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  Buckhorn suddenly found himself occupied by return gunfire sizzling in his direction.

  The muzzle flashes of whoever was shooting gave momentary bursts of illumination, but not exactly the welcome kind. Still, they did offer a target to pour more lead at, even though that meant continuing to mark his own position.

  “Stay low, Lucien!” he hollered amid the fierce bullet exchange.

  Triggering his last round ahead of having to reload, Buckhorn heard a gurgling yelp of pain that caused him to believe he’d scored a meaningful hit. Before he got too cocky or too quick to expose himself, he punched the spent shells from the Colt’s cylinder. As he thumbed in fresh loads he became aware that the lantern he’d blasted apart had sprinkled enough sparks into its own spilled fuel for the mixture to reignite. Flames quickly spread into the loose straw scattered across the stable floor, fanning wide and crawling up the post from which the lantern had originally hung.

  Snapping shut the loading gate of his Colt, Buckhorn moved forward, still with caution. An unplanned fire was always cause for concern but, in this case, for a brief time it also had the benefit of reintroducing some illumination to the inside of the stable.

  In the flickering glow, the sprawled shapes of the two men Buckhorn had put down became visible. Both, he was relieved to see, lay motionless. The bulky form of the second one he’d shot, the one who’d begun firing back at him, was unmistakably that of Oscar Turlick.

  But what of the boy?

  The pulsing light thrown by the spreading flames reached a little wider and Buckhorn made out a third sprawled form—a very slight one with feet encased in oversized shoes!

  Buckhorn threw caution to the wind and ran forward. Holstering his gun, he skidded to his knees beside the boy and scooped one arm under his shoulder, lifting his upper body gently. “Lucien? Lucien!”

  The only response he got was the crackle and heat as the flames crept closer. Startlingly, he became aware of another presence. Looking up in the eerie pulse of the firelight, he saw a man looming over him with a raised pitchfork, ready to strike.

  In the instant of time he had before the gleaming tines thrust down, Buckhorn recognized the man as the other mule herder from the river dock. He also recognized that even as fast on the draw as he was, he had no chance of bringing his Colt into play before he was impaled.

  Suddenly, a thunderous gunshot rang out. The man with the pitchfork hurtled backwards as a gaping red hole blossomed in the center of his forehead. The pitchfork clattered harmlessly to the ground.

  Twisting around, Buckhorn saw Andrew Haydon and Sterbenz standing on the edge of the shadows at the corner of the house opposite the one he had come around. Sterbenz was planted tall and rigid with a long musket held at the ready. Slightly ahead of him, Haydon leaned slightly to his right, supported by his crutch, left arm still extended forward, Colt Navy revolver gripped in his fist, a worm of smoke curling up out of its muzzle.

  Before anyone could say anything, the kitchen door slapped open wide and Melody burst out. “My boy,” she said in a quaking voice. “Is he . . .”

  Buckhorn stood up with Lucien in his arms and moved away from the spreading fire toward the anxious mother. “He’s breathing good and strong,” he reported. “He got knocked out, but I think he’s gonna be okay.”

  Closer to the house, Buckhorn lay the boy down on the soft grass where his mother could fuss over him. Straightening up, he turned to face Haydon and Sterbenz as they came walking over. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but none of you take orders very good about staying clear of the fray, do you?”

  Haydon pinned him with a steely gaze. “I’m a former officer in the Confederate Army, sir. I don’t take orders, I give them. I never hid from a skirmish in my life and wasn’t about to start tonight . . . especially not in the backyard of my very own home!”

  CHAPTER 6

  Once the threat posed by Oscar and his cronies had been dealt with, the fire naturally demanded everybody’s attention. With Haydon frantically manning the pump handle of the nearby well, Buckhorn and Sterbenz flung bucket after bucket of the water he churned out. They managed to subdue the flames before the damage to the stable was too severe.

  Even though the Haydon home was fairly outlying, the smoke boiled up high enough to draw the attention of some of his closer neighbors. By the time they arrived, however, the battle was pretty much won. Still, they were useful in helping with the cleanup. At Haydon’s request, one of the young men who’d shown up rode off to summon the parish constable in order to advise him of the fire and the criminal activity that led up to it.

  When the constable arrived to take statements and make his report, the official version he was given was that the three ruffians had tried to force their way into the back entrance with robbery on their minds. The added presence of Buckhorn, who was introduced as a visitor from out of town who’d served in the late war under Haydon, came as a surprise to the trio, his skill with a firearm even more so.

  The result was that the robbery attempt was abandoned and a brief running gun battle ensued when the three men tried to escape, ending in the stable where an errant bullet broke the lantern that started the fire.

  If anybody noticed any holes in this account, Haydon’s high standing in the parish and the obvious low standing of the would-be robbers made it not worth mentioning. The case was wrapped up and closed on the spot.

  * * *

  It was close to midnight before the bodies were removed, the last spark declared cold and dead, and the constable and neighbors were all gone. Melody and Lucien, who seemed fine except for a slight bump on his head where he’d apparently run into the man with the pitchfork when he tried to flee in the dark, had retired to their quarters. Even Sterbenz was excused for the night.

  Buckhorn and Haydon sat alone in the latter’s den. Buckhorn had retrieved his shirt, vest, and tie and was once again wearing them. The two men were sunk deep in overstuffed leather armchairs, each puffing on a long, aromatic cigar and each with a bulbous glass of wine close at hand.

  “I think,” Haydon said, exhaling a plume of smoke, “it’s about time we got around to discussing the details of the matter I want to hire your services for. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “By all means,” Buckhorn replied. “Whatever it is, don’t see how it can be much more exciting than the leadup to it has already been.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Haydon said. “Besides, any excitement you’ve recently encountered has been attached to you. It hardly qualifies as any kind of leadup to my proposal.

  Buckhorn shrugged. “Well, yeah, if you want to be technical about it, I guess.”

  Haydon arched a brow. “I will say that tonight’s events did provide a good demonstration of your qualifications for handling danger and, as you say, excitement. I fully expect you’ll be facing more of each if you accept my job offer.”

  “Let’s not forget, Mr. Haydon,” Buckhorn said, “that in the course of me demonstrating my ‘qualifications’ earlier tonight”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“you ended up saving my bacon with that final pistol shot. That makes me plenty beholden to you. Short of you asking me to work for free from here on out, you can probably figure I’m gonna take on the job you need done.”

  “Good. That simplifies things greatly.” Haydon took a sip of his wine then lowered the glass with a wry smile. “But of course, we won’t reach terms that way . . . so let me lay it out the rest of the way for you. Ultimately, what I want is for you to kill a man named Thomas Wainwright.”

  Buckhorn leaned forward in his chair. “Whoa. We may have hit another showstopper about as big as me working for free. I don’t know what you may have heard, but I don’t do assassinations. I can’t claim that killing don’t often come with my line of work. You saw firsthand tonight that it does, and you saw I’m not shy about it when it’s necessary. But I don’t gun men down in cold blood. That’s where I draw the line.”

  “I know that. I checked you out
thoroughly before contacting you,” Haydon told him. “Indications are that, in the past, you may have been somewhat less discriminating.”

  “This isn’t the past. It’s the here and now.”

  “I realize that. I also realize my choice of words in starting to describe the job I want done was a bit too blunt.” Haydon’s eyes narrowed markedly as he continued. “Make no mistake. I expect—and admit to even hoping—that you’ll have to kill Wainwright before the job is done. But you won’t have to do it in cold blood. If you go up against his corrupt operation on my behalf, you’ll have to kill him in order to keep him from killing you.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Haydon continued with his story. Wainwright had been a general for the Union Army in the late war. Haydon was a colonel for the Confederacy. They had clashed during that bloody conflict, though not in battle. Their meeting had come after Haydon was captured and incarcerated in a Union prison camp in southern Illinois . . . a camp run by Wainwright.

  “Seems like all you ever hear about is how bad things were in the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville,” Haydon related to Buckhorn. “But I’m here to tell you, firsthand, that life in a Union camp, especially one run by the likes of Wainwright, was no picnic, either. And he didn’t have the excuse of massive overcrowding and severe supply shortages like they did in Georgia. By his nature, Wainwright was—is—just plain cruel and sadistic.”

  Waving a hand through the empty space where the bottom half of his leg should have been, Haydon went on. “I can thank Wainwright for this. I arrived in his prison with a relatively minor wound suffered in the battle that resulted in my capture. They had a competent medical staff on hand but, because I immediately spoke up against the deplorable conditions I saw elsewhere in the camp, Wainwright decided to make an example of me. He ordered me placed in a hot box with only minimal water and no medical attention to the leg for forty-eight hours. By the time they dragged me out, gangrene had set in. I guess I don’t have to tell you the rest.

  “The only time Wainwright left me alone was during the period the stump was healing. After that, I became his favorite little toy for regular bouts of humiliation and torturous punishment. He never broke me completely, though. I fooled the son of a bitch by staying alive, unlike some of the men. Too damn many . . . When the war ended and they opened up the prison camp, I lost track of Wainwright. But not in my mind. He was always there. For all these years, I’ve kept hating and wanting revenge on a ghost. Finally, a couple months ago I got word of him.”

  Another former Confederate soldier who’d spent time in Wainwright’s prison camp had showed up in New Orleans and happened to hear Haydon’s name mentioned. He’d come calling on the off chance it was the same Haydon who’d been his commanding officer in the war. It was from this man Haydon had learned where Wainwright was utilizing his all-too-familiar ruthless, ironfisted tactics.

  Unlike many Southerners, Haydon had gone home from the war to find out he was not left penniless, thanks to his family’s holdings in a handful of businesses in and around New Orleans. Taking over the operation of those businesses, he had kept them maintaining nice profits and actually flourishing in most instances. That had left him a modestly wealthy man with the wherewithal to check out the Wainwright story more thoroughly and to eventually send for Buckhorn.

  “At first,” Haydon explained, “my thoughts were to go confront the evil bastard myself. Another of my overly romanticized notions, I fear. But the limitations of my missing leg and the demands of my various businesses brought me back down to earth and made me realize it would be best for me to remain here.

  “Besides, I expect he’d be too quick to recognize me. A stranger, someone with your experience, will be able to work your way in closer. I not only want Wainwright crushed, I want retribution meted out for far more than just what he did to me. He ruined the lives—ended lives, remember—of many a good man. He deserves a severe comeuppance and it would be ideal if he knew it was all toppling down around him and that I was the cause before he dies.”

  “Sounds like a tall order,” Buckhorn said on the verge of accepting the job. “But the way you tell it, he sure as hell does sound like an hombre who deserves a comeuppance. Reckon I’m willing to be the one to take a crack at delivering it to him.”

  * * *

  Two days later, in the first gray light ahead of the sun breaking above the horizon, Buckhorn rode out of New Orleans.

  He’d had his visit to the famous city, gotten a good taste, and enjoyed it, except for the encounters with Oscar Turlick, of course. He told himself he might return to cut another swath someday but, for now, he was satisfied. He had a job to do for Andrew Haydon and on top of that he was ready to take a break from all the congestion and noise and general hurly-burly. It felt pretty good to get out on the open trail again.

  It had better. A lot of open trail lay ahead of him—about twelve hundred miles, give or take. Three weeks of steady riding. With good luck, maybe a day or two less; with bad, some amount longer.

  Wagon Wheel, Arizona, was his destination. A town and a territory, under the thumb of the ruthless man whose name Haydon spoke with such bitterness. Thomas Wainwright. It was there the man was swallowing up vast sections of good ranchland and driving off those trying to make a go of it on the smaller spreads he saw as being in his way. The fellow who’d reported it to Haydon had been one of the latter.

  As he rode, Buckhorn remembered one other statement Haydon had said. “I want as much of his ranching operation as possible ruined, too. If that sounds petty and small, I can’t help it.”

  * * *

  Making it out of Louisiana took longer than anticipated due to the preponderance of small towns, meandering roads, farm fences, creeks, and swampy areas that had to be negotiated. It was nothing like the wide open spaces farther west where Buckhorn normally plied his trade.

  Especially the damn swamps. He was used to keeping an eye peeled for rattlers and scorpions and other desert and plains critters that could do a body harm. The thought of all the slimy creepy-crawlies that lurked in the ooze and under the green-water scum of a swamp made his skin crawl. Why the hell anybody would choose to live around such places was more than he could figure. When he expressed these thoughts to Sarge, the big gray chuffed and swung his head in agreement.

  By the second week, Buckhorn was well into Texas. The land was opening up, he was making better time, and was generally feeling better about things all the way around. Summer was wearing down, but it was still hot as blazes and the land was baked good and dry, thirsty for the moisture that winter would bring.

  And for damn sure there wasn’t a scummy green swamp anywhere in sight.

  CHAPTER 8

  On his twentieth night out of New Orleans, Buckhorn camped on a rocky slope just under some tall, partly collapsed spires within whose bases a small, stubborn pocket of stale water could still be found. He figured on arriving in Wagon Wheel the following day.

  While that would mark only the beginning of the job he had to do there, it nevertheless also marked the end of a long trip. A step in the process that he fully intended to celebrate accomplishing with a bath, a hot meal, a cold beer or three, and a deep sleep in a soft bed.

  For tonight, it was bacon, biscuits, and coffee cooked over a fire made of twigs and branches he’d scavenged from a stand of scrawny trees earlier in the afternoon. Buckhorn had provisioned himself well at the start of his journey and had done some replenishing along the way, but his supplies had again grown meager. Much as he didn’t mind trail life, it would be good to lay up for a spell and enjoy some creature comforts like a bed and stove-cooked meals prepared by somebody other than himself for a change.

  How long he’d be able to enjoy such creature comforts would depend on how long it took before he got sideways with Thomas Wainwright once he started poking into the how and why of things around Wagon Wheel.

  Buckhorn’s way wasn’t to put off facing up to something that needed doing, but in this case he
sensed it might not be a bad idea to take it a little slow, try to get a decent feel for the situation, before barging too recklessly ahead.

  He was still chewing on a bite of thick bacon and sopping up some of the pan grease with a piece of biscuit when he became aware of the riders approaching. From where he was picketed over in a clump of long grass, Sarge snorted a warning.

  “Yeah, I hear ’em,” Buckhorn muttered softly. He popped the grease-soaked chunk of biscuit into his mouth, washed it and the bacon down with an unhurried gulp of coffee. Then he sand-washed his hands to make sure they were free of any grease—wouldn’t do for his hands to be slippery if he had to get the gun out in a hurry—and situated himself to a slightly different sitting position so that he had better access to his Colt.

  Three riders came the rest of the way at a modest gallop. They reined up at the bottom of the slope, about a dozen yards down from where Buckhorn sat beside his fire.

  One of them called up, “Hello the camp.”

  “Right back at ya,” Buckhorn responded calmly. In the murky light of late evening, he could see the men all had the look of veteran cowpunchers. Dusty clothes, wide-brimmed hats above eyes perpetually squinted from too many hours in the blazing sun, spurs and chaps and kerchiefs to pull up over their faces when the wind whipped grains of sand so hard it could shred skin.

  All three men wore handguns holstered around their waists but none had the look of a tested gunny. Their pistols were likely just protection against rattlers or the four-legged kind of varmints, but Buckhorn knew you could never tell for certain. He himself was an example of someone who was as fast as or faster than most men, yet there was nothing particularly showy about his Colt or the way he wore it.

  The rider who’d called out the greeting appeared to be a shade younger than the other two and had an air about him that suggested he was the top dog—at least in his own mind—of this bunch.

  One of the others was a stoop-shouldered Mexican with a spill of jet hair swept across his forehead and such a wide-brimmed sombrero it could have damn near doubled for a lady’s parasol.