CHAPTER 11
A short time earlier, Sid Atkins and Bart Rome had ridden into Salt Lick, circling to the east so they could come in on one of the cross streets. That was Rome’s idea. He figured they would be less likely to be noticed that way, rather than entering the settlement on the north-south trail that became the main street.
They didn’t get in any hurry. A couple of horses moving through the night at easy walks wouldn’t draw much attention. A dog barked somewhere. The two men heard a few notes from a piano, but the music ended as abruptly as it began. Somebody must have opened the door at Apple Jack’s saloon, or one of the other saloons, and then closed it again quickly.
“Most of the town’s gone to bed,” Atkins said.
“Yeah, just the way we want it,” Rome agreed.
“They’ll get woke up soon enough.”
Before reaching the center of town, the two men turned their horses and rode into an alley cloaked in thick shadows. They knew from their visit to Salt Lick during the day that this alley ran behind the bank building. Since the bank was the most impressive structure in town, it was easy to spot, even at night.
They reined in behind the bank. A couple of posts supported a small awning over the back door, so they made sure their horses were tied securely to one of those posts. They would need the mounts in a hurry, and it would be disastrous if they came out of the bank and the horses had gotten loose and wandered off.
“Got the stuff?” Rome whispered.
Atkins patted the front of his coat. “Right here.”
“Let’s see if we can get in there, then.”
Banks tended to put most of their trust in their vaults, rather than the buildings in which those vaults were housed. Sure, the doors were locked, but breaking in usually wasn’t that difficult. Rome, who was better at such things than Atkins, drew a slim-bladed knife from a sheath at his waist and went to the door. He slipped the knife into the gap between the door and the jamb and began probing.
After a moment, he cursed under his breath.
“What’s wrong?” Atkins asked.
“The damn thing’s barred, not just locked.”
Atkins made a face in the darkness. “So you can’t unlock it?”
“Doesn’t matter if I do or not. We still can’t get in with that bar in place.”
“How about tryin’ the front door?”
“Too good a chance of being seen. A few people are still moving around.”
Atkins stepped back and looked up at the rear wall.
“Give me a boost up,” he said. “I can stand on that awning and reach one of the second-floor windows. I’ll get in there and come downstairs to open the back door.”
“Those windows are liable to be locked, too.”
Atkins shrugged. “So I’ll wrap my bandanna around my gun butt and break out the glass. I can do that without making a lot of racket.”
Rome thought it over for a moment, then said, “I suppose it’s worth a try. Our only other choice is to ride back out empty-handed and go back to the others, like we were supposed to. We’ll still have our shares coming to us.”
“If we do that, we’ll have money, all right . . . but we’ll never be rich.”
Rome slid the knife back into leather and bent over to lace his fingers together in a makeshift stirrup. “All right, come on. I’ll boost you up there.”
An awkward minute later, Atkins was standing on the awning, hoping that it wouldn’t collapse under him or prove so weak that he fell through it. He was able to reach one of the second-floor windows, but when he tried to shove the pane up, it refused to move. After trying to lift the window for a minute or so, he drew his gun, swathed the Colt’s butt in his bandanna, and tapped firmly on the glass.
If the window was nailed shut, he might have to knock all the glass out in order to climb through. But if it had a latch, all he needed was a big enough hole to reach in . . .
That was how it turned out. The glass shattered under the blow and fell into the room. The noise might have been loud enough to hear on the street, but Atkins didn’t think that was likely. He reached in, found the latch, and shoved it back. The window went up smoothly then, and a moment later he was inside.
The place was dark as the inside of a black cat. Atkins felt his way out of the room, which seemed to be an office of some sort, judging by the desk he banged his hip on. He risked snapping a lucifer to life long enough to locate the stairs. Since he was in an inner corridor with no windows, as he saw as the match flared up, it was safe to have a light.
Two minutes later he was downstairs, lifting the bar out of its brackets on either side of the back door. The key was in the lock. Atkins twisted it and let his partner in.
“Any signs of trouble outside?”
“No,” Rome said. “As far as I can tell, nobody heard that window break.”
Atkins grinned and said, “See, I told you. Luck’s on our side tonight.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way. Where’s the vault?”
“I don’t know, but the place ain’t that big. We can find it.”
Since the bank had two big front windows, they couldn’t risk striking another match. But the glass also allowed in a faint glow from other buildings along the street, so the two men were able to fumble their way through the lobby, behind the railing that separated the president’s desk from the rest of the room, and finally to the massive steel door of the vault, which was tucked away in the back of the lobby.
Rome rapped his knuckles against the door a couple of times and said, “Are you sure you can blow this thing open, Sid? It sounds mighty solid. Might be better to wait until the others are here and we can force the banker to open it, if it’s not already open then.”
“There you go, thinkin’ small again.” Atkins reached inside his coat. “All I got to do is wedge one of these sticks of dynamite right here beside the lock. It’ll blow the sucker right open. I’ve seen what this stuff can do, plenty of times.”
Rome sighed and said, “Well, all right. We’ve come this far, so I guess it’d be foolish not to go whole hog.”
Working mostly by feel, Atkins took a blasting cap and a length of fuse from his coat pocket and fixed them to the end of the explosive cylinder.
“Go out and get behind that counter where the tellers’ cages are,” he told Rome. “That’s far enough away and sturdy enough that it ought to protect us from the blast.”
“Will you have enough time to get away from it before it goes off?”
Atkins chuckled and said, “I’d damned well better, or else you’ll be scrapin’ me off the walls, Bart. Naw, don’t worry, I’m just joshin’ you. It’ll be fine.”
Rome hurried to shelter while Atkins placed the dynamite to his satisfaction. He had to drag over one of the ladder-back chairs in front of the president’s desk and angle it on its front legs so the back was wedged against the dynamite to hold it in place. The explosion would blow that chair to splinters, but that would hardly be the bank’s only loss.
Satisfied with the dynamite’s placement, Atkins stepped back a little and dug out another lucifer. He snapped the match to life with his thumbnail and held the flame to the end of the dangling fuse. With a sputter of sparks, it caught right away and began burning up toward the dynamite.
Atkins shook out the match and turned to hurry out of the railed-off area where the vault was located. He broke into a run as he headed across the lobby toward the tellers’ cages. From behind the counter, Rome said in an urgent whisper, “Come on, Sid.”
“I’m comin’, I’m—”
Atkins tripped on something and fell forward, sprawling on his face.
Terror shot through him, but a small part of his brain told him that he still had plenty of time. All he had to do was get up and take those last few steps to the counter. He scrambled to his feet, slipping once more as he did so, and he had to put a hand on the floor to steady himself.
He had just come upright for the second time when the dynamite went off with a huge roar that shook the floor and rattled the windows in the bank building.
* * *
Marshal Ted Cardwell was in his office with its adjoining cell block, nursing a cup of coffee and nibbling on a roast beef sandwich he had picked up at the Red Top Café, a few doors along the street.
He usually ate his supper here in the office like this, before heading out to make his final rounds of the town. Night rounds had been his job when he was a deputy, and since he didn’t have a deputy of his own after taking over for Marshal Madigan, he had continued with the chore.
He could have taken his meals at Ma Haskell’s boarding house, where he had a room, but he didn’t really like any of the other boarders . . . and they didn’t like him since he’d become marshal. He knew they resented him, since it was his job to enforce the law and he might have to arrest them someday. That possibility set a man apart and made other people nervous around him. Cardwell sometimes wished that wasn’t the case, but there was nothing he could do about it.
As he took another sip of coffee, he thought that things would be different if he had a house of his own. A house with a woman in it, maybe . . . a woman like Tommy Spencer.
Not for the first time, Cardwell fervently wished that he hadn’t let his emotions get the best of him that day when they’d gone on the picnic. He had been too forward with her; he wasn’t going to deny that. She had slapped his face for him, and he’d had it coming.
But he had apologized up one way and down the other, and he knew good and well that Tommy was smart enough to realize he was sincere. So why hadn’t she accepted his apology? Why had she refused all his invitations to have supper with him or to go for a ride in the countryside?
Maybe, he told himself, she just doesn’t like you that much. And if that was the case, he would just have to learn to live with it . . .
To distract himself from those thoughts, he opened one of the desk drawers and took out a stack of wanted posters. Nearly every time the stagecoach came in, the mail pouch brought more reward dodgers. Cardwell added them to the collection that Marshal Madigan had started, and every so often—like tonight—he got them out and went through them, studying the names, descriptions, and occasional photographs or drawings that adorned them. As a lawman, it was his job to be familiar with as many wanted men as possible.
There was no telling when some of them might show up in Salt Lick.
Cardwell flipped through the stack of posters as he finished off the sandwich and drank the rest of the coffee. He tried to time things so he would reach the end of his supper and the last wanted poster at the same time, but he didn’t quite make it. A few posters remained in the stack as he set his empty cup on the desk next to the sheet of butcher paper where the sandwich had been.
He was about to just flip those posters over and add them to the rest of the stack, then put all of them away, but since he was this close to the end, he decided to look at the few pieces of paper left from the original bunch. He turned one over, glanced idly at the next one, and then sat back in his chair and drew in a sharp, surprised breath.
A drawing of a familiar face was looking up at him from the reward dodger.
Cardwell stared back at it for a long moment.
Then he began to curse, soft but heartfelt, under his breath.
BART ROME was the name printed on the poster. Wanted for Murder, Attempted Murder, Bank Robbery, Train Robbery, and Grand Larceny. The charges covered Texas, Indian Territory, Kansas, and Missouri. Rome was known to be associated with the Snake Bishop gang.
“He didn’t even give me a fake name, the brazen son of a gun,” Cardwell said. “I should have recognized it. I wonder if . . .”
He started going through the remaining posters.
Sure enough, only two dodgers later, he saw a familiar name: SID ATKINS. Atkins’ poster had no photo or drawing on it, but the description matched. And Atkins hadn’t bothered with a false name, either. Cardwell groaned at this indication of how little regard they had for him as a lawman.
But why should he expect any different from a couple of owlhoots, he asked himself? Why would Rome and Atkins think any more highly of him than everybody else in Salt Lick? The townspeople all doubted his ability to enforce the law, despite the fact that he had worked for Marshal Jonas Madigan for more than a year and a half. He was too young, he had overheard some of them say. Just a wet-behind-the-ears pup.
So when he’d tried to show them all that he could be just as tough and hard-nosed as Madigan, they had called him full of himself and arrogant. What in blazes did people want from him, anyway? Couldn’t they see he was doing the best he could?
Maybe they were right to doubt him, he thought as he stared at the two wanted posters he placed side by side on the desk. He stood up, leaned forward, rested his knuckles on the desk, and glared at the reward dodgers.
He had had two wanted outlaws right in his grasp today, two members of the notorious Snake Bishop gang . . . and instead of arresting them, he had let them go! Worse than that, he had run them out of town.
The reward for each man was $500. If he had just locked them up, he would be a thousand dollars to the good, Cardwell thought bitterly. Some lawmen didn’t take bounties out of personal preference, but there was no law against it. More important, Atkins and Rome would be behind bars where they couldn’t commit any more crimes and couldn’t hurt anybody else.
If he had just done that, Tommy Spencer might feel differently about him. She might actually respect him, and from respect could grow something else . . .
Cardwell sighed. “Too late now,” he said aloud. Those two owlhoots were long gone.
The sound of the explosion that rolled through Salt Lick at that moment was so loud and powerful that Cardwell took an involuntary step back from the desk, almost as if the force of the blast had pushed him. His eyes got huge. He had no idea what had happened, but anything that sounded like that couldn’t be good.
The bank! Somebody might be robbing the bank. As soon as that thought flashed through his mind, others tumbled crazily after it.
Rome and Atkins were known to be members of the Snake Bishop gang. Cardwell had heard of Bishop and his band of marauders. They had raided towns across several states and territories, looting and burning and killing. Why would Rome and Atkins have come to Salt Lick, unless they were scouting the place for their leader, Snake Bishop?
Maybe the Bishop gang was raiding the town right now!
Ted Cardwell hesitated, knowing what a reputation Bishop and his men had for being ruthless, bloodthirsty killers. And he was only one man, who had never faced anything like that . . .
But the hesitation lasted only for a split-second. He had a job to do, and he was going to do it.
Without pausing to put on his coat, Cardwell grabbed a Winchester from the rack behind the desk. The rifle was fully loaded, but he jerked open a drawer and grabbed a box of cartridges anyway. If the Snake Bishop gang was attacking Salt Lick, he’d probably need the extra ammunition.
Then he ran out of the marshal’s office into the night, leaving the door open behind him. A wind drifted into the room, played for a moment with the wanted posters scattered on the desk, and then fluttered several of them to the floor.