Slocum and the Comely Corpse Read online

  Hix’s men kept pouring it on. At first there were a few return shots from the defenders, but they faded away to nothingness as the opposing volley increased.

  There was a lull as the attackers ran out of bullets and had to reload.

  Gunfire broke out behind the back of the saloon. A couple of the defenders had tried to escape that way. Two had gone out the back door when they were set upon by men Hix had stationed in back.

  One of the fugitives, the one nearer to the saloon, ran back to it and dived inside. The other was too far away to make it. Three posse men rushed him.

  He shot in their direction, missed. They shot at him, missing. He broke and ran, away from the building. A shot dropped him and he fell, rolling.

  He got on his knees, and threw away his gun and raised his hands. The trio advanced toward him.

  Now that he was in the open, he was in the line of fire of the rifleman on the rooming house roof.

  The rifle made a flat cracking sound. The kneeling man dropped, face-forward.

  The trio on the ground finished him off. They spent a little too much time standing in one place, looking at what they had done. A shot from the back of the saloon winged one of them.

  All three hit the dirt.

  Hix was through playing. A couple of his men went off to the side to make torches, while he and the rest kept up the pressure on the saloon.

  The torches were brought up. There was a lot of them. A voice from the saloon shouted, “Hey, what you doing out there?”

  Hix put a hand beside his mouth. “Throw down your guns and come out, or I’ll burn you out!”

  He made sure to keep under cover. In the saloon, the voice swore, saying, “Come out and be shot down like dogs!”

  “Burn, then!”

  “Listen, Marshal, there’s women in here!”

  There must have been, because a few female voices could be heard inside, protesting, being argued down by rougher male voices.

  “Send ’em out!” Hix said.

  More back-and-forth inside the saloon, the arguments getting heated. A woman shrilled, then shrieked in pain as her hysterical tirade was clubbed down by fists.

  “Sounds like they’re having trouble with their womenfolk,” Engels said.

  “Whores,” Pierce said. “They’ve made their bed, now they can lie in it.”

  Hix said, “We’re waiting!”

  “The gals decided they want to stay in here, Marshal, with some real men,” said the saloon voice.

  “Who’s that speaking?” Hix demanded.

  From the saloon, silence. Hix turned, facing Pierce and the foreman. “That loudmouth sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place the voice,” he said. “Know who it belongs to?”

  Pierce shrugged. Engels said, “Sounds like Bletchley.”

  “Bletchley,” Hix said, nodding. “Sure, he’s one of Pete’s saddle pals.”

  “Whiskey pals,” Engels said. “You know it’s Bletchley because he’s got that snotty tone in his voice. He’s a snotty bastard.”

  Hix called, “Bletchley! I know it’s you, Bletchley!” No reply. Hix said, “What’s the matter, Bletchley? Cat got your tongue? Or are you just too yellow? There’s a rope waiting for you, Bletch—”

  A shot barked from the saloon, biting the top of the marshal’s hat, shooting it off his head.

  “Damn! Went straight through the crown,” Hix said, examining the damage. He raised his voice, bawling, “You’ll hang, Bletchley!”

  “Burn them out, Marshal,” Pierce urged.

  “You don’t have to tell me twice! Ruining a perfectly good hat, the dirty—!!!”

  Hix gave the signal, setting the action in motion. While the others laid down covering fire, two posse men got on the roof of the building west of the saloon, lit torches, and threw them onto the Doghouse’s flat roof.

  They had tossed about five or six before those inside even knew what was happening. Gun barrels were thrust out of windows in the saloon’s west wall and fired up at the opposite rooftop, at the torch men.

  The angle of fire was steep, and as long as the torch men didn’t show themselves over the edge of the roof, they were in no danger of being hit.

  Hix’s men concentrated their gunfire at the north and west sides of the saloon.

  The torches on the roof continued to burn, while more thumped down beside them. In places, circles of flame began to spread to the roof itself.

  From the flames rose thin lines of gray smoke, bent eastward by the west wind. The wind tickled the flames nicely, stoking, spreading them.

  Soon, parts of the roof were venting thick puffs of smoke.

  One of the torch men got careless, leaning out over the roof while attempting to place a brand into the midst of a comer pyre. A bullet nailed him. He tumbled forward, falling headfirst into the space between the buildings. If the shot didn’t kill him, the fall did.

  A posse man ran up from the east side, tossing a torch at the saloon front. It hit the wall and bounched off, falling on the plank porch, where it continued to smolder.

  A second flung torch landed inside, a few paces beyond the doorway.

  The tossers dodged back under cover in time to avoid the lead thrown their way.

  The roof was blazing nicely now, a good hot bonfire. Thickening smoke went from gray-white, to gray, to dark gray. The flames crackled.

  More torches were thrown at the saloon front. Most fell on the porch, swelling the fire building there. Patches of flame writhed up the front wall.

  One perfectly flung torch arched through the left front window, disappearing inside.

  “That’ll burn Bletchley’s butt,” Engels said.

  A form took shape in the window frame, holding the torch, winding up to throw it back outside.

  Hix fired. The shape crumpled, falling back with the torch unthrown, dropping from sight.

  “Got him,” Hix said.

  Pierce said, “Was it Bletchley, Marshal?”

  “I don’t know, but whoever it was, he’s got!”

  Smoke massed under the Doghouse roof, lowering to the tops of the windows. The roof was almost a solid sheet of flame. Smoke poured out the windows.

  Inside, chaos, motion, curses, shrieks, shots.

  A man jumped out a window in the middle of the building’s long east wall, into the alley. The rifleman on the rooming house roof saw him first and fired, missing.

  The target ran back and forth in the alley, bouncing off the walls. The rifleman kept shooting at him and missing.

  The front of the alley was filled by some posse men. They didn’t miss. The man fell, dead.

  An arm of flame lifted out from the side of the saloon, into the alley, forcing the posse men back.

  Part of the burning roof collapsed, falling inward, forcing flames and smoke out the windows and door.

  Smoke poured into the street, hazing it. Hix didn’t like that so well. “Keep a sharp lookout!” he told his men. He knew the end was coming. They all did.

  From inside the saloon, a voice bawled, “Don’t shoot, the women are coming out! Don’t shoot!”

  Smoke blurred the scene, misty, eye-stinging. A knot of four female forms burst through the front doorway, their outlines vague, indistinct.

  The porch was ablaze, flames swirling around them. There were four of them, sobbing, coughing, choking, shrieking. They stumbled into the street.

  One of them lurched away from the others, staggering east along the road. A couple of posse men watched the skirted form with narrowed eyes.

  “Something wrong about that one,” said one posseman.

  “Man, you ain’t lying. She sure is ugly,” said the other.

  “Ain’t got no hair.”

  “Must’ve got burned off in the fire.”

  “Didn’t burn off that beard, though.”

  “What the—?! That ain’t no woman, it’s a man!”

  “It’s Bletchley! Shoot!—”

  It was Bletchley, wearing a dress over his clothes, t
rying to escape with the women. He wouldn’t have gotten more than a few steps away, if the smoke hadn’t been so thick. But a gust of wind had blown it away, leaving him standing exposed in the middle of the road.

  As a bona fide female, he looked mighty unconvincing.

  The two posse men swung their guns toward him, but his gun was already up, leveled. They hadn’t seen it because it was hidden behind the folds of his dress.

  Guns blasted. One of the posse men was chopped in the middle and went down. The other winged Bletchley. Bletchley dropped his gun, but stayed on his feet. He was a mean-faced hardcase.

  He paused, as if gathering himself to make a grab for the gun. The posse man who had winged him rushed forward, shooting.

  “Hell,” Bletchley said. He turned, ran. A bullet tagged him in the back. He lurched forward, arms windmilling. The posse man shot again. Bletchley halted, weaving.

  A couple more posse men opened fire. Gingham skirt folds swirling, Bletchley flopped into the dirt.

  He lay there twitching. More bullets were pumped into him, until long after he’d stopped twitching.

  One of the Doghouse women who crouched huddled in the middle of the road, coughing and gasping for breath, was shot by an antsy posse man.

  “Dammit, that’s a real woman you shot down there!”

  “Sorry, Marshal! I thought she was reaching!”

  The other two women lay flat in the street, arms held out from their sides, hands open to show they were empty. They would have played dead, but they were coughing too hard.

  A man crashed through the swinging bat-wing doors, through smoke and flames. He was sooty, singed, red-eyed.

  He tossed his gun into the street. “Don’t shoot, I give up!”

  A shotgun roared, all but blowing him out of his boots. It had been triggered by Wessel.

  “Leave some for the hangman, Dick,” the marshal said.

  5

  The next one out of the burning building was a man, a human torch. He ran blindly out the front door, into the street. He was wrapped in a blanket of orange and red flames. From a distance, from where Slocum was watching, they looked festive, like fiesta decorations.

  Closer, the flames made flapping sounds, like flags fluttering in the breeze. Their bearer made inhuman sounds, like a bellowing calf. The posse men were so startled by the awful spectacle that they forgot to shoot.

  The burning man staggered around in the street, zigzagging. Finally, somebody took pity on him and shot him. After he fell, he continued to burn for a while.

  The saloon was a pyre. More of the roof caved in, sending up showers of sparks. It didn’t seem possible that anybody could be left alive inside, but a handful of survivors wormed out of the windows in the west wall, flopping into the alley.

  The all-male bunch was in a sorry state. They were singed and smoke-blackened, their garments scorched. All the fight was cooked out of them. Their eyes were red and tearing, their faces snot-streaked. They wheezed and gasped for breath, for clean fresh air. They were seized with wracking coughs. They couldn’t stand. They came crawling out of the alley, hopping and flopping.

  The posse men could have easily finished them off, but for now, their bloodlust was sated. Some of them even helped pull the miserable survivors away from the blaze.

  The Doghouse was all wood, and once the fire had taken hold, it went up fast, burning with a thick, oily smoke, like greasewood. In the heart of the flames was a black boxy shape, the outline of the walls that still remained upright.

  Inside, the roof was down and the structure was gutted. The walls toppled inward, completing the destruction.

  After that, the fire quickly burned itself out, leaving a pile of smoldering rubble.

  Both neighboring buildings were banded with big scorch marks. Parts of the building on the east had caught fire. The owners asked Marshal Hix if it would be okay for them to put it out. After all the shooting, the locals were afraid to make a move without clearing it first, for fear that they would be mistaken for combatants and shot by trigger-happy posse men.

  Hix gave the okay and the building’s owner and a couple of barflies went up on the roof with axes, chopping off the burning sections and tossing them down on the still-seething remnants of the saloon.

  The fire had caught only in a couple of places and they were able to nip it in the bud.

  Now that the shooting was over, signs of life began appearing on the street.

  Windows were opened and heads thrust outside, something that people had avoided doing up to now, for fear of catching a bullet. A few braver souls stepped outside, not venturing far from their own front doors.

  Hix and his men rounded up the saloon survivors, four men and two women, herding them together in the middle of the street. The third woman, the one who’d been shot, was still alive, but while she was being carried indoors, she died.

  Dick Wessel went from body to body, six-gun in hand. One of the saloon bunch stretched in the dirt was badly wounded but still breathing. Wessel shot him in the back of the head, ending it.

  Everyone else on the street flinched, looking to see where the shot had come from. Wessel stood beside the newly made corpse, his gun still smoking. He smiled blandly and moved on to the next body.

  “Wish I had a gun,” Slocum said to himself while watching from the woods. “A town that hates this hard is a potential gold mine.

  “Before I’m through, somebody’s going to pay plenty for my troubles,” he added.

  On the street, the two captive women protested that they were innocent, and had been held in the saloon by force, against their will, as hostages.

  Hix seemed to be giving the matter some consideration. Before he could decide, a couple of the male prisoners started maintaining that they too had been hostages.

  The most vehement protester received a backhanded cuff from Hix that sent him sprawling.

  “We’ll cart ‘em all off to jail and let the judge sort ’em out later,” Hix said.

  “Hell, let’s hang them now,” Pierce said.

  “I’ve got a rope on my saddle,” Engels offered helpfully.

  “Never mind about that now,” Hix said. He put his fists on his hips and looked around meaningfully. “Reckon I showed ’em who’s boss,” he said.

  Every now and then something would give way in the smoldering pile of rubble, sending a plume of sparks skyward.

  Hix sent to town for a wagon, a freight wagon. The tailgate was lowered so the bodies could be loaded into the hopper. Hix roped some of the gawking idlers into helping out with the grisly chore.

  The wagon driver, a teamster, sat smoking a corncob pipe, puffing away, studiously avoiding even the consideration of any labor not directly connected with the driving of the wagon. The corpses stank and the pipe tobacco helped kill the smell.

  There was a flare-up of temper when some of the posse men thought that the dragooned body handlers weren’t handling the body of one of their fallen comrades with proper reverence.

  “You carry him, then,” said one of the reluctant conscripts. Before he and his fellows could walk off the job, Hix intervened.

  “Never mind about that. You men get back to work,” he said.

  Pierce, who was empty-handed, began lecturing the spectators. “Ingrates,” he said. “You people ought to be damned glad that we cleaned up that no-good Doghouse bunch.”

  From the sidelines, somebody said, “You didn’t do it for us. You did it for yourself. It’s your cattle they’ve been rustling, Mr. Pierce.”

  “Who said that?” Pierce demanded, fiercely eyeing the knot of Whoretown denizens in the street. They all looked around blank-faced, from side to side, each trying to create the impression that he or she wasn’t the anonymous heckler.

  Pierce glared, arms folded across his chest. “Don’t have the nerve to show yourself, huh? Seems to me that maybe we stopped our cleaning up around here a mite soon!”

  Deputy Wessel stepped up and began organizing the effort. “Put the
saloon dead in the wagon first.”

  A posseman complained, “Dammit, Dick, why should those scum get special treatment?”

  Wessel froze him with a look. “Because this way, their dead will be at the bottom of the pile, not ours. Or would you rather have them lying on top of our men?”

  “I get you, Deputy. You’re right, of course.”

  It was done as Wessel had directed. The saloon dead were carried to the wagon by their arms and legs, then heaved into the hopper, like so many sacks of grain. They lay in a heap behind the back of the driver’s seat, their limbs tangled.

  The dead posse men got better treatment. They were laid out on their backs, legs closed, arms at their sides. They lay side by side on the wagon bed. Marshal Hix handled the lugubrious task of closing the dead men’s eyes.

  The bodies lay in attitudes of repose, but none of them looked like they were just sleeping. They looked dead.

  The saloon bunch lay sprawled in a mass, sightless eyes staring. They really looked dead.

  Somebody found an old blanket and draped it over the dead posse men. “Lord rest ’em,” Hix said piously, looking heavenward.

  It was late in the day, the sun low. A slight smoky haze clung to the scene, like woodland mist.

  Hix closed the tailgate, securing it. The wagon driver reached for the hand brake, ready to move out. “Hold up a minute, driver,” Hix said.

  He and his men prepared to mount up. Somebody said, “What about the prisoners, Marshal?”

  “Let ’em walk,” Hix said. He called for a rope. The prisoners looked sick, but it wasn’t hanging time for them, not yet. The male prisoners’ hands were tied behind their backs. They were yoked together single-file, each of them strung by a noose around the neck to the same length of rope.

  One of the two captive women said, “You ain’t going to tie us up with those men, are you? It ain’t decent!”

  Pierce snorted. “You’re a fine one to talk about decency!”

  “Now, you just hold on to your horses, Mr. High-and-Mighty Pierce! I’ll have you know that I’m a respectable working woman,” she said, waving her finger at him. Index finger.

  “Respectable! Why, no respectable woman would be found on this side of the deadline,” Pierce said, sneering.