Bounty Hunter

Chapter 1

Big John Tone rode a sorrel horse out of the Chocolate Mountains of southern California, then swung due north, riding parallel to the Colorado River.

Ahead of him lay Milpitas Wash, which at this time of year, high summer, was as dry as mummy dust. On the south bank of the wash stood a sprawling cabin with a corral, barn, other outbuildings and a few smoke-colored ironwood trees growing here and there.

Apart from the dozen horses in the corral and the pigs and chickens rooting around in mud near the screeching windmill, Tone saw no sign of life.

But John Wesley Stillwell and his three sons were there. Tone was ready to bet the farm on that. And their womenfolk, a thorny complication that all too often shaped up to trouble.

Tone drew rein on the sorrel, swung out of the saddle and slid a .44-40 Winchester from the scabbard. He slapped the horse away from him, then stood straddle-legged in front of the cabin.

The heat was intolerable, and sweat trickled down Tone’s back. Flies buzzed around his head and the thick air smelled of dust, pig shit and creosote bush.

“John Wesley Stillwell,” Tone yelled, his voice loud and commanding in the quiet. “Come out. We have business to attend to, you and I.”

Silence. Then a chair overturned, thumping onto the cabin floor as though someone had brushed past it in some haste.

The door opened and Tone levered a round into his rifle.

A gray-haired, careworn woman stepped outside, probably years younger than she looked. The arid climate of the southern California plains country played hell on the fairer sex.

“I’m Martha Stillwell,” she said. She had her hands hidden under a linen apron. “What do you want?”

Tone acknowledged the woman’s presence with a slight incline of his head. “My business is with John Wesley, ma’am, not you. Tell him to step out and take his medicine.”

“My husband is not home.”

A curtain twitched in the window to the left of the door. Tone noted the movement and would remember it.

Martha spoke again. “What business do you have with my husband?”

“I think you already know my business, ma’am. John Wesley is wanted dead or alive for murder and cattle stealing. The price on his head is five hundred dollars, and I can take him in alive or dead. The choice is his.”

“We have womenfolk inside, and children.”

“They can come out after John Wesley.”

The woman took a step toward Tone, her mouth working. “Mister, we have so little and don’t foresee nothing but hard times comin’ down. We don’t need more misery heaped on misery.”

“John Wesley should have studied on that before he lifted cattle and murdered a drover, ma’am.”

Tone’s ice blue eyes ranged across the front of the cabin. Did that damned curtain move again?

“The drover fell off his horse and broke his neck,” Martha said. “John Wesley had no hand in that.”

“The vaquero died trying to stop your husband from running off his patrón’s cattle. If there had been no rustling, the man would still be alive.” Tone motioned to the cabin with his rifle. “The day is waning fast and my patience grows thin. Tell John Wesley to get out here.”

The woman shook her head. “My God, man, have some pity.”

“I have none to give, ma’am.”

“Who are you? Or are you a devil in the guise of a human being?”

“My name is John Tone.” He touched his hat brim. “Your servant, ma’am.”

Martha looked like she’d been slapped. “I’ve heard of you, John Tone. You’re the Nevada gunfighter all the men talk about.”

“Get your husband out here, ma’am, or I’ll go inside for him.” Tone’s cold eyes chilled the woman like winter wind. “If I am forced to do that, I’ll kill anyone, man, woman or child, who gets in my way.”

But the woman was no longer hearing words. Instinct had taken over, transforming her into a she-wolf protecting her brood. “You heartless son of a bitch!” she screamed.

As Tone had known they would, when Martha took her hands out from under her apron, they were holding a gun. As she thumbed back the hammer on the old Dragoon Colt, her eyes fixed on him, Tone fired. The impact of the heavy bullet slamming into her chest drove the woman backward. Amid a flurry of white petticoats, she tumbled into an empty zinc water trough and lay still.

A bearded man ran out the door, carrying a Greener shotgun. He took in the scene at a glance and cried, “Martha!” with an agonized shriek of despair and loss.

John Wesley Stillwell’s lips curled back from his teeth in a snarl of rage and he fired the scattergun from his hip.

A clean miss!

Tone fired, did not wait to see Stillwell drop, but levered the Winchester again and sent a shot crashing into the window. A man’s scream wrenched out over the racketing echo of the rifle fire and the shiver of shattered glass.

Stillwell was up on one elbow, clutching at his blood-soaked belly. The Greener had fallen just beyond his reach, but he ignored it, his eyes hot and furious on Tone.

“Just lay quiet, John Wesley,” Tone said. “There’s been enough killing here.”

A young towhead stumbled through the door, a rifle in his hands. His right cheekbone had been shot away and his face was a scarlet nightmare.

The man screamed curses, wild sounds bubbling out of his bloody mouth. He raised his rifle and Tone shot him, fired again. His first round took the towhead high in the left shoulder, but the man rode his second bullet into eternity.

As a hog and a flock of terrified, squawking chickens scampered past him, Tone fed shells into the Winchester from his cartridge belt, his eyes on the cabin door.

In the quiet that followed the panicked flight of the chickens, his senses alert to any sign of danger, he heard the soft scrape of wood on wood.

A door had just opened at the rear of the cabin.

Stillwell was dragging himself along the dirt, his right hand reaching for his shotgun. Tone ignored him and stepped on cat feet to the corner of the cabin. Just behind him, Martha Stillwell was sprawled in the trough, her face slack in death, eyes half open.

Tone watched and waited, and after a few moments the youngest of the Stillwell sons stuck his head around the corner. Tone’s snap shot was immediate and on target. His bullet took the youngster between the eyes, and he fell without a sound.

Turning, Tone saw John Wesley’s fingers scrabbling in the dirt close to the Greener. He closed the space between them in a few long strides and kicked the shotgun away.

“You, out there!” A man’s voice.

“What do you want?” Tone asked. He looked at Stillwell, who was dying hard and angry.

“We’re coming out.” A pause. “We’re done.”

“Step out with your hands empty, you and the women and kids. I’m not a trusting man.”

The surviving Stillwell son led the way, his arms stretched out from his sides, fingers splayed. Two young women and three children followed.

Under a sky the color of steel as the day faded, the women threw themselves on the bodies of the dead, their sobbing, shrieking lamentations scraping the twilight raw.

Tone glanced at the young man, who was now kneeling beside Stillwell. “Is he dead?” he asked.

The man nodded, not looking at Tone.

“What’s your name, boy?” Tone asked.

“Tom. Tom Stillwell.”

“Well, Tom, bridle your father’s horse and bring it out here.”

“Damn you! I told you, he’s dead!”

“So you say, but I’m still taking him to the law in Yuma.”

The man raised a tearstained face to Tone, his voice unbelieving. “My mother, father, brothers . . . You killed them all.” He shook his head, stunned, like a man who has just been read a bad-news telegram. He looked around him. “Two widows . . . orphans . . . all my brothers . . . dead.”

“Sometimes the cost of doing business comes high,” Tone said. He dug into his shirt pocket for the makings and rolled himself a cigarette. He thumbed a match into flame and through a cloud of smoke said, “Now bring that horse out here like I told you.”

As the undulating cries of the women rose in pitch and volume, Tom Stillwell rose to his feet and looked at Tone. He had brown eyes that were made soft by long black lashes.

“Pa talked about you, John Tone the man hunter. When the kids wouldn’t go to bed, he used to tell them, ‘Better get to sleep soon or John Tone will get you.’ We thought it was funny. The thing is, it was not funny. Not then, not now.”

Tone glanced at the sky. It would be dark soon and he’d have to ride. “I’m in a hard, unforgiving business,” he said absently.

“I know what you are, Tone. You’re a dangerous, heartless animal, a man without a conscience or a soul.”

“I’m all of those things, and worse. But I sleep well at night.” Almost casually Tone lifted the muzzle of the Winchester until it was in line with Stillwell’s belly. “Now you git, and bring out that damned horse.”

The man opened his mouth to speak but thought better of it. He turned on his heel and walked toward the women, who had removed his mother’s body from the trough and laid it out on the ground.

He stopped and glared at Tone. “Get your own damned horse.”

Tone glanced around him, at the wailing women and children and the pale dead, pondering with detached interest on the mayhem he had wrought in just a few minutes of hell-firing violence.

If John Wesley had taken his medicine and come quietly, none of this would have happened. That’s what Tone told himself. And that was what he believed.

He did not consider himself a cruel man and he harbored no ill will toward the men he hunted. When possible, he preferred to bring them in alive, but when guns were drawn, all bets were off.

Tone walked to the corral, bridled a gaunt old buckskin and led it back to Stillwell’s body. A tall man, and strong, he effortlessly lifted the dead body and draped it facedown across the horse’s back.

“What are you doing?”

A young blond woman strode toward Tone, her infuriated eyes the color of flames in smoke. “Leave him be,” she snapped. “I won’t have my father-in-law lie in foreign soil.”

Tone gathered the reins of the buckskin, stepped into the saddle of his sorrel and looked down at the woman. “You can retrieve his body and the horse in Yuma from the Territorial Vigilante Committee.” Tone touched his hat. “Good evening to you, ma’am.”

“You coldhearted son of a bitch, you murdered him! And his sons!”

Tone shrugged. “I’m sorry you take that attitude, ma’am. But John Wesley was notified.”

He swung his horse around and led the buckskin with its grim burden out of the yard. Something smelly splattered against his shoulder and a rock flew past his head. He turned. The women and their kids were throwing pig shit and anything else that came to hand at him.

John Tone glanced up at the violet sky, where the first stars hung like lanterns, lighting his trail.

He needed a bath and a hot meal. All in all, it had been a long, wearisome day.