Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) - Mickey Spillane (classic novels .TXT) 📗

even as she’d been sitting right here on this porch! It would have taken someone incredibly deft, capable of the sneaking silence of . . .

. . . an Indian. The kind of Indian who could send fiery arrows into the night, and turn a bunkhouse into a charnel house.

Jackson had reported seeing an Indian among the Circle G men at Sugar Creek, and Buck O’Fallon thought it had been the Chiricahua Kid, a notorious renegade Apache turned outlaw.

Could this be his handiwork?

These thoughts raced through her mind, as she watched her foreman working to get that branch loose and out, which he did, casting it aside; but the flames were encroaching his position, the entire building swarming with dancing demons of orange and yellow and blue. Men within were shouting. Screaming....

And by the time he got the door open, the men who came running out through billowing smoke were already burning, glowing, shrieking, probably rushing from the back of the building, where arrows had apparently hit the rear exterior walls, the other men within getting out of the way of the flaming figures, comrades they couldn’t help and hoped to avoid.

The race the burning men were running didn’t last long—they made only a few yards before flopping to the ground and soon the only movement coming from the crisply blackened figures were the flames emanating like a ghastly victory dance. The other men came stumbling out, coughing, hands over their faces. The bunkhouse was lost under the blanket of flickering orange-blue, the roar of the conflagration punctuated by crackling, a din so ear-filling that it took a few moments for the hoofbeats to register . . .

. . . hoofbeats of horses carrying a dozen-plus men, an invading army coming down the lane and charging into the open hard-dirt apron around which the outbuildings and ranch house were arranged. Handguns blazed their own little jagged orange fires as rounds were triggered into the staggering cowboys who didn’t even have time to know how they were dying or at whose hands.

From her perch on the porch, Willa began returning fire and two men tumbled from the saddles, plummeting to the ground, dead or dying, their horses charging on without them. The onslaught was something of a blur, but she recognized certain riders as being of the Arizona rustling bunch, the so-called Cowboys, who’d recently been hired on at the Circle G.

In between the burning bunkhouse and the oncoming riders, on the slight slope where the only thing alive about the charred dead men sprawled on the grass was the flames dancing on their backs, knelt Bill Jackson, cool and steady and still as he carefully picked off intruders, one, two, three....

But from behind the inferno that had been the bunkhouse scurried an absurd figure in fringed buckskin, a young man on foot, boyish but not a boy—wasn’t that one of Victoria Hammond’s sons? Like a refugee from a Wild West show, the buckskin cowboy, gun in hand, drew a bead on the kneeling Jackson, who did not see this ridiculous threat coming.

She screamed a warning, but the whoops and war cries of the invading force—whittled by a third now—merged with the growl of the vortex of flame and drowned her out. The crack of the gunshot got lost in the general clamor, but she saw the spurt of blood, a ribbon of red unfurling, exiting Jackson’s left temple, and he tottered for just a moment, already dead before falling onto his side, like a milk bottle hit by a County Fair ball.

Young Hammond had an awful smile on his face, an odd combination of glee and horror. But he didn’t wear it long. Willa took aim with that .22 in her fist, just as she had when her father taught her to shoot tin cans for practice. She fired twice and both rounds hit the buckskin figure in the chest, and he took the bullets like he’d been shoved there, twice. Not hard. Just shoved.

He looked down at himself, at two black holes that wept single scarlet tears, then gazed across the open area at Willa standing there with gunsmoke twirling like a tiny lariat from her gun barrel. The glee left, the horror remained, and then he took two tentative steps, with the gun still in hand, before falling flat on his boyish face.

Wielding a double-barreled shotgun, plump, white-bearded Harmon emerged from his cookhouse, in a red long john top and britches he’d thrown on—he slept in back—and let one barrel’s worth blow a rider off his saddle. Then he repeated the activity and reloaded.

Over by the horse barn—the burning bunkhouse sending sparks and cinders treacherously its way—lanky old Lou Morgan, the wrangler in charge there, was kneeling with his Winchester taking aim and bringing down more riders, calm as a hunter sighting a deer. And another deer. And another.

Though they were outnumbered heavily—just Willa and the cookie and wrangler and the now dead foreman—the invaders were getting driven back. Or maybe it was just that the attackers had accomplished what they’d set out to, now that every one of the cowhands who’d been in that bunkhouse been sent to heaven or hell, as the case might be.

At any rate, the raiders were gone as quick as they’d come, leaving a stirring of dust by way of farewell.

Willa stood and breathed hard, through the acrid taste and smell of smoke. She assessed the situation, sending her eyes around her property. The shack where those men had once slept before fiery death came knocking was spitting embers and cinders at the nearby barn. It would be only a matter of time before that building caught fire, too—the wind blowing north was the only saving grace thus far—and, of course, that was the structure within which all their horses were stabled.

No more contemplation.

Time to get to work.

She gathered Harmon and they joined Morgan, whom she told, “We need to start leading the horses from the barn into the corral.”

Morgan said gruffly,