Читать книгу Slaughter of Eagles - William W. Johnstone - Страница 7

Two hours later

From the moment he left MacCallister, Falcon had been on the trail of the band of outlaws. Though the tracks were gone, washed out by the steady downpour, before he lost them they had been leading directly and inexorably toward Black Hawk. The cold, driving rain that had started up in the higher elevations then moved down the slopes of the Front Range Mountains had turned the single street of Black Hawk into a rushing river.

Falcon knew if he couldn’t find his quarry in Black Hawk he would have to give up. But he was also reasonably certain the men, confident they had gotten away cleanly after the rock slide, would be there somewhere, taking shelter from the rain. Shivering in the cold downpour, Falcon perused both sides of the street as he rode into town. He rode past the buildings, subconsciously enumerating them as he passed. There was a rooming house, a livery, a smithy, and a general store that had DRUGS, MEATS, GOODS painted on its high, false front. There was a hotel, a restaurant, and of course, the ubiquitous saloon.

It was not exactly a bolt from the blue when he saw the horses he had been tracking—two roans, a black, a white, and a paint—tied up outside the Lucky Nugget Saloon.

“Well, boys,” he said aloud. “I’ll just bet you thought you were home free. Looks like you are in for a little surprise.”

He steered his horse toward the saloon, the hooves splashing up water from the flooded road as he crossed the street. Stopping in front of the saloon, Falcon slid down from the saddle then walked over to examine the right forefoot of each horse. He struck pay dirt on the third horse he checked. The paint had a tie-bar shoe, the same shoe he had been following for the last two days.

Falcon stepped up onto the porch and used the edge of the wide, weathered planks to scrape mud from his boots. He could hear the discordant pounding of an out of tune piano, and the loud guffaw of a man laughing, followed by the higher trill of a woman’s cackle.

Falcon slipped out of his poncho and hung it on a nail sticking out of the front wall. Taking his hat off, he poured water from the top of the crown, then put it back on his head. Finally, he eased his pistol from the holster and spun the cylinder to check the loads, satisfying himself he was ready for any contingency. Squaring his shoulders, he pushed through the swinging bat wing doors and stepped just far enough inside to be out of the rain blowing in.

The inside of the saloon was a golden bubble of light. A dozen lanterns hung from a couple wagon wheel chandeliers. A large cloud of drifting tobacco smoke spread throughout the room, dimming the light and creating an artificial fog sufficient to becloud the view. The features of people standing no more than a few feet away looked as if they were being viewed through a film of gauze cloth.

The wood burning stove put off enough heat to remove the chill from the damp, dreary day, and the room was redolent with the smell of burning wood, tobacco, stale beer, and wet clothing. It was noisy, with a dozen or more conversations, periodic outbreaks of laughter, and music—if the cacophonous result of a piano player banging away at the old, scarred, upright piano could be called music. The saloon was crowded. After a brief perusal, Falcon’s attention was drawn to a table in the far corner, where four men and two bar girls were laughing and engaged in loud, animated conversation.

“Honey, if you are going to put your hand there, you are going to have to pay for it,” one of the girls said with a loud squeal, her laughter joined by that of the others.

“Darlin’ I’ll be happy to pay for it,” the man replied. “Me’n my pards here done got us a lucky streak in a big poker game.” The speaker had only three fingers on his left hand.

“Yeah,” one of the other men said. “That’s what it was. It was a poker game.” He was wearing an eye patch over his right eye.

The others laughed, as if sharing some sort of inside joke.

“With all the money you boys are spendin’, that must have been quite a game,” the bar girl said.

“It was, darlin’, it was.”

Falcon moved a little closer so he could get a clearer look at the men.

He had been looking for five men, but there were only four. However, with one of them wearing an eye patch, another with only three fingers on his left hand, and a third noticeably shorter than the other three, he was convinced they were the men he had been following. The fourth man, as described, was unremarkable in any way. Those four men, as well the horses that were tied up outside, perfectly fit the descriptions of the men he had been following; the ones who had held up the bank in MacCallister.

Falcon had never seen the Mueller brothers, but he was well aware of them. Not since Frank and Jesse James had a pair of brothers become so notorious, and not even the James brothers had a reputation for killing to match the Muellers. Luke Mueller, particularly, was known to be a deadly gunfighter—deadly because he was both quick with a gun, and willing to use it. The one with the loud mouth was clearly the dominating figure among the four, in spite of being the smallest. Falcon was certain he was one of the Muellers—though which one he didn’t know. He had no idea where the other Mueller was.

“Tell you what, darlin’,” the little man said to one of the bar girls. “Why don’t me’n you go on up and join my brother and that big ol’ gal he is with?”

“What? In the same room?” the bar girl gasped. She shook her head. “No, sir, I couldn’t do anything like that.”

“Don’t get yourself all in a tither,” the little man said. “I didn’t mean join ’em in the same room. I just meant go upstairs like they did. We’ll find our own room.”

“Oh, well, that’s more like it,” the soiled dove replied. “I thought you’d never ask. I was beginnin’ to think you didn’t like me.”

“Oh, I like you, darlin’. I like you just fine. How ’bout gettin’ a bottle to take up with us?”

“All right.”

“Never mind the bottle, miss, he won’t be needing it,” Falcon called out. “None of them will.”

The four men sitting at the table looked at him in surprise, wondering who had the audacity to make such a confrontational declaration.

“Mister, what do you mean I’ll not be needin’ me a bottle of whiskey?” the little man asked.

“You won’t be needing it, because you will either be going back to MacCallister with me to stand trial for bank robbery and murder, or you’ll be dead.”

Falcon’s voice was loud and sharp, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. All conversation halted. The piano playing came to a ragged end, save for the last discordant note that hung in the air as everyone in the room turned to look at the man whose words had been so challenging.

The little man stared incredulously at Falcon for a moment, then he started laughing. The other three men who were sitting around the table with him laughed as well.

“You’re a funny man, mister. You’ve give me a good laugh. But tell me, what makes you think we held up a bank in MacCallister? Where is MacCallister, anyway? They ain’t none of us ever even been there.”

“Oh, you’ve been there all right,” Falcon said. “I know that, because I trailed the five of you from there to here.”

“You trailed us?” the little man asked in surprise. “Wait a minute. That was you?”

“It was me,” Falcon said.

“But I thought—”

“That you had got me with a rock slide. Yeah, that was close.”

“Who the hell are you, anyway? What’s your name?”

“The name is Falcon MacCallister.”

“Falcon MacCallister?” Terrell gasped. “You and your brother said takin’ that bank would be real easy. Jesus. Now we got Falcon MacCallister after us!”

“Shut up, Terrell, you damn fool! Don’t you realize you just confessed to murder in front of a dozen witnesses!” Mueller said.

“What the hell you talkin’ about? I didn’t kill nobody!” Terrell shouted. “Your crazy brother Luke is the one that done the killin’.”

“I told you to keep your mouth shut,” Mueller said angrily.

The bar girls standing near the table moved away quickly, while all the others in the saloon, sensing something was about to happen, moved back against the walls, opening up the center of the saloon. Falcon and the four men were at center stage in the unfolding drama.

Mueller smiled. Rather than softening his features, the smile twisted his face into a macabre, harlequin mask.

“You seem to have put yourself into a bit of a pickle here, Mr. MacCallister,” Mueller said. “There’s only one of you, and there’s four of us. ’Pears to me like you would’ve been a heap better off, just stayin’ out of this. I’m goin’ to enjoy this.”

“Take your guns out of your holsters and put them on the floor,” Falcon ordered.

Mueller shook his head, quietly. “Huh,” he said. “You want us to take our guns out of the holsters and put them on the floor, do you?” Mueller laughed. “Well now, MacCallister, I would call that bold talk for someone who’s not only outnumbered four to one, but who ain’t even holdin’ a pistol. I’ll tell you right now, the only way my gun is comin’ out of my holster is when I pull it to kill you.”

The grin that appeared on Falcon’s face, though not as broad, nor as forced as Mueller’s had been, was more frightening because it was cold, calculated, and confident.

The warmth of the stove felt hotter, and the smells seemed stronger. With everyone rooted in position, the scene could have been a Matthew Brady photograph taken from real life—a piece of time snatched from the present and eternally frozen in sepia tone.

What was different from just a heartbeat earlier was the sound, or more accurately, the lack of it. All music, all conversation, the clinking of glasses, and the scrape of boots on the floor were gone. Only the steady ticktock of the great regulator grandfather clock standing at the wall just under the stairs, interrupted the deadly quiet. More than one person in the room, sensing fortune had chosen them to witness an event that, one day they would speak of with their grandchildren, glanced at the clock in order to have it well memorized. In their telling of the day they saw the famous Falcon MacCallister killed, they wanted to be accurate in every detail, down to the exact time.

There was not the slightest doubt in anyone’s mind as to what would be the outcome of the dance of death they were about to witness. Falcon MacCallister was facing four armed and desperate men, and though MacCallister was wearing a pistol, it was still in his holster.

Outside a sudden, brilliant flash of lightning struck so close it was concurrent with an explosively loud peal of thunder. A couple of men shouted out in alarm, and one of the bar girls screamed.

Perceiving it provided him with the best opportunity to make his play, Mueller jumped up, his gun in his hand.

“Now boys!” he shouted, as the chair he had been sitting in tumbled over behind him.

The other three matched Mueller, jumping up and pulling their guns.

Falcon fired four times, the shots coming so close together it sounded like one sustained roar. Mueller got off one shot, but it was wide of its mark, crashing into the mirror behind the bar. Two of Mueller’s compatriots also managed to get off shots, one going into the floor, the other into the ceiling. All four men fell with fatal gunshot wounds.

“Did you see that?”

“I seen it, but I ain’t a’ believin’ it.”

“Ain’t no man alive can do that!”

“They sure as hell is, and we just seen it done!”

Falcon held his pistol at the ready, a little stream of smoke still curling up from the end of the barrel. Added to the other smells in the room, was the distinctive odor of burnt gunpowder.

One of the saloon patrons started toward the four bodies, lying where they fell. He stopped and held his hand out toward Falcon. “I just aim to check ’em is all, to see if they’re all dead.”

“They are dead,” Falcon answered as he put his pistol back in his holster.

“How do you know they’re all dead?”

“Because I didn’t have time not to kill them,” Falcon replied.

Everyone’s attention was drawn to the four dead men, so nobody noticed the piano player go up the stairs. Once upstairs, he tapped lightly on the door of one of the rooms. The door opened and a woman’s face appeared in the crack.

“What is it, Arnie? This feller paid me for the whole night.”

“Let me in, Patsy. I got somethin’ to say that he’s goin’ to want to hear,” Arnie said.

“I just heard somethin’ sounded like gunshots. Does it have somethin’ to do with that?”

Arnie nodded his head.

“All right, come on in.”

Patsy was naked from the waist up, but she had no sense of modesty toward Arnie with whom she had often shared her favors. Her breasts were large and flabby, laced with blue veins. On one of her breasts was a lump of scar tissue—the result of having had her nipple bitten off by a drunken customer. She led him over to the bed where slept the little man who had paid almost twice her normal fee.

“You say you heard the gunshots?”

“Yes. They woke me up.”

“Don’t know how they didn’t wake him up,” Arnie said, nodding toward the figure on the bed.

“He’s been drinkin’ all day,” Patsy said. “He was so drunk he couldn’t even do nothin’.”

Arnie chuckled. “You ain’t goin’ to give him his money back, are you?”

“No, are you crazy? I’ll just tell him how wonderful he was. He’ll never know the difference.”

Arnie started over to wake him up, then, remembering the incident downstairs when Luke had drawn his pistol against one of his own friends, Arnie hesitated. He pointed toward the bed.

“Maybe you had better wake him up,” he suggested.

Patsy smiled. “Are you afraid of him?”

“Yeah, a little,” Arnie admitted.

Patsy put her hand on the sleeper’s shoulder and shook him slightly. “Wake up, mister. Wake up.”