Bo and Scratch paused. “That’s right,” Bo said. “You have any idea where they came from?”
Rushford waved a hand toward the lower end of the street. “Down there somewhere. Do you want me to come with you while you check on them?”
Bo shook his head. “No thanks. This is our job, not yours.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got a stake in what goes on in Mankiller, too,” Rushford said as he came down the steps and took a pistol from inside his coat. “If there’s trouble, I’m happy to lend a hand.”
“Suit yourself,” Scratch said. He was peering down the street. “Bo, ain’t that smokehouse where we locked those fellas up down yonder about where those shots came from?”
The same thing had just occurred to Bo, and the thought brought with it a chill that pierced to his core. “That’s right,” he said. “Come on.”
The three men hurried along the street toward the smokehouse. As they approached, Bo couldn’t see anything unusual or threatening around the building. It looked just the way it had when he and Scratch and George put the prisoners in it hours earlier.
“What’s got you so worried about the smokehouse?” Rushford asked. “Did you say something about locking somebody in there?”
“The men who caused that riot at Bella’s this evening,” Bo explained. “Yesterday evening, now, I reckon, since it’s after midnight.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard something about that.”
They came up to the sturdy, squarish building and stopped in front of the door. Bo sniffed the air and thought he smelled the faint tang of powder smoke.
Scratch pounded a fist on the door and called, “Hey in there! You fellas all right?”
There was no answer.
Scratch tried again. “Damn it, speak up! Are you all right? Is anybody hurt?”
Silence was all that came from the smokehouse. It might as well have been empty.
Bo checked the padlock, thinking that maybe the shotgun blasts had blown it off so that the prisoners could be freed. The lock was intact, though.
“Son of a bitch,” Bo muttered, suddenly so shaken that he indulged in one of a very occasional profanity. He smelled something besides the gun-smoke, a coppery scent that set all his nerves on edge. “We need to get in there.”
Scratch and Rushford grabbed the bar and lifted it from its brackets. As they set it aside, Bo took out the key and twisted it in the padlock. The lock snapped open. He took it out of the hasp and pulled the door toward him.
The mingled smell of gun smoke and blood suddenly grew stronger. Bo reached in his pocket and found a lucifer. Holding the match up in his left hand, he snapped it to life while he gripped his Colt in the other hand, ready to fire if need be.
No one in the smokehouse represented a threat, though. The prisoners were nothing now except more work for Sam Bradfield.
Rushford glanced past Bo at the grisly scene. The flickering light from the lucifer revealed blown-apart bodies scattered all over the ground inside the smokehouse. It was obvious what had happened, although the how wasn’t so clear.
“Check around back,” Bo told Scratch.
The silver-haired Texan came back a moment later. “There’s a ladder propped against the back wall. I climbed up far enough to see that somebody chopped a hole in the roof. It ain’t a very big hole, though. Not big enough for anybody to escape through.”
“But big enough for the barrels of a shotgun, I’ll bet,” Bo said bleakly. “Whoever it was climbed up there and probably told those boys inside that he was there to get them out, so they’d stay quiet. Then he chopped out the hole, stuck the gun through, and let off both barrels. There wasn’t time enough between the first pair of shots and the second for him to have reloaded, so he must’ve had somebody helping him. The man on the ground handed up another loaded shotgun, and the killer emptied it, too, just to make sure he didn’t miss anybody with the first two barrels.”
“My God,” Rushford said in a voice thick with shock. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. This was the cold-blooded murder of, what, six men?”
Bo nodded. “Yeah. Six men.” He started to take a deep breath, then stopped because he didn’t want to drag that much blood-tinged air into his lungs. “Six men who can never testify against Jackson Devery now.”
CHAPTER 27
The campaign of terror that Bo and Scratch attributed to the Deverys, even though they couldn’t prove it, subsided somewhat over the next few days. It didn’t end completely, though. A couple of miners who had spoken up against the Deverys were jumped in a dark alley one night and beaten and kicked until one of them died and the other would probably never be more than a shell of a man. A mysterious fire nearly burned down the assay office. Francis O’Hanrahan, who had been an outspoken critic of the Deverys for a long time, limped into town one day with a bloody bandage tied around his leg. A bushwhacker had put a bullet through his thigh.
Bo knew good and well that Jackson Devery was orchestrating the whole thing, but the old devil was cunning. He didn’t leave any tracks, and since the murder of the miners who had started the fight at Bella’s, he didn’t enlist any outsiders in his cause, either. There wouldn’t be any more witnesses who had to be disposed of.
Slowly but surely, the brutal tactics began to have an effect. Everyone in Mankiller had been excited at first by the prospect of an election and a real town government. If the talk could be believed, Lucinda and the others were going to be elected in a landslide.
