30

Siringo slung his Winchester over his shoulder, made sure his Colt was secure in its holster and the Forehand & Wadsworth belly gun under his belt, and climbed an iron ladder up the side of the cement-block silo. When he clambered onto the roof, he was grateful to find that it was concave rather than convex, giving him a sounder purchase and a circular rim that concealed him from anyone on the ground when he lay on his stomach behind it.

It was more than twenty feet high and gave him a spectacular view of the ranch with its rolling hills, towering redwoods, and miles of vineyards. The thick vines curled about the pickets that supported them, resembling battlefields he’d seen in photographs taken during the Great War, decorated with coils of barbed wire. He hoped they’d slow down the assault the same way they had in France.

He saw the ranch’s old wooden silo a hundred yards off, the great boulder beneath which Jack London slept off his roistering life, the jagged ruins of Wolf House sticking up like the petrified bones of some great animal dead since before Man, and wished again that Charmian would have the gaunt rafters bulldozed and buried instead of shackling herself to a corpse. Everything he’d read by and about London celebrated life in its full ferment and decried death and destruction, while here in the heart of his chosen country, disappointment and loss was on exhibit as if it belonged to an extinct civilization. Dwelling on the past did no one good. When Siringo himself wrote about it, it was gone—except when it came bounding back from cover like a rebel bushwhacker.

*   *   *

Tom Horn made a tight six-foot-five squeeze through the trap into the cattle car on the A.T. & S.F. The Agency had advanced him a hundred in cash to ride the rails on a robbery investigation, and he’d lost it all on one turn of cards.

Siringo was “Charlie Cully” then, sent by the Agency to spell Horn, who was needed to testify in Albuquerque. He lent Horn money to get there, but he managed to lose that, too, and the last Siringo saw of the big jug-eared galoot was when Horn gave the brakeman his last dollar to put him in the stock car and then his shorn head lowering itself through the hole. He would spend the rest of the long trip from Coolidge hanging onto the hay rack to keep from being slashed to pieces by the longhorn steers below: a Horn among horns.

Then again, when Tom was braiding a lariat in a cell in Wyoming, killing time while waiting to mount the scaffold, Siringo supposed he looked back on that journey with a wistful expression.

*   *   *

No sign of intruders yet. He sat with his back to the rim, the carbine across his lap and his legs stretched out, waiting for the blood to stop pumping pain to his knee. When he turned his head to survey the grounds near the cottage, he saw the barrel of Hammett’s Mauser sticking out the stable window that the eel’s bullet had shattered—was it only a week ago?—Charmian’s Greener, a handsome English shotgun that could finance rebuilding Wolf House, if only she could bear to part with it, and the pigpens bristling with more artillery. From his position he saw far more than anyone else on the spread, legitimate residents and otherwise.

He took out his pipe, but he didn’t charge it. There was no good purpose in calling anyone’s attention to his smoke. The stem felt good between his teeth and took his mind off his knee.

Charlie Siringo reckoned that he’d had a good ride any way you studied it. He’d looked into Kid Curry’s cross eyes, the eyes of a killer, and lived to write about them, sung range songs with Billy Bonney, cheated a lynch mob in Gem, survived smallpox, and stood close enough to see men blown to pieces with dynamite, coming away with only a ringing in his ears that came back on quiet nights. If it all ended here, he came out ahead on points.

“Leastwise it beats sitting around the house watching the roof leak,” he said aloud.

*   *   *

Hammett, sitting on Abner Butterfield’s milking stool, leaned his Mauser against the windowsill and reached down to loosen the lace on the brogan. He rolled a cigarette, didn’t light it, hung it on his lower lip, and looked out the window, scanning the buildings and terrain. Siringo was out of sight atop the silo, but the man who looked for them could spot the weapons belonging to Charmian and the men on the ground. As he was watching the house, Becky bent to say something to her stepmother, caught his eye, and straightened when he raised a hand in greeting, removing herself from his line of sight.

He grinned wolfishly and listened to the horses snorting and shuffling in the stalls on the other side of the partition.

A high harsh whistle pierced the air, coming from atop the silo.

*   *   *

Siringo took his fingers out of his mouth, removed his Stetson, and rolled over onto his stomach, peering over the metal rim at the line of motor vehicles coming up the ranch road, Sheriff Vernon Dillard’s big Dodge in the lead. He rested his Winchester on the rim and drew a bead on its tombstone-shaped radiator, but he held his fire. The procession wasn’t inside range of the firearms at ground level, and the cars were passing between thick stands of redwoods; if the sheriff and his posse comitatus decided to bail out and take to the trees, there would be no smoking them out. He hoped the others wouldn’t be tempted to start the ball early.

With that thought in mind he watched anxiously as the motorcade continued at walking pace. Besides the touring car there were a couple of Ford roadsters, a Hupmobile, and a T truck. He wondered if it was the same one in which Lanyard had made his escape after shooting at Butterfield, and if it was the eel driving.

He counted five in the Dodge, two in each of the roadsters, and six more in the truck, including four in the bed, clinging to the stakes. The light caught shiny bits of metal he took for badges, but they wouldn’t all be deputies: The county wasn’t rich enough to afford that many on the payroll. Dillard must have deputized half the village.

Amateurs, then, most of them; or at least not full-time lawmen.

Which didn’t encourage him, not even a little bit. He remembered the trigger-happy p.c. shooting bloody hell out of that line shack that was supposed to contain Billy the Kid and getting nothing for all that expenditure of lead but one dead armadillo. And since there were no armadillos handy, that left two ex-Pinkertons, a parcel of ranch hands, and two women.

At length the last car cleared the woods. He leveled the carbine again, aiming low at the Dodge. The sheriff was a dumb lug and belonged to Joseph P. Kennedy instead of the voters who put him in office, but Siringo had no interest in finishing out his career as a murderer of policemen. He centered his sights on the left front tire and tightened his finger on the trigger.

Something struck the iron rim not six inches to his right, striking a spark and peppering his cheek with bits of rust. He heard the shot then, belatedly, bent by distance and wind, and dropped flat.

The report had not come from any of the automobiles, which were still moving, the noise of their motors probably having drowned it out to the ears of the occupants. Nor did it belong to the defenders: Looking up at the rim where it had been struck, he saw a scallop-shaped nick on its top, shiny where the bullet had scraped off the rust. It had to have come level.

He took a deep breath, mustering sand, and went up on his knees, shouldering the Winchester and snapping a shot at the top of the other silo. He hadn’t dared take time to aim, presenting as he did so clear a target, and although he couldn’t tell from that distance whether he’d hit anything, it didn’t matter, because it got the result he wanted. He saw a tiny billow of smoke atop the wooden tower and went flat again, just in time to hear the slug crack the air inches above his head.

The damn dime novelists had gotten it right for once. The criminal had returned to the scene of his earlier crime.