Bull's Eye Stage Coach

by Hall, Billy

  CHAPTER 12

  ‘We are sufficiently far from those you are so terrified of. You can get that thing away from the back of my head now!’

  Mac thought of several things to say, but held his tongue. His arm was growing awfully tired of holding both Belinda and the shotgun anyway. He swung the shotgun away from her and pointed it over the side of the wagon. He lowered the hammers, then flexed his hand several times, restoring the circulation to his fingers.

  Belinda turned toward him, her face a mixture of rage and fear. ‘You know that Dwight will track you down and kill you,’ she declared.

  ‘He’ll try. No doubt about that,’ Mac agreed. ‘Whether he will succeed remains to be seen. Other people have tried. They’re all dead.’

  Instead of waiting for an answer from her, he turned to the driver. ‘You got my horse waitin’ for us, Will?’

  Without turning around, Bandy said, ‘The horses are waiting. Yours, mine and the ones for the boys that were in town. Three extras, since I think three of our men were killed in town.’

  ‘Four,’ Mac corrected. ‘If you hadn’t gotten in such an all-fired hurry, we wouldn’t have needed to lose any. You knew I was gonna grab the girl.’

  ‘I knew you were going to try,’ Bandy corrected. ‘There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t slip. When I tell you I’ll do something, I do it.’

  ‘No matter,’ Bandy soothed. ‘Just four less to divide all this gold amongst.’

  ‘That much more to weigh us down and slow us up,’ Mac argued. ‘That stuff’s heavy.’

  ‘Ah, the burden of great wealth.’ Bandy almost mocked the other’s concern.

  ‘I don’t see anybody following us yet. I don’t like that.’

  ‘They will be afraid to follow, so long as we have the woman. Once we get rid of her, it will be a different story.’

  ‘What makes you think I plan to get rid of her?’

  ‘You surely aren’t thinking of taking her with you, are you?’

  ‘Why not? She’s a real looker. Feisty, too. I plan to get enough fun out of her to make up for the time I spent with my hands back in printer’s ink. Not to mention the whipping I took from that pint-sized dude. I wonder who he is, anyway?’

  ‘Johnny recognized him. He is a Pinkerton detective by the name of Val Lindquist. He is the one that arrested Johnny.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he shoot him while he had the chance?’

  ‘He would have, if you hadn’t chosen that moment to grab the woman. If any of us had started shooting after that, they would have decided they were all going to be shot, and had nothing to lose. Then they would have opened up on us regardless of the hostage.’

  ‘So he passed up on the chance to get even with the guy that arrested him!’

  ‘He believes he will get another chance. You can bet your bottom dollar that he, at least, will try to follow us.’

  ‘It’s a good thing we had this deal with the woman figured out ahead of time. They were really set up for us! How’d they know we were coming?’

  Bandy merely shrugged. He turned the team off the road just at the bottom of a long hill. He steered them into the bottom of a broad, shallow draw that led off to the east.

  Leaving the road slowed their progress considerably. The horses were forced to wend their way around clumps of brush, soap weeds and rocks. The grass and uneven ground lent more resistance to the wheels. The group of outlaws on horseback drew steadily farther ahead of them.

  Feigning resignation, Belinda watched desperately for a spot where she might lunge over the side of the wagon and duck behind cover before her captor could react. As she did, she listened to their conversation.

  ‘I guess it doesn’t matter,’ Mac said finally. ‘We got what we came for. Not to mention this rather delightful little bundle of pleasure to boot.’

  As he said it he reached out a hand, lifted her chin and leered at her. The look in his eyes sent shivers through her, try as she might to hide the fact.

  Bandy’s disapproval was obvious, even though his back was turned. ‘You had best give up the idea of taking her with you,’ he advised. ‘That can only lead to more problems than you can handle. When we get where we will divide the fruits of our labors, let her start walking back toward town.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Mac said flatly. ‘I been on good behavior way too long. I’m not about to miss out on having my fun with her.’

  ‘Taking advantage of her will almost guarantee that your misdeeds will catch up with you. Some things the Good Lord may wink at. Wanton abuse of a virtuous woman is not among them.’

  Mac laughed. ‘Well, now, aren’t you sounding just like a preacher! Where did you learn to be so high and holy?’

  ‘I am, in point of fact, an ordained minister of the Gospel,’ Bandy retorted.

  Belinda’s jaw dropped. Mac stared at the outlaw leader’s back for a long moment in silence, before he said, ‘What? Are you serious?’

  ‘I am most serious.’

  ‘Then what are you doing setting up the biggest hold-up Wyoming Territory has ever seen?’

  They rode in silence a long way. Mac waited as long as his curiosity could stand, then pressed for an explanation. ‘So what changed you from a preacher to a bank robber?’

  Again a long silence ensued. At last Bandy said, ‘I suppose the idea developed slowly, once I realized that the leaders of virtually every congregation perceive it as their divine duty to starve every member of the clergy as nearly as possible to death, all in the name of stewardship. They universally seek to squeeze the last dregs of service they possibly can from their ministers, while compensating them just as little as humanly possible. They bristle at and revile any and every perceived fault or misstatement. They provide only the most shabby and drafty places to live, often furnished with cast-offs which are no longer fit for their own families to use. At some point I began to resent their obvious, even ostentatious prosperity and my own poverty. When my wife died of pneumonia one cold winter, I determined to tolerate no more of their pious larceny. I gave the lot of them the tongue-lashing of their lives at prayer meeting one midweek evening. Then I emptied the pockets of the penurious penitents at gunpoint, and made my well-planned escape.’

  Mac laughed uproariously. ‘I would have given half my haul on this job just to’ve seen that!’

  Sensing her opportunity, Belinda grasped the side of the wagon, swung her feet over the side and shoved herself as far from it as she could. The rear wheel just brushed her hand as she catapulted away from it. She landed on an uneven spot of ground, twisted her ankle and fell awkwardly. She scrambled to her feet, ducked behind a large boulder and began to run as fast as she could, directly away from the wagon.

  It was not a good decision. Away from the wagon, to the side, meant toward the side of the gully. Shallow though it was, climbing up its side slowed her flight. So also did the stabbing pain in her ankle. She had made it no more than a dozen yards from the wagon when a cursing McCrae grasped her by the hair and jerked her backward. She sprawled painfully on the ground, the breath driven from her lungs.

  Mac kept his grip on her hair and hauled her to her feet. His face inches from hers, he continued to curse, telling her in the most graphic of terms the things he was going to do to her before he let her crawl back to her precious marshal, if she managed to live long enough to do so.

  He dragged her back to the wagon, still holding her by the hair. He grabbed the back of her dress and, using it and her hair, heaved her back into the wagon. She landed on the stack of gold bars in the center of the wagon. Another wave of pain shot through her from the small of her back where it contacted the edge of that stack of gold. She raised her head only to have Mac knock her flat again with the back of his hand on the side of her face.

  She laid there, fighting to breathe, trying desperately not to cry nor scream.

  Bandy urged the team back into motion as one of the other outlaws appeared in fro
nt of them. ‘You guys are takin’ your sweet time,’ he challenged. ‘Kick them horses up a notch.’

  ‘I have no desire to break a wheel on a rock and disrupt our well-laid plans,’ Bandy responded in a carefully measured voice. ‘Do you have lookouts posted?’

  ‘Yeah, we got a guy on top of a knoll, a-watchin’. Ain’t nobody even started out yet, don’t look like.’

  In minutes the wagon pulled into a broad, smooth space where the gully widened out. Several horses waited patiently. Five men stood waiting less patiently than their horses. The sixth man remained on his mount. Bandy reined the team to a halt and wrapped the lines around the brake.

  ‘Johnny and Nels, start counting the money in the bags, and divide it into eight stacks. Jesse and Arthur, count the bars of gold. The rest of you get everybody’s saddle-bags over here so we can do this quickly.’

  ‘What if it won’t all fit.’

  ‘Now there is a problem the Lord’s servants are inexperienced to deal with,’ Bandy chuckled. He was hurriedly replacing the clothes he had been wearing with a broadcloth suit, seemingly oblivious to Belinda’s presence. ‘If there is more wealth than we can carry, we shall simply have to leave the remainder here. Remember, the more gold you carry away with you, the slower your flight will be, and pursuit will be sure to come.’

  It took surprisingly little time for them to count and divide the neatly bundled packets of paper money. It appeared that it, alone, would nearly fill the waiting saddle-bags.

  ‘Put what gold you wish to carry in your saddlebags first. You may wish to leave behind the usual contents of those bags, knowing you can readily replace it all with the money in hand. Then place a few gold bars in your bedrolls, but be sure they are folded in place securely. They are extremely heavy, and will work their way out if they are not. It would be ironic indeed if our pursuers were to capture you following a trail of golden ingots instead of breadcrumbs!’

  He laughed as if he had just told the world’s funniest joke. Nobody else laughed. They were all too busy counting, dividing, or grabbing their share of the fruits of their robbery.

  Amazingly, they were able to distribute the several hundred pounds of gold and all the paper money, secure it and ride away.

  As the first of the group started to leave, Bandy offered, ‘Do not push your horses too hard, or they will tire too quickly. They are carrying the equivalent of an extra rider.’

  Nobody paid the least attention to him. He mounted his own horse and, leading the horse of one of the dead outlaws, he left at a trot, continuing eastward along the bottom of the draw the wagon had followed.

  Belinda’s mind was churning furiously. She well knew that flight was impossible. She had no gun, and certainly could not overpower her captor. Her eyes fell on the lace that decorated the front of her dress. Three rows of the lace were spaced horizontally across the skirt of the garment. Pretending resignation, she sat down on a large boulder, her back mostly toward those of the outlaws who had not yet left. Working as rapidly and silently as possible, she tore half a dozen pieces of lace from the dress’s decor. She wadded them up and stuffed them into her pocket.

  Mac had divided his share of the loot on to two horses. He motioned toward one of the animals. ‘Get on.’

  She hesitated the barest moment, then rose from the boulder and complied. ‘Just so you know,’ Mac told her, ‘if you try anything funny like tryin’ to run off on me, I’ll strip you naked and make you ride that way in the sun. It won’t take an hour afore you’re plumb fried, and you’ll find out what real pain is. In two hours you’ll have blisters the size of your thumb all over you and you’ll be screaming like a baby with the pain. And it won’t keep me from having the full measure of fun I have planned with you when we get where we’re going, but you’ll be in so much pain by then you won’t even care.’

  She gasped at his words, her face paling to a sickly, ashen hue. She swallowed hard, after three attempts. She did not for an instant doubt the man’s ability to be every bit as cruel as he threatened.

  It took every ounce of courage she could muster to slip a piece of the lace out of her pocket and drop it beside her horse as they rode away.

  CHAPTER 13

  ‘There’s eight of ’em. Two to one they’re goin’ eight different directions outa here.’

  Without looking at Dwight, Val replied, ‘I’m sure you’re right.’

  Wordlessly, as though they had ridden together for years, both men dismounted. Working in opposite directions, they began walking a large circle around the flat bottom of the vale, where the horseless wagon, bereft of its treasure, stood forlorn and deserted.

  Odds and ends of everything imaginable were strewn about the area. Several neckerchiefs, tins of Arbuckle, hardtack, boot repair kits, even several guns and boxes of ammunition had been cast aside as the outlaws made all available space in their saddle-bags.

  ‘I’d bet half of ’em even stuffed their shirts full o’ paper money,’ Dwight mused.

  Every little way he spotted where a lone rider had fled, all heading east or south, away from the road that led out from town. ‘Expectin’ someone to be chasin’ ’em pretty soon,’ he mused.

  He and Val met almost exactly halfway around the circle. ‘I counted six horses headin’ out this way,’ Dwight offered.

  ‘Five that way,’ Val responded.

  ‘McCrae rode in the wagon,’ Dwight mused. ‘Goode and Tighson had horses saddled and ready, and they rode ’em out. One o’ the gang was shot off’n his horse, an’ they took that horse with ’em.’

  ‘McCrae had obviously planned on bringing the hostage with the wagon, so his horse would most likely have been left here, along with Bandy’s,’ Val added, following Dwight’s line of reasoning.

  ‘So countin’ the team, they had eleven horses, but only nine people, includin’ Belinda.’

  ‘I cut two trails with two horses together.’

  ‘I spotted one.’

  ‘So two of them have an extra horse, each carrying only half as much money. The other one has Belinda.’

  ‘MacRae.’

  ‘Which is the one you’ll be following, I’m sure.’

  ‘Providin’ I can figure out which one it is,’ Dwight responded. The terror he kept carefully tethered in his mind nonetheless echoed in his voice.

  Silence descended between the two for a long moment. It was Val who offered, then, ‘Let’s follow the double sets for a little ways. Maybe we can figure out which extra horses are carrying money and which one is carrying her.’

  The suggestion rang hollow in Dwight’s mind. Her weight on a horse would not be different enough from half of one outlaw’s gold. The tracks would not be different enough to be able to tell which was which. Even so, for lack of any better idea, he mounted up and trotted over to where one double trail had left the area. He followed that trail for nearly a quarter of a mile, turned around to go back, when Val’s voice carried on the wind. ‘Over here!’

  He jammed the spurs into his horse’s sides much harder than he intended. The horse leaped forward, running flat out in three jumps. He caught up with Val scarcely three minutes later.

  ‘What’d you find?’ he called out, well before he had advanced to where the Pinkerton detective sat his horse, waiting.

  Silently, Val pointed at the ground.

  Sawing on the reins to pull his horse to a stop, Dwight stared where the smaller man pointed. Caught in the edge of a clump of sage brush was a piece of beige lace. Dwight’s heart leaped into his throat. He leaped from his horse and walked a swift circle around the sage brush. Then he followed the two sets of tracks for a ways, then turned and ran back. He picked up the piece of lace. It was heavily wrinkled, giving evidence that it had been tightly crushed before it found its way to where they had found it.

  ‘Is that hers?’ Val asked.

  Dwight forced himself to be calm. He relived in his mind the picture of Mac holding the shotgun to the base of Belinda’s skull. He remembered the dress sh
e was wearing. He looked at the lace. ‘Yeah,’ he said, the word catching in his throat.

  ‘She marked her trail?’ Val asked.

  A mirthless smile spread across Dwight’s face. ‘Sure’s anything. She found a way to let me know which set o’ tracks was hers.’

  Not wasting the time to ask if that were the set of tracks Dwight would be following, Val said, ‘I would guess that Bandy will be one of the other double set of tracks. He would most certainly commandeer one of the extra horses to aid his getaway. I have a fifty-fifty chance of guessing the right one. Since he was overseeing the division of the loot, that would most likely mean he was one of the last to leave. I will guess it to be the other set of tracks that lead just a little way west from the set you’ll be following.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Dwight agreed, already back in the saddle.

  ‘I’ll mark these two trails,’ Val offered. ‘That way the rest of them will know which ones to follow and which ones we are already pursuing.’

  Dwight nodded, impatient to be moving.

  ‘They will be more easily caught than they realize,’ he assured Dwight.

  Dwight frowned. ‘Why’s that?’

  Val smiled. ‘I’m sure none of them has ever seen that much gold, let alone tried to transport it. It is amazingly heavy. If it doesn’t tear out the seams of their saddle-bags, it will tire their horses much, much more quickly than they expect. They will either push their horses too hard and exhaust them quickly, or they will have to travel slowly enough to be readily overtaken.’

  ‘Except the two with a spare horse.’

  ‘Except the two with a spare horse,’ Val echoed.

  Dwight didn’t wait to hear any more. He didn’t wait to watch Val scratch arrows in the dirt pointing toward the tracks they each followed. He didn’t see him scratch a ‘V L’ beside one arrow, and a ‘D S’ beside the other. He didn’t look back to see the dust cloud rapidly approaching from town, as the posse raced to take up the pursuit. All he could see was the image of the woman he loved in the grasp of the outlaw.