the Iron Marshall (1979) Read Online Free Page A

mean, mean man. The one you hit was not Bob's son but Eben's, so you've made an enemy. Be on your guard, lad, for they'll stop at nothing until you're killed or maimed. He believed that big son of his was unbeatable and you felled him with a blow."
    Shanaghy shrugged it off. So he had made an enemy ... Well, he had made enemies before this one. Yet it was little he knew of Eben Childers then, and he cared even less, for he had been fighting for half his life and knew nothing else. "He's a hater, lad, and don't forget it. He lost money, but worse than that he was made to appear a fool, and he's a proud, proud man." The word got around that Childers was recruiting men for an all-out war with Morrissey, and Childers had influence where it mattered. Unexpectedly, Morrissey found doors closed to him that had always been open, but Shanaghy knew little beyond the casual barroom gossip that he picked up. Then, one night, as he was coming up the Bowery, he was set upon by a gang of thugs who emerged suddenly from a doorway. "Break his legs!" somebody shouted. "Break his legs and his fingers!"
    Again they reckoned without his knowledge of the area, for Tom lunged suddenly, meeting them as they came, and his iron-hard fist clipped the nearest man. The man fell. Leaping past him Shanaghy darted up a stair with the men hot after him. As he topped the flight, he turned. Then grasping a rail in either hand, he swung both feet up and kicked out hard. The boot heels caught the nearest man in the face and he toppled, knocking those behind him backward down the stairs. Again Shanaghy escaped over the roofs.
    When he came warily down from the roofs, a few doors from his room, he held himself still in the doorway while he looked carefully around. He was hot and tired. He wanted nothing so much as to climb the stairs to his own room and fall on the bed, yet he was wary.
    He had started to leave the doorway where he was hidden when he caught a flicker of movement in the shadows up the street. Was it a harmless drunk sleeping it off in a doorway? Or some of Childers's men waiting for him? No use taking the chance. He went back to the roofs. Almost a block further along, he descended to McCarthy's blacksmith shop. The place was locked and silent, so he crawled into a wagon, pulled a spare canvas wagon sheet over him and went to sleep.
    Shanaghy awakened to the clang of McCarthy's hammer. He sat up, rubbing his eyes. The sides of the wagon were high, and he could not see the wagonyard or the doorway to the shop. He stood up, grasped the side of the wagon and swung himself over. As his feet hit the ground he heard a rush of feet behind him. Instantly he ducked under the wagon and came up on the other side. A man started under the wagon after him, and Shanaghy kicked him in the head, then turned to face the two who had come around the end of the wagon. One of them yelled, "There he is! Get him!"
    Suddenly McCarthy was in the door of his shop, holding a hammer. "One at a time!" he shouted. "Or I'll bust some skulls!"
    The man who came at him was a beefy shoulder-striker from Childers's crew. It was a big, broad man with blond hair and a florid face who rushed at Shanaghy. The moment he put up his two hamlike fists, Shanaghy knew he might be good in a rough-and-tumble, but he was no boxer. The man came in, looping a wide right for Shanaghy's chin, and Shanaghy crouched and came in whipping two underhanded punches into the bigger man's belly.
    The two punches were perfectly timed. A right to the belly, a left to the same place and then an overhand cross to the chin, and the man went down. He tried to get up but slumped back down into the dirt.
    Turning sharply, Shanaghy hit the other man before he expected it, knocking every bit of wind out of him. As the man doubled up, Shanaghy gave him a knee in the face.
    The first one was crawling out from under the wagon, a streak of blood on his face. He held up a hand. "No! No! I quit!"
    "Be off with you, then,"