The Vengeance Seeker 4

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  Wolf Caulder had once saved Johnny Reno's life, and Reno had helped him complete his ten-year mission of vengeance upon his family's murderers. Then one day Caulder surprised Reno and his gang as they were robbing a bank, and everything suddenly changed … Caulder found himself faced with the hardest and most dangerous manhunt of his life!

  THE VENGEANCE SEEKER 4: CAULDER’S BADGE

  By Will C. Knott

  First published by Ace Books in 1977

  Copyright © 1977, 2020 by Will C. Knott

  First Digital Edition: July 2020

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

  One

  Wolf Caulder flicked his cigarette into the baked dust of Main Street. The rider leading the four saddled mounts was now heading for the Green River County Savings Association. This was the fifth strange rider in Green River in less than an hour and the other four had just crowded into the bank.

  In the shadow of the hotel porch, Wolf removed the marshal’s badge from his vest and pocketed it. Then he snugged down his black, flat-crowned Stetson and stepped off the low porch and angled casually across the street. He was a tall, lean man with a crooked tilt to his wide shoulders, dressed in a clean white cotton shirt under his vest and faded Levi’s tucked into scuffed half boots. A black eye patch covered his right eye and the long scar that ran back from it all the way to his ear gave that side of his face a worn, bent look.

  Gaining the wooden sidewalk in front of Seth Mabry’s barbershop, he walked without haste toward the bank’s entrance. A covey of elderly females swept out of Ida’s Dress Shoppe and went all fluttery when they saw him approaching. He greeted them solemnly, touching the brim of his hat to them, then waited for them to move well on down the street before he continued on to the bank’s entrance.

  There had been no time for Wolf to alert his deputy. The rider leading the horses was now only a few stores down from the bank. If Wolf waited, the gang might bolt from the bank and start hurrahing the town, possibly injuring townspeople. Wolf took a step back from the entrance, drew his Colt and kicked open the bank’s door. As the door snapped around, he stepped into the bank, his six-gun level. It would have been embarrassing if he had guessed wrong. But he hadn’t.

  All four bank robbers were facing Greenup Bird, who was in the act of handing the closest robber a grain sack bulging with currency. Behind Greenup yawned the huge floor vault, its massive door open wide. The clerk Finster was beside it, cowering against the wall.

  “Freeze!” Wolf commanded sharply, the resonant power of his voice sounding sharp and deadly in the silence that followed his entry. Three of the bank robbers dropped their guns to the floor. The fourth man—the one who had entered the bank first and the one Wolf had not been able to get a very good look at—turned slowly to face Wolf, his tanned face creased into a grin.

  “Hello there, Wolf,” Johnny Reno said. “Now what the hell are you doing pointing that at me for?”

  Wolf was astounded. “Johnny ...?”

  “That’s right, Wolf. It’s me, all right. Put that iron down, why don’t you? You know you don’t need it with me.”

  Wolf’s gun wavered slightly.

  That was all Reno needed. He had not dropped his own gun at Wolf’s command and now it spat fire, filling the tiny bank with the thunder of its explosion. Wolf felt the slug tear into his left thigh with the force of a sledgehammer, and went down heavily. He tried to haul his gun up into firing position, but Reno kicked it out of his hand, carefully, and with a wide grin on his face.

  The three others snatched up their guns and went racing out into the bright street, one of them with the bulging grain sack. As they hit the street the sound of gunfire erupted. Wolf struggled to push himself erect and go after them, but he could not manage it. Through the open doorway he caught glimpses of frantic townspeople ducking frantically out of sight. As Wolf had feared, the gang was shooting up the town as they mounted their horses. A hell of a lot of good he had been, he thought bitterly.

  Reno turned in the open doorway and looked back at Wolf. “What was the idea you trying to stop us, Wolf?”

  “I’m the marshal here.”

  Reno snorted. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

  “I’ll have to get you for this, Reno.”

  “I didn’t kill you just now, Wolf. I aimed low on purpose. That was because I owed you. But if you come after me, I’ll have to kill you. And I wouldn’t like that.” He smiled coldly. “So just stay put, amigo.”

  He vanished from the doorway.

  As the sound of clattering hooves faded, Wolf’s deputy ducked into the bank, his six-gun drawn. His name was Peter Winters.

  “You all right, Wolf?” the man asked anxiously, as he dropped to one knee beside Wolf.

  “I caught a slug in my leg,” he told Pete. “You better go for the doc.”

  As Pete left, townsmen crowded into the bank’s lobby to stare down at Wolf. Wolf felt himself growing weaker by the minute. He leaned his head back on the rough floor ... hands were lifting him. Then bright faces were staring down at him as he was carried out of the lobby and along the sidewalk to the barbershop...

  He was on his back on a table and he was as drunk as a lord. The doc’s bewhiskered face was looming over him and Wolf could see the ceiling of the barbershop’s back room where they had taken him. He tried to raise his head, but Pete placed the neck of a brandy bottle to his lips and forced him back down. Uncomplaining, Wolf let the fiery liquid pour down his throat, willing the intoxicant to snuff out the unwanted consciousness as Doc Jardine resumed his probing for the bullet...

  Through the shimmering pain that bathed him like the sun, Wolf found himself back on that desert where he first met Johnny Reno. As he rode slowly through the blasting heat, he watched the buzzards that had flapped down a moment before waddling like obscene old women about the still body of the man lying face down in the sand less than a couple of yards from the water hole.

  Guiding his horse past the dead man, Wolf pulled up at the well, slipped wearily off the horse and wet the animal’s nose first, then let the horse drink only in small gulps. At last, certain the animal would be all right, he leaned his own face into the water. He held it under for a second or two, then sat back and, cupping the water in his hands, drank greedily. The water stung his cracked lips and ran into his dry mouth and throat. Some of the water ran down his chin and dripped onto his sweat-soaked shirt and through it to his chest. Jesus, but it felt good!

  Only when he had slaked his thirst did he turn his attention to the dead man stretched out behind him on the burning sand. He would have to bury him, Wolf realized, before the buzzards got to work on his carcass. He walked over to the body, took the dead man by the shoulder and rolled him over. To his surprise the man’s eyes opened, closed against the glare of the sun, then opened to a squint. The eyes were red-rimmed, filled with pain, staring up at him out of a lean, sun-roasted face. Thick black hair framed it and a cruel, thin line of a mouth twisted into a faint smile.

  “You see, amigo, I am not dead yet.”

  Wolf took a tin cup from
his blanket roll and dipped it into the pool. Then he lifted the man’s head with one hand and brought the cup to the fellow’s mouth with the other. The man sipped slowly, carefully at first, then leaned back and looked up at Wolf.

  “There is a bullet in me, amigo. It has smashed one of my ribs and the life has drained out of me into this hot sand. Dig it out of me pronto, eh?”

  The man’s eyes closed and his head rolled slackly to one side.

  Wolf leaned his head against the man’s chest and heard a faint but steady beat. Then he examined the man’s chest. The hot sand had plugged a dark hole under the heart big enough to admit a man’s thumb.

  By the water hole that night, in the light of a dancing fire, Wolf probed the man’s chest for the elusive slug. When at last he found it and managed to work it out, his knife was bloodstained almost to the hilt and his patient’s chest was a ravaged, bleeding battleground ...

  ... the hole was growing still larger and now the desert chill was causing his teeth to chatter as he began to feel the pain himself. He was being sucked still deeper into Reno’s wound and all the while Reno laughed—for now it was Reno standing above him with the bloody knife while Wolf lay on his back on the still warm sand, his insides on fire...

  And all Reno would do was laugh...

  Wolf awakened quietly, like a swimmer kicking toward the surface from the depths. He opened his eye and, turning his head, saw the open window beside his bed, the strong breeze ballooning the lace curtains well out into the room. His forehead was soaking and the breeze cooled it deliciously. He was in Kate’s bedroom, he realized.

  His throat was dry and he saw the pitcher of water on the nightstand, an empty glass sitting beside it. But as he reached out for the pitcher, the door opened.

  Kate and the doctor hurried in, a smile on Kate’s face, a pleased grin on the doctor’s. “Looks like he’s going to live, at that,” said Jardine, placing his black bag down on the bed beside Wolf.

  “I won’t if I don’t get a drink of that water,” Wolf managed.

  Kate quickly poured a glass of water from the pitcher and handed it to him. But when he tried to take it from her hand, he grew suddenly dizzy and sagged back onto the bed. She bent over him, lifted his head, and let him drink from the glass.

  Shards of the nightmares he’d been having returned as he felt the cold water trickling down his parched throat. But he shook them off and glanced over at the doctor as soon as he had emptied the entire glass.

  “How long have I been here, anyway?” he asked.

  “Since the robbery,” Jardine replied. “Three days. It wasn’t the bullet so much. I got that out easy enough. And nothing vital was hit. But it was the infection that gave us trouble. How do you feel?”

  “Weak—and very, very thirsty.”

  The doctor nodded. “Drink all the water you want.”

  Wolf looked at Kate, who was standing at the foot of the bed, watching. “What will people say, Kate? I’ve been in your place overnight—just the two of us.”

  She blushed scarlet. “Let the biddies talk.”

  Wolf smiled. “Well, thanks for letting me stay here, but I’d like to get back to my hotel room as soon as possible.”

  “Not before you’ve eaten,” Kate protested, as she started from the room. “I’ve had some chicken soup simmering since noon.”

  As soon as Kate left, Wolf looked at the doctor. The man was gently removing the dressing from his thigh wound. As the doctor’s thick but gentle hands probed expertly, Wolf asked:

  “How much did Reno’s gang get?”

  “Quite a haul. They took all the gold and silver coins on hand, bonds, currency, bank notes and even sheets of revenue stamps. The total came to about sixty thousand dollars, according to Bird’s latest tally.”

  Wolf shook his head. “The bank’s wiped out then.”

  “Just about.”

  Wolf thought of the small ranchers and the townspeople. They had lost everything—years of savings, money put aside for a bad year or for trouble, money needed for growth, investment, for new buildings, for increases in herds, for new breeding stock. All of it gone—because he had once saved Johnny Reno’s life.

  “How long you figure I’m going to be laid up, Doc?”

  The man looked speculatively at Wolf, considered a moment, then shrugged. “A couple of weeks, at least. You don’t want to push it.”

  “Hell, I don’t,” he said.

  Kate entered then, carrying a steaming bowl of soup on a tray, along with a tall glass of milk and two thick slices of bread.

  Instantly Wolf realized he was famished.

  “How about some coffee?” he asked Kate as she set the tray down on the nightstand.

  “You drink this milk before you get any coffee,” she told him firmly.

  Wolf smiled and shrugged. He felt amazingly better and knew it was the smell of that hot chicken soup and the butter melting on the thick slabs of bread. It stirred the juices to life within him and he found himself able to push up and rest his back against the bed’s headboard.

  “I’ll be leaving you in good hands then,” said the doctor. He had put new dressings on Wolf’s wound and was now strapping shut his black bag.

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  The man waved and left.

  Kate became suddenly quiet as she set the tray down carefully on Wolf’s lap. Wolf said nothing that might disconcert her and ate with a zest that must have gratified her. Kate was a fine cook. The thing was, he didn’t want Kate to know that he felt the way he did about her. Kate liked him. He could tell that. And she was a fine figure of a woman. Also, she was not cold. Her warmth had drawn him to her from the start.

  But Wolf was not ready for settling down. Not yet, he wasn’t. He’d only hit this town a year before and the roots weren’t in very deep yet. And even if they were, Kate deserved more than he could offer. He was not much of a bargain for a woman who had turned the Green River Sentinel into the best newspaper in the county.

  “Well,” Kate said finally, as he leaned back from his plate and looked over at her, “feeling any better?”

  “Much better.”

  “Then you’ll be able to give me an eyewitness account of that bank robbery. Don’t forget. I’m a reporter first—a woman second.”

  “There’s not much to tell, Kate.”

  “It was Johnny Reno’s gang, wasn’t it?”

  Wolf nodded.

  “Greenup said that Reno knew you.”

  Wolf nodded. “That’s right. He did.”

  “The Reno Kid? But, Wolf, how could he know you?”

  He looked at her for a long moment before replying. “I saved his life once, Kate. A long time ago. And for a while after, we rode together. I had some men to find, and he helped me find them. But I didn’t need his help to kill them.”

  His words startled her, as he had intended they should. He saw her draw back from him, however slightly. Then her green cat’s eyes narrowed and she looked at him with an expression compounded of wonder and distaste. In that instant, he realized, she found herself drastically altering the picture of him she had built up over this past year.

  “Kill them?” she asked. “But why?”

  “They murdered my folks—years before.”

  He smiled grimly at her reaction.

  “Don’t worry, Kate. I haven’t killed a man in years. But when I get out of this bed, I’m going after Johnny Reno.”

  She took the tray off his lap and set it back on the night table. Then she sat down carefully on the edge of the bed and looked at him intently, as if she were trying to see in his face every one of those men he had said he had killed. Suddenly, he had become for her a curious specimen caught under a magnifying glass.

  “You’re going after Reno?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I thought he was your old friend.”

  “I’m the law here, Kate. And he broke it.”

  “You change sides that easily, do you?” She was unable to keep the
contempt out of her voice—and even as she voiced it, she blushed at the knowledge of what she had revealed.

  But Wolf had seen it coming before she had. He smiled bleakly at her. “No, it’s not easy, Kate. But Reno has just made it a little easier for me.” When she frowned and started to ask another question, he put up his hand. “I’m tired, Kate. I want to rest up now for a while, if you don’t mind. Thank you for that soup—and the bread. You’ve been very kind to me, and I won’t forget it.”

  She got quickly up off the bed, obviously aware that he was dismissing her. She was a beautiful young woman, he realized with a sudden pang—but a woman who would no longer allow herself to think of him as anything more than an acquaintance. She smiled without warmth and pulled the pencil out of the mass of chestnut hair she wore piled on top of her head.

  “Does that mean I’m not to ask any more questions?” she asked, as lightly as she could manage. “I haven’t got my story yet.”

  “Put the pencil away, Kate. You’ve got all the story you’re going to get.”

  “I see,” she said, moving to the tray, her petite features set stiffly. “And just when are you setting out after Johnny Reno and his gang?”

  “As soon as I can ride.”

  “Well, then,” she said, smiling frigidly, “when you get back, I’ll certainly expect an exclusive interview with the famous manhunter.”

  “I’ll be glad to oblige, Kate.”

  As she reached the door with his tray, she stopped and looked back at him. “Oh, I forgot your coffee.”

  He closed his eyes and let his head drop back onto the pillow. “That’s all right, Kate.”

  He heard the door close firmly and Kate’s brisk steps as she walked down the hallway to the kitchen. As soon as the sound of her footsteps had died completely, Wolf threw back the covers and carefully swung his legs out of bed.

  He sat for a long moment, letting himself get accustomed to the weight on his feet before he allowed himself to push his body erect. The pain in his left thigh was bothersome but not so destructive that he could not stand unaided. He tried a faltering step toward the open window. His head began to swim. But he fought off the dizziness and continued on until he reached the window. By that time the dizziness was gone. Still, he would be lucky to make it back to the bed, he realized.