Hell's Half Acre

by William W. Johnstone

  “And I’m a man who makes dreams come true—the bigger the dream, the harder I work to make it a reality. Savvy?”

  “I guess,” Jess said.

  “Don’t guess. I hate a guessing man. You got two choices: take the money or ride out of here a pauper. Will you be a rancher or a rat catcher? It’s a simple question and guessing don’t enter into it.”

  Jess said nothing and Koenig slammed the table. “Man, we got this town in the palms of our hands and all we have to do is squeeze it dry, wring it out like we’d use a whore and then, when it’s all used up, we walk away from it and don’t look back.”

  Looking at him, Jess decided Kurt Koenig was a ruthless man who always got what he wanted. He seemed unstoppable, not human but a force of nature. To stand in his way would be like a man trying to stop the progress of a tornado.

  Jess picked up the money. He would hitch his wagon to Koenig’s dark star but only for so long . . . only until he had enough money saved. That was it . . . the way it would be.

  Koenig gave a little smile of triumph. “All right, Sheriff, saddle up. We got riding to do,” he said. It was only then that Jess saw the city marshal’s shield pinned to Koenig’s vest.

  “Ride to where?” Jess said, getting to his feet. Koenig said, “Not far, only to Mary’s Creek just west of town.”

  “Who’s Mary?” Jess said. “Is she a farmer’s wife?”

  Koenig smiled. “Bless you for a swab. The creek is named for Mary LeBone, an Indian woman who drowned there a few years back. It’s open grass country and good graze for cattle. The Comanche and Apache hunted buffalo out that way, but the Indians and the buffs are all gone now.”

  “Out of my jurisdiction, isn’t it?” Jess said.

  “I’ll tell you what your jurisdiction is,” Koenig said. “We’re going to stop a crime before it happens. Now get your horse and rifle and we’ll ride.”

  * * *

  Two men were with Koenig, both of them with the broken-nosed look of street-fighting toughs. They introduced themselves to Jess as members of the Panther City Boys and let it go at that. Koenig, his eyes on the trail ahead, heard but said nothing.

  As the noon hour approached horses and riders cast shadows that pooled on the grass. The day was sultry, holding the promise of a summer rain, and the sun burned the sky like a red-hot coin.

  Koenig drew rein and turned his head to Jess. “You’ll soon make the acquaintance of Jeddah Burns and his sons Caleb and Jethro. They are breeds and not nice people.”

  One of the toughs sniggered as Jess said, “What crime are they about to commit?”

  “The murder of one Kurt Koenig, late of Fort Worth in the great state of Texas. At least, that’s the plan.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Jeddah sent me a message by a passing rider.” He reached into his coat pocket and produced a crumpled piece of paper. “Read it and weep,” he said.

  Jess smoothed out the note and read:

  KONEG YOU DONE FER MY DOTTER

  LITTLE AMY AND ME AND MY BOYS

  IS COMIN INTO FORT WORTH TO

  DO FER YOU. THIS IS A RECKONING.

  It was signed, Jeddah Burns.

  “Seems like he’s on the prod, all right,” Jess said. “What did you do to little Amy?”

  “I didn’t knock her up, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Koenig said. “Amy Burns worked for me at the Silver Garter strictly as a singer and dancer. But then she met a gambler who promised her marriage and a new life and then left her.” Koenig shook his head. “She cut her wrists and even Doc Sun couldn’t save her. She was eighteen years old.”

  “And Jeddah Burns blames you.”

  “You read the note.”

  “You’ve met him before?” Jess said.

  “Oh yeah. About a year ago he came to the Silver Garter and tried to take his little girl home to the family cabin by force. He shot one of my boys and would have plugged another if Johnny Dash here”—Koenig jerked a thumb over his shoulder—“hadn’t put a bullet into him. Jeddah hightailed it out of town, leaking blood, and this is the first I’ve heard from him since.”

  The man called Dash, about as tall as Jess but twice as big, said, “Amy told me later that her pa and her brothers wanted to keep her as a slave and for other stuff I can’t mention in polite company. Damn, but she was a right purty little gal.”

  Koenig grinned. “Johnny, I’m impressed by your sensitivity,” he said.

  Dash said, “Huh?”

  “I heard there’s a whole Burns clan up Cooke County way on the south bank of the Red—white, Mex and black all mixed up,” Koenig said. “Seems they’re an inbred bunch on account of how the daughters can never outrun their brothers. If Amy hadn’t met that gambling man she’d have done all right. She was well rid of her pa.”

  Koenig sat straighter in the saddle, his square chin jutting and determined. “All right, let’s go kill some breeds.”

  “Kurt,” Jess said, using the man’s given name for the first time, “we can arrest them and take them back to Fort Worth.”

  “Arrest them for what? Sending a threatening note? This is not an arresting time, Jess, it’s a killing time. So we ride and get it done.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The messenger who delivered the threat from Jeddah Burns said the three men had camped by Mary’s Creek in a ruined cabin that had been burned by Comanches in times past. The smell of smoke in the breeze led Jess and the others directly to it.

  A skilled draw fighter, Koenig dismounted and told Jess Casey to do the same. A horse’s back was not a good place for a fast draw and shoot. His two men remained mounted, rifles across their saddle horns.

  Jess and Koenig walked their horses across sun-dried grass and stopped when they were within a long rifle shot of the cabin.

  “Jess, start earning your money,” Koenig said. “Go tell Jeddah he has a choice—come out of the cabin and fight in the open like a man or stay inside and force us to come in after him.”

  “Hell, he’ll gun me for sure,” Jess said.

  “No, he won’t. Men like Burns are born to the feud and respect the parley. He’ll let you deliver your message and walk back here.”

  “I wish I had your confidence,” Jess said, his belly tight.

  “Get it done, Sheriff. It’s clouding up to rain and I don’t want to get wet.”

  Jess handed off the reins to Koenig and stepped toward the cabin. The dry grass crunched under his boots and the roofless cabin’s two burned-out windows seemed to stare at him with coal black eyes.

  When he was within hailing distance, Jess shouted, “Jeddah Burns! Step outside and hear my words.” He knew he sounded a tad melodramatic, but then this was an intense moment. The possibility of a bullet between the eyes concentrates a man’s thoughts wonderfully.

  “What the hell do you want?” This from the cabin. “Speak up, now.”

  “I have a message from Kurt Koenig,” Jess said.

  “I see him there,” the man yelled. “Dirty yellow coward is scared to come close. State your business and be damned to ye for looking like that dog George Custer. He done for some of my kinfolk.”

  Jess, stung by the Custer remark, stepped a few yards closer and said, “Mr. Koenig says he’s calling you out. He says for you to come face him and fight like a man, instead of hiding in the cabin like a frightened old woman.”

  “This is Caleb Burns,” another, younger voice said. “Is that what he said to my pa?”

  “Well, there was a lot more, about how your pa is a fraidycat and how he’s gutless and low-down, but I don’t want to say it. Mr. Koenig told me that your pa is so mean he stole a widow woman’s only milk cow and then pissed on her kindling, but I don’t want to tell you that, either.”

  Jeddah Burns roared, “Damn it, we’re coming out, and tell Koenig to be ready to get his work in because I aim to see that he’s skinned an’ his hide hung out to dry.”

  Jess backed away, wondering just how much old Jedda
h set store by the parley. But he reached Koenig and the others without drawing a bullet.

  “I caught the gist of it,” the big man said. “Jeddah was loud enough.”

  Jess said, “You heard him say he’s coming out?”

  “I heard him,” Koenig said. “Now we’ll see.”

  Only two walls of the rock cabin still stood, the front and left side. It was enough to hide the Burns boys from view and it made their surprise attack all the more unexpected.

  Digging spurs into their horses, they came around the cabin and headed straight for Jess and the others. Jeddah was in the lead. He fired and worked a Winchester from his shoulder and the passing breeze flattened his long gray beard against his chest.

  Behind him Jess heard the mallet thud! of a bullet hitting flesh and one of Koenig’s men screamed and hit the ground hard. Its stirrups flying, the man’s panicked horse galloped away.

  Without conscious thought, Jess found his Colt in his hand. He and Koenig fired at the same time. Jeddah shrieked and threw up his arms, his rifle cartwheeling away from him. One of his sons—Jess later identified him as Jethro—let out a strangled cry of grief and fury and rode hard at Koenig, his reins trailing, a bucking revolver in each hand in the old hell-for-leather charge that Captain Quantrill had made so famous.

  Koenig stood and worked his Colt, his face set and his legs spread wide. Bullets tugged at his coat but he fired steadily, refusing to give ground. Jethro jerked in the saddle as he was hit in the chest and his left arm suddenly flopped to his side and his revolver dropped to the ground. He tried to bring up his right arm but the momentum of his horse carried him past Koenig and he failed to get off a shot. The surviving rifleman behind Koenig jerked his mount to one side and fired into Jethro’s belly as the young man thundered past him.

  Jethro was done. His horse ran for about fifty yards, stopped dead and the man flew over its head and crashed onto the ground. Even at distance there was a distinct snap! as the man’s neck broke.

  Meantime Jess had his hands full with Caleb.

  Not trusting to the charge like his brother, he drew rein, slid his rifle from the boot and slammed a shot at Jess. The bullet was close enough that it clipped a shallow arc from the top of Jess’s left ear. Alarmed, he returned fire instinctively, a reaction to danger that had served him so well the night before. His bullet slammed into the receiver of Caleb’s Winchester then ranged downward into the man’s shoulder. Hit hard by the mangled round, his right shoulder a mess of blood and splintered bone, Caleb there and then decided to quit the fight.

  “I’m out of it!” he yelled. He dropped his rifle and raised his good arm.

  “Unbuckle your gun belt,” Koenig said.

  Caleb did as he was told and his holstered Colt dropped to the ground. “How’s my pa and brother Jethro?” he said.

  “Jethro is as dead as a mackerel and your pa is the same way,” Koenig said. “I figure by now they’re stringing wire in hell, boy.”

  Caleb’s chest was hollow, his shoulders hunched forward as he battled to absorb pain. But his bloodless lips were pale under his mustache. “I told pa we should shoot it out from the cabin,” he said. “But pa wouldn’t listen. He was a horseback fighter, a thing Bill Anderson teached him. So Bloody Bill done for him in the end.”

  Caleb untied the red bandanna from around his neck and shoved it between his wounded shoulder and shirt. “What happens to me?” he said.

  Koenig smiled. “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  Caleb said, “Let me go back to Cooke County and I won’t bother you no more.”

  “I think that will depend on a judge,” Jess said. A thin trail of blood trickled down his ear. He recalled the law book he’d read from cover to cover when he was snowed in at a Kansas line camp one winter and said, “You made an affray and resisted arrest with violence aforethought to say nothing of attempted murder.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Caleb said.

  “It means you’re in a heap of trouble, boy,” Koenig said. “You’re Caleb, right? How old are you?”

  “Sixteen, maybe seventeen, I don’t rightly know.”

  Koenig nodded and stepped to Jeddah’s body. He used his boot to roll the old man on his back and pa’s pale, sightless eyes stared at the clouding sky. “The old buzzard was going to skin me,” Koenig said.

  “Pa skun men afore an’ a Comanche woman one time,” Caleb said. “But only after they was dead, him being a church deacon an’ all.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be sadly missed by his congregation,” Koenig said. Then, “So what do I do with you, Caleb? If I let you go you’re sure to come back one day and shoot me in the back. Ain’t that so?”

  The young man shook his head. “I’m never coming back here, mister. I should never have left Cooke County in the first place.”

  “Your sister killed herself over a tinhorn gambler,” Koenig said. “Did you know that? Cut her wrists. Filled a damned copper bathtub with her blood.”

  “No, I never knew that,” Caleb said.

  “Well, now you do,” Koenig said.

  “I guess mistakes were made,” Caleb said.

  “And you made them,” Koenig said.

  “Let’s take him back to town and get his shoulder seen to, Kurt,” Jess said.

  “One of my men lies dead on the ground,” Koenig said. “I can’t let that go.”

  “He’s an accessory to murder,” Jess said. “He’ll spend a big chunk of his life in Huntsville.”

  Koenig shook his head. “No, I don’t want that. Let’s be sporting about this matter.”

  He stepped to his horse, slid his Winchester from the boot and said, “Caleb, are you a sporting man?”

  “I don’t know,” Caleb said.

  “Well, we’ll find out, won’t we,” Koenig said. “Jess, see that stunted mesquite tree over yonder to the right? How far off would you say that is?”

  Jess surveyed the flat land, then said, “A hundred paces. No less that that.”

  “That was my impression, about a hundred yards or so,” Koenig said. He smiled like a cobra smiles. “Here’s a lark, Caleb. I’ll give you a twenty-yard start before I start firing. If you can reach the mesquite I’ll cease fire and you can travel on to Cooke County unharmed.”

  Koenig racked a .44-40 cartridge into the chamber. “I can’t say fairer than that.”

  Caleb Burns was steadily losing blood and his face was ashen. “And if I don’t want to play your game?” he said.

  Koenig raised the rifle until it pointed at the young man’s belly. “Then I’ll gut-shoot you and leave you here. You’ll scream for hours, Caleb, and when death finally comes it will be a blessing.”

  Caleb Burns read Koenig’s face and knew he was bucking a stacked deck. He swung his horse around and kicked the animal into a gallop.

  Koenig let him go. Without hurry, he kneeled on the ground and took up a firing position. A flurry of rain swept across the grama grass and in the distance thunder boomed.

  “Don’t do this, Kurt,” Jess said.

  The big man ignored him.

  Caleb Burns had almost reached the mesquite. Thirty yards . . . twenty . . . ten . . . He drew rein when he reached the stunted tree and looked back. Then a moment of bravado that cost him his life.

  Caleb had not pegged Kurt Koenig as an expert rifleman. The big man was a named draw fighter, trained to shoot across the width of a card table. Making long-range rifle shots didn’t enter into his thinking.

  An old proverb says, “By ignorance we mistake, and by mistakes we learn.”

  Caleb made a mistake by turning his horse broadside to Koenig and raising his hat. But he would not live long enough to learn from it.

  Kurt Koenig’s bullet hit an inch to the left of Caleb’s nose. It was deflected slightly by bone, punched through the young man’s neck and smashed into vertebrae, cutting the spinal cord.

  Luckily for him, Caleb Burns was dead when he hit the ground.

  Jess Casey was appal
led. Koenig had executed the young man, murdered him and had lied to him. But the big man was smiling as his surviving gang member slapped him on the back and told him he’d done good.

  “Hell, boss, even Dan’l Boone couldn’t make a shot like that,” the man said.

  Koenig saw the shocked look on Jess’s face and said, “He should have kept on riding instead of making a grandstand play.” Jess was at a loss for words and Koenig stepped into the silence. “You did well today, Jess, stood your ground and got your work in. I won’t forget it come bonus time.” Then, dismissing him: “Johnny, round up the horses and strip the bodies of guns and whatever else they might have. We’ll let the coyotes bury them.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” the man called Johnny said, grinning.

  To Jess it sounded like one murderous thug addressing another.

  “I won’t forget it come bonus time.”

  Jess Casey had sold himself for thirty pieces of silver and now he began to understand just what that entailed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Big gunfight today, my friend, three men dead,” Dr. Sun said.

  Jess Casey watched the moths fluttering around the oil lamp in his office, and then said, “I had a hand in it.”

  “And now your hand feels dirty?”

  Jess nodded. “You could say that.”

  “Why do you stay?” Dr. Sun said. “This is not for you.”

  Smiling slightly, Jess said, “Doc, a man reaches my age and he’s all stove-up with years of cowboying and he looks ahead to a future bright with what? I can tell you, bright with nothing.”

  “So Kurt Koenig holds your future in his own dirty hand?”

  “He’s my ticket out of here with enough money in my poke to start my own spread. Sometimes a man has to bite the bullet.”

  “And sit down with thieves.”

  “Thanks for fixing up my ear, Doc. It doesn’t sting near as bad.”

  “Take a walk with me, Sheriff,” Dr. Sun said.

  He’d swapped his colorful robe for a high-button suit, an oilskin cape and a bowler hat, though his long pigtail still hung down his back.