Outlaw

by Charles G. West

  The fist missed by a wide margin, and Matt set himself to come up under the brute’s chin with the Henry. An instant before he retaliated, he heard a dull grunt and the smack of a fist against flesh. Turning at once, he saw the bartender drop to the floor, a four-foot length of timber falling to clatter on the planks. Quickly shifting his gaze back to the huge man standing before him, he saw the whiskers part to reveal a wide grin. “He was fixin’ to give you a real big headache,” the huge man said.

  “Damn, I reckon,” Matt replied, looking down at the heavy piece of lumber. He picked it up and stood poised to use it on his assailant should the bartender wish to continue the fight. Choosing a wiser course, the bartender crawled behind the counter to try to shake off the effects of the big man’s fist.

  “I owe you my thanks, mister,” he stated, and thrust out his hand. “Smith’s the name. I believe those ol’ boys was about to skin me good. Good thing you come along.” When Matt shook his hand, he knelt down and began gathering up the money. “Yessir, they was fillin’ me so full of that rotgut whiskey, I swear, I didn’t know if I was comin’ or goin’, but I knew they had to be cheatin’.”

  Matt couldn’t help but marvel at how suddenly sober the big man had become. “Shannon,” he replied in response to Smith’s introduction, and stood watching while Smith scooped up the money.

  “Most of this is mine, anyway,” Smith continued, giving Matt a wink. “But there’s a little profit here that I reckon I’m obliged to share with you. You shore as hell earned it.”

  Less concerned with the money than the thought of retaliation, Matt moved to the end of the bar where he could see what the bartender was up to. He soon spotted what he was looking for, and reached over the bar to retrieve a sawed-off shotgun. Breaking the breech, he pulled the shells out and threw them across the room. Then he laid the shotgun on the counter. Glancing at the cowering bartender, he was convinced that the precaution had probably been unnecessary. “I expect we’d better get outta here,” he said to Smith, “before your friends decide to come back for their money.”

  “Yeah, I reckon,” Smith replied, a wide grin parting the beard. He was obviously pleased with the way the evening had turned out.

  Outside the saloon, they both took a quick look up and down the street to make sure there was no surprise waiting for them. The street seemed clear, so they paused to shake hands again. “I owe you, Shannon, for steppin’ in back there,” Smith said, and pressed a stack of bills in Matt’s hand. Matt tried to refuse the money, but Smith insisted. “You go on and take it. Hell, it belonged to them buzzards, anyway. I ain’t got many friends in this world, and I reckon you’re the only one I got in this town.”

  “All right,” Matt relented. There was no doubt but what he could use the money. He stepped down from the boardwalk and turned toward the stable at the end of the street.

  “You headed for the stable?” Smith asked. “That’s where I’m goin’. I’ll walk with you.”

  “I figured you were stayin’ in the hotel,” Matt said.

  “Hell, no,” Smith replied. “I ain’t got no money to waste on a fancy bed. I need all my money to play cards.” He laughed at his own comment.

  They walked down the dusty street together, Smith in animated conversation about the card game, Matt scanning the street from side to side cautiously. He was not ready to believe that the likes of String Tie and his partners were prone to leave the fight without an attempt to recover their losses.

  Matt’s intuition was right on target. The gambler wearing the black frock coat and string tie, known to his partners as Shiner, was at that moment holding a handkerchief under his bloody nose. While the bleeding had slowed almost to a trickle, the nose was already swelling to double its normal size. “That son of a bitch with the rifle is gonna rue the day he set foot in this town,” he muttered angrily as he led his two partners into the back door of the stable. The fourth member of his party, who had made the hasty exit from the saloon, was still nowhere to be found. The two that remained, Tasker and Bodie, had scores to settle for themselves. All three were determined to extract vengeance on the big bald man and his newfound friend.

  Sam Pickens looked up when he heard the three come in the back of the stable. He recognized Shiner and his two friends immediately. Knowing they could hardly be up to any good, he called out. “What can I do for you, Shiner?” He noticed that all three were carrying rifles.

  “We’ve got a little business to take care of,” Shiner replied. “And if you don’t wanna get hurt, I’d advise you to make yourself scarce.”

  Sam hesitated, looking from one to the other. He was a peaceful man and liked to avoid trouble. But this was his property, and he didn’t like being ordered out of his own stable. “I don’t know what kinda trouble you’ve been up to this time, Shiner, but I don’t appreciate you bringin’ it to my place.”

  Shiner possessed neither the time nor the patience to bother with Sam Pickens. “I ain’t got time to fool with you, dammit. There’s gonna be lead flyin’ around in here in a few minutes, and if you’re in the way, it’ll just be your tough luck. So get the hell outta here before I decide to shoot you down just for the hell of it.” He stood there, glaring at the stable owner for several long seconds, his rifle poised to back up his threat while Sam made up his mind.

  Sam had attempted to demonstrate some backbone, but after thinking it over, he felt it wasn’t worth the risk. Without another word, he turned to leave, deciding it far more sensible to find the deputy marshal, and let him handle it. When he had left, Shiner turned to give quick instructions to his men. “Bodie! Over there behind them hay bales—Tasker, you climb up there in the loft. I’m gonna be here in the last stall, so mind which way you’re shootin’.”

  Matt and his newfound friend, the shiny-domed, bushy-whiskered man calling himself Smith, approached the stables just in time to see Sam Pickens coming out the front entrance. “Evenin’, Mr. Pickens,” Smith called out cheerfully.

  Sam hesitated for only a step or two, staring at the two men as if he had never met them. He couldn’t decide if he should warn them or just stay out of it, and let the lot of them kill each other off. He wavered for only a moment. “Evenin’,” he muttered, barely above a whisper, and hurried away.

  Matt and Smith turned to watch him depart. “Now, he’s actin’ kinda strange, ain’t he?” Smith mused. He glanced briefly at Matt, then turned to stare at the front entrance to the stable. The soft glow of a lantern somewhere inside the building illuminated the entrance. “Looks like he left a light on for us,” Smith joked soberly. Sam’s behavior was warning enough, even if the stable owner had declined to speak a word of caution. Smith continued to stare at the doorway to the stable, unconsciously shifting the pistol in his holster to make sure it was free. “You any good with that rifle you’re totin’?” he asked calmly.

  “I reckon,” Matt replied, equally calm. He had been almost certain that they were far from finished with String Tie and his friends. He would have preferred to avoid another confrontation, but his horses and all his gear were in the stable, and he had no intention of losing them.

  “I expect if we go walkin’ in the front door, we might find a little welcomin’ party waitin’ for us,” Smith said. He took a few moments to consider. “There’s a window in the tack room on the other side. You look a helluva lot younger and fitter that I am. Suppose you could climb in that window? I’m afraid I’ve got too much belly to tote.”

  “Yeah,” Matt replied, “I can make it.”

  “All right, I’ll sneak around and come in the back. Whaddaya think?”

  “Sounds as good a plan as any,” Matt said.

  Matt propped his rifle against the weathered boards of the barn side while he pulled himself up to the windowsill. After a quick look inside to make sure there was no one in the room, he pulled his body up, and went headfirst through the window. Once inside, he got to his feet and reached back out the window where Smith was waiting to hand up his rifle. Sm
ith nodded as Matt took the Henry, then turned and disappeared around the back corner of the building.

  It was not yet a hard dark outside the stable when Matt had climbed through the tack room window. Inside the small room, there was no more than a flicker of lantern light through the open doorway. It struck Matt as kind of careless for Sam Pickens to leave his stable with a lantern burning. The man had seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, all the more evidence pointing to an ambush waiting in the stable.

  Matt moved silently across to the doorway where he paused to listen. There was no sound in the stable other than the nervous shifting of horses’ hooves in the stalls and an occasional whinny. From his position inside the tack room door, he could see the front entrance to the stable, and the lantern sitting in the middle of the floor just inside. It was obviously set there on purpose to illuminate the entrance. He moved to the other side of the door, so he could look back toward the rear of the stable. Peering into the darkened rear of the building, his gaze shifted from the back stalls to a stack of hay bales in one corner. A likely spot, he thought, and unconsciously felt the hammer of his rifle with his thumb to make sure he had cocked it.

  Dropping to one knee, he inched closer to the door frame, his rifle trained on the baled hay. In the next instant, the quiet interior of the stable exploded with gunfire, and flashes of muzzle blasts split the darkness like dueling lightning bolts as Smith suddenly charged through the back door. Matt pumped three quick rounds into the hay bales, aiming at the muzzle flash. One of his shots found its target, as evidenced by a sharp yelp of pain.

  Matt ran across the open stable to take cover in an empty stall as another barrage of gunfire broke out near the back entrance. From the muzzle flashes, Matt could see that it was an exchange of pistol fire at close range. Afterward, there was a long period of silence. After a few moments more, he heard Smith call out. “Shannon, you all right?”

  “Yeah,” Matt replied.

  “We got both of the bastards,” Smith came back. “They was waitin’ for us all right.”

  Matt was about to wonder aloud about the other two poker players when he was suddenly stopped by a fine rain of hay dust sifting through the boards over his head. “Look out!” he yelled, but it was not quick enough to warn Smith. From his position in the loft, Tasker opened fire with his pistol just as Smith walked out into the lantern light. The bullet caught Smith in the shoulder and spun him around. Matt’s reactions were immediate, and Tasker fell from the loft, dead before his body crashed to the dirt floor with three .44 bullets in his chest.

  Matt took a quick look at Tasker to make sure he was dead. Then he made sure of the other two before going to Smith’s aid. “That was mighty damn careless, not checkin’ the loft,” Smith groaned as he held his shoulder.

  “How bad is it?” Matt asked.

  “Well, I’ve had worse, I reckon, but it hurts like hell.”

  “Maybe we can find a doctor in this town,” Matt said.

  “No—hell, no,” Smith protested at once. “We’d best get our horses, and get the hell outta here before that feller Pickens shows up with the deputy marshal. Somebody’s bound to come a’runnin’ to see what all the shootin’ was about.” He looked around for something to stuff against the wound to slow the flow of blood. “I don’t need no doctor, anyway. Just get me on my horse. I’ve got a place over in Injun Territory, and a woman who can take care of this bullet wound.” He grabbed a rag from a nail on the side of a stall, and stuffed it inside his shirt.

  A crowd of curious spectators was still gathering in front of the stables when the two riders galloped away into the night. Smith led the way, his body slumped slightly forward in the saddle, his left hand thrust inside his shirt in a makeshift sling for his wounded shoulder. Matt followed his new partner, leading both their pack horses, half expecting Smith to tumble from the saddle at any minute. The wound did not appear serious, but there had been quite a bit of blood loss, and Matt had seen men in the war faint from severe bleeding. Smith insisted that he was all right. Matt had to admit, the man seemed to be a tough old bird.

  When Fort Smith was far enough behind them to let up on the horses, they slowed to a walk. As Smith led them along a trail that wound through the hills north of the town, Matt thought about the turn of events that resulted in this new direction his life had taken. He knew nothing about the man he was riding with, other than the apparent fact that he was an easy pigeon to pluck at a poker table, and a helluva man in a bar fight. Still, Matt had detected an honest-rogue quality in the man that somehow suggested a sense of fairness. Matt followed him into Indian Territory simply because the man was wounded, although Matt was beginning to believe Smith didn’t need anyone to accompany him. Aside from that, Matt rode with him because he had no better plan. It didn’t seem healthy to hang around Fort Smith after shooting three men, especially after having seen a Wanted poster with his picture on it. Smith said he had a place in the Cherokee nation. Matt would go with him at least that far. Then he would decide where he would strike out from there.

  They made camp with little more than three or four hours left before sunup, confident at that point that there was no posse on their trail. While Smith knelt by a small stream to clean some of the dried blood away from his shoulder, Matt gathered some wood for a fire. After he took care of the horses, he came back to the fire to join Smith. “You want me to take a look at that wound?” Matt asked.

  “It’s all right, just startin’ to puff up a little. The damn slug’s still in there, but Broken Reed can dig it out tomorrow. We oughta be at my place before dark.”

  “That thing’s gotta be sore as hell,” Matt said. “You sure you don’t want me to try to cut it out?”

  “Thanks just the same,” Smith insisted. “But we’re less than a day to home; I expect I’d druther have Broken Reed do it.”

  “All right,” Matt shrugged. He gazed at the wounded man for a long moment. “Smith,” he pronounced, as if sounding it for the first time. “What the hell is your real name?”

  The big man chuckled before answering. “Ike,” he said, “Ike Brister.”

  Ike Brister. The name triggered a thought in Matt’s memory. No wonder the bushy-faced man had seemed familiar to him before. Ike Brister—that was the man on the Wanted poster he had found in Tyler’s saddlebags back in West Virginia. So now he was not only an outlaw, he had partnered up with an outlaw—a murderer no less. “I saw your likeness on a Wanted paper,” Matt said. “It said you murdered somebody.”

  “I seen your’n,” Ike returned frankly. “It said the same thing, only your name weren’t Shannon.”

  “Matt Slaughter,” Matt introduced himself. “They’re sayin’ I killed a Union officer, but it wasn’t murder. It was an accident. The damn gun went off during a fight. He wouldn’t be dead if he hadn’t pulled the pistol.”

  “They’re after me for killin’ a soldier, too,” Ike said. “Only it weren’t no accident. I followed the son of a bitch all the way up into Missouri to kill him. He was a sergeant with a Union cavalry company. They burnt my daddy’s house to the ground. And when Pap was finally smoked out, they shot him down, right there in his front yard. I reckon things like that happen in a war, but they wouldn’t let my mama even go to Pap’s side. This sergeant dragged her off, and hit her with his gun butt when she tried to pull away from him. If I’d been there, that sergeant wouldn’t have drawed another breath. Mama never got over that blow to the head. Some friends of ours said she finally died two months later. It took me the better part of two years to find the bastard that killed her, but, by God, I sent him to hell where he belongs.”

  There followed a long period of silence as both men thought about the irony of their situations. Matt had not really committed the crime for which he was wanted, but in his mind he knew that he could not fault Ike for taking the action he did. In his place, he would have been likely to do the same thing. Finding it awkward to say much in response to Ike’s confession, he shrugged and asked, “So you sa
w my picture on a poster, did you?” Ike nodded and smiled. “And you recognized me?”

  “Hell, I knew you were wanted when you came in the saloon.”

  Matt thought that over for a few moments while he made a decision. He reached up and stroked his mustache. “I reckon I’ll be shavin’ in the mornin’.”

  * * *

  They started out again at daybreak, Ike leading a clean-shaven Matt and the pack horses, continuing north until reaching a cross-trail that led them due west. They were well into Indian Territory now, and less than a day’s ride from the Cherokee village Ike called home. Maintaining a steady pace, the two riders held to a northwest course that led through country with hills covered with oaks and hickories. Ike plodded along, never complaining about a wound that was obviously beginning to fester. Matt decided that his gruff new friend was more than a little skittish about someone he just met probing his shoulder with a knife.

  True to his reckoning, a little after sundown on the second day, they struck a river that Ike identified as the Illinois. He led them down to the water’s edge where he pulled up and waited for Matt to come alongside. They paused there to let the horses drink, and Matt took the time to admire the pristine beauty of the river. His gaze scanned the high bluffs on the opposite side, covered with oaks and giant sycamores. Downstream, a small rocky island, thick with brush and river birch, split the gently flowing crystal clear water. Matt decided that he had seen few rivers that were prettier.

  “Come on,” Ike said, breaking into his brief reverie. “We ain’t got but two miles to go.”

  They picked up a trail that led along the river, and in a short time, Ike pulled up on a knoll overlooking a broad open meadow. Ike pointed to a cluster of log huts and skin lodges. “That there’s Old Bear’s village,” he said. “He’s my papa-in-law, although me and Broken Reed ain’t never been officially hitched.” He nudged his horse with his heels. “Come on. I’m gettin’ hungry, and this damn shoulder is painin’ me somethin’ fierce.”