She had not done this on her own hook but in the pay of Jimbo Turlock, leader and master of the so-called Free Companions private marauder army. Malvina was Most Wanted by the federal government in general and the Department of the Army in particular. More, she knew things. The Army’s top intelligence officers very much wanted to interrogate her about her knowledge of and participation in various subversive plots to destabilize the West and Southwest.
Sam had gone from Hangtree to nearby Fort Pardee to confer with his local contact, the post’s commanding officer, Captain Ted Harrison. While there he secured the services of Shrike, a Tonkawa Indian who scouted for the post and with whom Sam had worked in the past. Shrike’s Tonkawa origins would prove useful indeed in the swamps of Deep Hollow with its long-standing Tonkawa settlement. Shrike could talk to the tribes people in their and his own language.
Sam had left his beloved horse Dusty in the safekeeping of the Fort Pardee stable master, wanting to spare the animal the rigors and dangers of a trek to the East Texas Gulf Coast. Dusty would be well cared for in Sam’s absence and in the event that he did not return.
Sam procured a handful of Army horses and set off with Shrike on the long trans-Texas journey. Along the way they stopped at an Army post farther east that had access to a telegraph wire. Sending various coded messages to his contacts in the Department of the Army and the Secret Service, he gained much valuable intelligence about the situation on the Blacksnake in Moraine County.
Malvina’s presence among the entourage of Commander Rufus Barbaroux was verified. With his murky origins, extensive assets, wide-ranging connections high and low, and his overweening ambition, Barbaroux was just the sort of problem Sam had been set to solve as part of his undercover assignment. The All-Highest of the Department of the Army agreed, and charged Sam with the imperative: “Smash Barbaroux!”
Sam Heller held a presidential warrant, a powerful document that served as a kind of Open, Sesame! to a veritable Aladdin’s cave of potencies and powers. It enabled him to procure the crates of new rifles and ammunition needed to set up his gun-running operation into Moraine County.
Captain Hazard was the best at the smuggler’s trade on the Blacksnake and Sam suborned him to transport the weapons to Deep Hollow. Shrike’s advance work with the Tonkawa tribal elders and their front man Gator Al Hutchins proved invaluable in establishing a secure working relationship with the larger community of prickly, suspicious, and opportunistic Hollow bigs such as George St. George’s Nightrunners and Skinner Kondo’s River Rats gang.
Sam stayed in the background as much as possible in his role as the Major, source and supplier of the hardware, using Captain Hazard as his front man to oversee the details of taking on firearms cargo, transportation, and sales.
Johnny Cross’s arrival on the Blacksnake and his plot to spring Cullen Baker from Clinchfield Gaol proved to be the spark to detonate the powder keg that was Moraine County.
The crisis had arrived. The showdown was nigh—on the Blacksnake River.
Time for Sam Heller to take a personal hand in the matter. Which is why he was now posted on a shooting platform on Captain Hazard’s Blackskimmer as it was fast closing on the Sabine Queen.
Sam secured his position with a canvas safety strap around his waist, to prevent his falling off the platform in case of rough waters.
The instrument for Sam Heller’s deadly marksmanship was his mule’s leg, the chopped sawed-off version of the Winchester Model 1866, now fitted with an extra-long barrel and add-on wooden stock to transform into a long gun.
Sam forewent the use of a telescopic sight, knowing the lenses would be adversely affected by moist river fogs and hazes and turbulent splashing sprays. He could do what he had to looking through the rifle’s open sights.
Back in the war, sharpshooters on both sides frequently specialized in picking off gun crews manning cannons in the field artillery. Big guns fall silent when there’s no left alive to fire them.
Sam now set his sights on the Sabine Queen’s gun crew, currently shelling the escapees on Shoreline Road. The gun crew needed light to see by to effectively perform their operations. However dim and well shaded, that wan glow allowed Sam to see them.
Not an easy shoot. Apart from the low light there were conditions of distance and the pitch and roll of the Blackskimmer as it arrowed toward the Big White Boat. But Sam Heller was a marksman supreme, an expert.
The platform was too unsteady to shoot from a standing position and the platform too small from which to fire prone. Sam took up a sitting position, wedging himself in a rear corner of the platform with his back braced against an upright safety rail.
He shouldered his rifle.
* * *
The Queen’s gun crew chief at the bow gun again gave the command: “Fire!”
The crewman with a length of lit match cord reached for the touchhole to set off the charge.
Sam’s bullet drilled through him. The would-be igniter fell down dead on deck.
There was a moment of stunned surprise for the chief and his crew.
“I’ll do it myself!” said the gun crew chief. He knelt beside the dead man, who featured a big bullet hole in his chest. The chief pried open the corpse’s dead hand and took from it the match cord, which was still lit.
Crouched almost double, the chief moved toward the bow deck cannon, reaching out, extending the orange-embered tip of the match cord toward the touchhole.
Wham!
The chief reeled under the crushing impact of the bullet that killed him and fell down dead.
The three remaining gun crew members flattened themselves on deck.
“Where’s that shooting coming from?”
“On shore?”
“Whoever it is, that’s a helluva shooter!”
Up in the wheelhouse Barbaroux looked down in disbelief. “Fools! What’re they waiting for?” he fumed.
“Reckon they don’t want to get shot,” the pilot at the wheel said between puffs of his pipe.
“I’m paying them to get shot, damn them!” Barbaroux rushed to the forward area, throwing open a viewport to one side of the spoked steering wheel. Thrusting his face into the round open space, he shouted down to the crew at the bow, “Shoot, you blasted idiots! Shoot!”
The gun crew trio conferred.
“The gun’s all loaded and sighted in, it just needs a simple touching off that’s all.”
“We’ve already moved on, the original sighting’s no good.”
“Shoot it anyway, we’ll hit something. And if we don’t, so what?”
“You shoot it.”
“All right, I will!”
The volunteer crawled on hands and knees to the body of the slain crew chief. The match cord had dropped from his hand when he was struck. It lay nearby, still lit.
The volunteer crawled around the chief, reaching for the match cord. “I got it . . .”
Bam!
Down he went. He died right away, facedown, bleeding on deck.
“He got it, all right,” one of the two gun crew members said.
“This’s a death trap, I’m getting out of here!” said the other. He got to his feet and scuttled off to the port side, disappearing behind a stanchion.
In the wheelhouse, Barbaroux demanded, “Where’s that shooting coming from?”
“That boat there,” the pilot said, taking the pipe from his mouth and gesturing with the stem at the Blackskimmer moving along about a hundred yards off the starboard bow.
“I don’t believe it, nobody could hit with such accuracy at that distance on a moving boat,” Barbaroux said. Nevertheless he took up his telescoping spyglass, set the view piece to one bulging outraged eye, and peered through the lens.
He focused the lens image, bringing into view the rifleman who sat atop the boat’s shooting platform gunning down his mouth.
“Bah!” Barbaroux set down the spyglass.
The last bow deck gun crew member was antsy, whipping his head from side to
side, looking this way and that as if seeking a safe exit.
Barbaroux saw him doing it. He recognized all the signs of a man under fire losing his nerve and ready to run. Barbaroux had run many times himself but never mind that. He lifted the flap of his holster and took out his pistol.
The last gun crew member got his feet under him and shakily rose to a half-crouch, steeling himself to make a break.
Barbaroux extended his gun hand through the open porthole and fired a shot into the deck to one side of the gun crewman.
The gun crewman jumped. A follow-up shot tore into the deck on the other side of the gun crewman, pinning him in place.
“Do your duty or die!” Barbaroux bawled, face red as a sizzling brick oven.
Squaring his shoulders, the gun crewman swallowed hard and advanced stiff legged on the match cord length, bending forward and picking it up. He held the ill-fated match cord at arm’s length as though it was the problem, not the sharpshooter. It was still lit.
He started toward the cannon—
Slam!
The last gun crew member joined the other three dead bodies lying sprawled across the bow deck.
Sharpshooter Nye and his two marksmen came out on deck for a rifle duel with the shooter on the Blackskimmer. A well-placed round from Blackskimmer’s forward-mounted swivel deck gun blew the Queen’s three riflemen sky-high.
“Now what the hell do we do?” Barbaroux wondered aloud.
* * *
The Ram steam launch Gator Al plowed a dirty white furrow across the dark river surface on its collision course with Sabine Queen. The Ram itself skimmed the surface, rising out of the water like a skeletal iron horn.
The launch was now closer to Barbaroux’s steamboat than to the shore. Its course was meant to take the Queen amidships.
The laboring steam engine pounded and thrummed, shaking the boat and all in it. Belle Nyad was at the wheel, holding the course straight on. Her long black hair streamed behind like inky tendrils. Her lone eye gleamed wild but her face was set in masklike rigidity. Smooth, cold, impenetrable.
The airstream struck tiny orange sparks from the lit end of the cigar that Skinner Kondo held clamped between massive jaws. “I been saving this seegar for something to celebrate!” he shouted. “Now, this—Can’t think of a better use for it!”
Mantee and Crazy Chester threw the last of the split logs into the firebox. Pol Philpott cupped a hand to his mouth to amplify his voice. “Pressure’s so far into the red the boiler might blow before we hit!”
“That’d be a hell of a note!” Skinner Kondo laughed.
“She’ll hold long enough!” Crazy Chester cried exultantly.
Seemingly random splashes began to kick up in the water around the boat, but they weren’t random at all. They were rounds being fired at the launch by the Queen’s defenders.
Stray bullets began to whip and zing through the air around the onrushing launch. The crew ducked their heads.
The level and accuracy of the firepower increased as more shooters on board the Queen took notice of the launch closing on it. Bullets made thudding ripping noises as they buried themselves in the protective cotton bales bulwarking the attack boat.
“Keep your heads down!” Belle cautioned, taking her own advice.
Crazy Chester waved away the threat. “Aw, they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn—”
A bullet caught him right below his left eye. He fell in a heap to the floor of the boat.
“I warned him,” Belle said grimly.
“They don’t—didn’t—call him Crazy Chester for nothing,” Mantee said. His head was hunched way down low, below the gunwales.
“He’s bleeding all over the boat,” Pol Philpott complained.
“So what?” Skinner Kondo said.
Philpott thought that over for a few beats. “I see what you mean.”
“Time to light the fuse,” Skinner Kondo said. He leaned forward from the waist, cigar in hand.
The fuse protruded from the narrow end of the iron funnel holding the explosives. It lay below the curved panel where the wheel was set. Skinner Kondo pawed the air near the fuse but it remained unlit.
He sat up straight, a study in frustrated fury. “I can’t reach it! You do it, Belle, I’ll hold the wheel!”
Belle Nyad took the cigar he proffered and ducked down low, below the bottom of the panel. The orange disk at cigar’s end looked a bit wan, so she puffed until it was hot and glowing.
The fuse was not a single cord but a number of fuse cords all coiled together. Belle held the cigar’s hot tip to the end of the fuse cord. After a heart-stopping pause, a sputtering hiss announced that the fuse had been ignited. It shed tiny orange specks like a miniature fireworks sparkler.
Belle cautiously raised her head. “It’s hot!”
She went to throw away the cigar but Skinner Kondo caught her wrist before she could make the cast.
“That’s a hell of a waste of a good smoke!” he said, taking the cigar from her and sticking it back in his mouth.
An ever-mounting clangor was composed of the yammering steam engine, sounding as if it were about to shake itself apart; the roaring hiss of the straining boiler; the relentless churning of the stern paddlewheel; and the ever-increasing volume of enemy fire.
“They’re pouring it on . . . They know we got something here and they’re right, haw haw haw!” Skinner Kondo roared, gleeful.
He maintained his grip on the wheel, fending off Belle Nyad’s attempts to take the helm. “I got it, it’s all mine now,” he said.
The Sabine Queen’s multi-decked superstructure rose up ahead like a giant white wall. It blotted out the riverscape, filling the crew’s field of vision.
“Jump, boys, jump!—now!” Skinner Kondo urged.
Mantee threw himself over the port side, and Pol Philpott exited via starboard into the river.
The Queen was so close that the faces of excited crewmen appeared as pale ovals amid the gloom.
“You too, Belle!—out!” Skinner Kondo said.
“I’m sticking! We’re taking this ride together to the end!” she cried.
“That’s sweet,” he said. He grabbed her arm, hooked his other hand between her legs, effortlessly hefting her into the air and pitching her headfirst over the side.
A quick glance back revealed the reassuring sight of Belle’s head breaking the surface of the water. Did she call his name? Skinner Kondo couldn’t be sure, not amid the racketing engine noise and the crackling fusillade of bullets tearing into the boat.
Skinner Kondo leaned forward, puffing the cigar, bear paw hands clutching the wheel spokes as the Gator Al passed the point of no return.
“Most fun I’ve had in years!” he growled. Since the shooting that had left him dead from the waist down, in fact.
“Here I go!”
A slug tore into him, drilling deep into his barrel chest. He rocked with the impact but kept his grip on the wheel. A second, then a third round tagged him. Skinner Kondo growled, throwing them off like water—
Impact!
The Queen didn’t have a lot of freeboard between her waterline and gunwales, her shallow draught being a major factor in her ability to navigate the Blacksnake.
The tip of the ram lanced the Queen’s hull about a foot above the waterline. Wood splintered and cracked, hull planks breaking as the launch’s momentum drove the ten-foot ram half its length deep into the boat’s side.
The crash had nearly torn the ram loose from the launch, to which it remained attached by a handful of creaking straining bolts.
Skinner Kondo still lived, the vital force in the magnificent ruined hulk of his once powerful body refusing to surrender despite three mortal bullet wounds and the terrific shock of the crash.
Combine shooters lined the starboard rail, leaning over the side to blast Skinner Kondo with rifles and handguns, literally riddling his body with bullets.
The shooting stopped. He sagged slumping at the helm, only the r
opes binding him in place holding him even partly upright. His grip loosened from the wheel, hands loosening, opening, then falling away from the spokes.
He looked dead but wasn’t, not quite. His head tilted back and he looked up at the paling stars in the sky overhead. “Got me, yah dirty sons . . . but watch out for mah Sunday punch.”
Had he whispered it or just thought the words? Skinner Kondo didn’t know. What difference did it make anyhow?
The bomb blew.
In her cubbyhole of a cabin, Malvina the Conjure Woman, the Gypsy Witch, raised her hands over her head, shaking tiny wrathful fists at heaven.
The rolling thunder of the blast’s aftermath shuddered through the now wounded Queen.
Malvina slowly lowered her hands and opened them, covering her face with them. “Undone! Overthrown!” she shrilled.
A happy accident of the bomb blast—happy for the attackers, that is—was that the concussive force and pressure waves ripped the ram free of the launch, driving it deeper into the hole with pile driver power, widening the hole in the hull considerably so that it now reached below the waterline. River water began pouring through the expanded opening.
Sabine Queen took on water fast, quickly developing a noticeable downward tilt to starboard, while the port side steadily, inexorably rose.
The steamboat was stalled, dead in the water. There was flooding below decks. When the gang of boiler stokers saw water come rushing in, they abandoned their posts and rushed on deck for fear of drowning.
Barbaroux missed a bet there. Had he thought of it in time he would have had the hatches sealed so the stokers, engine tenders, and pipe fitters had to keep working the pumps to keep the ship afloat or else drown like rats.
By the time he had that brainstorm, it was too late. The machine-tenders had already fled beyond his reach to all points on the ship.
With Sabine Queen crippled, the swamper boarding party flotilla rounded the tip of the point to come sailing into view.
It was made up of several dozen small craft of all varieties: flatboats, keelboats, barges, launches, rowboats, pirogues, dugout canoes, skiffs, and more.
Seven Days to Hell Page 32