The Last Shootist (28 page)

“Take 'em down tonight. Break something this time. Don't kill 'em unless you have to, since you boys are no use to me in jail. I don't wish to be called out in public by either of 'em again. You know where they live?”

“Near each other up Youngblood Hill. We can ambush 'em up there,” offered William.

“That two-gun kid is dangerous; he's ready to scrap. I think his bartender buddy is packing, too. Saw him fingering his right coat pocket.”

William the wrestler nodded, speaking to the other two rough miners. “If they split up, Frankie and I will trail the gun boy. Duggan can follow the nervous one.”

Luther interjected. “Anybody armed?”

Duggan edged a revolver from his coat pocket. Frankie flashed a small pistol, too.

“Good.” Mr. Goose passed his .41 Remington derringer to William Pascoe with a couple extra rounds. “Hurry. Before they reach home.”

Grunting, his henchmen left their boss to finish his excellent whiskey.

 

Thirty-two

 

Their encounter wasn't a complete surprise, for the lads could hear heavy breathing from the darkness as they climbed the long second tier of wooden stairways up Youngblood Hill. They'd ambled home, dissecting their encounter with Goose and his thugs, wondering what might happen next. Bisbee sat at fifty-three hundred feet and the tops of these Mule Mountains were two thousand feet higher, so climbing partway to their cottages always left even these fit young men a little winded.

Gillom hesitated before stepping out onto the wider platform where one stairway ended and another began again up to the hill's top. He could hear noises, but there were no lights on this steep staircase and he couldn't see much in the darkness besides coal oil lamps glowing in the nearby miners' cottages. No moon out tonight. Ease bumbled up behind him on the stairs, pushing Gillom out onto the platform, which is where they got ambushed. Three men heaved up and came vaulting over the wooden railings around the platform from all sides, trapping the two young men in the middle of the square. Ease got in one good punch to a stranger's jaw before he was driven to his knees by a grab at his legs. Frankie had a mugger's choke on Gillom—a left arm around his throat with his right arm reaching over Gillom's shoulder and locking up the hold, using the radius bone of his right arm as a lever against the kid's windpipe. Before he began to black out, Gillom drew, cocked, turned the barrel around, and fired, right into the big man's gut.

“Ahhhh!”
The shot shocked Frankie into releasing him, but Gillom had to thrust off the heavy man who was pinning him against a railing. The escape gave him a view of Duggan astraddle Ease, slamming the young bartender in the face with punches as he tried to cover up. Firing again, Gillom executed Ease's attacker with one bullet to the back of his head. The two shot men went down heavily, bodies collapsing, the reports echoing up Tombstone Canyon.

The bank guard was then slammed against the wooden railing so hard he could hear a couple ribs crunch. He reached toward his new attacker with his right arm and revolver, but William Pascoe stepped outside his stretched arm to snatch his right wrist with his right hand, thumb down and palm facing Gillom. William jumped forward and chopped hard with his left hand to make Gillom bend his elbow. The wrestler snaked his left arm on top of Gillom's forearm, between his forearm and biceps. Reaching under his own right hand William grabbed his own right wrist with his left hand, forming his arms into a shape like the number four. Snapping the right arm down quickly, he drove Gillom to the platform with this move, yelling in pain,
“Owwwww!”

A figure four armlock is a restraint and control hold and could have broken Gillom's arm, except William forgot the kid's two guns. Gillom dropped his Remington as his right arm was about to break, but got his left hand working and pulled his other six-gun, cocking and snap-shooting a .44 slug into William's right thigh from up close. Now it was the wrestler yowling as he crumbled, releasing Gillom's bent arm.

It was hard to see in the darkness in this ringed open space with bodies banging about, anguished cries, flashes of gunpowder, and the scent of blood. Ease Bixler rolled out from under the dead man who had collapsed atop him. Bleeding from his nose, Ease managed to get his borrowed Colt from his coat pocket. Frankie, meanwhile, holding his stomach wound with his left hand, got his pistol out from under his waistband with his right. Braced against a corner post, the mugger aimed at Ease sitting across the platform with his pistol pointed, too. Both gunmen pulled their triggers simultaneously, muzzle flashes brightening the night for a long second. Younger Bixler was the better shot, finishing Frankie off with a bullet to the throat, severing his jugular in a burst of blood. Ease took a bullet in his upraised calf.

“Yowww!”
The bartender grabbed his wounded leg as Gillom staggered, watching wounded William fling himself over the railing and then slide down the weed-thick hill, limping off into the darkness, no match for Gillom's two guns.

“
Ease!
You gonna make it?”

“Shot my leg.” Ease wiped his bloody nose on a sleeve, so the red smear on his face matched his sideburns. Dogs were barking furiously, doors were opening, and lamps held high to see what in God's name was going on outside? The gunfire came from nearby, so the hillside's residents knew this shoot-out wasn't some drunken cowboys downtown on a toot.

“My ribs are stove in,” groaned Gillom as he gingerly felt round his aching chest. He moved near Frankie and noticed the assassin's trigger finger still twitching convulsively.

“I gotta get that bastard, Ease. He's wounded and he won't give us any chance next time.” Gillom looked at the two miners seeping dark blood, dead from shots to their heads. “Somebody will help you down to a doc. I'll be there later myself.”

“God's grace on you, Gillom. Don't let that Cornishman gitcha, or I'm all alone with that sonofabitch Goose.”

Then Gillom Rogers was gone, stepping gingerly down the long stairway, pearl-handled .44 in his left hand for balance as he rotated his right arm back and forth, trying to work out the ache. For the first time in his young life, he was on a vengeance trail.

Gillom could hear his prey sliding clumsily down the mountainside when he stopped clomping down the stairway to catch his breath and reload.
Must be close to midnight,
he thought,
and it's Thursday, so fewer miners will be out carousing.

When he reached the bottom of Youngblood Hill Gillom listened again and could make out a limping gait heading toward town, where the dirt road turned into the bricks of Main Street.

Passing store windows lit by electric lights, Gillom could see who he thought was William Pascoe, limping due to his leg wound. The man crossed the tracks of the railroad spur running south from Bisbee proper and limped along beside another short track laid uphill into the Copper Queen's smelter works, not far from their original glory hole shaft.
He can't go to the hospital,
Gillom surmised.
He'd be recognized and reported with a bullet wound, then connected to tonight's shooting. Maybe he's looking for his miner buddies to treat and hide him? Gotta be careful up there. I don't have any friends yet who dig copper.

Gillom followed as fast as his aching body would allow, stalking in the storefronts' shadows until he had to move out in the open on the train track up Sacramento Hill to the vast Copper Queen diggings.

The Cornishman hadn't stopped to scout his trail, unconcerned that anyone was able to follow him after this evening's bad confrontation, which had left all five combatants wounded, dead, or banged up. William limped inside the nearest of the big tin-sided buildings as his pursuer walked through the mine's entrance and then slipped back into the same building's night shadows. Gillom entered the southwest's biggest mining operation, which was easy to do, since hundreds of miners came and went on three different shifts without being checked, twenty-four hours a day, only Sundays off.

The steely teenager was determined.
This thug has to be stopped. This miner has beaten me up twice now and a third fight will surely end kill or be killed. Maybe I can get the drop on this wrestler, turn William in for attempted murder, but I doubt it. This Cornishman is too slick. He'd escape the law's grasp just as easily as he can break an arm hold in an unfair fight.

Gillom was blinded by bright electric lighting and a deep thrumming of heavy machinery inside the building. Farther in he saw William bent over a long wooden bench in front of a wallside of multiple hooks on which hung cleaner clothing the miners changed back into after their end-of-shift showers. The thug's back was to him and he was rummaging in a white wooden box with a red cross. His wool pants were loosened about his knees and his hands held a bandage and a bottle of antiseptic.

“Cousin Jack!” William froze, turned to see Gillom. He put the medicine bottle down. “You need to see Sheriff White. Or hear the music of my .44's.”

“The hell with you,” growled the wiry man, not quite so fearsome with his pants down. From his suit coat pocket appeared a derringer, just as Gillom aimed his revolver. William's specialty wasn't guns and his short-barreled shot missed. But he immediately dove to the floor, overturning the oak bench. The kid's bullets splintered thick wood. Behind the bench, the miner hastily splashed astringent over his wound and grunted loudly as he wrapped his bloody thigh tight with a bandage.

Gillom retreated around a wall corner, knelt, and peeked around it to pepper the overturned bench with a couple closer shots. Behind it, William had his pants back up. Digging into his other coat pocket, he pulled out a round tin container and from it a blasting cap crimped around a fuse. This thin metal spike of primer explosive was supposed to be inserted into a stick of dynamite to ignite it after a time delay and blow rock apart in the mines.

Gillom could hear a hissing, and after a long moment something burning came sailing over the bench in his direction.
What in hell?

The detonator's explosion reverberated in the high-roofed tin shed, generating more dust than damage in the changing room, but the surprise and shock to Gillom's ear drums allowed the tricky Cornishman to scoot. Some of Gillom's top hair was burned, he could smell it, and one eyebrow was scorched. He peeked around the corner again to see William limp out a side exit.

The teenaged gunman hurried after him and outside saw William limping into the Copper Queen's biggest building, their third smelter. This building was open on one side and men were working inside. The thrumming of air blowers inside this big smelter made hot work only slightly cooler. Smelter workers kept the molten copper flowing, so they paid little attention to William limping past them and stopping behind one of the huge Bessemer converters. But when Gillom followed the bodyguard, Remington in one hand and holding his aching ribcage with his other, they looked up from their dangerous work.

He couldn't hear a fuse hissing again, what with all the noise of the copper processing, when another lit blasting cap came flying at him. Gillom hit the dirt, but the surprised smeltermen did not and the nearest was knocked down by the detonator's blast. Before the assassin could light another, Gillom was back on his feet, running and firing both revolvers as he rounded the big iron converter with its red-hot copper cooking inside.

The frontal assault surprised the Cornishman, six-guns blazing at him, one shot hitting him in the chest, another in the groin. As he went down, the escape artist fired a last shot from his hideout gun, clipping Gillom's coat shoulder high. The impact didn't slow the kid's steps as he skidded to a stop next to this thug who'd twice tried to kill him this grim night. No hesitation, either, as he repaid the favor. Gillom Rogers bent over his fallen foe, put his .44 right into William Pascoe's hairline, the same way he'd done John Bernard Books.

“Say your prayers.”

“See you in Hades, you sonofabitch, or some other seaport,” groaned the bodyguard as he spit up blood.

“Fair journey then. And better luck.”
Click
.

Somebody from the smelter crew snuck up behind Gillom as his final gunshot echoed and put his lights out with a two-by-four to the back of his brain pan.

Through a dark mist, Gillom was vaguely aware of a bell ringing as he was carted down Sacramento Hill, going somewhere? Two slow bells, which in miner's terms, rang when someone died on the job.

 

Thirty-three

 

When he awoke again, Gillom had a bandaged goose egg on the back of his skull. The chunk of wood somebody had brained him with had broken his scalp, so the cut had been sewn up while he was knocked out. The teenager squirmed as he rose in bed.

“
Awww
.… Head aches.”

“Easy, son. You took a good blow to the bean. Rest and water and your headache will gradually go away. No alcohol, though, until we see how you do.” This opinion came from a slim, bearded man sitting on the next bed over, sewing up Ease's wounded leg. Dr. Frederick Sweet was the mining company's doctor.

“Least you don't have a hole in you,” his buddy offered.

“You gonna walk, Ease? Still chase girls?”

“Just can't catch 'em for a while. Doc here says the bullet went right through my calf, didn't break any bones.
Ouch!
” The bartender twitched as the nurse assisting dabbed astringent on his bare calf the doctor was stitching, to staunch the bleeding.

Gillom was concerned. “You see the sheriff?”

“No, but a deputy came about the gunfire and helped me in here. Told him we were ambushed.”

Gillom looked around. This hospital was Bisbee's first, located near the old Rucker Mine, about a half mile from Main Street. The facility had opened the year before and was a four-winged structure with a well-lit operating room. It was paid for by the Copper Queen Mining Company and its small staff hired by the same. Dr. Sweet no longer had to go to the patient's home and operate on their kitchen table.