The big gundown

The sound of horses made the boy look up from the puppies squirming in the basket. He saw three riders coming toward the isolated adobe ranch house. The morning sun was behind them, so all the boy could make out were the black, centaur-like shapes of men and horses.

He was on his knees beside the basket. He’d been playing with the month-old pups. A coyote had gotten their mother a couple of days earlier, and the boy’s father had said that the critters were too small to survive without her. Best just to smash their heads in and be done with it, he’d said.

The boy was already crying over what had happened to the mama dog, and his sobs had gotten even harder when he heard his pa say that. Then his mother had put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Don’t take on so, Cyrus. We’ll see if we can’t nurse them through. I can soak a rag in milk and let them suck on it.”

The boy’s father had just shaken his head as if that was the most loco thing he’d ever heard, but he didn’t argue. The boy was only five years old, but he had already figured out that when his ma’s back stiffened up like that and she got that look in her eye, his pa never argued with her. The boy was just glad that he still had the pups, and so far, they seemed to be doing fine.

He stood up, hurried to the open door of the low, sprawling ranch house, and called, “Riders comin’, Ma!”

She came out of the house, wiping her hands on a rag, and looked at the three men on horseback, who were now about fifty yards from the house. Then she said in a low voice, “Go fetch your pa, Cyrus.”

That was his ma’s don’t-mess-with-me voice. Cyrus nodded and ran around the house. His pa was in the barn out back, tending to chores. The four Mexican hands who rode for the spread were already out on the range.

Cyrus was halfway to the barn when he heard a gunshot and saw a muzzle flash from the shadowy interior, which was visible through the open double doors. He skidded to a stop, his eyes widening in surprise and fear as a man he had never seen before stepped out of the barn. Smoke curled from the barrel of the gun in the man’s hand as he looked at Cyrus and a grin spread across the hardened, beard-stubbled face.

Cyrus whirled around and ran back toward the front of the house. He heard a boom and recognized it as the sound of the family’s shotgun.

“Ma!” he screamed as he rounded the corner and came to an abrupt halt again. He saw that the three riders had reached the house and dismounted. One of them had hold of Cyrus’s mother while another wrenched the shotgun out of her hands. All three of the men were laughing, and none of them appeared to be hurt. Cyrus knew that if his Ma had shot at them with the greener, she must have missed.

He wished she hadn’t missed.

The man holding the reins of all three horses noticed Cyrus and grinned at him, just like the man who had come out of the barn. This man motioned toward him and said, “Come on over here, boy. These your pups?”

Cyrus’s ma struggled in the grip of the man holding her. “Run, Cyrus!” she shrieked. “Run!”

The man who had just spoken to him drew his gun and said in a warning tone, “Don’t you do it, son. Not if you don’t want something bad to happen to your ma.”

Cyrus was scared, but he was outraged, too, and he couldn’t hold that in. “You leave her alone!” he yelled. “And don’t you bother them pups, neither!”

That show of defiance brought more laughter from all of them, including the man from the barn, who had just come around the corner of the house behind Cyrus. He gave Cyrus a hard shove that sent the boy stumbling forward.

“You take care of that fella we saw goin’ in the barn, Brentwood?” asked the man standing beside the basket with a gun in his hand.

“Sure did. He won’t be bothering us.”

“Good. I reckon we can take our time, then, and enjoy these folks’ hospitality for a while before we ride on to Bisbee to meet up with the colonel.”

Cyrus knew that a colonel was some kind of soldier. He had heard his pa talk about how his grandpa had fought in a big war with a colonel named Custer. But these men didn’t look like any soldiers he had ever seen. They were all dirty, and wore rough clothes, and they were mean. You could just tell it. The meanness came off them like a stink.

“Just—just take what you want,” Cyrus’s ma said. “Only don’t hurt us. That’s all I ask of you. Don’t hurt us.”

The man holding the horses seemed to be the leader. He chuckled and said, “Why, we wouldn’t think of it, ma’am. But we’ll sure enough take what we want. You can damn well count on that.”

The other three seemed to think that was funny for some reason. The one holding Cyrus’s ma ran his hand over her chest, squeezing so hard it hurt. She gasped and turned pale under the tan that the Arizona sun had given her since she and her husband had started the ranch five years ago. She had given birth there, a long way from town or any other woman, with no one but her man to help her. Cyrus didn’t know all that and wouldn’t have understood it if he did, but he knew that his ma was really, really brave, and if these men had her scared, they had to be mighty bad.

“Culp, come over here,” the leader said. The man holding the empty shotgun tossed the weapon aside, onto the ground. Cyrus’s pa would have been upset if he had seen that. He always said you had to keep guns clean, that you had to take care of them if you wanted them to take care of you.

The leader was grinning down at the puppies in the basket. “Any of you boys need some target practice?” he asked.

“Culp, get one of those pups and you heave it as high in the air as you can. I reckon that’ll be some target.”

Horror washed over Cyrus as he finally realized what was about to happen. He stared as Culp bent over and took one of the puppies from the basket. The little black and tan dog squirmed and whimpered in the man’s rough grip.

Cyrus ran toward Culp. “Leave my puppies alone, you…you son of a bitch!”

He knew that was a mighty bad thing to call somebody. He had heard his pa say it a few times, when he’d hurt himself and Ma wasn’t around. He’d grin at Cyrus and tell him never to repeat that, and while he was at it, don’t tell Ma that he had just heard Pa use it, neither.

Right now, though, Cyrus didn’t care if he got in trouble. He was mad clean through. That son of a bitch was messing with his puppies!

Brentwood lifted a foot and kicked Cyrus in the side as the boy went past him. The kick hurt like blazes and sent Cyrus rolling across the ground. He tasted dirt in his mouth and heard his ma screaming even harder. Cyrus came to a stop on his belly and looked up to see Ma trying to get loose from the man who held her. She would run to Cyrus’ side, but the man wouldn’t let her go.

The leader wiggled the fingers of his right hand over the butt of the gun that stuck up from the holster on his hip. “I’ll bet I can blow that pup to pieces before it ever hits the ground,” he boasted. “There’s enough of ’em in that basket we can all take a turn.”

“Then we’ll take turns with the boy’s ma!” Culp said.

“You’re damn right.” The leader crouched slightly, ready to draw. “When I say go—”

“Go ahead and say it.”

That was a new voice, a flat, hard voice Cyrus had never heard before. He looked back over his shoulder and saw a stranger standing at the corner of the house. A tall man in a buckskin shirt and a broad-brimmed brown hat, who stood there with his thumbs hooked in his gunbelt like he didn’t have a care in the world. The hat shaded his face so Cyrus couldn’t see it all that well, but he saw blond hair curling around the man’s ears and down the back of his neck.

The smile on the leader’s face went away. An ugly snarl replaced it. “Who the hell—”

“Go ahead,” the stranger said again. “I’m betting I can kill all four of you before that puppy hits the ground. What do you think?”

“Kill him!”

It was amazing how much easier it was to live when you weren’t afraid to die. The man called Kid Morgan had learned that lesson and learned it well. He had been through hell on earth already. The next world couldn’t hold anything worse than the crucible of fire through which he had already passed.

Now, whenever he faced death a great calmness descended upon him. At the moment, the only thing that concerned him was getting lead in all four of the men before they killed him, so that they couldn’t hurt the woman or the boy after he was gone.

With a whisper of steel on leather, the Colt on his hip came out of its holster, seeming to leap into his hand of its own accord with a flicker of movement faster than the eye could follow. He went for the loudmouthed leader first, the man who thought it would be funny to blast a helpless puppy out of the air. If there had been time, The Kid might have permitted himself a second of satisfaction at the way the man’s face caved in on itself as a .45 slug pulped his nose and bored into his brain.

By the time that happened, The Kid had already shifted his aim and fired again, sending a bullet into the chest of the man holding the horses. As that man collapsed, The Kid pivoted and went for the hombre with the puppy. The man didn’t toss the little dog into the air as the leader had told him to. Instead, he dropped the pup to the ground and clawed at the gun on his hip. He hadn’t cleared leather by the time The Kid’s third shot punched into his guts and doubled him over.

Three of the bastards down and not one of them had gotten off a shot. Not bad. But the fourth man’s gun roared and The Kid felt a hammerblow on his left thigh. The slug’s impact knocked him halfway around, but he stayed on his feet and swung his Colt toward the fourth man.

The Kid’s finger froze on the trigger. The man had one arm looped around the woman’s neck, holding her in front of him. The Kid couldn’t fire without hitting her, and the son of a bitch knew it.

The gunman didn’t have any such worries, and a vicious leer appeared on his face as he drew a bead to put his next bullet dead center in The Kid’s body.

A man whose face was covered with blood lurched through the open door of the ranch house behind the would-be killer. He held something in his hands, and the morning sun reflected off it as he plunged it in the gunman’s back. The gunman screamed and staggered forward. The woman twisted out of his grip and threw herself on the ground, covering the little boy’s body with her own. The Kid’s revolver slammed out another shot. The fourth gunman jerked and pitched forward, landing on his face. The handle of a pitchfork stuck up from his back, the tines buried deep.

“Sean!” The woman leaped up and ran to the man with blood all over his face, throwing her arms around him. “Oh, my God! You’re alive! I thought—but you’re hurt!”

The man shook his head as he embraced her. “It’s not as bad as it looks. Cyrus! Cyrus, boy, are you all right?”

The youngster scrambled to his feet and dashed over to his parents. They both went to a knee to fold their arms around the sobbing boy.

The Kid took a deep breath. He still had one round in the Colt’s cylinder. Limping heavily as he felt blood trickling warmly down his wounded leg, he went to each of the gunmen in turn and checked to make sure that they were all dead.

Three of them were. The man who was gutshot was still alive, but he was unconscious and would never wake up again…if he was lucky. If not, he would come to and then die in agony in an hour or so.

With the threat over, at least for the moment, The Kid opened the gun and dumped the empties into the palm of his hand. He took fresh cartridges from the loops on his belt and thumbed them into the cylinder, leaving one chamber empty for the hammer to rest on, as usual. Then he pouched the iron and turned toward the family.

The pup that had been taken out of the basket sniffed and fumbled around his feet. The Kid leaned over, fighting the dizziness he felt from the loss of blood, and scooped up the little animal.

“Here you go, son,” he said as he held the puppy out to the little boy. “Your pup’s fine.”

The man stood up, leaving his wife and son kneeling on the sandy ground with the now-frolicking puppy. “I—I don’t know how to thank you, mister.”

“I told you to stay in the barn.” The Kid shrugged. “Under the circumstances, though, I suppose it’s a good thing you didn’t. Appreciate you giving me a hand.”

“You—you save the lives of my family, and my life, too, and you’re thanking me?” The man looked down in concern at The Kid’s wounded leg. “And you’re hurt!”

The Kid was about to say it was nothing, when he realized how stupid that was. He had a bullet hole in his leg—a couple of them, actually, since the slug seemed to have gone all the way through—and it hurt like hell. He had lost a lot of blood and the world was starting to spin funny.

He started to say something, but before he could get any of the words out, the ground seemed to tilt sharply under his feet. He felt himself falling and crashed to the ground. The last thing he was aware of before he passed out was a tiny wet tongue licking his cheek.

Consciousness began to seep back into The Kid’s brain. He wasn’t sure where he was, but he knew the place was warm and soft, and he wanted to just keep his eyes closed, settle down into those comforting surroundings, and never leave. He imagined this was what death must be like.

The pain brought him back. Pain was life. Life was pain.

He opened his eyes.

The boy was staring at him from a distance of a couple feet.

“Ma! He’s awake!”

At least Cyrus had turned away before he yelled. The Kid was grateful for that much. Even so, the boy’s voice struck his ears and made him wince.

Cyrus turned back to The Kid and said, “Howdy, mister. How do you feel?”

The Kid’s head hurt, and his leg felt even worse. It had a dull throb that went through him with every beat of his heart. But he managed to put a faint smile on his face as he husked, “I’m all right.”

“No, you’re not.” That comment came from the woman, who now leaned over him with a concerned expression on her face. The Kid was vaguely aware that she was pretty, with deep brown eyes and a mass of brown hair around her face and shoulders. She rested a hand on his forehead and went on, “You’ve got a fever. That wound in your leg must be infected.”

“You’ve got to…clean it out good.” The Kid’s voice was weak. He didn’t have as much strength as he had thought at first. “Carbolic acid…or if you don’t have any…plenty of whiskey.”

“That, we’ve got.” It was the man’s voice. He moved up on the other side of the bed where The Kid lay. Crimson still stained his face here and there, but most of the blood was gone. The woman must have cleaned it and then wrapped a bandage around her husband’s head where the bullet had grazed him. The man had been bleeding like a stuck pig when The Kid found him in the barn, but that was common with head wounds. It had taken only a second for The Kid to determine that the injury probably wasn’t serious. The man had been stunned, only half-conscious, and The Kid had told him to stay there while he went to deal with the men who’d invaded the ranch.

Those bastards were all dead now. The Kid remembered that much. He remembered being shot in the leg, too. He couldn’t afford to lose it. A crippled gunfighter was a dead gunfighter, and there were already too many men in the world who wanted to test their speed against the man called Kid Morgan.

“Get a cloth,” he rasped. “Soak it in whiskey…run it all the way through the hole…”

“That’ll hurt like blazes, mister.”

The Kid moved his head from side to side. “Don’t care. Just…do it. Then pour…more whiskey…on the wounds.”

The man and woman looked at each other, and the man shrugged. “I reckon he probably knows what he’s talking about.” A glance at The Kid. “Man like him’s probably been shot before now.”

A man like him
…The fellow probably didn’t mean anything by it. He was right, though. The Kid had been shot before. He knew about cleaning wounds and how to patch them up. It was a necessary skill when a man lived the life of a lone, drifting gunfighter.

“Cyrus, you go outside and play now,” the woman said.

“Aw, Ma, can’t I stay and watch?”

“No, you can’t. Now do like I told you and scoot!”

When the boy was gone, the woman pulled down the sheet that covered The Kid. He felt a momentary surge of embarrassment when he realized that he was pretty much naked, but the woman was brisk and businesslike about what she was doing, which helped. She went to fetch a clean cloth, and the man came back with a bottle of whiskey and what looked like the ramrod from an old muzzle-loading rifle.

“This ought to do,” the man said.

The woman leaned over the bed. “Let me take this bandage off.”

When she lifted the bandage, The Kid thought he smelled the rot setting in already. That was probably just his imagination, as there hadn’t really been time for the wound to fester that much. At least, he didn’t think so.

“What…day is it?”

“The same day it was you got shot, mister,” the man replied. “You were out for a couple hours, that’s all.”

That was long enough. The Kid didn’t like the idea that he’d been helpless during that time, although clearly he had nothing to fear from these people. He had saved their lives, after all.

The woman drenched the cloth with whiskey, wrapped it around the end of the ramrod, and said, “Are you sure about this?”

The Kid nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Wait a minute,” the man said. He took the bottle from his wife, slipped his other hand under The Kid’s head, and lifted it. “Take a swig of this first.”

“Good…idea.”

The man tipped the bottle to The Kid’s lips. The Kid took a long swallow of the fiery liquor. It burned all the way down his gullet, but that fire was nothing compared to the blaze that seared his leg as the woman pushed the whiskey-soaked rag through the wound. The Kid’s head tilted back against the pillow. He closed his eyes and felt the cords in his neck standing out as he clenched his teeth against the pain.

“Oh, God, Sean, he’s bleeding again!”

“Of course he is. Don’t worry about it, Frannie. The blood will help clean the wound.”

The Kid opened his eyes to look up at them. “Sorry about…your sheets.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Sean said with a shake of his head. “That’s a small price to pay for the lives of my family.”

The Kid winced as the woman withdrew the ramrod, and he nodded toward his leg.

“Pour the whiskey on it. Soak it good.”

Sean did so. The fresh surge of pain brought a grunt from The Kid’s lips. As the woman wrapped fresh bandages around his thigh a wave of drowsiness began to steal over him.

“I’m Sean Williams,” the man said. “This is my wife Frannie. And you’ve met our boy Cyrus. You don’t have to tell us your name, though. I know it’s sometimes not considered polite to ask about such things.”

“I…don’t mind…Name’s Morgan…They call me…Kid Morgan.”

Sean’s eyes widened. “The gunman?”

“Yeah…Lucky for you…right?”

“Damn right. We owe you our lives.”

Frannie had another wet cloth, wet with water this time, not whiskey. She wiped its cool softness across The Kid’s brow. The gentle touch felt wonderful.

“You sleep now, Mr. Morgan. Just rest, and we’ll take care of you.”

“Those men…”

“Don’t worry about them.” Sean’s voice was grim. “I’ve already dragged them off behind the barn. I’ll bury them, although it’s more than they deserve. I ought to just leave them for the buzzards.”

Whether the dead men were buried or not wasn’t what concerned The Kid. What he was worried about was that they might have friends who would come looking for them.

But the darkness came up and carried him away again before he could say anything more.