Ragtime Cowboys (24 page)

“I can shoot, too,” Becky said.

“Somebody has to load.”

“But why me? Why not Roberto?”

“Who's Roberto?”

“I am Roberto.” This was a stocky Hispanic who had proven as inept with percussion arms as Ivan. He was armed with a hay hook.

Siringo shook his head.

“Roberto scares the pants off me with that corkscrew. That's worth something. Anyway, you're the youngest here, and outranked.”

“Very well.” But her eyes blazed defiance.

Hammett cradled his Mauser and took out his flask. Siringo scowled.

“If that don't improve your aim, put it up.”

“What's the difference? It's a suicide play any way you look at it.”

Siringo took the flask from him and raised it. “Pinkerton men.” He drank.

“Good-bye, my lover, good-bye.” Hammett took it back and swigged.

Charmian held out a hand. He lifted his brows.

“Jack taught me to drink, too.” When she had it, she smiled. “Gentlemen; Becky. To the call of the wild.” She emptied the flask.

 

30

Siringo slung his Winchester over his shoulder, made sure his Colt was secure in its holster and the Forehand & Wadsworth belly gun under his belt, and climbed an iron ladder up the side of the cement-block silo. When he clambered onto the roof, he was grateful to find that it was concave rather than convex, giving him a sounder purchase and a circular rim that concealed him from anyone on the ground when he lay on his stomach behind it.

It was more than twenty feet high and gave him a spectacular view of the ranch with its rolling hills, towering redwoods, and miles of vineyards. The thick vines curled about the pickets that supported them, resembling battlefields he'd seen in photographs taken during the Great War, decorated with coils of barbed wire. He hoped they'd slow down the assault the same way they had in France.

He saw the ranch's old wooden silo a hundred yards off, the great boulder beneath which Jack London slept off his roistering life, the jagged ruins of Wolf House sticking up like the petrified bones of some great animal dead since before Man, and wished again that Charmian would have the gaunt rafters bulldozed and buried instead of shackling herself to a corpse. Everything he'd read by and about London celebrated life in its full ferment and decried death and destruction, while here in the heart of his chosen country, disappointment and loss was on exhibit as if it belonged to an extinct civilization. Dwelling on the past did no one good. When Siringo himself wrote about it, it was gone—except when it came bounding back from cover like a rebel bushwhacker.

*   *   *

Tom Horn made a tight six-foot-five squeeze through the trap into the cattle car on the A.T. & S.F. The Agency had advanced him a hundred in cash to ride the rails on a robbery investigation, and he'd lost it all on one turn of cards.

Siringo was “Charlie Cully” then, sent by the Agency to spell Horn, who was needed to testify in Albuquerque. He lent Horn money to get there, but he managed to lose that, too, and the last Siringo saw of the big jug-eared galoot was when Horn gave the brakeman his last dollar to put him in the stock car and then his shorn head lowering itself through the hole. He would spend the rest of the long trip from Coolidge hanging onto the hay rack to keep from being slashed to pieces by the longhorn steers below: a Horn among horns.

Then again, when Tom was braiding a lariat in a cell in Wyoming, killing time while waiting to mount the scaffold, Siringo supposed he looked back on that journey with a wistful expression.

*   *   *

No sign of intruders yet. He sat with his back to the rim, the carbine across his lap and his legs stretched out, waiting for the blood to stop pumping pain to his knee. When he turned his head to survey the grounds near the cottage, he saw the barrel of Hammett's Mauser sticking out the stable window that the eel's bullet had shattered—was it only a week ago?—Charmian's Greener, a handsome English shotgun that could finance rebuilding Wolf House, if only she could bear to part with it, and the pigpens bristling with more artillery. From his position he saw far more than anyone else on the spread, legitimate residents and otherwise.

He took out his pipe, but he didn't charge it. There was no good purpose in calling anyone's attention to his smoke. The stem felt good between his teeth and took his mind off his knee.

Charlie Siringo reckoned that he'd had a good ride any way you studied it. He'd looked into Kid Curry's cross eyes, the eyes of a killer, and lived to write about them, sung range songs with Billy Bonney, cheated a lynch mob in Gem, survived smallpox, and stood close enough to see men blown to pieces with dynamite, coming away with only a ringing in his ears that came back on quiet nights. If it all ended here, he came out ahead on points.

“Leastwise it beats sitting around the house watching the roof leak,” he said aloud.

*   *   *

Hammett, sitting on Abner Butterfield's milking stool, leaned his Mauser against the windowsill and reached down to loosen the lace on the brogan. He rolled a cigarette, didn't light it, hung it on his lower lip, and looked out the window, scanning the buildings and terrain. Siringo was out of sight atop the silo, but the man who looked for them could spot the weapons belonging to Charmian and the men on the ground. As he was watching the house, Becky bent to say something to her stepmother, caught his eye, and straightened when he raised a hand in greeting, removing herself from his line of sight.

He grinned wolfishly and listened to the horses snorting and shuffling in the stalls on the other side of the partition.

A high harsh whistle pierced the air, coming from atop the silo.

*   *   *

Siringo took his fingers out of his mouth, removed his Stetson, and rolled over onto his stomach, peering over the metal rim at the line of motor vehicles coming up the ranch road, Sheriff Vernon Dillard's big Dodge in the lead. He rested his Winchester on the rim and drew a bead on its tombstone-shaped radiator, but he held his fire. The procession wasn't inside range of the firearms at ground level, and the cars were passing between thick stands of redwoods; if the sheriff and his posse comitatus decided to bail out and take to the trees, there would be no smoking them out. He hoped the others wouldn't be tempted to start the ball early.

With that thought in mind he watched anxiously as the motorcade continued at walking pace. Besides the touring car there were a couple of Ford roadsters, a Hupmobile, and a T truck. He wondered if it was the same one in which Lanyard had made his escape after shooting at Butterfield, and if it was the eel driving.

He counted five in the Dodge, two in each of the roadsters, and six more in the truck, including four in the bed, clinging to the stakes. The light caught shiny bits of metal he took for badges, but they wouldn't all be deputies: The county wasn't rich enough to afford that many on the payroll. Dillard must have deputized half the village.

Amateurs, then, most of them; or at least not full-time lawmen.

Which didn't encourage him, not even a little bit. He remembered the trigger-happy p.c. shooting bloody hell out of that line shack that was supposed to contain Billy the Kid and getting nothing for all that expenditure of lead but one dead armadillo. And since there were no armadillos handy, that left two ex-Pinkertons, a parcel of ranch hands, and two women.

At length the last car cleared the woods. He leveled the carbine again, aiming low at the Dodge. The sheriff was a dumb lug and belonged to Joseph P. Kennedy instead of the voters who put him in office, but Siringo had no interest in finishing out his career as a murderer of policemen. He centered his sights on the left front tire and tightened his finger on the trigger.

Something struck the iron rim not six inches to his right, striking a spark and peppering his cheek with bits of rust. He heard the shot then, belatedly, bent by distance and wind, and dropped flat.

The report had not come from any of the automobiles, which were still moving, the noise of their motors probably having drowned it out to the ears of the occupants. Nor did it belong to the defenders: Looking up at the rim where it had been struck, he saw a scallop-shaped nick on its top, shiny where the bullet had scraped off the rust. It had to have come level.

He took a deep breath, mustering sand, and went up on his knees, shouldering the Winchester and snapping a shot at the top of the other silo. He hadn't dared take time to aim, presenting as he did so clear a target, and although he couldn't tell from that distance whether he'd hit anything, it didn't matter, because it got the result he wanted. He saw a tiny billow of smoke atop the wooden tower and went flat again, just in time to hear the slug crack the air inches above his head.

The damn dime novelists had gotten it right for once. The criminal had returned to the scene of his earlier crime.

 

31

When the first shot rang out, Hammett looked first at Charmian, then at the other guns inside his range of vision, including the one on top of the concrete silo. Siringo's hatless head appeared suddenly, then the spurt of flame from his Winchester. He didn't see where the third shot came from, but when Siringo ducked, he didn't have to.

“Mr. Hammett!” It was Charmian. “Who's shooting?”

“Mr. Siringo and the eel,” he called back. “They both took the high ground.”

“But, when—?”

“Get away from the window!”

Her head vanished below the windowsill just as something struck the frame, followed closely by the sound of the shot.

Hammett got up, moved the stool farther from his window, and laid the Mauser's barrel on the sill. “He's been here since Dillard's last visit!” he shouted. “The sheriff must've dropped him off before he drove in sight and worked his way around to the other silo. He didn't get into position till just now or he'd've picked at least one of us off when we came outside.”

“Is Mr. Siringo all right?” came Becky's voice from inside the cottage.

“Hang on.” He put his thumb and finger inside his mouth and whistled sharply through his teeth.

Another whistle answered from atop the near silo.

“He's fine!”

“What can we do?” Charmian asked.

Hammett reached down and tightened the lace on the brogan. “Start shooting!”

“At what?”

“The silo.”

“It's too far! This shotgun—”

“Stop wasting time!”

The Greener bellowed, spraying pellets that fell many yards short of the wooden silo.

Hammett shouted again, cracking his lungs. “Everybody shoot!”

The salvo from the weapons in the hands of the laborers sounded like an army of axes chopping wood. Hammett clambered out the paneless window and charged the wooden silo, firing the Mauser from the hip. The powerful semiautomatic rifle pulsed in his hands. Something struck the ground at his feet, throwing a clump of dirt and grass at his pants cuff, but he didn't slow down. The next shot made a snapping noise in the air past his left ear. He ran and fired; and now Siringo was returning Lanyard's fire from the top of the concrete silo, as fast as he could lever in fresh rounds.

Hammett's hat flew off his head, either from his own slipstream or carried away by a bullet. The Mauser's magazine emptied with a click. He threw it aside, drawing the .38 from his belt, and fired it at the top of the wooden silo, which stood well beyond pistol range.

And now more guns spoke. Dillard and his posse had taken up positions and were throwing lead at the running figure.

He was wheezing, and his pace grew uneven; his injured foot had entered the fight on the other side. He was close enough to the silo to be aiming almost straight up. The ladder attached to the side was nearly within reach. He was lunging at it, groping with his free hand, when something struck him from behind with the force of a catapult. His fingers grazed a rung of the ladder as he fell.

*   *   *

Siringo saw him fall, but only on the periphery of his vision. He was concentrating on the silo opposite, firing until the Winchester clicked, then ducking below the rim to reload. He cursed as he fumbled more cartridges out of the box he'd brought, forcing himself to fill the magazine before resuming.

The wooden structure was just within range; he could hear the slugs chunking into the boards, see splinters flying, but the man atop it was careful not to present much of a target against the sky; when Hammett had gotten too close for Lanyard to shoot at him without standing up and aiming almost straight down, he concentrated again on Siringo, and his shots were placed closer to his target. He must have had a telescopic sight and a gas loader with an enormous capacity, because the reports were so close together they sounded like one extended roar and he never stopped to reload. Siringo changed positions between shots, confounding the man's aim through the glass aperture, but his bump of good luck, and the eel's bump of bad luck, couldn't continue.

The sheriff and his men had found cover in scattered trees. They couldn't shoot up at Siringo's silo with any hope of hitting him, so they'd started snapping at the man running on the ground. There wasn't an expert shot among them, but then one of them got lucky. The old Pinkerton couldn't tell where his partner had been hit, but either it was a heavy round to knock him down at that range or it had found something vital.

Hammett's bump of courage must have been the size of a pumpkin. Siringo had never known a man—not Wyatt Earp or Pat Garrett or Billy Bonney or the whole goldarn Wild Bunch put together—who would run straight into crossfire when he could have stayed put and gone on breathing a little longer. He'd never see anything to compare with it, even if he survived that day.

And then—hell's bells!—he did see it.

*   *   *

Hammett breathed dirt.