Hour of Death

by William W. Johnstone

  In the middle of the chaos and confusion, Bob Pingry dove headfirst out a window in the right-side wall. He leaped to his feet and took off running, gun in hand as he angled toward a clump of trees, rocks, and brush. Fear and adrenaline combined to give him speed in spite of the flesh wound in his arm from Malachi’s earlier bullet.

  Posse men began potting at Pingry, bullets whipping around him. He snapped off a couple shots while on the run, venting noise and muzzle flares, hitting nothing.

  Sixkiller knew from hard experience that when everybody is looking at something on the right it’s often wise policy to see what’s happening on the left. He kept a wide focus while holding his fire when Pingry made his break.

  Why shoot when other posse men were targeting Pingry?

  Ignoring the distraction, Sixkiller was the first to notice a disturbance on the roof of the stone cabin. On the far side of the slanted rooftop, a hatch opened and a rifle barrel was thrust through the hatchway, protruding over the edge of the roofline.

  He realized that a sniper under the angled rooftop was setting up Malachi for a kill and pointed his rifle in that direction. He could have shot the sniper’s rifle, but preferred to shoot the man, waiting until the sniper stuck his head, shoulders, and upper body out through the hatchway, pointing his rifle at an oblivious Malachi Keene.

  Sixkiller fired first, tagging the sniper with several quick shots.

  The top of the sniper’s head above the eyebrows flew off. The rifle fell from its wielder’s dead hands, skittering down the front side of the roof and onto the ground as the sniper dropped out of sight through the hatchway, falling back into the cabin.

  There was a thud as of something heavy slamming into the dirt floor.

  Sixkiller remained mindful of his own admonition about the perils of misdirection, maintaining wide-angle vigilance over the battle scene.

  A figure broke into view from behind the cabin. Rifle in hand, he raced for the corral. Receiver, lever, and side plates on the rifle glinted like molten gold in the first rays of the rising sun shafting into Red Ravine. It could only be Lord Bletchley’s fabled big-game rifle and the man fleeing with it, Dean Richmond.

  Either there was a back door to the cabin—unlikely, since the others would also have made use of it—or Richmond had exited earlier via the roof hatch, managing to not show himself by sliding down the far side of the roof, dropping to the ground, and hiding behind the cabin until he could make a break to the corral, grab a horse, and escape.

  He ran fast—but not faster than the bullet from Sixkiller’s rifle. It tagged the outlaw, knocking him to one side and sending him stumbling off on a tangent.

  The shot caught the attention of the posse men. They turned their weapons on Dean and opened fire. He did a crazy whirling dance as slugs hammered into him, body twitching and jerking as it fell into the dust.

  Dean sprawled facedown, motionless, one hand clutching the gold-plated rifle in a death grip.

  The shooting stopped.

  Towhead Jimson emerged from the stone cabin with his hands up, covered by the gun in Malachi’s hand.

  In the Mississippi River country, a towhead is a partly submerged isle breaking the surface of the water with weeds and reeds dangling down on all sides. That described Towhead Jimson.

  He sported a poor man’s haircut, one performed by an amateur barber putting a bowl over the top of the person’s head and cutting all the hair hanging down below the rim. A boyish haircut that contrasted uneasily with an old, sharp-featured wrinkled face.

  Malachi made Towhead turn around and show his back to make sure the outlaw didn’t have a gun tucked in the waistband behind his back. He came up clean.

  “Watch him, son. He’s tricky,” Malachi cautioned Caleb.

  “If he moves wrong, I’ll put a bullet in him,” Caleb said.

  “Nothing fatal. He’s got to talk. Shoot him in the knee if you have to.”

  “It’ll be a pleasure.”

  Malachi motioned to Dillard and Randle. “Go around to the back of the cabin and make sure none of them are hiding back there.”

  They went. “All clear!” came the cry from behind the cabin.

  Malachi went into the stone cabin to check on the outlaws there. They were all dead. “Better that way,” he said to himself as he went back outside.

  Sixkiller and Vandaman examined Jimmy Duncan’s dead body. Rawhide thongs wrapped his hands, binding the fists tightly around a revolver so they were unable to open and release their grip on the guns. which were empty, of course.

  “He was a decoy, nothing more,” Sixkiller said. “They used him as a diversion to draw fire while they made their play.”

  “Poor sod,” Vandaman said, curiously unmoved. “He wanted to run with the big dogs and they had him for breakfast.”

  “His epitaph,” Sixkiller said.

  They went to Dean Richmond to pry the gold-plated rifle from his cold dead hands. His hands were cold, but not dead, and neither was he. A flicker of life still clung to his bullet-ridden body. They rolled him onto his back, faceup.

  Posse men gathered around to marvel that the outlaw still lived after taking so many bullets and spilling so much blood. Finally, his own blood had spilled instead of that of others.

  Some of the men were up for hanging him on general principles, but it was agreed that the effort of standing him upright to fit a noose around his neck would kill him on the spot so they let him be.

  “Anybody got a smoke?” Dean whispered.

  Cort Randle snorted with indignation. “Smoke! You’ll be burning in Hell soon enough!”

  Vandaman lit up a cheroot, holding it to Dean’s quivering lips so he could inhale.

  “Phaugh! These skinny cigars taste like horse turds,” Dean rasped, making a face. “What is that, a piece of a hangman’s rope?”

  “You ought to know. And by the way, you’re welcome,” Vandaman said sarcastically, upper lip curling in a sneer.

  “Oh well. Reckon it’ll have to do. Got any whiskey?”

  “Not a drop.”

  “Just my luck. But you ain’t no Mormon.”

  “No,” Vandaman said.

  “Knew it. Mormons ain’t allowed tobacco . . . or whiskey, neither. I was raised in the faith, but I . . . drifted.” Dean grimaced in pain.

  Vandaman held the cheroot to Dean’s mouth, occasionally flicking off ash from the burning tip. He had to. The outlaw couldn’t move his arms. A bullet had paralyzed him below the neck.

  Vandaman put the question to the outlaw. “What happened to Bletchley, Dean? Lord Bletchley, the owner of the golden rifle.”

  “I’m the owner of the golden rifle.” Dean sneered. “As for the Englishman, what do you think happened to him?”

  “I think you killed him,” Vandaman said.

  “We all killed him.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Bart and Lonnie and all the rest of the bunch. We killed them all together—the Englishman and his butler, maids, whores . . . there was a lot of them, dozen or so. We . . . lined them up against the wall of the cave and opened up on them, shot them to bits. That was something. I seen more people killed . . . down in Mexico during one of their revolutions, but that’s the most I ever killed at one sitting.” Dean smiled reminiscently, a faraway look in his eyes. “That sure was something . . . Good times . . .”

  “Why’d you do it? Why’d you kill them?” Vandaman asked.

  Dean was fading fast, but he still managed to summon up enough contempt to sneer as if Vandaman had asked the dumbest question imaginable. “Had to kill them. We robbed them and then there was the women, what we done to them. We’d have hanged for that sure if they were alive to set the law on our trail.”

  “Where are they? The bodies?”

  “The cave. Funny . . . the Englishman was looking for a gold mine and he thought this was it when we took him down in the mine. But he found out different quick enough. They all did. They’re all dead. Everyone of them . . . everyone but o
ne.”

  Sixkiller and Vandaman were electrified by the dying man’s revelation. They exchanged quick glances. Both were careful not to display any emotion, for fear of shattering the mood or stopping Dean from talking.

  “I’d have thought you’d have made a clean sweep out of it,” Vandaman said. “What’s the point of killing the others if there’s one left alive to identify you? Did one escape?”

  “Hell no. It was the Kid.”

  “Kid? What kid, Dean? There were no children with the Bletchley party.”

  “The Utah Kid. Man you really are green. The Utah Kid. Bart Skillern. My pard, my amigo . . . until the woman came along. That was the end of it. The handwriting on the wall. I should have killed her right off before she got between us but then that . . . would have ruined the whole scheme to skin the Englishman. I held my hand and now I’m dying and she’s probably . . . still alive and kicking.”

  “She must’ve been some kind of woman to get between two good pards like you and the Kid, Dean.”

  “She was just a high-class whore with highfalutin airs, as far as I was concerned, but the Kid couldn’t see her for what she was the Englishman’s whore, that’s all. You’d have thought she was some kind of royalty the way she carried herself. Even had a name like a princess. La Valletta. La Valletta, can you beat that? The Englishman called her The Maltese. Damned if I know why. Some kind of pet name for her or something.

  “The Kid thought she was something out of a storybook . . . a fairy-tale princess. She was good-looking, I’ll give her that. Like a circus queen, all curly, golden hair and spangles and a body on her that wouldn’t quit. But you could find hundreds like her in St. Louis or New Orleans. Just don’t try to tell the Kid that. He’d shoot your guts out for even looking at her crosswise.

  “He wasn’t thinking straight because of her. She got in his blood and he had to have her. Let the rest of the world go to rot and ruin.

  “I told him he was loco to let her keep on living. She knew . . . everything. She wasn’t at the mine for the killings because he had already hidden her in a safe place. Safe for her, but not for the rest of us.

  “That’s what ended my partnership with the Kid. We’d been pards since we were kids. We grew up here. I was Mormon and he wasn’t, but we always had one thing in common. We couldn’t wait to get out of here and raise hell. We sure raised it since.

  “I knew it was only a matter of time before it came down to a choice for him between her and me. Hell, he already made that choice the night he let her live while we killed all the rest of them. Alive, she was death at the end of a rope for us all.

  “So I cleared out. The only thing I took with me was the Englishman’s rifle. I’d wanted that piece from the moment I first laid eyes on it. The hole it could blow through a buffalo at distances make a Big .50 look like a popgun. I guess you could say that that rifle was to me what La Valletta is to the Kid.

  “And what’s that? Death. The rifle killed me sure as the woman’s going to kill the Kid—”

  “What mine, Dean? Where’s the mine?” Vandaman pressed. “Where’s the Bletchley party buried?”

  “Figure it out for yourself, lawman. I talked . . . to get a smoke—no damn good . . . nohow. But then . . . neither am I.” Dean chuckled and it started him coughing. He coughed up blood.

  “The cigar’s done . . . and so am I. I’m done talking. I’m . . .”

  The old Mormon hunkered down beside Dean Richmond. “It’s me, Dean. Malachi.”

  “I know. Things ’re . . . fading in and out on me . . . but I’d know you . . . from a long way off, old man.”

  “Listen up, Dean. You were raised in the faith like you said. You done a lot of bad things, but there’s still time for you to repent and seek forgiveness from your Maker.”

  “Too late. There’s no . . . forgiveness for me. I’m Hell bound.” Dean started coughing, blood spewing down his chin and neck. He made a noise like he had something caught in his throat and he was trying to clear it. He froze, stiffened, and went inert, unmoving.

  His eyes were open, unblinking. Staring. But whatever he was looking at was not to be seen by anyone on This Side.

  For Dean Richmond, it was the Hour of Death.

  “He just plain stopped,” Caleb said.

  “Yup. About twenty years too late. He spoke true at the last, though. He’s Hell bound for sure.” Malachi closed Dean’s eyes with his fingertips. He rose, groaning, but only because age was leaving him stiff-jointed and his legs ached from squatting down beside the dying man.

  He turned, facing Sixkiller and Vandaman. “You fellows get what you want?”

  “Most of it,” Vandaman said. “Not all, but—enough.”

  “Reckon that La Vallette gal is still alive?” Sixkiller asked.

  Vandaman shrugged. “Maybe yes, maybe no. Bart Skillern is a creature of whims. One day it pleases him to keep the woman alive, the next he might put a bullet in her head without thinking twice. I just don’t know.”

  “From the way Dean was talking, Skillern wants her bad.”

  “He did two months ago. A lot could have happened since then. I wanted to ask where Skillern was keeping the girl, but I didn’t dare. Dean hated her so much that if he thought there was a chance of her being saved he’d start lying or else just stop talking,” Vandaman said.

  Sixkiller nodded. “That’s how I figured it, too.” He looked around. “We’re done here. Reckon I know where my next stop is now.”

  “Ringgold?”

  “That’s right.”

  Chapter Four

  Two men lurked at the top of a ridge on an early Wyoming morning. They were bushwhackers, killers.

  Freedy was stocky, grizzled, hard-faced. He was holding a rifle.

  Hooper was younger, not yet out of his teens. He’d gotten his growth, but his face still showed traces of baby fat. With a thatch of yellow hair and a ready smile, he seemed like a pleasant-enough youth, except for his eyes. They were the eyes of a rattlesnake, bright, alert, and pitiless.

  Twin guns were worn low on his hips, tied-down. His hands hovered at his sides, ever-ready, never straying far from his gun butts.

  Their horses were tethered in a clump of trees at the base of the rise. It was generally felt to be an unnatural condition for a Western man, going about on foot instead of astride a horse. But this time it came with the job—the job of murder.

  The ridge ran east-west, cut by a trail that went north-south. The duo were perched just below the crest on the left-hand side of the trail, facing south.

  Watching. Waiting.

  The far side of the ridge sloped gently down to a flat, the edge of a shallow, saucer-shaped basin that stretched east, south, and west as far as the eye could see. The ridge was its northern boundary.

  Shot through with rock spurs and boulders, the depression was riven by cuts. No plants grew, no trees or brush, not even the toughest cactus.

  The trail dipped down the far side of the slope to the flat, stretching south across the basin, running straight as a string. Lighter in color than the rest of the scenery, it was the only way to distinguish it from its surroundings.

  Strong, gusty winds, with a hint of chill even in the heat of a late summer day, blew predominantly from the north, powdering the ridge with alkali dust. Freedy and Hooper had their hats jammed down tight on their heads to keep them from blowing away when the irregular winds gusted strong.

  Freedy lay belly-down, the barrel of his rifle protruding over the ridgeline. He was careful to keep the muzzle clear of the ground and dirt-free. The rifle was his stock-in-trade.

  Hooper hunkered down beside him.

  Freedy’s eyes were narrowed, dark glittering slits in a wide, flat face seamed like old saddle leather. His gaze was restless, searching, peering south along the trail into the distances of the basin.

  The Wyoming wind was changeable. One minute it blew strong and gusty, whipping up dust and chaff; the next, it died down to near stillness.

&nbs
p; A dusty haze hung over the basin, a permanent pall. It thickened and lessened according to the winds, but even in a rare flat calm it never went away.

  Hooper rose, straightening up. He was a long, lanky youngster. “See him?”

  “Nope. If I saw him, I’d shoot him and we’d be done with it.” Freedy was gruff, short-tempered, and sometimes hard to get along with. But he was useful.

  He was a veteran bad man, wise in the ways of the owlhoot trail with criminal connections throughout the West. He knew the fences of stolen goods, the forgers, madams and tinhorns, the crooked lawmen and the ones who couldn’t be bought, the proprietors of hideouts and refuges for fugitives.

  That’s why Hooper had partnered up with him. There was a lot an up-and-coming young gunman could learn from a man like Freedy.

  Hooper went to the top of the ridge, peering south.

  “Quit skylining,” Freedy said, irritated.

  “What for? You said you don’t see him. And I don’t see nothing.”

  “That don’t mean he can’t see you. Maybe his eyes are better.”

  “Than yours, maybe.”

  For some reason that tickled Freedy, renowned in the trade for his keen eyesight. He grunted, a corner of his wide, flat mouth quirking upward in what might have passed for a smile in a more good-humored fellow. “Yeah. That’s why I’m working the rifle.”

  “You’re the better rifleman, no doubt about that.” Hooper patted the sides of his holstered guns. “The ploughshares is my specialty.”

  “Yeah, and don’t you love to use ’em!”

  “I like to work up close, see the look on the other fellow’s face when I’m burning him down. There’s no fun in this long-distance stuff.”

  “I ain’t in this business for fun, Hoop.”

  “Don’t I know it! For you, it’s just a coldblooded business proposition.”

  “That’s right. And business is good.”

  Hooper snorted, shaking his head in disbelief. “Man! I hope I never get that old!”

  Freedy grinned. “Keep on the way you’re going and that’s one thing you ain’t never gonna have to worry about.”

  The sun was a yellow smear above the eastern horizon. Half-moons of sweat banded the underarms of Hooper’s shirt. He swore. “Getting hot already.”