The Stagecoach War

by Wesley Ellis

  Ki worked furiously at the lock. His dark eyes reflected the flames that grew stronger with every passing second. The heat was already intense. His eyes were burning and, when he looked up, it was as if a great, poisonous cloud was dropping right down on top of him.

  Ki dropped to his knees and lowered his head. His strong hands worked and the lock resisted. He began to cough. This caused him to lose control of the pick in his hand. He lost the feel of the locking mechanism. Ki shut his eyes and felt his hands and extremities begin to tingle. A terrible coughing spell dropped him to the floor. He pushed himself up and forced the pick back into the lock.

  “Ki!” Jessie screamed. “I heard the shot. Ki!”

  Somehow, she made it to the cell. He gave her the pick and she worked with a concentration that was unbroken until the door snapped open. Ki could smell hair burning and he hoped it was his rather than hers. He ducked his head and took a deep breath of the clean air that hugged the floor. When he reached for Jessie’s hand, he found her almost unconscious on the floor.

  “No!” he screamed, snatching her up and hurtling through the flames. The clear air outside struck him like a cold bath and he plunged into a horse trough. When he tipped Jessie’s face up to his own and stared at her in the moonlight, he saw her eyes flutter open and she hugged him tightly. Ki was glad she could not see that his tears were mixed with the trough water. They both turned to watch the sheriff’s office going up in flames. A fire bell began to toll just up the street and men came dragging a fire wagon.

  “Sonofabitch!” Sheriff Colton cussed, staring as the roof of his office building collapsed and hundreds of men rushed in to keep the fire from spreading through the entire downtown. A bucket brigade was quickly formed and reached to the Truckee River.

  “What happened?” the sheriff asked.

  Ki accepted the sheriff’s help in getting across the street. He sat Jessie down in front of the mercantile store. “You saved my life,” he told her.

  “How many times have you saved mine and helped me keep my Starbuck enterprises alive and safe from—”

  Jessie stopped in midsentence, but it was already too late. The sheriff was not the only one hovering over them. Orin Grayson’s shock and then fury was reflected in the firelight. It bronzed his face and made it as hard as that metal. Ki looked into Grayson’s eyes and they were molten with hatred. Then Orin Grayson spun on his heel and marched down the street. He knocked a man aside as he cut through the bucket brigade and passed out of sight.

  “What the hell is wrong with him?” Sheriff Colton asked. “One minute he was all upset because of Miss Wilson here, and the next—well, I never saw a man with a look in his eye like that unless he was ready to draw a gun and kill somebody. But Mr. Grayson, well, he’s a state assemblyman and no man of violence.”

  Jessie and Ki exchanged glances. They knew how dead wrong Sheriff Colton really was. The time for game-playing was over.

  Orin Grayson wanted to kill or get drunk, he wasn’t sure which first. As he stomped down the street, he was trembling with rage and knew he was in no state of mind to go into a saloon. His nerves were on a hair trigger and he was spoiling for trouble. A thread of reason told him he had better go to the Sierra Stage Line offices and empty the bottle of whiskey he had in his desk drawer. He would drink until all the demons in him were weak and spinning, and then he would fall asleep on his couch. The couch where he had often sampled the womanhood of Roxy Bonaday and once, that of Jessica Starbuck. My God, how could he have believed a woman that smart and beautiful could have been some common hustler! Everything about Jessica Starbuck screamed that it was a lie when she said she was some poor, down-and-out cousin looking for a handout.

  “She made a fool of me,” Grayson muttered angrily. “Even when she was screwing me, she was probably laughing and trying to get those goddamn names!”

  But he had not given them to her! Grayson reminded himself of that. It was a thin thread of victory, but one he would hang on to as he lowered himself into whiskey-soaked oblivion this night. He would have to kill Jessica Starbuck and that Chinese man who had twice escaped their hired killers. Jessica’s half-conscious words to the Chinaman had only confirmed the conclusion Orin Grayson had reached when he saw the woman risk her life in the sheriff’s office. He had watched them burst outside and had known instantly that those two were not strangers.

  I need to think, he decided. I need to get drunk tonight, but then I need to get Lee Ford and sit down and plan how the hell we are going to do this thing once and for all. A stick of dynamite hurled through the Bonaday Stage Line office window while they were all inside? No, that would bring on an investigation. Much too risky and crude. Besides, with the luck he had been running today, something would go amiss. The dynamite fuse either wouldn’t stay lit or else they would catch it and hurl it back out the window. Poison? A possibility. One thing for sure, he wanted them all dead now. Even Roxy.

  Roxy had come to see him right after her father had died. She had been in tears and he thought she had needed comfort, but he’d been wrong. She had told him that she had promised her father not to see him anymore. At least not as long as there was a Bonaday Stage Line operating. When he had tried to change her mind and take her in his arms, she had become stiff and unyielding. His mistake was in trying to pull her down on the couch and make love to her. A stupid mistake; it had sent her into a rage. She had struck him and he had punched her without thinking. When she picked herself up from the floor in his office, her lips had been smashed and bloody. She had smiled and thanked him for showing her the truth. The bitch! The stupid...

  Grayson stopped before the Sierra Stage Line offices and saw a light burning inside. He yanked out his pocket watch and saw it was one-thirty in the morning. He replaced his watch and his hand reached into his coat pocket to clasp the hideout gun he carried. Maybe the Starbuck woman had hired some detective to rifle the files in search of information.

  Grayson crept up to the building and peered through the window. He saw nothing in the outer office, but light was coming from Lee Ford’s little rat-hole space. Grayson moved inside and then slipped through the outer office with the gun pointed ahead of him. He was almost happy now. Catching a thief in the act would be a good excuse to kill and then get drunk, thus satisfying both of his urges.

  “Bakemore?”

  The bookish little accountant was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a lamp beside him. He was so engrossed in the ledgers spread out around him that Grayson had to repeat his name much louder. “Bakemore, what the hell are you doing in Mr. Ford’s office at this time of night!”

  The accountant jumped to his feet, spilling the ledgers and a file of letters and documents all over the floor. “Mr. Grayson!” he cried, “I ... what are you doing here at this hour, sir?”

  Grayson bent down and picked up a sample of the documents that lay scattered about. His eyes scanned them and he saw at once that they were mostly letters from their partners in Sacramento. Most of them were lengthy and damning. Each had been hand-delivered and they should have all been destroyed, or at least locked in the vault.

  Grayson stiffened. Maybe they had been in the vault. It wasn’t like Ford to leave this kind of evidence unlocked. The letters gave dates, events, and names of out-of-state outlaws hired to wage war on the Bonaday Stage Line.

  Grayson swung around and walked over to the vault. The only ones who had ever opened it—until tonight—had been he and Lee Ford. He turned around slowly to look at the white and trembling face of Peter Bakemore. “The vault door is open a crack. Where did you find the combination?”

  Bakemore wrung his hands. “I ... ah, Mr. Grayson, sir. I really want to say that I have always been a good employee and I appreciate—”

  “Answer me, you sniveling sonofabitch!”

  “Please, Mr. Grayson. I just want to leave and go home now. I’ll come back early and put everything in order and then I want to resign. I’m ... I’m very sorry.”

  Grayson p
ulled the hideout gun from his coat pocket. It was a pearl-handled .22-caliber. “I’m sorry, too. She got to you, didn’t she? Jessica Starbuck bought you. I thought you were incorruptible, but I was wrong.”

  “Please! I don’t know what you mean!”

  “Yes you do, Peter. Now back into Mr. Ford’s office like a good boy. That’s far enough.”

  Grayson stepped inside the littered little room. He closed the door, knowing that it and the outside door would effectively muffle all sound of gunfire.

  “Good night, traitor,” he whispered, pulling the trigger and watching the horror spread across Bakemore’s thin, scholarly features.

  “Oh, no!” the man screeched. “Please, Mr.—”

  Grayson smiled and pumped three more bullets into Bakemore’s narrow chest and watched him collapse across the scattered ledgers and papers. They would soak up the man’s blood—that was all the records and pages of tabula tions were good for anyway.

  Orin Grayson closed the disgusting little office and walked back to his own neat, tidy one. After he lit a lamp on his desk, he selected a good brand of Kentucky whiskey from his liquor cabinet and a crystal glass. He shined an offending water droplet away with the cuff of his expensive shirt. Holding the glass up to lamplight, he inspected it carefully and then nodded with approval. He filled the glass with whiskey and lit a cigar, then settled back to think and get drunk.

  He would have to request more men and money. The three financiers in Sacramento were not going to be pleased. Each day for the past week they had been expecting to receive a telegram telling them that the Bonaday Stage Line was bankrupt and its rolling stock could be picked up for a song. Now, he was going to have to tell them that Jessica Starbuck and a mysterious half Oriental who was either damn lucky or damn good were here to help the Bonaday kids. The three Sacramento men would be very unhappy about that, but it could not be helped. It was time that they realized the stakes had just gone up. Grayson would need at least a dozen gunmen to stop the Bonaday stagecoaches dead in their tracks.

  He closed his eyes, feeling the warm heat of the whiskey begin to take effect. He did not want to remember how he had been made a fool of by Jessica Starbuck and how she had almost succeeded in learning everything about the operation. Had that traitorous fool, Bakemore, told her anything? Maybe, but maybe not. Either way, she and her Oriental friend were as good as dead. If they stepped outside the Bonaday offices, they were easy targets. If they stayed inside, Grayson and Lee Ford would systematically bring the Bonaday line to ruin in very short order.

  It did not matter. There was just one thing that he regretted, and that was that he could not kill Jessie personally. Roxy? Well, she was only a pawn, a foolish young woman with more spunk than good sense. And he had taught her a few things, hadn’t he? Grayson smiled to remember how she had become an accomplished lover under his tutelage. Maybe she could be spared and ...

  Grayson rejected the idea. Lee Ford would not approve of sparing any of them. He’d want a clean sweep, a total elimination of them all. Better that way.

  Grayson finished his whiskey, poured another, and lurched out of his chair. He could feel the whiskey taking effect after just one glass. He walked back over to Ford’s office and studied the dead accountant’s pathetic, crumpled figure. A wave of contempt and pity swept over him and he wheeled about and returned to his office chair. Bakemore had been one of that kind of men Grayson neither understood, or cared to. He had been totally committed to his ledgers and records, to neat little columns of unending figures. Everything had to be recorded. A man could always deny he said something, but he was a sucker and a goner if he had written evidence to go against him in court. I will have to talk to Ford in the morning about how we shall dispose of the body and of those incriminating files, he thought. Better to slip them out and bury—or burn—everything. Cremation. Neat and complete. Yes, he thought, with a nod of his head. That is what we will do with the man and his goddamn figures.

  Grayson shook his head and drained his second glass in a single series of gulps. He wiped his lips and then his watering eyes with the white silk handkerchief in his coat pocket. He had a theory about the world that went like this: There were lions and sheep. If you were a lion, you were the king and you roared and took what you wanted. If a sheep got to thinking it was a goddamn lion, you slaughtered it so that all the other sheep would not make the same mistake. Peter Bakemore had most certainly been a sheep. But Jessie, though a woman, was a lion and so was her nameless half-Oriental friend.

  When the lions did battle, the jungle shook and even the tops of the trees trembled. Grayson smiled because he was the biggest, meanest lion in Western Nevada. And this was his jungle to rule and to keep.

  Chapter 11

  “So that’s it, huh?” Billy said, glancing at his sister. “The whole thing was a big lie cooked up by you, Ki, and my father.”

  Ki blinked. He was annoyed at this young fool for being so abusive. “What you don’t seem to realize is that Jessie has put her life in great danger by trying to help your stage line.”

  “Well, you can both go back to where you came from!” Billy said angrily. “Roxy and I weren’t in on this little game when it started, and we don’t want any part of it now. Is that understood?”

  Jessie was struggling with her own anger. She could understand why Roxy and Billy felt hurt and offended—after all, no one had trusted them to keep the secret. But had there been any reason to trust this pair? Billy had shown no sign of taking responsibility for his actions. He was a womanizer and a swaggering braggart. Roxy, well, she was sleeping with Orin Grayson and telling herself that she was love and they would be married.

  “It’s up to you,” Jessie said. “We’ll be on the next train out of here if you want, but I think you ought to use your brains instead of your heart before you say anything more.”

  “Your father ruined my father!” Billy shouted.

  “The hell he did!” Jessie’s green eyes were storming. “Have you already forgotten what your father’s last words were? He said he loved Alex Starbuck and that my father won fair!” She looked at Roxy. “Do you remember that?”

  Roxy was subdued and seemed very depressed. “Yes. And Father asked us both to trust you and let you help us. It was very, very important to him, Billy. It was about the last thing he said before he died.”

  Roxy took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Billy, the last thing you did was promise our father that you were going to beat the Sierra Stage Line. That you were going to use your brains and your gun. You swore it to Father just before he died.”

  “I will use my gun, goddamn it!” Billy spun around to leave. “That part of my promise I’ll sure as hell keep!”

  Ki stepped into the younger man’s path. “No,” he said. “If you go over to the Sierra Stage Line offices in anger, you won’t live to reach either Grayson or Ford. You’ll be shot down in their yard. No court would rule it anything but self-defense. You’d be giving your life away for nothing.”

  “Out of my way!”

  Ki stood his ground and waited. “Not until you cool down and agree to use what brains you might have. You promised to beat Grayson, now live up to that promise! It’s time to be a man, Billy. Quit acting like some kid anyone can bait with a woman or a taunt.”

  Billy roared in angry frustration and hurled himself at Ki. Billy was three inches taller and twenty pounds heavier, but Ki stood rooted in place and gave not an inch. When Billy swung, Ki ducked and delivered a soft tegatana blow that caught Billy on the collarbone and spun him half around.

  Billy’s face went white with pain and his left arm and shoulder seemed paralyzed for a moment. He took a step back and lowered his head, then charged. Ki waited until the last instant. Then suddenly his hand caught one of Billy’s outstretched arms by the wrist and brought it down sharply. He twisted the wrist and Billy cried out in pain as his momentum and Ki’s hold flipped him into a complete circle. Billy slammed into the wall and lay stunned.

>   Jessie went to get water and a damp cloth to revive Billy. He had a lot of courage but not much good sense. She hoped that Ki had changed that a little. Ki had acted correctly in keeping Billy from charging off to die.

  Roxy stared at Ki as if he had used supernatural powers of some kind. “I never saw anybody fight the way you just did. Who, or what, are you?”

  “I was trained as a samurai,” he said quietly, adjusting his clothing and watching Billy start to recover. Ki turned and stepped outside. The stage yard was deserted. All the employees had quit and there were six horses and a couple of coaches left. Ki moved off toward the corral, not wanting his presence to provoke young Billy any more than it had already. He did not enjoy making anyone look foolish. Ki received no measure of stature or pride from such a victory. His only source of real satisfaction was in keeping his body in perfect working condition and keeping Jessie’s body alive and healthy.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Roxy said, as she followed him out to the corral. “How did you do that to my brother? He’s bigger and stronger than you, and yet you made him look like a kid up against a man.”

  Ki shrugged. “Your brother must learn to be a man now or he will be killed very soon. I did not wish to humiliate him in there.”

  “You didn‘t,” Roxy said. “He and I are both capable of doing that for ourselves. Billy hasn’t made half the fool of himself that I’ve been making of myself these past six months or so. Can you imagine how I feel inside after being so wrong about Orin Grayson?”

  Ki turned against the pole corral fence. He reached out and touched the livid, purplish bruise across her cheek. “Did Grayson do this to you?”

  “Don’t tell Billy or he’ll go after Grayson no matter what.”