All The Guns Of Scotland.
Dai Reid
Published by Ray Jaxome at Smashwords
Copyright Ray Jaxome 2012
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Chapter One – The Story
The horse shifted under me a fraction; I could feel wariness and fear radiating off it. It was looking to the left, and as my gaze followed the horses I could see why it was frightened. These hills have been full of bandits for centuries, and the locals are supposed to keep shrubbery back fifteen feet from the road. But, of course, everyone is too busy simply surviving. The horse is looking at one of these brambly scrub patches; it has seen something it should not have.
The glint from a gun.
I let my hand fall to my side. Not touching my own gun, not quite, but as near as I can get without setting off the alarm. The satchel is bumping on my other side, and as I click the horse forward, I can tell it doesn’t want to go. But it is well trained, and it steps slowly and regally towards the ambush.
One step closer. Two. Now I am imagining where the death zone is, I can almost see it in my vision. In five feet time they could shoot. Could kill.
I stop one foot away from the death zone. My hand goes to my gun, and draws.
“What are you doing there?” I shout.
Silence for a moment, then the man stands up. He is taller and thicker than I am, covered in denim, plain clothes for a working man; I notice a little red patch where the blood has dried on his shirt. He looks very familiar, someone I have seen before. “Jo Swift,” the man’s voice drawled: not an American accent, “As I live and breathe.” The man took his gun, and shoved it back into his holster. Then he walked towards me. I was wary, but both his hands were empty, “What are you doing in these parts? Up to no good, I trust.”
“My business,” I replied, not ready to say anything about the contents of my satchel. He looked at me for a second, then his face broke into a giant grin, and he laughed with the loudest belly laugh I had ever heard.
“Of course,” he said, pointing to the satchel at my side, “It looks like you are the one I was sent to meet. The password is Robert.”
“The Bruce?” I said, even as my hand was grasping the satchel, pulling it from my head. He nodded, “A fine man,” he said. I threw the satchel through the air, and he caught it without any difficulty. He put it on, then nodded to me, and walked back towards the bush. I turned the horse and rode away, back towards the village.
I guess now that ten minutes after I left, some of the branches of the bushes near me would have shaken and a young boy would have stepped out, looked at the trail we had both made, and thought for a second. In any case, he pressed his hand into the mark the horse shoe left behind, and turned to follow me.
As I rode away from the meeting, I felt a lot happier. It seemed like everything was going my way. It was less than five hours to my next destination, and it was all relatively safe country. There were a few rattle snakes about, maybe even a bandit or two, but none of them would attack a man on horseback who obviously had nothing on him.
The weather was beautiful, too, so I started to hum under my breath. The horse knew I felt secure when I did that, and it relaxed too.
I arrived in town just before sundown. Most of the shops in town were shut, but there was a salon with a room available sign in its window. As I walked in I saw there was nothing much going on. A few cowboys in the back drinking a whisky, and a man at the bar wiping down the surfaces. He looked up, then scowled to see me.
“Jo Swift,” he said, shaking his head as he spoke, “What trouble have you brought us this time?”
“Just want a drink, and a bed,” I said to him.
“I thought I’d told you, there aint no bed here for the likes of you,” he said, and I felt my hand twitching down to my side. But all I did was smile at him, and he wilted. He knew he’d not stand up to me in a fight.
“Just for the night,” I said, “Then I’m on my way in the morning.”
He knew he had to give me the room; it wouldn’t do him any good to argue. We were old friends, even if he didn’t like me most of the time. Heck, even I don’t like me most of the time. I looked down at the key number and realised he’d given me my old room. It was the one next to the flat roof, so you could get a quick exit if trouble came to call.
“Thank you,” I said. After the drink, I walked up the stairs, opened the room, and lay down on the bed. It still had the lump in it I knew from previous stays, and if I looked carefully I could probably have found hairs I dropped in my last visit.
But I lay on the bed, and fell asleep.
The knocking sound woke me up. Insistent, five loud bangs. As I opened my eyes my hand automatically went to my gun. It sounded like trouble.
“Let me in!” someone said outside my room, “Let me talk to you!” I slid the door open a crack and saw the young kid. He was clearly a foreigner, but he might have had some American blood in him too. Once I saw that he was unarmed I pulled the door open wide, and he stepped in. Something had beaten him up real good, I saw, his eye was still discoloured and he walked with a limp. “They said you could help me!”