Ralph Compton - Doomsday Rider

His skin was an unhealthy gray, marred by angry red eruptions across cheeks and forehead, and his flat blue eyes were set close together at the bridge of a narrow, pinched nose that whistled softly when he breathed.

Hays was around five-foot-five and probably weighed no more than one hundred and thirty pounds, but he had the coiled strength of a rattlesnake and the ability to strike fast and without warning.

In a gunfight Scarlet Hays was sudden and pitiless, and lesser men feared him, a fact known to him and from which he derived much pleasure. He stepped constantly along the ragged edge of insanity and it took very little to tip him over into the precipice.

Buck Fletcher, as he stepped up onto the porch of the sutler’s cabin, spurs ringing, did not fear him, and this fact was also known to Hays, and from this he derived no pleasure.

Fletcher, Sieber and Moore crowding close behind him, stopped a couple of feet from Hays. The man did not budge, still blocking the door. Fletcher’s coat was open, freeing his guns, and there was ice in his eyes.

“Scar,” Fletcher said, “you can step aside and let me pass or I’ll walk right through you. The choice is yours.”

The gunman quickly thought this through, weighing his chances.

Fletcher watched him close, knowing Hays was frantically trying to remember how fast he’d seen the big man before him draw a gun. He remembered at last, drew no reassurance from that memory, and, his eyes ugly, tried a bluff.

“I step aside for no man, Fletcher,” he said.

There was a time for talking and a time for doing, and Fletcher, tired from the trail and cold, was in no mood for more talk.

He reached out fast, grabbed the end of Hays’s muffler, and jerked the gunman close to him. Fletcher backhanded Hays across the face, then did it again, blood spurting sudden and red from the man’s mashed lips.

Hays tried for his guns, hands streaking toward the butts of his Colts, but Fletcher saw it coming. He turned the gunman around and slammed him hard into the cabin wall.

Hays’s head hit with a sickening thud, and his Colts dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers. Fletcher stepped aside and let the unconscious gunman fall to the muddy boards of the porch.

Al Sieber stepped to Fletcher’s side and looked down at Hays’s bloody face without sympathy. “I got to hand it to you, Buck,” he said, shaking his head. “You sure have a way with folks.”

“I asked him to step aside and he couldn’t quite see his way clear to do it,” Fletcher said. “I can’t abide incivility in a man for its own sake, so I gave him his chance.”

“How’s about that drink?” Moore asked, his long legs stepping over the prostrate gunman. “Fletcher, I guess you’re buying.”

Three of Hays’s cronies were at the bar when Fletcher and the others stepped inside. But they left quickly, and from the window Fletcher watched them carry the rubber-legged gunman to a nearby tent.

Fletcher rejoined the others at the bar, and Jim Mulligan, a big-bellied, red-faced man with pomaded hair parted in the middle and arranged in kiss curls on either side of his forehead, wiped off the rough pine plank in front of them.

“What will it be, gents?” he asked.

“Whatever you got that passes for rye and three o’ them eight cent cigars,” Moore said. He nodded to Fletcher. “He’s buying.”

Fletcher shot a quick glance around the store. It wasn’t much, as sutler stores went.

Dry goods and burlap sacks littered the rough counter beyond the bar, and rough-cut shelves divided their length between canned goods—mostly beans, beef, and peaches—and empty space. There were stacked boxes of ammunition and a rack with rifles for sale that could shoot them. On a shelf at the base of the rack lay an assortment of revolvers, mostly army Colts, and a single nickelplated .40-caliber derringer. Plug tobacco, as strong-smelling and black as Jamaica rum, lay on the counter in open cardboard boxes, along with a jar of pink-and-white peppermint candy canes. Newly ground coffee, as black and just about as pungent as the tobacco, was lined up in a dozen paper sacks, and a small basket of brown eggs, speckled with straw, lay nearby, bearing a hand-lettered sign that read, Fresh.

When the rye came it was surprisingly good for soldiers’ whiskey, and Fletcher gratefully decided it hit the spot against the raw cold of the evening.

Fletcher drained his glass, refilled it from the bottle in front of him, and bit the end off his cigar. “Who were those three who left as we came in?” he asked the sutler, his eyes searching the man’s face.

Mulligan shrugged. “They’ve been in here drinking all day with Scarlet Hays. I guess you heard he killed another man this morning.” The sutler nodded toward the Franklin stove against the wall. “Right over there. Long Tom poured the last cup of coffee from the pot and Hays took exception to that.”

“I heard,” Fletcher said, lighting his cigar. “Hard thing, to die for a cup of coffee.”

“Mulligan, I didn’t recognize any of those boys,” Sieber said. “Did they just get in?”

“A couple of days ago. They drifted into the fort with Hays, and General Crook signed up all four of them as muleskinners.” Displaying the bartender’s easy way with gossip, Mulligan continued: “The older of the three, the big fellow with the yellow hair, is Asa Clevinger. The small man in the sheepskin vest is Milt Gittings, and the youngest goes by the name of the Topeka Kid, I guess because he hails from up Topeka way. The Kid fancies himself as a fast gun, and he’s said to have killed his share. Clevinger and Gittings are no bargain either, come to that.”

Fletcher sipped his whiskey, enjoying the rough, warm taste. “Odd thing for Hays to do, signing up as a muleskinner, I mean. It isn’t his line of work, not that I’ve ever known him to work.”

Mulligan shrugged. “Maybe he needs whiskey and women money. I know he visits the laundresses down on suds row from time to time. The general don’t hold with smoking, drinking, and cussing, but he turns a blind eye to loose women. Or at least, he has until now.”

It was possible that Scarlet Hays, absent gun work, might turn to honest labor for money and travel to where the army was hiring. But that wasn’t like the man. It was a deal to think about and a worrisome thing.

Fletcher felt a tug at his pants leg and glanced down. A little girl about four years old with long dark hair and a pair of wide, earnest hazel eyes was looking at him. She held a doll in both hands, holding it up to him.

“Baby,” the child said.

Fletcher smiled. “She’s a real pretty baby,” he said. The doll was probably from a traveling peddler and would be expensive, no small thing to buy for a child.

He had noticed the girl earlier with a woman who was arranging bolts of calico cloth and work boots at the back of the store and he guessed she was Mulligan’s wife.

“Up,” the little girl said, extending her arms even higher.

Without embarrassment, Fletcher picked up the child and held her in the crook of his left arm. “What’s your name?” he asked.

The girl smiled, showing not a trace of shyness, being well used to men of all kinds. “Amy,” she said. “Amy Mulligan.” She held up the doll again. “And this is Rose.”

“Pleased to meet you, Amy.” Fletcher smiled. He shook the doll’s tiny hand. “And you too, Rose.”

“Seems like you made a friend there, Fletcher,” Moore said. “Two of them, come to that.”

Fletcher nodded. “I don’t know why, but little kids just naturally cotton to me. And stray dogs and sick animals.”

“That’s on account of how younkers and animals don’t pay much attention to how mean and downright homely a man looks on the outside,” Moore said, a gleam of growing respect in his eyes. “They can see right through a man and know what lies beneath.”