His voice trailed away and it grew very quiet in the camp.
It could all be one elaborate lie, of course, Benedict mused, yet it had the sound of truth. And it was obvious what Billy Quinn was hoping to do. He had no future at all if they kept on going east, but should they return to Babylon and perhaps become involved in gunplay, he might be given a chance to escape.
Yet in spite of these things, it was impossible to shrug off what the killer had revealed, impossible not to envisage what could happen back there should events unfold according to Quinn’s prediction.
The Sudden bunch and the Murdocks and the innocent people in between ...
Brazos was first to move. With every outward sign of bad temper, he went to the horses, saddled all three and strapped on the camp gear. He cussed Bullpup who got in his way as he came back to haul Quinn to his feet, then ‘helped’ the killer into the saddle so vigorously that he almost fell over the far side.
All this without a word. And he still didn’t speak as he mounted, and leading Quinn’s horse, started out.
He rode back along their own tracks.
Duke Benedict sighed and shook his head as he went to his mount and stepped up. Hank Brazos was just dumb enough and believed deeply enough in simple heroics to turn his back on an easy ride east and a certain five thousand dollars, to face a situation that might well score him a bullet between the eyes for his trouble.
That was all very well for illiterate Texans. But what was his excuse?
Chapter Twelve – They Died Game
SLATTERY’S RIGHT HAND flashed, whipping his smoking .45 away from the falling figure of Virgil Murdock towards the silhouette of Stacey outlined against the gun smoke-shrouded window of the Nugget Saloon. The .45 moved fast, but Slattery’s grin of victory lasted only a second. Three soft-nosed slugs stitched a bloody pattern across his chest. Hitting the boards, he floundered like a landed fish, dying, his blood mingling with the blood already there.
One hand pressed to his side, Bourne Murdock turned, staring through the ghostly tendrils of smoke for another target. The Nugget was a slaughterhouse. None knew how many dead were in there, but most of those who had joined this fierce battle in the little saloon opposite the jailhouse were already dead or wounded.
It had erupted after Nero Nash fired his rifle into the jailhouse from the alley flanking the Nugget. Nash had expected the Murdocks to lay blame for the shot on Sudden, and indeed Stacey and Morgan had opened up on Crowdy and Weston right after the shot. But the sheriff and Virgil had spotted Nash’s gun flash and rushed across Front Street. Fleeing, Nash had suddenly found himself confronted by Tom Sudden and Kid Cimarron, drawn from Jones Street by the shooting. The shooting flared and by the time the fat saloonkeeper fell dead under the crossfire, the deadly battle was joined.
Now Bourne Murdock stumbled through wrecked furniture and bullet-shattered glass with a smoking Colt in his fist and fire in his guts looking for another man to kill ... another outlaw to pay for the murderous outrage on the town ... his town ...
But all he saw was tall Virgil’s pain-twisted body in the smoky gloom, and heard his cry.
“Bourne ... I’m sorry, Bourne. Say you don’t hold it against me before I die?”
“Hold what?”
“What I done.”
“What was it, for God’s sake?”
Bourne Murdock got no further, for at that moment he saw Kid Cimarron snaking from behind the bar to his left. There was blood on Cimarron’s shirtfront and his face showed ghostly pale, but the fire in his eyes burnt brightly and the gun in his fist was steady as it spewed fire with a voice that trembled the drapes and shook the sagging batwings.
Lead howled about Murdock’s tall form, slammed into the wooden walls, crashed through bottles and glasses on the shelves. The sheriff triggered back and from a far corner, the wounded Morgan’s six-gun chimed in with deep, booming blasts.
Caught on the fiery horns of the crossfire, Cimarron spun and smashed face first into an upright, both guns thudding to the floor seconds before he struck.
“Forgive me, Bourne ...”
Virgil was still alive despite the three slugs he’d taken in his shootout with Slade Slattery earlier, still whispering as the shadows closed in. “Forgive me ...”
The weak voice faded and was gone, stilled forever now.
The night Sudden had returned to Babylon, Virgil had tried to drown his guilt for it all in whisky. Now it had finally been quenched in blood.
The sheriff’s strength was fading fast as he peered around the death-filled saloon. They’d accounted for them all except Sudden. If he was to die, he refused to leave Sudden behind him. Very slowly he moved to the bleeding figure of Kid Cimarron and drove his toe into his ribs, not realizing the man was dead.
“Where’s Sudden?” he croaked.
“Here, Murdock!”
The voice, laced with pain, came from the front porch where Tom Sudden leaned with his guns in full view of the fearful, watching street. “You and me, Murdock ... you and me!”
Clearly the white-faced onlookers heard the challenging cry now that the guns in the saloon had finally fallen silent. Then they could hear the clatter and thud of wreckage being brushed aside as a man made his way towards the batwings of the Nugget.
Most towners watched in dread and awe, a few with bright-eyed enjoyment. But one watcher was dispassionate, as coldly aloof as a lobo wolf. Canada Smith stood solitary in the alleyway by the hotel with the sunlight gleaming on his vast beard and winking off the shining barrels of the Greener shotgun cradled in his mighty arms. And Babylon was too engrossed in what was taking place across the street even to be aware of the stranger.
Tom Sudden backed away from the porch as he heard the unsteady steps drawing closer to the batwings. With his guns in his hands and blood seeping through his shirt, Tom Sudden looked a desperate and dangerous man as he backed into the sun, and only Bourne Murdock was close enough to see the twist of regret in Sudden’s face.
Sudden had come home in search of vengeance. But he’d hoped it to be a just vengeance, one that would see Bourne Murdock jailed and the Sudden name cleared. He had enlisted gunmen to defend him against the Murdock clan in the event of trouble, and knew now that had been a grave mistake. He’d brought in guns and the Murdocks had finally answered with guns, just as he’d known deep down they always must.
Now it was too late for anything but this final act of a drama that had gone deadly wrong ...
Neither man spoke. It was far too late for words. They merely stood there facing each other for an agonizingly long second, and then their guns were speaking for them.
So they came to it, these men whose interlocking lives represented a strange saga of love and hate, of pride and passion, all narrowed down to one final, fatal clash of Colts in a dusty street—and all for love of a woman with green eyes and a way of walking that was hers alone.
Tom Sudden and Bourne Murdock fell together, as one man.
They died game.
The sound of gunfire that had made them spur faster had faded away completely as Benedict, Brazos and Billy Quinn covered the last mile to Babylon. Swinging into Front Street they saw the crowd gathered in front of the Nugget Saloon and the last tatters of gun smoke hanging over the rooftops.
They slowed to a lope, then a walk, their hoofbeats echoing hollowly against the false fronts. Two towners were already toting a still body across the street towards the undertaker’s, and in the alley flanking the saloon, they could see more forms, lying still.
They had come too late.
Their hoofbeats seemed to thump out those words as they saw men carrying the unmistakable figure of Virgil Murdock from the saloon. The storm had raged and passed and now the citizens were counting their dead.
Benedict and Brazos turned their heads sharply as Billy Quinn started to laugh. The man’s eyes were brilliant with excitement, his white teeth gleamed as he surveyed the carnage. They had seldom seen a man show such delight, and a
s Quinn’s laughter attracted the eyes of others, Brazos and Benedict looked at one another and nodded.
At last they understood the madness that lurked behind Billy Quinn’s boyish, clever facade. At last they understood how a man like he could kill the way he had ...
They halted in front of the hotel and stepped down. “Watch Quinn, Reb,” said Benedict starting off. “I can see Tara over there ...”
“Five,” Billy Quinn chuckled as another body was carried from the saloon. “What a show we missed, Texan.”
Hank Brazos stared at the killer and the sun exploded. He crashed against Quinn’s horse and went down with pain engulfing the back of his head, his last conscious sensation the taste of dust against his lips.
Quinn’s laughter died as he stared down at the figure of the giant with the Greener who had smashed the Texan down. Quinn was a man who was steeped in horror and violent death, yet never in his crimson career had he seen as many terrible things as he saw in the eyes of Canada Smith the moment before the shotgun exploded in a bursting roar of flame and all but blew his head from his shoulders.
Seemingly ponderous, yet in reality blindingly fast, Canada Smith swung the smoking shotgun barrel away from the tumbling body of Quinn and lined the muzzles on the twisting, tall figure of Benedict. With the sure instincts of the primitive, Smith had assessed the tall dude as the only potential threat to his runout now his vengeance had been taken.
And his judgment had never been more sound, for one glance was all Benedict needed to take in the bloody tableau behind him, one split-second was all it took for his lethal guns to leap and fire.
Dust puffs rose from Canada Smith’s vast jacket and he bowed towards the earth. On reflex he jerked the Greener trigger and the recoil of the great charge of shot slamming into the street at close range drove him back onto the hotel porch. He fell like a great tree, smashing porch rail and step, then rolled like a huge keg, coming to rest across the outflung arm of dead Billy Quinn.
“Billy!”
Coming up out of the pit of unconsciousness, Hank Brazos heard that scream, but couldn’t place the voice. But nobody else on Front Street had any trouble doing so as Tara Murdock flashed past the startled figure of Benedict and ran towards the hotel, arms outstretched, chestnut hair streaming behind her.
Brazos struggled to a seated position with his head filled with shooting stars as the woman rushed past. She flung herself on the shotgunned horror that had been Billy Quinn and cradled his bloody dead face in her hands.
“Billy!” she screamed. “Billy darling, don’t be dead!”
Billy darling?
The silence in Front Street was intense, save for the woman’s weeping. She hadn’t wept for dead Tom Sudden, nor shed a tear for her own husband lying stiff and stark in the Nugget’s shadow. Yet she wept for this dead man as though her heart would break and she cried the name “Billy!” over and over, revealing that she knew him as Billy Quinn and not Bob Walker ... showing she must have known all along that he was a killer ...
And she had loved him.
Nobody who witnessed her reckless grief in that dark hour could have doubted that. Tara Murdock, that great lady, had not been true to her husband. She had taken herself a lover and her lover was a butcher unworthy to lace Bourne Murdock’s boots.
She was the woman for whom brave Tom Sudden and Bourne Murdock had fought to the death, and she had not been worth it ... .
Seizing hold of the horse’s lines, Brazos dragged himself erect. He wasn’t concerned with Billy Quinn, with Canada Smith, or with the sprawled figure of the woman who sat soaked in blood cradling Quinn’s dead head in her arms. He was only concerned with Benedict who halted before him to stare down at Tara Murdock. The look of naked agony in the man’s face showed only too plainly that, to the list of the men who had loved Tara, they could now add the name Duke Benedict.
The sun was spilling its late afternoon warmth over the wide valley four days later as the two eastbound riders paused on a crest in the trail to take their last look at Babylon. From a distance the town looked peaceful, as indeed it was. Now. They had stayed on long enough to see Stacey Murdock sworn in as sheriff, to see Tara take the stage for California, and for a pair of bounty hunters to donate their five thousand dollars’ reward money to the kinfolk of those men who had lost their lives in what was already being called, “the battle of Babylon.” Now the long trails were calling again, and their pockets were still perilously close to empty.
“Where to, Yank?” Brazos asked as they started off. His tone was diffident for Benedict had been remarkably withdrawn over the past few days.
“Jones City. There’s a banking deal waiting there that I may be able to turn into a grubstake.”
“Bankin’? I never thought you knew anythin’ about bankin’.”
“I worked a year in my father’s bank in Boston before they realized I was not suited to it. But as bank clerking is hardly in keeping with my stylish image, you can keep that under your hat, mister.”
“Ain’t wearin’ a hat.”
“Well you should, for a brain like yours certainly needs protecting. The sun can scramble an underdone brain.”
Hank Brazos scowled mightily as Benedict kicked his horse ahead. Then suddenly he grinned. He had been waiting days for Benedict to come out of it, and that insult sounded as though he had suddenly come out of it, fighting.
The Texan winked down at Bullpup then took up his harmonica and played a merry tune as the sun went down over the Valley of the Teton Sioux.
Bullpup was happy, too. They were on the move again.
About the Author
E. Jefferson Clay was just one of many pseudonyms used by New South Wales-born Paul Wheelahan (1930-2018). Starting off as a comic-book writer/illustrator, Paul created The Panther and The Raven before moving on to a long and distinguished career as a western writer. Under the names Emerson Dodge, Brett McKinley, E. Jefferson Clay, Ben Jefferson and others, he penned more than 800 westerns and could, at his height, turn out a full-length western in just four days.
The son of a mounted policeman, Paul initially worked as a powder monkey on the Oaky River Dam project. By 1955, however, he was drawing Davy Crockett—Frontier Scout. In 1963 he began his long association with Australian publisher Cleveland Pty. Co. Ltd. As prolific as he was as a western writer, however, he also managed to write for TV, creating shows like Runaways and contributing scripts to perennial favorites like A Country Practice. At the time of his death, in December 2018, he was writing his autobiography, Never Ride Back … which was also the title of his very first western.
You can read more about Paul here.
The Benedict and Brazos Series by E. Jefferson Clay
Aces Wild
A Badge for Brazos
The Big Ranchero
Stage to Nowhere
Adios, Bandido
Cry Riot!
Fools’ Frontier
A Six-Gun Says Goodbye
The Living Legend
Diablo Valley
Never Ride West
Shoot and Be Damned
Wardlock’s Legion
Kid Chaney’s Express
Madigan’s Last Stand
Bury the Losers
The Buzzard Breed
Bo Rangle’s Boothill
Echoes of Shiloh
Born to Hang
Fool With A Fast Gun
Two Guns to Glory
Gunhawks on the Loose
The Glory Hunters
Nobody Kills Like Ketchell
Wear Black for Billy Quinn
… And more to come every month!
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