Rushford waved a hand toward the lower end of the street. “Down there somewhere. Do you want me to come with you while you check on them?”
Bo shook his head. “No thanks. This is our job, not yours.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got a stake in what goes on in Mankiller, too,” Rushford said as he came down the steps and took a pistol from inside his coat. “If there’s trouble, I’m happy to lend a hand.”
“Suit yourself,” Scratch said. He was peering down the street. “Bo, ain’t that smokehouse where we locked those fellas up down yonder about where those shots came from?”
The same thing had just occurred to Bo, and the thought brought with it a chill that pierced to his core. “That’s right,” he said. “Come on.”
The three men hurried along the street toward the smokehouse. As they approached, Bo couldn’t see anything unusual or threatening around the building. It looked just the way it had when he and Scratch and George put the prisoners in it hours earlier.
“What’s got you so worried about the smokehouse?” Rushford asked. “Did you say something about locking somebody in there?”
“The men who caused that riot at Bella’s this evening,” Bo explained. “Yesterday evening, now, I reckon, since it’s after midnight.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard something about that.”
They came up to the sturdy, squarish building and stopped in front of the door. Bo sniffed the air and thought he smelled the faint tang of powder smoke.
Scratch pounded a fist on the door and called, “Hey in there! You fellas all right?”
There was no answer.
Scratch tried again. “Damn it, speak up! Are you all right? Is anybody hurt?”
Silence was all that came from the smokehouse. It might as well have been empty.
Bo checked the padlock, thinking that maybe the shotgun blasts had blown it off so that the prisoners could be freed. The lock was intact, though.
“Son of a bitch,” Bo muttered, suddenly so shaken that he indulged in one of a very occasional profanity. He smelled something besides the gun-smoke, a coppery scent that set all his nerves on edge. “We need to get in there.”
Scratch and Rushford grabbed the bar and lifted it from its brackets. As they set it aside, Bo took out the key and twisted it in the padlock. The lock snapped open. He took it out of the hasp and pulled the door toward him.
The mingled smell of gun smoke and blood suddenly grew stronger. Bo reached in his pocket and found a lucifer. Holding the match up in his left hand, he snapped it to life while he gripped his Colt in the other hand, ready to fire if need be.
No one in the smokehouse represented a threat, though. The prisoners were nothing now except more work for Sam Bradfield.
Rushford glanced past Bo at the grisly scene. The flickering light from the lucifer revealed blown-apart bodies scattered all over the ground inside the smokehouse. It was obvious what had happened, although the how wasn’t so clear.
“Check around back,” Bo told Scratch.
The silver-haired Texan came back a moment later. “There’s a ladder propped against the back wall. I climbed up far enough to see that somebody chopped a hole in the roof. It ain’t a very big hole, though. Not big enough for anybody to escape through.”
“But big enough for the barrels of a shotgun, I’ll bet,” Bo said bleakly. “Whoever it was climbed up there and probably told those boys inside that he was there to get them out, so they’d stay quiet. Then he chopped out the hole, stuck the gun through, and let off both barrels. There wasn’t time enough between the first pair of shots and the second for him to have reloaded, so he must’ve had somebody helping him. The man on the ground handed up another loaded shotgun, and the killer emptied it, too, just to make sure he didn’t miss anybody with the first two barrels.”
“My God,” Rushford said in a voice thick with shock. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. This was the cold-blooded murder of, what, six men?”
Bo nodded. “Yeah. Six men.” He started to take a deep breath, then stopped because he didn’t want to drag that much blood-tinged air into his lungs. “Six men who can never testify against Jackson Devery now.”
CHAPTER 27
The campaign of terror that Bo and Scratch attributed to the Deverys, even though they couldn’t prove it, subsided somewhat over the next few days. It didn’t end completely, though. A couple of miners who had spoken up against the Deverys were jumped in a dark alley one night and beaten and kicked until one of them died and the other would probably never be more than a shell of a man. A mysterious fire nearly burned down the assay office. Francis O’Hanrahan, who had been an outspoken critic of the Deverys for a long time, limped into town one day with a bloody bandage tied around his leg. A bushwhacker had put a bullet through his thigh.
Bo knew good and well that Jackson Devery was orchestrating the whole thing, but the old devil was cunning. He didn’t leave any tracks, and since the murder of the miners who had started the fight at Bella’s, he didn’t enlist any outsiders in his cause, either. There wouldn’t be any more witnesses who had to be disposed of.
Slowly but surely, the brutal tactics began to have an effect. Everyone in Mankiller had been excited at first by the prospect of an election and a real town government. If the talk could be believed, Lucinda and the others were going to be elected in a landslide.
By the time the election was only a day away, though, more people were saying that it might be better to vote for the Deverys. The excuse they gave was that Jackson Devery and his family had founded the town, after all, and so shouldn’t they be the ones to run it?
Bo didn’t believe for a second that people really felt that way. They were just afraid of what could happen if the Deverys lost. Mankiller might become a gun-blazing battlefield. Some of the citizens declared their intention to not even vote and advised their neighbors to do the same. That way, if anything bad happened, it wouldn’t be their fault.
Bo overheard so many conversations like that that he began to grow disgusted. It would serve those folks right, he thought, if the election were called off and he and Scratch just rode away and left the town gripped in the iron fist of Jackson Devery. Biscuits O’Brien would be happy if that happened. He could go back to drinking himself to death.
But Bo knew that he and Scratch wouldn’t abandon the town. They had made too many friends here in Mankiller, among them Lucinda Bonner. She had been deftly fending off Scratch’s romantic overtures, and Bo didn’t blame her for that. She had more than enough on her plate right now as it was. He felt sort of sorry for his friend, though. Scratch was a hopeless romantic and always would be, and any time a woman didn’t return his affections, he honestly couldn’t understand it.
The rally was still scheduled for that night. The speakers’ platform had been erected in front of the Colorado Palace Saloon, and the red-white-and-blue bunting was draped from the balcony railing. Bo was worried that the Deverys would do something to try to disrupt the speeches, but there was no way to protect against that ahead of time. They would just have to wait and see what happened and deal with it then.
Late that afternoon, the Texans dropped in at the café to see how Lucinda was doing. She was working behind the counter as usual, but she seemed nervous.
“I don’t know how in the world I got talked into this,” she said with a little laugh as she poured coffee for Bo and Scratch. “I never made a speech in my life, and at my age I’ve got no business starting now.”
“What do you mean, at your age?” Scratch asked. “A beautiful woman is eternally young, Lucinda, and you certainly qualify.”
“I don’t need any flattery right now, Scratch Morton,” she told him sternly. Then her expression softened and she added, “But I appreciate it, anyway.” She looked at Bo. “What time is all this silly hoopla supposed to start?”