The Savage Gun

Table of Contents

 

 

CAUGHT IN A CROSSFIRE

A rifle cracked and he heard the whine of a bullet as it caromed off a solid object. Then, the heavy
boom
of the Henry again and this time he heard its echoes before the sound died away.

John made his decision.

He took another breath, then rolled away from the tree, throwing himself headlong on the ground. He found himself plunged into an alien world where dragons spewed flame and nightmares came into being out of some cavernous dungeon deep in the recesses of his mind. Two explosions shattered the taut silence in his brain.

In that first instant, when he was exposed, lying flat on the ground, putting the butt of his rifle to his shoulder, a giant pair of iron doors swung wide open.

His blood froze.

The gates of Hell opened.

Fire and brimstone rained down on him . . .

THE VIGILANTE
THE VIGILANTE: SIX-GUN LAW

 
THE DARK LAND
SUNSET RIDER
TEXAS DUST
BLOOD RIVER
THE SAVAGE GUN

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 
THE SAVAGE GUN

 
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

 
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / February 2007

 
Copyright © 2007 by Jory Sherman.

 
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eISBN : 978-0-425-21421-3

 
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1

THAT MORNING, JOHN SAVAGE AWOKE TO TWO KINDS OF THUNDER.

There was the thunder already in his head that had lasted through the long night, the pounding thunder that crept into his dreams like ancient tom-toms, blinded him with the throbbing beat of a bass drum, then exploded into a rolling peal of thunder as huge kettle drums, tympani, pounded so loud he screamed until his mother crept to his bed and soothed him to silence.

“My head,” he muttered. “The pain won't stop, Ma.”

“Now Ben told you not to handle that dynamite with your bare hands, Johnny. He told you to wear gloves.”

“Yeah, after I unloaded half a box of that stuff.”

“Shhh, you'll wake Pa and your sister. Now, go back to sleep and just bite down on the pain.”

“Don't you have some powders or something?” he asked.

“Next time we go to town, Johnny. Now, go to sleep.”

He had gone back to sleep, but the drums got louder and the pain shot through his head like an electric current and spread through every nerve in his body until the second thunder awoke him.

This was the thunder of the dynamite explosion in the mine up on the hill above the creek, the one he and Ben had set up to blow the day before.

John scrambled out of his bedroll, groped for his boots in the dim light inside the big tent where he and his family lived along Cripple Creek, high in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

He slipped on his boots, laced them up, and crawled from the tent, his eyes two thunderbolts of pain with someone pounding them in their sockets with a ten-pound maul.

The sky was a bloodred smear across the sky as John scrambled up the crude wooden steps fashioned out of whipsawed spruce that led to the mine shaft. Smoke and dust and fine grit weaved through the spruce and fir trees that obscured the adit of the mine, seeping through the coniferous trees like a stain on a wall of green. And he could smell the burnt powder mingled with the scent of evergreens, an acrid odor scratching his nostrils with sharp aromatic fingernails on a witch's long, bony fingers. Clouds wreathed and blanketed the high peaks, their misty underbellies dipping so low, he could almost touch them, and the red sky was like a memory of the explosion itself, smeared like blood across the eastern horizon, a distant ominous painting by a madman flinging gore from a rusted pail.

His parents had not stirred when he left and his sister only moaned in her blankets, still floating in tidal sleep as she always did. And she was always the last to get up and start whining for something to eat. Little Alice, his sister, was nothing but a spoiled brat, ten years younger than he, and, at eight years of age, about as useful in a mining camp as an accordion on a hunting trip.

John's suspenders cut into his shoulders as he cleared the landing at the top and turned to go around the guarding trees, a sudden fear in him that Ben was still inside the mine, his body ripped apart, smashed by hurtling stones into a pulpy mush, every bone broken, flesh mangled, black from fire and unexploded powder.

“Ben, Ben,” he called, and rounded the trees into the choking dust and smoke like a cloud before the adit, like a shroud draping the broken body of his friend whose legs had not carried him from the shaft in time.

“Johnny boy,” Ben said, stepping out into the open from a copse of trees that clung to the hillside several yards to the right of the smoldering mine.

“I thought you would wait, Ben. You said you'd wait to blow the powder.”

“Ah, couldn't wait. The lure of gold was too great in this hard-rock miner's heart, lad. Besides, it was the best time to light the fuse, see it sizzle and spark as it raced into the darkness. 'Twas a beautiful sight, Johnny boy. I wished you were here.”

John, panting, looked at Ben with mingled feelings of anger and annoyance. Anger because Ben had not waited for him before lighting the fuse; annoyance because the man was smiling in triumph, pleased that he had blasted a ton or two of rock with just the flicking touch of match.

“You said you'd wait,” John said again, his dark eyes snapping with splinters of light as he batted his eyelids.

“I lied, Johnny. The urge in me was too great, alas. I could not wait. The fuse was set and I did not want dew to settle on it and slow it down.”

John, slightly mollified, huffed a huff, snorted a snort, and breathed a deep breath.

“When can we go in?” he asked.

“Soon's all the dust and smoke clears out of that hole,” Ben said. He pointed down toward the creek. “Look.”

John saw the first tendrils of mist rising from Cripple Creek. As he watched, the mist thickened and rose, spreading to all the miners' tents, forming into clouds like those just above him, fanning out like lush folds of cotton bat-ting, blotting out all the rockers, the sluice boxes, the pans, picks, and shovels that lay along the banks of the creek. The sun was just brimming the horizon, enough to leech all the dew and the moisture from the creek into cloudy vapors that hovered over the camp, shrouding them until all signs of human life and activity disappeared.

“Lovely, ain't it, Johnny?” Ben Russell said.

“Like a dreamworld, almost.”

“And the clouds still coming down on top of us. Ain't nature grand?”

“Grand,” John said, looking up at the descending clouds, clouds that soon enveloped them in a wispy fog. He could feel the dampness, the soft touch on his face like a fleeting kiss, so soft, it was barely heavier than the air itself.

“The mountains make their own weather. They make the clouds and keep them long as they can, like pups. Then, when the world needs rain, they send them sailing out over the prairies and the dry lands, full of rain. The Injuns hold these mountains sacred and so do I, Johnny.”

“So, we're looking at the birthing of clouds right now.”

“Yep. And at the nursery. Those cloud-pups will rise up and join the big fellers in the sky. And they'll get fatter and fatter until it comes time to set sail and roam all over the world.”

“I like the way you put it, Ben.”

“Hell, that's the way it is, Johnny.”

Ben turned and walked over to the adit, peered inside.

“You can get one of them barrows over yonder and we can start shoveling.”

“Sure,” John said. The wheelbarrows were sitting in a copse of spruce and fir trees off to the left of the mine. There, too, were the shovels, picks, adzes, mauls, and some axes in case they had to cut timbers to shore up anything. But so far they had not had to do that. They were into hard rock and hadn't seen so much as a thumbnail of gold. But Ben said there was gold inside there, and they'd hit it any day now.

John loaded a wheelbarrow with two long-handled shovels. He wheeled it toward the mine. There was only room for one wheelbarrow at a time. Ben had blasted perhaps twenty feet into the rock. John didn't know how much deeper he had blown the rock out this morning.

“Safe to go inside, Ben?”

“Yeah, it's thinnin' out. Let me go first, just to check. I'll holler when I'm ready for you to come in.”

Ben stepped inside, walked a few paces, then disappeared. The mine was a straight shaft at this point, and would be until they found a vein and had to branch off. John was hoping that today was the day. Ben carried a couple of candles in his overalls and when he got all the way in, he would light one and take a good look at the newly exposed rock wall, going over every inch with a slow patience, like a jeweler examining a precious stone.