by Jake Logan
Not that what she looked like would matter one whit to Charlie, Ed reminded himself.
The sky had gone all squirrelly about an hour and a half ago, and that bothered Ed, too. By now, it had turned the color of a dirty nickel, was dull yellow in places, and had altogether gone an awful lot darker than it should be.
He supposed they were in for another blow. He wasn’t any too happy about it.
It wasn’t blowing yet, though, and when he’d asked Slocum about it, and hadn’t they better stop, Slocum had just grunted at him and waved him on. ’Course, that had been about twenty minutes ago.
Considering the way the big man seemed to feel about him, Ed didn’t press the question again. They’d stop when Slocum wanted to stop.
It was no skin off Ed’s nose, one way or the other. Slocum was going to end up just as dead, and the lady, too.
But where the hell was Charlie?
As a matter of fact, Charlie had trailed them to the point where they entered the hills, seen the path that Ed was taking, and promptly circled around.
At the moment, he was in front of them, flat on his belly on a rock above a particular narrow pass, with his spyglass to his eye.
Only one thing worried him. Not his bringing down the big man, of course. He had surprise on his side, and he was a pretty damn good shot, even if he did say so himself. What he was worried about was that he might not shoot the woman fast enough.
There were caves in these hills, deep caves. The only thing that tickled at his worry bone was that the woman would get her fanny—and the baby’s—back into one of them. Get into one of them with a gun in her possession, that was.
Might be days before he and Ed talked her out. Or got off a clean shot.
He didn’t want to take any chances on hurting that kid. At least, not until he and Ed had a chance to establish legal blood-ties to it.
Charlie snorted, despite himself. That was a laugh. But Tyler and his missus had been about fifteen hundred miles from home, and if he and Ed turned up in California with their poor orphaned niece or nephew, who was to say they were fibbing?
Especially if they went back to Cross Point first. Tyler and his wife had been through there. Not long enough to form any real ties, but long enough that they’d be remembered by the clerks at the mercantile and a few other stores.
Tyler himself had told Charlie and Ed that he and his wife had no living relatives. He said that the last of them, his wife’s uncle Desmond, was the one who had left the gold mine to him and his missus. It was actively producing right now.
And Charlie had been dreaming about going out to California and wading, naked as a jaybird, into a great big pile of his gold. Well, the baby’s gold.
But if the kid get sick or had an accident and croaked once he and Ed got out there and got themselves established, well, that was just too bad, now, wasn’t it?
Actually, Charlie had given a good deal of thought to trying to pass himself off as the kid’s father. But the modernities being what they were, he supposed it was entirely possible that Tyler had sent his wife’s uncle a picture of himself. Maybe a wedding picture or something. And miners, not being overburdened with possessions, tended to show those things off.
No, he and Ed were better off just playing the roles of shirt-tail cousins—second or third cousins, he thought—who had stepped in and dutifully taken over responsibility for the kid after the tragic deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Tyler.
May they rest in peace.
Why, even Charlie was close to wiping away a tear as he thought about how they’d introduce themselves.
He peered though his spyglass again. Still not a damned thing.
He hadn’t heard a shot, so he figured that either Ed couldn’t line one up, or else—like usual—he’d chickened out on doing the dirty work. Ed was his baby brother and all, but it was getting goddamn wearing, this reticent tendency of his.
Charlie might have called any other man a coward, but Ed was his only brother. A man couldn’t exactly call his own brother a coward, could he? Mainly because it would reflect pretty badly on him.
“Hurry the hell up, Ed,” Charlie muttered, and went back to staring through his spyglass.
“Stop,” Slocum said, and Ed pulled up his horse without thinking.
He craned around to see Slocum just sitting there, his brow furrowed.
“What?” Ed asked.
Slocum waved a hand. “Just wait.” Slowly, he turned his head from side to side, as if searching for something or someone.
Ed began to wonder if this Slocum bird wasn’t something besides a saddle bum. He sure had instincts, all right. What Charlie called instincts, anyway. It was all Ed could do not to join in with Slocum and eyeball the surrounding rocks.
He held off, though, and smiled to himself. Maybe Charlie was close, after all.
“What?” Ed Frame asked.
Slocum growled “Just wait,” and waved him off. He had a real bad feeling about this.
It had been growing on him for some time, but ever since they’d turned down this particular pass, it had gotten considerably stronger.
Ed was leading them in the right direction. Slocum hadn’t been through these hills all that often, but he had a mind for terrain. Things were looking familiar, and familiar in the right order.
So, if Ed Frame wasn’t up to something, what was tickling at the hairs on the back of his neck?
Finally, Slocum said, “All right,” and Ed Frame started forward again. Slocum, with Lydia and the baby before him, left a good distance between Tubac and the backside of Ed’s horse.
“What’s the matter?” Lydia whispered.
“Don’t rightly know,” Slocum replied. He was scanning the hills and the rocks, looking for something out of place, something to explain this feeling of his. “Somethin’ ain’t on the up and up, though.”
“You’ll protect us,” Lydia said, as if she truly believed it.
He wished he could.
At last they came into sight, and Charlie Frame broke out in a grin.
Not for long, though. His damned little brother was in the lead, and furthermore, the big man was riding the woman double. Plus, she was carrying that baby like a shield.
Now, wasn’t that just his luck?
He’d have to wait until they passed him down below to get a clean shot at that hombre, and even then he’d have to aim for the shoulder. He couldn’t take a chance on the slug going right though the big man and wounding the woman, because she just might fall off the stupid horse and land smack on the baby.
He needed that baby alive.
For the time being.
8
Slocum felt a familiar sharp, searing pain in his shoulder before he heard the shot.
He nearly tumbled off Tubac, but caught himself and tightly gripped the saddle horn. With the other, he wheeled Tubac around. Ignoring both the fire in his shoulder and Lydia’s surprised scream, he sent Tubac flying back down the pass.
He heard another shot—a handgun, this time—then a second rifle shot. Both missed him, but one slug sang off the rocks ahead, splintering them.
He had to make a fast decision: whether to try for the end of the canyon and the shelter of the bend—and risk staying in the open for at least another hundred yards—or duck into that cave that yawned to the left.
He saw the dust pop up from the canyon floor ahead just before he heard the sound of the shot, and made a sharp left turn into what he hoped and prayed was an unoccupied cave.
It was, thank God.
He flung himself down off Tubac, then jerked a terrified Lydia out of the saddle and to the ground before he fanned Tubac on the rump to send him farther in. Adrenaline overcame the pain, and he then threw himself forward and down to the cave’s floor and looked out over the pass.
Ed Frame wasn’t anywhere in sight. It crossed his mind that Frame had been shot and that now he’d have to do something stupid, like go out there and rescue him. And then he heard a shout.
&nbs
p; “You comin’ up or am I comin’ down?” A new voice. The man up in the rocks.
Slocum opened his mouth to holler something nasty back at him, but he was cut off before he could utter a word.
“Nope. You come on down, Charlie!” shouted Ed Frame.
Sonofabitch!
“That rat bastard!” Lydia shouted over the echoing cries of the baby, who had started to bawl.
“Just what I was thinkin’,” Slocum growled. He crawled backward, toward her, always keeping an eye to the cave’s mouth. These hills were peppered with caves and crevices, and Slocum was lucky he’d picked one that was more than a couple of feet deep. It seemed to go back a ways, too.
At least, he thought it did. He hadn’t bumped into Tubac yet, anyhow.
He backed up until he was even with Lydia, who was trying to hush the child. She wasn’t having much luck, though.
She glanced up, and her face was filled with worry and fright. “I don’t understand! How could he possibly have sent somebody ahead? How could he know we were out here in the first place? How could he—”
Slocum cut her off. “I don’t know. The thing is that he did it. That’s what we’ve got to worry about right now. You can ask all the questions you want later on.”
Slocum took his gaze from the cave’s mouth long enough to glance back over his fiery shoulder toward the rear.
It looked big enough. At the back wall, Tubac was standing about ten feet from him, which he figured made the cave about twenty-two or twenty-five feet deep. It was high enough to stand up in, too. At least, Tubac wasn’t banging his head on the rocky ceiling. He was close to it, though.
And there were no bats. That was good. If he was going to spend any time at all on his belly in a cave, he’d rather it were one where he wasn’t flopped in bat guano.
“You’re hurt!” Lydia cried, as if she’d just noticed. Maybe she had. And then she made a peeping sound, barely audible over the baby’s wails. “Oh, God! I’m hurt!”
She stared at her shoulder, and her eyes were round as saucers.
“No, you’re not,” Slocum said. There was no sign of movement out front. Ed and his buddy were probably still getting themselves arranged.
He nodded toward her shoulder. “No holes.” He took a look down at his own. The bullet, which had entered his back, had exited out the front. He said, “You just got some of my blood splatter.”
“Wondered why it didn’t hurt,” Lydia said, brows knitted. Then she looked back at Slocum again. “Can I fix that up for you?”
“You’d best quiet that kid, first,” Slocum said. “I can’t hear a damned thing.” He tipped his head toward the cave’s opening.
Lydia nodded, and Slocum left her, crawling back up toward the mouth of the cave. His shoulder hurt like hell and he needed to get his rifle out of the bag on Tubac’s saddle.
But first, he wanted to take a long look out front and see what Ed and his nasty little friend were up to.
Charlie, on his gelding, skittered down the last of the sharply angled cliff face and walked up next to his waiting brother. He swung down off his horse and shouted, “What the hell were you doin’, you idiot?”
Ed rose up from his squat, there in his bay’s shade, and hollered back, “What’d you mean, what was I doin’? I was doin’ what I was supposed to be doin’, that’s what! And don’t you ever say hello to a person?”
Charlie rolled his eyes. Ed had always been a little slow, but this was pushing it. “Hello! And I mean ridin’ out front, you lunatic! Hell, I could’a just picked him off clean if he was in front!”
He didn’t add that the baby would have still been in the way. He just felt like hollering at somebody right now, and Ed was handy.
And Ed was also a fool.
“I couldn’t do nothin’ else,” Ed said defensively, and dug his toe in the dirt. “I been tryin’ to get behind him all dang morning. I even tried to trick him. You know, that newfangled reverse psychology crud that you’re always talkin’ about!”
Charlie sighed. “Ed, how many times I got to tell you not to try out stuff you ain’t got no hope of understand-in’?”
“Goddamn it, Charlie, I was just tryin’—” Ed began.
“Don’t, Ed,” said Charlie with a disgusted shake of his head. “Just don’t. Now, where’d that sonofabitch take our little money machine to?”
Lydia finally got the baby quieted, just in time for Slocum to hear the final shouted words of Charlie and Ed’s conversation. Then they lapsed into a more conversational tone, and he couldn’t make out a blasted thing.
He’d learned enough, though, that he was fairly certain he and Lydia weren’t going to make it out of here anytime soon. This Charlie, whoever he was, appeared to be the brains of the outfit, although admittedly, that wouldn’t take a helluva lot. Slocum wouldn’t be able to flummox him as easily as he’d twisted Ed around his finger.
“Slocum?” Lydia whispered. “Your shoulder?”
He didn’t glance back at her. “Not yet,” he said.
“But—”
He held up his hand to silence her, and the quick movement brought stabbing shards of pain once again. He fought it off though, gritted his teeth, and put all his attention on listening to the approaching crunching sounds he thought that he’d heard, just over the soft whine of wind.
Footsteps. Two men, not more. And they’d left their horses somewhere.
But before they came into sight, they stopped. Slocum swore under his breath. It would have been awful nice of them if they’d just stand out there in the clear for a second or two. Let him take them both down.
They weren’t going to be that cooperative, though.
There came a soft mumble, not a word of which Slocum could make out except to tell that they were conversing, and then a shouted, “Hey, boy! You in there?”
It had been a heap of years since anybody’d had enough gall to call Slocum “boy,” and he believed that he was offended by it. In fact, it sort of set his teeth on edge. He made no reply.
Then Ed’s voice called out. “Hey, Slocum! You alive, or what? I heared that baby cryin’, so I know it’s alive!”
Once again, Slocum held his tongue. Which was a very good thing, because just then, those boys out there had themselves a right explosive conversation, a good part of which he heard.
“Slocum!” shouted the unseen Charlie. “You say Slocum?”
Ed muttered something, then Charlie set into a true hissy fit.
“Goddamn it, Ed! You mean to say we got the Slocum trapped in a cave and you didn’t bother to let me in on it?”
“Don’t hit me!” Ed shouted back.
“I ain’t gonna hit you! I’m gonna kill you, that’s what!”
The sounds of a scuffle came to Slocum’s ears, and quickly, he whispered, “Stay put!” to Lydia. Staying low, he crept from the cave and out into the open.
He moved toward the sound of the fight, hugging the rise of the cliff wall behind him, peering around boulders and rock heaps as he went. Finally, just as he rounded a jut of rock, Ed landed right at his feet.
It surprised the living hell out of both of them.
Ed groped for his gun just as Charlie’s shot chipped the rock hear Slocum’s face, spattering his cheek with granite shrapnel.
His gun drawn but not fired, Slocum pulled back quickly and muttered a string of curses. Ed had scrambled to safety by then, damn it, and Slocum had no choice but to try and skinny his way back to the cave.
Swearing beneath his breath, he started back.
But Ed and Charlie weren’t going to make it easy on him. Every rock pile and rock fall he rounded, every boulder he peeped out from behind, they were there in the distance, waiting for him. He had emptied his pistol before he was halfway back to the cave, and had to stop to reload. His face, already peppered with rock shards and bleeding profusely, was taking a new peppering.
Whoever that Charlie was, he was sure a good shot. Damn it.
Slocum had to empt
y his gun again to make it to the next boulder. Although he knew the wound wasn’t serious, his shoulder was paining him something fierce. His face stung to beat the band, and he was wiping blood out of his eyes every two shakes, but the thing that was bothering him the most was not knowing what the hell these two wanted!
“Whee!” shouted Ed while Slocum crouched behind the rock and reloaded once again. “This is a regular turkey shoot, ain’t it Charlie?”
And then Slocum heard a rifle’s report—not from across the narrow pass, but from the cave. By this time, the opening was only twenty feet to his left.
“Get out, you sons of bitches!” Lydia shouted from the cover of the cave. “Go on, or I’ll blast you to kingdom come!”
Strangely enough, a big grin momentarily widened Slocum’s face. What a gal!
He shouted, “Cover me!” and when Lydia began to pop off shots as quick as a serious string of firecrackers, he scurried the rest of the way as fast as he could. He threw himself the last few feet, then rolled past Lydia into the shadows of the cave.
She stopped firing, backed up, then turned toward him.
“I take it that whatever you did, it didn’t work,” she said dryly.
“You take it right.” Slocum panted.
“You’re a mess,” she said.
“Remember before?” he said. “When you asked to fix me up?”
“Offer still stands.”
“All right,” he said, observing the lack of any action whatsoever across the way. “Because now would be a pretty fair time.”
9
Charlie wrenched the hat from his head, then slapped his thigh with it. Then he whacked Ed across the chest.
“Hey, Charlie!” yelped Ed, jumping back in surprise. “Cut that out!”
“I’m gonna hurt you a whole lot worse than that if we lose the kid,” Charlie growled as he settled his hat back on.
He didn’t appear to be concerned that it was crooked, and Ed didn’t figure it would be too smart to point it out to him right at the moment. Instead, he started back toward where they’d ground-tied the horses.