“Just tell me where he is.”
Obviously, there was a lot more to this young woman than there appeared to be. A bitter, sour taste welled up under Matt’s tongue as he realized that she must be working with the gang. He didn’t know how she had gotten mixed up with Shade’s bunch, but that didn’t really matter now.
He didn’t answer Jessica’s question, though, because suddenly there was a lot more shooting outside.
Maggie couldn’t believe what she was doing. She had never pointed a gun at anybody in her life. She had never even shot a bird or a squirrel or anything like that.
And yet here she was, threatening to kill a man.
She had no choice, though. She didn’t know what had gone wrong with Garth’s plan, but if the outlaws succeeded in freeing Joshua Shade, there was still a chance, slim though it might be, that they would take her back to wherever they had left Ike and Caleb. All she could do was try to put them in her debt.
So for that reason, she had picked up the rifle and pointed it at Matt Bodine, taking him by surprise. She would force him to take her to Shade, she thought, and then Garth and Jeffries and the others would come and see what she had done…
Shots roared somewhere close by, outside the train. A window in the car shattered, and a woman shrieked in terror. Maggie couldn’t stop her head from jerking around toward the sounds.
From the corner of her eye she saw a flicker of movement, and instinctively squeezed the trigger. The roar of the shot slammed against her ears like a thunderclap.
Matt leaped forward, reaching for the Winchester’s barrel. He got his fingers around it and wrenched it upward just as the rifle blasted. The slug punched harmlessly into the train car’s ceiling, showering down some splinters.
Jessica Devlin cried out as Matt jerked the rifle from her hands. He leaped to one of the windows and saw the riders galloping past, firing into the cars. Matt recognized several of them from trading shots with them on previous occasions, and knew they were the rest of Shade’s gang.
He didn’t know exactly what the plan had been, but obviously the outlaws had split up, some of them boarding the train as passengers while the others waited for the shooting to start before rushing in to take a hand in the fight.
Matt broke out the window with the Winchester’s barrel, poked it through, and started firing. He picked off a couple of the outlaws, his bullets knocking them out of their saddles. But then he was forced to duck as a hail of bullets stormed back at him.
With a sudden lurch, the train jolted into motion.
Now what the hell…
Willard Garth struggled up out of the pit of pain into which he had been dropped. That damn half-breed Two Wolves had shot him, he remembered.
But he wasn’t dead yet, which meant he might still succeed in freeing Joshua.
Garth started struggling to his feet, but was only halfway there when a hand grasped his arm and helped him up. He blinked blearily at Jeffries, who still wore the conductor’s outfit and was covering the engineer and the fireman, who had been forced at gunpoint to the other side of the cab.
As Garth spotted Sam Two Wolves lying on the ground beside the engine with a dark bloodstain on his buckskin shirt, he felt a surge of satisfaction. The pain deep inside told Garth that he probably wouldn’t live to see the sun set again, but at least that damn ’breed was dead.
“Gimme…gimme my gun,” he rasped to Jeffries.
“You’re hurt, Garth—” Jeffries began.
“Hell, I know that! Just gimme my gun.”
Jeffries picked up the fallen revolver and pressed it into Garth’s hand. “I’ll watch these two,” Garth went on as he leaned against the side of the cab. “You go get Joshua.”
“Thorpe and that deputy hustled him around behind that shed.”
“You can take ’em by surprise,” Garth said. “They’ll think you’re the conductor.”
Jeffries’s eyes lit up. Garth was right. The lawmen wouldn’t recognize him.
“You’ll be all right here?”
“Sure. Just—” A wracking, agonized cough shook Garth for a second. He used his free hand to wipe bloody foam from his lips. “Just go get Joshua.”
Jeffries nodded, then leaped down from the cab and dashed toward the shed.
Garth’s head was swimming, and he knew he couldn’t count on staying conscious for any length of time. His lips drew back from his teeth in a grimace as he swung his gun up.
“Won’t need you two anymore,” he told the shocked engineer and fireman, then pulled the trigger twice.
The engineer doubled over as a bullet tore into his guts. The fireman went over backward under the impact, falling out of the cab and landing a few feet away from Sam Two Wolves.
Satisfied that neither of them was a threat anymore, Garth turned to the locomotive’s controls. As he had mentioned earlier, he had driven a train before, back in the days before he became an outlaw, and not much had changed since then. The throttle, the brake, the gauges were all the same. He was confident he could get the train moving again.
He heard shots from behind the shed, as well as from somewhere back along the train.
