Free .45-Caliber Desperado by Peter Brandvold

after the first blast now blew out past the aging lawman, across the gallery, and into the broad trail beyond. Only a few bits of wood remained, jerking back and forth on the spring hinges.
    The echo of the second blast had not died before Spurr gave a raucous yell and threw himself through the dark, smoky opening, instantly smelling cordite as he thumbed his Winchester’s hammer back to full cock.
    He hit the floor on his creaky right shoulder and hip, trying to ignore the hammering pain that lanced through both and making a vague mental note that he was getting too old for such maneuvers. He blinked against the misty shadows inside the saloon, saw an uncertain man shape before him, the light from the doorway behind him glinting on the black iron bores of a double-barreled shotgun.
    He fired once, twice, three times before he’d even stopped sliding on his hip and shoulder, and heard the man with the shotgun scream as he flew straight backward over a table. Spurr’s old eyes were slow to adjust to the gloom shot through with the glare of two long windows on the room’s left side, so all he saw were jostling, man-shaped shadows before two guns flashed simultaneously.
    The slugs hammered the front of a bar to his right, just above his sprawled, buckskin-clad body.
    â€œKill the old, nasty son of a bitch!” someone shouted.
    More guns popped, bullets chewing table legs and ceiling posts in front of Spurr, and the front of the bar to his right. Quickly, lying prone, elbows on the floor, he racked another live round into his rifle’s breech, took quick aim at the shadow before which one of the guns flashed, and fired. His target yelped and disappeared.
    He aimed at two more figures as they triggered revolvers while moving around the tables, and watched as he blew one of the yellow-toothed demons out one of the long windows, the man screaming and triggering his pistol into the ceiling and then disappearing through the shattering glass and out into the yard.
    More men screamed and shouted—many more than the three he was after—and triggered more lead, the gunfire in the close confines sounding like many blacksmith’s hammers rapping on empty tin washtubs.
    Spurr was low enough that several tables and chairs offered rudimentary cover, but he was glad to see a stout heating stove just ahead of him, in the middle of the room. It was flanked by a stout wood box with high side panels.
    He triggered two more rounds, then rolled to his left, wincing as several slugs hammered the floor around him, pricking his face with slivers. Two more screeched raucously off the woodstove as he piled up behind it, a man shouting, “He’s behind the stove—get him. I want that lawbringer beefed !”
    â€œHey, who is that?” Spurr shouted, hunkering low against the floor and thumbing fresh cartridges from his shell belt into his Winchester’s receiver. “I think I recognize that voice . . . just can’t recollect the name!”
    â€œIt’s Ludlow Walsh!” A bullet clanged loudly against the stove simultaneously with a revolver’s bark. “Take that, you dirty, badge-totin’, privy-suckin’ dog!”
    â€œLud Walsh?” Spurr chuckled. “Hell, I wasn’t after you, Lud!”
    A figure moved to his right—a man trying to work around him toward the bar. Spurr whipped his repeater around and fired, but the man ducked behind an awning post, and the bullet hammered a ceiling joist behind him, shattering a hurricane lantern.
    â€œHell, I didn’t think you was!” Walsh called from the far side of the room. “But I vowed I’d perforate your big, ugly hide first chance I got, Spurr. No way you’re walkin’ out of this waterin’ hole alive, lawdog. No way at all. Too many against you in here!”
    â€œThat’s how it sounds,” Spurr called. “I just hope the three fork-tailed devils I came special for are here!