“Sam, go on!” Coleman shouted as he lowered Bickford’s unconscious form to the floor. “Get out of here!”
Sam tilted his head and gave it a shake. He heard the words vaguely, enough to understand them, and realized that his hearing was coming back after the explosion. He saw Coleman waving a hand toward the far wall and looked in that direction to see a gaping hole in it. Barnabas Smith and several other men were waiting outside in the alley.
“Come on, Two Wolves!” Barnabas urged. “We’ll help you! We got a score to settle with Porter!”
It was true. Barnabas’s companions were some of the men who had been imprisoned in the wagons, and they all had guns. Barnabas held out a revolver butt-first, offering it to Sam.
Those men were farmers and drifters, and some of them probably really were moonshiners. A motley army, to be sure. But a hell of a lot better than nothing.
Sam glanced over his shoulder at Coleman. “Go!” the marshal urged again. He was reaching through the bars, searching Bickford’s pockets. “I’ll see if I can find the key to unlock this door. If I can, I’ll come and find you. But you got to get Hannah away from those bastards, Sam. You just got to!”
Sam gave him a curt nod of agreement. “I’ll get her, Marshal,” he promised. Still a little shaky on his feet, he climbed through the hole that the bomb had blasted in the wall and joined Barnabas and the others in the alley.
Barnabas pressed the pistol into Sam’s hand. “I saw Porter and the others headin’ down toward the doc’s house,” he said.
Sam nodded. “We’ll have to fight our way through,” he warned. “Some of us probably won’t make it.”
Barnabas grinned, and the expression was positively fierce, especially for such a small man. “Like I said, we got scores to settle with those sons o’ bitches.”
Sam was about to lead the way when he heard someone call his name. “Sam! Sam!” He turned and saw Matt running toward him, a gun in each hand.
Matt grinned as he came up and waved a Colt toward the destroyed wall. “What’d you do, blow the place up?”
“No, Barnabas did,” Sam replied. “Hannah and Frankie are being held down at the doctor’s house, along with the Loomises. Kane, Porter, and Grady are there, too.”
“Grady!” Matt exclaimed.
“It’s a long, ugly story,” Sam said.
“Then save it for later. Just tell me this. Is Grady one of the varmints behind all this trouble?”
“That’s right.”
“Then we’ll shoot him, too,” Matt said. “Come on!”
Chapter 37
They had barely emerged onto the street when bullets began to whistle around their heads. The blood brothers led the way, crouching, running, firing, their deadly accurate shots ripping through the men who tried to stop them. Barnabas and their other half-dozen allies followed closely behind, fighting with enthusiasm and courage that partially made up for their lack of experience.
Dr. Berger’s house came into view. About a dozen men ranged around the place, mostly relatives of Cimarron Kane but including a couple of the crooked deputies, opened fire on the group led by Matt and Sam, forcing them to dive for cover. They traded shots for a couple of minutes before Cimarron Kane bellowed, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
The shots died away on both sides. Kane stepped out onto the porch of Berger’s house with the doctor’s sister in front of him as he held a gun to her head.
“Bodine! Two Wolves! I saw you there! I don’t know how you got out, ’breed, but it don’t matter! We still got hostages in here, so you better give up if you don’t want their blood on your hands!”
“Let them go and fight it out with us, damn you!” Matt shouted back at him.
Kane laughed harshly. “Go to hell, Bodine! We got the upper hand here!”
Matt and Sam looked at each other as they crouched behind a parked buckboard. “He’s right,” Sam said. “We can’t risk the hostages.”
The sky was so overcast now it was almost black. Lightning clawed its way through the clouds. But the air was still hot and stifling, heavy with the threat of rain that wouldn’t fall. The hair on the back of Matt’s neck was prickling again as he said, “I think we’ve got an even bigger worry.”
Sam frowned. “What are you—”
Then he heard what Matt had heard a second earlier. It was a low-pitched, rumbling sound, reminiscent of a freight train approaching at high speed. Sam’s eyes widened in horror, matching Matt’s expression, as both of the blood brothers turned to peer toward the southwest.
The twister barreling down on Cottonwood dipped down out of the clouds like a thick, sinuous snake. The madly whirling column of air was at least half a mile wide. From this angle, they couldn’t tell if it had already touched the ground, but if it hadn’t, it was about to.
Yells of fear came from the gunmen around the doctor’s house. Not very many people could stand and watch a giant tornado approaching without panicking, and these killers were no different. Most of them broke from cover and ran.
Matt and Sam weren’t sure where they were running to, and the men probably didn’t know themselves. But the blood brothers took advantage of the opportunity. They stood up and charged the house, with Barnabas and the others behind them. The roar of guns was drowned out by the earthshaking rumble of the twister, but the flames stabbing from gun muzzles competed with the flash of lightning. Men toppled and fell, riddled by the slugs fired by
