Bullet Creek (14 page)

A bullet cracked into the closed front door, jarring it slightly. The timbered door and stout pine walls had been constructed to repel attacks by bandits and Indians, and the slug didn't come close to going all the way through.

A man's voice rose beyond the front door. “Sanchez, come on out and meet your Maker, you traitorous dog!”

Saying nothing, the old segundo coolly aimed his Spencer's barrel and snapped off another shot.

Heading for the window on the other side of the room from Sanchez, Tom asked, “How many we got out there?”

“I counted four,” Sanchez said, dropping to one knee. Two more shots pounded the cabin around the segundo's window. Sanchez snapped off another shot. Working the Spencer's trigger-guard loading mechanism and thumbing back the heavy hammer, his eyes bleak with shame at having been followed, he said, “De Cava riders.”

“Don't beat yourself up.” Navarro pressed his right shoulder against the open shutter and scanned the chaparral about thirty yards out from the cabin.

A rifle cracked, the slug drilling into the casing a foot from Tom's head. He peered across the yard. Smoke wafted above a rocky, brush-sheathed knoll. A man in a sun-bleached straw sombrero lay atop the knoll, his rifle jerking as he cocked it.

Tom levered three shots, blowing up dirt and rocks and snapping shrubs around the knoll. Dust sifted as the man withdrew behind the knoll's lip.

Meanwhile, Sanchez swapped lead with two shooters on the northwest corner of the yard while another triggered slugs through the window right of the front door, the slugs plunking into the tables, shattering a fruit jar and scattering flowers. A lamp exploded.

As Louise moved into the main room through the kitchen door, a slug slammed into a tin wash-basin hanging on the wall a foot from her head. The pan gave a bark and slid back and forth against the wall.

“Get under a table!” Tom shouted at her.

Cursing, his hard face flushed with fury, he rammed a fresh shell into the rifle's breech, ran to the front window right of the door, and edged a glance around the frame. A mustachioed Mex in a black-and-red-striped shirt and red sash crawled through the corral and ran toward the gaping barn doors.

Tom tracked him with the Winchester. As the Mex stepped into the barn's inner shadows, Tom squeezed the trigger.

The man grabbed his thigh, dropping his rifle and hopping back behind the barn's front wall. He lunged out from behind the wall, skipping on his good leg, grabbed his rifle, and retreated again behind the wall. Tom's second slug blew up dirt and hay between the gaping barn doors.

Navarro was about to fire again when slugs from both sides of the yard slammed into the windowframe, one cutting the air just above his head as it whipped through the window and buried itself in a wall.

The slugs kept coming, chewing and spraying splinters around the frame. Meanwhile, Tom used his rifle to close the shutter and lock it.

He turned to Sanchez, who fired through the west window, then withdrew and pressed his back against the wall. A bullet whistled through the window and drilled into a table.

“They mean business,” the segundo said.

“I get that impression.”

Sanchez spat wood splinters from his lips. “That's Augustin de Marcos out there. He's become very tight with Real. A pistolero much more than a cattleman.”

Navarro moved to the front door. A pop behind him spun him around. Louise was at the east window, levering her Winchester behind a cloud of powder smoke.

Navarro's gut wrenched. “I thought I told you to stay down!”

Louise fired and levered another shell. “You give the orders on Bar-V range, Mr. Navarro.” She aimed toward the knoll, pinning down the man in the sun-faded sombrero. “Here, you're under my jurisdiction.”

Tom cocked an eyebrow at her and opened his mouth to respond, but changed his mind. There was no arguing with a woman like that. He'd better get used to it.

As Louise and Sanchez fired through their respective windows, Tom continued to the door, turned the knob with his left hand, and threw it open. He dropped to his left knee in the doorway, picked out a man hunkered down behind a hay mound just left of the barn, and fired three quick rounds.

The bullets hit nothing but hay.

Cursing, Navarro bolted back behind the doorframe as two shots ripped into the wall before him, making it shake, one shot shattering the dry mud chinking between the logs. When the man behind the hay mound paused, Navarro bolted across the open door, snapping off two shots, again hitting nothing but hay as the shooter ducked behind the mound.

“Slippery sons o' bitches.”

The man on the east knoll drilled a round into the open door, scraping a couple layers of skin from Tom's left forearm. He felt as though he'd been touched by a glowing skillet. Shooting from the east window, Louise barked a slug off the shooter's rifle, sending up sparks and evoking a shriek.

Sanchez fired intermittently into a gully arcing around the yard's west edge, trading shot for shot with the man grounded there in the mesquite shrubs and cholla. The frantic whinnies of the stage horses rose from the corral.

Tom stepped back across the door as the man with the bullet-burned thigh opened up from between the barn doors, hammering the cabin's front doorframe. Tom was about to poke the Winchester out the front window and silence the man in the barn once and for all, when Sanchez said, “I think we have more guests.”

Tom looked at him. The old segundo had stepped back and was squinting at something in the western distance. “Wagon dust.”

Tom turned to Louise, who had turned away from the east window, her rifle smoking in her hands. “Another stage?”

“Oh, my God.” Louise's voice was pinched with dread. “It's Mordecai and Billie.”

Tom went over to Sanchez's window and slid a glance around the frame. A hundred yards away, a scarf of red-brown dust rose above the thick desert scrub. The faint clatter of iron-rimmed wheels rose above the intermittent gunfire and shrieks of ricocheting lead.

A bullet plunked into the outside frame. Tom withdrew his head and muttered a curse. “They're gonna parade right into our shindig.”

Louise stiffened, then began to move toward Tom. Remembering the window and the man behind the knoll slinging lead through it, she stopped and stepped back against the wall. Her face blanched. “We have to stop them!”

Tom slid his eyes about the room, thinking. Sweat streaked his face, carved runnels through the dust on his neck. “No one's covering the back. I'll slip out the back door, and try to flank 'em. If I can surprise one or two, the others might hightail it.”

He bolted past the window, heading for the kitchen.

 

Fifteen minutes before Sanchez saw the dust, Billie Brennan, sitting on the wagon seat right of Mordecai Hawkins, looked up from the dress she was sewing and heaved an exasperated sigh. “Doggone, Mr. Hawkins, do you have to hit every chuckhole in the gall-blasted trail? My fingers feel like pin cushions.”

Hawkins glanced at the girl, whose long, light brown hair hung straight down from her floppy-brimmed farmer's hat. “If your fingers feel like pin cushions, little miss, it's through no fault of mine. Fool's work, tryin' to sew in a moving buck-board wagon.”

“I've always done perfectly fine in the past, because you haven't tried to hit every chuckhole in the road.”

Wrinkling his thick red nose and pitching his voice high, mocking the girl's supercilious tone, Hawkins said, “I ain't been tryin' to hit every chuckhole in the road. There just so happens to be more chuckholes in the road after last week's gully washer. If I tried to avoid 'em all so you could sew some fancy pretties on your dress to impress that young puncher from the Bar-V, we wouldn't get back to the station till after dark.”

“They aren't fancy pretties—whatever fancy pretties are,” Billie said, returning her eyes to the dress sprawled across her lap. “It's diamond lace I bought in Tucson. I just want to look nice for the dance”—she glanced up at Hawkins, squinting one brown eye—“not for Lee Luther.” Turning back to her work, she added with less vigor, “I hardly know the boy.”

Hawkins chuckled. “I saw the way you two were makin' eyes at each—” The old mountain man stopped and peered straight ahead, scowling. What had sounded like a distant rifle shot had risen from the direction of the stage station, now only about two miles away.

“What was that?” Billie asked, sudden tension drawing her voice taut. As if in answer, another shot rose, then another.

Holding the ribbons high in his hands, Hawkins stared over the two mules' bobbing heads. He told himself that the shots—if they were shots—could be those of cowpunchers hazing calves from mesquite thickets or honing their aims on snakes or coyotes. Nevertheless, Hawkins's heart increased its beat, and small goose bumps rose across his shoulder blades, chilling him like a fall breeze over the Bighorns.

“Hold on, girl!” Hawkins shook the reins across the mules' broad backs. Braying, the heavy beasts shook their heads and manes and lunged into a shambling run.

Billie stuffed her sewing under the seat, snugged her hat down low, wedged her low lace-up boots against the dashboard, and held on to the seat with both hands. The wagon fishtailed around curves in the meandering trail. It bounced over rocks and potholes and the furrows made by recent rivulets. Spindly desert scrub and sun-baked rocks flew by, the mules' dinner-plate shoes pelting Billie's face with dust and fine pebbles.

When the cabin shuttled into view above the scrub, Hawkins jammed his mule-ear boots against the dashboard and hauled back on the reins, stopping the mules under a sprawling sycamore and giant cactus. Gunfire rose clearly, a staccato, angry fusilade just around the last bend in the trail. Slugs slammed into logs with resounding thumps and spangs.

Smelling the faint tang of gunsmoke on the eastern breeze, Hawkins leapt down from the box. His brows anxiously furrowed, he grabbed his Henry rifle from under the seat and ran around the rear of the wagon, ambling under the weight of his sagging belly.

Indians or bandits, no doubt. It sounded like Louise was putting up a good fight from the cabin.

Hawkins leaned his rifle against the front wheel and extended his arms to Billie, whose hands gripped the seat so tightly her knuckles were bone white. “Come on, girl!”

“What are you gonna do?” Billie cried as a gun cracked sharply in the station yard. Her eyes were tear-glazed, bright with terror as she peered down at Hawkins.

He lifted her down, jerking her hands loose, then grabbing her right hand and pulling her along behind him as he stalked into the chaparral. Under a cottonwood, he stopped and squatted before her, peered into her stricken eyes. “Stay here. Don't move a muscle or make a sound.”

He shoved her down on a rock, pulled his old Smith & Wesson from his holster, and extended it to her, butt-first. “Take this. When I come back for you, I'll whistle twice. Anyone else comes . . . well”—he nodded at the gun in the girl's trembling hand—“I taught you how to shoot.”

He tramped back to the wagon, picked up his Henry rifle, and headed into the chaparral. He followed a narrow dry wash through mesquite and desert willows, tracing a lazy curve toward the northwest corner of the station yard.

Shots resounded before him, cracking and echoing, occasional slugs spanging off their targets with angry shrieks.

He left the narrow wash, pushed through mesquite shrub, and hunkered down beside a rock. He was at the northwest corner of the station yard, the barn ahead and left, the cabin fifty yards ahead and right.

“Come on out, Sanchez!” a man yelled in Spanish from the other side of the barn. “You're only prolonging it!”

Smoke puffed from behind the barn's far wall. A rifle was thrust through the open front doors, and two shots popped.

The horses in the far corral whinnied and screamed and jostled the corral with wooden knocking sounds. The gate latch creaked and snapped.

Another shot rose sharply to Hawkins's left, indicating another shooter in the gully running close against the cabin's west side. The slug plunked into the casing around the window.

Hawkins's blood pumped. The goose bumps had been replaced by an angry heat.

Three men. He'd take the one in the barn first, then the one on the other side. Last, he'd see about the man in the gully.

He began to move left, rising . . . and pressed his head against a pistol barrel. He jerked with a start and froze when the pistol's hammer clicked back.

He turned his head slowly, running his gaze up along the long, silver-plated barrel of a Colt .45, aimed at his head, to the grinning face of the mustachioed Mexican behind it.

Navarro shoved the table away from the back door, sidled up to the knob, and turned it. Sensing someone behind him, he looked over his shoulder. Louise stood just inside the kitchen, her rifle held low across her thighs, her eyes bright with beseeching.

“Be careful!”

His gaze met hers. “Shove the table back when I'm gone.”

He opened the door a crack and peered into the backyard, where the hombre Louise had shot lay under a wavering, buzzing cloud of flies, the spilled blood glistening in the angling sunlight. Seeing no gunmen nor hearing any shot on this side of the cabin, he slipped outside and drew the door closed behind him. Inside, the table barked across the puncheons as Louise slammed it against the door.

Keeping his back pressed to the cabin's rear wall, Navarro sidestepped to the southwest corner and slid a look around the protruding ends of the hand-adzed logs. The man who'd been shooting from the gully was still there, shooting toward the window from which Sanchez returned fire with his Spencer.