Gunshots.
Frank knew that Rocking T cowhands were guarding the approaches to the ranch tonight, as they had been for the past several nights. A ragged volley sounded in the distance, telling Frank that those sentries were under attack.
That could mean only one thing. Somehow, Nathan Wedge had found out about the meeting tonight. That was the possibility that had worried Frank the most, because he suspected Wedge would be unable to resist the temptation to strike at all his enemies at once. Now, as the shots came closer, that seemed to be exactly what was happening.
The men in the barn were still wrangling over their best course of action. What they didn’t realize was that the choice had been taken out of their hands. Within minutes, they would be faced with a situation where the only thing they could do was fight for their lives.
Frank whirled toward them and shouted, “Shut up! Listen!”
His deep, powerful voice cut through all the arguing and made the men fall silent. As they did so, all of them heard what Frank’s keen ears had already detected. The rattle of gunfire shattered the night and came steadily closer as the Rocking T cowboys retreated, fighting a delaying action against the evil horde that had swept out of the darkness against the ranch.
Every man in the barn was armed. Some of them were seasoned frontiersmen who had fought Indians and outlaws in the past, while others had never fired a gun in anger. But even though Frank saw fear on some of their faces, he saw determination on every face.
“Get as many of the horses as you can inside the barn, then spread out and hunt some good cover!” he barked, instinctively taking charge at this moment of crisis. “They’ll be here in a few minutes, and we’ll give them a warm welcome.”
Counting all the men who had come to the meeting, plus the few Rocking T cowboys who were also on hand, Frank figured they had a fighting force of at least forty men. Wedge had no more than thirty men in his command, so the renegade Ranger was in for a surprise.
Frank’s forehead creased in a frown as he hurried toward the house with Tolliver, Ben, Darrell, and Nick. Something was wrong. Wedge might be an outlaw, but he wasn’t a fool. He had to know there was a good-sized group of fighting men at the ranch tonight. Would he attack anyway, even knowing that he would be outnumbered?
Maybe Wedge wasn’t outnumbered, Frank thought. Maybe he had rounded up some more gunmen somewhere.
They would know shortly, because the fighting was close enough now so that Frank could see muzzle flashes in the darkness as he and the others bounded up onto the porch. All around the ranch, in the barns, the corrals, and the bunkhouse, men were finding good spots to put up a fight. Frank cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Blow out all the lanterns!”
Instantly, lights began going out around the ranch. The house was plunged into darkness, too, as the lamps were blown out. Cecil Tolliver opened up the gun rack in his parlor and pressed Winchesters into the hands of Frank, Ben, and his sons-in-law. Frank stepped back out onto the porch and dropped to one knee, waiting to see what was going to happen.
He heard hoofbeats in the night, and then as horsemen raced toward the house, they shouted, “Rocking T! Rocking T!” They were the surviving guards, identifying themselves so that the ranch’s defenders wouldn’t shoot them down. In the moonlight, Frank saw that there were only three of them. His mouth tightened into a grim line. The other sentries must have been killed in the attack.
He stood up and waved to the riders. “Rocking T, over here!” he shouted, and the cowboys veered their mounts toward the house. They flung themselves out of their saddles while the horses were still moving and stumbled up the steps to the porch. One of them gasped, “It’s Wedge! Wedge and the Range—”
Muzzle flame lanced from a rifle barrel about fifty yards away, accompanied by a sharp crack. The cowboy who had been delivering the warning cried out and stumbled, then pitched forward on his face, his hat flying off. Frank saw the dark stain already spreading on the back of the waddy’s shirt where the bullet had struck him. Snapping the Winchester to his shoulder, Frank fired at the muzzle flash he had seen just before the young cowboy was hit. He didn’t know if his bullet found its mark or not, but as he worked the rifle’s lever and threw another cartridge into the chamber, he knew one thing.
The battle for the Rocking T was on.
33
Frank bent and grabbed the cowboy who had been shot. “Give me a hand with him!” he snapped at the other punchers, and one of them got hold of the wounded man under the other arm. Together they dragged him inside the house as Tolliver, Ben, Darrell, and Nick opened fire from the windows they had thrown open. They slammed lead at the dark area near one of the barns where the shot had come from.
Defenders opened up from the barns and the corrals, too, and as Frank stepped back to the doorway he saw several men on horseback fleeing from that deadly storm of bullets. The moonlight revealed something that sent a shock through him.
A couple of the fleeing gunmen wore high-crowned sombreros.
Just like the ones the Rurales wore.
Frank bit back a curse as he realized what that meant. There was a connection between Wedge and Estancia, all right. And now the two outlaws had probably joined forces in an effort to wipe out their opposition on this side of the border. Antonio Almanzar had mentioned that Estancia had partners in his smuggling operation. What better partner than Wedge, who was supposed to be in charge of enforcing the law in this area? It was as neat a setup as Frank had ever encountered, two “lawmen” who were really the bosses of a burgeoning owlhoot empire.
The presence of the Rurales also meant that the ranch’s defenders no longer outnumbered the attackers. Estancia would be able to throw at least twenty men into the fray on Wedge’s side, maybe even more than that if he’d already gotten some of his reinforcements from Mexico City. The position of the honest Texans had changed abruptly from perilous but tenable to downright precarious.
And once all the opposition north of the Rio Grande had been put down, the Rangers would lend a hand below the border as well and help Estancia take over there. If the power grab wasn’t stopped here, ultimately hell would break loose on both sides of the border.
Those thoughts flashed through Frank’s mind in a matter of seconds. No more shots came from the attackers, but he knew better than to think Wedge and Estancia had withdrawn their forces.
Those two bastards were just getting started.
That hunch was confirmed a few moments later. With a pounding of hoofbeats like rolling thunder, a large group of riders charged the house and the barns, blazing away as they galloped forward. “Let ’em have it!” Frank bellowed over the gun blasts. He stood at the edge of the doorway, partially shielded by the jamb, and played a deadly tune on the Winchester, crashing out the shots as fast as he could work the lever and squeeze the trigger.
The moonlight made accurate shooting difficult. Silver shadows shifted and darted in the yard between the house and the barns. The raiders spread out, too, instead of bunching up, which made them harder to hit. Frank saw a couple of the gunmen pitch from their saddles, but most of them survived the charge unscathed and continued spraying the house and barns with lead.
Sparks flew in the air as something tumbled end over end through the night. Frank heard it hit the porch and saw the sparks roll against the wall of the house. “Dynamite!” he yelled, but the blast of the explosive swallowed up the warning.
That end of the porch and part of the wall disappeared in a burst of flame and noise that shook the earth. The concussion slammed Frank off his feet. As he lay there for a moment, half in and half out of the door, stunned by the explosion, he heard several more blasts like the first one. The raiders had brought plenty of dynamite with them.
Frank pushed himself to his knees, shaking his head to try to get rid of some of the cobwebs clogging his brain. Somehow he had managed to hang on to the rifle. He saw one of the raiders veer his mount toward the house. The man was one of the sombrero
-wearing Rurales, and he had another stick of dynamite in his hand, the fuse sputtering and throwing off sparks as it burned.
Without really aiming, Frank jerked the Winchester to his shoulder and fired. The Rurale flipped backward off his horse, and the stick of dynamite went straight up in the air. It fell among some of the raiders, who shouted in terror and tried to rein their horses away from it.
The dynamite blew, sending men and horses pinwheeling through the air. That was finally enough to blunt the charge and make some of the attackers fall back. Frank scrambled to his feet and turned toward the parlor. That was the room closest to the explosion that had rocked the house.
Flames flickered up one of the walls, casting a hellish glare into the room. Everything was in disarray. Windows were shattered, pictures had been knocked off the walls, furniture was overturned. Ben Tolliver and Nick Holmes were trying to drag the unconscious forms of Cecil Tolliver and Darrell Forrest out of the room before the fire spread to them.
“Ben!” Frank shouted. “How bad are they hurt?”
“Just knocked out, I think!” Ben’s face was grimy with powder smoke and taut with strain. “They were the closest to that dynamite when it went off.”
Darrell was hurt worse than that, Frank saw in the glare of the flames. The young man’s left arm was bent at an unnatural angle and had to be broken. Right now, though, getting out of the burning house was more important than tending to a busted arm.
The thud of rapid footsteps made Frank whirl around and bring up the Winchester. One of the men who had just run into the parlor yelped, “Don’t shoot! It’s just us!”
Frank recognized the cowboys who had ridden in a few minutes earlier. “Give Ben and Nick a hand,” he snapped at them. “Get Mr. Tolliver and Darrell out the front door and head for the main barn. We’ll try to fort up there.”
Gunfire still roared outside as the attacking force probed at the ranch’s defenses. Getting from the house to the barn was going to be like running a gauntlet of flying lead. But Frank knew they had no choice. The fire started by the explosion was burning fiercely. If they hadn’t been under attack, they might have been able to put it out and save the house. As it was, all they could do was abandon the ranch house to the flames.
That was a bitter pill to swallow, but it was going to get worse, Frank thought as he snapped a shot, through the gaping aperture of the blown-out wall, at one of the Rurales who flashed past outside. The men who had gathered here tonight were outnumbered, and the raiders had dynamite, too. This fracas had turned into an unwinnable fight for the defenders. If they stayed and fought, they would take a heavy toll on the attackers, but in the end they would be slaughtered to the last man.
Like it or not, they had to cut and run, in hopes of fighting—and winning—another day.
Frank turned and hurried after the others. They had reached the porch and lifted the half-conscious Tolliver and Darrell to their feet. Frank knelt for a second beside the cowboy who had been shot, and checked for a pulse without finding one. The young man was dead.
Straightening, Frank said grimly, “I’ll cover you. Head for the barn.”
Ben, Nick, and the two punchers started across the open ground, half-carrying, half-dragging Tolliver and Darrell. Frank paced after them, snapping shots at every target he picked out from the moonlit chaos. Bullets whined around their heads and kicked up dust around their feet. Nick yelled in pain as a slug burned a path across his back. He stumbled but kept his feet.
Frank looked around and saw that the bunkhouse and the blacksmith shop were burning, too. As he watched, flames reached the hay barn, and it went up like a torch, throwing a red glare that stretched for hundreds of yards around it. Now the whole battlefield that the Rocking T had become was lit up like the middle of the day in Hell.
Something slammed hard into Frank’s hip and nearly knocked him off his feet. He reached down and felt a rip in the leather of his gun belt. A spent slug had struck him a glancing blow, but the thick leather had stopped it from penetrating. That had been a close call.
The men inside the barn had seen them coming. The doors swung open far enough to let Ben and the others stagger through. Frank hustled after them, his hip still smarting from the blow and making him limp a little. As he ran into the barn, the defenders slammed the doors behind him.
“What’ll we do, Morgan?” one of the men asked him, a note of desperation in the question. “There’s too damned many of ’em!”
“How many men do we have left?” Frank asked.
The man shook his head. “I don’t know! Some of ’em must’ve got blowed up by all that dynamite!”
A tall, lean figure strode forward. Enough light from the fires came into the barn through cracks between the boards for Frank to be able to make out the strained features of Doc Ervin.
“There are about thirty of us in here now, Morgan, counting you fellows who just got here,” the medico from San Rosa said. “That leaves eight or ten unaccounted for. I’m afraid they must have been killed in the fighting. When those explosions went off in the bunkhouse and the blacksmith shop, the men who had sought cover there abandoned the buildings and fought their way over here.”
Just like he and his companions had done, Frank thought. He nodded and said, “We can’t stay here. They probably saw us converging on the barn, and this is where they’ll concentrate their next attack. If they’ve got any dynamite left, they’ll try to blow us to Kingdom Come!”
Ervin jerked his head in a nod. “So we’ve got to get out of here.”
“That’s how I see it,” Frank agreed.
Ben Tolliver spoke up, saying, “We can’t do that! We can’t run!”
“It’s run or die, Ben,” Frank told him.
An old-timer with a jutting gray brush of a beard said, “When I was in the army durin’ the war, we’d call it a strategic retreat. Ain’t no shame in it.”
“But this is my home!” Ben protested.
Nick put a hand on his shoulder. “Mine, too, Ben, but Mr. Morgan and the others are right. If we stay and fight, we’ll all be killed. We need to get out, split up, and regroup later.”
Frank nodded. “That’s right, Nick. See about getting the horses ready. Ben, you help him.”
Ben looked like he wanted to argue some more, but the tone of command in Frank’s voice allowed no argument.
“We’ll go out the back,” Frank went on to Ervin. “I’m sure they’ve got it covered, but at least it’ll be darker that way, and they might not be able to shoot quite as well.”
“The battle is over,” Ervin said, “but the war isn’t. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Damned right,” Frank said curtly. “We’re not going to let Wedge and his friends get away with this. But when we tangle with them again, it’ll be at a time and place of our choosing.”
“Very well. I—”
What else the doctor was going to say remained a mystery, because at that moment one of the men who was up in the loft yelled, “Here they come again!” The riflemen up there had been trading potshots with the raiders, but now another concerted attack was on the way. The firing increased, and some of the bullets tore through the heavy planks of the barn to whine like bees among the defenders.
“Mount up!” Frank shouted. “Mount up and bust out the back! Don’t stop firing until you’re well away from the barn!”
Some of them wouldn’t make it, he thought bleakly. But some of them would, and the survivors would live to fight again.
He spotted Stormy on the other side of the barn and started toward the Appaloosa. Ervin caught his arm to stop him for a moment.
“About five miles north of here there’s a big coulee where a creek used to cut through a ridge,” the sawbones said. “It would be easily defended, and we could rendezvous there tomorrow.”
Frank jerked his head in a nod. “Sounds good to me. Spread the word as best you can, and I’ll do the same.”
Ervin agreed and then hurried off to find a horse. Not
all of the mounts had been brought into the barn before the fighting started, but Frank thought there were enough for everyone who was left. He reached Stormy, slid the Winchester into the saddle boot, and swung up onto the Appaloosa’s back. Most of the men were mounted, Frank saw, and as he looked around, the last of the defenders from the loft dropped down the ladders and hit leather.
“Go!” Frank shouted.
The bar securing the rear doors had been removed. The horses surged against the doors, throwing them open. Six-guns blazing, the men poured out of the barn.
As Frank expected, they ran into heavy fire from gunmen posted to watch the back of the barn. But the riders were moving quickly and the shadows were thick back here. Up front, a dynamite blast blew in part of the barn wall. The explosion came too late to catch any of the men inside, however.
A glance to the side showed Frank that Ben and Nick had managed to get Tolliver and Darrell onto a couple of horses. They had regained their senses, at least to a certain extent, and were hanging onto the reins themselves, even though neither man was shooting. Ben and Nick were staying close by in case either of them got dizzy and started to fall out of the saddle.
Frank’s Peacemaker was in his hand as he rode. He triggered at the muzzle flashes dotting the darkness around the ranch. One of the Rurales suddenly loomed up beside him, on foot, reaching up in an attempt to grab him and drag him off Stormy. Frank kicked the man in the chest and sent him flying backward. Another man charged him on horseback, firing wildly. One of the bogus Rangers, Frank judged as he snapped a shot that sent the man flying off the back of his horse.
As he rode up alongside Ben Tolliver, Frank holstered the Colt and leaned over to catch the young man’s arm. “Coulee five miles north!” he shouted over the tumult of gunshots and hoofbeats. “Meet there tomorrow!”
“Got it!” Ben called back to him.
“Spread the word!”
With that, Frank galloped on, pulling away from Ben and the others. He told several more of the fleeing cattlemen about the rendezvous. With luck, the word would get around to most of the survivors.
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