behind him, and he heard the hoofbeats as well as he stepped onto the roof. “Sounds like a big bunch.”
“Yeah,” Matt agreed. He trotted over to the front of the building, looked down, and saw Sheriff Flagg in the street. Cupping his free hand next to his mouth, Matt called, “Better get inside, Sheriff! Here they come!”
Flagg waved his Winchester in acknowledgment of the warning and hurried toward the sheriff’s office. Matt and Sam stood at the edge of the roof, peering northward into the darkness.
“You see ’em?” Matt asked after a moment.
“Not yet,” Sam replied, “but they’re coming. The hoofbeats are louder now.”
Matt looked down again. The street was pretty much clear now, the townspeople having scattered to hunt cover. He worked the Winchester’s lever, jacking a cartridge into the rifle’s firing chamber.
“Let ’em come,” he said.
Chapter 8
Matt and Sam moved to the corners of the hotel fronting the street and knelt behind the little wall. It wouldn’t provide much cover, but it was better than nothing.
The hoofbeats still sounded like thunder, but now it was as if the storm was about to roll into the town. Torches suddenly flared to life in the hands of some of the approaching riders, and from the intensity of the flames, Matt and Sam knew that the torches had been soaked in pitch.
“Drop those men with the torches!” Matt called to Sam. “They’re gonna try to set the town on fire!”
As the outlaws reached the end of Main Street and began to sweep into the settlement, the blood brothers opened fire, concentrating their shots on the men wielding the torches. With each crack of a Winchester, one after another of Shade’s men fell, dropping the torches to be snuffed out in the dust of the road.
The raiders returned the fire, sending a hail of lead from their six-guns at the hotel roof. Matt and Sam were forced to duck as the bullets chewed at the wall.
Then the outlaws raced on past the hotel as more gunfire began to erupt up and down the street. The town’s defenders were shooting from the cover of the buildings, but they didn’t seem to be doing much damage, Matt saw as he poked his head up again.
A bare-headed man in a long black coat whirled his horse and galloped back to the spot where one of the torches had fallen. It was still burning, and scarcely slackening his mount’s speed, the man bent down from the saddle, reached out with a long arm, and snatched the torch from the ground. He whirled it over his head and threw it at the window of a hardware store as he dashed past. The window shattered under the impact, and the torch landed inside.
Matt bit back a curse as he looked through the broken window and saw flames leaping up. He snapped a shot at the man who had thrown the torch, thinking that he might be Joshua Shade. Whether that was true or not, Matt’s bullet missed as the man jerked his horse around and headed down the street again.
The outlaws fought with the precision of a well-trained military unit, some of them staying together and sending volleys of lead ripping into the buildings they passed. Others split off from the main group.
Matt saw one man leap his horse onto the porch in front of a saloon; then the outlaw rode on through the batwings into the saloon, flames spewing from the muzzles of the guns in his hands as he charged in. That scene was repeated in several places up and down the street as the battle began spreading through the town.
Two of the riders headed for the hotel. Sam killed one of them with a shot that drove him backward out of the saddle, but the other man reached the porch with his horse. Both of the blood brothers heard the rending crash as the horse slammed through the doors, followed a second later by the boom of the hotel keeper’s shotgun, interspersed with the flatter reports of a revolver.
The six-gun kept blasting, but the shotgun was silent after the first charge went off. Matt and Sam knew that couldn’t be good.
“Damn it, the way they spread out we can’t do enough from up here!” Matt called. “We need to be down there!”
“I’ll get the ladder!” Sam said.
“No time for that!”
Holding the Winchester slanted across his chest, Matt stepped up onto the wall and leaped down onto the roof that extended out over the hotel porch. The roof had a little slope to it, so he slid down it to the edge and then rolled over it, catching hold with one hand to break his fall.
He hung there for a second, one hand holding him up while the other lifted the rifle and triggered it at an outlaw galloping past. The owlhoot’s bullet burned along the arm Matt was using to hang on to the porch, and forced him to let go so that he dropped the last couple of feet to the ground.
Matt’s slug, though, punched into the raider’s body, bored through a lung, and burst out the other side in a spray of blood. The man went spinning out of the saddle and slammed to the ground, bouncing once before he lay still in death.
Matt had gone to one knee when he landed. He stayed there and socketed the Winchester against his shoulder. It cracked again and again until the hammer clicked. The rifle was empty.
Surging to his feet, Matt grabbed the Winchester’s heated barrel with both hands and swung the weapon like a club as he leaped toward one of the mounted raiders. The man didn’t see him coming in time to get out of the way, and the rifle’s stock shattered under the impact of the blow—along with the varmint’s skull.
Matt tossed the broken rifle aside and palmed out both Colts. He had both of them smoking as he zigzagged across the street. Behind him, the outlaw who had ridden into the hotel lobby emerged on horseback through the broken doorway and swung his pistol toward Matt’s back.
Before the gun could erupt, another shot rang out. The desperado’s hat flew off his head as a slug from Sam’s .45 cored through his brain and exploded out the other side in a fist-sized exit wound. He toppled out of the saddle and sprawled limply on the hotel porch. His spooked horse leaped into the street and went sun-fishing off.
Sam had followed Matt’s lead and was hanging from the end of the porch roof, the smoking six-gun still in his other hand. He dropped the rest of the way and ran past the man he had just killed into the lobby.
The hotel man was slumped against the front of the desk, blood staining his white suit and turning it sodden. He had been shot at least three or four times. He lifted pained eyes to Sam; then his head fell forward as he died.
There was nothing Sam could do for the man now, so he wheeled around and charged back out into the street. Matt was across the street in front of the hardware store, which was still burning inside. When both Colts were empty, Matt jammed them back in their holsters and kicked the store’s door open. He ran inside and began looking for something he could use to beat out the flames before they got too big.
Sam crouched on the hotel porch and fired at the raiders as they galloped past until his revolver was empty. Then, instead of reloading, he ran into the hotel again and grabbed the shotgun the proprietor had dropped. A number of shells were still lined up on the counter. The hotelman hadn’t gotten a chance to use them.
Sam snatched the shells and stuffed them into the pocket of his buckskin shirt. He broke open the Greener, saw that only one barrel had been fired, and pulled out that shell to replace it with a fresh one.
Then, even though the man could no longer hear him, he told the proprietor, “I’ll try to put these to good use, sir,” and ran out of the hotel.
Bloody chaos had ensued, filling the town. A score of gunfights were going on, scattered from one end of the street to the other. Only one building seemed to be on fire so far, which was a blessing, but the blaze could still spread.
Sam felt the heat of a bullet against his cheek, and swung around to see who had fired it, lifting the shotgun as he did so. One of the outlaws was almost on top of him, about to trample him under the hooves of a charging horse.