The Phantom Gunman (A Neal Fargo Adventure. Book 11)

by John Benteen

  “You’ll allow what I tell you to allow.”

  “Trent—” But Antrim’s voice faded off. Trent laughed and the door slammed. He came back into Fargo’s view. “No guts,” he said. “Everybody knows it. Antrim never had any guts and never will. Everybody in Lincoln’s walked all over him and he’s never fought back. Got to be a laughin’ stock. Hell, he don’t even know which end of a gun a bullet comes out of.” Then the laugh faded. “Cannon?”

  Cannon said, “This goes against my grain, Trent. I’d rather wait until he’s on his feet and can use a gun.”

  “We’re not waitin’ for anything. We’ve got plenty of other work to do and we’re settlin’ this matter right now.” Trent’s face twisted. “All right. You don’t want to do it, I’ll show you how it’s done. Watch the door; Antrim ain’t going to give us any trouble, but that bitch of a daughter of his might.”

  Then he was standing over Fargo; taking pen and paper from his coat. “Well? You want to write, now? You got this one last chance.”

  Despite himself, Fargo felt fear. It was one thing to confront a man like Trent when he was on his feet, armed or unarmed; another to lie here helpless as a hogtied calf. But something in him would not let him yield. “Go screw yourself,” he said tersely. He tried to rise, but pain lanced through his chest and his head swam and he fell back.

  “Okay,” Trent said. “You’ve had your chance.” The old wound dressings were on the table. Suddenly he seized a handful of the gauze; before Fargo could resist, Trent’s fingers pried open his mouth; the cloth was rammed in, gagging him. Fargo raised his hands, but Trent knocked them away, easily. Then Trent was holding him down on the bed, and there was the click of a switchblade knife. The six inch blade moved back and forth before Fargo’s eyes, only an inch or two away.

  “A gunfighter that’s blind ain’t worth much, is he?” Trent whispered. “Ten thousand dollars against your eyes, Fargo.”

  Fargo stared back at him; now the fear was something like panic.

  “Five thousand for each eye,” Trent went on, and the tip of the blade pressed against Fargo’s forehead, just above his nose. “It won’t take but two seconds, Fargo. Two quick jabs, that’s all. Then you’re through, finished, forever.”

  And in that instant Fargo knew there was nothing for it. He had to give back the money. He fought to gather strength to mumble some kind of assent against the gag. The blade had moved, now, was poised just over his right eye. He shuddered, drenched in cold sweat. Death he could face, but to be blinded and left alive, helpless ...

  “Now,” Trent said; and in that instant the door slammed open.

  “Drop it, Trent!” Nita Antrim’s voice was strong, commanding, fearless.

  Trent froze. He looked up, the knife blade still poised just above Fargo’s eye socket. Fargo saw his face change, saw the flicker of fear that crossed it. Then it vanished; Trent smiled coolly.

  “Put that thing down, Nita. You don’t know how to handle it.”

  “You don’t have to handle a sawed-off shotgun,” the girl snapped. “I know that much. All you have to do is point it and pull the triggers.”

  “Cannon,” Trent said. “Take that thing away from her.”

  “You try,” Nita said, “and I’ll blow you apart.”

  Cannon said, “Trent, I’m no fool. I can’t draw against a dead drop with a riot gun.”

  “Why, you—” Trent broke off.

  “Take that knife away from his face,” Nita said. “Now.”

  “You shoot, you’ll blow him to hell, too.”

  “Maybe he’d rather be dead than blind. The knife, Trent.”

  Above Fargo, Trent stood poised for an interminable second. Then, slowly, the blade withdrew.

  “All right, Nita. You hold the high cards now, but the hand don’t win the pot. Me, Cannon, and Thad Selman. Especially Selman. You and your daddy’ll be damned sorry if you draw down that kind of lightning on you.”

  “You’ll be sorry if I pull this trigger.”

  Trent backed away. Now the cold sweat was on his face. And Nita Antrim came into Fargo’s vision, the sawed-off Fox leveled, bores swinging to cover Cannon, who also moved backward, and Trent in turn.

  “Out,” Nita snapped. “Now. Get out.”

  Trent closed the blade, pocketed the knife. As he did so, Fargo reached up weakly, pulled the gag from his mouth. He hawked, moistening his tongue. “Don’t worry about me, Nita. If they break, blast ’em.”

  “Nobody’s going to break,” Cannon said. “Come on, Trent.”

  “Yeah.” Trent moved around the bed. “Okay. But you’ve torn it, woman. You’ve got Selman against you, and me—and the whole Dolan bunch, too. I warn you, from now on, this town’s gonna be too hot to hold you and that lily-livered dad of yours.”

  “My father’s not lily-livered. He saves lives, he doesn’t take them.”

  “Well, he’d better start figurin’ out how to save his own.” Evidently, then, Antrim had come into the room. “You hear me, Doc?”

  “I hear you,” Antrim said. His voice was a trifle snaky.

  “Any man that would hide behind his daughter’s skirts—” Trent paused. “All right, Cannon, let’s go.”

  There was a taut silence then, and Nita turned, Fargo’s shotgun still leveled. She moved across the room, following them. Fargo heard doors close. Then Nita was back, the shotgun lowered. She and her father moved into Fargo’s view. As they did so, the girl shivered, then her knees buckled.

  Antrim caught her, held her close, taking the shotgun from her hand. “All right, honey,” he whispered. “All right. You did fine. I’m sorry that—”

  “No,” she said, her voice shaky. “Don’t be sorry. You made your promise. I’m glad for you to keep it.” Then she pulled away, steadier. “I’m all right now. Let’s see to Fargo.”

  They came to him. He looked up at them, knowing that he was forever indebted to them. The girl was magnificent; his admiration for her boundless. She was a woman fit for a man like him...

  Antrim’s face was pale. “I’m sorry, Fargo,” he said thinly. “I should have been the one to stand between you and them. But there are reasons. Let’s see what shape you’re in.”

  “I’m all right,” Fargo said. The doctor’s small, deft hands probed expertly.

  “Yeah. You are. No harm done.”

  Fargo said, “But I want a pen and paper.”

  Antrim’s brows went up. “What for?”

  “I want to write a bank draft.”

  “What?”

  “For Selman’s ten thousand dollars. And I want it delivered to Trent.”

  Antrim looked surprised. “They scared you that much? Well, I don’t blame—”

  “They didn’t scare me that much. Or maybe they did, I don’t know. But that’s not the reason. If Selman doesn’t get his ten thousand, Trent and Cannon will be back, one way or the other. Next time, you won’t take them by surprise. I … owe Nita my eyes. They’re worth ten thousand to me, to keep Selman’s gunnies off your neck.”

  “There is no need for that,” Antrim said. “Somehow, I can arrange protection ...”

  “What protection I want is my Fox double-barrel in bed here with me. I can handle it, weak as I am. And as for the money, the hell with that.” He paused, and when he spoke again, he voice was stronger and cold as iron. “When I’m on my feet, I’ll take it out of Harry Trent’s hide.”

  Chapter Seven

  Fargo’s hand flashed down, came up with the Colt aimed, his finger on the trigger. Then, with a movement equally and incredibly swift, he holstered the gun again.

  “You’re fast,” the doctor said. “Goddamn, you’re fast. I never saw anybody faster, except maybe—”

  When he broke off, Fargo turned to look at him. Henry Antrim sat behind his desk, blue eyes narrowed, having watched Fargo limber up first with the knife, now with the Colt. Only eight days had passed since Trent and Cannon had descended on the hospital, but in that interval Fargo’s strength
had come back, slowly at first, then in a rush, like water flowing through broken dam. He felt good, now, fit; and he was fully dressed, the gun slung on his hip.

  “Except maybe who?”

  Henry Antrim shrugged. “Forget it.”

  “No. I want to know who.”

  Antrim looked at him a moment longer. “The Kid,” he said.

  Fargo sat down, took out a cigar. In his time in the hospital, he had come to like and respect Henry Antrim, and he owed the doctor a tremendous debt. Antrim had saved his life; Antrim’s daughter, in that act of iron-willed courage, had preserved his eyesight. Trent had called Antrim a coward, but Fargo did not see how anybody who had fathered a daughter like Nita could be that. Besides, he sensed something in Antrim, a core like iron, harder maybe even than the iron within himself. The doctor refused to take human life, to fight, yes; but that did not mean he was a coward. It only meant that he held dear something most men in Lincoln County did not value at all.

  In many ways, Fargo thought, he and Antrim were very much alike, but there was no way he could put a finger on their similarities. All he knew was that they were friends and trusted one another. Now Fargo said, “You knew the Kid?”

  “I knew him,” Antrim said. “In the old days here.” He opened a drawer of his desk. “I think it’s time I prescribed some whiskey for you. Want a drink?”

  “Hand it over,” Fargo said.

  “Could use a little myself. Lowers the blood pressure, slows the heart. A man that drinks, in moderation, he’ll outlive a teetotaler.” Antrim took out a bottle, poured two shots, passed Fargo one.

  Fargo sipped his. “Tell me about the old days. Tell me about the Kid.”

  “Are you still after his hide?”

  “No,” Fargo said. “I gave Selman back his money. I don’t work for free. The Kid could walk up to me right now with all his guns, and if he didn’t get crosswise of me, I’d have a drink with him. Just like I’m doing with you.”

  Antrim nodded. “Okay, then. Well, like I said, I knew him.”

  “Well?”

  “Very well. He and I rode together.”

  Now Fargo understood what that rapport between himself and Antrim was. “You wouldn’t have been very old back then, either,” he said.

  “Maybe twenty, twenty-one,” Antrim said. “Young, yes, but in Lincoln County in those days, a man grew up fast.”

  “What was he like? They say he was a coldblooded buck-toothed little weasel.”

  “They say wrong,” Antrim muttered, drinking. “He was a young man with a natural talent. Some people can paint pictures, some ride buckin’ horses. He could pull a sixgun faster and shoot it straighter than anybody else. Something he was born with, like the color of his eyes. Something he couldn’t help being able to do.” Antrim finished his drink. “But there’s been an awful lot of crap spouted about the Kid.”

  “Such as?”

  “A lot of people claim he was born in Brooklyn, New York. He wasn’t. He came from Indiana. And his mother’s name was McCarty, not Bonney. Bonney was a name he used later, an old family name.”

  “They say he killed his first man when he was twelve. Stabbed a blacksmith in Silver City that insulted his mother.”

  “That’s a lot of crap. He hauled out of Silver City when he was twelve, all right, but it was because he got mixed up in a kind of childish prank. The sheriff clapped him in jail to teach him a lesson, but the Kid thought it was for real and escaped. Went up the chimney in the jail and out on the roof, jumped down, and took off for Arizona.”

  “At the age of twelve? That’s how old I was when I ran away from the bastards that took me in when my parents were killed by Indians. They didn’t want a son, they wanted a slave.”

  “Then you know what the Kid went through, taking off that young. Have another?” Antrim poured two more drinks. “Anyhow, he wound up in Graham County, Arizona. That’s where they started calling him the Kid. And that’s where he really did kill a blacksmith, when he was fifteen old. The Kid had been working as a teamster and a horse jingler, and he ran into this guy they called Windy Cahill, who was an Army farrier. Cahill kept picking on him—he was an overbearing son of a bitch—and one day the Kid had all he could take. He grabbed Cahill’s gun and plugged the bastard. Then he took off again, back to New Mexico.”

  “You know a lot about him.”

  Antrim stared down into his glass. “We talked a lot about our childhood days. He had a rough time growing up. Anyhow, he came back to New Mexico and he and a friend named Tom O’Keefe started for the Pecos Valley. Up in the Guadalupes, they run into Apaches, lost their horses and got separated. O’Keefe went back to Mesilla, but the Kid went on foot, hiding out, traveling only after dark, for two days. Went without food or water all that time. He was dead beat when he finally made it to the Jones Ranch down in the Seven Rivers part of Lincoln County. The Joneses took him in, gave him food, water, clothes, a horse.” Antrim lit a cigarette. “The Seven Rivers crowd rode against the Kid later on, in the war, but the Kid never forgot their kindnesses to him.”

  He sipped his drink. “Anyhow, Billy rode on up to Chisum’s ranch at South Springs on the Pecos. He stayed there a while, just another grubline rider. Did a few odd jobs for Chisum. Then drifted on up the Hondo River, ran into Jesse Evans. At that time, Evans was ramrodding the biggest gang of rustlers in Lincoln County. He tried to get Billy to join, but the Kid wouldn’t. He’d had enough trouble. He settled down on the Coe ranch instead, and for the first time he felt at home. He made a lot of good friends among the ranchers in the Ruidoso Valley. Then John Henry Tunstall hired him.”

  “The Englishman?”

  “Yeah.” Antrim looked past Fargo, his eyes cloudy. “There never was a finer man than Tunstall. You see, the Kid was a bastard, he never knew his own father. Never had any father at all, really, until Tunstall took him over. But Tunstall showed him what a real man was like, how a man that could read and write could make something out of himself. Made the Kid learn all that; the Kid liked to read, he picked up a pretty fair education with Tunstall. God knows, he loved the man.”

  “The Murphy-Dolan bunch killed Tunstall,” Fargo said.

  “That’s right. They were already pressuring Tunstall because he’d partnered with McSween in the store that competed with his. They went to law against Tunstall, and he tried to fight them with the law, but they owned the law here and in Santa Fe, both. Anyhow, Tunstall and some of his men, including the Kid, were driving a bunch of horses to Lincoln. Then what was supposed to be a posse looking for stolen horses hit the outfit. Some of Tunstall’s men had turned off to hunt wild turkeys. The Kid and another gunslinger named Middleton were riding behind, and the Dolan bunch caught Tunstall when he was alone and shot him down. Some posse! Jesse Evans, the biggest outlaw in Lincoln was riding with it!”

  He poured another drink. “All right, they got Tunstall. There were too many of ’em to fight then. But Tunstall was McSween’s partner and that sent McSween on the warpath, and the Kid was crazy mad with grief and rage. He tried the law, too, like Tunstall had taught him, but he got nowhere when he swore out warrants against Tunstall’s killers. So he went after ’em himself.”

  Antrim sat up straight. “After that, the Lincoln County War was Billy the Kid’s War. He and Dick Brewer formed an outfit called the Regulators and went after the people who’d killed Tunstall, with those warrants all sworn out, legally, by a Justice of the Peace.” Antrim laughed harshly. “They served ’em in lead. But Brewer got killed at Blazer’s Mill, and that left the Kid in charge. By then, he’d already knocked off Brady, the Murphy-Dolan bunch’s pet sheriff. He knocked off a lot of other people, too, in his time.”

  Antrim put down his glass, stood up. “There was no way you could live in Lincoln County back then and not kill people, and with the law against you, they swore out warrant after warrant. The Kid was pushed into outlawry. He tried to make a deal with Lew Wallace, the territorial governor, to turn state’s evidence against the D
olan bunch, but the minute he was taken into custody, he knew they were going to rub him out, and he escaped. And then Dolan broke the McSween faction in the five day fight right down the road. Killed McSween and most of his men when they ran out of the burning house.” He smiled tightly. “They didn’t kill the Kid, then, though. He was wearing two guns by that time, and he came out of that fire with both of ’em talking. He shot his way through to the courtyard wall, went over it, down the hill, behind the Rio Bonito cut bank and escaped in darkness. Then he came back to fight some more.”

  Antrim began to pace. “He never stopped fighting after that. Even when the McSween bunch was ruined, he kept on with his private war against the Dolan crowd. Sometimes he had to rustle cattle to stay alive, or pull holdups, but he kept on. Then Pat Garrett got him at the battle at Stinking Springs. The Kid stood trial, they sentenced him to hang, brought him back to Lincoln to break his neck …”

  “That was when he snatched Bell’s gun during the card game in the courthouse and killed both deputies,” Fargo said.

  “So the story goes,” Antrim said with a tight smile. Then he sobered. “Actually, one of the Kid’s friends had hid a gun in the privy outside the courthouse. The kid waited until Ollinger went to eat. Then he asked Bell to take him out there. When he came out, he had the gun in his shirt.

  They were going up the steps to the second floor when the Kid pulled it on Bell. Told him to stand hitched, but Bell made a break and the Kid had to shoot him.”

  “So that’s the truth of it,” Fargo said.

  “The solid truth,” said Antrim. He sat down again. “That still left Bob Ollinger, and he hated the Kid and the Kid hated him. Ollinger was a Dolan man through and through, and he tormented the hell out of the Kid while Billy was behind bars, wearing handcuffs and leg-irons. Anyhow, after the Kid got Bell, he ran to the weapons closet, broke it open, got out a double-barreled shotgun. Went to the courthouse window across from the hotel. Ollinger came running to see what the shootin7 was about. The Kid stuck the shotgun through the window, called out, ‘Hey, Bob.’ Ollinger looked up, went for his gun. The Kid let him have it.”