Читать книгу Judgment Day - William W. Johnstone - Страница 7

Upon reaching the big south gate of the town, Jason ran through it and dropped the crying boy. He leapt up on Megan’s horse, which was still tied to a nearby hitching post, and galloped back outside again through the stampede of men, women, children, and wagons coming swiftly toward him and the gate.

He paused only a moment to direct the first wagon driver toward the well, then spun outside the mass of the wagons to get a look at the horizon.

They were closer now. Almost close enough to make out individuals without the aid of binoculars, and through his mind raced the image of his sister, out at the MacDonald place. He prayed that she was all right, that she’d hidden, or that the braves were too intent on reaching the town and the wagons to bother with a meager homestead.

His thoughts were broken by a shouted “Jason!” coming from up the street. It was Ward Wanamaker, running toward him down the center of West Main, his gun drawn. Since Jenny had married and moved out, Ward had been renting her room. Jason believed in keeping his deputy close at hand.

“See to the wagons,” Jason shouted to Ward, then wheeled his mount back across the square to Dr. Morelli’s door. He didn’t have to knock, let alone dismount. Morelli was hurrying out the door when he got there.

“Apache!” Jason shouted, as if that one word were the answer to every question Morelli could possibly ask.

Apparently, it was. And in reply, the doctor nodded quickly and reached back inside the door for his rifle and his medical bag. “Get your wife and kids to the center of the square,” were Jason’s final words before he wheeled the horse once more and headed up toward Cohen’s Hardware. If those Indians made it over the wall, he didn’t want the first screams to come from Olympia and Doc’s kids, let alone Saul and Rachael Cohen’s.

Once he skidded Megan’s mount to a halt and tossed the reins around the rail, he banged at the glass out front of Salmon Kendall’s Mercantile until Salmon’s head appeared at the bottom of the steps. Then Jason made a sign—fingers for feathers—at the back of his head.

The mayor’s expression changed immediately, and he started shouting for his wife and kids to get the heck downstairs. Jason took off for the Cohens’ store, next door. He figured they were probably both out like snuffed candles, but he had to get both of them and their kids downstairs. Even with the outside wall—and the walls of their house—between them and the Apache, nobody should be upstairs right now. Jason knew what just one flaming arrow could do if it hit the right spot on a roof.

And so did Saul Cohen. If he hadn’t been knocked out on Doc Morelli’s joy juice at the moment, Saul would have moved his family downstairs long ago, and be out here on the street, helping Jason.

Jason unlocked, then pushed in the front door, and raced past shelves bulging with nail kegs and ready-made hinges and bolts and screws, pushed past a display of hammers and saws and awls, and took the stairs two at a time.

“I tell you, I’m pretty sure they passed us by,” Matt said from atop the ladder. His ear—attached to a head full of red hair as fiery as his sister’s—was still pressed to the floorboards above him, and his attractive brow was still knotted with concentration.

Below, on the dirt floor of the hidey-hole beneath the main room of their home, sat Jenny Fury, now Jenny MacDonald. Her long, slender legs were crossed Indian-style, and her arms were crossed, too. She didn’t answer him.

Everything about her body posture said, “No.”

Actually, everything about it said, “Go to hell,” but that flew past Matt’s understanding. As did most everything about his wife.

Jenny had learned that he didn’t care. He didn’t care about much of anything that didn’t concern him directly and personally and right now. His wife was not one of those things.

In a louder tone, he said, “Jenny, did you hear me? I said I’m pretty sure—”

She pursed her lips and hissed a short, “Shh!” at him. The idiot. Didn’t he know they could be up there right now, one of their heathen ears pressed to the other side of that floorboard?

Her hands gripped her arms tighter, and she felt herself shiver. Oh, how she wished she’d gone into town with Megan this morning! She would have liked to have seen her brother Jason one more time, if this was indeed her day to die….

Matt, now silent, came back down the ladder, unhooked the lantern, and carried it over. He sat down beside her, the lantern light washing over his hair and face before the dust kicked up by his boots rose to momentarily obscure his features. He coughed halfheartedly into his hands, then scrubbed his furrowed brow with manicured fingertips.

Jenny saw his hands tremble. He was scared. Not just scared of the Indians, scared of everything.

Perhaps even a little frightened of her.

She bit back the smile that threatened to pop out. Now was not the time for grinning like a fool. But she had suddenly realized why her husband could be—and usually was—such an ass. She supposed he was like a cur dog who snapped and growled at the person who tried to feed it. What had happened to make him so afraid?

She shook her head. It didn’t matter. She supposed it didn’t even matter what had spooked him so bad, probably when he was just a kid. Probably something to do with that father of his.

But it didn’t matter. What mattered, right at this particular moment, was keeping him from opening that trapdoor until she was absolutely positive that the danger had passed.

And she wasn’t sure.

Not yet.

Having gotten a doped and unconscious Saul and an equally drugged Rachael down the stairs and into the store’s back room, Jason gave their boys firm orders to stay put and stay down, and left them all in the store room before he started for the saloon.

Outside, the town square rang with gunfire, and Jason was narrowly missed by an arrow, which instead of clipping him in the neck, buried itself in the side of Cohen’s Hardware. The roof of Reverend Milcher’s church was already afire, he noticed as he made his way along the sidewalk.

Nobody was putting that out, but he saw that Ward Wanamaker was passing buckets along a line to the roof of the livery stable, which was also ablaze. Several of the newcomers were also helping with the stable, leading animals out and hitching them across the way, north of the town square.

Somebody had best see to the church, he thought as he ducked into the saloon.

“Jason!” shrieked Abigail, peeking over the bar top.

“Down!” he shouted back, and her head disappeared behind the bar like a pond turtle’s into its shell.

Rollie Biggston, the Cockney from California with whom Abigail was now in business, had vacated com pletely, but Gil Collins was at the window, watching the top of the wall and shooting any poor savage who managed to climb to the top. So far as Jason could tell, no Indian had yet made it over alive.

“Good man, Gil,” he said as Gil picked off yet another warrior coming over the gate. Jason had always thought they should have built it higher, and now it appeared he’d been right.

“Fish in a barrel, Sheriff,” Gil replied without looking around. He was busy reloading his rifle.

Jason drew and shot over Gil’s head, breaking a new windowpane but picking off a warrior who’d been right behind the one Gil had hit. The body toppled backward and out of sight.

Gil muttered, “Thanks, Jason,” before he brought up his rifle again and trained it on the top of the gate. “Sneaky critters, ain’t they?”

“They surely are. If you’re all right in here, I’m going to help with the fire at the church,” Jason said. His gun was still out, but he was backing toward the door.

“Go then,” Gil said, and took another shot.

Jason didn’t get a chance to see who Gil was aiming at. Or whether his shot had struck its target. He just ran like the devil was after him, ran through a barrage of arrows, and all the way across the street toward the flaming corner church.

The Milcher kids had been hurried across the way by their mother, and Jason gave them a reassuring wave as he scurried past. Then the horses and wagons ringing the center well blocked his sight of them, and he was in front of the church.

Everybody was still hard at work passing buckets toward the stable, but he got Salmon Kendall’s attention. “Half to the church!” he shouted over the battle noise. Salmon heard him, and directed every other man to make a second water line to the west and Milcher’s church.

Muttering, “Someday that sonofagun’s going to take my advice and not build that consarned thing so damned high!” Jason grabbed a full bucket from the closest man and made for the church doors.

Inside, he found that the flames hadn’t worked their way down to the first floor yet, but the smoke certainly had. The Reverend Milcher was stretched out behind his pulpit, unconscious and covered with ash. An empty bucket lay beside his hand.

First things first.

Jason set down his bucket, tied his bandanna over his mouth and nose, and proceeded to drag Milcher outside. Mayor Kendall and a new face greeted him outside. Both men were carrying buckets, and Kendall had his halfway to the ground before Jason waved him off. “Second floor,” he said raggedly. The smoke was getting to him, despite his efforts.

He dragged Milcher as far as he could, which was just to the other side of the circled wagons, and left him to regain consciousness in his wife’s arms. He barely heard Lavinia’s thankful cry of “Bless you, Jason, bless you!” as he sprinted back across the way.

The bucket line had reached the front of the church by now, and Jason arrived just in time to grab a full one from the front man, an enormous black man built like a stevedore and stripped to the waist. Jason took the bucket with a murmured “Thanks,” and headed toward the stairs at the backside of the first floor.

The smoke was thick, and it stung his eyes and nose as he felt his way up the steps. He bumped into somebody on his way up—Salmon, he thought, squinting against the smoke—but he kept moving until he reached the top landing and the Milchers’ living quarters.

The place was ablaze. Rugs sprouted flames like prairie sprouts grass. The sofa and chairs pocked the room like burning brush, and the heavier pieces—the breakfront and dining table and some wooden shelving—smoked in some places, flickered with infant flame in others.

Jason didn’t take the time to pick a target. He simply threw his bucket of water toward the couch, barely seeing the water fly through the smoke-filled room. But he heard it hit the target with a satisfying hiss. And immediately, he turned on his heel and found his way back to the stairs.

Halfway down, he ran into someone coming up. Salmon again. Wordlessly, through the roiling smoke, he traded buckets with the mayor and started back up the steps.

Outside Fury’s walls and at the top of a distant rise, Lone Wolf waited for his captains to return to him for a parley while he watched the battle.

It was not going well. In fact, it was going very poorly. The whites picked off his men from the top of their wall like his forefathers had once picked off the mighty grazing buffalo from the cover of long grass.

“I thought you said you had scouted,” grumbled Juanito, who had returned limping badly, a bullet imbedded in his thigh.

“I did,” snapped Lone Wolf. “Just last week.”

He had, too. All was just as he’d seen it, except for those big wagons they’d just observed hurrying to the relative safety of the inner wall. Lone Wolf knew they were freighters, daring to cart their wares across Apache land. And from past experience, he knew what they carried.

He smiled to himself. Very soon, there would be new toys for the children and pretty cloth for the women, and the Apache would all have a rich supply of cattle and pigs and flour and salt to last through the summer and winter, and new ponies.

“Your information was not very good,” said another brave, his voice mingled with the cries and shrieks of battle, and of men dying.

Bobcat Who Snarls added, “It was not good, Lone Wolf. The walls are too high for such men as we. It would take men the size of gods to step over them.”

“So said Raven Lids,” announced the brave who rode in with Bobcat Who Snarls. The dust still rose from his shoulders in clouds. “He said, ‘Then I will be that tall,’ and stood on his pony. He lies where they shot him off.” His tone indicated much cheating and untrustworthiness on the part of the whites.

“Pick up the dead,” said Lone Wolf, “and bring them back. The wounded too. But do not stop the fight. We can win. You and you,” he said, pointing first to one man, then the next, “take your men to the side of the town where earth greets the sun. Attack strongly. You, Bobcat Who Snarls, you get back to the gate.”

Bobcat Who Snarls didn’t look too happy, but went.

“Juanito,” commanded Lone Wolf, “get yourself to the medicine man.” He pointed to a brave squatted in the brush, about a stone’s throw away. “Tell him I said to mend your leg before you go back to battle.”

Juanito grunted, then left him, awkwardly hobbling toward the medicine man.

Lone Wolf glanced to the west. The sun was falling close to the horizon. There would not be much time left for fighting today.

Victory might have to be left for tomorrow. If this was the case, so be it.

Ward Wanamaker, the town’s deputy and the man who had organized the bucket brigades once the wagons were all inside and the stockade closed up against the heathen, was busily hauling bucket after bucket up from the well.

It was no easy feat, because the water level was rapidly falling. He knew that if they didn’t get these fires put out pretty quickly, they were going to have to let the fires have their way.

He didn’t want that.

His back aching, Ward hauled up another bucket, handed it to the next man in line, and sent down an empty. It was halfway to its target when he felt the arrow sink into his shoulder with a sharp sting, then a burning ache.

He fell to his knees, and then face-forward into the dirt of the street.

His bucket rope was grabbed by someone, he couldn’t see who, and he heard a voice shout, “Morelli! Dr. Morelli!”

And then he felt hands dragging him out of the way while he repeated over and over, “Get me up, get me on my feet, get me up.”

No one listened, not even his own body.

He passed out.