Hour of Death Read online

  “Um,” Freedy said, nodding. His face shone with sweat. He pushed his hat back on his head, wiping the sweat on the inside of a shirtsleeve.

  A canteen hung by a strap down from Hooper’s neck. He unscrewed the cap and drank deep. “Ahh . . .”

  Freedy curled up into a sitting position, resting the rifle across the tops of his crossed legs and reaching up. “Lemme have some of that, I got me a cotton mouth.”

  Hooper unslung the canteen, passing it to the other, the cap making tiny jingling noises where a thin chain linked it to the spout.

  Freedy took a swallow, then spat it out, making a face.

  “Hey, don’t waste it!”

  “Whiskey!” Freedy exclaimed.

  “Sure, what’d you expect?”

  “Water. What else, you danged fool!”

  “You put what you want in your canteen and I’ll put what I want in mine,” Hooper said, almost fussily. “Give it back if you don’t want it.” He took the canteen from Freedy.

  “A damn-fool kid trick,” Freedy said, shaking his head. “You ought to have more sense than that. You won’t think it’s so funny on the ride back to Ringgold. You get thirsty, don’t go asking for any of my water.”

  “Just so happens I filled my other canteen with water,” Hooper retorted, his tone saying So there! “I ain’t as green as you think.”

  “Lord, I hope not,” Freedy said feelingly. He stood up and started downhill, rifle in hand.

  “Where you going?”

  “To get my canteen like I shoulda done in the first place.”

  Hooper did not volunteer to get it for him and Freedy did not ask. He went downhill, his back stiff with indignation.

  Hooper’s sides quaked with silent laughter. He was careful to show no outward sign of mirth at the other’s discomfort. Freedy was a bad man to get down on someone. Hooper could beat him on the draw, no question. But Freedy was a rifleman and could stand off at a distance and pick him off. He was a dead shot with a rifle. For his part, he could use Hooper’s quick and deadly guns.

  The partnership suited the younger man for now. When—not if, but when—it should prove advantageous to him to dissolve it, he’d do so at close range with blazing guns. Hooper was ever on the alert for the main chance—his.

  Freedy went to the clump of trees where the horses were tied. He got his canteen from the saddle, took a long drink, and carried it with him, trudging back uphill.

  Hooper stood at the crest, facing south. Planted atop the ridgetop, hands on hips, his posture suggested he was master of all he surveyed.

  It burned Freedy that the kid was skylining again, but he let it pass. More, he went against his professional instincts and stood beside him. There was a reason for it. The standing man had the better view.

  “Nothing,” Hooper said in answer to the other’s unspoken query. “Not a sign of him. Maybe we missed him.”

  Freedy shook his head. “We cleared out of town way ahead of him, while he was still breakfasting.”

  “Maybe he ain’t coming this way.”

  “He is.”

  Both men’s skins were burned brown by long exposure to the outdoor life, but Hooper’s face flushed redder under the rising heat. He was sullen, pouty.

  That was the youngster in him showing, thought Freedy.

  “What makes you so sure he’s a-coming this way?” Hooper demanded.

  “This is the way to Ringgold,” Freedy said matter-of-factly.

  “Maybe he ain’t going to Ringgold,” Hooper said, knowing better, but argumentative, anyway.

  “He wouldn’t have been poking around asking about Bart Skillern, if he wasn’t going to Ringgold,” Freedy said. “Besides, where else could he go? Ain’t nothing around these parts but Ringgold and Rock Spring, and Rock Spring’s a flyspeck, a one-horse whistle-stop town—if you can even call it a town.

  “He might be delayed for any number of reasons, but he’ll be along this way, sooner or later.”

  “Well, I almighty hope it’s soon. I’m getting tired of waiting!”

  “We’re getting paid for it, Hoop. Mighty well-paid, if you ask me. Hundred dollars for each of us to kill a stranger, a nobody.”

  “I’m worth it.”

  “I ain’t arguing. My point is we’re on to a good thing here, so why kick about it?”

  “I want to collect the other half of my money and cut loose in Ringgold for some high living,” Hooper said.

  “We’ll be there before sundown.”

  “Who is this stranger, anyway?”

  “Nobody,” Freedy said definitively. “Calls himself Quinto. I never seed him before. Never heard of him. If he was somebody, I’d know who he was. I don’t know him from Adam so it stands to reason he ain’t nothing, nothing a-tall.”

  “You know ’em all, Freed,” Hooper said a bit admiringly.

  “Damned straight,” Freedy agreed.

  “Big though, ain’t he? Almost as big as Bull Raymond. He looks like some kind of Injin.”

  “Who, Bull?”

  “No, the stranger.”

  “A breed, I’d say. He’s got some white blood in him, looks like,” Freedy said. “Big or small, it don’t matter to me. He’ll go down the same as anybody else once my bullet’s in him. I don’t need to know nothin’ about the mark ’ceptin the money’s good and the man is dead.” Freedy took a small tobacco patch out of the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. He creased a cigarette paper into a V, shook tobacco into it, and rolled it up.

  Hooper had ideas. “I figure this Quinto’s some kind of lawman or bounty killer, like the others were.”

  “Most likely. He signed his own death warrant when he come looking for the Utah Kid,” Freedy pronounced. “Bart’s got standing orders to kill anyone who comes looking for him. Not that he couldn’t do it himself, fast as he is. But he can’t be bothered. He’s too busy keeping the money coming in. He’s a coming man, Bart Skillern is.

  “He’s got spotters planted in Ringgold and all through the valley, posted to keep an eye out for manhunters looking for his scalp. Even got a man in Rock Spring to check out anybody that gets off the train. Nobody ever caught the Utah Kid napping. He sleeps with one eye open.”

  “I would too, if I had a fancy gal like that Val keeping my bed warm.” Hooper leered.

  Freedy was not amused. “That’s one way to talk yourself into an early grave. Bart’ll shoot the eyes out of any man he catches looking at his woman the wrong way.”

  “I’m just saying that’s probably why Bart’s willing to spend good money to get killings done he could do himself. He don’t want to leave that gal alone too long. Hell, I wouldn’t neither.”

  “That’s killing talk, Hoop.”

  “I’m just thinking out loud. No harm in that.”

  “I reckon not, long as it’s between just you and me—out here in the open, with no one to spy on us and go running, telling tales out of school where they can get back to the Kid. But it’s a bad habit to get into,” Freedy said. “Get in your cups and drunk some night in Ringgold and you might let something slip. Next thing you know, Bart comes a-looking for you.

  “And don’t think some of our so-called friends in the valley wouldn’t go running to drop a word in his ear.”

  “The Kid’s fast, no doubt about it, but I ain’t a-feared of him,” Hooper said, thrusting his chin out aggressively.

  Freedy laughed humorlessly. “The hell of it, Hoop, is that I know you believe it.”

  “I surely do,” Hooper declared with the fervor of a true believer taking an oath on the Bible. “I say I’m as fast as any man on the Glint—faster! And I aim to prove it any time I’m called out. Maybe I will prove it, before we’re done in Ringgold. See if I don’t!”

  “I wish you luck. You’ll need it.”

  “Skill beats luck.”

  “The Utah Kid’s got both.”

  All the while they’d been talking, Freedy’s attention had never wandered from the basin below, constantly scanning
the southern landscape. He started subtly, but perceptibly. He stiffened, eyes narrowing, body quivering like a hunting dog on point.

  “What is it, Freed?”

  “Thought I saw something.” Freedy’s gaze fastened on a point in the background, at the limits of vision where objects swam in and out of focus.

  The gray-yellow wastes of the basin reflected a lot of light and glare. Strands and veils of dust swirled in the hazy air, swaying this way and that. Somewhere south along the trail, at the edge of visibility, Freedy saw—something. . . .

  Sweat stung his eyes. He blinked, looked again. Whatever he had seen was gone. He kept looking, but that antlike blur did not reappear.

  Hooper said doubtfully, “I don’t see nothing.”

  “It’s gone now, whatever it was,” Freedy said.

  “Sure you saw something? Just because I ain’t much of a hand with a rifle don’t mean my eyes don’t work and I didn’t see a thing.”

  “Maybe not,” Freedy said, unconvinced. “Let’s get down below the ridgetop. We shouldn’t be skylining.”

  “What the hell? If you can’t see him, he can’t see you.”

  “That ain’t how it always works out, Hoop.” Freedy moved down below the crest until only his head showed above it. Hooper followed.

  * * *

  Freedy was not wrong. He had seen something.

  In the southern part of the basin, a lone rider paused on the trail, looking north. Rider and horse seemed to be the only living creatures in the basin, not counting the hawks and buzzards soaring on the thermals high overhead the wilderness bursting with majestic scenery. The alkali basin with its harsh mineralized dirt was a wasteland.

  The roan horse was the color of dried blood. A massive animal, it was part quarter horse crossbred with a strain of Arapaho pony. The result was a steed built along the massive lines of a charger or war horse with much of the endurance and surefootedness of a mountain Indian pony.

  A splendid specimen, big-boned and sturdy, with a rider to match, an outsized individual even in the larger than life expansiveness of the West.

  An ordinary-sized horse’s back would have been deeply bent bowed by the heft of the man in the saddle, but the roan was undaunted by its weighty burden. A big man on a big horse, both were sweaty and dust-covered.

  The rider looked north again. He could barely make out the ridge, a flat two-dimensional shape curtaining the rim of the northern horizon. It was enough. He’d seen what he wanted to see—or rather, what he expected to see. His hand rested on the Colt Peacemaker holstered on his hip.

  Sixkiller had come to Wyoming.

  Chapter Five

  After rousting the Red Ravine gang, Sixkiller had taken a train from Salt Lake City to Laramie, where federal agent Vandaman had set up a temporary operating base. It was the nearest big town to Ringgold. Sixkiller had bought the roan horse in Laramie and rather than taking the train, had ridden it to Rock Spring, arriving two days before. It was a good way to get to know the horse and for the horse to know him. His own prized horse Ironheart was back in the Nations, being tended by a friend.

  West of Laramie, Rock Spring wasn’t even a small town, more like a hamlet. A handful of one-story, wooden frame buildings and shacks had been thrown up around the resource which gave it its name and its reason for existence—a small but reliable source of water that trickled from a spring in a crack in the ground rock.

  The most prominent structure in town was the massive water tank rising beside the tracks of the Union Pacific railroad line, which stretched east-west across southern Wyoming. In the vast dusty plains and alkali deserts, water for the boilers of its steam-driven locomotives was not easy to come by. Rock Spring was literally a “tank town.”

  It was also the jumping-off place to Ringgold in the lush Glint River Valley. That’s all Rock Spring would ever be, a way station en route to somewhere else, Sixkiller had decided.

  There was a saloon, a trading post, a café with some rooms to rent that provided lodging for travelers, and a ragtag assortment of other shacks and huts of dubious provenance.

  * * *

  An hour and more had passed since Freedy thought he saw something.

  It seemed an eternity to Hooper. He was not one for waiting. The impatience of youth mixed with the arrogance of one who is used to taking what he wants when he wants it, the young gunman was getting antsy waiting for the marked man to show.

  “I should have gunned down the big lout in Rock Spring yesterday,” he declared, his voice thick, the words slurred. Hooper had drunk deeply of the whiskey canteen.

  Freedy shook his head. “Bart said no more killings in Rock Spring for a while.”

  “Yeah, well, he don’t have to sit here in the hot sun all day waiting for some slow-footed breed to show up,” Hooper said.

  “The job gets done the way the Kid wants.”

  “It would’ve been so easy,” Hooper went on. “I’d’ve put a couple slugs in that red man and we’d’ve been long back in Ringgold, with cold beer and hot women. Hell, there ain’t even no law in Rock Spring to kick about the kill!”

  “Maybe that’s how Bart likes it and wants to keep it that way,” Freedy said.

  Hooper took another long pull of whiskey from the canteen.

  “Go easy on that stuff, Hoop.”

  Hooper made a face. “I ain’t drunk.”

  “Who said you was? But the whizz and the hot sun don’t mix so good.”

  “I’m as fast drunk as sober, Freed.”

  “Nobody said you ain’t. Anyhow it ain’t gonna matter. The mark’s gonna be stretched out in the dust long before them guns of yours can make a difference. Soon’s I get a bead on him, I’m gonna pot him with this rifle.”

  “Do me a favor. Give him one in the belly so he’s a long time dying,” Hooper said feelingly. “Make him suffer for making us wait here for him.”

  “I don’t go for the fancy stuff,” Freedy said noncommittally.

  “Don’t give me that.” Hooper scoffed. “I’ve seen what you can do with a rifle. You can tag a man anywhere you want without half trying.”

  Freedy chuckled dryly. “Thought you was in a hurry. Now you want to stretch it out. Can’t have it both ways. Which is it?”

  “Put a bullet in his guts and I’ll finish him off. That’ll give me another kill,” Hooper said. “You know what my goal is.”

  “I should. You talk about it enough.”

  Hooper went on, oblivious. “I want a man dead for each year I’ve been alive. Eighteen years—eighteen men. I’m more than halfway there. Twelve down, only six more to go.”

  “And when you reach eighteen, then what?” Freedy asked.

  “Oh, I’ll keep on doing like I been doing. Only once I got that tally under my belt I can relax some.”

  “Not you, Hoop. You ain’t the type. You ain’t easygoing like me.”

  Hooper snorted. “Easygoing? Is that what you call yourself?”

  Freedy let it pass. He never stopped studying the landscape.

  Hooper joined him peering down into the basin. “Still nothing! Ain’t he never gonna show? Why don’t you use them binoculars you got in your saddle bags?”

  “I told you,” Freedy began, in patient long-suffering tones. “Can’t risk sunlight glaring off the lenses. Our man could see it for miles off. If he’s even a little bit trail-savvy he’d know someone was up here laying for him. Whoever he is, he’s no greenhorn. One look at him and you can see that.”

  “That’s what I’d like—a look at him! Ain’t he ever gonna show?” Hooper complained again.

  In an instant, his query was answered in the affirmative. A new voice rang out from behind and below the two killers. “You up there! Drop your guns and turn around slow!”

  Freedy and Hooper stiffened. They rose slowly, standing up with their backs to the newcomer. Freedy held his rifle in both hands so that it stretched horizontally across the tops of his thighs. Hooper, empty-handed, stood with hands poised over his guns
.

  The stranger, Freedy told himself with bulging eyes, his mouth hanging open. He was awestruck, stupefied. He never heard the stranger coming. He hadn’t thought anyone could sneak up on him!

  He cut a sidewise glance at Hooper. Eyes glittering, nostrils flaring the youngster smiled with his lips closed. He trembled a little, but not with fear. It was the excitement of a horse at the starting gate right before the bell goes off to signal the start of a race.

  In that moment, Freedy knew exactly what was going to happen and what he had to do when it did, if he wanted to live. And he wanted to live more than anything. The two of them were under a gun, covered. But there was a chance for one of them—him—if he played his cards right. A slim chance, sure, but better than none.

  Besides, what choice did he have?

  Click.

  There it was, the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked, hammer clicking into place.

  “I ain’t funning,” the stranger said. “Drop ’em or I drop you!”

  Freedy turned his head, looking back over his shoulder. He wanted a look at the man who, for the moment at least, had gotten the better of him. What he saw gave him another jolt.

  The stranger was a man of stone!

  Dust mixed with sweat, formed a kind of thin paste on his exposed flesh, making him look like he was made of crumbling stone.

  An illusion, of course, but that’s how it looked to Freedy in that terrible instant. The stranger, Quinto as he called himself, stood at the bottom of the ridge, holding a gun pointed up at Freedy and Hooper.

  There was no mistaking the hulking outlines of the big breed, now neither red nor white man. He was covered from head to toe in powdery gray-yellow dust, like something not made of flesh and blood, but rather something from the mineral kingdom, looking like a crumbling, ancient statue come to life.

  A weird effect! It was the basin’s alkali dust that covered Sixkiller—for the stranger Quint was none other than he. Stony dust covered all of him but his hands—his hands and the Colt in his fist. Its long barrel gleamed blue-black, spotless and unwavering.

  “Hey, you!” Hooper shouted, his voice ringing clear, fine, and strong. He wasn’t yellow. There was no fear in the youngster.