The Independence Trail
Page 15
A sweaty-looking character, wearing a dirty apron over long johns, stuck his head out of a doorway on Art’s left and blinked twice as he saw the Henry pointed at his face. He squawked, reminding Catlin of a parrot he had seen two years before, at the Chicago Zoo in Lincoln Park. He looked to be a cook, and while his hands were empty, Catlin couldn’t take the chance that he’d recover from his shock and come back with a cleaver or a butcher’s knife.
Art pushed in through the kitchen door and found the peeper cowering beside a stove that could have used a thorough cleaning months ago. Wide-eyed and quaking, the cook showed him empty hands and whined, “I got nothing to do with that shit goin’ on out front.”
“Be smart, then,” Catlin said. “Skin out the back and stay well clear until you don’t hear shooting anymore.”
“Yes, sir! And thank you, sir!”
Art stepped aside to let him pass, confirmed that he was loping toward the back door, then went back to check the kitchen, just in case the cook had a helper hiding out.
Nothing.
Art reckoned that he’d stalled his entry to the barroom long enough. Tippit was in the thick of it, presumably, and Catlin went to see if he was even still alive.
* * *
* * *
A fuming string of curses poured from Oren Dempsey’s sour-tasting mouth as he scrambled around the little bedroom, pulling on his trousers, letting the suspenders droop until he found out that his gun belt wouldn’t buckle properly around them. He’d already dropped the whiskey bottle that he’d brought upstairs and had to dodge barefoot around its broken glass, stepping in wasted alcohol.
Jasmine was mewling underneath the bed—a tight fit for her, but she’d managed it, after the shooting started up downstairs. Dempsey snapped at her to shut the hell up, but she kept on crying like a little kid who’d reached inside her Christmas stocking and produced only a lump of coal.
Once he had fastened on his pistol belt, Dempsey unholstered his LeMat revolver, spun its nine-shot cylinder, confirmed a shotgun shell was loaded in its second barrel, and prepared to head downstairs. He thought of picking up the trapdoor Springfield propped upright beside the sagging bed but left it there, deciding that if ten shots couldn’t end the barroom battle, one more likely wouldn’t do him any good.
His first thought, when the shooting started, was of trouble where he’d left four of his riders playing poker with two whiskey bottles on their table. Dempsey knew the Calderón brothers liked picking fights when they were drunk, and Lubie Grant had trouble hiding his disdain for Mexicans, although you’d think he might have grown accustomed to them after pulling jobs together for the past couple of years.
As for McManus, well . . .
Before he cleared the bedroom doorway, though, another thought hit Dempsey. What if this was more than just a dustup between rowdy Comancheros?
What if some dirt they had done was catching up with them at last?
More worried now than angry, Dempsey stopped short in the second-story corridor and doubled back to Jasmine’s crib. He holstered his LeMat and moved directly to the bed, stooped down to grip its wooden frame, then heaved it up and over, and stopped from falling by the offside wall.
Beneath the bed, Jasmine was squirming like a bug will when the stone concealing it is suddenly removed. She yelped and tried to roll away from him, but Dempsey caught her tangled hair in one hand, hauled her naked to her feet, and wrapped his left arm tight around her, underneath her breasts.
His right hand drew the big LeMat again, its muzzle grinding hard into her back, below one shoulder blade.
“Let’s take a walk, darlin’,” he hissed into her ear, “and see what’s goin’ on downstairs.”
* * *
* * *
Sterling Tippit hadn’t been expecting all-out chaos when he walked into the Red Dog, much less that the Comancheros he was tracking would go wild and light the fuse themselves.
Of course, the barkeep hadn’t helped, pulling his shotgun when a couple of the poker players started squabbling at their table, halfway drunk and thinking they could settle it with shooting irons.
And it had gone to hell from there, the moment that the bartender produced his sawed-off coach gun, hoping it would calm the Comancheros down. Of course, it had the opposite effect, and by the time Tippit cleared leather with his Colt Dragoon, the barroom’s smoky air was full of flying lead.
It didn’t seem that any of the cardplayers were bent on shooting him, particularly. Once they all had guns in hand and the bartender had fired off one barrel of his Greener, it had turned into a loco free-for-all. The Comancheros started firing at the bartender, whose first round sprayed buckshot over their heads, not even grazing anyone, and Tippit hit the floor, trying to make himself invisible.
That didn’t work, either.
While random bullets pocked the Red Dog’s backbar window and smashed whiskey bottles on the shelves below, one of the Mexicans saw Tippit with his Colt in hand and winged a shot in his direction, gouging splinters from the wooden facing of the bar near Tippit’s head.
The Colt Dragoon bucked in Tippit’s hand, his instinctive reaction sending a slug downrange without taking time to aim it precisely. He got lucky. A gout of blood spurted from the Comanchero’s shoulder, impact spinning him around to hit the floor facedown.
Not dead but hurting at the very least—and that left three within the Bar X foreman’s field of vision.
From the racket he could hear upstairs, he supposed that reinforcements would arrive in seconds flat. And when that happened, Tippit didn’t want to be curled up against the bar in plain view.
Vaulting to his feet, he lunged across the bar and landed in a crouch beside the bartender, who stood hunched over, fumbling to reload his double-barreled shotgun. Glancing over at Tippit, he said, “You ain’t supposed to be back here.”
Before he could do anything about it, though, a bullet drilled the right side of his neck and came out on the left, blood spewing from its ragged exit wound. His head dropped over at an ugly angle, like a hanged man’s, and his knees folded, the bulk of him almost collapsing onto Sterling Tippit’s outstretched legs.
Reaching across the fallen body, Tippit grabbed the barkeep’s twelve-gauge, double-checked its load before he snapped it shut and thumbed both hammers back. Wedging his legs beneath him, waiting for a lull in pistol fire, he counted down until his moment came, then sprang up like an oversized jack-in-the-box.
He caught three of the former poker players starting to spread out and rush the bar. The fourth was still down, smearing blood across the floorboards as he tried to stand, without much visible success.
No time to hesitate, as three guns rose and tried to target him.
Tippit fired off both barrels of the Greener—left, then right—riding the weapon’s recoil, sweeping its twin muzzles sideways between shots. The shotgun’s sixteen-inch barrels sprayed buckshot across a wide front, striking two of the three Comancheros he’d hoped to bring down.
One took it squarely in his face, features erased by blood as his sombrero took flight with a portion of his scalp inside it. When he hit the barroom floor, limbs splayed, he shivered like a hooked trout drowning in fresh air.
The other moving Comanchero caught a charge beneath his upraised gun arm. He spun through three quarters of a circle with his buckskin shirt flapping around him, losing balance as he came out of the turn and dropping to all fours. He tried to rise again, palms sliding on the blood-slick floor, but Tippit dropped his borrowed scattergun, now empty, and reverted to his Colt, drilling a .44 round through the outlaw’s right armpit to put him down.
That left one on the run and headed for the stairs to Tippit’s right, fanning two shots off from his gun in rapid fire. Neither came close to Tippit, though he flinched involuntarily before he found his mark, leading the runner by a foot or so, triggering a fourth
shot from his big Dragoon.
The Comanchero seemed to stumble on his own feet, pitching headlong toward another table, where his forehead struck wood with a solid whack as he went down. He was recoiling from that impact when Zeb Steinmeier barged in through the Red Dog’s batwing doors, Volcanic rifle raised, and punched a fresh hole through the Comanchero’s back.
The gunman finally collapsed, blood pooling underneath him, pumping from a ruptured lung in jets until the gunman’s life was finished draining out.
No other threats were presently in sight, but Tippit heard more men evacuating upstairs bedrooms, hastening to the relief of their comrades. Willing himself to focus, he began reloading the Dragoon one fat round at a time and wondered where the other members of his posse were right now.
* * *
* * *
Stay up here and out of sight,” Mel Halstead warned Lurleen. “At least until the shooting stops.”
“What’s going on?” she asked him, in a whiny little-girl voice, sounding close to tears.
“How ’n hell would I know, woman?” Halstead answered back. “I’m goin’ down to find that out right now.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said, half sounding like she gave a damn about him. “It’s not safe.”
“Christ on a crutch,” he snapped at her, drawing his Schofield six-gun with a showy flourish. “If it was safe, I wouldn’t need this smoke wagon, would I?”
“I only meant—”
“You want a good idea?” he interrupted, mocking her. “Stay right here like I told you, till your boss comes by to fetch you.” And he went out, muttering under his breath, “Supposing that he ever does, the fool.”
Outside the bedroom doorway, Zachary Bodine nearly ran into Halstead running toward the Red Dog’s stairs himself. The barrel of his Springfield rifle glanced off Melvin’s shoulder with sufficient force to bruise him.
“Well, excuse hell outta me,” Halstead jeered at Zach as he ran on, oblivious.
“Excuse this!” Bodine answered back, his left hand raised, its middle finger spiked.
Some people. If there wasn’t gunplay going on downstairs . . .
Halstead refocused his attention on the clamor rising from the barroom, picking up his pace, eager to find out who was killing whom, and why.
* * *
* * *
Zeb Steinmeier had hesitated entering the Red Dog’s barroom when the shooting started up. He’d spotted Sterling Tippit at the bar, turning to watch some kind of hubbub at one of the poker tables, while the barkeep pulled a shotgun out from hiding and the whole scene went to hell in nothing flat.
Once bullets started flying back and forth, it seemed like suicide to walk in on the middle of it, with the bartender and Zeb’s own foreman taking fire, unloading back in Steinmeier’s direction, so he’d flattened up against the outer wall and started counting backward from one hundred in his head.
When he was halfway done with that, the firing slackened and he peered in through the window, saw one of the Comancheros—Christ, he hoped it was, at least—running in the direction of some stairs off to the left. Tippit had slipped behind the bar somehow, and he was lining up a pistol shot to drop the runner.
Thinking that the Bar X foreman ought to know what he was doing, Zeb pushed through the swinging doors with his Volcanic rifle braced against his shoulder, squeezing off his shot a split second after Tippit’s Dragoon spat lead across the Red Dog’s bar.
Between the two of them, they’d put the final poker player down.
When Tippit greeted him with a tight nod, Steinmeier tried to figure out if he’d hung back too long and come off looking like a coward, but the foreman didn’t chastise him. Instead, he started moving down the bar’s length, drawing closer to the stairs and whoever was storming down them, coming even later to the party than Steinmeier.
He passed the poker table with its scattered cards and coins, to reach another one nearby. Its placement granted Zeb a more direct view of the stairs, and so he flipped the table over on its edge, crouching behind it with his rifle aimed and braced.
Maybe five seconds now.
And four . . .
Three . . .
* * *
* * *
Lonnie Kilgore cocked his shotgun—first the left-hand barrel, then the right—wishing he had a drink ready at hand to steel his nerves. Too bad Lonnie had drained the bottle he kept hidden in his desk while washing down the supper Cletus Robard had prepared for him.
Now he was going into battle nearly sober, and the Red Dog’s owner didn’t like it one damned bit.
For starters, Kilgore wished he had more guns around the place. Between the shotgun in his hands and the Apache six-gun in his pocket, it was all or nothing. It was hard to miss a man-sized target with the double-barrel, but he only had two shots before he had to reload, which meant fumbling with the spare shells in his pocket, and it didn’t sound as if the shooters in his barroom would allow him any extra time.
With the Apache, by comparison, he’d have to move in kissing-close before he opened fire, and even then, he couldn’t gain a hit, much less a kill with its small caliber. On balance, Lonnie thought he might do better with the knuckle-duster or the two-inch dagger’s blade. But whether anyone would let him get in close enough for that was doubtful.
More likely, they’d just cut him down on sight.
“To hell with that!” he said aloud as he trudged along a not-so-secret passage from his office to the Red Dog’s barroom battleground, with access through a door behind the bar that he kept locked from the inside.
The Dog was his joint, and he wouldn’t have it taken from him by a gang of unwashed Comancheros who committed God knew what crimes to accumulate the cash they spent on Lonnie’s booze and women two, maybe three times a year.
He might be nothing but a small frog in a smaller pond, all things considered, but he had to take a stand sometime, somewhere.
And if he didn’t . . . well, what was the point in even drawing breath?
* * *
* * *
Art Catlin reached the beaded curtain separating the saloon from various back rooms and paused there for a moment, checking out the carnage on display beyond it.
Straight ahead of him, four gunmen who he guessed were Comancheros—or had been—lay sprawled in blood, their pistols lying just beyond the reach of outflung hands. Off to his left, a good-sized man he’d never seen before lay on his side behind the bar, shot through the neck, head lolling from a severed spine.
Above that corpse stood Sterling Tippit, busily reloading his big Colt Dragoon. His chosen weapon was the gun’s Third Model, recently converted from black powder to accept metallic cartridges, but still requiring Tippit to remove the cylinder instead of dumping empties and replacing them through a convenient loading gate.
As Tippit spotted Catlin, nodding curt acknowledgment, Art heard a clatter on the stairs and spun in that direction, shouldering his Henry, sighting down its barrel toward a clutch of five men rapidly descending from the second floor. One of them was naked, none entirely dressed; Catlin presumed that gunfire had drawn them from their pleasure in the upstairs cribs.
But all of them were armed and on alert, spotting their downed comrades, then cutting loose on Art and Sterling Tippit, judged to be their enemies. Crouching to clear the Bar X foreman’s line of fire when he was done reloading, Catlin framed the group’s nude point man in his rifle’s sights and put his first round through the gunman’s hairy chest.
* * *
* * *
Julius Pryor raced across the dusty street that seemed to mark the county line bisecting Devil’s Crossing, Remington revolver in his hand. He reached the Red Dog just as lamps were being lit in humble living quarters up and down the thoroughfare, the occupants alarmed by gunfire echoing from the saloon.
Get on with it, thought Pryor as he shoved in through the Red Dog’s swinging doors and joined the battle with his Remington, winging one of the Comancheros with his first .46-caliber slug and pitching the gunman off balance, making him tumble head over heels down the staircase.
That first shot brought Steinmeier’s head and rifle pivoting toward Pryor, but Zeb recognized his fellow drover instantly and swung his full attention back to the remaining enemies that Julius could see so far.
Four down, one wounded, four more rushing down the Red Dog’s stairs, but Tippit’s posse had been tracking twelve raiders from where they’d massacred the hapless Bjorlin family.
Where were the other three?
Julius pushed that question out of mind and focused on the gunmen he could see, who were intent on killing him and his companions if they got the chance.
The one he’d winged had landed in a heap but lurched upright immediately, still holding his pistol. Pryor had his six-gun leveled for a second shot, when someone to his right—Tippit or Catlin—dropped the wounded Comanchero with a head shot.
Cursing, Pryor sought another target while the four staircase survivors blazed away at anyone still standing in the barroom, and thinking, Christ! Why won’t they just hold still?
* * *
* * *