Frontier of Violence

by William W. Johnstone

  Still, it was time to quit lollygagging and get on with it. Do your business or get off the pot, as the saying went.

  Things were very quiet on this end of town. Even though the chaos around the Crystal Diamond had died down considerably, it remained the focal point of the majority of the citizenry. That was good; it meant they would be that much slower to react from up there to what Eames was fixing to do down here in Old Town.

  Shifting the gun in his waistband, making sure it rode there good and secure, Eames stepped out of the scrubby tree line and started for the hotel. He was focused now, intent on going in and getting this over with.

  Had he lingered just a few moments longer, he might have heard the sounds of the two horsemen reining up their mounts only a few yards in back of where he’d been standing . . .

  CHAPTER 37

  Clayton Delaney rose from the bed. After pulling on his trousers and boots, he went over to the washstand and poured some tepid water from the pitcher into the basin. He scooped several handfuls to his face, wetted and combed his hair, dried himself. Then he returned to the bed and finished getting dressed—gun belt, shirt, string tie, corduroy jacket. His arm and shoulder felt reasonably loose, without much pain, but he slipped the sling back on anyway. For appearance’s sake.

  He figured he would wander out and see if there was anything new in the wind. He realized, of course, that it was far too soon to expect a report back from the posse. But he also realized that he was feeling too restless to stay cooped up in this damn room, pretending to be nursing his hurt arm. Maybe he’d have a couple drinks, possibly a bite to eat. Maybe that would settle him down some.

  But all the while he knew the only thing that would really settle him down was getting his damn guns back.

  Delaney was just reaching for his hat when the knock sounded on the door. He turned quickly, automatically stepping to one side, out of the direct line of the doorway. He started to reach for the Colt riding in a cross-draw holster on his left hip, but the restraint of the sling hampered the movement of his right arm and hand. So he rested his left hand instead on the grips of the Colt. He was fairly adept at shooting left-handed if he had to. But, other than the fact he wasn’t expecting any visitors—unless it was the whore, coming back to try and earn more money—there was no particular reason to anticipate the knock meant trouble. Still, a man couldn’t be too careful.

  “Who is it?” he called.

  A voice from out in the hallway replied, “Message for you, Mr. Delaney.”

  Delaney frowned. “A message from who?”

  “I don’t really know, sir. It’s folded and sealed, with your name on the outside. The fella at the front desk asked me to bring it up.”

  The response sounded innocent enough to largely assuage the kind of suspicions and cautions that were second nature to Delaney. Plus, in his restless state he wanted so bad for something to happen that it also made him quicker to let down his guard.

  So he stepped to the door, undid the lock, pulled it open.

  In the brief moment Delaney had to study the man who stood there in the hallway, he thought he looked vaguely familiar. He might have gotten past the vagueness in another couple seconds if the man hadn’t produced something else to concentrate on instead—the .44 Colt revolver he suddenly raised and aimed straight at Delaney’s heart.

  Whether there was a slight final pause on Eames’s part for the task his heart wasn’t really in, or Delaney’s reflexes were just that good—by the time the. 44 discharged its first round, the man meant to receive the slug was a blur of motion, hurling himself out of the doorway and off to one side in a frantic dive and roll. The bullet whistled across the room and smashed against the far wall.

  As he sprang away, Delaney shoved against the door with his left hand, trying to slam it shut on the man with the revolver. If nothing else, it was meant to block the shooter’s view for a second or two while Delaney scrambled to find some cover and make it back to his feet. He was also trying to unholster his own gun, but hampered by the sling and attempting to do it with his left hand while at the same time rolling across the floor wasn’t working out very well.

  Eames, in the meantime, undeterred by missing his first shot, fired again almost immediately. This round blew a large chunk out of the cheap door that Delaney tried to slam on him, causing it to swing back wide again until it slapped rattlingly against the wall. Eames entered the room, charging through a haze of powder smoke, and swung his gun to draw a bead once more on the man he’d come to kill.

  He fired a third time at the frantically crawling, digging Delaney. The bullet tore a long gash across one bunched cheek of Delaney’s butt and whapped loudly against the baseboard of the wall just beyond. Delaney yelped as he reached up, his sling finally tearing away, and tugged on the heavy wooden stand that held the washbasin and pitcher. He tipped the stand over and down—basin, water pitcher, and various grooming paraphernalia scattering in every direction—just in time to absorb Eames’s fourth round. The bullet chewed deep into the wood but didn’t manage to penetrate far enough to do any more damage to Delaney.

  Finally, Delaney got his gun yanked free. Hunkered down behind the toppled washstand, without looking or really aiming—other than knowing he had the muzzle pointed in the right general direction—he raised his left hand and triggered off two rounds of return fire. The bullets whizzed wide of their target, but not by much.

  Dropping into a wary crouch, Eames fired again. But all he got for his effort was to see one of Delaney’s boot heels get blown away and fly against the wall, where it bounced off and came clattering back down.

  Now Delaney had his Colt in his right hand. Having kept track of his would-be assassin’s shots—five in total—he knew the man could have, at most, only one round left. Unless he had a second gun. Either way, Delaney was willing to try a bold move. Pinned down the way he was, he really had little choice. So he pushed up suddenly, to where he could see over the fallen washstand, and extended his arm to fire. Eames was right there, only a couple steps inside the doorway, framed by the light of the hallway behind him. He, too, had his arm extended, ready to shoot.

  Both men fired simultaneously. Delaney got off two shots, but the second was adversely affected by Eames’s slug tearing into the washstand directly in front of Delaney’s face and kicking splinters up into his vision. So Delaney’s second shot went harmlessly wide. But the one prior to that struck Eames high on his right side, breaking two ribs and tearing through a good deal of meat and muscle.

  Eames spun around, crying out in pain, and staggered toward the hallway. He tried a desperation shot over his shoulder, but the hammer only clicked on an empty cylinder. Then another. Emitting a wail of pain and frustration, Eames lunged the rest of the way out into the hall. There, he turned unsteadily and broke toward the rear stairs in a lopsided, half-staggering run.

  Delaney held off wasting another bullet. Wanting to follow through on the near-miraculous turn of events that had left him not only still alive but with a chance to actually gain the advantage in this conflict, Delaney scrambled desperately to crawl out from behind the toppled washstand and get back to his feet. Once he’d achieved this, he rushed across the room, stumbling awkwardly due to the one shot-off boot heel, and plunged out into the hallway. “Assassin! Stop that man!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “He just tried to kill me! Assassin!”

  Out in the hallway, he was in time to see his assailant starting down the stairs at the far end. Delaney snapped off a shot, but too hurriedly. The bullet tore wallpaper and blasted loose a shower of plaster dust from the slanted ceiling of the stair well just above the fleeing man’s head.

  Seconds later, loud voices rose from farther down in the stairwell. Shouts. Curses. Delaney checked his fire once again, for fear of hitting an innocent hotel guest with a ricochet. But then, a muffled shot rang out from within the stairwell. Followed quickly by another and after that the sound of tumbling bodies.

  Delaney ran in uneven st
eps to the end of the hallway and peered cautiously down. Below, on the first-floor landing in front of the rear exit door, three men lay in a tangle. One of them, the man who’d tried to kill him, lay very still and limp. The other two were kicking and shoving frantically to try and get out from under his dead weight. Both were wielding handguns. As they succeeded in rolling Eames away and clambering to their feet, they lifted their faces to gaze up at Delaney, and he was surprised to find he recognized them.

  “Iron Tom! Largo! What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

  Iron Tom Nielson flicked a glance down at Eames, then lifted his face again. “Helping to save your ass, by the look of it,” he said. “Don’t you think you should sound a little more grateful?”

  CHAPTER 38

  The bottom edge of the sun was touching the rim of the western horizon as the Shaws rode within sight of their ranch. The sky had finished clearing more than an hour earlier though the air remained cool and the thicker stands of grass still gave off silvery puffs of retained moisture as the horses’ hooves plowed through them.

  At the mouth of the wide, bowl-like area where the buildings were clustered, Moses brought his horse to a halt and leaned back in the saddle, eyes moving in a slow sweep of the scene. The main cabin, itself badly weathered and leaning and in need of repair, sat in the middle of a horse barn and a couple other shacks in even worse condition. Several tree stumps, left over from clearing the area and providing lumber but never pulled from the ground, dotted the floor of the bowl.

  Consuela was plastered to the old man’s back, bound there with her arms pulled forward so that they partially encircled his torso, and then her wrists tied with leather thongs to prevent her from pulling away. When Moses leaned back, his bony shoulders and the sour stink of him forced her to pull back as far as she could and turn her head in disgust.

  “What’s the matter, Pop?” asked Harley, reining up beside his father.

  “Nothing in particular,” Moses answered. “Just takin’ the caution of lookin’ things over good before we ride on in.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible for anybody from the town to have got here ahead of us, do you?”

  “No. Hell no. But that don’t mean some other polecat—a nester or some such—might not be still lurkin’ around.”

  “I don’t see no sign of anything, though, do you, Pop?” spoke up Wiley, who had Alora Dane lashed behind him in the same manner as Consuela was to Moses. “The horses are in the corral. Everything looks about the same as we left it.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Cyrus. “Same ol’ shithole it’s always been.”

  “To your ungrateful eyes and mouth, maybe,” said Moses. “But that shithole, as you call it, has been home and shelter to the lot of us for a good many years. All through most of the growin’ up of you boys. When your ma and me first settled here, it looked a lot better. Had what she called ‘the promise of a fine home for us to raise a family and a place where we can grow old together.’ I remember her sayin’ those very words. But then she got sick and died on us, and after that . . . well, it was just a place to stay, I reckon. A shelter from the storm, as they say.”

  “Don’t look so down, Pop,” Wiley said. “If it’s long worn out from the hope of what it was in the beginning, that just means it’ll be easier to leave behind. Right? And when we settle someplace new, where you and those gold guns will get the prominence and respect you deserve, then that will be a new and better beginning.”

  “Oh, la-di-da and bloomin’ flowers,” groaned Cyrus. “I wish I had me a fiddle to put a tune to all that mush.”

  “Shut up, Cyrus,” barked Harley. Then, addressing Moses: “We ought to go ahead and ride on in, don’t you think, Pop? We can get a fire goin’, finish dryin’ out, rustle up some hot vittles for our bellies before we pack up and get ready to ride out again. How’s that sound?”

  “Yeah, son. That sounds fine,” Moses said, his gaze drifting to a spot on the hillside behind the house where two tilting wooden crosses poked up out of some weeds and poorly tended patches of grass. The graves of Moses’s wife and the Indian squaw who came later. “But I don’t want to tarry any longer than we have to.”

  * * *

  After pushing their horses hard for several miles, Bob Hatfield had finally signaled a slowdown and he and Simon Quirt were letting the animals walk for a ways to rest and catch their breaths a bit.

  It was the first chance the men had to talk at any length since Quirt had shown up and invited himself in as a member of the posse.

  “How’s that head of yours?” Quirt asked as they plodded along.

  Bob said, “Well, I can tell for sure it must still be resting on my shoulders okay. Elsewise it wouldn’t hurt so dang much.”

  Quirt gave a shake of his own head. “I gotta tell you, that’s the damnedest thing I ever heard of. A bullet bouncing off a skull like that.”

  “Uh-huh. It’ll give me quite a tale to tell my grandkids.”

  Quirt cocked a brow. “What’s that name they call you—the one you don’t like? Sundown Bob, is it?”

  “That’d be the one.”

  “Well, there you go. Here’s your chance to get folks to ditch that once and for all and provide ’em something different to call you. Something more to your liking.”

  Bob looked more than a little dubious. “Like what?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. How about something like ‘Boulder-head Bob’?”

  “Oh yeah. That’s way better,” Bob said dryly.

  Quirt frowned. “You’re mighty hard to please, you know that? Come on, you gotta admit—Boulder-head Bob, that’s got kind of a ring to it.”

  “What I’ll admit,” Bob said, “is the first sumbitch I hear call me that, I’ll throw in the clink. Then I’ll come looking for you because I’ll know you planted the idea in his head.”

  Quirt’s frown turned into a grin. “I don’t usually take well to threats. But, coming from you, I reckon I’d better choose a different tack. I mean, anybody who can bounce bullets off his noggin ain’t somebody you want to mess with.”

  Bob just grinned, too.

  They rode a ways farther in silence. Until Quirt spoke up again.

  “This crew we’re going after. The Shaws. You ever had any tangle with ’em in the past? Before the brawl I heard about the other night in the Red-Eyed Goat, that is.”

  “Some skirmishes here and there when they came to town,” Bob told him. “Other barroom brawls, drunk and disorderly conduct that got some of ’em jail time on a few occasions. A couple instances of roughing up gals in the New Town whore cribs.”

  “I heard talk about ’em being suspected of some stagecoach robberies and probably a touch of rustling around the territory.”

  Bob nodded. “I’ve heard that kind of talk, too. And I don’t necessarily doubt it. Trouble is, none of it ever took place within my jurisdiction and nobody ever had any hard evidence they could bring forward. A couple different U.S. Marshals came through and did some poking around, but they couldn’t turn up anything they could act on, either.”

  “So, in other words, they’re crafty and slippery polecats in addition to being plenty damned dangerous.” Quirt set his jaw hard. “And, based on the way they tore so ruthlessly through a crowd of mostly innocents this morning, it wouldn’t be amiss to add in downright evil.”

  “Can’t see any argument against that,” Bob allowed. “Old man Moses is the brains behind the bunch. If you want to call it that. In any case, he’s leathery tough and bitter and seems to harbor a kind of hatred deep inside for all of mankind. Harley, the oldest son, is the toughest; quick tempered and violent on his own, and fanned all the more so when egged on by the old man. Wiley, the youngest, might be the only one with even a shred of decency in him. But he’s been following the lead of the others for so long I expect it’s too late to ever dig out that shred and have a chance for it to amount to anything. Then there’s Cyrus, the middle son. He’s twisted and snake mean in a deepe
r, darker way than any of the rest. Maybe the most dangerous one of them all.”

  Quirt looked over, regarding Bob closely. Then he said, “And he’s the one who roughed up the whores, ain’t he?”

  “Yeah, he is,” said Bob. “How’d you know?”

  Quirt gave an indifferent shrug. “It’s a pattern that fits the type, fits the way you described him. I ran into it more than once when I was with the Pinkertons.”

  Bob’s mouth pulled into a tighter line and his jaw muscles bunched visibly.

  Quietly, Quirt said, “It’s the thought of him being close to those women hostages—especially the Spanish gal you have personal feelings for—that’s driving you more than anything, ain’t it?”

  Bob shot a hard sidelong glance. “Best walk careful with your words, mister.”

  “Just laying it on the line for what it is, that’s all,” Quirt replied. “Not saying there’s anything wrong with it or that you’d be doing any different if she wasn’t part of it. Leastways not so far. But I just want to make sure you’re facing up to the fact of your feelings, and how they may play into this. You got seven other men—including me—riding into it with you. What you decide and why you decide it could make a difference on how many of us ride out. That’s all I want to get straight.”

  Bob exhaled raggedly. “How do you know about Consuela?” he wanted to know.

  “Heard talk around town.”

  “Seems to me you have a habit of hearing a helluva lot of talk.”

  Quirt shrugged again. “Reckon I must be a good listener. For what it’s worth, the talk about you and Consuela is very respectful. Except, that is, for those who think you’re a blame fool for not getting around to making her your wife.”