The Vengeance Seeker 4 Page 13

  Reno whirled back around and saw Tolliver and his wife bolting across the street, Tolliver dragging the woman after him with frantic haste. A shot came from across the street and Reno heard the bullet sing past his left cheekbone a moment before it shattered a window beside him. He backed into the land office and pushed the door shut behind him.

  That was the signal for the barrage to begin. A hail of bullets poured into the office, shattering the large plate-glass window completely, causing Reno to dive to the floor and cover his head from the flying shards of glass that filled the air. When the shower of glass had subsided, he crept over to the side of the window and peered out. He did not try to shoot back. He just waited. There was no sense wasting bullets. He ducked down out of sight.

  At length the firing stopped. Reno smiled. The sonsofbitches probably thought that hail of lead had caught him, that he was lying on the floor dead. Well, let them come over and find out if he was dead or not.

  He heard the batwings of the saloon flipping, then the sound of footsteps on the boardwalk. He could hear low voices conferring. Then came the Mountie’s loud voice as he called across the street.

  “Reno! You coming out?”

  Reno kept out of sight and said nothing. Again he could hear them conferring among themselves. There was disagreement. Some were for rushing the office, others for waiting it out. But a loud voice or two insisted that Reno had been hit. There was a sudden silence and then Reno heard the clink of spurs as a few men started across the street.

  He waited until he judged they were only a few feet from the sidewalk, then popped up and began firing. There were four of them. A fellow in front of the two Mounties carrying a shotgun. He went down first. Then Reno winged the Mountie, who spun around from the force of the slug and came to rest on one knee. Aiming carefully, Reno fired at the scarlet tunic. The Mountie went flying over backward, started to crawl, then lay still. By that time the other two citizens were racing back to the saloon. Reno decided against throwing a shot after them and ducked down out of sight.

  He could hear the man with the shotgun groaning, calling for help. Reno stood it for a while, then called out.

  “Okay! Someone come and get these two. I won’t shoot!”

  He listened to the scurry of feet and then the sound of the two men being dragged on their backsides to safety across the street. As the sound faded, he broke open the gate of his Colt and reloaded. He was not worried. They’d soon tire of the bloodshed and let him go—especially if he could get that other Mountie. They had a tiger by the tail and they knew it.

  Reno ignored the few random shots that now began planking into the office. His eye fell on the crumpled body of the land agent. He had not moved since being blown back into the office. From the look of him he was long dead.

  And they didn’t know that, which gave Reno an idea. But before he could follow the thought up, he heard small sounds at the land office’s rear door. Looking carefully, he saw the light under the door suddenly blocked out. Aiming low, he pumped four quick shots through the flimsy door and heard the cries of those on the other side as they fell back, wounded.

  Then he turned and yelled out the window: “This here land agent is wounded pretty bad! If you guys’ll let me out of this, I’ll let you see to him!”

  There was no immediate reply to his proposal. They were probably debating it, Reno realized.

  In a few minutes the answer came: “All right, Reno! But you got to promise to get out of this territory—for good! Back to the States! You hear?”

  “Sure!” Reno called.

  “What about that threat you made to Tolliver and his wife?” another voice demanded.

  “Forget it!” called Reno. “I was just bluffing!”

  That seemed to satisfy them. He heard the rising murmur of voices as everyone tried to talk at once. And then—abruptly—there was a silence as the sound of a horse galloping into town came clearly to Reno. He frowned.

  Then he had a sudden premonition and peered out.

  Wolf had heard the shooting while he was still well out of town and had urged his black to a gallop. As he clattered down the empty street now, he caught sight of men crouching behind posts and in the shadows of doorways, rifles held against their chests. A single glance told him it was the land office they were besieging. And a gut feeling told him he had tracked Reno to his last shootout.

  Swinging from his horse while it was still moving, Wolf slapped the black on the rump so it would go on by and then ducked into the saloon directly across the street from the land office.

  He pulled up at once as he found himself facing a murderous phalanx of assorted weapons, a grim face behind each one. In one corner of the place a wounded Mountie was propped up, an elderly doctor working frantically over him. Beside him, laid out flat on the floor, his eyes staring straight up, was a townsman who had been gut-shot. The fellow was groaning softly.

  “Who the hell are you, stranger?” a second Mountie asked, as he pushed through the menacing crowd facing Wolf.

  Wolf took his marshal’s badge out of his vest pocket and showed it to the man. The Mountie took it and examined it quickly, then handed it back to Wolf.

  “Who you got holed up across the street?” Wolf asked.

  “Reno,” the man replied unhappily. “Johnny Reno.”

  Wolf nodded. “Fine. I’ve been tracking him from Wyoming Territory. Much obliged. Guess you won’t mind if I bring him back with me to the States. He robbed a bank in Green River.”

  “You’ve come all the way from Wyoming?”

  Wolf nodded.

  “This complicates matters,” said the Mountie.

  “How so?”

  “We was just about to let Reno go. He’s got a friend of ours in there with him. Sam Sheppard. Shep’s hurt bad. Reno said we can have him if we’ll let him go.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “All we want is to be rid of the sonofabitch,” a townsman beside the Mountie snapped. “We don’t want none of his kind up here. We’d rather have Shep safe than Reno’s neck. Just so long as he stays the hell out of here from now on, I’ll be satisfied.”

  “What makes you think Reno’s telling the truth?”

  “What do you mean?” asked the Mountie.

  “You sure this friend of yours is still alive?”

  They looked at each other in sudden dismay.

  “That’s right,” a small fellow standing by the bar said. “We ain’t heard a word out of Shep since that sonofabitch shot him.”

  The Mountie turned quickly around, walked back to the saloon’s entrance and stuck his head out. “Reno!” he called. “Tell Sam to call out! We want to know if he’s still alive!”

  “He’s hurt too bad!”

  The Mountie turned and looked back at the others, a grim look on his face. Then he looked out the door again.

  “I’m coming over to check myself,” the man called. “If Sam’s not dead, the deal still goes!”

  As the Mountie stepped out through the saloon’s door, a shot from the land office hit one of the batwings, shattering it and sending an angry hornet of a bullet whining through the room. The Mountie ducked hastily back inside the saloon.

  “There’s your answer,” said Wolf.

  The land office had no back window, since it was cut out of the post office. The only way leading into the place was a door locked from the inside. Two men had already tried to blast their way through it, but Reno’s murderous fire through the door had wounded them both.

  Wolf knew he had no alternative then but to storm the office from the front. If he wanted Reno alive there was no other way, since even with Sam Sheppard no longer a bargaining chip, the good citizens of Red Deer had long ago lost their stomach for this bloody business and were anxious simply to be rid of Reno.

  Luckily, the Mountie was on Wolf’s side. His partner had just died of his wounds, and he wanted Reno too. Wolf was now just two stores down from the land office. He moved cautiously out from a doorway, cro
uched and ducked forward to the next store’s doorway. The townsmen were pouring a steady stream of lead into the office to cover Wolf’s movements. Only when Wolf gave them the signal would they slacken off.

  Wolf ducked into the last doorway before the land office—and waited.

  The fusillade was a good one. The sound of the bullets slamming into the woodwork and ricocheting around the land office came to him clearly now. He raised his left arm. The firing ceased. Gun drawn, Wolf darted along the boardwalk and into the land office. Reno was crouched down behind the window frame in the far corner, his hat drawn down tightly, his gun ready in his hand as he seemed about to peer out.

  “Hold it right there, Johnny!” Wolf told him, cocking his forty-five and striding quickly toward him.

  But Reno did not respond. Wolf reached down and grabbed his shoulder to pull him around. The man fell over stiffly, his hat falling off, his Navy Colt clattering to the floor. It was not Reno.

  “Drop it, Wolf!”

  Wolf turned. He did not drop his six-gun. Reno smiled at Wolf and stepped out in front of the counter, behind which he had been crouching. “I said to drop your gun, Wolf.”

  “Just go ahead and shoot, Johnny. Otherwise, give me that gun and come back to the States with me. Like I said before, you’ll get a fair trial.”

  “No, Wolf. I ain’t going back with you.”

  Wolf took a step toward Reno. The man cocked his six-gun and leveled it at Wolf. Wolf kept coming.

  “Damn you!” Reno cried. “You think I won’t shoot you?”

  “Then go ahead and shoot, Johnny. Either that, or give me your six-gun. That’s the only choice you got now.”

  “No, it ain’t!”

  Wolf saw Reno’s finger tighten on the trigger and dove at the man. The gun thundered in Reno’s hand and as Wolf struck Reno, he felt the bullet’s scorching path as it nicked his shoulder. And then he heard Reno gasp as he sent him slamming back against the counter.

  Twisting furiously, Reno managed to pull free and club down at Wolf with the barrel of his gun. He caught Wolf on the wounded shoulder. Wolf sank to one knee. Reno jumped back and fired again at Wolf, sending a bullet singing past his ear.

  Instinctively Wolf brought his gun hand up and squeezed off two quick shots. Almost before Wolf heard the roar of his Colt, both bullets struck Reno in the chest and drove his white silk shirt into flesh as two black, then crimson holes appeared. Reno seemed astonished at what Wolf had done as he was slammed back across the room, coming to rest against the doorjamb. He still held the gun in his right hand.

  For an instant Wolf covered him, waiting to see if Reno would raise the gun to fire at him again. Abruptly, the man turned and staggered out into the street. As soon as he was clear of the office, he began firing wildly at those figures crouching across the street. Immediately a devastating volley of gunfire opened up on him.

  Running to the doorway, Wolf saw the bullets slamming into Reno’s slim body, each one sending tiny puffs of dust into the air. Even as Reno sagged at last to the ground it looked as if his clothes were being torn off him by invisible fingers as the hail of bullets continued to slam into him.

  At last the firing ceased and Reno lay still in the center of the street. Wolf hurried out of the office and kneeled beside Reno.

  Astonishingly, the man was still conscious, a thin trickle of blood trailing out of the corner of his mouth. “That’s all right, Wolf,” he said softly. “It wasn’t your gun what killed me. Don’t you ever think that. Besides, it was all bad ... all going bad on me. I had no way out. Not for me ...” He winced, then looked sharply at Wolf, his eyes catching the blood flowing from Wolf’s shoulder wound. “Did ... did I hurt you bad?”

  “Just a flesh wound, Reno,” Wolf said. “There’s a doctor in the saloon. I’ll be all right. You too.”

  Reno managed a smile. “Hell, Wolf. You know better than that. You know ... maybe you shouldn’t ... have dug that bullet out of me ... shouldn’t have cared enough ...” He grinned wickedly. “Better for ... lot of people.”

  Wolf looked up at the crowd of faces peering down. “Any of you gone for the doctor?” he demanded, surprised at the dismay in his voice.

  “Why the hell should we?” said one of the townspeople, releasing a string of tobacco juice from the corner of his mouth. “Let the sonofabitch die. He deserves it.”

  Wolf looked back down at Reno.

  “See that, Wolf? He’s right. But you never did think so, did you, Wolf... never could ... tell a good hand from a bad one ...”

  Reno’s eyes closed and his head sagged to one side. Wolf got slowly to his feet. He took the badge he had pinned on his vest, unpinned it and dropped it into the dust beside Reno’s dead body.

  Then he turned and pushed roughly, blindly through the crowd of townspeople toward the saloon.

  Thirteen

  As Wolf had figured, without the firm hand of Pete Barnum the town of Lawson was in trouble. One of the saloons had recently been burned to the ground, and what few townspeople were about only glanced at him sullenly as he rode in. Wolf found Ma Jimson more than willing to let Rose go with him; and on the trail it was Rose who—in her eagerness to return to her husband—suggested they use the shortcut through the mountains.

  When they reached the mine the now dead miners had kept secret for so long, Wolf recalled that Juanita had told him they had stopped to take something from Compton’s ranch. Saddlebags, she had told him, that bulged quite a bit. Wolf dismounted and checked the mine shaft, found some loose floorboards in one corner near the entrance, and under them at least twenty bags of gold dust. He gave half of them to Rose and put the rest in his saddlebags, along with the more than thirty thousand in cash he had been able to retrieve from Reno’s saddlebags.

  Later that same day as they rode up to Frank Compton’s ranch, Rose spurred her horse and raced ahead of Wolf.

  “Frank!” she called, swinging off her mount and heading for the door.

  Before she reached it, the door swung open and the bent, twisted figure of Frank Compton appeared in the doorway. It was incredible how he had aged. His hair was streaked with white and he was leaning heavily on a makeshift crutch he had fashioned from a branch. One arm hung loosely at his side, and he must have lost at least fifty pounds.

  “Rose!” he cried.

  She halted in her tracks. “Frank! What ... what happened? Wolf said he left you in good shape. He said you was all right.” She looked back at Wolf for confirmation.

  “It was Sam ... Slim ... they found the gold dust I took ... they came after me ... shot me. I been all alone, Rose. All alone ... I almost died.”

  The two stood there looking at each other. Frank’s eyes lit on the left side of Rose’s face—the dead, lifeless side that still hung without expression. Rose saw the look on his face and swiftly lifted her hand to hide that side from him.

  “Rose ... I need you, Rose. I’m glad you came back!”

  With a cry the woman rushed to Compton and embraced him.

  Wolf reached Silver City a couple of days later. It was early and the town was sleeping off the night before, and Wolf had some difficulty raising Carl.

  At Wolf’s first question, Carl nodded his head, his dark eyes suddenly alert. “Juanita ain’t here no more,” he said. “I couldn’t hold her. She borrowed my rifle and rode off after those two miners who roughed her up. And when she returned ... well, she was no good to me. Too proud, she was. So I let her go.”

  “Go?”

  “Back to Mexico.”

  “You didn’t try to stop her?”

  “What was the use? She was a good girl. She saved her money and never caused trouble. I ... liked her. She wasn’t like the others. It wasn’t right for her to be ...” Carl shrugged. The little man was at a loss to find the words that could express what he had felt about Juanita Lopez de Santa Rosa.

  Wolf nodded his thanks to the man and left. He had a long stretch of daylight left and he was anxious to make it back to Gree
n River.

  By the time Wolf swung off his horse in front of the marshal’s office, a sizable crowd had gathered. Pete Winters, his deputy marshal’s badge gleaming on his vest, pushed through the crowd to greet Wolf as Wolf lifted the heavy saddlebags from his horse, lugged them through the crowd and dumped them finally onto his desk.

  As he stood back, Seth Mabry and Greenup Bird burst into his office. Greenup took one look at the saddlebags on Wolf’s desk and almost did a jig.

  “You got the money back!” he cried.

  “Not all of it. The bonds and the bank notes and the revenue stamps. But most of the currency got spent, all but thirty thousand, just about.”

  “Why, Wolf, that’s wonderful! You got better than half of it back! And what about Johnny Reno?”

  Kate squeezed into the office just in time to hear Greenup’s question. Wolf nodded to her, then looked back at Greenup.

  “Johnny Reno’s dead.”

  “You killed him!”

  Wolf heard the word racing back through the crowd packed solidly into the office doorway and against the window.

  Wolf nodded, unwilling to go into any details.

  “Do I still get my exclusive interview, Marshal Caulder?” Kate asked.

  He smiled at her. “Of course.”

  “All right! All right!” cried Pete Winters suddenly, as the crowd now began to push in through the open doorway. “Everybody out! This here’s a marshal’s office! We got important business to transact!”

  There were groans and cries of protest, but Pete pushed back those who were squeezing through the doorway. “Just go on back,” he insisted, “and spread the good word! Wolf’s brought back the bank’s money, and he’s killed Johnny Reno. Go spread the word! Go on now!”

  It worked. The crowd broke up and Wolf could hear the sound of running feet as people raced off to tell the news. He looked at Kate.

  “I’m glad you’re back, Wolf,” she said.