Some hardy brush grew along the base of the wall. Preacher had hoped to find a few small trees growing in the canyon as well, so that maybe he could hack them down and fashion a crude raft from them, but it appeared he was out of luck where that was concerned.
But the ledge was a good ten feet wide and led in the direction of the outlaw canyon, so he started along it.
The farther he went, the narrower the ledge became. Preacher was sure-footed, but even he had to lean against the rock wall and cling to it with strong fingers to keep from slipping off.
As the ledge narrowed, so did the canyon, until it was a deep gorge no more than fifteen feet wide, through which the creek now raced at breakneck speed. It was too dark down here in the bottom of this slash in the earth to make out many details, but Preacher heard the water roaring and splashing and figured there were rocks jutting up in the rapids.
Eventually the ledge was barely wide enough for Preacher’s boots. If it dwindled down to nothing, as it appeared it might, he would have no choice but to go back and look for some other way into the outlaw stronghold. If he had to do that, he might be too late to help Matt rescue Smoke and Luke . . . if he could get there at all.
But for now he was going to forge ahead, so he clung to the stone wall and moved his feet along the slippery shelf.
He had no warning when it suddenly crumbled underneath him. One second he was perched on the ledge, and the next he toppled backwards, flailing his arms in the air but finding nothing to grab on to.
He hit the water, which was icy from snow melt, and went under. The current caught him like a giant hand and flung him along the rocky gorge.
The eastern sky was gray with the approach of dawn by the time Matt reached the compound. It had taken him this long to get here because he’d had to go to ground several times to avoid discovery by roving patrols of outlaws. As isolated and difficult to get into as this canyon was, Matt was a little surprised Rudolph Kroll would go to that much trouble to guard the place.
But he had gotten in here, he reminded himself. So maybe Rudolph’s precautions made sense after all.
He didn’t know where Smoke and Luke were being held prisoner, but it made sense they would be in the big house where the Kroll brothers were. He needed to get in there and find them, but to do that he would need a distraction of some sort to draw everybody out.
His eyes narrowed as his gaze fell on the big adobe barn with its attached corral where more than two dozen horses milled. The barn wouldn’t burn, but the hay stored inside it would, and the smoke and flames would spook the horses into stampeding. That seemed like his best bet.
The buildings were all quiet and dark. People would be getting up soon to greet the new day, but for now nearly everybody was asleep. Matt catfooted from shadow to shadow as he worked his way toward the barn, and he was just about to dart through the opening where one of the big double doors was pushed back a few feet when a man stepped out through that same gap, stretching and yawning. Caught in the open, Matt had nowhere to go, and as the outlaw caught sight of him, the man clawed for the gun on his hip and opened his mouth to give a yell of alarm.
Chapter 44
Matt’s superb reflexes were the only thing that saved him. He sprang forward like a striking snake. His left hand closed around the man’s wrist and kept him from drawing the gun. At the same time, Matt’s right fist crashed into the outlaw’s jaw and rocked his head back sharply. The man’s knees folded up as he dropped to the ground, senseless.
No yell, no shot. Matt was still safe for the time being, and more importantly, his plan hadn’t been ruined.
Matt dragged the unconscious outlaw away from the barn and stashed him in the shadows of an empty blacksmith shop nearby. He used the man’s own belt to tie his hands behind his back and ripped off a piece of the man’s shirt, wadded it up, and shoved it between the man’s jaws as a gag. He took the outlaw’s gun from its holster and stuck it behind his belt.
In a gunfight, he wouldn’t have hesitated to ventilate any of the Kroll gang, but he wasn’t going to leave a helpless man to burn to death, even an outlaw.
He made it into the barn without further incident and found that it was empty except for several horses in stalls. He led them out through an inner gate into the corral, then went over to the corral gate and unfastened the latches holding it closed. He left the gate pushed up so the horses would stay in the corral for the time being, but once they spooked and began to bump against it, it would swing open and release them so they could get away from the fire he was going to set.
Back in the barn, he found a lantern hanging on a nail and used some cord from the tack room to rig a fuse leading to the lamp’s reservoir of kerosene. He poured some of the kerosene on the wooden support pole in one of the stalls directly under the hayloft, and then set the lamp next to a pile of hay by the pole. When the lamp lit it would set fire to the hay, and the furiously burning pile of dry hay ought to climb the oil soaked pole to reach the hayloft and start it blazing as well. From there, everything flammable inside the barn would burn and the horses would stampede . . . if everything went according to plan.
Matt struck a lucifer and lit the fuse leading to the lamp. As soon as he saw it was burning like it should, he hurried out of the barn. The eastern sky was orange now. Smoke came from the chimney of the big ranch house, and also from the cookshack behind what was probably the bunkhouse for the rest of the gang.
People would be up and around. Matt lowered his head so that his hat partially shielded his face and walked toward the adobe wall around the big house as if he belonged here and wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. An old man stepped out of the cookshack, tossed a pan of water on the ground, and went back inside after barely glancing at Matt.
He reached the shadows along the wall and vanished into them. The wall had a gate in it in front of the house, but there was probably a smaller gate elsewhere. Matt thought that might be his best way in.
He had just found it, not actually a gate but a narrow wooden door, when he heard a commotion from the front of the compound. From the sound of the voices, a lot of men were gathering, maybe the entire gang except for the sentries.
Matt glanced at the sky again. Sunrise was only minutes away. He remembered what the guards in the pass had said about the Kroll brothers planning to execute Smoke and Luke at dawn and how everyone would have to be on hand to witness it. He was running out of time.
The gate was barred on the inside, he discovered when he tried it. But the top of it was in reach of a tall man who could jump. He tensed his muscles, bent his knees slightly, gathered his strength, and sprang upward with his right hand stretching as high as he could reach.
His hand closed over the top of the door—and pain pierced through it. Matt stifled a yell as he hung there. Somebody had fastened barbed wire along the top of the door, and a couple of the vicious barbs had jabbed deep into his palm. Every instinct told him to let go.
Instead, he forced himself to hang on. He had to, for Smoke’s and Luke’s sake. He had to get in there if they were going to have a chance to escape their execution. Matt reached up with his left hand and got another grip on top of the door, more carefully this time. He managed to let the barbs stick up between his fingers. He pulled his right hand loose and shifted his grip with it. The hand throbbed with pain and grew slick with blood, but that didn’t stop Matt from pulling himself up so he could swing a leg on top of the adobe wall next to the door.
A glance toward the barn showed him only pale blue sky above it, streaked with thin, rosy early morning clouds. He thought he ought to be seeing a black pall of smoke from the barn by now. Its absence meant nothing had happened to draw the gang’s attention away from the house. They would be gathering there in overwhelming numbers.
It was too late to do anything else now. Matt swung himself over the wall and dropped to the ground inside the compound, bleeding hand and all.
Down here in this crude dungeon there was no way to te
ll how much time had passed, but it seemed like days to Smoke as he and Luke waited for their fate. Finally, heavy footsteps approached the door again.
Smoke had halfway expected to hear gunshots or even an explosion. It wouldn’t have surprised him a bit if Matt and Preacher had pulled off something like that.
But when nothing happened, he began to wonder if something might have befallen them. He had every confidence in the world in them and knew they would never let him down as long as they were alive, but sometimes luck turned on a man and there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing but fight, and maybe in the end lose.
“That’s Galt,” Luke said quietly as the footsteps came closer to the door. “Nobody else walks like him. I hear some other men with him. Probably rifle-toting guards.”
“They’ve come to get us,” Smoke agreed. “Must be getting close to dawn.”
Luke grunted and said, “Looks like Matt and Preacher aren’t going to get here in time.”
“I don’t plan to give up as long as I’m still drawing breath.”
“I didn’t say anything about giving up,” Luke responded. “But I’ll be damned if I stand by and let a vicious animal like Mordecai Kroll whip me to death. I’m going to get my hands on a gun and take a few of them with me before I make them shoot me.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Smoke agreed. “I’d like to send the Kroll brothers to hell first.”
Luke grinned in the gloom and said, “That sounds like a good plan to me.”
A key rasped in the lock, and the door swung back. Galt’s massive form filled the opening, just as Luke had predicted. Smoke couldn’t see past the majordomo, but he heard several men shifting their feet in the corridor.
“It’s time,” Galt said in his voice like the sound of distant drums. “Come on out.”
“Or you’ll drag us out?” Luke asked.
“I think you know the answer to that question.”
Luke lifted a slightly shaky hand and pointed a finger at Galt. He said, “You’re a smart man, Galt. Don’t try to deny it. I can see it in your eyes. Why do you work for a couple of monsters like the Kroll brothers?”
“Rudolph Kroll isn’t a monster,” Galt said. “He’s a genius. He’ll wind up owning this whole territory someday.”
“How can you call a man a genius when he lets himself be burdened by a fool like Mordecai?”
This time Galt didn’t respond. For a long moment he stood there glaring in the light of a lantern carried by one of the other men. Then he asked, “Are you coming out or not?”
“I don’t reckon we’ve got much choice,” Smoke said as he climbed to his feet.
Galt stepped back to let them emerge from the cell. The guards backed off with the rifles in their hands leveled at the two prisoners. The outlaws seemed a little nervous, as if they thought Smoke and Luke might try to jump them. If guns started going off in these close confines and bullets began to bounce around, there was a good chance somebody else would be hit besides the prisoners.
That possibility was enough to make Smoke give it some thought, but he decided against making a move right now. When he glanced at his brother, he could tell that Luke had come to the same conclusion. It would be better to bide their time.
The problem was that their time was running out.
With Galt looming behind them and the guards backing away ahead of them, Smoke and Luke walked along the corridor toward the stairs and then up to the ranch house’s opulently furnished first floor. Galt stepped around them then to lead the way to the front door and out onto the first of the flagstone terraces that dropped away from the house and gave a spectacular view of the outlaw canyon.
Two posts fashioned from thick beams had been set up on the terrace. They were nailed at their bases to other beams that formed crosspieces so the posts stood up straight and imposing. They were placed the right width apart so that a prisoner’s arms could be pulled out to his sides and tied to the posts. The setup was designed so that a man could be fastened to it and whipped, Smoke realized.
The man who planned to do the whipping stood by waiting in the garish light of a big red sun that had just peeked over the jagged mountains east of the canyon. Mordecai Kroll grinned as he moved his hand and made the long bullwhip dangling from it writhe on the flagstones like a snake.
His brother, Rudolph, was there, too, standing on the other side of the whipping posts with a solemn expression on his dark, dour face. Several yards behind him was the slim form of Rudolph’s mistress/housekeeper, Valencia.
The rest of the gang had gathered on the lower terraces, ordered there to witness the execution of the two prisoners. They were silent and unmoving. Some of them had women with them, an assortment of white, Mexican, and Indian soiled doves and camp followers. A few of the men seemed eager to see what was going to happen, but many of them were rather stolid and emotionless, as if they were here only because their boss had told them to be.
“I told you two bastards that you were gonna die at dawn, and I’m keepin’ my word!” Mordecai said exultantly. He used the whip handle to point at the sun. “Look there! That’s the last sunrise you’re ever gonna see!”
Smoke already knew the sun was up. As he and Luke paused at the edge of the terrace, he was looking at something else.
A giant ball of black smoke suddenly burst from one of the buildings outside the wall and rose into the air to form a column. At the same time, shrill whinnies of fear came from what sounded like dozens of horses, followed by the rumble of hoofbeats and an abrupt crash. Everybody on the terraces heard the commotion and turned to look.
“The barn!” Rudolph shouted. “The barn’s on fire! Save those horses!”
The outlaws rushed toward the open gate. Mordecai cried, “Damn it, wait! It’s dawn! These Jensens gotta die!”
Everybody ignored him. The men rushed toward the barn.
Smoke glanced over at Luke and moved his head in a tiny nod. He knew a distraction when he saw one. This was the work of Matt and Preacher.
Mordecai’s face contorted with hate and frustration. He flung the whip on the flagstones at his feet and yelled, “You’ll die anyway, damn it!”
He yanked the revolver from the holster on his hip. The gun flashed up toward Smoke and Luke.
Chapter 45
Before Mordecai could fire, a rifle cracked. The gun flew from Mordecai’s fingers and he twisted halfway around from the impact of the slug that drilled through his upper right arm.
Matt stepped out from behind some shrubs at the corner of the terrace and leveled his Winchester at Rudolph, who had started to reach under his coat for a gun.
“Hold it, Kroll!” Matt ordered. “Get your hands up or I’ll kill you!”
Luke glanced over at Smoke and said, “That’d be our little brother Matt?”
“That it would,” Smoke said with a proud smile.
Rudolph thought about making a try anyway, but then he slowly pulled his hand out from under his coat, empty, and raised both arms into the air. Galt growled and took a step forward, but Rudolph snapped, “Galt, no. He’s got the drop on us, whoever he is.”
“I’m Matt Jensen, that’s who I am,” Matt said. “The third Jensen brother. Pleased to meet you at last, Luke. I wish it was under better circumstances.”
“So do I, Matt,” Luke said. “But I’ll take it.”
With all the commotion going on from the barn being on fire, none of the other outlaws had paid any attention to the shot. The Kroll brothers, Galt, and three other owlhoots were the only ones here on the terrace with the Jensen brothers. Matt was outgunned, but none of the men staring down the barrel of that deadly Winchester seemed to want to start anything, at least not yet.
Matt motioned the guards back with the rifle. Smoke and Luke hurried over to him. Matt said, “Take my Colt and this gun that’s stuck behind my belt. That way we’ll all be armed.”
“Your hand’s bleeding, Matt,” Smoke commented as he slipped the revolver from Matt’s holster an
d passed it to Luke. He took the extra gun for himself.
“Yeah, I know. I stuck it on some barbed wire. But it’s nothing to worry about. I can still shoot, and that’s all that matters right now.” Matt raised his voice and called to the three guards, “Throw those rifles away, and your handguns, too. Do it now.”
The outlaws hesitated, but then Rudolph gave them a curt nod and they followed Matt’s order.
Rudolph wore an angry but pragmatic expression as he said, “The three of you have no chance to get out of here alive. You know that, don’t you?”
Mordecai had been whimpering in pain as he clutched his wounded arm. Now he exclaimed, “Don’t talk to them, Rudolph! Just kill ’em!”
“Don’t be a bigger damned fool than you already are,” Rudolph snapped. “If we try anything now they’ll kill us. But they’re outnumbered and they know it. They can’t get away.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Matt said confidently. “I reckon we can if we’ve got some hostages.”
For the first time a look of genuine concern flickered over Rudolph Kroll’s face. He said, “You’re wrong about that, Jensen. My men don’t love me that much. They’ll gun me down if it means killing you three and preserving the secret of this hideout.”
“What about your brother?”
Rudolph laughed coldly and said, “They’ll be even quicker to kill Mordecai.”
The younger brother forgot about how bad his arm was hurting and stared at Rudolph in amazement.
“How . . . how can you say that?” Mordecai demanded. “The men all love me!”
Rudolph didn’t dignify that absurd claim with a response.
“I think you’re wrong, Kroll,” Matt said. “I think your men will want to keep you alive because you know where all the loot from the gang’s jobs is stashed, and they don’t. You’re worth a lot of dinero to them.”
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