by Jake Logan
“I had to. I don’t think I can get away from town by myself. Mr. Parmenter isn’t much help. You saw him. He’s not got the skills needed to ride, much less escape from a pack of carrion eaters like the Butchers.”
Slocum steered Etta back down the narrow corridor to the stairs. Once outside, he urged her to even more speed. The first light of dawn made them gray blobs, not shadows moving within shadows. With startling speed, the sun came up and lit them brightly, as if they were on stage and had spotlights focused wherever they moved.
“Down,” Slocum grated, grabbing her around the waist and bearing her to the ground. They lay beside the boardwalk. Etta struggled a moment, then quieted when she saw two riders making their way up the street, heading in the same direction they were.
“Guards?”
“Cleanup crew,” Slocum said. “They’re out hunting for survivors to kill.”
He longed to rear up, shoot, and take out both men. That would be the utmost folly because he would have the rest of the gang on his neck in an instant. He damned them. He damned Pennsylvania and Ireland and everywhere and anywhere their boots had trod.
“Come on,” he said, although the two outlaws were still in sight. He gripped Etta’s hand and pulled her along. She was just slow enough that he had to yank hard on her arm to get her into a burned-out shell of a building.
“They saw us,” she whispered. “Why’d you—oh!”
She fell silent. Four more outlaws rode along the street where they had been lying beside the boardwalk. If they had remained where they were, they would have been caught immediately.
“You have to watch and listen both,” Slocum said. He was never quite sure what it was that had alerted him to the other men. It might have even been smell, though in the acrid atmosphere of the burned-out town, he had to rely more on sight and hearing. The vibration of the outlaws’ horses had come up through the ground. This time.
He looked around to get his bearings. They were in what had been the town bakery. The stench of burned wood here mingled with a more fragrant bread odor. Like a prairie dog, he popped up, looked around, and dropped back.
“What is it, John?”
“We’ve got big trouble. They’re all heading this direction. ” He knew running was out of the question. “Hide.”
“Where?” Etta looked around frantically. She yelped when he scooped her up and carried her to the large bread oven. He yanked open the door, rolled her inside, and followed fast, pulling the door closed after him.
In the dark, cramped space, pressed intimately against the woman, he should have enjoyed it. Instead, his heart threatened to explode in his chest. He heard men poking through the ruins.
“I saw som’thin’, I tell you, Barney.”
“There ain’t nobody here. Look around. See anythin’ movin’? Not even the rats are here, and they baked bread. What’s that tell you?”
“They baked shitty bread?”
Slocum heard the men laughing and probably playfully punching one another. Only after a respectable time did he push open the oven door and peer out.
“Are they gone?”
“Looks as if they are,” he said, but Slocum shut the oven door on a hunch. He was glad because several minutes later two men moved from behind a cabinet, holstered their six-shooters,and went back into the street. They had lain in wait to ambush any unwary survivor.
Slocum pushed the oven door all the way open and helped Etta out.
“That should have been fun, but it wasn’t,” she said.
“My thoughts, too,” he said. Slocum pointed in the direction of the bank, and they set out at a slow walk, watching and listening for the patrolling outlaws. They finally reached the bank and took momentary refuge there.
“Mr. Parmenter’s over there. See the tree? The cellar’s on the other side, near where the house used to stand.”
“Is he armed?”
“Why, I don’t know,” Etta said, startled. “I never asked. He never showed me a gun or mentioned he had one.”
“You’d better fetch him. If I knocked on the door, he might not recognize my voice.”
“Be right back,” she said, pushing past. She paused, smiled, and then kissed him hard. “For luck.” Then Etta dashed to the cellar, rapped several times, and was swallowed up by the ground.
Slocum waited impatiently, but it was worth it seeing Etta emerge from the ground, Parmenter immediately behind her. They hurried to the bank and knelt beside Slocum.
“I thought you were dead, that Miss Etta was only having hallucinations,” Parmenter said.
“I saw the telegraph office,” Slocum said. “It looks as if the equipment is ruined.”
“It’s not hard to fix. Even if the telegraph key is broken, I can send by tapping two live wires together. The bug only makes it easier and quicker to send.”
“Show me,” Slocum said, looking around and then heading directly across the street, angling for the telegraph office. The wall facing the street provided good shelter from prying eyes. He slipped into the wrecked telegraph office, spun, and aimed his rifle out into the street.
“Th-there’s a dead man at the key,” Parmenter said, stammering.
“Move him, then get to work,” Slocum said. “I’ll stand watch until you send the message.”
“It’s like Miss Etta said? You spliced the line?”
“About a mile outside town,” Slocum said.
“Very well. I need more battery acid.” Parmenter began rummaging about, making a considerable amount of noise, but Slocum was not going to tell him to be quiet.
Etta pressed close and whispered in his ear, “It won’t be long now. Then we can be together.”
“I hope you’re right,” Slocum said.
“Got it!”
More crashing and clanking sounded as Parmenter made a new lead-acid battery cell; then Slocum heard the familiar dits and dahs of a telegrapher at work.
“Is it going through?” Etta asked anxiously.
“I don’t see why not,” Parmenter said. “To be absolutely sure, I need to get a reply. But—”
The roar of a shotgun cut off the rest of his answer.
Slocum ducked, spun past Etta, and fired. His first slug caught the outlaw in the shoulder. He began cocking and firing as fast as he could, as accurately as he could. His fourth slug killed their attacker.
“Run,” he said to Etta. “Get back to the cellar and hide. I’ll decoy them away.”
Slocum kicked through the debris and got into the street. Four Butchers rode toward him. He emptied his rifle at them, winging one. He drew his six-shooter as he ran, getting off one round after another intended more to scatter them than to kill.
He reached the nearby burned-out saloon and whirled around, ready to finish the chore he started. None of the Schuylkill Butchers had come after him.
They had caught Etta and rode off with her dangling between two of them. She kicked and struggled, but was held spread-eagled and could not free herself. Slocum fired at one rider until his six-gun came up empty, hoping to give her a chance to escape. He missed with every shot.
Then he had to figure out a way of escaping the four more who were coming for him. If they caught up with him, he doubted they would just capture him. Instead, he would end up in butchered pieces all over the barroom floor.
17
The floorboards sagged under his weight. Slocum stamped down hard until the partially burned board gave way with a snap. He wasted no time kicking downward again and breaking a second board before jumping down, twisting about, and sliding under the saloon floor. Barely had he ducked down when he heard the thudding of boots entering the saloon.
“Where’d the son of a buck go?”
“Musta gone out the back,” said the second outlaw.
“Peter and Kiernan will drop him then.”
Slocum waited for the men to notice the broken floorboards, stick their guns down, and blaze away. Instead, they walked past the hole, not even looking down. He
looked up through the hole and saw their broad backs. Two quick shots. That’s all it would take to end the miserable lives of a pair of O’Malley’s killers. Slocum held his fire, though. They had said two more were out back.
He could not take on the entire gang, as much as he wanted to.
Wiggling along in the muck consisting of mud and charred bits of wood and soot, he reached the side of the saloon and peered out from under the floor. Slocum ducked back when he saw a pair of boots come around the back corner.
“I sure as bloody ’ell don’t see ’im,” complained the man. “He didn’t come this way, not ’less he’s a bleedin’ ghost!”
“We’re gonna make him into a ghost. He was real enough back when we nabbed the lass.”
“That’s the one O’Malley wants, eh?”
“How many beautiful women are there in this town?”
“Alive?”
This set them off into gales of laughter. Slocum dug his toes into the muck, pushed, and squirted out from under the saloon. He got his feet under him and ran for his life. The one Butcher who had come around the saloon had returned to his post behind, sure his quarry would eventually exit the back door. Slocum tried to run lightly, but they either spotted him, or heard his furious dash for freedom.
Bullets kicked up the dirt all around him. He kept running, dodged, and found himself back at the bank. The brick walls gave some protection, but it was four against one. Unless they called more men, he could stand them off for a few minutes while he thought of a way out of his predicament.
O’Malley had Etta by now, probably locking her up in the hotel. Slocum wished now he had resisted Etta’s insistence on getting the telegram sent and had taken out the leader of the Butchers. But that was water under the bridge. The outlaws had her prisoner—and they had him boxed in.
He looked back and saw the partly opened door to the bank vault. All the refugees’ crazy plans of taking shelter inside the locked vault came back to him. There would be plenty of air in the vault for a single man, but with the outlaws outside, they would have him permanently penned up in a steel-walled coffin.
His toe caught on a box buried in the rubble, and he stumbled to his knees. He angrily kicked out, then saw the dynamite he had not used before. How it had survived the fire, he didn’t know. Heat meant less to dynamite than the sudden jolt given by a blasting cap, but the nitroglycerin that formed the core of a stick was very heat-sensitive. Slocum had warmed frozen sticks of dynamite in hot water when he had worked a mine outside Georgetown, on the opposite side of the Front Range from Denver.
He searched for fuse and blasting caps to no avail. All he had were four sticks of dynamite. He listened to the four outlaws closing in on him and knew he had to work fast. He grabbed one stick, and tossed it in the direction where the bank door had been. He kept the other three, just in case.
“Rush ’im!” an outlaw cried. Three of them tried to crowd through the doorway at the same time. In the instant their gun hands were jammed together, he aimed and fired at the stick of dynamite on the floor in front of them. The explosion was satisfactorily large. It killed one and left the other two in bad shape.
One clutched at his eyes, and the other had lost part of his knee.
Slocum whirled about and fired, more out of instinct than anything else, and winged the fourth man, who was trying to get a shot at him.
Slocum finished him off with a better-aimed shot and then stood. He had three sticks of dynamite and a woman to rescue before O’Malley took it into his head to rape her. For all the outlaw leader’s boasting about giving her to Norris so she would eventually kill him, Slocum knew human nature well enough to believe O’Malley coveted her himself.
With his three sticks of dynamite tucked into his belt, Slocum set off for the far side of town where O’Malley made his headquarters. When he came to the junction in the street, the separating line between utter destruction in Sharpesville and the part left standing, Slocum saw that he had his work cut out for him. Dozens of the gang milled around in front of the still-standing saloon and the hotel. The whorehouse he had intended to use for his earlier sniper attack was similarly filled with the Butchers.
What had stirred them up he did not know—and did not want to find out. He slipped around to the rear of the hotel and chanced a quick look in the back door. As fast as he was, one outlaw spotted him and came rushing in his direction.
Slocum opened the door, waited an instant, and then slammed it hard in the man’s face. He was rewarded with a loud cry of pain. Slocum whipped open the door again and dispatched the outlaw using his knife.
Heart hammering fiercely, Slocum knelt over the man for a moment, then dragged him into a room and slammed the door behind him. Slocum pawed through the man’s pockets and found a few grimy greenbacks in a pocket. He added this to the wad of bills he had taken off other dead outlaws. If he lived to spend the money, he would be in clover for months and months, no matter how profligate he was.
Slocum looked up suddenly when the ceiling creaked. Someone was moving around on the second floor, just above this room. Slocum knew he would never make it to the rear stairs, and going through the lobby was out of the question. If dozens of the Butchers gathered in the street, there might be as many lounging around in the hotel.
A slow smile came to his lips when an idea occurred to him. Slocum used his knife to dig a small circular hole in the ceiling. He jammed the end of a stick of dynamite into the hole so it dangled downward. He stepped back, drew, aimed, and fired. The explosion filled the room with a cloud of plaster and momentarily deafened him, but it also accomplished what he had hoped.
The second-floor room fell down into the room he was in. Tied to a bed was a struggling Etta Kehoe. Two men lay on the far side, one half under the bed. The other had his pants down around his ankles and was trapped in the rubble.
Slocum shot him outright. The other man moaned and struggled feebly. He might have a broken back from the way his upper body twitched and his legs remained motionless.
“John, get me free. Th-they were going to—”
“I know what they were going to do,” he said. He used his knife to slash the ropes holding Etta spread-eagled to the bed. “Why’d you let yourself be caught like that?”
“Let myself!” she raged. “I didn’t—” She bit off her angry retort, then laughed. “You’re joshing me, aren’t you?”
“Got to find something funny in all this. Seeing you kicking and fighting between those two owlhoots as they rode away was mighty funny.”
“Only if you’re remembering it. It was pure hell doing it.”
“Come on,” Slocum said. He kicked open the door into the hall, and saw men crowding in to investigate what was going on under their noses. He dropped the two sticks of dynamite he had left, pushed Etta out the back door, then fired into the explosives.
The detonation picked him up and threw him past the woman. He recovered, but fiery tongues of orange flame licked outward and forced Slocum to avert his face. He threw up his arm to further protect his face.
“Come on, John. We’ve got to go!”
Slocum didn’t need Etta to tell him this. From the hotel, now engulfed in flames, he heard anguished screams of men caught by the unexpected fire.
“Get used to the fire, you sons of bitches. Burn in hell,” Slocum snarled. He scrambled to his feet and pushed Etta ahead of him. They had to escape while there was still enough confusion to hide their route away from town.
“Do you have a horse?” she asked.
“We’ll have to double up unless we can steal one along the way,” Slocum said, veering out of town and heading uphill in the direction of where he had left his gelding. He hoped that one of the Butchers would ride up so he could donate his horse. None of the outlaws showed any immediate interest in coming after them.
Slocum realized they might not know how the hotel had been set ablaze. Only a couple of the men had seen Slocum, and who would notice Etta was missing?
No one, except Sean O’Malley.
Slocum ran a little faster. Etta was gasping for breath by the time they found his horse. The gelding snorted in disgust, realizing how two riders would weigh him down again. Slocum cinched the saddle tighter, checked the bit and bridle, and then boosted Etta up. Slocum hastily got his foot in the stirrup and pulled himself up.
“Where are we going?” Etta asked.
“Away.” He got his horse moving at a steady walk, relishing the feel of Etta’s arms around his waist and her cheek pressed into his shoulder. He was stiff and sore, and the wound that had been sewn up earlier itched like ants had burrowed into his flesh, but Slocum couldn’t remember feeling better. He had escaped the Schuylkill Butchers. Again.
“Do you think the message got out?” Etta asked after a spell.
“I don’t know. Parmenter—that was his name, wasn’t it?—I know he sent the message, but if anyone heard it . . .” Slocum’s sentence trailed off. The cut in the telegraph line had been fixed. He was sure of that. But what if the outlaws had cut the line somewhere else? Or what if the line had fallen elsewhere on its own? The telegraphs were always out of order because of trouble with the wires and poles, and it seldom had anything to do with men cutting them.
But the telegrapher had seemed cheerful and believed his message had been sent properly. There had not been time for anyone along the line to reply. Slocum kept telling himself that was the case. He and Etta had fought too hard against the Irish cutthroats to let them get away.
“It got through,” she said. “I know it. The cavalry is on its way here now. They’d never allow anyone to slaughter all the soldiers at one of their posts,” Etta went on with more assurance than Slocum felt. “Fort Walker is an important post, with lots of soldiers.”
“If they don’t come in force, O’Malley will whup them like he did Major Zinsser and his troopers,” Slocum said. He knew how hard it would be for any army commander to believe an entire post could be wiped out and that a single gang of outlaws might number in the hundreds.