Cutthroat Canyon. William W. Johnstone

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, well, just remember what I told you!” Hamlin turned back to Strittmayer. “Anybody else killed?”

      “Just poor Johnny there,” Strittmayer replied as he waved a hand at the fallen gambler. “Several people were wounded, and my beautiful saloon, ach! It is shot to pieces!”

      “Well, you can talk to Little Ed’s lawyer about the estate payin’ for the damages, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waitin’ for it if I was you,” Hamlin advised. He looked around the room and raised his voice. “This saloon’s closed for the night! Everybody out! Go home!”

      Davidson said to Bo and Scratch, “Do you fellas have a place to stay here in town?”

      Bo shook his head, and Scratch said, “Not yet. We’d just rode in and stabled our horses. This was the first place we stopped.”

      “Come on over to the Camino Real with me then,” Davidson suggested. “That’s where I’m staying. We’ll see about getting you some rooms and a good hot meal.”

      “You don’t have to do that,” Bo said.

      “I think I do. Churchill would have killed me, sure as hell, if not for you two.”

      Bo and Scratch couldn’t argue with that, so after saying good night to Strittmayer, who promised to see to it that Johnny Fontana got a proper burial, they headed for the Camino Real Hotel with Davidson.

      The Camino Real was El Paso’s best hotel, and its rooms didn’t come cheap. The fact that Davidson was staying there confirmed that he had plenty of money. As the three men walked along the street, he said, “We were never actually introduced. I’m Porter Davidson.”

      “Bo Creel,” Bo said as he gripped the hand that Davidson put out. “This fancy-dressed drink of water with me is Scratch Morton. But I reckon you already know that since we told our names to the marshal.”

      “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Davidson,” Scratch said as he shook hands with the man. “Too bad there had to be so much gunplay first.”

      “Yes, it ruined what had been a fairly pleasant evening. But maybe we can make something out of it yet.”

      Davidson spoke to the clerk at the desk in the hotel lobby, and maybe slipped him a greenback, too. Bo wasn’t sure about that. But either way, within minutes the clerk was sliding a pair of keys across the desk to them. Even though the clerk had said originally that the hotel was full up, at Davidson’s urging he had somehow found a couple of vacant rooms on the third floor.

      “Is the dining room still open?” Davidson asked.

      “I believe it’s just about to close,” the clerk said.

      “Would you go out to the kitchen and let the cook know that we’ll need two dinners? Whatever’s left will be fine, as long as it’s hot.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      As they went into the empty dining room and sat down at one of the tables, Scratch commented, “You seem to be the big skookum he-wolf around these parts, Mr. Davidson.”

      “Not really,” Davidson said with a laugh. “I guess it doesn’t take long for word to get around, though, when you own a gold mine.”

      Scratch lifted his eyebrows.

      Bo wasn’t particularly surprised, though. Davidson hadn’t struck him as a cattleman, and on the frontier a rich man who didn’t run cows was usually mixed up with either the railroad or mining.

      “I didn’t know there were