The Kid put down his beer mug and rose slowly to his feet, his back to the wall. “Is that so?” he asked, sneering, both hands near the butts of his guns. “Tell you the truth, mister, I don’t see nobody in this room who’s man enough to git that job done.”
Smoke came to a crouch, then rising to his full height, lips drawn into a hard line. “Then look a little closer,” he snarled, as every muscle in his body tensed. “I think it’s time you boys cleared out of here. We’ll take our little disagreement outside. A friend of mine owns this establishment and I’d hate like hell to be responsible for spilling blood all over his nice clean floor, or putting any bullet holes in his walls. Meet me out in the street and we’ll settle this.”
“Like hell!” the Kid bellowed, hands dipping for his pistols as Smoke had anticipated all along.
In the same instant, Otto and the other cowboy were clawing for their guns.
Lightning quick, employing reflexes that had kept him alive in much tougher situations, Smoke came up with both hands filled with iron, Colt .44s, working his thumbs and trigger fingers in well-practiced movements, almost second nature to a man who kept himself alive by wits and weapons.
The Silver Dollar Saloon exploded in a thundering series of deafening blasts, becoming a symphony of noise when Louis Longmont added his gunshots to the concussions swelling inside the establishment’s walls.
The Arizona Kid was driven back against wallpapered planks behind him, his mouth grotesquely distorted when balls of speeding lead shattered his front teeth. His hat went spinning into the air like a child’s top as the back of his skull ruptured in flying masses of tissue, red hair, bone fragments, and brains.
At the same time Otto swirled, balancing on one booted foot while a spurt of blood erupted from the base of his neck above his shirt collar. Another slug entered his right eye, closing it upon impact amid a shower of crimson squirting from a hole below his right ear. Otto appeared to be dancing to an unheard melody for a moment, trying to remain upright on one foot, hopping up and down, dropping his gun to the floor to reach for his throat and eye socket.
The third gunman went backward through a shattering windowpane before his gun ever cleared leather, a .44 caliber bullet splintering his breastbone, puckering the front of his shirt as it sped through his body in the exact spot where Smoke placed it, with as much care as time afforded him.
Amid the roaring gunblasts, someone screamed outside the saloon, but it was the Arizona Kid who held Smoke’s attention now as the gunman slid down the Silver Dollar’s expensively decorated wall, leaving a red smear in his wake as he went to the floor in a heap, what was left of his mouth agape, dribbling blood down the front of his silk shirt, remnants of teeth still clinging to bleeding gums. A plug of his curly red hair was plastered to the wall above him, sticking there for a curiously long time before it dropped soundlessly to the floor beside him.
Otto teetered on one foot, making strangling sounds, blood pumping from his wounds as he somehow managed to remain standing, hopping for no apparent reason, since he had no leg wounds, merely unable to put his left foot down.
Smoke and Louis stopped firing, watching Otto perform his odd dance steps while gunsmoke rose slowly toward the ceiling.
“He’ll fall down in a minute,” Louis said, as though he was discussing the weather, or the felling of a tree. “Or should I put another slug in him and be done with it?”
“Hard to say,” Smoke replied dryly, holstering his pistols, his eyes on Otto. “He does a right nice dance step. Too bad we ain’t got a fiddler.”
The thumping of Otto’s boot and his choking sounds were the only noises inside the Silver Dollar for several seconds more as Smoke and Louis watched the dying man’s struggle. Suddenly, Otto’s knee gave way and he collapsed on the floorboards beside a brass spittoon with a soft gurgling coming from the hole in his neck. A dark stain began to spread across the crotch of his pants when his bladder emptied, a sure sign of the nearness of death.
Smoke sauntered over to the broken window, gazing out at the third gunman’s limp body. “This one’s dead,” he told Louis in a quiet voice. “I reckon I owe you for a piece of glass.”
“Nonsense,” Louis replied. “Hardly a month passes that I don’t buy a window or two, after some of my customers get a bit too rowdy. You don’t owe me a thing.”
Smoke turned to his old friend and grinned. “Yes I do, and you know it. The big guy, Otto, was a little faster than I had him sized up to be. I might have been picking lead out of my own hide if you hadn’t been here to back me.”
“Nobody is keeping score,” Louis said. “We’ve been backing each other so long I lost count of who owes who a long time ago. I’m not keeping a tally book, but I’ll wager it’s heavily in your favor. You’ve stopped a lot of lead from flying in my direction over the years. Now sit down. I’ll send someone for the undertaker and then I’ll send out those steaks and eggs, if the cook didn’t let ’em burn while all that shooting was going on.”Three
Sheriff Monte Carson came racing through the bat-wing doors with his gun drawn, followed closely by Pearlie and Cal. Carson stopped in mid stride when he saw the two bodies, and the broken window.
Carson looked at Smoke. “What the hell? I heard all the shootin’ an’ got here quick as I could.”
“A little misunderstanding,” Smoke replied, settling into his chair. “Two’s dead and the other one’s dying. They went for their guns first.”
“You didn’t need to explain that part,” Carson said, putting his pistol away. “I’ve known you long enough to know you’d never draw on a man first. Should I send for the doctor to attend to that bald feller?”
“He’s too far gone for that,” Smoke answered, lifting his cup of cold coffee as a signal for a warm-up. “Two slugs, one through an eye and the other through his throat. He’ll be dead before Doc can get here.”
Carson looked around momentarily. “Louis told me about these three strangers, how they was askin’ about Ned Buntline an’ drinkin’ a helluva lot of whiskey an’ beer.”
“They’re done with their drinking now,” Smoke remarked with no trace of emotion, “unless you count the way that big one over yonder is drinking his own blood.”
Carson took a deep breath. “I reckon I should be used to the fact that sometimes things start happenin’ early in Big Rock now an’ then. Before the last rooster stops crowin’ at daybreak we got three dead men to bury. Maybe we
