31
Slaughter held up his hand to halt the column of men riding behind him when he came to the sign saying “Big Rock, Colorado.”
He twisted in the saddle. “Men, load 'em up six and six, and watch your butts. I don't know if Monte Carson is in this town or not, but if he isn't, we're gonna raise hell until they tell us where he's hiding.”
Behind him, men pulled Winchesters and shotguns out of saddle boots and cradled them in their arms. They were ready to go to war, and each one felt there wasn't a town in the West that could stand up to a group such as theirs. Shopkeepers and pilgrims and cowboys were simply no match for men trained to use their guns to make war, and the sooner these citizens realized that, the sooner Slaughter would pay them their money.
“What do you think, boys?” Slaughter said to Whitey and Swede as they rode into town.
Swede shook his head. “I just hope it's gonna be as easy as you think it is, Boss. Treein' a western town ain't never been done before.”
“There is a first time for everything, Swede,” Slaughter said. “This is the roughest bunch of men I've ever had the pleasure to ride with. There ain't a one of them that hadn't killed more men than they can count. Hell, with this band of desperadoes, I could take Dodge City itself.”
Whitey pulled his Greener express gun from his saddle boot and broke it open, checking his loads. “I just want a chance at that Johnny West, or whatever he's callin' himself today.” He snapped the gun closed with a savage grin. “I'm gonna spread his guts all over Main Street if he's in town.”
Slaughter glanced at the albino. “A piece of advice, Whitey. I've seen West draw, so don't give him a chance to go for his gun. He's snake-quick and that shotgun won't do you no good if he feeds you a lead pill first.”
“He won't even have time to blink before I blow him all to hell,” Whitey growled, his eyes fierce.
“Hey, Boss,” Swede said, his head swiveling back and forth as he looked at buildings on either side of the street.
“What is it now, Swede?” Slaughter said, impatient with Swede's constant whining.
“There's something wrong here.”
“What'a you mean?”
“There ain't nobody on the street. It looks like the town's deserted.”
Slaughter looked around. For once, Swede was making some sense. Something was out of kilter here, all right. There wasn't a citizen in sight, not even a dog or a chicken. Something was going on, and Slaughter began to worry that perhaps he'd underestimated the ease with which they would take the town.
“Uh-oh,” Whitey mumbled.
“What is it?” Slaughter asked.
“Look over yonder,” Whitey said, pointing ahead down Main Street.
There was a large sign stuck on a post in the center of the street. Painted on it in large red letters was “Slaughter's Marauders . . . Welcome to HELL!”
“Shit!” Slaughter exclaimed, pulling his Colt, the hairs on the back of his neck stirring with the warning. Now he knew they were in deep trouble.
He jerked the reins of his horse's head around, getting ready to make a quick exit of the town. Then he saw three wagons blocking the street out of town.
“Damn! They've got us blocked in,” he said. He noticed his men were looking around, suddenly worried expressions on their faces, though most were too stupid to realize the trap they were in.
“Jim Slaughter,” a voice called from the roof of the Big Rock Hotel just up the street.
Slaughter turned to look up, putting a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun.
The man he knew as Johnny West was standing there, next to Monte Carson. Carson had a long-barreled shotgun in his arms, while West had his hands empty.
“Yeah, what do you want?” Slaughter called back.
Monte Carson said in a loud voice, “If you and your men drop your weapons, your men can leave peacefully. You, however, will be arrested, and in all probability, hanged.”
“My men and I haven't broken any laws,” Slaughter called back. “We just came into town to have a drink and be on our way.”
“I AM the law here, Slaughter,” Monte said, earing back the hammers on his shotgun. “You got one last chance to come out of this alive. Drop your guns, NOW!”
“That one's mine!” Whitey growled, swinging his Greener toward Smoke.
Almost quicker than the eye could follow, Smoke drew and fired, his Colt exploding and belching fire and gun smoke toward the albino.
Whitey twisted in the saddle, a hole in his right chest pumping scarlet blood onto the back of his horse's head. “Uh!” he groaned with the impact, looking down at the wound in his chest in disbelief.
His lips pulled back over his teeth in a snarl and with a mighty effort, he tried to raise the barrel of his shotgun toward Smoke, until a second shot punched a neat hole in the center of his forehead, exiting out the back of his skull and striking a man behind him in the chest. Both men toppled off their horses as Slaughter's men all aimed and opened fire.
Jensen and Carson dove behind a wooden wall that'd been erected on the rooftop just as bullets began to pockmark the boards.
Without warning, gun barrels appeared in many of the windows of the buildings along Main Street, and all began to fire into the heaving mass of men and horses that was Slaughter's gang. The horses reared and stampeded and crow-hopped, throwing some men to the ground, while others hung on for dear life as they galloped down streets and alleys trying to find a way out of the hell that Big Rock had suddenly become.
Slaughter leaned over his horse's neck, saving his life as a slug meant for him took the animal in the throat and threw them both to the ground.
The outlaw scrabbled on his hands and knees through clouds of cordite and gun smoke toward the entrance to the hotel. Maybe he could survive long enough to kill Monte Carson, whose treachery had caused this whole mess.
Swede leaned down in the saddle, spurring his horse forward and firing blindly at windows and doors as he rode down the middle of Main Street, desperately looking for a hole to crawl into.
Juan Garcia and Chuck Clute, two outlaws from Texas who'd come to Wyoming to escape the Texas Rangers, wheeled their mounts around and raced back down Main Street, trying to get out of town the way they'd come in.
To hell with Slaughter and his thousand dollars,
Garcia thought as he emptied his gun at fleeting shadows in windows.
They were twenty yards from the wagons blocking the entrance to town when four men stood up from behind haystacks in the wagons, all leveling shotguns at the bandits.
“Oh, shit!” Chuck Clute yelled when he saw the shotguns explode in his direction. Those were to be his last words on earth, as several hundred molten slugs of 00-buckshot shredded his chest and blew out his spine.
Garcia was stopped as suddenly as if he'd run into a brick wall by the express-gun loads, which catapulted him backward out of the saddle to land on his back in the dirt. His last view was of white clouds in a blue sky overhead before he began his journey to Hell.
Boone Marlow, who'd raped and killed more women than he had fingers, jumped off his horse and jerked open the door under the sign saying “General Store.”
He stopped short at the sight of a man with a Winchester in his arms. “Welcome to Big Rock,” Ed Jackson said as he pulled the trigger.
His slug hit Marlow in the upper stomach, doubling him over just as Peg Jackson pulled the trigger on the small .32-caliber pistol she held in her hand. The bullet, though small, made quite a mess of the top of Marlow's head when it blew out his brains.
Dusty Rhodes, a footpad and burglar from Memphis, Tennessee, who'd left that state after killing an entire family when caught robbing their house, made it to the end of Main without being shot. He jumped off his horse, gun in hand, and burst through the doors of the church, his eyes wide and sweat dripping from his face.
A man wearing a minister's collar was stirring some soup at a table loaded with food and blankets.
Rhodes aimed his pistol, a grin appearing on his face. “Hands up, preacher man. You're gonna be my ticket outta here.”
Pain exploded in Dusty Rhodes's head as Bountiful Morrow swung a two-by-four piece of wood into the back of his skull, crushing the bone and scrambling his brains. As he fell forward, blood spurting from his eyes and ears, she said, “Welcome to our church. Would you like to kneel and pray?”
Sam Fleetfoot, on the run from the Indian Nations for murdering three Indian marshals, tried to jump his pony through a window in a boardinghouse to escape the murderous fire from the buildings all around him.
He made it through the window, shattering the glass, but was knocked off his horse to land on his back on the wooden floor. A large piece of glass fell straight down. Sam Fleetfoot held up his hands, getting his fingers sliced off as the sheet of windowpane neatly severed his neck. His eyes were still open as his head rolled away from his body, but it was doubtful they could see the blood spurting from his neck.
Muskrat Calhoon calmly took a twist of tobacco out of his shirt pocket as bullets thunked into the wooden wall he was standing behind on the roof of the
Big Rock Guardian.
He bit off a sizable chunk of tobacco, then rose up and leaned his Sharps over the wall. It took but a second for him to spot and aim at a man riding down the street over three hundred yards away. He put the sight six inches over the man's head and slowly caressed the trigger. He was spun half around by the recoil as the big rifle belched two ounces of lead toward the outlaw.
Ernest Melton, noted murderer from Montgomery, Alabama, who'd killed two deputies and a family he took hostage in an escape before heading to Wyoming, never felt the slug that penetrated his spine between his shoulder blades and blew him over his horse's head, broken almost in half by the power of the Sharps cartridge.
Muskrat jacked another shell into the chamber and fired again, this time at a man running toward a dressmaker's shop. As the slug hit Happy Jack Morco in the shoulder and blew his right arm clean off, Muskrat mumbled, “Ya don't need no dresses nohow where yo're goin', sonny.” Evidently Happy Jack didn't think so either, for he fell squirming to the ground, where his screams of pain could be heard even over the noise of the gunfight, until he bled to death.
Haywood Arden stood in the doorway of his newspaper office, a shotgun in his arms, shouting, “Extra, extra, read all about it! Murderers killed in fatal attempt to take over town!” He punctuated his shouts by firing both barrels of the American Arms twelve-gauge and blowing Frank Broadwell and Chester Hughes out of their saddles as they rode hell-bent down the street.
Dana Arden calmly handed him another shotgun and began to reload his, saying, “Nice shot, Haywood.”
Marty Prembook, a stone killer who hired his gun out to anyone with the money to pay for it, decided he wasn't being offered enough for this job and jerked his horse's head around and galloped toward an alleyway. James Hunt, rapist, mugger, and pederast, saw Prembook making a getaway and followed as fast as his horse would run.
As they entered the alley, two figures stepped from the darkness of shadows along the buildings on either side.
Pearlie and Cal raised their Colts and fired as one. Two outlaws twisted and bent and fell out of their saddles to the ground. Hunt was killed instantly. Prembook, severely wounded, held up his hand. “Mercy . . . mercy,” he cried.
Pearlie hesitated, then jumped as Cal fired from behind him and punched a hole just above Prembook's nose.
Pearlie looked at Cal, his eyebrows raised, until Cal pointed and he could see the gun in Prembook's other hand, hammer still cocked. Pearlie grinned and held up a finger, showing he owed Cal one.
From his vantage point on the roof of the hotel, Smoke saw Swede riding down the street toward the livery. He took two quick steps, jumped to the roof next door, and hurriedly climbed down the stairs on the side wall. Weaving through the alley, he entered the livery stable through the rear door.
Swede was trying to burrow under some hay in the corner when Smoke stepped out into the light.
“You got two choices, outlaw,” Smoke growled, his hands hanging at his sides, relaxed.
Swede jerked around at the sound of Smoke's voice, a pistol in his right hand, barrel pointed down at the ground.
“What're those?”
“You can drop that gun and give yourself up and hang.”
Swede smiled sadly. “Not acceptable. What's the other choice?”
“I can kill you right here.”
“I got a pistol in my hand. Not even you are that fast.”
Smoke gave a small shrug. “I have a feeling we're fixing to find out. Right?”
“Goddamned right!” Swede said, and jerked the barrel of his Colt upward.
In one lightning-fast movement, Smoke drew and fired from the hip without aiming. His gun exploded a split second before Swede's did, his slug hitting the big man in the chest.
Swede's bullet grazed Smoke's throat, drawing a fine line across his neck that began to slowly ooze blood.
Swede stood there, a surprised look on his face. Then he looked down at the hole in his chest and the spreading red stain on his shirt.
“You've killed me.”
Smoke nodded. “It appears that way.”
Swede grinned, then coughed, blood trickling down the corners of his mouth. “Then I'll see you in Hell.”
Smoke nodded. “Maybe, but not today.”
Swede's grin faded and he fell forward onto his face.
Monte Carson stood up from behind the wooden barrier on the roof and aimed his shotgun down. Ike Black and James Blaine, both men who'd ridden with Quantrill's Raiders and were used to fire fights, had dismounted and were standing behind their horses, firing over the saddles at the window to the general store.