Point Rider (A Wild Bill Western Book 7) Read online

  It started when Bill noticed a nut-brown face that instantly stood out from the crowd—a stoic, unreadable face with black eyes sunk deep behind prominent cheekbones. The shako hat with its leather chin strap looked South American, Argentina maybe.

  Their gazes collided for a moment; then the man’s eyes slid away from him. He carried a Smith & Wesson tucked behind his sash, the special-issue, two-and-a-half-pound revolver sold to the Czar’s government in Russia. Bill recognized the extra finger grip on the trigger guard.

  The man passed by, and Wild Bill kept a close eye on him. Too late, he realized that was his big mistake. The hard case was only a diversion—by the time Hickok saw the second man lunge at him, it was too late to react.

  POINT RIDER

  WILD BILL 7

  By Judd Cole

  First Published by Leisure Books in 2001

  Copyright© 2001, 2016 by Judd Cole

  First Smashwords Edition: February 2016

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Our cover features Storm Chasers, painted by Andy Thomas, and used by permission.

  Andy Thomas Artist, Carthage Missouri

  Andy is known for his action westerns and storytelling paintings and documenting historical events through history.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  Fondly dedicated to “Pop-a-top” Charlie Waites,

  who still owes me $20.

  Chapter One

  “It ain’t death I fear, Wild Bill,” remarked “Gentleman John” Haskins to J. B. Hickok after nearly two hours of dead silence.

  Hickok, busy studying the creosote scrubland just north of Del Rio, Texas, slewed around in the saddle to look at his prisoner.

  “No, sir, it’s knowing exactly when death is coming, Bill, that’s the part I can’t abide,” Haskins assured him in his amiable Tennessee twang. “Out here a man expects death at any time. But a hanging date—now see, that gives you time to count down to your own dying. There, sir, is what I fear.”

  Hickok, a neckerchief pulled over the lower half of his face to cut the thick trail dust, nodded to concede the point.

  “All you had to do, Johnny, was push me to a gunfight and be done with it. You or me. You’re the one tossed down your shooter; hell, I can’t shoot an unarmed man.”

  Gentleman John snorted. “Why not? There wasn’t much else you didn’t shoot.”

  Armed with a half-dozen John Doe warrants, and more guts than good sense, Hickok had entered Rustler’s Roost, up on the Concho River, in a blaze of gunfire. When Gentleman John saw three of his toughest men shot to rag tatters, he got snow in his boots and surrendered. Thus had crumbled the largest rustling ring in South Texas.

  Wild Bill knew, however, that it didn’t end with that scrape up on the Concho. He expected more trouble, and at any time now. Gentleman John was the big he-dog among hard-tails in the Live Oak country, and he’d never go to the gallows without a fox play or two.

  “Bill,” Gentleman John said perhaps a half-mile later, “my mouth feels stuffed with cotton. I’d be beholden for a sup of something wet. Some libation with kick being preferred.”

  Hickok reined in his strawberry roan, letting his prisoner’s horse catch up. A long lead line connected the other horse to Bill’s bridle ring. Haskins’s hands were tied behind his back with strong cord that bit deeper the more a prisoner struggled against it. Only his stirruped feet held him in the saddle.

  Hickok shook open the long gray duster that did double duty: It protected his dark twill suit while also hiding the two ivory-gripped Colt Model P six-shooters that had become his trademark all over the frontier.

  By habit he loosened both weapons in their holsters, minimizing friction drag if he needed them quick. Then he produced a signed bottle of Old Taylor bourbon from his coat pocket. Gentleman John’s coarse-grained face eased into an ear-to-ear smile. But despite that pleasant smile and his impeccable manners, his eyes were as hard as his muscles.

  Bill carefully poured a generous snort into Haskins’s mouth. The rustler king smacked his lips appreciatively.

  “Now, that’s the boy you don’t want to give the slip to! I thank you, sir. Colonel Taylor’s fermentations are unmatched anywhere.”

  “Anything else,” Bill agreed amiably, “is burro piss. Now let’s make tracks, old son. I plan to reach Del Rio before sunset. I’ve grown soft since our war days, Johnny. I require sheets, a hot bath, the comforts of a woman, and a good poker game.”

  “Now, Bill, if comfort is your boy, why in Sam Hill would you pick Del Rio? You’d ought to’ve turned me in over at San Antone. That place is settling up, by the Lord Harry. Del Rio is just a bordertown roach pit.”

  Hickok needed no such reminder. He presently had a decent hotel room going to waste in San Antonio. Despite being so tired he could feel the dragging weight of the cartridges in his shell belt, he had been forced to pass his room by and bear due west to Del Rio instead.

  “This trip’s your fault, not mine,” Hickok reminded him. “To you a cow’s a cow, and you’re indifferent to where you steal it.”

  “Steal is a damned ugly word, Bill. I prefer to call it ‘rescuing mavericks.’”

  Bill snorted, the sound making his horse, Fire-away, prick his ears. In truth, the infamous Gentleman John Haskins specialized in “slicing off some beef” from massive drives pushing up the Chisholm Trail toward shipping points like Ellsworth and Abilene. He and his men were experts at employing running irons to cleverly alter established brands right alongside the trail.

  “Uh-huh, well, when you rescue a cow in Texas, then sell it in Kansas,” Bill informed him dryly, “that’s a federal crime. So I have to book you into the U.S. Marshals at Del Rio.”

  Bill opened his canteen and splashed water on his face, then Gentleman John’s. They had both slept in the open the night before, curling behind meager windbreaks of sagebrush. This final expanse, between the Nueces River and Del Rio, was a God-forgotten desert of bone-dry washes and salt sage.

  “There’s Del Rio,” Wild Bill announced as they crested a red rock bluff overlooking the muddy brown meanders of the Rio Grande—or the Rio Bravo to those who lived south of it.

  “Just in time, too,” Hickok added, looking overhead as heat lightning exploded like muzzle flashes behind the clouds. “Looks like a gully-washer making up.”

  “Well, then, sir,” Gentleman John said, his tone quietly resigned. “If the great farce is finally over, so be it! John Haskins played his part well, and now he’s weary of it. Besides, how many men get to be escorted to the hangman by Wild Bill Hickok? Hey? It’s been an honor, sir, and no hard feelings.”

  Hickok was not fooled for one second by this rhetorical smoke. Give Haskins a moment’s opportunity, and he’d run like a river when the snow melts.

  Bill dallied the lead line around his saddle horn, shortening it for this final approach into town. Even Del Rio, Bill noticed, had grown rapidly since the War Between the States.

  First came the abandoned buildings at the edge of town, choked with tumbleweed and Russian thistle. Hickok’s eyes remained in constant motion. Fire-away could feel his mas
ter’s caution— the gelding, too, brought his head up, ears pricked forward, as they advanced along wide, wagon-rutted Main Street.

  Next came the dugouts and sheds of the dirt-poor Mexicans, Indians, and ’breeds, a sleepy section that would come alive after sundown. They trotted past a dance hall that had seen so many fights the windows were boarded up. Past the livery barn, where a handsome dun horse was enjoying a good roll in manure.

  The center of town was much more active and crowded. Cowboys wearing bandannas and leather chaps lounged everywhere, sun-crimped eyes watching the new arrivals with bored curiosity.

  The adobe courthouse hove into view ahead, plastered white and topped with red tiles. But even now, this close, Hickok did not let down his guard. The stories about Gentleman John and his loyal minions were more than backcountry lore and saloon gossip.

  “End of the line, compadre,” Haskins said quietly as Bill reined in at the courthouse.

  Hickok didn’t like the ambiguity of the remark. The end of whose line? He brought his right foot out of the stirrup and swung down, landing light as a cat in the street. He looped his reins around the tie rail, eyes scanning everyone who passed.

  Like most survivors on the American frontier, Hickok had learned to tell a man’s home range by his rig and the way he shaped his hat. Men from northern ranges, for example, preferred a low, crimped crown, while on the southern ranges a higher, rounded crown was more common.

  As he helped Haskins to the ground, Wild Bill carefully gauged the home range and profession of every man who thumped by on the weather-rawed boardwalk. And good thing, for when the expected trouble came, it happened the way trouble usually happened out west. It was sudden, violent, and brief.

  It started when Bill noticed a nut-brown face that instantly stood out from the crowd—a stoic, unreadable face with black eyes sunk deep behind prominent cheekbones. The shako hat with its leather chinstrap looked South American, Argentina maybe.

  Their gazes collided for a moment, then the man’s eyes slid away from his. He carried a Smith & Wesson tucked behind his sash, the special-issue, two-and-a-half-pound revolver sold to the Czar’s government in Russia. Bill recognized the extra finger grip on the trigger guard.

  The man passed by, and Wild Bill kept a close eye on him. Too late, he realized that was his big mistake. The hardcase was only a diversion—by the time Hickok saw the second man lunge at him, it was too late to react.

  Wild Bill took a hard, straight punch right in the wind, and his knees started to buckle. Luckily his enemies hoped to avoid the sound of gunfire right out front of the courthouse. A knife blade flashed fire in the sun as the attacker made a vicious and deliberate swipe at the inside of Bill’s right elbow.

  Lightning reflexes let Bill pull his arm back just in time, so only his duster and coat sleeve were sliced open. Clearly the attacker was a blade expert—he was trying to sever the tendon inside the elbow. That was the quickest and easiest way to render an arm useless for life, since tendons could not knit or heal.

  “Hijo!” the attacker cursed when Wild Bill drilled two bullet holes into his heart, dropping him like a sack of grain. The man on the boardwalk whirled, making a stab for iron, but Hickok pivoted half-right on one heel and killed him with one clean shot to the brain.

  “Aww, damnit, Bill,” Gentleman John whined, his tone squeaky with disappointment. “You just put the kibosh on Rico Aragon and ’Braska Newcomb, my top hands. This child really is going to dance on air.”

  “Better you than me,” Bill remarked calmly. “It’s all right, Jude,” he called out. A whey-faced jailer clutching a shotgun had peeked outside to see what the racket was. “I just plugged two of Gentleman John’s associates. They won’t be needing a doctor, just the undertaker.”

  Bill’s first, reflexive action was to thumb reloads into his gun. Eyes still sweeping to all sides, he turned Haskins over to the jailer, then collected his mileage pay from the disburser upstairs. Any federal warrant paid a penny a mile to the arresting officer.

  Hickok collected a little over three dollars for Haskins—no Rockefeller fortune, he figured, but added on top of the four dollars a day Allan Pinkerton paid him, it was a nice little bonus. It meant he could play a little poker later, maybe even win enough to tell Pinkerton adios for a while.

  Right now, though, all he required was a hot bath, a thick steak, and a feather-stuffed mattress for his aching bones. Then he would make the return ride to San Antonio and that Judas-haired beauty who sang at the Lone Star Saloon.

  He descended the brick steps of the courthouse, gazing at his knife-shredded sleeve. A shudder moved down his spine as he realized how close that blade had come to giving him a dead arm.

  “Old son,” he muttered to himself, “that one was close, and they’re shaving closer every time. Pinkerton has got desk jobs, too. Maybe it’s time to ask for one.”

  “Confound the damn thing anyway!” Joshua Robinson swore out loud.

  Strong language for this son of Quakers, and the cause of it was a bulky new contraption that must have been invented in hell to drive mortals mad. Called a typewriter, it sat atop the writing desk before him.

  Allan Pinkerton had recently delivered it, in person, from his new branch office here in San Antonio. The famous detective had raved about the device, how it would transform world culture or some such truck.

  So far, though, Josh had spent most of his time untangling knotted ribbons and separating jammed keys.

  This newfangled contraption would never catch on, he told himself again. Not without plenty of changes. Why, it had nothing but capital letters! And no semicolon, nor even a numeral one!

  Someone rapped on the door of his hotel room, and Josh instantly welcomed any excuse to cut short his typing practice.

  “Open!” he called out.

  “Joshua, how fares it with the typing, laddie-buck?”

  A tall, slightly paunchy man wearing bushy burnsides and a smoke-gray wool suit strolled in, his manner brisk and businesslike. A Scottish brogue was evident in his trilled r’s and elongated vowels.

  “Mr. Pinkerton, how are you, sir? To be honest, this game is not worth the candle. Why, a fellow can’t even read what he’s typed unless he takes the paper out. And the letters are arranged alphabetically, but that’s just thickheaded. They should be set up so the most frequently used letters are right under your fingers or close to ’em. Sort of a home row, just like they’re arranged in a printer’s galley.”

  “A home row, eh?”

  Beaming, Pinkerton pulled a flip back pad and a stub of pencil from his pocket, making quick notes.

  “That’s the gait, Joshua! That’s why I brought you one. I know Chris Sholes, the inventor. It’s only been in production a few years now—it’s still being improved. Soon, it will be selling like buckwheat cakes.”

  Josh knew Pinkerton was a great enthusiast of things modern. The wily old Scotsman also tended to support new inventions with sizable investments, and thus he had become a master at a fairly new American creation some called “promotion,” others “hucksterism.”

  “If you came to see Wild Bill,” Josh added, “you won’t find him in his room. He rode up to the Concho River last week, looking for Gentleman John Haskins.”

  A sly look crossed Pinkerton’s face, and he closed the door with his heel.

  “You’re behind times. That job’s closed out,” Pinkerton informed him. “Jamie wired from Del Rio this morning. Haskins is locked down tight, and Jamie should be back in San Antonio in a few days.”

  “Jamie” was Hickok, whom he had known since before the war and had always refused to call Wild Bill.

  Josh’s eyes widened at the news. “Man alive! Is this an exclusive, Mr. Pinkerton?”

  The sly glint was back in the detective’s eyes. “Come now, lad. We’re fellow professionals, both of us free, white, and twenty-one. Call me Allan.”

  “Yessir, Mr.—uh, Allan. But I’m only twenty.”

  “No one’s counting
out west. Yes, it’s an exclusive.”

  Josh immediately stood up and, straining at the weight, put the typewriter back in its crate beside the desk. Haskins locked down! Jiminy! Not only the most notorious rustler in Longhorn country, but wanted for twelve killings and wartime desertion. He had been made even more notorious by consecutive write-ups in the nationally read Police Gazette.

  “There’s at least three other reporters camped in town these days,” Josh told the older man. “All trying to be first to get the latest ‘Wild West’ stories onto the wire. And Wild Bill stories are top of the line. So, thanks.”

  Pinkerton nodded. “Most journalists would kiss the devil’s ass for what I just gave you. But you stand out from the pack, Joshua. I, too, must thank you.”

  Pinkerton pulled a cushioned footrest close to Josh’s chair and sat down.

  “Son, does it not occur to you that I’ve come to see you, not your famous mentor? And I maun also be wonderin’—is Hickok the only famous chap currently residing here at the Cattleman’s Palace?”

  Josh shook his head. “You’re too far north for me, sir—uh, Allan.”

  “Why, I mean you, lad! Any civilized person in America knows the New York Herald is the greatest newspaper in the nation. But let’s not be falsely modest, Joshua. Its circulation has almost doubled since you became far-west correspondent.”

  Josh felt himself swell with pride. Well, wasn’t it all true? Never mind if the new ladies’ fashions section had something to do with it, too.

  “Now, don’t take me wrong,” Pinkerton assured him. “J. B. Hickok is truly an extraordinary man. Personally, I think only Daniel Boone, Jim Bridger, and Kit Carson will stand in American history as his equals at frontier survival. And no one is his equal at the quick draw, with the possible exception of Wes Hardin.”

  Pinkerton, a master at pulpit speech, paused to give his next point extra import.

  “But, Joshua, how does the entire world know what Hickok’s closest friends have learned from observation? I tell you, lad, it’s all because of two extraordinary writers: Ned Buntline, novelist, and Joshua Robinson, correspondent.”