Free Savage Texas: The Stampeders by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

. and saw a man with long yellow hair striding toward him with a sawed-off rifle in his hand, bandolier belts draping his shoulders and chest, and a look on his face that put Hiram in danger of losing control of his bladder right where he stood.
    Beyond the advancing man Hiram saw another man, leaning on a tierail and smoking a cigarette. He paid little heed to the man, the yellow-haired man dominating his attention.
    “Down with the pistol, you!” Sam Heller said, punctuating the command by lifting the chopped-down rifle an inch or two higher, so that if he fired, the slug would tear through Hiram’s intestines somewhere between navel and groin.
    “That dummy is threatening my partner with that pistol he stole!” Hiram answered. “Hell, he’s a public menace! A danger to us all! It’s him you ought to disarm.”
    “Timothy is as gentle a soul as you’ll find anywhere in the Pecos country,” Heller replied, moving his mule-leg up another little bit.
    “Timothy,” Heller said, “best you run that pistol up into the store and leave it with Mr. Lockhart. There’s no call for you to need to hurt anybody or to get hurt yourself. You don’t want that.”
    “Yes, sir, Mr. Sam,” Timothy said, and headed for the Emporium’s front door.
    Long-trained instincts told Heller that the big man with the pistol would likely try to take advantage of the minor distraction of Timothy’s movement to make a move of his own. Though Heller didn’t know Hiram Tate, he knew something about him, something the former Pinkerton had learned to read in others with little more than a glance. Everything in the pistoleer’s manner, stance, and expression told Heller that Tate carried in him a dangerous pride that would not let him tolerate being bested or publicly shamed. This was the kind of man, with the kind of pride, that turned minor brawls into deadly fights. Heller’s hand tightened on the grip of the mule-leg rifle.
    Hiram Tate swung and was about to fire at Heller when Heller’s weapon spoke first. With a blast akin to cannon fire, a hot slug left the shortened rifle and hit Tate right where Heller intended: the joint of his left shoulder. Tate grunted, spun, and fell, staining the ground red. His left arm was very nearly shot off, the joint shattered, the ball torn out of the socket, and only ragged flesh keeping the appendage attached to Tate’s body.
    Tate writhed and screamed, dropping the pistol from his right hand and groping across his chest at his ruined shoulder. Blood poured between his twitching fingers.
    Heller walked over to the fallen man and kicked his dropped pistol up under the boardwalk, out of reach. He leaned over a little and poked at Tate’s shoulder wound with the hot, short muzzle of the mule-leg. Tate screamed even louder, and his partner, Bill, a much less hardy man, stumbled to one side and vomited over the back side of the boardwalk.
    “You said something about ‘disarming’ somebody,” Heller said. “Now you know how I ‘disarm’ a man.”
    “God, I’m hurting, I’m hurting . . .” The red-haired Hiram’s groans were pathetic.
    “I bet you are. But you should thank me, really. I could have shot you in the gut, or the belly, or the heart or face. I was in a kindhearted humor today, though. I could see you weren’t a lefty because of which hand your pistol was in. So I decided that if you had to lose an arm, I’d at least let it be the left one, which you wouldn’t need as much.”
    “Oh God . . . God . . . you expect me to thank you for blowing my arm off?”
    “I expect you to get up and quit bloodying up the street, and to let me haul you off to the local sawbones and get that arm off the rest of the way, good and clean. Otherwise it’s going to just mortify on you and rot off, and probably by the time it was ready to fall off of its own weight, you’d have died from blood poisoning anyway. Look there, you fool! With all that twisting around, you’ve ground the wound right