Plastering his back to the sidewall, he peeked around and saw two men, each with a shovel, digging a grave. The ground appeared fairly hard and they were only two feet down or so. Nearby, on its back like a drunk after a very hard night, lay the corpse of one of their own — identified by Lola as Watters.
York considered: Two at once with a knife? Both men with tied-down sidearms?
How could he manage that?
Maybe he should go back for one of the shotguns, either his own in the barn or the dead guard’s at the corral. While he tried to come up with something, they made the hole a little deeper and one of the men, a bug-eyed character in a low-crowned plainsman hat, threw his shovel down.
“You finish it, Colton. I’m headin’ back inside. I am dry as this damn hole.”
“Better stay put, Maxwell,” the other one advised, his smallness emphasized by his absurdly wide-brimmed sugar-loaf sombrero. “The show in there might not be over yet, and Vint don’t seem to want no audience.”
York did not like the sound of that.
“That’s his problem,” Maxwell said, and threw down his shovel with a clang. “I need a drink.”
York tensed, but Maxwell headed back around the other way. That meant, coming around front of the building, the ex-shoveler might notice that neither the barn nor the corral guard was at his post.
Well, York thought, one knife per one man has been working just fine...
But the bug-eyed gunman didn’t notice, moving quickly, heading through the batwing doors, single-minded in pursuit of that drink.
York went back to where the other shoveler, Colton, was still at work, his sombrero off now. The man was muttering to himself, pausing to wipe sweat from his brow with the back of a hand. Then he got back to digging.
Knife in hand, York slipped up behind the digger, who was still down in the hole — maybe three feet deep now — but Colton, pausing in his work, sensed something and whipped around, swinging the shovel. York jumped back, dirt flying, the shovel missing him but knocking into the blade and jarring the Bowie from his grasp. The big knife tumbled away and the man swung the shovel again.
But York caught it by the handle, jerked it from the man’s grasp, and swung it himself, like a bat, with the back of the shovel smashing the man’s face in, snapping teeth like brittle twigs and jamming the bones of the digger’s nose up into his brain. The little man’s close-set eyes rolled up with mostly white showing as two blood trails trickled out and curved left and right, making his mustache red, and he flopped backward into the hole he’d dug.
A perfect fit.
York leaned in to make sure the digger wasn’t breathing — he wasn’t — then dumped the shovel in with the more recent corpse before tossing the sombrero over the hideous crushed-in thing that had been a face.
Clovis Maxwell came in through the batwing doors and what he saw tightened his belly. He had seen much and laughed at things that sickened most men. Yet this turned his stomach.
The dance-hall woman, Lola, was on the floor, sobbing, her clothing torn, tattered, bloody. Her face was a mess, bruised and bleeding, eyes swollen, hair an awful witch’s tangle.
Breathing hard, Rhomer was standing over her, tucking his shirt into his pants. She was crawling away from him, apparently trying to get to the end of the bar, maybe so she could get back behind there like the wounded animal she was and die in peace.
Rhomer, a cheek scratched and trickling red, grinned over at him. “You did miss a good show, Clovis boy.”
Maxwell made a face. “I wasn’t invited, remember? Hell, looks like you didn’t leave much for me.”
He barked a laugh. “That’s more than what’s gonna be left of Cullen here, if he don’t come to his senses.”
Rhomer stepped over the broken, crawling creature that Lola had become and approached Cullen, slumped on the floor, the dead ranch hand’s head still in his lap. The old man looked dazed, his unseeing face masked in horror.
Rhomer said, “Too bad you can’t see the lovely Lola, Cullen. Then you’d know for sure what’ll happen to you unless you sign them cows over to us.”
The blind man tried to talk, but it took several tries before he got out, “It... it wouldn’t do you a damn bit of good, anyway.”
Frowning, Maxwell asked, “What’s the old man mean by that, Rhomer?”
“No idea,” Rhomer admitted. The front of his gray shirt was splotched with the woman’s blood.
From the floor, Cullen said in defiance, “Every one of my stock, every inch of my land, is in my daughter’s name. You lousy, filthy piece of scum... you and Harry Gauge and the rest won’t get one damn head of it.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that, old man.”
From the batwing doors came: “What odds would you give me, Rhomer?”
York pushed through, shotgun barrels first — weapon on loan from the late corral guard.
Rhomer lurched toward his holstered gun where it, in its belt, lay on the bar. Maxwell, standing near York’s end of the bar, had his hand on his gun, half-drawing it, when the man with the shotgun again spoke.
“Got a barrel for each of you fellas,” he said, “and I won’t even have to aim much.”
Both men turned into statues, then each man’s eyes went to the other’s, and instinctively both sent their gaze past York to the world outside.
York shook his head, letting them stare into the twin black eyes of the shotgun — eyes that stared right back at them. “Nobody out there to come to your rescue, boys. Just a whole lot of dead men. You’re gonna want to put ’em up now.”
Rhomer, scratched face still bleeding, let out a deep sigh and his eyelids went to half-mast as his hands went up all the way. Maxwell already had hands raised.
Keeping his eyes on both men, York angled over to Cullen sitting on the floor, cradling the head of a dead friend in his lap. The old man’s upper leg was soaked red.
“How bad?” York asked him, half-kneeling.
“Not bad. Think the bleeding’s stopped.” The sightless man stroked the dead man’s hair. “Lou caught a bad one, though.” Then the milky eyes widened. “What about my daughter...? Is Willa all right?”
“Should be fine,” York said. “She’s with your men out looking for the herd.”
Cullen sighed in relief. Then he nodded toward something he couldn’t see, but where his blind man’s well-tuned hearing told him it was.
“You need to help her,” the rancher said, pointing.
Back there, tucked between the end of the bar and the wall, lay what had once been a beautiful woman. She was breathing, heavy and irregular, but nothing else indicated she might be alive. Her clothing was torn, ripped to tatters, and her flesh was patched purple with bruising, her face a mass of welts and cuts and swollen tissue, her eyes all but disappearing into puffy bulges slitted only ever so slightly. Her right arm hung at an impossible angle, loose as a broken shutter.
He went to her.
In his concern, he did not see Rhomer and Maxwell exchange glances, getting ready to find their moment...
He asked, “Rhomer do this to you?”
She managed a nod.
York stood, startling the two men, ending whatever impromptu move they might have been planning. He pointed the shotgun at Rhomer, who stood perhaps eight feet away. Maxwell was several feet beyond and to Rhomer’s left. Not far from the doors.
Gesturing with the shotgun, York indicated the gun belt on the bar. Rhomer narrowed his eyes, as if to say, You mean... get it? Put it on?