CHAPTER 36
As Slash raised his rifle, the lead rider bellowed, “Get ’em!” and rammed his spurs into his cream’s loins. The horse whinnied and lunged into a turf-chewing gallop as the rider raised his own carbine straight out in his right hand.
“Take him, pard,” Slash yelled. “I got the one behind him!”
The first man’s carbine cracked beneath the howling wind.
Pecos, who’d shrugged his twelve-gauge off his shoulder, took the cannon in both hands and tripped one of its two triggers. The first man screamed as the buckshot tore into him, turning him into a big yellow bird in his yellow rain slicker as he flew straight back out of his saddle, flapping arms and legs that served poorly as wings.
He hit the ground on his butt and rolled, his hat flying off in the wind.
The horse shot straight up the street past Slash and Pecos and Lisa, laying its ears back and whinnying shrilly.
Slash drew a bead on the second rider galloping toward him. The Winchester barked, and the second rider cursed sharply as he dropped his own rifle. He fell back and sideways down his horse’s right hip. Only his head and shoulders hit the street.
His right boot had gotten caught in his stirrup, and he screamed again in agony as the horse dragged him straight off up the street on the heels of the fleeing cream. The scuffed snow slush behind him was blood-painted pink.
Slash pumped another cartridge into his Winchester’s breech but held fire. Having seen what had happened to their two partners, the other five riders were holding back and quickly dismounting the sidestepping horses. Slash drew a bead on one, but the man was bouncing around too much, and the slug sailed over him and plunked into the street beyond him.
As the others scrambled for cover, they triggered their own rifles. Slugs sliced the air around Slash, Pecos, and Lisa, plunking into the two buildings behind them. Pecos discharged the second barrel of his sawed-off, but the double-ought buck merely tore into the wood of a building corner as his target leaped around and behind it.
“Ow!” Lisa cried.
As he worked his rifle’s cocking lever, Slash glanced toward the girl on his right, between him and Pecos. She’d fallen back on her butt, this time clutching her bloody upper left arm. Her Winchester dangled in her right hand. Slash saw what had happened. Forgetting that Slash had emptied her carbine, she’d been trying in vain to return fire, and one of the killers’ slugs had ripped into her.
“Thanks for emptying my guns, damn you!” she screeched at Slash, pain in her eyes.
Slash took his Winchester in his left hand and, crouching low, scrambled over to her. “Cover me, Pecos! I’m gonna take the deputy to cover!”
“All right, but hurry up—I’m low on ammo!” Pecos said, shoving his double-gauge back behind his shoulder and clawing his big Russian .44 from the holster on his right thigh.
As he returned fire on the five outlaws, who were now shooting from cover on both sides of the broad street, Slash grabbed Lisa’s right hand and drew her up over his shoulder.
“Ow!” the girl cried. “I ain’t a sack of potatoes!”
“No, you’re too loud for potatoes!” Slash shambled off toward the saloon as bullets buzzed around his head and thudded into the street with angry whines. All three horses—his, Pecos’s buckskin, and Lisa’s roan—had wisely jerked their reins free of the hitchrack fronting the saloon and run off in the direction of the two dead men’s fleeing mounts, away from the lead storm.
“My rifle!” Lisa shouted. She’d left her carbine in the street.
“I only got two hands, darlin’!” Slash was carrying his own Winchester in his right hand while holding the girl on his left shoulder.
“I ain’t your darlin’, cutthroat!”
“Well, okay, then . . . your loss . . .” Breathless, gritting his teeth against the five killers’ onslaught of flying lead, Slash pushed through the door that he and Pecos had left standing half open and deposited the girl on the saloon floor, leaning her back against the wall, under a badly faded oil painting of an Indian on a horse with hungry-looking wolves surrounding him.
Pecos triggered his last shot from the boardwalk, then ducked into the saloon as well. He closed the door against the killers’ lead, but he hadn’t even gotten it latched before two bullets plunked through the front window and ground themselves into a table.
Pecos dropped to a knee between the door and the now-broken window and broke his shotgun to commence reloading. “How bad she hit?” he called to Pecos.
Slash was inspecting the girl’s upper left arm, holding it in both of his hands. “I’ve cut myself worse shaving.”
“I didn’t say it was serious,” Lisa said defensively, studying the blood dribbling from the thin furrow that the bullet had cut across the outside of her arm. “I just said I was hit.”
Slash drew a handkerchief from his coat pocket, wrapped it around the girl’s arm, and tied it. He winced as another bullet smashed through the window and into the wall about three feet from the oil painting, over Slash and the girl’s head. He looked again at Lisa. “You’ll be okay till a sawbones can look at it.”
He frowned at her. She was as white as a sheet as she continued staring at her arm. “What’s the matter? It can’t hurt that bad.”
“Nothin’ .”
“What is it?” He was thumbing fresh cartridges through his Winchester’s loading gate.
“It’s just . . . I . . . I get all woozy when . . . I see my own blood . . .” Lisa sagged back against the wall, her chest rising and falling sharply. “I’ll be okay in a minute.”
“She okay?” Pecos asked as a bullet slammed into the door to his left, causing it to lurch in its frame.
Slash chuckled. “She’s fine as frog hair. She just ain’t quite as tough as she lets on.” He winked at the girl, who was hardening her jaws against her own anxiety, trying fiercely to compose herself.
“You both go to hell!” she raged.
“There ya go, darlin’,” Slash patted her chap-clad right leg. “You’ll be just fine! For now, anyways,” he added grimly, casting a glance out the window. “I can’t guarantee beyond that!”
Staying low, he scuttled over to the front window as more bullets smashed through it to screech through the saloon and slam into walls or tables or chairs. He dropped to a knee to the right of the broken front window and pressed his shoulder against the wall, pumping a fresh round into his Winchester’s action.
Outside, someone shouted. Another man shouted as though in reply. Then the shooting out there picked up. A veritable fusillade of lead came hurling through the mostly broken-out front window, breaking out what was left of the glass and hammering the bar and the back wall at the rear of the room.
“Get low, Deputy!” Slash shouted.
Lisa rolled down to her right shoulder and lay taut against the floor, holding that arm over her head as broken glass peppered her.
“What the hell’s goin’ on?” Slash yelled above the din at Pecos.
Also crouching low against the wall on the window’s far side, Pecos yelled, “If I had to venture a guess, I’d say they mean business!”
“I think one or two are giving another one cover!”
“You think?”
Edging a careful glance around the window frame, Slash spied a blur of fast movement out on the boardwalk fronting the saloon, to his left.
“Pecos, the door!” he bellowed.
Right on cue, the door burst open, and a big man heaved himself through the opening, turning toward Pecos and Slash, gritting his teeth, and raising the rifle in his hands. Slash started to bring up his own Winchester, but not before Pecos, who’d swung toward the door, tripped both triggers of his appropriately nicknamed gut-shredder.
Ka-boooomm!
The whole building leaped as the rifleman was hurled off his feet and straight back against the wall behind him, his violent meeting with the wall sounding almost as loud as Pecos’s twelve-gauge.
Dropping his rifle, what was left of the intruder sagged straight down to the floor. He looked at what little was left of his chest and belly, through the bloody threads of his rain slicker. He gave a weary sigh and, extending his legs straight out before him, slid sideways along the wall to pile up on his left shoulder, already as dead as a post.
“I’ll be damned if you didn’t call that one right!” Pecos bellowed at Slash.
Slash glanced out the window into the snowy dimness of the approaching evening, noting that the gunfire out there had suddenly stopped—a dirge of silence of sorts for the fallen intruder. “I usually do.”
“Just ’cause I don’t have time to argue the point don’t mean I concede it,” Pecos muttered, already plucking the smoking wads out of the coach gun’s tubes.
Slash snaked his Winchester through the window’s bottom right corner. He could see the two men on the other side of the street—the two who must have been covering for the dead man now leaking his life out in front of the door.
One crouched behind a rain barrel. The other was hunkered down behind a pile of moldering gray food crates. Pecos could see only brief glimpses of both men’s hat crowns and mostly concealed bodies, but he could hear them conferring in low tones between wind gusts.
The one crouching behind the rain barrel, to the left of the other one, suddenly snaked his rifle over the top of the barrel, aiming toward the saloon. Slash planted a bead on him quickly and squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.
The man flinched as flames lapped from his own rifle. He jerked back violently then, switching his rifle to his left hand, scrambled to his feet, turning and hurrying toward a corner of the mercantile behind him.
Slash drew his head back behind the window frame, for he’d seen the other man, hunkered down behind the crates, drawing a bead on him. That bullet sawed through the glassless window to thud ominously into the saloon’s rear wall.
Slash glanced out the window to see the man he’d wounded start around the mercantile’s left front corner. Again, Slash drew another hasty bead and fired. The bullet drilled through the fleeing killer’s left ear, spewing blood out the other side of his head. The man staggered sideways as though badly drunk, widening his legs as he fought desperately to get his boots beneath him.
He was out of luck. He was already dead. His brain just hadn’t told his feet yet. It did in the following seconds, though, for Slash saw the man drop in the trash-strewn lot beside the mercantile as he, Slash, turned his attention to the man hunkered behind the crates.
At the same time, Pecos fired his Russian .44 at the man, out the window to Slash’s left. Both bullets merely chewed wood from the crates as the man himself retreated back into the break between the two buildings beside him.
Slash jerked with a start when he became aware of a presence beside him, just off his left shoulder. “Jesus, Mary, an’ Joseph, darlin’—you gave me a start!”
Holding her Bisley .44 barrel up in her right hand, Lisa peered outside and then at the man slumped at the base of the opposite wall, just inside the open door through which snowflakes swirled to melt on the blood spilled there. “You two old scalawags still got some wood in your firebox,” she observed.
She glanced at Slash. He thought for a few seconds there she was actually going to smile.
“There’s a spark or two,” Slash allowed. “You ready to go to work?”
“What do you mean?”
“You and Pecos keep an eye on the window here. Shoot at anything that moves—’ceptin’ me, of course.” He gave a dark snort. “I’m gonna head out the back and see if I can get around the other two, try to get ’em in a whipsaw.”
Slash moved to the back of the room, keeping to the left wall. When he got to the back, he crouched, in case anyone shot into the building from the front, and pushed through a door nearly directly behind the bar. Through the door was a small storage area—gray, dingy in the weak light coming through a small rear window, and empty save for the scuttling of a mouse or a rat.
He made for the back door, unlatched it, cracked it, and looked around carefully. Seeing no one in the near vicinity, he stepped through the door and closed it behind him. The snow was still falling—large but widely scattered flakes. It changed suddenly from near dusk to a sudden sunrise, and the clouds parted, vivid lemon rays angling down from a break in the otherwise purple sky.
Weird weather, but not all that weird, really, for the high country.
The sun disappeared as quickly as it had shone itself, then reappeared again in another break in the clouds, directly over the mountain to the west, where the mine lay.
Slash moved along the rear of the saloon to the north. At the far end, he stopped and edged a cautious peek around the corner toward the front. There was a ten-yard, trash-littered gap, soggy with wet snow, between the saloon and the next building beyond.
The gap was empty. Slash was about to cross it to the next building when a rifle began barking in the distance. The shots sounded as though they were coming from the area fronting the saloon.
Another gun—a pistol—began answering the first reports. That was probably Lisa shooting out of the saloon’s front window. There were the rocketing thunderclaps, one after another, of Pecos’s gut-shredder, and Slash knew the two surviving killers—or at least one of them—were making another assault.
Pecos and Lisa were holding him off.
Slash waited till the sun disappeared again, purple cloud shadows swirling around him, then ran across the gap to the rear of the next building—a small, boxlike building that had likely been a “hog pen,” or a doxy’s crib in which to entertain her clients. The miners had likely given her plenty of business, way out here.
Slash continued to the crib’s far end. He cast another glance around the corner, then jerked his head back behind the crib again, his heart thudding.
A man was walking along the side of the crib, heading toward Slash. Slash didn’t think he’d seen him, for when Slash had looked along the crib, the man had had his head turned to peer back over his shoulder toward the front. He’d had two pistols in his hands, and he’d been holding them barrel up, hammers cocked.
Slash set his rifle down against the crib. He drew the Colt from his left hip, quietly clicked the hammer back. He raised the barrel, drew a deep breath.
He was about to step around the corner of the crib to confront the man trying to steal up on him, but then he stopped, blinked as he reconsidered the move. He dropped to a knee. He removed his hat. He tossed the hat high in the air and snaked his gun around the corner while tilting his head to aim down the barrel.
He was glad he’d changed strategy.
His opponent had stopped six feet away. He was waiting for Slash. He’d either heard him or glimpsed him. But he was waiting, all right. Now, having seen the hat and expecting Slash’s head to be where it would have been if he hadn’t taken a knee, the man stretched his lips back from his teeth and triggered both his pistols straight out from his shoulders.
From close range, the .45s sounded nearly as loud as Pecos’s sawed-off.
The stabbing flames, as well as the bullets, caromed over Slash’s head.
Instantly, the killer saw his mistake. He glanced at Slash’s hat, just then landing on a snowy sage tuft. The man’s jubilant snarl turned in a flash to deep chagrin and bright-eyed horror. He dropped his lower jaw and lowered his terror-stricken eyes to Slash, grinning up at him, aiming down the barrel of his own cocked .44.
The killer, a medium-tall man with a chaw-stained yellow mustache and chin whiskers, cocked his guns again and tried to jerk them down.
Before he could do that, much less squeeze a trigger, he was dropping to his knees outside the pearly gates and beseeching ole St. Pete for hallowed passage, which likely wouldn’t come. In fact, even as Slash lowered his smoking Colt and watched the killer hit the slushy ground on his back, blood geysering from the dead center of his chest, Slash thought he could hear ole Pete’s hysterical laughter up there amidst the golden clouds.
A rifle cracked in the distance.
It was followed by the thunder of Pecos’s cannon.
A man screamed. Slash hurried through the gap toward the main street. He spied movement on his right—a man running toward him, but on the other side of the street. His hat was off, and his oilskin flapped wildly as he ran, stumbling, dropping to a knee and then running again, only to stumble and fall.
A tall figure, murky in the jostling purple shadows, moved toward the fallen man. The fallen man bellowed an angry curse, then, twisting around to face the man walking toward him, clawed a pistol from a holster on his hip.
The tall figure stopped about ten feet from the fallen man. The shotgun in Pecos’s hands thundered, blossoming orange flames.
The head of the fallen man slammed back against the ground. He moved his arms and legs, like a bug on a pin, and then his head rolled to one side and the rest of him lay still.
Pecos looked up toward Slash. The tall ex-cutthroat broke his shotgun and began plucking out the spent shells. A gust of snow-laden wind blew clouds over him, and he disappeared in the stormy, high-mountain murk.