Matt jumped back to avoid the grabbing hands, and struck again with the poker. Caught him in the head again. Timmons was now on his hands and knees. Matt struck a third time, and a fourth. Timmons arms and legs went limp and he fell face forward to the floor.
Matt stood a moment catching his breath, iron poker in hand. It was only then that he realized flames were dancing at the other side of the room. He saw his bed was fully ablaze, fire rising almost to the ceiling.
His lamp, he realized. It had been knocked from the stand and shattered on the floor, but it had been burning.
He went to the doorway. “HIRAM!”
He looked back to the fire. A braided rug in front of his bed was already starting to burn, and the night stand was also in flames.
He needed something to attack the fire with. A blanket or something to beat at the flames. But the fire was spreading too fast. The lamp had been filled with oil that must have splattered when the lamp shattered.
He ran to Timmons and grabbed him by the hand, tossing aside the poker, and tried to pull him from the room. The man was heavy and Matt was not nearly as strong as he once was, but he pulled. The room was filling with smoke and he was starting to choke on it and it was burning his eyes, but he refused to give up and pulled the man from the room.
In the hallway, he rolled Timmons over onto his back and checked to see if he was breathing. He didn’t seem to be. Matt forced open one eyelid—on the eye that hadn’t taken the hit from the poker—and saw the pupil was fully dilated. The man was dead.
He let go of Timmons’ and rose to his feet. He looked down the hallway and called out for Hiram again. Then for Verna. He got no answer.
He looked back to his room and it was alive with fire. The bed was now mostly gone, and the fire was dancing along one wall and the curtains on the bedroom window were burning. The entire braided rug was a small pool of fire. Black smoke was rolling out into the hallway and forming a cloud along the ceiling.
He knew what to do. He would run outside and get the men and they would put this thing out. Blankets to fight the fire with. Buckets of water. But first he had to get everyone out.
He ran to Dan’s room, and found it empty. He blinked with puzzlement. Dan shouldn’t be up and about. He then went to Verna’s room, and then Hiram’s. Both were deserted.
He ran downstairs, calling their names. He checked the parlor, the kitchen, his office. Every room was empty.
That was when it struck him. What had happened. Timmons trying to kill him. Everyone else gone, including Dan. At first Matt had thought Timmons had maybe gone out of his mind. But now he knew better. Verna and Hiram had ordered it. They were behind it.
He stood by the desk in his office feeling a chill run through him. Like icy fingers had reached out from the cold ground beneath the house and grabbed him.
His own wife and son had tried to have him killed. Timmons, the poor fool, had always been in love with Verna. Even when Matt was first meeting Verna. Back when she was seventeen. Timmons had been a young, love-struck fool then. He would have done anything for her, and apparently this hadn’t changed.
Matt smelled smoke, and this brought him out of the reverie he realized he had fallen into. He stepped out to the entryway and saw it was filling with smoke. He glanced up to the railing at the top of the stairway, and saw the glow of flames. The fire had already spread out beyond his room.
What to do? Matt said to himself.
No. He was not going to allow himself to fall into indecision. He had allowed too much of this over the years. He had felt the man he once was waking up inside himself the moment Johnny arrived, and he was not going to allow himself to go back to what he had been becoming.
His wife had tried to kill him. If he was honest with himself, he supposed he had known she was cruel and cold, but he hadn’t thought she was capable of murder. And he hadn’t thought Hiram was, but if Verna said jump, the boy would ask how high. Anything she told him to do, he would. He had been that way his entire life.
Verna had ordered Timmons to kill Matt. Why, he could only speculate, but now was not the time for this. Now was the time for action. She had ordered Matt killed, and they had left, taking Dan with them.
He knew it would only be moments before someone outside saw flames from the window. He didn’t want to be found here. Better to let Verna and Hiram think he had been killed, either by Timmons or the fire.
His gunbelt and hat were still on the desk where he had dropped them. He ran back to his office and grabbed his hat and planted it on his head, then buckled on his gunbelt. He checked the loads, old habit, then went to the rifle rack and grabbed a Winchester. While he thought of it, he grabbed a second. In case Johnny wanted one. He intended to go find Johnny and they would tackle this situation together. He opened a drawer and grabbed a box of cartridges and stuffed it into one vest pocket, then on second thought grabbed a second box and stuffed into the other pocket.
He threw one last look at the room and said a mental good-bye. He expected to never see it again, even if this part of the house survived the fire.
His gaze fell on his desk, and he realized there was one more thing he was taking with him. He flipped open his box of cigars and grabbed a fistful. He had one more pocket in his vest, so he filled it with cigars.
He heard a knocking at the front door and someone calling. A man’s voice. Probably the sentries from out front. He had to move now, before the men came running from the bunkhouse. He already heard a voice calling out, “Fire!”
He went to the French doors at the back of the room and opened one and stepped out back. He heard shouts from the bunkhouse. He had to move now. The roof of the house was roaring with fire and lighting up the yard, so with a rifle in each hand, he ran to the side of the stable that was hidden from the fire. It was late at night. Upstairs, after the fight with Timmons, he had noticed the grandfather clock gave the time as ten after ten. The last time he would ever hear that clock chime. He wouldn’t miss it. The thing had been purchased by Verna, as had most of the furnishings.
As he hid in the shadows, men from the bunkhouse went running toward the main house. Ben Harris was among them, and so was Diego. Many of them were in undershirts and jeans with suspenders trailing. They had probably been in their bunks when the call went out. Had it been daylight, they would have seen him where he stood, but since it was night, they ran past the dark expanse of shadow and on to the house.
He waited until all of the men had run past, then he moved around to the front of the stable and the door. He lit a lantern and backed a horse out of its stall. The saddle he had used during the day was nowhere in sight so he grabbed another one that was draped over a saw horse. Once the saddle was in place, he tucked one rifle into the scabbard, then dropped both boxes of ammo into the saddle bags. He then led the horse to the door.
A canteen was hanging from a nail in the wall, so he grabbed it. He found it was empty, but he would fill it someplace else. He didn’t want to be found on the property. Let Verna and Hiram think he was dead. It would give him time to figure out what to do.
Once he had the horse outside the stable, he led it away from the house, to the open grassy hills behind the bunkhouse.
He led the horse until he felt he was a safe distance, and then swung into the saddle. The moonlight was bright enough so he felt he could ride safely. Johnny was either still in Greenville, or camped outside town somewhere. Should be easy enough to find.
He sat in the saddle and allowed himself one last gaze back at the house. It was now fully ablaze, lighting up the night like a huge torch. He hoped none of the men got themselves hurt trying to put it out.
He then turned his horse and started away, toward town.
14
Matt had been too many years out of the game. When you live like he and his brothers had back in the day, you sort of develop a mentality of warfare. But he hadn’t been shot at since he was twenty-five. Until the fight with Timmons tonight, he hadn’t been in a life
-or-death struggle of any kind since then. And he hadn’t killed a man.
Now, as he sat in the saddle in the very early hours of the morning, looking down at the darkened town, he found himself having to force himself to think.
He had expected to ride through the grassy hills outside of town looking for a campfire. Such things are usually visible from a distance. There was a good chance any campfire out there would belong to Johnny. But there were no campfires. He hadn’t expected Johnny to remain in town, but where else could he be? Matt surely didn’t want to ride down into town, because if he intended Verna and Hiram to think he was dead, it would be better if no one saw him.
And yet, he didn’t know what to do.
“All right,” he said out loud. “Think. You gotta think.”
He realized that even though he was the older brother, he had always allowed himself to take a sort of second seat to Johnny and Joe in their younger years. Both of his brothers had much more experience as frontiersmen and at warfare, and they seemed to even gravitate toward it. But this didn’t mean Matt wasn’t always observing them, and learning. Johnny, especially, seemed to have a natural way of thinking strategically in situations like this. Something that was never evident in their farm boy days back in Pennsylvania, but when they came west this ability seemed to manifest itself. Johnny also seemed to have natural leadership abilities. Matt was always the better speaker. To him it was almost showmanship. But when a leader was needed, men seemed to naturally be drawn to Johnny. It was Matt who married Frank McCarty’s daughter and eventually inherited the ranch, but when Matt and his brothers first rode into the area, it was Johnny who Old Man McCarty had made his ramrod.
All right, he said to himself. What would Johnny or Joe do in this situation? After all, this really wasn’t much different than chess, if you separated yourself from the life-and-death aspects of it all.
It occurred to him that finding Johnny should not be his first priority. Johnny would find him. His first priority was in town. After all, Matt had one more son. His oldest, Tom.
Tom had walked away from the family after an argument with Matt, but that argument had been about how Matt allowed Verna and Hiram to run the ranch, and the things they were doing. The things they were allowing to happen in town. The cruel way they treated the miners. The way they forced people off of their land in order to expand their empire. The things Matt had been turning a blind eye toward.
The main issue at the moment with Verna and Hiram was a canyon outside of town. Hiram’s mining engineers believed a large vein of gold ore cut into the walls of that canyon, but that canyon had belonged to a man by the name of Bernard Swan. He was a gentleman rancher who ran a small herd in the canyon. The canyon floor was large and grassy, and Swan had moved in more than twenty years ago and took the land as his. He had never filed the proper claim, and he had died three years ago, but Matt believed a legal argument could be made that, due to squatter’s rights, the land belonged to his heirs.
Matt remembered Swan well. A man of maybe sixty by the time he died, his hair had gone white prematurely and he had a barrel chest and bowed legs and sort of swayed from side to side as he walked, but when he sat a horse he moved like he and the horse were one. Never quite a gunhawk like Johnny or Joe, he was still a crack shot with a pistol or a rifle. There had always been something dignified about Swan. He pronounced his name Bernard, not Bernard.
Matt didn’t know the whole story, as Swan had been a private man. Matt got to town seldom and took little stock in gossip. But the story went that Swan had taken some sort of liking to a saloon woman in town, and before anyone knew it, had married the woman and she gave him a child.
Hiram and Verna would never have tried to bully Bernard Swan from that canyon. But the woman and the child were still there, trying to hang onto the land. Hiram and Verna wanted that canyon, and they had no intention of paying for land they could simply take.
They had acquired a small farm at the edge of the McCabe Ranch a few years ago. They probably didn’t know Matt was aware of this. He knew Timmons had been taking a buggy out there once a week to keep the place up. Matt had no idea why they would want the place, but he knew they had muscled the owner off of it, giving him the choice of taking their offer of less than half the going rate per acre, or being driven off. Like with the Swan canyon, the farmer had never formally filed a claim. An argument could have been made in favor of squatter’s rights, but Verna and Hiram could afford a lot of legal help, and the farmer none.
Verna and Hiram were bullies. Something Matt had never wanted to see and had ignored for a long time. The scotch had helped him do that. And he now saw they were potential murderers, too. If Verna was willing to have Timmons try to kill her own husband, if Hiram could go along with having his own father killed, then what would stop them from doing the same to Bernard Swan’s widow and daughter?
And what would stop them from hurting Tom and his family? There was nothing to gain financially from this, as Tom was a Methodist minister and lived in a little parsonage near the church in town. But Tom still legally owned a portion of the ranch and the other family businesses. Twenty percent. And that was a lot of money, considering the vast holdings that were now in the McCabe family. If Matt should continue to let Verna and Hiram believe he was dead—and the idea had its appeal, because it would allow Matt to just ride away from all of this—then the family fortune would be divided four ways instead of five. Tom would own twenty-five percent. As long as he was alive.
Money meant a lot to Verna and Hiram, but apparently life did not. At least, the lives of others. Matt had to get into town and warn Tom and get him and his family out of there.
The task seemed a little daunting to him, at first. To get into town without being seen. But he had ridden with Johnny and Joe and knew how to do this sort of thing, even though he might be a little rusty at it. He was a McCabe. Time to start acting like one.
With a rifle held across the front of the saddle and another one in the scabbard, he started his horse down the hill toward the darkened town below.
Tom McCabe drifted upward to consciousness. Someone was knocking on the front door downstairs.
What time was it? A lamp on a table at the bedside was burning low, and he could see the clock on the mantel across the room. Twenty after two?
He blinked the sleep from his eyes and sat up in bed. He was in his long-handled underwear, so he grabbed his trousers and pulled them on and stepped into slippers.
The knocking continued. A banging, actually. Like someone was taking their fist to the door, hammering at it with urgency.
Tom was a minister, pastor of the Methodist church in town. He was young, only twenty-four, but he seemed to be good at his job and the parishioners trusted him and often turned to him in times of need. It wasn’t unusual for one of them to come calling in the night, needing help of one kind or another. But the rapping on the door sounded almost frantic.
Lettie was stirring, her head on the pillow beside the one he had been using. Her hair was dark and tied back in a long braid.
“Tom?” she said. “What is it?”
“Someone’s at the door. I’ll go see who it is. Go back to sleep.”
“Well, if you need anything, come get me. If you need me to put coffee on, or anything.”
She was used to callers at odd hours, too. She was a minister’s wife.
Tom grabbed a lantern and struck a match to light it, and stepped out into the hallway and down the stairs. He hoped the pounding on the door wouldn’t wake up the children.
“All right!” he called, as he stepped down to the small entryway. “I’m coming! Hold on!”
He was holding the lantern in his right hand. He shifted it to his left, then slid the bolt on the door back and opened it.
A man stood there, in the lantern light. About as tall as Tom, but thinner. Scraggly whiskers along a narrow jaw, and a face that reminded him of a shark. Not that he had ever seen a shark, but he had read about them and
had a vivid imagination. Pinned to the man’s vest was a tin star. Tom had met the man before.
“Marshal Wells,” he said, a little surprised.
Wells grinned. Like a shark. “I been pounding on this door for five minutes.”
“Well, I’m sorry. But it’s late. I was sleeping.”
“I’m looking for your father.”
Tom blinked with surprise. “My father?”
“Yeah. You seen him?”
Tom shook his head. “My father very seldom comes here, I’m afraid. I never go out to the ranch anymore. I haven’t seen him, I regret to say, in months.”
Wells looked at him, nodding and smiling the smile that wasn’t really a smile. He then raised a hand to the door and gave it a push, knocking Tom back a little.
“Hey,” Tom said. “Now see here.”
Wells stepped in. “Now you see here, Father. We’re gonna search this place.”
“I’m a man of the cloth.”
“Be that as it may. I don’t really trust men of the cloth. I put you in about the same class as gamblers and politicians.”
Wells pushed past him, and was followed by another man, also wearing a badge. This man carried a scattergun.
Wells drew his pistol, and swung the door shut. “Bardeen, you search upstairs. I’m gonna search the downstairs.”
Tom was furious. “You stay away from my family.”
He started forward, fully intending to intercept the one called Bardeen but Wells placed the flat of his hand on Tom’s chest and pushed him back.
Wells looked at him, the grin back in place. Tom realized Wells was laughing at him. Wells said, “The nephew of the great gunfighter, huh? You sure don’t look like much.”
Tom reached up and knocked the hand away and went to push past Wells, but Wells drove a fist into Tom’s stomach. Tom doubled over and fell backward, landing on the floor.
Tom was as tall as Wells and was better muscled. But he did not advocate violence. When he was growing up, he had been taught how to shoot a gun by his father, but he had not fired one in years and had no guns in his house. He had never been in a fistfight.
Return of the Gunhawk (The McCabes Book 3) Page 14