Lowry stomped toward him.
“Then how do you explain those missin’ cows and two of my friends bein’ dead?”
“I’m sorry about your friends,” Sam said. “But maybe the cattle were stolen by rustlers.”
“On unshod ponies? And those two fellas had arrows stuck in ’em! Navajo arrows!”
“Anyone can ride unshod ponies,” Sam said. “And white men can use bows and arrows, too. It wouldn’t be the first time whites have tried to blame the trouble they caused on Indians.”
Lowry stopped in front of Sam, looked him up and down, and sneered.
“You don’t talk like a redskin, but you sure look like one,” he said. “Half-breed, ain’t you?”
“I’m half Cheyenne,” Sam said for what seemed like the dozenth time since he’d ridden into Flat Rock.
“No wonder you’re defendin’ those filthy savages. You’re just like ’em.”
“The Cheyenne and the Navajo have never been allies,” Sam pointed out. “They’re from totally different parts of the country. Anyway, the Navajo fought more wars against other tribes, like the Pueblo, than they ever did against the whites.”
“A redskin’s a redskin, and I got no use for any of ’em,” Lowry snapped. “And I sure as hell got no use for a smart-mouthed one like you, mister!”
He launched a fist at Sam’s head.
Chapter 16
Sam was expecting that. He’d had a hunch that Lowry was working himself up to a fight.
As the man lurched forward and swung, Sam ducked his head and bent at the waist. The punch sailed wide past his ear.
Thrown off balance by the missed blow, Lowry stumbled against Sam, who hooked a hard right into his belly. The breath went out of Lowry’s body with a whoof!
Lowry’s companions from the Devil’s Pitchfork yelled and surged toward Sam. As Lowry doubled over from the pain of the blow, Sam grabbed his shoulders and shoved him into the path of the charging cowboys. A couple of them ran into him and knocked him off his feet. Tripping over Lowry, the men went sprawling. More of the cowboys got tangled up and fell.
That gave Sam time to slip his Colt from its holster and say, “Just hold on, blast it! There’s no need for—”
“Watch it, Sam!” Stovepipe warned.
Men were crowded around Sam. Someone in the bunch lashed out and drove the side of his hand against Sam’s wrist.
Paralyzing pain shot up his arm. His fingers opened involuntarily, and the revolver slipped out of his hand and thudded to the sawdust-littered floor.
Another man caught hold of Sam’s shoulder and jerked him around. He heard a shout of “Let’s teach the redskin a lesson!” and then a fist seemed to explode in his face before he could get out of its way. The impact sent Sam stumbling backward.
He knew if he went down, there was a good chance these men would stomp and kick him to death. Because of that he fought desperately to keep his balance, but he felt it deserting him and knew he was about to fall.
At that moment, strong hands caught him from behind and kept him on his feet. Sam glanced around and saw it was Stovepipe Stewart who had caught him.
“Much obliged!” Sam gasped.
“Don’t be thankin’ me yet,” Stovepipe warned. “Here they come!”
It was true. Not only were the Devil’s Pitchfork hands closing in around Sam, several of the men who’d been in the saloon to start with had joined the fight, too, and all of them wanted his blood.
Sam put his back against the bar, hoping that the bartenders would remain neutral as they usually did when a brawl broke out. Stovepipe was on his right, Wilbur on his left, and both of the cowboys had their fists clenched and ready.
Sam wiped the back of his left hand across his mouth. That left a streak of blood on it from a bleeding lip.
“Are you two sure you want to take cards in this game?” he asked.
“You bet,” Wilbur said. “We don’t cotton to such bad odds.”
“So we’ll make ’em a little better,” Stovepipe added.
“All right,” Sam said.
That was all he had time to get out of his mouth before angry shouts filled the saloon and fists started flying.
Sam stood there with his back against the hardwood, slamming punches back and forth and trying to block the blows aimed at him. Quite a few of them got through despite his best efforts and rocked him. He stayed upright, though, and continued battling.
On either side of him, Stovepipe and Wilbur were doing the same. Stovepipe’s big, knobby fists on the ends of gangling arms snapped out with surprising speed and force and sent more than one man flying off his feet.
Wilbur’s style was different. With his stocky frame, he was more of a grappler. He got hold of two men, knocked their heads together, and then used their limp forms to trip up several more men.
With a bellow like a wounded buffalo bull, Pete Lowry plowed through the melee, knocking men aside in his attempt to reach Sam. Sam saw him coming and was able to get his feet set. He met Lowry’s charge with a straight, hard left and followed it instantly with a right cross.
Unfortunately, neither blow seemed to have much effect on Lowry. That prominent jaw of his might as well have been made of iron.
Sam had a hunch the big man’s weak spot was his gut and tried to land a punch there, but Lowry was already too close. He rammed into Sam and bent him backward over the bar.
Sam gasped as pain shot through him. Lowry began to hammer punches into his ribs.
Sam brought his cupped hands up and slapped them over Lowry’s ears. That made Lowry jerk back and gave Sam room to lift a knee into the man’s groin. Lowry didn’t shrug that off. With a keening cry of pain, he doubled over again.
At least nobody else had pulled a gun yet, Sam thought. That was the only good thing about this ruckus. As long as the men were just whaling away at each other, someone might get killed, but it was less likely than if guns were involved.
Even with Lowry incapacitated for the moment, there were plenty of other angry men to take his place. They crowded around Sam, Stovepipe, and Wilbur, and their numbers actually worked against them because they kept getting in each other’s way as they tried to throw punches.
Eventually, though, they would overwhelm the three men who stood together at the bar. Sam knew that, and he didn’t know if he could count on any more help. It was unexpected enough that Stovepipe and Wilbur had pitched in to aid him.
Either they weren’t members of the gang that had bushwhacked him and Matt, Sam thought as he blocked a punch and landed a haymaker on a man’s jaw ... or else they were playing a very deep game.
There was no time right now to ponder that, no time to do anything except keep on fighting and postpone their ultimate defeat as long as possible ...
The roar of a shotgun blast seemed to shake the entire room.
It was loud enough to assault the ears and make every man in the place stop what he was doing. A shocked silence fell as the echoes of the blast faded.
Into that silence came the sharp, angry voice of a woman.
“What in blazes is going on here?”
Sam lifted his eyes to the stairs and saw her standing there, her auburn hair pulled back away from her lovely face, the dark blue gown she wore hugging the splendid curves of her body. Smoke curled from one barrel of the double-barreled Greener in her hands, telling Sam that she still had a load of buckshot in the weapon, ready to cut loose again.
Even without the faint British accent to her words, Sam would have known from her regal bearing that he was looking at Lady Augusta Winslow, the owner of the Buckingham Palace Saloon.
Chapter 17
Lady Augusta eased back the shotgun’s other hammer. The sound was loud in the now eerily quiet saloon.
“I asked what’s going on here,” she said.
One of the bartenders spoke up.
“It was this Indian, ma’am,” he said as he pointed to Sam. “He started it!”
“That ain’t
true,” Stovepipe said. “Pete Lowry threw the first punch.”
That accusation brought howls of protest from a dozen throats as the Devil’s Pitchfork hands who were still conscious and on their feet loudly denied that Lowry had started the fight. Some of the other men in the saloon backed up their claim.
A jerk of the shotgun’s barrels made the men shut up. Lady Augusta looked at Sam, Stovepipe, and Wilbur and said, “You there. You three seem to be at the center of this maelstrom. Come up here, now.”
“Hear that, Wilbur?” Stovepipe asked with a quick grin. “You get to go upstairs and meet Lady Augusta.”
“Pipe down,” Wilbur snapped. A deep red flush spread over his freckled face. When Sam saw it, he realized that Wilbur had been worshipping Lady Augusta from afar. Evidently he had never actually met her.
“Make a path for them,” Lady Augusta ordered. No one in his right mind wanted to argue with a shotgun. There was plenty of angry muttering going on, but the men moved back to make way for Sam, Stovepipe, and Wilbur.
Sam spotted his Colt lying on the floor underneath the brass rail at the bottom of the bar, where someone had kicked it during the fracas. He reached down, picked it up, and slid it back into his holster, then joined Stovepipe and Wilbur as they crossed the room toward the stairs.
When they reached the bottom of the staircase, Sam was uncomfortably aware that the shotgun was pointing more at him and his companions than it was at the rest of the men in the saloon. He didn’t like climbing toward the menacing double maw of the barrels, but that seemed to be the most likely way he and his companions could get out of here with their hides relatively intact.
Lady Augusta drew back a couple of steps as they reached the second-floor landing. She still covered them with the Greener.
As she glanced toward the men down below in the saloon’s main room, she said in a clear, commanding voice, “I want everything cleaned up and put back in its place down there. Every man who pitches in to help gets a free drink.”
That sent men scrambling to pick up knocked-over chairs and right overturned tables. Even some of the men who had been in the middle of the fight were more interested now in earning that free drink.
Not Pete Lowry, though. He jabbed a finger at Sam and said, “Don’t you believe a word that filthy redskin tells you, ma’am. He says he’s half Cheyenne, but he could be lyin’. He could be one of those mur-derin’ Navajo himself, come into town to spy on us!”
“That’s insane,” Sam said.
“Just hush,” Lady Augusta said coldly. “Move down there to that open door. That’s my suite.”
Stovepipe looked at Wilbur again, who gave his lanky friend a warning glare. Stovepipe didn’t say anything.
With the shotgun trained on the backs of the three men, Lady Augusta followed them along the corridor to her suite.
Downstairs, Zack Jardine slumped in a chair at one of the tables that had been set back on its legs and glared at Angus Braverman and Doyle Hilliard.
“Was that him?” Jardine asked.
Braverman nodded.
“Yeah. I got a good look at him that day, Zack. There ain’t no doubt.”
“He didn’t look like he was hurt a bit, the way he was brawling. What about those two men who sided him? Was one of them with him that day?”
Braverman shook his head in answer to this question.
“No, both of those hombres are older than the fella who was with the half-breed. I don’t know what happened to him. He was hit, so likely he died, and now the ’breed’s lookin’ to settle the score for him.”
“One of us should have shot him,” Jardine said, keeping his voice low. “That idiot Lowry and his friends would’ve gotten the blame if that happened.”
“I never got a clear shot at him, Zack, or I might’ve,” Hilliard said. “Those boys from the Devil’s Pitchfork were crowdin’ around him too much.”
Jardine grunted. Boyd, Lowry, and the other two-bit desperadoes from the Devil’s Pitchfork thought they were tough hombres. The people of Flat Rock believed that, too.
They had no idea who the really dangerous men among them were.
“At least we know the rest of the boys did their job and ran off those cattle,” Jardine commented quietly. He had split his forces the previous day, keeping half of his men here in Flat Rock and sending the other half to rustle some cows off the spread south of the settlement.
Jardine had told those men before they left that if they got a chance to ventilate some of the Devil’s Pitchfork hands, not to hesitate. Dead cowboys and rustled cattle would go a long way toward stirring up the whites in the area against the Navajo.
Once those rifles he had hidden here in town were in the hands of the Indians, a shooting war would be inevitable. The hotheads among the Navajo would see to that, and they would find the settlers more than willing to fight.
Then the army would come in to clean out the hostiles, the government would take back the reservation land it had granted to the savages, and Jardine and his partner would be ready to take full advantage of that.
Deeds had already been drawn up, just waiting for the proper developments in Washington. Once they were signed, millions of acres would belong to Zack Jardine ... the King of the Four Corners.
It had a nice ring to it.
Of course, most of those acres were flat, empty, and useless ... but they surrounded areas where cattle could be run, and precious waterholes, and mines producing small but still lucrative quantities of gold, silver, and copper.
Besides, there was talk of running a rail line through here, and if that happened, the so-called worthless land would be worth even more. No land where the railroad wanted to go was truly worthless.
“At least we know the half-breed’s here now,” Braverman said, breaking into Jardine’s grandiose thoughts. “We don’t have to watch the trail for him anymore.”
“It would be better if Joe and Three-Finger had done like they were supposed to,” Jardine snapped. “We could have set a trap that would’ve made sure the meddling bastard was dead by now.”
“We can still kill him,” Hilliard suggested. “He’s upstairs right now.”
“With that Englishwoman,” Jardine pointed out. “Lady Augusta’s the belle of this whole region. We don’t want anything to happen to her.”
That brought another idea to Jardine’s brain, one that had crossed his mind on previous occasions. In an area where most of the women were either washed-out whores or Navajo squaws, Lady Augusta Winslow was a shining light of femininity.
If he was going to be the King of the Four Corners, Jardine mused, maybe he could interest Lady Augusta in being his queen ...
With a little shake of his head, he put aside that appealing thought and told Braverman and Hilliard, “Keep an eye on the ’breed, but don’t let him know you’re watching him. If you get a chance ... get rid of him.”
“What about those two cowboys?” Braverman asked.
Jardine shrugged.
“I don’t have anything against them. But if they’re in the way ... well, the buzzards would be even happier with three bodies than they would with one, wouldn’t they?”
Chapter 18
When Sam stepped through the door of the suite, he wasn’t surprised to see that the sitting room was elegantly and sumptuously furnished, from the rug on the floor to the paintings on the walls to the ornate lamp on a gleaming table.
He had seen enough downstairs to know that the lady liked fine things.
“Sit down,” she ordered as she came into the room behind them. “That divan will do.”
Stovepipe took off his hat and said, “Ma’am, not to be argumentative, but that’s a mighty nice piece of furniture to have three galoots like us sittin’ on it. We’re liable to get it a mite dirty.”
“Never mind that,” Lady Augusta snapped. “Sit.”
The three men sat.
She lowered the shotgun as she faced them, but the weapon was still pointed in their general d
irection. She wouldn’t have to raise it much in order to spray them with buckshot if she pulled the trigger on the loaded barrel. Shotguns were heavy enough that some women had trouble handling them, Sam thought, but not this supposedly genteel Englishwoman.
“Now tell me what happened down there,” Lady Augusta ordered. She nodded at Sam. “You.”
“Pete Lowry and some riders from the Devil’s Pitchfork came in and started talking about how the Navajo raided their ranch last night, ran off some cattle, and killed a couple of hands.” Sam inclined his head toward Stovepipe and continued, “I commented to my friend here how that seemed unlikely to me. Someone overheard me and told Lowry that I called him a liar.”
Lady Augusta nodded.
“I can see how that would spark a confrontation. I’ve seen these other two around, sir, but not you. Who are you?”
“My name is Sam Two Wolves, ma’am. And before you ask, I really am half Cheyenne. No Navajo blood, despite what Lowry said down there.”
“Yes, I didn’t think you looked much like any of the Navajo I’ve ever seen, and there are plenty of them around here. This is supposedly their land, after all.” She turned her attention to Stovepipe and Wilbur. “What about you two? Who are you, and what’s your connection with all this?”
Stovepipe still had his black Stetson in his hand, and when he nudged Wilbur in the ribs with an elbow, Wilbur snatched his battered old hat off his head, too.
“They call me Stovepipe Stewart, ma’am,” the tall, skinny cowboy said. “This here’s my pard, Wilbur Coleman.”
Wilbur opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a nervous squeak.
“You got to pardon ol’ Wilbur,” Stovepipe went on. “He ain’t much for talkin’, especially around beauti-some ladies.”
Lady Augusta didn’t smile, but Sam thought he saw a twinkle of amusement in her eyes for a second.
“Go on,” she said solemnly. “Why were you involved in that fight?”
“Because we were sidin’ Sam here,” Stovepipe explained. “Didn’t seem fair to us that so many fellas would jump one lone hombre and give him a thrashin’ ... especially when he was just tellin’ the truth.”
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