by Max O'Hara
The Peacemaker roared, filling the room with its thunder.
Stanley Cove sat back down sporting that third eye he’d intended for Wolf—a third eye in the dead-center of his forehead. Cove lifted his chin, squeezing his eyes closed, then slid straight down the chair till he was sitting on the floor. He’d left most of his brains in the chair.
A gun popped to Stockburn’s right. It was a thin report, like that from a small-caliber pistol.
Sure enough, when Stockburn swung back to face the desk, he saw Kreg Hennessey extending a pearl-gripped, over-and-under Derringer from over his desk. Wolf glanced down to see blood oozing from his own upper left arm, through the hole in the sleeve of his buckskin coat.
“Did you like that, Stockburn?” Hennessey snarled through his toothy grin. “Here, have one more!”
Stockburn threw himself back into a chair as Hennessey triggered another round. The bullet warmed the air at the end of Wolf’s nose as he flew backward in the chair, both him and the chair flipping backward onto the floor. Wolf grimaced against the burning pain in his upper left arm, rolled onto his shoulder, then climbed to a knee.
Hennessey had just opened a desk drawer and was hauling a Merwin & Hulbert Army Model revolver up with his right hand, gritting his teeth as he swung the gun toward Stockburn.
Wolf snapped up both Colts and blew Hennssey, screaming, straight back in his big chair. Wolf fired a third time, but he wasn’t sure the third shot hit home because by then Hennessey and his chair were out of sight below the desk.
Stockburn snapped a wary look at the open door. None of the gunmen from downstairs were rushing in at him.
Well, that was nice. Couldn’t let his guard down, though. He might have taken out a few snakes, but he was still firmly mired in their lair.
He heaved himself to his feet with a grunt. He holstered one Peacemaker, glanced at Sonny sitting on the sofa, head canted to one side, and then at Stanley Cove, slumped on the floor in front of the chair that wore most of the contents of his head.
“Nasty business,” Wolf wheezed, clutching his left arm with his right hand, ambling out the door and into the hall.
He reached down and picked up the Yellowboy. He couldn’t help noting how quiet it was in the drinking hall below the balcony.
Damned quiet.
Too damned quiet.
Hmm.
Stockburn took the Yellowboy in both hands and walked slowly over to the head of the stairs. He turned to gaze down the broad-carpeted stairs into the saloon hall below.
The crowd had thinned considerably.
In fact, Stockburn hastily counted around, say, a dozen men standing around the big hall, spread out around it, staring toward him, their guns still in their holsters but their eyes grave and menacing.
Only the killers remained. The townsmen had retreated to the safety of hearth and home. Stockburn didn’t blame them. He wouldn’t mind heading that way himself about now.
Stockburn sighed. Suppressing the pain in his left arm, ignoring the cool wetness of his own blood dribbling down his arm inside his coat sleeve, he started walking slowly down the stairs. He shifted the Yellowboy to his left hand and held up the right one, palm out.
He manufactured an amiable smile as he regarded the dozen men before him. They regarded the Wells Fargo detective like he was the only jackrabbit at a coyote convention.
That’s how Wolf was beginning to feel, too.
He stopped halfway down the stairs, broadened his smile and said, “The fun’s over, fellas. The boss is dead. Time to all go home now, get a good night’s sleep. Maybe ponder on your wicked deeds, think about making amends . . .”
He couldn’t corral them all himself, but he didn’t intend for them to get away scot free. Not after the savage murders they’d committed at the behest of Kreg Hennessey. But, without help, he’d done about all he could do here. For now.
Now, it was time to call in the U.S. Marshals. He and the marshals would hunt these men down one by one and make damn good and sure they stood trial for the crimes they’d committed. Stockburn recognized a few of the faces before him from wanted circulars. The others wouldn’t be too hard to run down—not after the others started going to jail.
It didn’t take jailed men long to get right chatty.
“The boss is dead, fellas,” Stockburn repeated, the smile on his face getting tighter by the second.
The killers stood gawking at him like coyotes around a campfire, inwardly slathering over the rabbit meat sizzling on a spit.
They wouldn’t want to do it here, would they?
Right here in the open, for all the world to know what they’d done?
Whom they’d killed . . . ?
On the other hand, why not? What was Watt Russell going to do about it? They’d kill Stockburn, mount up, and ride the hell out of Wyoming, maybe head for Texas or Old Mexico and wait for their trails to cool.
That’s what they were thinking, all right. Sure enough.
CHAPTER 34
A large cold worm flipped in the railroad detective’s belly.
Instantly, he turned the fear to fury. He had to. A frightened man didn’t shoot nearly as straight as a mad one.
Time to get mad. Real mad. Right now!
One of the killers before him slapped leather. Then another . . . another . . . and another . . .
Stockburn dropped to a knee, shouldered the Winchester, and clicked the hammer back.
Guns flashed and thundered before him.
The Yellowboy leaped and roared in his hands.
He took two devils out right away, throwing them over tables while blood plumed from their wounds. But the bullets buzzing around Wolf as the others scrambled for cover, cursing and shouting and flinging lead from their hoglegs, were getting closer by the heartbeat.
Stockburn had a vague notion that he had about three, maybe four more seconds left on this side of the sod, though because he was so damned busy slinging lead, he had no time to either worry about his imminent death or reflect on his life.
It was better this way.
He’d always known he’d go out in a hail of hot lead. He’d hoped it would be later as opposed to sooner, but this way was a hell of a lot better than wheeling himself around some pious Christian charity home in a push chair, soiling himself, having his Indian Kids and tangleleg confiscated by the Sisters of Sobriety, and believing he was Julius Caesar.
He’d just gut-shot one of the dogs firing up at him from over an overturned table near the base of the stairs when he saw in the upper periphery of his vision the saloon’s front door open beyond the eleven or so remaining crouching and firing killers.
Two men scurried through the door and dropped to their knees atop the steps rising from the drinking hall floor. Both were wielding rifles.
Great! As if Stockburn didn’t have his hands full enough without two more of Hennessey’s loyal stalwarts joining the party to add their own lead to the storm!
But...
Wait.
The two men atop the steps on the far end of the room began firing at the killers. Not at Stockburn.
Huh?
One of them, the bigger man whom a brief glimpse told Wolf was Watt Russell, gave a wild whoop, and shouted, “Die, you low-down dirty dogs!” He added above the rocketing blasts of the Winchester snugged up taut against his shoulder—“Die, you cussed vermin! Die!”
Three of the killers went down almost instantly, yelping and hollering in shock and misery.
As Russell and Stockburn’s second guardian angel hammered away at the screaming, scurrying, dying killers, Stockburn emptied his Winchester into the bloody, smoke-hazed crowd below him, then rose from his knee, filled his fists with both Peacemakers, and continued flinging lead where he spied movement through the fog.
The killers had been caught in a deadly whipsaw. As soon as Watt Russell and the second gent had joined the hoe-down, the killers, while not outnumbered, had been badly out-positioned. Their opponents had the high grou
nd; the killers had also been flanked.
Stockburn fired another round into the smoke haze, then pulled his smoking Peacemakers down. The only thing moving down there now was powder smoke.
On the other end of the room, orange stabbed from the maw of Russell’s revolver, angled down toward the floor before him and maybe halfway between the marshal and the bar. The shot evoked a clipped scream and a dull thud.
“There’s another one,” Russell’s partner said, and fired at the floor toward something Stockburn couldn’t see. The target was on the far side of the bar.
A man grunted. A dull thump followed.
“The rat was tryin’ to crawl to its hole!” Russell’s partner exclaimed.
Then Wolf recognized the voice as well as the silhouetted figure there in the smoke haze beside the thick-bodied Russell.
Paul Reynolds—ramrod for the Hell’s Jaw track-laying crew.
Reynolds lifted his head and pointed his arm toward Stockburn or maybe a little above, shouting, “Stockburn—behind you!”
Wolf wheeled as a gun roared at the top of the stairs. The bullet punched into the carpeted step inches from Stockburn’s left boot.
Wolf emptied both Peacemakers—one shot from the right one, two from the left one—into the tall, lumpy silhouette looming over him at the top of the stairs. The man jerked back then stumbled forward. He folded over himself, like a jackknife closing, and tumbled heavily, loudly down the stairs.
Stockburn stepped to one side as the man came to a stop on the steps beside him, feet up, head down, the body slanted sideways. The ugly face of Kreg Hennessey stared up at Stockburn with its dead open eyes and its swollen lips bristling with stitches ensconced in the Burnside. Two of Wolf’s last shots had punched through his right cheek and his thick, wrinkled neck, respectively.
“That the end of ’em?” Reynolds called. He and Russell stood side by side atop the steps by the door, looking toward Wolf.
“That should do it.” Stockburn crouched to pick up his hat. A bullet had blown it off his head. Make that two bullets. Lifting the hat from the floor, he poked two fingers through the holes, then chuckled at his good luck.
He’d missed saddling a golden cloud by the width of a cat’s whisker.
He’d had help, though, as well.
He stuffed the bullet-riddled topper on his head, walked down the stairs, and crossed the room to the front. The wafting powder smoke, fetid as rotten eggs, burned his eyes. He stepped over bullet-torn bodies, around overturned tables and chairs.
Russell and Reynolds dropped down the front steps and met Stockburn a few feet out from their base.
“Thanks, fellas,” Wolf said, a little puzzled by the help but grateful just the same.
Russell gazed through the smoke toward the stairs. His craggy features were grim, despondent. “The bastard as good as killed Ivy. He hired Slim Sherman. Him an’ Daniel Stoleberg. They was in it all together, Stockburn. These men drove McCrae’s cattle onto Stoleberg graze to cause a land war. A big, final showdown between the two outfits.”
He wagged his head shamefully. “And I was part of it because I did nothin’ to stop it. Didn’t tell you about it. Didn’t do a damn thing but sit in my office with my thumb up my ass!”
He ripped the town marshal’s badge from his coat and handed it to Wolf. “Here you go. You can throw that down the nearest privy. I’m not worth the nickel’s worth of tin it was stamped from.”
He swung around, tramped up the stairs, and went out through the open door.
Reynolds gazed after the grief-stricken marshal.
“Where’d you come from?” Stockburn asked him.
“I was in here havin’ a drink when you walked in. When you headed upstairs, I went over to the Territorial to retrieve my rifle. I had a feelin’ you were gonna need a hand or two. I was on my way back over here when I ran into Russell wielding his own Winchester.”
“He has more sand than I gave him credit for.”
“He does at that.”
“I have to apologize, Reynolds,” Stockburn said.
“Oh? Why?”
“When you told me you avoided the massacre because you were in town meeting with the Stewarts, yours was the first name I scribbled onto my list of suspects.”
The ramrod grinned. “You wouldn’t have been doin’ your job if you hadn’t, Stockburn.”
“You saved my bacon tonight. Call me Wolf.”
“All right.” Reynolds shook the detective’s extended hand. “Wolf it is. I’m gonna go over and tell the Stewarts they can continue with the rail line now. They’ll be happy to hear that. They’re hiring a new crew and are itchin’ to get the line finished by the time the snow flies.”
The Hell’s Jaw foreman winked and went out.
Stockburn turned to take one more look around the smoky room. The three bartenders were once again standing around behind the bar, behind which they must have taken cover when the lead had started to fly. One moved to the curve in the horseshoe and bent forward to stare down over the bar at the two dead men lying entangled near the brass rail running along the bar’s base, like lovers embracing in sleep.
The barman turned to Stockburn, who said, “Time to find other work, gentlemen.”
They looked at each other.
Stockburn walked out through the saloon’s open door.
He stopped when he saw Lori standing before him, looking up at him, her eyes awash with mixed emotions.
“You’re wounded,” Lori said.
Lamplight from the saloon’s windows shone in the blood on his upper left arm.
“I’m all right.”
“I heard what Russell said.” The girl looked down at her small hands entwined before her. “Daniel—him and Hennessey.”
“I’m sorry.”
Lori looked up at Wolf. Lamplight glistened in her tear-filled eyes. “I broke his heart. But I didn’t mean to.”
“I know.” Stockburn stepped forward and gathered her up in his arms, drawing her close against him, hugging her. “It’s not your fault.”
She sobbed, quivering.
Finally, she lifted her head to gaze at him gravely. “Wolf, my brother Law was in town with three other Triangle men just before you came. They loaded a wagon with guns and ammo. They’re going to confront the Tin Cup. They think it was the Stolebergs who rustled the Triangle cattle when it was only Hennessey and Daniel.”
Stockburn winced. “Damn. I met them as I was riding in. Was wondering what they had in that wagon.” He glanced at the saloon behind him. “Hennessey’s still wreaking havoc after he’s dead.” He looked at Lori. “I’ll ride out there first thing in the morning. I’ll try to defuse the situation.”
“I’ll ride with you.”
“Oh, no. You stay in town. I saw one young lady killed today. I won’t watch another die tomorrow.”
Lori pulled her mouth corners down, nodded.
“In the meantime,” she said, “let’s get you over to the hotel. I’ll tend that wound for you.”
“Did you get a room?” Wolf asked as he and Lori started for the Territorial.
Lori nodded, smiled crookedly up at him. She had one arm snaked around his waist. “I put it in your name.”
Stockburn gave a droll chuckle. “That’s going to get around Wild Horse in no time!”
“Why not?” she said with a weary sigh. “Everything else about me has.”
* * *
Stockburn woke with a start.
He wasn’t sure what had awakened him, but he hadn’t slept well. All night, the gun blasts from inside the Wind River Saloon & Gambling Hall had echoed inside his head. Also, his left arm throbbed so that any position he lay in wasn’t comfortable. He hadn’t slept for more than a few minutes at a time.
Or he hadn’t thought so, anyway. Maybe he had. It appeared later than he’d thought. He’d left the curtains partway open over the window on his left; he thought he could see some cream in the sky beyond the dark roof top on the opposite side of
the street. His inner timepiece that had awakened him, he realized now.
He sat up. Beside him, Lori groaned.
She lay mostly concealed by the bed covers, which were drawn up to her chin. Her chestnut hair spilled across the white pillow beneath her head. She lay facing away from Stockburn, her body loosely curled beneath the covers.
Lori moved her head a little, groaned again.
“Keep sleeping,” Wolf whispered. “Early yet.”
He’d slept fully dressed atop the sheet and quilt, covered by only a spare blanket. He sat up, tossing the blanket aside, wincing at the throbbing pain in his arm. It was only a flesh wound caused by a .22-caliber bullet, but he felt like a rabid rat was trapped in his arm, trying to chew its way out.
“Whiskey,” he grumbled, sitting up and reaching for the whiskey bottle on his bedside table.
He popped the cork, took a hearty pull of the panther juice. Then another.
One more for the road.
He got a fire going in the coal stove in the room’s corner to beat away the autumn chill for Lori when she rose.
He stepped into his boots, shrugged into his coat, set his hat on his head, grabbed the Yellowboy from where it leaned against the wall by the door, and quietly left the room.
He had a quick breakfast with two cups of black coffee laced with whiskey at the Cosmopolitan, then headed to the livery barn for his horse. Fifteen minutes later, he was on the trail to the Stolebergs’ Tin Cup ranch, hoping to arrive before all hell broke loose.
He didn’t make it.
CHAPTER 35
Stockburn heard the menacing rattle of gunfire as he closed within a mile of the Tin Cup headquarters, on the southern end of the Wind River Mountains’ southeastern flank.
He’d been trotting Smoke through the long, dry valley that dropped from the pass farther west, giving the horse a breather after a long gallop. Now as the shooting grew louder and more desperate and angrier, he booted the mount into a hard run.
He rode hell-for-leather, the Tin Cup headquarters growing from a dime-size gray splotch on the short-grass prairie ahead and below, until Wolf could make out the house and individual buildings and corrals.