the rear door, Rem, then to reach the street. Count twenty, say, and don’t hurry it.’
McAllister told him to go ahead. Hickok walked to the rear of the hotel and let himself out into a small yard there. This yard opened on to a narrow alleyway. Ten paces along this and Hickok was on the street. He peeked out and saw the dark maw of the alley in which by now Lawson should be stationed. He experienced the small flutter of doubt and panic that comes to all men who have lived by firearms and tense moments such as this. He prayed that everything would go right. After all, he thought, his friend’s life depended on it. That girl could be playing him false and he knew it. She may have set this up on instructions from her employer. Suddenly, in an awful moment of truth, Hickok was convinced that that was what had happened. He had been too damned smart for his own good. For McAllister’s own good. Suddenly, desperately, he wanted to call it off.
Then he saw Brevington.
There were a good many people abroad in spite of the intense cold. The saloons and dancehalls were doing a roaring trade. Many miners were in from the hills with their summer’s gold and were living it up to their own loss and the profit of the townsfolk. Among the hurrying figures on the sidewalk was one solid one that had halted. His hat was pulled down so the lamps cast a heavy shadow over his face, but Hickok, who never forgot a shape, the way a man had of standing, knew that it was Brevington. Hickok could not believe that the colonel intended to be Lawson’s cover man.
He was the kind of man who hired for his dirty work to be done.
But Brevington’s presence there showed Hickok one thing—the process was now too late to stop. He pulled back the heavy skirt of his buffalo coat. The opening of his clothes let the cold blast in so the sweat on his body froze. He was startled by it into full wakefulness. He took a half-pace forward and hoped that he was not revealed too much in the la
mplight. From his new position, he could see the front of the hotel. He could not see the windows enough to make out the watching men there, but nobody could have stepped from the front entrance and been missed.
Brevington had not moved. He stood about thirty paces to Hickok’s right. The gunfighter reckoned that the man must be able to see him, Hickok, plain and clear. But Hickok dare not change his position because he wanted the mouth of Lawson’s alley in his view. Just the same, he would have preferred to be behind Brevington.
Now an appalling thought came to him. What if the girl had not given him all the information? Maybe she did not have it all to give. Maybe there was a third or fourth man on this street, ready to cut down on McAllister. Hickok cursed his own and McAllister’s vanity for thinking that only their kind could settle this kind of affair. They should have let the soldiers play their part. They knew weapons and they were used to being shot at. Brigg would have been a useful man to have along.
He glanced up and down the street and saw nobody who might be an assassin, except for every other man there. Dread for McAllister sank like cold clay into the pit of Hickok’s stomach.
He glanced back at the hotel entrance and found that a tall, dark figure stood there. McAllister – hand in pocket, still as a rock, back straight. Hickok’s right hand touched the ivory-plated butt of his gun. He glanced right and saw Brevington move.
By God, the man was going to take a hand. That was a sawed-off shotgun he held.
Where else?
A window on the far side of the road suddenly opened and the lamplight caught at something there. A rifle. Hickok drew both guns. He knew then that this was going to be a massacre. Brevington had at least one hired gun here.
While Hickok’s nerves were tensed for a gunshot from one of three men, he was startled when it came from a fourth. McAllister pulled his Remington from his overcoat pocket and fired.
The manner in which he fired so surprised Hickok that for a second he held his own fire. McAllister fired high and his action seemed madness itself, for it must have been several feet above the head of the concealed assassin.
There was, however, method in McAllister’s madness – a fact of which Hickok should have been aware.
The bullet struck a sloping roof that came down sharply to the top of the fence bordering the alley. The impact of the big bullet moved the snow there and it came down in a great deluge.
Now suddenly Hickok’s hopes and spirits were up. He saw McAllister firing up at the window across the road from him and heard the bullet crash through the glass. Then McAllister had hit the pavement with his left shoulder in a long fast dive. One shot sounded from the alleyway. Hickok looked right and saw the shotgun levelled. He fired twice and the greener went off with a deafening roar. Men were shouting in alarm.
McAllister was rolling. The man in the upstairs window leaned out for a clear shot and Hickok drove two bullets into him. He stayed leaning out of the window.
Brevington was down, but the twin-eyes of the shotgun were turned in McAllister’s direction. Hickok fired, did not stop to see if he had made a hit and swung back for the alley mouth. He saw Lawson run out into the open to make sure of his shot. McAllister and he seemed to fire in the same second. Hickok fired twice from each gun and all four bullets ploughed into the gunman. They hurled him back against the wall of the building behind him and dropped him to the sidewalk.
Hickok stayed where he was for a second, blowing the acrid smoke away from him. He put his right hand gun away, but retained the left. There was one shot in it and he might need it yet.
Brevington lay with his head resting on an outstretched arm.
Hickok looked down the street and knew a kind of disbelief when he saw that McAllister lay still. It did not seem possible to Hickok that McAllister could be proved to be mortal.
‘Jesus,’ he said to himself, ‘I don’t believe this.’ But he knew that he had to believe it. This was something that came to all gunfighters sooner or later.
He walked down the street and found himself joined by three other men, all with guns in their hands. He saw that they were the men they had left in Steiner’s room.
Steiner said: ‘We came to take a hand, but you were too damned quick for us.’
They reached McAllister and Hickok said in a kind of hushed voice: ‘Rem, old timer.’
McAllister opened his eyes and said conversationally: ‘Well, that’s that, gents.’
Hickok said with great bitterness: ‘You son-of-a-bitch, I thought you was plumb killed dead.’
McAllister sat up. Then he stood up. He looked a little embarrassed.
He said: ‘It was like this, Jim – I just could not believe that I was alive. My God, I didn’t ought to be.’
‘That’s a fact,’ said Hickok.
There was a lot of the sounds of running feet, shouting. The law arrived on the scene. The law arrived too quickly for Hickok’s liking, in fact, and later he reckoned that one of the lawmen was another backup gun for Lawson. Never could prove anything, of course.
Brevington, they found, was alive. He appeared to go out of circulation in town from then on. That did not mean that he died of gunshot wounds or anything like that. Just that he thought it better to change his name and start afresh somewhere else.
Lawson and the unknown gun up at the window were both found to be dead. McAllister said that he sadly regretted not having killed a man who had stolen his best stud horse himself.
The questions followed. They stood on the freezing street and had the marshal and his deputies firing questions at them, which McAllister reckoned were a sight better than bullets. Finally, the undertaker came for the dead and the marshal told them they could go, but were not to leave town. The five men walked back into the hotel. When they were in the warmth of Steiner’s room and each man held a glass in his hand, the Indian agent said: ‘Well, maybe you ironed out our problem here, boys, but I can’t help wondering how old White Bull and his folks made out in the hills.’
McAllister said: ‘Indians die in the cold just like white folks, that’s for sure.’
‘Well,’ said Hickok, ‘I reckon a man has enough to be thankful for, just being alive.’
‘That’s a fact,’ said McAllister. ‘Let’s drink to Wild Bill Hickok.’
‘Aw, shucks,’ said Jim.
About the Author
Peter Christopher Watts
(19 December 1919 — 30 November 1983)
Is the author of more than 150 novels, is better known by his pen names of “Matt Chisholm” and “Cy James”. He published his first western novel under the Matt Chisholm name in 1958 (Halfbreed). He began writing the “McAllister” series in 1963 with The Hard Men, and that series ran to 35 novels. He followed that up with the “Storm” series. And used the Cy James name for his “Spur” series.
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