Spur

by Matt Chisholm

  “Now get along to the livery and get the wagon,” he ordered. She reached for her bonnet, put on her coat and said: “You rest up. You ain’t fit for no ride in a wagon.”

  “Rustle,” he said and she left.

  He heard the horse on the narrow street outside, but the sound was a common one and it didn’t register. Only when the latch lifted and the door to the street opened did he come to full awareness. He was putting a few battered treasures into a grip. He turned and saw Rick Hardwick in the open doorway.

  “Why, Rick,” he said.

  He stiffened in unbelieving horror when he saw the man lift the gun from leather.

  “You talked,” Rick said.

  “My God, no.”

  “What did you tell Spur?”

  Shroder backed up against the door of his daughter’s room. “He threatened to burn me. You won, I’da talked. He heated the rifle barrel in the fire and woulda branded me like a Goddam steer.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  Shroder whispered: “About you an’ Gomez.”

  Rick raised the gun, cocked and fired rapidly three times. The shots pinned Shroder against the door and by the time he slumped to the floor, Rick had disappeared into the night. Shroder’s daughter stared down at the dead body of her father that had burst open the door. She sniveled again.

  As Mrs. Shroder drove the light wagon along the dark and narrow street, she almost drove into the horseman as he came through the darkness toward her. She did not see who it was. He was just a somber shape, crouched over the neck of his horse with his hat pulled well down.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rick asked: “What do you aim to do, Gomez?”

  “We have the boys positioned nicely. If it comes to shooting, we can wipe them out. But who wants men killed when our ends can be obtained without bloodshed. I shall go and talk to Randerson.”

  “No sense in that. Randerson’ll stick a gun in your back and tell you if your men attack, he’ll kill you.”

  Gomez nodded.

  “There is a certain risk, I agree. But I have one of my hunches. We shall pull this off.”

  “Your hunches ain’t been workin’ so well lately,” Rick said.

  There was an ominous silence.

  “My hunch,” Gomez said, “is backed by the fact that I can shoot straighter and faster than Randerson. Trust me, amigo.”

  He tapped Rick lightly on the shoulder, walked to his horse and mounted. Rick heard him laugh in the darkness. Rick had known men with cool nerve, but he had never met a man like this Mexican. Rick had ridden with the great Sam Spur, but he reckoned that Gomez took the biscuit right enough. He listened as Gomez walked his horse away into the night toward the house.

  The place was in darkness as the sheriff rode into the yard. There was no sound but that of his horse’s hoofs. A lesser man would have quailed, knowing that at that moment he was surrounded by danger. His approach had been heard, of that he had no doubt. Nor did he have any doubt that at that very moment there was at least one gun pointed at his back. To show his coolness to the watching men, and possibly to himself, he pulled a cigar from his pocket and fired it. Then, leisurely, he stepped from the saddle and walked toward the door of the house. On this he rapped with the silver-mounted butt of his quirt.

  After a brief silence, the door opened suddenly and he found that the muzzle of a gun had been pressed into his flat belly.

  For one moment, he chilled with sudden fear. Then the strength of his character took over and he said in an even voice: “I want to talk, Randerson.”

  Randerson stepped back into the darkness of the room and Gomez followed him. Randerson said: “Turn up the lamp.” Somebody turned the wick of the coal-oil lamp and the room was dimly lit. The sheriff saw that there were four men beside Randerson in the big room, a fact that did not suit him at all.

  “Talk,” Randerson said. “Brocius, take his gun.”

  Gomez said: “Touch my gun and we don’t talk.”

  “There’s a gun pointed at your belly, you don’t have no choice.”

  “I have every choice. I have a small army out there. If I do not rejoin my men by a certain time, they open fire regardless of whether they hit me or not.”

  “A man would be a fool to make that kind of arrangement,” Randerson said.

  “Let us say that we are desperate men and will go to any ends to get what we want.”

  “What do you want?”

  “At this moment - nothing more than a few private words with you.”

  “Talk then. These men are in this with me up to the hilt.”

  “Privately or not at all.”

  “All right.”

  Brocius’s thick voice came.

  “Keep this bastard where we can see him, boss. He’s slipperier than an eel.”

  Randerson hesitated. Gomez began a turn to the door.

  “Come in here,” Randerson told him and opened a door leading off the big room. They went in and Randerson struck a match and lit the lamp that stood on the polished table.

  “Well, what’ve you got to say?”

  Gomez sat down and crossed one leg over the other.

  “I want to do a deal.”

  “I don’t do deals.”

  “You do this one or you could be dead.”

  Randerson stared at him from under his thick brows for a moment.

  “Spur came to see me, Gomez.” Did a flicker of alarm show in the sheriff’s eyes.

  “Interesting. That means that he is not far away. I want that man, as you know, Randerson.”

  “He told me.”

  ‘What?”

  “About the gold. You took it. You murdered those men with the burro-train.’’ Randerson spoke in an unemotional voice as if the lives of those men meant nothing to him. “That don’t concern me too much. What concerns me is it was my gold you took.”

  Briskly, the sheriff said: “That is in the past. Done with. Let us concern ourselves entirely with what must happen now. You have no doubt a considerable amount of gold cached down in Mexico. Enough to live on comfortably for the rest of your life. Be content with that, I beg of you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I have this place completely surrounded. Not a man can get out of it alive. We are both business men. Let us come to a decision that will make it possible for us both to come out of this showing a profit.”

  “Go on.”

  The sheriff smiled.

  “I want half of what you have hidden around this place. Then I will call it a day. Not a shot will be fired. You will depart in the dawn for the border. You will start to live the life of ease that you have been promising yourself.”

  Gomez expected a burst of rage from Randerson, but none came. The man had himself well in hand.

  “You’re cool,” Randerson said. “I’ll give you that. But you must also know that I have this place well-defended and it won’t be easy to take. My advice to you, Gomez, is get out of here - if you can and start shootin’.”

  “Where’s the sense in that, amigo? Men will die and there is no call for men to die. Just bring out your gold and we will ride away. You will be free to go.”

  “You expect me to believe that from a man who butchered a whole-pack-train in cold blood? You must be crazy.”

  “So you refuse?”

  “That’s right. I not only refuse, but I’m going to plant a bullet in your brain and start the ball. You forget it’ll be a pleasure to kill the men who took so much from me.”

  Gomez smiled again with regret. He spread his hands.

  “I am desolated that your reaction to my sensible offer should be such an emotional one. I expected something better from you.”

  “If you had been as sensible as you say,” Randerson said, “you would have expected only a bullet.”

  His thumb cocked the gun in his hand, the muzzle tilted so that it pointed at the sheriff’s head.

  Gomez looked for a brief moment into the black eye of the muzz
le. He went very still and his face grave.

  “There is something you don’t know,” he said in a confident voice. “And which you should know before you pull that trigger.”

  “What’s that?”

  Gomez moved with incredible speed.

  Moving one short pace to the left, he flicked the lamp from the table as he drew his gun with his right. As Randerson’s gun roared, the lamp crashed to the floor. Gomez was down in a crouch, firing. His shots staggered Randerson back against the wall with such force that the house shook; booted feet stampeded in the big room beyond. The door was kicked open and Gomez drove a shot though the opening. That would hold them for a minute. He dove for the window, still moving with an unbelievable speed for a man of his age, thrust up the sash, threw a leg over the sill and reached the stoop. He turned for another shot through the open window at the door of the room, then turned and ran along the stoop toward the east end of the house. A gun roared behind him and a bullet sang wide. Shouts from the yard. Beyond the yard the rifles of his own men opened up.

  With the burst of gunfire, a kind of exhilarating excitement ran through the man, something akin to the thrill he had known when he and his men had cut down on the defenseless smugglers in the canyon. He reached the end of the stoop, threw himself over the rail at the end and landed on hands and knees on the ground. The light was poor, even though dawn was not far off, and he reckoned that the men firing from the house and the bunkhouse could not see him.

  He ran straight out from the house for twenty or thirty yards, then turned sharply right till he came up against the rail fence of the corral. He went around the eastern end of the corral and now no lead was coming near and he was sure that Randerson’s men had lost him. He wondered if he had killed Randerson. If so, the fight might be over as soon as it began. He trotted along the edge of the corral, carried on south and then started singing out so that his own men wouldn’t shoot him. In a moment, he was flat on the ground alongside Rick.

  Rick said: “Your talk didn’t seem to get you nowhere.” Gomez flashed a grin in the dark. “I shot Randerson. The trip wasn’t wasted.” The firing died down. Dawn started to peep across the sky. “Kill him?”

  “Of that I cannot be sure. Maybe. He won’t feel much like fighting for sure.”

  In the house, Lucinia crouched over her man. He was lying in the big room on a couch where the men had carried him. The front of his shirt was soaked in blood. Brocius, used to wounds as he was, told her that Randerson had been shot in the chest and the stomach. The man was unconscious, lying limp and pale with his life blood slowly oozing from him. Brocius hovered over him with the girl. The three other men were scattered through the house now, at the windows, ready to shoot at any lurking figures in the dawn. The straw-boss was impatient. His place was with the men at a time like this. He should be directing operations.

  “Quit blubberin’,” he said. “Get hot water and plenty of clean rag. Rustle yourself now; we don’t have all day.

  She hurried out to the kitchen where she found a frightened Chinese. From him she obtained boiling water. She carried this into the main room and saw that Randerson hadn’t stirred. Then she ran upstairs, found a rifleman in her room and pulled clean cotton and linen from a drawer. With this she hurried downstairs again. She was unused to bloodshed and she had to get a strong grip on herself to do what she had to do. She knew now for certain that she cared for this man for something other than the money and clothes that she could get from him. Suddenly, she was terrified that he would die. This was the first real affection she had ever received from a man, the first time she had ever known some sort of security. She dipped some rag in the hot water and, having pulled aside the shirt that Brocius had slit with his knife, she started to wash the blood away.

  Brocius went into the kitchen and brought back some pig lard.

  “Put pressure on the wounds to stop the bleeding,” he told her. “The hog fat’ll stop the rag sticking to the wound.”

  She gritted her teeth and went on.

  Brocius walked to the window and looked out. The man standing near said: “They’re beyond the barn there. Some more up on the ridge. I reckon there’s a couple more at the rear of the house someplace. Christ, a fly couldn’t live out there.”

  Brocius wished he was with the men in the bunkhouse. That would be the center of the fight. Maybe Randerson should have thrown in with Spur. Spur’s gun would have been handy here today. But, wait a minute, what in hell was he thinking this way for? Gomez’s posse couldn’t out-number Randerson’s men. Nor could they out-gun them. Surely the men in the bunkhouse and the house here were unequalled for deadliness. But the Box R men were on the defensive, cooped up in buildings. The so-called posse were on the outside able to cut down anybody that stepped out into the open.

  A groan from behind him, brought him around.

  Randerson was conscious. In a mumbling voice, he started to give directions to Lucinia about how to dress the wounds. With tears in her eyes, she obeyed him. He smiled a little when he saw them.

  “Didn’t ever think I’d have a woman weeping for me,” he said. “Don’t fret, honey, I’ve had worse than this and lived.”

  She pressed a folded rag over the higher wound and he held it there, smiling at her. Then she made another wad and pressed it to the lower wound.

  “Now, listen, honey, and listen good,” he said. “There’s lead in the lower one for sure and you have to dig it out.”

  She looked at him aghast.

  “I - I couldn’t,” she told him.

  “You have to or I’ll die,” he told her steadily.

  Brocius broke out a window pane with his rifle-butt and started firing. The sound thundered in the confined space, the empties tinkled musically on the floor.

  Randerson said in a surprisingly strong voice: “Gomez and Hardwick ... they’ll be the only ones with guts in that outfit. Kill them and the rest’ll fold.”

  “Keno,” Brocius said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dawn came and Spur hadn’t returned. Jim Lowe started to worry a little. He could hear the firing below around and in the house and he could see at least two of the attackers as they crouched and fired. He sat there smoking and wondering what the hell he should do. He thought wistfully of Pilar’s cooking and wondered when he would get a good meal under his belt again. He had just run down the list and arrived with acute nostalgia at the chili con carne when he froze in horror as a man spoke behind him.

  “Stay real still, mister - this is a gun lookin’ at you.”

  He stayed real still, making no other movement than to lift his right hand well above the butt of his gun to show what his intentions were.

  “Turn around and let’s take a look at you.”

  Lowe slowly turned.

  He saw a small man in a brown store suit, a brown derby worn straight on his head. He looked like an inoffensive store clerk. The vicious little Colt with the short barrel in his small right hand looked incongruous. Memory touched Lowe. He’d seen this little jasper before. Around town maybe. What was a little townsman like this doing way out here?

  “Who’re you?” the little man asked.

  “You holdin’ the gun, mister,” Lowe said. “That means you can stop me shootin’ the livin’ daylights outa you, but it don’t mean you can get answers to any questions you fancy to put. No, sir.”

  “Spunky, huh?” The little man jerked his head to the firing below. Lowe wondered worriedly if he were a part of the Gomez outfit or the Randerson bunch. “Why ain’t you down there shootin’ the hell out of some poor bastard?”

  “Me?” said Lowe in surprise. “Why, that ain’t nothin’ to do with me.”

  “Then why the interest?”

  “Wa-al, kids like to stare at a railroad engines and some men’ll stare for hours at a man breakin’ a horse. Me, I can’t keep away from a gunfight.”

  “Just my luck,” said the little man, “I fix my sights on a man that can give me information an’ I hav
e to find myself a humorous guy.”

  He started and stared past Lowe as a sound from below that was separated by distance from the sound of the shooting came to his ears.

  “Hunker down again,” said the little man. He crouched down himself and Lowe heard the sound of a man climbing the gradient. Stones rattled, boot heels sounded on stone.

  Spur.

  Sam could walk into this trap. Lowe gathered his legs under him, threw himself to one side and tore at the gun at his hip, shouting “Spur” as he went. He fired as he hit the ground and was astonished to find that the little man was no longer there. He too had flung himself to one side. He had rolled and was now out of sight.

  He cocked his gun and waited. One glimpse of that brown suit and he’d blast its owner to hell.

  To his further surprise he heard the little man’s voice —

  “Sam, it’s Jody. This damn fool thinks I aim to kill you.”

  Spur’s footsteps hurried and he came into sight. He took one look at Lowe measuring his length in the dirt and the gun in his hand and said: “What’s the gun for and where’s Jody at?”

  The little man came into view.

  He looked annoyed.

  Lowe clambered to his feet and he looked annoyed. Spur seemed to be the only one there without a worry in the world.

  “Jody,” he said, “this is Jim Lowe, my sidekick. Jim, this is Jody. Old partner of mine. We’re workin’ together.” They glared angrily at each other and Lowe replaced the shell he had expended. “Shake hands.”

  Lowe said; “The hell I do. This sawn-off little son-of-a-bitch come struttin’ up here an’—”

  Jody said: “Watch your tongue, cowpoke, or I’ll—”

  “Look,” said Spur, “we have one fight down there. Do we have to have another up here? Shake hands or I’ll knock your fool heads together. It’s time we got movin’.”

  Reluctantly, they holstered their guns and shook hands.

  “If you’re a friend of Sam’s.” Lowe muttered.

  “Three guns is better’n two guns.” Jody murmured.

  Spur said: “Gomez and the posse have moved in on Randerson. I ain’t too sure what’s happened, but the shootin’ started inside the house.”