Stryker's Law (A Matt Stryker Western #1) by Chuck Tyrell

Author:Chuck Tyrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: western, cowboys, old west, range war, piccadilly publishing, western and frontier fiction
Publisher: Piccadilly Publishing

Chapter Seven

“Tom!” Stryker vaulted into the freight car.

“Ah. Ah. M-m-a-tt.” Tom Hall’s voice was hardly a whisper. His face was white and covered with a sheen of perspiration. He groaned, but didn’t move.

Stryker dug a clasp knife from his pocket, clawed it open, and cut Hall’s shirt and long johns away from the wound. A deformed bullet had torn a large hole in Hall’s chest. It bubbled and frothed with Hall’s shallow breathing. Stryker shrugged off his Mackinaw and ripped a sleeve from his flannel shirt. He folded the sleeve into a square, ripped off the other sleeve, cut it into strips, and tied the pad over Hall’s wound. “You lie still, old friend. We’ll get you out of this.” He rolled the Mackinaw into a pillow and placed it under Hall’s head. “Hang in there,” he said, and scrambled from the car.

“Fred! Fred!” Stryker ran down the tracks toward the engine.

The engineer poked his head around the cowcatcher. “What’s up, Marshal?”

“Those outlaws shot my partner. Get the steam up and back this train to Snowflake siding. There’s a doctor in Snowflake, right?”

“Doc Heywood.”

“Move it, man!”

The engineer and the fireman clambered into the engine’s cab. Stryker ran back to the freight car. Hall still breathed, but the breathing was very shallow. His eyes were closed. Stryker checked the gray. Dead. He went to Saif. The Arabian still trembled. “All right, all right,” Stryker said, soothing the stallion. He stroked the horse’s nose, then ran his hands over the black’s gleaming hide. He found one bullet burn across the top of Saif’s hips, but otherwise the horse was uninjured. Damn those Cahills. Killing a good horse like Tom Hall’s gray for no good reason. God but he hated people like that. The whistle blasted and the train clanked as the engine pushed the cars back against their couplings. Seven miles to Snowflake siding. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour. Stryker sat down by Tom Hall and leaned his back against the side of the car.

The siding west of Snowflake was little more than a pair of tracks set west of the main line. The switch to put the train onto the siding was about two hundred yards north of the ketch pens and loading chute. The ketch pens were skinned aspen poles, brought down the mountain from Ponderosa on the train. Off to the east a line of willows marked Silver Creek and the roof of Shumway’s mill showed red in the afternoon sun. In some parts of town, poplars were beginning to make themselves seen, and the sandstone walls of the new Snowflake Academy stood as yet with no rafters.

“Doc Heywood’s place is on past the Academy,” said Fred Baxter, GW&SF engineer. “You’ll know it. The only place in town that looks like a little castle.”

Stryker tightened Saif’s cinch and stepped aboard. “Be back shortly,” he said.

“We’ll water up while you’re gone,” Baxter said.

Stryker gigged Saif with his rowelless spurs and the Arabian was at a neck-stretched run in three steps.

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