by E. R. Slade
In the end he decided he couldn’t take the chance. He started back down the trail, mopping sweat with his bandanna. He went fairly slowly, eyeballing every bit of ground and every view through the trees to both sides.
As he got down near where Billy had been killed, having seen nothing, he started thinking about how likely it was that Everson would ride up that nightmare trail in the middle of the night. Yes, it was an obstacle to anybody wanting to follow, but it was also a considerable threat to life and limb even if you knew it well—and what would be the necessity? Nobody apparently suspected him. And riding down that trail in the dark with heavy saddlebags on behind would only be that much more risky.
He had reasoned Everson must have done so, at least the night Lon arrived in town, since the bandits had been riding up toward the pass after killing Billy, and either they had come back down with Everson’s share or he went up after it. Since he couldn’t picture the dividing up going on without all of them there, or see why they would want to haul the booty up that cliff more than once, it had seemed a reasonable guess that they had a hide-out up here and Everson went to see them at it.
But maybe not. Maybe there was no hide-out, just a meeting place, which would mean there was nothing to find. In which case the next meeting place could be anywhere.
Yet, where did the bandits go? They had to live somewhere. They were never seen in town. They almost had to have a hide-out, didn’t they? And if they’d had one up here somewhere a few days or a week ago, would they have abandoned it on Lon’s account? Didn’t seem likely to him.
But what about the lack of tracks? All that meant was that they either didn’t use the trail much, or made a point of riding around the few places where a track would show.
In his gut, Lon still thought the road agents had someplace to go up here. Finding it, however, was going to have to wait.
The trip down the cliff face went relatively easily—comparatively speaking. He tried to imagine getting so used to it that doing it in the dark—both up and down—wouldn’t seem like much of an obstacle. Maybe on a sure-footed horse that knew the way it would look less threatening.
He figured he was going to be right on time, but when he came in sight of town, there was the stage pulling out already. With him a ten or fifteen minute ride away at full tilt.
He knew Blacky was tired from all the climbing up and down, and he was tired himself one way and another, but this was no time to dawdle. He nudged his mount into a run, then managed to open him up in a full gallop.
He didn’t care for racing downhill over terrain he wasn’t familiar with. Could be a hole for Blacky to step in. But it was that or have no hope of catching up with the stage.
He aimed to cut the road so as to intercept the coach, then had to change the point he thought he would meet it, then again. Finally he saw he was going to have to give up that idea and try to catch up on the road. At least it would be easier going and less hazard to Blacky’s legs.
The stage appeared and disappeared as it wound through the scattered stands of trees, trailing a plume of dust. He caught glimpses of the driver’s whip snaking out, the stage swaying and rocking, top-heavy with luggage, the three guards with guns leaning into the turns. Two of them were Tuft’s men, the other the stage’s usual guard.
Maybe they could shoot their way through; but Everson would have planned for this. What would he do?
Lon made the road, but far enough behind the stage that it was out of sight and the dust had already settled or blown away on the light breeze. Blacky really needed a rest. He was panting dangerously. Lon let him walk a hundred yards, until the panting eased.
“Sorry,” he said, “but now we’ve got to go.” And he set his heels. The road was headed downhill, but only slightly. He knew later on it was going to drop off steeply and the favored place for holdups was just ahead of this since the stage had to slow down there and thread several tight turns between big tumbledown boulders. So Warner had described it to him. It shouldn’t be far now.
The trouble with trying to shoot your way through a place like that was that your advantage as a moving target was much reduced and you had no cover while the road agents had plenty.
He was now racing through a thick stand of evergreens and tasted grit in the air. With the sound of Blacky’s hooves and the wind in his ears he couldn’t hear anything else, but he must be catching up.
Gunfire erupted ahead, driving Lon’s heart up his throat. He yanked out his Colt, knowing he wouldn’t be able to hit much from the back of a galloping horse.
Blacky spun around a tight turn in the woods and there was the stage careening left out of sight around a huge boulder, the riflemen trying to aim up at the top of an even bigger boulder to the right from which came a puff of smoke. The slam of the rifle shot echoed, one man fell off the rear of the stage into the dust and there was answering fire from the stage, now out of sight.
Lon guided Blacky past the man in the dust, one of Tuft’s guards, who lay still, eyes open, rifle in the road beyond his open hand. In a moment Lon flashed around the left-hand boulder, saw another man in the road, heard more shooting, saw a third man toppling off the seat next to the driver, the stage going too fast, slamming into rock as it spun out of sight again.
More shots, now all from above. Lon knew he couldn’t do anything with his pistol and would have stopped to use his rifle except that he couldn’t see a target to shoot at.
There seemed to be only one rifleman above, far as he could tell. He was still shooting, presumably now at the driver. If the stage had no driver ...
Lon heard lead slam into rock to his left, and hugged the right side of the trail hoping it would make him harder to see; he got around the next turn.
And there was the stage headed down a steep grade, no driver in sight, horses spooked and running full tilt.
Lead sang off stones in the road—bullets meant for him.
Blacky was flagging under him, but he drove in his heels and yelled, bending low over his horse’s neck. The pistol was useless so he put it away.
Down over the edge they went, the stage just ahead and careening wildly. Inside it a woman was screaming, and the gray head of an older man stuck through a window on the left trying to make out what was happening.
Blacky was gaining, slowly. The road turned left, fairly sharply, the stage skidded, leaned, the inside wheels lifted; then after Lon was sure it was going over the wheels came back down, kicking dust as they grabbed the road again.
The shooting from behind had stopped, he was vaguely aware. He must have gotten out of sight of the rifleman. The older man in the coach saw Lon now and he yanked his head in. He must think this was another of the bandits. The woman was still screaming, a wild, insane sound.
Blacky would stumble soon if he had to keep this up, Lon could sense it. But they were nearly up to the spinning left rear wheel of the coach. Lon thought he might soon be able to draw even with the door.
Here was the man’s hand, holding the gun.
“Don’t!” Lon yelled, and the gun went off.
The slug went elsewhere, not being aimed.
“Runaways!” Lon shouted. “Let me aboard!”
The head reappeared; a mask of terror: the man was trying to see whether to trust Lon.
“I’m not one of them!” Lon shouted to him; he drew back into the shadows inside uncertainly. Lon wished the woman would stop screaming, but by the sound of it she probably wasn’t even aware of what she was doing.
There was another turn coming up. If he intended to try this he’d better do it now.
There was the brake arm just in front of the rear wheel; he edged Blacky closer, got his foot out of the stirrup.
He wasn’t going to be able to reach the luggage rack on the roof until he was off his horse. He could easily fall.
But there wasn’t any choice. He freed the opposite foot from that stirrup, slid off sideways slightly, felt for the brake arm, touched it; Blacky pulled away, then closed wi
th it again.
He put his weight on the brake arm, lifted off Blacky dropping the reins, swayed, fell against the side of the coach, got hold of the edge of the roof, then the rail of the luggage rack, then swung to face the coach door, right foot still on the brake arm, the other foot trying to find something to rest on, hanging with both hands from the rack.
There was only the front window, a big step up, but it got him high enough to help him scramble onto the luggage on the roof.
The prospect ahead was not encouraging. The horses were heading into the curve and the road was getting steeper. Boulders loomed on either side. The stage swayed, skidded, slammed into one of them and he lay flat and hung on; the luggage moved and came partly loose.
But the stout Concord coach still hung together, had all its wheels. He crawled forward and got down into the driver’s seat, saw one rein snagged in easy reach, but the other was dragging from the off wheel horse.
One hand on the boot dashboard, feet precariously on the pole, he managed to retrieve the line and got back up into the seat and started yelling whoa and hauling on the lines.
He might as well have been trying to stop a freight train with a pair of reins. The horses were totally spooked and the coach was an angry grizzly chasing them down the hill.
Lon saw another, sharper turn coming up, and there was a drop-off on the outside of the turn. He hauled on the brake lever, managed to make the rear wheels skid a little, but that made the coach yaw and pitch dangerously.
He talked to the horses, trying to make his voice sound soothing, meanwhile working the reins, hauling hard first on one, then other, attempting to distract the lead animals.
The woman, drat her, kept on screaming. If she’d shut up maybe it would help, but he didn’t see what he could do about her.
Here came the turn, the coach skidded, the outside horses kicked stones off the edge, he got a dizzying look down at treetops below, and grimly hauled on the inside rein.
They made it.
Then the ground started to flatten out a bit, the road fairly straight. He worked the reins, the brake, the reins, the brake, talked more to the horses.
The woman finally stopped screaming. Maybe she’d screamed herself into a faint. But it helped. The horses began to respond a bit to the reins, easing off their pace, maybe deciding the coach was only a coach and not a bear after all.
The horses slowed to a trot, then a walk, and finally he drew them to a halt. He realized his hands were shaking with practically a death grip on the reins. Consciously he relaxed them, tried to get his breath to come easily, watching the heavily lathered horses pant and quiver in their exhaustion.
Then Blacky came trotting by, gave a nicker and Lon called to him.
“Everybody all right inside?” he asked.
There was a mumbled something from within the coach but at the same time a motion in the trees to the left.
Here came the two men who’s killed Billy, both holding rifles and wearing laconic grins. Lon’s hand went to his Colt.
It wasn’t there.
Chapter Eighteen
“Hands up,” the one without a scar said. “Everybody inside, out. Reach for the sky.”
The older man and an older woman that Lon now recognized as the same ones who’d gone for a ride with Zinnia and Wescott, got shakily out, the woman leaning heavily on the man, starting to weep.
The man with the ugly scar had them empty pockets, looked into the coach, found a bag that was probably the woman’s, dumped it out, found a little cash but not much else of interest to him, took the man’s gold pocket watch and fob, his small, one-shot pistol, took the woman’s wedding and engagement rings and earrings and a bracelet she was wearing.
“You,” he said to Lon, “toss down whatever’s in the boot.”
There was a strongbox there, chained to the coach.
“Can’t,” Lon said, inwardly fuming that this holdup was happening on his watch. He sure had made a success of things so far.
Two rifles were trained on him. “Think you can,” the scar said dryly.
“You don’t understand. It’s chained.”
“Then unlock it.”
“Driver probably has the key, or maybe one of those guards you shot.”
“You got an ax. I see it hanging under the seat.”
With it the wooden brace was cut through and the box—heavy enough to take two men to hand it down conveniently—was set on the ground and attacked with the ax also. Inside was a sizable quantity of gold and silver coinage, plus some sort of gold-embossed certificates. Lon tried to fix every detail he could in his mind.
The road agents loaded a pair of sacks and put them on Blacky with sardonic sideways grins at Lon. They seemed uninterested in the luggage on the roof. They went off into the woods and were quickly out of sight.
“Are you folks all right?” Lon asked.
“We’re alive,” the man said, almost as though he wasn’t sure whether he was glad of it or not. He seemed pretty shaken.
“The only thing to do now is turn this coach around and pick up the others on our way back to town,” Lon said.
The woman seemed ready to collapse. He and the older man helped her inside, used some traveling robes to make her as comfortable as possible, and then the two of them stood by the door for a minute.
“Don’t think we’re not grateful to you,” the man said. “That was an amazing thing you did. I thought we’d all get killed, sure.”
“So did I there for a while.”
They were an hour or more picking up the driver and the three guards. They were all dead. Lon tied their bodies on top and on the rear of the stage so as not to upset the woman any further. He wasn’t sure what her condition was.
Lon did find his gun. It had fallen out of his holster while he was boarding the stage, it appeared. But that was about the only bright spot he saw. The road agents had gotten clean away and by the time he’d get a chance to attempt tracking them he’d be hours behind. Should he try to follow Everson instead?
It seemed clear that the shooter from the boulder top had to have been Everson. There was no way the road agents could have caught up so quickly as to be stepping out of the woods as soon as the stage arrived at the bottom of the grade. That meant Everson knew now he’d gotten the wrong man last night. Would he have gone straight back to town? Or to meet the road agents?
Lon checked over his pistol as he drove the stage the last hundred yards to town, then holstered the weapon to have both hands for the reins.
As he hauled to a stop in front of the stage depot, people gathering around to find out what this was all about, Lon’s eye was running up and down the street. No Everson. He climbed down, aiming to get out of sight fast. As he reached the rear of the coach, there came a familiar voice.
“Didn’t I tell you what would happen if you came back here?”
There stood Everson, gun drawn.
Lon cursed his own stupidity in not having had his pistol in hand from the moment he’d put down the reins.
“Drop your gun belt,” Everson said. “Move real slow. Your hand gets anywhere near your shootin’ iron, you’re a dead man.”
As Lon was considering his options, the older man, just climbing from the stage, said, “Hold on a minute, Marshal. You have the wrong man.”
“Stay clear,” Everson warned him. “No telling what a desperado will do.”
“I tell you, you have the wrong man. He saved our lives.”
“I’ve got the right one, all right. Drop that gun belt.”
There really wasn’t anything to do but drop it. He was aware of lots of blank, open-mouthed faces, people watching these proceedings.
So this is how it ends, Lon thought, as Everson marched him, hands up, to the jail. Curiosity seekers followed. That would save him for a short time. But when they had cleared off ...
Chapter Nineteen
Nothing more happened the rest of the day. Everson must want the cover of darkness.
The darker it got, the lower Lon got. Facing his own end was hard. But thinking of how Zinnia would remember him was what was most painful. What others thought didn’t matter as much. But if Zinnia always remembered him as the man who had deceived her, as a thief ... Would Betty Logan try to convince her otherwise? Why would Zinnia believe her? Why would Betty care to try to convince her, anyhow?
He heard approaching footfalls. His heart jammed pounding in his throat. Would Everson let him out and tell him to try to run, or just shoot him in the jail?
He decided the moment he was in sight of Everson without the jail door in the way—if he got that chance—he was going to go for him. If he was to die it wasn’t going to be standing back-to Everson with his hands up. He was going to be in the air launched at Everson like a mountain lion.
The latch of the outer door rattled. All of Lon’s muscles tightened in readiness as he flattened against the wall to the side of the iron door.
“Mr. Pike?” It was the doctor’s voice.
“Yes,” Lon said, gulping. “Yes.”
The iron door opened and he stepped out.
“Am I glad to see you,” he said in a low, shaky voice. “I really appreciate you saving me from my own stupidity.”
“I’d clear off fast,” the doctor said. “Here’s your gun. My little ruse won’t give you that much time.”
“Ruse?”
“I sent word to Everson that I wanted to see him. He’ll be wondering what’s up by now.”
“You watch yourself. He could shoot you, too.”
“That may be him coming now.”
They hurried in the gathering darkness, going out the rear of the alley.
When Lon explained what he hoped to do, the doctor lent him both a horse and a Winchester—Warner’s having gone off on Blacky’s saddle. Lon cleared out for the trail up the cliff, glad to be unexpectedly free, glad to hear that Scott Warner was holding his own, glad for the sharpness of the doctor. He would owe him the rest of his life. What there might be left of it.
Riding the cliff trail on Blacky had been bad enough. Doing it on a strange horse whose ways he didn’t know, and who didn’t know his ways either, made it extremely precarious. The animal either wanted to go too fast, or not at all.