Wells overplayed his hand.
Lordsburg was a long straggling collection of adobes and one-storey frame buildings stretching along the main trail from Las Cruces to Tucson with its road forking at the western edge of town up towards the mining towns of Safford and Globe. When he got in, Wells went directly to the telegraph office. Identifying himself, he was given a telegraph message from Washington, which he broke open there and then and read, cursing. No personnel from the Justice Department in this area. He went to the counter and asked the clerk for some paper, writing a message to the Commanding Officer at Fort Bowie in Arizona. It was succinct and peremptory.
NEED MILITARY ASSISTANCE ARREST OUTLAWS RESPON-
SIBLE ARMY PAYROLL ROBBERY KANSAS STOP
WANTED MEN HERE IN LORDSBURG TELEGRAPH
REPLY IMMEDIATELY STOP
‘Sign it Wells, Department of Justice,’ he told the clerk who looked at him goggle-eyed, his mouth open. ‘I’ll wait for the reply.’ He sat down on the hard bench that ran across one of the walls and fanned himself with his Stetson. It was as hot as the hinges of hell outside, and inside the cluttered little shack which housed the telegraph office the temperature was near to the hundred mark. He listened to the stuttering metallic chatter of the telegrapher’s key and imagined the wires loping across the long empty spaces, under the shadow of the Dos Cabezas, through the vicious lonely territory of the Chiricahua Apaches to the heat-blasted hell-hole in the very foothills of Cochise’s old stronghold — Fort Bowie.
He rolled a cigarette and smoked it. Later he smoked another, and was halfway through it when the telegrapher’s key started chattering again. He got up quickly, crushing out the cigarette on the earthen floor, and waited impatiently as the clerk wrote down the message.
When the man came across to the counter Wells snatched the paper from him and scanned it eagerly.
Then he crumpled it into a ball and threw it at the wall, giving vent to a muted oath.
Its words lingered in his mind’s eye, mocking him.
REGRET IMPOSSIBLE DETACH PATROL ASSIST YOU
DUE RECENT OUTBREAK APACHES STOP ALL
AVAILABLE MEN AT FULL READINESS HOSTILITIES
STOP GOOD LUCK STOP
It had been signed by the Commanding Officer of the Fort.
Wells turned to the clerk.
‘Where can I get a room?’ he asked.
‘Hotel’s up the street a couple o’ blocks, Mister Wells,’ the clerk said. ‘Turn right as you leave.’
He watched the tall lawman leave and then scuttled around the counter and picked up the crumpled piece of paper Wells had left on the floor. Crossing quickly to the door, he checked that Wells was indeed on his way to the hotel, and then ran back to his desk, switching off the machine. He let himself out of the back door of the telegraph office and ran up the alley until he came to the adobe wall which stood behind the hardware store.
There was a gate in the wall, through which he let himself, running up to the back door of the store and into its cool darkness.
‘Johnnie here?’ he asked the slatternly woman behind the counter. She looked up and nodded. ‘He’s aroun’ heah someplace,’ she said listlessly, then screamed
‘Johnnneeeee!’ Several screams later a freckle-faced lad of about twelve poked his head warily around the screen door and said ‘Huh?’
The clerk beckoned him forward and pushed a silver dollar into his hand. ‘You get on your pony an’ ride out to the Cravetts place with this note, son,’ he said. ‘You tell Mr. Cravetts I sent you an’ he’s to give you another dollar.’
The boy looked at him with wide eyes. ‘Two whole dollars? he said.
‘Get goin’ now, boy,’ the clerk said. He watched anxiously as the boy ran out to the corral alongside the building and threw a saddle and blanket on the pinto standing in the shade. The boy whirled off in a cloud of dust, heading southeast as straight as an arrow, and the telegraph clerk watched him go and then slowly smiled, the anxiety lifting from his shoulders. Dick Cravetts was the biggest rancher in these parts, and he had made an arrangement some time ago with the telegraph clerk that anything of especial interest going across the wires should be passed on to him. He said it helped him with his business, and the clerk figured it must, since every time he had passed on items of information, Cravetts had given him twenty dollars, one time fifty. This Justice Department business would be worth another gold eagle sure, the telegraph clerk told himself. He walked back to his office with a wide smile on his face, tipping his derby to two women shopping in the street.
They gave Wells absolutely no chance at all.
He was in a cantina on the east end of town when the four men came in out of the night. Two of them sat at a table, and the other two went to the bar, one on each side of Wells. He did not notice them at first, for the place was crowded and noisy, but eventually he looked up and saw the man along the bar on his right. The tow hair gleamed dull gold in the lamplight and the man grinned at Wells and raised his shot glass in a mock salute. Wells checked to the left, where he saw a big man with a broken nose standing, left arm on the bar, right hand hanging loose near a holstered six-gun. He cursed himself silently for his own stupidity, his mind racing to find a way of giving himself any kind of a fighting chance.
He turned around slowly and then his heart sank completely. At a table in front of him was sitting a man who could only be, from the description that Wells knew by heart, Dick Cravetts. He smiled, showing fine strong white teeth.
‘Mr. Wells,’ he said. ‘Understand you’re looking for me.’
His voice was hardly raised and yet everyone in the place heard what he said. The phrase was in no way unusual, and yet within fifteen seconds the room was cleared, with everyone who had been in there outside on the sidewalk, craning to see through the windows and over the top of the batwing doors.
‘You’re Cravetts? Wells said.
Cravetts nodded. ‘On my left, here, Frank Torelli. By the bar, on your right Johnnie Vister; on the other side Lee Monsher.’
Wells nodded. ‘The telegrapher?’ he asked.
‘Right first time,’ Cravetts said. He lifted the hand that had been concealed beneath the table and showed Wells the Navy Colt held in it.
‘Not even a fighting chance? Wells said. He was breathing very softly, tensing up slowly for the next thing he was going to have to do.
“Not even,’ Cravetts said and eared back the hammer.
In that moment Wells went up on his toes and over the bar backwards. He was in peak condition and trained to a hair, and his movement startled Cravetts enough to fire hastily. The .36 caliber slug hit Wells’ right hip as he flipped backwards on his shoulders and whacked his body around so that he fell in a sprawling heap behind
the bar, the lower part of his body a tearing mass of pain.
Now everything he had learned in fourteen years with the Justice Department came into play and the gun which had already been in his hand even as his back hit the bar came up and boomed into the face of Johnnie Vister as he jumped up on to the bar for a clear shot at the sprawling lawman. Vister’s face dissolved into a red smear and he went over backwards in a huge whirling pile, smashing tables and chairs to kindling as his heavy body landed. Cravetts and Torelli were both on their feet moving crabwise across the cantina towards the corners of the room and Lee Monsher was on the floor in front of the bar. He gave a thumbs up signal to Cravetts and emptied his gun through the thin timber facings below the heavier bar, spacing the bullets about six inches apart. They tore through the soft wood like butter, and would have cut Wells apart had he been able to move.
That he had been badly hit, however, the raiders did not know, and Monsher’s shots went wild. Cravetts scuttled for the end of the bar near where Vister’s grisly corpse lay and dived full length for the floor, coming around the bar enough to throw a shot behind the bar where he thought Wells might be. The bullet would have taken the lawman about belly height had he been crouching where Cravetts expected him to be, but Wells was still lying on his back and the bullets whined over him. He fired at the flash of Cravett’s Navy and his bullet burned a long furrow down the man’s back from left shoulder to buttock. Cravetts gave a long scream of pain and rolled out of range cursing as Lee Monsher, his gun reloaded, vaulted over the bar in one smooth sweeping leap. He came down with both heels on Wells’ outstretched legs.
Wells’ head went back against the dirt floor as the terrible pain smashed into his brain and he felt nothing as the tow-haired man kicked the gun out of his hand.
‘OK,’ Monsher said, standing up.
Cravetts was standing now as well, blood spreading a dark stain across the back of his shirt. He cursed at the pain of movement and snarled ‘Bring him around here!’
Monsher and Torelli dragged the half-conscious lawman around the bar and dumped him on the floor.
Cravetts picked up a whiskey bottle and poured it on the man’s face until he spluttered and tried to sit up.
‘Hold the bastard!’ he snapped. Monsher and Torelli half lifted Wells upright, while Cravetts slapped his face openhanded and contemptuous, until Wells moaned and opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the sentence of death written in Cravetts’ eyes, and he waited for the shocking pain of the final bullet.
‘No,’ Cravetts said. He let the rage seep out of his eyes.
His iron will was assuming control, straightening him up, cold and pitiless as a warring Apache.
‘Lawman,’ he said softly.
Monsher and Torelli looked at him and then stepped away. Wells swayed, trying to keep his feet. The pain in his wounded hip was white and intense but he would not let himself go down on the floor again.
‘Lawman,’ Cravetts repeated. ‘I’m going to let you live. But only so that you’ll be a living reminder to your Justice Department friends of what will happen if they send anyone else after me.’
‘You don’t … you don’t think anything you … do to me will stop them, do you?’ Wells managed.
‘Be interesting to find out,’ Cravetts said, and shot Wells through the right thigh. Wells screamed and fell writhing on the floor, blood gouting from the shattered mess of flesh and bone. His hands thrashed on the dirt floor and blood spilled from his mouth where he had bitten right through his tongue. Cravetts laughed and then shot Wells’ right hand to bits. There was a terrible silence, for Wells’ was unconscious, deep in the blackness of total agony. Gunsmoke swayed in the still air. Torelli and Monsher looked at their leader with white faces.
‘We oughta kill him, Dick,’ Monsher said.
‘No,’ Cravetts said softly. ‘Let him live. He’ll never walk properly again, never use a gun with that hand. He’s finished.’
‘He knows what we look like,’ Torelli said, nervously. ‘Who we are.’
‘So what?’ Cravetts said. His grin was like Satan’s death mask. ‘Tomorrow we head out for California. No more waiting. Johnnie’s gone. Milt an’ Howie aren’t here and the deadline is past. We split the money three ways and disappear.’
‘What about the ranch?’Monsher said.
‘Sold, two months back,’ Cravetts grinned. ‘The money’s already in the Cattleman’s Bank in San Francisco.’
He looked down at the maimed thing on the cantina floor and spat on it.
‘Vamonos!’ he said.