The Night Riders by Matt Laidlaw

Author:Matt Laidlaw [Laidlaw, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In the cell across the passageway, the man called Wilson was lying on his back on the cot, smoking a cigarette. His eyes were closed. Occasionally the cigarette trembled in his fingers.

Watching him, Jim Gatlin reckoned – hoped – he was more than half asleep.

‘So,’ Charlie Pine said, ‘are you going to tell me what happened last night?’

He was in Gatlin’s cell, sitting cross-legged on the end of the cot, his injured hand in his lap. He’d just been telling Gatlin how, after breakfast, he’d been watching from the window of room three in the Cedar Creek hotel as Wilson entered the jail. The man had not come out again. Interested, keen to talk to Gatlin, Pine had strolled across the street. Marshal Jax Silva had agreed to a ten-minute visit, opened Gatlin’s cell and grinned like a cat who’s got the cream as he locked the two men in.

Now, swiftly and in a quiet voice, Gatlin related the events in the saloon’s back room. He told the Pinkerton man about Green bursting in through the back door, how the gunslinger had downed Josh Notion with a vicious blow from his six-gun, about his own necessary but pleasurable restraining of the buxom Kitty Mac followed by his arrest and subsequent talk with Silva before the marshal locked him in the cell for the night.

‘Silva told me you’d been doing some eavesdropping for him over at the hotel,’ he finished. ‘And that what you heard sort of backed up my story.’

‘That’s right,’ Pine said. ‘Seems the feller sharing a cell with Wilson was in on that train robbery. Knows all about Hood. I passed on the information to Silva in the saloon before he barged through to arrest you.’

‘Damn!’ Gatlin swore softly, cursing what screamed of a missed opportunity. ‘That cattle rustler was there in the pen, as close to me as Wilson is now, all I had to do was talk to him. . . .’

Pine glanced across the passage as Wilson stirred, settled. He leaned forward to look toward the door leading to the front office. It was still closed. Then he spoke to Gatlin in a conspiratorial murmur.

‘Too late for cryin’ over what might have been,’ he said. ‘What we’ve got to set our minds to now is gettin’ you out of here.’

‘Silva won’t agree to that. He’s paid to look after Hood, and he’s already halfway to getting this bit of bother sorted out. He’s got me; he’s got Wilson. My guess is he’ll keep us locked up while he goes after the other two.’

‘Giving him a hand of four aces to show Hood.’ Pine grimaced. ‘I don’t think it’s as easy as you make out. Far as I know the only help Silva’s got comes from an old-timer, Ned Riley.’

‘Then he’ll walk out in the street, swear in the first two men he sees.’

Pine shook his head. ‘Something tells me he won’t do that. The man thinks a heap of himself. He’ll want to go it alone, come out of it the shiny hero on the big white horse.

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