Fighting Men

by Ralph Cotton

  “Sorry, Joe,” said Chicago, having noted that Geneva had gone back inside. “Are we going out there?”

  “Hell yes, we’re going,” said Curly Joe. “I want to know what the hell really happened out at that cabin.” He cut Big Chicago a narrowed stare. “Looks like the only way I’ll know for sure is if I ride out there myself and see if my men are dead or alive.” He looked at Russell and Thatcher and added, “If we happen upon some lone sumbitch at the fork in the trail, and have to kill him, I suppose we can all handle that, can’t we?”

  “He’s dead, soon as we get ourselves into scattergun range,” said Thatcher, patting his shotgun. Beside him, Russell nodded in agreement.

  “Good! Get our horses while I grab my boots and gun belt,” Joe commanded. He turned and hurried back up the side stairs into Geneva’s bedroom, slamming the balcony doors behind himself. Beside the bed, he pulled on his boots, grabbed his gun belt and threw it around his waist. Buckling the belt, he looked at the privacy curtain, beyond which were a chamber pot and wash pan. “Hurry up in there. I’m leaving,” he said.

  When Geneva gave no reply, he holstered his Colt quickly, stepped over and threw back the curtain. “Damn it, woman, I said—” His words stopped short.

  Sherman Dahl stood facing him, his feet shoulder width apart beneath the long black riding duster buttoned up to his collar. In Dahl’s hand was a sawed-off shotgun no different than the ones Russell and Thatcher carried on the street below. Against the wall of the small room stood Geneva, spread-eagle, her eyes wide in fright, a bandana tied tight around her mouth.

  Seeing the look of stark, puzzled terror come over Curly Joe’s face, Dahl said, “This is from James Fenwick Hatton.” Then he pulled the trigger; the first hammer dropped.

  “No!” said Curly Joe. He’d managed to snatch up his Colt, but it flew from his hand as the first blast picked him up and drove him backward across the room to the closed balcony doors. The second hammer fell. The blast picked him up from there and hurled him through the balcony doors, ripping out the doors, frames, curtains and all.

  “Lord God!” shouted Russell on the street below. All three men ducked and looked up from the hitch rail toward the double explosions. Above them, Curly Joe, his body entangled in ripped white lace curtains, jolted through the balcony handrail and flew out in a red mist as if launched from the barrel of a cannon. Along with splinters of wood, strips of white lace and shards of glass, Joe’s airborne body sailed out past a low overhang and dropped dead onto the street.

  Stepping from the privy room, Dahl broke open the shotgun on his way to the open hole in the front wall where the balcony doors had been. Keeping watch on the street below for Big Chicago, he pulled out the two spent loads and replaced them with two fresh rounds from his duster pocket. Catching a glimpse of Big Chicago moving across the street in a crouch, gun in hand, Dahl snapped the shotgun shut quickly and cocked both hammers.

  But as he raised the weapon and took a step forward onto the balcony, behind him he heard Geneva Darrows scream, “You son of a bitch!”

  He turned in time to see her raise Curly Joe’s Colt with both hands and fire repeatedly, the bandana off her mouth and hanging around her neck. The shots hit him hard, moving him steadily backward. The cocked shotgun slipped out of his hands as he stumbled off the edge of the balcony and plunged toward the ground below.

  “I got this son of a—!” Geneva shouted loudly. But her words were also cut short when Dahl’s dropped shotgun hit the floor butt first, angled straight toward her, and both hammers fell as one.

  The double explosion picked her up and blew her through the wooden door out into the hall. Splinters, flesh, brain matter and blood painted a wide streak along the wallpaper as her body hit the top of the stairs and slid down five feet, backward, before stopping, her wide dead eyes seeming to stare at the saloon below.

  Chapter 6

  In the alley behind the saloon, Lilly Jones sat atop her horse, holding the reins to Dahl’s big chestnut bay. Dahl himself had ridden in under a pile of blankets and supplies aboard the old miner’s cart. He’d slipped off the cart and into an alley as the cart rolled along the street toward the saloon. He’d told Lilly to hitch his bay in the alley and get away from there, lest she get tangled up in his trouble. Lilly had arrived unnoticed, a woman leading a spare horse along the back alley-ways of town.

  But she had not followed Dahl’s instructions to the letter. Instead of leaving his horse, she’d waited for him, holding her ground with the animals even as she heard the shots explode from the street. From her spot in the alley, she’d heard Geneva’s voice call out loudly from around the side of the building. She continued to sit for a moment longer, until the double blasts of the shotgun roared again, followed by return pistol and shotgun fire, which finally unnerved her.

  “That’s it, I can’t sit here doing nothing!” she said aloud to herself, gigging her horse forward, leading Dahl’s bay by its reins.

  At the front corner of the alley, she stopped for a second and saw Big Chicago and the other two men backing away from the middle of the street, their emptied shotguns smoking in their hands. Dahl lay half atop Curly Joe’s mangled body. The dead gunman had served to break Dahl’s fall. Unlike Curly Joe, whom the impact of the shotgun had launched out past the low overhang, Dahl had fallen first onto the sloped roof, then rolled off, down onto Joe’s dead, bloody back.

  “That’s enough, men,” Big Chicago said to Russell and Thatcher. “He’s dead.”

  Oh no. . . . Lilly closed her eyes for a second, then nudged her horse forward.

  As she drew close, Russell’s eyes narrowed and he asked, “Who the hell is this?” Then, recognizing the woman on the horse, he exclaimed, “Hell, it’s that whore, Knee-high. Wasn’t she with the lot of yas out there at the cabin?”

  “Yeah, she was there,” said Chicago, giving Lilly a hard stare.

  “Now we’ll hear what happened,” said Thatcher.

  “Like hell we will,” said Big Chicago. He threw his Colt up at arm’s length, aimed it straight at Lilly’s chest and pulled the trigger.

  Seeing the gun aimed at her, too late to get away, Lilly winced and braced herself for the impact. Then she let out a tense breath as she heard the hollow click of the gun hammer fall on a spent round.

  “Damn it to hell,” said Chicago to Russell and Thatcher, “shoot her! My gun’s empty!”

  “So are ours,” said Thatcher.

  “Then load up, damn it!” Chicago bellowed. “Before she cuts and runs!”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Lilly said, staring past the three at Sherman Dahl lying limp atop Curly Joe. “I saw what happened out at the cabin . . . this man shot all three of them, straight up. But it doesn’t matter now. All I want to do is take him away from here.”

  Chicago watched impatiently as Russell and Thatcher reloaded their shotguns. “Are you two jakes going to shoot this whore or not?”

  The two raised their reloaded shotguns toward Lilly at the same time. But this time before they could fire, Henry Eubanks and Stan the bartender stepped out through the batwing doors with raised shotguns of their own. “Hold it, gawdang it!” said Eubanks. “Nobody is shooting this whore. Knee-high is my em-ployee. Lower them scatterguns!”

  Chicago raised his hands chest high. “Easy, Henry, she rode in with this sumbitch,” he said. “I’ll wager that’s even his horse she’s leading.”

  “So?” said Eubanks. “I don’t give a damn if she was with him. It means nothing now.” His hands tightened angrily around the shotgun stock. “If you go and take a look, you’ll see Geneva Darrows is splattered out, bone to gut, all over the upstairs hall! Ain’t nothing you can say that’ll make me feel any better about it.”

  “It wasn’t us who killed Geneva,” said Chicago. “It was this lunatic.” He gestured toward Dahl, lying bloody and still on the ground. “He come here bent on killing Curly Joe. Geneva must’ve got in his way.”

  “I know he killed her,” said Eu
banks, his shotgun still up. “But I’ve lost one good whore already. I’m not about to lose another one today, unless you’re prepared to take her place.”

  “Don’t talk like an ass, Henry,” said Big Chicago. He cooled down quickly and considered things. With Curly Joe dead, as well as the man who’d killed him, it made little difference what Lilly Jones had to say about anything. “All right, men, lower the meat choppers,” he said at length.

  “Are you sure, Chicago?” asked Russell. “You are the boss now, far as we’re concerned.”

  As the gunmen, saloon owner and bartender stood facing one another, their weapons held at the ready, townsfolk began to venture forward from storefronts, tents and adobes.

  Noting the bystanders approaching, Big Chicago said, “Yeah, go on, lower them. It’s time we get into the wind anyway, before somebody else shows up with our names in their mouths.”

  Lilly stepped down from her saddle and led both horses over to Dahl, lying broken and still on top of Curly Joe. Eubanks and the bartender stood watching as Chicago, Russell and Thatcher gathered the horses, mounted and rode away at a trot. “You all right, Knee-high?” the bartender called out.

  “I’m good, Stan. Obliged,” Lilly said.

  “You ain’t coming back here, are you?” he called out, lowering his voice as if to keep Eubanks from hearing him.

  Lilly only shook her head in reply.

  “I thought not,” said Stan. He sounded disappointed.

  “Can you square it for me with Henry?” she asked.

  “He’s going to raise all kinds of hell,” Stan said.

  “Will you square it for me?” she repeated.

  Stan shrugged. “It’s squared,” he said, and he waved her away with his hand as he turned and stepped back inside the saloon.

  Stooping down over Dahl, Lilly laid a hand on the back of his bloodstained riding duster. “Are you all right, Sherman Dahl?” she whispered.

  After a pause, she heard a single tight, dry cough; then his rasping voice said, “I’ve . . . been better.”

  “Are you bleeding anywhere?” she asked.

  “I’m bleeding . . . everywhere,” he said. “Except where I’m wearing . . . my vest.”

  “At least you’re alive,” she whispered.

  “Yes . . . at least,” Dahl rasped, not sounding overjoyed by his good fortune.

  She breathed a sigh of relief and closed her eyes as if in a short prayer. She patted his back gently and whispered, “You lie still until I can get somebody to help carry you over to the doctor’s office.”

  “I’ve . . . got to . . . get up. . . .” He tried to rise, but Lilly pressed him back down firmly.

  “Lie still,” she said. “You’re in no shape to be getting up right now. You rest. I’m going to take care of you.”

  “No . . . there are things . . . I’ve got to do,” Dahl whispered as gathering townsmen drew closer around them in the dirt street.

  “What do you need to do that I can’t do for you until you’re back on your feet?” Lilly said. She kept him gently pinned down atop the dead outlaw.

  “I need . . . Curly Joe’s head,” he rasped, “for . . . proof of kill.”

  “Oh . . . I see,” she replied with a look of dread coming over her face. “Well, Curly Joe’s head will just have to keep for the time being.”

  As the townsfolk drew in closer, surrounding her and the two bodies on the ground, Lilly said to a familiar face, “Arnold, have someone help you carry this man over to Doc Shelby’s office. He’s in bad shape.”

  “Bad shape?” said the broad-shouldered townsman. “Hell, I don’t know how he can even be alive. I saw the men with shotguns both shoot him. . . . Chester Goines shot him too.”

  “Well, he is alive, and he’s losing blood,” Lilly said, not bothering to mention Dahl’s bullet vest. “Now help me get him over to Doc’s. See if Doc can keep him from bleeding to death.”

  The gray-haired doctor, Martin Shelby, had quickly taken Dahl in, and he immediately set about removing glass and splinters from the man’s wounds. He stopped the bleeding from almost a dozen open cuts, none of which were life threatening.

  Three hours later, he plucked another tiny piece of scrap metal from Dahl’s exposed upper arm and dropped it into a tin pan sitting on Dahl’s chest. By now, the pan held a fistful of broken scrap iron and misshapen buckshot, all of which were covered by a thin coat of Dahl’s blood.

  “Improvement or not, this thing likely saved your life, young man,” Dr. Shelby said, gesturing with bloody fingertips toward the bullet-riddled, buckshot-chewed vest piled in a ragged heap on a wooden chair beside the gurney where Dahl lay. “Everything that’s happened to that vest would have happened to your body had you not been wearing it.” He shook his head, a pair of long tweezers in his hand, and went back to probing the small bloody holes in Dahl’s arm for more bits of iron.

  “How did you ever keep from getting shot down before you owned one of these?” Lilly asked Dahl, standing back out of the doctor’s way. She eyed the torn, chewed-up bullet vest.

  “I’d say he didn’t keep from it very often,” the doctor put in, giving her a look over his shoulder. “From the looks of these old scars on his chest, he’s been on the ground more than he’s been on his feet.” He bowed back into his work with the tweezers. “What’d you say you used to do for a living?” he asked.

  “I taught school,” Dahl replied.

  “Go back to it,” Shelby said bluntly. “You’ve got too many holes in you. This work will kill you if you let it.”

  “I don’t plan on letting it,” said Dahl, his voice only slightly strained by all the physical abuse he’d been through. “That’s why I bought the vest.”

  “But now that your vest is torn to shreds, what’ll you do?” the old doctor asked.

  Dahl gave Lilly a look and replied, “Buy myself another one, first chance I get.”

  “I’d advise you to buy several, and keep them on hand,” Shelby said. “As long as Chester Goines is still running loose, you’ll never know when you’re going to need one.”

  “I wasn’t here looking for Big Chicago,” said Dahl. “He just happened to be with Curly Joe’s men when I got here. I spotted him first and followed him up to the cabin.”

  “I shouldn’t say this,” said Shelby, “being a man of medicine, such as I am. But you should have killed Chester Goines while you had him in your sights. If he even thinks you are after him, he’ll not stop until one of you is dead.”

  “It’s not as if I had him in my sights, Doctor,” said Dahl. “I saw him taking a position across the street right before I fell from the saloon balcony. After that, there wasn’t much I could do to stop him and his two men.”

  “I see, then.” Shelby nodded, leaning in closer to Dahl’s flesh, examining it for more bits of embedded scrap iron. “All the same,” he said, “if you come across Goines, Big Chicago as you call him, like as not he’ll try to kill you.” Finding a likely spot on the tip of Dahl’s shoulder, the doctor probed into it as Dahl winced from the pain.

  When the doctor had finished, he washed the blood from his hands and said, “There, that’s about the best I can do for you. No bones are broken, thanks to Curly Joe breaking your fall for you.” He gave a slight, dark chuckle and shook his head at the folly of what his years in medicine had shown him about the species of man. From his cabinet he took a hypodermic needle and spent several minutes readying it.

  “What is that?” Dahl asked, eying the needle.

  “It’s hydrochloride morphine sulfate,” Shelby answered. “Just a little something to make you sleep good for a while.” With his thumb on the syringe, he plunged the liquid into Dahl’s arm with authority.

  “I need to be awake, Doctor,” Dahl protested. “I don’t like not having my wits about me.”

  “Then I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointing couple of hours, young man. Because without a doubt, you are going to sleep.”

  Lilly stepped in as Dr. Shelby p
atted Dahl’s shoulder and stepped back from him. She stood at Dahl’s side as the doctor began rolling his shirtsleeves down and buttoning them at his wrists. “Don’t worry, Sherman Dahl,” she said. “I’ll be right here the whole time. Nobody will come or go without my seeing them.” She turned her head and looked at the doctor in anticipation.

  “You’re welcome to stay right here with him, of course, Lilly,” the doctor said. He straightened his string tie and reached for his derby hat hanging on a wall peg. As Dahl drifted away on the powerful drug, Shelby said to Lilly, “I don’t know what this man has done to deserve you, but he is a fortunate man indeed.”

  Lilly reached out a hand and brushed a strand of blond hair from Dahl’s forehead. “No, Doc, I’m the one who’s fortunate. . . .” Her words trailed as she looked down at Dahl’s dozing face.

  “I’m glad to hear you feel that way for a change, Lilly,” the doctor said quietly. He wasn’t sure she’d even heard him as he backed away, turned and walked out the door.

  Part 2

  Chapter 7

  Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory

  Six weeks had passed before a two-horse buggy pulled up in the circling path out in front of the J. Fenwick Hatton hacienda outside town. Assisted by Mexican house servants, Sherman Dahl and Lilly Jones stepped down from the rig. Owing to several deep scrap-iron wounds still healing in his upper left arm, Dahl’s left forearm rested in a black cloth sling looped around his neck.

  In Dahl’s right hand he carried a wooden crate by its top brass handle. The crate held a large wire-sealed glass apothecary jar. From inside the jar, the head of Curly Joe Hobbs stared out at the world through a pickling saline solution, a dull but scornful expression etched upon his face for all eternity.

  No sooner had Dahl and Lilly set their feet on the grounds than a silver-haired gentleman in a black swallow-tailed coat appeared as if from out of nowhere and bowed slightly at the waist. “Mr. Dahl, sir,” the man said. “Madam,” he said to Lilly.