CHAPTER TWENTY
When Breen and Keegan came to Purgatory City’s largest corral—usually held for beef, now filled with forty ornery, rank, and mean-looking mustangs—Matt McCulloch figured that they had sobered up enough to back out of the deal they had agreed to earlier . . . which is what any reasonable human being would do.
“Matt,” Keegan said, and let that sheepish, double-dealing, damn Yankee Irish grin crease his face. “As much as I’d love to work with you, get those hosses up to Fort Wilmont, well . . .” He shrugged.
“What about you?” McCulloch asked the bounty hunter.
“I got two prisoners I’d like to get to Precious Metal,” Breen said. “I can wait here, but you know I don’t like to wait. I’m with you.”
That surprised McCulloch, but he knew what was coming next.
“But . . .”
Yeah, the but. It was the but McCulloch expected from this . . . jackal.
“You, me, and him . . .” Breen nodded at Wooden Arm, about fifteen or twenty yards down the corral, standing on the lower rail of the corral, staring at those wonderful mustangs, unencumbered by that idiotic splint McCulloch had fashioned.
Hell, this morning, McCulloch had tried to talk to the young fool—talking, as always, with his hands and fingers—to get to a doctor. Have a real sawbones patch the boy up, but Wooden Arm adamantly refused. His brother had made this to heal him, and Wooden Arm trusted his brother’s medicine. It was second only to Broken Buffalo Horn’s power. McCulloch still wondered who the hell this Broken Buffalo Horn was—and just how powerful he might be. But he had to accept the Comanche boy’s reasoning. He felt a touch of pride that the teenager considered him a brother.
McCulloch considered another reason he had not pursued that argument. Even armed with a repeating rifle and a fully loaded Colt revolver, what chance did he have at persuading any doctor in Purgatory City, the county, or all of West Texas . . . even all of the Great State of Texas into being willing to treat a Comanche?
Breen shook his head. “You and me and him,” he said again and laughed. “We couldn’t get those horses to the Pecos River ourselves. I’m not sure we could even get them out of Purgatory City.”
Frowning, McCulloch said, “What about your prisoners?”
“Hell, Matt, I was drunk. You know that. You wouldn’t hold me to that idiotic idea. Kruger would cut our throats the first chance he got. He’s a bank robber, a murderer, a thief in the night. He doesn’t know a damned thing about herding mustangs.”
McCulloch spit between his teeth. “Not so hard. I learned. Just keep them moving in the general direction. Feed them. Water them. That’s all there is to it.”
It was Breen’s turn to spit. “You left out chasing down the runaways. Keeping them from bolting at night. You also left out all those mean dogs between here and Precious Metal—white, red, copper, blue, pink, purple—who will surely want to take them from us.”
“Then take your Kruger and your lady friend on the stage to Precious Metal. Wooden Arm and I can find someone else to do this job with us—for less money than we offered you, too.”
Breen turned and stared at the Wells Fargo office—the windows shot out, the front door riddled with bullets from that jail-break attempt—and some schoolboys playing hooky who were pointing out the very spot where town Marshal Rafe McMillian had been cut down in a hail of bullets and buckshot.
Suddenly he turned to Sean Keegan. “You Irish lout. Is that what they taught you in Londonderry? How to go back on your word?”
“Londonderry?” Keegan roared. “I never set me bloody toe in Londonderry.”
“Well, you sure act like it. You gave your word to Matt McCulloch. Now you’re going back on it!”
“Breen, you white-haired little varmint. Let me remind you it was your bloody reasoning not fifteen minutes ago that led me out of my fine little office to tell our fine, addle-minded fool of a friend that we wasn’t going through what we said we was going through.”
“I was testing you, Sergeant-No-More. And you failed.”
“Well, buster, ye is about to fail your next test, because we’ll be using what’s left of you in ten minutes to grease that broken-armed Comanche’s splint.”
McCulloch stepped between them, but three men had left one of the saloons, and from the look of them, they had been drinking since late last night. They also looked like trouble, for one pointed at the corral and they all started walking straight for the stables. Right toward Wooden Arm. When a cowboy was drunk enough or mad enough to walk, McCulloch knew he meant business.
“Excuse me,” McCulloch said, moving toward the street. “Whichever one of you is left standing, he’s hired.”
The cowboy on the southwestern edge, the bowlegged cuss with the green shirt and brown hat, spotted McCulloch first, and said something to the other two. They kept walking for a few more paces before the man in the middle, whose six-shooter was tucked inside the waistline of his black and tan checked britches, nodded, adjusted his tan hat, and then all three made a slight turn and went directly toward McCulloch. The third man, young, weasel-like looking, with a two-gun rig, grinned with drunken eagerness.
McCulloch stopped and waited, letting his right hand fall beside his Colt.
They threesome spread apart before they halted about twenty-five feet from the former Ranger.
“We don’t like injuns in our town, McCulloch,” said the middle man, who McCulloch recognized as Zebra Dave, a worthless man who probably earned his drinking money from the cows he rustled from the rancher who was paying him a dollar a day, a place to sleep, and three square meals every day.
“He won’t be here for long.”
“Oh,” said the weasel with a malicious laugh. “He’ll be here for a long, long time, Ranger.”
The one with the green shirt said, “Like till . . . Judgment Day.”
All three laughed, but that stopped when McCulloch saw their eyes move past him. He also felt the presence of a man on either side of him.
The cowboy in the green shirt took a few steps back. Weasel criss-crossed his arms till his hands rested on the butts of the two revolvers that hung low on his hips.
A laugh from McCulloch’s left indicated his friend had made the man easily. “I know you,” Jed Breen said, though McCulloch couldn’t tell who the bounty hunter was talking to. “Saw your likeness on a dodger in Cooter City nine months ago.”
McCulloch knew that to be a damned lie. Cooter City had been wiped out in a flood along the Nueces River ten years ago. Hell, these days there wasn’t a place where a wanted dodger could be put. There hadn’t been much of a place to hang a wanted poster eleven years ago, either.
“That’s a . . . lie,” the weasel said, but his face revealed doubt.
“We don’t like injun lovers, either,” Zebra Dave said.
McCulloch no longer looked at the kid in the green shirt. He figured that boy would be hightailing it for his mama in about thirty seconds. Besides, Sean Keegan hadn’t said one damned word, so McCulloch figured the old cavalry trooper had his eyes on the shaking punk.
“Keegan?” McCulloch asked, just to make sure he wasn’t mistaken, that it wasn’t wishful thinking that he felt a presence on his right. “That undertaker fellow, Percy something . . .?”
“A. Percival Helton. What about him?”
“He wasn’t among those killed during that raid by the Benteens, was he?”
“Nay. The greedy worm is doing a bonanza’s worth of business lately.”
McCulloch nodded. “I expect his boom will continue. In say . . . ten seconds.”
The two-gun punk made the first move, but McCulloch paid him no mind. The one wearing the green shirt turned and ran, and probably would have made it, but he tripped and fell face-first in the street. By then Jed Breen was cutting lose with his double-action Colt, the bullets popping the kid in both lungs, turning him around so Breen’s next two slugs went damned close to the exit wounds the first two bullets had made.
McCulloch took his time, knowing Zebra Dave, like most drunks, like most cowboys, would rush his shot. The bullet blasted dirt onto McCulloch’s boots before the Colt was halfway out of McCulloch’s holster. The second shot might have done some damage if McCulloch had not taken time to shave that morning. The third shot . . . well that might have hit the bell in the Catholic church’s front yard. McCulloch heard the chime, but surely even Zebra Dave couldn’t have shot that wild.
One blast from McCulloch put Zebra Dave on his knees. Zebra Dave’s last shot went into his own knee. That, McCulloch reasoned, was one damned ugly wound, and would have require amputation of the lower part of his left leg. Knowing the quality of the doctors in Purgatory City, that likely would have killed Zebra Dave anyway, but it didn’t matter. Zebra Dave had fallen over to his side on the street and tried to clutch his shattered knee.
“My leg,” he choked out, even though it was the bullet that Matt McCulloch had put in the lower part of his chest that killed him.
That should have been the end of it, but the boy in the green shirt sat up, cried out, cursed, and jerked out his pistol.
“Don’t be a bloody—” Sean Keegan said, but the kid shot anyway. Glass behind the three jackals shattered.
Keegan put a bullet in the heart, and that was the last fired.
“Idiot,” Keegan finished his sentence as the boy flattened onto the street, shuddered once, purged his bladder and bowels, and died with the two other damned fools.
Undertaker A. Percival Helton rounded the corner a moment later, looking as though he hadn’t gotten much sleep as of late. His eyes started gleaming when he saw the three corpses, and he sprinted to the center of the melee.
“They’re all yours, Worm,” Keegan said. “Resisting arrest. Charge it all to the county sheriff’s office.”
“That’s quite a tab you’re running,” McCulloch said as he holstered his Colt. He looked at Breen. “Was that kid wanted somewhere?”
The bounty hunter was busy chucking out his empties and replacing them with fresh cartridges. “Probably,” Breen replied. “But a punk like that, he’s hardly worth trying to claim a bounty on.”
They turned around and walked back to the corral, ignoring the stares and whispers from people beginning to line the boardwalks and streets of Purgatory City. McCulloch saw Wooden Arm. No longer standing on the corral, he had moved to the center, staring with Comanche solemnity at the three approaching men. The mustangs ran wildly in the corral but soon began to stop as the sounds of gunfire quieted and the smell of gun smoke dissipated. The Comanche boy’s good hand moved.
“What did he say?” Breen asked.
McCulloch answered Wooden Arm with his own hands first, then looked at the bounty hunter. “He wanted to know what that was all about.”
“How’d ye answer the lad?” Keegan asked.
“I told him it was . . . an error in judgment.”
“Aye.”
McCulloch turned to the Irishman. “Are you with us or are you staying?”
After a stutter, a stammer, and a sneer, Keegan smiled. “Aye. I’ll be riding with ye lads.” He looked at both boardwalks. “Sheriff Garcia will be coming back at some point, and he might question the charges that have been billed to his office. And I likely have friends at Fort Wilmont who’d buy me some fine Irish whiskey for I hear there are more saloons in that fine, bawdy town than there are in County Cork.”
“All right. I think we’d best light out for the Pecos before noon.”
“I’ll pack me gear,” Keegan said.
“Do that. But before you end your account with the county, why don’t you charge up some grub? And a wagon with some supplies. But don’t splurge.”
The former sergeant did an about-face and headed for the nearest store.
“But Sean?”
Stopping on a dime, Keegan spun around on his heel. “Sir!” he barked.
“No whiskey. Not even a dram of beer. I’m serious.”
“Ye’ll be a hard officer to serve under, sir.”
McCulloch smiled. “I’ll buy enough to put you under in Precious Metal.”
“A bloody fine deal. You’ll blow your four hundred and fifty dollars in one night, Matt.” Keegan practically danced across the street toward the general store.
McCulloch turned to Breen.
“What changed your mind?”
The bounty hunter chuckled, tilted his head, and nodded at the Wells Fargo office.
“Surely it wasn’t the price of three tickets on the stage to Precious Metal,” McCulloch said.
“No, not that at all. I just saw those bullet holes and everything, and it reminded me that’s from the raid on the jail. The one that led to all that.” His head tilted to the county courthouse—the charred part—and the school kids pointing to the black spot where the gallows had been before Sean Keegan had gone into action. “Well, it just suddenly popped into my mind that, after what your pard Mr. Keegan did to Lovely Tom Lovely, the rest of the Benteen boys will be out for blood. Sean’s blood. And”—he eased the Colt into his holster—“the Benteens are worth a hell of a lot more than Otto Kruger and Charlotte Platte combined.”
Breen’s right hand went up and punched McCulloch playfully in the shoulder. “I’ll gather my gear. Be back here with two more reluctant hired hands in fifteen minutes.”
Spinning on his heel, Breen raced across the street.
McCulloch turned around and saw the mustangs. Wooden Arm stepped into his line of vision and moved his hands.
What did he say?
McCulloch understood and tried his best to make his answer something that the young Indian brave would understand.
He signed, This is going to be the damnedest thing you ever tried, and you’re one crazy maniac to try it.
Wooden Arm studied McCulloch’s hands for a full fifteen seconds, then looked into the white man’s face for another ten, looked at the three dead men on the street, then back into McCulloch’s hard eyes. The boy grunted, nodded his head in agreement, and walked back to the mustangs in the corral.