Legion of Fire Read online

  When Burnett held up the marshal’s badge he’d only recently removed from his shirt pocket and extended it toward Turkey, the outlaw recoiled as if a snake was being waved in his face. “What’s the big idea? Are you crazy? Get that thing away from me!”

  The sun wasn’t fully above the ragged horizon of the badlands. As the group was making ready to ride away from their night camp Burnett had revealed his badge for the first time. It had come on the heels of a brief consultation between the marshal and Luke following a dawn grilling of Turkey about how far away from the Legion hideout they were and what they could expect in the way of lookouts or guards as they drew nearer. Turkey had assured them repeatedly that the hideout was so cleverly concealed the gang never felt the need for such measures.

  “No, no, I insist,” Burnett said, his tone patient and soothing to an exaggerated degree as he reached out and pinned the badge to the front of Turkey’s shirt.

  The recipient tried to twist away but, with his wounded arm in a sling and his wrists handcuffed to the saddle horn, his elusive movements were too limited to be effective.

  “We want to make sure you feel like a welcome part of our little group,” Luke added, adopting the same tone as the marshal.

  “I don’t want to be welcomed to your damn group!” Turkey protested. “Ain’t like I’m here by choice, you loco varmints. Get that stinkin’ piece of tin offa me!”

  “Consider it a trade. Here’s the item we’ll remove instead.” Burnett undid the knot on the red bandanna tied around Turkey’s arm, then pulled the piece of cloth loose and flung it away.

  “Fetch that back, damn you!” Turkey wailed. “It means something.”

  “Yeah. And everything it means is evil and lowdown,” Russell said, joining in on pressuring the outlaw.

  “To you, maybe. To me, it means a helluva lot more than your stupid badge. I hate it and want nothing to do with it. Can’t you understand that?”

  “What I understand,” Luke said, suddenly leaning close and dropping the phony tone from his voice, “is that if you’re lying about there being no lookouts posted around the Legion hideout and we ride up with you in the lead—like we’re fixing to do from here on—the first thing a lookout is going to spot when they see us coming is that nice bright target on your shirt. You know, the kind of thing you and the boys like nothing better than plugging holes in. Remember?”

  Turkey’s eyes bugged. “Here now! You can’t do a thing like that. You’re law dogs—er, I mean, you’re officers of the law. You gotta do things legal. You can’t plop me in front and make a target out of me that way.”

  “If there aren’t any lookouts, like you claim,” Russell reminded him, “how would that make you a target? What are you so worried about?”

  Turkey’s wide eyes were whipping from one face to the other of those drawn up in a semi-circle around him. “B-but you never know,” he stammered. “Kelson might not have lookouts posted regularlike, but that don’t mean there still ain’t men who go out and sorta patrol once in a while. If we ran into somebody like that and they saw me with this damn star stuck on me, I . . . I . . .”

  “You’d get your ass shot off,” Burnett bluntly finished for him. “But just so you know, we’d be grateful to you for drawing attention that way and giving us an opening to return fire.”

  “You go to hell!” Turkey’s eyes suddenly quit whipping around and blazed with defiance. “You might think that sounds like a real cute trick, but it wouldn’t fool my boys. They’d recognize me in time to hold off pluggin’ me.”

  “They might recognize your smell,” Luke said. “But if they see that star, that’s all that will matter to them.”

  “Says you,” Turkey sneered. “All the cheap tricks you can think to try ain’t gonna put you over on the Legion. The only slim chance you got is to turn and make a run for it right now. Otherwise your bones will be stayin’ in these badlands forever.”

  “Maybe so. But they won’t be the only ones,” Luke said. “Either courtesy of your trigger-happy friends or if you keep annoying me, yours could be among the first to start bleaching out. Now lead on, you pile of rodent guts. And you’d better get us somewhere pretty quick or I can’t make any promises about holding my annoyance level in check.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, Turkey indeed led them “somewhere” pretty quick. Albeit quite inadvertently, he led them into a direct confrontation with Henry Wymer and the four men accompanying him who were looking for sign of the overdue supply train.

  It happened suddenly and unexpectedly about halfway through a narrow, twisty arroyo into which Luke and the others had followed Turkey. As they rounded a leftward bend between moderately high sides with jagged rims, the arroyo flared out wider for the next thirty-odd yards, its walls tapering back to sloping, weather-worn shoulders. Directly in the center of the widened section were Wymer and the other raiders.

  Riding at the head of his own group, Turkey was naturally the first to see them. Unable to lift his hands and motion in any way, he still didn’t hesitate to hail his fellow outlaws and put the spurs to his horse, causing the animal to lunge forward with a startled yelp. “Don’t shoot, boys! It’s me! It’s good ol’—”

  That was as far as he got before he was hammered by a hail of bullets. Had he kept his mouth shut and not spurred the horse into leaping ahead, Wymer and those riding with him might not have reacted so hastily and actually taken a moment to recognize good ol’ Turkey. Instead—exactly as Luke and Burnett calculated—all the Legion men saw was a badge pinned on a man shouting and appearing to charge toward them.

  Whether Wymer or any of the others ever realized who it was they’d cut down, there was no way of knowing. They quickly found themselves on the receiving end of a hail of lead that did some messy cutting in return. Caught in the widened stretch of the arroyo with rounded, sloping sides that offered no cover, they were hopelessly exposed.

  As soon as Turkey had shouted out and put the spurs to his horse, Luke, who was riding just half a length back from him, knew what was happening—that Turkey had spotted one or more Legion raiders just ahead around the bend. Rather than try to restrain Turkey, Luke had dived out of his saddle and scrambled for cover in the splits and seams of the arroyo wall. Directly behind him, also reading the situation and reacting accordingly, Burnett did the same, only on the opposite wall of the passage. Hearing the shots, Russell also dismounted and ran for cover.

  Edging up quickly on either side of the fallen Turkey, Luke and Burnett moved forward far enough to see around the bend and into the open area where Wymer and his men were poised somewhat uncertainly with pistols and rifles still extended.

  The marshal and the bounty hunter didn’t waste any time in taking advantage of the moment. Without hesitation, they opened up. Burnett levered rounds from his Winchester and Luke fired first one Remington and then the other as fast as they could squeeze their triggers.

  It was savage and bloody and over quickly. The arroyo was so choked with roiling blue powder smoke that visibility was almost nonexistent. Nevertheless, Luke was able to make out that four men and three horses were down. The raider who’d been riding at the head of the group had fallen without getting off a shot. The men behind him had managed to trigger a smattering of desperate rounds before they too had spilled from their saddles, but all their shots had gone high and wild, none coming anywhere close to either Luke or Burnett. A single raider, the man farthest back in the pack, had wheeled around and ridden clear, bullets chasing as his horse’s hooves clattered a frantic retreat on the hardpan floor of the arroyo.

  Luke and Burnett held to cover for a full minute longer, their hands automatically reloading their weapons as their eyes carefully surveyed the scene for any sign of life that might still pose a danger. Satisfied it appeared safe, they rose out of their crouches and moved forward. Russell, who hadn’t been positioned to participate in any of the shooting, came from behind them, leading their horses.

  All of the fallen
men were dead. Two of the downed horses still had life in them but were too badly injured to leave suffering, so the marshal solemnly planted a Winchester slug in the brain of each.

  “Helluva thing to say,” he muttered afterward, “but I feel a lot worse about plugging those horses than I do for shooting the men we dropped here.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Luke said. “The four-legged critters had good hearts. The two-legged ones were nothing but wastes of air that quit deserving to breathe a long time ago.”

  Burnett expelled some air of his own. “Well, then I reckon we cured ’em of that.” He turned his head and looked up the arroyo, the way the escaped raider had gone. “Don’t expect we’ll have to look much farther, though, to find more requiring some of the same medicine.”

  “But how will we know how to find them now?” asked Russell, looking anxious. His gaze cut back to the sprawled form of Turkey Grimes. “We’ve lost our guide.”

  “I doubt we’ll need to worry very long about finding the rest of the Legion,” Luke told him. “Between the raider who got away to carry word and the noise we kicked up with this little skirmish, I expect the others will bust their humps wanting to introduce themselves.”

  Chapter 40

  “How big a posse was it? How many men?” Sam Kelson was peppering Josh Stringer, the lone raider who’d escaped the arroyo shoot-out, with rapid, demanding questions.

  Stringer stood somewhat unsteadily before the gang leader, still fighting to catch his breath, dripping clammy fear-sweat and blood from the bullet gash high on his right arm. The other men present inside the cave crowded around close.

  “At least half a dozen, I’d say,” Stringer reported. “It was hard to tell for sure because part of them were still around the bend of that little canyon. Hell, there could have been twenty or thirty back there for all I know. Mostly all I could see was the storm of lead they were pouring on us!”

  “You whittle down any of them in return?”

  “The front one. The first one we saw. I can’t say for sure after that.”

  “Seems to me there’s a damn lot you’re not sure of. But all the rest of our boys bought it? Even Wymer? You saw that for certain?”

  Stringer’s face bunched into an anguished expression. “Oh God, they fell like stalks of corn. We was caught in the open with no chance to find cover. And Wymer was riding right in front. He never had a chance.”

  Kelson slammed his right fist into his left palm. “Damn! Damn it all!”

  “What are we waiting for?” No Nation Smith growled. “Let’s go get the bastards!”

  “Why not let ’em come to us?” somebody else said. “We can hold off an army from the mouth of this cave.”

  Another voice said, “But if we let ’em bottle us up, that’s exactly what they’ll do—bring in an army!”

  “Everybody be quiet! Let me think!” Kelson focused his attention back on Stringer. “No mistake about it being a posse? A pack of law dogs?”

  Stringer’s head bobbed up and down. “That one in front, the one we cut down, was wearing a big shiny star. He called for us not to shoot, like he expected we’d just go along and let him get the drop on us because of his star. He was a law dog right enough. But he was dead wrong about how far he thought that would get him.”

  “Where was this? How far out?”

  “Not quite a mile. We was heading for that high ground to the southeast,” Stringer explained, “where Wymer figured we’d have a chance to look out and maybe spot the pack train coming in.”

  “That must be it. That must be how they got in so close,” Smith said. “That lousy posse must have stumbled onto Grogan and the others by accident, then forced ’em to tell where to find us.”

  “Take a lot to make Grogan spill,” somebody stated.

  “You couldn’t say the same about those Grimes boys, though,” somebody else replied. “I never did trust them stinkin’ damn hillbillies.”

  “How they found us,” Kelson said, “doesn’t matter so much for right now. It’s over and done. What matters is deciding on the smartest way to deal with them. And it sure as hell isn’t going to be sitting here waiting for them to land in our laps!”

  “That’s the talk I want to hear!” Smith said. “We go find ’em and jump in their laps. Right? And make sure we finish every last one of ’em so they can’t lead anybody else here.”

  Kelson held up a hand, palm out. “Not quite so fast. I’m all for landing on them and landing hard. But recall I said we needed to deal with them in the smartest way. Rushing out against a force of unknown size with nothing more than a notion to retaliate doesn’t seem overly smart, but drawing them in closer for the sake of sizing them up, does. And as long as we’re the ones pulling the strings, it’s hardly allowing them to land in our laps.”

  Smith scowled. “Just say how you want to play it, that’s all. Long as you give us the chance to put ’em in our gunsights.”

  * * *

  “Thoughtful of him to leave us such a nice, clear trail,” Burnett remarked, responding to the smear of fresh blood Luke was pointing out on a chest-high ledge of rock. “I didn’t think either of us hit that runaway skunk.”

  “Looks like one of us must have,” Luke said. “He’s not bleeding too heavy, but he’s spilling enough to mark the way he went.”

  “Ordinarily, I’d cuss myself for having shot a varmint and not put him down,” the marshal said. “This time I’m glad I only grazed him.”

  “What makes you think it was you who grazed him?” Luke asked. “How do you know it wasn’t me?”

  Burnett shrugged. “Because you’re a better shot than me. If you’d hit him, you would have put him down.”

  Luke’s mouth twisted ruefully. “You make it hard for me to argue the point, don’t you?”

  “The main thing,” Russell put in with a touch of impatience in his tone, “is that one of you hit the scoundrel and now his wound is marking his passage. That means, as long as he keeps dripping, he could lead us straight to the Legion hideout. Correct?”

  “Could,” Luke allowed. “If we stick with the blood trail all the way.”

  Having decided not to wait where they were for the expected response from other members of the Legion of Fire, they had continued on through the arroyo where the shoot-out took place. They hadn’t gone far past the open space littered with the bodies of men and horses before Luke spotted the first splotch of fresh blood. More had been appearing at regular intervals ever since.

  Frowning, Russell said in response to Luke’s statement, “Why wouldn’t we follow it all the way? I thought that was the whole idea.”

  “Tracking a grizzly to his den is different from charging in after him,” Burnett said.

  “Especially when you have reason to believe he’s caught your scent and knows you’re on the way,” Luke added.

  Russell’s frowned deepened. “Now you’ve got me even more confused. Back there just a little bit ago we agreed not to wait for the Legion to come to us. Now it sounds like you’re saying we’re not going after them, either. What am I missing?”

  Luke set his jaw firmly, then said, “The part where we show the grizzly we’re a trickier handful of trouble than he’s ready for.”

  Chapter 41

  Sam Kelson sat on a chunk of broken boulder about ten yards outside the entrance to the hideout cave. The morning was clear and bright, the air feeling like it had the potential to warm up more than it had over the past couple of days. A faint breeze was whispering through the surrounding rocks, stirring curls of dust across the oval of open ground that flared out away from his position.

  The gang leader sat unmoving, appearing quite calm. He gripped a Winchester rifle in his right hand, its butt resting on his thigh, barrel angled skyward. On the ground in front of Kelson sat a bedraggled Millie Burnett. A five-foot length of leather thong was cinched around her throat, its opposite end looped over Kelson’s left wrist. Another leather thong bound the girl’s wrists. Her tangled, matted
hair stirred slightly in the breeze. The expression on her pretty face was defiant, unafraid, but tension and traces of fear that she couldn’t suppress were evident deep in her eyes.

  The pair had been sitting that way for several minutes. The balance of Kelson’s men—including the recently wounded Stringer as well as Browne, the still-healing whipping victim—were dispersed at strategic points in the ragged thrusts of rock on either side of the oval area fronting the cave. Only the helpless Elmer Pride and Old Man Crowley were left inside.

  Kelson’s plan was simple. He meant to lure the posse in close, using the girl as bait to represent the other hostages and giving the impression there might be room for negotiation. Once he had the fools lulled and he and his men had had the chance to better gauge what they were up against, he’d give the signal to open fire. From their hidden positions, Smith and the others would hand the posse bastards a taste of what they’d done to Wymer, and blast them to hell and gone.

  All they had to do was show up . . .

  More minutes dragged by. The shoot-out had occurred less than a mile away by Stringer’s estimate. Kelson willed himself to stay patient. The posse would naturally approach with caution and they had some mighty rugged ground to cover. It was bound to take some time.

  And then, faintly at first, just barely above the low moan of the wind, he heard a sound. It gradually grew louder and closer. Clop . . . Clop . . . Clop. The footfalls of a single horse advancing steadily but slowly nearer.

  Kelson scowled. A single horse? What sense did that make?

  Before he had time to fret about it too much, the rider came into sight. One man. Tall in the saddle, solidly built, somber expression. Dressed all in black. Millie made as if to say—or possibly shout—something, and Kelson immediately silenced her with a sharp yank of the thong, turning whatever she was going to say into a gagging, strangled gasp.

  Horse and rider paused on the far side of the open area. Then, after just a moment, the man touched his heels to the horse’s sides and the animal proceeded on forward. The man’s eyes touched briefly on the girl before settling on Kelson. They stayed there, looking neither to the left or right as he rode the rest of the way. A dozen yards out, he reined up.