CHAPTER 14
“Hold it!” Bo called, his voice ringing with command.
The man paused and turned a sneering, rawboned face toward the Texans. He was medium sized but powerfully muscled, wearing a leather vest over a faded blue shirt and gray wool pants tucked into high-topped boots with big spurs strapped to them. A flat-crowned black hat was thumbed back on his thatch of equally black hair.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked in flat, dangerous tones.
“Reckon that ought to be obvious,” Bo said. “We’re the law in Mankiller. Part of it, anyway.” He inclined his head toward Scratch. “He’s Deputy Morton. I’m Deputy Creel.”
“Well, I’m Finn Murdock, and I don’t give a damn. You old geezers run along now, and me and my friends won’t teach you a lesson for interferin’ with our fun.”
The three men who had followed Murdock out of the saloon had the same sort of lean, wolfish faces. They wore their guns low and looked like dangerous men. Bo had no doubt that they were.
But he wasn’t going to let that keep him from doing his job, and neither was Scratch. The silver-haired Texan drawled, “You fellas leave that hombre alone and run along now, and we won’t throw you in jail for disturbin’ the peace.”
Murdock and the other gunmen stared at Scratch as if they couldn’t believe what they had just heard. After a couple of seconds, Murdock said, “I’ve already got my gun in my hand, you old fool. I can kill you quicker’n you can blink, damn it!”
“You might be able to get lead in me,” Scratch allowed, “but you’ll be stone-cold dead before I hit the ground. I can guaran-damn-tee that.”
People in the street and on the boardwalks began to scatter, sensing that bullets were going to be flying any second now. Bo and Scratch hadn’t really wanted such a dramatic confrontation so soon, but on the other hand, it would help the word get around town that Mankiller had itself a couple of real lawmen now.
Assuming, of course, that the Texans lived through the next few minutes.
The man who had been thrown out of the saloon to start this scrambled to his feet. “Stop it!” he said in a choked voice. “Nobody has to die over this. You and your friends can have my claim, Murdock. I’ll find another one.”
Bo said, “So you’re claim jumpers. Can’t say as I’m really surprised. What is it, you let Peckham here do all the work, and then you take it over and cash in on it?”
“None of your business, that’s what it is,” Murdock snapped. “And you shut your damn mouth, Peckham.”
One of the other men spoke up. “Finn, are we gonna let these old mossbacks talk to us like that, or are we gonna do something about it?”
“We’re gonna do something about it,” Murdock said between gritted teeth. “Right now!”
The barrel of the gun in his hand was still pointed up, as it had been when he cocked it. Now, as the sharp words came out of his mouth, it snapped down and gouted flame.
Bo and Scratch were already moving, though. Bo went left, Scratch went right, and as they darted aside, their Colts leaped into their hands. Scratch took Murdock first, triggering at the sneering gunman as he felt the tug of a bullet plucking at the shoulder of his shirt. The slug came close enough so that he felt the heat of its passage, but it didn’t actually touch his flesh.
Murdock couldn’t make the same claim. The .44 caliber round from Scratch’s gun punched into his midsection and doubled him over. Murdock’s gun went off again as his finger jerked the trigger, but it was pointing down now and the bullet tore into the boardwalk at his feet, throwing splinters in the air.
At the same time, Bo lined his Colt on the closest of the other three men and fired as they clawed at their guns. His first shot drove into the target’s chest and knocked the man back through the batwings, which swung back and forth wildly from the impact.
A slug kicked up splinters at Bo’s feet as he shifted his aim. With the cool, steady nerves of long experience, he aimed and fired, sending another man spinning off his feet. Speed mattered in a gunfight, but so did accuracy and steadiness.
A second shot blasted out from Scratch’s gun. The steel-jacketed round ripped through the fourth man’s body, puncturing his left lung. He crumpled, bloody froth bubbling from his mouth as he sprawled just in front of the saloon’s entrance.
All four of the gunmen were down, but at least some of them were still alive and therefore still dangerous. The Texans moved quickly, striding forward to kick guns out of the reach of clawing fingers.
Finn Murdock stared up at Scratch from pain-wracked eyes and gasped out, “How…how did you…”
“Think about it, mister,” Scratch said. “For fellas to get as old as we are, they have to be damn good or damn lucky…or both.”
Understanding dawned in Murdock’s eyes, but that was the last emotion to register there. They widened into a glassy stare as death claimed him.
The man who had fallen back through the batwings was dead, too, shot through the heart. The other two were unconscious and clearly not long for this world. Bo asked one of the bystanders to fetch the doctor anyway, then he and Scratch thumbed fresh cartridges into their guns to replace the rounds they had fired.
The miner, Peckham, stared at them from the street, where he had stood transfixed during the whole shoot-out. He seemed to have trouble finding his voice, but finally he was able to say, “You…you killed all of them. Four against two…and you’re not even wounded, either of you!”
“Murdock came close,” Scratch said, fingering the tear in his shirt where the gunman’s bullet had nearly tagged him. “This ain’t horseshoes, though. Close don’t count.”
Peckham stumbled over to the boardwalk. He was a stocky, middle-aged man with a broad, friendly face and curly brown hair. He shook his head in amazement as he looked at the bodies.
“Never saw anything like it in my life.”
That sentiment was echoed by numerous bystanders in the crowd that formed around the front of the saloon now that the shooting was over. Everybody wanted to take a gander at the bloody corpses.
A man pushed his way through the press of people. Bo recognized him as Sam Bradfield, the undertaker. Bradfield looked at him and Scratch and exclaimed, “Good Lord! When you said there’d be more business for me, I didn’t figure you meant this soon!”
“Wasn’t our choice,” Bo said.
“Those hombres called the tune,” Scratch added. “We just danced to it.”
Peckham said, “They were trying to force me to sign over my claim to them.”
“Is it a good one?” Bo asked.
A rueful laugh came from the stocky miner. “That’s just it. I’ve found some color, but not all that much. By the time I give the Deverys their share, I’m just barely making enough to keep going. I found a good-sized nugget yesterday, though, and brought it into town today. I guess Murdock saw it and thought my claim was a lot richer than it really is. That’s why I would have let them have it, especially if they hadn’t started roughing me up.”
Bradfield said, “I’ve seen this bunch hanging around town for several days. I had a feeling they were up to no good. They were just waiting for a chance to swoop in on somebody, like vultures. You were unlucky enough to be the one they picked, Tobias.”
Peckham nodded. “I reckon so. Thing is, that claim’s not really worth dying over.”
“That’s not what they died over,” Bo said. “They died because Deputy Morton and I stood up to them, and their pride couldn’t stand that.”
Bradfield frowned at the Texans. “And you risked dying, too, Deputy. You’ve barely pinned on those badges. You haven’t even had a chance to do the job we hired you for.”
“This is the job you hired us for,” Bo said, his voice hardening slightly. “Keeping the peace in Mankiller, no matter who threatens it. No offense, Mr. Bradfield, but if you want hired guns just to go after the Deverys, you’d best look for somebody else.”