Ralph Compton - Bounty Hunter

Stillwell was up on one elbow, clutching at his blood-soaked belly. The Greener had fallen just beyond his reach, but he ignored it, his eyes hot and furious on Tone.

“Just lay quiet, John Wesley,” Tone said. “There’s been enough killing here.”

A young towhead stumbled through the door, a rifle in his hands. His right cheekbone had been shot away and his face was a scarlet nightmare.

The man screamed curses, wild sounds bubbling out of his bloody mouth. He raised his rifle and Tone shot him, fired again. His first round took the towhead high in the left shoulder, but the man rode his second bullet into eternity.

As a hog and a flock of terrified, squawking chickens scampered past him, Tone fed shells into the Winchester from his cartridge belt, his eyes on the cabin door.

In the quiet that followed the panicked flight of the chickens, his senses alert to any sign of danger, he heard the soft scrape of wood on wood.

A door had just opened at the rear of the cabin.

Stillwell was dragging himself along the dirt, his right hand reaching for his shotgun. Tone ignored him and stepped on cat feet to the corner of the cabin. Just behind him, Martha Stillwell was sprawled in the trough, her face slack in death, eyes half open.

Tone watched and waited, and after a few moments the youngest of the Stillwell sons stuck his head around the corner. Tone’s snap shot was immediate and on target. His bullet took the youngster between the eyes, and he fell without a sound.

Turning, Tone saw John Wesley’s fingers scrabbling in the dirt close to the Greener. He closed the space between them in a few long strides and kicked the shotgun away.

“You, out there!” A man’s voice.

“What do you want?” Tone asked. He looked at Stillwell, who was dying hard and angry.

“We’re coming out.” A pause. “We’re done.”

“Step out with your hands empty, you and the women and kids. I’m not a trusting man.”

The surviving Stillwell son led the way, his arms stretched out from his sides, fingers splayed. Two young women and three children followed.

Under a sky the color of steel as the day faded, the women threw themselves on the bodies of the dead, their sobbing, shrieking lamentations scraping the twilight raw.

Tone glanced at the young man, who was now kneeling beside Stillwell. “Is he dead?” he asked.

The man nodded, not looking at Tone.

“What’s your name, boy?” Tone asked.

“Tom. Tom Stillwell.”

“Well, Tom, bridle your father’s horse and bring it out here.”

“Damn you! I told you, he’s dead!”

“So you say, but I’m still taking him to the law in Yuma.”

The man raised a tearstained face to Tone, his voice unbelieving. “My mother, father, brothers . . . You killed them all.” He shook his head, stunned, like a man who has just been read a bad-news telegram. He looked around him. “Two widows . . . orphans . . . all my brothers . . . dead.”

“Sometimes the cost of doing business comes high,” Tone said. He dug into his shirt pocket for the makings and rolled himself a cigarette. He thumbed a match into flame and through a cloud of smoke said, “Now bring that horse out here like I told you.”

As the undulating cries of the women rose in pitch and volume, Tom Stillwell rose to his feet and looked at Tone. He had brown eyes that were made soft by long black lashes.

“Pa talked about you, John Tone the man hunter. When the kids wouldn’t go to bed, he used to tell them, ‘Better get to sleep soon or John Tone will get you.’ We thought it was funny. The thing is, it was not funny. Not then, not now.”

Tone glanced at the sky. It would be dark soon and he’d have to ride. “I’m in a hard, unforgiving business,” he said absently.

“I know what you are, Tone. You’re a dangerous, heartless animal, a man without a conscience or a soul.”

“I’m all of those things, and worse. But I sleep well at night.” Almost casually Tone lifted the muzzle of the Winchester until it was in line with Stillwell’s belly. “Now you git, and bring out that damned horse.”

The man opened his mouth to speak but thought better of it. He turned on his heel and walked toward the women, who had removed his mother’s body from the trough and laid it out on the ground.

He stopped and glared at Tone. “Get your own damned horse.”

Tone glanced around him, at the wailing women and children and the pale dead, pondering with detached interest on the mayhem he had wrought in just a few minutes of hell-firing violence.

If John Wesley had taken his medicine and come quietly, none of this would have happened. That’s what Tone told himself. And that was what he believed.

He did not consider himself a cruel man and he harbored no ill will toward the men he hunted. When possible, he preferred to bring them in alive, but when guns were drawn, all bets were off.

Tone walked to the corral, bridled a gaunt old buckskin and led it back to Stillwell’s body. A tall man, and strong, he effortlessly lifted the dead body and draped it facedown across the horse’s back.

“What are you doing?”

A young blond woman strode toward Tone, her infuriated eyes the color of flames in smoke. “Leave him be,” she snapped. “I won’t have my father-in-law lie in foreign soil.”

Tone gathered the reins of the buckskin, stepped into the saddle of his sorrel and looked down at the woman. “You can retrieve his body and the horse in Yuma from the Territorial Vigilante Committee.” Tone touched his hat. “Good evening to you, ma’am.”

“You coldhearted son of a bitch, you murdered him! And his sons!”

Tone shrugged. “I’m sorry you take that attitude, ma’am. But John Wesley was notified.”

He swung his horse around and led the buckskin with its grim burden out of the yard. Something smelly splattered against his shoulder and a rock flew past his head. He turned. The women and their kids were throwing pig shit and anything else that came to hand at him.

John Tone glanced up at the violet sky, where the first stars hung like lanterns, lighting his trail.

He needed a bath and a hot meal. All in all, it had been a long, wearisome day.

Chapter 2

“Mr. Tone, there’s someone at the front desk asking to see you, sir.”

The morning hour was late and Tone was the sole patron of the Riverbank Hotel’s dining room, where he had been enjoying his ritual breakfast—when he was home in Reno, at least—of coffee, three fingers of straight Kentucky bourbon and his first cigar of the day.

Irritated that his tranquility had been disturbed, Tone nodded to the desk clerk. “Very well. Show him in, Lawson.”

The clerk bowed and glided away. He returned a few moments later with a small, wizened man who looked like a molting bantam rooster dressed in expensive broadcloth.

The man’s smile died somewhere between his thin lips and his eyes. “Mr. Tone, I presume.”

Tone carefully placed his cigar in the ashtray and rose to his feet. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

“Luther Penman, attorney-at-law, of San Francisco town.” The man gave a quick, birdlike bow. “At your service, sir.”

Tone waved Penman into a chair. “Please be seated.”

Penman perched on the edge of the chair, his glittering black eyes darting like an inquisitive crow, taking in the younger man’s expensive tailoring and snow-white linen.

“I’m happy to see you are prospering, Mr. Tone.”

Tone smiled. “I’ve had better times, and worse.”

“Not much better, I’ll be bound. I was about to say that your elegant and expensive suit is by Brooks Brothers of New York, but now, on closer inspection I believe it was tailored farther west, perhaps by Marx and Cohen of Silver City. Your diamond ring and stickpin are, of course, of local manufacture. The workmanship is slightly crude, but the stones are of excellent quality.”