Blaze! Night Riders

  BLAZE!

  NIGHT RIDERS

  Michael Newton

  Blaze! Night Riders by Michael Newton

  Text Copyright 2016 by Michael Newton

  Series Concept and Characters Copyright 2015 by Stephen Mertz

  Cover Design by Livia Reasoner

  A Rough Edges Press Book

  www.roughedgespress.com

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Chapter 1

  Zeno Voightlander—"Bad Eye" to friends and enemies alike, with precious few friends to his name—had been a hard man to track down. There was no mystery to that, since he had WANTED posters out in half a dozen states, all specifying that he could be brought in for a bounty whether he was breathing or had passed beyond the earthly pale. The truth be told, most lawmen would prefer him dead, which was a consequence of Voightlander committing seven murders on the record, plus at least three rapes and something like a dozen daylight robberies.

  Zeno was called "Bad Eye" because his left eye had a tendency to wander willy-nilly at the oddest times, as if it had an odd mind of its own somewhere inside the outlaw's long, rather misshapen head. One minute he'd be looking at you like a normal man, albeit with a strange, unsettling expression on his weathered face, and then the eye might roll back in his skull, showing blank, milky white, or shift off to one side and seem to focus on another portion of the room entirely. Anyone who thought it odd enough to laugh out loud was likely planted on Boot Hill.

  And that was Zeno's destination, too, once Kate and J.D. Blaze delivered him to someone with authority and cash to pay the price on Bad Eye's lumpy head.

  The nearest law was Yankton, seat of Yankton County, in Dakota Territory, one of six jurisdictions that had issued paper on the cockeyed gunman. Every sheriff in the territory would have his poster, either mounted on an office wall or tucked away somewhere, waiting for Voightlander to show his face or, better yet, come riding in facedown, tied on a horse.

  That was the way he traveled now, riding his own fleabitten gray, wrapped in the same serape he was wearing when he made his last mistake.

  J.D. and Kate had given him a chance, of course. They always did, no matter what the reputation of the outlaw they were dogging. Every man—or woman, come to that—had one chance to surrender, come along all nice and quiet like, and face whatever music waited for them in the nearest court of law. Sometimes they seized that opportunity, but most were too far out of line with normal thinking to give up without a fight.

  And when they faced the Blazes, man and wife—unique in all the West as married gunfighters and bounty hunters—none had so far managed to survive.

  "At least he didn't have a gang," Kate said, tired of the only sounds she heard being the clip-clop of their horses' hooves.

  "Too mean, from what they say," J.D. replied, shooting a quick glance toward their silent guest, relieved that they would be in Yankton soon, before he started going ripe. "Last known accomplice in a holdup, Zeno killed him so he wouldn't have to share."

  Kate smiled at that, an angel's face below her flat-brimmed hat, incongruous with the Colt six-gun on her hip. "And now," she said, "his cut's a clean hundred percent of nothing."

  She had done the killing this time, though they hadn't planned it in advance. Six days into their manhunt they'd discovered Bad Eye's camp and came up on him in the darkness, flanking him before they called for him to drop his guns and hoist his hands. Voightlander opted for a shootout, even though he couldn't see them in the night, beyond the pale ring of his firelight, and his Smith & Wesson Model 3 had barely cleared its holster when Kate drilled him through the heart.

  Call it the last of Zeno's bad decisions in the twenty-four years of his misspent life.

  Voightlander had been carrying three guns in total, plus two hundred dollars cash. That was an extra bounty, since they had no means of tracing it to any one of his prolific crimes, a bonus for the days they'd put in tracking him. J.D. had tried to figure out what that came to, in miles traveled, but long division hadn't been his strong suit, back in school, and he had given up when he got bored with it.

  They'd set an easy pace, J.D. riding his stallion, Kate aboard her gelding, while they kept the weather and decomposition of their silent passenger in mind. Another twelve or thirteen miles to Yankton ought to put them there by early afternoon, with money in their pockets shortly afterward.

  Assuming nothing else went wrong.

  * * *

  The thought of death was nothing new to Amos Hilliard. He had grown up with it on the plantation where he was born, in Mississippi, and had seen his daddy shot down for defying one of Master Cartwright's overseers when the scar-faced white man tried to have his way with Mama, right there in the cotton field, in broad daylight.

  At first, Amos had been too shocked and terrified to think. Later, he'd learned to hate—and then, against all odds, he'd learned to love again, when he had met Calliope. They'd caught the first big break in either of their lives when Union troops arrived to liberate them from the yoke of slavery, but what came next surprised them both. They had been free to leave the fields and bug-infested shacks that were the only world they knew—but where, then, should they go?

  The only answer that occurred to them was "North."

  Maps were a mystery to Amos, and the laws of Mississippi had forbidden teaching slaves to read or write, but he trusted his own sense of direction and they'd gotten help from other former slaves along the way, northbound. The distance from their so-called home in the Magnolia State to Dakota's southern plains was right around twelve hundred miles, but there was land waiting for them, and the protection of a Homestead Act signed by the President of the United States in 1862, which guaranteed one hundred sixty acres if they settled it and farmed the land for five years, minimum.

  Five years? They'd planned to stay forever in a place where they were free.

  Amos had never meant for them to die this way.

  His first mistake, he'd quickly figured out, was thinking white men changed somehow above the Mason-Dixon Line. In fact, along with unexpected kindness from a number of the folks they'd met along their northward trek, another kind of prejudice had followed Amos and Calliope across four states. The landscape changed, but white men's eyes too often looked at color first, instead of character, and it had been a shock to find how many southern refugees had pulled up stakes in Dixie during Reconstruction, carrying their mental baggage with them as they traveled north and west.

  Amos had found his land all right, and filed his deed. He'd built a cabin with Calliope's untiring help, and they'd begun to till the soil. Their first crop hadn't made them rich, but it was theirs, and Amos had great plans for doing better in their second year.

  Before the masked men came.

  Now here they were, after the threats and "accidents" around the farm that damaged critical equipment when they needed it the most. Sitting astride two horses and surrounded by a couple dozen men who meant to kill them, they had nearly reached what one of their abductors called the hanging tree.

  "You come a long way north for nothin'," one of their kidnappers jeered.

  "Sho' did," another echoed through his flour sack, with holes cut for his piggy eyes.

  "Shoulda stayed home an' kept on workin' for your massa," said a third.

  Amos saw no point in telling them that Master Cartwright hadn't lived to see the war's end, back in '65. His heart
had given out before the Yankees overran his little empire, taxed by fatty foods, moonshine, and losing two sons in the smoky hell of Gettysburg. As pampered white boys went, the Cartwrights hadn't been so bad, but Amos didn't mourn them when the news arrived that both of them were dead.

  Now he'd be joining them, and Amos wondered if the afterlife was segregated, and if he could find his sweet Calliope when they arrived.

  They reached the hanging tree while he was daydreaming of heaven, hot tears streaming down his cheeks and wishing that his hands weren't tied, that he could reach a gun and take a couple of the faceless bastards with him, anyway.

  "Awright," their leader called out, reining in. "Who's got the rope?"

  * * *

  "I hope they've got a nice hotel in Yankton," Kate remarked. "I'm tired of camping out."

  "The county seat and capital of the Dakota Territory," J.D. said. "It's bound to have something. I'll settle for a bed and a hot meal."

  "In that order?" she teased.

  "Unless I'm too worn out and saddle-sore."

  "You'd better not be, cowboy."

  "Giving orders now," he answered, not complaining. "Well, I'll see if I can rise to the occasion."

  "Do your best," Kate said, "or I might have to start without you."

  "Could be fun to watch, at that."

  He understood that marriage took the edge off things for some people and doused the fire that brought a couple close to start with, but that hadn't happened yet, with Kate, and J.D. seriously doubted that it ever would. She managed to surprise him frequently, in bed and out, which kept him on his toes and looking forward to each day they shared.

  Their trade was dangerous, of course—literally life and death, no telling when their golden days would come up short against a faster set of guns. It happened to the best and worst of shooters, but J.D. knew there was nothing to be gained from worrying, casting a needless shadow on the time they shared.

  Today, they were the winners. Bad Eye Voightlander had rolled the dice and crapped out for the last time, gone to his reward, whatever that might be. J.D., not being a religious man, had no idea if anything at all lay waiting on the other side of death, so he stayed focused on the living world and thanked his lucky stars each time he saw Kate's charming smile.

  "First thing after we drop this load," she said, "I think I need a bath."

  "I'll second that—for me, I mean," he added, hastily.

  "A nice, big tub," Kate said.

  "It doesn't have to be too big," J.D. put in. "I wouldn't mind the cozy kind."

  "All sudsy."

  "Hot and slippery." He felt himself responding to their back-and-forth, making him shift a little on his saddle for the sake of comfort.

  "From what I've heard, they have a famous steamboat landing. Lots of sailors shipping in and out on the Missouri River, if you're too worn out from traveling to help a girl."

  "I'll give you all the help you need, and then some. Just you wait."

  "I hope you live up to your promises."

  "When have I ever let you down, Darlin'?"

  "Always a first time, so they say."

  The land in front of them was rippled by a range of gently rolling hills, each one just tall enough to play a game of hide-and-seek with travelers who had their eyes peeled for whatever lay ahead. The next one J.D. crested made him stop dead with the view that lay in front of him.

  "What's wrong?" Kate asked him, riding up on his left side. Then she stopped, too, and muttered, "Oh. I see."

  Two hundred yards or so ahead, a group of hooded riders had a man and woman hemmed in near the base of a majestic oak tree, sixty feet or taller, standing on its own amidst the hills. Two ropes were dangling from one of the oak's stout lower limbs, just high enough to keep the victims swinging free and gasping out their final breaths once they were tied off by their necks and had their horses slapped away from under them.

  "Goddamn it!" J.D. groused.

  "I hear you," Kate said. "It's the last damn thing we need right now."

  "How do you want to play it?" he inquired.

  Drawing her Winchester out of its saddle boot, she answered back, "There's only one way I can think of."

  "Right," he said. "I hope Bad Eye won't mind."

  Chapter 2

  Amos Hilliard stiffened as one of his would-be killers slipped a noose around his neck and tightened it enough to make him gag a bit. He didn't worry about that, since he'd seen men strung up before on multiple occasions. When the rope sank home, they lost control of everything downstairs and fouled themselves, but puking wasn't part of it. Where would the vomit go?

  Hands tied behind him, there was nothing he could do but listen when the hangman roped Calliope. She couldn't help but sob—from grief, fear, whatever it was she felt—and it was breaking Hilliard's heart. It also made him furious, but any way he looked at it, the time for fighting had been back at home, before the lynchers broke his door down and disarmed him.

  Amos had been fooled into a feeling of security because the riders normally came out at night, sweeping across the plains with torches and the stench of rotgut liquor on their breath. There'd been some random shooting, plenty threats of course, and one barn burned so far, but no one had been killed.

  Just Hilliard's luck: he and Calliope would be the first to die.

  But not the last. He knew that much from grim experience with racist bullies, starting with his childhood in the Mississippi cotton patch and moving on from there, northward, where fabled streets of gold and people filled with tolerance were always one state farther up the road.

  Wherever ex-slaves tried to settle down and build a life, they ran into the same wall of resistance from white "natives"—who, of course, had come from somewhere else, killed off the real natives, and stolen every square acre of land they once possessed.

  Sweet land of liberty, my ass, he thought, and would have spit into the dust if he could turn his head that far, and if his mouth wasn't so dry from fear.

  They only had a few more seconds now. That much was clear, and Amos wondered if he ought to count his blessings while he had the chance. He'd lived to get a taste of freedom, had been privileged to find Calliope, and now would meet a relatively clean and painless death, although it came for him too soon.

  Some other things that he was thankful for: the bastards who were killing him had come by daylight, relatively sober and with jobs awaiting some of them when they were finished here, which kept them from developing ideas about raping Calliope. Amos had seen it happen, starting with the tragedy that took his father's life, and he had also seen men roasted by white lynchers while they screamed and begged for someone in the crowd to finish it.

  So, not a good day, hell no, but it still could have been worse.

  And once they'd finished dying...then what?

  Amos realized he didn't have a clue. The white man's Bible said one thing—or more than one, depending on which part of it you read on any given day—and back in Africa, from what his parents handed down by word of mouth, the stories had been altogether different.

  Was anything at all waiting beyond the veil of death?

  As if reading his thoughts, the hangman snarled at Amos, "Do you wanna pray, nigger?"

  Amos thought about it for a second, stretching out his final breaths, then said, "I reckon not."

  "Awright, then. Suit yourself."

  The masked man was about to slap the rump of Hilliard's horse, when someone interrupted him to ask, "The hell is that?"

  * * *

  J.D. and Kate rode closer to the lynching mob, both of their rifles cocked, stocks braced against their thighs, the muzzles pointed toward a sky with scattered clouds adrift. They brought Bad Eye Voightlander with them, draped across his saddle, as a token that they should be taken seriously by the men who hid their faces inside flour sacks.

  "This could go bad in nothing flat," Kate said.

  "You got that right."

  "Still time to turn around and ride awa
y."

  "Think you could live with that?" he asked.

  "I doubt it."

  "Right. Besides, they'd have to figure that we're witnesses and try to run us down."

  "Best get it done, then."

  "One way or another," he allowed.

  "I count eleven of them. How should we divide them up?"

  "You never know. They might be sensible and head for home."

  Kate nearly scoffed at that. "They're wearing sacks over their heads, J.D."

  "I see your point. Not big on brains, then."

  "I was thinking more about their nerves. Planning to hang a man and woman, but afraid to let the targets see their faces."

  "Maybe just a touch of shame?"

  "Or yellow to the bone. With any luck, they won't have sand enough to make a play."

  "But on the other hand..."

  "We'd still be witnesses. I know."

  "First twitch, we go for broke. Agreed?"

  "I don't know any other way to play the game."

  By now they'd halved the distance from their first view of the mounted mob, and many of the flour sacks had turned to face them, sunlight glinting on the beady eyes behind the holes someone had cut for visibility. Slowing his stallion somewhere in the range of eighty yards or so, J.D. heard one of them call out, "The hell do you want?"

  "Passing through," he answered back. "Delivering a stiff to Yankton's sheriff for the bounty."

  "What's that got to do with us?" the same voice asked.

  "Not one damned thing," J.D. replied. "But you were kind of hard to miss."

  "Truth is," Kate said, "you're in our way."

  "Is that a fact?" the hooded mouthpiece challenged.

  "Yep," she said. "And Bad Eye, here, is going to start smelling pretty soon."

  The name appeared to have an impact. Someone else among the lynchers asked, "That's Bad Eye Voightlander?"

  "The very same," J.D. answered.

  "Why didn't you just ride around?" the seeming leader of the outfit asked.

  "See, that's a problem," Kate replied. "We thought about it, then I told my hubby that a pack of cowards who would put on hoods to hang a woman just might shoot us in the back. Who knows, you might do anything."