Bullets Over Bedlam

by Peter Brandvold

  Shouting erupted below, and Flagg returned his attention to the wash. A blue shirt slid through the brush—a soldier making for a nest of rocks and saguaros to the marshal’s right. Behind the man, several bandits yelled and pointed. One raised a rifle, and fired.

  The blue shirt dropped behind a paloverde, then reappeared as the soldier continued forward on his hands and knees. Above the incessant whine of cicadas, Flagg heard the man’s sharp grunts and anxious pleas.

  The bandit who’d fired the rifle, and two others, descended on him quickly. The man with the rifle kicked him flat. He clamped his boot down on the soldier’s back as he spoke to the other two bandits, one of whom threw his head back and laughed.

  The bandit raised the rifle to his shoulder, aiming at the soldier’s head.

  Bunching his lips, Flagg snapped his own Winchester up. He aimed quickly and squeezed the trigger.

  A half second after the bark, the hard case with the rifle jerked his head up. His rifle came up, as well, the pop reaching Flagg’s ears a full second after the barrel puffed smoke. Dirt and gravel sprayed two feet from the wounded soldier’s head.

  The other two bandits snapped their own heads to the man with the rifle, who stumbled forward, tripping over the wounded soldier and dropping to his knees.

  “Open up on the sons of bitches!” Flagg barked.

  He ejected the spent cartridge, rammed a fresh round into the breech, then slid the barrel to one of the two other men near the soldier.

  As the man faced Flagg, crouching and spreading his feet and grabbing the six-shooter from the holster on his right hip, Flagg sent him tumbling into the brush, the wounded outlaw inadvertently triggering his revolver into the head of his dead cohort.

  Around Flagg, the deputies’ rifles sent a crackling fusillade into the wash. Like Flagg, all six were expert marksmen, and in that first volley a half dozen bandits were sent sprawling into the chaparral around the soldiers they’d am-bushed.

  Several others returned fire, shouting and arguing, then turned and ran. The man with the payroll money leapt a rock as he scrambled south along the wash.

  Flagg had run halfway down the ridge, snapping shots with his carbine. Now he stopped, aimed at the retreating back of the man with the loot, and planted the rifle’s sights on the fancy stitching adorning his bullhide vest, between his shoulder blades.

  He fired as the outlaw dodged behind a saguaro. The shot plunked into the cactus, spraying dust and cactus bark. Continuing down the wash, the man edged a look behind, then disappeared over a rise. Several of the deputies’ shots kicked up caliche and snapped mesquite branches as the last of the outlaws disappeared over the rise and was gone.

  Flagg continued down the rise, thumbing cartridges from his belt and feeding them into his Winchester’s loading gate. He glanced at Press Miller. “You and Hound-Dog fetch the horses.”

  Hound-Dog glanced at him. “What about Hawk?”

  “Hawk can wait. I know where he’s heading. We’re going after those bushwhacking sons of bitches!”

  Flagg repressed a smile. Not only would he bring Hawk to justice, he’d secure the Army payroll. He’d have his name in all the papers. A candidate for the territorial governor’s office couldn’t ask for better publicity.

  Shit, he’d be a hero.

  “These bushwhackers need to be taught a lesson,” Flagg said, lowering his rifle toward an outlaw writhing in the brush at the base of a saguaro. “And I’m just the teacher.”

  The outlaw, bleeding profusely from two holes in his chest, looked up at Flagg, his gray-green eyes pinched with pain. One-handed, Flagg pressed his carbine’s barrel against the man’s sweat-glistening forehead.

  The wounded man’s jaw tightened, and his eyes flashed horrifically.

  Villard, kicking over a dead outlaw to Flagg’s right, glanced at the man before Flagg, and frowned. “Hold on, Marshal.”

  “Deputy Villard, this man appears to be reaching for a pistol—wouldn’t you agree?”

  Villard looked at the man. The outlaw stared back at him, his eyes beseeching. He couldn’t be much over seventeen, with jug ears, hollow jaws, and close-cropped, sun-bleached hair. His hands were nowhere near a gun. In fact, both his holsters were empty.

  Villard’s eyes returned to Flagg. “We playin’ by Hawk’s rules, now, Marshal?”

  Flagg pressed his rifle barrel hard against the kid’s head. “Trying to keep this man alive, when he is obviously mortally wounded, would be a waste of our time. Time better spent hunting that travesty of justice, Gideon Hawk.” Flagg’s pinched eyes flicked toward Villard. “Wouldn’t you agree, Deputy?”

  Villard didn’t say anything for a moment. He glanced at Houston and Allidore, who’d both stopped their survey of the wash to regard Flagg incredulously. Villard looked again at the wounded man, bleeding out in the rocks and cactus.

  Slowly, the deputy nodded his head. “Appears that way to me, Marshal.”

  Flagg squeezed the Winchester’s trigger. The outlaw’s head exploded. The young man slumped onto his right shoulder, kicking his legs and clenching his fists, as if furious at having been killed.

  “We got two more over here,” Bill Houston called to Flagg, nodding at two men writhing on the ground between him and Allidore.

  “They’re both going for weapons,” Flagg said. “Kill them.”

  Houston glanced at Allidore, shrugged a shoulder, then shot his man in the head. Allidore’s rifle spoke two seconds later, drilling a rangy half-breed in a red bandanna through the heart.

  Houston and Allidore glanced at each other and chuckled.

  Flagg heard screeching and looked up. Already, the shaggy black crosses of buzzards winged in lazy circles over the draw. He turned away from the man he’d shot and walked around the wash, inspecting the other bodies.

  The eight soldiers were dead. Flagg found one more living outlaw, the man’s back rising and falling faintly as he lay facedown in a cactus patch. He’d been shot in the side and through one leg.

  Flagg shot him in the back of the head.

  A horse whinnied, and Flagg turned to see Miller and Hound-Dog Tuttle riding their own mounts down the ridge, trailing the outlaws. As they approached the bottom of the wash, Flagg reached for his reins.

  “What about the soldiers?” asked Bill Houston.

  “We’ll bury them later,” Flagg said, swinging into the leather. “After we’ve retrieved the payroll money.”

  He turned the steeldust in the same direction the other bushwhackers had fled, and gave him the spurs.

  Behind him, climbing clumsily into his own saddle, big Hound-Dog Tuttle glanced at Villard. “Think this’ll put him in the governor’s office, Franco?”

  “If it don’t get him—and us—killed.” Villard kneed his grulla into a trot.

  “That’s ‘doesn’t,’ ” Press Miller corrected. “Doesn’t get us killed.”

  The others laughed and galloped after Flagg.

  Flagg and the deputies ran their horses hard, following the bushwhackers’ trail—six shod horses splitting wind for the border. Flagg wouldn’t let them make it. He’d be damned if they’d make it.

  When they’d ridden for an hour, Flagg could tell from the tracks that the outlaws’ horses were tiring. On a ridge, the lawmen spied a long dust trail stretching out across the flat, chaparral-tufted desert below. The falling sun colored the dust orange, the six horses at the head of it, dun brown.

  The lawmen heeled their mounts down the ridge.

  “They know we’re back here,” Flagg said. “A couple keep slowing up and turning their horses to look back.”

  “Beware a bushwhack,” said Press Miller. “They’re good at it.”

  “I’m good at sniffing out a bushwhack, too,” bragged Flagg.

  He was. That’s why, following the trail between two low, piñon-studded scarps, he halted his steeldust as he stared down the horse’s left shoulder.

  “What is it?” asked Allidore, following Flagg’s gaze.
<
br />   “There were six horses a moment ago. Now there’re only five.”

  A rifle barked angrily. Hound-Dog Tuttle’s hat flew off his head.

  As the shot echoed shrilly around the scarp, Flagg shucked his Winchester and, turning the horse with one hand while jacking a fresh shell with the other, snapped the rifle to his shoulder.

  Smoke puffed around a thumb of rock jutting out from the scarp’s base. There was the metallic rasp of a rifle being levered, then flames stabbed through the smoke as the shooter fired again.

  Flagg cut loose with his carbine, sending lead through the smoke, peppering the scarp. The slugs barked off the rock, whining.

  A man screamed, stumbled out from behind the boulder. He dropped his rifle, lost his hat, and danced around, enraged and disoriented. Flagg’s bullets, ricocheting off the scarp, had shredded the man like shotgun pellets.

  Hound-Dog and Villard both sent more .44 rounds through him, laying him out flat on his back, twitching.

  Flagg turned his horse down trail. “Let’s go!”

  They galloped down a hill. Ahead lay a ravine, a purple gash in the fading light. At the lip of the ravine, sunlight shimmered off a rifle barrel.

  “Ambush!” Flagg shouted.

  A half second later, a rifle snapped. The slug twanged off a rock to Flagg’s left, caused a horse to whinny behind him.

  As more shots roared and smoke puffed amidst the brush along the lip of the cut, Flagg turned his mount in a full circle, dodging lead. “Three of you follow me! Three head right! We’re gonna get behind ’em and send some blue whistlers up their assholes!”

  Flagg turned his horse left, toward the bushwhackers’ far left flank. Houston, Miller, and Villard galloped behind him, hunkered low in their saddles, dusters flapping like wings. The other three lawmen raced right, returning fire, their silhouetted figures disappearing behind a billowing veil of gun smoke.

  Flagg felt a bullet curl the air behind his neck as his horse plunged into the ravine. The horse’s front hooves hit the gravel and tough, brown brush at the bottom, nearly sending Flagg over its head. He grabbed the horn and gave an involuntary grunt as the air whooshed out of his lungs.

  Sucking a breath and raising his Winchester, he gigged the horse westward along the draw. After three lunging strides, he saw the shooters lying along the ravine’s northern ridge. Three of the five turned toward Flagg, while the other two, hearing the other lawmen driving in from the west, jerked looks in that direction.

  “Goddamnit!” one shouted. It was the man who’d carried the Army payroll bags—a stocky gent in a black vest, with a broad pitted face framed by black muttonchop whiskers.

  Flagg jerked back on the reins with his left hand. With his right, he aimed the Winchester, snapped off a shot. The steeldust wasn’t stopped, and the jostling nudged the slug into the bank beside the outlaw’s right elbow.

  The man cursed again and fired at Flagg. A quarter second later, Press Miller’s rifle drilled the man through his chin, knocking him back against the bank. He had an amazed look on his face as he clutched his jaw with one hand while holding his rifle with the other.

  The other deputies cut into the outlaws, Tuttle’s barn blaster roaring amidst the rifle cracks.

  Hearing slugs whistling around him, plunking into the ground before and behind him, Flagg triggered his Winchester, levered, and triggered again. His steeldust was well trained, but not even a well-trained mount would keep its hooves planted amidst this much gunfire.

  Still, at least as many slugs found targets as flew wild.

  Less than a minute after the deputies had stormed into the ravine, all the outlaws lay stretched out along the bank, dead.

  The rotten-egg smell of cordite filled the ravine. The smoke hung like fog. Blood spurted from a dead outlaw’s neck, making a wet sound like water squirting from a highpressure spring.

  While the deputies sat their horses, staring sullenly at the dead men flung every which way upon the bank, Flagg gigged the steeldust forward. The horse climbed the bank and stopped beside the dark-haired hard case.

  Leaning out from his saddle, Flagg scooped up the saddlebags with his rifle barrel and draped them across his bedroll.

  He rode back down to the bottom of the wash, waved powder smoke away from his face, and turned back to regard the corpses.

  “We made short work of these bastards,” said Tuttle, chuckling and reloading his shotgun. “Hawk should be a turkey shoot.”

  Flagg looked at him. “You think so, do you?”

  Tuttle shrugged.

  Flagg laughed, reined his horse around, and rode off down the wash.

  9.

  SECRET PLACE

  SITTING under pines along the needle-strewn creek bank, Gideon Hawk watched the cartridge casing bob along a riffle in the gently flowing stream.

  Hawk had filled the casing with paraffin to help it float upright, and drilled a hole through it. After stringing fishing line through the holes and attaching the line’s other end to the homemade pole he’d crudely fashioned from a willow branch, he’d skewered a cricket to the hook.

  Flashing in the sunlight angling through the pines, the cartridge bobbed between two mossy stones, nudged a yellow cottonwood leaf, and dropped into a placid hole on the other side of the stream.

  The cartridge jerked suddenly into a small cavern made by an old pine root overhanging the river, and disappeared beneath the dark water.

  Somewhere in the depths of Hawk’s memory, a phantom called. “Pa, I think I got one!”

  Jubal Hawk stood on the far side of Wolf Creek, not far from their house in Crossroads, Nebraska Territory, the boy’s cane pole bent out over the rushing water. Six-year-old Jubal—stocky and dark-haired with eyes the same blue as his mother’s—ran along the creek while staring hang-jawed at the droplet-beaded line angling into a deep hole on the downstream side of a beaver dam.

  Hawk laughed. “Give your pole a tug straight up, and pull him in!”

  The boy gave the pole a tug and stretched a happy, terrified grin at his father fishing on the opposite side of the stream. “The hook’s set, but it’s really big. It’s a hog! Gotta be!”

  Hawk propped his own pole against the log he was sitting on, then rose and leapt onto the beaver dam. As he threw his arms out for balance, he made his way to the far side of the stream. The water, still icy this early in the spring, slid across his boots, riffling against his trouser cuffs.

  Jubal exclaimed with boyish glee as he tugged on the pole and backed away from the water, a suspender falling off a shoulder. One foot slipped in a patch of star moss, and he fell on his backside, his floppy-brimmed hat tumbling off his head. “Dang!”

  “Hold on to the pole, Jubal!”

  The pole had slipped out of the boy’s hands, but now as Hawk leapt from the beaver dam and onto the boy’s side of the stream, Jubal grabbed the pole and pushed up on his knees.

  “It’s gonna break,” he cried, lifting the pole’s end and peering into the stream.

  “It’s all right,” Hawk said, staring into the water along the bank, choking back a laugh. “Give it another tug and you’ve got him.”

  Hawk stepped back, wet boots squishing, as Jubal planted a hand on one knee and pushed himself to his feet with a grunt. When the pudgy boy got his other foot under him, he took a deep breath, balling his flushed cheeks, and tugged on the pole hard with both hands.

  There was a light, frantic splash as the fish shot out of the water and landed on the bank.

  “Oh, boy!” Jubal ran over to where the huge fish lay on a cottonwood root.

  Only, the fish wasn’t as huge as it had first appeared shooting out of the stream. In fact, it wasn’t much of a fish at all—just a little half-pound bullhead swaddled in moss, spruce-green watercress, and a soggy tree branch.

  The boy looked down at it, crestfallen. He kicked the tree root. “Darn! I thought it was a lunker!”

  Hawk laughed and tousled the boy’s hair. When he’d unhooked the gaspi
ng fish and returned it to the stream, he leapt onto the beaver dam, throwing his arms out for balance. “Back to work, son. Nothin’ comes easy, you know!”

  “But Pa, I really wanted it to be a lunker to show Ma!”

  The boy’s voice was drowned out by another. Someone was squeezing Hawk’s arm and calling his name. Hawk turned his head to find Juliana staring at him, her brown eyes showing concern, both hands wrapped around his forearm.

  She knelt beside him, her bare legs and feet curled beneath her, her soft, white skirt pulled up above her knees. Her hair hung in flowing waves across her shoulders, framing her tan, heart-shaped face.

  She glanced at the stream, the bridge of her nose deep-lined with excitement as she sprang up and down on her thighs. “Gideon, you’ve got one! You caught a fish! Pull it up!”

  Hawk turned to the stream. But instead of the tea-brown, sun-dappled water churning over the rocks, what he saw was a large cottonwood tree standing atop a steep hill. The tree was silhouetted against a stormy sky, its branches thrashed by pounding rain.

  Thunder rumbled. Lightning stabbed witches’ fingers across the gauzy darkness.

  Hanging from a stout branch of the tree was a pudgy young boy, turning this way and that in the wind . . .

  “Jubal . . .” Hawk muttered.

  His heart tumbled in his chest. He choked back a sob, squeezed his eyes closed, and gave his head a hard shake.

  When he opened his eyes again, the tree was gone. The stream appeared before him, the alpine air smelling like pines, mushrooms, and damp soil. Sun-dappled water churned over the rocks, washing a branch into a small trough and sweeping it downstream.

  Hawk felt a wetness on his cheeks. His throat was still tight.

  He glanced again at Juliana. She stared into his face, her own features flushed with worry. She squeezed his forearm and caressed his cheek with her other hand, thumbing away a tear—a soft, sweet caress.

  Her voice was barely audible above the stream. “Are you all right, Gideon?”

  For a half second, Jubal’s hanging corpse flashed again before his eyes. He blinked, and it was gone. There was only Juliana beside him, smelling like rose hips, the wind blowing her hair and buffeting her low-cut blouse. Before him was the stream in the deep, pine-studded canyon north of the hacienda . . . and the mesquite pole in his hands, jerking ever so slightly as a fish fought at the other end of the line.