The Diamond K Showdown Read online

  A swift glance to left and right told McGill that the open street was deserted. Cautiously, he stepped down into the dust. At once, clearly visible as the cold light of the rising moon slanted down across the false fronts, he saw the small, crumpled figure lying alongside the trough in front of Stolt’s Livery.

  ‘Johnny,’ he whispered hoarsely.

  Behind him, Jake Harding’s boots thudded as he came out of the shop.

  ‘Zeb’s jest walked in,’ he called. ‘They were playin’ hide and go seek, he reckons Johnny slipped away in the dark—’

  But McGill wasn’t listening. The shock of seeing his son lying in the dust had set his nerves singing like taut wires, his mind racing. He guessed that the men who had gunned down a defenceless kid had done so to draw him out. They’d followed him into town blind, likely set about hunting him down. Johnny, playing an innocent game, had been caught cold.

  So where were they?

  At his shoulder, Harding said softly, ‘Careful, boy. There’s horses tied outside the saloon, they’ll be watchin’ you from the shadows.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m pinned down by men I can’t see, with my son lyin’ in the street.’

  ‘Better that – for a few minutes longer – than seein’ his pa die tryin’ to reach him.’

  ‘If he’s bleeding his life away, he ain’t got a few minutes.’

  ‘Goddamn!’ Harding swore. ‘Where the hell’s Ed Thorpe?’

  ‘Christ knows – but I can’t wait.’

  ‘Ewan, for God’s sake!’

  Harding’s big hand grabbed for a shoulder, slipped off as McGill spun away and leaped up on to the plankwalk. Ignoring the storekeeper’s whispered warnings he ducked into the shadows, heart thundering as he flattened against the wall and waited with narrowed eyes for the crack of the shot, the killing impact of hot lead.

  No, it’s too far, he thought, as the silence dragged on. They were waiting until he got close, until he loomed large and they had a certain kill – and because with a pistol that was mighty close, he had breathing space, room to manoeuvre.

  He took a breath, began edging along the wall towards the end of the block beyond which lay old man Stolt’s livery barn. His eyes flicked back and forth between the crumpled figure lying in the dust, to the shadows on the opposite side of the street – because it was from there, surely, that the attack would come.

  A movement to his right, a woman’s worried cry, stopped him dead, prickled the hairs on his neck and jerked his head around. McGill let his breath go. Light was flooding from the store’s open doorway. Jake Harding’s stovepipe boots were kicking up dust as he pounded across the street. He was carrying a shotgun. As McGill watched, he reached the far plankwalk, and his bulk was lost in the shadows.

  McGill reached up, dashed the cold sweat from his brow. Again, he edged along the wall, pistol held high. His eyes resumed their watchfulness.

  Johnny hadn’t moved.

  There was no sign of Deputy Ed Thorpe.

  And now McGill had reached the end of the block.

  That close to the livery, he could smell the horses. The silence was so intense his ears caught the sound of their restless movements in the dry straw, their snorts of unease. For an instant, he wished he had their ears, the sixth sense that told them something was wrong, and where lay the danger.

  He looked across the open space to the crumpled figure of his son lying on his back with both arms outflung in the shadow of the horse trough, above him the flat glint of cold water. The sign of The Cross, McGill thought. He was thirty feet away, and there was no cover.

  But if they wanted him it was still a tricky shot for a six-gun.

  Then, whatever the risks, the blood-pull proved too great. McGill stepped down off the plankwalk, took two steps away from the buildings and was at once bathed in moonlight.

  He awoke to faint snapping sounds he couldn’t identify.

  ‘Jesus Christ, my head!’

  Deputy Ed Thorpe groaned the words, rolled over, shuddered as he found his face pressed into sour-smelling sawdust. He spat, levered himself up to hands and knees, head lolling painfully between bony shoulders. When he braced himself and raised it, dispersed the cobwebs with a shake of his head that he felt clear down to his boots, and peered through blurred eyes, he was looking into the black muzzle of a six-gun.

  ‘Far enough,’ the gunman said.

  A shaft of pain like fierce summer lightning dragged another groan from between Thorpe’s clenched teeth. He got his heels under him, teetered, then sagged backwards to finish up on his haunches with his back hard up against the boards fronting the bar.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You walked into trouble, tried to cool it, and a slug creased your skull.’

  This was a big, bearded man wearing a plaid mackinaw, a battered felt hat and black pants held up by a belt with a huge silver buckle and tucked into knee-high boots. He strolled across from a table, dropped to one knee alongside the lawman.

  ‘Leave him be—’

  ‘Yeah, you can shove it, pal,’ the bearded man said.

  Big fingers gently probed the sticky wound. Thorpe winced, felt the stiffness of drying blood on his face and neck, screwed his eyes shut. When he opened them, the big man was grinning, teeth flashing white in his dark-bearded face.

  ‘You’ll live to fight another day.’

  ‘Fight?’ Thorpe’s tone was bitter.

  ‘You did what you could, in the circumstances.’

  His vision clearing, Thorpe lifted an unsteady hand to move the big man to one side. Further along the plank bar, two rough men in range clothing were studiously avoiding his eyes. The worn holsters at their hips were empty. Behind the bar, eyes blank, the saloonist was polishing a glass with a dirty cloth while his jaws worked on a plug of tobacco. Another man, elegantly dressed, sat at a table in the corner playing a deliberate game of solitaire – it was the snap of the new cards on the table that had knifed through Thorpe’s consciousness.

  ‘Picked early evening,’ Thorpe said, eyes narrowed as he painfully gathered his thoughts. ‘Place is damn near empty at this time, got it all to yourselves.’

  This to the tall, lean man holding the pistol, who grinned wolfishly.

  ‘Pure chance, friend.’

  ‘You trailed Ewan McGill into town?’

  ‘Did we?’

  ‘More than that,’ said the bearded man, still down on one knee alongside Thorpe. ‘Feller out in the street with a Spencer, he gunned down McGill’s kid.’

  Thorpe swore softly, tried to push himself away from the boards. The bearded man pushed him back forcefully. His face was close to Thorpe’s. Out of sight of the gunman, one bright blue eye winked. And, as the big man’s hand fell away, Thorpe felt a sudden lightness at his right hip.

  Beyond the lean man holding the pistol, another, stockier, man was standing with his back to the swing doors. He was half turned, a cocked shotgun covering the room. A pile of assorted weapons lay at his feet. His attention was divided. And, as everything began to make sense, Thorpe knew he was waiting for the sound of a shot.

  ‘Plugged the kid to draw his pa out,’ he said, thinking out loud, and recalled telling McGill to go join his boy at Harding’s store. ‘But maybe he’s smarter than you think.’

  ‘Actin’ that way,’ the man at the doors acknow-ledged. ‘Movin’ through the shadows like an Injun. But the closer he gets to his boy. . . .’

  Thorpe grunted. Aware that the big man, under cover of his wide body and the loose mackinaw, was easing back the hammer of the pistol, he said loudly, ‘Where is the kid?’

  ‘He was plugged in the street, dropped by the livery,’ said the lean gunslinger. ‘Looks kinda forlorn, out there in the moonlight,’ he said, and his grin was cruel. ‘Like my pard said, the closer McGill gets the harder it’ll be to—’

  ‘Blade!’

  ‘Yeah?’

  The man with the shotgun had rested the butt on his hip, poked his head outside the saloon. Now he stepped back inside, said softly, ‘Feller from the store came across the street. Looked like he was totin’ a shotgun.’

  ‘He comes too close, blow him in half.’

  ‘What about McGill?’

  ‘Skinner’s about to take him,’ said the man called Blade, and his chuckle was a cruel sound. ‘How long does it take a man to walk a block in Coyote Gulch? Right now he must be close enough to look into his kid’s sightless eyes, and that makes the rest a duck shoot.’

  And even as he spoke, the evening’s stillness was split asunder by the crack of a single shot.

  When the attack came, he moved like a startled jack-rabbit and without conscious thought.

  The action saved his life.

  He had walked ten long paces across moonlit, open space. When his boots squelched in wet mud and he took the final step to his son, he knew he was too late. Johnny was on his back in the dirt. The cold water dripping from a thin split in the wooden horse trough had splashed on to his upturned face, pooled in the hollows formed by his eye sockets. But he had felt nothing. The blood from his wound soaked the front of his shirt, and the eyes that stared wetly up at the rising moon saw nothing of its pure brightness.

  McGill dropped to his knees, gunman forgotten, his throat clogged tight with grief and a swelling anger – and the bullet from the rifle that cracked wickedly across the street passed over his head with a sinister whine.

  Instinctively, he threw himself sideways and rolled. The movement carried him across the warm, sticky limpness of Johnny’s body. His head cracked sickeningly against cold timber. Icy water trickled down his neck.

  The second shot holed the trough and water gushed, a glittering stream in the moonlight. Disorientated, his mind numb, McGill leaned out to snap two fast wild shots at th
e far plankwalk, ducked back as the rifle cracked, caught the flicker of movement and the pound of boots as Jake Harding came running.

  The sudden deadly danger bearing down on him from along the plankwalk spooked the gunman.

  ‘Jeffers, Blade, get out here!’ he roared.

  As his words rang out, he stepped out of the shadows. He was black garbed, black of hair. Teeth gleamed white as his lips drew back in a snarl. The rifle he had used to murder Johnny McGill dangled in his left hand. He made a fast draw with his right and opened up on the advancing storekeeper with his six-gun. Slugs thunked into timber. Splinters hissed from a shop front. A window shattered, and at the tie rail, horses began backing and tossing their heads, eyes rolling. Then Harding’s shotgun flashed and roared as he let go with one barrel. Lead shot buzzed like a swarm of angry hornets. The gunman hurriedly flattened against the wall.

  Ears ringing to the roar of gunfire, McGill uncoiled, and exploded from the trough’s cover.

  He sped across the street at a crouching run, six-gun blazing. As he did so, the saloon’s swing doors were driven open by a kick. A stocky man leaped out, shotgun swinging high. He flashed a glance down the plankwalk. Then McGill’s swift approach in the brightening moonlight caught his eye, and he hesitated. He swung around to face the street. In the gloom of the deep shadows tight up against the saloon his eyes glistened white and wild.

  McGill triggered a desperate shot, saw the man’s shirt sleeve billow, heard his roar of pain. Then the six-gun’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber. As the stocky man stumbled towards the edge of the plankwalk, blood blossomed dark on his arm. But his right hand was lifting the shotgun. The twin muzzles were like evil black eyes, hunting McGill. He veered, ducked between the flashing hooves of the milling horses and under the tie-rail, heard the rattle of gunfire from the saloon, the sound of Ed Thorpe’s voice raised in fury. Then the shotgun roared.

  It was as if McGill’s thigh had been clawed by a cougar. Pain burned into his groin like streaks of liquid fire. His leg buckled. He went down, outstretched hand grabbing futilely at the cold night air, hit the dirt with a thump and heard the roar of the shotgun as Harding let go with the second barrel. And he was rolling, teeth bared with pain and both hands clamped to his leg, when the stocky gunman toppled lifelessly off the sidewalk and fell between the snorting horses to land on him like a wet grain sack and drive the breath from his body.

  Hands red with blood, McGill stiff-armed the dead weight off his chest, sucked in a mouthful of air and grabbed for the tie-rail’s upright. When he climbed to his feet, Jake Harding was alongside him, down off the plankwalk with thick legs braced as he fumbled in his vest pocket for fresh shotgun shells. His eyes were everywhere, his jaw tight.

  ‘Watch yourself, feller, there’s two more—’

  ‘Give me your pistol.’

  Without pause, Harding drew his Colt, tossed it to McGill, said, ‘For Christ’s sake stay behind the horses.’

  A rapid tattoo of shots drilled through his terse warning. Again the saloon doors were kicked open, and a man came tumbling out, a six-gun in each fist. He was tall and gangling. His glistening face was split by a savage grin, and he was snapping shots blind into the saloon while his slitted eyes rapidly searched the street. His swift glance alighted on Harding. He stepped back against the wall alongside the door. His first hurried shot whined over Harding’s head. The second clipped the shotgun as the storekeeper brought it level, tore it from his hands.

  Then McGill was shooting.

  He fired twice, saw a shot punch into the wall alongside the tall gunslinger, the second shatter the saloon window. Then the black-garbed gunman stepped coolly out of the shadows. He snapped a shot at McGill, watched him duck back into a crouch, then swivelled so that he and the lean man stood back to back. With one man facing the saloon, the other the street, they moved awkwardly towards the horses.

  For the third time the saloon’s swing doors crashed open. A massive, bearded man leaped out like a longhorn exploding from thick scrub, side-stepped to make way for Ed Thorpe.

  ‘That’s it!’ Thorpe roared. ‘It’s finished, all over, throw down your guns!’

  Pistol held cocked, McGill eased himself upright. Harding was down on one knee, groping for his shotgun. He found it, came up and shot a calculating glance at Thorpe and the bearded man, flanking the doorway. For several tense, strained seconds, the town of Coyote Gulch waited while the choice offered to the Spur riders of a sensible climb-down or a bloody gunfight balanced on a shaky fence.

  Then the black-garbed gunman spat a vicious curse. With a high overarm swing he sent the useless Spencer spinning end over end towards Harding. The storekeeper jerked his grizzled head out of the way and flung up an arm. Bone cracked as the rifle hit his wrist. He was still off balance when the gunman came across the plankwalk in a flying leap that carried him on to the back of a sleek, nervous horse. A quick flick of a gloved hand released the tied reins. A continuation of the same movement jerked the horse’s head around and it squealed and spun, its muscular shoulder slamming into McGill. His cocked pistol went off, the slug whining uselessly towards the night sky.

  Then the gunman was past, spurs raking the horse’s flanks as he sent it bounding away from the rail and out and around to race up the moonlit street.

  On the plankwalk, his lean sidekick was alone and outnumbered. But in a gun battle, fortunes fluctuate, nothing has permanence.

  ‘Skinner!’ he roared.

  His voice was a cry of outrage, his blazing eyes defiant. Ten feet away from him, Ed Thorpe growled a word at the bearded man, stepped back from the saloon and half turned to snap shots at the rider fast putting the dust of Coyote Gulch behind his mount’s flashing hooves. The big bearded man’s eyes were cool, fixed on the lean man, his pistol levelled. Down among the remaining horses, Harding was on one knee with a hand clamped to his cracked wrist, the empty shotgun forgotten in the dust.

  McGill had Harding’s pistol. The bearded man needed backup. As the black-garbed gunman tore up the street and the deputy’s pistol roared, McGill stepped away from the horses so that the bearded man could see him, saw his swift movement caught and noted as, for a split second, the cool blue eyes shifted from the gunslinger to the street.

  In that moment when concentration lapsed and McGill, too late, cursed his foolish action, the lean gunslinger pounced.

  A raking stride took him close to the man with the beard. A chopping left hand drove the levelled pistol aside. His own pistol came around in a looping blow that slashed across the big man’s cheekbone and sent bright blood spurting.

  McGill sprang forward, pistol raised, but the two men were locked together making a clean shot impossible. He bobbed left and right, feeling the weakness in his bloody thigh, cursing as the two men swayed. Then he became aware that the thunder of hoofbeats had faded and, with the mounted gunman gone, Ed Thorpe was spinning to face the action. But the bearded man was stunned and blinded, already going down as consciousness left him and his legs began to buckle. The lean gunman’s powerful shove sent him reeling. His head cracked against Thorpe’s jaw, his shoulder drove into the deputy’s guts. Both men toppled backwards, splintering the plankwalk’s rail. Arms flailing, the deputy landed in the dust with a thud and twisted away from the helpless big man.

  Now McGill’s way was clear.

  As the lean gunman wheeled from the splintered rail and cut across the plankwalk towards the horses, he at last managed a shot. He saw it clip the gunman’s hat, saw black eyes glint in the half-light as they picked him out, hopped awkwardly sideways as the answering shot winged his way – and stumbled over the dead gunman.

  He managed to save himself from falling with a spread hand flattened in the dust, fired a second shot from an unbalanced position with his knee on the dead man’s chest and knew he’d missed. And the lean gunman was moving fast, thinking even faster. Already he was in the saddle and swinging away from the saloon. He dug in his heels, flattened himself along his mount’s neck as Thorpe came up on his knees and fanned the hammer of his pistol. A hail of slugs screamed after the gunman. Magically unscathed, he spurred directly across the street and, as Thorpe’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber, he sent his excited mount leaping across the inert body of young Johnny McGill and disappeared down the narrow alley alongside Stolt’s Livery.