Eight Hours to Die

by William W. Johnstone

  Somewhere out there was Samuel Dav, John Henry thought.

  And every instinct in his body told him that the two of them would be facing each other with guns in their hands before the night was over.

  Chapter Thirty

  Only one lamp was burning in the newspaper office. Edgar Wellman leaned back in the chair behind the desk and watched Dav reading the sheets of paper the sheriff held in his hand. He felt some justifiable anxiety as he waited to see if Dav liked what he had written.

  Finally Dav nodded and set the sheaf of papers back on the desk.

  “Not bad,” he said. “The stories make it sound like I’m responsible for everything good that happens in this part of the territory, whether I really had anything to do with it or not, and they completely ignore the more . . . problematical aspects of the situation.”

  “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” Wellman asked.

  “Exactly,” Dav said with another nod. “And you can get these stories printed in newspapers scattered all over the territory?”

  “I think so. It may take awhile, but I guarantee you, Sheriff, within six months nearly everyone in New Mexico will have heard of the gallant fighting lawman named Samuel Dav.”

  That put a pleased smile on Dav’s face.

  “Good. When it comes time for the president to appoint a new territorial governor, I want my name to be the first one that comes to mind.”

  Wellman frowned and said, “Why would the president need to appoint a new governor? I thought General Wallace was doing a good job.”

  Dav waved off the question.

  “Never mind about that,” he said. “Maybe you’d better get started working on the first speech I’ll be making once I take office. I know it’ll be awhile yet, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.”

  Wellman was about to ask more questions when he decided it might be wise not to press Dav on the issue. Instead he said, “I didn’t know you wanted me to write your political speeches for you, too.”

  “I’ve been impressed with your work, Edgar. You’re good at what you do.”

  Praise such as that had always pleased Wellman. He found that it wasn’t quite so flattering when it came from the likes of Dav. However, he had thrown his lot in with the sheriff, and it would be dangerous to try to back out now.

  So he just nodded and said, “Thank you. I appreciate that, Sheriff.”

  “Call me Sam,” Dav replied. “We’re going to be partners now, after all.”

  Wellman knew better than to believe that. Dav didn’t have any partners, only people who followed his orders out of greed or fear or both. But if Dav wanted to pretend otherwise, that was fine with Wellman.

  “All right, Sam,” he said.

  Dav stood up.

  “Make sure you put something in that speech about how I’m going to crack down on lawlessness from one end of the territory to the other. There aren’t going to be gangs of crooks preying on the people of New Mexico anymore.”

  If Dav got his way, that would be true, thought Wellman.

  There would only be one gang of crooks preying on the citizens, and its headquarters would be in the territorial governor’s office.

  Dav left the newspaper office. Wellman gathered up the papers and aligned them in a neat stack on his desk. He blew out the lamp and went into his living quarters at the rear of the building.

  The window was open back there to let in a little fresh air, and as Wellman was feeling in his pocket for a match to light the lamp beside his bed, he heard the low mutter of voices from somewhere outside. He left the match where it was, and in a mixture of caution and a journalist’s curiosity, he moved closer to the window.

  The curtains were closed over it, muffling the sound. He parted them slightly and put his ear to the gap. There shouldn’t have been anyone skulking around in the alley at this time of night, and he wanted to know who was out there and what they were up to.

  “—waiting for us at the jail,” Wellman heard. The man’s voice was familiar, and after a couple of seconds the newspaperman placed it. The voice belonged to Alvin Turnage, one of the tellers at the bank.

  Something was different, though. Turnage’s tone was crisp and hard, as if he were accustomed to giving orders. That didn’t make any sense. The man was about as mild mannered as he could be.

  Wellman caught part of another sentence.

  “—go after the other deputies, right?”

  That question came in a rumbling tone that unmistakably belonged to Peabody Farnham, the blacksmith. Turnage and Farnham . . . and something about the deputies? That didn’t make any sense.

  But Wellman’s journalistic instincts were starting to kick in now. His gut told him that something was going on in Chico tonight, something big and important and probably dangerous. His first thought was to go find Sheriff Dav or some of the deputies and warn them.

  If he did that, though, he wouldn’t be able to see how the story was going to play out. And the story was everything, wasn’t it? He couldn’t very well report the news if he was helping to make it, could he?

  The men who’d been behind the newspaper office had gone on now. Wellman pushed the curtains aside and noiselessly raised the window more, so he could lean through it and look along the alley. It was plenty dark back here, but he could make out the shapes of half a dozen men dragging some limp forms. They were headed for the jail, Turnage had said. Wellman’s pulse began to race as he recalled that.

  The townspeople were fighting back at last, Wellman realized. They were staging a coup, an uprising against Dav’s tyrannical rule. But even if they had managed to capture a few of the deputies, they wouldn’t stand any chance against the rest of the sheriff’s cold-blooded killer crew. Would they?

  Wellman didn’t know the answer to that, but he knew one thing.

  He was going to find out.

  * * *

  The odds against the groups of townies being able to capture the off-duty deputies and bring them to the jail without being discovered were astronomical, John Henry knew. He wasn’t really expecting it to happen. But the more of Dav’s men who could be taken out of the fight at the start, the better. It was a matter of making the odds not quite so overwhelming.

  Still, when Turnage, the Farnhams, and several other men arrived at the jail with four prisoners, John Henry began to hope maybe the plan would work without any hitches after all.

  “Any problems?” he asked Turnage as Peabody and Nate hauled the bound, gagged, and unconscious deputies up the stairs to the cell block.

  Turnage shook his head.

  “No, we got in the back door of the Buzzard’s Nest without any trouble. There was one moment when I was worried, when one of the girls who works there discovered us, but she didn’t give the alarm. She just looked at us and turned away. She probably has grudges of her own against the sheriff’s men.”

  “More than likely,” John Henry agreed.

  “We took them one by one, knocked them out, and tied them up. They weren’t any match for Peabody and Nate. Not many men would be.”

  “I can testify to that,” John Henry said, recalling his own run-in with the blacksmith and his son.

  Creases appeared on the bank teller’s forehead as he asked, “What about the men who were going to the hotel?”

  John Henry could only shake his head and say, “I haven’t seen or heard anything from them. But maybe that’s good. There hasn’t been any shooting or yelling from over there.”

  “The old idea that no news is good news, eh? I wish I could believe that.”

  So did John Henry.

  “Do you want us to go see if we can find out what’s holding them up?” Turnage went on.

  John Henry considered the idea for a moment, then shook his head.

  “No, you and the others are going to fort up here for the time being,” he said. “Nobody’s going back out there until we’re all together again.”

  Turnage looked like he might want to argue the point, but before he
could another knock sounded on the office door. John Henry motioned for Turnage to stay where he was. He drew his gun as he approached the door.

  “Who’s out there?” he called softly.

  “Kate Collins,” came the reply.

  John Henry stiffened in surprise. Kate and her grandfather were supposed to stay at the boardinghouse tonight, well out of the line of fire. Jimpson was too old to be right in the middle of a gun battle, and Kate was . . . well, Kate was a woman, and although John Henry knew she might argue that such an attitude was unfair, he couldn’t help the way he felt about such things.

  He checked through the peephole to make sure none of the deputies had brought them here as prisoners in an effort to gain entry to the jail. Kate and Jimpson were alone. He unlocked the door and swung it open.

  “Get inside quick,” he told them. “What are you—”

  Before he could finish asking them what they were doing there, a burst of gunshots rang out, shattering the night’s stillness, and John Henry could tell that they came from the direction of the hotel.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Well, so much for everything going off without a hitch, John Henry thought bitterly.

  But that reaction lasted only a split second. He wasn’t the sort to stand around brooding when action needed to be taken.

  “Get in here!” he told Kate and Jimpson. “Alvin, hold the jail!”

  “I’m coming with you,” Turnage said as Kate and her grandfather hurried into the building.

  “No, you’re not. I need a good man to take over here.” John Henry added over his shoulder, “Lock the door behind me!”

  He didn’t take the time to see if Turnage followed his orders. Instead he ran toward the hotel, gun in hand.

  After that initial volley, a crashing silence had fallen over Chico again. The silence didn’t last long. Before John Henry could reach the hotel, more shots roared. Not all together now, but in an irregular pattern, as if men were firing at each other from behind cover.

  As John Henry cut across the street and approached the hotel, lightning flickered and thunder boomed like cannon fire. The storm had held off all evening, but now it appeared that it was about to break.

  The flash from the electrical display in the heavens lit up the street and the boardwalks for a second, and during that time John Henry spotted another man running toward the hotel. He recognized the stocky form of Deputy Aaron Kemp.

  Kemp saw him, too, and yelled, “Cobb! Do you know what’s goin’ on? What’s all that shooting?”

  Kemp didn’t know yet that a small-scale revolution was taking place in Chico tonight, nor did he know John Henry’s true identity. He could put that to use, John Henry thought.

  He paused as he and Kemp both reached the front of the hotel at the same time.

  “The shots came from inside,” John Henry said. “We’d better find out what’s happening.”

  “Have you seen Steve?”

  “No,” John Henry lied. “Maybe he’s inside.”

  Concern for his friend made Kemp turn toward the hotel’s double doors. As he did so, John Henry stepped behind him and struck. The gun in his hand chopped down in a hard, swift stroke and thudded against the back of Kemp’s head.

  Kemp never saw the blow coming. He grunted and fell to his knees, then pitched forward onto his face, out cold. John Henry reached down, grabbed the collar of Kemp’s shirt, and dragged him to the end of the boardwalk and into the dark mouth of the alley beside the hotel.

  John Henry would have liked to take Kemp back to the jail and lock him up, since that would put him out of the fight permanently, but there was no time for that. The gun battle was still going on inside the hotel. Innocent people might be dying. John Henry would just have to hope that Kemp would remain unconscious for a while.

  He ran down the alley, figuring it might be better to use the rear stairs. Pausing at the side door, he waited for a second, then jerked it open and went through in a rush. No bursts of muzzle flame split the gloom in the rear hallway.

  The stairs were to John Henry’s right. He could tell from the way the reports echoed in the stairwell that the shots were coming from the second floor. He went up, taking the stairs two or three at a time.

  Stopping at the top of the staircase, he went to a knee and took off his hat to peer around the corner into the upper corridor. At the far end of the hall were the main stairs that led down into the lobby. A man lay there on the landing, facedown. John Henry’s mouth tightened into a grim line as he spotted the pool of blood spreading around the man’s head.

  He couldn’t see the dead man’s face, but the man’s clothes told John Henry that he was one of the townspeople, not a deputy. That meant one of his allies had already been killed.

  Another man was down at the landing, lying behind a small table he had overturned. He fired over the top of it at an open door about halfway along the corridor. At least two men were inside the room that went with that door, leaning out to throw lead at the man who had taken cover behind the table.

  The angle was bad on both sides, but the two men inside the hotel room had the advantage of superior firepower. Eventually they would shoot that table to pieces. It woudn’t stop their bullets much longer.

  John Henry thought furiously. The room where the deputies were holed up was on the front side of the hotel. A narrow balcony ran along there. John Henry figured that represented his best chance to get the drop on them.

  He put his hat on and stood up, then ducked around the corner from the rear stairs and lowered his shoulder, ramming it against the closest door. With a splintering of wood, the door burst open. Light from the hall spilled into the room and revealed an elderly couple sitting up in bed, arms around each other, eyes wide with terror.

  “Sorry, folks,” John Henry told them as he ran across the room to the window. “Just stay hunkered down and you’ll be all right.”

  He hoped that was true. He thrust up the sash and stepped over the sill onto the balcony.

  He had counted the doors, so he knew how many windows he had to pass to reach the room he wanted. Even if he hadn’t, he would have known where he needed to go because of the muzzle flashes he saw through the window. The men in the room weren’t paying any attention to what was going on behind them, so they had no idea he was right outside.

  He tried the window, but it wouldn’t go up. Locked! That left him only one way in.

  The balcony was only a couple of feet wide, more for decoration than anything else. John Henry drew back as much as he could. As he did so, another cannon volley of thunder shook the settlement, accompanied by a blinding flash of lightning. John Henry felt the first fat drop of rain hit his face as he launched himself at the window as hard as he could.

  With a crash of shattering glass, he smashed through it and fell toward the floor inside the room. Sharp edges clawed at him, but he ignored the pain. He caught himself on his left hand as the two men in the room whirled toward him in surprise. Another lightning flash from outside revealed their faces. John Henry recognized them as two of Dav’s deputies who’d been sleeping here in the hotel, just as he expected.

  Then their guns began to roar again and his Colt blasted back at them, as the muzzle flashes competed with the lightning to see which could be the most garish and eye-searing.

  Whether the deputies had recognized him or not, they must have taken him for an enemy. Bullets plowed into the floor next to John Henry and whined through the air above his head. His revolver bucked in his hand as he triggered four swift shots.

  The slugs hammered into the two gunmen and drove them backward. One of the men hit the wall of the hotel room and started to slide down on it, leaving a bloody smear on the wallpaper from the wounds in his back where John Henry’s bullets had come out.

  The other deputy toppled through the open door, landing half in and half out of the room. He twitched as the man down at the landing shot him again and drove a slug into his body.

  John Henry scrambl
ed to his feet and approached the two fallen men carefully, keeping his gun leveled in case he needed to use it again. He still had one round in the cylinder.

  Both deputies were dead, though, so John Henry took advantage of the chance to dump the empty cartridges and thumb in fresh rounds from the loops on his shell belt. He filled all six chambers this time, instead of leaving an empty one for the Colt’s hammer to rest on as he usually did. Before this night was over he would probably need every shot he could get.

  The man in the hallway had stopped shooting. John Henry called, “Hold your fire! I’m coming out.”

  “Who’s there?” the man shouted back.

  “Marshal Sixkiller.”

  He stepped into the corridor and saw the man at the landing climbing painfully to his feet. Blood stained the man’s shirt on the side.

  “How badly are you hit?” John Henry asked as he hurried down the hall.

  The man shook his head and said, “It’s just a crease, I think. Hurts like blazes, though.”

  “They’ll do that,” John Henry agreed. He was able to get a better look at the dead townsman now and recognized him as the baker, Wilhelm Heinsdorf. That was a damned shame, John Henry thought . . . but it was a damned shame any innocent people had to die to free Chico from the evil grip of Samuel Dav.

  “What happened?”

  “One of the deputies woke up just at the wrong time and grabbed a gun, started blazing away at us just as we were about to grab them,” the townie replied. “Heinsdorf and I tried to fight back. The others turned tail and ran.” Scorn was obvious in his voice.

  “Not everybody’s cut out for a gunfight,” John Henry said. “Were there only two deputies?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know where the others who have rooms here are.”

  “Let’s get back to the jail. We may be in for a siege now.”

  And it might be too late for them to reach that sanctuary, John Henry thought, but he didn’t see any point in saying it until he knew for sure what the situation was. One thing was certain: at least some of the other deputies would have heard the gunfire and would know that something was happening on this stormy night. They would be primed for trouble.