Alone in the cool gloom of the livery stable the two men waited. Billy sat with his back against the wall, the window to the right of his head. Without moving too much he could quickly scan the street to ensure that their enemies made no sneaking dash towards them. The town had stayed silent now for over an hour. No shots had been fired, no attack mounted on their redoubt. Sudden had taken advantage of the lull to stanch the flow of blood from the youngster’s reopened wound by the simple expedient of stripping off the blood-stained bandage which Doc Hight had put on, soaking it in water and twisting it dry. Billy had set his lips tight as Sudden bound up the ragged wound, and had even essayed a tight grin as the puncher had then stripped off his own shirt to dab water on the six-inch bullet burn across his ribs.
‘They won’t get no closer to yu than that without interferin’ with yore breathin’,’ remarked the boy. ‘Need any help?’
Sudden grinned. ‘If I feel faint, I’ll yell,’ he said.
His medical chores completed, the puncher hunkered down on a bale of straw and began to roll a cigarette. Billy’s cheerful words were good to hear. The kid had nerve enough for six men, but nerve alone was not going to get them out of this box. He pondered the reaction of the town to the wicked blows dealt to Cotton’s prestige. Would anyone in this cowed little valley back them when the final attack started? That it would come, and soon, he did not doubt. There was no way of knowing when, or how. Cotton’s force might be reduced but he still had enough guns to give two lone men, one of them able to use only his left hand properly, a pretty bad time of it when he struck.
As if divining Sudden’s thoughts, Billy spoke aloud, his voice pensive and musing.
‘I shore can’t figger this burg,’ he began. ‘They musta seen all that’s happened; they shore knowed we was buckin’ Sim Cotton an’ his toughs. Why ain’t they pitched in to give us some support, Jim?’
Sudden shrugged. ‘Hard to say. It’d go ag’in them if Sim Cotton come out on top — I’m guessin’ he’s a man with a long memory for things o’ that nature.’
‘I know that,’ remonstrated Billy. ‘But if we’d had six men in here who could use a gun, we coulda sent Sim Cotton an’ his paid guns skedaddlin’ for the hills an’ set this town free o’ him.’
‘Mebbe that’s the problem, Billy,’ Sudden suggested quietly. ‘Have yu given any thought to what happens to this town if Sim Cotton is broken?’
‘Shore!’ replied Billy stoutly. ‘Every man jack in the place’ll be his own man again, makin’ his own livin’, sellin’ or buyin’ as sees fit to anyone he wants to. That can’t be bad, can it?’
‘Depends,’ his companion said. ‘It’s pretty easy to get into the habit o’ lettin’ someone else do yore thinkin’ for yu. Once that happens, every day that passes makes it tougher to think for yoreself ag’in.’
‘Shucks, Jim,’ scoffed Billy. ‘I ain’t never felt thataway.’
‘Yu ain’t, mebbe,’ Sudden reminded him, ‘but mebbe a few o’ the men in this town has. An’ they ain’t shore that gettin’ rid o’ one problem ain’t just takin’ on another. So they’re sittin’ tight, waitin’. If we come out o’ this alive, they ain’t no wuss off than afore. If we don’t, then they ain’t goin’ to have Sim Cotton takin’ after them for sidin’ with us.’
Billy made a rueful face. ‘I hadn’t given it much thought along them lines,’ he admitted. ‘Could be yo’re right. Yu’ve bin right about ’most everythin’ else.’ He bent a frowning gaze upon his friend. ‘I dunno how yu do it. Yu ain’t exactly elderly—’
‘Well, thanks for that,’ murmured Green.
‘An’ yet yo’re wise to the way all kinds o’ different folks see things. I ain’t never seen a man so fast on the draw as yu are, but yu ain’t that much older than me. How come, Jim?’
‘Just luck, I guess,’ came the reply, but Sudden’s voice was far from light. Behind it Billy Hornby sensed a deep sadness and knew, without being sure why, that his words had burned deep into some corner of his companion’s thoughts like salt rubbed into an open scratch.
‘Hell, Jim, I shore didn’t mean to pry—’ he began, but Sudden cut him off with a gesture.
‘Forget it,’ he smiled. ‘Yu wasn’t to know. Some fellers has to learn the ropes in different schools to others, that’s all.’
His mind went back into his own past. He saw himself again as he had once been, a thin, half-starved youngster roaming around the southwestern territories, more or less the property of the old Paiute horse-trader who had raised him. He recalled the nomadic life, the slow turning of the seasons as they had moved from place to place, the eventual discovery that the Indian was not his father. And then the years with Bill Evesham. The kindly old rancher had taken a fancy to the nameless boy and ‘bought’ him from the old Paiute, given him a name, a name which Sudden had discarded after the events which set him upon the trail of the two men he had vowed to his dying benefactor that he would find.’
‘I shore can’t believe that all this has happened in on’y one day,’ Billy began again tentatively. ‘Seems like half a lifetime to me.’
At these hesitantly spoken words, Sudden shook off his thoughts of the past. ‘I’m gettin’ worse’n an old-timer,’ he chided himself. ‘Next thing yu know I’ll be chatterin’ about the good ol’ days.’ To the boy he said: ‘Yo’re right. She’s been a’mighty long day. Makes yu realize what them men in the Alamo went through when Santy Anna was tellin’ his band to play the deguello.’
Billy knocked on the wooden wall and whistled. ‘I hope she don’t come out the same way,’ he said, with a shiver.
‘We got a fifty-fifty chance, anyways,’ Sudden told him. ‘Sim Cotton shore ain’t got the weight he had when all this started. He’s lost twelve men to our two.’
‘That still leaves him mebbe three or four—not countin’ hisself, an’ I’m thinkin’ yu’d have to hump yoreself, good as yu are, to beat Sim Cotton to the draw, Jim.’
Sudden looked up. ‘He’s fast, is he?’
‘Like a rattler,’ confirmed Billy. ‘He don’t make no play about it, but some as have seen him in action reckon he could’ve given that Texas outlaw, Sudden, a run for his money.’
To this last remark the puncher made no reply, but the grim lines around his mouth deepened slightly. For the fiftieth time he wondered how, and when, the next move would come.