Although the mountains were visible in the distance, they were still at least a day’s ride away when John Henry stopped for the night in the town of Stockton. It appeared to be a pleasant community surrounded by farmland.
“It’s been pretty easy going so far, Buck,” he told the horse as he led him into a livery stable stall. “Might get a little harder tomorrow. It’ll be a longer day for you, at the very least.”
Buck tossed his head as if to say that he was looking forward to it.
The liveryman recommended the San Joaquin Hotel to John Henry. He got a room and left his gear there, then walked down the street to the marshal’s office.
A sign on the building’s front wall identified the local lawman as Marshal Fred Gainey. John Henry went inside and introduced himself to Gainey, who turned out to be a tall, spare man with a mostly bald head and a bristly brush of a mustache.
“Federal man, eh?” Gainey said after they had shaken hands. “What brings you to Stockton, Marshal? Chasing down a fugitive?”
“Actually I’m on the trail of some counterfeiters,” John Henry explained. “I’ve tracked them from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and then they were headed in this direction.”
That put a frown on Gainey’s face. He asked, “Do you know what they look like?”
John Henry described Penelope Smith, then for good measure he threw in descriptions of Clive Denton and Nick Prentice, even though he wasn’t sure if either man was part of the gang, and then concluded by telling the local lawman what Ignatius O’Reilly looked like. Gainey listened attentively but then shook his head.
“Can’t say as I recall seeing anybody like that around today. You sure they can’t be more than one day ahead of you?”
“That’s right, at least where the blonde and the two younger men are concerned. They just reached San Francisco early this morning.”
“Well, I’ll have a word with the merchants around town and let them know to be on the lookout for any phony bills. And I’ll pass along those descriptions to my deputies. Don’t see what else I can do to help you, Marshal.”
“That’s plenty,” John Henry assured him. “I’m obliged to you. The only other thing I’d ask is if you can point me toward a good place to have supper.”
That put a smile on Gainey’s face, which normally seemed to wear a more hangdog expression. He said, “The Red Top Café is your best bet. On the other side of the street in the next block.”
“I’m obliged again,” John Henry said. He left the lawman’s office and found the café, which was a stone building with a red tile roof in the Spanish style.
After washing down a pretty good meal of steak, potatoes, and beans with several cups of coffee, John Henry went by the livery stable to check on Buck. Satisfied that the horse was being well cared for, he started for the hotel, intent on getting a good night’s sleep. Some men would have sought out a saloon and had a few drinks, but John Henry intended on making an early start the next morning and didn’t want anything interfering with that.
Night had fallen, and a lot of businesses were closed already. In a farming community such as this one, most folks probably got up and went to bed with the sun.
He was walking in front of one of the few lighted windows on the main street when the sharp crack of a rifle split the night air. From the corner of his eye John Henry saw a muzzle flash at an angle across the street. In the same heartbeat as the flash and the rifle’s report, he felt the hot wind of a bullet passing within an inch or so of his left ear.
The window behind him shattered as the glass exploded inward.
John Henry reacted instantly, letting his instincts take over as he leaped off the boardwalk and dashed behind a parked wagon. He crouched there and drew his Colt as another shot cracked. The slug thudded against the wagon somewhere. John Henry straightened and triggered two swift shots in the direction of the muzzle flashes he had seen.
He could see now that the bushwhacker had hidden behind another wagon. John Henry couldn’t tell if the rifleman was still back there or had fled into the mouth of a nearby alley. In the thick shadows it was hard to be sure of anything.
Angry shouts came from inside the building with the bullet-shattered window. From the sound of the man’s voice, he was just hopping mad, not hurt. John Henry hoped that the shot hadn’t wounded anybody, but right now he couldn’t check. If he tried to get into the building he would be silhouetted against the light again, a perfect target.
More shouts sounded down the street. Unlike some frontier settlements, Stockton probably didn’t have many gunfights breaking out in the middle of the night. People would want to know what was going on, but if they had any sense, John Henry thought, they would stay inside until things quieted down.
With all the commotion, it was a miracle that John Henry heard a plank in the boardwalk creak behind him. He twisted around and saw a figure looming ominously out of the shadows. Whoever it was might be an innocent bystander, John Henry realized, so he held off on the trigger even though his first impulse was to shoot.
Then he saw the figure thrust something long and menacing at him and he dived for the ground. A shotgun erupted with a deafening boom as a huge tongue of flame spurted from one of its barrels. Buckshot smashed into the side of the wagon and ripped through the air next to John Henry as he rolled underneath the vehicle. The only thing that saved him was that the range was close, so the charge hadn’t had the chance to spread out much.
As he came to a stop on his belly, John Henry tipped the revolver up and fired from underneath the wagon. The shotgunner cried out and staggered to the side. John Henry heard the thud as the double-barreled weapon fell to the boardwalk. The man who had wielded it collapsed on top of it.
The original bushwhacker was still in the game. His rifle cracked twice more as he emerged from cover and started across the street toward John Henry, throwing lead as fast as he could work the rifle’s lever.
John Henry rolled again as slugs plowed into the ground so close to his head that they kicked dust into his eyes. Half-blinded, he tried to swing the Colt around and bring it to bear on his attacker, but he had a grim hunch that he wasn’t going to make it in time.
Another handgun blasted somewhere nearby. In the confusion, that was all John Henry could tell for sure. But the rifleman suddenly stumbled and dropped the repeater. John Henry snapped a shot at him but couldn’t tell if he hit the man. Then his hammer fell on an empty chamber.
The bushwhacker turned and ran. He was moving fast enough that he couldn’t be injured very badly. John Henry scrambled out from under the wagon, jammed the empty revolver back in its holster, and gave chase.
Shadows swallowed the bushwhacker as he ran into that alley across the street. John Henry flattened against the front wall of the building next to the alley and quickly thumbed fresh cartridges into the Colt’s cylinder. Going down a dark alley with an empty gun was a recipe for disaster for a lawman.
But as he snapped the cylinder closed, he heard a swift rataplan of hoofbeats from the other end of the alley. John Henry bit back a curse. Clearly, the bushwhacker had had a horse hidden back there, and now he was galloping away as fast as the animal could carry him. John Henry knew that by the time he retrieved Buck from the stable and threw a saddle on him, the would-be killer would be long gone.
But the one with the shotgun wasn’t going anywhere. John Henry could see him lying motionless on the boardwalk in the light that came through the broken window. Even though his instincts told him that the man was either dead or unconscious, he kept the Colt trained on the still form anyway as he approached.
The man was lying facedown on top of the shotgun he had dropped. John Henry hooked a boot toe under his shoulder and rolled him over onto his back. The front of the man’s homespun shirt under his coat was dark with blood where John Henry had drilled him twice.
To the best of his recollection, John Henry had never seen the man before.
The sound of footsteps made him turn quic
kly toward them. A vaguely familiar voice called, “Hold your fire, damn it!”
“Marshal Gainey?” John Henry said.
“That’s right,” the local lawman answered. “Who’s there?”
“It’s John Henry Sixkiller.”
“Marshal Sixkiller! What’s going on here?”
Gainey, carrying a shotgun, came into the light. His eyes widened as he looked from the Colt in John Henry’s hand to the dead man on the boardwalk.
“That’s Floyd Matthews,” he said. “Did you kill him?”
“Reckon I did,” John Henry said, “but only after he came within a whisker of blowing my head off with that Greener.”
Gainey grunted and said, “Can’t say as I’m surprised. Matthews has been in trouble with the law more times than I can count.”
“He’s a local man?”
“Yeah. His pa and brothers have a farm north of here. Good folks, all of them. But Floyd was always off a little. Didn’t want to work, so he got sent to prison twice, once for robbing a store and once for holding up a stagecoach. I figure he’s committed other crimes nobody could prove on him, too. Did he try to rob you, Marshal?”
“No,” John Henry said, “he was out to kill me, and so was the fella with him.”
“There was another one?”
“Hombre with what sounded like a Winchester.” John Henry pointed at the wagon across the street. “He was waiting for me over there and opened up on me first. When he missed and I returned his fire, Matthews moved in from behind me with the shotgun.”
Gainey let out a low whistle and said, “You’re lucky to be alive if they had you in a crossfire like that.”
“I know,” John Henry said. “I probably wouldn’t be if somebody else hadn’t pitched in and winged the gent with the rifle. That wasn’t you, Marshal?”
Gainey shook his head and said, “I just got here. I was in my office when I heard all the shooting. Sounded like war had broken out again. You say somebody helped you? You didn’t get a look at him?”
“I never saw him,” John Henry said, “but there’s a good chance he saved my life.”
And he had no idea who could have done such a thing.
Chapter Twenty-two
They found the Winchester the bushwhacker had used lying in the street where he had dropped it, but it was just like a thousand other rifles and didn’t tell John Henry anything that would help to identify its owner.
By the time he rode out of Stockton the next morning, he still didn’t have any idea who had fired the shot that winged the rifleman and made him flee.
He had a hunch about the identity of the bushwhacker, though: Clive Denton. John Henry was becoming more convinced that Denton had sent Penelope Smith on into the mountains with the rest of the bogus bills while he kept an eye on her back trail. Somehow they had discovered that a federal lawman was tracking the gang and they wanted to stop him before he caught up to Penelope.
Buck kept up a ground-eating pace all day, and by evening John Henry rode into the foothills settlement of Sonora. Originally a mining camp, it had hung on after the boom days to become a reasonably prosperous town serving the needs of the mines that were still operating in the area.
The local law was a small, wiry man named Sam Meldrum, whose sweeping mustaches seemed much too big for his body. When he heard what had brought John Henry to Sonora, he suggested that they go around to the local businesses together and search for counterfeit bills. That sounded like a good idea to John Henry.
They found one of the phony ten-dollar bills at the livery stable, where the proprietor remembered the good-looking blonde in a buggy who had passed through around midday.
“She wanted to buy some grain for her horse,” the man explained. “I sold her some, of course.” The liveryman glanced back and forth as if to make sure no one was eavesdropping and lowered his voice as he went on, “Hell, I’d have given her the grain if I hadn’t been worried that my missus would catch on. She does all the bookkeepin’, and she’s got an eagle eye for any unexplained losses. But I tell you, fellas, ain’t many men’d ever say no to a gal as good-lookin’ as that yellow-haired filly. And I reckon she knowed that, too.”
“You know if she went anywhere else here in town?” Meldrum asked.
The liveryman scratched his jaw and pondered, then said, “While I was grainin’ her horse, I think she went up the street to the milliner’s. Can’t be sure about that, though.” When the lawmen started to leave the barn, he added, “That money she give me, you say it’s fake?”
“That’s right,” John Henry said.
“Well . . . I reckon it’s worth the price of the grain her horse et, just to get to talk to somebody like her for a few minutes.”
As they were walking up the street, Meldrum said, “This woman must be a mighty fine looker.”
“She is that,” John Henry agreed. “Crooked as a dog’s hind leg, though, and not to be trusted at all.”
“That’s a shame. I guess just ’cause a gal looks like an angel, that don’t mean she’s gonna act like one.”
“That’s about as true a thing as any man ever said,” John Henry agreed.
Not surprisingly, the stout, white-haired woman who ran the millinery shop wasn’t nearly as impressed with Penelope Smith as the liveryman had been. In fact, her face pinched with disapproval when John Henry described the blonde.
“Yes, she was here,” the woman said. “I sold her a scarf. She said she needed something to keep the dust out of her mouth and nose while she was traveling. I can understand that. This is a dreadfully dusty country.”
“But something about her rubbed you the wrong way, didn’t it?” John Henry guessed.
“Well . . . young women who look like that, they have a certain arrogance about them. As if the rest of the world should kowtow to them simply because so many men fall prostrate at their feet with desire. I can only imagine.”
Meldrum muttered something under his breath.
“What did you say, Sheriff Meldrum?” the woman asked with a frown.
“Oh, nothin’, nothin’ at all,” Meldrum replied hurriedly. “So you sold her a scarf, did you?”
“That’s right.”
John Henry said, “And she paid you with either a ten- or a twenty-dollar bill, didn’t she?”
“How in the world did you know that?”
“We’d better take a look at it,” John Henry said, sighing. He was pretty sure Penelope had struck again.
By now he had seen enough of the bogus bills to recognize what he was looking for almost right away. He pointed out the slight flaws in the printing, prompting the owner of the shop to exclaim, “Good heavens! A bill like that is worthless!”
“Yes, ma’am,” John Henry said. “I’m afraid so.”
“I knew a woman who looked like her couldn’t be trusted! I just knew it!”
“Do you know if she went anywhere else?” John Henry asked.
“I have no idea. If you catch her, Marshal Sixkiller, are you going to put her in jail?”
“That’ll be up to a judge and jury, ma’am, but I expect that’s what’ll happen.”
“Good. Her looks won’t do her much good there, will they?”
John Henry couldn’t answer that.
He was thinking more about the fact that Penelope was only half a day ahead of him now. He was closing in on her.
Which meant he would have to keep his eyes open even more. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there might be another ambush ahead of him somewhere.
* * *
He spent the night in Sonora and rode out the next morning after saying good-bye to Sheriff Sam Meldrum. From here on the going would be considerably more rugged as the trail rose into the mountains. The good thing was that the terrain ought to slow Penelope down in the buggy even more than it did John Henry on horseback.
“It’s up to you now, Buck,” he said as he patted the big horse on the shoulder.
Buck responded admirably, taking the steep t
rails with apparent ease. He was sure-footed, too, which was a good thing because there were places where a sheer drop-off of a couple of hundred feet bordered the road. Luckily, it was wide enough so that whenever John Henry met a wagon coming down, as he did a few times, he was able to pull off to the side and let the vehicles pass.
By afternoon John Henry and Buck had climbed high into the mountains. With the drop-off to the right, a steeply sloping rock face rose to John Henry’s left as the trail circled the shoulder of a snow-capped peak. The Sierra Nevadas were rugged but beautiful, he thought. Previous cases had taken him to New Mexico Territory and he had seen the mountains there. If anything, this California scenery was even more spectacular.
The trail entered a level stretch of a quarter of a mile or so, which would allow Buck to rest a bit as John Henry reined him back to an easy walk. The dizzying drop-off still loomed to the right, the cliff topped by rugged rimrock to the left.
John Henry had reached the midpoint of that level stretch when a sudden boom made his head jerk up. That sounded like dynamite, he thought.
As he saw a cloud of dust and smoke billow up from the rimrock, he knew his hunch was right. Somebody had just set off a blast up there. And there was only one good reason for somebody to do such a thing.
Somebody was trying to drop an avalanche right on top of his head.
It looked like they had a pretty good chance of succeeding, too. The slope here wasn’t sheer, but it was steep enough that once rocks started sliding and bouncing down it, nothing was going to stop them. Just such a deadly gray wave was coming toward John Henry now.
That realization of danger went through his brain in a fraction of a second. Almost as soon as the dynamite exploded, John Henry had jabbed his boot heels into Buck’s flanks and sent the horse leaping ahead.
“Run for all you’re worth, Buck!” John Henry shouted over the growing rumble of the rockslide.
Whoever had set off that blast had chosen a good spot. Whether John Henry turned around and tried to retreat or charged ahead, he and Buck had about the same distance to cover to get clear of the avalanche.
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