by Andrew Lane
The gunman disappeared inside the carriage again, but only for a moment. The door suddenly sprang open and the man dived out. He’d timed his dive perfectly and hit the mass of reeds and vegetation that lined the river bank. He vanished from sight, but Sherlock could track his path by the long ripped gap that appeared in the reeds as they slowed his progress.
Crowe slowed his horse for a moment, uncertain what to do, then urged it on, heading after the carriage rather than for the man, but Sherlock watched as the man emerged from the reeds. He was soaking wet, and there were gashes across his face from where the reeds had cut his skin.
He held a rifle in his hands. He raised it as Crowe approached, took careful aim along the long barrel, and fired.
At the same moment the fire blossomed out of the barrel, Crowe threw his arms up to his face and fell backwards, out of the saddle. He hit the road, right shoulder first, and rolled over and over in the dirt until he lay still, like a dusty log. His horse rode on, but without Crowe urging it on it slowed to a canter, then to a trot, then to a halt. It stood there, apparently watching the carriage as it receded into the distance and wondering what all the rush had been about.
Virginia screamed, ‘Father!’ as she pulled her horse to a skidding halt and threw herself out of the saddle. She pelted along the road towards him, regardless of the man with the rifle who was watching her approach.
And raising the rifle.
All this had happened within the space of a scattered handful of seconds. Sherlock dug his heels into his horse’s flanks. The horse surged forward.
‘Down!’ he shouted.
Virginia glanced back over her shoulder, saw him bearing down on her, and dived. As she rolled over, Sherlock pulled up on the reins. His horse jumped over her, seeming to sail through the air regardless of gravity.
The horse’s front hoofs hit the ground hard, and it stumbled, just as the gunman fired again. Sherlock didn’t even hear the shot. He was flung from the saddle and over the horse’s head. His mind was filled with the enormity of the ground as it rose up towards him. Time seemed to stretch out, and he found that he was wondering whether he would crack his skull or break both legs first. Something made him curl into a ball, tucking his head on to his chest and wrapping his arms around it while bringing his knees up to his stomach. He hit the ground and rolled, feeling stones bite into his flesh beneath his ribs, back and legs. The world flashed around him, over and over; dark, light, dark. He lost track of where he was.
After an eternity he came to a stop. Raising his head cautiously, he tried to work out where he had ended up. Everything was blurred, and he felt like part of him was still rolling over and over even though the feel of the stones beneath his hands and knees told him that he was stationary. His stomach clenched, and he had to stop himself throwing up. He could feel the rough burn of scratches across his whole body.
In the distance, the carriage in which Matty was being held as a prisoner was vanishing into a cloud of dust.
A shadow fell across him. He looked up. The man with the rifle was standing over him. He wasn’t sure, but it looked like it might have been the man who’d been knocked out by the lunatic, John Wilkes Booth. The other men had called him Gilfillan. His head was bandaged, and his eyes were full of vicious hatred.
‘What is it with you kids?’ he asked, raising the rifle. ‘Ah swear we’ve had more trouble from you in the past day than from the whole Union Army since the end of the War!’
‘Give my friend back,’ Sherlock snarled, climbing to his feet.
‘Tough talk from someone who ain’t goin’ to be alive in a minute’s time,’ the man said, smiling grimly. ‘We took the kid to stop you an’ that guy in the white hat from comin’ after us, but I guess that didn’t work out the way we expected. So ah’ll just kill you all now, and cable ahead to tell Ives to kill him, cos we don’t need him any more.’ He took his finger off the trigger and showed the back of the hand to Sherlock. There was blood on it, and what looked like a set of teeth marks in the soft flesh between the base of the thumb and the first finger. ‘That girl bit me!’ he protested disbelievingly.
‘Yeah,’ Sherlock said, ‘I bet you get that a lot,’ and he whipped his hand around from behind his back, releasing the stones that he’d picked up from the ground. They flew through the air in blurs, hitting Gilfillan on his cheek, his forehead and his left eye. He threw up his hands to his face, dropping the rifle. It bounced once, twice on the ground. Sherlock rushed forward to grab it, but the man kicked it out of the way. His hand caught in Sherlock’s hair and he twisted. Sherlock cried out in a mixture of anger and pain, and lashed out with his foot. His boot connected with Gilfillan’s shin, and the grip on his hair suddenly released. Sherlock sprang back, looking for the rifle. He caught sight of it at the same time as the American, and they both dived for it. Sherlock got there first, fingers clutching at the stock and body rolling out of the way as the man cursed.
They both stood there for a moment, breathing heavily. The man wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
‘You ain’t got the moxie,’ he said. ‘Ah’m goin’ to come for that gun an’ ah’m goin’ to wrap it around your throat an’ choke the life from your scrawny body!’
He moved forward, and Sherlock raised the rifle menacingly.
‘Don’t . . .’ he said.
The man kept coming, a grimace stretching across his face and his dirty hands reaching forward for Sherlock.
CHAPTER SIX
Knowing that he had no choice, Sherlock pointed the rifle at the man’s chest and pulled the trigger, bracing himself for the resulting recoil.
Nothing happened. The rifle failed to fire.
Gilfillan grinned triumphantly. ‘Grit in the mechanism,’ he said. ‘Got to treat them old rifles right. Smallest thing can stop ’em from firin’.’ He reached into a trouser pocket and pulled out something small and dark. He flicked his hand, and suddenly there was a blade in it, a wickedly curved blade. ‘Not like a knife. Knives work under most circumstances, I find. Slower than a rifle, but a lot more fun.’
He stepped forward and slashed the knife sideways, aiming for Sherlock’s eyes. The boy stumbled back, feeling the cold breeze following in the wake of the blade as it brushed his eyelashes. The low rays of the sun, reflected from the sharp point at the end of the blade, traced a red line across Sherlock’s vision that persisted even when the knife had gone.
Gilfillan stepped forward, jerking the knife upward, trying to get it into Sherlock’s stomach, but Sherlock blocked it with the stock of the rifle. The impact knocked him backwards, but Gilfillan held his wrist and swore.
‘That’s it,’ he snarled. ‘I ain’t goin’ to treat you like an equal any more. I’m goin’ to slaughter you like cattle.’
He reached out and grabbed Sherlock by the ear, before the boy could get away, pulling him closer even as he raised the knife towards Sherlock’s throat. Instinctively, Sherlock bought the rifle up between them, trying to block the blade, but as the barrel passed his face he had a sudden inspiration and he jabbed it straight upward into Gilfillan’s right eye.
The American screamed and staggered backwards, clutching at his face. Blood streamed from between his fingers. Sherlock expected him to fall to the ground, incapacitated, but his intact eye fixed on Sherlock and he screamed again, a sound of pure rage that echoed through the woods and sent pigeons flying from the trees. Lurching forward, he held the knife extended, reaching out for Sherlock. Still holding the rifle, Sherlock swung it at the American’s head. It connected with the bandage, an impact that echoed all the way down the stock, through Sherlock’s hands and up into his shoulders. The American fell like a carelessly thrown sack of corn; gracelessly and shapelessly to the ground
Sherlock watched him for a few moments, half expecting him to climb back to his feet and try again, but he just lay there, unmoving apart from the laboured rise and fall of his chest. His right eye, from what Sherlock could see of it, was a crater of red fles
h, while blood seeped through the bandage on his head, which was rising up as the flesh beneath it swelled even as Sherlock watched.
The man was like some supernatural force, impervious to pain and injuries that would fell a normal man. Sherlock felt his breath burning in his chest as he waited for Gilfillan to struggle to his feet again. Were all Americans like this, he wondered. Something to do with that frontier spirit that he had heard about? Part of him wanted to step forward and bring the rifle down several more times on the man’s head, making sure that he would never move again, but Sherlock wasn’t entirely sure whether that part of his brain was worried about Gilfillan regaining consciousness or whether he just wanted revenge for what the man had done to Amyus Crowe and tried to do to him. After a while he lowered the rifle. He wasn’t a murderer. Not a deliberate murderer, anyway.
When he was quite sure that Gilfillan wasn’t going to move for a while, he backed away, still watching, until he could hear Amyus Crowe’s horse whickering behind him. He turned.
Amyus Crowe lay in the dusty road. In the reddish light of evening, the blood on his forehead seemed almost to glow with a demonic intensity.
‘Is he . . . ?’ Sherlock started to ask, but he couldn’t bring himself to finish the question.
‘He’s still breathin’,’ Virginia answered breathlessly. Her accent had become more obvious.
She reached into a pocket and removed a scrap of linen – a handkerchief, Sherlock supposed. She was about to use it to wipe her father’s head, but Sherlock took it from her.
‘I’ll wet it in the river,’ he said.
She nodded gratefully.
He dashed across to the point where the falling American gunman had cut a swathe through the rushes with his body before emerging and shooting Amyus Crowe. Getting as close to the river as he could without falling in, Sherlock moistened the handkerchief, then returned to where Amyus Crowe lay. Virginia had straightened out his arms and legs so that he was lying more normally, not twisted up in the way he had landed. As Sherlock bent to join her, he noticed that Crowe’s chest was moving up and down and his eyelids were fluttering. It seemed like ages since Crowe had fallen from his horse, but Sherlock realized that it could only have been a handful of seconds, less than a minute at most. The fight with Gilfillan hadn’t been long, but it had been intense, and that had made it seem long.
Virginia was running her hands up and down her father’s arms and legs. ‘No broken bones, far as I can tell,’ she said. ‘Don’t know about his ribs, although I’d be surprised if he hadn’t cracked a couple. He’s got a whole load of cuts and grazes, mind.’
‘He was lucky,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘This close to the river, the ground is soft and muddy. If he’d come off the horse earlier, where the ground was baked hard, he might be dead by now.’
Virginia took the handkerchief from him and ran it across Crowe’s forehead. It came away bloody, revealing a long scratch which immediately began to bleed again.
‘I think this is where the bullet hit,’ she said.
‘Another bit of luck. A couple of inches to the left and it would have gone through his temple.’ Sherlock took a deep breath, and tried to stop his hands from shaking. ‘We ought to find a doctor.’
Virginia shook her head. ‘We need to get him back to the cottage. I can look after him there. As long as there’s no broken bones, what he needs is rest.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve got a feeling he’s been through worse than this and survived.’ She glanced at Sherlock, glanced away, then glanced back again, noticing his various bumps, scrapes, cuts and bruises. Are you OK?’ she asked.
‘I’ve had worse while playing rugby,’ he said.
She frowned, and shook her head.
‘It’s a game which I don’t like and which I don’t play very well. The point is, I’ll be all right.’
‘Did you get him?’ she asked angrily.
‘I stopped him,’ Sherlock replied, ‘but I think your father and my brother will want to talk to him, so I didn’t hurt him too much. Even though I could have done.’
‘Maybe you should have,’ she said darkly.
Thinking about head injuries, Sherlock asked: ‘What about concussion? The ball injured your father’s head, and he may have hit it as well.’
Virginia gazed at him. Her expression was fixed and angry, but her eyes told a different story. They were desperate.
‘We’ll have to watch him,’ she said. ‘Look for signs of dizziness, sickness, nausea or confusion.’
‘I’ve suffered from all of them in my time,’ Crowe said, faintly but distinctly. ‘Can’t say I enjoyed ’em much, but they were mainly self-inflicted. This time it wasn’t my fault.’
‘Father!’
Eyes still closed, he reached up and patted her clumsily on the shoulder. ‘I rolled when I hit the ground. Technique was taught to me by a rodeo rider in Albuquerque. If a body relaxes all its muscles and rolls up like a porcupine, it can probably survive a fall worse than that.’ He glanced at Sherlock, ‘I can see that you found out the same thing yourself He paused, closing his eyes momentarily and breathing slowly. ‘What happened to the coach?’
‘They got away,’ Sherlock said angrily. ‘With Matty.’
‘An’ the man who stayed behind an’ shot me?’
‘Alive but unconscious. We can take him back and question him, I suppose.’
‘Yep,’ Crowe said darkly, ‘I s’pose we can.’
Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘I can tie him up,’ he said. ‘Then we can sling him over my horse. If you’re all right to ride, Virginia can ride Sandia and I’ll walk.’
‘We need to move fast,’ Virginia said. For some reason she was blushing, and she wouldn’t look at Sherlock. ‘Walking would take too long. You can ride behind me.’
‘Are you sure?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,’ Crowe said, chuckling. ‘The ideas are good, but what are you goin’ to use to tie the man up?’
Sherlock thought for a moment. They didn’t have any ropes with them. He could use the reins from his horse, he supposed, but how would they make sure that it stayed with them when they rode off? Could he make some bindings from the reeds on the river bank? Too wet, and it would take too long. ‘My belt,’ he said finally. ‘I can tie his hands behind his back with my belt.’
Crowe nodded. ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said. ‘Or you can use the twine in my pocket.’ He glanced up at Sherlock. ‘There’s some things a man should always travel with – a knife, wax matches an’ a ball of twine. There ain’t much you can’t do with a combination of knife, matches an’ twine.’
Sherlock took the twine from Crowe and tentatively walked back down the road to where Gilfillan still lay. It was nearly dark by now, and for a terrifying moment Sherlock couldn’t locate the man in the shadows, but eventually he found where he was lying. He tied the man’s hands, wrist crossed over wrist, then left him and walked back to where his horse was cropping grass by the side of the road as if this kind of thing happened every day. Leading the horse back, he left it beside Gilfillan and bent down, trying to work out how to get the man up and on to the horse. Eventually he managed to manoeuvre the American to his knees, still unconscious, then slipped himself underneath the man as he slumped forward, taking the weight on to his upper back. He straightened, pushing with his knees and feeling his muscles protesting as he stood, head bowed forward, Gilfillan’s body balanced precariously across his shoulders. For a moment he panicked, unsure how he was going to get it on to his horse, but by that time Amyus Crowe was standing upright and Virginia could come across to help him. Between the two of them, they got Gilfillan slumped across the saddle of Sherlock’s uncomplaining horse. To stop him sliding off, Sherlock tied Gilfillan’s wrists to the stirrup on one side and his ankles to the stirrup on the other. Finished, he stepped back to admire his handiwork.
‘I been meanin’ to ask,’ Virginia said from beside him, ‘what did you end up callin’ your own horse?’
She seemed surprised. ‘Why not?’
‘Couldn’t see the point. Horses don’t know they have names.’
‘Sandia knows her name.’
‘No, she knows the sound of your voice. I doubt she understands words.’
‘For a kid who knows so much,’ she said critically, ‘you sure don’t know very much.’
The four of them made a sorry-looking bunch as they cantered back to Amyus Crowe’s cottage – Crowe slumped forward on his horse, Virginia on Sandia with Sherlock pressed close behind her and his own horse bringing up the rear with Gilfillan lying across it. The journey back seemed to take forever. Tiredness weighed Sherlock down like a heavy blanket. His scratches itched, and all he wanted to do was to roll into bed and sleep for as many hours as he could possibly cram in.
It was well and truly night when they arrived back, and Mycroft was standing in the doorway.
‘Sherlock!’ he called, ‘I was—’ He stopped. His voice, it seemed to Sherlock, was higher pitched than normal. He seemed to be struggling with some great emotion.
‘It’s all right,’ Sherlock said tiredly. ‘We’re fine. I mean, Mr Crowe has been shot, we have a prisoner and we didn’t get Matty back, but we’re all still alive.’
‘I had no way of knowing what had happened,’ Mycroft said as Sherlock slipped off Sandia’s back. ‘There were several courses of action open to me, but I was not sure which one was best.’
‘Shouldn’t you have caught your train by now?’ Sherlock asked.
Mycroft shrugged. ‘If necessary, I can find a comfortable hotel for the night.’
‘But won’t your superiors be annoyed when you don’t turn up to work tomorrow?’