Winchester 1887 (14 page)

Grip in his right hand, and a .41-caliber Colt Cloverleaf in his coat pocket, Zane Maxwell met the three men waiting for him at the depot. He let a porter carrying the baggage of some ugly spinster pass before he set his satchel on the plank floor and hooked his thumbs in his waistband. “You understand the job.” It was not a question.

“Yeah,” said the red-mustached man in a thick Texas drawl. “And we savvy the pay.”

“Good.”

The man with the red mustache looked like a cowboy, probably was some old saddle tramp who had been bucked off too many times by chuckleheaded horses. He called himself Red, so Maxwell figured he could remember that one's name. Red carried an old Yellow Boy Winchester, the 1866 model with the bronze-brass alloy receiver, a carbine in .44 rimfire with a nineteen-inch barrel and brass butt plate. Resting in a well-worn russet holster on his right hip was a .44-caliber Merwin Hulbert revolver, nickel-plated with two-piece ivory grips. The barrel was a long, sleek, and deadly seven inches. The only things about Red that remained clean were the carbine and open-top framed revolver. He'd do. Do just fine.

Beside Red stood a younger man in a plaid sack suit and bowler hat. His weapons were hidden inside his coat, but Maxwell had seen them before, a matched pair of .38-caliber Colt Lightnings, those self-cocking pistols with three-and-a-half-inch tapered round barrels. Nickel plated, pearl handled, and the dapper-dressed dandy with the hazel eyes and clean-shaven, almost babyish, face could use them. He called himself Steve Locksburgh and probably had yet to clear his teens. Maxwell had seen a wanted dodger on Steve Locksburgh tacked up on the wall outside the post office. Murder and robbery. The description, however, seemed too vague to attract any of Fort Worth's policemen or bounty hunters. Locksburgh had this cocksure attitude about him that made Maxwell think the kid didn't care if he lived or died. He'd do, too.

The third man stood tall, chewing on a match, thumbs tucked inside the gun belt he wore around his black-and-red striped britches tucked inside fancy black boots with white stars inlaid in the uppers. His weapons were Remingtons, butt forward on his left hip and butt facing the rear on his right. Old weapons that had been converted from cap-and-ball percussion to .44-caliber centerfire, also nickel plated but with walnut stocks, and eight-inch octagonal barrels and brass trigger guards. His black mustache was waxed, the ends turned upward, and he never smiled. The handle he used was John Smith.

Original.
Maxwell didn't believe that any of those three had been given those names after their births, but he didn't care. Link McCoy and he needed three men good with guns and unparticular about how they earned their pay. Men like that were easy to find in Fort Worth. Now that he was no longer playing the part of Butch Curry, reporter for the
Kansas City Enterprise
, he had rounded up the three men they needed.

He reached inside his coat and pulled out the train tickets, passing them to the three hired gunmen. “You don't sit together.” He stopped speaking until two other passengers had headed past them toward the waiting locomotive. “You don't speak to one another. In short, you don't know one another.”

The men said nothing.

“Smith, you get off at Denison with me. You check into the Red River Hotel. The next morning, you'll buy a horse at Greene's Livery. Ride north toward Colbert's Ferry, and I'll follow you, catch up before you cross the Red.”

Smith did not acknowledge a thing, but he knew what to do.

“You two”—Maxwell tilted his head at Locksburgh and Red—“will catch the Katy and ride north, getting off at Caddo. Tulip Bells will meet you there. He'll have horses waiting for you.”

Red grunted. “How's we ta knows what this Tulip gent looks like?”

You could look at the wanted posters
ran through Zane Maxwell's mind
.
What he said was “You don't.”

Red frowned and started to grumble, but Steve Locksburgh chuckled and turned to face Red. “Those lavender bandanas. The ones he give us yesterday evenin'. The one you said you'd never wear alive.”

Red didn't get it. “Huh?”

Locksburgh chuckled, shook his head, and brought out the makings.

As he began to roll a cigarette one-handed, Zane Maxwell explained. “Caddo's in the Choctaw Nation. When you get off at that depot, you'll both be wearing those two lavender kerchiefs.”

“The one you said you'd have to be dead wearin',” Locksburgh said.

Red grunted.

Locksburgh grinned again and stared at Maxwell. “I don't know what this job is, “but I do believe if we pull it off, we'll be as famous as the Daltons.”

“
When
we pull it off,” John Smith corrected.

“Just remember, you don't know me. I don't know you. You don't know each other.” That was it. Maxwell picked up his grip and walked away, finding his own ticket. He'd find his berth later after the train had pulled out of Fort Worth.

If everything went well, he and John Smith would be in Denison and lighting out for Indian Territory, where they would meet up with Link McCoy and track down that man-killing whiskey runner.

That should be easy enough,
Maxwell thought.

Then Tulip Bells would find Locksburgh and Red and steer them over toward Fort Washita.

Some soot-faced urchin stood pacing in front of the train waiting to pull out from the station, waving one of the Fort Worth newspapers in his hand, hawking out the headlines. Maxwell stopped to fish out his ticket and a coin for the tyke, which he flipped over. That kid was fast, snatched the coin, dropped it in a pouch hanging from his neck, and whipped out a folded newspaper.

“Thanks.” Maxwell climbed up the steps of the smoking car.

The only thing Red, John Smith, and Steve Locksburgh knew about the job was that they'd be paid $500 each, if they lived, and that they'd be riding with Zane Maxwell and Link McCoy. The McCoy-Maxwell Gang, or as Maxwell liked to call it, the Maxwell-McCoy Gang. That's all they needed to know for the time being. The details would be worked out later. Actually, soon.

Maxwell slid into a chair, tossed his satchel onto the cushioned seat across from him, and opened the
Fort Worth Standard
.

He didn't care about the news items, the murder in Hell's Half Acre the other night, the weather, the comments from the cattlemen's association meeting, or how Fort Worth was such a better town than nearby Dallas could ever hope to be. He just looked at the date underneath the newspaper's banner.

 

 

Seven days. One week until the Maxwell-McCoy Gang pulled off their last robbery. He was about to roll up the newspaper and toss it aside, when another headline in the lower left-hand corner caught his eye. Apparently the editors of the
Standard
had picked up an article that had first been published that spring in the
Kansas City Star.

Zane Maxwell read about young Emmett Dalton, how he walked out of the cellblock at the Kansas pen in Lansing every day. Lock step, single file, right hand on the shoulder of the inmate in front of him, left arm rigid at his side. Walking in unison, right foot high, left foot shuffle, march, march, march. But young Emmett was looking fit and proper, and no longer slumping from the wounds he had received in Coffeyville a few years back. How Emmett Dalton was the model prisoner, reading newspapers, and magazines, and books. Being rehabilitated. Hoping some kind folks might think better of him and issue him a parole or pardon and send him home to live out his days in peace.

Emmett Dalton. The one survivor of the Dalton Gang.

What was that cocky Steve Locksburgh had said?
“I don't know what this job is, but I do believe if we pull it off, we'll be as famous as the Daltons.”

Maxwell felt sweat rolling down his forehead, and he leaned over to open his satchel and fetch that flask of rye whiskey.

Certainly, the Dalton boys had earned enough fame to last a hundred years or thereabouts when they had tried to rob two banks at the same time in their hometown of Coffeyville, Kansas. Folks still talked about it almost three years after that bloody event of October 1892. Grat, Emmett, and Bob Dalton had ridden into town with Bill Power and Dick Broadwell. None had ridden out in one piece. Emmett's brothers were dead, along with Power and Broadwell, and Emmett had been shot to pieces but somehow had managed to live, get patched up, and sent to the Kansas state pen.

Yeah, the Dalton Gang was famous, sure enough. But most of them were dead.

Maxwell let the whiskey pour down his throat, took a deep breath, and slid over toward the window as the conductor called outside, “All aboard.”