“I want you to see what you’ve done, you damned Texans!” Devery shouted into the suddenly stunned silence that fell over the street. “You may have taken my town away, but this bitch will never be the mayor! You bastards stand there and watch while I blow her brains out!”
“You pull that trigger, you’ll be dead two seconds later,” Bo warned.
A savage grin stretched Devery’s mouth. “You think I don’t know that? You think I want to live in a world I can’t bend to my will no more?”
“You’re a sick son of a bitch, Devery,” Scratch said. “A mad dog. You need to be put out of your misery, and everybody else’s misery, too.”
“You go right ahead and do it,” Devery snarled, “but not until I pull this trigger!”
“Jackson, no!”
Edgar Devery pushed through the crowd, coming out to face his brother from a distance of about twenty feet. Jackson Devery looked surprised to see him. Edgar’s face was covered with bruises and blood. One eye was swollen almost shut. Devery had probably thought that he’d left his brother for dead in the old house at the top of the hill.
Edgar was still alive, though, even though he swayed slightly on his feet.
And he clutched a shotgun in his hands.
“Let Mrs. Bonner go, Jackson,” Edgar said. “This is over now.”
“No, it ain’t,” Devery said. “It ain’t over until I say it’s over.”
Edgar grunted. “Still got to be the big boss of everything, don’t you? You was always that way. Had to get whatever it was you wanted, and you didn’t give a damn about anybody else. You still don’t care who gets hurt, do you?” Edgar’s voice shook with grief. “My boy Thad’s dead. Your sons are all dead. You tried to kill me, you could’ve killed Myra, and you destroyed the rest of your family. And still all you care about is more killin’!” He raised the shotgun. “Let her go, or I’ll kill you.”
Devery stared at him. His voice shook when he spoke, too, but with rage and insane hatred. “You’d turn on me, on your own brother?” he demanded.
A hollow laugh came from Edgar. “After all this, that’d be funny, Jackson…if it wasn’t so sad.”
“You…you…” Devery couldn’t even find the words to express his lunacy. He flung Lucinda away from him, out of the line of fire, and jerked the gun in his hand toward his brother.
Edgar pulled the shotgun’s triggers first.
The double load of buckshot smashed into Devery, lifting him up off his feet and dropping him on the porch of the cafe. The bloody, shredded thing that landed on the planks barely resembled a human being. Even some of the hardened cowboys from New Mexico had to turn their eyes away.
Edgar slowly lowered the shotgun and turned to face Bo and Scratch. “I hated to do that,” he said. “I purely did. But somebody had to stop him, and I figured it was better if it was…if it was…”
He dropped the empty shotgun and would have collapsed if Bo hadn’t caught hold of his arm to steady him. “Take it easy,” Bo said. “We’ll find your daughter. She can look after you.”
“She…she’s alive?” Edgar asked.
“She was,” Bo said as he looked at the bodies sprawled in the street.
A lot of other people had been alive, too, who weren’t anymore. There would be plenty of mourning in the settlement over the next few days.
But life would go on, and for the first time in these parts for a good while, it would be filled with hope and promise instead of fear and tyranny.
Some fights were always worth fighting. Bo and Scratch, along with their fellow Texans, had learned that at the Alamo, at Goliad, at San Jacinto. And it was just as true decades later and hundreds of miles away, in a place called Mankiller, Colorado.
CHAPTER 31
“Sorry I let you down,” Biscuits O’Brien said from the bed where he lay swathed in bandages, in one of the rooms in Dr. Jason Weathers’s house. “I tried to stop ’em when they busted in to take the prisoners, but I didn’t expect ’em to blow the blasted wall down.”
“Nobody did,” Bo told the sheriff with a smile. “That just shows how far Devery was prepared to go to get what he wanted.”
“Loco as a hydrophobia skunk,” Scratch said from the other side of the bed. “Don’t you worry, Biscuits. You done fine.”
“And you’re going to make a good lawman for this town,” Bo added. “The town council has already voted to keep you on.”
“With…a couple of deputies…I hope,” Biscuits said.
“Well…for now,” Bo said. “But Scratch and I came to Mankiller to look for gold. We haven’t forgotten about that.”
They said so long to Biscuits for the time being. The sheriff had been wounded in several places during the fierce gunfight at the jail, but Dr. Weathers seemed convinced that he would make a full recovery.
The Texans left the doctor’s house and headed for the cafe. Evening had settled down over Mankiller. The bodies had all been toted away, the badly wounded were at the doctor’s place, and the Deverys who weren’t seriously hurt had retreated to the big old house at the upper end of Main Street. Edgar Devery, who was now the leader of the family, had assured Bo and Scratch that there would be no more trouble. Jackson Devery had
