MacDougal stopped a few feet behind Rattlesnake’s chair and made a production of holding his nose. “Whew, something’s awfully ripe in here,” he said loudly, looking around the room to make sure he had an appreciative audience. “I think something done crawled in here and died.”
Rattlesnake eased his hand down to the butt of the big Walker Colt in his belt, and as quick as a snake striking he whipped it out, stood up, and whirled around, slashing the young man viciously across the face with the barrel.
MacDougal screamed and grabbed his face as blood spurted onto his vest. Before the other men could react, Rattlesnake grabbed MacDougal by the hair, jerked his head back, and jammed the barrel of the gun in his mouth, knocking out his two front teeth.
As MacDougal’s eyes opened wide and he moaned in pain, Rattlesnake eared back the hammer and grinned, his face inches from the young tough’s. “Now, what was it you was sayin’, mister?” he growled. “Somethin’ ‘bout somebody smelling overly ripe, I believe?”
As one of MacDougal’s friends dropped his hand to his pistol, Bear Tooth stood up, and had his skinning knife against the man’s throat before he could draw. “Do you really want some of this?” he asked, smiling wickedly at the man. “’Cause if’n you do, you’ll have a smile that stretches from ear to ear ‘fore I’m done with you.”
“Uh, no, sir!” the man said, moving his hand quickly away from his pistol butt.
MacDougal’s eyes rolled back and he almost fainted from pain and embarrassment, and he sank to his knees on the floor of the restaurant.
Rattlesnake shook his head in disgust, pulled the Walker out of his bleeding mouth, and pushed him over with his boot until MacDougal was lying flat on his back, crying and moaning with his hands over his face.
Rattlesnake waved the Walker at MacDougal’s friends, who cringed back, and said, “You boys better take this little baby off somewheres an’ get him a sugar tit to suck on ‘fore he pees his pants.”
The men all bent down, picked MacDougal up, and helped him stagger out the batwings, their eyes fixed on the barrel of the Walker as they left.
Rattlesnake stuck the gun back in his belt and turned back to the table. “Now then, where’s my beer?”
After they’d all eaten their fill of beefsteak, potatoes, corn, and apple pie for dessert, Van Horne threw some twenty-dollar gold pieces on the table and they walked toward the door.
Smoke hung back for a moment and whispered to Cal and Pearlie, who broke off from the group and exited through a side door.
He glanced at Louis and nodded. Louis nodded back and kept his hand close to the butt of his pistol. Both of them knew the trouble wasn’t over yet. Men like MacDougal didn’t take treatment like he’d received without trying for revenge, especially when they’d been shamed in front of their friends and neighbors.
Just before Van Horne got to the batwings, Louis and Smoke stepped in front of him. “You’d better let us go out first, Bill,” Smoke said, his eyes flat and dangerous.
Smoke and Louis went through the batwings fast, Smoke breaking to the right and Louis to the left, their eyes on the street out in front of The Feedbag.
Sure enough, MacDougal and his friends were lined up in the street, pistols in their hands, cocked and ready to fire.
As they raised their hands to aim and shoot, Smoke and Louis drew, firing without seeming to aim. An instant later, Cal and Pearlie joined in from the alley where they’d come out to the side of the men in the street.
Only MacDougal, out of all the men with him, got off a shot, and it went high, taking a small piece off Smoke’s hat.
The entire group of men dropped in the hail of gunfire from Smoke and Louis and the boys, sprawling in the muddy street, making it run red with their blood.
“Damn!” Rattlesnake said in awe. He had started to draw his Walker at the first sign of trouble, but it was still in his waistband by the time it was all over. “I ain’t never seen nobody draw an’ fire that fast,” he added, glancing at Smoke and Louis with new respect.
Smoke and Louis walked out into the street and bent down to check on the men. They were all dead, or so close to dying they were no longer any risk.
A few minutes later a fat man with a tin star on his chest came running up the street. “Oh, shit!” he said when he saw who had been killed.
He looked over at Smoke and the group and moved his hand toward his pistol, until Smoke grinned and waggled his Colt’s barrel at him. “I wouldn’t do that, Sheriff,” Smoke said, jerking his head at the group of people standing at the windows and door of The Feedbag. “There are plenty of people in there who will say we acted in self-defense, so there’s no need for you to go for that hog-leg on your hip.”
“But . . . but that’s Angus MacDougal’s son,” the sheriff stammered.
Van Horne moved forward. “I don’t care if it’s the President’s son, Sheriff. These men drew on us first.”
“And just who are you?” the sheriff asked.
“My name is William Cornelius Van Horne,” Bill said, pulling a card from his vest pocket and handing it to the sheriff. “And if you’d like to send a wire to the United States marshall over in Denver, I’m sure he will vouch for me.”
The sheriff eyed the men standing in front of him, and wisely decided not to make an issue of it. “All right, if it went down like you say, you’re free to go.” He took his hat off and wiped his forehead. “But I don’t think Mr. MacDougal is gonna like this.”
Rattlesnake bent over and spit a stream of tobacco juice onto Johnny MacDougal’s dead face. “If’n the man has any sense, he’ll be relieved that we took that sorry son of a bitch off his hands,” he said. “If he’d had any sense at all, he would’a drowned him in a barrel a long time ago.”
Smoke hadn’t remembered Johnny MacDougal’s name, but he still remembered the young man’s lifeless, cold eyes that barely held a hint of humanity in them as he shot off his mouth in the saloon that day. The boy was evidently spoiled rotten, and had never had to face up to the fact that people feared him because of his father’s wealth, not out of any respect for him or because of any doing of his own.
He raised his eyes to Sarah’s. “But his name was MacDougal and yours is . . . ”
“Mine is MacDougal too,” Sarah said. “I lied when I told your wife it was Johnson.”
Smoke sighed and drained the last of his coffee from the cup, hoping it would stay down. “Well, if Johnny was your brother, then you know how unreasonable and stupid he was when he was drinking,” Smoke said, though his gentle voice took some of the sting out of what he said.
“What?” Sarah almost screamed, stepping closer to Smoke and raising her hand as if she was about to hit him.
Smoke smiled grimly at her. “Think about it, Sarah,” he said. “How many times before had he gotten drunk and caused trouble, assaulted or hurt someone? Why, the day he forced us to draw on him, I heard he’d killed an unarmed man the week before.”
When Sarah’s face flushed, Smoke continued. “Did anyone from your family go and tell that poor man’s wife and kids you were sorry for what your brother had done, or did you just use your father’s influence to sweep it all under the rug?”
“You son of a—” Sarah began.
“And did anyone from that man’s family come out to the ranch and try and take Johnny prisoner or shoot him for what he’d done to their father?” he asked, his eyes boring into hers as he spoke.
“You know that was different,” she almost screamed. “The man drew on Johnny first . . . ” she was saying.
Smoke started to interrupt her, but his vision suddenly narrowed and everything became dark and fuzzy, and then he tipped over and fell headfirst into a deep, black pool.