the same table where Bo and Scratch had taken cover. He pulled his gun from the shoulder holster Bo had seen earlier and started firing toward the street. He glanced over at Bo and Scratch and said, “I knew Churchill was a little loco, but I didn’t think he was crazy enough to come back and lay siege to the place.”
From behind the bar, Strittmayer called, “Everyone stay down, ja?” The next moment, several shotguns poked over the bar. Each of the weapons let go with a double load of buckshot. That barrage blew out what little glass remained in the windows and ripped into the cowboys in the street. Men and horses went down, screaming in pain.
Anger flooded through Bo. Not only was Churchill trying to kill everybody in the saloon, but now he had led some of his own men to their deaths, all because Churchill was a stubborn, prideful bastard who couldn’t admit that he wasn’t a very good poker player. What a damned waste, Bo thought.
He could only hope that some of that buckshot had found Churchill as well, so that maybe this fight could come to an end.
That didn’t prove to be the case. With an incoherent, furious shout, the rancher leaped his horse onto the boardwalk and then viciously spurred the animal on into the saloon. The horse was terrified, anybody could see that, but Churchill forced the wild-eyed beast on. Men rolled and jumped desperately to avoid the slashing, steel-shod hooves.
Three-Toed Johnny leaped up from somewhere and shouted, “Stop it! For God’s sake, stop it!” He had a derringer in his hand that Bo knew had come from a concealed sheath up the gambler’s sleeve. Johnny swung it up toward Churchill, but the cattleman was faster. He had a six-gun in his right hand, and as he brought it down with a chopping motion, powder smoke geysered from the muzzle. The slug punched into Johnny’s body and threw him backward.
Bo and Scratch fired at the same time, but Churchill was already jerking his horse around. Their bullets whistled harmlessly past his head. Churchill sent his horse crashing into the overturned table. Bo and Scratch threw themselves to the side to get out of the way, but the table rammed into Davidson and knocked him down. His gun flew out of his hand.
“Now I’ll get you, you damned four-flusher!” Churchill yelled as he brought his revolver to bear on the helpless Davidson, who lay sprawled on the floor under the rearing horse.
Bo and Scratch fired again, and this time they didn’t miss. Their bullets tore through Churchill’s body on an upward-angling path, causing him to lean so far back that he toppled out of the saddle. Suddenly riderless, the panic-stricken horse whirled around a couple of times, and then leaped out through the one of the already broken front windows.
The shooting from outside had stopped. Churchill’s men were all either dead or had lit a shuck out of El Paso. The survivors probably wouldn’t stop at Churchill’s ranch either. After this brutal attack on the saloon, the men who had lived through it would take off for the tall and uncut and keep going, so that the law would be less likely to catch up to them. With Churchill dead, his wealth and influence couldn’t protect them anymore.
A pale and visibly shaken August Strittmayer emerged from behind the bar clutching a reloaded shotgun. “They are all gone, ja?” he asked.
“Looks like it,” Bo replied. He heard a lot of shouting from outside. The city marshal and some of his deputies were coming toward the Birdcage on the run, he assumed. The sounds of a small-scale war breaking out had been enough to attract the law.
Bo didn’t pay any attention to that at the moment, but hurried to the side of Three-Toed Johnny instead. As Bo dropped to a knee, the gambler’s eyelids fluttered open. His vest was soaked with blood over the place where Churchill’s bullet had ventilated him.
“I think I’m…shot, Bo,” Johnny gasped out as his eyes tried futilely to focus.
“I’m afraid so, Johnny,” Bo agreed.
“Pretty…bad…huh?”
“Bad enough.”
“Well…hell…we all draw…a bad hand…sooner or later.” Johnny’s head rolled from side to side. His eyes still wouldn’t lock in on anything. “Ch-Churchill?”
Scratch had knelt on the gambler’s other side. “Dead as he can be, pard,” Scratch said.
“Good…At least I’m…not the only one…to fold—”
His eyes widened and grew still at last, and the air came out of him in a rattling sigh. Bo waited a moment, then shook his head and reached out to close those staring eyes as they began to grow glassy.
Strittmayer said in a hollow voice, “I never thought…I never dreamed that…that Churchill would…would do such a verdammt thing! To come back with his men and open fire on innocent people! The man was insane!”
Bo and Scratch got to their feet and started reloading their guns. “I don’t reckon he was loco,” Scratch said. “Just poison-mean and too used to gettin’ his own way.”
That was when several men with shotguns slapped the batwings aside and rushed into the saloon, leveling the Greeners at the two drifters as a gent with a soup-strainer mustache yelled, “Drop them guns, you ring-tailed hellions!”
CHAPTER 3
The man with the mustache turned out to be Jake Hamlin, the local marshal. The other shotgunners were his deputies, of course. They had seen half a dozen cowboys and a couple of horses shot to pieces in the street and had no idea what had prompted this bloody massacre, but the busted windows of the Birdcage told them that the fatal shots must have come from inside the saloon. So they had charged in and thrown down on the first two gun-toting gents they had spotted, in this case Bo and Scratch.
It took a good half hour for Strittmayer, Davidson, and the other witnesses in the saloon to convince the lawman that Little Ed Churchill had been responsible for the hell that had broken loose. Churchill had been an important man in West Texas, and now he lay dead on the sawdust-littered floor of the saloon. To Jake Hamlin’s mind, that meant somebody was guilty of murder, and who better for that role than a couple of no-account drifters?
“Creel and Morton, eh?” the marshal mused when he found out their names. “I think I got paper on you two back in my office.”
“We’re not wanted in Texas,” Bo said.
“And any reward dodgers you got on us from other places, well, those charges are bogus,” Scratch added. “We’re law-abidin’ hombres.”
“If you put those two fellows in jail, you will be the laughingstock of El Paso, Marshal!” Strittmayer bellowed. “I will see to this myself. Why, for Gott’s sake, they saved the life of Herr Davidson here!”
Hamlin frowned. “What the hell’d you say? Here, here?”
“No, Herr here!” Strittmayer said, pointing at Davidson.
Hamlin snarled and sputtered and finally said, “Oh, shut up and lemme think!” After a few moments of visibly painful concentration, he turned to Bo and Scratch and went on. “All right, I reckon you two acted in self-defense. But there’ll have to be an inquest to make it official, so don’t even think about slopin’ outta town until then.”
“We were planning to be here for a day or two anyway,” Bo said.
“Yeah,
