William Johnstone: Dead Before Sundown

“What’s going on in there?” the second mate asked.

Frank thought that was pretty obvious, but he suppressed the irritation he felt.

“Some men behind the bar are shooting it out with one hombre behind a table,” he explained. “I think the man behind the table is Salty.”

“Then he’s in a bad spot.”

Frank nodded. “That’s right. Eventually those varmints will shoot that table to pieces. I’m going around back to see if I can get in that way.”

Handlesman reached under his blue jacket and brought out a short-barreled revolver. “I’ll come with you,” he said.

Frank started to refuse but changed his mind before he said anything. If Handlesman wanted to get mixed up in this ruckus, it was his decision to make.

“What about me and the rest of the men?” Monroe asked.

“You’re not armed,” Handlesman snapped. “Stay out here unless you hear me yelling for you. Then you can charge in and do the best you can.”

Monroe nodded. “Aye.”

Frank put his hat on and jerked his head toward the black, narrow alley at the side of the building. “Come on.”

He and Handlesman made their way through the stygian gloom in the alley. Frank banged his knee against something, but not hard enough to hurt him. Trash rustled under his feet. More rustling, accompanied by squeaking, told him that rats were fleeing in front of him and Handlesman.

They reached the rear corner of the building. It was black as sin back there. Frank had to feel his way along with his left hand on the wall until he came to a window.

When he tried to raise it, it wouldn’t budge. The window had been either nailed or painted shut, and he didn’t have time to figure out which.

“Give me your jacket,” he said to Handlesman.

“What?”

“Your jacket,” Frank snapped.

Handlesman shrugged out of the garment and handed it to Frank, who wrapped it around his gun. The shooting was still going on in the saloon’s front room. That would help cover up any racket he made back here.

Anyway, he didn’t have any time to waste.

Using the jacket-wrapped gun butt, Frank smashed the windowpane. The broken glass clattered to the floor inside the room, but no one reacted to it, telling him the room probably was empty. He raked the Colt’s barrel around the edges of the window to clear away any shards.

“You might want to wait until you can check for broken glass before you put that back on,” he told Handlesman as he handed the jacket back to the second mate.

Handlesman grunted. “I’ll do that.”

Frank holstered his gun long enough to haul himself through the window. He drew it again as he turned back to give the burly ship’s officer a hand.

If anything, this back room of the saloon was even darker than the alley outside. The blackness was relieved only by a faint line of light that seeped under the bottom of a door leading into the main room.

As Frank looked at that line of light, he saw it pulse, brightening in time with the muzzle flashes from the guns going off on the other side of it. He gripped the Colt tightly and moved to the door. A second later he grasped the knob.

Frank turned the knob and eased the door open. It opened inward, which meant he had a chance to look out into the saloon’s main room before anybody noticed him.

From where he was, he could see along the area behind the bar. Three men crouched there, just as he’d thought. One wore the dirty apron of a bartender and had a head as bald as a cue ball. The other two sported somewhat shabby suits and derby hats. They looked like gamblers or whoremongers, maybe both.

The important thing was that none of them was Salty Stevens. Frank couldn’t be absolutely sure the man they were trying to kill was Salty, but Frank’s gut told him it was pretty likely.

He was about to step out and tell the men behind the bar to throw down their guns, when he suddenly realized that one of them looked familiar. It took Frank a moment to figure out where he had seen the man before and remember his name.

One of the derby-hatted men was the brutish criminal known as Yeah Mow Hopkins. Hopkins had been one of Soapy Smith’s top henchmen back in Skagway the year before, and after Smith had been killed in a shootout with a vigilante, Hopkins had lit a shuck from the Alaskan settlement, along with some of Smith’s other men. If they had stayed, they would have risked being on the wrong end of a lynch rope.

Seeing Hopkins made Frank more convinced than ever that Salty was behind that overturned table, which was starting to be pocked with bullet holes. If the old-timer had walked into Red Mike’s looking for a drink and recognized Hopkins as Frank had, his anger over being cleaned out by Smith’s gang might have prompted him to slap leather before he really thought about what he was doing.

All the saloon’s other customers must have fled when the shooting started. The place was empty except for the four combatants—and Frank and Handlesman in the back room.

Frank couldn’t afford to wait any longer. He pulled the door open wider and stepped out into the saloon’s main room, leveling the Colt as he bellowed, “Hold your fire! Drop those guns!”

All three men jerked toward him. The bartender and the other man brought their guns up. Hopkins turned and fled toward the end of the bar.

The would-be killers had called the tune, although they almost certainly didn’t realize that they were about to dance with the Drifter, one of the deadliest gunfighters around. Flame spouted from the Colt’s gun muzzle as Frank put a slug in the bartender’s chest.

The bald man went over backward, crashing into the bottles on a shelf attached to the wall and upsetting them. The bottles fell and shattered, and the reek of spilled rotgut suddenly mingled with the stench of gunsmoke.

The other man got a shot off, but it went wild, whipping harmlessly past Frank, who fired again. His bullet shattered the man’s right shoulder and knocked him to the floor, where he dropped his gun, clutched at the wound, and howled in pain.

Meanwhile, Yeah Mow Hopkins tried to escape out the saloon’s front door, but he stumbled as the old Remington roared again. Hopkins threw a shot toward the table. The man hidden there fired yet again. Blood sprayed from Hopkins’s hip as the slug clipped him and sent him spinning off his feet.

Frank lunged behind the bar and kicked away the gun that the second man had dropped. The bartender stared up out of lifeless eyes. He wasn’t a threat anymore.

Handlesman had emerged from the back room, gun in hand. Frank told the second mate, “Keep an eye on this one,” as he nodded toward the man with the busted shoulder. He stepped out from behind the bar.

“Frank? Is that you?”

The slightly mush-mouthed voice came from behind the overturned table. Frank recognized it, just as he had expected to.

“Yeah, it’s me, Salty,” he replied. He trained his gun on the fallen Yeah Mow Hopkins as he added, “You can come out from behind there now. Are you all right?”

The old-timer stood up with the Remington in his hand. His battered hat had fallen off during the fracas, and his white hair was tangled.

“I got a few nicks and scratches from all the splinters flyin’ around, but I ain’t hurt bad,” Salty said. “Them varmints threw a whole heap o’ lead, but none of it found me.”

“That’s good.” Frank approached Hopkins cautiously. The man seemed to be in shock as he lay there on the sawdust-littered floor and bled from wounds in his hip and thigh, but Frank knew better than to take unnecessary chances. The barrel of his gun didn’t waver.

Salty bent and picked up his hat. As he crammed it back on his head, he said, “You know who that fella is?”