Just before the Circle bunch rode off into the night, Chookie tossed a bundle of taped-together sticks of dynamite into the now-empty barn. The charge blew a huge hole in one wall and collapsed that side of the barn. With a earsplitting creak, the other side slowly caved in, until the barn roof was sitting flat on the ground.
Whooping and hollering, the Circle S attackers rode off into the night, knowing that it would take several hours for the Broken Lance men to round up their horses and launch any kind of pursuit.
John Lee staggered out of the house, still slipping and sliding on his slick-soled boots, dumplings in his hair and a piece of boiled chicken hanging out of one ear. In a futile gesture of rage and frustration, he emptied his pistols into the air, hitting nothing.
Nick slowly got to his boots, a huge knot on his head where he had impacted with the watering trough. He had lost his fancy guns and he was addled, for a moment not knowing where he was, who he was, or what the hell had happened. Cindy stuck her head out of an upstairs window and brought her reluctant husband back to reality by squalling at him.
“Aw, shut up,” Nick said. But he was catching on fast to married life. He did not say it loud enough for his wife to hear.
“Round up the horses,” John Lee said. He was so angry his voice trembled. And he was having trouble hearing out of one ear. He reached up and pulled a piece of boiled chicken out of it. “We’re striking back—tonight!”
His foreman said, “They’ll be expectin’ it, John. and they’ll be waitin’ for us.”
“Not at the Flyin’ V, they won’t. Those were all Circle S riders that hit us.”
Max nodded his head. “I’ll get us saddled up and fetch a sack full of dynamite. I’ll have one of the boys cap and fuse it while we’re roundin’ up the horses.”
“Pay-back time,” John Lee muttered and whistled and sprayed spit. “You boys had you a good time this night, now I’m going to have me a better one.”
But Vonny had warned young Noah what was going to happen right after the funeral, and Noah had turned his ranch into a fort, with riflemen ready in the best positions around the area. While there was only seven of them counting Noah, seven men with rifles could do a tremendous amount of damage. In addition to the riflemen, Noah and his crew had worked hard in painting rope black and then stringing it from barn to bunkhouse, house to barn, and corral to bunkhouse. The painted rope was just high enough to catch a mounted man in the chest or in the throat, and it was stretched tight.
“Here they come!” Burl called from the barn loft. “And they’re comin’ hard.”
“Let ’em hit the ropes!” Noah called. “And then open up.”
“For a youngster,” Mark raised his voice to be heard from the loft to the bunkhouse, “that boy’s got a lot of nerve and good sense.”
“And after what happened to his ma and pa,” Pete called, “I reckon he’s fightin’ with a heart full of hate for John Lee.”
Nick was leading the assault against the ranch. He came riding in with both hands filled with guns and knee-reining his horse. He was the first to hit the ropes and the rope caught him across the chest, lifting him out of the saddle and hurling him against Lew Hagan, slamming both men to the ground and knocking the wind from them. They both lost their guns. Their horses galloped on and kept on going.
Bradshaw had sticks of dynamite looped together and hanging around his neck when he hit the rope and was knocked from the saddle. He rolled and came to his boots, looking wildly around him. Burl lined him up in rifle sights and pulled the trigger, the hot slug striking the cap.
The explosion concussioned the night, and when all the bits and pieces finally fell back to earth, there wasn’t enough left of Bradshaw to write home about.
Nick was running wildly, disgust and fear moving him; part of Bradshaw had splattered all over him. He ran into the barn, and Mark rolled a bale of hay over the edge of the loft. The bale hit Nick on the back and knocked him to the rough floor, where he banged his head on the floor and was out cold.
A hired gun called Peck had run his horse into the back of another horse who had refused to go any farther, sensing that something was wrong up ahead and had stopped quite abruptly. The rider on the reluctant horse had gone sailing through the air, crashing into the corral and shot dead.
Peck left his saddle almost as suddenly as the now-dead gunny had and upon hitting the ground had started crawling on his hands and knees, getting the hell gone from that area. He’d been in too many fights not to know when one was going sour.
John Lee had his horse stumble and fall, spilling him from the saddle. He lost his hat and one gun and ran into the south end of the barn and stepped on the tines of a rake. The handle flew up and busted him directly on the snoot, breaking the nose. The blood flew as John backed out of the barn and caught up a loose horse, swinging into the saddle.
“ ’Et’s ’o,” he hollered.
“What the hell did he say?” Lightfoot asked Lopez.
“ ’Et’s ’o!” John squalled, his words slurred because his nose was spreading all over his face, and he didn’t have any front teeth to begin with.
“I’m gone!” Leo Grand said, and those close to him followed suit, riders heading out in all directions.
In the confusion, no one noticed Nick was not among them.
Noah and the hands roped the bodies of the dead by the ankles and dragged them to a gully about a quarter of a mile from the house. Two men were not seriously hurt and they were hog-tied and tossed back to the ground just as Nick was shoved out of the barn.
Noah pulled his .45 and cocked it, the sound loud in the night. He put the muzzle against the head of one of the hog-tied gunhands. “Tell me the names of those who whipped Jimmy to death, or die right here.”
The hired gun didn’t even take a breath. “John Lee and his son Nick, the foreman Max, and—”
“That’s enough,” Noah told him, holstering his pistol. “Gary, get me that quirt that Mex rider left here a couple of years back. Burl, you and Teddy strip Nick bareass and turn that barrel over yonder and tie him across it. I want his butt shinin’ up.”
“You got it!”
The short-handled quirt had four long, tightly braided lashes and was a cruel whip. Nick started hollering as the men tore his clothes off him and tied him belly down across the barrel. The two tied-up gunnies were thinking: Better him than me.
“Jimmy had the courage to crawl into town and live long enough to tell us who did it to him, Nick,” Noah said. “And I doubt he screamed once while you and your sorry father and the others were whipping him to death. I don’t think you’re one tenth of the man Jimmy was.”
He laid the lashes across Nick’s bare butt with all the strength in his strong young arm, and John Lee’s son started howling.
Chapter 20
Nick passed out long before Noah’s arm gave out. He finally dropped the quirt when he could no longer lift his arm and his chest was heaving with exhaustion.
Nick’s buttocks were a mangled, bloody mess.
“Throw a bucket of water on him and then pour salt in those wounds,” Noah ordered.
Awake after being doused with two buckets of water, Nick started screaming again when the salt was applied freely to his backside.
Noah cut the hog-tied pair loose. “Strip right down to the buff,” he told them. “Boots, socks, and all.”
“We didn’t have nothing to do with that kid gettin’ whipped!” Giddings said. He was almost sick to his stomach after looking at Nick’s ruined sitter.
“I never said you did. But if my arm wasn’t wore out I’d give you both a good hidin’. Now strip!” he yelled. “And get that damned Nick on his feet.”
“I cain’t walk!” Nick whined.
Noah jerked iron and put two slugs very, very close to where Nick lay on the water and blood-soaked dirt. Nick jumped to his feet, screaming from the pain in his mangled buttocks.
“Now walk!” Noah told the three. “You ought to make
the town by daylight.”
The three butt-naked men began walking, Nick whining and blubbering and sobbing as his bare feet moved him along.
“One thing about it,” Noah said with a smile. “There sure ain’t no place between here and town for them to steal any clothes. Nameit is gonna be quite the place to be come daylight when those three come strollin’ in.”
John Lee sat in his bedroom and didn’t know what to do. He didn’t think Nick had been hit, but the boy was still missing. He probably was taking the back trails home. John Lee placed a warm damp cloth over his busted hooter and moaned in pain at just the slightest pressure. One of the hands had set it, and that procedure had brightened up John Lee’s evening considerably.
It never entered John Lee’s mind that if he would disband his army of hired guns and thugs and outlaws, Jeff Sparks would be more than willing to forgive the past and live and let live—even though Jeff Sparks had told him that very thing. John Lee had stepped over the edge. He was insane. He had stepped into the murky waters of that form of insanity that allowed him to appear normal in most instances, even though his mind was full of snakes.
He leaned back in his chair and through the pain began planning yet another stroke against his enemy—which included everybody west of the Pecos. He silently cursed Jeff Sparks, Matt Bodine, Sam Two Wolves, Josiah Finch, Vonny Dodge, Noah Carson and everybody else he could think of. He fell into a nighmarish sleep just as dawn was breaking.
A shout brought another shout until everybody in the town of Nemeit had turned out, standing on the boardwalks in various dress watching the three naked men come limping into town. Nick Lee was bawling like a little baby, tears running down his dusty cheeks—his face, that is—his buttocks swollen to twice their normal size, each step sending excruciating pain through his body. The men had cut small leafy branches from a cottonwood tree and that helped to conceal their privates. They were a sight to behold; even Doc Winters could not hide his smile.
Matt and Sam stood beside Josiah and chuckled at the big tough gunhands, as bare-butted as a baby.
“Hey, Nick,” a citizen called out. “What’s the matter, boy, did someone take them fancy guns of yourn and spank your be-hind?”
“I’ll kill you!” Nick squalled. “I’ll kill every one of you. You can’t laugh at me. I’m Nick Lee.”
That brought catcalls and hoots of derision from the people-lined boardwalks.
“Our feets is tore up awful bad,” Giddings called to the crowd. “Can anybody give us some aid?”
“The same kind of aid you thugs give the people you burned out and kilt!” a woman yelled.
“Yeah,” a man called. “Go to hell!”
Nick collapsed on the street.
Doc Winters stepped out to help him. The townspeople did not challenge his right to do so. He was a doctor, sworn to take care of the sick. But no one made a move to help him. Winters glanced over at Matt. Matt shook his head. Winters cut his eyes to Sam. Sam shook his head. He looked at Preacher Willowby. The man was unmoved by Nick’s pitiful condition.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Willowby said, “you can stone the Philistine.”
“We don’t blame you for helpin’ him, Doc,” a woman called out. “But we ain’t gonna touch the lousy no-good.”
With his face in the dirt, Nick screamed, “I’ll kill all of you. I’ll burn your damned houses down and kill your kids and your dogs and cats and horses. You’re all inferior to me and my pa. You’re jealous of what we got!” Nick ranted and raved and snorted and blubbered and whistled his threats.
Giddings looked around him at the faces of the men and women. Hard faces, unforgiving faces. There ain’t no way we’re gonna do nothin’ but die fightin’ these folks, he thought. John Lee is not gonna win this fight. But he had taken the man’s money, and he would stick it out.
Providing he could get some clothes, that is.
His partner, Tidwell, said to Doc Winters, “We’ll pay you, Doc. We’re owed wages.”
“Get Nick on his feet and carry him to my office.”
“If we do that, we got to drop these branches,” Giddings said.
Doc Winters was catching on fast to frontier justice. “That is not my problem, boys. If Nick wants to crawl, then he can get to my office on his hands and knees.”
It was a strange and both comical and tragic scene being played out on the dusty street.
“Goddamn you all to the hellfires!” Nick screamed, crawling to his hands and knees, snot dripping from his nose and sweat from his dirty face. “I’ll get you for this. I swear on my mama’s grave I’ll kill all of you.”
Giddings and Tidwell manged to hold onto one thinly leafed branch with one hand and with the other hand managed to get Nick to his swollen feet and begin to walk to Doc Winters’s office.
Not one person offered to help. The blood from the rock and briar and cockleburr-mangled feet of the men left dark stains in the dust as they staggered on. Nick screamed and shouted and cussed the townspeople.
“That boy’s as nutty as his pa,” Josiah said, then predicted, “It’ll be over in a week to ten days. John Lee will never let this go unavenged. He’ll hit this town with everything he’s got, and that’s a-plenty.”
“He can’t tree this town,” Sam said. “No one has ever treed a Western town.”
“That’s a fact,” the Ranger said. “But I’ll bet you a pair of boots he’ll damn sure try.”
John Lee retreated further into the darkness of madness when he went into town to fetch his pride and joy home. Giddings and Tidwell had been forced to walk from the town to the Broken Lance range (no one would sell or loan them a horse) and had arrived in midafternoon, exhausted and wrapped only in ragged sheets from Doc Winters office. A wagon had been dispatched immediately, with John Lee and his small army riding with it.
Max went in first, alone, and paled at the sight that greeted him. Every man in the town was visible and heavily armed. There were riflemen on rooftops, riflemen in the alleys, riflemen on the second floor of buildings.
“One wagon, one driver, and you and John Lee can come in,” Pen told the foreman. “Anybody else gets shot out of the saddle. Take that back to that jerk you work for.”
Max nodded, turned his horse, and delivered the message.
“It’s a death trap in there, John,” he told his boss. “The slightest wrong move on our part and we’re dead meat in the street.”
“We’ll get Nick,” John said. “We’ll deal with the town and the scum in it later.”
John Lee almost bawled at the sight of his wonderful boy. Nick had been heavily sedated with laudanum and was mumbling incoherently. His buttocks had swollen to the size of a water barrel, and he screamed when they picked him up and toted him out, laying him facedown on a bed of hay.
“Take him home,” John Lee told the driver. John Lee stood alone in the street and looked at the people looking back at him. There was no fear in their eyes. The king and his court jester son had been dethroned. The only one who did not realize that was his royal majesty John Lee.
John Lee looked at Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves standing only a few yards away to the left of the doctor’s office door.
“Think this is funny, don’t you, boys?” John Lee asked in a low voice.
“Hysterical,” Sam told him.
Matt replied, “That stupid son of yours was some sight to see, lying in the dirt crying and blubbering like the coward he is.”
John Lee started to verbally fire back when he realized what the blood brothers were doing: they were deliberately baiting him, trying to force him into drawing. His gaze shifted at the sounds of a slow-walking horse. At the far end of the street, a man dressed in a black suit pulled up at the hotel’s hitchrail and swung down from the saddle.
Monty Brill had arrived.
John Lee picked up the reins and got into the saddle. He looked down at Matt Bodine.
“It isn’t over, Bodine.”
“I know that. But it
could be if you’d just listen to reason for a change.”
“I run this area,” John Lee said. “I always have and when this is over, I shall again.”
“No, you won’t,” Sam told him. “The people will never stand for that. Law and order has arrived, and it will prevail. Men like you can’t survive it.”
John Lee sneered at the brothers. “There is no law west of the Pecos, boys, and after you’re gone, and that stupid Ranger gets called elsewhere, everything will return to the way it was.”
“You’re forgetting Pen Masters and Bam Ford, aren’t you?” Matt asked.
“Who can prove where a shot out of the dark came from?” John Lee replied. He laughed at the expression on the brothers’ faces. “You’d like to kill me, wouldn’t you, boys? Sure you would. But you just can’t do it. You just can’t draw down and put lead in a man who’s just sitting his horse looking at you. That’s the difference in us, boys. That’s why I’m going to win this fight. Because if I had the drop on the both of you, and thought I wouldn’t get shot all to pieces by these town-folk, I could easily kill the both of you and not give it a second thought.”
“You’re a madman, John Lee,” Sam told him. “You need to be in an insane asylum.”
The rancher smiled at the brothers and turned his horse, riding slowly out of town.
“The town is going to have to be guarded at all times,” Matt said. “For sure he’ll try to burn it down.”
“We have more pressing matters to deal with, brother. You saw the man who rode in?”
“Yeah. That’s probably Monty Brill. I’ll face that situation as it comes.”
“Are you going to let him call the shots?”
Matt smiled. “Not hardly, brother, not hardly.”
“Then . . . ?”
“Watch.” Matt pulled on leather gloves as they walked.
The brothers crossed the street and walked toward the saloon. Josiah fell in with them. Vonny Dodge and several hands from the Circle S rode in, just as the sun was a boiling ball of fire sinking in the west. Vonny studied the strange brand on the horse’s hip and stepped up on the boardwalk just as Matt and the others reached the saloon.
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