Bell glanced down at the .45 Colt automatic he’d kept in an open desk drawer and regretted that he would not get to use it on the Butcher Bandit. Blowing the scum’s head off was too good for him, Bell mused. Not after he had murdered so many unsuspecting people. His death would save the taxpayers the expense of a trial. Now Bell was faced with admitting defeat and starting over again with the meager clues he and his agents had ferreted out.
Irvine walked over to the office door and leaned his shoulder against the frame. “I can’t deny it was a good try,” he said with a tightness in his voice.
“It looks as if the bandit failed to take the bait,” Bell said slowly.
“Perhaps he didn’t read the article in the paper because he doesn’t live in San Francisco.”
“It’s beginning to look that way.”
Just then the door opened and a woman wearing a buckskin skirt walked into the bank, her hat pulled low so it covered her eyes. Bell gazed past Irvine but relaxed at seeing what appeared to be a well-dressed woman. He nodded to Irvine, who walked back to his teller’s cage and said, “How may I help you, ma’am?”
Cromwell lifted his head slightly so he could look into Irvine’s face. Then with a pang of alarm he stiffened as he instantly remembered the Van Dorn agent as one of the men who were sitting with Bell and Bronson in the Bohemian Club dining room only days earlier. He did not answer Irvine for fear his voice would give him away to the agent. Cromwell became charged with tension as he realized this was a trap. There came a pause as he lowered his head, his mind racing with alternatives. His advantage was that the agent did not recognize him, not dressed as a woman, and was not alert to the fact that the bandit was less than four feet away on the other side of the counter.
He could shoot the agent and take what money was in the safe or he could simply turn around and walk out of the bank. He chose the latter option and was about to beat a hasty retreat when Bell stepped from the office. Cromwell immediately recognized Bell. For the first time in his criminal career, he felt the spur of panic.
“How may I help you, ma’am?” Irvine repeated, vaguely wondering why the woman did not answer him the first time.
Already, Bell was looking at him with a questioning expression on his face, as if the female customer looked familiar. Bell was a master of identification and had a photographic memory when it came to faces. His eyes betrayed the fact that he was trying to recall where he’d seen her. Then his eyes dropped to Cromwell’s hands, which were covered by leather gloves. Abruptly, as if he had seen an apparition, he realized that he was staring at the bandit. It struck him like a hammer blow to the head. Bell’s eyes flared open and he gasped: “You!”
Cromwell did not waste another second. He reached into his large cloth purse and jerked out his .38 Colt, which had a heavy cloth taped around the muzzle. Without the slightest hesitation, he pointed the Colt at Irvine’s chest and pulled the trigger. A loud thump reverberated in the bank’s lobby. Then he swung the muzzle around and shot at Bell even before Irvine hit the floor like a rag doll.
If Bell hadn’t instinctively whirled around and thrown his body over the top of the desk, crashing to the floor behind it, the bullet would have caught him square in the stomach. The violent thrust saved him, but the bullet still plowed through the fleshy part of his thigh. He hardly felt the piercing blow. In a single movement, he reached up and snatched his Colt from the desk drawer. Without the luxury of time, he snapped off a shot at Cromwell that missed the neck of the bandit by less than half an inch.
Then, faster than lightning could strike, both men fired again, the shots coming so closely together they sounded as one.
Cromwell’s second bullet gouged a small trench across the side of Bell’s head, barely piercing the skin but creasing the skull. Bell’s vision became a blurred mist and he fell into the black pit of unconsciousness. Blood quickly seeped from the wound and covered the side of his head. It had not been a decisive wound, but to Cromwell, who was still standing, it looked as if he had shot off half of Bell’s head.
The bandit did not come out of the gun battle unscathed. Bell’s bullet had caught Cromwell in the waist but had passed through without striking any internal organs. He swayed, and only by reaching out and grasping the edge of the teller’s cage did he prevent himself from falling to the floor. He stood there for a few moments, fighting the pain. Then he turned and unlocked the rear door, standing aside as Margaret burst in.
“I heard shots outside,” she shouted shock. “What went wrong?”
“It was a trap,” he murmured as anger replaced fear. Holding a hand over his wound, he motioned the muzzle of his Colt toward the office floor. “I killed Isaac Bell.”
Margaret stepped into the office and looked down at the bloodied Van Dorn agent and a look of horror came into her eyes as she recognized Bell despite the blood covering much of his face. “Oh, my God!” She felt as if she was going to be sick, but the nausea quickly passed when she turned and saw that her brother was also bleeding. “You’re hurt!” she gasped.
“Not as bad as it looks,” he said through clenched teeth.
“We’ve got to get out of here. The shots will bring the sheriff and rouse half the town.”
Margaret half carried, half dragged her wounded brother through the rear door of the bank. Outside, the horse and buggy were waiting. She used all her strength to push him onto the seat of the rig, untied the horse from the fence post, and climbed aboard.
She raised the whip to urge the horse to a gallop, but he grabbed her wrist. “No, go slowly, as if we’re two women out for a buggy ride. It will look suspicious if we charge out of town.”
“The sheriff is a smart man. I know him. He won’t fool easily.”
“Even a smart man won’t suspect a woman of robbing a bank and killing two men,” muttered Cromwell.
At the end of the alley, Margaret turned the buggy up a side street and then headed west toward the town limits. Cromwell took off the wolfskin coat and draped it over his lap to cover the blood that soaked his sweater. He slipped the Colt into one of his cowboy boots and sat back, trying to keep his mind clear by ignoring the throbbing pain in his side.
BELL HAD instructed Sheriff Pardee that he would fire a shot as a signal if the bandit made his appearance. But Pardee knew there was trouble when he heard five shots, some of them muffled like the distant dynamite charge in a nearby mine. He rushed into the street from a hardware store where he had been hiding, fearful that the woman he’d seen walk into the bank might have been shot by the bandit.
Seeing him running toward the bank, four of his deputies leaped from their hiding places and rushed after him, while a fifth deputy ran to the railroad depot to alert Curtis. With his single-action Smith & Wesson drawn and the hammer pulled back, Pardee burst through the door of the bank. At first, he didn’t see anyone. Irvine was lying out of sight, behind the teller’s cage, and Bell was down on the other side of the desk. Then he came around the cage, saw the Van Dorn agent sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood. He checked to make sure Irvine was dead before he entered the office and found Bell.