Must admit I was some surprised when the hardheaded bastard bounced up off that tile floor like a kid’s rubber ball. He came to unsteady legs and turned on me with all the ferocity of a caged tiger. Didn’t do him any good though. I used the lariat to give him another resounding wallop across the face that knocked him sidewise.
The stink-spraying skunk stumbled and tripped over a low, wooden table sitting in the middle of the room. He rendered that piece of furniture to splinters when he went through it and landed on the floor again. There was a loud, watery, smacking sound when his thick skull ricocheted off the floor. In a matter of a second or two, he was rolling back and forth in a puddle of blood and groaning like a man dying.
I didn’t wait that time but grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. Got him to his feet again. Brought the rope up from a spot about level with my spurs and laid it across his jaw. Force of the blow put him back on his knees. He swayed like a creek-side willow in a stiff, south Texas wind.
I tossed the length of braided leather aside and took a good, balanced stance. Delivered an iron-fisted haymaker that bounced off his eye socket. My other fist caught him in the temple. Soon’s he was down again, I set to kicking the hell out of him. Kicked that child-killing son of a bitch all over the room. Kicked and stomped on him till I got downright tired. He bled like a stuck hog. The sorry cuss moaned and groaned as if he was about to pass on for final judgment as I maneuvered him into a chair and lashed him down good.
I rummaged through a cabinet near the door, once I got him situated the way I wanted. Found an unlabeled bottle of what I figured had to be some kind of rye and poured myself a full tumbler. Pulled me up a second chair a few feet in front of the insensible wretch, flopped into it, and waited for him to find his way back to consciousness.
Took ole Ax almost half an hour to come around from the hellacious stomping I’d put on his sorry ass. Blood dribbled from a broken nose and a number of nasty-looking facial lesions when willful perception finally grabbed hold of him again.
Spitting red when he dragged his head up enough to see me, he said, “Who’n the hell are you?”
“Exactly who I said when I came through the door.”
“Texas Ranger? You’re a Texas Ranger?”
“Yes.”
“Got a name, ranger man?”
“Told you before, Lucius Dodge.”
“Ah, ah. Now that I think on it, seems I’ve heard of you.”
“Good chance you have.”
“Whatta you want with me, Dodge?”
“Oh, come now, Ax. Just really put your mind to it for a few seconds. Bet you can come up with something. Surely you still have the mental capacity to ferret out the hint of an idea on the subject hidden somewhere in that muddled, criminal brain of yours.”
He torqued his head around, raised one shoulder, and tried to rub his split, bleeding lips on his shirt. He eyeballed me again and said, “No. No. Can’t think of a single thing. Nothing. No reason for you, or any like you, to come in here and beat on me like this.”
I took a sip of my drink, then placed the glass on the floor beside the chair. From behind steepled fingers, I said, “Me’n my friend Boz Tatum buried your brother and most of his entire family out on Devils River the other day. Sorriest spectacle either of us have ever had to deal with.”
Of a sudden Webb stopped struggling. A look of focused fear spread over his bruised, lacerated, sweat-dripping face.
“And me’n Boz, doin’ the kind of work we do, well, we’ve seen more’n our share of blood, by God. Tracked the men who did those sorry murders down and killed them one and all. In the process found out that you’re the man behind all that needless butchery.”
His wide-eyed gaze darted around the room. Then, for some seconds he stared into the ash-laden fireplace. When he finally brought his fractured attention back to me, he said, “Suppose there ain’t no denyin’ it then, is there?”
“Nope. None a’tall.”
“You killed Murdock, Atwood, and the Pickett boys?”
“That we did.”
“Those were some damned tough men, mister. Kinda fellers you could bounce cannonballs off of. All right if’n I don’t believe a word of what you said concernin’ them, lawdog?”
“Sent Mad Dog Cutner to hell as well.”
Don’t think Axel Webb would’ve been any more surprised if I’d pissed in his hat, then tried to make him drink it. He made a kind of halfhearted, non-believer’s hissing sound, then said, “You killed Eagle Cutner?”
I couldn’t help but smile when I said, “Yep. Well, let me amend that a bit. I gave the man a simple choice. But I’m pretty sure he picked the right path.”
Webb coughed and spit a mouthful of blood onto the floor. He bit his already lacerated lip, then said, “What the hell does that mean?”
“Simple. I handed him a gun with one bullet in it. Pretty sure he’s shoveling coal in Hell this very minute. Swappin’ lies with Satan’s imps. Wonderin’ why he let a man like you lead him into his own death.”
“Eagle Cutner killed himself? That’s bullshit. I don’t believe a damned word of it. You’re a lyin’ son of a bitch.”
Locked him in a cold-eyed glare and said, “You gave your sixteen-year-old niece to that crazy bastard, Webb. We took her back and, given some fairly limited choices, Eagle ‘Mad Dog’ Cutner decided to end his own life. Personally, I think he made the right decision. Had I set Boz Tatum loose on the man, you would’ve heard him begging for mercy across nearly fifty miles of some of the roughest terrain in the whole of Texas.”
Webb sagged in his seat. Sounding defeated, he stared at the floor between his feet and mumbled, “Bullshit.”
I leaned back and pulled a hand-rolled ciga-reet from my vest pocket, fired it to glowing life, then pitched the smoldering lucifer onto the paper-and-dirt-littered floor. Calm as a horse trough in a drought when I blew a tub-sized smoke ring then said, “No, Ax, all those men you got to commit the equivalent of biblical murder are gone, along with your brother and most of his family. Now death has come for you, ole son. And you’ve been lookin’ right into his face, since the second you opened the front door.”
That’s when he started trying to bargain with me. “Look here, now, I never meant for Nathan’s wife or kids to have the smallest part in any of this. Only bad feelin’s I harbored were reserved for my brother. Didn’t know his family’d been rubbed out until Murdock and Atwood dropped the news on me over in Del Rio. You cain’t hold me responsible for what those idiots, and them half-witted Pickett boys, went and done.”
Figure it had to have sounded like cold spit hitting a red-hot stove lid, when I growled, “Oh, but that’s where you’re dead wrong, Ax. I don’t give a bagful of rotten horse dung why you had those evil sons of bitches chase your brother down and kill him, but his wife and children are another matter. Don’t care what you might’ve done in the past that put you in prison down at Huntsville in the first place. Can’t raise the least bit of sympathy that your brother didn’t bother to get you turned out. But I can tell you this. Tonight is your last night amongst the living. Before the next hour passes, you’ll be with your friends, and I’ll be on my way back to Devils River to take care of your badly damaged niece.”
Webb shot a hot-eyed, trapped-rat glance up at me. “Just what’n the blue-eyed hell you gonna do, Dodge?”
A second or so of charged silence hung in the air between us before I near whispered, “I’m gonna drag you outta here and hang you from a limb of that tree out in the courtyard of this house. The live oak with all those kid’s dolls dangling from it. Figure you’ll just resemble something akin to a bit bigger doll to most folks passing by in the street. ’Specially after you’ve shriveled up in the sun like a sack of beef jerky for about three or four weeks.”