White Lightning (23 page)

Bad business, all around.

“Let’s give the road another chance,” Slade said. “I can’t help thinking time is on our side.”

“See if you feel that way after a couple nights of sleepin’ on the ground.”

“Won’t be the first time,” Slade replied.

And suddenly, for no good reason he could name, his thoughts went back to Faith. Slade wondered how her plans for moving had progressed, if she would find a buyer for her
ranch before she left. They hadn’t spoken since the afternoon she’d told him she was leaving Enid, but the town was small enough that Slade knew he’d have heard about a pending sale. With people being what they were, the gossip would’ve reached him soon enough.

He didn’t think she’d wait, though. Having made her choice, he couldn’t picture Faith postponing her departure any longer than was absolutely necessary. Not unless…

He’d seen her at the doctor’s office. Not a social call, Slade figured. Was she suffering some kind of relapse from the injuries inflicted on what should have been their wedding day? Faith hadn’t looked sick, standing with Doc Abernathy on the street, but who was Slade to say? He didn’t have a medical degree, couldn’t pretend to diagnose an illness passing on the street.

If he could just—

“Marshals!”

A voice behind them, small with distance. Slade and Naylor turned as one, to see the bluecoats trailing them.

“What’n hell do they want?” Naylor asked.

“One way to find out,” Slade replied, reining his mare back to a halt.

“Strike you as odd, them coming after us?”

“It doesn’t fit with what their captain told me,” Slade replied. “About them hunting Indians.”

“No reservation hereabouts,” said Naylor.

“No.”

Slade freed the hammer thong that kept his Peacemaker secure inside its holster, seeing Naylor do the same, times two. He thought about the shotgun in its saddle scabbard but decided drawing it right now would be a bit too much.

The captain—Gallagher—was smiling as he led his little troop toward Slade and Naylor at a walk. The sergeant wore
a poker face, the others looking vaguely sullen and disgruntled. As they closed the distance down to thirty feet or so, Gallagher said, “I’m glad we caught you.”

“Didn’t know that you were chasing us,” the younger of the marshals said.

He had a wary look, it seemed to Virgil Bonner, sitting with his right hand near a holstered Colt, his left hand filled with reins. Both men were on guard, but still outnumbered more than two to one.

“Not chasing,” Captain Gallagher replied, “but when I saw you leaving town I had a thought.”

“Which was?” the older marshal asked.

“I wondered if you might be onto something after all,” said Gallagher. “About the renegades.”

Bonner wished they could just be done with it. He felt the others getting twitchy, wasn’t sure that he could count on them to keep their pistols holstered if the captain dragged the conversation out too long. They’d ridden out of town to do a job, and stalling only raised the tension level. Sowder, French, and Wetzel weren’t the most reliable of men under the best conditions. Twiddling their thumbs when they expected action only made them more unstable.

“Thing is,” the younger lawman said, “we’re workin’ on a lead here. It’s a two-man job.”

“More hands make lighter work,” said Gallagher.

“In this case,” said the older of the pair, “five extra men in uniform make it impossible.”

That stalled the captain for a second, working on the next thing he should say, still not giving the signal to get on with business. Why in hell was he still talking, anyway?

No guts,
thought Bonner, as his right hand came to rest atop his thigh, edging a little closer to his holster. Army fashion dictated a holster on the right hip, with the pistol
placed butt-forward for a kind of backward draw. The style had started with some fuddy-duddy who believed a mounted soldier’s foremost weapon was his saber, wielded in the right hand, while a pistol—being secondary—could be drawn if absolutely necessary with the left hand. As it happened, though, the holster’s placement proved ideal for right-handed drawing when a man was sitting down, if he had practiced and was smart enough to leave his holster flap unbuttoned.

Sergeant Bonner
was
a practiced shooter with his Colt Single-Action Army, and his holster flap
was
open. All he needed was the signal from his captain, or a false move from the lawmen they had ridden out from town to murder.

Any second now…

But Gallagher kept droning on. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” he said. “We didn’t mean to inconvenience you, of course. But since we’re here—”

Bonner glimpsed sudden movement on his left, French going for his pistol, sick of waiting, and there wasn’t any way to stop him. As the younger lawman shifted toward him, right hand dropping toward his own Colt, Bonner gave it up and made his move.

The crack of gunfire stung Slade’s ears, then he was adding to it with his own Peacemaker, drawing as the first two shots ripped out, Naylor and one of the blue-coated privates firing almost simultaneously. Slade had seen it coming, Naylor just a hairbreadth faster in responding, and the soldier toppling over from his saddle with a kind of gasping, snarling sound that may have come from his constricted throat or from a bullet-punctured lung.

A couple of the army horses reared, and Slade’s mare
shied a little as he got a shot off toward the scruffy-looking sergeant who was next in line. It was a hasty shot. Slade winged him, saw a puff of scarlet mist above one shoulder, but it didn’t slow the sergeant’s aim enough to matter. He returned Slade’s fire, a slug from the long-barreled Colt Army fanning the air beside Slade’s cheek, and then all hell broke loose.

There was no time to think, with six guns blasting back and forth from thirty feet or so, a couple of the horses making sounds like women screaming. A part of Slade’s mind was surprised, expecting army horses to be better trained for battle, but another part was grateful that it spoiled his adversaries’ aim.

Slade’s mare was cutting didoes of her own, a kind of hopping, prancing circle to the left that saved the wounded sergeant from his second shot. Slade’s bullet flew somewhere between the sergeant and a red-faced private to his right, whose Colt was blazing off a round toward Naylor. Naylor cursed, returned fire, as the roan’s quick circling motion brought Slade back around to face the firing line.

Enough!

Slade knew he would be quicker, maybe safer, on his own two feet. With that in mind, he kicked free of his stirrups, vaulted from the saddle, snatching at his lever-action shotgun in its scabbard as he dropped. Got off another wild shot from his Colt as he touched down and rolled, guessing the round was wasted since none of the men intent on killing him went down.

The shotgun’s eight-pound weight was reassuring in Slade’s hands. A second after he’d returned his six-gun to its holster, he squeezed off a blast in the direction of the sergeant he had winged, absorbed the recoil with his hip, and saw the storm of buckshot strike his target’s chest. No
flesh wound this time, as the heavy buckshot pellets shattered ribs and breastbone, punching Slade’s target backward from his saddle, airborne and ass over teakettle.

The shotgun blast provoked more squealing from a couple of the army horses, two already breaking formation, riderless. That left three mounted bluecoats firing, Naylor still astride his gelding too but saddle-slumped as if to make himself a smaller target for the enemy. Slade saw his partner fire a shot across the Appaloosa’s arching neck and heard one of the soldiers gasp a curse as he was hit, then Slade himself was dodging as the captain brought him under fire.

Gallagher saw the grounded marshal—Slade, his name was—swing the lever-action shotgun back around in his direction, lining up a shot. The captain fired instinctively, guessing the round was wasted, hoping it would make the lawman duck and miss, at least. Even while firing, Gallagher was hauling on his palomino’s reins, swinging the stallion hard around and out of line, prepared to run. A shotgun blast behind him gave the horse momentum and it bolted, rump-stung by a buckshot pellet, charging off to southward.

Running for its life, and Gallagher along with it, praying that he could hang on for the ride.

And what in hell was he supposed to do
but
run, for Christ’s sake? French and Bonner down already, dead or dying, and he’d never been a brave man, really. West Point had prepared him for command, but all the action Gallagher had ever seen was routing Indians from villages when they’d been ordered to move out, not even skirmishes in the accepted sense, although he’d killed a brave or two along the way, proving he had the stomach for it. And if they had been unarmed, what of it? Most of those the army killed
were women, children, or the elderly. There hadn’t been a battle worthy of the name since Gallagher was sent to Fort Supply.

But he was in one now—or running from it—and as he put space between himself and the ongoing gunfire, Gallagher began to think about how he’d explain it all to Colonel Pike. Much would depend upon the outcome, granted, and it suddenly occurred to Gallagher that bolting was a bad idea. By giving in to panic and escaping from the action, he’d created further problems for himself.

For one, he wouldn’t know the outcome of the fight until survivors straggled back to Stateline. If the lawmen made it back, he’d have no recourse but to run and keep on running, looking for a hideout where the army and the U.S. Marshals Service couldn’t find him. If a remnant of his troop returned, Gallagher would be faced with trouble of another sort.

They would be furious at him for running off, of course, but he could work that out. Bribe them to keep their mouths shut and concoct a story about hostiles who had jumped them on the trail, eliminating Bonner, French, and anybody else the marshals killed. He would go back with the survivors, make damned sure the lawmen’s corpses disappeared, use whatever remained of his authority and Rafferty’s cold cash to keep the men in line.

Or better yet, borrow a few of Rafferty’s hard cases from the Rocking R to finish off his squad. Let death ensure their silence while he staged the scene and spun a fable of miraculous escape from overwhelming odds. He even had the rump graze on his mount to make the story credible, and once the two lawmen had disappeared without a trace, who’d doubt that they had fallen prey to the same renegades?

With any luck at all, he just might pull it off.

•    •    •

Slade saw the captain bolt and chased him with a twelve-gauge blast, then had to focus on the bluecoats who had stayed behind to fight it out. One spurred his mount toward Naylor, trading close-range shots and doubling over as a bullet drilled his abdomen. Slade swung around to face the other, found the soldier bearing down on him, and squeezed off from the hip without a chance to aim.

It didn’t matter with the target looming over him, a stocky soldier leaning right across his saddle for a better shot at Slade. The buckshot barely had a chance to spread before it turned the shooter’s face and brains across his horse’s croup. The chestnut gelding bucked and sent its nearly headless rider flopping from his saddle to the ground, landing with all the grace of dirty laundry in a canvas bag.

Which still left one.

Slade pumped the shotgun’s lever action, spinning back toward Naylor and his gut-shot adversary, just in time to see a bullet strike the younger marshal’s chest. Naylor lurched sideways, spilling toward the earth, while Slade lined up the wounded private in his sights and blasted him from life into oblivion.

Four down, and as he ran toward Naylor, Slade had no view left of the retreating officer in charge. Dismissing Gallagher from conscious thought, a job to handle later when he had the time, Slade knelt at Naylor’s side and found the younger marshal laboring to breathe. A punctured lung and sucking chest wound made it doubly difficult, painting the lower half of Naylor’s face with blood. A darker stain, spreading across Luke’s shirt, told Slade one of the slugs had pierced his liver.

“Guess you’ll…have to…finish…this job…on
your own,” said Naylor, laboring to force the words out of his throat.

“Hang on,” Slade said. “I’ll get you back to town. The doctor—”

Even as he spoke, Naylor convulsed and coughed a small geyser of blood. As he slumped back to earth, his eyes were dim, unfocused, staring off somewhere beyond the morning’s scattered clouds.

Slade still went through the motions, feeling for a pulse he knew he wouldn’t find, then rose and looked around the battleground. Aside from Luke, four bodies lay in twisted attitudes of death, their faces slack, blood soaking through the tunics of their uniforms. Their horses hadn’t run far, once the shooting stopped, but Slade was damned if he would spend the whole day hauling corpses onto saddles single-handed.

One was quite enough.

The horses he could handle, though, once he had Naylor draped across his patient Appaloosa, standing still as if it understood the situation, maybe even felt a certain sense of loss. The other animals responded to his call, offered him no resistance as he linked their reins, forming a small remuda that would trail him back to town.

Another customer for Stateline’s undertaker, and if anybody wanted to retrieve the fallen soldiers, they were free to do so. Bill the army for their burial, or plant them with the other stiffs in potter’s field, Slade didn’t give a damn.

He had a date with Brody Gallagher, no matter where the captain tried to hide.

“And your bright idea was running straight back here?” asked Rafferty, sounding bemused.

“Where else?” Gallagher’s face was mottled, sickly
looking. Shallow breathing made it sound as if he’d done the running back to Stateline, rather than his winded, wounded horse.

“Try
anyplace
,” Rafferty answered. “Christ, man! Did you have to lead them back to me?”

“You don’t know that I’ve led them anywhere,” said Gallagher. “Or that there’s anyone to lead.”

“That’s right. I don’t know, since you ran and left your men to do the dirty work. But if you thought that they were
winning
, you’d have stuck with them to finish it.”