A Good Day To Kill by Dusty Richards Read Free Book Online

sniffed her nose at him. He looked pretty sour at Chet, but that was his luck of the draw.
    The day’s heat was rising. Dust rode the wings of the hot breaths of air propelled off the greasewood desert, and the two teams of horses raced eastward for Bentsen under the whiney voice of the driver. No shotgun guard on top, so there must not be a thing valuable in the coach. After passing through the giant forest of saguaros, they rocked out into the chaparral country. With purple mountains on the left and right, rising like loaves of bread, the road headed east. Horse changes were precise and they rolled on to Bentsen. There they left the fat complaining woman, who was obviously going eastward.
    With their things placed on the next coach in late afternoon, they climbed on. Chet felt pretty drained as the shadows began to lengthen on the settlements along the San Pedro River.
    Jesus had bought them another wrapped meal and they ate it while rocking out for St. David, the next town on the route south. Later, they swept into Tombstone and then made the fifteen miles up to Huachuca City. It was near ten o’clock by the time they found rooms in the hotel and hired a taxi to take them to the fort hospital.
    It was cooler up in the canyon. In the moonlight, Chet could make out tall cottonwoods and a row of officers’ houses lined around a large parade field. The taxi man let them out at the hospital.
    â€œWait. We’ll need to go back,” he told the taxi man.
    â€œSure.”
    A guard stopped them.
    â€œI’m Marshal Chet Byrnes. I wanted to check on some of my men here.”
    â€œYes, sir. Talk to the officer in charge inside, sir.”
    â€œThank you.”
    The screen door creaked when Chet pulled it back. There, seated on nail kegs, were Roamer with his head bandaged, JD with an arm in a sling, and Cole, all of them playing cards with the officer in charge.
    â€œHellfire, the boss caught us,” Roamer said.
    The whole bunch laughed, folded up their cards, and the officer had some chairs brought in for him and Jesus.
    â€œA bunch of outlaws had begun raiding ranches down here,” Roamer said. “I had all hands out questioning folks about what they knew. We were thinking they came out of Mexico. They were vicious and moving fast. They cut a small boy’s ear off in one raid, for no reason but that they were simply damn mean. It pissed off every man in the outfit and that sumbitch is now dead. We made sure of that. They used this same route to go over the border several times. So we wanted to set up and ambush them, but it turned out like Skeleton Canyon did. They must have had us watched. We rode into a trap.”
    â€œAll hell broke loose,” JD said, shaking his bandaged head. “But they’d struck the wrong guys. We laid down some rifle fire and discovered that the only weapons most of them had were cap and ball pistols. We knew all about those guns from New Mexico. We spread out and they began to pull back. We were killing anyone who showed himself. Shawn was bringing us ammo from the packhorses. I’d look up and he’d be back with three boxes of cartridges and then be gone again for more. How he went back and forth unscathed, I’ll never know. But he let us shoot and we kept them pinned down and killed any of them tried to move. There was so much gun smoke in that canyon—you couldn’t breathe.”
    Cole went on, “After a couple of hours, their reserves arrived, but we were dug in and we shot several of them before they got most of the bodies out. They didn’t want to fight us. They’d grab a corpse and run like hell.”
    â€œWhy did they take the dead men?”
    â€œWe figured it was so we couldn’t trace them to the old man’s ranch.”
    â€œAre all of you recovering okay?”
    â€œHell, yes,” Roamer said. “The three brothers were only scratched, so they went home. But let me tell you, if we ever