Sudden--At Bay (A Sudden Western #2) (22 page)

Sudden was on one knee, supporting
himself with his left hand, his right pawing at his forehead.
Rolfe’s shot had caught him high on the scalp, just above the point
of the hairline, half-stunning him, a thick trickle of blood nearly
blinding the puncher. Unsure that he had stopped Rolfe, Sudden
fired blindly into the red murk before his eyes, only to hear the
hammer fall upon an empty shell. Not fully in command of his
senses, he struggled to his feet, swaying, knuckling the blood from
his eyes, his blood-slippery hand fumbling at his belt for shells
to reload the gun, peering like an old man into the mist before
him. He lurched forward a pace as Billy Hornby took a step from the
porch of the saloon where he had rolled to escape the heedless
bullets. Even as the boy moved, as the townspeople began to get to
their feet, a remembered voice cut the hushed silence of the
street.

‘Green!’

Trying still to focus his blurred
vision, shaking his head to get rid of its steady buzzing, not
knowing that Rolfe’s bullet had badly concussed him, Sudden half
lifted the empty gun in his hand. The thin, terrible voice cut
through the fog.

‘Try it.’

He let his hand drop, shrugging. It
had been a brave attempt, but they had beaten him. The voice …
which of them was it? Why did he know the voice? And then his
eyesight cleared for a moment, enough for him to see the owner of
the keening voice, the figure of the man he had thought dead — Buck
Cotton!

The last of the tyrants stumbled
down from the porch of the Sheriff’s house. A murmur of hushed awe
escaped the clustered watchers for Buck Cotton was a sight to
inspire horror, fear and pity. Dried and matted blood caked his
hair, his face. His clothes were like those of some blood-spattered
scarecrow, torn, trailing in strips and tatters, filthy. The skin
of his exposed arms and legs, and the back of his trembling hands
was gone, leaving a raw exposed bloody mass, his twitching face was
as red and angry as a peeled tomato, and his eyes were glaring with
a wild and dislocated light. In his wavering grasp was a cocked
rifle covering his quarry. He took three weaving steps forward.
Nobody dared to move.

‘Yu did this to me, yu swine,’
whined Buck Cotton. ‘Yu did this.’ A sob of possessed rage swept
through his frame. ‘Yu killed Sim, too. Yu an’ yore stinkin’ nester
friend ruined it all. But yo’re goin’ to pay, damn yu. I’m goin’ to
shoot yu to pieces, Green, yu hear? Shoot yu to pieces. Bit by bit
by bit by bit.’ He cackled insanely, his laughter ending on a high
choked note. ‘Damn yu!’

His finger whitened on the trigger and Sudden,
helpless and unarmed, steeled himself for the shock of the bullet.
They said you hardly felt it, you only heard the shot. He winced as
the explosion filled the air.

It did not come from the barrel of
the rifle in Buck Cotton’s hands. It came from a battered old Army
Colt in the relentless grasp of Doc Hight. The medico, his face
swollen almost out of recognition, stood like an angel of vengeance
in the middle of the dusty street, the marks of the vicious beating
he had received plain for all to see. His shot smashed into the
stock of the rifle in Buck Cotton’s hands, tearing it from his
grasp, knocking him reeling back two paces. Hight’s stentorian
voice shattered the silence.

‘What kind of town is this?’ he
cried to the watching crowd. ‘Will you stand there and see the man
who saved you be murdered? Will you never understand that you must
fight to be free?’ An animal sound escaped from Buck Cotton’s
mouth. He dived forward to get his hands on the rifle which had
been torn from his grasp, a scream bubbling up insanely in this
throat.

‘I’ll get yu, Green!’ he
screeched.

Sudden took a step forward but as
he did so he heard a strange and awful sound, the sound of a feral
beast, the sound of men finally, irrevocably committed to a path of
violence. Sudden knew that sound. It was the sound of the awakened
mob. Fighting desperately against the blackness which swam up into
his head, he tried to shout, tried to hold back the violent tide of
death, but rough, friendly hands thrust him aside, lifted him, and
the sweet warm darkness began to fall and he cried out ‘No!’ to
stop them. But even as he did so he heard a terrible, inhuman
scream and knew that the men of the town had fallen like ravaging
wolves upon the last of the Cottons.

Far away, far away in the furthest
reaches of his consciousness, Sudden could hear voices, and memory
came slowly back into his brain like water spreading across sand.
He remembered fire, and then the stable; he remembered the sight of
a big man falling, folding forward like a broken blade of grass. He
remembered … he remembered? He opened his eyes. The light was like
a knife. Someone said. ‘He’s awake.’

A face looked down at him. It was a
young face, a boy’s face. Next to it was the face of a girl. They
looked alike. Brother and sister? They faded out of sight. Another
face. Bruised, yellow, purple, green, black. Swollen. Been in a
fight.

Then the boy’s face. He thought the
boy was crying.

‘Don’t cry,’ he said, and then he
fell asleep just like that, blackness slipping over him like a
soft, comforting blanket. He slept for another three days without
once opening his eyes, and then on the fourth morning he looked
about him and said to the man beside the bed ‘Hello,
Doc’

‘Thank God,’ breathed Hight.
‘You’ve come through.’

It was just ten days since the
events which had culminated in Sudden’s being brought, unconscious,
to the Lazy H ranch. Now the puncher sat in a comfortable chair and
listened to the excited Billy Hornby relate the events which had
taken place since the end of the siege. Doc Hight, his arm around
the shoulder of Jenny Hornby, smiled indulgently as Billy told his
friend his news.

‘Yu see, the Cottons was makin’ a
last bid to hold on to the town, an’ we never knowed it,’ Billy
said. ‘If yu hadn’t o’ happened along when yu did, they’d’ve done
it.’

‘I still don’t get it,’ smiled
Sudden. ‘Why was it so important to them to keep the town under
their heels?’

Hight leaned forward. ‘That’s the
most fantastic part o’ the whole story, Jim he said. ‘Shortly after
yu — shortly after we got the town back to somethin’ like normal,
this gent turns up askin’ for Fred Mott, the banker

‘Who’d skedaddled outta town when
he seen how things was goin’ interposed Billy. ‘He musta’ been
scared — he never even took his clothes.’

‘Luckily for the town, the vault
was on a time lock and couldn’t be opened. Our savings, at least,
are safe smiled Hight. ‘But I was telling you: the man turned out
to be a Mr Sandberg, an Inspector of Land from the territorial
Legislature. He seemed astonished that we didn’t know about the
Government’s plans to build a damn at Twin Peaks — that’s not far
from here, up in the hills at the end of the valley.’

‘We told him somethin’ about what
had been goin’ on Billy continued the story. ‘He said he’d met Sim
Cotton. The way he said it made it sound like he’d spotted Sim for
what he was.’

‘And now, dear Jim, thanks to you
everyone in the valley will share in the future,’ Jenny Hornby told
him. ‘Every acre of scrubland will be irrigated, and the whole
valley will be rich, fertile land.’

‘Worth a fortune,’ added Hight.
‘Which explains why Sim Cotton wanted to keep the town under his
thumb. As soon as the dam was given the go-ahead, he’d buy up every
building, every acre of land — everything would have been in his
hands.’

‘Until yu happened along Billy
finished. And then, with a quizzical frown. ‘Or
did
yu just happen along?’

Sudden regarded his young friend with a level
gaze.

‘How d’yu come to think somethin’
like that?’ he asked. His voice was lazy, but Hight detected
something in it which Billy did not.

‘Hell, Jim, I dunno foundered the
boy. ‘It was … just, well, as if someone’d known what was goin’ on
here, an’ had sent yu to come an’ put an end to it.’

‘Shore scoffed Sudden. ‘Someone
who knowed I’d get here on the day that he knowed yu was goin’ to
make a play against Buck Cotton. Someone who knowed I’d be able to
handle Sim Cotton an’ all his boys, an’ knowed that if they nearly
burned me to a cinder in a blazin’ stable, it’d be okay, because
I’d get out an’ then not get beefed, on’y creased. Shore he
finished, ‘someone sent
me, I reckon. Ol’
Lady Luck, kid. Nobody else.’

‘Well, anyway,’ Billy argued. ‘It
makes no never-mind — it shore was a good thing for this town that
yu happened along. The Cottons was aimin’ to eat this valley
whole.’

‘They nearly made it,’ Sudden
reminded him quietly.

‘Aw, shucks, Jim,’ protested
Billy, ‘they had no chance agin’ yu. I never seen anythin’ like
that fight in the street. Three o’ them, an’ one o’ them Sim
Cotton, an’ yu—’

‘Was within one millimeter of
cashin’ in my chips,’ Sudden said grimly. ‘If Doc here hadn’t
turned up — an’ I ain’t yet had a chance o’ thankin’ yu, Doc — by
the way, just where in Hades
did
yu come from?’

‘From my own house,’ smiled Hight.
‘I woke up lying on the floor, stiff as a board from the beating
Art Cotton had given me. I was surprised to find myself still
alive, and astonished when I discovered I was able to walk. I found
a bottle of whiskey and took a drink of that, which helped. Then I
looked through the window. It all came flooding back, the fight,
the siege. I could see the stable all but burned down. I could see
men in the street. I imagined that yu and Billy must both be dead,
and I went out to find out what had gone on. I must have not been
thinking too clearly for it never occurred to me that the Cottons
would kill me knowing that I’d been with you. But then I saw you,
and Buck Cotton ready to kill you. I didn’t know what to do but I
just kept walking, automatically, I suppose. I saw Billy’s gun
laying there in the dust. I didn’t know really what was happening,
but I was terribly tired and suddenly very angry, impatient almost,
and I just threw a shot at Buck. To my surprise, it disarmed him. I
thought he had already shot you, you see: you looked dead on your
feet.’

‘It’d been a hard sort o’ day,’
admitted Green with a smile.

‘An’ then the Doc yells out that
if they want it to be their town, them watchin’ had better do
somethin’ about it,’ Billy interposed. ‘The crowd tore Buck Cotton
to pieces.’

Jenny Hornby shuddered. ‘It must
have been awful,’ she shivered. ‘Even though they were so hateful,
I could not wish such a death on any man.’

‘No, it wasn’t pretty,’ Hight
agreed, ‘but it was necessary. If this town was ever going to have
any self-respect again.’

‘I remember the crowd yellin’,’
Sudden told them. ‘What happened after that? I must’ve been dozin’
at the time.’

‘Yu shore were,’ chortled Billy.
‘Sleepin’ Beauty had nothin’ on yu.’

‘They found Martin Kilpatrick in
the jailhouse,’ Hight told his listener. ‘The townspeople wanted to
hang him, but in the end he was stripped, tied to a horse, and
pointed north. He left the town without a single
possession.’

‘At that, he was lucky,’ growled
Billy.

‘That’s true,’ agreed the doctor.
‘But they all agreed that Kilpatrick had been nothing but a
tool.’

‘Hah, listen to him!’ snorted
Billy.’ ‘“They agreed”, he says, as if it had been some kind o’
sewin’ circle discussion. Jim, Doc stood over that shiverin’ old
misfit with a cocked gun in his hand, an’ told that lynch mob the
killin’ was over — unless someone tried to lay a hand on
Kilpatrick. They took his word for it, an’ backed off.’

During this recital, Jenny Hornby
regarded the medico with adoring eyes, while that worthy flushed
crimson and fidgeted in his seat. Unable to contain his
embarrassment he protested ‘Those men were only looking for a
scapegoat. By hanging Kilpatrick they would be hanging their own
guilt, their own refusal to fight the Cottons until it was almost
too late.’

Sudden shook his head. ‘That
psychology stuff’s too deep for me, Doc. But I’ll take yore word
for it. What happens now?’

‘We’ve elected a council,’ Hight
told him. ‘Land in the valley will be allocated to everyone in the
town according to how long they’ve lived here. After that, new
settlers will be entitled to file on the usual hundred and sixty
acres allowed by the Homestead Act. For the time being, I’m acting
as Mayor. And in that office, I want to tell you that we all felt
that as soon as you were on your feet properly, we’d offer you the
job of town Marshal, Jim.’

‘Yu don’t need me,’ he murmured.
‘The town is free.’

‘It’ll still be wide open for a
while,’ persisted Hight, ‘as the new settlers come in. We’ll need
help, Jim. And later … well, you could hang up your guns for
good.’

Sudden smiled sadly. It was a
tempting offer, indeed, to a lonely man. To put behind him the
empty outlaw trails, the long and endless quest upon which he had
embarked, to live in a friendly town, with good people for
neighbors. But it could not be, and he knew it.

‘If I’d lost my memory for good,
it might’a’ been possible,’ he told them. ‘But now, I can’t. I got
a job to do.’