Sudden--At Bay (A Sudden Western #2) by Frederick H. Christian

smellin’ up the
town. Move!’
    Parris jumped like a startled deer,
and hastened over to where Cotton lay sprawled in the dust. At
Sudden’s bidding, two of the bystanders helped him to get Cotton
into the saddle. Helm was slung face down across his horse’s back,
and the still-dazed Ricky was boosted into the saddle. Someone
brought Parris his placid mount. The Sheriff heaved himself up and
turned helplessly to the watchers.
    ‘ What am … what shall I tell? What
will Sim say when…?’
    ‘ Tell him yu beat ’em up yoreself,
Harry!’ yelled a man in the crowd, and Green smiled to himself.
Perhaps there was a chance yet that the townspeople would stand up
against the Cottons.
    ‘ Tell Sim Cotton what happened,
Parris,’ he told the Sheriff. ‘Tell him how, an’ tell him why. Most
of all, tell him not to come into this town unless he’s prepared to
leave it in a box. Now git!’
    Then he slapped the haunch of
Parris’ horse and that normally placid animal leaped wildly
forward, almost unseating the portly sheriff. The four horse
cavalcade thundered out of town. The bartender, Blass, had watched
everything that transpired through the smeared windows of the
Oasis. He turned now back to his bar as the crowd in the street
broke up, and the saturnine stranger who had precipitated the
downfall of Art Cotton came up towards the batwing doors of the
saloon.
    Blass watched him as he came in, followed by the
Hornby boy, who was looking at Green as if the cowboy had just
stepped off a winged charger. Blass nodded to himself as he moved
across to serve them.
    ‘ By God,’ he muttered. ‘I do
believe there’s hope for us yet!’ And then he did something that
nobody in Cottonwood had heard for many years. Raising his voice,
he called out to everyone within earshot ‘Belly up, boys! The
drinks are on the house!’

Chapter
Eight
    The Cottonwood ranch was not big,
considering the range it controlled. Altogether, Sim Cotton had
only fifteen men on his payroll, and this number included a cook
and a horse-wrangler, neither of whom was to be considered in any
way a fighting man. The cook was a grizzled oldster of perhaps
sixty summers who had been badly stove-up in a stampede many years
previously at Doan’s Crossing on the Red River, and the wrangler
was a half-Indian boy who spoke about three intelligible words in
English. Sim Cotton was a calculating man. He had always believed
that power was a tool, like a branding iron or a gun, to be used as
necessary, in the circumstances best suited to it. Power was
impersonal, and so was fear, and Sim Cotton knew how to use both.
Thus had his little empire in this valley remained in his grasp
long after the time when such empires had crumbled in other parts
of the West. Now he stood with his back to the fireplace in the big
living room of his ranch and considered the battered face of his
brother Art, the fawning figure of the sheriff, and the ugly
expression in the eyes of Chris Helm.
    ‘ So yu let that two- bit kid an’
his sidekick run yu out o’ my town?’ he asked his brother mildly.
There was no indication in his voice of the deep-wounded anger, the
searing hurt pride inside him.
    ‘ He buffaloed me afore I seen him
properly, Sim Helm told him. ‘I was out cold the whole time him an’
Art was scrapping Sim Cotton’s measured gaze swung towards his
brother.
    ‘ An’ yu…?’
    Art Cotton did not answer. He could
not bear the truth, that he had been thoroughly beaten. He could
not invent a plausible enough excuse to offer his brother to
explain his condition, so he simply sat, smoldering with hatred for
the man who had so marked him before the entire town burning
through him.
    ‘ An’ our brave sheriff was
sleepin’.’ Sim Cotton’s reptilian eyes rested now on the
apprehensive Parris, who threw up his hands in front of him as
though to defend himself against a blow, though Sim Cotton had not
moved a finger.
    ‘ I … I figgered the same as yu,
Sim … Mr