Eventually, though, they would overwhelm the three men who stood together at the bar. Sam knew that, and he didn’t know if he could count on any more help. It was unexpected enough that Stovepipe and Wilbur had pitched in to aid him.
Either they weren’t members of the gang that had bushwhacked him and Matt, Sam thought as he blocked a punch and landed a haymaker on a man’s jaw ... or else they were playing a very deep game.
There was no time right now to ponder that, no time to do anything except keep on fighting and postpone their ultimate defeat as long as possible ...
The roar of a shotgun blast seemed to shake the entire room.
It was loud enough to assault the ears and make every man in the place stop what he was doing. A shocked silence fell as the echoes of the blast faded.
Into that silence came the sharp, angry voice of a woman.
“What in blazes is going on here?”
Sam lifted his eyes to the stairs and saw her standing there, her auburn hair pulled back away from her lovely face, the dark blue gown she wore hugging the splendid curves of her body. Smoke curled from one barrel of the double-barreled Greener in her hands, telling Sam that she still had a load of buckshot in the weapon, ready to cut loose again.
Even without the faint British accent to her words, Sam would have known from her regal bearing that he was looking at Lady Augusta Winslow, the owner of the Buckingham Palace Saloon.
Chapter 17
Lady Augusta eased back the shotgun’s other hammer. The sound was loud in the now eerily quiet saloon.
“I asked what’s going on here,” she said.
One of the bartenders spoke up.
“It was this Indian, ma’am,” he said as he pointed to Sam. “He started it!”
“That ain’t true,” Stovepipe said. “Pete Lowry threw the first punch.”
That accusation brought howls of protest from a dozen throats as the Devil’s Pitchfork hands who were still conscious and on their feet loudly denied that Lowry had started the fight. Some of the other men in the saloon backed up their claim.
A jerk of the shotgun’s barrels made the men shut up. Lady Augusta looked at Sam, Stovepipe, and Wilbur and said, “You there. You three seem to be at the center of this maelstrom. Come up here, now.”
“Hear that, Wilbur?” Stovepipe asked with a quick grin. “You get to go upstairs and meet Lady Augusta.”
“Pipe down,” Wilbur snapped. A deep red flush spread over his freckled face. When Sam saw it, he realized that Wilbur had been worshipping Lady Augusta from afar. Evidently he had never actually met her.
“Make a path for them,” Lady Augusta ordered. No one in his right mind wanted to argue with a shotgun. There was plenty of angry muttering going on, but the men moved back to make way for Sam, Stovepipe, and Wilbur.
Sam spotted his Colt lying on the floor underneath the brass rail at the bottom of the bar, where someone had kicked it during the fracas. He reached down, picked it up, and slid it back into his holster, then joined Stovepipe and Wilbur as they crossed the room toward the stairs.
When they reached the bottom of the staircase, Sam was uncomfortably aware that the shotgun was pointing more at him and his companions than it was at the rest of the men in the saloon. He didn’t like climbing toward the menacing double maw of the barrels, but that seemed to be the most likely way he and his companions could get out of here with their hides relatively intact.
Lady Augusta drew back a couple of steps as they reached the second-floor landing. She still covered them with the Greener.
As she glanced toward the men down below in the saloon’s main room, she said in a clear, commanding voice, “I want everything cleaned up and put back in its place down there. Every man who pitches in to help gets a free drink.”
That sent men scrambling to pick up knocked-over chairs and right overturned tables. Even some of the men who had been in the middle of the fight were more interested now in earning that free drink.
Not Pete Lowry, though. He jabbed a finger at Sam and said, “Don’t you believe a word that filthy redskin tells you, ma’am. He says he’s half Cheyenne, but he could be lyin’. He could be one of those mur-derin’ Navajo himself, come into town to spy on us!”
“That’s insane,” Sam said.
“Just hush,” Lady Augusta said coldly. “Move down there to that open door. That’s my suite.”
Stovepipe looked at Wilbur again, who gave his lanky friend a warning glare. Stovepipe didn’t say anything.
With the shotgun trained on the backs of the three men, Lady Augusta followed them along the corridor to her suite.
Downstairs, Zack Jardine slumped in a chair at one of the tables that had been set back on its legs and glared at Angus Braverman and Doyle Hilliard.
“Was that him?” Jardine asked.
Braverman nodded.
“Yeah. I got a good look at him that day, Zack. There ain’t no doubt.”
“He didn’t look like he was hurt a bit, the way he was brawling. What about those two men who sided him? Was one of them with him that day?”
Braverman shook his head in answer to this question.
“No, both of those hombres are older than the fella who was with the half-breed. I don’t know what happened to him. He was hit, so likely he died, and now the ’breed’s lookin’ to settle the score for him.”
