Quarrels smiled. “Information? You know who Terry is. You don’t need me to tell you.”
“Ben St. John?”
“Huzzah for the man from Abilene.”
“Were you there? I mean, in Kansas, when it happened?”
“I was there. I didn’t see Liss screw the woman, but she squealed plenty, so we knew it was happening, me and Jesse and them.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
Quarrels shrugged. “Man wants to hump a woman, it’s no concern of mine.”
Keeping his anger in check, Clayton said, “Thank you for your help, Mayor. Now I can kill Terry with a clear conscience.”
“Ah, but it’s not as simple as that, Mr. Clayton.”
“It is to me.”
“Yes, I know. And that’s why I’m going to kill you.”
Chapter 67
Clayton was taken aback, but he tensed, ready.
He ran through names in his mind, gunfighters he’d heard men discuss: Wyatt Earp, John Wesley Hardin, Bill Longely, Harvey Logan, Dallas Stoudenmire, Ben Thompson . . . others.
But the name John Quarrels had never been mentioned that he could remember.
It didn’t mean the man wasn’t dangerous. He was. And he seemed supremely confident and that worried Clayton most of all.
Quarrels talked again.
“I need to keep St. John alive,” he said. “I squeeze money out of the fat man”—Quarrels made a clenching motion with his fist—“until his eyes pop.”
“You blackmail him by threatening to reveal his true identity.”
Quarrels smiled. “Blackmail is such an ugly word. Let’s just say Ben keeps me in a style to which I’ve become accustomed. That’s why I can’t allow you to gun him willy-nilly, as they say.”
Quarrels glanced at the sky.
“Be dark soon, Mr. Clayton. Shall we get this unpleasantness over with?”
It was obvious to Clayton that Quarrels’s talking was done, and he himself had no words left unsaid.
But after a struggle he managed to eke out a few that pleased him greatly.
“Quarrels,” he said, “you’re an even sorrier piece of trash than Terry.”
The mayor of Bighorn Point smiled. And shucked iron.
Clayton took the hit on his feet, fired back. Whether he had scored or not, he had no idea.
Quarrels stood flat-footed, expertly getting in his work. Two more bullets hit Clayton.
He dropped to his knees, his head reeling, raised his Colt to eye level, and fired.
Hit hard, Quarrels staggered back a couple of steps.
Clayton fired again.
Another hit, somewhere low in the man’s gut.
Quarrels backed up, bent over his gun. His back slammed against the house wall, and he straightened, ready to again take the fight to Clayton.
He ran his Remington dry, two shots kicking up dirt in front of Clayton’s knees.
As Quarrels clawed for his other gun, Clayton got to his feet. Holding the Colt in both hands, he fired, fired again. He tried for a third shot, but the hammer clicked on the empty chamber.
But it was enough.
Through a shifting shroud of smoke, he saw Quarrels fall, and the man showed no inclination to get up again.
Clayton swayed on his feet. Blood was draining out of him and he figured his life along with it.
He ejected the Colt’s empty shells and started to reload from his cartridge belt.
The bullet hit him like a sledgehammer.
He gasped in pain as the rifle round slammed into the left side of his waist near his spine. The .44-40 destroyed tissue on its way in, more as it exited his belly in an erupting fountain of blood and flesh.
Clayton fell on his back, struggling to stay conscious, blood in his mouth.
He thumbed off a shot in the general direction of the cattle pens.
It was a futile play born of desperation, but had the effect of driving the gunman out of hiding.
In the crowding gloom, Clayton had a fleeting impression of a tall, loose-limbed man with a drooping mustache running toward him, levering a Winchester from his shoulder.
Bullets kicked up around Clayton, one close enough to tug at the sleeve of his shirt. He laid the Colt on his raised knees, two-handed the handle, and got off a shot.
The rifleman stumbled, fell on his face. He tried to rise, but Clayton hit him again and this time the man’s hat flew off. A killing head shot.
Slowly, Clayton eased himself on his back. He’d been hit multiple times and any one of them could be fatal.
He stared at the sky.
A star blazed above him, bright in a dark part of the night sky that slowly spilled ink over the last pale remnants of the blue bowl of the day.
The darkness gave birth to a wind that sighed around Clayton, tugging at him, teasing him, mocking his weakness. The black horse stepped close, its reins trailing. Seeing no reaction from its rider, it turned away and Clayton heard the receding clop-clop of its hooves.
He tried to rise, failed, lay down again.
Why was he feeling no pain? Was that a good thing?
No, it was bad. Maybe his spine was shattered.
He closed his eyes and listened into the rustling night.
Then a darker darkness than the night took him.
Chapter 68
Cage Clayton opened his eyes.
The moon was high in the sky and had modestly drawn a gauzy veil of cloud over its nakedness. He heard whispers, a woman’s silvery laugh, the rustle of the wind.
He sat up, his eyes reaching into the night. They stood at the open door of the house, looking at him.
Suddenly Clayton was angry.
“Damn you both, you’re dead!” he said.
Lee Southwell smiled at him. She wore a white dress, a scarlet heart in front where her breasts swelled.
“We’ve come for you, Cage,” she said.
“Time to follow the buffalo, old fellow,” Shad Vestal said.
“And I don’t think I will. What do you think of that?” Clayton said.
He felt around him for his gun, his fingers flexing though the dirt.
“You’re one of us now, Cage,” Lee said. “You’re one of the dead.”
Vestal stepped out of the shadow of the door into the moonlight.
His head was a blackened dome of scorched flesh, bare, yellow bone showing, his eyes burned out.
“Parker Southwell is here, Cage,” he said. “Join us now. We don’t want to keep the colonel waiting.”
“Damn you, Vestal,” Clayton said. “You killed him.”
“Yes, and now I suffer for it,” Vestal said.
Lee stepped beside him, blood glistening on her breast.
“Would you like to sing, Cage?” she said. She looked at Vestal. “What shall we sing for Cage?”
She jumped up and down, then, gleefully, “Oh, I know. Listen, Cage. In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.”
“Shut the hell up!” Clayton yelled.
“In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.”
Clayton’s fingers closed on the handle of his gun.
He fired at Lee, then Vestal.
After the racketing echoes of the shots were silenced by the night, Clayton staggered to his feet, a man so soaked in blood he looked like a manikin covered in red rubies.
“I done for you!” he cried out. “I done for you both! And be damned to ye!”
The moonlight splashed the front of the house with mother-of-pearl light, deepening the shadows. The still body of John Quarrels lay close to the front door.
Clayton sobbed deep in his chest and dropped to his knees.
“I . . . done . . . for . . . you,” he said. “You came for me, and you rode my bullets back to hell.”
And he fell on his face, and gladly he let the darkness claim him again.