The Complete Western Legends Omnibus, page 27
“They’re charging!” she cried out.
“Hold your fire,” Matt said soothingly.
“But you said they’d be in the door ...”
“Hold your fire, Mrs. Bonham. Let ’em run themselves, let the fear of death work on ’em a little ...”
“But they’re getting closer!”
“Hold on.”
Waving rifles and six-guns of every description, the mob behind Joshua Taren kept coming. They were growing winded and increasingly worried about the lack of resistance they were getting from the house. But still they came, firing wild shots in the general direction of the front windows.
“Steady now,” Matt said. “Steady.”
“Now? Please?” Sharee begged, as a note of terror crept into her voice.
Matt knew that her fear of killing was now being eclipsed by her fear of death. She was ready to join the battle.
“Okay,” said Matt sharply, “… Fire!”
Her Spencer boomed, blasting a hole through the center of the charging mass of men, taking with it someone’s right leg and part of the right hip.
Without need of deliberate aiming, Matt’s Winchester spewed death at the charging horde. His first bullet ripped through someone’s shoulder, knocking the vigilante off his feet. The second bullet hit another of them in the chest. The man simply crumpled. His third slug came up high and smashed into someone’s cheek, right below the left eye, shattering the man’s face.
Sharee’s Spencer boomed again. A vigilante fell, gut-shot.
Bullets slammed into the house like hailstones, as Ballenger’s men opened fire, forcing Matt and Sharee away from the windows. But Taren’s followers didn’t press their advantage. They weren’t fighting men; they were clerks, storekeepers and the like, and the sound of all that extra gunfire only served to spook them the more. As a group, all of one mind, they hit the ground, hunkering down in this no-man’s land, halfway between heaven and hell.
“What now?” Sharee yelled above the din of lead crashing into the walls, splinters and glass flying all about them.
“Just a minute ... Bobby?”
“Yes, Matt?”
“Anybody comin’ up at the house from the back?”
“No. They were shooting from the woods, but nobody’s come out in the open.”
“Good ... Mrs. Bonham ... stay away from the window now. We knocked the charge out of ’em.”
“But what next, Mr. Howard?” she asked. “What’s gonna happen now?”
“It’s a cinch we can’t kill ’em all. We’ve got to do somethin’ to catch ’em off guard, to get somethin’ workin’ in our favor.”
“Will anything help, really, Mr. Howard?”
“If we could get out of here and to those hills you were talkin’ about, we’d have a chance of holdin’ our own for a while.”
“That chance is gone, though, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. But I got an idea. Only if it doesn’t work, we’re finished, right here and right now ...”
“Aren’t we finished anyway?”
“Could be, that’s why I figure we got nothin’ to lose.”
“What’s your plan?”
“We’re gonna kill ’em with kindness.”
“What?”
“That’s right. The one thing they’d not expect from us now, outnumbered and outgunned as we are, is a generous gesture. Right now we got about thirty some odd men lyin’ face down in the dirt afraid to come forward and afraid to go back for fear of a slug cuttin’ ’em down. And there’s a few wounded men lyin’ out there with ’em, likely to bleed to death unless they get some help. I figure to call a truce, let those men back off to the trees and take their wounded home.”
“What good would that do?” Sharee cut in. “They’ll just regroup and come at us again!”
“That’s right. They probably will. Only, if my plan works, we won’t be here.”
Sharee heard Matt out.
“It won’t work,” she said when he finished.
“You’re probably right,” he answered, “but we’re gonna do it, just the same.”
“But I don’t like it, Mr. Howard.”
“Mrs. Bonham,” he sighed, “it’s the only plan I got.”
She was silent for a moment and then said: “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Matt grabbed the already bullet tattered white curtains from his window and jerked them down to the floor where he lay below the sill. He tore a big piece of the curtain and tied an end to his rifle barrel, and thrusting the barrel out the window, waved it.
Slowly, the heavy fire subsided and a voice—Ballenger’s, not the sheriff’s—called out from the trees: “You ready to surrender?”
“Hell no!” Matt yelled back. “A truce is what I want. Only nobody moves an inch out there till I say so, or I open fire.”
“What’s on your mind?” asked Ballenger, curious.
Matt put the words together in his mind and began: “You folks think Mrs. Bonham and me are the children of the devil. I guess old man Taren and his friends must think there ain’t a decent bone in our bodies. Now you’re likely as not to have a real good close look at our bones later today, but when that happens, I hope some of you will remember that you’ll be alive because we let you live. That’s right—let you live ...
“You men out there in the field ... pick up your wounded and dead and take ’em home. And all of you ... we’ll let you retreat back to the trees. We’ll hold our fire.”
The livery man, Pete Nebris, hunkered down about twenty yards to Joshua Taren’s right, called out, “How do we know you won’t shoot us when we get to our feet?”
“Because I ain’t the bloodthirsty man you seem to think I am,” Matt answered.
Furious from being stuck in this position of impotence, Joshua Taren bellowed, “He’s lying! He knows he and that wretched woman are going to die and he wants to take as many of us with him as he can. Stay down. Don’t trust him.”
“If you folks want to stay put,” said Matt, “that’s your business. Explain that later, if you can though, to the widows and the kids of the men who are bleedin’ to death out there. You’re so set on killin’ us, you lost all sight of what’s important. You’d risk your lives to kill Mrs. Bonham, her boy and me, but not to help one of your friends and neighbors. This is the last time I’m offerin’ ...”
An idea occurred to Matt as he spoke ... something that would allow more time for his plan to work ...
“If you like ... if it’d make you feel safer ... one at a time, you can get up and hike back to the trees. Or you can crawl back. I don’t care. I’ll hold my fire as long as it takes you to get back out of range. Are there any takers, or is the truce over?”
There was silence. This was one decision each of the men lying out there was going to have to make by himself.
Punctuating the tense stillness was the sound of a man moaning from the intense pain of a .56 caliber bullet in his stomach. Another man wept softly, helplessly watching as his blood flowed freely from his shoulder, covering the green meadow with a shade of red.
“If you’re lying, damn your soul to hell,” Pete Nebris yelled. “I’m getting up.” The livery man slowly rose to his full height. He walked toward the gut-shot man, leaned over and hauled his wounded neighbor up over his shoulder and kept walking away from the house, toward the trees. The other men watched, waiting with the sure expectation that Pete Nebris would never be allowed to make it out of range alive.
But he did.
Another citizen of Woodston bit the bullet of courage and got to his feet. He helped the man with the wounded shoulder make it to safety.
A third follower of Joshua Taren’s rose and walked over to one of his neighbors who was no longer alive. He took his dead friend into his arms and carried him away from the house.
With each man that had the sand to rise and face possible death, the easier it was for the next man to stand up straight and walk away. One by one, then, they continued their retreat.
And Matt had his chance.
Quickly, he made his way to the back of the house.
There was a fairly large shutter that covered an opening in the kitchen wall that led to the woodshed. It had been built so that in winter, fuel could be passed into the house without going back and forth through the kitchen door. Matt opened the shutters and slipped out into the covered and shadowed shed where he could not be seen by the few Ballenger men who were off in the distance, well beyond the back of the house.
A deep gully had been furrowed by the run-off of spring rains as they flowed away from the house on the high ground toward the creek down below. Matt bellied down in that gully and crawled toward the creek. With everyone’s attention fastened to the Woodston men making their slow and deliberate retreat, supposedly under his watchful eyes, Matt was in little danger of being spotted.
Once he reached the creek he was camouflaged by the bushes that grew along its banks.
On the far side of the creek was a hill covered by buffalo grass. A Ballenger man kneeled atop the hill, eyes fastened on the men and the house below. He paid no mind to the lazily blowing tall growth around him, nor did he see the ever-increasing line of matted grass as it slowly reached from the bottom of the hill to the top. He only felt a hand reach up, grabbing him about the mouth, pulling him down, and the hard clunk of a rock against the back of his head.
From his new position on top of the hill, Matt could see that the last of the men were just now reaching the trees. Joshua Taren was among them. There might be little time left now to complete his plan.
Chapter Twenty-One
The sheriff, feeling his authority being usurped by Ballenger, was angry. Ballenger ignored him, making the sheriff even angrier. Taren, however, was beyond anger. Feeling the moral edge of his crusade against Sharee Bonham being blunted, he was frustrated almost to the point of madness.
“He made fools of us!” Taren raved.
“Not us,” said Ballenger evenly. “Just you.”
“What? What are you saying?” the storekeeper shouted angrily.
“I’m saying,” said Ballenger, keeping his temper, “that leading practically the whole town straight toward the muzzles of their guns was not the best strategy we could have come up with.”
“Something had to be done!” Taren shouted in his own defense.
“And something will be done, Joshua. Now calm down,” said Ballenger, taking complete control. “I’ve come up with a plan that will take care of this business once and for all.” He paused for dramatic effect. “We’ll burn them out.”
“Just a minute,” said Sheriff Pederson. “I don’t like it. That Matt Howard and Sharee did a pretty decent thing just now and maybe we ought to do likewise. Could be some folks here now aren’t so strong on the idea of killing them folks straight out the way you’re planning.”
“I think,” said Ballenger disdainfully, “that you’re forgetting your job, sheriff. That man out there tried to murder one of my men yesterday. Let’s not forget either that he killed Joshua’s son under, let us say, peculiar circumstances, which you, sheriff, did nothing about. And now, with the help of Sharee Bonham, he’s killed three more men while resisting arrest. And you want to let bygones be bygones?”
“Now listen, Mr. Ballenger,” began the sheriff.
But Ballenger cut him off. “No. You listen to me,” he said harshly. “There’s no turning back now. You’re either in this all the way, Pederson, or you’re out of it all the way. That means your badge. We can just as easily pin that star on Archie Walker or Luthor Smith.”
“You ain’t got the authority to do that,” the sheriff complained, sweat pouring freely down his face and neck, soaking the collar of his shirt.
“I got twenty Circle B guns that say I have the authority. And I got Joshua Taren and a lot of the good people of Woodston to back me. You gonna buck that?”
A small crowd had gathered around the two arguing men. Sheriff Pederson looked into their faces. He saw nothing but scorn in their eyes for him. What was a job worth, really? His hand came up to pluck the tin star from his shirtfront, a star he had worn with some considerable pride for seven years, and tossed it at Vernon Ballenger.
“What you’re doing is wrong,” he said. “I’m ashamed to have been a part of it. I can’t stop you, so I won’t try, but here is where I get off. You kill those folks out there and you’re breaking the law, no matter who wears that badge. And one more thing ...”
Ballenger slapped Pederson hard, with the back of his hand. “You’ve said all you’re gonna say,” the Circle B boss hissed. “You’re through here, Pederson. Shut up and get out. Right now!”
Slapped like that in front of a crowd of men he’d known for so long; slapped as if he were no better than a saloon swamper, brought Pederson’s blood to the boiling point. His instinctive thought was to reach for iron. He hesitated, though, just a fraction too long. In that split second he felt his six-gun being plucked from his holster. He grabbed for it anyway, but to no avail. Roughly, Pederson was pushed away by Archie Walker who held the ex-sheriff’s gun in his hand, smugly admiring the pistol’s weight and balance.
There is no telling what Ballenger and the frustrated mob might have done to the ex-sheriff at that point had they not been suddenly startled by a series of gunshots and wild, bloodcurdling yells.
“The horses!” someone cried out, “They’re being stampeded!”
It was remarkably easy. Not for the slightest moment had Ballenger, or the assembled multitude of Woodston, considered the possibility of being, themselves, attacked. No guards had been posted around the huge remuda of mounts bunched together behind some poplars on the east side of the trail that led to town.
Matt moved cautiously, but quickly, to untie every horse from the hitch-rope that had been strung along the trees. When he was finished, he climbed aboard a sturdy looking gelding, drew his pistol, fired three shots into the air, and gave a scream so loud and shrill he could’ve frightened the dead. The horses bolted and ran every which way until Matt fired three more shots and yelled again, turning them, as a herd, toward the open flats of Woodston, three miles away.
Once he got them running, he veered to his right, making his way, in a half-circle, back to the rear of the ranch house. As he galloped past the woodshed, Sharee and Bobby Bonham, riding Matt’s roan and the old mare, emerged from the enclosed shadows and followed close behind him.
They met some scattered rifle-fire from the few Ballenger men who had been positioned behind the house. But Matt, after reloading his Colt, kept them from taking careful aim by pouring lead at them whenever they lifted their heads to fire.
Soon, Matt and the Bonhams were clear of them, riding free of immediate pursuit, thanks to the stampede Matt had engineered. Now they were on their way to the Crow’s Nest for what they knew was going to be their last stand. There would be no more running after this.
Humiliated at the ease by which the deception was carried off, Ballenger lashed out at the symbol of all his frustrations ...
“Burn that house to the ground!” he bellowed at Taren and the other townspeople who weren’t out chasing down horses.
Taren was happy to follow the command, but one of the others balked, saying, “They’re not in there anymore. What good will it do?”
Answering for Ballenger, Joshua Taren cried out, “Not a stick of that place should be left to remind us of that woman. Turn it to ashes. Burn it down!”
Taren lit a torch from the smoldering fire beneath the kettle of boiling tar. Others followed his lead. Before long, the house became an inferno of heat and flame.
The chipped and peeling paint fed the fire as it reached ever upward, engulfing the dry wood of Sharee Bonham’s home. Before the house fell into a pile of blackened rubble and ashes, the inside of the structure, feeling the intense heat of the blaze, began to belch great billows of black, acrid smoke above the bright, leaping, orange flames.
From a distance of two miles, the fire seemed small and far away. Yet Sharee Bonham’s whole life was crumbling before her eyes, as she held Matt’s roan steady, and gazed at the sight behind her. When the house finally fell, more black smoke blew up in great filthy clouds, blotting out the sun, darkening the valley sky.
Matt came up alongside of her. Touching her limp, cold hands that held the reins, he said, “Don’t look back, Mrs. Bonham ... don’t look back.”
She lowered her eyes, then turned her head away from the burning ruin and said, “I won’t look back, Mr. Howard. My looking back days are through. Maybe my looking forward days too.”
“Hey now,” he said, “all things considered, we’re doin’ pretty well. And every hour, every day we’re alive, we’ve got a chance—kind of chance—to get outta this in one piece. You buck up, Mrs. Bonham. We’ve got a long haul ahead of us.”
A tired half-smile appeared on her lips. “I’ll be all right, Mr. Howard. Let’s get riding. It’s another mile and a half to the hills.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
In some earlier period of the earth’s development, rock and earth erupted skyward out of the middle of the flat valley floor. And at the crest of the highest of the hills that were formed in this earlier age, nature erected a nearly impregnable fortress. This was the “Crow’s Nest.”
On three sides of the Nest there was a sheer rock face that dropped thirty-five feet till reaching the somewhat more gently sloping incline of the rest of the hill. On the fourth side, a narrow, steep trail wound its way up to the top. It was on this fourth side that Ballenger and the others would have to come.
Just as Sharee said, there was a spring near the top, but once the fighting began, it was going to be difficult to reach it without covering some open ground. So they filled their canteens, plus anything else that would hold water, and stashed it away in a safe corner of their little garrison.
