The lookout was riding back down from the ridge five minutes later as Rangle returned to the camp. He walked across to the wounded outlaw, took the pannikin of whisky from South’s hand without a word, drained it, then tossed it aside. The hard stares of the outlaws flickered from Rangle to Stonehill. More than one of Rack Stonehill’s band of brigands had come to regret their decision to ride with Bo Rangle, and it seemed that the farther they travelled the meaner their notorious new partner became.
“How many, Bo?” Stonehill asked.
“About fifteen,” came the terse reply. “Raidin’ party is my guess.”
“That’s not good,” Stonehill said quietly. “Sioux, do you reckon?”
“This is Sioux country.”
The outlaws were still digesting this bad news when Hud York rode in with more. The lookout had sighted riders far to the south.
Rangle was the first to reach the crest of the ridge. Using York’s battered field glasses, he focused them on the string of tiny dots that were barely visible to the naked eye. The glasses made the riders bigger but there was no hope of identifying them yet. The cavalcade dropped from sight behind a low hill and Rangle lowered the glasses.
“How many did you count, Bo?” Stonehill asked, reining in beside him.
“Seven,” Rangle replied, tight-lipped.
“A seven-man posse?” Brick Whitehead frowned. “That don’t seem to add up. I never heard of a posse yet that was smaller than the jokers they was huntin’. Mebbe it ain’t a posse. Could be a bunch of miners? Hide-hunters mebbe?”
“Could be,” Rangle conceded. “But we’re gonna wait until they show again to make sure.”
It proved to be a ten-minute wait before the riders appeared again. They came from the timber, moving down a grassy slope towards a jagged arroyo. Wiping the glasses on his sleeve, Rangle lifted them to his eyes again and adjusted the screws. The first rider he focused on was a tiny, nondescript man in an ankle-length coat astride a buckskin. Rangle grunted. That pilgrim sure enough didn’t look like a posse man. He shifted the glasses and a towering figure astride a barrel-chested appaloosa jumped into his vision.
The outlaws heard Rangle’s sucked intake of breath, then they watched the color drain from his face.
“Who the hell is it?” Stonehill asked.
Rangle didn’t reply as an even more brutal shock came hard on the heels of the first. The tall rider in the black suit riding directly behind Hank Brazos was Duke Benedict.
Bo Rangle felt his heart clench in his chest. It was impossible. He’d seen that saloon collapse in flames, and nobody had come out. And Whitehead and Macall had gunned Brazos down at the Frontier Hotel.
Stonehill spoke to him but Rangle didn’t hear. The outlaw reached out, plucked the glasses from Rangle’s hand and lifted them to his eyes.
“Judas Priest!” he cried. “It can’t be!”
“Who the hell is it?” Whitehead demanded.
Stonehill stared at Rangle with disbelieving eyes. “It’s Brazos and Benedict. And Tara’s with ’em!”
The glasses were passed swiftly from hand to hand. Then they were all gabbling at once, except Bo Rangle. Seldom was Bo Rangle shaken, but he was shaken now. Benedict and Brazos had survived Whetstone, just as they’d survived so many times before. Benedict and Brazos. Their names hammered in the cage of his skull. How had they done it? How?
Then slowly the terrible shock left him and in its place came murderous rage. Whitehead and Macall! It had been their job to take Brazos quietly in Whetstone. They’d failed, and because they had failed, Benedict had been alerted, and somehow had escaped the holocaust. They had alerted Benedict, and they’d lied about killing Brazos. It was all their fault ...
Nobody saw the gun slip from leather; they were still watching that distant line of slow-moving riders. Rangle’s eyes, an insane blazing green in the sunlight, stabbed at Brick Whitehead, and his gun went up. Ward Bishop yelled a warning but it was too late. The Colt went off with a roar and Whitehead was slammed from the saddle with a bullet in the head. As Whitehead hit the ground, Rangle slewed in his saddle and sent another slug screaming between Bob Checker and Horace Dunbar. The bullet caught Sam Macall in the chest. Macall’s eyes bugged and his mouth opened wide with the terrible impact. Rangle then sent another bullet between his teeth.
The swiftest to react was Stonehill. He had his gun half out of leather when Rangle’s smoking Colt jerked to train on his barrel of a chest.
“Go ahead, Stonehill!” Rangle said coldly. “Pull it out and I’ll blast you to Kingdom Come.” His mouth twisted. “By Judas, I reckon I’ll do it anyway. Any man fool enough to have a pair like that in his string deserves to be put out of his misery.”
Stonehill froze, staring death in the face. In the shocked silence, other hands clutched gun butts but no gun came clear. The outlaws were all ruthless killers with more blood on their hands than they could ever wash off, but in that terrifying moment, as they stared at Bo Rangle, they were aware for the first time that this was a different, more savage breed of killer than they had ever known. Even with Whitehead and Macall lying dead in the grass, they vastly outnumbered Rangle. But had the odds been even greater in their favor, it was likely that no man there would have been willing to be the first to face that murderous six-gun.
“Go ahead,” Rangle raged at Stonehill. “Draw!”
Rack Stonehill couldn’t understand the things that lay behind Rangle’s eruption into murderous madness. The outlaw leader didn’t know how often Rangle had counted Duke Benedict and Hank Brazos dead, only to have them seemingly return from the grave to dog his heels. All Stonehill knew in that frightening moment was that he didn’t want to die.
He lifted his hand from his gun.
A sneer of contempt worked over Rangle’s mouth. The madness was still in him as his eyes swept over the white, strained faces of the others. Deliberately, he thumbed the hammer forward and let his gun arm fall to his side. Still no gun left leather. His lips skinning back in a wolfish grin, Rangle drove his Colt home and jerked his hand free from the butt.
“Now then?” he breathed.
No man moved. None seemed even to breathe. Finally, Rack Stonehill licked at his dry lips and got his voice working.
“We don’t want to gunfight you, Bo.” He turned a haggard look on the dead. “Mebbe ... mebbe you had a right ...”
Rangle’s chest shuddered with a convulsive breath and he felt the crazy, killing rage begin to ebb. They could have gunned him down, and in his fury he wouldn’t have given a damn. But the black moment was past now. He was again in control of himself ... and his position was stronger than ever.
“You bet I had the right, Stonehill,” he said. “And now that we’ve cleared the air, let’s make sure we understand each other. Until now we’ve been pards, hardcase. That ain’t so any more. Now I’m the boss man, and what I say goes. After you jokers quieten down and think this over some, you’re gonna start thinkin’ that maybe you’ll hightail it. But you ain’t gonna do it. And you know why, I reckon—on account of I’ll gun the first bastard that so much as looks crosswise. Compre?”
Nobody spoke.
“Compre?” he repeated.
“Sure ... sure, we understand, Bo,” Stonehill got out. “Don’t we, boys?”
They nodded and Bo Rangle smiled.
“Good enough. All right, let’s dust. I’ll ride drag from now on.”
The riders kneed their horses away. Stonehill swallowed painfully as he rode past Macall’s body, then turned in the saddle as Rangle fell in behind.
“What about Benedict and Brazos, Bo?”
“Leave me to worry about them.”
“Whatever you say, Bo.”
“That’s how it is, Stonehill—whatever I say. Just make sure you don’t forget it.”
It was late afternoon when Hank Brazos brought the cavalcade to a halt with a lift of the hand. He dismounted, passed the lines of his horse to Benedict, and with Bullpup at his heels walke
d across to where clear hoofmarks showed in a stretch of sandy soil.
“What’s he doin’ now?” Nick Beecher asked impatiently. It was the first time Beecher had spoken to Benedict since they’d come upon the corpses on the ridge just before noon.
Benedict didn’t answer, mainly because he didn’t know what Brazos was doing, though he guessed it had something to do with the Indian sign the Texan had picked up many miles back. Beecher muttered under his breath and reached for the bottle in his saddlebag.
“Better go easy on that stuff, Beecher,” Doc Skine advised. “If there are Indians about, we’ll all need clear heads tonight.”
Beecher bit the cork out. “Any time I want advice from you I’ll ask for it—lunger.”
Skine’s lips compressed but he didn’t reply. Benedict cocked a leg over the saddle pommel and beckoned the little man forward.
“You didn’t like that much, did you, Doc?” Benedict asked quietly.
“I can take it.”
Benedict studied him. “But you didn’t always take it, did you?”
Skine took out his kerchief and coughed into it. “Not always,” he admitted.
A match flared and Benedict sucked his stogie into life. He sat watching Brazos for a time as the Texan and his dog quartered the terrain surrounding the sandy strip. Then Benedict turned back to Skine.
“There seemed to be some doubt in Whetstone about your having been a gunslinger, Doc.”
The little man’s pale face broke into a humorless smile. “You can’t really blame them, can you? Nobody can say I look the part anymore.”
“I believe it.”
Skine’s eyebrows lifted. “You do?”
“Sure. I pride myself on being a good judge of men, Doc, and I’ve seen more gunfighters than I care to remember. You’ve got the look.”
“Well, you’re right, Benedict. But the old days seem a long way back now.”
“I sensed I had you pegged right, Doc. But you still puzzle me.”
“How’s that?”
“Why you’re here. I mean, I know Beecher and Cody are in it for the money, and the girl because she wants to even a score. As for the village idiot, he doesn’t have the brains to know how dangerous it is. But I don’t know why a dying man would want any part of a thing like this.”
Skine’s eyes narrowed. “Who says I’m dying?”
“I do.”
Their glances locked and held, then Skine shrugged and half-smiled. “You’re sharp, Benedict. Too sharp for comfort, maybe.”
“Not as sharp as I’d like to be—I still don’t know why.”
Skine turned his head to watch Brazos and for a long moment Benedict thought he wasn’t going to reply. But finally Skine said softly, “You really want to know?”
“I’m curious by nature.”
Skine looked at him with haggard eyes. “I can take being sick, Benedict, and I’m not afraid to die. What I can’t take is the feeling that this thing eating me out inside might have stolen more than lung and blood and tissue. It’s been two years since I used a gun. I’m not sure I’ve got the nerve for it anymore.” He straightened his narrow shoulders. “I want to find out if I’m still a man, and I guess I’ll have the chance before this is over. Satisfied?”
Benedict nodded. “I guess I am. And somehow I think you’ll make it, Doc.”
“You sound like you really mean that.”
“I do. Does that puzzle you?”
“Maybe a little. You’ve struck me as a feller who doesn’t believe in much of anything ... or anybody.”
Benedict’s broad smile flashed. It was his defense when he felt somebody might be getting close to seeing through his cynical veneer. “You’re right of course, Doc,” he murmured, then he turned his head as Brazos came walking back. “Well, Johnny Reb, what’s the story?”
Leather creaked in protest as Brazos heaved himself into the saddle. “Party of about fifteen,” he grunted. “They passed this way only a few hours ahead of Rangle, pushin’ north. Injuns.”
“That’s not good.”
“Correct.”
“What do you suggest?” Benedict’s tone was deferential, friendly. Last night’s small rift arising from the clash over the girl had only lasted until they’d come upon the buzzard-picked bodies of the two outlaws. The grim reminder of the dangers they could expect ahead had been more than enough to banish the brief unpleasantness, and they were back on easy terms again.
“I’d like to cut off the trail and chance pickin’ it up later,” Brazos confided, “but I guess that’s too big a risk. What do you reckon?”
“The risk of losing Rangle or the risk of running into a party of Sioux bucks? Not much of a choice, but I think I’d risk the redskins.”
Brazos grinned, the way he always did when the smell of danger was at its strongest. “That makes two of us, Yank.”
Five easy miles flowed behind them before they crossed a river that ran cold and swift over a sandy bottom. Beyond the river the country changed, the wide grass plains giving way to undulating hills and twisting canyons. Timber clothed the slopes, pine, piñons and great blue fragrant cedar bushes. Once a band of antelope wheeled and ran across an open space and into the timber, and tall gray deer with enormous antlers often bounced out of sight with long, stiff-legged jumps.
They came to a broad sweep of dead lava rock, twisted and fretted as though it had cooled only the day before instead of countless centuries ago. Brazos held them back to a walk while they crossed the lava for fear of laming the horses, then he signaled them into a lope again on the far side. The outlaws’ tracks still stretched ahead, but there was no longer any Indian sign to be seen.
By sundown they were riding plains wider and flatter than those they’d crossed before. The sun sank swiftly, and in the swift onrush of darkness they caught the glimmer of a campfire a long way ahead.
Benedict and Brazos brought the party to a halt, then rode on a short distance out of earshot to confer.
“Rangle?” Benedict asked, both puzzled and excited as he watched the distant point of fire.
It was a long time before Brazos answered, and in that time he had taken in every detail of the landscape ahead before the final darkness came down.
“I’d like to think it,” he said finally, “but it don’t set right, Yank. Maybe he doesn’t know we’re doggin’ him, but if he doesn’t then he’s growed mighty careless since we crossed tracks with him last. But even if he doesn’t know about us, he knows about the redskins. I saw where he took a good look at the Sioux sign back there, where we found them dead jokers.” He gestured ahead. “He’d have to be tetched in the head to light a fire like that, knowin’ there’re redguts about.”
His voice showing his disappointment, Benedict said, “That’s logical, I suppose. But if it’s not Rangle, then who? Surely not the Indians?”
“Could be, but I doubt it.”
“Then what’s your guess?”
“I smell a trap.” Brazos leaned forward on the saddle horn.
“Figure it this way, Yank. If Rangle knows we’re on his trail, then mebbe he’s decided he’d like to get it over and finished with. So he lights a fire and hopes it brings us in.”
“So we go in. Only we don’t blunder in like a herd of buffalo. We move in nice and quiet and—”
“And get tangled up with the redskins.”
Benedict peered at him through the gloom. “Who said anything about redskins?”
“I’m sayin’ it. You can bet your best boots we ain’t the only ones to sight that fire, Yank. Those Sioux are about someplace, and if they’re the same breed we struck up here last time, they’ll move in and no beg-pardons. So that leaves us—”
“Where?”
“By glory, I wonder ...”
“Come on, man, out with it! What brilliant flash of inspiration has rendered you even more incomprehensible than usual?”
“Stifle them ten-dollar words and listen. Let’s go back to starters, Benedict. Rangle mak
es this fire to lure us in. But he’s no fool, so he’d be about dead-certain that it’d fetch the Sioux, too, and mebbe he’s smart enough to hope that we’ll run into the Injuns and it’ll be all over bar the scalpin’. You followin’ so far?”
“By glory, that has the smell of a Rangle ploy and no mistake.
“Dead right. But there’s more to come. Rangle sets this thing up, but he wants to see if it works out or not. It’s plain as paint he wouldn’t want to wait around within rifle shot of that fire, so he picks a vantage point. Well, there’s only one vantage point out there, and that’s that grassy hill about a mile west of the fire.”
“You’re saying you think Rangle could be up there?”
“I’m sayin’ that’s where I’d be if I was wearin’ his boots.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
Brazos reached out and took the head of Benedict’s black as he made to turn. “We’ll need to take this cautious, Yank. We’re still outnumbered, even with Skine, Beecher and Cody. We’ll have to leave Peter and the girl behind when we move in and—”
“I’m fully aware of the odds,” Benedict said impatiently. “Of course we’ll be cautious. And, in the interest of caution, we won’t tell the girl what’s going on.”
“Why not?”
“Use your head, man. All she would have to do at the critical moment would be to let off a shot to tip Rangle off.”
“Let off a shot?” Brazos exclaimed. “What the tarnal would she do that for? She wants him dead!”
“So she says. Perhaps she does and perhaps she doesn’t. All I’m saying is, we’re not going to risk it. Agreed?”
“I guess ... but you’re wrong about her, Yank, all the way wrong.”
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