William Johnstone - A Good Day to Die

Sheriff Barton, Deputy Smalls, and the Dog Star bunch manned the defenses around the jail. They watched as three men ran into the street from the courthouse.

“Damn fools! What do they think they’re doing?” Keeping under cover of a barricade of hogshead barrels filled with sand and stacked hay bales, Barton cupped a hand to his mouth, shouting to the trio. “Get off the street, you jackasses!”

One of the three, Pastor Fulton of the Hangtree Church, was the town’s spiritual leader. A notorious brawler and hell-raiser long ago, he’d seen the Light and repented his ways, becoming a man of the cloth. He carried a Bible in his jacket pocket and wore a gun on his hip. He was a fighting preacher.

Pastor Fulton and the other two citizens hurried up to Coleman on the horse. The man with the rifle stopped dead in his tracks when he got a good look at the thing lashed upright to the saddle framework. His eyes bulged, his mouth hanging open.

“Get back, Pastor!” Barton called, making urgent warding gestures.

Pastor Fulton grabbed the horse by the bridle, trying not to look at what had been done to Coleman. “We’ve got to get this obscenity out of sight!”

“Pastor, don’t! Clear off!”

Pastor Fulton led the horse west, jogging alongside it. A second man moved with him. The man with the rifle stood in the middle of the street, motionless, except for turning his head to watch as Coleman’s horse stumbled into the street between the jail and the feed store.

As the men led the horsebacked atrocity down the side street, away from the horrified eyes of most of the defenders and certainly lost from view to those in the courthouse, a bowstring twanged nearby, followed by a thunking sound.

The man with the rifle staggered backward, an arrow sticking out of his chest. He tripped over his own feet, and lay on his back in the street, thrashing and writhing.

A Comanche stood on the near corner of the front porch of the Alamo Bar, fitting another arrow to his bow.

Pastor Fulton turned, drawing his gun and firing. Bullets crashed into the brave, cutting him down.

Fulton held the horse’s bridle in his left hand, a smoking pistol in his right. Turning to the other man with him, he said, “Take the horse, Joe, I’ll see to Sanders.”

Joe shook his head. “He’s done for, Pastor.”

Sanders, the man felled by the arrow, lay still, his open eyes unseeing.

Turning away from the dead man, Pastor Fulton led the horse with its grisly burden toward the Big Corral, Joe following. A gap opened in the Big Corral barricade. The pastor and Joe entered with their grisly burden, sheltered by reinforced walls.

“They made it!” Deputy Smalls exclaimed, breathing a sigh of relief.

Gunfire cracked from the direction of the Cattleman Hotel. “There’s more Comanches inside the town!” Barton yelled.

A brave crouched on the second-floor balcony at the front of the hotel, firing a rifle down the street.

“I got him,” Smalls said, shouldering his rifle, a single-shot .50-caliber Sharps buffalo gun. He fired, booming thunder.

The thudding sound of the big .50 round tearing into and through the Comanche was audible clear throughout Trail Street. The brave dropped as if he’d been slapped down.

Several rifle barrels bobbed atop the hotel roof. More Comanches.

During the predawn hours, Red Hand had infiltrated a number of skirmishers, riflemen, and archers into Hangtown. They were popping up all over, sniping at the defenders from every which way, sowing chaos, confusion, and death.

Bullets tore into the space in front of the jail where Smalls had been. He’d ducked behind the barricade after squeezing off his shot. Crouching under cover, he reloaded his buffalo gun.

Shooting crackled in and around Four Corners, the volume of firepower steadily increasing.

“This’ll put a twist in Red Hand’s tail,” Hutto said.

He and Lassiter were alone in an office down the hall from Hutto’s own. Fronting east, it was in the center of the building under the clock tower, below the face of the dial.

The two men were hunkered down below the windowsill. The glass had been knocked out of the window earlier; its bottom half was boarded up. Lassiter was putting the finishing touches on Black Robe’s garment, rigging it for flying. Sam had left it earlier at the courthouse for safekeeping. After the Coleman horror, Hutto came up with an idea for the defenders to get back some of their own against Red Hand.

Lassiter fitted a broomstick inside the shoulders of the robe to open up the garment and spread it out. He tied a short rope to each end of the broomstick, so the rope came out of the ends of the sleeves. He tied a somewhat longer rope to the middle of the short rope where it came out of the robe and secured the other end of the rope to a wall bracket.

Hutto sat with his back to the wall, holding a rifle. Lassiter crouched, testing the knots to make sure they would hold. “That does it, she’s ready to go.”

“Hold on to your hat, because when Red Hand gets a good look, the fur’s going to fly,” Hutto said.

Lassiter rose, sticking the top of his head above the boards nailed over the lower half of the window. The black robe was bunched up in his hands. Holding it over the top of the boards so it was outside, he let it unfurl so that it hung loose and free. The broomstick inside the shoulders spread out the garment so it could be fully and clearly seen for what it was by those outside.

He lowered it by the line attached to the ropes tied to the ends of the broomstick, until it hung five feet below the windowsill.

The black robe hung like a banner out the second floor window, below the clock tower. A ragged black flag, trimmed with buckskin fringe and boldly blazoned with sun, moon, stars, lightning bolts, diagonals, and zigzags, all picked out with yellow, white, and red beadwork.

It stood out in the dawn light shining on the east face of the courthouse.

Lassiter grabbed his hat and rifle. He and Hutto ran for the door, bent almost double. They ducked through the doorway into the hall, peeling off to the sides to put a solid wall between them and the room they had just quit.

The Comanches held their fire while they got a good look at the banner hanging below the clock tower. A banner that until the day before had been the potent medicine shirt of Black Robe, a mighty warrior and one of Red Hand’s inner circle.

The display was a way of stealing Black Robe’s power, his magic as the Comanches knew it.

Gunfire popped in the woods east of the courthouse. In a few beats, the shooting sounded like a string of firecrackers going off.

Bullets streamed at the courthouse, ventilating wooden barriers, flattening into leaden smears against brick walls. Rounds pelted the building’s east face, gouging out cratered bullet holes, beating up a cloud of rock shards, mortar dust, and wood chips.

Hutto had passed the word in advance, alerting those in the courthouse to his stratagem so they could take cover before the Comanches loosed the anticipated barrage.

Riflemen among the defenders were on the alert to look for telltale puffs of gun smoke among the thicket of woods to pinpoint the location of concealed enemy shooters.

The defenders returned fire, crackling reports rising and falling in waves. In the room at the top of the clock tower, sharpshooters Pete Zorn and Steve Maitland fired through slatted side windows.

Muzzle flares sparking through hazy gun smoke in the trees of the east wood gave them targets on which to center their gun sights. They squeezed off round after round, gun barrels heating up, turning red.

A large force of Comanches massed in the thicket was the source of much of the enemy’s firepower. But the infiltrators who’d sneaked into town at night were proving to be a more potent and deadly threat. They’d slipped in on foot, alone or by twos and threes, archers and riflemen, taking up positions around the Four Corners.