A Colt for the Kid (6 page)

He spent the next few moments swearing under his breath. There could be no doubt who had written the note. Bohun’s big, sprawling hand was easily recognisable. The thing was, what action should he take? Go directly to the judge and confront him with this piece of treachery. Or just keep quiet about it and look out for further moves from Bohun? He decided to keep the information to himself, not even tell it to Carter or Belle. For one thing, Belle would certainly have the matter in the open and that would be very little help. Still, it was going to be hell acting naturally when he met the judge. Knowing the man was weak and shifty was one thing but being aware that he would betray his friends was another.

Hennesey put the letter in a drawer of his desk, snuffed out the light and left the office. It was close to midnight and the least drunken of Donovan’s riders were already leaving the town. The rest would have to be persuaded by his own
efforts, seeing that neither Donovan or Stone were on hand. The idea caused him to grin a little. It did not matter to him if none of Donovan’s riders got back to their work by morning, but he wanted the town clear as soon as possible so that he could make his way back to the Stevens’ place. Luke Carter would be glad to see his saloon empty, too. Luke was taking the sixty-mile ride to Leastown the moment the Silver Dollar could close its doors.

In the late afternoon of the following day, Luke Carter led four other riders into the Stevens’ place. No hard rider, Luke drooped in his saddle and was so stiff and sore he could barely heave himself out of the saddle. The four who had ridden in with him seemed scarcely affected by the sixty mile ride. They were Burt Sanders, tall and brown haired, Sean and Mike Regan, twin brothers, red of hair and with startlingly blue eyes, and Abe Thomas, fortyish and sun dried to the toughness of good leather. Thomas had raised cattle in a small way until Donovan had forced him off the ranges, whilst the two Regans and Sanders were sons of homesteading families that had been ruthlessly driven from their lands by MD riders. All four had a burning desire to pull Donovan’s empire down.

Sam and Lucy Stevens came out on to the veranda as the thud of hoofs reached them. There were greetings, expressions of surprise at the way the Regan brothers and Sanders had grown from youths into tough young men in the seven or eight years since the parties had last met and on the part of the new arrivals a good deal of remarking on the fact that Lucy had grown from a pigtailed child into a young woman of considerable attraction. After that there was the business of seeing to the weary horses, then a deal of sluicing
away the riders’ own dust and grime. A substantial meal followed with hardly a word spoken about the business in hand. Then with tobacco smoke curling up to the rafters of the big living-room Sam said:

‘Lucy and I want to thank you fellows for coming. We hadn’t figured on asking help to fight Donovan, that was Luke’s idea.’

‘Think nothing of it,’ Thomas cut in. ‘We should have banded together years back. If we’d done that us fellers might have still been on this part of the land. Luke’s been telling us about Donovan’s latest moves and the only thing we want to do is put an end to them, fast.’

‘Yes, what’s the plan?’ Sanders asked.

Sam gave a thin smile. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t much of a plan. Hennesey was out here this morning and the best we could think of was to post a guard, say two men, about a quarter of a mile from the house. You fellows will have noticed when you rode in here that the going is pretty rough. In the dark, and Donovan usually has his dirty work done then, there’s only a narrow strip, say about a mile wide, that is reasonable for riders. Ed and I reckoned two men could watch that strip and if they see anything, sound off a shot. In the house here, four guns could hold off an army.’

‘That’s so,’ Thomas said. ‘Your Paw was pretty wise when he built this place in stone and only had small windows. Of course there were Indians about then.’

‘I’m not much of a hand with a gun,’ Carter put in, ‘but I guess I can make a row with one.’

‘We weren’t reckoning on your gun, Luke,’ Sam said. ‘Lucy was in the four. Hennesey wants you to get back to your own place. Tonight, if you can manage it.’

‘Tonight! Heck, I’m that sore and stiff I can hardly sit a chair, never mind a saddle.’

‘We’ll fix you up with a buggy and a cushion on the seat,’
Lucy smiled.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ Sam agreed. ‘The thing is, Luke, Hennesey wants someone in town he can trust. He didn’t say exactly why, but I gathered that he is more than suspicious of something the judge has been up to.’

Carter got to his feet. ‘In that case I’d best be going. I don’t want to be on the trail after sundown. By the way, Luke, how’s young Callum coming along?’

‘He was awake for about half an hour at noon,’ Lucy said. ‘He seemed a little delirious but I think he’s going to be all right. Perhaps a week or two in bed will set him right. I hope so, he took a terrible beating.’

‘Callum,’ Thomas said. ‘That was the name of those sodbusters Donovan stamped out. I wonder what became of them.’

‘Johnnie believes they’re dead,’ Lucy said quietly. ‘I suppose it’s best not to disturb the belief although from the time he learned from Donovan that he was the man who had cleared his parents from the land, Johnnie seemed set on doing murder. I only hope he doesn’t hold to the idea when he gets on his feet again.’

‘Well, they may be dead for all we know,’ Thomas said. ‘The only thing I know is there was no sign of life on the place when I rode over in the dawn. I didn’t dare go before that although I could see the blaze from their place and knew darned well what was happening.’

‘Much the same thing that happened to my Paw and Maw,’ Burt Sanders growled angrily. ‘I wasn’t much more than a kid at the time but I remember the shooting and burning all right.’

‘There’s two of us here with the same sort of remembrances,’ Sean Regan said with quiet emphasis, ‘and I guess Mike and I would sure like to shake hands with this Johnnie Callum. He must have real guts to fly at a man the
size of Donovan and him with four killers to back him up.’

‘I’m with you there, all the way,’ Mike said angrily. ‘Sure, I wish my own hands were big enough to tear the murdering skunk apart.’

Carter moved stiffly towards the door. ‘Show me this buggy, Sam, and the best of luck to all of you.’

With Carter on his way to town and the Regan brothers posted in the best position for guarding the house there was nothing to do but to settle down to the grim business of waiting and in the meantime carrying on with as much of the routine work of looking after the ranch as was possible. The waiting lasted for three nights with Sanders and Thomas alternating with the Regans as outside guards. It was a wearing business and perhaps doubly so for Lucy who did not have a man’s natural thirst for fighting. She found some relief in the fact that on the second day of waiting, Johnnie, after waking normally in the morning, insisted on getting out of bed before noon. He was wobbly on his legs but to the surprise of herself and Sam, rapidly gained a little strength. It seemed to her natural that he should at first be without his cheerful smile, but on the following day there was little doubt in her mind that Johnnie was brooding. Sam and the other men noticed it too and put it down to Johnnie’s desire for vengeance either on the men who had so brutally mauled him or on Donovan for his treatment of Seth and Louise Callum. They were right only in part. Johnnie wanted vengeance on Donovan for the parents he hardly remembered and only the big rancher’s death would suffice. Yet he fought against the desire to kill Donovan. Fought it with all his will, because after the way he had dealt with, first, Josh Manders and then Stone, he regarded himself as a natural killer, something near a maniac. He had seen both men through a red haze when fighting them and that fact coupled with the knowledge that he had little detailed
memory of either struggle was convincing enough to him. A few words spoken by an older and wiser man would have cleared the whole thing from his mind, but Johnnie kept his ideas to himself and none of the others tried to probe into them.

He was in bed but wide awake on the fourth night of the watch when the single shot sounded. He moved quickly and was, of those resting, first to get down to the living-room. Stevens, who was checking weapons that were on the table under a shaded light, said:

‘Pick which guns you like, Johnnie.’

Johnnie hesitated a moment. ‘I never used a gun before, Sam. I don’t know if I can shoot.’

‘Never used a gun!’ There was real surprise in Sam’s voice.

‘No. Manders had an old shot-gun but he wouldn’t let me go near it.’

Lucy and Thomas entered the room in time to hear the discussion. Sam was about to say something else when a second shot split the quiet of the night and there followed a rattle of six-gun shots.

‘Battle’s started,’ Sam said quickly. ‘Thomas, will you take that landing window? It’s the only one upstairs that looks on the back of the house. Sanders and I will take the front bedrooms. Lucy, keep to the living-room and see that you’re well behind the shutters. Don’t poke a gun too far through the loop-holes. It might give your position away.’

He and the other two men raced for the stairs just as a tattoo of slugs beat into the stout front door. Lucy picked up a Springfield. Then she regarded Johnnie calmly.

‘You’ll have to learn to shoot some time, you know.’

Johnnie nodded. ‘I wish I’d learned before, but I didn’t get a chance.’

‘Well, we’ll start now.’ She levered the shells out of a second Springfield and handed it to him. ‘Now throw it up to
your shoulder, like this.’ She demonstrated the movement.

Johnnie made a few awkward movements with the gun then started visibly as a patter of shots rattled against the shutter.

‘I ought to be outside doing something to chase those guys off,’ he said.

‘Johnnie, these men would kill you as easy as killing a running hen. You wouldn’t get a chance to use those big fists of yours. Now try again. It’ll soon come to you. Then I’ll show you about the sights and the loading.’

Johnnie tried desperately hard and five minutes later found himself at a loop-hole with a loaded gun to his shoulder. The last instruction he got from Lucy was to squeeze the trigger if he saw anything moving. He stood for three whole minutes with the rifle gripped so hard that his fingers began to ache. His eyes tried to differentiate between the various shadows between the house and the barns while part of his mind tried to digest and act upon all the advice that Lucy had just given him. The other part was occupied by the fact that from the men upstairs there was almost continual firing and from Lucy there was a shot every few seconds. Was there no attack on the rear of the house or was he so unused to this business that he could not see men who crept along in the dark? Then his face reddened. Of course there was no attack on this side of the house. Lucy had placed him here because he was useless at gun fighting. With his hands, perhaps, and when he lost his temper and had that red mist in front of his eyes but with a gun of any kind, no. The rifle relaxed in his grip and he was on the point of putting it down and turning away from the shutter when there was a bang that he heard above the others and the scream of a slug accompanied by a rending noise above his head. He was aware, without knowing it properly, that his shutter was being fired at, and the rifle firmed again in his
big hands. His mind cleared and Lucy’s instruction came to him calmly and lucidly. ‘Hold the gun well into your shoulder. Don’t grip too hard. Get the fore sight in the middle of the back sight and your target on top of the fore sight. Then squeeze the trigger.’

And there was a target, a man who had moved swiftly from the shadow of the bunkhouse to the slighter shadow cast by the windmill pump. A man who carried something bulky under one arm and seemed bent on reaching the horse barn. Two more slugs ripped through the shutter and the fusillade from upstairs reached to a greater capacity. Then the man with the bundle moved. He went at a run towards the horse barn and for a moment he seemed to stand on Johnnie’s gun sights. Only for a moment but it seemed minutes to Johnnie before he could steady himself into slowly squeezing the trigger. He felt the Springfield kick against his shoulder, then from outside came an explosion that made the stout walls of the house shudder whilst the darkness in front of Johnnie was split with a blinding, white light. There followed a blast of air that sent Johnnie reeling. The single light on the table snuffed out and where the shutter had been, a square of starlit sky showed. Dazed though he was, he reacted to Lucy’s cry of alarm and jumped to her side.

‘What was that, Johnnie?’

Her hand gripping on his arm brought a feeling that was new to him. A sense that he was needed. He felt the desire to protect this slender girl who clung to his arm and knew an exultation in his own size and strength.

‘I don’t know, Lucy. I saw a man running with something in his arms and fired, just like you told me.’

There was a sound of feet running down the stairs and Sam rushed into the darkened room. ‘That blast was dynamite,’ he shouted. ‘The front door’s off its hinges.’

He turned and ran back into the hall, Johnnie and Lucy
following close on his heels. The heavy door was flat on the floor and the hall a swirl of dust. There was no shooting now and the silence seemed ominous after the racketing of the guns. Sam and Johnnie lifted one end of the door and had it half raised when a single shot broke the silence and Sam, with a cry of pain, dropped his side of the door and fell backwards. Johnnie, overbalanced by the sudden shift of weight, found himself falling sideways. He dropped his hold on the door and fell on top of it as a six-gun hammered shots through the opening. Sprawled as he was on the floor he got a clear, skyline silhouette of the man using the gun. He felt rage surge within him, rage at the fact that Lucy was somewhere behind him and in peril from the slugs that sang low over his own head. He came bounding up from his sprawled position with the red mist of fury swimming in front of his eyes. The gunman was fifteen or twenty yards from the doorway when Johnnie came leaping out and directed his last two shots at the figure that was flying towards him. Johnnie felt the wind of one slug fan his cheek and for some reason saw clearly again. The rage was still with him when he closed with the man, but it was clear-headed anger, one that enabled him to swerve and evade the clubbed sixgun that the other swung at his head. He took the gunman at waist level and his long arms wrapping round the man, lifted him from his feet and dashed him to the ground. Johnnie followed up by diving on top of the gunslinger, received a knee jab in the stomach as his left hand reached the other’s throat, then he was astride the man and his bunched right fist was punching the other into insensibility.

In a minute or two he got to his feet, satisfied that the other was unconscious. He heard guns begin again their erratic banging and saw the red flashes coming from the house. Then came the pounding of hoofs and he saw the silhouettes of four riders gallop past the shattered door and
fill the space with their lead. Instinct, more than any knowledge of gunfighting, told him that the riders would circle the house and repeat the manoeuvre. Sharply aware of the danger of being shot by one of the defenders, Johnnie swung away from the direct line of the doorway and made a rush towards the house. He came to a crouch at the side of the veranda just as someone in the upper storey took two quick rifle shots at him. He had barely recovered from his forward rush when the hoofs sounded again and almost on the top of the sound he caught sight of the shadowy figure of the first of the riders. He let horse and man come almost abreast of him then left the ground in a long leap. He grabbed at the bridle and as the horse plunged and swerved, lifted his feet clear of the ground. He heard the oaths of the rider then a gun banged close to his head. The horse he was clinging to reared as far as his weight on its bridle permitted, then another horse thudding into it sent it staggering and pawing for a footing. For the next few seconds it seemed to Johnnie as he clung fiercely to the bridle, that the world was full of stamping horses, swearing men and guns that were being fired close to his head. Then the bridle broke and he hit the ground with a bump, saw hoofs that were apparently going to stamp him flat and rolled quickly to one side. A moment later he was on his feet and throwing wild punches at the head of a man who hit him so often with bunched up fists that it seemed to Johnnie that his adversary possessed more than one pair of arms. He made several attempts to close with the man and wrap him with his arms but each time a savage punch slammed him backwards. Guns were still banging but the racket of them went unheeded by the milling pair as they stamped about. Johnnie went down to a blow on the side of the head that caught him as he was boring in for about the twentieth time. He came bouncing to his feet again and rushed at his man who was standing with a
slight forward droop, arms pendant as if he was too weary to raise them. Johnnie heard, as he closed in, the man’s gusty, laboured intake of breath and the sound filled him with glee. He had this man beaten to a standstill and had done it without losing his own head. He chopped down the other’s feeble guard and for the first time in his life aimed a timed and directed punch. It took his adversary just under the ear and he dropped like a poleaxed steer.