“Damn right!” York said with a grin.
“Let’s do it!”
13
Marshal Jim Wilde’s posse had an hour to go before reaching Dead River when Smoke and York stepped into the back of the saloon. Inside, the piano player was banging out and singing a bawdy song.
“How do we do this?” York asked.
“We walk in together,” Smoke whispered.
The men slipped the thongs off their six-guns and eased them out of leather a time or two, making certain the oiled interiors of the holsters were free.
York eased back the hammer on his Henry and Smoke jacked back the hammers on the express gun.
They stepped inside the noisy and beer-stinking saloon. The piano player noticed them first. He stopped playing and singing and stared at them, his face chalk-white. Then he scrambled under the lip of the piano.
“Well, well!” an outlaw said, laughing. “Would you boys just take a look at Shirley. He’s done shaven offen his beard and taken to packin’ iron. Boy, you bes’ git shut of them guns, ’fore you hurt yourself.”
Gridley stood up from a table where he’d been drinking and playing poker—and losing. “Or I decide to take ’em off you and shove ’em up your butt, lead and all, pretty-boy. Matter of fact, I think I’ll jist do that, right now.”
Smoke and York had surveyed the scene as they had stepped in. The barroom was not nearly filled to capacity…but it was full enough.
“The name isn’t pretty-boy, Gridley,” Smoke informed him.
“Oh, yeah? Well, mayhaps you right. I’ll jist call you shit! How about that?”
“Why don’t you call him by his real name?” York said, a smile on his lips.
“And what might that be, punk?” Gridley sneered the question. “Alice?”
“First off,” York said. “I’ll tell you I’m an Arizona Ranger. Note the badges we’re wearing? And his name, you blow-holes, is Smoke Jensen!”
The name was dropped like a bomb. The outlaws in the room sat stunned, their eyes finally observing the gold badges on the chests of the men.
Smoke and York both knew one thing for an ironclad fact: The men in the room might all be scoundrels and thieves and murderers, and some might be bullies and cowards, but when it came down to it, they were going to fight.
“Then draw, you son of a bitch!” Gridley hollered, his hands dropping to his guns.
Smoke pulled the trigger on the express gun. From a distance of no more than twenty feet, the buckshot almost tore the outlaw in two.
York leveled the Henry and dusted an outlaw from side to side. Dropping to one knee, he levered the empty out and a fresh round in and shot a fat punk in the belly.
Shifting the sawed-off shotgun, Smoke blew the head off another outlaw. The force of the buckshot lifted the headless outlaw out of one boot and flung him to the sawdust-covered floor.
York and his Henry had put half a dozen outlaws on the floor, dead, dying, or badly hurt.
The huge saloon was filled with gunsmoke, the crying and moaning of the wounded, and the stink or relaxed bladders from the dead. Dark gray smoke from the black powder cartridges stung the eyes and obscured the vision of all in the room.
The outlaws had recovered from their initial shock and had overturned tables, crouching behind them, returning the deadly hail of fire from Smoke and Arizona Ranger York.
Smoke had slipped to the end of the bar closest to the batwing doors, and York had worked his way to the side of the big stage, crouching behind a second piano in the small orchestra pit. Between the two of them, Smoke and York were laying down a deadly field of fire. Both men had grabbed up the guns of the dead and dying men as they slipped to their new positions and they now had a pile of .44s, .45s, and several shotguns and rifles in front of them.
A half-dozen outlaws tried to rush the batwings in a frantic attempt to escape and were met by a half-dozen other outlaws attempting to enter the saloon from the outside. It created a massive pileup at the batwings, a pileup that was too good for Smoke to resist.
Slipping to the very end of the long bar, Smoke emptied a pair of .45s taken from a dead man into the panicked knot of outlaws. Screaming from the men as the hot slugs tore into their flesh added to the earsplitting cacophony of confusion in the saloon.
Smoke grabbed up an armload of weapons and ran to the end of the bar closest to the rear of the saloon. He caught York’s attention and motioned to the storeroom where they had entered. York nodded and left his position at a run. The men ran through the darkened storeroom to the back door.
Just as they reached the back door it opened and two outlaws stepped inside, guns drawn. Smoke and York fired simultaneously, their guns booming and crashing in the darkness, lancing smoke and fire, splitting the heavy gloom of the storeroom. The outlaws were flung backward, outside. They lay on the ground, on their backs, dying from wounds to the chest and belly.
“York, you take the north end of town,” Smoke said. “I’ll take the south end.” He was speaking as he was stripping the weapons from the dead men.
York nodded his agreement and tossed Smoke one of two cloth sacks he’d picked up in the storeroom. The men began dumping in the many guns they’d picked up along the way.
“Find and destroy the heathens!” a man’s strong voice cut the night. “The Philistines are upon us!”
“Who the hell is that?” York whispered.
