Dead Before Sundown Read online

  “Maybe not,” Salty said, “but when a fella sees somethin’ wrong happenin’, sometimes he’s got to step in.”

  “Or she,” Meg added.

  Frank didn’t argue any more. Instead he grinned and said, “I’m glad you two feel that way. I don’t reckon we can turn our backs on this, either. But we’ve got to be smart about what we do next. I think the two of you should stay here while I go take a look around. If I can find the bunch that has the guns now, we can follow them and try to find out what their plan is.”

  “You better be careful, Frank,” Salty advised. “I don’t figure they’d take kindly to bein’ spied on. You saw how quick they was to grab me an’ Meg yesterday, and they’re gonna be even proddier now that you killed one of ‘em.”

  “I plan on being careful,” Frank assured him. “Let’s get one of those horses saddled up.”

  When he had the animal ready to ride, he took hold of the reins and led the horse toward the mouth of the canyon. Salty and Meg came along with him.

  “The two of you lie low and stay alert,” Frank said. “I’ll be back later.”

  “It’s a shame we can’t do nothin’ about them smugglers,” Salty said. “I reckon it’s better if we follow the guns, though.”

  Frank nodded. “There’s nothing we can do about the guns being stolen. That’s already happened. But maybe we can stop them from being used to slaughter innocent folks.”

  He pushed some of the brush far enough aside to lead the horse through the gap he created. When he was gone, Salty and Meg could pull the brush back into place and make sure the canyon mouth was concealed again.

  Frank had just stepped out into the open when the morning erupted in noise. The terrible hammering of shots filled the air, and a veritable storm of lead pelted around him.

  Chapter 16

  Earlier that morning, just as the sun was about to creep up over the horizon to the east, Joseph Marat had opened his eyes and found himself staring down the barrel of a pistol.

  He started to jerk upright and reach for the revolver on his hip or the rifle lying on the ground beside him, but the gun muzzle suddenly pressed hard against his head and a gravelly voice ordered, “Don’t try it, boy. I don’t want to blow your brains out, but I will if I have to.” The man holding the gun chuckled. “Reckon I can always do business with your sister, if you’re not around anymore.”

  “Don’t …” Joseph had to stop and swallow hard before he could go on. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “I won’t give you any trouble.”

  “Didn’t think so.” The man lifted the gun away from Joseph’s forehead and straightened from where he had crouched beside the sleeping man.

  He was big and dressed like an American cowboy, with a black hat and denim trousers and jacket. He had bushy white side whiskers, and his face looked as if it had been carved out of a particularly rugged piece of sandstone.

  Nor was he alone. Several other men clustered around the camp, and Joseph felt a sudden surge of fear for his sister. He jerked his head from side to side, looking for her as he exclaimed, “Charlotte!”

  She cried out briefly, and a voice that was vaguely familiar to Joseph said, “Take it easy, Joe. Your sis is fine. Nobody’s going to hurt her.”

  In the weak light, Joseph saw a man in a derby hat holding Charlotte’s arm. The man’s other arm was around her waist, pinning her to him. To his surprise, Joseph recognized the man holding Charlotte as Joe Palmer, the American who had been spying on their camp two nights earlier.

  “I should have known you were with them,” Joseph said bitterly to Palmer. “You didn’t just stumble over us.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Palmer insisted. “It was just a coincidence, sure as shooting.” He grinned. “The woods are full of ‘em these days, seems like.”

  The white-haired, craggy-faced man said, “He’s right. Stand up, boy. We got business to conduct.” He added, “Keep your hands away from your guns, though.”

  Joseph obeyed the order, climbing stiffly to his feet and scowling at the strangers as he did so. He could see now that there were seven or eight of them, and they were all hard-faced, roughly dressed men who held their guns with an air of long and frequent use.

  He and Charlotte were a pair of sheep in the company of ravenous wolves, Joseph thought.

  But they had one advantage over sheep. They were the key to something these wolves wanted.

  Gold.

  “Let go of my sister,” he said to Palmer in a cold voice.

  “I’m not hurting her,” Palmer insisted. “I just grabbed hold of her to keep her from running around and getting in trouble.”

  The white-haired man made a curt gesture to Palmer. “Let her go.”

  Clearly, Palmer didn’t like the order, but he followed it. He took his hands off of Charlotte and stepped away from her.

  “Hope I didn’t offend you, Miss Marat,” he said as he reached up and touched the brim of his derby.

  She looked away from him pointedly and didn’t acknowledge what he’d said.

  The white-haired man faced Joseph and said, “Palmer tells me your name is Marat.”

  “Joseph Marat. This is my sister Charlotte.”

  “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,” the man said with an attempt at gruff courtesy. Just then he seemed to realize that he was still holding his revolver. He slid the heavy, blued-steel gun back into its holster. “My name’s Lundy. Owen Lundy.”

  “You are the one we came here to these mountains to meet?” Joseph asked. “We were not given any names.”

  “We’re the fellas you came to meet, all right. We’ve got what you want.”

  Joseph looked around. “I see no pack animals.”

  A humorless grin etched even more lines into Lundy’s face. “You don’t reckon we’d bring the guns with us to the rendezvous, do you? That’s not the way we do business, Marat. Where’s the gold?”

  Joseph was scared, but he forced himself to look and sound calm and cool-headed as he said, “That is not the way we do business. First we see the guns.”

  Lundy’s features darkened with anger. He took a step closer to Joseph and snapped, “You didn’t bring the gold?”

  Joseph steeled himself not to retreat in the face of the American outlaw’s wrath. “We can get the gold whenever we need it,” he said. “But not until we have examined the guns and found them to be everything you promised.”

  “Oh, they’re everything I promised, all right,” Lundy said savagely. “They’ll spit out more slugs in the blink of an eye than you can count!”

  “Show me,” Joseph said.

  For a long moment, the two of them stared at each other. Finally, Lundy shrugged and motioned to a couple of his men.

  “Bring up the mules.”

  They hurried to obey his command. Within minutes, they returned through the thick woods leading several mules with long wooden crates lashed onto them by thick leather straps that ran over the backs of the animals. Other mules had what appeared to be wagon wheels strapped to their flanks.

  “Break out one of the guns and set it up,” Lundy ordered.

  Joseph watched with rapt attention as the men took down a couple of the crates and pried the lids off of them. From the packing straw inside, they lifted out bundles wrapped in oilcloth. When they folded back the oilcloth on one of the bundles, the gleaming barrels of a Gatling gun came into view. The barrels, arranged in a circle, had an aura of death and destruction about them, Joseph thought … or perhaps he was being too poetic.

  “These weapons are mounted on wheeled carriages,” Lundy explained as the men began assembling the component parts of the Gatling gun. “The Army’s been experimenting with making them a little lighter in weight and easier to move around. They’ve taken out the cotton packing from around the barrels that had to be soaked in water to keep the gun from overheating. Turns out the air cools it enough.”

  The men took a couple of wheels from one of the mules and mounted a metal cross
piece between them. Two men held the wheels upright while another man fastened a curved wooden beam to the crosspiece. It extended out several feet to the back and the other end rested on the ground to form a brace that supported the wheeled carriage. Then two more men lifted the body of the Gatling gun out of the crate and bolted it into place on the carriage.

  “Once it’s set up, it’s pretty mobile,” Lundy said. “A couple of men can pick up that tongue in the back to turn it around or wheel it from place to place. You don’t have to have horses to pull it or even to transport it. Several men can do the job if they have to, once the gun’s broken down, and you can see for yourself that it doesn’t take all that long to set it up again.” The man shrugged. “Anyway, if you set it up where you want to do your shooting, you shouldn’t have to move it much.”

  Joseph frowned. “You brought ammunition?”

  Lundy pointed to one of his men and ordered, “Get those sticks of bullets.”

  The man brought out a pair of long, narrow metal magazines that fit into loading slots on the top of the weapon. The magazines held bullets that fed into the chambers as the barrels revolved and the gun fired.

  “Once your loaders get the hang of it, the thing’ll fire four hundred rounds a minute without much problem,” Lundy said. “The gun can actually handle close to a thousand rounds a minute without jamming or overheating, but men can’t reload that fast. You’ll need three men on each gun, a couple to load and one to turn the firing crank.”

  Lundy pointed out the wooden-handled crank attached to the body of the weapon.

  “Set up four of them around a target, and you can pour more than fifteen hundred rounds a minute into it,” he went on. “That’ll shoot holes in just about anything and blow it to hell in a hurry. And it’ll mow down the Mounties like wheat in a field.”

  Joseph’s voice was grim as he said, “They used a Gatling gun against my people the last time we tried to fight for our rights. It’s only fair that we use such weapons against them.”

  “That’s none of my business,” Lundy said. He waved a hand at the gun. “Well, there it is. How about that gold?”

  “Does it work? I have to see how it works.”

  Lundy smiled. “Try it yourself.”

  “You mean it?”

  Lundy motioned Joseph toward the gun. “It’s loaded and ready to go. Just turn that crank, like I said.”

  Joseph couldn’t resist the temptation. He glanced over at Charlotte. She looked apprehensive, as if she didn’t like this at all, but she didn’t shake her head to tell him he shouldn’t. Joseph approached the Gatling gun carefully, as if it were a wild animal that might attack viciously without any warning.

  As he grasped the crank’s handle, he bent down and squinted along the barrels to see where the gun was pointing. It was aimed across the valley at a stand of pines. There might be some small animals and birds in those trees, he thought, but that was their misfortune.

  He took a deep breath and turned the crank, hard and fast.

  The noise was incredible, slamming against his ears again and again. The shots roared out, coming so close together that it was hard to tell them apart. The rear brace shuddered from the recoil. The rate of fire slowed slightly and then picked up again, depending on how fast Joseph turned the crank. Across the valley, branches jerked and chunks of bark flew as the bullets chewed into the trees with ferocious power.

  Abruptly, the gun fell silent. The quiet sounded odd after that terrible racket. Lundy said, “You’re empty.”

  Joseph turned toward the outlaw in amazement. He had heard stories about these weapons, of course, but he had never seen one in action until now. It was awe-inspiring in its devastation. He peered across the valley and saw the scattered branches and the huge holes that the bullets had gouged into the tree trunks.

  If those trees were men, they would be lying dead on the ground now in bloody heaps, shot to pieces.

  Joseph turned to his sister. Charlotte still had her hands over her ears, where she had clapped them when the shooting started.

  “Do you want to try it?” he asked her.

  She lowered her hands and shook her head. She was pale and looked a little sick.

  “No. I don’t mind guns, but this … this is … evil.”

  “Nonsense,” Joseph said. “This is exactly what we need.” He looked at Lundy. “Can we reload it and shoot it again?”

  The outlaw grinned. “Sure. This time, my boys’ll show you how to load it, and you can do it yourself.”

  Joseph spent a while familiarizing himself with every part of the gun’s apparatus. He found himself fascinated by it. He thought not so much about the bloody havoc it was capable of wreaking, but more about what a mechanical marvel it was. He had to learn all he could about it so he would be able to teach his comrades among the Métis how to use the weapons.

  “We brought plenty of ammunition, but you don’t need to be wasting it,” Lundy cautioned.

  “One more magazine,” Joseph said eagerly.

  He cranked through those shells as well, watching with avid interest as several large branches fell off the pines. The hail of bullets had sawed them loose.

  When the Gatling gun fell silent again, Lundy said, “All right. You’ve seen what this thing can do. It’s time for you to keep your part of the bargain, Marat. Where’s our gold?”

  Before Joseph could answer, Palmer said, “That fella you sent out to scout the area is coming back, Owen.”

  Joseph looked around and saw a man riding up the valley toward them. When the man reached the camp, he reined in and swung down from his horse. He wore an excited look on his face.

  “What is it?” Lundy asked.

  “We’ve got some spies up the valley a ways, holed up in a little box canyon,” the man reported. “They’ve pulled some brush up in front of the canyon mouth to hide it, and I might not have even seen it if I hadn’t spotted some old pelican wanderin’ around. I watched him go back through the brush and slipped up to take a closer look. I think there’s several people in there.”

  Lundy frowned at Joseph. “Is that some of your bunch? You got the gold stashed in that canyon?”

  “I don’t know anything about this,” Joseph answered honestly. He looked at the scout. “You say this was an old man?”

  “Yeah, with a white beard and an old hat with the front pushed up.”

  Joseph shook his head. “These people are not part of our group.”

  Palmer spoke up, saying to the scout, “An old man with a white beard?”

  “That’s right. He had on a cowhide vest, too, if that means anything to you.”

  “Stevens!” Palmer said under his breath, adding a muttered curse.

  “You know these folks, Joe?” Lundy asked sharply. “I was willing to let you throw in with us, but if you’re trying to pull some sort of double cross, you’ll be damned sorry you did.”

  Palmer shook his head. “No double cross, Owen, I swear. But that old man’s an enemy of mine. He tried to kill me a while back, and I guess he’s followed up here into the mountains, the son of a bitch.”

  Lundy rasped fingertips over his beard-stubbled jaw as he thought. “Then I reckon you don’t really care what happens to this fella, do you?”

  “Not hardly. In fact, if you were to get rid of him, I’d consider it a mighty big favor.”

  Lundy nodded as he reached a decision. “Come on, then. Grab hold of that gun, boys.” He gave Joseph a savage grin. “You’re about to get a real demonstration of what a Gatling can do, Marat.”

  Chapter 17

  Frank’s instincts, honed to a razor’s edge by decades of the dangerous life he had led, were the only thing that saved him. Nerves and muscles galvanized into action and sent him diving backward.

  The horse reared up, screaming in agony as slugs pounded into its body. The animal shielded Frank as he rolled across the ground into the brush.

  Then one of the bullets struck the horse in the head, ending its pain and sendi
ng it toppling over backward. Frank had to scramble to keep the horse from falling on him.

  The Gatling gun still hammered out its lethal rhythm. Slugs tore through the brush.

  “Get down!” Frank yelled to Salty and Meg as he broke free of the brushy barrier into the canyon.

  He saw that they had already dived behind the log barricade. He joined them, vaulting over the logs and landing hard on the ground behind them. The jolt went all the way through him as his hat went flying.

  A stream of profanity from Salty’s lips threatened to turn the air blue around them. He got the torrent under control and asked over the racket of the Gatling gun, “What in blazes is goin’ on? Did we wander into the middle of a dadblamed war?”

  “It sure sounds like it,” Frank said.

  Slugs thudded into the log barricade and whipped through the air over their heads. The one thing they had on their side was that the brush across the canyon mouth concealed their position from the attackers. Whoever was using the Gatling gun was sweeping the fire back and forth across the canyon mouth, rather than concentrating his shots on the barricade.

  That was good, because at the rate those bullets were coming, after a while they might begin to penetrate the barricade if they were all aimed straight at it.

  “Blast it, this is all my fault!” Salty said bitterly. “Somebody must’a spotted me when I was out scoutin’ around earlier.”

  Frank had already figured out the same thing, although he hadn’t seen any point in bringing it up.

  “Shoot, we wouldn’t even be here if I hadn’t wanted to come after that varmint Palmer,” Salty went on.

  “Nobody forced us to come with you,” Meg said. “We’re here because we wanted to be.” She flinched and ducked as more slugs slammed into the logs. “Well, maybe we don’t want to be in this exact spot….”

  Frank risked a look around the end of the barricade. The dead horse lay about thirty feet away. The animal had fallen so that the side of the saddle where the rifle sheath was strapped was turned up. Frank could see the Winchester’s stock protruding from the sheath.