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

into the dirt. It’ll be dripping rot and pus in no time. Yep, you’d best get that flop arm hacked off right, or get ready to die hard and slow. Death by mortification ain’t no way for a man to go. I’ve seen it before. You don’t want it.”
    Heaving and coughing noises from Bill over on the boardwalk, on his knees, let Heller know that he was going to be no threat. But still he had an interest in the fellow. Something about him seemed familiar.
    Lockhart the merchant, helped by a store clerk, came out of the Emporium carrying a wooden door. This became a makeshift stretcher for Hiram Tate, who was fast on his way to the local doctor for an amputation already mostly completed courtesy of Sam Heller’s mule-leg rifle.

C HAPTER N INE
    Though the slug from Heller’s mule-leg had struck no vital organs, and blood loss had been sufficiently controlled to keep Hiram Tate from bleeding to death, Hiram died on the doctor’s table anyway.
    His heart, defective without anyone knowing it, including Hiram himself, was too taxed by the stress of his injuries to survive its ordeal. It simply shut down and the physician tending him found himself suddenly working to amputate the arm of a dead man. No point in that, he figured, so he stopped, washed himself up, and had Hiram hauled off to the local undertaker with both arms still in place, though the shot one was barely hanging on.
    The doctor, who typically took a few nips before taking a knife to anyone, leaned unsteadily over the dead man, then asked Heller, “Who is this poor joker?”
    “I don’t know, but I know I’ve seen him before. Kind of like that dead man I and that new picture-taker man found out on the Hangtree Road t’other day. Something familiar about him.”
    “I had the same notion myself,” the doctor said. “But I can’t put a finger on . . . wait a minute. Wait. I think I know.”
    Someone knocked on the outer office door, then immediately opened it. Sheriff Mack Barton walked in and stepped into the treatment room where the surgery had been taking place. “Doc, howdy. You, too, Heller. Heard about what happened. How’s the man who got . . . oh. I can see for myself. What did you do, Heller? Gut-shoot him?”
    “Nope. Just that left shoulder. No reason he should have died that I can see.”
    “Well, dead he is, anyway. And it really don’t matter . . . the reward for this one is on a dead-or-alive basis.”
    “So I was right,” the doctor said. “I knew I’d seen this man’s face before.”
    “Wanted poster?” Heller asked.
    “That’s right,” the doctor replied. “I was in over at Sheriff Barton’s office just a week ago . . . remember, Sheriff? You had that toenail growing into your toe and I had to cut it out?”
    “God, yes, I remember, and I got to tell you, Doc, you missed your calling. Should have been a butcher, the way you hacked on me.”
    “Feels better now, though, don’t it? And I can tell you there’s not been much difference between medicine and butcher work since the war. If I had ten cents for every arm and leg I sawed off during that damn war, I’d not have to be feeding potions and pills to a gang of Texas plains-hoppers.”
    Heller waved his hand over the dead man. “So, who is he?”
    “Well, at one time he was right-hand man to none other than Black Ear Skinner himself,” said Barton. “Hiram Tate. Wanted here, over in Arkansas, all the way down into Louisiana, and north of here clear into Kansas. Bad apple, this one was.”
    “Didn’t show a dang lot of sense, making such a show of himself on a public street with him being wanted everywhere,” Heller said. “All just to poke fun at a feeble-minded fellow.”
    “These type of men ain’t generally smart,” said Barton. “This one made it far as he has without getting himself killed more by luck than keen wits. But he has brought you some luck, Heller: he’s got reward money on his head, and since it was your bullet that brought him down, you got