Moonshine Massacre

Chapter 30

At the sound of the shots outside, Porter’s eyes jerked instinctively toward the door, and Sam made his move as from the corner of his eye he saw Coleman grab Hannah and drop down behind the heavy desk.

With blinding speed, Sam dived at Porter, going low to try to avoid the Colt’s barrel if the crooked lawman managed to get off a shot. Porter’s finger closed on the trigger. The shot was shockingly loud in the close confines of the marshal’s office, and the gun went off so close to Sam’s head that he felt the report pound against both ears. But he didn’t feel the heavy impact of a bullet and knew the shot had missed. An instant later, he crashed into Porter’s legs and drove the man backward off his feet.

Porter came crashing down on the floor. Sam lunged across the crooked lawman’s body, reaching for Porter’s gun hand. His fingers closed around Porter’s wrist and shoved the gun aside as it blasted again. At the same time, Sam hammered his fist into Porter’s face. The blow landed solidly on the man’s nose. Porter howled in pain as blood spurted. Sam hit him again. It felt every bit as good as Sam had thought it would a few minutes earlier.

So he hit Porter again.

Before he could land another punch, he felt Marshal Coleman tugging at his arm. “Take it easy, son,” the lawman urged. “He’s out cold, and if you keep hittin’ him like that, you’re gonna kill him.”

That didn’t sound like such a bad idea to Sam. When he thought about how Porter had hurt Hannah, a red haze tried to creep over his vision. With his breath hissing between clenched teeth, he forced himself to lower his arm, which he had poised to hit Porter again. He looked over and saw that the gun had slipped out of Porter’s fingers, so he reached for it and picked it up.

More shots came from outside. That had to be Matt doing battle with the deputies. Sam came to his feet and told Coleman, “Stay here. Look after Hannah.”

“Wait just a dang minute,” Coleman said. “Last time I looked, my badge said marshal and yours says deputy. We’ll both give Bodine a hand.”

“Somebody needs to protect Hannah,” Sam insisted.

“How about if Hannah protects herself?” she asked sharply. Sam looked at her and saw that she had climbed to her feet and taken down a shotgun from the rack behind the desk. She finished thumbing shells into the twin barrels and snapped the weapon closed. Then she handed the Greener to her father and went on. “You’re liable to need this, Dad. I’ll load another one for myself.”

Coleman took the shotgun and nodded. “You’ll stay inside?” he asked.

“Yes…even though I’d rather come with you.”

Coleman glanced at Sam and smiled faintly. “She always did have a mite of a mean streak.”

“Feisty,” Hannah insisted as she started loading another double-barrel. “Not mean.”

Coleman nodded toward Porter’s unconscious form. “Keep an eye on that snake, and if anybody besides us or Bodine or one of the townsfolk comes in here, blast the hell out of ’em.”

Hannah nodded in understanding.

Coleman started toward the door. “Come on,” he said to Sam. “Let’s see if we can give that pard of yours a hand.”

If Matt still had both of his Colts, he would have returned the fire in both directions. As it was, he had to pick and choose. He pivoted to his right and triggered twice, then left his feet in a rolling dive that carried him back under the wagon.

The man he had just knocked out and stashed there had a gun on his hip. Matt ran his free hand over the man’s body until he found the walnut grips of the weapon jutting up from its holster. He pulled the gun free and rolled the other way as bullets began to slice underneath the vehicle and kick up dirt from the ground. A couple of them thudded into the unconscious man. Matt felt a little bad about that…but only a little. The crooked deputy had been on the verge of joining his compadres in mass murder, after all.

As he cleared the wagon, Matt sprang back to his feet with a gun in each hand again, a situation that always made him feel better. Flame stabbed from the muzzle of each weapon in turn as he fired them, angling the barrels in different directions. He saw a man charging toward him stumble and pitch forward, and another man jerked around in a half-turn as one of Matt’s bullets tore through his body. Matt broke into a run toward the jail and kept firing as he ran. He targeted the muzzle flashes that seemed to surround him. Slugs whipped past his head.

Then he heard the boom of a shotgun, followed by swift blasts from a revolver. One man yelled in pain. Another stumbled out into the open, bent over almost double as he clutched at his bullet-riddled guts. Matt spotted Sam and Marshal Coleman coming toward him, fighting their way down the street. Coleman loosed the second barrel of the scattergun he carried. The flash lit up the night.

Then suddenly, as fast as it had started, the shooting was over. Sam came up to Matt and asked, “You all right?”

“Yeah, I think so. How about you?”

“Still a little gimpy, but no worse off than I was before.” Sam turned to Coleman. “Were you wounded, Marshal?”

“No, we took those varmints by surprise and hit ’em so hard they didn’t have a chance to put up much of a fight.”

“We need to get a lantern out here and make sure they’re all dead.”

“Good idea. I’ll fetch one from the office.”

Matt said, “Mike Loomis is wounded, back up the street. He’ll need a sawbones.”

Coleman nodded. “Doc Berger’s house and office is on Second Street, right around the corner from the hotel. Reckon you can take Mike over there?”

Matt had been reloading his guns. Finished with that chore, he holstered the weapons and nodded. “Sure.”

“I’ll stay here to keep an eye on things while you fetch that lantern, Marshal,” Sam said.

“By things, you mean them crooked deputies we shot?”

Sam grunted. “That’s right. And you’d better sing out before you go through the office door, just to be sure Hannah knows it’s you.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

Coleman and Matt set off in different directions along the street. Sam slipped fresh cartridges into the gun he had taken from Ambrose Porter, which luckily was the same caliber as his Colt.

Matt called, “Hey, Mike, it’s me, Matt Bodine,” as he trotted up to the rain barrel where he had left Red Mike Loomis. When he saw the figure slumped on the ground, his first thought was that the burly youngster had bled to death. Quickly, Matt dropped to a knee next to him and searched for a pulse in Mike’s neck. After a moment he found one, weak but fairly steady, and felt relief go through him.

Even though Red Mike was a big man, Matt got his arms around him and was able to lift him. Teeth clenched against the strain, he started carrying Mike toward the doctor’s house.

Several men emerged from one of the buildings as Matt came to it. “Bodine!” one of them called. “Let us help you.”

He recognized them as townspeople as they gathered around him and took Mike out of his arms. They carried the wounded man quickly toward Doc Berger’s place. The doctor himself met them before they got there, hurrying toward the scene of battle with his black bag in his hand.

“Who’s that you’ve got there?” the medico asked.

“Mike Loomis,” Matt told him.

“How bad is he hurt?”

“That’s your department. He caught a bullet in the side and lost a lot of blood.”

Berger nodded and said to the men carrying Mike, “Take him down there and put him on the table in my examining room. I’ll be right there.” Berger turned back to Matt. “Is anyone else wounded?”

“All those special deputies are shot up pretty bad.”

The doctor started to hustle in that direction. “I’d better see to them—” he began.

“No hurry, Doc,” Matt drawled. “They’re either dead or soon will be, and it’s no great loss either way.”

Berger paused and frowned at him. “What are you talking about, young man? I don’t particularly like that liquor law any more than anyone else, but those are lawmen!”

“Not hardly. They wore badges, but that doesn’t make ’em real lawmen. They were all crooks, Doc, just like Porter and Bickford. Murderin’ scum, each and every one of ’em.”

“What in blazes are you talking about?”

Matt took hold of the medical man’s arm. “Come on back to your place and see to Red Mike, and I’ll tell you all about it on the way.”

Berger still looked upset and confused, but he allowed Matt to lead him back toward his house where he had a patient waiting for him.

Back at the jail, Marshal Coleman emerged carrying a lantern that spilled its yellow glow in a circle around him. Sam joined him, and one by one they checked the bodies sprawled in the street. There were six of them, each one shot full of holes. Four of the men were already dead, one died with a final rattle of breath in his throat as Sam and Coleman checked on him, and the sixth man was unconscious but still breathing.

“Doc might be able to save this one,” Coleman said. “Where are the others? I thought there were ten of those deputies.”

“Two of them are with the prison wagons down by the creek,” Sam explained. “I knocked them out and left them tied up there. I don’t know about the other two, but Matt might be able to tell us what happened to them. They’re either around here somewhere, dead or knocked out, or else they realized the jig was up and lit a shuck.”

“What a massacre,” Coleman said as he shook his head slowly. “There’s been more powder burned and more blood spilled in the past two days than Cottonwood usually sees in a month of Sundays.”

“I’m sorry Matt and I brought so much trouble to your town with us, Marshal.”

“Oh, hell, none of it was your fault, son. You just happened to be here.”

Sam wasn’t sure about that. Over the years he had come to believe sometimes that he and Matt traveled under a cloud. It wasn’t a storm cloud, though.

It was a cloud of gun smoke.