The outlaw looked fearlessly down the twin muzzles. “Ah don’t cotton to a man drawin’ a bead on me. Particularly with a coach gun.”

“I’m not drawing a bead on you, Mr. Herbert,” Harry Frost replied. “I’m blowing your head off.” He jerked both triggers. The shotgun thundered like a cannon, and a swath of double-ought buckshot threw Herbert out of his saddle.

There was no echo on the open range, just a single blast of thunder and the neighing of frightened horses. When the dead man’s gang got their mounts under control, Stotts and Mayhew were pointing revolvers in both hands, and Harry Frost himself had reloaded. His face was red with righteous anger.

“Who else?”

They uncrated the guns, mounts, ammunition boxes, and landing carriages in the meager shade of the scrub brush and low trees that grew beside the creek. They disassembled and cleaned the guns and mounted them on the two-wheeled landing carriages. The weapons weighed nearly four hundred pounds, including the ammunition boxes. Cursing the weight, they rolled them up and down the dry creek bed, which was deep and narrow as a military slit trench. Positioned two hundred yards apart and elevated on their carriages, the Colts commanded the railroad tracks that the aeroplanes would follow to Abilene.

To ensure the guns were in working order, they fed the canvas cartridge belts into the breeches and fired fifty rounds from each, killing some cows grazing half a mile away.

Harry Frost handed Stotts his hunting knife. “Go slice off some supper. Better cut enough for breakfast. We’ll be here awhile.”

He ordered Mayhew to climb a pole and tap into the wires.

The telegrapher strung wire down to the ground, connected it to a key, sat propped against the pole with the key in his lap, and translated the messages that railroad dispatchers were transmitting between their distant stations. Several times, he warned that a train was coming. They hid under the trestle that spanned the creek bed until the train had thundered overhead. Most of the telegraph traffic was about shunting extra trains—rich men’s specials and newspapers’ charters—into Fort Worth for the big wedding.

Chapter 33

33

ISAAC BELL WAS SURPRISED when Preston Whiteway asked him to be his best man until he realized that the only people the newspaper magnate ever spent time with were people who worked for him, and the high-handed manner in which he treated employees guaranteed they would never be friends.