The Complete Western Legends Omnibus, page 31
Matt, for his part, knew when to retreat. Once he let his second victim cry out, as he did, he was sure he’d never be able to get close to another vigilante again. To a man, they’d be on guard against him. But at least he’d given them something to think about. A little fear can go a long way when you’re lying flat on your stomach, out in open ground, all by yourself, in the middle of a dark night.
Damned if he’d let the vigilantes use the corpses of the men he’d killed for cover, Matt quietly dragged the dead body of the second man he had killed to the side of the trail, behind a larger boulder, where he had earlier deposited the body of his first victim. After that, Matt crawled back up the slope, putting all of his attention to the task of moving as silently as possible so as not to alert the men below that he had left their midst.
He was almost at the top, when a few pebbles came rolling from above, cascading down the hill just to his right. “My God,” Matt thought, “someone’s gotten ahead of me and Sharee won’t shoot, thinking it’s me.”
Searching the blackness directly above and to his right, he saw nothing. No movement ... no sign of anyone. Yet Matt knew he was there. He drew his Navy Colt and waited. Minutes passed and Matt began to wonder if perhaps his mind was playing tricks on him. Maybe it was nothing more than a strong breeze that set those pebbles to rolling. But it wasn’t.
Matt heard the sound of a man scrambling to his feet and then saw him against the skyline, leaping over the rock wall, into their fortress. He landed inside the stone walls, right next to Sharee, except when he landed, he was dead. Matt shot him when he was in the air, the bullet entering the vigilante’s lower back, ripping through about half of his vital organs before coming to a stop near the back of his breastbone.
The stab of light from Matt’s six-gun acted like a beacon to the snipers. They knew that Ballenger had given orders not to fire their weapons until the signal was given. So it had to be Matt out there ... two sharpshooters, stationed lower on the trail near the switchback, opened fire, as did two of the three snipers on the surrounding hilltops who had a view of that side of the hill. Four bullets, from three different directions, came converging on the spot where Matt had used his gun.
He was out in the open, without protection, and he knew it. As soon as he had fired his Colt, Matt had rolled hard and fast to his right. It was enough to save his life, but not enough to keep from getting hit. One bullet only grazed his chin, drawing blood that dripped down his neck. The second bullet, though, pierced his left forearm, chipping a bone. The pain seared straight up his arm to his shoulder, but he didn’t cry out. Instead, he grit his teeth and pushed his face down against the ground and waited for the pain to subside. To make any noise now, would only give the snipers a better chance of plugging him for keeps.
A dull, throbbing was all Matt felt in his left arm when he once again began to crawl toward the rocks at the top of the trail.
Just to be on the safe side, right before coming over the outer stone wall, Matt whispered, “It’s me ... it’s Matt.”
And Sharee, just to be on the safe side herself, had her Spencer trained on him when he leaped over the rocks.
The sharpshooters fired a few rounds when he jumped, but they reacted too slowly. Matt landed safely inside, quickly hunkering down low, out of any future danger from sniper-fire.
Sharee was immediately by his side.
“I thought they got you ... are you all right?” she asked, breathless with fear.
“It’s not too bad.”
“Let me see ... where?”
He showed her his arm. Seeing an exit wound in his forearm, she was relieved that at least the bullet wasn’t lodged somewhere inside him. She ripped the left sleeve off his shirt, poured some water on it to get the dirt out of the fabric, then washed both wounds, using the wet cloth finally as a tourniquet.
Matt pulled his arm away from her then, but she pulled it right back.
“Just a minute. I’ve stopped the bleeding, but these wounds should be covered too.” So saying, she tore part of her blouse into a strip and used it as a bandage, wrapping it around his forearm.
“Okay ... okay,” he said, not allowing himself the pleasure of her concern, “that’s good enough. Get back to shooting down at the pass. I’ll keep an eye out for anyone who gets too close.”
“What about him?” she said, pointing to the dead man lying in the center of their little fort.
“Yeah. We better get him out of here. Could get to smellin’ pretty poorly by tomorrow afternoon, should we live so long. You’ll have to give me a hand.”
They slowly hoisted him up, Matt using only his right arm, so that the body was lying lengthwise across the top of a boulder. Then they shoved. The corpse went tumbling down the steeply sloping trail, like a log being rolled down to a river.
It was hard to tell, but it sounded to Matt as if at least one, maybe two, vigilantes got clobbered by their former friend.
He took only the slightest comfort at the thought, for it was well past midnight. In fact, it was getting on toward morning. Before first light there was going to be some kind of signal. And then, in the dark, they’d rise up from maybe only twenty to forty yards away and come charging, hell-bent for killing. It was going to be bloody, and it was going to be soon ...
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ma Stocker’s all night cafe sat at the edge of Brightwater’s city limits. She stayed open all night for two reasons—she couldn’t sleep at night since her husband died and, sometimes, at night, the damnedest things could happen. This was one night Ma Stocker was glad she was awake. She wouldn’t have missed this for ten straight hours of sleep ...
Three ornery, hard-bitten men who looked like brothers came swaggering into her chow house. They were trail weary, stubble-faced, and definitely on the prod ...
“Hey, you old bitch, fetch us a pot of coffee, and make it quick,” the eldest of the three men demanded.
Ma Stocker was used to catching a little abuse from time to time. It didn’t bother her. She stepped around the table of her one other customer, a lone man with his back to the three men, and brought the coffee.
“What else do you gentlemen want to order?” she asked.
“You got a special?”
“Right there on the board.”
“Give us three of ’em and make it fast.”
“What’s the big hurry?”
“Never you mind, old lady, just get the food.”
Ma Stocker lifted her nose in the air and went back into the kitchen. Small, and nearly empty as her cafe was, voices carried very well. She heard most of what they said:
“We’ve been chasing him for four days and we never seem to catch him,” one of the younger men complained.
“Don’t you worry. We’ll keep chasin’ him till he’s dead and buried. No man’s gonna get away with killin’ a cousin of ours.”
“He must be mighty scared of us. Never heard of Cort Lacey runnin’ like this before. Guess we must have kind of a family reputation.”
The three men laughed. “Lacey must of heard of what we done to Ray Smalley and his brother last month. That’d put the fear into anybody ...”
“Hey, you old bitch ... where’s that food,” the eldest suddenly called out. “I said we were in a hurry!”
She had guessed that the stranger, sitting alone, was a gunfighter by the smoothness of his hands and the quiet intensity of his eyes. It stood to reason that it had to be Cort Lacey when the three men started to bandy the name about. With a certain amount of devilish amusement she called out. “It’s comin’. You don’t want to be eatin’ runny eggs right before you die, do you?”
“Huh? What did you say?”
It was indeed, Cort Lacey. Turning toward the three men he said, “You’ve made a small mistake. I’m not running away from you. I’ve got pressing business and I’ve been in a hurry. Afraid you gents can’t come with me. This is where we part company.”
Ma Stocker, peeking out the kitchen door, was taking it all in. She knew she’d be telling this story till the day she died.
After their initial shock they scrambled to their feet. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they faced the man they had followed for the better part of four days and four nights.
They hoped to find Lacey somewhere out on the trail, maybe asleep in his bedroll. Bushwhacking was what they had in mind. It hadn’t occurred to any of them before this moment that in order to revenge their cousin’s death, it might mean the loss of one of their own lives.
In those close quarters, it seemed certain that at least one of the three brothers was going to die. If Lacey was as good as everyone said, maybe even two of them might die. But surely, so would Cort Lacey.
Yet no one made a move. Calmly, Cort spoke: “Your cousin ... the man I’m supposed to have killed ... would that be Sonny Faber?”
“That’s the one. So you admit it?”
“Yep. He deserved a killing. He murdered a prospector friend of mine. I caught him with the old man’s gold and his mule, too. He didn’t claim to be innocent, neither. It was a fair fight, but he came up a might short. I just wanted you to know that you’re fighting for the honor of a low skunk who killed a defenseless old man. If you want out of this, one of you, or all of you, it’s okay by me. No hard feelings. But if you want at it, let’s get it over with ...”
They had come too far to back down now. If one, or even two of them had to meet his maker, then, so be it. It was a stiff price to pay for the right to revenge, but that was their code and they’d live by it or they’d die by it.
The oldest of the three was the first to make a move. The barrel of his six-gun never cleared leather. The man rocked back from the impact of the bullet that struck him in the chest. He collapsed in a heap.
The other two fared no better.
One had his gun drawn and nearly aimed. He was about to shoot when Cort Lacey’s slug pierced his neck, splitting his spinal column in half. He was dead before he began bleeding.
The third brother had his chance but rushed his shot. The bullet splintered the wood floor two feet in front of the spot where Cort Lacey stood. Before he could get another bullet in the firing chamber, Cort shot him dead, the bullet boring into his skull through the right eye.
“Want some more coffee, Mr. Lacey?” Ma Stocker called calmly out from the kitchen.
“No thanks. Just the bill. Got to get to Woodston as soon as I can.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Use this instead of your Spencer when they make their charge,” said Matt, handing Sharee his Winchester. “Aim with the idea that your target’s about fifteen or twenty yards away and shoot waist high, or maybe lower—they’ll be runnin’, but they’ll be keepin’ low themselves. And don’t you pay no mind to anybody who gets close. That’ll be my job,” he said, palming his Navy Colt, “I’ll cover the short ground ...
“And you, Bobby ... you’ll be reloading for both of us, like you done before. Only now you’ll be doing it in the dark. Just relax and feed those shells in. It’d help, too, if you yell something when you’re one shell away from fillin’ all the chambers. That way we’ll know when to grab for the gun without wastin’ any time.”
Sensing the growing tension and fear in both mother and son, he let the urgency in his voice pass away and he said, in a calm, matter-of-fact way, “We’re gonna be gettin’ mighty hot and thirsty when all the shootin’ starts. Maybe we better have ourselves a little water now, while we got the chance.”
He was unscrewing the cap of a canteen when three shots, in quick succession, echoed through the silent hills. Matt threw the canteen to the ground and dashed back to his position, six-gun poised to spew death at anyone who threatened their lives.
The snipers let go with a ferocious barrage, while the men who had been on their bellies all night, rose and added the fire of their own weapons to the massive volley of lead. And then they charged.
Sharee raked the dark trail below with constant fire, not knowing if she was hitting anything. Matt yelled at her to shoot lower. She did, and this time, one of her bullets elicited a shriek of pain as it slammed into a vigilante’s groin.
Though the trail was exceedingly steep, the distance the attackers had to cover was relatively short. They were coming fast and getting close to the top. Matt could make out the dim form of a man five yards away and he shot him in the chest. Another got to within just a few feet, firing at the flash of light from the Winchester in Sharee’s hands. She was hit, but she held her ground. A second later, Matt blasted two slugs at him, one into the center of his belly, the other into what used to be the center of his face.
The Winchester was empty. Bobby was reloading. Sharee quickly emptied the Spencer and was without a weapon. Matt had emptied his Colt and had but three rounds left in the old pistol that he was using as a back-up.
There were just too many of them. And they were coming too fast for Matt and Sharee to stop them. Bobby was reloading as quickly as anyone could, but it could never be fast enough. They were going to be overrun without the ability to fight back anymore. Matt’s three slugs meant nothing against a charge of at least two dozen men. But Matt suddenly seized upon a desperate idea. In the darkness, in the confusion, against men who were untrained and unused to fighting, it might work ...
Firing his last three shots down into the ground, so the flashes of light could not be seen, and in the same exact sequence as the three shots that started the attack, Matt hoped that enough of the vigilantes would be fooled into thinking that they’d been signaled to retreat, that the charge could be broken.
He did, indeed, confound his attackers. There had been no pre-arranged signal for falling back, yet, it made sense to them that if Ballenger wanted a retreat, he would use the same signal as he had used to start the assault. And though the three shots sounded slightly different than the first three—a bit muffled—the bulk of the vigilantes couldn’t distinguish the difference due to the echoing hills. They fell back.
A handful of them, though, at the very crest of the trail, near the rocks behind which Matt and the Bonhams were using for cover, were the only ones who could tell that Matt had fired the shots, and they kept coming.
His guns now empty, Matt once again unsheathed his knife, prepared to fight to the death.
The first one of them to dive over the rocks came straight at him, the muzzle of his pistol pointing right into Matt’s eyes. The six-gun bucked. A fraction before that, Matt had ducked. He came up jabbing his knife into the man’s chest. The force of the vigilante’s dive into their rock fortress pulled Matt’s blade completely through his torso, gutting him wide open.
Two others came up behind the man that Matt had just killed. Only by then, Bobby had finished reloading the Winchester and had handed it to his mother. She shot one of them in the shoulder, knocking him back off the parapet of the stone wall, and back down the steep trail in a painful slide. The second man was right behind the first and had her dead to rights. She hadn’t levered another shell into the firing chamber. His bullet missed her, though, by four feet because an instant before he fired, Matt’s knife came hurtling at him, finding a resting place between the vigilante’s ribs, the point lodged an inch inside his heart.
By the time the dust and smoke settled, the first light of dawn was beginning to turn the sky into a grayish pink canvas. Not without some suffering, though. There was, of course, Matt’s bullet-riddled left arm. And now Sharee was hurt. A bullet had creased her side, furrowing a deep gash just below the line of her ribs. It wasn’t serious, but it hurt. Still, in all, they were grateful to be alive. Which was more than could be said by the men who had died trying to kill them that night.
“You had them!” Ballenger said angrily. “Another minute, two at most, and it would have been over!”
The men around him said nothing. Joshua Taren, wounded slightly when he tried to get through the narrow pass, brooded alone. Yet not a single man among them made a move to pack up his gear and go home. No. They had gone too far. Too many of their friends and neighbors, too many bunkmates from the Circle B, had died since this all began for them to turn away from it now.
Joshua Taren walked solemnly toward the large group of men that surrounded Vernon Ballenger. He said what all of them had begun thinking: “They must have used most of their ammunition during the night. Come dark again, well put an end to them.”
With Sharee and Bobby keeping watch, Matt slept most of the morning. He blissfully ignored the occasional whine of the sniper’s bullets, feeling that they were out of danger from them as long as they stayed low. And he was right. Except for a slug which flew harmlessly past them, hit a rock ledge ten yards beyond where they lay huddled on the ground, and ricocheted back, hitting Bobby in his right leg, just above the knee.
The boy’s terrified cry of pain cut through Matt like a knife. Awake instantly, he saw the fear in Sharee’s face and the blood all over her hands as she tried to stop the spurts of blood that were flowing from her son’s leg like a geyser. The bullet, flattened when it hit the rock ledge, had ripped an ugly hole in Bobby’s leg and had severed an artery.
Matt took off what remained of his tattered shirt, ripped it into strips, and tied a tourniquet tightly above the wound, and kept pulling tighter till the blood stopped pouring out the gaping hole in the boy’s leg.
“You’re gonna be okay,” Matt whispered to the frightened boy. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he lied.
Sharee did her best to nod her head in agreement to reassure her son, fighting back the tears.
Bobby wasn’t crying, but his eyes were wet. He clutched at his mother and she held him close. Between his exhaustion and his weakness from the loss of blood, the boy eventually fell asleep in her arms.
Sharee was badly shaken. She looked down at the ghastly wound and shuddered. “The bullet is still in there ... it’ll kill him ... what can we do?” Her voice was plaintive and full of a helpless melancholy.
