Scratch had barely avoided getting skewered that night. He had grabbed a Mexican officer’s saber and done a little skewering of his own before he and his companions lit a shuck out of there with some bags of beans they had managed to snag. But ever since then, Scratch hadn’t been too fond of creeping around in the dark.
At least in the dead of winter like this, he didn’t have to worry about stepping on a snake. Timber rattlers were plentiful in these Arkansas hills at other times of year.
Scratch crouched lower as muzzle flame bloomed in the darkness only a few yards from him. He was closing in on one of the bushwhackers. He didn’t want to alert the others that they had intruders among them, so he waited until a whole flurry of shots rang out before leveling the Remington and squeezing off two swift shots. As the echoes of the blasts faded, he heard something crash in the brush and hoped that it was his quarry collapsing with some good Texan lead in him.
Scratch figured he would move on to the next bushwhacker he could find, but he had gone only a few feet when somebody exploded out of the shadows and crashed into him, fighting like a wildcat. A fist smashed into Scratch’s jaw. The punch landing so cleanly had to be pure luck. It was too dark under these trees for anybody to see where he was aiming his blows.
But luck or not, the punch packed enough power to stun Scratch for a moment and send him stumbling back into a rough-barked pine trunk.
He didn’t drop his gun. As more blows pounded his body, he slashed out with the Remington and felt it strike something with a glancing blow. That gave his attacker pause and provided a chance for Scratch to hook his left fist out in a blind punch.
His fist sunk in something soft. A man’s sour breath gusted in Scratch’s face. Knowing the man was close to him, he lowered his head and butted hard in front of him. He felt the hot spurt of blood across his forehead as his opponent’s nose flattened under the impact.
Scratch swung the Remington again, and this time the revolver’s barrel landed solidly. A heavy weight sagged against the Texan. Scratch shoved it aside. The man landed with a thump at his feet.
That made two of the varmints accounted for, he thought ... unless this fella who had jumped him was the same one he’d shot a few moments earlier. He couldn’t rule out that possibility. The bushwhacker might have been wounded, but not enough to put him out of the fight.
Scratch ran his fingers along the barrel of his revolver to make sure it hadn’t bent when he walloped the hombre with it. If you were going to hit a man with a gun, it was better to use the butt, but he hadn’t had time to turn the weapon around.
The Remington seemed to be all right. Scratch started working his way through the darkness again. It seemed like there weren’t as many shots coming from the trees now, and he wondered if Bo had already taken care of one or two of the varmints.
Crouched in the darkness, Bo waited for a muzzle flash to pinpoint the location of another rifleman. As slugs zinged through the trees around him, he smiled grimly as he wondered if some of the bullets came from Deputy Marshal Brubaker’s gun. Brubaker didn’t know what he and Scratch were trying to do. As far as he would be able to tell, huddled there underneath the wagon, the Texans might as well have deserted him.
Bo was willing to take his chances. He didn’t have any other choice.
Flame licked from the muzzle of a rifle in some brush about twenty feet to his right. He shifted in that direction.
And then suddenly there was nothing under his feet but empty air. He lost his balance and fell forward, crashing down on a steep slope. Branches clawed at him as he continued rolling, unable to stop his plunge. In some part of his mind, he knew that he had fallen into a gully or a ravine that he had never seen in the darkness. And he had no way of knowing how deep it was ...
CHAPTER 12
He found out a couple of seconds later when he crashed into something solid with such force that it left him stunned, breathless, and unable to move. He was on the bottom of the ravine.
Dirt and pine needles rained down on him from above, pelting his face and causing him to jerk his head to the side even though the rest of his body still wouldn’t respond to him. Bo knew what the little avalanche meant. Somebody was sliding down the other side of the ravine, coming down after him, and he was sure they didn’t mean him any good.
He willed his muscles to move, to send him scrambling away, but they were stubbornly unwilling for several seconds. He finally rolled onto his belly and with an effort pushed himself to his hands and knees.
Before he could start crawling, a great weight landed on his back, knocking the breath out of him again. An arm looped around his neck and jerked tight, cutting off his air as a knee pinned him to the ground.
“Thought I heard somebody fall down in this gulch,” a man’s gravelly voice said. “Thought ye could sneak up on me, did ye? You son of a bitch! I’ll choke the life out o’ ye!”
The man was doing a pretty fair job of it, too. The brawny arm across Bo’s throat threatened to crush his windpipe. The knee in his back bent his spine painfully. His lungs cried out desperately for air.
And he had dropped his gun when he plummeted into the ravine, so he didn’t even have a weapon.
His hands moved over the ground around him in the dark, searching for something, anything. His fingers brushed against a rough surface, lost it for a second, then found it again. He closed his hand on a piece of broken pine branch slightly bigger around than his wrist. He didn’t know how long it was, but when he lifted it, it felt heavy enough to work as a weapon.
A red haze from lack of breath began to settle over his brain. Knowing that he could pass out at any second, Bo struck upward and back with the makeshift club.
The blow landed with enough power to make the would-be killer grunt in pain. The pressure on Bo’s throat lessened but didn’t go away completely. He struck again with the branch.
This time the man’s grip slipped enough that Bo was able to writhe free. He drove an elbow up and back into the man’s midsection, even as he gasped and dragged air into his lungs. Twisting around, he held the club in both hands and swung it as hard as he could.
When the blow landed he heard something crack. At first he didn’t know if it was the pine branch or one of his opponent’s bones. But the howl of pain the man let out told Bo it was probably a bone. Bo swung again but didn’t hit anything this time.
He heard a scrambling sound, and more dirt cascaded down around him. The man was fleeing, climbing up the side of the ravine. That was confirmed when Bo heard him yell in a voice like ten miles of bad road, “Come on, boys! Let’s get outta here!”
A few shots still rang out, but the sounds of battle began to fade quickly. Bo braced himself with a hand against the steeply sloping side of the narrow ravine and heaved to his feet. He didn’t have his gun, so he continued gripping the pine branch in case he was attacked again.
That seemed unlikely, though, he thought as a swift rataplan of hoofbeats drifted through the chilly night air and began to fade. It sounded like the bushwhackers were taking off for the tall and uncut, all right.
Bo stood there, his chest rising and falling rapidly as he tried to catch his breath. When he thought he was up to the task, he started trying to climb out of the ravine.
It was tough going. The slope was steep enough that he had to catch hold of roots that stuck out of the ground to pull himself up.
He was still climbing when Scratch called softly from somewhere above him, “Bo! Bo, are you around here?”
“Down here!” he replied. “Better stop moving around, Scratch, or you’re liable to fall in this ravine like I did. I never saw it in the dark.”
“Son of a gun! Are you hurt?”
“Shaken up a little, and some bumps and bruises, that’s all,” Bo told his old friend. “Plus one of those hombres tried to strangle me. Reckon I’ll live, though.”
“Can you get out? Do I need to fetch a rope?”
“I think I can make it. Hold on.”
He sat up and said, “All right. I’m out of that blasted hole in the ground.”
Scratch followed his voice and came over to him.
“Are you sure you’re not hurt?”
“Yeah, but I lost my gun when I fell, and I’m not very happy about that.”
“Maybe we can find it later. Let me give you a hand. We better get back to camp and make sure ol’ Forty-two’s all right.”
“And the prisoners,” Bo added as Scratch bent, took hold of his arm, and hauled him to his feet.
Scratch snorted in response to his old friend’s comment.
“I ain’t worried overmuch about those three,” he said. “But I expect they’re fine, locked up in that box like they are.”
“Did you swap lead with any of those bushwhackers?” Bo asked as they tried to find their way back to the camp in the thick darkness. The fact that both Texans possessed superb senses of direction came in handy.
“I shot one of ’em and walloped another,” Scratch replied. “Or maybe it was the same one, I ain’t sure about that. We’ll have to get a torch and check.”
“I knocked one out and tied him up,” Bo said. “If he’s one of Gentry’s men, Deputy Brubaker will have himself another prisoner to deliver.”
“Heck, it might be Gentry his own self,” Scratch said. “Wouldn’t that be somethin’?”
It would indeed, but Bo wasn’t going to count on that. The man he’d tussled with at the bottom of the ravine had sounded like the leader of the bunch, and that gent had gotten away.
“Creel! Morton!” That was Brubaker, calling from the camp. “Are you out there?”
“We’re here!” Bo replied. “And we’re coming in!”
They followed the sound of Brubaker’s voice and a moment later came out into the clearing where the wagon was parked. The deputy hunkered on his heels next to the fire, stirring up the ashes and adding twigs and dried pine needles until flames began to leap up again and cast a circle of faint light around the camp.
“Where did you two go?” Brubaker asked as he straightened and looked at the Texans.
“Why, we’re just fine, thank you most to death,” Scratch said. “Appreciate you inquirin’ about our health.”
“I can tell you’re both up and walkin’ around, so I know you ain’t dead,” Brubaker snapped.
“We circled around and flanked those bushwhackers,” Bo explained. “We were able to drive them off.”
“Kill any of ’em?”
“We don’t know yet. We’ll have to get a torch and go have a look. How about you, Marshal? Are you hurt?”
“No, they made it pretty hot under that wagon for me, but I wasn’t hit.”
“Have you checked on the prisoners?”
“They all called out and said they were all right when I asked them,” Brubaker said. “If you’re asking if I unlocked that door to take a look at them, hell, no.”
“I imagine they’re fine,” Bo said.
The fire was burning strongly now, so he found a branch that was thinner and lighter than the one he had used as a club and set it on fire. That would make a good enough torch for him and Scratch to find their way around in the woods.
“We’re going to take a look around,” he said as he held the torch in his left hand and used his right to pull his Winchester from its sheath.
It was difficult to tell exactly where they had fought their battles a short time earlier. Everything looked different in the flickering light of the torch. After a few minutes, though, Bo was convinced he’d found the log where he had knocked out the ambusher. He could see the scuff marks of their struggle on the ground beside the fallen tree.
But the man was gone, and Bo was forced to come to the conclusion that one of his friends had found him and turned him loose.
They were luckier when it came to the man Scratch had shot. That hombre lay on his side in a pool of blood, dead.
“We’ll take him back to camp so Deputy Brubaker can look at him. If he’s one of Gentry’s gang, Brubaker ought to be able to identify him.”
Scratch bent and grasped the corpse’s ankles. He dragged the body roughly through the woods, not being disposed to worry about being gentle with the carcass of a man who’d just tried to kill him.
Bo had thought there was something oddly familiar about the man’s face, and once they reached the camp and he was able to study it in the better light from the fire, he was sure of it.
“I don’t know him,” Brubaker declared. “To the best of my recollection, I’ve never seen him before. That doesn’t rule him out completely from being a member of Gentry’s gang, but it’s pretty unlikely.”
“I’d say you’re right,” Bo agreed, “because I think there’s a definite family resemblance between this man and those Staleys who jumped us back at the trading post.”
Brubaker leaned closer to the dead man and frowned in concentration. After a moment he said, “By God, I think you’re right, Creel. This is another one of that bunch.”
Scratch said, “You reckon the rest of the family found out what happened at Clark’s, and they came after us with vengeance in mind?”
“That seems mighty likely to me,” Brubaker said. “Blood feuds are common in this part of the country.”
“They’re common just about everywhere,” Bo pointed out, while Scratch made a disgusted sound. In their drifting, they had run across several “to the last man” feuds, and such conflicts were usually bloody and senseless.
“That’s just what we need,” the silver-haired Texan said. “Not only do we have to worry about a bunch of bloodthirsty desperadoes wantin’ us dead, but now we’ve got a whole clan of ridge-runnin’ hillbillies after us!”
“Not everybody in Arkansas is a hillbilly, Tex,” Brubaker shot back at him.
“No matter what you call them, they’re trouble,” Bo said. “And that’s one thing we already had plenty of without this.”
Brubaker nodded as he looked down at the dead man.
“You’re right about that, Creel,” he said. “And come mornin’, I know damn well what I’m gonna do about it!”
CHAPTER 13
“What do you mean, we’re gonna cut west into Indian Territory?” Scratch asked Brubaker as he and Bo rode alongside the wagon the next morning. “Ain’t it even more uncivilized and lawless than Arkansas?”
The rest of the night had passed peacefully. In the gray light of dawn, while Brubaker was hitching up the team, Bo and Scratch had carried the dead man’s body back to the ravine and dumped it in the deep gulch. Bo shoved some loose brush down on top of it. That was all the burial they could be bothered with for a no-good bushwhacker.
While they were doing that, they also searched the ravine until Bo found the revolver he had dropped the night before. It needed to be cleaned, but other than that it was none the worse for wear.
By the time they got back to the camp, Brubaker had the wagon ready to go. No one had had any breakfast yet, and Jim Elam had called from inside the wagon, “Hey! Ain’t you gonna feed us?”
“Later,” Brubaker had replied. “Right now I want to put some distance between us and this place.”
He had done so, keeping the team moving at a good clip as the sun climbed over the eastern horizon and then rose through the sky. An hour or so had passed before the deputy marshal abruptly swung the wagon off the road and onto a narrow, rutted trail that meandered off to the west.
Bo had asked him where he was going, and Brubaker had replied that they were cutting west into Indian Territory, prompting Scratch’s question. Now, in reply to the silver-haired Texan, Brubaker said, “Yeah, the Territory may be lawless and uncivilized, but I know just about every square foot of it, and travelin’ along that main road makes us sittin’ ducks for a
nybody who’s on our trail.”
“I can’t argue with that, Marshal,” Bo said, “but doesn’t Gentry know this part of the country pretty well, too?”
Brubaker shrugged. “Sure, I suppose he does. And he’s got friends among the tribes, too, hard though that may be to believe about such a bloody-handed scoundrel. But I’m bettin’ those blasted Staleys won’t know all the little trails and the cut-offs as well as I do, so maybe we can shake them off our trail, anyway.”
“Can you get the wagon through?” Scratch asked. “It’s pretty rugged over there.”
“Sure I can,” Brubaker replied with conviction. “It’ll be rougher going, but we can make it through. We’ll head west a ways, cut down to one of the Red River crossings, and then swing back east to Tyler.” He paused for a moment, then went on, “Might add as much as a week to our trip, but we’ll stand a better chance of gettin’ there safe with the prisoners.”
Scratch scowled and said, “Addin’ a week makes our wages not quite as good.”
“You’re gettin’ paid by the mile, too, remember,” Brubaker reminded him.
“Yeah, but if I know ol’ Bigfoot Southwick, and I do, he’ll try to say he’ll only pay us for what would’ve been the shortest route. He’ll claim goin’ the long way around was our decision and his court oughtn’t to be out any dinero because of it.”
“If he does, I’ll ... I’ll ...” Brubaker didn’t finish his sentence.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Scratch said. “Who among us is gonna argue with a federal judge and come out a winner?”
“Let’s just worry about that when the time comes,” Bo suggested. “Right now, it seems like Deputy Brubaker’s idea is a pretty good one.”
Brubaker made a growling sound in his throat.
“You might as well call me Forty-two,” he told Bo. “If we’re gonna be travelin’ together for nigh on to two weeks, there ain’t no point to bein’ formal.”
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