“Buckner! Kemp!” he snapped. “It’s an ambush!”
“Get ’em, boys!” Spivey roared.
The miners charged at the deputies from both sides, fists cocked to deliver sledgehammer blows.
Chapter Nineteen
Four men had come up behind the deputies, so when Spivey and his friend joined the attack from the front, that meant John Henry, Buckner, and Kemp were outnumbered two-to-one. The guns the lawmen carried would have gone a long way toward evening the odds, but they didn’t have time to pull the irons before the miners crashed into them.
In the blink of an eye, the angry confrontation turned into a wild melee. One of the miners tackled John Henry and drove him into one of the tables. The men who had been sitting there drinking scattered frantically as John Henry and his attacker landed on top of the table. With sharp cracks, a couple of the legs broke and the table collapsed, dumping the two men down among the debris.
The miner slugged at John Henry as he lay on top of the broken table. How many of these ruckuses could he be forced to endure in one day? he asked himself as the man’s fists thudded into him.
John Henry flung his arm out and closed his hand around one of the broken table legs. He could have killed his opponent by ramming the jagged end of the leg into his body. He didn’t want to do that, though, so he swung it as a club instead and pulled back at the last second so that the makeshift bludgeon rapped the man’s head with stunning force but not enough to fracture his skull.
John Henry grabbed the man’s shirtfront and threw him to the side. Freed of the miner’s weight, he was able to scramble to his feet, but just as he came up he caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye.
One of the other miners had picked up a chair and was swinging it at his head.
John Henry twisted and ducked forward, taking the blow on his hunched shoulders. It hurt enough to make him gasp in pain anyway. He ignored that and swung the piece of table leg. It caught the miner on the upper arm. The man howled and dropped the chair.
John Henry pivoted and threw a left cross that landed solidly on the man’s jaw and flung him backward. The man hit the bar with enough force that he flipped up and back, going all the way over. As he came down his legs smashed into a row of bottles on the back bar, shattering them with a great crash of glass.
John Henry turned and saw that Buckner and Kemp were getting the worst of it. Each deputy had been grabbed from behind by one of the miners. With their arms pinned, they couldn’t put up much of a fight as the remaining two miners pounded them with hard, bony fists.
He had run into the same thing with Price and Hoffman, John Henry recalled from earlier in the day, but here in this crowded saloon, Buckner and Kemp didn’t have room to draw their legs up and kick out at their assailants.
Despite the fact that they worked for the man whose schemes he had come here to destroy, John Henry waded in to help the other two deputies. He smashed the table leg across the back of one of the miners, staggering him. Whipping it around, he forced the other man to duck, which put the man in position for the kick that John Henry lifted into his belly. As that man doubled over in pain, John Henry smacked his head with the table leg and sent him to the floor.
Buckner and Kemp were stunned from the beatings they’d been getting, so the men holding them turned them loose and charged John Henry instead. John Henry twisted away from one man but caught a punch on the jaw from the other. The miner followed with a blow hooked into John Henry’s midsection.
Three of the miners were still on their feet, and three-against-one odds were pretty bad. John Henry wasn’t the sort to give up, though, so he ducked the next punch and stepped in to plant a short jab on a man’s nose. Blood spurted under the impact of John Henry’s knuckles. The man yelled in pain and stumbled backward, clutching at his bleeding, flattened nose.
Another man tried to grab John Henry from behind. He lifted his elbow under the miner’s chin and sent him spinning away. He had dropped the broken table leg in the struggle, but it was still lying on the floor near his feet. As the remaining miner charged him, John Henry kicked the table leg under the man’s feet. The miner tripped on it and let out a startled shout as he fell forward, out of control.
John Henry was ready. He clubbed both hands together and swung them in a powerful roundhouse blow that smashed into the miner’s jaw and used the man’s own momentum against him. The miner hit the floor so hard John Henry felt the planks tremble through the soles of his boots.
All the miners were down now, some of them unconscious, the others groaning. None of them seemed to be interested in fighting anymore.
That was good, John Henry thought as he stood there with his chest heaving, because he was just about out of stamina.
A few feet away, Kemp leaned on one of the tables with both hands. His head drooped so that his graying hair fell in his eyes. He shook his head slowly, evidently trying to clear the cobwebs from his brain.
Over by the bar, Buckner had propped himself up against the hardwood while he tried to catch his breath and get his wits back about him. He stared at John Henry and then at the bodies scattered around on the sawdust-littered floor.
“Son of a bitch!” Buckner said. “You’re a one-man wreckin’ crew, Cobb.”
“These hombres . . . didn’t give me much choice in the matter,” John Henry managed to say.
Buckner straightened and pulled his gun. John Henry hoped he didn’t intend to start shooting the fallen miners.
Luckily, that wasn’t what Buckner had in mind. He gestured with the Colt in his hand at some of the other patrons of the Buzzard’s Nest and ordered them to drag the miners over to the jail.
“Don’t make me tell you again!” he added harshly.
With obvious reluctance, the men got to work. It took a dozen of them to haul the miners out of the saloon. After retrieving their hats, John Henry, Buckner, and Kemp followed. John Henry had his gun out now, too.
“At this rate, the jail’s gonna be full before the night’s over,” Buckner commented. “Oh well, it wouldn’t be the first time.”
“I thought you said the townspeople weren’t going to fight back,” John Henry said.
“I said they hadn’t done much of it so far. Looks like that might be about to change, unless we can keep the fight knocked out of ’em.” Buckner laughed. “The way you whaled the tar outta this bunch might be enough to make the rest of these yokels think twice before they try anything like this again.”
John Henry hoped so.
Three big brawls in one day was enough.
More than enough, his aching muscles told him.
Chapter Twenty
Sheriff Dav was gone when John Henry and the other two deputies reached the office with the prisoners, but Deputy Carl Miller was still there. Miller stared at them as they trooped in. Some of the miners who had jumped the deputies in the Buzzard’s Nest had regained consciousness enough to walk with help from the men Buckner had pressed into service. Some of the others were still out cold.
“What the hell!” Miller exclaimed. “Steve, what have you and Aaron gotten into?”
“These varmints ganged up on us in the saloon,” Buckner explained.
“I didn’t hear any shots.”
Buckner grinned and said, “That’s because there wasn’t any shootin’. Cobb there laid into ’em with a broken table leg like ol’ Samson with the jawbone of an ass in the Bible.”
John Henry was a little surprised to hear Buckner make a reference to the Good Book, but he supposed that even crooked deputies might have once been little boys dragged to church by their mamas.
Miller looked at John Henry and said, “I thought the sheriff told you to take the rest of the day off.”
“He did,” John Henry agreed, “but after supper at the boardinghouse, I decided to walk back downtown with Deputy Buckner and Deputy Kemp.”
“And naturally the three of you wound up in the Buzzard’s Nest.”
Buckner sa
id, “You know how we like to start our shift off with a little eye-opener, Carl.”
Miller grunted. He waved a hand toward the stairs and said, “All right, take ’em up to the cell block. It’s a good thing we’ve got enough empty cells. Things better stay quiet the rest of the night, though, or else I don’t know where we’ll put any more prisoners.”
“We’ll put ’em three to a cell,” Buckner said. “That way there’ll be plenty of room left for other miscreants.”
It didn’t take long to get the prisoners locked up. The townspeople who had lent an unwilling hand to get them over there left in a hurry, obviously not wanting to spend any more time in the jail than necessary.
When the deputies came downstairs, Miller asked them, “What do you want to charge ’em with, attempted murder?”
Buckner frowned and said, “I ain’t sure they meant to kill us, Carl. More than likely they just figured to give us a good stompin’. I’d lean toward callin’ it assault on a peace officer. How about you, Aaron?”
Kemp grunted his assent.
Miller turned to John Henry.
“What do you say, Cobb?”
“Well, the town’s not depending on them for their blacksmithing skills, like the case with the Farnhams,” John Henry replied. “Do they all work at the same mine?”
“Yeah, the Lucky Seven,” Buckner said.
“Having all six of them locked up for very long might put a big dent in the crew up there,” John Henry said. “And the town gets a lot of business from the mines, I expect. So it would be a good gesture to maybe give them a stiff fine and then turn them loose. The mine owner might even pay the fine.”
Miller scratched his heavy jaw with a thumbnail and frowned in thought. After a moment he said, “I’ll have to clear it with the sheriff, but that’s not a bad idea, I guess. They can cool their heels overnight.” He looked at John Henry and added, “Anyway, it looked like you’d already doled out some punishment to ’em, Cobb. Tell me, do people just naturally try to kill you wherever you go?”
“Sometimes it seems like it,” John Henry said.
* * *
The boardinghouse was dark when he got back to it. John Henry supposed the people who lived there turned in early.
Most honest people went to bed when it got dark, or shortly after that, he reminded himself with a wry smile. It was the lawbreakers, and those who had to deal with them, who made up the majority of the night’s population.
The front door wasn’t locked. Businesses might lock their doors at night, but private residences were always left open. John Henry remembered enough from his tour of the house that afternoon to make his way to the stairs and climb them to the second floor.
His naturally observant nature helped him recall which room was his. He didn’t want to make a mistake and walk in on someone else, so when he came to the door he thought belonged to his room, he knocked softly on it before he grasped the knob with his left hand and turned it.
Habitual caution kept his right hand on the butt of his revolver as he opened the door and stepped into the room.
Nobody shot at him, so after a moment he closed the door. He took a match from his pocket and snapped it to life with his thumbnail. The flame’s glow showed him that the room was empty. He lit the lamp on the small table.
A knock as soft as the one he had laid on the panel a few seconds earlier sounded behind him.
Not knowing who it might be, John Henry drew his gun. He went to the door, and instead of calling out and giving somebody on the other side of the door with a rifle or a shotgun something to shoot at, he grasped the knob instead, twisted it, and jerked the door open.
Kate Collins took an involuntary step backward at the sight of him standing there with a gun in his hand, but she kept her lips pressed tightly together and didn’t let out a startled gasp. Instead she said curtly, “Put that away.”
Since she didn’t seem to be any real threat, standing there in a dressing gown that was tightly belted around her, with her red hair loose around her shoulders, he did as she requested and slid the Colt back into leather.
“What can I do for you, Miss Collins?” he asked.
“I heard you come in a minute ago. My grandfather and I don’t like to have our boarders disturbed, so it’s probably best if everyone is in their rooms before this time of night.”
“I was pretty quiet,” John Henry pointed out. “I don’t think I disturbed anybody.”
“If I heard you, some of the other boarders could have, too,” Kate said.
John Henry supposed that was true, but he thought it was unlikely, too. Kate must have been listening for his return, he thought. She knew he had left with Buckner and Kemp, but unlike the two of them, he was off duty tonight and Kate knew that. She knew he would be coming back to the boardinghouse sooner or later.
So why had she been waiting for him? John Henry couldn’t help but ask himself that question, and as he did, he was reminded of the kiss he’d shared with Kate that afternoon. All he’d been doing was trying to maintain his pose as one of Sheriff Dav’s crooked deputies, but for a second there, Kate had responded to him. At least, he believed she had.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll try to be more discreet in the future.”
“Thank you,” Kate said with a nod. “I appreciate that.” She started to turn away but paused. “You know, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard the sheriff or any of his men apologize for anything since they’ve been in Chico. You’re . . . unusual, Mr. Cobb.”
“No, I’m just like the others,” John Henry said. He could prove it by making advances toward her again, he thought, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do that.
“Maybe,” Katie said speculatively. “Maybe not.”
With that she turned away and started along the hall toward her room. John Henry quietly closed the door. He wasn’t sure what to make of Kate’s reaction to him.
He just hoped that he could get to the bottom of Dav’s plans quickly and take action to bring the so-called sheriff to justice.
He didn’t like who he was pretending to be.
* * *
The rest of the night passed quietly. John Henry rose early, as he was in the habit of doing, so he was downstairs in the dining room when Kate Collins began putting breakfast on the table a few minutes before six. She raised her eyebrows in surprise when she saw him.
“I didn’t think you men ever got out of bed until the day was half over,” she commented.
“After that supper last night, I didn’t want to take a chance on missing breakfast,” he said with a grin. He was stiff and sore from all the pounding on him that had been done the day before, but he tried not to show it.
Kate just said, “Hmmph,” and returned to the kitchen.
None of John Henry’s fellow deputies showed up for breakfast, but he got a chance to meet the other boarders in the house. In addition to the Petersons, who had been there for supper the night before, he met Alvin Turnage, who was a teller at the bank, Clara Mims, a middle-aged spinster who clerked at the Petersons’ store, and George Hooper, the manager of the local freight line office. All of them greeted him warily because of the badge pinned to his shirt, but John Henry was polite, if not overly friendly. Masquerading as a cold-blooded gunman went against the grain for him, so all he could do was manage it as best he could.
Not surprisingly, the bacon, hotcakes, and fried eggs were delicious, even more so when washed down with several cups of hot, strong coffee. John Henry enjoyed the meal a great deal. It would have been even better with some good conversation, but the other people at the table were quiet and subdued, probably because they were all afraid of him. He would have liked to tell them who he really was and set their minds at ease, but that was going to have to wait.
After breakfast was over, John Henry drank the last of the coffee in his cup and stood up.
“That was mighty fine, Miss Collins,” he said. “I’m much obliged to you for the meal.”
“You continue to surprise me, Deputy,” she replied coolly. “Not only do you apologize, but you say thank you as well.”
“I was raised to—” He stopped short. He’d been about to say that he was raised to treat people decently, but that wasn’t something John Cobb would say.
“You were raised to do what, Mr. Cobb?” Kate asked.
“Mind my own business,” John Henry said brusquely. He turned away from the table and strode out, feeling the hostile glances that followed him.
That didn’t go very well, he told himself as he walked toward the sheriff’s office.
Samuel Dav wasn’t there when John Henry reached the office, and neither was Carl Miller. Instead, a man he hadn’t seen before was sitting behind the desk. A deputy’s badge was pinned to his vest.
“Howdy,” the man greeted him in a voice like a washtub full of railroad spikes being dragged across a gravel road. “You must be the new fella.”
“That’s right,” John Henry said. “Name’s Cobb.”
“Oh, I know who you are. Heard all about you,” the man rasped. “I’m Gil Hobart.”
He stood up and shook hands with John Henry. Hobart was a broad-shouldered man with a craggy face to match his voice, dark hair, and a mustache.
“I take care of the jail durin’ the day,” he went on.
“When does the sheriff come in?”
“Shouldn’t be too much longer. Between you and me, I don’t reckon Sheriff Dav sleeps more’n a few hours ever’ night. He’s almost always around.” Hobart chuckled. “A while back, the Dutchie who runs the bakery was spreadin’ rumors that the sheriff was some sort of monster they got legends about over yonder in the Old Country. Don’t know what you call it, but it ain’t really alive, nor dead, neither. Bunch o’ hooey, of course. The sheriff got a good laugh out of it ’fore he set ol’ Heinsdorf straight.”
Like Steve Buckner, Gil Hobart appeared to be the talkative sort. John Henry went to the stove and poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot sitting there staying warm. He took a sip of it—nowhere near as good as Kate’s coffee, he judged, but drinkable—and said, “That’s a mighty odd story. The sheriff seemed human enough to me.”
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