The Fortune Hunters (15 page)

On the shot Thackery’s head jerked around and the Walker’s barrel sagged down out of line. Half a second later he was dead.

Seven hands moved the instant the gun no longer lined on Frankie’s body. Seven hands trained in the lightning fast withdrawal of weapons and skilled in aiming the weapons when they lifted clear of leather.

Ahead of the others, Dusty’s matched Colts roared, their lead ripping into Thackery’s head and shattering it like a pumpkin tossed against a wall. Mark’s ivory butted Peacemakers bellowed an instant behind Dusty’s and about the same amount ahead of Waco’s Army Colts making their music. A good quarter of a second later, last of the quartet into action, the Ysabel Kid’s old Dragoon vomited a .44 ball in a thunder-clap roar and a spurt of flame.

Elmo Thackery might not have died out there by the ravine, but he sure as hell was dead when his body smashed into the wall by the fireplace, hung there for a moment, then pitched forward on to his face. There were seven bullets in his body; four of .45 calibre, three a mere .44 in size. Any one of them would have killed him.

Powder-smoke whirled and eddied around the room. Frankie screamed again and twisted herself into her aunt’s arms, shutting her eyes to hide the sight she had just witnessed. The men stayed still as statues for a moment, then the girl’s sobbing jolted Dusty into action.

‘Frank, get the women out of here!’ he snapped. ‘Doc, look to Jennie.’

Holstering his guns, Waco sprang forward. With surprising gentleness he drew the almost hysterical little girl from Mamie’s arms and carried her from the room. Gaunt knocked the vanity bag from Joan’s hand and stamped on it, for the exploding powder’s flames had set fire to the material. With the fire out, he ushered Mamie and Joan out of the room.

Kneeling by Jennie, the doctor looked up to Dusty and shook his head. One glance had told him already that the two male Thackerys had passed beyond any human aid.

‘If I had some of the new gear they’ve brought out in the East I might be able to do something, Dusty,’ he said. ‘But there’s no chance for her with what I have here.’

‘Maybe it’s all for the best, Doc,’ Dusty replied.

Crossing the room without a glance at the bodies, the Kid entered the open priest-hole and looked around. He had seen such rooms in Mexican
haciendas
and knew what to expect. The room was small, square shaped, with a second entrance opening on to one of the passages built within the walls by some long forgotten architect. A small table stood to the right of the fireplace door, a solitary chair by it. Across the room was a small, thin bed, not much comfort for a man as rich as Elmo Thackery had been. The Kid’s eyes went to the block of stone on the table. It had been pulled out of the wall over a stout stone shelf above the fireplace door. Climbing on to the table, the Kid used it as a step to mount the shelf. He would be behind the portrait; a pair of holes, most likely in the eyes of one of the figures, allowed him to see what went on in the library and hear what the men in the room said with surprising clarity.

A man had to hand it to Dusty, way he figured this whole stinking mess out. Dusty had guessed that Thackery was hidden in the house and would be on hand to spy on any meeting held in the library. Playing on Thackery’s love for Jennie, Dusty hinted that she had been killed in an attempt to bring the man out of hiding. That was the reason for Dusty speaking louder than usual, the Kid could now tell he did not need to have troubled, an ordinary voice, by some trick of acoustics, could be clearly heard from the look-out place behind the portrait.

‘So this’s where he hid out, huh?’ Topham’s voice said from below. ‘Hey, where you at, Kid?’

‘Up here,’ the Kid replied and the startled man jerked back to crack his head on the low door. ‘This’s how somebody managed to kill Marlene Thackery and get out of a room leaving the door and windows locked on the inside. It sure as hell spoiled your open and shut case.’

‘Huh!’ grunted Topham. ‘I never really thought Miss Shandley’d done it.’

Miss Shandley would now be a third owner in the Thackery fortune and it did not pay to speak disrespectfully of powerful folks in the county, so Topham was hoping his words would reach Joan’s ears and cancel out any anger she might feel at his earlier suspicions.

Jumping down, The Kid looked around the small room. ‘Lordy Lord. Elmo sure must have hated folks to live down here ever since he was supposed to have died.’

‘Miss Jennie must’ve brought him food,’ Topham answered. ‘And he likely got out in the fresh air at nights.’

‘Just like you say,’ drawled the Kid and walked out of the room with Topham hot on his heels.

‘Cap’n Fog and Mark went outside,’ the undertaker told the Kid.

Despite his profession, the undertaker looked a mite green around the gills. He did not get much trade in his side-line—he actually ran the general store for a living—and did not care to have it delivered wholesale like this.

Mark found Dusty standing on the porch, leaning on the stone rail and looking across the range. For a moment neither man spoke, then Dusty seemed to become aware of his big amigo at his side.

‘How’s the shoulder, Mark?’ he asked.

‘Still there,’ Mark replied. ‘How are
you
?’

‘Sick to my guts. I knew that girl when she was as sweet, fresh and likeable as Frankie. That was how Jennie was first time I saw her. But she changed. Lord, how she changed. I saw the change when Elmo brought her down to Polveroso and tried to marry us off. He warped Jennie the way he was warped, turned her as mean and miserly as himself. I never regretted killing a man less, Mark.’

‘Do you want me to get the boys and saddle the horses?’

‘No. I’ll pull through. And we’ll have to help the women over this lot.’

At that moment the Kid came from the house, Like Mark, he guessed at Dusty’s mood. Walking forward, he sat on the stone rail and sucked in a breath of fresh air. It seemed unusually good after the acrid stink of burnt powder mingled with human blood and the musty, decayed stench of the priest’s hole.

‘How’d you reckon Elmo allowed to come back after they’d got rid of all the legatees, Dusty?’ he asked.

‘We’ll never know. Maybe he figured to appear one day and allow he’d been hit over the head and couldn’t remember who he was. He might even have thought he could just come back and nobody’s dare think anything wrong.’

‘He’d be plumb loco if he thought that,’ Mark stated.

‘Nothing he did was the act of a sane man,’ Dusty replied. ‘This whole affair, the way he planned every move of it, no sane man would have done all that. He was obsessed with the idea that everything he owned went to Jennie, and he turned her the same way. So they tried to make sure nobody ever laid hands on a cent of it. Lord, I wish Uncle Devil had never straddled us with this chore.’

‘Look at it this way, same as me and Lon do, Dusty,’ Mark answered. ‘Happen we hadn’t been along, Aunt Mamie, Frankie and Joan would be dead now, or real soon.’

‘That’s the only consolation to it,’ Dusty said. ‘Let’s go back inside.’

* * *

Casa Thackery did not die. It took much long persuasion on Dusty’s part to prevent the spread going by the board. At first none of the three women wanted anything to do with the house, for it held too many evil associations and memories. At last Dusty showed them how many people depended on the Thackery ranch for a living and they agreed to have the place run by a manager.

The shock of all she had seen made Frankie ill. Mamie and Joan left their affairs in Gaunt’s hand while they took the girl East. They were to travel almost around the world before she recovered and would never set foot in Texas again.

Three days after Elmo Thackery’s second, and final, death, the two women left for the east with Frankie. On the same day Dusty Fog, Mark Counter, the Ysabel Kid and Waco rode south, headed for the Rio Hondo country.

‘I sure hope lil Short-Stop gets well,’ Waco told the others as they passed over a rim and out of sight of Casa Thackery.

‘It’s maybe a good thing she’s going east,’ replied Mark with a grin.

‘Leave him be, Mark,’ Dusty ordered. ‘Haven’t you ever been in love?’

‘Not if I could avoid it,’ answered Mark, then he remembered something the Kid had said in Mulrooney before they took on Thackery’s chore. ‘Lon, the next time you allow we’re going to have an easy time on something, keep quiet about it. You’re just tempting old
Ka-Dih
to make things awkward for us.’

THE END

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THE QUEST FOR BOWIE’S BLADE
by
J. T. EDSON

The task seemed simple enough to the Ysabel Kid. All he had to do was ride into Mexico, find the man who had killed James Bowie at the Alamo and ask him to return Bowie’s legendary knife to its rightful owners. Nothing simpler—or so the Kid thought . . .

But before the job was through he had locked horns with some mighty bad hombres. Men like Manos Grande, the fearsome Yaqui war chief; Silk, a dude but also a lightning fast killer; and Juan Eschuchador, as mean a bandido as ever slit a throat. And then there were the women, real tough ladies like Belle Boyd, the rebel spy working for the US Secret Service or Belle Starr, the outlaw—but at least
they
were on the Kid’s side—or were they?

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