A sudden chill went through Maggie. Would she be arrested for trying to help the outlaws? She had been forced to do it, but the authorities might not see it that way.
She didn’t care what happened to her, she decided. She knew now that her husband and son were safe, and that was all that really mattered.
She found herself hoping, though, that after all this, Joshua Shade wouldn’t get away.
Kneeling on the pile of coal, Matt stuck his head over the tender’s side wall and leveled his Colt at the outlaws as they charged after the locomotive. He squeezed off two shots and emptied a saddle. Bullets whining around his head forced him to duck back down.
Suddenly, he heard shots coming from somewhere close by. It was hard to tell because of the noise of the engine, but he thought the shots came from the other side of the tender, at the back.
Matt scrambled over the coal and looked over the wall. A shock went through him as he saw Sam crouched on the walkway on this side of the tender, leaning around the rear corner to fire at the pursuing outlaws.
“Sam!” Matt yelled.
On reflection, that probably wasn’t a very smart thing to do, because Sam started in surprise and almost lost his balance on the precarious perch. He caught hold of a grab iron, though, and steadied himself as he looked up.
“Matt?”
“Yeah!” Matt saw blood on Sam’s shirt. “You all right?”
Sam waved his six-gun. “Just a scratch! Nothing to worry about! You?”
“I’m fine!” Matt ducked again as a bullet whipped past his ear.
This one came from behind him, though.
The bastards had him in a cross fire.
“He’s in the tender!” Joshua Shade told Jeffries as the wind in the cab whipped the crazed outlaw’s long hair around his head. “Get up there and kill him!”
Shade was at the controls of the locomotive now, but he wasn’t slowing it down any. Jeffries wasn’t sure that Shade even knew what he was doing. The engine continued to rocket along the tracks.
“Kill Bodine!” Shade screamed again.
Jeffries took off the conductor’s cap and flung it away. He stepped over Garth’s body and started climbing the rungs fastened to the outside of the tender’s front wall.
When he reached the top, he saw Bodine at the back of the coal car. Jeffries threw a leg over the wall and perched there atop it as he swung up his gun. As it came in line, he squeezed the trigger.
The train jolted a little at that moment, just enough to throw off Jeffries’s aim. His bullet pulverized a lump of coal instead of blowing Bodine’s brains out.
Then Bodine was turning and his gun came up with blinding speed and Jeffries saw the orange flash of powder inside the barrel. In that shaved fraction of a heartbeat, he could have almost sworn that he saw the bullet itself flying out of the barrel on a straight line at him.
Then the chunk of lead smashed into his forehead like a hammer blow, shattering bone and boring deep into his brain. Jeffries felt a burst of pain and then nothing as he went over backward, toppling into the cab to crash down next to Garth.
He was just as dead as Garth when he landed, too.
Matt saw the black-rimmed hole appear in the phony conductor’s forehead; then the man fell out of sight. He turned his attention back to the rest of Shade’s gang, but as he rested his gun barrel on the tender’s wall, he saw that the outlaws had their hands full with a new battle.
Men on horseback, men Matt had never seen before, had overtaken the desperadoes and attacked them from the rear. Shade’s men had no choice but to turn and fight back. Clouds of powder smoke rolled, bullets buzzed through the air like giant insects, men on both sides yelled, threw up their hands, and toppled from their saddles.
The fight was fierce, but lasted only moments. As the locomotive and tender continued to pull away, the smoke cleared enough for Matt to see that all the outlaws were done. A handful of the men who had attacked them were still mounted, but their losses had been heavy, too. The survivors spurred after the locomotive and tender.
Matt turned and began climbing over the coal toward the front. He didn’t know who was left up there. Maybe nobody. The locomotive could be running away on its own, with its throttle locked in place. Somebody needed to slow it down and stop it.
He reached the front end of the tender and looked over the wall, then ducked as Joshua Shade fired a pistol at him. The loco, longhaired outlaw chief stood at the controls, twisting around to shoot at Matt. A crazed laugh came from the man’s mouth as he pushed the throttle even harder, opening it up all the way.
The son of a bitch must be trying to wreck them, Matt thought. He sprang up and fired, sending a bullet ricocheting off the controls. Another shot sounded, this time from down below and to his left, and when he glanced in that direction he saw Sam thrusting a Colt around the front corner of the tender. Sam fired again, and glass shattered as the bullet smashed one of the gauges.
It was the steam pressure gauge, Matt realized as a narrow stream of the white, scalding stuff suddenly shot out. It washed right over Shade’s gun hand, and Shade screamed as the burning pain made him drop the gun.
Matt vaulted over the top of the tender and landed lithely in the cab, neatly avoiding the bodies of the dead men that lay there. He swung his pistol in a backhanded blow that slashed across Joshua Shade’s face and drove the outlaw away from the controls. Matt lunged for the throttle and pulled it back, then grabbed the brake and hauled on it as hard as he could. With jolting shudders that rattled his bones and threatened to shake his teeth out of his head, the locomotive began to slow.
Sam swung around into the cab and kicked away the gun Shade had dropped, just to make sure the lunatic
