One-Man Massacre

One-Man
Massacre

B
y Jonas Ward

A FAWCETT GOLD MEDAL BOOK

Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Conn.

All characters in this book are fictional

and any resemblance to persons living or dead

is purely coincidental.

Copyright
©
1958 by Jonas Ward

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof.

Printed in the United States of America

ONE

T

he
little old man and the big young one sat side by
side on the top of the mountain, faces turned thought
fully toward the rugged Big Bend country directly below,
backs disdainful of the magnificent sunset being staged
over the whole state of Chihuahua.

They sat together without speaking, the one with his
ancient and fragrant Meerschaum, the other with his
diminishing sack of Bull Durham, and soon the moonless
night began closing in on them and the mountain and
all the borderland like some softly closing door. Then it was pitch black, and something he saw made the young
one shift his wide shoulders restlessly.

"Damn it all, Fargo, you did it again," he growled.

Surprise made the old man's pipe glow brightly.

"Did what again, Buchanan?" he inquired.

"Lost track of another damn day."

"The hell you say!"

"Look for yourself, oldtimer," Buchanan told him and
Fargo looked, looked straight down from the mountain-
top. He shook his white-haired head incredulously.

"Now what can those pure fools be thinking of?" he
demanded. "How come they to light up Scotstown of a
Friday night?"

Buchanan sighed and ground his cigarette into the
earth.

" 'Cause it's sure-as-sin Friday/' Fargo continued posi
tively. Then he snapped his ringers. "Say
—I'll bet it's
the Fourth of July!"

Now Buchanan laughed.

"Should of quit when you drew even," he suggested
drily. "Now you've lost us a month."

"Ain't it July yet?" Fargo asked, doubt lining his voice.

"Not if we got here the middle of March. That makes
it a Saturday, middle of June, give or take a week."

"Well I'll be damned! How come I to miss checkin'
off a day like that?"

"Same way you misjudged the soft life of gold min
ing," Buchanan said.

"Not me, son. No, sir! I never claimed nothin' for
mountain livin' nor mountain minin'."

Let it go, Buchanan thought wearily, remembering
full well how the old man had showed him the dog-eared
map in that El Paso saloon, the picture he'd painted of
the two of them stuffing their pockets with nuggets the
size of eagle eggs. What the fast-talking old faker was
looking for in Paso was some two-legged jackass to break
his back against a goddam mountainside sixteen hours
a day. Meet Mr. T. Jackass Buchanan.

"We ain't doin' so bad," Fargo was telling him now.
"Not bad at all. Betcha the stuff we got assays out to thirty, thirty-two dollars the ounce."

"Sure."

"It will! Don't you think Fargo Johns knows the pure
dust when he gets it in his palm?"

"Hell, I reckon it's real enough, Mr. Johns. I just
hadn't figured on spending the next fifty years of my
life swinging your pickaxe."

"And you won't! You sure won't! Afore winter we'll
have enough to sneak us twenty, thirty Mexicans u
p
here. Just see if we don't. Then you and me, boy, we'll
just sit on our duffs and straw-boss the whole shebang."

"Sure," Buchanan said. "Before winter."

The rebuff sent Fargo back to his pipe, lapsed him
into troubled thinking. Nothing in this life comes easy,
he argued to himself; then had to admit he'd never
thought it would be this hard. Their take to date prob
ably didn't amount to more than three or four hundred
dollars
—and something he'd been observing for the past
few weeks augured worse for the future. Oh, the ore
was there all right, plain as a wart on your nose. But
though the mountain might be one pile of rich gold, getting it out was going to get rougher and rougher—
too rough even for someone with the prodigious size and
energy of his young partner. They badly needed water-
power, drills, three crews of Mexicans working round
the clock.

The pipe went out, sending a bitter taste along the curved stem. Story of my life, he thought. Sixty-four
years of it. Or was it sixty-five? Born July 18, 1782, he
knew that much. And been hanging by my thumbs ever
since.

Buchanan's great arm slipped around his thin shoul
ders.

"Don't mind my griping," Buchanan said. "Those
town lights threw me off kilter."

"Man gets pretty fine-honed, livin' like this," Fargo
conceded.

"Yeah. Go turn in, Fargo."

"Be some risky, droppin' down there for a visit," the
old man said probingly.

"Some."

"Stranger in town, busybodies askin' him questions.
Fella takes a drop or two too many and he starts braggin'
about his gold mine."

"Right. Get your sleep, oldtimer."

"Rascals be scramblin' up our mountain like pack
rats," Fargo continued. "Steal us blind . . ."

"Night, Fargo."

The old man got to his feet, stood looking down at
the blocky figure of Buchanan anxiously. Even as the
younger one was now, seated, motionless, he communi
cated a throbbing vitality, a wildness that was all the more felt because he was caged.

"Hell's bells!" Fargo burst out impatiently. "What
harm can it do?"

Buchanan raised his chin. "Now what?"

"Go on down there for a couple hours. Let some steam
off."

"Why don't we both go?"

"Me? Go all the way down this mountain in the black
of night and back again just for some white corn?" He
laughed scornfully at such a notion. "Catch me travelin'
all that distance just to get cheated of my hard-earned
money."

"You're gonna talk yourself into the trip pretty soon,"
Buchanan commented.

"You couldn't take me there piggy-back," Fargo said
resolutely, walking off. He returned in a few minutes carrying a small leather pouch.

"Don't throw it all away in one place," he said, pass
ing the fifty-odd dollars' worth of gold to the big man.
"And whatever you do, don't let no two-legged wolves
follow you back up here."

"Bring you back anything?"

"Well, if there's some left over, buy me a little to
bacco."

"That all?"

Fargo hesitated. "Got a birthday comin' up pretty
soon, if I keep close track of the days. Might treat my
self to a bottle of the mountain dew."

"See you in the morning," Buchanan said.

"Watch yourself, now."

"Sure."

"Hey, ain't you goin' to arm yourself?"

"Travelin' light," Buchanan said.

"Just as well," Fargo concluded. "Can't get into trouble
without a gun."

Buchanan crossed the clearing and disappeared over
the
side of the mountain, strolling with the lighthearted
air
of a man on a lark. If the lights of Scotstown meant
only five miles of hard traveling to Fargo, they promised
his tall partner a few hours' reprieve from the lonely mountain life. The prospect of hearing just one other
human's voice paid for the trip in full.

TWO

G
ibbons was
a man or not more than medium build,
but his specially made boots and high-crowned white
Stetson gave the impression of someone much taller.
His entrance into the Edinburgh Hotel was impressive as
well, the manner in which he strode directly across the
small lobby telling all present that here was a man whose
every waking moment was of urgent importance and
significance. Following exactly one pace behind him, in pseudo-military fashion, were two lean-faced, bleak-eyed
ones with the stamp of gunfighter all over them.

The man in the Stetson stopped at the desk, turned
when the clerk answered his brief question by pointing
to a group of men standing across the room, then walked
that way in his brisk fashion.

"Do I have the honor of addressing Mr. Malcolm
Lord?" he asked the heavy-set, hawk-nosed man in the
center of the group.

"You do, sir," Lord told him formally. "And you are
Captain Gibbons?"

"At your service."

They shook hands then, and Malcolm Lord's eyes
made an approving appraisal. He introduced Gibbons
then to the other four
—Butler, Watson, Sims and Mac-
Pike. Gibbons acknowledged each one ceremoniously,
unsmilingly, then swung aside.

"Gentlemen, my aides
—Sergeants Leach and Gruber,"
and by the act of turning his back to them in the next
moment he spared the Lord party any further socializing
with underlings.

"I suggest we adjourn to the Glasgow," Lord sug
gested. "We will have privacy there for our business."
They left the hotel and crossed Trail Street to the noisy,
brightly lighted Glasgow Saloon. Somehow the "ser
geants" made their way to the head of the party and it
was they who pushed open the swinging doors and en
tered the place first. And somehow the way they paused
just inside the doors, hands hooked above high-riding
gun butts, brought a hush in the sound, sent a warning
to every man in the big room. They moved to either side
then and let the group come in.

"This way," Malcolm Lord directed, leading them to
the private room he had reserved for the evening.

Suddenly a voice cut through the semi
-
silence from
the direction of the long bar. "So that's Black Jack Gib
bons!" it said belligerently, colored perhaps by whisky,
but far from drunk. "Feast your eyes, gents
—there's the
man that claims full credit for the Brownsville mas
sacre!"

Leach and Gruber had closed in instantly around Gib
bons, who had stopped in his tracks at the first sound of the quarrelsome voice.

"Good company you're keeping, Malcolm Lord," the
speaker went on. "The Rangers couldn't stomach him
after Brownsville, but I guess that don't hold for you."

"You're sodden drunk, as usual, Angus Mulchay,"
Lord snapped back across the room. "One more insult
to my guest and I'll forget your weakness . . ."

"No you won't," the man named Mulchay answered.
"You'll get somebody else to do your fighting, just as
you've imported this butcher . . ."