Sudden--At Bay (A Sudden Western #2) (19 page)

Nick frowned yet again.
‘Decoy?’

Art Cotton’s plan dawned on both of
the gunmen in the same moment, and their laughter was a commingling
of relief and admiration. The slow smile of evil spread on Whitey’s
dark-mustached face.

‘O’ course,’ he breathed. ‘They’re
expectin’ him back?’

‘O’ course,’ sneered Art Cotton.
‘Took yu long enough to get
it.’ The wild
light was still in his eyes but it was cold now and contained,
under a form of control. He inspected Nick, dressed now in Hight’s
clothes, with malevolent satisfaction.

‘Yu see it now?’ he asked them.
‘They sent him over here for something’ — mebbe he was tellin’ the
truth an’ it was medicine for the kid. Or mebbe they’re low on
water or cartridges’, even.’ His smile was pure evil. ‘That’d be
even better,’ he whispered, ‘but it don’t make no never-mind. Once
I seen it — that they was expectin’ him to come back — I seen how
we could take them…’ he snapped his fingers, ‘like
that!’

He began his pacing across the room again as Nick
made the final adjustments to his disguise. His fingers clenched
and unclenched, his thin lips worked as he prowled.

‘So I’m not worth a dime, eh,
Sim?’ he spat. ‘Well what does that make yore neck worth, damn
yu?’

Then he stopped pacing and gave his men their
instructions.

Apart from a few sporadic, seeking shots from across
the street, it had been quiet in the stable. Sudden had relieved
Bob Davis at his post by the window, and the storekeeper was
coaxing a reluctant fire underneath a coffee pot which he had
found, half full, on a table near the rear of the building. The
sharp, welcome tang of coffee filled the air.

‘My belly’s been thinkin’
someone’d cut my throat,’ Billy told nobody in particular, gazing
hungrily towards where Davis hunkered over the tiny blaze. ‘I ain’t
et since breakfast.’

‘When this is all over I’ll buy yu
the biggest steak in the territory,’ Sudden told him.

‘Nix on that, Jim,’ grinned the
boy. ‘I’m buyin’.’ He heaved a huge sigh. ‘I can see ’er now. A
big, thick slab o’ beef, with the juice runnin’ all over the plate,
an’ mebbe three aigs on the top. A whole skillet full o’ potatoes,
brown an’ crisp on the outside, soft as butter in the middle. Three
pounds o’ beans, mebbe—’

‘Was yu brung up by ’Paches,
mebbe?’ Sudden asked the boy, smiling. ‘Yu shore know how to make a
feller scream for mercy.’ He watched idly as Bob Davis walked over
to the window at the rear of the stable. ‘Yu ain’t the only one who
ain’t—’

‘Here comes the Doc!’ Davis’ voice
cut off Sudden’s mild complaint, and the puncher moved. backwards
away from the window, careful not to expose himself, as Davis
stepped away from his lookout, his hand reaching towards the
door.

‘Hell, he shore ain’t hurryin’
none,’ complained the storekeeper.

‘Come
on,
Doc, shift yoreself.’

A faint frown touched Sudden’s
forehead, and with a sharp admonition to Billy to keep the street
covered, Sudden slipped quickly across the stable floor towards the
window through which Davis had observed the Doctor’s
approach.

‘Anythin’ moves, blast at it as
fast as yu can pull the trigger,
Billy!’ he
called over his shoulder to the boy, as Bob Davis slid the heavy
bar away from the door. Sudden reached the window as Davis swung
the door ajar. The storekeeper poked his head around it and leaned
out, calling hoarsely ‘Hurry up, Doc, for
Gawd’s sake!’ Even as the words left his lips Sudden was
yelling
‘Slam that door!’ and Davis turned
his head sharply, startled. As he did so Hight’s figure lurched
forward into a flat run and Sudden saw the flickering movement of
two more shapes below the level of the window still moving fast for
the door. A blast of shots exploded in the doorway as he moved back
and to the side
to cover Davis and the
storekeeper catapulted back inwards, twisting, falling across the
threshold of the door, his feet kicking
high.

With a shouted warning to Billy,
Sudden’s hands flashed to his
guns as three
men loomed dark and huge in the doorway, their guns blazing wildly
into the semi-gloom, their seeking shots blasting across the
position he had just vacated. In this fraction
of a second, Sudden recognized the contorted face of Art
Cotton.
Then the intruders burst into the
stable, falling prone in scurrying,
rolling
movement, their actions kicking up a thin, sun-speckled cloud of
dust and chaff.

Now Sudden’s guns were answering.
The puncher had dived sideways towards the stalls on the left of
the stable, moving fast
and dropping on to
his rounded shoulder, as lancing flames from
deadly muzzles sought to level on his rolling
shape.

Sudden felt something like a red
hot iron being drawn across
his ribs, all
in this one long, endless second, the hammers of his own
weapons falling with incredible speed, hearing the
rolling blast of Billy Hornby’s gun behind him. The man who had
impersonated Doc Hight was doubled over just outside the doorway,
his
hands clutching his stomach, his head
almost touching the floor.
A second man,
heavily-mustached, was careering sideways,
torn off his feet by Billy’s rapid roll of low-aimed shots.
The stable
was full of powder smoke and the
whirring whine of whistling
lead and the
doorway was empty and there was the ugly sound of
men dying.

And then there was a brief, empty
silence and then as Sudden reached the end of his roll and gained
his feet, there before him, mouth drawn back from his teeth in an
animal snarl, was Art
Cotton, lurching
forward, the front of his shirt black with blood,
his eyes empty, desperately striving to raise the
gun in his hand while it grew heavier as the strength pumped out of
his body.

‘Damn
yore
eyes!’ screamed Art Cotton, thumbing back the hammer of the gun and
bringing it slowly up. Here he could press the trigger, flame
flashed from Sudden’s hip and Cotton staggered, pitched sideways
and slid to the floor, the weapon dropping from his twitching
fingers. Sudden shoved his smoking .45 back into its holster and
rose slowly, shaking his head.

‘I had to do it,’ he said, almost
to himself. He looked at Billy across the stable floor. Smoke
drifted lazily on the still air and there was the reek of cordite.
They stood like this for perhaps three seconds, then Sudden snapped
back into action.

‘Back to yore window!’ he shouted.
‘Keep that street empty!’ Billy leaped to his post, cursed, and
laid four shots across the street. Several of the Cottonwood men
who had been drawn from their lair by the sound of the gunfire
inside the stable scattered, diving for cover as Billy’s hastily
thrown shots buzzed about them. In another moment, their return
fire made the boy duck below the window frame as slugs whipped
splinters from the woodwork and thudded into the walls. He turned
to see Sudden bent over Bob Davis’ still form. The puncher had
slammed shut the rear door and the heavy bar was once more in
place. Their eyes met. Sudden shook his head, straightening up
slowly.

‘He’s dead, kid,’ he said
quietly.

Billy said nothing. There was
nothing to say. His eyes moved to the coffee pot, bubbling now on
the dying embers of the fire Davis had lit. He turned away from it
quickly and looked at the blank, bullet-pocked wall in front of his
eyes.

Sudden regarded the sprawled
corpses of Art Cotton and of the mustached Cottonwood rider. He
shook his head and walked to the window. Just outside the door lay
the man who had been dressed in Hight’s clothes, sprawled dead in a
pool of blood.

‘Looks like they got the Doc,’ he
told himself grimly. ‘Only the devil’s luck they didn’t get us,
too.’

It was a victory, but a bitter and
unhappy one. Although three more of Sim Cotton’s hired killers had
come to the end of their nefarious careers, it was at a terrible
cost. He shucked the empty cartridges from his guns, replacing them
with bullets taken from the belts of the dead Art
Cotton.

‘Anythin’ movin’ on the street?’
he finally said to his young companion.

‘Not a thing, Jim.’ Sudden
detected a note of weariness in the boy’s voice. Billy stood
slumped against the wall alongside the window. The fresh bright red
of new blood stained his shirt.

‘Yu opened that wound again,’
Sudden admonished him.

‘I
was
jumpin’ around a mite,’ admitted the kid. Then: ‘Is Doc
Hight…?’

‘That jasper outside is wearin’
his clothes,’ Sudden told him by way of reply. ‘An’ there’s no
movement over at the house.’ A bitter round of curses flowed from
the youngster’s lips at these words. Sudden waited until Billy
paused for breath, then told him ‘Cussin’s like sittin’ in a
rockin’ chair — it gives yu somethin’ to do, but it don’t get yu
anyplace. At least we got some more ca’tridges.’

‘It’s a hell of a price to have to
pay for ’em,’ ground out the Lazy H man. ‘I’d as lief done
without.’

There was nothing to say to that,
either. Sudden’s bleak gaze moved to the window.

‘Gettin’ late,’ he mused aloud.
‘Be dark in a couple of hours.’

They sat in silence for several minutes, each busy
with his own thoughts, both knowing that their thinking was along
parallel lines. It was Billy who put them into words.

‘Yu reckon they’ll hit us again
afore nightfall, Jim?’

Sudden shrugged.

‘Hard to tell,’ he admitted. ‘They
must know we’re alone in here. Sim Cotton’ll probably reckon he
don’t need to wait, but it depends on how many guns he can
muster.’

‘If they wait until it’s dark, we
ain’t got much of a chance,’ the boy murmured. ‘Have
we?’

‘There’s allus a chance, Billy,’
the puncher told him gravely. ‘Yu just have to wait until she pops
her head up, then grab ’er.’

The faintest of whimsical smiles
touched his lips as he spoke, but Billy’s gloom was not to be so
easily shifted.

‘Hell, I’d feel better if we could
do somethin’,’ he growled. ‘I shore don’t go much on this waitin’
game.’

Guns ready at their sides, the two besieged men
quickly scanned the empty street of Cottontown. At the far end, one
or two lights were already glowing. It was very still.

‘It’s the on’y game we got,’ was
Sudden’s quiet comment on the boy’s complaint.

Alone in the cool gloom of the
livery stable the two men waited. Billy sat with his back against
the wall, the window to the right of his head. Without moving too
much he could quickly scan the street to ensure that their enemies
made no sneaking dash towards them. The town had stayed silent now
for over an hour. No shots had been fired, no attack mounted on
their redoubt. Sudden had taken advantage of the lull to stanch the
flow of blood from the youngster’s reopened wound by the simple
expedient of stripping off the blood-stained bandage which Doc
Hight had put on, soaking it in water and twisting it dry. Billy
had set his lips tight as Sudden bound up the ragged wound, and had
even essayed a tight grin as the puncher had then stripped off his
own shirt to dab water on the six-inch bullet burn across his
ribs.

‘They won’t get no closer to yu
than that without interferin’ with yore breathin’,’ remarked the
boy. ‘Need any help?’

Sudden grinned. ‘If I feel faint,
I’ll yell,’ he said.

His medical chores completed, the
puncher hunkered down on a bale of straw and began to roll a
cigarette. Billy’s cheerful words were good to hear. The kid had
nerve enough for six men, but nerve alone was not going to get them
out of this box. He pondered the reaction of the town to the wicked
blows dealt to Cotton’s prestige. Would anyone in this cowed little
valley back them when the final attack started? That it would come,
and soon, he did not doubt. There was no way of knowing when, or
how. Cotton’s force might be reduced but he still had enough guns
to give two lone men, one of them able to use only his left hand
properly, a pretty bad time of it when he struck.

As if divining Sudden’s thoughts,
Billy spoke aloud, his voice pensive and musing.

‘I shore can’t figger this burg,’
he began. ‘They musta seen all that’s happened; they shore knowed
we was buckin’ Sim Cotton
an’ his toughs.
Why ain’t they pitched in to give us some support, Jim?’

Sudden shrugged. ‘Hard to say. It’d
go ag’in them if Sim Cotton come out on top — I’m guessin’ he’s a
man with a long memory for things o’ that nature.’

‘I know that,’ remonstrated Billy.
‘But if we’d had six men in here who could use a gun, we coulda
sent Sim Cotton an’ his paid guns skedaddlin’ for the hills an’ set
this town free o’ him.’

‘Mebbe that’s the problem, Billy,’
Sudden suggested quietly. ‘Have yu given any thought to what
happens to this town if Sim Cotton is broken?’

‘Shore!’ replied Billy stoutly.
‘Every man jack in the place’ll be his own man again, makin’ his
own livin’, sellin’ or buyin’ as sees fit to anyone he wants to.
That can’t be bad, can it?’