Apart from a few sporadic, seeking shots from across the street, it had been quiet in the stable. Sudden had relieved Bob Davis at his post by the window, and the storekeeper was coaxing a reluctant fire underneath a coffee pot which he had found, half full, on a table near the rear of the building. The sharp, welcome tang of coffee filled the air.
‘My belly’s been thinkin’ someone’d cut my throat,’ Billy told nobody in particular, gazing hungrily towards where Davis hunkered over the tiny blaze. ‘I ain’t et since breakfast.’
‘When this is all over I’ll buy yu the biggest steak in the territory,’ Sudden told him.
‘Nix on that, Jim,’ grinned the boy. ‘I’m buyin’.’ He heaved a huge sigh. ‘I can see ’er now. A big, thick slab o’ beef, with the juice runnin’ all over the plate, an’ mebbe three aigs on the top. A whole skillet full o’ potatoes, brown an’ crisp on the outside, soft as butter in the middle. Three pounds o’ beans, mebbe—’
‘Was yu brung up by ’Paches, mebbe?’ Sudden asked the boy, smiling. ‘Yu shore know how to make a feller scream for mercy.’ He watched idly as Bob Davis walked over to the window at the rear of the stable. ‘Yu ain’t the only one who ain’t—’
‘Here comes the Doc!’ Davis’ voice cut off Sudden’s mild complaint, and the puncher moved. backwards away from the window, careful not to expose himself, as Davis stepped away from his lookout, his hand reaching towards the door.
‘Hell, he shore ain’t hurryin’ none,’ complained the storekeeper.
‘Come on, Doc, shift yoreself.’
A faint frown touched Sudden’s forehead, and with a sharp admonition to Billy to keep the street covered, Sudden slipped quickly across the stable floor towards the window through which Davis had observed the Doctor’s approach.
‘Anythin’ moves, blast at it as fast as yu can pull the trigger, Billy!’ he called over his shoulder to the boy, as Bob Davis slid the heavy bar away from the door. Sudden reached the window as Davis swung the door ajar. The storekeeper poked his head around it and leaned out, calling hoarsely ‘Hurry up, Doc, for Gawd’s sake!’ Even as the words left his lips Sudden was yelling ‘Slam that door!’ and Davis turned his head sharply, startled. As he did so Hight’s figure lurched forward into a flat run and Sudden saw the flickering movement of two more shapes below the level of the window still moving fast for the door. A blast of shots exploded in the doorway as he moved back and to the side to cover Davis and the storekeeper catapulted back inwards, twisting, falling across the threshold of the door, his feet kicking high.
With a shouted warning to Billy, Sudden’s hands flashed to his guns as three men loomed dark and huge in the doorway, their guns blazing wildly into the semi-gloom, their seeking shots blasting across the position he had just vacated. In this fraction of a second, Sudden recognized the contorted face of Art Cotton. Then the intruders burst into the stable, falling prone in scurrying, rolling movement, their actions kicking up a thin, sun-speckled cloud of dust and chaff.
Now Sudden’s guns were answering. The puncher had dived sideways towards the stalls on the left of the stable, moving fast and dropping on to his rounded shoulder, as lancing flames from deadly muzzles sought to level on his rolling shape.
Sudden felt something like a red hot iron being drawn across his ribs, all in this one long, endless second, the hammers of his own weapons falling with incredible speed, hearing the rolling blast of Billy Hornby’s gun behind him. The man who had impersonated Doc Hight was doubled over just outside the doorway, his hands clutching his stomach, his head almost touching the floor. A second man, heavily-mustached, was careering sideways, torn off his feet by Billy’s rapid roll of low-aimed shots. The stable was full of powder smoke and the whirring whine of whistling lead and the doorway was empty and there was the ugly sound of men dying.
And then there was a brief, empty silence and then as Sudden reached the end of his roll and gained his feet, there before him, mouth drawn back from his teeth in an animal snarl, was Art Cotton, lurching forward, the front of his shirt black with blood, his eyes empty, desperately striving to raise the gun in his hand while it grew heavier as the strength pumped out of his body.
‘Damn yore eyes!’ screamed Art Cotton, thumbing back the hammer of the gun and bringing it slowly up. Here he could press the trigger, flame flashed from Sudden’s hip and Cotton staggered, pitched sideways and slid to the floor, the weapon dropping from his twitching fingers. Sudden shoved his smoking .45 back into its holster and rose slowly, shaking his head.
‘I had to do it,’ he said, almost to himself. He looked at Billy across the stable floor. Smoke drifted lazily on the still air and there was the reek of cordite. They stood like this for perhaps three seconds, then Sudden snapped back into action.
‘Back to yore window!’ he shouted. ‘Keep that street empty!’ Billy leaped to his post, cursed, and laid four shots across the street. Several of the Cottonwood men who had been drawn from their lair by the sound of the gunfire inside the stable scattered, diving for cover as Billy’s hastily thrown shots buzzed about them. In another moment, their return fire made the boy duck below the window frame as slugs whipped splinters from the woodwork and thudded into the walls. He turned to see Sudden bent over Bob Davis’ still form. The puncher had slammed shut the rear door and the heavy bar was once more in place. Their eyes met. Sudden shook his head, straightening up slowly.
‘He’s dead, kid,’ he said quietly.
Billy said nothing. There was nothing to say. His eyes moved to the coffee pot, bubbling now on the dying embers of the fire Davis had lit. He turned away from it quickly and looked at the blank, bullet-pocked wall in front of his eyes.
Sudden regarded the sprawled corpses of Art Cotton and of the mustached Cottonwood rider. He shook his head and walked to the window. Just outside the door lay the man who had been dressed in Hight’s clothes, sprawled dead in a pool of blood.
‘Looks like they got the Doc,’ he told himself grimly. ‘Only the devil’s luck they didn’t get us, too.’
It was a victory, but a bitter and unhappy one. Although three more of Sim Cotton’s hired killers had come to the end of their nefarious careers, it was at a terrible cost. He shucked the empty cartridges from his guns, replacing them with bullets taken from the belts of the dead Art Cotton.
‘Anythin’ movin’ on the street?’ he finally said to his young companion.
‘Not a thing, Jim.’ Sudden detected a note of weariness in the boy’s voice. Billy stood slumped against the wall alongside the window. The fresh bright red of new blood stained his shirt.
‘Yu opened that wound again,’ Sudden admonished him.
‘I was jumpin’ around a mite,’ admitted the kid. Then: ‘Is Doc Hight…?’
‘That jasper outside is wearin’ his clothes,’ Sudden told him by way of reply. ‘An’ there’s no movement over at the house.’ A bitter round of curses flowed from the youngster’s lips at these words. Sudden waited until Billy paused for breath, then told him ‘Cussin’s like sittin’ in a rockin’ chair — it gives yu somethin’ to do, but it don’t get yu anyplace. At least we got some more ca’tridges.’
‘It’s a hell of a price to have to pay for ’em,’ ground out the Lazy H man. ‘I’d as lief done without.’
There was nothing to say to that, either. Sudden’s bleak gaze moved to the window.
‘Gettin’ late,’ he mused aloud. ‘Be dark in a couple of hours.’
They sat in silence for several minutes, each busy with his own thoughts, both knowing that their thinking was along parallel lines. It was Billy who put them into words.
‘Yu reckon they’ll hit us again afore nightfall, Jim?’
Sudden shrugged.
‘Hard to tell,’ he admitted. ‘They must know we’re alone in here. Sim Cotton’ll probably reckon he don’t need to wait, but it depends on how many guns he can muster.’
‘If they wait until it’s dark, we ain’t got much of a chance,’ the boy murmured. ‘Have we?’
‘There’s allus a chance, Billy,’ the puncher told him gravely. ‘Yu just have to wait until she pops her head up, then grab ’er.’
The faintest of whimsical smiles touched his lips as he spoke, but Billy’s gloom was not to be so easily shifted.
‘Hell, I’d feel better if we could do somethin’,’ he growled. ‘I shore don’t go much on this waitin’ game.’
Guns ready at their sides, the two besieged men quickly scanned the empty street of Cottontown. At the far end, one or two lights were already glowing. It was very still.
‘It’s the on’y game we got,’ was Sudden’s quiet comment on the boy’s complaint.