And the Hills Opened Up by David Oppegaard Page A

inside to watch the action.  The stagecoach guard was lying on the floor, kicking his feet as he bled out on the barroom floor, surrounded by a large pool of spilled beer and broken glass.  His friends had gotten to their feet to remove their hats and watch him die.  They hadn’t drawn their pistols yet but Hayes knew it was only a matter of time until they forgot their shock and turned against Johnny.  The question of the moment was whether the Hayes Gang should stand with the fool or hand him over.  Johnny had killed the man straight out, with no eye to robbery or common sense.  They should have left the kid back in Denver, with the other thin-skinned young men who dwelt there, and it was Elwood’s own fault Johnny had traveled with them this far.  He’d shown the boy too much kindness in the face of too many obvious faults and now a time of reckoning had come.
    “What you thinking, El?”
    Elwood turned to see his own reflection in Roach Clayton’s spectacles.  He looked pale and out of sorts.  Almost like one of his men had done something so goddamn stupid it defied the mind’s powers.
    “We go down a man, it’s just going to make it harder to bust into that fortress down the street.”
    Johnny, perhaps stunned himself, had joined the coach guards as they stood above their dying friend.  One of the guards was pressing at the wound with a rag from the bar, but the blood kept seeping through.  The bartender, Caleb, had stepped outside to see if he could scare up the town sheriff. 
    “We’ve got your brother now,” Roach whispered back, his breath smelling like whiskey.  “We can make do with four.”
    Elwood looked past Roach and saw that Clem and Owen had spread out down the bar and dropped their hands to their sides.  They expected a shootout, but they didn’t see the two guards who’d left their whores to stand along the upstairs balcony and watch the commotion below.  They were standing in their dirty skivvies, each holding a rifle as they watched everything play out with a clear and steady gaze.  After a hard ride, they hadn’t had time enough to get properly drunk and they’d been interrupted in their attentions—they might as well have been two sleeping rattlesnakes Johnny Miller had poked with a stick for the hell of it.
    “Jesus!” the dying man shouted, then kicked up his feet in one last mighty convulsion before falling still.  Johnny Miller laughed and looked back at the bar, his eyes gleaming in an uncanny way.
    “How you like that, fellas?  A banker’s errand boy calling out to the Good Lord in his last moment, like he’d never heard of those moneylenders getting driven out of the temple.”
    The stagecoach guards turned in unison to regard young Johnny Miller and a new stillness fell upon the barroom.  Hayes felt a tickling on the nape of his neck that signaled the proximity of Death.  He paused in uncertainty no longer, striding across the barroom floor and dropping Miller with one punch across the right temple.  The surprised young man collapsed to the floor with a thud and Hayes stepped back to shake the heat out of his fist. 
    “There, fellas.  He’s all yours.”

    After some discussion, two guards went off and fetched one of the cheap pine coffins Leg Jameson kept stocked in his general store.  Then the guards lifted the dead man into the coffin and hammered the lid on right there.  When the box was sealed, the four living guards sat down around it and began drinking again, using the coffin for a table.  When the unconscious Johnny Miller showed signs of stirring, they trussed him up with a rope, also fetched from the store, and gagged him with a handkerchief.  They debated the young man’s fate between them, loudly proclaiming they didn’t know if it were best to hang Miller outright or turn him over to the law in Rawlins, where the killing could be done properly in front of a large crowd.
    Elwood Hayes didn’t like any of this, but he made himself