Chapter Thirty
Elmer looked around in the alley behind Foley’s Lodging House. “Looks like maybe a buckboard, or a small wagon, pulled by a team of horses. More ’n likely it was a buckboard, I’d say. The wagon waited back here for quite a while. But wasn’t only the wagon—they was riders back here, too.”
“How do you know?”
“See them turds there? Horses takes a shit ’bout ever two hours. There’s too many turds for ’em to all have come from one team. And as much as there is, you have to figure they was standing here for anywhere from half an hour to an hour. And there wouldn’t be no reason for horses and a wagon to be hangin’ around here in this alley, if they wasn’t waitin’ on somethin’. If you was to ask me, I’d say after she was took from the room, she was brought out here and put in a buckboard.” Using a stick, Elmer began a closer examination of the horse apples.
“Also, these here horses ain’t been stabled for a while. No oats, no hay. They been eatin’ nothin’ but grass for the last week or so.”
Elmer started tracking the buckboard, while Duff kept pace with him.
“Looks like they was headin’ south,” Elmer said.
They were about a mile south of town when they found the marker from Meagan. Duff spotted it first.
“Look at that, Elmer,” Duff said, pointing to a nail with a tiny bit of cloth. “That is nae accident.”
“No, it ain’t!” Elmer said, laughing. “That’s a smart woman you’ve got, Duff.”
“I’m goin’ into town. I want the rest of you stay here and keep an eye on the woman,” Johnny said.
“I’ll keep more ’n an eye on her,” Blunt said.
“No, you won’t,” Johnny replied. “You keep your hands off her. That goes for all of you. You don’t do nothin’ to her ’til I say you can. Like I said, I’m goin’ into town to do a little horse tradin’. If we can’t work somethin’ out, and by that I mean if we can’t get Emile turned loose, then we’ll give the woman back to ’em anyway. Only if that happens, MacCallister ain’t goin’ to like the way he gets her back.”
“Who gets her first?” Calhoun asked.
“We’ll play high card for her,” Johnny said. “Highest card goes first, then on down the line.”
“Hell, I don’t care where I am,” Blunt said. “As long as I get my turn.”
Megan listened to the men bartering for her with a mixture of fear and revulsion.
It was midmorning when Duff and Elmer reached Chimney Rock. Dismounting, Duff pulled his Creedmoor rifle from the saddle sheath. Then he and Elmer continued on foot until they reached a butte that extended north from the east-west Chugwater range. They climbed to the summit of the butte, lay on their stomachs, and began searching the canyon floor before them, each of them using binoculars.
“There they are!” Elmer said. “Up there in that far corner, by Needle Rock—do you see them?”
Looking in the direction Elmer pointed, Duff saw Meagan and four men. Meagan was sitting on the rocky ground just at the base of the Needle, and one man was standing right next to her. Two were standing several feet apart, and a fourth was acting as a lookout, perched on a rock about twenty feet higher than the others.
“What would you make the distance to be, Elmer? About six, or seven hundred yards?”
“At least seven hundred yards,” Elmer said.
“Aye, seven hundred. That’s what I was thinking as well. I’ll take care of the lookout first. Then the one that is standing the closest to Meagan, then the other two.”
“That’s goin’ to be one hell of a shot,” Elmer said.
As Meagan contemplated her future, she couldn’t help but be filled with trepidation. The one that the others had called Ike was standing very close to her, staring at her with eyes that were filled with lust and evil. His proximity to her was making her very nervous.
“You know what, girlie? I ain’t goin’ to wait on Johnny to get back,” Ike Thomas said. He rubbed himself, smiling obscenely at her. “No, sir, I ain’t goin’ to wait at all. Start takin’ off them clothes.”
“I have no intention of taking off my clothes,” Meagan said, trying to keep her voice as steady as she could.
Thomas pulled his pistol and pointed it at her.
“Take ’em off, or I’ll shoot you and take them off of you myself.”
“If you are going to touch me, I’d rather be dead when it happens, so go ahead. Shoot me.”
“I ain’t bluffin’ you, woman.”
“Neither am I,” Meagan said, defiantly.
“What are you doin’, Ike?” Blunt asked.
“I aim to have my way with this woman,” Thomas said.
“You heard what Johnny said. We ain’t supposed to touch her.”
“Yeah? Well, that don’t mean we can’t look at her, does it? Take off them clothes, like I told you to. Me ’n’ the others is goin’ to get us a look at a naked woman.”
“I have no intention of taking off my clothes.”
“You’ll either take ’em off now, when you ain’t hurtin’ nowhere, or I’ll shoot you in the leg and take ’em off of you. That way you’ll be hurtin’ and naked.”
“Yeah,” Calhoun said. “Johnny didn’t say we couldn’t look at her naked. Hey, Harper, you better take a look down here. This here woman is about to give us a show.”
Harper stood up and walked over to the edge of the rock, then looked down on the others.
“Have her move out here where I can see her too. Come on, girlie, give us a . . . uhhnh!”
Harper pitched forward off the rock, then fell head first, striking his head on the rocks below. He lay motionless where he hit.
“Son of a bitch, he fell off!” Thomas said.
There was no sound for a full second. Then they could hear, in the distance, the barely audible thump of a gunshot.
“What the hell was that?” Calhoun asked.
Blunt moved quickly to Harper, then turned him over onto his back. His eyes were open, and unseeing. There was a big, dark red hole in the middle of his chest.
“Uhnn!” Thomas said, and blood, bone, and brain matter sprayed from the side of his head.
“What the hell! Somebody is shooting at us!” Blunt said.
“Who!” Calhoun shouted. “There ain’t nobody here!”
This time, Calhoun heard the bullet as it came whizzing in. It struck Blunt in the middle of his chest, and he reached down to slap his hands over the wound. Looking down, even as the low, flat sound of the shot that hit him came rolling across the distance, he saw the blood spilling through his hands. He looked up at Calhoun.
“I’ve . . . been . . . kilt!” he gasped, just before he fell.
Calhoun started shooting wildly, pulling the trigger repeatedly until the gun was empty and all that remained were the echoes of the shots as they came rolling back.
“Where are you?” Calhoun shouted.
While Calhoun’s attention was diverted, Meagan reached down and slipped Blunt’s pistol from the holster.
“Who are you? Who’s doin’ all that shootin’?”
“I expect it is Duff MacCallister,” Meagan said.
Calhoun whirled around toward Meagan. “Come here, woman!” He shouted. “I’m going to . . .” He stopped in midsentence when he saw Meagan holding a pistol. She had it aimed at him, and she had already pulled back the hammer.
“You are going to do nothing but stand there without saying so much as one word,” Meagan said.
“Ha! Meagan’s got the drop on him!” Elmer said. “Come on, let’s go down there.”
It took a few minutes to cover the distance between the place where Duff had established his firing point, and where Meagan was standing with her prisoner.
“Good job!” Duff said when he and Elmer arrived. “Why, you didn’t even need me.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. After all, you were some help,” Meagan replied, teasingly.
Elmer was wheezing and breathing hard from the exercise of the long walk over uneven, rocky ground.
“Clay Calhoun,” Elmer said. “Where is Johnny Taylor?”
“The son of a bitch run out on us,” Calhoun said. “He left us here to die.”
“He not only ran out on you, Calhoun, he took all the money,” Duff said.
“No, he didn’t.”
“Are you sure?” Duff said. “We know that two days ago, there was a deposit of thirty-five thousand dollars made to a bank in Cheyenne in Johnny Taylor’s name. He not only stole from you, he stole from his own brother. Where did he get that money, if he dinnae get it from the money you took from the bank in Chugwater?”
“He couldn’t have done that,” Calhoun said. “This is the first time we have been back here since we buried the money.”
“You’re sure? It does nae bother me—you are goin’ to jail anyway. You’ll be tried for bank robbery and murder, while Johnny Taylor goes off to Denver, or San Francisco, or some such place to enjoy his ill-gotten gains.”
“I hear he’s plannin’ to buy a saloon in San Francisco,” Elmer said. “He’ll get rich as Croesus, while you ’n’ his own brother will hang.”
With a frustrated shout, Calhoun ran to the base of the Needle. He moved several rocks aside, then started digging with his bare hands.
“He wouldn’t do that! If he did, I’ll kill him with own bare hands! Half that money is mine! He promised me!”
Duff, Elmer, and Meagan watched quietly and unobtrusively as Calhoun became more and more agitated, digging faster and faster.
“Where is it? Where is it? Damn it! He had no right! He said that we would share the . . .” He stopped for second, then, with a shout of triumph, began to pull out the four rolled-up shirts, each shirt containing a share of the loot from the bank robbery.
“Ha! Here it is!” he shouted triumphantly. He held up one of the dirt-encrusted shirts. “I told you that he couldn’t have come back for the money, not without me know . . .”
Calhoun stopped in midsentence as he saw the expressions on the faces of the people in whose hands his fate now rested.
“You—you knew he hadn’t come back for the money, didn’t you? You just said that to trick me in to showing you where the money was.”
“Aye, lad, ’twas a bit of chicanery,” Duff admitted.
“You bastard!” Calhoun shouted. Moving quickly and unexpectedly, he stepped toward Meagan, who had, with the arrival of Duff and Elmer, let her guard down.
Calhoun stepped around behind her, put his arm around her neck, and began to squeeze.
Duff saw Meagan’s eyes begin to flutter, and he realized that Meagan could be gone in seconds, choked to death.
Then, Meagan, who was still holding the pistol, found the strength to point it at Calhoun’s leg and pull the trigger. Calhoun went down, screaming in pain.
Meagan returned to Chugwater in the same buckboard that had taken her out of town, but this time she was driving it, and the person who was tied up in back was Clay Calhoun.
“We’ll stop at the jail,” Duff said.
“Jail! I need a doctor!” Calhoun complained. “You can’t take me to jail before I see a doctor!”
“We’ll send for the doctor after we get you in jail,” Duff promised.
“That ain’t right,” Calhoun said. “It just ain’t right.”
When they reached the jail, Elmer continued on down the street to the doctor’s office, while Duff ordered Calhoun out of the buckboard and into the jail.
“I can’t walk,” Calhoun said. “Can’t you see I’ve got a bullet hole in my leg? That damn woman shot me in the leg.”
Marshal Ferrell, who was in the office then, came out when he saw and heard all commotion. He arrived just in time to hear Calhoun complain that the woman had shot him in the leg.
“You are the one that shot him, Miss Parker?” Marshal Ferrell asked, surprised at the revelation.
“I am,” she said.
“Why did you shoot him in the leg?”
“Because I couldn’t get the gun high enough to shoot him in the head.”
Duff, Marshal Ferrell, and Deputy Pierce, who had also come outside, laughed.
“Come on, Calhoun, inside with you.”
“I can’t hardly walk on this leg,” Calhoun said. “It’s hurtin’ somethin’ fierce.”
“Well, I can fix you right up,” Deputy Pierce said. “I’ve got a crutch inside that I’m hardly using anymore. I’ll lend it to you just so’s you can walk far enough for us to throw you in jail.”
“Clay! What the hell?” Emile said. “What are you doing here? Where’s my brother?”
“Where’s your brother? I’ll tell you where he is. He ran out on us, that’s where he is. You, me, and him, we are the only three left alive. And he is the only one who is still free.”
“Don’t worry about it. Johnny will get us out. I know he will.”
“You are a fool, Emile. We all were to trust him.”
“He’ll get us out. He told me he would, and I believe him. And if he can’t get us out one way, he’ll get us out another. He said if it came to it, he would hire the best lawyer he could find.”
“How is he goin’ to pay for that lawyer?”
Emile smiled. “What do you mean? I didn’t get to see any of the money, but I’ve done heard that we got over forty thousand dollars from the bank holdup. There ain’t a lawyer in the country you couldn’t hire for two hundred dollars.”
“Yeah? Well, we ain’t got the money no more,” Calhoun said.
“What do you mean we ain’t got the money no more? What happened to it?”
“We hid the money out, but it got found,” Calhoun said without further elaboration.
“So you mean we done all this for nothin’?”
Schumacher chuckled. “Looks like you boys have been left suckin’ hind tit.”
“What’s he doin’ in jail?” Calhoun asked.
“They thought he had somethin’ to do with you boys takin’ the dress-makin’ woman.”
“What the hell made them think that? He didn’t have nothin’ to do with it.”
Marshal Ferrell returned then and, going straight to Schumacher’s cell, opened the door to let him out.
“Sorry, Francis,” he said.
“You were listening?”
“Yes.”
“Marshal, you are short a man without Frankie Mullins. I’d like to come work for you again, if you’ll have me.”
“No more roughing up the prisoners?”
“No more, I promise.”
“All right, stop in the office. I’ll swear you in again, and pin the badge back on.”
“Thanks.”
When the two returned to the office, Marshal Ferrell opened the middle drawer of his desk, pulled out a badge, and pinned in onto Schumacher’s shirt.
“Welcome back, Francis,” Deputy Pierce said.
“Thanks, Willie. It’s good to be back.”
Within half an hour after Johnny left the canyon, he heard the gunshots. Thinking perhaps a posse had located his men, and not wanting to get caught up in the gun battle, he waited until he saw the buckboard heading back to town. The woman was driving the buckboard, and he recognized the two flank riders as MacCallister and Gleason.
Where were the others?
He waited until the buckboard was out of sight before he went back. Even before he got there, though, he knew what he was going to find. The buzzards circling overhead told him that.
As he got farther down into the canyon, the number of circling buzzards increased. Now, many of the big, black birds were diving toward something on the ground, and as he approached Needle Rock, Johnny saw what it was. There, drawn together so that they were lying side by side, were the bodies of Blunt, Thomas, and Harper. He didn’t see Calhoun.
For a moment, Johnny was angry. His entire gang was gone!
Then, as he thought about it, he realized that if everyone was gone, the money they had taken from the bank was his, all his. He was rich!
With no more than a cursory glance toward the macabre scene of the three bodies, Johnny moved quickly to the base of the Needle to dig up the money.
As soon as he got there, though, he could see that there had been digging. A lot of purposeful digging.
“What the hell?” he said aloud. “What is this? Who has been digging here?”
With a feeling of anxiousness, Johnny dropped to his knees and began digging. He threw the rocks aside, and dug like a man possessed. His hands became bloodied and bruised, but that didn’t slow him down as he slashed through the soil, tossing the dirt aside.
He knew within the first few minutes of digging that he wasn’t going to find anything. He knew, and even as he could feel the sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, he refused to tell himself the truth.
The money was there, it had to be! All he had to do was dig a little faster.
Then, when he was much deeper than he knew they had gone, he stopped digging. It was now obvious, even beyond his own irrational hope. The money was not there.
“No!” he shouted, the angst-ridden word echoing and reechoing through the canyon.