“Uh-oh,” Whitey mumbled.
“What is it?” Slaughter asked.
“Look over yonder,” Whitey said, pointing ahead down Main Street.
There was a large sign stuck on a post in the center of the street. Painted on it in large red letters was “Slaughter’s Marauders . . . Welcome to HELL!”
“Shit!” Slaughter exclaimed, pulling his Colt, the hairs on the back of his neck stirring with the warning. Now he knew they were in deep trouble.
He jerked the reins of his horse’s head around, getting ready to make a quick exit of the town. Then he saw three wagons blocking the street out of town.
“Damn! They’ve got us blocked in,” he said. He noticed his men were looking around, suddenly worried expressions on their faces, though most were too stupid to realize the trap they were in.
“Jim Slaughter,” a voice called from the roof of the Big Rock Hotel just up the street.
Slaughter turned to look up, putting a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun.
The man he knew as Johnny West was standing there, next to Monte Carson. Carson had a long-barreled shotgun in his arms, while West had his hands empty.
“Yeah, what do you want?” Slaughter called back.
Monte Carson said in a loud voice, “If you and your men drop your weapons, your men can leave peacefully. You, however, will be arrested, and in all probability, hanged.”
“My men and I haven’t broken any laws,” Slaughter called back. “We just came into town to have a drink and be on our way.”
“I AM the law here, Slaughter,” Monte said, earing back the hammers on his shotgun. “You got one last chance to come out of this alive. Drop your guns, NOW!”
“That one’s mine!” Whitey growled, swinging his Greener toward Smoke.
Almost quicker than the eye could follow, Smoke drew and fired, his Colt exploding and belching fire and gun smoke toward the albino.
Whitey twisted in the saddle, a hole in his right chest pumping scarlet blood onto the back of his horse’s head. “Uh!” he groaned with the impact, looking down at the wound in his chest in disbelief.
His lips pulled back over his teeth in a snarl and with a mighty effort, he tried to raise the barrel of his shotgun toward Smoke, until a second shot punched a neat hole in the center of his forehead, exiting out the back of his skull and striking a man behind him in the chest. Both men toppled off their horses as Slaughter’s men all aimed and opened fire.
Jensen and Carson dove behind a wooden wall that’d been erected on the rooftop just as bullets began to pockmark the boards.
Without warning, gun barrels appeared in many of the windows of the buildings along Main Street, and all began to fire into the heaving mass of men and horses that was Slaughter’s gang. The horses reared and stampeded and crow-hopped, throwing some men to the ground, while others hung on for dear life as they galloped down streets and alleys trying to find a way out of the hell that Big Rock had suddenly become.
Slaughter leaned over his horse’s neck, saving his life as a slug meant for him took the animal in the throat and threw them both to the ground.
The outlaw scrabbled on his hands and knees through clouds of cordite and gun smoke toward the entrance to the hotel. Maybe he could survive long enough to kill Monte Carson, whose treachery had caused this whole mess.
Swede leaned down in the saddle, spurring his horse forward and firing blindly at windows and doors as he rode down the middle of Main Street, desperately looking for a hole to crawl into.
Juan Garcia and Chuck Clute, two outlaws from Texas who’d come to Wyoming to escape the Texas Rangers, wheeled their mounts around and raced back down Main Street, trying to get out of town the way they’d come in. To hell with Slaughter and his thousand dollars, Garcia thought as he emptied his gun at fleeting shadows in windows.
They were twenty yards from the wagons blocking the entrance to town when four men stood up from behind haystacks in the wagons, all leveling shotguns at the bandits.
“Oh, shit!” Chuck Clute yelled when he saw the shotguns explode in his direction. Those were to be his last words on earth, as several hundred molten slugs of 00-buckshot shredded his chest and blew out his spine.
Garcia was stopped as suddenly as if he’d run into a brick wall by the express-gun loads, which catapulted him backward out of the saddle to land on his back in the dirt. His last view was of white clouds in a blue sky overhead before he began his journey to Hell.
Boone Marlow, who’d raped and killed more women than he had fingers, jumped off his horse and jerked open the door under the sign saying “General Store.”
He stopped short at the sight of a man with a Winchester in his arms. “Welcome to Big Rock,” Ed Jackson said as he pulled the trigger.
His slug hit Marlow in the upper stomach, doubling him over just as Peg Jackson pulled the trigger on the small .32-caliber pistol she held in her hand. The bullet, though small, made quite a mess of the top of Marlow’s head when it blew out his brains.
Dusty Rhodes, a footpad and burglar from Memphis, Tennessee, who’d left that state after killing an entire family when caught robbing their house, made it to the end of Main without being shot. He jumped off his horse, gun in hand, and burst through the doors of the church, his eyes wide and sweat dripping from his face.
A man wearing a minister’s collar was stirring some soup at a table loaded with food and blankets.
Rhodes aimed his pistol, a grin appearing on his face. “Hands up, preacher man. You’re gonna be my ticket outta here.”
Pain exploded in Dusty Rhodes’s head as Bountiful Morrow swung a two-by-four piece of wood into the back of his skull, crushing the bone and scrambling his brains. As he fell forward, blood spurting from his eyes and ears, she said, “Welcome to our church. Would you like to kneel and pray?”
Sam Fleetfoot, on the run from the Indian Nations for murdering three Indian marshals, tried to jump his pony through a window in a boardinghouse to escape the murderous fire from the buildings all around him.
He made it through the window, shattering the glass, but was knocked off his horse to land on his back on the wooden floor. A large piece of glass fell straight down. Sam Fleetfoot held up his hands, getting his fingers sliced off as the sheet of windowpane neatly severed his neck. His eyes were still open as his head rolled away from his body, but it was doubtful they could see the blood spurting from his neck.
Muskrat Calhoon calmly took a twist of tobacco out of his shirt pocket as bullets thunked into the wooden wall he was standing behind on the roof of the Big Rock Guardian. He bit off a sizable chunk of tobacco, then rose up and leaned his Sharps over the wall. It took but a second for him to spot and aim at a man riding down the street over three hundred yards away. He put the sight six inches over the man’s head and slowly caressed the trigger. He was spun half around by the recoil as the big rifle belched two ounces of lead toward the outlaw.
Ernest Melton, noted murderer from Montgomery, Alabama, who’d killed two deputies and a family he took hostage in an escape before heading to Wyoming, never felt the slug that penetrated his spine between his shoulder blades and blew him over his horse’s head, broken almost in half by the power of the Sharps cartridge.
Muskrat jacked another shell into the chamber and fired again, this time at a man running toward a dressmaker’s shop. As the slug hit Happy Jack Morco in the shoulder and blew his right arm clean off, Muskrat mumbled, “Ya don’t need no dresses nohow where yo’re goin’, sonny.” Evidently Happy Jack didn’t think so either, for he fell squirming to the ground, where his screams of pain could be heard even over the noise of the gunfight, until he bled to death.
Haywood Arden stood in the doorway of his newspaper office, a shotgun in his arms, shouting, “Extra, extra, read all about it! Murderers killed in fatal attempt to take over town!” He punctuated his shouts by firing both barrels of the American Arms twelve-gauge and blowing Frank Broadwell and Chester Hughes out of their saddles as th
ey rode hell-bent down the street.
Dana Arden calmly handed him another shotgun and began to reload his, saying, “Nice shot, Haywood.”
Marty Prembook, a stone killer who hired his gun out to anyone with the money to pay for it, decided he wasn’t being offered enough for this job and jerked his horse’s head around and galloped toward an alleyway. James Hunt, rapist, mugger, and pederast, saw Prembook making a getaway and followed as fast as his horse would run.
As they entered the alley, two figures stepped from the darkness of shadows along the buildings on either side.
Pearlie and Cal raised their Colts and fired as one. Two outlaws twisted and bent and fell out of their saddles to the ground. Hunt was killed instantly. Prembook, severely wounded, held up his hand. “Mercy . . . mercy,” he cried.
Pearlie hesitated, then jumped as Cal fired from behind him and punched a hole just above Prembook’s nose.
Pearlie looked at Cal, his eyebrows raised, until Cal pointed and he could see the gun in Prembook’s other hand, hammer still cocked. Pearlie grinned and held up a finger, showing he owed Cal one.
From his vantage point on the roof of the hotel, Smoke saw Swede riding down the street toward the livery. He took two quick steps, jumped to the roof next door, and hurriedly climbed down the stairs on the side wall. Weaving through the alley, he entered the livery stable through the rear door.
Swede was trying to burrow under some hay in the corner when Smoke stepped out into the light.
“You got two choices, outlaw,” Smoke growled, his hands hanging at his sides, relaxed.
Swede jerked around at the sound of Smoke’s voice, a pistol in his right hand, barrel pointed down at the ground.
“What’re those?”
“You can drop that gun and give yourself up and hang.”
Swede smiled sadly. “Not acceptable. What’s the other choice?”
“I can kill you right here.”
“I got a pistol in my hand. Not even you are that fast.”
Smoke gave a small shrug. “I have a feeling we’re fixing to find out. Right?”
“Goddamned right!” Swede said, and jerked the barrel of his Colt upward.
In one lightning-fast movement, Smoke drew and fired from the hip without aiming. His gun exploded a split second before Swede’s did, his slug hitting the big man in the chest.
Swede’s bullet grazed Smoke’s throat, drawing a fine line across his neck that began to slowly ooze blood.
Swede stood there, a surprised look on his face. Then he looked down at the hole in his chest and the spreading red stain on his shirt.
“You’ve killed me.”
Smoke nodded. “It appears that way.”
Swede grinned, then coughed, blood trickling down the corners of his mouth. “Then I’ll see you in Hell.”
Smoke nodded. “Maybe, but not today.”
Swede’s grin faded and he fell forward onto his face.
Monte Carson stood up from behind the wooden barrier on the roof and aimed his shotgun down. Ike Black and James Blaine, both men who’d ridden with Quantrill’s Raiders and were used to fire fights, had dismounted and were standing behind their horses, firing over the saddles at the window to the general store.
Monte pulled the triggers on his shotgun and reeled back as both barrels exploded buckshot at the men. Both men and both horses were knocked off their feet by the force of the blast. When Ike Black struggled to his feet, Monte dropped the shotgun and drew his pistol, shooting the man in the top of his head and driving him to his knees, where he stayed, as if in supplication, though he was dead as a stone.
Otis Andarko, Charley Adams, and Joe Belcham ran their horses up on the boardwalk and made it as far as Longmont’s Saloon. They dove off their mounts and scrambled through the batwings, huffing and out of breath from the exertion.
The three men had been comancheros in the past, making their living selling whiskey to the Indians, and guns that were then used to kill innocent settlers.
As they straightened up, they saw two men standing at the bar. One was dressed in a black coat, with starched white shirt and knee-high, highly polished black boots. The other wore a red checked shirt and Levi’s jeans and looked like a cowboy.
“Well, looky what we got here, boys,” Otis said as he dusted off his pants. “A tinhorn cardsharp and a sodbuster.”
Louis Longmont picked up a shot glass and drained the whiskey in one draft. “Johnny,” he said to Johnny North, standing next to him.
“Yeah, Louis?”
“Should we kill them now, or have another drink first?”
Johnny pursed his lips. “Gosh, I don’t know, Louis. What do you boys think?” he asked the three men standing in the doorway.
Joe Belcham couldn’t believe his ears. He looked at his two friends, then back at the two men at the bar. “But we got you outnumbered three to two,” he said, his hand moving toward his gun.
Louis shrugged. “I know the odds aren’t fair, but we don’t have time for you to go get more men.”
“What?” Otis asked.
It was to be his last question as Louis and Johnny filled their hands with iron and blew the three men back out through the batwings. None of the three managed to clear leather, much less get off a shot, before they were dead.
“Louis, let me buy you a drink this time,” Johnny said.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Louis said as Johnny poured.
Blackjack Tony McCurdy managed to get through Dr. Spalding’s office door with only two minor flesh wounds. As he burst into the room, the doctor looked up and said, “I’ll be with you in a minute, sir, as soon as I finish removing a bullet from this arm.”
Haywood Arden lay on the table with his wife, Dana, holding his hand. “I told you not to stand in the doorway like that,” she said. “I told you you’d get shot.”
Haywood nodded, his face covered with sweat. “I know, dear, but what can I say? It was my first shootout.”
Blackjack, who’d shot his first man when he was thirteen years old, and hadn’t minded that it was his father he’d killed, stepped over to grab Dr. Spalding by the arm.
“Shut the hell up. What’s wrong with you people? Can’t you see I have a gun?” he said, sticking out his hand with the Colt in it toward Dana.
“Oh, that,” Spalding said casually. Then in one quick motion and with a flick of his wrist, he slashed the extensor tendons of Blackjack’s right hand with the scalpel he was holding.
The pistol dropped to the floor as Blackjack screamed and grabbed his bleeding right hand with his left. He looked down and saw scarlet stains covering the boots he’d taken from Roscoe Archer’s body. His face paled and he fainted, falling to the floor.
“That’s right, have a seat and I’ll see to that nasty wound as soon as I’m finished here,” Spalding said, turning back to Haywood.
Monte Carson climbed through the rooftop door and let himself down to the top floor of the hotel. He’d just finished punching out his empties and reloading his Colt when he heard a sound behind him.
He turned and found Big Jim Slaughter pointing a pistol at him.
“You’re the cause of all this,” Slaughter said, a crazed look in his eye.
Monte smiled. “No, I’m not, Jim. It’s your greed and your stupidity that’s brought you here.”
“I’m gonna kill you, Carson.”
“I don’t think so, Jim. Not now, not ever.”
As Slaughter eared back the hammer on his Colt, Monte dropped to one knee and raised his pistol, firing twice in rapid succession.
The first bullet hit Slaughter in the right chest and spun him around, while the second entered the back of his head and knocked him to the floor, where he landed facedown in a pool of his own blood.
Monte got up, walked over to him, and rolled him over. Slaughter’s face was gone, blown away by the exiting slug from Monte’s .44.
Big Jim, you don’t look so big now, Monte thought.
Monte stepped t
o the window and looked at the carnage below. All of the outlaws were either dead or wounded and out of action.
Slaughter’s Marauders were as dead as their founder, and dead too was the past of Monte Carson, respected sheriff in Big Rock, Colorado.
EPILOGUE
Smoke and the acrid smell of cordite hung like an early morning fog over Big Rock, Colorado. The odors and sounds of men wounded and dying and dead assailed the townspeople, who were going about the grisly task of piling corpses in the back of buckboards for the short trip to boot hill, separating out the wounded, who would be first cared for by Doc Spalding, then jailed by Monte Carson, the man they’d come to kill.
Smoke Jensen walked from the livery stable, blood oozing from a close call on his neck. He looked up and down the street, his ears still ringing from the sound of his Colts when he blew Swede to Hell and gone, his pistol hanging at his side.
He took a deep breath, and realized with a start how much he loved the smell and feel and gut-wrenching excitement of a fight. It was not something he was proud of, but he was a pragmatic man, and he knew that one’s basic nature could be suppressed, but never changed. He guessed it was something he was going to have to work on.
“Hey, Smoke,” Louis called from over by his saloon. “You all right?”
Smoke came out of his reverie and fingered the wound on his neck. “Yeah, Louis, I’m all right,” he answered, and moved to join his friend.
Louis and Johnny North picked up the three dead men in front of the saloon and heaved them in the back of the buckboard Ralph Morrow was driving down the middle of Main Street.
“Looks like you boys had your share of action,” Smoke observed.
Louis shrugged. “These men had the gall to interrupt our conversation over two glasses of Napoleon brandy. What else could we do but shoot them for their impertinence?”
Cal and Pearlie sauntered up to join them, Pearlie still reloading his pistol.
“You boys all right?” Smoke asked, relieved to see them walking and know they had no serious wounds. Sally would have his skin if anything ever happened to either one of them.
Heart of the Mountain Man Page 22