Would he accept this invitation? Should he, was the thing. His thoughts raged against each other. On the one hand, it would be nothing short of insanity to knowingly ride into a setup. The best odds he had of getting out alive were three-to-one, because not only would he have to contend with this duly appointed pack of government manhunters, but with local law enforcement as well.
One was as bad as the other, for it was widely understood that Sheriff Tom Shepherd, the famous sovereign of Justicia jurisdiction, maintained a peaceful existence up there. And he wasn’t one of those dime-a-dozen, big fish-little pond lawmen who could be cowed without much effort. No, he knew gun work. At one time, Shepherd had walked the other side of the street before being sentenced to a five-year stretch in the state prison at Huntsville. Now, having done his time and found religion within Huntsville’s walls, he ruled Justicia with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. Or so Kings had heard.
It must have been quite a thing, the knowledge that an entire countryside of former friends and allies were now your sworn enemies. If there was one thing outlaws hated worse than a cutand-dried lawdog, it was a turncoat. But to the extent of Kings’s knowledge, Shepherd had yet to be sorted out by any of those former friends. Kings wasn’t a friend, knowing Shepherd by word of mouth alone, and he felt no such obligation to count coup on the man, but if push came to shove—if he and his boys decided to see what Justicia had to offer—then he wouldn’t hesitate.
Kings also knew that if they were to face up to a man like Shepherd, a few more hands would need to be brought in. He felt sure Yeager could convince Creasy and his crew to come along, back his play. That meant the proceeds would be divvied up into smaller portions than usual, but, in order to get those proceeds, they would first have to ride through a firestorm. So what was a few hundred lost or gained among friends if it improved their chances of riding away?
They had cheated the Devil before. They could do it again.
This omnipotent posse, overconfident in themselves and their authority, would turn around, lift their tails to scratch, and find the tables turned.
Eventually, the riders emerged from the narrow canyon corridor into the valley, their horses crunching snow and snapping brittle ocotillo.
From there, Kings pulled up twice, each time lifting his hand to close around one of his pistols. The first disturbance, a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, was only a family of javelinas rooting through the brush.
The second time, the movement came from up ahead, some thirty or forty yards down the trail. Standing in the stirrups, Kings determined it was no animal, but a man. Whoever he was, he was either squatting on his haunches or on his knees under a cottonwood, and his back was to them. Whether he was packing iron, Kings could not be certain, but he had to assume so . . . whoever the fellow was. He drew his own iron but did not cock it. He made a kissing sound with his lips, urging John Reb into a lope.
The sound of hooves rattling on frozen stones brought the man’s head around, and Kings was instantly on the alert. It was Henry Coleman, one of the three who rode with Frank Wingate.
What the hell?
The horsemen had closed to within twenty yards before Coleman found his feet. Slowed by the cold and by too long a period of immobility, the intruder knew if he went for one of his guns now he was a dead man. So he stood still, left arm held away from his side in a posture of surrender. His right—the shoulder still mending, heavily bandaged beneath his coat—hung straight down, hand and fingers stiff. His rifle was on the ground near the tree roots, out of reach. But maybe, if he could stall long enough . . .
At length, Kings said, “Your name’s Coleman, if I remember correctly.”
“Yeah,” he replied, shifting from one foot to the other—testing, trying Kings to see how loose a rein he would give him. “Henry Coleman, that’s my name.”
“Where’s your boss?”
The word had been chosen deliberately, and it elicited the expected reaction—Coleman gave a snort and ran his eyes over Kings, head to foot, scarcely concealing his disdain. “I ain’t called nobody ‘boss’ in my life.”
“No offense meant. What brings you back to these parts?”
Coleman did not answer straightaway. “Why, curiosity, Mr. Kings.”
Kings holstered his weapon and dismounted, his eyes never leaving the man. Only when he had both feet on the ground and both shoulders squared did he speak again. Some five or six paces separated him from Coleman.
“How can I be of help?”
“I just wanted to know, Mr. Kings, if you—”
Mid-sentence, Coleman went for his gun.
Kings had been waiting for the man’s left arm to move and was not caught off guard as Coleman hoped. His mind had been at work from the moment he placed Coleman’s face, and by the time he’d dismounted Kings decided that if things, for whatever reason, got ugly, and if it could be helped, he wouldn’t fire a shot. He didn’t want to make any more noise than he had to.
Kings slid the Bowie knife from its sheath and, stepping in hard and fast, struck Coleman across the face with the flat of the blade. The blow caught Coleman flush on the right cheekbone, stunning him, and that was all the opening Kings needed. He brought the blade around, slamming it upward into Coleman’s belly and driving it to the hilt. The two men were suddenly face to face. Coleman’s lips parted, but no words came out, only a gout of blood.
Kings said nothing, either—no gloating, no stark or poetic farewell. He withdrew the knife with a sharp twist, shoving his enemy away. Coleman fell to his knees, struggled to rise, couldn’t, and gave it another try. He failed again, then rolled over onto his side. He thrashed once and went still in a stew of blood, viscera, and snow.
Brownwell spat tobacco juice. “Hellfire . . .”
Kings wiped the blade clean on Coleman’s pant leg, then mounted up and took off at a fast clip. Minutes later, with the cabins in the distance, he halted before a lonely cottonwood to stare up at the welcome that had been left for them. The others spread out on either side, features uniformly grim.
Peering beyond the slowly twisting legs of what used to be Dave Zeller, Kings saw five horses in the corral, four of which hadn’t been there prior to their departure. He saw Zeller’s faithful dun mare and recognized the short-coupled bay with the white shoulder.
He also knew the man who rode it.
Kings calculated the odds and found them favorable. He kneed his horse to the right and addressed them all.
“I want y’all to fan out and make poor targets of yourselves,” he said. “When you see that door fly open and the rats come crawlin’ out, you scatter your shots. Bunch ’em up. Aim at anything and everything but them. Leave the rest to me.”
The four dismounted, drawing their rifles on the way down. Brownwell scattered the animals, then led the advance. They assumed various positions about the place—Yeager and Osborn at separate intervals behind corral posts, Brownwell to the rear of the woodpile, and Woods to one side of a big rock—all with direct beads on the front door.
On the sprint, Kings was soon among the horses in the corral. The next moment, he was skimming through the cottonwoods to the rear of the cabins. As his men watched, trying to follow his movements, he disappeared briefly—it might have been a minute—then reappeared, crouching low in his stocking feet, on the roof whose chimney was leaking smoke.
Kings knelt, shucked his overcoat, and draped it over the lip of the chimney. Unholstering a Peacemaker, he peered over the edge of the rooftop and waited, as a fox before a rabbit hole.
Smoke began to seep from under the door. From within there was the sound of choking men, which soon turned to shouting. Kings heard the door bang open and rifles sounded from the yard. The lighter crack of pistols responded from the doorway, and bullets thudded into the cabin as Kings’s men did as they’d been told. The air seemed to shake when someone from inside cut loose with a shotgun, spraying the sleety lawn with pellets that fell well short of the mark.
Kings waited until he heard hammers clicking on detonated cartridges before he moved, sliding on the seat of his trousers into the seven-foot drop to the ground. Cartridges continued to clink on the porch planks, cylinders buzzed as men hurried to fill them, and he rounded the corner of the cabin. Jack Light-foot was on the porch, as was Frank Wingate, who was just closing his Schofield.
A fragment of time slipped by before the intruders became aware of his presence. Then Kings jerked his pistol, and the single gunshot echoed off the steep canyon walls. Lightfoot spun, falling into and bouncing off the cabin door with a hole in his heart.
On the heels of that shot, Wingate and Kings fired almost simultaneously. Wingate’s bullet tore the fabric of Kings’s left sleeve and Kings’s shot sent woodchips flying as Wingate ducked around the opposite corner.
In no hurry, Kings pivoted through the smoke-clogged doorway, the muzzle of his pistol leading the way. Batting the air with his free arm, he stepped out of the light quickly and could just make out Dan Carver’s bulky form.
The big man was on his feet, clutching the back of a chair for support with his left hand. In his right was a cocked pistol, though he seemed unsure as to where he should aim it. His face was a ghastly shade of gray, and large drops of sweat crowned his forehead.
“Frank, that you?” On the verge of firing, Carver shouted again, “Frank!”
Kings’s third shot was well placed. The slug struck Carver below the left cheekbone and exited the back of his skull in a crimson bloom. Before the heavy body hit the floor, his killer was already sledging through the room, hooking a chair out of his way before opening the back door.
Two bullets perforated the wood, obliterating the latch. Then Wingate was running, and Kings stepped out onto the patch of ground at the bottom of the steps. It took him a moment to drag a sleeve across his watering eyes, and in that moment of blindness, Wingate could have made an end of him, but Kings continued, guns swinging low in either hand.
The land at the rear of the twin cabins was a half-mile wide for about two hundred yards. Then, the ground began to veer, starting at forty-degree angles, into chimney cliffs that tempted ninety sheer degrees. Both sides of the horse trail that led up into the higher elevations were choked with trees, and it was into those trees that Wingate’s tracks took Kings.
There were two shots left in his right-hand Peacemaker, five in the other, and fresh rows of cartridges on both belts. Wingate had twelve loops left in his that still held cartridges, a spare belt over one shoulder, plus three rounds in his Schofield. It was an even game between men who had a bone-deep hatred for each other, only Wingate was running the other way.
Wingate leaned against an antler-scarred trunk to catch his breath. He wasted no more than half a minute, then went down the ridge to the right, bulling through the stand, and burst into a clearing. Head spinning, he was uncertain as to where he should go from there. After a moment, he elected to huddle behind a rampart of rock and reload.
Kings was calm and kept coming. One way or another, he was going to kill Wingate, just as he had killed Coleman and Lightfoot and Carver. Nearing the same scarred tree that Wingate had stopped at minutes before, he heard the bark of a Schofield.
He dropped but held fire until he could discern from where Wingate’s shot had come. One thing was certain—it hadn’t been a direct shot from straight ahead, because the slug had torn a horizontal gash along the southeastern side of the tree.
Kings put an ear to the wind, searching for sound. He waited, then rose to one knee for a quick scan. No sign. Then he was up again and running, staying low. Here and there Kings paused to survey, always with something between himself and what lay ahead. The snow had soaked the thick wool of his socks, and where they showed through the slush, rocks hurt the soles of his feet. But he kept on, ignoring the pain.
If his guess was right, he and Wingate were cat-and-mousing closer and closer to a rainy-day-only, two-hundred-foot falls that had been dry and quiet for months now. He stopped again to reconnoiter at the mouth of a trench where snow, gravel, and boulders funneled down into a medium-wide depression in the earth. After a good rain, it would be murmuring with freshwater for the falls to spill into space. Kings had bathed under its shower more than once and hadn’t been able to hear himself think for the force of the cascade.
He turned, looking back the way he had come, then crouched, holstering the left-hand Colt to reload the other. There was a fist-sized rock near his foot with dark-brown sod on the top and frost on the bottom, which let him know that Wingate had indeed come this way.
For a long time there was no sound, no crackle of snow under a shifting boot, no click of a gun barrel against stone . . . Not even the breath of a man being backed into a corner. Nothing.
Kings had no idea where Wingate was, whether he was close by or farther along, but was Wingate just as blind as he was? Had he already pinpointed Kings’s exact location, and if Kings moved again, would Wingate put one in him? There would be no easy way out of this, but Kings wanted none.
After a while, there was a commotion up ahead. Kings rose higher and caught sight of Wingate scrambling down the riverbed, turning an ankle here, nearly falling there. Stealthily, Kings got to his feet, winced, and started moving. He tailed Wingate swiftly, careful to stay well out of his periphery.
Things were coming to a head.
When he came to the shocking realization of the falls a hundred yards downriver, Wingate swore. He turned with his eyes on the ground. Then his gaze came up, and he stopped short because there was Kings with a black, long-barreled pistol in his fist.
Neither man spoke; neither man dared to move. Kings had his revolver out at shoulder-height, arm and gun barrel straight and still as though carved from a single piece of granite. His expression was calm, but Wingate, with his .44 hanging waist-high, wore an ugly snarl.
Finally, Kings said, “Hello, Frank.”
“Hello, Kings.”
“Come down to this, has it?”
“Been comin’ down to this for a while. You just didn’t know it.”
“You forget what happened back on the Canadian?”
“I ain’t forgotten. Our present situation don’t make me no less thankful.”
The call of a warbler sounded from down the canyon.
“Gotta say, you got me at a disadvantage here, Kings.”
“Like you caught Dave Zeller at a disadvantage?”
“Got me there.” Wingate forced a smile. “Your man—he went down fightin’, I’ll give ’im that.”
“How you wanna play this, Frank? Even break with pistols?”
Wingate’s smile stayed where it was, though Kings could see it was strained, even at this distance. “Well, I appreciate that, Kings—I surely do—though I don’t know you’d call it even.”
As one man, they holstered their weapons.
“Too bad things turned out like this,” Kings said, keeping his hand on the pistol a moment longer.
“Way of our world, Kings. Sooner or later, we eat each other.” Wingate turned slowly to show his enemy the right side of his body, his hand hovering near his buckle for the cross-draw.
“Who’s payin’ for your supper, and how much?”
“Two thousand dollars American. Ned Spivey says howdy.”
“Didn’t think I’d heard the last of him.”
Stillness reigned for a time that seemed eternal. Then, from the corner of his eye, Kings saw snow crumble and crawl loose from a ledge. Wingate’s hand slapped his left hip.
Kings was faster, firing just as his opponent cleared leather. The shot from Wingate’s Schofield went wide as Kings’s bullet entered his liver from a distance of thirty feet, the force of it bringing him to his knees at the lip of the falls. His side seeping blood, Wingate almost looked amazed.
Smoke curled from the barrel of Kings’s Colt, the smell of it acrid in his nostrils. He looked into Wingate’s eyes and thought of the hate he’d seen in those of Henry Coleman just
before he died. It paled in comparison to the hate he saw now.
“Good-bye, Frank.”
All emotion left Wingate’s eyes as a second bullet punched through his forehead, and what remained of him toppled backward over the falls.
CHAPTER 18
Eight men awaited the arrival of the 12:30 train to El Paso, and, although the train was already a good forty-five minutes late, none of them said a word to the station agent.
They had come in ones and twos, ushered in by a north wind, to this squat frame building where trains stopped only briefly as they neared the end of the line. Once they had purchased their tickets, each group returned to whatever corner of the depot platform they’d claimed for themselves. They blew on their hands, stomped their feet, and huddled their shoulders against the cold, but there was little talk. The last to arrive was a tall man in a buffalo coat who came in from the southwest at a quarter to noon. He hitched his fine black horse with its tail to the wind and strode to the ticket window without looking left or right. He purchased his ticket and retreated to sit on the edge of the platform.
Kings was aware that he was being subjected to careful examination by the ticket seller, which was why he distanced himself so far apart from the others, and why he’d turned his back to them. To create the illusion that none of the men knew each other, they’d agreed to divide into groups and approach the depot from different directions at various times. Once there, they would avoid any visible form of communication. To further emphasize their disconnection, some—Kings, Brownwell, and Woods—dressed formally under their long coats, and only Kings had spurs on his boots. Woods had even toted a valise along. Bob Creasy and Charley Davis wore the wide-brimmed hats, leather cuffs, and big-roweled spurs of working cowhands, while Yeager, Osborn, and Hardyman Foss were dressed neutrally.
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