Gun Law (A Wild Bill Western Book 8)

by Judd Cole

  “What plan? First I’ve heard of it.”

  “That’s because it didn’t occur to me until last night when I was studying this,” Brennan explained, pulling an accordion-folded map from his pocket. “It’s a topography map made by the Army Corps of Engineers. I won it in a poker game out in Sioux Falls.”

  Brennan nodded in the direction of the buckboard parked in the weed-choked yard out front. “Ricky! Pull back that canvas tarp so we can glom the load.”

  Collins stepped outside, shunting his Sharps to his left hand and tugging back the tarp with his right.

  Out loud he sounded out the warning painted in big green letters on the sides of three wooden crates: “Dan-ger high ex-plo-sives.”

  “This map reminded me of a place I used to pass twice a week when I was a driver,” Brennan explained. “The dynamite’s been stored at my ranch since you boys boosted it from those miners near Pierre. If my plan works, it could all be over in about twenty seconds. We might have to do some digging, is all. I’ve got a steam-shovel crew standing by in Spearfish.”

  “Hell, I take your drift,” Urbanski said, suddenly catching on. “Devil’s Slope. That’s how’s come you wanted them stuck with tired horses.”

  Brennan nodded. “Can you picture it after one hundred pounds of dynamite has blown that rock dike away? And them below with exhausted horses in the harness?”

  Collins liked it so much, he started laughing as if at a capital joke. And even the hard-bitten, cynical Urbanski gave a grudging nod of admiration.

  “They’ll be like ducks on a fence,” he conceded. “Sometimes being sneaky is damned entertaining. But we best get humping if we want to get the charge planted. Way I collate it, we only got maybe two hours.”

  ~*~

  Josh had a stiff, sore neck the next morning, and he could barely rotate his head. But the Denver-bound bullion coach rolled out just after daybreak, Wild Bill nursing a tired but still-plucky team. Plastered linen covered shallow yet painful glass cuts on his hands and forearms.

  “The condition of these animals won’t matter a jackstraw either way,” he told his topside companions while they watched their three passengers board. “They rested one night on double grain rations, so they’ll hold up the forty-two miles to the next station, long’s they ain’t pushed too hard.”

  He paused and nodded to Saville and Appling. “Morning, Reverend, Mr. Lawton,” he greeted them, still keeping up the ruse as they filed outside, Appling picking his teeth with a spent match.

  They nodded, Rabbit-Face still unable to meet Bill’s frank gaze.

  “And if we’re attacked,” Bill resumed quietly, “those horses won’t be running anyway. You two remember—the very moment an attack starts, we take the offensive. They’ll be expecting us to wage a running battle. Instead, go at ’em head-on like badgers.”

  “And meantime watch the soldiers,” Josh put in quietly.

  “’At’s right. All of us, but you especially, kid. You’re sorta our personal bodyguard.”

  Josh nodded. “Still just a hunch, Bill?”

  “It’s Appling,” Bill admitted quietly. “Saville is slick. But his pard has got a guilty mind.”

  Wild Bill touched his hat as Charlene Durant came out last, her eyes shyly slanted away from Hickok’s gaze. Her hair was neatly coiffed, and she wore a blue knitted shawl against the bite of the morning air. As dust protection, she wrapped her head in a fancy scarf of poppy-colored silk sewn with sequins.

  She looks good covered or uncovered, Bill realized. He took her left arm to help her up the folding step.

  “Miss Durant,” he said quietly, detaining her a moment. “I have every reason to think we’ll be attacked again. You’re sure you won’t lay over here, take the next coach?”

  “Attacked again?” she repeated in a fading voice.

  “I b’lieve so, yes.”

  But she shook her head in determination. “I must get to Denver, Mr. Hickok. I trust you.”

  “Headstrong girl,” Wild Bill remarked when he’d climbed up onto the box.

  Jimmy took out the makings and built a smoke. He looked up at Josh and winked. “Ask me,” he said, licking the paper, “she’s determined, all right. Determined to stay real near Wild Bill Hickok.”

  Bill kicked off the brake and clucked at the team. “Well, nobody did ask you, old son. Keep your thoughts on the natural terrain.”

  But Jimmy wasn’t quite finished roweling his friend. “Yeah, boy, a gal puts on fancy feathers like that, hell, she’s dressing for a cotillion ball, not a dirty old stagecoach ride. She’s preening for you, Mr. Billy.”

  Hickok snorted, cracking the whip over the glossy rumps of the team. “You can just forget her motivations, Jimmy. You’ll bite your own teeth before you’ll ever figure out a woman. He-yah, he-yah!”

  “She’s as cold as last night’s pudding,” Joshua scoffed.

  Bill gave that remark a mysterious little grin. “What went cold last night can be heated up today. But both of you better quit dogging it and watch for trouble.”

  The first ten miles went by quietly enough, the landscape folded into low, stark ridges by ancient glaciers that left heaps of moraine but little screening timber. At one point they left the trail to pass a long immigrant train.

  “They’ll take the north fork at Silver Wolf Pass,” Bill explained. “We’ll take the south. Eyes to all sides, boys! They could hit us at any time now.”

  Joshua saw Wild Bill loosen his ivory-grip Colt .44-40s in their holsters. That gesture, like the calm, expectant look on Hickok’s face, said it clearly: The readiness is all. Wild Bill learned that lesson early in life as a young deputy in the Kansas Territory, and he lived by that law with everything he did.

  The terrain changed dramatically and quickly, showing the geologic ravages of some distant upheaval: buttes arose, scree piled at their bases, and the trail began to corkscrew around natural rock turrets. Soon cliff shadows engulfed the trail, and all three men watched in all directions.

  Though gradually failing him, Wild Bill’s eyes were still good enough to sweep the terrain and pick out a spot, above and to their right, where a natural rock dike held back an entire steep slope of loose talus and scree. Thousands of tons of it.

  Wild Bill had once protected railroad surveying crews, and he knew exactly how their surveyors marked spots like that on their maps: unstable landslide slope—demolish.

  “Yeah, I see it, too,” Jimmy said, reading Bill’s frown. “You still think tired horses won’t matter today?”

  Bill glanced at the trail ahead. Although it was straight again, it was now a long incline. Boulders and slag heaps blocked any escape left or right. Once again his “take the offensive” strategy seemed a pale consolation.

  “Well, odds are it won’t matter,” Wild Bill announced, trying to convince himself.

  The stagecoach climbed on, crawling across the base of the slope like a slow bug. Too late, Bill thought about hitching the saddle band onto the traces. But it would take more time now, exposed to danger, than they’d save.

  When Joshua heard the first stuttering rumble he looked straight overhead, expecting another cloudburst.

  But that first slow gathering of noise quickly escalated to a resounding explosion. Josh saw a huge dust cloud rise up fast like vented steam, blocking out the entire horizon. Then, in an eye-blink, it was as if the slope above them were a giant animal shaking itself off.

  That impression, in turn, passed in a heartbeat, and the frightened youth saw the entire mass of rocks suddenly bearing down on them, gathering size and speed like an avalanche of gray snow. Then Charlene Durant’s piercing scream from inside the coach cut into his heart like a blade, and Joshua heard the words clearly inside his skull, death-goaded from memory: Tell me how you die, and I’ll tell you what you’re worth.

  Chapter Ten

  Luckily for the others, however, Wild Bill Hickok did not bother, as Josh did, with philosophical thoughts at moments when death reared its he
ad. He knew instinctively that passivity usually meant death, and that even the wrong action was almost always preferable to no action.

  “Cover down!” he roared at his two friends as that swirling, choking vanguard of aroused dust engulfed them, thick as London fog.

  A freight-train roar filled his ears as Wild Bill, choking and nearly blinded, leaped off the box onto the back of a wheel horse. He managed to keep his feet, reach the lead team, and straddle both horses, hanging on to fistfuls of their mane.

  Their natural tendency was to try running left, not straight, to avoid the approaching maelstrom of death. But Wild Bill knew they’d all wipe out on the scattered boulders, trapping them right in the path of the crumbling talus slope. With sheer, brute strength, Hickok used his arms as powerful reins, muscling the frightened animals back onto the main trail and holding them.

  Yet—all was lost if they couldn’t pull faster. Hanging on precariously, Hickok dipped his head down and gave both horses a painful bite on their sensitive ears.

  “Hee-yah, you four-legged hell-stallions, hee-YAH!”

  Those harsh bites altered their fear to rage, and the lead pair surged forward, Wild Bill egging them mercilessly on. The dust now made the air unbreathable, choking eyes, nose, throat, and Wild Bill heard Charlene scream again when one of the first rocks reached them, a natural cannon ball as it blew a hole in one of the japanned side panels, rocking the stagecoach wildly and almost tripping up the team.

  But Hickok stuck like a stubborn tick, gravel dust pelting him like buckshot, unable to see or breathe, unable even to spur the horses on with voice commands, just hanging on and uttering urgent grunting sounds like a foraging bear. Joshua, curled into the smallest ball possible atop the coach, loosed a shout of terror when a wildly hurling rock whiffed just inches past his head and crashed into the top seat, cracking it in half.

  There was one horrifying moment where teamster Hickok believed he had failed to save his passengers or himself: A second rock, a third smashed the coach and sent it careening; the bulk of the talus weight was literally pressing them like worms about to die under a boot heel.

  Then—a lunging, rushing, praying break in the dust cloud, the roaring train commotion still ferocious and loud, but behind them, and for perhaps thirty seconds as the team slowly settled down, Wild Bill had trouble understanding they had cleared the landslide.

  The conveyance lurched to a halt, and a cheer erupted behind him as he staggered around to take the roll. Jimmy and Josh, both black as coal from the dust, waved triumphantly at their bigger-than-legend driver.

  “All safe inside!” John Saville reported, hanging out one window. “Though Miss Durant could use some smelling salts. Coach is damaged, Bill, but the wheels and axles appear intact.”

  “God’s trousers!” Appling shouted, hanging out the other window. “There’s no trail behind us now! Just a rock-plugged pass.”

  Bill called a brief rest stop so the horses could blow and the humans dust themselves off and inspect the coach closer. But even with Josh and Jimmy still excited and praising him, Bill sent them a quelling stare.

  “Stonewall Jackson” was all he had to say to Jimmy. The war veteran understood immediately: as too many Union soldiers learned, sometimes you celebrate a “victory” that, in reality, is only a calculated part of your defeat.

  Joshua, too, settled down and kept a close eye on the soldiers as they dusted themselves off. However, when they removed their weapons to clean them, Wild Bill and Jimmy kept their own weapons to hand.

  Bill’s always careful, Josh told himself. But he’s got no evidence the soldiers are Brennan’s guns. By now he ought to be convinced they’re playing it straight. I am.

  Charlene Durant, however, surprised everyone with the joyful good humor of her mood as she realized what she had just survived—and just who had gotten them through it.

  “They warned me back in Chicago,” she said with a charming smile, hopelessly dusting off her once-white shirtwaist, “‘wear black out west,’ they all told me. ‘It won’t show the filth.’ And I thought they were just lazy!”

  Her eyes never left Bill while she said all this.

  “Preening,” Jimmy repeated in a mutter only Bill and Josh could hear.

  “Maybe,” Bill muttered back. “But some birds mate for life and some don’t. I think she’s the kind that does. Now, if you two girls are done gossiping, all right if we move this coach to Denver? I got a bonus to collect.”

  ~*~

  The damaged but still-functioning coach covered almost ten miles in the next two hours, the fresher horses in the rear now switched to the lead traces. Even with stronger leaders, the team was unwilling to move much faster than a walking man. Wild Bill didn’t push them much, either, except on the occasional inclines. He was more interested in reconnoiter. He questioned Jimmy and Joshua constantly, keeping them honest.

  “Kid? What’s got that eagle circling?” he called out, pointing out across a grassy swale to a line of bare hills on the horizon.

  “What eag—oh, yeah, I see it.” Josh squinted in the afternoon sunlight. He was precariously balanced on the half of the seat that was still bolted to solid wood. The other half, crumbled useless, the metal frame bent out like a wind-twisted shingle, was now his footrest.

  “I think it’s following a bobcat,” Josh said suddenly. “Sure. The bobcat’s on a food scent, so the eagle means to steal the meal after the cat chases it out into the open.”

  Bill nodded. “Good. Bobcat hates the man smell. It wouldn’t hunt if there were any near it.”

  And he “borrowed” Jimmy’s eyes the same way. “James—what’s those dust puffs due west?”

  “A small herd of antelope, Bill. Crossing some low sand hills. Could be—No, they’re moving too fast—they’ve been spooked.”

  Bill nodded and asked Joshua to dig the field glasses out of his bedroll. The reporter took them from their case and handed them to him. Wild Bill spent at least a full minute studying the terrain to their west.

  “Sure. I can’t spot any men because they’ve moved up on us behind that long hogback ridge. Takes them fifty yards away from the road just up ahead. That’s why the antelope are running at right angles to the ridge—they’ve caught the man scent.”

  “Could be any men,” Josh felt compelled to say.

  “Kid,” Bill said with his usual calm politeness, “you done good with the bobcat. You couldn’t read sign like that when you first got out here. You’ve been a quick study. But you’re not quite ready for your ranger’s cap. It’s not all there to read sometimes. Sometimes you have to believe it when your blood tickles you.”

  Bill looked at Jimmy, then Joshua. He nodded to the right, due west. “I say we’ve got an attack coming from behind that hogback, should hit us in about fifteen minutes.”

  “Suffering Moses,” Jimmy swore, more impressed by Bill’s confidence than the threat itself. “He done this hoodoo business during the war, too, Joshua. He was never wrong.”

  Josh, finally impressed into silence, quickly slid out his flip-back pad and a stub of pencil, making some notes. Bill went on:

  “Jimmy, I’m thinking of sustained fire with strict target discipline. Like the 107th did when you broke Sherman’s picket line at Petersburg. So once targets are confirmed, you’ll empty first your long gun, then your short. I’ll take over immediately after your last shot while you cover and reload. We keep that pattern up—sustained fire.”

  Bill nodded at Joshua. “The Philly Kid here won’t actually empty his short gun unless they attack at close quarters. He’ll hoard his bullets while he also monitors our other guests.”

  Nobody topside had to ask who the guests were.

  “Kid,” Bill added, keeping his voice down, “I want you to have your shooter at the ready once those two Army pistoleros roll out, got it?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Stick them butts in your pocket, Joshua, and listen to me. This ain’t an editorial discussion in New York.
You're getting orders for combat, is that clear?”

  The reporter’s jaw shaped up strong. “Yessir!”

  “They turn them guns in the wrong direction, you shoot to kill right now, mister. Before they can find a bead. If there’s a mistake, let’s err in our own favor—you catch my drift?”

  Josh nodded. “Shoot first. Ask questions later.” He paused a moment, then added: “If at all.”

  Wild Bill grinned, cracking his whip when the team began bogging down. “There’s our boy! Besides that, spot their targets and see where their bullets hit. Low, wide, wild—I’m gonna predict they won’t score a kill.”

  “See if they even adjust for battle sights,” Jimmy tossed in. “Random misses mean they’re just doing it purposeful-like. Just slacking it.”

  Jimmy looked up. “Hogback’s about a half mile ahead,” he reported. He pulled the watch from his fob pocket and thumbed back the cover. “Been about seven, eight minutes since your prediction.”

  Bill shucked out his right-hand gun and slid it through his belt, closer to hand. He already had his Winchester across his thighs. Jimmy set his with the butt plate resting on his thigh, his hand on the lever.

  “Business is good for headhunters,” Jimmy called out cheerfully. But Hickok’s scowl reminded him just whose head was most valuable around here. That just made Jimmy grin wider, until Hickok, too, was forced to laugh.

  “If I lose a target to distance,” he told Jimmy, “I’ll flip my weapon to you, if you’re reloading, and you’ll flip me your empty.”

  Jimmy nodded. He had such faith in Wild Bill’s combination of sign-reading and hunch that he now slid down off the seat, kneeling on his right leg, his left braced out behind—snapping in for his favorite position, the kneeling offhand.

  “It’s been twelve minutes now,” Josh said, and the very moment he fell silent a rifle cracked, and Jimmy rolled to his left, grunting hard on a sharp intake of breath, when a slug punched into his right thigh. The noise of impact, like a spade cutting into earth, made Josh wince.