31

When the first shot rang out, Hammett looked first at Charmian, then at the other guns inside his range of vision, including the one on top of the concrete silo. Siringo’s hatless head appeared suddenly, then the spurt of flame from his Winchester. He didn’t see where the third shot came from, but when Siringo ducked, he didn’t have to.

“Mr. Hammett!” It was Charmian. “Who’s shooting?”

“Mr. Siringo and the eel,” he called back. “They both took the high ground.”

“But, when—?”

“Get away from the window!”

Her head vanished below the windowsill just as something struck the frame, followed closely by the sound of the shot.

Hammett got up, moved the stool farther from his window, and laid the Mauser’s barrel on the sill. “He’s been here since Dillard’s last visit!” he shouted. “The sheriff must’ve dropped him off before he drove in sight and worked his way around to the other silo. He didn’t get into position till just now or he’d’ve picked at least one of us off when we came outside.”

“Is Mr. Siringo all right?” came Becky’s voice from inside the cottage.

“Hang on.” He put his thumb and finger inside his mouth and whistled sharply through his teeth.

Another whistle answered from atop the near silo.

“He’s fine!”

“What can we do?” Charmian asked.

Hammett reached down and tightened the lace on the brogan. “Start shooting!”

“At what?”

“The silo.”

“It’s too far! This shotgun—”

“Stop wasting time!”

The Greener bellowed, spraying pellets that fell many yards short of the wooden silo.

Hammett shouted again, cracking his lungs. “Everybody shoot!”

The salvo from the weapons in the hands of the laborers sounded like an army of axes chopping wood. Hammett clambered out the paneless window and charged the wooden silo, firing the Mauser from the hip. The powerful semiautomatic rifle pulsed in his hands. Something struck the ground at his feet, throwing a clump of dirt and grass at his pants cuff, but he didn’t slow down. The next shot made a snapping noise in the air past his left ear. He ran and fired; and now Siringo was returning Lanyard’s fire from the top of the concrete silo, as fast as he could lever in fresh rounds.

Hammett’s hat flew off his head, either from his own slipstream or carried away by a bullet. The Mauser’s magazine emptied with a click. He threw it aside, drawing the .38 from his belt, and fired it at the top of the wooden silo, which stood well beyond pistol range.

And now more guns spoke. Dillard and his posse had taken up positions and were throwing lead at the running figure.

He was wheezing, and his pace grew uneven; his injured foot had entered the fight on the other side. He was close enough to the silo to be aiming almost straight up. The ladder attached to the side was nearly within reach. He was lunging at it, groping with his free hand, when something struck him from behind with the force of a catapult. His fingers grazed a rung of the ladder as he fell.

*   *   *

Siringo saw him fall, but only on the periphery of his vision. He was concentrating on the silo opposite, firing until the Winchester clicked, then ducking below the rim to reload. He cursed as he fumbled more cartridges out of the box he’d brought, forcing himself to fill the magazine before resuming.

The wooden structure was just within range; he could hear the slugs chunking into the boards, see splinters flying, but the man atop it was careful not to present much of a target against the sky; when Hammett had gotten too close for Lanyard to shoot at him without standing up and aiming almost straight down, he concentrated again on Siringo, and his shots were placed closer to his target. He must have had a telescopic sight and a gas loader with an enormous capacity, because the reports were so close together they sounded like one extended roar and he never stopped to reload. Siringo changed positions between shots, confounding the man’s aim through the glass aperture, but his bump of good luck, and the eel’s bump of bad luck, couldn’t continue.

The sheriff and his men had found cover in scattered trees. They couldn’t shoot up at Siringo’s silo with any hope of hitting him, so they’d started snapping at the man running on the ground. There wasn’t an expert shot among them, but then one of them got lucky. The old Pinkerton couldn’t tell where his partner had been hit, but either it was a heavy round to knock him down at that range or it had found something vital.

Hammett’s bump of courage must have been the size of a pumpkin. Siringo had never known a man—not Wyatt Earp or Pat Garrett or Billy Bonney or the whole goldarn Wild Bunch put together—who would run straight into crossfire when he could have stayed put and gone on breathing a little longer. He’d never see anything to compare with it, even if he survived that day.

And then—hell’s bells!—he did see it.

*   *   *

Hammett breathed dirt.

He lay on his face with something hot and wet streaming at a leftward angle from his right shoulder and his pulse centered where it started. All the shooting now was coming from the cottage and pigpens and both silos; the sheriff and his men had stopped when their only real target had fallen.

Without obvious stirring, he groped for the .38 where it had fallen and thrust it under his belt, covering the movement with his body.

The ladder was useless. It stood squarely in the sight of the posse: If their aim hadn’t improved except by luck, neither had his odds, and a man climbing a twenty-foot tower was hard to miss. He filled his lungs, emptied them, filled them again, coughed, pushed himself onto his hands and knees, and scuttled around the base of the silo, putting it between him and the sheriff’s party just as a slug from their direction banged against the wood near the ground.

He rolled over into a sitting position, resting his back against the silo, and groped behind his right shoulder with his left hand. The skin of his back jumped when he found the wound. He dragged his handkerchief out of his inside breast pocket and stuffed it into the hole, gritting his teeth. Then he looked up at the silo, rising and narrowing for miles toward empty blue sky.

London’s mania for innovation and modernization had not stopped with his writing. The storage building was rigged for automatic filling, with an electric motor on a concrete base, connected to an open bin and a copper pipe as big around as a man’s arm running from the bin to the top of the silo: The silage was shoveled into the bin and propelled by suction up the pipe into the silo. What the pipe lacked as a ladder it made up for by its placement.

But a man had to be fast. He had to climb twenty feet of slippery copper before the posse grew bold enough to come after him and before the pain of the bullet in his shoulder paralyzed him.

He reloaded the .38 from his pocket, pulled himself to his feet, and began shinnying.

*   *   *

“You dead, Hammett?” Siringo called out.

He didn’t expect an answer. Thinking aloud kept a man alert. There was a lull in the shooting; either the eel had run out of ammunition finally or he was playing the waiting game, counting on Siringo to forget himself and present a better target.

Hammett had vanished behind the wooden silo, whether to die or work some angle couldn’t be known.

The posse was getting curious. Siringo saw the sheriff lean out from behind a redwood, sweeping an arm in the direction of Lanyard’s silo. The man he was looking at, a badge-wearer crouched at the base of a neighboring tree, shook his head violently.

Siringo grinned. In every party of manhunters there was always one who placed his life before his job.

It was the volunteers you had to watch for: ordinary men who got a boot out of playing cowboys and Indians.

This time it was a skinny runt in a tweed suit and an argyle sweater, a bank clerk or sub-assistant postmaster. He waved to Dillard from behind his tree and started off at a slow walk, bracing his rifle against his hip like a great white hunter stalking a wounded lion.

Siringo decided not to wait for the man to trip and shoot himself in the head. When he was halfway to the silo, the old Pinkerton chucked a round past his head that sent him swiveling and running for cover, throwing away his weapon in favor of speed.

It was such an amusing sight Siringo forgot the eel.

A blow to his mouth rattled his bones and he ducked below the rim, the stem of his pipe still clamped between his teeth. He’d forgotten it was there until the bullet shattered the bowl. He spat out the stem and checked for more damage. A molar wobbled when he tested it. It was one of only two he had left. His luck; it was the good one.

He told himself to concentrate on the work. Eating soup at every meal got old fast.

*   *   *

People who talked about climbing a greased pole had never tried it.

Hammett had to stop every few feet, wrapping an arm around the copper pipe while he wiped his other palm on his coat, then reversing arms and wiping the first. The hands shook, not from fear but from increasing weakness. His wound was bleeding again despite the handkerchief he’d stuffed into it. How long a man had before he bled out was something Pinkerton didn’t teach.

The first shot in a while barked on the other side of the silo. The shot that came behind it was much closer; the vibration of the recoil made his hands buzz on the pipe.

It had nothing to do with him. He resumed climbing.

*   *   *

The sun was closing in on the western tree line. He figured the men on the ground were waiting for darkness before storming both silos. Lanyard would be waiting for the same thing. Siringo would have to show himself to stop the assault, and the sky offered no promise of a night without stars and moon.

He hoped Hammett wasn’t dead, and not just because he’d miss the man’s company.

*   *   *

His hand slipped. He caught himself with the other, but the movement brought the heavy brogan on his bad foot banging against the copper pipe. He was close enough to the top now to hear planks shifting when the sniper walked his way to peer over the rim.

There was no cover. Freeing one hand to grasp at his .38, Hammett slipped six inches and gripped the pipe again with both hands. He clung to the pipe and looked square into Edgar Edison Lanyard’s eyes and then the muzzle of his rifle, a Browning semiautomatic with a magazine as big as a toaster. The man’s straw boater was a flat disk pushed to the back of his head.