Seven Days to Hell Read online

  Lurline let Hoke hustle her away across the floor.

  “You ought to drink some more yourself, sonny; it might make you more sociable,” she said over her shoulder to Bill.

  “Ma’am, there’s not enough whiskey in the whole wide world to make me that drunk,” Bill said.

  Harry Hoke barked off a short mirthless laugh.

  At the bar he put his mouth close to Lurline’s ear and said, low voiced, “Steer clear of that one, Lurline, he ain’t funning.”

  “Huh! Some stuck-up punk kid who thinks a gun makes him a big man?” She spoke loud enough for Bill to hear her. “He’s lucky I didn’t slap him down and take his little popgun away from him . . .”

  “You’ll be lucky if I don’t slap you down.”

  “You? I’d like to see you try!” Lurline’s brayed laughter was mocking.

  Harry Hoke reached under the bar for a billy club he kept handy for handling quarrelsome drunks.

  “Shut up and behave before I put you out cold.” He spoke pleasantly, his barkeep’s mask of smooth impersonal geniality seemingly returned.

  That scared Lurline more than his earlier dark menacing looks and hostile tone.

  “When you wake up you’ll find your ass kicked out of here for good,” Hoke said, smiling.

  Lurline pulled in her horns. “Where’s my drink?” she demanded.

  Hoke stowed the billy club in its place. He poured Lurline a modest-sized whiskey. She gripped the tumbler, turning toward Bill and raising the glass in a toasting gesture.

  “Bottoms up!”

  Bill ignored her.

  “You’re no gentleman,” she accused.

  Hoke reached under the bar again.

  Lurline drank, setting down her empty cup.

  “Better shuffle off to your crib now, Lurline.”

  “You ain’t no gentleman, either,” she said self-pityingly.

  Bill sat upright, intent, listening. From outside came the sound of fast-approaching hoofbeats.

  Lurline heard them, too.

  “More company,” she said, brightening. “Maybe one of them knows how to treat a lady . . .”

  “What good does that do you? You ain’t no lady,” Harry Hoke said sourly.

  The hoofbeats neared, an ever-loudening drumbeat pounding the ground.

  The riders pulled up short outside the saloon in a flash of motion and cloud of dust. A horse half-neighed, half-shrieked in agonized protest as a hard-pulled bit cut painfully into its mouth.

  Bill Longley rose, filling his hands with guns: the one on the table and another in the holster on his left hip. He counted one—two—no, three riders.

  Gunmen. From the band that had tried to take him outside Weatherford, no doubt. Whoever the hell they were.

  A pause, then two men came rushing into the saloon.

  They had to come one at a time because the door was too narrow to fit more than one person. The first man in was big and burly, the other short and scrawny with red hair and beard.

  “That’s his horse, Kurt,” the little man said.

  “I know it, Ginger,” said Kurt.

  Bill’s table was in a dark corner at the back of the room. Coming in out of the daylight into the saloon’s gloom, the newcomers failed to see him at first. Their attention was on Harry Hoke and Lurline in the foreground.

  Kurt demanded, “Where’s the owner of that bay hitched out front—?”

  “Here I am,” Bill said.

  He wasted no time cutting loose. Gunfire flashed in the shadows, lighting up Bill’s face. He was grinning.

  Kurt’s chest was shattered by a row of slugs before he could pull his gun. He went down. That cleared Bill’s firing line on Ginger.

  Ginger clawed for his sidegun. He managed to clear leather but before he brought the gun level to shoot, Bill drilled him with lead.

  Paralyzed from the shock of being gut shot, Ginger stood frozen in place for an instant. Reflex action and gravity took over. He jackknifed, dropping floorward.

  Bill’s next shot took off the top of Ginger’s head, causing his hat to fly into the air, along with a lot of blood, bone scraps, and gray matter. The hat flew out the door into the street.

  Bill advanced, crossing the floor. Kurt was still alive. Gray faced, drowning in the blood filling his punctured lungs, he glared up at Bill, hating, unable to do anything else.

  Bill’s gun pointed downward, delivering the kill shot.

  Circling around the bodies, Bill approached the doorway at an angle to avoid being outlined. Standing against the wall to one side of the portal, he dropped into a crouch, peeking around the edge of the door frame.

  There was a big commotion out front. The trio hadn’t bothered to tie up their mounts before making their move.

  Kurt and Ginger had gone in, leaving the third man to hold the horses. He was a tinhorn-looking dude in a dark suit, white shirt, and fancy gold-colored brocade vest of a type favored by flashy gambling men.

  He had his hands full. One held a gun while the other fisted the trailing ends of three sets of reins belonging to their mounts.

  Agitated by gunfire, blood, and death the horses fought to break free. They kicked up plenty of dirt and grit, hazing the street front with a billowing dust cloud.

  The tinhorn was jerked from side to side, continually in danger of losing his footing and going under trampling hooves. He cussed the horses to kingdom come, which didn’t gentle them down any. The buffeting kept him from seeing inside the saloon.

  “Kurt! Ginger! What’s going on in there?” he cried.

  Bill reached around the door frame and shot him. The tinhorn vented a wordless outcry. The bullet hole blossomed red on his white shirtfront like a crimson carnation. Pretty, but Bill had been aiming for a more lethal result.

  The churning horses had yanked the tinhorn to one side, causing the bullet to miss its fatal mark. His fist opened, letting go of the reins, loosing the horses. They ran, scattering.

  Bill stepped outside. The tinhorn stood wide legged, swaying, trying to stay on his feet. His free hand was held pressed to his wound, blood streaming between his fingers, staining them red.

  He saw Bill. Bill put him down with a couple of center shots. The tinhorn lay sprawled in the dirt, limbs thrashing.

  Bill fired again. The thrashing came to a dead halt, along with the tinhorn.

  Bill sure admired that gold brocade vest; it was a shame to ruin it. But that’s how the deal went down.

  Dust kicked up by the horses drifted down to earth, falling like fine brown mist. Bill looked east along the road to Weatherford, unable to sight the rest of the hunting party. The three he’d killed must have been the advance guard. The rest would be along presently, sure enough.

  What few townsfolk there were must have gone to ground when the shooting started, for there were none in sight. The three horses had scattered and were long gone.

  Too bad, Bill thought, he could have used an extra to provide relief for the bay. He went to his horse. The bay was where Bill had left him, tied to the hitching post. Its walnut-sized brown eyes were wide and rolling and its pointed-tipped ears stood straight up but it was otherwise unharmed.

  Bill patted and stroked the animal, gentling it down—which didn’t take much. It was an outlaw’s mount, no stranger to gunfire and sudden death.

  Bill opened the top of one of his saddlebags. In it were some loaded handguns. The guns he’d used during the fight were low on ammunition. Reloading took precious time, especially with cap-and-ball revolvers, even though that was state of the art for the time and place.

  Bill always kept several fully loaded guns within reach at all times, a veteran pistol-fighter’s tradecraft.

  Now he swapped the guns he’d just used for some fresh ones, putting the empties in the saddlebag. He filled both twin holsters and had a third gun in hand.

  Harry Hoke peeked around the hogshead bar upright behind which he had taken cover. Lurline stood by the bar, white faced and quivering. She panted f
or breath like she was running a race.

  She screeched when she saw Bill with the gun. “Oh, lawd, he’s gone kill us all!”

  Lurline turned and ran for the side door, bearing down on it full tilt. It looked like she meant to plow straight through it, but at the last instant she flung the door wide open and ran out. She kept on going until she was out of sight.

  “Didn’t think she had it in her to run that far,” Bill mused. It showed what folks could do when they put their minds to it.

  He wagged the gun at Harry Hoke crouching behind the barrel. “Come out of there,” he said.

  The barkeep rose, holding his hands up in the air. “Don’t shoot, mister, I got no quarrel with you.”

  “You can put your hands down,” Bill said, sticking the gun in his belt.

  “Obliged,” Harry Hoke said, lowering his hands to his sides. He stared at the dead men. He puckered his lips and tried to whistle, but only a breath came out. “Lawd-a-mighty, that was some shooting!”

  Bill smiled with his lips, dark eyes blazing. “Know them?”

  “Never saw them before,” Hoke said. After a pause he said, “Lawdy, man! Don’t you know who they are?”

  “They’re part of a bunch that’s been dogging me since Weatherford. Why, I don’t know,” Bill said. But he could guess: Barbaroux.

  “Thought I’d lost them but they must have picked up the trail,” Bill continued. “They’ve been nipping at my heels ever since.”

  The barkeep swallowed hard. “You mean—there are more of them?”

  “Hell, yes. These hombres got ahead of the pack,” he said, indicating the corpses. “For all the good it did them.”

  Bill crossed to his table. The whiskey bottle was about a third full. He drank deep, draining it.

  Harry Hoke called to him: “I could use a drink.”

  “Help yourself, it’s your place,” Bill said.

  “Just letting you know what I’m up to . . . I don’t want you to think I’m getting up to any funny business.”

  “Do as you please.”

  Harry Hoke took a bottle off the shelf, uncorked it, and took a long pull from the neck. “I must be getting old, I ain’t so used to killings as I used to be.” He took another drink.

  Bill readied himself to leave. He tilted his hat to the angle he liked and squared his shoulders. “That the road to Hangtree?” he asked, indicating the trail.

  Harry Hoke nodded. “Due west as the crow flies. You’re a fair piece off yet.”

  “How far?”

  “Good half-day’s ride yet.”

  “Give me another bottle of whiskey for the road.”

  Harry Hoke took down a fresh bottle of the good stuff from the shelf and set it down on the counter. Bill reached into his breast pocket, fishing around for a coin, coming up empty.

  The barkeep held up a hand, palm out. “That gold piece you gave me covers it.”

  “Thanks,” Bill said.

  “None needed, you paid for it already. You done me and the rest of the folks hereabouts a favor when you gunned those varmints. We got us a bellyful of them Weatherford badmen shooting up the county.”

  Bill started for the front door.

  “Keep your guard up in Hangtree Trail,” Harry Hoke called after him. “It’s full of outlaws, too.”

  “I hope so,” Bill said.

  “How’s that again?”

  “I’m looking for one particular outlaw. I’ve come a long way to find him.”

  “Good luck.”

  Bill went outside. The locals were still out of sight. He stowed the bottle in a saddlebag and mounted up.

  There had been a change in the weather. A wind was rising out of the northwest, blowing scrums of dirt across the ground. It felt good after the dead breathless stillness earlier.

  A dust cloud showed in the east.

  They want me dead but they’ll have to work at it, Bill said to himself. We’ll see who lives and who dies!

  Harry Hoke stood in the doorway of the saloon, grinning. “You put Mineral Wells on the map, son!”

  Nothing like a bloody shoot-out to spread the fame of a place. The notoriety should be good for Harry Hoke’s business, too.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Bill Longley.”

  Harry Hoke nodded. “I’ll remember that.”

  “Everyone will, some of these days!” Bill Longley shouted, riding west, tearing along the trail.

  Harry Hoke got busy stripping the dead men of their valuables.

  SIX

  “Hellhounds on my trail!”

  In childhood days Bill Longley was haunted by the hellhounds.

  Now as a young man, Bill was being hunted by a different kind of hellhounds, one that was trying to take him down and might very well do so.

  Bill first encountered the hellhounds when he was a little boy growing up on the family farm in the small town of Evergreen, Texas.

  It was on a hot spring night when the Longley family went to a revival meeting featuring Reverend Jenkins Vale.

  The Longleys went to church every Sunday, just like everybody else in town. Reverend Jenkins Vale was a traveling preacher, one of that large breed of wayfaring preachers of the Gospel who journeyed most of the year ’round, making the circuit of small towns in the South and West.

  Preacher Jenkins Vale was widely held to be “mighty in the ways of the Lord,” as Bill’s ma put it, and so she believed. Ma Longley was powerful strong for religion, Daddy Longley less so, and that was a trial to her. Not that Daddy was not religious. He was a God-fearing churchgoing man, but he also liked to drink and smoke with his card-playing cronies, all of which strengthened Ma’s devotion to the Word.

  On the night of the meeting, Daddy and Ma and Bill and his brothers and sisters piled into a wagon and rode to the field outside town where the meeting would be held. Most of the residents of Evergreen were present. Apart from the good a revival meeting would do preaching the Word and restoring flagged spirits, it was a kind of entertainment in its way, a show, and as such a big event not to be missed.

  A small wooden platform for the preacher had been set up at on a rise at one end of the field. A crowd of a hundred and fifty men, women, and children, virtually the entire population of Evergreen and its surroundings, were grouped facing the platform, sitting on blankets spread on the grassy ground.

  When Preacher Jenkins Vale stepped up to the platform to open the meeting, little Bill was disappointed. He’d heard so much about the evangelist that he expected a giant of a man eight feet tall with long gray hair and a thick beard, like one of those old-time biblical prophets whose pictures hung on the walls of his Sunday school classroom.

  Preacher Jenkins was a decent enough looking fellow, middle aged, of middling height, with a medium-sized build. He wore a dark frock coat, light gray shirt with black ribbon tie knotted in a bow, and gray trousers.

  Little Bill Longley was forced to revise his opinion of Preacher Jenkins Vale dramatically upward the moment the evangelist opened his mouth to speak.

  What a voice the man had! It was rich, resonant, and rumbling with the Power and the Glory. The voice was a gift, and the preacher used it to the fullest. It was a voice to make believers out of doubters. It had a hypnotic effect, taking those who heard it out of themselves and carrying them away to an otherworldly realm where all that mattered were the eternal truths of Salvation and Damnation.

  Vale liked to remind his audience that he preached “the old-time Gospel of hellfire and brimstone.” So he did, devoting much of his time to lurid depictions of the temptations of the flesh and the terrible tortures of hell awaiting those who yielded to the devil’s lures. Little Bill was too young to understand much of the adult content of which Jenkins Vale spoke, but he thrilled to its passion and conviction.

  During a lull in the torrent of words, Preacher Vale made some conversational remarks about the changes in the weather, a sure sign that the deer-hunting season with its simple joys and pleasures woul
d soon be upon them and how much he was looking forward to spending some time outdoors with gun and dog in hopes of—“Lord willing”—bagging some fresh-killed venison for the cooking pot.

  This homely note struck a sympathetic chord in the audience, especially among the men, who virtually without exception were dedicated lifelong hunters as their fathers were before them and as their sons were in the process of becoming. A successful hunt meant the difference between a full belly and a meatless meal that left the whole family hungry and craving more.

  Jenkins Vale’s casual observation was the gateway by which the hellhounds would invade the imagination of little Bill.

  The devil was a hunter, too, Preacher Vale reminded his audience. He called the devil by the familiarity of Old Scratch, conjuring up a word picture of a foxy grandpa type with a pair of nubbins for horns peeking out from under a hat and oddly misshapen boots deformed by the cloven hoofs he had in place of feet.

  He further reminded them of the old saw, which held that to mention the adversary by name was to summon him up. Jenkins Vale was rewarded by the sight of many crowd members casting covert glances at their neighbors, or sometimes even an openly hostile and searching scrutiny of those around them, a reaction that seemed to amuse the preacher.

  But that foxy grandpa sitting quietly on a nearby blanket might be nothing more or less than a foxy grandpa, the preacher said, for Old Scratch could transform into the likeness of anyone he pleased, be it an old crone, a straitlaced maiden aunt, or fresh-faced young boy. On mention of this last, little Bill had the uncanny feeling that Jenkins Vale was looking directly at him when he said it. He also felt sure that at this mention Ma had cut a quick sidelong at him, looking away just as quickly. Little Bill squirmed, red faced.

  Don’t be too sure Old Scratch hadn’t taken the form of a comely young miss or handsome lad, Preacher Vale cautioned, quoting the passage from Scripture that states, “The Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.”

  That shape need not be human, either, for Scratch could take the form of any living creature, be it a bird of the air, beast of the field, or creature that dwells in the water. No doubt he had a special fondness for snakes, descendants of that serpent who tempted Eve in the Garden. The best defense against the Devil was faith and trust in the power and ultimate triumph of the Lord. The struggle was long and hard though, for Old Scratch was a mighty hunter, the preacher man said, returning to the main theme of his sermon.