Chapter Seventeen

 

HAWK COULD STAND upright in his present cell, which he had not been able to do in the cave across the clearing. The pain from his brutal wounds was subsiding. His right ankle, which he thought might be sprained or broken, was only bruised. He could walk on it without pain.

Through the thick planks of the floor above, he occasionally heard Keegan’s bellow. Doors slammed. There was a rattle of tin dishware as someone evidently cleared the tables of empty plates.

He thought about Amalie, her brave rescue attempt, and his dark face became somber. Hawk smashed a fist into the palm of his hand. Somehow he had to escape, take the girl with him.

A step beyond the door alerted him. He put his back to one of the heavy timbers that braced the floor above, and waited tensely. He heard the click as the big padlock was opened.

The door swung open, and Thomas Spate entered with drawn gun. Spate drew the door closed, scrutinizing Hawk with a yellowish gaze.

Gesturing with the .44, Spate ordered Hawk to back up. Hawk retreated to a point beneath the trap door.

Spate said, “You never did have brains enough to know when you’re licked.”

Facing his enemy, Hawk recalled everything he knew, of the man. Was there an Achilles heel? Vanity, was that it? He eyed the faint gleam of the gun barrel aimed at his midriff.

“You’re right,” Hawk agreed, forcing himself to speak calmly, “I never know when I’m licked.”

“I said you don’t have brains enough to know. A smart man would never have bought into this game in the first place.”

“Maybe my hatred is bigger than my good sense.” Hawk stretched his taut lips in a grin. “It goes back a ways.”

“And mine for you,” Spate said. His large thumb with its trimmed nail was rigid against the hammer of the .44.

“We can settle this,” Hawk said.

“Oh, it’ll be settled, never fear.”

“If you’ve got the guts, let’s step outside. Give me a gun. We’ll face up to who’s the better man.”

Spate gave a mirthless chuckle. “You’d like to think you’re clever enough to goad me into accepting your most generous offer.”

“You lack the guts to face me!”

Spate’s laughter filled the small evil-smelling cellar with its odors of stale food and rodents and dust. “You seem to ignore the fact that all I have to do is remove my thumb from this gun hammer and it’s all over.”

Hawk snorted. “You got this far by luck and treachery. I’ll wager my life against yours that I can outdraw you.”

“Hell, I can kill you any minute I choose, Hawk,” Spate pointed out. “I taught you everything you know. One of the important items being never to give your enemy a chance.”

“I remember well.”

“The chance I won’t give you. So save your energy. I have no intention of standing up to you in a gunfight.”

“Because you’re yellow clear to your heels,” Hawk said roughly.

“I’m only keeping you alive this long,” Spate said, his voice beginning to take on an edge, “in case I need you as bargaining agent for the ransom.”

“That’s not why you’re here now.”

“Just why am I here?” Spate seemed amused again.

“You think you can taunt me.” Hawk made his voice shake; he shook a fist. And as the fist was raised he slid his right foot forward an inch, then his left. “Make me beg or ask for some kind of a proposition that will save my neck.”

“Oh, it isn’t your neck that’s in danger,” Spate smiled. “Although hanging would be preferable to the other forms of death I’m considering for you.”

Hawk’s feet slid carefully forward once again.

“If you slide your feet toward me one more inch I’ll break your leg with a bullet.” Spate glared at Hawk, who felt a rivulet of cold sweat break down his back and soak into his blood-stained shirt. He mounted a different horse, realizing he could not reach Spate with talk of standing up to him with a gun.

“If you figure to kill me, all right But not Amalie Hitchburn.”

“I intend to make her suffer,” Spate said bluntly. “She’ll die in the end, of course.”

“As Lila French died.” And Hawk was rewarded when Spate’s bearded features darkened.

“She deserted me for you,” Spate snapped. “But only because I had to abandon her. I needed to convince my friends that I was on their side, not hers.”

Hawk laughed, pressing on. “You had no friends,, neither North or South. You played one against the other. And all your conniving got you nothing. The mills and factories you tried to protect were razed anyway. Just as this kidnapping won’t net you one two-bit piece. You’re dead and you know it.”

Spate’s cheek began to redden. “I think you have our positions slightly reversed, Hawk. You’re the one dead, or soon will be.”

Spate’s hand tightened on the .44. “I want to know who else is in this exchange besides Hitchburn and Granfield—the exchange that saved your neck for the return of the woman.”

“Don’t kill her, Spate.”

“Answer my question!” He looked at Hawk in the shadows of the cellar.

“You enjoy killing.”

“There is a certain satisfaction, yes,” Spate agreed coolly. “Although, at one point, I did briefly consider taking Amalie along.”

“But Keegan talked you out of it.”

“Keegan hasn’t got one damned thing—” Spate broke off, glancing at the ceiling. For some time there had been no sound of footsteps in the room above, no subdued voices. Spate continued in lower tones, his gaze once again settling on Hawk. “I’m the one who makes the plans.”

“And double-crosses everyone. As you figure to do to Keegan.”

Spate’s lips twitched through the trimmed beard. “You keep on and I might just give Amalie Hitchburn’s husband a real surprise. Lash you and the Hitchburn girl together. Get a larger cowhide, of course. Now that would be a sight for Hitchburn to see. You and his wife, entwined to the death.”

“Go to Hell.” Hawk spat in the space between them.

“Hawk, I branded you once. You were younger then, more able to withstand the shock of that red hot iron. Maybe now you’d break completely.”

“I tell you one thing, Spate. If I end up dead in this, I’ll be waiting for you right inside Hell’s front door.”

“Oh, you’re going to end up dead, as you put it.” Spate laughed again. “How you die is the only point open for discussion.” He gestured with the gun. “If you weren’t the victim in this, I swear, you’d be the type to get enjoyment out of it.”

“I never enjoyed killing just for the sake of killing.”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t get some satisfaction out of slaughtering those men at the gates,” Spate charged, no longer amused.

Hawk lifted a shoulder, eyeing the gun barrel so steadily pointed at his navel. “They were scum, those men of yours.”

“You and I are out of the same mold, Hawk.”

“And your friend Booth—was he out of the same mold?” Hawk said suddenly.

“I didn’t have one damned thing to do with that!” Spate’s voice was dangerously quiet.

“But you killed Lila French when she found out about the plot and wanted to alert the North—”

“You son of a bitch, you never did learn to keep your mouth shut! I am going to sew you up in that cowhide with Mrs. Hitchburn. Before that, I’ll let the men have their way with her. You of course, Hawk, will be the last of her lovers!”

Rage blinded Hawk. “No Colonel!”

Spate’s laughter rang metallic in the dim cellar. “So you suddenly remember rank.”

“Even you can’t be evil enough to—” Hawk threw his hands toward the roof of the cellar, then suddenly flashed downward. Desperately, he tried to slash at the gun barrel with one hand, to reach Spate’s throat with the other.

Spate, caught off guard momentarily, took a hasty backward step and fired. But Hawk had twisted aside. In the swift move, a bullet burned like a whiplash across the back of his left hand, numbing it momentarily. His right fist smashed into Spate’s face. But Spate, recovered now, jerked his head aside. Knuckles meant for the jaw scraped his cheekbone. But with sufficient force to drive him back against the door.

Before Spate could fire the pistol again and regain his balance, Hawk caught the right wrist, slammed it and the gun against one of the posts that supported the flooring above. Grunting with pain, Spate dropped the revolver. In desperation he tried to reach under his shirt for his other gun.

“Keegan!” Spate bawled. “Birnham!”

Hawk drove an elbow into the throat so that the last word ended in a strangled cough. “Goddamn you, Hawk!” Spate managed to get out, and as he spoke he brought up a knee, but Hawk avoided the thrust

Faint light suddenly penetrated the cellar as the trap door swung open and crashed back against the floor, shaking it. A weapon winked dully red in the opening. Its bullet ripped into the cellar door a few inches above the heads of the struggling pair.

“No guns!” Spate cried. “It’s too dark to see!” Again he tried to reach the weapon under his shirt. Hawk’s fingers clawed open the shirt, dislodging a small revolver which fell to the earthen floor and was kicked by one of them in the struggle so that it thunked against a far wall.

Sounds of a ladder dropped from above made Hawk break away from Spate. Spate took the moment to rip open the cellar door behind him, to let in more of the fading sunlight. Doubled over to minimize the target, Spate plunged out into the yard, shouting the alarm.

As two men started clumping down the ladder from above, Hawk scooped up the .44 he had forced from Spate’s hand. The pair on the ladder began to jerk at triggers, aiming in his general direction, probably not even realizing what had hit them. He had shot both of them off the rungs. Soundlessly, they toppled to the cellar floor, one on top of the other, bleeding into the hard-packed earth.

From upstairs came the thump of boots as other men raced outside to try to cut him off from the yard. They had not realized that the pair descending the ladder were already dead.

Without wasting motion, Hawk sprang up the ladder, landing on knees and left hand on an Indian rug, surprising the one man left in the communal dining room. Hawk’s right thumb yanked on the gun hammer and the man looked strangely saddened as a bullet exploded into the heart.

The gunshot in the house alerted those outside. Hawk heard them shouting, running now. Below in the cellar other men milled around. He fired down through the trap door, into the crown of a dirty hat, and he saw the man’s skull explode, spattering brains and bone about the cell.

Another man tried to scramble up the ladder and Hawk fired into his face. Bits of the skull flew into the face of the man behind him who was trying to gain the ladder. Hawk emptied the revolver into the cellar, then slammed the trap door shut. A bullet cut through the planks to smash into a lamp on the mantel of a stone fireplace. Coal oil began to spread across the floor.

“The son of a bitch is inside!” somebody shouted. “Get him!”

Dropping the empty pistol, Hawk snatched up the rifle, one of the men had dropped. Barely pausing, he seized a shotgun from wall hooks beside the fireplace. The rifle under his left arm, he stopped to make sure the shotgun was loaded, then ran out the door and across a front porch.

Somebody cut loose at him with a rifle, the bullet chewing into the porch rail. He landed heavily in the yard. The back of his left hand holding the rifle showed a long pucker where Spate’s bullet had creased him.

As he straightened up, three men charged around a corner of the main house and broke apart, yelling, when they saw the shotgun. One fired a pistol, but its bullet slammed into the eaves as Hawk cut loose with both barrels. Above the roar he heard one piercing scream; two already dropped without a sound, unrecognizable because they had taken the deadly sweep of pellets head on. The third man rolled about in the dirt, holding his belly.

Feeling nothing for any of them, Hawk began to sprint through the trees and toward the small house where Amalie Hitchburn was a prisoner.

“There he is!” came Kyle Keegan’s bellow.

Hawk, at a zigzag run, heard the dull thud of rifle bullets into tree trunks. One slapped into branches overhead to bring down a shower of pine needles. Then followed a whang of ricochet so close that he was momentarily deafened.

At a hard run, the shotgun abandoned, a rifle swinging in his right hand, he rounded the small house, thundered up the steps of the narrow veranda.

Meg and Trudy stood white-faced just inside the door, but offered no resistance as he caught Amalie by a wrist. He dragged her into the bedroom without speaking.

“Thank God you came—” she managed to blurt.

Glancing out the bedroom window, Hawk saw a man creeping toward the house, one arm lifted high in a signal to someone behind him. Hawk shot the arm and it dropped like a railroad semaphore. The man reeled and screamed. Behind him, two more men tried to snap off shots at the hawklike visage glimpsed in the window. One bullet smashed into the window frame, another cut cleanly through glass above Hawk’s head. He dropped to his knees.

“We got him!” cried one of them and began to run again. Hawk, abandoning the ruse, shot the man in the thigh. The man behind him spun around and ducked back into the shelter of the pines. Hawk knocked him sprawling.

“Come on!” Hawk gestured for Amalie. When she hung back, he seized her by the hand.

“They … they’ll kill us if we go outside,” she whimpered, her large blue eyes filled with fear.

“Stay here and you’re sure to be dead!” He hauled her to the window, leaped out and reached in to hook an arm about her waist. Long, scented hair brushed his face as he swung her through the window to the ground.

“I’ve never been shot at,” she gasped.

“Keep behind me!” he ordered. “Use my body as a shield!”