by Bill Brooks
* * * * *
Jack Corn had been doing some thinking of his own once the lovers had gone off to the only bedroom. The clan of them could hear Gypsy in the little room at work on Belle and it caused them to sweat in anticipation of doing the same thing with her as they listened.
“What we’re going to do, children, is kill them fellers outside . . . that big nig and that little humped-back son-of-a-bitch,” Jack Corn instructed his brood. “Then we’ll do ol’ Gypsy and keep whatever he surely has stole off somebody, and that woman, too. We won’t ever have to go to town no more for beaver . . . not with a fine-looking woman like Belle. We’ll keep her here for our own, and, when we ain’t using her, she can cook and clean and other things for us, just like your old ma did before she went insane.”
The plan delivered upon their ears brought the boys a certain bittersweet nostalgia about their late ma, but the prospect of having the beauty Belle at their disposal eradicated any such nostalgia for the old lady.
They looked at their pa eager as hunting hounds that had caught the scent of a fat rabbit.
“But we must take care, for Gypsy is a fast son-of-a-bitch with a gun, and them others is, too, by the looks of them,” the old man intoned.
“We’re plumb ready for whatever shakes out, Daddy,” said Tobe.
“I think soon as things quiet down good and well, a couple of you boys sneak out and chop off the heads of that big buck and that little feller first. Then we come in and shoot old Davy so full of lead he’ll leak blood for a month.”
They nodded their heads as one.
“Tobe, you and Alonzo go quiet to the shed and get the axes.”
* * * * *
Belle, as she was tugging on her britches, saw something pass by the window and paused in her dressing. Two shadows creeping toward the shape of a shed beyond the house. She could tell by the size of the shadows that neither shape was Blackbird or Little Dick and she knew full well how Gypsy walked bowlegged and it wasn’t he, either.
Oh, God! Everything’s started!
Fear crawled up her backbone like a centipede. A thrilling sort of fear like whenever blood was about to be shed. She just hoped she would be one of the ones shedding it. She never dreamed as a farm girl back in Iowa it could be like this.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
We slinked toward the house like a pair of stalking cats. Going slow so as not to make a sound, me carrying the 10-gauge and Dew Hardy his stolen pistol, both of us ready to do as much damage as necessary, but I was hoping not too much, because I was sick to death of killing and my heart just wasn’t in it any more like it once was. I couldn’t speak for Dew Hardy. He was a hard soul to figure. But I did not doubt he would do what he had to, for, in some ways, he seemed hard as slate on the inside.
Within a hundred yards of the cabin we saw the front door open, then close quickly, shutting out the light from inside. We saw a single man exit, and like me and the Pinkerton, stalking in his movements. Minutes earlier we’d watched the other two who’d been outside smoking go off together. We figured to bed down for the night.
“That’s Gypsy Davy,” Dew Hardy whispered.
“How can you tell?”
“By that big sombrero.”
We caught the glint of a silver revolver in his hand by the moon’s light. The moon was an orb of white like the light of freight train, only it wasn’t moving.
“What’s the son-of-a-bitch up to?” Dew mused
“A man in the night with a gun in his hand,” I said, “aims to kill them other two, I’m betting.”
“Yeah . . .” Dew started to say when suddenly the night erupted in a crackle of gunfire from the direction Davy had headed.
The gunfire was followed by screams, hoots and hollers, and loud curses. The muzzle flashes lit up the darkness like a swarm of fireflies—only real big fireflies and not the little kind. And then the gunfire came both within and without the cabin.
“What the god damn hell!” Dew Hardy exclaimed.
“I don’t know but it sounds like they’re killing each other,” I said.
Dew Hardy turned to look at me, his face glowing like that of a ghost in the eerie light of the moon.
“You’re shitting me, right?”
“Listen to it.”
“I am.”
“Keep listening.”
“I am.”
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
There was the whiz and pop and ricochet of flying lead and we both dropped to the ground for fear of stray bullets finding us. Our luck had been so bad lately it wouldn’t have been inconceivable we’d be hit.
We laid there, watching as the gun flashes winked on and off with the bark of pistols in and around the cabin.
Strangely I felt a calm sense come over me.
“What’ll we do?” Dew Hardy said.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”
“Yeah, that’s sort of what I was thinking, too.”
I took the makings from my pocket and rolled a shuck, then lit it, and laid there listening as murder took place.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
How it went down was this way.
Gypsy was about to shoot Blackbird who was lying on his side, knees pulled up, snoring softly. Nearby lay Little Dick, sleeping on his back, mouth open wide, snoring loudly.
Gypsy thumbed back the hammer of his pistol figuring to kill them quickly himself and not trust the Corns to get it done. Gypsy was a self-reliant type with mercurial musings. He’d decided at the last moment that he would himself kill the pair, then ambush the Corns, figuring Blackbird and Little Dick were the more dangerous of the bunch.
But then, as he was about to pull the trigger, he saw two of the Corn boys enter a tool shed, and so wondered what they were doing, skulking around in the moonlight.
Davy had a bad feeling. He watched them emerge again, and they were carrying something but at first he could not tell what until at last the moon glinted off one of their axe blades.
Well, god damn. That old man is going to try and turn the tables, his wily instincts told him. And why not? Wouldn’t I do the same if I was that old bastard and a chance at that money? Oh, hell, and Belle, too. I seen the way they stared at her, drool coming out of their mouths. Those dirty sons-of-bitches.
He cut loose on one and watched the figure drop like a stone as the other yelped like a scaled dog and ran for the house.
The shot awakened Blackbird and Little Dick who jumped up like a frog set on a hot skillet.
Blackbird saw Gypsy standing there with a pistol in his hand and figured rightly or wrongly that Davy had come to kill him. Blackbird drew his own piece from under his head, cocked and aimed it, but not before Davy turned again at the sound of a gun being cocked. Both men fired at once.
Davy’s shot proved truer, and Blackbird fell back dead before he could even give it a thought, his brains partly splattered across the face of Little Dick Longwinter.
Little Dick yelped and cussed and did a frenetic jig.
* * * * *
Inside the house Belle had come out the bedroom door and run smack into the old man and the three remaining Corn boys armed with gun, club, fry pan, and a knife respectively.
They saw her just as she saw them.
“Hey, little sister,” Jack Corn said with his nearly toothless and lascivious grin. “The chickens are coming home to roost this night.”
The boys cackled their delight.
The one they called Peckerwood said: “Dibs.”
She shot him first, and he looked down at where the bullet had punched a hole in his middle, then puked all over himself before pitching over.
The other two came at her with knife and club.
“You stupid bastards,” she said. “Don’t you know nothing? Taking a knife and club to a gunfight!”
It was for her almost orgasmic to shoot them so quickly it sounded like she’d only fired once instead of twice. She saw a strawberry blossom just below the eye of the one boy and the o
ther grabbed his throat. They both fell headlong, landing at her feet, the knife and club still gripped in their dirty hands.
Outside, she and the old man heard the gunfire.
“It’s a bitch, ain’t it?” the old man said as though taking delight in the mayhem. “I always knowed those children of mine would pass before me, and now they have. That leaves you and me.” He aimed his rifle, a Sharp’s Big Fifty, knowing and hating what damage it would do to her, but having no choice in the matter now.
“I was planning on diddling you whilst you was alive, but you leave me no choice . . . I’ll just have to do it before you grow too cold and stiff . . .”
He pulled the trigger, and she did, too.
* * * * *
Little Dick was scrambling around like a nervous debutante at her first ball, trying to avoid being shot dead by Gypsy Davy.
“What you doing?” he yelped at Davy, who himself had been shot and wounded by the off-mark bullet from Blackbird, blood dribbling from his rib meat.
Inches, Davy had thought when he felt the biting sting. Difference between living and dying is just inches.
“I come to kill you, Little Dick.”
“For what? I didn’t do nothing to you?”
“You was going to steal my money.”
“Steal your money? It was our money as I rightly recall. We all robbed that bank together.”
“That was then, this is now.”
Little Dick finally got his piece loose from its scabbard but in his haste shot himself in the foot and blew off the big toe of his right foot. He screamed and cussed and fell down and tried to get up again, not knowing whether to hold his foot or scramble for his dropped pistol.
“You might be a killer,” Davy said, drawing a bead on the wounded man, “but you ain’t a very good one.”
He pulled the trigger, laying Little Dick out like a slab of butchered beef. Then Davy turned to the house to mop up whatever had gone on inside.
He found Belle sitting in the doorway of their love nest, holding back the blood with her hands that was leaking from her middle where the round had gone. It had come out through her spine and splintered the doorjamb. Across the room, the old man sat dead with his mouth agape and his legs stretched out in front of him like he’d gone to sit on a chair and someone had pulled it out from under him.
“I can’t feel my legs,” Belle said in great distress, looking up at Davy. “Help me stand.”
Davy tried, but her legs flopped and wouldn’t hold her. Then he felt in her back a warm wet ragged hole he could stick all his fingers in, and set her down gently as a vase full of freshly cut flowers.
“You’re all ruined, Belle.”
“No!” she screamed. It was the worst thing Gypsy Davy ever heard a human say, the sound of her voice.
“That bullet took out some of your backbone.”
She screamed again.
“God it hurts.”
“I reckon so.”
“Carry me out of this place,” she pleaded.
He shook his head.
“Won’t do you no good, Belle. I’m half shot myself. Think some of my ribs is broke.”
“Where’re the others? Where’s Blackbird?”
“Stone cold dead.”
Again Belle cried out, but Gypsy Davy knew it wasn’t from pain this time.
“You and him were planning on running off, weren’t you?” Davy said.
Belle shook her head.
“Don’t lie to me now, Belle. It would be a sin to face Jesus with a lie on your lips.”
Belle looked as forlorn as he’d ever seen a body look.
Her fingers tightened around his wrist as he tried to stand away from her.
“Don’t leave me like this,” she pleaded.
She was still beautiful of face but the rest of her was ruined, ruined, ruined, and they both knew it.
“Look yonder,” Davy said, pointing toward the door.
And when she shifted her gaze in that direction, he shot her in the top of the head and quickly looked away because he did not want to see Belle Moon in further destruction.
His side burned like a fire inside his skin. He found the old man’s whiskey jug and poured some over the wound, then took a swallow to fortify himself against whatever he must face. He figured to burn the place and light out after collecting the money he and Belle had stored under the bed. The sheets still smelled sweetly of her perfume as he pulled out the loot, and it caused a small lump in his throat to think he’d murdered the only body he thought he had ever loved.
But then he suddenly realized that one of the Corn boys was unaccounted for—the one outside earlier with the one he shot. The one who’d run off.
Where’d that little son-of-a-bitch get off to?
He decided wherever that other little rascal had fled, he was most likely a good mile from the house by now. Those boys did not have their old man’s grit; you could see that in their weak eyes.
He stepped from the cabin.
Davy did not see the glint of axe blade arcing through the dark until it was too late.
The blade cut him clean through the neck, lopping off head with sombrero still attached by stampede string.
The head of Gypsy Davy with eyes open wide from surprise went rolling across the yard as the body folded like a deflated accordion.
Not so much as a word had Davy to say about his dying.
No time for eulogies or apologies or famous last words.
Many bandits died without giving speeches. Davy was simply one of the many.
The Corn boy stood breathless at his own brave act and was already beginning to fantasize about the reputation he would get from killing Gypsy Davy.
“Why it was easy as cutting the head off a chicken,” he said to the night air, as though practicing a speech he’d give over and over again in saloons all the rest of his life. “That blade cut clean and true and Davy never stood a chance to pull them fast pistols of his.”
Then two men stepped from the deeper shadows.
“Who you?” the boy demanded.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
When the shooting stopped, we rose up and walked to the house. It was still lit on the inside, but there were no more shadows passing back and forth.
We saw the kid swing the axe and Davy’s sombrero-clad head go flying. He stood there, muttering to himself, blood wet on the axe’s blade in the full moonlight.
It was about the bloodiest thing I ever saw. Dew Hardy raised his weapon to shoot the kid, but I pushed the pistol aside.
“Let it be,” I said.
The kid looked at us, said: “Who you?”
I’d no doubt he would be willing to behead us, too, if we hadn’t been armed, if he hadn’t seen the 10-gauge in my hands.
“You better go on and get the hell out of here,” I said.
“I’m already gone,” the boy said, dropping the axe before running off into the night.
“Why didn’t you just go ahead and shoot that little prick?” Dew Hardy said.
“There’s been enough hell paid this night,” I said. “He’ll live or die the way he’s meant to, but not by our hand, not this night.”
Dew Hardy shook his head.
“You are one hard fellow to figure,” he said.
“I guess that would make two of us,” I said.
After we checked everything and saw that there was no one left alive, I felt drained of all emotion and rolled myself a shuck and smoked it. The night wind blew gently down from some distant unseen mountains and the moon shone over everything in a sad sort of way. It was almost too quiet, but then it always is quiet—following great violence.
Dew Hardy bent and picked up the moneybags still clutched in Davy’s hands.
“Look what I found,” he said.
“What do you intend to do with it?” I said.
“Finders keepers,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“You ain’t intending on keeping it all for yourself,�
�� he said. “No god damn’ way.”
“I aim to take it back to the owners,” I said. “The bank money and whatever is left from the stage robbery.”
“All of it?”
“Yes, all of it.”
“But ain’t nobody going to know we got it if we ride off now.”
“I’ll know,” I said.
“You ain’t going to let me keep just a little . . . for our troubles?”
“Not a damned dime.”
“What if I feel differently?”
“Then I guess this night has not seen the last of death,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I would shoot Dew Hardy if he put up a fight over the money, but I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t, either.
“I ain’t afraid of you.”
“Never thought you were.”
“I could have just let you die back in that town.”
“You could have.”
“That don’t count for nothing with you, that I saved your hide?”
“It does, but that’s got nothing to do with stolen money.”
“I’ve never seen nobody so ungrateful,” he said.
“Then you’ve not met many,” I said.
“Shit.”
“You can still have whatever reward there is for Davy and them,” I said. “Just sit tight until the law and that posse gets here and claim the reward for yourself.”
“You don’t want none of it, neither?”
“No.”
“You think it’s blood money?”
“I don’t think nothing. I just don’t want any.”
“Well, I never met nobody like you in my life.”
“See you around someday, maybe,” I said.
We didn’t shake hands, but I could feel his eyes on me as I walked away with the moneybags.
“So long, Messenger,” I heard him say.
I didn’t bother to look back.
THE END
About the Author
Bill Brooks is the author of twenty-one novels of historical and frontier fiction. After a lifetime of working a variety of jobs, from shoe salesman to shipyard worker, Brooks entered the health-care profession where he was in management for sixteen years before turning to his first love—writing. Once he decided to turn his attention to becoming a published writer, Brooks worked several more odd jobs to sustain himself, including wildlife tour guide in Sedona, Arizona, where he lived and became even more enamored with the West of his childhood heroes, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. Brooks wrote a string of frontier fiction novels, beginning with The Badmen (1992) and Buscadero (1993), before he attempted something more lyrical and literary: The Stone Garden: The Epic Life of Billy the Kid (2002). This was followed in succession by Pretty Boy: The Epic Life of Pretty Boy Floyd (2003) and Bonnie & Clyde: A Love Story (2005). The Stone Garden was compared by Booklist with classics like The Virginian and Hombre. After that trio of novels, Brooks was asked to return to frontier fiction by an editor who had moved to a new publisher and he wrote in succession three series for them, beginning with Law For Hire (2003), then, Dakota Lawman (2005), and finishing up with The Journey of Jim Glass (2007). He now lives in Indiana, in one of his several home towns. The Messenger is Brooks’s twenty-second novel.