Max Collins - The Legend of Caleb York

In the tan Stetson now — leaving his shotgun behind, too, since the guard hadn’t been holding one — he eased over to the corral and the man posted there. This guard was short but burly, wearing typical cowhand garb down to the leather chaps, and cradling a double-barreled shotgun — a twelve-gauge, like York’s own back in the barn.

That might prove lucky as well, since the cartridges in his pocket would work in that weapon as well.

Strolling over to the cowboy, York kept his head slightly lowered — the resemblance didn’t carry that far — and the man asked, “What is it, Sam? Somethin’ up?”

York raised a forefinger of his left hand as if to say, “Just a minute,” and when he got close enough, put that left over the guard’s mouth as with his right he shoved the Bowie deep into the man’s belly. Stepping slightly to one side, York made a circular motion with the inserted blade, opening him up, then let the dead man fall onto what had emptied out of him.

York started dragging the gutted figure on its belly by the elbows to hide him behind a nearby trough, leaving a snail-like trail.

When the final watchdog, the one who roamed, came around from in back of the relay station building, he saw York, who was only halfway to the trough with his cargo. With much of the relay station frontage between them, the man contorted his face as he raised his Winchester, taking aim.

But York’s swift sideways throw of the Bowie caught the guard in the chest and rocked him back, rifle fumbling from his fingers and clunking to the ground. Still on his feet, the guard wavered, his mouth dropping open and his eyes popping wide, though he had nothing to say and nothing to see. He fell backward with the knife extended from him like a handle.

York moved quickly to him, not running, because the hard-packed earth of the apron where stages pulled up might give heavy footfall away. He removed the knife and dragged the body behind some barrels, leaving it there. Then — hearing conversation and something else... digging? — he crept around the near side of the weathered gray building, keeping low, knife in his fist.

Plastering his back to the sidewall, he peeked around and saw two men, each with a shovel, digging a grave. The ground appeared fairly hard and they were only two feet down or so. Nearby, on its back like a drunk after a very hard night, lay the corpse of one of their own — identified by Lola as Watters.

York considered: Two at once with a knife? Both men with tied-down sidearms?

How could he manage that?

Maybe he should go back for one of the shotguns, either his own in the barn or the dead guard’s at the corral. While he tried to come up with something, they made the hole a little deeper and one of the men, a bug-eyed character in a low-crowned plainsman hat, threw his shovel down.

“ You finish it, Colton. I’m headin’ back inside. I am dry as this damn hole.”

“Better stay put, Maxwell,” the other one advised, his smallness emphasized by his absurdly wide-brimmed sugar-loaf sombrero. “The show in there might not be over yet, and Vint don’t seem to want no audience.”

York did not like the sound of that.

“That’s his problem,” Maxwell said, and threw down his shovel with a clang. “I need a drink.”

York tensed, but Maxwell headed back around the other way. That meant, coming around front of the building, the ex-shoveler might notice that neither the barn nor the corral guard was at his post.

Well, York thought, one knife per one man has been working just fine...

But the bug-eyed gunman didn’t notice, moving quickly, heading through the batwing doors, single-minded in pursuit of that drink.

York went back to where the other shoveler, Colton, was still at work, his sombrero off now. The man was muttering to himself, pausing to wipe sweat from his brow with the back of a hand. Then he got back to digging.

Knife in hand, York slipped up behind the digger, who was still down in the hole — maybe three feet deep now — but Colton, pausing in his work, sensed something and whipped around, swinging the shovel. York jumped back, dirt flying, the shovel missing him but knocking into the blade and jarring the Bowie from his grasp. The big knife tumbled away and the man swung the shovel again.

But York caught it by the handle, jerked it from the man’s grasp, and swung it himself, like a bat, with the back of the shovel smashing the man’s face in, snapping teeth like brittle twigs and jamming the bones of the digger’s nose up into his brain. The little man’s close-set eyes rolled up with mostly white showing as two blood trails trickled out and curved left and right, making his mustache red, and he flopped backward into the hole he’d dug.

A perfect fit.

York leaned in to make sure the digger wasn’t breathing — he wasn’t — then dumped the shovel in with the more recent corpse before tossing the sombrero over the hideous crushed-in thing that had been a face.

Clovis Maxwell came in through the batwing doors and what he saw tightened his belly. He had seen much and laughed at things that sickened most men. Yet this turned his stomach.

The dance-hall woman, Lola, was on the floor, sobbing, her clothing torn, tattered, bloody. Her face was a mess, bruised and bleeding, eyes swollen, hair an awful witch’s tangle.

Breathing hard, Rhomer was standing over her, tucking his shirt into his pants. She was crawling away from him, apparently trying to get to the end of the bar, maybe so she could get back behind there like the wounded animal she was and die in peace.

Rhomer, a cheek scratched and trickling red, grinned over at him. “You did miss a good show, Clovis boy.”

Maxwell made a face. “I wasn’t invited, remember? Hell, looks like you didn’t leave much for me.”

He barked a laugh. “That’s more than what’s gonna be left of Cullen here, if he don’t come to his senses.”

Rhomer stepped over the broken, crawling creature that Lola had become and approached Cullen, slumped on the floor, the dead ranch hand’s head still in his lap. The old man looked dazed, his unseeing face masked in horror.

Rhomer said, “Too bad you can’t see the lovely Lola, Cullen. Then you’d know for sure what’ll happen to you unless you sign them cows over to us.”

The blind man tried to talk, but it took several tries before he got out, “It... it wouldn’t do you a damn bit of good, anyway.”

Frowning, Maxwell asked, “What’s the old man mean by that, Rhomer?”

“No idea,” Rhomer admitted. The front of his gray shirt was splotched with the woman’s blood.

From the floor, Cullen said in defiance, “Every one of my stock, every inch of my land, is in my daughter’s name. You lousy, filthy piece of scum... you and Harry Gauge and the rest won’t get one damn head of it.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that, old man.”

From the batwing doors came: “What odds would you give me, Rhomer?”

York pushed through, shotgun barrels first — weapon on loan from the late corral guard.

Rhomer lurched toward his holstered gun where it, in its belt, lay on the bar. Maxwell, standing near York’s end of the bar, had his hand on his gun, half-drawing it, when the man with the shotgun again spoke.

“Got a barrel for each of you fellas,” he said, “and I won’t even have to aim much.”

Both men turned into statues, then each man’s eyes went to the other’s, and instinctively both sent their gaze past York to the world outside.

York shook his head, letting them stare into the twin black eyes of the shotgun — eyes that stared right back at them. “Nobody out there to come to your rescue, boys. Just a whole lot of dead men. You’re gonna want to put ’em up now.”