Most of the gunnies were busy with a bucket-line, trying to keep the raging fires contained at one end of town. Smoke, Johnny, and Louis rode right through the bucket-brigade, guns sparking the fiery night, adding death and confusion to the already chaotic scene.
Louis, Johnny, and Smoke sent the gunhands-turned-firemen running and diving and sprawling for their lives. Most made it; a few did not.
Louis knocked a leg from under a TF gunnie and the man fell backward, into the raging inferno. His screams were hideous in the fiery, smoky, gunshot-filled night.
Tilden Franklin stood in the best suite of the hotel and watched it all, his hate-filled eyes as hot as the flames that threatened to consume the town. He turned to the small woman who had been the sole property of Big Mamma and, in his rage, broke the woman’s neck with his powerful hands.
He screamed his hate and rage and picked up the naked, ravaged woman and threw her body out the second floor window.
The young woman lay dead on the street.
Then, with slobber wetting his lips and chin, Tilden Franklin emptied his guns into the battered body.
“I’ll kill you, Jensen!” the man howled. “I’m gonna burn your goddamned town to the ground and have your woman…right in front of your eyes!”
14
The old gunfighters who had ridden to the TF ranch house lay on the ridges that surrounded the huge home and made life miserable for those TF gunhawks who had survived the initial attack.
The moon was full and golden in the starry night skies, the illumination highlighting the bodies of those gunnies who now lay sprawled in death on the grounds surrounding the bunkhouse and the main ranch house.
Those trapped in the bunkhouse and in the main house were not at all happy about their situation. Several had thought the night would cover them as they tried to escape. Those with that thought now lay dead.
“What are we gonna do?” a TF gunslick, who felt more sick than slick, asked.
“Hold out ’til the boss gets back,” was the reply. “There ain’t that many of ’em up there on the ridges.”
“Yeah, but I got me a peek at who they is,” another paid gunhand said. “That’s them old gunfighters. And I think I seen The Apache Kid ’mong ’em.”
Nobody said anything for a long time. Nobody had to. They were all thinking the same thing. Toot Tooner and Red Shingletown had already been spotted, briefly. Now the Apache Kid. They all knew what that meant: these hard ol’ boys didn’t take prisoners. Never had. They expected no quarter, and they gave none.
“I ain’t goin’ out there, boys,” a gunman said. “No way.”
“I wish to hell someone had told me this Jensen feller was raised up by Preacher. I’d have kept my butt up in Montana.”
“He ain’t so good,” another said.
Nobody paid any attention to him. The man was speaking without any knowledge of the subject. He was too young to have any real awareness of the legendary Mountain Man known as Preacher. If he had, he’d have kept his mouth shut.
“So we wait, is that it?” The question was thrown out of the darkened room.
“You got any better ideas?”
Silence, and more silence.
Even with only the sounds of their breathing to be heard, none of the TF gunhands could hear the moccasined feet of The Apache Kid as he slipped through the kitchen and into the large dining area. Sutter Cordova was right behind him. There had been a guard at the back door. He now lay on the porch, his throat cut, his blood staining the ground.
Both men had their hands full of pistols, the hammers jacked back.
“Something is wrong!” a TF gunslick suddenly said, his voice sharp in the darkened house.
“What?”
“I don’t know. But there ain’t a shot fired in more ’un fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“Maybe they pulled out?”
“Sure they did, and a hog is gonna fly any day now.”
Apache and Sutter stepped into the room and started letting the lead fly. They were grateful to Smoke Jensen for giving them this opportunity to go out as gunfighters should. They had all outlived their time, and they all knew it. They had no one to live for, and no one to grieve for them when they died.
They were a part of the West’s rapidly vanishing past. So they would go out as they lived.
The room filled with gray smoke, the booming of Colts and Remingtons deafening.
The Apache Kid died with his back to a wall, his hands full of guns. But the old man had taken a dreadful toll while he had lived this night.
Sutter Cordova went into that long sleep with a faint smile on his lips. His guns empty, the gunfighter buried his knife into the chest of a TF gunhawk and rode him down to the floor.
When the booming of the gunfire had faded away into the night, the other aging gunfighters walked slowly down to the big house. They checked out the bunkhouse and found no life there.
Carefully, they went into the house and lighted a lamp. They found one TF rider alive, but not for long.
“You old…bastards played…hell!” he managed to gasp.