Andrew Lane - Red Leech

They both stood there for a moment, breathing heavily. The man wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

“You ain’t got the moxie,” he said. “Ah’m goin’ to come for that gun an’ ah’m goin’ to wrap it around your throat an’ choke the life from your scrawny body!"

He moved forward, and Sherlock raised the rifle menacingly.

“Don’t...” he said.

The man kept coming, a grimace stretching across his face and his dirty hands reaching forward for Sherlock.

Knowing that he had no choice, Sherlock pointed the rifle at the man’s chest and pulled the trigger, bracing himself for the resulting recoil.

Nothing happened. The rifle failed to fire.

Gilfillan grinned triumphantly. “Grit in the mechanism,” he said. “Got to treat them old rifles right. Smallest thing can stop ’em from firin’.” He reached into a trouser pocket and pulled out something small and dark. He flicked his hand, and suddenly there was a blade in it, a wickedly curved blade. “Not like a knife. Knives work under most circumstances, I find. Slower than a rifle, but a lot more fun.”

He stepped forward and slashed the knife sideways, aiming for Sherlock’s eyes. The boy stumbled back, feeling the cold breeze following in the wake of the blade as it brushed his eyelashes. The low rays of the sun, reflected from the sharp point at the end of the blade, traced a red line across Sherlock’s vision that persisted even when the knife had gone.

Gilfillan stepped forward, jerking the knife upward, trying to get it into Sherlock’s stomach, but Sherlock blocked it with the stock of the rifle. The impact knocked him backwards, but Gilfillan held his wrist and swore.

“That’s it,” he snarled. “I ain’t goin’ to treat you like an equal any more. I’m goin’ to slaughter you like cattle.”

He reached out and grabbed Sherlock by the ear, before the boy could get away, pulling him closer even as he raised the knife towards Sherlock’s throat. Instinctively, Sherlock bought the rifle up between them, trying to block the blade, but as the barrel passed his face he had a sudden inspiration and he jabbed it straight upward into Gilfillan’s right eye.

The American screamed and staggered backwards, clutching at his face. Blood streamed from between his fingers. Sherlock expected him to fall to the ground, incapacitated, but his intact eye fixed on Sherlock and he screamed again, a sound of pure rage that echoed through the woods and sent pigeons flying from the trees. Lurching forward, he held the knife extended, reaching out for Sherlock. Still holding the rifle, Sherlock swung it at the American’s head. It connected with the bandage, an impact that echoed all the way down the stock, through Sherlock’s hands and up into his shoulders. The American fell like a carelessly thrown sack of corn; gracelessly and shapelessly to the ground

Sherlock watched him for a few moments, half expecting him to climb back to his feet and try again, but he just lay there, unmoving apart from the laboured rise and fall of his chest. His right eye, from what Sherlock could see of it, was a crater of red flesh, while blood seeped through the bandage on his head, which was rising up as the flesh beneath it swelled even as Sherlock watched.

The man was like some supernatural force, impervious to pain and injuries that would fell a normal man. Sherlock felt his breath burning in his chest as he waited for Gilfillan to struggle to his feet again. Were all Americans like this, he wondered. Something to do with that frontier spirit that he had heard about? Part of him wanted to step forward and bring the rifle down several more times on the man’s head, making sure that he would never move again, but Sherlock wasn’t entirely sure whether that part of his brain was worried about Gilfillan regaining consciousness or whether he just wanted revenge for what the man had done to Amyus Crowe and tried to do to him. After a while he lowered the rifle. He wasn’t a murderer. Not a deliberate murderer, anyway.

When he was quite sure that Gilfillan wasn’t going to move for a while, he backed away, still watching, until he could hear Amyus Crowe’s horse whickering behind him. He turned.

Amyus Crowe lay in the dusty road. In the reddish light of evening, the blood on his forehead seemed almost to glow with a demonic intensity.

“Is he... ?” Sherlock started to ask, but he couldn’t bring himself to finish the question.

“He’s still breathin’,” Virginia answered breathlessly. Her accent had become more obvious.

She reached into a pocket and removed a scrap of linen — a handkerchief, Sherlock supposed. She was about to use it to wipe her father’s head, but Sherlock took it from her.

“I’ll wet it in the river,” he said.

She nodded gratefully.

He dashed across to the point where the falling American gunman had cut a swathe through the rushes with his body before emerging and shooting Amyus Crowe. Getting as close to the river as he could without falling in, Sherlock moistened the handkerchief, then returned to where Amyus Crowe lay. Virginia had straightened out his arms and legs so that he was lying more normally, not twisted up in the way he had landed. As Sherlock bent to join her, he noticed that Crowe’s chest was moving up and down and his eyelids were fluttering. It seemed like ages since Crowe had fallen from his horse, but Sherlock realized that it could only have been a handful of seconds, less than a minute at most. The fight with Gilfillan hadn’t been long, but it had been intense, and that had made it seem long.

Virginia was running her hands up and down her father’s arms and legs. “No broken bones, far as I can tell,” she said. “Don’t know about his ribs, although I’d be surprised if he hadn’t cracked a couple. He’s got a whole load of cuts and grazes, mind.”

“He was lucky,” Sherlock pointed out. “This close to the river, the ground is soft and muddy. If he’d come off the horse earlier, where the ground was baked hard, he might be dead by now.”

Virginia took the handkerchief from him and ran it across Crowe’s forehead. It came away bloody, revealing a long scratch which immediately began to bleed again.

“I think this is where the bullet hit,” she said.

“Another bit of luck. A couple of inches to the left and it would have gone through his temple.” Sherlock took a deep breath, and tried to stop his hands from shaking. “We ought to find a doctor.”

Virginia shook her head. “We need to get him back to the cottage. I can look after him there. As long as there’s no broken bones, what he needs is rest.” She sighed. “I’ve got a feeling he’s been through worse than this and survived.” She glanced at Sherlock, glanced away, then glanced back again, noticing his various bumps, scrapes, cuts and bruises. Are you OK?” she asked.

“I’ve had worse while playing rugby,” he said.

She frowned, and shook her head.

“It’s a game which I don’t like and which I don’t play very well. The point is, I’ll be all right.”

“Did you get him?” she asked angrily.

“I stopped him,” Sherlock replied, “but I think your father and my brother will want to talk to him, so I didn’t hurt him too much. Even though I could have done.”

“Maybe you should have,” she said darkly.

Thinking about head injuries, Sherlock asked: “What about concussion? The ball injured your father’s head, and he may have hit it as well.”

Virginia gazed at him. Her expression was fixed and angry, but her eyes told a different story. They were desperate.

“We’ll have to watch him,” she said. “Look for signs of dizziness, sickness, nausea or confusion.”