Blood on the Gallows

Chapter 17

From his hiding place in the parlor McBride saw two riders tracking back and forth across the front of the cabin, their eyes fixed on the door as though they expected someone to suddenly appear. Both men held their rifles upright, the brass butt plates on their thighs, and they looked tough and ready, hard-faced men who had ridden many a moonlit trail.

‘‘Hell, Boone, he ain’t here,’’ one of the men said, loud enough for McBride to hear. He was tall and thin with sad, hound dog eyes and a knife scar on his left cheek. ‘‘The girl said she gut-shot him. He probably crawled away into the brush an’ died.’’

‘‘Probably,’’ the man called Boone allowed. ‘‘But them ladies told me they want us to kick his body and make sure it don’t come alive again. They don’t trust McBride to die or stay dead.’’ He turned to his companion. ‘‘If you find him still breathing, scatter his brains and then we’re done. Now go check the barn, Russ. I’ll try the cabin.’’

‘‘He isn’t here,’’ Russ said stubbornly.

‘‘Yeah? Well, if he ain’t, you’ll earn the easiest fifty dollars of your life, won’t you? Now, go do like I told you.’’

As Russ muttered his way toward the barn, Boone swung out of the saddle. His eyes wary, he slanted his rifle across his chest and walked to the front door. Boone was a tall man with long, black hair cascading over his shoulders under a flat-brimmed hat. He affected the flamboyant dress of the frontier gambler/ gunfighter and he moved gracefully, with the arrogant self-confidence of a named man.

McBride knew he was up against it.

He moved quickly and silently into the hallway and took up the shooting position he’d been taught by his police instructors. His right arm was straight out, revolver held hammer back, at eye level, the arch of the left foot behind the heel of his right.

The boot steps of the man called Boone grew closer to the door, squelching in the mud churned up by last night’s rain. Hostage to a silence that clanged in his ears like a firehouse bell, McBride nonetheless heard the taut tick of the clock in the parlor. Good, someone must have wound it, he told himself. He was about to take part in a gunfight to the death, and the thought was so incongruous he attempted a smile. But his lips were stiff and parchment dry and he couldn’t manage it.

A ways in the distance, McBride heard Russ yell, ‘‘Hoss in the barn, Boone. And a saddle.’’

McBride’s sweating fingers opened, then closed on the splintered handle of the Colt. The thud of his racing heart was in his ears, and his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. Outside the door the dead silence from Boone was filled with menace.

The man was going to shoot!

Every nerve in his body shrieking, McBride threw himself into the parlor just as four shots ripped through the front door. An instant later the door crashed inward, the hinges shattered from the frame. The door landed aslant in the hallway, its bottom edge wedged in the angle where the wall met the floor.

It took Boone a couple of seconds to boot the door aside and he gave McBride the time he needed. He had no time to assume the approved NYPD shooting position. He dropped to a knee in the hallway and raised the Colt to eye level with both hands.

Boone assumed he was stalking a gut-shot man who was either dead or dying hard and that made him overconfident. Had he gone to his holstered revolver he would have given himself more room in the narrow hall. Instead, he was forced to move his rifle up and clear of the door as he stepped around the debris. That cost him a lot more time than McBride was willing to give him.

McBride and Boone saw each other at the same moment. The gunman knew he’d been caught flat-footed. He cursed as he swung his rifle down and tried to bring it to bear on the big man. The Spencer carbine in Boone’s hands was short and handy, but he was a heartbeat too slow.

McBride fired. His bullet caught Boone in the right shoulder. The man absorbed the shock, but he was off balance, all his weight on his forward right leg. He triggered a round at McBride. Too low. The .50-caliber bullet plowed into the floor an inch from McBride’s left knee, throwing up a shower of splinters. McBride fired again, missed, then thumbed off a third shot. This time his aim was true and his bullet crashed into Boone’s throat where it met the top of the man’s breastbone.

The gunman staggered back into the angled door. His eyes were wild, filled with the knowledge of death. The terrible wound in his throat made him gag like a man drinking month-old milk and his bloody lips were stretched wide under his mustache.

But Boone had been there before and he had sand.

He threw the Spencer at McBride and went for his Colt. He was already a dead man, but he was fast. His revolver was clearing leather when McBride fired, hitting the gunman low in the belly. Boone’s Colt slammed, but his shot was wide. The man shook his head, trying desperately to focus eyes that were already seeing only darkness.

Anxiously aware that this was his last round, McBride rose to his feet, charged Boone and fired at point-blank range into the center of the man’s chest. Suddenly, as his heart burst apart, all the fight went out of Boone, draining away with his life. He fell against the wall, then slid to the floor, his dead eyes lifted to McBride, shocked and accusing.

His Colt hanging loose in his hand, McBride backed against the wall and lifted his head, gulping in air. He had not taken a breath since the fight started. His knees were shaking and Boone’s blood stained his hands and gun.

In the dime novels he’d read, the stalwart frontiers-man always downed his opponent with a single, well-aimed shot, and at one time McBride had believed this. But he had come to know that the reality of a gunfight was death in a slaughterhouse, bloody, drawn out and terrifying, and nobody died clean.

Wearily, McBride shouldered off the wall and reloaded the Colt from the shells he carried in his pocket. Outside he heard Russ yell, ‘‘Hey, Boone, you all right?’’

‘‘He’s dead,’’ McBride called out, an unreasoning, futile anger in him. ‘‘Damn you, if you want what he got, come right ahead.’’

The only reply was the hammer of hooves fading into the distance. It seemed that the man called Russ wanted no part of John McBride.

McBride had neither the strength nor the will to bury the dead man. He traded his damaged Colt for Boone’s much better model and filled his pockets with shells from the man’s gun belt. Then he left him where he was.

Russ would spread the word that McBride wasn’t dead and he could no longer remain at the cabin. In a land where he had plenty of enemies and mighty few friends, it seemed that every man’s hand was turned against him—and every woman’s as well.

Clare had sent the gunmen after him, McBride was sure, but Boone had talked about ladies in the plural. Who was the other one? The only woman who fit the bill was Dora Ryan—but she had no quarrel with him. Or did she?

McBride let it go. He was asking himself questions for which he had no answers. Only time would provide them . . . if he lived that long.

After loading what food he could find into a sack, McBride added a coffeepot and fry pan. He found Sammy curled up and terrified in a corner of the kitchen, soothed the trembling kitten as best he could, then carried him to the barn.

McBride saddled the mustang and led it outside. He had no clear idea what direction his future trail should take, and that bothered him. He knew that he owed it to his young Chinese wards to keep them at their girls’ finishing school, and for that he needed to do a couple of things—stay alive and earn money. But where to earn it? And, more importantly, how to keep breathing?

Again he was tempted to ride on and brush the dust of this part of the country off his shoes. But he was tired of being everybody’s whipping boy, and a slow-burning, enduring anger was building in him. In short, John McBride was through with being pushed around. It did not set well with him that so many people wanted him dead, and for reasons he could not fathom.

Clare’s betrayal was particularly hard to take. Why had she turned on him so suddenly? Why, after saving his life, had she tried to kill him—and then tried to kill him a second time?

McBride was convinced that the answer to the mystery lay within the boundaries of the O’Neil ranch—if only he could find them.