Rebel Yell

by William W. Johnstone

  Theirs was not the way of the gun but of the stiletto, knockout drops or poison in a drink, a hatpin or knitting needle through the ear and piercing the brain of a sleeping victim—male or female, adult or child.

  Yes, it took a certain kind of woman to follow the Free Company. They accepted a life of hardship, privation, starvation, and disease. But they hadn’t joined the horde of camp followers to get shot at. That was for the men.

  When the raid opened, most of the women did what they’d learned to do in a hundred, a thousand barroom fights, knifings, and shootings—they ran for cover. But little cover was to be found in Sidepocket’s box canyon.

  The attack loosed a floodtide of chaos. The raiders split into a center group and two wings. The left flank made for the cluster of tents where the inner circle of the Company was thought to be. Johnny, Huddy, and Carrados rode ahead of Vic, clearing a path for him. Vic galloped along, reaching into the sack of bundled dynamite sticks, pulling one out, lighting the fuse, and tossing the package where he thought it would do the most good.

  Johnny swerved his horse to charge a line of gunmen guarding an unhorsed wagon housed with provisions, water barrels, and food stocks. Carrados and Huddy followed his lead. Ten gunmen fired at them, red lines of flame licking out from their gun barrels.

  Johnny kept going, reins clenched between his teeth to free both hands to work his guns. He squeezed out shots, first from one gun, then from the other. He heard the guns of Huddy and Carrados firing along with his as the line of shooters began to melt away under the rain of bullets.

  A shooter screamed, dropping in front of the supply wagon. Another went down as Johnny closed in. The line had been cut by half. The others suddenly lost their nerve. They broke, scrambling for the sidelines, getting out of the way of the gun-wielding fury and his sidemen. Johnny shot some down as they ran.

  He swerved away from the wagon. The gun in his right hand clicked on an empty chamber. He holstered it, hauling out another pistol stuck in his belt, one of many. It was a tactic of a veteran pistol-fighter to not waste precious time reloading. He took as many loaded guns to a fight as he could.

  Such was part of the gospel as preached by Quantrill, and Johnny had learned his lessons well. He had three spare guns tucked into his belt and a saddlebag full of extras. He didn’t believe in doing things by halves, and making war was no exception.

  Vic reined in at the supply wagon, stopping suddenly. He tossed a lit bundle of TNT into the wagon and quickly spurred his horse away from it.

  Johnny had already changed course, making for the cluster of tan canvas tents that boasted the most military look of the sprawling camp. Vic followed.

  A few beats later, the dynamite blew up, demolishing the supply wagon. In its place rose a new pillar of fire.

  The tents were laid out orderly in classic grid style, with regularly spaced intervals between each one. A cart called a water buffalo held a big hogshead barrel of fresh drinking water. Rifles were stacked upright in cone-shaped arrangements in open squares fronting the tents.

  Here was where the elite of the Free Company was sheltered, the all-important leadership cadre by which elusive Jimbo Turlock exercised his authority over the rank-and-file troops.

  With the alert sounded and the attack well-launched, men rushed out of the tents in varying states of undress. Their women either screamed and ran or stayed behind, huddled on the ground inside the tents.

  Reaching the squares, men grabbed rifles, shouldering, pointing, and firing them at the raiders.

  Huddy charged, coming on strong. He was hit twice and went down, falling off his horse. A soft patch of muddy ground cushioned his fall, but he hit hard enough to knock the wind out of him and make him see stars. He was down but not yet out.

  One shot hit him high on the left side of his chest, just below the collarbone. The round had missed heart and lung—lucky! He’d also been shot through the bicep of his left arm.

  He was in a tight spot, plenty tight, but rose to his knees in the mud wallow, hands on the ground. His left arm wasn’t working too well. He shook his head to clear it, to wipe away the shower of little colored lights that floated in front of his eyes, veiling the scene.

  More Free Company men were running out of the tents, guns in hand. Three gunmen saw Huddy and ran toward him.

  He pulled a revolver—fast, like lightning—from the top of his waistband and started banging away.

  The man in the lead of the charge went down, falling on his face and dropping his gun. As he dragged himself up on his hands and knees, he and Huddy eyed each other for an instant.

  The outlaw grabbed the gun on the ground in front of him and pointed it at Huddy, but Huddy fired first, blowing the top of the other’s head off.

  The other two gunmen fired. The bullets passed over Huddy’s head.

  Huddy slammed the gunner moving in on the left side with two shots. He stopped suddenly, hitting an invisible wall.

  The third man was at point-blank range. Huddy swung the gun at him and fired. Momentum carried him forward until he came to a halt, dead. The hand of his outstretched arm was only inches away from where Huddy stood on his knees.

  The tent area continued to yield Free Company men running along the aisles between the tents looking to get in the fight. Women stuck their heads out from between tent flaps to see what was happening. In the early morning light, their painted and rouged faces looked like unnatural fright masks.

  A fat woman with frizzy brown hair in a bun, wearing a soiled white shift, ran back and forth in front of the tents shrieking and waving her hands in the air. Yet she seemed unhurt, not a mark on her.

  On every side, the camp was in an uproar. Free Company members were on their feet, some grouping together, others standing alone. The canyon floor seethed, a cauldron boiling with angry desperate men—armed men.

  The fast-moving figures of mounted horsemen, the Hangtree raiders, darted this way and that, plowing through the mass.

  The racket of gunfire rising to a steady roar was periodically punctuated by earth-shattering booms as Vic detonated a succession of dynamite blasts.

  Huddy was still kneeling in the muck, isolated and alone. He lurched upright, rising to his feet, unsteady. He’d taken quite a blow when he fell. His left arm hung down at his side, numb, useless. He clenched his fingers, making a fist. The hand worked, but he couldn’t raise it past his waist. The wound in his upper arm had impaired some key tendon or muscle.

  His right hand was still good and that was his shooting hand. He’d make it count.

  He looked around. His horse was nowhere in sight. Fled, long gone.

  Staggering to one side, he came into view of a group of men grabbing stacked rifles. He fired at them, dropping a man with one shot. Another in the group pointed a rifle and fired at Huddy, missing.

  Huddy’s gun clicked on empty. He let it fall, his hand streaking to the next gun in his belt and hauling it out. The motion threw him off balance.

  That saved his life. Rifle bullets tore through the place where Huddy had been standing. Lurching sideways, gun in hand, he threw down at the riflemen, pumping out lead.

  One man went down, then another until Huddy’s gun was empty and the riflemen were no more.

  A fierce black-bearded man hovered on the sidelines, rifle in hands. Holding the weapon hip-high, he swung the barrel toward Huddy.

  Huddy shouted something inarticulate, charging the other barehanded, set to sell his life dearly.

  The black-bearded man’s face vanished in a red wet blur as a bullet smashed into it.

  A massive shape loomed over Huddy, the figure of a rider on horseback. Johnny Cross.

  Wiley Crabbe rode up behind him, clutching his outlandish four-barreled revolving shotgun. He was not a big man. In fact, he was a scrawny undersized whelp who looked to weigh about a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. In his hands, the outsized weapon looked like a genuine hand cannon.

  Wiley tossed Johnny a half salute with a free
hand. “I’ll cover ya!”

  Johnny holstered his gun, freeing his hands, and turned his horse toward Huddy.

  Huddy reached out with his right arm, left arm hanging down limply at his side.

  Johnny got the idea. Approaching Huddy, he leaned out of the saddle and grabbed Huddy’s forearm. In one sweeping motion, he hauled Huddy up, lifting him clear off the ground and setting him behind the saddle on the horse.

  “Thanks!” Huddy said.

  “Hold on!” said Johnny.

  While the rescue was in progress, a fresh batch of Free Company men came into view. They’d been hanging back, held at bay by the volume of firepower Johnny had been pumping out of those twin Colts. The lethally streaming lead had come to a halt when he’d moved to save Huddy.

  A rush of a dozen or more men with guns blazing came pouring out from a lane behind a row of tents.

  “Git going, boys. I got you covered!” Wiley Crabbe called out.

  Johnny turned the chestnut horse toward the canyon exit and put heels to the animal’s sides, surging forward. Huddy hooked his good right arm around Johnny’s middle, holding on tight to keep from falling off as the horse leaped forward.

  A vigilant observer might have noticed something unusual about Wiley’s attire. The jacket was similar to a hunting jacket in that it had a heavily padded quilted cushion sewn into the right chest and shoulder area, where the shotgun butt would be snugged up against it when shooting. The padding absorbed much of the impact from the piece’s jolting recoil.

  His saddle was custom-fitted with a special high cantle in back. Its curved inner wall, also reinforced and padded with cushioning, supported his lower back.

  Not a wealthy or well-to-do man, Wiley lived hand-to-mouth. It was the best he could do on the scant wages paid him for laboring at the Doghouse Bar. He was a middling worker, at best. The drinks he sneaked behind the bar probably cost more than he was worth.

  The point being that while Wiley rarely had a coin to his name, he’d managed to scrape up enough cash to pay for certain vital accessories to complement his fearsome weapon and maximize its striking power. When it came to killing, this proud son of Hangtree, Texas, spared no expense.

  Bracing himself against the paddled cantle at the back of the saddle, Wiley shouldered the stubby short-barreled revolving shotgun and cut loose with a double-barreled blast into the charging Free Company frontline marauders. Yellow flame and clouds of gun smoke stabbed from twin-mouthed big barrels on the upper side of the weapon.

  A handful of gunmen at the head of the charge ran full-on into a devastating double-barreled blast of 12-gauge double-ought buckshot. For each of them it was like catching the full-force blow of a lumberman’s double-bladed axe square in the midriff. They went down like sheaves of wheat chopped by a scythe—the Grim Reaper’s scythe—falling in a heap of bodies, clothes, and flesh charred and smoking from the close-range blast.

  Some of those behind or to the side of the front-liners were caught in the broad fan-shaped spray of the shotgun burst. Even to catch one of the white-hot metal shot pellets in the flesh was a hurting for he who was hit.

  “That’ll learn yez!” Wiley chortled.

  A marauder held both hands to his ruined face, blood streaming out between his fingers. He tripped and fell over the pile of corpses in front of him. He did not rise again. Others fell down at the flanks of the group, staggering and crying out.

  The Company’s inner circle, its ruling cadre or officer class, the smartest and most ruthless killers of the crew came to fill the gap in the ranks.

  The bantamweight figure of Wiley Crabbe sat on horseback, wrapped in an ash-gray cloud of gun smoke. His right shoulder and chest were numb, his bones ached, his back was pressed hard and deep into the pads cushioning the built-up cantle. Undaunted, his blood hot and raging for battle, he braced the gun butt against a bony hip and thumbed the central axis release, allowing the barrels to revolve in a circle.

  Gripping the stock with one hand, he turned the four-barrel assembly in a counterclockwise direction with the other. A metallic click sounded each time the rear of a barrel came under the freed locking plate. As each smoking barrel came clear, he fed in a fresh cartridge.

  Two clicks sounded as Wiley turned the barrel assembly 180 degrees, bringing a pair of fully loaded barrels into place. All four barrels were fully loaded with two previously unfired barrels in place on the high side. He thumbed the release lever back down, locking it into place. “I’m ready for action and loaded for bear!” he crowed.

  More of the outlaw cadre popped up in the rows between the tents, shooting and shouting.

  Once more settling himself firmly in the saddle, Wiley ripped loose another big double-blast, clearing a significant space in the landscape by mowing down more Company men.

  The bone-jarring boom of Vic’s TNT blasts came less frequently. The battle was about to turn in favor of the defenders’ far greater numbers and firepower. The Hangtree raiders’ initial advantage of surprise was gone. The Free Company was starting to get its own back.

  The raid was meant to give Turlock’s outfit a bloody nose and get them good and mad, and it had certainly done all of that.

  “The climate’s getting unhealthy,” Wiley said to himself. “Too much lead in the air!” He turned his horse toward the east canyon wall, the way out to Wild Horse Canyon and escape.

  It looked like most of the Hangtree hometown boys were making for it. A handful of riders, some alone and others in groups of twos and threes, tore eastward across the canyon floor. Bodies sprawled on the turf marked the raiders’ single-minded path toward the canyon mouth.

  “Time to make tracks. Dig dirt, horse!” Wiley kicked his horse forward, cutting a winding weaving path among the crowding robber bandits.

  Of all places in the Sidepocket encampment, the eastern portal was the best guarded. Protected against an attack from without, however unlikely that might seem, it was also secured against deserters from within. From the top-ranked members of the leadership cadre to the lowliest scum of the camp followers, none could be allowed to depart freely and without official approval from the Commander, for fear they might betray some vital intelligence about the Company.

  If Jimbo Turlock had wanted stone walls and impenetrable gates he could have held Fort Pardee, but mobility had always served the Free Company well in the past, and he had no intention of sacrificing it, so the entrance was only partially blocked. In the center of the canyon mouth, several wagons had been turned on their sides and reinforced with stacked hay bales to serve as a shooting platform for a twenty-man squad of riflemen on duty. Open areas on both sides were blocked with waist-high ropes and chains that could easily be lowered to offer entrance or exit for duly authorized parties.

  When the attack broke, the gate guards were at first unsure what was happening or what to do. They feared the havoc within might be intended to divert them from an attack from without.

  The Hangtown Raiders massed under a towering rock on the south side of the canyon mouth, forcing the gate guard rifle squad to move to the far side of the barricade for protection, which put them on the outside shooting in. Instead of trying to keep hostiles out, they were trying to keep them in.

  The boulder at the south portal was shaped like an egg standing on its rounder, fatter end. Grouped under its overhanging curve, the raiders were shielded from the riflemen’s bullets by the curve of the massive, house-high boulder, but not from the guns of the masses inside Sidepocket Canyon.

  Cooler heads among the robber bandits were starting to take control of the situation. The cadre realized what had happened and were organizing a counterattack, getting their men under control.

  Working against them was the near-complete chaos among the main body of the rank and file, who were confused, angry, and frightened. They had been stampeded. Being gunmen, they used their guns. Some shot at each other, mistaking their fellows for foes. Others shot their guns off in the air just to be doing something.


  As for the horde of camp followers, they were in a blind panic. An undisciplined horde at the best of times, they were responding to the violence and brutality. They were being rounded up and herded like cattle, pushed out of the way so the main body of the Free Company could get into action.

  Johnny Cross, with Kev Huddy riding behind him on the same horse, reined in, joining other Hangtree raiders who had gathered under the big boulder.

  Seeing them mounted two on a horse, El Indio Negro started to ride off.

  “Wait! Where’re you going?” Baldy Vance shouted after him.

  “Be right back!” El Indio Negro called over his shoulder as he galloped back into the enemy camp, making a wide curving swing south along the canyon rim, then going north.

  “Crazy fool!” Baldy said, shaking his head.

  Under the outward-arching rock were Johnny, Huddy, Vic, Baldy Vance, Mick Sabbath, and Fritz Carrados. Of the original sixteen raiders who’d begun the charge, more than half were missing.

  Wiley Crabbe came in at a gallop, reining in and taking cover with the others.

  “That’s the last, I think,” Fritz Carrados said, “not counting El Indio.”

  “He’ll come back,” Baldy said.

  “Is this all of us that won through?” Johnny asked.

  “Looks like,” Wiley Crabbe said.

  “We’ve got to be sure,” Carrados said.

  “Look around. You see any of the others?” Wiley demanded.

  “What about Lord? Don’t tell me they got Tom the Lord!” Vic shouted.

  “Gone!” said Mick Sabbath. “I saw it, but was too far away to help out. Lord’s horse went down, throwing him into the middle of a mob. They rushed him, swarming all over him. He went down shooting to the last—” He stopped speaking for a moment. “Well, almost to the last. He saved one bullet for himself. He shot himself before they could lay hands on him. He was looking at me over the tops of their heads. He nodded to me before he pulled the trigger.”

  “Tom the Lord dead! I thought for sure he’d come through,” Vic said.

  “He died game,” Mick Sabbath said. “Ave atque vale! Hail and farewell!”