falcon and wolf 22 cliffie bonus.

 

 

Chapter 22

 

“I have to get to the Abbott boy,” said Freddy. “You idiot, Croaker, he saw you and Berlin!”

“We c’n silence him, boss,” said Croaker Pennyman.

“That shit, Nelson, told me to ignore any rumours I heard about the Abbott lot,” said Freddy. “I hadn’t heard any rumours, but in his anxiety to preserve the brat, he gave away where he is hiding.”

“It’ll be a cinch,” said Pennyman.

“We need the Black Falcon tied down first, so he can’t go to the kid,” said Freddy. “Jimmie, Scarface, Dougie, you keep him occupied at the front; the rest of you, charge the back and take him and that Injun of his down.”

“It’ll be a good laugh, boss,” volunteered Scarface Longfellow. “Can we help cut him up a bit?”

“Probably,” said Freddy. “You open up on the place at one in the morning; the rest of you, ten minutes later, and at the same time, Croaker and I will silence the brat.”

 

Luke was unsure what the timing would be, but planned to sleep as much as possible, taking turns with Wolf. He gave Freddy the respect of assuming he would organise a two-pronged attack on Luke himself as a decoy from his attempts on Tommy, who had stayed out of sight. He wondered if Freddy would take the bait, thinking it was a bit thin to suppose that any responsible adult would let Tommy sleep alone in the cellar rather than take him into his own house, but in this he did overestimate Freddy’s assumption that Luke was a responsible adult. Indeed, Freddy assumed that a bounty hunter would make the child sleep out of the way and hidden in a cellar rather than have a child anywhere near him. Freddy would never have wanted to have a child anywhere near him, after all, and the concept that the boy might be frightened, alone and in a cellar, and where his parents had died would not have swayed him in the least; children were to be seen and not heard. He would never have understood the concept of Luke telling the scared little boy stories to help him go to sleep, especially not mundane stories about childhood mischief. Freddy’s ideas of childhood mischief, however, differed wildly from Luke’s, and involved stealing for his drunken father, and discovering at the age of fifteen or so, being able to beat up almost any grown man, that others his own age would follow him, and they could demand money with menaces. Freddy enjoyed menacing people. He had learned a veneer of urbanity during his first jail stretch, when an old lag taught him, the hard way, that a smooth voice and quiet manner could be more frightening than just shouting at people. It had not, however, removed all his prejudices, but he was prepared to recall the lesson and give some respect to The Black Falcon even if he did look like an Easterner. Freddy’s way of respecting someone was to throw every one of his men against him. He half considered giving his men instructions to beat the two men half to death and then offer them a option of joining him, with the implied threat of ‘or die,’ but something told him that this suave youth would not join him. And any defiance might lose him face in front of his men.

 

oOoOo

 

Tommy had got up, because he woke at midnight, and his nerves were too stretched to let him sleep.  He crept into the front window, and watched. Several dogs slunk around the street.

Tommy shivered. He knew the dogs were there by Luke’s design, but the furtive, feral shapes slipping between shadows made him nervous. Dogs were only one step from wolves.

Tommy almost dozed off again at his watch point, waking when Luke came in.

“Couldn’t sleep?” said Luke.

Tommy shook his head, realised that it was dark and he could not be seen.

“No, I woke up and I felt sick.”

“It’s normal before a big battle,” said Luke. “You know what to do; will you be on watch? You can’t doze any longer.”

“I won’t. I’m awake,” said Tommy.

“Good man,” said Luke. He glided downstairs.

Tommy felt as if he was walking on air. Luke trusted him to do a man’s job.

 

 

Tommy strained to look into the darkness. Oddly, at first, it seemed to get darker the more he peered, with spots before his eyes, but in due course, his sight cleared, and the darkness seemed to become less intense. And then he saw the men move into position. One from the right; another from the left, and a second following him.

Tommy went to the head of the stairs, and knocked three times on the wall.

Two double knocks answered him, that his message had been received. Tommy went back to his spy-hole, rather than the window. The spy hole had leather tacked all around it, to catch any splinters,, if the false-front boards were hit. It would not stop rifle fire; but it might stop a pistol bullet, or at least slow it so that the buckskins Tommy wore might prevent him being badly wounded. It was a precaution worth taking, if not much of a defence in an out-and-out war.

   Tommy waited, half-way between excitement and terror. They had come before, and Luke and Wolf had seen them off. And those two were quite serene. And trusting him to fire the special cartridges.

There was the first shot; the first muzzle-flash.  Tommy fired back, in its general direction. He fired the second barrel of the shotgun, and fired the second barrel as the second gunman fired. Then he reloaded, memorising the whereabouts of the third gunman. That was his task done, and he ran down the stairs. The door to the shop, he noticed, had been barricaded. A dresser of very solid oak stood over the door, and a big chest in front of that.

“There’s a bed for you on the sofa,” said Luke, absently. “You might as well lie down and rest, though you’ll get precious little sleep, I fear. It’s going to be noisy.”

“I don’t mind,” said Tommy, taking off the buckskins obediently to get into bed. “Is your life always this busy?”

“Busy. Good word,” grinned Luke. “It’s this busy when I get going to sort something out. Sometimes it’s tedious and boring while I wait around for something I’m expecting to happen.  And sometimes it’s peaceful when I’m between jobs. But trouble finds me readily enough. Ah, there’s the back gate.”

There was a cacophony of metal objects.

“Circle round the edge!” someone called. “Don’t let them see your silhouette!”

Luke sniggered.

“Not got a clue,” he said. He set a taper to a fuse, and shortly, there was a whoosh! Of a rocket. At its zenith, it burst, not into stars, but into a blue-white glow, which seemed to hang in the air. White, startled faces looked up.

“Surrender and consider yourselves under arrest, or die,” called Luke.

“Charge him!” shouted a voice.

Luke sighed.

“I gave them a chance,” he said.

Then, as the mass of men charged, he opened up with the Gatling gun.

Tommy shivered at its inexorable chatter whilst Luke turned the handle, the bullets pouring out of it ruthlessly.

Wolf stood by with another magazine.

It was not necessary. The forty rounds of the hopper magazine were quite sufficient.

“You will not go out the back,” said Luke, to Tommy. “It’s going to be messy.”

“I think I’m glad to obey,” said Tommy. “What about the front?”

“I’ll go look out of the window,” said Luke. He ran upstairs, and came back, laughing.

“Funniest thing I ever saw,” he said. “Three of them run off by a pack of dogs, yipping and howling at their heels. Your aim is good, Tommy-boy, and they’ll we wondering how come all those dogs followed them, unless they figure out that you smothered them with aniseed.” He sniggered again. “Makes me think of a nursery rhyme I learned at my ma’s knee:

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark

The beggars have come to town

Some in rags and some in tags

And one in a velvet gown.”

Tommy laughed.

“I don’t know that one,” he said.

“It might be purely English,” said Luke. “I wonder how Freddy is getting on.”

“Tomorrow is early enough to find out,” grunted Wolf. “I make tea, then we sleep.”

 

 

Freddy made his way to the Abbott lot with ‘Croaker’ Pennyman, who had not been known as ‘Joey’ by his fond mother for many a long year, since before he was court-martialled and dismissed the Confederate Army for being too crazy and violent.

“Can I play with the kid? Can I?” he asked.

“Yes,” sighed Freddy. Pennyman’s games were unpleasant, but if appeased with being permitted to ‘play’ from time to time, he was more quiescent and better behaved in between, and less of a risk to his fellows. Freddy was not sure what had got Pennyman discharged the ranks, but it had involved prisoners, and was hushed up.

He checked his watch.

The Black Falcon and his Indian should be tied down by now.

The bullseye lantern he carried showed a well-trodden path, with small foot prints.

“Little fool,” said Freddy, in scorn.

It never occurred to him for one moment that a little kid might manage to set up a path as bait, nor that an adult would involve a child in such. Children, in Freddy’s book, weren’t clever enough to do much of any use. He recalled little of his own early life; it was sufficiently unpleasant not to want to remember, apart from a brief time when he lived with the schoolmarm when his father was in jail. Freddy had stood then at a crossroads, where he might have accepted her affection for an unwanted little boy, and learn to be a good citizen.  He made his choice, and cleaned out all her finances, having persuaded her to empty her bank account, to pay a non-existent debt of his father’s that he blacked his own eye to convince her that the creditors were demanding it from him. He had tried to rape her, and failed, and she told him that she would forgive him as God had intervened to prevent him violating her. He hit her with the washing dolly, holding it by two of its three legs, used to churn the washing, and pounded her over and over again until she was dead. Then he went to work on the railroad, using his tall frame to lie about his age. Here, he learned to fight, and discovered his ability at extortion.

But Freddy did not care that he had once been a frightened kid about Tommy’s age, who might have had a frugal but happy life with the schoolmarm. He still thought of himself as clever for escaping that ‘trap.’ And so, beyond wanting Tommy dead, to protect himself, he cared nothing.

Freddy held the lantern for Pennyman to open the trapdoor. If the kid had a gun, he would shoot at Pennyman, and if he got lucky, well, that was Pennyman’s loss.

He was not expecting the detonation which happened at the lifting of the stone.

Pennyman was virtually cut in half, and screamed, reaching for the belly which was spilling out into the dirt. By his bad luck, there were no major arteries hit, and the big blood vessels of his liver remained intact. The fireball cauterised much of what was left. Freddy was lifted and thrown a distance, his legs blown off at the knee. He landed hard in a world of pain. Bits of stone punctured his thighs and belly and he screamed.

 

 

Luke ventured out as the sky paled in false dawn. The sheriff would have to involve himself, and he did not want some random deputy being blown up by one of his makeshift mines.  He had a map of where he had planted them, and intended to dismantle them carefully, replacing the dynamite carefully in its box.

It was snowing, fitfully, but Luke had good winter clothing.

By the time he got there, Pennyman had lapsed into unconsciousness from shock; Freddy was whimpering in cold, shock, and pain.

“The hell!” said Luke. “Are you still alive, you egregious wet stain on your mother’s panties?”

“Help me!” whimpered Freddy. “I’ll give you anything you want.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” said Luke. “You tried to steal from a kid I’m fond of, and killed his parents. And do you know what I want in payment for that?”

“Anything!” said Freddy.

Luke laughed, covering how his stomach churned at what his trap had done.

“What I want is to watch you bleed your miserable life out, and the light to go out of your eyes as the agony is washed away only by death,” he said, viciously. “That kid heard his parents being burned to death. I want to tell him I watched you die in as much unbearable pain.”

“But you have to help me!”

“No, I don’t. I’m not a do-gooder. The law tells me I may not end your life now, because you are helpless, which would be a mercy killing, for you’ve a length of old piping stuck in your gut. You wouldn’t survive being moved, but I won’t help you die quicker. All I have to do to comply with the law is nothing.”

Freddy screamed, and begged, and sobbed; and Luke cleared away the other mines.

“You can always shoot yourself,” said Luke. “You have your gun. Of course, you can shoot me, but you’ll probably miss, and if you try, I’ll shoot your gun out of your hand. Law abiding citizen, me; waiting for the Sheriff’s office to open to tell them that you are alive and injured but armed on my ward’s lot.”

“You’re a cold-blooded devil,” hissed Freddy.

“Yes,” said Luke.

He picked up his last mine, and made his way out of the lot, whistling, his gun loose in his holster, and turning the instant he heard the scrape of Freddy’s gun on his holster.

True to form, Freddy tried to shoot Luke, who shot his six-shooter clear out of Freddy’s hand.

He left the dying man sobbing, and went to the Sheriff’s office, to report the night’s excitement to Dan Nelson.

He quietly vomited into a drain on the way home, and went back seemingly chipper enough to eat breakfast.

The mess in the back yard would be cleared up by the deputy sheriffs; and doubtless the local ordnances would also include a paragraph about repeating weapons not being permitted when protecting life and home, along with a prohibition on dynamite.

Luke did not really care; he had no real expectation of coming back to these parts.

“It’s over, now, Tommy,” he said. “Freddy and the other guy who hurt your pa are both dead.”

He cradled the sobbing little boy to him; the tears were healing.

 

Luke collected Annie-Beth from Mr. and Mrs. Chartovsky, and he, Wolf, Tommy, and Annie-Beth took the train as far as they might, Luke paying without a murmur for the damage Blackwind caused to the caboose.

And with a decent horse each for the children, they could ride to his parents’ house for a real family Christmas. And Christmas with his dear Ida.