Chapter 3
As Abel stepped onto one of the boardwalks fronting the businesses on the main street’s north side, a gun cracked and a girl screamed from the direction of the Wolfwater Inn, dead ahead of him now, two buildings away.
He increased his pace, hardening his jaws and quietly jacking a live round into his carbine’s action. The large plate glass window of the Wolfwater Inn was aglow with guttering umber lamplight. The watery light angled down onto the boardwalk fronting the place. As Abel stepped up onto the boardwalk, six feet from the orange glow, he stopped and pressed his right shoulder against the building’s adobe brick wall.
Doffing his hat, he edged a look through the dirty glass.
“I said Dance!” a man’s voice yelled.
There was a flash and a loud pop and the little dove, who stood in front of the table where six rough-looking men in dusty trail garb yelped, began to shuffle her bare feet, dancing, as the boisterous men lifted the hem of her gauzy cream nightgown above her bare ankles. Well, it wasn’t really dancing. She was just moving her pale, delicate bare feet to keep them from getting shot off.
Sleep ribbons jounced in her hair.
The man who’d fired the shot was none other than Frank Thorson himself. He sat with his knees spread wide, another little doxie perched on the right one, her arms around Thorson’s neck. She was a dark-eyed brunette who looked about as thrilled at the doings in the Wolfwater Inn as the little doxie doing the dancing while she stared down at her feet and sobbed.
The other men, including Skinny, sat around the same table as Frank, laughing as they swilled whiskey from shot glasses and beer from soapy mugs.
Abel could see several other girls poking their heads out from the dark mouth of a hall straight out across the room from him. Abel knew that down that dark hall was where Jed Timmerman’s girls plied their trade. Now they watched in horror as Frank Thorson continued to fire his six-gun at the feet of the girl the other girls likely considered as close as any sister. One of them, a tall Mexican with Indian-dark skin, was sobbing into the hand that a pretty blonde held over her mouth.
Timmerman himself stood behind the bar on the room’s far left side, looking ghostly pale, uncertain, and weary, clad in a pale cotton nightgown and with a pale cotton night sock on his head.
“That tears it!”
Anger overriding his reticence, Abel set his hat on his head and, holding his Winchester up high across his chest, pulled away from the window and tramped straight ahead along the boardwalk. He pushed through the batwings, took two long steps inside, and stopped, the louvered doors clattering back into place behind him.
He fired a warning round into the ceiling above his head, causing dust and plaster and bits of pressed tin to sift onto the floor around his boots, and yelled, “Hold it right there, Thorson!”
As the thunder of his shot continued to echo around the cavelike room, Abel jerked the cocking lever down, ejecting the spent, smoking cartridge, which clattered onto the floor over his right shoulder. He slammed the lever up against the gun’s frame, seating a fresh round in the chamber, and said, “You’ve had enough fun for one evening. Toss that hogleg away and have your boys, including Skinny, do the same with theirs. You’re all coming with me!”
His back to Abel, Thorson froze in his chair, holding his smoking six-gun straight up in his right hand, behind the back of the girl sitting on his right knee. The other men, including Skinny, had jerked their gazes toward the big, potbellied lawman standing in front of the batwings, tracking each of them with his carbine, narrowing one eye as he gazed down the barrel.
Silence hung over the saloon.
Thorson’s men, including Skinny, suddenly all looked sober as judges.
Yeah, Abel thought, trying not to smile. Yeah, yeah, see? You still got it. This ain’t as hard as you thought it would be, is it? You got ’em all dead to rights!
It helped, of course, that Thorson’s men were all distracted by the girl. Still . . . pride made Abel stand a little straighter, squaring his shoulders, and made him spread his feet a little wider.
There were six in Thorson’s bunch; Abel’s carbine held fourteen rounds. Thirteen remained. Six men against thirteen rounds. Let Frank do the math.
Maybe that was what the outlaw leader was doing now as he stared straight ahead at the little doxie who’d stopped dancing and stood with her head down, one pale foot resting atop the other. She held two fistfuls of her nightgown just above her hips. Maybe Frank was going over the odds, wondering how fast Abel was with the carbine.
Whatever he was thinking, the back of his neck above the collar of his gray shirt was beet red, and Abel didn’t think that was from sunburn alone.
Inwardly the lawman smiled.
“Drop it, Frank.” Abel kept his voice low, but hard. “I won’t tell you again!”
Suddenly, too quickly for Abel to follow or realize what was happening, Frank lurched up out of his chair. At the same time, he closed his right hand, his gun hand, around the girl’s waist, picking her up off his knee. As he swung toward Abel, a shrewd grin on his savage, mustached face, and a deadly glitter in his gray eyes, he held the girl in front of him, her bare feet dangling two feet above the floor. Quick as an eye blink, he’d switched his .45 Colt to his left hand and, holding the girl with his right arm, he raised the Colt to her left temple, and ratcheted back the hammer.
“Tell me one more time, Marshal!” Frank barked. “Tell me one more time how it’s gonna be!”
He chuckled as he dipped his chin and drilled Abel with his evil-eyed gaze. “Toss yours down or the girl gets her head blown off!”
Just as suddenly as Frank Thorson had gained his feet and swung toward Abel, using the girl as a shield, the confidence in Abel softened into an embarrassing mush he could feel in his knees.
No! he silently railed against it. You still have the upper hand here, Wilkes! Don’t forget who you are! You’re the man you’ve always been! Only your confidence has waned, that’s all!
He steadied the carbine in his hands, kept aiming down the barrel, this time at Frank Thorson’s left eye, above and to the right of the girl’s head. “Kill her and you die.”
Frank glanced at Skinny and the men to his right as he faced Abel. All looked a little constipated as they sat in their chairs, hands on their pistol grips, but leaving the hoglegs in their holsters. They were just drunk enough that they were having trouble figuring out what they ought to do.
“Kill me an’ they kill you!”
“Dead is dead, Frank! Think it over, Frank!” Abel hooked his own hard smile, staring coldly down the barrel of the carbine at Thorson’s left eye. “You ready to die here tonight?” He cut his gaze quickly toward the appropriately named Skinny sitting on the far side of the table from where Frank had been sitting and was now standing. “Are you ready to die here tonight for that little whore-killing punk you call a brother?”
Yeah, yeah. You still got it, Capable Abel Wilkes!
Skinny leaped to his feet and leaned over the table before him, yelling, “You go to hell, Wilkes. You kill my brother an’—”
“Sit down, Skinny,” Frank said through gritted teeth. “Sit down an’ pour yourself another drink. The marshal an’ me—we’re just havin’ a little understandin’, that’s all.”
“Drop the gun, Frank,” Abel insisted, keeping his hands and the Winchester steady, and mighty impressed with himself for doing so, his confidence continuing to grow. “Drop the gun. Have your boys drop theirs, and we’ll all live to see another bright, clear West Texas morning.” He smiled, enjoying himself now, already seeing in his mind’s eye himself hazing Frank Thorson and his worthless brother and the four other men over to the hoosegow.
Don’t go ridin’ into Wolfwater thinkin’ Capable Abel Wilkes is all used up, they’ll say. Hell no! Why, just the other night he filed Frank Thorson’s horns for him, locked him up with Skinny in the same cell Frank done broke Skinny out of! Ha!
“Drop the gun, Frank,” he said again, even quieter this time.
He could see the doubt in Frank’s eyes. The fear.
Yeah, he had Thorson on the run. Frank Thorson feared death, same as any man.
The saloon was so quiet that Abel thought he could hear a mouse ratcheting around under one of the floorboards near the room’s rear. He could hear the quick, raspy breaths old Jed Timmerman was raking in and out of his lungs behind the bar.
Meanwhile, Capable Abel Wilkes held the carbine steady in his hands. If he could have seen his own eyes now, they’d appear steely. Yeah. No fear in his eyes now. None of the fear he and Bethany had seen in them only a few minutes ago.
He stared into Frank’s eyes. They were cast with both anger and . . . fear. Abel took great satisfaction in that. He still had it, by God! He could still take down even an owlhoot of Frank Thorson’s caliber!
Finally the outlaw leader pulled his gun away from the whore’s head in disgust and said, “All right, fellas, drop your gu—”
“Dad!” came a cry from the night outside the Wolfwater Inn. It was Beth’s voice. No, couldn’t be. Beth is home. But then, the familiar, female voice came again, shriller this time, sort of gasping, sobbing. “Dad! Oh, God, no. Please! You’re hurting me!”
Abel’s heart thumped against his breastbone.
His hands holding the carbine shook a little.
Still, he kept the Winchester aimed at Frank Thorson’s head.
Only, the fear had suddenly left the outlaw leader’s eyes. Now the man shaped a slow smile beneath his blond mustache.
Abel could hear several sets of footsteps out on the street. They were growing louder.
Beth’s voice again: “Dad!” A man laughed and there was the sharp crack of an open hand laid against a face.
Beth screamed.
More laughter from out on the street, growing louder as the men and Beth approached the Wolfwater Inn.
“Dad,” Beth sobbed. “I’m so sorry, Dad! I didn’t . . . I didn’t hear them until . . . they were already in the house!”
Abel clenched his jaws as he continued to stare down his carbine’s barrel at Frank Thorson’s head. His grinning head.
“Thorson, you demon!” he bit out.
Thorson laughed. His snake eyes drew up at the corners as he said, “Sent two men after your deputy, Wilkes. Figured they’d lead us to you . . . to your daughter. Was expectin’ you, ya see.” He clucked and shook his head. “Darn fool.”
Outside, Beth screamed again. There was the thud of a body hitting the street.
Beth wailed, “Please . . . why are you doing this?”
Frank raised his .45 to the doxie’s head again, clicked the hammer back. “Drop the carbine, Wilkes,” he said through an oily grin. “Or this girl gets kicked out with a cold shovel. That girl out there, though,” he added, speaking slowly, raw menace in his evil eyes, “is going to die oh . . . so . . . very . . . slooooww!”
Outside, there was another sharp crack. Beth screamed again. There was the unmistakable sound of cloth being torn.
“No!” Beth sobbed.
Abel turned his head slightly to his right to shout through the window, “Let her go, you devils!”
Outside two men—the two men who’d followed Bushwhack to the Wilkes house—laughed. Beth sobbed.
When Abel returned his gaze to Frank Thorson, the man’s .45 was no longer aimed at the doxie’s head. It was aimed at him.
Thorson grinned, cheeks dimpling to either side of his thick blond mustache. The .45 blossomed smoke and fire. The bullet ripped into Abel’s right shoulder.
It was a large, hot fist ripping the carbine out of his hands and throwing him straight back onto a table. Groaning, clutching his bloody right shoulder with his right hand, he rolled off the table and onto the floor. The table came down on top of him. Lying on his back, raking breaths in and out of his lungs, he gritted his teeth against the searing pain in his shoulder as well as against the screams and cries of his daughter on the street beyond the big plate glass window.
Hearing the slow thump of footsteps growing louder, watching a long shadow slide toward him, Abel groaned as he slid his right hand to the old Colt holstered on his right hip. He groaned again as he began to slide the .44 from the holster. Then the long, tall shadow slid over him, the table was kicked away, and he looked up to see Frank Thorson standing over him, grinning, his devil’s eyes flashing beneath the flat brim of his low-crowned black hat.
The outlaw leader held the cocked .45 straight down along his right leg.
Abel froze in horror, watching the .45 slowly rise, hearing his daughter sobbing and groaning and complaining in the street to his right.
Abel grimaced up at Thorson as the grinning outlaw aimed the cocked .45 at Abel’s head.
“Please,” Abel begged, hating the fear he heard in his own voice. The desperation. “Let her . . . go! She . . . she . . . she’s a schoolteacher, for Pete’s sake!”
Thorson chuckled. Beneath the man’s malicious laughter, Abel could hear the drumming of the footsteps of the outlaw’s men and his brother, Skinny, most likely, striding quickly toward the batwings and out onto the street.
They were whooping and hollering and laughing in goatish celebration.
“No!” Abel said through a strangled wail. “Please . . . for the love of all that’s merciful—noo!”
Thorson laughed. “All that’s merciful don’t include me!”
Abel watched in frozen terror as the outlaw’s right index finger drew back against the .45’s trigger.
That was the last thing he saw before everything went dark.