Trackdown (9781101619384) (2 page)

He had reached the alley between the Prairie Queen and the hardware store, which was closed and dark for the night, when a shot blasted from the saloon, and a woman screamed.

Bill wheeled around and moved fast, limp or no limp. Some nights he carried a shotgun with him when he made his evening rounds, but tonight he flat out hadn’t thought to bring it along.

He had a Colt holstered on his right hip, though, and he drew the revolver as he reached the batwings. His keen brown eyes peered over them.

Customers yelled and scrambled to get out of the way as a man in range clothes stood next to the bar swinging a gun back and forth in a threatening manner.

“Everybody back off!” he shouted. “I’ll shoot the next man who lays a hand on me!”

Behind the bar were Glenn Morley, a balding man with graying red hair who wore a bartender’s apron, and the Prairie Queen herself, Annabelle Hudson. Annabelle’s long-sleeved, high-necked blue gown didn’t reveal much skin, but it was tight enough to show off the generous curves of her body.

Bill saw Morley start to reach under the bar and figured he was trying for a weapon of some sort. Annabelle moved up
and put a hand on his arm to stop him. She wouldn’t want that cowboy shooting up her saloon, but clearly she didn’t want Morley to risk getting hurt, either.

Instead she said, “Take it easy, mister. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

The cowboy grimaced as he jerked his head around to look over his shoulder at her.

“Damn right they ain’t, lady. I’ll blow a hole in the first man who gets near me.”

Bill saw a big wet patch on the cowboy’s faded blue shirt. He could make a pretty good guess what had happened. Somebody had gotten a mite too boisterous and spilled a beer on the cowboy, who’d taken offense, whipped out his gun, and let off a shot at the offender.

The fact that the cowboy was obviously drunk was probably the only reason a body wasn’t stretched out on the floor, leaking blood. He had missed…but he might not the next time.

At one time, Redemption had had an ordinance prohibiting cowboys from entering the town. Bill had come along, rescued the settlement from a bad fix, and then taken the marshal’s job. That had led to the easing of the prohibition against cowboys. Most of the time that had worked out fine, but not always.

Like tonight.

Bill was reasonably fast on the draw but no gunslick. However, he nearly always hit what he aimed at, and he knew he could put a bullet in that drunken troublemaker from here.

But if he did that, there was a good chance he would kill the man, and he wasn’t sure the fella deserved to die just for getting liquored up and crazy.

Instead Bill took a deep breath, pouched the iron, and pushed the batwings aside to step into the saloon.

Some of the frightened customers looked at him, and that drew the attention of the gun wielder. He swung the revolver in his hand toward Bill, who was ready to dive to the floor if he thought the man was about to shoot.

“Hold it right there!” the cowboy yelled. “Don’t come any closer, you damned star packer, or I’ll ventilate you!”

Bill held his hands up in plain sight so the man could see he wasn’t holding a gun.

“Settle down, amigo,” he said. “Texas, right?”

The cowboy frowned owlishly at him and said, “That’s right. How the hell did you know?”

Bill put a grin on his face.

“You think one Texan don’t recognize another Texan?” he asked. “Whereabouts you from?”

Still frowning, the cowboy replied, “Little place called Lockhart. You know it?”

“Shoot, yeah,” Bill said. “I’m from down around Hallettsville and Victoria.”

“Then what in blazes are you doin’ all the way up here in Kansas, and wearin’ a badge, at that?”

“Came up here on a cattle drive and decided to stay.” Bill moved closer as he spoke, not getting in any hurry. He was deliberate enough about it that he hoped the cowboy wouldn’t even notice. “It’s really a nice place.”

“I don’t know about that.” The man glared around the room. “I don’t think they like Texans.”

A year earlier, that would have been true, but not anymore. Bill didn’t want to go into all that history while the man was still waving a gun around.

The cowboy’s stance wasn’t quite so threatening anymore. The barrel of his revolver drooped a little, pointing more at the floor than the frightened customers. Bill eased a little closer and hoped that he could get the man to holster the gun.

Then he’d haul the fella down to the jail and lock him up overnight to sleep it off. He had done that before with other cowboys who’d had too much to drink. It sure beat having to kill somebody.

Keeping his voice calm and steady, he said, “You just got off on the wrong foot, amigo, that’s all. I promise you, Redemption is a nice, friendly place. Folks around here took right to me, and I’m as Texan as they come.”

That was stretching the truth some—when his trail boss Hob Sanders had brought him into town, badly injured by that bull, there had been plenty of citizens who didn’t want
him to stay—but things had changed. If this hombre would just put his gun up and go along peacefully…

Glenn Morley snatched a bungstarter from under the bar and swung it at the cowboy’s head.

Bill couldn’t stop his eyes from jerking wide in surprise. The cowboy saw that reaction, ripped out a curse, and whirled around. His gun came up again and flame spouted from the muzzle.

Several things happened at once. Annabelle Hudson cried “No!” too late to stop her bartender from attacking the cowboy. The bungstarter missed, zipping past the cowboy’s head with four or five inches to spare. The bullet from the cowboy’s gun went wide and hit a bottle of whiskey on the back bar. Glass and liquor sprayed in the air as the bottle exploded.

A split second later, Bill crashed into the cowboy as he tackled the man from behind. The impact drove the cowboy against the bar and bent him over the hardwood. Morley had lost his balance from the missed blow, but he recovered and brought the bungstarter around again in a backswing that cracked across the cowboy’s forearm and sent the revolver flying from his fingers.

The man’s hat had fallen off when Bill tackled him. Bill grabbed the back of the man’s head, tangling his fingers in thick sandy hair, and bounced the hombre’s forehead off the bar. He rammed into the man again, which drove the cowboy’s belly against the edge of the bar and knocked the wind out of him. The cowboy was stunned and gasping for breath when Bill hauled him around and walloped him in the jaw.

That put the cowboy down and out, sprawled in the sawdust that littered the floor in front of the bar.

Morley extended the bungstarter and asked, “You need this, Marshal?”

“No, there’s not any fight left in him,” Bill replied. “Where’d his gun go?”

“It’s back here,” Annabelle Hudson said. She reached down behind the bar and retrieved the weapon from the floor. Bill took it from her as she held it out to him.

Three rounds were still in the Colt’s cylinder. As Bill was emptying the cartridges into the palm of his hand, Annabelle went on, “Thank you for stopping him, Marshal. I was afraid he was going to kill somebody.”

“He might have,” Bill admitted, “but it would have been sort of by accident.”

“They’d be just as dead,” Morley said.

Bill shrugged and nodded.

“Can’t deny that.” He put the bullets in his shirt pocket and shoved the empty revolver behind his waistband. “Sorry about the bottle of whiskey he busted. If he’s got any money in his pocket, I’ll take out for it and see that you get it.”

Annabelle shook her head.

“There’s no need for that. I’m not worried about one bottle of whiskey. I’m just glad that no one got killed.”

“Me, too, ma’am,” Bill said. This was the most he had talked to Annabelle since she and Morley had showed up in town a couple of weeks earlier and moved into the vacant building to set up the Prairie Queen. He found himself liking her. She seemed pretty levelheaded.

He turned toward the crowd of customers, who were starting to relax now that the drunken cowboy was out cold.

“Who spilled beer on this hombre?” Bill asked.

“That was me, Marshal,” a man said as he moved half a step forward. Bill recognized him as Jed Abernathy, a freight wagon driver who passed through Redemption from time to time. Abernathy went on, “But it was an accident, I swear. I didn’t mean to cause no trouble. I started to apologize to the fella, but he whipped out that gun and dang near blew a hole in me.”

Abernathy swallowed hard at the memory of how close he had come to maybe dying.

“It’s all right, Jed,” Bill told him. “You’ve never started a ruckus before, and I don’t see any reason you would have on purpose tonight.”

“You’re not gonna arrest me, then?”

“Nope.” Bill looked down at the unconscious man at his feet. “But if you and your pards want to help me out, you can carry this fella down to the jail for me so I can lock him up. Reckon Judge Dunaway will want to levy a fine on him in the morning for disturbin’ the peace.”

Abernathy and several of his friends were eager to lend a hand. They took hold of the senseless cowboy’s arms and legs and picked him up. As Bill followed them out of the saloon, he heard Annabelle tell Morley that he should have done like she told him and not reached for that bungstarter.

Bill left them to work that out between themselves and went down the street with the men carrying the unconscious cowboy. He got ahead of them and opened the door of the marshal’s office.

As he did so, he heard the loud snores coming from the back room where his deputy Mordecai Flint had a cot. Mordecai was a wiry, bearded little frontiersman, a former fur trapper and army scout who had been serving as Bill’s deputy ever since some Indian trouble had trapped him in Redemption a few months earlier.

He could have left once that scrape was over, but as he told Bill, he had been drifting pretty much his entire life and wanted to see what it was like to settle down for a while. So far he had done a fine job as Redemption’s deputy marshal.

He was a mighty sound sleeper, which explained why he hadn’t heard those shots from the Prairie Queen and come to find out what the commotion was about. Bill didn’t hold that against him. Mordecai would be holding down the fort here in the marshal’s office later tonight while Bill was home sleeping in a nice, warm bed with a nice, warm wife.

The door to the cell block stood open since there were no other prisoners at the moment. Bill gestured toward it and
told Abernathy and the other men, “Just take him in there and put him in the first cell. The door should be open.”

He followed them into the cell block and watched as the men lowered the cowboy onto the bunk in the first cell on the right. There were four cells, two on each side of the center aisle.

As the men filed out of the cell, Bill nodded to them and said, “I’m much obliged for the help.”

“We’re grateful to you for what you did, Marshal,” Abernathy said. “If that locoweed emptied his Colt, there’s no tellin’ how many innocent folks he would have killed.”

“I think he was probably too drunk to hit anybody except by accident,” Bill said, “but it’s better not to take that chance.”

He grasped the iron-barred cell door and slammed it with a clang.

The noise must have roused Mordecai from his slumber, because the old-timer came out of the storage room scratching at his bristly, salt-and-pepper beard as Bill went back into the office part of the building.

Mordecai frowned in confusion at Abernathy and the other men as they left the office.

“What’s goin’ on here?” he asked.

Bill jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the cell block door, which he had closed behind him.

“We’ve got company in there,” he said. “Some cowboy had too much to drink down at the Prairie Queen and threatened to shoot up the place.”

Mordecai grunted and asked, “Kill anybody?”

“Not so’s you’d notice,” Bill said. “He shot the hell out of a bottle of whiskey, though.”

“Waste of a perfectly good bottle o’ who-hit-John,” Mordecai said with a sigh and a shake of his head. “Don’t reckon you can blame that yaller-headed gal who owns the place. We’ve had drunks get feisty in Smoot’s Saloon, too.”

“That’s right,” Bill said as he took off his flat-crowned brown hat and set it on the desk. He sat down and ran his fingers through his shoulder-length brown hair. He was tired
and ready to go home, but he frowned as he remembered something. “Aw, hell. I didn’t finish makin’ the rounds.”

“Let me do it,” Mordecai said. “I’m awake anyway. Once I get woke up, I have a devil of a time gettin’ back to sleep.”

Bill thought about it for a second and then nodded.

“All right, thanks.” He put his hands on the desk and pushed himself back to his feet.

“Prisoner got a name?” Mordecai asked.

“I reckon he does, but we didn’t get around to introductions. We can find out who he is in the morning.”

“That’ll do,” Mordecai said. He took down one of the shotguns from the rack on the wall behind the desk, got a couple of shells from a drawer, and slid them into the barrels. He wasn’t as good with a handgun as Bill, but he was a crack shot with a rifle and could handle a scattergun just fine.