CHAPTER 13
Somebody had already gone to fetch Salt Lick’s undertaker. The man’s wagon rolled up at the corner, and he and an assistant hopped down from the seat to tend to Marshal Cardwell’s body. They would deal with the bodies of the two dead outlaws, as well.
“Don’t you reckon we ought to stay here in case they need any help?” Windy asked.
Smoke tightened his grip on the old-timer’s shoulder. “I’m sure they can handle things,” he said. “That’s their job, after all. And if they do need help, there are probably plenty of men around who’d be willing to volunteer.”
“Yeah, yeah, I reckon so,” Windy muttered. With his eyes downcast, he allowed Smoke to steer him along the boardwalk toward the marshal’s office. The office door was open. Lamplight spilled through it from inside.
As they went in, Smoke saw papers scattered on the desk and across the floor. So did Windy, who hurried forward and started gathering them up.
“Looks like the wind made a mess in here,” he said. He balled the papers together and reached for one of the desk drawers, as if he were about to shove them in there.
“Hold on a minute,” Smoke told him. “What’s that you have there?”
“This?” Windy waved the jumbled sheaf of papers. “Oh, nothin’ important. Looks like some wanted posters. That’s somethin’ you’ll find in just about any lawman’s office.”
“Yes, it is,” Smoke agreed. “Put them down there on top of the desk.”
For a second, Windy looked like he might argue, but then he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down under the brush of white whiskers. He set the reward posters on the desk. Smoke leaned over and spread them out, smoothing them down where Windy had crumpled them.
“I admit I haven’t known you that long, Windy,” he said, “but it seems to me that you’re acting a little strange. You have been ever since you got a good look at the faces of those men we were forced to kill. You do know them, don’t you?”
“No, I . . . I . . .” Windy glanced down at the papers and suddenly jabbed a gnarled finger toward them. “I thought I recognized one of ’em from those reward dodgers, that’s all. I’ll bet a hat they’re somewhere in that bunch.”
“Are you in the habit of studying the marshal’s collection of wanted posters?”
“Not lately. Ted Cardwell didn’t want me around. But I told you, I used to work as a jailer sometimes, back when Jonas was wearin’ the star, and I’d go through the posters to pass the time when I was on duty at night. Sometimes, when you read about all them bad men and all the terrible things they done, it’s almost like readin’ a story.”
Smoke nodded slowly as he thought about Windy’s answer. That was actually a reasonable explanation the old-timer had offered him, he decided. He had no reason to doubt that it was the truth. Windy had seemed more surprised than recognizing a wanted owlhoot really warranted, but as Smoke had said, he didn’t know the old-timer well enough to say for sure what was or wasn’t out of character for him.
Smoke spread the wanted posters out more. One with a drawing on it caught his eye. He separated it from the others and pulled it closer.
“Look familiar to you?” he asked Windy after he had studied the drawing for a moment.
“That’s him! The fella we shot. I was right. He’s got paper on him.” Windy’s eyes widened. “And a five hunnerd dollar ree-ward!” He leaned over the desk and pawed through the posters. “What about the other one? Is he—Dadgum, look there! That matches the description of the other varmint, don’t it?”
“Sid Atkins,” Smoke read from the poster. “And the other man was Bart Rome. I wonder if they mentioned their names to that saloonkeeper who saw them.”
“Reckon we can ask ol’ Apple Jack and find out,” Windy suggested. “But whether they did or not, there ain’t no doubt these are the fellas.”
“I agree.”
“And they’re worth five hunnerd apiece. We can split that—”
Smoke waved a hand. “Don’t worry about that. You can have the reward.”
Windy practically licked his lips in anticipation. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I’m more worried about something else.”
“What’s that?”
Smoke tapped one of the wanted posters, then the other.
“These dodgers say that Rome and Atkins are both members of the Snake Bishop gang. I’ve heard of Bishop and his bunch. And from what I’ve heard, giving Bishop the nickname of ‘Snake’ is an insult . . . to all the snakes in the world.”
“He’s a lowdown sidewinder, all right. From, uh, what I’ve heard about him, I mean. And you think that since these two are supposed to be ridin’ with him . . .”
“It sure makes me wonder where Bishop and the rest of the gang are,” Smoke said.
* * *
Fifty miles south of Salt Lick, flames shot high in the night from half a dozen burning buildings. This settlement didn’t have an official name. There was no post office here; it wasn’t on any stagecoach line, and no railroad ran anywhere nearby. It was just a little wide place in the trail, with a trading post, a blacksmith shop, a saloon, and several houses where the people who ran those businesses lived.
They were the ones who had decided to call this tiny settlement Thatcher’s Crossing, after the fella who had started the trading post. The crossing part came from the fact that an even smaller east-west trail intersected the sparsely traveled north-south trail here.
After tonight, nobody would call it anything, unless, before the elements swallowed up the ruins entirely, somebody might point at them and say, “That’s where Thatcher’s Crossing used to be. Before Snake Bishop and his gang rode in.”
Bishop himself strode back and forth, the whip he carried in his left hand coiling and hissing around his booted feet like a live thing. Folks assumed he had gotten the “Snake” name because of how mean and ruthless and deadly he was, but that wasn’t the case at all.
Early on, down there in New Orleans, he had gotten a reputation as being a dangerous man to cross because of the way he handled a blacksnake whip. He didn’t care if somebody came after him with a gun; he was fast enough with that whip to cut a man to ribbons before the fool could draw and fire. And anybody who tried to use a knife against him was an even bigger fool. They’d never get close enough before Bishop had them on their knees, screaming because that whip had sliced their faces open, leaving them bloody and blind and ruined.
That whip had tasted plenty of blood over the years, a mighty damned lot.
And nobody wielded it better than Blacksnake Bishop.
Eventually, people had shortened the name to just Snake Bishop, and even in the cesspit of crime and corruption that was New Orleans, things got too hot with the law for Bishop to hang around. He had lit a shuck for Texas, or, as some of the old-timers from plantation days called it, the Texies.
But he took that whip with him, and it had helped him assemble the gang he led now, nearly four dozen of the toughest hombres west of the Mississippi. As the gang grew, they had ranged up through Indian Territory to Kansas and over into Missouri. They had held up numerous trains and stagecoaches, but what Bishop liked best was raiding towns, targeting banks in particular but looting whatever money and valuables they found in all the businesses, killing anybody who tried to stop them and then leaving the places burning behind them.
Unlike some men he’d known, Bishop didn’t get any particular pleasure out of burning things. It was just a good tactic; that was all. Folks with their lives destroyed around them, turned into smoldering heaps of ash, were too demoralized to even think about going after the men responsible for that atrocity. Mostly they just sat in huddled heaps and cried, until necessity forced them to get around to burying the dead.
By then, Bishop and his followers were long gone.
This place, with only a handful of businesses, had barely been worth the trouble. Once they counted the loot, more than likely they’d find that the take amounted to no more than five hundred dollars. Not even ten dollars a man, split evenly . . . which they didn’t, because Bishop always got a fifth of the loot off the top.
But hell, it was on the way to where they were going. Might as well hit it for the practice, if nothing else, Bishop had decided.
And so they had, sweeping out of the night, an unexpected storm of death and destruction. Now the buildings were on fire, half a dozen bodies were sprawled on the ground, motionless in the hellish glare of the flames, and another fifteen prisoners pressed together in a terrified cluster, surrounded by Bishop’s cold-eyed killers.
Bishop walked up in front of them and regarded them with no emotion on his face. He was a tall man, handsome in a brutal way, well-dressed in stovepipe boots, whipcord trousers, a frock coat, a white shirt, and a flat-crowned black hat.
He’d been raised in an expensive parlor house, the son of a whore and some unknown but no doubt well-to-do customer. His daddy had to be rich, because his mama was so beautiful, and as a boy Calvin Bishop had dreamed about the day that rich man would show up to claim him and take him and his mama off to a better life.
That had never happened, of course, and when Bishop was eight years old his mama had died of a fever, and he was left to survive on his own, whatever it took and whatever he was willing to do.
It hadn’t taken him long to realize that he was willing to do anything, as long as it got him what he wanted.
He swung his left hand back and forth, just a little, and the whip writhed at his feet. He lifted his voice and said over the crackle of the flames, “Do you people know who I am?”
No one answered.
Bishop didn’t delay. His left hand came up and the whip flashed out, and a middle-aged man with a drooping mustache shrieked in pain and dropped to his knees, pawing at the eye that the whip had just turned to jelly.
“I said, do you people know who I am?”
“You . . . you’re Snake Bishop,” another man forced out.
“That’s right. So you know I won’t hesitate to kill any of you who fail to cooperate with me.”
“What do you want from us?” a woman cried. “You’ve already taken everything!”
Bishop smiled and shook his head slowly. “Not everything, ma’am. True, my men went through the businesses and your houses and collected everything of value before they set them on fire, but I still see . . .” Bishop pointed with the whip as he counted quickly. “One two three four . . . young women who can be of comfort to my men on a chilly night such as this.”
That brought terrified cries from the women and angry shouts from the men, but with a whip-wielding madman in front of them and gun-hung outlaws all around, nobody dared move.
Bishop nodded curtly. Some of his men grabbed the girls he had indicated, tearing them away from their husbands or parents, and dragged them off.
One of the male prisoners found enough courage somewhere inside to step forward and rage, “Someday justice will catch up to you, Bishop! Someday you’ll get what’s coming to you!”
“But this,” Bishop said, smiling and shaking his head slowly, “is not that day.”
He cracked the whip. His men knew that signal. Guns came out and began to roar. The captives tried to flee into the night but had no chance before the flying lead scythed them all down. A few twitches and it was over, all but the echoes rolling away across the Panhandle plains.
Sometimes Bishop allowed the survivors of one of his raids to live; sometimes he didn’t. Unfortunately for the people of Thatcher’s Crossing, this had been one of those times when he didn’t.
The gang rode away a short time later, leaving death and ruins behind, taking with them the four sobbing girls, who probably wouldn’t live through the night either. Stopping here had barely been worth the time and trouble, Bishop thought again as he rode at their head . . . but it had livened up a long, boring ride.
The real payoff still lay ahead of them . . . in a town called Salt Lick.
* * *
Jonas Madigan had refused to go to bed until Smoke got back, but at least he was sitting in the parlor in a comfortable armchair with a blanket over his legs. He looked up, his dark eyes snapping with anger, and demanded, “What happened?”
Miriam Dollinger, sitting close beside him, reached over and took his hand. “Please don’t get too worked up, Jonas,” she cautioned.
He pulled his hand away. Miriam looked down quickly, Smoke noted, probably so Madigan wouldn’t see that he had hurt her feelings.
Smoke, who had just walked in, took his hat off and sighed. “I hate to tell you this, Jonas, but Ted Cardwell is dead.”
Miriam gasped. Madigan’s face grew even more haggard, but he said, “Go on.”
“A couple of outlaws tried to rob the bank. That explosion was them using dynamite in an attempt to blow open the vault door. They failed.”
“Well, there’s that, anyway, I reckon,” Madigan muttered. “What else?”
“Marshal Cardwell did his job,” Smoke said. “He tried to stop them from escaping. But they shot and killed him.”
“So the varmints got away?”
Smoke shook his head. “No. They tried to ride right down the street outside, past me and Windy.”
Madigan stared at Smoke for a second, then a grim chuckle escaped his lips. “Damn fools,” he said.
“They’re both dead.”
“I don’t reckon you had to tell me that. Is Windy all right?”
“He’s fine,” Smoke said.
“Good. I like that cantankerous old cuss. Where is he?”
“He walked down here with me to get his wagon,” Smoke explained, “and then he was going back to the marshal’s office. We figured somebody needed to be there, and Windy used to be the jailer, at least, even if he wasn’t an official deputy.”
Madigan nodded and said, “He’s a good man. I reckon he can hold down the fort for now.”
Smoke drew a chair up and sat down. Madigan had a right to know the rest of it.
“There’s more, Jonas. Windy recognized one of the outlaws from a wanted poster he’d seen, and we figured out who the other one was by going through the posters in the marshal’s office. They were both members of the Snake Bishop gang.”
Madigan’s eyes widened. He started to stand up, jolted out of the chair by what Smoke had just said. Miriam caught hold of his arm and kept him from standing.
“Please, Jonas—”
He ignored her and repeated, “Bishop! Good Lord, Smoke, over the past few years, he’s been the worst outlaw in this whole part of the country!”
“I know,” Smoke said, nodding. “We’ve heard plenty about him and his gang, even up in Colorado.”
“The varmints who hit the bank . . . you think Bishop sent them here to scout out Salt Lick and see if it’s worth raiding? I’ve heard rumors that that’s how he operates.”
“It’s possible,” Smoke allowed. “But remember, those two already tried to rob the bank. It could be that they’ve split off from Bishop and he’s nowhere around here.”
“Or it could be that he sent ’em and they decided to double-cross him and pull a job of their own,” Madigan said stubbornly. “That would’ve been a mighty foolish thing to do, considerin’ how loco he’s supposed to be, but the thought of gettin’ their hands on some loot might’ve made them a little crazy, too.”
“I don’t reckon we can rule that out,” Smoke said.
Madigan sat back, breathing heavily but more composed now. “In that case, there’s only one thing we can do. If there’s even the slightest chance that Snake Bishop is headed here, the town’s got to be ready for him. And that means we have to have a lawman.”
“Jonas, you’re in no shape to take over that job again,” Miriam said. “I know you still think of Salt Lick as your town—”
“It is my town, blast it!” Madigan thumped a fist on the arm of the chair. “It always will be, as long as I’m on this side of the dirt.” He shook his head. “But I wasn’t talkin’ about me. I’m not completely loco, Miriam. Hell, the town would be better off with Windy Whittaker as the marshal than with me!”
“I thought about Windy—” Smoke began.
“And you knew, even though you just rode in today, that he’s not up to the job, either.” Madigan glared at Smoke. “One of us might as well say it. If Snake Bishop is on his way here, then Salt Lick’s only got one chance, Smoke . . . and that’s you. You got to pin the badge on. You got to be the new marshal of Salt Lick.”