Riders From Long Pines (3 page)

Parks caught the sarcasm and replied over his shoulder, “When we're done down here, Carnes, I'll be pleased to discuss the James Gang or Charley Stockton with you, or any
damn
thing else you'd like to talk about, any
damn
place you care to, in any
damn
manner you like to—”

“Shut it, the both of yas,” Moore growled back to them. “Get control of yourselves. We've got a job to do here.”

The three rode down the narrow path in silence until they reached a spot where they stood hidden behind a stand of boulders alongside the trail. “When you said ‘
spending money
,' ” Parks inquired of Moore, “just how much do you figure we're talking about here?”

“Yeah, I was kinda wondering that myself,” said Carnes.

Moore considered it. “With any luck we'll make ourselves a thousand or so apiece,” he said to the other two as they listened intently to the stage rolling along the rocky trail. “Does that suit the two of yas?” he asked with a snap to his voice. “We went over all this before we agreed to do it.”

“Suits me,” Carnes said quickly. “Of course I never used to ride with the rootin'-tootin' bold-as-hell James-Younger Gang.” He shot Parks a look from above his bandanna mask. “So maybe I ain't the one to say.”

“Yeah, maybe you ain't.” Buckshot Parks stared at him through the jagged eyeholes, the flour sack revealing nothing.

 

Inside the stage, a big spotted cur sat panting in the sweltering desert heat. The animal stared menacingly at the two businessmen seated across from it. Drops of saliva dripped from the animal's lolling tongue and had formed a wide dark spot on the edge of the seat. The two businessmen had ridden in a stunned silence most of the past fifteen miles since boarding the stage at Albertson.

“. . . then the bastards threw me out!” Seated next to the big short-haired dog, retired army colonel Morgan Tanner sat with his tunic open halfway down his chest, revealing a deep, fierce tomahawk scar. He clenched a bottle of rye whisky in his fist. He had rattled on drunkenly above the creak of wood, the fall of hooves and the rumble of wheel. “Eighteen
got
-damned years! I fit Injuns. I fit John Reb. I fit Injuns again! Now the bastards threw me out!” At his free hand an Army Colt lay cocked on the seat. He picked it up and wagged it drunkenly toward the big dog. “So me and Sergeant Tom Haines here is going as far as we can ride. I'm going to beg the heathen Sioux's forgiveness, then put us both to sleep.”

The two businessmen looked at each other uncomfortably. One fidgeted on his seat. He cleared his throat and tried to make more pleasant conversation. “So, that's the dog's name, is it . . . Sergeant Tom Haines?” he asked meekly. “A rather unusual name . . .”

“Unusual . . .” The colonel stared at him drunkenly with a malevolent scowl on his weathered face. After a long tense silence he picked up the slack in the dog's thick leather leash, jiggled it and said, “The dog disturbs you gentlemen, does he not? Eeven with this
got
-damned leash and collar on him?”

“Oh no, sir! Not at all,” the two were quick to respond. One wiped sweat from his cheek with a handkerchief and ventured, “Although, if you will allow me to interject, I was taken aback upon finding him here. It is not what one will see these days in, say . . . St. Louis, or even Springfi—”

“Then damn St. Louis and muddy Springfield both to hell,” said the colonel. “You see which direction my string runs.” He wagged the Army Colt toward the rugged high desert.

“Indeed, sir, we do,” said the other man, eager to find some common ground. “May I point out that our string runs in much the same direction as yours?”

“Does it, now?” the colonel asked flatly.

“Most certainly it does.” Both men nodded quickly as one.

“God help us all,” the colonel murmured under his breath, looking away in drunken disgust, out across the harsh, barren land.

The dog stared. Saliva dripped. The two men looked at each other as the stage bounced along the rocky trail.

Atop the stage, the shotgun rider, Jim Blanton, first caught sight of the three riders as they sprang out into the middle of the trail, blocking it. “Don't brake her down, Baggy, you see what this is,” Blanton said, cocking both hammers on the double-barreled shotgun.

“Sure enough!” said the driver, Lionel Baggs. His instincts had sent his hand reaching for the long brake handle. But upon seeing the masked faces of the three riders, his hand went back to the traces in his other hand, raised them high and slapped them down hard onto the stage horses' backs.

“Damn it, they ain't stopping!” shouted Carnes, his horse stepping back and forth restlessly beneath him.

“It's
our job
to stop them!” shouted Moore, his rifle already up to his shoulder. He fired repeatedly at the oncoming stage as it speeded up toward him. The other two outlaws quickly followed suit.

Inside the coach, Colonel Tanner lunged upward with the forward thrust of the stage. The dog lunged forward beside him. The two businessmen were flung back against their seats. A handkerchief flew from one's hand. “My goodness! What now?” one of them cried out.

“We've got ourselves a melee, gentlemen!” shouted the colonel. A strange fierce look came into his bloodshot eyes; a wicked grin lit his face. He stuck the cork into the whiskey bottle and palmed it tightly. Even in his drunken state he quickly hitched the dog's thick leather leash around an iron grab bar overhead. “As you were, Sergeant Tom Haines, until further orders!” he shouted above the sound of gunfire.

“What shall we do? What shall we do?” one of the businessmen cried as the stage rumbled through the mounted gunmen, scattering the robbers even as the three fired relentlessly.

“Fight,
got
-damn it!” Colonel Tanner raged. Another Colt appeared as if from out of nowhere. The colonel pitched it into the man's trembling hands. “Fight or die!” he shouted with a maniacal laugh. Turning, the colonel hurled himself sidelong halfway out the stage window. With a loud war cry he fired shot after shot at the robbers as the coach rolled past them. The big dog bounced on the leather seat and barked and growled. Saliva flew in every direction.

“Fight or die?” the businessman cried, his eyes wide with terror, his knuckles turning white as he grasped the Colt. The two jerked back and forth violently with the rough riding coach. “Give me that, Fenton!” the other man shouted, grabbing the Colt from him. He shoved his arm out the other side window, closed his eyes tightly and fired toward one of the three riders.

Atop the stage, Jim Blanton slumped low in the seat, his empty shotgun still in hand. He could not force his right hand to loosen its tight grip on the gaping bullet hole in his bleeding stomach. Out in front of the fast-moving stage, Stanton Parks had managed to jump from his saddle and land atop the lead stage horses. He crawled down between the two running horses and began pulling back on their traces while the driver tried desperately to yank the traces from his hands.

“Load up, Jim,” the driver shouted, “he's dragging us down!”

Blanton struggled with loading the shotgun one-handed, the bleeding too profound to take the pressure off the wound.

“Jim, damn it, man!” shouted Baggs.

“I'm done for, Baggy,” Blanton said, holding the shotgun over to the driver.

Baggs only had a second to shoot him a glance. “Buck up, man! I need you shotgunning!”

“Aw, hell, Baggy, I'm dead here,” Blanton groaned. He collected himself, stuck two fresh loads into the twelve-gauge and cocked both hammers. But before he could get the shotgun up and aimed, a bullet from alongside the stage hit him high in his shoulder. At the same time, a shot from the other side of the stage grazed across Baggs' lower lip, ripping it away in a spray of blood. His bare lower teeth glared as he kept attending to the horses, yanking at the traces, trying to keep Parks from taking control.

From inside the stage, one of Colonel Tanner's shots hit Moore in his side, causing him to veer away and struggle to keep from falling off his saddle. On the other side of the coach, the businessman with the Colt fired the gun's last shot. The bullet hit Carnes in the side of his throat and sent him flying from his horse and rolling into a thick, wide stand of barrel cactus.

On the floor of the coach the other businessman lay dead in a wide pool of dark blood, his forehead agape from a rifle shot. “Fenton, my God!” the other businessman cried, turning from the coach window with the empty Colt in his hand.

“He's dead,
got
-damn it!” shouted the colonel, swaying wildly with the bouncing, rocking coach. “You will be too, if you don't
fight
!”

“I'm out of bullets,” the terror-stricken man called out above the barking, snarling dog and the insistent gunfire.

“Then
by
God, prepare yourself to use it as a club, sir!” shouted the colonel. His eyes were glazed and wild with battle.

He's insane!
the businessman noted to himself. Yet, even as he thought it, he turned the Colt around in his hand and grasped the barrel. The two felt the speeding stage began to lurch downward toward a halt amid shouts and cursing from the wounded driver and the equally wounded robbers. “Surrender, you damn fool!” Henry Moore bellowed at the driver, his own bleeding side causing his voice to sound strained and weakened.

“You shot my mouth off, you sons a' bitches!” Baggs shouted, his voice distorted by his missing lip. The dog remained in a bouncing, barking frenzy.

Feeling the stage begin to slow down, the colonel looked at the frightened businessman and shouted, “Hold your position! I'm going up!”

“Oh God!” the man cried, clutching the empty Colt to his chest. He watched the colonel slide out of the swaying coach window like an angry snake and disappear up the side of the cabin.

In the driver's seat, Baggs looked up in time to see the colonel grab him by his shoulders and yank him aside. “What are you doing?” he shouted. Beside them, Moore raced along, his rifle empty, but his Colt out of his holster now, and firing at the colonel from ten feet away.

“I'm getting us out of this!” the colonel shouted, grabbing the traces from Baggs' hands. Standing crouched in the seat, he lashed the traces wildly up and down, slapping Parks' face with them and sending the stage horses back into a hard run. “We're not licked! Not by a long shot!” he bellowed.

A bullet from Moore's Colt hit the colonel high in his ribs. But he only flinched and kept slapping the traces. Parks fell from between the two lead horses and rolled back beneath the other horses' hooves. Taking hard glancing blow after blow without losing consciousness, Parks grasped wildly at the bottom of the stage in a cloud of choking dust.

He managed to hold on just long enough to see the dirt and rock disappear from beneath him as the rear of the stage swung out off the edge of the trail for only a second. With a scream he turned loose just as the stage swung back onto solid ground and shot forward. He held on to an armful of rock and dirt and scrub juniper root as the stage rolled farther away, the shooting and shouting and barking dog traveling with it.

Beneath Parks lay a straight drop of more than a hundred feet onto sharp rocky hillside. He clung and clawed and wrestled himself back onto the trail and lay staring up at the sky for a moment, catching his breath. Then he rose unsteadily to his feet and limped on along the trail, his hat gone and one boot heel missing, dust streaming from his clothes and hair. His flour sack mask had ripped across the top and gathered down around his chin.

“I bet I kill them both—dragging me into a mess like this,” he said to himself.

The colonel remained crouched in the driver's seat, slapping the traces to the horses' backs. Beside him Baggs and Blanton held on for their lives. Alongside the speeding stage Henry Moore kept firing wildly, blood running down his legs from wounds in his chest, his side and his upper shoulder.

“Stop this damn thing!” Moore bellowed above the sound of the rocking, bouncing stage and the thunder of the horses' hooves.

“My goodness, Baggy, this fool is going to kill us all,” said Blanton, his voice and demeanor turning weaker and weaker with each passing second.

“Why won't he stop?” Baggy asked through his bloody disfigured mouth, while being slammed back and forth on the narrow wooden seat. “This ain't the first stagecoach that ever got robbed!” He rose in the seat and grabbed the colonel by his sleeve. “Please, sir, for God sakes, stop the stage!”

“No way in hell!” the colonel roared, jerking his sleeve free and slapping the traces even harder.

Seeing the trail begin to narrow even more as it went into a long curve around the hillside, Moore slowed his horse almost to a halt and shook his head. “Damn it to hell, it's only money!” he shouted after the fleeing coach. He watched the stage sway as it rode deeper into the long curve. Its two right wheels lifted inches off the ground for a moment. He heard a scream from one of the wounded coachmen as the coach wheels touched ground with a jar, then rose again.

“Hold on, cayouse,” Moore said to the horse beneath him, “this ain't over yet.” He watched the stage careen crazily out of sight around the curve. He flinched and grinned at the sound of a crash, and at a large puff of dust that sprang immediately out across the trail.

“That's more like it,” he said, tapping his horse forward, this time at a walk. He jerked the bandanna down from his face.

Keeping a hand to his bloody side, his Colt still in his grasp, Moore rounded the curve and stopped a few yards back to look the situation over. Beyond the stage stood a rise of dust where the horses had managed to break free and get away from the harshness of the leather traces at their backs. The stage had veered off the trail, struck a boulder and bounced along for about thirty yards before it stopped. It was now tipped dangerously to one side, its top resting against a sheer rock wall.