Trackdown (9781101619384) (34 page)

“Don’t listen to that punk, Jack,” one of the other gunnies said. “Even if he is the Palo Pinto Kid, there’s only one of him.”

Roland hesitated. Bill began to hope that he’d gotten through to the man.

A new voice suddenly cried, “What are you doing? Why
are you just sitting there talking? I paid you to avenge what happened to my daughter!”

Bill looked over and saw Walter Shelton on the boardwalk. The businessman had come up without anybody noticing, and now he was urging his hired guns to attack.

“Ride over them!” Shelton went on in a voice edged with hate and hysteria. “Kill Tom Gentry and anyone who tries to defend him!”

“Damn you, Shelton!” Burk Gentry yelled. “Those are fightin’ words!”

Bill held out a hand toward either side and shouted, “Shut up! Both of you, shut up! You’re tryin’ to take a bad situation and make it worse, all because of stubborn pride from both of you!”

“Pride!” Shelton said. “Don’t I have a right to see justice done, Marshal? If I don’t avenge my daughter, who will?”

Bill couldn’t answer that, but he didn’t have to. A man called, “I will!” and Bill looked over to see Ned Bassett striding toward them. Bassett still had a plaster stuck over the cut on his forehead he had gotten when Tom Gentry pistol-whipped him.

Tom pointed a finger at Bassett now and yelled, “I’ll settle with you later, mister, after I’ve got my wife back!”

“You’ll never get her back,” Bassett said. “She’s finished with you. But I’m not.”

He started rolling up his sleeves.

Tom stared at the watchmaker in disbelief.

“You’re offerin’ to fight me for her? You?”

“I’m not proud of what I’ve done,” Bassett said. “I knew it was wrong. But Virginia and I love each other, and yes, if I have to, I’ll fight for her. I’ve thought of nothing else the past few days.”

Burk Gentry said, “Damn it, Tom, let’s do what we came here for. Don’t let this little pipsqueak put a burr under your saddle.”

“No, he’s right, Pa,” Tom said as he swung down from the saddle. “I never did finish handing him his needin’s the other night, and when I’m done with him, Virgie won’t want him anymore.”

“Blast it, boy—” Burk Gentry said.

“Ned, stay out of this—” Walter Shelton began.

Neither Tom nor Bassett paid any attention to them. They rushed toward each other, forcing members of the posse to pull their horses aside. They came together in the middle of the street, fists flailing.

As marshal, Bill had broken up plenty of fights, but he wasn’t going to break up this one. Not when it looked like nobody was going to start shooting as long as Tom and Bassett were slugging away at each other.

Tom had a lot more experience at rough-and-tumble fighting. That much was obvious right away. He hammered a right and left to Bassett’s body and then tried to kick him in the groin. Bassett twisted out of the way of the kick and snapped a hard punch to Tom’s nose that made Tom take a step back.

Catching his balance, Tom launched forward again. He tackled Bassett around the waist. Both men went down in a welter of dust.

Tom landed on top and smashed Bassett in the face. The plaster on Bassett’s forehead began to turn red. The wound under it was bleeding again. Bassett got his arms up and blocked one of Tom’s punches. He heaved his body up, trying to throw Tom off to the side. Tom clung to him stubbornly.

Bassett managed to raise his leg enough to hook his calf in front of Tom’s neck. When he straightened it, that drove Tom back and off of Bassett, who rolled to the side and
pushed himself to his hands and knees. He struggled back to his feet just in time to meet another charge from Tom, who pounded him with a flurry of blows and drove him backward.

Bill wasn’t sure how Bassett was able to stay on his feet in the face of that onslaught, let alone fight back. The watchmaker did, though, and he even landed a punch or two of his own. Tom was confident, though, and kept boring in.

Suddenly Bassett twisted out of the way again, and the momentum of Tom’s missed blow sent him stumbling forward. Bassett grabbed him, hauled him around before Tom could catch his breath, and caught him from behind, locking an arm across Tom’s throat and grasping the wrist of that hand as he drove a heel into the back of Tom’s right knee. That leg buckled, and Bassett was able to ride his opponent to the ground. He dug a knee into the small of Tom’s back, pinning him there.

Tom’s face began to turn red from lack of air. Burk Gentry yelled, “Damn it, Marshal, he’s gonna kill my boy! Stop him!”

Bill was as surprised as anybody by the sudden turn the fight had taken. Tom Gentry was bigger, stronger, and more experienced than Ned Bassett, but Bassett had him down and was choking the life out of him. No matter what Tom had done, Bill wasn’t going to let Bassett kill him like that. He stepped toward the combatants, ready to grab Bassett and pull him off.

He didn’t need to. Bassett abruptly let go of Tom, allowing him to slump flat on the ground and gasp for breath. Bassett pushed himself to his feet and stepped back. A crimson thread of blood wormed its way from under the plaster.

“Being beaten by the local watchmaker isn’t…isn’t punishment enough for what you did to Virginia, Tom,” Bassett said. He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. “But I’m not a murderer, and like I said, I’m not blameless in this, either.” He turned to Shelton. “Tell your daughter good-bye for me, sir, if you would. I’ll be leaving Redemption.”

Shelton ignored Bassett. He pointed at Tom Gentry and said to his hired gunmen, “There he is! Kill him! Shoot him down like the dog he is!”

Jack Roland looked at his companions. Bill watched the men closely, but he couldn’t read a thing from their expressions.

Then Roland said, “A gunfight’s one thing, Shelton, but we’re not bushwhackers, and that’s what this would amount to. You’ll get your money back, less something for our time.”

He turned his horse away, and the others followed suit.

Shelton gaped at them. He said, “You…you can’t…There’s a debt to be paid…”

“Looks to me like Bassett and Tom Gentry settled that between them,” Bill said. “Go home, Mr. Shelton. Take care of your family. And that doesn’t mean have somebody killed.”

“I…I…” Shelton’s shoulders slumped in defeat. He turned away.

“What about us?” Burk Gentry bellowed. “We come to get that girl back.”

“No!” Tom croaked through his bruised throat as he struggled to his feet. “I don’t want her anymore. This has gone far enough, Pa. It’s time to forget about it.”

“Forget, hell! Ain’t you got no pride, boy? Ain’t you got an ounce of gumption in you? I tell you, we’ll ride down there and get her, and anybody who tries to stop us will be sorry. We’ll kill anybody who gets in our way!”

One of his other sons said, “Didn’t you hear Tom, Pa? He said to forget about it. Hasn’t this whole thing been ugly enough already?”

“But…but…” Gentry appeared to be flabbergasted that anyone would stand up to him, let alone his own offspring. “We can’t let somebody else
win
!”

“That’s just it, Pa,” Tom said hoarsely as he trudged to his horse. “I don’t think anybody’s gonna win in this.”

Tom was wrong about that, Bill thought as he watched the hired guns depart Redemption in one direction and the Gentrys ride out the other way, an apoplectic Burk Gentry the last one to leave. The town had won, because nobody had gotten killed.

“Lord, I think I want to sleep for a week,” he said wearily as he slid his rifle back in the saddle boot.

“Well, go ahead,” Mordecai told him. “I don’t mind keepin’ an eye on things for a spell longer.”

Bill smiled as he thought about Eden and said, “Maybe I won’t go to sleep right away.” Leading his horse, he started toward Monroe Mercantile as the former members of the posse scattered to return to their homes and lives.

“I’ll be in the office,” Mordecai called after him. Bill waved a hand to acknowledge the deputy’s statement.

Hartnett came up beside him and reached for the reins.

“I’ll take care of your horse, Bill,” the liveryman offered.

“Much obliged, Josiah. Where’d Jesse go?”

“He headed straight for the Prairie Queen,” Hartnett replied with a smile. “Said something about cutting the trail dust. After everything we’ve gone through together, I hope you don’t have to arrest him again.”

“Me, too,” Bill said.

He went up the steps to the high porch in front of the mercantile and started toward the door, but he hadn’t gotten there when it opened and Eden stepped out. She wasn’t alone. There was a man right behind her, and he had the barrel of a gun pressed into her side.

“You killed my woman, Marshal,” he said, “and now you’re gonna watch while I kill yours, before I cut you down.”

Eden was pale with fear, but in that moment when time seemed to stop, Bill saw something else on her face. Anger burned in her eyes, and he knew she was going to do something. He opened his mouth to tell her to wait, but the words never came out. She twisted in the man’s grip and the gun went off. She cried out in pain, but that didn’t stop her elbow from digging into his throat and knocking him back a step. Bill’s Colt came out of its holster in a smooth, instinctive draw. The barrel tipped up, and as Eden fell to the side, the gun roared, then roared again. The man staggered as both slugs drove into his chest. He tried to raise his gun but couldn’t seem to manage it. As he fell to his knees, the revolver slipped from his fingers. He pitched forward on his face and lay still.

Bill rushed forward, pausing only long enough to kick the fallen gun into the street before he grabbed Eden and pulled her up into his arms.

“I’m all right, I’m all right,” she babbled. “I’m not hit, Bill.”

He looked down at her side, saw the scorched mark on her dress from the muzzle flash. She had come that close.

But there was no blood, thank God. He held her tightly against him, vaguely aware that people were shouting and running toward them, but none of that was important now.

He was holding on to the only thing that mattered.

“So that was Caleb Tatum, the boss of those owlhoots,” Jesse Overstreet said as he strolled along the darkened street beside Bill. Overstreet had come out of the Prairie Queen while Bill was making his evening rounds and offered to join him, and Bill hadn’t turned him down. “We must’ve missed him while we were roundin’ up those varmints.”

“Yeah, and then he followed us back here to settle the score for that redheaded woman, Hannah. He told Eden that much after he slipped in the back of the store and knocked out her pa.”

“Is Mr. Monroe gonna be all right?”

Bill grinned and said, “Oh, yeah, he’s got a hard head. He’s been through a lot, though, so I hope life takes it a mite easier on him for a while.”

“How about you?” Overstreet asked.

“You mean, do I have a hard head?”

“No, I’m sayin’ is it time for life to take it a mite easier on you?”

“Well, that’d be all right, I suppose. I’m not gonna hold my breath waitin’ for it, though. It seems like there’s always some sort of hell poppin’ in Redemption.” They walked on in silence for a moment, and then Bill asked, “Are you really the Palo Pinto Kid?”

“I never said that I was. I just asked that hombre if he’d
heard
of the Palo Pinto Kid.”

“But…you’re not sayin’ that you’re not him.”

“I’m just sayin’ it’s a beautiful night,” Overstreet replied with a grin, “and you’d better enjoy it before that hell you were talkin’ about starts to pop again.”