Sidewinders Read online

  “Yeah.”

  They had left their horses temporarily at the livery stable. Bo mounted up, then gave Chloride a hand climbing on behind him. The three of them rode up the gulch to the old-timer’s cabin. An icy wind whistled along the creek.

  “Got a hunch winter’s comin’ early this year,” Chloride commented. “We’re liable to see snow before Thanksgivin’.”

  “I hope not,” Scratch said. “I got to find a wild turkey for Sue Beth to cook up for the feast.”

  “We’ll keep our eyes open,” Bo told him. “There are bound to be a few gobblers left around here.”

  The old cabin was dark and quiet when they reached their destination. Bo and Scratch kept their hands near their guns until Chloride had the candle lit, just in case anybody was lurking around who shouldn’t be. The old-timer poked up the ashes in the stove and got a fire burning again to take some of the chill out of the air.

  On a cold night like this, the best thing to do was curl up in some blankets and sleep. The Texans spread their bedrolls and turned in pretty quickly, followed shortly by Chloride. They would be up before dawn to get ready for the trip back up the gulch to the mine.

  Long years of experience had gotten both Bo and Scratch in the habit of sleeping lightly. It didn’t take much to wake them. The slightest unusual sound or any other warning of potential danger would do it.

  In this case it was a smell. Bo didn’t know how long he had been asleep when his eyes suddenly opened. Instantly he was fully awake. His life had depended on just such a swift reaction too many times for it to be otherwise. He lifted his head and sniffed the air.

  The sharp tang he smelled was familiar, and as he recognized it, he threw the blankets off and reached for his boots. “Scratch!” he said in an urgent whisper.

  “I smell it,” the silver-haired Texan replied in the same tone. “Coal oil!”

  “Yeah. Wake Chloride, but try to keep him quiet. We don’t want the varmints to know we’re awake just yet.”

  There was only one explanation for the smell of coal oil being so strong inside the cabin. Somebody was splashing the stuff around outside, soaking the walls with it, getting ready to burn the cabin to the ground . . . with Bo, Scratch, and Chloride inside it. The citizens of Deadwood would probably think the candle or an overturned lantern had started the blaze, but in reality, it would be pure murder.

  If the men outside got away with it. Bo didn’t intend to let that happen.

  Moving quietly, he pulled on his boots, buckled on his gunbelt, shrugged into his coat, and picked up his hat and Winchester. As he moved toward the door, he heard the soft whisper as Scratch tried to wake Chloride as quietly as possible, so they could take the would-be arsonists by surprise.

  That didn’t work. Chloride came up off his bunk sputtering and yelling. “What is it? Who’s there? Injuns! Don’t let ’em scalp you—”

  Just as Bo reached the door, he heard a man’s harsh voice outside, ordering, “Light it up!” Bo grabbed the door and jerked it open.

  A sheet of fire roared up in his face.

  CHAPTER 13

  In the sudden burst of flame, Bo caught glimpses of several men in long coats, bandana masks, and pulled-down hats. The Devils of Deadwood Gulch had come to call, seeking revenge for having their plans ruined the past two days. Bo heard a gun roar, saw the muzzle flash, and felt the wind-rip of the bullet going past his ear.

  “Keep your heads down!” he shouted to Scratch and Chloride. More shots blasted as he ducked back and kicked the door closed. Bo realized that the outlaws were giving him and his companions a choice: stay in here and burn, or flee through the door and be riddled with lead.

  But there was a third option, Bo thought, and he liked their chances better with it.

  He whirled toward Scratch and Chloride, who were grabbing up as much of their gear as they could carry. Flames were already licking up the front wall and one of the side walls, casting a garish light on the interior of the old cabin.

  “Come on,” Bo said. “Out the back!”

  “But there ain’t no back door!” Chloride protested.

  “There’s about to be!”

  Bo lowered his shoulder, got as much of a running start as the close confines of the cabin would allow him, and rammed into the rear wall as hard as he could. The rotten old lumber, the tarpaper, and the flimsy tin was no match for his hurtling weight. With a splintering crash, he burst through the wall, lost his balance, and sprawled on the ground.

  Scratch was there beside him a heartbeat later to reach down, grab Bo’s arm, and hoist his friend back to his feet. Somewhere nearby, Chloride’s old cap-and-ball pistol boomed.

  Bo still had his Colt in his hand. In the nightmarish glare cast by the burning building, he snapped a shot at a masked figure he spotted near the cabin. The man bellowed, “They’re back here! They got out!”

  “Head for the trees!” Bo ordered. Pines grew thickly on the wall of the gulch, all the way down to the base of the slope. The Texans and Chloride retreated toward them, backing away and sending bullets spraying around the cabin from Bo’s Colt, Scratch’s twin Remingtons, and Chloride’s old horse pistol. The burning cabin itself gave them some cover because the Devils had to come around it to get a shot at them, and every time one of them stepped into sight, Bo or Scratch or Chloride sent a bullet his way.

  They made it unscathed to the trees and got behind some of the thick trunks to continue the battle. Bo didn’t expect the fight to last very long, and sure enough it didn’t. The cabin was fully ablaze by now, but even over the crackling roar he heard the thud of hoofbeats as the outlaws took off into the night.

  The cabin was close enough to Deadwood that somebody in the town was likely to spot the orange glow in the sky and know that something was burning. Nothing scared people on the frontier like fire. Deadwood had several volunteer fire companies already. Some of the citizens were sure to come hurrying up the gulch to see what was going on.

  “Hold your fire, Chloride,” Bo called to the old-timer. “They’re not shooting at us anymore.”

  “Yeah, they’re gone,” Scratch agreed. “Took off for the tall and uncut when they saw we weren’t gonna cooperate with them killin’ us.”

  “The hydrophobia skunks!” Chloride raged. “They burned down my cabin! The dang no-good weasels!”

  Bo thumbed fresh rounds into his Colt. “We got our guns and most of our gear out of there,” he said. “Lost our bedrolls, but we can replace them. I see that a couple of poles on the fence around the shed and the horse pen are down, so I reckon our horses spooked and busted out when the fire started. They’re probably still around somewhere.”

  “Bound to have lost our saddles, though,” Scratch said. “We’ll have to ride bareback into town.”

  Bo grunted as he holstered his gun. “Won’t be the first time, will it?”

  Scratch chuckled and said, “Not hardly. When I was a kid, I reckon I must’ve rode a thousand miles before I ever knew what a saddle was.”

  “Yeah, well, we ain’t kids no more,” Chloride pointed out. “None of us.”

  “No, but I’ll bet Marty Sutton will advance us the money to buy new saddles and tack,” Bo said.

  “Folks comin’,” Scratch said.

  It was true. Bo saw the bobbing glow of lanterns coming up the gulch toward them. When he was able to make out one of the fire wagons from Deadwood, along with a crowd of men, he and Scratch and Chloride left the cover of the trees and walked toward the cabin. The roof had fallen in, and now the walls were collapsing as well. Showers of sparks climbed into the cold, black night sky. It would have been a pretty sight in a way, if not for the destruction it represented.

  One of the men from town spotted them and shouted, “There they are!” A group hurried forward to meet them.

  “What happened?” another man asked. “Are you fellas all right?”

  “We’re fine,” Bo answered. “And as far as what happened . . . some of the Deadwood Devils came to
pay us a visit.”

  “With a can of coal oil,” Scratch added.

  “Good Lord!” the townman muttered. “They tried to burn down the shack around you?”

  Bo nodded. “That’s right. We got out just in time and swapped some lead with them, but they got away.”

  “Three times!” one of the men exclaimed. “That’s three times the Devils have gone up against you Texans, and you’ve come out alive every time!”

  “Hey, what about me?” Chloride demanded. “I got away from ’em that first time, when they held up the Argosy gold wagon.” He thumped his chest. “I reckon I’m the champeen Devil-buster around here!”

  “You can have the title and welcome to it, old-timer,” Scratch said with a laugh.

  While Chloride was blustering again about being called an old-timer, the captain of the fire company said, “Let’s get some water on that debris, men. We don’t want the fire spreading.”

  The volunteers went about the task with practiced efficiency, working the hand pump to send a spray of water from the tank on the wagon through the hose and onto what was left of the cabin. Smoldering wood sizzled and popped as the water hit it.

  While they were doing that, Bo asked the captain, “Reckon we could get a ride back into town with you fellas? Our saddles burned up in the shed.”

  The man nodded. “Sure. Where are your horses?”

  “Around here somewhere,” Scratch said. He put a couple of fingers in his mouth and gave a piercing whistle. The Texans weren’t surprised when their mounts came trotting up a minute later. The horses were well trained and had a knack for avoiding trouble when they could.

  Once the fire was completely out, Bo, Scratch, and Chloride climbed onto the wagon with the rest of the men and rode back into town. The horses trotted along behind the wagon.

  A crowd of curious bystanders was waiting in Deadwood. The news of what had happened spread rapidly, and one excitable gent called out, “Three cheers for the gallant Texans and their defeat of the Devils! Hip, hip, hooray!”

  The rest of the crowd took up the cheer, which caused Bo and Scratch to exchange an uncomfortable glance. Scratch leaned closer to his friend and said quietly, “Some of those varmints may have took off their masks and snuck back into town already. They could be in this bunch right now.”

  “I know,” Bo said. “And after spending months terrorizing the people around here, I don’t imagine they’re very happy about what’s going on.”

  “That’s liable to make ’em try even harder to kill us.”

  Bo nodded as he looked at the excited crowd and said, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

  While Bo and Scratch were putting up their horses for the night at Hanson’s Livery after all, Martha Sutton arrived with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and a worried look on her face.

  “Are the three of you all right?” she asked. “I heard that your cabin burned down, Mr. Coleman.”

  “Got burned down, you mean,” Chloride said. “It was them durned Devils again.”

  “They seem to have declared war on the three of you.”

  “We’ve been in wars before,” Bo said.

  “Always came through all right,” Scratch added.

  “Then you’re not hurt?” Martha asked.

  Bo shook his head. “We’re fine. We lost our saddles, tack, and bedrolls in the fire, but that’s all.”

  “I’ll replace those,” Martha said with an emphatic nod. “It’s my responsibility. The Devils wouldn’t be after you if you weren’t working for me. And you’ll stay in those hotel rooms after all.”

  “We won’t argue about that with you, ma’ am,” Bo told her. “I’m a little curious, though, about one thing . . . How did you know what happened to Chloride’s cabin? It’s late enough that you had probably turned in for the night, hadn’t you?”

  Martha looked a little uncomfortable and embarrassed, and for a second Bo wondered if he had gone and poked his nose into something that was none of his business. But then she said, “Phillip Ramsey came to my house and told me.”

  “Ramsey?” Scratch repeated in surprise. “That bookkeeper fella who works for Nicholson?”

  Martha nodded. “He’d heard about it—I don’t know where—but he didn’t know if the three of you were all right. He thought I might want to know, since you work for me.”

  Scratch grunted and said, “I didn’t much cotton to that young fella. Seemed a mite weasel-like to me.”

  “Phillip’s not totally a bad sort. It’s just that he works for the Argosy, and, well, Lawrence Nicholson and my father were rivals for a long time. Naturally, there’s some hostility on both sides . . .”

  But there was a part of Martha that wished the hostility didn’t exist, Bo sensed. That didn’t come as a complete surprise to him. Martha and Ramsey were about the same age, after all, and even though a gal and a young fella might be business rivals, that didn’t always extend to the other parts of their lives.

  To spare Martha any further embarrassment, Bo changed the subject by saying, “We’ll head down to the hotel now and get some rest. Morning will come awful early, I expect.”

  Martha nodded. “Of course.” She put a hand on Chloride’s arm. “I’m very sorry about your cabin, Mr. Coleman. I’ll do anything I can to help make it up to you.”

  That much attention from a pretty young woman did wonders for the old-timer’s hurt feelings. Chloride shuffled his feet and said, “Aw, shucks, Miss Sutton, don’t worry about it too much. It was just a ramshackle ol’ cabin that didn’t even belong to me, not really. I was just sorta squattin’ in it.”

  “You lost some personal belongings, though. Just let me know what you need replaced, and I’ll take care of it if I can.”

  Chloride nodded. “Yes’m, I’ll do that. Right now, though, I’m fine.”

  She smiled at him and squeezed his arm, and Bo would have sworn that the old pelican was blushing furiously under all those whiskers.

  Martha insisted on going with them to the hotel and making the arrangements for their rooms. Then the three men insisted on walking her back to her house, a neat frame structure in one of Deadwood’s residential neighborhoods on the slope above downtown. It was the wee hours of the morning before they were all settled down and asleep in their hotel rooms, and as Bo had predicted, he seemed to have barely closed his eyes when the built-in instinct most frontiersmen possessed woke him. A check of his pocket watch told him it would be dawn in another hour.

  Scratch stepped out into the hotel corridor at the same time Bo did. The Texans nodded to each other and went to the door of Chloride’s room. Scratch put his ear to the panel and grinned.

  “Sounds like he’s still sawin’ logs in there,” he said. “We’ll have to wake him up.”

  “Better be careful about it,” Bo advised. “He may sleep with that old horse pistol under his pillow. You saw what a ruckus he made when you woke him earlier.”

  “Yeah, he acted like he thought ol’ Sittin’ Bull and Crazy Horse were after him.” Not wanting to disturb the other guests in the hotel, Scratch knocked quietly on the door and called, “Chloride! Hey, Chloride, wake up!”

  Then he took a quick step to the side just in case the old-timer grabbed a gun and blasted a shot through the door without knowing what was going on.

  Instead Chloride responded with a groggy, “Huh? What in blue blazes—”

  “Time to get up, Chloride,” Bo said through the door. “We’ve got things to do and places to be.”

  “Oh, yeah. Hang on.”

  Bo and Scratch listened for more snoring, in case Chloride went back to sleep, but a few minutes later the door opened and the old-timer emerged from the room, yawning. “All right, I’m ready to go,” he said as he ran his fingers through his tangled beard.

  They went to the livery stable first and found that Esteban, the Mexican hostler, was getting ready to hitch the mule team to the wagon by lantern light. Bo asked him when the saddle shop opened, and Esteban said, �
��Whenever you need it to, señor. The man who runs the shop lives above it, and since he is a bachelor, you will not have to worry about disturbing his family.”

  Bo nodded his thanks. “All right. We’ll wait a little while before we go over there. I see the café is open already, so we’ll have some breakfast first.”

  “Sí, Señora Pendleton is there early and late. She works very hard.” Esteban shrugged. “But what else is she to do, with no man in her life? It was very hard for her when her husband died.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Bo said. He lifted a hand in farewell. “We’ll be back after a while.”

  They went up the street and angled across to the Red Top. A couple of men were already at the counter drinking coffee. Sue Beth was nowhere in sight, but she emerged from the door into the kitchen a moment later.

  “It’ll be a while before the food’s ready,” she said as she greeted the newcomers with a smile, “but I can pour coffee for you.”

  “That’ll be fine, ma’am,” Scratch told her.

  They settled down on stools at the counter while Sue Beth placed cups and saucers in front of them and then fetched the pot from the stove. “I heard about what happened last night,” she said as she poured. “I’m sorry about your cabin, Chloride.”

  The old-timer shook his head. “It’s my own dang fault, I reckon, for throwin’ in with these two wild Texas boys and makin’ the Devils mad at us.”

  “They don’t like anyone defying them, do they?”

  “Apparently not,” Bo said. “They’d have to be pretty upset to burn down a fella’s cabin with him in it.”

  Sue Beth frowned. “Are you certain it was the same bunch? There could be more than one gang of outlaws around here, you know.”

  “That’s true,” Bo admitted. “But these hombres wore the same sort of outfit that the Devils do. Anyway, another bunch of owlhoots would have tried to rob us. Those men last night just wanted us dead.”

  “I’ve been doin’ some thinkin, too,” Chloride put in. “Last night I heard one of the varmints give the order to light that coal oil they’d splashed around, and I’d swear it was the same fella I heard bossin’ the others that day they hit the Argosy gold wagon.” A little shudder ran through the old-timer. “The same one who carved the pitchforks into the foreheads of them dead guards.”