Hour of Death Read online

  “But Dean Richmond’s not one to hide his light under a bushel. He couldn’t resist the urge to show it off, make himself look like a big man. Turns out it’s useful in holdups for potting stagecoach drivers and shotgun messengers. Leaves big holes in the bodies that could only be made by an elephant gun.”

  “That rifle’s enough to put a rope around Dean’s neck,” Malachi said.

  “We want to take Dean alive. He’s got a lot of questions to answer,” Sixkiller cautioned.

  “That’s a tall order. Dean’s not one to give up without a fight. I don’t want any of my men killed or hurt trying to take him alive,” Malachi said as the sky was lightening in the east.

  The three men turned their attention to the stone cabin. It had small square oil-papered windows, grimy yellow light glowing behind them. Horses milled about in a rail-fence corral to one side of the cabin.

  A stir within the cabin caused shadows to flit across the window squares.

  “Somebody’s up. What do we do?” whispered Holtz, a posse man.

  “Sit tight and do nothing till I give the signal. We want to catch as many as we can out in the open before making our move,” Malachi said.

  “Why don’t we just rush them?” asked Judd, another of the posse.

  “After you,” Caleb Keene said sarcastically.

  “I don’t know,” posse man Dillard mulled, thoughtful. “Maybe we should sneak up on them, take them while they’re sleeping.”

  “One of them, at the least, is awake,” Sixkiller pointed out.

  “Maybe he’ll go back to sleep,” a man named Brennan said.

  “Dean and Towhead are tough men to catch napping,” Malachi said.

  “Get too close and those horses might spook and give us away,” Caleb said.

  Vandaman studied the scene. “Not much cover down there and a clear field of fire from the cabin. You wouldn’t want to be caught out in the open when they start shooting.”

  “What if one of ’em tries to ride out?” asked Cort Randle.

  Malachi shook his head. “Can’t let that happen. That’ll give away the game. Stop him cold. Dead.”

  The cabin’s wooden front door creaked, swinging open. A man stood outlined in the doorframe. Shaggy-haired and bearded, he stepped outside, walking stiff-legged, staggering off to one side. He looked drunk.

  A rifle hammer clicked into position as Judd drew a bead on the newcomer, the metallic click seemingly unheard by the man in the gun sights.

  Caleb Keene went into motion quickly. Silently, he got behind Judd and placed a hand lightly on his shoulder so as not to startle him. “Ease off, Judd. Not yet. Pa will give the word.”

  Judd was an older, red-faced man with bushy eyebrows, a gray-flecked beard, and thick body.

  Thick in the head, thought Sixkiller.

  Judd slackened his finger off the trigger with obvious reluctance, but followed orders.

  The drunken outlaw stood bracing himself with one hand against a tree. With the other he unbuttoned his trousers and urinated against the trunk. When his business was done he turned, buttoning up as he lurched back inside the cabin. He left the door wide open.

  After a pause, somebody else inside reached out a hand and closed the door.

  The posse resumed its wait. But waiting was hard on the nerves. Not on those of hardened manhunters as Sixkiller, Malachi, and son, who outwardly seemed to have no nerves. Vandaman, too, seemed to keep himself under iron control.

  But the others? Sixkiller wondered how they would hold up.

  It was a brisk morning and his hands were cold, fingers stiff. He couldn’t have that and stuck his hands under his arms to keep them warm and supple for the work to come.

  A quarter-hour passed, then another. Paling stars faded into the whitening sky. Light pulsed, shimmering in the east.

  The grayish sky was slit with a razor line of pink color. A lone bird in a pine tree vented a few tentative chirps.

  Movement once more sounded inside the cabin.

  The lamp light went out, the windows becoming dull squares framing interior gloom.

  After a while, the front door opened, revealing a different man from the drunkard. He was younger, with long, thin, dirty blond hair and a scraggly yellow beard. He was skinny, sharp-faced, pale, and sleepy-eyed.

  He wore a faded red flannel shirt, jeans, and boots, and held something in his right hand, dangling down along his side.

  “Bob Pingry. He’s a bad ’un,” Caleb rasped hoarsely. “Fast.”

  Pingry knuckled his eyes with his left hand, eyeing the coming day with little enthusiasm and less love. Apparently he saw nothing of the posse nor sensed the presence of it, judging by his sneeringly indifferent expression.

  The object in his right hand was a gun belt complete with holstered gun. He started fastening it around his lean waist.

  A shot exploded, shattering the stillness.

  The bullet tore into the doorframe, spraying splinters into Pingry’s startled face. Cursing, snarling, he jumped back indoors, throwing himself to one side out of sight and out of the line of fire.

  One of the posse had gotten buck fever and jumped the gun, worst of all missing the target.

  Caleb cursed the offender. “Damn it, Judd—”

  “I thought he was reaching!” Judd protested.

  “That’s done it,” Malachi said resignedly, matter-of-factly.

  The posse waited a breathless delay of a few heartbeats—three or four—then oilskin window panes were torn down and rifle and six-gun barrels were thrust outside.

  With a chorus of curses and shouts, the outlaws loosed a big blast of firepower at the ridge top, pumping out a fusillade.

  Racketing noise crackled and spear-bladed muzzle flares were lancing lines of light. Bullets ripped into the rocks on the rise, gouging and cratering boulder faces, spewing rock shards and chips

  Horses went wild in the corral, uprearing, pawing, whinnying as they ran around wildly in frantic circles. Some sideswiped the split-log fence, but it held.

  Joining the jubilee of outlaw gunfire came a big booming blast with the bottom bass of a shotgun and the humming, hooting buzz of a high-velocity rifle. When it hit a rock, it ripped out a melon-sized crater.

  A unique sound.

  Sixkiller had never heard anything quite like it, yet realized immediately that it must be the exotic big-game rifle stolen by Dean Richmond . . . and undoubtedly being wielded by him.

  On the extreme left flank of the posse as it lay just under the ridgeline facing the stone cabin, Sixkiller lay prone, face in the dirt. He wasn’t going to stick up his head just yet to have it blown off by bad men’s bullets. Not that he liked being shot at without returning fire.

  He listened to the pattern of the shooting with peaks and lulls, the lulls occurring when guns ran out of bullets.

  Timing it exactly during the next lull, he risked sticking a small part of his head around the protecting boulder to sneak a peek. He was just in time to see an outlaw thrust a long, black, denimed leg out of the window frame and double over to squeeze through the square hole of an open window on the left side of the cabin.

  Sixkiller drew a bead on him with his rifle, squeezing the trigger. He tagged the escapee in mid-body. The impact threw the outlaw backward, causing him to fall out of the window and land in a heap on the ground below.

  He was redheaded with a snakelike face, yellow eyes glaring. A line of blood trickled down the corner of his mouth. He had his gun in one hand, his free hand pressed to his middle, blood gushing through his fingers. Staggering to his knees, he swept his gun from side to side like a dowsing rod, as if trying to divine the location of the one who’d shot him.

  Sixkiller didn’t keep him guessing long. He squeezed off another shot from the Winchester, placing it dead center in the redhead’s torso. That finished him.

  Sixkiller had no need to take a second look and rolled to the right, clutching his rifle to him. He knew his bullet had gone home to deliver the de
ath stroke. He lay on his back behind the bulk of the sheltering boulder just as the big-game rifle fired at him.

  It had a sound like an express train highballing nonstop through a station as the high-velocity round ripped through the space his head had just quitted. Right on its heels a second shot came, smearing itself across the protecting boulder. The massive rock slab shuddered from the impact.

  Sixkiller glanced sideways, making eye contact with Vandaman. “There’s your elephant gun!”

  Vandaman said nothing, just grinned tightly.

  Someone in the cabin slammed the front door shut, drawing attention to the solid portal of thick oak reinforced with iron bands. Posse men fired at it with little or no effect. Sixkiller would have liked to take a shot at it with that elephant gun. That would have softened it up plenty.

  Posse man Holtz toppled backward shot in the head, dead. Another—Judd—lay on his side kicking and writhing, bellowing in pain.

  Malachi worked his six-gun, trading shots with Bob Pingry in the cabin, covering behind the stone wall, reaching around to shoot through one of the front windows.

  He reached around too far in the open, exposing his gun hand.

  Malachi winged him in the arm.

  Pingry shouted, cursing, the gun dropping from his hand. He fell back, out of sight.

  Posse men and outlaws continued to exchange shots, the racket of gunfire rising and falling, counterpointed by cries and groans of the wounded.

  Rapid fire bursts settled down into vicious sniping.

  From within the cabin came a hoarse bawling outcry, touched with a ragged edge of taunting mockery guaranteed to raise the ire of any serious-minded lawman. “That you, Malachi?”

  “Yah! Who’s that? Towhead?” Malachi shouted back.

  “That’s right! What for are you shooting at me?” queried Towhead Jimson.

  “Come on out and I’ll tell you.”

  “Haw! I reckon not, Malachi. Why don’t you come on down here and tell me yourself?”

  From behind a rock, Malachi popped up like a jack-in-the-box, triggering several rounds from his six-gun at the window to the left of the front door, where Towhead’s voice seemed to emanate. He dropped out of sight a split second before a volley of rounds fired at him in quick succession, bursting from various gun ports and loopholes in the cabin.

  Some of the posse men returned fire.

  Brennan, on the far right flank, rose up from behind cover to take a few shots.

  The elephant gun cannonaded, a round ripping through Brennan with a wet smacking sound, punching a hole right through him.

  He lay on his back faceup, arms and legs sticking out, with a wound in his middle the size of a dinner plate.

  Sixkiller and Caleb Keene fired at the spot where the shot had come from, but Dean had already taken cover.

  A lull fell. Malachi shouted, “Still with us, Towhead?”

  “To the finish!” came Towhead’s reply. “Why you gunning for me, anyhow?”

  “You shot up some of my posse.”

  “You shot at us first! We didn’t know who you were. Thought you was dry gulchers or outlaws.”

  That got a nasty laugh from some of the gunmen inside the stone cabin. Encouraged by their response, Towhead followed that one with another. “Ain’t no jury’ll say we did wrong, lawman! We was just defending ourselves!”

  “Like you did at that stagecoach you held up last week at Rockrimmon?” Malachi returned.

  “Don’t know nothing about it. You got the wrong men.”

  “It won’t work, Towhead. You and your gang signed your work at Rockrimmon! You can thank Dean for that.”

  “How so?”

  “That big gun Dean’s packing. The masks you wore hid your faces, but not the gun. All the stage passengers saw it. Too bad for you, Towhead. That gun’s one of a kind. The only one in the world. It was made special for one of them British lords. There’s not another like it. That gun’s put a noose around all your necks, and you can thank Dean for that!”

  The immediate silence was followed by an angry outburst of several voices in the cabin, each trying to outshout the other.

  When they quieted down, Malachi threw some more fuel on the fire. Cupping a hand to his mouth to magnify his voice over the distance, he shouted, “Dean shot and killed the stagecoach guard. Why should the rest of you die for it?”

  That triggered another outburst of angry arguing and recriminations.

  “Sounds like tempers are running hot in there,” Sixkiller said.

  Malachi went back to work on the strained nerves of the desperadoes. “What’s it to be, boys? You got a better chance with a jury than you do against our guns. None of you has to swing on a hang noose, except the one who pulled the trigger. You call the tune, but call it quick. Time’s running out!”

  “Maybe he’s got something there, Towhead,” said someone in the cabin.

  “Quit crawfishing, Dunc,” Towhead replied.

  “Dunc. That’s Jimmy Duncan,” Caleb noted in an aside. “Always did have a yellow streak.”

  “Time’s up. What do you say, boys?” Malachi asked.

  “We like our chances here!” a new voice called.

  “Dean Richmond,” Caleb said, making the identification.

  Malachi laughed. “You speaking for the bunch now, Dean? What about you, Towhead? And the rest of you?”

  “What Dean’s saying makes sense to me,” Towhead said, though with no great surge of enthusiasm.

  “Not me!” Jimmy Duncan burst in. “Why should I die for what Dean did? Wait! No, don’t—please!”

  There were sounds of a brief savage struggle, a blow being struck, a pained outcry—then silence.

  Jimmy Duncan’s voice was heard no more.

  Malachi looked downcast. “Thought I had a chance of making them see sense, but no such luck. They’re more scared of Dean than they are of me or the noose. Reckon we’ll have to do it the hard way.”

  “They’ve got a pretty strong hand. Bullets can’t shoot through those stone walls,” Caleb said glumly.

  Sixkiller cleared his throat to get their attention. “Seems to me those stone walls work two ways for those owlhoots in the cabin—for them and against them.”

  A stir of interest flickered through the posse men.

  “You see the way bullets bounce off these rocks when they hit,” he went on. “One of those ricochets could tear your head off if it hits you the wrong way. Now what do you think will happen if we pour a whole hell of a lot of hot rounds through the windows into the cabin? The lead’ll bounce off stone walls and tear up anything in its way.”

  Sixkiller finished by spelling it out for them. “When lead bullets get bent out of shape against solid stone, they’ll play pure hell on any flesh and blood that’s in their way . . . I’m talking about those outlaws.”

  “Mister, I’d say you know how to flush out a passel of bad hombres,” Malachi said, smiling.

  “I’d like it if we could take Dean Richmond alive, but some folk just won’t listen to reason,” Sixkiller said.

  The posse was down three members. Brennan and Holtz were dead and Judd was wounded, out of action.

  Malachi spoke to the others. “Well men, let’s get to it. Pour your fire into them windows and make it hot. And be careful not to get yourself shot.”

  The posse men got into position, laying prone in a loose line just below the cover of the ridgetop, rifle barrels sticking out from between gaps in the rampart of boulders.

  Malachi called downhill to the stone cabin. “This is your last chance to give up. Throw down your guns and come out one at a time with your hands up—”

  The reply from the outlaws came as a blistering volley that did no harm whatsoever to the posse men, safe behind their stone bulwarks.

  But being enclosed on all four sides by upright stone walls was not the same as being behind a bulwark.

  Malachi thundered, “Let ’em have it!” and the posse opened fire.

  Twin tra
ils of lead targeted the cabin’s two front windows, streaming through the square-cut openings.

  Dum-dum bullets—so deadly because they fragmented into irregular scraps of lead, inflicting particularly nasty wounds—pinged off the walls, shrieking shrilly on their secondary tangents. The barrage sent them screeching on a three-dimensional web that ran riot through the stone cabin’s interior and woe to the man who got in their way.

  Malachi made a chopping gesture with one hand. “Cease fire!”

  The posse men’s volley became ragged, falling off.

  No shots were fired from within the stone cabin.

  “Any of you still with us down there?” Malachi called from behind the safety of a tilted rock slab.

  “No thanks to you, lawman!” cried Towhead Jimson. “We’re coming out so don’t get trigger-happy.”

  “We won’t . . . but no tricks!”

  “Hell no. We’re plumb out of tricks!”

  The front door opened wide, an empty oblong of blackness with no one enclosed in its frame. Then a figure swung into view from one side of the doorway and propelled through it into the open. As if he were flying, his booted feet barely touched floor and ground.

  “That’s Jimmy Duncan!” Caleb said.

  “He’s got his guns!” cried Dillard.

  Duncan lurched forward, head down, stumbling on rubbery legs, trying to keep from falling. His face was badly bruised, swollen. A nasty cut on his scalp bloodied his hair; blood tracks streaked his face. His eyes were wide in a face of fear.

  He waved his arms wildly as if trying to throw his guns away, but they remained attached to the ends of his arms as if fastened there. “Don’t shoot!” he shrieked.

  A handgun began firing from one of the front windows shooting at the posse . . . or at least in their general direction.

  “It’s a double cross!” Cort Randle shouted, shouldering his rifle.

  Caleb and Dillard did the same. All three opened fire, bullets tearing into Jimmy Duncan, cutting him down. He spun from the impact of slugs tearing into him from several directions, then fell crashing to the ground.

  Outlaws in the stone cabin blasted away at the posse.