Deadly Road to Yuma (22 page)

“Gonna have to…build the gang back up first,” Garth suggested. “We lost a bunch o’ men…tryin’ to get you loose.”

“Very well. The Lord’s work takes time.”

Garth hunched over against the pain as another coughing fit seized him. As it faded away, he realized that Joshua hadn’t thanked
him
yet. Joshua was quick to give the Lord credit, but it was Garth with a bullet through his lungs who was slowly drowning in his own blood.

But it didn’t matter, Garth told himself. He’d been willing to do whatever it took to save his friend from the hangman, even if it cost his own life.

Still, a simple
gracias
would have been nice…

Garth’s head slumped onto his chest and he died then with his hand on the throttle. The weight of his hand slowly shoved the control forward, and the train began to pick up even more speed.

A few minutes earlier, the eyes of Sam Two Wolves had flickered open as he sprawled there on the ground next to the locomotive. He hadn’t been unconscious long, only a minute or so, and the memory of being shot by the man in the conductor’s uniform came back to him instantly.

His vision was blurred at first, but as he heard more shots, his sight began to clear, and as he looked up at the cab through slitted eyelids, he saw the craggy-faced outlaw leaning against the side of the cab by the controls, and Joshua Shade being helped up into it by the phony conductor.

Sam wanted to find his gun and start shooting at them, but his muscles flatly refused to work. The shock of being wounded had paralyzed them momentarily.

He realized a second later that that shock had probably just saved his life. If he’d tried to struggle upright, the outlaws would have filled him full of lead. As it was, they were ignoring him, as if they were convinced he was dead.

Having no real choice in the matter, Sam lay there gathering his strength. He heard shooting all up and down the other side of the train, and wondered where his blood brother was. Knowing Matt Bodine, he was right in the thick of the fighting.

Steam hissed, and the train began to move.

As the cab pulled away from him, Sam rolled onto his side and then over on his belly. His hands and feet pushed against the ground, lifting him into a crouch. He would have liked to rest a while longer before having to move again, but the outlaws were getting away with Shade—and stealing a whole blasted train to boot!

Sam stumbled toward the coal tender. It had a walkway with a short railing on each side. Sam lunged toward it and reached out. He caught hold of the railing and pushed off hard with his feet, throwing a leg up onto the walkway.

Then he hung there, his other leg dragging on the gravel roadbed next to the rails, unable to pull himself up any farther. If he let go, he might fall under the wheels and be chopped to pieces. With his head thrown back, his teeth bared in an agonized grimace, and cords of muscle standing out in his neck, he struggled to save himself from that grisly fate.

Matt left Jessica Devlin where she was and ran forward through the first passenger car. He flung the door open and hurried out onto the platform, carrying the Winchester at a slant across his chest.

The first thing he saw was the conductor kneeling on the narrow platform at the rear of the coal tender. Matt realized with a shock that the man was struggling to uncouple the rest of the train from the locomotive and the tender. There was no good reason for him to be doing that…

Unless he wasn’t really the conductor.

That thought flashed through Matt’s brain in the same instant that the man in the blue uniform glanced up, saw him standing there, and started clawing a pistol from behind his belt.

“Bodine!” the man exclaimed involuntarily.

Knowing now that the “conductor” had to be one of the outlaws, Matt snapped the rifle down and fired from the hip. The man dropped into an even lower crouch, though, and the .44-40 round spanked off the tender’s rear wall. The phony conductor fired, spraying slugs across the passenger car platform and forcing Matt to dive back through the open door behind him.

Lying in the aisle, Matt tried to draw a bead with the rifle again, but before he could do so, the outlaw finally succeeded in yanking loose the pin that coupled the cars together. He darted back around onto the walkway that led to the engine as a gap suddenly opened up between the tender and the first passenger car.

Matt knew he had only seconds to act. Abandoning the Winchester because a rifle really wasn’t much good in a close-quarters fight, he scrambled to his feet and lunged out onto the platform. Without hesitating, he leaped into the air, throwing himself toward the tender with all the strength at his command.

If he failed in this desperate move, he would fall onto the roadbed, where the rest of the cars would run over him as their momentum kept them rolling forward.

One foot smacked down on the tender’s tiny rear platform. Matt grabbed for one of the iron hand-holds fastened to the wall of the car. His fingers slipped a little and he started to go backward, but then his grip tightened and he was able to pull himself upright. He leaned against the back of the tender, breathing heavily.

After a moment, he turned around, pressed his back against the rear of the tender, and pulled his right-hand gun so he could reload it. He looked back along the tracks and saw the rest of the cars beginning to slow down even more as their momentum wore off.

Unfortunately, he also saw the rest of Shade’s gang, half a dozen men, galloping after the locomotive and tender.

And now he was their target, he realized as powder smoke spurted from gun muzzles and bullets began to splatter against the metal wall behind him.

Maggie realized that the train was slowing down. She didn’t know what else was going on, but she knew they had left the water stop behind them. Where was Shade? Had his men freed him?

Shame burned inside her. She had tried to kill Matt Bodine. She never would have believed that she could take a human life, especially the life of someone who had never done her any harm. The thought sickened her, and she was glad Bodine had knocked the rifle upward as she pulled the trigger.

Now she ignored the chaos and confusion inside the car and ran toward the exit, intending to see if she could tell what was going on. She stepped out onto the platform as the train slowed even more.

But not
all
the train, she realized. She clung to the railing, leaned out, and saw the locomotive and the coal tender pulling away. They had been uncoupled from the rest of the cars.

The outlaws on horseback were giving chase and firing at a man who crouched on the narrow platform at the back of the tender. She recognized him as Matt Bodine.

She watched in horror, figuring that Bodine would be riddled with bullets at any moment. He ducked around the rear corner of the car onto the walkway that led up the right side of the tender toward the locomotive. That didn’t offer him any protection, though.

But then he began climbing, using the grab irons bolted to the side of the car as ladder rungs. As Maggie watched, Bodine reached the top and flung himself over, dropping onto the coal in the tender.

She didn’t see what happened after that, because the cars that had been cut loose ground to a halt and Maggie heard the pounding of more hoofbeats. She looked frantically toward the rear of the train, wondering what awful thing was going to happen next.

Instead she saw a miracle.

She saw her husband and son.

More men were galloping alongside the tracks, and riding double with one of them was Ike. He had Caleb clutched tightly to him with one arm while he hung on with the other. He yelled, “Maggie! Maggie!”

A bearded man who seemed to be leading the newcomers reined to a halt beside the platform where Maggie stood and called, “Ma’am, do you know where Joshua Shade is?”

Maggie waved toward the locomotive and tender. “I think he must be up there in the engine!” That was just a guess on her part, but she didn’t see any other reason why the outlaws would have cut those cars loose from the rest of the train.

The man nodded and spurred his horse into a run again. The men with him had halted for a moment, too, and Ike seized that opportunity to slide down from the horse he had been riding. Now he came toward the platform in a stumbling run, still crying, “Maggie! Maggie!”

Heedless of her own safety, she leaped to the ground and ran to meet him. They flung their arms around each other and held on for dear life, as if they would never let go.

“Are…are you all right?” she sobbed.

“I am now,” Ike insisted.

“And Caleb?”

“He’s fine.”

“Oh, thank God! Thank God!” It was all Maggie could say as she stood there hugging her husband and son and shook with the sobs of relief that went through her. Finally, she was able to ask, “Who…who were those men with you?”

He shook his head, which now had a crude bandage wrapped around it. “I don’t know, but they’ve been looking for Shade and his gang. I think they must be lawmen of some sort.”

A sudden chill went through Maggie. Would she be arrested for trying to help the outlaws? She had been forced to do it, but the authorities might not see it that way.

She didn’t care what happened to her, she decided. She knew now that her husband and son were safe, and that was all that really mattered.

She found herself hoping, though, that after all this, Joshua Shade wouldn’t get away.

Kneeling on the pile of coal, Matt stuck his head over the tender’s side wall and leveled his Colt at the outlaws as they charged after the locomotive. He squeezed off two shots and emptied a saddle. Bullets whining around his head forced him to duck back down.

Suddenly, he heard shots coming from somewhere close by. It was hard to tell because of the noise of the engine, but he thought the shots came from the other side of the tender, at the back.

Matt scrambled over the coal and looked over the wall. A shock went through him as he saw Sam crouched on the walkway on this side of the tender, leaning around the rear corner to fire at the pursuing outlaws.

“Sam!” Matt yelled.

On reflection, that probably wasn’t a very smart thing to do, because Sam started in surprise and almost lost his balance on the precarious perch. He caught hold of a grab iron, though, and steadied himself as he looked up.

“Matt?”

“Yeah!” Matt saw blood on Sam’s shirt. “You all right?”

Sam waved his six-gun. “Just a scratch! Nothing to worry about! You?”

“I’m fine!” Matt ducked again as a bullet whipped past his ear.

This one came from behind him, though.

The bastards had him in a cross fire.

“He’s in the tender!” Joshua Shade told Jeffries as the wind in the cab whipped the crazed outlaw’s long hair around his head. “Get up there and kill him!”

Shade was at the controls of the locomotive now, but he wasn’t slowing it down any. Jeffries wasn’t sure that Shade even knew what he was doing. The engine continued to rocket along the tracks.

“Kill Bodine!” Shade screamed again.

Jeffries took off the conductor’s cap and flung it away. He stepped over Garth’s body and started climbing the rungs fastened to the outside of the tender’s front wall.

When he reached the top, he saw Bodine at the back of the coal car. Jeffries threw a leg over the wall and perched there atop it as he swung up his gun. As it came in line, he squeezed the trigger.

The train jolted a little at that moment, just enough to throw off Jeffries’s aim. His bullet pulverized a lump of coal instead of blowing Bodine’s brains out.

Then Bodine was turning and his gun came up with blinding speed and Jeffries saw the orange flash of powder inside the barrel. In that shaved fraction of a heartbeat, he could have almost sworn that he saw the bullet itself flying out of the barrel on a straight line at him.

Then the chunk of lead smashed into his forehead like a hammer blow, shattering bone and boring deep into his brain. Jeffries felt a burst of pain and then nothing as he went over backward, toppling into the cab to crash down next to Garth.

He was just as dead as Garth when he landed, too.

Matt saw the black-rimmed hole appear in the phony conductor’s forehead; then the man fell out of sight. He turned his attention back to the rest of Shade’s gang, but as he rested his gun barrel on the tender’s wall, he saw that the outlaws had their hands full with a new battle.

Men on horseback, men Matt had never seen before, had overtaken the desperadoes and attacked them from the rear. Shade’s men had no choice but to turn and fight back. Clouds of powder smoke rolled, bullets buzzed through the air like giant insects, men on both sides yelled, threw up their hands, and toppled from their saddles.

The fight was fierce, but lasted only moments. As the locomotive and tender continued to pull away, the smoke cleared enough for Matt to see that all the outlaws were done. A handful of the men who had attacked them were still mounted, but their losses had been heavy, too. The survivors spurred after the locomotive and tender.

Matt turned and began climbing over the coal toward the front. He didn’t know who was left up there. Maybe nobody. The locomotive could be running away on its own, with its throttle locked in place. Somebody needed to slow it down and stop it.

He reached the front end of the tender and looked over the wall, then ducked as Joshua Shade fired a pistol at him. The loco, longhaired outlaw chief stood at the controls, twisting around to shoot at Matt. A crazed laugh came from the man’s mouth as he pushed the throttle even harder, opening it up all the way.

The son of a bitch must be trying to wreck them, Matt thought. He sprang up and fired, sending a bullet ricocheting off the controls. Another shot sounded, this time from down below and to his left, and when he glanced in that direction he saw Sam thrusting a Colt around the front corner of the tender. Sam fired again, and glass shattered as the bullet smashed one of the gauges.