cherubic smile on his face, cradling the empty bottle against his chest.
“Now I’ve got another man with a bullet hole in him, and that fella you ambushed may be smart enough to figure out why somebody tried to kill him ... again.”
Lady Augusta poured more whiskey over a knife with a keen blade that glittered in the lamplight.
“Now you’ll have to hold him down, gentlemen,” she told Jardine’s men who were still gathered on the other side of the bar. “Hold him tightly. I won’t be responsible for what happens if you don’t.”
At the table, Joe Hutto shook his head.
“I’m sorry, boss. We thought we were doin’ the right thing. What happens now?”
Three-Finger screamed as the knife cut into him, but the strong hands on him kept him from moving.
“Now we wait to see if that son of a bitch shows up in Flat Rock,” Jardine said. “If he does, I guess we’ll just have to kill him here.”
Chapter 13
Sam wasn’t familiar with Flat Rock’s history, but he knew the settlement couldn’t have been in existence for too many years.
As he approached the next day, he saw that it had sprung up at a spot where one of the little creeks in the area flowed across a large, flat rock, spreading out to form a shallow pool.
That much water was rare in these parts. There were a few mines in the Carrizos to the north and some ranches in the basin that spread south toward Black Mesa and Canyon del Muerto.
Officially, this was all Navajo land, but when there was money to be made, “civilized” men never worried too much about things like reservations and treaties. There were ways around any obstacle, routes usually paved with discreet payoffs.
Those mines and ranches needed supplies, and the men who worked on them needed a place to blow their wages on loose women, watered-down whiskey, and marked cards.
Flat Rock filled those needs, and as a result the settlement had more saloons than any other sort of business establishment, by a large margin.
When Sam rode into town, the main street was mostly empty in the blistering Arizona sun. A few wagons were parked in front of buildings, and a handful of saddle horses were tied at hitch rails. Less than half a dozen pedestrians were making their way along the boardwalks or trying to avoid the piles of horse droppings that littered the broad, dusty avenue.
No one seemed to pay much attention to Sam, despite his buckskin shirt and copper-hued features. Many frontiersmen had such deep, permanent tans that they appeared almost to have Indian blood.
Anyway, Indians were nothing out of the ordinary around here.
Sam had followed the wagon and horse tracks to within a couple of miles of Flat Rock. When the trail got that close, it was lost in the welter of tracks left by other riders and vehicles coming and going from the settlement.
Since he didn’t know anyone here in Flat Rock, he couldn’t trust anyone, either. He couldn’t even go to the law, if there was any, because it was possible the authorities were connected to the bushwhackers. He and Matt had run into plenty of crooked lawmen in the past.
While he was trying to figure out how to proceed, he might as well get something to eat besides the dried venison and corn he’d been subsisting on for the past day, he decided. He angled his horse toward the hitch rail in front of a squat adobe building with a sign on it that read simply CAFE.
Sam dismounted and wrapped his horse’s reins around the rail. As he stepped toward the open door, two men in dusty, well-worn range garb came out of the building. Heavy revolvers rode in holsters on their hips.
One of the men was tall and thin, with a hawk-like face and a drooping black mustache. He had an open-clasp knife in his hand and was using the point of the blade to worry at a piece of food stuck in his teeth. That seemed to Sam like a fairly dangerous method for a man to pick his teeth.
The other hombre was shorter and considerably stockier than his companion, though not actually fat. His battered old brown Stetson was thumbed back on a thatch of rusty red hair. He had an open, honest face with a slight scattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks.
The tall man folded his knife and slipped it into a pocket as he gave Sam a smile and a friendly nod.
“Howdy,” he said.
“Good morning,” Sam replied. “Or good afternoon. I’m not sure exactly which it is.”
The short man pulled a big railroad watch attached to a thick chain from his pocket and flipped it open.
“Seventeen minutes after twelve,” he announced. “So it’s afternoon.”
“Well, then, good afternoon,” Sam said.
“Are you new in town?” the tall man asked. “Don’t recollect seein’ you around Flat Rock before.”
“This is the first time I’ve been here,” Sam replied.
“Just passin’ through?” the shorter man asked.
Sam was puzzled by the questions, but then he remembered how much interest strangers sometimes drew in frontier towns. Anything to break the monotony of a sometimes drab existence was welcome.
And surrounded by such a rugged, arid landscape, life in Flat Rock would certainly be drab.
Sam had no real idea what the men he was searching for looked like, but the bushwhackers might have studied him and Matt through field glasses before they opened fire.
So for all he knew, these two apparent grub-line riders could be part of the gang.
Which meant they could know who he was, too.
