Gunslinger 01, page 9
part #1 of Gunslinger Series
The old man’s read, ‘I am Carl Jorge. My tong claterd to mush so I have lorst it.’
The fat one’s was similar. ‘I am Josh Hall. I rit the leter so I have lorst my hands.’
And the third one. ‘I am Lestr Rily. It was me that don the rid with the leter for help. I have lorst my feet for it.’
So much for the three brave men of Desolation. Ryker looked around him, wondering if the deserters had placed anyone to watch the trail or make sure nobody interfered with the corpses. Whatever happened, one thing was sure. That thousand dollars’ bounty wasn’t going to do anything for George, Hall and Riley.
Nailed to the tree, fluttering where the wind had pulled one corner loose, was another notice, in the same hand. This time it was signed.
‘See wat hapens to them as trys to get help from them outsid.
This wil hapen to al who try this trik on with us
and you no we are not joshing you on that.’
It was signed: Trank Starkey. Sergeant. C.S.A.
The Army of the Confederate States. So they were from the South. For the first time Ryker felt a touch of doubt at the mission that he had so casually taken on. Six men who could do this to another human being. Torture and mutilate and butcher men with as little thought as stamping on a scorpion or blasting the head from a rattler.
Any idea that he had once had of being able to sit down and have a talk to the men, persuading them with his skill with words that they would be better off out of Desolation, vanished like the dew in the morning sun.
All he could do was kill them. Try and kill them all in any way he could. There wasn’t any alternative at all to that.
Ryker holstered the Colt and walked back to where he’d tethered Nero. Just as he reached the stallion, ready to lead him to cover and go on in on foot, two shots boomed out from the hills above him and to the left.
The man in black made a grab at the saddle, trying to stop himself falling, then he staggered, doubled up, holding himself, and finally rolled to the trail, screaming out once, kicking and scrabbling, his boots scraping up a screen of dust. He made a despairing effort to stand, then staggered sideways towards the brush, toppled into the low scrub and disappeared.
After the two shots it was very quiet, the only sound the scraping of the three ropes on the hanging tree.
Chapter Ten
FACEDOWN IN THE mesquite, John Ryker hugged the big Sharps to him and lay very still, blinking dust and sweat from his eyes while he tried to work out just where the pair of bushwhackers were. From the sound, though it was muffled and distorted by the rocks around, he guessed they were heavy carbines. Almost certainly the big Enfields that had been used on the ‘Welcome’ notice.
Neither shot had come that close to him. One had whipped at the sand a couple of feet to his left and the other whined over his head, vanishing in the trees. If the deserters were where he thought they were, settled in near the top of the bluff, then they were too far away for really accurate shooting with the carbine. It had to be the best part of six hundred paces from where he lay, cautiously raising his head to peer through the fringe of bushes. A marksman with a good carbine, loaded carefully with handmade shot, might reckon to hit a man at five hundred paces, but the guns were designed for shooting at something a whole lot nearer. Say, up to two hundred paces.
Moving an inch at a time, Ryker dragged the Sharps to lie alongside him, hoping the watching men wouldn’t have noticed in the noise and dust and excitement that he’d managed to pull it from the holster under the guise of trying to mount up. It was ready loaded, and he pushed it right up to his shoulder, thumbing back the hammer as he did so.
Then he waited and watched.
The men weren’t likely to simply leave him lying there. But they would be cautious, not wanting to hurry on down in case he was shamming dead.
So Ryker waited.
They weren’t that good.
Or that careful.
Hidden from them, Ryker eased out the gold half-hunter of his father’s and glanced at it, careful to shield it so that the sun didn’t bounce back off it and give away his movement. Less than ten minutes passed before the killers started to get restless. They fired off half a dozen shots in the general direction of where he’d fallen, none of them coming closer than ten paces to him. He counted the interval between the shots, making it one every twenty-two seconds. If they’d had Spencers up there they might have been pumping out up to twenty rounds every minute. He was grateful that the north had won. The Spencer used only the special copper Spencer cartridge, and nowhere in the south were there facilities to manufacture them.
After that burst, nothing happened for another couple of minutes. Then, Ryker grinned savagely as he saw first one head, and then a second, appear over the crest of the bluff. There was a narrow trail winding steeply down the side of the red-orange cliff, which would bring them down within a hundred paces of him. But there was a maze of scattered boulders around the bottom, giving good enough cover for them to get a whole lot closer.
His worry had been that they would either be confident of his death and ride back to Desolation, which he knew must be somewhere beyond the two gunmen. If they’d both come at him on horseback, or with reinforcements, then his mission would have been over before he’d got started.
But their curiosity got the better of them. Both carrying their guns at the trail, they started off down the twisting path. Ryker watched them, lying still and easy and giving them plenty of time to get well on their way. From where they climbed, the rocks fell away sheer a couple of hundred feet, overhanging the river, in the bottom of the ravine, its sullen rumble muted by the surrounding cliffs.
The deserters were still dressed in the tattered remnants of Confederate uniform, the grey standing out against the bluff. From their slowness, it was clear that the path was extremely treacherous, which made it all the better for Ryker. If they were worried about falling, they were hardly likely to start running.
Moving with studied precision, the big man licked the index finger of his right hand and dabbed the bead of spit on the point of the fore-sight, making it stand out, and slid the long barrel so that it just protruded from his cover. He set the rear sight for five hundred yards, and glanced back at the trees to check the wind strength and direction.
The corpses danced and rocked stiffly against each other, giving him the answer. In from the left and about medium force. There wasn’t a gun in the world, to Ryker’s mind, to compare with the long .50 caliber Sharps for this sort of shooting. Accuracy at a great range. He’d had a grizzled old buffalo hunter in his store who’d told him that he’d once killed fifty-seven beasts in a single day, Using just fifty-seven bullets. It was that sort of gun, and once you got used to the rainbow trajectory of the heavy slug, you could reckon to hit most anything that you could see.
Ryker always shot two-eyed, like many of the really great marksmen. He sighted at the back man, reasoning that there was a chance that a hit on him might bring him down on top of the leading deserter and save himself the cost of a second shot.
The trigger was double-pressure. His fore-finger took up the first pressure, ready for the light touch that would bring the hammer down on the cartridge.
The men were almost exactly halfway down when he fired.
He felt the pressure against the front of his shoulder from the powerful recoil. His father had once fired the long rifle and moaned at the kick it gave, but Jack Ryker enjoyed the sensation. The feeling of the power of the gun. The cloud of black powder billowed out around him, and he immediately rolled over several yards to his left, in case one of the men up there was quick enough to sight in on the shot. Only when he was again settled did he risk a glance through the low brush.
He was just in time to see the man he had aimed at falling from the ledge. It was hard to see, but Ryker thought he could spot the splash of red in the middle of the man’s chest. He had gone for a center body shot, reasoning at that range he had more chance of a hit than going for the head, And if you got hit by a fifty-caliber bullet, no matter where it caught you, then the odds were that you stayed hit.
The deserter toppled soundlessly, arms flung wide in the air, the carbine dropping to the abyss with him.
Dead men weren’t interesting to Ryker. It was the other man who now took his attention. His grey uniform pinning him to the wall of the bluff like a fly in amber, the sniper was making desperate efforts to regain the top of the cliff. It was obvious that he had no idea where the shot had come from, but reasoned that it must be from the bottom. Had he slid and risked the drop by a mad dash for the safety of the valley end, he might have done better. As it was, he had already fallen to his hands and knees, legs pumping against the slippery sand of the trail to the top.
Ryker felt in the pocket of his coat and pulled out a fresh cartridge. As he opened the breech, the spent case was ejected in a cloud of reeking smoke. The new round slid easily into the wide groove, ‘like a cock up a whore’s snatch’, the old buffalo hunter had described it.
The bead of spittle still glistened on the fore-sight, and the gun settled comfortably into Ryker’s shoulder. First pressure on the trigger, and then he was ready to take out the second of his would-be killers.
The wind had freshened still more and was now whistling up the valley behind him, tugging at the bushes around him. He allowed a touch more for drift, sighted at the center of the stooping man’s body, and fired.
Almost simultaneously with the boom of the rifle, the man on the cliff stumbled forward and fell almost flat on his face. Whether he tripped or spotted the flash of the gun out of the corner of his eye and dived to try and beat the bullet, Ryker never knew.
The Southerner wasn’t ever going to tell anyone.
Not with the top of his head blown away into shards of splintered bone and pulped grey-pink brain.
The shot was truly aimed, and would have hit him in the chest had it not been for the sudden movement. As it was the fifty-caliber bullet hit him clean through the left ear, angling up and through, finally exploding from near the crown of his head and removing a chunk of skull as big as a saucer.
The impact rolled him half over on his right side, against the cliff. As Ryker watched through the clearing smoke, he saw the tiny figure in the grey uniform roll back on its face, and then lie still.
Even with his excellent sight, he couldn’t be absolutely sure of the killing. There seemed to be blood there, but it was hard to make it out against the red-orange of the cliff face.
‘Man who takes chances is a man who isn’t that concerned about living,’ he said to himself. It had been another of Hardin’s sayings. The cold young gunman had told Ryker that if he had even a grain of doubt about if he’d hit a man, then he’d just pour in the lead until he was sure.
So Ryker carefully loaded and fired one more round, watching with intense concentration and grinning as he saw the body jerk when the shot struck home. There was no further movement, and he reckoned that he could mark down two certain kills. It was a good start to the hunt. If the information on the flyer was right, then he’d wiped out one third of the enemy’s forces with just’ three shots, in an engagement that hadn’t lasted more than thirty minutes.
While he reloaded the Sharps, comforting the nervous Nero, he paused and checked the time. Twenty-two minutes from the moment the first shots had exploded in the dirt around his feet.
‘Guess I’d better find somewhere to put you, old boy, while I go on in.’ The horse rubbed his nose against his hand and whickered softly.
Ryker swung himself up into the saddle. The three corpses still pitched and danced in the wind, and he wondered if he should cut them down. But the contract only mentioned shooting and hanging the deserters. There wasn’t any mention of having to cut anyone down.
He heeled Nero forward, wondering if the noise of the shooting had carried all the way into Desolation, and decided that the rocks around, combined with the sound of the river and the wind, must have been enough to muffle them. Otherwise, he guessed that there would have been riders out by now.
Just round the corner of the huge bluff he saw that the trail widened further, with trees on both sides. Ahead it zig-zagged so that it was impossible to see too far. The small forest looked as good as any place to put his horse, and he walked the stallion in, tethering him to a stunted pine and making sure there was plenty of grass for him.
‘Be back later to water you, boy,’ he said. Unless he got himself killed, that was. And if he was dead he surely wasn’t’ going to be that concerned about what was happening to his horse.
He left the Sharps behind. Unless he could find himself a spot where he could pick off the remaining deserters in safety, then the rifle wasn’t going to be a lot of help. But he checked the derringers and the Colt, taking only a limited amount of ammunition for both. And his set of fine tools. He left everything else behind in the saddlebags.
Nero whinnied after him as he made his way back to the trail, deciding that the quickest way into Desolation was probably the straightest. There wasn’t any sign of a way over the rocks that narrowed in beyond the trees, and there didn’t seem too much point in trekking through the wood to keep out of sight. If they had men out, then they’d probably see him anyway. Since there were two guards already dead, it wasn’t likely that they’d stretch their forces any thinner.
Beyond the trees there was another belt of sandy cliffs, and beyond that he could finally see the top end of the box canyon, towering another four or five hundred feet high. As far as he could see it was sheer and unclimbable. Nolan said that the township lay in a small basin with the rocks all round it.
Nolan was right. Ryker cautiously eased forward until he was well among the boulders, and peered over and down. And there was Desolation. A scattering of houses, with a few larger buildings, that looked like a couple of stores and maybe a saloon. The odd thing about a community of that size was that there didn’t appear to be a living soul in the place. For a chilling moment, Ryker wondered if the deserters had run berserk and butchered all of them.
Then he saw a couple of women walking slowly across the little square at the center of Desolation. From half a mile away it was impossible to see if they were well, but at least they were alive. Ryker stretched himself out and lay along the side of the road, watching to see what was happening.
The answer was very little. Several women were hurrying nervously about their business, and there were surprisingly few men out on the streets. One that Ryker was sure was wearing Confederate uniform came out and stood for a long time staring up towards where he was hiding.
As he lay there he wondered what he was going to do. Maybe sneak in and try and take out each of the survivors singly and from concealment. That would be the best, but the way down to the nearest building was bare of cover. It was about five hundred yards from where he lay, and he had just decided that he would wait until dark and then make a try for it, when the three horsemen appeared in the square, led by the man in uniform. The sun was creeping around and it lay more or less behind Desolation, making it hard to see details, but it looked like all three were in grey. They cantered out in his direction, and Ryker looked back, wondering what his chances would be of breaking for Nero and a getaway, and deciding that he had plenty of time to reach the trees.
The riders reined in half-way out of town, within a couple of hundred yards of the hidden man, and seemed to be having an animated discussion. The man in the middle, whose hair looked to be a very pale blond, stood in the stirrups and peered up at the tangle of rocks where Ryker lurked. The sun flashed on something in his hands.
‘God damn it to Hell! A spyglass!’
He hadn’t taken that into his plans, figuring that if he couldn’t see them properly at that distance, then he too was safe from their eyes. But a magnifying glass brought him into their laps.
Just as he was about to run for it, the three men gave out a great echoing Rebel yell and spurred up the slope towards him. Out of the line of the sun he saw that they were very heavily armed. Each man had twin hand-guns at his belt, with carbines holstered on the saddle. The one on the left also carried a scattergun with sawn-down barrels. The other two hefted sabers.
Ryker tried to weigh up the odds. With the Sharps he could have cut down one and would probably have backed himself to pick off the other two with the Colt. Even when the horseman has superior fire-power, a good man on foot will always beat a mounted man. It’s impossible to shoot with real accuracy from the back of a horse. But that scattergun was something else. The weapon of a bad shot, but a lethal at anything like close range.
All this ran through Jack Ryker’s mind in a half-second. He had to get out of the rocks and then run in boots across the sandy trail to reach the trees where he might have a chance. And the men were whooping towards him at full gallop.
There wasn’t much choice.
Very slowly he stood up, lifting one hand high in the air, but keeping the right level with his shoulder. Enough, he hoped, to show that he didn’t want trouble, but close enough, he hoped, to get down to the Navy Colt if he had to as a last resort.
Seeing him, the three men all slowed, tugging savagely at their reins. They finally stopped about fifty yards from where he stood among the rocks, all watching him.
The tall one who’d carried the eye-glass, and who now hefted the scattergun, sat and looked down at the man in black.
‘I should have guessed. When Doolin and the Kid didn’t come back, I should have guessed.’
His voice was soft. Like a finger nail run over black velvet. Ryker felt the hairs crawling up his spine as he faced the leader of the southern deserters.
