The man who’d just had the top of his head blown off, part of it on the floor, part of it splashed over Redfield’s cocked shotguns, dropped to his knees, hitting the floor with a resolute thud.
Redfield stared down at him. He looked at his bloody hands and shotguns, and then, as though he thought the mess had been made by one of the dead fellow’s own pards, he loosed a bellowing cry and triggered both shotguns in turn.
The twin blasts were like a single keg of black powder being detonated in the cantina’s close confines. Two of Valderrama’s men, almost literally cut in half, were lifted three feet straight up in the air and hurled back toward where Arliss stood against the far wall.
Arliss screamed as the bloody bodies hammered into her, taking her to the floor.
Which was a good place for her, as it turned out.
For just then all hell broke loose as Valderrama and his other three men began opening up on Redfield and Alvear as well as on Haskell, who grabbed his Henry off the bar and clicked the hammer back, crouching, aiming, and adding his own rifle blasts to the deafening din.
All Bear could see before him was a lurching cascade of men and gunsmoke, flames lancing the smoke and evoking shrill screams and cries. As Valderrama fired two rounds into Redfield, sending the Ranger jerking back in his chair and sending another volley of ten-gauge buck into the ceiling above his head, the mestizo twisted around toward Bear, snarling, as he leveled his twin Remingtons.
Bear was falling back against the bar as a bullet clipped his left side. Valderrama fired his twin pistols, and one bullet clipped Bear’s right side while the other sailed past Bear’s head, within a hair’s breadth of the ear that had been clipped in the coffin when Haskell had been set sail down the Arkansas.
Haskell dropped the Henry and whipped up his Schofield, the big revolver leaping and roaring in his right hand.
Valderrama screamed as Bear’s two slugs plowed through the man’s red shirt, sending him stumbling backward where two of his other men were also stumbling, having been shot by both Bear and Alvear.
Alvear gave a scream and flew back against the wall behind him as one of Valderrama’s men drilled a bullet through his belly. Haskell bolted forward, continuing to fire his Schofield into Valderrama, who tripped over a chair and hit the floor, screaming.
A man rose to a knee to Valderrama’s right. Wounded, Bear was slow to swing his Schofield toward the man, who snapped off a shot. The bullet was like a branding iron swept across Bear right cheek. Stumbling backward, Bear drilled the man who’d just shot him then got his boots tangled up in an overturned, blood-washed chair and hit the floor, unable to break his fall.
His head struck the floor. A shrill ringing rose in his ears. The room grew gray and fuzzy around him.
He could smell blood and the rotten egg odor of gun smoke.
And then he couldn’t smell anything for a time though in the back of his brain a menacing voice said over and over again, “The Jackal! The Jackal!”
He had to get up.
He swam up out of the soup of semi-consciousness, lifted his head off the floor, and opened his eyes. Thickly wafting smoke burned his eyes and nose. One of his legs was propped atop the chair he’d fallen over.
Dead men lay strewn around him, some in pieces. One was moaning softly. Haskell turned his head to see Redfield’s overturned wheel chair and the Ranger captain’s black toes propped on the side of it, aimed at the ceiling.
Two of those painful-looking black toes twitched as, apparently, the old captain gave up the ghost.
Aside from the low, muffled moaning, an eerie silence had descended on the cantina.
Haskell started to lift his leg off the overturned chair, intending to rise, but then he heard the faint ring of a spur out on the street.
Bear froze. He stared at his boot.
His heart thumped anxiously.
The Jackal!
The spur chings grew gradually louder.
A mother’s voice at bedtime: Say your prayers or the Jackal will get you!
Haskell fought the instinct to heave himself to his feet and prepare to do battle. He wouldn’t make it from his position, in his condition. The Jackal would have him before he could get to his feet or raise the Schofield, which he’d dropped when he’d fallen.
Play dead ...
Bear closed his eyes as boots thumped on the boardwalk fronting Rosa’s.
His heart thudded heavily. He wondered if the harried organ could be seen thumping against his shirt. He tried to make his breathing shallow, but it was damn hard.
Outside, a breeze rose. It made a whooshing sound against the cantina, briefly pelted the window with dust.
Bear sensed the Jackal peering into the cantina.
He thought that even amidst the copper stench of blood and the fetor of gunsmoke he could smell the man. A cloying sweetness ...
Alvear continued to moan on the floor beyond Redfield.
Hinges creaked as the batwings opened. Boots thudded slowly, softly. Spurs chinged.
Haskell drew a slow, deep breath through his nose, trying to calm himself.
He’s here.
Lie still, you stupid bastard, or he’ll blow your head off.
That Sharps is likely loaded and cocked and ready to fly!
The Jackal moved slowly, stealthily into the room. Haskell kept his eyes lightly shut, but in his mind’s eye he saw the Jackal aiming that big Sharps hybrid with the German scope straight out from his right shoulder, swinging it around the room, looking for any indication that someone here was still alive.
Meanwhile, the breeze rose again. Alvear moaned. The Mexican must have nudged a chair, for there was a slight wooden scraping noise.
The Jackal moved slowly, quietly around the room.
The footsteps grew louder. Haskell could feel a floorboard sag beneath him. The Jackal was near.
The foot thuds stopped.
A smell of sweat and leather and cheap tobacco touched Bear’s nostrils.
The Jackal was standing over him, likely staring down at him, aiming that big Sharps at his head!
Hold still, Bear told himself. Don’t breathe ...
“Jack?” said a Spanish-accented voice. “J-Jack?”
Haskell felt the floorboard rise beneath him as the foot thuds resumed. The Jackal was moving away from him.
“Jack?” Alvear said in a pain-pinched voice. “H-help me to my feet, amigo.”
The boot thuds stopped.
Silence. Outside the breeze was moaning around in the street.
A gurgling sound. Then Alvear’s voice pitched with terror: “Jack, no!”
BOOM!
The entire room lurched as the Big Fifty thundered.
Haskell opened his eyes, lifted his head.
He looked around for his Schofield. It was under a table to his left. He grabbed it, lowered his leg from the chair, and heaved himself onto his knees.
He aimed the Schofield. “Hold it!”
A man stood facing the wall to Haskell’s left, about twenty feet away. The man’s back faced Bear. The man held a long rifle in front of him. Bear could see the barrel protruding from the man’s left side. The stock poked out from his right side.
There was a metallic click. The Jackal was trying to reload.
“Drop it now or take a bullet in the back, you son of a bitch!”
The man froze.
“Drop it now!” Bear bellowed.
“All right, all right, don’t shoot!” said a high, nasal voice, not the voice that Haskell was expecting. Not even close. “Take it easy.” The man leaned to his right and set the big rifle on a table.
“Take it easy,” he said. “Don’t shoot me!”
He raised his hands to his shoulders, palms out. He still had his back to Haskell.
“Turn around slow,” Bear ordered.
The man turned around slowly until he was facing Haskell.
“You’re the Jackal!” sounded a Spanish-accented woman’s voice behind Bear.
Haskell glanced over his shoulder to see Rosa standing up behind the bar, staring in wide-eyed shock at the man facing Bear. She’d taken the words right out of the lawman’s mouth. He returned his own disbelieving gaze to the man before him.
Jack Hyde—if that’s who Haskell was actually staring at it, that was--couldn’t have been much over five-foot-four, if that. Mid-fifties, pushing sixty. A mousy, little, craggy-faced, pot-bellied man with a thin gray mustache and patchy side whiskers. Round, steel-framed spectacles were perched on his nose. His baby blue eyes were bizarrely magnified by the thick spectacles, giving him a fishy, walleyed look.
His face was peppered with liver spots.
He wore a grimy three-piece suit with a ratty, cream-colored duster hanging to his knees, threadbare, pinstriped, broadcloth trousers that sagged on him, and a weather-stained cream Stetson. A string tie was knotted at his throat.
Jack Hyde gave a sheepish grin, revealing one silver upper front tooth. He didn’t say anything, just returned Haskell’s and Rosa’s stares with his own sheepish, vaguely cunning smile.
Haskell groaned against his sundry wounds—none of them overly serious, he didn’t think—as he stepped slowly forward, keeping his Schofield aimed at the little man who couldn’t possibly be the most wanted criminal in the frontier west.
Such a nondescript little man ...
Could he really be the Jackal?
Haskell stopped in front of the Jack Hyde, who was almost a foot and a half shorter than the lawman towering over him. Hyde’s raised hands came up only to the tops of Haskell’s shoulders.
Bear looked at the rifle on the table.
A Big Fifty, all right. With a long, narrow, brass cope mounted over the breech. The brass, scroll-leaf initials JH had been embedded in the oiled walnut stock.
Haskell looked at the fish-eyed little man staring up at him. “It is you, isn’t? You’re the Jackal.”
“Who’d you think I was, you big son of a bitch?” the little man snarled. “St. Fuckin’ Pete?”
Someone groaned to Haskell’s right. One of the dead men who’d nearly been cut in two by Redfield’s shotguns moved where it lay on the floor, against the base of the far wall. The body rocked to one side, and Arliss lifted her head to stare up over the top of the dead man’s shoulder.
“Arliss, you still kickin’?” Haskell asked, grinning with relief then quickly returning his attention to the Jackal.
“Not sure yet,” Arliss said as she moved another bloody carcass away from her, and heaved herself to her feet. “My head hit the floor, and ... ” She retrieved her hat and her rifle and, blinking as though to clear her fuzzy vision, stumbled over toward Bear and the little man.
“Who’s that?” she said.
“Miss Posey,” Bear said, “I’d like to introduce you to Jack Hyde, otherwise known as the Jackal.”
Arliss blinked again, scowled. “What?”
The Jackal wheezed out an effeminate chuckle then doffed his hat and favored Arliss with an oily grin.
“Where’s the gold?” Haskell asked the fish-eyed little man.
“Over to the hotel,” Hyde said. “Where do you think it is? It sure ain’t in my back pocket!”
Haskell gave a wry laugh. “You mean you been stayin’ over at the hotel this whole time?”
“Sure as beans,” the Jackal said. “What—you expected me to sleep out with the rattlesnakes? I had me a rough enough time with the one I tossed in old Redfield’s sleepin’ quarters!”
He gave a high-pitched girlish laugh.
“So you had no intention of sharing any of that loot with Alvear or the Ranger,” Haskell said. It wasn’t a question.
The Jackal rose up on the balls of his little boots. “Do I look like a man who’d trifle with the likes o’ them mangy curs?” He gave a wry snort then looked at Arliss again, swept his fishy eyes across her chest. “Now, you’d I trifle with, little girl!”
“You’re the Jackal?” Arliss kept staring at the little man as though she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“How ’bout you shoot this big son of a bitch,” the Jackal said, glancing up at Haskell, “an’ you an’ me’ll mosey on down Mexico-way and have us a fine, ole time!”
“Let’s mosey over to the hotel instead,” Haskell said, stepping back, wincing again as his bullet wounds grieved him. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to stay on his feet. He had to get both the Jackal and the loot over to Redfield’s jail for safe keeping, so he could pass out in peace.
As he and Arliss ushered the Jackal toward the door, Haskell glanced at Rosa still standing where she’d been standing before, behind the bar, staring incredulously toward the Jackal.
“You all right, Rosa?”
Her eyes swept his tall, bloody frame. “I’m doing better than you, Bear. I’d best get you a doctor.”
“Ah, hell,” Haskell said, following Arliss and Jack Hyde out the saloon doors. “I been hurt worse than this crawlin’ out of bed in the mornin’.”
~*~
The loot was where the Jackal had said it would be--in his room in Sundown’s only hotel, where’d registered under the name of Scrum Dawson.
The hotelier, Shep Hanson, was as surprised by anyone to learn that the shabby little trinket peddler, Scrum Dawson, was in fact one of the deadliest killers the west had ever known.
One month later, after the Jackal and the loot had been shipped to Denver via train car guarded by twenty soldiers from Fort Davis, and Haskell had made his way back in the same direction after healing from his wounds, Bear suckled Miss Arliss Posey’s left nipple in his suite at the Larimer Hotel and said, “I reckon that’s how he was able to stay ahead of the law so damn long.”
“I reckon it is,” Arliss said with a lusty groan, tipping her head back on the pillow. “Who’d have ever thought Scrum Dawson was Jack Hyde? It even took you awhile to convince Marshal Dade!”
“Yeah, Bear chuckled. “He thought I was pullin’ his leg, ole Henry did. I’m not sure he still quite believes it!”
They laughed.
“What I’d like to know,” Bear said, moving his head down from Arliss’s swollen breasts to poke his tongue into her belly button, causing her to arch her back and moan, “is how come he didn’t go ahead and ambush us again on our way back to Sundown that last day? I know he was behind us—for a time, anyway.”
“I reckon we should have asked him,” Arliss said, then chuckled. “Oh, Bear—that tickles!”
“I didn’t think of it. Too many other questions, I reckon. I got me a suspicion, though.”
“Mmmm?” Arliss reached down between them to wrap her hand around his jutting shaft. “What’s that?”
Haskell groaned as she fondled him. “I think he might have figured that since his ploy out on the range worked so well it might work that good in town, too.”
“What do you mean? Pitting us against Alvear and the Captain?”
“Why not? He’d been following us so he knew we knew he had taken the loot from the Silver house. I’m sure he was well aware of them twin cannons on Redfield’s chair, too. He probably figured that if Redfield didn’t clean our clocks, Alvear would. And then he’d only have Alvear to finish off himself.”
“Bear?”
“Then he could leave Sundown with a packhorse or two under cover of darkness, when Valderrama’s own jackals were still makin’ the whores scream, and scuttle across the border by dawn. The Jackal likely never woulda been heard from again.”
“Bear?”
Haskell looked at her. “What is it, darlin’?”
Arliss smiled up at him as she spread her raised knees and drew his jutting shaft inside her. “Let’s be quiet now.”
“Good idea,” Bear grunted. “Just one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I like working with you, Miss Arliss.” He grinned down at her.
Arliss laughed. “I like working with you, too, Bear!”