“I’d be perfectly fine if I did. Or have you forgotten how well I can shoot?”
Slaughter wasn’t likely to forget that. He had seen plenty of evidence of her gun-handling skills in the past.
“I know you can take care of yourself,” he said gruffly, “but this part of the territory is still too wild for a woman to be traipsing around by herself, even one as competent as you, my dear. There are still renegade Apaches up in the mountains and gangs of rustlers roaming around, not to mention road agents who would be on the lookout for such a tempting target as yourself. No, I’ll feel much better about your visits if you continue letting Stonewall or me fetch you whenever you want to come to town.”
“What if he’s gone sometime and you need all your deputies here?”
“I’ll just have to make do.”
“There’s no point in arguing with you, is there?”
Slaughter smiled. “On this issue, very little.”
They put that aside and talked for a while about what was going on at the ranch. So far, they hadn’t been blessed with any children of their own, and he suspected that they wouldn’t be.
However, they had taken in numerous foster children—white, Mexican, and Indian—and that meant the big adobe ranch house usually rang with laughter and young voices. Slaughter missed that pleasant hullabaloo as much as anything else about ranch life when he was in town.
Well . . . almost as much as anything else, he mused as he looked across the table at his young wife.
He was about to suggest that they adjourn to his suite upstairs when he heard a commotion out in the street. Someone rode past the hotel shouting something, but he couldn’t make out what it was.
Viola heard the racket, too. “Do you need to go see what that’s about?”
“If it’s trouble that I need to tend to, someone will come looking for me.” He decided that it might be wise to postpone his plans for a few minutes, just in case.
Sure enough, less than ten minutes had gone by when Burt Alvord appeared in the arched entrance to the dining room.
Only twenty years old, which made him a few years younger than Stonewall, Burt was nevertheless Slaughter’s chief deputy because of his tracking ability and his utter fearlessness in the face of danger. He was already half bald and wore a neatly trimmed mustache, which made him look older than he really was.
Slaughter could tell from the concerned expression on Burt’s face that the deputy was looking for him. He stood up and picked up his hat from the table. “I’ll see you later, my dear.”
Viola got to her feet as well. “If you think I’m going to let you run off without finding out what this is about, Texas John, you’d better think again.”
Slaughter didn’t want to take the time to argue with her, so he just crossed the dining room with her in tow. “Is it safe out there, Burt?”
“Oh, yeah. There’s no trouble, Sheriff, just some big news I thought you ought to know about.”
“Then by all means, let’s go hear the news.”
Slaughter took Viola’s arm, and they followed Burt out of the hotel. A large crowd had gathered down the street in front of the assay office.
In recent years that office hadn’t gotten as much work as it once had, back in the boomtown days of the Earps and the Clantons, roughly half a decade earlier. The silver deposits in the mountain ranges around Tombstone had begun to play out. If all the mines ever shut down, Tombstone could well wind up a ghost town, although there were enough ranches in the area that it might hang on to existence as a supply center for those spreads.
At the moment, some of the old excitement seemed to be back. Many of the townspeople and some cowboys who happened to be in the settlement listened avidly as a man unknown to Slaughter stood on the boardwalk in front of the assay office talking. “It’s one of the biggest veins I’ve ever seen, I tell you. High-grade silver ore, too, enough of it to make everybody in this corner of Arizona rich!”
One of the listeners was a little skeptical. “If there was a vein like that anywhere in the Dragoons, it would’ve been found before now. Somebody’s either salted a claim, or they’re playing some other sort of trick on you, mister.”
“Believe what you want, friend,” the stranger said. “The fella in the assay office is running his tests right now on the ore I brought in. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe him.”
As far as Slaughter could recall, he’d never seen the fellow who had brought the news of the silver strike into town. That made him a little leery of accepting the story at face value, although there was nothing unusual about strangers passing through Tombstone. With all the prospectors and drifting cowhands in the area, it happened all the time.
The uproar continued as some people eagerly believed the story while others dissented. Slaughter allowed it to continue. As long as people were just talking, the law had no need to step in.
A few minutes later, the assayer appeared in the office doorway and set off a new outburst of shouted questions. People wouldn’t quiet down, even when the assayer tried to talk.
Slaughter told Viola, “Stay here.” He added over his shoulder to his chief deputy, “Keep an eye on her, Burt.”
Slaughter was smaller than many of the townspeople in front of him, but that didn’t slow him down as he shouldered his way through the crowd. When the citizens realized who he was, they made room for him, and a moment later he stepped up onto the boardwalk with the assayer and the stranger who had brought in the ore.
When Slaughter faced the crowd and held up his hands, everyone quieted down almost immediately. He turned to the assayer and asked, “What about it, Tom? What’s your opinion of the ore you just tested?”
“It assays out at just over eighty dollars per ton, Sheriff,” the man replied. “Definitely high-grade ore.”
That verdict brought excited shouts from the crowd. The naysayers were completely drowned out. The man who had brought in the ore whooped and shouted, “I told you! I told you so, didn’t I?”
Almost instantly, the assembled townspeople began to scatter. Word of the new strike would spread like wildfire. Even though it was fairly late in the day, a lot of people would take off for the Dragoons right away, bent on beating everybody else to the mountains and filing claims on the new strike. The lure of getting rich quickly never wore off.
In fact, Slaughter saw it on the face of his chief deputy. Burt looked like the proverbial cat on a porch full of rocking chairs. He wanted to jump, but didn’t know which way.
Slaughter looked around for the stranger. He intended to question the man more about the discovery. The assayer was the only one still standing on the boardwalk with him.
“Where’d that other hombre go?” Slaughter asked.
“I didn’t notice him leaving, but he probably went to the general store to pick up some supplies and then head back to the mountains. That silver really is high-grade, Sheriff. If I had any desire to chip ore out of the rocks, I’d be right there with him. But I’m not really cut out for the mining life.”
“Neither am I, not at my age,” Slaughter growled. He looked at Burt Alvord again. “I have a hunch that all the young fellows in Tombstone won’t agree with me, though.”
Chapter 3
True to Slaughter’s prediction, less than an hour later Tombstone had an empty look about it. The only men on the streets were grizzled old-timers, and fewer of them than usual. Many of the veteran prospectors had taken off for the Dragoons to make one more stab at hitting it rich.
Some of the storekeepers and clerks had stayed behind in town, along with the handful of doctors, lawyers, and other professional men. It would have been difficult to round up a dozen able-bodied men between the ages of twenty and fifty.
Including Sheriff John Slaughter’s deputies.
By the time he’d gotten to the courthouse after escorting Viola back to the hotel and seeing her safely ensconced in his suite, Burt and Stonewall were out in front of the courthouse putting the fin
ishing touches on the packs they had loaded on a couple mules.
Slaughter groaned. “Not you two. You’re not gallivanting off to the mountains in search of a silver bonanza, are you?”
“I’m sorry, Sheriff,” Burt replied, “but you heard what Tom said. Eighty dollars a ton!”
“Do you know how much work it is to mine a ton of ore?”
Stonewall said, “We’re young and strong. We can handle it. And this might be our only chance to ever get rich, Sheriff!”
“I could forbid it, you know. You work for me. I could tell you to get rid of those pack mules and go on about your jobs.”
“Yeah, but you won’t. You remember what it was like to be young and a real go-getter.”
Burt frowned, thinking that maybe Stonewall wasn’t taking the best tack in the argument.
Slaughter had to chuckle at his young brother-in-law. “So I’m old and slothful, eh?”
“Well, no, that ain’t exactly what I meant, John . . . I mean, Sheriff. It’s just that only so many chances come along in a fella’s life, and if he don’t try to grab as many of ’em as he can, he winds up lookin’ back someday and wishin’ that he’d done things differently.”
Slaughter could understand that. He had always done his best to seize the opportunities that came his way. Few things were worse than for a man to live a life of regret.
Besides, other than occasional brawls like the one earlier in the Top-Notch, Tombstone and all of Cochise County had been pretty peaceful lately. No Indian raids, no rustlers driving wide-looped herds toward the border, no gunfights or murders.
“All right, The town will muddle along without you for a few days. But I’m still not convinced that strike is genuine. You’re liable to wind up very disappointed.”
“But you heard the assay report,” Stonewall insisted. “Eighty dollars a ton! Isn’t that what you told me, Burt?”
“It sure is,” Burt agreed.
The optimism of youth, Slaughter thought. He waved a hand in the air. “Go ahead. But if you see that it’s not going to pan out, I expect you to get back here without wasting any time.”
“You can count on us, Sheriff,” Stonewall said.
If that was true, they wouldn’t be running off to the mountains to look for silver. But maybe he really was getting old, Slaughter told himself. And a man was only young once.
With Stonewall and Burt gone, he made the evening rounds himself. Tombstone was about as quiet as he had ever seen it. With the Top-Notch closed and the other saloons in town practically empty, the potential for trouble was almost nonexistent. Finished, he locked up the sheriff’s office in the courthouse and went back to the hotel.
He might be too old to go running off to the mountains at the first wild rumor of a silver strike . . . but he wasn’t too old to enjoy spending some time in the company of the hot-blooded young woman he happened to be married to.
* * *
The next day, from the top of a shallow rise just south of town, a man peered through a pair of field glasses at the streets of Tombstone. He lay there utterly still for long moments as he studied the settlement. Morning sunlight washed over it, revealing little movement.
Finally satisfied with what he saw, he lowered the glasses and slid back down the slope. When he could stand up in a crouch without the possibility of being spotted from town, he did so and hurried toward a nearby draw where several dozen men waited on horseback.
The man with the field glasses was about thirty years old, lean, and darkly handsome. Stubble covered his cheeks and jaw. He wore high-topped boots, whipcord trousers, and a tan cotton shirt. A steeple-crowned sombrero hung on the back of his neck by its chin strap.
He carried a revolver holstered on his right hip, a sheathed bowie knife on his left side, and had the indefinable look of a man who knew how to use those weapons.
As he went down the bank into the draw, one of the riders edged his mount forward and asked in Spanish, “How does the town look, Chaco?”
“Empty. Well, not totally, of course. A few people are moving around. Women and old men, mostly.”
The rider, who was as burly as Chaco was wolfishly lean, threw back his head and laughed. “We have come to visit on a good day, eh, amigo?”
“You’re right, Gabriel. We’ll probably find little opposition.” Chaco raised his voice. “That means it will be that much easier to ensure that no one is killed, eh, compadres?”
Despite his name, Gabriel appeared decidedly unangelic. He scowled. The other men looked as much like hard-bitten bandidos from south of the border as Chaco and Gabriel did, but mutters of agreement with Chaco’s statement came from several of them. From the time they had crossed into Arizona, Chaco had made it clear that there would be no loss of life in Tombstone if at all possible. He had led them successfully so far in their campaign, so they weren’t inclined to go against his orders.
Gabriel held the reins of Chaco’s horse. He took them and swung up lithely into the saddle. After settling his sombrero on his head, tightening the chin strap, and checking to make sure that his Colt slid freely in its holster, he nudged the horse into motion and led the way toward Tombstone.
It was a little after nine o’clock. The bank had just opened.
* * *
Slaughter was in the habit of rising before sunup, but sometimes that habit was put aside, especially after a night spent in passionate reunion with his wife, whom he hadn’t seen for several months.
As a result, the blazing red orb was well up in the sky before he sat down to breakfast in the hotel dining room. Viola was still upstairs asleep; he would take some coffee to her when he finished his meal.
He wondered how things were going with Stonewall and Burt and the other silver-seekers in the Dragoons. It was too soon for them to be discouraged, he thought with a faint smile. Dreams of a bonanza died hard.
But after a few long days of backbreaking labor with pick and shovel without finding any of that rich, high-grade ore—which was the outcome Slaughter fully expected—his two young deputies might start looking at things in a different light. They might decide that steady wages held more appeal than a lot of hard work for nothing.
When he had finished his steak and eggs and hotcakes, a buxom blond waitress in a starched white apron came over and asked with a sweet smile, “Would you like some more coffee, Sheriff?”
“No, thanks, Hannah, but if you’d pour a cup I can take upstairs to Mrs. Slaughter, I’d surely appreciate it.”
“Of course. Is Mrs. Slaughter enjoying her stay in town?”
“Well, she only got here late yesterday afternoon . . . but I certainly hope so.”
Slaughter stood up and walked over to the big front window while the waitress went to fetch the coffee. Only a few other people were in the dining room this late, and they didn’t pay any attention to him as he looked out at the street.
His eyes narrowed slightly as he noticed a large group of riders drawing rein in front of the bank. The fact that they were all Mexicans didn’t bother him; the number of them, about a dozen, did. His squint deepened as he looked along the street and saw two more groups of strangers, each about the same size, loitering on horseback at opposite ends of the street.
He hadn’t been a lawman all that long, but he’d always had an instinct for trouble. Alarm bells ringing in his brain, he turned and strode back to the table where he had left his shotgun and snatched it up, then turned toward the door.
Hannah came out of the kitchen carrying a cup and saucer. “Sheriff? Your wife’s coffee?”
“No time for it now,” Slaughter snapped.
He was right about that. He had just stepped out of the hotel lobby onto the boardwalk when he heard gun thunder erupt from inside the bank.
Chapter 4
Viola Slaughter stretched in the bed. The sheets were smooth and luxurious as they slid against her bare skin and prompted a little sigh of contentment deep in her throat.
Of course, she had nice sheets on her b
ed in the ranch house, too, but that was different. With John in Tombstone nearly all the time, that bed was just for sleeping. Viola didn’t take any particular pleasure in that.
She reached out, but his side of the bed was empty. She had expected that, so she wasn’t actually disappointed. John was an early riser, usually up well before her. He had said something the night before about bringing coffee to her this morning, so she figured he was down in the dining room getting his breakfast. She would see him soon.
In the meantime, she got up, found the nightgown she had discarded in the throes of passion, and pulled it over her head.
Sitting down at the dressing table, she picked up her brush and started running it through her hair, which was loose and hung in thick dark waves below her shoulders. She wanted to look good when John came back upstairs.
The sound of gunshots somewhere outside made her eyes widen as she looked at herself in the dressing table mirror.
It wasn’t that uncommon for guns to go off in Tombstone. The place had settled down some since its boomtown days, but drunken cowboys still had to let off steam and many arguments were still settled with lead.
But so early in the morning?
That seemed more sinister. She set the brush down, stood up, and moved to the open window, where a yellow curtain billowed slightly in the morning breeze. She pushed it aside and looked out.
The first thing she saw was her husband striding across the street at an angle toward the bank with his shotgun in his hands. As more shots blasted, she realized they came from the two-story, redbrick building that was John’s destination.
As usual whenever trouble broke out, John Slaughter was headed straight for the middle of it.
* * *
Everything would have been all right if one stupid teller hadn’t decided to be brave. The foolish hombre probably wanted to make a good impression on his boss, Chaco thought, and figured reaching for a gun was a good way to do it . . . even though he was outnumbered more than ten to one.
As for Gabriel, well, Chaco couldn’t blame his old friend too much for what happened next. After all, the teller shot at him first, and Gabriel had reacted as any man would when he heard the whisper of a bullet passing close beside his ear.
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