The Black Hills

by William W. Johnstone

  It was Pee-Wee’s brother, Billy.

  Pee-Wee rose onto his knees and thrust his right hand straight out toward that side of the trail, which was the direction he assumed the shooter had gone. Billy and several other men neck-reined their horses sharply and thundered off into the darkness.

  Another drew rein in front of Pee-Wee, shouting, “Who was it? Who was it? Did you see him?”

  Pee-Wee’s head was reeling. He was still seeing blasts of orange light in his eyes. He looked around. Several men lay in the trail behind him. Leo lay to his left, arms thrust out, ankles crossed. He wasn’t moving.

  “Did you get a look at him?” the mounted man before Pee-Wee asked again as other riders thundered off into the darkness south of the trail.

  Pee-Wee spat blood and bits of teeth from his lips. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the man who’d thrust the rifle into his mouth. But he’d seen the gray Confederate campaign hat and the long, blond hair tumbling onto thick, broad shoulders clad in buckskin. And he’d recognized the handsome Henry rifle that had once belonged to the eldest Buchanon brother, Shep.

  “Hunter Buchanon,” Pee-Wee said, though he doubted the rider before him could make out what he’d said. With his mouth so full of blood, he hadn’t been able to understand it himself.

  Hunter Buchanon!

  The name rocketed around inside his head, though, clear as a church bell on a cool autumn morning.

  Hunter Buchanon!

  CHAPTER 28

  Billy Chaney galloped around a tall, broad cottonwood and then drew his gelding to a skidding stop. Several other men drew their own mounts to stops behind Billy, horses blowing, saddle leather squawking.

  “Where is he?” asked a man to Billy’s left. “You see him?”

  “Shut up!” Billy rasped, violently slashing down with his arm.

  Holding his reins taut in his right hand, holding his Winchester across his saddlebows with his other hand, he looked around, listening. Trees pushed down close to the trail. Beyond the dark webbing of branches, stars shimmered. The sliver moon was kiting over the blunt peak of a distant ridge.

  A silence too silent lay heavy over the trees and the slopes rising to each side of the crease Billy was in.

  Suddenly, hooves thundered and the silhouette of a horse and rider bounded out from behind the dark shoulder of a slope maybe thirty yards ahead of the Chaney pack, and went charging on up the trail.

  “Hi-yahhh!” the man bellowed. “Hi-yahhhhh!”

  Hunter Buchanon. Had to be . . .

  “There!” Billy shouted, crouching low over his horse’s head and ramming his spurs into his gelding’s flanks.

  He whipped his Winchester up and snapped off a shot. The bullet screamed off a rock somewhere wide of his target. As the gelding lunged on up the crease between the buttes, Billy drew the Winchester across his saddle again. He had to pull his head down nearly to the gelding’s mane as a low-hanging branch swept over him, brushing the top of his horse’s head.

  Behind him, a man screamed as the branch unseated one of the half dozen or more riders giving chase behind him.

  Billy stared over his horse’s laid-back ears at the dark crease ahead of him, and the misty gray shadow of the rider pitching and swaying maybe forty yards beyond. The crease through which he was leading Billy and the other riders was brush-choked in places. Choked with rocks and fallen trees in other places. More branches hung low from the slopes to each side of the trail.

  Billy ducked another one just as the branch swept his hat from his head. Behind him, another rider screamed. The scream was followed by the crashing thud of yet another rider smashing to the ground.

  Ahead, the pack’s quarry rose and fell violently as Buchanon’s horse leaped a deadfall pine. Billy’s gelding cleared the pine. A second later, a horse behind him screamed and then its rider screamed as horse and rider, apparently not making the leap as cleanly as Buchanon and Billy had, took a nasty tumble.

  “Where the hell’s he leadin’ us, damnit?” yelled a rider behind Billy. Billy recognized the voice of a Chaney cousin, Ed Landers, who worked as a guard at the mine. “That rascal’s trying to kill us!”

  “Shut up and ride, Ed! I am not losin’ that devil! He killed Luke an’ my pa!” Billy ducked another low branch. “Might’ve killed Pee-Wee, by the look of the poor soul back on the trail! Savage rat!” he bellowed, lifting his head high to direct the insult at the man riding like a wind-blown tumbleweed ahead of him.

  “Crazy to be ridin’ this hard at night!” a man far back in the pack shouted. “Damn reckless, you ask me!”

  Another horse and another man screamed. More crunching and thrashing as the terrain took down another rider in the Chaney pack.

  Another man cursed.

  Ahead, the crease turned sharply to the right. Billy followed it around a wall of broken rock. Two eroded, brush-stippled stone walls now rose to each side, pushing down close to the trail Billy was following, which had suddenly become a dry creek bed, it appeared, though it was hard to see much of anything in the darkness relieved only by the starlight and the light of the sickle moon angling down through the trees.

  Billy slowed the gelding, then stopped it, holding up his hands for the other riders to follow suit. They came storming up behind him, jerking back hard on their horses’ reins. Billy glanced over his shoulder. There were five . . . now six men behind him, checking their nervous, skitter-stepping mounts down.

  Billy turned his head forward, squinting his eyes, probing the nearly impenetrable darkness closing down around him. The sudden, inky darkness was why he’d stopped the gelding. Ahead, a horse whickered. Billy snapped his Winchester to his shoulder, loudly pumping a live cartridge into the action.

  With his knees, he urged the gelding slowly forward.

  When his horse had taken maybe four steps, Billy saw another horse standing just beyond him, maybe fifteen yards away. The horse, staring toward him, eyes like dim lamps in the darkness, was saddled. Sweat foam glistened on its withers and in wind-blown streaks across its jaws. Its bridle reins were wrapped around its horn. Peering beyond the riderless horse, Billy saw nothing but a high rock wall. Atop the wall were the dark columns of pines and firs.

  “Holy cow,” exclaimed a man close behind Billy. “He’s led us into a box canyon!”

  “Trap,” raked out a man sitting stiffly to Billy’s right, his voice pitched low with dread. “It’s . . . it’s a trap!”

  The silence closed around them. Billy sensed the fear of the other men. It was growing as palpable as his own. His heart thudded heavily against his ribs.

  “Oh . . . darn,” said a man to Billy’s left.

  Billy kept his Winchester pressed to his shoulder, his cheek snugged up against the stock. He swung the barrel left, then right, then left again, looking for a target, waiting in silent terror for a bullet.

  “Where is he?” he said, quietly but anxiously. “Anyone see him?” He raised his voice. “I know you’re here, Buchanon!”

  Stretched seconds passed.

  A disembodied voice came out of the darkness, a rich Southern accent, slow and self-assured, sounding near yet far away. “You fellas don’t realize that when you tangled with the Buchanons, you dipped your hand in a sack filled with cottonmouths. You tangled with the wrong damn passel of Graybacks!”

  Billy screamed and triggered his Winchester at where he guessed the voice had come from, the rifle bucking hard against his shoulder, bright red flames lapping from the barrel. He screamed as he fired again, one-handed, holding his jittery mount’s reins taut with his free hand. The other men raised their own rifles, and they fired into the darkness at the top of the canyon wall.

  The din was deafening, the screeching of the reports vaulting around the canyon to chase their own echoes toward the high-floating moon.

  One terrified horse bucked, screaming, and threw its rider back over its arched tail.

  The hammer of Billy’s Winchester clicked benignly down against its firing pi
n.

  Shortly, the hammering of the rifles dwindled, replaced by the clicks of empty chambers. The man who’d been thrown from his horse gained his feet, grunting and cursing under his breath.

  The silence descending over the smoke-foggy canyon was even denser than before.

  “Did we get him, you think?” asked the man to Billy’s right.

  The answer came from the darkness, the voice slow, steady, deadly.

  “Nope.”

  * * *

  The only thing more satisfying than killing men who’d wronged you in the worst possible way was doing the job with your big brother’s prized rifle—the big brother whom some of these men or their raggedy-assed brethren had killed gutlessly from ambush.

  Lord help him, as Hunter squeezed the Henry’s trigger and watched Billy Chaney punched back off his horse. Hunter cut loose with a wild, involuntary Rebel yell, an ear-rattling chortling wail that would have impressed even Bobby Lee—the coyote, not the Confederate general, though the latter likely would have sat up and took notice as well.

  Guffawing loudly, Hunter rammed another round into the Henry’s action and fired down into the box canyon before him, at the horseback riders sitting their horses like ducks on a millrace.

  Damn hoople heads had ridden straight into his trap.

  Hunter fired again, again, again, and again, flames geysering from the Henry’s barrel and the empty, smoking cartridges arcing back over his right shoulder as he opened the breech and seated yet another round that sent yet another Chaney-sympathizing SOB wailing to his reward.

  He was disappointed when only six riderless horses were bucking and pitching and screaming loudly down there beyond the webbing fog of powder smoke. Nasty Pete was down there, as well, but he was acting far calmer than the other six mounts, who were wheeling in the darkness and finally galloping out through the bottleneck-like entrance to the box canyon, on the canyon’s far side.

  Pete had just turned and was starting to follow them when Hunter, rising from his prone position behind a low rock and a thick cedar root, stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Pete whinnied, looking up at Hunter, who approached the lip of the canyon.

  “Stay, Pete.”

  The horse bobbed its head and remained in place.

  Quickly, adroitly, Hunter clambered down the canyon wall, leaping the last five feet to the canyon floor and swinging around to face the chasm littered with sprawled, man-shaped silhouettes.

  One man was moving, moaning.

  Hunter walked over. The only man who appeared not to have given up his ghost was Billy Chaney. Chaney was holding a hand to his neck, groaning and cursing and pushing up into a sitting position. He heard Hunter’s quiet barefoot tread, saw his tall shadow angle over him.

  Chaney looked up, sidelong, raising one brow, saw the broad-brimmed Confederate campaign hat on his assailant’s head, the grizzly claw necklace splayed across his broad chest.

  He looked at the Henry rifle in Hunter’s right hand.

  “Ah hell,” he said.

  “Fittin’ place for you, Billy.”

  Hunter aimed the Henry casually with one hand and drilled a neat, round hole through the dead center of Billy Chaney’s forehead.

  His rifle report rocketed around the canyon before dwindling toward the stars.

  Silence settled.

  It was short-lived.

  As Hunter looked around, making sure none of the other Chaney riders was still moving, a horse whickered beyond the canyon’s entrance. It was followed by a man’s hushed voice. Another hushed voice answered the first one.

  Quickly, Hunter made his way over to the narrow canyon entrance, the thick, calloused soles of his bare feet absorbing the pinch of sharp rocks and thorns. He dropped to a knee at the entrance’s left side and peered out into the dry creek bed down where he’d led his foolhardy pursuers.

  Maybe sixty yards back down the cut, two horseback riders were moving slowly toward him, riding abreast. Hunter could see only their shadows, which occasionally melded to the shadows of large trees and rocks as well as to the cutbanks on each side of the wash.

  The men kept coming, the horses taking slow, plodding steps toward the canyon, one of the horses bobbing its head, likely smelling the coppery odor of fresh blood and powder smoke.

  “You see anything?” one rider asked the other when they were roughly thirty yards from Hunter’s position.

  “Hell, it’s so damn dark I can’t see my hand in front of my face.”

  “The shots came from just ahead. You think maybe they got him?”

  “If they did, where are they?”

  Hunter straightened. He stepped forward, his left arm and his rifle wide, showing himself and saying, “They’re in the canyon yonder,” Hunter said. “They’re as dead as Sunday’s pig.”

  “Nuts,” one of the men cried, jerking back on his horse’s reins.

  Hunter racked a round into the Henry’s breech, snapped the brass butt plate to his shoulder, aimed quickly, and triggered two quick rounds, emptying both saddles. The horses reared, clawing their hooves at the sky, whinnying crazily, then swung around and galloped back the way they’d come, kicking one of the two fallen men.

  The other one grunted as he heaved himself onto all fours and began crawling after the horses.

  Hunter walked up to him.

  He kicked the man over on his back. The man looked up at him. It was Wilbur Brown, a man who mucked out livery barns in Tigerville and was a known Chaney friend and Confederate-hater.

  “Rebel trash!” Brown spat.

  Hunter responded with Shep’s Henry.

  CHAPTER 29

  Hunter raised the Henry, the octagonal maw smoking in the darkness. He rested the rifle on his shoulder, held up his left, gloved hand.

  As still as stone.

  He looked down at the man he’d just killed. The man’s eyes were half-open, dimly reflecting the moonlight. Blood bubbled darkly from the round hole just above his right brow.

  Hunter’s nerves were customarily calm in the face of killing. He wasn’t sure what bothered him worse—that he’d killed again or that he felt little to no emotion about it. At least, no emotion in its aftermath. A few minutes earlier, however, the bloodlust had literally howled out of him, as it had in the early days of the war, when he’d found himself not only uncommonly adept at making war but being thrilled by it.

  Like a savage. Which he supposed a very large part of him was despite his efforts to deny that aspect of himself. He had a good dose of the warrior blood of his Scottish ancestors, forever at war with the wild blond hordes from across the North Atlantic.

  He felt no emotion. No guilt. No regret. If he and his family had been left alone, he wouldn’t have had to take up arms again. But they hadn’t been left alone. His brothers had been killed, his father wounded.

  All he really felt about the entire nasty mess was a firm resolve. He hadn’t started this war. But he was damn sure going to finish it.

  He could hear men yelling farther back along the dry creek bed—likely those injured from the breakneck run along the wash, who’d had the misfortune of finding themselves astride less sure-footed and night-savvy mounts than Nasty Pete—and those men gathering the injured as well as the dead. Hunter felt compelled to go back and finish them all off—one after another.

  Why not?

  They’d burned his ranch and some had probably been in on the earlier ambush that had killed Shep and Tye.

  He nixed the idea. He’d killed enough men for one night. When more came after him, he’d kill them. He’d kill as many as he had to. He’d like to kill Stillwell, as well, but he had a feeling the man had taken the gold—Hunter and Annabelle’s stake—and lit out for Mexico. Maybe someday Hunter would meet the gutless thief again, and he’d settle up for the thievery and the cave-in.

  He’d done enough here for one night. Besides, he wanted to check on Annabelle and his father. These men wouldn’t track him tonight. They’d had a belly full of Hunter
Buchanon.

  He whistled for Nasty Pete. When the horse had trotted up to him, blowing and shaking his head, Hunter shoved the Henry into the saddle scabbard, mounted up, and rode off down the dark draw, past the entrance to the box canyon filled with corpses. He took a roundabout way back toward the cave.

  He knew this part of the Hills like the back of his hand, and Nasty Pete did as well—even at night. Some horses were better night travelers than others, and Nasty Pete was the best night horse Hunter had ever ridden.

  Nearly an hour later, he rode up the final ridge through the trees and saw the small, flickering orange fire that Annabelle had kept burning against the night’s chill. From somewhere, Bobby Lee gave a low howl. Nasty Pete took only two more strides before there was the loud scrape of a Winchester being cocked.

  “Who’s there?” Anna called. “Name yourself!”

  Hunter smiled. He could hear her but he couldn’t see her. She’d obviously heard him coming and moved away from the fire, knowing the flames would compromise her night vision and allow her to be seen by a rider coming up on her like Hunter was now.

  “It’s me, honey.”

  Hunter kept Nasty Pete moving up the steep incline, hearing the crackling of the flames now in the cool, quiet night. Bobby Lee ran up and then around Hunter and Pete, yipping softly in greeting. Hunter heard the soft ping of the Winchester’s hammer being set down against the firing pin. Anna stepped out of the darkness to the left of the cave and into the small sphere of flickering light encircling the fire.

  Anna leaned the rifle against the cave wall, then strode down to where Hunter stopped Nasty Pete near where Anna’s buckskin was tied and wildly switching its tail, happy to have Nasty Pete back, Hunter reckoned—as Nasty as Pete was.

  “Thank God,” Anna said. “I heard the shooting.”

  Hunter swung down from the grullo’s back.

  Anna gazed up at him, her eyes wide with concern. “Are you all right?”

  Hunter nodded, wrapped his arms around her, and hugged her tightly against him. She hugged him back. She lowered her gaze to his feet and then smiled up at him. “My barefoot warrior.”