Midnight Rider

Chapter 10

No sooner had Macon Ray and the other two ambushers fled out of sight down the mining trail into Central City than Rochenbach, the Stillwater Giant and Pres Casings rode around a turn in the trail and slid to a halt, seeing the bodies of Bonham and Batts and the dead horse lying in a heap. The wounded horse raised its head from the ground and whined pitifully.

“Who the hell could have done this?” Casings asked, turning his horse back and forth on the trail, the Giant doing the same right beside him.

“Nobody knew about this but us,” said the Giant, swinging his rifle up as he scanned the steep, dark hillside.

Casings nudged his horse along the trail a few feet, then turned it and nudged it back. He looked all around, rifle in hand, cocked and ready.

Rochenbach drew his Remington and cocked it as he stepped his horse over to where the wounded horse lay suffering.

Both the Giant and Casings flinched as a shot from the Remington exploded behind them and the horse fell silent.

“Somebody must’ve known something,” Rock said, turning his dun, looking at the other two. His voice sounded suspicious.

“Don’t go getting the wrong idea on us, Rock,” said Casings. “We’re as bewildered by this as you are.”

Rochenbach looked at both of the dead horses and saw no sign of the saddlebags. This was bad. The safe money was gone—money that he personally took responsibility for.

“Rock! What’s that?” Casings asked, interrupting Rochenbach’s thoughts. He gestured toward the rope tied to a scrub pine and drawn tight over the rocky edge of the cliff.

“I’ll check it out,” said the Giant, nudging his horse closer to the edge, then stepping down from his saddle and testing the tension on the rope with the grip of his huge hand. “Somebody’s down there,” he said to the other two. Then he called down the steep darkened hillside, “Hey, who’s there?”

“It’s me, Giant…,” said Dirty Dave Atlo in a weakened and defeated voice.

“Give me a name before I start putting bullets in your shirt pockets!” the Giant warned, leveling his rifle down into the darkness.

“It’s Dave Atlo, Giant,” Dave called up to him. “I—I recognized… your voice.”

“That doesn’t make us pals, Dirty Dave,” said the Giant. But he lowered his rifle now and looked to Rochenbach and Casings for direction.

“Ask him what he’s doing down there on the end of a rope,” said Casings.

Rochenbach sat watching, sliding his Remington back into its holster.

“What are you doing down there on the end of a rope?” the Giant called down, repeating Casings’ question word for word.

“We robbed your boys and killed them,” Dave said. “Bonham threw the money down here… put a bullet in my belly before he died. Macon Ray Silverette double-crossed me—sent me for the bags, left me down here to die.”

“Ask him who put them on to us,” Rock said to the Giant.

“Who put you on to us, Dirty Dave?” the Giant called down the hillside.

“Nobody,” said Dave in a pained voice. “I—I saw you ride into Central City, knew somebody was about to get robbed.” He paused, then said, “Suppose you could pull me up, Giant? I’m hurting something awful.”

Rochenback and Casings looked at each other.

“Tell him we’ll pull him up,” said Rock, “but if he doesn’t tell us where they’re headed, we’ll throw him right back down there.”

Giant called out, “We’ll pull you up, Dave, but if you—”

“I heard him, Giant,” said Dave Atlo. “Pull me up. I got no reason to hold out on yas… not for Macon Ray’s sake. Him and them other sons a’ bitches left me here to die. I’d be a fool to stick with them.”

The Stillwater Giant looked at Casings and Rochenbach.

“Pull him up, Giant,” said Casings. “Let’s hear what he’s got to say.”

Dave Atlo grunted and groaned in pain as the Giant pulled effortlessly, hand over hand, on the rope. When Dave’s hands gripped the edge of the rocky trail, the Giant stood looking down at him.

“Hel-help me on up. Please?” Dave whined.

The Giant reached down with one large hand, grabbed him by the nape of his neck and raised him over the edge. He held him up at arm’s length, dangling in the air, kicking his feet, screaming out in pain, both hands going to his bloody belly. Then he dropped him flat on the hard ground. Dave let out another pain-filled scream.

“Was this all because Andrew Grolin beat you out of your money last year?” Casings asked. He sat his horse sidelong to the downed outlaw leader, his rifle loosely pointed down at him.

“You bet it was,” said Dave, pain-stricken, clutching both forearms across his bleeding stomach wound. “I—I expect it wasn’t a wise thing, looking back on it.”

“Damn Grolin,” Casings whispered to Rock. “He caused this, cheating one of our own.”

Rock only nodded, watching, listening.

“Where is our money headed?” Casings asked Dave Atlo.

But Dave continued reflecting. “I should… have forgotten what Grolin did to me, as it turns out.”

“Get him on his feet, Giant,” said Casings, seeing Dave was starting to drift and fade.

The Giant pulled the wounded outlaw up and steadied him for a second, then stepped back.

“Dirty Dave, look at me,” said Casings, in a firmer voice. “Where is Macon Ray Silverette headed with our money?”

Dave sighed and shook his head, looking up at Casings.

“I was heading us up the gulch, north of Black Hawk,” he said. “The Apostle Camp—been deserted for years, except for some old road agents who lie low there.”

“The Apostle Camp, where the Toet brothers ate a squaw years back?” Casings asked.

“Yep,” said Dave. “Regular folks shy clear of the place. But Macon Ray and I hide there all the time. We toss the old-timers some whiskey to keep them happy.”

“Did you get a chance to count that money?” Casings asked. Rock sat listening in silence.

“No,” said Dave, “didn’t you?”

“I figured around nine or ten thousand,” said Casings.

“Damn, that would have lasted me a long time,” Dave said with regret.

“Any reason to take you into town?” Casings asked pointedly.

“No,” Dave said grimly, “I’m done for. I just didn’t want to die down there—not that it matters, I reckon.”

“What do you want, Dirty Dave?” Casings asked, staring intently at him.

“Hell, you know what I want,” said Dave. He shook his head and mused. “This was crazy of me. I was sitting in Central City, drinking, diddling a young whore. Now look at me.”

Casings stared at him solemnly. “You should have kept on diddling,” he said. His rifle bucked once across his lap. Dirty Dave flew backward off the edge as the bullet bored through his heart. The sound of the shot echoed off into the black distance.

“He’s right back down there,” Giant said, looking down the dark hillside.

“Yeah,” said Casings, “but now we know what happened. We can tell Grolin where the money went.” He started to turn his horse as the Giant climbed into his saddle.

“Wait a minute,” Rochenbach said in surprise. “What about the money?”

“Forget it, Rock,” said Casings. “Grolin said make the practice job, then ride straight back, get ready for the big job.”

“Forget ten thousand dollars?” said Rochenbach.

“We don’t know it was that much,” said Casings.

“However much it was, I can’t let it slide away from me,” Rochenbach said. “This work is not my hobby. I’m in it for the money.”

“I’m telling you what Grolin told me,” Casings said. “Don’t think I like riding away from this.”

“Then don’t,” Rochenbach said flatly. He turned his dun and started to put it forward ahead of them.

“What are you saying?” said Casings.

“What I’m saying is, do what suits you best,” said Rock. “I’m going after my money.”

“All right, I’m in with you,” said Casings, he and the Giant catching up to him. “But what about Spiller, Penta and Shaner? They won’t know what happened to us.”

“They’ll have to figure it all out as they go,” said Rochenbach, gigging his dun up into a gallop on the rocky hill trail.

Riding alongside Rochenbach, the Giant said in his deep voice, “Grolin is going to be madder than a hornet at us.”

“If Grolin gets mad when we hand him a saddlebag full of money, we shouldn’t be working for him anyway, Giant,” said Rochenbach. He gave Casings a knowing look as he spoke.

“Yeah,” said the Giant with a wide grin, “that’s what I say.”

Macon Ray Silverette and the other two ambushers swung wide around the main street of Central City, but they stopped long enough to load up on bottles of rye whiskey at a small trading post along the trail. While a bleary-eyed store owner concentrated on tallying the whiskey, Macon Ray wrapped a hand around a thick bundle of cigars and shoved them inside his coat.

“I saw that,” the owner said, raising his eyes.

“No, you didn’t,” said Macon Ray, feeling full of himself after the night’s robbery. “You just think you did.” He drew his Colt and cocked it arm’s length in the clerk’s face before adding, “Otherwise you’d be calling me a thief and a liar right to my damn face.”

“You’re absolutely right, sir!” said the badly shaken man as Kinney and Fackler both followed suit, raising their guns, cocked and pointed in the clerk’s face. “I—I don’t know what must have come over me!”

“That’s what I thought,” said Macon Ray. “You two grab that whiskey,” he told Kinney and Fackler. “This man all but called me a thief; he’s got to make recompense for it.”

They gathered the bottles of whiskey and left without paying, while the owner stared helplessly at them, grateful to still be alive.

With their regular saddlebags stuffed with whiskey bottles, they rode on in the night through the mining town of Black Hawk and on through Gregory Gulch, a stretch of scrub, craggy cliff and ledges strewn with torchlit hard-rock mines. The odor of wood smoke and burnt sulfur loomed in the chilled air above glowing smelter mills.

When the last flicker of torchlight and furnace glow fell away behind them, the three riders turned onto a narrow path leading up to a long-abandoned mining camp perched on a sawtooth ridgeline. At the edge of a clearing hidden behind a stand of pine, Macon Ray brought Joe Fackler and Albert Kinney to a halt behind him, seeing a dark figure standing on the porch of a run-down mining shack.

“Who the hell goes there?” an unfriendly voice called out from the dark porch.

“Hobbs, it’s us,” Macon Ray called out across the small clearing. “Ray Silverette, Albert Kinney and Cockfighting Joe Fackler.”

Fackler eyed Macon Ray in the dark.

“Nobody’s ever called me that, Ray,” he said.

“I just thought it fitting after what you did to Dirty Dave,” Macon Ray said with a dark chuckle.

From the porch, Parnell Hobbs called out, “Where’s Dave Atlo?

“In hell, I expect,” said Ray. “But that’s a long story, best told closer up.”

“Come on up, then, Macon Ray. Let me get a look at you,” said Hobbs.

As Macon Ray nudged his horse forward, Joe Fackler and Albert Kinney following right behind him, Fackler grumbled, “I don’t like being called Cockfighting Joe. Don’t get it started, Ray.”

“Or what?” Macon Ray asked, feeling satisfied, the saddlebags full of money across his lap. “You going to shoot me?”

Joe started to cock the shotgun lying across his lap, but he thought about the money and eased his thumb off the gun hammers.

“I just don’t like it, is all,” he said, the three of them drawing closer to the porch.

“Who don’t like what?” asked Hobbs as the three came to a halt and he stepped forward off the dark porch. He eyed the saddlebags across Macon Ray’s lap, Ray’s rifle lying atop them.

“Fackler here don’t want to be called Cockfighting Joe,” said Macon.

“Who’s calling him that?” asked Hobbs.

“I am,” said Macon Ray. He looked past Hobbs as the shack door opened and two more men stepped onto the rickety porch.

“Howdy, Raymond Silverette,” said a lean old gunman named Latner Karr. He struck a match and lit a thin cigar. Then he stepped forward, eyeing the saddlebags. “Whatever’s in the bag, I bet it recently belonged to somebody else.”

“Howdy, Latner,” said Macon Ray, recognizing the old man in the flicker of match light. “You’d win that bet,” he added. “It’s money, and some of it’s yours for letting us hole up here.”

On the porch, a sightless outlaw named Simon Goss stepped forward, testing his footing with each step. Following the sound of Karr’s voice, he stopped and stood beside him. His right hand rested against a large Walker Colt hanging down his chest by a lanyard cord.

“What kind of money? How much is there?” he asked with great interest, his blind eyes searching aimlessly in the night. “Is some of it mine?”

“Howdy, Blind Simon,” said Macon Ray. “It’s money we thieved from Andrew Grolin’s thieves.” He grinned proudly. “And damned right, some of it’s yours—all three of yas, like I said,” he added.

Latner Karr stared knowingly at Macon Ray.

“Andy Grolin’s men could be right on your ass, is that it, Raymond?”

“No, we got away clean as soap,” said Macon Ray. “I’m just wanting to lie low awhile. Cockfighting Joe here threw Dirty Dave Alto over a cliff. I’m taking charge.”

“Stop calling me that name,” Joe said in an angry tone. “And I didn’t throw Dirty Dave over a cliff. I forced him to climb down over it on his own.”

“At the end of that goose gun he’s packing,” Macon Ray added, gesturing at the shotgun on Joe’s lap.

“And he’s dead now?” said Karr. “You’re certain of it?”

“Yep, I’m certain of it,” said Ray. He pulled Dirty Dave’s pistol from his belt slowly and pitched it down to the lean old gunman. “You know how partial he was to this six-shooter.”

“He wouldn’t give it up without a fight,” said Karr, inspecting the pistol in his hand.

“He got himself gut-shot by Lonnnie Bonham, so he was dying anyway,” said Ray. “But that’s the end of his string. Whatever he was, I now am.” He smiled proudly and patted the saddlebags. “I’m hoping you three will celebrate with us.”

Latner Karr looked off along the path they’d ridden in on. “I need to mull it over,” he said.

“You do that, Lat. But believe me,” said Macon Ray, “nobody knows we’re here.” He lifted the saddlebags and pitched them to the ground at Karr’s feet. Blind Simon jumped a step at the sound of bags landing in the dirt. “So, mull it over while you help me count this money,” he added with a sly grin.

“I smell whiskey,” said Blind Simon, sniffing the air toward the three horsemen. “Cigars too.”

“The nose on this man, I swear to God,” said Macon Ray. He shook his head in amazement.