His Ragged Company Read online

  The valley where the Simpkin farm stood grew darker by the minute. The hills around it were high enough to choke off the sunlight well before the day was at an end. I heard Rufus cursing and stumbling behind me.

  The Simpkin farm hadn't functioned in years. Long before my time in Blackpeak, a dispute between landowners had seen the Simpkins killed by a rival. Gruesome stuff, from what I had been told. Husband, wife, two little girls, all shot to death.

  Since then, the rotten old farmhouse and the dilapidated barn behind it had become a regular meeting-place for hooligans of all kinds. The fields had been sunburnt into uselessness. Brown weeds overtook much of the land around it. A wagon missing a wheel sat in the front yard, along with a moldering pile of wood half-sunk into the earth. There was a crumbling well that looked about ready to fall in on itself. Two old trees reached leafless arms for the sky. Sad to see a good, productive farm fall into such misuse.

  Two shadows stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the porch. Our welcoming party. The Gregdon Twins stared at us as we approached them. As I got closer, I could feel their eyes boring into me. Didn’t really matter right then if they could aim for shit or not – I was under the impression they could, and that’s what mattered the most.

  “Evenin’ Billy, Curtis,” I said easily as I strode up to them, keeping enough space between them and me so I could see their every move, but just little enough so the shotgun would have an effect if it needed to. I sucked my teeth. “You boys got a real nice place, here. Love what you’ve done with it.”

  “What the hell you want, Faust?” snarled Billy, his dark facial hair matted with flakes of blood from his swollen nose. He wore a black vest and a dark hat. Wisps of unkempt blond hung around his ears and neck. He kept playing with the gun in his hands.

  “Just to talk. Was wondering if you wouldn’t mind sitting down with me to discuss some things.”

  “What things?”

  “Law things,” I said. “Breaking rules things. Starting trouble kind of things.”

  Billy Gregdon pointed over my shoulder at Rufus. “And you brought that pig here to do it, huh?”

  “He lodged a complaint. I followed up on it.”

  “You hear that Curtis?” asked Billy.

  Curtis, who stood just beside his brother – and who looked nothing at all like a twin, from his brownish hair to his oversized nose and his too-far-apart eyes – crossed his arms before his chest. Two wooden handles stuck out at his hips. “Thought I heard it,” said Curtis, his voice shrill. “Lodged a complaint, Rufus did. Lodged it with the law.”

  “’Spose that means we go quietly,” said Billy, never looking away from me.

  “’Spose so,” said Curtis.

  I held up a hand. “Not talking about anybody going with anybody, boys. Just here to mediate and be sure we can retain the peace.”

  Billy Gregdon said, “Oh, so you’re rehabilitatin’ us.”

  “Looks like it. You all take something from Mr. Oarsdale here? He seemed mighty offended.”

  Curtis’s lips and nose curled up in a sneer. “Don’t know why he should be. He been stealin’ from the boys up at the mine for some time now.”

  With the hand not holding the sixgun, Billy Gregdon reached back to his other holster, which was filled with a very unorthodox weapon that didn’t seem to fit quite right in it. The grip was not the crescent-shaped, flat-ended one you might see on a revolver. It looked longer, gnarled, a little more ornate and primitive. Then he said, “Thought we’d give him what he deserved.”

  “That’s my gun,” Rufus blurted from behind me.

  Billy grinned a smile with less teeth than I had fingers. “Belongs to us now. Think of it as payment for all the things you been snatching from the boys workin’ Bisbin’s mine.”

  “Hard workin’ folks,” said Curtis. “Don’t deserve nothing getting stolen.”

  I cleared my throat. “Stealing is stealing no matter what. Rules against that kind of thing here.”

  “You gonna punish Oarsdale for what he took?” snapped Billy.

  “Nobody told me he took anything,” I said.

  “He took a lot,” said Curtis.

  “Important things,” said Billy.

  “I ain’t took nothing,” Rufus shouted, and I felt him surging forward behind me. I reached out a hand and caught him mid-stride. I shoved the old drunk back. “What did I tell you, Rufus?”

  “That’s my gun.”

  Trying to stand between thieves and drunks was a lesson in futility. I was more tense than I should have been. My shoulders started to ache. Our shadows grew longer. The sun was setting, and if we talked too long and nothing came of it, then Rufus and I would lose our advantage if things came to shots.

  “Between you all and me,” I said, “I don’t care who stole what. Rufus was the only one who went through the proper channels to let me know. Gregdons, if you’d come to me before today, we very likely would be witnessing a very different situation. But you didn’t. The rules don’t apply to would-haves or could-haves,” I warned them. “I’m asking you kindly, as the marshal of Blackpeak, to return to Mr. Oarsdale what property belongs to him.”

  “He means the gun,” said Rufus, “and the lucky—“

  “Rufus,” I snapped. I held out my free hand and wriggled my fingers. “The pistol, Billy Gregdon. Pass it on.”

  “And what if I don’t wanna?” he said.

  “I get it anyway.”

  “That a threat?”

  “Professional inference.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” asked Curtis.

  “Means that by the kindness of your good Christian souls, in adherence to the values your Mama taught you, and because Saint Nick will bring you sugarplums in your stocking if you do—“ I readjusted my hold on the double-barreled, whipped it up with one hand to close the breach, and drew back the hammers, “—you’d be best off handing over the pistol so I don’t have to give you both some new leaky holes.”

  I’m a professional gunman, or something fairly close to it. It’s my job to take situations over the line.

  “We can talk about this,” said Curtis.

  “Damned right we can,” I responded.

  “No,” said Billy. He was no longer playing with his revolver. He was holding it tightly, as if he expected to use it. “I ain’t giving the thing back. There’s a price to pay for stealin’.”

  “Price to pay for stealing from a citizen of Blackpeak,” I said. “Drop your weapon and give me what belongs to Mr. Oarsdale.”

  I know from experience that it’s hard to think when you’re staring down two very loaded shotgun barrels. Billy Gregdon shifted his weight from one foot to another. He raised his chin. Instead of staring at the gun, he stared at me. ​“Just because you’re the marshal doesn’t mean you can go around killing anybody you want over something as simple as an old man's gun. Laws ain’t written with blood,” Billy said.

  “True, but sometimes it takes a little bit to enforce them. Give me the pistol and—“

  “Elias!”

  Rufus shouted with a timbre in his voice that didn’t suit his normal tone. It sprang me into action. If I had followed my instinct, I would have squeezed the triggers and unloaded both barrels at Billy Gregdon, but that would have been an awfully unsolicited mess. I thought defensively. I skittered back away from Billy Gregdon. Just as I did so, I caught sight of Curtis Gregdon drawing one of his pistols. He had the hammer back before it had even left his holster. He aimed across himself at me, between his brother and Rufus.

  He pulled the trigger.

  I’ve done this a few times. You still startle, of course. You still flinch. And you react. You react because if you don’t, that knife’s got your guts, or that lead’s got your cheek. Before the first swing or shot, you’ve already built up a catalogue in your head: where to go, where to aim, who to wax first. When you look at your surroundings, you unconsciously size them up and produce alternate routes to cover and safety. And when it’s time, becau
se whether or not you expect it, time’ll come sooner or later, your body often moves before your brain, usually recognizing a threat before you even see it.

  I pulled the shotgun around as I fell back and gave Curtis Gregdon the left barrel. There was a flash, a roar of flame, and I saw him stumble, clawing at his bloodied face.

  “Son of a bitch,” shouted Billy Gregdon. He had his revolver poised a second later. I dove for the well. A shot rang. Granite sprayed into the air as a bullet smacked right into a stone beside my head.

  One.

  “Rufus,” I said. “Cover your ass!”

  He went for the woodpile. He fired without looking, his thumb working his revolver's hammer between each shot. Dirt kicked into the air and splinters blew out from the side of the busted wagon as his stray shots flew off-course. Billy Gregdon didn't budge. He shifted his aim to Rufus and squeezed off another round.

  Two.

  “Stop firing, Gregdon,” I said from behind the well. “This ain’t any kind of solution—“

  Another round gnawed through one of the well’s wooden posts. ​Three.

  I sucked down a breath and leaned out from around the well. Gregdon skittered back to the farmhouse, far more focused on me than Rufus, who blubbered and shouted from behind the woodpile.

  I made a dash for the next line of cover – the wagon – about ten yards away. I loosed the right barrel of the shotgun as I ran. The spray hissed across the ground and threw up dust. Pellets slashed into the porch, but Gregdon didn't slow. I slid to a halt behind the wagon just as his fourth shot slammed into the ground where I’d been a moment before.

  Four.

  I heard the door of the farmhouse slam shut. I cracked the shotgun, kicked out the spent shells, and slid in two more. I drew the hammers back. Curtis Gregdon moaned from the middle of the yard, his boots kicking against the dirt. Not dead. A pang of sympathy rattled through me. “Rufus,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Stay out here. I’m going after Gregdon.”

  “What you want me to do?”

  “Keep a bead on Curtis,“ I said. “If he somehow manages to go for his gun, finish the job.”

  Billy was luring me into unfamiliar territory, trying to slice away my confidence. While he might not have had many escapes from within the farmhouse, I wouldn’t either, and he knew the place a hell of a lot better than I did. I choked down another breath, crawled to my feet, and then sprinted from behind the wagon, crossing the front yard of the farmhouse as fast as I could.

  Billy shot twice – five, six – from one of the windows on the second floor. One of the rounds clapped into the peat right in front of me. Another one of them buzzed past my ear. I staggered in surprise and all but threw myself onto the porch and beneath the rotten overhang.

  He had fired six shots. As long as my counting was right, he’d be reloading. I had only seen him with one revolver, and there was something about Rufus’s gun – the other one that Billy had – that made me think it wasn’t worth shit to fire in a gunfight. It was decorative, not likely a battle piece. Bragging rights.

  I crashed in through the crumbling front door into a dusty foyer strewn with garbage. Under my feet, empty tobacco-wrappings rustled and broken bottles crunched. With the sunlight coming in through the doors, I noticed there were long, hand-drawn stains scribbled on the walls and floors with messy ink. Most of them looked like triangles. They were all very exact, some sharing lines of the others. They varied in size from ones as tiny as a coin to as large as a man's head. While there were many that seemed as if they'd been scrawled with painstaking, equilateral measurements, the occasional triangle had been hastily swept out of broad, arm-length strokes. There must have been hundreds of them, though counting to six bullets had already strained my brain enough as it was.

  The Gregdon twins were budding artists, it seemed.

  “Billy Gregdon,” I shouted at the stairs, rounding them with the barrels of my shotgun before me. “Put down your weapon and accompany me to Blackpeak. We might be able to overlook the—“

  “I’ll kill your ass before that, Faust,” he bellowed from upstairs.

  I heard spent casings clatter to the floor.

  Alright, then.

  Time to make a move.

  I pounded boots up the rickety stairs, praying with each step that my heel wouldn’t just punch through the old wood and break my ankle in the process. I shouldered the shotgun and hugged the wall, biting my bottom lip so hard that I could taste the blood seeping into my mouth.

  As I crested the top of the stairs and looked down the hall, Billy Gregdon stood as a black silhouette against a window. He was just snapping the shutter on his revolver, cocking it, and raising it as I appeared.

  He aimed, grinned, and fired.

  A whistling bullet sheared against the wall just to my right. He fanned the hammer for two more shots, but those bullets lanced off somewhere into the hall behind me. Fanning was a stage invention, a showy display more than an effective one. Keeping the trigger squeezed so that multiple shots required only the snap of the pistol's hammer was flashy. Hell on accuracy, too.

  I didn’t have time to admire my own luck before I remembered that he still had three more shots.

  I squeezed off both barrels.

  The reverberation of the blast shook the dust off the ceiling-beams. The flash sprayed light across the walls. I caught sight of Billy Gregdon falling to the side, his hand – suddenly red and shredded to ribbons – letting go of the sixgun.

  Silence overtook the creaking farmhouse. I heard Billy Gregdon wheezing and cursing just inside of the room. I took the few available seconds to reload the shotgun and stepped into the shot-peppered room to find Billy huddled in the corner against the crumbled frame of an old rope bed. He clutched his bloodied right arm. The shotgun had pretty much ripped the limb off at the elbow. His face was splattered with blood. His pupils gaped.

  “Hurts,” he said. “Hurts.”

  “I imagine so,” I said, keeping the barrels trained on him. “Stand up, Gregdon.” He did, using the wall for support. He left a long, red streak across it.

  “You did my brother," he hissed.

  “And I'll do the same to you. You hear me, Gregdon?”

  He glanced at his ruined arm, then back at me.

  “I’ve got a way about me,” Billy said, sneering through his pain. “So does the world, Faust, and you ain’t even realized it yet. If only you knew. If only you knew.” His mangled arm was a saggy lump of candle-wax. By some will, he managed to lift his shredded hand up to his forehead, slow-like, so I didn’t startle.

  In his grip, he clutched a piece of folded paper. Then he touched his thumb just between his eyes, pressed his forefinger and middle-finger above them on his brow. Like there was an ache in his head he was going to pinch right out. He left three spots of blood on his sweaty skin.

  Then the paper vanished like smoke.

  Against my breast, a murmur of heat touched my skin. What had he done?

  I poised the shotgun. “You shouldn't take what you know damn well isn't yours. Unholster the gun and give it to me, boy,” I finally said. “Real easy.”

  Gregdon did just as I asked. Only, he did it a lot faster than I anticipated.

  My body had started to settle down from all the excitement running through it, so when he yanked Rufus’s gun out of its awkward holster, my reaction time had already slowed. I saw a flash and a flare of heat from the top of the pistol before its mouth erupted into a plume of black smoke and muffled flame.

  He barely had time to raise it all the way before I fired. The shotgun kicked against my shoulder as a spear of agony pierced through my right leg. Billy Gregdon let out a choked wail. The shots took him in the chest and sent him staggering toward the window. He crumpled against it. The remaining glass shattered underneath his weight and he flopped out onto the overhang of the porch. Then he rolled and fell two stories.

  The sound he made when he hit wasn't a pretty one.
/>   I screamed against magma pain in my thigh and fell back against the nearest wall.

  My pants were stained with sticky blood. Every time I moved my right leg or put weight on it, the muscles coiled with pain. I bared my teeth and clamped a palm around the wound. The blood kept coming, rushing with every new heartbeat.

  Gregdon had dropped Rufus's pistol on the floor. It was an older flintlock, certainly not ideal in the kind of gunfight we'd been waging. He had used its one loaded shot on me at the last instant. I picked it up and examined the barrel, the striking mechanism, and the carvings wrought down its wooden frame. Bronze filigree ran along the wood in a net-like weave, and the black steel of the striker hadn't been touched by a single lick of rust.

  “This flying Gregdon boy dead, or just unconscious?” he asked.

  “He making noise?"

  “No.”

  “He moving?””

  “No.”

  “Bet’s on dead,” I said.

  I retrieved my shotgun, dragging my leg and a wide snail-trail of blood behind me. I used the wall to steady myself as I stumbled down the steps.

  When I got outside, I saw Gregdon’s corpse laying flat on the ground, his limbs twisted at unnatural angles. Blood coagulated in the dry dirt around him like little glass beads.

  “Jesus Christ, Elias,” said Rufus, rushing to me. “You alright?”

  “What's it look like?”

  “Like a gunshot,” he said.

  I stared at him. I held the flintlock out for him. Rufus suddenly stopped being interested in Gregdon’s body and took the pistol from me.

  With a frown twitching under his beard, he shook the black-powder pistol and said, “It’s been shot.”

  “That’s what happens with guns.”

  Rufus Oarsdale cradled the old weapon as if it was a precious bauble. Even sniffed the barrel. “Shot recently.”

  “That’s what happens with gunfights.”

  He seemed to put two and two together, and while I doubt Rufus Oarsdale would have come up with anything remotely like four, he definitely understood that there was a correlation between the empty gun in his hands and the bleeding puncture in my thigh. He gave the weapon a kiss on the barrel, and then stuffed it down into the holster where he had been holding the revolver I gave him.