Bullets Over Bedlam

by Peter Brandvold

  As Flagg kicked his right boot savagely, insisting that Hound-Dog go, too, Miller glanced at the others, jerked his head, then rose and strode into the shadows. The other four deputies followed, holding their rifles high in both hands as they traced Hawk’s course around the scarp and headed up the ridge.

  Hound-Dog looked down at Flagg.

  The marshal winced and bellowed, cursing, casting his gaze from one bloody arm to the other. “Thought I’d turn tail.” He chuckled crazily. “I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch!”

  Hound-Dog ripped his neckerchief off, began looping it over Flagg’s right arm. “Don’t waste your energy, Marshal. Soon as I get your arms wrapped, I’ll take you inside and try to figure out how much damage that crazy bastard did to ye.”

  When Tuttle had both of Flagg’s arms wrapped with neckerchiefs, he slipped his hands under the marshal’s arms, tugging him to his feet. He had to do most of the lifting. Flagg was growing weak from blood loss and shock.

  One arm around the man’s waist, Tuttle led Flagg to the saloon’s back door, then inside and up the stairs at the back of the main hall. The second-story hallway was dark, but a thin line of light beneath a door at the far end revealed five other doors. Choosing one at random, Tuttle threw it open and led Flagg inside to a bed.

  Flagg sagged onto the mattress, the leather springs complaining. He froze when the muffled cracks of a rifle sounded, rending the quiet night. The six or seven shots seemed to have been fired by the same rifle.

  Flagg glanced at Tuttle, who’d frozen beside him, shaggy eyebrows arched as he listened. Snarling, the marshal grabbed the big deputy’s broad arm and squeezed, gritting his teeth. “Go find out what’s going on, Hound-Dog. I want to know what’s going on!”

  He’d no sooner bellowed the last word than his eyes grew heavy. The snarl faded from his lips, and his shoulders slumped, as if the muscles and tendons had suddenly dissolved.

  “Easy, Marshal.” Hound-Dog eased the man down onto the bed. It wasn’t hard. Flagg was almost out, his breath growing shallow, eyelids fluttering.

  Behind Tuttle, a door latch clicked. He rose quickly, wheeling toward the room’s open door as he drew his Colt Army from the cross-draw holster on his left hip, raking the hammer back.

  Near the doorway, keeping close to the hall’s far wall, the barman appeared in his canvas breeches and underwear shirt, suspenders hanging down his sides. He held a rusty bull’s-eye lantern up high in his right hand.

  Lowering the pistol, Tuttle said, “The marshal’s been hurt. There a sawbones in town?”

  Baskin raised the lamp a little higher as he moved forward and peered into the room. The copper lantern’s light fell across Flagg’s bloody, unconscious body. The barman’s own eyes were swollen nearly shut. That and his broad, purple nose gave him a bizarre, owl-like look.

  He glanced at Tuttle, pursing his lips with satisfaction. He snorted, “No,” then turned and sauntered back down the hall. Shortly, a door closed and latched with a solid thud.

  His own breath coming hard and raspy from enervation, Hound-Dog peered around the dark room, found a gas lamp on the dresser, and lit it. With his bowie knife, he’d cut away both of Flagg’s bloody sleeves and was examining the wounds when voices rose from the alley.

  The voices moved inside, echoing around the main hall and obscured by boots pounding the floorboards then hammering the stair steps and growing louder, making the entire building shake.

  Press Miller’s face appeared in the doorway. He was sweating and breathing hard, his hat askew. He shook his head as he stepped into the room.

  “He fired at us from up the ridge. There’s no way we can take him in the dark. He knows the terrain too well.”

  The others filed in behind him and spread out around the bed. Miller shuttled his gaze from Flagg to Tuttle. “How’s he look?”

  By way of answer, Tuttle spoke to the group, urgency pitching his voice. “I need my saddlebags from the livery barn. I also need hot water, whiskey, and all the cloth you can find.” He glanced at Villard. “Franco, I’ll be needin’ your stiletto to dig those bullets out.”

  All the other men except Miller and Villard shuffled out of the room and down the stairs. Villard hiked his right boot onto a chair, jerked his trouser cuffs above his boots, and slid a slender, bone-handle stiletto from the well.

  As Villard handed the knife to Tuttle, Flagg opened his eyes. They were red-rimmed and rheumy, spoked with pain lines. His glance found Miller staring down at him.

  Flagg cleared phlegm from his throat, curled his upper lip. “You get him, Press?”

  “First thing in the mornin’,” Miller said. His nostrils flared. “When you open your eyes tomorrow, first thing you’ll see is Hawk’s head starin’ at you from that washstand over there.”

  Flagg sneered and grunted as misery shot through him. His eyes held on Miller’s. “Tough talk. You make good on it . . . or I’ll see you only work as a deputy town marshal in a backwater mining camp.”

  Tuttle and Miller shared a glance. Then, his face flushed, Miller turned, hefted his rifle, and went out.

  15.

  THE HUNTED

  AFTER he’d fired a half dozen shots at the deputies climbing the ridge behind him, giving them second thoughts about the night scout, Hawk returned to the hacienda. He quickly stuffed his saddlebags and war bag with his possibles, then saddled his horse and made a dry camp a hundred yards east along the ridge.

  In a slight cleft in the ridge, the ruins of an old stone house—probably an ancient sheepherder’s shack—stood amidst brush and rocks and sparse firs and pines. Just east of the shack, an arroyo ran down the ridge toward the canyon, choked with mesquite, paloverde trees, cactus, desert willows, and a few spindly cottonwoods. It was a direct route down to the village, but, with the dense cholla, “jumping cactus,” it was no place for horses. The few times Hawk had felt like walking instead of riding to the village for supplies, he’d discovered several mine pits along the wash, as well as a dozen or so Apache arrows, two of which protruded from a half-mummified man in thread-bare dungarees and hobnailed boots, a few strands of long red hair curling atop his head.

  Hawk spent the night sitting with his back to the shack’s ruined west wall, holding his Henry across his thighs. He took catnaps while keeping an eye and ear skinned on the hacienda hulking in the western darkness, which was where Flagg’s men would no doubt look when they came stalking him.

  It was doubtful any would turn back. It was their job to bring him in or, as the governors’ death warrant provided, to kill him.

  They’d been his colleagues at one time, so he’d felt compelled to warn them off. He’d given them a chance to turn around and go home. If they didn’t—if they insisted, instead, on continuing the hunt—he had no choice but to turn and fight.

  No animal—grizzly, wolf, mountain lion, or man—could be expected to do otherwise.

  The stars turned in the velvet sky. Nightbirds called. His bedroll draped about his shoulders, warding off the early autumn chill, Hawk slept and woke, slept and woke. Once, he rose, stretched, and strolled around the shack as he smoked. When he’d finished the cigarette, he drained his bladder and sat back down against the wall.

  He yawned and draped the blankets around his shoulders, set the rifle across his thighs. The cold seeped up from the ground. The rifle barrel grew chill. He yearned for a bed. This hunted life was getting old, but now that the wheel was spun, there was no way to stop it save death.

  That time would come. But not before he’d taken down a few more killers like those who’d killed Jubal. Not before the men hunting him had earned their trophy.

  He leaned his head back against the cold stone wall. Shortly, his eyes grew heavy, and his chin dipped to his chest.

  Later, he became aware of warm air caressing him. A wren chittered. Hawk opened his eyes and looked around, curling his finger through the Henry’s trigger guard.

  The trees and brush stood silhouetted against a paling
sky. Gray light pooled atop stones, filling their pits and fissures with purple shadows, and squirrels scuttled along pine branches.

  Hawk remained sitting, moving only his eyes, taking in everything around him, looking for hidden dangers he might have missed while he slept. Deeming the area safe, he was reaching for his canteen when a squirrel suddenly began yammering loudly down the arroyo, as if scolding an interloper.

  The cacophony cut through the morning silence, making Hawk’s pulse race.

  He climbed to his feet stiffly, moved to the shack’s front corner, and dropped to one knee, peering down the arroyo.

  There was the faint click of a kicked stone.

  Hawk raised the Henry to his shoulder, snugged his cheek against the stock. He aimed down the V-shaped notch obscured by overhanging branches. A few seconds later, a figure moved toward him, barely seen behind the veil of leaves and pine trunks.

  Anticipating the man’s route, Hawk aimed at a gap between two branches, and waited. Footsteps rose. The figure appeared between the branches, the head moving into Hawk’s rifle sights. His finger tensed on the trigger, began taking up the slack.

  Seeing the long hair and curved figure, his heart thudded. He flicked his finger away from the trigger, and lowered the rifle, squinting down the arroyo.

  The girl ducked under a pine branch and moved into the open, shoulders hunched beneath a frayed, brown serape.

  Hawk kept his voice low. “Juliana!”

  She stopped suddenly, turned to him, her hair flying about her shoulders. “Gideon?”

  Hawk rose and tramped quickly down the arroyo and grabbed her arm. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Face flushed from the climb, eyes worried, she looked up at him. “There are lawmen in the village. Last night, I heard the shooting. I had to come.”

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I kept imagining you up here alone, dying.” She threw her arms around him, burying her head in his chest. “But you are all right?”

  He pushed her away from him, kept one hand on her arm. “Damnit, they might have seen you, followed you!”

  “I was very cautious.”

  Hawk cast his gaze down the arroyo. The squirrel had stopped its tirade for a time. Now, it had started again. Far down the arroyo, Hawk thought he spied movement through the branches.

  “I’m getting you out of here.” He turned and, jerking Juliana along behind him, tramped back up the arroyo and around the shack to where he’d tied the grulla. He’d send her back to town via the main trail.

  “Gideon, I am sure I was not followed—”

  Hawk stopped suddenly, staring northwest. Thirty yards away, the grulla was walking away from him . . . being led away from him by a man in a long gray duster and black, high-crowned hat.

  Hawk’s heart lurched. “Run!”

  He pushed the girl forward, and turned back the way he’d come. Twenty yards away, smoke puffed under a willow and a rifle cracked, the slug spanging off a rock half a foot before Hawk’s right boot, spraying gravel in his face.

  Behind him, Juliana screamed. He heard her stumble and fall.

  Rage burning through him, Hawk slammed the Henry’s butt against his right hip, aimed down the arroyo, and snapped off a veritable fusillade, blowing up dust and snapping branches and punching bullets through cactus plants.

  Amidst the cracks of the Henry, a man grunted. Several others shouted angrily.

  Hawk snapped the rifle up and turned, looking for the deputy who’d been leading the grulla off. The horse was nowhere in sight. The deputy was hunkered down behind a deadfall pine, his cheek snugged against a rifle stock, the barrel aimed at Hawk.

  Hawk wheeled as the rifle boomed. The slug slammed into a mesquite branch as Hawk bolted forward. Juliana was on the ground, staring up at him, terrified. Hawk grabbed her arm as several more shots split the air around him. He pulled her up and over the ridge behind the sheepherder’s shack, the deputies’ shots kicking up dust and pummeling stones at their heels.

  The shots continued angrily as Hawk and Juliana ran down the opposite ridge, Hawk clutching her hand in his own. Several slugs spanged off the ridge crest, careening harmlessly into the air, before the shooting stopped altogether.

  When Hawk and Juliana had followed a game path through the chaparral for a hundred yards, another rifle boomed on the ridge top. Hawk didn’t turn around but kept running, pulling the girl around a trail bend.

  The slug blasted rock to their right.

  Then they were scrambling down the ridge and into the canyon. The stream where they’d fished was a meandering, silver thread in the misty morning shadows at the bottom of the gorge.

  When several more shots sounded, and excited shouts lifted, Hawk stopped. “Keep going!”

  As Juliana kept running down the switchbacking trail, Hawk turned and aimed the Henry up toward the ridge crest. The deputies were following the trail in a shaggy line, running. Hawk planted a bead on the first man, and fired.

  The slug tore into a stunt cedar behind him, the shot echoing around the canyon. The man dove into the brush as Hawk levered a fresh shell and fired at the man behind him.

  That shot, too, was errant. The man dropped behind a boulder while the others behind him scrambled for cover farther up the ridge.

  Hawk rose and ran after Juliana.

  He’d gone ten yards when the deputies’ shots resumed, spanging off the rocks around him, spraying sand and shards, ricocheting around his legs and snapping cedar branches.

  He’d nearly caught up to the girl when he stopped again, swinging around while raising the Henry toward his shoulder. A bullet slammed into the Henry’s breech with an ear-numbing scream, sending sparks into his eyes, the ricochet tearing across his right hand. The rifle tumbled out of his hands, smoking.

  Hawk lunged toward it. Two slugs blasted into the rocks before him. He pulled back, glanced up trail.

  The deputies were closing, pausing only to fire.

  As three shots hammered around him, Hawk turned. Leaving the Henry and cursing his luck—he was armed now with only two revolvers against six men with rifles—he ran after Juliana’s retreating figure.

  He overtook her as they gained the canyon bottom. Not slowing down, he grabbed her arm. They ran east along the gurgling stream, the deputies’ shots whistling over their heads and pounding the opposite ridge.

  Hawk and the girl turned a bend in the trail. They leapt the stream and sprinted into the narrow feeder canyon, startling several mule deer grazing the ironwood shrubs.

  “Inside!” Hawk ordered when they’d come to the low, oval opening at the base of the canyon wall.

  He pushed Juliana through the cave mouth and turned. No sign of the deputies, but shouts echoed from the main chasm. He dropped to all fours, swept his hands across the fresh prints in the chalky dust, then doffed his hat, and rolled through the opening. He crawled until the ceiling rose, then stopped, half-turned back toward the light, and dangled a wrist over a knee.

  He could hear better than he could see Juliana in the darkness, breathing heavily. He could feel the heat of her body beside him. Neither of them said anything. In the heavy silence, they listened intently.

  Outside, footsteps sounded—boots puffing dry dirt, spurs chinging. “They came this way,” said one of the deputies, the voice muffled by ten feet of solid rock.

  The sounds faded, then died as the men passed the opening without spying the notch cave. Farther inside the cavern, bat wings flapped, echoing their sinewy squeak, and Hawk felt the fragrant, heavy humidity pushing toward him from the falls.

  “They’re gone,” Juliana said through a long, relieved sigh.

  “For now.”

  Hawk rose, grabbed her hand, and led her back into the chasm. They came to the waterfall and looked around. The sky above the falls was a soft, early morning gray stitched with the small, winged silhouettes of birds. Light tumbled over the rocks of the sunken roof, glittering dully on the water and filling most of th
e gorge with cool, black shadows.

  Hawk stared at the jumble of wet rocks rising to the ceiling. Slippery, no doubt, but climbable.

  Hawk took her hand again, led her to the base of the falls. He raised his voice above the clamor of the water on the rocks.

  “We’re gonna climb out of here. It won’t be long before those lawmen find the notch cave, so we have to hurry. You go first. Watch your step!”

  Juliana’s fear-glazed eyes met his, then moved to the falls. She lifted the heavy serape over her head, tossed it down, then sprang forward into the tumbling stream. Instantly wet and spitting water, she reached up, grabbed a rock, hiked her foot onto another, and began climbing.

  Hawk waited until she was six feet above him, then followed her, reaching for holds and dodging the three or four streams of falling water. Juliana rose nimbly above him. Once, she loosed a rock, which tumbled over Hawk’s head and clattered onto the floor below.

  She stopped and looked down, eyes wide. “Sorry!”

  Catching a slender thread of water in his left eye, Hawk made a face and shook his head. “Keep climbing!”

  He reached up, grabbed a rock furred with mineral deposits. His hand slipped off the rock, and for a moment he hung by only his right hand. He dug a boot into the wall, found a crevice, and, ignoring his heart’s hammering, continued climbing.

  Above, Juliana was nearly to the top.

  Hawk lowered his head, looked for another handhold, and continued climbing. When he looked up again, he was five feet from the lip of the gorge.

  Juliana had disappeared.

  Only the spring-fed stream curled over a shelf of black granite and tumbled into the hole, the edge of the stream soaking his left arm and clouding his eyes with vapor.

  Hawk bunched his lips and heaved himself up. In seconds, he peered up and over the lip of the chasm.

  His stomach sank and filled with bile.

  Juliana stood ten feet back from the hole. A tall, patch-bearded man with a moon-and-star badge pinned to his duster lapel stood behind her. He had one arm across her chest, gripping her firmly against him. His other hand held a long-barreled Colt Navy to her temple. Her dress and underclothes were soaked, clinging to every curve.