Sudden--At Bay (A Sudden Western #2) (12 page)

‘
All quiet,’ he announced. ‘Try
an’ get to yore posts without attractin’ too much attention. It
would be a shame to spoil the surprise.’ His thin smile boded ill
for the men who were to be the recipients of this
surprise.

While his companions hastened to
their positions, Sudden crossed the street to the jail. He sat
there on a rocked-back chair, tilted against the wall, his hat
pushed forward over his eyes. Beneath the shaded brim, however, the
keen gaze missed no movement on the street.

‘
Shore hope I’m figgerin’ that
Cotton jasper,’ he soliloquized. ‘If he hits this town hard, we’re
goin’ to know we’ve been in a fight.’ And saying this, his gaze
wandered to the unguarded southern end of the town, and the line of
dusty green which marked the banks of the river. His mind was busy.
‘If I was Sim Cotton, how would I play her?’ he asked himself.
‘What would I expect me to think I’d do?’ The nonsensical character
of his unspoken question brought a smile to his lips. After sitting
for a while deep in thought, he stepped out into the street, pacing
purposefully. A quick glance showed him that Blass was in position,
and a moment later he glimpsed the storekeeper on the opposite side
of the false front of the saloon, their rifles commanding the whole
length of the street. Sudden glanced now towards the Sheriff’s
small shack. Hight waved from behind the closed window, a quick
signal that all was well. Sudden nodded.

‘
Well, we’re all set to go to the
ball. All we need now is the music’

He walked back towards the jail and leaned casually
against the porch rail, relaxed and waiting.

Up on the saloon roof the bartender shook his
head.

‘
Look at him,’ he told his
companion. ‘Yu’d think he had nothin’ more on his mind than the
next drink! That jasper ain’t got no nerves!’

Davis grinned and said, ‘Wal, it’s
probably just as well. I reckon we got enough for us an’ some left
over for him.’

Blass shook his head wonderingly.
‘He shore is a cool sort o’ cucumber. I’ll tell yu one thing: he
ain’t ordinary no forty an’ found cowpoke.’

‘
Yu ain’t whistlin’ Dixie,’ agreed
the storekeeper. ‘I still ain’t figgered out why he ain’t
skedaddled. This yere fight ain’t none o’ his never-mind. I’d say
he done considerable more than he needed to when he bruk the kid
out o’ jail. Why for yu reckon he’s pitchin’ in this
hoedown?’

Blass shrugged. ‘No good reason I
can see,’ he said. ‘Unless he just enjoys a scrap.’

‘
He better had,’ was the
rejoinder. ‘For we’re shore as hell in for one.’

With this remark silence fell between them, and they
turned their eyes towards the street, empty and yawning below them,
except for the motionless figure of James Green, standing alone and
waiting.

Chris Helm smiled like a wolf at the three shots
rang out behind him.

‘
Sim was right,’ he told the three
men with him.

‘
Figgered,’ agreed the
villainous-looking half-breed on his right. ‘They must have us down
as pretty stupid if they reckon we’re goin’ to ride into a
whipsaw.’

‘
I don’t reckon they know what to
expect,’ Helm told him. ‘That’s why we’re playin’ it the way I told
yu afore we left the ranch.’

‘
Yu reckon yu can drag it out
until we get around?’ asked a short, narrow-eyed man wearing his
gun on the left side, butt forward.

‘
Yu just get there, Hitch,’ Helm
said. ‘An’ come in fast when I take Green.’

‘
Yu sound awful shore he’ll come
out after yu alone,’ Hitch argued.

‘
I am,’ was the unemotional reply.
‘Who else could he send?’ The quartet reined in their horses. Over
a rise perhaps a hundred yards in front of them the town could be
clearly seen, spread unprettily across the gray-green prairie like
toy houses dropped by a tired child. Beyond and to the southwest
the thin line of trees marking the course of the river laid a strip
of brighter color across the land.

‘
Yu boys got it straight, now?’
Helm asked, harshly. ‘I don’t want no slip-ups. When yu see me set
him up, yu come up that street
fast,
Felipe, yu take the saloon
side. Bann, yu take the middle. I want yu on the jailhouse side,
Hitch. Keep yore eyes on the roofs, all o’ yu. They may have more
men than we figger. Okay, move out!’

The three Cottonwood riders thundered off at a
tangent across the area between the town and the river. Helm drew
his guns, spun the cylinders, checked the action, and thrust them
back into the tooled leather holsters. He slapped his horse into
motion and moved slowly ahead towards the northern end of the
town.

The three shots rang out, flat and emphatic, in the
open prairie beyond the northern edge of town. The two men on the
roof saw Sudden straighten up and step slowly forward into the
centre of the street. They scanned the northern end of the street,
and presently the lone horsemen moving in a leisurely fashion
towards the edge of town.

‘
One man alone,’ frowned Davis.
‘Are they mad?’

‘
Mebbe, mebbe not,’ was the terse
reply. ‘Keep yore sights on him regardless. Jim,’ he called. ‘One
man. Looks like the big feller, Helm.’

‘
Nobody else in sight, no dust?’
called the man in the street without taking his eyes off the rider
now visible at the far end of town.

‘
Nary a thing,’ came the
reply.

Sudden nodded and gestured them to conceal
themselves again. He watched as the lone rider dismounted outside
the general store and tied up his horse. Helm looked as if he were
no more concerned than if he were really going into the store for
some tobacco as Green paced slowly forward, up the street past the
saloon now and drawing level with the bank.

Helm stepped away from his horse’s
side into the middle of the street, perhaps fifty yards away from
the approaching Green. He smiled thinly, settling on his heels,
letting Green come to him.

‘
Keep comin’, cowboy,’ he said
softly to himself. ‘Keep comin’.’ Aloud, he called, ‘Yu got any
last words for yore tombstone, Green?’

Sudden stopped, measuring the man.
Helm’s confidence was no real surprise, for the man was a
professional gunfighter, had been through this before so many times
that it must almost be a ritual by now. Green’s mouth went grim as
he thought of the men, innocent men, unskilled in the use of guns,
who had fallen dead at this killer’s feet.

‘
Yeah,’ Green told him, stopping
about twenty feet away from the gunfighter. ‘Yu might make shore
they put “
alias Sudden”
on it.’

Consternation touched Helm’s face
for a moment, but then confidence reasserted itself.

‘
So yo’re Sudden,’ he sneered. ‘I
thought I knew yu. They say yo’re fast.’

Sudden noted that for a fraction of a second, Helm’s
eyes were focused on some distant point behind him down the street,
but his cold gaze did not leave the man before him.

‘
Yu got the choice o’ findin’ out
or gettin’ out, Helm,’ Green told him. ‘Make it.’

‘
In my own time, Mr Sudden,’ Helm
smiled. He was almost relaxed, only the cat eyes wary and watchful.
‘I’ll take yu when I’m good an’ ready.’

The two men stood for a frozen second, as if time
itself was standing still. Then a door banged open and in that same
moment, all hell broke loose on the street of Cottontown.

Doc Hight had watched Sheriff Parris like a hawk
from the moment he heard the three warning shots echo flatly across
the town. The old man had given him no trouble, but had remained
where Doc had told him to stay, flat against the far wall of the
shack, his hands behind his neck.

In the suspenseful moments
following Helm’s arrival in town, which Hight could not see, Parris
played on the medico’s taut nerves with telling
comments.

‘
Yore sidekicks will run out on
yu, Doc,’ he cackled, evilly. ‘Yo’re goin’ to look mighty sick when
Sim Cotton’s boys get yu.’

‘
Keep your mouth shut,’ rapped
Hight. ‘I might just take Green’s advice and tap you one with
this.’ He gestured with the gun barrel. The Sheriff was unabashed
by this threat, however.

‘
Yu lay into me, an’ yu’ll get
twice yore value when Sim’s done with yu, boy,’ he jibed. ‘Yu
better turn me loose while yu got a chance.’

‘
I’ll put a bullet in your fat
belly if you don’t keep still,’ growled Hight, now uncertain as the
continuing stillness outside remained unbroken. Where was Green?
What was happening? He edged over towards the window, peered out,
looking up the street. He saw Green walking slowly north towards
something or someone he couldn’t see. He pushed his face harder
against the glass, trying to bring the far end of the street within
his range of vision. In this moment, his attention was completely
diverted from the old sheriff, who, with an agility surprising in a
man so large, took three fast steps across the room and crashed a
clenched fist to the base of the medico’s neck. Hight dropped,
stunned, to his knees as the sheriff wrenched the pistol from his
nerveless fingers. The gun rose high and fell, stretching Hight
unconscious on the floor.

Without further thought, Parris
rushed across the room and pulled open the door which led directly
on to the street, yelling at
the top of his
voice: ‘On the saloon roof, boys! Watch out on the––’ and that was
all he ever said for in the precise moment that he wrenched open
his front door and dashed out into the street, the three Cottonwood
riders who had circled the town came out at full gallop from behind
the jail, guns drawn, bearing down on the lone figure of Sudden in
the street.

Felipe, the half-breed screamed
aloud as his horse ran straight into the sheriff. In another second
the three riders were fighting their panic-stricken horses, trying
desperately to stay in the saddle, as the guns started to
boom.

Helm’s hands had flashed for his
guns in the moment he heard the door bang, sure that the sound of
his comrades approaching would momentarily distract the calm,
saturnine figure before him. Helm was very, very fast. He had moved
before Sudden even started for his guns, and Helm had his fingers
crooked on the triggers when twin spurts of flame belched from
Sudden’s hips, hurling Helm backwards and over, the gunman’s guns
exploding as the reflex action made him jerk the triggers. Helm
died happy thinking he had killed Sudden, while Sudden, moving even
as the shots he had fired whisked Helm over, was rolling sideways
and turning, his twin revolvers blasting shots into the twisting,
churning mass that was the three riders in the street. One horse
was down hurt, and the others were still rearing, screeching as the
bullets whined about them and the roll of gunfire multiplied the
panic caused by the moving thing that had tangled itself in their
legs. The half-breed, Felipe, lay cursing, one leg twisted at an
unnatural angle, sidling towards the revolver which lay in the
dust, Blass and Davis stood up on the saloon roof, pouring rifle
fire into the struggling group in the street. The dust rose high
and figures became obscure. Still the two men on the roof kept
firing, and went on shooting until their weapons were
empty.

The silence when the firing ceased was shattering.
Green edged along the saloon porch, guns cocked and ready, as the
dust sifted down in the street and figures became distinct again.
One horse was dead, its body half covering the tattered, smashed
thing that had once been the sheriff. The other horses had
skittered off down the street until their dragging reins had halted
them; they stood now, nervously snorting and pawing the dust, just
beyond the jail. The three Cottonwood riders were dead. None of
them had fired a shot.

Green was standing in the middle of the street
looking down at the carnage when the bartender and the storekeeper
joined him.

‘
My Gawd!’ gasped Blass in an awed
voice. ‘Did we do that?’

‘
I just kept shootin’,’ Davis
said, ‘I couldn’t see nothin’, but I kept shootin’.’

‘
It’s over now,’ Sudden told them.
He felt a great weariness for a moment. ‘Go an’ see what happened
to Doc Hight. He may be hurt.’

The two men hurried off towards the
Sheriff’s cabin. Looking up Green saw Billy Hornby running down the
street, as men emerged from doorways, their actions curiously
hesitant.

‘
Jim!’ Billy called. ‘I stayed up
at the north end, in case they come runnin’ back that way. I didn’t
know they’d split up. Is anyone hurt?’

‘
On’y them,’ the puncher told him.
‘We come out without a scratch.’

‘
I see yu got Helm,’ Billy
enthused. ‘Good for yu.’

‘
He had it comin’,’ Green said
flatly. ‘But I ain’t proud of it. I ain’t proud of any o’ this. If
Harry Parris’ hadn’t taken it into his head to try an’ let Helm
know somethin’ Helm knew already, it’d be us lyin’
there.’

He looked around as the two men
came out of Parris’ house with Doc Hight. The medico was rubbing
his head; his face was a picture of chagrin.

‘
Jim,’ he began. ‘I’m shore
sorry…’

‘
Forget it,’ Sudden retorted. ‘In
a way, yu helped. Those three woulda given me a bad moment if it
hadn’t ’a’ been for Parris.’