Charles West - Day of the Wolf

“You know, that mouth of yours is liable to get your face busted up,” Buck threatened. He was about to say more when Skinner called out from the back door.

“Lookee here what I found,” he announced, herding Billie Jean and Rose into the saloon ahead of him.

“Well, now,” Buck crowed smugly. “All three of them whores is here. There weren’t but two of ’em here that night, ’cause one of ’em went with him—that little young one, I bet, ’cause I ain’t ever seen her before. You ever seen her before, Skinner?”

“Nope,” Skinner replied.

“So that looks to me like that murderin’ bastard came back here,” Buck went on. “And that means you all have been lyin’ about it.” He pulled his pistol and stuck it in Marvin’s face. “And I don’t like bein’ lied to.” Terrified, Marvin clutched the bar to keep from collapsing.

“He ain’t got nothin’ to do with the man you’re lookin’ for,” Lorena insisted angrily. “He doesn’t know where Wolf is.”

Buck cocked his head to gaze at her. A smug smile spread slowly across his rough features. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he don’t know where Wolf is. I’m askin’ the wrong person. Bring that one over here, Skinner.” He pointed to Rose. Skinner grabbed her by the back of her neck and pushed her over to face Buck. Buck took hold of her throat and pulled her up close against him. “Now, here’s the way we’re gonna play this game,” he said, glaring deeply into her terrified eyes. “I ain’t gonna ask you but once, and you’re gonna tell me where your boyfriend, Wolf, is. ’Cause if you don’t, I’m gonna put a bullet right between your eyes. And then I’m gonna ask the same question to the next one, and the next one, till somebody tells me what I need to know.” He clamped down hard on Rose’s throat. “Now, what about it, missy? Is he worth dyin’ for?”

“You lookin’ for me?”

The voice came from the front door of the saloon and startled everyone. Buck reacted quickly, shoving Rose out of the way and swinging his .44 around to aim at Wolf, but his pistol fell from his hand to clatter loudly against the floor. Then he dropped to the floor beside it, an ugly hole in the side of his head. Skinner managed to fire once, but not before Wolf ducked behind the door frame, where he dropped to one knee, swung his rifle around the frame, and fired a second shot. This one, because of his haste to fire, was not a killing shot, only hitting Skinner in the lower leg, but it was enough to cause him to panic, and he dived back through the doorway into the hall. He attempted to peek around the door to take another shot at Wolf, but the angry avenger was now walking across the barroom floor toward him, firing one shot after another as fast as he could pull the trigger and chamber another round. The one-man volley was tearing the door and its frame to pieces as chunks of wood flew in every direction. Fearing his life was about to end, Skinner scrambled to his feet and ran for the door at the end of the hallway, ignoring the bullet wound in his lower leg. Wolf reached the hallway in time to see the frantic outlaw as he neared the outside door. He raised his Winchester with time to place the front sight squarely between Skinner’s shoulder blades and pulled the trigger, only to hear the metallic click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber. A second later Skinner was gone. Wolf started to give chase, anxious to end his war with the Dawson brothers, but he felt compelled to make sure Rose and the others were all right and no one had been hit by a stray bullet. He could not explain what had caused him to return to the saloon: instinct, gut reaction, or something else. He just knew that he had felt that something was wrong. Whatever the reason, it had been a critical decision.

Reloading the magazine in his rifle as he went back into the saloon, he looked at Rose first. She was shaken, sitting on the floor by the bar where she had fallen when Buck had shoved her, but otherwise appeared to be unharmed. Marvin, his face still ashen with fright, exclaimed, “Somebody go find the sheriff!”

“What for?” Lorena responded. “He won’t come.” A sheriff had recently been appointed by a committee of business owners in the gulch, but fighting and shootings went pretty much unpunished in the wild boomtown.

His rifle fully loaded again, Wolf looked around the room once more before declaring, “I reckon everybody’s all right. I’ll be going after the other one.” He turned and went out the door. Rose scrambled to her feet and ran to the door to watch him leave. He untied Brownie’s lead rope from his saddle and retied it on the hitching post, then turned to a wide-eyed miner who was one of a dozen spectators drawn to the sound of the gunshots. “A man just rode outta here—” Wolf started to ask.

That was as far as he got before the man blurted excitedly, “That way! Ridin’ hell-for-leather!”

All thoughts of a tender wound in his side gone from his mind, Wolf jumped aboard the bay and was off at a gallop down the narrow street toward the north end of the gulch. Rose turned back to find Lorena watching her. “He’ll be coming back,” Rose told her, a hopeful look upon her face. “He left his packhorse here.”

Lorena did not comment, but to herself she thought, She ain’t learned her lesson yet . She shook her head sadly and went to help Marvin clean up another puddle of blood. “Tell that undertaker it might be to his advantage to have an office here.”

Marvin didn’t appreciate the joke.

It was not difficult to follow Skinner’s wild flight down the middle of the busy street, for the people were still parted after their attempts to avoid being run over or, in the case of wagons, a head-on collision. Near the end of the street, the parting of the crowd ended, causing Wolf to pull back on the reins and scan the alleys between the buildings. Then a lone horseman climbing up the side of the mountain caught his eye, just as he disappeared into a stand of pines near the top. Wolf swung the bay’s head toward the mountain and was immediately off again, his horse laboring up the steep slope.

Confident that the bay could match the horse Skinner rode, Wolf encouraged him on until reaching the pine belt near the top of the mountain. Then judging from the condition of the gelding, he figured that Skinner’s horse would be no better off, and Skinner would be forced to rest it or face the possibility of being on foot. That increased the high possibility that Skinner had positioned himself for an ambush, so Wolf dismounted and left his horse behind while he continued on foot.

By God, Skinner told himself, in an attempt to bolster his courage, let him come on . He was aware that Wolf was close on his trail. He had seen him take to the hill behind him, so he had whipped his horse mercilessly until coming to a narrow ravine that led to the crown of the mountain. It was deep enough to hide him and his horse, so he hurriedly dismounted and left the horse to stand with its head drooping, trying to recover its wind. Skinner, his rifle loaded and cocked, his left boot filled with blood from the slug that had torn through his calf, burrowed into the side of the ravine and waited for the man chasing him. While he waited, lying flat against the hard ground, he thought of the image of his brother’s head as it was suddenly slammed to one side with the impact of the rifle slug. He could not rid his mind of that horrible image as he stared back along the path he had taken to the ravine. It was combined with frequent flashes of the determined countenance of the hunter stalking him now. He had killed Buck! And that was something Skinner had thought could never happen, and it was a crushing blow to his confidence. Always before, no one had stood up to the Dawsons, especially Buck, and he thought again about running but knew that his horse was spent. These thoughts were causing havoc in Skinner’s brain, and he tried to calm himself. He ain’t nothing but a man. He ain’t no spirit. He just got lucky with that shot that killed Buck, and he’s got to come up through those trees to get me. And when he does, he’s a dead man . His attempted reasoning did little to steady nerves already frayed with fear.