Читать книгу A Good Day for a Massacre - William W. Johnstone - Страница 6

CHAPTER 1

“You two old scalawags stop that wagon and throw your guns down, or we’ll fill you so full of lead, they’ll need an ore dray to haul you to Boot Hill!”

The shout had vaulted down from somewhere on the forested ridge jutting on the right side of the old wagon trail. The words echoed around the narrow canyon before dwindling beneath the crashing rattle of the freight wagon’s stout, iron-shod wheels.

Jimmy “Slash” Braddock turned to his partner, Melvin Baker, aka the Pecos River Kid, sitting on the freight wagon’s seat to his left, and said, “Who’s callin’ us old?”

Driving the wagon, handling the reins gently in his gloved hands, Pecos turned to Slash and scowled. “Who . . . what?”

“Someone just called us old.”

Pecos lifted his head and looked around, blinking his lake-blue eyes beneath his snuff-brown Stetson’s broad brim. “I didn’t hear nothin’.”

“You didn’t hear someone call us old from up on that ridge yonder?”

“Hell, no—I didn’t hear a damn thing. I think you’re imaginin’ things, Slash. It’s probably old-timer’s disease.”

“Old-timer’s disease, my butt.” Slash’s brown-eyed gaze was perusing the stony ridge peppered with lodgepole pines and firs, all cloaked in sparkling, smoking gowns of high-mountain sunshine. “I heard someone insult us way out here on the devil’s hindquarters.”

A rifle cracked on the ridge. The bullet punched into the trail several feet ahead of the two lead mules and spanged shrilly off a rock. Instantly, the mules tensed, arching their tails and necks. The off leader loosed a shrill bray.

“Whoa!” Pecos said, hauling back on the reins. “Whoa there, you cayuses!”

As Pecos stopped the mules, Slash snapped up his Winchester ’73, pumping a live round into the action. He’d started to raise the rifle, to aim up the ridge, when another rifle barked—this one on his and Pecos’s left. The bullet cracked loudly into the wagon panel two feet behind Pecos. The sound evoked a low ringing in Slash’s ears; it made his heart kick like a branded calf.

Pecos flinched.

As men who’d spent over half their lives riding the owlhoot trail, robbing trains and stagecoaches and evading posses and bounty hunters, they were accustomed to being shot at. That didn’t mean they’d ever gotten comfortable with it.

“You were told to throw your weapons down, buckos!” said a man with a British accent from the pine-clad slope on the trail’s left side, on the heels of the rifle crack’s dwindling echoes. “You won’t be told a third time. You’ll just be blasted out of that wagon boot to bloody hell an’ gone!”

Slash glanced at Pecos, who sat back on the hard wooden seat, holding the reins taut against his chest. Pecos returned Slash’s dark look, then lifted one corner of his mouth, clad in a silver-blond goatee that matched the color of his long, stringy hair, in a woeful half-smile.

Slash cursed. He eased the Winchester’s hammer down against the firing pin, then tossed the rifle into some soft-looking brush to his right. Pecos set the wagon’s brake, wrapped the reins around the whip-sock, then tossed away his Colt’s revolving rifle, which had been leaning against the seat between him and Slash.

Crunching, scraping footsteps sounded to Slash’s right. He turned to see a man descending the steep, talus-strewn ridge on the trail’s right side, weaving through the scattered pines. He held a Spencer repeating rifle in one hand, aiming it out from his right hip while he used his free hand to grab tree trunks and branches to break his fall.

“Now, the hoglegs!” he shouted as he approached the bottom of the canyon.

He appeared to be a young man—whipcord lean and wearing a shabby black suit coat coppered with age over a ragged buckskin shirt unbuttoned halfway down his bony, hairless chest. A badly mistreated opera hat sat askew on his head, from which a tangled mess of lusterless, sandy hair hung straight down to his shoulders.

An old-model Colt jostled in a soft brown holster hanging loose on his right leg.

He stopped near the bottom of the trail, sidled up to a stout pine, and aimed the rifle straight out from his right shoulder, narrowing one coyote eye down the barrel at Slash’s head. “Ain’t gonna tell you old tinhorns again. Just gonna drill you a third eye. One you can’t see out of!”

He gave a crow-like caw of laughter, obviously pleased with his own joke.

“More insults,” Slash said, staring at the coyote-faced youngster. He couldn’t have been much over twenty. The scars from a recent bout of pimples remained on his cheeks and forehead. “First we’re old scalawags. Now we’re tinhorns.”

“You fellas are startin’ to hurt our feelin’s,” said the Pecos River Kid, looking from the younker on the right side of the trail to the Brit now descending the slope on the trail’s left side.

“We’ll hurt more than that, old man,” said the limey as he dropped down even with the kid, on the opposite side of the trail. He was older but not any better-looking. “If’n you don’t shed those shootin’ irons I can plainly see residin’ in your belt sheaths, you’re gonna be snugglin’ with the diamondbacks. The knives, too. Nice bowies, they appear. Might have to confiscate those. I’m a knife man, myself. Had to be in Five Points. I have quite a collection, and an ever-growin’ one, I might add.”

He smiled, showing large, horsey teeth the color of old ivory. “I keep ’em sharp enough to split hairs with, don’t ya know.” The smile grew more suggestive, menacing.

Slash exchanged another dark glance with Pecos. Slash carefully slid his two matched, stag-butted Colt. 44s from their holsters—one positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip, the other thonged on his right thigh—and tossed them away, again aiming for a relatively soft landing. As a man who’d lived his life depending on his guns to stay alive, he didn’t like mistreating them.

Pecos wore only one pistol—a big, top-break Russian. 44—in a holster tied down on his right thigh. He pulled the big popper free of its holster with two fingers and heaved it into some brush on the trail’s left side, near where the limey stood aiming his Winchester at him.

When he and Slash had both gotten shed of their bowie knives as well, the two ex-cutthroats and current freighters sat in uneasy silence, hands raised shoulder-high, palms out. Slash didn’t like this position. He wasn’t used to it. He was usually the one calling the shots and facing men staring back at him, warily, with their own hands raised shoulder-high.

He hadn’t realized what an uneasy feeling it was, having guns held on you, your life almost literally in the hands of someone else. Someone who might just have an itchy trigger finger, like the scrawny kid in the opera hat, for instance. The kid not only looked like he had an itch to sling some lead, but the maniacal glint in his coyote eyes told Slash he had a fondness for killing.

Or at least for inflicting fear.

The kid and the limey continued on down the slope, keeping their rifles aimed at Slash and Pecos. As they did, two more men appeared, stepping out from behind boulders on either side of the trail, thirty and fifty yards beyond, respectively, where the trail doglegged to the left.

One was a big, beefy Mexican in a shabby suit that was two sizes too small for him. He’d probably stolen the garb off some hapless wayfarer now feeding buzzards in a deep mountain ravine. He wore a bowler hat and two sidearms, and was wielding a Winchester Yellowboy rifle. A thick, black mustache drooped down over the corners of his mouth.

The other man was almost as big as the Mexican, but he was older, maybe in his forties. He had red hair beneath a black slouch hat. He was dressed in a paisley vest and sleeve garters, like a pimp or a gambler, and he carried a double-barreled shotgun at port arms across his chest—a grim, angry-looking gent with a large, wide slab of a face outfitted with small, gray eyes set too far apart, giving him the look of a demented mongrel. All four were likely riding a bout of hard luck in these remote mountains, probably having followed gold veins to nowhere. They’d probably thrown in together to make do, which meant haunting lonely trails for pilgrims to plunder and send nestling with the diamondbacks.

The redheaded mongrel’s thick lips were set in a hard line. His ratty string tie blew back over one shoulder as he caught up to the Mexican, and they stopped about ten feet out beyond the two lead mules, who shifted uneasily in their hames and traces.

“How much you carryin’?” asked the red-haired man, giving his chin a belligerent rise and shoving it forward.

“I’ll do the askin’, Cord,” said the Brit.

“Get on with it then,” Cord said, an angry flush blazing in his nose.

The Mexican grinned as though nothing thrilled him like dissension.

The limey turned to Slash and Pecos. “How much you carryin’?”

The kid squealed a little laugh. The Mexican’s grin broadened.

Their demeanors told Slash that they weren’t professionals, and that they hadn’t been together long. Sure enough, they’d merely thrown in together to try their hands at highway robbery for a stake that would take them to the Southwest before the first winter snows. Their types were a dime a dozen on the western frontier.

“What’re you talkin’ about?” Slash said.

“Don’t let’s chase the nanny goat around the apple orchard,” the kid said, canting his head and twisting his face angrily. “We seen you comin’ up this trail two days ago. You had a good load on ya. You came up from Fort Collins. We followed you out of town. Now, your wagon bed is empty, and we’re thinkin’ you mighta made a tidy little sum for deliverin’ them goods up to one o’ the minin’ camps in the higher reaches.”

Pecos glanced at his partner and said, “Slash, I think they’re fixin’ to rob us of our hard-earned wages. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t like it, Pecos. I don’t like it one bit.”

Pecos looked at the limey and then at the kid standing on the opposite side of the trail from him, aiming his rifle out from his right hip. “Why don’t you four raggedy-heeled vermin get yourselves some honest jobs? Try workin’ for a livin’!”

Given his and Slash’s shared past, Slash glanced at him skeptically. Pecos caught the glance and shrugged it off.

“Wait, wait, wait,” the kid said, scowling again, again canting his head to one side and staring at the two former cutthroats through skeptically narrowed eyes. “Did you say Slash an’ Pecos?”

Slash winced.

Now that he and Pecos had given up their outlaw ways and had bought a freight company in Fort Collins and become honest, hardworking, and more or less upstanding citizens, he and his partner had tried to forget their old handles and call each other by their given names instead. Slash was now Jim or Jimmy, and Pecos was now Mel or Melvin.

Old habits died hard.

The kid grinned like the cat that ate the canary and slapped his thigh. “I’ll be damned!”

“What?” asked the Mex.

The kid glanced at each of his long coulee-riding partners in turn and said, “You know who these two old coots are?”

“Who?” asked the limey.

“Why, they’re Slash Braddock and the Pecos River Kid, that’s who!” The kid threw his head back and laughed, showing that he was missing one of his eyeteeth.

“You mean,” said the Brit, dubiously, “you think these two old men sitting here in this freight wagon are Slash an’ Pecos?” He stared at the two freighters and shook his head. “No. No. Nonsense. You’re gettin’ soft in your thinker box, Donny boy.”

“We ain’t that old, fer chrissakes!” Slash said, scowling angrily at the younger men, all four of whom were now laughing at him and his partner. “We ain’t but fifty or so . . .”

“Give ’er take,” put in Pecos.

“Whatever,” Slash said. “That hardly makes us old men. Besides, were you fellas raised by wolves? Don’t you know you’re supposed to respect your elders, not rob and belittle ’em?”

The limey shook his head again and stared in disbelief at the two middle-aged freighters. “Damn, you two sure have changed. I’ve seen pictures of you both in the illustrated newspapers, an’, an’, well . . .”

“Yeah, well, we all get older,” Slash said, indignant. “Just wait—it’ll happen to you, amigo.”

“What’s Slash Braddock an’ the Pecos River Kid ridin’ a freight wagon for?” Donny asked, keeping his rifle aimed at the two former cutthroats. “You mossyhorns get too stove up to sit a saddle? Your peepers dim so bad that you can’t shoot?”

He smiled again, mockingly.

“As if it was any of your business,” Pecos said, “which it ain’t, we was both pardoned by none other than the president of the United States his ownself. So we got no more paper on our heads, and we’re free to live honest lives workin’ honest jobs, which is exactly what we’re tryin’ to do.”

That wasn’t the entire story. The agreement was that they’d be pardoned for their many sundry sins in exchange for working under the supervision of Chief Marshal Luther T. “Bleed-Em-So” Bledsoe unofficially from time to time as deputy U.S. marshals, hunting down the worst of the worst criminals on the western frontier. Between those man-hunting jobs, they were free to run their freight business, which they’d been doing now for six months, having bought the small outfit from an old man in Fort Collins who’d wanted to retire and live with his daughter in Denver.

“You’re also free to get robbed by blokes like us,” said the Brit, narrowing his eyes threateningly again, clicking back his rifle’s hammer. “Now . . . back to how much money you’re carryin’, which, by the way, we’ll be relievin’ you of.”