Yakima let the batwings slap shut behind him as he stepped quickly to the right, away from the door, aiming his Yellowboy straight out from his right shoulder and clicking the hammer back to full cock.
A man seated with two others to his left jerked back in his chair, raising his gun-filled right hand. Yakima drilled a slug into the table. The man yelped and jerked back in his chair again, making a face. His eyes were wide and pain-wracked beneath the brim of his cream Stetson.
Yakima curled half of his upper lip in a wry smile. The bullet must have clipped something important beneath the table.
“Stand down, gentlemen!” Bryson bellowed, holding both of his black-gloved hands up, palms out. He sat to the right of the table at which the wounded man was sitting, now squirming around in his chair and grinding his back teeth.
“Stand down! Stand down!” Bryson ordered.
All six hired killers had tensed as they sat in their chairs at the two separate tables, the tables about ten feet apart, ahead of Yakima and to his right and left. But now the six men eased back in their chairs, removing their hands from the hoglegs strapped to their sides.
Five of the six eased back, rather. The one who’d gotten something important goosed beneath the table sat with his back taut, glaring up at Yakima, chomping down hard on his lower lip.
He was the tallest of the bunch—long-faced with yellow horse teeth and wearing a tattoo of a naked dancing girl on his long, tan neck.
To him, Bryson said sternly, “That was your own damn fault, Ryder! What makes you think you can jerk iron on our lawman here? Damn fool!” The former Confederate turned to Yakima. “I’d like to apologize for my friend here. In fact, you can have his beer. I don’t think he’s in any condition for beer at the moment.”
He glanced toward where Cleve Dundee stood holding a wooden tray bearing six filled beer schooners. Dundee stood near the bar at the back of the room, straight beyond Yakima, sliding his wary gaze tensely between the newcomers and the half-breed lawman. He was visibly sweating, and Yakima didn’t think it was just because he was afraid he was going to have his saloon busted up again, either.
Yakima looked at Dundee. “Hot day. Sure, I could go for an ale.”
Dundee strode forward, lowering his tray to the men to Yakima’s left, two of whom lifted a schooner of the frothy ale. Ryder was leaning forward over the table, glowering toward Yakima, his face looking washed out and haggard. Dundee lowered the tray to the men on Yakima’s right, and when those three each had a beer, he brought the tray with the last beer on it to Yakima.
Dundee gazed anxiously at the half-breed. Yakima gave the saloon owner a mild smile as he lifted the beer from the tray and raised it in salute. Dundee retreated behind the bar, where he stood, hands on the bar top, looking anxious. His mouth moved inside his thick beard.
Yakima held his beer in his left hand. He held his rifle in the other hand.
The six men at the two tables gazed at him, flint-eyed. They were at a stalemate. They might have outnumbered Yakima, but they hadn’t been aware that the lawman’s play was being backed. Yakima hadn’t known that, either. They’d expected him to be dead by now, and that they’d be drinking their beers in peace.
That hadn’t happened. They’d been caught sitting, their guns in their holsters. Yakima had the drop on them. So now they were just going to have to bide their time and see what the future brought.
Yakima raised his beer again in salute. “Shall we drink to those two poor devils in the street?” He glanced over his shoulder. “They’re turning that Arizona dirt a darker shed of red.”
Dixon glowered atYakima. Then he forced a smile and looked at the other men sitting around him. “Why not? Of course! Why the hell not?” He chuckled and took several deep swallows of his beer.
The others followed suit, as did Yakima.
Dixon lowered his beer schooner and raked a sleeve across his bearded lips. He held his gaze on the tall half-breed standing near the door, and his eyes darkened. “Who are you?”
“The name’s Yakima Henry.”
“The new law in town,” said a man at the table to Yakima’s left, casting a dimple-cheeked, jeering grin at Dixon. “Fuckin’ Indian!”
The others laughed. All except Dixon, who just smiled mockingly at the lawman.
Yakima narrowed his eyes at the dimple-cheeked fellow, and said through gritted teeth, “What did you call me?”
He moved forward, still holding his beer in his left hand, rifle in his right hand.
The dimple-cheeked fellow’s dimples slowly disappeared as Yakima approached.
Yakima stopped before the man’s table and, keeping the others in the periphery of his vision, on the alert for sudden moves, he glared at the suddenly dimpleless, stone-faced man before him.
“Apologize,” Yakima said, tightly, “and I’ll think about letting it go.”
The man drew his lips together in a white line. His brown eyes blazed, and his hairy nostrils flared.
A man rose suddenly to Yakima’s right, filling his hand with a big Remington.
“No!” bellowed Dixon, beside whom the now-standing man had been sitting.
Yakima swung the Winchester around and pulled the trigger, the rifle roaring, flames stabbing.
The man beside Dixon screamed and dropped the Remy as he flew straight backward and landed on a table, kicking.
Another man jerked to his feet—this one to Yakima’s left. Yakima dropped his beer on the table of the hairy-nosed fella and shot the second would-be shooter before he could get his six-shooter unsheathed.
The hairy-nosed fella jerked his arm down beneath the table, reaching for a pistol, and Yakima shot him before quickly dispatching two more, the Yellowboy thundering like an angry god, red-flashing bursts lighting up the room, cartridge casings arcing back the lawman’s shoulder and pinging onto the floor around his boots.
Yakima racked another round into the Winchester’s action and, holding the stock up close to his cheek, looked around through the wafting powder smoke. Four men were down. Two were still sitting—the man whom Yakima had pinked in the nether regions beneath the man’s table, and Dixon.
Two men lay dead around Dixon, one lying on the table behind the ex-Rebel gang leader. Two others lay dead near the other man, who sat at a table ten feet from Dixon. He sat with his hands extended halfway across his table, palms down. He hung his head, wagging it slowly, long hair hanging down around both sides of his face. He looked fearfully up at Yakima from beneath shaggy brows, bunching his lips dreadfully.
Dixon sat straight-backed in his own chair, hands raised to his shoulders, smiling. He looked cool and calm, except for the single sweat bead rolling down the left side of his face to disappear into the tangle of his dusty beard.
“Well, well, well,” said the ex-Confederate. “Aren’t you special?”
“All I know is you got six men dead and”—Yakima glanced at the other man still shaking his head and grimacing at the half-breed with the Yellowboy repeater—“two more soon to follow.”
“I’ll admit I misjudged the situation.”
“Rebel Wilkes sure holds a grudge.”
“He does at that. It’s a southern thing.” Dixon smiled.
“He also must have deep pockets, meaning the stillborn railroad must not have cleaned him out entirely.”
“Oh, it did. He’s working for his father now, trying to dig himself out of the hole this town put him in. Tom Wilkes is one wealthy old Rebel, most of it stolen, of course, but I heard he invested well.” Again, the self-satisfied smile.
“Rebel’s father pay you?”
“No one paid us. True, I owed Rebel’s old man an old debt from years back—a little matter concerning a deputy US marshal on my trail and sporting a federal warrant in his saddlebags—but it’s not every day an old killer like me is turned loose on a whole town . . . with the whole town and all its riches . . . including its women . . . including the pretty wife of the dead town marshal . . . as my reward. Makes it some bit easier, knowing that Tom Wilkes, the old Rebel outlaw himself, has the county sheriff in his back pocket. Old Tom bought the sheriff as a Christmas present, shall we say, for his boy.”
Yakima had wondered why he hadn’t heard by now from even an over-worked, spread-too-thin county sheriff, under the prevailing circumstances. Word of the Apache Springs situation must surely have spread to the county seat in Tucson.
Well, now he knew.
“Get up,” Yakima said, wagging the Yellowboy. “I got a room ready for you. One with a barred door.”
“I don’t think so.”
Yakima arched a brow in question.
The old Confederate quirked a challenging smile.
Yakima set the rifle down on a table to his left. Then he brushed his hand across his holstered .44, unsnapping the keeper thong.
“Get up,” he ordered the other man.
Dixon slid his chair back and rose slowly, keeping his hands raised to his shoulders until he was standing. Then he lowered them slowly to his sides.
He stared at Yakima.
Yakima stared back at him, unblinking.
Dixon’s right hand dropped to the holster thonged to his right thigh. He had the converted Griswold & Gunnison .44 half-raised and cocked when Yakima’s Colt danced in the halfbreed’s hand.
Dixon stumbled backward, kicking his chair. Grimacing, he fired the Confederate pistol into his table, shattering his beer schooner and sending frothy ale cascading across the table’s scarred wood. He wobbled on his hips but maintained his feet, looking suddenly as though he’d swallowed something foul down the wrong throat.
He glanced at the growing stain on his light-brown wool vest and white shirt, then rolled his fast-fading eyes up at Yakima. “Fast . . . fast fuckin’ half-breed,” he grunted through a grimace, stumbling sideways. He smiled coldly at his killer, eyes bright with mockery. “Fast fuckin’ Injun!”
Yakima pumped two more bullets into him. The ex-Confederate jerked two more times, violently.
“Go to hell.” Dixon got his boots tangled up in his chair and fell hard with another grunt and a long, final sigh.
Yakima turned to the man he’d pinked through the table.
“Can you ride?” he asked him.
The man’s pain-sharp eyes widened in surprise. Then he nodded.
“Tell Wilkes if he sends anyone else, I will personally lead those men back to him, tied belly down across their saddles. And he’ll be so full of lead he’ll rattle when he walks.”
The man rose stiffly. He had his right hand clamped over the inside of his upper right thigh. Blood streaked the inside of his pant leg all the way to the man’s high-topped, black boot. He strode toward the batwings as though he had a full load in his drawers. He pushed through the batwings, hobbled across the gallery, climbed onto a rangy chestnut, and, leaning forward and gritting his teeth, rode away.
“Christalmighty,” Dundee groused behind his bar, looking around at the dead men, the growing blood pools on his floor. “Why does my place have to take the brunt of this little disagreement?”
“You serve good beer,” Yakima told him, grabbing theYellowboy and starting for the batwings. “I’ll be back to finish mine later.”
He pushed through the batwings. The Rio Grande Kid sat in the hide-bottom chair to the left of the door, legs stretched out, boots crossed at his ankles. His chin was dipped toward his chest, as though he were napping, and his thick hands were laced over his broad belly still poking out through the missing buttons of his hickory shirt.
“What’re you doing here?” Yakima asked him. “I thought you were headin’ out for El Dorado.”
The Kid lifted his head and inhaled deeply. “I was, but . . . turns out I was a tad short on supplies. Came to town to fill the larder. When I got to town I realized I had a hole in my damn pocket!”
“You had a hole in your pocket?”
“All my jingle musta dropped straight down my leg!”
“That’s too bad.”
“I’ll just have to work for a week or two, build up a grubstake. Maybe I can find a rancher who needs some broncs broke.”
The Kid turned to look toward the adobe-brick bank sitting across the broad street and outside of which several townsfolk—three men and two women, one holding a parasol against the desert sun—were standing and staring toward the Busted Flush. “Or maybe I’ll hold up the bank.” The Kid rubbed a big paw across his jaw as though thinking it over. “Sure, maybe I’ll hold up the bank. Why don’t you take tomorrow off? Go fishin’ up in the mountains. I don’t want to have to shoot you since I ate your grub, drank your mud, and smoked your tobacco, an’ all.”
“Hold on, now, Kid,” Yakima said. “Don’t go off half-cocked.”
“Easier said than done!”
“If you need a job, you can work for me for a while. How ’bout pinning a deputy town marshal’s badge on your shirt for a few days? I need a fresh set of eyes, and the cool, cunning eyes of the Rio Grande Kid would more than fill the bill to help me keep an eye on things around here.”
The Kid squinted up at him and quirked a devilish grin. “Pretty good shootin’, eh?”
“Not bad.”
“Not bad? Hallkatoot—look at ’em!” The Kid gestured at the two dead men lying in the street. Haugen was kneeling beside the corpse on the street’s far side, going through the dead man’s pockets and just now holding a pocket watch up to his ear. “Two shots. One for each. Killin’ shots, both!”
“Preening doesn’t become an outlaw of your stature. What do you say?”
The Kid raked a nail along his jaw, squinting into the sun. “I don’t know—a badge? On the Kid’s chest? Shit, I’m an outlaw. The worst of the worst. Might be a tall order for the Kid to keep his town manners . . . follow the law instead of breakin’ it, like usual. But, oh, all right, since you seem to be in such a tight spot, an’ I ate your grub, drank your mud, and smoked your tobacco.” He looked up at Yakima. “What do you pay?”
“Fifty cents a day? Plus one beer?”
“Make it sixty cents and two beers, and you got a deal.”
“I’ll pay you out of my own salary,” Yakima said. He flipped the Kid a silver dollar. “There’s a dollar to start, with a bonus. Help Haugen haul the dead men over to his undertaking parlor. You and the gravedigger can fight over what you find on their persons. They looked pretty well heeled. Just on them alone, you’ll probably find enough for mining supplies.”
Yakima stepped off the Busted Flush’s boardwalk. “And take these horses over to the livery.”
“It’s going to take me some time to get used to takin’ orders from an Injun,” the Kid yelled behind him.
“You’ll get the hang of it,” Yakima said.
He glanced at the undertaker, who was pulling a boot off one of the dead men and inspecting the man’s socks. “Hey, Haugen,” Yakima called. He slid his gaze toward where the four dead men were propped against the front of the undertaker’s shop in their wooden overcoats. “Why don’t you plant those smelly bastards before you bait in the wildcats?”
Haugen scowled and gritted his teeth as Yakima continued to the marshal’s office. He stopped when he saw a familiar buckskin tied to the hitch rail fronting the building, and the flaxen-haired girl standing on the gallery.