William Johnstone - Thunder of Eagles

Smitty knocked lightly on the door, then pushed it open. “Mr. Rudd?” he called.

“Yes, come in,” a voice answered from inside.

Rudd was a man in his sixties, with white hair and white muttonchop whiskers. He was sitting at his desk, writing in a ledger, but looked up, then nodded as he recognized Smitty.

“Mr. Smith,” he said. “You would be here for the Garrison shipment, I take it?”

“Yes, sir. Did everything get here that was supposed to?”

“It did,” Rudd replied. “It’s the rearmost car at the back of the marshaling area. Let’s see, the number of the car is”—he paused to consult a book—“yes, here it is. The number is 10031. Here, I’ll write it down for you.”

“Thanks,” Smitty said, taking the number from Rudd. “Is all of it in the same car?”

“Yes, everything in that one car. Will you be signing for it?”

“No, I will sign for it,” Falcon said.

“And you are?”

“Falcon MacCallister.”

“Falcon MacCallister?” Rudd said, reacting to the name. “Are you the famous Falcon MacCallister?”

“I don’t know about the famous part,” Falcon replied.

“Yes, sir, this is the same Falcon MacCallister you’ve prob’ly heard about,” Smitty said. “After what happened to our last shipment, General Garrison hired Mr. MacCallister to ride along with us.”

“Yes, yes, I heard about what happened to the last shipment. What a shame. Mr. True was a fine man, a true gentleman. I will miss him. Uh, Mr. MacCallister, no offense, but do you have some authorization to sign for General Garrison’s shipment? It’s railroad regulations, you understand.”

“No offense taken,” Falcon said, showing the stationmaster the letter Garrison had given him before he left town this morning.

Rudd put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, hooking them carefully over one ear at a time. Then he read the letter slowly, as if going over each word. Then, he cleared his throat and put the paper aside.

“Sign here, please,” he said, sliding a bill of lading toward Falcon.

Falcon signed the document, then he and Smitty returned to the wagons.

“Back there in the corner, boys!” Smitty called to the other drivers. He pointed to the car in the most remote part of the yard.

Lee Davis and Gene Willoughby had been cutting weeds around the depot when Falcon went in to talk to the stationmaster.

“Son of a bitch!” Davis said. “Son of a bitch, it’s him!”

“It’s who?” Willoughby said.

“Wait, I’ll be right back.”

“I ain’t cuttin’ all these damn weeds by myself, you know,” Willoughby called out after Davis dropped his weed hook and started toward the depot.

Davis moved up close to the window that opened onto Rudd’s office, then looked in. Seeing what he wanted to see, he hurried back to Willoughby, whose right earlobe sported a ragged, encrusted wound.

“It’s him,” Davis said.

“Yeah, that’s what you said a while ago,” Willoughby replied as he continued to swing the weed hook. “Only you ain’t said who.” The expression in his voice showed that he had little interest in whoever it was Davis was talking about.

“Who? Him, that’s who,” Davis said. “Falcon MacCallister, the fella that shot off your earlobe when we tried to hold up that stage.”

That got Willoughby’s attention and he looked up sharply. “What? Are you sure?”

“Damn right I’m sure. I not only recognized him, I heard him tell Rudd that was his name. You might remember, that’s the son of a bitch that took our guns.”

“Yeah, and our boots, too,” Willoughby said. “Where is he?”

“He’s with them wagons,” Davis said, pointing to the three wagons that were now working their way across the tracks toward a freight car that was sitting alone.

“Well, what do you know?” Willoughby said. “I’ve been waitin’ for a chance to get even with that bastard, and here it is.”

Davis smiled. “Yeah, I thought you might be happy about this.”

“Damn!”

“What?”

“We ain’t got no guns,” Willoughby said. “Like you said, MacCallister took ’em. So, how are we going to do this?”

“I know where there’s a couple pistols,” Davis said.

“Where?”

“In a cabinet in the back of Rudd’s office.”

“They loaded?”

“Yes, they keep ’em loaded all the time. But if you can get Mr. Rudd to come out here, I can get hold of ’em.”

“How’m I goin’ to get him out here?”

“Here,” Davis said. “Put your hook under these railroad spikes. I’ll do it, too. We’ll see if we can pull a few of them up.”

Working together, they pulled up a couple of spikes, then were able to move the rail slightly out of line. “That’ll get his interest,” Davis said as he threw the spikes out into the adjacent woods.

Davis wandered off so that he wouldn’t be noticed. Then he waited as Willoughby went in to summon Rudd. A moment later, he saw Rudd come out of the depot, then stand over the track looking down at it and shaking his head.

“I’m glad it’s not the high iron,” Davis heard Rudd say, referring to the main line. “But even though this is a spur, it has to be fixed. We can’t be having cars run off the track here.”

With Rudd engaged, Davis went into the stationmaster’s office, opened the cabinet, and took out two pistols. Checking them quickly, he saw that both were loaded. He was back outside by the time Rudd returned from his inspection of the track.

“Did you get them?” Willoughby asked.

By way of answering him, Davis handed him one of the pistols.

“Let’s do it,” Willoughby said.

Falcon was standing by the front of the one wagon that had already been loaded, watching as the men loaded the second of the three. It wasn’t that he was too lazy, or too good to help with the loading; it was that he appreciated professionalism, and the three freight wagon drivers were professionals. They knew exactly how to load the wagons to get the maximum efficiency from the available space, and also where to place the weight in order to make the wagon ride better and to enable the team of horses to work more efficiently.

Falcon scratched a match on the weathered wood of the wagon, and was just holding it up to light the cigarette he had just rolled when a bullet slammed into the wagon just inches away.

Drawing his pistol and spinning in the same moment, he saw two men standing about twenty-five yards behind him. There was something familiar about them, though for the moment, he didn’t have time to consider what it was.

“Damnit, Davis, you missed!” one of the two men yelled. He fired his own gun even as he was yelling.

Falcon fired twice, and both men went down. With his gun held ready, he hurried toward them. When he got there, one was already dead, the other was dying. That was when he saw that they were the same two men who had tried to hold up the stagecoach between La Junta and Higbee.

“Damnit!” Falcon said angrily. “Are you crazy? I wasn’t after you. Why did you do this? You got yourselves killed for no reason!”

“It was supposed to be the other way around,” the one remaining outlaw said. This was the one with the mangled ear. “We was supposed to kill you.”

“What’s happening? What’s going on?” the wagon drivers called, and seeing Falcon standing over a couple of bodies, they hurried down to see, drawn by a morbid curiosity. By the time they got there, both outlaws were dead.

“I didn’t figure we would be hit until we were on the road on the way back,” Smitty said.

“They weren’t after the loads.”

“They weren’t?”

“No,” Falcon answered. “This had nothing to do with the loads. This was personal. These men were after me.”