“Hell’s bells, you’ve gone loco, old son,” I muttered to myself as I swung my legs out of bed and stuck my feet in my boots. Wearing the boots and a pair of long underwear, I picked up my rifle and went to the window to look out.
The horse had come to a stop between the house and the barn and looked lost. It wasn’t riderless, though. A dark shape hunched forward in the saddle, leaning over the horse’s neck. I knew a hurt man when I saw one, even in bad light.
The hope that the horse would move on and take its burden with it never crossed my mind. In those days, unless you were the sorriest no-account that there was—like the Daughtrys—when you saw somebody in trouble you tried to lend a hand if you could. So I grabbed my hat off the peg, stuck it on my head, and went outside in my long johns to find out what was wrong.
I wasn’t careless about it, though. I took the Winchester with me.
Pausing on the little gallery in front of the house, I called, “Hola, amigo! Are you hurt?” In that part of the country there was a good chance the fella was a Mexican, so that’s the way I greeted him.
He didn’t say anything, but the horse turned its head toward the sound of my voice. I walked toward it, watching for any sign of a trap or an ambush.
The horse shied away from me. The man in the saddle swayed back and forth like he was about to fall off, and I realized that he might be unconscious. I knew a man could pass out and still manage to remain mounted. I’d done it myself a time or two.
I spoke softly to the horse, but it danced farther away and the rider swayed even more. I could tell he was about to lose his balance. Without thinking about what I was doing, I jumped forward to catch him as he pitched out of the saddle.
He was lucky I was there and lucky as well that his foot didn’t catch in the stirrup, because the horse ran off toward the barn. I caught my mysterious visitor, staggering a little under his weight even though he was slender. Because I was still holding the rifle at the same time, hanging on to him was awkward. As carefully as I could, because I felt a sticky place on his shirt that had to be blood, I lowered him to the ground.
His hat fell off as I did so, and in the light from a half-moon that hung over the hills, I saw that his face was familiar. The last time I’d seen it was right here in front of the ranch house as I gave him those wrapped-up biscuits to keep him from starving.
The young fella I’d been convinced was on the dodge had come back to the Fishhook, and now he had at least one bullet hole in him.
CHAPTER 8
One good thing about living an active life is that not many things take you completely by surprise. No matter what happens, there’s at least a chance that you’ve run into it before. For example, this wasn’t the first time I’d had a wounded man land on my doorstep.
So this didn’t exactly throw me for a loop. The first thing I did was straighten up and listen. Any time you’ve got a wounded man, there’s a good chance somebody’s chasing after him. I listened as hard as I could for the sound of rapid hoofbeats.
The night was quiet, though. Could be he’d given the slip to whoever shot him. But just in case somebody who wasn’t friendly might show up in the near future, I decided I’d better get him into the house.
I leaned the Winchester against one of the posts holding up the thatched awning over the gallery. Then I bent and got my hands under the wounded man’s arms. I lifted him, my back protesting some as I did so, and slung him over my left shoulder. I took him inside, balanced him precariously while I took the blanket from the bed and threw it on the sofa, and then lowered him onto it. He was out cold and never stirred or made a sound.
I fetched in the rifle, hung it on the wall, and lit the lamp. The glow from it told me that the young fella was still alive. His chest rose and fell in a shallow motion.
His horse was still out there and needed to be dealt with. I left him there on the sofa and went outside again. The horse was still skittish, but I’d had practice catching animals that didn’t want to be caught. When I had hold of the reins I led the critter into the barn, put him in an empty stall, and took the saddle off him. It was just a well-worn old saddle, nothing really to distinguish it, so I stuck it in the tack room.
With that taken care of, I went back to the house, pausing on the gallery to listen again. The night was still quiet.
When I stepped inside, I found myself looking down the barrel of a gun.
My visitor had come to and rolled onto his side. He lacked the strength to get off the sofa, but he had been able to pull a small revolver from his pocket. I knew that must be where he’d gotten it, because it sure as hell wasn’t one of my guns. As he pointed it at me his hand shook so much the barrel must have traveled a good six inches back and forth. That made me sort of nervous, because the hammer was cocked and all it would take to fire the blasted thing was a little pressure on the trigger.
“You don’t want to shoot me, son,” I told him. “I’m tryin’ to help you. Why don’t you put the gun down?”
“Wh . . . where . . . ?”
“This is the Fishhook Ranch. You stopped by here a while back, remember? You watered your horse and I gave you a cup of coffee and some biscuits. My name’s Jim Strickland.”
He was in too much pain to remember much of anything, I realized. He kept wobbling that gun at me and said, “Stay . . . stay back . . . I’ll shoot . . .”
I was getting a little disgusted. You try to help somebody and they point a gun at you. That’s just not civilized behavior.
I held out both hands and approached him slowly, saying, “Now just take it easy, take it easy, I’m a friend, I won’t hurt you, son—”
I saw his eyes roll up in his head and knew he was about to pass out again. The gun sagged toward the floor. But as it did his finger tightened on the trigger and I had to make a wild jump to keep from getting a toe shot off as the revolver barked. I must have been a pretty funny sight, hopping around in boots, hat, and long underwear like that.
The slug smacked into the floorboards. A second later the gun slipped from his fingers and thudded to the floor. I kicked it and sent it sliding well out of reach.
Then I took hold of his arm and rolled him onto his back again. I wanted to get a look at that wound.
He had lost quite a bit of blood, but as soon as I peeled his shirt back I saw that the injury wasn’t serious, even though it probably hurt like blazes. A bullet had plowed an inch-deep furrow along his rib cage. I worried that he might have a cracked or broken rib in there, but if that was the case it hadn’t punctured a lung. He didn’t have any bloody froth on his lips, and when I put my ear next to his mouth I could tell that his breathing was normal. I didn’t hear any wheezing or whistling as I would have if he’d had a hole in one of his lungs.
I cut the blood-soaked shirt off him, then used a whiskey-soaked rag to swab the blood away from the wound. The kid groaned when the liquor bit into raw flesh but didn’t wake up. The gash was still oozing crimson when I bandaged it, but I could tell it was going to stop soon.
With that done, I straightened up and thumbed my hat to the back of my head as I looked down at him. His cheeks were gaunt, and his dark hair was matted with sweat. I could tell that he’d been on the run for a while. I knew the look well. I had seen it gazing back at me from the mirror often enough.
“Kid,” I said, “what in the hell am I gonna do with you?”
I couldn’t stop thinking about what Clyde Farnum had told me about that attempted train robbery. It was thought that one of the outlaws had been wounded in the shootout with the Wells Fargo men, and now here was this youngster showing up with a bullet crease in his side. The two things didn’t have to be connected, of course, but it made sense that they might be.
If that was true, the law was after him, and that was trouble I didn’t need. Sheriff Emil Lester was already suspicious of me. If he found me harboring a wanted fugitive, he might decide I’d been part of the gang that tried to hold up the train. He might dig around enough in my
background to discover that Jim Strickland wasn’t my real name. He might even figure out the name I was best known by, and I sure didn’t want that. I was doing my damnedest to put those days behind me.
So if I wanted to look out for my own best interests, helping this kid was a damned fool thing to do. I knew that . . . but I also knew that I wasn’t going to turn my back on him. The Good Lord just hadn’t made me that way.
Those thoughts were going through my head when I heard swift hoofbeats outside.
When you hear that sound at night, you know there’s a good chance trouble has come to call. I whipped over to the table and blew out that light, knowing that I was too late. Whoever was out there would have seen the yellow glow in the windows already. But even so, there was no need for me to make things easier for ’em. Moving by feel in the darkness, because I already knew every inch of that house like I had lived there for ten years, I plucked the Winchester from its hooks on the wall near the door and waited.
The hoofbeats came to a stop. I couldn’t hear much through the door, but I knew the horses had been run hard enough that they would be moving around restlessly out there, snorting and blowing.
A man called, “Hello, the house!”
The windows opened from the middle like shutters. I eased one of them back a little and asked, “What do you want?”
I halfway expected the riders to be a posse from the county seat, but the man who had spoken wasn’t Sheriff Lester. He might be one of the deputies, though, I thought.
“We’re lookin’ for a friend of ours. He might’ve ridden in here a little while ago. Young fella, about twenty years old.”
“If he’s a friend of yours, you ought to know for sure how old he is,” I said.
The man sounded impatient as he said, “Never mind about that. Have you seen any strangers tonight?”
“Not a one,” I said, and I told myself that was an honest answer. I might not know the wounded man’s name, but he wasn’t a complete stranger. I had offered my hospitality to him before and he had accepted, so as far as I was concerned that meant we were acquainted.
“You haven’t heard a horse go by?”
“Nope.” That was true, too. None of the horses that had come up tonight had gone by. They were all still here.
“You wouldn’t mind if we take a look around?”
“As a matter of fact, I would. I don’t cotton to folks nosin’ around my place at night.”
My eyes had adjusted to the dark. From where I was, I could see two men on horseback. Judging by the sound of the hoofbeats I’d heard a few minutes earlier, at least one more man had ridden up with them. That meant he was unaccounted for, and I had a hunch he’d gone around to cover the back of the house. There was a window back there, but no door.
My last statement had drawn a few seconds of silence. Then the man who’d been doing the talking said, “Mister, I don’t really care what you cotton to. If our pard’s here, we’re gonna find him, and you’d be wise not to try to stop us.”
“Bein’ wise is something that nobody’s ever accused me of,” I said. “I’ve got a Winchester pointed at you. Rattle your hocks out of here while you still can.”
They weren’t quite sure what to do. I was pretty good at sensing such things. If I was alone, they had me outnumbered. But they had no way of being sure I didn’t have half a dozen well-armed men in here with me.
The fella decided to try to repair the damage. He said, “Look here, amigo, we got off on the wrong foot. We’re not huntin’ trouble. Our friend’s hurt. We just want to help him, that’s all. If he’s here, we’ll take him and go, and you won’t have to see any of us ever again.”
It was a tempting offer in a way, but I can count. Four men had gotten away from that holdup, and one of them was wounded. Now I had a wounded, unconscious man on my sofa and three men, more than likely, outside my house. Three men on the run from the law, I reminded myself. They might be desperate enough they wouldn’t want to leave any witnesses behind to tell the sheriff that they’d been here or which way they went when they rode off. I knew there was a better than even chance if I opened that door, they’d shoot me down.
Besides which, some other thoughts were percolating around inside my brain. When the kid stopped by here before, he sure hadn’t acted like he was part of a gang. Instead he had given the impression that he was on his own, without any friends or family within a hundred miles, at least.
So if my suspicions were right and he had fallen in with this bunch during the time since he’d been here, they likely weren’t the good friends to him the spokesman was making them out to be. I didn’t have any real reason not to trust them, other than what my gut was telling me, but that was enough.
“I told you, the fella you’re looking for ain’t here, and I’m not in the mood for company. So turn around and ride off.”
They were just shadows in the dark to me. I couldn’t see their faces. But I could tell from their attitudes they were torn about what to do. The air held a sense of menace that told me they wanted to yank out their guns and start blasting.
Then something tipped the scale. The third man hadn’t gone around to the back after all. He was over at the barn. I heard his voice come from there as he yelled, “Hey, Steve, Randy’s horse is in one of those stalls! The yellow bastard’s here, all right.”
The one called Steve ripped out a curse and told the man with him, “Scatter!” At the same time, both of them jerked guns from their holsters.
There was no point in waiting any longer. I stuck the barrel of that Winchester through the window and cut loose my wolf.
CHAPTER 9
The two men in front of the house were already moving, but I was pretty sure I winged one of them. He let out a yelp, and I saw him twist sideways in the saddle.
About then bullets smashed the window and sent glass flying, and I had to duck. I hoped none of the slugs whipping around the room hit the kid where he lay on the sofa, but there was nothing I could do about that now except try to end the fight as quickly as possible.
I rolled across the floor to the window on the other side of the door and came up on my knees. Instead of taking the time to open the window, I broke out the glass with my rifle barrel. One of the men was right in front of me, trying to get his horse back under control. The shooting had caused the animal to spook, and it was crowhopping around so that the rider had his hands full just staying in the saddle.
I solved that problem for him by blowing him off the horse’s back.
He threw his arms in the air and screamed as he fell. As I shifted my aim and searched for the other men, I heard something smash through the rear window. I twisted around so that my back was against the wall. The man at the window opened fire, spraying bullets across the adobe wall above me as he triggered wildly. I went flat on my belly, staying low, and aimed just above his muzzle flashes, firing three shots of my own as fast as I could work the Winchester’s lever. The man stopped shooting and disappeared from the window.
The door crashed open then, but the third man had sense enough not to just charge in blindly. Instead he threw something in ahead of him.
My eyes widened as I saw a stick of dynamite go bouncing across the floor with sparks flying from its burning fuse.
There was no time to think about what to do. I moved, diving toward the dynamite as it started to roll under the sofa where the wounded youngster still sprawled. I couldn’t reach it in time with my hand, but I stuck out the Winchester and used the barrel to bat the red cylinder away from the sofa.
I’d like to claim credit for what happened next and say that it was because of my quick thinking and hair-trigger reflexes, but to tell you the truth it was just pure dumb luck. The dynamite went spinning back through the open door onto the gallery just as the spark on the fuse reached the blasting cap. It went off with a boom, blew the hell out of the awning, knocked down one of the posts, cracked the adobe wall, and left a big hole in the boards of the gallery. The thunderclap of the
explosion deafened me for a minute or so as well.
I stayed there on the floor, trying to catch my breath while my hearing came back to me. My head swiveled from side to side. I couldn’t hear anything, so I had to rely on my eyes to warn me if more trouble came my way.
It didn’t, and when my ears started working again I heard the ugly sound of somebody gasping and gurgling for air they just couldn’t get.
I climbed to my feet and felt my way over to the table where the lamp sat. I kept some matches there, and I lit one of them and held it above my head in my left hand while I pointed the Winchester in front of me with my right. If I fired the thing one-handed it might break my wrist, but I had to be able to see.
When I stepped outside, the flickering light from the match barely reached a dark shape spread out on the ground about ten feet from the gallery. I moved around the hole the dynamite had left and approached the figure.
The man lay on his back, his feet kicking feebly as he pawed at his neck with his hands. He was trying to get hold of a large, jagged splinter of wood that had lodged in his throat. The explosion must have sent it flying right at him. As I watched, he managed to pull it loose.
That was a mistake, although leaving the splinter in his throat wouldn’t have done anything except postpone the inevitable. Blood poured from the wound, his feet scrabbled a frantic little dance in the dirt for a few seconds, and then he went limp. I knew he was dead, but I lowered the match close to his face anyway and saw the glassiness that was spreading over his eyes.
The match burned out. I went inside and used another one to light the lamp, and then I took it back out to check on the other two. They were dead as well, one in front of the house with half his face blown away and the other at the back window with a couple of bullet holes in his chest.
Butch Cassidy the Lost Years Page 6