Gunslinger 05, page 1
part #5 of Gunslinger Series
The Home of Great
Western Fiction!
It was a savage, snowbound Arizona mountain winter when Ryker’s old enemy, banker Goldburgh, came to him and told him his daughter had got herself kidnapped by the murderous Brennan gang. Ryker wasn’t about to help Goldburgh-even for a 12,000 dollar reward.
But the gunslinger soon had something against the Brennans when they broke his right arm. That’s when Ryker got himself a scattergun – the kind you don’t need to aim too carefully to cut a man in half. Now the Brennans were going to pay, and Arizona was going to see a lot of blood on the snow ...
GUNSLINGER 5: ARIZONA BLOODLINE
By Charles C. Garrett
First published by Sphere Books Ltd in 1979
Copyright © Charles C. Garrett 1979, 2023
This electronic edition published August 2023
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book / Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Series Editor: Mike Stotter
Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books
This is for Angus Wells, who likes Westerns.
A man could choose worse company to write with.
Chapter One
IT WAS BLEAK mid-winter. The frosty wind moaned around the wooden frame buildings of Tucson. The dusty earth of the Arizona Territory was iced hard as stone, only a fine dust blowing from its surface. The rutted tracks of the main street were usually awash with mud, but the water was now frozen like iron.
A few days earlier snow had fallen. Snow on snow. The sky lay across the horizon like a sullen grey blanket, and the air tasted bitter. Christmas was a day ago. A carved wooden wreath, painted green, hung on the door of the main saloon. Big Dolly Harman’s place, the What Cheer.
The rest of the town looked like it always did. Like it had been built yesterday and was about to be pulled down tomorrow. The snow had come from the north, howling across the hunting lands of the Pima Indians. A tribe that had not given too much trouble to the local whites for a good few months. For Tucson the threat lay all about them. To the west and to the south. Apaches.
Cuchillo Oro, the lone Mimbreño warrior with his golden knife was still loose in the Territory, despite the efforts of Cyrus Pinner of the U.S. Cavalry to capture him.
But it was Christmas. A time to drink and whore and forget about the Apaches. Even Sheriff Nolan, not the most forgiving of men, was generous to the noisy drunks and the cowboys firing their pistols into the lowering sky in the middle of the night.
A time of peace and good fellowship.
At its height the pale disc of the sun held just enough warmth to move the light snow from the open spaces, though it still lay in drifts in the shadowed places of the township. White mounds, like scattered graves, covered with a veil of red dust.
The young man going calling stepped carefully around a pile of dried horse chips, not wanting to lose the polish from his best boots. He was the only one in the family who gave a damn about his appearance. It pleased him to have got dressed up neat for the visit. His brothers and his pa were all waiting around the front of the house for him to finish his business.
It was a big house. Near the biggest in Tucson. And that meant it was one of the biggest in the whole Territory. Square-built with a brick base, and heavy pillars rising up either side of the double front door. Painted white. Paint that was renewed every year, regular as the clock. So that it didn’t flake and peel like most of the other buildings around. And it was a big piece of land. Near as big as some of the smallholdings around. The young man looked at it, pausing by a clump of tall saguaros, watching his breath pluming out ahead of him in the cold air.
‘By God, but it’s getting even colder,’ he said, to nobody in particular.
It was bigger than his Pa’s whole spread, way out of town to the east, at the end of a box canyon. Didn’t seem right that one man should have such a house while another sweated his life away trying to scratch a living from a bare patch of dry earth.
He grinned at that thought. Not that his pa had ever done a whole deal of scratching. Not pa.
There was a shallow draw running parallel with the main street, lying behind the saloons and the livery stable. Instead of walking along the street, the young man chose to approach the house along the draw, keeping low as he went. Hunching his shoulders under the heavy jacket against the wind. Hat tugged low over his eyes.
The windows at the back were all shuttered against the winter, and he watched them as he made his way towards the back door. Squinting through the dust for any sign of life. But the house looked as lively as a closed mortuary.
The sky hid the sun, but there was a faint brightening nearly overhead. The young man looked up at it, judging the time to be about right for his visit on the young lady of the house. Her father would certainly be safely out of the way at his place of business.
He walked nearer, along a path that had once been neat and trim but had been allowed to slide back into disarray. His boot-heels rang on the frosty earth, his Mexican spurs jingling at each step. There was a Dragoon Colt tied to his right thigh, a leather thong retaining it in its place. He wore gloves of tanned hide, and carried a double-barreled scattergun in his hand.
It was an English, ten gauge, weapon, the barrels sawed down to around twenty inches for ease of handling. The convenience sacrificed a little of the gun’s accuracy, but nobody carried a shotgun, for its accuracy.
Only for hunting.
Reaching the back porch he squared his narrow shoulders and stepped up to the door. Rapping on it with his knuckles, the sound muffled by the gloves. But someone had seen him coming up the path, as there was immediately the noise of bolts rattling open. Chains being drawn. A key being turned in a stiff lock.
Then the door creaked slowly open, a face appearing at the crack.
The young man knew the face.
‘Hello Susanna.’
‘Good day,’ replied the woman, suspiciously. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want first to wish you all the very best at this festive season.’
‘What else?’
The smile was fading from the young man’s face and he pushed at the door with the toe of his boot but the woman had her own foot set against it and it remained nearly closed.
‘I suggest you tell your mistress that I’ve come to call on her, Susanna.’
The door opened a crack wider, revealing more of the maid-servant’s face. It was wrinkled, and tanned from the long days in the desert wind and sun. As a girl Susanna had been taken badly by the smallpox, and her cheeks bore mute testimony how close she had come to death. All around the mouth and eyes there were the pitted craters of the ravaging disease.
There had never been a time when any man would have called Susanna beautiful or desirable. Even out on the frontier of civilization where any woman was worth a deal more than her weight in gold-dust. It wasn’t just the dreadful pocking of her face.
When she was ten Susanna had fallen when leading a stallion to service a mare, and the enraged animal had lashed out at her, catching her across the head with a savage kick. It had fractured her skull, and left her with the corner of her mouth pulled down in a permanent scar. It had also addled any brains that she might have had so that she could only be used for the simplest household chores.
Folks in Tucson figured she was lucky to have landed a position like she had with one of the wealthiest families in the Territory. But Susanna worked hard and she was decent and God-fearing. Clean and loyal. A woman who knew her place and kept in it. That was what her employer saw in her many years back when he first came to Tucson with his wife and young children.
Now his wife was dead. Dead of a fever in the baking summer of sixty-two. Four and a half years ago. Leaving him with a daughter just entering her teens and a young son barely walking. Without Susanna life would have been quite intolerable. With her help he was able to pursue his solitary aim of becoming rich and powerful.
The young man knew all of this. Knew that the sullen, pock-marked woman held a deal of authority and wasn’t likely to help anyone whom she thought uppity with her. But it was freezing cold on the back porch and time was passing.
‘Will you please go tell your mistress that I have come to call on her?’
‘Maybe she won’t see you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Miss Abigail’s kind of choosy on where she goes and who she goes with.’
‘I’m good as the next man.’
‘Depends on who the next man is,’ retorted the maid, tartly.
‘Please, Susanna,’ he begged, hating the woman for making him act humble.
‘Well … I’m not at all sure that Miss Abigail’s ready and old enough for a beau.’
‘But I—’
‘And not one like you.’
‘Why the—?’
‘But I’ll tell her anyway. That’s my job here, and I do it as well as I can. Wait here.’
The door slammed shut in his face and he stood there, hearing the echo of the woman’s steps as she strode away along the hall towards the front of the big house.
He fingered the smooth stock of the shotgun, rubbing his gloved fingers absently over the polished wood. Checking automatically that the weapon was loaded. Flipping the hammers with his thumb, hissing through his teeth in irritation as a thread of the stitching caught on the tip of the right hammer, snagging and pulling, leaving a small hole in his glove.
There was the sound of the feet returning and he felt the muscles of his face tightened up with the beginnings of anger when he noticed that Susanna was alone. The door swung open wider and the maid smiled at him. It was an unexpected sight and he stared at her. Seeing the way that the old scar tugged at the woman’s mouth. Noticing that she seemed flushed, the angry pock-marks standing out livid like the buried ashes of a dying fire. Maybe she’d been told off for keeping him waiting. The young man hoped she had.
‘Miss Abigail said she’d be down real soon to see what you want.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Lord have mercy!’
‘What?’
‘You! I know the Master would be most displeased if he knew you were here. Cheap rubbish like you! And he will know, you can depend on that.’
The young man frowned at the expression of triumphant contempt on the servant’s face.
‘There might come a day, Susanna, when you will have some cause to think back on those words and wish that you could pick them up from the dirt and swallow them down.’
‘You threatenin’ me, sir?’ she asked, the ‘sir’ drawn out to emphasize what she thought of him.
He was prevented from replying by the appearance in the doorway of the girl that he came to see.
‘Miss Abigail. Good day to you.’
She looked at the servant. ‘You may go in and get on with some work, Susanna. I do not think that my father would be pleased to know that you spend the day chattering in such an idle manner at the back door.’
‘Why … I declare that …’
‘You may go in, Susanna. And don’t stop with those spotty ears of yours flappin’ to see what you can sneak to my father about.’
They both waited until the woman had vanished from sight. Then he smiled at the girl. Taking off his hat and bowing low, keeping the scattergun at his side. She curtsied back.
‘You’re becoming bold. You know that the old dragon will tell my father.’
‘Perhaps, Miss Abigail. Perhaps.’
‘Oh, she will. I know her. But to what do we owe the honor of this visit?’
‘I want you to come walking with me.’
She smiled. None of her usual admirers had been around since before Christmas. And this young man was never going to be a real beau. The whole of Tucson knew too much about his family for that to happen. But he was known to be bold and forward. There was a spice of danger in the air, and Abigail was a headstrong girl.
‘I don’t know. Folks might see us.’
‘Wouldn’t matter if’n they did.’
There was something about him that Abigail found powerfully exciting. None of his family gave a sweet damn for authority. She’d even heard it said that Sheriff Nolan was frightened of them. And the boy was almost trembling. She could see the way his fingers were tightening around the butt of the sawn-down shotgun in his right hand.
‘Why’ve you got that old gun with you? You goin’ to do some shootin’ while we walk?’
‘Then you will come?’
‘I didn’t say so.’ She shivered and pulled a woolen shawl about her shoulders. ‘It is so cold out here. I must go in before I freeze to death.’
‘Please come with me.’
‘So you can go huntin’ me with that gun.’ She reached out impulsively and stroked the barrel. Although she was only sixteen, Abigail was precocious in her knowledge of men and how to deal with them.
‘Leave it alone!’ The young boy snatched the scattergun back from her fingers.
‘Why? You think I haven’t seen such weapons before. I think that’s too big a gun for such a baby-faced boy to carry. I’m used to men’s weapons,’
She giggled at her own rather wicked joke, but the young man didn’t smile. This had been going on too long.
‘Are you coming with me?’
‘What if I say I won’t?’ she teased him.
Suddenly, with explosive anger, the young man rammed the twin barrels of the gun under her chin, forcing her head back sharply, making her gasp with pain and shock. ‘If you don’t, you rich bitch, then I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off your fuckin’ shoulders!’
Chapter Two
IT WAS THE day after Christmas. John Ryker heeled his black stallion, Nero, forwards, away from the freezing wind that came rolling down from the north. It had been a long, long ride down from San Francisco, where he had been involved in a bloody fight with the Chinese of the sprawling waterfront town.1
Most of the bounty money from the job had already gone. There had been new tools to buy to help him in his deadly trade. For Ryker was a gunsmith. Just about the best around. He could make or mend any weapon a man might bring him. Not only that, Ryker was also skilled at using guns. That was where the real money could be made. In hunting down men. Killing them if they resisted. A hired gun had a good life in the South-west. For as long as he lived.
Tucson wasn’t far away now. Ryker was looking forward to the comfort of a bed at the ‘What Cheer’, and seeing his old friend the sheriff again. Tucson had a lot of memories for him.
Some good.
Some not so good.
Like most of the towns on the frontier, Tucson didn’t boast a single hotel. There were two or three houses where men could find bed and board and there was always the floor of the livery stables. Apart from that there were only the three saloons. They offered bed and bawds. But the ladies came a whole lot pricier than the beds did.
Ryker still had enough left to keep him going for a few days. Nolan, the over-weight lawman, had been helpful to him in the past, steering bounties his way. Maybe there would be something in that line when he reached the town. It never for a moment occurred to the tall man on the black stallion that there might be anything at all odd in seeking a chance to hunt and kill other men for money on the day after Christmas. John Ryker wasn’t that interested in the time of love and friendship.
Maybe once he had been.
But life had dealt hardly with him. His beloved Emmy-Lou had died during the burning of Richmond in the recently ended War between North and South. His mother had died of a fever on the way out West. With Mary Ryker’s death, most of the heart fled from John’s father, Angus. Once a skilled doctor, Angus Ryker found comfort and courage in bottles of whisky. With the predictable results.
Then, with John William Ryker establishing himself in a tiny settlement in Arizona as a fine gunsmith, tragedy finally came winging on down from the darkening sky. And set its claws to his guts.
Ryker had sold a gun to a man. A small, forty-five caliber Derringer. Six inches in length, firing a seven-sixteenths lead ball. A walnut stock with some neatly worked cross-graining.
A pretty little gun.
That had gone from hand to hand and finished up killing a President.2
Revenge took its time to travel south and westwards, but it finally reached a settlement in the back of beyond. The two men wanted Jack Ryker but he was out. So they took care of his ailing and drunk father.
That was the beginning of the end for Jack Ryker. The end of his secure life mending and making guns. And the beginning of his life using them. It was ironic in a way. He really knew guns. All kinds. Pistols, rifles, scatterguns, even the ponderous multi-barreled Gatlings, They all came easy to him. He had a feel for them. Understood them. Could tell at a glance if anything was wrong. He was also a brilliant shot. The crown of his low-cut, black hat sported a shining silver dollar. With a bullet-hole neatly blasted through the middle of it. Ryker had put that hole there. With a fifty-caliber Sharps rifle at a hundred paces.
But until that sweltering day in the middle of June, eighteen months earlier, he had never ever drawn a gun in anger. Never fired at a man.
