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  The Cullanes owned San Jaime — body and soul. They always had. In San Jaime what the Cullanes said was law, and God help the man who crossed them. So when the capable-looking drifter rode into town and tossed the rulebook out of the window, most of the townspeople ran for cover. But this time Cullane men died and San Jaime was no longer in bondage. How long this freedom would last was another question - for up in the mountains Old Man Cullane bellowed his order at his cutthroat crew . . . Bring him in . . . Bring me Sudden - dead or alive!

  SUDDEN – DEAD OR ALIVE

  SUDDEN 4

  First published in the U.K. in 1970 by Corgi Books

  Copyright © 1970, 2014 by Frederick H. Christian

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: January 2014

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  For Billy and Pierre — than whom there are no finer.

  Chapter One

  ‘I’m warnin’ yu, Marshal - I ain’t goin’ in no jail!’ The words were hissed rather than spoken, and indeed, the malevolent gaze of the man who uttered them was as beady and fixed as that of a desert sidewinder. He crouched by the long wooden bar in the saloon, his hand spread like the talons of some evil bird of prey above the butt of a Colt’s Frontier model nestling in a split back holster tied low on his right thigh. But if the eyes were those of a snake, the rest of the face was more like that of a rodent. Thin, narrow at the temples and narrower at the jaw, teeth protruding and misshapen, an aquiline nose drooping pronouncedly over thin lips now pressed into a bloodless line, the whole appearance was that of a cornered, vicious animal. An animal which, cornered, would be more dangerous than most because it would always fight treacherously, and without scruple.

  ‘Yo’re goin’! Or yo’re handin’ over that hawgleg now!’ Facing the rat-faced one, the second speaker looked almost boyish, although few of those watching in frozen immobility were misled by Mike Hyde’s fresh-faced appearance. He was a veteran, a young lawman who had won his spurs in a tough game, perhaps the toughest - town taming. Hyde had seen more than his share of assassination and mayhem. He was still around; which was proof he was able.

  ‘Yu want my gun - yu better come an’ take it!’ spat the thin one, still standing crouched and tense, his fingers curled above the gun. If he knew of Hyde’s reputation he showed no awe of it, and his next words revealed the reason for his assuredness. ‘No man takes the gun of a Cullane without an argument!’

  There was a swift collective indrawn breath as the watchers in the saloon heard this announcement of the rat-faced one’s identity. Few men in the Territory had not heard of the Cullanes - that ugly renegade brood and their plundering raids from the legendary stronghold in the San Geronimo Mountains across the river.

  ‘So that’s one of the Cullanes,’ whispered an onlooker to his neighbor. ‘Mighty ugly-lookin’ critter, if yu ast me.’

  ‘I never ast, but yo’re right,’ breathed the listener. ‘Last time I seen a mouth like that, it had a hook in it.’ Their gallows humor was of no help or consolation to the young town Marshal, who stood facing the snarling badman, some discomfiture showing in his face and stance. Those watching well knew the cause of it. If Hyde allowed any man, Cullane or not, to flout his ordinance against the wearing of guns in town, then Fronteras would be wide open again within twenty-four hours. Equally, if he pushed the confrontation to its ultimate conclusion, he would bring down the full wrath of the Cullanes upon the town. Hyde’s face twisted with indecision, and he looked around quickly, edgily, as though seeking support or confirmation of his action from someone, anyone, in the crowd. Nobody moved. Fronteras was a tough town, with an all-male population. It lay deep in the south of the Territory, many days’ ride away from the nearest Federal law. Every man in it skinned his own cats his own way. The town paid Hyde to take his chances.

  ‘I’d say yore Marshal’s got hisself a tiger by the tail,’ observed a drummer at a table near the window, his legs tensed ready for the dive to the floor if shooting began. His voice trembled a little, and he tried to force a smile to cover it, but the smile wouldn’t fit his face. ‘In trouble if he lets go, an’ in trouble if he hangs on,’ he mumbled to nobody in particular. In truth, nobody would have taken any notice of a passing stranger anyway: every eye in the place was riveted upon the two figures facing each other by the bar. Hyde’s lips had firmed to a decisive line. He had made his decision, and he laid it down, flat and hard and challenging.

  ‘It’s no go, Cullane, or whatever yore moniker is. Check yore gun like everyone else, or yo’re headin’ for the hoosegow.’

  ‘Goddamn yu, yu tin-star —’

  As he mouthed the unforgivable oath, Cullane’s hand flickered towards the neat-butted Colt’s in the split back holster. This was a man well used to the gun, and sure of his ability to outdraw any hick town Marshal trying to run a bluff, and he died with the contempt written on his face.

  For Hyde was fast; very fast, as good as some of the best. His gun roared once, twice, a split second after Cullane had made his move. Hyde’s first bullet took the rat-faced Cullane squarely in the center of the chest, while the second blasted a neat hole between the baleful eyes. Cullane was as dead as mutton even as his body was smashed backwards by the impact of the heavy slugs, battered into the rough adobe wall of the saloon, and slid lifeless to the dirt floor. A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of the dead man’s twisted mouth as Hyde stepped forward, gun cocked and ready.

  ‘Anyone else?’ he snapped. There was a light in his eye, the cold, empty light of animal ferocity that said he would kill anything which moved at that moment.

  ‘No need o’ that, Marshal,’ someone muttered. ‘He’s as dead as Moses.’

  Hyde blinked once, twice. Then his chest rose and fell, and the empty glare left his eyes. He holstered his gun and knelt beside the fallen figure. He placed his fingers on the side of Cullane’s neck for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Yo’re right,’ he said. ‘Damned fool. Why couldn’t he just check his gun?’

  He stood up, his shoulders slumped; the reaction to the previous moments strong upon him. Roughly - perhaps more roughly than he intended - he shouldered his way through the crowd, past those eager now to touch him, to shake his hand, congratulate him, buy him a drink, be his friend. Brusquely telling two of them to get the dead man across to Doc Ziegler’s office, he turned to the bartender, who stood as imperturbable as a lizard behind the rough wooden bar.

  ‘Eddie, gimme a drink. Make it a double.’

  ‘Got her ready for yu afore the shootin’ started, Mike,’ the huge barkeeper told him. ‘Knowed yu’d need her — after.’ He was a tall, heavily built man with a big handlebar moustache. His face glowed with perspiration in the light of the flaring kerosene lamps. Hyde grinned at him, but there was little humor in the smile.

  ‘Nice to know someone around here has some faith in me,’ he said, acidly. ‘Help was some conspicuous by its absence a minnit or two back.’

  ‘Shucks, son, yu got no call to blame folks for not backin’ yore play,’ Big Eddie remonstrated. That’s what they done hired yu for.’

  ‘I know it,’ the Marshal shrugged. ‘Allasame, I’d’ve been pleased at some kind o’ support, even if it
was on’y moral.’

  ‘Moral support?’ chuckled Big Eddie, ‘In Fronteras? Mike, yo’re old enough to know better.’

  ‘Hell, yes …but seein’—’

  ‘ Seein’ who it was, yu mean?’ Big Eddie’s booming voice came down to a dull rumble ‘Son, blowin’ out the light o’ one o’ the Cullanes ain’t any way to make yoreself popular. Askin’ folks to back yu with some half-baked drunk is one thing. Takin’ on the Cullanes is somethin’ else again.’

  ‘ That’s what I’m thinkin’ about,’ Hyde told him. ‘It ain’t me I’m worryin’ about. It’s the town. I ain’t keen on the idea of that gang o’ renegades takin’ a spite out on the town for what I done.’

  ‘Can’t imagine it,’ Big Eddie told the Marshal, consolingly. ‘Anyways, I was yu I’d spend some time worryin’ about my own skin.’

  ‘Yu reckon they’ll take it like it was: fair an’ square?’

  ‘Mebbe, but I misdoubt her,’ Big Eddie said with a sigh. ‘All I ever heard about Old Man Cullane tells me he ain’t one for carin’ much whether anythin’ was fair or square or otherwise. In his book they’s on’y one way to do things - his way.’

  ‘What are yu tellin’ me - I ought to hightail it out o’ here?’ asked the Marshal.

  ‘Might be sensible, kid,’ Big Eddie boomed. ‘Not heroic, mebbe. But sensible.’

  ‘Hell, Eddie, if I was to scratch dirt I’d never get a job anywhere in the West, an’ yu know it.’

  ‘As a Marshal, probably not,’ Big Eddie agreed, pursing his lips. ‘But I ain’t shore I’d ruther be a dead Marshal than a live bookkeeper somewheres else.’

  ‘Quit yore joshin’, man,’ Hyde told him. ‘I’m talkin’ about law an’ order. If I was to run from the Cullanes, Fronteras would be back to bein’ a Hell town faster’n yu could say Satan.’

  ‘Boy, I’d take on Satan hands tied an’ hornswoggled afore I’d recommend anyone to take on the Cullanes. They’re pizen mean. They don’t know nothin’ about good or bad or right an’ wrong. Anyone takes a gun to one of ’em takes a gun to ’em all. Yo’re talkin’ like a dime novel - no offence, boy, but yu are. Fightin’ square with a critter like Old Man Cullane’d be like askin’ Old Nick for his word as a gentleman.’

  Young Marshal Hyde’s mouth set stubbornly and he shook his head.

  ‘Nope, Eddie, yo’re wrong! I’m bankin’ on this town backin’ my judgment. I killed that feller in self-defense, and this town knows it. Yu may be right about the Cullanes, but this is my town, an’ I’m stayin’.’

  He set his Stetson more firmly on his head and pushed out of the crowded bar into the street. The batwing doors swung to and fro behind him for a moment, and Big Eddie watched them with a rueful expression on his normally imperturbable face. Then with an impatient shake of his head, he moved down the bar to serve two noisy citizens who were telling each other what they would have done to Cullane if he had killed Mike Hyde.

  Fronteras was a very small town; ‘a mite on the one of these days’ side, they said, meaning one of these days it would grow, one of these days they would get around to building sidewalks, one of these days they would do something about the unlovely piles of refuse rotting in the desert sun behind the equally unlovely frame buildings which cluttered the flat prairie on which the town stood. Along a street wide enough to turn a wagon and team of oxen without backing and filling, a street hock deep in summer with the ubiquitous gypsum dust of the Southwest, and as deep in mud when it rained, sprawled perhaps a dozen buildings. Big Eddie’s saloon was the biggest; standing at the northern end of the street, it dominated the place. There was a rundown hotel of sorts where the miners from the local copper mines came in to spend their hard-earned wages on a shave, a haircut, a room and a bottle of raw whiskey. There was a stable, a cramped general store whose merchandize was as coated with the desert dust as the customers who purchased it, a large frame shack with lean-to which housed the Marshal’s office, jail, and sleeping quarters, and about twenty other houses - some not much more than roofed-over dugouts, temporary lodgings for the drifters, the small-time outlaws on the dodge, on their way to Mexico, slipping back in to the United States across the Rio Grande, accommodation for rustlers spending their thieves’ pay, robbers changing stolen money into Mexican pesos, cowboys moving across Arizona towards Texas and the jobs on trail herds going north along the Chisholm Trail. An unlovely town, good for nothing except passing through on the way to somewhere else, Fronteras had been a border Hell until Big Eddie and one or two of the town’s permanent citizens had called a halt, and employed themselves a Marshal to quieten the town down a little. Not too much; a town like Fronteras had to be pretty open, and not ask too many questions. But not a Hell town. All that happened to that kind of town was that eventually somebody heard about it and sent in the real Law. Nobody wanted that. So Fronteras was kept in line. Just enough. It would never grow. It would remain forever just what it was: a dirty little town at the end of nowhere, known by those who used it, unloved and unremembered. No woman had ever lived in Fronteras.

  At dawn, no light showed at any window and the grey half-light softened the ugly crudity of the boxlike shacks along the street. Somewhere a coyote raised a last howl at the fading night, but nothing else stirred. Slowly, infinitesimally, the rising sun touched the rim of the Sierras with orange and black, deepening the shadows at the base of the mesas across the plain into purple pools. At the southern end of the street a band of riders came into view. Slowly, moving carefully and warily, they sifted into the street, silent on hoofs muffled with gunnysacks, bits and bridles wrapped in burlap, all in dark clothing. One, two, four, eight, fifteen, seventeen of them, spreading themselves into a single file, moving quietly, ominously up the street. With never a word spoken or a sound made they took up positions along the deserted street and the first faint rays of the sun glinted on highlighted metal, touching unscabbarded Winchesters and the oiled barrels of .45s. Pale light touched the faces of the silent men, but still no one spoke; there was no sound except the scraping of a match, harsh in the stillness, followed by the puffing flare, the glow of light as a crude torch was ignited. Then another and another and another were lit from that, and passed on, until each man held in his hand one or two flaming brands.

  The tallest of the men, and obviously their leader, kneed his horse into the middle of the street, turned and looped the torch up and over his head, then down, then up again, the movement both a signal and a completion of his intent, for the torch arched up high and down on to the warped roof of the saloon. It bounced and slid, clattering loudly in the still dawn, then caught on some projection and lodged there, feeding itself upon the tinder-dry timber and tarpaper of the roof and the false front, probing with careful fingers of flame into the uprights and pillars of the frame building. And even as it landed, the torches of all the others looped up into the morning sky and down. On the house of the town’s elderly doctor, on the roof of the livery stable, the little dusty store where mice ran blindly from the unexpected noise, upon the wooden-framed houses, and the Marshal’s office — every building which would burn was set to the torch as the men in the street went about their deadly work with smooth, rehearsed precision. An encouraging morning breeze, cool and laden with the tang of sagebrush, found the flames and fanned them, nursed them and brought them to full and bursting life as the riders grouped now together in the middle of the street, ranged in a rough square, rifles canted at their hips, eyes squinting into the leaping flames which towered now ten feet above the buildings and hurled a climbing black cloud of smoke towards the uncaring sky.

  The crackling noise, the roar of the flames, the swirling smoke, the sudden cries of alarm which came from within the houses seemed to have no effect upon the men in the street except that, as if by signal, they all levered the action of their Winchesters, the deadly slick-a-slack drowned in the growling strength of the fires and the panicked shouts of men waking from sleep into the very actuality of Hell.

  ‘Fire!’ Men scre
amed, shouted, cursed; men groaned, choking in heat and smoke, bellowed in pain or frustration, whimpered in white panic, but always the same word: ‘Fire! Fire!’

  By now the roof of the saloon was an inferno, and already flames were bursting from the windows of houses up and down the street. A man ran out of the door of one house yelling at the top of his voice. He stopped in puzzlement, frowning at the men arrayed in the center of the street, shaking his head. He was an old man and his nightshirt was charred from the flames. ‘Fire, goddammit!’ he screeched. ‘Don’t jest sit th—’

  Two rifles spoke in unison and the old man was smashed into the dust by the bullets. For a fantastic moment there was a complete silence, as if the world was holding its breath; the sound of the two shots echoed clearly and then, shouting, screaming, babbling, jostling, half dazed by sleep and incoherent with fear, the men of Fronteras tumbled from their blazing houses into the street and in front of the rifles of the executioners.

  Doc Ziegler came out of his house, clutching his old medical bag, his half-frame spectacles askew on his nose, looking wildly about him for someone whom he could help. They cut him down without warning. They cut down another man, then another. Man after man was stopped in his tracks by the deadly hail of bullets. They died helpless, panicked, unable to defend themselves, uncomprehending, unaware of the reason for their death, faced by the expressionless faces behind the blazing guns. The dead and dying littered the street and still the merciless enfilade went on, callous, inhuman, unceasing.

  It was a scene from Hell itself. The scuttling damned, the feral, faceless executioners lit by the seething colors of the leaping fire, tortured eyes streaming in the blackness of smoke and soot, hurt men dying with amazement in their eyes, surprise on their faces, without knowledge of the source of their death, walking into the brutal smashing wall of lead that laced the indescribable virulence of that satanic dawn.