Zeke and Ned (18 page)

In two more strides, Ned was at the bench and had his pistols. For a moment, he considered turning back to the courtroom but was deterred by the sound of three horses outside, coming at breakneck speed. He jumped out the door so fast that he knocked one of the newly appointed deputies flat on his face and into the street.

Sure enough, one of the racing riders was Tuxie Miller. Ned saw at once that he had been wounded—one pants leg was red with blood. Two men were pursuing him, about fifty yards to his rear. One of them was the maniac Davie Beck, and the other an old man Ned could not immediately identify, with long, white hair and no hat. Davie Beck was not shooting, but the old man was popping at Tuxie with a six-shooter. Davie was waving what looked like a saw as he rode, and the old man with the streaming white hair was holding a big bowie knife between his teeth.

The deputy Ned knocked over had dropped his Winchester. Ned picked it up, and immediately shot Davie Beck's horse. The fatally wounded animal went down in a heap, with Davie underneath it. Ned thought that would stop the old man, but it did not—the old fellow ran right over Davie, just as Davie was trying to struggle out from beneath his fallen mount. Tuxie Miller reached the courthouse and spilled off his horse, almost into Ned's arms.

Tuxie was white as a ghost, from loss of blood or fear or both, Ned reckoned.

“Shoot, shoot, it's White Sut Beck!” Tuxie gasped, before stumbling into the courthouse, his wounded leg pouring blood.

Ned remembered then that the Beck clan had a patriarch somewhere. Ned had heard no mention of the old man in years, and supposed
he was dead. White Sut was said to live in a shack under a tree in an obscure spot west of the Mountain—he was said to keep a bear and a buzzard as pets, and among his many eccentricities was a fondness for hunting wild pigs barefoot, armed only with a knife, probably the very knife he was now gripping between his teeth as he bore down on the courthouse, white hair streaming. Davie Beck lay run over in the street beside his dead horse. He was not moving a muscle.

Ned had to act quick. The easiest thing was to shoot the old man's horse out from under him, which Ned did. But his horse, a stout sorrel, did not die clean and immediate. Instead, it began to run in circles, pouring blood from behind a foreleg and nickering a wild, high nicker of distress. Then, to old White Sut's extreme annoyance, the sorrel quit circling and went off in a dead run back toward where it had come from, the old man cursing and sawing at the reins all the while.

That'll fix
him,
Ned thought, keeping an eye on Davie Beck, who had still not moved a muscle since being run over by old White Sut. It struck Ned as odd that Davie had ridden in carrying what looked like a saw, but he had no time to brood on the matter.

Bill Yopps and his ruffians had suddenly vanished.

N
ED RAN BACK INSIDE THE COURTROOM, JUST AS SHOTS ERUPTED
. A
S
he passed the bench with the guns on it, Ned scooped up two or three more pistols.

When he jumped into the courtroom, he was not surprised to see Bill Yopps climbing through a window, his shotgun cocked. Without delay, Ned shot him. Marshal Yopps fell backward, discharging the shotgun directly into the chest of quiet Sam Beck, who had been helping him get through the window.

The ruffians who had been with Bill Yopps were handing pistols and rifles inside to the Becks. As soon as he could get his pistol cocked, T Spade turned and fired at Zeke, who had been on the prisoner's bench. But Zeke was no longer on the prisoner's bench, and T Spade's bullet took Judge B. H. Sixkiller in the throat.

The Judge did not feel the bullet at first. He stood up, and tried to rap his gavel. It was a court of law he was conducting, and a court of law had to be conducted with propriety. Men were not to be climbing
in windows and using firearms in his court. Ned Christie had been right about the deputies, but now the deputies were outside, when the Judge needed them inside. He tried to rap for order, but dropped his gavel.

When he bent to pick it up, he noticed blood on his hands; worse than that, the bending did not quite work. He could not reach the gavel, which lay right at his feet. But the gavel moved, or he did—one moment it was below him; then suddenly, it was at eye level. Judge Sixkiller got his hand on it, and began to rap it on the floor. It made him feel better to be rapping the gavel. He meant to rap it until people stopped clambering about and put away their firearms and settled down and behaved, like people in a courtroom ought to. When he turned his head toward the crowd, all he could see was feet—feet in farmer's shoes and feet in boots. He saw a body laying not far away; it looked like one of the Becks, but he had never known the Becks well, and could not say which Beck it might be. He rapped the gavel again, and began to wave for the bailiff Judge Parker had so kindly loaned him. He wanted the bailiff to wade into the crowd and get them seated. Because Zeke Proctor's lawyer had been late, the trial was already well behind schedule.

It was a thing that bothered the Judge grievously, too, for throughout his career he had insisted on punctuality. He meant to explain to Judge Parker the next time he saw him the chain of circumstances that had led to the trial slipping off schedule. Above him there was shooting and shouting, but the Judge, watching the feet, occasionally rapping his gavel, slipped beneath the racket into a place of quiet. He was the judge; he still had his gavel; and the gavel represented the law he had long tried to serve. He was confident he could eventually bring the trial to order and see that the matter before him was judged in a dignified manner. He loved the dignity of the law and always had, even when he had to do his judging in a plank schoolroom somewhere in the District and hand down rulings involving milk cows and goats. All the shouting and clambering going on around him would have to stop—and it would stop, he knew, once people heard the rapping of his gavel. It was a good gavel, oak wood, solid; he had ordered it special from a law store in Chicago, Illinois, and had waited six months for it to reach the District. Once they heard it rapping, the crowd would respond.

But now, just for a moment, it was good to rest, in the quiet place
beneath the clambering and the shouting. He needed to rest, just for a moment—it might be a long trial.

“My God, T. Spade just shot the Judge!” Ned said. He could see no sign of Zeke. Maybe Marshal Yopps's ruffians had dragged Zeke out the window and cut his throat, or taken him off to hang. But there
was
sign of Tuxie, who sat scrunched up in a corner, trying to get his leg to stop bleeding.

“Where'd Zeke go?” Ned asked. Then he took a shot at Slow John, whose head had just appeared in the window. Slow John disappeared, though Ned had shot high, nervous about hitting some innocent in the crowd, most of whom still sat on benches, bewildered.

“Zeke ain't passed this way,” Tuxie said. “Loan me a weapon, I'm unarmed.”

“You stay down like you are,” Ned said. “They can't hit you if you're down. I got to find Zeke.”

Meanwhile, the Becks—all except Sam, who was dead—had equipped themselves with the firearms handed in through the window.

“Give up, Zeke, you're surrounded,” Willy Beck yelled. “There'll be innocent folks killed if there's too much shooting in this courtroom!”

Then Willy saw a man about the height of Zeke and immediately shot him, only to realize when the man fell that it was not Zeke at all—it was a skunk trapper named Bully Lanham, a fellow he knew only slightly. Oh, Lord, I should have waited till he turned around, Willy thought. He realized that he had just fulfilled his own prophecy. Bully Lanham was a man with few friends who had probably just wandered into the trial out of curiosity.

Slow John made the mistake of trying to hand another gun through the window, this time to Frank Beck, who already had so many guns in his hands that he was having a hard time figuring out which one to shoot. Ned saw Slow John out of the corner of his eye; he jumped on a bench so as not to risk firing across the crowd at too low an angle. Slow John saw him and ducked, but not quickly enough or far enough. His hat fell off, and Ned's bullet hit him dead center in the top of his skull. Slow John fell back out the window and was seen no more until after the battle, when the bodies were counted.

It was Tuxie Miller, trying to keep low in the corner, who first spotted Zeke Proctor. Zeke, still handcuffed, was inching along on his belly, well protected by a forest of legs and feet.

That Zeke, he's sly, Tuxie thought. He waved at Zeke, but Zeke had his head down, trying to avoid notice.

C
HILLY
S
TUFFLEBEAN HAD BEEN IN THE MIDDLE OF AN AISLE WHEN
the shooting started.

He had been trying to persuade an old man with a face so weathered that it looked rusty to move closer to the window so he could do a tidier job of getting rid of his tobacco juice. The old man had spat on the floor twice, a thing that would have earned him immediate expulsion from Judge Isaac Parker's courtroom, for Judge Parker supplied spittoons in adequate numbers and expected them to be used. The old fellow was resistant to Chilly's polite suggestion that he move over to a window. In fact, he ignored Chilly so rudely that Chilly had a notion to grab the old man by the scruff of his neck and carry him outside.

He was attempting polite suggestion, when he looked over and saw a man handing guns through the window to T Spade Beck. That was highly irregular and would have to be stopped at once, but before Chilly could move to stop it, Ned Christie shot Bill Yopps, who discharged his shotgun square into Sam Beck. The blast knocked Sam in among the spectators, one of whom fell backwards onto Chilly's legs, knocking him down.

As he fell, Chilly saw Judge Sixkiller put his hand to his throat. From that moment on, Chilly's main effort was to avoid being trampled. He heard more gunshots—a lot more gunshots—so many, in fact, that he soon concluded being knocked over might be a blessing in disguise. He was close to the Beck side of the courtroom, and when he risked looking up saw that all three of the remaining Becks were firing steadily across the courtroom. He could hear their bullets thunking into the walls, which indicated to him that the Becks were inexpert marksmen. They were firing point-blank in a crowded area, and all they were able to hit was the other side of the room.

Ned Christie stood boldly on the bench he had jumped upon, and drew the same conclusion. The Becks were shooting hell out of the walls. Zeke was nowhere to be seen; Tuxie was losing too much blood; the Judge was down, though not necessarily dead; one Beck was finished; and he himself had accounted for Bill Yopps and Slow John. He
needed to get a tourniquet on Tuxie's leg before the man bled to death. It was time to end the bloodshed.

“Here, now!” he yelled, leveling both pistols at T. Spade Beck. “You Becks give it up, or I'll kill every damn one of you!”

At that moment, there was a wild howl from behind him. Ned turned to see Davie Beck, his forehead bloody, trying to fight his way through the crowd. Davie was still waving the saw blade in front of him like a sword. A crude effort had been made to shape it into a long knife, but it nevertheless looked like a saw blade to Ned.

“Let me through, you goddamn pullets!” Davie yelled. He was practically frothing at the mouth, in his frustration at not being able to plow a path through the gaggle of spectators.

“Ho, Davie—ho, now!” Ned cried, leveling a gun at him.

“I've come for your liver, Christie, and I'll take your damn balls while I'm at it!” Davie bellowed, pushing two frightened muleskinners aside.

“You won't saw me, Davie!” Ned replied, cocking his pistol. He raised his gun to shoot, but before he fired, Zeke Proctor suddenly rose out of the crowd just behind Davie Beck. He threw his handcuffed arms over Davie's head, and sank his teeth hard into Davie's right ear. When Zeke's teeth bit into his ear gristle, Davie screamed like a banshee. He tried to turn and saw at his attacker, but Zeke began to choke him with the handcuff chain, still biting hard on his ear. The two men went down in the crowd, rolling over and over, not far from where Tuxie Miller sat—looking far too pale, and feeling increasingly faint.

“Here, Christie, take this to hell with you!” T. Spade yelled, leveling a long-barreled Winchester rifle at Ned.

Ned swung his pistol toward T. Spade, but then saw that T. Spade did not know how to work the rifle. In his haste, he jammed a shell halfway in the chamber, a fact that frustrated him so that he began to pound the stock of the rifle onto the floor. The third time he struck, the gun went off—the bullet struck Thelma Grimmet, Polly Beck's older sister, who was trying to squeeze past her brothers-in-law and run away. Like Sam Beck, Thelma was hit at point-blank range and was dead before she hit the floor, a fact that horrified Frank Beck. Here they'd come in force to the courthouse to kill Zeke Proctor, having gone to the expense of hiring Bill Yopps and three ruffians, and so far they had only managed to kill two members of their own family. If
they did not manage to get their wits about them, there'd be no Becks left at all.

“Hell, we're only killin' off one t'other!” he told his brother. “Let's jump out that window while some of us are alive!”

“I'm willin', but what about T.?” Willy Beck ventured.

Frank Beck had developed a sudden and powerful urge to live. Before anyone could stop him or offer him argument, Frank Beck jumped out the window, landing right on top of the two remaining ruffians from the Cave, both of whom were squeezed up against the building awaiting developments. The one development they had not expected was to have Becks raining down upon them. Willy Beck, his pistol empty, took only a moment to follow Frank's lead. Willy landed right on a thin ruffian named Eli Ross, damaging Eli's spine so badly that he was never able to walk fully upright again.