High and Wild Read Online Free

as she watched the three banditos slowly strangle above the bar.
    Haskell elbowed the girl.
    And then he clawed both pistols from behind the waistband of his canvas trousers and shouted, “We got trouble, chiquita ! As soon as I start shooting, run to the stairs!”
    Haskell bolted forward, both pistols raised. The man running toward him stopped suddenly, screamed, and raised his own revolver, but not before both of Haskell’s pistols roared above the din.
    One of the Pinkerton’s bullets punched through the nearest rurale ’s forehead, and his second shot caused Captain Villarreal, still standing on the bar, to acquire a shocked expression and to look down at his chest, from which a small fountain of dark red blood spurted.

3

    H askell shouted, “Run, chiquita !” as everyone in the room screamed and dived for cover.
    As Sonoma gave a wild Yaqui bellow that sounded like the warning of a stalking wildcat and leaped over tables toward the stairs, Haskell extended both his pistols toward the two rurales on the balcony on either side of the executioner’s winch.
    They’d grabbed Springfield rifles and were cocking the weapons as they aimed them over the top of the balcony rail. Haskell shot the one on the left first, then quickly took care of the one on the right.
    The one on the right screamed and fired his rifle into the ceiling above the drinking hall before he went stumbling backward, covering his bloody face with one hand.
    The other rurale lurched a step backward, dropping his rifle, and clutched his chest before stumbling forward and plummeting down over the balcony rail. He landed atop the bar with a loud, cracking bang beside his fallen rifle.
    Haskell let out a savage whoop and jumped onto the table in front of him. He hopscotched tables over the cowering men and whores, paused halfway across the room to trigger shots at the rurales poking their heads in the front door, and then resumed running toward the bar on which Captain Villarreal was still standing in shock beside the men he’d hanged.
    Haskell leaped onto the bar between the captain and the three hanged men. Villarreal was still clutching his hands over the frothy blood bubbling out of his chest, just left of his heart. As he stared in gray-faced, hang-jawed shock at the big, shaggy-headed “ peón ” standing before him, his eyes appeared about to bulge out of his head.
    â€œWho . . .” he rasped, barely audible above the incredulous mutters rising from the cowering crowd, “are . . . you?”
    Haskell grinned and lifted his sombrero straight up off his head before stuffing it back down on his dark brown curls. “Pinkerton Detective Bear Haskell, at your service, Captain Villarreal.” He swung around to send another slug hurtling through the front door, where several cowering, shifting rurales were trying to draw a bead on him. “Love to stay an’ chat, but since you’re about dead anyway, and I got the president’s niece to rescue, I reckon I’ll be sayin’ howdy-do!”
    Haskell shoved his pistols behind his waistband and leaped up onto the body of the first bandito on his left hanging about two feet above the bar. Climbing up the dying bandit, he paused to wink at Pancho Calaveras on his right, whose face was paper-white and turning blue, tongue swelling as it jutted out one corner of the killer’s mouth, and continued shimmying on up the rope.
    He reached the balcony rail and hoisted himself over, landing flat-footed. Sonoma was already there, aiming a Colt Dragoon she’d taken off a dead rurale over the balcony rail and yelling, “Just had to take the hard way up, didn’t you, amigo ? Or don’t you Texans believe in taking the stairs?”
    She triggered two shots at two rurales in the drinking hall who had been trying to make their way through the panicking crowd toward the stairs, and then she flung another through one