Winchester 1887 Read Online Free Page B

spit tobacco juice on the floor. The third tossed the saddlebags over his shoulder, walked past Crawford, then stopped and turned. “Don’t get no foolish notions, bub.”
    â€œN-no . . . s-sir . . .” Crawford stammered.
    The masked man slammed the barrel of his Remington revolver against Crawford’s head. He saw stars, then nothing at all.
    Outside the bank, Stoney Post yelled, “It’s hot out here, Link!”
    Those were his last words. A blast blew him through the plate-glass window as Link McCoy opened the door of the bank.
    He cursed and sent a shotgun blast across the street. “I told you this was a mistake, Zane,” he told his partner, who checked on Stoney Post and then cut loose with his Winchester rifle.
    â€œYou told me!” Zane Maxwell yelled and began feeding cartridges from Stoney Post’s shell belt into the Winchester ’73. Post wouldn’t have need of those shells anymore.
    â€œGet out!” McCoy yelled to the gang members. “We get separated, we’ll meet at the Salt Works.”
    â€œGet killed,” Maxwell said, “we’ll meet in Hell.”
    Even McCoy had to laugh at that, but he focused on business as soon as the boys bolted into the streets, trying for their horses tethered by the bank and funeral parlor. He fired the shotgun, levered another round, and fired again. He and Zane crouched at the shattered window, and Zane made his .44-40 rifle sing. As soon as McCoy’s sixth shot finished, he fell back from the window and began reloading the cut-down Winchester. He had only two shells in when he saw that fool teller, coming at him, a little brass-framed Sharps derringer waving wildly in his shaking hand.
    â€œDon’t be a fool,” Maxwell yelled at the idiot, but did not wait for the teller to lower the four-shot, .30-caliber rimfire popgun with the fluted barrel group. That old relic, made before the War Between the States, might not even fire, but Link McCoy was not one to take chances or give fool bankers second chances.
    The shotgun roared, and the teller went flying against the counter while the Sharps Model 2A sliced across the room, bounced off a desk, and fell into a wastebasket.
    McCoy jacked the hammer and finished reloading the shotgun.
    â€œCorey’s bought it,” Maxwell said, as he fell back and reloaded the Winchester. “And I think Tawlin got hit.”
    â€œRest of them?” McCoy levered a fresh load into the chamber of the ten-gauge.
    â€œHard to tell. Made it, maybe.”
    â€œLet’s you and me make it, maybe.” Link pushed himself up and bolted through the open doorway, blasting away with the sawed-off shotgun.
    Farmers mostly, in that part of the country, not that it was worth growing anything other than corn. Farmers and city folk, if you could call Greenville, Arkansas, a city. The people were full of grit. McCoy would give them that much, but not much when it came to brains. Too nice for their own good.
    All they had to do was kill the outlaws’ horses, but the good folks of Greenville prized solid horseflesh, so McCoy swung into the saddle of his piebald mare, fired his last round from the Winchester, and waited until Maxwell found the saddle. Both men spurred their mounts and rode west toward Indian Territory, leaving two of their gang dead on the streets, poor old Stoney Post dead inside the bank, along with the corpse of a fool bank teller with a chest full of buckshot.
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    Mike Crawford’s head was splitting. The knot on his skull felt like it would split his scalp, at least the part of his scalp that hadn’t been split wide open by that buffaloing hoodlum in the wheat sack. He held a rag trying to stanch the flow of blood, trying to ease the agonizing pain in his head, and trying—and failing—to hear everything Grover Cleveland, president of the Greenville Independent Bank but no relation to the president of the United States, was