Chapter Ten
Duke Rudd was still as bored as he’d been the day he forced himself on that saloon girl Della. Showing her what a mean, tough hombre he was had made things better for a while, but it hadn’t taken long for the feeling to wear off. Rudd leaned his skinny frame against a hitch rack and idly considered going over to the Silver Spur to see if Della was around. He hadn’t been there since that day, thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to stay away for a spell and let her get over being mad at him. She might’ve complained about him to Royal Bouchard, who owned the place.
Rudd wasn’t worried about Meade, the bartender, but Bouchard was a different story. Rudd wasn’t exactly scared of Bouchard—he wasn’t scared of anybody except Billy Ray Gilmore, and only a damned fool wouldn’t get nervous sometimes around Billy Ray—but he was wary of the saloon keeper. Most folks in Purgatory wouldn’t meet your eyes when you looked at them. Bouchard would, and although he had never given the members of the gang any trouble, there was always the sense that he might be willing to if he was pushed into a corner.
Sam Logan was sitting on the edge of the boardwalk behind Rudd, a barlow knife in his hand as he whittled on a piece of wood. Logan always had to be doing something with his hands: whittling, playing cards, cleaning his gun, or just fidgeting until Rudd sometimes wanted to yell at him to just stop it. Usually it was little fellas like Rudd who were nervous and fidgety, but not always. Big, bulky Sam Logan was proof of that.
“I think maybe I’ll go over to the Silver Spur,” Rudd said.
Without looking up from the piece of wood he was trying to fashion into a whistle, Logan said, “I thought you said we oughta lie low for a while, Duke. That whore might still be on the prod after what you done to her.”
“I didn’t do nothin’ that ain’t been done to her hundreds of times before,” Rudd insisted. “Maybe thousands.”
“I wouldn’t want to have to do the cipherin’ to count it up,” Logan said.
“Maybe I’ll tell her I’m sorry,” Rudd mused. “I ain’t, really, of course. But I could tell her that.”
“You think she’d go upstairs with you again?”
“She might.”
“But you don’t have ten dollars.”
“I got three,” Rudd said. “How about you, Sam? You be willin’ to spot me seven until the next time Billy Ray gives us some dinero?”
“I don’t know,” Logan said. “Seems like I’ve spotted you a few bucks in the past that you never paid back.”
“I’ll get even with you, don’t you worry about that. Come on, Sam—” Rudd stopped short. He was still looking out into the street, and he had just seen a rider go by whom he didn’t recognize. “Who’s that?”
“Who’s who?” Logan asked.
“That fella there on the gray horse,” Rudd said, nodding toward the stranger.
Logan closed his knife and slipped it and the partially completed whistle into his pocket as he stood up. He stepped over to the hitch rail and stood beside Rudd.
“Him?”
“Yeah.”
The man was average sized, but there was something about him that made him seem a little bigger. Maybe it was the powerful shoulders. He wore jeans, a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled back a couple of turns, and a broad-brimmed, cream-colored hat thumbed back slightly on dark hair. The butt of a Winchester jutted up from a sheath strapped to his saddle. From where Rudd and Logan stood, they couldn’t see the man’s handgun, but they could see the shell belt strapped around the man’s hips so they knew he was packing a revolver.
“Must be new in town,” Logan said. “I never seen him before, and he don’t look like the sort of hombre you usually find in Purgatory.”
“No, he don’t,” Rudd said. “He looks like trouble.”
“But not for us, because we ain’t got nothin’ to do with him.” Logan nudged his friend in the ribs with his elbow. “Hey, there’s Cravens. Why don’t you go ask him for the loan of seven bucks so you can maybe play slap and tickle with Miss Della?”
Rudd looked around and saw a stout, middle-aged man in a town suit and narrow-brimmed hat crossing the street near them. He appeared to be heading for the bank, which was no surprise since Joseph Cravens was not only the mayor of Purgatory, he also owned the First Territorial Bank.
“Oh, sure,” Rudd said. “I’m gonna ask the town banker to loan me whore money.”
“Can’t ever tell,” Logan said with a grin. “He might say yes.”
Rudd doubted that very seriously . . . but hell, it was something to do, he thought, and it might be good for a laugh just seeing the look on Cravens’s face.
“Fine,” he said. “Let’s go.”
With Logan trailing him, he moved quickly to intercept Cravens before the banker reached the boardwalk. Rudd lifted his hand, put a friendly grin on his face, and said, “Howdy, there, Mr. Cravens. Talk to you for a minute?”
Cravens stopped and frowned worriedly. He recognized Rudd and Logan, of course. Just about everybody in Purgatory knew who the members of Billy Ray Gilmore’s gang were, even though the law didn’t seem to be able to do anything about them.
“What is it you men want?” Cravens asked in a curt voice.
“Well, that’s no way to talk to a potential customer,” Rudd said. “I want to discuss a business transaction with you.”
That seemed to surprise Cravens. He said, “Really?”
“Sure ’nough. I’d like to see about gettin’ a loan from your bank.”
“A loan? Really?” Cravens still seemed wary, but the instincts ingrained in him by years in the banking business made him ask the question. “What sort of loan? How much money are we talking about?”
“I need ten dollars for a whore,” Rudd declared. Might as well let Logan keep his three bucks and get the whole shooting match from the bank if he could, he thought.
“Ten d-dollars,” Cravens said, starting to sputter a little. His face turned red, either from anger or embarrassment, or both. “For a . . . a prositute!”
“Whore, prostitute, soiled dove, call her whatever you want,” Rudd said. “You should know, though, Mr. Cravens, that she ain’t your run-of-the-mill whore. She’s special. In fact, if you was to loan me twenty dollars, there ain’t no tellin’ what I might be able to talk her into doin.”
Cravens moved to the side, as if to try to get around them.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I have business to tend to.”
Rudd put a hand on the banker’s chest to stop him.
“Now, I’ve made you a fair business proposition,” he said. “You gonna approve my loan or deny it, Mr. Banker Man?”
“I . . . I can’t. . . . Please, let me by—”
Rudd stepped back. He wasn’t getting out of the way to let Cravens pass, though. Instead, he reached down to his hip and closed his hand around the butt of his gun.
“I guess if you ain’t gonna loan me that money, the least you can do is dance a mite to entertain us.”
He drew his gun and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet smashing into the ground about three inches from Cravens’s left foot.
Cravens let out a startled, frightened yelp and jumped instinctively away from where the bullet had kicked up dust. Logan laughed at that, shrugged, and pulled his gun as well. Both weapons roared, spraying lead around Cravens’s feet and making him hop frantically as Rudd cackled and said, “Dance, Banker Man, dance!”
Then Logan yelled, “Oh, hell, Duke, look out!”
* * *
When John Henry heard the shots coming from the vicinity of the bank, he figured somebody was holding up the establishment.
Instead, as he wheeled Iron Heart around, he saw two men standing at the edge of the street firing their revolvers at the feet of a third man, who was leaping around desperately trying to stay out of the way of the slugs.
The sight of it made John Henry mad. Just downright mad.
He heeled Iron Heart into motion, sending the big horse galloping toward the three men.
The two gunnies heard the thundering hoofbeats just in time. One of them let out a warning yell, and they leaped in opposite directions, barely avoiding being trampled. One of the gunmen was a little, rabbity-looking man. The other hombre was big and stolid, slower to move. Iron Heart’s shoulder almost clipped him.
John Henry reined in and turned his mount again. The smaller man yelped, “What the hell are you doin’? We was just makin’ him dance!”
John Henry’s Colt flickered out of its holster and roared, sending a bullet smashing through the smaller man’s left foot. The man screeched in pain, flung his arms in the air, and went over backwards. His gun slipped from his fingers, flew up about ten feet, then fell and thudded into the dust of the street.
John Henry twisted in the saddle. The bigger man was trying to draw a bead on him. John Henry fired first, targeting the man’s right foot. He yelled and started hopping around. He hung on to his gun, so John Henry sent Iron Heart lunging past the man and swung his Colt so that the barrel cracked across the wrist of the man’s gun hand. The man dropped the weapon, sobbed, and tried to cradle his injured wrist against his body. His wounded foot wouldn’t support his weight, though, so he fell into a heap on the ground.
“Sorry, boys,” John Henry said. “I just meant to make you dance. Reckon I’m not as good a shot as you fellas are.”
The man in the town suit stared wide-eyed at John Henry as if struggling to comprehend the sudden violence that had broken out in front of him. He said, “You . . . you shot them!”
“If there’s one thing I hate, it’s seeing somebody being picked on,” John Henry said. Actually, there were plenty of examples of injustice that he hated, but that was one of them.
“You don’t understand!” the townsman said. “Those men are part of Billy Ray Gilmore’s gang!”