Mason charged into the main house with the hunting rifle in his hands. He stomped inside and kicked the door shut behind him before yelling, “It’s only me, Allison.”
From upstairs, Allison shouted, “I heard shooting next door.”
“Yeah. It turned out all right. Stay in that room, though. I’ll let you know when it’s safe.”
“All right,” she said.
Mason picked a spot in the front room where his back was to a wall and he had a clear line of sight to the front door as well as to the bottom of the staircase. He took a knee, held his rifle in the closest semblance to a firing stance that he could manage, and waited.
It wasn’t long before he heard voices outside but couldn’t tell if they were coming from the road or the river. Mason quickly realized it was both, since the voices rose into shouts with gunshots quickly following.
“All right,” he whispered. “Here we go.”
Most of the gunfire sounded like pistol shots, but Mason wasn’t absolutely certain. When the shooting waned, the shouting flared up. And when firing commenced again, the shots came quicker and closer together.
Fierce shooting.
Enraged, desperate voices.
The gunshots ripped back and forth until Mason thought they simply wouldn’t stop.
Finally something heavy battered against the back door of the house. Mason shifted to point the rifle in that direction to see who might be coming.
Footsteps thumped against the floor as a familiar voice drifted through the air. It was one of Greeley’s men and he rushed toward the stairs.
Mason pulled his trigger and put the man down.
Outside, the shooting had stopped.
The front door swung open and Seth Borden walked inside.
“Sir,” someone shouted from the porch. “Let me go inside first. I heard a shot.”
“I know!” Seth said. “I heard it too and my family’s in here!”
Mason stood up with the rifle held in a loose grip across his body. “What happened out there?”
“Oscar Lazenby brought a few men with him as deputies. Men fresh out of the army, mostly. I brought ’em all here and when we showed up, a group of them gun hands in gray suits were coming out of the trees. I imagine you heard the rest.”
“Any of those gunmen left?” Mason asked.
“One or two. They’re being trussed up so they can be brought to the local law. How about you tell me what happened in here?”
“This one came in, probably looking for the papers or someone to use as a hostage. He didn’t find either.”
“That’s not Greeley.”
A few other men walked inside behind Seth. One was a tall, gangly fellow with a trimmed beard and a few strands of dark hair hanging from beneath his bowler hat. Seth hooked a thumb toward him and said, “That’s Oscar Lazenby.”
Lazenby tipped his hat. “I don’t suppose you’d know where we can find Cameron Greeley?” he asked in a smooth British accent.
“Yes,” Mason replied. “I believe I do.”
* * *
The Delta Jack was sitting less than a quarter of a mile from Seth’s dock. When Mason, Lazenby, and a few of the federal deputies boarded her, there were only a couple of overmen to be found. Since the hired guns weren’t idiots, they surrendered to the superior numbers without a fight. Mason himself went straight to the main theater and headed for the office in the back. Just for his own amusement, he knocked on the door before entering.
“Come in,” Greeley said casually from the next room.
Mason opened the door and stepped inside. “Hello, Cam.”
“Where’s them hostages?” Greeley asked as he got up and walked around his little desk.
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what? That you’re gonna get your teeth knocked out before I toss you over the side of this boat? Oh, I know that real well.”
Smiling, Mason said, “Do you see any gray suits around me? That’s because there aren’t any left. They’re either dead or under arrest. Now come on out and get what’s coming to you before things get even worse.”
Greeley scowled and flipped his jacket open to uncover the pistol hanging at his side.
“Give it a rest,” Mason said. “If you were any good with that thing, you wouldn’t have so many gunmen around to keep you from getting those soft hands dirty.”
“What did you just say to me?”
“I’m saying I’ve played this game long enough to have you figured front to back. You’re a sniveling little coward who isn’t even good enough to be called an outlaw. At least most outlaws have some sand to them. You can’t even stand up to a mercantile inspector, let alone steal a boat properly.” Mason wasn’t worried about speed when he drew the Remington from his shoulder holster. His read on the man in front of him was spot-on, since Greeley didn’t so much as twitch toward the gun he’d so proudly displayed. “Lose that pistol,” Mason said.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Greeley said rather unconvincingly as he gingerly removed his firearm and threw it into a corner.
Mason reached into an inner pocket and pulled out a bundle of folded papers. Slapping the papers onto the desk, he said, “There’s the legal documents you were after. How did you even get your hands on this boat anyway? Actually, forget I asked. Even if you stood there and explained it all to me, I don’t care. All those men on your precious list are alive and well, which means you had a good run but it’s over now.”
Greeley walked right over to him and sneered. “You’re real tough right now on account of those guns you’re wearing.”
“You’re afraid.”
“Of you? Hardly.”
Mason removed his shoulder holster and tossed it into the corner where Greeley’s pistol had landed. As he removed the sawed-off Remington and tossed it there as well, he said, “You’re afraid of losing what you’ve got. Any gambler worth his salt will tell you that’s a fatal weakness.”
“Close that door and we’ll see who walks out of here.”
“You’re also afraid of witnesses,” Mason said while walking to stand in the doorway. “That’s why you wanted Simons dead. Because he knew all about you hiring murderers and sending them off to have good men killed just to suit your needs. He also knew who, exactly, your first overmen were. He had names and I’m sure at least a few of them have a bone to pick with you. What’d you do? Cheat them on their pay? Hang some of them out to dry when they got caught by the law while on one of your filthy errands? Any one of those sounds about right, coming from you. At the very least, Simons could connect you to known murderers, and that’s something you simply cannot abide.”
“You’re dead.”
Mason reached into the pocket where he’d stashed the last weapon smuggled from his cabin. “I knew you would say something like that, just like I know you’re not going to make a reach for any of those guns. You rely on hired muscle too much. They’re good, but once they’re gone you’re vulnerable.”
“You’ve got nothing but a lot of talk on your side,” Greeley said. “Whatever you’ve done to distract my men, it won’t last forever.”
“You think I was bluffing about your men? Damn, how the hell did I lose that hand to you?” Mason slipped the knuckle-duster onto his right hand and closed his fingers around the curved iron brace. He looked down at the dented strip crossing his knuckles and then to the little sharpened spike emerging from his fist. “I am really going to enjoy this.”
Greeley stood tall and confident that he could not possibly be harmed while on the holy ground of his precious Delta Jack. Mason convinced him otherwise by slamming a reinforced fist into Greeley’s stomach.
Greeley straightened up and took a swing at Mason in return. He missed his first attempt but connected on the second, which was a strong left hook. “You misread me again, Abner,” he said as he drove a quick uppercut into Mason’s midsection. “That’s why you’ll always be a loser.”
Even though Mason was surprised at how well Greeley took that first punch, he didn’t let that prevent him from delivering a few more. The first two were jabs to Greeley’s chest. The next two went to the ribs. When wearing a knuckle-duster, picking the proper targets was essential if a man wanted to keep his opponent awake or alive.
“You wanted me to be the one seen going after Simons,” Mason said while continuing to pepper Greeley with punches. “And you wanted me to be seen leaving Sedrich just like you wanted me to be seen going after Seth Borden. That way, I could take the blame for whatever happened to them.”
Greeley pulled in a labored breath. When he tried to stand upright, he didn’t quite make it. “You weren’t supposed to make it out of Sedrich alive, but you did and you ruined the sweetest deal any men like us could hope to get. After how you carried yourself through this, I was thinking about cutting you in on the profits from this gold mine. Now you’ll get nothing!”
Thanks to the difficulty Greeley had in drawing breath, Mason could see the next punch coming at him from a mile away. He stepped out of its path and pounded the knuckle-duster into Greeley’s face. That dropped Greeley to one knee, where he spat some blood onto the expensive carpet.
“I’m getting my reward right now,” Mason said.
“Lazenby will hurt all of us,” Greeley wheezed. “Damn near everyone on this boat has cheated and we all got things to hide. That inspector woulda found out about me and my overmen, but he woulda found out about you too! I was protecting all of us!”
The fight had taken them into the theater. There was nobody onstage at the moment, but most of the tables were filled by people who couldn’t believe what they were seeing and were unwilling to look away. “None of us is putting our necks on the block for you or those bloodthirsty animals on your payroll,” Mason declared. “Isn’t that right?”
Nobody in that room was about to disagree.
Gritting his teeth, Greeley reached down to expose one boot so he could pull out the.32 holstered there. He stopped before drawing the weapon when he felt the knuckle-duster’s short blade pressed against the side of his neck.
“If I so much as twitch right now,” Mason warned, “this part of your neck gets opened up and you bleed out like a stuck pig in less than a minute. You really want to take a shot at me that bad?”
Greeley eased his hand away from the holster and let out a tired sigh when Oscar Lazenby and his deputies walked in through the theater’s main entrance.
“I would’ve paid my debt,” Mason said. “But you wanted more than that. You wanted to run me into the ground, step on me to get what you wanted, and then bury me just because it suited you. Well, since you got so greedy, you won’t get anything you were after. I didn’t kill Simons, but I also got him stashed somewhere safe so when you’re put in front of a judge and witnesses are needed to prove you guilty, Simons will provide them. Seth Borden and his family are alive, so the old man will get his boat back. He’ll name it after his girl and Mr. Lazenby will surely help him get his permits. You’ll be the one hung up and left dangling, Cam. All because you got greedy.”
“I’m gonna—”
“Enough idle threats,” Mason said. “You see all these folks here? They spend their days and nights sitting at card tables, swapping stories, and right now I’m giving them a good one to tell. They’ll spread the word about how your big, bad overmen were swept away and you were dragged out of your office to be beaten down for all to see.”
Greeley looked up at him and said, “I’m not down yet. You don’t have the—”
Mason hit Greeley with all he had, square in the jaw. Greeley flopped back, bounced off the leg of the closest table, and fell facedown on the floor.
“That was impressive,” Maggie said as she approached them.
Mason straightened up, removed the knuckle-duster, and wrapped an arm around Maggie’s waist. “I suggest we do ourselves a favor and leave,” he said.
“Why?” she asked while Lazenby and his men swarmed around Greeley.
“This boat is about to change ownership and I doubt it’ll bode well for the atmosphere around here. Greeley may have been a slimy bastard,” Mason said with a tired grin, “but he ran a damn good casino.”