Deadwood Gulch

CHAPTER 13

In the sudden burst of flame, Bo caught glimpses of several men in long coats, bandana masks, and pulled-down hats. The Devils of Deadwood Gulch had come to call, seeking revenge for having their plans ruined the past two days. Bo heard a gun roar, saw the muzzle flash, and felt the wind-rip of the bullet going past his ear.

“Keep your heads down!” he shouted to Scratch and Chloride. More shots blasted as he ducked back and kicked the door closed. Bo realized that the outlaws were giving him and his companions a choice: stay in here and burn, or flee through the door and be riddled with lead.

But there was a third option, Bo thought, and he liked their chances better with it.

He whirled toward Scratch and Chloride, who were grabbing up as much of their gear as they could carry. Flames were already licking up the front wall and one of the side walls, casting a garish light on the interior of the old cabin.

“Come on,” Bo said. “Out the back!”

“But there ain’t no back door!” Chloride protested.

“There’s about to be!”

Bo lowered his shoulder, got as much of a running start as the close confines of the cabin would allow him, and rammed into the rear wall as hard as he could. The rotten old lumber, the tarpaper, and the flimsy tin was no match for his hurtling weight. With a splintering crash, he burst through the wall, lost his balance, and sprawled on the ground.

Scratch was there beside him a heartbeat later to reach down, grab Bo’s arm, and hoist his friend back to his feet. Somewhere nearby, Chloride’s old cap-and-ball pistol boomed.

Bo still had his Colt in his hand. In the nightmarish glare cast by the burning building, he snapped a shot at a masked figure he spotted near the cabin. The man bellowed, “They’re back here! They got out!”

“Head for the trees!” Bo ordered. Pines grew thickly on the wall of the gulch, all the way down to the base of the slope. The Texans and Chloride retreated toward them, backing away and sending bullets spraying around the cabin from Bo’s Colt, Scratch’s twin Remingtons, and Chloride’s old horse pistol. The burning cabin itself gave them some cover because the Devils had to come around it to get a shot at them, and every time one of them stepped into sight, Bo or Scratch or Chloride sent a bullet his way.

They made it unscathed to the trees and got behind some of the thick trunks to continue the battle. Bo didn’t expect the fight to last very long, and sure enough it didn’t. The cabin was fully ablaze by now, but even over the crackling roar he heard the thud of hoofbeats as the outlaws took off into the night.

The cabin was close enough to Deadwood that somebody in the town was likely to spot the orange glow in the sky and know that something was burning. Nothing scared people on the frontier like fire. Deadwood had several volunteer fire companies already. Some of the citizens were sure to come hurrying up the gulch to see what was going on.

“Hold your fire, Chloride,” Bo called to the old-timer. “They’re not shooting at us anymore.”

“Yeah, they’re gone,” Scratch agreed. “Took off for the tall and uncut when they saw we weren’t gonna cooperate with them killin’ us.”

“The hydrophobia skunks!” Chloride raged. “They burned down my cabin! The dang no-good weasels!”

Bo thumbed fresh rounds into his Colt. “We got our guns and most of our gear out of there,” he said. “Lost our bedrolls, but we can replace them. I see that a couple of poles on the fence around the shed and the horse pen are down, so I reckon our horses spooked and busted out when the fire started. They’re probably still around somewhere.”

“Bound to have lost our saddles, though,” Scratch said. “We’ll have to ride bareback into town.”

Bo grunted as he holstered his gun. “Won’t be the first time, will it?”

Scratch chuckled and said, “Not hardly. When I was a kid, I reckon I must’ve rode a thousand miles before I ever knew what a saddle was.”

“Yeah, well, we ain’t kids no more,” Chloride pointed out. “None of us.”

“No, but I’ll bet Marty Sutton will advance us the money to buy new saddles and tack,” Bo said.

“Folks comin’,” Scratch said.

It was true. Bo saw the bobbing glow of lanterns coming up the gulch toward them. When he was able to make out one of the fire wagons from Deadwood, along with a crowd of men, he and Scratch and Chloride left the cover of the trees and walked toward the cabin. The roof had fallen in, and now the walls were collapsing as well. Showers of sparks climbed into the cold, black night sky. It would have been a pretty sight in a way, if not for the destruction it represented.

One of the men from town spotted them and shouted, “There they are!” A group hurried forward to meet them.

“What happened?” another man asked. “Are you fellas all right?”

“We’re fine,” Bo answered. “And as far as what happened . . . some of the Deadwood Devils came to pay us a visit.”

“With a can of coal oil,” Scratch added.

“Good Lord!” the townman muttered. “They tried to burn down the shack around you?”

Bo nodded. “That’s right. We got out just in time and swapped some lead with them, but they got away.”

“Three times!” one of the men exclaimed. “That’s three times the Devils have gone up against you Texans, and you’ve come out alive every time!”

“Hey, what about me?” Chloride demanded. “I got away from ’em that first time, when they held up the Argosy gold wagon.” He thumped his chest. “I reckon I’m the champeen Devil-buster around here!”

“You can have the title and welcome to it, old-timer,” Scratch said with a laugh.

While Chloride was blustering again about being called an old-timer, the captain of the fire company said, “Let’s get some water on that debris, men. We don’t want the fire spreading.”

The volunteers went about the task with practiced efficiency, working the hand pump to send a spray of water from the tank on the wagon through the hose and onto what was left of the cabin. Smoldering wood sizzled and popped as the water hit it.

While they were doing that, Bo asked the captain, “Reckon we could get a ride back into town with you fellas? Our saddles burned up in the shed.”

The man nodded. “Sure. Where are your horses?”

“Around here somewhere,” Scratch said. He put a couple of fingers in his mouth and gave a piercing whistle. The Texans weren’t surprised when their mounts came trotting up a minute later. The horses were well trained and had a knack for avoiding trouble when they could.

Once the fire was completely out, Bo, Scratch, and Chloride climbed onto the wagon with the rest of the men and rode back into town. The horses trotted along behind the wagon.

A crowd of curious bystanders was waiting in Deadwood. The news of what had happened spread rapidly, and one excitable gent called out, “Three cheers for the gallant Texans and their defeat of the Devils! Hip, hip, hooray!”

The rest of the crowd took up the cheer, which caused Bo and Scratch to exchange an uncomfortable glance. Scratch leaned closer to his friend and said quietly, “Some of those varmints may have took off their masks and snuck back into town already. They could be in this bunch right now.”

“I know,” Bo said. “And after spending months terrorizing the people around here, I don’t imagine they’re very happy about what’s going on.”

“That’s liable to make ’em try even harder to kill us.”

Bo nodded as he looked at the excited crowd and said, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

While Bo and Scratch were putting up their horses for the night at Hanson’s Livery after all, Martha Sutton arrived with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and a worried look on her face.

“Are the three of you all right?” she asked. “I heard that your cabin burned down, Mr. Coleman.”

“Got burned down, you mean,” Chloride said. “It was them durned Devils again.”

“They seem to have declared war on the three of you.”

“We’ve been in wars before,” Bo said.

“Always came through all right,” Scratch added.

“Then you’re not hurt?” Martha asked.

Bo shook his head. “We’re fine. We lost our saddles, tack, and bedrolls in the fire, but that’s all.”

“I’ll replace those,” Martha said with an emphatic nod. “It’s my responsibility. The Devils wouldn’t be after you if you weren’t working for me. And you’ll stay in those hotel rooms after all.”

“We won’t argue about that with you, ma’ am,” Bo told her. “I’m a little curious, though, about one thing . . . How did you know what happened to Chloride’s cabin? It’s late enough that you had probably turned in for the night, hadn’t you?”

Martha looked a little uncomfortable and embarrassed, and for a second Bo wondered if he had gone and poked his nose into something that was none of his business. But then she said, “Phillip Ramsey came to my house and told me.”

“Ramsey?” Scratch repeated in surprise. “That bookkeeper fella who works for Nicholson?”

Martha nodded. “He’d heard about it—I don’t know where—but he didn’t know if the three of you were all right. He thought I might want to know, since you work for me.”

Scratch grunted and said, “I didn’t much cotton to that young fella. Seemed a mite weasel-like to me.”

“Phillip’s not totally a bad sort. It’s just that he works for the Argosy, and, well, Lawrence Nicholson and my father were rivals for a long time. Naturally, there’s some hostility on both sides . . .”

But there was a part of Martha that wished the hostility didn’t exist, Bo sensed. That didn’t come as a complete surprise to him. Martha and Ramsey were about the same age, after all, and even though a gal and a young fella might be business rivals, that didn’t always extend to the other parts of their lives.

To spare Martha any further embarrassment, Bo changed the subject by saying, “We’ll head down to the hotel now and get some rest. Morning will come awful early, I expect.”

Martha nodded. “Of course.” She put a hand on Chloride’s arm. “I’m very sorry about your cabin, Mr. Coleman. I’ll do anything I can to help make it up to you.”

That much attention from a pretty young woman did wonders for the old-timer’s hurt feelings. Chloride shuffled his feet and said, “Aw, shucks, Miss Sutton, don’t worry about it too much. It was just a ramshackle ol’ cabin that didn’t even belong to me, not really. I was just sorta squattin’ in it.”

“You lost some personal belongings, though. Just let me know what you need replaced, and I’ll take care of it if I can.”

Chloride nodded. “Yes’m, I’ll do that. Right now, though, I’m fine.”

She smiled at him and squeezed his arm, and Bo would have sworn that the old pelican was blushing furiously under all those whiskers.

Martha insisted on going with them to the hotel and making the arrangements for their rooms. Then the three men insisted on walking her back to her house, a neat frame structure in one of Deadwood’s residential neighborhoods on the slope above downtown. It was the wee hours of the morning before they were all settled down and asleep in their hotel rooms, and as Bo had predicted, he seemed to have barely closed his eyes when the built-in instinct most frontiersmen possessed woke him. A check of his pocket watch told him it would be dawn in another hour.

Scratch stepped out into the hotel corridor at the same time Bo did. The Texans nodded to each other and went to the door of Chloride’s room. Scratch put his ear to the panel and grinned.

“Sounds like he’s still sawin’ logs in there,” he said. “We’ll have to wake him up.”

“Better be careful about it,” Bo advised. “He may sleep with that old horse pistol under his pillow. You saw what a ruckus he made when you woke him earlier.”

“Yeah, he acted like he thought ol’ Sittin’ Bull and Crazy Horse were after him.” Not wanting to disturb the other guests in the hotel, Scratch knocked quietly on the door and called, “Chloride! Hey, Chloride, wake up!”

Then he took a quick step to the side just in case the old-timer grabbed a gun and blasted a shot through the door without knowing what was going on.

Instead Chloride responded with a groggy, “Huh? What in blue blazes—”

“Time to get up, Chloride,” Bo said through the door. “We’ve got things to do and places to be.”

“Oh, yeah. Hang on.”

Bo and Scratch listened for more snoring, in case Chloride went back to sleep, but a few minutes later the door opened and the old-timer emerged from the room, yawning. “All right, I’m ready to go,” he said as he ran his fingers through his tangled beard.

They went to the livery stable first and found that Esteban, the Mexican hostler, was getting ready to hitch the mule team to the wagon by lantern light. Bo asked him when the saddle shop opened, and Esteban said, “Whenever you need it to, señor. The man who runs the shop lives above it, and since he is a bachelor, you will not have to worry about disturbing his family.”

Bo nodded his thanks. “All right. We’ll wait a little while before we go over there. I see the café is open already, so we’ll have some breakfast first.”

“Sí, Señora Pendleton is there early and late. She works very hard.” Esteban shrugged. “But what else is she to do, with no man in her life? It was very hard for her when her husband died.”

“I’m sure it was,” Bo said. He lifted a hand in farewell. “We’ll be back after a while.”

They went up the street and angled across to the Red Top. A couple of men were already at the counter drinking coffee. Sue Beth was nowhere in sight, but she emerged from the door into the kitchen a moment later.

“It’ll be a while before the food’s ready,” she said as she greeted the newcomers with a smile, “but I can pour coffee for you.”

“That’ll be fine, ma’am,” Scratch told her.

They settled down on stools at the counter while Sue Beth placed cups and saucers in front of them and then fetched the pot from the stove. “I heard about what happened last night,” she said as she poured. “I’m sorry about your cabin, Chloride.”

The old-timer shook his head. “It’s my own dang fault, I reckon, for throwin’ in with these two wild Texas boys and makin’ the Devils mad at us.”

“They don’t like anyone defying them, do they?”

“Apparently not,” Bo said. “They’d have to be pretty upset to burn down a fella’s cabin with him in it.”

Sue Beth frowned. “Are you certain it was the same bunch? There could be more than one gang of outlaws around here, you know.”

“That’s true,” Bo admitted. “But these hombres wore the same sort of outfit that the Devils do. Anyway, another bunch of owlhoots would have tried to rob us. Those men last night just wanted us dead.”

“I’ve been doin’ some thinkin, too,” Chloride put in. “Last night I heard one of the varmints give the order to light that coal oil they’d splashed around, and I’d swear it was the same fella I heard bossin’ the others that day they hit the Argosy gold wagon.” A little shudder ran through the old-timer. “The same one who carved the pitchforks into the foreheads of them dead guards.”

“But you can’t be sure of that, can you?” Sue Beth asked.

“I reckon not. But I got a feelin’ in my bones that I’m right, and I’ve learned to trust these old bones.”

Charlie the cook called through the opening behind the counter. “I got flapjacks and bacon ready!”

“I’ll be right back,” Sue Beth told her customers.

The food was as good as always. Bo, Scratch, and Chloride enjoyed their breakfast and washed the meal down with plenty of coffee. Having their bellies full helped them get over everything that had happened the night before.

When Bo went to pay for the food, Sue Beth shook her head and said, “Marty Sutton came by here a while ago and told me that if you stopped in for breakfast, I should just add the bill to her tab.”

“Miss Sutton’s already up and about?” Bo asked.

Sue Beth nodded. “That’s right. She had some coffee, then said she was on her way to Bullock and Star’s. She may still be there.”

Bo put his hat on and ticked a finger against the brim. “We’re much obliged. See you the next time we’re in town.”

“Hopefully that won’t be too long.”

“And maybe we’ll have that turkey for Thanksgivin’,” Scratch added.

Sue Beth laughed. “I’ll be waiting.”

The big mercantile down the street was owned and operated by Seth Bullock and Sol Star, Bo knew. He remembered both men from the previous visit he and Scratch had paid to Deadwood. At that time, Bullock and Star had only recently arrived from Montana and were selling their stock of goods out of a tent. Since then, they had built a big, prosperous-looking establishment that took up most of a block.

Sol Star ran the place for the most part. His partner Seth Bullock had been the marshal of Deadwood for a while and done a fine job of it from what Bo had heard, bringing law and order to the raw mining camp and continuing to serve after Deadwood had become an actual town. Sol Star was something of a civic leader, too, having been elected as Deadwood’s mayor several times. Star might still be mayor, for all Bo knew. All he cared about at the moment was the fact that the store was already open and Martha Sutton had gone over there, evidently to arrange for the supplies they were supposed to load on the wagon to take back to the mine.

Martha stepped out onto the store’s porch as Bo, Scratch, and Chloride approached. She was bundled in a heavy coat this morning, her breath fogging in the air in front of her, but her blond curls hung free around her shoulders as usual. She smiled and said, “Good morning. Mr. Star and his clerks have the supplies ready, and they can load them as soon as you bring the wagon over.”

Chloride nodded and said, “I’ll go fetch it.”

As the old-timer hurried off, Martha went on to Bo and Scratch. “I hope you don’t mind, but Mr. Star had some good saddles, and I took the liberty of buying a couple of them, along with everything else you’ll need.”

Bo and Scratch glanced at each other. As veteran horsemen, they would have preferred to pick out their own saddles. Every rider had his own likes and dislikes, and they were usually different. But Martha’s heart was in the right place, so Bo said, “I’m sure they’ll be fine. We appreciate it, Miss Sutton.”

“There hasn’t been any more trouble since Mr. Coleman’s cabin burned down, has there? I haven’t heard about anything.”

Scratch said, “The rest of the night was plumb peaceful.”

“You think you’ll be back tomorrow with the other load of gold?”

“We should be,” Bo said.

“What will you do after that?”

Bo shrugged. “Keep poking around, I guess. We’d still like to find where the Devils stashed all the loot from those earlier robberies.”

“If it’s even still around here,” Scratch added.

“But we’ll stay in touch, and whenever Andrew Keefer and the men at the mine have another load ready to bring down the gulch, we’ll handle that chore for you,” Bo went on. “As long as you want us to, that is.”

Martha laughed. “I think you can count on that, Mr. Creel,” she said. “You and Mr. Morton are the only ones who’ve had any luck at all stopping the Devils. The way things were going, the mining business in this whole area was going to be ruined. Digging the gold out of the hills doesn’t do any good if you can’t get it into the bank.”

Bo nodded and said, “That’s true. And I reckon the way the Devils had everybody so scared was almost as bad as losing all that gold.”

“Worse, maybe,” Martha said. “If things had kept on, Deadwood might have been a ghost town in another year. Now, though, people have hope again. And they have you two to thank for that.”

“And Chloride,” Scratch added with a grin. “That old-timer gets a mite touchy when he’s left out of anything.”

“I heard that, dadblast it!” Chloride called out from the street in front of the store where he had just brought the wagon to a stop. “I ain’t that much older’n you, you danged Texas roadrunner!”