The Border Empire by Ralph Compton

Empty trotting alongside, he rode to the back of the lodging house. There he left the three horses, Empty remaining with them. The back door of the rambling old house wasn’t even bolted, and he caught his breath when he stepped into the hall. The place was dark except for a wedge of light from beneath a single door—the door to the room where Maria was to be waiting. And Maria was there. What was left of her. On a nightstand beside the bed a lamp burned. Maria had been stripped and spread-eagled on the bed, her body a bloody mass of knife wounds. They had tortured her before finally slitting her throat. Wide open, her sightless eyes begged in mute appeal for mercy that had been denied. Her mouth hung open, her lips frozen in a silent scream of pain and terror. Wes ground his teeth in fury, cursing himself for a fool. On the nightstand—if he needed proof—was one of the gold medallions with the dragon’s head. The bastards wanted him to know they had murdered Maria, and they hadn’t followed him because they expected him to return. He knew then what he should have suspected. He had walked into a deadly trap! Empty began barking furiously, all the assurance he needed that the outlaws were waiting for him to break for his horses. Quickly he blew out the lamp. Even as he approached the window, it shattered in a tinkling crash. Lead slammed into the wall and sang off the bed’s brass frame. There was but one way out, and that was through the door and into the hall. The old house had a second floor, and Wes remembered the stairway in the hall. On hands and knees he crept through the door, only to have the hall floor creak. Immediately, from the end of the hall, there was the roar from three different weapons. Lead whipping over his head, Wes fired three times at muzzle flashes. There were groans of pain, gaining him a few seconds to get to the stairs. They creaked badly, but his pursuers didn’t know he had left the hall, and there was more shooting. Reaching an upper hall, Wes made his way toward the rear of the house. He hoped there might be a door leading to an upper balcony, but there was neither. Quickly he felt his way along the wall, searching for a door. Finding one, he stepped into a room where there was a window. But when he attempted to open it, the casing wouldn’t budge. It seemed to be nailed shut. In the dim light from the window, he could see a bed, and beside it, a nightstand. Seizing the nightstand by two of its legs, he used it to smash the window, frame and all. There were curtains, and the sudden draft sucked the loose ends of them out the window. The room being at the very rear of the house, the ceiling had begun to slope downward with the contour of the roof. The window was close enough for Wes, standing on the sill, to grasp the edge of the tiled roof. But the breaking glass had attracted the attention of the outlaws, and as Wes scrambled for the roof, lead began ripping into the side of the house.
    â€œThe bastard’s on the roof!” one of the outlaws shouted.
    But Wes reached the roof, and the shouting below had the desired effect. Men joined their comrades below the smashed window. By the time Wes had crept to the very end of the gabled roof, he was able to step down to the roof that sheltered a back porch. Empty was still barking from a distance, which told Wes one or more of the outlaws had stayed with the horses. The hound either saw or sensed Wes at the roof’s edge and came surging in, growling viciously. Startled, the outlaw who had remained with the horses began firing, but only got off one shot. Colt in hand, Wes came down astraddle him, clubbing him unconscious. In an instant, Wes was in the saddle, kicking the grulla into a gallop. His Colt in his right hand, he seized the bay’s lead rope in his left. The black nickered, but with Maria gone, there was no need for it. The outlaws rounded the comer of the house and began firing. Wes fired only