Shotgun Johnny
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Johnstone Country. Next Stop: Hell.
NO ONE MESSES WITH SHOTGUN JOHNNY.
It takes a brave man to ride shotgun for the Reverend’s Temptation Gold Mine in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It takes an even braver man to try to rob a coach of bullion when the shotgun rider is Johnny Greenway. Armed with his weapons of choice—two sawed-off, double-barreled shotguns in custom-made holsters for pistol-quick draws—Shotgun Johnny ain’t stopping for no one . . .
NOT UNLESS THEY WANT TO DIE.
Johnny Greenway was once a family man. A well-respected marshal who always played fair. Then his wife and son were killed by cutthroats. Johnny killed the killers. Then he hung up his badge and picked up a bottle. Now a shadow of his former self, he has nothing much to live for. But when he singlehandedly stops a bank robbery, he catches the eye of the banker’s daughter. She’s impressed by Johnny’s gun skills, and offers him a job riding shotgun. First he’ll have to stop drinking and clean up his act. But that’s not all that needs cleaning. The mountain trail to the mine hides the filthiest, dirtiest gang in the territory. They’re gunning for the gold. But Shotgun Johnny will be gunning for them . . .
NO ONE MESSES WITH SHOTGUN JOHNNY.
It takes a brave man to ride shotgun for the Reverend’s Temptation Gold Mine in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It takes an even braver man to try to rob a coach of bullion when the shotgun rider is Johnny Greenway. Armed with his weapons of choice—two sawed-off, double-barreled shotguns in custom-made holsters for pistol-quick draws—Shotgun Johnny ain’t stopping for no one . . .
NOT UNLESS THEY WANT TO DIE.
Johnny Greenway was once a family man. A well-respected marshal who always played fair. Then his wife and son were killed by cutthroats. Johnny killed the killers. Then he hung up his badge and picked up a bottle. Now a shadow of his former self, he has nothing much to live for. But when he singlehandedly stops a bank robbery, he catches the eye of the banker’s daughter. She’s impressed by Johnny’s gun skills, and offers him a job riding shotgun. First he’ll have to stop drinking and clean up his act. But that’s not all that needs cleaning. The mountain trail to the mine hides the filthiest, dirtiest gang in the territory. They’re gunning for the gold. But Shotgun Johnny will be gunning for them . . .
Release date: July 25, 2023
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Print pages: 400
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Shotgun Johnny
William W. Johnstone
“Ouch!” said “Rocky Mountain” Vernon Wade.
“What’d you do?” asked his partner, Pete Devries, with a snort of laughter.
“Burned myself.” Wade winced as he shifted his hot coffee cup in his hands. “Think it’s funny?”
Devries shrugged and sipped from his own hot cup. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Why is my burning my hand so funny to you, Pete?” Wade asked, glaring across a corner of their low fire at his partner, Devries.
“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” Devries said. He was tall and sandy-haired, and the brim of his Boss of the Plains Stetson was pulled low over his gray-blue eyes. “I reckon it was funny cause you otherwise act so tough. Forget it, Vernon. Stand down. I just chuckled at somethin’ I thought was funny, that’s all. I didn’t mean to give offense.”
“You did give offense.”
“Well, then, for that I apologize.”
“I am tough, Pete.” Wade glared darkly. “And don’t you forget it.”
“Okay, I won’t forget it.” Devries looked off into the darkness of the Sierra Nevada Mountain night.
“There you go again, laughin’.”
Devries looked back at Wade, who was dark and solidly built with a thick beard he hardly ever washed and certainly never ran a comb through. On a previous bullion run he’d pulled a tick out of it the size of a sewing thimble but only because Devries had noticed it and mentioned it. Otherwise, it might still be there, sucking blood out of the humorless killer’s cheek.
“What’d you laugh at that time, Pete?” Wade wanted to know.
“Oh, hell, Vernon!”
“Stop callin’ me Vernon, Pete. Folks call me Rocky Mountain or nothin’ at all. Folks call me Vernon only when they want to disrespect me, an’ you don’t want to do that, Pete. You really don’t want to do that!”
“All right, all right, Vern . . . er, I mean, Rocky Mountain. I apologize for callin’ you Vernon and for any and all other sundry ways I might have given offense during our time workin’ together!”
“In case you’re at all interested in anything except snickerin’ like some twin-braided schoolgirl, I jerked with a start because I got distracted by a sound I heard out there.” Wade pointed his chin to indicate the heavy darkness beyond the flickering orange light of the fire. “And, while I was silently opinin’ on the source of the sound and the possible nature of the threat, if the sound’s origin is in fact a threat, I let the cup tip a little too far to one side. So I was, in fact, reactin’ as much to the sound as to the hot coffee washin’ onto my fingers.”
“Well, now that we got that all straightened out,” Devries said, trying very hard not to give another wry snort, “what sound did you hear or think you heard?”
“I heard it, all right.” Wade set his cup on a rock ringing the fire. He grabbed his Henry repeating rifle, rose from where he’d been sitting back against the woolly underside of his saddle, and walked over to stand by a tall fir tree at the edge of the encampment. One of the three horses, tied to a picket line nearby, gave a low whicker. “I got the hearin’ of a desert jackrabbit, an’ I heard somethin’, all right. I’m just not sure what it was.”
“Why don’t you take a guess?”
Again, Wade turned a dull, hateful stare at his partner. “You don’t believe me? Or you think I’m just actin’ like some fearful old widder woman, hearin’ things?”
Devries looked at the Henry. Wade held the sixteen-shot repeater in his right hand, partly aimed, threateningly, in Devries’s direction. That was no accident. Wade wanted Devries to feel the threat. Devries knew that it was entirely likely that Rocky Mountain Vernon Wade would kill him for no more reason than because he felt Devries had insulted him, which Devries supposed he had, though he’d mostly just been funning around.
Before they’d started working together, hauling bullion down out of the mountains from the Reverend’s Temptation Gold Mine to the bank in Hallelujah Junction, Devries had heard that Wade was thin-skinned and hot-tempered. He’d also heard that Wade had killed men for little more reason than he’d taken offense at how they’d glanced at him, or for something someone had said in passing likely not even meant as an insult.
Now Devries realized those stories were true, and he made a mental note to tread a little more cautiously from here on . . .
“No, no, Vern . . . er, I mean, Rocky Mountain!” Devries said. “Will you please get your shorts out of the twist they seem to be in? I do not think you were acting like no widder woman. I believe that you in fact heard something, and I was just thinking that if you can’t pinpoint exactly what that something was, maybe you could just opine aloud on it.”
Wade studied him skeptically from over his shoulder.
Devries’s heart quickened. Jesus, he did not need this. Life was too short to be guarding gold with some sorehead with a hair trigger. And as loco as an owl in a lightning storm to boot!
Wade turned his head forward suddenly, sucking a sharp, shallow breath. “There it was again.”
Devries pricked his ears. All he could hear was the snapping and crackling of their low fire and the infrequent stomps and shifts of the two horses and pack mule picketed twenty feet away. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“Well, I heard it.”
Devries set down his coffee and rose from the log he’d been sitting on. He grabbed his Winchester and walked over to stand near Wade. Devries stared out into the darkness beyond their camp here in Henry’s Hollow, not far from the South Fork of the Avalanche River and Grizzly Falls. He held his breath as he listened, squinting into the darkness, blinking, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the lack of light over here.
Normally, only fools and tinhorns would build a fire when they thought there was a chance they were being stalked. But neither Devries nor Wade had thought anyone would be fool enough to shadow them—two gunmen of significant reputations in this neck of California and Nevada. No man was fool enough to think they could swipe the bullion out from under Pete Devries and Rocky Mountain Vernon Wade.
Devries had thought so before, and, not hearing anything except the hooting of a distant owl and the soft scuttles of some burrowing creatures, he still thought so.
Maybe Wade was not only crazy. Maybe he was like some fearful old “widder” woman—hearing things.
Best not allude to the possibility, Devries silently admonished himself. Or at least do so in a roundabout way . . .
“Hard to believe anyone would fool with us, Rocky Mountain,” he said softly, staring into the darkness. “I mean you alone carry one hell of a reputation on them broad shoulders of yours. How many men have you killed, anyway?”
“I stopped countin’ when I was twelve.”
Devries snapped a disbelieving look at the big man standing to his right.
Wade felt it was his turn to snort. He turned to Devries with a crooked smile inside his black beard. “Just foolin’ with ya, Peter. I think I stopped countin’ when I was thirteen and a half.” His smile grew wider.
Devries smiled then, too, thinking it was all right since Wade had made a joke.
Was it a joke?
Not that Devries was all that impressed or afraid of Vernon Wade. Devries had been a gunslinger and regulator of some renown for half a dozen years, before he’d ended up in the Texas pen for killing a barman in Nacogdoches. His attorney had gotten him out early when he’d discovered that the prosecutor had bought guilty verdict votes from three jury members. Devries hadn’t been out of the pen for more than two days before he’d broken into the prosecutor’s home one night and slit the man’s throat while the man had been sound asleep beside his wife, who’d woken up screaming when she’d heard her husband choking on his own blood.
In other words, Devries’s past was as impressive as Vernon Wade’s. Pete just wasn’t the blowhard Vernon was. Yes, Vernon. Devries might call the man “Rocky Mountain” to his face, just to keep things civil between them, but in his own mind he’d forever know him as Vernon. Or maybe even Vernie. The only reason Pete didn’t put a bullet through the blowhard’s left ear right here and now was because this bullion run they were on, from the Reverend’s Temptation to Hallelujah Junction, was one of the most perilous runs in all the Sierra Nevadas. The Temptation was a rich mine, and every owlhoot in California and Nevada knew it. There might be a handful just stupid enough to make a play for the gold, maybe not knowing who was guarding it.
The way Devries saw it, four eyes were better than two. Best to keep the peace.
Besides, Devries didn’t want to ruffle the feathers of his comely employer, Miss Sheila Bonner, the young lady who’d taken over the Bank & Trust in Hallelujah Junction from her father, who’d also owned the Reverend’s Temptation Mine. Miss Bonner was quite the looker, maybe the prettiest woman Devries had ever laid eyes on. She filled out her fine, if overly conservative, frocks just the way a dress was meant to be filled out. Pete was figuring to make a play for the woman. Not to marry, of course. Devries was not the apron-strings sort. But he purely would like to see what Miss Bonner looked like under all them fancy trappings, and, most of all, how she’d treat a fella after the lamps were turned down in her deceased father’s stylish digs on a nice shady lot in Hallelujah Junction.
Devries didn’t want to do anything that might spoil his prospects for a conquest. Shooting his partner, he supposed, might do just that. He’d put up with only so much, however. He could always shoot dim-witted Vernie, and blame it on a bushwhacking owlhoot making a play for the bullion.
He stifled a laugh then jumped with a little start when Wade leaned toward him and said quietly, “I’m gonna wander on over this way. What I heard came from over there. You head that way. We’ll circle around, check it out.”
Devries’s hackles rose a little at being given orders by one so cow-stupid not to mention ugly and with the hygiene of a hyena, but what the hell? “All right,” he said, rolling his eyes. He still hadn’t heard anything and was beginning to believe his partner really was as jumpy as that “widder” woman.
Vernie strode into the darkness to Devries’s right. Devries stood looking around and listening a while longer. When he still hadn’t heard a damn thing except the soft crunch of Vernie’s boots in the dead leaves and pine needles, he indulged in another acidic snort then moved out into the darkness to his left.
“Big dummy,” he muttered under his breath, and chuckled.
He stepped over a log, pushed through some shrubs, and stopped to look around and listen again.
Nothing.
He turned to his left and headed along the camp’s eastern periphery, maybe ten feet beyond the reach of the fire’s dwindling umber glow. When he was off the camp’s northeastern corner, exactly opposite from where he and Vernie had separated, he stopped and listened again.
Not a damn thing. Hell, even the owl had stopped hooting.
Pete yawned, raked a hand down his face. They’d had a long day on the trail in the high-altitude wind and burning sunshine. He was tired, wind- and sunburned, and he was ready to roll into his soogan. They’d rig up the horses and pack mule and set out again on the trail that led down out of the mountains soon after first light.
He turned to look back over his left shoulder, across the encampment toward where Vernie must be stumbling around in the darkness, chasing the shadows of ghosts. Pete had just opened his mouth to call out to his partner, when Wade himself yelled suddenly, “Stop! Stop! I see you, dammit! Stop or I’ll shoot!”
Wade’s Henry thundered—a loud booming report that made Devries leap with a start, his heels coming up off the ground.
He jerked again when the Henry spoke again . . . again . . . and again.
The sound of running footsteps sounded on the far side of the camp, maybe two hundred feet away, beyond the horses that were nickering and prancing around in fear, the mule doing the same, braying softly, all three tugging on their picket line.
“What is it?” Devries yelled, his heart pounding. “What do you see, Vern . . . I mean, Rocky Mountain?”
The running footsteps stopped suddenly.
Wade said something too softly, or maybe he was too far away, for Devries to hear.
Pete did hear the sudden gasp, however. It was loud as gasps go and it was followed by what sounded like a strangling sigh. The sigh was followed by a shrill, “Ahh . . . ohhh . . . ohhhh, gawd! Oh, you dirty, low-down . . .”
There was a light thump.
“What is it, Wade?”
Devries ran toward the sound of the commotion. He sprinted through the weak light thrown by the fire and then out of the light again and into the darkness near the whickering, skitter-hopping horses and mule. A deadfall pulled his right foot out from under him, and he hit the ground hard.
He lifted his head, sweating, his heart thundering in his ears. “What is it, Rocky Mountain?”
He stared into the darkness, breathing hard from the short run and the fear that verged on panic.
Footsteps rose on his left. Devries whipped his head in that direction. Someone was moving toward him, taking heavy, lunging strides. He saw the man’s thick shadow.
“Wade?” he called. “Rocky Mountain, that you?”
No reply except for the heavy, lunging steps. The thick man’s shadow moved through the forest, crouched slightly forward.
“Wade?” he called again, panic a living beast inside of him.
He looked around quickly, not hearing anything but the big man’s approach. Still, he had the sense that he was surrounded and that men were tightening their positions around him.
He turned again toward the camp. The light from the fire began to reach the approaching man. Devries swung around from the darkness and, squeezing his cocked Winchester in both hands, hurried back into the camp just as the thick figure stepped up to the fire on the camp’s opposite side.
Devries stopped.
“Rocky Mountain?”
Vernon Wade stood with his knees bent. He was crouched forward, chin dipped toward his chest, his arms crossed on his belly. Slowly, Wade lifted his head. He wasn’t wearing his hat. His shaggy, unwashed hair hung in his eyes, which flashed in the fire’s umber light. His gaze found Devries gaping at him from the other side of the fire.
“Th-they’re . . . they’re . . . here,” Wade said in a strangled voice.
Devries sucked in a breath when he saw what appeared to be blood—what else could it be?—oozing out from between his partner’s crossed arms. Blood and Vernon Wade’s innards.
Devries shuddered as though racked with a violent chill. Cold sweat pasted his shirt under his leather jacket against his back.
“Who’s here, Rocky Mountain?”
“Oh . . . oh, gawd!” Wade sobbed, dropping to his knees. He lifted his head and stretched his lips back from his teeth. “They killed me!”
His arms fell to his sides. As they did, the guts he was trying to hold inside him plopped onto the ground before him. He fell face forward and lay across his bowels, shuddering as he died.
Devries stared down at the big, dark lump of his dead partner. “Who killed you, Rocky Mountain?” he whispered, rolling his eyes around, trying to peer around to all sides at once.
He glanced toward where he and Wade had placed the panniers filled with bullion from the Reverend’s Temptation, between their two saddles, one on each side of the fire. Devries blinked his eyes as if to clear them.
The panniers were gone.
Again, his poor abused heart gave a violent kick against the backside of his sternum.
Someone laughed behind him. It was a high, devilish squeal. It was followed by the crunching of running feet.
Devries whipped around, raised his Winchester, and fired.
“Who are you?” he shouted, ejecting the spent shell from the Winchester’s breech and seating a fresh one in the action.
He fired again. Again. The rocketing blasts shattered the night’s heavy silence and made his ears ring.
More squealing laughter, like the laughter of a devilish boy pulling a prank, rose on his right. It mingled with the laughter of what sounded like a woman.
Devries slid the rifle in that direction, cocking it, the spent shell pinging onto the ground behind him. The rifle leaped and roared in his hands, flames stabbing from the barrel.
More laughter—this time on Devries’s left.
Pete fired.
He fired until he had no more cartridges left in the Winchester’s magazine. He winced when he heard the ping of the hammer dropping benignly against the firing pin.
He stared through his wafting powder smoke into the darkness around him.
No more laughter now. No more running footsteps. No more sounds of any kind. Not even the breeze.
The horses and mule must have pulled free of their picket line and hightailed it, for he did not see their bulky silhouettes on his left, though in his anxious shooting he hadn’t heard them bolt.
The empty rifle shook in Devries’s hands.
He dropped it as though it were a hot potato. It plopped onto the ground at his feet.
He reached across his belly with his right hand and pulled the big, top-break Russian .44 positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip. His hand was shaking so badly that he had trouble unsnapping the keeper thong from over the hammer, raising the heavy pistol, and cocking it.
“Show yourselves!” he screamed. “Show yourselves, you devils!”
His own echo washed over him, further chilling him. It sounded like the echoing cry of a terrified old widder woman.
A man’s voice said casually behind him, “You boys sure can cook a good pot of coffee.”
Devries whipped around so quickly that he almost fell.
He swung the big Russian around, as well, and aimed toward the fire. The blaze had been built up a little so that the light shone on the face of the man crouched over the opposite side of it. The man held a steaming tin cup in his gloved hands.
Devries moved slowly toward the fire. His heart was like a giant metronome in his chest, the pendulum assaulting his heart like a sharpened steel blade.
Devries stopped about ten feet away from the fire, staring aghast at the man hunkered there on the other side of the flames, on his haunches. He had a devil’s grinning face with high, tapering cheeks obscured beneath a thick, sandy beard, and wicked slits for eyes. Coarse, sandy blond hair poked out from beneath the battered Stetson stuffed down on his head. He wore a buckskin coat with a fox-fur collar. A Colt’s revolving rifle leaned against the log to his right, within easy reach.
The man smiled his devil’s smile at Devries. He raised his coffee to his lips, blew on it, and sipped. Swallowing, he straightened to his full height, which was maybe six feet, if that. He was not a tall man. But, then, Harry Seville had never needed to be.
What Seville lacked for in height, he made up for in pure cunning and blackhearted meanness and storied savagery.
Footsteps sounded around Devries. Squeezing the big Russian in his hands, he swung the pistol from right to left then back again, that metronome in his chest fairly shredding his heart. Men stepped into the firelight around him by ones and two and threes and fours . . . until well over a dozen men aiming rifles or pistols at him surrounded him, grinning beneath the brims of their battered hats.
Make that over a dozen men and one woman, a big one who looked very much like a man except she wore a long, black skirt. She was laughing beneath the round, wide crown of her man’s felt hat.
“Ah,” Devries heard himself say in a small, defeated voice. “Ah . . . hell . . .”
The big man laughed heartily, his devil’s eyes slitting so much that they were nearly closed. The other men laughed, as well. They laughed and elbowed each other and pointed out the object of their mockery. They snorted and brushed fists across their noses and poked their hat brims back off their foreheads.
Devries had just begun to feel warm liquid trickling down his leg before a hand slugged his hat from his head from behind then grabbed a fistful of his hair. Pete cried out as the brusque hand pulled his head back by his hair until he found himself staring up at a big, dark man towering over him from behind. Devries tried to raise the barrel of the Russian, but then he felt an icy line drawn across his throat, and all strength left him at once.
He sank to the ground, gasping, lifting his hands to his neck to try to remove the cold noose that had been drawn taut around him. His fingers touched only the oily slickness of blood.
There was no noose. His throat had been cut.
Lying on his back, Devries stared up from the ground at the man who’d killed him. He was a tall, broad-shouldered gent in a bearskin coat and a bullet-shaped black hat from beneath which twin black braids trailed down over the front of his broad shoulders.
Seville and his half-breed Sioux partner, Louis Raised-By-Wolves. He knew their dastardly reputations.
Devries had done some lousy things on this earth, but he didn’t believe he’d ever committed an atrocity horrible enough to warrant the last thing he saw on this side of the sod be Louis Raised-By-Wolves staring down at him, chuckling at him and licking Devries’s own blood from the blade of his bowie knife as though it were the sweetest nectar he’d ever tasted.
“You have such a lovely body, Miss Sheila, for the life of me I can’t understand why no man has yet staked a claim on you!” intoned Verna Godfrey early the next morning in Hallelujah Junction.
Sheila Bonner stood holding her breath while the maid laced up the back of her blue silk whalebone corset. She said in a somewhat pinched voice and with a vaguely ironic air that was no doubt lost on Verna, “I don’t know, Verna. I guess men are smarter than we give them credit for.”
“Oh, that’s just silly. No smart man would pass up such a beauty. They’re all imbeciles!”
“Most men feel threatened by professional women . . . and women who don’t put up with their blather. Wrap that into one female package, Verna, and you get an old maid.”
“Shame. Just a shame,” Verna said with an exasperated sigh, sadly shaking her head as she stared into the looking glass of Sheila’s recently deceased father’s stout English shaving stand. It was the only large looking glass in the crisp, brick, Victorian-style house that Sheila’s father had built soon after the mining camp of Hallelujah Junction had boomed into a town of considerable wealth and distinction, at least by remote Sierra Nevada Mountain standards.
The young woman standing half-naked in the looking glass, staring back at her own image, was one of considerable wealth and distinction, as well. The wealth might be somewhat precarious, given her father’s recent death and some of the risky business decisions he’d made preceding it, as well as the temperamental boomtown economy, but there was no questioning the young woman’s attractiveness. The dark brown of her almond-shaped eyes was exquisitely complemented by the rich chestnut sheen of her long, thick hair, which Verna had spent nearly the entire last quarter-hour brushing out so that it flowed down Sheila’s slender back like the thick mane of a blooded mare. The young woman’s subtly heart-shaped face with its long dark lashes, pert nose, gently tapering cheeks, and strong jawline, might have been carved out of ivory with the precise chisel-work of the most delicate of carvers.
Her bosoms, while not overlarge, were pert, firm, and perfectly shaped.
Looking down in that direction, unable to not feel a little pride at the attributes God had found her worthy of owning, Sheila said with a wry snort, “Men are smarter than we women give them credit for. The proof is in the pudding—er, the corset, I should say.”
Still tightening the laces against Sheila’s back, Verna met her gaze in the looking glass and frowned. “What on earth do you mean, dear?”
“Who else but a man would invent such a draconian and demeaning contraption as the whalebone corset? And who but a woman, foolish in our need to please said men right down to wearing the most uncomfortable contraptions invented since the Middle Ages’ instruments of diabolical torture, would be harebrained enough to wear them?”
Verna stared at Sheila in the mirror, the old woman’s frosty blue eyes opaque with distressed incomprehension. “Oh, dear . . . how you do go on!” She laughed heartily, causing her sagging jowls to quiver. “I declare, you do so remind me of your father sometimes in the way you put words together. Just like Mister Bonner, I often can’t understand but maybe two or three words you throw out at a time!”
The older woman laughed and shook her head as, finished tying the corset, she lowered her hands to her sides. “Oh, dear . . .” She glanced around Joe Bonner’s sparsely but tastefully furnished bedroom with its canopied, four-poster bed, which was where the two women were standing for the use of the dead man’s mirror. “I do so miss the mister so . . .” She turned back to regard Sheila tragically in the looking glass. “I’m so sorry, dear! How utterly heartless of me to mention—”
Turning, Sheila took the old woman’s thick wrists in her hands, smiling gently at her, caressing her hands with her thumbs. “How heartless of you to remember my father? Nonsense, Verna. It warms my heart to know how much you cared for him.”
“Oh, but it’s so soon . . .” The housekeeper turned her head to gaze out the window to her left, which nearly as perfectly as a picture framed Martin Bonner’s grave set back in a small stand of young spruces and marked off from the rest of the yard by a black, wrought-iron fence. The grave itself was a firm young mound covered with rocks and adorned with the flowers Sheila had laid atop it only yesterday, having laid a fresh spray of hollyhocks on the grave every morning since her father’s funeral the previous week.
Martin Bonner had been stricken with a series of small but debilitating strokes over the past year, due in no small part, the local doctor had opined, to the financial strain Bonner had been feeling for the past eighteen months at the bank he’d owned, the Hallelujah Bank & Trust. The beginnings of that strain had corresponded with the first of several robberies of the gold bullion Bonner transported, by independent contractors, out of the mountains every month from the Reverend’s Temptation Gold Mine, which he also owned, at the base of Grizzly Ridge, on the east side of the Sierra Nevadas.
With each succeeding robbery and the loss of over two hundred thousand dollars in bullion, the poor man’s health had deteriorated until, unable to ignore his wretched state any longer, he’d finally written a letter to his daughter, Sheila, who’d been working as an accountant for her uncle, Martin’s younger brother, in Philadelphia. Martin had moved. . .
“What’d you do?” asked his partner, Pete Devries, with a snort of laughter.
“Burned myself.” Wade winced as he shifted his hot coffee cup in his hands. “Think it’s funny?”
Devries shrugged and sipped from his own hot cup. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Why is my burning my hand so funny to you, Pete?” Wade asked, glaring across a corner of their low fire at his partner, Devries.
“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” Devries said. He was tall and sandy-haired, and the brim of his Boss of the Plains Stetson was pulled low over his gray-blue eyes. “I reckon it was funny cause you otherwise act so tough. Forget it, Vernon. Stand down. I just chuckled at somethin’ I thought was funny, that’s all. I didn’t mean to give offense.”
“You did give offense.”
“Well, then, for that I apologize.”
“I am tough, Pete.” Wade glared darkly. “And don’t you forget it.”
“Okay, I won’t forget it.” Devries looked off into the darkness of the Sierra Nevada Mountain night.
“There you go again, laughin’.”
Devries looked back at Wade, who was dark and solidly built with a thick beard he hardly ever washed and certainly never ran a comb through. On a previous bullion run he’d pulled a tick out of it the size of a sewing thimble but only because Devries had noticed it and mentioned it. Otherwise, it might still be there, sucking blood out of the humorless killer’s cheek.
“What’d you laugh at that time, Pete?” Wade wanted to know.
“Oh, hell, Vernon!”
“Stop callin’ me Vernon, Pete. Folks call me Rocky Mountain or nothin’ at all. Folks call me Vernon only when they want to disrespect me, an’ you don’t want to do that, Pete. You really don’t want to do that!”
“All right, all right, Vern . . . er, I mean, Rocky Mountain. I apologize for callin’ you Vernon and for any and all other sundry ways I might have given offense during our time workin’ together!”
“In case you’re at all interested in anything except snickerin’ like some twin-braided schoolgirl, I jerked with a start because I got distracted by a sound I heard out there.” Wade pointed his chin to indicate the heavy darkness beyond the flickering orange light of the fire. “And, while I was silently opinin’ on the source of the sound and the possible nature of the threat, if the sound’s origin is in fact a threat, I let the cup tip a little too far to one side. So I was, in fact, reactin’ as much to the sound as to the hot coffee washin’ onto my fingers.”
“Well, now that we got that all straightened out,” Devries said, trying very hard not to give another wry snort, “what sound did you hear or think you heard?”
“I heard it, all right.” Wade set his cup on a rock ringing the fire. He grabbed his Henry repeating rifle, rose from where he’d been sitting back against the woolly underside of his saddle, and walked over to stand by a tall fir tree at the edge of the encampment. One of the three horses, tied to a picket line nearby, gave a low whicker. “I got the hearin’ of a desert jackrabbit, an’ I heard somethin’, all right. I’m just not sure what it was.”
“Why don’t you take a guess?”
Again, Wade turned a dull, hateful stare at his partner. “You don’t believe me? Or you think I’m just actin’ like some fearful old widder woman, hearin’ things?”
Devries looked at the Henry. Wade held the sixteen-shot repeater in his right hand, partly aimed, threateningly, in Devries’s direction. That was no accident. Wade wanted Devries to feel the threat. Devries knew that it was entirely likely that Rocky Mountain Vernon Wade would kill him for no more reason than because he felt Devries had insulted him, which Devries supposed he had, though he’d mostly just been funning around.
Before they’d started working together, hauling bullion down out of the mountains from the Reverend’s Temptation Gold Mine to the bank in Hallelujah Junction, Devries had heard that Wade was thin-skinned and hot-tempered. He’d also heard that Wade had killed men for little more reason than he’d taken offense at how they’d glanced at him, or for something someone had said in passing likely not even meant as an insult.
Now Devries realized those stories were true, and he made a mental note to tread a little more cautiously from here on . . .
“No, no, Vern . . . er, I mean, Rocky Mountain!” Devries said. “Will you please get your shorts out of the twist they seem to be in? I do not think you were acting like no widder woman. I believe that you in fact heard something, and I was just thinking that if you can’t pinpoint exactly what that something was, maybe you could just opine aloud on it.”
Wade studied him skeptically from over his shoulder.
Devries’s heart quickened. Jesus, he did not need this. Life was too short to be guarding gold with some sorehead with a hair trigger. And as loco as an owl in a lightning storm to boot!
Wade turned his head forward suddenly, sucking a sharp, shallow breath. “There it was again.”
Devries pricked his ears. All he could hear was the snapping and crackling of their low fire and the infrequent stomps and shifts of the two horses and pack mule picketed twenty feet away. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“Well, I heard it.”
Devries set down his coffee and rose from the log he’d been sitting on. He grabbed his Winchester and walked over to stand near Wade. Devries stared out into the darkness beyond their camp here in Henry’s Hollow, not far from the South Fork of the Avalanche River and Grizzly Falls. He held his breath as he listened, squinting into the darkness, blinking, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the lack of light over here.
Normally, only fools and tinhorns would build a fire when they thought there was a chance they were being stalked. But neither Devries nor Wade had thought anyone would be fool enough to shadow them—two gunmen of significant reputations in this neck of California and Nevada. No man was fool enough to think they could swipe the bullion out from under Pete Devries and Rocky Mountain Vernon Wade.
Devries had thought so before, and, not hearing anything except the hooting of a distant owl and the soft scuttles of some burrowing creatures, he still thought so.
Maybe Wade was not only crazy. Maybe he was like some fearful old “widder” woman—hearing things.
Best not allude to the possibility, Devries silently admonished himself. Or at least do so in a roundabout way . . .
“Hard to believe anyone would fool with us, Rocky Mountain,” he said softly, staring into the darkness. “I mean you alone carry one hell of a reputation on them broad shoulders of yours. How many men have you killed, anyway?”
“I stopped countin’ when I was twelve.”
Devries snapped a disbelieving look at the big man standing to his right.
Wade felt it was his turn to snort. He turned to Devries with a crooked smile inside his black beard. “Just foolin’ with ya, Peter. I think I stopped countin’ when I was thirteen and a half.” His smile grew wider.
Devries smiled then, too, thinking it was all right since Wade had made a joke.
Was it a joke?
Not that Devries was all that impressed or afraid of Vernon Wade. Devries had been a gunslinger and regulator of some renown for half a dozen years, before he’d ended up in the Texas pen for killing a barman in Nacogdoches. His attorney had gotten him out early when he’d discovered that the prosecutor had bought guilty verdict votes from three jury members. Devries hadn’t been out of the pen for more than two days before he’d broken into the prosecutor’s home one night and slit the man’s throat while the man had been sound asleep beside his wife, who’d woken up screaming when she’d heard her husband choking on his own blood.
In other words, Devries’s past was as impressive as Vernon Wade’s. Pete just wasn’t the blowhard Vernon was. Yes, Vernon. Devries might call the man “Rocky Mountain” to his face, just to keep things civil between them, but in his own mind he’d forever know him as Vernon. Or maybe even Vernie. The only reason Pete didn’t put a bullet through the blowhard’s left ear right here and now was because this bullion run they were on, from the Reverend’s Temptation to Hallelujah Junction, was one of the most perilous runs in all the Sierra Nevadas. The Temptation was a rich mine, and every owlhoot in California and Nevada knew it. There might be a handful just stupid enough to make a play for the gold, maybe not knowing who was guarding it.
The way Devries saw it, four eyes were better than two. Best to keep the peace.
Besides, Devries didn’t want to ruffle the feathers of his comely employer, Miss Sheila Bonner, the young lady who’d taken over the Bank & Trust in Hallelujah Junction from her father, who’d also owned the Reverend’s Temptation Mine. Miss Bonner was quite the looker, maybe the prettiest woman Devries had ever laid eyes on. She filled out her fine, if overly conservative, frocks just the way a dress was meant to be filled out. Pete was figuring to make a play for the woman. Not to marry, of course. Devries was not the apron-strings sort. But he purely would like to see what Miss Bonner looked like under all them fancy trappings, and, most of all, how she’d treat a fella after the lamps were turned down in her deceased father’s stylish digs on a nice shady lot in Hallelujah Junction.
Devries didn’t want to do anything that might spoil his prospects for a conquest. Shooting his partner, he supposed, might do just that. He’d put up with only so much, however. He could always shoot dim-witted Vernie, and blame it on a bushwhacking owlhoot making a play for the bullion.
He stifled a laugh then jumped with a little start when Wade leaned toward him and said quietly, “I’m gonna wander on over this way. What I heard came from over there. You head that way. We’ll circle around, check it out.”
Devries’s hackles rose a little at being given orders by one so cow-stupid not to mention ugly and with the hygiene of a hyena, but what the hell? “All right,” he said, rolling his eyes. He still hadn’t heard anything and was beginning to believe his partner really was as jumpy as that “widder” woman.
Vernie strode into the darkness to Devries’s right. Devries stood looking around and listening a while longer. When he still hadn’t heard a damn thing except the soft crunch of Vernie’s boots in the dead leaves and pine needles, he indulged in another acidic snort then moved out into the darkness to his left.
“Big dummy,” he muttered under his breath, and chuckled.
He stepped over a log, pushed through some shrubs, and stopped to look around and listen again.
Nothing.
He turned to his left and headed along the camp’s eastern periphery, maybe ten feet beyond the reach of the fire’s dwindling umber glow. When he was off the camp’s northeastern corner, exactly opposite from where he and Vernie had separated, he stopped and listened again.
Not a damn thing. Hell, even the owl had stopped hooting.
Pete yawned, raked a hand down his face. They’d had a long day on the trail in the high-altitude wind and burning sunshine. He was tired, wind- and sunburned, and he was ready to roll into his soogan. They’d rig up the horses and pack mule and set out again on the trail that led down out of the mountains soon after first light.
He turned to look back over his left shoulder, across the encampment toward where Vernie must be stumbling around in the darkness, chasing the shadows of ghosts. Pete had just opened his mouth to call out to his partner, when Wade himself yelled suddenly, “Stop! Stop! I see you, dammit! Stop or I’ll shoot!”
Wade’s Henry thundered—a loud booming report that made Devries leap with a start, his heels coming up off the ground.
He jerked again when the Henry spoke again . . . again . . . and again.
The sound of running footsteps sounded on the far side of the camp, maybe two hundred feet away, beyond the horses that were nickering and prancing around in fear, the mule doing the same, braying softly, all three tugging on their picket line.
“What is it?” Devries yelled, his heart pounding. “What do you see, Vern . . . I mean, Rocky Mountain?”
The running footsteps stopped suddenly.
Wade said something too softly, or maybe he was too far away, for Devries to hear.
Pete did hear the sudden gasp, however. It was loud as gasps go and it was followed by what sounded like a strangling sigh. The sigh was followed by a shrill, “Ahh . . . ohhh . . . ohhhh, gawd! Oh, you dirty, low-down . . .”
There was a light thump.
“What is it, Wade?”
Devries ran toward the sound of the commotion. He sprinted through the weak light thrown by the fire and then out of the light again and into the darkness near the whickering, skitter-hopping horses and mule. A deadfall pulled his right foot out from under him, and he hit the ground hard.
He lifted his head, sweating, his heart thundering in his ears. “What is it, Rocky Mountain?”
He stared into the darkness, breathing hard from the short run and the fear that verged on panic.
Footsteps rose on his left. Devries whipped his head in that direction. Someone was moving toward him, taking heavy, lunging strides. He saw the man’s thick shadow.
“Wade?” he called. “Rocky Mountain, that you?”
No reply except for the heavy, lunging steps. The thick man’s shadow moved through the forest, crouched slightly forward.
“Wade?” he called again, panic a living beast inside of him.
He looked around quickly, not hearing anything but the big man’s approach. Still, he had the sense that he was surrounded and that men were tightening their positions around him.
He turned again toward the camp. The light from the fire began to reach the approaching man. Devries swung around from the darkness and, squeezing his cocked Winchester in both hands, hurried back into the camp just as the thick figure stepped up to the fire on the camp’s opposite side.
Devries stopped.
“Rocky Mountain?”
Vernon Wade stood with his knees bent. He was crouched forward, chin dipped toward his chest, his arms crossed on his belly. Slowly, Wade lifted his head. He wasn’t wearing his hat. His shaggy, unwashed hair hung in his eyes, which flashed in the fire’s umber light. His gaze found Devries gaping at him from the other side of the fire.
“Th-they’re . . . they’re . . . here,” Wade said in a strangled voice.
Devries sucked in a breath when he saw what appeared to be blood—what else could it be?—oozing out from between his partner’s crossed arms. Blood and Vernon Wade’s innards.
Devries shuddered as though racked with a violent chill. Cold sweat pasted his shirt under his leather jacket against his back.
“Who’s here, Rocky Mountain?”
“Oh . . . oh, gawd!” Wade sobbed, dropping to his knees. He lifted his head and stretched his lips back from his teeth. “They killed me!”
His arms fell to his sides. As they did, the guts he was trying to hold inside him plopped onto the ground before him. He fell face forward and lay across his bowels, shuddering as he died.
Devries stared down at the big, dark lump of his dead partner. “Who killed you, Rocky Mountain?” he whispered, rolling his eyes around, trying to peer around to all sides at once.
He glanced toward where he and Wade had placed the panniers filled with bullion from the Reverend’s Temptation, between their two saddles, one on each side of the fire. Devries blinked his eyes as if to clear them.
The panniers were gone.
Again, his poor abused heart gave a violent kick against the backside of his sternum.
Someone laughed behind him. It was a high, devilish squeal. It was followed by the crunching of running feet.
Devries whipped around, raised his Winchester, and fired.
“Who are you?” he shouted, ejecting the spent shell from the Winchester’s breech and seating a fresh one in the action.
He fired again. Again. The rocketing blasts shattered the night’s heavy silence and made his ears ring.
More squealing laughter, like the laughter of a devilish boy pulling a prank, rose on his right. It mingled with the laughter of what sounded like a woman.
Devries slid the rifle in that direction, cocking it, the spent shell pinging onto the ground behind him. The rifle leaped and roared in his hands, flames stabbing from the barrel.
More laughter—this time on Devries’s left.
Pete fired.
He fired until he had no more cartridges left in the Winchester’s magazine. He winced when he heard the ping of the hammer dropping benignly against the firing pin.
He stared through his wafting powder smoke into the darkness around him.
No more laughter now. No more running footsteps. No more sounds of any kind. Not even the breeze.
The horses and mule must have pulled free of their picket line and hightailed it, for he did not see their bulky silhouettes on his left, though in his anxious shooting he hadn’t heard them bolt.
The empty rifle shook in Devries’s hands.
He dropped it as though it were a hot potato. It plopped onto the ground at his feet.
He reached across his belly with his right hand and pulled the big, top-break Russian .44 positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip. His hand was shaking so badly that he had trouble unsnapping the keeper thong from over the hammer, raising the heavy pistol, and cocking it.
“Show yourselves!” he screamed. “Show yourselves, you devils!”
His own echo washed over him, further chilling him. It sounded like the echoing cry of a terrified old widder woman.
A man’s voice said casually behind him, “You boys sure can cook a good pot of coffee.”
Devries whipped around so quickly that he almost fell.
He swung the big Russian around, as well, and aimed toward the fire. The blaze had been built up a little so that the light shone on the face of the man crouched over the opposite side of it. The man held a steaming tin cup in his gloved hands.
Devries moved slowly toward the fire. His heart was like a giant metronome in his chest, the pendulum assaulting his heart like a sharpened steel blade.
Devries stopped about ten feet away from the fire, staring aghast at the man hunkered there on the other side of the flames, on his haunches. He had a devil’s grinning face with high, tapering cheeks obscured beneath a thick, sandy beard, and wicked slits for eyes. Coarse, sandy blond hair poked out from beneath the battered Stetson stuffed down on his head. He wore a buckskin coat with a fox-fur collar. A Colt’s revolving rifle leaned against the log to his right, within easy reach.
The man smiled his devil’s smile at Devries. He raised his coffee to his lips, blew on it, and sipped. Swallowing, he straightened to his full height, which was maybe six feet, if that. He was not a tall man. But, then, Harry Seville had never needed to be.
What Seville lacked for in height, he made up for in pure cunning and blackhearted meanness and storied savagery.
Footsteps sounded around Devries. Squeezing the big Russian in his hands, he swung the pistol from right to left then back again, that metronome in his chest fairly shredding his heart. Men stepped into the firelight around him by ones and two and threes and fours . . . until well over a dozen men aiming rifles or pistols at him surrounded him, grinning beneath the brims of their battered hats.
Make that over a dozen men and one woman, a big one who looked very much like a man except she wore a long, black skirt. She was laughing beneath the round, wide crown of her man’s felt hat.
“Ah,” Devries heard himself say in a small, defeated voice. “Ah . . . hell . . .”
The big man laughed heartily, his devil’s eyes slitting so much that they were nearly closed. The other men laughed, as well. They laughed and elbowed each other and pointed out the object of their mockery. They snorted and brushed fists across their noses and poked their hat brims back off their foreheads.
Devries had just begun to feel warm liquid trickling down his leg before a hand slugged his hat from his head from behind then grabbed a fistful of his hair. Pete cried out as the brusque hand pulled his head back by his hair until he found himself staring up at a big, dark man towering over him from behind. Devries tried to raise the barrel of the Russian, but then he felt an icy line drawn across his throat, and all strength left him at once.
He sank to the ground, gasping, lifting his hands to his neck to try to remove the cold noose that had been drawn taut around him. His fingers touched only the oily slickness of blood.
There was no noose. His throat had been cut.
Lying on his back, Devries stared up from the ground at the man who’d killed him. He was a tall, broad-shouldered gent in a bearskin coat and a bullet-shaped black hat from beneath which twin black braids trailed down over the front of his broad shoulders.
Seville and his half-breed Sioux partner, Louis Raised-By-Wolves. He knew their dastardly reputations.
Devries had done some lousy things on this earth, but he didn’t believe he’d ever committed an atrocity horrible enough to warrant the last thing he saw on this side of the sod be Louis Raised-By-Wolves staring down at him, chuckling at him and licking Devries’s own blood from the blade of his bowie knife as though it were the sweetest nectar he’d ever tasted.
“You have such a lovely body, Miss Sheila, for the life of me I can’t understand why no man has yet staked a claim on you!” intoned Verna Godfrey early the next morning in Hallelujah Junction.
Sheila Bonner stood holding her breath while the maid laced up the back of her blue silk whalebone corset. She said in a somewhat pinched voice and with a vaguely ironic air that was no doubt lost on Verna, “I don’t know, Verna. I guess men are smarter than we give them credit for.”
“Oh, that’s just silly. No smart man would pass up such a beauty. They’re all imbeciles!”
“Most men feel threatened by professional women . . . and women who don’t put up with their blather. Wrap that into one female package, Verna, and you get an old maid.”
“Shame. Just a shame,” Verna said with an exasperated sigh, sadly shaking her head as she stared into the looking glass of Sheila’s recently deceased father’s stout English shaving stand. It was the only large looking glass in the crisp, brick, Victorian-style house that Sheila’s father had built soon after the mining camp of Hallelujah Junction had boomed into a town of considerable wealth and distinction, at least by remote Sierra Nevada Mountain standards.
The young woman standing half-naked in the looking glass, staring back at her own image, was one of considerable wealth and distinction, as well. The wealth might be somewhat precarious, given her father’s recent death and some of the risky business decisions he’d made preceding it, as well as the temperamental boomtown economy, but there was no questioning the young woman’s attractiveness. The dark brown of her almond-shaped eyes was exquisitely complemented by the rich chestnut sheen of her long, thick hair, which Verna had spent nearly the entire last quarter-hour brushing out so that it flowed down Sheila’s slender back like the thick mane of a blooded mare. The young woman’s subtly heart-shaped face with its long dark lashes, pert nose, gently tapering cheeks, and strong jawline, might have been carved out of ivory with the precise chisel-work of the most delicate of carvers.
Her bosoms, while not overlarge, were pert, firm, and perfectly shaped.
Looking down in that direction, unable to not feel a little pride at the attributes God had found her worthy of owning, Sheila said with a wry snort, “Men are smarter than we women give them credit for. The proof is in the pudding—er, the corset, I should say.”
Still tightening the laces against Sheila’s back, Verna met her gaze in the looking glass and frowned. “What on earth do you mean, dear?”
“Who else but a man would invent such a draconian and demeaning contraption as the whalebone corset? And who but a woman, foolish in our need to please said men right down to wearing the most uncomfortable contraptions invented since the Middle Ages’ instruments of diabolical torture, would be harebrained enough to wear them?”
Verna stared at Sheila in the mirror, the old woman’s frosty blue eyes opaque with distressed incomprehension. “Oh, dear . . . how you do go on!” She laughed heartily, causing her sagging jowls to quiver. “I declare, you do so remind me of your father sometimes in the way you put words together. Just like Mister Bonner, I often can’t understand but maybe two or three words you throw out at a time!”
The older woman laughed and shook her head as, finished tying the corset, she lowered her hands to her sides. “Oh, dear . . .” She glanced around Joe Bonner’s sparsely but tastefully furnished bedroom with its canopied, four-poster bed, which was where the two women were standing for the use of the dead man’s mirror. “I do so miss the mister so . . .” She turned back to regard Sheila tragically in the looking glass. “I’m so sorry, dear! How utterly heartless of me to mention—”
Turning, Sheila took the old woman’s thick wrists in her hands, smiling gently at her, caressing her hands with her thumbs. “How heartless of you to remember my father? Nonsense, Verna. It warms my heart to know how much you cared for him.”
“Oh, but it’s so soon . . .” The housekeeper turned her head to gaze out the window to her left, which nearly as perfectly as a picture framed Martin Bonner’s grave set back in a small stand of young spruces and marked off from the rest of the yard by a black, wrought-iron fence. The grave itself was a firm young mound covered with rocks and adorned with the flowers Sheila had laid atop it only yesterday, having laid a fresh spray of hollyhocks on the grave every morning since her father’s funeral the previous week.
Martin Bonner had been stricken with a series of small but debilitating strokes over the past year, due in no small part, the local doctor had opined, to the financial strain Bonner had been feeling for the past eighteen months at the bank he’d owned, the Hallelujah Bank & Trust. The beginnings of that strain had corresponded with the first of several robberies of the gold bullion Bonner transported, by independent contractors, out of the mountains every month from the Reverend’s Temptation Gold Mine, which he also owned, at the base of Grizzly Ridge, on the east side of the Sierra Nevadas.
With each succeeding robbery and the loss of over two hundred thousand dollars in bullion, the poor man’s health had deteriorated until, unable to ignore his wretched state any longer, he’d finally written a letter to his daughter, Sheila, who’d been working as an accountant for her uncle, Martin’s younger brother, in Philadelphia. Martin had moved. . .
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Shotgun Johnny
William W. Johnstone
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