A Good Day for a Massacre

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  A stone dropped in Slash’s belly when Hattie gave another one of her groans of outrage, scraped her chair back from the table, and rose to her feet like a wildcat preparing to pounce. In a flash, her big horse pistol was in her hand, and Slash watched in silent horror as she cocked it loudly and thrust it up and over the table and planted the barrel against the Indian’s nose, yelling, “How dare you—you smelly, rock-worshipping heathen—come over here and insult me with such a moronic proposal! Purchase me for a horse?”

  Both Slash and Pecos stared, tongue-tied, at the big, cocked pistol that the girl held tightly in both hands against the Indian’s nose. Slash thought for sure the man would explode in fury.

  But, no. He didn’t look frightened or angry at all. He looked genuinely even more delighted than when he’d first walked over here.

  He crossed his eyes as he looked down at the big gun snugged against his nose and then slid his gaze in raw delight, in euphoric enchantment, at the girl beetling her brows and pursing her lips at him, holding the pistol rock steady in her small, strong hands.

  Meanwhile, the big Indian’s just-as-big twin was sagging back in his chair, leaning back against the wall and laughing and stomping his boots on the floor in spasms of joyful humor. He held one hand to his forehead and the other across his mouth, childlike, as he continued to stomp his feet and roar.

  The other three customers looked on, grinning from beneath their hat brims, cigars smoldering in two of the men’s hands, chaw streaming down the chin of the third one.

  The Indian twin whom Hattie was bearing down on slid his flashing dark eyes to Slash and said, “All right—we give you two ponies for this little wildcat!”

  Hattie’s jaws grew even tauter, and she yelled, “Why, you—”

  Slash reached out with both hands, grabbed the gun, and lifted it straight up as Hattie squeezed the trigger. The blast rocketed around inside the cabin, the bullet plunking into a ceiling beam directly over the table. Slash wrenched the big popper out of the girl’s hands. She screamed and cursed him, her hat tumbling down her back, her hair falling over her face.

  Slash shoved her brusquely into her chair, lowered the smoking Remington to his side, and held his left-hand palm out to the Indian in supplication. “Friend, I want to apologize for my . . . my . . . my niece there. Her blood tends to run a little hot when she’s hungry.”

  “Yeah, she just needs to get a little somethin’ down her gullet is all,” Pecos added, turning his reproving glare on the girl and adding, “Maybe a rusty nail or two would be more to her liking.”

  “Three horses!” the big twin said through a beam at Slash, holding up that many fingers.

  Sitting low in her chair, peering through the screen of her mussed hair, Hattie gave another enraged wail through gritted teeth. Pecos hurried around behind her and clamped a hand over her mouth, muffling the outcry.

  Turning to the big Indian, Slash grinned and shook his head. “No, no.” He chuckled. “You see, this polecat’s . . . well, she’s my niece, you see. An’ she’s not for sale. Not that I wouldn’t sell her, personally, if I could, but, well, she just ain’t mine to sell, ya see? If I were to accept such an offer, we’d likely have quite the family dustup, don’t ya know. Besides, if you wanna hear it from the horse’s mouth”—Slash leaned toward the big Indian twin and held his hand to his mouth as though conveying a secret—“she ain’t worth one ewe-necked broomtail, let alone three mountain-bred mustangs!”

  He laughed.

  Hattie squirmed in her chair and cussed. At least, Slash assumed she was cussing again. He couldn’t tell for sure, because Pecos held his hand taut against her mouth.

  “You not sell wildcat girl even for three horses?” The big twin looked incredulous and more than a tad heartbroken.

  “Nah, can’t do it,” Slash said. “Sorry, amigo. I’ll buy you a beer, though. Apron, outfit the twins with a fresh round of your delightful ale, will you?”

  That seemed to appease the big twin. He muttered under his breath, eyed Hattie as though she were a tasty meal he was having to walk away from, then tromped back over to his table, where his twin was still chuckling over the whole affair, apparently having the time of his life.

  Pecos kept his hand over the girl’s mouth. She sat fuming, glaring up at him.

  “I’ll take my hand away, but only after you promise to behave yourself,” said the big ex-cutthroat. “I didn’t come here to get shot over no caterwauling Pinkerton.”

  She just stared up at him, her face pale with fury.

  “Okay, here we go,” Pecos said. He glanced at Slash, then removed his hand from over the girl’s mouth.

  They both thought for sure she’d explode like a keg of dynamite and were surprised when she remained in her chair, pale with rage, jaws hard, eyes like two chunks of brown flint, but as quiet as a church mouse.

  Slash and Pecos sighed in relief.

  “Now, then,” Slash said, “maybe we can finish up our meal in peace and ride the hell out of here.”

  “What about the men we’re tracking?” Hattie asked him.

  “What about ’em?” Slash said, spooning stew into his mouth.

  “We haven’t inquired about—”

  “More beer, gentlemen?” The barman had limped over to their table holding a stone jug. “Refills only a penny.”

  “Sure, sure, I’ll take a refill,” Slash said, holding up his half-empty glass.

  “Me, too,” said Pecos. “Damn good ale, sir.”

  The man had topped off Slash’s mug and had just started to pour more ale into Pecos’s mug when Hattie set her spoon down, cleared her throat, and looked up at the big man. “Excuse me, sir, but I have a question,” she asked loudly enough for the entire room to hear. “Has a group of riders passed through here recently? Perhaps a beady-eyed group of border toughs leading a pack mule or two?”

  The barman dropped Pecos’s heavy glass onto the table. The glass struck the table with a sharp thud and fell over. The ale spilled across the table and onto the floor.

  The barman looked at the young Pinkerton, wide-eyed, lower jaw hanging.

  The room fell deathly quiet.

  All eyes were on Hattie.

  Slash glanced around the room, heart tattooing the backside of his breastbone. Pecos looked around, his own ticker turning somersaults. Every muscle of every man in the place was drawn taut as razor wire.

  Slash looked at Pecos. Pecos looked back at him in hushed awe. “Oh . . . boy . . . ,” he muttered.

  The men to the cutthroats’ left and right leaped to their feet, clawing iron.

  “Get down!” Slash cried, and hurled himself to the floor as the guns started thundering.

  CHAPTER 22

  Slash hit the floor much too hard for his old bones, to which such a violent landing was a grave insult. They let him know how they felt.

  Hattie screamed.

  Slash looked up to see her still sitting in her chair, covering her head with her arms.

  “I said get down, girl!” Slash grabbed two chair legs and pulled the chair out from under the Pink with both hands.

  Hattie screamed again as she and the chair were thrown sideways to the floor.

  Guns thundered around Slash, making his ears ring. Bullets screeched over his head, thumped into the floor around him. Several drilled the barman, who’d been even slower to duck than the girl had been. He screamed as he did a bizarre little two-step as the bullets turned him like a pinwheel, blood leaping from his wounds.

  Lying flat against the floor, Slash clawed both his pistols from their holsters and aimed straight out in front of him. The three men who had been sitting to his left were all standing, crouching, mouths drawn wide and eyes pinched to slits, as their six-shooters roared, flames and smoke blossoming wickedly from their barrels.

  Quickly, but sucking a calming breath to steady his aim despite the bullets buzzing around him like angry honeybees enraged by a hive-plundering bear, Slash centered his sights on the man on his
far left and fired.

  As his bullet punched into the center of that man’s chest, Pecos just then rose from where he’d thrown himself to the floor to Slash’s right and returned fire at the two big Indian twins, both of whom were throwing lead at him, snarling like angry wolves, their pistols bucking in their outstretched hands.

  One bullet sawed a nasty trough across the outside of Pecos’s left arm while another nipped his earlobe. His own Russian roared, flames lapping toward the big twin on the left, punching the man back against the wall with a startled look on his dark-eyed face.

  To Pecos’s right, beyond where Hattie lay flat on the floor beside her overturned chair, her head buried in her arms, Slash steadied his left-hand Colt, picked out the hombre who’d been sucking the tobacco quid, and drilled the man through his right shoulder. The man cursed as he dropped one of the two pistols bucking in his hands and twisted backward toward the wall behind him.

  Wasting no time, Slash triggered his right-hand hogleg and blew the man on the right, who’d dropped to one knee, firing and blaspheming Slash’s lineage with shouted epithets, a third eye just above his right one. That lifted the man up off his knees and threw him out the window behind him in a nasty squeal of shattering glass.

  “Dangit!” Pecos yowled, glancing down at the tear in his denims carved by a bullet newly flung by the surviving big Indian twin, who’d somehow managed to dodge two more of Pecos’s slugs.

  The bullet burn, just above Pecos’s knee, felt like a scorpion’s bite.

  “Take that, you rock-worshippin’ devil!” Pecos bellowed, aiming down the big Russian’s barrel again and stabbing flames as well as a .44-caliber round of solid lead in the surviving big Indian twin’s direction.

  That bullet made the surviving twin a survivor no more. He’d thrown his and his brother’s table over and was using it as a shield, but he’d lifted his head up at just the wrong moment. Pecos’s bullet had skimmed over the table’s edge, carving a slight notch out of it just before punching into the big twin’s Adam’s apple.

  It took his brain a while to get the news that he’d been reunited with his brother, however.

  The big twin lurched to his feet, clawing with both his ham-sized copper hands at the gaping hole in his throat, which was oozing bright red blood down his chest. As he kicked the table out of his way and lurched toward the door, Slash, to Pecos’s right, fired again at the hombre on the room’s opposite side—the one who’d been sucking the chaw. The bullet Slash had assaulted the man’s shoulder with had not finished the man.

  Now, like the second big Indian twin, he’d pushed his and his two dead amigos’ table over and had dropped to a knee behind it. He snaked his Colt around one side and fired twice. One bullet curled the air off Slash’s left ear, and the other warmed the air off his right ear, there where he knelt on one knee, aiming both his own Colts at his adversary.

  When the chaw-chewer pulled his revolver and his head back behind his table, Slash fired both his own Colts directly at the table itself. He triggered them again, both weapons bucking and roaring in his hands, until four jagged holes made a vaguely serpentine line across the table, from left to right.

  Behind the table, Slash’s foe screamed angrily and with no little anguish. He rose to his feet, grimacing and still cursing, his face and chest a bloody mess, raising his revolver once more.

  He didn’t get off a single shot before Slash shot him again, punching him out through the same window through which one of his amigos had flown en route to his own reward, which would most likely be a coal shovel.

  Meanwhile, the second big twin Indian didn’t make it to the door

  He dropped to his knees five feet in front of it. He was wheezing and making strangling sounds as blood continued to pump out of the hole in his throat. He was dying hard and slow.

  “Amigo, I’m gonna do you a nice turn you don’t deserve,” Pecos said, raising his smoking Russian once more and punching a merciful bullet through the second big twin Indian’s left ear and out the other one.

  The big twin’s head jerked violently sideways. It steadied again on the big man’s shoulders. He gave one last ragged sigh, then fell face-first to the floor with a heavy, liquid thud.

  Wincing from his three bullet burns, Pecos looked around, blinking against the peppery sting of wafting powder smoke. Slash did the same thing, only he wasn’t enduring any nips from bullet wounds but only the indignant barking of his knees and shoulders and sundry other age-brittled bones and stiff muscles. Said parts hadn’t enjoyed their sudden meeting with the floor.

  When both men saw there was no more immediate threat, they slowly gained their feet with groaning grunts.

  Slash looked down at the dead barman, who’d been hit at least four times, it appeared. One bullet had plundered his right eye. “Poor devil.”

  Pecos looked down at where Hattie still lay flat against the floor, her arms covering her head. Her hair was fanned out across her head and shoulders, like a silky chestnut tumbleweed. The Pink was as tense as a coiled rattlesnake, trembling.

  Pecos prodded her gently with a boot toe and said sourly, “You can get up now.”

  Hattie jerked with a start, then lowered her arms and glanced up at Slash and Pecos.

  Slash cursed as he glared down at her. “What do you got to say for yourself, you crazy polecat?”

  Hattie looked around, vaguely sheepish. She cleared her throat, then heaved herself to her feet with a sigh. Color quickly returned to her ashen cheeks. She looked around again, tossed her hair back, then grinned in unabashed pride and delight, rising up and down on the toes of her boots. “Do I know how to haze a rat out of its hole, or don’t I?”

  “I’d like to know what rats we’re talkin’ about!” Pecos said in exasperation, fingering his bullet-nipped ear. “Besides that—you almost got all three of us greased for the pan!”

  Slash lunged toward her, gritting his teeth. “I oughta take you over my knee an’ . . .”

  He let his voice trail off when he heard something out on the raised boardwalk. Pecos had heard it, too—the squawk of a loose board. Both men raised their pistols, clicking the hammers back. The old man who’d been sleeping out there stepped into the open doorway, blinking sleepily into the saloon’s smoky shadows.

  When he saw the three revolvers leveled at him, he said, “Easy, now . . . easy, now, fellas.” He held up one age-gnarled hand, palm out, and tugged at his tangled, gray bib beard with the other hand. “I ain’t no threat. Years ago, maybe.” He wagged his head. “Not no more. Even if I had me a hogleg, I couldn’t shoot it straight.”

  He peered around the room, his eyes growing slowly wider as he took in the carnage. “Boy,” he said, whistling, “you fellas sure clean a place up. Say, you ain’t gonna kill me, now, too—are ya?”

  He raised both hands now quickly, his washed-out blue eyes glinting fearfully.

  “That depends,” Pecos said. “You need killin’?”

  “Hell, no!” The graybeard cleared his throat. “One of my ex-wives might say differ’nt, but what do they know? They’re old and even uglier’n me. I didn’t have no part o’ this bunch, if that’s what you’re thinkin’.”

  Hattie strode toward the old man, her chin in the air. “What bunch are you a part of, old man?”

  Keeping his hands raised, the graybeard grinned at the girl, his lusty eyes raking her up and down. “Say, now, you’re right purty.”

  “What I look like has nothing to do with anything.”

  “I’d argue the point,” the old man said, still grinning, still feasting his eyes on the saucy little Pink.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him.

  “Jupiter Dodge. What’s your name?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Well, hell—I told you my name. Why can’t you tell me yours?”

  “Because I don’t like the way you’re undressing me with your eyes, old man!”

  “Stop callin’ me old! And I can do any damn thing with
my eyes that I want at my age!”

  Jupiter Dodge glanced around the girl toward Slash and Pecos. “If you ain’t gonna kill me just yet, I think I’ll mosey on over to the bar and have one on ole Earl Kinney.” He glanced at the barman lying, belly down on the floor, in a pool of his own thick blood. “Since he ain’t around no more to bust my chops over it . . . nor to keep my account,” he added with a cackling laugh.

  Slash and Pecos followed the man with their eyes as he walked around behind the bar and looked at the shelves flanking it, tapping a finger against his lower lip as he contemplated the bottles.

  “Who are you, Dodge?” Slash asked him. “And who are these men we killed?”

  “In self-defense,” Pecos added.

  Dodge glanced over his shoulder at the two former cutthroats. “Me? Why I’m just an old man. I live in a shack down the creek yonder. I still do a little prospectin’ when my chilblains ain’t actin’ up, but mostly I sleep an’ drink and fish some, fight the bears off my stoop. Valley’s thick with bears. Used to hunt and trap before I took to prospectin’. I been in these mountains longer than I ain’t.”

  He turned to the shelves flanking the bar again. “Ah . . . there we go. I knew he had a bottle of Spanish brandy up here somewhere . . . waitin’ just for me all these years!”

  Dodge cackled as he reached up to pull a bottle off a shelf. He blew the dust and cobwebs from the bottle and set it on the bar planks.

  “What about them?” Slash asked the old-timer, glancing at the dead men strewn around the edges of the room. “Who’re they? Why did they get iron-grabby when Hattie asked about a certain gang who might’ve passed this way?”

  The old man grimaced as he pulled the cork out of the brandy bottle with a loud pop.

  “Who are they?” Dodge asked, scowling, face still red from the exertion of popping the cork. “Well, hell—don’t you know who they are?”

  “If we knew who they were, Mister Dodge,” Hattie said, “we wouldn’t be asking you—now, would we?”

  “All right, all right—don’t get snippity, young lady. They’re, uh . . .” Dodge glanced around the room, as though suspecting one of the dead men might be listening. He looked out the dirty front windows flanking Slash, Pecos, and Hattie, and then he said, keeping his voice low enough to be heard only in the saloon, “Why, they’re owlhoots, of course. Thieves of some sort.”