Trev Rawley wasn’t dead, but he was damned near it.
He lay on a pile of straw in the livery stable, where Ed Fischer’s men had brought him. The panicked horse had tangled itself in some scrub behind the house across the street; Dick Boyd had sent a couple of men over there during a lull in the firing. They had carried the bleeding hulk down along the arroyo beneath the bridge at the south end of town and up behind the houses to the stable.
Big Ed looked down at the mess of Rawley’s face and body and he shuddered. Raw, pulped, a mass of torn flesh with great skinless patches that looked like peeled tomato, the marshal’s whole frame was an obscene mess of black and yellow and purple and bloody red, the clothing hanging in tattered strips, stuck to the dozens of deep gashes and ragged cuts which oozed blood on to the heedless straw. His hair was matted and thick with dried blood, his throat an awful raw thing totally stripped of skin by the searing rope. Rawley’s voice was totally gone: he could not speak, nor cry out in search of relief from the scouring, burning agony which was devouring him. Twisting, whimpering, he rolled and bucked on the makeshift palliasse, lost in some mad red world of pain.
“God damn you!” Big Ed said to the thing on the ground.
Dick Boyd heard the words, and came over to stand beside Fischer.
“Take it easy, Ed,” he said, softly. “He’s bad hurt.”
“Good,” snapped Fischer savagely. “If it hadn’t been for him we wouldn’t be bayed up here like some wagon train full of pilgrims in Comanche country! If it hadn’t been for him being led like some kind of stinking circus animal in front of the whole rotten town, we’d have just rode in and taken Mister Angel like that!” He snapped his fingers to show how easy it would have been. “Instead of which, the bastard is forted up in the strongest building in town, it’s damned near nightfall, and it’ll take . . .” His voice trailed off and he looked thoughtful.
“Who the hell is in there, anyway?” he said softly.
“Dunno,” Boyd told him. “But whoever it is, they can shoot. By the sound of the gun, it’s Doc Day. Angel and the kid, of course, we know are in there. Mebbe others: I dunno. But those bastards can shoot, Ed. We’ve lost half our men, and I’ve got three others wounded.”
“You see,” Fischer said, kicking the ruined sole of the marshal’s boot. “You see?”
Trev Rawley rolled his head from side to side, his eyes staring and wide, clouded with immense pain. If he understood what Ed had said, there was no sign of it.
“All right,” Fischer said, “Get a couple of men over to the store. See if there’s any blasting powder in there. If there is, bring everything you can carry down here!”
“Blasting p— ?” Dick Boyd’s mouth fell open. “But Ed—you aiming to blast them out? What about Joe? The whole place will go up! You can’t—”
“Can’t?” roared Ed Fischer. “Can’t?”
He caught the man in a viselike grip, smashing Boyd back against the wooden wall of the stable, shaking the door-frame. Boyd’s breath whistled out of his body, and he shook his head in panic.
“You—tell—me—I—can’t?” snarled Ed Fischer.
“No, Ed—no,” Boyd managed. “No!”
“I can do anything I want to do!” Fischer told him, releasing his hold. Boyd slumped back, eyes wide with fear. “My stupid brother got himself in this mess. Expects me to get him out the same way I always have. Well, the hell with him! This time I look after Number One! Number One!” Fischer shouted, smacking his fist against his chest. If he noticed the astonished look of his remaining riders, he did not show it.
“Well?” he roared at Boyd. “Get at it, damn you!”
For a moment, Dick Boyd just stared at his leader, and then he broke and ran, tapping two of his men on the shoulder and running crouched from the back of the stable across the alley to the rear of the saloon and again to the store next door to it.
Twenty minutes later they were back. They had blasting powder in cans, coal-oil, caps, everything they needed.
“Now,” Fischer gloated, looking out of the shattered window towards the looming hulk of the jail, a solid darker blur in the shadowed darkness of the street outside. “Now, you stinking rats! Let’s see how you like these apples!”
Apart from a few sporadic shots from across the street, it had been quiet since nightfall. Doc had boiled up some pretty revolting coffee on the big potbellied stove while they took stock of their situation. They fed some of the bitter, hot brew to the kid, who was sitting up, but wincing every time he moved his wounded shoulder.
Angel confessed himself somewhat puzzled by the fact that Fischer and his men had not tried to rush the jail. They had everything going for them: superior weight, more firepower. It didn’t figure, unless Fischer’s crew had been more badly hurt than he thought. He tried to recall how many men he’d seen in the rushing moments when the column had thundered down the street. Ten, twelve? It was hard to say. He looked at Doc’s powder-grimed face, the wrinkles at the corners of the medico’s eyes looking as if they had been painted on white. Dick was alert now, and if worst came to worst, could probably handle a pistol with his left hand.
“I sure as hell could use a skillet of bacon and eggs,” the kid said with a wry grin. “How about you?”
“Sure,” Angel said.
“Maybe we could just step up the street to the Chinaman’s and get us some,” Doc suggested.
“Love to,” Dick Webb said, playing the tired joke along. “But right now business is a little confining.”
They fell silent for a moment, then Dick Webb spoke.
“Frank,” he said. “You think we’ve got any chance at all?”
Angel shrugged.
“Hard to tell,” he said. “If your sister can make it through to Fort Union, or even Springer, we can pull through.”
“Hell, don’t try that on me,” Dick Webb said. “That’s a good two day’s riding.”
“Don’t spit on your luck,” Angel said. “They might run into a patrol.”
“And pigs might fly,” the doctor said. “What the hell are those guys shooting at now ?”
The cause for this question was another heavy outburst of firing directed against the front of the jail. The guns boomed and boomed again across the street, flashes of lancing flame streaking out from the windows and doorways of the livery stable. They heard the flat whack of lead smashing into the adobe, and Angel turned toward the doctor with a quizzical look, his eyebrows raised.
It was at that moment that the explosion happened.
The jail was built in the shape of a thick “L,” with its lower arm fronting the street. In the upright, the two big cells were paralleled by a corridor which had a door at its far end, behind the building, through which the prisoners were taken to the latrines. Another door halfway along this corridor led into the big room in which Angel and his friends were si ting. It burst open with a tremendous crash, tearing from its hinges and smashing into the corner of the room as the enormous explosion ripped half of the wall behind the jail apart with a thunderous roar.
With a shouted warning to Doc Day, Angel’s hands flashed for his guns as three men loomed dark and huge in the doorway, misted in swirling dust and fumes, their guns blasting wildly through into the room. Angel threw himself to one side, and his own gun blazed four times as he rolled across the floor. Two of the dark shapes folded to the floor in front of him. Behind him he thought he saw Dick Webb thumbing a fast shot into the murk, but he had no time to look longer.
He moved out fast into the hallway, stumbling over fallen brick, guns up and ready as he saw a man running towards the back of the jail across the open ground outside. He saw the man’s gun come up and fired in the same instant that the running man did. A streak of red hot pain touched Angel’s body beneath his right arm and he spun off to the left, smacking against the wall of the cells, half falling in the jumbled darkness. The man outside cartwheeled over and down and Angel didn’t see him anymore.
Then there was a moment of complete silence, as if God had ordained a moment for the living to identify the dead. Angel turned around and there behind him was Joe Fischer, stepping over the fallen door of his cell. A gun in his hand and the feral light to murder in his eyes.
“Angel?” he said.
Doc shot him from about three feet away with the Sharps, and Angel would remember the awful meaty smack of the bullet hitting Joe Fischer’s body for many and many a long nightmare. Joe’s whole body was smashed against the adobe cell wall as if some mighty hand had swatted him like a fly, and he slid down into the rubble, leaving a ghastly smear streaking the wall.
Day stepped into the broken corridor, his eyes glaring through a mask of adobe dust. There was blood on his shirt, and Angel put out a hand to touch it, but Doc smiled and waved him away.
“It’s from Dick’s shoulder,” he said. “I’m all right.”
His reassuring tone suddenly altered, his eyes widening as he looked over Angel’s shoulder.
“Fire!” he shouted. “They’ve set the place afire!”