Sidewinders

Book 1: Sidewinders

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Westerns

Synopsis

First in the blazing Western series featuring two reluctant heroes from the bestselling authors of the First Mountain Man and Last Gunfighter novels. In frontier literature, the name “Johnstone” means big, hard-hitting Western adventure told at a breakneck pace. Now, the bestselling authors kick off a rollicking, dramatic new series—with the first novel about a pair of not-quite-over-the-hill drifters winding their way across the American west—mostly on the right side of the law . . . but sometimes, if the situation calls for it, on the wrong side . . . Meet Scratch Morton and Bo Creel, two amiable drifters and old pals. Veterans of cowboying, cattle drives, drunken brawls, and a couple of shoot-outs, Scratch and Bo are mostly honest and don’t go looking for trouble—it’s usually there when they wake up in the morning. Now, in remote Arizona Territory, they’re caught up in a battle between two stagecoach lines. The owner of one, a beautiful widow, has gotten both Scratch and Bo hot and bothered—each trying to impress her as they fend off the opposing stage line trying to destroy her. But nothing is what it seems in this fight, and two tough sidewinders are riding straight into a trap. Praise for the novels of William W. Johnstone “[A] rousing, two-fisted saga of the growing American frontier.”— Publishers Weekly on Eyes of Eagles “There’s plenty of gunplay and fast-paced action.”— Curled Up with a Good Book on Dead Before Sundown

Release date: September 1, 2008

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 318

Sample

“All I’m sayin’ is that a man who ain’t prepared to lose hadn’t ought to sit down at the table in the first place,” Scratch Morton argued as he and his trail partner Bo Creel rode along a draw in a rugged stretch of Arizona Territory.

“You didn’t have to rub his nose in it like that,” Bo pointed out. “That cowboy probably wouldn’t have gotten mad enough to reach for his gun if you’d just stayed out of it.”

“Stay out of it, hell! He practically accused you of cheatin’. I couldn’t let him get away with that, old-timer.”

There was a certain irony in Scratch referring to Bo as “old-timer.” The two men were of an age. Their birthdays were less than a month apart. It was true, though, that Bo was a few weeks older. And neither Bo nor Scratch was within shouting distance of youth anymore. Their deeply tanned, weathered faces, Scratch’s thatch of silver hair, and the strands of gray in Bo’s thick, dark brown hair testified to that.

The Arizona sun had prompted both men to remove their jackets as they rode. Scratch normally sported a fringed buckskin jacket that went well with his tan whipcord trousers and creamy Stetson. He liked dressing well.

Bo, on the other hand, usually wore a long black coat that, along with his black trousers and dusty, flat-crowned black hat, made him look like a circuit-riding preacher. He didn’t have a preacher’s hands, though. His long, nimble fingers were made for playing cards—or handling a gun.

He had been engaged in the former at a saloon up in Prescott when the trouble broke out. One of the other players, a gangling cowboy with fiery red hair, had gotten upset at losing his stake to Bo. Scratch, who hadn’t been in the game but had been nursing a beer at the bar instead, hadn’t helped matters by wandering over to the felt-covered table and hoorawing the angry waddy. Accusations flew, and the cowboy had wound up making a grab for the gun on his hip.

“Anyway, it ain’t like you had to kill him or anything like that,” Scratch went on now. “He probably had a headache when he woke up from you bendin’ your gun over his skull like that, but he could’a woke up dead just as easy.”

“And what if that saloon had been full of other fellas who rode for the same brand?” Bo asked. “Then we’d have had a riot on our hands. We might have had to shoot our way out.”

Scratch grinned. “Wouldn’t be the first time, now would it?”

That was true enough. Bo sighed. Trouble had a longstanding habit of following them around, despite their best intentions.

Friends ever since they had met as boys in Texas, during the Runaway Scrape when it looked like ol’ General Santa Anna would wipe the place clean of the Texicans who were rebelling against his dictatorship, Bo and Scratch had been together through times of triumph and tragedy. They had been on the drift for nigh on to forty years, riding from one end of the frontier to the other and back again, always searching for an elusive something.

For Scratch it was sheer restlessness, a natural urge to see what was on the other side of the next hill, to cross the next river, to kiss the next good-lookin’ woman and have the next adventure. With Bo it was a more melancholy quest, an attempt to escape the memories of the wife and children taken from him by a killer fever, many years earlier. All the fiddle-footed years had dulled that pain, but Bo had come to realize that nothing could ever take it away completely.

After the ruckus with the redheaded cowboy, they had drifted northward from Prescott toward the Verde River, the low but rugged range of the Santa Marias to their left. Some taller, snowcapped mountains were visible in the far, far distance to the northeast. Flagstaff lay in that direction. Maybe they would circle around and go there next.

It didn’t really matter. They had no plans except to keep riding and see where the trails took them.

Changing the subject from the earlier fracas, Scratch went on. “I think we ought to find us some shade and wait out the rest of the afternoon. It’s gettin’ on toward hot-as-hell o’clock.”

Bo laughed and said, “You’re right. Where do you suggest we find that shade?”

He waved a hand at the barren hills surrounding the sandy-bottomed draw where they rode. The only colors in sight were brown and tan and red. Not a bit of green. Not even a cactus.

Scratch rasped a thumbnail along his jawline and shrugged. “Yeah, that might be a little hard to do. Could be a cave or somethin’ up in those hills, though. Even a little overhang would give us some shade.”

Bo nodded and turned his horse to the left. “I guess it would be worth taking a look.”

They had just reached the slope of a nearby hill when both men heard a familiar sound. A series of shots ripped through the hot, still air. The popping of revolvers was interspersed with the dull boom of a shotgun. Bo and Scratch reined in sharply and looked at each other.

“Sounds like trouble,” Scratch said. “We gonna turn around and go the other way?”

“What do you think?” Bo asked, and for a second his sober demeanor was offset by the reckless gleam that appeared in his eyes.

The two drifters from Texas yelled to their horses, dug their boot heels into the animals’ sides, and galloped up the hill. The shots were coming from somewhere on the other side.

Bo was riding a mouse-colored dun with a darker stripe down its back, an ugly horse with more speed and sand than was evident from its appearance. Scratch was mounted on a big, handsome bay that was somewhat dandified like its rider. Both horses were strong and took the slope without much trouble. Within moments, as the shots continued to ring out, Bo and Scratch crested the top of the hill and saw what was on the other side.

The rocky slope led down to a broad flat crossed in the distance to the west by a meandering line of washed-out green that marked the course of a stream. A dusty road ran from the east toward that creek, and along that road, bouncing and careening from its excessive speed, rolled a stagecoach.

The driver had whipped his six-horse hitch to a hard gallop, and for good reason. Thundering along about fifty yards behind the stagecoach were eight or ten men on horseback, throwing lead at the coach. Even in the bright sunlight, Bo and Scratch could see spurts of flame from the gun muzzles. A cloud of powder smoke trailed after the pursuing riders.

As if the circumstances of the chase weren’t enough to convince Bo and Scratch that the men on horseback were up to no good, the fact that they had bandannas tied across the lower halves of their faces to serve as crude masks confirmed that they were outlaws bent on holding up the stage. The two drifters brought their mounts to a halt at the top of the hill as their eyes instantly took in the scene.

Scratch reached for his Winchester, which stuck up from a sheath strapped to his saddle. “We takin’ cards in this game?” he called to Bo.

“I reckon,” Bo replied as he pulled his own rifle from its saddle boot. He levered a round into the Winchester’s firing chamber and smoothly brought the weapon to his shoulder. As he nestled his cheek against the smooth wood of the stock, he added, “Since we don’t know the details, might be better if we tried not to kill anybody.”

“I figured you’d say that,” Scratch grumbled as he lined up his own shot.

The two of them opened fire, cranking off several shots as fast as they could work the levers on the rifles. The bullets slammed into the road in front of the masked riders, kicking up gouts of dust. The men were moving so fast it was hard to keep the shots in front of them, and in fact one of the bullets fired by the Texans burned the shoulder of a man’s mount and made the horse jump.

That got the attention of the outlaws. They reined in briefly as Bo and Scratch stopped shooting. It was their hope that the masked men would turn around and go the other way, but that wasn’t what happened.

Instead, the gang of desperadoes split up. Three of them dismounted, dragging rifles from their horses as they did so, and bellied down behind some rocks. The other seven took off again after the stagecoach.

“Well, hell!” Scratch said. “That didn’t work. We should’a killed a couple of ’em.”

“Come on,” Bo cried as he wheeled his horse. “They’re going to try to pin us down here!”

Sure enough, the three men who had been left behind by the rest of the gang opened fire then. Bullets whined around the heads of the Texans like angry bees, one of them coming close enough so that Bo heard the wind-rip of its passage beside his ear.

They heeled their horses into a run again, following the crest of the hill as it curved to the west. The outlaws continued firing at them, but none of the bullets came close now.

The hill petered out after about three hundred yards. Bo and Scratch started downslope again, angling toward the wide flats and the road that ran through them. They glanced over their shoulders and saw that the three men who had tried to neutralize the threat from them had mounted up again and were now fogging it after the rest of the gang, which had carried on with its pursuit of the stagecoach.

In fact, the outlaws had cut the gap to about twenty yards, and from the way one of the men on the driver’s box was swaying back and forth and clutching his shoulder, he looked like he was wounded. The other man, who was handling the reins, looked back and appeared to be slowing the team.

“He’s gonna stop and give up!” Scratch shouted over the pounding of hooves. “Those owlhoots got their blood up! They’re liable to kill everybody on that coach!”

“They might at that!” Bo called in agreement. He had rammed his Winchester back in the saddle boot. Now he unleathered the walnut-butted Colt on his hip and said, “We won’t hold back this time!”

Scratch whooped. “Now you’re talkin’!” He drew one of the long-barreled, ivory-handled, .36-caliber Remington revolvers that he carried.

Both men opened fire as they veered toward the road. The hurricane deck of a galloping horse wasn’t the best platform for accurate marksmanship, but Bo and Scratch had had plenty of experience in running gun battles like this. Their flank attack was effective. A couple of the outlaws were jolted by the impact of the drifters’ slugs and had to grab for the horn to keep from tumbling out of the saddle.

Despite having a heavy advantage in numbers, the masked outlaws began to peel sharply away from the road. They threw a few shots at Bo and Scratch, but didn’t put much effort into it. The Texans slowed their horses as the would-be robbers abandoned the chase, picked up the three stragglers, and galloped off to the east.

“We goin’ after ’em?” Scratch asked.

Bo’s forehead was creased in a frown. “Have you gone loco? With five-to-one odds against us, I plan on thanking my lucky stars that they decided it wasn’t worth it to rob that stagecoach after all!”

“We winged at least a couple of ’em. I saw the varmints jump.”

Bo nodded. “Yeah, I did, too.” He inclined his head toward the coach, which had rocked to a halt by now, with thinning swirls of road dust rising around it. “Let’s go see how bad that fella on the stage is hurt.”

The wounded man was still conscious. They could tell that from the furious cussing they heard as they approached. The driver had climbed down and was helping the other man to the ground. As the hoofbeats of the Texans’ horses rattled up, the driver turned and pulled a gun.

“Hold on there, son!” Bo called as he reined in. “We’re friends.”

Scratch brought his bay to a halt alongside Bo’s dun. “Yeah,” he said. “In case you didn’t notice, we’re the hombres who got those owlhoots off your tail.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction that the gang had fled.

The driver nodded and holstered his gun. “Yeah, I know that,” he said. “Sorry. I’m just a little proddy right now.”

“You’ve got reason to be,” Bo said as he swung down from his saddle. “How bad is your friend hurt?”

The driver was a young man, probably in his mid-twenties. He wore a brown hat and a long tan duster over denim trousers and a blue bib-front shirt. A red bandanna was tied around his neck. His wounded companion was considerably older and sported a brush of bristly gray whiskers. He had lost his hat somewhere during the chase, revealing a mostly bald head.

He answered Bo’s question by saying, “How bad does it look like I’m hurt, damn it? Them no-good buzzard-spawn busted my shoulder!”

The right shoulder of his flannel shirt was bloody, all right, and the stain had leaked down onto his cowhide vest. Crimson still oozed through the fingers of the left hand he used to clutch the injured shoulder.

“Take it easy, Ponderosa,” the younger man told him. “Sit down here beside the wheel, and we’ll take a look at it. It might not be as bad as you think it is.”

“Oh, it’s bad, all right,” the old-timer said. “I been shot before. Reckon I’ll bleed to death in another few minutes.”

“I don’t think it’s quite that serious,” Bo said with a faint smile as he tied his dun’s reins to the back of the coach. Scratch had dismounted, too, and tied his horse likewise. Bo went on. “My partner and I have had some experience with gunshot wounds. We’d be glad to help.”

“Much obliged,” the young man said. “If you’ll give me a hand with him…”

Bo helped the driver lower the old man called Ponderosa to the ground. Ponderosa leaned back against the front wheel while Bo pulled his vest and shirt to the side to expose the wound. Under Ponderosa’s tan, the bearded, leathery face was pale from shock and loss of blood.

While Bo was tending to the injured man, Scratch glanced inside the coach and said to the driver, “No passengers, eh?”

“Not on this run,” the young man said with a shake of his head. “And not much in the mail pouch either. If those outlaws had caught up to us, they would have been mighty disappointed.” He held out his hand. “My name’s Gil Sutherland, by the way.”

“Scratch Morton.” As Scratch shook Gil Sutherland’s hand, he nodded toward Bo and added, “My pard there is Bo Creel.”

“And I’m Ponderosa Pine,” the old-timer introduced himself through gritted teeth as Bo probed the wound. “Given name’s Clarence, but nobody calls me that ’less’n they want’a tangle with a wildcat.”

“We wouldn’t want that,” Bo said with a dry chuckle. “Good news, Ponderosa. That bullet didn’t break your shoulder. I think it missed the bone and just knocked out a chunk of meat on its way through.”

“You sure? It hurts like blazes, and I can’t lift my arm.”

“That’s just from the shock of being wounded. We’ll plug the holes to stop the bleeding, and I think you’ll be all right.” Bo looked up at Gil Sutherland. “How far is the nearest town?”

“Red Butte’s about five miles west of here,” Gil replied. “That’s where we were headed when they jumped us. This is the regular run between Red Butte and Chino Valley.”

“Let’s get Ponderosa here on into town then. He needs to have a real doctor look at that wound, just to be on the safe side.”

“That’s assumin’ there’s a sawbones in this Red Butte place,” Scratch added.

Gil nodded. “Yes, there’s a doctor. Don’t worry, Ponderosa. We’ll take care of you.”

“Ain’t worried,” Ponderosa muttered. “Just mad. Mad as hell. I’d like to see Judson and all o’ his bunch strung up.”

“Who’s Judson?” Bo asked as he used a folding knife he took from his pocket to cut several strips of cloth from the bottom of Ponderosa’s shirt. He wadded up some of the flannel into thick pads and used the other strips to bind them tightly into place over the entrance and exit wounds.

“Rance Judson is the leader of the gang that was chasing us,” Gil explained.

“Him and those varmints who ride with him been raisin’ hell in these parts for six months now,” Ponderosa added.

Scratch asked, “If folks know who he is and that he’s responsible for such deviltry, why don’t the law come in and arrest him?”

Gil Sutherland shook his head. “We’re a long way from any real law out here, Mr. Morton. There’s a marshal in Red Butte who does a pretty good job of keeping the peace there, but he’s not going to go chasing off into the badlands after Judson’s gang. That would be suicide, and he knows it. We all do.”

Bo finished tying the makeshift bandages into place. He straightened from his crouch, grunting a little as he did so. “Old bones are stiffer than they used to be.”

“Tell me about it,” Ponderosa grumbled. “And I’m quite a bit older’n you, mister.”

“Let’s get you in the coach,” Gil suggested. “It won’t be all that comfortable, but it should be better than riding up on the box.”

“Wait just a doggone minute! I signed on to be the shotgun guard, not a danged passenger!”

“I’ll ride shotgun the rest of the way,” Bo said. “Where’s your Greener?”

“On the floorboard where I dropped it when them polecats ventilated me, I reckon.”

Gil said, “I don’t think Judson and his men will make another try for us. You don’t have to come with us into town.”

“We don’t mind,” Bo said.

“Truth to tell, all this dust has got me thirsty,” Scratch added with a grin. “You got at least one saloon there, don’t you?”

“Several,” Gil admitted.

“Then what are we waitin’ for? Let’s go to Red Butte!”

Once they had loaded the still-complaining Ponderosa Pine into the stagecoach, Bo climbed onto the driver’s box next to Gil Sutherland, leaving his horse tied at the back of the coach. Scratch mounted up and rode alongside as Gil got the vehicle moving.

“Used to be a Butterfield coach, didn’t it?” Bo asked as he swayed slightly on the seat from the rocking motion. He had Ponderosa’s double-barreled scattergun across his knees.

“How did you know?” Gil said.

“You can still see some of the red and yellow paint on it in places.”

Gil grunted. “We didn’t strip the paint off on purpose. The sun and the dust and the wind in this godforsaken country took care of that for us.”

“We?” Bo repeated.

“My father was the one who started the stage line. It runs from Cottonwood to Chino Valley and on over to Red Butte, where the headquarters are. There’s another line that runs from Flagstaff down to Cottonwood and then on south, but there was no transportation from Cottonwood west to the Santa Marias until my father came along. Chino Valley and Red Butte were growing fast because of all the ranching and mining in the area, so he thought it would be a good gamble that they’d need a stage line. He figured some other settlements might spring up along the way, too.”

“Sounds like a worthwhile gamble,” Bo said with a nod. “How’s it working out?”

Gil scowled and shook his head. “Not so good.”

“Because of those outlaws? Folks are too scared of being held up to ride the stage?”

“Well, it didn’t help when Judson and his bunch started raising hell, but that’s not all of it. Those other settlements never sprang up. There’s just Chino Valley and Red Butte. And the mines played out, for the most part. There’s only one still operating at a good level.”

“So there’s not as much business as your pa thought there would be.”

“That’s right. It’s been a struggle to make ends meet.” Gil’s voice caught a little. “It didn’t help matters when my father got sick and died.”

Bo looked over at the young man with a frown. “You’re running the stage line now?”

Gil shook his head again. “My mother’s in charge. I do what I can to help, just like when my father was still alive. I’ve got a younger brother, too, but he—” Gil stopped and drew in a breath. “Let’s just say that he’s not much for hard work and leave it at that.”

Bo didn’t say anything in response to that. Clearly, there were some hard feelings between Gil Sutherland and his little brother, and they might well be justified. But Bo knew it usually didn’t pay for a fella to stick his nose into family squabbles.

Gil drove on in silence for a few minutes, then said, “Thanks for pitching in back there. Judson’s bunch would have caught us in another minute or two, and there’s no telling what they might have done, especially when they found out they weren’t going to get much in the way of loot.”

“It looked like you were about to stop and let them catch up,” Bo said.

“That’s right, I was. I knew we couldn’t outrun them, and the way Ponderosa was only half conscious and bouncing around on the seat, I was afraid he might get pitched off and break his neck. I was hoping they’d just take the mail pouch and let us go.”

“Is Judson in the habit of doing things like that?”

Gil shrugged. “They’ve killed a few men during their holdups, but only when somebody tried to fight back. Like when they hit the bank over in Chino Valley last month.”

“They’re not just stagecoach robbers then.”

“No, they’ve rustled cattle and run them south across the border into Mexico, they robbed the bank like I said, and they raided the Pitchfork Mine and stole an ore shipment that was about to go out. They’ve stopped the stage half a dozen times, I guess, even though they’ve never made a very big haul at it. Killed a driver and a guard, though, so nobody wants to work for us anymore. Ponderosa and I have been taking all the runs ourselves lately. Now he’s going to be laid up for a while, more than likely.” Gil sighed. “I don’t know what we’ll do. Shut down, I guess.”

Bo didn’t say anything to that either. He had some thoughts on the matter, but he kept them to himself for the time being.

The creek that Bo and Scratch had seen from the top of the hill turned out to be a narrow, shallow stream, not much more than a twisting thread of water in a gravelly bed. As Gil drove across it at a ford, he said, “This is Hell Creek. Not much to look at, but it’s the only water this side of the Santa Marias and it never dries up, no matter how hot the weather gets.”

“Spring-fed, I reckon,” Bo said.

Gil nodded. “That’s right. North of here, in the ranching country, it’s bigger.”

Bo sniffed the air. “Sulfur springs, too, unless I miss my guess.”

“That’s how it got its name,” Gil said. “From the smell of brimstone. Not very pleasant, but the water doesn’t taste too bad. You get used to it after a while, I suppose.”

The terrain began to rise a little once they were on the other side of Hell Creek. The slope was very gradual at first, but became more pronounced. More tufts of grass appeared, and even some small bushes. Bo saw trees up ahead, where the foothills of the Santa Maria Mountains began.

A little over an hour after they left the site of the attempted holdup, the stagecoach arrived at Red Butte. Bo and Scratch saw why the settlement had gotten its name. A copper-colored sandstone mesa jutted up from the ground about half a mile north of the town, which had a main street, half a dozen cross streets, and a couple of streets parallelin. . .