“Go ahead,” Yok Zapata said, glancing at the young man. “That way we can see where the men are waiting in ambush. We will say nice words over your grave.”
Ross didn’t think much of that idea at all. He shut his mouth and kept it closed.
In the ghost town, the men waited patiently. They all knew that if they kept their heads about them and didn’t jump the gun, they could cut the odds down by a full one-fourth at the first volley.
The outlaws, gunfighters, and disgruntled sons fanned out, slowly circling the town. The seven in the town waited. A few of the seven could have dropped some of those stalking them. But they waited until more showed themselves. In the distance, a horse whinnied and stamped its foot. Birds sang and soared in the sky.
Blue Anderson stepped into the rear of the old apothecary shop, and Doc Blaine had no choice in the matter. He turned and filled the hired gun’s belly full of his own special prescription for outlawism. Blue staggered out the space where the door used to be and fell to the ground, his guns falling from his fingers and his eyes wide and staring at the sky. Doc waited.
Before the echo of the shot had faded, Matt drilled a man through the brisket and set him on the ground on his butt, hollering in pain.
John Carlin lifted his Greener and blew a hole in Proctor big enough to stick a telegraph pole through. Proctor was lifted off his boots by the hideous killing blast and was dead before he hit the ground.
Sam Hawkins jumped into the dusty, cobwebby saddle shop and peered into the murk, his eyes not adjusting from the bright light outside.
“You looking for someone special?” Tom said.
Hawkins spun around, and Tom gave him two .45 rounds, one in the belly and the other in the chest. Hawkins did a little dance step to the tune of his guns falling and rattling to the floor, and then he followed them down into the dust. He drummed his boots on the floor in a final exit and then lay still.
Marcel Carlin jumped into the old dry goods store and spotted Sam Two Wolves. “Goddamn breed!” he yelled, and started blasting away in the gloom. He didn’t hit a thing. Sam coolly turned and leveled a .44 and drilled the young man in the shoulder, the slug breaking the shoulder and knocking the youngest Carlin outside. He lost one gun when he hit the ground, and crawled away, blubbering and cussing.
Paul Stewart took a chance and tried to run across the weedy street, both pistols blazing and blasting. Four pistols barked. The hired gun danced and jerked his way into death and collapsed in the dirt. His guns went off as he hit the ground, sending up a shower of dirt and pebbles.
Marcel crawled across the alleyway and under the building occupied by Nate. Nate heard the scratching and waited, staring down through a hole in the rotting floor. Marcel stuck a gun up through the hole, and Nate blew the gun out of the young man’s hand, taking a couple of fingers with the smashed pistol. Marcel hollered and shrieked and scurried like a big rat out from under the building. He crawled out behind a dilapidated old outhouse and wrapped a handkerchief around his ruined right hand. He wished he’d never listened to his brothers. He wished he was back home. He wished he’d never plotted and schemed to kill his mother and father. He heard a buzzing and froze in horror. Then he felt the hot lash of fangs. He screamed and lifted his left hand. A big rattler was holding onto the fleshy part of his hand, the fangs somehow caught. Marcel jumped up and went running and screaming across the meadow toward his horse, his heart pumping wildly. He made about two hundred yards before he collapsed face down amid the wild flowers. He shrieked and wailed but no one heard him over the roar of gunfire. It took him a few minutes to die. They were not pleasant moments. But Marcel had never been a very pleasant young man. The huge rattler, as big around as an average man’s forearm, bit Marcel a few more times in the face, just for good measure. Marcel had fallen on the snake’s tail. Pissed the rattler off something fierce.
“You damn greasy Injun!” Nyeburn roared, locating Sam’s position and vividly remembering the thorough butt-whipping Sam had laid on him inside and outside of Singer’s office. “I’ll kill you.”
He came running toward the old store from the south side, ducking and dodging and running from tree to bush. Sam waited. Nyeburn stepped in a hole and went sprawling, losing both guns and bashing his head against a stump, knocking himself unconscious and putting himself out for the duration.
“Idiot,” Sam muttered, and leaned against the wall, waiting, trying to forget the ache in his ribs.
“Give this up, boys!” Tom Riley yelled.
“Hell with you,” Johnny Carlin returned the yell. “You’re all gonna die right here. You hear me, Big John. I’m tired of livin’ in your shadow. I’m gonna be known as the man who killed Big John Carlin. Me, you son of a bitch.”
“Well, you got part of it right, boy,” Big John Carlin said. He leveled his .45 and shot his oldest son through the belly. The father fought back tears.
11
“Johnny!” Clement screamed. “That was Pa who shot you. Pa did. Goddamn you, Big John.”
“Oh, my God,” Bull muttered. “Dear God, help us all for the mistakes we’ve made with our kids.”
“Bull!” Big Dan Parker bellered.
Bull said nothing. He waited.
“How much is your life worth, Bull?” Parker yelled. “Sign your ranch over to us, Bull, and you can ride out.”
“You have to be kidding,” Bull muttered. He thought he knew where the voice was coming from. He holstered his pistol and picked up his Winchester, earing back the hammer.
“You hear me, John!” Parker yelled. “Take your wife and your yeller boy and ride out.”
Bull put four rounds as fast as he could lever into the side of the old building. Seconds passed in silence. Big Dan Parker came staggering out, the front of his shirt, from neck to waist, was bloody. He swayed for a moment, then fell on his face in the dirt and weeds.
“Damn you all to the fires of Hell!” Paul Brown yelled. “Me and Dan was buddies.” He jumped out into the street and tried to race across it.
He didn’t make it. The hail of bullets turned him around and around and dropped him dead, not more than three feet from his buddy.
Two of those would-be toughs who came in with the Sutton-Carlin kids made it back to their horses and lit a shuck out, heading for safer places.
“Cowards!” Hugh Sutton hollered, half-rising from behind a water barrel. Nate sighted him in and knocked him sprawling. He got up, and Bull drilled him clean. Hugh fell to the ground and did not move.
“Damn you!” Randy screamed. “Damn you, Bull.” He emptied both pistols at the old saloon building, hitting nothing but warped and rotting boards. He pulled two more pistols out from behind his belt, and Doc Blaine sighted him in and blew one of his knees into pebbles. The young man screamed in pain and passed out on the boardwalk.
“Insanity,” Bull muttered.
From the loft of the livery, Matt had been watching Yok Zapata inch his way behind the buildings on the east side of the old town. Not being a man who was terribly interested in fair play with someone who was trying very hard to kill him in any way possible, Matt lifted the .44-.40 he’d taken from Ralph Masters and plugged the half-Apache from four hundred yards away. Yok stumbled around for a moment, and then, purely unintentionally, sat down in an old wooden chair and looked at the hole in his chest.
“Well, I’ll just be damned!” Yok said, and died, his chin on his chest.
“Yok!” Bacque shouted. “Where are you, Yok?”
“Dead,” Ned Kerry called in a hoarse whisper. “He got drilled from someone in the livery over yonder. In the loft.”
“Then that man is dead,” the French-Canadian vowed, and began slipping around to the edge of the last building on that side of the street. “Whoever he might be.”
“Bodine, I think,” Ned said.
“All the better,” Bacque replied.
Matt watched his progress carefully, but he could get no clear shot. Bacque was being very cautious. Matt heard
a noise on the floor below him and with a silent curse, left the opening and moved silently to the ladder. He looked down just as Simon Green looked up.
Matt shot him with the .44-.40 at a distance of about twenty feet, the slug striking the gunhand in the center of the forehead. Simon had hired his gun out for the last time.
Matt heard boots on the floor before him and figured it was Bacque. He moved silently to stand on several bales of old hay and was just in time, for Bacque started filling the old barn loft floor with bullet holes. Several hit the tightly bound bales but did not penetrate.
“Come on down and fight me, Bodine,” Bacque called.
Matt said nothing.
“You want me to come up, hey? Well, my mother raised no fools, Bodine.”
Matt waited, listening to him reload both pistols. He closed the loading gate with a faint snap.
“I will let you safely down the ladder, Bodine.”
Sure you will, Matt thought. Of course, you’re such a gentleman.
Bacque started filling the loft floor with holes. Matt kicked a bale of hay over, and it landed with a thump. He removed a spur and groaned loudly, then tossed the spur to the floor. It rattled once, and the big barn was still and warm in the sun.
“If it is a trick, it is a very convincing one, Bodine,” Bacque called.
Matt saw the ladder tremble under the gunfighter’s weight. He raised the already cocked rifle.
Bacque’s hat appeared, then the man chuckled. “I am glad you are dead, Bodine. I just bought that hat. Had you fallen for the hat-on-a-stick trick I would be very angry.”
His head appeared, and Matt shot him in the center of the face. Bacque tumbled to the lower floor. Matt did not have to look to see if he was dead. A .44-.40 slug in the face at about ten feet doesn’t leave much room for doubt. He was walking back to his post when he heard the rumble of many horses at a full gallop.
“Riders comin’!” a gunfighter shouted.
“Jesus Christ!” another shouted. “Must be a hundred of them.”
“Ring the town,” Matt heard Lars call. “No one gets out alive unless they want to surrender.”
Pistols and rifles started hitting the ground, and men began leaving their positions and walking out into the street, their hands held high.
“All right, all right!” Ramblin’ Ed called. “We yield. It’s over.”
“I’ll be goddamned if we do,” came another shout, and Ross Sutton and Clement and Pete Carlin ran out into the street, screaming curses and guns blazing at the posse members. John and Bull lifted their rifles. The men had tears in their eyes as they opened fire.
Matt averted his eyes as the fathers cut down their outlaw sons.
It was over.
12
Johnny Carlin and Randy Sutton lived through the fight. Randy’s leg was amputated at the knee, and Johnny would spend months recovering from his stomach wound. Randy eventually went to college and after that became a traveling tent preacher. Johnny drank himself to death. Marcel, Clement, and Pete Carlin, and Hugh and Ross Sutton were buried in the old cemetery of the ghost town, along with the bodies of the slain gunmen.
Doc Blaine hung up his guns.
Daniel Carlin and Connie Sutton were married shortly after the fight at Big Ugly.
Nyeburn recovered from his head wound and was sentenced to a prison term, along with the other hired guns. All of the hired guns vowed someday to kill Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves.
The daughters of Bull Sutton and John Carlin were never heard from again. If Petunia made it as an actress, she did it under a different name.
Tom Riley was elected sheriff of the county, and Nate Perry was elected marshal of Crossville.
Parley Davis became a full-time deputy sheriff.
Van Dixon married Miss Charlotte.
Miles Singer left town and dropped out of sight.
John and Ginny and Bull and Roz adopted a whole orphanage of kids and proceeded to start life anew.
Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves . . .
“You look healthy enough to me,” Matt said to Sam.
“I am healthy enough to throw you in the creek.”
“Don’t try it,” Matt warned with a grin. “I’d hate to put you back in the hospital.”
The brothers were tying their bedrolls behind the cantles of their saddles.
“Where to this time?” Sam asked.
“Well, I believe we discussed going home.”
“I didn’t think you took that very seriously.”
Matt’s grin widened.
“That’s what I thought.”
Lawyer Sprague walked up. “Well, boys. What trail do you take now?”
“We were just talking about that,” Matt said.
“And . . . ?”
“I guess we’ll know when we get to the crossroads,” Sam said.
“You’ve got to settle down someday,” the lawyer said.
The blood brothers nodded in agreement, swung into the saddle, and both of them lifted a hand in farewell. They pointed the noses of their horses west and slowly rode out of town.
Little Billy, his dog by his side, waved at the brothers.
Matt and Sam returned the wave, Matt saying, “That makes it all worth it.”
“You are a hopeless romantic,” Sam said. “But I suppose I shall have to tag along, watching you endlessly tilt at windmills.”
“You’re a pretty good filter yourself,” Matt said.
The brothers grinned at each other and rode on to write another page of Western history.
AFTERWORD
Notes from the Old West
In the small town where I grew up, there were two movie theaters. The Pavilion was one of those old-timey movie show palaces, built in the heyday of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin—the silent era of the 1920s. By the 1950s, when I was a kid, the Pavilion was a little worn around the edges, but it was still the premier theater in town. They played all those big Technicolor biblical Cecil B. DeMille epics and corny MGM musicals. In Cinemascope, of course.
On the other side of town was the Gem, a somewhat shabby and run-down grind house with sticky floors and torn seats. Admission was a quarter. The Gem booked low-budget “B” pictures (remember the Bowery Boys?), war movies, horror flicks, and Westerns. I liked the Westerns best. I could usually be found every Saturday at the Gem, along with my best friend, Newton Trout, watching Westerns from 10 A.M. until my father came looking for me around suppertime. (Sometimes Newton’s dad was dispatched to come fetch us.) One time, my dad came to get me right in the middle of Abilene Trail, which featured the now-forgotten Whip Wilson. My father became so engrossed in the action he sat down and watched the rest of it with us. We didn’t get home until after dark, and my mother’s meat loaf was a pan of gray ashes by the time we did. Though my father and I were both in the doghouse the next day, this remains one of my fondest childhood memories. There was Wild Bill Elliot, and Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers, and Tim Holt, and, a little later, Rod Cameron and Audie Murphy. Of these newcomers, I never missed an Audie Murphy Western, because Audie was sort of an antihero. Sure, he stood for law and order and was an honest man, but sometimes he had to go around the law to uphold it. If he didn’t play fair, it was only because he felt hamstrung by the laws of the land. Whatever it took to get the bad guys, Audie did it. There were no finer points of law, no splitting of legal hairs. It was instant justice, devoid of long-winded lawyers, bored or biased jurors, or black-robed, often corrupt judges.
Steal a man’s horse and you were the guest of honor at a necktie party.
Molest a good woman and you got a bullet in the heart or a rope around the gullet. Or at the very least, got the crap beat out of you. Rob a bank and face a hail of bullets or the hangman’s noose.
Saved a lot of time and money, did frontier justice.
That’s all gone now, I’m sad to say. Now you hear, “Oh, but he had a bad childhood” or “His mother didn’t give him enough love” or “The homecoming quee
n wouldn’t give him a second look and he has an inferiority complex.” Or “cultural rage,” as the politically correct bright boys refer to it. How many times have you heard some self-important defense attorney moan, “The poor kids were only venting their hostilities toward an uncaring society?”
Mule fritters, I say. Nowadays, you can’t even call a punk a punk anymore. But don’t get me started.
It was, “Howdy, ma’am” time too. The good guys, antihero or not, were always respectful to the ladies. They might shoot a bad guy five seconds after tipping their hat to a woman, but the code of the West demanded you be respectful to a lady.
Lots of things have changed since the heyday of the Wild West, haven’t they? Some for the good, some for the bad.
I didn’t have any idea at the time that I would someday write about the West. I just knew that I was captivated by the Old West.
When I first got the itch to write, back in the early 1970s, I didn’t write Westerns. I started by writing horror and action adventure novels. After more than two dozen novels, I began thinking about developing a Western character. From those initial musings came the novel The Last Mountain Man: Smoke Jensen. That was followed by Preacher: The First Mountain Man. A few years later, I began developing the Last Gunfighter series. Frank Morgan is a legend in his own time, the fastest gun west of the Mississippi . . . a title and a reputation he never wanted, but can’t get rid of.
For me, and for thousands—probably millions—of other people (although many will never publicly admit it), the old Wild West will always be a magic, mysterious place: a place we love to visit through the pages of books; characters we would like to know . . . from a safe distance; events we would love to take part in, again, from a safe distance. For the old Wild West was not a place for the faint of heart. It was a hard, tough, physically demanding time. There were no police to call if one faced adversity. One faced trouble alone, and handled it alone. It was rugged individualism: something that appeals to many of us.
I am certain that is something that appeals to most readers of Westerns.
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