It was a short but cold tour of duty, and uneventful, as Zach waited out his two hours under a three-quarter moon that gave him a fairly bright view of the barnyard from his post in the shadow of the log wall. In a good bit less than his two hours, since he had no watch, he decided he had been there long enough, so he headed back to the barn to awaken Slow Sam, who had drawn the next watch. Reluctant to leave his bedroll close to the fire in the doorway, Sam complained that it didn’t make sense to stand out in the cold when common sense told him Joel McAllister wasn’t fool enough to show up there as long as the five of them were waiting for him.
“Quit your bellyachin’ and get your ass out there,” Zach told him. “I took my turn, so you can damn sure take yours.” He stood over him until Sam eventually crawled out of his bedroll and got to his feet. “I sat down against that piece of wall over at the house,” Zach offered. “That’ll keep the wind offa ya. There’s a pretty bright moon out, so you can see the whole barnyard good enough.” Sam grunted begrudgingly, grabbed his rifle and blanket, and walked out.
In the open yard between the barn and the house, Sam paused to check the time. He pulled the pocket watch he had taken from a stagecoach passenger several years before in a holdup in Wyoming, and held it up to catch the moonlight on the face of it. “That son of a bitch,” he grumbled, for he was twenty minutes earlier than he should have been. His immediate reaction was to go back to the barn and roust Zach out of his bed, but he changed his mind, since he was already up and awake. “What the hell?” he muttered. “I’ll just wake Tatum up twenty minutes early.” Still perturbed, however, he remembered Zach’s advice and went to settle down against the partial wall of the house.
Only an hour into his guard tour, his eyelids became heavy, and soon he caught himself nodding, so he admonished himself to stay awake. But it was to no avail. In a matter of minutes, his chin dropped down to almost rest upon his chest. A few minutes later, he began to snore.
Behind him, a dark figure rose from the ashes and burned timbers of the destroyed home and moved silently like a shadow to the section of wall where the sleeping man sat hunched against it. Slow Sam jerked his head slightly when the hand clamped over his mouth and pulled his chin up from his chest. His whole body stiffened when the long skinning knife slashed his throat, his legs thrashing violently as he desperately tried to pull away from his executioner. But there was no escaping the powerful hands that trapped him.
When finally the last trace of life drained from his victim, Joel released his hold and let him slump to the ground. He felt no guilt from the savage way he had killed the man. He would have felt even more gratified had he known that, by a twist of fate, he had dispatched the very murderer who had killed the women with a knife. It was a matter of necessity anyway, for with what he planned to do, he could not afford a noisy killing.
Crouching there in the shadow of the wall, he paused to listen. When he was certain that all was quiet in the barn, he made his way quickly across the open yard to the corral, stopping to listen again before continuing. There was still no indication that all was not peaceful among the sleeping outlaws inside the barn. Satisfied, he began to remove the rails that served as the gate to the corral. When they were all out, he went inside, got behind the horses, and gently herded them out of the corral. They needed little encouragement, and were soon quietly walking out into the open barnyard. He walked along behind them, encouraging them on until they were close to the edge of the clearing.
Aware then that he was pushing his luck, for anyone who happened to walk out of the barn would instantly see him out in the open moonlit yard, he turned and ran back to his horse. The gray was waiting patiently where Joel had left it near the edge of the trees behind the barn. He climbed into the saddle and rode around the ruins of the house to the front corner, where he could see the open barn door. He looked toward the horses again and saw that they had stopped to mill around near the edge of the trees on the other side of the clearing. Three quick shots from his carbine encouraged them to trot for a few yards before slowing to a walk again, but were successful in scattering the freed mounts among the trees. He turned then to focus on the door of the barn.
“What the hell?” Tatum shouted, bolting upright out of a sound sleep.
“The horses!” Strong yelled. “Somebody’s after the horses!”
Tatum didn’t hesitate. Grabbing his Henry, he ran out the door, looking frantically from right to left. His eyes found the man on horseback aiming a rifle at him a split second before the muzzle flash and the solid impact of the bullet when it entered his chest. He ran half a dozen steps farther before crumpling to the ground, dead.
“Hold on!” Strong barked when Larkin started to follow Tatum. “He’s sittin’ out there, waiting for us to come out.”
“Damn it!” Zach swore. “He’s got us trapped in here!”
“Just hold on a minute!” Strong ordered. “He might be waitin’ for us to run out, but he can’t come in without gettin’ his ass blown off. There ain’t nothin’ we can do till daylight. Then he’s gonna have to back off, ’cause there ain’t no place to hide out there.” He looked around him then to see what their situation was. There was a window in the back between the two stalls, and one on the side facing the house. “One of you get on that window in the back,” he directed. “The other’n take that window on the side. I’ll watch the door. He’ll play hell comin’ in here after us.”
“What about the horses?” Zach asked as he ran to the back of the barn.
“We’ll have to worry about runnin’ them down after daylight,” Strong said. “There ain’t nothin’ we can do about ’em now.”
Outside, still seated on his horse where the corner of Boone’s front porch used to be, Joel continued to watch the open door of the barn while keeping a sharp eye in case one of them slipped out of one of the windows. After a while, when it appeared that they were choosing to hole up instead, he decided that his work was done for that night. There was very little chance that he could successfully storm the barn without giving one of them a clear shot at him.
Although his need to complete his quest for revenge was still strong, he knew he could not fight all three of them out in the open. So he contented himself with the knowledge that his enemies were now reduced to three, plus the man responsible for all of the killing, Boss Beauchamp. He would continue to catch them one by one until he had extracted full payment for Boone’s and Riley’s deaths as well as the execution of the women. So he turned the gray’s head away from the house and loped up through the pine trees toward the back of the mountain. He was hungry and he needed sleep.
Tomorrow I’ll find them again, he thought.
• • •
There would be no more sleep that night for Strong and his two remaining gunmen. First light of day found them still watching warily for a new attack. When it was finally light enough to see, they decided it best to take the precaution of going out the back window, in case McAllister had sat waiting all night for someone to show his face. Still, there was no one of the three eager to expose himself outside the barn, until finally Tom Larkin volunteered.
“To hell with it,” he snorted. “I’ll go. We can’t stay here in this barn all day. I’ve got to find my horse.” So, with a boost from Zach, he went out the window, landed on his shoulder, and immediately rolled over, ready to fire. When there were no shots fired, he got to his feet and made his way along the back of the barn until he reached the corner. Peering cautiously around the corner, he waited several minutes with no sign of anyone in the yard between the barn and the house. So he walked around the empty corral to the front of the barn. There was still no sign of anyone, so he decided McAllister had gone.
“Hey,” he called out, “you two lily-livered gunslingers can come out now. He’s gone.”
Strong was not so sure. He considered the possibility that Joel was hidden somewhere, and was waiting to lure all thre
e of them out in the open. So he hung back to let Zach go out the door before he did. When there was still no sign of attack, he cautiously followed Zach, relieved when there was no shot fired. Larkin walked over to look at Tatum’s body.
“He hit him right square in the chest, right in the heart, I expect,” he said. Then a thought occurred to him and he started checking Tatum’s pockets, knowing that, like all the men, he was carrying a large cash bonus for the “Indian raid.” He found the money in an inside vest pocket and started to put it away, but Strong saw him.
“What the hell do you think you’re doin’?” Strong demanded.
“Well, hell, he ain’t gonna need it where he’s gone to,” Larkin replied.
“We’ll be splittin’ that money three ways,” Strong told him.
Overhearing, Zach went over to Slow Sam’s corpse by the cabin wall, intending to search his pockets as well. “I reckon this here’s the reason we didn’t hear no noise when that son of a bitch was scatterin’ the horses,” he said as he looked at the half-breed’s slashed throat. “I wondered what happened to him. I thought he mighta run off.”
Before doing anything else, they counted the money found on their late partners and divided it three ways. Only then was there any thought about what they should do about the fact that they were on foot. “They most likely didn’t go very far,” Larkin said, “if we just knew what direction they run off in.”
“He mighta rounded up them horses and drove ’em off somewhere where he’s got ’em hid,” Zach suggested. He shook his head slowly and said, “It’s a helluva long walk back to Blackjack Mountain, especially carryin’ a saddle.” His comments were sobering to his two partners, who had not considered that possibility to that point.
“We need to take a look along the creek on the other side of those trees,” Strong said, assuming the horses would naturally go to water. He was not at all enthusiastic about walking down this mountain and hoofing it seven miles to Beauchamp’s ranch at the base of Blackjack Mountain.
All three knew that they were of little use on foot, hunting for McAllister, or running from him, so they threw their saddles on their shoulders and started up through the trees to look along the stream. It was a fruitless search. They saw not one of the five horses, and soon were at a loss as to where to look further.
“We’d best give up on the horses and start walkin’ before that bastard comes back and catches us out in the open,” Strong finally decided.
So they started on a line as straight toward home as they could figure. It was their misfortune that only one man had seen the direction their horses had been driven from the corral, and he was shot dead before he could tell anyone. In fact, the horses had fled in the opposite direction from the stream where the three men had searched, running up through the trees at the far end of the meadow where Boone McAllister had built his home. They had not gone far into the trees, and wandered back to the barn later in the morning.
• • •
The sun was well up when Joel returned to his brother’s home and sat his horse inside the tree line while he took time to look the scene over. By all appearances, it seemed that the three men were no longer there, for their horses were milling about the barn and the yard, still unsaddled. And the two bodies of the men he had killed the night before were left where they had fallen. After a wait of approximately fifteen minutes more, he decided that they were really gone, so he nudged the gray and the gelding walked slowly out of the cover of the trees toward the barn.
With his rifle out and ready to fire, he watched the door of the barn carefully, still alert to the possibility that he might be riding into a trap. But there was no one waiting in ambush as he rode right up to the barn door. Taking a brief look inside, he saw three saddles that had been left behind. Since there had been six of them when they had come up the mountain the day before, that told him that the three had left on foot, carrying their saddles. Evidently they had looked for their horses in the wrong direction.
It didn’t take much looking around to discover the trail left by the three where they crossed the open yard between the barn and the belt of pines behind. With a cautious eye, he followed the tracks left by the frequent scuffing of their bootheels on the floor of the pine forest. They led him to a fork in the stream that flowed back to Boone’s house below. The tracks were not so easily followed at that point, but he was able to surmise by some broken branches of laurel bushes that they had thrown their saddles down at one point while they apparently searched up and down the stream. It took him some time after that before he was able to find where they had left the trees and set out across an open meadow.
They’re heading for home now, he thought as he sighted along the line they had started on. He set out after them.
• • •
Tom Larkin stumbled, almost falling, on a shale-covered slope. Cursing, he complained, “These damn boots ain’t made for walkin’.” He was not as stout as Strong or Zach, and his saddle seemed to have acquired a good bit more weight during the several hours he had carried it.
Neither Strong nor Zach had complained about the load on his shoulders, although they were getting tired as well. Neither man wanted to admit to a weakness.
“I reckon we could set ’em down for a little while and give you boys a rest,” Strong said. “Maybe when we get to that pile of rocks down yonder.”
“I don’t need no rest,” Zach boasted, although he was glad someone had finally called for a break.
They continued down toward the large outcropping of rocks that Strong had indicated. When within a dozen yards of the rocks, Larkin stumbled again, but this time he went down and a rifle shot was heard immediately after.
“Run!” Zach yelled, not waiting for Strong to follow.
Running as fast as he could to gain the protection of the rocks, he felt the impact of a second bullet when it smacked into the saddle he carried on his shoulder. It caused him to run even faster.
Gasping for breath, the two men dived behind a finger of rock that jutted out beyond the boulders. Fearing for their lives, they dropped the saddles and pulled their rifles out of their scabbards.
“Up there!” Strong shouted, and pointed to a large boulder that sat on a flat rock base with another boulder behind it. “We’ll have cover from both sides up there.”
Zach moved immediately without questioning. He wanted something solid between himself and the determined avenger, and the boulder looked to be the best place to be at this moment. He was only a step ahead of Strong as they scrambled up over the smaller rocks to squeeze in between the two larger boulders. Back-to-back, they were confident they could handle an attack from either side.
“Let the bastard come on now!” Zach bellowed, once he felt the security of the rock protecting him. He rose a little in an effort to spot the shooter. “Come on down here now, you son of a bitch!” he shouted out. He was immediately answered by a bullet that glanced off the boulder a foot from his head, causing him to drop down on his knee before the next shot came. “Damn!” he muttered, knowing the next one might have his name on it. His sense of bravado having been corralled, he pressed Strong. “We’re in a helluva bind in these damn rocks. What are we gonna do? That bastard’s got us pinned down here.”
The question was already troubling Strong’s mind, and he couldn’t see an answer that was satisfactory. “Nothing we can do right now,” he said. “He can stay up there above us all day if he wants to. Our only chance is to sneak outta here after dark.” It was an option, not a good one, but better than the other remaining one—charge out in the open to take him on in a shoot-out.
“It’s a helluva long time till dark,” Zach complained, “and I ain’t got much water left in my canteen as it is.”
“You’d best scrape up some of that snow between these rocks, then. But I’ll tell you, dyin’ of thirst ain’t your main problem right now.”
He
dropped to his knees and crawled a few feet to the side in an effort to see where the shooter was. A small space between the curved bottom of the boulder and the flat shelf it rested on afforded him a tiny window to look through. After a few minutes of scanning back and forth across the slope above them, he suddenly snapped his gaze back to a low clump of laurel a few yards below the crest of a ridge.
“I got him!” he exclaimed excitedly. “He’s up there behind some scrubby little bushes. Move over to the other side of this rock and you can see what I’m talkin’ about.” Zach moved at once, and when he reached a space where he had a view of the ridge above them, Strong gave him directions. “See them two little bent-over pines on the right side of where that ridge slopes up on the right? Now come on over to your left to that little clump of bushes. He’s behind the biggest one right in the middle.”
Zach followed Strong’s directions and located the bush. “I see where you’re talkin’ about,” he said. “But I don’t see nobody. How do you know he’s behind that bush?”
“I just saw it movin’ about a minute ago. He’s behind it, all right. He’s just settin’ up there waitin’ for one of us to stick our heads out. And that ain’t no protection a’tall, so if we fill that bush up with lead, we stand a damn good chance of gettin’ him.”
“Might just be another marmot,” Zach said, remembering the last time they had massacred a bush. “But, hell, I don’t see any better place he could be up there.” He shifted his position to a point where he could aim his rifle through the small opening between the rocks and waited for Strong’s signal.
Silver City Massacre Page 19