There was a thump of something thrown to the ground, and a voice shouted, “And don’t come back!”
They rode off quickly into the darkness, and we went out there. Bending down, I lit a match.
It was Tom Lundy, and he was dead. He had been shot three times in the back, and then somebody had turned him over and shot him between the eyes from such close range that the wound was marked with powder burns.
We carried him back to the hill and laid him down on the ground, and Kate Lundy came and stood over him.
He was her last living relative, and he had been both brother and son to her. After her husband had been killed by Indians Tom was all she had left, and now he was gone.
His gun was in its holster, the thong still in place, evidence that he had not expected shooting trouble.
Standing there, we looked down at those bullet holes. Three shots in the back at close range that had ripped through his back, tearing great holes through his chest. And in case he was still not dead, a man had leaned over him and finished the job with a pistol bullet.
Suddenly Red Mike began to swear in a choked, horrible voice.
Tod Mulloy said, “If it’s the last tiring I do, I’m going to burn that town.”
“Let’s do it now,” Carson said. “Right now!”
“No.” The word was flat, cold, in a voice such as I had never heard Kate Lundy use before. “No,” she repeated.
“We’re pulling out?”
“No.”
That was all she would say, and the men were silent.
Nobody slept that night, but in the morning Naylor and Priest went out and dug a grave on a flat place at the very top of the hill. They dug it deep, and we buried Tom Lundy there.
Looking off toward town, using the field glasses I kept in my saddlebag, I could see the glint of rifles from the rooftops or corrals.
“They’re waiting for us, Kate,” I said. “They are waiting to get us as we ride in.”
“We’re not going in.”
Rule Carson swore. “Now, look here, Mrs. Lundy,” he began. Tom was -”
“Tom Lundy,” she said, “was my brother. He took my husband’s name, and my husband considered him his son.” She paused. “We wanted children, but we never had any … only Tom.”
She turned to Red Mike. “Mike, I want you to saddle the steel-dust, and I want you to ride to Texas. I want you to find twenty-five men who can handle guns, and who can take orders.” She looked over at the town. “Can you find that many?”
“I can find a hundred,” he said. “Volunteers, if you want them.”
“I want men who work for wages,” she said, “and I’ve the money to pay them.”
Red Mike turned to look at me. “Who do you think?” he asked.
“The Cuddy boys,” I said, “and Harvey Nugent, Sharkey, Madden, and Kiel. Some of the Barrickman or Clements boys if they’re around.”
Kate stood there, looking toward the town, a tall, lonely woman, with high cheekbones and a face still lovely despite what sun and wind had done to it.
“You’re going to fight, Kate?”
“Not the way they expect,” she said. “Not at all the way they expect.”
But it was that morning that it began, and it was a kind of warfare I had not expected, and was not prepared for. Nor were they.
She wrote three telegrams that morning, and she sent Delgado off on a fast horse to take them to the nearest station to the east. It was a water tank and saloon twenty miles away.
The day drifted slowly by and the men sat around playing cards. Toward sundown they drifted the horses to the nearest creek and watered them.
Riflemen still stood guard on rooftops and in the alleys approaching the town.
Kate remained in her ambulance most of the day, an the rest of us waited.
“They must be getting kind of nervous down there,” Tod Mulloy said finally. “We’ve got the edge, because we know what we’re doin’ and they don’t.”
The thought seemed to cheer everybody up a little, and I noticed that every once in a while one of the men would go up the rise and stand there looking off toward the town. They could see us up there, and our inaction must be puzzling to them.
“They will not sleep much tonight,” D’Artaguette commented. “Nor did they last night.”
Kate looked over at him. “Nor will they for many nights to come.”
At noon on the third day, a rider came toward us bearing a white flag. With my field glasses I could see it was Bannion, the one man in town – unless it was Hardeman – who might be allowed close enough to talk.
Bannion had always been fair. He had staked more than one busted trail hand to a final drink when his money was gone, and had even furnished a couple of riders with horses to get back to their outfits.
Kate, D’Artaguette, and I went down the slope to meet him.
“I had nothing to do with this, Mrs. Lundy,” he said. “I want you and the boys to know that. Nothing at all. I didn’t even know it was going to happen.”
“Did they ask you to come out and look the situation over?” I asked.
“Yes … they’re worried. They can’t figure what’s happening. They’ve been laying for you, expecting an attack just any minute.”
“Let them worry,” Kate replied. “Mr. Bannion, you have the reputation for being a fair man. Now we’re going to give you a chance to save yourself. You will have no time to consider this, but take my advice and do as I say.
“Go back to town. Tell them the truth, that we would not allow you into our camp. Then sell your saloon.”
“Sell my saloon?” he repeated in astonishment
“Why, I can’t do that! Anyway, they would think it mighty odd -”
“Would you rather sell at a loss – and you may have to – or come out with nothing at all?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Mr. Bannion,” Kate asked quietly, “did you ever see a town die?”
He just looked at her, and after a minute he said, “Thank you, ma’am. Thank you.” Then he turned his horse.
“Mr. Bannion,” Kate added, “and this is for you, and you alone to know. One hundred miles west of here there’s a creek that flows along the edge of a wide flat. There are hills to the north, and some cotton-woods there. It’s on the main line of the railroad.”
Well, I looked at her. Of course, I knew the place; we had camped there once. In fact, I myself had camped there several times, and had taken our herd there the season before.
What she had in her mind I did not know, but looking at her face – and never had I seen it so cold – I knew what was going to happen to the town.
That town, the town that had killed her brother, was going to die.
It was not a man, nor several men who were going to die, but the town itself.
Chapter 4
Kate Lundy had given no instructions to Red Mike other than to hire fighting men, but we all knew that Red Mike would tell the story of what had happened. And it was such a tale as would be canted by the winds and the dust until it was the talk of every campfire and every ranch house in all of Texas.
We camped on the knoll under the Kansas sky, and we let the days drift by, but there was plenty to do. On the fourth day two riders drifted toward our camp, and both of them I knew.
They were fighting men encountered en route by Red Mike and sent on to us. Bledsoe was a former Ranger who had served with Big-Foot Wallace, and Meharry was a tough young Irishman who had fought in the French army at Sedan, a veteran soldier.
Priest and Naylor she sent off to the west to the place she had spoken of to Bannion, and they had their instructions. When she took them aside and told them what they were to do, they just looked at her, then at each other. Suddenly, both started to grin; and they were still grinning when they rode off to the west.
“Conn,” Kate said to me, “mount the men, and just at dusk ride toward the town.”
I waited. There were men with rifles waiting there in town, under cover. We would be riding up in the open.
“Ride until you are just out of rifle shot,” Kate said, “and make sure you give yourself the benefit of the doubt, then ride around the town. Do not come back until after dark.”