Buckhorn and Madison dismounted. Madison introduced Buckhorn to the other guard, whose name was Carlson. That one was a lot more curt with the nod he gave Buckhorn, which was the reaction most people had to a half-breed.
One of the men from the wagon came over. He wore work boots, canvas trousers, and a faded blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up a couple of turns to reveal brawny forearms. Instead of the Stetson most men wore out here, he had a brown fedora on his head, like a businessman from back east.
“Neal Drake,” he introduced himself before Madison could say anything. He held out a hand to Buckhorn. “I’m the chief surveyor on this crew. I assume you’re another of Mr. Conroy’s men?”
“That’s right. Joe Buckhorn.” They shook hands.
Drake chuckled, which relieved the somewhat grim lines of his face for a second. “I’m glad to see another man who doesn’t share the western taste in headgear.”
“I’ve just always been partial to a bowler for some reason.”
Madison said, “Jimmy tells me it’s been quiet out here.”
“Yes, for a change. We’re making nice progress. We ought to be out of the canyon in another couple of days.”
“That’s good to hear,” Madison said. He turned to the guards and went on, “Jimmy, you and Carlson can head for Crater City.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the settlement. “Buckhorn and I will take over out here.”
“You’re gonna take a turn yourself, Yancy?” Jimmy asked, obviously surprised.
“That’s right. New man and all.”
“Well, it don’t matter none to me, I reckon,” Jimmy said with a shrug and a grin. “I’m ready to pay me a visit to Miss Quinn’s house! I’m partial to that little Chinese gal who works there, the one they call Nancy.”
The two men slid their rifles in the saddle boots, mounted up, and rode toward the northern end of the canyon, not wasting any time turning their responsibilities over to Buckhorn and Madison. They were out of sight in a matter of minutes.
Buckhorn and Madison picketed their horses the way the other two mounts had been. As they drew their rifles from the scabbards, Madison said, “There’s not much to do out here except keep your eyes open. Watch the rimrock on both sides.”
Neal Drake said, “Someone took some shots at us from up there three days ago.”
“Anybody hurt?” Buckhorn asked.
“Not this time. They put holes in our water barrels, though. We had to go back to the springs on the other side of the mountains, patch them, and fill them again. Half a day’s time wasted.”
“Conroy said one man was killed . . . ?”
“That was a while back, about halfway between the mountains and Fletcher’s Crossing. They hit us in the middle of the night, yelling and shooting. They ran off our mules. I think that’s all they were really after, but one of the men got in the way of a bullet. He lived a few hours and died the next morning.” Drake’s face was plenty grim again. “It was after that I rode to Crater City and told Mr. Conroy we had to have some guards out here.”
“You didn’t have guards before that?”
Madison said, “Mr. Conroy didn’t realize it was necessary. He didn’t think Thornton would go as far as murder. I told him there was a chance of it . . .” Madison’s shoulders rose and fell. “But he’s the boss.”
“Before that I posted a sentry every night,” Drake said. “We all took turns. But we’re surveyors, not gunmen. Some jobs call for a different sort of professional.”
“That’s where we come in,” Madison said. “You go ahead with your surveying, Neal. Buckhorn and me . . . we’ll take care of any hot lead that needs to be dealt.”
CHAPTER 8
Buckhorn had seen surveyors at work before, so he didn’t take much interest in watching Neal Drake and the other four men in the crew setting up their transits, taking sightings, pounding stakes into the ground, and running lines between them.
He was curious enough, though, to ask Madison, “Who’s in charge of determining exactly where the line will go?”
“That’s Drake’s job,” the gunman answered. “He’s an engineer as well as a surveyor. Not the kind who drives a train—”
“I know what you mean,” Buckhorn said.
“He used to work for the Union Pacific. Supposed to be the best at what he does.” Madison grinned. “Sort of like me.”
Buckhorn heard the veiled challenge in Madison’s voice. Every man who made his living with a gun had to have that sort of arrogance about him, a belief that he really was the best. That served to counteract the almost near certainty that sooner or later he would die violently, when he came up against someone who really was better.
Buckhorn had accepted that fate for himself a long time ago. The only way to avoid it was to hang up his gun and find a place where nobody knew who he was, where he could live out his days doing something else.
The “something else” was the kicker in the deal. What was he going to do for a living? Clerk in a store? Push a mop in a saloon, like his grandfather had done?
A bullet was better. A second of pain, then endless oblivion, if he was lucky.
If he wasn’t—if all the sky pilots were right—he would wake up to the fires of hell, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about that now. It was too late.
“Who else has Thornton got working for him besides Ernie Gratton?” Buckhorn asked Madison, to pass the time as much as anything else.
“Larry Dunn, Ed Price, Lew Merrill, Calder Watson, Bob Leslie, Johnny Starr . . . Hell, I don’t know everybody who’s thrown in with him. I don’t keep up with all the gunnies who drift in and out of Crater City. You ever cross trails with any of those fellas?”
“Heard of some of them, that’s all.”
“You’re not friends with any of them?”
“A man would be a fool to make friends in this business,” Buckhorn said.
“That’s true.” Madison grinned. “You never know when you might have to shoot one of them. That could weigh on an hombre’s conscience—if he had one.”
They ate lunch from supplies that the surveyors had in the back of the big, heavy wagon. There were tents in the wagon, too, so they could move their camp every day as the work progressed.
After lunch, Neal Drake and his crew were ready to move on. Buckhorn and Madison put their rifles away while the surveyors climbed onto the wagon, and one of the men took up the reins to get the mules moving.
Buckhorn and Madison took the lead, riding past the staked lines that marked the path the railroad would follow. Next would come the grading crews to level the route. Buckhorn wouldn’t be surprised if they had already started working their way north from Fletcher’s Crossing.
The group traveled about half a mile before Drake called a halt.
“Set up camp here, Jack,” he told one of the men. “We’ll walk back to where we left off and start working in this direction.”
The surveyors began to jump down from the wagon. The driver looped the reins around the brake lever and stood up. As he did, a shot rang out and knocked him back over the seat to sprawl on some of the equipment stacked there.
Buckhorn knew instantly where the shot had come from. His keen sense of hearing was able to home in on the sound of the blast, which was loud enough to make him think it came from some sort of buffalo rifle.
He leaned forward in the saddle, jerked his Winchester from its sheath, and smoothly brought the weapon to his shoulder. It cracked sharply as he aimed a shot at the rimrock on the right side of the canyon.
Madison’s rifle slammed out a shot a mere heartbeat later, aimed in the same direction. Then both men each cranked off three more rounds as fast as they could work the Winchesters’ levers. It was unlikely they would hit anybody concealed in the rocks along the canyon’s rim, but that storm of lead ought to make the bushwhacker duck, anyway.
“Grab some cover!” Madison shouted at the surveyors. “Buckhorn and I will keep ’em busy!”
> They opened fire again. The echoes of the shots crashed back and forth between the canyon walls until they were deafening.
While that was going on, Drake and another surveyor grabbed hold of the wounded man and lifted him out of the wagon, handing him down to the other two men. Then all of them hustled toward some boulders that would provide shelter for them. There were a couple of rifles in the back of the wagon, but the surveyors were in such a hurry they left the weapons behind.
Buckhorn and Madison went the other way, urging their horses toward the base of the canyon wall on the same side as the ambusher. The stone wall itself would protect them, since it would be difficult for the hidden rifleman to get an angle on them from up there.
When they reached the base of the wall, they swung down from their saddles and dropped the reins, leaving their mounts ground hitched. Madison said, “That horse of yours doesn’t seem to spook easy.”
“He’s heard gunfire before,” Buckhorn said. He held the Winchester across his chest and looked up, searching for any sign of movement. After a moment, he went on, “You know whoever took that potshot may be gone by now.”
“Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if he lit a shuck,” Madison agreed. “Did you hear any more shots after that first one?”
“No.”
“Neither did I. Maybe he was satisfied with drilling one of Drake’s men.”
Buckhorn leaned out a little to study the canyon wall on both sides of them and asked, “You reckon there’s any way up there?”
“Hell, it’s got to be a hundred feet to the top! You’re not thinking about climbing it, are you, Buckhorn?”
“If anybody’s still up there, they wouldn’t be expecting that,” Buckhorn pointed out. “You could keep up some fire from down here so they’d think we were both still pinned down.”
“Sounds like a loco idea to me, but if you want to give it a try, it’s your hide you’ll be risking.”
The canyon wall was pretty rough, with lots of fissures and outcroppings, and quite a few gnarled, hardy bushes grew from it in places. Buckhorn’s eyes traced a possible route that he thought would take him to the top.
He handed his rifle to Madison and said, “I think I can make it. You can use both of those Winchesters to make it sound like we’re both down here.”
“All right. I’d tell you to be careful, but hell, this is a loco idea to start with!”
Buckhorn moved along the wall, staying close to it until he reached the spot where he wanted to start climbing. He wedged the toe of his left boot into a crack and stretched his right arm as far as he could to close his hand around a rocky knob. He pulled himself up and reached with his left hand for another hold.
Luckily the canyon wall wasn’t completely perpendicular. It sloped in just enough to make an ascent like this possible. Buckhorn climbed about a fourth of the way, then stopped to rest while he had a little ledge on which to rest both feet and a bush to cling to. He tested the plant’s roots before he trusted much weight to them.
Even though he was only about twenty-five feet off the ground, he knew better than to turn his head and look down. He had never really been bothered by a fear of heights, but there was no point in risking getting dizzy. Instead he looked at the rock wall a few inches in front of his face.
Down below, Yancy Madison kept up the gunfire directed at the rimrock. Now and then he fired the Winchesters one handed, at the same time, worried less about accuracy than about preserving the illusion that he and Buckhorn were both still shooting.
After catching his breath for a couple of minutes, Buckhorn started up again.
The buffalo gun’s dull boom sounded again above him. A yell came from across the canyon, probably from the boulders where Drake and the other surveyors had taken cover. Buckhorn resisted the temptation to turn his head and look in that direction. He couldn’t do those men any good if his head started spinning and he fell off the canyon wall.
At least he had confirmation now that the bushwhacker was still up there on the rimrock.
He stopped to rest only once more during the climb. The bushwhacker’s rifle blasted again while he was stopped. The slug whined off a rock down below. The man on the rim couldn’t get a clean shot at his targets, so he could be trying to bounce around a ricochet that might hit something. That wasn’t a bad strategy.
Buckhorn started climbing again.
His muscles were beginning to tremble a little by the time he reached the top. He pulled himself up and over and rolled into a little hollow. He stretched out there on his belly as he took off the bowler hat and raised his head to look in the direction of the bushwhacker’s shots.
Another boom from the buffalo gun. Buckhorn saw a puff of gray powdersmoke in the air on the other side of a big slab of stone. He pushed himself to hands and knees, clapped on the bowler, and then drew his Colt as he came up in a crouch and started catfooting toward the bushwhacker.
With the revolver leveled in front of him, he eased around the slab. The man with the buffalo gun was about fifteen feet away with his back toward Buckhorn, kneeling behind a rock. He was on the scrawny side, wearing overalls and a hat with a wide, floppy brim. He was reloading the single-shot buffalo gun, and after closing the breech he slid the barrel forward over the rock and rested the weapon there to steady it.
From where Buckhorn stood, he could have put a bullet in the bushwhacker’s back without any problem at all. He didn’t, though. A frown creased his forehead. The fella with the buffalo gun didn’t look like a hired killer of the sort that might be on Hugh Thornton’s payroll. Buckhorn wasn’t sure why anybody else would be taking potshots at Dennis Conroy’s surveyors, though.
There was one way to find out. After taking another shot, the bushwhacker would have to reload. That would be the time to get the drop on him and find out what was going on here.
The buffalo gun went off again with a thunderous roar, belching smoke and fire from its muzzle. A rifle like that packed a hell of a recoil, and as it kicked back, the bushwhacker lost his balance. He let go of the rifle with his left hand and waved that arm in an attempt to catch his balance, but it didn’t work.
Buckhorn darted forward as the bushwhacker sat down hard. He cracked the Colt’s barrel across the wrist of the hand still holding the rifle. The bushwhacker let out a high-pitched yelp of pain and dropped the buffalo gun.
Buckhorn swept his left arm across the man’s chest and knocked him back even more. Pivoting, Buckhorn came down with a knee in the man’s belly to pin him to the ground. He put the Colt’s muzzle in the man’s face and said, “Don’t move, you son of a—”
He stopped short because he realized he wasn’t threatening a son of anything. The bushwhacker’s hat had fallen off, allowing long, honey-colored hair to spill out on the ground. Wide, terrified brown eyes stared up at Buckhorn from a heart-shaped face.
The bushwhacker was a girl, little more than a child.
Then a hate-filled glare twisted her face as she said, “Go ahead and shoot, you old dirty bastard!”
CHAPTER 9
For a long moment, Buckhorn was too surprised to do anything except stare down at the bushwhacker he had caught.
“Damn it, if you’re not gonna shoot me, get the hell off of me! I can’t . . . can’t breathe!”
He realized his knee was digging into her belly with what had to be considerable force. He looked her over as best he could and saw that she didn’t appear to be carrying any other weapons, although it was hard to be sure, what with the baggy overalls she wore over a homespun shirt. Satisfied, he stood up and loomed over her, keeping the Colt pointed in her general direction just in case she tried something.
He had killed women before, but only when they were trying to kill him. And he had never killed a kid, either boy or girl.
She sat up. The long hair fell over her shoulders and down her back. She took hold of her wrist, winced, and said, “I think you broke it.”
“Nah, you’re moving your hand too much for it
to be broken,” he told her. “Anyway, even if I did, you ought to be thankful. I could’ve put a bullet in your back. I came damn close to doing just that.” His eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”
“Go to hell. I don’t have to answer any questions from a . . . a . . . what in blazes kind of a redskin are you, anyway? I never saw an Indian dressed like you before.”
“Don’t worry your pretty little head about that.”
“Aw . . .” She tilted her head to the side and put a phony smile on her face. “You think I’m pretty?”
Then she snarled and started spitting curses at him again.
Buckhorn thought about picking her up, putting her over his knee, and swatting her butt the way a bratty kid deserved, but she was a little too old for that. Instead he reached down, took hold of her arm, and jerked her to her feet.
“Ow! You go to messin’ around with me, Injun, and I’ll scream!”
“Who do you think is gonna come help you, the men you were trying to kill just now?”
“I wasn’t tryin’ to kill nobody,” she snapped. “Just scare ’em a mite.”
“Tell that to the man you shot.”
For the first time the angry mask on her face slipped. She said, “I . . . I didn’t mean to hit him. I was gonna shoot over his head. But then he stood up just as I pulled the trigger . . . How bad was he hurt, mister?”
“I don’t know. His friends carried him off into the rocks and took cover before I could see much. With a bullet as big as those buffalo guns fire, though, you don’t have to hit a man square to kill him. The shock might’ve been enough to do him in.”
“I hope not. Like I said, I didn’t mean to kill nobody.”
Buckhorn said, “Who the devil are you?”
She hesitated, then in a surly voice said, “My name is Lorna . . . Lorna McChesney.”
“How old are you, kid?”
“I’m not a kid,” she said hotly. “I’m a woman full-growed. At least . . . I will be in a few years.”
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