39
One miner who witnessed the fight later called it one hell of a battle, and the old ghost town of Bell City would forever after be known as Hell City.
The rain stopped during the night and the sky became star-filled. By dawn, Layfield’s men were in place, and there was nothing for the defenders of Hell City to do but stand and fight; for Layfield’s men now were located at each end of the ghost town, and escape for the defenders was impossible.
“This reminds me of the time I was surrounded by about five hundred Kiowa,” Preacher said. “That was back in the late ’40’s, I reckon it was.”
Audie rolled his eyes, knowing Preacher was about to launch into another of his tall tales. Lobo began pulling up clumps of grass and sticking them in his ears while Jamie laughed at the antics of the men.
“They’d ambushed an army supply train, but didn’t know there was about a thousand or so rifles scattered out among the wagons and cases and barrels of shot and powder. I couldn’t run nowheres, my good hoss had pulled up lame, so I started loadin’ up them rifles just as fast as I could. I must have loaded up near ’bouts two/three hundred of them rifles ’fore them painted-up Injuns realized I was there. They’d been busy torturin’ them what was left alive. When they seen me, here they come, a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ and a-shriekin’ like devils. I commenced to firin’ just as fast as I could pick up one rifle and let ’er bang and lay it down and pick up another one. Them Kiowa never seen nothin’ like that. They’d charge and I’d bang. I was firin’ them rifles like pistols, one in each hand. The smoke was so thick you couldn’t see. They was dead Kiowa a-layin’ all over the place. It was a sight, let me tell you. We fought near ’bouts all morning’ ’fore them Injuns finally give it up and went ridin’ off, carryin’ their dead. That was a hell of a fight, let me tell you that, boys—and you, too, Miss Hannah.”
Audie stared at him for a moment. “Why, you misbegotten old reprobate, what has that to do with our present situation?”
“Well, I don’t rightly know,” Preacher replied. “It just reminded me of it, that’s all.” He walked off to take up his assigned position.
“There was about a hundred of them Kiowa,” Sparks said.
“You mean the story is true? ” Cord asked.
“Yep. Most of it. Preacher must have kilt or wounded forty or fifty Kiowa ’fore they give it up and rode off.”
“ ’Course it’s true,” Preacher said, pausing in the street to point toward the rear of the building. Then he walked off.
Audie thought about the stacks and stacks of rifles and belts of ammunition that had been retrieved from the dead and wounded of Layfield’s and Ellis’ men after their abortive charges. “There was a moral to the story after all,” he muttered. “But getting it out of that old buzzard is sometimes as difficult as shaking hands with a grizzly.”
The defenders began loading up Henry rifles and Colt pistols and passing them around. “This will give us a little better chance,” Cord said, just as he left the room with an armload of rifles and pistols.
“For a fact, we ain’t got much of a chance,” Sparks said, heading out the door and to his position near the east end of the town.
They looked up as Smoke’s pistols barked twice down at the west end of the street.
“The first ones who reached us did not make it very far,” Night Stalker called from across the street.
“It’s been nice knowin’ you folks,” Lobo said. “I reckon our string’s done run out. But I aim to take a bunch of them bastards with me.”
He was carrying a load of weapons that would have staggered a big mule.
“Here they come!” Preacher hollered. “And we didn’t kill near ’bouts as many as we first thought neither! They’s swarmin’ like bees.”
Jamie stepped out onto the warped boardwalk, his hands filled with Colts. He emptied the pistols into knots of men rushing into the streets from all sides and watched them fall. He holstered the empties and filled his hands with Colts pulled from behind his belt. The morning was bright, sunny, and rapidly turning bloody in the Colorado Rockies.
Hannah shouted out in Shawnee and used her now-empty rifle as a club, smashing heads until she went down under a mob of blue-shirted men. Jamie did not see his old friend fall, but when her shouting ceased, he knew she was gone. It filled him with a rage he had not experienced in years. He turned toward where he had last heard her shout and emptied Colts that filled his fists into the mob of men. Then he picked up two Henry rifles and began firing them, twirling the rifles like batons to work the levers. A bullet nicked one arm, another bullet slammed into a post and sent slivers of wood into his face, and yet another round burned his right leg. Jamie stood like a rock, loaded rifles leaning against the store front, within arm’s reach. He would empty two and grab up two more. The street became thick with gunsmoke and ringing with the pitiful cries of those wounded.
“A thousand dollars for the head of Jamie MacCallister!”
Jamie grabbed up two fully charged pistols and two rifles and ducked back inside the building, running the length of it and exiting out the back door. He turned and came face-to-face with a handful of blue-shirted Revengers. It was too close for rifle work, so he started swinging one rifle like a club. He heard skullbones pop and jaws break under the impact. Dropping the now stock-broken rifle, he grabbed up a Henry from one of the downed men and ran up the alleyway just in time to stand, watching through horror-filled eyes, as Cord stepped out into the street, both hands filled with pistols. Cord had changed clothes. He was now wearing his old Confederate uniform, from his cavalryman’s boots to his gray, gold-braided hat.
“Come on, you Yankee bastards!” the former plantation owner shouted. “Meet the gray one more time.”
Cord began firing as fast as he could cock and fire. Jamie watched his body soak up lead, but the man stayed on his boots, exacting a fearful toll from the blue-shirted men only a few dozen yards away. He emptied his pistols and sank to his knees in the muddy street, the front of his gray coat soaked with blood. Dropping the empties, Cord pulled out two more pistols from his sash and kept on firing. Cord Woodson died on his knees in the street. But he would not fall over; he remained on his knees, facing the enemy. One more insult to the blue-shirts.
Jamie stepped out of the alleyway and gave the remainder of the men who had killed Cord their final insult: he filled them with lead and watched them fall. Jamie dropped those empty pistols and the empty Henry and jerked out his last two Colts.
Night Stalker screamed out insults from a rooftop and leaped down into a knot of now badly disoriented and frightened men, a knife in one hand and a tomahawk in the other. He began cutting flesh and splitting heads. His body jerked time after time as bullets tore into him, but the Nez Perce warrior would not go down that easily. When he finally fell, he was surrounded by a sea of blue, dead and dying.
Dark Hand, one leg broken by a bullet, and blood streaming down his face from another wound, painfully hauled himself to an upright position, tied himself to a hitchrail, and began screaming insults in Cheyenne. The surviving defenders of the battle of Hell City found him there after the fight; the Cheyenne warrior had suffered over a dozen gunshot wounds before dying. A pile of blue-shirted bodies lay in a semicircle all around him.
Jamie saw a man cautiously making his way up the street, staying close to the buildings, ducking in and out of doorways, and turned to face the man.
“Step out into the street, you yellow-bellied bastard!” Jamie called over the hammer of gunfire.
“MacCallister?” the man shouted.
“That’s right. Who are you?”
“I be Clyde Ellis and I’ve come to kill you, MacCallister.”
The two men were oblivious to the waning sounds of battle around them.
“You can try,” Jamie called.
Clyde stepped out from the doorway. “I’ll just do that,” he said.
“I doubt it,” Jamie replied, and shot him twice, one slug taking the man in the chest and the second slug tearing open his throat.
Carl Miller could see that the battle was nearly over, and they had lost. It was incredible. Nine men and one woman had defeated a superior force. It was time for him to haul his butt out of this death trap.
“You going somewhere?” the voice stopped him and turned him around.
Carl faced a young man, no more than nineteen at the most. He grinned. The fool had his pistols in leather. “You damned stupid little pup!” Carl said, and lifted his rifle.
Carl’s eyes could not follow the blur of the draw. Gunsmoke bellowed from the pistols and gunfire hammered the morning. The last thing Carl Miller thought before he died was that no man alive could hook and draw that fast.
Smoke Jensen turned and saw that the battle was over. The main street of Hell City was littered with the dead and the dying and the wounded. He looked around for his mentor, Preacher, and a smile creased his lips as his eyes found the old mountain man, walking up the boardwalk toward him.
“By God, now that was a purdee good fight, boy!” Preacher called. “We skunked ’em good, we did.”
Preacher’s eyes found the hitchrail-tied body of Dark Hand and the bloody body of Night Stalker. “Damn!” he swore.
Audie stood over the battered and bloody and almost unrecognizable body of Hannah and slowly shook his head. “I shall never meet a braver woman,” the little man said. Audie had suffered two wounds: one in the side and the other one in his left arm.
Lobo lumbered into the street and picked up his little friend just before Audie hit the ground and carried him off to tend to his wounds.
Sparks had a bullet crease on his noggin and a burn on his leg. Preacher and Smoke and Lobo were unscathed. Jamie stepped out into the street and looked around him. He had four minor wounds, including a slight head wound that dripped blood down onto his face and shirt.
“They’re hightailin’ out, Jamie MacCallister!” a miner shouted from the slopes of the pass. “Headin’ north, they is. ’Bout thirty of ’em, all told.”
Jamie waved at the man. “Let’s bury our dead,” he said.
“That there was a brave man,” Preacher said, pointing to the body of Cord, dead on his knees in the muddy street. “He needs some fittin’ words on his marker. You got airy?”
“Yes,” Jamie said, wiping the blood from his face. “We’ll burn into his marker these words: ’His last hand was a good one.’ ”
* * *
Jamie buried Hannah Indian fashion, along with Dark Hand and Night Stalker. He buried Cord, dressed in his full Confederate uniform, on a lonely ridge overlooking a pretty stream and using a hot iron, burned the words HIS LAST HAND WAS A GOOD ONE, into the marker. The miners came down from the slopes and pitched in, helping to bury Layfield’s and Ellis’ men. They were buried in a mass grave and the spot marked with the date of their death. Then Jamie, Audie, and Sparks tended to their wounds.
The guns, horses, and remaining supplies of those who had come west to kill Jamie were given to the miners.
Preacher and Smoke rode out, followed the next day by Lobo, Audie, and Sparks. The day after that, Jamie pointed his horse’s nose toward home. On a hill overlooking the deserted town, Jamie paused to look down at Hell City for a moment, then lifted his eyes to the graves of his friends: Cord, buried on the south side of the town; Night Stalker, Dark Hand, and Hannah, laid to rest on the north side of the pass.
Jamie raised a hand in farewell and then lifted the reins. “Let’s go home, Lightning. I think we’ve both earned a good long rest after this nonsense.”
* * *
Thirty miles away, to the north, Aaron Layfield and what remained of his army were camped, seeing to their wounds and wallowing in hatred for Jamie. And there was plenty of hate to go around. Aaron had sent a messenger back east to notify the kin of Clyde Ellis of the tragic events that had befallen their relatives. Those who had escaped with the slightly insane colonel of the army of Revengers and part-time lay preacher were the most dedicated and hard-bitten of his men, all veterans of the War Between the States. Aaron had asked those men if they would stay with him, to plan a way to rid the world of Jamie Ian MacCallister. They had all agreed to stay.
“We shall one day be victorious,” Aaron declared, after an hour of praying and receiving what he considered to be a sign. “For God is on our side.”
The sad thing was, Aaron Layfield really believed that.
* * *
Jamie rode into his valley and slowly swung down from the saddle, his kids and grandkids and great-grandkids gathered around him. It was quite a crowd.
Kate pushed her way through the children to stand staring up at her man. “Is it over now, Jamie?” she asked.
“It is as far as I’m concerned. But Aaron Layfield got away with some of his men. I can’t speak for him, Kate.”
“Tell us where he went, Pa,” Falcon said. “We’ll ride over and clean out that nest of snakes once and for all.”
“Hush,” Kate told her youngest. “Let’s talk of peace.”
“There ain’t gonna be no peace until this fool Layfield is in the grave, Ma,” Morgan said. “We might as well get it done now.”
“Don’t sass your mother, boy,” Jamie said, and Morgan shut his mouth.
“Hannah?” Kate asked.
“Laid to rest the way she wanted, Kate. She and the Swede are together on the starry path.”
“Did she die well?”
“That she did. Audie said he had never met a braver woman.”
“Then all the ones who came west with us are gone.”
“I suppose so,” Jamie said, experiencing a weight of sorrow for a moment as his eyes drifted to the cemetery with its rows of neat headstones, marking the resting places of good friends. He looked at the hundred or so members of the MacCallister clan and said, “Let me rest and bathe and eat, then I’ll tell you all what happened.”
When no one showed any inclination to leave, Kate put her hands on her hips and said, “Move!”
They moved.