Lassiter 4

by Peter McCurtin

  There was a gaping hole in the bank wall where the window had been. A dead body without a head hung across the opening, the rifle still clutched in the hands. There was no sign of the head inside or outside the bank. Lassiter wasn’t looking for it. It was something he noted without thinking about it.

  Gun ready, he climbed across the body, through the hole in the wall. The way the bodies inside were torn apart by the blast there was no way to tell how many guards there had been. The cashiers’ cages were wrecked, the bars twisted. The big steel safe was exactly where the Irishman said it would be. It was the only undamaged thing inside the bank.

  Brushing off the chunks of fallen plaster, Lassiter examined it, a heavy standard Crossley & Powers with a combination lock. The firing down by the bridge was heavier now, and without thinking about it he was waiting for the explosion. He tied a stick of dynamite to the safe with a length of copper wire. Nitro was the smart way to blow a safe, but the dynamite would have to do. He shortened the fuse with a knife and got out fast through the hole in the wall after firing the fuse.

  The safe blew and smoke and dust boiled out through the hole. Both sides of the main street were burning, and right after the safe the bridge went up, the first charge, the second, then the third. The ground shook under Lassiter’s feet, and more brickwork fell from the wall of the bank. He climbed back into the bank, the gray powdery dust stinging his eyes.

  He took a breath and pulled on the handle of the safe, and the door creaked open. The money stood there in neat stacks, crisp and new in its bank wrappers, undamaged by the blast. The Irishman said fifty thousand dollars, and there might be more than that. Lassiter took the canvas sack stuffed into his belt and began to fill it. While he was doing it, he heard them coming back from the bridge, keeping up a running fire as they came.

  Brigham Colmar’s Indian-brown face poked through the hole in the wall. For fifty thousand it came to a small sackful. Lassiter slung it through the hole to the Indian and came out after it. The Indian rode to get Lassiter’s horse, galloped back with it, and threw him the reins. “Let’s travel,” Lassiter said.

  A bullet knocked one of the men, Canaday, off his horse. Canaday’s friend Tolliver wheeled his horse, swearing, and shot at something. Tolliver, holding the gun. started to climb down. “Leave him,” Lassiter yelled. “Move out. Everybody move out.”

  They got out fast, up the slope, then back along the ridge the way they had come in. The road would have taken them out of there faster, but the road went nowhere but to another town and more militia. The telegraph and telephone lines were cut, the bridge was blown, more than a few militiamen were dead, and there wasn’t any time to lose. The raid on the bank was supposed to be timed with other, smaller attacks—no banks—made from Fort Liberté and another strong point the Irishman had set up. Until now it had been mostly talk, flowery speeches and flag waving. If a raid on the bank and the smaller raids were the start of the rebellion, the beginning of the Irishman’s so-called policy of total terror, the “official” declaration of armed insurrection against the Province of British Columbia and—Lassiter grinned at the notion—the whole goddamned British Empire. He rubbed his neck, thinking of the rope that was waiting for him now.

  They got down off the ridge and rode beside a long, straight, narrow drainage ditch that ran through a valley on the other side of the ridge. Lassiter looked at the sack of money roped to the Indian’s saddle, then at the Indian’s face. “We lost five men,” Colmar said, “and we captured one Maxim gun and two boxes of ammunition.”

  Lassiter looked back at the horse carrying the rapid-fire gun. Another riderless horse carried the boxes of ammunition slung across its back. There hadn’t been time to dismantle the Maxim gun. It rode on the animal’s back, the tripod sticking out awkwardly, the bullet-heavy feed belt flopping. Looking at it, Lassiter felt the professional man killer’s interest in something new and deadly. It was beginning to look as if they had the makings of a real guerilla troop. The Maxim was factory new and not completely free of grease. It bothered him to see any fine weapon used badly, and if he had been in charge of the militiamen back there he would’ve kicked their asses from hell to breakfast.

  Colmar saw Lassiter was smiling. It wasn’t much of a smile—Lassiter was smiling sourly at his officer like thoughts—and the Indian didn’t smile back. The Indian never smiled, never did much of anything, never wasted energy or motion.

  “You capture the gun?” he asked.

  The Indian nodded.

  “You know how to work it?”

  “No,” Colmar said. “Do you?”

  Lassiter knew how to take a Gatling apart and put it back together with his eyes shut. An infantry officer he rode with once on a train told him something about the new rapid-fire gun a Maine Yankee inventor named Hiram Stevens Maxim was manufacturing in England. The officer said the new gun could fire six hundred rounds a minute. Lassiter couldn’t recall much else about the conversation.

  “We’ll learn,” he told Colmar. “You tell those boys back there to treat that gun like a new bride.”

  Riding steadily but easily because of the gun and the coiled belts of ammunition in the two boxes, they moved through the valley beside the irrigation ditch and through a wide gap into another valley. The farmland dropped behind as they rode the length of the second valley, resting their horses before they climbed back into the foothills, following an old Indian trail used before the white men pushed west into British Columbia. There was no point trying to cover their tracks. There were too many of them, the winter-soaked ground was soft enough to be mud in places, and even if the ground had been hard and dry there wasn’t time. Anyway, that wasn’t the idea, according to the Irishman. They, meaning the ham-fisted Colonel Cameron and his militia officers, would know about Fort Liberté by now. McCain said the idea wasn’t to defend the fort but to use it as long as they could, then move out to another strong point when Cameron was strong enough to move against them. It was standard guerilla tactics, with nothing wrong with it in theory, but Lassiter, like any professional, was leery about the Irishman’s amateur spies.

  The watery sun was directly overhead when Lassiter ordered Colmar to have the men dismount and get something to eat. They were deep in the foothills now, with eight or nine hours ride uphill to where the mountains split and the trail went through a narrow pass, ran level for about three miles before it started down on the other side toward the fort. Without the gun to slow them down they could have made better time. Lassiter said to ride easy. He wasn’t fooling about how important the Maxim was. To him, it was more exciting, in its way, than any young bride.

  The men chewed on dried beef and hard biscuit while Lassiter walked up to the high rock where Colmar was scanning the country behind with field glasses. They had been on the move for five hours and, slowed by the gun, about twenty miles.

  “See anything?” Lassiter asked.

  “Nothing,” the Indian said.

  Lassiter took the field glasses, and, from high up where they were, he started a slow sweep of the countryside, starting first at the end of the ridge, then the length of the irrigation ditch in the first valley, and on through the gap into the second. The only living thing he saw was a woman, miles away, slopping hogs in front of a farmhouse.

  “Move them out,” he told the Indian.

  The sun was bright without heat, and they mounted up and began to climb again, the tension from the raid all gone now, leaving their bodies dull and cold. Lassiter thought of the bottle waiting for him in his quarters at the fort. He rolled a cigarette and made do with that, sucking in the bitter blue smoke, thinking about the money in the sack, idly going over the possibility of taking it and heading south. Naturally, he would have to kill the Indian. After that, what about the rest of them? He could always set up the Maxim gun when they made camp for the night. Once he got the hang of it by chewing up the bushes with ten or twenty rounds he could simply swing the Maxim on its tripod and kill them all. There were fifteen, i
ncluding the Indian. The Maxim fired six hundred rounds a minute, sixty rounds in ten seconds, six rounds in a second. Five seconds, ten to do it right, was all he needed.

  Lassiter grinned without showing it, thinking that some men played games like chess in their heads. Others, himself for instance, used more interesting games to kill time.

  It was getting dark when they entered the mouth of the pass and Lassiter told the Indian to get the men off their horses. “No fires,” he told Colmar. “They might as well get used to it. There will be a lot of cold camps if this war goes on.”

  The Indian shrugged. Cold or heat meant nothing to him. This war meant something to him, but since that first time when he said he wasn’t in it for the money he hadn’t said anything else.

  “You watch the money,” Lassiter said, grinning at the dull suspicion in the Indian’s heavy eyes. “I’ll set up the gun.”

  Colmar paused just long enough for Lassiter to say, “You can stand behind me while I do it. If that’s what’s bothering you.”

  “No need,” Colmar said, and Lassiter knew he could take that two ways. Colmar trusted him, or he didn’t think Lassiter could kill him, gun or no gun.

  He loosened the ropes that held the gun and carried it to a shelf of rock overlooking the camp. Ritter, the German, had survived the attack on the bridge. Lassiter told him to open one of the ammunition boxes, to bring fresh belts for the gun. The German had been a farmer longer that he’d been a soldier, but he did what he was told, quickly and easily.

  Checking the Maxim, Lassiter decided it sure as hell was a nifty piece of work, light but sturdy, operated by a short-recoil, and that was about all he knew about it. Checking the way it worked inside would have to come later. He told Ritter to straighten the twisted feed-belt, to hold it steady, to let the feed mechanism take the belt once he fired, and it began to move.

  With the Maxim the first shot had to be fired like any other gun. The men making camp below looked uneasy when Lassiter took his place behind the gun, the German hunkered down beside it, and swung the barrel, tilting and depressing it, to get the feel.

  Colmar sat on his saddle looking up at Lassiter. The sack of money lay beside him. Lassiter wondered what the Indian was thinking about. Lassiter knew the Indian was fast with a six-gun, maybe as fast as he was himself. It would be interesting to know how fast any man was against an automatic weapon. But this wasn’t the time for that.

  “Everybody keep down,” Lassiter said, aiming the gun at a patch of bushes on the other side of the camp. He knew about Gatlings, had used them in the Cavalry and other places. There was no need to hold a Gatling steady when you fired it. The weight of the gun did it for you. He pressed the trigger and the Maxim came to life. A string of bullets tore the bushes to pieces, first the dirt and roots, then the tops when the barrel of the gun tilted because he wasn’t using it right. He took his finger off the trigger, and the gun was quiet. It was as different from the Gatling as any gun could be. It wasn’t often that Lassiter got enthusiastic about anything, not even about women or money.

  The old German soldier squatting beside the gun was sweating in the cold air, delighted with the new killing machine, no longer a farmer.

  The men, all except the Indian, were hugging the ground. They stayed that way when the shooting stopped. The Indian sat on his saddle, working on the barrel of his revolver with an oily rag. The Indian, the rag in his left hand, looked up at Lassiter. He took his time about saying what he said: “Works pretty good.”

  “Let’s try it again, Fritz,” Lassiter told the German.

  It took two more tries before he got the hang of it. Nothing that concerned the use of weapons took Lassiter long to learn. The bullets chewed the bushes to bits, and, holding the gun steady in his big hands, he put the bullets where he wanted them to go. When he stopped firing again, the German said the feed-belt was almost run through. Lassiter remembered something else he knew about the Maxim. There were clips at the beginning and end of every feed-belt. One belt could be clipped on to the other, making continuous fire possible.

  Ritter checked the belts and nodded happily. The German was impressed with Lassiter’s knowledge. Lassiter was glad to know the feed-belts could be linked. He was glad because even after checking the gun he wasn’t sure how to start a belt through. He didn’t tell the German.

  Eager to help, Ritter linked the belts and Lassiter triggered ten rounds, all that were left in the first belt. A squeeze on the trigger started the new belt and it went through smoothly—a short burst—until he let up on the trigger. New bride! he thought. Like hell! There would always be new brides, and they didn’t matter a damn right now.

  “Let go the belt,” he ordered the German. He remembered something else from his conversation with the infantry officer on that train. That the Maxim worked best when the belt was fed by a second man. That it usually worked pretty well, with few chances of jamming, when the man behind the gun allowed it to feed itself. That the gunner could still shoot all right if he learned to reach around and let the belt run across his hand, keeping it level and easy.

  Colmar stayed where he was, polishing his gun, the rest of the men flat on their faces, while Lassiter looked around for something solid to shoot at. There was a twisted mountain pine growing from a crack in a rock. Using the swivel, he lined up the barrel of the Maxim to where he thought it should be. Firing—the belt fed through fine—he knew he was still shooting it with a sideways turn of the Gatling, and he corrected the line of the barrel, unsqueezing the trigger when he did this. When he fired again, correcting slightly as he did, the steady fine of bullets stripped the bark off the tree in chunks and nearly tore it in two. He could have knocked down the tree if he’d been willing to use more bullets. He wasn’t. There was still a lot he didn’t know about the Maxim—what to do if it jammed, for instance—but he knew he needed the bullets.

  He told Ritter to get back down, and he told the Indian to come up. The Indian wasn’t honored by Lassiter’s trust, and his expression didn’t change, not much anyway, when the working of the gun was explained to him. Lassiter explained about how the gun must be held steady, the way it fired, not faster than the Gatlings Colmar knew, but more evenly. The important thing was to remember that the Maxim had only one barrel while the old Gatling had many. With this in mind, the Maxim must be fired in short bursts so the single barrel would not overheat.

  The Indian nodded. “I have been watching and listening,” he said.

  “You take the first four hours,” Lassiter said, not taking too much of a chance with the Indian.

  The Indian nodded again and said nothing.

  Chapter Seven

  In the morning Lassiter learned how to remove the Maxim from the tripod. That was about the only thing that happened while they rode through the long pass, down from the high country, down through the foothills and half a day later to the flat country that rose and finally climbed over the valley wall, past all the guards along the way, until Fort Liberté could be seen in the distance.

  Lassiter halted his men while he, next Colmar, swept the old fort with the glasses. It looked all right to him and the Indian agreed and they rode down to the flatland, coming in all together, no matter how they felt about the money and Lassiter and the Maxim gun, tough and jaunty in their saddles, knowing they were harder and had done more than the other men in the fort.

  They were still three hundred yards from the fort when Lassiter felt the small hairs prickle on the back of his neck. Something had gone wrong in Fort Liberté, and he didn’t know what it was. He felt it in the sudden tightening of his gut, as though expecting a blow, an attack from something he couldn’t see. He looked at the Indian and knew Colmar had sensed it before he did.

  “What do you think?’’ he asked.

  “Something,” the Indian said. “Something’s happened.”

  What Lassiter noticed was how quiet Fort Liberté was. Through the field glasses he recognized some of the men on the walls, so it didn’t look
like a trap. Cameron and his men hadn’t moved on the fort and taken it while they were away. It was still early afternoon and usually at this time of day the fort was humming with activity, infantry squads drilling, carpenters trying to nail the old fort back in shape. There was movement inside the fort, but it was slow and heavy, without noise.

  “Something bad,” the Indian said.

  They rode through the gate. Lassiter waved at the men in the twin gate towers, and they didn’t wave back. The other men in Lassiter’s column were slow to get the feeling. They had it now.

  The farmers and half-breed trappers who should have been drilling stood in scattered groups all over the parade ground along the inside of the walls. They weren’t drilling, but they had their rifles and they held them stiffly, like men who wanted to start shooting. Lassiter didn’t think it would take much to start the citizen soldiers shooting at him and his men.

  There was no sign of McCain. Lassiter went looking for him in his quarters, and he wasn’t there. He told the Indian to keep the men together, to have them dismount, to set up the Maxim gun just in case. He was walking toward the commandant’s office when the Irishman opened the door and came out followed by the half-breed Baptiste. McCain’s pale eyes jumped from Lassiter to the Maxim gun with the Indian behind it, the German farmer beside it holding the feed-belt ready, the muzzle turned away from the muttering groups of infantrymen. The Indian knew men all right. They weren’t worked up enough yet to point the Maxim straight at them. To do that might start them shooting, because they were mostly farmers and trappers and didn’t know what a Maxim gun could do. And if they did know, they might not care.