William Johnstone - Texas Bloodshed

He didn’t see the little gully tucked away in a fold of the hills until she fired at him from it. Powder smoke spurted as the shot rang out. At the same instant, Scratch heard the wind-rip of the bullet past his ear.

The Remington in his hand roared as he kicked his horse down the slope toward the gully. He squeezed off three shots that had Cara ducking for cover.

Scratch was on top of the gully before he realized it. Suddenly aware that his horse couldn’t stop in time, he booted the animal’s flanks again and sent it lunging into the air in a daring leap that carried horse and rider all the way over the gully.

The horse landed awkwardly, though, and lost its footing. Scratch yanked his feet out of the stirrups and left the saddle in a dive. A cloud of ashes rose around him and choked him as he landed on his shoulder and rolled. Pain shot through him. His old bones didn’t take kindly to such punishment.

But he was all right, and he came up on a knee with both guns drawn as Cara burst out of the gully mounted on her horse. The revolver in her hand blasted at him. He threw himself to the side and returned the fire as her bullets smacked into the ground beside him, kicking up dirt and more ashes.

She was past him in the blink of an eye. Scratch’s right-hand Remington was empty, but the left-hand gun still held a couple of rounds. He lifted it and squeezed them off just as she twisted in the saddle and flung one final shot back at him.

Scratch had time to see her body jerk as if she were hit, then something slammed into his head with tremendous force, knocking him down so that he was stretched out on his back. He tried to get up, but his muscles refused to obey him. The fire must have started up again, he thought crazily, because red, leaping flames seemed to fill his brain. He was vaguely aware that the drumming of hoofbeats continued, then a terrible roaring sound welled up and drowned them out. That roar was his own blood inside his skull, he realized.

And Cara was getting away. There was nothing he could do to stop her now. Consciousness had started to slip away from him, and when it went, it would probably take his life with it, he knew.

“S-sorry, Bo ...” he whispered through lips crusted with bitter ashes.

Then the darkness took him.

CHAPTER 34

There had been a drought in East Texas, too, but nowhere near as bad as the one that gripped the country west of Fort Worth. So even though it was still winter, the countryside around Tyler was considerably greener than it had been over there in the Palo Pinto Hills where Bo, Scratch, and Brubaker had fought their battle with the Gentry gang.

The three men looked considerably better, too, as they left the courthouse. They were dressed in clean clothes again, Bo had a new hat to replace the one with the hole shot through it, and although Brubaker’s left arm was in a black silk sling and Scratch had a bandage around his head so that he had to wear his hat cuffed back a little, those were the only outward signs of their injuries. Bo hadn’t been wounded at all during the ruckus.

All three men were still a little hoarse when they talked, though, and from time to time fits of coughing seized them.

One such fit struck Brubaker now. The deputy stopped and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, coughing into it until the spasms subsided. He glared at the dark stains on the handkerchief and rasped, “I think I’m gonna be coughin’ up ashes the rest of my borned days.”

“You’ll get over it sooner or later, Forty-two,” Bo told him.

“Yeah, but it’ll be a long time before the smell of smoke stops givin’ you the fantods,” Scratch added. “Maybe never. I feel the same way.”

“Well, at least the job’s done now,” Brubaker said as he put away his handkerchief. “And none too soon to suit me. I’ll be glad to get back to Fort Smith. I plan on headin’ that direction as soon as I’ve seen the sentence carried out, so I can tell Judge Parker I saw the last of the Gentry gang swing with my own eyes.”

“Only it ain’t the last of ’em, is it?” Scratch asked quietly.

“You said you thought you hit Cara with your last shot,” Bo pointed out. “She may not have made it.”

The three of them had just come from Judge Josiah Southwick’s courtroom, where the esteemed federal jurist that Bo and Scratch still knew from their youth as “Bigfoot” had sentenced Dayton Lowe, Jim Elam, and Cutter Brown to be hanged by the neck until dead. Brown was the outlaw who had surrendered in the violent aftermath of the wildfire, but he had only postponed his fate by doing so.

Bo had galloped over the hills and found Scratch lying unconscious on the slope overlooking the Brazos River. Blood and ashes had painted a ghastly pallor over Scratch’s face, but he’d been breathing, and once Bo had cleaned up the wound he had seen that his old friend was only grazed on the side of the head, enough to knock him out but not enough to kill him. When Scratch had come to, Bo had informed him that that cast-iron skull of his had saved his life again.

“Cara got away,” Scratch had said then, bothered by that more than he was the head wound.

“I know,” Bo said. “But wherever she is, she’s somebody else’s problem now.”

It had taken the rest of the day to round up some horses and recover those pack animals loaded down with stolen loot. Bo found his horse, which had survived the fire although its hide was singed in places. They never found any sign of Brubaker’s mount.

Nobody wanted to spend the night out there in that smoky wasteland, so they had ridden through the darkness back to Weatherford with their prisoner. The wildfire had burned itself out before it reached the town, but it had left a wide swath of devastation through the Cross Timbers. The area would be a long time recovering from this ... but as Bo had said, it would recover.

From Weatherford, Brubaker sent a wire to Fort Smith explaining the situation to Judge Parker. Brubaker kept the details of the judge’s reply to himself, but Bo got the feeling that Parker had pretty well burned up the telegraph wires.

Brubaker didn’t seem worried, though. With the exception of Cara LaChance, the entire Gentry gang was either scattered, wiped out, or due to hang, so they no longer posed a threat to Indian Territory.

Losing Cara was a bitter pill to swallow, but telegrams would go out to the chief marshals across the frontier, warning them to have their men keep an eye out for her. If she was still alive, she would turn up sooner or later.

The local sawbones had insisted on keeping Scratch in the hospital for a couple of days “to make sure that bullet didn’t addle your brain any more than it already was to start with,” as Bo put it. When the doctor pronounced Scratch well enough to travel, the three of them set out for Gainesville, taking their prisoner with them.

Once there, they had picked up Brubaker’s wagon, loaded Lowe and Elam into it along with Brown, and headed for Tyler to finish the long journey at last. Brubaker told the local lawman to go ahead and release Early Nesbit, since they didn’t have to worry about Hank Gentry coming after them anymore.

Scratch had told them how Cara killed Gentry, confirming for all of them, as if they needed confirmation, that the blonde was plumb loco.

When they reached Tyler, Bo and Scratch had had a rather uproarious reunion with Bigfoot Southwick, who momentarily lost the dignity that normally accrued to a federal judge and slapped his old friends on the back, boisterously bellowing, “Bo Creel and Scratch Morton! Hell, I figured some other judge would’ve hung you sidewindin’ scoundrels a long time ago!”

“There wouldn’t be no justice in that,” Scratch had told him with a grin. “If anybody should’ve shook hands with the hangman, it’s you, Bigfoot.”