Flintlock

by William W. Johnstone

  Fong stepped to the older girl. “Show me your back,” he said.

  Garrard roared, “I’m damned if she will!”

  “She will,” Tyrell said quietly, relaxed, but with his hands close to his guns.

  Garrard had propped his rifle in a corner but didn’t seem inclined to go for it and confront the grim old marshal in a close-up gunfight.

  Her eyes averted from Fong’s gaze, the girl unbuttoned the back of her dress while Garrard stood by and fumed.

  “Not a mark, huh?” Charlie Fong said.

  The girl’s slender back was crisscrossed with whip scars, some red, raw and recent, others stark white and older.

  Then the girl surprised him. She pointed at the younger girl and said, “My sister the same. Worse I think.”

  “So they’re marked up a little,” Garrard said. “It’s none of your damned business. They’re mine and I can do what I want with them.”

  “Charlie, did I see a barn behind the house when we rode in?” Tyrell said.

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “Go see if Garrard has horses. If he has, saddle them up and bring ’em here.”

  “You leave my damned horses alone or I’ll take the whip to you, Chinaman,” Garrard said.

  He made a move toward the cat, but stopped when he found himself looking into the muzzle of Charlie Fong’s .38.

  “Give me an excuse to kill you, Garrard,” Fong said. “Say something or make a fancy move.”

  “Charlie, remember what I told you about the killin’,” Tyrell said. “That’s my bailiwick.”

  “I remember.” Fong glared at Garrard, then pushed his revolver back in his pocket and stepped out the door into the rain.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “What the hell are you doing?” Silas Garrard said.

  Pleasant Tyrell smiled without humor. “I’m confiscating your women.”

  “And my horses.” Garrard’s voice pitched into a whine. “You can’t leave me afoot in this wilderness.”

  “I can and I will,” Tyrell said. “It’s the luck of the draw, my man.”

  The older Chinese girl wore a slicker that Charlie Fong had found in the barn. The younger was lost inside a seaman’s oilskin coat and the sleeves drooped over her hands.

  Despite their limited English, both girls realized what was happening and Fong decided they seemed more than eager to leave.

  He didn’t yet know just how eager.

  “I paid for those women and I have a bill of sale to prove it,” Garrard said to Tyrell. “I’ll see you lose your star over this, you damned old fool.”

  The marshal smiled. “Garrard, this may come as a surprise to you, but it shouldn’t—I’m looking for an excuse to gun you myself. So I advise you to back off, stay quiet and lay low.”

  Frightened now, Garrard let it go like a man dropping a hot brick. “I can die out here without a horse,” he said.

  “Hell, you’re within walking distance of a dozen settlements,” Charlie Fong said.

  “The Apaches are out, damn you,” Garrard said.

  “Yeah, so they are,” Fong said. “That’s bad luck for you.”

  “Maybe you should try using your whip on ol’ Geronimo,” Tyrell said. “It worked with . . .” Tyrell sought the right word, then settled for “children.”

  During this exchange, no one noticed that the older girl had disappeared.

  But when she stepped out of the cabin door, everybody took notice, especially Silas Garrard. His eyes as round as coins, he said, “What the hell are you going to do with that?”

  The Sharps rifle’s twelve-pound weight was a load for a small, slender girl, but somehow she wrestled the gun to waist level.

  And fired.

  Up close, the roar of a Sharps fifty was thunderous, loud enough to cover Garrard’s agonized scream.

  The recoil knocked the Chinese girl on her back—but the bullet in his groin slammed Garrard to his knees, then his butt.

  He looked at the scarlet stain that covered his crotch and he screamed, “She shot it off!”

  “My God,” Charlie Fong whispered. “Is it true?”

  Garrard screeched the words, “Yes, it’s true! Look at me! The bitch shot off everything I got!”

  Marshal Pleasant Tyrell helped the girl to her feet and said, “Young lady, you sure got a direct way of making a statement.”

  “Kill her!” Garrard screamed. “Shoot her, you damned idiot!”

  Charlie Fong looked at the girl. It looked like the enormity of what she’d done had finally sunk in. Tears ran down her cheeks as her sister put her arms around her and whispered words in Chinese that Fong, an orphan raised by whites, didn’t understand.

  Garrard rocked back and forth and moaned, his eyes fixed on his ruined groin. Then he glared at Tyrell again and squealed, “She shot a white man. Kill her. Hang her right now.”

  “Well, I’ll need to investigate this and make a report,” Tyrell said. “That takes time. By the way, seein’ what’s happened an’ all, can I still call you Mister Garrard?”

  “Give me a gun!” Garrard pleaded. “Let me kill the bitch. She’s ruined me.”

  Charlie Fong bent from the waist and stared at the man’s crotch. “She’s done for you, all right,” he said. He straightened. “It’s a sad thing to say, Cap’n, but your screwin’ days are over.”

  This brought another wail from Garrard, and Fong said to the marshal, “Do you plan to arrest her?”

  “Yeah, he’s gonna arrest and then hang her, lay to that,” Garrard shrilled.

  “I reckon not,” Tyrell said. “It was an unfortunate accident. Damned gun went off by itself, anybody could see that.”

  “You crazy old coot, she tried to kill me,” Garrard said.

  “I don’t see it that way . . . ah . . . Mr. Garrard.” Charlie Fong told the girls to mount up, then said to Tyrell, “They’d better come with me.”

  “Where are you taking them, Charlie?” Tyrell said.

  “I’d rather not answer that, Marshal,” Fong said.

  “You’re going to meet up with Abe Roper and Sam Flintlock. Ain’t you?”

  “Like I said, Marshal, I’d—”

  “Rather not talk about it, I know. Well, I reckon them two little gals will eat their weight in groceries on the trail to wherever the hell you’re headed. I suggest you go into the cabin and sack up some supplies.”

  Garrard rocked back and forth and groaned. Bound up in a tight cocoon of pain, he said nothing.

  After Fong left, Tyrell said, “Garrard, seein’ as how you got a real bad misery an’ all, if you want I can scatter your brains, and you won’t hurt no more. It’s a tough thing, expecting a man to live without a pecker.”

  Garrard, his mouth all screwed up in a snarl, said, “I hope you die of cancer, old man. You’ve lived too long.”

  Tyrell shook his head. “That’s the last time I try to do you a favor. You’re just not an appreciating man.” He smiled. “How you gonna piss? You thought about that?”

  “Leave me the hell alone.”

  Tyrell’s eyes hardened until they were steel blue. “Like you left the two little Chinee girls alone? Their lives must have been a hell.”

  The older girl spat, then said, “He is . . .” to Tyrell. The next word was Chinese and sounded like mawguay.

  “What does that mean, little gal?” the marshal said.

  “Devil,” the girl said. “He is a devil.”

  Garrard stared at the girl with such a look of demonic hatred that even Tyrell felt its venom.

  “He’s the devil, all right,” he said. He made a tut-tut sound with his tongue and shook his head. “And him without a pecker. Don’t that beat all.”

  “I got the groceries,” Charlie Fong said. He smiled at Garrard. “Just about cleaned you out, Silas, but I’m sure you don’t mind.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Tyrell said. “I want to feel clean again.”

  “You’re leaving me alone here to die?” Garrard said as
the marshal swung into the saddle.

  “Seems like,” Tyrell said. “And I can’t say it was real nice meeting you.”

  Garrard had lost a lot of blood and he looked as though he was barely holding on to consciousness. But he gritted his teeth, then rolled up his left sleeve and revealed a grinning skull branded with a red-hot iron into the inside of his forearm.

  “Gaze on that, old man? It was burned there in Haiti by hellfire. A witch done that, a hag who’d been dead for years and then came back to life. She was what the natives call a zombie woman. Understand?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tyrell said.

  Garrard’s eyes were wild, and as though he hadn’t heard, he said, “The skull gives me the power to know if a person will die soon, and God curse you, you’ll be dead and rotten before this week is out.”

  Garrard raised his arm. Blood from his hand ran down his wrist and it looked as though the skull was shedding scarlet tears.

  “God curse you,” he said again. “God curse you to damnation.”

  Silas Garrard died with that last, vile blasphemy on his lips.

  Pushed to his limit and then beyond, Tyrell drew both his guns and pumped ten bullets into the man, the last eight jerking his already dead body like a rag doll.

  Through a drift of smoke, he looked at Charlie Fong and said, “I told him I was looking for an excuse to plug him. He gave me one.”

  Marshal Pleasant Tyrell tried valiantly to smile, but his lips were bloodless and all at once he looked old . . . and very, very tired.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “You scared the hell out of me, Jack,” Charlie Fong said. “I took you for an Apache.”

  “Well, you were half right,” Jack Coffin said. His eyes flicked to the girls. “Where have you been? China?”

  “It’s a long story,” Fong said, “and I only want to tell it once. Where are Sam Flintlock and Abe Roper?”

  Coffin turned in the saddle and pointed toward the Carrizo foothills. “Close. That’s their smoke,” he said. “Only a bank robber and a gunfighter would make smoke like that in Apache country.”

  Fong scanned the distance and said, “I see it, south of the big mesa.”

  “Yes. But tomorrow I’ll lead them north to Pastora Peak and we’ll search there. It’s high, timbered country that could easily hide a cave.”

  “So you haven’t found the bell yet?”

  “No, not yet, but I will.” He stared closely at the girls, then said, “We already have a woman in camp. Now we’ll have three, and Roper isn’t going to like it much.”

  “Who’s the woman?” Fong said. “Anybody I know?”

  “A white woman who is not right in her mind. Sam Flintlock calls her Ayasha.”

  “How did—”

  “It’s a long story, Charlie,” Coffin said. “I’ll let Samuel tell it.” He glanced at the sky. “The rain is following you.”

  “Jack, I reckon I’ve got grief following me,” Fong said. “What am I going to do with two young Chinese girls?”

  “When you sell the gold from the bell, send them back to China,” Coffin said.

  “Well, it’s a thought,” Fong said. “But China is a big place. Where would I send them and to who?”

  “Well, you could raise them like your own.”

  “Do I look like a pa to you?”

  “Yes. I think you’d do just fine as a pa.”

  Charlie Fong smiled. “Jack, that just ain’t going to happen.”

  “Then ask Sam Flintlock for advice.”

  “Hell, Sammy never had a pa except for old Barnabas and he was part grizzly. What does he know about raising two young girls?”

  “That’s why he will give you good advice,” Coffin said. “Because he knows nothing about raising children.”

  Charlie Fong couldn’t figure that one and didn’t try.

  And then the rain started.

  “I rescued them, Abe, like I told you,” Charlie Fong said. “What do you want me to do? Chase them away and let them get eaten by bears?”

  Abe Roper scowled. “Get this, Charlie, them gals don’t get a share of the golden bell. Same thing I told Sam’l when he rescued the crazy white woman. She don’t get a share either.” He spat into the fire. “And another thing, we don’t collect any more females on this trip. We’re overrun with them as it is.”

  “I got to agree with you there, Abe,” Flintlock said.

  “Well, I’m glad you do, Sammy, since you’re one o’ the collectors,” Roper said.

  Flintlock smiled at that, then said, “This Pleasant Tyrell feller, Charlie, he a tall, skinny old man who wears a top hat and carries two guns? Kinda looks like the pictures of Wild Bill in the dime novels, except older, huh?”

  “That’s him, all right. Killed that Garrard feller like I told you, which was probably just as well since he’d no pecker left. Why do you ask?”

  Flintlock and the others sat under a canopy of stretched-out slickers and pine branches that ticked rainwater into the hissing fire. Ayasha, still silent, sat between the Chinese girls who fussed with her hair, spoke to her in a language she couldn’t understand and made her smile.

  “Why do you ask, Sam?” Fong repeated.

  “Oh, three years ago, maybe four, I was in the Nations hunting a black farmhand who’d taken up an ax and chopped his employer, his wife and a visiting neighbor into a hundred little pieces.”

  “Did the farmhand count them?” Roper said.

  “Hell, yeah, he sure did. And I meant the old man and the two women were each chopped into a hundred pieces.”

  “Making three hundred pieces in total, like,” Roper said.

  Flintlock nodded and Roper said, “I just want to get the story straight.”

  “Well, anyway, I tracked the feller, as I recollect his name was Hamp Wade, to a sod cabin on the bank of a place called Dead Beaver Creek, on account of how he now had a thousand-dollar bounty on his head, dead or alive. Besides hisself, he had a kept woman in there, a Choctaw, who had an ass so big she couldn’t have sat down in a number three washtub.”

  “Interesting that, about the ass I mean,” Roper said as he poured coffee into his cup.

  “Yeah, I guess it is at that,” Flintlock said.

  “Where does Marshal Tyrell come in?” Charlie Fong said.

  “I’m getting to that,” Flintlock said. “How it come up, I saw smoke rising from the cabin chimney and there was a sow and a litter of piglets rooting around out front. So I reckoned ol’ Hamp was to home.”

  “Them pigs was a dead giveaway, rootin’ around like that,” Roper said. “And the smoke.”

  “Yeah, Abe, that’s exactly how I had it figured,” Flintlock said.

  “Then what happened?” Roper said.

  “What happened was, I left my horse in some wild oaks and cat-footed it toward the cabin.”

  “Your gun was drawed, I hope,” Roper said.

  “It most certainly was, Abe.”

  “Just makin’ sure.”

  “Well, I figured to kick in the door of the cabin and—”

  “What kind of door?” Roper said.

  “Just an ordinary planed timber door on leather hinges, Abe.”

  “Gettin’ things straight in my mind, Sammy,” Roper said, his gaze concentrating on the cigarette he was building.

  “Anyhoo”—Flintlock shook his head—“wait a minute, why the hell did I decide to tell this story? It’s like it goes on forever.”

  Thunder rumbled in the distance and lightning briefly turned the pines into slender columns of steel. Rain hissed around them and rattled on the slickers like a snare drum.

  “You’re tellin’ it good, Sammy,” Roper said. “And now I guess we’re gettin’ to the exciting part, the killin’ an’ the cuttin’. Though I did cotton to the bit about the pigs. I’ve took to likin’ pigs real recent.”

  “To make a long story short,” Flintlock said, with a sidelong glance at Roper, “I was about to step in front of
the door—”

  “To kick it in, like,” Roper said.

  “Yes, indeed, Abe,” Flintlock said. “To kick it in.”

  He sighed and said, “Just as I stepped in front of the door a voice behind me yelled, ‘Shotgun!’ I dived for the dirt and a moment later a scattergun blast blasted a hole in the door that you could’ve driven a team of mules and a Studebaker wagon through.”

  “To make a hole that big, it was a ten gauge,” Roper said. “Had to be.”

  “That’s what it turned out to be, Abe,” Flintlock said. “Well, a minute later out comes ol’ Hamp with the Greener in his hands and a killin’ light in his eyes.”

  “An’ you plugged him square, huh, Sammy?”

  “Nope. This old feller comes up and cuts loose with two .44-40 Russians. Hamp drops, dead when he hits the ground. Then the Choctaw comes out with a knife in her hand and the old coot shoots her down. Time passes, about as long as a slow-talking man would take to count to five—”

  “How slow would he talk, Sammy?” Roper said.

  “And then”—ignoring Roper—“this towheaded kid charges through the door, blasting away with a Colt’s self-cocker, screaming like a wild Comanche.”

  “An’ then what happened?” Roper said. “This is gettin’ real good.”

  “The old man gunned him. Three dead on the ground in less than a minute.”

  “And the old feller was Pleasant Tyrell?” Charlie Fong said.

  “As ever was, I reckon. Seemed he had a warrant for Hamp Wade for murder, and me and him happened to arrive at the cabin at the same time.”

  “And then what?” Roper said.

  “Well, I’d taken some buckshot in my right shoulder and ol’ Tyrell patched me up and later we split the thousand-dollar bounty on Hamp. I always reckoned that was real white of him, seeing as how I almost got my head blowed off and never fired a shot.”

  Flintlock poured himself coffee and said, “After that I never seen or heard from him again until you mentioned his name, Charlie. He’s a tough, hard old man is Pleasant Tyrell. And mighty fast on the draw and shoot.”