The kid cried, “Spurr, you whoremongerin’ ole devil—I’m all shot up over here!”
“I told you to stay to ground, you worthless pup!”
Guns blasted from the three front windows of the outlaw shack. Chunks of hot lead screeched through the air, thumped into the ground near where Deputy Sheriff Kenny Potter lay writhing, his rifle in the dirt beside him. He had both hands cupped to his bloody left side, holding his guts in.
“Spurr, I can’t get up!” the kid cried as a bullet blew up sand and gravel two feet beside his curly head. He whipped his face away from where the bullet had hit, screaming, “Spurr!”
Deputy United States Marshal Spurr Morgan chewed out a frustrated curse, brushed the back of his buckskin glove across his patch-bearded cheek, and raised his ’66 Winchester to his bowed, old shoulder. He fired once, twice, three times, the rifle thundering and stabbing smoke and flames toward the brush-roofed, adobe-brick cabin.
The echoes sounded like shrill witches’ squeals as they chased each other around the New Mexico canyon.
The sun-washed outlaw shack fronted a lumpy stone escarpment about sixty yards away from the dry wash that Spurr was hunkered in. Two of his bullets hammered the gray wooden casing around two windows with loud, wooden whumps! The third slug winged through the window right of the Z-frame door, evoking a clipped scream from inside.
“Goddamn you, Spurr!” shouted one of the train robbers holed up in the shack. “You just blew one of my ears off!”
“Come on out of there peaceable-like!” the old lawman shouted, “or I’m gonna shoot off a helluva lot more than that, Philpot!”
Spurr, Sheriff Ralph Adams, and Adams’s deputy, Kenny Potter, had tracked the outlaw gang, known far and wide as Philpot’s Dogs, out of Jicarilla, New Mexico Territory, and into the nearby Jicarilla Mountains. Adams had been shot in the left leg the day before when Hector Philpot’s bunch had bushwhacked the three lawmen. Spurr had patched up the sheriff as well as he could and sent him back home for tending.
Spurr and the young deputy, Potter, whom Spurr doubted was a day past twenty and was as green as willow bark, had continued to the shack here along Turkey Gulch, in one of the range’s dry canyons. The gang of five was holed up inside with the eight thousand dollars they’d stolen from a payroll shipment belonging to a mine in southern Colorado. The mine had been contracted by the federal government, which had made looting it a federal offense.
Thus, Chief Marshal Henry Brackett had sent his most experienced, also oldest, deputy, Spurr Morgan, down from his headquarters in Denver to run the dogs to ground. Since Philpot’s gang had shot up Jicarilla on their southern dash to the border, Adams had insisted that he and his wet-behind-the-ears deputy throw in with the federal lawdog.
Spurr had welcomed Adams’s help, but he didn’t cotton to younguns tracking experienced killers. Now, as young Potter continued to scream and curse and roll his guts out into his bloody hands, the federal lawman remembered why.
Spurr had told the kid to remain in the wash, but since there’d been no horses in the corral flanking the cabin, and they’d seen no signs of life around the place, Potter had insisted the shack was vacant. Against Spurr’s orders, he’d risen up out of the wash, calling Spurr an old woman, and walked toward the cabin, whistling.
That’s when the gang had thrown the shack’s shutters wide and opened up with their rifles.
Now, Hector Philpot showed his hatless head in the window, his left hand covering his left ear, holding a Spencer .56 in his other hand. “You got more sand than brains, old man! You’re one against five, and my gang’s just like me”—the long-faced outlaw flashed a silver-toothed grin—“poison mean!”
Spurr pumped a fresh shell into his Winchester’s chamber and fired. Philpot gave a taunting whoop and slid his head back behind the window frame as Spurr’s slug sliced the air where the sneering face had been a wink before. Inside the cabin, a bottle broke with a hollow bark of shattering glass.
Judging by the sound, the bottle had been at least half full. Spurr smiled.
“Shit!” yelled another outlaw with a raspy Texas twang—Nordecker Riley, most likely. “That there was our last bottle o’ red-eye!”
A rifle snaked out the window left of the door, and Spurr jerked his head back behind his covering boulder as the gun roared. The slug hammered the front of Spurr’s boulder with a crashing squeal, spraying rock dust and shards in all directions.
“Throw that old cannon of yours out here, Spurr!” shouted Philpot. “Then the hogleg. You don’t got a chance against us. If you don’t, the boy dies—understand?”
Hunkered low behind the boulder on the bank of the wash, Spurr chewed his lip as he held his cocked rifle straight up and down against his shoulder. He cast his blue-eyed gaze out from beneath the brim of his tan Stetson till he could see Kenny Potter lying about thirty yards out from the cabin. He was thirty yards to Spurr’s right, where the dry wash curved around to the south side of the cactus- and yucca-stippled yard.
A covered stone well lay within five yards of him.
“Kenny, crawl behind that well!” Spurr called. “Can you do that, son?”
The outlaws had stopped shooting. An eerie silence hovered over the yard blasted with brilliant mountain sunshine raining out of a cobalt sky. Kenny rolled onto his right shoulder, his deputy sheriff’s badge glinting on his brown wool vest, and lifted his hatless head. His curly auburn hair bounced around his ears and neck. The boy’s face was a mask of pain and horror.
He shook his head and clamped his hands tighter against his bloody side. “I can’t, goddamnit, Spurr. My insides is fallin’ out!”
Just then a rifle roared from a cabin window. Out of the corner of his left eye, Spurr saw the bright red-orange flash and the streak of powder smoke. Kenny screamed and jerked his head down, pressing his forehead against the sand and gravel as he moved one hand up from his belly to his left ear.
“That’s for my ear, Spurr!” Philpot shouted above the metallic rasp of a rifle’s cocking lever. “An ear for an ear. That’s fair, ain’t it?”
Spurr looked at Kenny. The young deputy was twisted around with his face in the dirt, shoulders jerking as he sobbed and clutched the far side of his shaggy head. A good-looking kid. The kind that no doubt drew many a young woman’s eye back home in Jicarilla.
But he’d be considerably less attractive without that ear, though the belly wound would likely be the end of him.
Rage burned through Spurr like a glowing war lance.
“Goddamnit, Philpot—he’s just a kid. Can’t you see he’s down?”
The only reply was ribald laughter and the loud rasp of another shell being jacked into Philpot’s .56.
Spurr snaked his rifle around the rock and cut loose with three more shots before return fire pushed him back behind cover. Several slugs spanged off the boulder. A few more blew up clumps of dirt and gravel around him. One large-caliber bullet tore up a yucca plant and hurled it back into the wash behind him.
Amidst the din, Spurr heard the distinctive roar of Philpot’s Spencer. Kenny shrieked. As the gunfire died, Spurr edged another look around the rock to see Kenny arching his back and awkwardly reaching for his bloody left knee. The young man’s mouth formed a perfect O as he lifted his head and loosed a horrific scream.
The gunfire died.
Silence like a held breath descended.
Spurr could hear the boy sobbing against the ground as the blood ran out of him. The cries were like razor-edged daggers raked across every nerve in the old lawman’s big, sinewy body. He pushed his hat off his head, raked a hand down his patchy, light-brown beard streaked with gray, cursing under his breath. His weak ticker heaved like a foundering horse in his chest.
Part of him wanted to throw his guns down and walk out from behind the rock. But the experienced lawman in him knew that that wouldn’t save Kenny. It would only get them both killed. And Philpot would ride free, laughing, him and the rest of his wolves heading off to whore away the winter in Las Cruces.
“Kenny,” Spurr said, hearing the anguish in his own voice. “Hold on, son.”
Philpot called, “What do you say, Spurr? You gonna come out with your hands wide, or we gonna have to go on killin’ this poor pup…slow?”
Spurr raised the Winchester to his shoulder, keeping it low and back where no one from the cabin could see its dusty, octagonal, blue-steel barrel. He stared out over the sights at Kenny’s slumped, prone figure, the boy mewling now like a gut-shot coyote. His head lolled slowly from side to side, and he was digging the toes of his spurred boots into the gravel, as though feebly trying to push himself forward.
Spurr cleared the emotion from his throat as he pressed his cheek up against the Winchester’s worn walnut stock. “Ya done good, Kenny!” he shouted, though it came out cracked and shrill. “Ya done real good!”
The Winchester roared, bucking against Spurr’s brittle shoulder.
The old lawman sobbed and sniffed, a single tear rolling down his weathered face and tracking into his scraggly beard as he ejected the spent cartridge from the Winchester’s breech. It clinked off a rock behind him.
“You’d have made a damn good lawman one day,” he added tightly, not looking at the deputy’s spasming figure beyond the rifle’s smoking barrel, blood blossoming from the hole in his left temple.
“Jesus Christ, Spurr!” Philpot yelled from the cabin, chuckling in disbelief. “What’d you do?”
“I killed him,” Spurr said softly, weakly, ramming a fresh cartridge into the Winchester’s chamber, then brushing the tear from his cheek with the back of his gloved hand. “And now, if it’s the last thing I do, by thunder, I’m gonna kill you.”