Doomsday Rider

Nine

Fletcher and Charlie Moore rode side by side along the road, following the wagon tracks.

Around them, sweeping gracefully up from the flat, snow-covered foothills sparkled in the morning sunlight and rose up to meet craggy red rock peaks, most of them showing their own white crest. The land was quiet, serene, hushed, long miles stretching to the distant mountains.

Fletcher loved the mountains and the way they called out to him, the language they used written in the wind, telling him of silent places among the pines and rocky gorges deep with darkness and mystery, urging him to seek, explore, and find.

In his wild days, not long past, in the empty aftermath of hell-firing gun battles when men died, Colts roaring, on the filthy sawdust floor of saloons or in the dust of cow-town streets, he had many times sought out the mountains to restore his troubled soul.

The mountains did not judge, nor did they console; they were just there, unmovable, unchanging, defying the rains and the snows that would take a million times a million years to erode their hard blue rock to the depth of a man’s fingernail.

Fletcher would spend a month, two months, riding among the pine-covered peaks, then, shaggy and uncurried, more wolf than man, descend once more to the flat to pick up his life and again become the person he had been, a man born to the gun with no other way to make a living than from his practiced skills, trusting to nothing but the Colt and the Winchester rifle.

It was a hard, unbending life, long on pain and fear and short on joy, but it was the life he had chosen for himself and there was no going back from it. Not now. Not ever.

As he looked at the mountains rising from the silent land far ahead of him, these thoughts filled Buck Fletcher’s mind, and he found no comfort in them.

He rode on with a caution born of the years, his blue eyes never still, searching the land around him.

The shots racketed through the morning quiet, shattering the stillness into a thousand separate shards of sound.

More shots rang out, then more.

“What the hell!” Charlie yelled.

“Sounds like a battle up ahead,” Fletcher said. He leaned down and pulled his Winchester from the boot under his left knee. “Let’s go take a look-see.”

A man doesn’t ride headlong into gun trouble. Fletcher and Charlie walked their horses toward the noise of the shooting, their eyes constantly scanning the land around and ahead of them.

The road rose to meet them, then took a sudden dip down the other slope of the hill, leveling out about half a mile ahead. To the left of the track rose another hill, crested by a jumbled pile of huge boulders, here and there a stunted spruce growing among them. Angry gray puffs of smoke rising up from the rocks showed where men were holed up and shooting.

But at what?

The answer to that question became clear to Fletcher a moment later when he saw an Apache crawl forward on the snow in front of the rock, taking advantage of every scrap of cover he could find. The Indian put his rifle to his shoulder, fired, cranked the rifle, and fired again.

Another shot, this time from the rocks. The Apache threw up his hands, his rifle spinning away from him, and rolled down the slope, and landed spread-eagled at the base of a spiky mescal.

But that warrior was only one of a dozen who were converging on the rocks from all sides.

“Is it sodjers up there?” Charlie asked, his far-seeing eyes trying to penetrate the distance.

“Maybe,” Fletcher replied. “Or Scarlet Hays.”

“Hah, then let him die.”

“Can’t, Charlie. He’s no good and I’d surely like to leave him to the Apaches, but I need him.”

Fletcher turned to the old man, a fierce, laughing recklessness in his eyes that Charlie saw and noted, seeing it as an echo of other, wilder, times. “You ready?”

“Hell, boy, as ever was.”

“Then let’s go save Scar Hays’s mangy hide.”

Fletcher let out with a wild war whoop and spurred his horse. He threw his rifle to his shoulder, cranking and firing so rapidly the movement of his hand was a blur.

An Apache, startled, turned and ran toward Fletcher, his rifle coming up fast. Fletcher fired and the man screamed and went down. Another Apache appeared from a stand of mescal, and Charlie’s shot took him in the middle of the chest.

Up on the rocks, two men appeared, both of them firing. An Apache went down, then another.

Now Fletcher and Charlie were among them. Holding his rifle like a pistol, Fletcher fired at an onrushing Indian and the man fell, blood staining the snow around him.

One of the men atop the boulders threw up his arms and toppled backward. But the other man, a towheaded youngster, was still shooting, handling his rifle well.

It was too much for the Apaches. They broke for their horses, leaving at least six of their number dead on the ground.

Charlie fired a parting shot at the Indians before they disappeared over the crest of a hill. He brandished his rifle above his head and yelled a wild, ululating war whoop, his old eyes shining with excitement.

“Damn it, Buck,” he said, “we done it.”

“Looks like,” Fletcher allowed. “Now let’s go see if Scarlet Hays is among the living.”

There had been three men holed up in the rocks, and when Fletcher and Charlie dismounted and climbed among the boulders two of them were already dead. The top of Asa Clevinger’s head had been just about blown off by a bullet, and Milt Gittings, who had been one of the men who climbed on top of the boulders to fire at the Apaches, lay on his back, his staring eyes unseeing, the blue shadow of death already on his face.

Only the Topeka Kid was still alive and unhurt, and right now his lips were curled into an insolent grin. “I guess I’ve got to thank you for coming to our rescue, Fletcher,” he said.

“You don’t owe me a thing, boy,” Fletcher replied, his eyes as cold and level as his voice.

“Wasn’t aiming to anyhow,” the Kid said, his grin growing wider.

“Where’s Scar?” Fletcher asked.

The Kid shrugged. “Who knows?”

“You were guarding Hays’s back trail and seen us coming,” Charlie said. “Were you and them other two laying fer us when the Apaches attacked, Kid?”

“Go to hell,” the Kid said. “I don’t have to answer questions from you.”

“Boy, I ought to whup your ass,” Charlie said, his face flushing red above his beard.

“Anytime you want to try it, old man, have at it,” the Kid said, his hands moving to his holstered Colts.

Charlie moved toward the youngster, but Fletcher stepped between them. He looked at the Kid, fighting to keep his own rising anger in check. “Now, I don’t much care for your manners, boy, especially toward your elders,” Fletcher said. “But right now that’s neither here nor there. What I want to know is where I can find Scar.”

“You go to hell,” the Kid said. “Anyhow, Scar ain’t skeered of you, and come to that, neither am I.”

The Topeka Kid was not much above medium height, but muscular and wiry. His eyes were an icy blue, and a fine, incipient mustache smeared his top lip, a vanity that every Western man with even the slightest claim to manhood sported in those days.

He wore dust-colored range clothes and a canvas mackinaw, but the guns in his belts were expensive and flashy, nickel-plated with grips of yellow ivory.

The Topeka Kid was said to have killed more than his share of men, and looking at him now, that arrogant, insolent grin on his face, Fletcher was willing to believe it.

He’d seen youngsters like this one before, back along a thousand half-forgotten trails. Young as he was, the Kid would be as dangerous as a striking rattler, and he’d be almighty sudden, deadly, and certain.

“Buck,” Charlie said, the anger in him subsiding, “seems to me ol’ Scar can’t be too far ahead if’n he left these boys to finish us and then catch up with him.”

Fletcher nodded. “Let’s mount up and ride.”

He turned to clamber back down the boulder-strewn slope, but the Kid’s voice, icy cold and slightly mocking, stopped him.

“Hey, Fletcher,” he said, “Scar told me he seen you draw one time and he says I’m beaucoup faster than you.”

Fletcher turned, his eyes shading from blue to gunmetal gray. “He lied to you, Kid.”

The Topeka Kid shook his head. “Nah, it don’t work that way. See, ol’ Scar, he never lied to me before.”

“Well, he lied to you this time.”

“I surely don’t think so. I reckon maybe you’re the damn liar.”

At that moment, Fletcher knew the Kid was going to try it. The youngster wanted to go back to Scarlet Hays and tell him he’d outdrawn and killed the great Buck Fletcher. And after that he’d recount the same thing to every two-bit gunman he met, increasing his reputation so that armed and belted men would step wide around him, and talk soft and low in his presence.

Charlie, a perceptive man, knew it too. Now he tried to step in and make the whole thing go away.

“Kid,” he said, “maybe you best mount up and ride on out of this territory. We saved your hide today; be content with that.”

“You shut your trap, you old goat,” the Kid said, never taking his cold snake eyes off Fletcher. “Well, Fletcher,” he said, “I called you a damn liar. Are you going to take it and back down?”

Smiling slightly, Fletcher shook his head. “Boy, I’ve been doing this kind of thing for longer than you. Your gun won’t even clear the leather. Now do as Charlie says and ride on out of here and no hard feelings.”

The Kid thought that through, and Fletcher saw a slight doubt creep into his eyes. But there was no turning back from this and the Kid knew it, and so did Fletcher.

“Fletcher,” the youngster said, “do I have to slap you into drawing?”

And the Topeka Kid drew.

He was fast, very fast.

But his fancy Colt was still clearing leather when Fletcher’s bullet took him in the middle of the chest.

The Kid staggered back a step, his Colt coming up fast, and Fletcher fired again and again. Three bullet holes appeared in the center of the Kid’s mackinaw, so close together they could have been covered by the palm of a woman’s hand.

Slowly the Topeka Kid sank to his knees, his gun falling from his suddenly unfeeling fingers.

Fletcher stepped up to the boy, looking down at him.

“Hell, you ain’t that fast,” the Kid said, blood staining his lips. “I just seen you, and you ain’t near as fast as Scar.”

There was a well of kindliness in Buck Fletcher, buried deep but nonetheless there, that sometimes manifested itself at times like these. But this wasn’t one of them.

“Kid,” he said, “you weren’t much.”

The Topeka Kid, who would have been nineteen years old that spring, died with that realization, Fletcher’s harsh words branding themselves into his brain before his eyes closed and he looked only into infinite darkness.

Charlie Moore stepped beside Fletcher, glanced down at the dead youth, and shook his head. “You didn’t kill him, Buck. Scarlet Hays did.”

“Maybe so, Charlie,” Fletcher said, a cold emptiness in him, “but it sure don’t make it any easier.”