Again he laid down heavy fire with a Winchester, followed it with a Spencer, grabbed up a shotgun and fired four charges at the three Indians who were closing in on him.
The first blast had knocked the first Indian down, fairly lifting him off his feet. He was dead – half blown apart – before he hit the ground.
In all, the fight lasted five hours, with long intervals in between. Rowdy knew the Kiowa language, and he could distinguish some of their talk. Some were for pulling out. They had no clear idea what sort of trouble they had stumbled into, but they’d had enough.
Rowdy shouted insults at them in Kiowa and talked about ghost guns, which one of the Indians had mentioned. He told them the spirits of the great warriors, enemies of the Kiowa, were all about him.
One of the Indians boasted to the others that he would attack alone, and Rowdy sat back and let him come. When the young warrior was almost upon him, he opened up with a Colt revolving shotgun. There wasn’t enough left of that young Indian to carry home, and, thoroughly worried, the Kiowas pulled off and let him alone.
Standing in the street, looking up and down, I could see that the town was finished. It was Aaron McDonald who had killed it, not what we had done. And Aaron McDonald was in jail, locked up and waiting to be shipped east for trial.
He had sent for his daughter, but she had not appeared. When next seen in public, she was standing waiting for the stage, two carpetbags beside her on the walk.
A man came riding up the street on a roan cow-horse, and when abreast of me he drew up. “Anybody lost a bay gelding with three white stockings … blaze face?”
That sounded like Red, Kate’s favorite horse.
“Why?” I asked.
“Seen one like that at the crick, back yonder.” He pointed toward the creek that ran by the edge of town.
“Thanks,” I said.
I strolled along the street to the corral and stable, and I glanced into the stall. Sure enough, the bay gelding was gone. Saddling up, I stepped into the leather and rode down the street.
John Blake came to the door and called out to me, but I only lifted a hand. “Back in a minute!” I said, and went on.
It was a cool, pleasant morning. If those people could get their wagons rolling they could manage some miles before the heat set in.
The bay gelding was cropping grass on a green patch in the bottom, and I rode up to him and got down to pick up the halter rope. The gelding shied off a little, and I walked after the rope.
As I straightened up with it, I saw a faint hint of dust in the air along the draw to the south.
Suddenly I felt the hair prickle on the back of my neck. I stood very still, thinking quickly, as I should have been thinking before this. How had the gelding escaped? Why- “Hello, Dury. This here’s a long way from Burro Mesa.”
He had come up from behind the nearest willows, a gun in his hand. He was a tall, raw-boned man that I recalled seeing in town.
“I’m Frank Shalett. Or Hastings, if you like that better. Heard you’d killed Rich and Flange some time back, and I got kind of tired watching out for you. You’ve worried me some, so I think I’ll see how you look when you sweat a little.”
He had his gun dead center on me, and he was at pointblank range, not over forty feet away. He had been put up to me as a dead shot, and the chances of him missing at that range were slight. Yet I’d seen some good shots miss, especially when the shooter was being shot at – which he didn’t expect to be.
“Nobody will ask any questions when they find you with a gun on,” he said. “After all, everybody knows you’re supposed to be a fast man.”
This was the last of the men who had killed Jim Sotherton. How long ago that seemed! Why, I hadn’t thought of hunting for him in years. Not since before the war, for I more than half believed him dead. And now he had caught up with me.
But that dust I’d seen … this man hadn’t made that dust.
“Couldn’t have been you,” I said aloud. “You must have been waiting here quite a spell.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“Dust I saw in the air,” I said. “Somebody else is here.”
He looked disgusted. “Why, you damn’ fool! You don’t think I’d go for anything like that, do -”
It is harder for a man to shoot quickly to his right, so I stepped quickly left as my hand went for my gun. He shot … missed … shot again. The bullet struck me; I felt the solid blow of it and was firing myself.
Bracing myself against another bullet, I steadied my hand and put a bullet into his belly, then another. There was a spot of blood on his neck near the collarbone, and he turned around and fell, tried to rise, and slumped back.
A voice spoke. “Now, that’s what I call a fancy bit of gun play.”
Where had I heard that voice before? A rifle bellowed, and the six-shooter was knocked from my hand. “And there’s another bit for you. I been aimin’ to even things up, even though it taken me time.”
It was the Dutchman. It was that dry-gulching, sure-thing killer, Bill Hoback.
There was blood on the sand at my feet. I’d been hit, and I’d been hurt. The shock was keeping me from feeling it now, but how long would that last?
My gun was gone.
My rifle was on my saddle, and my horse was at least fifty feet away, and it might as well have been as many miles.
When he shot the pistol from my hand – no trick for such a man with a rifle at the distance – it left my arm numb to the elbow. The gun had gone spinning, and it was probably good for nothing now, anyway.
He had me, and he was going to kill me. Only he had to be sure I suffered, for I’d hurt his pride.
The boys had been right, of course. You don’t let a man like that live. You kill him as you would a rattler, because he’ll always be waiting around for you.
Somehow I’d gone down on one knee, and I was fuzzy about that. Had I dropped before he shot at me, or afterward?
He was back there in the brush, and he had been there when Frank Hastings, or Shalett or whatever his name was, and I shot it out. He had been waiting to see me dead, or to finish me off. He had me cold. Think … I had to think.
The boys could have heard the shooting, but not many of them, if any, were up and about. This was a morning when they could sleep and there were few such mornings for them.
“Don’t figure on help. I can see that road, and if anybody starts this way I’ll kill you and skedaddle. Be a while before they find out there was somebody else than you and Shalett – if they ever do.”
If he could see the road, there was only one place he could be. The trouble was that he could cover every bit of the hollow where I stood from where he was hidden.
The patch of willows and cottonwood was fairly large, with some blackberry bushes among the undergrowth, which were covered with thorns that would catch and tear at a man’s clothing.
My eye caught a glint of sunlight. His rifle barrel was pointed at me from alongside a tree trunk, and well back in the brush.
Frank Shalett’s body lay there in front of me. Suddenly I saw a slight movement of the dead man’s hand – some tightening of muscles, or relaxing. The hand had fallen across a rock when he went down, and if it moved ever so slightly again, it would fall off into the dry leaves below it.
My head was spinning, and my eyes had trouble coming to focus. Had the hand really moved?
Yes … it was moving again. “Frank!” I yelled. “Toss me the gun!”
And the hand slipped off into the leaves.
Instantly, the Dutchman shot into the dead man’s body, and at the moment the gun muzzle was deflected I threw myself into the brush.
Hitting the ground, I lay absolutely still, not moving a muscle. He would be listening, and at the slightest sound I would be dead.
He might kill me, but now I had a fighting chance, if no more.