Valley of the Gun (9781101607480) (22 page)

At the sound of the shooting, Hornady's horse fidgeted, but with his free hand, DeShay reached over and grabbed it by the bridle. The custom revolver pointed at Hornady's belly.

“Don't shoot, Sheriff!” Hornady said. “I wasn't trying to get away.”

DeShay settled and swung the smoking revolver away from pointing at its owner. He looked at Fletcher, who raised his smoking Colt and twirled it on his trigger finger. Smoke left a wide silvery circle behind the twirling gun barrel.

“They're going to know you're coming now, Sheriff,” Hornady said.

“I expect they will,” DeShay said. “But I saw no good in getting the Ranger freed and coming racing back into these men's rifle fire.”

“Yeah, with Orwick's men licking at our backs,” said Fletcher.

“Sounds like you're feeling better, Arlis,” said DeShay.

Fletcher gave a dark grin.

“I always feel better when I've killed somebody,” he said, stopping the twirling Colt, the barrel pointed upward in his hand.

Chapter 22

Sam listened to the sound of gunfire in the distance, recognizing the distinct metal after-ring of the big Simpson-Barre. Across the room, Uncle Henry Jumpe and Elder Barcinder turned to each other with thin knowing smiles.

“It's about time we heard from our friend Lightning Wade,” Uncle Henry said. “I wonder what he's shooting at.”

“I except he'll be here sometime tonight,” said Barcinder. “You can ask him in person.”

Sam knew that he had heard the sound of Hornady's custom revolver, but he also knew it wasn't Lightning Wade who had been firing it.

“You men carry on,” Barcinder said to the two young churchmen guarding the Ranger. “Dad will deal with him first thing come morning.”

“Yes, Elder Barcinder,” said one of the guards. They both appeared to be at attention as the elder and Uncle Henry turned and left. The two young men, Lyndel Rowe and Hiram Smith, relaxed now that the church leader was gone.

They had shoved the Ranger into the small timber building moments earlier. Now they stood back looking down at him as he struggled up onto his knees in the darkness. The only light in the building came from the moon shining through an iron-barred window.

“Look at him, Hiram,” Lyndel said under his breath. “They are all the same. They have no God, no beliefs. They're no better than the dumb brutes in the field.”

“And this one, a man of the law,” said Hiram with disdain.

“Huh, what law?” Lyndel chuffed.

“They are all heathens, men without souls, Lyndel,” Hiram replied, also under his breath. “Thank God Dad has shown all of us the right path.”

“Yes, thank God,” Lyndel agreed.

“Anyway,” said Hiram, “I wouldn't want to be in this one's boots once Brother Caylin gets his nose set and his black eyes attended to.”

“He's going to beat him senseless,” Lyndel said, shaking his head slowly.

Sam looked up at them, his hands tied together in front of him with a few inches of slack rope between his wrists.

“Can I get some water?” he asked quietly. His eyes had already made a sweep around the room.

The only thing he'd spotted that might be of any help to him was a rusty spoon, half-covered with dirt, underneath a wall timber. As he asked for water, he stood in a crouch and moved over a few feet to the wall. He sat down and leaned back, a few inches from where the rusty spoon lay.

“What do you say, Hiram?” Lyndel asked his guard partner. “Should I get him some water?”

“No,” said Hiram Smith, “we brought him here. We're watching him. That's all we were told to do.”

“Yes, but still,
water . . . ?”
said Lyndel Rowe. “What harm is there in that? I don't mind going and getting him some.”

“Do what suits you,” Hiram said. “I'm going to sit right outside the front door, where we're supposed to be.”

The two turned and left. Before the door closed behind them, Sam snatched the small metal spoon from the dirt. He felt along the bottom edge of the wall in the thin, grainy light and found a flat, thick foundation stone. Keeping as quiet as he could, he began rubbing the metal edge of the spoon back and forth, sharpening it.

He stopped rubbing when the door opened and Lyndel Rowe walked back in and held a dipper of water down to him.

Sam drank the dipper empty and handed it back to the guard.

“Obliged,” he said quietly. He leaned back against the wall and watched as the guard turned and left.

As soon as the guard had closed the door behind himself, Sam went back to rubbing the edge of the spoon handle against the stone. He needed the edge to sharpen enough to cut the rope wrapped twice around his wrists. After a few minutes, he held the spoon by its bowl and tested the sharpness of the handle's edge against his thumb.

It would have to do, he told himself.

With a twist of his wrist he turned the spoon and started sawing the edge back and forth on the bite of the rope. But he stopped before cutting through the first wrap when he heard the thick nasal tone of the big churchman who had made the mistake of backhanding him earlier on the trail.

“We're not supposed to let anyone in there, Brother Caylin,” Sam heard one of the guards say on the other side of the thick door.

“I promise you, Young Brother Lyndel, I won't be a minute,” said the thick gruff voice. “Before Dad has him hanged, I owe this man a good bloodletting. Look at what he did to me.”

“Go on, let him in, Lyndel,” said Hiram Smith. “It'll be fun to watch.”

Sam heard the door latch lift on the outside.

“I don't want to watch,” Lyndel said. “I'll wait out here.”

“Boy, I do,” Hiram said, sounding excited at the prospect.

Sam pushed himself up the rough timber wall to his feet and stood waiting, the spoon tucked away between his bound hands.

When the door opened, the flickering glow of a small lantern entered the room. Hiram Smith stood holding the lantern up as the huge, broad-shouldered man stepped inside, rolling up his shirtsleeves.

Lyndel Rowe backed out the door and closed it.

“Well, well, Ranger,” Brother Caylin said to Sam, a nasty grin spread beneath his badly engorged nose, his black swollen eyes. “I was just telling these young men, before Dad hangs you I want a piece or two of you myself.” He swung his right hand behind his back and pulled out a long skinning knife.

Sam only stared, his back against the wall.

“Oh no, Brother Caylin!” said Hiram, his eyes going wide. “You never said anything about cutting him—”

“Shut up,” said Caylin. “I'm saying it now. For what he did to me, he's got a bad cutting coming.”

Lyndel backed away, holding the lantern.

Sam held his ground against the wall, his hands tied in front of him. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked quietly, his feet planted firmly apart as the big man loomed in closer, the knife blade drawn sidelong, ready to make a swing.

“Oh yes, you bet I do, Ranger,” said Caylin. He crouched, moving in closer, as if at any second the Ranger would bolt and try to make a run for it. “I've thought of nothing except doing this ever since you—”

That's close enough,
Sam told himself.

He sprang forward from the wall with the quickness of a mountain cat, stopping Brother Caylin's words short. The big churchman, his arms spread wide, moved too slowly to protect his face. All he could do was let out a torturous scream. So did Hiram Smith, who stood back watching in horror, seeing the Ranger make a hard lunging stab, handle in his right hand, and bury the bowl of the spoon deep into Caylin's left eye socket, rounding it deep just beneath the eyeball itself.

Caylin's knife flew backward from his hand and bounced off the wall, landing at Hiram's feet. Sam jammed the spoon deeper into the bleeding eye socket before turning it loose. The big man staggered in place, shaking. His screams resounded long and loud.

As Caylin screamed in agony, Sam grabbed the handle of an empty waste bucket sitting on the floor. He made a long, vicious swing, both bound hands on the handle, and shattered it to bits alongside Brother Caylin's thick jaw. The big man crashed down face-first. Luckily he landed on the right side of his face, the spoon handle sticking from his left bleeding eye.

Hiram's first move was to throw his rifle up to his shoulder. Yet, seeing how things were going, instead of firing he hurriedly backed out the door and slammed it shut before Sam could cross the room to get his hands on him. Outside, Lyndel latched the door quickly as more churchmen came running from every direction.

Inside the building, in the darkness, Sam snatched up the skinning knife and dropped onto his knees beside the downed man. Searching the man's pockets and along his waist belt, he found no gun.

“Ranger, give it up,” Uncle Henry Jumpe's voice called out as his big fist pounded on the thick door. “You're not going anywhere. We've got more rifles trained on this building than you can count.”

“Your good
brethren
here will lose his eye if he doesn't get some help,” Sam called out. “He could die from it.”

Sam heard voices speaking back and forth. Then he heard Jumpe say angrily, “A
rusty spoon?
How in the world did he get his hands on a rusty spoon?”

“I've got his knife,” Sam said. “I'll gut him if you try rushing in here.”

“Good, you do that, Ranger,” said Jumpe. “Before you do, I've got somebody who wants to talk to him before you kill him.”

“Anybody you send through that door is dead,” Sam called out. He was bluffing, trying to stall, buy some time until DeShay and Fletcher showed up—if they'd been behind the gunfire he'd heard to begin with. All right, he admitted to himself, getting out of here alive looked pretty slim. . . . He backed to the wall and slid down into a crouch. He reversed the big knife in his hand and cut the rope off his wrists.

A moment passed; he stared at the front door as it opened slowly and a frightened-looking woman slipped inside holding a glowing lantern. She clutched a small boy to her side, his arms around her waist.

“Mr. Ranger, don't murder us, I'm begging you,” the woman said in a trembling voice. “I'm Iris, one of Brother Caylin's wives. This is his oldest boy, Young Caylin. You've got to let us drag poor Caylin out of here.” She nudged the boy as if giving him his cue.

“Mr. Ranger,” he said, “please don't kill my pa.”

Sam just looked at them, realizing that these churchmen of Dad Orwick's had found far more uses for their wives and children than fieldwork and carrying firewood.

“All right, out there,” Sam called out past the door, “you win. Come get him out of here.” He sat back and let the knife fall from his hands.

As the building filled with armed churchmen, their rifles and shotguns pointed at the Ranger, Sam rose to his feet and held his hands chest high. Three men hurriedly dragged Brother Caylin out the door, his wife and son right behind him, the spoon handle sticking straight up from his bleeding eye.

Barcinder stood in front of Sam, flanked by two riflemen and Uncle Henry Jumpe.

“I had hoped we could make it through this night without incident, Ranger,” Barcinder said. “But all this disturbance has interrupted Dad's evening.” He glanced at Uncle Henry and the two riflemen. “Take him up the hill. Dad wants to see him tonight.”

Jumpe gave a dark chuckle.

“Somebody bring a rope,” he said. “We'll be needing one as soon as Dad's finished with him.”

—

With a lasso tightened around him, pinning his arms to his sides, the Ranger was marched up the pathway leading to Dad Orwick's, a rifleman flanking him on either side. Uncle Henry Jumpe walked in front of him, leading him by the rope. A dozen armed churchmen followed, as did Frank Bannis, Morton Kerr and Riley Dart. The three outlaws lagged back a few feet.

“We get inside, fade off to the right. There's a side door there. When Barcinder gives a sign, we bust in, kill Dad and anybody standing close to him.”

“Whoooiee,” said Dart, excited, “this is the kind of stuff I was born to do.”

“This is what Barcinder said to do?” Kerr asked.

“Are you going to start questioning what I say, Morton?” said Bannis.

“No,” said Kerr, “it's just that we're taking an awful big chance with all these armed churchmen—”

“Forget it, Morton,” said Bannis, cutting him off. “The ones who don't run will likely shoot one another once we make our move.” He looked at Kerr as they walked along and added, “And, yes, it is what Barcinder said to do, except he figured on us doing this tomorrow. The Ranger fouled things up spooning the big fellow's eye. So now we do it tonight instead.”

They walked on behind the churchmen until they reached a stone-lined path leading around the right side of the large house. There they split away from the others without being seen and stopped at a large side door. Kerr and Dart's eyes widened as they saw Bannis pull out a large key and slide it into the door lock.

“Where'd you get that?” Kerr asked in a whisper.

“Take a wild guess,” said Bannis.

“Elder Barcinder is slick enough he thinks of everything, I reckon,” Kerr whispered.

“You reckoned right,” Bannis whispered.

He turned the key and shoved the door open slowly into a pitch-blackness broken only by a slanted intake of purple moonlight.

Dart started to close the door behind them, but Bannis stopped him.

“Leave it open some,” he said to him over his shoulder, “else we might crack our heads if we have to get out of here in a hurry.”

“Good thinking,” Kerr whispered.

—

As the three walked deeper into the large, dark house, Mattie Rourke slipped from the nearby brush up to the opened door and eased inside, the rifle she'd taken from her saddle boot in the common barn pressed to her bosom.

Hearing the footsteps of the three men moving stealthily through the house ahead of her, Mattie turned into a dark hallway where she noticed a thin line of lamplight seeping beneath a closed door.

Dad's bedroom?
Could she be that lucky—catch him here on his way to meet with Barcinder and the men all the way on the other side of the large house?

She eased down the hallway to the door and turned the knob silently. Inside the room, she closed the door just as silently and stepped over to the foot of the large feather bed. Seeing someone under the covers, she raised the rifle to her shoulder and cocked it.

“Who's—who's there?” asked a frightened young woman who sat up in the bed, pulling a blanket up across her bare breasts. “Dad, is that you?” she said sleepily, her eyes not yet registering who stood there in the grainy flicker of lamplight.

Mattie let out a tight breath and lowered the rifle.

“No, it's not Dad,” she said, moving around to the side of the bed. She realized this was one of Dad's new wives—
children, victims
, she thought, correcting herself. “You keep quiet, dear,” she said. As she spoke, she felt moved to reach out and cup a hand to the young girl's cheek. The girl was barely in her teens, hair the color of fresh cream, eyes the palest of blues, even in the dim light.