Sudden--At Bay (A Sudden Western #2) (15 page)

‘Allus supposin’ Sim Cotton don’t
decide to finish off what he started,’ pointed out Davis. He was
standing by the window, keeping an eye on the empty
street.

‘Hold still now,’ Hight advised
Billy. ‘This is the part that nobody likes.’ He poured some fluid
from a bottle he had taken from his pocket on to a cloth, soaking
it. He then slapped the cloth swiftly on to the wound. Billy’s face
drained of what little color was left in it, although he allowed no
sound to escape his clenched lips.

‘Hell … Doc…’ he gritted
eventually. ‘Wh … what was that? Sheep dip?’

‘Alcohol,’ was the smiling
reply.

Billy shook his head. ‘I reckon
that’s takin’ a drink the hard way.’

Hight bound the wound up again, and
fashioned a sling from the youngster’s bandanna.

‘Keep that arm as still as you
can,’ he warned Billy. ‘You’ll start the bleeding again if you jump
around too much.’

‘Hell, Doc,’ protested the boy.
‘If I don’t jump around some, I’m likely to get perforated again!
An’ I shore can’t shoot left-handed.’

‘Yu’ll never have a better chance
to learn,’ interposed Sudden. He nodded towards the street from his
position to the side of the window. Hight and the boy sidled over
to join him.

‘What’s going on?’ asked the
medico.

‘I can’t make it out,’ Davis said.
‘Hammerin’? What would they be hammerin’ on?’

Glancing outside, the doctor saw a group of men at
the far end of the street, well beyond effective pistol range,
clustered around something which he could not see. The sound of
hammering carried clearly on the silent air.

Billy narrowed his eyes, straining
to see what it was that they were doing. ‘It … it looks like some
kind o’ big table,’ he offered.

‘O’ course!’ breathed Sudden. He
moved away from the window. ‘Bob, Doc, Billy, keep that street
covered the whole time. Don’t
take yore
eyes off it. An’ Billy — yu give me a runnin’ account o’ what’s
goin’ on.’

Sudden rummaged about at the back
of the stable, eventually finding what he was looking for, a short,
wicked-looking leather knife. He snapped the blade off this, and
laid it on one side. The thin clink of the breaking steel caused
Billy to glance around.

‘What yu up to, Jim?’ he
asked.

‘Keep yore eyes on that street,’
Sudden told him. ‘What’s happenin’ out there?’

‘Looks like they’ve finished
hammerin’,’ was the reply. ‘They’re pickin’ up the table, or
whatever it is. Movin’ back o’ the store.’

‘They’ll be headin’ for the rear
o’ the jail. Throw a couple of shots at them if they show
theirselves, but don’t waste no bullets!’

Sudden was hacking away now at the willow slats
which, woven together formed the separating walls for the horse
stalls in the stable. He found one almost six feet in length, and
pulled this out, then a thinner, smaller one.

Billy, unable to contain his
curiosity, took another peek at his friend’s activities.

‘What in tarnation? Yu aimin’ to
fight ’em off with sticks, Jim?’

Green smiled, without once stopping
what he was doing, paring the bark away from the smaller shaft. ‘Yu
may just be right.’

Billy shrugged, and looked at Hight
and Davis with his eyebrows raised. Hight shrugged by way of reply.
‘Beats me, too,’ Davis said. In that moment, several of the
Cottonwood riders scuttled across the open space separating the
jail and the sheriff’s house. Hight threw one quick shot at them
without effect. It drew no return fire.

‘They’re behind the jail, Jim,’
Billy called. ‘They’re gettin’ ready.’

‘So’m I,’ was the uninformative
reply. Hight turned now, and saw Sudden busily pouring a stream of
gunpowder out of a dozen cartridge cases from which he had
extracted the slugs. There was
already a
small black pile of it on a piece of waxed paper that lay on
the floor. What in the name of the devil was the
man up to?

‘They’re shapin’ up for somethin’,
Jim,’ called Billy.

‘Tell me what’s
happenin’.’

‘They’re pushin’ somethin’ out —
it looks like one o’ the tables from the saloon. Looks heavy. It
ain’t movin’ easy. Got two men pushing I’d say.’

‘It’ll be heavy enough,’ Green
said. ‘It’s an old trick. Yu nail three tabletops together, use
them as a shield. Ain’t many guns can put a slug through three
inches o’ timber. Tell me how far they’ve got.’

‘About level with the front o’ the
jail. They’re findin’ it hard work. She’s stickin’ in the sand a
mite more’n somewhat.’

‘Give ’em a couple of shots,’
called Sudden. ‘See what happens.’ Billy nodded to the doctor, and
leveled the gun in his left hand. His shot whined off target,
kicking up a gout of sand perhaps six feet to left of the moving
wooden shield.

‘Damn!’ he exploded. ‘I ain’t even
likely to hit New Mexico shootin’ left handed.’

‘Rest yore gun on the windowsill,’
Sudden called. ‘Squeeze yore shots off, gentle like!’

Billy did as he was bid, and this
time his shot thwacked into the table-shield, which was now perhaps
a quarter of the way across the street. Hight put another two shots
into it. Slivers of wood whirred away into the air, but the bullets
obviously had not penetrated. The shield continued to make
inexorable forward progress, propelled by the men behind it. A
veritable barrage of shots exploded from the jail and to the rear
of the late Sheriff Parris’ house, forcing the men at the windows
to duck hastily below the level of the sills. Bullets whined
through the gaping window frames, smacking into saddles that were
slung on the rafters. One shot hit a metal bit dangling from a hook
on the wall, and whisked the bit across the stable with a dissonant
jangle of metal. The continuous thunder of shots went on, making it
doubly dangerous to look out into the street, and impossible to
return the fire. Hight must have dared the former however, for he
said tensely, ‘They’re about halfway, Jim!’

‘I’m nigh on ready,’ was the terse
reply. ‘Let ’em come a mite nearer.’ He was packing the waxed paper
parcel into a tack box which he had found on the blacksmith’s
workbench. Sudden then straightened up, eyeing the bales of straw
stacked against the south wall of the stable. He gauged its height
in relationship to the windows and nodded.

‘Billy, Doc! Get away from that
window!’

The two men moved rapidly away from
the window, their widening gaze of astonishment fixed on Sudden.
The puncher had fashioned from the willow branches which he had cut
from the stalls a makeshift bow and an arrow. To the arrow was
fastened the tack box full of powder. Around it was a sheaf of
straw. The arrowhead was a broken knife blade.

‘What the devil?’ exclaimed
Hight.

Sudden grinned mirthlessly. ‘Yu
both better start prayin’ this thing works he told them. ‘I ain’t
used a bow an’ arrow since I was about fifteen. I’m hopin’ I recall
how it goes. If I get it wrong, I’m begin’ yore pardon in advance.
We won’t be around afterwards if it lands in here.’ He clambered up
on top of the pile of straw bales.

Billy, unwilling to reveal his ignorance and unable
to contain his curiosity, whispered a question to the doctor.

‘It’s an Injun fire arrow, an’
then some,’ Hight said. ‘Watch!’

Sudden struck a match and touched it to the bundle
of straw. The flame flickered, then blazed up, and as it did, in
one smooth, sweet, sure movement Sudden pulled back the bowstring
to its fullest extent and released it.

The burning arrow described a line
of light from Sudden’s position on top of the bales of straw,
thrumming through the window and imbedding itself into the
still-advancing wooden shield, low on one side, near the
ground.

For perhaps half a second there was
a silence, then a thunderous, flashing roar which hurled a cloud of
smoke and sand and stones high into the air, spattering the stable
walls, pattering down on the roof. Billy thought he had heard a
scream but couldn’t be sure.

‘Put some shots into that smoke!’
yelled Green. ‘Pile it on!’ The four of them sent a seeking hail of
bullets into the thinning cloud of oily smoke which hung on the
afternoon air. Gradually, it sifted sideways, swaying in a faint
breeze, clearing slowly, thinning, disappearing.

There was a shallow, black-edged
hole in the street. The wooden shield lay ten yards away, split
into three pieces. Some smaller shards of wood lay scattered about.
Between the stable and the still smoking crater lay two broken,
sprawled bodies.

‘My Gawd in Heaven!’ breathed
Davis in an awed voice.

‘They never knew what hit them,’
commented Hight.

Sudden vaulted down from his
platform of straw bales. Outside, the street was still again.
Nothing moved. It was as if Cotton’s men were stunned by the
complete demolition of the wooden shield, by the murderous blast
which had torn their two comrades apart. Green scanned the street
as well as he could without exposing himself to a seeking
sniper.

‘Where’s everybody gone?’ he
muttered. ‘They ought to be
hoppin’ wild!
They ain’t that afraid o’ four men … unless…’

‘Unless what, Jim?’ Billy’s
question was eager.

‘Unless they ain’t got many men
left themselves!’ Sudden told him.

‘Let’s reckon it up. How many men
did yu tell me Sim Cotton had out at the Cottonwood? Fifteen, was
it?’

‘Somethin’ like that Billy
confirmed.

‘Not more?’

‘Hell, no. A dozen hard cases was
plenty to keep this town in line,’ Davis told him with a
self-critical smile.

‘Yu’ve proved Cotton wrong about
more than that today,’ Sudden told him. ‘An’ if my reckonin’s
correct, yore Mr Cotton is a mighty worried
hombre.
He ain’t a-tall shore whether
there’s a U.S. Marshal comin’ here or not. We know there ain’t, but
Cotton can’t take the chance that I wasn’t bluffin’. He’s lost some
o’ his men, includin’ his top gun. I’d say, all things bein’ equal,
that Sim Cotton must be what them novelists call thinkin’
furiously.’

‘Yeah, shore,’ interposed Davis,
‘but he ain’t exactly short o’ manpower. I make it he’s still got
mebbe seven or eight men left.’

‘Odds o’ two to one,’ muttered
Billy. ‘We can do it.’

‘We can,’ Green told him grimly,
‘as long as we don’t use no more ammunition than we got to. I’m
pretty low: how about yu men?’

The others checked their cartridge
belts quickly, dismay spreading on their faces as they realized how
many shots they must have fired during the course of the last few
hours.

‘Hell’s teeth, Jim!’ gritted
Billy. ‘We can’t give up now, when we’ve gone this far. We got to
get some more ca’tridges.’

Sudden nodded. ‘I know it. Doc — yu
got any in yore house?’ Hight answered affirmatively, his face
setting into serious lines as he realized the import of the
puncher’s question. He stepped forward and laid a hand on Sudden’s
arm.

‘Oh, no you don’t,’ he protested.
‘You’re not going to try to get across there and back for
cartridges. You’d get your ears shot off.’

‘If I don’t get some ammo, they’ll
be shot off anyways,’ was Green’s laconic reply. ‘I’d as lief be
shootin’ back when it’s tried.’

Hight shook his head. ‘I’ve got a
better idea,’ he announced. Green looked surprised, and the medico
continued, ‘Think for a minute, Jim. Who knows I’m here? Only Sim
Cotton — right?’

Sudden nodded. ‘I reckon. Providin’
he ain’t spread the news.’

‘So as long as I can make it
across to my house unseen, nobody but him would think it amiss if
they saw me in there: right?’

‘Yu mean, they’d think yu’d been
there all the time?’ asked Billy.

‘Precisely,’ said Hight. ‘If I
slide out of the back door, I can easily get across to my place —
you can lay down some covering fire to make them duck down while
I’m on open ground — and get the ammunition. Coming back would be
the same thing in reverse. And we’d be out of the
woods.’

Sudden demurred. ‘Hell, doc, I
could do that — better than yu, in fact. Just tell me where the
slugs are, an’ I’ll go an’ fetch ’em.’

‘Jim,’ argued Hight patiently.
‘You must see the sense of what I’ve been saying. If any of
Cotton’s men see me moving around in my own house, that’s one
thing. If they spotted you, that would be quite another. And once
you were cut off, none of us would have much chance. As it is, I’m
expendable. You are most decidedly not.’

The other two concurred with this latter statement
so vehemently that Sudden was forced to admit the logic of what
Hight had said.

‘Yo’re takin’ a big chance, Doc,’
he pointed out, relenting.

‘Nothing like the chance I’ll be
taking if I don’t go,’ Hight told him. ‘Now less speeches and more
action. Let me get on my way.’

Sudden smiled, the first real smile
that had crossed his features all that day. He touched Hight’s
shoulder.

‘Yu’ll do,’ was all he said, but
Hight beamed.